Mae nodded at me and headed out of the room with Larry, who shut the door behind them.
Then I found myself alone with this man, this visitor who had made his way onto our lands.
I looked over at him for some time, lying there in the bed. He didn’t look over at me – all he did was stare ahead of himself, looking down at his hands a little as his chest rose and fell desperately, each breath becoming more and more of a struggle.
We had had discussions with outsiders in the past. Intruders arrived every so often, it was just something unavoidable that I had come to terms with. It was the reason that the lookout posts were a necessity, because you never knew when anybody was going to show up.
On a couple of occasions we had had travelling salesmen show up. They passed by, paying no mind to the fact that we had built a community. All they did was knock on the door, ask if we wanted to trade, and we did so. We swapped anything we had in abundance for anything that we needed, before they went off on their way without another word.
Some people simply suited the apocalypse and adapted naturally to it.
This man clearly wasn’t one of those people.
I took up the wooden chair Mae had been using and sat down at his bedside, keeping my distance and looking over at him. His hands were still tied.
For some time I watched him, he refusing to look over at me despite the fact that I knew he was aware of his surroundings.
‘What should I call you?’
A pause, then-
‘Morgan.’
His voice was husky, but at least I had gotten something from him.
‘How are you feeling?’ I finally asked. ‘Gave me a bit of a shock there when you came through the forest.’
Silence.
‘Look; you can talk and we can have a friendly discussion, try and do our best to help you live, or we can dump you in the forest to die. I won’t have anybody threatening the sanctity of this place, or the people who live here. We keep to ourselves, don’t mean any harm to anyone, including you. Unless you decide to-’
‘You’ve no idea what’s coming for you, boy.’
When he finally did speak, his words came out with such surety and measure that it daunted me. It wasn’t so much the foreboding nature of what he said, but the conviction with which he said it. It intimidated me more than I would like to say, and I struggled to keep my shock under wraps, hidden away from showing on my face.
‘What’s coming for me?’
‘For all of you. Those things, they just… There were so many of them. It was insanity. Coming at me like animals…’
‘What things?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘You can’t be infected,’ I said, looking him up and down. ‘Anybody the virus can kill it killed a long time ago. No mutated strains, either. None that we know of, anyway, and I seriously doubt that the first case has just so happened to show up at our town out of nowhere.’
‘First time for everything…’ He said with a cough, spluttering wildly. Spats of blood flew onto the sheets before him, and I felt myself unconsciously moving away from him in my chair. ‘We let her in, just like you let me in… The biting, it was... They just bite, over and overand if there’s anything left of you then you come back as one of them…’
‘One of what?’ I asked, staring him down as my heart raced.
‘She took a while to die, but… But…’ The man sighed, before an odd, discomforting smile appeared on his face. ‘It’s funny, really. The way this has all gone. We never found out where she got it from… But she came from the south. Out cold before we could get a word from her…’
‘From where? Where?’
It appeared that all of this had done him in, though. All of a sudden his eyes glazed over and his mouth fell open, and his body began to seize as he struggled against the bed.
‘Mae? Mae!’
A few seconds later she and Larry came bounding through the door and over to the bed. I stepped back, watching this odd, nightmarish scene take place before as his body continued to seize and I heard the death rattle click out from his lungs.
This situation flew by me so quickly I almost missed it. For a few seconds longer his body surged as Mae and Larry tried to hold him down, but there was nothing they could do. Eventually he came to a stop, sinking down onto the bed as his chest stepped moving, his dead, wide eyes staring up at the ceiling.
Mae and Larry came to a stop, realising that any more energy wasted on the situation would be a pointless act, and letting their arms fall to their sides as we looked about the room and down at the body, then repeating the whole thing again.
‘He say anything?’ Mae asked, looking over at me.
‘Would you really wanna know if he did?’ I asked, looking over at them both.
‘If he’s said something important we need to know, Tommy.’
I looked between the two of them, running a hand through my hair as I ran over what he had told me in my head.
‘He seemed to imply that he had been bitten… That that was what had caused his infection… And that people came back after they died as some kind of animal.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ Larry said.
‘Me too, I gotta say.’
‘Just telling you what he told me. I think we should get rid of the body. Tonight.’
‘Fuck that,’ Mae said, laughing and shaking her head. ‘By the laws of nature, and in my experience as a nurse, he’s dead. This can wait till the morning, I’m damn exhausted. You can move him then.’
I wanted to argue, but I knew that it would do no good. It had been a long day, just like every other day, and it was past midnight.
‘All right,’ I said, nodding. ‘Just do one thing for me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Lock this door after you leave.’
Chapter Eleven
Knock Knock
After I left Mae’s house I walked through the streets of Bastion, back to my house. It was dark and quiet, but as I glanced up at each of the houses that surrounded either side of the roads, I saw the occasional set of eyes watching me, the flutter of curtains as they were drawn to block even more pairs of eyes from view.
Even in a community like this, one where people were so close, the prospect of something new or an outsider threw everything into turmoil.
Now he was dead, though. He had faded from the world as quickly as he had arrived in our town, and tomorrow we would have to make arrangements to get rid of the body.
Whether or not that would make people feel better or worse was another matter altogether. We all distrusted outsiders to some extent, but the thought of one dying inside our walls wasn’t exactly a great alternative.
It was something that I always remembered – people didn’t care all that much about the troubles of others from faraway worlds until those problems reached their front doors. We were the same, but when I appeared to know something that I wasn’t letting on, I became the leader and the pariah. Small towns talked, and things couldn’t be kept secret for long.
I thought back to what Morgan had said as I headed up the street to my house, getting closer and closer to it. I had a lot of secrets, but the one that I had bestowed to me, and that I had relayed to Mae and Larry, was the strangest.
He had said that he had been bitten, infected by something, just like the others had been. There was a woman from the south who had come to him, or them, or whoever he had been with, and she had brought it to them.
His story was outlandish in many ways – he was implying that something could die and then come back to life as something else. From the old history books I had read about medieval witch hunts and superstitions, ghosts and things like. I remembered something about possessions, where the spirit of somebody else – or something – could take over another’s body.
The virus that had almost driven humanity to extinction was within the laws of nature – it had spread just the way a v
irus did, killing the host and dying itself in the process when it had nobody else to infect.
What he was talking about, though, was…
Nonsensical.
I reached the end of the front yard to the house, looking about the streets and the houses, the place that we had built together. It was playing on my fears, on my horrors – I savoured this place in my blood, and it was second in my life only to my family, to those closest to me…
I was being paranoid.
I shook my head, heading down the drive to my house, to the end of another day.
***
The third day.
I’ve promised to myself that I’ll tell this story from start to finish, regardless of what happened. To the people of Bastion I would have probably seemed a pretty good leader, at least I would like to think that. In me telling you everything, though, you’ve seen the darker side of this world that we live in. You know things that so few people know, things that were kept hidden – what Morgan said to me, the man that I killed in the farm, how I snuck out and buried his body in the woods.
This is what happened on the third day of our story.
I awoke with a shudder, feeling wide awake pretty quickly, my mind racing with prospects and thoughts. It wasn’t one of those days where I found myself trying to remember where I was – quite the opposite, as my mind raced with every issue that we faced.
It wasn’t an issue, though. All we had to do was remove the body, wrap it up and bury it a few fields away, in a small patch that we reserved for deaths in the community. In all of our time here only a few had passed in our company. Diseases and infections happened, and while in the old world they could be treated simply with antibiotics, now our supplies were much less comprehensive. We had raided chemists and pharmacists over the years, long abandoned shops, scavenging for medicine, but sometimes people slipped through our figures. Sometimes they preferred to go by their own hand, going out into the field with a gun and taking their own lives, while others preferred to have the community by their bedside, looking after them until their last moments, knowing they were surrounded by people who loved them.
This is what I thought about as I got dressed and checked my schedule. It was me who would be on guard duty that morning, standing on the eastside lookout post. That, of course, wouldn’t be for another hour. I had awoken early to move the body, and right now the spectre of death was watching me from nowhere, occupying my mind.
It was a reality that we all had to face.
I headed downstairs, unlocking the footlocker beneath the cabinet and taking the gun, checking it before slinging it over my shoulder.
I peaked into the living room, seeing that it was empty. By the time I had gotten back last night Leah and Hayley had still been here, but I had gone straight to bed. I didn’t want to spread any information, regardless of who it was to. The day had been too long, and I was ready to crash.
Returning to the door I took a deep breath and unlocked it before stepping outside.
Despite the warmth, it was a cloudy, overcast morning. The street was quiet once again, and as I set off down the street… Well, I remember that I had this discomfort. No… I think that, looking back, the thought terrifies me that I didn’t know that all of that was coming up on me, all of what was about to happen. Sometimes the most terrible things that happen to us creep up out of nowhere and level us like nothing we’ve ever felt. There are no warning signs, and certainly no hints. They come at us and we have to do our best to get the fuck out of the way.
It’s amazing how things can turn to absolute shit so unfeasibly quickly, yet it can take a lifetime to put it all back together again.
I turned the corner of the street, heading left towards Mae’s house, which was right across the road from Sam and Laz’s kitchen. In stark contrast to the day before, the place was quiet, with nobody standing around. At that point they would have been in their homes, perhaps just waking up to attend to their morning duties, the little things that all came together to function as a whole, keeping Bastion running.
I stopped at the end of the garden, looking up at the quiet house. It was just like all the others.
I’m describing all of this now because the memories are coming back to me… The memory of that day. Everything happened so quickly, but I’m going to try to relay it you exactly as I can remember it.
I walked down the yard, stopping at the front door and rapping my knuckles against the glass. I waited for a little while before knocking again, much more loudly.
Nothing. I thought I could hear something from within, but then it disappeared… If I could even hear it.
Finally, after perhaps a minute of waiting, I tried the door handle. To my surprise it opened – I paused, holding my hand on it and listening.
Silence.
I headed inside.
The stench was the first thing that struck me. It emerged forwards at me through the dark interior of the house, that smell of pus and disinfectant so repugnant that I gagged. I brought a hand up to my mouth, my heart beginning to race as the endless possible implications of what it could have meant setting into the definitions in my mind.
‘Mae? Larry? Are you guys awake?’
Things were still deathly quiet as I resolved to search the ground floor. I set off down the short hallway, peaking into the living room and then into the kitchen.
Things had been left pretty much as they were when I had left the night before – if anything had changed down here it was so small that I hadn’t noticed.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment, about to head upstairs, realising that they were probably still asleep – even though that didn’t seem like them – when I stopped by the refrigerator. There was a picture of the two of them there, an old, grubby Polaroid of Mae and Larry, arm in arm. They were muddied, their hair greasy and messy, probably after a long day’s work. But above all of that stuff, they had the most genuine smiles stamped across their faces as they gazed into the lens of the camera that was taking their picture. It must have been years old, the photo.
It even brought a smile to my face.
At that quiet, peaceful moment, the last for a long time, I heard a creaking sound upstairs. If they were waking up now, it would be a good time to get the body promptly moved.
I set off through the hallway, reaching the stairs and taking each one hesitantly, one at a time, not knowing that I was delaying my discovery of what awaited me. I reached the upper floor, and the moment I looked about myself I knew that something was wrong.
Both doors were open – the one where Morgan’s body was, and Mae and Larry’s bedroom. Wandering into other people’s houses wasn’t exactly an accepted custom, even in such a close-knit community as ours, but when it came to something a serious as this it was something of a given.
It only took a moment for me to pull the gun from over my shoulder by the strap, holding it tightly in my hands. I aimed the barrel ahead of myself as I called out once again, my eyes darting quickly between the two open doorways.
‘Is anybody there?’
A shuffling sound that I couldn’t quite determine the source of emerged from the dimly lit house.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
Carefully, my heart pounding in my chest, I made my way into Morgan’s room. I edged around the doorway, peaking into the room, and felt my breath catch in my throat as my eyes fell upon the sight before me.
The bed had been overturned, and every other object in the room had been strewn about or smashed, as if somebody had ransacked the place. It was like arriving on the aftermath of a home invasion, but this invader was not one who had pushed his way inside.
We had brought him in.
Now he was lying awkwardly in a slumped pile by the overturned bed. His eyes were wide open, as if permanently shocked, gazing up at the ceiling. I knew within seconds, largely from the pool of blood and the unambiguous glimmer of the surgical scalpel sticking out of the side of his head, that he was long dead.
>
Quickly, I glanced about the room, checking for any other signs of movement, for another body. Mae and Larry were nowhere to be seen.
I had handled grim situations in the past, the kind of things that creep up on you and make you witness horrendous acts of violence and terror that shake you to your very core, but somehow, this one shook me even more.
It wasn’t the fact that the man was dead – it was the fact that there was no sign of Mae and Larry, and that no alarms had been raised in the wake of all this madness.
Some astonishing act of violence had taken place here that nobody had known about. How many hours ago had this happened?
‘You two better say something soon,’ I said loudly, returning to the hallway outside with the gun raised. ‘I’m gonna need some information here, guys…’
I slowly edged my way towards their bedroom door, trying to stop my finger from twitching on the trigger. I took several deep breaths, stopping in the doorway. My view was blocked by the open door, and as I pressed on, inch by inch, I heard that same shuffling again that I couldn’t trace from before.
Then there was a whimpering, the sound of something helpless and in pain.
I turned the corner, looking into the room, and as my mind processed it all I felt my chest almost seize up completely.
The room was as wildly splayed out as the other had been. Larry’s body was on the bed… I say body, but it was only after a few seconds that I realised he was still alive despite all the blood that was spread about the room, pooled and splattered in some quantity over every surface. He was staring at the ceiling, each breath a wheezing mess that looked as if it was about to be his last, and yet another managed to continue shortly after. I had never seen such an image of hopeless, miserable horror.
‘What the fuck…?’ I found myself whispering, keeping the gun held up as I pointed the barrel into the room.
It was only after I dragged my eyes away from the sight of Larry that I saw her.
Mae was stood by the window, still, facing away from me. She was looking out of the window over Bastion, or at least looking in the direction of it, seeing as the curtains were still drawn. What shook me most was the stillness of her – she didn’t seem to be moving at all. Not even a breath was being taken as she stood there.
The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) Page 8
