"They've come to reclaim what's theirs," Gabe said.
The old man turned back to face him. "And you? You've come for my daughter?"
"Just to set her free."
Flowers laughed. "She doesn't need you for that, son. She's quite capable of doing it for herself."
"What do you mean?"
"Meaning," he reached out and placed a hand on hers, though she remained motionless, "I'm losing her with every passing second."
"You lost her a long time ago." He paused, studying his former boss. "Tell me something, Harry - you feel all this was worth it? Your acquisition of power. Was it worth the expense? What it cost you?"
Flowers withdrew his hand and stood. "I've hated myself for what I've had to do over the years. But somebody needed to take control, you must know that. You saw it when you joined my organisation - you were unused to the kind of work myself and my boys deal with, but you stuck around, especially after the outbreak. Why? Because for all that you might've despised me, you recognised there was somebody making decisions, formulating plans. A position like that is a beacon around which others gather, an anchor in uncertain times. But it requires sacrifices."
"Don't play the fucking martyr," Gabe snapped. "Everything you did, you did for your own benefit."
"Maybe. But don't kid yourself that you coming here is some kind of noble gesture. You're assuaging your own guilt too, for the mess you left behind."
"I always told her I'd be here for her. That's why I continued to work for you, and that's why I'm here right now. To try to bring her back."
"Well, you're too late," Flowers murmured. "She's lost to us both."
"What you mean is that the wound you inflicted a decade or more ago has finally reached her heart," Gabe snarled. "And now you can put her in the ground where she won't be a problem any longer."
Flowers' eyes flamed with anger. "I was protecting her, like any father would."
"Yeah? That what you told her infant son, as you held him for the final time?"
The older man let a bellow of rage and backhanded Gabe across the face. The impact knocked him back but he barely felt it. He swung the shotgun into Flowers' midriff, doubling him up, then delivered a powerful blow across the back of his head, a strike so hard it splintered the wooden stock of the weapon. He discarded the gun, grabbed Flowers by the throat and lifted him up against the wall, his fingers digging into the cold skin of his neck.
"You think... you're any better than me, O'Connell?" Flowers hissed, blood and drool dribbling from his mouth. "We're just two creatures... from the grave, who... should've died a long time ago."
"Difference is, I tried everything I could to stop becoming the monster, whereas you embraced it. But you know what? For you, I'll make the exception." Gabe pushed the old man's head back, exposing a tract of flesh. But just as he leaned in to take a bite, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He cast a quizzical glance over his shoulder, and saw Anna standing behind him. He relaxed his hold on Flowers, and stepped back; she was looking at her father, eyes full of shadow, her features composed in a death mask.
"Anna?" Flowers whispered.
"Dad." Her voice didn't seem to come as much from her lips as from within her, vast and emotionless.
"I'm so sorry."
His words were barely audible, but even so she shushed him quiet, placing a hand on his cheek, stroking it, moving down to his throat. She held it there, then tightened and squeezed and tugged, wrenching open her father's windpipe, which came free with a moist sluicing sound. He gargled, the rotten tissue of his neck collapsing without the support. Anna planted two hands on either side of his head and twisted it like a screw-cap, decapitating him with one swift motion. She studied her father's head for a moment, kissed it lightly before dropping it to the floor, then stepped back beside the window. Gabe moved forward, and took her crimson-stained hand in his.
"I'm not going to become like you," she said quietly, her gaze roving over the world beyond the glass.
"I know."
"I'm not going to stay."
"Me neither."
Anna lay her head on Gabe's shoulder, and they stood there in silence, framed against the light.
They found Gannon not far from where they'd left him, crouched among the scrub. He raised his eyebrows that it was just the two of them.
"Gabe was never coming back," Beth said, before the question could be voiced.
"But the charges have been lit?"
Adam nodded. "With the deadheads providing the distraction, it wasn't difficult to start the fire."
The three of them watched as smoke began to billow from Harry Flowers' mansion, windows shattering from the heat, flames greedily swallowing timbers, dark black clouds massing above the roof. The dead that had poured through into the grounds stopped and circled the conflagration, like pilgrims to a great mystical vision. Beth wondered briefly if it was her imagination, or whether she actually saw a couple intertwined at an upstairs room, unconcerned by the encroaching fire, gazing back out at their audience; but in an instant they were gone, hidden by the roiling, thick smoke.
They watched until the house was no more than a blackened skeleton, a husk, confident that it wouldn't rise again. Then they turned and started back towards the city.
EPILOGUE
The Quiet Earth
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights
22 May 1992
Foothills North of Srebrenica,
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Bird cry echoes through the valleys, sharp and distant and mournful, like a parent calling for a lost child, and the black shadows of great wheeling shapes, wings outspread, circle the verdant slopes of the lowlands. A wind ruffles through the landscape, long grass dipping with the same tremulous undulation as the rhythmic pulse of a sea tide, and he stands with his face to the breeze, allowing himself to be buffeted by it. His skin is pocked with grit, his eyes watering from the flecks of dirt blown into them, yet he refuses to turn away. He feels like he's composed of shifting sand, subject to the whims of the elements; or maybe one of the skeletal trees perched upon the outcroppings, clinging tenaciously to life as it's stripped and scoured by an unstoppable eroding force. The chill in the air numbs his ears, dries his lips, and causes his nose to run - he wipes it on his sleeve - but the sky is the colour of sapphire and nothing can diminish the unblemished beauty of the vast canopy above him. It is a glorious spring morning, one in which the blood rushes a little faster and the hair tingles in syncopation with the new season budding around it.
He likes to take at least one moment a day to appreciate the country in this way, which has otherwise been disfigured by conflict. It serves as a reminder that time and nature will prevail, despite his species' best interests; that the planet keeps turning, that the sun continues to bestow its nourishing rays upon the surface, teasing seed into bloom, oblivious to the rampant designs of his kind. This land has seen enough hate wrought upon it to deface it permanently, the scars running deep below root and rock to leave it irrevocably changed, yet it refuses to be battered into ugliness: it continues, unbowed, to exist while all around it death tries to spread its taint.
It's a small moment of marvel, and one that he never grows tired of experiencing. He flicks the last of his ash off the end of his cigarette, and drops the butt into the mud, grinding it out with his heel. Breathing in that fresh-dew smell, swelling his chest with cool mountain air, he reaches for his shovel and hums as he begins to dig, dark soil turning beneath his blade. For two long hours he toils, producing a pit several feet square, work so professionally accomplished that he barely gives it a second glance, rarely stops to consider its size; he knows from instinct that its dimensions are correct. He's dug many more like it, and the
procedure has the touch of routine about it, his labour accompanied constantly by quiet and tuneless melodies, as if he's unaware he's even making a sound. His movements are swift and unhampered by doubt, aware that he cannot afford to linger too long; this will not be the only hole he will have to dig before the day is done.
Hoisting himself out of the pit, he tosses the spade aside and grabs the nearest of the bodies by the legs, dragging it towards its makeshift grave. All the corpses have been wrapped in linen and tightly bound, and he is relieved that at least he does not have to look them in the face when he showers the dirt down upon them; but even so he can tell by the size and weight of this cadaver that it was a child, no more than a teenager. It is not the first he has buried, but that doesn't make it easier, to feel its lightness as he hefts it in his arms for a moment before allowing it to tumble into the ground. He hopes that the bodies that will be following it are the child's family - it makes little sense in the scheme of things, but provides some crumb of comfort that they will have each other's company beneath the soil - yet there is no way for sure of knowing. There are too many dead requiring his attention, and the niceties of a civilised grave have been foregone in the interests of speed and sheer quantity. Entire villages have been decimated, carcasses line the roads, and he has been charged with their disposal. So he retrieves the next and the one after that, filling his pit with these human-shaped parcels, humming in that cracked voice, stopping to pile the dirt back in once it is full before starting to dig again. He coughs, sniffs, wipes back tears, and continues, knowing he has no time to dawdle; and knowing too that this job will never be finished, not by him nor his successors. It is an insurmountable task, and yet one that he has accepted and one he will endeavour to complete while there is still breath left in his lungs.
The birds cry to one another as they skate low across the windswept hills, their shadows playing on the heaped mound of bodies that extends around the base of the valley: there are thousands of them, with no markers to distinguish each swaddled corpse from its neighbour. The dead congregate patiently as they await their return to the quiet earth, now gratefully far from the words of their roaring.
Matthew Smith was employed as a desk editor for Pan Macmillan book publishers for three years before joining 2000 AD as assistant editor in July 2000 to work on a comic he had read religiously since 1985. He became editor of the Galaxy's Greatest in December 2001, and then editor-in-chief of the 2000 AD titles in January 2006. He has written one other novel, Judge Dredd: The Final Cut, and lives in Oxford.
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