On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  On the right-hand side of the street a house still burned. Flames spewed out of the windows, the walls only just discernible beyond the upward-flowing rivers of smoke. A few of the men who had come from the camp to help were caught in the fire’s trance. They were just staring at it. Even above the car’s engine, Charlie could hear the low, powerful breathing of the fire in full power.

  On the other side of the road, what looked like a newspaper shop had had its windows put through and the contents incinerated. The inside looked like a great, dark mouth. There was a long, black, crumpled mass lying half in the shop and half out. It would not have looked human were it not for the outstretched arm on the pavement.

  They saw McAvennie up ahead. In the kerb a weed had grown so high that it came up to his waist. The plants were moving back into the areas that had for so long been human domain. Slowly, Charlie thought, they were slipping to nothing, like a puddle drying up.

  Fields stopped next to the Scot. Charlie got out of the car and went up to the tall weed. He put his fist around it and wrapped one of the fronds around his hand. He went to pull it up but something stopped him. An internal part of him said to leave it.

  ‘You were supposed to stay in the camp,’ said McAvennie in a tired voice. He looked at Fields. ‘How many?’

  ‘Twenty-five families,’ answered the American.

  ‘You couldn’t persuade any of them to stay?’

  Fields shook his head. ‘Every one of them who wanted to leave, left. I couldn’t talk them down. What about here?’

  ‘Carnage.’

  McAvennie’s face was redder than usual and his clothes were darkened by smoke. Fields placed his hands on his hips. His injured arm still didn’t look right in its socket.

  ‘They killed them all,’ McAvennie said.

  Charlie’s gut tightened.

  ‘How many of them are there?’ Fields asked.

  ‘Christ knows. They’ve just disappeared again. They come in and they go out like the fucking wind.’

  Charlie looked around him. ‘There must be a lot,’ he said.

  ‘A lot more than we think.’ McAvennie blew out a lungful of air. ‘For them to do something like this . . .’ He trailed off. ‘There’re fifty houses here,’ he said.

  Not seeing them was the worst part. He found it hard to picture it, hard to think where they might be hiding. All they left behind them was death and destruction.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  McAvennie stared into the middle distance. ‘We’re going to burn the bodies. We have to. Forty of them.’

  Fields hesitated before asking, ‘Kids?’

  McAvennie pulled his trousers up around his waist. ‘Killed them this time.’

  Charlie’s skin went taut. ‘What are they doing?’ he said.

  ‘They’re trying to scare us. Freak us out,’ said Fields.

  McAvennie nodded soberly.

  Charlie’s grip tightened around the plant. ‘It’s just fucking ridiculous. Fucking pricks.’ He could feel his body’s reaction hard now. ‘How can they do this? We’d never do something like this.’

  ‘That’s ’cause we’re civilized.’ McAvennie snorted.

  ‘No.’ Charlie shook his head. His legs were shaking. ‘They were civilized too.’

  ‘Jesus, Charlie man, think of the underbelly. The sex traffickers, the drug dealers, the gangs, aye? They were in the cities before. But there ain’t no cities now so they’ve had to move, right?’

  ‘But killing kids—’

  ‘Come off it, are you kidding? Charlie, these are bad men on a different level. They’ll do anything. They do bad things for the fucking sake of it. Compassion is a weakness to them.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ Fields said.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said McAvennie, glancing at him. ‘Bad is more powerful, always will be. You stick five good people in a room of a hundred bad people and they’ll get ripped apart. But you put five bad people in a room of a hundred good people, and it’s still the good people who’ll lose.’

  The wind blew the scent of burning wood across the street.

  ‘Should we fight them?’

  McAvennie blew some air from between his lips. ‘We could.’

  ‘It’d be a difficult thing,’ said Fields. ‘These guys don’t fuck around. They really know what they’re doing. And what have we got? We don’t know how to fight.’

  ‘We’ve got a few people. There’s that guy who was in the army, and a few cops. We have weapons.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said McAvennie. ‘We’ve got something they don’t have.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘We’re the good guys.’

  McAvennie shook his head. ‘Not that, no. I wish that counted but it doesn’t. Nah.’ He swatted a fly from his face. ‘However many people they have, we have a lot more.’

  McAvennie took them down an alleyway between two of the houses. High wooden fences had been erected on either side. More of the tall, ugly weeds had cracked the pavement and grown up with their hardened fronds.

  The alleyway led into a children’s play area. A handful of men from the camp were standing around a pile of human carcasses, heaped motionless, side by side, two deep. A strange image of vacuum-wrapped hot dog sausages came into Charlie’s head. He had seen many corpses since the Sadness arrived but they still did not look real. There was no physical difference between a dead body and a live one, and yet there was a difference. Dead bodies looked faulty, animalistic. Without the spark to animate them it was difficult to imagine how such a thing could harbour something like life.

  Charlie watched the men in the play area. Two of them struggled between a wooden kissing gate on the far side of the park. Between them, curved like a hammock, was another carcass, this one female.

  Charlie looked at the man holding the legs and a trickle of anger dripped into his stomach.

  ‘He wanted to help,’ said McAvennie.

  The white face of Mims reflected the colour of the sky.

  ‘But he’s bad,’ said Charlie.

  McAvennie was standing behind him. ‘We have to keep him on side.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Would you rather fight against him, if the time comes?’

  That was not good enough for Charlie. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘He wanted to help.’

  ‘No he doesn’t. He’s just here to get a good look. Because he’s sick.’

  ‘Easy, Charlie.’

  ‘I’m right.’

  ‘Really? So why are you up here?’

  Whatever McAvennie said, Charlie would not agree. It was only yesterday that Mims had attacked him.

  ‘He’s been through a lot, Charlie. It’s bound to mess you up.’

  Mims and the man with him dropped the dead woman at the end of the line of corpses. Her body slumped to a rest, her arm falling awkwardly underneath her body, and the scale of what had happened to the village shunted into Charlie. These people had been massacred. He imagined the screams and the pain, the despair and submission as the black wave swept through the streets. The fibres in his bones hardened, the marrow inside them toughened, the darkness surrounding him calcified.

  ‘Any more?’ McAvennie called.

  Mims saw Charlie. As the other man answered McAvennie, Charlie watched the silent grin expand on Mims’s face.

  ‘One more that we can see, Mr McAvennie.’

  McAvennie nodded.

  ‘Bring it here and then check the cul-de-sac.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ came the answer.

  Still smiling at Charlie, Mims turned and left the park at the far side.

  The hinges of the old front door creaked open. They could do with some oil, Miriam thought absently.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘They killed everyone in the village,’ McAvennie said.

  The latch was still in her hand and she was glad for the weight of the door. It supported her as her legs became weak. Deep down she knew what had happened. It was always th
e worst outcome when people were involved.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ McAvennie said. ‘If you do, they’ll come for you too. And then they’ll come for us.’

  She knew what he was saying was the truth but she could not register his words. Her mind returned over and over to the same memory: the flailing arms of people on fire.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything we know,’ he said.

  She moved her hand from the latch to the edge of the door.

  ‘We don’t know where they come from or why they’re doing what they’re doing. They’re like ghosts. All we really know is that they’ve been taking kids.’ He spoke plainly, in short, precise sentences. ‘Probably for a long time.’

  Slowly, the words started to make sense.

  ‘The folks over near the farm had kids. We know this, and we know there were no kids left after they had been there.’ He stopped and stooped, looked up into her eyes. ‘Are you OK?’

  Miriam turned and ran to the back of the house with her hand over her mouth. Kneeling in front of the toilet she threw up into the bowl. Her throat stung and cool sweat appeared at her brow. The air was cold in the room and felt good against her face. Shakily, she drew herself to her feet.

  McAvennie waited patiently at the front door. Uninvited, he had not stepped inside.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice sounded croaky.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall. She was tired. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you come to the camp?’

  ‘Do you really think it will make any difference?’

  ‘I do.’

  Miriam swallowed. Her mouth was full of mucus. ‘This is . . . insane.’

  McAvennie said nothing.

  ‘Why . . . why do you think they’re taking kids?’

  ‘They’re not normal people, Miriam, they’re animals. Kids are easy to train, easy to scare. They’re just slaves.’

  Her mind could still not process it properly. The idea was too far removed.

  ‘When do you think they’ll come?’ she said. There it was, she thought. She was going to give up the house.

  ‘They won’t come tonight,’ he said. ‘They know we’ll be on guard. But after tonight –’ McAvennie shrugged – ‘who knows?’

  She opened her eyes a little. McAvennie’s face looked like it had become faintly lopsided. His large head looked less symmetrical than it had.

  ‘Can you protect us tonight? Just in case?’ She tried to smile.

  ‘Of course.’

  The baby moved in her stomach, twisted itself around and rubbed against the womb. ‘I’d like one more night here,’ she said.

  Fields and Charlie were checking the remainder of the houses in the village. Entry was not difficult – all the front doors had been smashed in. The sky was darkening. They needed to check every house before the bodies could be burnt.

  A surprising number of the houses were empty. The old occupants had either left their homes at the start of the outbreak and escaped to an unknown fate, or had been killed by the marauders somewhere outside, whilst fleeing.

  Charlie was standing in front of a small white house. The lawn had grown untidily to knee height. There were no burn marks on the walls and the windows were intact.

  Going inside the houses was a strange experience. In the long-since-evacuated places a thin veneer of pristine dust had accumulated on the hard surfaces. The houses without people were strangely cold. It was like looking at an old photograph, a snapshot of how things were.

  Once inside the small white house he called out. No answer was returned and so he went into the living room. A television was in the far corner, near the window. There was an old-fashioned gas fire fastened to the wall where a fireplace had once been. On the mantelpiece was a glass-faced carriage clock. Its gold-plated mechanism had stopped turning and the time was permanently set at a quarter past six. A china figure of a ballerina, sitting down and tying the strings of her ballet slippers, was next to the clock, and next to her was a small teddy bear. There was a photograph of a young girl in a standing frame.

  The staircase creaked under his weight. The ceiling on the landing was low. He thought he heard a noise downstairs. He called out again but there was no answer. Outside, he thought he could hear shouting. He listened closely but there was nothing.

  The front bedroom housed a large, wooden bed. The mattress was gone and the springs sagged in the centre. Underneath the only window was a dressing table. A large yellow powder puff sat next to an array of metal trinkets. Charlie felt an overwhelming sense of melancholy. He lifted the powder puff off the dressing table. Flecks of white makeup had hardened on its surface. I shouldn’t be in here, he thought. He wanted to go back to Emily, to hide out in their van and pretend the world didn’t exist.

  He sensed something behind him. The old woman’s ghost, he thought. He stopped and put the yellow powder puff down. No, not a ghost. He turned round.

  Mims smiled at him and lifted a sharp knife up in front of his face. He twirled it so the edges glinted white in the dying of the daylight.

  ‘I told you I was going to kill you,’ he said.

  Charlie backed into the dressing table. It shuddered under his weight.

  Mims stepped into the room and rolled his tongue across his upper lip. The fork in it looked plump, distended. Even from across the room Charlie could see the scars of ulceration.

  ‘You see, they think my “treatment” made me like this. But that’s my great secret. It didn’t.’ He smiled. ‘That’s the thing about the end of the world – it’s a perfect leveller. All our histories were wiped. Look at me. I am a murderer, and yet when I was doomed, they saved me. Me. The only one they saved. Crazy, isn’t it?’

  Charlie fumbled behind him for one of the metal trinkets on the dressing table. They clattered on to their sides.

  ‘Are you seriously thinking of fighting me off with a makeup pot?’ He paused and smiled again. ‘I bet you didn’t think you’d ever meet somebody like me, did you?’ He snapped his lips. ‘Look at what I can do when there’s nobody to stop me. I can . . . revel . . . in it.’

  Shouting outside. He turned his head and looked out of the window. Below, Fields and another man were running up the garden path into the house.

  Mims cricked his neck and sighed. Charlie could see he was making a decision. His movement was quick.

  ‘Charlie.’

  They were calling to him. They were running up the stairs.

  The knife was in the air. Charlie turned away. He saw Mims straighten. The knife missed and slammed into the wall an inch from the window.

  When Fields saw Mims he stopped.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said.

  David joined him on the landing outside. He was looking at Charlie in a strange way. Charlie couldn’t tell what was going on. Mims was standing in the room as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Charlie,’ said David. ‘You need to come.’

  Charlie looked at him. He was stunned by what had just happened. Mims just stood there. There was too much going on.

  David stepped into the room, into the light.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We have to go.’

  Outside there was the loud roar of a car engine.

  Fields sat in the back with him. They drove quickly through the side streets and on to the road that led out of the village and back to the camp.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Are they back?’

  He looked out of the windows on every side, twisting his body left and right, searching for a sign of the marauders. But he couldn’t see anything.

  Nobody spoke. They came to the camp and slowed. He expected the car to stop in the car park. That was where the cars stopped normally, surely. His heart was beating fast. He was realizing something. He shook his head. His mouth filled with water and he started to feel sick.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  It w
as all he could say. His body was restless. There was an energy building inside him that had nowhere to go. He looked at Fields. The American refused to look back.

  The car passed through the car park and ascended the hill towards the lighthouse.

  He had met her at university, in their very first term. There had been an Indian summer that year and he had happened to be sitting next to her on the lawn outside the main campus building one day. There were perhaps fifteen or twenty people sitting in the circle, all of them nervous about meeting new people, all of them trying to say something interesting or funny. The lawn was dotted with daisies; that was what he remembered. And clover rings. He remembered it because she had made a daisy chain. She didn’t say much as she threaded the stalks of the flowers together.

  Her vacant eyes didn’t even recognize him.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. There was no power in his legs. He slumped to his knees and put the palms of his hands on either side of his face. ‘Oh no,’ he said again. ‘Oh no, no, no.’

  He could feel Fields and David standing behind him. His mouth opened wide and he drew breath. She was looking at the ceiling. The old doctor with white hair and a white beard was sitting on a plastic chair on the other side of the bed. Shouldn’t he be doing something? Shouldn’t he be getting ready to take a reading, or filling up a syringe, or preparing a drip? He was just sitting there.

  Once, there had been a knock at the door. Somebody was on the phone. He got out of the little single bed in his dorm and went to the door. He turned back and she was looking at him. The sun was shining through the crack in the curtains. Her hair was spread across the white pillow and he felt a flicker in his stomach.

  The room they were in now was cold. Her hair was on the pillow but it wasn’t like it had been. He stood up again. She moved her head and looked at him. It wasn’t her. She had her body but it wasn’t her.

  ‘What can we do?’

  The doctor looked at him from across the bed with terrible eyes.

  ‘There must be something.’

  ‘You can only accept it,’ said the doctor, with a voice so gentle that it hardly reached him.