On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  But he didn’t know where he was going anyway. Where would this path lead? After the camp there would be nothing. Everything they had worked towards, all their tents, supplies, clothes would be left behind. This was craziness.

  Despite that, there was no choice now. Even if they wanted to, they could not get back. They were being carried forward in great heaves, as if the path to the beach was a great, inhaling gullet sucking people through it in giant breaths. The human tide was too strong to push against.

  Somebody clattered into his back and he was shunted forward into the little girl. She fell to the ground. It was so tight that David couldn’t even look down to find her. Claustrophobic panic was conducted through the bodies and they were sucked forward again. David couldn’t stop. Groans of discomfort muffled the air. The little girl’s body was behind him. The mother tried to turn.

  ‘Jenny,’ she called. ‘Jennifer.’ Her voice was discordant.

  David was trying to stop the surge but the sheer weight of people around him was too great.

  ‘Stop,’ he yelled.

  Nobody listened. Nobody could stop.

  ‘There’s a little girl back there.’

  Somebody behind him heard him. ‘What did you say, mate?’

  ‘Back there, there’s a girl.’ He nodded backwards.

  The man to whom he was speaking was tall and large-framed. He was able to shift his body round.

  ‘Oh God, please get her back,’ the girl’s mother cried.

  The small cluster of people in that tiny human cell heard the call and tried to look down.

  David felt like his ribs were going to cave in. His gun pressed painfully into his chest. It was difficult to breathe. And then there was a release. A quirk of the surge freed some tiny space in front of him. He swivelled round and gulped precious oxygen. He could see behind him and a strong emotion ran through him. The little girl was being passed over the heads of the crowd. It was hard to believe how far back she was. He must have moved forward fifteen yards.

  ‘Over here.’ He thrust a hand into the air.

  Other stifled reaches went into the air, passing the body along them.

  David pushed the back in front of him and the girl was dropped into the space, where he held her in his arms so she couldn’t get hurt.

  Then there were screams coming from somewhere near the back of the crowd. He closed his eyes and concentrated on taking short, shallow breaths through his nose. Wherever the current told him to go he went, knowing it would inevitably feed him on to the beach. The mother kissed her daughter’s head and face with desperate intensity.

  The ground shuddered beneath the force of some unseen explosion and in the back of his mind he wondered how many of the marauders they had managed to kill. He hoped that in exchange for the camp they would have extracted a good pound of flesh.

  Breathing was becoming even more difficult now. His chest was in a lot of pain. The shallow breaths were not enough and his lungs gagged for air. He was being asphyxiated where he stood. He tried to move forward but the ocean of people moved at its own pace. There was too much blood in his brain.

  ‘Christ,’ he whispered.

  The screaming at the back of the crowd grew louder in his skull. They were being slaughtered.

  ‘Come on,’ a voice called.

  David opened his eyes. Two men were standing on top of a corridor of sandbags, ushering the herd. There was a sudden rush, like being pulled into a black hole, a whistling in his ears, the return of oxygen, and then he was through.

  He ran out into the sand. He needed to get away from the crowd and recover a sense of space. He found the mother and set her daughter down next to her.

  ‘Go,’ called one of the guards from the sandbags. ‘Don’t hang around.’

  The woman looked at David. ‘Where do we go?’

  The screaming was so loud now. The poor people behind him were in agony.

  ‘Anywhere. Just run.’

  He started moving. The camp had to be let go of. It was over.

  It was enough for her. She cried openly and squeezed her arms around her daughter. This was the final demonstration that the atrocities of the last year would never, ever be cleaned. The filth was too thick and dense to be forgotten.

  ‘One.’

  ‘Kill me,’ Miriam heard her mother say. ‘I beg you.’

  ‘That is not how it works. Only Miriam can choose. Two.’

  ‘You’re just going to kill us all anyway,’ Miriam screamed. ‘What’s the point in this?’

  She opened her eyes, and there was a moment of recognition as the future opened up again before her in an explosion of whiteness. Her mind tripped into place and her lungs ceased their inhalation mid-breath. There was no time. She spoke.

  ‘Just shoot,’ she said.

  A massive pulse of shock and sound boomed inside the hollow chamber and Crowder fell violently forwards. Smoke rose from his back and Edward lowered the gun.

  ‘Oh God,’ she cried.

  ‘Eddie?’ Mary said quietly.

  The boy looked tiny with the long, metal weapon held outwards in his arms. He hadn’t hesitated.

  Miriam put Mary down, crawled over the bed, over the body of the dead man and to Edward. She snatched the gun from him, threw it down and pulled him to her, taking his head in her hands and pulling his face into her shoulder.

  The ledge on which they were standing was so narrow. The three rungs of the metal railings, the only thing between them and the precipitous fall, seemed too fragile. There was something inviting about the drop. It called you in.

  Mims and Charlie stood there looking at each other. Neither of them said anything. The mist rose behind Mims. Away to Charlie’s left the air was clearing. The distance into which he could see deepened with each passing second.

  They ran for each other and collided hard. The railing bent outwards under their weight with a groan. Mims pushed Charlie back. His centre of gravity moved up him and he spilled backwards. Mims manoeuvred his body to the side, between Charlie and the windows. He was trying to force him through the gap between the lowest rung of the railings and the bricks.

  Charlie gripped the rung with his injured arm. With gritted teeth he forced the back of his head into Mims’s face.

  Rolling away, Charlie stood. Mims rushed him. His wild chaos was too powerful for such a small space. It was out of control. Charlie ducked and Mims threw his arms over Charlie’s back. With a thrust of his legs, Charlie forced himself up and Mims was thrown clear of him and over the top of the railings.

  Instinctively Charlie pushed out a hand from between the second and third rungs. It caught Mims before he fell. Charlie’s body was dragged out and it hammered into the railings. They shuddered under the weight but held.

  Charlie looked down into the face of the man who had tried to kill him. Mims’s snake tongue flailed outside his mouth in a silent scream. He tried to loop his legs up on to the brick ledge but Charlie knocked them back.

  ‘If you pull me up I’ll kill you. That’s a promise.’

  ‘So you want me to drop you?’

  Mims stopped kicking. ‘You won’t drop me.’

  Mims’s weight was pulling Charlie down over the railing but as long as the metal held, he could hold on. The arm that kept Mims up was the one that had been slashed with the knife. But Charlie could hold on.

  ‘It’s in your nature to save me. You’re compassionate in a dispassionate world. It’s the reason people will never think like you, or McAvennie, or anybody else like you. You know I’m right – just look at what’s happening down there. They’re running for their lives.’

  The mist was thinning so fast that Charlie could see the blackness of the night behind it.

  ‘You’re in the minority. You’ll never win. People are selfish and spiteful and just want to look out for themselves. You and your society, you can’t just overwrite billions of years of life. That’s your problem. You could never kill another person. You’re on the wrong side of th
at line. That’s why you won’t let me go.’

  In his mind, Charlie saw the man in the hamlet falling lifeless from the rooftop.

  ‘But you forgot something,’ Charlie said.

  Mims said nothing in reply.

  ‘People like you, people who think they know everything?’ The blood from his arm dribbled on to Mims. ‘Usually don’t.’

  He let go of the wrist. Charlie could see the bottom of the lighthouse now. The mist was almost gone. Mims made no sound as he fell. Just before he struck the ground his arms opened, wing-like. His face stared up at Charlie and Charlie drew his head in from the ledge, turned his body round so he was lying on his back, and looked out at the sea, at the clear moon cutting a silver line over its calm surface.

  And that was his test, he thought. He had let a helpless man fall to his death when he could have been saved. And it wasn’t just because of self-preservation. He had enjoyed it. Regret rushed into him.

  The people in the camp, his neighbours and friends, were still down there. And he was not helping. He sat up and let the gentle wind cool his face. Thoughts tumbled fast through his mind. With his eyes closed he saw Emily again on the lawn beneath a sunny sky, there was warmth in his bones, she was making her daisy chain and he leaned in to her to speak his first words. He was sensing the river of good that flowed through the favourite people in his life: his family, his old friends, Emily, Miriam, George McAvennie. He thought of them all and remembered how Dr Balad had described them: people who had something in them that made other people love them. Charlie opened his eyes. The night was so dark, so black.

  ‘It’s just the absence of light,’ he said aloud.

  That was what George had said. He would never say what he was feeling inside to anybody else. It would sound ridiculous and sentimental, but it was real. He couldn’t, and didn’t want to, deny it. His body started to tingle. His chest swelled. McAvennie wasn’t lying, he wasn’t wrong. It really was true. Mims was not going to define him. His reaction to Mims’s death was his definition. Charlie sat up and looked at the watch on his wrist.

  The mist had almost gone. David could see the sea. The tide was as full as it would become. The sound of the surf doused the screams.

  He ran as fast as he could but he was malnourished and his legs were weak. He could see the shapes of other people all around him running blindly into the darkness.

  He thought of his parents, of what might have happened to them. This was the same: dread of the unknown, fear of the future, panicked confusion. Over a small series of moments he began to lose hope. He had lost the young family he was supposed to be protecting just as he had lost his own family.

  He listened to the sounds around him. There was the hiss of the ocean and dull footfalls of those running away and the quick wheeze of his breathing.

  ‘Just keep running,’ somebody up ahead shouted.

  The hard, sharp fact that the camp really had collapsed hit him like a brick in the ribs. This was the end now. His head swayed from side to side and he wondered if the people around him were thinking the same thing. Why were they even running?

  He ran for ten more seconds and then the change came. The motion in his legs slowed, slowed, and he stopped. He held his hand out in front of him and could hear the sound of his pulse in his ears. The hand blazed bright pink in the white light. This was impossible, he thought. Night can’t just end. Above him, the sky was still black.

  The yellow of the beach glowed brilliantly before him and all the people burned to full technicolour life. And they had all stopped running.

  The moon sat in the sky as it always had, no lighter and no darker than it had ever been. But this light was different. Bathed in it, David felt suddenly unafraid. The people in front of him turned in unison. They pointed back up the beach and David watched as they looked at one another with confusion.

  This was so familiar. Being there on the beach, surrounded by his neighbours, it was like those nights when they had bonfires and McAvennie would promise that everything would be OK if they would just stick together.

  He looked up at the cliffs and had to cover his eyes because the light was so bright. It was the lighthouse. Somebody had switched the light on.

  The beach looked like a slice of lemon, the green of the grass like molten emeralds, the blue of the sea like pure sapphires. But the most beautiful part of it were all the people. When the light hit their backs it stopped them in their tracks. It held them in a trance. Charlie felt what they felt. Across the space his heart beat to the same rhythm as theirs. The light turned them round and now they were facing him. They looked like tiny, multicoloured plasticene models on the set of a children’s television show. Stationary, arms at their sides, they looked up at the light. He waved to them but they couldn’t see him.

  Charlie checked the watch on his wrist. There were just five and a half minutes left on it. He looked over the edge of the railings and saw the large white truck parked below.

  They looked up the beach, expecting to see a black wave of killers coming towards them along the crisp, yellow sand, but that was not what happened. The light that lit up the beach in such a vivid expression of colour showed the people that nobody was chasing them. The marauders had not followed.

  David stood there in the light and watched the perspiration rise from his shoulders. He closed his eyes and the light was so bright that he could see the insides of his pink eyelids, the red veins swimming across them like the bare winter treetops.

  He still had his gun. All around him were other men, most of them armed. They looked at each other and sense clicked into place. They could not leave the camp. If they lost the camp they would all die. What McAvennie had always said drifted silently through them. With all the light in the air, it was hard to be so afraid of the dark.

  Without saying a word, speaking in silence, everybody began walking back to the camp.

  The body of Mims lay as a tangled mess of limbs behind the van. In a way, Charlie wished he had landed on the roof of the van. It would have been fitting that the two of them should ride together on the road to oblivion. He left him on the concrete, his body obliterated and cold.

  The keys were in the truck. He started it up and found the headlights and two beams of light flowed out before him, just catching the final remnants of the mist in their streams.

  The road from the lighthouse down to the camp was clear. He wound down his window and felt the air on his face. There were two and a half minutes left. He was ready for this. He didn’t feel any fear. He pictured driving headlong into the low wall at the front of the house. The van would probably get through the wall and maybe even into the house itself. There would be no pain. It would all happen quickly.

  He got through the stone pillars of the car park and the road narrowed. A large crowd were near the entrance to the beach, the light from the lighthouse throwing them into stark relief. The men had formed a defensive line around the people and sandbags were being passed over the heads to make a wall. Some of the men were making their way cautiously back into the camp. There was no sign of the marauders.

  When the men saw the van approach they turned their guns towards it. Charlie leaned out of the window and waved to them. If it had been dark they would not have seen his face and he would already be dead, but now the men held fire. A few of them recognized Charlie because they were McAvennie’s men.

  ‘Let him through,’ they shouted.

  The guns were lowered and Charlie swept past. The men knew what the van was. They knew the plan.

  He pulled through the deserted car park. Bodies lay at the side of the road. Some wore gas masks. Most didn’t.

  There was a sudden, loud bang at the back of the truck. Charlie’s heart leaped. He checked the watch. One and a half minutes. There was nobody in his mirrors. He couldn’t see where the attack had come from. Placing his foot firmly on the accelerator he sped between the caravans and cars. Then there was another bang and then another. He looked over his shoulder, out of t
he window, but couldn’t see anybody.

  He checked the watch again and there was one minute left. He had to keep going. He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep, cleansing breath. He wasn’t going to stop.

  Now he was on the road heading up the hill to the house. He turned off the headlights. The light from the lighthouse was just enough to see the graded difference between the black grass and the blacker road.

  His foot was hard down on the pedal but the gradient of the hill stopped him getting up any speed. It was dark but they could surely see him coming. Machinegun fire rattled from somewhere up on the hill. Charlie held his hands firm on the wheel.

  The windscreen made a series of thumping sounds and spider webs cracked across it. Charlie ducked. The bullets thudded into the seat behind him. He threw the switch on the headlights in an attempt to blind his attackers but the bullets kept coming. The van veered wildly across the road. He tried to check the watch but his arm wouldn’t turn properly.

  He thought he had been shot again but then his body slid into the door and there was a screeching sound. The van was up on its side and Charlie became sickeningly aware that he would never get the truck to the house. The horizon flipped and the passenger side of the cab was crushed in as it struck the ground. The twisting steel came towards him. He watched it approach and shunted as far away from it as he could before his body became weightless again and the truck flipped once more. In the mirror he saw the back door fly open and sheer clean off and violently pirouette off into the darkness. The truck landed flush on its side. Charlie’s back was against the driver’s side window. The glass cracked and cut into his skin. Involuntarily his arms pulled him away and the truck came to a halt on the grass.

  Stillness. He was trapped. The passenger side was crushed. The driver’s window was against the ground. His body was twisted round so his face was against the broken windscreen. His chest was crushed against the steering wheel.