by Rhys Thomas
The headlights shone across the grass. The house was just ten yards away. The marauders were there, looking at the shattered carcass of the van. There were so many of them. Down on the camp he had seen hope on the faces of those men who were trying to fight back.
But there was no hope against this. Mims was right. The watch in his wrist ticked quickly to zero and Charlie closed his eyes.
He waited and wondered if this was what finally happens. Maybe that last moment of life was able to stretch itself. The watch beeped quietly. The bomb hadn’t gone off. Charlie opened his eyes again.
Five marauders came out on to the grass and into the two beams of the headlights, their dark bodies like shadows against the brilliant green of the illuminated grass.
From the back of the van something started screaming. There was somebody in there. The marauders closed in around the truck. A huge, black horse moved behind them. Charlie watched as one of the men stopped and quickly lifted his gas mask off his face. There was more banging inside the truck, this time like footsteps. And then the marauders stepped back. And then they fired their guns.
Bodies streamed out from the back of the truck. They ran so fast. A few fell under the rain of gunfire but even they struggled to their feet. They threw themselves on to the armed men, two on one.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Charlie whispered.
The infected men and women flowed past the fallen bodies of the gunmen and into the little garden and then into the house. Charlie watched the relentless advance into the building, and the sight of men being thrown clean through the upstairs windows to the ground below. Muffled gunfire came from inside the house and Charlie smiled. This was going to work.
There were people moving around outside. Miriam grabbed her children and pulled them away from the door. She could hear men talking amongst themselves and she thought she could sense a jovial note in their sounds. She looked at her mother.
There were two dead bodies in the small, cramped space and the air was acrid with the smell of heat and blood.
When the figure appeared at the door she watched it calmly. Her finger was against the trigger of the shotgun but she didn’t fire. Death was already too close.
‘Are you OK in there?’
The voice was clear. There was a jangle of excitement in it.
‘Who are you?’
‘It’s OK,’ said the man. ‘We’re the good guys. Come on. The beach is safe. We’re taking everyone down there. Let’s get you out of there.’
He had to turn his body around in the tiny capsule of space as if it was a spinning globe. The folded metal where the passenger side of the cab had collapsed was sharp. Jagged limbs of steel dug into his flesh as he manoeuvred his way to the opposite of his original position. He needed to get out of the cab before the infected people in the house finished their massacre.
He pushed against the shattered windscreen with his feet. The glass gave easily and fell away as one satisfying mass. Charlie crawled backwards out of the cab. His arm brushed against his face and he felt the stickiness of half-congealed blood from the knife wound.
The air was wonderfully cold when he fell on his belly on to the cool grass. He rested there for a moment and felt the soothing waxiness of each individual blade on his cheek before the time came to struggle upright. He swayed on the spot with dizziness and then placed one uneven foot in front of the other. Pausing briefly he listened to the dying screams of the men in the house and laughed at how diabolically clever Dr Balad’s plan had been. One of the dead men was just feet away from him. Charlie stole his gun and looked at the heavenly light shining on the bright beach making it look like a giant sliver of moon. The green-blue of the sea, white and foamy at the fringes, looked, with the black night sky behind it, like the beach from some paradise in another galaxy.
Charlie went as quickly as he could down the hill, where the fighting perpetuated itself in the drilling sound of quick gunfire bursts. Most of the marauders had returned to the house on top of the hill and he found it hard to believe there could be many more down there.
As he came to within a hundred yards of the camp, the large, dark form of what looked like an army personnel carrier rumbled out from between the entrance gates.
Charlie hopped clear of the road and lay down in the grass. In the light of the lighthouse he saw a solitary man running up behind the truck.
Coolly, Charlie aimed the short, stubby rifle he had stolen at the windscreen. He fired without even thinking about it. The gun cranked one bullet from its magazine clip. It pinged into the windscreen and ricocheted off into space. Charlie was surprised by his accuracy. He fired again with the same result and so he aimed at the front tyres and pulled the trigger, firing rounds in quick succession. He didn’t stop firing until the truck lurched downwards. One of the tyres had been shredded. The effect was less dramatic than he had hoped for. The thick tarpaulin at the back of the truck was thrown aside and his gunfire was returned.
They couldn’t see him. He was too far away. Their fire was aimless, scattering over the grass like seeds on barren land. Charlie aimed again and fired calmly back at them as if he was doing nothing more than playing a video game.
Behind the slowing van the man who had been chasing had still not been spotted. He threw something, stopped and ran off into the grass, throwing himself dramatically to the ground with his arms over his head. A pregnant moment of expectation held time still. There was loud shouting from the truck. And the truck exploded outwards.
Charlie watched the explosion mushroom in a self-sustaining fireball that kept going and going. It went out in all directions. At the base of the truck a circle of fire flowed out along the ground. From some heated epicentres fingers of yellow flame spat like the tails of meteorites into the sky.
The shockwave reached Charlie and his body felt like it was being dragged backwards by an invisible force. Shards of shrapnel whistled on the air and landed all around him and he laughed with a sense of uncontrolled freedom.
He looked at the skeleton of the truck. The square metal bands that had been the steel structure of the truck’s back end had been snapped open and were now facing up into the sky like the cracked-open ribs of a giant insect-like monster.
He went down to the remains. Nobody moved within. He couldn’t even see any bodies. They must have been vaporized. He liked that idea – there was a sense of completion to it.
Through the flames he saw the man who had thrown the grenade. He was coming round the fire towards him.
‘Did you see that?’ His voice had the enthusiasm of a small child. ‘Did you see what I just did?’
He was a man of around fifty years, but the pride lifted his body and made him seem a lot younger.
‘It was pretty good.’ Charlie beamed.
‘Was it you who was shooting at them?’
‘Yup.’
‘Nice one. Good teamwork, eh?’ He placed his hands on his hips and shook his head. ‘They were trying to steal our petrol.’ He laughed. ‘I bet they wish they hadn’t now. Did you see the size of that explosion?’
Charlie looked at him as they shared the satisfaction of their small victory. He was remembering something. The orange glow on the man’s face reminded him of something.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, with sudden recognition.
He flung out the back of his hand and tapped the man in the chest. Blood from his arm inadvertently splashed on to the man’s sweater.
They both looked at the stain.
The man brushed it off. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘My mother-in-law gave it to me.’
Charlie looked at him. ‘You can’t remember me, can you?’
The man shook his head.
‘I met you on the first night I came here. On the beach. Remember?’
‘Sorry.’
‘You gave me and my girlfriend a baked potato.’
The light of recognition came into his eyes, if not of Charlie himself then of his action.
‘Oh yeah, I rememb
er,’ he said.
The two of them shook hands and started laughing as the recklessness of their actions caught up with them.
The man’s smile beamed out and the orange light in his little dark eyes looked like it came from within the eyeballs themselves. He used his free hand to pat Charlie warmly on the shoulder.
‘What a coincidence.’ He laughed. ‘So how’s it going?’
He looked at his little sister’s face through the dark. They went down the hill, led by the men, and her body wobbled on the uneven ground. She turned her face to him and almost tripped. Edward reached out for her and pulled her up.
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah.’
He lowered his voice and leaned in to her ear. ‘Robin Red Breast, where are you?’ he said.
She looked at him again, and half a smile was on her lips.
‘In the clouds,’ she said quietly.
Edward nodded seriously and they walked on.
There were a lot of fires in the campsite. Men were calling to each other somewhere off in the distance, but Edward felt safe. He was with his family again. That was all he cared about.
‘Ed,’ he heard her call.
He looked down and Mary was holding something up to him.
‘Look,’ she said.
He took something soft from her hands and held it up to the light.
‘It worked!’ he said loudly. The grey fur of the rabbit foot glistened orange at its edges. One of the surges he felt for her rushed through him. ‘You’d better hold on to this.’
He handed it back to her and she awkwardly shoved the foot back into her jacket pocket. Edward turned and smiled at his mum and grandmother behind him, and then turned back towards the bright light of the beach.
‘Everything is sun,’ he whispered under his breath.
As they went downhill, along the low wall of the car park towards the beach, Miriam put her hands together and found herself unable to say anything.
Ahead of them a milky cone of light scythed its path through the night as a finger of hope but she felt little from it. She should be so happy. Edward had come back and everybody was still alive. They had made it. And yet she could still feel the dead weight of the woman pressed against the side of her body. The other woman.
Across the wall, in the car park, she saw the man with the thin blond hair and glasses whose son had been killed. She watched unblinking at the act he and the four men he was with were about to carry out. They had captured a man she knew. They had left his flamethrower strapped to his back in some bizarre symbol of indignity. His hands were bound in front of him.
The five men were unaware of the family passing behind them. They raised their rifles in unison and gunned down their victim. The man slumped to his knees and that was how he stayed, without enough gravity at his tilting side to pull him to the ground.
Miriam stopped. The others didn’t hear her and kept on going down the hill. She thought she had heard something. It had sounded like a faint mewing. There it was again. It was coming from the other side of the wall, up the hill, away from the beach.
Leaning over the wall she saw, slumped against it in the shadows, a bundle of black blankets. Something was wriggling inside them. Checking to make sure nobody could see her, Miriam rolled her body over the wall to the other side, all the while trying to protect her baby from being crushed under her weight.
There was a nagging thought at the back of her mind: she should not be doing this. But the thought could not hold sway over the infinitely stronger compulsion to reach the dark bundle of blankets. The air drained of noise and the blankets moved in such a way that the face of a young infant came out of their darkness to peer at her through two tiny black eyes. The child looked strange. It was too small for the stage of its development, like it was just a tiny version of the human form without being actually human. Its jaw was sharp and jutting. It looked as if it had no flesh or skin.
Two minute white fists appeared from the folds of black cloth, balled up so tight they looked like little marble rocks. The child opened its mouth and closed it again, up and down, up and down, soundlessly.
Miriam went to it and crouched down and looked into the black eyes. Tiny flecks of colour were in them, swimming like tadpoles. The colours of the rainbow, she thought haphazardly.
‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly surprised.
The child had disappeared. The blankets were gone. She was looking at an empty patch of ground. And then she was standing up again. She was at the perimeter fence. There was a crack in it and she was staring through it at the black line of trees across the moonlit field. Something like a sludge oozed invisibly over her skin and she stepped through the crack in the fence. A desperation fell over her as if somebody had cut open her belly and everything had come sloshing out and she entered into a state of bleakness that she had never even known could be possible. This was it. She was crying; a deep, desolate sadness was right through her, to her very core, and it was time to go.
PART FOUR
MIRIAM
Walking across the tilled soil was difficult. Her feet sank into the mud but she kept going, one foot in front of the other in front of the other. The field was long, the air was cold and the blackness of the night made her feel as if she was the last person left on Earth. She came to a low wooden fence and climbed over it. She was standing beneath the eaves of the first trees of the forest and there she paused, turned and looked at the beam of light coming from the lighthouse.
Her pupils contracted just a fraction and she stood there in her mud-caked shoes and saw nothing beyond the photons of luminescence; no deeper meaning, no affection for the people caught in its streams, no sorrow for those who had died beneath the spiralling columns of grey smoke before it. Pinpricks of pain stabbed her temples. They were all of them fighting and struggling, and to what end? They would come to their deaths and grieve over the things they had never done, their regrets, their all-too-short lives and think, was this really all it was? And the world would turn away from them and say, it really was.
Miriam walked into the forest. The trees were tall. Their trunks were branchless until they reached the high crowns, their bark glowed an eerie silver, and she put one foot in front of the other in front of the other. Any animals that may have been watching were silent and still.
She walked without rest for three hours into the night. Sometimes the trees would break and return to fields and she would walk across them and the half-light of the moon would cast a vague shadow before her. Sometimes she would cross a dark country lane between two tall hedges. Sometimes she would come to a dead end, unable to pass a thicket or some brambles, and when this happened she would turn back and try another pass because no matter what lay before her she was compelled to keep moving.
She became aware as she walked of nebulous things happening inside her, of her body turning into a hollow shell. Before, she had been aware of her skeleton and muscles and organs and ligaments, but now it was just a void. Into the void, from a spring that had opened at her centre, poured a dense, viscous fluid. The spring was the same spring that had sometimes poured the syrupy golden liquid into her, but this new dark matter was not like that. Her body filled slowly with it, starting at her feet. Drip, drip, drip. When it reached halfway up her thighs it became too heavy for her and she fell on to all fours and started to crawl. Her knees hurt and she cut the palms of her hands on sharp rocks.
Through the trees the light of dawn danced above her head and she felt as if the forest was leading her somewhere. As she crawled her hands sank into the grime and her knees slopped against it. The mud spat up and speckled her arms. The hem of her skirt dangled in it and became heavy.
A sudden sense of grief beat across her chest like a heavy weight. It punched through hard, seeking out the quiet corners of her soul, filling them with its endlessness. She remembered her father and the loss since his death, which she had filled with happy memories of him, and which had dissipated in the streams of time, came back
to her tenfold. It had festered for so long beneath those coping mechanisms that it had grown unseen, like a virus amplifying in damp lungs. The grief, the untouchable desperation of it, fell on to her body like a heavy blanket pressing her down.
This was it, she knew. That was what happened. What everybody else had been through was going to happen to her. This was what happened when her hope died. That was what the baby with the colours in its eyes had been.
She clamped her teeth together. Whatever dam had been in place to hold the grief in its safe reservoir had been breached. It gushed through in dark, oily torrents, and she knew that the flow would not end yet because Henry’s grief had not arrived.
She could feel it rearing up as an immense wave. It dragged the sand of her hope into its midst and used it to perpetuate its own growth. As the wave crashed down she fell on to her side. The mud washed into her hair, into her ears, over the collar of her shirt and on to her skin. Henry. Tendrils of emptiness lashed within her ribs. They found their way to every corner of her, searching out the happiness in her with blind, slapping thrusts. Miriam’s body became taut in muscular spasm as the tentacles invaded. They broke through the membrane of her womb and slithered around the face of her unborn child, lifting up its neck and threading their ends into the child’s ears, its nostrils, its mouth, its tear ducts, until the child was incorporated into it in a hermetic symbiosis.
Miriam screamed. The noise of her scream seemed to part the branches of the trees overhead and continue on and up, into the sky, over the forest. She screamed until the lining of her throat became dry and tender, until the point when her voice being drawn along it was like a metal file scraping against the gullet.
The faces of the dead swam before her and Miriam was forced to look at them. She could not turn away because the thing that tempered grief, that broke it down into bearable chunks her soul could endure, was gone. She placed her left palm on her face and tried to dry her tears but her hand was slick with mud. She could smell it: damp and earthy.
