Twenty-Five Percent (Book 2): Downfall

by Nerys Wheatley

They decided to go analogue, as they didn’t know how long it would be before the electricity, phones and internet disappeared. WH Smith looked as bad as everywhere else, but little had been taken. The store was simply covered in books and stationary strewn all over the floor. Evidently your average looter wasn’t on a mission to further their literary pursuits. They found the Ordnance Survey map section relatively untouched and loaded all the maps for the areas through which they’d be travelling into a carrier bag.

  On their way out of the centre, heading back to East Town, they came across a roadblock. A very familiar looking roadblock.

  Alex stopped his bike and flipped up his visor. “I’m getting a strong sense of déjà vu,” he said, looking around.

  Sure enough, four men appeared from out of a house at one end of the pileup of cars.

  “Let’s just go around them,” Micah said.

  Alex flexed his hands, remembering his wounds from their first time here. “Not this time.” Lifting the helmet from his head, he got off his bike and placed it on the seat.

  “Hey,” one of the men said, “I know you two.” He turned to the other men. “He’s the one who took my sword.”

  Micah heaved a sigh and dismounted, removing his helmet. The man Alex remembered as the leader of the vigilante group walked forward.

  “So you survived,” he said. “Pity. It is still the case that everything with white eyes has to be put down.”

  “Where’s my sword?” the first man said. “We can’t kill him until he tells me where my sword is.”

  He strode forward, raising the knife he held. Finely tuned anger zipped through Alex. He was done with running. Walking forward to meet the man, he dodged a knife thrust and grabbed his wrist, twisting. The man cried out and dropped his weapon.

  Still holding his wrist with one hand, Alex used the other to punch him. Hard. The man concertinaed onto the road.

  Next, Alex went for the leader, grabbed the knife he was fumbling to pull from his belt and hurled it over the top of a nearby two storey house, hearing it clatter onto the roof. Grasping the front of the man’s jacket, Alex lifted him up and slammed his back into a nearby van, pinning him in place, his dangling feet scrabbling for purchase against the door. One of his hands wrapped around the man’s throat, not tight enough to block his airway, but enough that it would be uncomfortable.

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” Alex growled, “this little power game you’ve got going on here is going to stop. I don’t know how you’ve managed to survive the past two weeks, but the only way you will stay alive from now on is to stay out of the way of me and every other Survivor in the city. You think with the law gone it’s all about who’s strongest? You’re right. But that isn’t you. Not even close.” He lifted him higher, constricting his grip slightly. The man’s eyes bugged. “Do you understand?”

  He tried to nod, but Alex’s hand allowed no movement of his head. “Yes,” he rasped instead.

  “Good.”

  Alex let go and he fell to the ground, rubbing his neck and trying to hide the dark stain on the crotch of his trousers. The gazes of the two other men were flicking nervously between Alex and Micah.

  Micah was leaning against his bike, arms crossed, affecting disinterest.

  The man with Alex scrambled to his feet and stumbled away, disappearing around a corner. The remaining two men turned to follow.

  “Hey,” Micah said, pointing at the man Alex had punched, “take him with you.”

  Casting fearful glances back at Alex, they grasped their unconscious friend beneath his armpits and dragged him away.

  Alex walked back to his bike.

  “Feel better?” Micah said.

  Alex pulled on his helmet. “It helped.”

  4

  “Wake up. It’s getting late.”

  Micah looked blearily up at Alex from the sofa. An arm snaked from beneath the blanket and he peered at his watch. “It’s six thirty!”

  “Now you know how it feels. Go. Shower. I’ll make breakfast.”

  The sausages were halfway done when the red light on the electric hob went off. Moments later there was a yell from the direction of the bathroom. Alex sliced the sausages in half and pressed the cut edges onto the frying pan, attempting to get them to cook on the heat left in the metal. Then he tried the light switch. Nothing happened. A couple of minutes later, the electricity turned on again.

  Alex couldn’t help wondering if the breakdown of the country’s infrastructure was beginning. He knew he should be more worried, but right now the anxiety portion of his brain was focused on Hannah. When she was safe, then he would stress about power and water and how he would cope without flushing toilets and hot showers.

  “The electricity went off,” Micah said as he walked into the kitchen ten minutes later.

  “It’s back on now.”

  “Yes, I know. It came back on right after I’d rinsed off in freezing cold water.”

  “We may be doing that all winter,” Alex said, placing two plates of sausages, scrambled egg and toast on the table. “Man up.”

  Micah sat down. “Says the person who got a nice, hot shower. Got any tomato sauce?”

  . . .

  Even though they left before seven thirty, Leon and his family were there to see them off.

  As Alex said goodbye to his friends, for the first time since they’d decided to go to the Omnav headquarters, it came over Alex how dangerous what they were about to do was. He had no idea how bad it was going to be outside the city or what they would find once they reached their destination. What he did know was that thousands, maybe millions by now, of eaters were out there.

  But he and Micah were tough. They were prepared. They were armed.

  So he definitely didn’t feel like shedding a few tears as he said goodbye to Leon’s two little girls. And those few tears he didn’t feel like shedding most assuredly did not threaten when Katie wrapped her short arms around his neck and said in his ear, “Bring me a Kitkat.” Okay, it wasn’t the words so much as the way she said them. Or that she said them at all.

  Furthermore, when he went down onto one knee for Emma to hug him, and she held onto him tight and told him tearfully that he had to come back safe or she’d be really cross, he absolutely did not feel like blubbing right there in the street in front of everyone.

  Because Alex was a big, tough, manly Survivor who dealt with his emotions in a stoic and restrained manner. And there was only a small chance his insides might have been made of marshmallow.

  “You’re a complete sap when it comes to those two little girls, aren’t you?” Micah said with a smirk as they climbed onto their bikes.

  Alex would have answered with a witty yet scathing retort, but he didn’t trust his voice not to crack if he spoke.

  They picked their way through the city streets in silence. More people were venturing out than had been two days ago, although fear etched their faces as they watched Alex and Micah drive by. The sooner the patrols began that Survivors and Bates were planning, the better. People needed security, to feel they weren’t alone. When Alex got back, he would join them.

  It took them over half an hour to reach the former site of the barriers meant to contain the eaters in the north western corner of the city, and another ten minutes to get to the bypass that ran around the southern and western edges.

  Driving down the slip road onto the northbound carriageway, Alex saw no movement at all. No moving vehicles, no people, nothing. The road was also clear of abandoned cars, which he found odd until he thought about it. He was expecting to find that everyone would have tried to leave Sarcester at once, leading to a nightmarish scene of traffic jams and accidents. But then he realised that most of the population would have been inside the barriers, unable to go anywhere. The big, dual carriageway trunk road that wrapped around Sarcester before heading north and then west across the country would have been able to take the traffic if it hadn’t come all at the same time. It was likely most people trusted that th
e government had the crisis in hand, until they didn’t. And by then it was too late.

  They made good time for the first few miles, pushing the bikes up to ninety miles an hour now there was no other traffic to worry about and no law enforcement to stop them as they cruised at twenty miles above the speed limit. They did get flashed as they passed a speed camera, but Alex doubted there was anyone left in whatever office that dealt with them to care. He was beginning to think that maybe they’d reach the Omnav headquarters within two or three hours and this would all be over before dark.

  They’d only travelled for fifteen blissfully uninterrupted miles, however, when they came across the biggest pile-up Alex had ever seen.

  He brought his bike to a halt some way from the mangled crush of cars, vans and lorries, and flipped up his visor, Micah doing the same beside him.

  They were close to the river that curled around and ran through the heart of Sarcester. Some distance ahead, Alex could see the huge bridge spanning the water, the road sweeping up onto its hundred and fifty foot high curve dotted with cars along its length. The myriad of crashed vehicles had spilled over the central reservation onto the other side of the road, blocking all four lanes.

  Some of the cars had been crushed, as if something big had rolled over the top of them. A massive articulated lorry listed on one side, supported by the semi-crumpled central crash barrier it lay across. Its front end was angled across three quarters of the road, making it impossible to see anything beyond.

  The buzz of a few billion flies permeated the air. Alex spotted bodies inside a couple of the nearer cars.

  The road here cut through a small hill and hawthorn clad banks rose to either side. Several cars had veered off the road and buried themselves in the long grass. There was no way they’d be able to get around.

  “We’re going to have to go through,” he said. “Be careful you don’t drive over any broken glass.”

  Micah looked sceptical, but nodded.

  Alex drove to the first cars and manoeuvred his motorbike in amongst the vehicle carnage. For the first few dozen feet, it wasn’t so bad, with the cars and vans fairly well spaced apart and not difficult to get around. But they began to close in as they approached the lorry. At one point they couldn’t get through at all and Alex had to lift the bikes over where the crumpled bumpers of two cars pressed up at an angle against each other.

  Finally they managed to edge around the cab of the lorry, where they stopped. Alex had thought that maybe the jack-knifing trailer had been the cause of the massive accident, but the carnage continued beyond its hulking form.

  He looked back at Micah and pointed to a military truck. Micah nodded. They saw more military vehicles dotted in amongst the cars and, in the centre, one massive tread crushing the bonnet of a blue car. The tread belonged to a tank.

  Alex stared at it in astonishment.

  “I think we know what crushed those cars,” Micah said.

  “When the barriers went down, the army must have had to run.”

  “I think they would have called it a strategic retreat.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever they called it, they ran. And then this happened,” he waved his hand in an all encompassing gesture, “and nothing could get past.”

  “Even a tank.” Micah turned off his engine and climbed off the bike, removing his helmet. “I’m going to go look.”

  “What? Why?”

  He shrugged. “Because I’ve never seen a tank up close.”

  Alex sighed and took off his helmet. “What are you? Seven?”

  “Come on. It’ll only take a minute.”

  They wended their way between the cars and trucks strewn haphazardly across the road, having to climb across bonnets a couple of times when there was no other way through. Many of the vehicles still contained their occupants, or rather their corpses, but others were empty. Some had passengers, but no driver. Not everyone had died in the crashes.

  Even more disturbing were the trails of dried blood that stained the ground, seeming to indicate the injured had got out of their cars somehow. Or been dragged out.

  Alex began to feel uneasy. He sniffed the air, but all he detected was the unpleasant, but lately all too familiar, stench of decomposition. The breeze, however, was blowing from back in the direction they’d come, making it all but impossible to smell anything up ahead.

  “Let’s not stay too long,” he said as they reached the tank.

  “Why?” Micah looked around. “Can you smell something?”

  “Only rotting bodies.”

  “Even I can smell that.” Reaching the tank, he climbed onto the hull and looked down at the metal behemoth. “Can you imagine how useful this would be if we could get it back into the city?”

  “As long as Bates doesn’t get his hands on it, yes. But we have to get to Sheffield.”

  “I know. Just, for later, when we’ve rescued Hannah and the others.”

  “You just want to drive a tank, don’t you?” Alex said.

  “Don’t you?”

  He couldn’t prevent a smile from creeping onto his face. “It would be kind of cool.”

  Micah climbed onto the turret and stood up, looking around. He turned in the direction they were travelling and immediately dropped down onto his stomach.

  “What is it?” Alex said, already climbing up beside him.

  He pushed up high enough to see along the road towards the bridge. A few hundred feet ahead, in a clear area beyond the far edge of the pileup, the ground writhed.

  Eaters. Hundreds of them.

  The horde was on its knees and Alex didn’t have to see them up close to know why. They were feeding.

  He still couldn’t smell them and, engrossed in what they were doing, they weren’t making any sound. But the blood red colour of the ground around them made it obvious what was going on. He could see a lot of khaki uniforms in what the eaters were wearing. He had no doubt there would be many amongst what they were eating too.

  “What do we do now?” Micah whispered as Alex lowered beside him. “There’s no way we can get past all of them.”

  Alex rubbed his eyes in frustration. “This is the only way across the river for miles. It will add at least an hour onto the journey, and that’s if we don’t run into any more eaters.”

  “So what do you suggest? Because if it involves driving through them and hoping for the best, I’m going to have to decline.”

  Alex lifted up again to study the gruesome scene. “Maybe we could somehow circle around this hill and get back onto the road just before the bridge and...” He stopped, squinting. He thought he’d seen movement in one of the cars towards the front of the pileup. Probably just a trapped eater. Then he saw it again. “Oh, no.”

  “What? What is it?”

  Alex lowered back down to sit on the hull of the tank. “There’s someone alive up there.”

  5

  “What do you mean, someone alive?” Micah said. “There’s hundreds of very alive eaters up there.”

  “I mean uninfected and alive, in one of the cars.”

  Micah’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “No, I’m joking because I think the situation calls for some light relief.”

  Micah was silent for a few seconds. “Please tell me they are somewhere we can get to easily without being seen by the very large horde of eaters out there.”

  “They are somewhere we can get to easily without being seen by the very large horde of eaters out there.”

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  Micah rolled over and stared up at the fluffy clouds drifting through the bright blue sky. Alex followed his gaze. He hadn’t noticed before, but it was a pleasant day. Weather-wise, anyway.

  “Alright, let’s do it.” Micah rolled back over and slid to the ground.

  Alex took a moment longer to appreciate the beautiful cerulean blue sky before everything went to hell, then dropped to th
e ground with him.

  Leaving the motorcycles where they were, they crept through the maze of cars towards where Alex had seen the trapped person. And, by extension, towards the feasting eaters. As they got closer, he began to detect the odour of eater mingled in with the stench of rotting flesh, but there was none of the cloying pheromone smell. He guessed they didn’t need any mutual encouragement to sit around and eat.

  When they were within sight of the eaters, they lowered to the ground and crawled to a relatively safe spot from where they could see the car in which Alex had seen the movement. The dark red estate sat a couple of cars back from the very front of the mass accident. The front of the car was crumpled and pinned up against the kind of army vehicle he couldn’t identify by name, but had seen on dozens of news reports from places like Afghanistan and Iraq. It was giving the car a modicum of shelter from the eyes of the eaters just a few dozen feet away.

  When nothing showed itself inside the car, Alex began to wonder if he’d imagined the movement. Was he risking their lives for nothing?

  Then the top half of a head appeared, two eyes peering through the window. It was a woman, dark haired, maybe around fifty. The terror and despair he saw in her eyes tore at Alex’s gut. How long had she been here, hiding, trapped, waiting for the eaters to either leave or find her? It must have been days.

  No longer. They were going to get her out if it killed them. And it probably would.

  Glancing at the horde to make sure there was no attention directed at them, Alex waved. The woman’s eyes widened as she saw him. Then she started to cry.

  He put a finger to his lips then held up his hand, palm towards her, indicating for her to wait. She nodded and wiped at her eyes and he ducked out of sight again.

  “So what’s the plan?” Micah whispered.

  It was a good question. Alex had hoped to have a good answer by now. “Get her out and run?”

  Micah rolled his eyes. “As always, we go into a ridiculously dangerous situation woefully unprepared.”