by Tim Lebbon
We're ready to leave by mid-morning. Hangovers have mostly lifted now, and there's an unexpected air of excitement amongst our small group. I had expected the beginnings of our journey to be downbeat and filled with dread, but even Jacqueline is smiling, and Cordell is keeping any doubts to himself. My thoughts lie at journey's end, and I guess everyone else is thinking the same way. I'm trying to imagine Bar None, the last bar in the world, sitting aloof on a Cornish cliff overlooking the wild sea, seagulls buzzing its old slate roof, windows long-ago painted shut against bitter ocean winds, walls painted white and chimney smoking a welcome. Inside . . . I cannot see. Michael has given me nothing for that.
I dwell little on the trip between now and then. The hundred and fifty miles of open countryside, dead towns and cities, burnt out power stations, abandoned cars, impassable roads, fields spotted with the humps of rotten cattle, rivers swollen with spring rains and bodies from the hills, and other things we cannot prepare for, or even imagine. We are not the only survivors, we know that since Michael came. I try not to think about meeting others. When I do, the outcome I envisage is never good.
I glance down at the city, pleased to see that the skies above it are empty today. Those things have never bothered us. But they are there. Their impossible truth is something we have never had the confidence to really discuss.
"So are we ready?" Cordell says. He's at the Manor's front door, looking out at us where we all stand on the gravel driveway. The door is open behind him, and looking inside feels like staring into the past. I can see the staircase that I will never climb again, ever. The banister already seems to have gathered a veneer of dust, and I'm sure I can make out a huge spider's web on the upstairs landing.
"I am," Jessica says. "Never thought I'd have wanderlust, but I just want to get out of here now."
"Yeah," the Irishman says, "this doesn't feel like our fuckin' pad anymore."
He's right. I look at the Manor's upstairs windows and they're impenetrable.
Jacqueline sighs, nods, then climbs into the first Range Rover and starts it up. The growl of the engine startles a flock of birds from a tree in the garden, and they loop around our heads a couple of times before disappearing over the building's roof. I imagine them following the contours of the land until they reach the tower, roost in the Manor builder's folly, ready to watch us leave and reclaim their home again.
"We should leave the doors open," I say. I expect one or two of the others to disagree, but only the Irishman offers a reply.
"He's right. We won't be back."
Cordell nods and walks to the second Range Rover. "Don't get too far ahead," he says to me quietly as he passes by. He's frowning. For the very first time that day, I feel a sense of fear at what we are about to do.
I mount the bike and kick it to life. We have already agreed to a preliminary route, and I tick off the road names and numbers in my mind. It sounds easy enough, but it's inevitable that we will encounter obstructions on our way. There will be abandoned vehicles of all kinds, untamed undergrowth, and perhaps fallen trees from the winter storms just gone by.
And maybe other things, Cordell said.
Like what? Jacqueline asked.
People.
I zip my jacket and make sure the woollen gloves allow me adequate sensation. I have no helmet—Michael came without one—and my glasses will have to suffice in place of goggles. People, Cordell said. I think of that now, and every bad apocalyptic movie I have ever seen comes back to me again. Roadblocks manned by cannibals, a river of zombies stumbling along the tarmac, biker gangs raping women and slitting men's throats, road gangs shooting a driver for the gallon of gas in his or her tank . . . Each situation seems ridiculous individually, but I know that Cordell is right. There will be people out there, and many of them may not have weathered the past six months as well as we have.
What do we do if someone asks where we're going? Jessica asked.
Tell them to mind their fucking business, the Irishman said.
We have an air rifle and a shotgun. It's not a country where automatic weapons and rocket launchers are lying around to be claimed, yet there are places where a determined gang could find such things.
I shake my head and rev the bike. Jacqueline smiles shyly behind the windscreen of the first Range Rover, the Irishman sitting beside her. Cordell starts the second vehicle, adding to the noise. Jessica is his companion.
I'm on my own. And this is no time to get scared.
I lead the way along the gravel driveway. I move slowly to begin with, slipping into second gear and leaving it there for a while. The bike rides smoothly, crunching over gravel and responding well. It feels good beneath me. I'm warm and safe, my thinning hair combed by the breeze.
I can hear the large Range Rovers following me, their heavy wheels crushing gravel aside whereas mine simply rides over the surface. They contain our worldly goods, everything the five of us owns: our food, a few bottles of wine, two guns, gallons of water stored in old milk churns, and a selection of books from the Manor's library. We are carrying some of our past and all of our present with us, and for a while the future will exist only until the next bend in the road.
I reach the gates, pass between them and turn right without pause. As I straighten and shift gears I look to my right, through the budding hedge at the Manor. It looks so old and badly maintained, so lifeless, and I wonder whether it has borne that appearance for the past six months. I thought we brought life to the place, but perhaps not. Even with candles burning in its windows, I think maybe it simply looked haunted. I glance higher at the tower, and for a second I see my own pale face watching from its balcony. I swerve the bike across the road and regain control, then look again. The face has gone. It was never there at all, of course, but its absence makes me eager to be away.
I look over my shoulder, nod at Jacqueline at the wheel of the vehicle behind me, and start to pick up some speed.
That wasn't me, I think. That wasn't anyone. I wonder if Michael had sensed me watching him zigzag between stalled vehicles down in the city. I feel no probing eyes on me now, but that is no comfort.
The road bears left and down, passing between a high ceiling of trees whose branches meet overhead. The budding leaves already form something of a canopy, and the road is speckled with their shadows. As spring advances so their shadows will grow until it is sunlight that spots the road. The ebb and flow of nature, the rise and fall of seasons, had always been a fascination for Ashley.
I dreamed of her last night—of course I did, the hops insisted upon it—and her presence in my mind is a comfort, even though I cannot see her.
I know she will be helping me on my way.
And as I think of her strained face again, for the first time ever I am glad that we never had a child.
Golden Glory, one of Badger's finest, pale and gold, crisp and refreshing and sweet, a barbeque beer that binds together outside eating, afternoon drinking and the sound of aircraft Dopplering across the hazy blueness of a late August afternoon, making it a whole, sensory experience that will be remembered as a day of your life. There's something almost sentient about a beer that manages to do that, as though supping Golden Glory is drinking in the flavour of life and the language of God. Three bottles, four, and even with spiced burgers and marinated lamb steaks resting in my stomach, still the ale slipped down well on that endless summer afternoon.
The barbeque was cooling in a far corner of the garden, because we needed no more heat. I was comfortable in a pair of shorts and nothing else, and Ashley was wearing a short summer skirt and a roomy blouse, no bra, her hair tied loosely, sun cream speckling the fine hairs on her neck and smeared across her ears where I had failed to rub it in properly. Too much effort. I could just about lift the glass from lap to mouth and back again, and I knew that later we would go inside, shower and make love. Skin warmed by the sun, we would make sure we moisturised each other, and then lie atop the bed and draw the curtains, sweating and cooling again in our be
droom's shadows.
A robin sat on our garden fence, chirping at us. It was almost tame. A wisp of cloud had appeared high up, barely moving as though uncertain of which way to go. I was trying to make out images in the cloud, but it and my mind were too vague to form a solid shape. For no reason I could properly discern, that troubled me.
Sometimes it's a day of your life for all the wrong reasons.
Ashley rose from her chair, groaning like an old woman, and stretched. Her blouse rose up and offered me a peek at several inches of taut belly. She rubbed at her hair, stretched back to look up at the sky, and I could make out the shape of her nipples beneath the material. I hummed appreciatively.
"Thought you were asleep," she said.
"You just woke me up."
"Another drink?" She grabbed the glass from my lap and walked toward the house.
"Just one more," I said. "Then I think I need some aftersun."
"Me too," she said without turning around.
"I have a handy applicator."
She glanced back, smiled, and as she passed through the back door she flipped up the back of her skirt, flashing her buttocks. I followed her into the kitchen, watched her carefully pouring another two bottles of Golden Glory, and we never finished those bottles. It was an absolutely perfect day, hued with an unspoken certainty that thrilled us both.
Next day Ashley's period came, three weeks late, and perfection took its leave.
I follow the lane left and right down the hillside, aiming for the river that borders one side of the dead town, and already this feels like an alien place. The new growth in the hedgerows had been unchecked this spring, allowed to spread untouched by shears or tractor or the wing-mirrors of cars. It bulges out into the road, fresh thin shoots branching off older brown limbs, and buds spot them green. It's not preventing our travel, but I have to drive down the centre of the road to avoid being whipped around the face. I hear the vehicles behind me scraping past here and there, wood bearing on metal like troubled chatter. The road itself is littered with winter's fallen leaves. With no traffic to clear them away the leaves have remained, forming a damp, muddied layer across the tarmac. It's not too slippery right now, because we haven't had rain for almost two weeks, but I still ride carefully.
The motorbike feels comfortable beneath me. It's responsive and obedient, taking me across flat, level surfaces, dodging around small humps in the road that may be buried branches or other things hidden by fallen leaves. My arms start to ache soon after leaving the Manor, but it's not an unpleasant sensation. I can feel the power of the machine transmitted up through my bones, and it feels good.
I reach the end of the narrow lane and let the bike coast to a standstill. The Range Rovers stop behind me, and I hear doors opening, feet crunching on the road. Nobody speaks, because there is so much to say.
The lane emerges out onto the dual carriageway that follows the course of the river past the town. There are a few buildings on this side of the waterway—a petrol station, a fast food restaurant hunkered low in a lay-by, a terrace of old houses still looking angry at the road's intrusion on their long front gardens—but the real town starts directly across the carriageway and over the river. We're still slightly elevated here, because I stopped a hundred meters from the side of the main road. I sense a definite boundary: behind us is the Manor and the time we spent there; before us, once we are on the road, lies a future hinted at by a man who came and went in one day. We can see into the first streets of the city, and this is a very private moment for us all.
I have not been this close to a town for six months. I have watched from the relative safety of the folly, seen winter and spring settle across this dead place, but I have not really been close enough to see. One of the blocks of trendy riverside apartments across from us has been gutted by fire, its steel-framed roof warped and angry. The rendered façade is scorched black, windows smashed, and in the small garden leading down to the water lay several shapes that could be burnt furniture or dead people. The sun is at just the right angle to shine through the shattered windows, and even from this distance I can see the shapes of picture frames hanging askew on walls, and the shadow of a fallen ceiling. From the folly I had noted this place as a smear of black on the otherwise blinding white façade of the riverfront properties. Here, the detail is depressing.
A body is hanging from a third-storey balcony several properties along from the burnt building. It's neck has been stretched to an impossible length, and I'm amazed it's still hanging there at all. The glint of bone shows through tattered clothing. The head is a mass of dirty blonde hair, and I can just make out one silver shoe, sharp against the corpse's uncertain outline.
There are abandoned cars on the dual carriageway, most of them parked along the hard shoulder, windows gritty and dusted from the winter downpours. The rain still bears dust, and Cordell thinks that there may have been a war somewhere far away in those long, final days. Even as death stalked the drivers they obeyed old habits. The cars are mostly well parked, only a few edging noses or rears out into the inside lane. But there are also those that are not parked at all, and it's these that makes me think we will never get more than a few miles.
To the south, a crash has left a shiny black scar across both lanes of the southbound carriageway. The dark remains of several cars and a truck are twisted together, and the fire that consumed them six months before also melted and reset the road. I can see an easy way past along the hard shoulder, but there will be more accidents like this.
I keep glancing up at the sky. None of those flying things makes itself known, and for that I am glad. This close, we would be able to see exactly what they are.
"Nothing in the sky," Cordell says. The others are looking as well. Yes, we're all glad.
We stand there for some time, all of us looking at this place we have only seen from a distance since the plagues. The detail is shocking, humbling, and it hits me all over again that things will never be the same. Things are going to change, Michael said.
The smell here is not too bad. I feel the breeze kissing the nape of my neck, a sign that the prevailing wind is carrying the city away from us. But still a hint of its decay hangs in the air, old rot and new devastation. I try to imagine all those thousands of places abandoned or filled with dead, and the overall image is as it always has been: a place of disease, stink, decay, scavenging animals and perhaps scavenging survivors as well. A place where none of us has any desire at all to go. There are homes in there with the family sitting dead around a laden dining table, one last meal interrupted by death. There are gardens filled with the remains of last year's unpicked fruit and vegetables, greenhouses still sealed and rank with rotten tomatoes, cucumbers, marrows and seedlings. There are bodies in gutters with their faces ripped off by wild dogs. Cinemas and theatres are filled with corpses, melting down together as decay does its work, because in the last days they were using such large public places as temporary morgues. The parks are also filled with the dead, some buried, many laid in piles alongside holes that will never be filled. Excavators sit like silent monsters beside them, perhaps with their drivers still at the controls. Much of the dying happened slowly but right at the end, when panic gave way to utter chaos and a regression to a more animal state, the final annihilation was mercifully fast.
And yet we survived. It's something none of us has been able to explain. I have not thought about it for a while, because I still believe myself to be relatively sane. Perhaps not compared to the older gauge of sanity—I dream, I scream, and I place value on my life in relation to the ales I have drunk and the memories those tastes inspire—but it works for me. We all have our ways to get by.
"It's the future that's important," Jessica says. "Not what we see now, all this old stuff."
"I sat over there once," Jacqueline says quietly. She points over the road and across the river at the expensive waterside apartments. I'm not sure whether she's indicating the spread of fire-gutted buildings, but I don't think it
matters. "Sat on a balcony while Roger made gin martini cocktails. We watched boys swimming in the river, and later some adults went down there and stripped to swim. I was amazed at how unabashed they were. Naked, in front of everyone else. Roger smiled at me and touched the back of my neck." She touches herself there hesitantly, as though afraid that her fingers will feel someone else.
"We don't need to go across there," Cordell says. "The bridge is clear apart from a bike, but we don't need to go across there. We go around. Everywhere like this, we go around, until we reach Cornwall."
I glance at the road bridge and make out the shape of an abandoned bicycle straddling the white line at its highest point. I wonder where its rider had gone all those months ago. We can't see the actual surface of the river from here.
"I agree," I say. "There's nothing for us there."
"That's history," the Irishman says. And I shiver, because for an instant I'm certain he is right. If we try to cross the bridge and enter the dead town, we will find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Because right now we're looking at the past, and soon, as spring progresses and summer looms, nature will begin to look forward. Lawns will go wild, plant pots will seed themselves farther away, gardens will become unkempt and start probing limbs and roots beneath patios, toward walls and through the gaps of open windows.
"I remember it differently," I say.
"Let's go." Jacqueline climbs into her Range Rover and starts the engine. The noise brings us all around, and as I mount the motorbike and kick it to life the town seems to fade from my vision, covered with a haze from the river perhaps, or drawing away.
