by Tim Lebbon
We stand that way for a while, silent, listening to the rumble of the bus's engine. I can sense the shape in the driver's seat behind me, its foot resting on the gas.
We all wait for someone else to speak.
"Who are you?" Cordell says at last.
"The man with the gun," Billy says.
The Irishman snickers, puts his hand over his mouth to hide his smile.
"What?" Billy demands. He moves forward one step, raising the gun. I could tackle him now. But the results of such a rash move are beyond contemplation. However bad Lucy's shooting may be, she'd cut us all down with one long burst.
"Sorry," the Irishman says. "But 'the man with the gun' . . . ? Reminds me of a bad Steven Seagal movie I saw once."
"Was there a good one?" Lucy asks.
Billy turns and looks up at her, scowl breaking into a smile.
This is Monty Python, I think.
Jacqueline takes the initiative and, with a few words, breaks the thin ice we have all been treading. "I don't suppose you have anywhere I could pee?"
"We've been here about six months," Billy says ten minutes later. They've stopped the bus and led us behind it, into a compound formed beside the road. It has the pick-up truck on one side, a dozen sand-filled barrels forming another wall, and a heavy steel storage container closes it off from the road. It's in the container that they have made their home. Billy will not let us inside.
The bus driver turns out to be a girl of about seven or eight. She doesn't speak. Lucy says she has not spoken since they found her, days after the end, cowering in the middle of the motorway beside the bodies of her parents.
"Why not a house somewhere?" Cordell asks.
Billy nods at the bus. "We have that. We travel around quite a bit, looking for stuff. But back here feels safe. And we're waiting for someone."
"Who?"
"My son," Billy says.
"And my daughter," Lucy adds.
"Why wait here?" I ask.
"Last time I spoke to him, when the plagues were hot, Nathan said he'd try to make it here," Billy says. "It's on the way to London. Where my parents live. Nathan loves his grandparents. And I can't . . . I can't remember him. So he must still be alive."
"So how do you work that one out?" the Irishman says.
Billy glares at him. "If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories."
The Irishman nods, but thankfully he realises it's best not to probe any more.
The little girl is sitting on a sand barrel, looking the other way.
"So you've set up a toll road," I say.
Billy nods.
"Many takers?" Jessica asks.
Billy's face darkens and he turns away. He seems to be staring at the ambulance.
"We'll give you some food," I say. "And we have a few bottles of wine to spare. But . . ."
"We can't go into Newport," Lucy says, pre-empting my question. "No way. Can't. Wouldn't. And most of the houses in the countryside seem to be occupied by. .. the dead. A lot of people out here went home to die."
"But all the cars on the road?" Jessica says.
"People fleeing the city. And that's why we can't go in."
"I locked them in the ambulance," Billy says suddenly. "There were only two of them. But they were . . . well, you know. I can see you know. Even after we shot them we knew they'd be up, so I dragged them into the ambulance and parked it there."
"We did it," Lucy says.
Cordell goes to speak but I shake my head. There is much more here than we know, but to reveal our ignorance would lose us any small advantage we may have. Billy's gun is pointing at the ground, but he still grasps it tight. It would be foolish for us to assume that we are anything more than prisoners.
"Why don't you burn it?" I ask, trying to get Billy to reveal more.
He grins at me. Shakes his head. "Very good," he says. "But no. Because now I've got my own weapons of mass destruction."
Jacqueline is terrified, I can see that. Shivering, moaning. She broke the tension earlier but she's raising it again now. Lucy is staring at her, and Billy glances at her several times before raising his gun again.
"So why are you on the road?" Lucy asks.
"Going somewhere," Cordell says.
"Where?"
"Away from where we were." I have no intention of mentioning Bar None, or Michael, or any of the ideas we have about what is happening.
"What's wrong with where you were?"
I think of what they have said, how they've acted. I look at the battered ambulance. "The things," I say.
Billy's eyes widen. "What were they like? How did they look?"
I frown and stare down at my feet.
He grunts. "I understand. Rather not say. Rather not talk about them. I understand."
And it's as easy as that.
The young girl stands and leads Jacqueline back down the ramp. She is carrying a pistol tucked into the belt of her jeans. Jacqueline walks with her head down, holding her arms and shaking. When they drive back up in one of the Range Rovers Billy reverses the bus and makes room for them to come through.
Lucy and Jessica negotiate over some food and a few bottles of wine and, our passage paid, we're given the go-ahead to retrieve the bike and the other Range Rover.
They leave us with the shotgun and air rifle, and we go on our way.
"If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories," Billy said. I think on this as I guide the motorbike slowly along the motorway. "Alive in my memories."
Ashley is dead in my memories. Unless I take a drink and let taste and texture inspire the past, she is a blank where she should be whole, a void where she should be the heaviest thing in my mind. If she was dead I'd be carrying her still, but I feel more empty than I ever have before.
"Billy is mad," I mutter at the breeze. "And Lucy. Both of them mad." And I think of the ambulance with its back doors pressed tight against the concrete wall, metal welded and bolted over the windows, dents in its sides as though made by something inside trying to get out.
I'm approaching another exit from the motorway, this one leading into the heart of Newport along Caermaen Road. I have travelled this road so often with Ashley. I can see her crying and dying, see her lying dead on her bed, but can I really? I was almost mad myself by then; insane with the cries and wailing of my dying neighbours, the smell of my sick wife, and the impossibility of my own unblemished skin, clear lungs, hopeful, crazy eyes. Can I really trust my own memories of that final time so much?
The exit is close now, a couple of hundred meters away. I ease down on the throttle. Our house is less than a mile from here, in a nice cul-de-sac close to the centre of town. The area had been improved drastically in the years before the plagues. Pedestrianised streets, housing grants, parks, planting. It was a nice place to live.
Ashley could still be there.
I saw her die, I saw her tears and pain and I can still see them, even now.
Nevertheless, I cannot feel the weight of my wife's history inside. And she had meant so much to me that her death would surely be heavy indeed.
Knowing that I was mad to listen to a madman, still Billy's words had affected me. If I applied them to myself they answered some questions, but they presented twice as many. These new questions—Is she dead? Is she alive? Is she still here?—could be answered so much more easily. A turn of the handlebars. A ten minute diversion. Proof, of what I thought I knew.
"A mile from here," I say, and I turn from the motorway.
There's a chorus of horns behind me. I know I should stop and explain, but to do so would be to allow Jessica and the others to talk me out of this. She is wise and I feel weak, and I would end up in the back of a Range Rover while the Irishman rode the bike closer and closer to Bar None. And I would be as safe as could be then, but I'd never know. I'd have to watch the last of Newport fading behind us, never to be seen again. And even if I closed my eyes . . . still only the tears of death.
"Sorry!" I shout. I wave a hand,
trying to communicate that I won't be long. In my side mirrors I see Cordell flashing lights and the Irishman hanging from the passenger window, waving as though to haul me back. They follow me, and I feel an instant stab of guilt. They don't want to leave me behind.
This exit ramp rises to a roundabout above the motorway, and at the top of the ramp there's a knot of cars tied together by the ghost of a terrible fire. Their shells have been melted into grotesque shapes, spiked ribs and metallic spines that look for all the world like the skeletons of living things. I can squeeze by, just, and as I use my feet to guide the motorbike through the narrowest of gaps, that guilt punches in again.
I can't look back. I hear the Range Rovers stop, the doors open, voices calling out in confusion and dismay, and I can't look back.
I pause, leaning to one side to support the bike. "My house!" I call. "I have to see. Just to make sure. To make certain my certainty. You understand?"
"No!" the Irishman says. "You're a fucking idiot, and I don't understand a word!"
"I understand," Jacqueline says. I still can't turn, but I smile. And I really believe she does.
"You'll get yourself killed!" Jessica shouts.
Cordell joins in. "The city's not safe, you know that, Michael told us, everything's wrong and rotten and . . ."
"Give him half an hour," Jacqueline says. "Please?"
"Half an hour," I shout. Without waiting for a reply—a yes or a no—I rev the bike and move away.
And I don't, I can't, look back.
I'm not sure what I expected. Streets filled with marauding zombies, maybe. The hate-filled dead rising up at my impertinence, clawing their way through closed wooden doors, rising from hastily dug graves, reaching for me with nails crusted with the dried blood of older victims. Or groups of pet dogs gone feral, Alsatians leading packs of corgis, a King Labrador ruling over a domain of vicious poodles, terriers and spaniels. Maybe I'd expected to see half the town in ruins, fallen victim to pyromaniacs and vandals since society's rapid decline. All the clichés.
But I see none of these. There is damage, of course, and plenty of signs that things are not right. The first row of houses lining Caermaen Road is scarred by a rubble-filled gap, as though time has punched out one of the town's teeth. Gas explosion, I guess. Front gardens have gone wild, carefully maintained borders swallowed by tangle root, and lawns are lush and heavy. And here and there, the remains of bodies.
The main impression I get as I ride closer to my old house is that everyone has gone away, and what they left behind will take its time to die. This is what Armageddon has always looked like in my mind's eye. It means the end of humanity, not the end of the world. I'd dreamed this once as a teenager: an empty world, humanity gone or been taken, and its roads and paths, rooms and gardens slowly being overtaken by nature once again. In five years there will be no sign of these carefully maintained gardens. Ten years from now the roads and pavements will be turned crazy by roots and shoots breaking through from below. In twenty years some of the roofs will fail, forty years walls will fall, and a century from now this will be a forgotten city. Animals will own it once again. There will be rooms that survive, and places where the stain of humanity will take much longer to be cleaned away. But it won't take forever.
It's sad, but I can't help thinking of it as something of a triumph.
Maybe I really am mad, I think, and then I turn the corner into my own cul-de-sac.
Memories rush in. In all of them Ashley is a presence but not an image.
"Be there," I say, but there's no way she can. Even if the grey area of my memory is fooling me, and she didn't die, there would be no reason for her to remain in our home. There had been none for me.
"I left because you were dead," I say. I switch off the bike and kick down the stand. The silence is shattering. The last revs echo away between houses and back along the street, and then I am in a silence broken only by the breath of the wind. There are birds, but they sing in the distance. I guess that anything nearby has been shocked into muteness by my appearance.
I remain motionless, breathing as gently as fear and anticipation will allow, until the birds start singing again. They flit from roof to roof, disappearing into eaves and through the eyes of smashed windows. They bring life to this place, and I hope, I pray, that they're an omen.
"I'm a fool," I say. "I saw her die." But I imagine a last-minute panic, Ashley leaving to find her mother on the other side of the city while I stayed behind, and that scenario suddenly seems just as likely. I remember none of it . . . but it has the power of possibility. "A damn fool."
I walk toward the house. It looks just as overgrown and abandoned as all the others. Of course it does; if she was still here, she wouldn't want to advertise the fact. Maybe there are many people still at home . . . letting the grass grow, the plants make a tangle of their garden . . . awaiting someone like me to come and rescue them from the certainty of their deaths.
The front door is closed, as I had left it. Empty milk bottles stand in their wire cage, awaiting collection. I shade the glass in the door and press my face to it. Inside seems quiet, undisturbed, and wholly alien to me.
I knock, smile, shake my head, and force the door open with three hefty kicks. It rebounds from the hall wall and I hold it open. The house is silent. "It's me," I say. There's no answer.
I don't know this place. There are pictures on the wall that I remember buying, but they're strange to me now. The painted hall wall had taken me two whole weekends to finish, but it's as if this is the first time I've seen it. The air of the house, the space, is all wrong, and I cannot find it in myself to know it as home.
I step over the threshold and head for the stairs. I have no desire to see the rest of the house, because there's nothing here for me. Only the bedroom. That's where I remember leaving Ashley's corpse because I could not face burying her. So if my memory is not lying, if I'm not quite as mad as I think, if she really is dead . . . that's where she will be.
I climb thirteen stairs and stop on the landing. There's a smell. It's not rot or decay, isn't even that unpleasant. Maybe it's just the aroma of a house that has been locked up for six months with no ventilation. Even a home has to breathe.
Kidding myself, I think. That's Ashley I smell, or what's left of her. Do I really need to see?
And of course, I do.
I walk forward, pass the bathroom door, the spare bedroom, and stand before our bedroom door. Suddenly there is a rush of memory, so intense and raw that I sway and hold onto the banister to prevent myself from falling. A scratch on the door from when we moved in our new bed. A pluck at the corner of the landing carpet where I hadn't fitted it quite right, and the vacuum cleaner kept snagging it. A splash of paint on the skirting to the right of the door, from when I was decorating the walls; I'd always intended cleaning it off. Every memory involved Ashley's presence, but none of them involved her, as a visible, touchable entity. Still she is so far away from me, and on the other side of a door.
"Well, standing here won't solve anything," I say. "Ash, I'm coming in."
I push open the door. And there she is.
A few minutes later, sitting in the street beyond my front garden, wallowing in memories of Ashley that are all mine, I see the first of the shapes milling at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. I think it's Cordell and I stand to wave, but then other shapes join the first, moving cautiously or awkwardly into the street, and I know that I'm in trouble.
So here they are. The zombie hordes, the survivors turned to cannibalism, the gang ruled by a sadistic ex-military man intent on gaining control of the nothing that's left. Here is the Armageddon I imagined as a child. And for a moment, content in remembering Ashley without having to drink to see her beautiful face once again, I really don't care.
Seven: Holy Grail Ale
Ashley was crying again, her hair catching the glow of sunlight through the open window blinds, and this would be one of the days of my life. I went to her and held her as I alway
s did at times like this. And as always, there was nothing I could say.
Later, we drove out into the country to one of our favourite pubs. We listened to Thin Lizzy on the stereo, their classic Live and Dangerous album, and we were both silent as Lynott gave his perfect rendition of "Still in Love with You." Our windows were down, our spirits rising, and Ashley rested her hand on my thigh as I drove. I touched the back of her hand now and then, but the country lanes were narrow and twisty, and I spent a lot of time changing gears.
When we reached the pub and parked, Ashley turned to me and said, "Everything's going to be all right." She smiled. And even though her eyes were still rimmed red from crying, I believed her.
It was cool, but we kept our jackets on and sat outside, listening to the tinkle of their old water feature. There was a main road half a mile away and the background hum of traffic was constant, but it still felt quite peaceful here. It was early evening, so there weren't many customers yet. We had a corner of the garden to ourselves.
Ashley went in to buy a drink, and she came out with two bottles of Black Sheep Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale and pint glasses. I smiled, but my stomach fell. A novelty beer such as this surely couldn't taste very good.
I was wrong. It was a nice pint—pale amber, light and fruity, subtly bitter and dusty at the end—and the bottle labels gave us a laugh.
Ashley sat beside me, eschewing eye contact for the sake of closeness.
"So what are we going to do?" she asked.
"Sit here and drink some more."
She nudged me. "We have yet to toss a coin to see who's driving home."
I shrugged, looked around, let the setting sun warm my face. "Fuck it," I said. "Let's stay here and call a cab later."
"Sounds good," she said, but she drifted off and became contemplative. Ran her finger around the rim of her glass. I knew she had meant something different. "So," she said after a minute or two, "what are we going to do?"
