by Tim Lebbon
It was later, when they'd taken her away and said she'd be fine, and the house had welcomed me back inside—my new house, my home—that I started to shake, spilling tears and gasping for air as massive sobs shook me to the floor.
I wake, sit up, crying. The Irishman is sitting with his back to me, and he doesn't turn around. I silently curse his politeness.
"Holy shit," I say.
"What?" Cordell is behind me, and I stand and turn around.
The house . . . that voice . . . my home?
I shake my head. "Bad dream." I look around, searching for a sign that there were reasons for that memory, but I find none.
"We should go," Jessica says. "You okay?"
I nod, run my hands across my scalp. Damn! That was weird. That was . . .
I mount the bike, kick it to life and fill my head with noise before I allow myself to admit what has happened.
That was Jacqueline. I had one of her memories.
A dozen miles later, travelling toward the falling sun, we see something that stops us in our tracks: a forest, starting immediately beside the motorway and spread up and across the low hills of Somerset. It sweeps away from the road, climbing slopes, spiking hilltops, and looking along the road's route I cannot see where the trees end. They look young and fresh—their leaves sporting vivid shades of green, visible trunks quite smooth and unworn by time—and I wonder how long they have taken to grow.
The others climb from the Range Rovers, I dismount, and we stand together beside the road.
"That doesn't look quite right," Cordell says.
I laugh, but it's a desperate sound. "I drove this way several times each year," I say. "This shouldn't be here. There should be farms out there, and a hotel up on that hill with panoramic glass windows, and barns and a field full of junked cars half a mile that way." I point at the trees, the trees. There's no sign of any buildings, anywhere. No power pylons, no flashes of tumbled masonry, and no fields outlined by wild hedges or old stone walls. Only trees, with dozens of birds spotting the sky above. We can see quite a long way into the forest, because the leaves seem not to have grown into a full canopy yet. But that's the only real sign that these trees have not been here for very long.
How long ago? I think. How long since Ashley and I came down here? I'm not sure what to feel. I suppose I should be scared. We're standing before something supernatural, after all: a forest that was not here a year before. Yet so much has happened that the term natural has taken on new meaning, and continues to change.
"We'll go in," the Irishman says. His voice is lacking in his usual lightness. "There'll be plenty to see in there." He starts across the hard shoulder toward the overgrown hedge that marks the edge of relative normality.
"Hey," I say. "It may not be safe."
The Irishman turns and shrugs. "What is?"
The trees whisper.
I take a step back and almost trip. Jessica gasps and reaches for the shotgun. There was not even a breeze, and only a few leaves seem to flicker and shift.
The Irishman pauses before the hedge and stands on tiptoes to see over. He looks left and right, stumbling a couple of times as he tries to stretch higher. When he drops down onto flat feet he seems smaller than before. Shrunken.
"What is it?" I say.
"Dangerous in there," he says. He joins us back on the road and looks left and right, examining the motionless queue of vehicles. "Notice anything?"
We look, and yes, I have already noticed. Perhaps it just didn't register before.
"Doors are open," Jessica says. "We've seen a few before, but there are lots more here. As if there was something to stop and get out for."
"They're in there." The Irishman nods at the forest, then turns and climbs back into his Range Rover. He shuts the door, and the sun glares from glass so that I only see him in silhouette. Even then I know that he is shaking.
"Do you really want to see?" Jessica says. Cordell has started for the hedge, and even though I can answer Jessica's question I follow him. Some things need to be seen. The bodies in the cars can stay where they are, because they have chosen a very private death. The old cities clotted with dead and scattered with damaged survivors will never be somewhere for us, because they are so far in the past, awash with the stink of yesterday's rot and madness. But here, the supernatural gives us some way to glimpse something else. Something changed, perhaps, or of the future.
We reach the hedge together. I'm taller than the Irishman, and I can see more. Cordell finds a rusted paint pot hidden in the grass and stands on it. To begin with, we say nothing.
In this new forest, the trees are spaced far apart. The ground between them is rich with low plant life, some of it root crops gone wild, some wilder plants spread from the hedges or seeded by birds. There are none of the usual signs of an old, established wood: no fallen trunks, jagged stumps or banks of old shrubs. But there are people. I can see a dozen from where I stand, all of them involved somehow with the trunk of a tree. I can think of no other word that suits: they're involved.
A naked man is pressed against one trunk, the wood holding him tight where it has grown to encompass his abdomen and stomach, and even the tip of his nose and lips seem to be held still. He seems to be dead, though his pale skin is unmarked by decay. His hair is long and tangled, and I can see insects crawling in and out of its mess. There's a woman to my left, legs and arms protruding from either side of an oak tree's trunk. Her face is almost entirely out of sight, only a cheek, ear and length of golden hair still revealed. I can tell it's a woman because one breast is also loose, hanging as though heavy and full. There's an old man high in one tree's branches, pierced in several places and held aloft while leaves cloak him green. A child—I think it's a boy, though I cannot be sure—is buried to the chest in the junction at the top of an elm. The child's head hangs to the left, neck apparently broken. Still, no rot.
"They're alive," Cordell breathes.
"No. I don't think so."
"But their skin, their faces. They're still whole, and if they came from those cars . . ." He points back over one shoulder with his thumb, never taking his eyes from the trees.
"I think they're being kept," I say.
"Kept?" He glances at me then back at the trees, and I see realisation settling.
"What do you see?" Jessica calls.
"Dead people," I say.
Cordell shakes his head. "Kept for what?"
I have no idea, but he looks at me, demanding an answer. I shrug. "Food?"
"Food. But it's not all of them. Not every tree has someone."
"No. Maybe just the lucky ones."
There's another whisper from the trees, and I instinctively look up to see the patterns of leaves waving at the sky. But there is almost no movement. No breeze. The whisper goes on, and I know it has come from deep within this new forest.
I expect a head to turn then, a fist to clench, an exposed eye to blink slowly, a mouth to stretch into a smile, but none of that happens. The bodies remain still but whole, kept and protected from the ravages of decay by their new tree homes. I wonder whether they share more with the trees than just space.
"We need to go," Cordell says. He steps down from the paint pot and walks back to the road, and I can hear him mumble something to Jessica.
I take one last look, because it suddenly seems important to see. Nothing changes; there is no revelation. The trees whisper again as I turn to leave, but there is no calling in that sound, no lure. Perhaps it's a language we were never meant to know.
As I ride alone, I dwell upon the memory I had from Jacqueline's life. She must have told me about it during one of those long, sleepless nights when we lay together, for comfort and company rather than anything else. We had talked a lot then, drifting in and out of sleep, to and from dreams, and I revealed much more about myself in that bed than at any time since Ashley. Jacqueline did as well. I cannot recall the actual conversation when she talked about her new home in West Wales and the bloodied
girl out on the road, but it must have happened. Must have.
But that felt like a memory of my own!
I ignore the voice of reason in my mind, because it's surely mad.
That evening, as the sun finally sinks away, we park on the road and sit together in one vehicle. The sunset is giving us a wonderful display of colours as it settles low over the Devonshire hills. Cordell once said that the fine sunsets were caused by dust in the sky from a distant war. But he hadn't repeated that assumption for a while, and I was trying to forget.
"That's beautiful," the Irishman says.
"It is." I'm sitting behind him and I see the sunset through the frazzled ends of his long hair.
"We should be there tomorrow," Cordell says.
"You think so?" Jessica is in the driving seat. She's nursing the shotgun like a teddy bear.
"So long as the roads stay as clear as they have been, yes."
"What's happening?" she says. "What were those trees? Why were they holding dead people, like you said? What's happening?"
None of us answer for a while, and I feel the need to break the silence. "Michael told us things are moving on," I say.
"Great," the Irishman says. "Moving on to carnivorous fuckin' trees."
"They weren't eating them," Cordell says. "Not really."
"We stay to the road," I say. "We stick to the plan, get to Bar None as soon as we can."
"If it even exists." Cordell slips down in the seat beside me and looks at the Range Rover's ceiling. "Maybe Michael was a madman."
"You really believe that?" I ask. He closes his eyes.
"I have a plan," Jessica says. "If we don't find this place, I have a plan. There's a place on Bodmin, out on the moor, a hotel."
"Jamaica Inn," I say.
She smiles and nods. "We could go there. It's in the middle of nowhere, away from any towns or cities, and if there were people there at the end, I'll bet it wasn't many."
"Not many bodies to move, you mean," the Irishman says.
"Could be they're still alive."
"I'm not going out there," Cordell says. He nods at the windscreen but I know what he means, we all do. The wilds. "I'm staying on this road until we get to Bar None, then I'll go inside and see if what he said is true. And if it's all bollocks—if we don't even find the place—I'll turn around and drive all the way back home. I will. But there's no way you're dragging me onto the middle of Bodmin Moor. I've been there and it's wild. And that was before." He shakes his head. "No way."
"Well, it's just an idea."
"We've put so much trust in him," I say, and my words dwindle away into silence. We're all realising exactly what we've done: given up a safe place, come out into the changing world, opened ourselves up to danger, chasing the dream of a place that may or may not be, all on the strength of one man. Perhaps the end really has driven us mad.
We park the Range Rovers close together and sleep in them. The Irishman and I chat for a while, but there's a weight of knowledge between us that makes idle conversation seem almost disrespectful. We've seen and sensed individual things that are strange and almost incomprehensible. Considered together, they give evidence of a huge change. I'm scared, and nervous, and thrilled.
"You know what I heard?" he says, breaking a loaded silence.
"I'm sure you'll tell me."
"Theories," he says. "The internet was alight with them in the weeks before the end. They appeared on all the usual conspiracy theory websites to begin with. I used to love all that bullshit: who shot Kennedy, how the moon landings were faked, who paid for Princess Diana to be assassinated. But pretty soon after they appeared on these sites, the major news agencies started to repeat the same stories. Details were slightly different, dates and places altered just subtly. But close enough."
"Is this the thing about the plagues' origins?"
"Yep. To begin with everyone thought it was just one plague out of Africa, like Ebola. But then it became clear that there were different strains, and from then on new plagues were identified every few days, and new points of origin were found. A cave in Indonesia. An inaccessible valley in Brazil. India, the Australian Outback, an ice-cave in Alaska discovered by oil drillers. Other places, too."
"Lots of people said it was terrorism."
"What terrorists would plant germ warfare weapons in places so far out of the way? If it was terrorists, why not London, New York, Moscow, Paris?"
"Too heavily protected?"
The Irishman held up his hand, flexed his index finger and hissed. "Aerosol. Doesn't take much."
"So it's nature," I say. "That's what these stories were getting at. Nature did this."
"Humankind's expansion into nature. Almost as if these plagues have always been there, a guard against us going too far. And when we did go too far . . ."
In one way it's a momentous idea that I can barely absorb. In another, more immediate way, it really does not matter.
I drift off to sleep thinking about the bomb in the channel tunnel, and how nature was far more subtle.
Next morning we eat a brief meal of tinned fruit then set off early. We want to reach Bar None today, if we're ever going to reach it at all.
We travel well that day, pausing here and there for one of the Range Rovers to push tangled cars from the road, stopping around lunchtime to refuel from the jerry cans in the back of the Irishman's vehicle.
We see more strange things, but try to ignore them.
Late afternoon we leave the motorway and head off across the countryside, following A-roads that twist between hills and valleys. These roads are generally quite clear, but when we come across the first real barrier, it's a bad one. An oil tanker has jack-knifed and exploded, taking a dozen cars with it, and we have to leave the road and drive through overgrown fields, skirting a few copses of trees that have strange growths at their centres, ploughing through hedges that grapple at wheels and axles. I take the rear, driving the bike along the route the Range Rovers are carving across the fields. I feel very vulnerable.
We make it back onto the road past the site of the accident, and head off once again in pursuit of a place that may not be.
But Bar None's existence is revealed to us long before we reach it.
I see her as we drive around a bend. She's standing in the middle of the road, away from any wrecked cars, wearing a white wedding dress over leather trousers and a leather jacket. The dress would probably fit her were it not for the clothes beneath, but it is bulged and stretched as though fit to burst. It's unnaturally clean. Her face is painted red.
I stop the bike and turn around. Jessica shrugs.
I look at the woman again and she's still standing there, smiling. She starts walking toward me. I rev the bike and drift forward another fifty metres, then kick down the stand and dismount.
I look around. To my left a steep hill rises away from the road, and to my right there are fields. There could be a hundred people hidden within a hundred steps of me, and I'd never see them. But I need to offer a peaceful sign to this woman, so I smile and walk to meet her. We both pause several steps from each other. There's something strange about her, way beyond the red-painted face and unusual attire, but I can't place it.
"We can't allow you to reach there," she says.
"Reach where?"
"Bar None."
We, she had said. Of course, I never believed she would have been on her own, but now I'm conscious of other eyes upon me. "Come with us," I say. That disarms her. She frowns, steps back, and that's when I realise what it is about her that's so strange. What I thought were loose threads from the hems of the wedding dress are in fact fine white roots, delving out from beneath the dress's sleeves, across the backs of her hands and around her fingers. There are some at her throat as well, fine white veins trailing upward for her face. The dress is unharmed. These are growing from beneath.
"You'd take me?" she whispers.
Now she's talking in the singular. If this is a game, I have to win. I can fee
l the others watching from inside the Range Rovers, and I step to one side to allow Jessica a clear shot.
"Have you not been there already?" I ask. The woman's face drops, all signs of hope slipping from the glazed paint. She spits, laughs, turns around to present her back to me.
"You think I'd have come out again if I had?"
"I don't know anything about Bar None," I say.
The woman spins around again, and spittle flies from her mouth. "Don't lie to me, fresh man. Don't fuck with the Wild Woman of Wongo. Last man who fucked with the Wild Woman left his dick inside. Shall I show you? Would you like to see?" She's lifting the wedding dress and hauling down the zipper on her trousers, and as she's distracted I take another look up at the hillside to my left. I can detect no movement there, but it's so overgrown that there could be anything hidden on its slopes.
"I don't need to see, I believe you," I say.
The woman lets her dress drop. "Oh, if you did see you'd never believe, fresh man. So innocent. So sheltered. Where have you been all my new life?"
I've no answer, and she spits again.
"Well, doesn't matter. You're not going there. We can't let you."
"Why not?"
"So you do know Bar None!"
I offer a rueful smile, as though she has won one over on me. "We just heard it's a nice place to stay."
"Nice?" She moves closer and now I can smell her, a mix of freshly cut grass, turned earth and raw meat. I glance down at her throat and see those roots stroking her chin, as though encouraging her to speak again. "Nice? It's nice if you like pain, and rot, and torture. Nice if you want your face flayed away and pebbles put in place of your eyes. Then it's nice, fresh man. Nice for you and all your fresh meat." She looks over my shoulder at the Range Rovers. She seems disappointed. "Fresh, but so sparse."
"We don't want trouble," I say. "We don't want anything from you, all we want to do is pass."
