The End of Everything | Book 8 | The End of Everything

by Artinian, Christopher

  “Hello. You were talking. Hello,” Mila said.

  Bill turned back and stared her straight in the eyes, but it was as if he was looking straight through her. “Bill? Bill, are you okay?” Rod asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “The fence,” he said, looking back towards the plywood.

  “You’re starting to worry me a bit, mate. Do you need to sit down?”

  Bill looked back towards Rod. “I’m a bloody idiot. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Of what?”

  “We’ve got strapping, we’ve got chains. It’s not perfect, but we can fix a couple of strips of fencing over the weaker parts and see if we can secure them into position. It might make it a little harder for them to break through.”

  Mila and Rod looked at one another excitedly. “Do you think that will work?” Mila asked.

  “Well, it’s not going to hurt, is it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  At first, the driver of the lorry thought he was hallucinating. The last thing he expected to see as he emerged around the bend were two young women standing in the middle of the road, one of them with a shotgun pointing straight towards him; beyond them lay two of his friends in puddles of their own blood. As the first round fired, he instinctively jammed the brakes full on. The windscreen shattered in multiple places as the shot spread, rendering forward vision virtually impossible. The lorry’s tyres began to squeal as it skidded. If there had been more than a split second to think, the driver would have carried on going, full speed, it was not much of a game of chicken.

  But, as it was, he had committed to braking and now, as the lorry veered haphazardly from side to side, he realised he was becoming more of a passenger than a driver. The vehicle behind was travelling way too close and had not been privy to the snapshot image that had begun this sequence of events. Before the second driver had the chance to react, the front of her cab smashed into the back of the first lorry, shunting it and making the already difficult controlled deceleration impossible.

  The first driver screamed, as did the two passengers. They had seen what he had seen. Neither of them had believed it, neither of them had time to react or process the information, and as they could no longer see the road through the windscreen, it was only as the lorry went into a spin and they glimpsed through the passenger side window that they caught sight of the two young women sprinting from the road and into the trees. However, the girls were the least of their worries. As it continued to whirl, the lorry banked, and then another terrified scream rose from inside the cab as it tipped.

  Above their panicked cries, they could hear the screeching tyres of the second vehicle as it desperately tried to avoid another collision with them, but it was already too late.

  As the first truck smashed down hard on the road, causing the driver and the second passenger to catapult into the passenger nearest the door, inadvertently snapping his neck with one of their jumbled, flailing limbs, the second lorry ploughed into their undercarriage. The cries of terror from the female driver and her passenger were nothing compared to the screams of pain that erupted from deep inside them. But in turn, those sounds were mere whispers beside the massive explosion as the fuel tank of the toppled lorry ignited.

  The first vehicle, which had now been shunted onto the leafy verge to the right of the road, became engulfed in flames. The fire travelled over the body and into the cab and cargo compartment as if it possessed a sense of consciousness, determined to seek out and destroy any life.

  The female driver of the second truck could see her hands, her arms, and her legs all ablaze. Somehow, she managed to find the handle of the door and jump down to the ground. She no longer knew if she was screaming or not. There was a sound of some kind; it was the shriek of a crying, pained animal as its own death fast approached. She could feel everything and nothing as she staggered one, two steps. She could smell burning flesh, her own burning flesh, she could hear it crackling. It was only for a brief moment that she could see it, but then, as her eyelids welded shut and she fell to her knees in an unforgiving agony that Hell’s torturers would have been proud of, she became blind to everything.

  Her body began to convulse as it finally shut down. A childhood image flickered into her mind. She was cowering behind the sofa in fear as the rest of the family watched the frightening green witch from The Wizard of Oz. From her hiding place, she could not see the scary images, she could only hear that frightening voice—I’m melting … I’m melting.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Robyn had prepared herself for the kick from the shotgun, but it was still more powerful than she had anticipated, and the result was a lot more gruesome than she had thought possible.

  Even from the distance she and Wren had retreated to, they felt the heat of the blast. Before she pulled the trigger, she saw the look of shock on the young driver’s face and realised that the same effect could probably have been achieved by just standing there as much as firing the weapon. The series of events that followed left her and Wren dumbfounded.

  They had witnessed a lot of messed-up stuff, a lot of destruction; indeed, they had been responsible for a lot but nothing like this. Robyn bent over and threw up until there was nothing left in her stomach. She could have handled it all – the crash, the inferno – but seeing the burning, shrieking woman jump down from the cab of the second lorry was an image she knew would haunt her until the day she died.

  Robyn knew she had changed a lot in the time she had been away from Wren. She had become a lot tougher, a lot more focused, but she wasn’t a psychopath; she wasn’t evil.

  “Are you okay, Sis?” Wren asked, placing a hand on Robyn’s back as she continued to retch.

  Robyn remained bent over for a moment before slowly straightening up. She had tears in her eyes. “Oh yeah, couldn’t be better.”

  “You didn’t do that. They did that.”

  “No. I did that. I let my anger get the better of me. I walked out into the middle of that road and—”

  “And nothing. They kidnapped Mila. They kidnapped a lot of people and put them into harm’s way without a second thought. Today, we’re putting a stop to it. We won’t take pleasure out of someone’s pain or suffering, but it’s not on us, Bobbi, it’s on them.”

  Robyn wiped her mouth and let out a deep breath while Wren moved around in front of her and gently wiped the tears from her sister’s eyes with her thumb. “You’re a good sister, Wren.”

  “No, I’m a great sister,” Wren replied, smiling and finally managing to break a small smile on Robyn’s face too. “Now, come on, you’ve got a badass reputation to uphold. No more tears ’til it’s just you and me.”

  The pair of them walked back to the road to see Izzy and Marcus had disturbed and frightened looks on their faces, and as the massive plumes of charcoal smoke rose into the sky, it suddenly dawned on them that it would not be long before the army in Andrew’s Bay would be sending out a search party.

  “We’d better go,” Izzy said, doing her best to rally Marcus and the rest of their people, who were gradually starting to appear from their various hiding places.

  “We’ll go back to your place; then we’ve got somewhere safe for you to hole up while we head into Inverness,” Wren said, taking the lead while her sister still recovered.

  “Inverness?” Marcus asked incredulously. “You can’t be serious. That’s suicide. We can’t go into Inverness. Do you know how many people were in Inverness before all this happened?” Suddenly, he regained some of his pompous self-assuredness as he addressed the younger of the two sisters.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I was living on the outskirts for months. I went in every few days. I know those streets like the back of my hand, and that’s why I know if the infected haven’t got into that lorry yet, if Mila and your people are still trapped inside, we can get them out.”

  “We can’t do anything because we aren’t going. It’s suicide.” />
  “When I said we, I meant me and my sister. You honestly think we need a bunch of people with us who pee their pants at the first sign of trouble? We’re all out of adult nappies, so I think it’s better if we go by ourselves, don’t you?” Wren asked with an angry look in her eyes.

  The bluster left Marcus’s argument, and he was about to add something further but then thought better of it. “Do you really think you can do it?” Izzy asked.

  “I know we can,” Wren replied. “But if we don’t get out of here now,” she said, looking towards the inferno, “we won’t be going anywhere.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Despite the damage to some of the strapping, they managed to salvage a lot that was still usable. Once Rod had outlined the plan to everyone, a fresh enthusiasm came over the occupants of the cargo compartment as they went about the task at hand.

  “I have a suggestion,” Mila said.

  “Well … go on,” Bill replied. “You don’t seem to have a problem speaking your mind, so speak it.”

  Mila smiled. At first, she hadn’t been sure whether she liked Bill or not, but she realised he was actually a nice guy, just a little old fashioned, a little set in his ways, but decent all the same. “Gitter … I don’t know the word for it in English, but it is like crisscross,” she said, gesturing with her hands.

  “Grid? You mean a grid?” Rod asked. “So one row of fencing goes vertical and another goes horizontal making it stronger.”

  “Yes,” she replied excitedly.

  “That’s a bloody good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” Bill said.

  “You are old and possibly going senile,” Mila replied with a straight face.

  Bill looked at her for a second and then burst out laughing. “Well, you’ve got my number. Come on, let’s get to work.”

  Rod clapped his hands loudly. “Hang on a second,” he yelled to be heard over the sound of the incessant noise, “Change of plan.” He conveyed the revised idea, and when he was done, small teams got to work with even more enthusiasm. He, Mila and Bill worked as one, binding together three crisscrossed sections of fencing.

  “When you give people something to do, it takes their minds off what’s happening,” Bill said, smiling.

  “I don’t think it is just that. I think it is the fact that we are making this compartment safer. We are making it more difficult for the infected to get in,” Mila replied.

  “Yeah, but to what end?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “We could make this place like Fort Knox. We could make sure nothing ever got in here, but there’s a flip side to that, isn’t there?”

  “You mean the fact that we’ll never get out?” Rod asked.

  “Bingo. We’re already thirsty, I dare say there are a few rumbling stomachs too. It won’t be long—”

  “Then what is the point?” Mila snapped.

  “The point is it gives us something to do. It takes our mind off things and on the off chance our captors do see something else that tickles their fancy, there is that slimmest of possibilities that we can escape this coffin and actually die out in the open,” Bill replied, smiling.

  “I was wrong about you. I thought you were doing this because you thought we had a chance. You’re doing it because you’re bored.”

  “You’re wrong. I think there’s about a one in a million chance of us getting out of here, and I’m probably being generous there. But if the situation arose to give us that chance, people need to have hope. Sitting around listening to those things doesn’t do anybody any good. Contributing like this, working together as a team, no matter what the task, that gives people something at least.”

  Mila regarded Bill for a few moments. “You are a puzzle to me.”

  “You sound like my first wife.”

  “You mean there was more than one woman on the planet foolish enough to marry you?”

  Bill smiled. “Do you ever think before you speak or do you just say the first thing that comes into your head?”

  “I think about it; then I say it anyway.”

  Bill laughed. “Actually, you’re not like my first wife. I don’t think I’ve met anyone quite like you before.”

  “There is no one quite like me.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Wolf draped himself over Wren and Izzy while Robyn drove. Eight more of the disheartened resistance fighters slouched down in the back of the van. They had all aspired to being heroes, beating their loved ones’ oppressors into submission and whisking them away to safety. As it turned out, they had been badly organised and scared witless, relying on two young women to take all the risks while they cowered behind trees fearful for their own lives.

  Robyn looked in the mirror to make sure the Vauxhall Zafira driven by Marcus was still following. The massive pyre of smoke from the wreckage was still visible, but they had managed to put a good distance between it and them. As Robyn had steered the van over the verge on the other side of the road to get around the carnage, the heat had been overpowering, so she could only guess what it had been like for that woman whose burning image would forever be stuck in her mind. The more distance she put between herself and that horrifying moment, the better.

  “I could go with you. I should go with you,” Izzy blurted as if it had been something weighing heavily on her mind.

  Robyn looked across at her before returning her gaze to the road ahead. “No,” Wren replied firmly.

  Tears formed in Izzy’s eyes. “I’m not proud of how I reacted … how all of us reacted back there. It’s not right for you two to take all the risks. I should go with you.”

  “I don’t want to sound cruel, Izzy, but …” Wren didn’t quite know how to proceed with her thought.

  “But I’m useless. I’m just a useless, frightened joke?” The tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

  “Well … now you mention it,” Robyn replied.

  “Bobbi!” Wren snapped angrily.

  “I was joking. Look—”

  “Look,” Wren interrupted, “the first time we had to face a bad situation like the one today, it didn’t go smoothly. We got out by the skin of our teeth. Since then, we’ve faced a lot of really tough fights together, and we know exactly how the other works. Sometimes having more people isn’t the best way to get the job done. It’s having the person who knows you best standing right by your side that matters.”

  Izzy gently stroked Wolf’s thick coat as tears dropped onto the back of her hand. “I suppose you’re right. I’m just so ashamed. I had it in my head how it was going to go today. I saw myself holding my brother tight. I didn’t think for a second it would end up the way it did.”

  “Like I said, we’ve had a lot of practice, and, anyway, I need somebody who I like and trust to look after my boy,” Wren said, smiling and scratching behind Wolf’s ear. The German Shepherd angled his head upwards and licked Wren’s nose, making her giggle.

  “You’re not taking him with you?”

  “No. We can’t. As clever as Wolf is, he can’t climb ropes or ladders. It’s the key to getting around the city safely; the reason I survived there as long as I did was that I travelled by rooftop. I’ll leave him back at the farm with you, and you have to promise me you’ll look after him.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I mean it. He saved me … he saved me a thousand times over, and if this wasn’t so important to Bobbi, I would never even think of leaving him for a second, so I need you to promise me.”

  “Wren, I promise you. I won’t let anything happen to Wolf.”

  Wren looked into Izzy’s tear-filled eyes. “Good then.”

  The coast road snaked and twisted. It rose up steep inclines then dipped into deep troughs. Eventually, Robyn could no longer see the billowing smoke in the wing mirror, but rather than feeling comforted, a fresh anxiety gripped her. Each mile she put between them and Andrew’s Bay drew them a mile closer to Inverness. For all those months, the single most important thing in her life had been finding h
er sister, and now she had, she was undertaking a fool’s errand, risking Wren’s life and her own to go into the heart of Inverness to find Mila.

  She had never felt so conflicted about anything, and it made her stomach churn over and over. Could she really put her sister in harm’s way for such a long shot? She was about to find out.

  chapter 14

  The upbeat mood in the confines of the cargo compartment lasted as long as the job lasted, which was almost exactly what Bill had predicted would happen. Give somebody something to do, and it gives them a purpose. Give them nothing to do, and they have no purpose.

  After the last strap was tied into place, the twenty-four men and women sat down in their own small cliques, and the odd frightened gasp sounded as more of the vehicle’s rusted undercarriage disintegrated.

  “So,” Bill said, looking towards Mila and Rod as they sat in a well-spaced triangle, “that one in a million chance we were talking about. Say it happened, say they lose interest in us, say something distracts them for long enough for us to get out of here, where would you go?”

  “My friend went west. That is where I must go,” Mila replied.

  “West? That’s it, west?” Bill said, smiling. “That’s pretty vague.”

  “The world is a lot smaller than it was. If she is out there, I will find her.”

  “She must be a good friend.”

  “She is more. We are like sisters.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows. “Been through a lot together, have you?”

  Mila’s eyes glistened in the dim artificial light as memories of the time she and Robyn spent together came flooding back. “More than you would know.”

  “And you?” Bill asked, turning towards Rod.

  “Well, I’ve got an actual sister out there somewhere. We were separated in the woods not too far from Andrew’s Bay. I suppose I’ll head back there and see if I can find some clue as to where she is.”

  “That’s crazy,” Mila blurted. “She wouldn’t stay around there for so long, nobody would.”