by John Eider
The print works at which we had been based had been on the very outskirts of a town, and so as I set off I had been able to avoid those streets and shops altogether; yet after a fortunate string of woods, golf courses and farmland I was already coming onto the first outlying houses and affluent estates of my target town by seven in the evening. I wasn’t meant to have gotten this far till nightfall – were we getting too good at this cross-country lurching?
(For the record, on my day’s walk I had seen increasing signs (Wareing had taught me well) of indiscriminate crop robbing, predominately from the areas easiest to reach around the edge of fields. Unlike the organised harvesting we’d seen earlier on the mission, this was haphazard, even maniacal at times, with as much pulled up too young, or thrown away with the earth ripped up by starving, half-mad hands, as had been taken away to be cooked or – I guessed most likely – gulped down raw. (There are folk tales from those times of whole towns going rural, just heading out one day into the fields, and it is speculated that these groups formed the first crowds at the new aid stations.) At one point I heard what might have been a distant shotgun firing; and also passed the body of an old man on the path. He had been out there a while, for the sun and animals had got to him, though was showing no obvious signs of initial injury.)
Not wanting to go any further into the town centre while still light, instead I paused awhile in the large, dry garden of a deserted suburban house and ate some squirrel Wareing had caught and cooked the previous night. Two questions had occupied me, you see: where were the people; and if there were no people, then where were the bodies? The busy town now unavoidable, I decided there was no better place to get started in finding out my answers than along the arcing crescent of affluent homes I was sat at the start of and which led off from the signposted main road. Here, in what I knew would always have been the quietest and safest part of town, I could slowly get used again to streets and houses and buildings close around and looming over me.
However, after weeks living along the open French coast and latterly roaming the British countryside, even this street, with its spaced out houses set back from the road, spooked me. Thinking back, I wonder if it wasn’t through not being able to make out the horizon line, of even these scattered houses leaving me feeling penned in? They were not new homes, built perhaps in the Sixties or Seventies, with shallow roofs and picture-frame windows; and it was these expanses of plate glass, by turns dark and gaping or brightly reflective, that looked out at every side of me, from beyond wide driveways or behind tall birch and weeping willow. Not for the first time, I felt watched.
The road could have had a sign hung at each end, ‘Closed for the Duration!’ so untouched did it seem by recent events; as if the residents had simply shut up their homes and moved away until the local difficulty had passed. The first house I actually approached though was the first to still have a car outside: I needed people, alive or dead or at whatever state in-between. Pushing through bushes to the house’s picture window, I saw through it smart furniture – reclining chairs, sprawling sofas, a low coffee-table – spread across a well-appointed room. There was no evidence though of crisis, death or recent habitation.
I turned back to the drive and realised my mistake – the car was tiny, a candy-coloured sporty model. This was a second car, a weekend-racer, either his or her run-around, and not the family estate they would have packed up to leave in. I wondered how far they’d got? Hopefully to a rural second home, or that of friends out of town; to a port and then a refugee ship; or most likely to a crowded aid station – almost everyone who fled ended up at one of those, it seemed. (Why the runaround hadn’t been in the garage that day would remain a mystery to me, as it would have been far too noisy to hoist up the garage double-door and see.)
As I moved down the curving road (which took me closer into the centre of town than I realised) it was the image of the sofas, as I gawped into these large lounges, that haunted me – I who had known nothing more comfortable for days than work chairs pushed together. And then I saw the burnt out house.
Like a blackened tooth in a perfect mouth, it stood out a mile and drew me running toward it. There was no sound, no smoke, no other house harmed. As I reached it I looked through its front window, between the shards of blackened glass. Inside I saw the patterns of rainwater spattered on the charred window frame, the same on the surface of a still-shiny table just inside the room. I hadn’t felt rain for three days, and this fitted the timescale, the fire clearly having being out a while.
I walked around the side of the house, and found the back even more dishevelled, the garden full of burnt or abandoned camping equipment, a knocked over makeshift stove. The back windows of the house were not only cracked with heat but smashed out, the furniture and fittings of those rear rooms strewn among the other things on the lawn.
Without entering I could see that the house was gutted inside, the paint peeled and bubbled, wood reduced to charred ash. Sticking out from beneath what had possibly been a sideboard were what were definitely human legs. Other shapes across the floor could have been bodies, had I risked entering to check. I crossed myself (where on our journey had I picked up that habit?) and turned back to the garden – to see several panels of the back fence missing. These opened out onto farmer’s fields, and as I got there I saw evidence of planned harvesting, neat rows of plundered crops. Beyond this field were others: some covered with netting, some with wide blue plastic tubing, which I thought might have been protecting tomatoes.
‘They had made a commune,’ I heard myself say; as just then a figure unseen, crouching by the fence scurried off in the direction of a farm building beyond the blue tubes. I watched him run expertly through the obstacles, to be greeted by a flicker of light in the dusk as a door was opened for him, and as quickly shut again. ‘Some of them made it then,’ I whispered this time; while asking to myself: who had wrecked the house, and why?
As I left the house and continued along the road I saw more signs of damage: smashed windows, a burnt out car; and as it was almost dark by then, I kept on eastward toward the town centre. It was still an hour’s walking before I found the district specified on the map. By then every second house had damage, with shouts being heard and movement sensed in gardens and around corners – though not from anyone or anything that had the nerve to approach me. The oddest thing was that I began to see bones. Some of them were certainly big enough to be human, but they came in all sizes, heaped or scattered or alone; and though smeared with blood and sometimes strung together in half skeletons, the remarkable thing was how efficient whoever or whatever had done this had been in picking them clean.
I turned a corner around a Victorian end-terrace… and quickly spun back round again, my back pressed against the cool red brick, fearing to breath. For not ten yards from where I’d stood my light-adjusted eyes had seen a pack of dogs, all sizes and breeds, but dominated by three or four as big as ponies, one of which I thought a Doberman. They must have found new prey for they were packed tight together, their heads meeting over something; but how long would that meal last, and could it satisfy them all? I moved my hand slowly across the wall and found the edge of a door. Feeling down I reached its handle, but as I turned it it neither budged nor did so silently.
Across the road, five narrow houses back the way I’d came, was an arched alleyway built into the terrace and which didn’t appear gated. I dashed for it; and not a moment too soon, as behind me I heard the slithering of rushing paws rounding the corner. For five breathless seconds, not daring to turn and look, I ran and somehow made the alley, throwing myself in and nearly going over as I roughed up against the shadowed walls.
Half way along the thin, brick tunnel, no doors on either side, I turned and saw the melee as eight or ten dogs tried to enter the tight passageway together. Each with filthy coats and blood around their mouths – they must have been nearly finished with their last victim then, and none of them looked full; especially not the Doberman that was pushing the others away to
nearly fill the alley entrance all by itself. I will never forget that dog: its dark-grey colouring, its noble stance, its upward-pointing ears. We stared each other out for what seemed much longer than it could possibly have been.
Wareing the poacher, in that situation, might have risked a throw of his only weapon; but I knew my limitations – and also that I could sucker-punch this brute. My knife was in its holster on my belt, my fingers already gripping the handle through a corresponding hole tailored in my jacket pocket. The Doberman ran at me, I stepping back once and pointing the blade up into its chest as it leapt.
Its face hung an inch before mine as it died, I nearly falling under its weight, before hoisting the animal away to land on top of and amid the following pack. For a moment the other dogs paused, unsure what to do, before as one descending on their leader’s warm body.
All but for a bounding Bull Terrier, who instead of joining the feeding throng instead jumped up to catch my left hand. In an effort to swing him off I only succeeded in dashing my left knuckles against the near brickwork; yet the flash of anger the pain brought to my face, and a flash of my freshly bloodied blade, saw him let go with a whimper to fall on his back and squirm away to join the others. I ran through the alley to the back yards of the terrace, threw my knife and pack over into the next garden, grappled with the fence one-handed, and fell down safely on the other side to collapse in rushed breathing and near tears.
The Terrier had mostly bit into my coat’s cuff, but at least two teeth had ripped my wrist; meanwhile from the dashed brickwork blood pulsed out of the knuckles. Our bags had a small first aid kit, and with blood everywhere I managed to open it and get a bandage wrapped around my hand. I heard a scratching then at the fence; and so packing up I left by the back gate. Here was the path the binmen used, which ran behind the small backyards. Following this, I came out further along the road on which the dogs had first been eating; yet in their place was now a different, oddly moving shape, one that made a scratching, squeaking sound: rats, in a huge seething mound over the dogs’ last victim. I suddenly felt chillingly sick, and dashed off in the opposite direction along the empty street.
Chapter 15 – In the Park