All Roads End Here
Page 30
The world below is a mass of confused movement. For so long the wastelands have been desolate and quiet, but now they’re alive with activity. There are an impossible number of Haters choking the life out of what’s left of the city. Some are still in vehicles, but many more are on foot, surging forward as a ragtag and uncoordinated, yet devastatingly effective, army. And just as Franklin and Jayce foresaw, the people are evacuating the camp in equally huge numbers.
They’re like lambs to the slaughter.
The last of the city-based CDF forces take the lead in long convoys of vehicles and people racing away along all the passable routes out of town, and where the two sides opposing meet, there is absolute carnage.
Yet Matt takes some slight comfort from what he’s seeing, because the majority of the fighting right now appears to be taking place in and around No Man’s Land. He knows that’ll change once the Haters have established full control out here—which they inevitably will—but for now he thinks this gives him the slightest chance of getting back to the house, getting Jen, and getting out again before all is lost. It is only a slight chance, he knows that much, but this morning that’s all he’s got left to cling on to.
But hold on … This isn’t right … This isn’t what he was expecting to see. Some of the Haters are retreating, too. It’s not important. It doesn’t change anything. The only thing that matters is getting back into the camp and—
Wait. What’s that?
There’s a single speck racing at an immeasurable speed across the rapidly lightening blue-black sky overhead. It doesn’t look like a plane and it can’t have come from the abandoned airport … he watches it flying toward the city with a mix of unease and awe. He’s not seen anything moving so high and so fast since long before the war began. It even outruns the jets.
He realizes what it is just microseconds before it happens.
Matt brakes hard and brings the van to a barely controlled stop. The front swings out wildly and is hit by another vehicle going the other way. He’s thrown backward then forward in his seat and his head cracks against the wheel, but the pain is an irrelevance now because he knows what’s coming.
He drops to the ground and covers his head as the world around him is filled with an unbearable white light. He screws his eyes shut and covers his head, but even that doesn’t block out the brightness. It only lasts for a fraction of a second, but it seems to take forever to fade. And all that Matt can think in that split second of white-hot heat and absolute madness, is that Jen is gone.
The blast wave hits next, immediately followed by a ferocious dry-hot, hurricane-strength wind. There’s a gut-churning feeling of weightlessness as the van is picked up and thrown through the air, and though Matt braces himself for impact, he loses consciousness and doesn’t feel the return to earth.
48
He vomits. Throat dry. Raw. Nerves, it must be. Too soon for radiation, but that’ll get him soon.
Survival instinct.
It still drives him, still keeps him moving, even though everything that mattered is now lost. The van’s on its side. He picks himself up and crawls out through the hole where the windscreen used to be.
Hands and knees through the gravel and dust.
He waits. Listens. Slowly gets up.
Absolute fucking silence.
Am I already dead?
The sky is the color of bile. The city is gone, just black ash remaining. A mushroom cloud climbs up forever from its ruin, hanging over everything like a malevolent demon, the fucked-up king of all it surveys. A warm wind nudges Matt into action and he starts to move. If he doesn’t he knows he’ll die. He thinks he probably will anyway. The Haters will get him even if the radiation doesn’t.
Keeping the cloud behind him, he works his way back through a world which has changed again beyond all recognition. Legs numb with shock, heart heavy with grief, he half-runs and half-walks. Has to move fast, but at the same time he doesn’t want to breathe in hard for fear of sucking in more and more of the toxic shit that’ll soon be filling the air.
Nothing is as it was. All structure and form have disappeared. The world, already scarred by months of fighting, has now been seared and scraped clean. He pauses at the top of another hill, and it’s as if he hasn’t moved any farther from the mushroom cloud. It’s still on his shoulder, towering directly overhead. Looming. Poisonous. Full of hate.
* * *
It takes him more than an hour to retrace his steps, and in all that time he sees no one else alive.
The distribution center has collapsed, and the printing house has been partially crushed beneath it. Already weakened by the crashed truck, half of the building has fallen in on itself. The walls which separate the offices from the rest of the site have gone down like dominoes, and Matt has to dig his way through to find the door down. He hammers against the entrance door, exhausted and broken, calling for help with a weak, rasping voice which sounds like no one he recognizes. When they hear him and it opens, he virtually falls inside.
They ask him what happened and, when he tells them, the little hope that’s left in the survivors’ enclosed world disappears for good.
They know they’ll never leave here.
ALSO BY DAVID MOODY
One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning
Them or Us
Dog Blood
Hater
Autumn: Aftermath
Autumn: Disintegration
Autumn: Purification
Autumn: The City
Autumn
About the Author
From the UK, DAVID MOODY first self-published Hater on the internet in 2006, and without an agent, succeeded in selling the film rights for the novel to Mark Johnson (producer of The Chronicles of Narnia film series) and Guillermo del Toro (director of Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Shape of Water). With the publication of a new series of Hater stories, Moody is poised to further his reputation as a writer of suspense-laced SF/horror and “farther out” genre books of all description. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Midlands Regional Protection Zone
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Also by David Moody
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the char
acters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALL ROADS END HERE. Copyright © 2019 by David Moody. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Rowen Davis
Cover photograph: road © Christie Goodwin/Arcangel
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-20627-5 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-10844-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250108449
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First Edition: February 2019