The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow

by Collingbourne, Huw

  But it scared them. They called out a few choice obscenities and vanished into the night. The last thing I heard was a voice calling in the darkness, promising that they would be back and that next time they’d be armed with more than rocks.

  The Colonel had a nasty looking gash on his cheek but the doctor said that, luckily, no bones had been broken.

  The following day, the thaw came.

  12

  The first thing I noticed was the water dripping from the icicles above the windows. I went outside. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. The Colonel felt this was a good sign, that soon everything would be tickety-boo, ship-shape and Bristol fashion, the power would come back on, the BBC would resume its scheduled programs and we would all be able to carry on as if nothing had happened.

  Doctor Prentiss was not so sanguine.

  As for me, I thought the change in the weather could only be for the better. After breakfast (cornflakes with reconstituted dried milk, which was revolting), Geoff, Bobby and I set off on the road back to my house. Heather Cottage had been my home for the last two years. I’d grown very fond of it. So when I saw the state it was in, I was shocked. The broken window was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the trail of footprints leading to and from the front door. People had been there. Difficult to guess how many. They’d gone in through the window and, as far as I could see, they’d left by the door.

  Once inside, I could see that they’d done a pretty thorough job of wrecking the place. I wasn’t too worried that they might have stolen things because I haven’t got much worth stealing. A tatty old computer. Some books. A cheap TV set. The only things of any value… Oh God, no! I rushed upstairs. My guitars. They’d wrecked my guitars. An Ibanez RG, a Harald Peterson classical guitar. A Gretsch 6120 ‘Chet Atkins’. Sacrilege. The Grestch was a work of art. I could imagine somebody wanting to steal it. I couldn’t imagine why would anyone would want to destroy it. But that is exactly what they had done. Its gorgeous orange flame-maple body had been smashed with great violence and now lay scattered across the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” Geoff said.

  “About the Gretsch?” I said.

  “About your house.”

  Ah, but it wasn’t my house, was it. I was just the tenant. I think I mentioned earlier that an old college friend had rented it to me. Fully furnished with good antiques. I looked around the place. Windows had been smashed. Legs had been broken off chairs, the drawers had been taken from a chest of drawers and smashed into fragments, great gouges had been carved into the wood of a 19th Century sideboard. How was I going to break the news of all this destruction to Justin? That was the friend who had rented the house to me: Justin Davenant.

  Then another thought occurred to me. Maybe Justin wasn’t alive any more. I don’t know why I thought that. I still hadn’t formed a clear impression of the true extent of the catastrophe that had hit the country. I think it was the sheer wantonness of the destruction, the desecration of the antique furniture, the ruin of my beloved guitars that made me conceive of the idea that Geoff might, after all, be right. That Douggie Lampton’s madness might have been closer to sanity than I’d thought. That Doctor Prentiss’s cynicism might have been all too justified. That the world was no longer as it had been.

  “What do we do now?” Geoff said.

  “I don’t know.”

  But I pretty soon came to a decision. There was nothing keeping me or Geoff here any longer. Neither of us had a proper home to go to. As for me, I wanted to find out what had happened to my country. I would go to the village. And if I couldn’t find the truth there, I would go to the town. And if I couldn’t find the truth there, I would keep on going until I did find it.

  The sun was still shining as we set off towards the village. The snow didn’t melt all at once but at the sides of the road there were some places that weren’t shaded by hedges and banks where the snow was starting to turn to slush. I thought of the doctor’s warning. The snow is our only protection, he’d said, like a defensive wall around the village. Doctor Prentiss had formed the opinion that it was only a matter of time before the mass violence that had sprung up in the towns would spread into the surrounding countryside. The thaw was not yet well enough advanced to diminish our ‘protective wall’ to any significant extent so I didn’t think this was a problem we would be forced to confront quite yet.

  It was a long slog through the snow, back the way we had come – past Lampton’s Farm, past the road leading to the Church Hall. But this time, instead of turning up the hill towards the Hall we kept on going down into the valley, towards the village. From a distance, everything looked peaceful. The roofs of the stone-built houses and shops that straggled along Fore Street sparkled, white and brilliant, beneath the clear blue sky. At the far end of the street, smoke rose from the chimney of The Farmer’s Rest – the old, thatched pub that was the social centre of the village.

  Fore Street, which runs through the centre of the village, was eerily empty. The Lettuce Leaf grocery was shut. So to was Barnford’s Bakery. There were no people on the streets but the snow had been well trampled on the pavement, mainly in the direction of The Farmer’s Rest. That seemed as good a direction to take as any so that’s where we went.

  The Farmer’s Rest is one of those comfortable, old-fashioned pubs that have all but vanished from the towns of Britain but can still be found out in the depths of the countryside. It has just one bar with wooden settles against the walls and a couple of rough oak tables and chairs standing on the slate-flag floor. There is a glass fronted case on the wall in which a stuffed fish is mounted – in memory of some angling achievement that occurred so long ago that nobody knows who caught the fish or why it was thought worthy of preservation. There is a big open fireplace in which a pile of burning logs provides heat enough for all that big room even in the coldest depths of winter.

  When I opened the big oak door and stepped inside, the heat hit me at once. I unbuttoned my coat, took off my gloves and unwrapped my scarf. Two old gents were sitting on stools by the bar. The landlord, Alan Pendelin, was standing behind the bar, as he always was, drying glasses with a towel.

  “Afternoon gents,” he said, just as he always did, “And what’ll it be today, then?”

  “Two pints of bitter,” I replied though I wasn’t at all sure that Geoff was of legal age to be served with alcohol.

  “The pumps isn’t working,” Alan Pendelin said, “But we have barrels of Stormy Bay or Otterly.”

  “Stormy Bay,” I said.

  The two barrels were resting on a trestle behind the bar and while Alan Pendelin poured two glasses straight from the tap, one of the old gents at the bar nodded to me, smiled and said, “Cold enough for you, lad?”

  “Warmer in here anyway,” I said. It was meaningless chatter. The kind of thing you say to strangers in a pub.

  The other old gent, who had been eating from a packet of crisps, leant down and offered a crisp to Bobby, who had strolled in with us. “That dog you got there could be the twin to Douggie Lampton’s dog,” he said.

  I smiled. I hoped the old man would be content to think there were two dogs that looked alike. I didn’t want to get involved in a discussion of Douggie Lampton and how we came to have his dog.

  When Alan Pendelin pushed the two foaming glasses over the bar towards us, I handed him a ten pound note and he went to the till to get my change. At least, the normal business of everyday commerce hadn’t yet been disrupted in the village.

  “You’re Eddie Parkham’s boy, ain’t you?” said one of the old gents to Geoff, “I heard young Greta got taken bad with this flu that’s doing the rounds.”

  “’Tis a bad to-do,” said the other old gent as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and coughed into it wetly. “It’s the phlegm that gets you.”

  “I haven’t been into the village for a while,” I said, “On account of the snow.”

  “You that newcomer ain’t you?” said one old gent, “The one
what lives up in Heather Cottage.”

  “That’s me.”

  “You’d have been snowbound up there, I suppose?” Alan Pendelin said.

  “Pretty bad,” I said, “But that’s not the worst.”

  “Oh no?”

  “This morning someone broke into my house.”

  “Burglar?” said one old man.

  “Not sure. Didn’t steal much as far as I could see. Just wrecked stuff.”

  “That’s the way of the world,” muttered one of the men impassively.

  “You was there when they broke in?” said the other man.

  “I was up at the Hall. Last night, I mean.”

  “The Church Hall, was it?” said Alan Pendelin.

  One of the old men laughed. “Emergency Operations Centre, that’s what they call it. Lot of bloody rubbish, that is. Just a chance for the Colonel to swank around and tell people what to do.”

  “He isn’t even a proper Colonel,” said the other old man.

  “’Tis Colonel they call him though. Too good for the likes of us he is, if you ask me. Put another pint in there, Alan.”

  Alan Pendelin took the empty glass and filled it from the cask.

  “Why was you up at the Hall, then?” asked one old gent.

  “I hurt my arm,” Geoff said, “Jonathan here took me to see Doctor Prentiss.”

  “I thought he retired years ago,” said Alan Pendelin.

  “He’ll be up at the Hall, I expect,” said one old gent, “Him and the Colonel swanking it over everyone.”

  “That dog do surely look like Douggie Lampton’s dog,” said the other old gent.

  It was a nice pub, the beer was good and the heat of the fire was welcome but I didn’t feel this conversation was leading anywhere. So I took a more direct approach: “How many people in the village have had the flu?”

  “Look at the pub,” said Alan Pendelin, “Normal times we’d be packed.”

  “People is too damn’ scared to leave their houses,” said one old gent.

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “Oh, you know,” he said vaguely, “One thing and another.”

  “So what’ll you be doin’ now, then?” asked Alan Pendelin.

  “Oh,” I said, “I was thinking of taking a look around town.”

  He shook his head gravely – “From what I been hearin’, ’tis best to keep clear of town.”

  13

  We followed the road out of the village. It took us past the village green which is a square of grass with a duck pond in the middle. In summer they have a farmers’ market there on the weekends. It’s full of noise and laughter then. Today it was as silent as the rest of the village. As silent as the grave.

  There were no ducks on the pond. The water had frozen and a layer of snow had settled over the ice. Snow so completely covered everything that I nearly missed the old woman’s body. She was lying on her side at the edge of the pond. The body was covered by just a thin crust of snow so I guessed she hadn’t been there long.

  “Aggie Wilton,” Geoff said, “She used to run the sweet shop years ago. Sold sherbet and old-fashioned mint humbugs.”

  We carried on walking and soon we passed two more mounds in the snow. They must have been there longer. The bodies were more deeply covered. I didn’t look closely. I’d had my fill of death. All I wanted was to get away from this place. I wanted to get away from a place where bodies could be left outside and nobody came looking for them, because nobody cared. We passed half a dozen more bodies before we were outside the village.

  “They said there’d only been three deaths,” Geoff said, “When we was in the Church Hall. Three people had died. That’s what they said.”

  “They can’t have known the full extent,” I said, “Maybe there’d only been three deaths when they’d gone to the Church Hall.”

  “Or maybe they was lying,” Geoff said.

  “Either way, the sooner we get into town the better.”

  “And how are we going to do that? It’s over twenty miles. We’ll never walk that distance in this snow.”

  “We’ll need a Land Rover.”

  So we stole one. It was in a farm about half a mile further along the road. I suggested trying to hot-wire it, even though I had no idea how that was done. Geoff saved me the trouble. He noticed that the keys were in the ignition. I didn’t feel bad about stealing the Land Rover. The farmer and his wife wouldn’t be needing it any more. We found their bodies in the kitchen. Someone had beaten them to a pulp with a crowbar. The crowbar was still there, lying next to the bodies on the floor.

  The world had gone mad. What I didn’t know was that we were heading deeper into the insanity.

  Part II – Anarchy

  1

  It was a dark, litter-strewn lane on the northern fringes of the town. The left-hand side of the lane was bounded by a crumbling red-brick wall. On the right-hand side there was a wire-mesh fence beyond which was a big yard of some sort. A couple of derelict trucks stood in the yard, surrounded by heaps of wood and metal pipes. It looked like the yard of a builder’s merchant.

  The moon, which was nearly full, was all the light there was. I dared not switch on my torch for fear of being seen. Up ahead, about two hundred yards away, was a bridge – it looked like a railway bridge – that spanned the lane I was walking down. The bridge was barely visible, its outline faintly silvered by moonlight.

  The lane, the bridge, the yard and the town beyond were all silent. Well, not completely silent because, from time to time, I heard sounds – shouting, breaking glass, once a noise that sounded like guns being fired – but they were in the far distance; away on the other side of town.

  I was in an industrial area. From its air of dereliction, I surmised that its industry no longer functioned and any people who might once have been there had departed. There was nobody: no night-workers, no long-haul drivers, no watchmen. Only the rats remained. The unexpected desertion of their domain had given them a new boldness. A big black rat strolled across the lane in front of me, stopped for a moment to look at me while it preened its whiskers, decided I was of no interest and casually moved on.

  The wire-mesh fence began to rattle. My heart skipped a few beats. There it was again. The mesh rattled, fell silent, rattled, fell silent. There was a rhythm to it. It wasn’t shaken by the wind – there was none – and no wind could create a noise with such a regular beat. A person created a noise like that. Someone grasping the wire-mesh then releasing it, grasping it then releasing it.

  I flattened myself against the wall. Should I run? Go back the way I had come? Or should I stay there, hidden in the darkness? Hoping that whoever was approaching wouldn’t notice me?

  I strained to see who, or what, was coming towards me, causing the fence to rattle, fall silent, rattle, fall silent. For a moment or two I could see nothing. But then, as it came closer, the moon shone upon it and I could make out the shuffling, shambling silhouette of a man, clutching the wire with both hands to support his weight; then releasing his grip with one hand, grasping the wire again about a foot or so distant from his previous hand-hold, taking a step, then going through the same routine with his other hand. And in that way, he was making slow and difficult progress, reeling himself in along the meshwork fence, handhold-by-handhold, step after shuffling step, moving slowly and painfully towards me.

  That he was in pain was self-evident. With each shuffling step, he made a slight noise, a groan as though through gritted teeth. When, at last, he was just a few yards away, I could hear his laboured breathing, like air bubbling through liquid. Then he stopped. He clung to the fence, his body sagging, the strength in his arms barely able to support his weight. He stood there, wheezing laboriously. Then he turned towards me. He looked directly at me. Even in that pale light, I could see that there was something wrong with his eyes. They looked too big, swollen and straining against inflamed eyelids. His eyes were full of pain and terror.

  “Help me,” the man said.

 
I didn’t know what to do. The man was ill. He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t dangerous. He was just in terrible pain. My instinct was to go to him. But what then? What in the world could I possibly do to help him? I could give him nothing because I had nothing to give. I could take him nowhere because I had nowhere to take him.

  “Help me,” he said again. There was such sadness in his voice that I couldn’t resist the urge to go towards him. The least I could do was to hold him, relieve him of the struggle of supporting his own weight if only for a few moments. Hold him. Comfort him.

  But as I took a step towards him, the man slumped down, his fingers losing their grip on the wire fence. As he fell to the ground, he vomited. I jumped back. He was vomiting blood. It flew from his mouth explosively. Finally, he lay on the ground, at peace, alone in tatters and rags while blood continued to gush from his mouth and nostrils. A few yards away a rat sat watching, preening itself, waiting…

  For a while, I stood there, shaking. It was an uncontrollable reaction. I couldn’t stop my body from trembling. Maybe there are those people who can stay calm when faced with sudden death. And maybe, eventually, I will be one of them. Because the way things are now, death is something you get used to – something you experience every day. Even now, after everything I’ve seen and experienced, I am still not hardened against death. When that man bled out in front of me, it made me feel physically ill. For what seemed like an awfully long time I did nothing but stand and stare. A man I’d never met, had asked for my help and then died and I couldn’t think what to do next.