Denny simply increased the depth of his scowl.
“How are you guys doing?” Jez asked. “It’s good to see some life around here. Well, life that isn’t trying to create more death, that is.”
Michaela grinned. “Yeah, it is a bit like that.” She stopped, her head cocked to one side, her hand on her hip. “You should know that we’ve been traveling just the two of us for some months now.”
He held up his hands again. “I’m not going to ask to tag along. Though I must admit, being alone does get kind of lonely.”
Her defenses went back up. “Don’t think I’m going to be the one to stop you being ‘lonely’”
The boy stepped forward this time his hand on his own knife.
“Hey, that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t blame you for being paranoid, but really, I’m not like that.”
“No one left here is one of the nice guys. Just the fact you’re here tells me that.”
“Well you’re still here,” Jez pointed out. He motioned to the boy. “And so is he.”
He couldn’t blame her. Like the children, there weren’t many women left. When the number of men dominated the number of women, they tended to do whatever the hell they wanted. There was no room for feminism in this world.
“I’m not a rapist,” he said, bringing the fear out in the open. “I’m no innocent, as you have guessed, but one thing I am not is a rapist.”
She relaxed again, she shoulders slumping, her head titled to the side. “Okay. I believe you. But if you try anything, I promise you both me and Denny here won’t fail to hurt you. It won’t be the first time.”
He saw the hardness in both their eyes, the things they had been through already toughening them. Of course, Jez could never know how much of their attitude was there before the Revelation.
“So is it okay if I go in?” he said, nodding towards the small grocery store across the street.
The woman stuffed the knife back inside her belt. “Sure,” she said. “You mind if we join you, we could use some stuff ourselves.”
The boy shot her another glare, but both she and Jez ignored it.
“Of course not.”
Jez was glad of the company. It had been a long time since he spent any time in anyone’s company, even longer since he had spent any time in the company of a woman. His wife had left him shortly after their daughter had been killed, her grief too great to support that of anyone else’s. Not long after that Jez had killed Lily’s murderer. With blood still on his hands, Jez had walked into the nearest police station and handed himself in. He had been in jail since then.
After so long with no one to talk to, Jez found he had lost his ability to make small talk. In an uncertain silence, they went into the store together. More bodies lay in heaps in the aisles, and they had to step over them to reach the shelves of canned goods. Michaela’s hand clamped her nose, trying to stifle the smell of death. Denny’s mouth was a hard line, but Jez could see his throat working. The boy was trying not to show any weakness in front of this new arrival.
“You never get used to it, huh?” Jez said, trying to only breathe through his mouth.
They picked tinned goods off of the shelves—sweet corn, ham, pasta—dropping the cans straight into their bags.
“It doesn’t exactly help to work up an appetite,” Michaela said.
They gathered what they needed: more bottled water, food, even medicine—paracetamol and ibuprofen plucked from behind the counter. A portable emergency kit, intended to be kept in the boot of a car, or taken on a camping trip.
They were about to leave when Jez stopped for one more thing: a bottle of top-shelf single malt.
Michaela gave him a look, but it was one look he chose to ignore.
They stepped back out onto the street.
“Now what?” Jez asked. “You guys got a plan?”
“Yeah,” said Denny, taking a long drink from the bottle of water he was holding. “Stay alive.” He threw the bottle on the ground and no one said anything. It wasn’t as if littering was the height of their priorities right now.
Jez gave him a tight smile. “I was thinking something a little more short-plan than that.”
“We’ve been staying in a department store in St. Johns Wood. I guess not too many people were taking advantage of the better than half price sale, so the bed department was pretty much empty. We only had to shift a few bodies to have it to ourselves.”
Together they walked down the street; Michaela and Jez side by side, Denny lagging behind.
Michaela saw something and faltered.
Ahead of them, depicted across the side of a building, at least six foot high, was the sign of the dragon. The three of them stopped in a row, standing, looking up at it. Tension thickened the atmosphere.
“I see it in my dreams,” Michaela said.
Jez turned, her words surprising him. He too had seen the dragon.
“He’s coming for us,” said Denny. “He’s luring us all in, and then he’s coming for us.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” Denny shot him a look that was close to contempt. “The devil.”
“The devil?” He didn’t know anyone else thought the same as him.
“It’s not so hard to believe is it?” Denny continued. “We know God took everyone else, right? All the do-gooders and bible-bashers. They all got taken in the light and left us here in this burning hot, stinking place.”
“They weren’t all bible-bashers,” Michaela said. “They were normal people who hadn’t done anything wrong. It was only us, the one’s who committed crimes God could not forgive who were left.”
Jez wondered exactly what their crimes were, but he was too scared of destroying the new and fragile camaraderie to ask.
Night was fast approaching.
“We need to get back,” Denny said, glancing at the reddening sky. “It’s not good to be out when it gets dark.” Jez glanced at him, looking for an explanation. “The dreams are worse,” the boy said. “It’s like He can sense you more if you’re out in the open.”
“Do you really believe that? That he can see us in our dreams?” Jez stared at him, his own plethora of nightmares fresh in his mind.
“It’s how He’s going to control us. It’s how He’s going to make us do what he wants.”
“And what does he want?”
“To claim the earth as his own.”
Michaela glanced to either side, at the cracks in the pavement through which small fires roared like bizarre street barbeques.
“I thought it was already His.”
***
Night had long since fallen. Three men, each with their own axes to grind, sat, huddled together in London’s Regent Park. A fire crackled and burst in front of them, spurting its sparks out into the night.
It was a place they had been to before. The constant heat and lack of rain meant they had been able to camp out, and together they had dragged mattresses and carried sleeping bags, anything to make the spot more comfortable. There was only one reason they had picked that particular place, and that was the lack of bodies. There was only a young couple who must have snuck to the sheltered area to make out, and the men had had to carry their bodies to the main pathway, dumping them with the rest.
Jared, the youngest and least hardened of the group, had turned and puked.
The fire crackling before them was one they’d built themselves. None of them quite trusted the spurts of flames erupting from the earth. Their source was unknown and the composition possibly dangerous. They were also unpredictable and they never knew when the fires were going to suddenly spurt up or die away—as volatile as a live volcano.
The men emptied tins of ‘all-day-breakfasts’ into saucepans, placing them straight into the fire. Jared didn’t even bother emptying the can, simply pulled off the ring lid, put the whole thing into the fire and then ate straight from the can. Earlier he’d cooked canned pies this way, and now he used a knife to dig them out, the pastry soggy but filling. He wo
lfed them down, making appreciative noises.
“One good thing about the Revelation,” said Jared, between mouthfuls, “is at least I don’t have to feel guilty about not eating my vegetables anymore.”
Mason glanced over at the younger man, his heavy eyebrows raised. “Is that the best thing you can think of?” he said. “Not that we no longer have to live by anyone else’s rules, or that we can reclaim the world as our own, but that you don’t have to eat any fucking vegetables?”
Jared shrugged, his head hung noticeably lower, though he continued to stuff pie, one handed, into his mouth. “Was just saying,” he mumbled.
Mason didn’t intend to ever admit to the other men the reason he was really still here. Murderers, even rapists, got away with it when they were in mutual company, but he knew if he ever admitted to them that God hadn’t wanted him because of a certain fondness he had for young kiddies, he knew no one else would want him either. He had suffered in jail because of what he had done, and then was relocated by the government. Since then he had been left alone, though he struggled to control his urges, and just before the Revelation had happened, his eye had wandered to the neighbor’s eleven-year- old girl. Of course she was dead now, along with the rest of the children, and he had no intention of ever letting onto the others his reason for still being there.
It wasn’t like the other two men were angels. Jared had beaten his ex-girlfriend to death when she had tried to leave him, though of course he said she had been asking for it. Felix Kettering, a skinny black man with bulging, bug eyes, was the other man in their gang, and a serial rapist. His kind was another that was not so popular behind bars, but Felix had no shame about what he did. In his eyes women were no better than animals, and they were his to do with as he wanted.
Jared and Felix had met in prison and had been out in the exercise yard when the Revelation had happened. A low security prison, many of those around had died, God finding what was in their hearts good enough reason for forgiveness. Those left had quickly pulled the gates open and made their way out into their new world.
“I wish we could get away from the damn stink,” said Jared. “I can handle the rest of it: the heat, the bodies, if it wasn’t for the fucking stench they give off.”
“It’s not just the bodies,” said Mason. “It’s the Sulphur. I went to this place in New Zealand once, years ago when I was young. It was full of hot pools you were supposed to swim in and it smelt like this. Like rotting eggs and bad farts all rolled into one. It amazed me that people actually lived near by. I guess when you’ve grown up around it, you just get used to it.”
“No fucking chance I’m getting used to it,” Felix sniffed. “And it’s getting worse, if you ask me.”
“It’s all the bodies as well,” Jared said, shivering despite the heat. “They’re decomposing, breaking all their shit down and stuff.”
“Yeah, and they’re not going anywhere.”
The men sat silent for a minute, staring into the bright sparks of the fire.
“We can go out into the countryside again.” Jared suggested.
“What’s the point?” said Mason. “There might be fewer bodies, but there is nothing to do. And all that happens is that we end up needing to come back to the city for supplies.”
“London’s my home,” Felix growled. “I’ve been born and bred here. I aint going to get chased out by nobody.”
“Well what the fuck are we going to do then?” said Jared. “We can’t go on like this.”
“The devil makes work for idle thumbs.” Mason mumbled and the other men stared at him.
It was true. With no jobs to go to, family to look after, only each other, day after day, the future stretched ever onwards. If they met other people, it was with suspicion and hostility. They each knew exactly the type of person who was left, and that person was exactly like them—murderers, liars, and thieves. There was no urge to regroup and rebuild. Yet that was exactly what they would need to do if they were ever to have a future.
But there was one main problem for this new generation to ever be able to have a future, and that was the distinct lack of women. It wasn’t that there weren’t any at all—he was sure there were—but the type of women left weren’t exactly the nurturing kind. If they were to have any kind of future as a species they would need to find a way to remedy that problem.
A wind blew across the park and carried on its breath was the low roar of the dragon.
The men froze. They knew they could have imagined the sound, it was easy to be spooked when surrounded by the dead, but they also knew it was more than that. He was out there now.
God and the devil had gambled for souls, and it looked like the devil had lost. The only ones he had left were the bad ones, the ones who had not made God’s cut.
For the moment none of them spoke, all waiting to see if the growl would come once more. He was near tonight and that meant the dreams would be most powerful. The more evil their souls, the clearer they felt Him.
“What do you think He wants?” Jared spoke first, his voice barely more than a whisper.
“He’ll tell us.”
Mason was certain. He had been seeing and hearing the voice practically since the moment he had woken from the Revelation.
***
Jez stood in the middle of a field. As he turned a slow circle, he saw the field had no boundaries; it stretched on in every direction. Darkness surrounded him, yet he could see, like a night lit by moonlight. The grass below foot looked like black glass, each stem perfectly formed, but as he stepped forward the grass shattered. In the distance a fire burnt, and suddenly there was another one, closer, and then another. They burst like spurts of lava in the dark.
And, at the center of the flame, was his daughter. Screaming in the dark, she writhed in pain, her eyes pleading with him, her hands reaching through the flames.
“Lily!” he tried to yell, but his voice disappeared into the black, as if he had never spoken the words at all…
Jez woke with a start, his hair slick to his forehead, his t-shirt damp and sticking uncomfortably to his skin. He breathed out, a slow, unsteady breath, hoping to dispel the depth of his dream. In the bed beside his, Michaela fidgeted in her sleep, kicking out, moaning.
He knew her dreams were similar to his own, full of fire, of heat, of people burning. And he knew if they dreamt long enough, the graceful flight of a dragon would swerve its way into their sleep.
On the other side of him a movement caught his attention and he half-rolled, twisting his neck to see what it was.
In the pale moonlight that slated through the tall windows of the department store, Denny walked, taking slow, steady steps towards the windows. Jez pushed himself to sitting.
What was he doing? Had the boy heard something?
“Denny,” Jez called softly, careful not to wake Michaela. Denny didn’t respond, he just kept going, carefully navigating the items of furniture. “Hey, Denny,” Jez hissed, louder now, but still he did not respond.
There was no way he could not have heard him.
Jez swung his legs off the side of the bed. Was Denny sleep-walking? It wouldn’t have surprised him, after all, he was still just a boy, and he had seen and experienced things no child should, however wayward that particular child had been.
It was eerie, watching the boy crossing the room like a ghost. Jez wondered if Denny sleep-walked often, and if he should wake Michaela. He turned and glanced down at her sleeping face. She had fallen still, whatever terrors her dreams held for her had passed for the moment. Knowing how hard it was to get peaceful rest these days, Jez let her sleep.
Jez pushed himself to standing and slowly crossed the department store floor. He wondered what the etiquette for waking sleep-walkers was. He was sure he heard somewhere that you weren’t supposed to wake them, but instead just guide them back to bed.
That was what he would do, he decided. Just try to get Denny back into bed.
Now only a matter of feet away, the
boy’s back was still to him. Denny had almost reached the tall, floor to ceiling windows. Jez hoped the windows were strong; he didn’t want Denny taking a dive through them.
“Denny?” he called again, his voice still soft, but louder. He reached a hand out and carefully laid it on Denny’s shoulder.
At his touch the boy spun round. Something flashed in the moonlight and Jez darted back in surprise, but not quickly enough. Bright pain slashed across his chest and he cried out in shock.
Quickly, his own pain was forgotten. Denny stood with tears pouring down his face, the knife held at his own throat.
“I’ll do it,” he whispered, though Jez couldn’t tell if he knew who he was talking to. “If you touch me again, I’ll do it.”
2013: The Aftermath Page 37