“Who?”
“Exactly.”
“Why did you support them?”
“I was born and lived near there.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you lived there.”
“Not much. Went to school then joined the army.”
“Were your parents worried about you being in the army?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t care at the time.”
“Why not?”
“We didn’t part on good terms. We used to argue a lot. I wasn’t a good son.”
“Why weren’t you a good son?”
“I was always getting into trouble; fighting a lot and wasting my time. I did some stupid things that I regret. I caused my parents a lot of heartache.”
“I’m sure your parents still loved you.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Did you fight in any wars?”
“I was stationed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.”
“What’s ‘the Troubles’?”
“It was when two groups of people decided they didn’t like each other. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds simple to me.”
“It really wasn’t,” he said. “A lot of people died. A lot of them died for nothing. Including some of my friends.” He thought of the Burned Man following him through life.
“I’m sorry your friends died, Morse.”
“Thank you. But it was a long time ago, and at least they never had to see the world end.”
“Do you ever think about them?”
“Every day. But I forget their faces sometimes. If I saw them walking along the road, I’d know instantly it was them. But when I try to imagine their faces, they’re just vague, blurry images.”
“Sounds sad,” she said.
“It was a long time ago. Worse things have happened since.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After traipsing through thick meadows of ferns and long grass they arrived at the outer edge of a village. They crossed a stretch of tumbledown wasteland to the back of a house standing alone near the main road into the village. Morse broke into the house and searched the gathering of squalid rooms, relieved to find no infected or crazed survivors. They secured the building and holed up in the living room. Florence slept while Morse walked around the house. The driveway was empty; the former inhabitants must have left in the hope they’d reach the coast and be evacuated. He wondered if they’d made it.
He looked at sepia wedding photos and examined the small things that were once important to whoever used to live there. Ceramic figures and a dog bed. Trophies from the local football league. A photo of a middle-aged man in a tracksuit accepting an award for Youth Football Coach of the Year. Morse went through drawers and pored over junk mail left in a pile on a stool near the front door: letters offering loans and credit cards; a flyer from the local Christian centre; a birthday card. He looked at his reflection in a tall mirror and was shocked at the grey in his beard and the lines around his eyes. The dry opening of his mouth. Withering away like a straw man in the winter.
There was an impressive DVD collection. A games console that would have been brand new and gleaming at the beginning of the outbreak. A Dell laptop that he tried and failed to start. IKEA furniture. He noticed the door under the stairs and studied it for a short while before moving on again. A box of cheap jewellery on the dressing table in the master bedroom. Gaudy earrings and garish necklaces.
The bottom drawer of the dressing table was locked. He levered the crowbar between the drawer and the frame, and when it splintered open he stood back and had to sit down on the bed when the photos spilled onto the floor.
“Oh fuck. Fucking hell. Oh fucking Christ.”
He had to look away from the Polaroid images of anguished, crying children clad in dirty underwear and rags. Tears and tortured faces.
Morse dropped the crowbar on the bed and put his head in his hands. Hard to gather air in his chest, like his lungs were flat with exhaustion. A wince behind his ribs, the reminder of his ailing heart. He made a low sound in his throat and screwed his eyes shut.
He took his hands from his face. He couldn’t touch the photos. Then he stood, grabbed the crowbar and left the bedroom.
*
Morse checked that Florence was still asleep before he went to the door under the stairs and found it locked, just like the dressing table drawer. He worked at the door with the crowbar and when it opened with a dull crack he stood in the doorway, coughing at the dusty air. He put away the crowbar and unshouldered his rifle.
The torchlight moved upon the walls of a small room not much larger than the inside of a telephone box. The smell of damp sawdust and mould. To his immediate left, a wooden stairway descended into silent darkness. Morse took a breath and the old air left a bad taste in his mouth. A feeling of dread seemed to settle on his shoulders and press at the back of his neck.
He pointed the rifle down the stairs, took the first step slow and careful, recalling when he was twenty and one of the first to arrive at a Belfast pub destroyed by an IRA bomb. The broken bodies and screaming women. The futile movements of dying people in the ruins. The heat of the fire. Morse had held the hand of a man covered in burns and barely recognisable as human, screaming the names of his family until he’d died.
The Burned Man.
Such memories never went away. Such things were not meant to be forgotten.
*
He descended the steps. At the foot of the stairway he stood on the earthen floor and looked around, his eyes watering at the reek of decay. It was a basement as wide as the house with scratch marks on the walls of mildew-stained stone next to him. Cobwebs long abandoned by spiders. The far sides of the room were lost to darkness. Nothing moved.
He found the bones in the middle of the floor, formed into a pile and covered in dust. Children’s bones. Two small skulls glaring from the dirt. When he crouched and examined the mound, he noticed teeth marks on several rib bones. A low groan escaped from his mouth, and he stood and stepped away, feeling the room move around him like a backwards carousel. He swallowed. Muttered under his breath. Slapped the side of his head until his vision settled.
He went on with the torchlight sweeping the walls. Short steps towards the shadows until they receded and he was standing before the bodies huddled together in one corner. He let out a sob as the light moved over the naked, dried-out corpses slumped over one another or sitting against the walls. Their gaunt, withered faces, stretched tight over their small skulls. Some of them had died embracing each other. The mummified dead. Stiffened limbs and paper-thin skin. The stink of old shit and piss forced him to step back. He counted fourteen bodies. They’d been dead for well over a year, he reckoned.
Morse turned away and returned upstairs.
*
Florence rubbed her eyes and yawned. “What’s wrong?”
Morse gathered his pack. “We have to go.”
“Why? Is it the infected?”
“No. Do as I say.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Trust me, Florence. We can’t stay here.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They walked in silence, skirting the village and moving out into the fields. Florence didn’t ask why they’d left and Morse didn’t tell her. He stared ahead, lost in thought. After all the horrific and tragic things he’d seen over the years, he’d thought himself inured to it all; he’d been wrong and the thought of his hubris sickened him. He wondered about the names of the children who’d died in that pitch black basement. He thought about that for a long while as he walked.
*
Morse laid the map on the bonnet of a car mired in roadside mud, holding down the corners with small stones.
“Where are we?” Florence asked. She stood and looked down the road. Hedgerows flanked the cracked and crumbling tarmac. Yellow weeds. Sickly vegetation.
“We’re near a village called Fo
ulden,” Morse said, checking the map. He took in the names of places and felt a sudden pointlessness to their coming here.
“Are we near the border?” Florence was throwing bits of gravel in the roadside ditch.
“Yes, we’re near.”
“How near?”
“Very near.”
“Could we walk there today?”
“If we got a move on.”
“I’m tired.”
“So am I,” Morse said. “Do you want to rest here for a little while?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Sure?”
She looked at him, her eyes large and troubled. “I’m sorry about last night, Morse. It’s my fault we were chased.”
“It’s okay,” Morse said. He stifled a yawn and cradled his rifle. “But you have some explaining to do. What were you doing?”
She chewed on her lip. “I woke up last night while you were asleep. I lay there for a while until I heard the sound of an injured animal inside my head. Then I had an urge to go outside. So I snuck out and found the infected man. I wasn’t scared of him, because he was lonely and sad, and he remembered bits of his old life.”
“He remembered?” Morse said, unbelieving.
“Yes. His name was Darren Dilnott. He told me.”
“He spoke to you?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know?”
“I just knew. And do you want to know something else?”
“What?”
“I think he was glad when you shot him, because he wanted to die. There was still a part of his old self inside him, but it was overwhelmed by the virus in his blood. He’d seen himself kill or infect many people, including his loved ones, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He was glad to die.”
“Christ.” Morse sighed.
“At least he’s at peace now,” Florence said.
Morse stood looking down at the road, thinking about the souls and minds of men, and hoping his own could still be saved.
*
They walked for another mile before Florence asked for a break. Morse noticed a sign for a local flying school and they followed the dirt track several hundred yards through a ring of woodland that enclosed a civilian airfield. Morse thought there might be survivors holed up in the buildings, but when they reached the end of the track and saw the chain-link gate hanging open and rattling in the low breeze, he knew his optimism was misguided and he had to hide his disappointment from Florence.
They went through the gate, their boots splashing in mud and puddles, into the airfield. The wind slipped through the trees and the wire fence to sweep over large expanses of grass. Morse stopped and looked around. Florence was silent beside him. He led her to the control tower and the surrounding outbuildings, and they explored the silent rooms and climbed the stairs to the control room where they found the wizened corpse of a man in a shirt and tie and no trousers. He was still wearing socks. A leathery husk, like an effigy from olden times.
Nothing of use there. No food. Judging by the scattering of drawers and cupboards, this place had been looted a long time ago. Now there was just dust and decay.
Florence stood next to the dead man and looked at his shrivelled face and his empty eye sockets. She went to touch his grimacing mouth but withdrew her hand at the last second. She turned to Morse, her face unreadable. Morse offered her a weak smile and they went back outside.
*
They walked the weed-infested airstrip and wandered among the abandoned civilian planes slowly rusting upon the sodden earth. Morse wondered how long they would stand in the cold and the rain before they collapsed.
Florence ran one hand along the bottom edge of a wing. Her face held a reserved sort of wonder. She glanced at Morse. “Could you fly one of these?”
Morse stood looking at the planes, the wind at his back like a constant follower. “No, Florence. I was a soldier, not a pilot. And I don’t like heights.”
*
They roamed the empty hangars. Florence listened to her voice echo in the cavernous spaces and the sound of her footsteps bounce off the walls. Morse watched for infected, but there were none, and the only life they saw were the rabbits chewing on patches of grass near the asphalt runway.
When they went back outside Morse looked at the sky and tried to picture it full of planes and vapour trails. He hadn’t seen any machines in the sky for at least six months. All the helicopters and jets were grounded or wrecked. The realisation saddened him and he looked away and scanned the fence around the airfield for movement. He spat, wiped his mouth, and watched Florence trying to get as close to the rabbits as she could before they bolted. When it began to rain they returned to the control tower and watched the downpour from the large windows looking out at the airfield.
*
“I think we should stay here for the night,” Morse said.
Florence glanced at the dead body in the chair. “What about him?”
“We’ll have to move him.”
“Okay.”
“You take his legs.”
They carried the body down the stairs to a utility room on the ground-floor. The body was loose and light in Morse’s hands. Bones barely held together by sinew. Morse found a sheet of tarpaulin and covered the man and they left him there. Then they went around the building and secured the windows and doors, and when that was done they returned upstairs.
*
The light leaving the sky. The breeze sweeping over the airfield, pulling at the tattered windsock across the runway. It was getting colder. Florence sat in a swivel chair and flicked the switches on the control console. She spent an hour talking to non-existent planes and pilots over the broken headset she’d picked up from the floor. When she was finished playing, she just stared out at the airfield and the wide sky and said nothing.
*
In the low light of the Coleman lantern, Morse checked the rounds for the AK-47 and the pistol, and then reloaded both guns. The task relaxed him and slowed his heart. Kept his mind distracted.
“How many bullets do you have left?” Florence asked, sitting across the floor, eating an MRE. Chicken teriyaki.
Morse put the back of his head against the wall. Sleep worried at his eyes. “Enough to make a difference.”
“How many infected have you killed?”
“I can’t remember.”
“A lot?”
“Enough.”
“Is it different than killing normal people? I mean, does it feel different?”
“Sometimes.”
“I killed a man, once,” she said.
Morse raised his face to her. “When?”
“A few days after the plague arrived. He wasn’t infected. He was just an evil man”
“Why did you kill him?”
“Because he wanted to do things to me, so I killed him with a knife.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” Morse said.
“It used to make me feel bad, but now I’m glad I killed him. Does that make me a bad person, Morse?”
“No,” he answered. “Not at all. You did the right thing. He would have killed you otherwise. But he would have done worse things to you first.”
“Yes.”
Morse lowered his head and let his heavy eyelids fall. “Kill or die.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Morse woke with a small cry and pawed for his rifle in the dark. He held it close to his body and waited for his breathing to slow. Closed his eyes and tried not to think of corpulent faces and rancid mouths. A memory of jaws biting near his throat and the bestial stink of the infected.
Florence’s voice in the darkness: “Are you okay, Morse?”
He tried to speak, but he had no spit. He made a low noise, like the small whimper of a child, and then remained silent. Florence didn’t reply. After a little while he heard her breathing regulate as she went back to sleep.
Morse looked into the dark for a long time and in his mind recited the names of dead soldiers he
’d known in long ago years.
*
They left the airfield behind and walked back up the dirt track and onto the road. The horizon was a thin red line slowly spreading into the sky.
“I think it’ll be a nice day,” she said.
“It’ll be cold,” said Morse. He watched the roadsides and the shadows under the trees. “You warm enough?”
“Yes. How far from the border?”
“Not far.”
Soon the sun was above the horizon. A thin glaze of cirrus clouds across the sky, blown by westerly winds. Morse would have called it pleasant in other circumstances.
Further on they found human remains. A spinal column, pelvic girdle, splintered leg bones. Morse located what was left of the skull scattered a few yards away in the dirt. Tufts of pale blonde hair. Scraps of skin and flesh remained. The brain, eyes and genitals had been consumed. The internal organs devoured too. An efficient eater had done this.
Florence stood staring at the remnants of some unfortunate soul. Morse looked to the ground around the chewed bones and placed his hand next to one of the large paw prints in the damp earth. The heel pad. Claw marks. Fresh kill and fresh tracks.
“What is it?” asked Florence.
Morse was thinking about the zoo advert they’d passed a while back. He hefted the rifle and stood, glancing around, watching the treeline.
“Morse?”
He looked at her. “The infected didn’t do this.”
*
They walked the road, moving at pace.
“Maybe it was a dog,” Florence said.
“That’s what I thought,” said Morse. “But the paw prints were too big. It was something large. A tiger or a lion. Or a panther or a leopard, maybe.”
“A puma?”
“Could be. It was bound to happen when the outbreak hit. Some animals escaped from captivity.”
The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier Page 5