Sadie was scratching at her mouth and sniffling wetly. Her eyes found him, and he stepped back because they swam with pain, rejection and a little madness.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’ve already waited here too long.” He ignored the twinge in his side and straightened his spine. His limbs felt heavy and weak.
“You can’t leave me,” Sadie muttered. Her expression turned Morse’s insides to slurry. “Not after what we shared.”
“Let me out of here,” he said, trying to keep his voice firm.
“The door’s locked.”
“Then give me the key.”
“No.”
“Please, Sadie. I don’t want any trouble.”
“Any trouble?” She let out a burst of humourless laughter, and her grin was thin and bloodless. “You should have thought of that when you were fucking me last night. I gave myself to you and you took advantage of me, and now you’re just going to discard me. You used me, Joseph. You used me and fucked me and then tossed me away when you became bored. I won’t have it. I won’t.”
Morse held out his hands in an effort to placate her. But her shoulders were trembling and she was breathing heavily and tears fell from her livid eyes.
“You bastard!” she cried. “You toxic fucking male!”
“Please calm down, Sadie.”
She rose from the mattress, her hands bunched into fists. Her mouth opened and she bared her teeth. A screech climbed from the base of her throat and she leapt at Morse and rained her fists onto his head and shoulders. He tried to fend her off, but she was strong for her size and her clenched hands found his jaw and nose and caused little bursts of pain in his face. Morse stumbled backwards then pushed her away, and she fell onto his mattress, but she climbed to her feet and came at him again, her face savage and hysterical.
When he pushed Sadie against the wall, the air was knocked from her chest with a stifled gasp. He’d pushed harder than he’d meant. She put one hand to the back of her head and collapsed to the floor, dazed and mumbling.
Morse kept an eye on her hands as he crouched and went through her pockets. And when he found the door key he stood and looked down at her while she cried and glared up at him with murder in her eyes.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” he said. “I’m sorry.” But he could tell she wasn’t listening, and no amount of apologies would suffice now. He had to get out and away.
Before he unlocked the door and left, he looked back at her as she sobbed into her hands. There was a muffled growling from her throat.
Morse apologised again and left her behind, and her cries followed him all the way up the corridor and down the stairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He limped down a ravaged aisle of the supermarket, surrounded by empty shelves and racks, his feet kicking through the trash strewn on the floor. Cardboard boxes and plastic bags, tangled with empty tins and cans. There were stains he didn’t stop to inspect.
Pausing only to catch his breath and rest the aching wound in his side, he struggled towards the front of the supermarket, squinting at the grey daylight through the intact windows. When he reached the deserted check-outs, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw Sadie emerge into the store with her rifle held to her shoulder. He stumbled faster, ducking as a bullet struck a support column ahead of him, and then peered over the end of a check-out.
Sadie was hurrying down the aisle towards him.
“Shit.”
She stopped and fired again, and the swivel chair to his right was knocked flat.
He headed for the doors, but when he reached them they wouldn’t open. And he turned around as Sadie walked into view. She aimed the rifle at him as he ran to his right, towards the toilets, and stumbled through the doorway. He limped down a corridor, but it was a dead end. He turned back and entered the men’s toilets, swarmed by the smell of stale urine and shit.
Hunched over panting, his hands on his thighs. The floor was stained and slippery. Nowhere to go, except for a narrow window high in the wall above the urinals. He wasn’t sure if the window was wide enough for him, but it was his only chance, so he climbed onto one of the urinals. The fresh air against his face when he opened the window almost distracted him from the terror of the situation, despite the rattle of his heart. He pulled himself up and started to force his way through the open window. The frame scraped against his back and chest, and the wound in his side felt like it was ripping, but he kept going until the sound of a rifle being cocked stopped him halfway through the window.
Sadie’s footsteps approached behind him and stopped. “Get down, Joseph. You’re not going anywhere.”
Morse shuffled down from the window and fell against the wall. Sadie’s face stretched taut with anger as she stepped forward, just out of arm’s reach. She was breathing hard and smelled of sweat and gunpowder. Morse didn’t see the rifle butt as it swung upwards and cracked him on the side of the head. He fell at her feet and she stood over him. And before he could raise his hands to his face, she hit him with the rifle butt again and again until the world blacked out and the last thing he heard was her voice telling him he was an awful, terrible man.
*
Morse woke seated on a plastic lawn chair with his hands tied behind his back. His face felt puffy and swollen. It hurt to move his mouth. A sharp pain pulsed at the back of his skull. When he scraped his tongue over his teeth, one of the molars came loose. He spat it onto his lap and it tumbled to the floor by his feet.
He raised his head, swallowing blood, waiting for the room to stop moving. Sadie was standing before him, the rifle in her arms. She was dressed for the outdoors, her stern face framed by the hood of her thick coat.
“I thought you’d never wake up.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m merely giving you what you deserve, Joseph. What toxic men like you deserve.”
“Do I deserve this?”
One corner of her mouth twitched. “I can’t let you leave.”
He snorted, looked about himself. “Obviously.”
“I wish you could understand. You need me, and I need you. I’m sorry it’s worked out this way. I thought you would be different from the others, but you’re just the same. You’re all animals. Beasts. As bad as the infected.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“This is an old land,” she said. “An ancient island. Deep time. The gods of the fields demand tribute, and they will always be here, always watching, part of the land. Part of the earth.”
“Just get it over with. Shoot me. Hurry up.”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Joseph; I’m taking you to meet the god that I serve.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
He glanced around, sneering, and pulled on his restraints without success. “So, where is your god?”
She grinned below glazed eyes. “I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sadie sniffled and muttered as she pushed Morse down the dirt track towards their destination, pressing the rifle barrel between his shoulder blades. Her feet slopped through puddles and mud.
Morse glanced into the empty fields and shivered, bowing his head against the drizzle. He didn’t look back at her.
Flecks of ash rode on the wind or fell onto the black water that filled the ditches flanking the lane. The sky lacked colour. It all smelled bad, like the world was decaying in the aftermath of terrible violence.
Gravel crackled under his boots. The drizzle soaked through his t-shirt to his skin. His body, except for his bruised and sore face, was slowly turning numb. Between the chattering of his teeth he spat bloody saliva.
“Where are we going?” he asked her.
“You’ll find out. Keep moving.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. The time for pleading and bartering has passed. Now it’s time for the tribute.”
&nb
sp; “You’re going to sacrifice me?”
She didn’t answer; her silence was enough.
“Why now? Why didn’t you do this when you first found me?”
“Stop,” she said, and he obeyed, cringing and drawing his shoulders in. He looked to the field to their right, blinking water from his face. About fifty yards away an infected man was sprinting across the barren ground towards them, cadaverous and rabid, the skin sagging from his bones.
The rifle cracked. The infected man fell down. Morse looked at Sadie as she turned the rifle back towards him. A wisp of smoke rose from the barrel.
“Nice shooting,” he said.
“Keep walking.”
He exhaled. “Okay.”
“When you get to the end of the lane, turn left. Understood?”
“Yeah.” He spat again and let the drizzle wash the phlegm from his lips. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“I asked you why you didn’t sacrifice me as soon as you found me.”
He sensed her hesitation. The sound of her slow breath.
“I denied them to you. Because you’re the first one I’d taken a shine to. I let my guard down and you took advantage of me. Then you rejected me.”
“I didn’t reject you.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
She let out a bitter laugh. “I tried to save you, but you pushed me away. We could have been good together, but you ruined it all. So now you have to be offered up to the gods of the fields.”
He thought about all that and said nothing then turned left at the end of the lane.
*
Through a stretch of barren woodland, the air cold against his teeth, his boots splashing in puddles and slipping on wet moss. Sadie kept the rifle to his back and didn’t speak, and the only sounds she made were the damp movements of her mouth and the scrape of her coat against the thin trees.
Scratching branches and sharp sticks. Dripping leaves. Stinking mulch and stones. Distant animal calls echoed through the woods.
“How much further?” Morse looked to the tops of the trees. His larynx was sore. In the pale light, he sagged against a trunk covered in slimy lichen. Sadie pushed him onwards and merely told him to keep moving or she’d use her knife on him and he would arrive to the gods cut and bleeding.
*
Finally they broke through the trees into a large clearing of knee-length grass. The drizzle had become sleet, and it fell fast like it was in a hurry to meet the ground. Morse wiped his face with his bound wrists and stopped when Sadie tapped him on the shoulder with the rifle barrel.
“We’ve arrived,” she said, her voice weakened with awe.
“This place?” Morse looked at her. They were both dripping and cold, but Sadie seemed unbothered aside from the twitching muscle under her left eye.
“Keep walking,” she said. “You’ll know when to stop. This is the place where you’ll die, Joseph. Can you feel it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Morse halted a few yards from the edge of a large pit in the centre of the clearing. Sadie gestured for him to move forward, and he did so reluctantly, watching his footing, until he stopped at where the ground fell away.
He looked at what dwelled within the pit.
At least twenty feet down, the bottom of the pit was covered in conjoined bodies and limbs and faces. Infected people melded together to make a monster, writhing and flailing, wheezing through wet mouths and vertical apertures. A heaving mass of glistening, tumour-swollen flesh. Nests of eyes and grasping hands. Serpentine appendages and sprouting cilia. Blood, pus, and pale fluid. And when those damp, squalid and squirming faces looked towards the daylight and the two figures standing at the pit’s edge, they opened their mouths in gaping, silent screams and the rancid miasma of rot and bad meat was pushed before them.
“My god,” Sadie whispered.
Morse stepped back from the pit. “This is your god?”
She looked at him and raised the rifle. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Such a beautiful thing. It’s hungry.”
“The infected are always hungry.” He heard them pawing and scraping at the pit walls, dislodging soil and grit. “You’ve been feeding them?”
“Sacrifice. You wouldn’t understand.” She smiled thinly.
“So what’s going to happen? You shoot me, I fall into the pit, and they get their lunch?”
“Something like that.”
“Don’t you understand what you’re doing?”
“I know exactly what I’m doing. It has to be done.”
“Why?”
“Because God demands sacrifice, that’s why.” She stepped towards him and forced him closer to the pit, until he was right at the edge and black soil was crumbling near his feet.
“Please don’t do this,” said Morse. “If you want me to stay with you, I will. I’ll forget about leaving. We can be together.”
She shook her head. “You’re lying. I see the lies in you, Joseph. I see the deceit leaking from the corners of your eyes.”
From the distant sky, the sound of thunder reverberated through the air. The call of the Plague Gods in the clouds.
The infected in the pit gurgled and cried, excited at the close proximity of fresh meat. Morse looked down at them. Limbs and hands flailed madly, clutching and slippery. Pale forms writhed like oversized larvae.
He looked back to Sadie. “Go on then. Shoot me in the head. Get it done, you crazy bitch.”
She looked down the barrel at him. He had always imagined he would meet death head on. But he was terrified and didn’t want to die. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. And he felt a sudden aching despair inside him, because he would never see the sun again. He’d never see Florence again. He wondered if he was escaping one hell for another, for all the bad things he’d done.
The wail of the Plague Gods was getting louder. They would be the last thing he’d hear, and it saddened him beyond words.
Sadie placed her finger on the trigger.
He looked up the barrel at her face and thought about the night before. He spat and waited for the bullet, hoping to be dead before he fell into the snatching hands below.
The clearing was silent. He ground his teeth and tensed his wasted muscles.
Sadie breathed out, her face slick with rain and exultation.
The Plague Gods wailed directly overhead; Sadie glanced up for half a second and Morse took his chance and stumbled into her with his head bowed and rammed her in the chest. The rifle fired near to his head, and he cried out as he spun around blindly. A moment of panic until he righted himself. The report of the rifle left an echoing thunderclap inside his head. His ears rang with the aftermath of exploding air.
Sadie had fallen, and before she could rise Morse kicked her in the face, and she dropped the rifle and rolled away close to the edge of the pit.
Morse breathed hard, gulping for air. He faced her as she climbed to her feet and pulled the knife from her belt. Her face contorted with anger and madness, the skin over her cheekbones florid and taut. She turned the knife in her hand then took two quick steps and lunged, swinging the blade towards him; he was too slow and her attack left a shallow cut on his left arm. He grimaced at the pain.
They faced off across a distance of a few yards. Sadie feinted with the knife and smiled. She was muttering mad things under her breath, the recital of a prayer only she was privy to; the insanity of a wretched mind hollowed out by isolation and loneliness.
She lunged again, the blade held out straight, and Morse side-stepped her and hooked his arms over her knife-arm, squeezing her wrist tight against his ribs. He cried out in pain as her arm caught the wound in his side, but he held her tight, even when her free hand curled into a claw and swiped at his face. He dodged her sharp nails and head-butted her when her face came close to his own, and she stumbled away clutching her nose, whining through her hands. She dropped the knife.
Morse crouched to retrieve it from the long grass then rose into a standing position with the blade held between his bound hands.
Sadie was on her knees, scrambling for the rifle.
He staggered forward with the knife held out just as she lifted the rifle from the ground and turned towards him, and he met her just as she raised the rifle, plunging the knife into her stomach.
She let out a small gasp, and when her eyes fell upon him in that small moment he felt sorry for her. An expression of sorrow on her face. Her mouth moved silently to let out a low breath.
“I’m sorry,” Morse told her.
Sadie stumbled backwards with the rifle clasped in her hand and the knife stuck in her belly. She tottered on the edge of the pit, and Morse almost reached out for her, but then she overbalanced and tilted back and fell away from him.
Her screams were all he could hear as he fled from the clearing and back into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The thunder in the sky. The falling rain and bitter drabness of the land in the terrible winter.
Morse cut the washing line around his wrists by scraping it over a piece of torn metal hanging from the frame of a wrecked car. He returned to the supermarket and scavenged what he could from the remains of Sadie’s supplies. A few tins of vegetables and two of ravioli. Two half-litre bottles of spring water. A quarter-full jar of instant coffee granules. The Coleman lantern, two candles and a lighter. A blanket. He put on his tactical vest and the heavy coat over it then grabbed two sharp knives from Sadie’s collection, tucking one into his belt and the other up his sleeve.
He put the supplies in a holdall and strapped it over his shoulders then left the supermarket in the slowly-dimming light of the late afternoon. The wound in his side felt like it had been stretched and opened. He checked the bandage, fearing the worst, but there was no blood, so he left it alone and hoped it would heal, given time.
The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier Page 9