He put the pistol away to save the last round for himself and raised the crowbar as a woman in the flapping remnants of a dressing gown reached for him with raw hands. And when the crowbar impacted with her face, it crumpled inwards and she fell down wailing until Morse silenced her with a downward swing that broke her skull and exposed the glistening pulp of her brain.
More infected came for him – disjointed and frail, murmuring in spasmodic bursts – and he killed them all, crushing their skulls and shattering their bones until their broken bodies lay around him and he was last man standing. They had been weak, malnourished creatures, like starving street addicts. He felt no pride in their murder.
After he wiped his eyes of tears he looked down the road. The SUV was facing him. The masked men of the Order watched from behind the windscreen. They had killed the other infected. Bodies sprawled all over the street. Gardens of flesh and twitching piles. The stink of them was abhorrent. More death in the shattered wastelands.
Morse stared at the SUV, his shoulders sagging and tense with exertion, his limbs heavy and aching.
The rev of the SUV’s engine was the only sound.
Morse spat. Nowhere to run. A flickering image of Florence appeared in his mind. He said her name and smiled through the pain of his mouth.
The masked men watched him.
He took the pistol from his belt and considered using it on himself, but it felt pointless when so many others in this damp hell wanted to take his life instead.
The SUV started towards Morse, tyres screeching and over the tarmac and building up speed until it was screaming straight for him down the road.
He raised the pistol. Took aim, steadied his hand with the other, and as he let out a ragged breath he pulled the trigger.
He said her name.
The bullet pierced the windscreen and took the driver in the chest; his hands flinched on the steering wheel and the SUV veered to the side of the road, passing Morse by less than an arm’s length as it crashed through the bridge’s iron railings and plunged to the river below.
Morse fell to his knees and dropped the pistol, lowering his face to the surface of the road. He crawled to the side of the bridge and looked down to the shallow river. The SUV had landed on its roof, and two of the men were trying to climb out of the battered vehicle; flailing in the water, soaked and gasping, their masks fallen from their faces. Smoke rose from the underside of the vehicle. The wheels were still spinning.
The infected were upon the men as soon as they emerged from the SUV, tearing and biting, dragging the men onto the riverbank to pull them apart. And when they were done with them, the infected reached inside the vehicle for the other men and pulled them out through the water. One of them regained consciousness at the same moment a girl pierced the top of his head with the stinger that emerged from her gaping mouth, and he screamed until the other infected smothered his face with their own. Then there was merely the sound of meat being sucked from his skull and his legs kicking on the riverbank stones.
Morse lay on the road, staring at the sky. When the rain started falling he was grateful and hoped it would wash him clean.
*
As he was limping past the graveyard, Violet rushed out to meet him, her hair and face dusted with soil, and her eyes manic like she’d seen something from her nightmares. She fell against him, breathing hard, trembling. She looked up at him.
“It was digging them up,” she said. “Scavenging on the dead.”
When Morse looked towards the churchyard, he glimpsed a thin shape on gangling legs darting between the headstones, and he told Violet they should leave before it grew tired of bones ransacked from old graves.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Four miles south-west of Bristol.
The fog had moved in less than an hour ago as they walked along the motorway. They listened for footfalls and wheezing breaths. Morse looked at his shaking hands. Violet offered him a weak, awkward smile. He faced forward, where he could only see a dozen yards down the road before it faded into the fog.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
*
The fog absorbed the ambient sounds of the land and cloaked it all in silence. They found a truck loaded with antique furniture; some of it had spilled onto the road in the long ago and now most of it was rotting and splintered. A mahogany table and a grandfather clock. A sideboard. A piano tilted at an angle on the road, its back legs snapped and buckled.
Violet raised the fallboard and tinkled the piano keys.
“Did you play?” Morse asked her.
She smiled ruefully. “I wish I’d learnt. Too late now.”
The truck’s cab was burnt out. Anonymous bones all blackened and covered in ash. The steering wheel was a charred relic. A roasted boot in the driver’s footwell.
They walked on.
“I dream about flying,” Violet said.
Morse watched the fog. “Like a superhero or something?”
She snorted. “No; I’m in a plane. A 747…or something like that, and I’m in my seat and other passengers are in their seats. People going on holiday and honeymoons. Happy people. Families. All that shit.”
“What happens in the dream?”
Violet’s face darkened. She pursed her mouth. “They all get infected, and I’m only the one that’s still normal. And I can hear the screams inside their heads and they’re begging me to help them. Then the fuselage bursts open and we’re all pulled out and then I’m falling – we’re all falling – but we never hit the ground.”
“I have no fucking idea what that means,” said Morse.
She laughed without humour. “Me neither. It’s just dreams, isn’t it?”
“Reality is just as fucked up.”
“Absolutely. My grandad would have called it God’s Wrath.”
“Really?”
“Big time. He was all about that sort of shit. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters now…if it ever did.”
“Grandad used to say ‘the hearts of men are fickle and greedy’. Stuff about the ‘folly of man’, whatever the fuck that is.”
“Sounds like a people person.”
“He was a good man, in his own way,” Violet said. “He tried his best.”
Morse stopped.
She halted beside him. “What’s wrong?”
“Listen.” He frowned, squinted into the fog ahead and to the right. He could hear the sound of harsh breathing drifting towards them, like someone with a lung infection struggling for air.
Violet looked at him. “I hear it.”
And when Morse turned his head to follow the sound he saw a man limping along the other side of the carriageway, partly-shrouded by the mist, thin and mangled, coughing blood onto his chin and chest. A sickly wraith in flapping clothes holding his hands to his throat while a low growl ensconced in fluid escaped from his mouth. His feet scraped over the road, and when he was gone Morse and Violet remembered to breathe again.
*
They were passing through the Mendip Hills. Through the mist, the faint forms of slopes and rises could be seen. A road sign ahead. KEEP APART 2 CHEVRONS. Morse grunted.
“Do you still want to do this?” he asked Violet. “You can leave, find somewhere safe. You could survive.”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“Fair enough.” He checked the map and tried to estimate their position. He thought that Banwell was to their east. The villages of Christon and Luxton were somewhere to the west.
They arrived at an old army truck abandoned on the motorway. A hulking shape with no shadow.
Violet looked up at the vehicle. “This belonged to the Order.”
Morse checked the truck, but there was no one inside and no supplies left behind. He spat.
Violet w
alked around to the front of the truck and returned a few seconds later. “Ran out of diesel. Engine’s cold.”
Morse looked on the ground for any signs that Florence had been there. He only gave up when Violet said they should move on, and he agreed and followed her down the road.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
As they went on, Morse stared at the TrafficMaster cameras atop four metre tall poles. Sensors and antennae. All of it dead. No one was watching.
A cluster of buildings to the left of the motorway past a wire fence. Possibly a factory. A sign for a metalworks.
They kept walking, their feet dragging on the road. Crackle of grit. Stepping over weeds, rags and trash. Dead leaves. The top layer of tarmac was crumbling in places.
“The fog smells like decay,” Violet said.
“I imagine most of the world smells like it,” Morse replied.
Much further down the road, they came to a road sign.
WELCOME TO SOMERSET
“You’ve come a long way, baby.” Violet spat a laugh out.
Away to the left, in a shrouded field, the thin shape of an electricity pylon emerged like an abandoned wicker man. A dead sentinel on the Somerset Levels.
*
They’d walked for hours, and now the dark was closing in and all about was the dying of the light.
They cut across a wild field and entered a hamlet of several houses where nothing moved or made any sound and the buildings welcomed them with open doors. They moved slowly, carefully, listening to the fog.
Violet led Morse to a house on the very edge of the hamlet and stepped through the doorway, sweeping the insides with her torch. She knocked on the jamb and waited. Morse gripped his crowbar and looked around, and when he turned back to Violet she nodded at him and moved further inside the house. He followed, closing the front door behind him.
Violet waited for him in the hallway.
Together they searched the house for infected.
*
They sat around two birthday candles fastened to a nub of Blu-Tack and watched the small flames as they ate from tins of food.
“How far are we from Hallow Hope?” said Violet, chewing with her mouth open.
“About eight miles. We’re close.”
“Not close enough to walk there tonight.”
“Maybe.”
“It’d be stupid to keep walking in the dark.”
“I know.” He sipped water. Held one hand up to the light, noticing the faint tremor under his skin. “What if we get there and they’re gone? I don’t know what I’d do.”
Violet’s eyes were solemn. “Would you give up?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could try and get off the mainland,” she said. “What’s it like in the rest of Europe?”
He put the water bottle down. “It’s about as fucked as it is here. Wherever you go, it’s fucked.”
“So, is this it then?”
“What do you mean?”
“The end. The end of us; of the human race.”
“Who knows? We don’t know how the other parts of the world are doing, but the last we heard, it had all fallen. Parts of the United States could be surviving. Canada and South America. The Middle East. No idea about China or Russia. I think it’s the same all over the planet, to be honest. The Plague Gods have won.”
“I’ve always wondered how North Korea would have coped.”
“Who knows? Who wants to know? I don’t want to know.”
“Maybe there’s a survivors’ colony in Greenland or Alaska; or the Antarctic.”
“Maybe,” Morse said. “It’s not impossible.”
“What about the tribes in the Amazon?”
“Fuck knows.” He rubbed his aching face.
“It’s insane,” said Violet. Her eyes were watery in the candlelight. “One day everything is rosy – fast food, smartphones, Amazon, Google – everything at your fingertips. And now it’s all gone.”
“Extinction level event.”
“Do you know what I miss most?” she said.
“What?”
“Custard donuts.”
“I miss chips with brown sauce.”
“Nice one.”
Morse smiled at her, and she smiled back, but the moment soon died when she had to wipe her eyes and turn away.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The infected attacked during the night. It started with scraping at the walls and then the front door was hammered upon by a scrum of bodies all clamouring to get inside.
Morse and Violet stood together in the hallway and faced the demented groans and vile shrieks from beyond the house.
“We have to fight,” Violet said. She sounded terrified.
Morse wriggled his fingers around the shaft of the crowbar and nodded.
“Get ready.”
The front door didn’t hold for long until it was splintered and ripped down. And then the infected came inside with their black claws, thrashing limbs and choking mouths. Glimpses of wet tendrils writhing in the dark.
Morse attacked the first infected through the door – a shivering abomination of a naked man – and it fell back with its face crumpled inwards. Violet used her lump hammer to crack a woman’s skull open.
The next infected creature rushed forward with sharp fingernails and gnashing teeth. Violet hit the creature around the side of the head and pushed the knife into its stomach.
The infected came towards them, scratching at the walls and floor. Morse swung the crowbar double-handed and knocked a teenage girl off her feet; she hit the wall before she lunged forward again, and he brought the crowbar down and collapsed the top of her skull. She lay writhing at Morse’s feet until he stamped on her throat, crushing her windpipe and snapping her neck.
More infected poured through the doorway. Morse and Violet exchanged a glance.
“Good luck,” she said.
Morse nodded at her. “Ready?”
“No, but fuck it.”
“Good.”
They screamed and rushed towards the infected, weapons held high, murder in their hearts. And all about them was flesh and blood.
*
In the first light of the day they stood exhausted in the fog outside the house, the corpses of infected around them; some still twitching or wheezing their last breaths. Everything stank of the plague and the insidious pestilence.
Morse dropped the bloodied crowbar, his arms trembling, and put his hands on his thighs as he hunched over and vomited onto the ground. His clothes were covered in gore and his face was speckled with blood. His heart hurt. When he’d finished expelling the contents of his stomach he stood and looked at Violet as she crouched by the broken body of a little girl. She was crying. He walked over and stood beside her.
Violet didn’t look up at him. “She looks like my niece.”
The girl’s scalp still retained a few wisps of blonde hair. Her bloodshot eyes open and lifeless. The dress she’d been wearing on the day of her infection was little more than strips of filthy rags over her emaciated body. It had been a blue dress. Prominent ribs. Her hands were more like claws. Her stomach was perforated with stab wounds.
“It’s not her,” Morse said.
“I know.” Violet tossed her knife away and it clattered on the road. The blade thick with drying blood. “But when I saw her, I thought it was Julia, and I hesitated and she almost had me because of it. I never knew what happened to Julia. I last saw her with my sister, running towards a refugee shelter as a swarm of infected poured down the street.”
Morse touched her shoulder.
“They were all people, Morse. They all had ambitions and hopes and fears and worries. They loved and hated and they had dreams, and now it’s all nothing.”
“Come on,” Morse said. “Let’s get cleaned up.”
She let out a deep sob and wiped her eyes. “Okay.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
They left the motorway and took the A39 later that morning. Five miles fro
m Hallow Hope. There was thunder in the east, crackling and roaring, and it sent a shiver through Morse’s bones. The thought of facing a Plague God turned his heart to cinders and drained the strength from his legs. What would he have to confront to save Florence?
“There’s something ahead,” Violet said as she slowed her pace. “Looks big.”
Morse saw it rise from the mist and thought it was some species of infected monster before he noticed the windows and the curve of a wheel.
They stopped behind the back end of a minibus. Morse looked further into the mist where it revealed the convoy of vehicles. Morse moved forward and Violet followed. Minibuses, vans and Land Rovers.
It was all abandoned. No bodies. The backs of the vehicles were loaded with belongings, baggage and supplies. Cold engines.
“Where have they gone?” Violet toed a dropped handkerchief. “Why would they leave all their stuff behind? Why would they leave the vehicles with fuel still inside?”
Morse stood watching the vehicles. “Let’s walk down the road and find out.”
*
A mile later they found the bodies half-eaten and dismembered. Ripped flesh and skin upon the blood-red road. Throats slashed. Hanging tongues. Vacant eyes.
This was the Order of the Pestilence, or what remained of it.
Morse looked down at the cadavers scattered across the road, searching for Florence’s corpse among the remains, but the sheer violence of their deaths made it impossible to identify anyone. His eyes were hot and stinging, and he felt sick. The smell was of slaughterhouses and carrion rooms.
“I can’t see Florence anywhere.” His voice was weak and unsure. His legs felt unsteady. The ground seemed so far away. A mounting pressure reared inside him as he tried to hold the trembling of his hands while stepping over severed body parts, hair and peeled skin. Offal-stink made him dizzy.
The Plague Series | Book 3 | The Last Soldier Page 19