The Last Soldier

by Hawkins, Rich

  “Their nest was in an old building site. They were asleep when I found them, curled around each other. There were bones and scraps of clothing on the ground. I found Karen’s head.”

  “How did you kill them?” Morse asked.

  “There was a litre bottle of turpentine in a tool shed. Poured it over them as they slept, then I chucked in the road flare you gave me and the bastards went up in flames. Even then some of them tried to attack me, so I shot them. The ones I set on fire took a while to die.”

  She could still smell the turpentine on her hands and hear the screams of the infected creatures as they burned and reached out to her.

  “What did you do afterwards?”

  “I walked. When I arrived at Black Heddon it was deserted. Then I saw the Order’s soldiers going back and forth from the manor house. So I watched and waited, hoping to see if you were there, until they all left in a convoy of vehicles and headed south. I found you in that room on the basement level. In the dark.”

  Morse’s face tightened, like he was recalling a bad memory.

  Violet said, “You told me that the Order wanted ascension. What does that mean?”

  Morse snorted. “Nothing good. Something about the next stage of evolution.”

  “They think being infected is the next step in evolution?”

  “Somewhere in-between, I think.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “The worst thing,” Morse said in a low voice, “was when I spoke to Florence, she seemed like a different person, like she was someone else. Brainwashed. I saw the look in her eyes, in the way she looked at me. It wasn’t her. Not really her.”

  Violet was unable to look away from the pain in Morse’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Morse grabbed a blanket and pulled it up to his neck. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  *

  While Morse slept, Violet walked around the rooms with her torch, studying the artefacts of the former inhabitants. Faded photos of children making silly faces. Pictures of cute dogs. Small mementoes and relics. A shelf full of ornithology books and porcelain doves. A sideboard crammed into a corner, topped with a platoon of plastic toy soldiers.

  She went through a white door into the garage attached to the side of the house, and stood in the dark, sweeping the torchlight over a dull green Land Rover Defender. The painted metal gleamed under a layer of dust.

  She whistled lowly. “Well, hello.”

  Apart from the deflated tyres, the vehicle was in good condition. She found a set of keys on a wall-hook in the kitchen and climbed into the vehicle. When she tried the ignition there was nothing but a dry clicking. She tried again and it was the same. Then she tried once more and then gave up because she was worried the sound would attract any nearby infected.

  After she’d popped the bonnet, she checked the battery then the water and the oil. She stood there and inhaled. The smell of cold engines brought back memories of helping her dad fix his car when she was a little girl.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  In the morning she left Morse in the house and went out into the desolate village. She didn’t know its name, and didn’t care.

  The sky was dark grey, but without rain. Her trainers scraped over the road and shards of shattered glass. She watched the houses for movement. Crows squabbled over the dead body of one of their own, bedraggled and crumpled in the road. A fox appeared in the road ahead of her and darted away when she approached.

  The mechanic’s garage was at the outskirts of the village. It was a small, independent garage – probably family-owned before the outbreak. A metal sign swung from a chain on a post. Chant, Bradshaw and Park’s Motors. Not exactly catchy.

  On the forecourt were rusting, bird shit-splattered cars with price-signs stuck to the inside of their windscreens. Weeds prospered around the wheels.

  The front of the building was a small office with intact windows. She opened the door and stepped inside the reception, stepping past faux-leather seats once used by customers while they waited for their cars to be brought around the front. A fake potted plant. The beige wallpaper made her eyes ache.

  The rot-stink hit her immediately, and she stepped back, grimacing, before she continued.

  A drinks machine was trashed. She rooted around in the remains, but all the cans had been taken. In the office at the back a dead man slumped over his desk; skeletal and rotting in his shirt and tie. A scalp of wispy hair above a face which was no more than a blackened skull whose remaining scraps of flesh were like putrid jelly. One of the countless dead.

  Violet found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket of the man’s suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. A full pack. She pulled one out and sparked up next to the dead man, then sat on the edge of the desk and smoked slowly with hands shaking from the sudden burst of nicotine.

  She allowed herself a small smile and knew she’d have to ration the cigarettes in future.

  *

  As rain began to fall she went out to the garage at the back of the property, and aimed her pistol and torch into the dark mouth of the entrance where the large sliding doors were open just enough for someone her size to fit through. She stood and waited for something to rush out at her, but when nothing emerged she stepped inside and tried not to panic at the swarm of the dark about her. She moved the torchlight over the inside of the garage, across the floor and up-and-down the walls, breathing silently. The smells of engine oil and WD-40 were like bittersweet memories.

  She swept the torch over hydraulic presses and racks of tyres, stacked tool boxes and jacking beams. Diagnostic machines, engine cranes, and emission analysers. While she searched amongst the various equipment racks and stands, looking for a battery compatible with the Land Rover, she scavenged a lump hammer and a crowbar, and put both of them into an empty gym bag she’d found under a workbench. In a tool chest, she uncovered a packet of cheese and onion crisps beneath some gloves.

  Eventually she found the correct battery and put it in the bag. Struggling to lift the bag, she slung the strap over her shoulder and emerged from the garage, into the dull light of the day. The rain had dwindled to drizzle. There was thunder far away.

  An infected man in overalls staggered from the birch trees on the other side of the property; he was wretched and hunched, almost skeletal, and he halted and sniffed at the air. When his gaze fell upon Violet, tendrils emerged through the torn holes in his overalls and swayed in the air, dripping pale fluid from their sharp tips. His face contorted into a snarl and his mouth slowly split open down the middle to display an inner maw of serrated teeth.

  The creature charged towards Violet. She dropped the bag, put away the torch then raised the pistol, took aim and bit down hard on her lip. The taste of smoke in her mouth. The rise and fall of her heart. She fired and the bullet took the man through his right thigh, and he fell forward. His hands clawed at the air, and he tried to rise, but before he could climb onto one leg Violet put the pistol away, took the lump hammer from the bag and walked over with the intention of breaking his body into pieces.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Morse was slumped on the sofa when she returned to the house. She gave him the packet of crisps she’d found, which he ate while she unpacked the crowbar and lump hammer from the gym bag. They looked at each other and said nothing. Morse finished the crisps and screwed the packet up then dropped it behind the sofa.

  *

  In the vague light of the garage Violet fitted the battery while Morse held the torch beside her. It took her a while to remove and replace the old battery, and when it was done she tried the ignition and after four attempts the engine started with a muffled crack of the exhaust. She revved the accelerator and then let the engine tick over. According to the fuel gauge there was just over half a tank left. She hoped the diesel hadn’t deteriorated too much.

  Morse opened the garage door to disperse the smoke
and watched the street while Violet used a foot pump to inflate the tyres. Afterwards, her legs ached and throbbed, and her face was slick with sweat.

  She turned towards the doorway. Morse looked back at her.

  “I think we’re ready to go,” she said.

  *

  Violet smoked and drove while Morse navigated from the seat beside her, surveying a road map he’d found in the glove compartment. The roads outside the village were mostly clear of car wrecks and obstructions. Rain pattered against the windscreen between the screeching of the wipers. The tyres ground upon the deteriorating tarmac and kicked up puddles and grit.

  They passed the dark stain of Newcastle away to the east. The countryside faded to dull tones. Infected people wandered the land, wailing towards the sky in the pouring rain; abject creatures slumped and impassive as if in mourning for the dead world. Morse watched them and could only feel pity for their distressed lethargy. A man clad in soaking rags, kneeling in the mud, reached one hand towards them as they passed, his face broken with pain and misery.

  They made slow progress along the country roads and had to turn back at the dual carriageway when it was blocked with traffic jams of derelict cars. A Waitrose lorry was jack-knifed over a flyover. Infected dwelled among the dead vehicles, lurking like tired transients.

  There were infected on the back roads too, hunched over next to vehicle wrecks or crawling from ditches with a look of idiot hunger on their faces. A woman in an Avenged Sevenfold t-shirt, with wiry tendrils spilling from her skin-tight face, stumbled into the road and the Land Rover clipped her and she tumbled away with arms flailing.

  They passed a pile of gathered shopping trolleys by the roadside, left there like the last example of modern art.

  The things they saw watching them from the fields and amongst the trees. Violet kept her foot down on the accelerator.

  Occasionally Morse had to get out and clear the road of fallen branches and the left behind possessions of refugees who were now long-dead and gone from the world. Personal effects and paraphernalia. He opened a luggage case and rifled through the clothes inside; took a woollen hat, two scarves and a large-sized jumper. When he stared at a photo album opened at a page of sunny beach snapshots, Violet had to press the horn to wake him from his reverie and warn of writhing figures emerging from the trees behind them.

  He climbed back into the vehicle and gave one of the scarves to Violet.

  *

  When some roads were impassable, Violet took the Land Rover across fields and scrubland. The rough ground shook the vehicle and jolted them in their seats. Violet drove carefully to avoid a puncture.

  After they returned to the road, they passed an infected girl of no more than six years old with a sodden teddy bear still in her hand. Morse had to look away from her sorrowful face. He turned to Violet; she looked at him then turned to face the road again. She had seen the girl too. There was nothing to be said.

  *

  The roads the Order had taken on their way to Hallow Hope were cleared of obstructions and wreckage.

  They had covered fifty miles by the time the light faded from the sky. Violet stopped the car next to a field. There were fresh tyre tracks in the roadside mud. In the field a man had been tied to a wooden cruciform and his heart cut from his body and burnt in a small campfire nearby.

  Morse and Violet stood looking at the dead man. His head was bowed to his chest. Neither of them wanted to look at his face. The red hole in his chest glistened. A sliver of white bone was visible.

  “Looks like a sacrifice,” Morse said.

  Violet prodded at the cold ashes with her foot. “Didn’t the Mayans rip out the hearts of sacrificial victims?”

  “That was the Aztecs.”

  “Yeah, them as well.”

  “Old rites,” Morse muttered.

  Violet looked at the dead man. “What was he sacrificed to?”

  “The Plague Gods.”

  “Sick fuckers.”

  Morse stared across the fields. “Blood sacrifice.”

  *

  Morse swapped with Violet and drove for a while as darkness fell about them and covered the land. He turned the headlights on. Violet found a Johnny Cash CD and listened to The Man comes Around over and over again until Morse had a headache and switched it off despite her protests.

  They stopped and left the engine running while they drank water and ate. They kept the doors locked. Morse stepped outside and pissed in the grass. Then he got back inside, put the vehicle back into gear and started down the road again.

  *

  They travelled parallel to a railway for a few miles. An abandoned train left upon the tracks. Four carriages burnt out from the insides and no glass in the windows. Charred metal. The suggestion of skeletal forms in some seats. Morse slowed as he passed the train and thought he saw a lone spindly figure walking along the aisle in the last carriage, and he was sure it turned to look at them as they went past.

  *

  They emerged onto the A1 motorway and passed Sunderland within the hour. Violet was asleep. Morse kept the speed below sixty, mindful of abandoned cars and trucks in the dark. The clattering of his pulse as he worried about Florence and what was happening to her. The guilt and shame of failing her. The fear that she was beyond his reach and he couldn’t help her. It was like a hole in his heart, aching with remorse.

  He glanced at Violet sleeping, her face barely distinct in the dark. He hoped she was dreaming of good memories.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  A Sunday morning. The sun rising above the treetops. Violet and Ethan held hands along the pathway running through the nature reserve and past the dark serpentine river. They talked and laughed and tried to remember what happened the night before at her uncle’s 50th birthday party in the function room of a three-star hotel.

  “You were so drunk,” Ethan said. He was tall and dark-haired. His shoulders were thin, but she was fine with that; her last boyfriend was obsessed with going to the gym and looked like a fitness model, but he ended up being an arsehole. Ethan was completely different. He didn’t drink protein shakes three times a day, pluck his eyebrows with tweezers, or take longer than her to get ready for a night out.

  “I was not drunk,” Violet said.

  “Liar.”

  “You were drunker than me.”

  “Ah, so you admit you were drunk then…”

  She looked at him, tried not to smile. “A little bit. You’re a lightweight anyway.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not. It’s not my fault you can’t handle your ginger beer.”

  “Ginger beer? Piss off.”

  She laughed. He playfully punched her shoulder.

  “That hurt.”

  “Quit whining, woman.”

  “Cheeky twat.”

  “Yeah, I know I am. That’s why you find me so irresistible.”

  “You wish.”

  “Oh, come on, I am one sexy mother.”

  “Are you still drunk?”

  Ethan laughed. “Maybe a little bit. I blame your dad for making us do those tequila shots at the bar.”

  Violet felt her stomach churn at the memory. “Yeah, they were nasty.”

  “I can still taste them.”

  The pathway opened out into a meadow. They followed a trampled track through the grass and climbed a fence and stopped by the river. She noticed that Ethan’s face was quite sweaty and clammy. Probably the alcohol. He’d just recovered from a nasty cold, and had made the most of it by getting her to be his servant for two days, bringing him soup and buttered toast whilst he stayed in bed watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Office while drinking Lucozade.

  Ethan looked at her then quickly looked away, wiping his mouth and sniffling.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered too fast. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Definitely.”
/>   “You’re acting weird.”

  “I’m fine.”

  They walked on, watching squirrels dart along tree branches and crows circle in the sky.

  Then Ethan stopped. He faced her. His expression was serious, and that worried her a little. A muscle twitched under his eye and his mouth opened a little to show his teeth. He brushed a strand of hair away from his face.

  He’s going to break up with me, she thought. Three years, all for nothing. It was his flat, so I would have to move out. All of these thoughts went through her mind.

  She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “We need to talk, Violet.”

  He knelt upon one knee and looked up at her, one hand in his jacket pocket. And he pulled something from his pocket. A little box coated in velvet, which he opened, and inside was a ring so delicate and beautiful she was speechless.

  Ethan swallowed, bit his lip. “Violet Harrigan, will you marry me?”

  Violet felt her legs weaken and her stomach turn upside down. She looked from Ethan to the ring then to Ethan again. She opened her mouth to speak, but there were no words. She felt lightheaded.

  “Violet…?”

  “Uh…”

  “Are you okay?”

  Her face broke into a wide smile. “Of course I’ll marry you!”

  Relief swept over Ethan’s face. He took the ring from the little box and placed it over her finger. The ring caught the light like it was magic. Ethan stood and they hugged and kissed. Then they hugged again. He wiped the tears from Violet’s eyes.

  The ring was a perfect fit as Ethan slipped it over her finger.

  “I love you,” she said, looking up at him.

  “Back at you,” he said, smiling. “I’ve got to say, that’s a fucking relief.”