No air below, but air above. Which meant the tunnels below were caved in. Otherwise he’d have been able to smell the staleness of the underground. The underground’s stolid air was only ever broken by the passage of trains. Paul had a feeling it would be a long time, if ever, that a train ran those tracks again.
He climbed, he ached, he swore. Steadily, carefully, slowly. He cut his hands and his bare legs. He bashed his head on girders and stone and metal signs. Tore flesh from his shoulders. He burned himself on hot pipes and he was frightened, yes, but the fear of dying blind in the dark was worse than the fear of what he’d find above.
One thing at a time. For now, climb. For your brother and your father. For your mother.
For you.
Climb.
So, hands and knees, not thinking about the future (refusing to), he crawled through the broken earth toward the wind and the filthy air, upward whenever he could, sometimes down when the way was blocked, but always into that horrid, fetid air.
It felt as though he’d been climbing for more than an hour. Maybe two, three, four hours? Couldn’t tell, but his pains, his exhaustion…both told him he’d been struggling upward for a long, long time.
Paul had no idea when he began, or when he emerged, but emerge he did. He felt the first sense of air all about him. Flat stone beneath his knees.
He felt like crying, but he didn’t want to unclench his eyelids and risk any further damage to his eyes, could they ever stand a chance of maybe healing (blind optimism?). Instead, he lifted his wool jumper to find his shirt beneath.
It was a tough shirt, pure cotton. It took teeth and strength, but he managed to tear a good strip, long enough to tie around his eyes. He could feel the lessening of the wind’s pressure on his eyelids. Enough so he could keep them closed, but relax a little.
Fuck, he hurt.
He was, he realized, still on hand and knee.
He tried to imagine the carnage, but his mind shied away. A single, sole blessing of his blindness. He had no wish to see what the rock, the quake, the blast, the animals and the rioters and the insanity had done to the city.
He had a choice. Was he going to crawl hand and knee in the ruins until someone helped him, or stand on his own feet and walk like a man?
Was it stupid to try and walk?
Maybe. But with slow, small steps, his hands out? It’d still be quicker than crawling. There had to be someone still alive. Had to be.
Crawl or walk, but move, Paul.
Paul stood. It hurt. Blood trickled from a hundred small wounds. His muscles screamed as they stretched. His head pounded, he was dizzy and felt, for a moment, like he was going to pass out and fall flat on his face.
But he didn’t. He stood, a small smile on his face.
“I’m standing,” he whispered to himself. Crazy, maybe, but just that one tiny thing gave him hope.
“I’m fucking standing up!”
Steady, Paul, he thought. But then, fuck it, he thought. Because what harm in it? If he couldn’t take a little happiness in small victories, what was the point?
“Hello, London!’ he cried out. “Hello! I’m fucking standing! Hey, look at me! Ladies, gentlemen…behold…the amazing standing man!”
He laughed at himself, his voice lost in the wind and the distant explosions and sirens and screams and clattering and banging and rumbling.
He laughed like a fucking lunatic, painfully aware he was on the edge of madness, alone in a sea of chaos.
But Paul wasn’t alone. Behind, silent, unseen, a line of men and women watched him beneath the blackened skies. They heard and felt his joy as they saw him emerge from the shattered earth. And yet instead of rushing to help, or offering a hand, each of them cried silent tears beneath their crowns, those terrible crowns made of thorns, or barbed wire, or broken shards of glass.
And behind the setting skies…a new dawn.
V. The Calm Beneath the Storm
35
Purple skies. Purple earth.
Purple skin. It reminded Frank of plenty of dead bodies he’d known, some of which he’d made. Looked like livor mortis. But Frank wasn’t dead. Just fucking purple.
Everywhere Frank looked held that same sickening hue, except his ragged stump and forearm and biceps. They weren’t purple. They were angry purple. The kind of purple purple would be if it was really fucking pissed off.
Frank was kind of stuck on the word purple. It was jammed inside his head, spinning around, filling up his thoughts. Lightning flared all across the city. Fires burned. It was dark, constantly, but everything had that weird tone, as though he were seeing through a photographer’s shaded lens, like people used to spice up pictures before technology and computers and smart phones and tablets came along and did it better. It was the end of the world, though, Frank figured. Or so close the difference wouldn’t weigh more than a few grams at most. First thing to go would be the technology, then the mechanical. People, it seemed, had gone fucknuts crazy before the rock even hit.
Frank Liebowicz wasn’t angry about his arm, or the world, Finley…none of that. His arm was angry, with infection. Frank himself was calm, quiet. The quiet man, roaming the city streets. He didn’t rant or rave, though he knew he should, because the infection must be in his brain for him to be so goddamn stuck on the word purple that everything in the entire world looked purple, felt purple, sounded purple.
“You need to get some help,” he told his reflection in a rare unbroken window, flames burning hard behind him. Something ruptured underground and flames were pouring through cracks in the pavement. Nice and toasty, probably, thought Frank through his delirium. Still, it wasn’t like he was cold. He was sweating, struggling to breathe. Partly because of the atmospheric pressure, which was intensely screwed since the impact and the resulting storms.
The heat beneath the storm was insane, too. Like some kind of hothouse effect, the flames and the earth’s natural heat given no room to breathe. The air was stuffy and muggy and full of dust. It stank of roasted flesh and plastic, rubber tires, melted steel and glass and charred wood, ozone, sewage, fuel…plenty of unsavory things for a man to be taking into his lungs.
Rain, too. Dirty rain. Purple.
Purple purple purple.
Frank still stood before the window. Maybe he’d started looking at himself in the window for a reason, but he couldn’t remember what that reason was.
He wasn’t a lonely man, but he was finding a little comfort in his own presence. Someone there to talk to, even if he didn’t talk back. Which, he guessed, was kind of a small mercy—if the Frank in the window began replying, he’d be in real trouble.
You’re already in real trouble, he thought, down in the core of him that was always completely and utterly sane and rational.
People think killers are irrational, insane, fueled by rage, drugs, money, sex, hatred…
Not Frank. Frank was sane. Purple, but sane.
“I’m not crazy,” Frank told the window. “Not crazy. Just need some help.”
No help to be had, is there?
No. No, there wasn’t. He’d have to do it himself, same as he always did.
He’d lost his long coat somewhere along the way. His shirt was torn and his arm was open to the foul air and fetid rains. It was a horrific color right the way up as far as his shoulder. Poison eating its way higher and higher, right until it hit the important stuff.
He didn’t think he had long.
Need help, he thought.
The torn strands of his flesh and his gunshot shattered bones were open for every kind of infection going.
There is no help. There is nothing left. Just them, and me, and all the other people?
Where the fuck were the normal people? he wondered. If those crazy butcher fuckers in their crowns had made it, surely some normal people had lived, too? Right?
So, where were they? Where were the police, the army, the ambulances?
Nothing but crazies, wherever he went.
He
re comes one now, he thought with complete detachment. Look at her. Poor bitch. Cut to fuck. Probably crying. They all cried.
Everyone cries in the end, he thought, as he watched her approach him in the reflection. She carried one of those tree saws in her right hand. He thought it might be called a bandsaw, but he wasn’t a lumberjack.
The saw, whatever it was called, dragged across the pavement, bumping and scraping.
He was a right-hander, but he could manage well enough with his left. Frank turned, raised his weapon, and asked the woman the same thing he’d asked untold others in the wasteland that was London.
“Who are you?”
She didn’t reply. He had seven bullets left between both guns he carried. She didn’t look all that dangerous, but he had a new cut across his forehead for believing the same thing of a different butcher a couple days before. Maybe longer.
But about death, Frank wasn’t confused.
He pulled the trigger. Bang, a flash, a dead butcher falling amid her own raining blood.
Frank put the gun against his face. The muzzle felt hot. He thought about it, seriously, for a minute.
Then he took the gun away from his face, leaving a burned circle on his cheek, and pushed the weapon back into his trouser pocket.
“I’m not done yet,” he told his reflection. His reflection didn’t say anything. Frank was grateful. He’d half expected his reflection to shake its head in disagreement, and he was feeling pretty fucking tender. He didn’t want to waste a bullet shooting a window.
36
Now he had six bullets and was standing at the spot of the loudest noise in London’s East End.
The East End that seemed solely populated by the butchers.
With only six bullets between two guns, one hand and some kind of virulent infection that made every movement feel like he was swimming through lava…
Not, he thought, the best place to be, maybe.
“Better get moving,” he told himself.
Frank stumbled away from his reflection, over the headless girl, and took the first street he found. He had no idea where to go, but to stay still was to invite disaster. The crazies were all over the East End—an infection, like a virus, eating up the carcass of the city, chewing up whatever was left. Sometimes, literally. That was why he’d taken to calling them butchers—in his head, at least. Psychopathic cannibals, shedding tears and blood as they hacked and ate, chopped and chomped.
Everything had become so simple, though, that for a man with Frank’s particular skills, London wasn’t the hell some might think. Sure, he was hurting, but the world had boiled down to a place of such simple perfection that there wasn’t a damn thing to worry about anymore.
Him, the butchers. A few people, harried and terrified—real people. But they weren’t his concern. He wasn’t some paladin in a medieval tale. He was a bastard and he knew it, and anyone he saw?
Simple worked best for Frank.
Only trouble he was in, really, was with his arm. It was just fine, roaming the streets of the dead city shooting cannibals in the head for kicks, but if he didn’t get himself fixed up, he wouldn’t last much longer.
In the old world, he’d known places to go to get patched up.
Now? He didn’t even know where the fuck he was, let alone where a safe house was, or even a hospital. He knew he’d started out in the West End, got turned around, and ended up in this side of the hell that London had become…all in the space of a couple of days.
Surely he hadn’t been wandering more than a couple of days?
Difficult to tell by anything other than the progression of the infection in his ravaged right arm.
No clocks, no day or night. No more communications…fuck, probably not even telephones. No television, no helpful policemen to ask the time or directions.
That eerie purple dark and the filthy rain, the dust and wind and the carnage of a city hit by fire and quake and storm and insanity.
Something blew up a couple of streets away. Frank turned his head to look, merely on instinct. He didn’t see what blew, but he did catch sight of a butcher—just a glimpse, but yes, they were following him.
He only caught sight of one, but he couldn’t rely on there being only one.
Six bullets. Maybe five for them, one for yourself.
That was giving up, though. Frank didn’t give up. Didn’t run. If he did either of those two things, he knew, he wouldn’t be himself anymore. He’d be like them—the butchers. Giving over to something not in their nature. Why else would they cry?
Frank didn’t cry. Didn’t give in.
He turned into a small side street, no idea if it led to help, a hospital, a pharmacy…but didn’t go any farther.
Up ahead a small cadre of butchers waited. Tears on their faces, sharp crowns on their heads. One among them stepped forward and even Frank, largely inured to pain and suffering, winced.
The man at the head of the butchers was pierced throughout—some kind of king among clowns. He wore the crown, yes, but he was pierced through thigh and arm, feet, hands…like some kind of sick marionette, each piercing tied with chain, so that as he walked he clanged and clanked. Blood poured from his wounds, but unlike the others, he did not cry. He grinned. There was blood on his teeth, some, Frank saw, cracked.
Six bullets.
Frank counted the butchers ahead. Seven, plus their little king.
He thought about turning and walking away—the butchers didn’t move fast.
But they’d still catch him.
And that’d be running. Frank didn’t run. He wasn’t built that way.
Six bullets. That’d leave just the two butchers…
One-handed, unarmed, could he kill just two?
No brainer, thought Frank.
Frank raised his gun, fired once. Drop their king. Fucker looked like he could barely stand anyway, but take the head and the body would follow.
Usually.
Frank’s shot hit the pierced king dead in the face. A little to the right of the man’s nose, about where the bridge would be. The bullet came out the other side—the back of the man’s head. A puff of bloody mist in the odd light. The man didn’t drop. He didn’t cry out. His head snapped back at the impact, but that was all. The little king grinned, still.
Five shots, thought Frank, and one wasted on a guy who…what? Liked being shot?
Frank didn’t waste any more time trying to figure out how a man took a bullet in the face and carried on smiling. He didn’t waste any time on it at all.
Fine, little king can’t die? Five bullets.
Frank aimed, fired. Five bullets, five hits. Five butchers dead on the floor.
Two crazies left, plus the undead king, because what the fuck was the point of shooting someone who couldn’t die? No sense in wasting bullets.
Frank realized he’d used his last bullet, and the thought made him smile. Because he felt like running, yes, he really did. But now he couldn’t, and even one arm down, he smiled.
The little king hadn’t stopped smiling.
Five down, two and some kind of pincushion fucking zombie left.
Frank grinned back at the little king and walked toward the butchers with the gun still in his hand. He didn’t run, they didn’t run. He was unarmed but for what amounted to a short cudgel. They carried knives and axes, and had heads that were full of broken glass…
Frank grinned wider still and headed straight for the butcher farthest to the left, the one with the biggest weapon—a fire axe. A good heavy weapon. Probably, it’d be a little unwieldy for a one-hander like him, but it was the best of a bad bunch.
Frank caught the first blow, axe haft to useless right forearm. It hurt like fuck, but not as much as taking the axe head somewhere important, and his right forearm was the least important part of him. He followed in with a hard blow from the empty pistol to the nose, and the guy was dead, really dead, and the axe was in Frank’s left hand before the corpse hit the road.
One butcher
and the crackpot king left.
Frank was still smiling, though, because he had an axe and everything suddenly made sense. A perfect moment in time, for him. Like any moment when a man’s just doing what he was built for, and knows it.
37
A few minutes later, Frank was breathing hard with sweat pouring through his tattered shirt. He was sore all over, too, but the good kind of sore. The honest kind a person gets from a job well done.
People pieces were strewn all around. Frank stood among them, swaying. He was about ready to pass out on his feet, but he knew more would come. He looked up from the slaughter to find his way, and found himself on his arse atop the little king’s torso. His head swam with fever and exhaustion and the dry, dirty air. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe, to rise. His axe slipped from his hand. The haft of the axe was covered in blood and hair and other fluids.
Got to get up, Frank. Got to keep going. Got to…
“You look like a man who could murder a cigarette,” said a voice to his right. Instantly, the slippery axe was in Frank’s left hand again, drawn back over his head. Ready as ever.
But it was just an old guy sitting on a rare unburned tire. Just out of reach of Frank’s weapon. Naked as the day he’d been born, a kind of unabashed nakedness, like this was the old man’s natural state, like he’d look out of place with clothes on.
That’s…weird, thought Frank. His mind felt slow, sluggish…half-dead, truth be told. But he wasn’t so far over into delirium that he thought for one moment the old naked guy was any kind of hallucination. There was something about the man that was…hyper-real.
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