Now it was his show.
The man worked. He talked. He talked about Sid and Silvia and a baby yet to be born. He wanted that baby, quite badly. So badly, in fact, that he’d been moving people around to make getting that baby a reality, and make that baby safe.
Like his past, like his nature, the smoking man wasn’t entirely sure why he wanted the babe. All he knew was that he needed the child.
So, when the candles went out, the smoking man worked by the light from the tip of his cigarette and the fire in his eyes. He cut flesh and stitched, making things…better. He pinned bones and trimmed bones. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, aesthetically. But functionally. The big guy was built like a tank. The girl like a missile. He improved them, nurtured them.
The baby he so wanted, he thought maybe wasn’t ever meant to be his.
These two, though? He grew to love them, over the course of the week he worked. Like…a rough kind of adoption.
He talked, he worked, he smoked. Darkness came and went, days and nights bled into each other.
The smoking man, done, told them the punch line at last. Brother and sister listened. They had little choice, but really, it was a good story. And it was pretty fucking funny, after all.
VII. Pusherman
44
In the few weeks since the big one hit and the earth began to fill the skies, Dawn Graves grew used to a life alone.
Since Robert’s death, she’d been alone. Truly alone, she thought, then. But she didn’t know as much as she thought she had, because this…this was isolation. This place, this new England under the constant cloud of dirt, the endless filthy rain and the wind that scoured the flesh…
This was isolation and desolation.
Dawn could barely imagine the scope of these end days…did they extend to the whole of the U.K., Europe…farther?
The big one must’ve hit, and hit hard. A smaller strike from the south, the best she could figure, and then, shortly after, the bigger portion of the meteor would have struck, somewhere in Russia, the Eastern bloc, maybe even Asia.
It couldn’t truly be the end, though…could it?
The truth was, she had no idea, and was too afraid to find out. What if she walked away from this place, headed south, and saw the results of a meteor striking? What if the streets were lined with the dead, the dying, the desperate? Would people be pulling together, trying to survive? Or, like she feared, would it be dangerous for her and the child in her belly? People scavenging and looting. Gangs, trying to survive any way they could…animals? Wild animals, starved, packs of dogs…she didn’t know. She imagined dystopia, not utopia. From all she knew of people, she did not think for one minute that people’s base nature would be lost along with television, the Internet, telephones, medicine, science…and yes, religion, too.
Dawn understood that she was anxious and that her anxiety was providing scenarios to let her out of being brave. The braver option would be to seek society, to see with her own eyes what remained of the world outside the haven she’d found, the tranquil idyll in the country.
This life was enough, wasn’t it? A simple life; small, easy meals. A toilet that still worked, food in a pantry, a single camping stove she’d found, early bed, early rise. Small chores. No stress.
The world had ended, and she didn’t feel like she had when the world was still going strong. Didn’t feel like she needed to keep up with every series on television, or check her messages on her phone.
Simple was, it turned out, quite a bit easier than she’d ever imagined.
Baby’s coming, though.
But she shied away from that thought. Pushed it down as far as it would go. Which wasn’t far, because the baby was right there, in her massive bump, in her aching hips and weak bladder.
Was it brave, or stupid, to head away from this spot she’d found with no people? Brave, stupid…did it matter?
Could she birth her baby here, alone?
Dawn thought these things, staring out at the filthy, angry sea in the dim daylight. At her back was a small, well-kept garden, sloping upward toward a modest cottage. It had probably been a holiday home, before the skies got dark. She’d found it empty. Now it was full of her things.
Still, it didn’t feel like any kind of home.
It felt bereft…but then, she thought, maybe that was just her.
Dawn Graves pushed herself from the sand and pulled the scarf around her face tighter. She was panting with exertion when she reached the house she’d taken for her own. Her feet splayed now as she walked, and her belly was damn heavy.
She figured she had maybe a week to go, but with the stress, the fear, that she’d felt with the meteor hitting, with her friend Richard’s death…the end of the world…might be her baby would come early.
It might be oddly relaxing now, here in her quiet place away from the world, but would giving birth alone, and all that having a child entailed, be relaxing? Doing it all alone. Everything. Feeding, changing, bathing. The small sicknesses that babes suffered, the colic, the restless nights…
Could she do it? And did she have time to figure it out?
“You haven’t got a week,” she told herself, closing the slightly skewed old wooden door of her borrowed cottage against the dusty winds.
No. Not a week. Sooner, she thought, and nodded, feeling that was right.
Time to make a choice.
45
Soon after Dawn had fled Cambridgeshire, leaving Richard Graves’s corpse behind in the burned carcass of his country home, she’d run out of petrol. Already, seeing her last friend die, her tears had been running freely. When her car coasted to a stop on the border of Lincolnshire, she broke. Not all the way, but quite a long way broke, for sure.
Dawn Graves had screamed and sobbed until her head and chest and throat all hurt, right there in her useless car in the middle of a deserted country road. Her car, full of all the things she’d need to bring her baby into this dead or dying world…except petrol.
New life in her belly and nothing but death to come.
Dawn hit despair unlike anything she’d known. Suddenly, her philandering husband’s hard murder, her friend Richard dying in her arms…she thought she’d known sadness and loss, but the death of her car hit her harder than every other loss combined. Maybe it was more like a last card on a house of cards, the one that’s too heavy, or unbalanced, that shifts the flimsy structure just enough to send everything tumbling down.
But right then? It was all about the car. Her dead car.
“Fuck!” she screamed and hugged the steering wheel harder, perhaps, than she’d hugged Richard as he’d died.
Had she even hugged him? Or had she thought only of herself?
She couldn’t remember and the thought sent her into fresh streams of sorrow.
Later, when she was cried out, she got out of the car and walked maybe two miles up the road. The skies had been dark like night before, but when she finished her tears, there was a little light to see by.
She headed north, on foot. Soon enough she was caked in the muck carried on the wind. Thick on her face, like a woman addicted to foundation.
After walking a way ahead of her car and her only possessions, she stopped.
Stopped and stared.
Even though the light of the new day was dim and poor, she could see the view well enough. The road she’d been taking ended and joined a larger stretch of dual carriageway. There were cars aplenty on the road. Cars as far as she could see. All the people who’d been fleeing one place to another.
Cars covered in dust and grime. Not running cars, or moving at all. Like an elongated car park in the middle of the country.
She wasted a little time on pointless, trivial thoughts before she came to the kicker.
Where the hell’s the petrol station?
How the hell am I going to get anywhere?
Why aren’t they moving?
For a while, she just stood at the junction, looking out at the rows of cars and trucks, a
couple of motorbikes on their sides.
Everything covered in that horrible dust.
Too emotionally exhausted to think.
Just ask someone for…just…
“Ask who?” she said, jumping at her own voice, soft though it was.
Ask who?
Every single car down there was as dead as hers.
Not one wiper moved. No exhaust fumes blew in the wind.
Those cars, possibly every one, had run dry.
Because they’d been sitting there since…
Since…
Dawn caught herself chewing on her fist and forced her hand down by her side.
Empty, or each and every one was a coffin.
And either way…
“What the fuck?” she said. No one, not a single soul, had got out and walked? No doors open, no cars running, no wipers moving…
Like everything had stuck in a single moment in time.
Suddenly, Dawn was cold. If the owners, the drivers, of those vehicles were all dead…every one of them? Was it a poison, a gas, something viral?
Were they all dead?
If they were, then she was cold, afraid, and completely, utterly, alone…and would be until she, too, joined them in eternal rest.
46
Every cell in Dawn’s body screamed at her to run, turn around, run, before she knew either way.
A thousand coffins…all in a row…
She imagined opening one of those doors, and a dead body (a man, a woman, a family) and the hiss of gas like some old crypt as the smell of death met the air.
It’s not even been a day, she reasoned.
Then, exhausted as she was, she hit upon an even worse truth.
She could not see into the cars, or the trucks.
But she could see motorbikes, flat upon the road.
But no riders.
If everyone had died at once, like they’d been gassed or poisoned, or something (but you’re not sick, Dawn…you’re not sick…) where were the riders?
That cold feeling spread right to her core.
The baby kicked.
The baby kicked hard. And that, more than any other kind of goading ever could, got her feet moving again.
She had to know. She had to.
Dawn Graves walked down the slip road until she came to the first car. Holding her breath and trying to calm herself for the sake of her baby, she pulled open the door before she could balk and run. If she started running now, Dawn knew she wouldn’t stop until her heart gave out.
Empty. The car was empty. Chocolate bar wrappers, the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, and a dead mobile phone.
Nothing else. No people. No animals. No insects, even. Nothing at all.
Her legs gave way without a warning and she crashed to the dirt-covered road, cracking her arse hard enough to take her breath away, and there was nothing left in her mind but one, final, terrible question, repeating itself over and over.
Where are all the people? she thought, and could not stop it, no matter how hard she tried.
47
If she’d been alone, that might have done it. Just the sight of that one empty car. It might have been the one thing that would have put her down.
But she wasn’t alone. Dawn wasn’t a unit of one any longer.
She sat on the dirty road crying about her hurting arse and everything else that was fucked up about this shadow-life she found herself living. She cried about crying, about being unable to stop crying.
But then?
Then her baby kicked her so hard it took her breath away.
For some reason, the baby kicked her again. This time, like the baby had drawn its little foot right back to get a good swing.
Kicked hard enough, in fact, to make Dawn piss herself a little.
And that was all it took. One minute, she was all but broken. The next, she was rolling around in the dirt howling with laughter. It wasn’t the borderline laughter the crazies laugh before they slip over the edge. It was good, clean laughter.
It felt so good, Dawn just went with it. She let the laughter bubble away and gave in to it so completely that she was at some point in danger of passing out. And when she reached the point where her head felt like it was about to explode and she saw stars and felt her vision dim right down to a single point? Then she laughed even harder, and fuck it if she did pass out in her own piss, because she’d been given the kick up the arse (in the bladder, maybe) she needed.
Slowly, over the course of minutes rather than seconds, she gained some kind of control over herself. Later, still, she found she could think again.
“Just you and me, buddy,” she told her child, and finally began thinking. Really thinking.
Looking, too. Turned out the days were short and it was getting dim.
She wasn’t sold on the idea of spending the night in this automotive graveyard.
So, think, she told herself. Think, and stop being a victim. You’ve done that.
Newer cars, not like hers, but real modern cars…they had cutoff technologies, right?
They sat idle in traffic, say, for five minutes, the ignition cut off. Saved on petrol, diesel, whatever…
Maybe, she thought with a sliver of hope, I won’t need to walk back to my car after all…
She smiled a little and began looking around. Wasn’t as easy as she thought it’d be. All the cars looked roughly the same—just dark shapes beneath the grime. Nothing in particular to help her pick the newer cars.
What happened to the people, Dawn? You forget that?
Robert’s voice, her dead bastard of a husband.
She shunted his ghost right out of her head.
He didn’t have any power over her. Not even here, not now, not ever again.
Whatever happened to the people was a problem for another day. Today’s problem, today’s only problem, it turned out, was guessing the new cars by the vague shapes she could discern beneath the darkening skies.
There was no way she was going to sleep in one of those tombs, nor was she going to walk all the way to her car, pregnant, damp, in the pitch darkness.
So, think, woman.
Her own voice. One she hadn’t heard herself utter since she’d been a young woman, before Robert had beaten her down. Not with his fists. But then being beaten didn’t always take violence, did it?
Dawn smiled a little. Big cars. 4x4s. That was the trick. They were more expensive to buy, more expensive to run. A good shot?
Maybe.
She had no idea, but she tried a few. Without exception, she found the car doors unlocked.
No people, keys in the ignition.
But after six tries, no petrol in any of them. All slightly older cars. Not really old, but not new enough to have ignition cutoff technology (she had no idea what that was called…she supposed, now, at the end, it didn’t matter in the slightest).
She wasn’t about to give up, though. She’d rolled around so long, crying and laughing, she had mere moments before nightfall.
“Daft girl,” she told herself after realizing what she’d been thinking.
She flicked on the lights of all the cars she checked, until a large swathe of the dual carriageway was bathed in a dull and dirty glow. Not as bright as it should have been, but then the cars were covered in dirt and the air was full of it, too.
It took more than twenty tries before Dawn found a car with both keys and petrol in the tank. It proved to be an automatic, a Volvo, a large 4x4, and also on the fast lane of the carriageway, blocked on one side by a metal barrier, on the other by cars.
She had a choice. Keep trying, pass this one up for something maybe better, maybe worse, down the line or just roll with it.
She smiled. Then she got in the car, keyed the ignition, and clapped in unashamed delight when the car roared to life.
Dawn Graves flicked on the wipers, slammed the door behind her. Then she checked the rear seats, swung the wheel hard to the left and began driving through the traffic. The b
ig car managed without even raising its voice. When there was no gap, she made one. Nudged the bumper into the offending car in her way, and started out slow and low. The Volvo barely broke a sweat.
Dawn drove back through the night. The Volvo’s headlights barely touched the dusty darkness, but that was just fine, because she didn’t care about that. She cared about having enough light to reach her stash…her baby things…the things her child would need to make it in the dark new world of muddy skies and purple light.
48
That night, Dawn slept in her new Volvo after she found her car. It wasn’t the first time she’d slept in a car. It was going to be the last, though.
The following day, she hit the roads again, heading north, then east. Hunting out a quiet place to birth her angel. And while she drove, Dawn Graves began to serious consider what she might need to do should she actually live.
49
In looking back at that night in the Volvo, how she’d been cramped and uncomfortable, yet determined, and in some ways refreshed, Dawn’s mind was made up.
It wasn’t about her, or her fear, or anything else. It was, in fact, nothing to do with her. Not really. The important thing was her baby. The baby’s life, safety. Later, happiness?
If such a thing could be found in this world, she vowed to teach it to her baby.
Dawn nodded to herself in the kitchen of her borrowed cottage. It was a pretty place, like something she imagined from a hokey film set in the country. Plenty to like, for a woman bringing a child into the world. Old houses, they could stand the end of the world. Newer places? They depended on energy, technology. Old places like this had woodstoves, stocks of candles and maybe generators somewhere tucked away. She figured they had a lot of power cuts out here in the middle of nowhere. They were ready for it, for a return to a world that ran on wood and coal.
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