Left to Darkness

by Craig Saunders

  A moment later, a puff of smoke drifted past his face on the filthy wind.

  He turned, and spoke to the man who’d been watching from the shadows.

  “Done my bit,” said Adam.

  “Man of your word,” said an old man, stepping forward. The old man was naked and held a cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand. In his left, he held something else.

  “Man of my word, too,” said the old guy and handed the young man Adam a pipe and a lighter. Adam knew what to do with both. He’d known the pipe well, since he’d been no more than a teenager. He thought it had been gone, the pipe, from his life. But then, this. This Armageddon. This sorrow. A sorrow so deep he didn’t, couldn’t, see a way out. But here was this man, this pusher, offering him the only way out he’d ever known.

  Adam nodded to the man and took the path he’d always known he would. Took the pipe in hand—a good-looking pipe, he thought, idly. He lit it, smoked. He didn’t look happy or sad. Not particularly. He just looked like a man tired, lost, and happy to lie down and give it all up for a hit and a little peace.

  “Don’t do drugs, kids,” said the old guy, walking away.

  Adam smoked a while.

  Then?

  Well, then he didn’t.

  52

  The new world was a hard, grim place, day or night. Now, in the full, enveloping dark, that world should have felt eerie, or disturbing. The quality of the headlights on the muck blowing in the air, the occasional vehicle looming in the darkness ahead. Maybe if they’d been full of death, it might have been different. She imagined driving past those cars, cadavers grinning at her, pressed against the window. But she didn’t need to, so she pushed the thought away and just drove. With the headlights dipped, she found she could see a little better. It was kind of like driving through fog, but dry instead of damp.

  Once, she forgot she had no windshield and put on the wipers to help her see. The wipers folded into the car and she jumped and screamed.

  She didn’t do it again.

  With the light splintered on every particle of dust at her back, she stopped to check the road signs on her way south, forced to get down from the big car and walk to each sign at each junction. With her bare hand (she didn’t have any gloves), she wiped the grime away from the metallic signs and figured out her route along the way. She had no map, but really, even a map wouldn’t have helped much.

  The entire world probably looks like this, she thought. A world where all the people turned to dust blowing in the air. I’m breathing them in.

  Stop.

  “Morbid much?” she said to herself, just to hear something other than her own thoughts and the constant drone of the wind.

  At the speed she was traveling, she imagined she wouldn’t find the hospital for hours yet. Barely driving above a crawl. Might have even been able to jog it quicker.

  But it turned out to be closer than she’d thought. Everything—distance, appearance, time—was different in the dust.

  The hospital didn’t look that large. It couldn’t be anything but a hospital, though, she figured, as she followed the road round toward a car park with maybe thirty cars parked. She pulled up, leaving herself plenty of room between her car and the next nearest, still wary of being near those empty shells. Something unsettled her about them, though she didn’t know why.

  Why are you parking in the car park?

  She realized she could have driven right up to the double doors in front of her, had she wanted to. She could have driven the car through the doors and parked up in accident and emergency.

  She could have shot a man in the head earlier, too. Just because there weren’t any people to stop you from doing something, doesn’t mean you should just go ahead and do it.

  God, she thought. I hope there are people around who still park in the car park.

  Tired and covered in the deepest darkness she’d ever known, Dawn Graves stepped from the car and stretched as best she could with a bowling ball belly. Her lower back was tender, and she needed the toilet. But she wasn’t going to rush in blindly. She had a small flashlight, the one thing Richard hadn’t thought she’d need, but there had been plenty in the cottage.

  She locked the car (got no windshield, honey), taking the shotgun with her, held in the crook of one arm, flashlight in the other. The gun was loaded, again, though this time she resolved to let people speak before trying to take their heads off.

  Warily, she headed for the first entrance she could see. It was, in fact, the double doors to accident and emergency. A small hospital, with an even smaller A&E. No more than three floors high at any one point. Her small flashlight was powerful enough to illuminate the sign, not strong enough to reach the top floor of the building. Either way, when she shone her flashlight through the wide glass doors, it was all dark inside. No sign of life.

  That was, until she walked up to the doors and they opened on automatic. Automatic doors were so ingrained in her that it didn’t strike her until she was inside. Then she figured out why she was suddenly cold. Because the doors worked. Because there was electricity in the hospital.

  Why was she afraid? A week without electricity and suddenly she was a cave girl, afraid of the miracle of automatic doors?

  No. You’re afraid because if there’s still electricity, there must be a generator. If there’s a generator? Someone set it to working.

  She remembered the boy-man, Adam, telling her there were people here. So why was she afraid? Why surprised?

  Because you have become that cave girl, she thought.

  But she had two choices—move on or go it alone.

  Which brought her to her next thought—did she call out, hopeful, or hunt in the dark, cautious? She opened her mouth to call out because the alternative was the least attractive option.

  She managed a timid, “Hello?” Surprised herself again with the sound of her voice in the hollow room, then, when the lights came on? She jumped and screamed. An actual scream, fear and surprise.

  Every light flicked on. Sudden, blinding, and terrifying. And people started cheering from somewhere within the hospital.

  Cheering. Like a happy sound. A lot of people, pleased with themselves.

  Good people?

  Did bad people cheer like that? Happy cheers?

  “Come on, come on,” she told herself. Dawn thought about leading with the shotgun, letting the barrel take her to the sound of people—real, living people.

  Wrong impression.

  What if they’ve got guns? What if they shoot me?

  She was trusting in the word of a man she’d met in the middle of nowhere. Trusting that the survivors, the living, were good people. The kind of people who still parked their stolen cars in car parks, even when they didn’t need to…

  Dawn took the first step. The second wasn’t any easier.

  Took the third, fourth, and she was walking. Walking in a lit hallway, in a hospital with people in it. Just like the old days.

  People are social creatures, she thought. Social.

  Got to be right. Please be right.

  The hallway led in plenty of directions, but she followed her ears and…her nose?

  God. Was that hot food?

  Her mouth watered. She hadn’t realized how desperately hungry she was until she smelled real food. She imagined waves on the air, like a cartoon character, and managed a weak smile. A smile with little hope and a lot of sadness. But a smile, nonetheless.

  A wide-open door in front of her was all that stood in the way of some kind of contact. She stood in the doorway, gun held by her side and not in front of her. For a moment, she watched the people within. They looked like her kind of people. Sounded like good folk making the best of a bad time. They felt right. That kind of sixth-sense thing again. But it hadn’t steered her wrong yet.

  Feeling like a fool, she coughed. She imagined them, turning, raising weapons, or rushing her with teeth and fists.

  Settle down, Dawn.

  She cough
ed again and an old man turned.

  Please have a face, she thought, but didn’t quite know why she would think such a thing. Of course he’d have a face.

  “Oh…young lady,” he said. “Impeccable timing. We’re just sitting down for dinner.”

  Smiling. He’s smiling. He hasn’t got a gun or a machete or a giant fucking tentacle where his head should be.

  He seemed, in fact, like a perfectly normal older man.

  Dawn barely heard a word anyone said after that, because she was crying, and then, she was eating, and all the while people smiled and chatted and joked. They ate, they passed things to each other. Cutlery clanked on crockery, the aroma of food hung in the air.

  Dawn, in a haze, remembered growing up. Remembered family get-togethers, Sunday roasts her mother made and rightly took pride in. She could feel those old meals in her soul as she ate the simple fare put before her, and it was just as good as Christmas dinners and birthday parties back in the long- lost past.

  This felt like all of that and more.

  It felt like a little slice of home.

  VIII. In the Kingdom of the Blind, the One-Armed Man is King

  53

  Silence fell.

  No. Not silence. The wind howled and dust scoured. Rubble crumbled in the distance, things burned, Paul’s ears still rung with his shouting.

  But in the sudden absence of violence, Paul could hear again, not because London had fallen quiet, but because he had. He stopped shouting out and listened. Really listened, like his life depended on it.

  There…

  A man’s rough and heavy breathing. Like a man who’d been lifting weights. Or killing people hard. There had been no screams, though. But the sounds of violence, yes…

  Breathing.

  Paul turned toward the sound.

  I have no weapon and I’m utterly blind…

  I’m going to die, thought Paul Deacon. Strangely, the thought didn’t fill him with fear. Instead, he was full of more of a kind of tired resignation. After all, how was a blind man going to live in this? The dust and wind tore at his face. His eyes stung even behind his shirt-blindfold. Blind, but still able to feel. He was blind, standing before a murderer, or murderers, in his boxer shorts. His legs were cut and burned raw in so many places it felt as though he’d been rubbed with sandpaper.

  He couldn’t do anything at all against men or women. A child could knock him down, had he wished. And he certainly wasn’t going to be able to live in this world.

  The end really came, after all, he thought.

  Could just give up and die, he thought.

  I could beg, he thought.

  All of that was true but the last. He could beg but he wouldn’t. Not again. Never again. He’d done that, once. And now here he was, helpless and blind.

  Never again.

  The sound of footsteps approaching, barely audible over the ragged breath of the man who had, to Paul’s ears, been killing some people not a moment before. Something metallic, too. Clanging unevenly against the broken road.

  Paul’s mind could well imagine a man, covered head to toe in blood, dragging a weapon across the floor, coming to take his life. What kind of world did I come back to?

  He couldn’t run.

  I could beg, he thought, again.

  But no. No.

  The footsteps, the heavy sound of metal on tarmac. And, as the footsteps and the labored breathingsounds came closer, something else, too. A terrible, sickening stench. Like rotten meat coated in shit. His gag reflex kicked in. Unable to help himself, bile rose in the back of his throat. Unbelievably bitter and singularly unpleasant.

  What if the owner of those erratic footsteps was like him? A survivor, a victim?

  That had just murdered some people with his bare hands? Or hers?

  But it didn’t sound like a woman. The footsteps were heavy. Some kind of cadence within the sound that spoke to Paul of a man with large feet. The breathing, too, spoke of a large man, one more than simply out of breath. One who was sick.

  A man who stank.

  Paul coughed, involuntary, but the best he could do against that stench.

  It was the first sound he’d made loud enough to penetrate the constant whir of the wind since the fight had begun. Fight, he wondered, or murder?

  He was almost too tired to care, wished he didn’t care at all, and was surprised at himself that when the stinking man spoke, he actually jumped and made a stupid sound, like a teenage girl might.

  “You’re blind?” the man said. The owner of the stench…and the heavy metal thing. He spoke in a slurred, tired voice.

  He’s hurt. Really hurt. Is that a wound stench? Jesus.

  Paul smelled blood, and now that the man was closer, he recognized the smell for certain. A rare smell, but he’d smelled it before, on the homeless and insane and at old crime scenes. The stench of rotted flesh.

  It wasn’t a smell his nose would ever forget.

  Despite himself, or maybe because of what he was at heart, Paul replied. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”

  The man laughed, then started coughing. Coughed a while, a thick wet sound that bubbled up from his lungs. Like an infection.

  “A bit…yes…quite a bit.”

  “What…what’s happening?”

  The man fell into a coughing fit again, and this time Paul thought he wasn’t going to stop.

  But he did, though he continued to wheeze and struggle for breath while he spoke.

  “I don’t think I’ve got long, so listen, okay?”

  Despite the fact that the man smelled and sounded like he was at death’s door, there was strength there, in his voice and his words.

  “You’re blind, I’m pretty fucked. But…thing is…you’re going to need me.”

  Paul nodded. Didn’t say anything. The man was right. It was obvious enough.

  “We’re going to need each other. But if we’re going to get the fuck out of the city, you’re going to have to save my life. Figure you owe me…for back there…”

  Paul thought about asking what had happened. But he knew, didn’t he? This stinking man in front of him had just killed a bunch of people. Now he was standing there, like it was nothing, and asking Paul to save his life.

  Paul didn’t think about it long. Just listened, nodded. He wanted to speak, but he didn’t need to—he was blind, not the stinking man. He wondered if all blind people spoke more, to compensate, like some people who were hard of hearing had a tendency to shout.

  But whatever was going to happen from here on out, he knew the man was right. They needed each other. Paul wasn’t sure who would need whom more.

  You’re not a policeman anymore, he told himself. You’re on the other side of the fence. Where the victims are. You need help, he needs help. Just fucking get on with it.

  “I’m carrying a bag,” said the man. “Got some medicine and stuff. Antibiotics. Painkillers. You’re going to have to get them in me. I think I’ve got an infection.”

  “How will I know which pills are which?” Paul asked.

  The man managed a grunt by way of reply. Then, loud even in the wastes of London and the cacophony of the wind through the shattered buildings, there was the heavy crash of a big man hitting the ground.

  54

  “Shit,” said Paul.

  Some guy comes out of nowhere, saves him from something he can’t see. Single-handed, with no gunfire. Not a single shot. Some kind of fucking tank that had taken on (killed, Paul, he killed them…don’t sugarcoat it) a bunch of people and won…while he was thick with some dreadful infection, a survival expert, a martial artist or something. The man was something, all right.

  He was also probably the toughest man in London right now…passed out on the floor at Paul’s feet. Passed out next to the blind man, who was possibly the most useless man in this situation, the most terrified. Paul felt like a coward, consummate and complete in his fear, crippled and unmanned by it.

  He felt like roaring, stamping his f
eet. He was afraid, hurting, fucking blind. He’d thought he was going to die, then he’d had a little hope, and now?

  “Fuck,” said Paul. He wanted to roar and scream and cry…but he was too afraid to make a sound. He was utterly helpless.

  But he didn’t have the luxury of being the victim anymore. The guy stank to high heaven. Some kind of raging infection in a wound. Neither of them would be going anywhere if Paul couldn’t get the man back on his feet. Whatever was wrong with this guy, he had two good eyes…he might not think he was ahead of the game, on the floor, out cold, but to Paul’s mind he’d settle for a festering wound and his eyes back.

  Got a bag, the guy had said.

  Paul might have wanted to lie down and die, but if he did? If he gave up, he’d be taking this man with him. This man who wasn’t dead yet. His breathing, ragged and tortured, but alive.

  Are you still a policeman, Deacon? Still a cop?

  Paul figured he’d better find out, and fast.

  Find the bag, find the pills. Make the man swallow his pills. Hope like fuck something works.

  Wow, Paul. That’s a great plan. You must be a big-shot detective.

  I was, Paul told his snide mind. Was.

  Or, still? Once a copper, always a copper? Was that even true? Could a blind man be a policeman?

  He’d still be better than some, he thought to himself, and almost laughed, though he managed to stop at a small chuckle. He really didn’t want to get to laughing. Not right now, completely screwed, in the middle of a broken city, no people, only bodies and insanity and big unconscious men dragging…

  The big guy had been dragging something…right? Something that sounded heavy and metal.

  Paul was loath to get down on his hands and knees to root around. He was wary of any kind of contact. Worried, too, that if he touched something and didn’t know what it was, that he’d scream like a little kid.

  Truth was, being blind was all kinds of terrifying.