by Luke Kondor
His eyes turned to red as the tears rolled down his cheeks.
“I was in the building opposite. I had a view into her glass doors and saw the whole thing. I would’ve called the police but… there really were no police then. So, I watched. I watched as these boys took the old lady’s supplies. I saw hers crying for help, loud at first but then as she bled out the cries became less and less until the woman simply laid there.”
He turned to Colin.
“And I watched. That’s when I realised that I’d beens wrong this entire time. When you boil piss down, it doesn’t give you gold. The alchemists lied to us, Colin. When you boil the piss, all you’re left with is boiled piss.”
Through his tears his lip curled and he smiled. Somewhere behind them Byron was now heading back with the dogs. There was a big smile on his face as the dogs tugged at their lead, all of their feet and legs caked in thick mud.
Colin smiled as Dylan bounced excitedly into the air. “Yeah well, some of us ain’t too bad, I hope.”
Anton considered this a moment. “Right. That’s why, even if there’s the remotest chance of survivors, I can’t leave them to die. They’re good people. I can’t just wait and hide anymore. I’m not going to let the bad guys have their way. I’m going to go to King’s Hill and I’m going to help. I’m going to be what I wanted to see in others.”
Byron returned and climbed over the fence. Dylan and Whisper crawled underneath, tangling their leads between the wooden beams. Despite himself, Anton chuckled. Colin joining a second later.
“Okay. Dogs are refreshed. My heart is pumping. What’s the plan?” Byron said.
“Well, my friend. It looks like Anton is heading off to King’s Hill to check for survivors.”
For half a moment, a wave of confusion passed over Byron’s face. Anton looked up at Colin, blinking stupidly as the sun touched the horizon and shone its concentrated beams across the land.
“And we’re going too,” he winked. “That okay by you?”
“Sure,” Byron said, already moving to load the dogs in the car. “Why the hell not?”
*
They drove on for another half hour or so before it fell dark. Colin suggested pulling over and stopping for the night. With Anton crouching closer and closer to the steering wheel to see the road, and the fact that they all thought it would be a terrible idea to put on the car’s headlights for fear of attracting too much attention (and for the extra fuel wastage), it seemed the safest option. Even Keaghan agreed as he nodded sleepily in the back, doing his best now to fight the gentle rocking motion of the car.
It took them all of about ten minutes to put up a tent where Anton, Byron and Colin would take it in turns to sleep – rotating their guard duty. They hadn’t anticipated a fourth arrival, so they helped Keaghan into his sleeping bag, wrapping him up like a little lost Moses in swaddling, and left him to sleep in the backseat of the Ranger.
Byron handed the dogs’ leads to Colin, who volunteered to take first shift. He didn’t feel tired and wondered if he’d sleep at all that night. He fixed both Whisper and Dylan’s leads to his harness and walked the dogs up to the roadside, Anton and Byron’s whispers fading with the shadows. Colin took a left and turned off into a wooded area further up the road.
“Not too far, okay?” he said to the dogs who curiously sniffed the floor ahead, “I don’t want to lose the others.”
The night was peaceful. A thin sliver of moon ducking and hiding between rolling cloud cover. There was a little wind which brought goosebumps to Colin’s flesh, but the dogs didn’t seem to mind. All around was quiet. If Anton was correct, and they had only a few miles to go, he found it hard to believe that there could have been the distant sounds of gunfire a day or two ago. Now, it was as if the world had taken a deep breath inwards and was waiting with bated breath for the massacre.
Colin thought back to the early days of the rot. Travelling by himself, as many others had – and still did – stumbling across whole towns of the dead. If society was to rebuild itself at some point in time, he hoped he was long dead and buried in the ground before they built the cleanup crews. For him, that would be priority numero uno. Clear and burn the dead. Make way for the new living.
He kicked a rock across the road and wandered on. When he reached another junction, he pulled Whisper and Dylan back. At the fork there sat a sign, crooked and lined with a thin layer of moss and grime. It read: London 80 miles.
London.
His home.
Or, at least, the place he’d called home for the majority of his life.
London Bridge is falling down… falling down. No. Fell. It is fallen.
He rubbed his eyes, paused and tried to remember it. The way that it was. High-rise buildings, traffic and smog. The smell of coffee and e-cigarettes. The underground. The Thames. The constant feeling that you were going to be swallowed up by the vastness of it all. Like the city was a beast and it needed your soul.
Would he ever go back?
What death must remain behind those quarantine walls now?
Without realising it, a tear trickled down Colin’s face. He ran his thumb and forefinger across his wet eyes as Whisper and Dylan sat waiting for him. Whisper’s tongue lolled out of her mouth as she yawned with a gentle whine. Dylan licked Whisper’s ear and shook his head before walking over to Colin, looking up expectantly. The dog’s eyes were large and brilliant in the moonlight. Little galaxies of blue dancing around deep black holes. Colin smiled and ruffled the fur beneath his chin.
“C’mon, guys. That’s quite enough of all that.”
He wasn’t sure how long he kneeled at the roadside for, staring up at the large white sign that had once been a guiding beacon for the thousands driving this road. It was only after his legs began to tingle that he rose, clicked with the side of his mouth, and headed back with the dogs.
When he arrived back at the car, he found Byron already waiting at the tent entrance.
“Nice run?”
“Yeah. Something like that,” Colin said as tiredness began to wash over him. He handed the dogs over and clambered into the tent, knowing that it wouldn’t be long until he was woken and they carried on to King’s Hill.
To find whatever horrors awaited there.
~ 13 ~
“Why do they call him the Scarred Man?” Joanna said as she pulled Sunny along, Veronica leading the way between two narrow cabins.
“You’ll see,” Veronica said dryly.
It had already been a long day, and Joanna found herself huffing, dragging loose locks of damp hair behind her ear. Veronica had called it the best job in Hope. A real break compared to some of the other assignments she could have been given. But no, Joanna found the work exhausting. Trailing from house to house, offering support to a town full of hypochondriacs with nothing more to offer than a ‘chin up’ and a prayer, maybe a teabag (gold dust to the township).
On the up side, she’d acquainted herself with a large portion of Hope. They bumped into Gene and checked on his rash. They dropped in on the Martelles, politely declining a cup of herbal tea. They’d even stumbled across a group of children. Three of them. For a moment Joanna had been excited, looking to Sunny, almost forgetting that he wasn’t a normal child. Not like those three – Ed, Gareth, and Ruby – who were chasing each other behind bushes and giggling.
But Joanna was now apprehensive about this final visit. Veronica had said she’d ‘saved the best for last’, but the idea of meeting a man who had the whole town referring to him as ‘the Scarred Man’, made her uncomfortable.
As they emerged from the cabins, they came to something of a cul-de-sac. Four cabins rounding the end of the road. Of those four, three of them were smashed and abandoned. The other—
“Benjamin!”
Joanna looked to where Veronica was waving. In the only habitable-looking cabin stood the strangest man Joanna had ever seen. He watched from the glass panel of the doorway, clothed in nothing but a yellow-white pair of underpants.
His face was torn, his body scratched to hell. His arms were little more than sticks and his hair hung by his shoulders. He stared vacantly ahead. To Joanna, he looked like a recovering cat’s chew toy.
“You okay?” Veronica whispered out the side of her mouth.
Joanna nodded and they entered the house.
Inside, the smell of fust and mould was a force to be reckoned with. It lay heavy on the air and tightened her airways. Clothes lay on the floor in sloppy piles. Stains and cracks decorated the walls. There were broken plates and glasses.
A bull has been in this china shop, she mused, a bull with a shotgun with a thing against Chinese culture.
The Scarred Man watched Joanna with unblinking eyes, his hands sitting on his distended belly.
“Hello Benjamin,” Veronica beamed. “How are we doing today?” Her words were soft and warm. They were inviting, and the Scarred Man took to them, smiling stupidly as he turned away from Joanna. She breathed a gentle sigh of relief. As much as she understood that there were people everywhere like the Scarred Man, visibly tortured and deranged, she still couldn’t help but feel a little ill at the sight of him. There was a certain creepiness about that blank face that reminded her of something that she couldn’t quite place.
The man scratched at his missing right ear where a single hole had been studded into the side of his head. Occasionally a finger of his would find the wall or an item of clothing and would caress them curiously as if they were Braille and he was trying to get a read on it. His shape turned almost to a silhouette as the sun continued to set on the horizon behind him, washing his back in a warm orange glow.
Joanna was so transfixed with him that she’d barely noticed that Veronica had disappeared from the room. A moment later, she returned with a white ceramic mug with a broken handle. The liquid inside smelled sickly sweet.
“What is that?” Joanna said.
“Cinnamon, some camphor oil, and a tipple of Dad’s moonshine. We’ve tried various things but we’ve really struggled with this one.” She brought the mug to the Scarred Man’s dry lips. The smell of the concoction drew him from his trance, distracting him from his study of the knots of his wooden walls. He greedily took the cup and gulped the warming contents.
“What do you mean? What happened to him?”
“Benjamin wasn’t always like this. He was a forager when we first found Hope. There was only ten of us back then, and we were all still finding our feet. Benjamin would go out every day for hours and come back with carrier bags full of herbs and berries for tea, and would occasionally find us meat. Moles, badgers, stuff that he could take his axe too.”
Joanna looked at the Scarred Man, struggling to imagine what that disfigured form might have looked like before. Something less like the Hunchback of Notre Dam and more like a banking clerk perhaps? There were traces of him, what he used to be, for sure. Like he was unfinished. Like he just needed someone to smooth over the skin, add the final bits of hair (and an ear), dress him up in a suit, slap his ass and send him on down to Canary Wharf.
He moaned now as he drank, slurping and splashing some of the fluid onto the floor below.
Okay maybe not a banker, she thought.
Sunny took a lazy step forward, Joanna’s hand automatically finding his shoulder and nudging him back. His eyes fixed on the Scarred Man.
“So then about a year ago,” Veronica continued. “Benjamin goes out, as he did every day, but he doesn’t come back. Nothing. No sign whatsoever. We lost him for—”
“Does he mind you talking about this in front of him?”
Veronica’s smile twisted with sad pity. “Not one iota. He doesn’t mind much of anything anymore. He just… is.”
The Scarred Man sat down now, his back straight against the wall as he lapped at his cup, tongue darting to the bottom of the ceramic where the dregs remained.
“How did he find his way back?”
“We searched for two days and couldn’t find him. Henry was pulling his hair out with worry – you know how much he cares about his kin now. Imagine him back then with only a handful of Hopefuls.
“But then, when we arrive back at the site, he’s already here at the gates. In a right state. Looked like he’d been mauled by a lion. We’d never seen anything like it. We patched him up as best we could but the man’s never been the same. He used to quote Thoreau and Kerouac, but now I barely ever hear him speak. It’s as if, whatever happened out there, just erased who he was.”
“That’s awful,” Joanna said, turning to see that at some point in the story, Sunny had escaped her grasp. He was now standing over the Scarred Man, looking down at him with studious eyes. She thought of calling him back to her side, but what was the harm? Despite his name, the Scarred Man seemed to be nothing more than a beaten and bruised—
Sunny crouched down next to the Scarred Man, leant forward and cupped a hand to his mouth. Joanna could hear whispers as Sunny spoke ever so gently into the hole where the Scarred Man’s ear had once been. She felt herself flush. For anyone else, it would merely look like a kid’s game of secrets. But to Joanna, this was the first time he’d spoken in over a week.
“Sunny?” Joanna called. “Sunny!”
The boy didn’t seem to notice her.
“Wait,” Veronica said, holding Joanna back as she moved to separate the two. “Give them a moment.”
When Sunny was done, the Scarred Man nodded enthusiastically, grinning stupidly with excitement, eyes never moving.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered, leaning forward a little. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Veronica and Joanna looked at each other. Sunny came back to Joanna and squeezed her hand.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the Scarred Man continued to no one.
“What is he saying ‘yes’ to?” Veronica asked.
Joanna crouched down. “Sunny? What did you say to him? What did you say to the nice man?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
Sunny stared blankly at Joanna, as though she had just spoken to him in Russian. His green eyes bright and keen.
“Curious,” Veronica muttered to herself as she offered another cup of steaming liquid to the Scarred Man. He took it gratefully, spilling some of the contents out the side of his mouth as he tried to drink and talk at the same time, eyes now locked on Sunny.
Joanna leant in close to the boy, lips a hair’s width away from Sunny’s ears. “Sunny? Please. Tell me what you said.”
Sunny stared at the Scarred Man. It was then that Joanna figured out who the Scarred Man reminded her of.
Sunny. He reminds me of Sunny.
“I wouldn’t read a great deal into it,” Veronica said, though her eyes watched the two staring at each other with some suspicion. “Sometimes the quiet ones only trust the quiet ones.” Veronica busied herself in the kitchen awhile, returning some time later with a bowl of something steaming which she spooned into the Scarred Man’s mouth. The whole time they were there, his lips never stopped moving. Never stopped repeating that rhythmic, “yes, yes, yes.” Joanna sat with Sunny next to her, trying awhile to glean some response from him. Whether he chose to ignore her, or genuinely couldn’t bring himself to speak again, it made no difference. She was to get no response from him now. His mouth was sealed tighter than the vault which had sealed the bunker down by the coast.
It was dark by the time they closed the door behind them. The Scarred Man could be seen through the window as they took the public path home, avoiding the darks of the shadows. Veronica warned that, though they were in their little bubble of Hope, you never really knew what could happen. It paid to be prepared.
Joanna hardly said a word on the way back to the infirmary. Sunny held her hand, for a while seeming like a normal boy going for a walk with his carer. But as she looked down at him in the dark patches between the glows of the torches, she couldn’t help but notice just how bright his eyes seemed to shine.
Beautiful emeralds now lit from a fire within.
~ 14 ~
N
o one would know how much it would all change that night. For the comfortable town of Hope, raid-and-rot-free for well over a year, there were some that had given up all pretence of the dangerous world beyond their walls. Farmers who did little more than grow small batches of crops in their greenhouses. Fisherman who confined themselves to their lakes, lacking the equipment to batch hunt the fish until there was nothing left. To them, there would always be fish to catch. To the dressmakers and carers, life had reached a consistency that they were happy with. In a post-rot era, it would be routine that was the new disease. The infection which brought down a town’s defences and rotted their world from the inside out.
In the old bowling alley, full of candles and broken arcade machines, they danced. The musicians sang and played the songs that their parents taught them. The dancers jigged and jived with virgin smiles on their faces, bellies wobbling with contentment with each hop and step. The songs the only medium now through which the stories were told.
Songs of death. Songs of love. Songs of hope.
As the night rolled on, Chef wheeled in more of his food, almost spilling a large vat of soup. A slosh comprised of boiled water, salts, mushrooms, several tins of chopped tomatoes, and the flesh of a lame duck found dead in the lake.
And, sat at the back of the hall, watching from his plastic throne, Henry drank deeply from his cup of moonshine. Unaware of just how much life could change, in nothing more than a night. His hazy thoughts not on the merriment before him, but on the three travellers sent out into the night to hunt for the truth in a world in which the rot was already back on the rise.