“What are you, a little girl or something?” he said to himself between his breaths, and then he spat on the floor, a little in disgust, and a little to get rid of the excess saliva he had produced while he was running.
After a minute or two he straightened himself, and when he turned to continue on his way, he stared right at the tip of an arrow that was resting on a crossbow and pointing directly at his forehead from only a few centimeters away. With no time to think, Tetra threw up his hands in surrender.
* * *
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing here?” the boy said, his crossbow still pointed at Tetra’s head. He was older than Tetra by maybe two or three years. His body was stocky but muscular, his amber hair short. His clothes were ragged and dirty. He wore a backpack much larger than Tetra’s. Dangling from it on a leather string was a dead rabbit. Although the boy was clearly in charge of the situation, being armed and all, he seemed agitated and nervous. His finger on the trigger was twitching, and he was panting heavily.
“Please,” Tetra said. “Please don’t kill me.”
The older boy lowered his crossbow and made a step forward. He pushed Tetra against the next tree and pressed his arm against his chest. “Answer the bloody question!”
Tetra stared at the boy’s face that was only a few centimeters away from his. He found his sparkling green eyes, the deep pores in his unclean adolescent skin, and his fiery hair strangely attractive, but it was quiet evident that he hadn’t brushed his teeth or taken a shower in a while. Tetra couldn’t blame him. He had yet to take his first post-apocalyptic shower himself, but at least he still had a toothbrush, and he used it, too.
The boy increased the pressure on Tetra’s chest and shouted, “Are you deaf?”
“Kettering!” Tetra hurried to say. “I’m on my way to Kettering.”
The boy took his arm off Tetra’s chest. “Then why aren’t you taking the bloody road?” he said and slapped Tetra’s head. Tetra flinched in anticipation of pain, but the hand only grazed his head.
“I was taking a shortcut.”
“A shortcut through the debris and the undergrowth?” The boy snickered. “How’s that working for you?”
“Not so great, I suppose.”
“I could have killed you!” the boy barked, almost biting off Tetra’s nose.
Tetra looked at the crossbow in the boy’s hand. “Are you hunting?”
“No, I’m on my way to the crossbow championships.” He rolled his eyes. “Of course I’m bloody hunting!”
“Are there any animals left alive then?”
“Not many. Rabbits mostly. Survived in their holes underground. All the deer are dead. Couldn’t find anywhere to hide. Most of the wild boar too, I suppose. I saw a live one earlier, but it escaped. I was trying to follow its trail but then you showed up out of nowhere. The boar is probably miles away by now, so thanks a lot for that!”
“Sorry,” Tetra said sheepishly.
“What do you want in Kettering anyway? The place is in ruins.”
Tetra’s heart sank. “In ruins? Have you been to Kettering? How bad is it?”
“I haven’t been,” the boy said. “But look around you. Doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what it must be like, does it?”
“But surely people will have survived in the underground emergency shelters, no? Even if the buildings above ground got damaged.”
“I wouldn’t know.” The boy looked at Tetra. “Have you got family in Kettering then?”
Tetra nodded. “My father. Well, and my sister, I suppose. Not sure about my mum.”
“Well, good luck,” the boy said and used his crossbow to point westward. “Now get out of my forest. Road’s that way.” He turned and walked away.
“Wait!” Tetra called after him. “Can’t you help me get to Kettering?”
“I just did. Road’s that way. About a mile. Now go.”
“No, I mean … can’t you take me to Kettering? You know your way around the forest better than I do. I might get lost and scare off all your rabbits and wild boar.”
The boy laughed out loud. Then his face turned serious and he said, “Do I look like a bloody babysitter? Road’s that way. Now piss off or I’ll shoot you!”
Tetra begged, “Can’t you please …”
The boy raised his crossbow and aimed it at Tetra.
Tetra turned around and ran.
* * *
Without even once looking over his shoulder, Tetra ran all the way to the main road. When he reached it, he propped his hands against his knees and took a minute or two to catch his breath. He was feeling dizzy, but he resisted the temptation to collapse and fall headfirst to the muddy ground. Once he had caught his breath and his heart stopped racing, he grabbed a bottle of water from his backpack and had a few big swigs as he looked around. The road lay wide and empty. To the north it led back home, to the home he had left only two hours ago. Probably another three hours, maybe four, to the south lay Kettering. Like its surroundings, the road was covered in thick, gray sludge, but ruts on both lanes seemed to suggest that vehicles had been traveling in both directions some time after the impact. How frequently or whether the last vehicle had passed days or just hours ago, Tetra couldn’t tell. He couldn’t see any footprints apart from his own. He looked back into the forest and briefly considered going back and trying to find the boy with crossbow again, but he quickly dismissed the idea. Of course it would have been nice—reassuring—to have a friend or even just a temporary companion, someone who was bigger and stronger than Tetra, and armed. Someone who could help him face the dangers that potentially lay ahead. Tetra’s self-confidence had been dwindling rapidly since he had left the relative safety of his home, and once he had been exposed to the elements, his valor and heroism had quickly turned into angst. There had been reports on the radio about food riots in Birmingham and Manchester in which dozens had been trampled to death, and while Tetra assumed that the population of Kettering was well below the critical mass required to spark riots, he knew there were enough imponderabilia and potential dangers. If someone’s mind was set on kidnapping, raping, and murdering a helpless child, there probably hadn’t been a better time in history to do it than now. If a stranger were to stop beside him here and now and drag Tetra into their car, who would hear his desperate screams for help? He really shouldn’t be out here on his own, but he needed to find his father. Alas, the boy with the crossbow, whom Tetra couldn’t stop thinking about, had made it abundantly clear that he was not for hire. Tetra was on his own, and he had to be grown-up about it, so he marched on, feeling nearly as proud of himself as he felt scared.
After another half hour of walking, he encountered the family. The road was turning a bend, so when he saw them—and they saw him—it was already too late for him to hide and think for a moment whether meeting them would be a good idea or not, the way he could have done, had he spotted them from a mile away. Tetra briefly considered changing the side of the road and simply ignoring them as they passed. He dismissed the idea because it seemed awkward and rude, and two adults in their late thirties with a little girl didn’t appear to be much of a threat. Besides, maybe they were coming from Kettering and could tell him with greater accuracy what the state of the town looked like than the boy with the crossbow.
When they were only forty of fifty meters apart, the little girl broke free from her parents and ran towards Tetra. He kept walking until she stood in front of him. She was younger and smaller than he’d originally thought. Tetra guessed her age at around nine or ten. Her clothes were neat but like her hands and face covered in small blotches of dried sludge.
“Hi,” the girl said.
Tetra nodded. “Hello.”
“What’s your name?”
For some reason he thought it would be safer to give her his real name. “Oliver.”
“His name is Oliver!” the girl shouted over her shoulder. Turning back to Tetra, she said. “I’m Ceria.” Then she wrapped her arms
around Tetra’s right arm and pressed her cheek against it as if he were a found-again long-lost toy. She walked him towards the two adults who had almost caught up. When they reached each other, the girl announced, “He’s nice. I like him.”
The woman took Tetra’s face in her hands and looked at him, smiling. “Such a beautiful little boy,” she said to no one in particular. Then she pressed her nose against the top of Tetra’s head and smelled his hair, inadvertently forcing Tetra to smell her body in return. It was reeking of sweat. “Beautiful,” the woman said again.
“Now now,” the man said. “Let go of the poor chap already, you two. You’re all over him like a pair of vultures.”
They all laughed. Even Tetra mustered a smile when the woman let go of him at last, but Ceria kept clinging to his arm.
“My name is Gordun. This is my wife Edna. And you’ve already met our daughter Ceria.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Oliver.”
“Now tell me, Oliver,” Gordun said, putting his hand on Tetra’s shoulder, “what is a fine young lad such as yourself doing out here all on his own?”
“I’m on my way to Kettering.”
Ceria gasped and tightened her grip around her arm as she looked at him fearfully. Tetra tried to ignore the uncomfortable amount of physical contact.
“Oh dear,” Edna muttered. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
Gordun looked as if he were struggling to find the right words. “Son,” he said gravely, “Kettering is not a good place for a young lad such as yourself.”
“Why?” Tetra asked. “What happened? Is the town in ruins? Did people die? You must tell me, please!”
“Well, the town is not in ruins,” Gordun said, forcing a smile. “Most of the buildings are fairly new and were able to withstand the impact remarkably well. That’s the good news, I suppose. The only good news. But the people …” He looked at his wife who wiped away a silent tear and nodded, encouraging him to continue. “You see, Oliver, there has been an accident at one of the public emergency shelters. A terrible, terrible accident. Nobody knows what exactly happened because there were no …” He took a deep breath. “A fire broke out at the shelter. It must have been at exactly the time when the fire was raining from the sky on the outside because the entrance of the shelter was tightly barred. It is thought that when the fire broke out, some people were trying to open the door and get out while others were defending the doors because they didn’t want the hellfire that was raging outside coming in. When we opened the doors …” His voice was trembling now. “When we forced the doors open from the outside the next day, there were signs of a struggle. We found people with stab wounds right near the entrance. They must have been killed in defense of the doors by those who were desperately trying to get out. In the end, they all perished. Over a thousand people in that shelter, and not a single one got out alive. May God bless their poor souls. The last thing they ever felt was fear. The last thing they ever heard were the screams of people dying. It must have been a horrible, horrible scene right out of hell.”
Tetra was speechless. A million thoughts were running amok in his head. He tried to remember every little detail about his mother’s place in Kettering, the location of the public emergency shelters, and the conversation his father had had with Olivia on the phone before he had left. Tetra’s mind desperately tried to come up with plausible scenarios that involved his father and sister not spending the night at one of the public shelters, but where else would they have gone, and why? His father had gone to Kettering to bring Olivia back home, and he’d had plenty of time. What could have delayed them so much that it had been too late for them to leave the town? And then where did they go? There were too many questions and only one way to get the answers.
“I have to go,” Tetra said and started walking, but Ceria, still clinging on to his arm, held him back.
“Let me go!” he said and broke free with a violent jerk of his arm. “I have to find my dad!”
Edna turned to Gordun. “You cannot let him go!”
Gordun blocked Tetra’s way and raised his hands. “Look, son, I know you’re upset now, but please listen to me. I’m not finished yet. There is something else you should know about the town and its people.”
Tetra looked at him impatiently. “Unless you can tell me what happened to my dad, I don’t want to hear it!” He tried to make his way past Gordun, but the man placed an iron grip around his arm. Tetra yelped more out of surprise than pain.
“You must hear it, son! These people … they’re not good people. They’re dangerous!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The town council …,” Gordun said. “In the months before the impact, the council got money from the government, like all councils across the country, to buy emergency food rations, enough of them to last the entire population of the town at least two weeks after the impact. But when on the morning after the impact the people of Kettering went to the warehouse where they thought the food rations were stored, it was empty. Completely empty. Not a single grain of rice, not a single pea, nothing. The people got very angry, and so they went to the houses where the council members lived, but they couldn’t find any of them. They could only find the wife of one council member and the son of another. They both said that the two council members had disappeared before the impact and that they had no idea where they were. But the people, an angry mob by now, didn't believe a word they heard, and then they … they beat them both to death. A fifty-five-year-old woman who had lived in Kettering her entire life, and a twenty-three-year-old boy, just out of university. Beaten to death with spades and clubs, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, in the middle of England. It was pure barbarism.” Gordun shot a look at the sky as if he were blaming God. “Anyway, while some people were busy rioting in the street, the rest of us had started to clear the bodies from the emergency shelter. We couldn’t just leave them there, could we? They had to be identified and given a proper burial, because even if civilization breaks down, we’re still human, aren’t we? We couldn’t just leave them at the shelter, shut the door and forget about it, could we? So we decided to carry the bodies to the gymnasium of the nearby school, all of them, one by one. At the gymnasium we put them on the floor, divided into three sections. One for those who had been stabbed or trampled to death or died from smoke inhalation. You know, victims that were still easy to identify by the people who knew them personally. One section, at the other end of the gymnasium, was for the charred remains that we’d never be able to identify. And then we had the third section, the biggest one, for those whose bodies had been cooked by the heat of the fire and roasted by the flames. There were hundreds of them, and we had lined them all up side by side, and their smell filled the entire gymnasium. Do you know what a whole gymnasium full of roasted human bodies smells like, son?”
Unable to speak, Tetra shook his head. He didn’t even want to know.
“I’ll tell you what it smells like, because it’s a small I shall never forget as long as I live. It smells like a barbecue. The biggest barbecue you have ever seen. Tons of mouthwatering crisp, tender, and juicy meat in that gymnasium, and outside a mob, hungry and furious because they just found out that they don’t have enough food to feed the whole town for more than a day or two. Can you imagine that, son?”
Tetra was aghast. He wasn’t sure what scared him more, the story he had just heard or the way Gordun had told it, with a deranged look in his sparkling eyes and a creepy, mad smile on his face. Beginning to feel nauseous, Tetra took a step back from the man. “I … I think I better go now,” he said in a low voice as if he were trying not to wake a sleeping dog. While he was still trying to figure out whether he should walk or run, he heard Edna’s voice behind him.
“I’ve had enough of this shit!”
Tetra saw the surprised look on Gordun’s face, but before he had the time to turn around, his lights went out.
* * *
When Tetra came to, he found himsel
f sitting on the forest floor, stark naked, his hands tied behind the tree he was leaning against. The bruise on the back of his head was the size of a small chicken egg, and it hurt like hell when it touched the tree. A few meters away, with their backs towards him, Edna was tending a fire while Gordun was building a contraption out of tree branches and metal rods that conspicuously resembled a rotisserie—a big one. In the distance, Ceria was gathering more firewood. Still dazed from the blackout and overwhelmed by an immediate onset of panic and mortal fear, Tetra’s brain short-circuited and he started to shout at the top of his lungs.
“Help! Heeeelp!”
They didn’t leave him much time. Gordun immediately turned around and walked towards him. He pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and stuffed it in Tetra’s mouth. Tetra gagged at the vile, acrid taste, but he didn’t have enough food in his stomach to vomit.
With a deranged smile, his lips glistening with saliva, Gordun patted Tetra’s head and said, “There, there. That’s a good boy. Now don’t you worry, it’s gonna be all right.”
He rose to his feet and took a few steps back. Meanwhile, Ceria had dropped off her firewood by the fire that Edna was stoically tending and ran over to Tetra. She kneeled down by his side and gently stroked his arm. Tetra turned his head to look at her, breathing heavily through his nose, his heart pounding in his chest. In her face he saw the same deranged smile, in her eyes the same madness he saw in Gordun.
Eschaton - Season One Page 26