And then, as Julian was considering chewing his nails because he was worried that he was going to chew through his lip, the street suddenly seemed to clear. As if they’d been summoned, the things that still prowled and lingered abruptly departed.
Moved as one. Urgent and intense.
Pearcey calmly transferred Julian and their few possessions to the car. Swiftly and sedately as if they were simply adhering to a tight schedule and were in danger of being late for their next appointment. They were travelling before Julian truly had time to appreciate it, their temporary shelter disappearing behind them, the front door open and swinging in the gentle breeze.
Pearcey piloted them onto the motorway. The M1.
For fifteen minutes, they sped along, making faster progress than at any point during the previous day. There were abandoned vehicles, but less than Julian had expected, and the road was navigable. On two occasions cars flew past them on the opposite side of the motorway, heading south. They spied a few mutated creatures at the sides of the road, a few prowling around empty vehicles, but not the density of numbers that they’d encountered the day before.
The first real blockage that they hit was impassable. Monumental and complete, no possibility of negotiating a way round it. Not without heavy lifting gear and a raft of specialised personnel, and Julian thought they had more chance of booking a last minute getaway break in sunny Spain than the emergency services turning up.
The accident must have been horrific. In the distance, they could still see a smoking tangle of metal that completely obstructed all three lanes. Between that pile up and themselves sat a solid mass of abandoned vehicles. Julian wondered if it was the remains of some impromptu convoy, people banding together to escape. Strength and safety in numbers sort of thing. Whatever the circumstance, it had ended in disaster.
Long before they reached the jam, figures could be perceived moving amongst the mass of cars and trucks. Things that jumped on top of cars and dropped from view just as quickly. Hunched and stalking, darting into the greenery at the side of the road with sharp bursts of speed.
Pearcey slowed and stopped. Considered the opposite lane across a median strip that was double fenced. Two metal guard rails separated by a thin ribbon of patchily anaemic grass. On that, stretching away into the distance, towering concrete poles that sprouted twin lights. Quite possibly the only thing that could grow in that grass Pearcey thought. The southbound lane was clear but he didn’t think he could crash those barriers without possibly writing the car off in the process. That wasn’t a possibility he wanted to entertain, not even for one minute. He couldn’t see any figures in their immediate vicinity, but Pearcey had a premonition of movement in the bushes off to their side. It might have just been the wind, but then again it might not.
In the rear view mirror he observed another car approaching. Approaching fast. It grew from a speck to a discernible shape with an alarming rapidity. A low slung black car. An Audi TT if he had to make a guess. Really shifting. Really rocketing down the road baby. That was a driver who was in a real rush to get somewhere.
The thing that lurched out of the bushes didn’t so much run at them as hobble in a perverse parody of haste.
Julian screamed as it fell against his window. Claws clacking on the metal and glass. Teeth perpetually bared by the inferno that had blackened and consumed its mutated flesh. It had somehow survived that fire, but it had been twisted beyond even the metamorphosis of the disease. The disease didn’t give up easily though. That mutative force, that transformative stealer of humanity, laboured to preserve its child. Strove to repair irreparable damage and prolong the new life of its progeny. Blistered and ravaged as it was, the creature lived past its natural destruction and obeyed the feral hunger that was now its essence.
“Go. Carlton. Go. Please,” Julian moaned.
The thing swung a stiffened arm, a peeling black stick tipped with spear points. The claws punctured and sank into the roof. Julian stared into its dry tooth-rimmed maw. Millimetres of glass the only barrier between them. If the next swing hit glass, he thought that barrier might be gone. Just hard little pieces lying in his lap.
Pearcey was aware of the creature. Also aware of those that were filtering through the cars in front them to crouch and observe. All too aware.
The gun rested between his thighs, the barrel pointing at Julian. He didn’t intend shooting the monstrosity at the side window, shooting out the glass, until there was absolutely no choice. That would seriously damage what little integrity the vehicle still retained as a protection. He thought he could do it quickly enough if he had to. Kill the creature and save Julian. They’d find out one way or another.
And he wouldn’t move the car. He couldn’t.
He had no idea what that crazy deathwish fucker in the sports car was going to do. TT man was nearly with them and wasn’t slowing. Not even slowing a little bit from what Pearcey perceived. Whatever TT man was doing, the crazy bastard didn’t appear to be anticipating the road. If he was, he was anticipating the end of the road.
The Audi blew past them in a blur.
Very close.
If the Impreza had still possessed wing mirrors, the one on Pearcey’s side would have misted into oblivion. They both felt their car not just rock, but actually shift in the backwash, the backend of the Impreza wanting to chase after one and half tons of black skinned bullet.
Pearcey watched fascinated as his death skimmed past.
It hadn’t slowed as it closed in and he’d thought it would hit them.
Was in truth astonished when it missed, however narrow the miss turned out to be.
He followed its course as it impacted the jam of cars. For a brief moment, it was as if some fractious melding occurred. The black car seemed to disappear in a slowly blossoming cloud of debris. A cloud that spread and enveloped the stalled cars around it. Pearcey would later imagine that he witnessed the explosion actually begin. Imagine that he saw that first spark turn into a tiny glowing sun before it became the massive flaming ball that shredded the air and hurled lethal chunks of wreckage in all directions.
Belatedly, Pearcey ducked and pulled Julian down below the dashboard with him. But not before Julian had time to see the creatures that were mixed in with that debris. Blown and scattered like so much waste. Not before Julian had time to see a ragged disc of metal come whirling from the conflagration like some raw edged frisbee. Watched it come whistling toward them.
Toward him was what he thought. He didn’t have time to see it skim past the car, a foot to his left. The creature there had staggered in the blast and as it reeled back toward the car, still fixated on Julian, that rough wheel of metal scythed into it. Vertically imbedded itself into the creature’s head and neck, the force of the impact whisking it backwards. The thing travelled thirty feet without touching the ground before it slid another twenty on the grass verge. Twitching and dead by the time it stopped forever, half concealed by roadside greenery.
As more wreckage pinged and rained around the car, Pearcey, still wedged behind the dashboard, awkwardly shifted it into reverse and backed it up in a wavering drunken line. As soon as he felt safe enough to do so, he sat upright and swung the car in a tight half circle and began driving back the way they’d come. Creatures were already beginning to appear, running in the direction of the crash.
“These things are fucking unreal. They hear a noise and assume they can eat whatever made it,” Pearcey said disgustedly.
“We need to get off the motorway for a while by the looks of it.”
He scrutinised the new chips on the windshield.
“We got some hits from that shrapnel shitstorm but the old warhorse seems to be running okay so fingers crossed it’ll keep rolling.”
Julian nodded as Pearcey accelerated and weaved to avoid the creatures that had appeared on the road.
“What were they doing? The person driving that car. Surely they saw the traffic jam? They must have.”
Pearcey kept his e
yes on the road but he replied.
“We’ll never know Jules. It’s one of those questions that won’t have any good answers so you’re better off not asking it.”
Julian nodded again. He could think of answers and none of them were in any way good.
<><><>
They drove on and then attempted to rejoin the motorway around Newport Pagnell but they encountered problems almost immediately. Worse than the blocked roadway were the swarms of creatures. There were hundreds.
Ahead they could make out some sort obstruction in the road but they never got close enough to discover the specific cause. The area in front of them boiled with mutated humanity like a steaming sewer full of voracious rats. Pearcey had noticed an increased frequency of them in the last minute or two but had expected it to thin when he hit the motorway. He hadn’t anticipated this heaving sea of clawed savagery. However curious he might have been to know the reason for it, he extricated them as fast as he could. The density of monsters behind them was also swelling at an alarming rate.
“Jules, I’m done with the fucking autobahn unless you have any objection. That objection will have to be backed up with a very well-reasoned argument as well my friend. Because frankly, and I never thought I’d say it after cursing city driving for most of my life, the freeway is beginning to give me the fucking heebeegeebees.”
Julian had no objections.
<><><>
On the outskirts of Birmingham city centre, the Impreza started making a worrying ka-chunking sound. Even Julian, who wouldn’t have recognised an odd sound in a car’s engine if it stood up and sang the national anthem to him with a personal dedication at the end, agreed that it was conspicuous.
“The fucking suicide bomber in the TT. I think the blast may have done something.”
Pearcey looked across at his companion as he spoke.
“There was a lot of crap flying. A bit of it might’ve punched into the engine. How far away do you think we are?”
Julian consulted the road atlas.
“Twenty-five miles perhaps. As long we don’t hit too many detours. Are we going to break down? Petrol will be tight anyway by the looks of it,” he replied, peering at the gauge.
Pearcey tucked his lower lip inside his top teeth and frowned at the road in front of him.
Estimating. Guessing.
“Let’s just keep our fingers crossed and push on. With just a bit of fucking luck we’re nearly there. And don’t worry about that gauge, it always reads low.”
<><><>
Pearcey was correct in some respects. In others he was way wide of the mark. With some luck, they could have arrived at their destination in no time at all. But luck was in short supply these days and, in fairness, they’d used up a fair old slice of theirs already.
And he was correct in not being concerned about the reading on the fuel gauge. They didn’t have very much petrol but what they did have would be perfectly sufficient for what remained of their journey. That would turn out to be well short of their target of the Black Hills Institute.
It wouldn’t be too long at all before Pearcey’s trusty old Impreza would reach its final resting place where it would gradually rust away to nothing.
Just another piece of mysterious and archaic wreckage in a world full of such relics.
<><><>
“What the fuck is this? The sign said five ways not five fucking islands.”
Pearcey weaved around an empty car and circled the main island again. He slowed and peered for signs. It was a huge roundabout with some sort of sunken level in the middle. Trees were planted on the lower level and they’d grown up high, so high that they bordered and loomed above the road above them.
Creatures crawled in the trees, hung there like some new strain of exotically hideous parasite. The thought of them raining down on the car was making Julian squirm in his seat. Carlton’s repeated circuit of the island wasn’t helping make him any less nervous.
Pearcey eventually chose an exit onto another adjoining island. They’d decided to go through the centre of Birmingham because it was quicker and in theory less populated because it wasn’t residential. Whether that logic stood up to scrutiny was something that they couldn’t know. Who knew anything now?
Julian was worried about the noise from the engine. Worried about how much petrol they had. Worried that at some point one of those things that used to be a person, one of the Jacks, as Carlton sometimes called them, was going to throw itself at the car and come crashing through his side window. Or through the windscreen.
They were his immediate worries because they just happened to be at the front of a long queue. When he’d told Carlton that he wasn’t sure if he could do this, wasn’t sure if he could survive this insanity, he hadn’t been lying. He hadn’t gone into any depth with Carlton about those feelings but he really did doubt his ability to deal with it.
He’d managed to block thoughts of his family and friends. Managed also to shut off the horror of the CIMC shelter behind them in London. However, he was struggling to not think about the driver of the black car. The man or woman who had driven at over a hundred miles an hour into what was effectively a solid steel wall.
That hadn’t been an accident. That person had chosen to do it. To end themselves in a cloud of metal and fire.
Did they intend doing it when they got into the car? Or did they start driving and see whatever they saw and decide that oblivion was better?
Whatever the sequence, whatever the process of their descent, Julian was worried that he might get to a point where he understood it. Worried that he might one day identify with the choice they’d made.
He was really worried about that one. How did you deal with this insanity and remain sane? Who could take this madness and accept it and keep going?
Carlton Pearcey?
Wearied by the world and wise to its worst excesses, possessed of a practicality that Julian couldn’t really grasp, calculating and cold when circumstance demanded. Did Carlton know how to deal with this? When Julian looked over at those red rimmed eyes, he thought that however much good advice he offered, Carlton was only human. And that phrase now carried nuances which were new and not completely clear to him.
A lot of people maintained that suicide was the coward’s way out, but Julian didn’t see it like that at all. He was too scared of death to see anything cowardly in consciously choosing it. What Julian cleaved to, clung to like a desperate man in a flood clings to a crumbling chunk of his roof when the rest of the house has washed away, was that to do what the driver of the black car had done required a desperation that equated to bravery. A bravery that Julian didn’t possess. Whatever inspired that bravery wasn’t strictly relevant. Be it despair, grief or plain old insanity, Julian didn’t want to attain that level of courage.
It was becoming apparent that there were more creatures than they’d realised. In the brief time in which they’d circled the island and slowed their speed, a growing number had converged. Drawn to the noise and motion of the car.
As Pearcey chose the exit that took them down Broad Street, he had to break through a small group. Smashing the vehicle into them. Flinging them aside in a fury of broken limbs and spinning bodies. His foot jammed to the accelerator as they broke through, left the roundabout and shot down a gently curving street lined with bars, shops and offices.
The ka-chunking sound in the engine increased in volume and pitch. A new loud metallic spanging sound made them both glance down automatically.
“What the fuck ...” Carlton muttered in exasperated uncertainty.
It sounded as though some overworked piece of metal was about to burst up through the floor at their feet.
Perhaps it was that spanging noise that made them fail to see the flatbed truck in time. It could have been. There was absolutely no doubt that the noise was a distraction. Added to the ka-chunking clank that was already there, there might also have been enough racket to at least partially mask the approach of another vehicle.
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Of course, it might have been the combination of stress and fatigue. They’d been under unrelenting pressure for some time. Understandably, neither had gotten very much real sleep of late. Even for an individual like Pearcey, trained and experienced, these were trying times. And you had to remember, they were being chased. They certainly couldn’t forget it.
Not that it mattered ultimately.
Pearcey nor the other driver would ever be prosecuted for reckless driving. Natural justice was more the order of the day now. As they screamed round a bend in the road, the oncoming tri axle flatbed trailer was virtually upon them.
It was very big and quite old and going disastrously fast. It had seen a lot of miles alright and hauled a fair few loads by the look of it. Unlikely though that it had ever made a journey quite like this, its final trip.
On the driver’s side, a creature hung precariously to the front of the truck, its upper body inside the cab. Another clung stubbornly to the roof spoiler whilst also attempting to gain access to the cab.
Pearcey had time to see three passengers. Not details, but he could make out that the driver was scrunched up against the other two people. Vainly trying to control the vehicle and at the same time avoid the thing that was half into the cab. At the last moment the driver also vainly attempted to avoid the collision.
Pearcey’s reactions kicked in a little too late. His last conscious act was to wrench the wheel to the left in order to miss the oncoming truck. It very nearly succeeded, but as the man once said, close ain’t no cigar. The right of the Impreza hit at just enough of an angle to impact and deflect.
After that the world turned upside down and went dark for Carlton Pearcey.
The Impreza twisted and rotated through the air like a skewed bullet and landed on its roof still travelling forward. Inverted, it skidded in a shower of sparks and disintegrating glass. Mounting the curb, the car crunched into the wall of a building and scraped along that until coming to rest with the front end poking out beyond the end of the wall.
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