by Rich Hawkins
Morse’s heart was palpitating as he looked back and saw the SUV come down the slope and into the field.
“Keep going,” he said to Violet. “They’re following. They’re not giving up.”
Violet was muttering under her breath. Morse thought she was praying.
*
They emerged onto a narrow road. Morse glanced back, but didn’t see the SUV behind them.
Violet said, “If the road’s blocked at some point, we’re fucked.”
“I know. Keep going.”
She slowed the Land Rover to skirt around a rusting Volvo crashed halfway into the hedgerow. Half a mile further on, they entered a village. Violet kept at a steady speed through the deserted high street. Morse glimpsed movement in some windows and gardens; staggering figures reacting to the sound of the engine.
There was a crossroads ahead, directly in the middle of the village. A set of traffic lights, and a church further on.
The Burned Man stood by the roadside as they passed. He stared at Morse without expression. His blackened skin wept from glistening cysts. He moved his mouth slowly, as if invoking something old and forgotten.
When the Burned Man grinned, Morse looked away.
He whispered the man’s name and apologised.
“Did you say something?” asked Violet.
They were halfway through the crossroads.
Morse went to answer her.
The SUV came at them from their right and there was barely time to shout a warning before the plough on its front swiped the Land Rover from the road.
CHAPTER FIFTY
His vision trembled and he put his hands to his face and groaned as the world shuddered in the aftermath of the crash. Violet was murmuring something as she tried to raise her head from her chest. Morse looked towards the front of the car, where steam was rising from the engine, and the bonnet was crumpled and hanging open after hitting the garden wall. The stink of engine coolant and hot metal. The airbags had already deflated.
Everything blurred, dipping in-and-out of focus until nausea swelled in his stomach. He ached all over and his head was pounding. He pawed for the seatbelt release, and when he was free he grabbed the pistol from the footwell and climbed out of the Land Rover on unsteady legs. When he took a breath it ached through his teeth. He closed his eyes to stop the ground from moving underneath him.
Looking back down the road he saw the SUV trying to reverse out of the slopping mess of a rock pond, its wheels spraying up brown water and mud.
Several infected began to emerge from ruined houses and beneath piles of debris. Filthy, shivering creatures crawling from their nests. They headed towards the SUV, hands grasping at the air, their mouths working like mechanical traps. Men, women, children. One woman slithered from underneath a mound of bones and trash and went down on her knees as tumultuous appendages and stingers burst from the dripping cavity of her torso. Her limbs twisted into sharp points and she went onto all fours and skittered in the direction of the SUV, mewling like a sickly newborn thing.
Morse pulled Violet from her seat. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and looked at the ruined front of the Land Rover. “I’ll live.” She leaned against the side of the Land Rover and held her leg, while Morse retrieved the bag with their meagre supplies inside.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We seem to have agitated the villagers.”
Violet took the lump hammer from her pocket. Morse slung the bag over one shoulder, the crowbar in his hand. The pistol was tucked under his belt.
They hurried down the road, away from the Land Rover, just as more infected appeared from between the houses, drawn by the sound of the SUV’s engine and the gunshots.
The men of the Order were fighting off the infected. Pained shrieks and cries stirred the air. Morse glanced back to see two of the men stood either side of the SUV, firing pistols at the diseased villagers, who fell in their disordered ranks.
Violet gasped and grimaced, trailing her right leg slightly. Morse helped her along as they approached a short stone bridge flanked with iron railings.
“You should leave me here and go on by yourself,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Don’t be fucking stupid. Keep moving.”
An infected man in a ripped chef’s tunic stumbled from the doorway of a half-collapsed building, painfully contorted and gasping. The man sighted them and opened his mouth; the squirming horror of his tongue flicked at the air past his teeth. Another infected creature appeared behind him, covered in dirt and encrusted fluids, its neck swollen with rippling tumours.
“Keep moving,” Morse said, trying to move faster. Violet moaned at the pain in her leg. “We’re not giving up now.”
You should shoot her, a voice at the back of his mind said. She’s slowing you down.
He shook his head.
Do it. Survival of the fittest. You’ll die with her, otherwise…
More infected emerged from the other side of the road, slavering and squealing.
Shoot Violet in the leg. Cripple her. Escape. Survive.
The infected screamed and wailed, hungry for flesh, lost in a haze of bloodlust.
Do what you always do. Survive when others die.
Morse pulled the pistol from his belt, swallowing the knot in his gullet. He looked at Violet. “I’m sorry.”
She turned to him. “Sorry for what?”
He let out a rasping breath. He felt sick.
“You’re worrying me, Morse…”
When he spoke, his voice was calm and ordered. “Go on alone, while I keep these fuckers busy. I’ll catch up. I promise.”
“Morse…” Confusion in her eyes.
“No argument. Just do it. I’ll find you.”
“But…”
“I’ll see you again, Violet.”
She looked at him, then grabbed either side of his head and kissed his brow. “You’re a stupid bastard, Morse.”
He smiled wanly and handed her the bag. “Just go.”
She turned, stumbling away, and glanced back over her shoulder as Morse stood in the middle of the road and waited for the infected to reach him.
*
Violet spied the shallow river beneath her as she hobbled across the bridge and then down the narrow street. She entered the churchyard, caught in the shadow of the church tower looming above her. Glancing around to make sure she wasn’t followed, she stepped amongst the old graves, using the headstones to support her weight. She winced and stopped, then tried to continue, but in the end she slumped to the ground with her back against one of the gravestones, exhausted and sore, watching the rise and fall of her chest while she tried to regain her breath. The lump hammer’s grip was slick with sweat as she held it tightly.
The gunshots from back up the street sounded so distant. She exhaled in shuddering breaths. Her eyes were stinging with tears. A wave of regret at leaving Morse behind swept through her body in juddering bursts. She hoped death came quickly for him.
It began to rain. She made a sound like the beginning of hysterical laughter, staring up at the sky with her mouth open. And stayed that way for a short while, and only when she heard the pattering of limbs nearby did she lower her face to meet the spindly-legged thing coming towards her from between the graves.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Morse stood on the small bridge, flanked by old metal railings, and shot the first infected that reached him. The shuddering old man whose back was covered in needle-thin spines collapsed near his feet with his black heart blown from his chest.
He put the pistol away to save the last round for himself and raised the crowbar as a woman in the flapping remnants of a dressing gown reached for him with raw hands. And when the crowbar impacted with her face, it crumpled inwards and she fell down wailing until Morse silenced her with a downward swing that broke her skull and exposed the glistening pulp of her brain.
More infected came for him – disjointed and frail, murmuring in spasmodic bursts �
� and he killed them all, crushing their skulls and shattering their bones until their broken bodies lay around him and he was last man standing. They had been weak, malnourished creatures, like starving street addicts. He felt no pride in their murder.
After he wiped his eyes of tears he looked down the road. The SUV was facing towards him. The masked men of the Order watched from behind the windscreen. They had killed the other infected. Bodies sprawled all over the street. Gardens of flesh and twitching piles. The stink of them was abhorrent. More death in the shattered wastelands.
Morse stared at the SUV, his shoulders sagging and tense with exertion, his limbs heavy and aching.
The rev of the SUV’s engine was the only sound.
Morse spat, wiped his mouth with his fingers. Nowhere to run. A flickering image of Florence appeared in his mind. He said her name and smiled through the pain of his mouth.
The masked men watched him.
He took the pistol from his belt and considered using it on himself, but it felt pointless when so many others in this damp hell wanted to take his life instead.
The SUV started towards Morse, tyres screeching and over the tarmac and building up speed until it was screaming straight for him down the road.
He raised the pistol. Took aim, steadied his hand with the other, and as he let out a ragged breath he pulled the trigger.
He said her name.
The bullet pierced the windscreen and took the driver in the chest; his hands flinched on the steering wheel and the SUV veered to the side of the road, passing Morse by less than an arm’s length as it crashed through the bridge’s iron railings and plunged to the river below.
Morse fell to his knees and dropped the pistol, lowering his face to the surface of the road. A burst of laughter that wasn’t his own slipped from his mouth. Then he crawled to the side of the bridge and looked down to the shallow river. The SUV had landed on its roof, and two of the men were trying to climb out of the battered vehicle; flailing in the water, their masks fallen from their faces, soaked and gasping. The wheels were still spinning. Smoke rose from the underside of the vehicle.
The infected were upon the men as soon as they emerged from the SUV, tearing and biting, dragging the men onto the riverbank to pull them apart. And when they were done with them, the infected reached inside the vehicle for the other men and pulled them out through the water. One of them regained consciousness at the same moment a girl pierced the top of his head with the stinger that emerged from her gaping mouth, and he screamed until the other infected smothered his face with their own. Then there was merely the sound of meat being sucked from his skull and his legs kicking on the riverbank stones.
Morse lay on the road, staring at the sky. When the rain started falling he was grateful and hoped it would wash him clean.
*
As he was limping past the graveyard, Violet rushed out to meet him, her hair and face dusted with soil, and her eyes manic like she’d seen something from her nightmares. She fell against him, breathing hard, trembling. She looked up at him.
“It was digging them up,” she said. “Scavenging on the dead.”
When Morse looked towards the churchyard, he glimpsed a thin shape on gangling legs darting between the headstones, and he told Violet they should leave before it grew tired of bones ransacked from old graves.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Four miles south-west of Bristol.
The mist had moved in less than an hour ago as they walked along the motorway. They listened for footfalls and wheezing breaths. Morse looked at his shaking hands. Violet offered him a weak, awkward smile. He faced forward, where he could only see a dozen yards down the road before it faded into the mist.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
*
The mist absorbed the ambient sounds of the land and cloaked it all in silence. They found a truck loaded with antique furniture; some of it had spilled onto the road in the long ago and now most of it was rotting and splintered. A mahogany table and a grandfather clock. A sideboard. A piano tilted at an angle on the road, its back legs snapped and buckled.
Violet raised the fallboard and tinkled the piano keys.
“Did you play?” said Morse.
She ran one finger over the lid, lost in thought. “Not really. My mum tried to get me to learn with a private teacher when I was sixteen, but I never took to it. And the teacher was an old perv who kept trying to look down my top.”
Morse spat.
The truck’s cab was burnt out. Anonymous bones all blackened and covered in ash. The steering wheel was a charred relic. A roasted boot in the driver’s footwell.
They walked on.
“I dream about flying,” Violet said.
Morse watched the mist. “Like Superman?”
She snorted. “No; I’m in a plane. A 747…or something like that, and I’m in my seat and other passengers are in their seats. People going on holiday and honeymoons. Happy people. Families. All that shit. There’re usually a few celebrities amongst us.”
“Like who?”
“That bloke on that kids’ show.”
“Which one?”
“Doctor Who.”
“Was it a kids’ show?”
“Seemed to be when I watched it.”
“Fair enough. Which Doctor was it?”
“The one who’s Scottish, but put on a Cockney accent.”
“David Tennant?”
“That’s the one. He was in the Harry Potter films too.”
“I didn’t know that. What happened in the dream?”
Violet’s face darkened. She pursed her mouth. “They all get infected, and I’m only the one that’s still normal. And I can hear the screams inside their heads and they’re begging me to help them. Then something happens and the fuselage bursts open and we’re all pulled out and then I’m falling – we’re all falling – but we never hit the ground.”
“I have no fucking idea what that means,” said Morse.
She laughed without humour. “Me neither. It’s just dreams, isn’t it?”
“Reality is just as fucked up. Has been for a while.”
“Absolutely. My grandad would have called it God’s Wrath.”
“Really?”
“Big time. He was all about that sort of shit. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters now…if it ever did.”
“Grandad used to say ‘the hearts of men are fickle and greedy’. Stuff about the ‘folly of man’, whatever the fuck that is. Pretty mental.”
“Sounds like a people person.”
“Only if you believed what he believed.”
“I knew plenty of people like that.”
“He was still a good man, in his own way,” Violet said. “He tried his best. Died of a heart attack on Christmas Day in 1998.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Morse stopped.
She halted beside him. “What’s wrong?”
“Listen.” He frowned, squinted into the mist ahead and to the right. He could hear the sound of harsh breathing drifting towards them, like someone with a lung infection struggling for air.
Violet looked at him. “I hear it.”
And when Morse turned his head to follow the sound he saw a man limping along the other side of the carriageway, partly-shrouded by the mist, thin and mangled, coughing blood onto his chin and chest. A sickly wraith in flapping clothes holding his hands to his throat while a low growl ensconced in fluid escaped from his mouth. His feet scraped over the road, and when he was gone Morse and Violet remembered to breathe again.
*
They were passing through the Mendip Hills. Through the mist, the faint forms of slopes and rises could be seen. A road sign ahead. KEEP APART 2 CHEVRONS. Morse grunted.
“D
o you still want to do this?” he asked Violet. “You can leave, find somewhere safe. You could survive.”
Violet scratched her face. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“Fair enough.” He checked the map and tried to estimate their position. He thought that Banwell was to their east. The villages of Christon and Luxton were somewhere to the west.
They arrived at an old army truck abandoned on the motorway. A hulking shape with no shadow.
Violet looked up at the vehicle. “This belonged to the Order.”
Morse checked the truck, but there was no one inside and no supplies left behind. He spat.
Violet walked around to the front of the truck and returned a few seconds later. “Looks like it ran out of diesel. Engine’s cold.”
Morse looked on the ground for any signs that Florence had been there. He only gave up when Violet said they should move on, and he agreed and followed her down the road.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
As they went on, Morse stared at the TrafficMaster cameras atop four metre tall poles. Sensors and antennae. All of it dead. No one was watching.
A cluster of buildings to the left of the motorway past a wire fence. Possibly a factory. A sign for a metalworks.
They kept walking, their feet dragging on the road. Crackle of grit. Stepping over weeds, rags and trash. Dead leaves. The top layer of tarmac was crumbling in places.
“The mist smells of decay,” Violet said.