A man’s voice, cracking with fear, called out as Royce hobbled into the dark of the narrow hallway and stood back from the door. The man was pleading to be let inside and hammering on the door so hard it rattled on its hinges. Royce stood back and stared at the door. He swallowed hard down his throat and into his gullet. His stomach was all knotted and gurgling. He breathed through the holes in his face.
“Let me in! Please let me in!”
The man’s cries were getting louder and more desperate, but Royce didn’t move, because his legs felt concrete-set and he couldn’t lift his feet from the floor. He wished that the man would leave the door alone, and his hands curled and uncurled at his sides as he backed against the wall.
“Let me in!”
It could be a trick, Royce thought. Could be a ruse to lure him out and open the doors, so the man could take the house for himself. Maybe there were others out there, watching from a distance, waiting and planning. Thieves and murderers. Maybe they had been watching the house since he’d arrived.
The man went to each downstairs window in turn, fumbling and banging on the glass. He wouldn’t be able to smash through the double-glazing unless he had something heavy duty, or a gun. Then Royce heard the back door being tried, and he held his breath, but the barricade held. The man circled back to the front of the house and shouted again. Royce crouched against the wall in the dark and folded his arms over his chest and laid them on his knees. He rocked back and forth as the man shouted, swore and threw himself at the door.
An inhuman scream came from the beyond the house. The man began sobbing, and Royce wanted to let him in, but he didn’t move from the wall even though he was ashamed of his cowardice and hated himself for it.
*
Royce limped up the stairway to the window on the landing, where he pulled back a flap of curtain and looked outside. The man was stumbling across the adjacent field away from the house and the road, tripping and flailing, a rucksack hanging from one shoulder and slowing him down. Even from fifty yards away the emaciation of the man’s body was obvious through his ragged clothing. He was no member of a murderous gang; he was just another desperate survivor, no different than Royce.
A pack of infected emerged from a dark thicket into the field. There were seven of them, awful shapes in the pale light; ravenous and wasted. Limbs twisted with horrid movements and mouths snapping at the air. They sighted the man across the field and set after him. The man looked back once, then stumbled and tripped, falling to his knees as the rucksack fell from his shoulder. He rose and staggered onwards, then realised he’d left the rucksack behind, but when he turned around the infected were within forty yards of him and he slumped as he seemed to accept he couldn’t reach the bag before the infected reached him. So he stumbled onwards, but he didn’t make it far before he stopped again. He was crying, his head lowered, his hands making a gesture of prayer.
It all happened very quickly.
The infected fell upon him and he was lost beneath the writhing bodies and grabbing hands, and all those mouths.
The man was dismantled and emptied upon the field and his opened body steamed into the cold air.
CHAPTER FIVE
Royce lay on the sofa with a photo of his family in one hand. He was a lumpen shape under the blankets. The guilt inside him like the weight of stones. Acid broiled in his stomach and made him nauseous. Maybe he had done the right thing, because if he’d let the man into the house, the infected would have followed.
It gave him no comfort.
He mouthed the names of his wife and his daughter and mourned them through the dark hours as the infected wailed in the desolate fields.
He did not sleep that night.
*
The dawn came like the rise of something unclean beyond the curve of the Earth. Birdsong woke him, and he went to a window and peered outside to see that the infected were gone. His ankle felt better, although he was careful when he moved and each step was taken slowly through the cold house. He dry-heaved into the toilet then leaned against the bowl and closed his eyes. He stayed that way for a while, but then his legs began to stiffen, so he stood and went downstairs.
*
His breakfast was a Mars bar and some water. The craving for a strong, sweet coffee and buttered toast with sliced banana darkened his mood. He gathered his remaining supplies and left the house. The morning was dull and cold. He wondered how long it was till Christmas or if it had already passed.
He went down to where the infected had killed the man, and scattered the crows who’d been feeding on the scraps. They settled upon a nearby tree and watched him, waiting for him to leave. He stood over the remains, whispering an apology. He asked for forgiveness, but the wind that slipped past him and over the fields was indifferent to the suffering of men.
There wasn’t much left of the man, and what there was stained the damp grass, all gristle and splintered bones, hair and sinew. Pale white skin. The leftover bits of him. His clothes had been torn into wet scraps. There was a wedding ring among the remains. A boot with a foot inside it, severed at the ankle.
Drag marks and footprints on the ground. The smell of exposed innards and raw meat. He remembered when he was a boy and his mother used to bring bones home from the butcher’s shop for the dogs. The popping sounds of the bones as the dogs chewed at them. He pictured slavering wet mouths, but not those of his old pets.
Royce left what remained of the man on the grass for the scavengers and walked over to the rucksack. It was untouched. He watched it for a while, as if he were afraid something squirming and damp would erupt from it. Then he crouched and opened the rucksack. He glanced over his shoulders then looked inside, reached in and pulled out a notebook. He turned it over in his hand then leafed through the pages. It was a plague journal. A photo of a boy in a school uniform fell out and landed by Royce’s feet. He picked it up and looked at it, then placed it on top of the journal and laid them on the ground. He also found an old James Herbert paperback, a Darth Vader action figure, and a matchbox containing a few clippings of auburn hair. Half a roll of toilet paper and a bottle of silted water. At the bottom of the rucksack was a leather wallet with fifty pounds in ten pound notes, two credit cards, a driver’s license, a blood donor card, and a receipt from an Esso petrol station in Yeovil. Royce checked the driver’s license and read the man’s name, as if doing so would honour him in death.
“Ben Ottway,” Royce whispered. The words were taken by the cold air. “I should have helped you, Ben.”
He pocketed the toilet paper then replaced the photo of the boy inside the journal and returned it to the rucksack along with the other items he didn’t need.
Royce shouldered his rucksack and moved on, his boots pressing into the sodden ground. He turned back once to the house and it was as dark and silent as when he first arrived.
*
He was directionless and lost, and the land accepted him for the shambling wreck he had become. Aimless in the dimming light, he considered turning around and heading back to the house, but it was easier to keep his feet shuffling down the road. If he had stayed at the house, the infected would have found him eventually, and he would have ended up like the man he’d refused to help.
Distant thunder in the west, trying to catch him. He stopped in the road and poked the toe of his boot at a vague pile of human skin; it had been sloughed, like snakeskin. Moulted. Leading away from the skin and into the scrub at the side of the road was a trail of drying slime. He didn’t follow the trail. No good would come of it.
He walked onwards, watching a thin plume of smoke on the northern horizon. A burning house, perhaps. Didn’t matter. He was inured to it all, the destruction of what used to be.
He saw a buzzard feeding on the corpse of an infected man by the roadside. Rending the flesh with hooked talons. The bird raised its reddened beak at Royce until he passed. He thought about the possibility of the plague jumping species. At least if the plague was contained just to humans, the
other animal species would stand a chance of survival. If it did manage to jump from humans to other animals, that could mean the destruction of all life on the planet.
*
Later.
Glancing over his shoulder, back at the road behind him, because he was sure he was being followed. He walked for what felt like hours, exhausted and thirsty, drying out and weakening with each step. He stopped in the middle of the road and looked at the cats’ eyes glinting like cheap pound shop jewellery. Tears on his face. A pressure behind his sternum and a scratch in his throat that wouldn’t go away. He shrugged off the rucksack and drank from the water bottle until he was coaxing the last drops into his mouth. Then he returned the bottle to its place and bent over with his hands on his thighs. His face was hot and clammy, sweat leaking from the pores. Dry mouth. He had expected this, sooner or later, sleeping rough and living in squalor. A hole in his stomach he couldn’t fill. His vision dimmed and the road crawled under his feet. He rubbed his knuckles against his eyes and when he took them away there were nonsense afterglow shapes in all he could see. His cough was deep, hacking and wet. There was mucus in his phlegm when he spat.
He raised his head and looked far down the road. His wife was standing there, out of focus and dulled like an old photograph. A frail image in danger of being swept away by the wind. She was smoke and ash, beauty and darkness.
Royce didn’t believe in ghosts, not even in this world.
She’s not a phantom, but she’s not real. You know that.
But he wanted some comfort, something to soften reality’s razor edges. Anything to keep the darkness away for a while. It was exhausting to be scared all of the time.
He straightened and shouldered the rucksack, and walked towards her. He would have smiled, but he’d lost the muscle memory of such a simple act. As he went to her, he was faintly aware of the approaching thunder and the skies ready to open, and he was almost upon her when she held her arms open for him. And in the second it took Royce to see it wasn’t his wife, the woman lunged towards him all ruined and wheezing, a thin shape in clotted rags. He saw her eyes. Her nose. Her face.
Her pretty mouth with all its dreadful teeth.
CHAPTER SIX
Royce sagged on the grass verge by the roadside and watched the woman’s corpse twitch on the tarmac. The crowbar was by his feet, matted and bloodied with pulped meat, scraps of bone and hair. He whimpered when he saw the blood on his gloves and he took them off and dropped them to the grass. The light was fading and the wind screamed over the low rises and slopes. His entire body was trembling and bile pressed hotly at the back of his throat. He spat until the sour taste left his mouth. A flash of lightning from the direction he’d come. The approaching storm. Deep concussion of thunder. The woman finally went still. Her body was infested with tumours and lesions. Her face was gone and a pale tubular appendage hung limply from what remained of her mouth.
Royce shivered. Cold running through him. It took so much effort to take a life.
*
Almost full dark. He shrank away from the roaring sky and walked through the rain to wash the blood from his clothes. He needed to be cleansed.
An overturned car offered no shelter among the shapes of twisted bodies inside and dark stains on the fractured windows. No shelter on the road, and he thought he would die of exposure out in the darkness.
Lightning exposed the landscape in half-second glimpses. There were dozens of figures in the fields, motionless and staring at the sky. His heart froze and he stopped and looked up to where the lightning revealed a gigantic dark shape in the clouds. Something immense he’d seen during the first days of the outbreak. The rain stung his face and took his breath. And as he stared at the shape it seemed to drill pressure into his eyes, and he turned away clutching his face.
There was woodland ahead and to the right, running alongside the road from across a field. Black trees backlit by bursts of brilliant white light. A sanctuary from the storm. He would deal with whatever waited amongst the trees.
He made for the woods, struggling against the driving rain, dragging his crumpled body past the charred ruins of abandoned vehicles. Through the trees under the dripping canopy, Royce stumbled and fell like a blind beggar. Stray, low limbs scratched his face and snagged on his clothes, and he held his hands in front of his eyes to protect them as he staggered through bracken and undergrowth, leaves and sticks and dead branches. Thunder echoed and chased him through the narrow gaps between the trees.
The sensation of being circled and that circle being tightened to meet him. He shook it off and kept moving, cringing at the touch of branches like so many reaching fingers. He tripped on hard roots bulging from the ground and he fell onto his stomach and the air was knocked out of him. He gasped and spat. Groaned in his throat. Hot needles in his bad ankle. The rain fell onto the trees. He rose and limped onwards, slumping against the dark trunks and their shadows, until he emerged into a small clearing where the ground was waterlogged and his feet splashed through cold puddles. He stopped and caught his breath, his chest heaving and tight, the woods dripping around him. A dark muddled shape ahead of him in the middle of the clearing. Rain upon canvas and plastic. He fumbled for his torch and kept the light low to the ground. The knife he had taken from the last house was clenched in his fist.
A half-collapsed one-man tent, torn and slashed but still intact. Sagging with dead leaves and grime. Barely standing in the hard rain. He directed the torch at the opening in the tent, and nothing moved in there or emerged to meet him. With the knife held out he crouched, then crawled into the tent and swung the torch around. A dry floor. No bodies or signs of violence. No blood. Nothing but empty soft drinks cans and food wrapping. He lay down in the cramped shelter like an animal that had found a place to die. He pulled the zip down, closing the entrance, and took the rucksack from his back and hugged it to his chest as he curled into a squalid mound, clutching the knife in one hand as the storm raged and crashed, and rain lashed the tent. The creak and rattle of trees in the wind. His teeth were chattering. Even his bones were cold.
Royce closed his eyes, soaked and shivering, frightened in the dark of the woods.
*
In dreams, his neighbours hunted him through the back gardens and narrow roads of his hometown. His pet dog eviscerated on the front lawn. A burning house in the distance.
A dream, but also a memory.
When he woke the storm had moved on and dawn had arrived and gone. He was still clutching his rucksack, unmoved from the night before. His clothes were still damp and now he stank like something dragged from a marsh. His bones ached and he gasped for water. A damp heat behind his sternum. Wheezing with every breath scraped from his heavy, sodden lungs. He coughed into his chest and groaned as the inside of the tent swayed and crawled.
He raised his head to the sounds outside the tent. Something working at the ground with a snout and paws, snuffling through the dirt. He moved the knife away from his body and pulled the zipper down a little and peered from the hole. Even the grey light hurt his eyes, and he blinked, lowered his face from the sky and the black trees. The snuffling became a low growl, joined by another. Two white poodles stared at Royce in his shelter, their teeth bared, and he stared back at them, stifling a cough in his throat.
The poodles were half-starved, mangy creatures, and they slowly backed away from Royce as he pulled down the zipper and slouched on his knees in the mouth of the tent. He looked into their wild eyes. Fur coated with grime. They whimpered and growled until they turned and bolted into the trees.
Royce pulled out the map and studied it on his lap. He had a vague idea of his location. He sat there for a while and forced himself to eat a chocolate bar. Movement was a struggle, and he swayed when he climbed to his feet. Aching and weary. Hot skin dripping sweat. He spat and muttered as the wind swept through the tops of the trees. Birds called in the early light.
He pulled on the rucksack and left the clearing behind.
*
Struggling through the woods, his arms around his chest, the knife stored up one sleeve like a magic trick. Easy to imagine ghosts out in the trees and spend forever searching for them. He clutched at his chest and retched into troughs of dead leaves and weeds. His eyes watered and the trees swam in and out of focus. Stinking mulch under his feet. Animal sounds in the distance. If he collapsed, he wouldn’t get up again.
The trees all around him. He caught movement at his flanks. Mammals of the woods and birds in the trees. The cold found his skin. He licked moisture from gnarled oaks and birches.
Further on he encountered a white stag feeding from the sodden ground. Royce halted, open-mouthed, careful to keep his distance. In awe of the magnificent thing. The stag turned its head and looked at him. The temptation to reach out and try to touch the animal, to make sure it was real and not some fever-illusion.
“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” Royce whispered, his voice like nails over sandpaper. “I thought the infected would have caught you by now.”
The stag was not afraid of him.
Royce slouched against the nearest tree. “I guess you could say the same to me, mate.” He coughed hard and hunched over with spit on his lips, and when he raised his face again the white stag was gone and Royce was alone again.
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 3