“Old.”
“That’s funny,” George said, but didn’t laugh.
Royce scratched his beard and scanned around them, watching the fields and the hedgerows. “You sure the cloth and tape will hold until we find some boots?”
George turned his left foot from side-to-side. “Probably. I think I wrapped it a bit too tight, but it’ll do.”
“Good,” said Royce. “Let’s go. Only a few hours and it’ll be dark.”
They arrived at the town in the dwindling afternoon when spells of drizzle came and went and sometimes became sleet. Royce and George stopped on the road that led into the town, but as they looked around at the half-collapsed buildings, scarred roads, craters and sweeps of devastation, they realised there wasn’t much left to call a town.
On the outskirts they had found the months’-old remains of several soldiers rotting and scattered near to a few rusted automatic rifles beyond use. Not much left of them but bones and the scraps of their distinctive uniforms. They had been dismembered in death.
“Oh my god,” said George, his voice low and scraped from his throat. He closed his arms around his chest, his hand tightening on the hatchet grip.
After finding the soldiers, Royce expected to see bodies in the town, but there were none so far as he could see. Charred houses and the crumbling shells of buildings where water dripped through the shredded roofs. Exposed foundations and open basements flooded by rainwater. Toppled chimneys and crumbling mortar. Gardens reduced to piles of broken concrete, stone and earth. Bullet holes in walls from high-calibre rounds and rusting shell casings scattered like pennies. A yellowed spine and pelvic girdle were all that remained of some poor unfortunate. A Challenger tank half-buried in debris. Red brick fragments and melted plastic. Warped metal.
“Looks like they bombed the town,” said George. “Smells like shit.”
Where the street was buckled and damaged, the tarmac cracked and gaping, a sewer pipe was jutting from underground darkness, exposed and broken. Puddles of sludge and slopping piles.
Royce checked the ground under his feet, worried he would fall through the road.
Some houses had been almost scraped from the earth. Some of the streets had been levelled completely. The roads were buckled and gouged. Small craters filled with rainwater. The charred shells of vehicles. Water pipes had cracked open, flooding roads. Debris and wreckage strewn everywhere. Glittering shoals of shattered glass. Shades of iron and slag. Bones among the ruins, like little surprises for the keen eyed.
Tarmac had melted, re-solidified into ripples and then cracked, exposing the layers underneath.
The skin had been torn off of the town. It had been hollowed out. Royce raised his face to the sky and savoured the drizzle on his face. The town seemed lifeless apart from the scampering rats and the squabbling gangs of crows watching from atop walls and damaged buildings. Streets of rubble, smashed walls and torn metal. Streets that weren’t streets anymore but long stretches of devastation. Cars with drivers incinerated to bone behind the wheels in the desolate silence. Burnt-out shops and pubs. Disfigured road signs to nameless streets, slanting roofs and haunted places. Collapsed street lights. Skittering things concealed by shadow.
Royce spat ash from his mouth. Gravelly bits of rubble and dirt trickled down a mound of broken stone and bricks. A blackened skeleton was sitting against the wheel of a heat-blasted car, showing off a sharp grin. The tyres had melted and reformed into solid puddles of black.
George’s face was pale and anxious. His arms drooped at his sides.
“I’d heard that the RAF bombed population centres during the outbreak,” said Royce.
“Desperate times,” George muttered. “Bad times.”
Ash and rainwater had formed a thick kind of slurry in the gutters. Royce noticed something bloody and furred crushed under some masonry. The town was an overwhelming sight. Bombed-out buildings wavered. The wind swept through what remained of the streets, and when he listened closely the wind gave a haunting wail. Trees were raggedy nightmare shapes of charcoal with arms spread towards the sky.
The sight of such devastation stole Royce’s breath.
Churches, supermarkets, shops, a train station – all ravaged by ordnance and fire and battle; obliterated in some cases. Craters from artillery and mortar shells. A forgotten battlefield. Windswept desolation.
At least the destruction was done by conventional weapons; Royce had heard about cities in America and China rumoured to have been hit by nukes.
George scanned the street and beyond. “I don’t think we’ll find any boots here.”
Royce kicked a small lump of brick and spat. “Keep an eye out for any infected.”
They moved through the streets, avenues and cul-de-sacs like thieves, using the cover of rubble, crumbling walls and burnt-out cars. The ruined streets so cold in the late day, and no sound but the mourning ash-flecked wind. They passed a tall statue of some locally-renowned man dead since the nineteenth century. A landowner or politician, no doubt. It was pitted and scarred, and part of its face was missing. The name plaque on the plinth scraped bare. Further on they stalked past a church bereft of its spire. Fragments of stained glass caught the grey light.
More army vehicles wrecked and abandoned. The black bones of a small animal in a gutter. Fallen, smashed trees turned to drifts of charcoal. Grit between Royce’s teeth when he opened his mouth. A tower block was blasted and tilting, its face sheared off, exposing the dark chambers of flats and abodes. Royce looked for movement up there, but didn’t look for long because he was sure he’d seen a dead body seated at a dining table.
“There must be a high street,” George said. “Shops. A mall. Must be something left.”
Past overturned cars and a van resting on its side. A school was now a gathering of gutted buildings in which nothing dwelled but shadows and the echoes of children’s feet in the playground.
The sounds of their movements seemed too loud in the dead silence and their footfalls echoed down what remained of back streets and roads blocked with sharp mounds of rubble and twisted metal. They skirted a crater that looked to have been made by an artillery shell. Water pooled at the bottom of the crater. Nearby, a skeletal hand poking from a mound of debris formed by the collapse of a wall. It was difficult to pick through the streets with so many obstructions and detritus littering the way.
Royce watched for ambushes in the narrow thoroughfares.
“I wonder how many people died here,” said George. His face was slack and his eyes swollen in the bone sockets of his skull. Royce had never seen such devastation that wasn’t on the television from some distant war-torn country or from black-and-white photos of bombed cities in World War Two.
George was first to notice the plume of dark grey smoke rising above the ragged rooftops ahead of them, serpentine against the sky.
*
Cars crammed onto the kerbs of the pavements and roads cluttered with debris. Royce and George halted fifty yards from a Victorian red-brick Baptist church which had escaped much of the damage wrought upon other buildings. But its exterior was scarred and smoke-stained and the decorative windows at the front of the building were broken. A canvas sign had come loose on one side and was hanging down the front of the church, above the open doors beyond a flight of wide stone steps: CARPENTER FROM NAZARETH SEEKS JOINER. There was no graveyard.
“Is that sign supposed to attract people?” Royce said, wiping his mouth.
“Not a fan?” said George.
Royce spat. “Never really bothered with any of that stuff. You?”
“I was a choir boy, a very long time ago. Church of England. Lots of repression and dodgy vicars. My parents were very religious. They wanted me to enter the church when I grew up.”
“And did you?”
“No. My father was very disappointed. He came to terms with it eventually.”
The street outside the front of the church was cluttered with abandoned cars slewed over both lanes of
the road. The smoke was rising from the car park to the side of the church, obscured by blackened shrubs, bushes and a stone wall with a black iron gate blocking the entrance. Royce could smell the smoke and something else he couldn’t identify, which was acrid and cloying in his lungs. They stopped at the car park wall and peered through the gateway. The wasted muscles in Royce’s chest tightened. The smoke was rising from a burning pile of corpses. That smell he had recognised was human meat, gristle and skin cooking in the fire. The funeral mound was approximately six feet tall and the writhing flames reached another four feet into the air. Heat stirred the air. There was another pile of skeletal bodies on the tarmac, soon to be for the pyre.
Royce looked at George and shrugged.
A man appeared from behind the bonfire, pushing a wheelbarrow overladen with twisted limbs, dusty torsos and dry heads upon which ashen faces grimaced or grinned. A jumble of browned scalps visible within the scrum of bodies. The wheelbarrow wobbled in his hands and leaned to one side, almost toppling on a few occasions, before he set it down and put one hand to the small of his back and stiffened. He wiped his glistening forehead with one thin arm. He was very tall, clad in a navy blue boiler suit and running shoes. A handkerchief covering the lower half of his long face below a pair of goggles. His long black hair was tied into a ponytail reaching halfway down his back.
He unfurled his awkward arms, lifted a small corpse from the wheelbarrow and threw it onto the fire. Popping, cracking sounds reminded Royce of cereal in milk. He and George watched the man work. The dry cadavers took to the fire like kindling. His breath fogged in the air. And when he was finished the man took off his gloves and goggles, pulled the handkerchief past his mouth and over his chin, and wiped his face with a tissue from one pocket and tossed it into the fire. He could have been aged anywhere between forty and seventy.
Royce opened and inched through the gateway with George on his heels. When the man saw them crossing the tarmac towards him, he put down the water bottle he was drinking from and appraised them without reaction. No fear, surprise or suspicion in his face. His grey eyes clocked the shotgun in Royce’s hands. Royce looked for any weapons tucked into the man’s boiler suit or within his reach. George walked alongside Royce, wincing at each step. The duct tape and rags were unravelling from his foot as his trainer scraped across the ground.
They halted five yards from the man. Royce coughed smoke from his lungs and his eyes watered, and held the shotgun across his body to ensure that the man had a good look at it. The bonfire crackled and spat.
“Hello,” the man said. He raised his hands and his eyes flicked towards the shotgun again. “There’s no need for that here, my friends. I’ve just finished for the day.” The man’s voice was soft. His tongue darted out and scraped across his lower lip towards a cold sore at the corner of his mouth. “My name’s Charlie. It’s been a while since I’ve met any survivors. Pleased to meet you both.”
“I’m Royce. This is George.” He nodded his head sideways at the old man.
“George. Royce.” The man seemed to taste the sound of their names in his mouth. He smiled thinly, as if self-conscious about his teeth.
“We saw the smoke,” George said.
Charlie looked down at him and adjusted his gloves. “I’m laying these people to rest. It’s what they deserve.”
“Even the infected?” said George.
“Especially them. The fire purifies them.”
“I see,” Royce said flatly.
George looked at the fire then back to Charlie. “Aren’t you worried that the infected will find you out here?
“This town is clean. They don’t come here anymore.”
Royce scanned the road behind them, then the perimeter of the park. “You sure about that?”
Charlie put his gloves in his pocket. “As sure as I am of anything these days. Have you both been travelling?”
“That’s right,” said Royce, unwilling to add anything more.
“Where are you headed?”
“We’re not sure yet,” Royce said before George could answer. “Do you live here?”
“In the church,” Charlie said. He must have noticed the doubt in Royce’s face, and he smiled again. “It’s perfectly safe inside, and even if the infected did return, the church is still fairly secure.
“Fairly?” Royce said.
“It’s safe enough. Trust me.” The tall man glanced at the sky. “It’ll be dark soon. Would you both like to stay for the night? I haven’t got any spare food, but you’ll be safe. Better than sleeping on the floor in the shattered ruins of some house.
“Okay,” Royce said. “But I’m keeping the shotgun with me.”
“That’s absolutely fine, my friend. Let’s go inside. I have coffee.”
”What about the fire?” George said.
Charlie smiled at him. “It’s fine. Let it burn.”
*
“This place was a shelter,” Charlie said, as he spooned instant coffee into mugs. “In the beginning.”
They sat around a cast-iron fire pit, in the light of glowing coals and embers. A warmth Royce could lose himself in. The heat against his hands and face, so welcome after walking in the cold and rain. His shrunken stomach was full and content after they had eaten food from their packs. They exchanged a few words during their meal, but the conversation was stilted and sparse. He had thought it ridiculous at the time; after the destruction of society, social awkwardness should have been a thing of the past.
Outside, the funeral pyre still burned. Royce could smell it.
The inside of the church had been stripped of everything suitable to feed the fire outside. All the wooden pews had been ripped from the floor and demolished, and were now no more than assorted piles of kindling. The starless sky was visible where a section of the roof had been ripped away during the fighting. The windows were boarded over by plywood. Charlie had wrapped a thick iron chain around the front doors and secured them with a large padlock. He placed the key in the breast pocket of his boiler suit. Royce hoped there was an exit at the back of the church, because he didn’t want to be trapped inside the building if a swarm of infected broke down the doors or smashed down the blocked windows. He was wary of Charlie and he kept the shotgun close to hand.
Charlie boiled a pot of water over the fire and filled the mugs then added powdered milk and stirred it into the drink. The smell of the hot coffee made Royce’s mouth water. He let himself close his eyes and imagine he was somewhere closer to home.
George was sitting across from Royce, huddled under a blanket. He warmed his bare feet by the fire while his trainers and socks dried in a stinking pile nearby with his and Royce’s wet coats.
“Sorry I haven’t got any sugar,” Charlie said. “I ran out of it a few weeks ago.” He handed out the coffee. Royce took his mug eagerly and held it close to his face and breathed in the rich aroma. He was salivating as he took the first sip, and it was good despite the fine scum of powdered milk floating on top.
Charlie blew on his coffee and made little ripples across its surface. He sat between Royce and George, sipping, his eyes ablaze from the embers reflected within them. George stared at the steam rising from his own mug. He looked mesmerised and close to tears. Such simple things for desperate souls at the end of it all.
Royce savoured the coffee with each mouthful. His chest and stomach filled with heat. Between the coffee and the fire, he hadn’t been so warm in a long time, and he could have wept right there and then in the company of two strangers. And he wondered about how events had led him here, huddled around a meagre fire in the ruins of a church. Hiding from the darkness.
“Haven’t seen anyone around here for weeks,” said Charlie. “Not since the last group of people came through here.”
“Other survivors?” said Royce.
“Just people passing through. Refugees on the roads.”
“Did any of them say where they were going?”
“Nowhere specific,” Charlie sa
id. “Just looking for shelter.”
“Have you been here since the outbreak?” Royce asked him.
“I’ve lived in this town since I was born.” He finished his coffee and put it down on the floor, then looked at his creased hands before the fire. A scar ran along the back of his left hand. A wedding band on one finger.
“Why are you still here?” said George. “There’s nothing left of the town.”
Charlie glared at George, but then his eyes softened and he looked away. “I had a job to do. Once the fighting had finished and the town was bombed, there were bodies everywhere. Bits of bodies and blackened bones. I was the last one alive. There was no one else. And there was nowhere to go. If I had left with the small groups of refugees I would have died with them out in the countryside, so I collected the bodies and put them on the fires I’d made. I’ve made a lot of fires, my friends, and I’ve laid a lot bodies upon them, but now I’ve finished and my work is done, and I’m very, very tired.”
“All those bodies,” said George. He watched sparks escape the fire pit as Charlie stoked the embers with a brass poker.
“Such a task does things to a person,” Charlie said. “Wears you down. Makes your bones ache. Gives you bad dreams.”
“We all have bad dreams,” said George, staring into his coffee.
Royce turned to Charlie. “You said this place was a shelter. What happened here?”
Charlie didn’t take his eyes from the fire. “The same that happened everywhere else, I bet. The plague spread and the infected were gathering. Bad vibes, man. I came here when the army turned the church into a rescue shelter – there was just death and infection on the streets. Over two hundred refugees crammed in here without food, piss-all water and limited medical supplies. No organisation. It didn’t take long to fall apart.”
“The infected attacked the church?” George said.
Charlie shook his head. “We didn’t need the infected to tear things apart – we did it ourselves.”
“How do you mean?”
“Once the water ran out, things got worse, and people started fighting. And from there it descended into chaos. By then the town was a battleground and the damage was done. People fled into the countryside. I stayed and watched the infected overwhelm the army. Then the jets came and dropped their bombs. Now nothing lives here.”
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 9