Soon afterwards they were on the road and heading east. Royce sat next to George and looked out the window at the sleet falling over the withered land. Sister Fiona was taking care of Amy at the rear of the bus; she had woken earlier and talked to Royce and George, had laid her hands on her stomach, and the loss and pain in her eyes was such that Royce would have given his own life to guarantee the life of the unborn child. He would have given himself freely to whichever god demanded a sacrifice. A life for a life.
But there was nothing he or George or any of the others could do for her but wait.
He felt drowsy, the vehicle’s motion making his eyelids heavy. The heaters on the coach were on full-blast. He fell asleep to the sound of children muttering old rhymes, and his last thought before darkness took him was his grievance with the heart-breaking fate of all life, to age and falter and die.
*
Royce dreamed about the first days of the outbreak. The monsters scratching at the windows of his home while his wife tried to calm their baby daughter crying upstairs. The burning houses and the burning streets; the infected stalking through the smoke. He remembered seeing the little girl from next door – she had just celebrated her tenth birthday – standing in the middle of the road with blood down the front of her pyjamas, jerking her head from side-to-side like a predator catching the scent of prey downwind. He had only looked once at her face before he turned away.
Another dream: he was sitting in his seat on the coach, and the vehicle had stopped in the road. The seats were occupied, but the people seated ahead of him would not turn to show him their faces. And he was too scared to look at the people behind him, because he was terrified of the wet rattling of their breathing and the low growls from their mouths.
*
George was asleep. Royce watched the countryside move past. Roving packs of infected in the fields. He saw two bloodstained women chase an injured deer from a dense thicket and bring it down upon the ground. The poor animal struggled as the infected set to it with their hands, teeth and squirming things that emerged from epidermal rents.
A thought came to him, fleeting but undeniable; a worm burrowing into the soft meat of his mind.
They will wipe this world clean.
The infected screamed at the coach as it passed.
*
Royce awoke, dull and listless, sunken in the seat, his limbs aching at the grind of the coach’s wheels on the rutted roads. The smell of damp clothes around him made him feel sick.
“You were talking in your sleep,” said George.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I was glad for the conversation.”
“Thank you, George.”
“For what?”
“Taking care of me after what happened at Starling House.”
George hesitated. “Don’t mention it.”
“How have we survived?” Royce looked at the old man.
“Luck, I suppose,” George said.
“But luck runs out eventually.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think we’ll survive long enough to see Denmark?”
“I didn’t think you were that bothered,” George said.
“It’s just a question.”
“Go back to sleep, Royce.”
*
The coaches resorted to back roads when they found the main thoroughfares blocked by car wrecks and debris. One road had been thick with the wrecks of over thirty cars and an artic lorry lying on its side across both lanes. Sometimes there were bones on the grass verges. Sometimes the infected skittered from the undergrowth with black claws raised to their chests. Royce saw a human torso amongst the thin branches of a tree, like something stored for later consumption.
It was slow going on the roads made treacherous by snow, mud, ice and rainwater. The coaches negotiated flooded roads and fallen trees. Men had to disembark and push car wrecks to the sides of the road so the coaches could pass.
Royce studied the members of the Family around him. They treated Royce and George with the sort of benign disdain reserved for stray dogs. The Family was an insulated community of believers. They were a herd. They were sheep, told what to do by Marek.
Royce wondered how many religions had survived the plague. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism. All those different sects of Christianity. Scientology. Were they mostly gone, wiped away, their members either dead or infected? What use was faith when the world had already ended?
He looked at the sky. An immense shadow loomed in the dark clouds. A fleeting glimpse of something colossal and mind-breaking. And he had to avert his eyes because he was small and insignificant, unworthy to gaze upon such terrible, wondrous things.
*
Shadows encroached on the roads until there was nothing else left. Hills and fields succumbing to the dark. The sun was hidden by the tumultuous sky, and when it fell the fading of its light was barely noticed.
The coaches stopped at a rest-stop for the night. Food and drink were rationed. Prayers were said before their sparse meals. Hushed words and tones of reverence. Royce stayed silent. When he looked at their faces he saw cleft palates and hair lips, scars and disfigurements. Before the coming of the plague, most of these people would have been social outcasts. Outsiders. The Family had taken them in, welcomed and accepted them; gave their lives meaning, no matter how debatable the meaning.
George mumbled something under his breath before he started on his serving of cold spaghetti hoops and tinned pork sausages. Royce ate his food slowly, wondering how safe they were in the coaches. The windows were high above the ground, but the infected were tenacious when in pursuit of prey. He felt exposed and vulnerable.
He stared at the same moon he had watched during his boyhood. But there would be no more exploration of the solar system and beyond. He thought of the probes sent into space years ago, now drifting though the cosmos, a roaming vestige of the human race. The last memory of a dead species.
But the moon would abide, no matter what the plague did to the planet, and that made Royce feel a little better.
Later, he was drifting in and out of sleep, slipping from dreams and nightmares, groaning at his stiff legs. George was snoring. Behind him a murmured voice prayed to an obsolete god, begging for salvation.
Royce doubted reality; this world that should not be.
In his mind, a vision appeared of his wife resplendent in her wedding dress, the veil obscuring her face like a funeral shroud. He remembered a baby’s cot stained with blood, toys smashed around it on the floor, and he sobbed into his hands so not to wake the dreamers around him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A member of the Family died in the night, and was found the next morning slumped in his seat. The old man had been very ill. A few men took the body from the coach and laid it on the melting layer of snow in an empty field. The ground was too hard for them to dig a grave, and the Family didn’t believe in burying the dead, so they closed his arms over his chest, raised his face to the sky and covered him in a blanket. Marek gave a short eulogy as they stood in a circle around the body and said prayers for the departed. The man’s name was repeated by the mourners until Marek stopped them with a raised hand.
The infected screamed from somewhere in the distance, answering their grieving.
The body was left behind, an offering to the earth.
*
The coaches stopped periodically so that people could stretch their legs, breathe some fresh air, and relieve bladders and bowels under armed guard. The children were told to pray for guidance on the journey ahead. There were no snowball fights.
They had to bypass Salisbury because it had been bombed to shattered ruins and there was no way of going through it. It was a while before they were clear of the devastated city, crawling along bad roads through dismal villages.
Mist and drizzle, low clouds. Bouts of heavy rain that felt like punishment, lowering the visibility to about twenty yards all around. The coaches stayed together, creeping over fr
aying tarmac, grinding through gears.
Royce had been drifting in and out of sleep, and woke to a burst of laughter from the back of the coach. He rubbed his eyes and yawned, noticing that George was gone from his seat. Royce looked around and saw many of the Family had turned back to the rear of the bus.
George appeared in the aisle, his cheeks flushed and his mouth shaped in a hesitant smile.
“It’s Amy,” George said. “She says the baby’s kicking.”
Royce followed George to the back of the bus, where Sister Fiona had placed her hands to Amy’s exposed belly. Two other women, scrawny and smirking, loitered behind her, waiting their turn. When Royce and George arrived, Amy smiled at them, tears in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” Royce asked as he crouched next to her with George. The coach’s suspension rattled from potholes in the road.
“I’m fine,” she said. “The baby’s fine. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” Her voice was low and came out quickly. One hand hovered tentatively by her face. Her eyes were wide and near-hysterical. Muscles twitched in under her eyes and around her mouth.
“Praise God,” said Sister Fiona.
Royce frowned at the old woman, but she ignored him and stared at her hands moving over Amy’s stomach. “God gave the little one the strength to survive. He gave you all the strength to survive. He has a plan and you’re all part of that plan. We’re all part of the plan. He will take care of us now. Praise God.”
Royce was about to reply when a booming cry from above silenced every mouth on the coach; an ear-shattering wail from gargantuan lungs and flesh caverns. Mournful. The sound of a sickly god crying into the void.
They looked to the ceiling; others peered out of the windows. The sound of the rain was like little stones falling. Royce went to a window, nudged a short man out of his way, and looked to the underside of the low cloud, as something huge within it pulsed darkly. The clouds broiled, rippling from within. Part of him thought it was beautiful. He felt a little sick.
“Is it one of those things?” George asked. No one answered him. Royce heard several people mumble frantic prayers. Shocked pale faces blurred past him as Royce went to the front of the coach. Marek’s son Justin, a tall, hook-nosed man with curly hair and a slack mouth, was muttering into his walkie-talkie. His face was pale and loose-fitting.
The two coaches halted on the road. Royce held onto a handrail to avoid being pitched forward. Justin was nodding, his eyes watery, as the walkie-talkie spat Marek’s voice.
“What’s going on?” Royce said. “Why have we stopped?”
The driver, a sullen and wiry man, looked at the sky, and his hands tightened upon the steering wheel. Justin ignored Royce, frowning as he concentrated on the walkie-talkie. Marek’s voice was jumbled by static, punctuated by strange clicks.
“Say again, Father,” said Justin. He wiped sweat from his brow, staring at the front coach. “I didn’t catch you. Say again, please.”
Another prehistoric, reverberating cry split the sky and caused everyone on the coach to press their hands to their ears. The inside of the vehicle trembled. Someone cried out, and when Royce took his hands from his head there was the sound of something like a low pulsing in the sky. The walkie-talkie offered the sounds of children’s screams, half-drowned by static. Seconds of dead silence.
The clouds were full of shadow and they were moving. Royce’s heart palpitated.
“Justin…” Marek’s voice on the walkie-talkie. “Justin, we can see it above us…” More static, like gravel falling upon metal. “Sky…shape…immense…god…”
Several huge black tentacles, as thick as anchor chains on cruise ships, descended from the clouds and seized the first coach, wrapping themselves around it, shattering windows and crunching sheet metal. Justin almost dropped the walkie-talkie when screams burst from its speaker. The black tentacles gripped and shook the coach, lifting it off the road. Gunshots boomed from inside the vehicle. Blurred shapes behind the rain-streaked windows. Other, thinner, tentacles dropped from the sky and coiled around the coach, puncturing metal with the pulsing spikes that burst from their skin.
“Holy fuck,” said Royce. He put one hand to his mouth.
“We have to do something,” Justin said, his eyes beseeching Royce. “We have to help them.” He went to open the coach doors but Royce held him back.
Justin stared at Royce, his mouth quivering.
“It’s too late,” Royce said.
Justin pushed him away.
They turned to look out the windscreen.
The tentacles lifted Marek’s coach into the air, fifty feet from the ground. The groan of metal with the snapping of rivets and bolts. A muffled bang as a tyre burst.
“You can’t help them,” Royce said.
Justin stared out the windscreen, his face crumpling.
The tentacles fastened and began crushing the coach. And it was taken into the sky and the clouds with its passengers. The serpentine shadows of the tentacles remained for a moment, and then they were gone. The walkie-talkie was all screams, babbling and desperate pleas from high above. A child’s voice praying to God was the last thing to be heard before it went silent.
Justin stared at the walkie-talkie until Royce took it from his hands and switched it off. The rain fell against the windows, pattering softly like searching hands.
“Father,” Justin said into the walkie-talkie. “Father, can you hear me?”
Royce stared at the spot where Marek’s coach had been before it was snatched away. People began screaming behind him, mixing with panicked voices tight and high-pitched with fear. Some of them wailed for Marek and the children.
Justin looked at Royce, face ashen, his lips damp. His mouth moved, twitching at the corners. He slumped upon an empty seat, awestruck and trembling, and turned his face to the rain.
“They were taken,” Justin said. “All those children, taken into the sky.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The coach swerved along wild country roads, the windscreen wipers struggling to keep pace with the torrential rain. People were crying, wailing and praying in despondent voices.
Royce pitied them.
The flock was lost, rudderless, unravelling. Their prayers were not answered. Some of the Family looked to him, as if for guidance, and the pain in their eyes shrivelled something inside him. Justin was staring at his hands on his lap, his head nodding faintly.
The rain didn’t falter. The sound of its roaring. Staring into the rain, the driver’s hands were white on the steering wheel. Royce watched above, waiting for the coach to be grabbed and plucked from the road. He thought of Marek and the others taken into the sky, and what they must have seen beyond the clouds: what those tentacles were attached to, and if there was a terrible mouth waiting for them.
The coach halted as the driver hit the brakes and the tyres screamed. Bodies fell forwards, unprepared. Royce clung to a handrail and shifted his feet so that he didn’t slip on the floor. Justin hit his head on the back of the driver’s seat and slumped to the floor, moaning softly with one hand to his forehead.
The driver stared through the windscreen and put his hands to his mouth. “Oh dear God. Dear God.”
Royce followed his gaze and had to stifle a cry when he saw the swarm of infected ahead of the coach, lurking in the rain like an army of mourners. Hundreds – maybe thousands – of them filled the road and the fields either side for over two hundred yards in both directions. The swarm stretched away into the rain. The nearest of the infected was about twenty yards away. Most of them were facing away from the coach or staring at the ground or the sky. Drenched, ragged, emaciated. Mutated into awful things. They appeared dormant.
“What do we do now?” the driver said.
One of the infected, a woman shivering in the remains of a stained quilted housecoat, raised her face towards the coach and looked directly at Royce. She opened her mouth and her black tongue emerged and tasted the air. Then she screamed, and it pi
erced the falling rain and awoke those around her. The other infected turned towards the coach, their shoulders hunched, limbs twisted, spines arched or crooked, faces contorting into folds of rippling skin and flesh. Phallic growths and fleshy pincers emerged sloppily from torsos and damp clefts. Hands that grasped and flexed.
The infected shrieked, bolting towards the coach, arms flailing. Justin stood open-mouthed at the approaching swarm.
Royce looked at the driver. “Go through them.”
The driver’s face loosened on his skull. The first dozen infected were barely ten yards away when the driver put his foot down on the accelerator and the coach lurched forward. Royce sat down and held onto his seat.
The coach had barely hit twenty miles an hour when it collided with the swarm and was engulfed by thrashing bodies. They threw themselves at the coach, leapt at the windows, scraping and clawing at the sides until the sound of fingernails and claws upon metal was all Royce could hear above the growl of the engine and the falling rain. The coach juddered and shook as its wheels swatted and crushed bodies. The shattering of bones. Internal organs reduced to pulp. And there was no end in sight to the swarm, the bodies coming from all directions as the wheels struggled through their ranks, crunching through pulped remains. The driver twisted the steering wheel to stop the coach from crashing into a ditch.
The suspension was rattling. Some of the windows cracked, cleaved in fractures, covered in blood and gore. Infected were clinging to the coach, trying to tear at its sides. There was no way to fight them off.
The doors burst open under the pressure of the thrashing bodies. The driver lost control of the coach; it veered from the road and skidded onto wet grassland, lost to its own inertia as blood-streaked figures with gasping mouths spilled on board. They pushed the stench of gangrene and slaughter before them. Justin fired his pistol at the invaders, but the shots went wild. The infected pulled the driver from his seat and opened him on the floor. He screamed once before his voice was lost to wet splutters and his throat was torn out. Justin fired again and one of the infected fell back with a hole in its chest and bits of the driver in its mouth.
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 16