Ditches foaming with stinging nettles, weeds and wild flowers. Blackberry bushes without fruit. Public footpaths being absorbed slowly by the land. A tractor had been abandoned in the middle of a field.
Royce dug an ammonite fossil from the hardened topsoil. He blew away the loose dirt and ran one finger over the striations upon its coiled shape. In his youth he collected fossils and kept them in an old biscuit tin. He pocketed the ammonite and looked at the land ahead of him. No one travelled the roads. Winter trees wilted in the sunlight, crows’ nests upon their bare branches. A fox darted into a copse of beeches. Tufts of sheep’s wool and strips of cloth snagged on barbed wire.
Royce arrived at a shabby roadside restaurant. Out the front of the restaurant was a picnic area overgrown with weeds and an empty car park littered with trash.
He had heard the barking dog a hundred yards back down the road, and now he followed the sound of the dog along the wide ribbon of tarmac reaching behind the restaurant to another car park. A row of trees separated the property from scrubland and fields beyond.
Royce halted.
A man had tied the dog to some rusted railings once used to park bicycles. The dog strained and jerked at the knotted rope around its neck, growling at the scraggly man standing nearby with a butcher’s knife in his hands. There was a small holdall on the ground by his feet. When Royce called to him, he turned and his face was severe with hunger, his shoulders thin and hunched, draped in a stained shawl. A glimpse of a dark tattoo on his throat.
Royce approached.
The man raised the knife and frowned. “What d’you want?” His beard was nicotine-stained and he kept blinking as though dust was in his eyes. A smudge of dried blood under one nostril. “Stay back.”
Royce halted a few yards from the man. “What are you doing?”
The man spat, wiped his mouth and the matted hair of his beard around it. “I need to eat.”
Royce nodded at the dog. “There’s no meat on it.”
“Better than nothing.”
“No point killing a dog,” said Royce.
“Who the fuck are you to say what I can eat?”
“I like dogs,” Royce said. “Please don’t kill the dog. I’ll give you some of my food, if you want.”
The man sniffed. “What you got?”
“Some chocolate. Baked beans.”
The man snorted. “Baked beans? Nah. I need meat.”
“If you kill and eat the dog, it’ll only keep you going for a few more days. It’s pointless.”
“I’ll just kill more dogs,” the man said, and there was humour amid the desperation in his voice. “I’ll kill whatever I need to survive.”
Royce raised his hands in a supplicating gesture. “Please don’t. There’s no need to kill the dog.”
The man shook his head and turned back to the struggling animal, whose whimpering broke Royce’s heart. His eyes were hot and stinging, and his breathing quickened. He thought of all the dogs now feral and without families and homes, running wild and scavenging. He thought of his old dog ripped open on the front lawn and how he had watched from the kitchen window and been powerless to save him.
Royce stepped towards the man.
*
He sat in the restaurant with the knife on the table, his hands red and violent, and he couldn’t shake the memory of the man’s pale gasping face and blood-speckled mouth. The taking of the knife from the man’s hands. The ease of the blade through the soft flesh of the throat and sawing into the windpipe. The man’s pawing at him, terrified and without avail, because he was weaker than Royce.
Royce had been muttering something and he couldn’t remember what the words had been. It felt like time had gone away and then returned. He had released the dog, and it had paused and watched him, then fled.
He smoked a cigarette in silence between sips from one of the bottles of water he’d found in the man’s holdall. He would save the other for the road. His ribs ached, and breathing deeply brought a sharper pain that worried him. He used his tongue to nudge at loosened teeth.
After finishing the bottle, he searched the restaurant with the knife in his hand. A few sachets of tomato sauce in a plastic container next to the till. A small packet of stale biscuits beneath drifts of carrier bags. There was a wad of ten pound notes under the counter, smooth and pristine, and he put them in the stolen holdall for use as toilet paper.
He guzzled the contents of one of the sachets and pocketed the others, then searched the kitchens and the back rooms, but they had been emptied of anything edible. Frustrated, he returned to the front of the restaurant and rested at one of the tables, to look out at the man’s body on the tarmac. The crows that, until recently had been lurking in the trees, were gathering around the body, and Royce wished them a wholesome meal.
His hands were shaking, and the rise and fall of his heart was erratic. Despite his guilt, killing the man had come easily to him. Just like killing the teenage boy had been a simple act.
When Royce put his head in his hands, the dead man’s blood was smeared on his face.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Later, he moved on and the dog followed him for two miles of painful walking before he stopped and turned back. The dog halted and watched him from a distance as he took one of the stale biscuits he’d found in the restaurant and held it in his hand. The dog sized up the treat, tilting its head to one side.
“Don’t you remember me?”
The dog didn’t move.
Royce split the biscuit and left one half on the road, turned around and moved on.
*
It occurred to Royce that maybe the dog was waiting for him to collapse so that it could attack and eat him. He kept the knife close, just in case.
The sky clouded over. Thunder far behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the dog keeping pace with him at its usual distance. Later, Royce sat by the side of the road upon a muddy bank and ate sparingly from his provisions. The dog watched him from down the road, but didn’t approach.
Royce took the other half of the biscuit and placed it on the road. The dog took a step forwards then stopped, looking at Royce then the small morsel by his feet.
“Good dog,” Royce whispered.
The dog held its ground. Royce finished eating and continued down the road. Further on, when Royce looked back, the dog was eating the biscuit.
“Very good dog.”
*
In the late afternoon Royce sheltered under the bough of an oak tree while the rain fell over the silent land. The light was fading and he would have to find somewhere to spend the night. The dog, soaked and bedraggled, sat in the rain and watched him. Royce tried to entice the dog with some food, but the dog just stared at him.
Royce put the food away and huddled against the tree. “Stupid dog.”
*
When the rain stopped and the only sounds were from water sluicing into flooded drainage ditches and dripping from trees, Royce moved on and the dog followed him.
A village appeared in the dying light. The spire of a church as a warning or a welcome. There was only silence, but he didn’t trust it. Approaching the village, he stopped and wiped months’ worth of grime from the sign at the side of the road.
St. Mary Bourne. He was somewhere in Hampshire.
Below the sign was an arrangement of small bones. A cairn of remains, including a child’s skull with the cranium smashed. Next to it was a glass jar full of milk teeth. What would George have said about it? What did it mean? He tried not to ponder too much as he entered the silent village and stepped among shattered glass and derelict cars. Everything dull with the coming of dusk. Pools of black forming as the light fell away. He took out the knife. There was a corpse propped upright in a bus shelter, a peeled man grinning at Royce’s arrival.
He stopped in the middle of the street, his hands at his sides, breathing in the damp air. Nothing emerged from the houses, the quaint shops or the overgrown gardens. But the darkness within t
he open doorways and windows was thick and pulsing, and he gripped the knife a little tighter.
*
The stink of rot and decay pushed away from some houses, and he didn’t want to see the corpses waiting for him inside those charnel rooms. Maybe in the morning, when his resolve was a little stronger and the dark wasn’t so keen on his shoulders. He chose a house that appeared uninhabited and watched the windows as drizzle fell upon him, waiting for the twitch of a net curtain or a shadow behind the glass. The front door was ajar, showing a sliver of darkness, and he walked up the garden path past a child’s tricycle fading into the high grass. The smell of mildew came to him when he pushed the door open. He hesitated on the threshold and checked the hallway walls for claw marks or blood. The carpet was waterlogged where the rain had entered through the doorway. He listened and frowned, aware of a scraping sound from the kitchen, ahead of him. Royce breathed slowly through his mouth.
The child emerged from the kitchen, infested with pus-filled tumours, and almost fell into Royce’s arms. He pushed it away as he raised the knife in his other hand, and felt no horror when he looked into the thing’s face. Only a deep sadness manifesting in his bones. The plague had made the child genderless and shrivelled, naked and hairless, rasping through the dripping hole of its mouth. Its eyes, glazed and sore, their sockets raw with lesions and scratches that leaked milky discharge, appraised Royce. It stank of sewage and decay.
When the child fell upon the knife it simply gasped and collapsed, palsied limbs trembling in its death throes. Royce looked at its face and was certain he saw relief.
He stayed with the child until it died.
*
On the outskirts of the village he found a house clean of infection. He checked the rooms and the hiding places, under the beds and in the airing cupboard. And when he was finished he secured the house from the inside as best he could and stood by one of the windows observing the street. There was no sign of the dog, and he hoped it had found somewhere safe for the night.
He closed the curtains, then lit a candle and acquainted himself with the silence of the house’s empty rooms. A painting of a scene from Dante’s Inferno mounted over the blackened fireplace. Stacks of old science journals in a corner. Cushions thrown around the floor. On a pinewood table, a pile of textbooks about quantum mechanics. He flicked through the pages until his eyes began to hurt, the pages beyond his comprehension. It was lost knowledge, anyway, unless there were still scientists hiding somewhere, maybe in a lab in some secret bunker.
He walked through the rooms of the house and tried not to dwell upon the photos on the walls.
*
Royce found a bottle of TCP and a batch of cotton buds in the cabinet above the bathroom sink. Sitting on the edge of the bath, he dabbed at the many cuts and scratches on his body, gritting his teeth against the pain. But the pain soon faded and when he finished he drank from the dusty bottle of red wine he’d scavenged from the back of a kitchen cupboard. Dark bruises on his skin. One of his molars dropped from his gums and he spat it into the toilet bowl, where its bloody root reddened the water.
“Falling apart,” he said, and threw more wine down his neck.
His back seized up soon afterwards, and he spent the rest of the night sprawled on the sofa with the bottle to his lips.
He heard infected in the street outside and waited for them to arrive at his door.
*
His dreams were violent with reds, death-screams and spasms. The screams of everyone he’d lost. Snatches of memory from stumbling through a street with police sirens about him and people dead in the gutters. Low concussions from nearby streets. Running for his life with monsters on his heels, his cries slipping through the smoke of house-fires. A burning church from which flaming shapes emerged shrieking. A soldier in a gas mask and tactical armour gunning down fleeing civilians. The tune of his daughter’s favourite toy playing over the madness of the outbreak. The memory of cowering behind a wheelie bin when a pack of infected set upon an old man. Flocks of birds reeling into the air as the infected screamed down avenues and roads, attacking the cars stuck in traffic jams, swarming those who tried to escape. Windows smashed and shattered and doors were torn away by the ravenous things. Slaughter on the roads. The chaos spreading. Blood on the streets. A man dragging a girl into an alleyway. Royce’s feet treading on something soft and damp, but he didn’t look down. Never look down.
He heard George’s voice amidst the panic and death, calling to him, calling for help. But there was no help to be given, or to be had, and no way to change what had gone before.
The dead would remain dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
He woke on the sofa and whispered his wife’s name. What day was it? He coughed through what felt like a mouthful of ash, and his teeth tasted of blood and old wine. He groaned and rubbed his face then put one hand to his damaged ribs and dry heaved into a wicker wastepaper bin he’d grabbed from the floor. The tune from his daughter’s favourite toy was stuck inside his head. He remembered he used to press the red button on the teddy bear’s stomach and it would sing a nursery rhyme in a funny voice. The bear had annoyed him to the point where he’d tried to discreetly dispose of it in the bin at the end of the garden, but now he would have given his teeth, eyes and toes just to hold the bear and smell it and recognise the marvellous scent of his daughter’s skin imbued within it.
*
He scavenged some items from the house, including a can of lemonade he drank in one go to dull the raging thirst in his mouth and throat. The front door was too loud as it opened. He stood with the cold air against his face as a songbird warbled in a nearby garden in the first hours of daylight.
The dog was watching him from the footpath, crouching on its back legs.
Royce paused in the doorway. “Good morning. Want some breakfast?”
That the dog didn’t run was an affirmative answer, Royce reckoned. He went into the kitchen and rooted through the cupboards and drawers until he found a can of dog food he’d spotted yesterday. He emptied it into a cereal bowl then placed it just inside the front doorway.
The dog watched intently. Pricked up its ears then rose from path and stood glancing back-and-forth between Royce and the bowl. Sniffed at the air and stepped forward, ribs moving under its hide. Royce retreated from the bowl until he was in the doorway of the living room down the hallway from the front door. The dog entered the house slowly and looked around. Its long claws scratched on the carpet as it went to the bowl and sniffed at the food. A moment of hesitation, in which Royce was sure the dog would turn and flee; but then it was taking mouthfuls of the soggy mush. It was ravenous. The poor starving thing.
Royce watched the dog, arms folded, and waited until it had finished the meal before he stepped forward, but the dog turned and ran from the house. And before Royce was halfway down the garden path, the dog had disappeared into wild gardens down the street, and he would be lucky to see it again.
*
Before Royce left the village he searched the grocery shop and found a can of Happy Shopper orangeade underneath a mess of torn cardboard and plastic wrapping, dented and scuffed but airtight. He also scavenged a few tins of corned beef right on the edge of their expiry dates, and while searching a garden he picked up an axe and a folding spade from a ramshackle shed left unlocked by its last owners. He swung the axe and the weight in his hands felt proper and good.
He left the village and looked for the dog in the fields, but there was no sign of it and he accepted he was alone except for the rain and wind following him along the road.
He walked, one foot then the other, over and over.
A field of scrubland, bracken and stinking mud was a graveyard for over a dozen army tanks left abandoned during the outbreak. The ground was scarred and pitted, bullet casings gleaming in the mud. Royce walked among the tanks and counted fourteen rusting hulks in the rain. Dripping barrels and turrets. He trod over bones sinking into the mud and over patches of gro
und scorched bare, broken by craters and rents. On the other side of the field, something with multiple black insect legs hunched over a mound of carrion, pulsing intermittently. There were other things crawling over the ground. Things that skittered and cried and scuttled and howled. Creatures made of tendrils, with human faces screaming from amongst folds of blubbery flesh. Pale-limbed beasts thrashing in the mud. Scavengers of rot.
Royce kept low and slipped away before the monsters saw him.
*
The dual carriageway stretched away from him and found the horizon. The rain had ceased. Royce stepped between left-behind vehicles fading into the same dull shades as the road. Crows flapped around a collapsed tent on the central reservation. His boots scraped damply on the layer of leaf-mulch covering the road and he hefted the axe with both hands, glancing at the bits of rubbish accumulated beneath the vehicles. The bonnets and roofs of some cars were coated in dead leaves and muck.
He watched flocks of birds in distant skies, and was caught unaware by an infected woman in a stained and shredded tracksuit as she climbed from the front of a car and lurched towards him on bare feet all raw and flayed. Serrated teeth unsheathed from putrid gums, awash in black fluid spilling down her chin. She was all sharp edges and glistening meat, gibbering and wheezing past raw lips formed in something like a pout. Royce pushed her away with the sole of his foot and when she came back at him he swung the axe in a wide horizontal swipe and caught her in the side of her neck. Her head lolled to one side with a wet snap and something cracked underneath her skin. She made a pained gurgling as Royce hit her again and she fell against the car and cracked a window with the back of her head.
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 18