“Put down your gun,” the man said to Royce, his voice matter-of-fact and emotionless.
Royce didn’t move. He looked at Amy. Her downcast eyes, exhausted and terrified, and the pleading shape of her mouth.
“Put down your gun,” the man repeated. “Or she dies. It’s your choice.”
“Who are you?” Royce said. “What do you want?”
“Do what I say. Put down the gun.”
“Has he hurt you, Amy?” Royce kept his eyes on the man’s face.
Amy shook her head.
“What do you want?” Royce asked the man.
“I want you,” the man said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Put down the fucking gun. If you don’t, she’ll die and it’ll be your fault. More blood on your hands.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Royce said. “Don’t do anything stupid. Just tell me why you’re doing this.”
The man’s grin was severe, bitter and wolfish. “You don’t remember?”
“Remember what…?”
“The teenage boy you shot. You were hiding in a ditch when he found you and you shot him. You killed him.”
Royce remembered. A sharp memory of the lad’s shocked face as the buckshot tore into him. The blood on the ground.
“He was my younger brother,” the man said.
Royce tried to speak, but the muscles in his mouth were slack, and the sky suddenly felt very low. The world closing in.
“I remember,” said Royce. Words formed slowly from his dry mouth. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t have a choice. I thought he was going to kill me. I thought you were hunting us.”
The man shook his head. “We were heading for the east coast. We’d heard packs of infected in the local area, so we were in formation in case they attacked. I’d already lost two men the day before.”
“Your men?”
“I was their leader. But now they’re all gone. Most of them are dead, killed by the infected. The others abandoned me to make their own way across the country when I told them I was going to track you down.”
“You’ve been tracking us, all this time?”
“My brother was only seventeen.”
“I didn’t want to kill him. If I could live that moment again, I’d change what I did. I’m sorry.”
“I have no intention of hurting the lady or her unborn child, as long as you comply. I’m not a monster and I have no quarrel with them. All you have to do is put down your gun and I’ll let them go.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your promise?”
“If I’d wanted to hurt her, I’d have already done it. This isn’t about her; it’s you I want. Now do as I say. This doesn’t have to get ugly.”
Royce felt his heart sag like old cloth. His arms could scarcely hold the weight of the pistol. He blinked at the heat in his eyes. The regret and melancholy that would never leave him. His head hurt, and such a feeling of exhaustion fell over him that it was all he could do to stay on his feet.
He looked at the pistol in his hands, then at Amy. Finally, at the man. “Okay.”
“No, Royce, don’t…” Amy’s voice was small and frightened.
“Shut up,” the man told her, and he tightened his grip around her neck.
Slowly, Royce raised his hands and threw the pistol into a garden, so it was lost among the long grass. He put his hands at the back of his head.
The man let go of Amy and pushed her away, then he was upon Royce in several quick steps, and Royce held up his hands but it did no good. The man batted away Royce’s frail defensive gesture and fell upon him with his fists until he was curled up on the ground. And then the man began with his feet, kicking Royce’s stomach, groin and legs, and he never said a word. Agony exploded over Royce’s body as he tried to fold himself small to deflect the man’s attack, but those hard fists and feet found his soft parts and bones and ripped the breath from his lungs. He felt bones crack and skin tear, and the world became blinding, white-hot pain when a boot caught him in the back of the head.
Amy screamed and tried to pull the man away from Royce’s cowering form, but the he pushed her to the side of the road and when she tried again, the raising of the pistol discouraged her and she kept her distance.
The man halted and looked down at Royce. He stepped away, wiping his mouth. Sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Get up,” the man said.
Gradually, Royce unfurled himself, still shielding his torso with his elbows as he coughed into his bruised hands. Crumpled upon the road, his body sore and raw, and his insides felt fractured, loosened into broken bits. His ears rang. Fresh bruises rising on his skin. The healing cuts and wounds from the coach crash were reopened and bleeding. He leaned to one side and vomited a pale fluid flecked with blood onto the road. One of his front teeth tumbled past his lips and fell into the vomit. He raised his head, and the sky was too bright and the ground seemed to rise and fall. After he’d wiped his wet lips and purged the last of the vomit from his mouth, he looked up at the man, cowering like a beggar, his hands near his head and shaking.
The man’s face was morose, heartbroken, and the hand by his side was curled into a bloodless fist. He nodded towards Amy. “Say goodbye to her. I’ll let you have that.” He stepped away and let Amy go to Royce. She crouched by his side and held his shoulders as Royce sat up. He wheezed and groaned, grimacing at fresh agonies in his limbs. With one push of his tongue he found more loosened teeth.
Falling apart at the end of it all.
The man lowered his pistol and watched them.
Royce coughed when he tried to speak, and it took a while for the spasms in his chest to subside. His eyes watered and wetted the darkening bruises on his face, and he told Amy that he was sorry he couldn’t stay. She was crying, and she hugged him and he savoured her warmth, the smell of her hair. Her life and the life within her.
With his free hand, Royce wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Hurry up,” the man said behind them, rubbing his sore knuckles.
Royce wished Amy and the baby well and told her to keep heading for the east coast.
“Fiona’s dead, isn’t she?” said Amy.
“The infected. It was quick. I saw it happen.”
“I thought we were going to stay together. All of us.”
“Things don’t always work out the way we want them to,” Royce said. He doubled over into a coughing fit, clutching his ribs.
“I don’t know if I can make it on my own,” Amy said. Her face was very close to his. She was trembling.
Royce shook his head and tried to smile for her. “Yes, you can. You’re stronger than you think you are. You’re stronger than me. You don’t need me, Amy. Find sanctuary, be safe and stay resolute. You’ll be a wonderful mother.”
She looked at him, her body terribly frail underneath her clothes, her face blotchy and wet. She said nothing, wiped under her eyes.
“Did you have any names in mind for the baby?” Royce said.
“I don’t know. Why?”
He told her a name.
“I quite like it,” she said. “Why that name?”
“It was my daughter’s name. She should be remembered somehow.”
Amy was nodding, her face creasing into a stifled sob.
“It’s going to be okay,” Royce said. “Look at me. You’ll make it to the last outpost.”
“Let’s go,” the man said. “Get up.”
Amy helped Royce to his feet, and he groaned with each movement in his throbbing, sore joints. Her hands were a comfort upon him. When she let go of his shoulders he wavered and held his arms out to stay upright. The sky pulsed when he looked at it. He stepped away from Amy, and she made to follow him, but the man with the gun forced her back. She bristled and opened her mouth to say something, but Royce looked at her and shook his head.
“It’s okay,” Royce told her. “It’ll be okay.” His words tasted of blood.
The man jabbed the pistol towards Royce, forcing h
im down the road. “Maybe you’ll see each other in the next world.”
With the man at his back, Royce started walking down the road. One foot, then the other. Boots scraping. The man’s slow breathing behind him. Crows perched in treetops, cawing at a condemned man.
Royce never looked back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
They went into the fields, the man walking three paces behind Royce, their slow footfalls on the damp earth under a sky like a sea of ash. Royce kept his hands raised and looked straight ahead, hunched over and swaying in the rain-specked wind. With each breath came a sharp pain in his chest. His ribs grinding on broken angles. One side of his face was swollen, his left eye half-closed and weeping, and the cuts and bruises on his body leeched at the last of his strength. He was ready to fall down.
“You understand why I must do this,” said the man.
“I understand,” Royce said.
“A life for a life, like the old ways,” the man said. “I wish there was another way, but you’ve left me no choice.”
“Please don’t hurt Amy, after this, once you’ve finished with me.”
“I have no intention of hurting her; I’ll be heading up north once we’re done here.”
“What’s up north?”
“I’ve always wanted to visit the Lake District. Never had the chance to go before. My wife always preferred to go abroad.”
“You were married?”
“She was infected during the outbreak. I had to kill her.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“There was no other choice.”
“Do you remember her face?” said Royce.
“Most of the time,” the man said. “It’s difficult some days, like I can see her through a veil.”
“You’re lucky. I can’t remember my wife’s face, or my daughter’s.”
The man spat. “It’s all fading into the dark.”
“I hate the dark.”
“It’s all around us. The dark always wins, don’t you think? I think we’ll all be gone soon.”
“Maybe,” Royce said. “Depends how many of us are left.” His thoughts drifted to Amy, and he tried to imagine her raising her child in a world of monsters.
“I don’t see where we go from here,” the man said. “The plague is everywhere. I used to think we could reach the stars, and make great discoveries. What we could have achieved. But maybe it was never to be, and the plague is just the universe’s way of wiping us from existence. Maybe we’ve had our time in the sun. We never thought it could happen to us. Just think how many species have died out in the history of our planet. Lost to time. Millions of species. It’s beyond comprehension. We’re just another one to add to the list. An ape that grew too clever for its own good. But the Earth will abide.”
“Do you find that comforting?” Royce asked him.
“In a way. I don’t know what will happen to the infected. Maybe they’ll die out, or go dormant. Maybe they’ll evolve into something else.”
They walked on. Meadows forming out of the wild fields. Birds in the sky, weaving flocks. The bleak call of something in the woods.
They arrived at a stretch of barren ground and the man told Royce to stop and kneel down. Royce complied, wincing at the pain in his legs, one hand over his fractured ribs. His heart was steady. There was no fear of death, not now. He was beyond that. He stared straight ahead as the man moved closer behind him. The wind slipped across the fields and the broken horizon. The dead towns and villages, and the ruined cities.
Royce looked at the wane of the light in the clearing sky; the last time he’d see the sun as it fell. Taking his last breaths with the taste of blood and dirt in his mouth.
The man put the pistol to the back of Royce’s head and his breath caught in his throat. Royce looked out across the fields towards a hedgerow where the arrangement of rags and sticks could have passed for the forms of his wife and his swaddled daughter. Waiting for him to join them. Pleasing shapes to ease the last act of a life. It was easy to fool himself, especially now, even after all he’d seen.
The man let out a tired breath. “You won’t hear the shot.” His voice was almost kind.
Royce closed his eyes, and he smiled when he delved back into past years and finally remembered the faces of his family.
“I want to go home.”
And the man was right; Royce never heard the shot.
CHAPTER FORTY
The car had broken down five miles from the coast, rattling to a stop on a wind-blown stretch of some derelict road. Now she was walking, her bag hanging from her shoulder, the pistol in her hand tucked inside one pocket. The memories of Royce, George and Sister Fiona travelled with her. She pulled her coat over her swollen belly and pushed on, breathing through a clenched jaw at the aches and pains bursting within her limbs.
Sometimes, when she concentrated, she thought she could almost smell the sea.
She had last seen an infected person two days ago. The nights were silent without their cries. She wondered if they were dying out, with nothing left to prey upon and winter in its coldest months.
Amy looked ahead to the distant horizon, where huge banks of black clouds had formed to the east, out to sea. Falling drifts of distant rain like a veil over the sky.
The road never seemed to end, and she walked on.
Her water broke as she struggled along a dirt track on the outskirts of another unnamed village. She stumbled to a barn in a nearby field and shut herself inside and slumped on a blanket she laid upon the straw pile at the back of the building. Meagre daylight slipped through the thin gaps between the wooden slats in the walls. She pulled off her boots and her jeans then placed Royce’s pistol at her side.
The contractions were like knives slashing inside her. She felt like she was coming apart. The world was white-hot agony, and she screamed and cried, writhing, sweating and squirming on the blanket. The pain deepened, spread, and she cried and shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at the shifting walls and heaving floor.
The time shortened between the contractions until she felt the baby move and she was ready to push.
She opened her eyes. Her swollen breasts ached. Fire inside her. Immense pain beyond anything she’d ever felt before. The smell of her insides. Blood and fluids leaking onto the blanket. The urge to expel everything from her body. She snatched handfuls of straw and clenched her hands into fists.
A lone infected, drawn by her screams, was scratching at the exterior walls and the door, trying to get in. Glimpses of its awful face sniffing between the slats. It growled and shrieked, enraged in its hunger, tortured by bloodlust. Amy shouted and cursed at the creature.
“Go away! Leave me alone!”
The baby emerged after the sun had gone down, squirming and grey, bloodied and gore-streaked. A screaming girl. Amy lit a Coleman lantern from her pack and then cut the newborn’s umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. Wrapped the girl in a towel she had taken from a house full of corpses. The baby girl looked at her with such large eyes and wonderment that Amy cried. She was beautiful and fragile, precious and frail.
The infected thing slammed against the walls. The doors rattled.
Exhausted, her heart swollen and her body trembling, Amy cradled the girl with one arm while she picked up the pistol. It was shaking in her hand. A door hinge snapped. A gaping mouth appeared through a torn hole then drew back.
Amy told her daughter that she loved her. Kissed her forehead and smelled the wonderful scent of her scalp.
“Welcome to the world,” she said, holding back the hysteria behind her eyes.
Wood broke under the violence of blackened claws.
Amy had forgotten how many bullets were in the pistol. Whatever was left, it would have to be enough. If she had to, she would use the gun to club the infected to death. Nothing would take her baby away.
Her daughter looked up at her with the smallest curve of a smile.
Amy smiled in return. “Everything’s goin
g to be okay. I’ll take care of you.” Her voice wavered on the last word and she began to cry.
She aimed the pistol at the doors and waited, her vision wet with tears.
The sharp crack of splintering wood.
The doors flew open.
An infected man, alone and hungry, snarling through a slack mouth. Stink of decay and dirt. Deathly thin underneath the slashed and filthy remains of a funeral suit.
Amy kept her arm steady. The feel of the pistol in her hand. Looking down the barrel at the monster.
She remembered those who had died on the road.
The monster lurched forward.
The baby cried.
Amy pulled the trigger and said her daughter’s name.
THE END
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 20