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.
“I’m sorry,” Royce said.
She was slumped on the tarmac with her arms raised to him when he stepped towards her and brought down the axe. And when he was finished with her, he searched amongst the cars while he watched for other surprises. In the back of an old Vauxhall he found – among scattered comic books, glassware and useless electronic gadgets – a plastic bag swollen with lottery scratchcards. He sat on the front seat and went through them, scraping at the cards with the nail of his index finger. He laughed when he scratched away the varnish over the numbers on the fifteenth card in his hands and realised he had won ten thousand pounds. He laughed until his throat ached and his stomach cramped. And for a while he couldn’t stop laughing and he didn’t care; didn’t care for it any more than he cared for the insects crawling over the upholstery or the rats watching him from the roadside gutters.
He stood and threw the scratchcards onto the road and they scattered in the wind.
*
Royce kept walking with his face against the wind. He sometimes thought that George was behind him, keeping him company on the road. No movement in the fields to either side. He watched the horizon and pulled his coat tighter around his throat. He stopped when he noticed something under a slumping tree at the side of the road. A damp mound of black and white fur that fell into focus when he came nearer. Something dead.
He stood over the body of the dog and bowed his head. Closed his eyes as his heart shrivelled. The pain of his empty stomach; a tremendous sadness inside him that rose into his chest and took the breath from his lungs.
The dog was curled up as if sleeping, head resting on its front paws. Royce crouched and laid his hand on the dog’s head and there was no warmth. He looked for a cause of death, but there was none. Dehydration or starvation, maybe. Royce checked the loose collar around its thin neck. A metal tag with a name and a telephone number.
Freddie.
Maybe Freddie had known death was coming and had come here to die. Royce stroked the dog’s fur and whispered to him and hoped he had passed without pain or sadness.
He hoped Freddie hadn’t felt too alone.
*
Using the spade, Royce dug a shallow grave in a field away from the road, then lowered the dog into the earth with much care and piled the excavated dirt upon the body and recited a poem about death his paternal grandfather had often quoted when drunk. The wind took the words and dried his mouth, and he stared at the damp ground with his face slack and tired.
Royce gathered stones from nearby and piled them atop the grave. He stood next to the grave and looked out across the countryside, feeling like the last warden of an old world. He was wishing he could have saved the dog, when a series of gunshots rang out far ahead, down the road.
*
He walked, watching the distance ahead and blinking rain from his eyes. A low pain settled at the top of his skull and began to work downwards. His bones were heavy and slow, a skeleton in filthy clothes shambling along a blackened road. Pain all over him like hard fingers. A ghoul haunting the highways.
There was a traffic pile-up ahead, and when he arrived there with his legs aching and his pulse pounding in his ears, he found the bodies of two infected slack and dead upon the road. A man and a woman, starvation-thin and covered in grime, their chests opened from fresh gunshot wounds. The woman’s stomach was riddled with pale tendrils. The man had died with his hands grasped into claws resting upon his chest.
The sound of movement behind him, but before he could turn, something cold and hard was pressed against the back of his head. A metallic click trembled through his skull. A gun, he thought absently, relieved that his end would be quick. But he recognised the voice that ordered him to raise his hands and turn around.
He pivoted with his hands in the air. The tip of the pistol barrel inches from his head.
Sister Fiona’s face was gaunt and sickly, her hair matted with dried filth. Her pistol hand was shaking and her finger quivered upon the trigger. She frowned, uncertainty in her eyes, her mouth closed and bloodless and mean.
“Royce?” Her voice wavered.
He nodded, remained still, and he didn’t lower his hands until she lowered the gun.
Sister Fiona called over her shoulder: “You can come out. It’s safe.”
A small face rose from behind a dead car beyond the old woman. Nervous eyes. Then the face broke into a sad, strained smile. Amy emerged from her hiding place, cradling her stomach in her hands. She went to Royce and hugged him, and he could do nothing but stand there and feel her face buried against his chest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The housing estate had been built less than a year before the world ended. Red brick modern houses arranged in small cul-de-sacs where the new roads and pavements terminated. Houses in straight rows along empty streets. Now the gardens were dense and flourishing with weeds, but the roads were remarkably clean, as if the apocalypse hadn’t touched the estate. No cars on the roads or the driveways. Some of the FOR SALE signs had collapsed. The windows of the houses were bare, and it occurred to Royce that the estate wasn’t inhabited when the outbreak hit. He looked through double-glazed windows into unfurnished rooms with bare walls.
Amy and Sister Fiona stood in the street, huddled together in the vanishing light.
*
Royce chose a house at one end of a cul-de-sac and gained entry through a side door. They searched the house and then settled in the living room, whose window looked out onto a walled-in garden. The wall was high enough to hide any light in the window from anyone outside the property. Royce went out into the back garden and tested the wooden gate, which held and was almost as tall as the wall.
Candles were lit and blankets were laid out next to tins of food. The sagging and slumping of limbs. Tired breaths. Exhaustion in the words taken from their mouths.
They shut themselves away from the world, sat with the candle between them, and the light painted their shadows upon the walls. The room still retained the smell of plaster. They were shivering in their blankets, solemn faces in the candlelight. Pitch black past the window, night without starlight, absent moon. Absolute darkness. They ate the food they could spare for that night, all of it taken in small mouthfuls in the silence of the room. Royce swigged from the can of orangeade and wiped the back of his sleeve over his mouth. His beard itched.
“How did you survive?” Royce asked the women. “Did anyone else make it?”
Sister Fiona looked at him then looked away quickly and folded her arms over her chest. Amy raised her face from the candle flame; her eyes could have been oil. “We were still inside the coach when the infected swarmed us. Everything seemed at weird angles; it was unreal and dream-like. There was blood and broken glass. It felt like someone had been kicking me. Some people were already dead, but most were injured. The infected dragged people through the shattered windows, and some infected were clawing to get inside. I remember their faces, and I remember the faces of the people around us. Some of them prayed, but it didn’t do them any good.” Amy gently rubbed her belly, her eyes distant. “Fiona grabbed my hand and took care of me. We managed to get out by crawling through the busted fire escape at the back of the coach. Fiona shot some infected that came at us and she dragged me with her
until we were clear of the crash site. We hid amongst the trees, and when I looked back towards the coach, I didn’t see anyone else escape. Fiona saved my life and my baby’s life.”
Royce looked at her and imagined those terrible minutes inside the wrecked coach.
Amy wiped her eyes. “How did you escape, Royce?”
He told them about how he had been thrown clear and spent the following hours hiding up a tree.
“What happened to George?” Amy said. “I didn’t see him.”
Royce swallowed. “He’s dead.” A lie was a kinder gift than the truth.
“You saw him?”
“Yes. He died quickly, if that helps. He didn’t suffer.”
Amy nodded, then winced and held her stomach.
“The baby?” Sister Fiona asked her.
“She’s just kicking.” Amy tried to smile, but it was very thin. She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them again she exhaled through gritted teeth and touched the small of her back. “The little monkey is playing football, I think. Maybe she’ll play for England Ladies one day. She’s a tough one, I can tell.”
“Just like her mother.”
“I keep worrying she’ll be born prematurely,” Amy said. “All this stress, fear and exhaustion.”
Sister Fiona placed one wrinkled hand on Amy’s shoulder. “She’ll arrive when she’s ready.”
Amy looked at the candle flame. Her eyes were large and glassy. “I wonder how long until she’s ready.”
“Are you ready?” said Royce.
She raised her face to him. “Yes. She’s the reason I’ve come this far. She’s the only reason I’m alive – to bring her into the world.”
“You’ll be a fine mother, Amy,” said Sister Fiona. “You’ll keep her safe.”
“Do you think we’ll reach the coast?” Amy said.
Sister Fiona sipped her water. “Have faith, Amy.”
Amy nodded, blinking her moist eyes.
Royce looked at the women’s shadows on the wall. “We should get some sleep. We all need some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day.”
*
Amy was asleep, wrapped in her blankets so only her face was exposed. Royce watched her during the night, when he couldn’t sleep because of the images that visited him whenever his closed his eyes. Horrid faces and awful mouths. Sister Fiona had left the room to walk around the house. Royce went to find her.
She was standing at an upstairs window looking out at the deserted street. The clouds had parted and the moon was out. The pale light made her a ghost. She glanced at Royce when he stood next to her, but said nothing.
They stared out at the night.
“I’m sorry about your group,” said Royce.
She looked at the moon. “Thanks. That’s very kind of you to say.”
“You should get some sleep.”
“They’re all gone,” she said. “Taken up. I’ve lost them all. I don’t know why God would let that happen. Did He do it to save them from suffering? But if that’s true then why did He leave me here? Did I commit a sin, or offend God? What did I do? Am I forsaken, Royce?”
He wanted to tell her that he thought it was all nonsense, but he didn’t have the heart. “Things just happen. We can’t stop that.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t believe in anything, Royce. I knew that when you travelled with us.”
“So, if everything happens for a reason, why did your god let the plague decimate the planet?”
“Punishment, I think.”
“And I’m guessing that you and your group thought you were spared God’s wrath because of what you believed? Is that what you told all the children?”
“Yes. Because it was true. We were His chosen people.”
“So why are the rest of them dead?”
Fiona’s breath was mist on the window. “I don’t know. It’s not for me to understand God’s work. Maybe He has left me in this world as a lesson…because I was too pious, too sure of myself. I don’t know. I prayed for a sign, for an answer, but there’s nothing.”
Royce folded his arms, watched the stars pulsate and shimmer. He didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t want to stay here any longer,” she said. “I want to leave.”
“We’ll leave in the morning,” Royce said.
“No, you misunderstand. I want to leave this world, this life.”
“You want to die?”
“I want to die.”
“Don’t say that. You can’t leave Amy and the baby.”
“That’s why I’m glad we found you again,” she said. “Because now I can leave and be sure you’ll take care of them. I couldn’t have left them alone in this terrible world. But now you’re here, Royce, and you can be their guardian.”
“No, wait…”
She offered him the pistol. Her face was serene. “I want you to shoot me, Royce.”
“I can’t do that.” He stepped back and held his hands in front of him. “I won’t.”
“Please,” she said. “It would be a kindness. I want to join my people – my brothers and sisters – in the next world. Don’t make me stay here alone.”
“You’re not alone,” Royce said. “You’ve got me and Amy.”
“Yes, and I’m thankful to both of you. But you’re not my family. You’re not my people. I have to be with my people. Don’t you understand?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Royce said. “There’s enough death around here.”
Sister Fiona turned away and looked out at the darkness. The pistol remained in her hand.
“A little more death won’t make any difference.”
*
Royce woke on the floor with the echoes of bad dreams crying in his head. There had been a nightmare about Amy giving birth to a squealing thing with claws and hooves.
A noise had woken him. He lay still. It had been the sound of a door closing. Amy was still asleep. Sister Fiona’s heavy coat was bundled on the floor, next to her pistol. Royce listened for the sound of movement in the house, but he could only hear Amy’s gentle breathing across from him.
He rose and stumbled into the hallway. The front door was shut. He went into the kitchen and stood among the bare worktops and empty cupboard units, his heart loud and stuttering. Looking out the window he saw Sister Fiona walking up the road away from the house, towards the other end of the cul-de-sac.
He checked on Amy to make sure she was still asleep, then grabbed the pistol and went outside, where he glimpsed the old woman disappearing around the side of the last house at the far end. He staggered after her, breathing hard and wincing at the stiff joints in his legs, boots scuffing on the unbroken tarmac. From a garden, birds took flight into a reddening sky. Royce rounded the corner of the last house and halted.
The estate ended, and beyond the last house Sister Fiona was walking away across a field, approaching a long ridge of tall trees. Royce broke into a pained jog, gaining upon her, but when he was within fifty yards of her and she was on the edge of the treeline, she halted and turned to face him.
Royce stopped.
Sister Fiona was shaking her head.
“Come back,” Royce said.
No, she mouthed, and her face was serene.
The infected flooded from the trees behind her, festering, crooked and frenzied. Swiping claws and jabbering mouths. She turned to accept them with her arms held wide.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Royce staggered back to the estate. He reached the house and his legs gave out and he slumped in the garden, his breath spilling out of him. The front door was open, but he was sure he’d closed it before going after Sister Fiona. He went into the house and called to Amy, but there was no response and he hurried into the living room and her bag was still on the floor along with her discarded blankets. He called her name again, searched the house then outside.
She was gone.
He searc
hed deeper into the estate, wandering into a stretch of woodland that bordered the road to the east. Infected people milled about between the trees, wheezing and growling, slouching in the dead leaves, bracken and muck. He retreated back the way he’d come when something made of sharp limbs and tendrils thrashed through the foliage near to where he’d been hiding.
He circumnavigated the estate, but found no sign of Amy, and he stood in the middle of the street with his hands on the top of his head. Turned to look at the houses around him as tears welled in his eyes. Saliva on his lips. Chest shivering with his ragged breathing.
From the field where Sister Fiona had been slaughtered, the infected screamed.
*
Royce sat on the floor of the living room with his back to the wall, facing the window with the pistol in both hands. There were four bullets left. He stared past the window at the patch of sky and watched it dim as hours passed in the waning day. He did not eat or drink and he closed his eyes for minutes at a time when he tried to remember the faces of his family and all the friends he had lost. He remembered George, and cried for the old man and his cruel fate.
Time passed. Thunder in distant skies. The walls were flawless and cold around him and he was alone again. Always alone to face the dark.
Time passed.
Three knocks at the front door woke him from his stupor. His heart lurched as he listened. Another three knocks, slow and deliberate, like knuckles rapping on his coffin lid.
He got to his feet, checked the rounds in the pistol, and went to answer the door.
*
The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 19