Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  ‘I could have looked in her purse, checked to see if there was someone I could call. I know my girls are dead, perhaps her father is still waiting somewhere for her.’

  Jeb held a hand over the bank of tea lights, watching the way the flames reflected against his skin. He looked up and met the old man’s eyes. ‘No one can bury them all. That’s one of the reasons we’re heading out of London. Other diseases will start to take hold. Cholera, typhoid …’ He shrugged, acknowledging that he had come to the end of his understanding of infections. ‘Other things.’

  Magnus thought about the fires Jeb had seen from the top of the hotel; soon it would be too late. ‘We were shot at by soldiers. They told us we were in a controlled zone.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘The authorities couldn’t keep up with the number of deaths, but they sure were quick to stamp down on damage to property. Certain zones, shopping districts in the centre of towns, were meant to be no-go. I guess you’ve seen for yourself that it didn’t work.’

  Jeb said, ‘It looked like people decided they wanted to die in front of a big flat screen, drinking a bottle of Chivas and wearing nice new trainers.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘I always thought of Brits as restrained, but the scenes I saw on television of your city centres reminded me of footage of the LA riots. I didn’t want any part of it, so I maxed out my credit cards, booked myself in here and phoned home every quarter-hour in the hope that someone would pick up. Eventually Ben, my neighbour, answered.’ Eddie’s voice broke. ‘He told me what had happened to my girls.’ The old man covered his face with his hands and took a deep juddering sigh. When he removed them he was calm again. ‘I never bothered to ask Ben what he was doing in my house. Anything there that he wanted, he was welcome to. I just wished him luck and hung up the phone. I’ve been here ever since, screwing up the courage to do what needs to be done.’

  Jeb nodded. His face was blank, as if he were back in the prison cell he refused to share.

  ‘We’re heading north,’ Magnus said. ‘Far north in my case. I’m from Orkney.’ It seemed crass to mention family after Eddie’s tale, but he asked, ‘I don’t suppose you heard anything about how things are up there, in the islands?’

  ‘No, son.’ Eddie raised his glass to his lips. Magnus got the impression that this time it was an attempt to avoid meeting his eyes rather than an urge for alcohol that prompted the move. ‘I never heard anything about how things are up there.’

  ‘Why don’t you join us?’ Magnus looked at Jeb, inviting his support, but Jeb stared unspeaking at the candles in front of him.

  ‘I appreciate the invitation.’ Eddie gave a polite smile and once more Magnus caught a glimpse of the person he had been before the crisis: a man with enough self-regard to stand by his convictions and enough empathy to do so graciously. ‘But I don’t have the energy left for that kind of trip. I thought I might hang around here, see if I can’t find a way into the British Library and take a last look around for old times’ sake. This disaster may have its compensations. I may never see another of Shakespeare’s plays performed, but perhaps I can revisit his First Folio before I die.’

  ‘There are fires in the city, diseases.’ Magnus looked at Jeb again, but Jeb’s face had regained its shuttered look.

  ‘This isn’t a time to be sentimental about strangers, not if you want to survive.’ Eddie nodded towards Jeb. ‘He knows that.’ His eyes met Magnus’s. ‘You’re a young man. You still have things you need to do, find a girl, start a family. I did all that. It was fun and I highly recommend it, but there’s nothing left for me. I’ve lost my taste for life.’

  His cousin Hugh had been a younger man than Magnus was now, but he had lost his taste for life too. Magnus wanted to say something about the misery of suicide, but the words were beyond his grasp. Somewhere another door slammed. All three of them turned towards the noise, but there was nothing in the lobby except a clash of colours and patterns it had once been thought worth a lot of money to sit among.

  Eddie got up and walked slowly towards the bar as if his joints were hurting, though it might have been the shaker full of martini inside him that slowed his pace. ‘There are more survivors than you might think.’ It should have been a cause for celebration, but Eddie’s expression was serious. ‘Keep your eyes open, and be careful how you go. Like the bard said, “The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.”’

  PART TWO

  By then we had made our covenant with silence,

  But in the first few days it was so still

  We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

  ‘The Horses’, Edwin Muir

  Twenty

  The sound of Magnus and Jeb’s motorbikes cut through the countryside, announcing their progress. Despite the heat they were both dressed in motorcycle leathers and crash helmets, both of them with scarves wrapped around their mouths and noses to guard against the dust and the stench of decay. The smell had grown worse as they left London behind. The summer had been a good one and crops had ripened earlier than usual. Now they lay rotting in the fields. Cattle also lay in the fields and some of them were rotting too.

  The motorbikes had been Magnus’s idea, the guns strapped to their backs Jeb’s. They had planned to spend their nights sheltered in houses large enough to have spare bedrooms left unoccupied by the dead, but had encountered too many decaying corpses, too many families huddled together in death, too many blown-out brains and emptied pill bottles. Now they camped outside, taking turns to stay awake, like cowboys crossing the plains in some old movie.

  Magnus reckoned that he could have reached the ferry terminal at Scrabster in two days, if he had bombed the journey. But they had met the aftermath of several accidents on their way out of London: a driver thrown through the windscreen of his car, a teenage boy impaled on the railings of a park he had somehow got locked inside, a little girl who had fallen from a high, neglected building; that last one had made Magnus cry. The tears had been a release, and he had hated himself for feeling better.

  The accidents were a reminder that it was not only the sweats they needed to survive and they had agreed to stick to a steady thirty miles an hour, in the hope of avoiding a broken leg, or worse.

  Magnus and Hugh had graduated to motorbikes in their teens. They had weathered the usual falls and near misses, raced each other past Maes Howe, the sky stretching wide and seamless above them. Neighbours had warned their parents of the speeds the boys went, but even his father’s sudden death had not persuaded Magnus of his own mortality.

  Hugh had let the waves roll over him, filled his pockets with stones, weighted his rucksack with boulders and then walked into the sea. His death had rendered life more fragile, but it had increased Magnus’s recklessness. It was as if he had to live life twice as hard, to show Hugh, who was often with him, just out of sight on the periphery of his vision, what a fool he had been to give in.

  The sweats had defeated Magnus’s appetite for danger. He kept recalling the final frames of Easy Rider, Peter Fonda engulfed by flames, Dennis Hopper lying shot at the side of the road. Neither he nor Jeb had mentioned what provision they would make should the other fall ill, or become injured. There was no need.

  It was late afternoon and the sun was at its highest point, but the narrow road they were travelling was bordered on either side by tall verges which raised the surrounding fields three feet above them. It was like travelling through a shaded valley. Orkney was flat and almost treeless. You could see for miles. Here roads took dark twists and turns, the high verges and hedgerows deadened sound and it was impossible to know what might lie around the next corner, or who was hiding among the greenery.

  They had started their journey on the M1 but, though the earth had seemed to be dying, it was as Eddie had said: other survivors haunted the landscape. Magnus caught occasional glimpses of them peering from curtained windows, hiding in verges, lurking in shadows in deserted towns. He wondered if it was death that had made them that way
. Survivors had been abandoned by everyone they held dear and though their loved ones had had no say in it, their going made it harder to trust the living.

  At first, Magnus had dismounted and taken off his helmet when he saw another survivor. But perhaps some of the prison menace still clung to him because so far people had melted away, except for an elderly man who came out of his cottage, levelled a shotgun at Magnus and told him to get going.

  ‘We don’t mean any harm,’ Magnus had said.

  The old man had kept his aim steady and repeated his instruction. ‘Be on your way, boys.’ But perhaps he believed Magnus because he added, ‘And watch how you go. There are some bad buggers about.’

  The old man had been dressed in work gear. His blue overalls and battered wellies reminded Magnus of his father and he had wanted to ask him what they should do. But Magnus had caught the light of madness in the old man’s eyes, saw the tremble in his trigger finger and got back on his motorbike and rode away without another word.

  He and Jeb had agreed to switch to the B-roads after an encounter with a souped-up Porsche. The car had driven alongside them, coming too close to their bikes and then drifting away, playing with them like a sheepdog harrying sheep. Magnus had known there was only one end to the game and had slowed his bike, bracing himself for the scud of concrete against flesh and leather. But Jeb had slid the gun from the inside of his jacket and fired at the car. They were still moving too fast for him to take proper aim and the shot had gone wild, but it had been enough to frighten the Porsche’s driver and the car had zoomed off along the motorway.

  They had come across the Porsche again a few hours later, parked at a service station. There were other cars skewed across the car park, all of them high-performance. A deep bass rock beat echoed from somewhere in the centre of the squat building. Magnus and Jeb had remained straddled on their motorbikes.

  Jeb had flipped up his helmet’s visor. ‘They still have electricity.’

  The services housed an M&S, a Burger King, and a Krispy Kreme Donuts concession. Magnus did not have to get close to know that it would smell foul inside. You would have to be unhinged to make your base there among the rats and putrefying food. He counted the cars. ‘Twenty of them. Quite a gang.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Jeb leaned back, stretching his spine, his gloved hands still gripping the bike’s handlebars. ‘Or one Top Gear fan having the time of his life.’

  He got off his motorcycle, unsheathed the Bowie knife he kept strapped to his calf and began slashing the cars’ tyres. After a moment’s hesitation Magnus dismounted, slid his own knife from his rucksack and did the same. They had been running low on fuel and had turned into the service station in the hope that they could switch on the petrol pumps or siphon petrol from abandoned cars, but had driven on without filling their tanks.

  That was a day ago. The only people they had seen since were a couple of what Magnus had thought were youths, crouching in a ditch. Jeb had driven by without noticing them, but some movement had snagged Magnus’s eye and he had seen two frightened faces, one brown, the other ruddy with sunburn, hiding in the shadows thrown by an overgrown hedge. It was only as he drove past that he realised they were girls in men’s clothing. If he had been travelling solo Magnus would have slowed his bike to a halt, but he had looked at Jeb’s broad, leather-clad back and decided it was better to travel on. The girls’ fear brought back the alleyway behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, the man trying to force himself on the drunken woman.

  Magnus’s thoughts were dominated by the past, memories of home, his family, childhood, his cousin Hugh. The circumstances of his meeting with Jeb also preyed on him. Each night Magnus told himself he would ditch the ex-con and make his own way. Each morning they drove on together. Sometimes one of them was ahead, sometimes the other but, although their bikes ate up the miles at an even pace, they rarely travelled side by side.

  There was safety in numbers, Magnus told himself. But he knew that he feared being alone in the changed landscape. It was too quiet, too full of the voices of the dead. As if on cue he heard his father say, ‘A man is the company he keeps.’ Magnus knew how his father would have reacted to his son teaming up with a prisoner who had been confined to a wing reserved for sex offenders. Thoughts of his father sparked more thoughts of home. Magnus had tried calling his mother several times, but though the phone rang on, no one answered. They would be okay, he reassured himself. His mother was the most resourceful woman he knew and Rhona came from the same stock. If anyone could survive it would be them. But survival had nothing to do with skills and good sense. It was a toss of the dice, a spin of the wheel of fortune.

  Sunlight dappled through the hedgerows, strobing on the road ahead. Jeb had lengthened the distance between them. His body and the bike he was riding were figured with glimmering patterns formed from brightness and shadow. Magnus followed him, travelling through a discotheque of flashing light and dark. The birds seemed to have grown louder as the other sounds of the world had receded. A chaffinch was repeating the same phrase over and over, a piping refrain in a clamour of chirps, trills and flourishes. Magnus blinked his eyes. They had been driving for hours now. When the road widened he would pull ahead, slow the bike to a halt and call a coffee stop.

  Another sound reached him, an alien hum that outstripped the noise of their motorbikes and the commotion of birds. For one maddening, panicking moment Magnus thought a bee had somehow found its way inside his motorbike helmet, but then he realised the sound came from outside himself. It was an engine, high-pitched with speed, and it was growing louder.

  Jeb’s bike was up ahead, still in the centre of the road, travelling towards a blind bend. Magnus shouted at him to pull over, but his words were lost in the slipstream of noise and breeze. Magnus slowed his bike, steering it left, drawing closer to the verge to give whatever was coming towards them space to pass. He shouted again. Perhaps Jeb was caught in his own thoughts of the past and it was the lure of them, or other dreams, that stopped him registering the approaching engine. He heard it too late and pulled right as he cornered the left turn. A yellow Audi emerged around the bend and the bike skewed across the road, throwing Jeb beneath it. The wheels kept on spinning. They struck the tarmac and propelled the bike, with Jeb still pinned under it, across the road towards a ditch.

  Magnus flung his own machine into a hedge and threw himself after it. The Audi skidded across the road, narrowly missing Jeb’s still moving bike, and pitched to a halt in a cloud of burning rubber, facing the direction it had come from. The door of the car opened and the driver got out. Magnus’s first thought was that he was just a boy. Magnus shouted, ‘Help me get the bike off him,’ and started to run to where Jeb lay trapped half in, half out of the ditch.

  His second thought was that the driver wasn’t a boy, not really. He was short and slightly built, but he was dressed in a palette of summer pastels that suggested rounds of golf with business cronies, followed by vodka and tonics in the clubhouse bar. The man grinned and his face creased into lines that were at odds with youth. There was something familiar about the aged-young face. Magnus realised that it reminded him of an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy one of the comics on the circuit had used as a prop. It was a horrible object, prone to obscene observations its handler would never have got away with. Time seemed to falter. Magnus took a step backward and the driver reached into the car.

  Jeb let out a shout that broke the spell and Magnus started towards him again. ‘Help me get this bloody machine off him,’ he shouted at the man. Jeb must have managed to reach the motorbike’s ignition because the engine died and its wheels faltered to a halt. There was a smell of oil and petrol and Magnus thought how easy it would be for the whole thing to go up. ‘Are you all right?’

  He lowered himself into the ditch. Jeb was curled as far forward as the motorbike would let him, clutching at his right leg. His face was twisted in agony.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Magnus said, his heart hammering in his chest. ‘We’ll get it
off you.’

  Jeb said something fast and urgent, but his voice was hoarse and Magnus could not make out the words. He put his gloved hands on the scorching metal, trying to work out how best to lift the bike free, without doing more damage. ‘Fucking …’ Jeb’s voice was a struggle of pain and phlegm. ‘Fucking … fucking …’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Magnus tried to soothe him. ‘We’ll find a chemist’s, fire some painkillers into you.’

  The best option might be to take the bike apart, he decided. Remove its panniers and handlebars, its saddle and wheels and then see where they could go from there.

  ‘Fucking …’ Sweat spangled Jeb’s forehead. His words were growing in urgency. ‘Fucking look behind you!’

  Magnus turned. The yellow Audi’s boot was open. The puppet-faced man had taken something from it and was coming towards them. At first Magnus thought he had reached the same conclusion about dismantling the bike and had found a tool to do the job, then he saw the glint of the blade and realised it was a machete, or did he mean a Samurai sword? There was a man in Stromness who had killed his best friend with a Samurai sword that had hung blamelessly above the couch in his sitting room for years. Magnus’s mind was racing. He pulled off his motorcycle gloves and reached for the rifle strapped to his back, but it snagged on something and he could not pull it free. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck …’ Now it was Magnus who was swearing. Jeb said nothing, but his breaths came fast and heavy, like a horse after a gallop along the sands. Magnus pulled at the rifle again. This time it came free, but the man had reached the edge of the ditch.

  He said, ‘You’re the vandals that slashed my tyres,’ and raised his sword high.

  Magnus was fumbling with the gun. Fuck! He had shot almost as many rats as Hugh, but now his fingers were groping for the safety catch.

  ‘Shoot him,’ Jeb whispered. ‘Fucking shoot him.’

  And the man’s head exploded.

  The spray of blood, bone and brain was warm; body temperature, Magnus thought. He wiped a hand across his eyes, trying to clear the redness from his vision, and felt a wild, hysterical urge to laugh. He stared stupidly at the gun in his hands, knowing that he had not pulled the trigger, but unable to comprehend what had happened. He looked at Jeb. His face was red, as if someone had peeled the skin from his flesh. His eyes were trained towards the road above. Magnus followed his stare. A tall man in a clerical collar and army fatigues walked to where the driver lay slumped at the side of the road. He prodded the body gently with the toe of his boot, though there could be no doubt that the man was dead.