by David Moody
And then he flinches.
The Hater hears him and reaches for the door, but Paul reacts first.
He bursts out of the wardrobe, sprints the length of the short landing, then shoves the Hater in the small of his back and sends him flying forward. He hits his head on the sink with a nauseating crack and staggers back. While he’s off-balance, Paul pushes him into the bath.
“Move!” Paul grabs Matt’s shoulder and drags him downstairs.
“Wait.… Don’t…”
But Paul’s not listening. He bursts out of the front door at full pelt with Matt in tow and runs straight into a group of black-suited, face-masked, machine-gun-wielding soldiers coming the other way. Both he and Matt immediately raise their hands in submission, but it’s a futile gesture.
“Fucking sort them out,” one of the soldiers yells, and two of them grab one man each and drag them away. They’re shoved up against the nearest wall, machine guns in their faces. Matt tries to protest, to explain, to plead, but no one’s listening. He takes the butt of a weapon to the gut for his troubles.
The Hater comes staggering out of the house, looking for his prey. Four more soldiers turn on him and unload their guns, hitting him with enough bullets to bring down twenty men.
“They’re clear, Sarge. They have to be,” the soldier pushing Matt’s face against the brickwork shouts to his commanding officer, voice muffled by his mask.
“Check ’em,” the sergeant shouts back.
“But, Sarge, if they haven’t gone for us, then—”
“Fucking check them! Now!”
“Sir.”
Matt is turned around and pushed against the wall again, arms pinned behind him. His neck and shoulders are held as another faceless trooper pricks his skin with some kind of needle-sharp sensor, then checks a small, tabletlike machine. Matt can only move his eyes, but he’s aware of enough rough movement to his immediate right to know that the exact same thing is happening to Paul. They’re both held for what feels like forever but in reality is just a few seconds.
“Clear,” the soldier checking Paul shouts.
Another wait. Is something wrong?
“And this one,” the soldier in front of Matt confirms. The grip on his neck is relaxed, but several guns still remain trained on him.
The sergeant steps forward—face hidden, indeterminable intent—and barks out more orders. “Get ’em out of here. Get ’em on one of the buses if they ain’t already gone.”
The soldiers march Matt and Paul down a short alleyway and across a desolate-looking street, then push them toward a retail park. An empty horseshoe of familiar high-street stores around a large car park, which is is half-full of people left waiting.
People like Paul and Matt.
The Unchanged.
Temporary two-meter-tall metal barriers have been wrapped around the car park. Is it to keep the crowds in or keep the Haters out? Matt can’t tell which. He and Paul are herded into the midst of the masses. Matt realizes Paul’s somehow still clinging to his precious shotgun. Strange how no one protests, Matt thinks. Strange that no one cares.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Paul demands, though he knows Matt doesn’t have any answers.
More soldiers are here, corralling the public. A young woman—who looks as terrified as Matt feels—offers an explanation. “They’re shipping us out to Lincoln. It’s the closest camp.”
“Camp? What the hell?”
She doesn’t reply, the movement of the crowd carrying her away before she has chance.
The sounds of more gunfire and mortar rounds come from the area Paul and Matt have just escaped. Then a more familiar noise as a convoy of three beaten-up coaches races down the road and pulls up near the entrance to the car park. Metal grilles are welded over windows.
More through luck than judgment, Paul and Matt are near to where the coaches stop. The crowd surges, and they’re carried toward the first of the transports. Paul catches Matt’s eye as they’re separated by the surge, Matt involuntarily moving ahead. “Just get on the bus.”
“Stay close, mate,” Paul shouts back, desperately trying to keep up.
Between twenty and thirty soldiers form an outward facing funnel at the door of each bus, giving the public some protection as they pile forward. Matt manages to slip through and get on board. But Paul is pushed farther back and struggles to get anywhere close.
Haters.
Paul glances back over his shoulder and sees a massive pack of them approaching. They sprint toward the retail park en masse, breaking through the military’s first line of defense with arrogant ease. The fastest few start climbing up and over the barriers and are brought down by machine-gun fire. It’s a testament to how volatile and dangerous this nightmare situation is that the soldiers fire without any consideration for the safety of the public they’ve been sent here to protect, and as many civilians as Haters are mown down. It seems the amount of collateral damage is unimportant today. No cost is too great. All that matters is destroying the attacking enemy.
Paul’s struggling to move in any direction now. The panicking crowd is tightly packed around him, so close he can barely breathe, and he’s finding it hard to keep his feet on the ground. The thought of being trampled to death is marginally less terrifying than the idea of being torn apart by Haters. His view is obscured—all he can see are people as desperate as he is clamoring for the same safety he himself craves.
He doesn’t see the Hater who drags down one of the soldiers defending the retail park. She’s still firing as he attacks her, finger stuck on the trigger, bullets spraying wildly in all directions.
The soldier inadvertently wipes out a swath of troops and civilians before her life is brutally ended. Almost everyone to Paul’s immediate left is killed, and for a second he just stands there numb, alone and exposed, soaked with blood spray. The tank they saw earlier is here now, and it fires a shell at the biggest group of Haters. It explodes with a deafening noise, which temporarily silences everything else.
Paul is surrounded by corpses, standing like a lone tree in an otherwise fallen forest. His eyes sting with smoke and grit and his ears are ringing with muted sounds and a high-pitch whistling. He’s still motionless. Stunned.
“… fucking idiot, move!”
Someone’s shouting at him, but he can barely make out the person through the chaos.
“Paul, move!”
It’s Matt. He reaches out for him and pulls him up onto the bus just as it starts to pull away. Matt drags him deeper into the impossibly overcrowded vehicle, and when the driver banks around a corner at speed, the two of them are thrown over to one side. They fall down two steps midway down the length of the vehicle, holding on to each other for support. A storage hatch is down here. Matt pulls the door open and they cram themselves inside and block it behind them. Pushed up tight against each other. Unable to move.
The rest of the bus is filled with deafening noise.
Wave after wave of Haters attack.
31
The speed of the bus increases and the ferocity of the attacks eventually subsides. Now the only noise Matt and Paul can hear is the god-awful din from their fellow passengers: the terrified, the injured, the dying. It’s virtually pitch-black down here. Sensory deprivation. Not being able to see makes what’s happening outside all the more terrifying.
“I need to move,” Paul says.
“What?”
“Got a cramp in my leg. Need to fucking move.”
“Tough. There’s no room.” Matt feels Paul push against him. The barrel of the shotgun presses against Matt’s gut. “Mind that damn gun!”
“Open the door, Matt.”
“I can’t.”
“Open the bloody door!”
Paul tries himself, but it won’t budge. The stairwell outside is packed with people. That’s the only explanation.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he whines. “Please, mate, get me out of here. I can’t stand it. I can’t—”
/> Paul’s voice is silenced when the coach veers hard over to the right. It mounts the curb, then collides with something, then topples over and skids to an abrupt halt on its side. Paul smacks his head against the side of the vehicle and is knocked out cold. Pinned beneath his dead weight, all Matt can do is listen and wait.
The coach is rocked as another wave of Hater attacks begins.
Countless footsteps. Hammering on metal walls. Glass being smashed. Doors being wrenched open.
Soon all Matt can hear are the helpless screams as another cold-blooded massacre unfolds.
32
When Paul wakes up, Matt has his hand over his mouth. “Shh … not a sound.”
Disorientated and claustrophobic, he still tries to fight. Matt increases the pressure.
“Shut up, calm down. They’re still out there.”
It’s several hours before it’s quiet for long enough for them to risk moving.
* * *
The door is wedged shut by three dead people. Lying supine, it takes both Matt and Paul pushing together to shift them. A middle-aged woman is taking up most of the space. Once he gets a hand through, Matt is able to push her onto her side, then over onto another body, so there’s room enough to get the door open. He crawls over Paul to get out first, but stops moving again and listens when he’s barely halfway.
Not a sound.
Dead.
The two men scramble out from their hiding place, climbing up and over bodies. The coach is lying on its side, its interior rotated through ninety degrees. Seats jut out from the wall at right angles to the ground. Matt uses them to haul himself up, then gazes around to try to get his bearings.
“Fuck.”
They’ve both seen a hell of a lot of terrible things in the last week, but nothing like this. The interior of the coach is like the bloodbath on the Heavenly Vision multiplied by a factor of several thousand. At least on the wreck of the ferry the individual bodies were discernible. Here it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. This is butchery on an unprecedented scale. This is fucking terrifying.
“We need to find some cover,” Matt says. “Can’t risk being out in the open.”
He walks along the side of the coach in the space between the seats and the roof, crunching glass beneath his boots. Fortunately the exit is open. He stands on the blood-soaked driver’s chair, then reaches up and grabs a handrail. He hauls himself up out of the chaos, then lies flat on the upturned side of the beached vehicle. He ducks his head back inside and looks for Paul. He’s several steps behind. Eyes wide with fear. Clinging to the shotgun like his life depends on it.
“Quick,” Matt hisses. “Move.”
The coach was ambushed on a stretch of narrow country lane, miles from anywhere. Low hedges are on either side of the tarmac, and open countryside beyond in all directions. They couldn’t be more exposed here.
Matt helps Paul up and out.
“We’re fucked,” Paul says. “We’re completely fucked.”
“We’re still breathing, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, but for how much longer?”
Matt climbs down onto the road, ready to run.
“Where you going?” Paul shouts after him, sounding desperate.
“Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“It’s not safe. We should stay here.”
“And how’s that gonna help?”
“We might run into more of them out there.”
“We probably will. We’re okay at the moment though.”
Matt looks around. Everything’s clear. Too clear for his liking. He stares out across the fields and imagines swarms of Haters converging on them from all directions.
Paul’s just behind him now, half-crouching in the road like he doesn’t want to be seen. “Come on, mate, get back inside. Please.”
“Why? You expect me to sit in there and just wait for them to find us?”
“They’re gonna find us anyway.”
“Maybe. So we can either sit and wait for them to kill us, or we can die trying to get away. We could look for a car. Try and get to Lincoln if that’s where the bus was heading.”
“I can’t see any cars. Can you?”
“Not here, no. Look farther than the end of your nose, for crying out loud. There’s a whole bloody world out there.”
“Yeah, a whole bloody world full of them.”
“Fine. You stay here.” With that, Matt’s gone. He starts jogging down the road, conserving his energy so he doesn’t run out of steam, but moving fast enough not to get caught napping.
He glances back. Paul’s following. No surprise.
Going around a meandering, S-shaped bend in the road, Matt stops sharp and doubles back when he sees a lone figure up ahead. A disheveled-looking man is leaning up against a tree as if he’s taking a pee. When, after a few seconds, the man hasn’t moved, Matt does. He takes a few more tentative steps forward, then relaxes when he realizes the man’s dead. He’s been impaled against the trunk. His torso has been pierced with a sports javelin, snatched from a local school playing field perhaps, and used as a basic, but incredibly effective, weapon. It’s been bent and buckled and has snapped just where it sticks out of his back, presumably so the javelin’s owner could find some other victim and make maximum use of the weapon: two spikes, two kills.
“Fucking hell,” Paul says, breathless, almost sounding like he admires the Hater’s handiwork.
Now that they’ve stopped again, once he’s checked there’s no one else (still living) around, Matt snatches a couple of seconds to try to get his bearings. It doesn’t matter where they are, he decides, because neither of them know the area and they have no idea where they’re going next. But through the brittle-branched trees up ahead, Matt spies red-gray roof tiles. “What do you reckon?” he asks, though in all honesty he’s little interest in his reluctant companion’s opinion anymore. He starts running again before Paul has a chance to answer.
* * *
The house they choose to hide in is small and unassuming. It’s the second home along on a new development that’ll now never be finished or fully occupied. Some look like they were lived in, but many of the homes here are just shells. Some are only half-built. The roads and pavements haven’t yet been laid. Pretty much everything is covered in a fine layer of gray dust.
This one was a show home. It’s immaculately decorated inside, finished to an artificially high standard. Most important, it’s unlived-in. No one’s been here for a long time, it seems. Matt hopes no one else will come here for a while longer yet.
He leaves Paul in the house and checks out some of the other homes in the development and the rest of the construction site because he’s quickly realized that the downside of the model hideout they’ve chosen is that the cupboards are completely bare. He climbs over fences and skulks across unturfed back gardens to avoid being out on the road and being seen. For a heart-stopping second he thinks his number’s up when he sees a woman leaning against a patio door watching him, but when he realizes just how much her revealing negligee is actually revealing, he knows he’s safe. She’s drenched with blood from the waist down. She’s died propped upright, trying to get out. Christ, was she in the middle of sex when her other half killed her? The level of callous violence on display here is startling. Such speed and intense brutality. The Haters kill first, then think about it later.
He checks the dead woman’s house, figuring the presence of a corpse is a reasonable indication the place is safe. A little food is in the kitchen. It’s not much, but it’ll do for tonight and maybe the morning. He finds a few other bits and pieces from the garage that might prove useful, stuffs them into a couple of bags he finds, and takes it all back. It makes him feel surprisingly vulnerable and ineffective, transporting the bulk of his impromptu end-of-the-world survival kit in a supermarket carrier bag. The irony that it has BAG FOR LIFE printed on the side is not lost on him.
Still, if he’s struggling to adjust, his companion is acting like a
complete fucking amateur. Matt stops outside the house they’re hiding in and watches him. He’s sitting in the window of the kitchen–dining room in plain view. Anyone could have seen him.
Paul sees him and lets him back inside. They drink and eat as best they can, but neither of them has any appetite. The nerves are unbearable. “This was just the kind of place Jen wanted us to buy,” Matt says, thinking out loud. Paul just grunts. When the food’s finished, Matt goes through the rest of the slim pickings he found. He has a Stanley knife and a few chisels they can use as weapons.
“Fat lot of good they’ll do you against those bastards,” Paul says. “I reckon even if we both had Uzis and they were bare-handed, the odds would still be against us.”
As Matt’s emptying his pockets, he realizes he’s still carrying his mobile phone. “Old habits die hard.”
“What?”
“My phone. Almost forgot I had it.”
Paul grunts again and moves closer to the window again, peeking out at the world from behind a long curtain.
Instinctively, Matt tries to turn the phone on. Despite still being wrapped in the overprotective cover Jen bought for him, the screen is chipped. The damage annoys him more than it should. Without thinking, he starts working out how long he’s got left on his current contract before he can get an upgrade. He quickly realizes how pointless a thought that is. It’s three or four months, he reckons, something like that, but the reality is that right now he’s doubtful he’ll even be alive when his contract’s up.
The screen lights up and the phone turns on.
Shit.
Matt’s amazed. He knows he can’t have long, but a few seconds of charge is a few seconds longer than he’d ever expected. He puts the phone on the kitchen counter and watches it cycle through all its usual checks, ready for it to suddenly switch off and die as he thinks it inevitably will.
But it doesn’t.
Barely any battery left. The faintest flicker of signal strength … it doesn’t matter. He knows what he has to do.