by David Moody
Eddie’s eyes locked with the girl’s, and she reached towards him with her working arm mottled with black rot and encrusted cysts. Her hand opened and shut, then opened again, and the splay of her fingers was like a pale spider unfurling itself.
‘How did she get here?’ said Sam.
Eddie looked down the river. ‘Probably fell into the water and was carried here.’
‘I wonder where she came from.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Will she die without a name?’
‘What?’
‘We should give her a name, Grandad.’
‘She already has a name. We just don’t know it.’
‘That’s just as bad as not having a name.’
‘Don’t be silly. We can’t give her a name.’
‘Because you’re going to kill her.’
Eddie nodded and couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes.
‘Are all the children dead?’
‘You’re alive.’
‘I mean, apart from me.’
‘Go back to the house.’
Sam didn’t move.
Eddie turned to him. ‘Did you hear me?’
Sam looked down. His mouth moved silently. His gaze drifted over his feet. Then he raised his head and his eyes were damp. He looked from Eddie to the girl and back again. One hand fidgeted with his ear.
Eddie’s voice softened. ‘Do as I say, lad.’
His shoulders sloped downward. ‘Okay, Grandad.’
‘Good lad. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Eddie waited until Sam was inside the house before he took the pistol out. He looked at the girl. Dark blood dripped from her lips. Bleeding gums in her carnivorous mouth. The remaining strands of her hair plastered to her pale scalp. She could only raise her head from the mud for a short time before she slumped back down again. Pinned by gravity, mired in the thick mud. Spat from the dark river.
Eddie stepped forward so that he stood at the edge of the mud. He raised the pistol. At a distance of less than five yards, he centred the gun on the girl’s head. His voice was faint as he apologised and spoke words of comfort.
The gunshot scared the birds from the trees.
◆◆◆
He dragged the girl from the mud and laid her down near the willow tree at the foot of the garden. With the spade he’d found in the back of the house he dug a hole for her as the light burned on the horizon and the sky became white and flat. He placed her in the grave and covered her with loose dirt. He marked the grave with stones and said the words he remembered once spoken at a funeral long ago. He was choked with guilt and despair. Then he crouched and laid one hand upon the grave. Another body lost to the earth. His clothes dampened with sweat. Aching limbs. A throbbing heat in his calves. The world was cruel and it made him sick. He’d hoped the sun would appear to see her into the ground, but there was no sun and everything was dull and silent around him.
◆◆◆
They faced each other across the kitchen table. Eddie craved a drink. His skin was clammy and he kept thinking of the girl.
Sam was eating baked beans from a plastic bowl. ‘How long are we going to stay here, Grandad? Are we going to leave one day?’
Eddie looked up from tracing his finger along a crack in the table. ‘Maybe one day, lad.’
Sam nodded and scooped beans into his chewing mouth. His hair was getting long. Eddie tried to remember where he’d put the scissors. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, Grandad.’
‘I’m sorry I was angry with you earlier.’
‘You didn’t mean it.’
For a long while Eddie said nothing and watched the boy eat as he scratched at the table top with his fingernail. Nothing but silence outside. The sound of Sam mashing beans between his teeth and slurping at the tomato sauce.
Eddie smiled at the boy then stopped because a smile felt like an obscene thing when all was gone and children had been murdered.
◆◆◆
It was mid-morning when Eddie came to a decision. He was getting the shakes, restless and jittery, and he realised he had to do something when Sam caught him inhaling the leftover fumes from an empty whiskey bottle. The look of disappointment in the boy’s face would stay with him for a long time.
Eddie told the boy they needed supplies, which was not a complete lie. Essential supplies.
Sam only looked at him and nodded.
‘Lock the door behind me,’ Eddie said. ‘Keep the curtains closed and stay away from the windows.’
‘Yes, Grandad.’
‘What do you do if someone comes around here?’
‘Hide.’
‘What do you do if they know you’re in here?’
‘Don’t let them in.’
‘And if they get in?’
‘Show them my knife.’
‘Good lad.’
◆◆◆
The sky so pale and full of nothing. Eddie trekked across the fields, struggling against the ground that slowed him to awkward steps. He paused on a worn slope to catch his breath. The countryside silent and forlorn, coloured in decay, exhausted by the winter. Black branches of tall trees creaked in the wind. He moved on, the rucksack swinging against his back, rustling like cloth. He was inured to the sight of bones in the fields. Remnants. The forgotten dead.
He stepped around animal holes and jagged stones. Creeping movements in thickets. A fleeting shape in the treeline; possibly a deer.
Nearing the village, silent and dark in the shallow valley below. Walking and watching. Moving through brush and briars, the damp ground impeding his steps. Small lanes blocked by floodwater and fallen trees. The wind rushing through weeds and long grass to howl past him.
Sometimes, if he listened, there was music on the wind that fell across the fields.
A bare orchard. Whispering leaves. An overgrown cricket pitch and a white-walled pavilion falling into disrepair, its thatched roof rotting and blackened. He had played cricket in his youth, and an image came to him of men wearing white in the outfield while a fast bowler ran towards the wicket. Sunshine and the crack of the cricket ball upon a bat. Eddie stood at the edge of the outfield and imagined the crowd applauding a wicket or a well-struck boundary. And in the long grass he found an old cricket ball and picked it up and tossed it in his hand. It was coated in slimy grime. In the days before the plague it must have been lost when it was hit into the undergrowth. He threw it towards the centre of the pitch and thought it would stay there for the rest of time.
Despite each fresh reminder he still couldn’t grasp the enormity of what had happened.
Everything is gone.
He passed a crossroads marked by a tall oak scarred and withered by winter. A signpost. Alderbrook. A child’s rusted bicycle in the undergrowth, strangled by vines and weeds. Novelty reflectors on the spokes. A torn denim jacket hanging on a chicken wire fence.
He stopped in the road to catch a glimpse of the sun.
◆◆◆
At the outskirts of the village a car had crashed into the front of a house, damaging the wall and cracking one of the windows. The doorway was blocked by the car, which was empty and slowly rusting.
Eddie stood before the house and looked up at the windows; no movement, although he imagined pale forms bristling with tumours and black spines mewling behind the net curtains. Perhaps watching him, with their mouths forming squeals of delight. He moved to the side of the house, where he managed to climb through an open window with some difficulty. And with a groan he lowered himself into a laundry room and crouched on linoleum flooring between a washing machine and a tumble dryer. He froze and listened. A shelf lined with fabric conditioner, washing powder tablets and stain remover. Piles of folded towels, two of which he took and placed in his rucksack once he had risen from the floor.
The rooms opened to him as he moved deeper into the house. He felt mildly ridiculous with the pistol, like an imitation of a capable man. A man stuck in a nightmare.
He went th
rough the kitchen cupboards and found a tin of strawberries in syrup, and one each of sweetcorn and marrowfat peas. A jar of coffee. A half-empty box of PG Tips. He searched for whiskey, grinding his teeth and scratching at the corners of his mouth. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
In the living room, the skeleton of a man reclined in an armchair, dressed in a funeral suit with a plastic rose in the breast pocket. Held together by leathery sinew. The air was thick with the man’s decay. No clue as to how he died.
Eddie admired his shoes.
He kicked the empty vodka bottle across the floor and it rolled against the far wall.
◆◆◆
A potato peeler and a wrapped stack of paper plates both went into the rucksack. When he realised there was no alcohol downstairs and how that filled him with anger, he felt such a depth of self-loathing that it was all he could do not to bang his head against a wall. Bile and acid like serpents inside him. He watched his hands tremble. Then a bout of intense frustration and helplessness overcame him and he sat down opposite the skeleton of the man and saw himself in some similar near-future where his bones would be found in some squalid room.
He left the living room and climbed the stairs, the steps creaking under his boots, his hand trailing through the dust covering the banister. When he reached the landing, something began pawing and slapping at the other side of a bedroom door. Self-adhesive plastic letters stuck on the door. NATHAN.
For a while Eddie stood listening to the growls and whimpers from within the boy’s bedroom. The trample of feet. The sound of a mouth breathing wetly as it pressed against the other side of the door. He took the pistol and moved to open the door, but at the last second his nerve failed him, and he turned away to walk down the stairs.
◆◆◆
He staggered from cover-to-cover and between old cars that were rusting into dull shapes covered in grime and bird shit. Cracked windscreens. Glass shards amongst the drifts of dead leaves in the roads. Rust and dust and the gutters blocked by dried mud, thin sticks and leaves. Weeds growing through the cracks in the road. Drifting trash.
He could never shake the feeling of being watched and hunted as he glanced up at the windows of silent houses where the guttering was slowly detaching from lichen-speckled walls, loosened by the shuddering gusts of wind and rain.
He searched the houses and his heart was aching and loud. It took the best of him to brave those rooms; and aside from a few unexpected finds – a tin of chickpeas, which did nothing to raise his spirits, a can of lemonade and a packet of pretzels – there wasn’t much. Sam would be happy with the lemonade, at least.
The houses were looted clean. Mould-stained curtains fluttering in the breeze past the teeth of smashed windows. Broken furniture and tattered things. Everything fraying, dwindling and fading. Empty cupboards and stinking crypt-rooms of old murder scenes, where the floors were covered in bones that cracked beneath his boots.
How many people had passed through the village since the outbreak? Looters and refugees. Scavengers. Survivors. How many? He wondered how much of the land had been stripped clean and ransacked.
◆◆◆
He followed the road to the pub and stopped in the street, flanked by dark houses and trees. His shoulders slumped and he spat. One hand formed into a fist and tightened until it was bloodless. The grinding of his teeth as he clenched his jaw.
The pub had been burnt to the ground and all that remained was ash and debris and nothing else. Eddie’s heart sank and the stiffness in his throat brought him close to tears.
He picked through the ruins, stepping over charred rubble and scraps of metal with sharp edges. The smell of mould, plaster, and old drains. In the wreckage, things he recognised: the snapped legs of bar stools, broken tables reduced to limbs of damp wood; the remains of a pool table. Moss and weeds flourishing in the cracks and holes. Piles of rotting wall insulation.
There was thunder in the distance, like the collisions of great ships. He felt his body temperature dropping. He waited for the rain and stood amongst the smashed glass, mortar dust and brick fragments. Wooden beams blackened by fire. When the wind gusted just right, he thought he could smell the ghost-fumes of whiskey and vodka. He kicked at rubble and ash, and searched until his back was sore from hunching over and his legs were aching. And then he sat in the ruins and picked up handfuls of dust and watched it fall through his fingers.
He realised he was shaking his head. He spoke to the uncaring sky. It would be easy to give up and lie down in the ruins, and fade into the decaying landscape. The dust and ash and all things left to desolation.
‘It’s all nothing.’
He squatted and wrapped his arms around his chest, rocking gently. A soft drizzle fell. He shivered in the rain. Blinked water from his eyes and tasted it around his mouth. His face was cold and bloodless, a dirty mask of creases and old lines.
Tiredness heavy in his bones, he fell into a deep daydream and stared at his feet until something began to emerge from the wreckage to his left. At first he thought it was his mind playing tricks, but when he stood and turned he saw a pair of pale hands appear from underneath a lattice of broken wood. As though awoken by the rain. His mouth fell open. And then a snuffling form, raggedy and covered in ash and dust, emerged wheezing into the daylight and crouched on a slab of concrete with its head bowed and its hands curled into claws. It looked up and saw Eddie, and its face was little more than stretched and peeling skin across a tumescent skull; its eyes were bulbous and pained. A thin and genderless thing in the remains of a police uniform. It hissed at Eddie through a filthy mouth.
Eddie raised the pistol.
Another infected scrambled out from beneath a pile of bones and rubble, retching in its throat. Ruined and hunched, naked and bruised, it turned towards Eddie with eyes excited by hunger.
Eddie turned and staggered away; he fired the pistol blind over his shoulder and when he looked back the creatures were already chasing him.
◆◆◆
He ran despite the faltering of his legs, down an unknown road where the buildings slumped and sagged. There were yellowed bones in the drains. A name written in blood across a window. The rain fell against his face and slowed him, soaked him to the skin, as he struggled past the abandoned relics of a dead world.
The infected followed.
◆◆◆
He opened the door to the hardware shop and slipped inside, quietly closing the door behind him. He threw the bolt and retreated from the plate glass front window into the shadows at the back of the shop, dripping rainwater.
‘Wankers,’ Eddie said, taking deep breaths to inflate his lungs. He blinked to push away the white flashes at the edges of his vision. His heart was wild. Adrenaline caused tremors in his limbs. His legs went from under him and he fell down and shuffled backwards on his arse until he was behind the counter with his back against the wall.
He bowed his head to his chest. His buttocks and thighs ached. A sharp pain stabbing his knees. His chest tightening with each hurried breath.
He looked around. The cash register and a chip and pin card machine sat on the counter, and underneath – to his delight and relief – was a bottle of supermarket brand scotch among stained scraps of cloth and piles of scrap paper. He grabbed the whiskey and hugged it to his shuddering chest. The seal was intact. He smiled, his throat choked with emotion. His hands were shaking as he ripped the seal away and unscrewed the cap. Then he tipped the bottle to his mouth and drank.
◆◆◆
He imagined there were people moving among the aisles, chattering and shuffling their feet. Saturday morning shoppers looking for a bargain. Eddie laughed to himself and took another swig. If the infected weren’t out in the street, he would have been almost content. He muttered a poem he’d learned as a child, and fell into a haze of memories from before the outbreak. The frivolous concerns of his old life.
He shuffled onto his knees, holding the whiskey and the pistol, and peered over the rim of the coun
ter.
One of the infected was looking through the front window into the shop, its face pressed against the glass. Eddie ducked, his heart flinching, and hoped the shadows at the back of the shop were dense enough to hide him.
The tortured cries of the infected echoed in the street. It sounded like the street was full of them. Where had they all come from?
He waited for a while longer, and the day went on. The rain tapered to drizzle and the cries of the infected died away. He had to get back to Sam before dark, and this formed a knot of anxiety in his chest. Placing the whiskey bottle in his rucksack he checked the window at the front and saw it was empty then he rose into a pained crouch and crept along the aisle to the back of the shop, where he found a door that led outside into a yard infested with weeds. He breathed the fresh air, glad for the breeze and the soft rain against his face. The sky turned from dull white to grey, and everything was washed out as if viewed through failing eyes.
Two ancient bicycles chained to a metal post, their chains rusted tight. A pile of concrete blocks. A Ford Fiesta mounted on bricks. With the pistol he swept the yard and when he was sure he was alone he moved to the back gate. He paused, and then opened the gate and the creaking of its hinges was muted in the rain. He winced and stepped onto a dirt track that ran behind the shop. The puddles were grey and there was the smell of animal rot. To his left and right, the track led to the streets. Beyond the track, directly opposite the backyard, was a row of pine trees and past the trees the old church and its tower loomed very tall.
Eddie turned towards one end of the track, when an infected man stepped around the corner at the entrance to the street. He was terribly thin, stooping with the burden of black tumours on his naked back. His hands scraping at each other and his wrists. The man saw Eddie and let out a breathless cry, then started down the track towards him on twisted legs that seemed to stab at the ground as he moved.
Eddie raised the pistol then realised a gunshot would bring more infected.