This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  I remember the old man getting off the bus a stop before us. He peered at me as he went by, and my dad nearly leapt out of the stall behind me. The old boy just smiled at me, and pointed at the empty cream soda bottle that I had been sitting squeezing the air out of, so it made a whistling sound. I remembered him so clearly because of his distinctive appearance. He was scruffy beyond scruffy, half of his clothes in tatters, with rips and holes dotted all about him. I think his boots were held together with masking tape or something similar. His beard was long and plaited, almost like thin dreadlocks, with multicoloured string, or threads of some sort, woven into the plaits. How he managed it, I don't know, but he must have been wearing at least six or maybe seven layers of coats and jumpers in varying stages of disrepair. Finally, there was the hat. A baseball cap that had faded over the many years that he must have been wearing it, until it was a light shade of muddy brown. That hadn't stopped him from attaching about half a million tiny pin badges to it.

  He had the strangest face I think I've ever seen. His nose was huge and bulbous, his eyes deeply inset and smaller than I thought was possible. To me, he looked exactly like I had imagined a goblin would appear, except grimier, if you could get grimier than a goblin.

  "You finished with that, son?" he had said, with a wink. I just stared at him and held the bottle out. I imagine that my mouth was wide open, my jaw ready to bounce off my lap. He took the bottle, winked at me a second time and said "You'll be fine," then he gave me another toothy grin, and shuffled off down the stairwell.

  I woke soon afterwards, startled by a noise outside, but the dream was still fresh in my mind, and the images overlaid reality for a few seconds. From where I was lying, huddled in the blanket (which was damn warm if a bit smelly), I could see all the other posters on the walls. There, stuck right where it had been back then, though partially covered by a few newer posters, was the same one, ripped corner and all.

  Evita. Starring Marti Webb.

  There it was, right in front of me.

  I sat there for a while, going over it in my head, and although I'm uncertain, I think that was how it happened. It's not all in my imagination.

  The noise outside repeated once more. Shuffling, scratching. It brought me round in a second. I lit up the torch as quietly as I could, and tentatively peered out of the window.

  DogThing was shuffling about at the front of the bus, and although he only stayed for a few minutes before heading back out into the darkness, I've never been so relieved to see a mutt from hell.

  An hour later, and I was out the back of the bus, cooking mushroom on a small fire. I was tempted to cook inside the bus, but if the thing went up in flames I would be homeless. I figured I would hear a zombie coming in plenty of time.

  I was wrong.

  It was already past me and moving off into the darkness when I became aware of it, just visible on the edge of the light cast by the fire. This one was only small and carried its own severed arm in its other hand. It went on, lumbering its way past, into the darkness, and off in the direction of the old camp, and the wall.

  Where were they going?

  I hadn't been totally stupid. The mace was leaning against the side of the bus, barely a foot away from me, and I leapt round the fire to grab it. I was still standing there, shaking and nervous as hell, thinking that the thing would come back again, when two more shuffled into the light. They were leaning on each other, or maybe one was dragging the other along. The shorter of the two had a leg dragging behind it, barely attached. They completely ignored me and followed the same path.

  You know what's worse than having to fight zombies? Being ignored by the damn things. It makes you wonder if you are even there. I suspect that if I wandered near them, they would probably attack me (which I'm not going to test), but the way they just carried on, ignorant of my existence, made me wonder if they sense much at all. Maybe they can't even see you unless you are right on them.

  It's starting to grate on me. The need to know where the hell they are all going. I know that I'm going to be daft enough at some point to follow them and find out, but right now I'm down to two cans of drink. I'm surprised that I've managed to make the remaining few last this long.

  I want to go back to the old camp, and disregard the need to head off somewhere that I don't know to find more supplies. Food isn't a problem as there are about a million mushrooms growing in the dark all over the place. Water is a problem, though.

  Ok, I'm heading out now. Got my satchel and a few bits and pieces. Got the tools, the mace, lighter, a couple of empty bottles (one of which looks remarkably like that bottle I gave the old man on the bus), a few torches, and one of the lanterns.

  I decided to go for the bike and pram pile, to see if I can put together some form of trolley to move stuff in. It's right on the edge of an area I haven't been far into, with plenty of mushrooms, so I can explore a little and grab some food at the same time.

  Oh, and it's not near the zombie route.

  Day 14

  Yesterday I spent the majority of the day rummaging through the pile of prams and bicycles trying to find enough useful bits to put something together. I did it in the end, after a lot of messing about. I found an old pram that only had three wheels, and a single wheel that was roughly the same size. It's probably going to wobble though.

  Thinking of other possibilities, I also picked up a couple of the bikes, and various other parts that looked usable, and pushed them along in the pram, back to the bus.

  After a couple of trips there, I had enough bits to rig something up, and spent the rest of the day inside the bus, fixing up my new contraption. I made it from two prams, four bikes, and a heap of other bits to keep it from falling apart. A push cart.

  It is a thing of engineering genius and beauty.

  Well, it is to me.

  There is only one can of drink left. I've done well to ration them, but they don't exactly quench any thirst. If anything, they make it worse.

  Today I decided to go and have a poke around back near the old camp. There was an area where all the cardboard was damp, so I figured there had to be water near there, somewhere. I took a pile of empty bottles and one of the hanging lanterns. Hopefully I'd find something to fill the bottles.

  On the way to the wreck, I spotted the hose pipe that I had seen before. It had a few holes in it, and was wrapped round a massive stone block that looked like a collapsed part of an old building. It took a bit of cutting with the new knife to free a section of it about four metres long. I cut it into two pieces, which should be enough for siphoning off petrol, I thought. I've seen how it's done; my dad was always tinkering with his car, but I've never tried to empty a petrol tank myself before.

  The zombies had gone, and there wasn't even much left of the gargantuan one with the swinging head for a weapon; the one that I torched. There were small bits here and there, but the majority had vanished. I'm sure some of the bits were broken bone. Maybe DogThing came back and had his dinner here.

  After clearing out what remained of my camp, including the pillow, sofa foam, curtains, and odd bits that I had collected, such as the pile of chair legs, I wandered back over to the car wreck.

  It was still there, with that musty smell of petrol lingering in the air. Where I had managed to prise open the side of the vehicle, the petrol tank was in clear view. I admit that I was a little nervous holding a lighted torch over it.

  After propping the torch up a few feet away, I took off the petrol cap and forced the pipe down the hole. It took a lot of sucking to get the petrol flowing out, and it tasted disgusting, but soon I had a few full bottles.

  The lantern, once filled, lit up an area much bigger than the torches did. At last a source of light that shouldn't run out every half an hour. I hoped.

  It was strange to see the old camp area, and the place where I first arrived, all brightly lit up. I could clearly see a hundred yards or more before the bright light began to recede.

  After a bit of clamberin
g about, I found a decent piece of metal pole and attached it to the pram with ripped bits of curtain, pointing upwards. A couple of whacks from my mace and there was a hook shape on the top to tie the lantern on. Another strip of the curtain sorted that out.

  The damp area where I first found the cardboard, a few feet from the spot where I first woke up, was as dry as the rest now, and I couldn't find a reason for it being wet in the first place.

  Something I hadn't noticed while I was living out of that camp was a mountain of books and newspapers about a hundred yards along the wall, in the opposite direction from where I made my quick exit a few days ago. I pushed the cart over to it and had a rummage in the pile.

  There had to been thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books and magazines in the pile. I grabbed a few of the least damaged ones and stacked them on the cart before moving on, promising myself that I had to come back and have a proper look. If I was going to be stuck here, I may as well have something to read.

  It was so much easier to spot useful things with the area lit up almost as bright as daylight, but that also meant I kept seeing stuff that would definitely come in handy. Far too much of it to carry at that moment. Damn it. I was becoming a bag lady.

  One interesting thing that I did spot was half a dozen sacks filled with empty drink cans, the same ones that I had been living off. Unfortunately, there weren't any left unopened. Had someone else sat here drinking them all?

  DogThing hasn't shown his face again since he popped back to the bus yesterday. I wish that I knew what he knew. He's probably lying in a huge pool of water somewhere, drinking his fill and frolicking on the shore. If only he could talk. I bet there would be an endless amount of interesting things he could tell me, having lived here all his life. I still wonder what exactly he is, and how he got here.

  As I headed out to the mushroom field, I spotted the oddest thing.

  Scaffolding.

  I don't mean piles of it. This stuff was already erected and sitting there in the middle of an immense clearing in the junkyard that was close to the wall. Some of it was hanging down, ready to collapse, but most of it was standing quite sturdy, ramps, ladders and all. The only thing that was missing was the building in the midst of it all. There wasn't time to head over to it and investigate; I needed new supplies. I set off again, pushing my cart back towards the mushroom field.

  Sometimes it just doesn't click does it?

  Then later on you have an epiphany, and feel damn stupid because you didn't put two things together.

  Mushrooms.

  Where do they grow?

  In the dark. With little light. In the damp.

  I was busy cutting up my third mushroom, standing in what looked like an endless field of the things. They stretched on as far as I could see, so I wasn't going out into them. I'd have gotten myself lost.

  Then I felt something tap me on the shoulder.

  I spun round, dropping both the mushroom and my knife. My heart almost leapt out of my throat. That stunned tingling feeling you get when you jar an elbow, or knee on something, shot through my whole body.

  There was nothing there, only more mushrooms and darkness.

  I was alone.

  The mace was in my hand in about a millisecond, well, maybe not that quick, but I was fast. It was a good job that I wasn't holding the lantern or I might have dropped it and wound up standing in complete darkness. A minute went by and then I felt it again, but this time it was on the top of my head.

  A drip.

  In the utter silence of this never-ending void, I heard a sound that nearly made me jump up and down with joy. It was only a faint noise, barely audible, but it was there.

  The pattering sound of rainfall.

  Day 15

  Catching rainwater is not an easy thing to do.

  I spent the remainder of day 14 hunting down bits of plastic and sheets of anything that I might be able to use to catch the water in. Eventually I dug some holes in the sparse layer of soil that is like a crumbly coating on the rock floor. I straightened out what little bits of plastic sheeting I could find in the nearby rubbish, making small reservoirs. Then I waited for the water to collect.

  An hour later and I managed to fill one bottle of water up, which I drank down in about three seconds.

  It was fantastic. But there wasn't enough of it.

  After some more hunting, and more digging, I eventually managed to cover a large area of ground with little potholes for the water to collect in. I'd have to come back after I'd slept and hope that it had worked.

  I had another strange dream last night.

  I was still on the bus, sitting watching the traffic and the throng of people on the streets of London, but this time I was the only one on the bus. I didn't look downstairs at the driver's booth, mainly because I had an eerie feeling that it would be empty.

  The journey seemed to last for ages, but then I guess it would if you were sitting there with no destination. I had no idea where I was going or where I was supposed to be getting off. So I sat there. Then I fell asleep, within the dream, which was odd.

  In the dream within the dream, I was watching the old tramp again, but this time he wasn't in London, not even on the bus. He was here, walking among my mushroom patch, past all of the (now full!) little water pits I had built.

  He didn't seem aware of them though. He appeared preoccupied with something else, something that I wasn't privy too. He was wandering slowly through the mushrooms. Although it might sound strange, I think that he was singing to them. He held his arms outwards and his palms flat. A mumbling sound, like a hum of an electricity generator, was coming from his throat.

  He walked on, and I was trapped in my camera view of his journey through the mushroom field, which ended after about a half-mile later, after passing some particularly huge mushrooms that must have been ten feet tall.

  Along the way, I noticed wooden shafts jutting out of the ground, with pieces of bright cloth tied to the top. The tramp seemed to be using them as a guide through the mushrooms.

  After the mushrooms ended, the ground was hard rock. No crumbly soil coated the flat plane of ground that he walked over. I couldn't take my eyes off him. My gaze was fixed on his back. I tried to look around me, but my head wouldn't turn. I was only allowed to look in the direction that he was facing.

  The expanse of flat rock went on for the best part of a mile before the ground once again turned to soil. I suspect it was much further, but that was the distance that my brain registered.

  Now the land sloped downwards, and for the first time, my vision was released. I realised then that I hadn't been seeing by the light of a torch. I wasn't even there to be carrying one. I was floating, disembodied behind the tramp, and he wasn't carrying any form of light source. Instead, the area was lit by the glow that now came from the scene in front of me.

  Where the flat rock plane ended, a valley spread out below us. Wild slopes covered in strange glowing grass and even stranger plants spread out before me.

  It was hard to judge the distance to the far side, where the rocks were sharp and jutting upwards into what appeared to be a rock face. It looked like a natural rock wall, rising for hundreds of feet from the valley floor, and lit up by massive stalactites that were formed from a strange, blue, translucent, glowing, glass-like material.

  There was a waterfall cascading down into the valley, and white foam splashed off the rocks as the water fell from the darkness above, to end in a roaring swirl in the middle of a crystal-clear lake.

  It was beautiful.

  My gaze went back to the old man, as he made his way down to the water. I noticed for the first time that a body lay barely five feet from the water's edge.

  I followed him down the slope and glanced down at the body. It was him, or what was left of him. Something terrible had happened to him here. Apart from his face, which had enough features remaining to make him recognisable, the rest of his body had been torn apart and spread out across the area in a franti
c and random pattern. I guessed that something had literally ripped him apart.

  I turned to the other old man, the same, but living one, to find him looking back at me. His eyes were brimming with tears. He spoke, and his words were the last part of the dream that I remember before I woke up.

  "Wake up."

  I had to find out. I had to go there. It was probably quite a journey. I don't remember the exact passage of time from the dream, but it didn't matter. I had to find the valley. I didn't remember looking at it during the dream, but when I went over it in my head, I was positive that there was a building, a shack of some sort, up on the rocks on the opposite side of the water. There was a wagon, a log pile, and other vague features that I had forgotten, or were blurred, as many things are in dreams. Someone lived there. I don't know if it was the old man, but if the place still existed, I was going to find out.

  But not without being prepared first.

  I spent the whole of the day getting my supplies together, packing whatever I thought that I would need into my cart. I hauled out the sack of bottles and made some alterations to it so that it would hang comfortably off the front of the cart. I collected more wood, and made more torches until I ran out of the curtain material. By the time I was finished there was a pile of torches enough to last me a few days if the lanterns ran out.

  A trip out to the mushroom patch later on rewarded me with a dozen full bottles of water. I drank two of them down straight away, relishing the feel of real water running down my throat. No more cheap cola for me.

  I'd kept a lookout while walking there, hoping to spot more plastic sheeting or anything that might collect water. Nothing jumped out at me.

  After chopping up another mushroom to take back with me, and checking that all my makeshift water collectors were set up properly, I turned to head back, but couldn't help but stop and look out over the expanse. Somewhere through those mushrooms I would hopefully find some that were ten feet tall. If I did, I would know that there was a chance that everything else I had seen in the dream was true.