by Glynn James
“All this time. I thought that I was trapped forever to haunt the spot where I was killed. It wasn’t the case at all. The compass.”
“That means you can come with me.”
“What?”
“You can come with me, when I leave.”
That took a moment to set in.
“Of course, yes, I can can’t I?”
“I just have to keep the compass with me. Of course it’s up to you.”
“I wish to come. Leave this place. I’ve been stuck here so long that I can’t even remember what other places look like anymore.”
I started back up towards the shack.
“Then it’s decided isn’t it. We leave.”
Rudy caught up with me.
“When? When do we go?”
I could sense the anticipation in him now. He was bursting to get out of here and I was glad. I’d been too safe at the shack, too comfortable. All the water and food I needed and a roof over my head for a few days had made me complacent. I’d been putting off leaving because I was getting used to feeling less lost.
“Now. We go now. It has to be. If we wait then I might start doubting.”
We went into the shack and I started gathering as much up as I could.
Rudy hovered around. I could sense he was itching to help me pack, but obviously couldn't.
“Which way will we go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to go backwards. Not back to the bus or the scrap-yard. We can’t get that door open so that’s not an option. Across the swamp maybe?”
Rudy shook his head at this.
“Too dangerous. There are far too many gargants out there and no shelter for miles, but if that’s the way you want to go we can go around.”
I stopped packing and looked at him.
“Didn’t you say that round the swamp was the zombie path?”
“We can go the other way round, up into the rocks on the other side, along from here. It may look sheer but there are numerous paths and some ruined buildings dotted here and there. At least until we reach the city. It’s the way I came here all those years ago.”
“Sounds good.”
“After that, when we reach the city ruins, we’re into new territory though. I don’t know the way after that.”
“We deal with that when the time comes.”
An hour later and we were on our way, and what a strange bunch of travellers we made. I pushed the cart, which was full of everything I’d brought with me so far and a heap of stuff from the shack, everything I thought I could push in the cart that may be useful. Beside me walked Rudy, a ghost. His face beaming with a smile I hadn’t seen since I met him. Around us, circling, hopping from rock to rock and sniffing at everything that we passed, were the maw.
I had wondered if they would follow us, or if it would be only DogThing. When we left it was five maw, but by the time we got to the ruined building with the cellar, three more had joined us. I don’t even remember seeing them arrive, they were just there with the others, scouting ahead of us and watching our backs, constantly guarding.
So here I am, camping down in the cellar, writing this by the faint light of the lantern, before I go to sleep. Rudy has become my watchman. It's strange that he doesn’t sleep. I guess ghosts don’t need to. He seems quite happy with the idea of sitting there all night, watching out for me.
I heard the maw moving around occasionally, but mostly I think they are huddled together in the ruined building above me.
Before I go to sleep I’m going to tell you about one other thing. Something I found down here in the cellar. It’s written on the wall, in charcoal or black chalk, and I didn’t notice it until I’d already eaten and set out my bedding.
I turned the lantern up brighter so that I could read it.
It says…
CutterJack, CutterJack,
He knows where your throat is at,
Listen out and watch your back,
Slice you, dice you, little rat.
It’s signed underneath. “Adler.”
Day 26
“They’ve gone.”
Rudy was sitting at the bottom of the steps when I awoke. It took me a few moments to catch up, clear my head, and realise where I was.
“Who? Gone?”
He nodded towards the stairs leading out of the ruined cellar.
“The maw.”
I sat up pretty quick at that, pulled myself to my feet and walked towards the stairs. My body ached again. First night out sleeping rough again I guess. I’d gotten far too used to the mattress in the shack.
“All of them?”
DogThing was still there. He was sitting up on top of one of the broken walls that ringed the building, scratching away happily.
The ruins of the building suggested that it had once been a house of some kind. It reminded me of the walls they dug up in that TV program. What was it called? Time Team! I loved that program. Hippy archaeologists in a hurry.
Rudy was close behind me.
“Only him left. The rest seemed to have gone. I didn’t even notice them go, and I’ve been sat out here all the time you were asleep.”
I don’t know what it was that I felt. Fear maybe. It wasn’t pleasant.
“Strange. I was kind of getting used to them being around.”
(Laughter)
“Yes, me too.”
I went back down into the cellar and started packing up my stuff. Most of it was still in my sack and I had left some of it up in the cart. Ten minutes later and we were ready to leave.
Then I realised that I wasn’t even sure where I was heading. I hoped that Rudy might have some idea.
“So. Where now?”
“You’re asking me? Well apart from that rhyme down in the cellar, we don’t have a lot to go on do we?”
“Nope. Not a lot. I guess we head down into the city?”
“Well, it’s dangerous down there from what I remember. Zombies, CutterJack and who knows what else.”
I climbed up onto one of the rocks downhill from the ruin and sat down on the top. Rudy appeared next to me, though I don’t remember him climbing.
From my perch on top of the rock, I could see quite a distance down into the valley, even though it was, as always, dark. The darkness seemed more like a fog and less like pitch black. Dotted around the ruins were small clusters of light, though I couldn’t make out what it was that the light was coming from. It was enough to get a rough idea of the layout of the buildings and streets. It wasn’t as vast as I had imagined it would be. Rudy had called it a city, or was it The City?
“I expected it to be bigger.”
“Oh? Well, I guess it’s not the size of a city like London or Birmingham. I must admit I don’t remember. It was always Adler that called it The City. I suppose he named it that.”
“Did he go there much?”
“Yes, quite a lot. He became quite the scavenger and explorer over the years. Most of what we had in the shack was scavenged by Adler from those ruins. I never did get to ask him how far he actually travelled. He was always up in his camp, or in the shack, before I went to sleep. He said that The City was a gold mine of useful junk.”
“He must have travelled fast to get here and back in a day.”
“He did have his bicycle.”
The bicycle. Of course. I had forgotten that the professor wasn’t on foot.
“Well, trying to find some trace of his passage might be a place to start, do you think?”
Rudy was frowning.
“Yes, I think so. If there is anyone that has an idea of what else might be out there, it would be him. That is if anyone does.”
“He may still be there for all we know.”
I was only hoping of course. I knew as well as Rudy that the professor would be long gone. But maybe there would be some trace of him staying there, or some clue somewhere of where he might have headed. It had been a long time though, from what Rudy said, years even. Adler could well be miles away, hundred
s of miles. He could be dead, a pile of bones somewhere.
Or another ghost?
I couldn’t think of a better plan though. I knew that I had to keep going, even if it meant the risk of bumping into zombies or this CutterJack person.
For the next couple of hours we travelled down the hill, negotiating our way through the rocks. The cart was becoming a bit of a hindrance now that the ground was more uneven. I hoped that when we got down into the city that the roads or paths would be easier ground.
I was down to four bottles of petrol for the lantern now, and thanks to the river near the shack, twenty bottles of water. I still had a dozen torches and a whole heap of dried pods left, even some of the mushrooms.
Light was becoming less of a problem now, and most of the time we travelled in the dark. My eyes seem to be adjusting even more to it as each day passes, and neither DogThing nor Rudy seem to have a problem seeing.
Am I going to end up with strange bright googly eyes like DogThing? Like that Gollum creature from The Hobbit.
We eventually made it down onto the flat ground and the edge of the City. The layout was the strangest thing I’d seen in a while. It wasn’t like any other settlement I’d seen. It was almost like someone took a big old chunk of London and dumped it here. There was no build up of smaller buildings or suburbs like every other town or city I’d ever been to. The road where we first entered the ruins just “started” right next to the first building, cobbles and all – yes, real cobbles. They made the cart almost impossible to push.
I don’t know why I was expecting a modern city, or even vaguely recent buildings. As we had travelled down through the rocks towards the looming buildings I’d had a chance to get a rough layout of the place. The slope we were travelling down was quite steep, and we had been at least a few hundred feet above the city when we started down the rough track. There were only four streets in each direction, all crossing like a grid, like the blocks in New York, but this place was nowhere near as new. I’m not much of an expert on old buildings, but I’d have said that they were a few hundred years old, and most of them looked like they hadn’t collapsed over the years. To me they looked like they had been bombed. Dotted here and there along the pavement were clumps of glowing grass, like up near the shack. It gave the streets an eerie alien feel.
Most of all I noticed how quiet it was.
We walked up the first street we entered, with DogThing following us a few feet behind. He was alert, I could tell, I’ve somehow gotten used to reading some of his behaviour, and he was jitterish, on edge.
The street was called Charleston Way. The sign was rusty and hanging off of a broken post that looked like something had smashed into it. I struggled over the cobbles and hauled the cart up onto the pavement. It was littered with piles of rubble and junk, but the slabs made it flat enough that the cart moved over it easily enough.
We headed towards the middle, passing run-down shops and flats. I glanced into one of the shop windows, through a hole in the glass. I could vaguely make out what might have been shelving and display cabinets, but it was too dark in there to get a proper look.
“Hold up.”
Rudy peered through the window.
“Did you spot something?”
“I don’t know, maybe just junk, but you never know, might be something in there.”
I pulled the cart up alongside the door to the shop and grabbed the lantern. It only took a few seconds to light it. I was getting quite quick at it now. I grabbed the mace and used the sharp, nasty end to push the front door open.
The door fell off.
I’d barely touched it, the lightest prod, but it was enough to send the door off of its hinges and crashing down with a loud bang. Dust flew everywhere, a huge cloud of it bellowed up upwards, until it made a signal that would be visible for miles (if anything could see for miles).
DogThing ran. He was fifty yards down the street before he stopped and sat down to watch me from a safe distance.
“Crap. I didn’t want to do that.”
“Hmm, no, maybe not,” said Rudy, from behind me.
Big, deep sigh.
“Well, that kind of settles it then. If there is anyone here, they now know we are.”
“Or any Thing. I’ll keep look out, out here,” said Rudy.
I stepped over the collapsed door and shone the lantern into the shop. Most of the dust had gone outside, so I could still see clearly. Strewn across the floor were empty tin cans and ripped boxes. I picked up one of the boxes nearest me. It was torn and covered in dark, mouldy stains.
Weetabix. Empty. Damn.
It was the same along every row, counters full of ripped and damaged packaging that was either empty, or had contents that I wouldn’t have touched, even if I was starving.
Then I reached the back of the shop.
There, on what looked like the shop counter, right next to a smashed up cash till, was a cardboard box with cans of tinned food carefully stacked into it. I emptied it out onto the counter to see how big a find it was. Peaches, beans, stewed steak, mushy peas, there was a few of each type of can, all unopened and seemingly undamaged.
“Bingo.”
I packed the tins into the box again and walked around the back of the counter, all the time wondering who would leave a box of food tins lying around. Maybe someone had packed them and meant to take them away, but for some reason hadn’t been able to? Not a comforting thought.
Then I found out why they were still there.
There was a door at the back of the counter, this one also barely hanging off of its hinges. It was slightly open, a light coming from inside, and a noise that sounded like wasps swarming.
Or flies.
Masses of them buzzed around.
The room was only small but the devastation was huge. Whatever had happened in there had happened quite recently, like within a few days, or a week at most. It was all disgustingly fresh. Blood was scrawled all over the walls and collected in little, congealed pools across the floor. Scattered here and there were the remnants of someone or something, chunks of bones and flesh, and other stuff that I couldn’t identify, didn’t want to identify. In the corner a small electric lamp lay on the floor, plugged into some kind of battery. It was still on.
Then the smell hit me. I stepped out of the room and threw up all over the counter. I felt my heart rate screaming and panic about to take over.
“Rudy… ”
He was already there.
“Oh, my god.”
It took me a minute or so to regain control of my faculties, hanging off of the side of the shop counter with my head spinning, and my stomach lurching.
“This was recent, wasn’t it?”
I looked up. Rudy was standing in the doorway, staring at the mess.
“Do you think it was… a person?”
“Had to be… ”
I turned away. I couldn’t look at it again. Zombie bits were one thing, but a real person I couldn’t handle.
“Wait though. No.”
Rudy had gone into the room.
“This skin, it’s not human skin, it’s like lizard skin. It’s all scaly.”
That brought me to my senses. It wasn’t a person.
I walked back to the door and stepped inside. Rudy was kneeling down near the back corner of the room. The stench was terrible. He pointed at a piece of the body, and when I took a closer look I could see exactly what he meant. Not only was the skin not human, but what I was looking at was the jaw of a lizard or cat-like creature.
“What the hell was it?”
Rudy stood up and left the room. I followed him.
“There are more than zombies, gargants and the maw here. Adler always said there was. Come to think of it, he claimed he had seen the maw, like your DogThing, fighting against another creature that was slightly larger, and covered in grey coloured scales, like a maw but not hairy.”
“I see. Well that looks greyish doesn't it? I can’t tell with all the blood.”
“Yes, like a lizard’s scales even.”
It was then that I noticed the footprints. I hadn’t seen them when I was searching the shop. I guess I had been too busy checking what was on the shelves to take any notice of the floor. Starting from the carnage room behind the counter, and running straight in line towards the entrance were bloody footprints. Human footprints. There were also other footprints that might have been paws, lots of them.
Someone had run out of the place after the lizard thing had been killed. Someone in a hurry, and they might have had maw with them, or chasing them.
I followed the footprints out of the shop and further along the street, but they soon disappeared on the wet cobbles, twenty yards along the street. They ended in the middle of a street crossing, right next to a manhole cover. The paw prints split off and went in all directions.
Rudy was right behind me, as was DogThing, who seemed to be over his scare from the noise of the collapsing door.
“Do you think?”
Rudy’s eyes shone in the dim glow. They said exactly what I was thinking.
“They escaped.”
“Yes.”
“Whoever it was that was in that room managed to slaughter that lizard thing and then escape this way.”
“Chased by the maw? Or maybe more of the lizard cat things? I’m not much of a tracker. Wasn’t in the scouts when I was a kid.”
Rudy stood frowning at the manhole cover and then back at me.
“You’re not seriously thinking of going down there are you?”
I shrugged.
“There’s a chance of finding someone else, someone alive and recently here. I can’t ignore it!”
“Oh, crap.”
Rudy sighed.
“You have no idea what’s down there. It could be crawling with god-knows-what. Zombies and, well there are a lot of other dangerous things in this place that I can’t even begin to describe.”
“You think I shouldn’t look?”
Rudy was pacing the ground now.
“I’m not saying that. Just, well, you only have that spiked stick, and whatever went down there… ”
“Whoever went down there.”
“… whoever then. You don’t know that it’s a person. It could be a zombie. It could be CutterJack.”