by Tim Lebbon
Approaching a gate in the stone walling, he saw a pile of dead cattle. There must have been a dozen cows there, crushed against the gate and the wall on either side, corpses bloated with gas, legs stiff, mouths frozen open and eyes wide. Some of the eyes had been pecked away by birds, but several dead crows were also scattered amongst the bodies.
Wounds pouted open, bubbled with eggs. Silent vesps nestled in the spaces between bodies. The stink was horrendous, and he breathed through his mouth as he eased cautiously by.
The stench followed him along the road. The cows must have panicked, herded together and pressed against the gate as the vesps came at them. How many had it taken to kill them all? It hardly bore thinking about, and Huw did his best to shrug it from his mind.
The road veered down. It curved around a hillock and swept across the wider hillside.
About ten minutes later he saw more bodies. These were human. They were lying in a ditch beside the road, so he paused and checked them out through the binoculars. It took him a while to work out what was so troubling, then he realised that there were no vesps guarding them. He was already so used to seeing vesps around bodies that these looked unusual without them.
Huw weighed up the option of leaving the road and skirting around the dead, but he’d effectively trapped himself—a steep wooded slope down on one side, an even steeper hillside heading up on the other. Go either way and he might make a noise.
He made sure the rucksack was on tight and held the spear in both hands, then started downhill again.
It was a man and a woman. They were lying beside the road and it looked like they’d been dragged there, arms up above their heads, legs straight out. Still no vesps. He paused several times as he walked closer, looking around, and it all felt wrong, unnatural. He was more worried about there being no vesps than if he’d seen them.
They were in their twenties, fit-looking, both kitted out in cycling gear. Their bikes were nowhere in sight. The man had his wrists tied together with a sock and his throat was cut. Huw thought the woman had been stabbed. He didn’t get any closer. The smell was bad, there were insects, and he didn’t want to see any more.
From that moment on everything changed, and Huw carried that change with him. It had been bad enough seeing that bastard pointing a gun at his daughter, but seeing those two bodies brought home to him that they now existed in a very different world. They were living after. Before was order and society, structure and support systems, and even when the vesps came and attacked there were plans, advice was being broadcast, and they were waiting for the authorities to come and help. They had been waiting for others to put things right, and now he was unsure whether that was ever going to happen. They couldn’t live in the before any more. Someone had killed that couple, because it was after. If they were going to survive, they had to embrace the change. Go with it.
Huw realised that they also had to keep doing what Ally was best at—gathering information and knowing as much as possible about the world they faced. The murdered cyclists were as much a part of that as the vesps.
He moved on quickly, upset at what he’d seen and more scared than he’d ever been. Part of him wanted to rush back and be with his family, just in case whoever had done it found the house. But the bikes had gone, and he guessed that the bodies were at least a couple of days old. Whoever had murdered them was far away. Or dead themselves. His family needed food, and if they started going truly hungry it would affect their judgement. They had to keep their wits about them.
An hour later he sensed a change in the air around him. It started feeling heavy, and it even smelled different. He worried that perhaps a new, huge wave of vesps was incoming, spreading that weird, sour smell they seemed to exude. But then he looked west and saw the heavy clouds rolling over the ridge line, and knew that a storm was building.
He didn’t for a moment think about what that might mean.
He knew he had to turn around and get back. There were maybe three hours of daylight left, and it would have been dangerous to travel by night, even though he had the torch. He knew that there were more dangers out there now than just the vesps.
But he was much closer to the lake by then, heading north parallel to it so that he didn’t get too close to the town, and he wanted to reach the top of the rise just ahead. Just one more look, he thought. And when he reached the top he looked down and saw the pub. It was maybe three hundred metres along the road, an old, attractive building with a car park, large garden, and a couple of smaller outbuildings which were probably holiday homes.
Half of the pub had burnt down. The other half was blackened, windows smashed, roof stoved in, but he could still see how nice it had once been. Lots of the ash had fallen across the road, and as he drew closer he could see only a few tracks through the ash fields. Some sets of footprints, and a few bike trails. Some of the footprints led back and forth to the pub, but it seemed quiet and still, deserted.
He approached cautiously, the spear in one hand and binoculars in the other. He paused every few steps to check out the buildings and car park. There were a few cars there, and a couple of vans with bike and canoe racks. He worried about those vehicles. There was no movement, but they all had windows covered with ash from the fire, those closer to the building scarred with bubbled paint from the flames. He couldn’t see whether any of them were occupied.
Everything told him to get away. Time was passing and he had a several-mile hike back to the house before dusk fell. But he was desperate not to return empty-handed.
He moved closer. Stayed alert. Watched for movement, listened for noise. There were a few vesps flying around, though no more than usual. He noticed some birds, too. Siskins, thrushes, some blackbirds, and none of them were singing. That was amazing, and he logged that for a later discussion with Ally. Could birds really learn that quickly? He didn’t know, but it buoyed him, and gave him a glimmer of hope that he’d been sorely lacking for the past few days.
He passed through an open gate into the beer garden, and it was… strange. Most of the ash seemed to have been blown out across the car park and road, and the garden was surprisingly tidy. There were still a few glasses on the tables. One was full of wasps. He thought it was too late in the season, but they’d come from somewhere, drawn by whatever had been left in the glass, and drowned. Cider, probably. He wondered why their buzzing hadn’t brought the vesps. Perhaps it had, and the solidity of the glass had made them lose interest.
It was the back end of the pub that had been burned, and his spirits sank when he realised that the kitchens and stores were probably housed there. But there would still be crisps and nuts behind the bar, and drinks. That close, he started to really want a drink.
He needed to be careful, to take things slowly, but there was also a pressure to move fast. Time was running out. Daylight had been replaced by a heavy greyness. A breeze picked up ash from the burned buildings and bare tree branches waved. A couple of crisp packets skittered across the garden path and Huw froze, looking around for roosting vesps.
After a few moments he approached a smashed window towards the front of the pub. That was when he caught the first whiff of decay. There was something dead close by, and that meant there was a good chance there were vesps guarding it.
Unless the eggs had already hatched. He didn’t know, didn’t understand enough about them to guess at what stage these eggs might be. He should have turned around and left, but he’d cast aside good sense. It was partly the lure of food and drink, also pure curiosity. He wanted to be able to return home, sit with his sweet daughter, and tell her something new.
So he went to the window, trying to breathe softly through his mouth in an attempt to avoid the awful stench of rot. He could smell the fire, too, and tried to concentrate on that. When he reached the window and looked inside, he smelled more. They say that aromas inspire the strongest memories, and…
Spilled beer, sticky carpet, and Huw was back in his twenties, him and Kelly courting and spending mo
st Tuesday evenings out at a country pub. They’d sit in the beer garden. Usually just the two of them, but sometimes friends would go too, and some of those evenings were special times for Huw. Those moments that don’t seem so spectacular when you’re living them simply because you expect them to be good, but when you look back they’re some of the best moments of your life, so clear in your memory that they might as well be happening on a loop. He felt that, and other things too, recognising less pleasant smells like the odour of vesp, the dampness of old burnt wood. Rotting meat. He’d never quite known the smell of human remains in decay, until then. Good old memories clashed with horrible new ones, and he leaned over and vomited in an old sand bucket sprouting cigarette ends. He tried his best to be quiet. He was terrified. After each heave he looked around, broom-handle spear raised. But nothing came at him, not from the trees and darkening sky, and not from the ruined pub’s interior.
After Huw finished vomiting he moved forward and shone the torch inside.
The bar was a ruin, scorched black from smoke, bottles and optics smashed from the heat. It was a mystery how the fire had not consumed the whole building. Perhaps it had rained heavily soon after the fire began, so it didn’t really get a good hold.
There were ten, maybe twelve dead people inside, all huddled around or on top of the bar. He guessed there were more behind the bar, too. They’d died after the fire. There was no sign of scorched clothing or melted shoes, no burns on the bodies. But he guessed that they had been dead for a week or more, and they stank.
They were guarded by vesps. He could see maybe eight of them. Most were motionless, roosting, but a couple walked slowly across the carpet around the corpses.
He wanted to leave. He knew then that he should have never gone so close, shouldn’t have let curiosity get the better of him, nor his desire for a bottle of wine. How stupid. How selfish! He backed away, very slowly, and a gust of wind hushed through the trees and bushes around the damaged pub.
The vesps around the bodies shifted as one, their tendrils rising, splaying out and feeling at the air, as if they could feel the sound rather than hear it. He saw a shimmer pass through a couple of them, a shudder as their glistening skin stretched and contracted again. He brought the spear around, readying to swing it across in front of him and cut them from the air if they launched themselves from the window.
But none came. And as Huw started moving again the torchlight shifted, and through the window he saw something else. In the opened stomach of one of the bodies on the bar there were handfuls of eggs. They glistened like ice cubes, a wet glimmer reflecting the torchlight. There must have been twenty eggs, each of them the size of an apple, and he couldn’t help wondering how long they had been there.
Those corpses they had seen on the road soon after leaving the Jeep were new, the eggs in them recently laid. But the ones he was looking at there were days old, maybe a week. The bodies were bloated with gas, the rot was sickening, and he saw other signs of how long they had been there. Slickness. Leakages.
He started wondering why the eggs hadn’t hatched. So much of what they had seen, and even more of what Ally had read out from the Internet, indicated that the vesps had a very rapid life cycle. The eggs hatched, the young were instantly able to fly; they grew quickly and were soon able to reproduce. It all contributed to how they had come so far so quickly, and how the vesps that emerged from the cave had rapidly become the millions, or billions, that had swept across Europe. They were a virus.
But these seemed to be waiting.
Curiosity bit Huw again. He backed away across the garden until he reached the gate, then went out onto the road. The car park was on the other side of the pub, in the opposite direction to the one he needed to take. It seemed safe.
Before he could think about it for too long he picked up a stone from beside the road and threw it.
Huw thought he would never be able to make that throw again, not if he tried a hundred times. The stone arced over the road and into the car park, struck the bonnet of a car parked there, bounced, and smashed the side window of another.
It was more noise than he’d heard in over a week.
He crouched down with breath held. Then he heard it. His kids had always loved bubble-wrap, popping the little bubbles one by one. The sound he heard was a little like that except louder, and wetter. The sound of many bubbles popping, machine-gun quick. A high-pitched keening hurt his ears. Almost too high to hear, still it seemed loud.
Infant vesps. They came quickly, fluttering from the smashed window he’d been staring through so recently, more exiting through other openings, and they descended on the car park. They were clumsy at first, flitting back and forth, colliding with each other, and Huw was sure he saw some of them fighting. Several fell and twitched on the ground. But most of them swarmed across the two cars where the stone had hit, crawling wetly over the ashy bonnets and windscreens.
The bigger vesps that had been guarding them circled, never quite settling. Perhaps they could already sense that there was no prey.
He wanted to run. It was disgusting. Once when he was a kid, Huw had found a spider’s nest in his parents’ back garden. He didn’t know what it was so he prodded it with a stick, knocking it back and forth until it fell from the fencing panel and burst on the ground. Countless little spiders spilled from it and starting crawling, everywhere, in every direction. He dreamed about it that night, and his mother told him it was the only time she’d ever heard him shouting in his sleep.
As he retreated from the pub as quickly as he safely could, his only thought was to reach the cottage. He wanted to be with Kelly that night in case he dreamed and started to scream. He looked back a few times, and the last time he saw the swarm of baby vesps dispersing in all directions, some settling on the pub’s roof, most disappearing into the distance. Having found no prey at the source of the sound that had wakened them, they were going hunting.
He started running. He did so as silently as possible, remembering what he had read about effective, soft running—land on your mid-foot, roll forward, push the ground behind you. He didn’t go too fast because he didn’t want to pant too loudly.
By the time he passed the two dead cyclists, the storm was setting in, but it was only when the rain began that he really noticed it. The fury. The noise. And he stopped in the road and looked around at the rain coming down in sheets, the sudden darkening of the skies, the leafless trees waving in the wind, the plants in turmoil, and those greyish-yellowish shapes flying back and forth, confused and panicked and insane.
He spoke aloud then for the first time in six or seven hours. Without even thinking about it he said, “Oh shit,” but his voice was lost to the wind. The storm had fallen quickly and heavily, and he was stuck in the middle of it. The rain and wind didn’t bother him so much, nor the cold. It was them.
There was sound everywhere, and so were they.
He headed for a wall at the side of the road, thinking he might find cover. Over the wall, huddled against the other side where it was sheltered slightly from the storm, he shrugged on another fleece from his rucksack and settled down to wait.
The storm had brought an early dusk. Dark clouds surged above, and the downpour had become even heavier. Wind roared against the hillside, shaking trees and whistling between rocks. Lightning flashed and thunder smashed. And the vesps were everywhere.
He could see them flying in confused patterns, crawling across the ground, leaping from rock to tree and back again. Some of them seemed to attack wherever they landed, others simply flew or crawled. Most were alone, and he thought perhaps they could not hear each other’s calls in the chaos.
A few minutes after he took shelter, a vesp dropped down beside him. It was less than a metre away, and for an instant he was frozen, staring at it. The thing’s mouth was wide open but not facing directly at him. So many teeth. Its little legs were straight and stiff, holding it up from the wet ground, and those tail tendril things were splayed behind it, squirming
as they tried to make sense of the storm. It jittered left to right and back again, and the tentacles became tangled as they switched direction.
He picked up the broom handle and stabbed it at an angle through the mouth. It struggled a bit, but Huw pushed hard, then lifted it against the wall and pressed it there. The knife sliced out through its side and the thing dropped dead.
Huw so wanted to run right then, but it took only one glance over the wall to make him realise he was safer where he was. It was strange how he was thinking of that old woman’s cottage as home, surprising how a dangerous place could seem so idyllic when he was somewhere far more dangerous. But he guessed home was where his family was.
He remained behind the wall, and it was one of the worst nights of his life. Not since the crash had he felt so alone. While the storm raged he weathered some rough times—terror over what might be happening back at the cottage, sorrow that his family might lose him and never know what happened, even jealousy that they were all together and he was alone.
There was more thunder and lightning, and that seemed to rile the vesps even more. He saw them attacking each other.
Three more times through the night he killed a vesp with the spear. He used the torch as much as possible. He was concerned that the batteries would fade, but even more worried about being in complete darkness. He didn’t know what might be out there in the night. He had not been afraid of the dark since he was ten years old.
The storm raged until the early hours, then slowly began to fade. Huw was soaked through. Shivering. Trying to stop his teeth from chattering, because as the wind faded he saw vesps roosting in trees and across the top of the wall once again.
He returned home through the dawn, shaking so much from the cold that he could hardly breathe, empty-handed, bringing only the story of his expedition for Ally’s expanding notes.