by Rich Hawkins
“Why did you make us hide?”
Frank remembered walking past the pile of bodies the soldiers had made. He had felt voyeuristic and disrespectful looking at the small corpses.
“How do you think the soldiers would’ve reacted to us witnessing them kill a bunch of kids? Do you think they would have let us go on our merry fucking way? They would’ve shot us.”
“Shot us?” said Joel. “Our own army wouldn’t shoot us. We’re not infected. They’re on our side. They’re supposed to help us.”
“They wouldn’t let that sort of thing get out. They would’ve shot us and dumped our bodies with the children. No one would ever have found out. Take your head out of your arse for a minute.”
“Don’t insult me. Fuck off.”
Ralph stepped towards him.
Frank and Magnus moved between them and Frank put his hands on Ralph’s shoulders. “Calm down, mate. Count to ten or something. There’s no need for this.”
He glared at Frank, cracking his knuckles. Then his face cleared, his body loosened, and he nodded, suddenly ashamed.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“It’s okay.” Frank turned. “Are you okay, Joel?”
Joel nodded, but didn’t look at Ralph.
They walked onwards.
*
The men entered the village as dusk fell, and walked up the high street of dark houses and shadowed windows. No birdsong or animal sounds. No signs of life in the area.
They passed a Range Rover lying on its roof, and stepped around the shapes of dried blood on the road. A pair of polished shoes had been left by the edge of the pavement, as though someone would return to collect them. There was a strange smell in the air, faint but noticeable, a chemical taint that Frank associated with public swimming pools and cupboards full of cleaning agents.
Dead birds littered the ground. Blackbirds, sparrows and crows. Black eyes and beaks of yellow or grey. Dark feathers fluttered in the breeze. Magnus’s mouth fell open when he saw them.
“Another ghost town,” said Ralph, switching on his torch and lighting up the shop doorways he passed.
“Where is everyone?” Frank asked.
“No idea.”
“There they are.” Joel nodded towards the end of the street, where a pile of bodies filled the road. His shoulders slumped and he let out a shuddering sob.
They walked to the corpse heap. No one spoke. Joel was over six feet tall but the pile of remains towered over him. The men were swallowed by its shadow. Frank looked down at the dried out bodies. Many of them had died reaching for something. Dozens of slack faces and entwined limbs. Glazed, bulging eyes and mouths frozen in their last screams. Some of them had died raking their fingers on the road. Fluids had leaked from their mouths, eyes, and ears, drying into dark stains.
Frank watched a beetle crawl over a woman’s face and into her mouth. To think that Florence was among the dead here almost floored him. He didn’t know if he could come back from seeing her within the tapestry of stiff limbs and waxen expressions. Not again. Not after losing Emily.
There were even dead dogs and cats within the pile. Pets with collars and name tags. Frank shivered with revulsion and sadness. A pool of darkness formed in his stomach and he wanted to cry at all of the pointless death before him.
“These people weren’t infected when they died,” said Ralph.
Magnus stepped back from the corpses. “I can’t see any bullet wounds. No sign of infection. None of them were shot. How long have they been dead?”
“Couldn’t have been long,” Frank said.
Ralph folded his arms. “I think it was chemical weapons that did this. Some kind of nerve agent, maybe. Who knows what the army and the government have got tucked away waiting to be used? More shit than we’ll ever know about.”
“It gets worse and worse,” said Magnus.
Frank’s great-granddad Joseph Hooper had fought at the Somme and Passchendaele during the First World War. He’d survived the conflict but died before Frank was born. According to Frank’s father he’d never said much about his time in the trenches. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the hell of France and Belgium back then. Gas attacks. Mud and slaughter. Men choking and clawing at their throats as they died in agony.
Frank wiped his sweat-soaked face. His throat had dried and closed up. He thought he heard someone crying far away, a sound echoing down the empty streets, but it wasn’t real. He looked at his shaking hands.
“So the army killed these people and piled them here?” asked Magnus.
“Looks like it,” Frank said.
Joel clutched something unseen in one hand. “Maybe it wasn’t the army.”
“Who else would have done this?”
“The things in the sky, maybe,” said Magnus, and the other men looked at him.
“How bad are things going to get?” Joel said. His face was sagging and forlorn. “All this death. Are we in danger, here?”
Ralph glanced back at the bodies. “In danger from what?”
“Whatever killed these people.”
“If we’ve been contaminated, it’s too late now. And if there was still a danger, we’d already be dead.”
“I admire your confidence,” said Magnus.
Ralph regarded the sky. “We should find somewhere to spend the night. Just because there’re no infected here at the moment doesn’t mean they won’t pass through.”
Frank turned away from the pile of bodies. “Agreed.”
“We can’t stay in this village,” Joel said.
Ralph looked at him. “Why not?”
“It doesn’t seem right.”
“We’ll find a house at the other end of the village,” said Frank. “It’ll be okay, Joel.”
Joel ignored him.
Magnus had covered his nose and mouth with one hand. “I hope there aren’t more bodies. I’m sick of seeing bodies.”
Ralph picked something from his teeth and flicked it away. “Doesn’t matter. Bodies are just bodies. It’s all just meat.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The men found an empty house and made it their own for the night. Ralph secured the doors and closed the curtains.
They made sure to check the attic.
Joel removed the family photos from the walls and formed them into a pile in the corner. No one questioned his motives. They knew why, and they were grateful.
They gathered around Frank’s map in the living room. Ralph had lit a candle he’d found in a drawer, confident that the curtains would hide the light from outside. They ate a sparse meal of cold hot dogs and baked beans from tins liberated from the kitchen cupboard. Ralph found a bottle of cheap whiskey and handed it around. Frank drank and the alcohol warmed his insides, numbed the edges and made it easier to think about Florence.
Joel hardly touched his food, and eventually he lay on the floor in silence, sipping from a bottle of water and staring at the ceiling. Ralph ate the rest of his share.
“All we seem to do is hide in other people’s houses,” said Magnus. “Dead people’s houses.”
Ralph took a shot of whiskey. The candlelight made his face flicker with shadow as he regarded Frank. “I thought we’d lost you, mate. I thought you were dead.
Frank winced as his spine clicked. “I’m sorry for leaving, lads. I won’t go out there on my own again.”
“Good to hear. Can’t have you leaving me with Magnus and Joel. It’s a nasty job trying to keep them from kissing and cuddling every five minutes.”
The three men laughed. Joel remained unmoving.
Their laughter cut out. The men looked at the floor, as though ashamed of themselves. To Frank, it felt strange and even offensive to laugh after what he’d seen today. He took a large swig of his drink and it burned his throat burned. His head went a little fuzzy as he studied the map before him. He’d folded it into a small rectangle that showed southern England. He placed his finger on a spot on the map.
“We’re here. Slinfold. You see
?”
Magnus and Ralph nodded.
Frank ran his finger westwards along the map. “And these are Loxwood, Ansteadbrook, Haslemore, Bordon. Various towns and villages.”
“I wonder what we’ll find in them,” said Magnus. He didn’t look optimistic as he put down his empty glass.
“I was supposed to take Florence to her aunt and uncle in Bordon. I promised her.”
“It wasn’t your fault she was taken,” said Ralph.
“I still feel like shit.”
“We all do, mate; it’s the end of the fucking world.”
“She’s gone,” Magnus said. “There’s nothing we can do about that now.”
Frank downed the rest of his glass then looked at Ralph. “Refill, please.”
“Good idea.” Magnus gave a wan smile.
Ralph nodded, replenishing their glasses and his own.
They drank and studied the map again.
Frank said, “We’ll skirt the northern edge of the South Downs National Park, avoiding Farnham, Basingstoke and Winchester. The next big population centre will be Salisbury.”
Ralph sucked on his teeth. “The army might have razed Salisbury to the ground.”
Magnus looked shocked. “Would the government do that?”
“I don’t think they will,” said Frank. “Guppy told me that the army is regrouping in Salisbury.”
“Why in Salisbury?” asked Ralph.
“Because all the main roads go through there. He also said they were transporting refugees by train out of the city. Salisbury’s important to the government and the army. They won’t want to lose it to the infected.”
“It’s probably a fucking battleground by now.”
“Let’s worry about that when we get there. We might not even get that far.”
Ralph grunted. “I’m impressed; you sound as pessimistic as me.”
“I’ve had a bad few days,” Frank said without humour. “We all have.” He was struggling to hold it all together, and it wouldn’t take much for him to fall apart. But that was true for all of them, he supposed.
He glanced at Joel and wondered what his friend was thinking.
“We could go around Salisbury,” said Ralph. “Avoid it completely.”
“That’s a possibility, but it would take much longer. I want to get home as soon as possible. And maybe we can catch a ride on a train, if we’re lucky.”
Ralph and Magnus nodded.
Frank folded the map and put it away. “We’ll try to find a car in the morning.”
“Maybe something that has enough petrol to take us further than twenty miles this time,” Magnus said.
Frank noticed Ralph looking at him with a barely-disguised expression of pity and concern. “What’s wrong?”
Ralph’s face softened and he turned his head away. “Nothing, mate. Just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“Good.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Just before midnight Frank was in the kitchen, staring out at the darkness. The clouds receded to reveal the moon all stark and clear and pale in the starlit desolation of planets, suns and everything in-between. Burning constellations stretched into infinity and declared him as insignificant as the dead insects on the windowsill. He rubbed his face, and when his hand came away damp he realised he was crying.
A burst of white light – some kind of military ordnance – appeared low in the far off sky, past the back garden and the fields beyond.
“War,” he whispered.
*
The four men watched from the back garden, passing the whiskey back and forth until it was dry.
The distant horizon was lit up by tracer rounds and muzzle flashes, followed by the crack of gunfire and booms and detonations.
“I watched a documentary last week,” said Ralph. “It was about World War Two. Old footage of battles and night time skirmishes. It was like this.”
“Last week seems like years ago,” Frank replied.
Joel took a sip of whiskey and grimaced. “I remember watching the invasion of Iraq. The night-vision shots of Baghdad being bombed…” His voice trailed off.
Silence fell upon them. Nothing else to say.
Magnus asked, “Do you think we’re winning?”
*
Frank woke a few hours later on the living room floor, the others were asleep. The sound of engines approached outside. He stood and pulled aside the curtain over the living room window and looked onto the street.
Beyond the other silent houses, headlights were coming up the road, and moments later a convoy of civilian vehicles passed through the street. Frank counted fifteen as they went past, cars, trucks and minibuses full of people. Refugees. Survivors.
He didn’t go outside to stop them, scared to leave his hiding place.
The convoy passed out of sight.
“Where are you going?” he whispered, before returning to the floor and going back to sleep.
*
They left the house at first light. A cold breeze pushed them onward below clouds the colour of concrete and oil smoke.
The crackle of gunfire rose in the south.
Frank found a battered and ugly Volvo. It took four attempts to start the engine, and when it did it spluttered into a gargled cough of fumes and oil-stink.
Fighter jets sliced the sky overhead.
The men left Slinford and its dead behind. Magnus drove.
Joel seemed to have recovered slightly. He had eaten the remaining four biscuits from the plastic bag. He still looked pale, but that could have been the morning light casting his skin in shades of ivory and chalk.
There were wrecks on the roads. Shattered glass and crumpled metal. Collisions and accidents from days ago, when the outbreak had first hit. Magnus slowed the car to manoeuvre around them, careful not to puncture the tyres on broken glass.
They passed a car transport truck that had ploughed through a wooden fence and into a field, shedding much of its load of brand-new cars, which were now scattered like a child’s neglected toys. The truck was on its side and would stay there for a long time, maybe years. Maybe for good.
They passed a few groups of refugees on the road, but with Ralph’s insistence they ignored their pleas for help. Frank looked back at the people struggling with injuries and children, and felt a stab of guilt. These people, lame and shuffling along the road, would be prey for the infected.
He kept thinking of Florence. His shame and guilt at losing her was strong and potent in his blood.
Then he saw something that quickened his heart and turned his mouth dry.
“Slow down,” he said.
“It’s just another wreck,” said Ralph.
“No, it’s not. Pull over.”
Magnus protested, but stopped the car.
“The white van. That’s the van they took Florence in.”
Ralph eyed him doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Frank was out of the car and approaching the crashed van. He stopped and stood away from it, clutching his axe in one hand as he suffered a rush of blood to his head. He swayed, trying to ignore the dull pain in his muscles.
The van lay on its side against a sloped grass embankment topped by several trees. The driver’s door was open.
“Florence,” he whispered. He opened the back doors of the van and stepped back. His eyes were wide and stinging.
“Frank, you dickhead,” Ralph shouted.
Frank slumped. The back of the van was empty except for dirty blankets piled to one side and empty tins of baked beans scattered on the floor. A stink of sweat and grease wafted towards him. There was no sign of Florence.
Ralph stood behind Frank. “What the fuck are you doing, mate?”
“She was here.”
“Who? The girl?”
“Her name is Florence.”
Frank turned and barged past Ralph. There was some blood on the road. A scrap of cl
othing. Tyre marks burned into the tarmac.
“Looks like they hit something,” said Joel.
In the grime and dirt on the side of the van was a small handprint with its fingers splayed apart. A little girl’s hand. Frank traced a finger around it then went to the cab, which was empty. The windscreen was cracked. Splotches of blood stained the driver’s seat.
The others were standing at the front of the van.
“There’s blood on the bumper and number plate,” said Ralph. He touched the bonnet. “Engine’s still warm.”
“Where did they go?” Magnus asked.
Joel looked at the blood on the road. “What did they hit?”
“There,” said Ralph, pointing down the road.
Someone was lying on the embankment, ten yards away.
Ralph raised the flare gun and walked towards the prone shape. The others followed. “Roadkill. Lovely.”
The woman was a broken jumble of twisted limbs. The van had thrown her this far. Skin hung in tatters from her bare legs. Her right foot was turned the wrong way. When the men gathered around her, she gulped a breath of air and fixed what remained of her face upon them. Her chest rose and fell spasmodically. She reached her left hand towards them, as if imploring them for help, but there was hunger in her eyes and the hiss from her throat was inhuman.
From somewhere nearby rose the shrieks and wails of the infected. The woman listened to them, her body shaking, and she screamed in reply.
The men flinched and stepped away.
“Fuck this,” said Ralph. “Let’s go.”
Magnus stared at the woman. “What about her?”
“Forget her.”
“Florence!” Frank said, raising his voice, hoping she was in the area. Fragile hope bloomed inside him.
“Shut up,” Ralph told him.
“Florence!”
“Shut up!” Ralph grabbed hold of Frank.
“Where is she?” Frank was close to tears, staring into his friend’s face. “Where did they take her?”
“She’s gone, mate. She’s gone.”
“Ralph’s right,” said Magnus.
There was something small and white in the grass, half-hidden amongst dandelions and daisies. Frank recognised it. He broke from Ralph’s grip and picked it up.