The Plague Series (Book 1): The Last Plague

by Rich Hawkins

  The sight of individual infected amongst the swarm broke his heart. Their clothes and uniforms told of their lives before the outbreak, when they were normal people, not mindless monsters. Soldiers, paramedics, police officers and civilians. All creeds and sizes. Severe mutations. Tendrils bursting from sallow skin. Men in business suits and children wearing little more than sopping rags. When Guppy caught sight of a woman in a maternity dress, he had to look away quickly before his eyes found the swollen curve of her belly. Fat people, thin people; others in running gear or their Sunday best now torn and filthy. A female vicar with palsied arms and a snapping mouth staggered like a drunk.

  It was a meandering, twitching mass of infection heading south towards the coast, where refugees sought salvation and rescue.

  The possibility that his ex-wife and son were either dead or infected made him sick and miserable. But he had to keep hoping. Had to keep going. There was nothing else to be done.

  His eyes were damp when he lowered the binoculars. He wiped at his face and glanced around to make sure nothing was creeping up on him. The thought of Frank and Florence on their way home lifted his mood, and he toasted their journey with a sip from his water canteen. It had been two days since they went their separate ways in the countryside outside the smoking ruins of Horsham. Two days of evading the infected and wallowing in guilt at the deaths of his fellow soldiers. He whispered their names like an incantation in the fading light of the day, before a glimpse of movement lower down the hillside caught his attention. He shouldered his rifle and looked down its scope, towards a copse of trees brimming with shadows.

  Several infected people were wandering across the hillside, flitting between the trees. His heartbeat spiked at the sight of them, even as they moved away from him. They were separate from the swarm below, hunting through the long grass, twitching and shuddering like drug addicts in the throes of withdrawal. He watched the pack until it disappeared farther down the hill, and seconds later the shrill cries of more infected rose from around him.

  It was time to move on and find a place for the night.

  *

  The area was teeming with more infected than he’d expected, and in the fading daylight it had been a frightening journey from the hillside to the edge of King’s Hill, a village in the mid-west of Kent. Hostiles everywhere, it seemed. Despite a few close calls, he hadn’t used his rifle, hiding from the creatures instead of engaging them. The infected screamed and shrieked, as if they could sense him and hear his hammering heart as he searched for refuge against the approaching darkness.

  Guppy clambered over a tall wooden fence and dropped onto the lawn below in an awkward heap, suppressing a groan as a pang of dull pain flared in his right ankle. Immediately he raised his rifle towards possible threats, breathing low and steady, noting the approaching sounds of infected in the street he’d just escaped. He crouched low to the ground until the footfalls faded down the road. Then there was silence save for the cawing of crows circling in the sky and songbirds singing from the boughs of leafy trees nearby.

  He scanned the remnants of a child’s birthday party around him. The patio doors were open, inviting him into the darkened house. The tall fence obscured the gardens of the other houses down the row. They were the kind of properties beyond the means of the working class.

  Balloons and bunting brightened the back of the house, either attached by lengths of string or nubs of Blu-Tack. The only movement was from the flapping little triangular flags in the breeze. Fallen banners, napkins, paper plates and plastic cups were strewn around the pristine lawn and the patio. A swimming pool gleamed in the receding sunlight. A long table supported a buffet of crisps, biscuits, sandwiches, and other party food. A large chocolate cake sat in the middle of the table, still appearing immaculate, as though it was a prop of some kind, but Guppy didn’t risk taking a slice. The rest of the food was mouldering, rotting, picked at by birds and insects in the days following its abandonment. He didn’t fancy several days of diarrhoea and vomiting at the roadsides on the way to Lowestoft.

  Keeping his rifle ready, he stood and stepped through the ruin of the party, avoiding the few splatters of dried blood on the patio amidst the stale crusts of bread and trampled party hats. A large homemade banner hung over the open back doorway: HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY KIERAN!!!!!

  Alfie would be six next month. The banner felt like a kick in the teeth, a reminder of Guppy’s absence from his son’s birthday parties. He slumped, tried to suppress the flashbulb images of the people he’d failed in his life. All of those he’d neglected during his years as a soldier. Alfie and Colleen. His parents. His sister, now long-dead.

  The lads he’d lost in the battles against the infected. His mates and brothers. He should have saved them. The realisation that he was the only survivor of his company made him want to sit down and give up, just to wipe the slate clean and offer some apology for everything.

  He entered the cool shadows inside the house, leaving behind the wreckage of the party. There’d be no more celebrations for a long time.

  The living room was all shades of beige and soft white, except for a trail of blood leading from the doorway to the sofa. The cushions on the sofa were smeared with red, dried to a crust in places. He kept his rifle raised, glancing around to check every dim corner and doorway. He blinked sweat from his eyes, and his stomach gurgled with anxiety and hunger as he checked the back rooms of the house and made sure not to look at the birthday cards dotted around. The kitchen was deserted. Crumbs on a breadboard. A bowl of blackening bananas. A quick glance through the window above the sink revealed the empty street beyond the front garden and its arrangements of brightly coloured flowers. It would have been a nice scene if not for the ragged corpse of a man in the driver’s seat of a crashed car. His bones appeared dull white through the picked-away patches of his flesh. Beyond the street was a small park bordered by verdant trees.

  After a thorough search of the house, including the attic just to be on the safe side, he returned downstairs to secure the doors and windows. As he went to close the patio doors, he paused at the sounds of distant detonations reverberating through the sky and recognised them as mortar rounds landing. Seconds later the ground trembled as something more powerful found its mark from across the fields. A few bursts of machine gun fire rang out; then nothing but silence as a pang of shame and guilt troubled his thoughts.

  With the house locked from inside, he went to the kitchen window and looked out at the sudden appearance of several infected on the street. Two of them, a man and a woman, were picking at the corpse in the car, stripping skin and meat from its face and stuffing it into their mouths with fervour. Others dwelled in the road, staring at the sky as they twitched and snarled.

  Guppy watched them for a while, his anger at the creatures such that he had to stifle the urge to go out into the street and put them down with his rifle.

  He hated the infected.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His dreams were formed from memories and the mistakes of his life. Dead soldiers with faces little more than gleaming bone demanded to know why he had abandoned them. He saw Sibbick, Pike and Gawen, their expressions sorrowful and pained. He saw Frank and Florence walking hand-in-hand towards a beach covered in corpses and slopping red remains.

  Colleen called him a coward. Alfie cried and asked him to come home. Then they were all dead and nothing mattered.

  *

  During the night, between bouts of sleep, the great swarm passed nearby and the sound of their passage was like something out of a Biblical nightmare. Screams and inhuman wails mixed with the trampling of feet and tortured shrieks as the walls of the house shook.

  Guppy had huddled in a corner with his rifle clasped to his chest, waiting for the infected to find him. But they never came for him. He stayed awake for the rest of the night.

  At first light he ate an MRE of scrambled eggs, followed it with a few biscuits he’d scavenged then chased it all with water from his canteen. Afterwards h
e shrugged on his gear and hefted his rifle then stood at the kitchen window.

  In the pale sun of early morning, over a dozen infected lurked in the street, staring at the brightening sky with dull eyes. Their numbers had increased. The corpse in the car had been dragged into the road during the night and now lay in pieces on the tarmac. One of the infected, a woman who looked like someone he once knew, caught his eye. She was hunched over, twitching and shuddering, her long hair matted and dirty. Her face and the front of her dress were covered in dried blood. Guppy watched as her hands opened and closed into fists repeatedly and her torn mouth bit at the air in quick movements. Another infected was covered in severe burns, its skin blackened and fused with its clothes in places. It had once been a man. The raw wound of its mouth trembled in a frenzied grimace.

  Guppy considered shooting them, but the noise would attract more infected, and he had to conserve his ammo for the long journey ahead. He chewed the inside of his mouth and tapped one finger on his rifle while thunder crackled in the distant sky. He recognised the roar of Typhoon jets flying overhead. The war was still raging, and again he felt a twinge of guilt at abandoning his duty.

  But the urge to find Colleen and Alfie was the only thing that compelled him, now.

  *

  Wincing at each low scrape and creak as he opened the front door, Guppy stepped outside with his rifle raised. He stayed close to the doorway, making sure to keep his movements slow and discreet, and scanned the street.

  The infected were oblivious to him, lost in their diseased daydreams. Some of them swayed, as if listening to a lullaby only they could hear. Trash stirred in the whispering breeze. Birds sang from the trees in the park across the road. Hunching over to stay as low as possible, he crept through the florid garden and down to the line of wrecked cars alongside the kerb. He crouched on the pavement. Several infected loitered at either end of the road, with others scattered in between. He had to get across the road and into the park without being noticed. There was enough space for him to slip between their ranks, but he would have to be careful. The thought of passing so close to the monsters, to smell their filth and corruption, curdled his stomach.

  They were motionless save for the sporadic twitching and spasms of their bodies. Wretched dreamers.

  Guppy swallowed down his dry throat and wished he had something stronger than water to quench his thirst. He flicked off the safety of his SA80 rifle and slowed his breathing despite the panic of his heart. He gritted his teeth with such force that a muscle twinged in his jaw, and he peered over the bonnet of the car he was hiding behind to check on the infected’s positions.

  They hadn’t moved. They appeared dormant. Guppy wondered if they would hibernate if left alone long enough. It was a theory he had no interest in testing.

  He was rising from behind the car when the infected directly ahead of him were torn apart in a hail of fifty-calibre bullets from down the road. The report of automatic gunfire was deep and reverberating, deafening him for a few terrible moments. Bodies were annihilated where they stood. Entrails burst and hearts were blown out of chest cavities.

  He took cover again as more rounds thudded through the air, impacting the road or streaking above and around him. Blood splattered against the other side of the Vauxhall. His heart juddered. The deep rumbling of a Challenger 2 battle tank approached from down the road. The ground was trembling beneath him. More gunfire followed, mixed with the shrieks of the infected, and when Guppy looked back at the road, all the infected were dead and little more than shredded remains. An arm wearing a wristwatch was one of the few recognisable pieces amongst the carnage.

  The tank began moving up the road, towards his position, the growl of its engine growing louder. He kept his head down and hoped there were no infantry accompanying it. If he tried to run across the road, he’d be cut down in seconds. He kept hold of his rifle and hoped for the best.

  Moments later it seemed that the world was shaking enough to fall apart as sixty tonnes of tank trundled past him, grinding the tarmac into pieces, kicking up grit and dust into the air. Guppy stifled a cough tickling the inside of his throat, and only released it when the tank had vanished from sight. Then he stood and glanced around, noting how the tank had crushed the remains of the infected into little more than red smears on the road. The air stank of hot metal and offal. He exhaled, spat, and shook his head at the slaughter he’d witnessed. But he was becoming inured to it, like the good soldier he’d been trained to be. Desensitized to the carnage. Like the days back in Afghanistan. The smell of blood never seemed to leave him.

  He moved across the road and entered the shadows of the trees in the park.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Guppy left King’s Hill to the distant crashes and booms of artillery. The blue sky was little comfort, even less so when he noticed the grey clouds massing on the western horizon. The rolling thunder of ordnance miles away drifted to him. Several Hercules transport planes flew high above, heading eastwards out of the UK. He wondered where they were going. Mainland Europe? Somewhere further afield? It didn’t matter. Their mission was far beyond him. He wished them well and hoped they reached a safe place.

  One-hundred and thirty-five miles to Lowestoft.

  He walked through a meadow teeming with hogweed, nettles and wild flowers. The elevated land offered a view of the A228 dual carriageway five hundred yards to the west. He stopped and took out his binoculars. Refugees were walking the southward side of the carriageway and its grass verge. Vehicles weaved through the moving crowds and ragged groups. Several people perched on or clung to a JCB backhoe loader as it trundled down the road. An old milk float burdened with a dozen refugees, some of them infants. A few cars and trucks meandered, unable to pick up any speed amongst the masses. People begged for lifts to drivers whose vehicles were fully loaded. A group of children looked out from the front skip of a bright yellow dumper truck. The man driving the dumper was gesturing for them to sit down, but the children were having too much fun to listen.

  Some refugees tried to start the abandoned cars on the road, but few succeeded.

  The stream of humanity kept moving. It was an awe-inspiring sight. A sight that gave him a modicum of hope. But he knew the infected wouldn’t be far behind.

  It didn’t take long to be proven right. In one of the fields adjacent to the road a group of seven refugees were set upon by numerous infected who emerged from the dense trees with ferocious intensity. One of the refugees, an older man in a wax jacket, felled two of the infected with blasts from his shotgun before he and the rest of the group were brought down and attacked. The wind carried their screams. Three refugees were killed outright, mutilated by teeth and busy hands, while the others became infected from bites and writhed upon the ground for a short while before rising in jerky movements to join the feast of their former companions.

  Guppy lowered his binoculars and walked on.

  *

  He walked parallel to the road, keeping his distance to avoid any unwanted attention or army patrols.

  Two miles farther on, a house burned, billowing smoke that tainted the air. Bodies lay on the front lawn. He didn’t go down the hill and investigate.

  The shrieks of the infected echoed through the fields.

  He stalked narrow dirt lanes and ducked through gaps in dense hedgerows. Progress was slow as he checked every possible point of ambush. His heartbeat spiked at the shadows beneath the trees. Helicopters whirred overhead. He became accustomed to the distant flash-bang of ordnance dropped by screaming jets.

  Walking along a bridleway, he passed a pile of electrical goods in a ditch. Microwaves, toasters, televisions and car stereos. They appeared to be in good condition. It made no sense to him.

  A stained jacket flailed on a stooping tree branch. A beanie hat impaled upon a briar patch. A broken plastic toy hidden in yellowing grass. Scraps of paper fluttered on the errant breeze. At one point during the morning he halted and raised his rifle towards a suggestion of movem
ent in a nearby thicket, but it turned out to be a lone dog trailing its leash as it foraged in the brush. Guppy lowered his rifle and watched the dog pass out of sight.

  At the end of one narrow lane, where the flanking trees spread limbs that crowded him like eager devotees, he found an abandoned car and some scattered belongings. Steam was rising from the beneath the car’s raised bonnet. Guppy glanced inside the car to make sure it was clear of any lurking infected then checked the engine, parts of which were rusted and charred. The battery was leaking a noxious substance. He shook his head and wrinkled his nose at the acrid stench.

  He searched the jumbled insides of the car for anything he could scavenge, but there was only the left behind mementoes of a family, and it saddened him to see the abandoned toys, books and empty water bottles. A child’s colouring book and scattered crayons.

  He moved on, contemplating the family’s fate and wondering if he’d have to deal with them at some point down the road.

  *

  Whilst walking a back road, Guppy had to dash to the verge and hide behind a gnarled oak to avoid a pack of infected heading his way. He clicked off the safety on his rifle and crouched to make himself as small as possible, barely breathing, gritting his teeth. The thudding panic inside his head was maddening. Low growls and nonsense muttering drifted towards him, blended with wet clicking sounds and scuffling feet.

  Moments later the infected passed him, and he stifled a shudder of revulsion at the sight of severe mutations and weeping cysts, bleeding sores and jaundiced skin. They were filthy, wretched things. One of them, a thin man with a matted beard, gasped and trembled as black tendrils emerged from his chest and rotund stomach. His arms were wracked with spasms. Another infected, an old woman in a torn, bloodied cardigan and tattered skirt, was chewing on the dead rodent she clasped in her hands. At the back of the group a man in a turban shook his head from side-to-side while he bled from his eyes and mouth.