The Plague Series (Book 1): The Last Plague

by Rich Hawkins

  The scream of metal was followed by the deafening impact as the car veered into the side of a van, throwing Guppy forward. A hammer-crack echoed inside his head as his face struck the steering wheel, followed by the sensation of a heavy door banging shut. The engine died with a shrill grinding that shook the rest of the car. He raised his head, eyes watering, vision blurring into murky nonsense as he put his hands to the newly-crumpled shape of his nose. Blood dampened his fingers. He made a vague, confused grunt, and slumped back in his seat. All sound seemed to fade from the world, even Delores’ sporadic whimpering from beside him. His pulse hammered through the pathways of his brain. The air stank of battery acid, petrol and metal. He tasted blood in his mouth. His head lolled, chin dipping against his chest as he fell into a numb and sluggish inertia that sapped the strength from his limbs.

  He spoke words he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t work his mouth properly. Then the world went away, and he was lost to darkness.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Guppy came to on his hands and knees upon the road outside the car, awash in the frayed glare of the headlights. There was a blurred memory of staggering from the car to dry heave on the tarmac, surrounded by the ambiguous shapes of dead vehicles and shadows. The sudden panic when he remembered the arachnid creature had him pawing for his sidearm, which he grabbed with one clumsy hand and swept around the dark, looking for a target.

  Four yards away, revealed in the headlights, Delores sat in the spilled ashes of her husband, crying as she grasped the now-empty casket. The side of her head was bleeding. Her cardigan was torn. She said her husband’s name in shivering gasps and asked for forgiveness. She cursed God and bowed her head to sob, dropping the casket so she could clench her hands in the ashes, which ran through her fingers like sand.

  Guppy could only stare at her, numb with shock and thick-headed, his mouth dry and aching.

  Delores was still calling out to her dead husband when the arachnid creature descended from the darkness above and seized her with its front mandibles. She screamed and flailed. The mandibles, like much of the creature, were dripping with a greasy fluid. Hooked and severe. The sharp tips stabbed into her skull even as she tried to pull them away.

  The creature shrieked and reared up, lifting Delores from the road. Her legs kicked. Her screams became shriller, agonised and full of terror, before she was silenced when a serpentine stinger with a weeping needle-tip emerged from the wet maw between the mandibles and thrust into Delores’ gaping mouth and down her throat. Her eyes bulged as she began to choke. Her arms jerked and juddered at her chest.

  Guppy heard the crack of bone inside Delores. She fell limp with her eyes still open wide, her husband’s ashes billowing on the road and between the cars. A half-second later she was snatched upwards as the arachnid thing ascended in a swift motion almost too fast for Guppy to register, vanishing into the lightless spaces above. Moments later crunching and sucking noises echoed down.

  He was rising to his feet when a naked form emerged from the shadows and darkness ahead of him. A man, whose skin seemed to have been melted and then reset, leaving it sagging and encrusted and sore. Most of his face had been eaten away. His withered genitals were an appalling sight. He was a shambling nightmare in the beam of Guppy’s torchlight, opening his mouth to emit a damp cry of pain.

  Guppy dropped the man with two shots to the heart.

  A second later, a woman in a similar state approached from the opposite direction, her bare soles scuffing on the tarmac. Her eyes bulged and wept. Her teeth gnashed within her bleeding mouth. Most of the hair was gone from her scalp. She thrashed her arms in spasmodic movements.

  She was within six yards of Guppy when he put a single round through her awful face. As soon as she hit the ground, dead and crumpled, he scanned the darkness around him staring down the sights of his sidearm, searching for movement. But nothing else came at him, although the suggestion of busy movements just beyond the reach of his torchlight kept his nerves jangling and frayed.

  Guppy stumbled back to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition, but the engine gave nothing save for a rattling choke. He swore under his breath, glancing around and above to watch for hostiles, before again trying the engine.

  He soon gave up after the headlights died, leaving only his rifle’s torchlight against the darkness. He banged his forehead on the steering wheel.

  A scythe-like appendage stabbed through the roof, inches from his face, and without thinking Guppy pulled out his pistol and fired three times in reply. The creature shrieked and the appendage withdrew. The gunshots stung his ears and thumped inside his head, mixing with a shrill ringing.

  With a terrible rending and scraping, the front edge of the roof was wrenched open by bony pincers, and in moments the roof was peeled away like the lid of a sardine tin. The scream of ripping metal echoed through the air.

  The arachnid’s head appeared above Guppy, dripping and bulbous, its multiple eyes set upon him with a ravenous hunger.

  He emptied the pistol at what passed for the abomination’s face. The creature reeled away, out of sight. He holstered the pistol and grabbed his rifle, then opened the door and dove out of the car. He froze in a crouching position, sweeping the darkness with the rifle, its torchlight moving over cars and dank walls.

  The scrape and skitter of the arachnid’s limbs echoed above and around, seeming to come from every direction, disorientating him.

  Now, he was being hunted.

  After grabbing the petrol can from the boot of the car, Guppy moved, stepping between dead vehicles, until he ducked down behind a transit van, trying to stifle his harsh, hurried breathing and crazed heart. His stomach gurgled and creased, worrying his guts.

  The creature’s damp clicking rose from back down the tunnel, its sound drifting and quickening, as if the monster was in a frantic state.

  He rose and got moving again, but only managed a few yards before his torchlight flashed over the walls, causing him to stop suddenly. The breath fell out of his chest. A tremor pained his heart at the sight around him.

  The torchlight revealed prone human shapes entangled in sporadic patches of a web-like substance on the walls either side of him, wrapped up and trapped, with only their sunken faces uncovered. Cocooned. There had to be at least a dozen. Men and women, mouths frozen in silent screams, eyes wide open with the horror of what had happened to them. If they weren’t dead, they were certainly beyond life, beyond help, and Guppy lowered the torchlight to let the darkness hide them again.

  “You’ve been busy,” he said. “Whatever the fuck you are…”

  Scuttling and skittering drifted towards him from the shadows, along with the vague sense of movement from back down the tunnel. It was time to stop this. After pulling on his gas mask, he unscrewed the cap of the fuel can and doused the surrounding cars then retreated in slow steps, leaving a twenty yard trail of petrol that led back to the scattering of vehicles in the middle of the tunnel. The pungent fumes made him giddy and reminded him of when he was a stupid kid and liked to sniff petrol as an alternative to superglue. He almost laughed.

  Once the can was empty he threw it away, hoping the noise of it clattering on the tarmac would attract the arachnid creature. He took out his box of matches, which was part of his basic kit. He looked at the sheer darkness where the creature was hiding.

  “Come on, you fucker. Come and get it.”

  He lit a match and waited, protecting the flame with his hand.

  He waited.

  Sounds of scraping movement upon metal grew louder until they were almost upon him, and then the arachnid thing emerged from the dark directly ahead of him, perching upon the roofs of cars dripping with petrol. It stared at Guppy and shrieked, its multiple eyes gleaming in the wash of the torchlight.

  He dropped the match. A second passed. Then a low, barely-heard whoosh as the fumes evaporating on the surface of the petrol ignited and the trail leading back to the cars became a line of fi
re.

  The creature screamed. Guppy raised his middle finger at it.

  “Yeah, fuck you, too.”

  The cars around and beneath the arachnid thing went up in flame. The creature reared, flailing its sharp limbs, and toppled backwards as the fire surrounded it. Smoke streamed in all directions. Windscreens cracked and tyres popped. Guppy pulled on his gas mask, and as he turned away the people on the walls screamed in unison, forming a hellish, inhuman chorus to a cosmic hymn. It was a deafening sound.

  Guppy started along the tunnel, stumbling and hurrying, trying to get away before the fire reached the cars’ fuel tanks.

  Seconds later an explosion knocked him off his feet and filled the tunnel with flying debris and the roaring of thunder.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Guppy staggered out of the tunnel, smoke billowing around him, the sunlight blocked by the high retaining walls to either side. He struggled up the slope to ground level and slumped on the road, sitting against the side of an abandoned car. He took off the gas mask and let it fall to his lap. His body sagged, worn out and pained, as he glanced at the blue sky speckled with thin clouds. Such relief overcame him that he had to bite down on a burst of hysterical laughter.

  He had the knuckles of one hand at his mouth, eyes watering and sore, when the arachnid thing crashed out of the tunnel, aflame and wreathed in smoke, thrashing and shrieking in agony. It loped up the slope towards Guppy – who was caught in such surprise that he couldn’t raise his rifle – but collapsed upon the ground within several yards of him. Those lethal limbs twitched once before they finally fell still.

  Guppy grimaced at the heat from the flames eating the creature’s flesh. Its eyes popped and bled. The smell was vile, like the burning of offal and animal hair.

  He stared past the creature, towards the tunnel he’d been lucky to escape. “I’m sorry, Delores. I’m so sorry.”

  *

  Drawn by gunfire and the arachnid thing’s dying cries, infected people emerged from between the derelict vehicles around Guppy. They moved fast, streaming in from the roadsides and verges, enthralled by the smell of his sweat and exhaustion, intoxicated and shuddering. Wretched effigies of lost humanity and disease.

  Guppy stood, leaning against the car, and took aim at the nearest infected, a middle-aged woman in a torn nightgown. A filthy slipper on one foot, the other red and scraped raw from her adventures during the outbreak. Her mouth snapped. Her eyes blazed with hunger. Long hair tangled with twigs and leaves.

  Three rounds from Guppy’s rifle pierced her chest, and she was dead before she hit the ground. Then he sighted the other infected streaming towards him. His heartbeat remained steady as he took and gave each breath through his mouth and found his next target, screaming at him from his right flank: a teenage boy in a Gunship t-shirt and blood-encrusted jeans.

  Guppy put two rounds into the boy’s midsection, and then one in his head after he fell down and started skittering forwards like a broken insect.

  More infected came. A man in tennis shorts and little else. A woman wearing a tabard and black leggings. A soldier in shredded and bloodied fatigues still wearing his helmet. Several children. All of them mutated to some degree, blighted with black spines, cysts, lesions or squirming tendrils. They were ragged, feral and hungry. They were monsters.

  Guppy took down the man in tennis shorts first then scattered his fire in controlled bursts, dropping more of the infected until his rifle was empty.

  Letting his rifle hang loose on its strap, he grabbed a frag grenade from its pouch and pulled out the pin then threw it towards the approaching pack of infected directly ahead.

  He squatted behind the car, closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears, and three seconds later the grenade detonated and shook the immediate world with a reverberating boom and explosion of debris from the direction he’d thrown it. Shrapnel cracked windscreens and windows and tore through metal.

  The sound of detonation echoed around then faded. The following silence was broken only by the weak cries of wounded infected.

  Keeping his movements calm and clean, Guppy ejected his empty magazine and replaced it with a full one. He stood again and chambered the first round as he brought up the barrel of the rifle.

  Only two infected remained on their feet amidst the aftermath of the grenade blast – a man in nothing more than a gaping dressing gown that exposed his swollen stomach and withered genitals loped towards Guppy; and beyond was another man, clad in stained gym wear, running at full pace, gnashing his teeth. His left arm was limp and lacerated, hanging from his shoulder by a flap of skin and some ligament.

  Guppy exhaled, sighted the nearest man.

  Aim, fire, repeat. It didn’t take long.

  Both the infected fell amongst the remains of the others. Some were still alive, mortally wounded, limbs severed, chests and stomachs shredded. Faces perforated by shrapnel.

  Guppy was about to show them mercy when another infected burst from his left flank and tackled him. He fired once, too late, and was knocked to the ground. The infected man – or what had once been a man, but now emaciated and raw – pinned Guppy to the ground and snapped its jaws inches from his face. Guppy barely managed to get his rifle across his chest and hold the creature back. The infected thing gibbered and trembled manically, inching its mouth closer to Guppy’s face. Its eyes were livid with bloodlust and the urge to rip into soft flesh.

  With all his strength Guppy pushed the infected away with his rifle. The creature fell on its back, thrashing and mewling, legs kicking like an upturned beetle. Guppy rolled away and rose to a crouch. On pure instinct, he swung his rifle around just before the infected thing clambered to its hands and knees, head dipped and mouth gnashing. Eyes crazed with hunger.

  Guppy kept his finger on the trigger as he fired. The hot rounds tore into the creature, tearing apart its chest and stomach, throwing it back against the side of a car.

  It died staring at him. Once a man, but now a dead monster sitting in a pool of infected blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Guppy checked for any bites or scratches on his body but found none, and the frantic fear of infection faded with his manic heartbeat. He leaned against a car, sighing with relief, spitting the taste of dirty air from his mouth.

  At least he was across the Thames, on the A282 between Purfleet and Grays in the borough of Thurrock. The daylight was bleeding from the edges of the sky. The sun was falling by slow degrees.

  More infected would arrive soon, drawn by the disturbance he’d caused. He moved on down the duel carriageway, leaving the godforsaken tunnel and the dead behind.

  *

  Guppy passed the sign welcoming him to Essex. Distant sounds of car engines rose from unseen roads. The north side of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge loomed above him and off to the right. No sign of movement up there. It was a relief. Maybe everything on the bridge had been burned and annihilated.

  A thunder-like reverberation pierced the sky to the west.

  He was ailing, exhausted in his bones, breathing through gritted teeth as he tried to quicken his pace while vulnerable in the middle of the dual carriageway, which was mostly clear ahead of him save for a section of tarmac crammed with the corpses of over a dozen vehicles. A few half-eaten bodies were strewn around. Crows and magpies picked at the dead. No sign of hostiles in the immediate area.

  He rested at the side of the road, leaning against a metal railing as he sipped from his canteen. Greenfield land cleaved by dark roads led westwards. The peaks of taller buildings were visible in the distance straight ahead, where he hoped to be heading. A thin plume of smoke rising from the centre of the buildings was the only sign of anything amiss over there. Guppy snorted, shook his head. If only it was true. If only it was an ordinary day at the end of summer and all was well with the world. No great death toll. No pandemic. No chaos and slaughter in the sobbing screams of civilisation.

  No monsters, he thought as he moved on, casting his gaze around,
chewing the inside of his mouth as he did when he was a child. Old habits never died.

  He’d only walked another ten yards when he stopped again. Shouldering his rifle, he looked through the scope at the movement on the road far ahead and sucked in a breath that caught in his throat.

  Three hundred yards directly ahead, snarling and contorted faces and snapping mouths defined themselves in the scope’s limited field of vision. Crazed eyes and flailing arms. Fleshy tendrils emerging from stomachs and chests. Dried blood and grievous wounds. Bite marks and reddened scratches.

  The abominations filled the width of the dual carriageway, both southbound and northbound sides.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  The flock of infected – once some of the good people of Purfleet – had to be over two hundred-strong. But it was just a guess; Guppy couldn’t see past the first amassed ranks of the infected. Too many for him to kill.

  Thinking quickly, he ducked inside a nearby car and lay across the backseat after closing the door behind him. Empty fast food wrappers on the floor. The corpse of a fat man slumped in the driver’s seat, face upturned, mouth gaping. Guppy became as small as possible, drawing his limbs and rifle tight to his body as the flock of infected approached. With the front windows open, he heard their muffled grunts and growls growing louder. Animalistic rasps and guttural chattering. He imagined their awful mouths dripping with blood and saliva. He imagined them homing in on him, craving the flesh he offered. If they caught him before he could get the rifle barrel into his mouth and pull the trigger, his death would be slow and agonising. Still, it was better than infection. Better than being a monster.

  The trampling footfalls and dull scrapes and thuds as bodies jostled and thrashed were almost upon him when he flicked off the safety on his rifle. He exhaled through gritted teeth then took a shallow breath and held it as the first rank of infected arrived amongst the cars, their shadows and silhouettes swarming around him, passing by with their gnashing mouths and low cries of hunger. The occasional elbow or limb bumped and scraped at the car. The sudden stench was overwhelming, like an invisible wave of filth, excrement and gangrenous wounds. He kept his eyes focused upon the back of the driver’s seat, scared to look anywhere else. It was easier this way, even as the fear of violent death welled in his heart and thickened the inside of his throat.