by Terry Tyler
Ludlow belches. "Pardon me. So, what's the plan, are we going in mob-handed?"
Verlander closes his eyes for a moment. No subtlety, these ex-army types. "We'll give it time to settle down, while we start work on the Downs. Make sure the virus has died out. Then we'll do a recce. Softly, softly."
Ludlow's greasy mouse shuffles its arrow through various screens. He nods. "Give 'em another winter, and they'll do anything for a chance to live like they used to."
"Exactly." Verlander smiles. "Desperation is a demanding master; we might find out they're all worker bees, after all."
Part Two
Six Months Later
November 2025
Chapter Seventeen
Doyle sits on the top of the hill and watches the diggers and cranes move back and forth, far below, ripping up those sublime areas of rolling green that must have once been protected by conservation laws. He is filled with a profound sadness. All that natural beauty, there since time began, destroyed—for what?
He lights a cigarette and lifts the binoculars to his eyes, scanning the scene. The binoculars are strong enough to confirm that many of the workers are Asian, but they're not Chinese (softer features) or Indian (lighter skin). He's not sure what nationality they might be. Geography was never his strong point.
The day is mild; he's been lucky so far, this autumn. Summer was surely the wettest ever—some days he thought he'd never be properly dry, ever again—but, even now, in early November, it's not that cold. Only a thin frost, most mornings. He wonders if this work, whatever it is, will cease once it gets colder.
A few raindrops fall and he turns away, pulling up his hood and skidding back down the hill. It's a six-mile cycle ride back to the pub he's made home, but what the hell? He's got bugger all else to do. Aside from not being able to drive, the hardest aspect of this new life is solitude. He wishes he'd taken the trouble to find out where Travis was heading before he scarpered on that strange, quiet afternoon, but he was too eager to get away from that poisonous bitch Aria before he did or said something he shouldn't; she had Travis wrapped around her sharp little finger, and he didn't want to witness a good bloke go down. Mostly, though, he was just in a hurry to get home. Find his mum and his brothers.
And when he got there, he wished he hadn't.
Even as he turned into that neat little terrace of new builds, he knew it wasn't going to be good. The silence pounded in his ears: no traffic, no kids shouting, no doors slamming. All he could hear was the plodding of his footsteps along the pavement. As he neared his mother's house, the sick dread grew worse. A bin-liner-wrapped package lay in one front garden. A corpse. He'd seen so many on his journey from London, spoken to a soldier who'd told him that, at first, people had buried the bodies of their loved ones in their gardens, but others obeyed the instructions to leave them outside for collection. After only a few weeks there were too many to collect, and few left alive who gave a damn about burying them.
The smell. Jesus. Several years ago, when he was working in a restaurant, a rat had died under the floorboards. The stink was so bad that they couldn't re-open for two days; he'd forgotten what it was like until he smelt it again, down that neat little row of well-maintained abodes.
In his mum's tiny, square front garden, Doyle found another of those bin-liner-wrapped packages, and he began to cry, from the shock, the loss, but most of all the fear of what he would find inside the house.
A greeny-purply-greyish thing lay in the bed that belonged to his brother, Michael, and there was a godawful smell coming from his mother's room, so he knew the package outside must contain the remains of his youngest brother, Tommy. Doyle clamped his hand over his nose and mouth and hurtled down the stairs so fast that he slid down the last few, slamming the door behind him; the stench followed him down the road, even as he turned the corner onto the main drag, even as he ran past other rows of dead houses, until he came to a stop on a grass verge near some traffic lights, collapsed, puked up, lit a cigarette and wept until his ribs hurt.
"Fuck this," he said, eventually. "The fuck do I do now?" A drink, that was what he needed. If everyone was dead, the pubs would be abandoned and the drink would be free. Not all bad, then. A good drop of the hard stuff always helped.
He walked, he cycled, and he spent the winter on a boat. Lucy, a girl from the old days (if indeed fellows of twenty-nine could have old days) had a narrowboat moored at a village called Stoke Bruerne in Northamptonshire, and he knew where the spare key was buried; she'd told him about it in case he ever needed a hideaway. He never had—he was far too artful—but he remembered where the key was. There was no Lucy. He supposed somewhere there was a greenish-greyish-purple thing where she used to be, too.
The boat started first time. Big can of spare fuel. Bedding. Tins and packets in the cupboards. His new home, then. Doyle sat at the helm that first day, smiling in the autumn sunshine and feeling very pleased with himself indeed.
In a drawer he found a thick, empty exercise book. This would be his diary; he would write in it every day. First, he had a few weeks to catch up on, beginning with the day he stepped out of the bunker.
It was something to do, anyway.
Somewhere along the banks of the Grand Union, one bright and frosty morning in January, he met a couple called Brian and Kerry. They bonded over the cup of coffee he offered them in exchange for chocolate from their bag of looted swag, and the fact that he and the young man shared a first name; they came aboard, and Doyle agreed that he would continue to be known as Doyle, to avoid confusion. Brian and Kerry stayed with him because they had nobody left and nowhere else to go; they were lazy, and drank even more than he did, but it was better than being alone, an extra two pairs of hands through the locks, someone to mind the boat while the other two went off hunting for supplies.
The days passed easily; sometimes he was wet, cold and hungry, occasionally bored and morose, but there was laughter, too, and, on sunny spring mornings, a curious peace. Down in that parallel world of canals and rivers, he could pretend the destroyed land did not exist. They chugged past empty villages, fields of abandoned crops. Huge industrial estates, blots on the landscape where already, nature had begun its fight back, as weeds grew thick below the smashed windows. Abandoned cars in the car parks. Supermarket trolleys; everywhere, the supermarket trolleys. Moving slowly through Leicester, where the waterway ran through the city, Kerry piped up that she'd been on a barge holiday once, and she'd been advised not to stop in Leicester as it wasn't safe to leave the boat.
"But it won't matter now, will it?" she said, cheerily, swigging from her bottle of cider. "'Cause there's no one here to nick nothing off of it."
They had only walked a hundred yards from their mooring when the explosions made them hurry back.
Didn't sound like gang warfare; they were too loud. Doyle watched the sky light up with flames, darken with smoke as they took the boat through the rest of the city and out into the countryside.
Somewhere on the Trent-Mersey, Doyle lost his companions and his boat. On a sunny afternoon in May, he went off to walk through the peaceful trees and grassy footpaths on his own, because Brian had hinted that he and Kerry could do with some 'alone' time. Doyle understood; he knew this meant they wanted to drink themselves stupid and get naked without having to keep the noise down. He walked for a mile or so before he found an old pub. The door was hanging open, and inside it smelled of beer and mustiness rather than rotting matter, for a change, so he stayed a while. Took his diary from his small backpack, helped himself to a bottle of warm lager or two, and pulled a chair out into the sunshine to write up the last few days.
Walking back, he smelled the fire before he saw the smoke; it hit only his subconscious, at first, but as he wandered through the trees, enjoying the dappled sunlight through the canopy of branches above, he noticed how it grew stronger the nearer he got to the boat.
By the time he saw the smoke he feared the worst. When he reached the water, he saw that there was
nothing left but the shell of the blackened boat, embers still burning. Nothing was left, no Brian, no Kerry. All his possessions aside from the contents of his backpack: his precious diary, a bottle of water, a few cereal bars and his knife. At first he wondered if they'd done it on purpose, burned his home and scarpered, but he saw no reason for them to do this, and when he spied their two pairs of running shoes where they'd left them on the bank that morning to dry out, he knew for sure that it had been an accident. A candle knocked over, a cigarette left burning.
He sat on the bank and looked at what remained of his home for a long time, until the sky began to darken. He hoped they had not suffered, had been overcome by smoke in that deep drowsiness that follows drunken sex. Surely this must be so, or they would have jumped into the river. That they might have been awake but unable to escape was too horrific to contemplate.
Night fell, and he turned around and walked back to the pub.
During that wet summer he moved from place to place without a plan; he slept wherever was dry, comfortable and clean, found food and drink where he could. Sometimes he explored; he visited places of beauty, the caves of the Peak District, because he had nothing else to do and thought he might as well. He was lonely, always; he came across other people, even stayed a few days with some, but they were in turn hostile, or broken. Or they would latch onto him, hoping he might save them. He knew there must be communities of sound people somewhere, who were beating this thing, forging some sort of life, but he didn't know where to look.
Everywhere, there were piles of charred skeletons. Burial pits. Deserted camps. He stayed away from the big towns. Too dangerous. Gangs. Disease. Rats.
He went east, because he remembered childhood holidays in Norfolk. Cycling down by the Broads, he looked at the narrowboats and thought about taking another one, drifting up and down the watery ways as he had before, but autumn was drawing near and he wasn't sure he wanted to spend another winter as he had the last. There was a world of difference between liking your own company and enforced solitude.
Sitting outside a ransacked pub called the Pleasure Boat Inn, one afternoon in early September, he looked at the boats and an idea occurred to him. If he found a proper boat, he could travel. He knew the Channel Tunnel was no more, because somewhere, some time along the mess of days, he'd met a guy who'd told him that it had been destroyed (by whom?), but if he had a boat he could get over to Holland or France, see if there was life to be lived. The disease must be global, or surely a rescue operation would be underway for the UK, but if he could get to France, he could go south. Be somewhere warm.
There was a marina at Wroxton, which would house the sort of boats he was looking for. Not that he knew how to sail one, but it had to be easier than driving a car, which he'd tried a few times, nearly killing himself twice. At least if he fell into the sea he could swim; it wasn't like crashing into a wall.
He couldn't spend the rest of his days wandering alone from town to village, from empty house to looted shop, wondering what the hell he was going to do when the food ran out.
The marina at Wroxton was a wreck, and most of the boats were gone. Those still there had been occupied since the outbreak, and the smell was enough; no way was he clearing out toilets before he went to sea.
He walked back up into the deserted town with its customary broken windows, bags of rotting rubbish and abandoned cars, and decided to find a drink to soothe his disappointment. Standing at a junction, he looked around, and was just about to head to a café bar across the road, which looked the most intact, when he heard laughter.
He stopped, and listened. People talking. People.
The voices floated out of the open front door of a seedy looking pub on the corner of the street. A few months back he might have looked through a window first, made sure they looked relatively harmless, but today he was so weary from the constant disappointments, so aching with loneliness, that he turned around and walked straight in.
There were six of them, sitting round a table, drinking beers and soft drinks and eating crisps, laughing at something the bigger of the two men was saying, as if they were a group of friends on a normal Saturday afternoon.
The bigger chap was called Eric Foster; he introduced Doyle to his wife, Lacey, and his son, Cal. The other man was called Richard, also with his son, Christian, a tall, sulky looking teenager. The pretty young woman with the pale hair was Jodie; she didn't appear to belong to anyone.
They were on their way to nowhere, they said. They'd been living in a community way up north, on Lindisfarne, just off the Northumbrian coast, but it had, in Jodie's words, 'gone to shit'.
"What sort of shit?" Doyle asked, nodding his thanks to Eric Foster for the warm bottle of Sol. No one answered immediately; Jodie looked at Eric and Richard, then down at the floor. "Oh, you know," she said, in the end, pushing a strand of hair away from her face. "Food rationing. Bloke in charge is a tosser. There was a murder, and he acted like it was nowt."
"It was great a while back," Eric said. "We'd started growing crops, but the summer was so wet and some failed; nobody knew what they were doing, really. It was trial and error, but the trouble with error, these days, is that it means going hungry."
"And he lets these yobbos smoke marijuana openly, in the pub!" said Lacey. "When we first got there we had a functioning school, but the woman who ran it left after the murder, and the other teachers appear to have forgotten what their job is." She sniffed. "Now there are bikers waving guns around, and the idiot in charge seems to think this is a good thing!"
Young Cal Foster grinned. "I was glad when the school stopped!"
Doyle laughed. "Yes, I think I would have been, too!"
Cal did a theatrical pout. "Mum teaches me now. It's so-oo boring!"
"There are other school-age youngsters there," Lacey went on. "I don't get it; do people not care?"
No one answered. Richard and Christian had little to say; they both sat with folded arms and sulky expressions as Eric, Lacey and Jodie revealed more details about their former community.
Finally, Richard spoke.
"We should have kept the whole fucking lot of them out." He downed the large whisky chaser by his side. "Right at the start. Fended for ourselves, not let any of them on. None of those young 'uns, not the hippie and his friends, not that fucking Dex, and certainly not the psychopath."
"Yeah, but we did, didn't we," Eric said. "And hindsight is a wonderful thing."
"True dat." Doyle smiled, and they clinked bottle necks. "Had you been there since it started, then?"
Eric nodded. "Group of us, aye. Twenty-odd." He frowned. "Come on, Richard, some of the newcomers were okay. Phil's responsible for the food we did manage to grow. And Rowan. She did a great job."
"Sure she did." Lacey folded her arms. "If you don't mind being told how much you can and can't have to eat. I'm sure Dex and his girlfriend have enough, up at that castle. And how come I was always on laundry duty?"
Christian fiddled with his nasal piercing, and deigned to make his first comment. "Lacey, it's, like, a post-apocalyptic world. Course there's not enough to eat. Haven't you read The Road?"
Jodie put her hands on the table. "Can we stop talking about it? It's over, and we're not going back." Doyle noticed how fragile she looked, as though she'd suffered great trauma. She looked down at the floor, mostly, and scratched at her wrist, picked at her nails.
Christian gave her a slow hand clap. "Well said, that woman."
"So what's the plan now?" Doyle asked.
Eric shrugged. "Haven't got one. We were hoping to find another community somewhere else, one that's functioning properly."
"One that's run by the military, I say," Richard stuck out his bottom lip. "People who've had some kind of training. Fella in charge on the island, he took people off their duties to ponce up the castle so he could lord it over us. Walked around the place interviewing people for some stupid book he's writing, instead of getting his hands dirty, like the rest of us."
/> "Yeah, King Prick," drawled Christian.
Doyle frowned. "I don't know if I fancy living somewhere run by the military."
"Nor me; I met a few in Wales," Jodie said. "At a refugee camp, back at the start; it was bloody awful. Me and some of my mates escaped."
"Escaped?" Doyle didn't like the sound of that. "You mean you couldn't just leave when you wanted?"
"I hadn't had the vaccine, had I? If you hadn't got a wristband, they shot you if you tried to leave."
"Shot you? What, like, dead?"
"Er, yeah." She gave him a withering look. "That's generally what 'shot' means, isn't it? They'd give you a chance to come back if they caught you, but if you made a break they'd just shoot." She shrugged. "Saw it happen."
"But you never caught the virus? That's interesting."
"Oh, I would have done, I should think, eventually. I was given a vaccine, though. My brother—" She made a choking sound, covered her mouth, and Eric put his arm around her shoulder.
"There, there, pet," he said, squeezing her to him. "You’re with us now, we'll look after you." He looked up at Doyle. "We've just been working our way down the country, looking around, staying here and there, thinking what to do next. I reckon the south is where we need to be."
Doyle nodded. "I agree. Mind if I tag along?"
Eric raised his bottle. "The more the merrier. You're not a psychopath, are you?"
Doyle raised his, in reply. "Only on Tuesdays."
"We need to prepare before we go anywhere," said Lacey. "We need food, water, a decent vehicle that we can sleep in if necessary, toiletries, medical supplies. We can't just drive off into the unknown." She put a protective arm around her son, who tried to shrug it off. "Cal's had a dicky tummy off and on, ever since he ate some tuna on the island that was on the 'past the sell-by date but still safe' shelf. I told them, those dates are there for a reason, but who listened to me?" She formed her lips into a thin line. "So no, we're not ready to go careering across the country on a whim."