Blood on the Motorway

by Paul Stephenson

  He was dimly aware of something moving past him, above him, and two words whispered into his ear.

  'Told you.'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SOUR TIMES

  Struggling to take in the extent of the carnage, Tom rubbed his eyes free of tears and stood up. Cars piled up in a massive wreck at one end of the road and fires burned in adjacent streets, smoke spewing forth in heavy black torrents. The house next door had a corpse dangling from an upper window. Beyond were houses that had turned to nothing more than ash and rubble.

  He fumbled behind him for the door handle. He couldn't stand to see any more, and retreated to the relative safety of his house and its singular corpse.

  Upstairs, Leon was still sat in the same chair, chain smoking. He stared at the body on the bed, two fag ends extinguished at his feet and another already lit. He looked up at Tom.

  'Did you phone the police?' he asked.

  'No,' Tom replied. 'Go look out the window.'

  Leon got up, crossed the room and pulled back the curtain. Tom watched his jaw slackening like a cartoon character.

  'Whatever has happened, it's bigger than Danny,' he said, and Leon nodded. They stood in silence as Leon surveyed the new world from the window.

  'I can't see any movement. Did you see any survivors?' Leon asked.

  Tom shook his head.

  'We can't stay here,' Tom said. 'There are fires everywhere.'

  Leon nodded. They both stared at Danny's corpse for a few moments, Tom wondering if it was right that they just leave him there to rot, maybe to burn.

  'We have to leave him,' Tom said. Leon looked at him and nodded. They left the room, careful not to disturb the body of their friend. Without a word they went to pack.

  Tom closed his door and sat on his bed. Now he was alone, questions buzzed around his head.

  How big is this? Is it the whole country? The whole world? Is everyone dead? Are my parents dead? Is there still a government? How did this happen? How the hell am I still alive?

  His head swam and nausea gnawed at his stomach. He looked around at his worldly possessions. Useless shit like CDs, trinkets, stacks of music magazines, old video games, and a hundred other things no longer relevant in the world outside that front door. This would be no jaunty adventure. He stuffed as many half-clean clothes as he could find into a rucksack, then a few books, a notepad, and the remainder of his weed and tobacco.

  He rolled a cigarette and lit it just as Leon knocked on his door and entered. Tom noted his eyes were as red and puffy as his own felt.

  'Can I have one of those?' he asked, and Tom rolled one for him. Together they made their way into the kitchen and dumped their bags on the table.

  'So what's the plan?' Leon asked.

  In that moment, Tom knew he was somehow now in charge of their combined well-being. On top of everything else, he would have to make the decisions. This was nothing new when it came to his friendship with Leon, whose idea of decision-making was generally restricted to the selection of drinking establishments.

  'I dunno. I guess we start by trying to work out what the fuck is going on. We should head into town, at least see if there are any other survivors. If we made it through the night, there must be others.'

  Leon nodded his approval, then gave a small chuckle.

  'It looks like you got your wish,' he said. When Tom shot back a quizzical look, he continued. 'Only last night you said you wanted to get out of this place. You got your wish. I doubt we'll ever set foot in this house again.'

  'Maybe I should lay off the wishes for a bit then, eh?'

  They picked up their bags, slung them over their shoulders and headed to the front door.

  'Ready?' Tom asked, and Leon nodded.

  Tom watched Leon's face as he took in the scene before him. He imagined it looked quite different than it had at window level.

  'Fucking hell.'

  They made their way down the worn concrete steps and stepped over the bodies that littered the pavements, taking care not to disturb the corpses. The faces all held the same look of wide-eyed accusation and Tom found it impossible not to lock eyes with their dead stares.

  The acrid smell of petrol filled the streets, and as they rounded the corner of Riversdale Terrace they came upon its source. A petrol tanker had crashed into the local church, a large gash along one side, its contents spilling into the road. That it hadn't yet been caught by the errant ember of a nearby fire seemed to Tom to be a miracle, albeit one with a limited shelf life.

  'Something tells me we should find another route,' Leon said, and Tom nodded his agreement.

  They went into the back streets and trudged on in silence. The carpet of bodies thinned here, and they were able to put quick distance between themselves and the tanker.

  'Fucking hell,' Leon said. 'We're bloody lucky. If that thing had gone up an hour ago, I reckon it'd have taken our house with it.'

  There were no signs of other survivors. They kept their eyes open for movement, but all was quiet. No twitching curtains, nothing.

  'We should think about food,' Tom said. 'Water too.' His stomach started to ache. The thought struck him that the most important thing in their lives now, and for the foreseeable future, was finding a way not to starve to death or dehydrate.

  Leon's backpack was too heavy. Tom saw him shifting it every few minutes, until it started to affect its owner's mood.

  'What are we going to do when we get into town, anyway?' Leon asked, somewhat petulantly. 'Check and see if fucking McDonalds is open?'

  'Well, why not, eh?' Tom snapped back. 'If it is, they'll have food.'

  'I could go for a box of nuggets, I suppose.'

  'I'll tell you now, though, if there are zombies running around the city centre, I'm blaming you.'

  'If there are zombies, you can blame me as much as you want, just as long as you don't run faster than me.'

  'Deal,' Tom said, smiling.

  They were coming up to the city centre now. Smoke billowed into the sky ahead of them. Tom spotted a corner shop with its shutters closed and went to investigate. He gave it a kick, He wasn't hugely surprised when this didn't lead to the shutters retracting and the door springing open.

  'Bloody inconsiderate of people not to leave their shops unlocked,' he said, but when he looked at Leon, his friend stared beyond him, his face draining of colour.

  Tom turned round, his pulse quickening. Standing in the road, frozen in the same uncertain pose, were three men, and a woman. The middle man carried a large plank of wood, the end smeared with red.

  His stomach sank and his knees began to buckle. Their faces were like masks, betraying none of the fear Tom imagined must be plastered over his own. Their uniform tracksuit, gold chain and cygnet ring ensemble would have had Tom crossing the road to avoid them even on a good day. They all seemed to be giant sized.

  They stood staring at each other for what seemed an age, Tom feeling his heart pounding in his throat, his bladder suddenly and urgently full.

  It was Leon who broke the tension, striding past Tom. 'Hi,' he said, holding out his hand. Leon's ability to charm and disarm had always been extremely useful at parties, especially those he had not been invited to, but Tom wasn't so sure it would have the same impact here and braced for violence. 'I'm Leon, this is Tom.'

  The four of them looked taken aback. 'Ow, d'yuh knar what's fucking garn on heya like?' the man with the terrifying death stick said in an almost impenetrable Mackem accent.

  'We were hoping you could tell us,' Tom ventured, emboldened by the sudden upsurge in dialogue.

  'We woke up after the storm and everything was like this,' Leon confirmed.

  'Aye, the storm,' the woman nodded.

  These were not the fearsome hoodlums of his imagination, but three teenagers as wary of Leon and himself as they were of them. But they were still carrying a big, bloodied stick.

  Without a further word they moved past them, back the way Tom and Leon had just come.

 
'Um, I wouldn't go that way if I were you,' Tom called after them, thinking of the oil spill, but they carried on as though they hadn't heard him. He stared after them until they were out of sight. Leon fixed Tom with a wry smile.

  'How rude!'

  'Yeah,' Tom replied. 'Kids today, eh?'

  'I honestly thought you were going to faint,' Leon said, laughing.

  'Yeah, well I was half expecting zombies. At least we know we're not the only people still alive.'

  'Fat lot of good it does us. Let's hope the next people we run into are capable of conversation and not carrying a fucking great big stick?'

  'Agreed,' Tom said.

  The corpses were more varied the closer they got to the centre. Fewer slippers and dressing gowns, more salmon shirts, cargo pants, and densely gelled hair atop silently screaming faces on the men, skimpy dresses pulled tight over dead flesh and carefully coiffed hair matted with blood for the women.

  Tom shuddered. Leon made his way over to the shuttered shop front of a Currys electrical outlet Tom had spent countless hours shuffling around, depressed at the shiny things he couldn't have.

  'We need to get in there,' Leon said, sizing up the best possible entrance. 'If this is only local it'll be on the news.'

  'And if it's not?' Tom asked.

  'Well then there'll be no news and we're completely and utterly fucked.'

  Tom couldn't fault the logic. They both started to try to prise their way in.

  Twenty minutes later they slumped exhausted to the ground, their efforts to lift the shutter met with immovable metal intransigence.

  'Motherfucker,' Leon said. 'Anyone would think they didn't want people to break in.'

  The sun was high overhead now. Despite the cold, they had both worked up a considerable sweat. They moved to the back door and tried to force it, but not being master criminals they failed to make the slightest impression on the defences of a shop that had doubtless survived far hardier attempts on its virtue.

  Tom bent double, wheezing. 'I'm exhausted,' he said.

  'I need a drink,' Leon said in agreement.

  Leon pulled out his pouch and rolled a spliff, which they sat and smoked in silence. Tom watched the sky, hoping to see a plane. He sighed. Half the day gone and still nothing made sense.

  His muscles burned, his throat was parched. The spliff did nothing to help. All he wanted to do was curl up here in the street and go to sleep.

  'Of course,' Leon said, leaping to his feet. 'We could just pop into the completely open nightclub just up the street.'

  Tom followed his friend's gaze, shook his head at their combined stupidity, and got to his feet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ASHES & FIRE

  The windscreen didn't hold out long against Jen's kicks. She glanced back to the approaching feet, two sets of them, but she could see nothing above the ankles. She had no desire to see any higher.

  Eventually, the seatbelt gave way to her frantic tugging, and she forced her way out. Without looking back, she ran as fast as she could for the end of the street. Blood flowed down one leg of her jeans and pain shot through one side, but she ignored it as best she could and focused on moving.

  A call went up behind her, but she daren't look back. They could be friend or foe, but her fight or flight response was lodged firmly in the latter camp. She ran for five minutes, as flat out as she could, until her leg was numb and her chest swelled with pain. She stopped and bent over, rasping.

  Looking around her, she realised she'd nearly made it home. Her heart rose and sank in one fluid movement.

  Do you really think Daniel is going to be there in his moth-eaten dressing gown, offering you a cuppa and inviting you to blow off work and watch Jeremy Kyle and Loose Women with him?

  She shuddered. She didn't want to go home.

  She had to. Had to be sure.

  First she had to get there. Dead eyes seemed to fix her with the same blank stare from every vehicle. She ignored them and walked. Her shoulder hurt, her leg hurt more, and her mouth was dry. She thought of the bag of supplies and realised it was still in the back seat of the car.

  Bollocks.

  She rounded the corner into her street and there it was. 44 St Paul's Terrace. Never had it looked as imposing to her as it did now, the small terraced house she'd lived in with her boyfriend for the last year. She passed the bodies of neighbours who’d come out to the street for a view of the storm and searched for her keys, before remembering she'd dropped them in the cinema.

  Fucking great.

  Thankfully, Daniel was rubbish at remembering to lock the front window, and after some jiggling, it came loose. She had barely enough room to wriggle her way in.

  I'll forgive you for leaving the window open if you could just be alive.

  The lounge table showed all the standard detritus of a boys' night in: Pizza boxes, empty lager tins, half a tube of Pringles and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

  Heart in her mouth as she made her way up the stairs, she hardly dared make a sound. All she wanted to hear was a call of, 'Jen, that you?'

  At top of the stairs she walked the final few feet as slowly as she could. Surely, if he was alive he'd have been out to meet her. Or maybe he was out there in the streets somewhere, looking for her? She stared down at his battered trainers, kicked off in the hallway, and knew that wasn't the case. The bedroom door stood closed. She took a deep breath, and turned the handle. The door swung inward.

  His body lay slumped against the far wall, eyes open, nose and mouth smeared in thick dried blood. She let out a howl, ran to the body and cradled his lifeless head to her chest, her sobs echoing through the empty house.

  She stayed in that position until the daylight had faded, tears streaming down her cheeks until she could cry no more. She finally let go of the body when the light outside became so dim she could no longer make out the blood on his jeans.

  Wiping the tears from her face, she rose, and looked out of the window. The distant glow of hundreds of fires filled the sky, smoke and ash drifting through the air.

  She flicked a light switch, but nothing happened. She went back to the window. No lights were on anywhere. She went downstairs and fell onto the sofa, staring at the dead television. It was so quiet. She got up and went to the front window. No signs of life in any of the other windows, but she'd seen precious little sign of that before the world ended. The only interactions she'd ever had with her neighbours had been on the rare occasions that she and Daniel had friends round. Invariably, they would come knocking on the door the minute any hijinks passed the midnight hour. She was glad that if Daniel had to die then at least they had too. Then she felt guilty.

  How long would it take the fires to make it this far out, she wondered? York, the city that had survived the Vikings, the Romans, and endless Hen Do’s, was on fire. The railway station was between her and the town, so until she saw its high-arched roof aflame she was probably safe. It would be her canary down the mine.

  She closed the curtains. She was tired, scared and prone to floods of tears whenever she remembered the body of her dead boyfriend in the room above. Her stomach ached.

  She didn't want to leave the house. It felt wrong to abandon Daniel. She didn't want to stay, either, with his body in the corner of the bedroom. She couldn't sleep there, that was for damned sure.

  Fuck sitting in the dark crying, Jen, be strong. Be practical.

  She got up and made herself busy. She found candles, a pen, and a pad of paper. She started scribbling notes on the pad, a cold hard assessment of where she was. She listed all the things she knew, which was not much. She wrote down all the things she had in the house, getting up to check the cupboards to see what food would last out beyond the end of the day. Lastly, she split a page into two halves and wrote 'STAY' in one column and 'GO' in the other. In the stay column she started to scribble.

  I know where I am

  I know the risks

  Few days’ worth of food

  She stoppe
d there. She started on the go column:

  Fires are spreading

  Daniel is upstairs

  Might find out what's going on

  Might find people

  She stared at the paper a moment, scrunched it up and threw it against the wall. Daniel used to bemoan the fact that in zombie films nobody ever seemed to think about going to a house in the countryside with a month of supplies and riding it out, or at least he had until he'd seen 28 Weeks Later and how well that plan had worked out.

  People. She would need to find people, that much was obvious, but the idea terrified her. Who could she trust? How long would it be before people started to turn on each other for their own survival. She'd need to keep to herself, sustain herself, not get bogged down in other people's problems. She'd need to get moving.

  Her mum had always joked that she'd never dealt with being alone well, especially for an only child. She'd moved out at the age of eighteen and moved from house share to living with a boy and back to house share on a cycle for a number of years, never once being on her own for any period of time. Truth was she was never good at having to deal with her own company. She guessed that would have to change.

  She picked up the pen again and started a list of everything she might need if she wanted to leave. After scribbling for an hour she ended up with a wish list that would fill a caravan, then added 'caravan' for good measure. By now the candles were burnt down to their stubby ends, the light fading to the point where she could barely make out her own scrawl. She didn't have even a fraction of what she needed, and didn't need most of what she'd written, but those were problems for tomorrow. Tomorrow she would need to take this grand plan and put it into action.

  Looking over the empty pizza boxes she realised she hadn't eaten a thing all day. The milk in the fridge was still okay, so she poured a bowl of cereal and stared at the darkness. She went to the bathroom and examined her head wound, then wiped the mascara mess from her face, washed, and stared into the mirror, the tears welling up in her eyes again. She returned to the lounge, sunk into the sofa and let sleep wash over her.