by Tim Lebbon
We're drawing closer to the large roundabout below the motorway flyover. And this is where our whole journey could change. If the motorway is jammed with abandoned vehicles then we will have to walk, and a trip that would take perhaps two days in vehicles would stretch to weeks on foot. Can we really walk that far? I think. With everything that might be out there, can we go that far without meeting something or someone dangerous, or succumbing to hunger or thirst, or just giving up? It's not a thought I wish to explore at any length, nor a situation I want to experience.
Right now, I could kill a pint of beer. Bluebird Ale from Coniston Brewery sticks in my head for some reason, a beer I have not seen for sale in many places. Drinking atoms of Donald Campbell with every mouthful, Ashley had once said, displaying the gruesome streak of humour she mostly kept in check. But it was a good beer, and we shared good times drinking it, and for a moment faster than the blink of an eye Ashley smiles at me and sees away the fears.
There's something else marring the surface of the road ahead. I frown and squint, sure that the sun is dazzling me and perhaps setting a mirage in my path. The road seems heavily textured, bubbled and spiked, and I roll to a stop. The vehicles halt behind me, and I hear the expectant purr of their motors. I hold up one hand and roll slowly forward.
The stretch of road is clear, so it's not somewhere scorched by a blazing car. There are no bodies, no debris on the tarmac, and then colour crowds in and I know what I'm seeing.
Shoots. Thousands of them, thin and sharp and spiked with bright green leaves yet to unfurl. Most of them have barely broken the surface of the road, but some are several inches high, thick at the base and pointed at the top. A few—maybe two dozen—would probably reach my knee, and these have started to spread and sprout now that they're free of the ground. I don't recognise them. The heads of these taller specimens have fattened leaves spreading from the bulbous tops and seeking the sun.
Trees? I'm not sure. I edge forward and kick out at a couple of the shorter shoots, snapping them off. Their exposed cores glitter wet in the sunlight. They've forced their way up through the road across a wide area, extending from here all the way down to the motorway roundabout. They're small, weak plants, and yet for some reason I feel reticent about riding through them.
Jacqueline toots her horn and I glance back. She's leaning from the window, hand outstretched as if to say, What? I shake my head, shrug and move on.
I cannot feel the shoots snapping beneath the motorcycle's wheels, but I know they are. I cannot even hear them breaking beneath the much wider tyres of the Range Rovers. We plough through this new spread of greenery and growth, leaving behind us the scars of our journey in crushed lines of life, and we don't even notice what we are doing.
We have seen no one else alive. There have been plenty of bodies in sealed cars, charred skeletons on the roadside, vague humps at the edges of fields bordering the road that could have been the remains of people fleeing something in the traffic. But we are the only living humans here. I feel like an intruder in this world, and I have already berated myself for thinking of it as a dead place. It's far from dead. Bereft of humanity, maybe, but perhaps all the more alive because of that. Birds flock and flicker through the air, and here and there I've seen the distinctive gatherings of stick and feather nests, resting in the arms of blackened bent metal along the road. There were the wolves a couple of miles back, and other large shapes move across the fields. Foxes, I'm guessing, and more deer, and perhaps cattle that managed to survive the winter and are now reaping the green benefits of spring. The roar of our engines startles some shapes into stillness, but others seem unconcerned at our passing. A family of rabbits sits beside the road and watches us drive past, eyeing the Range Rover wheels suspiciously.
High above, I see two huge birds circling. Buzzards, perhaps, though they look too large for that. Eagles, I think. But that's ridiculous. There are some wild eagles left in the northern reaches of Scotland, but . . .
But what about the wolves?
As I start slowing toward the motorway roundabout I see the unmistakeable outline of a person walking from west to east along the overpass. The shape pauses, looks our way and begins to run.
"So why are we still alive?" Cordell asked. It was our fourth night at the Manor, and the first night we were all there together. Jessica had come in that day, cycling down the lane and spotting me standing on the folly's balcony. She had stopped and zinged her bicycle bell, waved, and turned in the gates. I had smiled, delighted at the innocence of such a gesture. Humanity lay dead and rotting around us, and here was this woman, riding her bike and waving as though she was on a summer bike ride before lunch. It was the first time I'd smiled in almost a week.
"Don't know," the Irishman said. "Maybe we've all got something in common. Something in our blood. Makes us immune. I'm a Celt, what about you lot?" He smiled at Cordell, who scowled back.
"No need for that," Jacqueline said.
"I'm jesting with you, that's all," the Irishman said. "I'll not take the piss unless I like someone, and I like you all. How's that, then? I'm not the easiest to please, when it comes to meeting new folks. I'm stubborn and I don't suffer fools gladly."
"No fools here," I said.
"You're right!" the Irishman said. "No fools here. Five of us, and no fools."
Jessica tapped her beer bottle with her wedding band, frowning. "I've been thinking about this a lot," she said. "I've cycled maybe a hundred miles since the end, across South Wales and through the Brecon Beacons, and I've not seen anyone else. No one. I was really beginning to think I was the only one left alive, and I tried to understand why, and I came up with the idea that maybe I was dead. Dead, and haunting the mountains. And maybe everyone else was dead too, and they were haunting other places. Or the very same places, but I just couldn't see them. Maybe everyone haunts their own version of the world."
"Six billion worlds to haunt," Jacqueline muttered.
"Well, I'm not dead," Cordell said. He leaned across and punched the Irishman on the arm. "Dead?"
"Not me." The Irishman took another swig of his beer. "Damn, that'd taste nowhere near as good if I were."
"Something in our past?" I said. "I had whooping cough when I was a kid. Got a steel rod in my wrist from where I fell off a skateboard."
"I had meningitis," Cordell said.
"So did I!" Jacqueline said.
Jessica shook her head. "I've always been very healthy. Colds and bugs, and aches and pains as I get older, but I've never had what I'd class as an illness."
"Perhaps that's it," I said. "We're all unusually fit and healthy."
"I had breast cancer," Jacqueline said. "Five years ago."
We sat silently for a while, and all five of us took a drink at exactly the same time.
"So are you all clear?" Cordell asked.
Jacqueline nodded, smiling. I liked the expression on her face right then, but it would be so rare.
"Maybe it was something we ate," the Irishman said. He snorted, took a drink and started laughing, spitting his beer across the table. We joined in, and we ended up having a good evening. From then on we gave up trying to fathom why we seemed to be the only survivors of the human race.
No fools here, I said. And I was right, none of us were fools.
The people we meet on the slip road up to the M4 are fools. So that's that theory blown out of the water. They're fools because the first thing they do is reach for their guns.
And then they start shooting.
It takes me a few seconds to realise that the shots are wild and panicked, but I also know that they've got more than air rifles and shotguns. I've only ever heard automatic weapons fired in movies, but the angry rattle is obvious, and I feel bullets hailing past my head as I fall from the bike. I protect my head, roll, and drag myself to the side of the road. I stop when I hear the ping and crack of bullets striking metal. I've come to rest behind an overturned car, and I sit up and look back down the slip-road.
Jessica and Cordell have already driven below the overpass, out of the shooters' line of sight.
Great idea, I think. Great idea of mine. Drive up on my own to show we're not a threat. Fucking great.
I was still a hundred meters from the road block when they started shooting, but I'd seen enough. There was a heavy pick-up truck and an ambulance parked across the road, a double-decker bus head-on between them, and beyond that several caravans and four-wheel drives. The shooting came from the upper deck of the bus.
Down the road, Cordell peers cautiously around the corner of the bridge. I raise my hand—not too far—and he nods.
The silence is shocking after the thunderous gunshots. My bike has stalled, and the only sound is the idling motors of the Range Rovers out of sight beneath the motorway. Maybe they are already planning on how to get me away from here . . . but I hope not. The shooting had started wild and it missed me, but the shooters have had time to gather their senses. And the Rovers are much larger targets.
Cordell glances around again and I wave him away. Shake my hands, shake my head, trying to convey my thoughts: Don't come up this way. He nods and disappears again, and I hope he understood.
"Hello in the bus!" I shout. There is no response. No more shooting, and no answering shouts.
Are they circling around to me now? Crawling along the ditch to my right, or up on the motorway bridge to my left? I look up at the road barrier, expecting to see a head and gun peering over at any minute. There's no way they would miss from up there. I could run, I suppose, and trust that their inexperience would not let them hit a moving target. But it's not a scenario that offers much comfort. I don't want to die with my brains splattered across warm tarmac. I don't want the others to see me shot down, and leave me as they drive in the opposite direction. I don't want to be just another fading memory in their tired minds.
"Hello in the bus!" I shout again, trying to inject some urgency into my voice. My only answer is a metallic clatter and a curse. The only blessing is that it sounded as though it had come from the road block, and not closer.
I look up and see a flock of birds making patterns against the blue sky. It's a big flock, and I'm not sure I've ever seen so many birds together before. Swifts, I think. Picking flies from the air, or maybe communicating in some way I cannot imagine.
"See the birds?" I shout. "I'm as harmless as them. We're not here for trouble, and we don't want to hurt you."
The gun cracks in again, and a dozen bullets rip into the car or ricochet from its flaking shell. I roll into a ball and pray I'm hiding in the best place. The shooting fades away to stunned silence once more, and I find no holes in my body. Holy shit, I think, I'm being shot at! My jacket is grubby, and the white shirt beneath has picked up a heavy smear of oil from somewhere. I think of Bruce Willis and begin to giggle. That's not good. Giggling to myself when someone's trying to blow my guts across South Wales . . . that's not good.
I glance downhill and Cordell is there, peering up at me and waiting for me to move. I raise a hand again and he nods and disappears. He'd been carrying the shotgun that time.
"Fuck's sake!" I shout, and it's a sudden sense of panic more than an attempt at communication.
"Stand up!" a voice shouts.
"And have you blow my head off?"
"I can't hit the side of a barn, old man."
"I'm forty-five! I'm not old."
"You're bald!"
"I was bald when I was eighteen!" My face is pressed close to the tarmac and I can see ants marching in a line. Some of them carry pine needles, others carry dead ants. They're larger than any wood ants I have ever seen, and I wonder where their nest may be.
"So stand up!"
"Are you going to shoot?"
"Are you going to eat us?"
Eat? I frown, shake my head. Did he really say that? "Eat you?"
Silence, and then some muffled voices. I hear a clang of metal on metal again, and then a motor starts uphill from me.
I freeze. Listen. It sounds like a big diesel engine, perhaps the bus. If they choose to drive down and ram the car I'm hiding behind I'll be squashed flat. The ants march on before my nose, and I know that they'll survive.
I look down the gently sloping road. I could run, but it's a long couple of hundred meters. Plenty of time for a bad shot to get lucky.
The engine rattles as it's revved. Cordell looks around the bridge footing again, shakes his head, raises his hands palm-up, and I have no idea what he's trying to say.
I risk a look around the end of the overturned car and don't get my head blown off. It's difficult to see which vehicle has been started, but there's activity on the bus. The sun is glaring from its windscreen, so I can't see whether or not there's anyone in the driver's seat.
I'm starting to sweat. The sun is hitting the car and melting onto me, and the coat I wore to ride the bike is suddenly too hot. For the first time I turn and try to see inside the car, but its roof is crushed down on my side, and a slick of broken glass and ripped interior shields my view. It doesn't smell of anything too bad. I hope it's empty.
Either side of me are several places where bullets have blasted through its metal shell. My blood runs cold.
I stand up. There's really nothing else I can do. Run and they'll shoot me for sure, stay here and they'll ram the car and crush me into the road. Stand, submit, and perhaps they'll keep fingers from triggers long enough for us to talk.
I raise my arms and wait for the shot. It does not come. Nobody shouts either, and I begin to wonder where they've gone.
"Quickly!" It's a distant shout, and I turn and see Cordell gesturing me toward him.
"This way," another voice says. The voice with the gun. I obey, stepping out from behind the car and walking slowly toward the barricade. As I walk I have time to take in more details, and none of it fills me with hope. The pick-up truck has been there for a long time, because its tyres are flat and there's a swathe of rust spotting its heavy hood. Its windscreen is smashed. The ambulance looks as though it could be mobile, but its rear doors are pressed hard against the retaining wall holding back the motorway twenty feet above. Its cab is ridged and dented, and rough sheets of metal have been welded across its windows. Between the truck and the ambulance is the bus, and as I move closer I can see it moving slightly as people walk about inside. Its engine growls. The front window is missing upstairs, and a man and woman are hunkered down, guns protruding over the sill and tracking my progress.
The bus is pocked with bullet holes. The driver's windscreen is hazed. For some reason they've decided not to knock it out.
"There's no harm in me," I call. I open my raised hands as though to prove I'm not carrying an unpinned hand grenade, or a vial of botulism. "We just want to come through."
"Walk to the front of the bus, put your hands on the grille and stay still," the woman shouts. I do as I'm told. I can see the shape in the driver's seat now, and I'm sure it's just a kid.
I hear the thump-thump of someone running downstairs, and seconds later the hot barrel of a gun is pressed against my temple. "Really," the man says, "don't move."
We stand there in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. It's almost ridiculous. I wonder whether he's waiting for me to make a move so he can claim self-defence when he kills me. I don't give him the pleasure.
This is unreal, I think again, and I smile.
"What's so fucking funny?" There's fear in his voice, and I don't like that. It's dangerous.
"Sorry," I say. "I've never been shot at before. It's just all a bit surreal."
"Surreal," the man says. He snorts, then giggles. "Lucy! He thinks this is surreal."
"Tell me about it," a voice says from above. The woman, probably leaning out and covering me with her own weapon.
"Look, we don't mean any harm. We just want to get by."
"Well, you have to pay us," the man says, and for the first time I really recognise the utter terror in his voice. I wonder what he was before the pla
gues: a teacher? Butcher? Accountant? Lorry driver? Now the world has ended and he's just trying to survive, and I'm certain that this is the first time he's asked someone for payment to pass. Just set up here? I think. Or has no one come this way in months?
"What do you want?" I say.
"Food."
"And booze," Lucy says.
The man snorts again. "Food. Weapons, if you have any."
I don't want to reveal how pathetically armed we are. "We have some food you can have," I say.
"And booze, Billy," Lucy says again.
"Some wine."
"Okay, then," the man, Billy, says. "Okay. Tell your people to come up."
"How?"
He hesitates, then shoves the barrel of the gun hard against my head. Bad move, I think. Don't show him up, not in front of his Lucy. He needs to be in charge.
"Call them!" he says. "Tell them to come on foot."
I turn. Cordell is peering around the corner of the underpass, and I see Jessica standing just behind him. They're both holding their guns. I wave them to me, and they disappear back around the corner.
"Now we see how much they think they need you," Billy says. His gun is pointing at my gut, but his eyes are everywhere else. Checking the fields, the road above . . . everywhere.
"What are you scared of?" I ask.
Billy glares at me. "As if you didn't know."
He's talking about something very particular, a definite threat rather than just the wilds we have already seen. I decide to say nothing.
Cordell and the others appear around the corner and start up the incline. They're still carrying their guns, and to begin with I think Billy will go mad. But I see him size up our meagre weaponry; a shotgun, an air rifle. He and Lucy are obviously much more heavily armed, and he seems to draw power from this.
"Break the shotgun!" Billy calls. "Carry the pea shooter by the barrel." Cordell and Jessica comply. When they're twenty paces away Billy calls, "Far enough."