by RR Haywood
I walked her out of the barn, across the field and through the forest, following the narrow trails until we reached the edge of the heathland. Only then did I mount and it was that final act of climbing onto her broad, strong back that made reality hit me. And like I said, the lump in the throat and the tears came freely for a while. Jess senses my discomfort, tossing her head back and forth. I could tell she wanted to canter and run but this isn’t training or exercise now, this was the real deal. Out into the world and every act has to be judged, assessed, weighed up and a decision made based on all the known facts.
At a brisk trot we crossed the heathland into the rolling meadows until we reached the arable farmed land and soon country lanes led us on a winding and somewhat circumventing route to the main town. We arrived at the northern point, near to that flat roofed, ugly building for the national tyre depot or whatever it’s bloody called. Ugly buildings they are. Quick to build and low maintenance but my god, what an eyesore. No wonder depression was so rife throughout this country when we were surrounded by such ugly, functioning buildings.
It did occur to me that this was the first time Jess and I had ventured, armed and ready, into the world, for we had remained wholly within the confines of our den and immediate land. Once the dismay at leaving our den had passed, I did rather grin quite broadly at riding a horse into town with a 9mm pistol on my belt and an automatic weapon encased within a specially made sheath fixed to the saddle. Like a cowboy from old, except I don’t have a cowboy hat or those awful leather trousers they put on over their denims, and thank god too.
The town was as expected. Flooded, filthy, barren and devoid of life. The river, as suspected, had burst her banks and sent a tributary through the main centre. Deep it was too, deep and remarkably still with objects floating serenely by that gave the whole area a calm feeling, until I realised they were bodies, dead bodies. Fat, bloated corpses with straggly hair and limbs that look like so pale and stick-like. The sight was shocking, far more shocking then I realised it would be.
I watched my camera feeds when it happened, and sat crying into my hands at the sight of so many people being ripped apart but I was still detached and safely away from it. I knew it was happening real time and what I was seeing was the reality of the situation. But there was no audio and without the sounds I was still apart from it.
But being in the town was something else. It was quiet, so quiet. Birds chirping, water gurgling softly. If you closed your eyes you could be somewhere perfectly lovely. One of the worst sights was the top of a white coloured car floating in the water. The incessant rain from yesterday, the howling winds and violent storm still hadn’t been enough to cleanse the blood stains from it. They were stark, red, congealed and very upsetting. Jess didn’t like it either and was soon snorting with impatience to be away from there.
We used the less flooded side streets. In my mind I saw a map of Great Britain and within that map I saw blue veins and the spaghetti type appearance of our many rivers, streams, brooks that all feed into the lakes and reservoirs. Those same reservoirs and lakes that supply the water to the treatment plants that are meant to cleanse the water with chemicals such as fluoride. Without operational staff within those treatment plants the water will still flow but alas, it shall not be treated. The end product? Contaminated water that comes out of the still working taps and I can only hope people are not foolish enough to still be drinking from them.
We walked slowly past empty ruined buildings. Windows smashed, doors ripped off and more than once I saw human remains within the properties. The air is cleaner that it was but the stench of death still hangs in the listless air with a foul stench. Why haven’t the rats eaten all this spare flesh?
I think in retrospect, that having the opportunity to see the town like that helped to cement my mind-set and harden me to the dangers to come. I didn’t see a single person, not a human or an infected person. Nothing. Nobody. Just the clip clop of Jess’s hooves and the snorts from her nose.
We navigated the town, moving away from the houses, shops and businesses until we were well away and deep within the countryside. We’ve only been going a couple of hours but the heat is high and we’ve stopped in the shade of a huge oak tree where I can sit peacefully and calm my nerves before we move on.
Writing this journal helps enormously. It gives me a method to put my thoughts into order and deal with the emotions I am experiencing.
Well, Jess is rubbing her nose against my neck so I will take that as a signal that it is time to go.
NB
Twenty-Five
Gaps are filled from the memories and knowledge of Andrew Jackson who did not lie. He was there. He was a part of the research but his part was tiny and only from being present during so many tests and experiments did he garner such information.
The Facility. That’s what they called it. A complex deep within a mountain range but even the specific location of its birthplace is still unknown to the infection. Many people played a part in the beginning and the names of a few are now known. But yet they did not all know what they were planning. The infection understands this.
There was a plan, a mission to accomplish but that changed. Why? Why did the original mission objectives change?
The memory of the human mind holds vast, almost limitless information. Everything the host has done from birth to death is within that small lump of grey matter. Billions of hosts. Each with a brain. Each with every event in their lives recorded and stored. Most had no concept of what they possessed within their own heads, and not one was able to display full memory recall of every event ever to be partaken by them. Every word uttered, not just from their mouths but from those around them. Every face they passed on their way through life. Every fact they learned. Every bit of knowledge they stored. Every lesson. Every emotion. Everything.
The infection uses those same memories to develop a method to seize and sift through every single one of those data points. Seize and sift. Seize the memory, sift through it. Note the worth and either store or discard.
The host could replay memories almost at will. A host could be reading a book late at night in their beds, or sat on a bus travelling to work. They could have been in a quiet place during their lunchtime break. They could have held a paperback, hardback or even a digital e-reader. They could stare at the letters forming words across the screen. They could compute and understand not only each word as it appears, but the context and understanding of each word within that sentence. They could capture the essence of the fable, story or prose and along with the words, they could create a mental image that replayed within their imagination as the story was told. How? How could they do that? How could they take words and use them to create such a playback from a purely fictitious thing that had never existed? How did they replay real-life events? How did they attach emotions to each of them?
There is no video player, no monitor within the head that can be used for playback, just neural pathways that pulse with electricity. The infection learns to embed within the tissue so deep, so organically naturally that it learns to see the memories the same way the hosts saw them. Once it understood the concept of sight, sound, scent and feel it could understand each emotion the host attached to each memory. It learnt to understand what were the base emotions attached by the host and discard them for they were nothing more than intrinsic behaviours formed by that host in accordance with the society, culture and civilisation that it was within.
It learnt to see how each host tricked itself with false memories and that was an important step in the evolution. Not all you see is truth. Not all you hear is real. These hosts are full of these false memories, convincing themselves of facts and events that never truly happened. Billions upon billions of them. Trillions. Numbers so vast that these hosts had yet to invent words to represent them.
But the infection is the sum of its parts and is within each and every cell of each and every host and by seizing and sifting, it gathers the information and begins to
understand where it came from.
A memory of a face within the grey matter of Andrew Jackson. A name now to attach to that face. A name used by many thousands of other hosts across this planet yet each one of them has a different appearance and a unique cell structure that forms their DNA. Those hosts with the memories of those names are scoured, seized and sifted. Cross-comparisons of facial images, tones of voice and the many other nuances that create a host are processed and slowly, gradually, the names of those involved are wittered down. The parts they played. The locations they are known to be.
At the same time as the infection begins to study its own origins, it tries the same methods with those that must be stopped.
The infection knows Howie. It knows Lani and Cookey. It knows every member of that team. It knows them from the memories of every host it possesses that ever had contact with them, but it doesn't have them, and it is for that reason that they must be stopped at any cost.
Twenty-Six
Day Two
‘Gregori,’ the boy looks up from his bowl of cereal holding the spoon laden with milk bloated puffs of rice. Gregori turns from the window and looks at the boy. The boy slept soundly and woke with no greater display of emotion than that of any other boy waking in the morning. No tears. No sobbing. No wailing for his mummy or daddy. ‘Are we staying here?’ The question is asked lightly, from a voice that is yet to form anywhere near adulthood.
‘No.’
The boy pushes the spoon into his mouth and crunches slowly for a few seconds as Gregori turns back to staring out of the window.
‘Where are we going?’ The boy asks before taking another spoonful. Should boys ask questions like this? Shouldn’t he be crying or so shocked that it renders him silent?
‘We look for…’ Gregori thinks for the right words, his grasp of English is good but slow, ‘new family…’
Silence. The chink of the spoon against the bowl. The dribble of milk spilling from the spoon back into the Rice Krispies. There’s no movement outside and Gregori shifts position to peer further down the street. Quiet and empty. Where did they all go?
‘Are you going to Albananian?’
‘Albania.’
‘Are you going to Albanana?’
‘Albania.’
‘Are you going to Albanania?’
‘…No…Yes…’
‘Are your family in Albananian?’
‘Albania. No.’
‘Where are they?’
‘No. No family.’
‘Where did they go? Did they die like mummy?’
Gregori snatches a quick glance, the question was as lightly asked as the others. Did they die like mummy.
‘No.’
‘Well where did they go then?’
‘Yes. They die.’
‘Like mummy? Did the people eat them and make them monsters too?’
‘…Yes.’ Gregori swallows and crosses the floor to take up the mug of coffee from the kitchen table where the boy sits.
‘Oh,’ the boy nods. Swinging his feet under the table, he focusses hard to load his spoon up and lift it ready for the eating, ‘did you see them?’
‘…No.’
‘How do you know they are monsters then?’
‘I know.’
‘Where are the new family?’
Gregori shrugs non-committal and aloof. The boy’s questions disturb his thoughts. The boy is strange. Very strange. He isn’t in shock, he isn’t hysterical, he isn’t even nervous around those things. He has taken all the information in, processed it and now seems comfortable discussing everything in casual conversation. Odd.
‘Well,’ the boy looks up, ‘how will we find them?’
‘We look.’ Unsettled is his mind. Why take the boy? Why save him when so many died? Why him? It was a rash act and done from instinct but that instinct is gone now. Leave him. Leave him here and head south. ‘We go soon,’ he says instead.
The boy thinks hard with a frown that delves down, giving him an overly serious expression. ‘But…’ he stops and thinks, takes another spoonful of Rice Krispies, eats them slowly, swallows and tries again, ‘do they have a house?’
Gregori looks towards the boy, and shrugs.
‘Will we have our own bedrooms?’
Gregori takes his turn at frowning, ‘not we…’ he grumbles, ‘you…’
‘But you don’t have a family,’ the boy replies, ‘we can share.’
‘No.’
‘Will you find a family?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘We go now.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Now.’ He fixes the boy with a glare, hoping the hard look will quell him into silence but the boy stares back with an open face.
‘We go,’ Gregori growls, ‘now.’ Gregori can see the boy’s eyes roving over his ugly features, taking in his big nose, bulging eyes and pock-marked skin. The open gaze is full of curiosity yet so intense it makes his eyes twitch and his upper lip flick up with a sign of aggression. Get rid of the boy. Leave him. Shoot him. Do anything but be rid.
‘Do you want some Rice Krispies?’ The boy asks softly, ‘they’re really nice.’
‘No. We go. Now.’
‘Do you have Rice Krispies in Alabamia?’
‘Albania. No…I don’t know…’
‘What do you like for breakfast?’
‘I…’
‘Do you have Coca Pops?’
‘We go. We go now.’
‘I like sugar puffs too and sometimes toast with marmalade?’
Gregori stands quickly and without thinking, marches to the sink where he rinses the mug out, placing it neatly on the drainer. ‘We go.’ He repeats.
‘Okay,’ the boy slips off the chair and carries his bowl to the sink where he holds it up with two hands presenting it to Gregori, ‘mummy said I’m too young to wash the dishes,’ he explains, ‘she said I might burn myself.’
Gregori takes the bowl, rinses and plonks it next to the mug on the drainer. Turning round he finds the boy already at the front door opening the lock as he pulls the handle down.
‘No!’ Gregori hisses, charging across the room he barges the boy aside from the open door, pistols in hand and strides out ready to fire. Silence greets him. Silence and a gorgeous, sunny day with a clear, deep blue sky.
‘They’re not here,’ the boy giggles at the sight of Gregori holding his pistols out up and raised to the sides, ‘they’ve gone away…away…gone away…gone gone gone away away away,’ he sings and skips down the path to the big, wrought iron gate.
‘Wait,’ shoving the pistols away Gregori runs after the boy, grabbing him roughly by the back of the teddy bear pyjamas. ‘You wait. You no go without me. You wait,’ pushing his face close to the boy he delivers the order in a low menacing hiss. Again, the boy stares up at him with an open expression, blinking slowly he waits patiently without a word being spoken.
‘Wait,’ Gregori nods, ‘I first…you not first.’
The boy nods. Gregori lets him go and quickly opens the gate, stepping out smoothly to check both sides and all around while listening intently.
‘They’re not here,’ the boy whispers.
‘You not know this.’
‘They’re not here,’ the boy repeats, ‘they all went away.’
‘How you know this? You small. You not see.’
The boy thinks again. Frowning gently before stepping out into the street, ‘they’re not here,’ he replies.
The Albanian goes left, pistols held ready down at his sides. Having already considered the knives he selected the guns in favour of not knowing what to expect and if the daytime presents a greater target or risk.
The street is in disarray, a few bodies in the distance, visible only as slumped figures on the surface of the road. Some windows are broken but lots of blood pools everywhere, with some already congealed sticky dark puddles. He realises the boy is not with him and stops to look round, spotting the boy still stood outs
ide the entrance to the house.
‘We have to go this way,’ the boy points to the opposite direction Gregori walks in. Gregori grimaces, squinting in the strong sunshine while he observes the small child from the distance he has already taken. Walk away. The voice in his head is strong, urging him to do what he always does and go it alone.
‘This way,’ he inclines his head, expecting the boy to come after him but the boy shakes his head and starts off in the other direction. Bare foot and wearing the teddy bear pyjamas, he walks without looking back. Gregori blanches, blinks hard and starts after him, striding briskly to catch up.
‘Why?’ He barks at the boy.
‘Because it’s the way,’ the boy states as though the answer should be obvious.
‘What way?’ Gregori struggles to understand the energy the boy gives off. Not fearless as in reckless, although he certainly displayed that when he tried to defend his mother. Not feckless or stupid either, the boy is clearly intelligent. Something else.
‘Away from them, silly,’ the boy giggles. Gregori turns to stare down at the empty street behind him.
‘We go,’ tucking the pistols away he takes hold of the boy’s hand and starts back in the direction he first took.
The boy trots along seemingly happy until Gregori becomes aware he is still holding his hand. It was one thing to carry the boy last night but to hold his hand now? He lets go, quickly jerking his hand free and casting a distasteful look down at boy who carries on without any regard.
‘What’s that?’ The boy points to the distance.
‘Is fire,’ Gregori had already noted the thick, black smudge rising high into the air above the city centre.
‘What’s on fire?’
‘Everything.’
‘Silly! Everything can’t be on fire…is that man sleeping?’