Beneath the railway bridge, they stared ahead at the traffic jam of cars and the murders of crows, the unkindness of ravens – families of birds brought together by the treat of meat. They squawked and pecked and hopped from car to car, body to body.
“We could use the cars like stepping stones,” said Nate.
“I wanna get out of here, I don’t know how much more I can take,” said Ruby. “It’s too much.” Closing her eyes, she could all too easily envisage the green fog with its foul smells bloating to breaking point; until it had squirmed its way into her and changed her, turned her green. My body, my body, MY BODY!
Opening her eyes, she saw Nate drop his bags and clamber to the roof of a car.
Hands on hips, he imagined making their way forward. If it was this bad here, he couldn’t even imagine what the bridge would be like. He climbed up the cab of a nearby lorry next, and then pulled himself to the top. From here, he could see the bridge, and dark, erect figures patrolling it. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“There’s more of them on the bridge. We could take them on maybe, but we’ve gotta get there first through all this, and it just gets worse by the look of it.” Nate jumped down and something beneath the lorry tried to screech, but it came out more like a whistle. An arm extended out; Nate pulled on it and silenced the whistling noise with a stamp to a skull.
Ruby fell against a car and closed her eyes. “I’m tired,” she said.
Looking up, Nate stared at the vast arch of the railway bridge rolling above them, its bricks stained grey and white. “Of course! Jesus. We can use this one!”
She smiled at Nate. “What a pair of dunces we are.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Lead the way.”
“Sure, now we just gotta get there through all this shit.”
“And hope it’s less shit.”
Nate collected his bags, took Ruby’s hand and lead the way up the hill, hiking over the bonnet of one car as the road was blocked by a confusion of metal.
Ruby squeezed his hand and pushed her head into his arm for comfort; “It’s denser.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“The air, I mean.”
“I’m taking shallow breaths.”
“Me too.”
Ahead loomed a converted high-rise; eight stories of glass and metal that catered for the richer end of the housing market. They scanned the windows for movement, signs of life, but who would want to remain here after this? Who would have paid so much premium for a view of the river, a stone’s throw from the bistros and cafes of Foregate Street and five minutes from Chapels Walk – where the highest class restaurants could be found – that they would stay now; their closed windows a viewing portal to a hellscape?
Hand in hand, they headed for an alley; an entrance to Foregate Street that separated the high-rise and the high-street cinema. It would open up right in front of the train station, but as they neared, the problem became obvious.
Blocking the entrance was a cascading pile of bodies, four or five high in places, with carrion-feeding birds grazing in the armpits and knee-pits; all the soft bits.
“Let’s just go back, Nate, we’re just digging ourselves bigger hole after bigger hole.” She sat down and put her head in her hands. “I’m so tired.”
Shaking his head; “There’s gotta be a way.” The red-brick sides were flat – no sills in sight. “Can’t climb.”
“I’m not climbing.”
As Nate neared the alley the green fog became even denser, his nostrils flared in defiance at the stench, and rather than breathe, he tried to swallow air. Where the tide of bodies fell into the street, he held his hand over his mouth and nose to act as a filter. Two crows took flight, resting on a nearby metal fence until the coast was clear again.
At least some were clothed here. They were easier to distinguish; this arm belonged to him, that leg to her. And these were stationary. Looking ahead, he could see the end of the alley as a bright white goal, but nowhere was the ground flat. “How is this even possible,” he said into his cupped hands.
“I’m not climbing,” repeated Ruby, staring at him.
“Look, I dunno.” He took a step into the tide. “It’s doable.”
Standing, she replied, “It’s sick. There must be another way, or we turn back.”
“To what?” he asked, perched on someone’s back. “Look,” he gazed down the alley and the river of arms and legs, and knew, right then, that he could do it, to get to where they needed. “We go back, there’ll be more of them, and they’ll be alive, and we’ll have to fight them. You’re tired, I’m tired. We try the actual bridge and we have to fight them. I don’t know about you, but I’m not up for pushing my limits, at least not right now. Not about how many of those things I can kill. But if we make it to the station, I guarantee somewhere to rest. A way out of here. That train line will be clear, unlike the roads. There’ll be a Stationmaster’s office. There may be one or two things for me to kill, but I can handle that. We climb through this shit, there’ll be nothing to harm us because they’re beyond the ability to harm us, just look at them. They’re nothing. They move? They can’t harm us; we’re already fucked.”
“This is so fucked up.”
“Fucked up option one, two, three.”
“There is a scale,” said Ruby, walking over to the tide of bodies. She placed a boot on someone’s shoulder. “And this is as high as it gets.”
“Sooner started, sooner done. Come on.” Nate started the climb, but after two tentative steps dropped to all fours. “Unsteady.”
“Man, these are fucking people, Nate.”
“Try not to think about it.”
She closed her eyes; she swam in an ocean of green, at the deepest, darkest depth. The breaths she took were the bare minimum needed to survive. “I hate you.” She opened them and saw Nate was already a few metres ahead.
“It’s not too bad. Try not to look at faces.”
“Fuck.” She put her whole weight down on the shoulder she had been tentatively stepping on, and it felt in a million ways wrong – oh so wrong, so wrong – and she fell immediately forward, her reaching hand slipping between two bodies, her cheek slamming hard flesh. Meat. Chewed tissue and gore holes pock-marked the skin where birds and rodents had dined.
“You okay?”
“Fuck you.”
He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. This was the right action – he knew it. “One hand, one foot at a time.” He watched as she rose onto all fours and began to clamber towards him. “That’s it.”
“Didn’t I already say ‘Fuck you’?” She wished for gloves and knee pads, and made a note to change these clothes as soon as she could. Hell, could she change her skin? Change everything?
One foot, one hand, at a time – fuck you, Nate – worked, and fuck you again for being right. It was doable. Nothing moved. They were just dolls, mannequins, thrown out to make way for a new, improved set. That’s why some were clothed, while others were naked. Too much effort to de-clothe the old mannequins – last season’s clothing anyway. Better to let some homeless person at it. Heck, they probably had passed by – why it stank so much. All that vomiting and pissing and shitting will do that to you when you can’t properly bathe.
Distracting herself, she was able to follow Nate down the alley. In sections, it was possible to walk the pavement, and then it was back up clambering over bodies again.
Towards the end, she heard Nate say “Oh shit.”
“What is it?”
“We’re just gonna have to go for it. It’s the street, everything’s moving.”
Until now she had held back the urge to vomit – though god knows how – but she felt her stomach turn. She couldn’t speak for fear of spewing.
“Okay,” he said. “Right opposite is the train station. We have to cross the road though. Do you think you can run?”
She sidled up next to him, checking out the street. “No.”
&n
bsp; “The quicker we do it, the sooner it’s over, and the less chance they can react.”
She looked over to the station entrance; the front glass doors were smashed in, but beyond the pouring of bodies, it looked clear, with those steps rising up to the platform like heaven’s stairway.
“Just gotta go through hell to get there,” she said.
“We can do it. Ready?”
“Let’s go.”
Vaulting the first body, they landed on tarmac. The rest of the run was like a tire-strewn assault course as they skipped and galloped across to Foregate Street station, twisting ankles on others’ ankles, snapping bones. A chorus of whining welled, and as it rippled like dominos left and right, it rose to a wailing sea that pierced their ears – and the bodies kept piling up. Ruby could just about see where Nate was leading them over the bodies – but getting there?! The cries sent black-breasted birds into flight, dozens and dozens of them, and their flapping wings seemed to amplify each wail as it crescendoed and crashed over them. With each leg lunge failing more and more to find stable ground, as more and more bones snapped, so their eyes filled with increasing tears, until it wasn’t just the wails of the dead that were howling. “Just run!” managed Nate, thumping his booted feet into dead thighs, dead chests – caving them in – shoulders, heads; scrambling on all fours towards the station entrance. He heard Ruby crying out behind him, but also her footfalls following.
Almost in unison, they climbed to the highest point and then crowned the peak, toppling over into the station lobby. They rolled to a standstill and pushed themselves backwards until their backs were against a wall. They listened to the crying and moaning as it stilled, slowly, echoing into the lobby chamber. And then they listened to each other.
*****
In the forest, long, skinless legs grow from the earth. Many legs. They conjoin together to form the trunk of a tree, ringed with both sets of genitalia, and rise to dimples like belly-buttons; all this pink and raw like skinned chicken breasts; and up to chests and breasts and nipples sprouting leaves; to heads waving on the end of long necks in the breeze; heads without faces. The arms extend up into a darkness.
The ground is wet beneath bare feet, slippery even, and this too is flesh; the fibrous muscle pulsating and rising and falling. But the feet are sturdy – all four of them – and a nose sniffs the blood that pools from the ground in the little cavities, and a tongue laps hungrily from them.
A torso sticks up from the ground over to the left, which the eyes investigate. ‘RIP’ is scratched into the chest. Claws dig at the ground, blood seeps from the wounds, and they continue to dig, rending tissue and soft, fatty flesh until they find what is buried. A heart beats. The nose sniffs – the heart smells of nothing.
A tree wails; eyes look up. The breasts on the nearest tree weep milk; a mouth floats over and opens over an engorged breast, savouring the gushing, warm liquid that flows, until something scratches the back of its throat and it recoils, seeing the nipple sprouting an arm, then a hand, then fingers, and growing longer and longer until it just drops off and melts into the fleshy, bulbous earth below.
Then the throat is choking and it’s darkness everywhere. There’s dirt in the mouth that’s gritty between the tongue and the roof, which crunches between teeth as jaws open and close, grasping for air – its tongue reaching out.
*****
Daylight reached out into the Stationmaster’s office through dusty blinds rolled down over the window. On the floor, Nate and Ruby were curled up under a single sleeping bag, their backpacks used as pillows. In the corner of the room, crisp wrappers and the plastic packaging of various vendor-kicked chocolate bars were crumpled up, as well as crushed cans of Coke and Dr Pepper. “If we ever run out of Dr Pepper on our travels,” Nate said the previous night, “we’re going to have to find the Coke factory.”
Ruby hadn’t smiled, just closed her eyes, hardly able to keep them open. She was soon lightly snoring, and so was Nate.
He opened his eyes and breathed deeply through his nostrils, as though breaking the surface of water. Absorbed every scent from Ruby’s scalp and hair. He kissed her lightly on her crown and then pulled back from her, uncovering himself and standing up. He pulled on the rope that lifted the blinds and then looked out, casually downing another Dr Pepper and opening whichever chocolate bar was nearest to hand. He checked his hands as he unwrapped the Mars bar; the fingers seemed longer and his nails had grown, though he hadn’t used nail clippers in a long time and had resorted to biting them for maintenance. He did so now.
The platform outside was mostly clear; only eight decomposing bodies that they had counted the evening before. Where blood had ran, it stained the warning signs painted on the platform about getting too close to the edge, despite months of rain. Old adverts encased in plastic frames adorned the red-bricked walls above wooden benches – always for books it seemed, the train-goer ever the avid reader.
“Morning,” said Ruby, sitting up and stretching. “That was so uncomfortable, last night. Let’s not do that again.”
“Agreed,” said Nate, throwing her a Snickers. He picked up a can of Coke and sat it down besides her, placing it at her feet. “Only mattresses from now on. And once we’re out of here, no more big towns… ever.”
“Deal.” She flicked the tab on the Coke and it hissed open. “What are the odds on the water running in this place?”
“Slim to non-existent. I’ll go check anyway.”
“Maybe take a can with you. You look like a Neanderthal covered in shit. Smell like one. You can always wash with some pop. Take the Lilt shit, though.”
Laughing, he picked it up and left the office for the male public toilets. Inside, a naked dead woman was straddling the toilet – her clothes piled in the corner. Nate left and tried the female’s instead. No dead bodies in there. He turned the tap but nothing came out, so he unzipped his fly and relieved himself in one of the toilets. The water in the bowl was thick and brown – Nate blocked its stench.
At the sink, he opened the tab on the can and sipped from it, staring at his face in the mirror. His facial hair, nominal at best, was thickening. He poured the liquid over his face and washed off the blood and mud of the previous day, and then ran his fingers through his lengthening hair, pulling whatever caught in a clump to free it. He did this for a minute or so and then said, “That’ll have to do,” and returned to the cloudy day. It was still cold, but the clouds made it warmer than yesterday.
Ruby walked past and headed for the men’s, but Nate said “Don’t go in there,” and she entered the female’s instead.
At the edge of the platform, Nate looked west in the direction the rail crossed the river, and could see it was a clear path. He didn’t know the route, but it could at least take them right out of town.
A railway map on the wall wasn’t detailed enough to tell him where they were going, just that it lead to Malvern – whose hills could be seen for miles around – and then onwards to Hereford, south-west. That direction was spotted with towns, big and small, and the open hillsides of Wales’ central region was what attracted him most right then – no more hordes of the risen centralised in compacted regions, just one at a time, please.
He gathered their belongings from the office and piled them all on a bench outside the public toilets, waiting for Ruby. The sun was low – looking at the station clock which was still analog and wind-up, the time read just after eight. “How many heard your bell ring?” he said, thinking of Big Ben.
“All set?” said Ruby upon leaving, wearing a new jumper from her bag.
“Ready to go.”
They put the bags on their shoulders – feeling lighter than the previous day – and jumped down onto the tracks. Ruby knelt and placed a hand on a rail, feeling its cold solidity and looking down the arrow-straight path it carved, rivet after rivet after rivet in sixty-foot intervals. Her one boot on a sleeper, the gravel between each – the immensity of even the minutiae of detail dawned on her; not only had
someone laid each rail, but each stone was there because someone had poured it there. She looked at the amount of work that had gone into just this short run of track and found she couldn’t comprehend the work it took to lay all the track she could see running into the distance, let alone all the track across the whole of Britain.
Nate was already walking – your train is departing, final destination – “Unknown,” she whispered, falling in behind him. He’d brought her here, put her through the shit-storm that was yesterday – but he had gotten her out of it. He wasn’t to know how bad it was here. Fuck, how could anyone have guessed that?
Together, they matched their strides to the sleepers, each foot landing with a thud. Crossing the bridge that ran over Foregate Street, she was tempted to look over the wall, to reassure herself that it was all just a bad nightmare; down below would be nothing but street and road and seagulls crawling through the early morning gutters for scraps.
But it stank. No more vindication was needed. They each held their breath as they walked. They imagined arms forward swimming through a green miasma.
Over the bridge, the tops of buildings were reflectionless and grey; triangles that erupted from squares and rectangles and the occasional window with its curtains drawn. Someone had made it to a rooftop and spray-painted ‘There Is No God’ on one, with an arrow that pointed to another slogan ‘Don’t Bomb Us’. “What do you think of that?” Nate said.
“Something that would only happen in a movie.”
“It would’ve only taken the press of one button – metaphorically speaking.”
“People are assholes though; they’d rather watch us suffer.”
The rooftops gave way to the very tops of the very tallest trees, the sky and the horizon. They each took a side and walked along the edge, noting the conclave of bodies and the movement on the bridge over to the left – some were walking, others were crouching on all fours. Ahead, the river surged, swelled by the recent rainpour. The green miasma they walked through turned ochre and beige, transforming to damp leaves as they crossed, and when they were finally over, they took gulping breaths.
The Risen (Book 1): The Risen, Part 1 Page 13