The Plague Series (Book 2): The Last Outpost Read online

  THE LAST OUTPOST

  A NOVEL

  BY RICH HAWKINS

  All content © Rich Hawkins, 2020

  Cover and interior layout © WHITEspace, 2020

  www.white-space.uk

  The right of Rich Hawkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Mum and Dad

  Many thanks to everyone who has ever supported my writing and bought my books. I’m immensely grateful to my friends and family for all the encouragement and help over the last few years. Cheers to my literary heroes, who continue to inspire me with their work.

  Lastly, thanks to Steve Shaw for helping get this book into publication again.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Royce hid from the monsters beyond the trees in the damp woods. He crouched against a bare grey oak and pulled his rucksack to his chest, his heart lurching at the thrash of dead leaves and snapping sticks. Away to his right, a black and wretched figure flitted between the thin birches. Royce made himself small and close to the ground, squirming and shivering in the cold, a frightened mammal in a hole, his heart squeezed and pulled by muscle and exhaustion. He stifled a sob from gritted teeth as water dripped from strangling branches and screams echoed and slipped through the trees. Animal-like sounds. The lament of the infected. He closed his eyes, counted the rest of his life in chambered heartbeats. If he ran he would be chased, brought down and torn apart.

  With the rucksack kept to his chest and his insides like loose stones, he crawled to a shallow trench in the ground and lay on his back amidst the bracken, moss and woodland detritus, staring at the washed out sky until his chest stopped shuddering and the terrified flail of his heart slowed. The dim light faded slowly to darkness. The smell of fungi and dirt in this open coffin of earth. Black beetles crawling over mulch and earthworms burrowing beneath the damp topsoil. A mouse scurried past Royce’s face, fleeing the approaching night.

  The woods fell silent.

  *

  It was almost full dark when Royce emerged sweating and wheezing from the trees, pawing at his filthy clothes to remove leaves and thorns. Mist was forming around the low hills under the pale shard of moon. There were no stars and the infected were gone. From where he was standing the horizon opened up and it was all darkness out there. Fields and hedgerows with no one left to tend them. Dormant farmland. The stains of distant towns and villages.

  Struggling with the rucksack, he started across the fields. He limped and hurried, casting glances around and over his shoulders, moving in small steps, vulnerable on the open ground. The dark was thickening, like blankets and sheets around him. His torch was in the rucksack, but using it would give away his position to anything stalking the fields. He stumbled over the sodden ground and slippery mud, his old boots worn and tattered. The cold air scraped at his throat as he pulled in each breath, and he kicked his legs and grunted as dull pain shot towards his knees.

  Stopping in the middle of the field, he bent over with his hands on his thighs, grimacing at the burning in his chest. He quietened his breathing and listened to the dark around him, attuned to the scurrying of nocturnal creatures. He pulled the collar of his coat around his neck and straightened, then moved on, dismissing a chorus of high-pitched wails as nothing but the wind slipping through winter-bare hedgerows.

  The land was haunted, but not by ghosts.

  *

  The mist caught him as he staggered into the next field. It smelled of damp and mould, and it was all about him like wood smoke. Royce hefted the crowbar in his gloved hands, finding no comfort in its weight. The mud sucked at his boots as he lifted one foot then the other, and patches of the mist dispersed and shrank away as he walked. He halted when he heard awful sounds like an animal being flayed, in the distance. He thought he glimpsed movement at his flanks, and lifted the crowbar to his waist, but there was nothing there.

  Across more fields and hawthorn thickets; over ditches of nettles and weeds that wore him down. The temperature was dropping. The night would be close to freezing. He hurried onwards as if lost in a dream, wincing with each step and breathing hard through his dry mouth. He imagined what it would be like to die of exposure, to slowly succumb and fade and then drop to his knees, curl into a shivering form as the cold crept into his limbs and the other parts of him, and then stop his heart while his mind slipped away to happier times and summer gardens of laughter.

  He stumbled and slowed, tempted to listen to the voice in the back of his mind that told him to stop, give in, let go, let go of everything that once mattered.

  Royce halted when a squat shape of concrete and stone appeared out of the mist. He wiped his eyes with the back of one hand. Glanced over his shoulder then back to the structure, took a hesitant step forwards and swallowed down the rawness in his throat, expecting something to come screaming out of the black doorway.

  With the crowbar raised, he suppressed the bile and acid broiling in his chest and approached the structure.

  It was a pillbox, built during World War Two, one of the many ‘hardened field defences’ that once dotted the mainland. Barely taller than Royce, hexagonal-shaped with walls pitted and scarred, dotted with lichen and moss. He stopped before the entrance, where the door had been removed long ago, and took his torch from the rucksack. The cold air dried the sweat on his face. He pulled up the cloth around his neck so that it covered his mouth and nose. Fabric sucked past his lips as he breathed.

  Distant sounds out in the mist. Strange calls and keening wails. Cries scraped from wet vocal chords.

  He hesitated at the threshold, the mist drifting and sloughing at his back, and he aimed the torch into the dark of the structure’s insides. One step. Two steps. He held his breath and didn’t release it until the shadows had retreated from the torchligh
t. He twisted the crowbar in his grip and considered the force it would take to cave in a human skull.

  Then he was past the doorway, and he halted.

  Nothing reached for him out of the funhouse dark. Everything dust-caked and old. The smell of shut-in spaces and so many forgotten crypts.

  *

  The narrow corridor branched into three small bare rooms. No lighting on the dour ceilings. In the event of an invasion, vertical slit-like embrasures in the walls would have been used by infantry as firing holes. The torchlight swam across the ceilings. The floors were furred with dust and crumbled mortar, the interior walls slowly degrading. Rodent droppings and paw prints. Dead insects dried to carapaces and husks. Old stains and spiders’ webs with silk cocoons. Something small, feathery and desiccated in one corner.

  Royce looked through one embrasure, but then retreated from the opening as if scared the mist would catch his scent and slip into the pillbox to smother him. He played the torch beam around a room. The remains of an old campfire in the middle of the floor. Patches of the walls were blackened. Ash and charcoal crumbled and crunched under his boots, and with his left foot he sifted through the cold ashes and found a scorched photo charred and melted round the edges. A sunny day. Smiles for the camera. A family portrait with the bright blue sea behind them.

  He dropped the photo and nudged it back amongst the ashes. By the wall, under the embrasure, were empty tins heaped upon a thick book. He bent, squinting and fretting as he checked the labels. Baked beans, spaghetti hoops, and ravioli. He picked up a tin that once contained peach slices in syrup and inhaled the residual sweetness. His mouth watered; it made him giddy and sad, mournful for lost things. He retrieved the book from underneath the tins and looked at the creased cover. A collection of fairy tales left behind by some nomadic survivor. Royce wondered what became of them.

  He shook off the rucksack and settled down in a corner facing the doorway to the corridor. He took out the blanket, the half-eaten packet of cheese crackers and the small bottle of water he was conserving with little sips. His back against the cold wall, he laid the musty blanket over his legs and up to his chest. He gnawed at the crackers and took small mouthfuls of water. The tongue behind his teeth licked the water from the roof of his mouth.

  When he found a dust-covered silver penny on the floor by his feet, he cleaned it with his spit and regarded it like the greatest of all things.

  *

  In the deepening cold he wrapped himself in the stinking blanket and tightened against the wall with his knees drawn to his chest. His teeth chattered as he trembled and watched the doorway and the inky darkness. The smell of ash, his filthy skin and damp clothes.

  His eyes closed whenever he let his thoughts wander to brighter days, and his head dropped and nodded as he remembered a warm bed in another life. A mug of hot chocolate and buttered toast. A good book and a takeaway. The memory of prawn crackers brought tears to his eyes.

  He smiled a slow, wan smile. Then he thought about his eventual death and that if he fell asleep he might not wake again. And he realised he didn’t care too much about that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The mist receded in the grey light of dawn. Royce ate a meagre breakfast of half a stale bagel and some peanuts, followed with a few sips of water. Afterwards he scraped his toothbrush over his teeth, then stretched his limbs and winced at the ache in his bones.

  He squatted in a dark corner and shat, and when he was finished he wiped his arse with torn away pages of fairy tales.

  He left the pillbox as the pale sun climbed the pale sky. It wasn’t a safe place to take shelter. He picked his way through other fields, his empty stomach aching and his legs throbbing with dull pain. Yellowed bones scattered over stubbled ground. Curved ribs and slats of vertebrae, pallid jawbones and blunt teeth. A smashed skull and gaping eye sockets, gnawed clean and left in the dirt among the black beetles and patches of pale grass.

  Royce took out his binoculars and scanned the broken horizon. A group of deer grazed by a grove of trees, picking at the sparse ground. Crows lifted from the fields and flocked northwards. When he looked again for the deer they were gone. He put away the binoculars and unfolded the tattered map from his back pocket. A red cross marked upon a location. He estimated his position, scratching at his beard, talking nonsense to himself. Not far away now. Maybe a few hours’ walk. Maybe more, if he had to stop and rest.

  *

  He walked alongside a narrow road until it terminated at a T-junction. Two cars, at some point during the outbreak, had suffered a head-on collision. A few yards away, another car was nose-down in a ditch. Further on, a lorry had destroyed a wire fence and was lying on its side like a felled juggernaut in the scarred field.

  The wind moved across the road. Royce pulled up his cloth-mask and tightened the straps on the rucksack. He went to the cars on the road and stood looking at the crumpled bonnets, torn bumpers, fractured windscreens and ruined metalwork. Side mirrors hanging on wires. Tyre marks and shattered glass on the tarmac and the grass verges. Scraps of metal and plastic.

  Both of the driver’s doors were open. He checked one of the cars and found an impact point of dried blood and hair in the cracked windscreen. A pile of bloody bandages on the passenger seat. A man’s shoe in the footwell. In the back was a baby seat, which he found himself staring at it until his eyes stung. He went to the other car, a Ford Escort with flat tyres and smashed windows. No bodies. Insurance documents on the seats, all useless and sun-bleached. And when he walked to the car in the ditch he almost stepped in a bundle of rags and bones and a flap of something leathery that had once been skin.

  The car was empty and there was no food to be found.

  As the sky grew dark, he entered the field and went to the back of the trailer and put one ear against the door. Held his breath. Silence inside. He unhooked the metal latch and pushed the door so that it opened enough for him to peer inside. He switched on his torch and held it to the dark gap, and he slumped when he ran the light around the empty trailer.

  Royce left the door hanging open and walked around to the cab. No way of getting inside unless he climbed up to the passenger door or smashed the windscreen. But when he looked through the mottled glass and saw the driver being absorbed by wet strands of fungus-like flesh, he stepped back and was grateful for the windscreen between them. One side of the driver’s face was pressed against the glass, his mouth slack and flowering with writhing blooms. The man’s visible eye opened, swollen and livid, and Royce retreated hurriedly towards the road with the sky fading black above him.

  *

  Royce walked and watched the sky. Thunder crackled in the distance. The wind pulled at him. Willow trees stooped and swayed. Despite his hunger and thirst he bypassed two villages and a small town because he’d heard the warbled shrieks of infected from its desolate streets. The cold gripped him and there was nothing left of the land save the dirt and stone under his boots. He stopped, glanced around then checked the map.

  Not far to go. He walked onwards.

  *

  His heart quickened when he glimpsed a guard tower through a thin line of trees, but he had to stop and rest before he approached the camp. Exhaustion filled him like slow poison. He sat and cast his eyes around. From the rucksack he took a small bag of Maltesers with only three left inside, and popped one between his teeth, savouring the taste on his tongue and the working of his saliva glands before he bit into it. He closed his eyes and thought of home. The silent land around him. A knot in his stomach. No noise from the camp, just the wind prevailing over forgotten fields.

  *

  He slipped through the trees and emerged into the open. The camp had been raised upon a showground used before the outbreak to stage music festivals, fun fairs and agricultural exhibitions. It was the width of two football pitches alongside each other, surrounded by a tall metal fence and heaped sandbags. Swathes of barbed and razor wire. Empty dens of sandbags where machine gun nests once flanked the entrance.
The large gates were hanging open and creaking.

  In the field across from the camp, there was a large pile of bodies spilling from a hole. Royce envied the dead in their glistening mounds. From where he stood he could see right through the middle of the camp, where the walkway was muddy between rows of tents and portable cabins.

  Through the entranceway, walking slowly until he halted and looked around, the crowbar held at his side, his other hand with its thumb hitched under the strap of the rucksack over his shoulder. Squirm of mud under his boots. Shoeprints and large tyre tracks around him. He was careful not to slip. Silence in the tents and empty spaces. He chewed on his bottom lip and watched the canvas walls of tents flap and billow. The hammer of his heart in his throat. He pulled the hood of his coat over his head as drizzle began to fall.

  Turn around and leave. There’s nothing here.

  He couldn’t leave before he’d searched the camp.

  It was a village of tents like a third-world slum. Rows of them, all sizes and colours, pinned by metal stakes and anything sharp and sturdy enough to hold them to the earth. Chemical toilets. IBC tanks had been used to store drinking water, but now they were empty and dry.

  The ground was waterlogged and muddy, with sparse patches of dead grass. Some tents had collapsed. Paper strewn across the dirt. The taste of ashes in the air and the smell of burnt plastic and wood. People’s belongings left behind and children’s toys scattered on the ground. A metal bucket filled with sand and cigarette ends. Lawn furniture, tables and chairs. Sodden, stained blankets. Dresses and jackets on clothes hangers idled on the side of tents and washing lines. A bicycle with a buckled wheel. Bins full of rubbish and rotting food. Stacked wooden pallets and mounds of trash. A plastic bag was stuffed with twenty pound notes. The cold ashes of abandoned campfires and the skittering of rats through the cold walkways.