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

  The signs of a hurried abandonment. A forced evacuation. But to where? Tears pricked his eyes and a cold knot formed in his stomach. He imagined the terrified refugees led from this place by soldiers and taken back out into the ruins of the country. Trying to escape the mainland, Royce assumed. He had heard the stories. He had heard what happened at Sidmouth.

  Past washing lines heavy with hanging clothes, he stared at a line of occupied body bags. Scattered marbles in the grass. Dirt and puddles. A biohazard suit left on the ground like the sloughed skin of some alien creature. The entrances to tents were hungry mouths.

  The only body he found was a man who seemed to have set himself on fire. A foetal shape shrivelled and blackened, with gritted teeth too white. An empty can of petrol and a lighter lying in the scorched grass not far from where his corpse had fallen. He smelled like wet charcoal and barbecued pork. Royce walked away when his mouth began to water.

  The field hospital at the heart of the camp had been ransacked. Rows of empty beds, some of them overturned. Nothing left to salvage, it seemed. No bodies. Smashed equipment and dirty bandages. A bin filled with used syringes and medical instruments coated in dried blood. Royce searched through drawers and storage boxes, and all he found was a box of waterproof plasters and some anti-bacterial wipes. Nothing else.

  In one tent, where the blankets upon a bed were damp, lumpy and stinking, he found a holdall filled with jars of baby food. Some of the small jars were smashed or cracked, but a dozen or so were intact and sealed, so he pocketed them and thought himself lucky.

  He searched the mess tent, walking among the tables dotted with plates of rotting food. He picked up a steel ladle encrusted with mouldy porridge, looked at it with dull curiosity, then placed it back in the cooking pot where he’d found it.

  Moments later he was crouched trembling in one of the walkways with his hands balled into fists and pressed against his mouth. When he held his hands before his face, they were shaking as if with palsy. His heart felt too large and too fast, fed by the terror of being alone for the rest of his life. Left behind.

  He wandered among the camp as the light waned and shadows filled empty spaces. A dog howled in the distance and it was the most mournful sound he had heard in living memory.

  *

  Royce heard the mewling above the dry rattle of the wind, and he walked towards the sound, and it grew louder until he was almost upon it. He stopped before a ramshackle tent still wet from the last downpour. A canvas flap shifted in the breeze and lifted to reveal oily darkness and the suggestion of movement.

  The mewling stopped.

  Using the crowbar he slowly lifted the flap and peered in. The sudden daylight, even as grey as it was, showed him the inside of the tent. He stepped back but remained in the entranceway, his stomach turning to soup.

  A woman and her baby lying on a camp bed.

  “Oh my god,” Royce whispered.

  The baby was sucking upon the woman’s breast, its mouth melded to her skin. Most of the baby’s body was attached to the woman, as if the infant were some kind of parasite. The baby was a gaunt and squirming thing with a bloated stomach, knotted with tumours and cysts. Its tiny hands looked normal. A head of wispy hair. It would have only been several months old when it was infected along with its mother. Maybe it had been born just before the outbreak started.

  The mother began to coo to the baby. Crimson veins down the woman’s face and neck. The shadow of her pale scalp underneath her thinning hair. Her mouth was sharp and sore, and a glistening tongue lurked beyond her scabbed lips. One side of her skirt was hitched up, exposing one thin leg and a dirty knee. Her vest was shorn of one strap, and her left breast was hanging down, veiny and engorged, sustenance for the feeding baby.

  Royce was silent. The day fading behind him. Bursts of thunder far away. He lowered the crowbar as his face became slack and cold, because there was no threat from the woman, just the echoes of the person she used to be before the world ended. He stepped away and let the canvas flap drop. Staring at the tent, he didn’t move for a long time, his hands worrying at each other until he found the conviction to finally move and leave this dead place.

  The camp would be there for years, battered by rain and snow, hailstones and storms, until it was finally consumed by the land.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stumbling down tumbledown tracks and bridleways, past burnt-down farms as he dragged his rucksack behind him and glimpsed the bones of livestock in the black ruins. He looked at the sky and let the rain dampen his face. His feet pained him. At the roadside he sheltered in an abandoned car whose windscreen was plastered with brown leaves and detritus. Smell of leather upholstery and the old world. No keys. Cigarette ends in the ashtray, and an empty Starbucks cup in the drinks holder. A book of baby names with certain pages folded at the corners. C for Catherine. M for Michael. In the glove compartment was a packet of mints, and he ate them one at a time with the downpour upon the car as he mourned for the infected, for the dead, and for the world lost to the plague.

  *

  After the rain stopped, Royce left the car and walked on, aimless and lost with the scuttle of dead leaves around him. He skirted a village where the cries of abominations echoed through barren streets and gardens. A mile later he stopped in the road when he saw a house ahead and set back from the right side of the road at the end of a long driveway.

  Losing the light in the sky, or what light there was on days like those, as the grey afternoon sloughed into darkness. He needed to find shelter for the night, and his legs couldn’t carry him much further. Blisters burned on his feet and made him wince with each step. Callouses and bruises. Cold and aching, a patchwork man made by clumsy hands.

  Past thin trees and telephone poles with sagging wires, Royce clambered over a muddy bank and cut across a waterlogged field to the rear of the house. The sky was the colour of dull steel. A magpie watched him from the shelter of a dripping bough. There was thunder far behind him, chasing his heels. He hobbled across stones and dirt and mud, slowing until he had almost stopped. A thin wooden fence protected the back garden, and he rested behind it and listened. He was just tall enough to peer over the fence and glimpse the back of the property. A lawn that hadn’t been mown in months or longer. A fishpond. A child’s trampoline. The curtains drawn in the windows. The back door was shut. Royce grabbed the rim of the fence and pulled himself up, hoping it wouldn’t collapse under his weight. Splinters dug into his gloves. The fence trembled as he swung one leg over the rim, followed by the rest of his shivering form, and he tumbled to the grass on the other side and landed on an ankle, which turned awkwardly. He collapsed on to his back and cried out.

  He put his hands to his ankle, sat against the fence and waited for the pain to fade. Sweat beaded his face and dampened his thick beard. It was just a light sprain. He sighed and wiped his face. When he put out his hands and stood, biting his lip, the ankle held, but hurt when he moved it. A break would have been the end of him.

  He began limping towards the back of the house. A plastic heron staked at the edge of the fishpond. Small rocks and garden ornaments. The water was stagnant, like oil. The remains of a goldfish floating on the surface. Flaps of orange-gold skin and the nub of a tiny spine. Most of the meat eaten away. Other goldfish lurked below the surface, flashes of colour in the murk. The runt of the group had been set upon and devoured.

  At the end of the lawn were two makeshift graves. The bare earth had been flattened, and at the head of each grave a crude cross had been fashioned from sticks entwined with string. The graves were deep enough to discourage scavengers. Royce remembered digging a grave not so long ago, while sirens wailed and streets were full of slaughter and fire. A grave for two bodies, so they’d be together in the earth. The sheer effort it took to carve a hole out of the dirt. The act of wrapping loved ones in blanket-shrouds and lowering them into the ground. Covering them with soil to honour the old traditions.

  His ankle flared with pain and he lea
ned against the outer wall with deep breaths shuddering in his chest. The windows were clouded with grime. He tried the door and pushed; it didn’t give, but after a while of prying the jamb with the crowbar, the door pulled away from him with a low crack and swung inwards into the dark. He paused on the threshold, muttering to himself, his arms throbbing from the effort of busting the locked door. Paranoid about booby-traps, he looked for silk-thin trip-wires attached to shotguns triggers or slicing blades. He’d had nightmares about breaking into a house and sticking his foot into razor-toothed steel jaws. He worried about severed arteries and amputated legs, and catching tetanus from rusting metal. He worried about bleeding out and dying alone because there were more mundane, albeit just as lethal, infections to be caught if care wasn’t taken.

  The house was dark before him.

  *

  The low howl of the wind under the eaves. Dust in the stale air. The sigh of shifting walls painted with oil-slick shadows as Royce steered the torchlight around the kitchen. He pulled back the curtains and closed the back door, then slanted a wooden chair under the handle to keep it shut. Dead electrical appliances like obscure relics. Crumbs and mould on the worktops. Fridge magnets from animal parks. A circular dining table with a newspaper and some magazines piled next to salt and pepper shakers and a bowl of hardened sugar. The dirty linoleum floor squealed under the slip of his boots as he tried the lights and other switches, but everything was dead. Through an open doorway, a hallway ran to the front of the house.

  Royce stood and listened, glancing at framed photos on the Welsh dresser of a middle-aged couple with a girl in her early teens. Happier times. Their smiles made him feel sick and lonely. In the mausoleum silence he stared at the photos until his eyes stung and he looked away. He was tempted to check the cupboards for food, but his priority was to clear the house and ensure he was alone.

  Into the hallway, soft steps and the muffled rhythm of his breathing. Compressing lungs and a trembling heart as the torchlight speared the darkness. The air tasted old and sour. Coats on a rack were slouching shapes reaching for the floor, but nothing hungry lurked in the shadows. He hoped if any infected were upstairs they would have heard him and come down by now. But not all infected were so obvious in their hunting methods.

  He picked up a cordless telephone from its cradle and put it to his ear just to remember a simple act from another life. All those things taken for granted. He closed his eyes to the silence, trying to imagine a human voice at the other end of the line, a voice saying his name. Cold callers or loved ones. Anyone. It seemed ridiculous now, for voices to have been connected over such distances.

  He looked at the ceiling and its fine fractures, and remembered the horrors he’d found in other houses and buildings he’d searched in the days following the spread of the plague. Nests and dens in blocks of flats. The lairs of monsters in bungalows and council houses. Silent tombs and charnel houses. In a house just outside Taunton he’d found the rooms turned into larders for creatures that liked to ripen their meat before consuming it. Naked bodies hanging from resin-like secretions on the walls. A man squirming for breath inside a glistening cocoon.

  Royce was adamant he would never end up like that, trussed up and helpless, food for obscene appetites.

  He opened both sets of curtains in the living room, which looked out into both the front and back gardens. He watched dust rise and fall and settle upon the dulled furniture. Watery daylight killed his shadow. Dead flowers in vases on the windowsills, their petals like flakes of slowly crumbling ash. The driveway was empty, as was the road beyond.

  Oil paintings on the walls. Beige wallpaper, domestic and dour. Empty boxes of Ritz crackers. Old newspapers scattered around the room. Royce noticed headlines from the days before the outbreak – a celebrity divorce, lying politicians, trouble in the Middle East and religious fundamentalists protesting against gay marriage. On the coffee table were empty cans of Lilt, Tango and Pepsi, and encrusted cutlery upon dirty plates. Plastic folders stacked into fragile towers. A bookcase crammed with old and creased paperbacks. A glass cabinet full of someone else’s memories and mementoes. Porcelain ornaments on the mantelpiece above the fireplace blocked with piled stones and bricks: a defensive measure against the infected, because some monsters were not averse to scuttling down chimneys to reach their prey.

  Candles had burned down to dregs of oily wax and charred wicks. He picked up a box of matches then dropped it when he shook it and nothing rattled inside. Amidst the relics and the grey light Royce saw the reflection of himself in the television. He was a wraith, a shade, a figment made of straw and feathers. Something barely real. He picked through the mess and nudged an empty water bottle with one foot. No more recycling, ever again, and all of it like dusty relics.

  *

  The stairway creaked under his weight as he climbed towards darkness. The torchlight was a spear. His nerve endings tingled and he swallowed a lump in his throat. He opened the curtains in the small window on the landing and paused to check his grip of his hand around the crowbar. Four closed doors to four shut away rooms. Did he want to see what waited inside them? The shift of his feet answered and he opened the door to the bathroom, where he found drops of dried blood in the bath. He turned the taps and there was only the dry rattle of pipes in the walls. No water in the toilet. When he saw what remained of himself in the mirror above the sink he turned away quickly. The push of his bones against his face. To see his grinning skull leering back at him like something excavated from a pile of steaming rags.

  Then he was standing in the girl’s bedroom between the pink and white walls. Cuddly toys cradling their hearts. Posters of pop bands and cartoon characters, photos in heart-shaped frames, and a dressing table with a jewellery box, hairbrushes and a notebook with CASSIE’S DIARY – KEEP OUT written on the front cover, secured with a tiny padlock of shiny metal.

  In the master bedroom he found an empty bed and strewn sheets, a wardrobe filled with old-smelling clothes that reminded him of Oxfam shops. Nothing of any use to him.

  When he opened the door to the last room he had to step back from the smell of dry decay. The woman was hanging from the ceiling by a rope slung over a wooden beam. He went into the room. The skin shrivelled tight on her sunken face, mummified like a desert-corpse. Dull teeth glimpsed through her frozen mouth, curtained by straw-like hair. Her wide-open eyes never left Royce, and he stepped back from the rot-stink and the dried-out lumps of her body within the dressing gown holding her together. A spider crawled across one bare leg and vanished into the swaddled folds.

  Royce lowered his head towards the floor and mourned her, for she had been beautiful.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He cut the woman down and wrapped her in a blanket then laid her in a corner of the room. When he checked the attic for nasty surprises he found last year’s Christmas decorations and a colony of mice scurrying about the dust and forgotten things.

  As the light faded in the early dusk and the wind shrieked like graveside mourners, he secured the house and closed the curtains, then lit a candle against the dark.

  *

  The kitchen cupboards were bare except for a small bag of salted peanuts and a tin of green beans. He turned the tin over in his hands and inspected it for punctures, grimacing in the candlelight. It was sealed tight and intact. When he opened the fridge he shrank away from the cloying, choking stench of rotting ham and eggs. Its interior was alive with mould and crawling insects.

  He picked through the rooms, checking the hideaway places, his shadow becoming something spindly from the flickering flame he carried. Afterwards, he sat in the living room and went through the useful things he’d scavenged. A bottle of apple schnapps pulled from the back of a cupboard in the utility room out the back. The green beans and the peanuts. A meal fit for pilgrims and drifters.

  He had found the girl’s stash of chocolate under her bed: over a dozen bars of chocolate and a small box of Quality Street. The unexpected find did little to li
ft the darkness from his mind, and only served to remind him of Christmas afternoons in front of the television.

  Next to the stash had been a laptop in a travel case. He sat back on the sofa and set the laptop down on his thighs. In the half-light it seemed like a piece of fantastical machinery from another age. He remembered Wi-Fi and broadband and search engines. He missed social media. What had his last Facebook status been? His final tweet? It had all been so fragile. A world of small concerns and problems.

  He switched the laptop on and waited while it powered up, aware of how fast his heart kicked. The glow from the monitor hurt his eyes but made him smile. The battery was fully-charged. Files and icons on a desktop background of snowy mountains in some glacial landscape. Somewhere beautiful and far away. Royce took a few minutes to acquaint himself with the keyboard and the mouse pad. His fingers moved hesitantly. Unsurprisingly the internet was down. He snorted. No more Google. And he went through the files, aware that there were only a few hours left in the battery. There were documents; photos of holidays in France and Spain. White beaches and Disney-blue skies he’d never seen in real life.

  The media player was full of music by saccharine pop bands, so he opened another file, which listed a number of romantic films, musicals and Pixar cartoons.

  He watched WALL-E while he gorged on the Quality Street and schnapps, and found himself crying at the end of the film. The alcohol swam in his blood and numbed his face, flushed his skin with warmth. His vision blurred as he drank. He finished the box of chocolates and moaned while he held his cramping stomach.