All the Dead Are Here (6 page)

Jeb’s expression hardened. “I won’t let you go. You are being a silly old fool, now enough of this. Let’s get inside out of the cold.” Jeb rose as if to leave, the conversation over.

John’s hand shot out and grabbed his Grandson by the arm. Jeb was surprised at the strength of his grip and he looked down at the rice paper skin and twine-like ligaments beneath. Jeb felt the power of his Grandfather’s conviction.

“Answer me two questions before you go. Grant me that at least,” said John. Jeb nodded slowly. “Do you respect me?”

“Of course I respect you. Respect you and love you that’s why this is such a stupid idea. What is it? A week to London by horse in early spring. Jeez, if the cold doesn’t take you the Warlords will. You’ll have to pass right by the Marquis’ territory, his people would skin you as soon as look at you. No. It’s a stupid idea.”

“So you love me but don’t respect me enough to grant this last request?”

Jeb sighed. “No, that’s not what I mean. I just don’t want to lose you. You are the heart of this community, you saved these people, your people, when the cannibals came. You bred the horses, you delivered babies. Good God no-one here can imagine life without you. Even now you are the voice of wisdom in the council meetings. We can’t... I can’t let you go.” John loosened his grip. “Then answer me one last question before you go. If you know the answer I’ll stay, and we’ll never speak of this again.”

Jeb nodded.

“Who was Vincent van Gogh?”

Confusion flushed across Jeb’s face. “What?”

“Who was Vincent van Gogh?” John insisted.

“Someone from before the Fall?”

“Not good enough.”

“Come on, Granddad. All that is lost, of course I don’t know who he is.”

“Then I go. The day after tomorrow. I go home.” John couldn’t help the smile cross his face.

Jeb stood tall, John’s hand falling from his arm.

“What a stupid question. None of that matters any more, it’s all lost, gone, done. You taught me that.” said Jeb.

“I was wrong. I need to go back, son. I need to see where my life began. I need to understand... oh I don’t know... I need to understand what happened to me... what happened to the world. I need to... just find my own peace. I can’t do this without going back there. Hell, I can’t explain it. It’s just something I need for me, just to be selfish for once, perhaps. One final thing before I die. If I don’t find what I’m looking for I might come back.”

“No you won’t,” said Jeb in a whisper.

John smiled the best fake smile he could muster. “No. No I won’t.”

“Ok. Are you absolutely sure about this?” Jeb said, his face crinkled in concern, an involuntary wetness forming in his eye.

“It’s the only thing important to me now,” John said coldly.

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“It’s still early. I’ll sit for a while and go straight to bed. Talk to the family, honestly and with conviction. Tell them I will not be swayed in this and convince them to let me go with grace and dignity. That’s all I want.”

Jeb paused and squatted before his ancient grandfather. They looked at each other for a long time, both in the moment and remembering the best times of each other.

“It won’t be easy, but I’ll do it, you stubborn old shit.”

John smiled. “That’s no way to talk to your Grandfather,” he said softly.

Jeb reached round the paper thin frame of this old man and hugged him tight. John reciprocated and softly patted Jeb on the back. Unconsciously, they drank each other in, the smell, the feel of the bones beneath flesh, before Jeb rose and strode away without looking back. Both men had restrictions in their throats and could not see for the tears in their eyes.

John sat as the final patches of blue above faded to black and in the distance he watched the starlings wheel. They tested their roost time after time. Descending and rising, descending and rising, each movement accompanied with a crescendo of wings until finally they settled for the night. When he realised they would not rise again, John stood slowly, carefully, mindful of his
complaining ligaments and joints before picking up the bottle and two mugs. He straightened slowly and walked back around and into the wooden house.

John sat atop Beiber. The old horse had served him well over the years and over the journey of the last fourteen days. He had had to detour around the ever expanding Territory of The Marquis, littered with graffiti, destruction, and macabre warnings to stay out of their zone. Together they had stopped at the Freedom House, an old pub on a naturally fortified location that served as the home of a small community. They had stayed at Jessie’s house. John had planned to say goodbye to Jessie’s husband, Phil, but the old man had died the previous winter and the news hadn’t yet reached the old man’s home. Upon leaving Freedom House he stopped at the large graveyard, found the location of his old friend and had a brief conversation with the plot before moving on.

His journey took him South until he reached the outskirts of the ruined city, spread before him like a forest-dominated Amazonian temple in the dewy spring morning. Through the silent city he had ridden, down ancient A roads, pitted and covered with ivy, to end here, at the end of the street he grew up in.

He recognised the layout but not the scene. Where there had been neat rows of Victorian houses with a driveway and small front lawn, now there was just a carpet of fresh green growth. Before neat rows of cars lined the streets, now rusting frames punctuated with the occasional skeleton lined up waiting to rot to nothing. Slowly the old man calmed his horse and slid delicately from its back. It took him a moment to straighten up, then, with a flourish, he unsheathed the machete. Trampling across vines and grasses that lifted the tarmac from below he found where the sign should be. Shaking, he lifted the tool and brought it down into the undergrowth with a crack. Hacking away at the underbrush he cleared the area around the rusted sign. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he spat a fat glob on it and began to clean the sign. It confirmed his suspicions as the words Lawn Avenue revealed themselves.

John was home.

The houses were unrecognisable, the ones that were poorly maintained when the end came were already in a state of partial collapse but as he led the old horse down the silent street, his memory filled the blanks until he stood in front of his childhood home. Using the machete he cleared the gate, the structure in front of him appeared intact and none of the windows to the front of the house had been broken.

He tied the horse to the gate and fetched a small pack of oats, which he laid out for his companion to contemplate. He rubbed the horse’s neck and whispered in his ear. Then he turned and struggled through the thorny garden to the front door. Sweating now and already feeling weak, after all, the journey had been long and he had picked up a wicked cough, he slowly grabbed away at the vines and tendrils covering the door. Then he reached into his pocket and picked up the key. Worn smooth with constant friction, its brass muted the sun to a burnished gold. The key entered the lock easily enough but would not turn. John moved closer to the door and leant into the movement. For a moment he thought the key would break and then, with a high pitched snap the lock turned and a crack opened in the door. John pushed hard as it broke free of the vegetation holding it in position. It crunched as it moved to reveal the dusty gloom beyond. A cloud of dust blew back from the house into John’s face and he felt it tickle his lungs. He started to cough.

“
I’m too old for this shit. Far too old,”
he thought. Although he was elated his quest was nearing its end, he himself had wondered about the sanity of this journey, especially just before sunrise when the night was at its coldest.

The old dust irritated his lungs as he continued to cough. The liquid sound echoed around the empty street. Bent double, he spat phlegm and blood onto the path before his lungs stopped their complaints and the coughing ebbed to a whistling wheeze. Returning to his pack he took a canteen of water and drank it carefully, the cool fresh taste calming his throat. After a moment to right himself, he looked though the open door to the darkness beyond. He found himself full of trepidation, and wanted to turn and go home. Mission complete. However, he had come a long way for this so he entered his old home slowly. A thick layer of dust coated every surface, undisturbed for eighty years. He found himself surprised at this.

He had considered the building gone, fallen through rot or burnt to a cinder by the fires that raged uncontrolled through the cities sometimes. He had considered the house ransacked, graffiti sprayed on the walls, ruined by marauders who had all the time in the world to look for trinkets or objects of interest. Yet as he stood in the front room, gloomy from the dirt on the windows and the unconstrained growth in the garden, it was as if he had merely returned from school on that fateful day. His father’s newspaper still lay on the coffee table. He approached it and peered at the headlines, and the date. The day the world changed. He reached to pick the paper up but it crumbled as his fingers touched it until after several attempts all that remained were dusty fragments of dried paper.

Looking around the mote filled room, his memory fired to life. Long distant memories of objects and possessions sprung unbidden to mind. Watching Star Wars with his dad, or playing on the long forgotten games console under the TV and just snuggling into his mum when he was little while he watched kid’s programmes. He remembered working with his dad to paint the cellar after it was renovated, chasing his Mum round with a dripping paintbrush. Then, as he lazily scanned the room, each bookshelf, each object loaded with memory, he saw the Encyclopaedia under the coffee table. He had forgotten the time he spent just flicking through it. It was an old hardback edition that had belonged to his Grandfather, dog eared and battered. When he bought it, most of the facts in it were outdated and more easily referenced with a PC, but he remembered it smelling old and sweet, like talc. Slowly, he bent to pick it up, when he heard a long slow scrape which stopped as abruptly as it started. Too short to fully locate.

John rose with the book and looked to the front door.
“Perhaps the wind picked up”
, he thought, but it didn’t appear to have moved. He paused and listened again, holding his breath so that the wheeze from his chest couldn’t be heard. There was only distant birdsong in the Spring morning. After a moment he remembered the book and opened it slowly. It creaked and cracked as the dust fell from its pock marked jacket. Inside, the paper had fared better than newspaper, but the binding had not. It split as the pages fell open letting a section of the book flutter to the floor. Gently he turned each page, drinking in works of art, bathing in its knowledge.

“
How could this have happened? How could we have lost it all?”
The gravity of the question came to him slowly with each turned page. It was all gone, never to be retrieved. All human knowledge squandered, rotting where it lay in the buildings and homes that would soon themselves rot to nothing. He thought about the Louvre where the Mona Lisa lay, probably fallen from its hook and smashed to the floor. Or the great libraries of the world where the moisture would rot the pages until fungi finally ate the great philosophers’ words. Even the great edifices of the planet, the pyramids, or the Statue of Liberty lost to the sands like that film. What was it called. Planet of the Apes! He remembered. Jeez. All the films gone too. He saw quite a few after the Golden Times, remnants of a sane world, as he moved from base to compound in his younger years. That was until the petrol spoiled and the tech gradually stopped working, finally useless and redundant as the world around. Everything great built by man gone in less than a generation. After he was gone the Golden times would be a myth, like the Roman Empire to him, but without any relics or records to understand the once great civilisation that dominated the world. A great malaise came over him and
he wanted to rescue it all, he wanted to bottle and preserve it, keep it safe from any more decay but, it couldn’t be saved. It was too late.

He dropped the book to the floor. It kicked up a small plume of dust, and he felt bereft. “
Why the hell am I here? What good can I possibly achieve
?”
he thought as the anger rose within him. Just a stupid idea from a stupid old man. What was the point in remembering all this stuff, what was he gonna do, move back in and order pizza until he died? He clenched his fists in rage.

“This should have been mine!” he shouted at the dead room. Not even sure himself what he meant.

“This should have been my life!” he shouted again, pointing at the wall. “I was too fucking YOUNG!” he exclaimed before screaming, “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THEM?”

He suppressed a cough rising in his throat before realising that he was staring at the picture on the mantelpiece. It was covered in dust, the figures within mere silhouettes. He took the picture in his hand and wiped across it to reveal him, younger, no more than five, perhaps. He had forgotten the picture entirely. In it they were sat in the garden on the decking his father had built. They were surrounded by pots of blooming flowers. His dad looked down on him as he sat making a face at mum who was smiling at the camera. Good God she was beautiful, even though she was casually dressed for a day in the garden, she glowed in the faded picture. Black hair tinged with sunlight, wide, smiling lips and warm, round, blue eyes.