Autumn: The Human Condition (37 page)

`Fraser's the last one back inside. He tries to shut the door and gets caught by one of them that manages to grab hold of his leg as he climbs up. I'm watching and I can't look away and I'm thinking that this can't be happening. It's a kid, probably not even fifteen, and it's body is so light and empty that it's hanging off him and Fraser's just dragging it along. It's got hold of his boot somehow and he's using the butt of the rifle to smash its hand away. He pushes it off and tries to shove it back out of the door. Wheeler leans out and pulls the door shut but the bloody thing isn't out. Its head and shoulders are fucking wedged in and Wheeler's banging and pulling at the door, trying to get it shut. The kid's got one arm inside the transport and it's still trying to grab hold of Fraser. He just stands there, lifts up his rifle, and blows a fucking hole in the middle of its face. Wheeler opens the door while we're driving and kicks what's left of the kid out onto the street.'

Kilgore rubbed his eyes and looked up into the light above him momentarily before dropping his face and letting his head hang down again.

`And that, mate,' he mumbled, trying unsuccessfully to light a cigarette with nervous, shaking hands, `is just about all that you and me and everyone else in this bloody place has got to look forward to. We either spend the rest of our time buried in this fucking hole, or we end up stuck out in that bloody mess up there, wrapped in a fucking plastic suit until whatever it is that's done all this finally catches up with us.'

SKIN

My name is Skin, and I have been waiting for this for so fucking long...

His name is actually Scott Weaver, and despite all the bravado and bullshit, he's scared as hell although he'd never admit it. Skin is what he used to call himself in front of his friends. It's the name he used to use on Internet forums and chatrooms, and which he sprayed onto the side of buildings and bus shelters. Skin is sixteen and, like many other distant, alienated and disenchanted adolescents, has a grudge against the rest of the world because he's convinced that the rest of the world has it in for him. His frustrations have been building and his problems festering for months now, and each day he has felt himself getting closer and closer to breaking point. Three weeks and two days ago, however, some of the pressure was suddenly and inexplicably released. Three weeks and two days ago the rest of the world died.

In the long hours alone Skin often thought back to how it began. It was a Tuesday morning, and his parents had been giving him hell because he'd only just come back in from being out all Monday night. He didn't know what their problem was. He'd been out with a few friends and they'd lost track of time, so what? They'd had a few drinks, so what? They'd done some drugs (nothing heavy, but his parents didn't need to know that), so what? His dad had gone on and on about how this was the time of his life where he needed to put more effort in, not less. He and Dad had started shouting and swearing at each other and that had made his mother cry, and that had made Dad even angrier. Christ, they couldn't ever see his point of view. More to the point, they didn't want to. They judged him more by the way he dressed and the music he listened to and the people he hung around with than anything else. His dad hadn't spoken to him for almost a month when he'd first had his ears and nose pierced. Fucking hell, if only they'd known about the tattoos and the other piercings he'd had done in the summer just gone...

He'd been sat there in the kitchen, trying to find a way out of the conversation without letting them win, when it happened. One minute they were both in full flow � Dad yelling at him for being a bloody waste of space, Mum crying into her tea and yelling at Dad to stop yelling � the next they were dead. Both of them. Face down, dead on the floor.

The death of his parents (and, apparently, the rest of the world) was the moment it finally all began to make sense. Up until that day Skin's summer had been fucking miserable and the tedium showed no sign of relenting. He'd flunked his exams and left school and had then been forced into enrolling for re-takes at college. And his girlfriend had left him. They'd been together on and off for eight months when Dawn ended it. She said that he'd bullied her into having sex. She'd said that he kept making demands that she wasn't prepared to fulfil. It was her fault, the fucking tease. She was the one who dressed like a fucking whore all the time for Christ's sake. Jesus, she was the one who'd been sat there in a fucking corset, tight black leather mini-skirt, fishnet stockings and knee-high PVC boots when she'd told him that she didn't want to be with him any more. He'd lost his virginity to her pretty early on in their brief relationship and his imagination had run away with him since then. He'd already learnt that he was the only virgin in the relationship (he'd suspected as much) and that made him feel like he had something to prove, or that he had some catching up to do. Skin had always imagined first sex would have been this incredible event � the undisputed highlight of both their young lives so far � but the reality had been bitterly disappointing. Instead of endless hours of uninterrupted dirty passion he had to settle for a fifteen minute fumble in Dawn's bedroom while her mum went to the chip shop. And half of those fifteen minutes were spent trying to get the bloody condom on.

In the three weeks between Skin splitting up with Dawn and the sudden arrival of the end of the world, he began to hate her with a vengeance. He still saw her regularly because, after she'd finished with him, she started sleeping her way around his friends, doing more with each of them (if the rumours were to be believed) than she'd ever done with him.

After they'd all died he'd been nervous and frightened for a while of course (who wouldn't have been?) but his fear and anxiety was primarily caused by the fact that he didn't know whether he was in danger, not because of what had happened to the rest of them. As the hours ticked by and his personal safety and apparent immunity to whatever had happened seemed more certain, his confidence and attitude gradually returned. He got himself as far away from his parent's safe and predictable upper-middle-class home as he could and began to enjoy his new and unexpected role as king of the world. He could do what he wanted, whenever he wanted. After a couple of days the bodies had risen, but even that hadn't dampened the sudden euphoria he'd felt at having survived when absolutely everyone else had died. He was invincible. Without doing anything, he had won.

Brought up on a dark diet of pulp horror films, comics and books, Skin revelled in the filth, disease and decay. As the bodies around him became more active, he actually became more confident and self-assured. As the potential danger increased, so his excitement and adrenaline levels rose. He looted shops, taking food, booze, cigarettes, magazines, music and whatever else he damn well wanted. And, in a long-considered and calculated gesture of defiance, he built a base for himself right in the middle of the school he'd just left. He spent days tearing the place apart. He ripped the heart out of the place that had caused him and countless hundreds of other kids untold amounts of grief over the years. He'd pissed on the headteacher's corpse. He'd even squatted down and taken a shit in the middle of the classroom where he'd been humiliated and yelled at by his Nazi-like Maths teacher Mr Miller last term. And where was Miller now, he thought smugly to himself? Dead, just like the rest of them. Skin had sat in the classroom for a while, his feet up on Miller's chair, drinking scotch. He laughed out loud at the irony of it all. And they'd said he'd never amount to anything...

The bodies became increasingly insistent. The damn things just wouldn't leave him alone. He tried to convince himself that he was the subject of some bizarre kind of hero-worship but he knew that wasn't the case. Just the slightest sound or unexpected movement from him would cause a crowd of the bloody things to herd after him incessantly. And he noticed that they'd started to become violent too, occasionally tearing each other apart. He guessed that it wouldn't take much for them to start on him if he gave them half a chance. Skin made a conscious decision to keep out of sight and lie low for a while but, before disappearing from view, he went out looting again. He rode into town on his bike, following the route of the bus he used to take. Once there he cycled through the side-streets until he reached one particular shop. He and his friends had spent hours looking in the window before now but they'd never managed to make it inside. The shop sold hunting and fishing equipment. He didn't know what he wanted or needed, but he took as much from the shelves as he could carry � knives, pistols, rifles and anything else which looked vaguely useful and suitably harmful. He packed it onto the bike and rode back to school.

Skin was in charge now. Unrestrained and unstoppable, he made the decisions and he made the rules. Hiding away didn't suit him. Why should he keep out of sight when he was in control? He moved through the bodies with contempt and disinterest, only running when he absolutely had to. Already feeling vastly superior to the decomposing relics which surrounded him, the fact that he was now armed made him feel impervious and all-conquering. He carried weapons with him all of the time. He hadn't had to use them yet, but he was ready.

Food began to become a problem. He'd had some supplies with him but they'd quickly dwindled down to nothing. With a rucksack slung across his back and a rifle in his hand he walked to the local shopping precinct, which was around half a mile from school. He'd spent many long afternoons hanging out there with his friends when they should have been in lessons. Hadn't done him any harm missing school, had it, he thought to himself as he crept through the supermarket, collecting up all the food he could find which was still edible. Most of the shop's stock had gone rotten. The place stank of decay and he almost threw up. He needed to rest and catch his breath before he made the trip back to school. Not wanting to wait in the decaying supermarket he walked further into the building, eventually emerging out of a back entrance. A grey concrete staircase led up to a row of boarded up, graffiti-covered flats above the shop. Skin climbed the stairs and forced his way into one of the flats. He rested for a while in a cold and damp empty living room. He lay on the floor and passed the time with cigarettes and alcohol he'd taken from the shop below.

A narrow veranda ran across the front of the flats. After almost an hour had passed Skin stepped outside and stood there and looked out over the whole of the dead precinct below him. A large, roughly elliptical collection of run-down shops centred around a large oval patch of muddy grass, it didn't look very different now to how it always used to look, he thought. There were a few bodies still lying on the ground, but other than that the place looked as grey, lifeless and terminally dull as it always had done. Even those bodies which incessantly dragged themselves around looked strangely similar to how they'd been before they'd died. Slow, empty and pointless. Skin baulked at the idea of ever allowing himself to become like that.

Standing up there, in full view but knowing that he was completely safe and untouchable, he felt incredibly powerful and strong. He felt in full control, almost like some kind of ancient lord looking down over his rotting subjects. Maybe this was his opportunity to show them just how powerful he was? He ran back into the flat and grabbed the rifle he'd brought with him. He rummaged around in his rucksack for ammunition and then stepped back outside. He loaded the rifle and took aim.

Can I do this? Of course you can.

Should I do it? Why not, who's going to stop you? No-one tells you what to do anymore.

Does it matter? Don't be fucking stupid. Of course it doesn't matter. Damn things are dead anyway.

Skin lined up a single, bedraggled figure in his sights. Breathing heavily he squeezed the trigger slightly and took up the slack, loosening his grip momentarily with nerves. There's nothing to be scared of, he thought, clearing his throat and then holding his breath as he prepared to fire. Just fucking do it. The end of the rifle seemed to be waving about uncontrollably. He wedged the butt deeper into his shoulder, shuffled his feet and re-balanced himself and then located the figure in his sights again. Before he'd had chance to dissuade himself he pulled on the trigger and fired. The gunshot cracked in his ear, rendering him temporarily deaf on one side, and the force of the shot almost threw him over. He dropped the rifle and rubbed the sore patch on his shoulder where the recoil had dug in. He shook his head clear and then looked out over the precinct. There wasn't much to see at first, primarily because all of the bodies gathered there had turned and had suddenly begun to stagger towards the supermarket. After a few seconds he managed to locate the body he'd been aiming at. He'd hit it. Christ, he thought, he'd hit it bloody well. It was difficult to see exactly how much damage he'd caused, but it looked as if at least half of its head had been blown clean away. More importantly, the fucking thing had finally stopped moving.

Skin stood on the veranda and fired another thirty-two times, managing to down at least another twenty-four bodies. Each time he fired the rifle he became more accustomed to the noise and the kick it gave him. He learnt to ride the recoil and absorb it. He learnt how to load and reload quickly. Most importantly, he learnt how to get rid of those fucking things below him.

Unchecked and unrestricted, Skin's confidence soared. No-one was laughing at him now or trying to tell him what to do, were they? No-one was on his back to do this or do that or be home by a certain time or not to wear certain clothes or not to speak in a certain way or not to drink or not to smoke or... Christ, he could do anything.

He began by getting himself more comfortable. The school had two gymnasiums, housed in a single two-storey building. He moved from his previous classroom hideout and made his home in Gym 1 (as it was known) on the first floor. There he hoarded the supplies he'd collected and, under cover of night, he fetched more. Using a battery-powered machine he filled the vast room with music from when he first woke to when he finally fell asleep at night. Fully aware of the effect the noise had on the dead population but arrogantly indifferent to their attentions, he drank and smoked his way through each day. His height above the crowds seemed somehow to camouflage the direction and source of the sound. Although it continued to attract many more bodies to the school, they wandered aimlessly around the campus rather than gravitating towards the gym building.