I rev the bike and the shapes pause. They exchange glances, but nothing seems to pass between them. And in that moment my fear breaks through, and I begin to make out more details.
The shapes are wearing more than clothes. One of them has a necklace of yellowed bones. Another seems to have a face covered in sharp white spots, and they could be embedded teeth. One girl—she can't be more than thirteen—has a skull protruding above her head, tied on with a couple of leather belts. The skull has a smashed jaw and several obvious fractures. The girl does not smile or frown. She is as expressionless as her gruesome decoration.
There's more, but I don't want to see. I rev the bike again and try to judge whether I can make it past them. They're spread out across the road, advancing in a clumsy, slow line, and I suppose I could ride straight through them. But even though they appear slow and apathetic now, they still have weapons. I imagine the blade-strewn doll being thrown at my face when I'm going twenty miles per hour.
Something draws my attention upward, and a shadow slips across the sky. It glides, swoops, flits from here to there without really making itself known. I squint against the bright sky but that does not make seeing it any easier.
Just like back in the city near the Manor. Seen from a distance, those flying things we were content to leave alone
. It's closer now, and though I still can't make it out—or perhaps I'm too scared to admit what it is—I'm now in its domain.
And then there's a noise from farther away, louder and more violent than the deathly shuffles of these lost people. A gunshot, the scream of an engine struggling to overcome some obstacle, a shout. I turn my head slightly so that I can hear more, and the shapes before me screech.
They run at me. All pretence at lethargy now broken, I'm more shocked than I should be. I kick the bike into gear but my foot slips on the clutch, I tip sideways, and my knee takes all the weight as I lever myself upright again, twisting the throttle, leaving a line of hot rubber on the ground behind me, aiming across the street at the timber front gate of the Barkers' garden. My only advantage now is that I know the lie of the land here, and in those shapes' once-blank faces I haven't seen anyone I recognise.
Once-blank, because now they're twisted into expressions of pure hunger, and hate.
I stand slightly as the bike bumps over the low kerb. The Barkers' gate smashes open, hinges squealing. A woman tries to grab me as I enter the front garden. Her fingers curl through a cloth loop on my jacket's shoulder and I throw all my weight forward, changing into second gear and hauling on the throttle. For a moment I think I'm going to be pulled backward from the bike—I'm sure the woman is actually being dragged along behind me—then she screams and falls free.
I glance back to see the others trampling over the woman as they pursue me. She's shouting something that sounds like, "Davey! Davey!"
I steer beside the house, slowing slightly so that I can step the bike along the narrow path between the garage and boundary hedge. The hedge has blossomed and expanded, and I have to use the bike's power to pull me past the grasping, tangled branches. The people are close again as I burst into the Barkers' back garden, and I give them a face full of exhaust fumes as I power the bike at the back gate. This one is also made of wood but it's stronger, the locks better maintained, and at the last second I realise my mistake. I lean back, the bike's front wheel strikes the gate, and I'm thrown forward and up as the bike rises onto its front wheel.
I end up sprawled on the ground at the base of the fence, motorbike idling on its side beside me, and by some miracle I haven't been crushed. I shake my head, dizzied by an impact I can't even remember.
Another flying thing passes directly over the garden, too fast to see. It leaves a hint of jasmine on the air, and below that a smell I don't want to recognise.
There's a triumphant whoop and the people run at me. "Eating tonight!" one of them screeches. It could even be the young girl. Her eyes are wide, the injured skull waving wildly above her head as she runs.
There's a roar behind the fence, the explosion of a car horn being leant on, and the people pause, staring up over my head.
A shotgun fires. The woman with the teeth embedded in her face crumples, her mouth a circle of shock as the front of her dress turns wet. Her hands go to the wound, and inside.
The gate is kicked open and there is Cordell, hauling at my arms, shouting at me to stand. I see panic on his face, and fear, and anger as well, because I've dragged them into this situation and as far as he's concerned there was no need.
"Come on, come on!"
"The bike," I say.
"Fuck the bike!"
"I'm taking it."
"Leave the bike," a gruff voice says, and one of the men takes a quick run toward us. The shotgun roars again and his shoulder explodes. He goes down, arm flapping.
"I'm taking the bike," I say to Cordell. I'm standing, my legs and arms work, and that's good enough for me.
"Fuck's sake," he says quietly, and I can see all the anger now. He glances up at the sky, down again. "Your choice. Follow us, then. It's not pretty out there, and we won't stop for you on the way out."
"Thanks for coming," I say.
Cordell giggles, a frightening sound. "Thanks for the invite!" He giggles again, then helps me lift the bike.
The people are standing in a line from the side of the Barkers' house to where the man with the shattered shoulder writhes on the ground. They're not looking at us anymore. They're looking at the man, and the woman with the wound in her stomach. Staring at them. Their faces are not quite as blank as before they had charged me, though the violence seems to have gone from them. I see hunger.
Cordell is right, it's not pretty out there. I ride between the Range Rovers, so I don't see everything that goes on. But the shotgun fires several more times, I hear the impact of bodies against metal, and three times I have to veer quickly as a crushed body appears from beneath the vehicle ahead of me. Once I ride straight over a man, unable to avoid him without crashing the bike into a lamp post. He screams as I wheel across his already crushed stomach. I even say sorry.
Looking to the left and right I can see people standing along the side of the street. Not many of them—maybe a dozen between my cul-de-sac and where the houses stop before the motorway—but they all look similar to those that had attacked me. Still human, but only just. Desperate. Hungry.
I know what they were after, but I can barely acknowledge it, not right now. It'll take time to sink in. If these
are
the things Billy and Lucy have locked in that ambulance, what do they intend doing with them?
More shapes flit by above us. None of them come any lower, none attack. I'm being to wonder whether they're really there.
With violence and screaming we leave Newport behind, drive onto the motorway and make our way as far from there as we can. I'm cold, even though the sun is still warming my skin. I've been stupid. But everywhere I look, every scene I take in, is tinged now with a memory of Ashley. After six months I feel the grief beginning to hit home. I can't help smiling.
"Fucking idiot!" the Irishman says. He doesn't shout and rage, and in a way that's worse. This is a very controlled anger.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I had to go, to see."
"Because of what that nut case said?"
"No, not really because of that at all."
We are milling around the vehicles while Cordell and Jessica change a flat tyre on the lead Range Rover. The old tyre has several nails embedded in it, probably picked up in the city. Something else I feel responsible for.
"Don't pick on him," Jacqueline says. "This is strange for all of us."
"Strange? Did you see those people back there? What they wore, what they carried?"
"They haven't moved on like we have," I say. "Michael said they'd be out here."
"Yes, but he didn't suggest we go
looking
for them."
"I'm sorry," I say again. I've already thanked them all for coming after me, and I don't want to lessen my gratitude by belabouring it.
The Irishman shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair. "So, find what you went looking for?"
"Yes," I say.
"Good." He walks away, and I can tell that his anger is already abating.
"Fixed," Cordell says. "Let's go. We can make another few miles before sunset. Then I think we should camp. What do you all think?"
"Good idea," Jacqueline says. She glances at me and smiles, and I mount the motorbike.
We're riding away from the setting sun, and it throws my long, reaching shadow before me.
Later, parked beside the toll booths before the Severn Bridge, we all sit in one of the Range Rovers to eat. Conversation returns to Billy and Lucy, and Cordell mentions that he caught a glimpse inside their metal container. "Like an armoury in there," he says. "Guns and boxes of stuff everywhere."
"It's what was in the ambulance that interests me," Jessica says.
Jacqueline shakes her head. "Not me. Don't want to know. Not me."
"I wonder what they're
really
doing there," I say.
"Waiting for someone," Cordell says.
The Irishman snorts. "Strange place to wait."
"Close to the city, so they can drive in quickly," I muse. "Close to the motorway for a quick escape."
Cordell nods. "And enough weapons to fight a small war."
"Wonder where they found them," Jessica says.
We drift into silence, eat, sharing an occasional nervous glance. But most of the time we look outside.
During the hour it took us to drive from Newport to where we are camped, we saw wolves on the hillsides, something larger—a bear, the Irishman said—splashing in an irrigation ditch, and a minibus stalled in the middle of the road with blood and bones decorating its insides. No disease deaths there. Cordell swears he saw teeth and claw marks on some of the bones when he went to investigate. The rest of us stayed away.
"Well, we're moving on," Jessica says, breaking the silence with a sigh.
"Aren't we just." I think of the things Michael said, and I too wonder at the true identity of those things inside the ambulance. More of the mad, hungry people from the city, or something else?
And were there more of them on the prowl?
We cross the Severn Bridge and drive another fifteen miles that evening. The light is good and the sky is clear, so we decide that it would be wiser to move while we can. "The sooner we get to Bar None, the better," the Irishman says. As I'm riding the bike—battered from its two recent spills, but still functioning perfectly well—I wonder whether that's the case at all.
None of us really know what we'll find when we get there.
We stop eventually on the hard shoulder, camouflaging the vehicles between a succession of broken-down and burnt-out lorries. Cordell finds an empty cattle truck and we agree that, with its viewing slots, it's an ideal place to camp.
So begins our first night away from the mansion in six months.
As the sun goes down, the first strange sounds rise.
Since my teens, I've loved listening to the countryside at night. There are very few areas where you can still really do that without the background hum of civilisation intruding. There's always a distant road that carries cars and lorries late into the night, a train track that supports midnight transports between factories and foundries, or the noises of a town asleep. A sleeping town is like a sleeping person; it rumbles and clicks, snores and groans. Electric lines hum. Cats howl, fight and rut. Vehicles tick as they cool down, and there's always a TV or radio keeping some insomniac or night-shift worker company while their family sleeps nearby.
It's very, very rare to hear nature at its rawest. I used to think I could. I occasionally drove out into the country at night, sometimes with Ashley, more often on my own, and I thought I'd found a few places where wilderness still survived. Places where the touch of humanity had yet to reach: on top of a hillside, past the end of a track in the local forest, deep in one of the valleys of mid-Wales. I sat away from my car, stared at a sky unpolluted by artificial light, and listened. And I thought I heard a nature that was, for a time, ignorant of humanity.
Sitting in the cattle truck beside civilisation's clogged tarmac artery, I realise how wrong I was.
This
is nature.
This
is the natural order of things, without the influence of humanity to weigh things down or scare them into silence. Perhaps some of the creatures we hear outside were born into a world without people, offspring of animals that lived through the plagues and celebrated by giving birth to their first truly free descendants. Perhaps many of them are older that that, but in the six months since the end of humanity's reign on the planet they have forgotten how things used to be. Whatever the case, the night is filled with howls, growls and cries of freedom; things hunting and mating, stalking and eating.
"They've forgotten we're here," Jessica says.
"Good," says Jacqueline.
"I recognise some of them," the Irishman says. "But not all."
"Fox," I say, and it sounds like a screaming baby.
"Badger."
A creature coughs and barks nearby, perhaps as close as the ditch bordering the adjacent field. "Dog?" Jessica asks.
"Maybe." I shrug. "There must be thousands gone feral."
"Always had it in them," the Irishman says. "Never trusted a fucking canine in my life. They fooled us with their puppy-dog eyes, their begging, their rolling over to play dead. All they ever wanted was our meat." He grins at me and starts to snicker.
"You're a bad movie trailer," I say, and the two of us laugh. Nobody else seems amused, because that really doesn't sound like any dog we've heard before. It's a bark that says something, rather than just a shout to get our attention.
"
Do
you think they know we're here?" Jacqueline says. She stands at the edge of the cattle truck and looks out through one of the slits. I used to hate these vehicles when I was a kid, seeing all those sheep or cows crammed in on their way to be slaughtered or sold. They always looked so helpless in there, the lucky ones able to stick their noses out through the slits to catch one final breath of freedom before their skulls were holed.