He still stood, staring at the sizzling mass on the carpet. Stepping past it, I grabbed his arm, shaking him until he met my own gaze. “You just saved my life. You killed the bitch. Now let’s go.”
He stared into my eyes for a few seconds and then nodded before his stare moved slightly beyond me.
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“Matt. The curtains are on fire.”
Turning round to face the room, I could see where the bottom of the thick old material was losing the battle against the fire. The flames were also slowly moving up the bedspread.
“Fuck it. We’ll leave it.” Tugging his arm, I pulled him out of the room and towards the stairs.
“Wait.”
Eager to be gone, I snapped impatiently. “What?”
“What did that thing say? Did it speak to you?” His eyes were full of dread, and it sapped my anger. The whole thing had run in crazy time for me, and I hadn’t realised that he’d been close enough to hear it.
“We’ll talk about it on the way to town, okay?” It had to be okay, because I wasn’t ready to discuss that yet, my thoughts spinning too fast to focus. Once again, I was drawn back to that memory of Chloe in the darkened living room holding a conversation without a telephone. The likelihood of the dead widow being the same one as I’d seen in the cafe in Stony was highly unlikely, so how could it have known about the dying man’s words?
At the bottom of the stairs, George held out my backpack to me and loaded the guns while I put on the pack.
“I can use one of these. Not a brilliant shot, but I was good in my day. National Service and all that.” He filled his pocket with more shells and then did the same with mine. He met my eye and lowered his voice. “You carry the second one. Nigel’s not reliable and John’s too young. Dave’s outside throwing up.” The old man’s expression was grim. “I don’t know what that bite did to him, but it’s not good. We need to go on to Woburn. It’s a couple of miles on from here, but
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they are more likely to have a good chemist there than that little village. We’re also going to have to find some more cars.” Squeezing my arm, he glanced upstairs. “Is it dead?”
“Yeah, it’s dead. I fucking hope it is, anyway. We blew two of its legs off.” Smoke was starting to appear at the top of the stairs.
George slapped me on the shoulder. “Well, we’d better be going then.”
Following him back out into the humid air where the others had gathered, Katie and Nigel supporting Dave, that image of Chloe lingered, and things seemed to slot a little into place. Could the widows have some kind of collective consciousness? It would make sense that if they did before they evolved, then maybe they did after. Following George’s lead, I trudged silently back onto the gravel track, not feeling much more secure for the shotgun resting across my shoulder. Within a few steps, the first heavy drops of rain began to fall.
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Chapter Fourteen
The rain was still coming down steadily when we entered the historic, idyllic town of Woburn, a haven of thatched buildings and antique furniture shops, awash with the spirit of Miss Marple, tea shops and twitching net curtains. Although I was thankful that, as we walked warily towards the main road, none of those thin voiles moved to signal prying eyes. I was pretty certain that if they did, it wouldn’t be just nosy old ladies trying to peer out at us.
We’d actually been closer to Woburn that we’d originally thought, and by braving the roads rather than attempting to navigate across the fields, it had been a much easier walk than our first of the morning, despite the weight of the bags and the clouds emptying onto us from above. Plus, this time round, no one even attempted a conversation. I led silently, my gun ready even if I wasn’t, and George brought up the rear, his weapon held hopefully with a little more confidence.
The main street of the town was wide, the middle
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section made up of two lines of parking bays to accommodate the shoppers that converged there during the daytimes and especially on Saturdays. These were normally full, but as we turned the corner I could see only three or four cars stranded there, and it would seem that as with most of the rest of the animal kingdom, the human race had stayed in the comfort of their own homes to die. Or change. Which pretty much amounted to the same thing for those of us that were left behind.
“Where’s the chemist? Does anyone know?” Katie sounded tired, and I’d noticed dark circles gathering under her eyes as the day wore on. Nigel had taken over her role as support for Dave as the older man had got progressively weaker, but had remained silent on the journey, and it was still Katie that had given Dave the odd word of encouragement and support as he desperately tried not to show how much he was suffering.
“I think there’s one at the other end of the street. This bit’s all furniture shops and cafes.” I kept to myself that the reason I knew it so well was that Chloe had dragged me up here to choose pretty much all our furniture, wanting something a little more personal than what the huge warehouses in the Milton Keynes shopping centre had to offer. Another pang of loneliness and heartache stabbed inside, and I hoped that there would be a time when I felt safe and secure enough to allow some time for all the grief inside to come out and then allow me to keep her close inside. I needed it, and I felt I was cheating Chloe by not getting rid of some of the pain so I could then work on savouring our memories and committing them to a safe place in my mind. Surely that’s what the grieving process
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was supposed to be about. Not this shutting out of everything, just to try and keep my head clear.
For the moment, I kept my head down, and avoided looking in the windows of the shops we passed, holders of invisible snapshots of my previous life, focussing instead on the weight of the gun and the pack on my back while I stared at the cobbles.
“Hey, look at that white van!”
Jane trotted up past me and ran a few steps ahead before I could slow her down by grabbing at her sweatshirt sleeve with my free hand. “Hey, no running ahead. What van?”
“Over there! Look!” I followed the excited pointing finger that bounced up and down as she jumped with the kind of energy that only a child could have after everything we’d been through in the past twenty-four hours. “Look!”
It was white, but it wasn’t a van. It was a minibus parked outside the little parade where the chemist was, and it only took a second or two for all of us to catch on to what Jane had seen that had sent her bouncing. The engine was running, the sound coming over the silent air towards us in a steady thrum, and from the exhaust a grey mist pumped out into the haze of rain. The deadness in my legs lifted as they instinctively picked up the pace.
“There’s people.” Turning around, I grinned at George and the others behind me. “There’s people in a shop up there! Come on!”
The straps of the rucksack dug painfully into my shoulders as I jogged, but that wasn’t going to stop me from running. Just the idea of other people alive out there sent a shockwave of anticipation through my
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system. I don’t think I’d have slowed down even if I’d accidentally fired the shotgun, which I was waving around in a cavalier fashion, trying to manage its length and weight and not succeeding. As George caught up with me, I almost felt a pang of envy at his grace, the weapon tilted into his shoulder. Even for a tired old man, he was managing a whole lot better than me. I could hear Nigel puffing somewhere behind my ears. It didn’t surprise me that he’d abandoned Dave in order to keep up with the guns. Maybe that made him more of a natural survivor than the rest of us, but I’d take my chances as I was.
“What if they’re not friendly?”
George sent a disparaging look over his shoulder. “As long as they’ve only got two legs, they’ll be fine by me.”
By the time we’d trotted the couple of hundred yards up the slight incline, the minibus slowly getting larger and larger, all our eyes focussed on it, no longer any thought for what might leap out at us from the recessed doorways or windows around us. My breath was hot as it raced in and out of my lungs. My face glowing, I stopped and almost leaned my gun against the wall before realising how stupid that was. Nigel was beside me, way more out of breath than I was, and looking behind me, I could see that George had slowed down to wait with Katie and John, who between them were trying to keep up and support Dave’s weight.
“There’s no one in here.” Disappointment flattened Jane’s voice as she peered on tiptoes into the slightly tinted windows. The green letters on the side read meadowbank school, and I figured by looking at the painted flower that it was a primary or middle school. My heart ached for Jane, suddenly aware of just how
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lonely she must be. No other children to play with, to share her fears with without being patronised or smothered in platitudes.
I stepped back and stared into the face of each of the shops. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
There was a dry cleaner, an off-licence two doors further up, a small co-op and the chemist we’d been looking for. The only one that didn’t look broken into was the dry cleaners and that didn’t come as much surprise.
“Hello?” I called out again. John echoed my call with his own, but there was no answer, and my heart started to sink. Maybe we were too late. Maybe there were widows lurking inside that had killed whoever had left the engine running out here. I stepped forward and was about to try searching in the co-op when a voice startled me.
“About bloody time! Are you the cavalry?”
Peering out of the off-licence doorway, an arm waved in our direction, a bottle of beer gripped in one hand. Attached to the arm was a middle-aged man, his face hidden behind an overgrown, curly silver-grey beard, his body tall and lanky, thin apart from a small paunch jutting out under his cable-knit sweater. Great. Another born survivor. Where were all the Arnold Schwarzeneggers when you really needed them?
Grinning, he made his way towards us, and we met him halfway. He held out his hand, his skin slightly leathery from what I imagined were too many Spanish holidays, and a thick gold chain bracelet shone conspicuously on his wrist. Twinkling, his bloodshot eyes were blue at the centre, and despite the slight drunken sway in his stance as he pulled himself straight, I found myself warming to this stranger.
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“Oliver Maine. Nice to meet you.” His rough-edged voice had an upper class accent that oozed private schooling, a contrast with the bottle of Carling Special Brew by his side. Despite his age, there was something of the teenager about him. “Now can anyone bloody tell me what’s been going on? Where the hell is everybody?”
“Don’t you know?” Katie was incredulous. After all we’d seen and been through, it was hard to believe that there was someone alive who wasn’t all too aware of the widows.
He shook his head, helping himself to a cigarette as I opened my pack to take one for myself. I lit it for him, cupping the light to protect it from the wet, and he took a long drag, shaking his head.
“What is it? Some kind of chemical warfare? A plague?” He stared at our blank expressions and shrugged. “I’d had a bit of a drink. I thought it’d help me get rid of the blasted headache I’d had for a day, which I’m pleased to say seems to have disappeared, and I remember being in the pub, and I vaguely remember leaving, but after that it’s a blank. Woke up a couple of hours ago in my flat. I’d slept a whole day and night. Anyway, I decided a hair of the dog was required and when I came out, it seemed to me that every other bugger had disappeared off somewhere. So where the hell are they all?”
Watching the slight shake in his hand, I knew that a hair of the dog was probably the way that most of Oliver Maine’s days started. The shake wasn’t the only thing that gave his drinking problem away. It was his choice of drink. Carling Special Brew was lethal. A bottle of that would knock my socks off, and our new friend was drinking it first thing in the morning.
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“It’s a long story.”
He grinned again, refreshingly undisturbed by the lack of human company. “Well, if it’s a long one, it’d better be bloody interesting. Is that your bus?” He laughed, a bubbly warm sound. “Not exactly army regulation, is it?”
John frowned, the rim of his baseball cap darker where the constant rain had slowly soaked it. “It’s not ours. Our cars got wrecked. I thought it was yours.”
“No, nothing to do with me. I only live round the corner. I walked.”
I turned round to look into the other shops, Nigel and John doing the same. If the van wasn’t Maine’s, then who the hell had driven it down here? The question was momentarily forgotten as Dave, leaning against the bus, threw up, clear liquid spewing down the front of his clothes.
“We’ve got to get him some medicine.” Katie nodded in the direction of the chemist.
She was right. Dave’s medicine was what we’d come here for in the first place. “John, why don’t you and Jane go in the co-op and get some supplies. Put them in the minibus. If the driver doesn’t turn up, we may as well take it.” No one argued with me. We were like scavengers now-the morality of taking what wasn’t ours no longer applied. A lot of things no longer applied. “Nigel, you keep your eyes open out here with George.”
His eyes narrowed. “Do I get a gun?”
No fucking way, you whining selfish fucker, was what I wanted to say to him, but I bit my tongue. “No, George has got his, and John can take the other one. He’s got Jane with him.” The slight black look that
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Nigel sent in the direction of the despondent child may have been missed by some, but I definitely saw it. Turning away, I pushed open the broken door into the chemist. “Come on, Dave. Let’s get that arm seen to.”
Oliver Maine hadn’t needed asking to help Dave through the door, and he watched with concern as Katie started to carefully peel the bandage from the wounded arm. I’d stepped behind the counter and begun rummaging through the various books and medical catalogues, desperate to find some kind of information on all the boxes and bottles of pills that surrounded me in the pharmacist’s area. I scanned for animal bites and blood-poisoning, or any all round antibiotic.