Authors: Craig Saunders
In
September, the world's population was estimated at somewhere in excess of seven
billion people. Before he left the office, O'Dell glanced at his screen at the decrypted
message from a small enclave beneath Whitehall. That missive would fly through
airwaves and wires to secure locations in places as diverse as Hong Kong,
Osaka, Auckland and hidden facilities deep beneath the Nevada Desert and
mountain ranges flung wide across the earth - the Rockies, the Urals, the
Kunlun.
A
reduction in the world's population of around 30%. Attrition of up to a minimum
of an additional 25% expected to within three months.
More,
O'Dell knew, would follow. Because he had seen it, and
he
had made it
happen.
On
the way out, and on to the cafeteria, he stepped over Boyle. Boyle didn't move.
O'Dell vaguely remembered shooting the chief of his science team in the head.
Outside,
his actions were clear enough, bad memory or drunk. The walk toward the
elevator was like a game of hurdles in the Olympics.
A
game, is that?
he wondered idly.
Or is that a kind of race?
Blood
splatter here, spray there. Gunshot men and women, some still moving, or people
broken by hands or teeth driven by the madness Boyle put in the air filtration
system.
In
the elevator he found a lone woman who'd pulled her cheeks away. She grinned at
him while he pushed the button to travel down three floors and eat his
breakfast.
'Morning,'
he said.
He
whistled and she picked up the tune. He shot her before the elevator opened,
and was forced to shoot one of the cooks (he remembered, vaguely, that he'd
always thought of her as a dinner lady) who roared and ran at him with a
serving spoon. Not an especially deadly weapon, but it was the look of the
thing.
I
might be going slightly insane myself
, he thought. The hot counter was
still filled with the night's food, because everyone caught a case of the
crazies after U+03BF hit their lungs. He found this more disappointing than the
fact of his entire staff's demise. He hated cooking.
'I
don't think I know how to cook,' he said to a man masturbating into beef
stroganoff with someone else's hand. 'Do you?'
'Lend
us a hand, boss,' said the man.
'Rather
not,' said O'Dell, and shot the man. He figured making his own bacon probably
wouldn't be that hard at all, but damned if he'd embarrass himself in front of
a man wanking with a borrowed hand.
*
A
short retirement, but earned.
Those
left behind, though, in towns and villages of the world? Of England?
When
madness and nuclear war both ran their course, the world was darker; souls and
skies.
Men
and women searched for those they loved, or settle for someone, at least, for
comfort or consolation until then. Survivors travelled together, or alone. Some
were fighters, some ran when they could. Food emptied, taken by the car load.
People took more than they could eat, then died and the food went to rot or
simply lay forgotten and lost in one of the millions of homes throughout the
country.
Others
stayed where they were. Those people went about their business as they always
had, either because they were insane, or because they felt such a sense of duty
or place that they would not give up. Like a policeman who died trying to
disarm a murderer with a machete in some Northern town. A woman who wept over
her dead Red Setter dog and refused to follow her husband when he and her
daughter fled their town died three days later with her blood pooling around
her, on her shining tile floor she'd been so proud of, her wrists slit by her
own hand. Her daughter and husband both were raped, partially skinned and
impaled beside the motorway that ran north-to-south, south-to-north. A man cut
himself with a simple thorn while trying to dig out his rosebushes to save them
from the awful rain. The wound festered. He squeezed the pus from it for a
while, and then, later, just sat in a deckchair in the deluge and let himself
slip away. Three teenagers ran riot across Sussex for a fortnight, until an elder
farmer shot two of them dead with his shotgun. The shotgun was more accustomed
to partridge, but it turned out it worked just fine on the little bastards on
his property. Two nights later, the third boy snuck in while the man slept and
stuck a knife in his chest. The old man never even woke.
Those
that survived the initial insanity fought through hate or need. Sweet old folk
and thoughtful younger people, people who were kind enough, but bastards and
psychopaths, too who preferred this world, and the voices of the angry and the
mean were always the loudest, the most shrill. The good fell quiet, the bad
shouted.
When
the end of the world came, people didn't change. They polarised, perhaps. But
people don't change, not really. It's just that they stand out more when the
background noise falls away.
*
X.
The Underpass
It
was three days after Francis left Kssh-Ksash man's van until she could face
moving, but bare the outside world, too. The maintenance room small and mean,
but it was her refuge from the growing storm that had begun already and this
deluge - madness, not wind and rain - came in hard and fast.
Cars
sped by full of fleeing, terrified people after that first crazy day when the
bomb tore the heart from England, and the world, too. That constant hum of
sound over the country soon quieted. The rumble of cars someplace in the middle
of field and city, but the drone of planes overhead, and people talking or
arguing or kids yelling and screaming.
Francis
figured they were in that middle place - the byways that joined the country
like the veins of England's bottom-heavy body. Where that traffic would ordinarily
flow, constant, it fell to night-time volume within a day. By the time she
ventured outside again, Francis saw barely any movement at all.
On
the horizon, perhaps five or twenty miles away (it was impossible to guess)
smoke filled the day, fire lit the night.
Francis'
concerns were closer. Ten feet away was a Nissan - a family car, high. The kind
she'd never had cause to drive. But families with kids kept
things,
didn't
they? The family was gone - wherever, it didn't matter to Francis. They'd been
a day with nothing but crisps and a few biscuits. She imagined she'd drool if
they found baby food, even.
Ten
feet,
she thought.
Fuck's sake.
Her
left foot - the one she'd torn free of the lunatic's farmhouse floor - was far
worse than the right. The right, she'd bound with duct tape and called good.
The left was seeping, a bandage of torn and dirty shirt held down enough to
keep the foot together, but not good enough to
heal
.
Edgar's
got it worse
, she thought as she stared at her goal - the car that might
contain food, drink, or medical supplies. A simple first aid kit would be
better than what they had now - caretakers' things.
George
has it worse,
she thought, trying to push her fear of more pain away.
He
doesn't complain.
Edgar,
the old bastard, complained endlessly. He was near to delirium with the pain,
but it didn't change the fact that he wouldn't fucking shut up.
But
then George is mute and paralysed.
'Fuck
off, Francis,' she told herself, because her thoughts were turning mean. As was
she. She was tired and hurting and her left foot was infected, the bones inside
broken without doubt. Duct tape can only cure so much.
Barefoot
and crawling, she still didn't want either foot to take any weight, or touch
anything at all. If she was still, the pain brought tears. If she knocked
either foot the pain became bright enough to blind.
Concerned
yourself living, not dying,
she thought.
Death's got enough on his
plate.
Those
distant fires and the dried-up traffic weren't hard to understand. People dying
all over. O'Dell's work?
No
doubt at all.
It
was just hard to mourn, even cry, when you were busy mourning for yourself -
all the things you lost, all the pain you feel, your hunger and your fear - a
mind gets overfull, sometimes. We bail our thoughts out so we don't sink.
Crawl,
then,
she said, almost baiting herself, winding herself up. Minds need to
be tricked sometimes, too, into doing things they rail against.
In
the distance, small shapes moved over the fields, roaming wild. Herds, but
people, rather than animal.
But
wild, for sure.
'Crawl,'
she said, not needing trickery any longer.
She
did. Hands and knees toward the abandoned Nissan. The short distance hurt.
The
car was empty except for two crochet blankets, like babies had from
grandmothers who knew the makings of such things.
The
world's going to need a hell of a lot of grandmothers,
she thought,
disappointed and angry, too.
She took the blankets, though, because
something was better than nothing. Not as good as food, water, or medicine.
They would die without these things.
She
swore, eyed the herd (still distant) and began the slow, aching crawl to the
next nearest car. Dark wasn't far off.
At
the next stop she found two chocolate bars in the glove compartment, and a
packet of Anadin in a side pocket. A pair of sunglasses, too. They were
prescription and no good for anyone, probably. When she took them off, the wild
people walking in the distance were closer, brighter.
Time
to get back.
Those
people weren't her friends. The first of many people who weren't friendly. In
those first few weeks, the mad ruled.
*
The
maintenance room was cramped but it was beneath tons of concrete and steel, the
door hidden in shadows during the day and close enough to invisible at night. There
were plenty worse places to wait on the apocalypse.
Nights
darkened after the fires died down. No one came to fight those blazes. They
burned until there was little left for the fires to feast on. The crazed forgot
the lighting of fires, then, almost rabid in their madness, and their fury.
Some recovered quicker than others, some not at all, and some
liked
it.
But
O'Dell brought new fire.
The
herd thinned. The strongest would survive...but the weak, too. Deer and
wolves...a place for all in the new world.
*
The
three survivors slept like people did before electricity, or even candles -
when it got dark, they closed their eyes and slept or listened for noises in
the night. They ate the way people had before times of plenty - when they
could.
The
small stocks of food that Francis' stole or found or scrounged did not last. They
spent long, slow days by talking and telling their stories out loud and in
their heads. Healing was a large part of it - willpower and time and luck - but
mostly will. The mind leads and the body follows because it is told to. Broken
bones, severed nerves, torn or excised flesh...these things never heal
completely. Injuries like that are pains that can be mastered, though. A limp,
or writing re-learned. It takes months or years, perhaps, but people adapt, and
that fact remained true.
They
waited to see if they'd die. If they didn't, they weren't going to.
Only
once did anyone scream closer enough for them to hear. High-pitched, but a man.
A few days later Francis found the man and didn't vomit or cry and knew she
could handle it.
Still
handling it
, she thought, but that night she woke from a nightmare and
screamed just as the dead man had.
She
took to roaming in the dark after a fortnight. In the day, she could see
danger, but it could see her, too. Somewhere out there, the mad roamed and she
didn't want to endure what they would do.
She
thought of the Kssh-Ksash man. Questioning, hungry.
He
was dead, but others weren't - not yet.
*
Edgar
slept, sometimes raving, sometimes lashing out with his left arm, scattering
paint, glue, tape - things long forgotten, perhaps for road crews or used by
the men who attacked weeds along the roadside with industrial-sized strimmers.
Edgar
swore at Francis, even George, with the hardest, cruellest words he could find.
He heard the words that tumbled from him and hated them, someplace deep that he
couldn't reach; calm and peace a deep, clear pool lost under a cover of oil and
scum.
His
infection raged. He sweated and smelled rot in his ruined arm. Sometimes
Francis was there when he woke. George, always.
His
respites were few, though.
But
hospitals were things of the dying world. Will was all they had.
*
While
Edgar raved and burned inside George reached out and took away the worst.
He
hurt, but Francis was right. He didn't complain because he was muted, and
paralysed. But he
did
hurt.
He
had something else to pull him through, though.
Wait,
George. Wait. It will get better.
That
voice was older, and the voice that always seemed to know what was true and
what was not - the voice wiser than George's eight years by far.
Those
older thoughts knew that Francis would always hobble, and Edgar's right arm
would end as a dead lump that hung from his side and that George himself would
be just fine. Francis and Edgar were mortal.
What
was he? Something more than human...or less, or a short sideways step from a
twisting ladder?
None
of them knew.
Telepathy,
regeneration, precognition.
'If
one thing can be true,' Francis asked on one of those long, slow nights,
shortly before they left their own small bunker, 'why do the other things have
to be a lie?'
If
one remarkable thing were true, could others be equally possible?
Edgar
thought they could.
*
Francis
tried to find some kind of feeling, to cry, even, when the rain came, heavy
with the ash of distance cities.
She
couldn't.
Instead,
she concerned herself with survival.
'We're
going to have to move on,' she said. George watched her and Edgar (brighter, if
only a little) and listened. Francis moved easier with the aid of a pair of
crutches she'd found nearly a mile away. The truth she understood, if they did
not, was that without the crutches she might not have made it back. Luck was
the only thing keeping them alive right now.
Maybe
George's will, too,
she thought. But that couldn't
feed
them.
'I'm
going further and further each day. While I'm sure the exercise is good and all
that - if I have to fight? If I have to run? I can't. That's as simple as it
gets. I could probably go a couple of miles. I could maybe take a car. But if I
do get in trouble...if I don't get back?'
George
and Edgar could see the truth of it. Without Francis, they were done.
And
the truth of
her
situation was different now. It took a while for her to
recognise it, even after all the time she'd spent with George, and now Edgar.
They
were her responsibility.
She
was the parent she'd never wanted to be, and if her children could not run...neither
could she. The underpass was simple, perhaps dull, and human minds sometimes
relish simplicity and a well-earned break from care and concern.
But
respite ends.
'You're
right,' said Edgar. George managed the smallest of nods.
*