The hospital was on fire. Great towers of smoke climbed into the sky. Part of it had already collapsed.
The infected owned the streets. They saw lone survivors taken down by baying packs of monsters.
Something with tentacles and too many legs was wrapped around a pile of bodies.
Magnus was shivering in the boot of the car.
Joel looked at him. “We won’t abandon you, mate.”
Magnus replied, “I don’t want to go back home and spread the plague. What if I infect my family? What if I kill them? What if I kill all of you?”
“We’ll sort something out.”
“You might as well stop and leave me by the roadside.”
“We’re not going to leave you, Magnus,” said Frank. “We’ll be with you until the end, mate. I promise.
We
all promise, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” said Joel.
“Yeah,” said Ralph, his voice a whisper.
There were tears in Magnus’s eyes. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be a monster.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Joel was the one who said it.
“What if we get home and they’re all dead?”
Frank looked at him in the rear-view mirror. “We don’t know what we’re going to find.” He thought of crows picking at Catherine’s torn remains on their front lawn.
“He’s got a point,” said Ralph. “Everywhere else has been fucked,”
“Everywhere we’ve
been
,” Frank said. “There could easily be places that are still surviving.”
“You believe that?”
Frank ignored the question, answered it with one of his own. “I thought Ralph was the only doom-monger amongst us?”
“Things change,” Joel said.
* * *
Deserted roads, and fields that had been harvested long ago.
Home.
They entered the village from the south. A signpost at a crossroads next to a tall oak tree. Birdsong. Familiar roads, lanes, and fields. Things remembered. Despite the sense of dread infused within each of them, they felt welcomed. The feeling of returning to where they belonged.
Smoke was rising from the other end of the village. Frank remembered Wishford and how that village was overrun by the infected.
No one emerged from the houses to greet them. No welcoming party. Many of the doors on many of the houses had been ripped from their hinges. Smashed windows. Dried patches of blood. The signs of ruin they had grown accustomed to.
Silent houses of people they knew.
As the car coasted past Silver Street and onto Middle Street, the engine died and rattled to a stop. As if it was meant to be. Magnus was the last out onto the road, breathing slowly and holding his wounded shoulder.
Florence glanced up and down the street. “It’s like my village. Where’s your house, Frank?”
“At the other end of the village, along with Joel’s house and Magnus’s house.”
“The poor end of the village,” Ralph joked, and no one laughed.
Frank looked down the street. The church spire jabbed towards the sky. He saw movement near the front of a garden. The others saw it too, and turned towards it.
A dog emerged from between two cars, padding onto the road, sniffing the ground. A black Labrador.
“That’s Al Copper’s dog, Stumpy,” said Ralph. “Look at its tail.”
Ralph was right. Al Cooper was one of the drunkards that frequented the pub almost every night. He and his dog were inseparable. The Labrador’s tail had been bitten off by a badger a few years ago.
“So, where’s Al?” asked Joel.
“He might be around here somewhere,” said Ralph. “But he might not be the same Al that we know.”
Stumpy saw them watching him and raised his head. His ears pricked up and he sniffed the air for their scent. Magnus stepped forward.
The dog growled, his ears flattening against his head. His legs stiffened. He stared at Magnus.
Magnus stared back at the dog.
Stumpy turned away whimpering, and ran away down the street.
“I hope he survives,” said Ralph, watching the dog disappear. “He’s a good dog.”
They came to the village hall on Church Street. The doors were hanging open and there was a dead body at the top of the steps leading up to the hall, unrecognisable due to the severe mutilation inflicted upon it.
More bodies inside the hall, left where they had fallen, but not left untouched by the ravaging hands of the infected. The floor was slippery in places, sticky in others. Arterial spray on the walls, insane patterns of red. The men looked for their loved ones but couldn’t identify them. If they were here it would never be known.
Frank stepped back from the smell. His eyes were stinging. He breathed through his mouth.
Joel was crying and sniffling, wiping his face. “I want to wake up. Please let me wake up.”
Frank put one hand on Joel’s arm. He looked at Magnus, who had retreated from the doorway to stare into the sky.
Magnus said, “They’re up there in the clouds. Above the clouds. They’re up there waiting. I can hear them. They’re speaking to me. Speaking to all of us but only some of us can hear them.”
His skin was radiating heat, slick with fever. He closed his eyes, took in a breath heavy with exhaustion and sickness. His body was trembling. He had lost weight. The corners of his mouth flinched. He spat on the ground; yellow sputum flecked with red.
“Magnus?” said Frank. “Are you okay?”
Magnus opened his eyes. He swallowed. His skin pulsed. He wore a defeated smile. Tears in his eyes.
“Not long now.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
We’ve all come home
, Ralph thought.
They arrived at his house first. He made the others stay on the street; he wanted to go into his house alone. Frank nodded in understanding and let him go.
He halted at the garden gate, composing himself, gathering his thoughts. His heartbeat was fast and strong. Adrenaline made his arms and hands tingle. He breathed through his nose, filling his lungs with clean air. For the moment, the entire world consisted of just him and the house.
The garden was just as it had been when he’d left. Mum liked to plant and to tend the flowerbeds, but Dad was in charge of the lawn and he was proud of it.
Ralph didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay by the gate and hold onto the thought that his parents were alive and uninfected; that they would be inside the house waiting for him. He would walk through the door and they’d be sitting down in the living room, watching one of the old Peter Sellers films they enjoyed so much. Dad would be in his armchair with a cup of tea and a small plate of chocolate digestives. Mum would be sitting on the sofa, sipping Bovril and petting their cat, Gus. They would be in there and they would welcome him home, and Mum would make him a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich with brown sauce. Even Gus would welcome him home with an uninterested glance and a swish of his tail.
Past Mum’s hideously beige curtains, he could see part of the kitchen and the living room. He looked for movement, but there was none. The red front door didn’t open for him. No welcome for the returning son.
This house was ingrained in his memory. This house where he lived; where he grew up. This house where his childhood memories were made and treasured.
Ralph opened the gate and then walked up the garden path. He stopped at the front door, laid one hand upon it. He turned the handle and the door opened inwards. A breath of old air met him.
He stepped into the house. An oppressive silence, like a break between screams. He moved slowly into the living room. Two empty armchairs and two empty mugs. The television was dead. Old photos in silver frames. A four-day-old newspaper on the floor. Shelves of autobiographies and history books. His father’s slippers next to the fireplace.
French windows looked out onto the back garden. He remembered playing football with Dad out there when he was a boy. There was nobody out there now. He wondered where the cat was. He checked every downstairs room but couldn’t find his parents.
He trod lightly on the carpeted stairway. He reached the landing and paused outside his parents’ bedroom. A basket of dirty laundry and a cheap painting on the wall. The door was closed. He didn’t want to enter. He listened for any sound and was disappointed with silence. He steeled himself for a terrible sight. He opened the door. The smell of rot greeted him.
I hope you’re both dead…
His father was face down on the bed. He’d been partially eaten and his spine was exposed, dull white nubs of bone showing through yellow fat and the red flesh of his back. The back of his neck had been gnawed away. His father’s killer had ripped through his clothes to get into him. Bare feet and callouses. Grimy soles. The wonky big toe on his right foot. Long toenails; Mum had always moaned at Dad to cut them more often.
Both bedside lamps and the pillows were dotted with dried blood.
His father couldn’t be dead. A part of Ralph refused to believe it. He didn’t want to turn his father over and see his father’s face. He didn’t want to see the last expression his father wore as he died.
Ralph stared at the corpse until a sound from the bathroom stirred him.
He found his mother lying in the bath. She was covered in blood. Her eyes were dark pools and she hissed at Ralph through a red slash of a mouth.
Ralph’s heart felt like a bag of stones. He held his ground, feet shifting on the linoleum floor.
“Mum,” he whispered. “Mum, it’s me. Ralph.”
She was naked. Her fingers were elongated and tipped with onyx claws. Her right arm was hanging over the side of the bath, dripping blood onto the floor. His skin was pale and mottled with grey. He felt embarrassed at the sight of her sagging breasts and wrinkled stomach.
Shit, piss and blood filled the toilet.
His mother reached for him with her right hand.
Ralph shrank away from her.
His mother let out a plaintive mewl. She was one of
them
now. And in a second of pure white-hot agony, he realised his mother was gone forever.
He walked to his bedroom and reached under his bed, groping amongst the porn magazines and old James Herbert and Shaun Hutson paperbacks. He pulled out the baseball bat and gripped it in both hands. The base of the handle was wrapped in duct tape for better grip. His initials were carved into the wood. He returned to the bathroom, every bit of him screaming to run away, but he wouldn’t. He had a job to do.
His mother waited for him. She reached out to him again, and there was something like recognition in her dark eyes as Ralph stood over her. Her mouth opened; her tongue emerged like a gleaming serpent from a cave, picking scales of dry blood from her chin.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” he said. “Thank you for everything. I love you, Mum.”
His mother’s face was pathetic and full of woe. Maybe she whimpered. Maybe she said his name.
He brought the bat down on her head. His mother’s skull gave no resistance and her body jerked as her nerve endings flared for one last time. A soft moan left her mouth. A sigh of relief.
Ralph finished her without hesitation, forcing all his strength into the final blow. He stared at her body. This broken, diseased thing that had once been his mother. He pulled on a pair of gloves, carried her to the bedroom and laid her down next to Dad.
Ralph covered them with a blanket and said goodbye.
After grabbing some bandages, gauze and painkillers for Magnus, he raided the alcohol cupboard for the last bottle of vodka, then pulled a photo of his parents from its frame and put it in his pocket. He guzzled a few mouthfuls of vodka, savouring the burn in his chest. He punched himself until his face was sore and tender, and he enjoyed the pain because pain was life and life was pain, and one could not be without the other.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
They walked past places remembered from days gone by. They checked the church and found it empty. They found a man lying by a woman’s grave, his throat cut by his own hand. There was a photo by his body. Frank didn’t look at it for too long.
The pub, The Duke of York, was deserted. There were smashed glasses and bottles on the floor, upturned tables and chairs. Blood on the floor and on the bar, but no bodies. Frank stared at a human ear left on the bar, like an offering for them. He covered it with a towel used to clean up drink spillage.
They arrived at the street where Joel and Anya shared a semi-detached house. Fallen leaves flittered upon the road. A plastic bag coasted past. The breeze was cold and intrusive, reaching inside Frank’s collar and stroking the back of his neck.
Smoke dirtied the air, made it thick and acrid.
Joel’s house was burning, along with the house next to it. Joel ran down the street and fell to his knees before the raging fire. When the others caught up with him, he was crying and biting down on his left wrist. Frank crouched next to Joel, grimacing at the heat pressing against his skin. The fire’s voice was deep and growling. Flames leapt from the shattered windows. The roof had collapsed; the chimney had toppled and broken on the road. There would be nothing left, save for ash and carbon, once the fire died. The fire heated the air until Frank could feel the back of his throat begin to dry and itch.