Authors: Conrad Williams
Nick was still reeling, aghast at her attack. His expression changed
too, though, when he heard the squeals and yells, strangely muted
and muffled, as if the people releasing them were doing so while
swaddled within thick scarves or balaclavas. There was the
occasional metallic impact, as if a large hammer or pickaxe were
being swung into brickwork.
'Where are they coming from?' Nick asked, twisting around as if
trying to keep his eye on an irritating insect. 'I can't tell.'
'Underground,' Bo said, turning his attention to the house. 'This
must be some kind of vent for the tube. Feel.'
He was right. The fabric of the house was warm to the touch, and
vibrated with the movement of motorised exhausts. He put his ear
against the wall and the screams seemed perilously close, as if they
were centimetres away from him, on the other side.
'They heard me,' Sarah said. 'I'm sorry. I lost it. I didn't mean to
do that.'
'We need to leave,' Bo said.
They headed south along Frith Street, taking the path of least resistance,
despite Bo's wish that they should make as many jinks and
kinks as possible in order to put any pursuers off. Nick was right to
argue that they travel in as straight a line as possible. It would
minimise the possibility of coming across danger. Which was not to
say it didn't happen. Crossing Shaftesbury Avenue and heading down
to Seven Dials along an Earlham Street turned into an obstacle course
by a series of upturned market stalls, they were attacked by four
women wielding cleavers turned black with dried blood. One of them
clipped Tina's shoulder but didn't do much more than help open the
seam of her jacket.
'This way,' Bo yelled, dragging Tina with him. Her face was bone
china.
Sarah shepherded Claire and Lamb ahead of her, and became so
conscious of the lack of shelter at her back that her skin and scalp
tightened, waiting for the fatal blow. They were perhaps ten yards
away, close enough to hear the measured pattern of the women's
breath. Behind all that blood, the shreds of muscle and fat, Sarah
could see they were beautiful. You could fall in love even as you were
being ingested.
'We're not going to make it,' Nick said. His eyes were egg-large.
Snot was smeared across his upper lip. He was running just ahead of
the girls, whipping his head around to look over Sarah's shoulder
every few seconds. Just as she was sure she could feel the hot sweet
breath on her skin, the ghost of swiping fingers millimetres from
purchase, someone wailed sorrowfully off to their right. Everyone
turned to look. An old couple were stumbling through the shattered
remains of James Smith & Sons holding, between them, the hands of
a boy who could have been no older than five years. Umbrellas and
walking canes were ranged around their feet. The woman had
stumbled into a stand and spilled them. She was on the ground,
broken jags of glass sticking out of her knees. The man was pleading
with her, trying to get her upright. The little boy stood between them,
crying uncontrollably.
Sarah sensed a difference. The threat was off her, as swiftly as a
sudden change in temperature when standing beneath a shower. 'Oh,
no,' she said. But there was another voice, coming from a black,
foetid mouth in the ancient, lizard part of her brain, that was
whispering,
good, good, them, not us.
Bo had heard it too, and was acting on it. 'Keep going,' he said.
'Don't look. Don't fucking look.'
But she did look and, as they followed the curve of Shaftesbury
Avenue right before heading left up Endell Street, she knew she would
not forget the look of terror on the little boy's face as the women
changed course and opted for easier prey. The cleaver rose and fell,
rose and fell. At the sound, Sarah was thrown back twenty-five years
to an image of her dad digging for potatoes in their garden, the spade
hitting chunks of brick in the soil.
'Survival of the fittest,' Nick said, offering her a little smile. 'If it
hadn't been them, it would have been us. Would have been your
daughter.'
She couldn't bring herself to say that she thought it might be better
that way.
By now they were some way east of where they had planned to be.
It was getting late. The streets were becoming more crowded with
things needing nourishment and not that many people left to offer it.
Bo led them up the steps of a sports centre and through swing doors
into a reception area. When they were inside, Bo shut the doors and
shot the locks. They bolted through the turnstiles and into the female
changing rooms. Abandoned clothes hung from coat hooks, but there
was no blood here. No bodies. They moved on, through the showers
and on to the cool, tiled edge of a swimming pool that had been
drained of water. Their footsteps made weird, edgy echoes that shot
around the cavernous space and ricocheted off Sarah's nerves. A
single hand lay palely by the pool edge, like a peeled crab.
'The clever ones, the survivors, will all be inside now,' Nick said
to Bo, as if trying to persuade him that he had made the right
decision. 'I say we stay here till morning.'
'We might not have till morning,' Bo said, jerking his head Claire's
way. She had stepped into the drained swimming pool and was
hunched up in a corner, hugging her knees to her chin. A container of
brightly coloured swimming aids – floats, noodles, armbands – only
served to highlight the horrible porridge-coloured mess of her skin.
The egg was a horrid cobalt protuberance. Even at a distance of
around thirty feet, the others could see it beginning to move in the
groove of her armpit. Sarah was fascinated and appalled at the same
time. How did you cope with that sensation in your own body? Could
you even try? Was Claire already sloping through internal territories
of insanity? Black jungles that kept her busy, kept her from thinking
too much about what lay ahead for her? She was getting to know the
lay of a land that would be home for the rest of her life.
'You're right, though, we're pushing our luck out there. But we
need to find Claire somewhere cooler to sit.' As Bo spoke a suspicion
about what was happening, or an answer to it all, danced just out of
reach. He couldn't follow the thought back to its root; it got
cut off by his own skewed loyalty to the monsters and his increasing
fallibility. He felt close to vomiting again but managed to hold it
back.
'Of course,' Nick said, and the little smile he had given Sarah had
not yet vanished, 'it might be that they didn't attack us because they
recognised you. I mean, when you're trying to find your way around,
you don't stick one to the navigator, do you?'
'Believe what you want,' Bo said, his voice a tired rush. 'Those
who want to come with me will come with me. You go your own way
if it makes you happier.'
Now the smile did falter, as Nick looked around the group, and
Sarah saw that he had no confidence in offering anybody the option
of a splinter group led by him. He might be suspicious, but he was a
coward. 'I'll check the windows,' he said. 'See how secure this place
is. I don't want to run into a mouthful of cleaver again, not unless I'm
packing something that will give me the chance of a fair fight.'
Bo's nausea undermined him. He felt his weakness come through;
it was a fragile, etiolated feeling, like hot glass teased thin and long.
Lift his shirt and there'd be cracks showing in his skin, he was sure of
it. He left the pool's environs and entered one of the staff offices
behind the reception area. It was an uninviting room, coldly
decorated in stark, unimaginative grey tones, but anywhere away
from the others was good enough for him at that moment. Sarah
followed, keeping her distance, unsure of what was happening to
him, other than it not being good. She watched as he dragged a
wheelchair out from behind a desk and began to unfold it. He seemed
to be diminishing by the second. She was sure that the first time she
had seen him – admittedly skinny, but also purposeful, determined –
at the hospital, there was more to him than what she saw now. He
was a jumble of badly arranged bones beneath that hulking biker
jacket and flapping jeans. His appearance reminded her of childhood,
sneaking into her mother's room to try on blouses and skirts and
dresses that were many, many sizes too big for her. He fell into the
office chair. It was like someone finding their own off switch. He was
still. He looked like someone who might never get back up again.
Sarah returned to the pool and asked Lamb to stay with Claire.
She parried the inevitable protests and questions, promising she and
Nick would be back soon. Nick seemed to perk up, the admonished
dog given a tickle behind the ears, and bounded after her.
'Windows, then,' she said to him as they ascended a tiled stairway
to the first floor. 'There's probably a fire escape too. We need to
make sure the doors are blocked.' She shuddered. 'And that there
aren't any of those bastards already in here, waiting for the dark.'
'We should look for weapons too,' Nick said.
In a public swimming baths? Good luck
, she felt like saying, but
she didn't. Nick had been knocked back a little too much lately, she
thought. He was trying. But then she remembered how he had
suggested Claire ought to be killed back at Tina's flat, and she didn't
let herself get too sympathetic.
They found a storeroom containing cabinets that revealed nothing
more deadly than row upon row of hanging files. A fire extinguisher
was rejected for being too heavy and too cumbersome. The windows
were old, etched with a defunct company logo, but solid and barred.
Nick found a box of polythene-wrapped black sweaters and tossed
one to Sarah. 'I noticed you were shivering,' he said. She tore it open.
The legend
STAFF
was outlined in large white letters across the back.
She wriggled into it. It was thick and instantly warming. She took a
couple more for the girls.
'Thanks, Nick,' she said. 'I feel better already.'
'What happened with us?' he asked her, trying to appear casual as
he poked and prodded around more boxes and chests. 'Where did
everything go pear-shaped? I thought you and me. I thought, you
know ...'
'You thought there might be a fuck in it, at least.'
'You think I came with you all this way just to dip my wick? I
admit, after the other night, when you undressed in front of me.
When you asked me to kiss you. I thought something might develop,
yes – but I was thinking of more than just sex.'
Their search of the storeroom complete, they moved back into the
corridor. Up on the left were the doors to the public toilets. She
followed him into the gents.
'Love. Marriage. Kids. Old age,' she said, her voice echoing
against the tiles as the door closed behind them. Two cubicles. Two
urinals. A mop in a bucket. As weapons went, it was not promising.
The windows in here were all locked and barred too. You came for a
swim here, there was no escape.
'Maybe. Maybe, yes,' he said. 'After what we went through in
Southwold. After that connection.'
'Love is dead, Nick,' she said. 'Look around you. I doubt we'd find
a registrar able or willing to splice us together. We might find one
that wants to slit our necks. And five will give you ten that old age is
something we'll never experience. I'm not even sure about the next
ten minutes. I've enough love for my daughter, that's all.'
He stepped towards her and placed a hand on her breast. She
didn't move away. She stood her ground. 'What are you doing?' she
asked.
'Seducing you. Trying to make things right.'
She closed her eyes. 'Nick. We are in the middle of the end of the
world. People are dying. People are dying
right now.
I don't think Bo
is going to make it through till morning. And he's our best chance of
surviving.'
'I disagree,' Nick said. He was stroking her breast now, palpating
it through the thick cotton of the sweater he had given her, allowing
his thumb to snag the soft bulb of her nipple as he moved his hand
around its curve.
She was enjoying it, that was the galling thing. The last six
months had been a lonely, cold time spent watching the shadows
through the window or waiting for the phone to ring, keeping tabs
on her daughter, driving through the dark, driving through rain.
Running away. Running away. She had had no down time. No time
for tenderness or reflection. She had once been the kind of woman
who enjoyed long baths, glasses of red wine, music, books. She was
now the kind of woman who had no time for any of that. All of her
sensuousness had been driven out of her by the relentless pursuit of
sanctuary.
'Ah, Jesus. What the hell,' she sighed, and, lifting her sweatshirt,
she guided his hand to her bare flesh. They gasped together at the
sudden new sensation – the chill of his hand, the heat of her tit, the
softness, the tenderness – an intimacy that had felt as though it had
been deleted from humanity over the course of the previous few
weeks.
He drew her against him and pressed his hungry open mouth
against hers. She felt his groin grind into her own and she met it full on.
His fingers reached for her buttons and as he popped them open,
one by one, she pressed him back into a cubicle. She kicked the door
shut and flipped the lid of the toilet down. She pushed him back so
that he was sitting and quickly removed her jeans. Her thighs
slithered deliciously against each other. She was wet. He could have
been anyone. That was what made this suddenly okay. Let him
believe what he wanted. Let him think she was The One. He was a
moment of pleasure for her and she would take it. That was all.
The door of the cubicle swung shut, but not before she saw a
shadow lengthen on the polished, faux-marble floor tiles. It could
have been the outer door slowly swinging closed on its ageing
pneumatic hinge. It could have been Lamb or Claire coming to find
her, or maybe even Bo coming for a piss. She couldn't stop the
laughter in her throat. Nick moved back to look at her face, ever
the victim, a silent question in his own eyes:
are you laughing at
me?
Her need was so great that it blinded her to the poverty of her
surroundings.