Amidst the falling dust (The Green and Pleasant Land) (7 page)

“Mr Kessler” I returned his greeting. The others came running as soon as they heard the voice from the speakers. “Patrick” said my former CEO in a friendly tone “What are all these people doing in my office?”

“Trying to survive Mr Kessler...sir, where are you?” I ask still in disbelief at what I am seeing. “Far away Patrick, far away and safe”.

“Well that's good to hear sir, I wish that the same could be said of us, Edenpark has been infested Mr Kessler, we are in here looking for the keys to your car in order that we might escape?” The blond billionaire mulls this over thoughtfully.

“My heart, my heart goes out to you Patrick, truly it does...but survival, survival is not for everybody my boy, sometimes it is easier to accept your fate, in times such as these, really there is no escape.” I do not get a chance to respond. I have felt his hot breath coming over my shoulder the whole time and after what was just said there will be no containing him.

“Well bugger you very much Mr CEO but some of us want to survive anyway if it's all the same to you, so be a good chap and tell us where the god damn keys are would you?!” Tasker almost screams into the webcam and covers the screen in spittle as he does so.

“And who are you?” says Kessler apparently unphased by Taskers rage.

“Lieutenant Tasker, British Army”

“Ah, a military man, well I am sorry to hear that your brave endeavours are coming to an end, perhaps you should turn that weapon on yourself, after putting your comrades out of their misery first yes?” I can scarce believe that I am hearing, Stefan Kessler had always seemed like a mild mannered compassionate man. Despite his calm smiling demeanour there was no mirth or mercy about what he was saying, he seemed to be speaking to us in the same way that a scientist would address a lab rat.

“Mr Kessler,”

“Yes Patrick,”

“Eight years ago on a company retreat in Eastern Europe we went white water rafting on the Danube, do you remember that sir?” Stefan nods.

“You will recall that you fell from the raft and struck your head. By the time you came to you were in the hospital, do you remember that also sir?” Again he nods.

“Stefan, I was one of the people who jumped in, I helped pull you from the water, I pressed my mouth to yours and I literally breathed life back into your body”. I let the silence hold for a moment or two before adding “That sir, was an act of compassion.” I do not need to elaborate, he gets the point, I just hope it is enough. I hear several voices from the background on his end of the transmission and Stefan appears to be listening and nodding to someone off camera.

When he looks at me again the smile is gone and a slight frown furrows that surgically perfected brow. “In the private bathroom there is a towel cupboard. The wall at the back is false, behind it is a ladder which goes down to an escape tunnel which leads out to the hills well beyond Edenpark.” The others move straight away. I sigh a relieved sigh which is cut short by the banging on the office door. They have arrived.

“Thank you sir, goodbye and I hope to see you again one day”, the smile is back on Stefan's face but he shakes his head at my statement. Just as I make to move away he speaks. “Patrick” he calls.

“Yes sir?”

“Fey Le Nar raen” he says before the screen goes dark. I carry my confusion with me as I reach the bathroom, see the broken panels at the back of the towel cupboard and follow my comrades down the ladder which leads into the gloom of the escape tunnel.

There is a light on the horizon as I exit the tunnel into some hills just to the north of Edenpark. The site is far away, yet I can still see the terrain around it shifting slightly as the cadaver swarm ebbs and flows around the pyramid. The tunnel had been long and dark but the passage was smooth and well built. I tripped and stumbled under my own steam not because of any architectural flaws in Kessler's escape route.

The others did not wait for me, I was not surprised, I could hear them getting further and further ahead the whole way up the tunnel but I did not call out, I would not shame myself any further. There is relief as I see them sitting waiting for me as I emerge, the relief does not last, as soon as I am in the open they are on their feet and start surging down the hillside towards a nearby farmhouse. Thanks for the rest guys.

Edenpark was a revelation on more than one level. Pendragon Systems was a progressive company, it did not believe in standing still or having its progress come about as a reactionary measure. Pendragon wanted to control the market, to control the scenario. I'd always been a supporter of this proactive approach, but the events of the past day led me to question whether or not the lines had become blurred. Stefan Kessler and his company seemed to have been remarkably well prepared for an apocalyptic nightmare which no one, apparently, had seen coming.

I shiver as I stand under a tiny canopy on the side of one of the farms outbuildings. The rain pours steadily down the corrugated corridors and splashes noisily at our feet. Across the way Tasker and Trowler are fiddling with the engine of a run down looking Range Rover. Patricia, Mark and Daniel stand with me, they do not seem to be shivering, but all of us are silent, alone with our thoughts. Any attempt at conversation is struck down, for all I know we are all standing here thinking the same thing but we're just too afraid to broach the subject.

Or perhaps it's just me, perhaps I alone am worried and filled with fear, perhaps they are stoically staring out at the rain and thinking of successes to come, planning a way out of the mire. Perhaps not. But I am not yet dead, and will not be reaching into anyone's brain to seek out their thoughts any time soon.

There comes a throaty rumble from the car. Trowler gives us a thumbs up, Tasker pays us no heed at all, I honestly don't think it would make any difference to him if we came along or not.

The vehicle is cramped. We still carry a fair amount of munitions and supplies, gun barrels dig painfully into peoples ribs, boxes of ammo weigh heavily on our feet and will lead to a numbness that the rest of the body would envy if it knew what other kind of fates might be in store.

We drove to the top of the drive which leads out on to the main road. I volunteered to open the gate, once the vehicle was through I closed it back up and jumped in the car. Tasker was scowling, the others had grins painted on their weary faces.

“What?” I ask of the amused collective.

“Felt the need to close the gate eh old chap” says Mark Kirby.

“Ah” said I realising the source of their mirth “Old habits die hard”

“Old soldiers die harder” intoned Trowler and Daniel Sutton almost in unison. I nodded my head at the old saying and then with our fearless leader muttering to himself from behind the steering wheel we pulled out and started our journey.

Had these been better times then we would have jumped on the ring road outside Carlisle, pootled onto the M6 and zoomed south at high speed. But these are not better times, nor the same times, these are the hard times of our times. These are the days about which the poets would write and the prophets would be prophesying, if it wasn't for the fact they are all dead and trying to eat those that aren't.

So we took the little winding back roads. We were stopping constantly to force unoccupied vehicles or vehicles being driven by the truly dead, off to the side.

Back at the farm the discussion about our next step had been a short one. Trowler and Pat had floated the possibility that given our predicament the mission was effectively over and that perhaps the time had come to begin the long cross country hike to the east in order to try and somehow get back to the aircraft carrier.

Tasker said that the mission went on. He further explained that someone was broadcasting the radio signal from Ravensburg. If they had access to transmission equipment then they might have access to other things, like aviation fuel. Mark and Daniel had stayed silent because they agreed with him. I stayed silent because I was afraid of him. And so we headed south.

By back road and dirt track we eked our way south. I nodded off on occasion, I'd come to and look out at another field, another hedgerow, the patchwork of green and brown that was as much a symbol of Britain as all the other stereotypes. After many more hours than it should have taken we reached the first of the great lakes of the County of Cumbria.

It was getting dark as we came through Pooley Bridge at the north end of Ullswater. The wide body of the lake stretched out like a long black slug winding its slimy way south.

“We're stopping?” I said feeling like an idiot as soon as I'd said it. Tasker had pulled the car over to the side of the small road into some trees, of course we were stopping.

“It's getting dark, and much earlier than usual, my guess would be that we're in for a storm” said Trowler giving me an explanation. I nodded. The first rumble of thunder came and the rain started to lash down on the vehicle, some of the rain drops fell freely down onto the car, others cascaded in miniature waterfalls off a dozen different leaves before striking. Conversation was nearly impossible given the noise of the lashing rain, we lit no light that would give us away to any foe in the dark.

The only real option was to close my eyes and try to sleep. Dreams did not come easy and when they did they were a mimic of the horror of real life. Over and over my subconscious mind confronted me with images of what I'd seen on the display screen at Edenpark. Over and over I saw Vincent, as a puppy which morphed into a monster and ate me whole. Over and over I imagined my wife and sons last moments. Then just as the nightmare was at its deepest, just as my dream self drowned a welcome drowning another thought, a thought of razor sharp clarity entered my head and shook me awake.

The others were all sleeping or pretending to be asleep. Except for Patricia. She was looking up at the thunder split sky through the trees, watching the lightning intersect with the few visible stars in a display of destructive beauty.

“Patricia” said I leaning in close and whispering right into her ear. She nearly jumped out of her skin but recovered quickly. “What?” she hissed leaning in, seemingly annoyed at my intrusion.

“Back at the house, when I was attacked by the hound, why were you in the attic?”. Even in the low light of the night storm I could see her confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“When I was in the garden running away, I saw a figure and a light at the attic window?” She fixed me with a level gaze. Though she tolerated me with a little less open disgust than someone like Tasker I knew that she, like them all considered me to be a weak link in an unsteady chain. Even so there was a curious pity in her eyes as she leaned in.

“We never went into the house Patrick, we only arrived minutes before the incident and just stayed on the perimeter. No one went inside”.

There were plenty of rational explanations. Plenty of logical paths which I could have guided myself down. It could have been a vagrant, it could have been a cadaver. It could have been a trick of the light or it could have been a ghost. No. There was someone standing in the attic window with a candle. Cadavers have no interest in candles and as far as I know neither do ghosts. a living breathing person stood there, a person who up until now, in the middle of all the madness which had conspired against us since, I'd just assumed in the background of my mind was one of my fellow travellers.

In the hours since Patricia told me that they never set foot in the house I'd gone over it again hundreds of times. I'd fixated on that tiny blurred scrap of memory in my head. I examined the fleeting moment from every single angle, and as the mind has a tendency to do so, I started to make changes to my memories, where there was no face before I started to imagine many different faces. But it always came back to two, the two most prominent faces in my life, the faces who I had watched over in their sleep many times in my life, him and her, the wife and the son.

The thought that I might have tiptoed around inside the house, sniffing at the mouldy memories whilst one or both of them were in the loft brought me a mixture of hope and despair. I'd been so close, close enough that a man with wit and wisdom might have checked up in the attic, what with it being one of the more obvious hideouts in the house. Instead I'd stayed downstairs weeping into a rotten pillow, curse myself for a fool.

I must get back, I could think of nothing else as I sat there in the lonely dark. The storm passed and we had a brief respite beneath the stars. But barely had the last of the raindrops finished diving down from leafy heights that the clouds started to roll in from the west again. Within hours of the death of one storm nature gave birth to another right above our heads.

My mind resigned itself to a logical if slightly depressing fate. Should such a twisted luck have been suffered, should my wife or my son or my wife and my son live, still in our house. Then they had been there for many months, and hopefully they would remain, for as long as it took me to get back there. For as long as it would take me to gather the courage to flee from Emmanuel Tasker again.

Thinking about the lieutenant made me look up and glance in his direction. My eyes darted at each of them in turn, taking in the five silhouettes and pondering briefly the ridiculousness of our scenario. Cooped up in a car, in the middle of the nights second storm, the world had ended, all purpose had been lost. But still we sat here anyway, pretending. That's all we'd ever done, made a show of carrying on, giving ourselves missions and then clinging to them like life rafts.

Whereas the previous storm heralded the coming of an early sunset, its brother seemed to introduce us to a late dawn. The day barely climbed from the dark auspices of the weather front, but after a time I realised with shock that a new day was upon us. Barely a wink of sleep had been mine, but still I had the cramp and stiffness to show for a long stormy night in the car.

As they woke one by one they shared a look. A look that said they'd woken from a bad dream and wished that they could go back. A look that asked what they'd done to deserve to wake at all.