Bar None (10 page)

We come to a slew of wrecked vehicles, and beside the road I see the remains of a military helicopter. The rotors are clearly visible farther out in the field, detached but protruding from the ground like giant darts. The body of the aircraft is lying on its side down the embankment and across the ditch, burnt out and showing its charred metallic skeleton to the sun. Some of the crashed cars are similarly blackened, and I wonder how many people died here as a result of watching the helicopter plummet from the sky and explode. Dozens, probably. Even though billions are dead, such numbers still have more of an effect on me. A dozen is easier to imagine than a billion. I can see a dozen faces from my life, but a billion is beyond my comprehension.

There's a skeleton on the road. I see it at the last minute, thinking that it was a shred of cloth or a scrap of tattered cardboard, and I ride across it, wincing as the bones crush beneath my wheels. I look left and right at the shattered cars, trying not to wonder whose son or husband, daughter or mother I have just run over.
Roadkill
, I think, and the image does not sit well.

Something has come this way since the accident. I'm riding across wide swathes of melted tarmac where burning cars had once stood, but now they're piled at crazy angles along the side of the road, torn bodies huddled together against prying eyes. Lucky for us, otherwise the Range Rovers would never make it through. I wonder who it was, and when, and what they had been driving. I hope that the cleared route continues.

We're drawing closer to the large roundabout below the motorway flyover. And this is where our whole journey could change. If the motorway is jammed with abandoned vehicles then we will have to walk, and a trip that would take perhaps two days in vehicles would stretch to weeks on foot.
Can we really walk that far?
I think.
With everything that might be out there, can we go that far without meeting something or someone dangerous, or succumbing to hunger or thirst, or just giving up?
It's not a thought I wish to explore at any length, nor a situation I want to experience.

Right now, I could kill a pint of beer. Bluebird Ale from Coniston Brewery sticks in my head for some reason, a beer I have not seen for sale in many places.
Drinking atoms of Donald Campbell with every mouthful
, Ashley had once said, displaying the gruesome streak of humour she mostly kept in check. But it was a good beer, and we shared good times drinking it, and for a moment faster than the blink of an eye Ashley smiles at me and sees away the fears.

There's something else marring the surface of the road ahead. I frown and squint, sure that the sun is dazzling me and perhaps setting a mirage in my path. The road seems heavily textured, bubbled and spiked, and I roll to a stop. The vehicles halt behind me, and I hear the expectant purr of their motors. I hold up one hand and roll slowly forward.

The stretch of road is clear, so it's not somewhere scorched by a blazing car. There are no bodies, no debris on the tarmac, and then colour crowds in and I know what I'm seeing.

Shoots. Thousands of them, thin and sharp and spiked with bright green leaves yet to unfurl. Most of them have barely broken the surface of the road, but some are several inches high, thick at the base and pointed at the top. A few—maybe two dozen—would probably reach my knee, and these have started to spread and sprout now that they're free of the ground. I don't recognise them. The heads of these taller specimens have fattened leaves spreading from the bulbous tops and seeking the sun.

Trees? I'm not sure. I edge forward and kick out at a couple of the shorter shoots, snapping them off. Their exposed cores glitter wet in the sunlight. They've forced their way up through the road across a wide area, extending from here all the way down to the motorway roundabout. They're small, weak plants, and yet for some reason I feel reticent about riding through them.

Jacqueline toots her horn and I glance back. She's leaning from the window, hand outstretched as if to say,
What?
I shake my head, shrug and move on.

I cannot feel the shoots snapping beneath the motorcycle's wheels, but I know they are. I cannot even hear them breaking beneath the much wider tyres of the Range Rovers. We plough through this new spread of greenery and growth, leaving behind us the scars of our journey in crushed lines of life, and we don't even notice what we are doing.

We have seen no one else alive. There have been plenty of bodies in sealed cars, charred skeletons on the roadside, vague humps at the edges of fields bordering the road that could have been the remains of people fleeing something in the traffic. But we are the only living humans here. I feel like an intruder in this world, and I have already berated myself for thinking of it as a dead place. It's far from dead. Bereft of humanity, maybe, but perhaps all the more alive because of that. Birds flock and flicker through the air, and here and there I've seen the distinctive gatherings of stick and feather nests, resting in the arms of blackened bent metal along the road. There were the wolves a couple of miles back, and other large shapes move across the fields. Foxes, I'm guessing, and more deer, and perhaps cattle that managed to survive the winter and are now reaping the green benefits of spring. The roar of our engines startles some shapes into stillness, but others seem unconcerned at our passing. A family of rabbits sits beside the road and watches us drive past, eyeing the Range Rover wheels suspiciously.

High above, I see two huge birds circling. Buzzards, perhaps, though they look too large for that.
Eagles
, I think. But that's ridiculous. There are some wild eagles left in the northern reaches of Scotland, but . . .

But what about the wolves?

As I start slowing toward the motorway roundabout I see the unmistakeable outline of a person walking from west to east along the overpass. The shape pauses, looks our way and begins to run.

"So why are we still alive?" Cordell asked. It was our fourth night at the Manor, and the first night we were all there together. Jessica had come in that day, cycling down the lane and spotting me standing on the folly's balcony. She had stopped and zinged her bicycle bell, waved, and turned in the gates. I had smiled, delighted at the innocence of such a gesture. Humanity lay dead and rotting around us, and here was this woman, riding her bike and waving as though she was on a summer bike ride before lunch. It was the first time I'd smiled in almost a week.

"Don't know," the Irishman said. "Maybe we've all got something in common. Something in our blood. Makes us immune. I'm a Celt, what about you lot?" He smiled at Cordell, who scowled back.

"No need for that," Jacqueline said.

"I'm jesting with you, that's all," the Irishman said. "I'll not take the piss unless I like someone, and I like you all. How's that, then? I'm not the easiest to please, when it comes to meeting new folks. I'm stubborn and I don't suffer fools gladly."

"No fools here," I said.

"You're right!" the Irishman said. "No fools here. Five of us, and no fools."

Jessica tapped her beer bottle with her wedding band, frowning. "I've been thinking about this a lot," she said. "I've cycled maybe a hundred miles since the end, across South Wales and through the Brecon Beacons, and I've not seen anyone else. No one. I was really beginning to think I was the only one left alive, and I tried to understand why, and I came up with the idea that maybe I was dead. Dead, and haunting the mountains. And maybe everyone else was dead too, and they were haunting other places. Or the very same places, but I just couldn't see them. Maybe everyone haunts their own version of the world."

"Six billion worlds to haunt," Jacqueline muttered.

"Well, I'm not dead," Cordell said. He leaned across and punched the Irishman on the arm. "Dead?"

"Not me." The Irishman took another swig of his beer. "Damn, that'd taste nowhere near as good if I were."

"Something in our past?" I said. "I had whooping cough when I was a kid. Got a steel rod in my wrist from where I fell off a skateboard."

"I had meningitis," Cordell said.

"So did I!" Jacqueline said.

Jessica shook her head. "I've always been very healthy. Colds and bugs, and aches and pains as I get older, but I've never had what I'd class as an
illness
."

"Perhaps that's it," I said. "We're all unusually fit and healthy."

"I had breast cancer," Jacqueline said. "Five years ago."

We sat silently for a while, and all five of us took a drink at exactly the same time.

"So are you all clear?" Cordell asked.

Jacqueline nodded, smiling. I liked the expression on her face right then, but it would be so rare.

"Maybe it was something we ate," the Irishman said. He snorted, took a drink and started laughing, spitting his beer across the table. We joined in, and we ended up having a good evening. From then on we gave up trying to fathom why we seemed to be the only survivors of the human race.

No fools here
, I said. And I was right, none of us were fools.

The people we meet on the slip road up to the M4
are
fools. So that's that theory blown out of the water. They're fools because the first thing they do is reach for their guns.

And then they start shooting.

It takes me a few seconds to realise that the shots are wild and panicked, but I also know that they've got more than air rifles and shotguns. I've only ever heard automatic weapons fired in movies, but the angry rattle is obvious, and I feel bullets hailing past my head as I fall from the bike. I protect my head, roll, and drag myself to the side of the road. I stop when I hear the ping and crack of bullets striking metal. I've come to rest behind an overturned car, and I sit up and look back down the slip-road.

Jessica and Cordell have already driven below the overpass, out of the shooters' line of sight.

Great idea
, I think.
Great idea of mine. Drive up on my own to show we're not a threat. Fucking great
.

I was still a hundred meters from the road block when they started shooting, but I'd seen enough. There was a heavy pick-up truck and an ambulance parked across the road, a double-decker bus head-on between them, and beyond that several caravans and four-wheel drives. The shooting came from the upper deck of the bus.

Down the road, Cordell peers cautiously around the corner of the bridge. I raise my hand—not too far—and he nods.

The silence is shocking after the thunderous gunshots. My bike has stalled, and the only sound is the idling motors of the Range Rovers out of sight beneath the motorway. Maybe they are already planning on how to get me away from here . . . but I hope not. The shooting had started wild and it missed me, but the shooters have had time to gather their senses. And the Rovers are much larger targets.

Cordell glances around again and I wave him away. Shake my hands, shake my head, trying to convey my thoughts:
Don't come up this way
. He nods and disappears again, and I hope he understood.

"Hello in the bus!" I shout. There is no response. No more shooting, and no answering shouts.

Are they circling around to me now? Crawling along the ditch to my right, or up on the motorway bridge to my left? I look up at the road barrier, expecting to see a head and gun peering over at any minute. There's no way they would miss from up there. I could run, I suppose, and trust that their inexperience would not let them hit a moving target. But it's not a scenario that offers much comfort. I don't want to die with my brains splattered across warm tarmac. I don't want the others to see me shot down, and leave me as they drive in the opposite direction. I don't want to be just another fading memory in their tired minds.

"Hello in the bus!" I shout again, trying to inject some urgency into my voice. My only answer is a metallic clatter and a curse. The only blessing is that it sounded as though it had come from the road block, and not closer.

I look up and see a flock of birds making patterns against the blue sky. It's a big flock, and I'm not sure I've ever seen so many birds together before. Swifts, I think. Picking flies from the air, or maybe communicating in some way I cannot imagine.

"See the birds?" I shout. "I'm as harmless as them. We're not here for trouble, and we don't want to hurt you."

The gun cracks in again, and a dozen bullets rip into the car or ricochet from its flaking shell. I roll into a ball and pray I'm hiding in the best place. The shooting fades away to stunned silence once more, and I find no holes in my body.
Holy shit
, I think,
I'm being shot at!
My jacket is grubby, and the white shirt beneath has picked up a heavy smear of oil from somewhere. I think of Bruce Willis and begin to giggle. That's not good. Giggling to myself when someone's trying to blow my guts across South Wales . . . that's not good.

I glance downhill and Cordell is there, peering up at me and waiting for me to move. I raise a hand again and he nods and disappears. He'd been carrying the shotgun that time.

"Fuck's sake!" I shout, and it's a sudden sense of panic more than an attempt at communication.

"Stand up!" a voice shouts.

"And have you blow my head off?"

"I can't hit the side of a barn, old man."

"I'm forty-five! I'm not old."

"You're bald!"

"I was bald when I was eighteen!" My face is pressed close to the tarmac and I can see ants marching in a line. Some of them carry pine needles, others carry dead ants. They're larger than any wood ants I have ever seen, and I wonder where their nest may be.

"So stand up!"

"Are you going to shoot?"

"Are you going to eat us?"

Eat?
I frown, shake my head. Did he really say that? "
Eat
you?"

Silence, and then some muffled voices. I hear a clang of metal on metal again, and then a motor starts uphill from me.

I freeze. Listen. It sounds like a big diesel engine, perhaps the bus. If they choose to drive down and ram the car I'm hiding behind I'll be squashed flat. The ants march on before my nose, and I know that they'll survive.