Savage: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel (34 page)

One of the two surviving tribesmen came at Pat
quickly, almost falling forward rather than walking.  Pat brought down the
heavy rock and obliterated the man’s head like a mango on the motorway.

Marge sliced the legs off the last dead man and then
stamped on his face until he stopped moving.  Once it was all done, the
three of them stood there, looking at one another and panting.  The gravel
had become a battleground and blood was everywhere.

“You never killed a bleedin’ one,” Marge said to
Ralphie.  “You useless
drongo
.”

“I was just getting warmed up,” he argued, before
staring at the ground and looking ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Pat, clapping him on the
back.  “Just get the beers on the go and we’ll say no more about it.”

“Should we call the wallopers?” Marge asked.

“No phone,” said Ralphie.

Marge shrugged.  “I’m sure someone will come by
eventually.  No point sweating it.”

Pat looked down at the six dismembered tribesmen and
felt bad.  Their people had traditions when it came to the dead.  It
felt wrong to leave them all hacked up.  It didn’t stop him from going
back inside the bar and finishing his beer, though.

When four other tribesmen turned up an hour later, Pat
felt a little better.  Ralphie got the new men all a beer and they holed
up in the bar together.

“The dead are rising,” said one of the men who said
his name was
Berri
.  He spoke the best
English and was the
one
who explained how half of his
tribe had gone to the city to sell wares, but only a handful had come back; and
they had been sick and injured.  Before they died the sick men spoke of
chaos and murder in the city.  Adelaide was on fire and awash with blood
and terror.  It all sounded very dramatic.  Several hours later the
injured tribesmen had risen up as zombies and attacked the rest of the camp. 
Berri
and his companions were all that was
left.  They had tracked the six dead tribesmen to the watering hole and
were glad to have found them at rest.  Pat and the others had performed a
service by killing them permanently.

“So,” Pat said.  “It looks like it’s the end of
the world, then.” 
Berri
nodded earnestly. 
His eyes were wide and full of anxiety.  Pat let out a hearty laugh. 
“Don’t look so worried, old cobber.  We’ll be just fine.  This is
Australia.  Everything tries to kill you in Australia.  What else is
new?”

To that they all laughed and shared a drink.  The
men and women of the bush were as prepared for the apocalypse as anyone could
be.  They were already seasoned survivors and a bunch of zombies wasn’t
enough to get their knickers in a bunch.

Pat sipped his beer and had one last thought,
though. 
I wonder how my boy, Sally, is getting on?

T
he beard is lonely.  The beard
is hungry.  The beard is afraid.  Once the beard had a name.  It
might have been Daniel, or Dave, maybe Stephen.

He was just the beard now, though.  Ever since
he’d used his last razor, his bushy black beard had grown from the saplings of
stubble to the fuzzy behemoth that it was now.  It had become his identity
more than his name ever had.  He knew that if he were to ever meet other
survivors it was the beard they would see first.  The beard kept him warm
and reminded him that he was alive.  The dead did not grow beards.

The beard’s gold
Omega
watch, a gift from his
grandmother, had the day of the month on it, along with the time, but nothing
else.  All the beard knew was that it was the 3
^rd
.  Of
which month or even which year he did not know.  All he knew was that the
beard was long and getting longer.  Every inch it grew was another month he
had avoided the dead.  The beard had been alive inside the old fish shop
for a very long time.  The fish had spoiled and stunk so bad that it had
made his eyes water and his nose run at first, but eventually he had gotten
used to it.  The smell had eventually become part of the beard.  The
only thing that had kept him alive so long was the dried and salted fish inside
the shop: smoked haddock, pickled cockles, and other foul tasting sea creatures
that had fortunately not poisoned him up until now.  He was running low,
though, and soon the beard would have to leave.

He had been preparing to do so, summoning up the
courage over the span of days, when he saw the other people.  They were
far away in the distance, but he had spotted them from the second-story flat
above the shop in which he lived above the fish shop.  There were a dozen
men over by the church, trying to get a Range Rover started.  The beard
wanted to shout out to them, but the beard knew that they would not hear
him.  The dead would, though, and then the beard would be done for and
would grow no more.

But the beard had to leave soon.  The beard was
starving.  The beard was lonely.  The beard was afraid.

The beard made his escape.  He slid out of the
fish shop’s back door and ran from the building.  The group of survivors
were half a mile away and from the street he could no longer see them.  He
knew where the church was, though.  He had grown up in the village and had
visited the church himself on occasion, although it was only to appease a girlfriend
whose name he no longer remembered. 
Janet, her name had been Janet
. 
The beard remembered.

The beard passed into an alleyway that he knew would
take him between the old post office and the
Salty Cod
takeaway towards
where the churchyard was located.  If he kept up his pace, he would be
there in minutes, but it was the quickest he’d moved in months.  The beard
was short when last he had sprinted.  Doing so now turned his lungs to
choking syrup and he was forced to slow down to a jog and then a lolloping
gait.  It wasn’t long before the beard needed to stop completely and take
a breath.

The sounds of voices came from nearby.  The other
men were close.  The church was just up ahead.  The beard was
glad.  The beard was excited.

The beard was about to use his last reserves of
strength, to sprint towards the first men he had seen in a very long time, but
somebody jumped out and stopped him.  The person was rude and nasty. 
The other person bit the beard right on his arm and made him yell.

The beard recoiled backwards, clutched the burning
gash on his arm and found blood there.  The beard growled, angry and
afraid.  Bites were bad.  The beard knew, but could not remember
why.  But the beard knew bites were bad. 
Very
very
bad.

The person who had bitten him was a woman with a wide
smile.  The beard punched her in her face and threw her to the
ground.  The beard felt alive as he stamped on her head until she was not
alive.  Then the beard felt bad.  The woman had once been like
him.  He had his beard and she had her smile.  Now her smile was gone
and the beard was bleeding.

The voices from the church had stopped.  The
beard sprinted as fast as he could.  They could not leave without
him.  They were his only hope.  The beard was starving.  The
beard was lonely.  The beard was bitten.

But when he reached the church, the only thing he
found was the sight of a distant minivan, disappearing into the distance and
leaving the beard still alone. 
And bitten.
 
The beard was bitten.

The beard began to cry.  The beard began to
laugh.  Then the beard turned around and set off in the other
direction.  He could never hope to keep up with the men in the van, but
perhaps he could find where they came from.  Perhaps there were more
people nearby.  Maybe he had missed them all this time.  He wondered
if they were at the pier.  It was at the other end of the village, but the
more the beard thought about it, the more it seemed like a great place for
people to live.  The beard had been alone and afraid for too long, but he
was outside again now; it would do no good to go back into hiding.  The
beard was starving. 

The beard would head towards the pier.  Maybe he
would find people there.  People to help him and look after him.  It
would be perfect.  He wouldn’t be alone anymore.  They might even be
the beard’s friend and feed him until he was full.  The more and more the
beard thought about it, the faster he ran.  In his excitement, he couldn’t
help but let out a screech.  What he wanted now, more than ever, was to
find people and eat.

The beard was hungry.

I
t had been nineteen days since the
Kirkland
had sunk.  Edward knew because that was how many days’ rations he had left
with and he had just run out.  He was floating up the Irish Sea with no
food and no petrol, too afraid to take his chances on land. 
I’m almost
there, though.  I know I am.

Edward had enjoyed the safety of the fleet and once
thought that he would never leave it, but when a war had started with the pier
on the south coast, he realised that the fleet didn’t offer any real safety,
just the illusion of it. 

After the great warship sank, the several dozen
vessels of the fleet quickly scattered.  Many chose to form up again,
further out to sea, and retain their safety in numbers.  Edward chose to
go it alone.  He knew that the schism would get ugly.  The
consolidated fleet with a single leader had become a shattered outcropping of
floating fiefdoms.  Life would never again be pleasant on the sea. 
So he had set off alone. 
Old and alone.

At first Edward had no destination in mind.  He
chose to sail north because the British Isles
were
familiar to him.  If he’d journeyed south to the continent he would have
been lost.  So he had left the English Channel and entered the Irish Sea,
shivering against the Polar Maritime winds.

Once he watched the last remnants of the fleet fade
away, the isolation had set in.  Edward had always thought himself to be a
fairly self-reliant person.  He had kept few friends in his previous life
and had been single for several years.  He hadn’t always been so private,
but a broken teenage heart had left him emotionally drained and unable to
devote to building new relationships.  Still, he’d been happy enough,
sitting behind his desk, designing advert after advert for various companies
and magazines.  He liked his job, his pay, and his home.  He felt
little need to fill it with superficial relationships so that he could feel
better about himself.

But he quickly realised how much he needed other
people once he was alone on the sea. 
Whilst Ireland sat
off to his left and Wales to his right, neither landmass contained life of any
kind.
  Edward knew that beyond the coastlines there would be an
abundance of wildlife and, of course, hordes of the dead, but from out at sea,
the world seemed uninhabited, as if he were the only person left in the
world.  The loneliness seemed to crush down on Edward, making him want to
scream and shout.  Occasionally he did.

It was at his most desperate, about seven days in,
when Edward suddenly knew where he was heading.  The destination popped
into his mind like a zit bursting.  He would head to the place he loved
the most, yet had visited only once.  He would sail for the Isle of Man.

The Isle of Man was where he had met Elsie. 
Edward had stayed at her cosy bed and breakfast when he visited the isle to
meet a client interested in sponsoring the
Manx Grand Prix
who needed to
put forward a marketing brief first.  They had opted for someone younger
and more ‘tech savvy’ in the end, but Edward had decided to make a holiday of
it and stay a few weeks.  One of the upsides of his job was that he could
work anywhere with a phone line and Internet connection.  There was no
hurry to get back to his apartment in Croydon.

Elsie had owned the bed and breakfast since her
thirties.  Her mother and father raised her in the business and left it to
her when they died.  Elsie kept the place presentable all on her own and
Edward immediately loved it when he saw the open log fires and worn-down carpets. 
It felt like a real home, something he’d never had.  Love never came
easily to Edward and his work had consumed him as a younger man.  He had
grown old as a man alone and always wondered what it would be like to sit in
front of the fire with newspapers and slippers.  Elsie showed him.

Every morning he would awake beneath the thick duck
feather duvet, got dressed, and made his way down where Elsie would have the
fire already lit and a newspaper ready.  A mug of steaming hot tea would
await him, along with a plate of biscuits.  It was perfect.  The
simple, cosy life Edward had always wanted.  The only thing he lacked was
someone to share it with. Elsie had given him that, too.

About a week into his stay, the bed and breakfast had
been empty bar himself and Elsie.  The holiday season had not yet begun
and bookings were few and far between.  Edward had invited Elsie to eat
with him of the evening, and she had obliged.  Slowly, each night, they
would get to know each other a little better.  Like him, she had never
married.  Like him, she too was content, yet lonely.  She liked her
life but sometimes wished for company.  During the second week of his
stay, he had kissed her, and she had taken him into her bed.  They had not
made love, not that night, but instead they cuddled and talked until morning
arrived.  They slept until late afternoon in each other’s arms.  It
had been heaven.

Edward’s proposed three-week stay had turned into
three months.  He and Elsie were inseparable.  He even started
helping around the hotel, doing his own work in the evenings via phone calls
and emails.  It had been the happiest time of Edward’s life and he had
felt a change inside himself. 
A warmness
had
come over him; something that made him smile at strangers and giggle at the
cheek of children, where before he would’ve been offended.  It felt a lot
like being happy.  He’d always thought himself to be a happy person, but
he knew now that he had been wrong his entire life.  Being content was not
the same as being happy.

But then business had called.

A large oil company offered Edward the job of
rebranding them after a recent failure had tarnished their reputation.  If
successful, Edward stood to make a fortune.  He could retire and live with
Elsie.  She could retire too.  But Elsie did not want that.

She asked him to stay, to retire right then and run
the hotel with her.  He thought her mad.  He had worked his whole
life for an international campaign like this.  The big jobs all went to
the larger marketing conglomerates, but this oil firm wanted to go the ‘down to
earth’ route and work with someone on the ground – an everyday person. It
would be the culmination of Edward’s life work.  He and Elsie could be set
for the remainder of their lives.  But she did not want to be kept. 
She had her own business and she would rather him be the one to be looked
after.  Edward could not accept that.  He was a man.  He could
not just settle down and let a woman look after him.  Edward looked after
himself.

Angry, he had gone back to his empty flat in Croydon
and got to work.  Only a few days passed, though, before he began to mourn
what he had left behind.  The work wasn’t as fulfilling as it used to
be.  He missed Elsie.  He had made a mistake.

Fortunately, one phone call was all it took to make
things right again.  Elsie forgave his abandonment of her and wished for
him to return at once.  And he was going to do just that.  The oil
company would have to find somebody else because Edward was putting his flat on
the market and retiring to a cosy bed and breakfast with the woman he
loved. 

He was due to catch the ferry in less than two weeks,
to begin his new life once and for all.  Two weeks and he would be back
with his beloved Elsie.

But it took only one week for the world to fall apart,
and all thoughts of Elsie were replaced by the need to survive.  When the
dead rose, nobody got to keep their plans.  Nobody got their promotions at
work, wedding dates were forgotten, and distant lovers became
unreachable.  It all fell apart.  In the ensuing chaos, Edward had
been swept south to the coast.  There, he and a handful of survivors
sought the safety of the sea.  John, a postal worker from Milton Keynes,
had allowed Edward onto his pleasure cruiser and the two of them had eventually
come upon the
Kirkland.
  Back then the fleet had been their
saviour, but John died soon after from an untreated infection he picked up
after catching himself on a rusty rigging hook.  Edward sailed alone after
that, chatting rarely with the neighbouring boats and receiving his rations
once a week.  Then the
Kirkland
sank and he now lacked even those
interactions.

Alone and hungry, Edward accepted that he was going to
die soon.  The world had ended a year ago and he was just a
straggler.  The apocalypse would swallow him up eventually.  When it
did, he intended to be on land in a place that he loved – the only place
he ever felt at home, even if it had only been for a shot while.

The Isle of Man was just up ahead, looming on the
horizon.  He could make out Port St. Mary, his destination.  Seeing
the old fishing village immediately brought back memories.  He remembered
walking along the seafront with Elsie, hand in hand, and eating sandwiches at a
little place called the
Patchwork Café.
 He hoped it was still
there.  He could see no reason it wouldn’t be.  People may be gone,
but their memory still littered the land with its monuments.  Now that
humanity was almost extinct, even a mundane post box or cracked telephone booth
took on a certain antique quality.  They were relics, no different to the
scattered spearheads of Romans or the cracked vases of the Egyptians. 
The scattered iPhones of modern man.

Even the boats of the harbour glinted in the dying
sunlight like ethereal monuments to mankind.  From two miles out, Port St.
Mary seemed no different than the last time he had seen it. 
In fact I
can still see the hustle and bustle. 
The boats
manoeuvring around each other and old men fishing from the sea barriers.
 
I’ve been alone too long.  I am imagining things…

But the more Edward squinted, the more he could see
that he was not imagining things.  The boats in the harbour were indeed
moving.  The harbour walls were indeed lined with fishermen.  The bay
was alive with life. 

Impossible.

When Edward sailed into the harbour, men and women on
other boats began to wave and whistle.  As he got closer still, they
shouted out to him.  They asked for news, they welcomed him, they asked
his name,
they
told him jokes.  Edward tried to
shout replies to all of them, but he was overwhelmed.  He reached the
nearest jetty and threw out the mooring rope.  Immediately a man and two
young boys grabbed it and tied it to a hook.  Then they helped him
aboard. 

Edward’s knees were shaking as he stepped foot on
solid ground for the first time in a year.  He felt like he was going to
throw up, although he had not eaten since yesterday.

“Hello there, friend.  It’s good to see a new
face.  Tell you the truth most of us never expected to see one again.”

Edward eyed the father of the two sons and tried to
speak.  Eventually he had to force the words out of his mouth.  “Y-
you’re
all alive!  How…how…?”

“The infection never made it here,” the man explained,
understanding what Edward was trying to ask.  “There were three or four
cases brought by a couple of overseas couriers but they were quarantined before
they could infect anyone else.  We’re safe here.  We know what
happened on the mainland, but there’s been no danger here since it all
started.”  The man placed his hand on Edward’s shoulder.  “It’s safe
here.”

Edward started to cry.  There were no words to
express how he was feeling.  The veil of doom that had clung over him for
an entire year had lifted and safe and ordinary people once again surrounded
him.  He didn’t realise how much he’d missed ‘ordinary’.  He wept so
hard that he shook.

The other man went so far as to give Edward a
hug.  As he squeezed his shoulders, he said, “I can’t imagine what you’ve
been through, friend.  Have you been out there on the sea this whole
time?”  Edward nodded against the man’s chest.  “My God, and to think
we’ve all been here, safe and sound the whole time.  We’ve tried sending
out messages, tried to let people know we’re here, but we haven’t seen anyone
new in over six months.  We assumed we were all that was left.”

Edward pushed away from the man all of a sudden. 
In all of his emotion, he’d forgotten why he was here in the first place. 
“Elsie!”

“I’m sorry?” said the man.

“I need to go to the bed and breakfast.”

“Which one.”

“I…I just need to go.”

The man chuckled with confusion.  “Sure, let’s
get you settled and safe.  I’m sure you could use some food.”

“I don’t need food,” said Edward.  He ran up the
stone steps in front of him, heading up into the village above.  When he
reached the top, there were three-dozen people standing in the street watching
him.  None of them seemed threatening, but their stares made him feel like
some sort of alien.  He turned left, turned right, tried to get his
bearings.  As much as he had dreamt of the village and the bed and
breakfast, he did not recognise where to go.

But then he saw her.

Elsie was standing in the street, clutching a basket
of firewood and staring at him with wide eyes. 
She’s keeping the fires
lit.  She knows I love them.

Edward took a step towards her.  “I’ve come
back,” he shouted over to her.  “I was a fool for leaving, but I came back
for you.”