The Last Plague (20 page)

     They whispered their daughter’s name.

     The beeping of the heart monitor stopped and became an uninterrupted wail.

* * *

Frank’s eyes snapped open. His head throbbed with each heartbeat.

     Dark shapes overhead.

     The infected were upon him.

     Cold hands flailed at his arms and legs.

     One of the infected said his name.

     That was not possible.

     His name was spoken again. Louder. Clearer. A voice he recognised.

     “Frank! Frank, are you okay? Talk to me, Frank!”

     He opened his eyes. Three figures crouching over him. He was hallucinating, surely.

     Ralph, Magnus and Joel looked down at him.

     “Ghosts,” Frank muttered. “Lots of ghosts…” His mouth was dry, his tongue swollen like a ripened fruit. His gums were tender and his jaw felt bruised and sore. His stomach was a broiling mess of stinking juices. He raised one hand to a lump on his forehead and winced, then threw up on Ralph’s shoes. Coughed up bile, spit and the undigested dregs of that morning’s breakfast.

     “Charming,” said the ghost of Ralph. “Ain’t seen you in ages, and you chunder on my best trainers.”

     “Sorry,” Frank slurred, forgetting what he was sorry for.

     “Is he okay?” said Joel’s shade. “I thought he was dead.”

     “Broken bones?” said Magnus. He looked into Frank’s face. “Frank, are you okay? What happened to you?”

     “Looks like he got in a fight,” Ralph said. “And lost it.”

     “Let’s move him,” said Joel. “Get him off the street.”

     “The monster’s nearby,” said Magnus. “It followed us.” His face was loose like a poorly-made mask.

     Frank smiled at his dead friends. Ralph and Magnus hoisted him to his feet. The street around him was a spinning carousel. His bones felt brittle, his skin so tight over them it might split if his friends moved him too suddenly.

     “Hurry up,” said Joel. “It’s coming.”

     They dragged him down the street and climbed aboard an abandoned bus. Frank’s eyes bulged at the dead driver sagging over the steering wheel. The dead man’s uniform was straining at his swollen body.

     “I used to ride the bus to school,” said Frank.

     “We all did, mate,” said Ralph.

     He swooned, and the world became dark.

* * *

Frank came to on the seat of the bus. He could smell piss and vomit. Staleness. The peculiar musk of public transport that birthed images of sagging pensioners, grey-faced women, and chavs scowling at thin air. Then his own odour of old sweat and clammy hands.

     Ralph held him down. He shook his head and put his finger to Frank’s mouth. On the other side of the aisle Magnus and Joel cowered behind a seat.

     Something creaked at the front of the bus. Something had joined them. Frank peered around the side of the seat in front of him and looked down the aisle.

     In the aisle was a grey and naked bipedal creature with mottled skin and spindly legs. Once a man, but now something else. The sound of its breath was a wet gurgle. The top half of its skeletal body was all writhing tentacles dripping gelatinous fluids onto the floor. The creature turned its body towards them. Tentacles dotted with tiny suckers, and at the centre of the tentacles was a human face, grey and anguished, pulled tight across angles of bone. And, as Frank watched, the face opened like a fleshy flower to reveal a circular pink maw rimmed with tiny sharp teeth. An inner face. A whip-like red tongue squirmed within the maw.

     Frank felt his legs go weak.

     The creature turned away and appraised the dead driver. Its tentacles latched onto the man’s back, dragged his bulk from the seat towards its pink maw and red tongue.

     The dead man’s head vanished within the clutch of tentacles. His body jerked, trembling to the sounds of grinding and sucking.

     The creature plucked the man from his seat and pulled him outside to be dragged away.

     The men regarded one another, and they were silent.     

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

They stayed on the bus. It was quiet outside.

     “I thought you were ghosts,” said Frank. “I thought you were all dead. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you all.”

     There had been much back-slapping and man-hugs earlier. The camaraderie was a lift to his spirits. Frank felt some hope, for the first time in a while.

     Frank checked for his inhaler in his pocket and was relieved that it hadn’t fallen out. Joel’s wallet was there too. He handed over the wallet. Joel nodded tersely and thanked him.

     Frank thought about Florence. He tried not to think about what those men would do to her. Best not to linger on it. Madness waited on that path.

     “What happened to you, lads?” Frank asked.

     “What happened to
you
?” said Ralph, his face serious. Freckles of dried blood on his face. “You abandoned us; left us in that house with freaks in the attic.”

     “You shouldn’t have left us,” said Joel.

     “I’m sorry,” Frank said.

     Magnus looked at him. “What happened?”

     Frank recounted the events up to when they found him on the pavement outside. They were silent as he told them of the last two days; about finding Florence and rescuing her from Wishford.

     “Fucking hell,” said Magnus. “This is insane.”

     “That poor girl,” Ralph muttered. “She survives all of that carnage just to be abducted by a few perverts in a van.”

     “Monsters, everywhere,” Magnus said.

     “A plague,” said Joel. “It’s almost Biblical.”

     “Let’s not start that nonsense,” said Ralph.

     Magnus cleaned his glasses. “A virus.”

     “How is it transmitted?” asked Joel. “By bites? By blood and saliva?”

     “If it’s airborne we’re all fucked,” Magnus said.

     Ralph scratched himself. “You’re lucky to be alive, Frank. I wish you didn’t try to save every person who needs help. We need to look after ourselves, not other people. I told you that before you left us. I wish you would listen to me.”

     “Yes, I know, Ralph. But you don’t know what I’ve been through. You don’t know what I’ve seen. I had to kill a man who was eating his dead family. I’ve watched people get slaughtered by monsters. Florence lost her parents to the infected, saw them die, so I had to take care of her. I tried to protect her but I failed. Don’t talk down to me, Ralph. We’ve all made bad decisions and done things in the last day that we regret, so why don’t you just back off for once?”

     Ralph held eye contact with him. “I’m sorry, Frank. You’ve got some bollocks, I’ll give you that. I didn’t mean to…”

     “Don’t worry about it,” Frank said. “Doesn’t matter now.”

     “Kiss and make up, lads,” said Magnus. He grinned.

     Frank shook his head.

     Ralph grunted, looked away. He was holding the flare gun Frank had found.

     “Be careful with that,” said Frank.

     Ralph tapped the flare gun against his forehead and winked.

     Frank appraised his friends. Studied the small details that told of what had happened to them. They looked like he felt, and he felt like sun-fried shit in a shoebox. They were exhausted and stressed. Hunted and haunted. Pale faces and red-rimmed eyes. He wondered what terrible things they had seen. Ralph appeared to be coping better than Joel and Magnus, although there were dark bruises under his eyes, and his thickening beard made his face seem heavy and spade-like. There was a plain white plastic bag on his lap. The bag bulged.

     “What’s in the bag?” asked Frank.

     Ralph put the bag on the floor. “Not much. Things we’ve scavenged on the way here. A torch, a bottle of water, a packet of painkillers, a packet of biscuits…”

     “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

     “Yeah,” Ralph said.

     Joel was rubbing the left side of his jaw, a nervous tic that Frank recognised. There was something in his other hand, which was clenched into a fist. He was taking great pains to keep it hidden.

     Magnus was trembling and blinking his eyes. He ran his hands over his shaven head. He looked ready to drop. His jacket was torn and there were stains on his trousers. Frank tried not to guess what they were.

     In the distance, something roared.

     Night was coming.

     Ralph shut the doors.

     Time to hide when the darkness arrived.

* * *

“We managed to get out of Wishford,” said Ralph. He was looking at Frank, his face caught in shadow as the light faded. He told Frank about the attack on the rescue centre.

     “We were lucky,” said Magnus.

     “How did you escape?” Frank was sitting on a seat, sipping from a water bottle.

     “We hid in the kitchen, in a big cupboard where they stored food. We barricaded the door. The infected didn’t find us. We waited, listening to the screams. Then everything went silent. Eventually we crept out. There were only a few infected remaining at the school; they must have left in search of more victims. We managed to sneak outside and down the street. We were lucky to get out of the town alive. People were fleeing the town. We were running across the fields outside of Horsham when the bombs hit. Still can’t believe they firebombed a town.”

     “Things are bad, if that’s the government’s solution to the plague,” said Joel.

     “But to firebomb a town on British soil? This isn’t the fucking Blitz,” said Magnus.

     “There wasn’t a choice,” said Frank. “The town was overrun. The infected were everywhere. I saw them. We all did.”

     Magnus cleared his throat. “And that enormous thing in the sky,” he said. “We all saw it.”

     “What do you think it was?”

     “It was alive. It wasn’t a ship or a craft. It was organic.”

     “We don’t know that,” said Ralph. “It could have been anything.”

     Joel said, “Yeah, Ralph’s right.”

     “It was like a god,” muttered Magnus.

     “It can’t be a god,” said Joel. He went to say something else, but stopped himself. He shook his head. He looked sick.

     “It doesn’t matter,” said Ralph. “We have to worry about the things down here with us.”

     A few moments of silence. Almost full dark outside. They were four huddled darkening forms amongst the stinking seats.

     “It’s the entire country, isn’t it?” said Joel. “It’s everywhere.”

     “Seems that way, from what we’ve heard,” said Ralph.

     “You think it’s global?” Magnus’s voice was hoarse.

     No one answered at first. Then Ralph spoke.

     “That doesn’t concern us at the moment, lads. We have to get home before we start worrying about the rest of the world. They don’t care about us. Fuck them, for now. This is England.”

     “He’s xenophobic and borderline racist,” said Joel. “But he’s right.”

     “Suck my balls,” Ralph said. “But thanks for agreeing with me.”

     “I’m sorry about Florence,” Joel said to Frank. “Even when everything’s falling apart, people are still bastards.”

     “People are always bastards,” Ralph said. “Maybe even more so when things are bad.”

     Magnus was nodding.

     “Wish we could catch the men that took her,” said Ralph. “Fuck knows what they’ll do to her. I’d cut off their bollocks if I got my hands on them.”

     “She’s gone,” said Frank. His acceptance shamed him. He had lost Florence just like he had lost his daughter. He should be searching for her. But it was dark, the men would be far away by now, and Frank was terrified of the things lurking in the dark.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Joel awoke to the sound of helicopters flying over the village. He rubbed his eyes, yawned into his hand. A gradual increase in light as dawn broke outside. There was too much grey in the world and it depressed him.

     The country is dying, he thought absently.

     He checked to make sure his small crucifix was in his pocket. He couldn’t see the helicopters but the air trembled with their presence. They flew close to the rooftops, and by the time he rose from his seat they were gone.

     Joel looked at the other men. By the movement of their faces, they were dreaming. Magnus muttered something under his breath. Ralph’s mouth hung open towards the roof, catching dust.

     Joel looked at Frank and smiled. He was relieved that Frank was alive. They were all together again. Joel was adamant the four of them would never fragment again on the way home. He felt something like love for his mates.

     After checking his mobile phone, which was almost dead, Joel ate a biscuit and looked out at the street to the side of the bus. He thought of Anya and if they would be alive by the time of the wedding.

     Would there even
be
a wedding?

     Not if everyone was dead and the country was burning.

     He stretched the muscles in his face. He cleared his throat, wetted his mouth with short sips of lukewarm water from the only bottle in the plastic bag. He liked the quiet, before the others awoke. The village outside was a dead place and there was plenty of quiet. Only the birds in the trees lining the street broke the morning’s silence.

     Joel sat down and wondered what sights he would see today. He took the photo of himself and Anya from his wallet. He smiled at it. He missed her deep in his stomach. He put the photo back in the wallet and pocketed it.

     Then the infected came.

     Joel ducked down in the aisle. He froze. His heartbeat filled his head. He breathed slowly through his mouth, peering through the window on the right side of the bus.