The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) (10 page)

In his lap, open at the page he’d been reading, was a Bible – and as I looked around the room, wrenching my eyes away from him, I saw there were various crosses and framed religious passages. I returned my gaze to the corpse, taking a step or two. But I didn’t want to see the sections he’d been reading in that book, because of what I feared they might be; didn’t want to look upstairs – not just because the steps seemed as rickety as all hell, but because I was frightened of seeing something…
someone
in the bed. Maybe a wizened old woman, his wife. Not saying that makes any sense – and I probably should have made sure there were no nasty surprises – but it did to me at the time. So I simply sat down opposite the man and continued to stare at him.

As I did that, suddenly things started to take shape. I remembered what I’d seen when that woman had pressed her face up against the driver’s side window. Something spreading up her neck, across her face – like the rust on the car, but slightly different: dead skin, like that of the man’s in front of me. No, not just dead… decaying. The same was true of those birds on the ground, I now recalled. Some of them bald in places – which could have been due to the hard landing, yet something told me it wasn’t. Flashes of things in my head, connections being made. This man, my father, the woman’s face… The birds, the crazy people, Mum… The buildings outside that were in such a state of disrepair, and those falling buildings again… The hole in the motor, the holes in the road… flaking, cracking.

And then, I guess you could say I had a revelation. I knew what was happening, even if I didn’t know the reason for it. Everything – like this man, whether he’d died of natural causes or not; like my Dad had been after he’d taken his own life – was rotting away. The craziness that had been caused back in the facility, back in that town, had happened because the rot had somehow wormed its way into people’s brains – affecting them in the same way that terrible disease had affected my mother and so many others I’d witnessed when she’d been taken in. Maybe it had crept up the back, into the brain-stem – something that wasn’t visible straight away, something you had to
look for
specifically. It would explain the different kinds of behaviour anyway… and did you know – I certainly didn’t until I found out later on – that a bird’s brain and a human brain have similar wiring?

And brains, like machines – like a car or helicopter engine, or even a gun – only have to have one faulty, one malfunctioning part for the whole thing to go to pot. But it hadn’t just got into people, into machinery this… this
Rot
. It had got into the roads, buildings. Organic, non-organic. As incredible as it sounded, it was fucking up everything around us. I couldn’t prove any of this at that time, of course – for that I would need to do some research, maybe find books that could help, do some tests, but it all made sense to me. For the first time since I’d heard the alarms, that gunfire back at the facility, it all made perfect sense!

I don’t know at what point after I’d been thinking all this I dropped to sleep, but it was like my body needed to recharge, and now I’d reached this conclusion it could power down for a while. I remember dreaming about clouds again, about flying. No cats woke me up this time, however, I just opened my eyes when the sun came flooding in through the window, finding us in that living room. It had the capacity to make anything look beautiful, that light – another thing we all took for granted, every day – even that dead farmer, who looked so peaceful in his chair. I hoped then he’d gone before all this took hold, before the Rot did something to his brain; to his land. Probably hadn’t… but it did tell me one thing: that this fucking disease didn’t re-animate the dead. No people rising out of their graves to eat you in this apocalypse, thank fuck. So, you will never hear me say the ‘Z–word’, no matter what state these people find themselves in. Just doesn’t describe them. Dying, putrefying, but not dead.

I thought about burying him, saying a few words, but it seemed cruel to move him. This was his home, probably had been forever, and it felt right to cremate him inside it. Felt also like the fire would be doing something good this time, something cleansing instead of killing people as it had done at the facility; in the cellar. Out the back, I found a couple of tractors that didn’t look like they’d been used in an age – although in this new climate, how could you tell? – but I also found cans, some of which still had diesel inside. I spent the next twenty minutes or so pouring it onto stuff inside, starting with the old man, and then I dug out some matches from the kitchen.

As I walked away from that farm, leaving it burning up, I said a quick prayer for the man who had looked so much like my father – or like he would have looked before the undertakers cleaned him up. Wondered if there really had been a wife upstairs in the bedroom.

Wondered what I would find when I reached the next town or city.

Stop.

CHAPTER SIX

Record:

Once I knew about it, once I knew what to look for – instead of my eyes sliding off it; my mind filtering it out – I saw it everywhere on my journey. For example, I came across a lake covered in patches of what I thought was algae. Not all that unusual, you might think, but there was just something about this particular stuff. Wasn’t green for a start, it was a kind of purple-grey colour. I found a stick and poked at one of the denser bits, which wrapped itself around the wood. Sure enough, when I brought it out again, it was already starting to be eaten away, like I’d just dipped it in acid. I knew the SKIN would probably protect me even from this, but I wasn’t willing to put it to the test until I had no choice. Instead, I threw a stone into the centre of the lake, urging the water, the ripples, to tear into that Rot – to break it up. Did very little good; the infection was too strong and spreading all the time. But I had to believe there was a way to fix this, to fight it, to reverse it. That there was still hope.

I headed south, following my compass until I hit a main road and then a motorway. Sticking to hills which ran parallel to the long road, some of which were covered with grass that was turning brown – dying or already dead – I saw cars that had been either abandoned or their drivers had crashed them. Thought about going down and seeing if any would start, but it was too much hassle. The affected were flitting between them; some even crawling over lorries or coaches, as I hunkered down on the hillside and watched them through my binoculars. Each person, and every vehicle down there, was in a different stage of the Rot. With some figures it had accelerated, now covering half their faces, eating away the flesh in parts – so that I could see teeth and tongues through their cheeks. With others it was only noticeable if you looked really hard; tiny islands of Rot at the hairline – which wasn’t to say it hadn’t covered other parts of their bodies, beneath whatever clothing they had on. It at least backed up the idea that the virus spread at different speeds in different cases.

I saw more cracks in the roads as well, holes ranging in size from the crater-like one I’d seen before to some as small as hubcaps. The closer I came to the city this road was guiding me to, the more I could see how the virus had devastated the buildings. There was an office block, for instance, which had Rot climbing up the side like ivy up a cottage; here and there its insides had been exposed, displaying rooms with desks and chairs rather than organs and muscles – but the effect was the same.

I made a conscious decision there and then never to go up higher than the first floor of a building, and even then to be ready to make my exit quickly in case of tremors. Nothing that we had trusted before could be relied on now, and I thought to myself,
does that include reality?
This was all so alien to me, like the Rot was transforming our landscape into one of those distant planets the SKIN was designed for… and that made me wonder whether the cause had really been man-made at all? Chemical weapons we concocted ourselves, or some race out there in the heavens trying to destroy us for whatever purposes. Science fiction or cold, hard facts? After all, nothing
should
be able to affect organic and non-organic material in the same way.

As I crested one of the last hills before I hit that sprawling metropolis, I caught sight of a stadium. Obviously used for sporting events at one time, football matches and athletics, it had probably also hosted its fair share of concerts. That was something I hadn’t even thought about while I’d been on this trek: how much I missed music. Still do, though I’ve managed to find a working iPod here and there since then – working for a little while, at any rate, so I can listen to songs through the speakers. Anyway, that place was full of the affected – the Rotten, as I’ve since come to call them. Filling the stands, covering the grounds; it was clearly where they had chosen to gather – maybe following the call of some kind of trace memory from their previous lives? Somewhere they went to have a good time? Would explain why we kept hearing them above us in the pub, why they kept coming back time and again – I’m still surprised they weren’t there when I went upstairs.

Mum was always trying to get out of the house when the dementia really started to kick in. Trying to get somewhere, though she could never explain exactly where. Then, inside the specialist ward they’d taken her to – I’m loath to call it a home, because the place was like Fort Knox – while she was still in better shape than she had been in that hospital bed, she’d wandered the corridors convinced she was walking the streets of her old village where she grew up. Perhaps that was it, going to somewhere comforting; that made you feel better? Often she’d gather other patients as she went, like the Pied Piper. All of them seeking something together – though at times it would also lead to fighting amongst themselves.

I was witnessing a similar kind of behaviour now, droves of the Rotten flocking together like those birds, to go somewhere – to do something they couldn’t explain even to themselves. Congregating to listen to some sort of unspoken sermon. Was that where they’d been in the last town, while I wandered through deserted streets? After an initial spurt of energy, had they calmed down and followed some kind of call – only to realise at the last minute I was trying to get away? Pretty egotistical of me! Did it really make any difference now? Did their behaviour since it all happened matter? Surely the only thing that did was getting to the bottom of ‘how’, and putting a stop to it. Returning things to the way they had been before… Even more arrogant, you might say, but I still had to try; for all I knew there
was
only me.

Waiting for cover of darkness this time, and using the night-vision scope to see, I slipped into the city as stealthily as I could. My gun was primed, and – so far – not suffering from any effects of the Rot. But I wasn’t relying solely on that anyway, as I had the hammer and hatchet tucked into my belt, just in case. My first port of call would be a Tourist Information Centre, something with detailed maps of the city.… Of course, they don’t make maps to help you find
those
places, but eventually I came across a signpost pointing to one – Rot only partially obscuring the letters. It was deserted inside, as far as I could tell, and I found what I was looking for quickly, tucking a dozen or so into my backpack – I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have spares in case any of them should fall to pieces.

The map told me my next port of call was on the east side of town, a straight line from the Tourist Information – so I just had to keep heading in that direction to hit it. I was about halfway there when I felt the now familiar rumblings of the earth – followed by a building collapse maybe a few streets away. It urged me on to my destination – to get what I needed as quickly as possible – assuming that was still standing, of course.

It was. The library, being an old building that had already stood the test of time, would probably still be standing when everything else had crumbled around it… I hoped. There were none of the Rotten inside here, either, which was a sad testament to how things were before; the fact fewer and fewer people were going to them, how many were shutting down. But I still didn’t want to hang around, so I set to work looking for the section I needed: the sciences. Now, I’ve never been one for studying – not really. A lot of what I learned to be a pilot was a necessity, but the skills were already there. Didn’t mean I
couldn’t
learn, though – I’m not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, some of that stuff made my head hurt, seriously.

I grabbed what I considered essential and got out of there as fast as possible – heading back to the outskirts of the city, up onto those hills where I knew I’d be relatively safe. That was where I flipped through those books, studying information about how things are made up, about genetics and cell structure and diseases – lots of things I’ve already forgotten about. Was no mystery what put me to sleep the following night, that’s all I’m saying.