Autumn exodus, p.25
Autumn - Exodus, page 25
It was still raining when the first orange-purple hints of morning began to appear in the otherwise inky-black sky. There’d been little change through the long hours of darkness now ending, but the conditions did seem to have eased slightly. Sam tried to see what was happening outside, but it was impossible. He stuck his head out of the hole in the roof, but the angle was all wrong. David had tried opening the loft hatch a couple of times before dawn, but it had been equally difficult to make out any details, except that below them remained a swirling chaos.
It felt like everyone was waiting for someone else to take the lead and ask the questions that were inevitably going to have to be asked. How were they going to get out? If they managed to escape from the building, would they be able to get out of Knottingley? Was there any point trying?
‘So, this is it, is it?’ Noah asked, finally breaking the wordless deadlock. ‘Are we just going to sit here until our last few scraps of food run out?’
‘We’ve only been waiting for your brilliant suggestion, Noah.’ Sam asked, unimpressed. ‘Why don’t you go down and have a look around?’
‘I’m asking, not volunteering,’ he replied quickly. ‘Christ’s sake, you’d have to be crazy to go back out into all that shite. I saw enough last night to last me a lifetime.’
Marcus laughed. ‘A lifetime, seriously? I’m starting to think a lifetime for us might just be the rest of today and maybe tomorrow.’
‘Can’t we have a bit of positivity here?’ David asked. ‘Are we just going to throw in the towel?’
‘I wish I’d stayed in Yaxley,’ Noah said.
‘Yeah, I wish you had too,’ Sam agreed.
‘Fuck you.’
‘No one made you come with us,’ David reminded him.
‘I know that. But with the benefit of hindsight, leaving what we had there was a really fucking stupid move. Since then, all we’ve had are problems. Big ones. We should have learnt our lessons earlier and just put up with what we had. The grass is always greener, and all that crap. I’m getting homesick for Lakeside, for crying out loud.’
‘It’s not as bad as you’re making it sound,’ Vicky said, struggling for volume. ‘You’ve just spent a shitty night in a wet attic. At least the dead aren’t a threat.’
Her comment was met with a moment of silence. Had she lost it? Had the sickness got to her brain? ‘Bullshit,’ Noah said.
‘It isn’t. You can’t see it because you’re not looking for it.’
‘Looking for what?’ David asked.
‘You just assume they want to kill us. I don’t think they do.’
‘Why else would they be hounding us constantly? Why else would they attack us whenever we get anywhere near them?’
‘They don’t. Maybe they once did, but now? You’re misreading the signals.’
Noah laughed. ‘This is fucking priceless.’
Vicky ignored him. ‘That’s why they were outside and wouldn’t go. They know we’re in here; I think they think we can help them.’
‘I’ve heard it all now.’
‘Just watch them. Put yourself in their shoes. Their behaviour has been changing, it’s been changing all along. I think they’re starting to understand what’s happened to them. I think they’re gravitating towards us because they want us to help.’
‘Don’t tire yourself out, love,’ Ruth said.
‘Stop assuming the worst. Have a little faith. Look how far we’ve come.’
Noah remained unconvinced. ‘And look how far we’ve got left to go! Since I fell in with you lot, it’s been the same pattern repeating itself over and over. Someone has a good idea, we all support it, it goes wrong, we’re all fucked. Wash, rinse, repeat.’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘It is like that. That’s exactly what it’s like.’
‘There’s always a way out,’ Sam said. ‘Things are shitty now, sure, but they’ll improve. They have to.’
‘Oh, change the bloody record will you.’
But Sam wouldn’t. ‘We might end up stuck here for a few more days until the floodwaters recede, so what? If Vicky’s right about the dead, that changes everything.’
‘The dead aren’t our only problem.’
‘Right, I know that. Piotr might get to Ledsey Cross before us. So what? He’s one man, and Vicky says there are loads of people there, a strong, well-organised community. Hey, Selena, how many did you say there were?’
Nothing.
No reply.
Ruth switched her torch on and shone it around frantically. ‘Jesus and Mary! Where’s Selena?’
#
Their bickering always annoyed her. It was wasted energy, that was what Kath had told her once when she’d been arguing hell for leather with Vicky about something unimportant, and she’d never forgotten it. None of them had even noticed her prise open the loft hatch a while earlier and drop down. She hadn’t used the ladder, hadn’t wanted them to realise what she was doing and start another argument about how it was too dangerous and how someone older and more responsible should go down instead, or worse, that one would go with her. Sometimes she thought they didn’t understand about life in their new world; hadn’t thought as much about it as she had. None of the old rules applied, did they. It didn’t matter that most of them were older than she was, some of them double her age. Fact was, they’d all been living through this hell for an equal length of time. When it came to dealing with the apocalypse, they were all equally experienced.
The soles of her shoes squelched on the sodden landing carpet. Even up here, it seemed, the water had found a way of getting in. She saw that a window had blown open during the night, letting in the elements. The smell inside the guesthouse was rank. She’d gotten used to the stench of decay, but this was on another level. She covered her mouth and nose with her scarf, though it barely made any difference.
The building was by no means silent, but it was reassuringly quiet. Last night’s maelstrom had passed. Above her head, Selena could hear the pointless conversation droning on in the attic. Elsewhere, a constant soundtrack of drips, dribbles, trickles, and splashes kept silence at bay. Definitely much quieter outside this morning, that was for sure. The rain and wind had dropped. The roar of the water had receded.
A couple of corpses had made it as far as the first floor, but she dealt with them quickly and efficiently, barely missing a beat. The motionless body of a long-dead woman lay halfway along the next set of stairs, sprawled face-down and face-first as if she’d simply washed up on the tide, hair splayed like seaweed. Selena stepped across and sank her knife into the woman’s exposed right temple, just to be sure. She then crouched down and peered through the banister to try and get an idea of both the damage to the building and the level of the undead threat that remained. From where she was looking, she couldn’t see any corpses that were still mobile. There were plenty that had been dashed on the rocks, some relatively whole, but most appeared to have been torn apart in the chaos overnight. There were a couple stuck behind a sideboard that was wedged in the doorway of the lounge, but despite the fact they struggled incessantly when they saw her, she was confident they weren’t getting out. The front door was blocked by junk, inside and out. Selena thought it was safe to keep going.
The drip, drip, dripping kept her on her toes. It was hard to tell whether what she could hear were the dribbles of water escaping from nooks and crannies in adjacent rooms, or the slippery flesh and liquefied remains of corpses creeping up on her. The small dining room was a chaotic mess of body parts, so random that it was impossible to work out which limbs belonged together. Some still twitched. It reminded her of a programme she’d watched on TV once about fishing out at sea, when a net had been emptied on the deck and most of the fish were still flapping.
She checked each remaining downstairs room but found only one more corpse that was capable of movement. It had, somehow, become impaled on a strip of hooks in the kitchen, out of reach. It looked like it had been hung there purposefully, a grotesque and rapidly deteriorating hunting trophy.
Suddenly, coming down alone seemed like a really bad idea, and she didn’t like being here on her own at all. A drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and emptied all over the floor. Selena helped herself to a couple of knives and looked out of the back of the building. The carpark was mostly dry, and the coach appeared okay. The work they’d done to block the gap at the bottom of the gates seemed to have done the trick.
She was going the wrong way. It was the front windows she needed to look out of, but she was delaying the inevitable. As long as she stayed in the kitchen, staring out through this grubby window at the square, wall-enclosed scrap of wasteland out back, she could avoid the fact they were stuck here. That much she was beginning to accept. There’d be no Ledsey Cross today, no happy ending. Why not close the book now? Avoid the end until it came to find her? So she delayed acknowledgement and clung on to a few more precious seconds of inactivity and relative calm.
That the front door was open and neither water nor corpses were getting in was a good sign, she supposed. She slipped in mud as she approached the front of the building. Every ground floor surface was coated with a layer of the stuff, everything greasy to the touch. Here, the place felt more like a section of a cave system than a residential building. She took a deep breath and began to disassemble the heap of junk that separated her from the outside world. She took hold of a tree branch as thick as her wrist and yanked it towards her, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried again – same result. Once more, and the branch came away, bringing with it much of the rest of the blockage. She was on her backside before she realised what had happened, and she scrambled for one of the knives she’d just picked up, ready for attack.
Nothing came.
Cautious, Selena inched back towards the doorway.
She stopped. Then grinned. Then laughed out loud.
The road outside the guesthouse was still a river, though the water was nowhere near as deep and ferocious as it had been last night. But what really took her by surprise, what delighted her more than anything that had happened in the long days since their exodus from London had begun, was the fact that the street was otherwise completely clear. The water last night, when the rain had been relentless and the level of the swollen river had been at its highest, had coursed with such force through Knottingley that it had washed away the dead from the streets.
As long as they could get the coach started and get out of the carpark out back, she thought they might actually have a chance of getting the hell out of here and reaching Ledsey Cross.
48
Though the first few streets were precarious, the water still wheel-deep, they were clear again once they had got back onto the A1. After that, they made progress with newfound speed that would have seemed incomprehensible just a short while earlier. Though the cleansing effect of the floodwaters hadn’t reached far beyond the very centre of Knottingley, it didn’t matter. The dead had been badly affected by the extreme weather conditions of the last week. The cold, the snow, the permafrost, the sudden thaw, the torrential rains... they’d all combined to wreak havoc on the undead monsters. Their decaying flesh, already barely enough to keep holding their sagging, corrupted bodies together, was now weaker still. For the first time, the dead appeared vulnerable. Some had been reduced to little more than puddles of flesh. The flesh of others, those that had been subjected to the full force of the floods, had been swept away, pared from their bones. Some were almost completely devoid of meat now; their gleaming, jet-washed skeletons appeared impossibly clean.
Sanjay drove, Vicky and Selena with him up front. Selena had her phone in her hands, plugged in to keep it alive. She was glued to the brightness of the screen. Though satellite-based navigation systems had been down since just after the beginning of the end, she’d had the foresight to download off-line copies of certain maps before the networks had died. She was a smart kid. Having copies of maps of the centre of London had saved their skin on more than one occasion in the early days of the catastrophe, but she’d also thought ahead and taken copies of maps of the area around Ledsey Cross. That they were now following those maps was such a long delayed, much doubted dream that it didn’t seem real. ‘We’re well past being level with Leeds now,’ Sanjay said. ‘I can hardly believe it. I never would have thought we’d have made it this far.’
‘Less than twenty miles left I reckon,’ Selena said. ‘We could walk it if we have to.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Vicky said. She had her eyes closed and was resting her head against the window. Even thinking was exhausting now; she had barely enough energy to breathe. Sanjay looked over at her. He’d spoken with David about her before they’d set out. They’d always known that delivering Selena safely to the people at Ledsey Cross was all that mattered to Vicky. David had wondered if she was doggedly holding on just to make sure it happened.
He nudged Selena. ‘Look, at that! A sign for Heddlewick.’
She’d been looking old beyond her years recently, the pressure of their situation weighing as heavy on her as everyone else, but now she grinned at him, excited. ‘I know. Can’t believe it! Crazy name, though, don’t you think?’
‘It’s very Northern-sounding, I’ll give you that much.’
‘Annalise won’t believe it when we get there. Kath told her that me and Vicky were gonna come. We said it was gonna take a while to get here, but I didn’t think it would be four months.’
‘I’m sure she’ll still be expecting us. Vicky told me that Annalise was close to your friend Kath. She said Kath was stubborn, that she wouldn’t have given up.’ He looked across and saw that Vicky had fallen asleep. ‘Between you and me, Selena, she said you reminded her of Kath, not that I ever met her, of course. She said you could be just as cantankerous.’
‘Not sure what that means, but I’ll take it!’
#
They were deep into open countryside again, the last vestiges of the chaos-filled urban and suburban areas left far behind. Out here, the world felt vast and endless. At times up on the hills there was no sign that things were any different to how they’d always been. If there’d been any human remains up here, they’d likely have decayed away to nothing or simply been swept away by the rains. Sanjay stared out of his window, transfixed by the normality of this perfect, unscarred part of the world. At moments like this, he felt optimistic. He hoped this was what the view from Ledsey Cross would be like. Clean. Fresh. Unspoilt. Natural.
After climbing for a while, the road descended before plateauing again. Here, the route became harder for Sanjay to follow, the coach cumbersome and the roads littered with debris. The floods, the driving rains, and the frosts and thaws of the last few days had clearly had a substantial impact on this part of the world. Up ahead, a minor landslide had all but obscured the entire way. He was forced to slow to a crawl and drive in the gutter to keep them moving forward. ‘And to think,’ he said to himself, ‘we used to believe we were the ones in charge.’
‘What are you on about?’ asked Selena.
‘Nothing,’ he said. He could have told her about how he’d seen more potholes in the road in the last couple of miles than he expected, or how weeds and tree roots had already made inroads and would eventually chew their way through the tarmac, breaking it into useless, tar-coated pebbles. He didn’t bother mentioning how roads blocked now would stay blocked forever. What was the point? The kid had enough to contend with. She’s never even driven a car, he thought sadly. By the time she got to his age, driving would likely be a thing of the past.
The power station they’d seen from a distance on their long and lonely walk into Knottingley loomed into view. They were much closer now, but it was still many miles away. The damage wrought on the towering structure was sobering even from way out. At some point there’d been a huge explosion at the station, that much was blindingly apparent. One of the colossal cooling stacks had collapsed to half-height. ‘Are we safe being this close?’ David asked Sam.
‘As safe as anywhere. It wasn’t a nuclear plant, if that’s what you mean.’ Sam could tell from David’s reaction that was exactly what had concerned him. ‘There was Derwent to the south, and Heynsham further north, but nothing more local than that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Spent enough time protesting about them, didn’t I?’ He lowered his voice so as not to scare the others. ‘Don’t breathe too easy, though. We’ve talked about this before. I’ve no doubt there have been meltdowns all around the world since everyone died. Whether lethal amounts of radiation reach us or not depends largely on the wind direction. Just put it from your mind, Dave, because there’s fuck all we can do about that noise.’
Noah overheard Sam. ‘I’m less concerned about the radiation and more worried about the dead. An explosion like that will have been felt for miles around. Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield... who knows how many corpses might have come this way to investigate.’
Sam shrugged. ‘Again, my advice is the same. Put it from your mind because there’s fuck all we can do. We’ll deal with whatever we find, same as always.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘But nothing, Noah. Seriously, forget about it. We’re not going to get a lot closer to that power station, anyway. We’ll be turning off towards Heddlewick before we get anywhere near.’
After twisting and turning on the descent from the hills, the road now stretched out ahead of them again, wider and more direct. There was a single vehicle stalled up ahead. Sanjay slowed down. David leant forward from the back, concerned. ‘Trouble?’
‘Possibly. Is that our minibus?’
He stopped a short distance away. ‘It is, you know, it’s definitely ours. I remember the registration ending EXC. It’s the van we took from Yaxley. Doesn’t look like there’s anyone in it, though.’
‘I’ll go and see what’s going on,’ Marcus said, and before anyone could protest, he let himself out of the back and crept towards the abandoned vehicle. He became more confident as he got closer. The others watched in silence as he opened the driver’s door and leant inside. He turned the key in the ignition. The lights came on, but nothing happened.
