Decay Inevitable

The figure was standing now, turning fully to face the three. He began to pace towards them. At this distance, he seemed too angular and unathletic to cause them any harm. Sean bristled as if sensing a confrontation. Will pressed a hand against his chest.

“Go,” he said. “Take Emma and get away. Plug the leaks.” He offered a flattening of his lips which passed for a smile. “Do what I couldn’t do,” he said, bitterly, “and save a few lives.”

The old man was approaching quickly. From his hand swung a length of rope. They could tell, even at this distance – some eighty metres – that he was grinning, his mouth a scythe of teeth.

“Okay,” Sean said. “Okay.” He gave the phial back to Will and took Emma’s hand. He pressed the edge of his knife against the flesh where it joined and, fading as he drew blood, said to Will, “Watch yourself. You’re dead. It’s probably for the best that you try to stay that way.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: THE CUCKOLD'S NECK

THEY STOPPED IN front of an electrical shop in Market Gate to watch a news bulletin. Shaking cameras relayed live footage from Charing Cross Road of a cordon of mounted and armed police trying to peg back a mob of pale, unblinking corpses. They were untainted by putrefaction, these dead. It was as if they had been rehabilitated, captured at their physical peak, perhaps thanks to the abiding memories of those they had left behind. Nobody wants to remember the sick and the infirm.

Emma said, “How long, do you think, before we have the same problems up here?”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Maybe never.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma chided him. “Looks like it.”

The town centre was deserted. When the clock struck the hour, Emma jumped and the sound flew through the empty streets, carrying its cold, lonely message.

Cars had been abandoned on the roads, some of them having flipped onto the pavement or been involved in minor collisions with other vehicles. In one of the more serious accidents, a woman had been trapped in the driver’s seat of her Mini by the steering wheel, which had been pushed forwards into her chest by the force of a bus’s impact. A fire had broken out and ravaged her. Smoke rose from her charred remains. Her eyes swivelled as Sean and Emma walked past, and followed their progress along Sankey Street. Emma thought she was grinning at them but felt something rise in her throat when she realised it was only because her lips had been burned away.

At the town hall Sean broke away from Emma and jogged towards the taxi rank. The lawns of Bank Park surrounding the town hall were in need of a trim. A lawnmower had been left in the middle of the task. A single gardening glove lay next to it, bright orange in the green.

There were no drivers in the taxis, but more than one had failed to take the keys out before leaving their cab. Getting into one, he started up the engine – a shocking roar that broke the silence – and swung the cab out of the queue, halting in front of Emma, who climbed into the back.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Farmhouse,” Sean replied. “Somewhere I saw a gathering of my softstrip friends some time ago. I didn’t get a chance to go in and look around. But I think that’s where their HQ is.”

The streets radiating out of town shed their drifts of traffic until the route was relatively unimpeded. Emma saw dark figures in windows looking down on the cab as it wound its way towards the dual carriageway. The houses in these terraced streets seemed to be affected by the tension in the air, the loss of community. They hunched together, seeking safety in numbers, and closed their eyes to the outside world. Their hard, cement faces found sympathy in Sean’s and – Emma noticed in the rear-view mirror – her own.

The dual carriageway became a road became a track littered with leaves and mud. On either side, ploughed fields spread out, their furrows parallel to the road, perspective sucking all of their lines to a point straight ahead where a farmhouse with a sunken, defeated look sat waiting for them.

Sean ditched the car half a mile shy of the building, having turned it to face the opposite direction. He pocketed the keys and they took to the field. Hunched low to the ground they slowly neared the farmhouse, their breathing becoming more laboured, hanging like empty speech bubbles around their heads.

It was late in the afternoon and the sky was heavily bruised but no lights had come on in the farmhouse.

“We could be in luck,” Sean said. “It might be empty.”