Autumn a-1 Read online

  ‘It’s all right,’ Carl sighed. ‘Bloody thing can’t even see me.’

  With that he lifted up his arms and put a hand on each one of the man’s shoulders. The body stopped moving instantly. Rather than resist or react in any way it simply slumped forward. Carl could feel the weight of the body (which was unexpectedly light and emaciated) being entirely supported by his hands.

  ‘They’re empty, aren’t they?’ Emma said under her breath. She took a few tentative steps closer to the corpse and stared into its face. Now that she was closer she could see a fine, milky-white film covering both eyes. There were open sores on its skin (particularly around the mouth and nose) and its greasy hair was lank and knotted. She looked down at the rest of the body – down towards the willowy torso wrapped in loose, dirty clothing – and stared hard. She was looking at the rib cage for signs of respiration. She couldn’t see any movement.

  Michael had been watching her as intently and with as much fascination as she’d watched the body.

  ‘What do you mean, empty?’ he asked.

  ‘Just what I said,’ she mumbled, still staring at the dead man. ‘There’s nothing to them. They move but they don’t know why. It’s almost as if they’ve died but no-one’s told them to stop moving and lie still.’

  He nodded thoughtfully and watched another one of the creatures as it wandered aimlessly across the road a little way ahead of the van. Carl again looked into the face of the body he was holding and then dropped his arms, allowing it to move freely again. The second he had released his grip the corpse began to stumble away.

  ‘So if they’re not thinking, why do they change direction?’ he asked.

  ‘Simple,’ Emma answered. ‘They don’t do it consciously. If you watch them, they only change direction when they can’t go any further forward.’

  ‘But why? If they can’t make decisions then they shouldn’t be able to realise that they’re stuck. When they hit a wall shouldn’t they just stop and wait?’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘It’s just a basic response, isn’t it?’ Michael said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Suppose so. It’s just about the most basic response. Christ, even amoebas and earthworms can react like that. If they come across an obstruction then they change direction.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ he pressed. ‘Are they thinking or not thinking?’

  ‘I’m not sure really…’ she admitted.

  ‘You sound like you’re saying that they might still have some decision making capabilities…’

  ‘Suppose I am.’

  ‘But on the other hand they seem to be on autopilot, just moving because they can.’

  Emma shrugged her shoulders again, becoming annoyed.

  ‘Christ, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I think.’

  ‘So what do you think? What do you really think has happened to them?’

  ‘They’re almost dead.’

  ‘Almost dead?’

  ‘I think that about ninety-nine percent of their bodies are dead. The muscles and senses have shut down. They’re not breathing, thinking or eating but I think that there’s something still working inside them. Something at their very base level. The most basic of controls.’

  ‘Such as?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Want to take a guess?’

  Emma seemed reluctant. She wasn’t at all certain about what she was saying. She was improvising and having to think on her feet.

  ‘I’m really not sure,’ she sighed. ‘Christ, it’s instinct I suppose. They have no comprehension of identity or purpose anymore, they just exist. They move because they can. No other reason.’

  Conscious that she had become the centre of attention, Emma walked away from the van towards the row of shops to her right. She felt awkward. In the eyes of her two companions her limited medical experience and knowledge made her an expert in a field where no-one really knew anything.

  On the cold ground in front of a bakery the body of a frail and elderly old man struggled to pull itself up. Its weak arms flailed uselessly at its sides.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ Carl asked, peering cautiously over Emma’s shoulder.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she mumbled.

  Michael, who had followed the other two, nudged Emma’s shoulder and pointed at an upturned wheelchair which lay a few metres away from the body. She looked from the chair to the body and back again and then crouched down. Fighting to keep control of her stomach (the rotting skin of the old man gave out a noxious odour) she pulled back one of his trouser legs and saw that the right leg was artificial. In its weakened state the body couldn’t lift it off the ground.

  ‘See,’ she said, standing up again. ‘Bloody thing doesn’t even know it’s only got one leg. Poor bugger’s probably been using a wheelchair for years.’

  Disinterested in the crippled body and feeling nauseous and uneasy, Carl wandered away. He walked alone along the front of the row of silent shops and gazed sadly into the window of each building he passed. There was a bank – its doors wide open – and next to it an opticians. Two corpses sat motionless on dusty chairs waiting for appointments with their long since dead optometrist. Next to the opticians was a grocery store. Carl went inside.

  Inside the shop was dank and musty. The pungent smell of rotting food tainted the damp air. The smell acted like smelling salts in suddenly reminding Carl of all that had happened. In a fraction of a second he was reminded of the nightmare of Northwich, the loss of his family and everything else that had happened in the last week. He suddenly felt exposed, vulnerable and unsafe. Looking over his shoulder constantly he began to fill cardboard boxes with all the non-perishable food he could find in the tiny little store.

  Emma and Michael arrived at the shop seconds later. In little more than a quarter of an hour the three of them had transferred much of the stock to the back of their van. In less than an hour they were back at Penn Farm.

  21

  Michael and Emma sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. It was almost four o’clock. Carl had been working on the generator outside for the best part of the afternoon. The back door was open. The house was freezing.

  ‘There’s got to be something driving them on,’ Emma mumbled. ‘I can’t understand why they keep moving and yet…’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Michael cursed, ‘give it a rest, would you? What does it matter? Why should we give a damn what they do as long as they’re not a danger to us. Christ, I don’t care if I wake up to find a hundred and one of the fucking things stood around the house doing a bloody song and dance routine. As long as they don’t come near me and…’

  ‘Okay,’ she snapped, ‘you’ve made your point. Sorry if I don’t share your short-sightedness.’

  ‘I’m not short-sighted,’ Michael protested.

  ‘Yes you are. You don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself…’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘No it isn’t. I’m looking out for you and Carl too. I just think we have to face facts, that’s all.’

  ‘We don’t know any facts. We don’t know fucking anything.’

  ‘Yes we do,’ he sighed. ‘For a start it’s a fact that it doesn’t matter what’s happened to the rest of the population as long as nothing happens to us. It’s a fact that it doesn’t matter why millions of people died. What difference would it make if we knew? What could we do? What if we found some fucking miracle cure? What are we going to do? Spend the rest of our lives sorting out fifty-odd million corpses at the expense of ourselves?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘But nothing,’ he snapped.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she said quietly, resting her head in her hands. ‘It’s the medic in me. I’ve been trained to…’

  ‘Forget all that,’ he pleaded. Michael stared at Emma. She sensed his eyes burning into her and looked up. ‘Listen to me,’ he continued. ‘Forget every
thing. Stop trying to work out what’s happened and why. I’m not short-sighted and I’m not selfish, I’m a realist, that’s all. What’s gone is gone and we’ve got to make the most of what’s left. We’ve got to say fuck everything else and try and build some kind of future for the three of us.’

  ‘I know that,’ she sighed, ‘but it’s not that simple, is it? I can’t just turn away and…’

  ‘You’ve got to turn away,’ he said, slamming his hand down on the table and raising his voice. ‘Christ, how many times do I have to say it, you’ve got to shut yourself off from the past.’

  ‘I’m trying. I know I can’t help anyone else, but I don’t think you’ve thought about this like I have.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Michael asked, sitting up in his seat. There was an equal mix of concern and annoyance in his voice.

  ‘I want to make sure we’re safe, same as you do,’ she explained. ‘But have you stopped to wonder whether it’s really over?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who says that’s the end of it? Who says that the bodies getting up and moving around last week was the final act?’

  Michael realised what she was saying and a sudden cold chill ran the length of his spine.

  ‘So what are you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, slouching forward again. ‘Look, Mike, I think you’re right, we have to look after ourselves now. But I need to know that whatever it was that happened to the rest of them isn’t going to happen to me. Just because we’ve escaped so far doesn’t necessarily mean we’re immune, does it?’

  ‘And do you think that we should…?’

  Michael’s words were cut short by a sudden loud crash from outside which echoed through the otherwise quiet house. He jumped up from his seat and ran out to where Carl was working. He found the other man sitting on the grass with his head in his hands. Through the half open shed door he could see a tool box on the ground which had clearly been kicked or thrown in anger.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked.

  Carl grunted something under his breath before getting up and disappearing into the shed again.

  ‘Is he okay?’ Emma shouted from the safety of the back door.

  Michael turned round and walked back towards her.

  ‘Think so,’ he sighed. ‘Think he’s having a few problems, that’s all.’

  She nodded thoughtfully and went back inside. Michael followed her into the sitting room. She sat down next to a large patio window and stared out onto the garden. It was a bright, sunny afternoon and she could see the shed from where she was sitting. Carl’s tired shadow was clearly visible inside.

  Cautiously (as he wasn’t sure if he was disturbing Emma) Michael sat down on the arm of the sofa behind her. He picked up an old newspaper from a nearby coffee table, flicked through a few pages and then threw it back down again.

  ‘Assuming we are immune and we do survive all of this…’ he began quietly.

  ‘Yes…’ Emma mumbled.

  ‘Do you think we’ll be able to make something out of what’s left?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘Don’t know. Do you?’

  He got up and walked to the other side of the room and leant against the wall.

  ‘We can be comfortable here, I’m sure of that much. Christ, we could turn this place into a bloody fortress if we wanted to. Everything we need is out there somewhere. It’s just a question of getting off our backsides and finding it…’

  ‘Daunting prospect, isn’t it?’ she interrupted.

  ‘I know. It’s not going to be easy but…’

  ‘I think the most important thing is deciding whether we want to survive, not whether we can.’ She turned around to face Michael. ‘Look, I know we could have anything – bloody hell, we could live in Buckingham bloody Palace if we wanted to…’

  ‘…once we’d cleared out the corpses…’

  ‘Okay, but you get my point. We can have anything, but we’ve got to ask ourselves if there’s anything that will make any of this easier to deal with? I don’t want to bust a gut building something up if we’re just going to end up prisoners here counting the days until we die of old age.’

  Michael sighed. Her honesty was painful.

  ‘I agree. So what do you want? Accepting that we’ve all lost everything that ever mattered to us, what do you think would be worth surviving for now?’

  She shrugged her shoulders and turned to look out of the window again.

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not sure.’

  Michael’s mind began to race. He hadn’t dared to think about the future because, until yesterday, there hadn’t seemed to be much chance of any of them actually having one. Ever the loner, however, he realised that there was in fact very little he needed. Shelter, food and protection, that was just about it. There were many aspects of his pre-disaster life that he was glad to finally have lost. Question was would time heal his, Carl’s and Emma’s mental wounds and allow them to make a life with what was left?

  Their silent and personal thoughts were interrupted by another unexpected noise from outside. A roar of machinery followed by a low, steady mechanical chugging, followed by a scream of delight from Carl.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Emma smiled. ‘Will you listen to that!’

  Michael left the room and was halfway to the back door when Carl appeared running the other way.

  ‘Done it!’ he gasped breathlessly. ‘I’ve fucking done it!’

  He slowed down, walked proudly into the kitchen and flicked the light switch on the wall. The fluorescent lighting flickered and jumped into life, filling the room with harsh, relentless and completely beautiful electric light.

  22

  The three survivors continued to work around the house until just after nine o’clock that evening, the presence of electric light having substantially extended the length of their useful day. Once their supplies had been stored and the van and house made secure for the night they stopped, exhausted. Emma made a meal which they ate as they watched a video they’d found.

  Michael, who had been sitting on the floor resting with his back against the sofa, looked over his shoulder just after eleven and noticed that both Carl and Emma had fallen asleep. For a few moments he stared deep into their frozen faces and watched as the flickering light from the television screen cast unnerving, constantly moving shadows across them.

  It had been a strange evening. The apparent normality of sitting and watching television had troubled Michael. Everything had seemed so very ordinary when they had started watching the film an hour and a half earlier – within minutes each one of them had privately been transported back to a time not so long ago when the population of the country had numbered millions, not hundreds, and when death had been final and inevitable, nothing else. Perhaps the night felt so strange and wrong for that very reason. The three of them had been reminded of everything that they – through no fault of their own – had lost.

  Michael found it disappointingly typical and increasingly annoying that he had ended up thinking like that. Gone was the time when he’d been able to enjoy the cheap and cheerful comedy film such as the one he’d just sat through for what it was – a temporary feel-good distraction, almost an anaesthetic for the brain. Now just about everything that he saw, heard and did seemed to spark off deep questions and fierce emotional debates inside him which he didn’t want to have to deal with. Not yet, anyway.

  His lack of concentration on the film had been such that he hadn’t noticed it had finished until the end titles had been rolling up the screen for a good couple of minutes. Preoccupied by dark thoughts again he stayed sat on his backside, waiting for the tape to run out. As the music faded away and was replaced by a gentle silence he opened a can of beer and stretched out on the floor.

  For a while he lay still and listened carefully to the world around him. Carl was snoring lightly and Emma fidgeted in her sleep but, other than that, the two of them were quiet. Outside there was the c
onstant thumping and banging of the generator in the shed and he could hear a gusting wind, ripping through the tops of the tall pine trees which surrounded the farm. Beyond all of that Michael could just about hear the ominous low grumble of a distant but fast approaching storm. Through half-open curtains he watched as the first few drops of cold rain clattered against the window. The noise startled him at first and he lifted himself up onto his elbows. For a second he saw a definite movement outside.

  Suddenly scared and nervous and pumped full of adrenaline, Michael jumped up, ran over to the window and pressed his face against the glass. He peered out into the dark night, hoping for a few anxious seconds that the mechanical noises being made by the generator had acted like the classical music had back in the city, attracting the attention of survivors who would otherwise have remained oblivious to their arrival at Penn Farm. He couldn’t see anything. As quickly as he cleared the glass the rain outside and the condensation inside obscured his view again.

  The others were still asleep. Thinking quickly Michael ran to the kitchen and picked up a torch that they had deliberately left on a dresser in case of emergencies. The light from the torch was bright and he followed the unsteady circle of illumination through to the back door of the house which he cautiously opened. He stepped out into the cold evening air and looked around, ignoring the heavy rain which soaked him.

  There it was again. Closer this time. Definite movement around the generator.

  With his heart thumping in his chest he made his way further into the garden towards the shed and then stopped when he was just a couple of metres away. Gathered around the walls of the small wooden building were four dishevelled figures. Even in the dim light and with the distraction of the wind, rain and approaching storm it was obvious that in front of him were four more victims of the disease, virus or whatever that had ripped through the population last week. Michael watched with curiosity and unease as one of the bodies collided with the door. Rather than turn and stagger away again as he’d expected it to have done, the bedraggled creature instead began to work its way around the shed, tripping and sliding through the mud.