All Roads End Here Page 2

  Matt swerves around the back of a Hater woman as she attacks a lone Unchanged soldier who’s crashed his jeep and is running for his life. The soldier scrambles for his rifle but the woman’s speed and ferocity is too much. He makes eye contact with Matt for the briefest of moments, eyes wide and desperate for help, but Matt just keeps running because the longer he’s out in the open, the greater the chance this’ll be the day it all goes wrong and he ends up like the poor fucker he’s just ignored.

  There are still more Haters coming, wave after wave of them pouring into the street like a pitch invasion at the end of a football final, desperate to spill Unchanged blood.

  Matt makes himself stick to his plan (for what it’s worth) and ignore the panic that’s rising in his throat like bile. There’s a nagging voice in his head screaming you’re fucked … you should have stayed where you were, you idiot. But Matt’s had enough of waiting. He’s been taking baby steps home for weeks and now that he’s almost made it back, the temptation to sprint for the line is impossible to ignore. He was always going to have to make a move like this sooner or later. He’s starting to think later might have been a better option.

  He’s a couple of meters short of the footbridge, and about fifty meters ahead of the slowly advancing battle-bus. In front of him is a mob of between twenty and thirty Haters, all of whom have him in their sights. Matt runs straight at them.

  Going up.

  He takes them by surprise when he darts left and pounds up the spiral slope onto the footbridge; a long, wheelchair-friendly, corkscrew climb upward. Looking down through the railings, he sees waves of them coming after him. The pursuing pack splits, racing toward the opposing ends of the bridge, cutting off his escape. They’ve got him trapped and they know it. All exits reduced to zero.

  Or so they think.

  Matt’s one step ahead of the game. Always has been. Can’t afford not to be. These days a split-second advantage is all that separates the living from the dead.

  He’s halfway along the length of the narrow bridge, exposed and in full view. And as the resistance convoy finally picks up some speed, the enemy’s focus shifts to the lone idiot up high. Matt stops. He just stands there and waits as Haters come at him from both directions. The fastest are terrifyingly close. He can almost feel their breath on him, can smell their doglike stench.

  Timing is everything.

  Just one second longer …

  As the nearest Hater lunges for him, Matt climbs up onto the safety railing and jumps off the bridge. He lands hard on top of the battle-bus as it passes underneath and he hammers the serrated pick of the ice axe down through the metal skin of its roof, giving him a solid anchor. He wraps the nylon strap around his wrist again and again and holds on for all he’s worth, the strap so tight that if he was to be thrown from the bus, he’d likely leave a severed hand behind. He flattens himself down and spreads his weight, maximizing his surface area to reduce the risk of being thrown off, at the same time hoping the street-level fighting will continue to be more of a distraction than him being up here. He has visions of bayonets and gunshots coming up from the top deck to try and force him off.

  What have I become?

  Sometimes Matt’s unrecognizable to himself. The journey home has changed him. He looks back at the seething crowds he’s left behind on the bridge, baying for his blood, and thinks I’m not like you. The Haters are dangerous as hell, but they’re increasingly predictable. He’s trained himself to think like them and anticipate their next move, then do the exact opposite. And then he thinks about the people in the battle-bus. I’m not like you, either.

  Facedown. Breathing hard. Relieved but nervous. (Relatively) safe for now. It’s only now that Matt allows himself to believe he might finally have done it. Next stop, home. Nine weeks, three days, eight hours since he was last there. Back to Jen. Christ, he’s missed her. The thought of seeing her again takes the faintest edge off the painful emptiness he’s felt for weeks.

  2

  Matt used to know this area well, though it’s taken him a while to work out precisely where he is. Watching the world from this height is disorientating. There’s a tenuous familiarity, but everything’s changed; torn apart and turned upside down and left looking nothing like it used to. It makes him wonder what kind of condition home will be in when he finally gets there. The journey back has taken so damn long, slow shuffles and baby steps all the way. Endless diversions. Countless nervous hours spent sitting still, waiting for danger to pass. It’s been the slowest crawl. Less than two hundred miles has taken almost eighty days. But he was always going to come back, even if it took ten times as long. How could he not?

  Matt thinks back to the last time he traveled by bus, the last time he was in a vehicle of any description, come to think of it. He’d had company then. Sometimes he regrets leaving Paul O’Keefe to die, but he knows Paul wouldn’t have given him a second thought if their positions had been reversed. Matt often thinks about how Paul murdered their friend Natalie so he could secure his own seat on the boat home. At the time Matt had been appalled but now, in retrospect, he wonders if some of the things he’s done to survive have been any worse. I did what I had to do, is what he tells himself. It’s funny, he has memories of Paul saying something similar.

  Matt learned fast that even though the world is an infinitely more violent place now, it still takes brains more than muscle to stay alive. He’s always been a realist who erred on the side of caution (it’s the ex-accountant in him) and though people used to see that as a negative trait, his ability to sidestep trouble is actually what’s kept him alive. In a war as one-sided as this, you risk everything if you try going toe-to-toe with your enemy. Only trouble is, when you duck a punch in the face out here, someone else usually takes the hit instead. He’s lost track of how many people he’s left behind with bloodied noses (or considerably worse).

  It’s hot up here on the roof of the bus. The early-summer sun burns down, heating up the metal surface he’s lying on, frying him like an egg, but the discomfort’s a small price to pay for the separation from danger. The bus lurches as the road turns right and the militia fighters downstairs release a volley of gunfire, driving back a frenzied Hater attack before it can properly get started. One of the military vehicles behind follows up with a heavier artillery strike, pounding the enemy into submission with a howitzer. The weaponry at their disposal is reassuring.

  Matt wonders if there’s a single square meter of the country left where people aren’t killing each other? From what he’s gathered on his slow-motion travels these last nine weeks, the largest cities which haven’t yet fallen to the Haters have become refugee camps. Tactically and logistically it makes perfect sense to isolate us from them, but the prospect of mixing with any other people again makes him feel uneasy. He’s done what he can to avoid everyone else since nearly getting his fingers burned early on. He spent a couple of days in the company of a girl called Sarah. She’d been following a similar strategy to him: keep quiet, keep out of the way, let everyone else panic and draw away the Haters. He should have seen it coming, though. When push came to shove, she didn’t hesitate to throw him under the bus. The pair of them had been backed into a corner and had split to stay alive, agreeing to rendezvous later a little further down the road. But Sarah never had any intention of meeting up again. Matt had been her stooge. From the moment they’d separated she’d been intent on sending the attacking Haters after him. She’d have done for him too if he hadn’t been one step ahead of her game. Suspecting trouble, he’d already doubled back and sent the Hater hordes flocking in her direction instead.

  He’s not sure if Sarah survived. He hopes she did. She wasn’t stupid like Paul, she was just … just too much like Matt. The two of them were never going to get along. They’d have been constantly risking each other’s necks to save themselves.

  The bus is powering along again now. Matt peers down over the side as they drive through the remains of a fairly typical residential street. Seein
g the place reminds him of a stranded family he came across, early days. Just thinking about them makes his heart sink, even now. In more than two months of frequent low points, that day was the lowest of all. He grips the ice axe handle tight and buries his face. He does his best to forget but whenever he starts to remember the family’s faces, it’s always hard to stop.

  He’d stumbled on them by chance while investigating signs of recent occupation: mum, dad, and three kids hiding in an attic bedroom. They’d knocked through to the loft space of an adjacent house and that had thrown him off the scent for a while but, once he’d found them, they’d panicked in unison, figuring he was a Hater. He’d tried to explain, tried to convince them they were all on the same side, but his pleas had fallen on collective deaf ears and by the time Mother had accepted that if he had been there to kill them he’d have done it already, it was too late. Their panic and noise had attracted the first few Hater scouts, and when the family had refused to shut the fuck up, Matt had no choice but to abandon them or go down with them. He climbed out of a Velux window and took shelter on the roof, clinging on to a crumbling chimney stack where, precarious and exposed, he’d heard every last scream of each of the five deaths. Their hunger temporarily sated and assuming the place had been cleared of Unchanged, the Hater pack soon slunk off in search of more kills, oblivious to the fact he remained so close. Matt had stayed up on the roof for more than a day until he was certain they’d gone.

  He’d taken what was left of the family’s food, looting from around their bodies. Maybe he could have helped them, but it had been easier to sacrifice five lives and use their deaths as cover. It was him or them. By making themselves the target, they’d allowed him to survive.

  There’s a bump in the road that nearly sends him flying off the bus and he grabs the handle of the ice axe again with both hands. The wrenching pain in his wrists helps him focus on the here and now and forget about the then and there. But it’s not all cut-and-dried, good and bad, right or wrong. Between black and white he’s found there are a thousand shades of gray.

  Ten days ago Matt took the mother of all wrong turns and ended up walking into the middle of a Hater encampment. Unable to get away for fear of being seen, he’d spent hours lying curled up in the mud just meters away from a huge mob of them, listening to their noise. War’s a big deal for both sides, that much is a given, but Matt had been surprised how the psychological impact of the fighting appeared to be taking its toll on many of the Haters, too. Listening to them talk, he found himself beginning to identify with their plight, sympathizing almost. He heard them talking about how their lives had been chewed up and spat out by the conflict, same as his. It was the first time he’d heard the word Unchanged used to describe people like him, and the way they’d used the term sounded derogatory, as if people like Matt had failed to evolve. He, on the other hand, took it as a compliment that he’d not been corrupted by the scourge of the Hate.

  The stench there had been vile and the close proximity of the Haters had kept him permanently on edge, but Matt’s exhaustion had eventually got the better of him. He’d slept fitfully in the deep mud, camouflaged by the mire. Uncomfortable at first, as the hours had worn on it had clung to his body like a blanket, insulating him from the cold, the malleable ground molding to his shape like a memory foam mattress, holding him like a hand.

  The Haters left hurriedly during the night, called away to battle. When, after several more hours, they’d failed to return, Matt risked getting up and moving on. He’d even had the nerve to stop and steal a little food from the dying campfire; a subtle fuck you to the enemy. Buoyed up by his insignificant little victory, he’d walked a couple of miles farther before making a discovery which, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, made him question which side were the true architects of hate. He found a place so heinous that it had made him want to stop and give up there and then. He’d not just felt his heart sink, but also his soul.

  Bodies, Matt had long since realized, could be useful. They’re a source of clothing and supplies, as well as camouflage. He’d found playing dead to avoid attack was immeasurably easier when those people around him actually were dead.

  On the run again after leaving the camp, Matt thought he’d lucked out when he came across a stack of twenty or so cadavers in a clearing in a wood. But relief had turned to disgust and then to terror when he discovered he hadn’t found twenty bodies, he’d found hundreds. There may even have been thousands. And the mounds of agitated earth and long, freshly dug-over scars in the ground nearby intimated there may have been many, many more besides, hastily dumped in anonymous mass graves. It was a death camp. Knowing the Haters rarely bothered to dispose of their kills, after exploring the site in the rapidly deteriorating daylight Matt reached the inevitable conclusion that this wholesale, mass-produced massacre had been Unchanged in origin. Finding what was left of the Haters from the campfire had been proof positive.

  Still, he remembered thinking at the time, needs must.

  * * *

  The memories make the time melt. Another jolt in the road and he’s back on the roof of the bus again, almost home.

  3

  Here we go again. Another abrupt change of direction and speed. The sounds of another skirmish growing louder by the second. Yet more Haters are attacking the convoy.

  Matt lifts his head and risks looking around, focusing on distant features and landmarks as a distraction from the swell of violence immediately below. A distinctive clump of years-old trees on top of a dome-shaped hill just outside the city boundary—The Beeches, he thinks they’re called—confirms he’s on the right track at last. Turning to the east he catches a glimpse of an instantly recognizable industrial skyline, and the sudden familiarity makes him catch his breath. There’s a building or two missing like knocked-out front teeth, as if the city itself has come off second-best in a schoolyard scrap, but there’s no mistaking home. There’s a haze of oily smoke hanging in the air that he can smell from all the way out here and the place looks disappointingly decrepit. Jen’s in there somewhere, he thinks, and his pulse starts to race faster. Christ, he’s missed her. He can’t wait to see her and hold her and know that she’s safe.

  The road curves in the opposite direction now and Matt adjusts his position, able at last to get a better view of home. There’s much activity in the shadows of the city. It’s been dry for the last week or so and great clouds of dust are being thrown up by vehicles which race around the outside of the encampment. Drones and helicopters are carpet bombing a region outside the city to the east, keeping more Haters at bay. That’s a good sign, he thinks. If the Haters are being pushed back, then by default that must mean the population of the city is relatively safe. Lifting himself up onto his elbows, Matt orients himself. He sees the motorway and other arterial routes, but he has to hunt for them because they’re not as immediately visible as they used to be. They’re quiet. Cauterized. It makes sense because if you control the access routes, you control the flow of people. This is the only place he knows that still matters. It matters to the refugees who want to stay alive, and equally to the Haters who want them dead. In the immediate area at least, this place is pivotal. All roads end here.

  But by far the best way to control the movement of people, Matt realizes, is to build a bloody big wall with a bloody strong gate. From his elevated vantage point he sees what he assumes is the main entrance into the city. There’s a stream of people trying to get in. Protected by heavy weaponry and by persistent drones which hang motionless in the shimmering summer heat-haze, people are being funneled toward the mother of all checkpoints.

  The noise level increases dramatically, and Matt looks up and sees that one of the helicopters has drifted out from the city to meet their convoy. He knows he has to get off the roof and get among the masses. Everyone looks the same from a distance, he thinks, Hater and Unchanged alike. They’ll assume he’s a stowaway Hater and try to take him out. He consoles himself temporarily with the thought tha
t they wouldn’t risk dropping a bomb on a bus full of survivors just to get rid of one potential Hater, would they? Then again, maybe they would. Imagine the damage a single Hater could do inside the camp. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The helicopter banks away to the right. Matt cranes his neck and watches it climb away, then buries his face again when the aircraft unleashes a screaming missile which roars toward him, filling the air with noise and heat and choking fumes. It hits the ground a couple of hundred meters beyond the bus and when the explosion dies down he sees that the target was yet another surge of Haters. Most of them have been killed outright, but a few stragglers remain and are taken out by more potshots from the battle-bus and the gunners on the back of other vehicles. One of the surviving killers—a huge, lumbering, blood-soaked bulk of a man—scrambles over a pile of rubble and runs toward the convoy, deceptively agile in spite of his size and his injuries. Killing means more to him than living. Fucker looks like he’s been driven out of his mind by the Hate. He’s hit by bullet after bullet until he finally drops.

  And here comes another one.

  A shot is fired from the front of the bus, hitting this next Hater in the shoulder. He’s slowed but not stopped. The impact barely even registers, barely even causes him to misstep. He’s hit in the belly by another bullet, but still he keeps coming. Breaking ranks, a biker soldier loops around the back of the bus and comes at the Hater like a medieval gladiator, carrying a length of metal pole like he’s jousting. Even though the Hater’s been blown up and shot twice, he’s still got enough about him to sidestep the end of the pole and grab hold of it. He hoists the biker clean off his machine and the bike freewheels through the glass door of a long-dead branch of McDonald’s.

  The leather-clad soldier is up in seconds, but the Hater’s already coming for him. The soldier snatches a pistol from a holster and fires again and again and again, and it’s only when the Hater’s taken five more bullets (the last one right between the eyes) that he finally goes down. He hits the deck but his momentum keeps him moving forward, skidding through the dust and coming to an undignified halt just short of the soldier’s booted feet.