All nightmare long, p.27
All Nightmare Long, page 27
There were maybe fifty of them. Most were clumped against the section of fence built across the road, but I saw a few down in the fields as well. One of those still seemed to be carrying a rifle across his back, though now I hoped he no longer remembered how to use it.
They were making very little noise. A few moans and groans, but none of the raging growls that had marked the first phase of infection. All these were past that now—they’d gone mad, and killed, and died, and now they were back again, and all they saw when they looked at me was my succulent still-beating heart.
There’s been a recurrence, O’Driscoll had said. Smug prick. I looked for him, but didn’t see him. I hoped he’d been killed and torn apart, found true death, because however much I hated him I’d had contact with him, and he was a human being like me. He was only doing what he’d thought was right, and this was no way to end up.
I tried to make out exactly what this meant. The Purge had worked in Usk, for a while at least, and now that there had been an outbreak beyond the town, surely the military would launch another Purge? But there was no sound of vehicles anywhere, neither ground nor air, and I could see no plane trails in the sky.
And there was that burning city.
I sat and watched them for a while, trying not to appreciate the stark truth of things: that this plague had gone further, and perhaps was still travelling.
Then I knew what I had to do before returning to Bindy, because I couldn’t go back to her with half-truths and suppositions. I had to make sure that we were safe, and that our prison had become our refuge.
I walked north first of all, following the fence all around the town until it reached the river. I looked into the town at the stone bridge, and from here I could just see the clumsy block barrier that they’d built at its centre. The fence extended right across the river and continued on the other side, obviously encompassing what had been their encampment.
I followed the fence back around the town, crossing the road where most of them were still gathered. They pushed and shoved, but it was solid, and they had no real strength.
A mile to the south of town I saw O’Driscoll. He was naked, and his entire front was a mass of dried blood. I couldn’t make out whether or not it was his own, and I gave him a wide berth. He leaned against the metal upright, banging his head rhythmically against it as he watched me pass.
The fence reached the river on that side too, and crossed over, and I knew I had to swim over to make sure. I half-swam, half-walked, and on the other side where their encampment had been, I found that the fence only enclosed a small part of it. Gates were built in at two points, both of them padlocked and chained. I’d found no breaches, and no areas where any of them could climb over. The military had been very thorough and determined to keep us in, and as I forded the river again and walked back into town I thanked them for that. It was a good job they’d realised how dangerous we could be.
Bindy was in the hotel bar, sipping nervously from a glass of wine. When I entered she jumped up and ran to me, cursing and crying and wrapping her arms around my neck.
“Where the fucking hell have you been?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re all I’ve got, Tobe, you’re all that’s left. Don’t you dare scare me like that again, ever!” She pulled back and held my face, staring into my eyes, and I realised something both striking and comforting then: in her own quiet way, Bindy was in charge.
“I won’t,” I said. She held me tight again, and I hugged her back. “You’re all I’ve got too, Bindy.”
She pulled away, stalked back to the bar, poured some drinks. She wouldn’t catch my eye.
“It’s spread outside,” I said.
“I know. I guessed. I walked and saw the fence, and some of...them.”
“That big fire’s still burning.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe they’ll starve.”
We sat down together and drank, shoulder to shoulder on a leather sofa, the contact so important. There was so much more that needed to be said, but I knew it could wait. We both realised the truth—that our entrapment had become the only freedom left.
Later, just before midnight, I asked her what she’d found as she continued searching the big houses on that street. Her hesitation was just too long for me to ignore, and she would not meet my eye. But when she said, Nothing, I nodded and let it stand. For then, at least.
That night in bed, we began our future together. It was beautiful and intense, and I think the passion came more from our continuing freedom than anything else. I should have felt guilt, but there was none, because the past was now so far away and obscure that it felt like someone else’s memories. Maybe in the daylight things would be different, but then it felt so right.
Afterwards, lying in the dark listening to a silence that would become the norm, she told me.
“I found her,” she said.
“I know.”
“In the last house. I nailed the doors shut.”
“Good.”
“So...?”
“Tomorrow, yes. We’ll go and set a fire.”
I did not sleep at all that night. The fear was there that we had left it too late, and I listened every second for sounds that did not come: the creaking of footsteps on the stairs; the low grumbling of my wife come to berate me and regain my heart.
Even though she said nothing, I knew that Bindy remained awake as well. She was looking after me.
Dawn brought the smell of burning from afar, and we went out together to finish cleansing our town.
MAY THE END BE GOOD
“Things went ever from bad to worse. When God wills, may the end be good.”
—Unknown monk, Worcester, England, 1067
As dawn broke it started snowing again, and Winfrid saw a body hanging from a tree.
He paused downhill from the grisly display, catching his breath and shrugging his habit and sheepskin in tighter. Nothing could hold back the shivers. They were mostly from the cold, but over the last ten days he had seen things that set a terror deep in his bones. Fear of God he had, as did any monk; a complex, rich emotion that seemed to both nurture and starve. But this fear was something new. He had yet to define it fully.
Perhaps the body in the tree would feed him another clue.
As he crunched through the freshly falling snow, softly layered over the previous week’s falls, several birds took flight from the corpse. A rook he expected, but some of the smaller creatures—finches, a robin, several sparrows—were a surprise. With fields of crops burned, villages put to the torch, and the dead more numerous than ever before, perhaps these previously cautious birds were taking whatever they could get.
“Even the animals are against us,” he muttered as he moved cautiously uphill. He didn’t truly believe that, because the animals served only themselves. But if they had turned, it would have been the fault of the French. This brutality, this scourging of the land, was all their doing. William the Bastard and his mounted armies had not stopped when they defeated the English uprising in the north. They had carried on, shifting their attention from soldiers to farmers, peasants scraping a living from the land. The cattle fell beneath the sword first, then homes were put to the flame. Anyone who objected received the same—sword, flame, or sometimes both.
Winfrid had seen a child speared onto the side of a burning home. A man split from throat to crotch and seeded with the torched remnants of his stored harvest. Women tortured and raped, left as barren as the land. Whole villages torched, populations massacred or left to fend for themselves from a blasted landscape where nothing would grow, no livestock remained alive, and no building was left standing.
The north had paid a hundred times over for rebelling against he who called himself king, and that debt was still being gathered.
The body was relatively fresh. A man, stripped of clothing and hung from his neck that was stretched thin and torn, head blackened and tilted to one side. His swollen tongue protruded from his mouth like a final scream.
Winfrid muttered some prayers and tried to unsee the signs of scavenging. He had witnessed them on several bodies over the past few days, and rumours of cannibalism muttered in the darker parts of his mind. Prayers would not hide them away.
The man’s legs were mostly stripped of flesh, bones plainly visible in several places, knife marks obvious. His cock and balls were gone, his stomach slack and drooping, and his stick-like fingers seemed unnaturally long.
Winfrid’s prayers froze when he heard a sound. It might have been a song being sung in the distance, or a whisper from much closer. He stared up at the dead man’s face and saw no movement there, but still he hurried on, pleased when the trees and snow finally hid the grotesque sight from view.
“Just the wind,” he said. His voice was muffled in the landscape, the white silence of snow and woodland showing only scattered signs of life. Birds pecked ineffectually here and there. Rabbits scampered from shadow to shadow. He saw prints that might have belonged to a fox, but then found larger marks that were undoubtedly those of a wolf. Winfrid had heard that wolves had ventured north and east from the borderlands between England and Wales, but he was surprised that they had come this far. The slaughters in the north would have left little for them to eat.
He would have to be careful. Hungry wolves had been known to take down a grown man, and with the snows falling later this year, a pack might become desperate.
He heard the sound again, from ahead and above, drifting down the hillside and twisting between the trees. Perhaps it was the wind, but it had a haunting quality that stopped him in his path. It lured him in and scared him at the same time. I believed I was away from the horror, he thought, but perhaps he never could be. The body hanging from the tree was yet another sign of that, and he had no way of knowing just how far King William’s fury might extend.
The wind, the voice, suddenly ceased, and the silent snowscape surrounded him once again. Frightening though the sound was, in a way the silence was worse. He moved on, listening for more sounds and keeping alert for movement.
It was difficult. He was cold and tired, and a man in his fifth decade was not meant to be wandering the landscape, especially one as harsh as this. He had spent his younger years spreading the Word, and now in his old age he should be comfortable in the monastery, waking early to pray, tending the gardens, brewing mead, and waiting for that approaching hour when God called him home. But instead the monastery had been sacked, riches plundered, and the monks turned out to fend for themselves. Never a material man, even so he had cried at the sight of French knights and their horses trampling the fields he had toiled in for so long.
Winfrid started a low, soft prayer, the whispered words calming and comforting. It reminded him of friends and peace, and right then he would have given anything for either.
“Did you hear her?”
The voice shocked him and he started upright, staggering into a young tree. The impact shook dead leaves and snow from a fork in its branches, and he saw the man through a haze of falling leaves and ice.
“You. Did you hear her?” The man seemed frantic, head jerking left and right like a chicken’s. He had one hand cupped behind his ear.
“Did I hear who?” Winfrid asked.
“My Lina. My sweet girl Lina, singing so that we can find her, though we never can, we never can!”
“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called. Winfrid saw them both more clearly now that the falling leaves had settled. The man was twenty steps away, the woman close behind him, and he had seen healthier-looking people dead by the trail. How they could still be alive he did not know.
“My name is Winfrid,” the monk said. He offered them a prayer in Latin, aware that they would not understand yet eager to ensure they knew who he was. They looked hungry. And Winfrid could neither forget, nor unsee the cannibalism he had seen.
“So you did hear her,” the woman said.
“No, I—”
“You’re praying to bring her back to us. So keep praying. Tell God to give her back!”
“I can’t tell God to do anything,” Winfrid said.
The man and woman stared at him for a while, the snow floating between them doing little to soften their skeletal forms. Then the man began to cry. They were dry tears, but his shoulders shook, and his chest emitted a click-click like bone tapping against bone.
“Will you eat with us?” the woman asked. She held out her hand even though they were twenty steps apart.
Winfrid’s stomach rumbled. He could not recall the last time he had eaten anything resembling good food, and as if bidden by her invitation, he caught the scent of cooking meat on the air. They’ll attract wolves, he thought. Or Frenchmen might still be close, looking for survivors to kill for fun.
“Eat what?” he asked.
“Rabbit,” the woman said past her husband’s shuddering, shrivelling form.
It was through hunger that Winfrid let himself believe her.
They had a weak fire burning on a small, rocky plateau shielded by a steep hillside. Several sticks spanned the fire, with chunks of speared meat spitting fat into the flames. Snowflakes hissed into oblivion in the smoke. Burning logs jumped, settled, coughed ash.
Winfrid’s mouth watered at the smell. “There are wolves. I’ve seen their tracks.”
“We’ll die if we don’t eat,” the woman said. They stood round the fire. It was too cold and wet to sit down. The man was a shaking statue, staring at his shoes and dribbling from his mouth. Even with thick clothing, he was barely there. His wife was just as thin, but she seemed stronger. More present, less close to death.
“And with Lina still out there, we can’t just go on,” she said. “We lost our other children. Our three boys, two girls, dead and gone ....”She stared into flames.
“The French?” Winfrid asked.
“Some of them.” She stretched her hands out to be warmed. “The things I’ve seen...”
And the things I have seen, Winfrid thought. The murders and rapes, the fury and wretchedness, the inhumanity. And sometimes the pity and love. That kept him going. God’s love, always, but even more affecting was the love he saw between people. Not everyone was given over to violence. It provided hope.
He prayed that this sad couple might also give him hope.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were leaving our village,” she said. “Four weeks ago.”
“More,” the man said. Winfrid had not even thought he was aware, but now he saw that the man’s shivering had lessened, and he leaned against his wife. Still looking down at his feet. “Six weeks, maybe seven. Forever.”
“Maybe,” she said. “They were burning the village. The cattle had been slaughtered. The knights had killed anyone with a weapon or farming tool in their hands, and their blood was up. They wanted more. Some of them stayed...in the background. Just killing things. But one of them, the one in charge, he was bigger than them all.”
“Bigger than any man,” her husband said.
“It just seemed that way,” she whispered. “He was taking the girls and raping them. I ran with Lina, crawling through a muddy field, and Eadric here met us a day later on the other side of the woods.”
“I saw what else they did,” Eadric said. He stared into the weak flames, then knelt and ripped a chunk of meat from one stick. He handed it to his wife, then tore off a scrap for himself. They both started eating, noisily, slurping at running fat and grunting in satisfaction as the hot, chewed meat slipped down their gullets.
Winfrid’s hunger turned from pang to pain, and he swayed where he stood. A fat snowflake landed on his nose and remained there, as if he gave off no heat. As if he were dead.
“Ten days, it took, to get this far,” the woman said, chewing and swallowing as she spoke. “Meat?”
“Yes, I . . .”Winfrid said. He leaned forward and fell to his knees. Coldness ate through his clothes and surrounded his legs. Heat stretched the skin of his face, and as he reached forward, his hands tingled, burned. He touched the hot meat on one stick, then drew his hand back again.
“Where did she go?” he asked. Their daughter Lina kept them here, and suddenly he wondered how. The singing he might have heard could have been the wind, or perhaps it was this woman’s own madness. Or this man’s. Neither seemed all there.
“The shadows,” the woman said. Her eyes went wide and she stopped chewing, staring off past the fire into the shady woods.
Snow continued to fall, dulling any sound, making even the crackling flames sound weak and distant. “She walked into them and never came back.”
“She got lost in the woods?”
“She is not lost,” Eadric said, looking up at last. He followed the woman’s gaze. “We are lost.” He started to sob, going to his knees and clasping her clothing all the way, trying to keep himself upright. “We are lost!”
“How do you catch rabbits?” Winfrid asked. “Where are your spears? Your snares?”
“We find them dead,” the woman said. “Hanging from the trees.”
Winfrid stood and backed away from the fire. The remaining meat was blackening beneath the flames, and it would be dry and tough now, hot. Filled with juice and fat. Rabbit, that was all, and he had eaten rabbit a thousand times before. But though hunger squirmed in his stomach and writhed in his bones, he no longer had an appetite.
“God help you,” he whispered. Eadric smiled at him then, displaying several teeth and the dark gaps between them, and shreds of meat speckling his tongue. The woman smiled as well. “God help you both, because your daughter is dead, and—”
From somewhere higher up on the hillside, there came singing.
A sweet, light voice rose and fell. Winfrid could not hear the words, but the music they made drove through him like the sharpest blade.
“Lina!” Eadric shouted.
“She sings to us,” the woman said. “Every day she sings, and we go to find her, and we never do...but one day we will, one day when the snows end and life returns to the land and Lina sings us closer and closer, we’ll find her, and in the end everything will all be good.”
