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Six: London Pride

On a hot day in the capital, interspersed with pints of London Pride—hoppy, with a citrus bite and a light bitter finish—whenever we could find a pub not jammed to the gills with thirsty marchers and press people eager for a drink, Ashley and I joined a protest march against the war in Iraq. It was an adventure. We'd travelled down the night before, enjoying the communal spirit on the coach, Ashley dozing with her head resting against my shoulder, slowing as we neared London and taking four hours to make our eventual way, snake-like, into the city. We had intended staying in a guest house that night, but it was almost three a.m. by the time we poured from the bus. We thanked the exhausted driver and he smiled back, giving us a cheerful peace sign and telling us to go get them. Once on the street we found that the atmosphere was already buzzing. Hundreds of people were dipping in and out of all night diners, with many more pitching stands and tables from which they were selling banners, placards and tee-shirts.

"Shall we hit the sack?" I asked.

"I don't think I could sleep a wink!" Ashley said. She grasped my hand and we plunged into the crowd. She'd been asleep for four hours on the coach and I'd grabbed barely half an hour, but I was so thrilled by her enthusiasm that I didn't have the heart to insist.

And I'm glad I didn't. We ate an early breakfast—or a very late supper—of sausages, mash and onion gravy, then found a pub that was probably breaking a dozen laws by being open at four in the morning. Trade was manic, and the landlord seemed to enter into the spirit of safe rebellion by halving the prices of his drinks. We settled down at a small corner table and drank London Pride at less than two pounds per pint. It was bliss. We could barely hear each other talk above the hubbub, but we spent much of the time listening to the good-natured banter, the occasional song, and the exhortations of a tall Scot who insisted on dancing on tables and regaling us with poems no one could understand.

The Pride was gorgeous. I'd drank it outside London but it never seemed to travel very well. Perhaps it didn't like being away from home. Here it was smooth and rich, giving a distinct hoppy smell and a full-bodied taste. The pub served its beer in mugs, which was a refreshing change, and by the time the march was due to start at nine a.m. we'd already had several pints, some more food, and a couple of hours of lively singing, chanting and cheering.

When we exited the pub and headed north toward the march, we passed a group of more serious protestors standing on the corner. We were here because we felt bad about the war, the lies spewing from politicians' mouths, the whole basis upon which we were invading another country. It made Ashley and me angry and we'd printed our own "Not in My Name" tee-shirts, because we didn't want some side-street vendor profiting from such heartfelt conviction.

These people standing on the corner had built a screen from torn cardboard boxes and timber framing. They'd covered its entire surface with white paper and then started affixing pictures, photographs and bold lines of quoted rhetoric at various places. George Bush, Tony Blair, Saddam Hussein, military hardware, oil drilling rigs, the UN flag, the French President, soldiers with brown skin and white, a group of children playing in a park in London, a group of children playing in a park in Baghdad. When they'd finished they connected faces with words, images with photographs, and then they combined the disparate threads and joined them at the centre. There sat a gruesome photograph from the first Gulf War, showing the effects of a high-explosive bomb on the confined space of a bomb shelter. Written across the temporary screen below this photograph, in what I was almost certain must have been one of the protestor's blood, was the word Innocent.

The crowd grew quiet as it passed this presentation. A few still bickered and jeered, but mostly we were cowed by the seriousness of the display. We were here partly for the protest, but mostly for ourselves, pandering to some deep-felt guilt and trying to give ourselves a sense of having done something positive. We were being safe, and hoping it would make a difference.

The display shamed me in ways it should not have. It made me sad that we'd been drinking beer and having fun while these protestors faced such dreadful photographs, pinned them up, cut their veins to add their words of defiance.

"How can they be so intense?" Ashley said to me. "It's all about a combined voice, isn't it? We're here in numbers, not to see who can be most horrifying." And she was right. We passed the make-do display board and its creators, leaving them in a bubble of uncomfortable silence that hung in many places across London that day. Mostly the people on the march were like us, ready for a day out to make our voice heard and our statistic felt. Ashley and I did not feel bad about that. We marched, wore our tee-shirts, and we even got to speak into a camera from a regional TV station in Wales, though we never found out whether the interview was broadcast.

Indeed, some of these more extreme protestors tended to spoil the spirit of the day. One group of them chanted, "Blair fucks Bush!" again and again, unconcerned at the presence of young kids brought along by their parents to take part in this public outpouring of opinion. Another started a shuffling, clumsy scuffle with police, and while they were handcuffed and led away they shouted about fascist abuse and the stifling of freedom of speech. We looked and shook our heads, because we were as free as anyone. We were making our feelings felt. We were saying something, and doing so far more effectively than being locked away in the back of a police van.

The sense of camaraderie was powerful and dizzying, and there was no impatience whilst queuing for food or toilets, no anger, no tempers flaring. Ashley and I sat outside a pub drinking London Pride late that afternoon, our feet sore and legs aching from walking so far, and a gang of kids from a school in Yorkshire put on an impromptu acrobatic display in the street while their teachers enjoyed a drink.

"They'll remember this forever," one of the teachers said to me, sipping from his drink, his eyes alight.

"Do you think it'll do any good?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Absolutely not. But it never was about stopping the war, was it?"

I thought about that for a long time, and later when Ashley and I were making love in our guest house bedroom, I knew what he meant. We marched, but we knew it would never stop the war. We made love, but we knew now that we could never have children. It was the process that made a difference, not the end effect, and it was all about love. Afterwards I told her what I thought, and she agreed.

"Not hippyish, not Seventies-flowers-in-our-hair," she said, "but yes, today was all about love." We held each other close as we fell asleep, happy that we had made a difference.

 

Cordell offers to ride the bike but I refuse. It already feels like mine. We have ridden and fallen together, and in truth there's something special about it because it was Michael's. And whose before his? I think. Whose was this bike before Michael found it coughing away alone, by the side of the road? Cordell claps me on the shoulder and tells me to take care.

We head down the hill toward the M4 junction, and the wolves are on my mind. We just witnessed a wolf pack make a killing in the South Wales countryside. Even with everything that has happened that instils a sense of amazement in me, and I'm glad I can still feel that way. I keep glancing in my wing mirror, expecting to see loping grey shapes keeping pace with us in the fields, darting from cover to cover as they stalk us southward. Instinct goes so far, but these creatures knew what they were doing. They were practised, their assault perfected. They were wild. Our view would have been the envy of any wildlife cameraman, and though the attack was far away, still the tactics were clear.

Perhaps they'd escaped from Longleat or some other safari park when the end came. The wolves there were kept out in the open, a large enclosure where they could wander away from the fascinated gaze of children if the mood so took them. Ashley and I had been there several times (and she must have smiled, she must have laughed, but still I only remember her when I'm drunk). But the wolves' food at Longleat was delivered already dead, because it was felt that visitors could be disturbed to see the majestic creatures hunting and killing their own prey. Yes, instinct went so far, but I was unsure whether animals reared and kept in such surroundings could ever really adapt to the wild.

And certainly not this quickly.

Perhaps they had been living in the wild for decades. Britain echoed with these stories, tales of cryptozoology featuring wild cats and bears and wolves, and there were many professional scientists prepared to risk their reputations by agreeing with such tales. And Wales had always been a hub of sightings. With its mountain ranges and wide swathes of sparsely populated countryside, it was a natural home for creatures that wished to exist below the radar, popping up only now and then to slaughter half a flock of sheep or gash some over-inquisitive rambler's legs.

I think of the pack circling the deer, herding them, and the waiting wolves pouncing from the cover of trees. And a shiver runs down my back. I am suddenly certain that we have just witnessed something far removed from how the world was before the plagues came.

We come to a slew of wrecked vehicles, and beside the road I see the remains of a military helicopter. The rotors are clearly visible farther out in the field, detached but protruding from the ground like giant darts. The body of the aircraft is lying on its side down the embankment and across the ditch, burnt out and showing its charred metallic skeleton to the sun. Some of the crashed cars are similarly blackened, and I wonder how many people died here as a result of watching the helicopter plummet from the sky and explode. Dozens, probably. Even though billions are dead, such numbers still have more of an effect on me. A dozen is easier to imagine than a billion. I can see a dozen faces from my life, but a billion is beyond my comprehension.

There's a skeleton on the road. I see it at the last minute, thinking that it was a shred of cloth or a scrap of tattered cardboard, and I ride across it, wincing as the bones crush beneath my wheels. I look left and right at the shattered cars, trying not to wonder whose son or husband, daughter or mother I have just run over. Roadkill, I think, and the image does not sit well.

Something has come this way since the accident. I'm riding across wide swathes of melted tarmac where burning cars had once stood, but now they're piled at crazy angles along the side of the road, torn bodies huddled together against prying eyes. Lucky for us, otherwise the Range Rovers would never make it through. I wonder who it was, and when, and what they had been driving. I hope that the cleared route continues.

We're drawing closer to the large roundabout below the motorway flyover. And this is where our whole journey could change. If the motorway is jammed with abandoned vehicles then we will have to walk, and a trip that would take perhaps two days in vehicles would stretch to weeks on foot. Can we really walk that far? I think. With everything that might be out there, can we go that far without meeting something or someone dangerous, or succumbing to hunger or thirst, or just giving up? It's not a thought I wish to explore at any length, nor a situation I want to experience.

Right now, I could kill a pint of beer. Bluebird Ale from Coniston Brewery sticks in my head for some reason, a beer I have not seen for sale in many places. Drinking atoms of Donald Campbell with every mouthful, Ashley had once said, displaying the gruesome streak of humour she mostly kept in check. But it was a good beer, and we shared good times drinking it, and for a moment faster than the blink of an eye Ashley smiles at me and sees away the fears.

There's something else marring the surface of the road ahead. I frown and squint, sure that the sun is dazzling me and perhaps setting a mirage in my path. The road seems heavily textured, bubbled and spiked, and I roll to a stop. The vehicles halt behind me, and I hear the expectant purr of their motors. I hold up one hand and roll slowly forward.

The stretch of road is clear, so it's not somewhere scorched by a blazing car. There are no bodies, no debris on the tarmac, and then colour crowds in and I know what I'm seeing.

Shoots. Thousands of them, thin and sharp and spiked with bright green leaves yet to unfurl. Most of them have barely broken the surface of the road, but some are several inches high, thick at the base and pointed at the top. A few—maybe two dozen—would probably reach my knee, and these have started to spread and sprout now that they're free of the ground. I don't recognise them. The heads of these taller specimens have fattened leaves spreading from the bulbous tops and seeking the sun.

Trees? I'm not sure. I edge forward and kick out at a couple of the shorter shoots, snapping them off. Their exposed cores glitter wet in the sunlight. They've forced their way up through the road across a wide area, extending from here all the way down to the motorway roundabout. They're small, weak plants, and yet for some reason I feel reticent about riding through them.

Jacqueline toots her horn and I glance back. She's leaning from the window, hand outstretched as if to say, What? I shake my head, shrug and move on.

I cannot feel the shoots snapping beneath the motorcycle's wheels, but I know they are. I cannot even hear them breaking beneath the much wider tyres of the Range Rovers. We plough through this new spread of greenery and growth, leaving behind us the scars of our journey in crushed lines of life, and we don't even notice what we are doing.

 

We have seen no one else alive. There have been plenty of bodies in sealed cars, charred skeletons on the roadside, vague humps at the edges of fields bordering the road that could have been the remains of people fleeing something in the traffic. But we are the only living humans here. I feel like an intruder in this world, and I have already berated myself for thinking of it as a dead place. It's far from dead. Bereft of humanity, maybe, but perhaps all the more alive because of that. Birds flock and flicker through the air, and here and there I've seen the distinctive gatherings of stick and feather nests, resting in the arms of blackened bent metal along the road. There were the wolves a couple of miles back, and other large shapes move across the fields. Foxes, I'm guessing, and more deer, and perhaps cattle that managed to survive the winter and are now reaping the green benefits of spring. The roar of our engines startles some shapes into stillness, but others seem unconcerned at our passing. A family of rabbits sits beside the road and watches us drive past, eyeing the Range Rover wheels suspiciously.

High above, I see two huge birds circling. Buzzards, perhaps, though they look too large for that. Eagles, I think. But that's ridiculous. There are some wild eagles left in the northern reaches of Scotland, but . . .

But what about the wolves?

As I start slowing toward the motorway roundabout I see the unmistakeable outline of a person walking from west to east along the overpass. The shape pauses, looks our way and begins to run.

 

"So why are we still alive?" Cordell asked. It was our fourth night at the Manor, and the first night we were all there together. Jessica had come in that day, cycling down the lane and spotting me standing on the folly's balcony. She had stopped and zinged her bicycle bell, waved, and turned in the gates. I had smiled, delighted at the innocence of such a gesture. Humanity lay dead and rotting around us, and here was this woman, riding her bike and waving as though she was on a summer bike ride before lunch. It was the first time I'd smiled in almost a week.

"Don't know," the Irishman said. "Maybe we've all got something in common. Something in our blood. Makes us immune. I'm a Celt, what about you lot?" He smiled at Cordell, who scowled back.

"No need for that," Jacqueline said.

"I'm jesting with you, that's all," the Irishman said. "I'll not take the piss unless I like someone, and I like you all. How's that, then? I'm not the easiest to please, when it comes to meeting new folks. I'm stubborn and I don't suffer fools gladly."

"No fools here," I said.

"You're right!" the Irishman said. "No fools here. Five of us, and no fools."

Jessica tapped her beer bottle with her wedding band, frowning. "I've been thinking about this a lot," she said. "I've cycled maybe a hundred miles since the end, across South Wales and through the Brecon Beacons, and I've not seen anyone else. No one. I was really beginning to think I was the only one left alive, and I tried to understand why, and I came up with the idea that maybe I was dead. Dead, and haunting the mountains. And maybe everyone else was dead too, and they were haunting other places. Or the very same places, but I just couldn't see them. Maybe everyone haunts their own version of the world."

"Six billion worlds to haunt," Jacqueline muttered.

"Well, I'm not dead," Cordell said. He leaned across and punched the Irishman on the arm. "Dead?"

"Not me." The Irishman took another swig of his beer. "Damn, that'd taste nowhere near as good if I were."

"Something in our past?" I said. "I had whooping cough when I was a kid. Got a steel rod in my wrist from where I fell off a skateboard."

"I had meningitis," Cordell said.

"So did I!" Jacqueline said.

Jessica shook her head. "I've always been very healthy. Colds and bugs, and aches and pains as I get older, but I've never had what I'd class as an illness."

"Perhaps that's it," I said. "We're all unusually fit and healthy."

"I had breast cancer," Jacqueline said. "Five years ago."

We sat silently for a while, and all five of us took a drink at exactly the same time.

"So are you all clear?" Cordell asked.

Jacqueline nodded, smiling. I liked the expression on her face right then, but it would be so rare.

"Maybe it was something we ate," the Irishman said. He snorted, took a drink and started laughing, spitting his beer across the table. We joined in, and we ended up having a good evening. From then on we gave up trying to fathom why we seemed to be the only survivors of the human race.

No fools here, I said. And I was right, none of us were fools.

The people we meet on the slip road up to the M4 are fools. So that's that theory blown out of the water. They're fools because the first thing they do is reach for their guns.

And then they start shooting.

 

It takes me a few seconds to realise that the shots are wild and panicked, but I also know that they've got more than air rifles and shotguns. I've only ever heard automatic weapons fired in movies, but the angry rattle is obvious, and I feel bullets hailing past my head as I fall from the bike. I protect my head, roll, and drag myself to the side of the road. I stop when I hear the ping and crack of bullets striking metal. I've come to rest behind an overturned car, and I sit up and look back down the slip-road.

Jessica and Cordell have already driven below the overpass, out of the shooters' line of sight.

Great idea, I think. Great idea of mine. Drive up on my own to show we're not a threat. Fucking great.

I was still a hundred meters from the road block when they started shooting, but I'd seen enough. There was a heavy pick-up truck and an ambulance parked across the road, a double-decker bus head-on between them, and beyond that several caravans and four-wheel drives. The shooting came from the upper deck of the bus.

Down the road, Cordell peers cautiously around the corner of the bridge. I raise my hand—not too far—and he nods.

The silence is shocking after the thunderous gunshots. My bike has stalled, and the only sound is the idling motors of the Range Rovers out of sight beneath the motorway. Maybe they are already planning on how to get me away from here . . . but I hope not. The shooting had started wild and it missed me, but the shooters have had time to gather their senses. And the Rovers are much larger targets.

Cordell glances around again and I wave him away. Shake my hands, shake my head, trying to convey my thoughts: Don't come up this way. He nods and disappears again, and I hope he understood.

"Hello in the bus!" I shout. There is no response. No more shooting, and no answering shouts.

Are they circling around to me now? Crawling along the ditch to my right, or up on the motorway bridge to my left? I look up at the road barrier, expecting to see a head and gun peering over at any minute. There's no way they would miss from up there. I could run, I suppose, and trust that their inexperience would not let them hit a moving target. But it's not a scenario that offers much comfort. I don't want to die with my brains splattered across warm tarmac. I don't want the others to see me shot down, and leave me as they drive in the opposite direction. I don't want to be just another fading memory in their tired minds.

"Hello in the bus!" I shout again, trying to inject some urgency into my voice. My only answer is a metallic clatter and a curse. The only blessing is that it sounded as though it had come from the road block, and not closer.

I look up and see a flock of birds making patterns against the blue sky. It's a big flock, and I'm not sure I've ever seen so many birds together before. Swifts, I think. Picking flies from the air, or maybe communicating in some way I cannot imagine.

"See the birds?" I shout. "I'm as harmless as them. We're not here for trouble, and we don't want to hurt you."

The gun cracks in again, and a dozen bullets rip into the car or ricochet from its flaking shell. I roll into a ball and pray I'm hiding in the best place. The shooting fades away to stunned silence once more, and I find no holes in my body. Holy shit, I think, I'm being shot at! My jacket is grubby, and the white shirt beneath has picked up a heavy smear of oil from somewhere. I think of Bruce Willis and begin to giggle. That's not good. Giggling to myself when someone's trying to blow my guts across South Wales . . . that's not good.

I glance downhill and Cordell is there, peering up at me and waiting for me to move. I raise a hand again and he nods and disappears. He'd been carrying the shotgun that time.

"Fuck's sake!" I shout, and it's a sudden sense of panic more than an attempt at communication.

"Stand up!" a voice shouts.

"And have you blow my head off?"

"I can't hit the side of a barn, old man."

"I'm forty-five! I'm not old."

"You're bald!"

"I was bald when I was eighteen!" My face is pressed close to the tarmac and I can see ants marching in a line. Some of them carry pine needles, others carry dead ants. They're larger than any wood ants I have ever seen, and I wonder where their nest may be.

"So stand up!"

"Are you going to shoot?"

"Are you going to eat us?"

Eat? I frown, shake my head. Did he really say that? "Eat you?"

Silence, and then some muffled voices. I hear a clang of metal on metal again, and then a motor starts uphill from me.

I freeze. Listen. It sounds like a big diesel engine, perhaps the bus. If they choose to drive down and ram the car I'm hiding behind I'll be squashed flat. The ants march on before my nose, and I know that they'll survive.

I look down the gently sloping road. I could run, but it's a long couple of hundred meters. Plenty of time for a bad shot to get lucky.

The engine rattles as it's revved. Cordell looks around the bridge footing again, shakes his head, raises his hands palm-up, and I have no idea what he's trying to say.

I risk a look around the end of the overturned car and don't get my head blown off. It's difficult to see which vehicle has been started, but there's activity on the bus. The sun is glaring from its windscreen, so I can't see whether or not there's anyone in the driver's seat.

I'm starting to sweat. The sun is hitting the car and melting onto me, and the coat I wore to ride the bike is suddenly too hot. For the first time I turn and try to see inside the car, but its roof is crushed down on my side, and a slick of broken glass and ripped interior shields my view. It doesn't smell of anything too bad. I hope it's empty.

Either side of me are several places where bullets have blasted through its metal shell. My blood runs cold.

I stand up. There's really nothing else I can do. Run and they'll shoot me for sure, stay here and they'll ram the car and crush me into the road. Stand, submit, and perhaps they'll keep fingers from triggers long enough for us to talk.

I raise my arms and wait for the shot. It does not come. Nobody shouts either, and I begin to wonder where they've gone.

"Quickly!" It's a distant shout, and I turn and see Cordell gesturing me toward him.

"This way," another voice says. The voice with the gun. I obey, stepping out from behind the car and walking slowly toward the barricade. As I walk I have time to take in more details, and none of it fills me with hope. The pick-up truck has been there for a long time, because its tyres are flat and there's a swathe of rust spotting its heavy hood. Its windscreen is smashed. The ambulance looks as though it could be mobile, but its rear doors are pressed hard against the retaining wall holding back the motorway twenty feet above. Its cab is ridged and dented, and rough sheets of metal have been welded across its windows. Between the truck and the ambulance is the bus, and as I move closer I can see it moving slightly as people walk about inside. Its engine growls. The front window is missing upstairs, and a man and woman are hunkered down, guns protruding over the sill and tracking my progress.

The bus is pocked with bullet holes. The driver's windscreen is hazed. For some reason they've decided not to knock it out.

"There's no harm in me," I call. I open my raised hands as though to prove I'm not carrying an unpinned hand grenade, or a vial of botulism. "We just want to come through."

"Walk to the front of the bus, put your hands on the grille and stay still," the woman shouts. I do as I'm told. I can see the shape in the driver's seat now, and I'm sure it's just a kid.

I hear the thump-thump of someone running downstairs, and seconds later the hot barrel of a gun is pressed against my temple. "Really," the man says, "don't move."

We stand there in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. It's almost ridiculous. I wonder whether he's waiting for me to make a move so he can claim self-defence when he kills me. I don't give him the pleasure.

This is unreal, I think again, and I smile.

"What's so fucking funny?" There's fear in his voice, and I don't like that. It's dangerous.

"Sorry," I say. "I've never been shot at before. It's just all a bit surreal."

"Surreal," the man says. He snorts, then giggles. "Lucy! He thinks this is surreal."

"Tell me about it," a voice says from above. The woman, probably leaning out and covering me with her own weapon.

"Look, we don't mean any harm. We just want to get by."

"Well, you have to pay us," the man says, and for the first time I really recognise the utter terror in his voice. I wonder what he was before the plagues: a teacher? Butcher? Accountant? Lorry driver? Now the world has ended and he's just trying to survive, and I'm certain that this is the first time he's asked someone for payment to pass. Just set up here? I think. Or has no one come this way in months?

"What do you want?" I say.

"Food."

"And booze," Lucy says.

The man snorts again. "Food. Weapons, if you have any."

I don't want to reveal how pathetically armed we are. "We have some food you can have," I say.

"And booze, Billy," Lucy says again.

"Some wine."

"Okay, then," the man, Billy, says. "Okay. Tell your people to come up."

"How?"

He hesitates, then shoves the barrel of the gun hard against my head. Bad move, I think. Don't show him up, not in front of his Lucy. He needs to be in charge.

"Call them!" he says. "Tell them to come on foot."

I turn. Cordell is peering around the corner of the underpass, and I see Jessica standing just behind him. They're both holding their guns. I wave them to me, and they disappear back around the corner.

"Now we see how much they think they need you," Billy says. His gun is pointing at my gut, but his eyes are everywhere else. Checking the fields, the road above . . . everywhere.

"What are you scared of?" I ask.

Billy glares at me. "As if you didn't know."

He's talking about something very particular, a definite threat rather than just the wilds we have already seen. I decide to say nothing.

Cordell and the others appear around the corner and start up the incline. They're still carrying their guns, and to begin with I think Billy will go mad. But I see him size up our meagre weaponry; a shotgun, an air rifle. He and Lucy are obviously much more heavily armed, and he seems to draw power from this.

"Break the shotgun!" Billy calls. "Carry the pea shooter by the barrel." Cordell and Jessica comply. When they're twenty paces away Billy calls, "Far enough."

We stand that way for a while, silent, listening to the rumble of the bus's engine. I can sense the shape in the driver's seat behind me, its foot resting on the gas.

We all wait for someone else to speak.

"Who are you?" Cordell says at last.

"The man with the gun," Billy says.

The Irishman snickers, puts his hand over his mouth to hide his smile.

"What?" Billy demands. He moves forward one step, raising the gun. I could tackle him now. But the results of such a rash move are beyond contemplation. However bad Lucy's shooting may be, she'd cut us all down with one long burst.

"Sorry," the Irishman says. "But 'the man with the gun' . . . ? Reminds me of a bad Steven Seagal movie I saw once."

"Was there a good one?" Lucy asks.

Billy turns and looks up at her, scowl breaking into a smile.

This is Monty Python, I think.

Jacqueline takes the initiative and, with a few words, breaks the thin ice we have all been treading. "I don't suppose you have anywhere I could pee?"

 

"We've been here about six months," Billy says ten minutes later. They've stopped the bus and led us behind it, into a compound formed beside the road. It has the pick-up truck on one side, a dozen sand-filled barrels forming another wall, and a heavy steel storage container closes it off from the road. It's in the container that they have made their home. Billy will not let us inside.

The bus driver turns out to be a girl of about seven or eight. She doesn't speak. Lucy says she has not spoken since they found her, days after the end, cowering in the middle of the motorway beside the bodies of her parents.

"Why not a house somewhere?" Cordell asks.

Billy nods at the bus. "We have that. We travel around quite a bit, looking for stuff. But back here feels safe. And we're waiting for someone."

"Who?"

"My son," Billy says.

"And my daughter," Lucy adds.

"Why wait here?" I ask.

"Last time I spoke to him, when the plagues were hot, Nathan said he'd try to make it here," Billy says. "It's on the way to London. Where my parents live. Nathan loves his grandparents. And I can't . . . I can't remember him. So he must still be alive."

"So how do you work that one out?" the Irishman says.

Billy glares at him. "If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories."

The Irishman nods, but thankfully he realises it's best not to probe any more.

The little girl is sitting on a sand barrel, looking the other way.

"So you've set up a toll road," I say.

Billy nods.

"Many takers?" Jessica asks.

Billy's face darkens and he turns away. He seems to be staring at the ambulance.

"We'll give you some food," I say. "And we have a few bottles of wine to spare. But . . ."

"We can't go into Newport," Lucy says, pre-empting my question. "No way. Can't. Wouldn't. And most of the houses in the countryside seem to be occupied by. .. the dead. A lot of people out here went home to die."

"But all the cars on the road?" Jessica says.

"People fleeing the city. And that's why we can't go in."

"I locked them in the ambulance," Billy says suddenly. "There were only two of them. But they were . . . well, you know. I can see you know. Even after we shot them we knew they'd be up, so I dragged them into the ambulance and parked it there."

"We did it," Lucy says.

Cordell goes to speak but I shake my head. There is much more here than we know, but to reveal our ignorance would lose us any small advantage we may have. Billy's gun is pointing at the ground, but he still grasps it tight. It would be foolish for us to assume that we are anything more than prisoners.

"Why don't you burn it?" I ask, trying to get Billy to reveal more.

He grins at me. Shakes his head. "Very good," he says. "But no. Because now I've got my own weapons of mass destruction."

Jacqueline is terrified, I can see that. Shivering, moaning. She broke the tension earlier but she's raising it again now. Lucy is staring at her, and Billy glances at her several times before raising his gun again.

"So why are you on the road?" Lucy asks.

"Going somewhere," Cordell says.

"Where?"

"Away from where we were." I have no intention of mentioning Bar None, or Michael, or any of the ideas we have about what is happening.

"What's wrong with where you were?"

I think of what they have said, how they've acted. I look at the battered ambulance. "The things," I say.

Billy's eyes widen. "What were they like? How did they look?"

I frown and stare down at my feet.

He grunts. "I understand. Rather not say. Rather not talk about them. I understand."

And it's as easy as that.

The young girl stands and leads Jacqueline back down the ramp. She is carrying a pistol tucked into the belt of her jeans. Jacqueline walks with her head down, holding her arms and shaking. When they drive back up in one of the Range Rovers Billy reverses the bus and makes room for them to come through.

Lucy and Jessica negotiate over some food and a few bottles of wine and, our passage paid, we're given the go-ahead to retrieve the bike and the other Range Rover.

They leave us with the shotgun and air rifle, and we go on our way.

 

"If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories," Billy said. I think on this as I guide the motorbike slowly along the motorway. "Alive in my memories."

Ashley is dead in my memories. Unless I take a drink and let taste and texture inspire the past, she is a blank where she should be whole, a void where she should be the heaviest thing in my mind. If she was dead I'd be carrying her still, but I feel more empty than I ever have before.

"Billy is mad," I mutter at the breeze. "And Lucy. Both of them mad." And I think of the ambulance with its back doors pressed tight against the concrete wall, metal welded and bolted over the windows, dents in its sides as though made by something inside trying to get out.

I'm approaching another exit from the motorway, this one leading into the heart of Newport along Caermaen Road. I have travelled this road so often with Ashley. I can see her crying and dying, see her lying dead on her bed, but can I really? I was almost mad myself by then; insane with the cries and wailing of my dying neighbours, the smell of my sick wife, and the impossibility of my own unblemished skin, clear lungs, hopeful, crazy eyes. Can I really trust my own memories of that final time so much?

The exit is close now, a couple of hundred meters away. I ease down on the throttle. Our house is less than a mile from here, in a nice cul-de-sac close to the centre of town. The area had been improved drastically in the years before the plagues. Pedestrianised streets, housing grants, parks, planting. It was a nice place to live.

Ashley could still be there.

I saw her die, I saw her tears and pain and I can still see them, even now.

Nevertheless, I cannot feel the weight of my wife's history inside. And she had meant so much to me that her death would surely be heavy indeed.

Knowing that I was mad to listen to a madman, still Billy's words had affected me. If I applied them to myself they answered some questions, but they presented twice as many. These new questions—Is she dead? Is she alive? Is she still here?—could be answered so much more easily. A turn of the handlebars. A ten minute diversion. Proof, of what I thought I knew.

"A mile from here," I say, and I turn from the motorway.

There's a chorus of horns behind me. I know I should stop and explain, but to do so would be to allow Jessica and the others to talk me out of this. She is wise and I feel weak, and I would end up in the back of a Range Rover while the Irishman rode the bike closer and closer to Bar None. And I would be as safe as could be then, but I'd never know. I'd have to watch the last of Newport fading behind us, never to be seen again. And even if I closed my eyes . . . still only the tears of death.

"Sorry!" I shout. I wave a hand, trying to communicate that I won't be long. In my side mirrors I see Cordell flashing lights and the Irishman hanging from the passenger window, waving as though to haul me back. They follow me, and I feel an instant stab of guilt. They don't want to leave me behind.

This exit ramp rises to a roundabout above the motorway, and at the top of the ramp there's a knot of cars tied together by the ghost of a terrible fire. Their shells have been melted into grotesque shapes, spiked ribs and metallic spines that look for all the world like the skeletons of living things. I can squeeze by, just, and as I use my feet to guide the motorbike through the narrowest of gaps, that guilt punches in again.

I can't look back. I hear the Range Rovers stop, the doors open, voices calling out in confusion and dismay, and I can't look back.

I pause, leaning to one side to support the bike. "My house!" I call. "I have to see. Just to make sure. To make certain my certainty. You understand?"

"No!" the Irishman says. "You're a fucking idiot, and I don't understand a word!"

"I understand," Jacqueline says. I still can't turn, but I smile. And I really believe she does.

"You'll get yourself killed!" Jessica shouts.

Cordell joins in. "The city's not safe, you know that, Michael told us, everything's wrong and rotten and . . ."

"Give him half an hour," Jacqueline says. "Please?"

"Half an hour," I shout. Without waiting for a reply—a yes or a no—I rev the bike and move away.

And I don't, I can't, look back.

 

I'm not sure what I expected. Streets filled with marauding zombies, maybe. The hate-filled dead rising up at my impertinence, clawing their way through closed wooden doors, rising from hastily dug graves, reaching for me with nails crusted with the dried blood of older victims. Or groups of pet dogs gone feral, Alsatians leading packs of corgis, a King Labrador ruling over a domain of vicious poodles, terriers and spaniels. Maybe I'd expected to see half the town in ruins, fallen victim to pyromaniacs and vandals since society's rapid decline. All the clichés.

But I see none of these. There is damage, of course, and plenty of signs that things are not right. The first row of houses lining Caermaen Road is scarred by a rubble-filled gap, as though time has punched out one of the town's teeth. Gas explosion, I guess. Front gardens have gone wild, carefully maintained borders swallowed by tangle root, and lawns are lush and heavy. And here and there, the remains of bodies.

The main impression I get as I ride closer to my old house is that everyone has gone away, and what they left behind will take its time to die. This is what Armageddon has always looked like in my mind's eye. It means the end of humanity, not the end of the world. I'd dreamed this once as a teenager: an empty world, humanity gone or been taken, and its roads and paths, rooms and gardens slowly being overtaken by nature once again. In five years there will be no sign of these carefully maintained gardens. Ten years from now the roads and pavements will be turned crazy by roots and shoots breaking through from below. In twenty years some of the roofs will fail, forty years walls will fall, and a century from now this will be a forgotten city. Animals will own it once again. There will be rooms that survive, and places where the stain of humanity will take much longer to be cleaned away. But it won't take forever.

It's sad, but I can't help thinking of it as something of a triumph.

Maybe I really am mad, I think, and then I turn the corner into my own cul-de-sac.

Memories rush in. In all of them Ashley is a presence but not an image.

"Be there," I say, but there's no way she can. Even if the grey area of my memory is fooling me, and she didn't die, there would be no reason for her to remain in our home. There had been none for me.

"I left because you were dead," I say. I switch off the bike and kick down the stand. The silence is shattering. The last revs echo away between houses and back along the street, and then I am in a silence broken only by the breath of the wind. There are birds, but they sing in the distance. I guess that anything nearby has been shocked into muteness by my appearance.

I remain motionless, breathing as gently as fear and anticipation will allow, until the birds start singing again. They flit from roof to roof, disappearing into eaves and through the eyes of smashed windows. They bring life to this place, and I hope, I pray, that they're an omen.

"I'm a fool," I say. "I saw her die." But I imagine a last-minute panic, Ashley leaving to find her mother on the other side of the city while I stayed behind, and that scenario suddenly seems just as likely. I remember none of it . . . but it has the power of possibility. "A damn fool."

I walk toward the house. It looks just as overgrown and abandoned as all the others. Of course it does; if she was still here, she wouldn't want to advertise the fact. Maybe there are many people still at home . . . letting the grass grow, the plants make a tangle of their garden . . . awaiting someone like me to come and rescue them from the certainty of their deaths.

The front door is closed, as I had left it. Empty milk bottles stand in their wire cage, awaiting collection. I shade the glass in the door and press my face to it. Inside seems quiet, undisturbed, and wholly alien to me.

I knock, smile, shake my head, and force the door open with three hefty kicks. It rebounds from the hall wall and I hold it open. The house is silent. "It's me," I say. There's no answer.

I don't know this place. There are pictures on the wall that I remember buying, but they're strange to me now. The painted hall wall had taken me two whole weekends to finish, but it's as if this is the first time I've seen it. The air of the house, the space, is all wrong, and I cannot find it in myself to know it as home.

I step over the threshold and head for the stairs. I have no desire to see the rest of the house, because there's nothing here for me. Only the bedroom. That's where I remember leaving Ashley's corpse because I could not face burying her. So if my memory is not lying, if I'm not quite as mad as I think, if she really is dead . . . that's where she will be.

I climb thirteen stairs and stop on the landing. There's a smell. It's not rot or decay, isn't even that unpleasant. Maybe it's just the aroma of a house that has been locked up for six months with no ventilation. Even a home has to breathe.

Kidding myself, I think. That's Ashley I smell, or what's left of her. Do I really need to see?

And of course, I do.

I walk forward, pass the bathroom door, the spare bedroom, and stand before our bedroom door. Suddenly there is a rush of memory, so intense and raw that I sway and hold onto the banister to prevent myself from falling. A scratch on the door from when we moved in our new bed. A pluck at the corner of the landing carpet where I hadn't fitted it quite right, and the vacuum cleaner kept snagging it. A splash of paint on the skirting to the right of the door, from when I was decorating the walls; I'd always intended cleaning it off. Every memory involved Ashley's presence, but none of them involved her, as a visible, touchable entity. Still she is so far away from me, and on the other side of a door.

"Well, standing here won't solve anything," I say. "Ash, I'm coming in."

I push open the door. And there she is.

 

A few minutes later, sitting in the street beyond my front garden, wallowing in memories of Ashley that are all mine, I see the first of the shapes milling at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. I think it's Cordell and I stand to wave, but then other shapes join the first, moving cautiously or awkwardly into the street, and I know that I'm in trouble.

So here they are. The zombie hordes, the survivors turned to cannibalism, the gang ruled by a sadistic ex-military man intent on gaining control of the nothing that's left. Here is the Armageddon I imagined as a child. And for a moment, content in remembering Ashley without having to drink to see her beautiful face once again, I really don't care.

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Framed