PART TWO
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
Twenty
The sound of Magnus and Jeb’s motorbikes cut through the countryside, announcing their progress. Despite the heat they were both dressed in motorcycle leathers and crash helmets, both of them with scarves wrapped around their mouths and noses to guard against the dust and the stench of decay. The smell had grown worse as they left London behind. The summer had been a good one and crops had ripened earlier than usual. Now they lay rotting in the fields. Cattle also lay in the fields and some of them were rotting too.
The motorbikes had been Magnus’s idea, the guns strapped to their backs Jeb’s. They had planned to spend their nights sheltered in houses large enough to have spare bedrooms left unoccupied by the dead, but had encountered too many decaying corpses, too many families huddled together in death, too many blown-out brains and emptied pill bottles. Now they camped outside, taking turns to stay awake, like cowboys crossing the plains in some old movie.
Magnus reckoned that he could have reached the ferry terminal at Scrabster in two days, if he had bombed the journey. But they had met the aftermath of several accidents on their way out of London: a driver thrown through the windscreen of his car, a teenage boy impaled on the railings of a park he had somehow got locked inside, a little girl who had fallen from a high, neglected building; that last one had made Magnus cry. The tears had been a release, and he had hated himself for feeling better.
The accidents were a reminder that it was not only the sweats they needed to survive and they had agreed to stick to a steady thirty miles an hour, in the hope of avoiding a broken leg, or worse.
Magnus and Hugh had graduated to motorbikes in their teens. They had weathered the usual falls and near misses, raced each other past Maes Howe, the sky stretching wide and seamless above them. Neighbours had warned their parents of the speeds the boys went, but even his father’s sudden death had not persuaded Magnus of his own mortality.
Hugh had let the waves roll over him, filled his pockets with stones, weighted his rucksack with boulders and then walked into the sea. His death had rendered life more fragile, but it had increased Magnus’s recklessness. It was as if he had to live life twice as hard, to show Hugh, who was often with him, just out of sight on the periphery of his vision, what a fool he had been to give in.
The sweats had defeated Magnus’s appetite for danger. He kept recalling the final frames of Easy Rider, Peter Fonda engulfed by flames, Dennis Hopper lying shot at the side of the road. Neither he nor Jeb had mentioned what provision they would make should the other fall ill, or become injured. There was no need.
It was late afternoon and the sun was at its highest point, but the narrow road they were travelling was bordered on either side by tall verges which raised the surrounding fields three feet above them. It was like travelling through a shaded valley. Orkney was flat and almost treeless. You could see for miles. Here roads took dark twists and turns, the high verges and hedgerows deadened sound and it was impossible to know what might lie around the next corner, or who was hiding among the greenery.
They had started their journey on the M1 but, though the earth had seemed to be dying, it was as Eddie had said: other survivors haunted the landscape. Magnus caught occasional glimpses of them peering from curtained windows, hiding in verges, lurking in shadows in deserted towns. He wondered if it was death that had made them that way. Survivors had been abandoned by everyone they held dear and though their loved ones had had no say in it, their going made it harder to trust the living.
At first, Magnus had dismounted and taken off his helmet when he saw another survivor. But perhaps some of the prison menace still clung to him because so far people had melted away, except for an elderly man who came out of his cottage, levelled a shotgun at Magnus and told him to get going.
‘We don’t mean any harm,’ Magnus had said.
The old man had kept his aim steady and repeated his instruction. ‘Be on your way, boys.’ But perhaps he believed Magnus because he added, ‘And watch how you go. There are some bad buggers about.’
The old man had been dressed in work gear. His blue overalls and battered wellies reminded Magnus of his father and he had wanted to ask him what they should do. But Magnus had caught the light of madness in the old man’s eyes, saw the tremble in his trigger finger and got back on his motorbike and rode away without another word.
He and Jeb had agreed to switch to the B-roads after an encounter with a souped-up Porsche. The car had driven alongside them, coming too close to their bikes and then drifting away, playing with them like a sheepdog harrying sheep. Magnus had known there was only one end to the game and had slowed his bike, bracing himself for the scud of concrete against flesh and leather. But Jeb had slid the gun from the inside of his jacket and fired at the car. They were still moving too fast for him to take proper aim and the shot had gone wild, but it had been enough to frighten the Porsche’s driver and the car had zoomed off along the motorway.
They had come across the Porsche again a few hours later, parked at a service station. There were other cars skewed across the car park, all of them high-performance. A deep bass rock beat echoed from somewhere in the centre of the squat building. Magnus and Jeb had remained straddled on their motorbikes.
Jeb had flipped up his helmet’s visor. ‘They still have electricity.’
The services housed an M&S, a Burger King, and a Krispy Kreme Donuts concession. Magnus did not have to get close to know that it would smell foul inside. You would have to be unhinged to make your base there among the rats and putrefying food. He counted the cars. ‘Twenty of them. Quite a gang.’
‘Maybe.’ Jeb leaned back, stretching his spine, his gloved hands still gripping the bike’s handlebars. ‘Or one Top Gear fan having the time of his life.’
He got off his motorcycle, unsheathed the Bowie knife he kept strapped to his calf and began slashing the cars’ tyres. After a moment’s hesitation Magnus dismounted, slid his own knife from his rucksack and did the same. They had been running low on fuel and had turned into the service station in the hope that they could switch on the petrol pumps or siphon petrol from abandoned cars, but had driven on without filling their tanks.
That was a day ago. The only people they had seen since were a couple of what Magnus had thought were youths, crouching in a ditch. Jeb had driven by without noticing them, but some movement had snagged Magnus’s eye and he had seen two frightened faces, one brown, the other ruddy with sunburn, hiding in the shadows thrown by an overgrown hedge. It was only as he drove past that he realised they were girls in men’s clothing. If he had been travelling solo Magnus would have slowed his bike to a halt, but he had looked at Jeb’s broad, leather-clad back and decided it was better to travel on. The girls’ fear brought back the alleyway behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, the man trying to force himself on the drunken woman.
Magnus’s thoughts were dominated by the past, memories of home, his family, childhood, his cousin Hugh. The circumstances of his meeting with Jeb also preyed on him. Each night Magnus told himself he would ditch the ex-con and make his own way. Each morning they drove on together. Sometimes one of them was ahead, sometimes the other but, although their bikes ate up the miles at an even pace, they rarely travelled side by side.