Keith angrily blasts on the horn, the uncomfortably loud sound forcing me into action. I walk down the uneven path and push the door. It sticks at first but opens when I shove it hard, making the same loud, ear-piercing creak it always did, except it sounds a thousand times louder tonight because everything else is so deathly quiet. I step inside and shine the flashlight around. The shared lobby has been trashed, and the ground beneath my feet is covered in bits of broken furniture and other rubbish. I recognize some of these things. They used to belong to me and my family. The kids used to hate being out here.
The front door of the apartment is open. It swings to and fro slightly in a gentle breeze. The wood is splintered and cracked across its width, and there are several dirty boot marks, most probably left by the soldiers who were forcing their way in as I was trying to get out when I was last here. With trepidation I push it open and go inside, and immediately I’m sucker-punched by the familiarity of everything again. I kick my youngest son’s upturned stroller out of the way and move farther down the hall. The first room I reach is the kitchen. I go inside, and I can smell my father-in-law’s corpse before I see it. He lies exactly where I left him, still covered in his blood-soaked duvet shroud, decay having deflated his lifeless bulk down to half its former size. Hard to believe that this rancid, shrunken, germ-filled mass is all that’s left of Harry. When I think of him I still remember the man who used to look after the kids and who always gave me such a hard time, a crotchety, white-haired old bastard who did all he could to make my life difficult. In spite of everything that’s happened it’s hard to look at him in this state.
I look up and shine the flashlight back across the room toward the doorway, suddenly remembering the screams and the terrified faces of my family when they saw what I’d done. I remember Ellis’s frightened face clearest of all, desperate for answers that I didn’t yet know I could give her.
I retrace their steps, moving back along the hallway until I reach the living room, the small circle of light from the flashlight providing more than enough illumination, and step over what’s left of the furniture Lizzie stacked up here to keep me out. It’s cold and damp in here, the broken window having left the room open and exposed to the elements for weeks on end. There’s black mold on the walls, and the paper’s peeling. The apartment has been ransacked, but I don’t think Lizzie did this. Our things have been trashed by scavengers looking for food, weapons, and valuables. They were wasting their time here. We never had anything worth taking.
A missile or jet roars through the air above the apartment with a piercing scream. Silence returns in seconds, but Keith blasts the horn again, and I pick up my pace. I don’t bother with Edward and Josh’s room. Instead I go into the bedroom Lizzie and I shared, and I look down at our bed. The thought of being so physically close to her makes my skin crawl. Surprisingly, the thought of being so far from her now makes me feel equally bad. I grab a change of clothing from the wardrobe (all of Lizzie’s clothes are still here-proof that she never came back), then run through to Ellis’s room. I shove some of her belongings into my backpack-a doll and a rainbow-colored sweater she used to live in-figuring that the familiarity will help when we’re together again. Didn’t matter what she was doing or where she was going, when we asked her to get dressed, this sweater was what she always chose. I hold it to my nose and sniff it, hoping to remember her scent. It just smells of the apartment, damp and musty.
I take one last look around, then make my way back out to the others, knowing that whatever happens, I won’t be coming back here. Keith hits the horn again as I run through the lobby. I push my way back out into the open and take a deep breath as soon as I’m outside, relieved to be out of that foul-smelling, claustrophobic hellhole full of reminders of the person I used to be. I hear gunfire nearby, followed by a scream that could be either rage or pain. I throw my bag into the van, then climb in and slam the door.
“Any sign?” Paul asks.
“Nothing.”
Yet another helicopter hovers nearby, this one using a searchlight to illuminate the ground below.
“We’re not going anywhere else for a while,” Keith announces as he starts the engine and pulls away. “This place is too damn busy for my liking tonight. Anywhere close where we can hole up until it quietens down?”
All eyes are on me, and the pressure is unwelcome. The only thing I’m sure about is that I’m not going back into the apartment. I try to think of other places nearby that might still be standing. Through a gap between two houses at the very bottom of Calder Grove I see the tall, dark outline of a high-rise that looks reasonably intact. That’ll do.
“Turn left at the bottom of the road,” I tell him. “I know somewhere.”
12
KEITH STOPS THE VAN behind a row of overflowing garbage cans, almost directly beneath the high-rise apartments. We each grab our individual bags of weapons and supplies and head for the shelter of the building. The front doors are missing, and the entrance foyer is as trashed as everywhere else. Like an idiot I instinctively press the button to call the elevator. Old habits die hard.
“Don’t think that’s going to do anything, my friend,” Paul whispers sarcastically. I push past him and follow Carol, who’s already heading up the stairs, the glowing orange tip of another cigarette illuminating her route through the darkness. There’s a woman’s badly decomposed body at the very bottom of the first flight of steps, her neck snapped and her decayed face wedged against the wall. She was like us, and that immediately puts me on edge. I step over the corpse and start to climb, wondering pointlessly if she fell or if she was pushed.
For a few minutes we do nothing but climb, our footsteps echoing up and down along the entire length of this dark and otherwise silent stairwell. We move quickly, most of us climbing two steps at a time. It’s hard work, but the pain is easy to ignore. It’s a perverse reality of my situation: I eat scraps, survive out in the open, and live from day to day, but I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. The others are the same. Carol races ahead like a woman half her age. I feel strong and powerful, my body lean, toned, and efficient. Makes me wonder how, when everything was available to me on a plate and all I had to worry about was my family and my piss-easy job, did I manage to fuck everything up so badly? The memory of who and what I used to be is embarrassing. I wish this had happened to me years ago.
“How far?” Carol shouts down from several flights up.
“Just keep going,” I answer. We’re more than halfway up now. The higher we go, I think, the safer we’ll be.
“Wait,” Keith yells. I stop climbing and turn back. He’s still a floor below me. “Look at this.”
“Look at what?” Paul grunts breathlessly as he pushes past and starts heading back down again. I follow him back to floor eight (of eleven or twelve, I think). This floor is different from the others. I passed it too quickly to notice, but the doors leading from the staircase to the rest of the building here have been boarded up. There’s plenty of broken glass and other debris around here, but it doesn’t look like the barrier has been breached.
“This has been done from the inside,” Keith says, stating the blindingly obvious.
“So there might still be someone in there,” Carol adds, equally pointlessly.
“Must be Unchanged,” Paul says under his breath as he runs his hands over the large sheets of plywood that have been nailed to the inside of the door frame, pushing and prodding in different places, trying to find a weak spot. He finds one near the bottom right-hand corner where the door frame is rotten. He brushes away shards of broken glass with his feet, then sits down on his backside and pushes the board with his boot. When it moves slightly he beckons for me to help him. I position myself directly between him and the handrail of the staircase so he can’t move backward, then brace myself as he starts to kick at the wood. The noise is massively amplified by the confines of our surroundings, but in the moments of silence between kicks, everything else remains reassuringly quiet. He’s barely forced open a wide enough gap when he turns around, drops his backpack, and scrambles through. Once on the other side he pulls at the plywood and manages to yank away a piece about a yard square. I slide his bag through, then follow him.