And that was the real reason I wasn’t thinking about trying to go home. I could only pray Em and Buster hadn’t suffered.
That was an odd thing, too. Suddenly I was thinking about religion, but I wasn’t religious. I’d always been a non-believer. A lot of the survivors, though, were born again in the wake of the world’s end. They kissed the ground and thought about everything in terms of prayer and miracles.
People were getting superstitious, too.
That happens when you’re reduced to firelight. It takes you back to a more primitive existence, and with it come primitive fears. We’ve never really grown out of them as a species. They’re still there, all of those old caveman fears we thought we’d left in the Stone Age. They’re hardcoded in our DNA, just waiting for disaster to reawaken them.
It didn’t take long before the first of the survivors started seeing things in the moonlight, shapes circling around the ruined plane. Out there. Watching. They rarely came close enough for us to get a good description, and everyone seemed to see something slightly different. Different sizes, different shapes, coloration, but one thing everyone agreed on—the phantoms moved on all fours. Piecing their different stories together, it sounded like everyone was describing their own version of a pack of stray animals, some dogs, maybe wolves, some more exotic; there was even a horse among the sightings. I didn’t think they had wolves in Scotland, but I didn’t want to stake my life on it.
What I didn’t tell anyone was that I’d seen something out there, too. A shape. Low. Golden fur matted with ash and dust and dirt. Nosing around in the undergrowth. It never came closer than maybe five hundred feet from the crashed plane, but that was close enough for me to recognize what it was.
A ghost light.
I kept what I saw to myself, but some people in the group must have worked out that everyone was seeing something similar flickering out there in the darkness of night.
Those dogs were a curse.
To see them was to know you were dead, even if death hadn’t caught up with your body yet.
It was only a matter of time.
I wasn’t ready to go. Nothing was going to make me give up my grip on this life until I was ready. I hadn’t survived a nuclear holocaust to give over my fate to phantom hounds. I’d leave, but on my terms. Though I had no idea what those terms actually were.
I started to look for a purpose, beyond the obvious, in living. I wondered if it might not be worth going on a pilgrimage, trying to find some of the old relics, maybe venturing over the water into Europe, try to find the Spear of Longinus or the Shroud of Turin, some kind of holy artifact that survivors could rally behind. Was that my hope I was looking for? Maybe the mainland hadn’t been hit as badly as Britain? That was something to cling on to, wasn’t it? The notion that old enmities had made us a target, but that somewhere out there, life was almost normal.
I thought about the old legends, about Glastonbury Tor and ley lines and the legends of Arthur, the Once and Future King, who was supposed to return in the hour of our greatest need. If ever there was a time for him to show up, this was it, wasn’t it? I thought about Saint Patrick charming the snakes out of Ireland and the old forest gods that predated modern faith. Herne the Hunter, Puck, and Robin Goodfellow. I thought about our warrior queen, Boadicea, and our Lionhearts and bravehearts and broken hearts. The landscape, sour now, reminded me of the burned monasteries and kings buried in carparks.
Surely, in all of this ruin, there must be some sort of symbol, something that could be used as a beacon to shine its light in our dark time?
Yusef, an old IT programmer with no useful skills in this broken new world, was the first to volunteer to become one of my Grail Knights. Hejdur and Heldur, two brothers from Iceland, offered their strength—and with both of them close to six-five and built like the proverbial brick shithouses, they had plenty of that to offer—and Priya, a mother of three from New York who’d lost everything just like me, completed the circle. Five of us from the original 418 survivors broke camp and set off south, walking out of the mountains into the nuclear winter.
I don’t remember the first time we noticed the shadow moving through the trees, but it was Yusef who saw it. He pointed through a gap in the skeletal limbs toward a deeper darkness he claimed was back there, but I couldn’t see it. Neither could the others. We believed him, though. It was one of two things: a dog, hungry, driven out of the shadows to follow us and find food, one that none of us could seem to get a fix on. Or Yusef’s days were marked.
I almost told him, but almost is a big word. I couldn’t. Not when it came right down to it. Telling someone you think they’re going to die because they’ve seen a ghost dog… well if it isn’t exactly bugfuck crazy, it certainly isn’t normal conversation, put it that way.
And if it wasn’t a ghost, then it was a flesh-and-blood animal, and it was only a matter of time before it became desperate enough to attack.
We were in the heart of its territory.
We made camp that night, huddled around the few sticks we’d managed to scavenge, warming our hands. We didn’t talk much at all. No matter how much life we managed to stir into the flames, they didn’t give off any real heat. I was shivering despite being layered up in several skintight tee shirts beneath my heavy-duty four-seasons fleece. I should have been sweating. But I just didn’t sweat anymore.
He saw it again. I know he did. But he didn’t say anything. That was the first real hint he knew what was going on. He was a smart guy, Yusef. When no one else was looking, he tugged down the collar of his shirt and I saw the blisters. He was sick.
The dog had come for him, come to shepherd him into a better death.
Again, I thought about the golden shadow shape that had dogged my footsteps since the plane; my own ghost light.
I wished he’d fought it. I wished he’d realized it didn’t have to end this way, that there had to be hope, there had to be miracles in this ruined land.
His answer was to tell me there were 23,000 nuclear warheads in existence. That was it. His version of a miracle. I didn’t grasp what he meant until we reached Arthur’s Seat and what had been Edinburgh Castle.
Twenty-three thousand warheads.
How many of them had been launched? Not just one or even a handful. When the Russians launched theirs, had we retaliated with Tridents and the Americans with their bombs, filling the sky with that long-promised mutual end? We had no way of knowing, of course. There weren’t secret factions out there with shielded computers and secret networks clued in to news broadcasts on hidden television stations. There was nothing. We hadn’t seen a soul since leaving the wreck. That alone scared me more than all the other things we had seen added together.
Edinburgh had been razed. Several walls had survived intact, the shadows of collapsed landmarks charred onto them as a reminder of the city that had been lost. The wind was the worst. It churned up the ash, making devils to blow down Princess Street. It stung my eyes.
I wept. And not just because of the dust.
There was no weakness in tears, no matter what I might have thought when I was a kid trying to learn to be a man.
We went down towards the River Leith, though in my mind I was calling it the Lethe, which made it feel like an entirely different river we had to cross. The Queen’s ship was down there. Or had been. The metal had buckled and warped under the incredible heat. Now the thing in the water was unrecognizable.
Staring, fixated at the hulk, I heard something.