“Keep your head down,” Frank told her. “Don’t look out the windows.”
She nodded.
Guppy handed his rifle to Frank. “Look after that while I drive. Don’t shoot yourself. The safety’s on, but still be careful. Okay?”
Frank nodded. He held the rifle by his legs, the barrel pointing upwards. He swallowed to wet his throat. He noticed the tax disc on the windscreen was out of date by a week. A pair of miniature boxing gloves hung from the rear-view mirror. Old parking tickets around his feet. The smell of cigarette smoke had been absorbed into the car’s interior.
Guppy reversed the car into the middle of the road.
“Put on your seatbelts,” he said.
Frank did so, and then checked Florence did the same.
The Fiesta started down the road, approaching the infected. They saw the car and bolted towards it, their eyes gleaming in the headlights. One of the infected men had been a police officer; his mouth contorted and peeled away to reveal jagged teeth. Whatever had made them human was gone. Many of them were all eyes and teeth.
“Maniacs,” said Guppy.
Frank braced himself, stared through the windscreen. He gritted his teeth, narrowed his eyes so that the sight of bodies being smashed aside wouldn’t be so clear.
Impact. The judder of limbs against the car being thrown aside. Terrible faces glimpsed for a second before they vanished. Screams of the infected. Something was caught under the wheels and crushed wetly like rotten fruit. A fleshy pop of skin and fluid. A body rolled across the bonnet and hit the windscreen, cracking the glass and falling away. Blood on the glass and hands scraping at the windows. The car jolted, its suspension grinding and clanging; Frank banged his head against the side window and his vision blurred.
The screams faded behind them. Clear road. The car was juddering and shaking. Frank hoped the car would make it out of the town.
He looked back at Florence. She still had her head bowed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re safe.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Horsham was burning. The sound of flames was like roaring wind. A firestorm.
Guppy parked the ailing car by the roadside, looking down at the town as the fire consumed it. There were muffled pops and booms. Buildings collapsed. Wood and brick structures were fuel for the fires. Detonations flashed and echoed around the low hills and fields. Red and yellow and orange rage. Smoke and flame. Incineration that was almost awe-inspiring in its devastation.
Billows of smoke reaching for the sky. The fire seemed alive; sentient and malign in its hunger.
Frank remembered taking Catherine and Emily to see fireworks on Bonfire Night at one of the fields outside Shepton Beauchamp.
He wondered how hot the fires down there burned. He thought he could smell roasting flesh. If he closed his eyes and listened hard enough, he could hear the screams of those trapped in the fire.
No one screamed for long.
Frank imagined what it would be like to be caught in the streets when the incendiary bombs hit. Burned alive. No one would survive. Not even the monsters roaming the streets.
He sucked on his inhaler twice.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” he said. “Never thought I’d see an English town get firebombed. Especially by its own government.” He stopped talking, simply because words meant nothing at that moment when faced with the swelling inferno before them; what had once been Horsham.
“I hope that there weren’t many people in the town when the bombs dropped,” said Frank. “Uninfected, of course.”
“There would have been a few hundred, at least,” said Guppy. “Maybe the infected had already killed them…or worse. The fire would have been a mercy for them.”
Frank felt sick. He glanced back to see Florence asleep on the backseat.
“It won’t be enough,” Guppy said. “They’ll have to purge every village, every town…every city, to beat them. To destroy them.” He nodded at Horsham. “This is nothing. Next time it’ll be nukes.”
Frank couldn’t take his eyes away from the fire. “Nukes?”
“I’m just a grunt, so I might be wrong. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Not with the people we have in charge. They’ll panic. If they’ve already took the decision to firebomb a town, things are really bad.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Frank.
Guppy spat. “Scorched earth.” His eyes glowed yellow from the flames. “Funny thing is, when I was a lad, I used to love staring at fires. I could watch a bonfire for hours, mesmerised.”
Movement in the fields below caught Frank’s attention. Refugees were fleeing across the fields. The infected wouldn’t be far behind.
“We can’t stay here,” said Guppy. “We have to find shelter for the night.” He switched on the engine.
Before they moved off down the road, Frank saw flashes of light from both the north and east.
He tried not to think what they were.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Guppy stopped the car at an isolated cottage a few miles from Horsham. The windows were dark. No sign of habitation.
He woke up Florence. She was bleary-eyed and sleepy. When Frank told her they were going to stay the night in the house she looked at him and nodded.
Frank got out his torch and shone it around the empty driveway and the garden. An overgrown lawn spotted with molehills. A set of creaking, rusted swings. Garden gnomes were grinning at him. The cottage was small. White speckled walls and vines of ivy. Old wood aged by decades. Square windows with rotting frames. A flowerbed long devoid of any flowers. The cottage was a relic. Abandoned.
The front door was closed.
Guppy twisted the handle and the door opened a little. He pushed it with the barrel of his rifle. Frank stood alongside him, shining the torch inside. Florence followed them.
Darkness cleaved by torchlight. A stairway leading upstairs. The smell of dust, mildew and old clothes. Silence, apart from a tap dripping in the kitchen at the back of the house.
“Shut the door,” said Guppy. “I’ll check the rooms.”
Guppy searched each room. He told Frank and Florence not to enter the bedrooms. He didn’t need to say why.
They bedded down in the living room. Florence took the sofa. Frank found some old blankets for her. She returned to sleep quickly. Guppy barricaded the doors with furniture. He would keep watch. Frank offered to take it in turns until first light, but Guppy refused.
Frank settled in an armchair. He missed Catherine intensely. He thought of Ralph, Magnus, and Joel, and wondered if they had been in Horsham when the bombs fell. The possibility needled his heart and turned his guts to jelly.
He fell asleep thinking about lost friends and great mountains of writhing fire.
When he woke, the silence stunned him. He wiped spittle from his mouth. His eyes were wet. He had been crying in his sleep.
Florence was a shape in the darkness, breathing slowly and steadily.
Guppy wasn’t here; might have abandoned them, but Frank was too tired to care at the moment. He rose, stepped quietly over to Florence. He stood over her and her pale face became clear like a ghost in the dark. She looked so much like Emily that she could have been Emily. Could have been her twin.
Frank smiled at the sleeping girl. He brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. Her blankets had fallen to the floor, so he replaced them on her body.
He stared at her for a long while.
Guppy was standing in the doorway watching him.
“Everything okay?” The soldier’s voice was flat and tired.
“Florence was having a bad dream.”
“You should get back to sleep.”