They found a car as they entered the village of Milborne Port the next day; a Honda Civic of no use to the dead man lying next to it with his throat torn out.
Ralph removed the parcel shelf from the car and made Magnus sit in the boot, away from everyone else. Quarantine, Ralph called it, and said that if the plague was airborne it would lessen the chance of Magnus infecting the others. Magnus didn’t argue. No one argued. He sat in the boot without complaint.
Frank volunteered to drive. They left the village. They passed through Sherborne; apart from scavenging birds, it was deserted. The dual carriageway to Yeovil was littered with crashed cars. Frank guided the Civic slowly around them, watching the road. An infected woman with a snapping mouth for a face bolted out from one pile-up and launched herself at their car. Her right arm was a flowering mass of urchin-like spikes. Frank steered away from her, resisting the temptation to run her down.
They reached Yeovil not long after.
A car was burning. Two bodies next to it, limbs splayed, faces torn to red ruin, insides scooped out, half-eaten and left to dry on the tarmac. There was blood smeared on the walls of houses. Bodies in gardens, lying in the grass and on flowerbeds. A dead woman on a set of swings. Lone infected looked out from the windows, screaming silently. A man was sitting in a car, staring at his lap. He was covered in blood and he was grinning. As Frank drove past, the man looked up quickly and laughed. His eyes were gone.
Some of the roads were blocked, so they had to reverse and find other roads leading to housing estates and side-streets. Kebab shops and Chinese takeaways. Blocks of flats loomed above the streets. There were people still alive in the town. Some of them watched from their windows, waving for help, uninfected and clean and doomed.
The hospital was on fire. Great towers of smoke climbed into the sky. Part of it had already collapsed.
The infected owned the streets. They saw lone survivors taken down by baying packs of monsters.
Something with tentacles and too many legs was wrapped around a pile of bodies.
Magnus was shivering in the boot of the car.
Joel looked at him. “We won’t abandon you, mate.”
Magnus replied, “I don’t want to go back home and spread the plague. What if I infect my family? What if I kill them? What if I kill all of you?”
“We’ll sort something out.”
“You might as well stop and leave me by the roadside.”
“We’re not going to leave you, Magnus,” said Frank. “We’ll be with you until the end, mate. I promise. We all promise, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” said Joel.
“Yeah,” said Ralph, his voice a whisper.
There were tears in Magnus’s eyes. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be a monster.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Joel was the one who said it.
“What if we get home and they’re all dead?”
Frank looked at him in the rear-view mirror. “We don’t know what we’re going to find.” He thought of crows picking at Catherine’s torn remains on their front lawn.
“He’s got a point,” said Ralph. “Everywhere else has been fucked,”
“Everywhere we’ve been,” Frank said. “There could easily be places that are still surviving.”
“You believe that?”
Frank ignored the question, answered it with one of his own. “I thought Ralph was the only doom-monger amongst us?”
“Things change,” Joel said.
Deserted roads, and fields that had been harvested long ago.
Home.
They entered the village from the south. A signpost at a crossroads next to a tall oak tree. Birdsong. Familiar roads, lanes, and fields. Things remembered. Despite the sense of dread infused within each of them, they felt welcomed. The feeling of returning to where they belonged.
Smoke was rising from the other end of the village. Frank remembered Wishford and how that village was overrun by the infected.
No one emerged from the houses to greet them. No welcoming party. Many of the doors on many of the houses had been ripped from their hinges. Smashed windows. Dried patches of blood. The signs of ruin they had grown accustomed to.
Silent houses of people they knew.
As the car coasted past Silver Street and onto Middle Street, the engine died and rattled to a stop. As if it was meant to be. Magnus was the last out onto the road, breathing slowly and holding his wounded shoulder.
Florence glanced up and down the street. “It’s like my village. Where’s your house, Frank?”
“At the other end of the village, along with Joel’s house and Magnus’s house.”
“The poor end of the village,” Ralph joked, and no one laughed.
Frank looked down the street. The church spire jabbed towards the sky. He saw movement near the front of a garden. The others saw it too, and turned towards it.
A dog emerged from between two cars, padding onto the road, sniffing the ground. A black Labrador.
“That’s Al Copper’s dog, Stumpy,” said Ralph. “Look at its tail.”
Ralph was right. Al Cooper was one of the drunkards that frequented the pub almost every night. He and his dog were inseparable. The Labrador’s tail had been bitten off by a badger a few years ago.
“So, where’s Al?” asked Joel.
“He might be around here somewhere,” said Ralph. “But he might not be the same Al that we know.”
Stumpy saw them watching him and raised his head. His ears pricked up and he sniffed the air for their scent. Magnus stepped forward.
The dog growled, his ears flattening against his head. His legs stiffened. He stared at Magnus.
Magnus stared back at the dog.
Stumpy turned away whimpering, and ran away down the street.
“I hope he survives,” said Ralph, watching the dog disappear. “He’s a good dog.”
They came to the village hall on Church Street. The doors were hanging open and there was a dead body at the top of the steps leading up to the hall, unrecognisable due to the severe mutilation inflicted upon it.
More bodies inside the hall, left where they had fallen, but not left untouched by the ravaging hands of the infected. The floor was slippery in places, sticky in others. Arterial spray on the walls, insane patterns of red. The men looked for their loved ones but couldn’t identify them. If they were here it would never be known.
Frank stepped back from the smell. His eyes were stinging. He breathed through his mouth.
Joel was crying and sniffling, wiping his face. “I want to wake up. Please let me wake up.”
Frank put one hand on Joel’s arm. He looked at Magnus, who had retreated from the doorway to stare into the sky.
Magnus said, “They’re up there in the clouds. Above the clouds. They’re up there waiting. I can hear them. They’re speaking to me. Speaking to all of us but only some of us can hear them.”
His skin was radiating heat, slick with fever. He closed his eyes, took in a breath heavy with exhaustion and sickness. His body was trembling. He had lost weight. The corners of his mouth flinched. He spat on the ground; yellow sputum flecked with red.
“Magnus?” said Frank. “Are you okay?”
Magnus opened his eyes. He swallowed. His skin pulsed. He wore a defeated smile. Tears in his eyes.
“Not long now.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
We’ve all come home, Ralph thought.
They arrived at his house first. He made the others stay on the street; he wanted to go into his house alone. Frank nodded in understanding and let him go.
He halted at the garden gate, composing himself, gathering his thoughts. His heartbeat was fast and strong. Adrenaline made his arms and hands tingle. He breathed through his nose, filling his lungs with clean air. For the moment, the entire world consisted of just him and the house.