He took a short-cut across the big grass field, saw the farmhouse when he topped the brow. Something about it added to his unease. Sure it was summer and there wouldn't be smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney. But there would be activity of some kind. The red pick-up was in the yard; there was no sign of the bantams which virtually lived by the back door. He started to run.
Breathless, he went in through the yard gate and that was when he first saw his parents. They were in the big dutch barn which still had a few bales of last year's hay in it and ... oh Christ, it wasn't really them . . . was it? No, for fuck's sake, you aren't my parents!
His logic tried to throw out all sorts of answers, tried to make him believe them. A couple of tramps, filthy dirty and with no clothes, they'd hidden in the barn. But these weren't tramps. Facially they resembled his mother and father, the man looking like his pubic hair had run riot and grown a widening path right up to his stubble of a beard. Instead of the old-fashioned short back and sides his hair curled greasily down to his shoulders. Phil kept his eyes elevated; it was too embarrassing to look below the waistline of your own father.
On to his mother: she had lost her false teeth so that her cheeks were hollowed, her mouth shrunken. Again an excess of hair but it was not so prolific on her body as on her husband's. Unsightly baggy breasts that sagged with age, a roll of waistline fat that she had hidden from him for years with a pair of corsets. A V of hair; he jerked his head away, saw their expressions of fear, the way they backed away from him. It was them.
'Father, mother.' He whispered the words, tried to will them to shout back, 'We're not your father and mother.' They huddled together pathetically, whined like a pair of collies that knew they were in for a good larruping. For maybe ten seconds parents and offspring stared at one another and then with a shrill shriek the two hideous caricatures broke into a shuffling flight, scrambling over hay bales, dragging each other in turn, out through the other end of the bay and into the fields.
Phil Winder stood and watched them go. He did not pursue them because he did not want to catch up with them again, did not want to have to look upon their wizened animal-like faces and have to convince himself once more that they were his parents.
He didn't need any more convincing, didn't look for reasons, accepted that some terrible change had come over everybody and everything. Except himself? Fearfully he smoothed his hands down his body, felt at his skin. He seemed OK.
It was a long time before he finally plucked up the courage to go into the house, kicked open the back door and almost shouted 'Is anybody there?' Of course there was nobody there. Then the stench hit him, a foul putrefying odour that would have had him spewing if he hadn't had an empty stomach. He retched and it hurt, recognised the smell even before he saw the mess on the red quarry tiles, patches of semi-solid excreta crawling with bluebottles. They lifted, settled again almost immediately, fed ravenously.
They've shit on the floor, a voice inside him gasped and he wanted to cry. Oh Jesus, who's done this to my folks?
Apart from that the house was much the same as it always was, working-class tidiness reminiscent of his mother's upbringing in a farm labourer's cottage in the days when people really were poor. He checked himself in the mirror, didn't really care now whether anything had happened to him or not. Physically he looked the same. But I'm going slowly fucking mad.
Looking back he could not really remember how he had passed the rest of that awful day. He had shovelled up the mess on the kitchen floor, thrown it out into the yard and the flies had followed it. After that he had just sat about, lying to himself that his mother and father would be back later and everything would be all right.
But they did not return and everything wasn't all right. Dusk merged into darkness and he still sat there in the old wooden rocking chair by the dead Rayburn. He was still there in the morning when the sun's rays gently eased him awake and everything came flooding back to him. I'm glad I don't believe in you, God, because you wouldn't have let this happen. He ate a tin of cold beans and cut his finger opening the can so that he spottled blood on the working surface. Eventually he stopped bleeding and made himself some coffee, tried to work out what he was going to do.
He needed help; he'd take the pick-up into the village and tell the police. The police always knew what to do, didn't get in a flap. His mind made up, he went outside, noted absent-mindedly that it was going to be another scorcher. He had completely forgotten about his experiences below ground; this was far more terrifying.
As he drove into the village he knew right away he wasn't going to get any helpbecause there wasn't anybody here to help him. Like a trained burglar sussing out prospective houses he could tell that every one was empty, whether the front doors hung open or not.
He might have been a century too late, the inhabitants dead and gone. A cat jumped off a stone wall and fled at his approach. A mongrel dog barked at him from a distance then turned and ran with its tail between its legs. Apart from that there was no sign of life.
He pulled up by the triangle of rough unmown grass that was fondly termed 'the Green' and saw at a glance that the telephone in the kiosk had been vandalised; the receiver and dialling mechanism were torn away, left smashed and bent on the floor.
He sighed his despair, glanced at the Mazda's petrol gauge. Almost empty, just about enough juice to get him back to the farm. And he was only going back there because it had once been his home.
He made it to the yard gates before the engine stuttered and died, free-wheeled the last few yards. It was only later that he asked himself why he hadn't tried some of those parked cars in the village; almost surely he would have found one with the keys in and some petrol in the tank. But he hadn't and that was that. He wasn't going back there again.
Days stretched into weeks and still he hung around the farm doing nothing. When the fridge was empty he started on the freezer; the generator out by the buildings would keep it going for some time yet because it was not running anything else. When he ran out of food he would think of something but not until. His parents would not be coming back, the sheep were still in the barley and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do about it. For the time being he would sit it out.
The initial terror had numbed him but gradually it was wearing off. Acceptance came in stages but reasoning was a different matter. The eternal 'why'. Why had everybody just up and gone? It was some sort of nuclear attack, of course. He had escaped because he had been down the mine but soon radiation would take its toll of him. When he felt really ill and started throwing up he would know that he had radiation sickness, the beginning of the end. Cancer, really. And once he was sure, he would do something about it; he'd read somewhere that it could take you months, even years, to die depending upon how exposed to it you had been. He wasn't going to wait and suffer that long.
What he needed to do, he decided, was to get away from this place, move further afield and maybe meet up with some other survivorsif there were any.
And it was on his very first trek beyond the boundary stile on the bridle-path that he met up with that party of hunters from the hills. They must have heard him coming, had lain in wait for him along that overgrown path, some of them up in the trees above.
Something hit him. Ape actors in a jungle movie coming right out of the screen, sending him sprawling, surrounding him, jabbering. Breathless, he looked up, found the twin prongs of a pitchfork only an inch or so from his throat. He tried to swallow but couldn't make it, let his eyes roll because he couldn't move his head. There were a lot of them, maybe twenty or more, others standing just outside his range of vision. And every one of them bore a strong resemblance to how his parents had looked the last time he had seen them.