Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land) Read online

  “Does that feel better?” Wrong question. I cannot think why but asking him that seems to have terrified him, what little strength he has left is wasted as he thrashes on the floor. I shush and calm him as best as I can. I look up at Mac. A look of acknowledgment passes between us, this man is at the end of his path. But as his breaths become shallow and intermittent he manages once last interaction with the world. The old man reaches up a calloused hand to my head and pulls it closer to him.

  He smells almost as bad as the decayed ones, his defeat at the harshness of the world is embedded in every bloody contour of his old wrinkled face. With my own face but inches from his own he whispers his last words, words which struggle to escape him, words which threaten to be carried away without a recipient even by the calm air on a day like this. “Ravensburg, the hospital at Ravensburg, it is...”

  Whatever it is I will not find out from him. The sentence remains unfinished. The last breath and the last words rattle from him entwined in one another and never to reveal what may have come after.

  We did not bury the body, nor did we set it alight for we had not the tools to dig or burn. We left him there, leaning against the trunk of an old oak tree, there he may lay still, or maybe he is walking by now. The fate of the old man's corpse is less of a concern to me than his final words, as we walk home in silence I dwell upon them, examining them from this way and that.

  Back at out requisitioned homestead Sue can tell that something is amiss, as if the blood on our clothes is not enough of a give away the darkness in our eyes speaks volumes. But I have not the time for lengthy explanations, I ask the family to gather around the kitchen table. As Mac regales them with the story of what happened I am hunting through the pages of Mrs Robinsons old map of the UK.

  They are so gathered and as Mac finishes his recollections I stride into the room. Zaks eyes are brown like mine, Mac has the green gaze of her mother, but it is to my blue eyed girl that I look, my pale Ellie, wrapped up in one of Mrs Robinsons hand sewn blankets, it is for her that this must be done. I put that map book down on the table and point at a circled place upon the old yellowed pages. “We are going to Ravensburg”

  Chapter 4, On the road

  Mrs Robinsons car was a tiny old beetle. It was a lurid green and though we could all fit into it, it was a squeeze. It was not the kind of automobile that you would want to be driving through a dead world in, it was not the kind of car which you would desire to sail up the deserted highways of the apocalypse in. It was not the kind of rig which you could mow down large numbers of cadavers with, it wasn't the car for us.

  Fortunately there were a number of remote neighbours dotted about the hillside around the lake who had more suitable means of transport. I shopped around like a common car thief before pulling up to the homestead in a heavy duty range rover I'd relieved the owner of which would be our chariot as we made out way to Ravensburg. It was sturdy, spacious, secure and it had a massive steel bumper that was just screaming out to be covered in cadaver entrails.

  We'd all spoken about coming back here once we'd visited this hospital, once Ellie was better. Even so we packed as if it was the last time we would see the little white cottage, hidden by a fortress of trees and thick thorny bushes.

  Several days after the death of the old man and with the car fully loaded we prepared to say goodbye. I walked down to the lakeside and stared out over the water for a time. We'd seen an increasing number of cadavers emerge from beneath the glittering gateway of the lake. It was this increasing cadaver presence along with Ellie's worsening cough that was giving them the impetus to move on. That and the many armed creature which I'd killed.

  I had in the end told Sue about what I'd seen, I lay in the soft glow of the morning light one day and told her about the nightmare, about my worry about what it might mean. That rather than healing in any way the world out there was becoming sicker every day. She managed a few hollow comforts in return. Too busy with her own dark dreams, uncertain which malign fate to curse with greater fervour, the death of the species or the death of the family.

  I skimmed a stone and turned my back on the water. I joined the rest of the Locklear clan in the car and without a word or a backwards glance we set off from Windermere, back out into the big wide world.

  Ravensburg wasn't far from where we were. Maybe an hour and a half’s drive, dependent on traffic of course, I smiled despite myself at my rather inappropriate inside joke. There would be no traffic. The only obstacle we might encounter on the actual road was a queue of stationary cars, dead metal boxes which had long ago ceased to be traffic and were now just part of the terrain.

  However the road we were taking was not a major one and unlike the arteries which snaked their way out the cities I hoped to find it relatively clear of obstructions. The owner of this particular vehicle, Mr Dan Holly, a neighbour of Mrs Robinson, had very kindly left me a pair of tinted driving glasses for the journey today. I remarked to the kids that I looked quite cool in my dark glasses, they remarked that I was a delusional sad case. It was just like old times.

  During the long flight from the city when the shit had been fairly consistently hitting the fan every single day we'd seen a lot of carnage. Many fires had burned with no one to put them out.

  Similarly even after we had escaped the concrete leviathan we'd stood on many hilltops and watched the towns and cities burning. The combination of unattended accidents, looting and a general desire to destroy things had painted a picture of a nation in flames. By day columns of smoke could be seen rising up into the sky like slow moving tornadoes of ash and grime. By night the horizon was illuminated by constant false dawn as the orange glow of burning Britain lit the sky and filled our nostrils with the scents of destruction from dawn to dawn and dusk to dusk.

  Up here, in the more rural part of the world things seemed remarkably different. Fences were still standing, bluebells danced and swayed by the side of the road. To our utter amazement at one point we passed a field in which there stood a herd of cows, absently chewing the grass and staring vacantly at the infrequently seen car as we passed by.

  Despite the normality of the country idylls at which we marvelled there were some very stark reminders of the kind of world in which we now lived. As we neared the north part of the lake we passed just south of the town of Ambleside. The national express coach which had been blockaded across the main road going into the town was covered in bullet holes and a large crudely written sign which simply said 'stay away'. Whether this was a threat or a warning the Locklear family did not want to find out.

  Those parts of the town we could see told a grim tale. Burnt out buildings, burned out cars and bodies hanging from lamp posts. Some of them had signs wrapped around their necks but it was impossible from this distance to read them. We even saw the occasional cadaver roaming the streets, their bloodied eyes turned hungrily in our direction as we passed, but this A road was far enough south of the town that we did not need to worry unduly. We did find a couple of cadavers on the road here and there, but they did not last long against the thick bumper on the front of the land rover.

  After about half an hours driving from the Robinson house we came to a crossroads and a decision had to be made. If we continued south on this main road then we would have to drive through the outskirts of the town of Windermere. As settlements went it was not huge, and housed only about ten thousand people. But it didn't matter how strong the bumper on the front of the car was, if we got stuck in a herd of cadavers that might easily have gathered in a population of that size, then we would be finished.

  The other option was to go left, a thin winding road through some woodland which held its own perils, if they encountered any kind of obstacle on such a road then it would be a hard task to come back, we were also open to more hidden ambushes on a path, where cadavers might stumble from the undergrowth or fell men might lay in wait to take that which was ours and subject us to all manner of man made horrors.

  In the end we went left, w
ith all four passengers on strict instructions to maintain a vigilant gaze against any foe that might come against us.

  Everything seemed to be going well. Until I beheld the grey horse, it had no rider, and it was death. I instinctively slammed on the breaks coming to a stop a few feet from the beast. Whatever fields and dunes it might have ran across with fleet footed abandon in life this was a creature of a very different makeup in death.

  Its eyes were white and bloody, the similarly pale froth which foamed around its sharpened teeth was flecked here and their with crimson. Its skin had fallen off in many places as the creature had decayed, here and there ribs could be seen, poking out of rotting flesh, a darker grey then that off its skin.

  Too late did I spy the fact that the dead horse had a rope around its neck which led off into the bushes. I yanked the gearstick back into reverse just as they struck. I heard one of the rear passenger windows break and saw hands reaching at Ellie. They weren't dead hands, they were dirty and filled with violent intent, but they were very much alive. We started to reverse just as one of the other windows went, this time on the front passenger seat. Sue screamed, Ellie screamed, I felt my heart start to race.

  I back up too far, we went up onto the verge and I cursed loudly as the rear wheels became lodged, jutting over a mound of rocks and roots. I glanced up to see our ambushers. They were all male, their eyes were almost as empty as those of the cadavers. Their clothes were shabby and all of them sported the same scraggly beards and unkempt hair that I did.

  Aside from the old man this was the first human contact we'd had in a year, the first interaction with someone outside the family since Greg, and it was evident that very little had changed. It was no surprised me that civilisation had fallen, my outlook had always contained an element of melancholic nihilism which I'd tried to shelter from my loved ones, no, what surprised me was the speed with which it had fallen and the finality with which the ties which used to bind us had been severed.

  They seemed to be all around us, though there were only half a dozen of them it felt like a swarm, they carried clubs and knives and it was obvious that this robbery would also involve five executions.

  The only advantage to us I could see was that these men were emaciated to a large degree, they had evidently not wintered on the veritable feasts which had come out of a larder like Mrs Robinsons. They were hungry men in a desperate world, and one of them had just reached in and half dragged my sickly daughter from the car.

  Time seemed to slow down, the gruff shouts of the attackers, the bellows of pain and rage from my sons, the piercing screams from the female members of the Locklear clan, it all came through dulled and stretched and unreal. In the space of a few heartbeats I saw so many details, I saw Zak drive the point of a Stanley knife blade into the eye of an attacker on his side of the car, I saw Ellies back start to bleed from the cuts she was sustaining from the broken glass of the window, I saw Mac run a kitchen knife across the hand of the man who was trying to pull his sister from the car, the man shouted and let go and Ellie hung half way out the car like a rag doll.

  Then I heard it, I heard it cut through the mental quagmire like a blade “Rob!!” she screamed, my lady wife. This 'Rob' this was not the fearful, or the demanding or the cajoling or the submissive. This was the 'what the hell are your doing just sitting there 'Rob'.

  I pushed the door open with as much force as I could muster sending one of the attackers sprawling onto the tarmac. He'd barely got to his elbows before I was upon him. The kick hit his chin so hard that his neck snapped back with enough force to break. The man with the bloodied hand who'd been trying so vainly to take my daughter ran at me, I blocked his poorly aimed blow before ramming his face into the roof of the car, even as he fell I grabbed him and wedged his head in the door way before slamming it shut with all the ferocity I could summon.

  I pulled Ellie from the window and opened the door allowing Zak and Mac to climb out. Then we were on the offensive. Hammers, knives, machetes and cleavers, the remaining four assailants put up a poor fight, three died quickly, the last one tried to climb back up the embankment into the bush, he fell twitching with my eldest sons meat cleaver between his shoulder blades.

  I looked around, sizing each of them up from head to toe, I looked for scratches and bizarrely I looked for bites, I'd become so used to fighting cadavers that it took me a moment to realise that the evil of men was of a different nature to the evil of the dead, though it would not have surprised me to find that the living had reached such a level of depravity as to feast on their own.

  Contemplation of my bloody but very much alive family was cut short by a snort from behind me. The strange grey horse which had been our bait eyed me balefully. I severed the rope holding it with a single swipe of the machete, the creature did not flinch as I did so. It stared for a few moments more, then it wandered off into the undergrowth with the odd maggot wriggling its way to the surface and falling to the floor, soon it was lost from sight and we were alone and surrounded by empty silence.

  It took three of us pushing to dislodge the car from the embankment and get it back onto the road. We left the bodies for the flies and for each other dependent on which one rose first. We continued on and were all relieved when we exited the trees and were surrounded by open country side again. Up the road a way we saw the high hills of the northern part of the Lake District national park were rearing up. Nestled deep within them were some of the other bodies of water that gave the area its name, like Ullswater and Grasmere.

  Our objective was closer than that but we still had a bit of a drive. Sue started to fiddle with the radio but I switched it off straight away which earned me a long steady glare for the next several hundred metres. I ignored it and we all retreated to within our own thoughts. I didn't want the others to hear the strange messages and the manic laughter.

  At one point we passed some wreckage in a field, a downed plane of some kind I assumed, had I paused and considered the wreck I might have thought it odd that whispers of smoke still climbed from it here and there, and that fires burned within the metal shell. But we did not pause, I was deep in thought and much of it ill. We left the wreckage behind along with the fields and the cows and the long dead horses.

  I'd never been a violent man, in the old world it had filled me with revulsion and on the rare occasions when I was confronted with it I often felt sick and dizzy. These days it seemed that all you had to step out the front door and violence would find you. There was no time for dizziness and sickness, I could not revile something which I was forced to do with such regularity lest I end up reviling myself.

  I told myself over and over that we were still good people, that my sons were good men, men of necessity who in another life would be writing bad poetry, serenading pretty girls and buying flowers for their mum. But there was always that nagging doubt, that same voice which had fallen silent with death of principle, the one which looked on in horror from behind the red mist as my sons sliced peoples faces in half with meat cleavers and beat them to death on the open road. What were we becoming?

  The maudlin lay heavily on me in a mirror of the sky above which darkened as we drew closer to out target. The pitter patter of the rain did not comfort me as it once had, I heard Ellie complain as the droplets came in through the broken window, this was not what she needed right now, the sooner we found that hospital the better, provided there was any one there to help of course.

  Between the grand lakes of Windermere and Ullswater there is a lesser know and inferior body of water called the Ravenpool, named as such for its popularity with ravens which inhabited the area. The dark wings could oft been seen flitting here in there on the banks of the Ravenpool, taking on water and keep a wary eye on the long grass for enemies.

  It was next to this body of water, just off the beat and track for a way that the settlement of Ravensburg could be found.

  We turned off down the road towards the dwelling, a number of large buildings could be seen on the othe
r side of the lake. The sky had darkened to an angry, inky black and the steady downpour was illuminated by the car headlights. I would one day look back on this moment and curse my own stupidity. I would curse myself for not asking a very simple question, why on earth would such a small and remote place have its very own hospital? We were about to find out.

  Chapter 5, Ravensburg

  The first impression was not great. It might have been dampened by the weather unfolding in the sky above us but Ravensburg did not have the look of a functioning anything about it. The huge gates which sat across an opening in the equally foreboding walls had been torn off their hinges by a tremendous impact at some point. They lay bent and mangled on either side of entrance and their demise made our passage onto the grounds of Ravensburg that much easier.

  Following our trauma on the road and the fact that poorly blocked window frames were letting in water I was keen to get inside as soon as possible. For that reason I did not take the time to clarify the rain blurred signs which I squinted at as the land rover bumped its way through the puddles of the hospital car park.

  What we were looking for was not hard to find anyway, the grand entrance to the hospital was marked by the tall doors beneath the colonnade and the intimidating statue of a raven with its outstretched wings which sat above it. Below the bird in large letters written across the lintel were the words 'Healing begins in the mind'. A nice little aphorism probably coined by one of the hospitals patrons.

  The rest of the family disembarked and huddled in the shelter of the large grey columns while I parked the car. I even managed to park between the lines. Why? I do not know, for not a single other vehicle could be seen there, but old habits die hard. I got a strange feeling as I jogged through the rain and up the half dozen or so steps leading to the entrance. I remembered dropping Sue at the entrance to County General when Zak was born while I parked up nearby. She was sat waiting patiently in a wheelchair for me with an orderly who was grinning broadly at some jape about my parking I was certain she'd just made.