Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land) Read online

  Then I stop. I switch off the radio, I kill the violins and the cellos and the trumpets. They had been superseded by frantic voices, by the naysayers and the doomseers. Fine then. I will clean in silence.

  But the absence of music reveals other sounds. The helicopters, the endless drone of the watchers in the sky. Up to no good, peering down, gazing into the castles of lesser men and greater women. They have not stopped for days.

  I approach the living room window. The thick red velvet curtains have been drawn for a week, Harold's insistence. Every now and then he puts his foot down, and I let him, even façades need maintaining after all. I raise a hand hesitantly and take hold of a fold of the thick dark fabric, a part of me longs to pull them back. To fill the room with sunlight and to fill my eyes with the truth of what is happening outside.

  My hand drops. My ears know the truth already, and the sun does not shine today. I take in a deep breath of British determination, I fill my lungs with it and hold it for as long as I can. Things rumble up and down the street which cannot be cars. No car squeaks and thuds in that manner, only a vehicle with heavy metallic tracks can emit such a noise.

  I have heard the sounds of so much breaking glass that there cannot be single window left untarnished in the neighbourhood. I have heard so many screams that the whole town must be hoarse. Every now and then gunfire bursts out, sometimes far away, sometimes from the bottom of the garden. On occasion the thunder rumbles, and it talks louder than all the rest.

  Still I clean. Still I do dishes, and laundry, I iron and while I am steaming I watch the clock, I imagine Molly and Harold's footsteps up the driveway, but in my imaginings they were home long ago. But I cannot show weakness, I cannot show fear even to my own reflections, for if they see it they will know it to be true and will refuse to hide me any longer.

  Then I hear a car outside. I hear an accompanying crash. I shudder at the thought of the casualties among the gnomes. The hesitant hand is brushed aside, the curtains fly back along the railings. Old Mrs Andrews across the street seems to be missing a foot. She is crying as she pulls herself through misery and down the street. The Potters battle desperately to keep the enemy from the door.

  I see men in uniform running, in the wrong direction, I believe. Empty vehicles, burning houses, dead bodies, spent cartridges and broken gnomes.

  The street is full of strangers, members of some strange parade, they shuffle and shamble with a twisting gait, they move as if uncomfortable in their skin, which is a pallid and maggoty affair across the board.

  They see me, they move to greet me. Harold has fallen from the car, a wounded man he staggers too, but from injury as opposed to affliction. I walk quickly to the front door, I do not run, one must take ones time come the end of days, lest the sun sets too quickly on our demise.

  When I open the door Harold has gone, replaced by something that looks like Harold. “Where is Molly?” I ask it. No answer comes the reply. Harold has gone grey and his eyes have begun to bleed. My attempts to slam the door are futile. Now I do run, the time for prim and proper has been and gone.

  I return to the living room and consider drawing the curtains, for quite a crowd of red eyed spectators has gathered at the watching window. They tap upon the clean, clean glass. The glass does not have my resolve, it weakens in many places forming inelegant splintered cobwebs.

  Harold puts his arms around me from behind. For a moment I imagine it to be a protective gesture, an act of love and affection, I feel young again. I feel his warm breath on my neck, I turn from the window as it shatters and the audience invades the stage. I meet my own reflection and see the weakness that has always been there. Thoughts of Molly, thoughts of England fade away to less than dust. His hard teeth meet my soft neck, and I wonder what regrets await me after the meal.

  The Grey Republic

  She wouldn't leave him. He was sick, to move him would be to kill him. So she stays, as do we all. The begging of sons and grandsons did not move her. She is a rock on which a nation rests, well, she was.

  Him, he is so sick that he won't know it even when he's torn limb from limb. She will though, she will feel his death, and her own, just as she seems to have felt the deaths of all those who have fallen to the cadaver.

  I could tell you my name I suppose, but that wouldn't matter would it. We are both waiting for the same thing, though it will be different for each of us, you the watcher, me the sufferer. So, I guess this is the point where I tell you what I see, where I tell you how I feel. Think of long red carpeted corridors, think of the very definition of the word palatial.

  Think of gold on the walls used to separate the tapestries from the portraits. Think of mirrors that could swallow you whole, think of chandeliers and crystals. Think of opulence. Now imagine what that looks like with no one around to maintain it. Imagine blood splattered here and there, think of those nice well kept carpets being marred by the impromptu barricade me and my fellows have put across the corridor. Now we are there, now we are looking at the same world.

  The lights are still on because this is one of the few buildings in all of London which has backup generators to the backup generators for the actual backup generators. The corridor like most of the palace is filled with silent lions, filled with roses which never age. We have piled the chairs and tables high against the doors at the far end. I cannot see the handles but I can hear them clicking now and then as fingers lock around them, dead but still curious, they will sniff us out soon enough.

  There was a time when the cool metal of the gun in my hand would comfort me, it would instil me with a sense of pride and power. Now all I can feel is the weight of it, now all it fills me with are thoughts about whether or not I might be better off using it on myself rather than what is on the other side of that door.

  Behind us is the master bedroom. A sanctuary for none, a tomb for two old people, one of whom is sick enough to be dead already, the other who did not need to go out like this. Her loyalty is exemplary, her love for her husband a shining light which cannot hope to pierce the darkness outside the palace. We would expect no less from her, but still I think I am not the only household guardsman in this corridor who wishes she had shown just a little less integrity this time around.

  There is a loud crash against the barricaded door. We all jump, it is not that we were idle, but now we are a little more tense. There is a part of me that wants to look around at the others, to seek some reassurance from them. But I know that cannot come to pass, all I will see in them is a reflection of myself.

  Another crash, the splintering of wood. Too big to be a cadaver, I suspect one of their large cousins has come across them gathered outside the door and decided to investigate. I think I can hear sobbing from the bedroom, but I'm not certain, I try to focus on something else. I look at the writing desk overturned in front of me. I look at the ornate carving around it and the secret draws located underneath. I cannot recall which room that we requisitioned it from but it is likely to have been from one of her personal chambers. I ponder the monarchs who must have once sat here, plotting, pandering, or general meandering. I wonder if any of them ever dreamed that it would come to this, that their kingdom would one day be swallowed by darkness.

  That they could have seen a time when there palace was invaded by enemies is certain, but could they have begun to imagine an enemy such as this, I think not. A third crash disturbs my reveries. Several of the piled chairs tumble down away from the door.

  A dozen of us heft our weapons. We drew straws for this, but ah, we did not get the shorts ones, we got the choices, did we choose badly? It seems unlikely we will be given a chance to dwell on our fate.

  There are several more loud impacts in quick succession, the doors explode inwards in many pieces and dozens of chairs fly through the air and bounce down the corridor. I think I hear a wail from the bedroom. The sound is cut short as we release the thunder. Bullets streak down the corridor into the dark portal at its end.

  We pause briefly, long
enough to see the line of cadavers start shuffling towards us, arms outstretched, imploring us to join them, soon enough you greedy bastards. We mow them down with ease. Still they come at us, they are fearless as they are less all else.

  Like a spent cloud soon the hail of fire stops, this is our last stand. The ammunition left to us by the rest of the household battalion is embedded in the walls of this once great palace of Buckingham. Every stairwell, every dining room, every bedroom and every corridor has been a battlefield. And now we are here and have barely a bullet between us.

  I am proud of my brothers as they surge over the barricade with their bayonets and lay waste to the first few ranks of the endless march of the dead. I do not join them, for I made perhaps the hardest choice of all.

  The bedroom door clicks shut behind me as I leave my brothers to their nobility. The gun is like lead in my hand. The sun is streaming through the windows bathing the golden four poster in the glory of the morning.

  She has been crying. I see why. A prince lays dead upon the sheets. The tears are dry now, they did not last long. No words pass between us. She knows I think why I am here, but I think she knows as well as I do that I cannot accomplish the task I gave myself.

  From the bedside table she draws a weapon of her own, a tiny pistol that looks almost like a toy. She nods at me and we both turn towards the door as it bursts open and foulness invades the room. A swarm of cadavers pours through the opening, but in their midst is something much larger, a king among the dead, how fitting.

  The fiend scuttles across the bedroom when it sees us. Its skin is a waxy, shiny carapace, dark caramel in colour and swirling with patterns and thick black veins.

  It does not pause, it does not hesitate as one of the three foot long spikes on the end of its arms punctures through my liege and pins her dead against the wall. My gun barks pitifully at the creature. In slow motion I watch another of the massive arms unfurl and curve around towards me. I am lifted and pinned alongside her, we are puppets and playthings. My lady and her protector, dead upon the wall, how did it come to this, how did old England fall?

  The Green and Pleasant Land

  Amidst the Falling Dust

  Copyright©2013 Oliver Kennedy

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter 1, The Last Days of Summer

  The cool metal of the deck helped in no small amount to alleviate some of the nausea. You wouldn't have thought after so many months at sea that it would still be like this. Reduced to a quivering jelly, curled up in the foetal position after a bout of retching over the side. The bile and remnants of this mornings measly breakfast have splattered harmlessly down the side of the aircraft carrier and into the uncaring sea. The water had spent centuries absorbing the filth of mankind and has grown accustomed to swallowing up our many failings.

  Several of my fellow drifters stand nearby. They have become used to the sight of my prone form on deck. The brief respite from the nausea that the vomiting has given me has allowed the shame to flood in. They may have become used to it, but I have not, and the humiliation burns me like a red hot poker.

  I get to my knees, I stare out over the iron grey waters of the North Sea. Beneath my feet is sixty five thousand tons of steel, the man made monster that was to have been the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier. But like much in the old world that was to have been, it has not come to pass. The vessel is a shell, a hastily assembled life raft to which nearly six hundred men and women are clinging with increasing desperation.

  So as we lay here bobbing up and down, I look out at the winding coast of the green and pleasant land, and I think back over this bleak year of my life....

  My name is Patrick Redmayne. I work, or rather I worked for a company called Pendragon Systems. We were in the defence industry, or, as we used to call it while we stood around the water cooler, the 'attack industry'. We supplied the weapons of war to any and all who were willing to wage it, to pay the toll. Business was booming, and we were too ignorant to see that we were supplying the means of our own downfall.

  The military buildup by the USA and China had sent jitters through the wider pacific rim region and the world. Contracts were rolling in, tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, advanced littoral warships. The nations of the earth were watching the worlds two mightiest military powers square up to each other, and their minds turned to self preservation. Within a matter of months the tentacles of globalisation had been severed, the planet divided into paranoid armed camps, which, when they weren't busy eye-balling each other across the barbed wire, were desperately trying to combat the enemy within, the totem of our downfall, the Deathwalker virus.

  Like much of the masses I sat down, idly playing with my cereal watching it all unfold on the news, watching the song of doom build to its inevitable crescendo, when it got there it broke every window in the world, it shattered glass, and steel, and bone.

  My home is a town called Carlisle, to the far north of England. Sadly I was not there when it all collapsed for good. Sadly I was not with them when it all went to pot. I was ensconced in temporary housing at the Rosyth Shipyard, some portacabins huddled in the shadow of the beast.

  I remember the last phone call, the usually tired and worried voice at the other end was fearful now, hysterical. In the background I could hear breaking glass, shouts of rage and pain, my son, my son, at whom do you roar. Wendy, she told me that there were familiar faces in the crowd. Familiar yet alien, neighbours of many years with crazed faces, grey skin and outstretched arms. She begged me then, she begged me for help, she begged me to be there, to live and die with her. She begged me before the phone went dead. That is that last I heard of Wendy Redmayne or my son Gideon.

  I stared at the phone for a long time, until shouts and screams from the outside managed to penetrate through the wall of grief springing up around me.

  You see until then much of what we'd seen, we'd seen through a screen. Clinics in the big cities that were pictures of chaos. Maddened patients, the first to have received the vaccination, with bloodied eyes, who were savaging each other, savaging the doctors and nurses around them, savaging the baton wielding police who attempted to put them down. Hospitals were like warzones in a conflict that soon spread to the streets.

  Scientists pondered, prevaricated and gesticulated. They did not provide any answers, they contradicted themselves with every other statement. There was a famous tussle at the united nations, world leaders and foreign ministers brawling like common thugs in the grand chamber of the UN. That was while the networks were still up, but it wasn't too long after that the world went dark.

  So you see we were witnesses night after night to scenes of civil chaos punctuated by generic footage of military buildups in many of the worlds flashpoints and border zones. We carried on working, though I don't know why, the top brass of the UK military seemed just as content to carry on as the board of Pendragon systems were. But there comes a point when even the stiffest of upper lips must tremble, when even the most stubborn of lions must be brought low. For the thousands of workers at the Rosyth shipyard, that day was August 19th 2014, the last day I spoke with my wife.

  I ran from the portacabin to see what all the noise was about. At the far end of the dock I could see a large crowd of people pushing at the thick iron gates, I could see soldiers pointing guns, some of them fired into the air but it did not seem to have any affect on the desperate souls straining to get in. I started to walk towards them. I wondered what fear would cause people to face down armed soldiers in such a way. Then I looked beyond the crowd, to the hills above Rosyth.

  The hills were alive with what looked like people, but they did not move with the haste of prey, but with the shuffling gait of the new world predators. For the last few days the UK's major population centres had been experiencing surges in the numbers of those infected with the Deathwalker virus. And as me and my colleagues spent the morning glaring at screens and shivering despite the summer sun, it turned out that the population of Dunfermline, which had t
urned pretty much overnight, had descended on Rosyth and added its populous to their numbers.

  The desperate crowds at our front gate were those few who'd managed to get out, sadly they assumed that the military protected shipyard would provide some salvation for them. They were wrong, as pointed barrels and the no nonsense commands of the soldiers indicated.

  When the hill wanderers reached the rear of the crowd the screams rang out like sirens. The infection rippled through the crowd along a surge of blood and flailing limbs like some sort of perverse Mexican wave.

  Then came the breaking point. The fence gave way. A nervous soldier fired a confident bullet, dozens more of it's fellows followed it, racing into bodies with the reckless abandon of hot lead. Sirens rang out as hundreds of figures raced into the shipyard, some of them were alive, some were not. It became evident that the gate guards and their rapidly diminishing amounts of ammunition were not going to be sufficient to hold back the horde, I was glad to see I was not the only one to turn and run.

  Above the din of the crowd I was aware of helicopters coming in low, I heard the rattling boom of chaingun cannons and the sounds of shredding metal, cracking concrete and tearing flesh. The carrier seemed to represent a beacon of safety and we swarmed towards it like ants. I was only a couple of metres from a boarding ramp when a form reared up in front of me and knocked me to the floor.

  This was my first up close and personal encounter with a deathwalker. Though humanoid in shape the stark absence of humanity was apparent on a number of levels. From its mouth there poured a frothy mixture of blood and white saliva, it's skin was grey except for the veins which stood out as thick black lines which criss-crossed the figure from head to toe. The eyes were dull red orbs devoid of anything but hunger and hate.