Bar None (11 page)

I look down the gently sloping road. I
could
run, but it's a long couple of hundred meters. Plenty of time for a bad shot to get lucky.

The engine rattles as it's revved. Cordell looks around the bridge footing again, shakes his head, raises his hands palm-up, and I have no idea what he's trying to say.

I risk a look around the end of the overturned car and don't get my head blown off. It's difficult to see which vehicle has been started, but there's activity on the bus. The sun is glaring from its windscreen, so I can't see whether or not there's anyone in the driver's seat.

I'm starting to sweat. The sun is hitting the car and melting onto me, and the coat I wore to ride the bike is suddenly too hot. For the first time I turn and try to see inside the car, but its roof is crushed down on my side, and a slick of broken glass and ripped interior shields my view. It doesn't smell of anything too bad. I hope it's empty.

Either side of me are several places where bullets have blasted through its metal shell. My blood runs cold.

I stand up. There's really nothing else I can do. Run and they'll shoot me for sure, stay here and they'll ram the car and crush me into the road. Stand, submit, and perhaps they'll keep fingers from triggers long enough for us to talk.

I raise my arms and wait for the shot. It does not come. Nobody shouts either, and I begin to wonder where they've gone.

"Quickly!" It's a distant shout, and I turn and see Cordell gesturing me toward him.

"This way," another voice says. The voice with the gun. I obey, stepping out from behind the car and walking slowly toward the barricade. As I walk I have time to take in more details, and none of it fills me with hope. The pick-up truck has been there for a long time, because its tyres are flat and there's a swathe of rust spotting its heavy hood. Its windscreen is smashed. The ambulance looks as though it could be mobile, but its rear doors are pressed hard against the retaining wall holding back the motorway twenty feet above. Its cab is ridged and dented, and rough sheets of metal have been welded across its windows. Between the truck and the ambulance is the bus, and as I move closer I can see it moving slightly as people walk about inside. Its engine growls. The front window is missing upstairs, and a man and woman are hunkered down, guns protruding over the sill and tracking my progress.

The bus is pocked with bullet holes. The driver's windscreen is hazed. For some reason they've decided not to knock it out.

"There's no harm in me," I call. I open my raised hands as though to prove I'm not carrying an unpinned hand grenade, or a vial of botulism. "We just want to come through."

"Walk to the front of the bus, put your hands on the grille and stay still," the woman shouts. I do as I'm told. I can see the shape in the driver's seat now, and I'm sure it's just a kid.

I hear the thump-thump of someone running downstairs, and seconds later the hot barrel of a gun is pressed against my temple. "Really," the man says, "don't move."

We stand there in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. It's almost ridiculous. I wonder whether he's waiting for me to make a move so he can claim self-defence when he kills me. I don't give him the pleasure.

This is unreal
, I think again, and I smile.

"What's so fucking funny?" There's fear in his voice, and I don't like that. It's dangerous.

"Sorry," I say. "I've never been shot at before. It's just all a bit surreal."

"Surreal," the man says. He snorts, then giggles. "Lucy! He thinks this is surreal."

"Tell me about it," a voice says from above. The woman, probably leaning out and covering me with her own weapon.

"Look, we don't mean any harm. We just want to get by."

"Well, you have to pay us," the man says, and for the first time I really recognise the utter terror in his voice. I wonder what he was before the plagues: a teacher? Butcher? Accountant? Lorry driver? Now the world has ended and he's just trying to survive, and I'm certain that this is the first time he's asked someone for payment to pass.
Just set up here?
I think.
Or has no one come this way in months?

"What do you want?" I say.

"Food."

"And booze," Lucy says.

The man snorts again. "Food. Weapons, if you have any."

I don't want to reveal how pathetically armed we are. "We have some food you can have," I say.

"And booze, Billy," Lucy says again.

"Some wine."

"Okay, then," the man, Billy, says. "Okay. Tell your people to come up."

"How?"

He hesitates, then shoves the barrel of the gun hard against my head. Bad move, I think. Don't show him up, not in front of his Lucy. He needs to be in charge.

"Call them!" he says. "Tell them to come on foot."

I turn. Cordell is peering around the corner of the underpass, and I see Jessica standing just behind him. They're both holding their guns. I wave them to me, and they disappear back around the corner.

"Now we see how much they think they need you," Billy says. His gun is pointing at my gut, but his eyes are everywhere else. Checking the fields, the road above . . . everywhere.

"What are you scared of?" I ask.

Billy glares at me. "As if you didn't know."

He's talking about something very particular, a definite threat rather than just the wilds we have already seen. I decide to say nothing.

Cordell and the others appear around the corner and start up the incline. They're still carrying their guns, and to begin with I think Billy will go mad. But I see him size up our meagre weaponry; a shotgun, an air rifle. He and Lucy are obviously much more heavily armed, and he seems to draw power from this.

"Break the shotgun!" Billy calls. "Carry the pea shooter by the barrel." Cordell and Jessica comply. When they're twenty paces away Billy calls, "Far enough."

We stand that way for a while, silent, listening to the rumble of the bus's engine. I can sense the shape in the driver's seat behind me, its foot resting on the gas.

We all wait for someone else to speak.

"Who are you?" Cordell says at last.

"The man with the gun," Billy says.

The Irishman snickers, puts his hand over his mouth to hide his smile.

"What?" Billy demands. He moves forward one step, raising the gun. I could tackle him now. But the results of such a rash move are beyond contemplation. However bad Lucy's shooting may be, she'd cut us all down with one long burst.

"Sorry," the Irishman says. "But 'the man with the gun' . . . ? Reminds me of a bad Steven Seagal movie I saw once."

"Was there a good one?" Lucy asks.

Billy turns and looks up at her, scowl breaking into a smile.

This is Monty Python
, I think.

Jacqueline takes the initiative and, with a few words, breaks the thin ice we have all been treading. "I don't suppose you have anywhere I could pee?"

"We've been here about six months," Billy says ten minutes later. They've stopped the bus and led us behind it, into a compound formed beside the road. It has the pick-up truck on one side, a dozen sand-filled barrels forming another wall, and a heavy steel storage container closes it off from the road. It's in the container that they have made their home. Billy will not let us inside.

The bus driver turns out to be a girl of about seven or eight. She doesn't speak. Lucy says she has not spoken since they found her, days after the end, cowering in the middle of the motorway beside the bodies of her parents.

"Why not a house somewhere?" Cordell asks.

Billy nods at the bus. "We have that. We travel around quite a bit, looking for stuff. But back here feels safe. And we're waiting for someone."

"Who?"

"My son," Billy says.

"And my daughter," Lucy adds.

"Why wait here?" I ask.

"Last time I spoke to him, when the plagues were hot, Nathan said he'd try to make it here," Billy says. "It's on the way to London. Where my parents live. Nathan loves his grandparents. And I can't . . . I can't remember him. So he must still be alive."

"So how do you work that one out?" the Irishman says.

Billy glares at him. "If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories."

The Irishman nods, but thankfully he realises it's best not to probe any more.

The little girl is sitting on a sand barrel, looking the other way.

"So you've set up a toll road," I say.

Billy nods.

"Many takers?" Jessica asks.

Billy's face darkens and he turns away. He seems to be staring at the ambulance.

"We'll give you some food," I say. "And we have a few bottles of wine to spare. But . . ."

"We can't go into Newport," Lucy says, pre-empting my question. "No way. Can't. Wouldn't. And most of the houses in the countryside seem to be occupied by. .. the dead. A lot of people out here went home to die."

"But all the cars on the road?" Jessica says.

"People fleeing the city. And that's why we can't go in."

"I locked them in the ambulance," Billy says suddenly. "There were only two of them. But they were . . . well, you know. I can
see
you know. Even after we shot them we knew they'd be up, so I dragged them into the ambulance and parked it there."

"
We
did it," Lucy says.

Cordell goes to speak but I shake my head. There is much more here than we know, but to reveal our ignorance would lose us any small advantage we may have. Billy's gun is pointing at the ground, but he still grasps it tight. It would be foolish for us to assume that we are anything more than prisoners.

"Why don't you burn it?" I ask, trying to get Billy to reveal more.

He grins at me. Shakes his head. "Very good," he says. "But no. Because now I've got my own weapons of mass destruction."

Jacqueline is terrified, I can see that. Shivering, moaning. She broke the tension earlier but she's raising it again now. Lucy is staring at her, and Billy glances at her several times before raising his gun again.

"So why are you on the road?" Lucy asks.

"Going somewhere," Cordell says.

"Where?"

"Away from where we were." I have no intention of mentioning Bar None, or Michael, or any of the ideas we have about what is happening.

"What's wrong with where you were?"

I think of what they have said, how they've acted. I look at the battered ambulance. "The things," I say.

Billy's eyes widen. "What were they like? How did they look?"

I frown and stare down at my feet.

He grunts. "I understand. Rather not say. Rather not talk about them. I understand."

And it's as easy as that.

The young girl stands and leads Jacqueline back down the ramp. She is carrying a pistol tucked into the belt of her jeans. Jacqueline walks with her head down, holding her arms and shaking. When they drive back up in one of the Range Rovers Billy reverses the bus and makes room for them to come through.

Lucy and Jessica negotiate over some food and a few bottles of wine and, our passage paid, we're given the go-ahead to retrieve the bike and the other Range Rover.

They leave us with the shotgun and air rifle, and we go on our way.

"If he was dead, he'd be alive in my memories,"
Billy said. I think on this as I guide the motorbike slowly along the motorway.
"Alive in my memories."

Ashley is dead in my memories. Unless I take a drink and let taste and texture inspire the past, she is a blank where she should be whole, a void where she should be the heaviest thing in my mind. If she was dead I'd be carrying her still, but I feel more empty than I ever have before.

"Billy is mad," I mutter at the breeze. "And Lucy. Both of them mad." And I think of the ambulance with its back doors pressed tight against the concrete wall, metal welded and bolted over the windows, dents in its sides as though made by something inside trying to get out.

I'm approaching another exit from the motorway, this one leading into the heart of Newport along Caermaen Road. I have travelled this road so often with Ashley. I can see her crying and dying, see her lying dead on her bed, but can I really? I was almost mad myself by then; insane with the cries and wailing of my dying neighbours, the smell of my sick wife, and the impossibility of my own unblemished skin, clear lungs, hopeful, crazy eyes. Can I really trust my own memories of that final time so much?

The exit is close now, a couple of hundred meters away. I ease down on the throttle. Our house is less than a mile from here, in a nice cul-de-sac close to the centre of town. The area had been improved drastically in the years before the plagues. Pedestrianised streets, housing grants, parks, planting. It was a nice place to live.

Ashley could still be there.

I saw her die, I saw her tears and pain and I can
still
see them, even now
.

Nevertheless, I cannot feel the weight of my wife's history inside. And she had meant so much to me that her death would surely be heavy indeed.

Knowing that I was mad to listen to a madman, still Billy's words had affected me. If I applied them to myself they answered some questions, but they presented twice as many. These new questions—Is she dead? Is she alive? Is she still here?—could be answered so much more easily. A turn of the handlebars. A ten minute diversion. Proof, of what I thought I knew.

"A mile from here," I say, and I turn from the motorway.

There's a chorus of horns behind me. I know I should stop and explain, but to do so would be to allow Jessica and the others to talk me out of this. She is wise and I feel weak, and I would end up in the back of a Range Rover while the Irishman rode the bike closer and closer to Bar None. And I would be as safe as could be then, but I'd never know. I'd have to watch the last of Newport fading behind us, never to be seen again. And even if I closed my eyes . . . still only the tears of death.

"Sorry!" I shout. I wave a hand, trying to communicate that I won't be long. In my side mirrors I see Cordell flashing lights and the Irishman hanging from the passenger window, waving as though to haul me back. They follow me, and I feel an instant stab of guilt.
They don't want to leave me behind.