Earthfall (2 page)
The boy slowly pulled off his coat and T-shirt and stood in front of the mirror that hung on the front of one of the storage cupboards, inspecting the gash across his chest. He was relieved to see that the cut didn’t seem too deep despite being sore to the touch. He stared at himself in the mirror for a moment longer. He’d lost probably a third of his body weight over the past few months and the slim face topped with long, straight, jet-black hair that stared back at him seemed strangely unfamiliar. Once upon a time he had been teased about his weight by other kids, but now he knew that they would never make fun of him again. If someone had told him back then that he would one day actually miss Simon Haines shouting ‘fatboy’ at him in the playground, he would have told them they were mad. Now he’d happily put up with it just so he could hear another human voice again.
He opened one of the storage cupboards that lined the room and pulled out a small first-aid kit. He cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe and wrapped a bandage round his chest a couple of times to cover it, picking up the slashed and bloodstained T-shirt with a sigh. It looked like he would need to do some clothes ‘shopping’ soon too. That could wait for another time though. Right now he was exhausted.
The boy lay down in his sleeping bag on top of the inflatable mattress on the other side of the room and picked up the small battery-powered radio that lay next to his bed. For five minutes he slowly rotated the tuning dial with his thumb, listening for any sign of a human voice between the static, but there was nothing, just the relentless white noise that he had been listening to for the past eighteen months. He turned the radio off and closed his eyes. The encounter with the Drone had very nearly been a disaster. He knew that he couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that and not for the first time he found himself wondering if he should try to find himself more substantial weapons. At the moment he carried nothing deadlier than a Swiss army knife when he went above ground, but the problem was finding something more useful. For a while he’d carried a baseball bat, but that had just been a pain to lug around. What he needed was something light but effective, a gun ideally, but there were very few of those to be found lying around, especially now that the Walkers had hoovered up anything useful or dangerous for their masters. He’d just have to keep looking, he thought to himself as he slowly drifted off to sleep, and hope that in the meantime he could avoid any more close encounters.
The boy awoke with a start. His dreams had rarely been pleasant since that day eighteen months ago, but this one had been unusually vivid. He’d been slowly walking towards a cliff and could not control his legs. He just kept on taking one step after another, getting closer and closer to the edge. The final, inevitable fall was what had woken him. He opened his eyes and checked the old-fashioned wind-up watch that had replaced his own when the battery had failed a month earlier.
‘Whoa, nice job there, Rip Van Winkle,’ the boy said, raising an eyebrow. It was ten o’clock at night. He’d slept for nearly fourteen hours. Suddenly he was shaken by a coughing fit that made the gash across his chest flare with searing pain. He lifted the bandage and looked at the wound beneath. The area immediately surrounding the gash was an angry red colour and there were fine green lines just under the skin that seemed to be spreading out from the site of the injury and across his chest.
‘Just what I need,’ the boy said to himself as he got to his feet unsteadily. He had learned from experience how dangerous an infected wound could be, but he’d hoped that by cleaning and dressing it he would have avoided any complications. He opened another one of the storage cupboards and looked along the shelves of books inside. He’d realised early on that his best chance of living through this was by learning the basic skills needed for survival and so one of the first books he’d looked for was a first-aid manual. Books were easy to find; the Walkers didn’t seem to care about them at all and so bookshops and libraries still had full shelves. It was a good job too, because if they hadn’t he suspected that he would have been driven mad by boredom long before now. He flicked through the book and made a note of the names of the antibiotics he would need to find. He knew it wouldn’t be easy – hospitals and pharmacies were some of the first places that the Walkers had stripped.
He used a piece of duct tape to patch up the tear in the bloodstained T-shirt and pulled it carefully over his head, wincing with discomfort. He slipped his coat on and picked up his pack before opening the door leading to the cistern room. A confused frown appeared on his face as he saw the daylight flooding in through the grating far overhead. He quickly looked again at his watch.
‘Oh no,’ he whispered.
It wasn’t ten o’clock at night, it was ten o’clock in the morning – he’d only been asleep for four hours. Pain lanced across his chest again and he suddenly realised how serious the situation was. If the infection from the wound had already spread that far, there was no way he could wait until nightfall to go out and search for antibiotics. By then he might not even be able to climb the ladder to the surface. The only option was to go topside in daylight, but that was practically suicidal. Another coughing fit came from nowhere and he reached for the railing in front of him to steady himself as the room seemed to spin round him for several sickening seconds. As he fought for breath and the spinning slowly stopped, he knew that he had no choice.
It was really very simple: maybe get killed up there, or definitely die down here, alone in the dark.
The boy peered out from the shadows of the storm drain, squinting against the brightness. He waited, listening carefully, but heard only birdsong and the sound of the river meandering past a couple of metres below him. He crept forward out of the culvert and for the first time in months felt the sun on his face. In the past it might have been a wonderful feeling, but now it was doing nothing to stop the clammy chill slowly creeping across his body. He tried hard to ignore the voice at the back of his head telling him that this was more than just an infected wound, that the Drone had done something to him, something bad. He scrambled up the riverbank and at the top lay flat, peering across the park. He normally preferred to use one of the less exposed exits from the sewer system, but today he needed what was on the other side of the park. It was one of the largest hospitals in London – one of the places that he tried to stay as far away from as possible. It was a magnet for Walkers and where there were Walkers there were always Drones. His body was suddenly shaken by another coughing fit and the burning pain in his chest drove him to his feet.
He made for the hospital’s main entrance. The doors were open and there were multiple trails of muddy bootprints leading inside. Walkers had definitely been here, but he had no idea how recently. He crept into the gloomy reception area. His own breath seemed impossibly loud as he listened carefully for sounds coming from further inside the building. He heard nothing but the smothering silence that he had become used to over the past months. The boy read the signs on the wall and quickly spotted what he was looking for. He headed off down the corridor to his left, following arrows to the pharmacy. A couple of minutes later he was at the top of a flight of stairs that led down to basement level. He peered into the darkened stairwell and pulled the torch from his backpack. Without any electricity the only light inside the building was what bled in through the windows, but down there it would be pitch-black. He made his way down the stairs, shining the torch on the ground just a metre ahead of him. The muddy bootprints headed towards the pharmacy and the boy realised with a sense of creeping despair what that meant. The pharmacy would be empty.
He continued to follow the signs on the wall and the bootprints on the floor until he arrived at a small waiting area lined with tired-looking plastic chairs and a serving counter sealed by a rolling steel shutter that was set into the wall. Further along the corridor was a door that led into the dispensary area. It had already been forced open, the frame around the lock splintered and cracked. He pushed the door further open and peered inside. There was nothing here. He made his way to the rear of the room, hoping that something might have been missed. He found several shelves still filled with medical supplies, but could not find the antibiotics he needed. He did, at least, find a couple of large plastic tubs filled with painkillers and after popping a couple of pills in his mouth to try to deaden the pain in his chest, he shoved the rest into his backpack. He took several packets of bandages and other dressings and tubes of antiseptic cream, anything that might prove useful in the future. It struck him as odd that these shelves had been left untouched by the Walkers.
Heading back to the counter he looked around for anything that might give him some clue to where he still might be able to find the medication he needed. He spotted an empty trolley off to one side with a clipboard hanging from its handle. He picked it up and read the top sheet of paper. It was a list of medicines to be distributed to various departments of the hospital, and as he read it he saw that the majority of the antibiotics were sent to either the children’s ward or the geriatric ward. That made sense – the very young or the very old would be most vulnerable to infection. He just hoped that the Walkers hadn’t looted those wards as efficiently as they had the pharmacy.
He hurried back up the stairs, grateful to leave the darkness of the basement, and headed towards the reception area when he heard a sound that sent a chill down his spine. At first it was hard to make out, but slowly it became clearer. It was the sound of marching boots and it was getting louder with each passing second. That sound could only mean one thing: Walkers were coming. The boy looked around desperately for somewhere to hide. He hurried to the glass wall at the front of the reception area and looked outside. There, just a couple of hundred metres away, a column of marching people was entering the hospital car park. Their bizarre assortment of dirty clothes and long ragged hairstyles gave them a dishevelled appearance that was at odds with their strangely disciplined lockstep march. The boy knew that the other thing they would share was a haunting, vacant expression that showed no hint of the personalities they had all once had. There was nothing behind a Walker’s eyes, no indication of the humanity that had once been there.
He ran back into the shadows, leapt over the counter and tried to slow his breathing. As the noise of marching feet filled the reception area, the boy could make out another sound – a low, throbbing hum. He wasn’t surprised, every group of Walkers he’d seen had been accompanied by Drones, but he’d been very careful to never get this close to a group of them before. Suddenly, as a high-pitched, almost ultrasonic, whine filled the air he felt something he had not felt in months – a bizarre, uncomfortable sensation in his head, like having an itch in the middle of his brain that he couldn’t scratch. A second later it stopped and the sound of marching started again as the Walkers headed further inside the building, presumably to continue stripping the hospital of any supplies that they might need. The boy rubbed his forehead as the irritating sensation inside his skull faded. He still had no real idea what it was, but it certainly brought back unpleasant memories of the day all those months ago when the world had changed for ever.
The boy could still hear the Drone hovering somewhere nearby. For some reason it wasn’t following the Walkers into the building. In fact, it didn’t seem to be moving at all. The boy dared not risk sneaking a peek over the counter to see where it was; he knew all too well that if he could see it, it could see him and that would be a very bad thing indeed. He had learned a painful lesson the previous night about just how dangerous it was to not maintain a safe distance from those floating nightmares. He had no choice but to wait and hope that it would eventually move away.
For several long minutes the boy crouched, praying that the Drone would follow the Walkers further into the building. Just as he was starting to think that he might have to take a huge gamble and make a break for it, the pitch of the throbbing sound from the Drone increased and it began to move. For a few terrifying seconds the noise got louder, but then it began to diminish, heading further away.
The boy took a deep, relieved breath and, without warning, his chest convulsed as another coughing fit struck. He clamped his hand over his mouth, trying to stifle the sound, but it was too late. The hum of the Drone grew louder again as it returned, attracted by the unexpected noise. The boy darted out from behind the counter and sprinted towards the front door, all hope of remaining hidden gone. The Drone rounded the corner behind him and emitted a horribly familiar shriek as it spotted its prey. A short black tube on the top of the hovering creature swivelled towards the boy, and with a flash and a crackle fired a searing bolt of green light at him. The boy dived forward through the doorway as the energy blast struck the glass directly behind him. The huge sheet of toughened safety glass shattered into millions of tiny pieces all around the boy. He leapt to his feet and began running across the car park, dodging between the rows of dusty, abandoned vehicles as the Drone streaked across the reception area in pursuit, the low throbbing sound of earlier replaced by an angry-sounding whine.
