Tails of the Apocalypse (35 page)

Heldur was the next to admit he’d seen something, but he was much more precise in his description of it. It wasn’t an animal. It was a sallow-skinned naked man, feral, his face blistered and raw, clumps of hair fallen out to reveal suppurating sores and puss seeping from his scalp.

I wasn’t sure if he was Heldur’s ghost, or if the feral man was the first survivor we’d found.

I’m not sure which possibility was worse.

Hejdur woke us in the middle of the night to say he’d heard something and crept out to investigate because he was sure he’d seen the same feral man lurking close to our makeshift camp. That gave me the creeps, but to be blunt, better some feral enemy come at us tooth and claw than the grimmest reaper turn out to be an irradiated corpse skittering across the blasted landscape. That was the stuff of nightmares right there. If he was real, we could put him out of his misery.

That’s how I’d started thinking; the first man we’d encountered, and I was picturing ways to end his life. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

When Hejdur returned without finding the man, the brothers decided they were going after him.

I didn’t follow them.

I needed to get my head around the fact that I was seeing monsters where there were—at worst—desperate, dying men. I didn’t like what the long walk was turning me into.

It wasn’t until I’d been walking for an hour in the opposite direction that I realized I had no intention of heading back to the camp. I was going home. Alone.

Only I wasn’t alone, was I?

I was following my own golden ghost light south toward home.

It didn’t take more than twenty miles for him to make himself known again. This time as we walked, he kept looking back over his shoulder, as if to make sure I was still following.

His tail whipped back and forth, always happy, just the way I remembered him. The closer we came to home, the more familiar my ghost light became.

He’d found a stick.

It might as well have been the canine equivalent of Ascalon or Excalibur or whatever other name that fabled sword went by the way he strutted with it in his mouth. So proud. There was a wonderful nobility about the way he watched over me as he led me home. There was no judgment for my having not been there when he and Em had needed me the most.

I wept as I walked, a single track of tears trailing down my dirt-smeared cheek. I was sure I was losing my mind, driven mad by the solitude, twisted by the grief until I’d finally broken.

I thought of all of the other animals the survivors had seen around the wreckage. A few had seen wild horses, flocks of sparrows, owls in the trees, crows, dogs like Buster; there was even a hart.

They were all soul guides, psychopomps.

Their role in every culture was the same: to shepherd the soul into the Afterlife.

But I wasn’t ready to go.

Not yet.

I wanted to go home first.

We reached the crater that had been London. All that remained was mud and silt and broken stone buried under a cloud of ash. Long shadows were burned into the ground by the heat from the nuclear blasts. Twisted wrecks of cars and buses resembled nothing more than struts of old meccano. I reached down to stroke Buster, needing to feel the familiar comfort of his soft fur beneath my fingers.

He hadn’t barked once in three hundred miles.

He looked up at me expectantly.

Once upon a time I would have dipped my hand into my pocket for some sort of treat when we walked through the woods. We were denied those simple pleasures now. But we were together, and that was miracle enough to this non-believer.

At last, a miracle in a broken, blasted land.

We were a day from home.

I hunkered down beside my best friend, ruffling my fingers through his fur, and said I only wanted one day, just one more.

He looked at me with pity in his eyes and understanding.

I wished I could read his mind.

“Penny for them,” I said, as he inclined his head, looking at me.

He answered by licking the ash off my fingertips.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—or what that last meal had been. Fish, maybe?

That felt like something I ought to remember.

We walked through what remained of the capital. Everywhere I turned there were ghosts. They offered their own mournful laments carried away by the wind.

I saw lovers holding hands.

I saw an old man on the corner smiling at the ghost of the woman who’d been his wife for sixty years.

I saw kids on the corner kicking a football against a wall that wasn’t there.

I saw an elderly woman weighed down by carrier bags overflowing with groceries she’d never eat.

I saw a boy pushing a bike and girls skipping rope.

I saw all these signs of life, normality, but none of them saw me.

They all had that same glazed expression on their faces, locked in their shared moment of death. They were just the last lingering memories of life the city clung to. They weren’t real.

Neither were the buildings.

They were just more memories. That explained how streets led into the wrong streets, missing out huge sections of the city as we walked, each step one step closer to home.

We shared one last night under the stars, Buster and I.

There was fire in the sky as the night remembered the death of the world.

It wasn’t beautiful.

There was no beauty left in the world.

Buster was anxious. He wanted to be on the move. He didn’t like the rumbling thunder off in the distance. The sound—or maybe it was the change in barometric pressure—made him uncomfortable. I hated that I couldn’t soothe him. So instead of sleep, we walked on.

We arrived on the Downs at sunrise.

The other hour when magic was in the air.

Langley Vale was in a dip in the rolling hills. What that meant was that the two hundred houses were saved from the worst of the nuclear wind. Seventeen miles and some from ground zero meant that some of the houses that had once traded hands for upwards of half a million pounds still stood. The old school with its prefab guts had blown away. There wasn’t even a shadow where it had stood.

Buster whined as I stood there, looking at the raw wound in the land where it’d been, remembering my first kiss that had happened in that old building. He wanted to move on. He was in a hurry to get home.

We entered Grosvenor Road at the top of the village. The old street sign was buckled, half the letters blistered and bubbled away from the metal.

Buster was half-jumping with every step now, so close to the bungalow where we all lived.

The long tarmac drive hadn’t been repaired in the thirty years since I’d first walked up it. Weeds grew wild, coming up through the cracks. The old sycamore was split, half its trunk torn open and in the grips of mold, while behind it the three oaks were gone, their roots ripped up. Bricks and broken mortar gathered around the fallen trees. Bar one wall, they were all that remained of my home.

This wasn’t the homecoming I’d promised myself.

I walked through the rubble, my faithful friend at my side.

Along with all the horror stories of after, they never tell you about the flash burn that follows the rolling out of the nuclear wind. It’s like a photograph imprinted on the wall in a perfect silhouette. Em was there. So was Buster. I could see her crouched down beside him. Holding him.

I wondered if he’d been frightened.

I couldn’t bear that thought.

I knew my wife. As terrified as she was, her thoughts would have been for Buster. I could hear her now murmuring:
Shhhh, shhhh, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right…

I wasn’t a Grail Knight, I knew.

I wasn’t any sort of hero who might unify the survivors after the bombs.

I was just a guy called Steve, desperate to go home to a life that was over.

I hunkered down beside Buster, within touching distance of the ash shadow burned into the last wall of my home, and let him lick my face.

He had done his duty.

He had been my guide.

I was ready to admit the truth: that I had never walked away from that wreckage. That everything, the weeks and months that followed in that endless aching journey to get here, was my soul coming to terms with the truth.

I saw movement in the shadow as Em’s blackened outline slowly rose.

I saw her hand reach out.

Buster left my side, walking into the shadow beside her.

They were my life.

And now that it was over, they could be my forever after.

I was ready.

I could go now.

I walked towards them, my shadow joining with theirs on the wall.

I used to say that I didn’t write stories; I wrote little pieces of me. Sure, that’s a bit pretentious, but the idea is that the author puts a lot of himself into his work, and in this case, there’s M, my wife (so not quite Em), and Buster. I was raised in Langley Vale on the Downs in Epsom, and it’s one of the few places in the world that truly feels like home. So, when I was asked to write something for this collection, it felt only right that it should be a sort of homecoming. They say you can never go home again. I like to think that isn’t true.

That’s the thing: I’ve changed a lot as I’ve grown older. I used to be all about the adventure. I’ve toured the States, backpacked across Europe; hell, I’ve even upped sticks and emigrated to Sweden, but now all I really crave from life are the simple things, and all of those are at home. So, just like the Steve in the story, I like to think I’d move Heaven and Earth to get back there when the End came. Sorry, I mean
if
… if the End came … if.

Steve’s latest novel is
Sunfail
.

She won’t go in a store
when she’s not working. It’s just a thing of hers. I don’t explain it, except to explain it away. I tell people that she’d rather lie just outside the door, out of the way, and watch strangers zoned on
Q
pass by.

The door to Marty’s slid closed behind me with a whoosh, and I watched through the glass as she moved to the side, circled twice, and plopped down on the cement sidewalk to wait.

“She can come in, you know,” Marty said from behind the counter.

“I know.”

“I’d probably even find her a treat around here somewhere,” Marty said as he gestured with obvious irony at the sparse shelves.

“What can I say? Kristy doesn’t come inside unless she’s working. I don’t want to make her come in.”

Marty cocked his head to the side and smiled. “What is it you two do again, anyway?”

Again? I’d never told Marty what I do.

I smiled. “I run errands. Do some off-book deliveries if you must know, or if you’re taking notes for Transport. Nothing big.”

Marty’s face worked hard to feign hurt and insult.

“I… I… You know I don’t deal with Transport. I’m no rat spy.”

I smiled again, showing him I was joking. I didn’t know if he informed for Transport or not, but it wouldn’t do to make him think I suspected him. For now, I didn’t.

“Man, you gotta be careful with talk like that,” Marty said mostly under his breath. “Ain’t much love for TRACE around here, but a guy could get shanked if some people thought he was spilling to Transport.”

“I know,” I said. And I did. “I was joking.”

“Well, don’t joke around like that,” Marty said. His brow dipped and he looked at me through narrowed eyes. “We’re all just trying to get by, man, and besides, I don’t care what you do. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some kind of
extracurricular
income. God knows I do.”

I nodded slightly and held Marty’s gaze, not giving anything away. As I expected, when I didn’t break in, he kept talking.

“Yeah, and on that note, I… And this is … you know…”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, it’s just that I have a large quantity of clean Q if you’re interested. Off-grid stuff. No tracking codes or tagents.”

“Nah.”

“Maybe if you were going out near the hangers or anywhere by a refusenik camp.”

“I’m not.”

“But…”

“I don’t use Q,” I said. “I’m still off-line and got no thought of logging on anytime soon.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I know,” Marty said. “I remember that. But … you move around a lot, you know. Doing whatever it is you do. And you meet people. Know people.”

I looked outside, and from up near the counter, I could see Kristy as she sniffed a passerby. I knew if she smelled TRACE or Transport she’d let me know. The real reason she
chose
to stay outside.

“Yeah,” I nodded at Marty. “I know people. I move around. But I don’t
know
the kind of people you’re talking about.”

Marty’s head rocked back a little and his lips pulled into a smirk. “I’m stuck here, man. I don’t get around. I have to make contacts when I can. Limited clientele and all that.”