The Brink (30 page)

The large double doors were wide open when he reached them and, peering around the corner, he looked out onto the pitch and gazed at the mass of tents and shelters, crudely erected here and there with an enormous fire pit in the middle. It brought back memories of the last scavenger camp he’d seen and he almost shuddered because of it.

Milling around the place were a few shambling people, dressed in the usual garb of the scavenger marked by their strange obsession to wear the wealth of the former world with such pride that bordered on the ridiculous. A woman leaned on the back of a chair, steadying herself as her long gold chains, perhaps eight in total, dangled from her neck and rattled against the vast quantity of gold and silver rings on both hands. She wore the best trainers on her feet, now covered in mud from the trampled field beneath them, and the best tight fitting jeans with the label still attached and the three figure price dangling and swaying in time with the chains.

A man approached her, bald on top and struggling to keep upright on his drunken legs, clutching a magnum of champagne in one hand and a nickel-plated pistol in the other. Where he’d got the gun from, Alan could never know but it shone almost as brightly as the gold on the woman and looked just as comical.

“Give us a swig,” she moaned.

“Fuck off,” was the reply. “You can’t keep it down anyway.”

“I’m dying, aren’t I? I don’t want to die sober. Give us a drop.”

“Suck me off and I’ll think about it.”

“Go to hell,” she cried and doubled over, vomiting as she did so.

Alan backed away and thought for a moment. Then, setting bomb 42 down against the wall, facing the double doors, he began to arm it the way Henry had shown him and he checked the battery levels on his hand-held detonator were still in the green. Then, cocking the rifle, he began to walk towards the field and out into the dim morning light.

They saw him just as his boots touched the grass and squelched in the thickly layered mud, trampled down by so many since the last football game had been played there. The woman was the first to speak, trying to raise herself up from where she leaned but failing miserably.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, struggling to keep from vomiting. The man gazed at him, still stunned by the fact that someone had managed to get into the field without him knowing. His jaw dropped slightly and revealed bleeding gums without teeth and eyes that rolled in their sockets.

The first round passed straight through her skull, felling her like a tree cut down at the roots. She took the chair with her, tumbling into the mud, face downwards and lifeless.

The man didn’t move. He wanted to, Alan could see that, but he just didn’t have it in him anymore. He walked towards him with the rifle raised and stopped a few feet away.

“Just do it,” said the man, looking directly at him. “You might as well. We’re done for anyway. I don’t even know why he came back.”

This produced a coughing fit that had the man doubled over, spitting blood from his dry and cracked lips onto the ground at his feet.

“Are they all like this?” asked Alan.

“Those left alive are. The rest didn’t last long. Thought it was a plague or something. Fucking radiation, eh?”

“Where’s Richard?” he asked.

“Over there.”

Alan looked into the middle of the camp, saw the tall wooden pole sunk into the ground and the man tied to it and turned back to the scavenger.

“He dead?” he asked. The man nodded and coughed again. “You do it?”

“Us.”

Alan fired. The man dropped, his skull split open at the back and the fragments painted a bloody picture on the tent canvas behind him. Something moved inside. The door opened and a young woman crawled out, her hair almost gone and her eyes yellow and sunken into a pale skull. From where he stood, Alan couldn’t have missed. He fired once and she dropped to the floor, another broken head, another blossom of crimson on the next tent along.

One shelter at a time he moved through the camp, only firing a single round because the people there couldn’t do much else but let him. He didn’t think, he didn’t feel. He just pulled the trigger and when the magazine was empty, he loaded a fresh one and moved to the next tent, one round each, to the head if possible but sometimes they made it difficult, covering their faces as he aimed, causing him to fire through bone and flesh until the scavenger was dead. He circled the warm, tortured remains of Richard as his body strained against the bonds that held him to the pole.

He worked through the dwellings systematically, like he was exterminating the habitat of some pest, some species of insect that’d dared to attack his home, his own space, his people. Several who had some kind of strength left put up a fight. At one tent where a piece of Richard’s uniform had been pinned to a guy-line as a trophy, a man came rushing out with a pistol in his hand and a knife in the other. Moll met him head-on, leaping upwards and landing on his chest, letting loose a terrifying growl as she tore out his throat with a single tug from those powerful jaws.

Another came from behind, firing a shot into Alan’s arm which grazed the bone but passed straight through the flesh and out the other side. He turned, drawing the machete at his belt and walked towards the man, hacking off his pistol hand at the wrist and driving the heavy blade home into his neck which caused him to let out a gurgled scream before collapsing to the floor in a bloody heap.

A woman of about 50 years tried to jump on his back but her strength failed her just as Moll clamped her jaws around her thigh. Tumbling to the ground, the beast straddled her and attacked, tearing sinewy strands of flesh from her face and hands, throwing them aside in a desperate bid to land the killing blow to her throat.

On it went. The carnage became a rout and those who could summon their last drops of strength made for the exit with terrified cries, wondering what kind of demon had been let loose in their camp that day. Seeing them run, Alan struck down another with his rifle and thumbed the safety of the detonator free, waiting until the right moment. When it came, when at least a dozen were in the corridor, he pressed the button, blowing the whole place apart and bringing the brickwork of the hallway down upon their heads.

When the last tent was cleared, Alan found that his ammunition had been spent and only two rounds remained in the magazine of the rifle. He approached the pole in the centre of the camp, still able to smell the sickly-sweet aroma of burned flesh, and checked the broken body of the former guard for a pulse. There was none, yet the skin was still warm enough to tell him that the cries he’d heard before had been his. Richard was dead now, betrayed by his own people and humiliated for it in the worst possible way.

Alan cut his bonds and allowed the maimed body to fall to the floor, noting that the missing hands and feet were still cooking on a rusting half-barrel barbecue directly opposite the pole. Feeling sick to his stomach, he took those parts and threw them on top of Richard’s body, glad that in some strange way the scavengers hadn’t been cannibals, merely sick and twisted individuals that’d done it to him to mock him, to heap those insults upon him before he died.

Moll sniffed his remains and walked away. It saddened Alan to see the man so badly treated, so maimed by the violence done to him that any kind of remorse at the genocide he’d just committed was submerged beneath the images of the tortured man. He’d been wronged by that guard, but not to this degree, not to within a hundred miles of this kind of punishment.

Alan searched the last of the camp and, finding none alive, fired off the last two rounds before throwing the thing into the flames along with any other weapons he could find. There was nothing left to do now and so, taking a flaming brand out of the camp fire, he began to light each of the tents in turn. When the place was ablaze, he left the devastation through a breach in the wall made by the explosive and never looked back.

21

As the years passed by, no one at the camp had much time to dwell on those events that, for a while, had rocked their small, fragile world. When the stranger had been driven out, life returned to the hard struggle it’d always been. With Rachel and the others in charge, work began on the allotment almost immediately and it never stopped. Every patch of soil, every salvaged grow-bag, anything that could hold seeds or bulbs were made use of until their world became green again.

It’d been a close call. Those first crops almost didn’t make it. Then the shoots started to come through as the last of the supplies dwindled to almost nothing. Then there were the first crops. Small, stunted things, but a hope of more to come, that it was possible to make it, that there was a chance in the soil yet.

In the third year a man wandered up to the gates of their camp and stood waiting to be seen. He was lean and short and wore battered army fatigues two sizes too big for his frame and he carried his world in a rucksack on his back. When the guards asked him his business, he said he was there to deliver a package to a man by the name of ‘Doc’ and he was under strict instructions to give it to him alone.

Doc was called for and they met at the gates, the man refusing to enter the camp and expressing his wish to be on his way as soon as he could.

“Where are you from?” asked the medical man.

“North,” he replied.

“And you want to speak to me?” The man shook his head.

“I’ve been told to give you this,” and with that, he rummaged in his pack for a small parcel, neatly wrapped in paper and tied together with string. He passed it to Doc who held it in his hands, wondering what on Earth it could be.

“If I could trouble you for a few litres of water, I’ll be on my way,” said the man, offering his battered canteen to Doc. A guard took it from him and ran to fill it from the water tower.

“What’s your name?” asked the medical man.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied.

There was an awkward silence as they both waited for the guard to return. When he did, the canteen was passed back to him along with a cloth bag of food.

“You’re very kind,” said the man. “Have a nice day.”

And with that, he turned and left, retracing his path away from the camp until he disappeared around a bend in the road.

Doc watched him go before he began to consider the package in his hands. With a scalpel that he carried in his pocket, he cut the string and unwrapped the paper, exposing a small cardboard box about the size of his hand. He felt a sudden fear inside, a terror that its contents would confirm something he’d avoided thinking about since the stranger had gone and something he didn’t want to believe was true. With trembling hands, he lifted the lid and gasped.

“What is it?” asked the guard next to him.

It took him a few moments to compose himself before he could speak again. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he stared into the box.

“She’s alive,” was all he could say as he looked at the photograph, recently taken and hastily printed onto old paper. There was his daughter, Janet, smiling in spite of her hair loss and the scar that ran down her left cheek. At her side, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, was Moll who gazed beyond the camera to the man behind it.