The Last Plague (27 page)

     “You can stay with me and my wife. Her name is Catherine. She would love to meet you. I reckon you’d both be great friends. We’ll look after you.”

     She eyed him. “Do you and your wife want to be my parents now?”

     Her question took him by surprise.

     “No one could ever replace your parents, Florence. That wouldn’t be right. We’re just trying to look after you.”

     She looked at the floor. “I’m hungry and thirsty.”

     “So am I,” said Frank. “We’ll get something when we get off the train.”

     “Promise?”

     “I promise.”

     “Okay.”

     Frank wanted to be her father. He couldn’t deny it to himself. He looked at Florence, and his chest felt full of air; but it was a good feeling.

     He rested his eyes and shut out the world for a little while. He felt Florence’s weight on his lap, comforting him. It gave him hope to think that such a delicate creature had survived so far when so many others were dead. 

     He kept his eyes shut and he could almost pretend that Emily was sitting on his lap.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Magnus awoke as the world shuddered around him. The squeal of brakes, like an animal pulped beneath the train. A hard jolt and the shock of recoil. Stillness and inertia. Voices and panic. The cry of a child being hushed by its mother.

     He’d been dreaming of Debbie and the boys again. He was tired.

     The train had stopped. The carriage creaked. He blinked his eyes clean, wiped them with the back of one hand. He yawned. His back and his legs ached fiercely.

     The rain had eased off; only a few droplets on the windows. The other refugees were looking down the train. Disquiet and apprehension. A few whispered words. There was a vague smell of opened pores leaking sweat.

     “What’s happened?” Magnus asked Ralph. “Why have we stopped?”

     Ralph spared him a puzzled glance and shrugged.

     Magnus pressed his head to the window, tried to see towards the front of the train. Nothing. There were fields on both sides of the train, and beyond them were deep ranks of trees that led into darkness. He stared into the trees for a while. Shadows moved, stopped, and moved again. He got the feeling of something stirring within the inky darkness. His skin broke out in gooseflesh.

     He looked away.

     “What’s going on?” Joel asked from behind. Frank was reassuring Florence. 

     Anxiety and pent-up anger began to take hold on the collective emotions of the refugees; a single pulse composed of their combined heartbeats, growing faster with every second that the reason for the train’s stop was not revealed.

     Magnus could hear voices from the next carriage. Arguments were breaking out.

     Ralph was looking down the aisle, trying to see past the standing bodies.

     “What’s going on?” said Magnus.

     “Maybe we’ll be told in a minute.” 

     The speakers in the carriage buzzed with static, and a tinny voice spoke: “
Uh, please stay calm. Do not panic. There is an obstruction on the track. Do not panic. In a moment the driver will be passing through the carriages to the other end of the train so we can reverse...
”

     Cold sweat broke out on Magnus’s back and ran down his spine.

     The carriage rocked gently on its wheels. At the back of the carriage, a woman screamed. She was pointing out the window, towards the trees flanking the train. Someone asked her what was wrong. She shrank away from the window, her face stretched and pale.

     “There’s something out there!” she cried. “Something in the trees!”

     Magnus looked at the trees. He moved towards the window until his nose was touching the glass. The shadows were moving again. Gaining shape. Coalescing.

     Coming towards the train.

     He retreated from the window.

     A man burst from the trees, sprinting towards the train. He was topless. His jeans had been torn into rags. His upper body had developed dark lesions. His left arm was withered into a hooked appendage. Magnus couldn’t hear him, but he could tell that from the shape of the man’s mouth and the crazed intent in his eyes, he was screaming.

     “Infected!” someone said.

     Another man bolted from the trees, running for the train. Then, another. Four, five, six. All of them were horribly deformed.

     “They’re on the other side as well!” a woman cried.

     Heads turned. Magnus managed to peer between the scrum of bodies blocking the aisle, and saw men and women tearing down the field towards the train.

     “Oh shit,” Magnus said.

     The infected emerged from both sides.

     Panic broke out on the carriage. The infected kept coming. The fields on either side of the train were filled with them.

     Magnus looked past the infected people. He was so scared that his heart almost stopped.

     Something large was coming through the trees.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

The thing began as an amorphous shadow skulking within the tree line, and then it emerged. Frank’s hands tightened around Florence; an instinctive act of protection. The other refugees saw it, too. The carriage was full of screaming and crying. A lone voice begged its god for help that wasn’t coming.

     The train driver, a plump and sweaty man, was trying to make his way up the aisle, towards the other end of the train. He was struggling to wriggle through the bodies crowding the carriage. He was too big. He shouted and swore at them to let him through. They ignored him, staring at the thing coming at them from out of the trees.

     The creature loomed almost thirty feet tall; a spindly, dangling abomination. Frank couldn’t take his eyes away from it.

     Joel was shaking his head. His eyes were wide and shivering with tears. He rubbed the rash on the side of his neck. He looked at Frank, opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him.

     The creature broke through the trees, pushing branches from its path. Frank couldn’t see it clearly, but its tall, bloated body appeared to be pulsing. There were tendrils attached to its main mass. Then it opened its mouth, and despite the carriage interior’s muffling effect, its screech was high-pitched and anguished. The carriage trembled.

     The infected people reached the train and began to pound, scratch and claw upon it. The refugees looked down at them, safe for now, until they found a way inside.

     The tall thing skittered across the field on rows of insect legs. It moaned dully as it moved.

     “What the fuck is that?” said Ralph.

     Frank saw its body in detail for the first time, and he wished it to be the last. The creature halted by the train, looming over it, casting a shadow that darkened the inside of the carriage. Its tendrils were tipped with stingers or sharpened claws. There were human faces partly-submerged within its mass, and the flailing naked arms of those people were hanging from its flesh, their fingers grasping at the air. Faces and body parts were dripping a pale fluid onto the ground. The beast was a growth of half-absorbed bodies and screaming faces. They were still alive. They were part of the creature, assimilated into its body. A monster composed of human bodies and infected flesh.

     Those human eyes, so many of them, appraised the contents of the train. One of the eyes, bloodshot and staring, seemed to find Frank and focus on him. It was using the eyes of its human victims to navigate. Its body was veiny and pulsing, throbbing dully and slowly like a pig’s heart. It didn’t possess a face, but there was a mouth, and it opened just a little into a vulva-like aperture showing pink gums and a glistening passage leading to somewhere he didn’t want to visit.

     The beast had no teeth. It didn’t need teeth.

     One of the tendrils scraped against the window, its claw scoring a line in the glass. It left behind a smear of sticky fluid.

     “What is it?” asked Joel.

     The tendrils shot forward and grabbed the carriage, shaking it. People collided and fell into the aisles.

     Magnus said, “I can hear the people inside it. They’re talking to me. Can’t you hear them?”

     “What are they saying?” Frank asked.

     “They want to absorb us. Eat us.”

     “That’s good to know,” said Ralph.

     The beast shuddered and the faces within its body opened their mouths and screamed. It was the sound of a hundred people suffering, trapped in a feverish half-existence of agony and hunger.

     “Those poor people,” said Joel. “Dear God.”

     The ceiling of the carriage trembled; there was a ripping, screeching sound and several of the tendrils plunged through the roof, into the carriage. Part of the ceiling directly over the middle of the carriage was ripped away. The beast caught the scent of the people inside the train. The refugees retreated from the ragged hole, scrambling away, panicking and squabbling and screaming.

     The tendrils descended. A woman screamed and a tendril whipped towards her and wrapped around her neck. Two men tried to grab her, but the tendril dragged her from where she cowered and took her away. The woman screamed until she was silenced by something wet and sucking. Frank thought of those pink gums and that vaginal mouth and he shivered. Bile rose in his throat. He put himself between Florence and the hole in the ceiling. She was crying.

     The two men who’d attempted to save her were also grabbed by other tendrils and taken. Their screams were brief.

     More of the roof was ripped away. A screech of metal. A rush of cold air. The hole grew bigger. The sudden stink of the beast, like raw meat.

     More tendrils crept through the hole, twitching and jerking at every human heartbeat.

     The beast screamed.

     Joel screamed.

     Others screamed with him.

     The beast wanted them all.

     The tendrils claimed other refugees, including the driver, and plucked them from the carriage. Neither the tendrils nor the people returned. The beast put its wet mouth to the hole in the roof. There was a gurgling, gagging noise. The fleshy, contracting maw widened until it covered the hole completely.

     A clear fluid dripped from the mouth. The gagging sound grew louder. Something pale and wriggling appeared inside the mouth and then dropped into the aisle with a moist slap. The refugees stared at it as they retreated, screaming and shouting

     “It’s like it’s just been born,” said Frank.

     “Newborn,” Ralph said.

     The pale thing – the newborn – was a collection of white pincer-limbs, a segmented abdomen and a glistening thorax of mottled flesh. About the size of a large dog. Its skin was wet and coated with creamy mucus dripping from its body. It unfolded itself from the carriage floor and opened its mouth, which was something that shouldn’t have existed beyond the pitch-black fathoms of the seas. Sharp mandibles and clicking jaws. It stood on multiple legs, wobbling like a baby giraffe, and cried out in a high pitched shrill that turned Frank’s insides to quivering jelly.

     The newborn’s eyes were like white grapes upon fleshy stalks. A shadow of a dark pupil within each eye. The newborn turned towards a man to its right who was cowering in his seat. The man looked back at it, his eyes wide.

     The creature let out another shrill cry.

     The man screamed.

     The newborn pounced on him, stabbing him with its pincers, making itself part of the man’s torso. The man spluttered blood from his mouth. The creature needled him, puncturing his internal organs and slicing him from groin to neck, ravaging his body. His insides fell out like a sloppy surprise. 

     Screams filled the carriage. The newborn separated itself from the dead man and dropped to the floor, skittering underneath the seats.

     Frank looked back at the hole in the roof; into the beast’s mouth as it gurgled and gagged.

     Ralph was trying to undo his jeans.

     “What the fuck are you doing?” Frank asked.

     Ralph ignored him, reached into his jeans and produced his flare gun.

     Ralph checked the gun was loaded then crept down the aisle until he was beneath the large, wet mouth. His eyes went wide. He aimed the flare gun towards the mouth. His movements were calm and deliberate. 

     He pulled the trigger. A flash of red light and smoke.

     The beast screamed. There was pain within the sound. The flare was fizzling inside the beast. A smell of burning.

     Then the carriage was shaking.

     “Shit!” cried Joel.

     The windows imploded. Flying glass flew and found soft flesh, faces and eyes. Screams of agony. Frank slipped, fell down in the aisle. Ralph collapsed on top of him.

     There was a terrible wrenching sound. The world quaked around them. A deep roar. A feeling of moving into the air. Weightlessness that seemed to last for hours. The carriage left the ground. Then a crash. Impact. A pain in Frank’s legs. His breath was stolen.

     Metal and glass everywhere. Broken, screaming bodies.

     By the time Frank came to his senses, he realised the carriage was upside down and he was lying on the ceiling.

     Ralph was lying next to him, eyes open and unseeing.

     Ralph wasn’t moving.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

There was screaming, crying and moaning. An unseen woman begged for help. The inside of the carriage was all grey light and bright splashes of blood. Broken windows and warped metal. Bodies lying at contorted angles. The world was askew. The hot smell of opened bodies.

     The seats were hanging above Frank. Bags and belongings littered the ceiling.

     Frank grabbed hold of Ralph’s arm, shaking him. “Ralph! Ralph!”

     Ralph blinked. He groaned. He sat up and spat a tooth onto his chest.