EDEN (27 page)

‘Those with nothing will have had nothing to lose,’ the captain agreed.

‘The hell with that,’ Bradley uttered. ‘You all want to go back to living in huts made of dried dung and eating bugs for a living, that’s your call. I want MTV and my goddamned car back. Speaking of which, why the hell are we walking? Couldn’t we grab a working vehicle or just sail the launch round into the Charleston?’

‘They don’t work, dumbass, that’s the whole point and anyway we don’t know who’s watching,’ Hank replied. ‘It’s easier to keep a low profile if we stay on foot.’

‘Harder to get away, too.’

The streets were littered with vehicles, abandoned when they had run out of gas or their circuits had fried during the solar storm. Massachusetts Avenue was packed with silent, empty cars left nose to tail with their doors open. Cody could envisage the mass exodus from the city, the jammed streets and panicked citizens seeking to flee the looting and the starvation. He blinked away images of screaming, hungry children and deadly conflict between warring families, unable to bear the hollow fear deep in his guts as he thought of Maria.

As he turned north onto a street dominated by a large cathedral, Cody slowed as he saw bodies strewn across the road ahead amid the debris. Flocks of birds fluttered as they swarmed across the bodies and a couple of feral dogs looked up as Cody appeared, their jaws drooling with meat.

The team stopped behind Cody.

‘They’re all dead, guys,’ Bradley uttered. ‘What are we waiting for?’

‘Disease,’ Bethany said, and looked at Cody. ‘Will you help me? We need to check them out, see what happened.’

‘Seriously?’ Cody asked. ‘Can’t we just go around?’

‘We need to know what we’re dealing with here,’ Bethany insisted. ‘If we’re hunting around for supplies we may pick up illnesses ourselves. The more I know, the better I can treat us if we get infected.’

***

‘Wait here,’ Bethany said.

The team obeyed as Bethany donned gloves and a mask, handing an identical set for Cody to wear before they strode toward the nearest corpse, an African-American woman lying on her back.

‘The dogs,’ Cody cautioned her. ‘They’ve been eating the dead bodies.’

Bethany hesitated as she looked at the animals. Both were mangy, their fur matted and their eyes glowing with the strange light of true wild animals. Both were also large, powerful animals. Cody recalled that all so-called toy-dogs were the result of mankind influencing evolution, selective breeding creating novel forms of animal that had no ability to survive in a natural environment. All dogs had ultimately evolved from wolves, and only those with the size and strength to dominate like a wolf could live in a world devoid of humans. He knew that all small dogs would have died of starvation or predation shortly after the Great Darkness and that in a similar time frame all other dogs would have become feral and developed pack structures, completely eradicating thousands of years of domestication in a matter of weeks.

Bethany stepped back as the two dogs growled, saliva drooling from their jaws as they bared their fangs, their heads lowering as they turned to face the intruders.

‘They see us as prey,’ Cody whispered. ‘Back up, real slow.’

Before anybody could stop him, Bradley aimed his pistol and fired a single shot.

The report cracked out like thunder and echoed away across the city. One of the dogs shuddered and dropped as though its legs had been whipped from beneath it as the other whirled and fled down the street. The birds took off in an enormous clatter of wing beats as they climbed up into the blue sky above.

‘You idiot!’ Charlotte slapped Bradley hard across the shoulder. ‘You want everybody to know where we are?’

‘There’s nobody here,’ Bradley replied without concern.

Hank turned and glared at the soldier. ‘You screw up like that again I’ll put the next bullet between your eyes. Understood?’

Bradley held the captain’s gaze without fear, but he did not retaliate.

Cody turned back to the dozens of bodies before them, strewn across the street like discarded dolls. Bethany approached the woman's corpse.

Even from ten yards away Cody could see that her eyes had been pecked out by birds and that her belly, once swollen with internal gases, had ripped open as cleanly as though sliced with a surgical knife. The decayed innards swarmed with maggots, a cloud of flies buzzing like smoke on the air above her, but the woman’s skin was slack and her bones protruded through some parts of her limbs and chest. Cody stayed a few yards back from the corpse.

‘Any ideas?’ he asked.

Bethany briefly examined the corpse and then stood up. ‘Cholera again,’ she said, ‘probably been here a few months. The cold of winter slowed the decay.’

‘Lovely,’ Cody replied, looking further up the street and keeping thoughts of Maria out of his mind. ‘Same for the rest of them?’

‘Hard to be absolutely sure,’ Bethany admitted as she moved from body to body, ‘but they all have a classic symptom called washer-woman’s hands, caused by massive dehydration. My guess is that the cathedral was used as a hostel, infected water was drunk and the pandemic spread.’ She looked at Cody. ‘Which means that they had no useful medicines or antibiotics here.’

‘The area’s already stripped clean,’ Cody replied, ‘probably right after the storm.’

‘This is why things deteriorated so fast,’ Bethany said as she gestured to the corpses behind her. ‘People didn’t know the simple basics of water treatment when they couldn’t get it out of a tap or bottle. All they had to do was boil their water for ten minutes and it would have been fine.’

‘Maybe they couldn’t,’ Cody said. ‘Plenty of trees lining the streets but none have been stripped of their branches.’

‘Which means people were already too far gone when supplies ran out,’ Bethany said. ‘Too much panic, not enough thought.’

Cody looked at another body near the cathedral steps. The corpse seemed fresher than the others. He walked across to it and looked down.

A man who had died somewhere in his twenties. Painfully emaciated, wearing several jumpers, two pairs of pants and a hat, presumably to keep warm. Despite the rigours he had endured Cody could tell that he had not lain long outside the cathedral. One of his eyes was still in its socket, not yet attacked by the birds.

‘Shot,’ Bethany said, ‘back of the head.’

Cody saw the bloody exit wound of shattered bone and blood soaked hair.

‘He can’t have been here long,’ Cody pointed out. ‘The body’s in too good a shape.’

‘Less than a week,’ Bethany agreed. ‘Somebody was here, and they were armed.’

Cody hurried back to the group as he tore off his gloves and mask and filled Hank in on what they had learned.

‘What about the others?’ the captain asked. ‘Any others shot?’

‘Much older remains of cholera victims,’ Bethany informed him. ‘There’s not much left of any of them.’

Hank was about to reply when Bradley’s voice cut across him. ‘I see movement.’

Bradley’s comment caused everybody to duck down and move into the shelter of the cathedral’s steps, keeping clear of the bodies nearby.

‘Where away?’ Hank demanded.

‘Far side of the intersection,’ Bradley replied.

The broad streets ahead were bathed in sunlight, and as he watched Cody saw a bedraggled figure shuffle into view with a slow, awkward gait. Moments later more followed, their heads hanging low.

‘They look like zombies,’ Jake uttered.

Cody frowned as he watched the shabby looking crowd slowly wander across the intersection. Their faces were dark with dirt, their hair falling past their shoulders and their ragged clothes hanging from their emaciated frames.

‘Must have heard the gunshot,’ Hank uttered as he cast a dirty look at Bradley. ‘We saw people like this in Baltimore, driven insane by sickness and thirst.’

‘Best we go around them,’ Jake said, ‘just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’ Bradley asked, ‘just in case they’re flesh-eating monsters? Jesus Christ.’

The soldier stood up and strode out into the street, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.

‘Brad, no!’ Charlotte hissed.

The crowd of people stopped and slowly turned to look at Bradley. Then, they began shuffling toward him.

‘Hey,’ Bradley shouted at the crowd. ‘Any of you tell me where the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts is?’

The crowd continued toward him, began stumbling as they attempted to run. Cody saw faces blank with exposure, shock and terminal illnesses. Eyes were sunken into bruised orbs, skeletal jaws and cheekbones protruded through paper-thin skin, tongues hung limp from cracked lips.

Bradley’s jaunty expression slipped as the crowd began to rush him.

‘Get into cover!’ Jake shouted at the soldier.

Bradley started to back up and raised his pistol. ‘You all back off now, y’hear!?’

The crowd kept coming, a mournful wail swelling from their ranks as they rushed in a tumbling wave of pitiful desperation toward Bradley. Cody realised that in their extreme famine and sickness, the once ordinary citizens had deteriorated into a mindless mass of humanity blindly wandering the city streets.

‘Take them down!’ Hank yelled as he burst from cover.

Bradley fired at the nearest of the onrushing crowd, a man whose beard reached to his chest and whose face was infected with deep lesions that weeped thin yellow pus down his cheeks. The shot hit him in the chest and propelled him backward into the crowd behind him, his collapsing body trampled in the rush. Others fell over him, tumbling to their knees, but the crowd kept coming as though poured from a bottle, flowing over the obstacles with blind instinct. Cody saw mouths devoid of teeth, infected lesions bloodied and decaying, greying skin and thin, straggly hair advancing in one awful mass of suffering humanity.

The crowd let out a wail of anguish and fear at the sound of the gunshot, primeval reactions to danger, but like some unstoppable machine bent on self-destruction they continued toward Bradley even as Hank and Sauri opened fire, cutting them down one by one.

Bradley fired twice again, and then the crowd were upon him and too close to shoot. Cody saw the soldier swing his pistol into a man’s face and send him flying onto the cracked, moss covered asphalt. A man grabbed the soldier, trying to cling to him as he screamed in a tearful rage. Bradley shook the man off and turned as he fell to his knees, drove a heavy boot into the man’s face that flicked his head back with a sound like a snapping twig.

Cody dashed forward and grabbed Bradley, pulled him back by his shoulder as he yelled at him.

‘They’re not harming you! They just want help!’

Hank’s voice shouted out above the commotion of gunfire and screams.

‘Cease fire!’

Sauri and Hank fell back from the onrushing horde as Cody and Bradley joined them. Together with Bethany, Taylor and the rest they began jogging away from the feebly pursuing crowd.

‘We go around, cut through to the next block!’ Hank snapped. ‘Let’s avoid any more confrontations, understood Brad?!’

The soldier nodded as they ran and cut right through a service alley filled with litter and decomposing bodies. Cody leapt over them as he ran, then burst out into the adjoining street and cut right again. They kept running until they could no longer see the shuffling masses pursuing them. Cody slowed as they reached Brookline and waited for the others to catch up.

Jake laboured in last, his chest heaving as he waved his hand up and down.

‘Let’s not do that again,’ he gasped, ‘or you’ll have another damned corpse on your hands.’

Charlotte took the lead and they walked in silence for a further hour, skirting bodies lying in the streets in their hundreds. Many had decomposed sufficiently that they were more bone than flesh, pale white scalps flecked with ugly clumps of wiry hair, skeletal arms poking out of tattered clothes still attached to bodies picked clean by countless marauding rodents.

They reached St Elizabeth’s shortly before noon, the sun warm and the day surprisingly bright. The clement weather contrasted sharply with the silent city and the macabre remains haunting the lonely suburbs.

As they climbed a hill that looked out to the south, Hank waved his hand for them to slow. Since leaving south Boston they had seen no further wandering tribes of crazed survivors, nor indeed any signs of life other than birds and the occasional packs of dogs that showed their heckles and fangs in defiance before fleeing. Now it became obvious why.

‘We can’t go much further,’ he said.

Cody looked ahead and felt his guts twinge as he saw the bright green woods and mossy roads give way to an ashen wilderness of skeletally dead trees and odd, patchy lawns and fields. Houses had been stripped of their paintwork and the bodies of both humans and animals lay strewn across the roads.

‘What the hell happened here?’ Bradley uttered.

‘Plymouth nuclear storage facility would be my guess,’ Hank replied. ‘This is the fallout from the cooling station. Acid rain, radiation, you name it.’

‘Christ, should we even be here?’ Seth asked. ‘What about radiation poisoning?’

‘Most of it will have been washed away into the soil over the winter,’ Jake replied. ‘But that explains the state of those people we saw wandering Boston. They were suffering from radiation poisoning.’

‘Where’s your house?’ Bethany asked Charlotte.

‘It’s along here,’ Charlotte replied, gesturing to a leafy side street that narrowly skirted the dead zone ahead of them.

Charlotte led them to a once handsome Colonial style house that overlooked Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Multiple bedrooms, triple garage out back, surrounded by chestnut trees and with broad lawns that were now becoming overgrown with tall weeds. She stopped and a hand flew to her mouth as she surveyed the shattered windows, the busted front door, signs of small fires peppering the window ledges.

Bethany put her arm across Charlotte’s shoulders. ‘I’m sure he’s not in there,’ she whispered. ‘He would have got out.’

‘You want me to check it out first?’ Bradley asked her, moving close by her side.

Charlotte shook her head, gathered herself. ‘No, we go together.’