Plagued (11 page)

“Beyond these trees is the path to Solitude. Should
be there in half an hour, we’re gonna have to slow down, you see — the roads
are uneven here, don’t want to get a flat,” Annie said, reducing her speed
considerably.

 “Haven’t seen anyone alive or otherwise comin’
this side besides old Pete and his whore, so I reckon we’re gonna have a quiet
ride.” She turned on the radio but heard nothing but hissing. She shrugged and
pressed the ‘CD’ button — the King himself, Elvis Presley, began crooning about
a famous crying dog as they drove onwards.

Sarah leaned against her arm in the back, feeling
the sun’s warmth on her face and listening to the hypnotic ‘hissing’ sound of
the leaves blowing in the wind. If she closed her eyes, she could nearly
imagine this day being perfectly normal. Just a trip out with friends on a beautiful
day.

“So Mark, I’ve heard Sarah’s love story but what
about yours? Did you have a lady back home?”

Sarah looked up, her curiosity piqued by the topic
change.

Annie spotted her expression in the side mirror
and smirked to herself.

“No, nothing like that,” Mark said. “We split
months before this happened.”

“Aww, sorry to hear that, son,” Annie said and
tapped him on the knee. “What happened, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

“She just left. Took her stuff and most of mine
and walked out one day. She said we never talked,” he snorted. “Strange. She
did nothing
but
talk.”

Annie laughed heartily.

Sarah glanced at him in the mirror on his side of
the car and saw he was already watching her. He gave her a grin and she smiled
back. “Did you love her?” she asked softly, trying not to sound too interested.
Mark raised his eyebrow for a second, just long enough for Sarah to see it,
before it disappeared.

“Loneliness maybe, but not love. We met at a bar —
great start, I know. She just came up to me, told me to take her to my place. I
was so stunned that I did exactly that. Then she just didn’t leave. We just
sort of stayed together. Dad says I was just too polite to tell her to get lost.
Not that I would have dared — Simon, my friend, had been trying to get me a
girlfriend for a long time. I didn’t want to burst his bubble,” he said
laughing. “Dad was right.”

Annie slowed to drive over a cattle grid. The Land
Rover jittered in response. “You know, I think we might just find the love of
your life in Solitude, Mark. I got a feeling in my water,” she said, eyeing
Sarah mischievously. She saw Sarah’s eyes widen.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, amused.

“I get these feelings, Marky, and when I get them,
they’re
always
right. Sometimes things are just meant
to be,” she
said, not taking her eyes off the road. “Not far now.”

Mark chuckled to himself. “I don’t think there’s
going to be many dating opportunities for a while. It’s just not a romantic
situation. The majority of the women that I’ve seen so far have tried to bite
my head off. But, I’m happy as I can be right now,” he said looking at Sarah in
the side mirror and winked dramatically.

Sarah shook her head at him in mock disgust, hiding
the butterflies that fluttered in her stomach. Annie watched this in silence,
getting all the information she needed from it.

They sat quietly for the rest of the ride,
listening to Annie whistle to the music playing. There wasn’t a single cloud in
the sky, and Sarah began wondering what month it was — she guessed late August
to early September from the heat.

After a while of silent driving, Annie slowed
down. Coming up to the right of them, in the distance, they saw grey slated
rooftops and chimneys sticking out above the trees.

“Nearly there,” she said.

Apprehension filled the air as the ground to their
right started to rise up into a large banking that encircled this side of the
village. Only a long path cutting straight through the hill that was made for
tractors gave them access from this side.

Annie slowed the vehicle to a crawl as she drive up
to the cutting, ready to turn the Land Rover right and straight through into
the village. “Grab my gun, Mark.”

He did so and grabbed a hand full of shells and
put them in his pocket for easy access.

“Now don’t shoot until we say so, we don’t want to
cause any unnecessary noise. And we definitely don’t want to shoot anyone
that’s not infected,” Annie said.

“Is anyone else getting the feeling that this
isn’t such a good idea?” Mark said and was met with silence, their lack of an
answer confirming it for him.

They drove into the cutting and slowly down the
path, which wasn’t very long but extremely dark, thanks to the valley-like hill
on either side of them. Trees and weeds grew on each side of the cutting,
making it difficult to see where they were heading but after only a few minutes
of driving, the valley began to flatten back down again as they entered
Solitude. They drove out into open space and light hit them, perfectly
highlighting the small, wooden sign that read in white font, ‘Farm traffic
only.’ Below that it said, ‘Solitude.’

The Land Rover bounced as it drove off of the dirt
path and onto the asphalt cul-de-sac at the bottom of the village. Despite the
sound of birds singing, there was an eerie silence. The streets were empty
apart from rubbish like paper and tin cans blowing across the streets in the
gentle afternoon breeze. Sure, Sarah had seen it quiet before, but never had it
felt so
dead
.

They passed a black Corsa that was parked on
someone’s front lawn with its doors wide open. There was a large crack in the
windshield and a dark stain ran down it. Sarah tried to remember who the owner
of the car and the lawn might be, but she wasn’t sure—whoever it was had tried
to make a quick getaway, and failed. She hoped it was one of the newcomers to
the village, someone she didn’t know.

“I don’t think there’s anyone here,” Mark said,
his gun propped on his knee.

“My parents live right up the street from here...”
Sarah said, letting the sentence trail off.

“Everythin’s gonna be fine, honey. Don’t you worry
about it,” Annie purred, looking at Sarah in the rear view mirror.

They drove up the street slowly, checking for
signs of life in every house they passed, but seeing none. Windows were smashed
and glass littered the gardens. They all saw the tell-tale brown stains
littering the curbs and roads but—for Sarah’s sake more than anything—they
didn’t mention it.

They drove past number 13 Sage Road and Sarah
asked Annie to slow down. She had known the old couple that lived there since
she was a child; their names were Barbara and Trevor Ash. They had given her
five pounds for each of her birthdays until she was thirteen years old and
Barbara had always smelled like cinnamon. Her heart sank as she looked at their
house and the hand print smudged down the glass of their living room window.
Sarah closed her eyes, despair flowing through her.
My parents are dead too.
They’re dead.

The roads in Solitude meandered around the houses
in long curves causing a well-run joke that the builders were drunk when they
laid them. The houses themselves were older builds with darker brickwork and
the occasional slate roof, though many had been updated with double-glazed
windows and new, easy to clean white PVC doors. They had been originally built
in the 1900s, Sarah had once read, but had been updated a few times since
then—much to the displeasure of the older residents.

Although it was a relatively short drive to get
here from the other towns nearby, there wasn’t much reason to. The village had a
small Miner’s welfare (like many of the smaller villages in the area) and a
small Post Office that was mainly used by its elderly residents, since most of
the younger generation had been quick to leave at the first opportunity they
had.

Sarah had hoped that her hometown’s slow-paced
lifestyle might have helped it during the outbreak but even in this small
mining town, people had still ransacked each other’s houses in a blind
panic—without a thought to those inside.

She had lived in Solitude all her life and enjoyed
it, until her teenage years when it had become stale and uninteresting. For a
mischievous girl and her friends, it had lost its appeal— they had no boys their
own age to flutter their eyelashes at and the only place to get beer or
cigarettes was the welfare. The problem with the latter was that everyone in
the village knew that she wasn’t old enough to drink or smoke, so acquiring
them without leaving the village was difficult. So they kept themselves busy
with video games and walking through the farmland and woodland behind the village.
Though that period was a great time in her life, it didn’t last. Eventually her
friends all grew up and moved away, leaving Sarah in Solitude, alone.

She began to wonder where all her friends were and
the thought that she might never see them, or her neighbours, again was too
much for her. She burst into tears in the back of Annie’s Land Rover. Seeing
her, Mark reached behind his seat and held her hand sympathetically. Life was
never going to be the same.

At the end of the street, Annie pulled up outside
a house with ‘36’ painted on its red door. The front window was gone and glass
littered the window-sill and the grass around it. The grass on the front lawn
was long and weeds were climbing high, completely untamed.

Sarah climbed out from the back of the 4X4 and
stared through the windows, her skin prickling with a sudden burst of fear.
This was her parents’ house. She heard a car door slam twice and a second
later, Mark was stood at her side with his shotgun.

“I told Annie to wait in the car, just in case,”
Mark said, gently as he watched Sarah’s reaction.

She nodded in return, not taking her eyes off of
the house. “Let’s get this over with.” Her voice was shaking. Followed by Mark,
she walked steadily up to the front door and put her head towards the wood,
listening for any sound coming from inside. She hoped—irrationally, she
knew—that she would hear her father’s voice beckoning her inside. But there was
nothing.

“Do you want me to go first?” Mark said, readying
his gun.

“No,” Sarah said. “If they’ve turned, I want to be
the first to see.” Her hand hovered over the door handle as she fought the urge
to just turn around and leave her parents’ fate unknown. But she knew she
couldn’t do that. She gripped the handle and pulled it downwards, her stomach
did a flip as the latch opened smoothly and the door cracked open.

She pushed the door open quickly and the two of
them stepped backwards instinctively as they peered inside the darkness of the
hallway. Coats and shoes lay strewn across the floor and all the doors leading
to the other rooms were closed, apart from one—the bathroom. Sarah stepped into
the house, feeling the softness of the rug beneath her feet; it said ‘Welcome’
in black letters that had been worn away over time. 

“Careful, Sarah,” Mark whispered.

She carried on as if she hadn’t heard him. She
took another step into the house now, focusing her attention on the open door
to her left and the stairway at the end of the corridor. The house was silent. Seeing
no blood stains around the walls or floors, Sarah felt a glimmer of hope and it
excited her—the idea that her parents were still in here and alive took over
her and she yelled out, “Dad!”

Before Mark could object, a high-pitched wail came
from the bathroom a split-second before a figure came rushing out of it. Sarah
cried out as a woman with wild, grey hair shot towards her, frothing at the
mouth and spitting it down her own chin and neck. Sarah lifted her arms over
her face pathetically just as she felt a hand around her arm and a tug
backwards.

Mark, who had grabbed Sarah as soon as he heard
the screech, pulled Sarah backwards and she stumbled over the doorstep as the
wild woman ran for them. The woman was nearly on top of her as Sarah managed to
scramble to her feet, aided by Mark. He pushed her towards the car and swung
his arms up, pulling the trigger of the shotgun he was holding as he aimed it
towards the frothing woman’s face.

The gun went off with a loud crack and Mark’s
shoulders were forced backwards from the recoil. The woman’s front teeth and
most of her jaw disappeared, being replaced by a large number of splattered,
red holes. She fell backwards onto the ground, thrashing her arms in front of
her face as she squealed wretchedly.

Mark turned around and ran for the car and Sarah
was already sat in the back. As soon as he jumped back into the passenger seat,
Annie floored it and they sped off towards the centre of Solitude.

Mark turned around in his seat and looked at
Sarah, who was panting heavily. “Was that—?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. I don’t know who that
was.”

“Good,” Mark said. “Where do we go now?”

Just then a large, new-looking building surrounded
by small, ornamental trees came into view. A large chain link fence was visible
around the back of it.

“That’s the Village Hall!” Sarah said, excitedly.
“Stop there!”

Annie followed a small roundabout until they faced
the entrance to the car park and she pulled inside. She parked the car across
the bays, close to the front door and they studied the front of the building
carefully.

The Village Hall—or Solitude Centre, as it was also
called—had been restored many years before and was one of the newest buildings in
Solitude. Used mainly for youth clubs, sports and days out for the elderly, it
was also the largest building in the village.

The Centre’s windows were large and stylish, both
those and the glass-paned doors were double glazed. Sarah knew they were pretty
tough to break. As a child with her first pair of rollerblades, she rode down
the steep path leading to the back door of the building, and couldn’t stop
herself from rolling straight into the glass. Her nose had bled for two days.

The large green curtains in every upstairs window were
closed so it was impossible to see inside, and the ones on the lower floor had
been heavily boarded up. The large main door was also boarded up with wood and
the glass on the outside was completely smashed. There were bloodied scratch-marks
running down its surface, like someone had frantically tried to get inside—but
the door held strong.

“Wait here,” Sarah said, and climbed out of the
jeep, “there’s another entrance round the back.” She walked slowly and
carefully around the back of the large building, hugging close to the wall as
she went. She knew that usually there was nothing around there but a large
chain-link fence that enclosed the back entrances completely. She reasoned that
if the gate was still locked tight, there was a good chance any survivors would
be still safely inside.

A large, brown rat ran out of an overturned
dustbin as she walked past it, startling her. The animal shot her a quick
glance and then squeezed its podgy body through the fence.
Plague.
 She
shuddered at the thought. The gate here leading around the back was still
locked with a padlock, so she looked through the fence to see the back door—it
had also been boarded up but the glass here was still intact. She fought the
dash of hope that hit her, trying to avoid any unnecessary disappointment if
the hall was empty. 

As she walked to the jeep, she saw something in
the corner of her eye that seemed to come from the second floor windows. She
could have sworn that a light had flickered through a gap in the curtains. She
motioned to Mark and Annie and they poked their heads out of the jeep, following
her gaze. It began flickering again; a dim, orange light barely noticeable if
you weren’t looking for it. Something dark blocked the light for a few seconds,
and then the curtains slowly closed shut, taking the light with it.

“Someone’s up there!” she whispered.

Mark grabbed the shotgun and held it tight as they
climbed out of the jeep and ran to Sarah as she began banging on the large
double doors frantically.

“Is anyone in there? It’s Sarah Carlisle, I live
here! Please let us in!”

“Sarah! Be quiet! We don’t know who it is!” Mark
growled, looking around him nervously.

“I don’t like this,” Annie muttered from her place
at Mark’s side.

Sarah stopped banging and stood with her ear
against the door, waiting for movement but the double doors were too thick to
hear through.

 After a few minutes had passed, Mark resigned and
lowered the gun. “Maybe it was nothing, Sarah, it doesn’t look—”

“Sarah?” a woman’s voice whispered through the
door.

They heard the sound of metal creaking on the other
side of the door and suddenly it began to give way. A crack a few inches wide
appeared in the door, revealing a portion of a young woman’s face that was
bathed in a warm light from the candle she was holding. She had short blonde
hair and freckles sprinkled on her nose, ones that Sarah recognized almost
instantly.

“Emily?” Sarah said, dumbly. She looked at the
woman’s features in the gap in utter disbelief.

The young woman nodded. She placed the candle on
the floor and pushed the bar on the door open. Emily paused in the doorway,
staring at Sarah with teary eyes. Her lips were trembling as the two women
stared at each other, smiles creeping on their faces.

“I can’t believe it,” Sarah wept.

They jumped toward each other and embraced. Emily
squeezed Sarah hard around the waist and burst into laughter.

“We’ve been so worried about you!” Emily cried
into Sarah’s neck.

Sarah broke away then and turned to face Mark and
Annie, who were staring in confusion. “This is my friend, Emily, we grew up
together!” Sarah grinned. “Emily, these are my new friends, Mark and Annie. I
just….I can’t believe it!” She laughed.

Emily’s hand shot out and grabbed Annie’s hand. “I’m
so glad not everyone is dead!” she said, with a large smile. She shook Mark’s
hand then, shaking it furiously.

He smiled. “Me too.”

Emily looked Mark up and down with a raised
eyebrow, still holding his hand. She turned to Sarah then, and mouthed ‘WOW’.

Sarah shook her head, smirking at her friend. “Are
you alone?”