The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Read online

  I’m getting morbid again and I really don’t mean to. Have no reason to at the moment. For the first time in as long as I can remember, there is actually hope. I’m hopeful. But there’s a way to go before I can explain why, and it might take a few more of these entries before I can get you up to speed. For now, I think I’ll call it a day. I’ve already been away too long, and if this experience has taught me anything it’s that time is precious… it’s rotting in its own way, too. Second by second, minute by minute.

  I will be back, I promise. Then I’ll tell you how it all started. Where that hope came from, and how it came into my life. Had some crap to go through first, but isn’t that life whatever happens? You have to take the rough with the smooth, and often something that you think is the worst thing that’s ever happened turns out to be the best. I know, I know… I’m keeping you in suspense, but I really do have to get back.

  Dinner will be ready, you see, and she’ll be waiting for me.

  Shit… didn’t mean to say that. Where’s the erase on thi–

  Stop.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Record:

  Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy. You might have noticed that.

  I’m also a sod for breaking my own rules, always have been and probably always will. I like to think I take precautions, but really I’m a spur of the moment kind of guy; I live on my wits, which is probably what made me so good at what I used to do. Probably what has kept me alive since the Rot took over, in spite of my own attempts to sabotage myself. Sometimes stuff like that ends up working for you, though, rather than against you.

  I’ve found another quiet half hour, while people are sleeping. I’m far enough away that I don’t think I’ll wake them with my voice, and it’s been nearly a week since my last entry so I think I’m probably overdue an update. Or to bring you up to date, if you see what I mean?

  Right, well, as I continued to make my way in this world, I came to accept that nothing was ever going to change for the better, only get worse and worse. You can imagine what a frame of mind that puts someone in. I was in a bad way, let’s just say that – probably even worse than those poor bastards out there who were losing pieces of themselves by degrees. Memories, personalities, fingers, toes… that kind of thing. I saw no evidence that this process was reversing itself, and with good reason, I later found out – nothing to support that nature was fighting back, that it had “found a way”, as people used to say. Only that she seemed to have abandoned us, left us to our own sordid devices. And they were still quite sordid. Every now and again, regardless of the condition the Rotten might be in, I’d see them attempting to hump each other. Some had actually forgotten what they were supposed to do, what went where – I’d see ‘people’ who were losing their shape attempting to thrust into what was left of ears or noses, usually just ragged holes. Either that or they didn’t have the… equipment to do what it was they were trying to do. A nightmarish thing to witness, if you haven’t already.

  The Rotten were becoming more and more monstrous as time passed, even those who were still holding it off pretty well – and I hadn’t come across anyone else on my travels who was immune, like Dennis, Carrie and Rakesh had been. Made me wonder if that had been the case at all? Perhaps I’d just assumed it, and if they hadn’t been killed they might have ended up like all the rest of them. Maybe there had never been such a thing as immune – and, if so, was I the only one it hadn’t touched, because of the SKIN? I couldn’t attest to anywhere abroad, but it was certainly looking that way here, in this country.

  Until I came across her.

  As I think I mentioned in a previous recording, I don’t get involved in other people’s business, especially now; I keep myself to myself and leave the Rotten to it. That’s how I’d live out my life, such as it was. But then it happened, a few miles outside one of the towns I was skirting, on my way back up the country after my disappointing – no, downright disheartening – trip to the capital and the tunnel. Once again, like so many things nowadays, I heard the trouble before I saw it. Screaming… a female voice. A woman’s cries for help.

  “Help me! Please… Oh please help!”

  They carried in the silence of what had once probably been quite a picturesque part of the countryside, but was now covered in the telltale signs of the Rot. Withering foliage, turning brown and purple-grey; hedgerows that had folded over and were gasping their dying breaths. The noise was coming from a bridge not too far away. Made of stone that looked like it was just showing the first signs of the infection, it stoically maintained its original arched appearance.

  Just off to the side, down the embankment a little way, I saw the woman who’d been yelling for attention – though where she thought that would come from out here, even before everything had gone haywire, was anyone’s guess. She looked normal from this distance, no trace of the Rot on her face, nor down her neck – her hair was tied back in a pony-tail – and there was no rot on her shoulders or down her arms and legs; she was wearing some kind of vest-top and shorts, you see; had the whole Lara Croft thing going on. But just what was she doing out here in the first place? The same thing as me, avoiding the major population centres as best she could? Maybe you could ask her, once you’ve given her a hand – once you’ve helped her, I said to myself.

  There were several Rotten surrounding her, all male, looking like they’d come from under the bridge – perhaps they’d gravitated to that place because they used to hang out there before ‘the change’. Now it just looked like she’d encountered not one troll from out of a fairy tale, but a handful that were about to eat her up. “Oh God, please, someone help me!”

  She was armed, but only with a knife it seemed – and this she swiped left and right in an arc, trying to ward off this group. Like that would do any good… Even if she stuck one of them, they probably wouldn’t even feel it – the pain receptors in the brain are usually one of the first things to go, I’d worked out. I pursed my lips, watching as the pack drew nearer and nearer to her. Could I just sit there and wait for the inevitable to happen, especially if there was even the remotest chance she was okay, the first person I’d seen in all this time…? Surely the Rot would have affected her by now, if it was going to?

  And if she was immune, was I about to watch one of the few chances humanity had left die right in front of my eyes – without doing a blessed thing about it?

  Could I afford not to play the Good Samaritan this time? Could I just let the first glimmer of hope I’d had in a long while dwindle away?

  You can probably guess the answer to that question. Before I had time to question my actions any further, I’d already set off and was making my way down the embankment to join in the party. By this time my guns had all gone the way of the dodo, as had the sword, axe and mace I’d picked up along the way. My weapon of choice at that particular time was a staff – using my rifle like one so many times had given me the idea. Made from the best bit of wood I was able to find and with sharpened ends, I’d actually become quite skilled with it – holding the Rotten at arm’s length, dispatching them without having to go anywhere near. Mind you, for close-up combat, I’d taken a leaf out of Jane’s book – no, don’t mention Jane – and had a pair of lethal-looking scissors I’d swiped from a cottage the previous week tucked into my belt. I’d seen the damage a pair of those could do first hand, so…

  I was hoping I wouldn’t need them, though – and things went well, to begin with. The first Rotten, I stabbed in the back of the head with one end of the staff, hefting it like a spear, except I was keeping hold of it. The guy’s skull was so soft it went in like a finger into an overripe tomato. A rotten tomato maybe that should be? The others were turning in my direction, which was what I wanted really – to take the focus away from Lara… in my head I’d already named her that, didn’t matter what she turned out to be called. But as I brought up the staff to smack another in the face, she joined in, knifing a Rotten who’d turned his back on her.

  Another c
ame from my right, and I turned to do the same move again – staff up and striking squarely in what was left of the man’s face. Only this time when I drove the wood forward, it snapped in two. The Rot has the worst timing ever when it comes to weaponry. Thinking fast, I turned each of the separate pieces of wood sideways, then rammed them into the chests of that man and one more who was attacking. One, when he dropped to the ground, broke up into goo, the body-slime oozing and seeping into the muddy grass.

  That just left the last one to tackle, and my scissors were now out as he flung himself at me with a gurgle; all the language he could muster, with most of this mouth eaten away by the Rot. I thrust the sharp end of the scissors up into his stomach and he bent over, falling onto me – took all my balance to remain on my feet. Then I dragged the scissors upwards, opening his belly and chest, turning away as his innards splashed out over me and onto the ground beneath us.

  Disgusted, I shoved the man off to join his fallen comrades on the field of conflict. It had been a while since I’d found myself in such an intensive fight – I’d forgotten how the adrenaline starts to pump, keeping you up until you’re done. Bringing you crashing back down afterwards.

  But nothing could have brought me crashing down to earth with a bump quicker than what happened next. I looked across at the woman, at Lara, and she offered a smile and a nod of thanks.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  Another smile, another nod. Except there was something strange about both of these. The movements not quite right. Then I spotted the tiny traces of Rot at the corners of each eye, at her nostrils, like she’d been taking it as some sort of drug. Easily missed from the distance I’d first spotted her, it soon became apparent that she wasn’t normal in the slightest. “Help… please help… oh God… please!” she screamed, even though I was only a couple of feet away. Now the appeal sounded very much like that holy man’s, back at the shopping centre had, begging for his Lord to do something. For this woman, however, they were just words that had become stuck; an old fashioned CD skipping or an even older broken record repeating the same things over and over. Something she’d been saying when everything went pear-shaped – stuck in a frozen moment of time?

  Then came the lunge, and she was close enough that I wasn’t able to dodge it. Lara – the only name I would ever have for her now – tripped as she did so, the knife in her grasp plunging into my left thigh. It went through the material of my jeans – the cargos I’d originally snatched having long-since perished – and penetrated both the SKIN, and my skin.

  I let out a furious cry, directed more at myself than at Lara for doing this – though there was a good deal of hate in it for her as well, don’t get me wrong. Staggering back, I took the knife away with me, wrenching it out of her grasp and managing to knock her away with the back of my fist at the same time. The wound was agony and I transferred my weight to my good leg, hopping back out of her reach. But, like the other Rotten, Lara didn’t know when to quit. They never do.

  Once again, she charged – but this time I had the scissors held upright as she fell onto me. They went in at about where the liver is, as we both flopped over and onto the slushy ground. Lara kicked and writhed for a few minutes, but when her movements stopped I knew she was dead. That was when I heaved her off me and lay there, trying not to think about the throbbing at my thigh – trying not to think about the fact that the knife was the only thing sealing the gap in my SKIN. The blade might already be infected, in which case so was I – but if it wasn’t, could I be quick enough to pull it out before the Rot ferreted its way in? I knew that the SKIN would knit itself together around the wound – it was one of the things Weeks had taught me that I had listened to. But I didn’t know how long it would take, nor how much blood I’d lose in the process. If the SKIN healed itself over the cut in time, then it would start to reprocess any blood I was losing after that, even start to heal my wound. But could it get back what I might have lost in the meantime…? And that’s even if the blade hadn’t nicked an artery or something. I’d bleed out for sure at that point… though I suspected it had actually hit the pin in that leg, which was why it hadn’t gone all the way in.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, though there was nobody around to hear me. So much for the story of the Samaritan. What was that old phrase? No good deed goes unpunished? This one certainly hadn’t.

  Took me a while to summon up the courage to even look down at my leg, let alone do anything about it. The jeans material was wet, my blood seeping through no matter what I did. “Fuck!” I said again, almost a whisper this time. I gritted my teeth and went for broke, sitting up and grabbing the knife handle, then yanking out the blade.

  I let out an almighty scream, not at all butch – more like a little girl wailing for her mother. No… that just makes me think of Jane again. Wish I could tell you that I handled it better, but it probably hurt as much as when I crashed that test plane; at least then they’d had me under within seconds of reaching me, and I didn’t know a thing until I woke up in the hospital. This I did know about; this I felt. It took all my willpower not to just black out, like I had done after the chopper crash. I ripped off a piece of my coat sleeve and tied it around the thigh, in lieu of the SKIN reforming again – might even help it along, I figured. It would definitely stem the bleeding…

  But then what? Nothing for miles in any direction that I could see – definitely nothing back where I’d come from. Nothing but rotting land. I cursed the fact that my staff was broken, because I could really have used it as a crutch. Instead, I had to try and get up that banking, crawling – felt like even the slope was working against me, the Rot gaining more and more ground the harder I tried. Got up to the top eventually, though. Managed to get to my feet, too. Walking would not be as easy, I soon realised, keeping weight off my wounded leg, favouring the other one. I fell over so many times just hobbling away from that bridge, from the scene of yet another trap the Rotten hadn’t really planned, but which had worked a treat on this stupid sap.

  I set off, carrying on along the ‘path’ I’d been walking when I heard those cries for help in the first place. Should’ve just ignored them, I kept telling myself over and over. Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve… No excuses; got caught again – and I had always been taught to take responsibility for my own fuck-ups. That was when there were other people I could blame, of course; people other than the Rotten. Who, by the way, in my head had become a species in their own right, set apart from me, setting them apart from what they had been before all this happened. Now they were something else, something not even related to me anymore – not even remotely human. Something hideous, to be scorned. My enemy. Everything I stood – when I could stand – against. Pure emotion, the basest of instincts.

  The hatred coursing through me gave me strength – and no, the irony wasn’t wasted on me. But I like to think my mother’s survival instinct had something to do with it again. Drove me on, hobbling and falling over so many times, only to pick myself back up again. If I sat down and gave in this time, that would be it. The end of me. No more feeling sorry for myself, I had to go on. Had to make it to somewhere.

  Had to have hope in something.

  By the time I crested that final hill, by the time I saw it ahead of me, I was virtually crawling again. On my hands and knees, though it was killing my injured thigh – then on my belly like a snake. There appeared to be an unaffected building ahead of me, another oasis in the middle of this brown desert the countryside had become. Somewhere that looked small and stable enough to hide in, to shut myself away from the Rotten until I’d recovered. To let the SKIN do its job.

  I didn’t realise as I made my way up that path what kind of structure it was, though there were signs of it everywhere – on the roof for one thing. But inside it couldn’t be ignored. And so I struggled up the aisle, the red velvet carpet showing only the faintest hint of Rot. Crawled between those pews, heading for the steps at the front. The weak light of that day was pawing at the st
ained glass windows, which depicted saints and angels.

  I made it to the steps and managed to touch the altar before I passed out, feeling like I’d achieved something – when in fact I’d achieved sod all once again. I’d reached a small chapel in the middle of nowhere. So what?

  So everything, as I would discover the next time I came to.

  Stop.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Record:

  Have you ever been in love? I thought I was once or twice.

  First time was at school and, looking back, it was probably just a crush. Didn’t stop it hurting, though, when she fell in love with someone else. Second time was in my twenties and it hurt a whole hell of a lot more when it fell through. I thought we were on the same page; she messed me about… didn’t end well. Other than that, as I think I’ve said, women have come and gone in my life. Love was for other people, didn’t think it would ever happen for me – and especially after the apocalypse hit. Just shows you how wrong you can be.

  Because when I woke up in that chapel, her face was the only thing I could see – and I think I knew it… felt it there and then, or maybe that’s me projecting things onto the past that weren’t there. Didn’t say anything at the time, mainly because she was holding a crossbow levelled at my head; one of those new-fashioned repeaters, judging from the cartridge underneath.

  Not the best of starts, I’ll grant you – but she warmed to me.

  “Easy,” she said as I turned and started to sit up. “Take it nice and slow.”

  “I… I don’t think I can take it any other way,” I assured her, which was the truth. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight boxer – but then blood-loss will do that to you. The SKIN would replenish my reserves eventually, but how long had I been unconscious? There was only one way to find out – and my mind immediately flashed back to The White Hart’s cellar, where I’d asked exactly the same question.