The Rot (Book 1): They Rot Page 10

  The dark-skinned woman waited patiently at the foreman’s desk, her machete laid on the table. The room was small, at best, and with the three prisoners lined up at one end of the room, their hips were pressed against the walls.

  Stephen slunk in and stood behind the woman, a mountain guarding a house. The kid stood waiting outside.

  She studied them for a long moment, taking extra time when it came to Colin, looking him up and down with eyes that gave nothing away.

  “Names?”

  The redhead began immediately, “Oh… of course. My name’s Joanna Salt, and this here is Sunny. We were simply travelling when—”

  “—I believe I only asked for names.”

  Joanna’s mouth clamped shut.

  “And you?” she said, turning to Colin.

  Colin met her icy stare. “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

  He heard the redhead woman next to him gasp. Ria held his stare, eyes burning into his own before a small grin crept up the side of her mouth. “Bold words from a man at the other end of a blade. But you’re right, where are my manners? I’m Ria, and currently I have you by the balls, mister…?”

  “It’s Colin Bolton.”

  “Well, Mr Bolton, let’s put this out there now. You answer my questions, I might just let you live. If you don’t, I’m happy to throw you out into the wild after dark and chop up your fleabag mutt into a delicious stew for my men. How does that sound?”

  Colin didn’t nod, but Ria seemed satisfied that the message was clear.

  Ria stood and walked to the front of her desk. “That goes for you two, too. Start acting up and the same applies. I’ve never tried it myself, but I hear that some scavvies have taken to throwing kid meat in their chowder for dinner. Now, how is it that my men found you wandering out alone? Fleabag, you first.”

  A thousand lies passed through Colin’s mind, then. At one point in his life, he was quick to think, able to dish out white lies pretty easily if it meant serving a better purpose. He had spent years telling Rachel that their circumstances were changing, that money would soon be pouring through the door and everything would be okay. He had spent years with the LeShards convincing himself that they were nothing more than a means to an end. A roof over his head and some food in his belly, knowing all the while that that wasn’t exactly true. Even along this road he was now taking, he was telling himself that he could find some good in the world. That he’d be able to find Hope and maybe make something of a life.

  Ria leant back, resting a hand on the machete’s handle.

  “I was chased from my home,” Colin said at last, seeing no point in pretending. For all they knew, he was lying now. “I lived on a farm for the last few years with two companions and the dog out there. They were kind to me, taking me in when I needed shelter and offering me food. They were all I had in the world.

  “Then a stranger came to the farm. They took him in, I was reluctant to accept him in. But he helped us run the place for a short while. Letting us lower our guard. Then, in the middle of the night, more arrived. I found my keepers bound and gagged before the scum slit their throats and chased us out. We fled and found ourselves in the wilderness. That was just two days before now.”

  Colin glared at Stephen, remembering how the brute had taken to pounding his face with that solid piece of granite he called a fist. Feeling, even now, how hard it was to move the muscles in his face through the pain. Stephen shuffled on his feet, and, if Colin wasn’t imagining it, his tattooed face softened ever so slightly. There was something behind those eyes.

  “I see,” Ria said, scratching her chin. “And where are you headed now?”

  “That’s my business.”

  There was a moment when the breath drained from the room. Even Ria, whose eyes darkened for a moment, seemed to weigh the outcome of her next move. After a moment she decided to wave it away as a lost cause before turning to the woman and the kid. “And you two?”

  Joanna jumped, as if she had been so sucked into Colin’s story that she forgot about her own. But then, as she realised Ria was waiting, she came alive.

  Even with her hands tied behind her back she was animated, her face passing through every emotion Colin knew. She babbled through most of her talk, fear shutting down the parts of her brain that allowed straightforward, functioning speech. But Colin caught the gist.

  The woman – who Colin had, at first, thought to be the child’s sibling or mother – was the child’s guardian. She had come across him alone on her journey after she had become separated from her own group. She had been wandering the rolling countryside of Kent, finding hollows and shacks to sleep in at night as she headed in the direction that she believed her group to have gone. A few days into her journey she had stumbled across Sunny stood by the roadside of a triple-stretch motorway with his thumb out, clearly waiting for a ride that wouldn’t come.

  They had since banded together (‘strength in numbers after all’) and were simply minding their own business when they had been taken by the old man and the kid. They had threatened her with their weapons and dragged them to the dilapidated warehouse where they all stood now.

  As Joanna’s speech came to an end, Colin observed the beads of sweat collecting on her brow, and couldn’t help but notice how she shuffled her feet, and how often her eyes darted about to odd places in the room, looking out the window as if expecting something to come at any moment.

  “Is this all true, boy?”

  Sunny looked directly into Ria’s eyes, but his mouth did not move. His eyes were glassy and seemed, rather, to look through Ria as she stared at him with fascination.

  “Has his tongue been removed?”

  Joanna bent down to Sunny and nudged him desperately with her shoulder, whispering something inaudible into his ear. A moment later he blinked, then nodded. Joanna stood up straight and exhaled, the breath uneven as her eyes shimmered again on the edge of tears.

  “You see? We’re not a threat at all to you people, we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So if you’d please just consider letting us go, we can head on our way and leave you in peace.”

  To their surprise, Ria started laughing. “You think you’re going anywhere? My dear, it’ll soon be curfew. You’ll need to settle yourself down and get comfortable, I’m afraid. We’re here for the night. Stephen, take them out of my office.”

  As Stephen nodded and stepped around to remove them, Joanna’s eyes widened. “Staying…? For the night?… But, no, we can’t… We can’t stay here… It’s not safe. It’s not safe!” She whipped around to Sunny, her face urgent, begging him to pass on some vital information.

  But Sunny didn’t respond. Only stared in that glassy-eyed way that Colin was growing accustomed to, but still made him uneasy.

  Joanna’s protests rang through Ditton Factories as Stephen forcefully took her back to her spot in the corridor. Colin waited patiently for Stephen to come and collect him as he heard Ria whisper something to the baseball bat kid about checking the doors to see if the others had come back. When Stephen’s shadow did loom over Colin, he waited to be thrown once more over his shoulder. To his surprise, however, Stephen prodded Colin gently in the back and allowed him the privilege to walk.

  As he resumed his place next to Wheat, Colin looked up into the giant’s eyes. And, for nothing more than a moment, thought he saw a kindness there that he hadn’t seen before. A gentle drop of rain in an ocean of fire.

  ~ 18 ~

  The engine roared through the trees sending flocks of birds to the sky. Dark spots in the golden air. They’d covered some distance now, with Chicory behind the wheel and Dutchman clutching the map as the car rolled and sped across the landscape like it was being chased. A couple times Dutchman almost found himself hurling out the open window until the car hit a smooth stretch and the bouncing evened out.

  “Are yous certain that nothing is on the mind?” Dutchman asked.

  Chicory was pissed. That much was obvious. But he
seemed to prefer to tear up the car’s tread than chew on his companion’s ear.

  Chicory answered with a rev of the engine.

  “Looks, I know it’s difficult taking orders from Ria—”

  “Difficult?! It’s near-fucking-impossible.” Another rev as the car sunk and then bounced into the air over a dip in the muddy terrain. “This was supposed to be my last patrol.”

  Dutchman shook his head.

  “Exactly. It was all meant to be clear and easy. Head out with Lee, show him the ropes, and back in time for tea. You think I would’ve suggested bringing back the girl and the kid? No. No, I wouldn’t. But Lee had other ideas. ‘Please, Uncle? Please, can we take them? I’ll need to have practice on how to subdue hostiles’ blah, blah, blah. And now, here I am. Out on the road again looking for the guy who bragged, only a day ago, that he could handle it out there by himself. That he could run his own patrol without any newbies. I just want to settle down and put all this raiding malarkey behind me. I’m getting way too Danny Glover for all this.”

  “Dannys Glover?”

  Chicory nodded and matter-of-factly said, “Old, my friend. I’m getting too old for this shit.”

  He floored the accelerator as the land began to decline. Dutchman snuck a peek at the gauges to see the needle spiking into the red zone. He held on to whatever was nearby. Outside the window the trees whirred by, blurring into a single green mass as the car curved around a small bend on the packed dirt road.

  “Stills, maybes you slow a bit. What if we miss something on the way? There’s no point in goings so fast if we could miss him.”

  Chicory narrowed his eyes and concentrated on the road. The sun was low enough now to be slicing into his eyes whenever there came a gap in the trees so he lowered the visor. “Look, foreign blood. You focus on the map, I’ll focus on the road. We’ve got about forty minutes until curfew, and I intend to get us back in time. The last thing I need today is to be locked outside while the others are cushty cosy inside, you hear me?”

  Dutchman fell quiet and returned to the map. Occasionally he would mutter a direction to his partner. As the car jostled and jolted around he traced their progress with his finger. They’d covered a fair bit of terrain already. From Ditton they had made it through trees to fields, to trees, to tarmac roads, then back into the trees again. According to their map they had cleared most of the north to east quarter and were now making their way along Ria’s hand-drawn circle’s edge towards the east-south section. Marked on the aged paper were a couple of small hamlets, a church, and a few scattered farmhouses. Despite Chicory’s protests of driving near residential houses, they had yet to see a single soul on their trip.

  “Still gets me every time,” Chicory said a short while later, the anger subsided somewhat. “How empty it all seems. You forget sometimes when you’re part of a group. At least you’ve got each other to keep you company. But out here… Damn.”

  Dutchman nodded, remembering it well. There was a time when the roads were never empty, and people bustled about in the towns, the cities, the hamlets. There was an element of safety. Of community. A time when he had everything to look forward to, and a world of opportunity ahead.

  But then came the rot. The extraordinary virus that had taken to England as a flame takes to cotton. Only a few months later and the planes were grounded, the country was at war, and the quarantines were set.

  No power. No contact with the outside world. Just a migrant alone in a strange country.

  That had been eight years ago.

  A part of him – a big chunk in fact – held on to the idea that perhaps the rot hadn’t hit the rest of Europe in the same way. Perhaps it hadn’t brought Holland to its knees, as it had England. Maybe his sister and his Mam and Pap were still alive out there somewhere, living happy lives. Maybe they’d grown a little older but were still waking each other up every single morning with shouts of ‘coffee’ and ‘pancakes’. Maybe they’d mourned the loss of their little boy for a couple of years and had passed the initial grief by placing a small dust-covered photo frame on the mantel. Maybe they were, right now, at this very moment, driving to pick Greta up from school, ready to take her back home for dinner and a movie. Maybe they hadn’t succumbed to the rotters and the chaos around it. Maybe they hadn’t holed up and guzzled mouthfuls of painkillers and slept their way to a peaceful death as a way of escaping the rotting world around them.

  Chicory snapped him from his thoughts. “Think maybe it’s about time to head back?”

  Dutchman looked out the window, then at his map. At some point, his thoughts had distracted him enough that he had no idea where they were. Out on the horizon, outline lit by the setting sun, he could see a crop of trees next to a barn. A little to the right, and much closer there were a couple houses stood next to each other, green foliage poking out the windows and doors, stretching towards the light. “Sounds good.”

  Chicory practically spun the car around in a 180° arc and thumped the accelerator. The engine protested, but if he heard it his face showed no sign of recognition.

  Dutchman held on for dear life. Luckily Chicory seemed to have a compass point back to the factory in his heart, for he didn’t ask his partner for directions once. As they sped back Dutchman kept looking over his shoulder at the sun as it sank to the horizon. He started to get an uneasy feeling in his stomach as time dragged on and the landscape still seemed as alien as ever. He strained to see the sight of any landmark that they may have seen on the way out, but nothing stood out. He looked from the map to the windows then back again.

  He was about to inform Chicory of his concern, when the green blur of the trees they were darting back through parted for just a second. A solid lump of something dark. Enough of a something for Dutchman to call for a stop and make the old man reverse.

  “You had better be right about this,” he protested, slamming the car into gear.

  They drove backwards for a good few hundred metres before they found it. The gap in the trees. Chicory reversed a bit more before turning right and heading towards the object that had caught Dutchman’s eye. With his ageing eyesight, it took a little while longer for Chicory to realise what they had found, but Dutchman had long since clasped his hands to his mouth and had the door halfway open before the car stopped to get out and approach.

  “Hold up!” Chicory shouted.

  Dutchman paid no attention, only stopping when he was a metre away from where the dark blue car was parked only millimetres away from the trunk of a large oak. The driver’s side windows were smashed and the door left wide open. On the grass, twinkling in the dying light, the fragments of glass were spread across the floor. Amidst the shards were small specks of, what looked like, blood.

  Chicory came panting up a moment later behind Dutchman. It took him a moment longer to take in the scene.

  “That’s David’s car,” Chicory whispered.

  Dutchman looked around him into the darkening shadows of the trees. “I know.”

  ~ 19 ~

  David had always been an arrogant man. Near six feet in height with a broad chin and stubble like you might’ve seen in the adverts with topless men, clutching aftershave and false promises of harem-fun-times. At some point, he’d become Ria’s right-hand man. It was obvious why. Their meetings suddenly lengthened and seemed to only occur in places where the doors could lock. Dutchman always guessed that he was just hungry for power, resented the fact that Ria was assigned the role as leader, and perhaps that was his way to wheedle up to the top.

  Surely there were worse ways?

  But the one thing Dutchman always remembered when he thought of David, was the matching blue handkerchief that he wore around his neck like train robbers in the old cowboy flicks.

  And there it was. Lying on the floor about thirty metres from where the blue Vauxhall had found its resting place.

  Dutchman picked up what was left of the handkerchief between pinched fingers.

  “Jesus,” Chicory whispered. “What do
you think happened?”

  Dutchman looked around for any clues. Besides the smashed windows, the open door and the blood, there was little that could be confirmed without the body. Down on the floor, there was a single track of footsteps that led away from the car.

  “Yous tell me, friend. It doesn’t makes sense to me.”

  They followed the footsteps as far as they dared without leaving sight of their own car. The last thing they needed was to find themselves stranded without a vehicle amongst this mess.

  They trod carefully over small bits of bracken, making sure not to make too much noise. Now and then they heard the sound of something breaking, or the rustling of leaves, and swung anxiously in that direction, only to find that it was a fox or mouse of some sort.

  “Here. Check this out,” Chicory called, waving Dutchman over. He was pointing at the floor where something glistened under a stray golden ray of light. A metal thing on the floor. “That’s his watch, right?”

  “Right.”

  They both stood, practically back to back, and gave one more sweeping look around the area. Their eyes widened and their hearts quickened.

  “Mark it on your map, foreign blood,” Chicory said, blinking against the slices of light that were now so low they were almost horizontal. “We’ve stayed too long. We need to get back, and quick.”

  A moment later they were back in the car. Dutchman pulled out his map and scanned his finger over the quadrant that they had entered some time ago before he lost his internal compass. Chicory brought the car to life, the engine like a rumble of thunder amidst the heavens. He looked over to Dutchman. “Which way?”

  Dutchman frowned, trying to find any sign of anything remotely familiar that might give them some kind of clue. He felt Chicory’s stare on his head.