The Last Plague Read online

  Frank put his head down, held Florence tightly, and shoulder-barged through the crowd. He glimpsed wet mouths and squirming tongues flicking outwards. Horrid, malformed faces shrieking and covered in blood. There was a severed arm on the ground, still with a wristwatch. People were dragged back up the beach, clawing at the sand.

  He saw a blond-haired girl ravaged by two infected men. They pulled at her and she came apart easily like tender well-cooked meat slipping from the bone. An old woman, bleeding from her stomach, crawled on her hands and knees, reaching out to Frank, until a girl with a serrated mouth, moving like an insect, with fleshy vestigial limbs emerging from her torso, pulled the old woman towards her. Frank watched. The infected girl’s limbs developed clawed fingers and began pulling apart the old woman’s mouth until her face tore with a sound like ripping fabric. Then some kind of dangling stinger emerged from the girl’s torso and slid between the old woman’s legs. The stinger began to thrust, moving slickly and deep. The girl’s body sagged and she let out a soft moan, both tortured and pleasurable. The old woman bucked and writhed, her hands flailing vainly at her assailant until the life drained out of her and she went still as the infected girl violated her.

  This all happened in the space of five seconds.

  Frank turned away and vomited onto his shoes.

  Florence was screaming.

  Frank turned back and held the girl.

  A man stood before them, his clothes torn and his body shaking. His mouth stretched wide and a glistening proboscis emerged from between his teeth. Frank stepped back. The proboscis probed the air. A clear fluid dripped from its tip and its sheath pulled back like a foreskin revealing a pink, thin appendage with a sharp, wriggling point.

  The man lunged at them.

  Florence cried out.

  The man’s head exploded and he collapsed.

  Ralph walked over to the man and stepped on the still-wriggling proboscis until it was crushed beneath his foot and leaked white fluid onto the sand. He was holding a pistol. Army-issue. He looked at Frank and nodded.

  “Where did you get that gun from?” Frank asked.

  “Belonged to a soldier. He didn’t need it anymore.”

  Frank tightened his grip on Florence’s hand.

  Ralph put a bullet through a growling woman’s face as she lunged at him. Then he turned back to them. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The infected man opened his stinking mouth and snapped his teeth towards Anya. She recoiled, stumbling. The man let forth a growling roar and the fleshy needles on his face quivered. A dark fluid dripped from his eyes.

  Joel smashed him in the face with a rock he’d found on the sand. The infected man fell to his knees, clutching his face with one gnarled hand.

  Joel brought the rock down on the man’s head. The man slumped on his back as his shattered skull leaked a putrescent liquid onto the sand. Joel discarded the rock, grabbed Anya and ran for the shore, pushing people out of the way. He saw one of the landing craft straight ahead. Navy crewmen were loading people onto it, and there were Royal Marines alongside them, shooting any infected that got too close. Other craft were getting swamped by the desperate refugees. One craft was a heaving mass of bodies, infected and uninfected, the marines lying dead in the surf.

  Some of the craft were leaving. Joel pulled Anya with him, bursting into a sprint.

  A young boy bolted towards them, his body festering with coiled tentacles and rupturing tumours. Joel and Anya halted as the boy blocked their path. The boy wailed through a contorted mouth. His head split open into teeth-lined halves and a nest of trembling wormlike feelers rose from within his cranium like snakes from a charmer’s pot. The feelers, each one of them approximately three feet in length, possessed clusters of tiny sucking mouths upon their forms, dilating at the close proximity of prey. Joel and Anya backed away, and the boy-thing followed. Pale, milk-white spider-legs grew from the boy’s flanks and came to rest on the ground lifting him from his original height and supporting him in his new form.

  Joel put himself between Anya and the boy-creature. People were running past them. The infected boy reared up and wailed a terrifying and painful sound and came towards Joel and Anya.

  Then Joel did something he never thought he would have done.

  A middle-aged, chubby man stumbled next to them, and Joel pushed the man towards the boy-thing. The man screamed and looked at Joel with an expression of undiluted terror and fear.

  “I’m sorry,” said Joel, but the man didn’t hear him.

  The boy reeled the man in and wrapped dripping tentacles around his body. The man begged to be released. The boy pinned him on the sand.

  The man screamed again.

  The boy’s feelers elongated from within his head and clamped upon the man’s face. The man wriggled and squirmed, clawing at the feelers as they drilled into his eyes, his mouth, and the soft tissue of his cheeks and chin.

  The man stopped moving. The feelers detached, then retreated, leaving only a skull and a few scraps of skin and muscle.

  Joel and Anya ran for the shore. The craft was almost full, getting ready to leave.

  “Wait for us!” Joel shouted.

  One of the marines turned and fired at them. They both screamed, then glanced back to see a bloated woman collapsing onto the sand behind them, a red wound where her face had been.

  “Quickly,” the marine said. He shot two more infected advancing towards them.

  Joel pushed Anya onwards. His legs felt like they were on fire. One last push. All he could hear was the screams of the infected.

  The marines pulled them on board over the lowered ramp, and they collapsed among the other refugees who had made it. Many of them were crying and sobbing; others were in stunned, traumatised silence.

  Joel turned back to the beach. He couldn’t see Ralph, Frank or Florence. The shoreline was a field of slaughter. Blood stained the sand and made the water red. Body parts floated in the water. Most of the craft were leaving. So many people left behind. The majority of the refugees still on the beach were either dead or too badly injured to move. Arms and legs torn away. Severe mutilations. Grisly mounds of meat still alive and begging for mercy. Packs of the infected were feeding.

  Gunshots down the beach, where a few marines were holding off the infected until their craft could escape. There were bodies everywhere. He saw infected children scavenging on warm remains and sucking the marrow from snapped bones.

  Monsters stalked the beach.

  “Let’s go,” said one of the marines.

  “You can’t leave yet,” said Joel. “My friends are still out there.”

  “Sorry, mate. It’s too late. Too dangerous to stay.”

  “Look!” said Anya, pointing to their left.

  Frank, Florence and Ralph were running towards them, weaving between scavenging infected and wounded refugees. Ralph raised his hands. He had a pistol.

  A pack of infected were behind them.

  “Come on!” Joel shouted.

  They splashed through the surf towards the craft. Ralph turned and shot two infected.

  They kept running.

  “Move faster!” Joel said.

  They were ten yards from the craft when something came out of the water and battened upon Frank.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Frank went down and dropped Florence. She fell into the water with him. She reached out for him and screamed. Frank looked at her once before he was dragged into the water. The creature had hold of him and there was a sharp pain in his stomach. He saw its face, and the sight of it almost stopped his heart. He took in mouthfuls of saltwater and it filled his lungs.

  The pale thing had once been human, emaciated and twitching, its eyes like black marbles surrounded by bleeding cysts pricked with tiny teeth. The ragged remains of a white shirt clung to its form. It was still wearing a red tie. It leered at him with a wound of a mouth and lifted him out of the sea. He vomited water, sucked in air, his e
yes stinging. Cold fingers gripped him. His stomach was bleeding. The creature’s teeth were stained red. It roared at him and he smelled its fetid, warm breath. Rot and mould and something worse.

  Ralph shot it in the face. The creature dropped Frank. Ralph pulled him up. The other infected were closing in.

  Frank turned to Florence. “Go! Get on the boat!”

  Florence hesitated.

  “Go!”

  Then Joel was running back to them, kicking his legs through the water. He scooped her up, but she resisted him, flailing her arms.

  Agony bolted through Frank’s body. The wound on his stomach was deep. He was losing blood steadily. Ralph was beside him. He looked dazed and pale. There was a red slash on his neck; the edges of the wound were already turning black.

  They looked at each other. They both understood. Then they turned to Joel and Florence.

  Joel was crying. He nodded.

  “Get out of here,” said Ralph.

  Joel said nothing. Florence had stopped fighting him. She was shivering and soaking wet, her red hair plastered to her head.

  “I can’t leave you both here,” Joel said. “You can’t stay here.”

  Ralph raised his pistol, aimed it at Joel. “Go.”

  “Get Florence off the beach,” said Frank. “Get to Anya.”

  Joel looked at them, his face slack and unbelieving and his mouth open. He glanced at the pistol.

  Ralph’s arm was shaking. “You have to go, mate. No time.”

  Joel nodded, turned and ran back to the craft with Florence.

  Frank watched them climb aboard the craft. Anya took hold of the girl and hugged her. They turned to Frank and Ralph.

  Frank waved. He had done all he could. He had done his best. They would live. They would survive.

  Ralph turned back to the pursuing infected. He fired the pistol until it clicked empty. One infected man remained from the pack. Ralph let the man come to him. Ralph pistol-whipped the man in the face until he went down, and then dropped the pistol so he could gouge out the man’s eyes with his thumbs. The deformed man raked at Ralph’s body with hooked claws until he went limp in Ralph’s hands and floated away, face-down and half-submerged in the water.

  Frank went to Ralph and helped him to his feet in the surf. Ralph’s hands were raw and weeping, the skin torn into maggot-white flaps and clefts. He was bleeding into the water.

  They both turned to watch the last of the landing craft leave.

  They staggered onto the beach, supporting each other. Both of them were losing blood. The monsters left them alone.

  Ralph nodded and tried to smile. “I can feel it inside me. I don’t feel like myself.”

  “Me neither,” said Frank.

  The cries of the dying echoed across the blood-soaked beach. Offal and bones were scattered. They walked past a little girl peeling a man’s lips from his mouth. She paused to grin at them.

  Groups of feeding infected had gathered along the beach, snaffling up piles of slick remains. They fed slowly and calmly. There was an infected man in a straitjacket, stumbling around in circles, his face a torn ruin. Black tentacles had burst through the straitjacket and were wavering around him. He was laughing.

  There were many deformities and mutations. Faces with too many eyes. Bony, pale figures stumbling around clutching pieces of sopping flesh. Infected meat that glistened like succulent jelly, quivering and dividing and forming pincers, vermiform tentacles and black maws. Vaginal mouths parted to show such sharp teeth. Bodies were slipped free from their skin and consumed by ravenous appetites.

  The beach was full of meat.

  Frank and Ralph watched them feed. They made no attempt to harm the infected. They turned back to the sea and the ships out there waiting for the evacuated refugees. The lucky ones.

  “I’m glad they made it,” said Frank.

  “Joel and Anya will take care of Florence,” Ralph said. “You did the right thing, mate. You saved the little girl, and you got us here. You gave us a chance of survival.”

  Frank didn’t answer. He looked out towards the ships, and he wondered where they would go.

  Maybe they were just delaying the inevitable.

  “Extinction level event,” said Ralph, as though he had heard Frank’s thoughts.

  Frank nodded.

  There were flashes of light from the ships. He didn’t realise what this meant until the shells detonated around them. The world became a roaring of explosions and blinding light. The groups of feeding infected were smashed into wet mulch. The naval guns hammered at the shore, sending up great billows of sand, scarring the ground and obliterating those still on the beach. Shrapnel flew, decapitating the infected and shredding bodies into pulp. No sound but the boom of the guns and the shells hitting the ground. Frank couldn’t hear himself scream. He and Ralph tried to stagger from the beach. A shell landed nearby, engulfing them in plumes of sand and dirt. The ground shook. They fell down. The scream of the shells overhead. Boom and crash. The earth shaking, coming apart, tearing and ripping. The smell of fire and burnt meat.

  Frank looked up at the darkening sky, the taste of blood in his mouth. He felt the pain of the infected as they were destroyed.

  The screaming world became oblivion.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  The landing craft moved towards the waiting ships. The escaped refugees were silent, vacant eyed and exhausted. Florence was sitting with her head on Anya’s chest while Anya stroked her hair and hushed whispered words of comfort to her. Joel rested his arms on the side of the craft, staring at the beach they had escaped. The horizon was stained with smoke. The beach was a ruin of scars and craters. Great Britain was gone. England was gone. He would never return.

  What about Europe and the rest of the world?

  Joel wiped his eyes. “We made it.”

  “Not all of us,” said Florence.

  “I hope Ralph and Frank died quickly,” Joel said. “I hope they’re not alive and infected.”

  “Nobody could’ve survived on the beach,” said Anya.

  Joel took out his crucifix and extended his arm until his hand was over the side. The sea was protean and tempting, abyssal and dark. He lowered the crucifix towards the water.

  Joel’s hand flinched.

  The waves crashed.

  EPILOGUE

  Frank awoke and watched the sky until his eyes stung. He was tired and his bones were heavy.

  He sat up. His lungs ached with a cancerous pain. His inhaler was gone. He spat on the sand. His spit was bloody and glistening. His body was intact. The wound in his stomach itched and burned. He’d lost a lot of blood.

  He was dying, and he knew this.

  He looked around. Human remains littered the beach. The ground had been churned and torn. Craters and gouges in the earth.

  There was something beside him.

  Ralph.

  “I’m sorry, mate,” said Frank. His voice was weak and slurred.

  Ralph had been spread around. Shrapnel had ripped most of him into sloppy little bits. The rest of him was a smear upon the sand.

  Frank stood over his Ralph’s remains and said a silent farewell to his friend. Then he turned towards the horizon. The ships were gone. There was only the sea. The waves were growing tall and violent.

  There was a storm coming.

  He hoped the storm wiped the land clean.

  Frank walked from the beach, heading inland. His heartbeat was slow and loud. He stumbled on rubbery legs. Sweat beaded on his skin. He passed through Sidmouth. The infected he encountered left him alone. He was one of them, of course. His body, even as it was weakening and dying, was changing. His skin was getting paler, almost translucent. The cries of the gulls were the screams of tortured men.

  He thought of Florence, and was grateful she had escaped. She was safe. Joel and Anya were safe. It was some consolation.

  He realised how stupid he’d been to think Florence was his daughter. To think she was Emily.

&nb
sp; She could have been his daughter, in a different life.

  But he was only a man and there was only one life. And if he lived, he would become something else. He walked back to the camp, thinking of Catherine. He would be with her again. He would find her.

  The camp was ruined. The two coaches left behind had been smashed and battered. Bodies on the ground. Crows picked over the cadavers. Frank could smell the rot and slaughter still in the air.

  There were still some infected here; the stragglers and those too weak to walk away. Wretched specimens being absorbed by the mud and filth.

  Captain Shaw was sitting on the ground against a scrum of corpses, staring at the skin peeling from his hands. His bones had changed and shifted so that his body was an ill-fitting sack over them. He wheezed and groaned. He had paled to ivory. His eyes were red-rimmed and haunted. He sagged like a pile of old clothes.

  Shaw’s naked stomach had birthed a colony of red writhing cilia. A yolky substance dripped from the corners of his mouth. Small, wet spikes were emerging from his scalp, like a crown of thorns.

  Shaw looked at Frank and whimpered for mercy.

  Frank took a pistol from a dead soldier’s hand. He went over to Shaw and shot him in the head. Shaw’s body quivered once then fell still. Frank dropped the pistol.

  There was movement out by the edge of the camp towards the north side where the pits had been carved into the earth.

  A little girl, red-haired and pale. It wasn’t Florence.

  It was Emily.

  Frank smiled.

  She beckoned to him.

  Frank went to her.

  As he approached Emily she turned and started towards the pits, glancing back at him. He followed. She led him to the pits. He thought he could hear her voice inside his head. Emily halted by one of the pits and looked down. Then she turned back to him. She smiled again. She pointed into the pit.

  He looked into the earth. When he looked back at Emily, she had vanished.