Читать книгу The Last Chapter - S. C. Loader - Страница 7

Chapter 2

His anger sated by two acts of vandalism Adam stared out over the fields opposite his house and those of his now long dead neighbours. Lying due north and only two kilometres distant was the leading edge of an escarpment; rising up one hundred metres over the plain which housed the city and a multitude of towns and villages. From the top, it held some spectacular views, not only of the plain below and the northern edge of the city but also of some distant mountains and on clear days, even the occasional glimpse of the river that split the city into two halves.

The land behind the escarpment gently fell away into a series of valleys over many kilometres and like the chain of five villages below the escarpment and a town that lay unseen twenty kilometres to the north-east formed the initial part of an area he intended to search for other survivors.

Back in the cab and with its engine running Adam glanced at the central display again, it was only after a surreptitious glance at his watch to verify that the displayed time was correct did it occur to him that if they had not matched, then it was no longer possible to know which of the two was correct.

If he had totally failed to notice the early morning heat haze as he stared out across the fields or feel the warmth on his skin, then the display's 26° temperature reading only served to confirm that the summer heatwave had not yet abated. A very stable weather pattern had begun a month previously bringing perfectly clear skies, above-average temperatures and an air rarely disturbed by even the slightest of breezes. The latter of which had puzzled Adam while trying to understand how the plague had moved across the land at such extraordinary speed.

Hoping to cause an accident rather than trying to avoid one Adam turned the monstrous mobile home out of the side road and onto the main road without so much a glance in either direction. Unfortunately, there was no lifeenriching sound of crunching metal, no horn beeping, angry shouting or any swearword laden threats to be heard, just the low hum of his new home's engine.

Having settled for driving in the middle of the road rather than his own carriageway Adam habitually checked the mirrors to see what was behind him and caught sight of his past life fading slowly into the background and realised he had now finally crossed a line in the sand.

After only six kilometres Adam parked up outside the village shop of Upper Boarstead, the first of three planned stops for that day. Investigating the shop he was disappointed to discover that both its plate glass windows and the two glazed wooden doors remained undamaged. The doors themselves were also locked and the inside of the mini supermarket remained neat and tidy. If anyone had survived in this village, then they had not yet sought to seek out any supplies here. While returning to the mobile home he became acutely aware for the first time of how unnerving the silence around him really was. There was not a single man-made sound to be heard anywhere, there were no aeroplanes in the sky, no distant vehicles, no radios, no children, no machines. Everything has fallen totally silent around him and only the flight and call of the birds dispelled the fear that deafness had befallen him. A goosebump raising shiver crept slowly down the length of his spine.

His plan was to attract the attention of any survivors with loud music played through the front door speakers of the mobile home. Unfortunately, as is customary with many mobile homes, there was no passenger door so instead, he had to settle for just an open window on that side of the vehicle. On the driver's side, however, he could leave the door wide open while the CD played through Slade's Greatest Hits at full volume.

While he waited to be found, he cleared himself a place to sit amongst the piles of supplies that various local businesses had donated to his survival and read a manual that he had come across the previous day creatively entitled A Hirer's Guide to the Hymer ***** Hotel.

'Five stars?' he questioned casting an eye over what he could see of the luxurious interior, its plush white leather seating, masses of beautifully lacquered wooden surfaces and the fully fitted kitchen. Then he cast a mind's eye what he could not see, the raised double bed, the quadrant shaped glass shower, the sleek smooth lines of the bodywork, even the way the three solar panels had been neatly shaped around the skylights and roof vents, 'But there's no swimming pool!' he added jokingly.

When the engine next sprung into life 13:31 19 Aug. 31° shone out from the display, far later than Adam had anticipated leaving. The reason lay in the Hirer's Guide, it had shown him how to connect the propane gas tank and this not only brought the large refrigerator/freezer into use but also the stove and a working stove meant hot food and far more importantly the chance of a hot cup of tea. Hot tinned ravioli followed by two cups of builder's tea may not have appealed to too many patrons of five star hotels, but to Adam, it was the height of luxury, his first hot food and hot drink since the power failed a week earlier.

His next stop was at the petrol station in Middle Borestead, only two kilometres cross-country. The reason why there was no Lower Borestead occupied his thoughts while he investigated the petrol station. Despite being situated on a major arterial road leading from the city to the north of the country neither the petrol station, the attached shop nor the café next door showed any signs of having been visited by any supply seeking survivors.

Apart from those blasting out of the CD player the only other human voice he heard during his hour-long wait was his own, mostly singing off-key and at full voice to Slade's better-known singles. It was not, however, an altogether fruitless wait as he managed to turn on the heat exchanger and the solar panels to produce hot water, thanks once again to the invaluable assistance of the Hirer's Guide.

As the hour came to a close Adam wandered out into the middle of the deserted road and stared out across the fields in the general direction to where he had once lived, now eight kilometres distant, saddened he averted his eyes towards the city. Only five kilometres from where he stood was where he had swapped an eight year old family saloon with dodgy brakes for a luxurious, top-of-the-rage five star hotel on wheels and beyond that were all the shops and businesses that had so generously donated towards his survival, but how long was that survival destined to be if all he found was silence wherever he visited? In the opposite direction and on this very road lay his next destination, a large town called Cloudham. There he hoped to find a reason why he should not break the promise he had given to his wife.

Before parking up in the town centre, Adam made five short stops en-route to investigate two further petrol stations and three supermarkets, all remained disappointingly untouched. While Elvis serenaded the local population at full volume Adam took to his feet to examine a few shops and a cafe for any signs that someone else had survived the plague. Although downhearted not to find the evidence he was looking for, he was not altogether surprised.

The world map displayed in a travel agents window drew his attention to one country, in particular, Australia. His parents had flown out there on a long overdue visit to see his sister, her husband and their three children a week before the first news stories about China broke. When he had last spoken to them, they had intended to return home earlier than planned, but shortly afterwards a worldwide ban on international air travel was imposed and he had never been able to contact any of his family again. Had they all died or had any of them, or even all of them been spared? Was that a question that could ever be answered he wondered? Melancholy thoughts were not helping him so when he reached a large hotel sporting one star less than his current abode, Adam added his voice to that of the King in the vain hope of enticing a response, but as usual, only the birds through their shrill alarm calls showed any displeasure in his dreadful signing. Catching sight of the darkened hotel reception area sent an instant cold shiver down his spine leaving in its wake a very unsettling feeling that raised every hair on the back of his neck, only the familiar territory of his own hotel, now affectionately named Five Star, and the presence of a large hunting knife tucked into the back of his shorts managed to ease it.

A glance at his watch revealed it was later than he had appreciated and, if there had been any, long enough for any survivors within earshot to show themselves. Five minutes after leaving the town centre he reached his intended overnight stop just outside the eastern edge of the town, a bridge spanning a deep cut in the landscape containing a six-lane motorway. Under normal circumstances and at six-thirty in the evening this motorway would have been alive with the cut and thrust of modern motoring, this evening, however, it lay eerily deserted as far as the eye could see in both directions.

Hunger made itself known and Adam cast an eye over the hoard of cardboard boxes, plastic bags and shrinkwrapped packaged food that lay haphazardly stacked in every available space, but nothing his eye fell upon inspired him to spend an hour in the galley preparing it. He was not a good cook and if forced to it he could only put together about a dozen or so meals without the need to refer to a cookbook, but the greater majority of those meals included convenience foods, foods that were inconveniently no longer available. Attempting to clear a little space on the dining table he knocked over a carton and its contents spilt out under the table. Ten minutes of his new life were spent on his hands and knees trying to pick up the spilled packets of part-baked bread rolls from on and behind all the other cases stored under and around the table. Reading the cooking instructions on the last packet ignited the desire for warm buttered rolls filled with a doorstep thick slice of cheddar cheese. Unfortunately, all the dairy products had spoiled by the time he had gone post-apocalypse shopping. Having loaded up Five Star's oven for the very first time with eight finish-them-off-yourself bread rolls and the kettle on the boil, Adam set about trying to locate the last ingredient for his dietitian's nightmare of a meal, extra-thick-cut Seville orange marmalade. The kettle had long boiled before the whereabouts of the shrink-wrapped tray of twentyfour marmalade jars was discovered hiding in the shower under another stack of edible supplies.

In the dining area, Adam sat on the room intruding section of the L shaped seating, thus gaining a perfect view in both directions of the motorway through the side windows and a spectacular panoramic view of the open countryside through the huge windscreen opposite. A long window ran behind the length of the L shaped seating and because it was behind the driver's seat on a left-hand drive vehicle the view from it was currently due south, towards the city. On the opposite side to the L shaped seating was a small two-seater bench and behind that, the window was only a third of the size of its opposite counterpart. It still, however, provided a good view of the motorway, now all he had to do was cross his fingers and hope that somebody would use it.

With the last remnants of sunlight fading from the sky, Adam climbed up onto the small roof rack at the back of the vehicle with a pair of binoculars, but there was little to see. Behind him the town was mostly hidden by trees, the two villages to the east were still too far away to see and as there were no errant motorists using the motorway he opted for observing the local wildlife instead.

A few unidentifiable birds still flitted about along with a few bats and he heard the last calls of some sleepless pigeons and the first of newly awoken owls. The bark of a distant fox broke a lengthy quiet spell and Adam thought how bitterly disappointed any Hollywood disaster movie director would have been with the scene before him.

If a scriptwriter for a cataclysmic disaster movie had presented the scenario that the human race simply took to their beds and died, then he would have been looking for a new job the following day, but in reality, this was what had happened. The first symptom of the plague was a niggling medicine-resistant headache, which developed in stages over five to eight hours into an extremely painful, vision depriving migraine. Shortly afterwards all limb coordination was lost and the victim fell unconscious, depending upon their age death followed between twenty-four to seventy-two hours later. Due to the nature of the plague, most of the victims died in their own homes and in their own beds, so there were no corpses littering the streets and no wrecked cars lying haphazardly up against lampposts. There were no looted shops or smashed windows, no burning buildings and no agonising screams cutting into the night. In reality, the director's favoured sound effect of sporadic gunfire had been replaced by the call of nightjar and the hoot of an owl. However, despite missing all the usual trademarks associated with disaster movies one thing did remain, an uneasy edge-of-the-seat feeling that something horrific was about to suddenly burst forth, the popcorn shaker as the film directors referred to it.

Woken by the dawn chorus Adam stumbled halfdressed and bleary-eyed out of the bedroom desperate to relieve himself of three cups of tea and a large bottle of mineral water. After an altercation with a case of baked beans and a family-sized tin of chilli-con-carne he finally managed to enjoy a pleasure reserved for lone survivors of an apocalyptic event, to urinate over the railing of a bridge onto a motorway a good twenty metres below without fear of either being seen or rebuked.

In collaboration with an open six-pack of mineral water bottles, the family-sized tin of chilli-con-carne launched a vicious retaliatory attack upon his return, not only causing great pain to his shin and a big toe but also extracting a vow to do some serious tidying up.

As the smaller villages had very little to attract potential survivors and posed serious difficulties manoeuvring such a large vehicle around them, Adam kept to the larger ones. Unfortunately, the next village on his visiting list had nothing to offer either, not even a vending machine at the railway station. While Slade was again given the task of trying to wake the dead or entice a travelling companion to join him, he set about fulfilling his vow to tidy up his mobile abode. An hour later and with the early morning sun rapidly turning every flat exposed metal surface into an environmentally friendly hot plate, the next village came under scrutiny. Predictably neither the petrol station nor the two vending machines on the station platform had been tampered with. After an unintentionally long stay, he left in his wake two large recycling containers full of mixed contents, but he doubted anyone would complain. The next village was not particularly large, but he paid it a short courtesy visit in order to placate the irrational fear that he might just pass through the only village with a survivor in it. Roxy Music entertained the dead while he finalised his housework by giving Five Star a thorough sweeping through followed by a good polish.

The display showed 14:06 20 Aug. 33° as Adam pulled up to the first of two stops in Mansvale, being almost two kilometres long, but only two or three houses deep on either side it was a classic example of a ribbon settlement and its length, he felt, warranted a second stop. Roxy Music continued to entertain the local population while Adam wandered through his abode admiring his handiwork. The raised double bed with separate mattresses at the rear of the camper now donned for the first time a complete set of bed linen. Crisp new white cotton sheets and new navy blue pillowcases and duvet covers, along with four new goose feather pillows and two new summer-rated cashmere duvets. The generosity of the bedding company also extended to three further complete changes of bed linen, two more pillows and two winter-rated cashmere duvets. All these were stacked down the left-hand side of the bed as there was no other storage area big enough. Of his clothes, only a light jacket and a couple of pairs of jeans found hangers in the small wardrobe, some shorts and a small selection of still wrapped T-shirts took up residence beneath them on the floor. The winter necessities like hats, gloves and scarves, all his spare shorts and a large selection of heavy shirts all found a home in the overhead lockers at the head end of the bed. His underwear filled the tiny bedside cabinet and his spare footwear aptly filled a small locker at the foot of the bed. Everything else was either packed into carrier bags or one of the eight fold-out crates and they all joined the spare bedding, which meant that the bed was no longer accessible from that side. Despite lacking the water to use it he had also cleared the quadrant shaped glass-fronted shower cubical of foodstuffs primarily on the grounds that it made the whole bedroom look so much neater. Much to Adam's dismay, the reason why Five Star's designer had installed the shower in the bedroom was not covered by the question and answer section of the Hirer's Guide. Leaving the bedroom the toilet on the right had been left untouched, with no water to spare it seemed a waste of time to tidy it up. On the opposite side to the toilet, was the galley and every one of the generously sized cupboards had been filled, including the overhead cupboards and a floor-to-ceiling pull out larder. Between the toilet and the side entry door stood a large refrigerator/freezer combination, the refrigerator now sporting a few bottles of mineral water, six previously unaffordable bottles of white wine and an impressive assortment of soft drinks and beer, the freezer compartment, however, remained unoccupied. The L shaped seating around the dining table now contained all the rice, pasta and three cases of finish-them-off-yourself bread rolls and under the two-seat bench opposite sat a hefty collection of more than sixty large bottles of mineral water.

Adam broke into a smile as he passed an admiring eye over the neat polished interior, finally, he had a home.

A deep hole exposing a water mains pipe and Adam's inquisitiveness helped to idle away some time and two solar-charged warning lamps that marked the roadworks at night sparked an idea. Bolt cutters liberated the lamps from the steel barriers that prevented curious passers-by from falling into the hole and after cleaning the small solar panels and the amber coloured lenses on both sides of the lamps he felt confident his plan would work. The three controls were easy to understand, the first was a simple on/off switch and Adam set that to the on position. The next was a dial to set the ambient light level when it should start working, he chose the darkest setting available. The third and last option was to set the time between flashes, he chose the longest in the hope that it would preserve enough battery power to help it last through the night. On Five Star's roof rack he tied one lamp with its lenses facing front to back and diagonally opposite, the other facing side to side. His nighttime home would now automatically turn into a mobile lighthouse making it easily seen, even from considerable distances and different viewpoints, by a potential driving companion. A self-congratulatory meal of a family-sized tin of tuna followed and following the tuna the remaining four tarts from a six-pack he had started the previous evening, which he had to admit were exceedingly good. The hole in the ground acted as a convenient litter bin and after assuring himself that he was still alone, a public convenience as well.

The second stop in Mansvale was next to one of the bridges crossing the stream that ran through the entire length of the village. Classics of the sixties now made the play list and while he walked back down the road to check out a small nearby grocery store he accompanied Tom Jones at the top of his voice in rebuking the unfaithful Delilah. Disappointment lay in wait for him, although not in the untouched shop or in Delilah's reprehensible behaviour, but in the inefficiency of his mobile disco. This had been the first time he had moved any distance behind Five Star while a CD has been playing and although at thirty metres the volume on the driver's side was encouragingly loud it dropped quite noticeably once he moved to the passenger side. Curious to know the sound level in front of the vehicle, he crossed the bridge and headed for a small school and attached kindergarten some fifty metres distant. Another disappointment awaited him, although audible the weak volume would not have raised an eye of a weary cat let alone his chances of finding someone else to talk to. All this time he had assumed he had been broadcasting to an entire village only to discover now that two-thirds of his audience had not been receiving his signal.

Despondent, his mind wandered off to find a solution while his body dawdled along the pavement in the general direction of the kindergarten. When his reverie broke he found himself staring at some children's hand-prints displayed in the kindergarten windows. One particularly small hand-print, with a shaky crayon written “Anja” beneath it, suddenly raised a metaphorical blindfold. Cursing himself for his own stupidity he ran back to Five Star and immediately turned the CD player off, then listened out intently for the slightest of sounds, sounds possibly made by a small child trapped in their own home.

His mistake had been to assume that his driving companion would be an adult, who would upon hearing his music either come to investigate when able-bodied or if not, make their whereabouts known to him. It had never crossed his mind that his driving companion might be a young child, which as a recently bereaved father of two young children was deplorable.

His own son and daughter were typical children, their eagerness to explore and their natural curiosity about the world around them forced him to fit child locks to cupboards, windows and especially to outside doors, not only for their own safety but also for both his and his wife's peace of mind. If a child had survived in such a household, then they were effectively imprisoned and the only way they would have to make their whereabouts known would be to scream and shout until someone heard them, but what if that particular someone had been playing music at full volume? Then they had not only missed an opportunity for a much sought after driving companion, but also the chance of saving a young child's life. With a large crowbar in hand in case a door needed to be forced open, Adam began walking around all the short side streets and cul-desacs using the crowbar as a makeshift drum stick double rapping it against anything that would make a distinctive noise, garden railings, fences, car body panels or the kerb when nothing else came conveniently to hand. Households that showed evidence of young children having once lived there received either a loud, 'Hello,' or a hefty rap on the front door with the crow bar, but for all the noise he made all he managed to awaken were a few dogs and some ghosts. Knowing what lay behind almost every bedroom window he looked at caused the return of that uneasy, spine chilling feeling, allayed only by the weight of the crowbar in his hands. Before climbing back into Five Star's cab Adam took one last despondent look around himself and turning his eyes skywards enquired, 'Is it too much to ask, for someone to occupy the seat next to me? Young or old, male or female I don't care,' then after a moment's thought added the condition, 'but breathing… please!'