Dog Blood (7 page)

TAKE A LEFT, THEN straight to the top of this road,” I tell Keith, my voice so quiet I have to repeat myself twice before he hears me. We’re very close now. I used to walk this way when I came home from work at night. When we turn the corner I’ll be able to see the apartment building at the top of the hill. I brace myself, not looking forward to going back. Keith stops the van suddenly and waits. He’s finally been forced to use the headlights and the bright beams of light illuminate several flashes of sudden, darting movement across the road in front of us. We watch in silence as a pack of stray dogs streaks through the ruins in search of food. Once probably lazy, well-fed, pampered pets, they’re now nervous, thin, and savage creatures. One of them, a mangy fawn brown mongrel with protruding ribs and ragged fur, stops in the middle of the road and stares defiantly at the van, ears twitching, light reflecting in its eyes. The standoff lasts for just a few seconds before something more interesting causes the hound to turn and chase frantically after the rest of the pack.

The interruption over, Keith drives on again, and in seconds I can see the outline of the house I used to share with Lizzie and the kids. In the winter I was able to see the lights on in the windows from here, and sometimes I could see the shadows of the kids as they ran from room to room, aggravating their mom and each other. I’ve got to forget about all of that now, but it’s hard. As I get closer, each new wave of familiarity hits me like an undefended punch in the face. At the same time, I feel a nauseous disgust-shame almost-that I was ever a part of this place. I can’t believe I allowed myself to stay trapped in such a pathetic, restricted, and pointless life for so long.

“Lovely spot,” Paul grumbles sarcastically as he surveys the battered remains of the run-down development I used to call home. The sky’s clear tonight, and the moon’s severe but limited light illuminates all the details I was hoping not to see.

“It’s hardly changed,” I tell him, semiseriously. “It looked this bad before the fighting.”

Another helicopter flies overhead, the constant chopping of its rotor blades audible even over the rattling engine of this ancient van. The others watch anxiously as it banks high above us, then turns around and flies back on itself, but I pay it hardly any attention. I’m focused on the dark apartment building we’re fast approaching, wondering what the hell I’m going to find inside. I know Ellis won’t be there. I just want to find a trace of her, an indication, no matter how small or how slight, of where she might have been taken.

Keith stops the van in the shadows, nestling it up against a tall wooden fence, and switches off the engine. Two more helicopters drift overhead. Are they tracking us? None of the others seem overly concerned.

“You’ve got five minutes,” Keith says with a slight trace of urgency in his voice. “Spend too long screwing around in there and when you come back out you’ll find us gone. There’s a fair amount of activity around here tonight, and I don’t want to get caught in any crossfire. Understand?”

“I get it.”

I reach up to open the door, then stop when Keith speaks again.

“Just remember,” he warns, “we’re here to find other people like us, not just your kid. If she’s not here or at the other house, you forget about her. Is that clear?”

Who the fuck does he think he is, talking to me like a goddamn drill sergeant? I ignore him and get out of the van before anyone can say anything else. I slam the door without thinking, and it echoes around the desolate neighborhood like a gunshot.

I stand at the end of the path that leads up to the communal front door of the apartment building, carrying only my backpack, a flashlight, and a knife. Except for the broken window and the ragged curtains whipping in and out in the wind, the apartment looks just like it always did. Seeing this place seems almost to cancel out the last three months. It feels like only yesterday that I was last here…

Keith angrily blasts on the horn, the uncomfortably loud sound forcing me into action. I walk down the uneven path and push the door. It sticks at first but opens when I shove it hard, making the same loud, ear-piercing creak it always did, except it sounds a thousand times louder tonight because everything else is so deathly quiet. I step inside and shine the flashlight around. The shared lobby has been trashed, and the ground beneath my feet is covered in bits of broken furniture and other rubbish. I recognize some of these things. They used to belong to me and my family. The kids used to hate being out here.

The front door of the apartment is open. It swings to and fro slightly in a gentle breeze. The wood is splintered and cracked across its width, and there are several dirty boot marks, most probably left by the soldiers who were forcing their way in as I was trying to get out when I was last here. With trepidation I push it open and go inside, and immediately I’m sucker-punched by the familiarity of everything again. I kick my youngest son’s upturned stroller out of the way and move farther down the hall. The first room I reach is the kitchen. I go inside, and I can smell my father-in-law’s corpse before I see it. He lies exactly where I left him, still covered in his blood-soaked duvet shroud, decay having deflated his lifeless bulk down to half its former size. Hard to believe that this rancid, shrunken, germ-filled mass is all that’s left of Harry. When I think of him I still remember the man who used to look after the kids and who always gave me such a hard time, a crotchety, white-haired old bastard who did all he could to make my life difficult. In spite of everything that’s happened it’s hard to look at him in this state.

I look up and shine the flashlight back across the room toward the doorway, suddenly remembering the screams and the terrified faces of my family when they saw what I’d done. I remember Ellis’s frightened face clearest of all, desperate for answers that I didn’t yet know I could give her.

I retrace their steps, moving back along the hallway until I reach the living room, the small circle of light from the flashlight providing more than enough illumination, and step over what’s left of the furniture Lizzie stacked up here to keep me out. It’s cold and damp in here, the broken window having left the room open and exposed to the elements for weeks on end. There’s black mold on the walls, and the paper’s peeling. The apartment has been ransacked, but I don’t think Lizzie did this. Our things have been trashed by scavengers looking for food, weapons, and valuables. They were wasting their time here. We never had anything worth taking.

A missile or jet roars through the air above the apartment with a piercing scream. Silence returns in seconds, but Keith blasts the horn again, and I pick up my pace. I don’t bother with Edward and Josh’s room. Instead I go into the bedroom Lizzie and I shared, and I look down at our bed. The thought of being so physically close to her makes my skin crawl. Surprisingly, the thought of being so far from her now makes me feel equally bad. I grab a change of clothing from the wardrobe (all of Lizzie’s clothes are still here-proof that she never came back), then run through to Ellis’s room. I shove some of her belongings into my backpack-a doll and a rainbow-colored sweater she used to live in-figuring that the familiarity will help when we’re together again. Didn’t matter what she was doing or where she was going, when we asked her to get dressed, this sweater was what she always chose. I hold it to my nose and sniff it, hoping to remember her scent. It just smells of the apartment, damp and musty.

I take one last look around, then make my way back out to the others, knowing that whatever happens, I won’t be coming back here. Keith hits the horn again as I run through the lobby. I push my way back out into the open and take a deep breath as soon as I’m outside, relieved to be out of that foul-smelling, claustrophobic hellhole full of reminders of the person I used to be. I hear gunfire nearby, followed by a scream that could be either rage or pain. I throw my bag into the van, then climb in and slam the door.

“Any sign?” Paul asks.

“Nothing.”

Yet another helicopter hovers nearby, this one using a searchlight to illuminate the ground below.

“We’re not going anywhere else for a while,” Keith announces as he starts the engine and pulls away. “This place is too damn busy for my liking tonight. Anywhere close where we can hole up until it quietens down?”

All eyes are on me, and the pressure is unwelcome. The only thing I’m sure about is that I’m not going back into the apartment. I try to think of other places nearby that might still be standing. Through a gap between two houses at the very bottom of Calder Grove I see the tall, dark outline of a high-rise that looks reasonably intact. That’ll do.

“Turn left at the bottom of the road,” I tell him. “I know somewhere.”

KEITH STOPS THE VAN behind a row of overflowing garbage cans, almost directly beneath the high-rise apartments. We each grab our individual bags of weapons and supplies and head for the shelter of the building. The front doors are missing, and the entrance foyer is as trashed as everywhere else. Like an idiot I instinctively press the button to call the elevator. Old habits die hard.

“Don’t think that’s going to do anything, my friend,” Paul whispers sarcastically. I push past him and follow Carol, who’s already heading up the stairs, the glowing orange tip of another cigarette illuminating her route through the darkness. There’s a woman’s badly decomposed body at the very bottom of the first flight of steps, her neck snapped and her decayed face wedged against the wall. She was like us, and that immediately puts me on edge. I step over the corpse and start to climb, wondering pointlessly if she fell or if she was pushed.

For a few minutes we do nothing but climb, our footsteps echoing up and down along the entire length of this dark and otherwise silent stairwell. We move quickly, most of us climbing two steps at a time. It’s hard work, but the pain is easy to ignore. It’s a perverse reality of my situation: I eat scraps, survive out in the open, and live from day to day, but I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. The others are the same. Carol races ahead like a woman half her age. I feel strong and powerful, my body lean, toned, and efficient. Makes me wonder how, when everything was available to me on a plate and all I had to worry about was my family and my piss-easy job, did I manage to fuck everything up so badly? The memory of who and what I used to be is embarrassing. I wish this had happened to me years ago.

“How far?” Carol shouts down from several flights up.

“Just keep going,” I answer. We’re more than halfway up now. The higher we go, I think, the safer we’ll be.

“Wait,” Keith yells. I stop climbing and turn back. He’s still a floor below me. “Look at this.”

“Look at what?” Paul grunts breathlessly as he pushes past and starts heading back down again. I follow him back to floor eight (of eleven or twelve, I think). This floor is different from the others. I passed it too quickly to notice, but the doors leading from the staircase to the rest of the building here have been boarded up. There’s plenty of broken glass and other debris around here, but it doesn’t look like the barrier has been breached.

“This has been done from the inside,” Keith says, stating the blindingly obvious.

“So there might still be someone in there,” Carol adds, equally pointlessly.

“Must be Unchanged,” Paul says under his breath as he runs his hands over the large sheets of plywood that have been nailed to the inside of the door frame, pushing and prodding in different places, trying to find a weak spot. He finds one near the bottom right-hand corner where the door frame is rotten. He brushes away shards of broken glass with his feet, then sits down on his backside and pushes the board with his boot. When it moves slightly he beckons for me to help him. I position myself directly between him and the handrail of the staircase so he can’t move backward, then brace myself as he starts to kick at the wood. The noise is massively amplified by the confines of our surroundings, but in the moments of silence between kicks, everything else remains reassuringly quiet. He’s barely forced open a wide enough gap when he turns around, drops his backpack, and scrambles through. Once on the other side he pulls at the plywood and manages to yank away a piece about a yard square. I slide his bag through, then follow him.

We’re standing on an empty, relatively uncluttered landing. There are three apartments on this floor, two doors on one side of the landing, one on the other. Two of them are open. I quickly check one over. Its three main rooms are empty and fairly undamaged. There’s even the stale, mold-covered remains of a final untouched meal on a table in front of a lifeless TV. The owner of the apartment must have left (or been dragged out) in a hurry. Keith disappears into the other open apartment and reappears on the landing after a few seconds.

“Nothing,” he says quietly, “just a corpse on a bed.”

“On a bed?” Carol says, surprised.

“Someone’s laid out their missus or their mother or something. Dressed her up nice and brushed her hair. Still looks fucking horrible.”

“Very touching,” Paul mumbles as he presses his ear against the closed door of the remaining apartment. He pushes it gently, but it doesn’t move.

“Smash it?” I suggest, my axe ready in my hand. He thumps it pointlessly, then nods his head and moves to one side. I lift the axe and thump it down, the clang of metal on metal filling the air as I mis-hit and catch the Yale lock. I lift my arm again. Keith grabs my wrist before I can bring it down.

“Listen.”

I do as he says, but I can’t hear anything. I try to pull my hand free, but he tightens his grip and glares at me.

“I hear it,” Carol whispers. Then I do, too. A quiet, muffled voice shouting at us from deep inside the apartment.

“Not my…” it shouts, the third word unclear.

“Not my floor?” Keith suggests.

“Not my fault?” Paul offers, shrugging his shoulders. “Get the door open, man, and let’s get him killed. It’s just some nutter.”

I do as he asks, smashing the blade down again and again until the weak wood splinters and the lock gives. I kick it open and peer into the gloom. A well-timed explosion outside bathes everything in ice white light like a camera flash for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to see that there’s someone standing at the far end of a short hall on the other side of the door. I catch a glimpse of his motionless outline, or hers, directly ahead. The door slowly swings shut again.

“How many?” Carol asks.

“Just one that I can see,” I answer. “Pass me the flashlight, Keith.”

Keith switches on the flashlight, but before he can pass it to me, the door flies open and the figure throws itself at me. The force of the sudden, unexpected attack takes me by surprise. I trip over my own feet as I stagger back, and before I know what’s happening, I’m lying flat on my back with a foul-smelling fucker right on top of me. He grabs the collar of my coat and lowers his face until it’s just inches from mine. His breath is so bad it’s making me want to puke.

“Not my fight,” he shouts, peppering me with spittle. “Not my fight-”

Keith smashes the side of his head with the flashlight, sending him reeling.

“Not my problem,” he sneers, trying not to laugh at his own joke. The man who attacked me rolls over and gets up and stupidly starts walking back toward Keith again.

“Not my fight,” he says, blood running down his face. “Leave me alone. It’s not my fight. Get out of here…”

Keith lunges forward again, flashlight held ready to strike, sensing the kill.

“He’s one of us, Keith,” Carol warns, but it’s too late. He swings the flashlight around and smashes it into the man’s face again. He drops to the ground, and this time he doesn’t get up. Keith shines the light down. Christ, Carol’s right. He was one of ours. Keith looks at him with disdain, then steps over the corpse and goes into the apartment.

The small, squalid place is like a cocoon. The door I broke down hadn’t been opened for weeks. The air is musty and stale, and the rooms are filled with boxes of supplies. On closer inspection, we find that almost all of the supplies have been used up. The dead man on the landing hardly had any food left.

“He’d done well to last this long,” Paul says, watching me as I check through more empty cartons.

“If you ask me,” Keith says, wiping the flashlight clean on a floral curtain, then opening a door into another room and glancing around it, “people like that are as bad as the Unchanged. Not fighting with us is almost as bad as fighting against us. You don’t have a choice whether or not you want to be a part of this war. There’s no opt-out clause for anyone.”

“That was his wife, you know,” Paul says, following me out onto a small veranda that overlooks what’s left of my hometown. I’ve been out here for a while, just getting some air.

“What?”

“The guy Keith did in, that was his missus lying on the bed next door.”

“How d’you know?”

“Found a photo of the pair of them together. Lovely couple,” he murmurs sarcastically.

“Was she like us?”

“Nah, one of them.”

“But he couldn’t let go?”

“Looks that way. Probably killed her, then regretted it. True love, eh?” he jokes. “Never runs smooth.”

“You’re not wrong. My other half was…”

“I know. Bad luck, man.”

“What about you?”

“Good question.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve been with my girlfriend for three years now. Then all this happened…”

“Was she Unchanged?”

“No, nothing like that. We stuck together for a while after the Change, then just drifted apart. Just didn’t need each other like we used to.”

I glance across at him. He’s hanging his head out over the high balcony next to me, staring into the distance.

“I guess relationships and stuff like that have had to take a backseat with all this going on.”

“You’re not wrong,” he sighs. “You know, I was thinking the other day, I haven’t had a hard-on for weeks.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“I’m not complaining,” he says quickly. “It just hadn’t occurred to me before. I’ve stopped thinking about sex, stopped looking at women… hope to God this is just temporary.”

I’m the same, although I don’t bother telling him. It’s just a question of priorities, I expect. When the fighting’s over, things will get back to normal again.

I look out toward the city center in the distance, glowing like the embers of a dying fire. There’s a strange beauty to the devastation tonight. This place always seemed ugly and oppressive to me before, but these days I see wonder and detail in things I used to look straight through. The Hate has opened my eyes. The area immediately around this high-rise-the place I used to call home-is dark and largely silent, just a few small fires and the odd flash of movement visible through the early evening gloom. From up here tonight the world seems vast and never-ending. There are clouds looming on the horizon, swallowing up the stars. There’s rain coming.

“What’re you thinking?” Paul asks after a couple of minutes have passed. “Not still thinking about my dick, I hope!”

“Just how massive the world feels tonight,” I answer honestly as I watch a lone helicopter leading a distant convoy of Unchanged vehicles across their so-called exclusion zone. “First time I’ve been back here in months. From up here I can see where I lived and where I worked and everything in between. Can’t believe I used to spend virtually all my time in the same few square miles of space. Kind of makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?”

“The best thing about this life of ours now,” he tells me, “is how open it’s made everything. All the walls and barriers that used to hold us back have gone.”

“I’ve been thinking about my apartment. It was just barely bigger than this place, and there were five of us living there. Five of us! How the hell did we ever manage to cram that many lives into such a small space?”

“That wasn’t living, that was just existing.”

“I can see it now, but when you’re in the middle of it you just make do, don’t you. You try to make the most of what you’ve got…”

Paul nudges my shoulder, and I look across at him. He gestures out over the city.

“All of this, my friend,” he says, “is ours now.”