The Green and Pleasant Land (Book 1): Old World Read online

  I recalled dropping her at that same entrance each time she brought another miracle into the world. She'd radiated such calm. In my recollections they were all sunny days, a marked difference from the grey and miserable turning of the clock under which our current memories were being born.

  I ushered them through the tall red wood doors of Ravensburg Hospital and we surveyed the domain which lay beyond. The storm which had settled itself comfortably above us made a bid to rob this day of all its sunlight, even so we could make things out in the murk. Long dusty corridors filled with the hustle and bustle of imagined spectres only. The nicely mosaicked floor was covered in broken glass and twisted metal, the foyer looked like a tornado had gone through it. The damage did not seem consistent with neglect or even the ravages of a cadaver outbreak, this looked more like deliberate and focused destruction.

  “Where now dad?” whispered Mac. I didn't know why he was whispering and neither did he, it was just one of those places, the places where silence commands obedience to its law. Where the quiet will brook no contest to its mastery and will weave a hard fate on anyone who shatters its solitude with their own vocal chaos.

  “Let me think” I responded peering into the gloom. Ellie coughed, and then coughed some more. I felt a creeping sensation behind me, it was nothing of the real world, it was regret, my old friend, he'd been absent for some time now. In this life the kind of decisions that you regret are not the kind of decisions that you live to see the other side of, which I sincerely hoped would not be the case for us today, for I was beginning to feel that familiar cold feeling festering my mind.

  This was not a place where lives would be saved. Like most of our land life had deserted this hospital long ago, there were no teams of experts waiting on hand to assist us. No wise and learned men who would know the malady of my daughters lungs by listening to just one of those wracking coughs, which of late had started to leave little pin pricks of blood on her hand when she raised it. She hadn't said anything to me, but I'd seen the crimson fingers and I felt the pain she felt with each cough. It was the pain that drove me here, the blood which fuelled my worry and now added its weight to my regret.

  But we were here now and we must try. “Doesn't look like there is anyone home” voiced my wife in a whisper which even at low volume could not disguise the 'I told you so hidden in it'

  “We had to bloody try” I said with too much aggression. She looked wounded, though not wounded enough to stay a retort.

  “We didn't have to do anything” she snapped. I bit my tongue. It hurt. A lot. She'd been perfectly amenable to the idea of coming here, it had been a joint decision right up until the point it was the wrong decision, now it was slowly being painted and relaunched as my decision. Zak headed of any further arguing.

  “There might be medicine” he offered helpfully. I nodded using his bright idea as a shield to ward off some of Sue's daggers. “Should we split into teams?” croaked Ellie in a tired and sickly voice. “No” said Mac straight away, “We don't split up, it's not our way” he looked at me and I handed out another approving nod. I looked around again, a plan forming in my mind, it was not the best plan, but it was the only one which my worried mind could muster right now.

  “This main building works its way around a courtyard” I said peering out through a broken pain at the rain soaked plaza in the middle of the building.

  “Lets do a circuit if this corridor, we will work our way around and check rooms which lead directly off of it only, we don't go wondering down any other long dark corridors and if we get back here without having found anything then we will hunker down in reception, wait for the rain to stop and come up with a better idea, okay?” I received a collective of much appreciated nods.

  “Torches?” I quizzed looking at a Zak. He nodded and pulled a number of torches from his rucksack and handing them out to the others. They all seemed surprised that I'd suggested deploying the artificial illumination. Even before the apocalypse I'd been stickler for conserving power, and that was back in the days when I could nip to the shops and buy some Duracell. Many things had changed in the new world, and one of them was that I'd gone from being a stickler to being the grand arbiter of all draconian rules regarding torches.

  Many nights in the early days had been spent sitting in a cold light-less camp with my families hostile glares directed at me through the dark. But I hadn't relented and thanks to that here we were, eighteen months beyond the end of the world and we still had working torches.

  I sheathed my machete in exchanged for a hefty silver maglite. With the hatchet in my other hand we started to make our way down the right hand corridor which would bring us around the large courtyard.

  The hospital was huge, beyond this central compound there were a number of wings and dozens of outbuildings and tenement blocks. It would take days to search the whole place, days of exposure to the hidden dangers which lurked beneath every shard of broken glass which crackled like frosty snow beneath the tread of my size ten boots.

  I did not switch on my torch just yet. That would be a last resort, when the dark had grown so powerful as to rob me of the sight of the hand in front of my face.

  The ramshackle nature of the place did not improve. The building was by no means new and had fared badly in this era of doom. The rain formed puddles not only from the leakage which came in through broken windows but also from all the droplets which cascaded to the floor from many points in the ceiling. In places the mould had grown so thick and so black that it resembled a monster pulsating out of the wall, eating away at the old lead paint and sending the spores of its invasion force to cover the walls around which had yet to feel the force of the conflict.

  There were other things on the walls. Things I hoped that the others were not seeing but that I knew they were. Blood, plenty of blood, and shit by the looks and smell of things. There were words too, words written in blood and shit as well as words written in traditional ink, which looked something of a cop-out against the backdrop of bodily fluids which some enthusiastic souls has used to daub the place. Much of what was written was nonsensical ravings, the same mad desperate phrases which we'd seen covering the sides of thousands of buildings on our journey into doom. 'God save us' 'God help us' 'Where is my family?' etc etc.

  There was some originality here, sadly it was fairly negative in its outlook 'I will eat the eaten' 'blood rivers run not dry' 'welcome to the hall of the shadows own accord'. So many people became writers when the apocalypse happened, yet they all seemed to be able to write only about the doom that was occurring, very few spoke of hope or salvation, I could not blame them, but if they did not look for it then how would it ever find them?

  We darted off into a hundred side rooms on the way round. We ransacked cupboards which had already been ransacked many times by hands equally as desperate as ours. Some cotton wool, many pieces of obscurely shaped plastic that I could only imagine where to insert. The dirt of the world had been blown in through thousands of tiny cracks into this place which had once been a centre of healing. Things scurried in the dirt, they hurried this way and that beneath the rotten mass of the world, but they paid us no heed and we did not pursue them. Though my mind had entertained such thoughts more than once they were far from a reality, the remainder of the Robinson larder as well as the bounty of our vegetable patches were in the back of the landrover, I would eat rat one day maybe, but I would be much closer to death than I was today.

  We'd reached the top of the central corridor which led back down to reception. We'd just rounded the corner to make our way empty handed back down to our starting point when I saw it. The silhouette was hundreds of metres away, standing in the light of the doorway which we'd come through an hour before.

  I put my arms out and we all stopped, we all peered but could make out nothing of the figure but its dark outline. Something was not right, something hadn't felt right from the moment we'd left Mrs Robinsons, I felt a very real sense of dread wash over me, it came from every c
rack in every wall, through every broken window, it infused my being, I stood and watched the figure at the end of the corridor, transfixed by the patient silhouette which swayed gently from side to side.

  Then came the scream. It made its way up out of the earth, from some dark room beneath us, far away yet close enough to pierce the dread. It was a soulless bestial noise. It was pain the likes of which can only come from a body whose spirit has already escaped it in madness. Then the silhouette started to run towards us, it was joined by more, some from the left, some from the right. They looked like shadows as they ran through the gloom towards us, but they cackled with a cruelty that only men can muster.

  Chapter 6, Howling mad drums

  "Dad, dad?!” shouted Zak.

  “What?” I said tearing my gaze from the group running down the corridor towards us.

  “Fight or run?” It was a good question and one I needed to answer quickly. I listened to the sounds of the rapidly approaching group. They howled as they came. It was not a friendly greeting.

  “Run” The decision was made. I was panicking, we all were. In my indecision about whether or not to lead the charge away from danger or hang at the back to make sure it never caught us I drifted between the two, which was probably a bad idea. We ventured down one of the corridors which led into the west wing of the prison. We turned this way and that.

  Without saying anything the torches had all been lit up, it looked like a disco was making its way down through the stained insides of the old hospital. The fact that we had run only seemed to excite the group behind us, their hollering and feral bellowing had become more enthused and filled with perverse joy when we'd bolted.

  The place was a maze of confusing twists and turns. We ran up and down stairs, around corners and down long narrows which led to more of the same. We fell at times, we staggered. With each step I heard the pack closing in. They chanted as they came, not words, just grunts and growls like designed to inspire more fear and add to their own lust for the hunt. It worked.

  My poor Ellie she was struggling, her legs were dragging and her ailing lungs were finding it hard to keep up. This was not the girl who I'd watched cross the line in first place in her school cross country a few years ago, this was a sickly ghost who I could love no more than I did but for whom I grew more afraid with each passing moment.

  In the end we ran into a large room on one of the upper most levels of the hospital. The frosted windows all along one wall at least let in a fair amount of the grey light from outside, enough of a light to see that this was a dead end. Had I been in the frame of mind to analyse small details then I would have noticed that the windows in here, like all those which we'd seen in Ravensburg hospital so far, had thick wrought iron bars across them.

  Neither of the two other doors in the room opened. It was empty bar for what looked like the ragged ruins of some playing dolls which lay here and there, perhaps this was some sort of child's playroom. These dolls had seen better days however, most were twisted and quashed and had suffered the tread of many a foot.

  We turned to retreat but too late, this was our dead end, this was out last stand.

  They did not hurry through the doorway. We backed up slowly towards the windows weapons at the ready. They entered the room with at a purposefully leisurely pace. They sauntered and strolled in to face us.

  Since the world ended I'd looked upon the many horrors, since before then I'd seen things gazing back at me from the other side of a television screen that petrified me. I'd seen the dead walk and I'd seen things which should never have existed this side of damnation come running at me in the night. But this group, these foul creatures exuded an air of malice and dark intent that could not even touch upon the foulness that the world had thrown at us so far.

  They were all male. Every one of them was dirty beyond belief, covered in their own filth, in each others, sweat and blood and piss and shit, they smelled as bad as they looked and they looked like they'd just crawled up out of a well of blood and faeces. Some of them moved with catlike grace, some of them jerked spasmodically. Some of them fixed us with hungry level glares, some of them twitched and shuffled and could barely keep their eyes on us.

  Like a procession of doom they seemed to keep coming through the door. With each one of the pack who stepped into the room a little bit of my hope that we would get out of here faded. Fifteen, in the end there were fifteen of them.

  For a long time no one spoke. They sized us up and we glared right back at them. The air between us filled with all sorts of unspoken dialogue. With their eyes, with their lingering stares they filled the space with threats of all that they planned, all that they desired to do with their hapless prey. And we retorted, with the steely eyed gaze of a group that was far from hapless. A group which had hacked and cleaved its way for many miles across the war torn land and would hack and cleave its way out of this room if need be. The problem was the yawning pit of fear in my stomach that told me this was a long way from an even fight, no least because of the great worth of all we had to lose. These men, these beasts, they'd had very little to lose before the apocalypse, all that it had robbed of them was their fear of persecution, their fear of punishment.

  “Come to join the crazies, the crazies, the crazies, the crazies, the crazies..” the speaker, who emitted a certain amount of crazy himself with his manic grin and contact bouts of furious nodding, only stopped when cuffed round the back of the head by one of his pack.

  “We want no trouble” I said immediately regretting the words, they sounded hollow and ineffectual, they sounded afraid and they bounced off the walls and spoke back to me in low mocking tones of the power I'd given up by speaking. They knew then that I was afraid, they could not see it in my stance, nor the faint glint of the sharp, sharp blade I held between us, but they could hear it in my wavering voice.

  “No one ever wants trouble” said one of the men, the poor and threatening attempt at humour drawing out a few grunting laughs from his fellows.

  “Most people who don't want trouble refrain from driving around in storms” said another.

  “We were looking for shelter” I retorted. Sue was just behind me, I felt her try and reach a hand into my, looking for some hope, some solace to still the trembling. I pushed her hand away, I wanted to maintain an façade of strength, I am an idiot. Several of the pack laughed at my words. One of them, a hulking brute at the back who had a number of hideous scars around his eyes rumbled in a deep thunderous voice “What kind of madman looks for shelter in a loony asylum”. There were several more laughs and I closed my eyes and cursed myself a thousand times within a split second.

  The rumbling giants statement brought together a number of faint warnings and obvious failings which had been dancing around the edge of my subconscious ever since that stupid bastard old man had died mid sentence in the woods. I'd been ignoring these shouting voices but there was no ignoring them any more.

  A huge hospital in the middle of nowhere, bars on all the windows, very little in terms of that which you would class as normal medical paraphernalia. Then there were the jump suits, the faded blue, covered in blood and dirt, identical jumpsuits that the men before me were wearing. It was the loony asylum remark that hammered the last piece of the puzzle into my stubborn mind. I saw myself, five years ago, sitting on the sofa channel hopping on one of the rare quiet evenings, I remembered the hour I'd whittled away watching 'World Most Dangerous Criminals'. I recalled with grim clarity the section on Ravensburg Secure Hospital, home to some the United Kingdoms most notorious killers who had deemed to be suffering from insanity by the courts. And now here they were, standing between my family and the door, and every one of them held a razor sharp scalpel in their hand.

  The lunatics seemed quite content to continue the standoff, allowing the tension to build. Then she coughed. My little girl. A scraping, harsh cough which danced around the room in a similar fashion to how my words had done a few moments before.

  “She's sick” said
one of the pack, “She's infected” said another, “We can't allow sick people in the hospital”. Piped up a third with a wicked smile on his pockmarked face.

  I charged. And I screamed. A horribly spotty man with thin ginger hair was the first to go down, he stared dumbly at the stump where his hand had just been attached as he sank to the floor. The blood was a red flag to the chaos which surged into the room. They went in with me, my brave Locklears, my brave family. I'd held each one of them to my chest many times in my life, they'd all listened to my beating heart and had I hoped known comfort in the fact that it beat for them. Now I watched them go to battle as they'd done many times over the past year, my heart beat still but they could not hear it above the cacophony of screams.

  Mrs Robinsons hatchet took half a face off. Everything was so lucid, there was no mist this time, no rage swallowed me, the part of my mind that was still thinking realised that it was because this time I was more afraid, too afraid to be angry.

  I saw Mac and Zak leap in at the madmen, hacking, cutting, but they were cut back, scalpels lashed out, they draw blood like steel fangs from the soft skin of my children. Then events spiralled beyond my control. I saw the slight form of my teenage daughter dart through the opening in the enemy ranks which had occurred in the fighting. She fled the room, out of immediate danger, my relief was short lived however as I saw three of the pack chase after her.