Doomware (26 page)

He didn’t know how long he drove for. It felt like a long time. When the motorway came to an end he gritted his teeth and took the most obvious route straight ahead, ploughing on into London. The mist didn’t let up; it was a uniform mass that obscured everything beyond it like a veil – a veil that refused to lift except with close proximity. His eyes kept searching for the familiar figure of his friend. How long should he keep going? Maybe Tarot had never even taken the motorway. If so, there were so many minor roads he could have taken that finding him would be next to impossible, even with a vehicle. It would be a lost cause. Not to mention a waste of precious petrol. He thumped a clenched fist against the steering wheel in frustration. He could almost taste the futility of the search. His foot twitched on the accelerator. He ought to turn around and go back. Now, before something happened to compound the situation.

No! Damn it, no!

Instead of easing up on the accelerator, he pressed down on it. One more mile, he thought. Just one.

Half a minute later Tarot materialised out of the mist. He was standing looking in his direction; he’d obviously heard the Land Rover approaching. David gasped as relief flooded through his body. He brought the vehicle to an angry, screeching halt and killed the engine. He might have burst into tears, had it not been held back by a dam of righteous indignation.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled as he leapt out the Land Rover.

Tarot eyed him calmly, unmoving, looking identical to the night they’d met: sunglasses, cap, gun, equipment strapped everywhere.

“Huh?” David prompted him, his voice seemingly amplified by the still morning air. “Walking out in the middle of the night? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Tarot said evenly.

“Why’d you go without telling me? Are you punishing me for not wanting to leave?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why? Why go now?”

“You’re not ready to leave; I accepted that. I figured you’d change your mind if I actually found the Promised Land.”

David snorted. “The Promised Land?”

“Yes. You can mock it if you want, but I believe it’s out there somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ!”

A frown furrowed Tarot’s brow. He turned and started walking in the direction he’d been heading in.

“Where are you going?” David called after him.

Tarot didn’t stop. “I told you.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” David said, hurrying to catch up with him.

“You’re welcome to try and stop me if you want,” Tarot said in his slow, amiable voice, hardly needing to point out his personal armoury of weapons.

“We can’t talk about this?”

“We can talk when I get back. I know you won’t be going anywhere.”

They walked along in silence for a moment.

“But you can’t just go,” David blurted out, his anger giving way to desperation.

“Why not?”

“Because … What am I gonna tell Shawn?”

“Tell him the truth.”

“The kid’ll miss you like hell. It’s not fair on him.”

“The kid’ll miss me,” Tarot echoed, a gentle half-smile playing about his lips. “And you accuse me of using the boy as an excuse?”

“Okay,
I’ll
miss you, for Chrissakes,” David said, gesticulating wildly, his voice rising. “Is that what you wanna hear? You want me to beg? Christ! I’ll fucking beg. I can’t face this shit-pile of a world without you. I don’t
wanna
face this shit without you.”

The last sentence was wrenched out of him, resonant with emotion like an overdue oath of contrition. It brought them both to a halt. Tarot looked at him head-on. David could feel him searching his face from behind his sunglasses.

Then, without a word, Tarot turned and strolled off towards the Land Rover. David watched him, stunned.

“You want me to drive?” Tarot said over his shoulder.

* * *

When they got back to the flat they found the boy on his bed, in pieces. He’d woken to find Tarot’s note, both of them and the Land Rover gone, and had assumed the adults in his life had abandoned him again. David held him on his lap, rocking him to and fro while kissing him and uttering an avalanche of apologies, but the boy was inconsolable. He filled the flat with ear-splitting, howling sobs. David had never felt so guilty in his life. Tarot looked on helplessly, similarly ashamed, but it was David who’d left the boy sleeping alone, without a thought for what he’d think when he woke up.

“Hey, hey, hey!” he said to the boy. “Guess what, little man? Guess what? We’re going to the seaside.”

The boy’s face was bright red and contorted by sobs. The howling stopped, but he kept sobbing and rubbing his eyes.

“That’s right,” David said. “We’re leaving. You’re gonna see the sea with your own eyes.”

“Really?” the boy sniffed.

“Yes, really,” David said, giving Tarot a meaningful look. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Can Tom come too?” the boy asked in a quivering voice.

“Of course Tom’s gonna come.”

After a while the boy’s excitement about leaving took over. He returned to his normal self, seemingly forgetting he’d ever been distraught as he set about deciding what to take.
 

“So you mean it?” Tarot asked David.

“Yes,” David said. “Tomorrow.”

“You’re sure?”

David nodded. He’d never felt so sure of anything. He’d almost lost Tarot. He’d upset the boy. For what? There was nothing for him here any more. His parents weren’t here. His mother wasn’t in the grave he treated like a shrine any more than she he’d been in the body that had tried to kill him. His old life was gone, and a new one awaited him somewhere else. He didn’t know why he’d been unable to see it until now, but the blind spot that had concealed it was well and truly gone.

“You knew I’d come after you, didn’t you?” David said.

Tarot shook his head. “I hoped you might.”

“Why’d you come back?”

The reply was unhesitating. “Because you gave me a reason to.”

* * *

That afternoon David went to the walled garden. The morning mist had burned away and it was a pleasant, sunny day. He sat by his mother’s grave listening to the birds singing and the pond water trickling.

Then he laid some fresh flowers on the grave and said goodbye.

They left early. David was surprised to find he didn’t have an emotional response to leaving the flat behind. If anything, he felt glad to be going. The city itself he felt a little differently about. Goodbye sad old London, he thought as the streets swept by. They’d decided to stick to the motorways to begin with, so they drove out of the city to the M25. The cat mewed in its box for a while, but soon settled down and was quiet.

While discussing which direction to go in, Tarot said, “I think we should let Shawn decide. Which one do you want: the English Channel, the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Ummm, the Atlantic,” the boy said. “I like oceans: they’re the biggest ones and the best ones, aren’t they?”

David smiled to himself. The boy had every atlas there had ever been in his head, and he knew his choice would mean the longest journey.

“The Atlantic Ocean it is,” Tarot said, giving David a rueful look.

They made slow progress on the M25, but once they left it there were frequent stretches of clear motorway where they were free to pick up speed. They went west. It was a cloudy day brightened by regular sunny intervals, and David wound his window down and let the wind ruffle his hair. There was a nervousness in the pit of his stomach, but its ill effects were all but cancelled out by an incredible feeling of freedom. He’d never made the best traveller, but it felt good to be on the move now, putting distance between himself and the scene of the past year’s heartache. Not that it was possible to escape the virus’s devastation. The evidence of calamity was everywhere. Fly-clouded bodies sitting in cars. Fields full of dead cattle. Washing line clothes scattered to the winds. Vehicles hanging precariously off the sides of motorway bridges.

There were relatively few zombies on the motorway, and those there were tended to get out of their way. Some self-preservation instinct was at work, and only once did they come close to running one down, delivering the thing a glancing blow. Zombies often chased after them, and after a while the boy became so blasé he started pulling faces at them out the back window. They all laughed, but David couldn’t relax completely. He couldn’t help thinking how it would only take a mob to overturn them and that would be it. Game over. Zombie mob mentality was clearly based on the live human version; he’d seen it in action and it was terrifying.

They made good progress until they came upon a scene of destruction. An articulated lorry had come to rest diagonally across the carriageway, accumulating an assortment of piled-up vehicles. At some point the whole lot had gone up in flames. The resultant wreckage blocked every lane of the motorway, including the hard shoulder, and there was no way to cross the central reservation to the eastbound carriage. Fortunately, they’d not long passed an exit, so Tarot did a U-turn and they left the motorway.

The going on minor roads wasn’t as difficult as they’d feared. The virus had struck everywhere during the night, meaning there was more traffic on the motorways than the minor roads, as opposed to vice versa.

They stopped in a random lay-by and ate lunch. The clouds had diminished the further west they’d driven, almost like a good omen if David had believed in such things. Now the sky was deep blue, hardly troubled by cloud at all. He asked Tarot if he wanted him to drive, but Tarot said he was okay.

They drove on for hours through towns and villages David had never heard of. He recognised nothing. Occasionally the boy chirped up with some snippet of information from his brainware’s archives, but mostly they just went west, little caring about where they were or the route they took.

On minor and rural roads it was more difficult to avoid hitting zombies. The first time it happened the boy burst out laughing at the sight of a semi-naked woman flailing over their bonnet.

“It’s not funny,” Tarot said, silencing the boy.

“It was nervous laughter,” David said in Shawn’s defence. “He was just defusing the situation.”

“None of us’ll be laughing if I hit a survivor,” said Tarot grimly.

David didn’t voice out loud how he thought that telling zombies from survivors was a relatively simple task, in daylight at least; he understood the pressure Tarot was under. “You want me to drive?” he asked.

“No,” Tarot said.

* * *

It was late afternoon by the time they hit moorland the boy said was Dartmoor. They’d yet to catch a glimpse of sea. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the light was good, but David started getting anxious about where they were going to sleep. He didn’t relish the thought of sleeping in the packed Land Rover. He doubted he’d get a wink of sleep with only sheets of vintage glass separating him from zombie-ridden darkness.

The moorland they were crossing was dotted with tors crowned by rocky peaks. The boy saw it first, from miles away: one of the tors was topped by a man-made structure. As they grew nearer they could see it was a small church. David and Tarot exchanged a look.

They parked in an empty car park at the base of the church’s tor. The view from this level was dominated by a rock formation, enormous and formidable-looking, which formed part of the hill the church was perched on. The car park contained an inoperative information screen, above which was written in permanent lettering:
Church of St. Michael de Rupe, Parish Church of Brentor
.

“You got anything on it?” Tarot asked the boy.

“Church of Saint Michael de Rupe, meaning ‘of the rock’,” the boy said. “Originally constructed atop Brent Tor, Dartmoor, circa eleven hundred and thirty AD. Described by Tristram Risdon as ‘a church, full bleak and weather-beaten, all alone, as if it were forsaken’.”

They made their way up the steep grassy slope of the tor, around the massive rock formation which fascinated David, transfixing him.

“It says this was a volcano millions of years ago,” the boy said. “The rock’s called basalt.”

The church was tiny, with a low-rising battlemented tower and a small graveyard. It was, indeed, “bleak and weather-beaten”. This high up it was cool and windy, but the view was breathtaking. Rolling countryside stretched away in every direction and, as it was such a clear day, they could see for miles.

“What a strange place for a church,” Tarot said. “Where did the parishioners come from? There’s no town.”

They looked at the ancient collection of tombstones.

“The inscriptions are gone,” David noted. “Weathered away.”

The boy said, “That Tristram guy said the ‘churchyard doth hardly afford depth of earth to bury the dead; yet doubtless they rest there as securely as in the sumptuous Saint Peters, until the day of doom’.”

The boy’s words caused them all to pause, lost in their own thoughts. It was impossible to avoid thinking that the “day of doom” had been the day of the virus, and that here the dead were, still resting, beyond it.

The church door was unlocked. Inside were neat, compact rows of wooden pews and a chancel featuring a single stained glass window.

“What do you think?” David asked Tarot.

“It’s perfect,” Tarot replied. “We’ll stay here tonight.”

David breathed a sigh of relief. “I can’t see us getting many unwanted visitors.”

“We’ll have to cover the windows. If a light shows it’ll be like a beacon.”

They had to make a couple of trips back down to the car park in order to get everything they’d need for the night. In his enthusiasm the boy kept running ahead, and David had to keep reminding him not to go off on his own.

By the time they’d brought everything to the church the sun was sinking into the western horizon. They ate a meal before covering the windows with blankets.

* * *

The church door opened and Tarot poked his head in. “You two’ve gotta see this,” he said.

It was night-time and they were lounging on the pews, only a couple of torches switched on to keep the light level low.