The Devils Harvest: The End of All Flesh. (37 page)

My mind was drifting to the past. I was exhausted physically and mentally.

I headed for one lorry and then understood what the smell was. It was filled with pigs, three levels high. All dead – bloated and laying on their sides. Swollen legs pushed through the slits in the wooden trailer sides. Wide open swollen eyes, glassy and staring blankly at nothing. And of course, once the body was no longer able to control itself, the first thing to go was the sphincter muscle group, one being the anus sphincter; shit was everywhere.

Another four of the trucks had dead animals in. All like the animals at the farmyard I had escaped from.

I now hoisted myself through the gap between the truck and the factories back door. Once again death was everywhere. Animals had collapsed while being herded down the long ramp of the truck, fallen and died where they had landed. To one side, partly covered by the body of a bloated pig, lay the corpse of a young man. Six more men and one woman were in and around the loading bay.

I wandered the factory, shocked at the magnitude of the dead. Hundreds, if not thousands of animals lay everywhere. Pigs and cows littered the floor, laying in their own filth.

The air smelt putrid and vile. I had my tracksuit pulled all the way up, covering my mouth and nose, using it as a filter to keep the worse of the smell at bay.

Around the areas I walked I saw about twenty human bodies, mixed in with that of the animals. Most on the slaughterhouse floor, where the cutting, bleeding and preparing areas were. But some I found in the office to one side, slumped over their desks or lying on the deep red coloured carpet. It was an odd colour choice; it looked like it was saturated with blood. Maybe it was in case someone had to enter from the main ‘killing floor’ and it was to hide bloody footprints?

A vastly obese woman was laid spread eagle on her back, chubby arms akimbo at her sides. She had been dead for more than six hours, because of her blood pooling, a process called
hypostasis
or most commonly known as livor mortis, when the blood has stopped flowing and rests at the lowest point of the body. The skin had turn vivid pinky-red a couple inches up her arms and neck.

She must have been trying to take some file from the cabinet, because the drawer was still open with sheets of paper scattered all around her. She had died while sucking on a lolly, the white stick still sticking out her blue-lipped mouth. Her hair still held its shape, even though she lay on the floor. She had a big old-fashioned sixties style beehive haircut, as if she belonged in the 1988 movie Hairspray. It must have taken her hours to comb it in to place every morning, and must have needed a least a tin of hair spray a day to keep up. Beside her was a purse, its contents spewed across the red carpet. I grabbed her car keys and headed to the car park.

The key had a Volkswagen keyring so I obviously presumed her car was a Volkswagen of some kind. But after trying all the Volkswagens – two Golf’s, a new style Beetle and a Passat, I started trying the other cars. It turned out she owned an old white rusty Ford Fiesta. The keyring was possibly one item on her long wish list.

I now drove along the road that joined the factory to the outside world. I had no idea where it would come out.

The car smelt of stale cigarette smoke and sickly sweet, possibly from the four different
Little Trees
air-fresheners that were swinging from the rear view mirror. Rubbish littered the left hand side footwell; many crisp packets and sweet wrappers. Ironically all the crumpled cans were of diet coke. Even after everything she had eaten she still believed diet soda would in someway help her. Sadly a photo perched behind the steering wheel, slightly blocking the Speedo, it was a picture of two small twins, about two years old. The two little girls were dressed in violently pink woollen dresses.

The road ended up leading to a small village. I didn’t notice a sign on the way in, possibly because it was the only road leading off in that particular direction and that road only led to the factory and no further.

I received a far greater shock in the small village.

It looked like a battleground, as if a chemical weapon had been dispersed. Bodies lay everywhere, as if a child had been playing with toy plastic soldiers and had knocked them all flying.

It reminded me of photos I had seen of the horrendous Halabja massacre, which took place on March 16th 1988, during the last days of the Iran/Iraq War by Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. It had been ordered by the late Saddam Hussein. It was reported up to 5,000 people were killed and injured up to 10,000 more. It was classed as an act of genocide. Karma and a rope sorted that dictator out.

I looked around, the sense was very similar.

A man lay dead on the pavement, his small Scottie dog dead alongside him. A woman with a small child crumpled beside a red postbox. The small girl was still clutching the soggy letter, ready to be posted in her little white gloved hand. A van was smashed against a low garden wall; the driver slumped over the steering wheel. Another driver hadn’t even made it into his car, the keys were swinging in the door, he lay dead beside the vehicle. A jogger lay face down in an oily puddle. An old woman in her cleaning smock was strewn across the doorstep of her house; the wind was making the door bump against her body.

There was a Mitsubishi Shogun which had flattened a small picket fence and rammed straight into the front of a thatched cottage. A fire had started, either from the 4X4’s petrol tank or from somewhere within the building. Half of the small dwelling and the two next to it had been partly consumed by the flames. Parts of the smouldering thatch roof was still strewn everywhere.

I slowly drove the car along the main street. Bodies littering the pavement and on the road and in gardens like thrown confetti. A flock of house sparrows, along with a few blackbirds, lay scattered across several gardens and the road.

I navigated around a paperboy, his papers littering the street, blown around by the wind and made mushy by the rain. The boy’s small body lay twisted over the frame of his white BMX bike, the back wheel lazily turning in the air, the small reflectors spinning around, being the only movement.

My head was also spinning.
How could no one have noticed? Where was the police, the ambulances? Why was it so quiet and still? When had this happened?

I was no taphonomy specialist, but I had done some research for my last book. Taphonomy comes from the Greek word
taphos
, meaning tomb. There are five stages used to describe the process of decomposition: Fresh, Bloat, Active and Advanced Decay, and Dry/Remains. These five stages are coupled with two stages of chemical decomposition: Autolysis and Putrefaction.

The human bodies I had seen at the farmhouse had been well on the way to Stage three: Active and Advanced. Strange that the animals in the barn and scattered around the area were stage two: Bloated. Maybe when they had run out of humans in the area, they had started on the animals, hence their different decaying stage.

But those in the village were different again; they would be classed as Fresh.

I parked in the middle of the street and walked into a small shop with an attached post office. I needed food, even with everything I had seen. My blood sugar level was right down, a headache starting to gather just behind my temporal lobes, and rather than eating properly I had been throwing up. And unlike everyone else, I was still every much alive and I needed food and drink to keep me that way.

People were blocking the narrow aisles. The cashier was slumped over the counter. They all had a glassy look in their dead eyes. Tongues lulling out their months, the same as the cows I had seen. None of them looked as if they had died in painful convulsions. It looked like they just all slumped over, dead. And just like the abattoir it stunk of waste, this time human.

I grabbed what I needed, not having to worry about leaving money behind.

I tried the old fashioned red box public payphone that sat on the curb outside the store. Nothing. Dead as the bodies littered around it.

Along the main street cars had crashed into stationary ones and each other. All the engines silent.
Did they turn off when they collided, or did the engines still turnover and simply run out of petrol or diesel?

I ran to a small house that was squashed between two others in a long dark red brick row. I kicked the door open, splintering it from the frame. I stood in the front room, my heart racing.

The décor was straight out of the fifties; the wallpaper and old furniture all so depressing in muted brown and faded green colours, with three ducks hanging on the wall over the fireplace, similar to Hilda Ogden’s three plaster flying ducks from Coronation Street, I had seen on retro posters.

Slumped in the stripy brown and yellow chair was an old man, his feet up on a matching footstool, with one sock off, as if he had started to cut his toenails. But now he looked like he was taking a short nap, rather than being dead. Beside him, face down on the brown carpet was his wife. A brightly polished silver tray with two cups and a teapot, sugar bowl and teaspoon lay smashed and scattered around her.

In front of the old man, resting on an old chipped and scuffed cabinet was a fifty inch flat screen LG plasma television, which completely looked out of place in the old well worn room. It was on, but it showed only static. Wait, the aerial could be disconnected. It wasn’t. I flicked through the channels. All as dead as its owners.

Panic was making me sway on my feet.

Next to the old man, on a small side table, was a handheld radio that looked as old as its owner. I grabbed it, flicking it on then skipping through the different stations. All I received in reply was the hissing of static. No stations were broadcasting.

I grabbed my iPhone out of my pocket and turned it on with a shacking hand. It seemed to take forever to boot up. The silver Apple logo appeared, inert and mute. Eventually the screen switched to my lock screen wallpaper, but the bar across the top was announcing it was searching for the carrier. After a minute of holding the device in my shacking hand, no Wi-Fi, no 3G and no 02 carrier registered.

It was a dead zone.

Words from the Wise

T
he phone in the old couple’s home also didn’t work. I didn’t understand what was happening. Had the entities wiped out the whole village, including the factory? And why wasn’t anything broadcasting? Were they blocking all telecommunication signals with their technology – phone lines, digital TV, mobiles and broadband – so a warning couldn’t be sent out?

Surely the whole country wasn’t now one huge mausoleum? Had the harvest, as they called it, already begun in earnest? What name would mankind give to this nameless terror?

I returned to the white Fiesta, revving the engine as I tried to work out what to do, where to go. I continued on down the main street, just to see where the road came out, possibly to a main road and signposts, so I could get my bearings.

All the way along the street it was just the same, death everywhere. I was preoccupied with my daunting thoughts that I didn’t notice any signpost, only the street names, which were more-or-less the same in every village and town throughout the country – Mount Pleasant Road, Abby Road, Courtney Road, King Street, Queen Street and Union Street.

I had to navigate around crashed cars. In one section of the road a large white Ford van was blocking the whole street, having jack-knifed sideways. I had to backup and find another route. I found a small back road, just wide enough to fit the car though. It came out into a large paved pedestrian precinct, full of market stalls, either in the process of setting up or packing away, I couldn’t tell which. Luckily there weren’t too many bodies, and the stalls were spaced far enough apart to navigate through them, and then back onto the road and out the other side of the small parish.

There was no main road on the other side of the village, just another narrow lane winding its way through the high hedges on either side. I continued along it, my mind drifting, confused and angered at the same time. So much death. So many lives ended so tragically. And what were they talking about when they made reference to the Spanish Influenza, were they trying to imply they were responsible for all those millions of deaths? First taking about seventy-five million, then almost a hundred million. How many would they take of today’s almost seven billion population?

I came across a hamlet, if it could be called that, simply a collection of eight houses along the lane I was travelling. At first I though this was different, no bodies littering the lane. Until I saw an arm hanging from a smashed windowpane. Then noticing a dead cat against a low wall. Another lifeless zone.

Questions ran through my mind.
Why didn’t they just kill me? Why was I so special?
Running the events of the farmhouse over and over in my head, I realized they could have easily stopped me at any given moment. So why hadn’t they? So many questions, that I simply didn’t have the answers to.

Then a movement caught my attention, a flash of something. I slowed the car, bringing it almost to a stop, crawling it along. There in the field to the right was something I couldn’t explain. A watery image was gliding across the green field, the grass unaffected by its passing. It seemed the size and shape of a person, but I couldn’t see clearly, it looked like a misty apparition.

My eyes were straining while trying to work out what the image was. When suddenly more appeared from out of my line of sight and continued across the field such as the first. No appendages moving, simply gliding. A gathering of possibly ten or so figures was floating before me, each the same height as the others, each seemingly gliding without effort off into the distance.