Chapter 8
Hogan had continued walking for five days. He was heading due north, for no other reason than he reckoned that the areas that would be the least effected by the pulse would be the most rural ones. And he figured that the Highlands of Scotland were about as rural as it ever got. So he was heading there.
Sticking to the side roads, paths and fields as much as possible he made about twenty miles a day. He slept rough, always in the open as opposed to in a building. Under bushes, hedges, copses of trees. Buildings would either already contain people or they would attract people. And now the word, ‘people’, could just as easily read, ‘predator’. Hogan wasn’t afraid of anyone but there is little that one can do if someone smacks you in the head with a shovel while you are asleep. So at night he went under cover and hid.
And all the while the sky above him churned in silent colorful beauty as the gamma rays from the massive solar activity painted the heavens with its Auroral display.
The first couple of days had been the worst. The initial trek out of London. Roads packed with people leaving. Shambling along, shoulder to shoulder. Some pushing shopping trolleys, piled high with worthless goods. Paintings, books, ball gowns. He had even seen one person pushing a wheelbarrow with a grandfather clock in it. Hogan knew, within days, that same person would give everything that he owned for a simple plastic bucket to carry water in. Fools.
After the first few miles he started to notice the dead bodies. Every hundred yards or so. Next to the road. Sometimes alone. Sometimes surrounded by family members. Or friends. Heart attacks, strokes, exhaustion. Old and young dying together as the rigors of the new world took their toll on the sedentary lifestyle of the modern man.
A body left out in the open begins to mortify in two to three hours. After twelve hours the smell, a mixture of decayed cheese and rotten eggs, can be detected at five hundred yards. The fact that there seemed to be a dead body every hundred yards or so meant that there was no way of escaping the putrid smell of death if you continued to stick to the roads. And for most, they had little choice but to do so.
As well as the odor of rotting flesh there was also the gut-churning stench of the body-wastes of the hundreds of thousands of people. Some would veer twenty yards or so off the road to defecate, others, exhausted already, would simply evacuate where they stood. The verges on the sides of the motorways were already running slick with tons of human waste.
A country sized petri dish of disease cultures waiting to mature into typhoid, cholera and salmonellosis.
So Hogan pulled off the main roads and struck out across the countryside instead. Even in the countryside he came across bands of wandering people. Families, groups of strangers. Gangs.
All took one look at the marine and gave him a wide birth.
He left greater London, crossed Herefordshire and into Bedfordshire. Although he had been living in England for over six months before the pulse, Hogan had not traveled outside of London and he marveled at the countryside as he walked. It was a land built in miniature. Small fields, hedges and low stonewalls. Cottages with ceilings a foot lower than the marines six foot four. Roads so narrow that they wouldn’t even constitute a footpath in America.
It was a land of history and quiet dignity. A land that seemed more suited to its current devolution back to the dark ages than it was with the crass modernity that had swamped it a mere week before.
Near the end of the sixth day he breeched a small hill and found himself looking at a twenty-foot high stonewall. In front of the wall was a dry moat, perhaps six feet deep. The wall curved away from him on both sides.
He turned left. At various points along the wall there were arrow slits and a few low towers. The wall was obviously ancient but, just as obviously, was still in very good condition. An impenetrable fortress.
He continued moving, looking for an entrance.
He heard it before he saw it. A crowd of people. A low level of talking with the odd shout thrown in. He walked around the curve and saw, perhaps sixty people standing in front of a massive set of wooden gates. The gates were closed.
The crowd carried a mixture of weapons, cricket bats, metal pokers, garden forks. A couple of double-barreled shotguns. One even carried a six-foot long pike, its metal head dull with rust.
A man stood on the allure, behind the battlement, above the gate. He wore the full-length black academic gown of a Professor, complete with red hood. In his right hand he held a .22 target rifle. He was not pointing it at anyone.
‘I am sorry, people, but I cannot let you in. The students here are my responsibility and I could not ensure their safety if I let a crowd of strangers in. I am very sorry.’
‘What about me, Professor?’ Shouted a man at the front, his arms raised beseechingly. ‘You know me; I’m not a stranger. I run the local post office. Ronnie. Ronnie Bagstone.’
The master shook his head. ‘Sorry, Ronnie. No outsiders. Now please disperse. It will do you no good standing out there, my mind is made up.’
‘Up yours,’ shouted a longhaired man in blue overalls. ‘You’ve got food and water. Let us in or we’ll burn the gates down.’
A few others in the crowd shouted their agreement.
Then someone started a chant. ‘Burn. Burn. Burn.’
It was quickly taken up by the others. ‘BURN. BURN. BURN.’
One of the shotgun wielders took a bead on the master and fired. Fortunately he was loaded with birdshot and the tiny pellets rattled harmlessly off the battlements.
There was a whirring sound as a lighted Molotov cocktail, a glass milk bottle filled with gasoline and topped with a burning rag, sailed over the crowd and burst on the wooden gates. The explosion of gas a dull crump. The master threw a bucket of water over the wall and most of the fire went out.
Things had gone far enough and the marine’s inherent hatred of mobs rose up within him.
He filled his lungs and, in his best parade ground voice bellowed out.
‘Stop. Desist what you are doing and step away from the gates.’
The crowd turned as one to stare. And the sight of him was enough to silence them.
Six foot four of fully armed, well pissed off, marine master sergeant. Body armor, helmet, massive machine gun and Colt 45.
But the crowd hadn’t eaten for three days. And the only water that they had found had been brackish and muddy. In short, they were dying. And dying people scare less easy than those who are full of life.
‘Stuff you, yank,’ said the longhaired man. ‘Go home to yank land, you tosser.’
Hogan smiled. ‘Wish I could, my friend. But, as that’s not going to happen, why don’t you all make like sheep and flock off.’
Someone at the back of the crowd threw a rock. It whipped overhead and hit Hogan on the helmet. Immediately a barrage of sticks and stones hailed down on the marine. He dodged most, reaction speed in the uncanny range. But many missiles struck. And they hurt.
Then, without warning, the crowd charged.
The marine didn’t even contemplate bringing his SAW to bear. These were civilians. Starving, desperate for food and water. Instead he used the butt of the machine gun to protect himself. Smashing left and right in a blurred frenzy of movement. Ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty-five people went down under his blows.
And then it felt like someone had hit him in the chest with a sledgehammer. He glanced down to see two tines of a steel garden fork sticking up through his neck and into his jaw. The longhaired man had stabbed him under his left arm and from behind, slipping past the body armor, smashing his top two ribs, shattering his collarbone and severing his subclavian vein.
Hogan had seen people who had been stabbed there before. It was what the marines called, ‘A career ending wound,’ in that, when you got one, you died. End of career.
But if years of training alongside some of the hardest men in the world had taught Nathaniel Hogan one thing, it was never say die.
He drew his colt 45 and started firing as fast as he could. The crowd turned and ran. Except for longhaired man who took two rounds to the face.
Hogan fell to his knees.
Black…