The World After (Book 3) Read online

  “What do you think happened to Mike’s group?” Holly asked.

  Her words were said as if she were psychic, like she could read my thoughts. She had a funny way of doing that, did Holly.

  I held my icy cold fingers over the fire and tried to absorb as much warmth as I possibly could, which was never going to be nearly enough. “I don’t know where they are.”

  “But the place. The place they were going to. The place you said was going to be a good place. That could still be out there?”

  I tasted a bitterness in my mouth. I didn’t like lying to Holly. But I’d long ago accepted that sentimentality or trying not to hurt her feelings wasn’t going to do either of us any good. Honesty was the only policy where I was concerned, especially when it came down to Holly.

  If it kept her alive then she’d thank me for it, as much as she might not appreciate its short-term value.

  “That place wasn’t there,” I said. “It was a trick. A trick, just like the rest of the tricks we’ve stumbled upon. There’s no sanctuary. There’s no secret hidden place where everything is okay again. There’s just surviving. That’s all we’ve got now. And we’ve got to learn to live with it.”

  Holly shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t seem all that impressed. “Well I think there is a secret place,” she said.

  “Oh really?”

  Holly nodded, and leaned closer to the fire. “I think it’s a place where everyone is happy. Where there’s lots of people and they’re all smiling and—and where everything is okay again. Like it used to be.”

  I smiled. “I hope so.”

  “I know so. And I’m going to find it.”

  I added some wood to the fire, which excited Lionel, as he wandered around to get some more of the heat. There was a hunger deep in the pit of my stomach, even though I’d eaten today. It was another thing, along with the cold, that you just grew used to in time. Malnourishment wasn’t a sudden process like you expected it to be. You didn’t realise you were growing malnourished until one day you looked in the mirror and realised your cheekbones were gaunt and your face was pale.

  I’d always been a slim guy. But there was a fine line between slim and skeletal; a line that I had dangerously stepped over the edge of.

  But that wasn’t something I could become too worried or absorbed with now. BMI, ideal body weight, all that crap was irrelevant. What was relevant was finding enough food to not wither away completely. That was the battle we faced every single day.

  “And when I do find it,” Holly said, standing up with her hands behind her back in the way she always did when she was trying to teach me something about the world. “You’re not coming in.”

  I widened my mouth. “Wow. After all I’ve done for you. After getting you this far. You’re a little evil bugger, you know that?”

  Holly giggled a little. She was just playing around, and we both knew it. As I looked at her, smiling, happy, I pictured my own daughter standing there and teasing me like this, with Harriet by my side.

  Both of us should be here, dog at our feet, sitting around a nice cosy living room fire.

  Both of us should be together… but not like this.

  She sat back down again, edging closer to the fire this time. She stared into it, longingly. Sometimes I wanted to ask Holly what was going on in her mind, but I knew that was dangerous. Her mind must be a complex mesh of all kinds of thoughts and ideas. She’d seen and been through things no child should ever have to. She was no normal human being, not anymore.

  “Will we really never find somewhere safe? Really?”

  Her sudden shift in tone startled me, somewhat. She’d gone from certainty of this fantasy that she was going to find somewhere safe, to questioning me about the matter. And that was ultimately for one reason. She trusted me. She saw me as the adult. She wanted me to tell her that everything was going to be okay, even when I couldn’t give her that answer.

  I was about to tell her that I didn’t know. That I could only go off the evidence I’d seen, and all that evidence suggested we weren’t going to find anywhere safe. We weren’t going to find a sanctuary.

  But there were some times where little white lies were appropriate.

  This was one of those times.

  “Maybe we will,” I said.

  Holly’s eyes lit up in the orange glow of the fire, and I saw the hope rising in her body again.

  And that broke my heart.

  Because deep down, I knew I was lying.

  Deep down, I knew this was as good as it got.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mike Crayford wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, just that he had to keep on going, keep on searching, keep on hoping…

  It was dark. He preferred walking in the dark. He was frozen to the bone. The weather just didn’t seem to be getting any warmer.

  “Just keeps on coming, the cold,” he said. “Keeps on getting cooler. Right, Ben?”

  He looked to his left, but of course he knew the truth. Ben wasn’t there. Ben wasn’t even alive anymore. None of his people were. Well. At least the ones that had travelled with him.

  There had been plenty of revolt when he’d decided to walk towards the supposed sanctuary. But when they’d got there and found the place emptied and torched, all hope died. The group turned on each other, and for the first time, they turned on Mike.

  Some of them got away and no doubt started new lives of their own.

  Others… others, Mike had to deal with, in his own way.

  He smiled when he thought about the fear in the eyes of the final people in his group. The slaves who had been in service to him for so long. Who had been so, so loyal to him.

  Then he’d taken their lives away and hadn’t felt a shred of guilt or remorse.

  He stopped walking, right in the middle of the road. His feet were blistered. Which was why he was better off if he kept on going. After all, the more he moved, the more chance he had of finding somewhere.

  Finding somewhere that would welcome him.

  Finding somewhere that would allow him to fall into with their open, generous, human arms.

  Finding somewhere that, when he got his strength back, he could tear apart from the inside.

  Instead of walking on, though, Mike found himself falling to his knees. Cold specks of snow fell down onto him as he crouched there in the road. There was something bothering him. A memory of a person; someone he’d faced off against what must be months ago now.

  Scott.

  He thought about Scott and the way he’d looked at him with such assertiveness, with such self-worth. Mike hadn’t liked the way Scott stood up to him. And to know that he was a part of Phillip’s group in the end… well that was just as difficult to swallow, especially after Phillip’s people gained control of Mike’s old caravan site. His old home. His whole damned legacy.

  He knew he had been foolish, leaving the caravan site in search of a better option. But no great man deed had been achieved by just sitting around and waiting for something to happen.

  He had taken a gamble. It hadn’t paid off.

  His luck was sure to change soon enough.

  He lifted his head and went to pull his tired, withered body to his feet when he saw something ahead.

  It was a figure. No doubt about it. A figure, standing there in the snow.

  Mike squinted ahead, right down the street he was walking along. For a moment, he wondered if it was some kind of creation; something conjured up by his dehydrated, starving body and mind.

  But no.

  No matter how much he blinked, that figure was still there.

  It was a child.

  Mike dragged himself to his feet. He forced himself to walk towards this… this child, just standing there, all alone.

  The child—whose gender he still couldn’t distinguish—didn’t move a muscle.

  “Hello?” Mike said. His voice was raspy. “What are you doing out here? You must be freezing.”

  As Mike got closer to this
child, thoughts started to fill his mind. Dark thoughts that he knew he should repress but that he just couldn’t help.

  A hunger deep inside.

  Meat.

  Food.

  He staggered further towards the child, who he swore was a boy now. He was so close to him. He just had to reach out. If he could just reach out for him and put him out of his misery, he could…

  Then, something strange happened.

  The boy ran off into the trees.

  Mike looked at the trees where the boy had gone and he felt anger building up. He didn’t want to be made a fool of. Not by a stupid kid.

  No. He was going to make the stupid kid pay for making a fool of him.

  He moved towards the trees. Even though his feet were sore, he picked up his pace, walking faster than he had done in a long time. His walk turned into a run, and before he knew it he was surrounded by trees. Surrounded by darkness.

  There was no sign of the boy.

  He felt the anger and the frustration building up. He’d been humiliated one too many times in his life. He wasn’t going to just stand by and watch as it happened once again.

  He turned around to face the road and he saw something.

  Or some one.

  There was somebody standing there. They weren’t a child.

  No. There was more than one person.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four…

  All of them were closing in on Mike. All of them were silhouetted by the darkness.

  But Mike could smell something like rot and it made him feel… well, he had to admit it. It made him feel terrified.

  He turned to the trees in an attempt to run away.

  He saw the young boy standing right opposite him.

  “What—”

  The boy pulled back a knife and slammed it into Mike’s belly.

  Mike felt hot, searing pain fill his body. As blood drooled between his fingers, the weirdest thought he had was that the blood was nice and warm, that he had finally found something that would warm him up.

  He tried to lash out at the boy and escape simultaneously.

  In the end, all he could do was fall down, onto his belly.

  He lay there for a few seconds. Then as the urgency of his situation increased, he stuck his fingers into the dirt and tried to get himself away. He wasn’t dying here. He was going to get away. He was going to escape. He wasn’t going to be made a fool of. Not again.

  He tried to pull himself along.

  Then, he felt a heavy foot on his back.

  He held his breath as that foot pressed down. He didn’t want to turn around. He didn’t want to face up to the person who was standing over him.

  He didn’t have a choice.

  He looked around.

  When he saw the mask on the man’s face, a deep, morbid part of Mike’s body couldn’t help admiring it, even if it terrified him.

  “Go on then,” he said, fully accepting of his fate now. “Be done with—”

  The knife slammed into Mike’s neck.

  Mike spoke no more.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Three days later and I was doing my best to find some suitable berries.

  Vitamin C wasn’t as easy to come by in this new world. After all, all of the picked apples and fruits had rotted away long ago—or the last of them had been eaten, at least. There were places where fruits and vegetables were still being grown, for sure. I even knew a couple called Jill and Ian who had a farm, and were running a sustainable existence for themselves, both from a crop and animal front.

  Well. They were. I’d been back there and I’d found the farm had gone to ruin. The crops had been burned down. The animals were either missing or dead.

  I’d felt a deep sadness when I’d stood there, Holly by my side, and thought of the generosity of those two people. I didn’t know what they’d been through. I hoped that they hadn’t been forced through any situation that was harsh on them.

  But it was naive to even think they had possibly got away with it.

  This world was cruel. It didn’t treat the nice people well.

  It only tossed them under the tires and drove over them, leaving them in the dirt.

  But now we were looking for berries. Searching for berries wasn’t an easy task. There was a fine line between finding a nutritious berry filled with vitamin C, like the rose hip, and ending up picking a Black Bryony, which was highly poisonous.

  Both of them looked similar, which just added to the confusion and the struggle in searching for anything adequate and non-lethal.

  Teaching a young girl to do the exact same thing when my knowledge was limited too… well, that just added to the peril of the situation.

  Holly huffed and puffed as she walked along, Lionel beside her. I could see that she wasn’t happy about something.

  “Got something to get off your chest?” I asked.

  She frowned. She was in one of her moods, as we waded through the leaves. The sun peeked down between the branches. But it wasn’t enough to warm me up completely. “Nothing.”

  I stopped. “No. Go on. What’s up with you?”

  “All this searching for some rubbish berries. I don’t even like berries!”

  I heard her shout and I felt a mixture of agitation and frustration, both with and against Holly. I wasn’t a dad. I’d never been a dad.

  Sure. I’d come close to being, before Harriet was knocked down in the road, our child and her both taken from us.

  But that was that. It was history. There was no turning back history.

  I stopped, then. I walked in front of Holly, looked into her eyes. “Look, Holly. I’m trying my best here.”

  “But I just don’t like berries.”

  “I know it’s frustrating,” I said. “If we could eat chocolate all the time then hell, I’d be up for that. But we can’t. That’s not the reality of the world we live in. We need our vitamins, and finding the right kind of berries is the best way of getting our vitamins. It also means you’ll know exactly what we’re looking for in future.”

  “But won’t you always be here?”

  I wanted to say yes. But I couldn’t. I knew it would be foolish to do so. If I had to scare Holly into adapting to this new world then so be it. Sometimes you just had to be cruel to be kind.

  “How do you know so much about stupid berries anyway?”

  I walked further through the trees, scanning the ground for them. “Harriet and I used to go foraging.”

  “Is that like, something dirty?”

  “Something dir… No. No. Foraging is where you go out into the wild and search for plants and berries. It was about the only good outdoorsy thing I could do. It became quite a hobby of ours. We’d drive up into the middle of nowhere and gather a load of berries to make a pie out of, or some leaves to throw into a salad. Out there, in nature, it felt like we were a part of the world. Like nothing could touch us.”

  “You loved her, didn’t you?”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. I couldn’t let my weakened defences show in front of Holly. I had to be stronger than that. “Come on,” I said. “We’d better keep on searching. These berries aren’t going to find themselves.”

  We walked further, without much in the way of luck. Lionel trotted alongside us nonchalantly, like he was bored by this whole situation too. I wished it were easier. I wished I could recreate the joy that foraging used to bring me. Hell, I wished I was better at it, and that I’d taken mine and Harriet’s trips into the woods more seriously from the start.

  Perhaps now things would be different if I had.

  Or perhaps they wouldn't. Perhaps they’d be the exact same.

  I thought about the first time we’d gone into those woods together. The first time Harriet introduced me to the hobby that her mum had passed on to her, and the hobby that her parents had passed on to her. I thought about the way I’d held Harriet’s hand, the way her hair had blown in the breeze, the way we’d fallen down onto the ground
laughing with one another, totally in love, totally connected by our mutual love.

  “I did love her,” I said. It took me a few seconds to realise I’d said it aloud. “But now she’s gone. And that means we have to…”

  I stopped.

  I stopped when I saw what was in the woods, behind the bushes in front of us.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “What—”

  “Just stop.”

  Holly stopped. Lionel stopped too. And together, we both stood there, perched in the long grass, looking ahead at what was ahead of us.

  Heart racing, I looked at Holly, and I found myself smiling. “Maybe we won’t have to pick any berries today after all.”

  She looked back at me not with relief but with concern.

  Just ahead of us, there were three tents.

  There was a smoking barbecue in front of them.

  And on display in the third tent, there were supplies.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I looked at the camp ahead of me and I knew what I had to do.

  The camp was quiet, which was both exciting and disconcerting. After all, quietness just brought along a whole load of questions with it. Why was it quiet? Was there nobody home? If there wasn’t, were they out in the woods for some reason? Were they watching us?

  And if they were home… where exactly were they?

  “We should go say hello and see if they are friendly,” Holly said. “Maybe they can help us.”

  I heard Holly’s voice and it made my stomach sink. Her optimism was troublesome, mostly because I knew that blind faith was a risky thing in this world. After all, everyone’s motives should be questioned. Nobody should be trusted without good reason.

  And yet, here we were. Holly with me. Lionel with me. People—and a dog—who hadn’t known one another, all together, all trusting one another.

  Holly started to move slowly towards the camp, but I put a hand in front of her.