Authors: Nathan Kuzack
When he got to the Lighthouse he felt no emotional reaction at all to the fact that the note and the paper were still untouched. He sat in an armchair by the drawing room window, close enough so that he could look out onto the street, wrapped in a blanket like an old maid. He simply didn’t have the energy for anything more. Music played as the grandfather clock gently ticked away the passing time.
The next day he felt much better, and he decided to take a shorter route continuing from where he’d left off, a truncated version of the route he’d intended to follow from the start. The weather was still dull, the sky dark and depressing like a reflection of the events taking place beneath it. He walked at a leisurely pace, alert as ever but less hopeful of seeing the boy. The visualisations of him were more infrequent, partly because the image he had of the boy was already starting to get fuzzy and difficult to hold on to; it kept slipping away like water through fingers. Hope was draining away in a similar fashion and he hated himself for it. What if he searched and searched and couldn’t find the boy, and went on fruitlessly searching the city streets as if wandering an endless maze of his own making? What if he was too late? What if, one day, he finally found the object of his quest and all that remained of him was a half-eaten corpse? A vision of such an eventuality was summoned into his mind, the detail of it horribly vivid. That was the reality of this world. That was what he was setting himself up for!
With a fury that sent determination coursing through him, he assailed the vision of the boy’s rotting body, expunging it. If that was what was in store then he’d descend into a pit of depression he’d probably never emerge from, but in the meantime he would not give up on the boy. No matter what. Even if the search brought him to his knees, left him crawling and crazed, babbling incoherently about the mythical blue-coated boy he’d once set eyes upon. His strength was bolstered by thinking these things. Deep down he knew what he was doing was as much for himself as the boy – if not more – but the taint of such self-centredness precluded full acknowledgement of the fact.
He examined the sky and wondered whether it was going to rain. Of course! That would be the perfect time to hunt for the boy: when it was raining. It was nerve-jangling enough for him, a fully grown man, to be outside amongst them, but for a kid it must have been next to petrifying. Rain at least reduced the chances of coming into contact with them, providing a shred of an advantage any child save an absolute simpleton would have recognised and seized upon. It was possible the boy only ever went outside when it was raining, rendering his searching in these dry conditions futile. But then he remembered the time on the flyover – it hadn’t been raining then. Why had the boy risked going outside without the protection of the rain on that occasion? Then it dawned on him.
He’d been drawn by the sound of the gun
.
Which meant he had to live within earshot of a gun being fired on those playing fields. It was all supposition and didn’t really amount to much, since the sound of the gunshots would have carried for miles in the still air of the dead city, but he felt greatly encouraged nonetheless. He would adjust his search to the south and east, closer to the area of the playing fields off Temple Mills Lane. He should probably wait until the next spell of rain too. He wondered whether the boy would respond to gunshots a second time. Or would he be put off, thinking he was a zombie made even more lethal by his possession of a gun? It was worth a try if all else failed, he thought.
Continuing on the remainder of the route he’d planned, he ruminated hopefully about his chances of finding the boy in the rain. When he reached the vicinity of the flat the bastard Varley spotted him and he was forced to make a dash for home. By the time he’d reached the safety of the upper floors of Trinity Court his heart was thudding in his chest like a separate organism desperate to escape his body. The episode was enough to convince him that prolonged searching in dry weather conditions was simply too dangerous.
He would wait for rain.
* * *
He waited and waited. Day after interminable day not a drop of rain fell on the streets surrounding Trinity Court. The waiting and the watching were both tiresome and tiring. He busied himself cleaning up the spare, and long-neglected, bedroom. When rain finally did arrive it was in the dead of night, when any search would have been pointless. The street lights still came on dutifully enough at the first sign of approaching darkness, but no one but the undead would have trodden voluntarily into that giant shrieking graveyard, the madness of it made even worse by the shadowy artificial half-light. David lay awake in bed, listening to the rain and wondering if God was deliberately toying with him. Not that he really believed in God, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. He was a pagan of an unnamed order. Christianity and Islam and all the others he viewed as “man-made” religions, involving the creation of God in man’s image rather than the other way round. His God was a different, and far from benevolent, entity, a concept he’d harboured since long before the calamity.
He believed that, in God’s eyes, the things he’d created were merely experimental works in progress, making the Earth akin to an enormous Petri dish, just one of many, and humanity a culture of microorganisms inside it. His belief called to mind the first paragraph of
The War of the Worlds
, with God replacing the Martians who’d scrutinised the inhabitants of Earth “as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”. Like Wells’s Martians, God watched the Petri dish Earth with interest, possibly intervening once an aeon in the form of an asteroid or an ice age, providing the catalyst for the next phase of the experiment. He’d watched the accretion of the planets, the collision of the Earth and Theia and the formation of the Moon, the wreathing of the Earth in fire and then ice and back to fire again, the incalculable evolutions of multicellular life and the dinosaurs’ reign, the asteroid strike and the subsequent rise of the mammals, culminating in the viral implosion of man’s empire. This latest turn of events God watched – as with all the others – with the investigative zeal of a scientist, a studied objectivity and a sense of fascination – and maybe not even this last one; maybe he’d witnessed the same thing happen on countless other Petri dish worlds and was bored by its predictable nature. This way of thinking had only been strengthened by the advent of the Eridani transmissions.
A little over 200 years ago people had started picking up strange radio transmissions. The origin of these transmissions was pinpointed to a planet orbiting a star in the same region of sky occupied by the constellation of Eridanus, the river. The transmissions were extremely weak – only audio to start with, progressing to television – but became startlingly clear when boosted by modern techniques. The originators of the transmissions were christened the Eridani, and mankind knew beyond doubt that it was not alone.
Since the planet the Eridani lived on was 10,000 light years away, communication with them was effectively out of the question. The transmissions had spent 10,000 years crossing the great spatial divide between the two planets, meaning the inhabitants of Earth were seeing the Eridani as they had been that long ago. Any message sent to them now would have required the passage of at least 20,000 years before any response could have been expected. Mankind could only watch the ancient events as they had unfolded on the distant planet, any attempt at a dialogue rendered futile by the vastness of space.
Nonetheless, the world was transfixed by the sight of life on an entirely separate world. People marvelled not at the differences between human beings and the Eridani, but at the similarities. The Eridani were humanoid in form: two arms, two legs, a head, two eyes, two ears, a mouth. They were divided into male and female, and the females gave birth. They fought wars and suffered natural disasters. They made movies and hosted great sporting events. They loved and laughed, hated and cried. The science of exobiology was given a huge boost by the study of the Eridani – their
physiology, their languages, their cultures, their relationship to their home world’s environment – solely via their extrasolar transmissions. The world at large was enthralled, excited, obsessed – but only for a time, and a surprisingly short time at that.
After the initial excitement had died down, the general public grew tired of the Eridani transmissions. Watching them was akin to watching terrestrial television programmes from the 20th century. They were old, irrelevant, pointless. The Eridani were too human, their planet too Earth-like, their society too reminiscent of a bygone era, to hold people’s attention for long.
Maybe God was afflicted with the infamous “Eridani ennui” when it came to his planetary creations. David suspected it was even worse than that. He believed that God – if such an entity existed at all – held mankind in no higher regard than a human being held a germ on a microscope’s slide.
How else to explain all the death and suffering and unanswered prayers?
Five long, infuriating days after the early hours downpour, he watched as dark clouds swept in from the south-west and settled over the city. They hung there for a time, burgeoning and poised, taunting him, before unleashing themselves. He punched the air, grinning like a lunatic. He was ready – more than ready. He zipped up his raincoat and adjusted the waterproof hat on his head.
His jubilation quickly turned to exasperation, though, when lightning started to flash and rising winds drove sheets of rain against the window. This was no obligingly middling downpour; it was a tempest. Would the boy venture out in this? The first peal of thunder rang out, malevolent and terrible, and his heart sank. It was enough to put anyone off, even without the possibility of murderous zombies wherever you went.
“Typical!” he spat through gritted teeth.
Well, he’d asked for rain and now he was getting it with interest. He should have learned to be more wary of what he wished for by now. He still had to try, storm or no storm. He left without his holdall, taking only the rolling pin, the gun and a map covered in a transparent plastic sheath.
Outside the weather was even worse than he’d expected. Luminous arcs of forked lightning shot across the sky, casting the backdrop of clouds into oily black relief, while rain lashed into his face, forcing him to walk hunched over and making it difficult to see properly. The flashing distortions of the lightning, the noise of the thunder and rain, and the rain’s hampering of his vision overpowered the state of heightened sensory acuity with which he’d learned to walk the city streets, rendering it counterproductive rather than useful. It was horribly unnerving being outside in such conditions. It was too easy to imagine a soaking wet zombie, concealed by the storm’s tumult, looming right up to him before he’d even caught sight or sound of it, and images of such a thing happening kept flashing unbidden into his mind, causing him to look over one shoulder or the other every few paces. He loathed his imagination in situations like this; a good imagination was to fear what high winds were to a bush fire. If the storm didn’t ease up the search was going to be one very long and unappealing proposition – maybe even an impossible one.
He made his way to the High Road and crossed over the motorway via the same bridge from which he’d surveyed the virus’s carnage that first day. He always thought of that day whenever he was here. The view from the bridge tapped into the memory of that powerful first phase of disbelief, a feeling that had never really left him since; it continued on in muted form, a ghost of its former self but still there, unaffected by the avalanche of proof his eyes had borne witness to. Past the Tube station he turned right onto Westdown Road. Some instinct told him the boy had accessed the motorway from this direction, but upon what basis this was founded he didn’t know. Had the wind been travelling in this direction when he’d been test-firing the gun? He couldn’t remember. For about the millionth time in his life he wished he had a cybernetic brain – specifically, the total recall of one. Then he would have been able to replay every moment of his sighting of the boy on the flyover, as well as look up a whole host of data that had been stored away automatically. Time. Temperature. Geographical location. Air pressure. Humidity. Wind speed. Wind direction. Light level. Visibility level. If only he had such a wealth of information already there in his head, waiting to be summoned with no more than a thought. His predisposition to resent cybernetics, while simultaneously wanting to be like them, had always riled him, mainly because it was so inevitable. He really had no say in the matter at all. Of course, he thought in a subdued kind of way, if he’d had a cybernetic brain he would be dead right now like all the rest of them.
A huge fork of jagged lightning followed closely by a boom of thunder rent the sky asunder like an airburst. The storm was virtually on top of him; its forceful gusts of wind and rain were misery-making. He kept having to blink rapidly, wiping his face repeatedly with a damp sleeve, in a vain attempt to keep rainwater out of his eyes. He hurried into an alleyway between two houses, sheltering under a sheet of plastic stretched between them, and shook himself vigorously. What an earth was he doing out here, where he could barely see where he was going, let alone search for a child? He was pitted against elements far beyond his control, floundering, pathetic, as unlikely a candidate for an act of deliverance as a drowning rat. A wave of hopelessness threatened to engulf him completely and sweep him back to the dry warmth of the flat. No! He had to go on. He couldn’t give up this easily. What chance did the boy have if he did? Think of the kid, you selfish son of a bitch.
After watching the storm rage for a while, he braced himself for being in its teeth again and returned to the pavement. He walked the length of Westdown Road and turned left onto Cranbourne Road, rejoining the High Road. He’d sometimes walked this way when there’d been problems with the Tube, strolling unhurriedly in the morning sun – as he chose to remember it now – to the nearest overground station.