“What? What is it?” Ted bustled his way past and stood in front of his van. For a moment, he didn’t understand what he was seeing, just a ragged puncture in the side of his bonnet. Then he realised. “You shot my bleedin’ engine, you daft cow!”
The soldier apologised profusely, but Ted wasn’t interested. He shut her up with a stern shove, sending her backwards by several steps. His anger took hold of him, and he had to turn away to keep from losing control. The soldier’s reaction took a few seconds. At first, she stood there looking stupefied, but then her face creased in anger. Thankfully, she didn’t point her rifle at him. “You’ve got a screw loose, mate.”
“I’m not your mate!”
“Damn right, you ain’t. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up my enemy.”
Ted sneered. “And then you’ll shoot me, right? Go ahead, luv. I’m passed giving a monkey’s.”
“What? Of course I won’t shoot you. I don’t shoot people for being arseholes. You’d have to try a lot harder.”
“Whatever,” said Ted. “Just bugger off, okay? I don’t like company. I just… I just want to be left alone.”
The soldier kept her hands at her sides, and the angry expression drained from her face. She seemed to chew on something for a moment, then looked at him with pity. “My name’s Hannah, okay? Hannah Weber. I’m sorry about your truck, but when I saw you surrounded by dees, I was more concerned with dropping bodies than picking my shots. At such a short range, my rounds would have gone in and out. Let me look under the bonnet, okay? I might be able to find a workaround.”
Ted knew his way around an engine, but other than identifying the obvious, he had no specific skill. As a soldier, this bird—Hannah—might know how to fix what was broken better than him. He laid his hammer across the truck’s front seats, then pulled the lever under the steering column. The bonnet hopped two inches and Hannah went over to it, lifting it all the way and propping it open with the shaft. “Here’s your battery,” she said, pointing.
Ted rolled his eyes. “I know what a battery looks like.”
Hannah shook her head and whispered something under her breath which he assumed wasn’t a compliment. She undid the terminals on the battery and removed the contacts, then lifted the cell out of its housing. It was clearly beyond saving. The bullet had entered the left side but hadn’t come out the right—lodged somewhere in the unit’s gooey centre. A thin, clear liquid leaked from the hole, and an acrid odour irritated Ted’s eyes as he leant over the engine. He stepped back and grunted a litany of obscenities.
Hannah turned to him, a pained look on her face. “I’m really sorry, mate.”
“Ted,” he said, sighing as his curse words ran dry and left him utterly deflated.
“Huh?”
“My name is Ted. Look, I’m sorry I shoved you. My temper, it’s.... It’s not what it used to be.” He ran his hands through his thinning brown barnet and looked up at the darkening sky. Night approached. “Sodding ‘ell!”
Hannah warily offered her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ted. Wish it were under cannier circumstances. Tell you the truth, I was wondering if I’d ever see another person.”
“There’s still a handful about if you search enough, but there’s less and less every day. I ain’t seen a soul in a couple days now, not since some family in a clapped-out camper van heading south on the highway. They were moving at a fair old nick, so I don’t think they were leaving anything good behind them.”
“Do you know if there’s anywhere people are heading? Any camps, safe places?”
Ted frowned. “You’re the squaddie. Shouldn’t you know better than me?”
“You’re right, but it never hurts to ask. There’s nowhere safe I know of. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? I ain’t searching for safety.”
Hannah rubbed at her forehead, perplexed. “Then where are you…?”
Ted sighed. He’d lowered his guard more than he’d intended to already. This Hannah seemed a decent enough sort, but he still wanted to get back on the road, alone and moving. “It don’t matter,” he said. “Nothing matters anymore.”
Tellingly, the soldier didn’t argue. She stared at the floor and breathed out slowly. Both knew the hopelessness of their situation. The demons had invaded the world from several thousand locations at once, making any attempts at an organised defence impossible. Ted was no military strategist, but before the televisions had stopped working, he’d garnered enough to know the enemy had obliterated humanity before it even realised it was under attack. The demons hadn’t come for war, they’d come to behead mankind with one swoop of a sword.
Ted reached into his truck and pulled something out of the glove compartment. He thought about shoving it into the small rucksack he kept on the passenger seat but slid it into his jeans instead to keep it close. He slung the rucksack over his shoulder and gathered up his hammer before starting up the road. The breeze seemed to whisper threats, but he ignored them.
Hannah called after him. “Where are you going?”
“North.”
5
DR KAMIYO
For the first time in his life, Dr Christopher Kamiyo had no idea where he was going. As a child, he’d accounted for every minute of every day far into the future. He’d known which college he’d attend by the age of ten, and which university by the age of twelve. Informed decision-making was the crux of his existence. That was what his parents had demanded of him.
Now, Kamiyo was sitting at the side of the road in mismatched shoes while bleeding from his left ankle—a prize for climbing over a barbed-wire fence. He fingered a glob of super-glue taken from his rucksack into the two-inch gash and hissed at the resulting sting. Fixing himself up was becoming a regular occurrence, and he envisioned a future where he casually popped his eyeballs back in his skull or stitched
