His travels had taken him north, almost as far as Scotland. He’d spent so long keeping to the fields and side-roads it was hard to know for sure where he was, but he had at least zeroed it down to the county of Northumberland. In the early days of the demon invasion, he’d hidden out in the apartment building where he lived with several other junior doctors and staff. A safe place, inhabited by colleagues and familiar faces, but when the riots began, the building gradually bled its inhabitants. A pair of residents went out for supplies and never returned, a group of nurses packed bags and made a dash for safer climes, while a newly qualified anaesthetist hanged herself from the stairwell with IV tubing. Things only got more desperate after that.
Kamiyo’s parents lived in London, which was part of the reason he’d taken a position in Manchester two-hundred miles away. Both cardiologists, his parents had been absent and overbearing in equal measure, yet he missed them now. He knew he’d never see them again. London might as well be Timbuktu. Or Mars. His mother hadn’t hugged him since childhood, but he would give anything to collapse into her arms again someday.
Did I make them proud before everything went sideways? Or will I never get the chance?
When the invasion began—hordes of demons spilling out from those bizarre gates—trains skidded to a halt and planes stalled beside runways. Motorways became snarled war zones. The country disintegrated in a matter of days, and everybody found themselves locked-in place and surrounded by chaos. There was nowhere to run, and no way to get there. The invasion spread and spread, and soon Kamiyo’s apartment building stopped being a sanctuary and started resembling a tomb.
Twelve had remained inside when the demons first arrived. The monsters swarmed the streets like locusts, picking clean the flesh of anything living. Kamiyo and the other survivors watched in horror from a third-floor window while people were dragged from shop fronts and other hiding places. A mother with a baby locked herself inside the boot of an old Volvo but was promptly discovered and torn apart. The demons tossed her baby into the gutter like old fish and chip paper. As a maternity doctor, Kamiyo had seen dead babies before, but that image had replayed itself in his mind every night since. Even as he thought about it now, it placed him right back into the nightmare of that day.
No one had escaped the killing. A man in an unravelling turban had made it as far as a Ford Ranger, and nearly got away after mowing down half-a-dozen demons in his path, but then he had careened into a laundrette’s plate-glass window and slumped against the steering wheel. A monster covered in burns dragged the man out and snapped his neck.
“Come on!” Sonja had urged Kamiyo during that time they’d watched the horror from the windows. Sonja was a pretty nurse from Oncology who lived in the building, and Kamiyo had often wondered if there was a spark between them. Now he’d never find out.
“We have to run,” Sonja had begged him, “before they find us.”
Kamiyo had agreed, but a registrar from Plastics argued against, making it clear he would take his chances staying put. A nurse and a senior administrator vowed to remain as well. That left nine people willing to make a run for it, and of those nine, only Kamiyo ever made it farther than a single block. Sonja had called out to him as demons peeled strips of flesh from her body, but he hadn’t turned back to help her.
That Kamiyo was still alive now, weeks later, astonished him, but it left tomorrow a blur, like coming up from his parent’s swimming pool with chlorine in his eyes.
There appeared to be three main types of demon. There were what he thought of as the ‘burn victims’, who seemed to make up the bulk of the demon army—walking and moving like human beings, but so mortally wounded they couldn’t possibly be alive. They attacked without pause.
Secondly, there were the apes. He called them that because they loped about on all-fours, leaping and bouncing like chimpanzees. They were the least human-looking and attacked with terrifying ferocity.
Finally, were the zombies—the most human-looking, but rotting like the horror film staple to which he compared them. Unlike the other two types of demon, the zombies were—ironically—the smartest. They could talk and think and often acted with intent. They did not attack without pause, and appeared to be the ones who called the shots.
He avoided all three types.
Kamiyo heard rumours of other types of monstrosities back in the days before the internet had fallen and people had still gathered to share news and supplies. The last time he’d seen another person now was four days ago—a hairy biker riding an American-style chopper with a crossbow on his back. The man slowed down to eye Kamiyo, but decided the introduction wasn’t worth it and sped on by, his dirty hair flapping in the wind and a pair of angel wings on his dirty denim jacket. Where are the angels now? Kamiyo had asked himself at the time.
He’d never been a religious man—both parents were atheists—but he feared he may have been wrong about the whole thing. Hell had invaded Earth, and that proved there was more to existence than Science understood. Did that mean Kamiyo had devoted his life to a fallacy? Was Science a false path?
No, I devoted my life to healing people. That isn’t a waste.
In the pulpy science fiction novels he’d secretly binged on as a teenager, doctors had always been a part of the hero’s group. Healers were the good guys. Yet, since the demons came, Kamiyo had not helped a single soul. Instead, he’d watched people die by the thousands with no hope of medical intervention. You couldn’t staunch blood
