He pulled her up the steeply climbing alley where another man around Thackeray's age waited anxiously, shifting from foot to foot. He had a thin acne-scarred face and long hair, and wore an old greatcoat and motorcycle boots.
'You're a stupid fucker, Thackeray,' he hissed. 'If they catch us now because of her-'
'I couldn't just leave her out there, could I?' Thackeray protested. He turned to Caitlin again. 'This is Harvey. Not a six-foot invisible white rabbit, but just as much fucking use.'
The bikers reached the end of the alley. A flashlight shone up and Harvey threw himself into a doorway. Thackeray pressed himself against Caitlin and her against the wall. His nose was only a centimetre from hers. He stared deeply into her eyes, which were seemingly untroubled by the threat below. Whatever he saw there brought a smile to his face.
One bike turned into the alley, paused briefly while the engine gunned, and then began to move slowly up. Thackeray dragged Caitlin into the doorway where Harvey cowered. They exchanged a nervous look and then Thackeray nodded to the door. Harvey wrenched at the handle, but just as it came open the light shifted enough to reveal a white cross on a red circle.
'Fuck. Charnel house,' Harvey whispered.
'No choice.' Thackeray propelled him through, then thrust Caitlin in with him and eased the door shut. 'Don't hang around near the door in case he checks inside,' he hissed.
'I can't see anything!' Harvey whined. 'And shit, it reeks!' He coughed. 'I can't breathe! I'm going to choke to death in here!'
Thackeray gagged and pulled his scarf tighter. 'She's not moaning so you can't either, you big fucking girl. We haven't got a choice. Get a move on.'
'Bastard.'
The sound of Harvey shuffling through the dark filtered back to them, and then Thackeray followed suit, holding Caitlin's hand tightly.
'Look, I'm going to use my flint,' Harvey said. 'They won't see the light through the door.'
He struck it three times and then a light flared. The shadows swooped back to reveal a scene so terrible Thackeray and Harvey recoiled, but there was nowhere to avert their eyes. Bodies bearing the unmistakable signs of the plague were stacked against the walls in various stages of decomposition, men, women, young, old. The floor around their boots was puddled with juices.
But that wasn't the worst thing. Several pairs of eyes followed the light, and then the moans started. Some were barely human, a whine on the edge of death, a hum of madness inflicted by the situation. Others whimpered. And a few called out in frail, pitiful voices: 'Help me. Please help me.'
'Shit!' Thackeray said in horror. 'The bastards have dumped some in here while they're still conscious.'
'There's nothing we can do about it.' Harvey tried to sound hard, but he couldn't keep the desperate humanity out of the end of the sentence. 'Bastards,' he said under his breath, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
'What kind of person are you to do something like that?' Thackeray guided Caitlin ahead of him until they reached an area where there were only corpses.
'I don't know how many times I've see this, but it still makes me sick.' Harvey picked his way through the cadavers to the back of the room where the flickering light revealed a door. 'I hope you're right and we are immune.'
'We'd be dead by now if we weren't.' Thackeray glanced back to the area where the barely living still moaned, wondering if there was anything he could do.
'There must be, what?… thousands gone by now…'
'Tens of thousands.'
'Smacker says there's whole areas where they haven't cleared them — Erdington, Bearwood… They're just lying in the streets, what's left of 'em now, in their homes… He said there's like, plagues of rats and clouds of flies as big as your fist, and the stink-'
'All right, I don't need you to paint me a picture. Let's just get out of here.'
They made their way through the door and into the back of the building where there were even more bodies. A section had been set aside where corpses could be prepared for disposal, but neither Thackeray nor Harvey paid any attention to it.
They eventually made their way out through a window on to a flat roof and then a fire escape. The roar of the bikes had now moved down towards Digbeth. They moved through the still city, the smell of corruption never far from their noses. Occasionally they'd glimpse frightened people scavenging amongst the cavernous buildings, masked with scarves or hooded to keep the stink out or in a feeble attempt to stop the spread of infection. A medieval air now lay across a city that had been thriving and modern only months earlier. Thackeray and Harvey had their base in the Mailbox, a once-upmarket shopping mall now reduced by looters to a maze of empty rooms. They lived in the barricaded back offices of a former shoe shop, with dwindling supplies stolen from a supermarket lorry in the early days of the Fall. Their food cache had once been secured in an entire shop — bottled water, trays of cans, sacks of pasta and rice — safe behind a steel security gate that could only be opened by a key Thackeray had taken from a security guard killed in the first rash of riots. Now it filled barely a tenth of that space. They still didn't know what they were going to do when it was all gone.
Once safe inside they relaxed. They had a couple of armchairs, sleeping bags under rickety tents of designer sheets to make it more homely, the food for the day in one corner, a?1500 Arabian rug on the floor, scatter cushions all around and a poster of FHMs cover girls on the wall.
'It might look like a seedy smackhead's squat, but we like to call it home,' Thackeray said, sitting Caitlin down on one of the cushions.
'So what's the deal with the bow and arrows?' Harvey said, nodding towards the weapon that was still strapped across her back.
'I don't know. Maybe she uses it to hunt animals. Nothing like a bit of roast squirrel.' He went to remove the bow, but Caitlin's hand went up unconsciously to block him. 'OK. She wants to keep it on. Might be uncomfortable sleeping in it, but that's her call.'
Harvey threw Thackeray a can of sardines and opened one himself, eating with his fingers. Thackeray took out one sardine steak dripping with thick tomato sauce and offered it to Caitlin. She looked straight past it, past him, so he put it to her mouth, rubbing it gently back and forth on her lower lip. Eventually her tongue flicked out to taste it, then she took a bite, and then took the whole piece into her mouth hungrily. 'I don't know where you came from,' Thackeray said softly, 'but you can't have been walking round this city long in this state.' He fed her another piece of sardine. 'And it looks like it's been a while since you ate. So how did you get here? Couldn't have wandered in from the outside. Getting past all the checkpoints… it was bad enough before the plague. Muzzy in the west isn't letting anybody pass through his turf. Siegler in the east has bolted everything down — and those bastards down south, you wouldn't be in this good a condition if you'd passed through there.' A look of distaste crossed his face.
'You don't really reckon she can hear you?' Harvey peered into Caitlin's blank eyes, then shook his head and returned to his can of sardines.
'It's trauma — hardly surprising in this place. She's probably locked up deep inside, understanding everything I'm saying. A fugue state…'
'You've had too much of a bloody education, you have.' Harvey finished his can and tossed it into a shiny dustbin in the corner. 'I have to ask you, mate — isn't it going to hamper us a bit carting a zombie-bird around? We've had enough close calls as it is.'
'We couldn't just leave her out there, Harvey, for all those other bastards to pick off. How humane would that be?'
'You just fancy her.'
Thackeray didn't answer. Thackeray and Harvey cared for Caitlin for the next week. After the first day she was able to feed herself, silently, laboriously, and she was capable of coping with her other bodily functions once they showed her the toilet. When her period started on the third day, Harvey went out and located a large cardboard box of sanitary towels from the storeroom of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Thackeray slept on the cushions while Caitlin had his sleeping bag, and during the day they gave her plenty of exercise walking around the roof of the Mailbox. Though she didn't realise it, from that vantage point the true state of the city could be seen.
