PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

Right now:

They were waiting for her on Dundooan Road.

Sally turned the corner and there they were—an older woman and a young boy, who looked very much alike. They were obviously mother and son. Neither of them noticed Sally, they simply stared straight ahead with glazed eyes.

The mother was short and thickset, wearing a woollen hat, a long raincoat and carrying an old cloth shopping bag. The son was about twelve years old, skinny and pale with black hair. He wore a hoodie, jeans and trainers.

There was no expression on their faces, their jaws were slack and their mouths hung open. The son was standing a few steps behind his mother, his right arm swung backwards and forwards in a shallow arc. The mother was swaying slightly, as if the shopping bag was about to overbalance her. There was nothing going on behind their eyes, no mental faculties of any sort. They were completely soulless, everyone in Dunballan was. Everyone except for Sally.

She walked over to the mother and son to get a closer look at them. The mother’s breathing was irregular and sounded like dried peas rattling in a box. Her eyes were cloudy and opalescent, so were the son’s. Sally hadn’t seen that before.

They must have been outside on the night it happened, the night Sally hated to think about, when everyone in Dunballan changed. Most people had been in doors when it occurred, but Sally occasionally came across a few unlucky ones who were caught in the street.

Dundooan Road was on the outskirts of Dunballan, so she’d only just gotten to it. This meant the mother and son had been out in the open for nearly eight days and were suffering the effects of exposure and dehydration. The first thing Sally had to do was get them in doors.

“Come on you,” Sally said. She put her hands on the mother’s shoulder and began to turn her. The people she found in this condition were usually very compliant and though they didn’t have any consciousness, they would walk or move wherever Sally guided them.

The mother was ice cold, like a corpse. She might not live much longer. She began to turn, took one step, faltered and pitched forward colliding with Sally. She was much heavier than she looked. Sally’s legs went from under her and she fell onto her back. The mother crashed down on top of her.

A sharp pain shot through Sally’s shoulder blades as she hit the pavement and the breath was knocked out of her. The mother’s forehead smashed into Sally’s cheek, making her wince and cry out. She could smell the woman’s breath, sour and rank like rotted flesh. It rattled in her throat as she took one last painful breath, shuddered and went limp.

As the mother’s muscles relaxed and lost all their tension, her body became heavier, pinning Sally to the ground. Sally tried to push her off, but she was too limp, too much of a dead weight to move. She was crushing Sally’s chest, and Sally found it hard to catch her breath.

“Get off me,” she shouted at the corpse, as though that would help. She didn’t want to be trapped outside with a dead woman on top of her. She’d hardly slept, hardly eaten, and she didn’t have the energy to shove it off.

Sally’s only hope was to wriggle out from underneath the dead mother. So, she rocked herself backwards and forwards, scraping her elbows and her backside, but managed to get her left arm and leg out from under the corpse. This gave her enough purchase to use the weight of the body to her benefit, pushing against it with her left arm while she pulled her right arm free and manoeuvred her right leg out from under it.

Sally got to her feet, sore and out of breath, and walked over to the boy. He hadn’t moved or changed his position one bit. He was still staring straight ahead and swinging his arm. She touched his cheek and unlike his stone cold mother, he seemed to have a temperature. He probably wouldn’t last much longer himself, but she still had to get him inside. She would deal with the mother’s corpse later, when she had time.

“Come with me,” she said and took hold of the boy’s hand. He didn’t show any signs that he’d heard her, or even knew she was there, but he walked after her without any resistance. Sally led him to the door of the nearest cottage. As she reached for the handle, she felt something brush the back of her leg.

She looked behind her and saw a small black cat at her feet. Its fur was matted and its bones were beginning to show under its coat, but Sally couldn’t help but feel a tiny moment of excitement. Could the cat have wandered in from outside Dunballan? Might there be one other fully conscious being here apart from her?

She bent down and picked up the cat, stroking it as she lifted it up and looked into its eyes. It went limp in her hands, all the life drained from its muscles. It had no more awareness than the mother or her son. Neither did it have a soul.

Sally scolded herself for getting her hopes up. There wasn’t a single living thing in Dunballan with a soul, even the birds and the animals were affected. Sally knew that she was just being foolish. She put the cat back on the ground. It swayed but remained on its feet, then carried on along the cracked paving stones, moving from pure muscle memory. In a few days it would probably be dead.

Sally felt a huge pang of guilt about all the pets and other animals she was allowing to starve. She just didn’t have time to feed them all and most didn’t eat even when she put food down for them. They just stared straight ahead, panting, but showing no other signs of life.

Sally tried the door of the cottage and was surprised to find it was locked. This was unusual for Dunballan. It was a remote town and people from outside hardly ever visited, everyone knew their neighbours’ business and, as a consequence, very few people locked their doors.

Sally examined the front door, which had a single Yale lock but no mortise. She’d learned a lot about locks in the last eight days, especially how to break into the few that were locked. The Yale lock was over twenty years old, so opening it wasn’t an issue.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a credit card. She worked the card between the frame and the door, and then slid it into the lock mechanism and released the latch.

The door swung open and a familiar stench wafted out from the hallway. It was in every house she entered—unwashed bodies, stale air and human waste. A sad, pitiable smell that Sally would never get used to, a constant reminder of how desperate things had become.

Sally led the boy down the hall and opened the first door on her left, which led into the living room. There was one other person in the room—a short, thin lady in her mid-fifties sitting in an armchair, gazing into space, her jaw hanging slack. The roots were showing in her dyed brunette hair and there were flakes of dandruff on the shoulders of her cardigan. She didn’t pay Sally any attention. Her only movements were the rise and fall of her chest and the occasional slow blink.

The boy allowed himself to be brought into the room and Sally got him to lie down, on the sofa, and then she covered him with a blanket she found. He offered no resistance. His cloudy eyes simply gazed into the distance at nothing at all. He was burning up. Sally needed to find more blankets and get some water into him.

The television was still on, tuned to a shopping channel. The presenter was extolling the virtues of incontinence pants. Sally looked at the yellow and brown stains that spilled out from underneath the woman and thought this ironic. The woman had been in the same position for the last eight days, but her bowels hadn’t stopped working. Sally would clean her up, as soon as she’d tended to the boy, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

She found the kitchen at the back of the house. A tall man, with broad shoulders and wavy ginger hair, greying at the temples, stood at the counter next to the sink. He seemed familiar to Sally, but she wasn’t sure where she’d seen him before.

He was staring at the wall in front of him, rocking gently from foot to foot. He paid no attention to her, his eyes were glassy and his expression vacant. He was holding his left hand out in front of him, the fingers bunched into a fist. It looked like there was something in them.

On the counter in front of him were mugs, a packet of tea bags and a bottle of rancid milk. He must have been making a cuppa when it hit, and he hadn’t left that position since. There was a large wet stain around the crotch of his grey flannel trousers and a big brown lump bulged at the back. Some of it had spilled over the top of his waistband and stained his shirt. Another loose pile had found its way down his trouser leg and onto the floor. His heel caught it every time he rocked, making a tiny squelch.

Sally wrinkled her nose. She took one of the mugs from the counter, blew the dust out of it and filled it with water from the sink. She held the mug up to the man’s cracked lips, and he swallowed the water automatically without showing any other sign of consciousness. Sally was aware that she should be helping the boy first, but she was here in the kitchen and the boy might not last much longer. The man had a better chance of survival.

She decided to check the cupboards to see if there were any tins, or packets of soup she could heat to feed them. Soup was the best thing because they were less likely to choke on it. She didn’t find any tins or packets, so she checked the fridge. It was full of raw meat that was starting to spoil. Sally would have to check for soup in the neighbouring houses and come back to feed them later.

She pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down. A wave of exhaustion washed over at the thought of traipsing backwards and forwards between houses with soup. She was so tired she could feel it in her bones. She cradled her head in her hands and sobbed with exhaustion.

She’d visited fourteen houses already today, and she’d hardly had anything to eat herself. She hadn’t slept more than two or three hours a night in over a week. She wasn’t certain how much longer she could keep this up. Every living creature in Dunballan needed her care, they were all empty vessels left idling. If Sally didn’t look after them, they would keel over and die like the mother in the street.

Fairly soon she would have to start making difficult decisions about who lived and who didn’t. Dunballan was a small town, but there were still over two thousand people living there, if you could call what they did living. Sally couldn’t feed all of them, or clean up after each of them, there simply wasn’t time, and she didn’t have the physical energy to care for them all. Her life was already one long round of drudgery, breaking into their homes, searching their larders for food.

Then there were the bodies she had to pull from crashed cars, and the corpses that had fallen from ladders, or scaffolding. They had to be disposed of and there was never enough time to do that, not if she wanted to keep all the others alive.

As the wave of despondency and helplessness threatened to overwhelm her, she felt new emotions growing in her chest—guilt and recrimination. It was a familiar cycle, one she went through at least once a day. This was her job, nobody else could deal with this. She couldn’t get the authorities in, they wouldn’t believe her if she told them what had really happened.

This was her burden and hers alone. She had to step up and cope with the aftermath as best she could.

Sally got to her feet, trying to ignore the knot of pain between her shoulder blades and the bruises she got from the fall. She went back to the sink to get some water for the boy. As she was running the water, the man caught her eye again. She was curious about what he held in his left hand. She reached over to him and tried to open his hand, but the man resisted her. This wasn’t normal. They usually did whatever she told them to.

His hand was rough and calloused but surprisingly warm. Touching it brought back a sudden memory and she knew exactly who he was, or who he’d once been. He was the local butcher. Sally had been in his shop only eight days ago, when Dunballan had been an entirely different place.

If Sally hadn’t gone into his shop, if she hadn’t carried out her mad escapade, then nothing would be like it was now.