Falling Into Heaven Read online

  Thomas would always try to imagine what the lives of his passengers were like when they were away from the artificial world in which he existed. When they ventured back into the real world did they continue to smile and point at things they saw as they flashed past them as they did on the train ride? Or did they realise that everything was acceptable in the outside world, everything was different?

  The group of four held his attention as they approached the ticket kiosk. The girls were dressed in denim shorts and pastel cotton tops, their attention flitting and impatient, wandering restlessly over the vintage signs and framed posters from an age they would never know. The boys were in jeans, and darker shirts; sunglasses casually pushed on tops of heads, or dangling loosely from a top pocket. They didn’t so much walk as saunter, in the aggressively defiant way that typified their apparently stated superiority over Thomas. Their youth only served as a reminder of how many wasted years he had spent, and the fewer remaining ones he would fritter away.

  The blonde boy, hair cropped short, muscles rippling from the bulk of the neck to the thickset ankles, advanced to order the tickets. His feet were surprisingly small, almost dainty, and left the impression that when walking on them the rather heavy body would have to lean carefully to maintain balance.

  ‘Four,’ he said. Adding quietly, seemingly guiltily, ‘Please.’

  Thomas noticed that he didn’t once look him in the eyes as they transacted.

  One of the two girls, conversely, seemed to develop a fascination with Thomas. She looked directly at him straight away, engaging eye contact and tempting with a slow smile, more lips than whole face. Her eyes were as blue as the hopes of a new morning.

  ‘I wasn’t going to take her out again today,’ Thomas said.

  The boy bristled with an over eager anger. He had seen the girl’s look. ‘Eh? We’re customers, you can’t treat us like that.’

  Thomas was immediately defensive, apologetic. He considered the options and found only one. ‘All right then, but you’ll have to give me a few minutes.’

  It would mean bringing the engine into the sheds with the best of the light gone and he hated to miss the first caress of nightfall; but he couldn’t see any alternative.

  His earliest memories of his father involved domestic routines that seemed to be performed with reluctance and with a certain amount of embarrassment. As he became older and was able to judge his father’s character with some objectivity Thomas realised he was the kind of man that believes each sex has it’s role within the upbringing of a child and is uncomfortable when asked to perform outside that arena; in acting as mother figure he was poor at ad libbing. He knew what he had to do – washing, ironing, cleaning and so forth but never relaxed into the routine that was inevitable. Each week seemed to be performed with a lack of physical energy as though there was belief that this would be the last week this task was thrust upon him.

  Quite young, possibly at the age of five, Thomas could recall the reference to his mother’s death. There were always stories at bedtime, invariably involving a family grouping of some kind; generally a mother even in the simplest of fairy tales. Resentful comments began to litter the readings until Thomas learned to feign sleep as an escape.

  ‘When’s the train?’

  Thomas looked up from the ticket register. It was the blue-eyed girl. Her body was pressed artlessly against the smeared glass of the booth, a soft casual breast partially flattened against it. Thomas imagined the breast without the glass barrier, conjured images of it near to him.

  They were alone and she was partially naked. Her breast was buzzing like a bee on his tongue, the honey nipple sweet to taste. Her energy stung him, and he took the initiative, draining life from her, suckling on her nectar, the pollen goodness forgiving his need as it fed his desire. They had all the time they needed, it was day, it was bright. Then he opened his eyes to look at her and the treacherous darkness had stolen upon him and left him alone.

  Looking at his watch, and confirming accuracy with the clock on the wall behind he said, ‘It looks like you’re the only passengers this trip. Give me five minutes.’

  ‘You can have all the time you want.’

  Thomas stared at her back as she re-joined the others, all laughing at their youth and freedom. He had spent a lifetime misinterpreting what people said to him, looking for meanings that didn’t exist, hoping for deeper connections than ever materialised.

  As he grew up, and the relationship with his father became more than son totally reliant upon father, he began to appreciate the damage he had done. There was a barrier erected as soon as he was born. The death of mother, wife, became the death of two people, a spilt that carved memory in half. Thomas felt as if he had only ownership of half a past, the remaining pieces jealously shuffled away from him at every opportunity, as each year his sense of loss grew. Grew, and was nurtured by a father who became increasingly selfish in his need to remind Thomas of his legacy; a legacy that thrashed and wailed within him in mute denial.

  An early teenage memory involved his first date with a girl from school. Uncertain what to do, say, how to behave or react, he did a natural thing and asked his father. Remarkably his father refrained from sarcastic comment and sat his son down for an earnest talk. His advice seemed, even to a naïve Thomas, to involve more physical contact than Thomas thought would be expected, and more emphasis on remarking on the girl’s body than he would have thought comfortable. When the evening came Thomas had resolved to tone down the way he approached her, but nervous and unclear in her company he resorted to some of the advice given by his father. He never saw the girl outside school again; and worse, she let everyone know what had happened.

  The platform was dry and dusty under the shadowing heat of the early evening sun. The young people slouched on the wooden benches, waiting listlessly for the chance to board the train. Thomas stoked the engine, ensured everything was how it should be. As he glanced back at the increasingly noisy group he found the girl staring at him again, stopping only when the muscled blonde pulled her roughly to his side, replacing her gentle stare with his own, dangerously different one.

  Part of his procedure was to walk through each carriage, there were only four, to check each was clean and ready. He was doing this, two done and the third underway, when he became aware of the attention focussed on him. Each of the windows of the carriage was filled with the faces, head and shoulders, of the two boys and two girls. They were staring at him wordlessly; arrogantly pressing a threat against the glass of the window much as the girl had pressed her breast.

  ‘Won’t be long…’ he started to say, but they opened the doors anyway, in almost perfect synchronisation, and collectively entered the carriage.

  Involuntarily Thomas stepped back, but they did nothing more sinister than smile at him and sit down. They slumped down, feet immediately on the seats in front, adding to a faded ambience dulled by years of use and ineffective cleaning.

  ‘Don’t be long…’ Thomas wasn’t sure which of them spoke but the sentiment came from all of them.

  He moved as quickly as he could through the last carriage and busied himself in getting the train ready for departure. It was later now than he had anticipated; dusk would be trailing across the tracks, risking death beneath the wheels. He didn’t want to share the darkness, not with these people, nor with anyone.

  As the train pulled slowly out of the sleeping station he glanced back and saw all four heads peering out of four windows staring at him. He turned back to the inside of the engine, watching the track ahead, but his attention was diverted and held by the four sets of eyes.

  Even when the light had been switched off again and the small room was encased in full darkness Thomas could still see the swinging legs of his father. The chair upturned in the corner where it had been kicked, the newly purchased rope frayed at the end where it had been cut to length. The equally frayed cuffs of his father’s trousers and the incongruously neatly clipped toenails. Thomas sat on the floor
of the darkened room for what seemed like hours, humming quietly in the silence, explaining to his father that it wasn’t his fault; none of it was.

  They pulled the emergency cord after about half an hour. The train slowed to pass over the river bridge, moved away around the bend and they pulled the cord. Thomas had no choice; he had to respond by applying the brakes and bringing the train to a halt.

  Dusk was already dominant as he waited, knowing they would come for him. He scanned the surrounding fields as best he could, capturing the scampering of a rabbit near some trees, the steady movement of a herd of red flanked cows moving towards the gate.

  There are, initially, three levels of pain.

  The first came in the shape of the second girl, who pulled him from the cabin of the engine and scratched and kicked him to the ground. Second level of entry was the second boy whose fists claimed greater powers of resistance and who left him squirming in the dust. The blonde boy with the jealous eyes was the third level, with spiteful kicks aimed at delicate parts of the body.

  Left writhing in agony as they walked away across the fields, towards the distant road where escape would already be waiting for them.

  Thomas Linden had lived with pain of the fourth level, but he had never understood or begun to appreciate it; his lesson had begun.

  The blue-eyed girl was the exquisite pain he had circumnavigated all his life. She gave birth to his pain, and simultaneously killed it. She left him panting for more in the womb warm blackness of enfolding night, as she raised his thresholds higher and wider. She opened to him and her lustful fury was resonant as she closed his expectancy forever. Like all levels of pain she blurred in time, minutes, hours, and like most lovers she left him to discover if he had found the true level.

  Darkness licked all around as he surfaced onto a lake of intense agony. Blackness laid waiting in pools of hopeless ecstasy, dangerously dark. Night had subtly caressed him for so many moments now, with its strident tones of affection, that he was uncertain if he was awake or still unconscious.

  The dark night that he had so willingly embraced all his life was now an impostor. It offered no solace; it tried only to leech the remaining warmth from his body, to further sting the cuts and bruises.

  The fourth level had finally found him and the preceding pains had left him too exposed for its majesty. He lay in the cold dust, the cooling engine impotent behind him. Four of the carriage doors were open in defiant victory, and, as the final layer of blackness enveloped him, he closed his eyes, welcoming the night as always; except this time he would have nowhere to hide within it. This time he was a part of the darkness; and perhaps he always had been.

  SALVATION

  Maguire arranged the shotgun cartridges on the dining table and counted them again. Ten, plus the one he kept in a leather pouch hung around his neck. The one in the pouch he was saving – it was not to be used against them. It was his last resort, his final solution. From observing what happened when he had shot the others he’d worked out that the only way to finally finish them off was a headshot. Anywhere else on the body and the bastards just kept getting up and coming after him.

  If the worst happened, and he was sure that eventually it would, then he would simply load his final cartridge into the shotgun, place the barrel at his neck and pull the trigger. It should take his head clean off and stop him becoming like them.

  But that was a few days off yet. There was still a chance he could get away. There was still a faint hope.

  Leaving the cartridges on the table he went across to the window and looked out. The sun was starting to sink in the sky, the sunset a vibrant wash of orange and cerise, making the clouds look as though they were on fire. The quality of the light was lambent, painting the tops of the surrounding trees with gold, making them shimmer in the early evening breeze.

  It all looked so peaceful, so serene, that Maguire had to force himself back to the ugly reality of his life. His eyes followed the line of the electrified fence surrounding his farm. There were small groups of them dotted every hundred yards or so along the perimeter. Some of them he recognised, some he didn’t. Some were familiar faces to him; Eric Stapleton, the owner of the village shop, Jean Luff who ran the post office, Eddie Graves, the local bad boy, a tearaway whose petty crimes had seen him in trouble on many occasions with Tony Fisher, the village policeman. Fisher was there too, standing just beyond the fence with the O’Sullivan brothers who owned the neighbouring farm.

  They stood there day after day, keeping up the vigil, kept at bay by the static hum of the fence, but dedicated and relentless, waiting for him. Sometimes Maguire would become exasperated with them and loose off a shot from the gun, but those incidents were becoming less frequent as the supply of ammunition dwindled.

  Did they really expect him to just go out there and surrender himself to them? No, not even he believed that. The sickness had robbed them of the ability for cogent thought. They were dead, empty husks in which the life force had been snuffed out, but reanimated as walking corpses. They could not reason, could not establish a rational thought pattern. They were just reacting to stimulus, much like plants or vegetables.

  He was just the stimulus they were reacting to at the moment.

  At least that was what he told himself. It certainly made it easier for him when he was forced to deal with them. Blowing off the head of someone you once considered your friend is a traumatic experience, but one he’d suffered on countless occasions. The thought that they were just mindless automatons assuaged the guilt and made it possible to continue. For a moment, when he blasted his wife, Jenny, he had been sure there was something in her eyes, some spark of acknowledgement of what he was about to do, but then she’d closed her eyes, and his scream of anguish drowned out the sound of the gun. And when it was all over he’d hugged her headless body close to him for several hours, telling her and himself over and over again that he really had no choice. His existence after that seemed very long, the days relentless, and the nights endless.

  He pushed himself away from the window and went into the anteroom to check the generator. The room was dusty and cold. It was once used as a storeroom for his wife’s jams and chutneys. She had quite a reputation for her preserves and pickles, so much so that it became quite a lucrative side-line, helping the farm’s economy, and balancing out some of the losses caused by the EU farming policy.

  There were still all manner of jars on the shelves, but it was the generator and the hundred litre containers of fuel to run it that occupied most of the space in the room. He topped up the generator’s fuel tank and checked the motor. Once he was satisfied everything was in order he went back to the kitchen to prepare himself some dinner.

  He’d had to get used to eating alone after Jenny’s death. For the first few weeks it was terribly hard. Several times he cooked a meal and discovered he’d laid two places at the table and cooked twice the amount he needed. Those evenings ended with him drinking himself into a drunken unconsciousness.

  Later, when the global ramifications of the sickness became fully known – before the cessation of all media – and the attacks on the healthy by, what the newspapers and television had christened the undead, were becoming commonplace, he forced himself to eat in order to keep up his strength. Now, after three months without Jenny, and with the world’s population all but destroyed, he was beginning to wonder if it was all worth it.

  As he chewed the beef he’d salted and preserved a month ago, he fingered the pouch around his neck. It would be so easy now to kill himself. There was very little in the world worth living for. The things he’d once thought important, the tiny hopes and fears he’d considered part of his character, were all meaningless. The relentless terror of each day, of each night, had squeezed any semblance of normality he’d once known. What was now normal was just to breathe each breath and be pleased to have the chance to breathe another.

  He remembered the first time he realised that Jenny was going down with the sickness. She was sun
bathing in the garden and came in to pour herself a glass of lemonade. They were both aware of the seriousness of the sickness that was sweeping its way across the globe – the media had been filled with little else for the previous fortnight – but despite the heavily reported facts of whole towns and cities being wiped out by the sickness, there prevailed an almost mocking scepticism about it that, to a certain extent, he and Jenny had bought into. And so when she reached down in front of him to get some ice out of the freezer and he saw the small grey patch of skin – no more than the size of a penny – on her shoulder, he nearly laughed. It was only when he mentioned it to her and saw a look of terror flare in her eyes that the enormity of it sunk in.

  That evening they both got very drunk, made love with a passion that had been lacking in their marriage for years, held each other and cried.

  The progress of the sickness was alarmingly fast. Within twenty-four hours Jenny developed a fever. Within forty-eight the grey patch had spread across her entire back, spread round to touch her breasts and was creeping up her neck under her hair-line.

  Twenty-four hours after that she died at his hands as he blasted her in the neck with the shotgun.

  He finished his meal and dropped his plate in the sink to join the others that were growing mould there. There was no mains water to wash dishes. His entire water supply was kept in plastic containers in the spare bedroom. He could not waste that on washing either the dishes or himself. If he stank it was too bad. He doubted the undead would bother too much about the smell as they disembowelled him, and feasted on his entrails.

  The reports of the cannibalistic attacks was muted at first – the media instructed by their governments to hold back from reporting the widespread nature of the incidents – but gradually the attacks became too frequent and too violent to contain. And very shortly after that there was nobody left to report them – no newspapers being printed, and no television and radio being broadcast. The world died, with a speed that took everyone by surprise. Those who were left, those immune to the sickness, were so few it was only a matter of time before the undead became the only inhabitants of a tired and ailing planet.