Read Online Bar None by Tim Lebbon - Free Book Online
Authors: Tim Lebbon
Tags: Science-Fiction
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distance since the plagues. The detail is shocking, humbling, and it hits me all over again that things will never be the same. Things are going to change , Michael said.
The smell here is not too bad. I feel the breeze kissing the nape of my neck, a sign that the prevailing wind is carrying the city away from us. But still a hint of its decay hangs in the air, old rot and new devastation. I try to imagine all those thousands of places abandoned or filled with dead, and the overall image is as it always has been: a place of disease, stink, decay, scavenging animals and perhaps scavenging survivors as well. A place where none of us has any desire at all to go. There are homes in there with the family sitting dead around a laden dining table, one last meal interrupted by death. There are gardens filled with the remains of last year's unpicked fruit and vegetables, greenhouses still sealed and rank with rotten tomatoes, cucumbers, marrows and seedlings. There are bodies in gutters with their faces ripped off by wild dogs. Cinemas and theatres are filled with corpses, melting down together as decay does its work, because in the last days they were using such large public places as temporary morgues. The parks are also filled with the dead, some buried, many laid in piles alongside holes that will never be filled. Excavators sit like silent monsters beside them, perhaps with their drivers still at the controls. Much of the dying happened slowly but right at the end, when panic gave way to utter chaos and a regression to a more animal state, the final annihilation was mercifully fast.
And yet we survived. It's something none of us has been able to explain. I have not thought about it for a while, because I still believe myself to be relatively sane. Perhaps not compared to the older gauge of sanity—I dream, I scream, and I place value on my life in relation to the ales I have drunk and the memories those tastes inspire—but it works for me. We all have our ways to get by.
"It's the future that's important," Jessica says. "Not what we see now, all this old stuff."
"I sat over there once," Jacqueline says quietly. She points over the road and across the river at the expensive waterside apartments. I'm not sure whether she's indicating the spread of fire-gutted buildings, but I don't think it matters. "Sat on a balcony while Roger made gin martini cocktails. We watched boys swimming in the river, and later some adults went down there and stripped to swim. I was amazed at how unabashed they were. Naked, in front of everyone else. Roger smiled at me and touched the back of my neck." She touches herself there hesitantly, as though afraid that her fingers will feel someone else.
"We don't need to go across there," Cordell says. "The bridge is clear apart from a bike, but we don't need to go across there. We go around. Everywhere like this, we go around, until we reach Cornwall."
I glance at the road bridge and make out the shape of an abandoned bicycle straddling the white line at its highest point. I wonder where its rider had gone all those months ago. We can't see the actual surface of the river from here.
"I agree," I say. "There's nothing for us there."
"That's history," the Irishman says. And I shiver, because for an instant I'm certain he is right. If we try to cross the bridge and enter the dead town, we will find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Because right now we're looking at the past, and soon, as spring progresses and summer looms, nature will begin to look forward. Lawns will go wild, plant pots will seed themselves farther away, gardens will become unkempt and start probing limbs and roots beneath patios, toward walls and through the gaps of open windows.
"I remember it differently," I say.
"Let's go." Jacqueline climbs into her Range Rover and starts the engine. The noise brings us all around, and as I mount the motorbike and kick it to life the town seems to fade from my vision, covered with a haze from
The smell here is not too bad. I feel the breeze kissing the nape of my neck, a sign that the prevailing wind is carrying the city away from us. But still a hint of its decay hangs in the air, old rot and new devastation. I try to imagine all those thousands of places abandoned or filled with dead, and the overall image is as it always has been: a place of disease, stink, decay, scavenging animals and perhaps scavenging survivors as well. A place where none of us has any desire at all to go. There are homes in there with the family sitting dead around a laden dining table, one last meal interrupted by death. There are gardens filled with the remains of last year's unpicked fruit and vegetables, greenhouses still sealed and rank with rotten tomatoes, cucumbers, marrows and seedlings. There are bodies in gutters with their faces ripped off by wild dogs. Cinemas and theatres are filled with corpses, melting down together as decay does its work, because in the last days they were using such large public places as temporary morgues. The parks are also filled with the dead, some buried, many laid in piles alongside holes that will never be filled. Excavators sit like silent monsters beside them, perhaps with their drivers still at the controls. Much of the dying happened slowly but right at the end, when panic gave way to utter chaos and a regression to a more animal state, the final annihilation was mercifully fast.
And yet we survived. It's something none of us has been able to explain. I have not thought about it for a while, because I still believe myself to be relatively sane. Perhaps not compared to the older gauge of sanity—I dream, I scream, and I place value on my life in relation to the ales I have drunk and the memories those tastes inspire—but it works for me. We all have our ways to get by.
"It's the future that's important," Jessica says. "Not what we see now, all this old stuff."
"I sat over there once," Jacqueline says quietly. She points over the road and across the river at the expensive waterside apartments. I'm not sure whether she's indicating the spread of fire-gutted buildings, but I don't think it matters. "Sat on a balcony while Roger made gin martini cocktails. We watched boys swimming in the river, and later some adults went down there and stripped to swim. I was amazed at how unabashed they were. Naked, in front of everyone else. Roger smiled at me and touched the back of my neck." She touches herself there hesitantly, as though afraid that her fingers will feel someone else.
"We don't need to go across there," Cordell says. "The bridge is clear apart from a bike, but we don't need to go across there. We go around. Everywhere like this, we go around, until we reach Cornwall."
I glance at the road bridge and make out the shape of an abandoned bicycle straddling the white line at its highest point. I wonder where its rider had gone all those months ago. We can't see the actual surface of the river from here.
"I agree," I say. "There's nothing for us there."
"That's history," the Irishman says. And I shiver, because for an instant I'm certain he is right. If we try to cross the bridge and enter the dead town, we will find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Because right now we're looking at the past, and soon, as spring progresses and summer looms, nature will begin to look forward. Lawns will go wild, plant pots will seed themselves farther away, gardens will become unkempt and start probing limbs and roots beneath patios, toward walls and through the gaps of open windows.
"I remember it differently," I say.
"Let's go." Jacqueline climbs into her Range Rover and starts the engine. The noise brings us all around, and as I mount the motorbike and kick it to life the town seems to fade from my vision, covered with a haze from
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