The Last Days Read online

  The Last Days

  Written by Andy Dickenson

  Edited by Laura Atkins

  Illustrations by Sarah Evans

  Find us on:

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TLDbyAD

  Twitter: @TheLastDays_AD

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.thelastdays-online.co.uk

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Notes from the Author:

  More thank yous:

  “In the Last Days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains. It will be raised above the hills and the peoples will stream to it.

  “Many nations will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord’.” Isaiah 2:2

  The Last Days and all characters thereof are copyright © Andy Dickenson 2012

  Chapter One

  A LOT had changed since the end of the world. Not all of it bad, Klaus Gravenstein thought, as his snowboard snaked across Ben Nevis.

  For one thing, Scotland was getting far more snow nowadays and the slopes were a lot less crowded. Klaus felt the soft powder give way beneath him as he darted around a birch tree; the snowboard, whipping up sheaths of white slush, painting elegant curves into the piste.

  Secondly, after witnessing the almost entire annihilation of all human life, he had no fear of death. Quite the opposite in fact.

  Klaus bounced lightly on the board and sniffed the air as the slope bottomed out. He was alone amid a white wonderland, mere tips of bracken blowing in the breeze. He pulled his knees to his chest and jumped across to another run, looming from the frozen ocean. Twisting his body, he howled with delight before landing heavily, the breath momentarily torn from his lungs.

  Beneath the woollen scarf laced with hoar frost, Klaus Gravenstein grinned and pulled the fur of his new Parka tighter around his neck. This was the life: new climate, new coat, new world. Klaus loved new things.

  “Closer,” the Voice cooed. “We’re getting closer. Not far now.”

  Klaus fingered his beard as it poked from beneath the anorak. How long had it been? He marked the days of his journey only by the tight lines of emptiness spreading across his belly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything other than nuts or stale chocolate. His every muscle, every cell, longed to be fed.

  I must find this place soon, he thought. And when I get there they will prepare a feast for me. A great feast.

  But, as he skidded along a bluff, a cramp grabbed his stomach and squeezed. Klaus snapped his back foot down on the snowboard. It groaned and juddered sickeningly, swinging him out of the loop.

  The Voice in his head laughed as he crouched lower to steady himself. Klaus felt the rush of air through his jeans as his route straightened before he kicked back to come around in another aching turn.

  The board fought against him and flipped back. Before he could readjust his bodyweight, Klaus Gravenstein fell headlong into the snow.

  Instinctively, he threw out an arm to support himself only to feel it crack as his weight carried him over. Tumbling, he screamed, his ankles wrenched from the board as the clippings tore, sending it spinning into the air.

  Klaus pitched and spilled, his legs floundering as he was tossed faster and faster down the mountainside. He caught jumbled glimpses of ice, limbs and sky, before finally mustering the courage to stretch out his right hand and grasp at a clump of heather.

  His body lurched violently out of the spin, slamming against the side of the cliff, his legs hanging helpless and heavy, the roots of the plant snapping as he slid further over the edge. He watched the blades slipping through his grasp. There was no way of judging the drop below. His fate, he thought, was out of his hands as he plunged through frozen white air.

  “Typical.” The Voice chuckled. “For countless years people have travelled here, battling their way through the unforgiving peaks of the Scottish Highlands.”

  Crash!

  “That’s what the legends say. Let’s hope they weren’t all as useless as you, you great German oaf.”

  Klaus shook ice from his hair. He had fallen forty feet only to land in a snowdrift so deep he’d sunk another five. His broken arm sat contorted on his lap, shards of bone an inch above his left wrist catching on the lining of his jacket. The rest of his body grumbled but was generally unscathed. The snowboard was nowhere to be seen.

  “Can’t you please be careful?” the Voice persisted, “You know I wouldn’t mind but you are rather important to me, and how am I going to do this job without you?”

  How indeed? Klaus wondered as he dragged himself up to his full statuesque height. He began clawing his way to the surface, the snow melting through his clothes, slicing into his beard. Blood oozed from his arm and left a trail of scarlet behind him.

  Klaus stared up at the precipice he had fallen from and felt a pang of relief that the pack with all the climbing gear he’d stolen was still attached to his back. His gaze then returned to his crippled arm, his glove quickly filling with warm blood as he tramped over to the crag’s face.

  Scanning the rocks and rubble, he soon found what he was looking for. Bending down, Klaus wedged his left hand into a tight gap between two boulders. He gripped the stone with his right and arched his back, staring at the brittle bend where the radius had broken, the blood pumping. He pulled.

  Birds, sheltering in snow-capped pines, flew from their perches as his screams reached them. A peregrine falcon remained alone on a swinging branch, picking at a morsel of carrion, its eyes trained on the strange figure stumbling about in agony, his bloody forearm now realigned. “Sheisser! Sheisser! SHEISSER!”

  Raging, Klaus taped some adhesive stitches over the wound and fumbled about for a stick to form a splint. He then took an ice pick from the backpack and began to climb.

  The tools, like his clothes, had been easy to find. What could be simpler than burgling a deserted department store? His mind swam back to the warmth of the Range Rover he’d been forced to abandon on the outskirts of Inverness. Such vehicles were as common as the skeletal bodies usually found within them, but fuel was becoming harder to locate. Siphoning petrol from pumps across Europe used to be as easy as stealing the cars in the first place. But in Scotland they’d been bled dry.

  “The last survivors of a broken world - the faithful and the helpless,” the Voice, his constant companion, continued to taunt him. “Many have followed these steps.”

  “And like sheep we join them, yes?” Grudgingly, Klaus pulled himself closer to the top of the ridge.

  “We could always tur
n back?” the Voice insisted.

  “Sure,” Klaus countered. “Like we have a choice.”

  The cold was setting into his frame, his new jeans a damp curse that would coat him in ice and leave him to freeze. His left hand grabbed for a handhold and Klaus gasped as pain shot like molten lava down the length of his broken arm.

  “Thousands have come this way, watching time in frozen moments. Feeling eternities pass in blind emptiness,” the Voice carried on musing. “Across the desert of a new Ice Age.”

  “Easy for you to be so melodramatic,” Klaus snorted. “You’re not the one freezing your tail off.”

  Hours later he staggered onto another pass. The landscape that earlier seemed so serene now concealed him in a cruel storm. Klaus used his right arm to shield his face and stumbled forwards, the snow biting at his legs with every step.

  “Keep going, you great lump,” the Voice said, its insolence like a blanket of calm.

  Klaus had long ago lost track of his age, though he believed he was somewhere in his thirties. The Voice, however, had the uncanny knack of making him feel like a child.

  “Du bist mir ein feiner freund!” Klaus yelled, resuming his native tongue.

  “Come on you dog, you’re tougher than this,” the Voice chided. “After all, we’re meant to be assassins, aren’t we?”

  But Klaus’s mind was as lost in the blizzard as his feet, digging trenches through waist-deep contours of ice. He stared into the white sky, willing it to darken, before spying an Aspen grove at the top of the valley. He aimed his numb frame at the trees and climbed, the ground crackling beneath him.

  Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch.

  The poplars reminded him loosely of his Bavarian home. He gagged at the memory. What the forest had done to him. His nostrils flared.

  “Careful,” warned the Voice. “They’ll be watching us soon.”

  But the fresh scent of the trees, many of them grounded, was irresistible. Klaus stepped through the wreckage of fallen branches looking like so much twisted metal. His thoughts turned to his trek through the Channel Tunnel - the battered trains and cars that littered the concrete tomb of the undersea kingdom. The place where the Voice had found him. A shadow lying among corpses. A parasite looking for the perfect host.

  Klaus watched red squirrels leap between tree trunks. Dimly, he imagined sinking his teeth into one and ripping raw flesh from its scrawny frame.

  “Quit dreaming of your stomach,” the Voice demanded. “We’ve got a job to do, remember?”

  Klaus vaguely recalled something about work and drunkenly checked the lining of his jacket to make sure his expenses were secure.

  “You know, wolves used to infest such forests as these,” the Voice said wistfully.

  “Until man came along,” Klaus snorted back.

  “And now that man has ended, the wolves will rise again,” the Voice agreed. “But first the land must be purged. You can smell it can’t you, the pollution?”

  “Pollution?” Klaus sighed, “I thought we were done with all that?”

  “No, no you fool. It’s not the stench of oil slicks and exhaust fumes that pollutes this land. No, it’s murder.”

  But Klaus was too drowsy to reply, his head swimming with the change in altitude. He tripped over something solid beneath the snow, and sunk to the ground like a chest sinking to the ocean floor.

  ………...

  “Sector 1218. Run programme.”

  The young girl’s soothing voice echoed within the machine, instantaneously transformed into zeros and ones as processors whizzed to meet it. Neon’s companions shifted reassuringly at her side. She smiled, the lights of countless monitors bathing her wide brow in a faint blue glow.

  Even now, they still come, she thought.

  Her big magenta eyes stared hopefully at the screens, and yet she groped involuntarily for Brian, her loyal teddy bear.

  ………...

  The hairs within Klaus Gravenstein’s nostrils twitched and stiffened, kindling his dreams with a feverish start. His stomach lurched and Klaus gasped at dry, dead air.

  Scrambling to his knees, he slipped the heavy pack from his back and pulled the ski mask from his puffy eyes. In his delirium he could have walked in circles for miles and yet Klaus stared, his bruised lips parting breathlessly. Thousands of graves, a ramshackle mass of wooden crosses, surrounded him. They climbed hills and toppled over each other’s shadows, strewn across the white valley.

  An electric spark crackled in the air to his left and a TV screen jumped into life.

  “Hey there! My name’s Jason and welcome to my Magic Kingdom! Yes, I’ll be your King and host during your stay in our fair city. Just think of me as Henry VIII with a better line in mother-in-law jokes...”

  The old fashioned set stood within an enormous bell jar, snow rising to kiss its frosted glass. Klaus’s hands met the curved window and were warmed at the touch, yet there seemed to be no condensation inside the vessel. Instead a cluster of glowing crystals sat on top of the machine, a handful of copper wires leading to plugs at its back.

  “…Or, and here’s an idea folks, imagine I’m like Mickey Mouse, just without that annoying habit of chewing through your cereal boxes and leaving little ‘gifts’ all over the kitchen floor. I just hate it when he does that, don’t you?”

  However, the gap-toothed face on display was unmistakable. Jason King used to be the world’s most famous celebrity. He grinned, a golden crown sloping on his thick brown hair. “God-damned Mickey. He’ll send his lawyers over for that one, you see if he doesn’t.”

  Klaus Gravenstein roared with laughter in time to the studio audience, clapping and whooping on the screen. The image returned to that of the comedian, now puffing on a fat cigar.

  “Now, your carriage will arrive shortly so smoke ‘em if you got your plastic lungs in the mail this morning, I know I did, and, er, try not to get too spooked, okay?”

  Far from frightened, Klaus tipped his head back and roared again, his parched throat rasping with the effort of each cackle.

  We made it! he beamed.

  But the Voice was silent.

  ………..

  “Programme complete. Execute automated service 615.”

  A large violet crystal pulsed above Neon’s head as her brainwaves exerted themselves. The 11 year old bit her lip and pulled her teddy bear closer to her chest.

  “Shall we give him the full tour, Daddy?”

  Jon Way’s thoughts flowed through her mind like daisies floating on a pink river, each one bursting into a shower of petals as his words were revealed. Neon giggled, the children surrounding her laughing too.

  “No sweetheart, just bring him up to the gates.”

  ………..

  Klaus knelt, gawping, as a bright red steam engine chugged into view. It continued around him in a circle, complete with gold snowshoes dusting powder from the buried track. It then halted in front of him and whistled, slightly off-key.

  Jason King once more barked from the set: “Okay, that sounds like our ride! Well, what are you waiting for? All aboard for the last train...”

  Klaus always remembered the ‘King of reality TV’ more as a chat show host than an actor, but nevertheless he greeted the man’s final words with an involuntary shiver.

  “To Albion.”

  The locomotive was waiting, smoke puffing from its golden funnel, a single carriage behind it.

  Klaus rose cautiously to his feet, his right arm clasping the left. He towered above the coach and scowled as he squeezed through the door. He then uncoiled himself on a seat and stretched his legs with some difficulty. As if watching him, the engine honked another disjointed tune and began rolling forward. His head hanging out of the window, Klaus howled uproariously, exposing his yellow pointed teeth.

  This is it!

  Ducking back inside, he examined his carriage. Like the engine it had the look of a Victorian original but what at first appeared to be wood quickly revealed itself as plastic, its paintwork
peeling in the cold. High in the corner a camera’s iris clicked and zoomed.

  “There, you see it?” Klaus whispered. “You were right. There are still people here.”

  But yet again the Voice didn’t answer. It felt far away, further than it had been for a long time and, free of its shackles, Klaus remembered.

  He remembered far too much.

  For him, the world had ended in the Bavarian forest. As darkness had fallen around his family’s cabin by Lake Chiemsee the twelve-year-old Klaus had run in a blind panic. The TV and car radio were both dead. His mother’s body lay sprawled on the kitchen floor.

  His sister Sabine was crying as he screamed at her to pack. He chased through every room collecting supplies - bedding, clothes and food. Fighting back tears he ran up the road for help only to find a crumpled police car, its lights flashing amid broken branches.

  He had to summon all his courage not to leave then, drive the family saloon away, as far away and as quickly as possible. But his sister was inconsolable. She would not pack. She would not leave without her mother. And he would not leave without her.

  Then the forest came for them. Its talons scratching at the doors. Strange shapes howling in the moonlight outside.

  Dark forces had awoken at the end of the world. Humanity never stood a chance. Except maybe here, in Albion.

  The carriage drifted among the graves, a flat TV attached to the swaying walls playing an introductory film of the city - its theme park and studio complex - home of the Little Princess, The Justice Ride, the Salvino Hotel and “reality’s greatest adventure”.

  But Klaus was no longer listening.

  Chapter Two

  SIR WILFRED Justice watched the little steam train as it rattled on its course through the burial mounds. A damp breeze whistled past him and he gripped the ledge of the cliff. “Bobbins, Miss Robbins!” he swore, loose rocks scattering beneath his hobnailed boots.

  He then flexed his powerful shoulders, his black leather jacket creaking in complaint. Canvass trousers sagged under the weight of many weapons - a large slingshot, a small crossbow, even an improvised ball and chain - while a chain mail shirt clung to his flabby stomach.