Where Were You When The World Ended?

A Ring of Oak & Apple, a Weep novella is nearly ready. I’ll be sending a free digital copy out to all members of my newsletter this month. You can sign up here. Until then, I hope you enjoy Chapter 2.

The heat of the fire chipped away at Fin’s thawing hands. Swollen fingers responded slowly. Only near the heat was he conscious of how cold the night had become. Before morning, moonlight would reflect off thin ice fringing the slower courses of the river.

He disinfected the can of beer before cracking it open. Bubbles frothed up and spilled over the edge. A lump formed in his throat. He swallowed it down with most of the beer.

Somebody draped a blanket around him. I hope they didn’t notice me flinching. People settled down around the fire. Fin was the centre of attention. He put the can aside knowing it would not take much to soften his suspicion with so little food in his system.

He rummaged through his store at the bottom of the kayak and took out some tins of food to share. Better they think of me as an asset rather than a drain on their supplies.

“It’s not pay to stay,” the woman who had told him to strip said, though she still took the food without hesitation.

“I’m not paying, I’m pitching in.” Fin’s lips cracked, he could taste copper when he ran his tongue across them. He moved a little closer to the fire. “How long have you been here?”

Somebody handed him a bowl of meaty stew. He buried his nose into the rising steam. “I never thought food would bring me to tears, but this does smell good.”

“Good stock and spices left here. Most of what you see was left behind by those that lived here before us. They must’ve been locals. Nobody has come back to try and claim it,” somebody said.

Try and claim it. Fin burned the roof of his mouth on the first bite. “They just left this?”

The woman sitting next to him spoke. “I was the first one to arrive. Desperation forced me into the water and I thought I’d drowned and gone to some shitty heaven when I found this. I lit the fire and waited for days for the weepers on the shore to lose interest. Maybe the weepers scared the people off. Or they saw me on the island and didn’t want to chance an encounter. I don’t know and I don’t want to guess because odds are they’re dead. I’m Eilish by the way. You met Ian, he mostly just walks the shore, keeping an eye out for new islanders.”

Fin nodded his hello.

“Jack is the one that gave you the can of beer and became your best friend when you took out the whiskey,” Eilish said.

People started introducing themselves. Too many.

“As bad as the weepers are, I was more freaked out by the abandoned camp,” Eilish said. “There were photographs and valuables buried among the clothes and at the bottom of sleeping bags. It looked like no more than a heavy rain had upset the tents. There’s at least two winters worth of turf and coal for the fires. They must have had large ships to transport everything here, but the only ones left on the lake are small rowing boats. Half of them are barely fit to be taken into deep water. I stayed here and waited, but so far everybody here came from elsewhere.”

“Maybe they heard news of a better place and went down the river,” Fin said.

“There are no better places,” Jack said. “My guess is they brought the infection here with them. If they became weepers, they could have walked into the lake chasing after birds.”

“How are you supporting so many people? I’m not asking for specifics. Keep your secrets. I’m curious because most of the houses I’ve been to have been emptied of food.”

“There’s excellent farmland in this valley,” one of the older men said. “So far we’ve found a few fields with livestock still in good health. We don’t know how to keep the meat if we butcher them, so we’re feeding them. If nothing else, they keep most of the infected away from the lake. There’s a massive shed stacked so high with boxes of potatoes that you’d need a forklift to reach the ones at the top. One of them could support us for a month.”

“A lot of good that will do us,” Eilish said. “They’ll turn at the end of the season, then we’ll have nothing but rot.”

“You could always plant them,” Fin said.

Nobody was quick to answer. People drank to fill the silence, or just stared into the fire. He knew how they felt. Nobody wanted to believe that this would go on so long that future-proofing now involved farming. How far will we fall?

“We’ve spoken about it,” Eilish said. “There’s enough equipment and we know where we can find diesel for the tractors, but we’d bring a lot of unwanted attention down on us. Imagine we went to the bother of doing all of that work, only to be swarmed by a horde. We might seem like a large group to somebody used to being alone, but there’s a lot to do. Too much. We’d need to set up fences so our fields won’t be trampled.”

“I don’t even think it’s just that,” Jack said. “The idea of planting in order to eat in a few months, that does something to your mind. I know I find myself thinking that this’ll be over in a month. Two, tops. If we put the effort in, the reality hits you that this is the new normal. All you want to do is hide. Not push your boundaries out and fight back against the weepers.”

“Stop that talk,” a shrill woman said. “We’ve enough food to keep us going until we’re rescued.” Her eyes were puffy and red; Fin wondered if her agitation was because of his presence.

Jack gave Fin a sardonic grin. “See what I mean? So, where were you when the world ended?”

Fin chewed the meat in his stew while he thought how best to answer. “Where was I when the world ended?” He smiled. “Hardly dinner talk, is it? I haven’t once sat with strangers and not heard that question in some form or other.” It’s the type of question you always get asked if you hang around people too long. 

Jack cut in. “‘Have you been bitten?’ My pet peeve question. Topical though.”

“‘Have you got any food?’” Eilish said, that’s always a fun one. 

“It’s been such a long time since anybody asked me anything,” Fin said. “The danger, I find, is not with the people themselves, rather what losing them does to you.” He picked up his can of beer, confident he had enough soakage in his stomach to take a swig. “I was at work. That’s the short answer. In Westport.”

A man sitting on the lichen-covered stone wall of the ringfort cleared his throat for attention. He was one of the oldest people Fin had come across in months. His brow wrinkled at rest, his skin was sallow and his hair was light as mist. “What point in time can you single out and say, ‘That’s it, that’s when things started falling apart’?”

Jack scoffed. “When you saw somebody balling their eyes out and your first response wasn’t to help, but run away.”

The old man shrugged. “There were plenty of moments when you thought ‘There’s no way it can get worse.’ Those were almost pleasant, you acclimatised to terrible. One of the highlights for the history books – if anybody survives this to write about what happened here, is if they managed to keep the weepers from spreading outside Ireland.”

“That might be it for me,” Eilish said. “The moment we knew we were alone. When the world was okay with letting a nation die.” 

“Yes, but if it actually works and prevents this plague from spreading, I could forgive them,” the old man said. “I would not wish this to be repeated anywhere else on earth. I don’t know if it has spread. If so, what’s the point?”

“We’re not alone!” The woman that had shot down the farming idea stood up. Her colourful rain jacket crinkled as she stormed off. “We work all day and then have to listen to this doom and gloom. It’s so boring.” She disappeared into one of the larger tents.

Jack raised his beer at her passing. “I remember in the beginning watching as it started out slow–”

“Slow?” Eilish interrupted. “There was nothing slow about it. It spread through us like fire through a parched wood, doused in petrol. There was nothing natural about it, either. Even if you could convince me that it just popped into existence, then how do you explain the response to it? You don’t just keep something like this in one country. Not in the modern age. Oh, and it all conveniently happened during a storm, so all planes and most boats were grounded. Awfully convenient timing, no?”

Fin stopped chewing. The weight of the flash drive and all its secrets hanging from his neck was a constant burden. Now it felt like it glowed against his skin and whispered, aching to be known. “I have a good idea of how it started.”

“Okay, please, no conspiracy theories,” Jack said. “All I was getting at was that it happened slowly enough for us to watch as politicians regressed back to people and started looking after their own – well, more publicly than usual.”

“The world didn’t end with a bang,” Fin said. “It must have been an infectious cough. I like to imagine it was one of those dry, scratchy, awkward ones that you can’t get rid of, really makes you stand out in a crowd. Do you know the hardest question I’ve gotten was not what you’d expect? ‘How many did you kill?’ That’s an easy one, I count their faces when I close my eyes, and when I dream, they get a second chance at me. Honestly, the hardest question to answer is ‘What day is it?’ I’m not even sure of the month anymore. For me, the world ended the last time I saw Solene. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

*

The fire crackled behind a ring of soot-blackened stones. Fin leaned forward to allow a man to pass behind him. He came back from the dark and cool trees with moss-covered firewood and fed the flames. Fin watched the sparks rise into the canopy of ancient oak and apple trees. Will we survive to see fruit?

“Is the heat worth the light?” Fin asked. He could not remember the man's name. You learned quickly that memorising names was a waste of time. It was impossible to forget them.

“The dead are already watching us,” Jack said. “They can’t swim, so the cold is our immediate threat. The risk is worth the comfort. Hard to work when you haven’t slept the previous night. Shivering costs calories. Everything must be accounted for.”

“No need to scare the children with talk of them watching,” the old man said.

“I’m not out to scare anybody. It’s the truth. Keeping things from them might make it easier to sleep now, but they need to be prepared. They’re watching. Even when they’re not, treat them like they are.”

Fin could sense the background tension. His first impression was that these people were good and looked out for each other, but they were people and they were all dealing with loss and regret and were facing their mortality.

“How can you possibly know that they’re watching us in the dark? It’s not as if their eyes glow.” The man Fin suspected had arrived not long before him spoke for the first time.

“How did you survive this long? Assume they’re always listening, always watching,” Jack said.

“Paranoia is no way to live.”

Jack threw his arms up in exasperation. “It’s the only way to live, you absolute gobshite. Don’t you worry though, stick around. I’m paranoid enough for all of us.”

Fin felt that same paranoia on the river. The small hairs on his body nearly continuously at attention. It was exhausting, always checking over your shoulder, jumping at every noise. Instinct was a body language that he was only just learning to understand. “Have any of you encountered… intelligent infected?”

 Eerie silence was his answer. He imagined the shivers were a shared sensation around the fire.

“How do you mean, intelligent?” Jack asked.

It was only a feeling, and not one that Fin was willing to have his mental health questioned over. “I’ve had a few strange encounters that would make you wonder what’s going on in their heads.”

“If I hadn’t just gone for a piss, I’d need new underwear,” someone said. “The way you were going on, I thought you were about to tell us that you saw weepers hiding in bushes, holding string attached to a box on a stick, hovering over a crate of beer.”

“Jack would have died in the first week if that were the case,” Eilish said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to treat the weepers like they’ve just been awarded college degrees. Whatever keeps you alive.”

Too often Fin had dissuaded himself from the idea that they retained some level of intelligence, only to swear he spotted a familiar one. “I’m pretty sure that some of them have been tracking me down the river.”

“Ah now you’re talking ghost stories, not a bad one mind,” Jack said. “If the weepers had any sense at all, then we’d all be wandering the country slack-jawed like them.”

Fin remained silent; he did not have to convince them. He was barely able to believe it himself. “So the fact that weepers and zombies exist doesn't faze you, but the possibility that some of them didn’t lose all their marbles is completely beyond belief?”

Before Jack could respond, Eilish did. “You could buy the exact same jacket in every town and city across the country in identical clothing chains. That could’ve been what you saw.”

“Maybe,” Fin allowed. He cheered up momentarily as he tried to believe it.

Around the ringfort there was a mix of shoddily constructed rafts made from empty barrels and wooden pallets. Deflated boats and pool toys were flattened out to dry. There was a small one-person sailing craft hauled onto the land. Fin could see the mast through the trees. Only one vessel had an onboard engine, but the noise would draw so many weepers that it would strand them on the lake for days.

The ringfort acted as a windbreaker. The branches overhead shivered in the breeze, the gentle rustling sounded too similar to the stalking dead. In the dark there was little difference between a settled zombie and an exhausted survivor. Though they were hardly harmless. There are no innocent survivors. It was a harsh way of looking at people, but it kept him alive. He leaned back against his battered kayak. When he closed his eyes for too long his heart rate rose until they snapped open. He desperately needed sleep, but he doubted he would find any.

The people here could not endure silence for long. The relaxing banter was a small bit of civilisation Fin had gone without for too long. Despite his hesitation towards others, he felt a kinship with them.

The light cast haunting shadows through the trees. The ghosts of old had no grip on him, not now, after being steeped in terror for so long. The sound of lake water lapping over warbling stones calmed him. The dead don’t swim. Fin listened to the noise of the natural world, but as soothing as that was, he could not sit idle. He needed to know what lay ahead, he needed their stories. They too would want to hear about what awaited them. He felt that anybody tracing back his steps would surely die. It was with grim realisation that he was certain they felt the same of him heading east.

The whiskey finally made its way around the fire and back to him. It was considerably lighter. The bottle was cold to the touch, but it would keep them warm for the night. He poured himself a shot. Then took out another bottle from his kayak. An expensive, top-shelf brand, not that that mattered now.

“Survival essentials,” Eilish said when she saw the size of the second bottle.

“You might joke, but a hangover has saved my life more times than I’m comfortable with.” And been the death of more than I can bear. The thought stole his brief smile. There was a measurable drop in dread as the drink loosened them. If they were like Fin then they would soon stop worrying about what they had survived and become thankful that they had survived. But it was only putting dread off until morning.

He took a blackened pot from his kayak and excused himself. Walking towards the shore was slow work, the fire had robbed him of his night eyes. All heat had left him before he reached the water. This is dangerous, lad. You want to get back to the fire. Soon you’ll want to stay with them. Why not, sure?

He knelt and filled the pot. Somewhere in the darkness a bird took flight. It danced across the surface of the lake. Its wings cut the air with a velveteen rasp as it flew overhead. Fin could not make out anything that might have disturbed it, but he did not start breathing normally again until he was back in the camp. He placed the pot to boil.

“What did all of you do before this?” Fin asked. “I was a night porter.” He took a small sip of the whiskey. It stung his cracked lips and scalded the back of his throat. “Though if we’re going for complete honesty, I was a terrible one.”

Sap inside one of the logs erupted with a crack and a small constellation of sparks rose into the night, before the cold extinguished them. Somebody poked the dead wood until it crumpled into the bed of glowing embers.

“Beautiful sky out tonight,” Eilish said. She got comfortable once her cup was full of whiskey and lay in a bed of crinkled leaves.

Fin looked up through the clearing of trees. The bulbous moon hung overhead, eavesdropping on their conversation. It was so clear he could map every imperfection scarred across its surface. “If you were really stretched to look for a positive in all this, the night sky is astonishing these days,” he said.

“The whole country is a dark sky reserve. Amateur astronomers are trying to hide their delight,” Eilish said. “The ones that are still alive. I was an overnight garage attendant. Worked in the arse end of nowhere.”

“Those trucks in town, are they yours?” Fin asked.

“No. The roads are completely impassable. Only things worth a damn on wheels now are bikes and scooters.”

“I’m desperate to find a pair of those shoes with wheels in the heels,” Jack said, generating a laugh from the others.

Without a word, Ian came out of the shadows to pour some whiskey into a flask and then walked back from the light.

When the water in the battered pot boiled, Fin took out his hot water bottle and carefully filled it. After he tucked it beneath his jumper he noticed all eyes on him. “What?”

“That’s a million dollar idea,” Jack said.

“It has been the difference between life and death a few times,” Fin said.

“I was a student,” one man spoke up just as the whiskey bottle reached him. His unibrow was slowly starting to fill in. His ragged stubble was turning into a scraggly beard of red and brown. He was hesitant to pass the bottle when a young teenager went to take it. Her parents were not present to deny her and to try to fill that role had the potential to cause more harm than a cup full of whiskey could.

Some in the group laughed when she spluttered after she drank. The atmosphere seemed more normal by the minute. Fin found no humour in it. He stood up, crossed the ring and took the cup from her. Exchanging it for an unopened bottle of soda. “Don’t let your guard down. Don’t dull your senses or fuddle your inhibitions. You’d be wrong to think all the rapists are dead.” There were no accusations at his outburst. “Cut your hair, too.”

“I don’t want to cut my hair. I wear hats so the weepers can’t grab it,” she said.

Fin walked back to his kayak, cheeks burning from the attention. He sat down with a grunt, old bruises twinged, his hip ached from a fall that had not healed properly. “Say they knock your hat off and you’re bald, then you have a chance to get away. Sometimes all we can hope for is a bit of luck.”

Eilish spoke up. “We make our own luck. Don’t wait for it. Look at me, I won the lottery.” She waved a tattered and worn ticket in the air.

“I don’t know that I’d call winning the lottery just as the world ended good luck,” Fin said.

“Hang on, they never got to call the last draw. It was supposed to be the day after storm Peggy,” Jack said.

She winked at him. “I promise you, this is my winning ticket. My luck.”

The bottle finally made its way back to Fin. He could already feel it loosening his nerves. Somewhere in the distance they heard the desperate weeping of an infected. Sound travelled far in a dying land. Silence took on a unique aspect when it was almost all-encompassing.

Fin topped up his cup and sent the whiskey around the ring again. “I’d like to hear that story.”

Warm food, a fire and alcohol put all of them in a mood for stories. Those in their tents, wrapped in blankets and rustling sleeping bags, stopped their private conversations to listen.

More weepers took up the call of the hunt on the mainland. It had a withering effect on those that heard it. Fin raised his can of beer as a toast, hoping that the monsters had only found a fox or badger.

“I wonder what this ringfort meant to the people that built it,” Jack said to drown out the weeping. “It’s quite amazing.”

“My granddad used to tell me that they were pathways to other worlds,” Fin said.

“I wish,” Eilish smiled. “Travel across rivers was probably the best option hundreds of years ago, when the country was covered with trees. They could have been way stations.”

“Stop stalling. You’re after telling us that we’re sitting with a millionaire. Let's hear the story,” Jack said.

“It started with a storm called Peggy.”

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Eoin.