As a deathly chill spread from my stomach to claim my extremities and my heart pumped faster than the clickety-clack of the trucks on the track, I turned to face my companions.
Chapter Fourteen
Their eyes were open. The light in the truck was poor — narrow shafts admitted by the gaps in the walls — but sufficient to allow me glimpses of terrible wounds, encrusted with blood now cold and dark. No one had told me what form of execution was preferred in the City but many of the injuries were consistent with my suspicion that suspects had been thrown into the football ground to fight for their lives with vicious dogs.
A man propped up not two feet from me had a ragged hole in his throat where a beast’s jaws had fastened and refused to let go. A short young man with a shock of blond curls and empty dark eyes had black puncture marks on his neck and chest. Either the accused were cast naked into the arena or the authorities stripped the bodies after the dogs had done their worst.
The train clattered on into the night, travelling distressingly slowly. I looked through a gap but couldn’t see anything beyond the hedges and trees and occasional lights at the edge of the track.
There was a pungent smell in the truck, which I had been trying to ignore. All I could think of was the bag of turnips I had once left undisturbed for months in the crisper drawer of my fridge. When I came across it I took hold of the top of the bag and pulled. The paper bag, weakened by the soggy decaying mess inside, broke and decomposed vegetables went everywhere.
It was the details — the shaving scar, the mole on one woman’s cheek, the pierced ears, dark roots amid dyed blonde hair — that affirmed the humanity of the train’s cargo. Otherwise they could be sides of meat destined to hang on hooks in the market. And yet, though dead, they remembered enough of life to remain standing.
As the train slithered across a set of points the truck rocked and a tall man with a long, crumbling nose and a bloody superficial labyrinth where his right ear had been fell against me. I recoiled but he came with me, the weight of several bodies pushing him from behind. We tumbled to the floor of the truck. Bodies slithered over the tops of ones that had already fallen and soon I was buried beneath them, trying to block my nose and avert my gaze. Even when I thought the landslide had stopped, another slight jolt from the train scythed a fresh crop.
Winded and bruised I tried to crawl out from under the corpses and it suddenly occurred to me that the train must have crossed over into our world. That was why they had all fallen over. At last they could rest in peace.
But I realised I was wrong when I felt a tickling on my ankle and tried to pull it away and couldn’t. One of the corpses was using it as a handhold and had started to climb up my body.
Another, a woman with a deep, sharp cleft in her face — the dull flesh of her cheek flapped loosely, exposing the glimmer of bone beneath, clearly not the work of pit bulls but that of a blade — approached me from my left. She crawled over the pile of bodies to get at me, clawing with her one good hand.
It dawned on me that I was the cause of these deaths. Or that was what the City would want me to think, anyway.
More of them found the energy to move, raising shaved heads that bore deep scratches from doing battle in the stadium, moving forward on elbows and stumps. Their desperate, vengeful hands reached out to my face, their broken, bone-splintered fingers cracking as they sought to put out my eyes, tear my flesh, as theirs had been.
I retreated into the corner, desperate to deflect their clumsy assaults. Still they came. As they hit me, some of them sacrificed their skin as it split from knuckle and joint like rotten fruit. The tall man with the crumbling nose had hauled himself up the length of my body and had his face next to mine. As weak blows landed on my legs and feet, this man opened his mouth as if to kiss out my life. His teeth were still good but his gums were rotting, his mouth having become a still-warm nest for fat white maggots, and the foul stench almost overpowered me. I was sick again, spitting bile at the man’s face, into his glassy eyes.
He opened his mouth wider and several of the larvae tipped out, wriggling, falling down the front of my shirt. He was pressing closer to meet my lips when his head fell forward and thumped against my breastbone. I noticed the others collapsing. Their little attacks ceased and they rolled off me. I pushed the tall man away and the maggots spilled out of his mouth onto the floor of the wagon. I approached the side of the truck and peered out.
I saw a galaxy of red lights hanging seemingly in mid-air and wondered if instead of crossing back into the real world I had entered some even more bizarre territory. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I could make out vertical masts and diagonal stays. The lights were attached to the masts, which occupied a vast area on the right of the line. There was a road also. A vague memory plucked at the back of my mind. I’d seen the masts before.
It came to me: Rugby radio masts. If that were the case, the train would be pulling into Rugby station any minute. I opened the catch on the gate and made a wider crack in the side of the wagon. I craned my neck to see up the line. I could see lights and a station approaching.
I knew, however, that even if the train stopped or slowed down enough for me to jump, I wouldn’t be able to. I might have seen no sign of them, but the train had to be carrying guards whose job it would be to unload the corpses. And if they didn’t get me, I’d still be stuck in Rugby in the middle of the night.
I fastened the gate and crouched down as the train rumbled under the vast glass canopy of Rugby station. The platforms were lonely and wet but they were part of my world. I wanted to get out, bend down and kiss them. The train slowed down and stopped, presumably awaiting a green light. I watched through the cracks as a British Rail guard sauntered down the platform, tapping his whistle against the side of his leg. He stopped fifteen yards from my truck, took off his cap and smoothed his hand over his balding head, yawning. I wondered about trying to call him over but the train jerked into motion again and we trundled out of the station.
The train accelerated, heading north. It blasted through Coventry station without slowing down, skittered over the level crossings at Canley and Tile Hill, then raced through cuttings, a tunnel and more deep cuttings and another tiny station before easing off in the approach to Birmingham International. Even here, though, there was no command to halt and the train thundered on towards the heart of Birmingham, under one road, over the next, another level crossing, a blink of a station, more bridges and tunnels, long streets of houses rising on either side then falling away and cars suddenly passing beneath the moss-clad stone arches under the tracks. Through Stechford, and past a bleak ill-lit park on the right, and finally the driver applied the brakes. The cattle wagons rolled forward, under three more roads, past a works depot on the right. Less than a mile away M6 traffic whipped through a busy interchange. Amid a great clanking of iron and steel, the train halted.
In the sudden stillness I listened to the hum of the motorway and the stuttering hum of the diesel. In between the motorway and the railway were several gasholders, three of them bunched up close to the M6 — I’d passed them dozens of times driving up to Manchester — and two hemmed in between a canal on the left, a scraggy little river, the railway line where I was sitting, and another line which came out from underneath and veered off to the right.
Of these two gasholders — both were the spiral-guided design — one was full and the other still half-empty.
Why did I think of it as still half-empty rather than only half-full?