Chapter 3: The Bruises We Carry
The dark in the cellar was a living thing. It pressed against Jim’s eardrums, thick and humming with a silence so complete it had its own weight.Time dissolved. It could have been minutes or an hour since the dragging footsteps had faded. They waited longer, just to be sure, listening to the slow drip… drip… from a pipe in the corner and the ragged syncing of their own breath.
Milly finally let out a controlled sigh, a soft release of held tension. She shifted, and the sound she made was small—a sharp intake of breath through her teeth.
“Your ankle?” Jim’s voice was a gravelly whisper, too loud in the tomb-like quiet.
“Stiffening up,” she said, her tone trying for dismissive and missing by a mile. It was tight with pain.
She aimed the torch at her leg, pulling the soaked fabric of her trouser leg up again. In the stark white beam, the bruise had bloomed. The individual finger marks had merged into a cuff of purple-black that wrapped around the pale skin of her ankle like a vicious bracelet. The swelling was evident now, distorting the shape of the joint.
“Christ,” Jim murmured.
“It’s fine. Just needs moving.” She tried to rotate her foot and winced, a full-body flinch she couldn’t suppress. “Boot’s not helping. Got to get it off.”
She bent forward, her fingers fumbling with the cold, wet laces. Her movements were clumsy, hampered by pain and the awkward angle. Jim watched her struggle for a moment, her frustration a tangible heat in the cold air.
“Let me,” he said.
She froze, her head still bowed. The torch beam trembled slightly in her hand, painting jittery shadows on the brick. For a second, he thought she’d refuse. Her independence was a wall she’d built brick by brick over twenty-eight days of hell. Letting someone past it was its own kind of risk.
“Yeah,” she said finally, the word barely a concession. “Alright.”
He moved closer, the water in the cellar bottom sloshing quietly. He took the torch from her, propping it on a crumbling brick so the light pooled on her leg. Her boot was a sturdy, scuffed hiking thing, the laces slick and tight. His own fingers were cold and numb, but he worked at the knots with a patience he didn’t feel.
The silence between them was different now. It wasn’t just the waiting silence of prey. It was charged, fragile. He could hear every shift of her body, every slight catch in her breath.
The laces gave. Gently, he tugged the heel, his other hand cradling her calf. “This might hurt.”
“Just do it.”
He pulled, slowly. She stifled a gasp, her leg jerking in his hands. The boot came off with a wet suck, followed by her sodden sock. Her foot was shockingly white and cold in the light, the violent bruise a grotesque shock of color around the delicate bone. The imprint was perfect, a savage map of a hand that wanted to pull her into the dark.
Without thinking, he reached out, his fingers hovering just above the bruised skin, not touching. “The grip on you… it was so fast.”
“They’re all fast,” she said, her voice oddly distant. She was looking at her own injury as if it belonged to someone else.“Strong, too. You forget, until they’ve got you.”
His touch finally settled, feather-light, on the unmarked skin just above the bruise, checking the swelling. Her whole leg went rigid. Not from pain, this time. It was a different kind of tension. He looked up.
The torchlight from below carved her face into a stark relief of angles and hollows. The defiance, the weary sarcasm, the calculated hardness—it was all gone, wiped clean. What looked back at him was raw. It was the face of the woman who’d been running for twenty-eight days, who’d seen everything, lost everything, and was just so utterly, profoundly tired. There was a vulnerability there so complete it stole the air from his lungs. Her dark eyes held his, and for a flicker, the wall was just gone.
He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
Then she blinked, and it was like a curtain falling. She looked away, down at his hand still on her leg, and cleared her throat. “It’s just a bruise. It’ll fade.” She pulled her leg back gently, breaking the contact.
The moment shattered, leaving behind a new, awkward awareness. Jim busied himself with her boot, squeezing out as much water as he could, pretending his heart wasn’t hammering against his ribs. “We should keep it elevated. Reduce the swelling.”
“We should get out of this hole,” she countered, but the edge was dull. She accepted the boot back, not putting it on, just holding it. “Need to see if that thing’s still out there.”
They listened again. Nothing but the eternal drip.
Jim stood, his joints protesting, and swept the torch beam around the cellar properly. It was larger than he’d first thought. Beyond the circle of light, the darkness deepened into alcoves stacked with forgotten junk: mouldering cardboard boxes, a rusted bicycle frame, piles of old newspapers gone soft with damp. The air wasn’t just damp earth and coal dust. Underneath it was a sharper, more acrid smell.Mildew, yes. But something else. Something chemical and faintly sweet, like rotten laundry and bad medicine.
And then he saw the walls.Not just damp. Covered in scrawls.
He moved the beam slowly. The bricks were a canvas of frantic, childlike chalk drawings, smudged by time and moisture but still chillingly clear. Stick figures with oversized, screaming mouths. Blobby, monstrous shapes with too many teeth. Crude houses with black smoke pouring from the windows. And words, over and over, in clumsy, looping capital letters: ‘BAD AIR’ ‘HIDE’ ‘THEY HEAR’ ‘DONT SLEEP’.
“Milly,” he whispered.
She had seen them too. She pushed herself up, leaning heavily against the wall, her injured foot held off the ground. Her face in the flickering light was pale. “Kids,” she said, her voice hollow. “They must have hidden down here. At the start.”
Jim’s beam traced a sequence of pictures. A stick figure family. Then a red scribble over one. Then the blobby monsters appearing. Then just one small stick figure alone in a corner. The final drawing was a lopsided sun with a sad face.
The chemical smell seemed to grow stronger. He followed it to a far alcove, the torchlight revealing not coal, but a pile of empty plastic bottles, boxes of faded tablets, and crumpled tubes of ointment. A makeshift pharmacy. A family doctor’s desperate, futile stash. Among the debris, a small, neat pile of stuffed animals, their fur matted and dark.
He stepped back, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. This wasn’t just a hiding place. It was a tomb. The last refuge. The ‘bad air’ wasn’t just a childish fear. They must have heard the news, the warnings about the virus being airborne in the early, chaotic days. They’d sealed themselves in with their medicine and their chalk.
He didn’t need to ask what happened to them. The silence of the house above was answer enough.
“We can’t stay here,” Milly said. Her voice was firm now, the vulnerability sealed away, replaced by a steady urgency. “This air… it’s not right. And if they come back…”
“The door upstairs is solid,” Jim said, walking to the interior door and testing the handle. It didn’t budge. Deadbolted from the other side.
“Then we go back out the way we came. Once it’s clear.”
They decided to wait until the faint, grey light of morning began to seep around the edges of the coal chute door. It was a long, cold vigil. Milly tried to sleep, her head against her pack, but Jim saw her flinch at every distant noise from the world above. He kept watch, the torch off now to save the battery, sitting in the thick, scented dark with the ghostly chalk warnings at his back.
Just before dawn, a new sound came. Not from above, but from within the house. A slow, heavy thud, directly overhead. Then a scrape, like furniture being dragged.
Something was inside.
Milly was instantly awake, her hand on her knife. They stared at the ceiling, as if they could see through the layers of wood and plaster.Another thud. Closer. On the stairs.
It was followed by a low, rasping moan that seeped through the keyhole of the barred door. It was in the hallway. Right outside.
The thing in the garden hadn’t left. It had found a way in.
Jim’s blood turned to ice. He looked at Milly, her face a pale moon in the gloom. Her eyes darted to the coal chute, then back to the door. The calculus was brutal. A possible infected outside, or a definite one now just a few inches of wood away.
The handle on the cellar door rattled, once, twice. Then a body slammed against it. The solid door shook in its frame, but held. For now.“We go. Now,” Milly mouthed, already shoving her swollen foot back into the damp boot, her face contorting with the pain she refused to voice.
Jim didn’t argue. He shouldered both their packs, handing Milly the torch. She limped to the coal chute, her movements agonizingly slow. The banging on the door grew more frantic, a relentless, mindless drumbeat of hunger.
Jim cupped his hands. She stepped into them, her weight slight, and he boosted her up. She grunted, scrambling against the metal, her injured leg dragging. She managed to hook her elbows over the edge and haul herself up, disappearing into the narrow opening. A second later, her face reappeared, strained, hand reaching down.
“Packs!”
He passed them up. The banging behind him was a thunder. He thought he heard wood splintering.
He jumped, his fingers scraping against the wet stone, finding the lip. Milly grabbed his wrist, pulling with a strength that surprised him. He kicked against the wall, hauled himself up and out, tumbling onto the wet, rubbish-strewn grass of the garden just as a final, massive crash echoed from deep below.
They lay panting in the cold, grey dawn.The garden was empty. The street was silent.
Milly sat up first, her breathing ragged. She looked at the coal chute, then at the house. The front door was hanging open, swinging slightly in the breeze. She met Jim’s eyes. No words were needed. It had gotten in through the front. It was now trapped in the cellar. Their hiding place had become its prison.
She got to her feet, testing her weight on the bad ankle. It held, but just barely. Her expression was pure grit. “We need to move. It’ll find another way out eventually. Or its noise will draw others.”
Jim stood, scanning the quiet terrace rows. The city was holding its breath in the pale morning light. The fear was a constant companion now, a cold stone in his gut. But so was something else, forged in the dark cellar beside the chalk tragedies. A solid, quiet certainty.
He adjusted the packs on his shoulders, his gaze settling on the northern horizon, beyond the jagged rooftops. “Which way?”
Milly nodded north, her jaw set.“That way. And we find a car that actually starts. No more luck. Just mechanics.” She took a step, a slight stumble corrected with a grimace. This time, when Jim moved to her side, offering an arm for support, she didn’t shrug him off. She leaned into it, just a little, and they began to walk, two shadows limping away from the grave of a house, toward the uncertain dawn.
She leaned into it, just a little, and they began to walk, two shadows limping away from the grave of a house, toward the uncertain dawn. The morning was a cold, grey wash, leaching color from the shattered windows and burnt-out shells of cars. Every sound—a skittering can, the groan of settling timber—made them freeze, hearts thumping against their ribs.
Milly’s rhythm was a painful staccato: step-drag, step-drag. Her breaths came in sharp hisses through clenched teeth.
“We need to get off this street,” Jim muttered, his eyes never still, scanning the silent gaps between buildings. “Too exposed.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she gritted out. But she was flagging, and they both knew it. The adrenaline from the cellar was gone, leaving only the deep, throbbing ache in her ankle and a fatigue that felt geological in its weight. They turned onto a broader avenue, where the skeletons of double-decker buses lay like beached whales.
The silence here was different. Not empty, but watchful. Jim’s neck prickled. He kept seeing movement in his peripheral vision that vanished when he turned his head. Just ghosts, he told himself. Or crows.
“There,” Milly said, nodding toward a side street clogged with abandoned traffic. A silver estate car was angled halfway onto the pavement, its doors shut, windows intact. It looked less derelict than the others. “That one. Maybe.”
“Maybe’s a hell of a word,” Jim said, but he steered them toward it. The interior was a mess of old food wrappers and faded maps, but there were no stains, no signs of violence. The key was not in the ignition.
Milly leaned against the bonnet, sweat beading on her pale forehead. “Check the visors. Glovebox. Under the mats.”
Jim handed her his pack and tried the driver’s door.Locked. He wiped a grimy sleeve across the window and peered in. Nothing on the visors. The glovebox was shut. He moved to the passenger side, his reflection in the glass a gaunt stranger with wild eyes. This door opened with a stiff, protesting creak.
The smell of old crisps and mildew wafted out. He flipped the visor down.Nothing. The glovebox clicked open, revealing a manual, a pack of tissues, and a tin of mints.No key.
“Damn it,” he whispered.
“Keep looking.” Milly’s voice was strained. She was watching the street, her knife now in her hand, resting on the cool metal of the bonnet. “People hide them. In the wheel arch. Sometimes a magnetic box under the chassis.”
Jim dropped to his knees on the wet pavement, ignoring the sharp bite of gravel. He felt along the inner lip of the front wheel arch, his fingers slick with grime. Nothing but rust and grease. He shuffled to the rear arch, the rough concrete tearing at his trousers.
His fingers brushed against something cold and metallic, wedged up inside the arch. A small, flat box. He pried it free. It was rusted shut. He smashed it against the curb once, twice, the clang echoing terribly in the quiet street. The lid popped open. A single silver key gleamed inside.
“Got it,” he breathed.
He scrambled up, key clutched in his filthy hand. Milly’s face cracked into a fragile, relieved smile. It vanished as her eyes snapped to something behind him.“Jim. Move.”
Her voice was low, urgent.He turned. A figure stood at the end of the side street, thirty yards away. It was utterly still, silhouetted against the grey light. Its head was cocked, listening to the sound of the box hitting the curb. As they watched, it began to walk toward them. Its gait was wrong, a stiff-limbed, deliberate shuffle that was somehow more terrifying than a sprint.
“Get in the car,” Jim said, fumbling with the key. It scraped against the lock.He missed.
The figure’s pace quickened. A low, rattling sound carried down the street.
“Jim.” Milly pushed off the bonnet, hobbling to the passenger door.
The key slid in.He turned it. The lock clunked up. He yanked the door open and threw himself into the driver’s seat, the familiar smell of stale upholstery flooding his senses. Milly tumbled into the passenger seat beside him, slamming her door just as the thing reached the bonnet.
Its hands slapped against the windshield, leaving greasy prints. Its face was a ruin of old scars and fresh, oozing sores, its eyes a milky, vacant blue. It opened its mouth and let out a wet, hollow groan, leaning in to press its forehead against the glass with a dull thud.
“Key goes in the ignition, genius,” Milly snapped, her eyes wide on the thing outside.
Jim’s hands were shaking. He shoved the key toward the steering column, missed, tried again. The tip clicked home. He turned it.
The engine gave a long, grinding whine. It coughed.It died.
The infected at the windshield began to rock the car, its movements growing more agitated. Another shape appeared from behind a van, drawn by the noise.“Turn it again. Don’t pump the gas,” Milly instructed, her voice forced calm. “Just hold it.”
He turned the key again, holding it. The engine whined, strained, sputtered. A cylinder fired.Another. The engine roared to ragged, vibrating life. The dashboard lights flickered on—the fuel gauge needle jerked and settled just above a quarter tank.
“Go,” Milly said.
Jim fumbled for the gearshift, slammed it into first, and stomped on the accelerator. The car lurched forward, the infected figure scrabbling at the hood before falling away. The estate car bumped over the curb and onto the main road, engine howling. He wrestled the wheel, straightening out, and shifted up. The buildings began to blur past.
In the passenger seat, Milly let out a long, shuddering breath and sank back into the headrest. She stared at the side mirror, watching the street and its lonely, receding figures shrink away. The only sound was the rumble of the engine and the swish of tires on damp asphalt.
She reached over and turned the heater on. A blast of cold, then lukewarm air smelling of dust filled the space between them.
“Quarter tank,” Jim said, his voice unsteady. “Where to?”
Milly kept her eyes on the road unraveling before them, past the ruins of a city she once knew. “Anywhere that isn’t here.”
They drove north until the taut silence in the car grew too loud, the only words being Milly’s occasional, terse directions to avoid blockades she half-remembered. The city’s corpse gradually gave way to scarred suburbs, then to hedgerows beginning to reclaim the edges of the road. The world outside turned into a blur of rain-streaked glass and encroaching green.
After an hour, Milly pointed to a faded sign for a garden centre. “Turn in here. We need to let the engine rest. It’s overheating.”
Jim guided the wheezing car off the main road and down a lane choked with brambles. The large car park was a graveyard of ornamental fountains and toppled statues. The main building’s glass facade was mostly shattered, but a smaller attached office, built of cinderblock, had a solid-looking door.
“That’ll do,” Milly said, already pushing her door open before they’d fully stopped.
She moved with a focused limp, circling the structure. Jim followed, a tire iron held loosely in his hand. The office door was locked, but a single grimy window around the back was cracked open an inch. He smashed the remaining glass carefully, reached in, and unlatched it.
The air inside was stale and cold, smelling of dry rot and forgotten paper. It was a single room with a desk, two chairs, and a small, mildewed sofa. Most importantly, it had no other doors and only the one window. They barricaded the window with the desk and shoved the sofa against the door. For the first time in days, they had four solid walls.
Milly sank onto the floor with a groan, carefully working her boot off again. The bruise had deepened to a spectacular, ugly palette of violet and green. “Looks worse than it is,” she lied, not meeting his eye.
“Right,” Jim said, rifling through his pack. He found a half-empty bottle of water and a relatively clean cloth. “Here. It’s cold, but it might help.”
He handed them to her, their fingers brushing. She didn’t flinch this time. She took the offerings silently, draping the damp cloth over her ankle with a sharp hiss. The afternoon light, weak and grey, filtered through the dirty glass, catching the dust motes dancing in the space between them.
Jim explored the room. In a bottom drawer of the desk, he found a treasure: two unopened packets of digestive biscuits, brittle with age, and a small, sealed tin of shortbread. He held them up. “Christmas came early.”
A real smile, thin but genuine, touched Milly’s lips. “A feast.” She watched him as he brought the food over, sitting against the opposite wall with a sigh. “You’re oddly handy for a man who slept through the end of the world.”
“I wasn’t always in a coma,” he said, leaning his head back against the cinderblock. The coolness seeped into his scalp. “I was a bicycle courier. Before. Knew every street, every shortcut.” He paused. “Useless knowledge now.”
“Not entirely.” She nibbled on a biscuit, staring at the wall. “You knew how to feel for that key box. That’s something. Most people just look in the ignition and give up.” She took another bite. “I was a researcher. At University College London. Microbiology.”
Jim blinked. “Studying things like…?”
“Like what’s out there?” She gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “Not exactly. My work was on soil bacteria. Nitrogen fixation. Saving the world through agriculture.” She gestured vaguely with her biscuit at the crumbling room. “Irony’s a bitch.”
A comfortable quiet settled, filled only by the sound of chewing and the distant caw of crows. The shared food, the simple safety of the four walls, created a fragile bubble of normalcy.
“The family in the cellar,” Jim said after a while, his voice quiet. “The chalk. Did you see… the last drawing?”
Milly’s chewing slowed. She nodded, her eyes losing focus. “The sad sun. Yeah.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I found a place like that, early on. A bathroom. Two toothbrushes. Kids’ toothpaste. They’d… they’d taken the easy way out. Together.”
She said it flatly, a clinical fact. But the weight of it hung in the air, dense as the dust.
“I woke up alone,” Jim said, the words spilling out before he could cage them. “In a hospital bed. Tubes in my arms. No one. Just the silence. I thought I’d gone deaf.” He looked at his hands, calloused now but soft then. “For a minute, I thought… this must be what death is. Just you. Forever.”
Milly listened, her dark eyes fixed on him. She didn’t offer pity, which he was grateful for.
“I’d take the silence over the noises,” she said finally. She leaned her head back, exposing the pale line of her throat. “The first week, I hid in a locker in a gym. I could hear them… moving through the weights room. That rasping sound. And sometimes… they’d just talk. Broken bits of sentences. A word. A name. That was worse.”
They sat with the ghosts for a moment, the distance between them across the floor feeling both vast and insignificant. The light was fading, painting the room in deep blue shadows.
“We should stay the night,” Jim said, his practical voice returning. “Your ankle needs it. We’ve got walls.”
“One night,” Milly agreed, her tone conceding a major point. She shifted, wincing as she tried to find a comfortable position for her leg. “You take first watch. I don’t think I can keep my eyes open.”
“Deal.”
As full dark fell, she stretched out on the floor using her pack as a pillow. Jim sat by the barricaded door, the tire iron across his lap, listening to the sounds of the night and her breathing slowly even out into sleep. Hours later, he heard a rustle. Her voice, thick with sleep, cut through the dark.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
A long pause. “Thanks. For the key. And the biscuits.”
He smiled in the darkness. “Any time.”
Just before dawn, a new sound pierced the quiet—not the rasp of the infected, but the distinct, mechanical rumble of a heavy engine grinding down the distant main road. It grew louder, then stopped. Doors slammed. Voices, clear and human, carried on the still air.
Jim was instantly awake, shaking Milly’s shoulder gently. Her eyes snapped open, alert.
They listened, frozen, as the voices argued, then laughed—a raw, ugly sound. The engine revved once more and began to move again, fading away toward the east.
The silence that followed was no longer comforting. It felt watchful, charged with a new and different kind of threat.
Milly sat up, her face a pale smudge in the gloom. She looked at Jim, then at the door, her expression hardening back into its familiar, guarded lines. The brief peace of the shelter was shattered.
“Time to go,” she said quietly, already reaching for her boot. “People are worse.”