The Visitor | A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery Read online

  The Visitor

  Terry Tyler

  ©Terry Tyler 2020

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, websites, computer applications, product names and incidents are either products of the author's imagination, and subject to copyright protection, or used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the express written permission of Terry Tyler.

  All rights reserved.

  Dedicated to DI Moose, who loves to look for clues.

  About The Book

  First of all, thank you for downloading The Visitor, a stand-alone novel and not part of any series, though I do not rule out the possibility of a sequel!

  It is set in the same world as my Project Renova series, where a devastating virus sweeps across the planet in the year 2024, but this is a new story, with new characters. I've been wanting to write another post-apocalyptic novel for a while, from a different angle; this time, the collapse of society is but a backdrop to another horror. I loved writing the Project Renova series, which has proved so popular with readers, so I decided to return to that world for The Visitor.

  The idea for this story came to me some time ago: four friends, one of whom inherits a cottage in a quiet rural setting, complete with survival bunker. While spending an idyllic summer weekend there, the four joke about knowing where to head in the event of a global catastrophe, little knowing what will take place a year later.

  As this novel is set at the beginning of a pandemic, it features certain genre standards―the initial shock, descent into chaos, adapting to a changed world―but is essentially a murder mystery, and it is around this that the story revolves.

  Terry Tyler, October 2020.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Part One: What Lies Ahead

  Chapter 1: Jack

  Chapter 2: Jack

  Chapter 3: Jack

  Chapter 4: Avalon

  Chapter 5: Finn

  Chapter 6: Jack

  Part Two: The Next World

  Chapter 7: The Visitor

  Chapter 8: Avalon

  Chapter 9: Finn

  Chapter 10: The Visitor

  Chapter 11: Jack

  Chapter 12: The Visitor

  Chapter 13: Avalon

  Chapter 14: Peggy

  Chapter 15: Finn

  Chapter 16: The Visitor

  Chapter 17: Jack

  Chapter 18: The Visitor

  Chapter 19: Jack

  Chapter 20: Avalon

  Chapter 21: The Visitor

  Chapter 22: Jason

  Chapter 23: Jack

  Chapter 24: The Visitor

  Part Three: Killer Within

  Chapter 25: Private Christopher Morgan

  Chapter 26: Avalon

  Chapter 27: Jack

  Chapter 28: Avalon

  Chapter 29: Avalon

  Chapter 30: The Visitor

  Chapter 31: Finn

  Chapter 32: The Visitor

  Chapter 33: Zak

  Chapter 34: Jack

  Chapter 35: The Visitor

  Part Four: Secrets

  Chapter 36: Jack

  Chapter 37: The Visitor

  Chapter 38: Dust to Dust

  Chapter 39: Jack

  Chapter 40: Jack

  Chapter 41: Jack

  Chapter 42: Jack

  Chapter 43: Jack

  Chapter 44: Avalon

  Chapter 45: Sarah

  Chapter 46: Jack

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Other books by Terry Tyler

  Prologue

  Even when I was a child, I knew I had a dark side. Sometimes it thrilled me, my wicked secret, but at other times it made me scared of what I could do.

  I subdued it, but I was keeping caged a resourceful beast who would, eventually, learn to pick the lock. After the world went to hell, when we began to act according to our own instincts, judgement and needs, rather than the redundant rules of a disintegrated society, 'it' became 'he', and broke free.

  I call him The Visitor. He arrives―sometimes unannounced―stays a while, does what he must, then leaves me to resume my life without him.

  The Visitor is clever; he plans, so he may continue his activities without constraint or consequence. He would hate to be hidden away again. Back then, he was biding his time, waiting for this new era.

  I don't know that I would want to live without him. Not now.

  Part One

  What Lies Ahead

  We took it all for granted. We had global travel, instant communication anywhere in the world, TV, pubs and restaurants. We lived lives of comfort and plenty, the most fortunate people in the history of mankind, but we didn't understand the fragility of our civilisation; we assumed, if we thought about it at all, that this was just how life was.

  We thought we were entitled to all we had. We were so, so wrong.

  Jack Keller

  December 2024

  Chapter 1

  Jack

  Safe Haven

  There were four of us, friends until the end.

  Our friendship weathered all periods apart, all ebbs and flows in fortune, and changes in partners. We four. Sarah, me, Rexy and Daisy.

  The last time we were together was in July 2023, when we visited the Norfolk village of Hincham, tucked away in deepest countryside, so small that if you rummage in your glove box while you're driving through, you'll miss it. Two roads in an L-shape, with a crumbling 17th-century church in the corner, set back from the road. Old houses made of Norfolk stone nestle between lilac and laburnum trees, while butterflies flutter among wild flowers of purple, white and yellow along overgrown grass verges.

  We were there to check out Sarah's inheritance from her Uncle Jerry: his two-bedroomed, mid-19th-century cottage at the far end of Church Lane, hidden by apple and lilac trees scattered down the seventy-yard-long front garden. The house is reached down a track at the side, just wide enough for one vehicle; behind, the conservatory, back garden and garage are fenced off from prying eyes.

  Safe Haven is so-called because it's more than just a cottage. It is a cottage with a survival bunker. The real deal, not just a dingy basement with shelves of dried food and a couple of camp beds. Uncle Jerry's bunker is a post-apocalyptic des res, with a sofa bed, two tiny bedrooms―one with bunk beds―a flushing loo, washing machine and shower. A TV, computer, and a box of hard drives and memory sticks containing thousands of digital video titles. A proper kitchen. Vast water, fuel and oxygen tanks, an industrial-size generator, a grow room and well-stocked stores.

  We did the tour with open mouths, and when we'd stopped saying 'bloody hell' and 'I can't believe it', I examined a list of the TV series available for us to watch, and said, "So while everyone else is up there getting eaten by zombies, we'll be down here watching Battlestar Galactica?"

  Daisy said, "Does the larder offer gluten-free options? If it doesn't, I'm not coming, nuclear wasteland or no nuclear wasteland."

  Rexy said, "This place is better than our flat―what time does the global pandemic start?"

  Had we but known.

  Hincham is, Sarah told us in her email, fifty per cent Norfolk born-and-breds for whom Norwich is the shining metropolis, and fifty per cent incomers who've installed AGAs and filled their houses with pine furniture and rustic kitchen utensils. In pre-pandemic times, the population stood at around two hundred and fifty. Th
e nearest villages―Melton Fields and Woodley―are two miles away on either side, separated from Hincham by―you've guessed it―fields and woods.

  Uncle Jerry bought Safe Haven in 2019, and continued to supervise work on the bunker even when he discovered he had less than a year to live, so that his only niece would have a bolthole when disaster struck, as he was sure it would, within the next few years.

  "I had no idea; I expected him to leave the place to a dogs' home or the East Anglian Preppers Society."

  He deflected Sarah's requests to visit while construction was taking place, and told no one he was dying until the end was near; nor did he tell Sarah about her inheritance when she visited him during his final weeks. After the funeral, she received a letter from his solicitor, containing a neatly-typed document from Jerry himself, with full bunker instructions.

  The last page warned her not to tell anyone in the village of its existence.

  'Otherwise, come the day,' he wrote, 'they'll be knocking on your door expecting you to feed them. What's down there is for you and your friends, not them; I've always kept myself to myself, as you know, but they're a nosy lot, and they were constantly peering down the lane, trying to see what was going on. The new conservatory and garage provided the cover; I took great pains to keep inquisitive eyes away.

  Watch out for Will Garvey, who thinks he owns the village, and Peggy Holcroft, the town crier. As soon as it starts, you get yourself down there and don't come back up.'

  'Wonder what he thinks 'it' is likely to be," said Rexy. "Any clues, so we can prepare ourselves?"

  Over the years, we'd heard much about the uncle who'd been expecting the world to end since the 1980s, and spent his evenings chatting on online prepper forums.

  "They gave him a purpose," Sarah said. "I never expected him to die so soon, though. Nor did he."

  I asked, "What will you do, keep it as a weekend retreat?"

  She nodded. "Greg wants me to sell it and plough the money into his latest project. Apparently my refusal to do so indicates my lack of faith in his entrepreneurial abilities."

  Greg was her second husband, a property dealer and grade A wanker.

  "No way," said Rexy. "This place is a dream. Anyway, what would we do when the zombies turn up?"

  Daisy said, "Selling it would be like spitting in your uncle's face."

  "That's exactly what I said to Greg." Her face softened as she picked up a photo of herself as a child, with Jerry and her mother, on a sunny beach; for a moment the hard edges she'd developed since being with Greg disappeared, and she looked more like the Sarah I first met.

  Before our last year at college, back in 2008, we were the lucky four out of over a hundred who responded to an advert for people to share a house in Vauxhall ('suit students'). 27 Lincoln Street. Happy days. Sarah and Rexy knew each other and applied together, but Daisy and I were strangers. I don't know why we clicked as we did, because we're all so different, but it just worked.

  We kept the house on for over a year afterwards, but inevitably our lives veered off in different directions. There was never any doubt that we'd keep in touch; ours wasn't one of those friendships that peter out after a couple of reunion meetings and promises to 'do this again―soon!' that never materialise. Our lives crashed and boomed and zig-zagged in the way life does in your twenties and early thirties, but the bond shared by the four of us remained.

  None of us had children yet. Sarah's first husband―who she met while we were still at Lincoln Street―wanted to do the kids thing, but she had entered the frenetic world of modelling by that time; it was never going to happen. Six months later it was all over.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I thought I'd lost her.

  I think I was always in love with her, but in a way that I could handle, as long as I knew that our 'family' was more important to her than any transient love. One night, back in the early days, I mentioned to Rexy that I was going to make a move, but he told me not to.

  "If she says no, you could ruin what we've got here. She's got enough schmucks lining up for her; you don't want to join the queue. You'll have her, just not yet."

  Rexy was right. Rexy was often right.

  Sarah and I had a six-month fling nine years later, in 2017, which ended when she went away for three months that turned into nine. By the time she came back I'd met Elle.

  That summer weekend in Hincham, one year before the world as we knew it came to an end, Sarah was happy to come up to Norfolk alone; Greg was too busy and important to leave London and spend a weekend with her friends.

  "I'm supposed to be sending him photos of the place; he said I'll change my mind when I see what we can get for it." She laughed. "I like how he says 'we'."

  Elle hadn't come, either; she was unable to leave her beauty salon in the Northamptonshire village of Dowthorpe, where we lived, because Saturday was her busiest day. Nothing to do with the fact that she couldn't stand Sarah, of course. I was glad, although I pretended to be disappointed. I was looking forward to a weekend with just the four us.

  That wasn't what I got, though.

  I arrived at the cottage around ten-thirty on the Saturday morning, as requested, to find Daisy already there, with her strange younger brother, Finn. Twenty-eight and never left home, he spent most of his time model-making in his bedroom.

  Daisy was living with her parents on a temporary basis after her husband cheated on her, and Finn had asked to come because he wanted to see the bunker.

  "He worked out the departure time and route based on traffic flow graphs," Daisy whispered to me. "We pulled up outside at ten twenty-seven."

  Though he showed great interest in the workings of the bunker, he hardly spoke all weekend. Daisy thought he was on the autism spectrum; as a child he'd been prone to heated outbursts that she was sure were fuelled by frustration at his inability to communicate. As a psychologist, though, she did tend to look for the 'syndrome' in everyone who differed from a perceived 'norm', while their parents rejected any suggestion of developmental disability. My (unprofessional) opinion was that he simply didn't like talking much.

  Rexy and his latest girlfriend, Avalon, arrived half an hour late, despite having to travel only thirty miles from Shipden, on the coast. They'd been together for eighteen months, though I'd met her only twice before. On the surface she seemed like his usual type―intense, dark-haired and arty-looking―but he assured me that she was 'the one'.

  "It's like all the others never existed, you know?" he told me, after about ten pints during our last meeting. "I always thought that soul mate stuff was bollocks, but Avalon―the night we met, we both knew."

  I was happy for him. He was my best mate in the world. She was pretty, all big brown eyes, cute nose and perfect lips―think Snow White mixed with Betty Boop mixed with Siouxie Sioux―but her charms had yet to reveal themselves. Like Finn, she didn't talk much that weekend.

  Then again, I knew how Elle felt when the four of us were together. She said it was intimidating, and boring.

  "You talk in private jokes and references. Constantly."

  I was a little bewildered by that. "No we don't. Only now and again, when we get onto reminiscing."

  She laughed at that. "I'll film you, one of these days. When anyone else tries to join in the conversation, it's like you drag yourself away from the other three and politely allow them to speak."

  I truly don't believe it was that bad, and I knew Elle was jealous of them, particularly Sarah, but I could understand how she felt.

  That Saturday morning, we'd hardly finished our coffee before Rexy said, "C'mon, then, let's see old Jezza's secret bunker. I want to know where I'm going to be hanging when the bomb drops."

  Despite Sarah telling us that it was 'a bit special', I watched her lifting a rug in the conservatory and opening a trapdoor without expecting much. When I followed her down the sturdy steel and wood stairs, though, my mouth fell open. This was a home.

  As well as the sofa bed and TV, the living area sported we
ll-stocked bookshelves, video games, and a laptop with a printer.

  "I wonder if that's for you?" said Daisy. She meant me.

  Now would be the time to tell you that I've written a few books. Alas, four average-selling sci-fi thrillers do not a living make, so I was working as a hospital porter while pondering whether to grow up and get a proper job. When I say 'average-selling', I mean that if they covered the supermarket bill, it was a good month.

  "Oh, I'm sure it's for Jack," said Sarah, softly. "You know how he loved your books." She gave me one of her intimate looks, to which I was determined not to react.

  She was the one who left me, after all.

  "You're sorted, then, Jacko," said Rexy. "You can spend the apocalypse knocking out more silly stories about aliens and spaceships. Trouble is, when all the supplies have gone and we're forced to go into the nuclear wasteland to see if we can find the odd irradiated bunny for our tea, there won't be anyone to publish them."

  I laughed. "I don't write about spaceships. Or aliens."

  "Yeah, I know, I read one. It was crap. How can it be science fiction with no spaceships and little green men with laser eyes?"

  He taunted me in a similar way in front of Elle once, declaring that not only could he dash off one of my Twilight Zone rip-offs in his lunch hour, but he'd seen all my books in a bargain bin in one of Shipden's many second-hand bookshops. Elle became super-indignant on my behalf, only to become angrier still when she found out it was yet another private joke.

  According to Rexy, I write bad fan fiction and only got a book deal because I gave the publisher a blow job. I reply in kind by calling Rexy a freeloading layabout who spends his days lying on the sofa wanking over the sex scenes in The Witcher 3.

  He's actually got a degree in philosophy, though since college has worked only in boatyards and bars, and is sometimes unemployed.

  As for the video games, I can't comment.