by Drew Brown
They had reached the village.
31
“Keep an eye out,” Budd said. “It’s not far.”
The truck rolled over a small, raised bridge that spanned a narrow stream. As they descended the far side, the sound from the tires changed as the bridgework switched back to a concrete surface. The sudden change in sound was enough to make Budd jump in his seat.
He watched through the passenger-side window, alert for any movement in the fog. Running along the road was a small wooden fence; behind it, the rectangular shape of a bungalow with a shallow, sloping tiled-roof. The white-painted walls were barely visible, but the windows glistened like monstrous eyes. Nothing moved upon the well-kept lawn and full flowerbeds.
Rolling slowly on, the next house was equally picturesque: a detached two-story cottage with a pebble-dashed facing and square windows, which stood at the end of a stone path.
It was quiet...
“Anything your side?”
“Nothing, dude.”
Probably too quiet...
“The pub’s on the left,” Budd said.
“Hurry,” Danek snarled.
Sam took no notice of the instruction. He kept the truck progressing at the same slow speed, trundling past one house after another.
“This is place,” Danek said, but despite the keenness in his voice, he did not lower the handgun from Juliette’s side. “The pub is there.”
Budd looked ahead to the familiar sign, which hung perfectly still in the calm air.
The Rose and Crown.
Like the houses around it, the area surrounding the pub appeared uninhabited. Nothing moved in the gloomy village. Juliette leaned over in her seat, trying to look up at the pub’s windows.
Budd guessed she was hoping to spot someone inside.
Sam stopped the truck outside the pub. He pulled up the handbrake and put the gear-stick into neutral, but kept the clutch down with his left foot so that the vehicle was ready to depart at a moment’s notice.
“Get out,” Danek said, shoving Juliette over so that she was pressed even closer to Budd, who, in turn, was pinned against the door.
“Maybe we should wait a minute?”
“Get fucking out!” Danek shouted, and he jabbed Juliette once more with the Glock’s barrel.
She cried out with pain.
Budd did as he was told, opening the door and jumping down onto the road. He staggered a few steps, the pain from his left thigh jolting through his body. Regaining his composure, he readied the shotgun and moved so that the truck was at his back.
He looked at the old building, casting his vision across each of the eight small windows at the front, four on each of the two stories. The aged, thatched roof sloped towards the road, sitting above the uneven stone wall, which had a porch protruding from the middle to enclose the front door.
There was no sign of life.
Or moving death...
Bogey appeared from the truck’s rear and knelt down. He covered the pub’s door with his MP-5.
Juliette and Danek dropped noisily from the cab. The Pole kept her close, pushing his handgun into the small of her back.
“Minka,” he called, his voice echoing along the fog-filled street.
“Be quiet,” Bogey hissed.
Danek ignored the soldier. “Minka, come out,” he shouted again. Without waiting for a reply, the Pole nudged Juliette towards the pub’s entrance. “I am here.”
Budd felt his heartbeat rising.
Danek pushed Juliette across the pavement and through the gap in the low brick wall that marked the boundary of the pub’s front garden. It was only a few steps across the sandstone-slab patio to the front door.
“Stay out here,” Budd called.
Juliette looked back over her shoulder but was propelled on by Danek, who was close behind her with his left hand around her shoulder and the Glock pressed into her lower back. “Help me, Monsieur Ashby,” she said as she reached the half-glazed wooden door.
For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing that the entrance to a bar was actually locked...
The door swung inwards with only the lightest of touches from Juliette. She vanished inside, obscured behind Danek’s larger body. The Pole continued to shout Minka’s name.
Budd hurried after them and jumped the low wall, taking the most direct route to the entrance. He spotted a section of damaged timber around the front door’s latch, where pale splinters showed bright against the varnished frame.
The door had been forced open.
“Ashby, stay outside,” Bogey ordered. “I’ll go in.”
Budd ignored the instruction and crossed the threshold.
The Rose and Crown wasn’t much of a pub, but it was the only one within walking distance from the airfield. And it served some pretty good whiskey.
So, yeah, the ceilings were too low, the floor creaked, the windows leaked, the place was either too hot or too cold—depending on if the fire was lit—and the regulars looked like they’d grown up in black and white, but the old place did have a certain charm.
Her name was Daphne…
The familiar sights of the barroom allowed Budd to move freely once he was inside. He ducked beneath a low beam, heading to the right, close behind Danek, who was struggling to maneuver Juliette between the scattered wooden tables and chairs.
Halfway across the room, Danek gave up and pushed her aside. She tripped over a fallen barstool and landed heavily on the spiral-patterned carpet.
Danek ran to the far wall and pulled open a paneled door, revealing the bottom of a staircase. “Minka!” he shouted.
Budd laid his shotgun on one of the few tables that was still standing and helped Juliette to her feet. She threw her arms around him and kissed his lips. He cupped his hands around her face; her skin was soft and her hair silky smooth. He could taste the salt from her tears.
I hadn’t realized she’d been crying...
Budd let the kiss linger, half-listening as Danek pounded up the stairs to search the floor above, the Pole’s voice becoming more frantic with each unanswered call of his girlfriend’s name.
Budd pulled back. “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly. “After he had the gun, all I could do was play along.”
“Do not be sorry, Monsieur Ashby,” Juliette whispered. “You stayed with me. That is more than I would ever ask.”
“You’re stuck with me, sweet thing.”
“I hope so.”
You don’t get married as often as I have without picking up a sense for when things are getting dangerously sentimental...
“Well,” Budd said with a wink. “You do make damn good coffee.”
Juliette knocked the base of her fist against his chest and let out a short burst of laughter. Budd saw the moment of out-of-place happiness in her eyes and he couldn’t help but smile at the sight of it.
Bogey cleared his throat. “Are you two finished?”
There was no time to answer.
Danek rushed back down the stairs, waving the Glock around his head. “They are gone,” he cried.
With all the overturned furniture, and the splintered lock on the front door, it didn’t take much detective work to deduce what had happened.
Happy Hour was over…
“I’m sorry,” Bogey said. “But we’re leaving.”
“No, no,” Danek shouted. “My Minka is here.”
“Keep it down. You’re welcome to stay. But we’re going.”
Budd turned to the left, his attention drawn by a soft-edged shadow that slid across the patterned carpet at his feet. He raised his eyes to the windowed section of a door that led out to the pub’s rear, a small, enclosed beer garden.
He recoiled from what he saw.
Oh crap...
32
Minka stared at them through the glass.
There were mouth-sized chunks of flesh missing from her face, round potholes that oozed blackish blood. Stringy strands of shredded skin peeled away from the woun
ds.
She raised her hands to the window, dragging them across the thin pane that stood between her and her prey. A dark streak was left upon the glass where she made contact: her fingers were missing, bitten away to leave nothing more than jagged fleshy stumps with white centers.
The severed bones rattled against the glass.
Danek screamed.
He dropped to his knees and buried his face into the palms of his hands, letting the Glock fall from his grasp. Minka turned to the noise and fixed her stare upon him. Her mouth opened to display her teeth, which chomped together, already in the motion of eating. She shuffled to her left, pressing against the closed door, unsteady on her feet.
Her hand smashed through the glass.
Budd grabbed the shotgun one-handed from the tabletop. “There’s nothing we can do here,” he said, tugging at Juliette’s sleeve.
She resisted his efforts.
Her attention was with Danek, who had started to crawl towards the beer garden’s door. The Pole’s path was littered with small packets of ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard, as well as knives, forks and spoons, which had fallen from a tipped-over cutlery station.
Minka pushed her head through the broken window. A shard of glass sliced off a large piece of her scalp, peeling it away like the skin from over-ripened fruit.
Budd pulled Juliette harder, yanking her around to face the front door. Her eyes widened and she shouted a warning. Budd spun on his heels, releasing her arm so that he could take better hold of the shotgun and bring it up to fire.
Out of the darkness at the far end of the barroom, a female fast-mover was running barefoot towards them, her progress almost silent upon the carpet. She wore a pair of black panties and an oversized white shirt that was splattered with spots of blood. More of the thickening liquid matted her blond hair, which streaked behind her as she launched herself at Bogey.
Even during the apocalypse, that moment before you introduce your new lover to your ex is pretty uncomfortable. Blond, beautiful, slightly wrinkly—heck, I can’t always score with women half my age—Daphne was the one good thing about the nights I’d spent at The Rose and Crown.
She’d even kept my old shirt.
Still, our romance had definitely run its course—I’m always game for a bit of kinky biting, but necrotic cannibalism is another matter…
The soldier turned too late and his short burst of fire did nothing more than blast holes in the ceiling.
White chunks of plaster rained down.
Dust and smoke filled the air.
Daphne crashed into Bogey and he crumpled under the force of her attack. She landed on top of him, her left leg tangled beneath his body as they hit the ground.
A loud crack sounded as her shinbone snapped.
Bogey tried to throw her off, but she had wrapped her hands around his throat, her fingers digging into his flesh. She held on tight, straddling his chest.
Budd aimed his shotgun.
From five or six feet, I reckoned it’d be a fifty-fifty chance that Bogey would get caught in the blast. And that was only as long as he stayed flat.
Well, if I’m honest, maybe his odds weren’t even that great.
All right, all right, there was no chance he’d be unscathed, and I damn well knew it too. But I had to do something.
They were in the way of the door…
He settled his index finger over the first trigger, but Juliette stepped across him before he could fire. She held a wooden barstool aloft and smashed it over the top of Daphne’s head. The single blow was so hard that the jarring shook the stool from her grasp.
Juliette reeled away as the stool clattered to the floor.
Bogey squirmed, trying to wriggle free. He had his glove-encased hands under the monster’s chin, holding her mouth at bay. “Help me,” he cried.
Budd heard a loud thud to his right, the noise coming from the same direction Daphne had first appeared from. A gawky-looking teenager with long limbs sprinted from out of the dark, his gangly frame adorned with a pair of red boxer shorts and a sleeveless yellow T-shirt.
Blood glistened around his mouth.
Budd raised his aim.
Boom...
Beneath the low ceiling, the shotgun’s retort was deafening and the flash burned onto the backs of Budd’s eyes. The teenage-monster ran on several steps, his momentum carrying the near-headless torso until the body finally collapsed into a heap at Budd’s feet.
Dark blood squirted from the neck’s stump.
Danek screamed again.
Budd turned to the Pole, his finger moving to cover the shotgun’s second trigger.
Minka was fully inside the barroom, pulled through the door’s broken window by Danek. Budd watched as the Pole rolled on the carpet with the injury-riddled, shambling-corpse of his former girlfriend, stabbing at her with a steak knife that he’d found on the carpet. There was already one blade lodged deep in her shoulder and a fork buried in the top of her leg.
Danek had several bite-marks across his forearms, and a piece of his eyebrow was missing. Blood ran down his face from the deep wound.
He didn’t seem to care.
Rolling on top of Minka, Danek managed to force the steak knife into her right eye. The steel blade slipped through the gooey orb, plunging deep into her brain. He wiggled the knife in a circle and her limbs twitched like those of a giant, grotesque dummy.
Budd looked away.
Juliette had returned to Bogey’s aid, having discovered an eighteen-inch, cast-iron poker from the fireplace. She swung it like a baseball bat across Daphne’s face. Blood splattered from the monster’s mouth, carrying with it fragments of broken teeth.
Screaming with effort, Juliette struck a second time, a little higher, and the impact caved in one of Daphne’s cheeks. The monster released her grip on Bogey’s throat and launched herself at Juliette, reaching for her ankles.
Juliette retreated in small, quick backward steps, skirting the debris on the floor. Daphne crawled after her, unable to stand on her broken leg. Slithers of bone perforated the taut skin, the lower half of her shin pointing away at forty-five-degrees to the rest, the snapped appendage wobbling with every movement she made.
She snarled as she gave chase.
Bogey rolled onto his side, coughing to clear his compressed windpipe.
Budd sidestepped, widening the angle as Daphne crawled by, her attention locked on Juliette’s feet. She was in the open, clear in the space between Bogey and Juliette.
The shotgun’s barrel erupted with flame.
Daphne’s body skittered over the carpet, thrown by the blast, but instead of stopping, she propped herself up and continued crawling towards Juliette, although this time her stance was more lopsided. Her right arm was missing below the elbow and her lower jaw had vanished, the tongue somehow unharmed and still lashing around unhindered.
Breaking up is hard to do...
Juliette took the poker in both hands and waited until Daphne was at her feet. She stabbed down, ramming the poker’s point through the top of Daphne’s skull, spearing it into the brain.
A wet, bubbling noise issued from Daphne’s exposed throat, and blood poured from her nostrils. When Juliette let go of the poker, Daphne’s body slumped to the floor. The fingers on her left hand twitched, jerking as though playing the keys of an invisible piano.
Budd pointed to the door. “Move it, sweetheart.”
Juliette looked at Danek, who was sitting by the back door. Her eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open and her bottom lip trembled. “Oh, no. Please, no,” she said.
Juliette’s expression knotted my stomach. She wasn’t scared—I’d seen that plenty of times already. No, this was something else.
This was revulsion.
And, after all we’d been through—heck, she’d just skewered a brain on a poker—I couldn’t imagine what would cause such a reaction.
And I was reluctant to find out...
Danek was kneeling over Minka’s body, the
Pole’s face contorted with a grim determination. His teeth were gritted. He had both hands wrapped around the steak knife’s handle.
The blade was aimed downwards.
Tears streamed from his eyes.
I felt sick...
Minka lay sprawled on her back with her distended belly exposed. The oversized blue sweatshirt and the layers of clothing beneath it were pulled up and out of the way.
You see, ‘til then, I hadn’t realized how far along the Baby Train she actually was—the baggy tops had done a good job of hiding her bump. I’d used the same trick before I switched from beer to whiskey in my late thirties…
Danek plunged the knife into Minka’s bulging abdomen, the tip sliding through the strained white skin near her belly button. He sliced the bump from the bottom to the top, leaving a dark red line in the wake of the steak knife’s blade.
Budd heard Juliette gag and glanced back at her. She had her eyes closed and a clenched fist across her mouth.
I’d seen enough already. Too much...
The Pole tossed the knife aside.
He eased his fingers into the gash across Minka’s stomach, his hands delving deeper until they disappeared. With a heave, he ripped the two sides of Minka’s belly apart.
Danek leaned forward, peering into the gore-filled well.
He was crying, his hands exploring further inside Minka’s abdomen, rummaging around her insides. Without any warning, the Pole pulled his arms out and held something aloft, twelve inches above Minka’s corpse. There was blood all the way up to his elbows. It trickled down his arms, dripping from his prize.
Budd looked away.
He’d glimpsed the baby’s outline, the small, unstable head and tiny arms and legs. He’d seen the umbilical cord trailing back into Minka’s deflated belly.
