by Owen Seth
He creeps along, ensuring that his footsteps are mouse-like. Only twice does his weight give birth to the noise of a broken twig. His attention spans in every direction, eagle eyes flitting from side to side as if he's experiencing a conscious form of REM.
The tree comes to him quicker than he remembered. Must've been the adrenaline; it does funny things to a man's perception. He sees the leg. It is not attached to the tree but on the floor, next to the half-consumed body of a dishevelled fox-hound. The weakest, he assumes. And then he laughs, loudly and crazily, a stupid act that could give his position away. He slumps to the floor, tosses the dog-corpse to one side and picks up the bone, holds it like a new born. He sits against the tree, the remaining nubs of flesh oozing black blood onto his body.
'Everything's a fucking cannibal!' he muses to the forest. 'Are you? Tell me! Do trees eat trees? Do bushes eat other bushes? Because we do! I've seen it! I've fucking seen it! And now the dogs! They had a calf's leg but that wasn't enough! Fuck them! Fuck them all!'
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Days pass like a second hands on a wrist watch. Man has long left the forest and until this moment has not seen any life, bar crows and the occasional insect. He keeps off the roads and paths, usually about one hundred metres away, his body low, out of sight. At any moment he expects what's left of the hunters to turn up, with Smith leading, an axe in his hand, looking brutish on horseback, his wild hair flowing like a Viking warrior, eager to see if Valhalla is ready for him.
The days are getting hotter and if he had to guess he would say it was early June. Luckily he came across a stream and was able to drink his fill before replenishing the water bottles.
So, after many days running, roaming, escaping, his thirst is quite suitably quenched and what he really wishes for is some food. And just as his stomach begins to rumble, it appears as though his wish has been granted.
Standing before him, forty or so yards away, is a goat, its legs doddering slowly, merrily almost as it chews away at the grass. Man sees it. Man wants it.
But he knows he has to be careful. Goats were once wild, after the lights went out, but many were hunted by men or torn into pieces by wild dogs. He heard a story about a panther that had escaped from an abandoned wild life park emerging from the undergrowth and stealing a goat from a group of would be hunters. These days, the cows and pigs and chickens and goats are generally someone's property. Used for meat and milk and cheese and for dispatching unwanted piles of waste. There's a risk to be had if he takes this goat. But his growling belly will make him do it.
Carefully he places the back pack on the ground, striving to create as little sound as possible. He opens it and retrieves some duct tape. He opens the duct tape and places the hunting knife on the shiny, white knee joint of the cow-leg bone he carries as a club. He wraps the tape around steal and bone, positions it to resemble a pick axe. A few layers to fix the two together and he has a new weapon. Something rangy; a war hammer.
He keeps low to the ground, bear-crawling slowly as blades of wispy grass graze his hairy cheeks. It’s a painful process, one that saps energy from his nutrient-starved muscles. He moves closer, his body sliding over the ground like a snake with limbs. The goat is unaware of his presence, ignorantly chomping down on grass and twigs and earth. A slight breeze cools Man’s sweaty brow and he stays still, enjoys the coolness. Still. Still.
A mass of power and flesh, the speed of a madman, the downward arc of a makeshift club.
The kill isn’t clean. The club is not as efficient as he would like it to be, the blade moving inside the tape with every strike. The goat slumps to the ground, bleating and bleeding profusely, seven stab wounds pumping blood into a world outside its body. Man looks at the dying animal, his blood-speckled face brightening in the sunlight. No need for any more suffering. He reaches into his waistband for the karambit, crouches over the animal and cuts its throat, the artery spurting out liquid the colour of pinot noir in rapid, heartbeat rhythms. Thirty seconds is all it takes. Thirty seconds for a confused and scared beast to slip off into another realm, to cease to exist in any other form that sustenance.
He butchers the carcass quickly, his belly's rumbles dictating the speed. He guts the beast, opening the stomach to release the steaming mass of half-digested grass. The heart and liver; he'll eat them now. He knows they taste the best when they're fresh.
It takes a few minutes but he gathers dried wood and grass, the desiccated ground follicles crisply ruffled in his clumsy grip. A lighter starts the fire and he watches, mesmerised by flames that flutter in the day wind, staring at a tiny bundle of heat, a scorching recreation of his former home. Of Emma's home.
Man shakes his head, rids his mind of the thoughts that plague him. He pierces the goat innards with a stick and holds them over the fire to blacken and burn. A couple of minutes on each side and he can wait no longer, tears the heart from the stick and bites into it. The outer layer is blackened, pulmonary veins and arteries shrunken into crispy squid rings of gristle. A blood clot is squeezed from one of the chambers like a congealing red snot. Blood spatters his chin as he tears left to right like a bull shark, the irony taste overwhelming the taste buds. Now, he has to chew.
It's an old trick he taught himself, when he was first cast out into the shadows. A trick that taught him to survive with little food for many days. To make the most of every meal; of every opportunity. He grew soft at the farmhouse, became sloppy and lazy and that's why they caught up with him and why he feels so hungry. The lesson lies within eating the half cooked offal: compared to the tins of soup that he so brazenly squandered, this heart tastes like shit. In eating the goat's organs he is reminding himself to make the most of any good meal he can. The goat meat, if his stomach and weakened mind had anything to do with it, would be consumed within a day. If he can be patient, a skill that he's had to teach himself, he can make it last two weeks.
Man consumes the heart and the liver but throws the burned and putrid stomach to one side. His shrunken belly struggles to contain the innards so he lies back, takes deep breaths. He turns his head on the cooling grass and sees the animal’s head, still attached to its body. The eyes are open, gleaming in the sun like black blood diamonds.
'I'm sorry,' he says. 'But it was necessary. You aren't worth a cut. I haven't let you down.' He sighs. 'Thank you.'
Man closes his eyes again and all he can see is a baby's head with curly hair, tiny black eyes and a very cute smile.
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Man wakes, groggy and stiff and full of a fiery rage. His dreams took him to places that he's tried to forget, the recesses of his sensory existence where life is as it was and not how it is. Man is a throwback, a survivor of the old ways but he exists in the New World. Even back then, the time that his dreams transported him to, he felt primed for something bigger, readied for a life full of heartache and violence and struggle. He feels, no, he knows that he was born like this.
His eyes open to the sight of the butchered goat, a dim blue glaze having set over the beast's black eyes. With a powerful hand he pushes its head away, forcing the hardened tendons to crack. He gets to his feet, lifts his arms and stretches. Grabs one hand with the other, bends it back to relieve the tendonitis in his elbow. Repeats on the other side.
He looks on the grass and sees the blackened fire site covered in twigs, the thin wooden fingers pointing in every direction but his, splayed like a cartoon bomb site. He sees the mountain of goat limbs, a squadron of flies buzzing over it like tiny vultures. He swats them away and places most of the meat into a dirty carrier bag. Back in the old times Man would have worried about eating the meat. But not now. A few years living on the flesh of random creatures, of water ravens and seagulls and pigeons, the dirtiest of animals, has trained his stomach to accept almost anything. The meat should keep for a while. If he's lucky he'll find a stream, hang the carrier bag in the cold water for a few hours while he bathes and drinks. Sometimes he tries to fish, his hands hel
d still in the water as tiddlers flow through, a patient man's game. Once he caught a rainbow trout, held it up to the sky and marvelled at the beautiful array of prismatic colours that ran the length of its belly. That one, he threw back. Somethings, he knows, are too beautiful to kill. Even if he has too.
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Man gathers his belongings, stuffs everything into the rucksack, bar the goat meat which hangs loosely in the carrier bag from one of the frayed shoulder straps. He checks his weapons, measures their sharpness. Not the best but with enough velocity most blades will cut through flesh. He takes the karambit and cuts away at the frayed edges of his corduroy shorts, now black and grimy with a wanderer’s wear. He takes a sip of water from a bottle, feels some escape and fall from his chin, clambering down through matted beard hair to drop swiftly to the earth.
The morning is hot and full of danger. Soon other animals will come to feast on the goat carcass; carrion birds will hang in circles in the sky, a sign to anyone around that a murder has taken place. Man sniffs the air around him, still pungent with the throng of death and blood. A bead of sweat lines his brow and he wipes it away. He sighs out aloud, squeezes his hands and then scratches the itching cuts on his arm.
And then he walks, feet clumping over grassy mounds, bent low, looking for the rest of his life and everything that comes with it.
EARLY SUMMER
Man lurks in the undergrowth by a horse-beaten road, the makeshift bone-pick resting readily in his hand. He sees it ahead of him. The hustle and bustle of life, medieval-like in appearance, a mulch-filled cesspit of humans and animals, violence and survival. He smiles to himself, his lips barely visible under the beard that has grown bigger over the weeks he's been on the road.
The rumbling of hooves drops his body to the floor, a natural reaction to such danger.
Limber thins of grass mingle with his beard, blowing slightly on an easterly wind and he remains still, tiger-like in tall grass.
Then he sees it, the war party he's been expecting. He saw them leave the day before, six of them, a horrifying pack of balding monsters. He watched their horses, powerful and lean, coats glistening and healthy in the midday sun. He wondered where they were going, how long they'd be. Then one of them, a raw-boned brute with facial scars crisscrossing and connecting like jigsaw pieces, the leader of the pack, shouted to the rest that it'd be a quick mission. Another village, half a day's ride south of them, rich to plunder. Man digested the leader's words with little ease. Even before the lights went out he's been aware of humanity's devolution, the anthropological throwback to days when the Northmen set foot on English soil. He expected them to return with supplies, their blood-bathed bodies stiff with the after effects of adrenaline. But as they pass him, all six still intact, still breathing heartily, he sees exactly what they went for.
People.
Bound together with zip ties and rope, each rider carrying a beaten and unconscious prisoner. Man's eyes light up the greenery, focusing on each of the prisoners, all men, all beaten and bloodied. The last rider passes and his barely conscious organic plunder looks in Man's direction, sees the whites of Man's eyes and throws him a look of defeat. The prisoner's eyes tell tales of what's to come, of unspeakable horrors that Man both understands and abhors.
The riders pass and Man relinquishes his position, watches the doubled-up horses thunder along the dirt road, down a steep hill and onto the settlement.
The village, bordered by a brown-red river, is bigger than any that Man has seen since the lights went out. His eyesight is failing, especially in his bad eye, but Man is able to see what he sees and absorb it. At least what lies on the outskirts of the village, just before the river. An iron-barred box of horrors, of limbless shit-stained freaks, once thought of as people, now known only as food.
The hand that grabs his guts, the tearing heat that rises in his abdomen, the searing pain in his head is itching to crawl to the surface. It's been a while.
The settlement is vast and imposing, a village of old packed with red-brick buildings and cobbled streets. A stone bridge that echoes the drumming of hooves leads riders into the village; it’s one way in, and one way out. A church steeple rises out of the redness like a saviour, barbed wire wrapped around the cross that sits atop. Man wonders if anyone goes to that church any more. If people still believe in a higher power other than greed and instinct. He doubts it. Beneath the steeple, on a sloped roof, Man can sees a weather vane, a cockerel’s body with arrowed limbs. Then he sees the spikes around the church roof. Sees the human heads that have been placed on top of them. Five or six, he can’t quite make them out. One is black, decomposition, or flies, or both. He imagines the smell, feels it sneaking into his nostrils and gags.
‘Maybe they’re the believers,’ he says to himself. ‘Turn the other cheek and someone will hit that one too. Gullible fools!’
He shifts his attention to the riders, all of them, a horde in his eyes, a marauding band of animals. In this world and all of the worlds that came before it, only the strong and vicious and cruel tend to survive. In this world, religion has no place any more. For surely, if what they believe is true, Hell is what Man can see all around him and Heaven is the sweet release of death.
The riders pass into the village, shouting and screaming…a war cry of victory. Man sees horses stop, riders dismount and people appear, weak-looking and balding. They swarm on the war party, clapping and cheering with little enthusiasm. Then they tear at the prisoners, pull them from the horses and drag them through the streets. One of the horses turns and Man sees something. A symbol, white and shiny in the sunlight. It’s a symbol he has not seen for some time. A symbol that he thought died with the end of the world, the eradication of history books and the fading memories of those who witnessed it first-hand.
A swastika. Sloppily seared into the horse’s flesh; scar tissue turned white.
Man closes his eyes, rubs them, opens his good eye and takes another look. It remains in the same place…seared into the leader’s horse.
Man turns his back to the village, holds his head in his hands and contemplates the sight he has just witnessed.
He remembers that before the lights went out there had been a resurgence in far right interests. Political parties sprouted like weeds, their proposed policies born out of a hatred for mass immigration. But no-one he knew back then really followed those idiotic ideals. It was the working class, the people who were stamped on by austerity more than anyone else, those who bought the lies fabricated by the government to rally them against the changing tide of multiculturalism. Man never thought that those ideals would get anywhere. Not in the real world, not in the world they once had.
‘Evil thrives where good men do nothing,’ Man says out aloud. ‘Or where good men have all died out.’
He turns to look and sees that the riders have disappeared. A few people remain in the streets, some leading the prisoners to the iron-barred box of cripples. With little mercy they throw the prisoners inside. One of the captors turns and cries something inaudible down the street.
Man waits and watches. Something inside him tells him that he needs to see whatever comes next. A big man emerges in the road, giant cleaver in one hand and a glowing red-orange pan in the other. He holds the pan with a thick oven glove and Man can see that he wears blood-stained overalls. He’s the butcher.
As he approaches the cage one of the captors pulls at a creature inside it, drags the deformed body to a spot just outside, a brown, grass-covered verge. Man squints, sees the body wriggle and writhe, a gag stuffed into its mouth. It rolls in spastic circles over and over on the greenery. Man sees why. The creature has only one arm and one leg.
The butcher and the captors laugh and point at the cripple, talk amongst themselves. Then the butcher steps forward, rests the pan on a nearby rock and puts a foot on the cripple’s head, presses it into the earth. He turns and a smaller man grabs the remaining arm, holds it out straight.
One swing of the
large cleaver is all it takes to remove the cripple’s arm, sending his body shivering into a volatile spasm. The butcher asks for the pan but the smaller man fails to pick it up. The handle is too hot for him, even with the glove. The butcher retrieves it, as blood gushes onto the ground, turning the brown grass red. The fleshy stump is seared by the burning pan; the cripple has stopped moving. The butcher slaps him and gets no response. He looks at the smaller man who holds his arms out in a way that says he doesn’t understand. The butcher laughs and turns to the cripple’s body. He lifts the cleaver above his head and brings it down. Once. Twice. Three times.
Man takes a deep breath and then lets it go. He sees the two men picking up parts like they’re about to construct a mannequin. The smaller man has a leg and an arm, the butcher, the torso and a head. As they approach the iron cage the butcher moves to it, holds the severed head up and talks to the prisoners. Carefully, he sets the head down a short distance from the cage so that it is facing the occupants. And then he and the smaller man and the remaining crowd move off in the direction of the main street.
Man looks away and sighs, grabs for his weapons and holds them tight. He knows that when he makes contact they’ll never take him like that. If anything, he’ll do something awful, something deserving of a place on the church spikes. For Man too, is a survivor. He has made it this far. He is sure he can go further.
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Man contemplates the darkness of what he saw the day before, the treatment of human beings as nothing more than livestock. In a way, they were nothing more than livestock, even before the lights went out. They were just never eaten. A lucid vision appears in his mind, a memory of what he once saw when the televisions worked and man-harnessed lightning surged through insulated metal. He remembers watching a TV documentary about battery; seeing them, malformed and stuffed into cages, or crammed into an aluminium warehouse, falling over each other, pecking at manufactured seeds until they were deemed old enough and plump enough to massacre. He remembers those chickens, the expressionless look in their eyes, the constant echoes of clucking idiots who were born into a life that was not worth living. Man remembers those birds and laughs. Compared to what he saw the chickens had it easy. They were not starved and hacked to pieces, one limb at a time by their own fucking species.
