Breeding Ground

by Sarah Pinborough

  “Has something hurt Chester? Is he okay?” Jane was almost crying herself as she fell to her knees on the grass, hugging the dog’s neck and making our examination more difficult.

  I stood up, perplexed. “No, I don’t think so, honey. He doesn’t seem to be hurt. You found anything, John?”

  “No. Nothing.” He stroked the dog’s head, and the howl lessened into a pitiful mewl. “There, there, boy. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  “Something freaked him, though.” What could it have been?

  “Did you ever see that film, The Thing? The one with Kurt Russell?” I stared at Nigel, waiting for him to make whatever shit point he was heading towards, and when it came, he didn’t disappoint.

  “Well, maybe the widows are going to start erupting from him now. Maybe that’s what’s pissing him off.” He laughed slightly at his own poor attempt at humour, and if Whitehead hadn’t turned up I think I’d have stopped stroking the trembling animal and beaten the life out of the pompous shit, no matter who tried to stop me. Sometimes I dream of that day and wish I had. I really do. As it was, I didn’t and Whitehead stumbled over to us, his eyes wide.

  “You’d better come.” He swallowed hard, the action almost comical, one arm waving absently behind him. “You’d better come and see . . . in the infirmary. . . .” He turned on his heel and started back the way he came, pulling on George’s sleeve, dragging him back with him. The rest of us trotted after him, apart from Jane and John, still soothing the anxious dog. It seemed that Chester had no desire to follow Chris Whitehead, and I wondered if whatever had disturbed the doctor was what had set the dog off. The infirmary. Dave. What the hell had happened to him now?

  As I tumbled through the doorway, a pace or two behind George, my feet seized up, my legs incapable of taking me further forward until my brain could translate what my eyes were seeing into some kind of rational meaning. I stood swaying and staring, mouth open. I won’t let it kill you. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Just let us get on with it, all right?

  I fought the urge to gag, and my leaden legs finally found the strength to step forward and come alongside George. I could feel his body shaking next to mine, his breath coming quickly. “Oh, no. Oh, Lord no.”

  Dave lay on the infirmary bed, his arm hanging down the side, his eyes shut. Beside him was a packet of sleeping pills and an empty glass. On the table was an empty bottle of wine that Katie must have snuck out of the canteen, and two plates with the remnants of smoked salmon and what looked like fine pate and toast on them. The condemned man’s last supper. The tips of his fingers were blue where the blood was settling, and a small amount of dry puke had crusted at the edges of his mouth as if something inside him had desperately tried to get the sleeping pills out.

  My gaze moved round to the tableaux at the other end of the room, pulse quickening, not wanting to accept what I saw there. Not ready to accept it.

  Why she hadn’t taken the sleeping pills as well, I don’t know. Maybe she thought they wouldn’t work on her. Maybe she wanted a fail-safe, no shit method. Whatever the reason, she’d done what she’d set out to do. Her small lifeless body hung from the makeshift noose tied round the metal curtain pole, the stool kicked away, sideways on the ground. Thankfully, her head was lolling forwards. I wasn’t sure I could take the sight of her bulging eyes and thick tongue, her elfin beauty destroyed by strangulation. There wouldn’t have been enough weight to break her neck, and a thick sob squeezed out of me with the unwanted image of her kicking and struggling as she slowly lost her breath.

  It took a moment before I realised she’d pinned a note to her jumper, and I shuffled forward, needing to read it. It said one word. One word was all that was needed.

  FAT.

  Oh Jesus.

  Whitehead was stammering behind me. “She must have planned it . . . she must have . . . they must have talked about it this morning. . . .”

  Staring at her, my heart aching, I wondered if she’d held Dave’s hand and soothed his brow as he drifted away. I wondered if they’d talked and laughed over their last meal, reliving precious memories. I almost felt a pang of jealousy at that shared experience. Why hadn’t she talked to me? Why hadn’t she told me?

  Needing to know, I reached forward and lifted her jumper, wanting to see her skin beneath. My breath stopped in my throat. FAT. One word that said so much. She was still slim, not big like Chloe got, but beneath that smooth surface, unnatural lumps and bumps protruded like bags of loose fat under her skin. Oh Jesus, Katie. I was barely aware I was crying, the tears blurring my vision and burning my eyes, and George pulled me back, slowly taking my shoulders.

  “She must have been so scared, George. She must have been so scared.”

  “Yes, son. She must have. Now let’s get her down from there, shall we?”

  My brain thudded painfully, a headache raging into life. This had happened much more quickly than it did with Chloe. Only a few days ago, Katie had been strolling around in vest tops. There was no way she could have been hiding any of those unnatural excesses of flesh from us, so how could it have happened so fast? How could it have done this to her so quickly? And why didn’t she say something? I remembered the way the widows hadn’t attacked her in the pub. Could they sense the change in her even then? Christ, I hated them, and I hated the scientist who had allowed them to happen.

  “Come on, Matt. You’ve got to be stronger than this.”

  George squeezed my shoulder, and the surprise of his touch made me slam my gaping mouth closed, biting down hard on my tongue, bursting the flesh and filling my mouth with the sickly taste of blood. Pain gripped me and as I cursed the shock of the scene around me lost its grip slightly, the added brightness created by my hot mind dimming slightly back to normal light.

  Without speaking I wrapped my arms round her still-warm body, trying not to feel the too-familiar lumps beneath her clothes, as George reset the chair and untied her, letting her slump over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Her slight frame seemed too heavy and my arms shook as I slid her onto the narrow examining table in the far corner. Vessels burst, sending rays of red toward her pupils; her too-wide eyes stared at me from above the thick purple lips that I could remember kissing not so many weeks before, when they were slim, pink and hot with human desire.

  It was Katie, but not Katie; a distorted interpretation of what she had once been, and staring at her and then at Dave behind me, tears rolled down my face and I couldn’t stop my sobbing, their faces blurring with those locked in my head forever that I would never see again. Too many to mourn, even Chloe just one of thousands or millions, a tiny speck in this tragedy.

  “Holy fucking shit.” Nigel must have followed us inside and through my tears I turned to see him standing in the doorway, hands on his hips, taking it all in. “Holy fucking shit.” His eyes rested on Katie, and I saw a flare of victory in them. “I knew it. I fucking knew it. She had one of those things growing inside her, didn’t she?” He stared at me, and then George. “I told you we shouldn’t trust those women, but oh no, you wouldn’t have any of it. Well, now look.” He pointed at Katie as if what he was saying would shed new light on the situation, as if she were going to sit up and agree with him and his pompous prick attitude. “And there’s two more back there.” His voice was rising with angry indignation. “What are we going to do about them?”

  My shoulders slumped. I didn’t have the energy to shout back, or to even get mad. Phelps would never see things the way we did, the way any decent person would. Shouting would only serve to make him more fucking self-righteous. I let out a long sigh and almost laughed.

  “She killed herself, Nigel.”

  “So?” His ever-sweaty brow furrowed, not seeing how the method of her death could have any bearing on what he had to say.

  “Yes, she had a widow growing inside her. Do you think she wanted that? Do you think she did it on purpose? She killed herself, for fuck’s sake. And she did it for us as well as for herself. She wanted to kill the wi
dow, and to do that she had to kill herself, and you want to talk about trust?” My voice was tired, low and even and maybe that gave it more power, because when I met Nigel’s eyes there was real hate trembling in them. His mouth worked to get the words out.

  “We might not be so lucky with the other two. They’ll turn next, I fucking promise you.”

  Where did he get so much loathing from? After all that had happened in the world around us, surely those of us that had survived should learn to trust and respect each other. His negativity drained the remains of my energy.

  “Nigel, Jane is a little girl who has been through enough already, and now we’ve got to go and tell her that her big sister is dead, and all you can think about is the vague possibility that she might turn into one of these things one day. You’re a father. Surely you feel more than all this suspicion and hate. What if it was your little girl?” I stared at him. And what the hell happened to her, anyway? “What if it was Emma that had made it and I was suggesting that she had no hope? How would you feel then?”

  His jaw gritted for a moment and I got the feeling that he was fighting the urge to strangle the life out of me with his bare hands, and I couldn’t understand why. He stood like that, frozen, his fingers twitching, for a full ten seconds letting out a long sigh, and leaning against the wall behind him, shutting his eyes. I could almost see the shudder of emotion rippling through his middle-aged body.

  “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I’m sorry.” He covered his face, rubbing at his eyes. “I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. It’s just all too much to bear.”

  Now it was my turn to be lost for words. I hadn’t actually thought what I’d said would have any effect on Nigel at all, but it seemed that my quiet tirade had hit home.

  His shoulders shook slightly, almost as if he were crying, but his hands were shielding most of his face and I couldn’t see for sure.

  “I think that’s what the problem is. I think when I look at Jane and Katie, I think of my poor Emma and I can’t handle it.” He looked up, eyes slightly damp. “I’m sorry, Matt. I really am. That girl killed herself to protect us all and that must have been a terrible decision to make. I can see that now.”

  He was still wearing a suit shirt, and sweat stains stretched in huge crescents from his armpits, darkening the blue. The sight of it turned my stomach, and I wondered how much he meant what he was saying. It was a bit of a turnaround for him, but then I doubted I would ever really understand this man. I knew that I would never really like him, and I wondered if that was making me suspicious of his change of heart. The thought made me feel guilty.

  “Don’t worry about it, mate.” My words sounded hollow even to me. “This shit affects us all differently.”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No. No, it doesn’t. It shouldn’t.” I didn’t know how to deal with this new contrite Nigel and just stared at him as his words blubbered out. “I’ve got to change the way I look at things. I’ve got to give that little girl some support. As if she were my Emma.” With that real tears oozed over the rims of his eyes and he cried openly.

  For a second, I thought about going and putting an arm around him, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

  “Speaking of which,” Whitehead was standing by Dave’s body, his composure a little recovered, “someone better go and break this news to Jane before she comes wandering in here looking for her sister.”

  My heart sank with the prospect, but George took the burden from me. “I’ll go. By my age, you’ve had a little experience of handling these things.” The expression on his face, however, told a completely different story.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  I stared at Phelps, not sure that I’d heard right. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. I mean, she doesn’t know you that well and—”

  “Please. I need to start somewhere. I need to do this. I was a father, after all, of a girl the same age.”

  Was. The past tense. It unsettled me, but George nodded.

  “Okay. But let me do the talking.” He didn’t sound like he wanted Phelps along at all, but I guess he decided that this new truce was too delicately in the balance to risk cutting Nigel out. I doubted it was going to make too much difference who told Jane. You couldn’t make something like that less painful. It was going to destroy her. I was sure of it.

  “And I’ll start preparing the autopsies.”

  “Jesus, Whitehead.” I turned my disgust on him. “Can’t you give it at least an hour?”

  He shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so bad taste. Not thinking straight.” His eyes were sad, and with him I felt none of the anger that I would associate with Phelps’s crassness. There was nothing intentional about Chris.

  I nodded back, my eyes still filled with tears that I was desperately holding within the red rims of my sockets, and then coughed, trying to clear my voice.

  “I’ll go and get on the radio again while you two speak to Jane. I said I’d let them know how things had turned out, and I may as well do it now.”

  Leaving Whitehead there amongst our dead, I went back out into the sticky air and, feeling as if I could cry forever, let the tears loose for a few private moments before reaching the hut.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It took me an hour or so of numbed transmitting to get a response from London, my brain slowly adjusting to the horror of what Dave and Katie had done as I sat there, repeating words without listening into the microphone on the desk. If I’d waited much longer I think I would have been in an almost semi-vegetative state, the constant repetition working like a mantra. When the same voice came back through the headset that I’d heard this morning, my whole body shook as reality took hold again.

  The man at the other end still sounded tired or drunk or whichever. It was difficult to tell. I wondered if he thought the same hearing me.

  “Our man killed himself. With one of the women. She was getting fatter.” The words felt heavy just leaving my mouth. “I guess they figured that it was better to go out together and in control than wait for whatever was going to happen to them.” All I could see as I spoke was Katie’s death mask, and I wondered if I would ever be able to remember her as she had been alive. I doubted it. It was hard to picture Chloe before she started getting fat. I could do it, but it took concentration, and I figured my memories of Katie would be damaged in the same way.

  “It was probably for the best.” There was little sympathy in the words, but then I hadn’t really expected it. The world was hardly full of hope these days, and so Katie and Dave really hadn’t stood a chance of any miracle recovery. He continued to slur slowly into my ears.

  “Have you seen any black widows at your end? Smaller than the normal ones?”

  “No.” My stomach tightened slightly. Were they evolving again? “Why? Have you?”

  “No, but I caught the end of a broadcast from somewhere in Wales. It didn’t really make sense, it was just some bloke laughing very loudly and talking about these black spiders. He didn’t seem to be transmitting to anyone in particular, just randomly. I tried to get a fix on him from some of the others, but it seems that less and less people are out there on the airwaves.”

  He didn’t need to spell it out. If they weren’t on the airwaves, then it was likely that they were gone, dead, over and out. More Katie’s and Dave’s. The precious remnants of humanity slowly being wiped out.

  “I was planning on contacting you this evening, actually. I’ve seen something that might interest you. Something fucking positive for once.”

  “Oh really?” God, I needed something good, but I didn’t think there was much that was going to cheer me up today.

  “Yeah, I’ve been outside today. Didn’t really have a fucking choice—no food or water. Anyway, there’s some activity out there. Human activity.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s the army. Well, more like small squads of mercenaries in scruffy army clothing, but they seem pretty organ
ised, so I can only reckon that they’re something to do with whatever’s left of the central government. I’ve seen three lots of them out there today, and they’re all doing the same thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Spraying the widows with blood. They’re going into buildings and attacking them. I saw them get one of the bitches out on Pall Mall. They squirted the blood at them and it worked like fucking acid. The thing was dead in seconds. It was fucking amazing to watch.”

  Great as it sounded, it was too confusing. “That can’t be right. The widows eat people. How can they do that if our blood is poisonous to them?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s human blood, or even if it’s blood at all. Maybe it’s blood they’ve tampered with.” He paused, as if his few moments of animation had exhausted him. “Whatever it is, it smells like blood. The streets are covered with it, and there’s much less widow activity out there. I’ve decided that next time I hear them pass, I’m going to try and join them. It’s better than sitting here and doing nothing but trying to survive and fighting a losing battle.”

  The desperation was clear in his voice, and I got the impression that he was the last of that band of survivors to still be with us. It was probably the best thing for him to do, but my heart ached with the thought of losing more contact. As each day passed, it seemed that we were alone in safety in the whole of England. I knew that couldn’t be the case, but that was sure as hell how it felt, especially on days like these.

  “Well, good luck mate. If you do go, make sure you let whoever’s out there know that we’re here.”

  “I will. And good luck to you lot, too.”

  I’d only just signed off when Rebecca came into the hut, her dark eyes sad and damp. Without trying to communicate, she sat on my lap and hugged me tight, maybe as much for herself as for my comfort, and for a split second I couldn’t help but wonder what was growing inside her taut olive skin. Still, she smelled good and as we quietly cried together, her fingers running through my hair, I let all my emotions out.