Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  After another few moments he moved on, cutting across the road and entering the landscaped area at the side of the building. A few night birds hopped between the branches of the low trees; something burrowed into the foliage at his feet. There might be rats this close to the canal, but it was probably something as harmless as a hedgehog.

  “I’m coming,” he whispered. “I’m coming, dollface.” It was not the kind of casual language he ever used; the lines were taken from some film he’d seen. All of his best lines came from films, or books. Not that he ever spoke them to anyone other than his own face in the mirror, or perhaps Mother’s closed bedroom door...

  The main doors operated on an expensive security system, involving a pass code and a CCTV monitor, but there was a man who lived on the ground floor, in apartment Number 03, who habitually neglected certain essentials of home security. He always left his bathroom window ajar. The man worked nights. Daryl knew this from his surveillance exercises; either unaware or uncaring of the dangers inherent in city living, the man never bothered to close the window when he left for his job. Daryl stepped softly along the side of the building, ducking below the eye-line of the windows.

  Soon he reached the open window.

  He reached up, slid his arm inside, and popped the catch. It was that easy: the fine line between entry and exclusion, life and death, was a scant few inches of air between sill and frame. It was almost absurd the risks some people took without ever acknowledging the possible consequences.

  Daryl glanced along the length of the building, carefully inspecting the area for prying eyes. Then, satisfied that no one was around to witness him, he clambered up the wall, finding a foothold on the smart new cladding, and forced his thin body through the window.

  Once inside the bathroom he returned the window to its former position, being careful to ensure that it looked exactly as it had before. Once he was satisfied, he walked across to the door and stepped out into a long narrow hallway. The front door was located at one end of this hallway; the living room was at the other.

  Daryl didn’t bother to have a nose around the apartment. He simply walked to the front door, opened it, and let himself out. He moved swiftly to the fire stairs – the lift might not be working due to the power blackouts – and climbed to the seventh floor, where Sally was waiting for him.

  He’d been inside before, sneaking in after another tenant before the main door could close. He’d received a funny look, but was not challenged, even though he had stayed there for two hours, exploring the interior of the building and waiting for Sally’s husband to return home from a day shift so he could study any idiosyncratic lifestyle patterns the man exhibited. Even then he was aware that the slightest piece of behavioural data might help him in the future, when finally the time came to put his plan into action.

  He was breathing heavily when he reached the seventh floor, and his lungs ached slightly. At home he lifted weights to add strength – but not bulk – to his wiry physique. He had the body of a distance runner: lean, powerful limbs, a hard, skinny torso, but his lower legs – specifically his ever-puny calf muscles – remained weak and his stamina was terrible. His upper body strength, however, belied the narrow build he hid beneath his baggy clothing.

  He was certain that Sally would admire his physique. He would leave her no choice in the matter.

  He approached the door to her apartment and stood outside, running his hands across the surprisingly lightweight wooden door. She sat behind an inch of hollow, low-grade timber, awaiting his ministrations.

  “Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby.” He giggled, but made sure that he kept it low, under his breath.

  Then, feeling an enormous surge of energy building from the soles of his feet and climbing the length of his body, flowering at the midriff, throat and face, he knocked six times in rapid succession upon the door – exactly the way he knew that Sally’s husband, that idiot copper, always knocked.

  He repeated the jokey secret knock – again, just like the husband always did – and then stepped back to wait for Sally to open the door and let him in; a shy suitor nervously awaiting his reluctant paramour.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CROWD’S MOOD was turning nasty. Young men and women were pushing and shoving each other to get through the hastily assembled cordon of officers. Rick took his place in the line, using the riot shield he’d been given moments earlier by a stern-faced Sergeant by the name of Finch. A veteran of the miners’ strikes back in the 1980s, Finch was a bull of a man with a broad build, a solid gut and a grey beard. His eyes were steely; they’d looked upon horrors normal men could barely even contemplate. His name was spoken in whispers along the station corridors, and his reputation was immense.

  “Hold the line!” Finch’s voice boomed above the noise, making him heard despite the rising volume of other voices – shouts and threats and chants. “Make a wall. Be ready!”

  Rick shifted backwards and tucked into the wall formed by his colleagues, holding up his reinforced plastic shield to link with those of the men on either side of him. The crowd surged again, forcing a way through. Finch barked more commands, but this time the sound of his voice was drowned out by the rising tumult of obscenities. The crowd would not be held. The mood was building, turning intense and somehow animalistic.

  Rick raised his head from the line and looked up at the sky, taking a moment away from the melee. Tiny snowflakes had begun to fall, drifting like confetti thrown onto a wedding crowd. The noise receded; a silent weight flooded in to replace the jeers. He felt calm for a moment, above and apart from the commotion. Bodies slammed against him but he could not take his eyes from those wondrous white specks as they fell to earth in lazy, haphazard patterns. His breath misted before his eyes; he didn’t know how long it had been so cold, and had failed to notice the radical drop in temperature before now.

  The snowflakes melted on impact with the ground, as if such a pitiless place could not hold on to their purity.

  Suddenly the area was flooded with bright white light. The ground became a sort of screen; flat, blank and reflective. Two police helicopters swung low over the scene and hovered, the sound of their rotors deafening. The crowd seemed to pause en masse then, as if the mere presence of the ’copters had made each individual aware of what he or she was doing and re-evaluate their stance. Finch took the opportunity to strengthen the line, and the man with the bullhorn shouted instructions.

  The crowd still seemed caught between two states of mind; they were all poised on the brink of something catastrophic, yet not one of them was willing to follow through. Then, just before a breaking point was reached, Finch fired his pistol into the air.

  Five shots. Rick was so acutely attuned, so hyper aware, that he managed to count every one of them. The crowd seemed to take in a single breath, giving up an inch of ground, and at that point every officer present knew that the situation had been salvaged. This was northern England, not downtown LA; when someone started shooting, it was still an unusual enough event to shatter almost any moment of tension.

  The life went out of the massed bystanders; they broke up into smaller groups, the mob physically losing its shape. The threat of violence was still there, but now it was subdued and had returned to skulk beneath the surface, peeking out like a naughty child caught in the act of an indiscretion.

  “Let’s get this shit cleared,” said Finch, and Rick was unsure whether he meant the still-present crowd, the bodies, or the whole damn thing.

  In Rick’s experience, it often happened the same way in battle. One minute the dogs of war were straining at their leashes and the blood ran like lava in the veins of those building for warfare; the next minute, after the initiative had been taken and the pressure relieved, it was as if conflict had never been an option. He had struggled to acclimatise to the wild swings of emotion, the acute stresses, when he first joined the army, but after his initial tour of duty it became like second nature. First nature, if he was honest. Once a man has tasted the pote
ntial of battle, he never functions in quite the same way again.

  A short time later it was like the standoff had never even happened. Clusters of bystanders still hung around on the fringes of the scene, smoking cigarettes, sipping cans of cheap supermarket beer, even eating burgers and kebabs – unbelievably, some opportunistic local vendor had set up his van a few yards away.

  Rick stood watching the vicinity, awaiting further orders. During the lull, his mind returned to Babyface and the way the dead man had bitten clean through the end of the lad’s tough leather boot. Surely that was not possible: no human being could bite through that kind of material.

  But were these dead things actually human, or in the process of revival did all humanity simply fall away?

  He recalled another episode from a few months before, when a training exercise had turned serious. He and a handful of fellow recruits had been practicing manoeuvres on a local football field after dark when a solitary figure had wandered over. The man was pumped full of illegal drugs – PCP, probably, judging by what happened next. The man had gone wild for no reason whatsoever, pulling out a kitchen knife from under his shirt. He stabbed one man and slashed two others, taking several truncheon blows to the head in the process, but kept on coming, swinging that lethal blade through the air.

  Finally he’d been felled by a rubber bullet. None other than Finch, the principal officer in charge of the training exercise, had characteristically stepped up to sort things out. The man had gone down only because his body reacted to the shot; his mind was still on the attack, sending signals of aggression to his flailing limbs.

  Maybe it was the same with these dead things? Because they were already dead, they felt no pain; their physical responses were not like those of the living. Maybe they would just keep on coming, brushing off all attacks, until somebody destroyed the brain – the engine that drove them.

  “How are you holding up?” Finch stood at his side, as if appearing from nowhere. It was because of such feats that he was ranked as a legend among the uniformed officers. He was always there, always watching and waiting for a problem to solve.

  “Still here, sir.”

  Finch smiled. “Cigarette?”

  Rick shook his head. “I don’t, sir.”

  “I give you another three months before you do.” Finch lit the cigarette, smiling around the short flame. His heavy-browed face looked eerie in the flickering light, like a Japanese demon mask. His iron-grey hair was swept back from his hairline, and his eyes shone. “Listen up Nutman. I know you have a new wife at home, so if you were to have vanished during that little skirmish back there I’d put in my report that the last time I saw you, you were holding the line with the rest of us.” Finch raised his eyes, peering out from under his tough-looking forehead. Everyone knew he’d lost his wife to cancer. She had died slowly, and in great pain. After her funeral, the famously hardcore Finch had softened, but in a way that gained him even more respect. Almost overnight, as if it were the result of an epiphany, he’d turned from a hard-edged bastard into someone who genuinely cared about the men under his command.

  “I’ll hang around a while longer, sir. Just to make sure everything’s okay. D.I. Harper’s on the warpath. I wouldn’t want to upset him again.”

  Finch smiled again, showing his shockingly white teeth; they looked nothing like the teeth of a heavy smoker. “Listen, your shift ended a couple of hours ago, everything’s fine here. Go home, Nutman. Go to your wife. The shit has gone up all over this city – all across the country. Last thing I heard, London was going under. Liverpool is struggling. Fuck knows what’s happening in Manchester. We’re teetering on the edge here in Leeds. In another hour, you won’t even be able to move across the city to get to your missus.”

  The gravity of what Finch was saying began to sink in. The man was right: if situations like this one were happening city-wide, the main roads would soon be blocked. Gangs and looters were already out in force and whatever units remained on the clock would be struggling to shut down the city, to keep it all under some semblance of control.

  Things did not look good, whichever angle you viewed them from.

  Finch finished his cigarette and threw the butt on the ground. He stamped on it more times and much harder than was strictly necessary, as if making a point. Giving one final glance at Rick, he winked. Then he was gone, gravitating towards some other part of the night, where men like him were needed, always needed.

  The bloodstained desert of Afghanistan, many clicks south of Kabul, was never far from Rick’s mind. Even now, back home, the sounds and sights and smells of the hot dunes remained with him, colouring his perception. Back in Helmand Province, when the gunfire had started and a concealed device had blown the tracks off the US military Humvee he and his two best friends were travelling in, he’d made a rushed promise to a God he did not believe in. He’d made a pact with whatever deity might be listening that if he survived this one, he would never abandon Sally again. Surely this was the time to make a return on that promise – if there was a test to be taken, what better time than now, when all the rules had changed and the world had become unbalanced?

  Perhaps the God he’d never believed in did in fact exist in such an altered world.

  He glanced around, noting the positions of all nearby officers, then quietly turned and walked into the darkness towards a low brick wall behind which lay a grotty urban park. He climbed the barrier in a second, hopping over it without making as much as a slight sound. When he dropped down on the other side, he rolled and kept low as he moved towards the small stand of trees at the rear of the paltry half acre of faded greenery.

  No one called his name. Nor did anyone come running to drag him back to his post. Acting on the decision had been easier than he’d imagined. Deserting his duty; it felt wrong, against his nature. But if he stayed put and hoped for the best, Sally would be forced to handle events on her own.

  No way. That was out of the question.

  If a trained killer could not protect his loved ones, then what good was that training? He’d done his duty, even in these extraordinary circumstances – no one could accuse him otherwise. Now it was time to let the populace take care of their own problems and hope that he did not have a serious one of his own.

  He glanced back and saw a couple of dark, shadowy figures drifting away from the block of flats, heading off into the side streets and cul-de-sacs of the estate. Had Sergeant Finch whispered into more ears than his, or had those others reached the same decision as Rick on their own?

  Good for them, he mused: strange times called for unusual measures, and in a world gone mad, the only thing stronger than death was love.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE INTERNET SERVER was unstable but still Sally managed to establish a somewhat tenuous connection.

  After the lights went out and the TV and radio died, she’d unpacked her laptop and set it up on the dining table in the open plan kitchen. She sat by the window, glancing occasionally over her shoulder to check on the situation outside. She’d seen no one else since the car crash, after which that hideously injured woman had crawled off into the darkness at the side of the canal.

  The laptop battery had about an hour’s worth of juice and she was linked up to a wireless hub. Scanning news sites and message forums she’d already managed to establish the scale and immediate impact of events. It was massive: an international phenomenon that was even now spreading across the globe, respecting no borders and tearing down all geographical and political demarcations.

  London, the capital, was on its last legs. All the major cities were falling. The reason behind this madness was impossible to comprehend; even now, after reading so many first hand accounts online, she refused to accept it as the truth.

  The dead, those disembodied cyber personalities – lines of text pretending to be voices – told her, had risen and begun to attack the living. Graveyards, morgues, the cold rooms in hospital basements: all were origins of the attacks. The buried dead,
the recently deceased, the murdered, the accidents, the suicides... they were all climbing out of their coffins, off their slabs, up from their death scenes, and walking, attacking, killing. Eating.

  It was insane.

  Sally was monitoring a BBC message forum, a local chat group dedicated to the Leeds area. It was usually a place where people gathered online to discuss topics of concern or interest – crime rates, council taxes, wheely bins and forthcoming events in and around West Yorkshire. Tonight – or was it morning already; she’d lost track of time – the forum was buzzing with terrified people unable to sleep and sharing information about the situation outside.

  mum died half n hr ago

  This abrupt message represented the continuation of an ongoing discussion in which Sally was involved from earlier: a thirteen year old girl whose mother had been attacked by a group of teenagers several hours ago as she went out to investigate a ruckus outside their home. The girl did not know how to drive and an ambulance had failed to arrive. The girl’s mother had been stabbed. She’d died from her injuries.

  stay calm, honey

  Sally felt helpless. What else could she do but offer faceless support, floating around like an inarticulate god?

  shez moving. just sat up in bed. luks funny. like shez drunk or somethng.

  Sally’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. What on earth was she meant to do? She didn’t even know where the girl was located – just that she was somewhere in Leeds. Even if she did have an address, by the time she got there (if she even got there) it would be much too late to make a difference.