by Gary McMahon
Rick left Sally on the sofa and retreated to the bedroom. He took off his clothes and laid them out on the bed, then went to the bathroom and took a shower. There was still enough hot water for him to remain under the jet until he felt at least partially cleansed.
After showering, he cleaned his teeth with Sally’s toothbrush until his gums bled. The bristles were worn, but he imagined that they tasted of Sally. Tears ran down his cheeks. He refused to wipe them away. In the mirror, his face had become harder, leaner; the face of the killer he was trained to be. That face had always lurked beneath the face he wore every day, waiting for the slightest opportunity to surface and show itself to the world. It was a face that had felt the desert sun, the hot shower of blood, the grit of explosions and nearby gunshots. It was the ancient face of warfare, a dark countenance worn by so many before him and countless more warriors who would come marching after, battling their way through whatever kind of world was left behind.
In the bedroom, he opened the secret door at the back of the wardrobe. He was forced to remove all the clothes on hangers to gain access, but Sally would not need her blouses and dresses any more. He picked up a long overcoat she hardly ever wore and put it to one side. He would put it on her before they left the apartment.
Inside the hatch was an M16 assault rifle he’d managed to smuggle back from Afghanistan. There was also a second-hand gun, another Glock like the one he had in the holster on his belt. Boxes of ammunition for these two guns sat on a couple of shelves he’d screwed to the wall. Hanging on a hook was a large hunting knife, one edge serrated and the other smooth and scalpel-sharp. Fresh riot gear hung on a peg. He put on the clothing, enjoying the clean feel of it against his skin.
Rick took the guns, knife and ammo and returned to the living room. He wrapped the M16 in an old black dress Sally used as a dust sheet whenever she decorated, and put the other stuff in his rucksack. The bag was full now, but he still managed to squeeze in the whisky bottle and an old photograph of Sally, taken by a mutual friend, name now forgotten, when she and Rick had first become a couple.
Sitting on the floor, the rucksack between his knees, Rick sipped the whisky. It burned a path down his throat and heat bloomed in his stomach, making him feel that somewhere at the end of all this there was hope. He finished his drink and set the glass on the floor. Then, standing, he prepared to move Sally.
First he inspected the landing. It was clear; nothing had disturbed the silence since he’d shot the kid. He traced a route along the landing to the stairs, then descended the stairwell with his gun at the ready. He propped open the doors along his route, mindful that if he was carrying Sally’s by now largely unresponsive body it might prove difficult to open them as he went.
Outside, he pulled the Nissan up to the front entrance, scanning the entire area for movement. He left the car doors open and made for the cover of the lobby. Pausing before re-entering the apartment block, he stared around him, taking in the seemingly tranquil atmosphere. Nothing moved, and there were no sounds other than that caused by the light sing-song motion of the canal. Even the birds had stopped singing.
Overhead, the sky was a vast dark canopy, covering the hell below. There were no planes up there, not even a light aircraft. The extent of the situation must be huge: it was impossible to prepare, to set out plans, for something as insane as this. He wondered again if, as had been intimated on the few news reports he’d managed to glimpse, terrorists were responsible, or if this was some kind of cosmic accident. Perhaps God had judged humanity as unfit to carry on, and instead of another cataclysmic rainfall he had simply decided to flood the earth with the dead.
It was clear now that anyone who died would return to attack the living, and that all they wanted was to eat. Humanity stripped down to an awful basic drive to consume. Take away the trappings and progress of evolution, the intellectual ground man has made up over the millennia, and all that remains is a brutish appetite. Beneath all that emotion, beyond love, hate and even fear, all you have left is hunger.
For years now, he thought, we’ve been trained to become the ideal consumer. Now that’s all we are. Mindless consumers, just not in the way they intended…
Rick turned his back on the thought and entered the building. His finger was light on the trigger of the gun, but the triggers at his nerve-endings – the ones that really mattered – were all-too-ready to react and make him spring into action.
He made his way back up the gloomy, windowless stairwell, keeping an ear out for the telltale signs of anyone creeping around on any of the floors. All was silent; the other tenants were either dead, had hit the road in an attempt to escape the city, or were hiding indoors, afraid to even move.
Then: laughter. A soft, echoing chuckle that rose up the concrete throat of the stairwell. Rick stopped, turned around, and dropped to his knees, peering back down the way he’d come. The laughter did not come again, and after several agonising minutes he stood and climbed to his floor.
Sally looked as if she were asleep when he entered the apartment, her head on the cushions, arms lying straight down at her sides. Her white-covered hands were clenched, the fingers stiff as windblown twigs against her thighs.
Earlier, when he’d cleaned her up he had slipped some running shoes on her feet and managed to get her to slide her arms into a heavy woollen cardigan. Now, he eased her upright so that her back was against the rear of the sofa, then clumsily manhandled her into the long overcoat he’d retrieved from the wardrobe along with his portable arsenal.
Sally moaned once, almost a word... a real word, not one that existed only inside his mind. Then, like a blissed-out crack-head, she lapsed into a deep silence. He slung her up and over his shoulder, into a fireman’s lift. She was heartbreakingly light, not much more than a bag of bones. Her muscles were already beginning to waste away, hanging slack on the bone beneath. Rigor mortis would set in soon – maybe that was why some of the dead things moved so stiffly, their limbs seizing up hours after death. The state, he knew did not last long; and after it wore off, the arms and legs would move easier, but still they lacked co-ordination. Sally, her brain only partially functioning, would probably be incapable of independent movement: even without the morphine, her body would be as floppy and unresponsive as a rag doll. The drug was more for his peace of mind, a safety precaution in case the hunger that drove these things broke through and gave her away.
Rick could barely believe that he was about to try and pass off his dead wife as the victim of an accident. She certainly looked the part – no problem there; the disguise was realistic to a fault. But the psychological ramification of his idea, the damage already being done to his sanity, was surely immeasurable.
He carried Sally downstairs without incident. By the time he’d buckled her into the passenger seat of the little four-wheel-drive vehicle, the washed-out sun was already on the wane. Night was dominant in these dark days, as if what was happening to people was somehow reflected in the very cycle of the earth as it shuddered through a mockery of its usual routines.
Rick started the engine but did not drive away from the apartment block. He stared through the windscreen, at the sketchy twilight, and wondered if his slowly emerging plan could ever work. He had a vague idea that rural areas might be the safest places to hide, and he and Sally had rented a cottage up in North Yorkshire two summers before. He still knew the way, and they had always planned to return to the cottage. They had spent a two-week period there which had, in retrospect, been one of the happiest times of their lives.
The cottage was miles away from the nearest town, and hidden from the road by acres of fields and woodlands. It had taken them hours to find it that first time, and only once they’d actually done so where they able to find it again. Every trip out to the shop, or to some local point of interest, held the fear that they’d get lost upon their return to the small stone cottage.
It was the best he could do, the only option he could think of. He hoped that no one else had gone th
ere, and that the roads were passable. If they couldn’t make it there, to that isolated potential refuge, then he was fresh out of ideas.
He glanced at Sally. She was still out cold, her head tilted against the headrest. A scrap of hair had crept through a fold in the bandages, and the sight of it almost killed him. Even now, like this, he loved her – but was it really her that he felt compassion towards, or some other woman who had taken her place? His wife was dead, and this slow-witted impostor was all he had.
Rick closed his eyes and turned away. He could not let himself dwell too long on such thoughts: that way lay madness, and probable destruction. He let his foot fall onto the accelerator and pulled away, the rear wheels skidding on a patch of gravel. Their old home shrank in the rearview mirror, turning into a small-scale replica of the place where they had lived. Like the rest of the world, it was becoming even smaller, dissolving into nothing more than a wan memory of what had once been and could never be again.
“I know exactly where we’re going,” he said, still not looking directly at Sally, “but I’m not sure if we’ll ever get there.” He watched her reflection in the darkening glass of the windscreen. She did not stir.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TWO-TIME KILLER.
No, too cheap and pulpy, like an old 1950s film noir.
The Man Who Killed Her Twice.
Ditto.
Daryl smiled as he packed his bag, amusing himself by imagining alternative titles for the TV-Movie-of-the-week that would never be made about his exploits. He knew that he should be shaken by what had happened with Mother; but, as usual, human emotions were beyond him, as if separated from his body by a plate glass window. He could see them capering around in the outside world, and even believe that others experienced them, but to him they belonged to an unknown culture he did not understand.
Instead, all he felt was… well, a bit tired.
He finished packing and went to the bedroom window, looking down into the drizzle-damp street. Only a few people had passed by since he’d despatched Mother, and they were either racing along in bashed-up vehicles or running on foot. Most of these latter were carrying weapons – garden tools, table legs, cricket or baseballs bats: anything they could get their hands on.
For now, the street was once again quiet and empty. The embers of dying fires were reflected in the sky but there were no more sirens tearing through the evening air. Daryl remembered reading somewhere that society was always no more than four days away from absolute chaos. This was at least the second day; perhaps that estimate had been off by about forty-eight hours.
Daryl passed Mother’s room on his way to the stairs. He paused outside the door, trying to feel something. His body felt like an empty canister; nothing stirred in there but the blood pumping through his veins. His mind, however, was a nest of vipers, a coiling mass of madness.
“Goodbye, Mother.” He continued to the stairs and descended to the ground floor, where he headed straight for the front door. There was nothing left here – not a single thing to keep him or even to delay his journey. The only thing that mattered lay somewhere out there, in the gathering darkness: Sally, his first, his one true victim.
The absolute love of his life.
He had a rough plan to retrace his steps along the canal and see if the Nutmans were still at their apartment. He imagined that the husband might have committed suicide when he came home to find his new wife slain. That would make things so much easier. If, when he got back there, she had risen and was occupied feasting upon her husband’s corpse, he could move in for a swift second kill. Or, better still, he could somehow incapacitate her and enjoy himself, making the second time last longer than his first stab at killing.
First stab. That was almost funny. And the perfect title for his imaginary biopic!
He reached the garden gate without incident, then heard a strange sound. He paused, listened, and identified it as the sound of eating. Standing beside the high line of privet bushes that separated Mother’s property from next door, he remembered the neighbours and their earlier battle. They must have ordered out for food, and were now enjoying an open-air meal.
He smiled. Then crept softly to the end of the garden and turned right out of the gate, heading for the end of the street where he could access the canal.
At first he thought that someone was coughing, or more likely struggling to breathe. Then, as the sound became louder, whatever was making it drawing closer, he realised what it was. The noise was too muted and belching to be coming from a motorcycle, so he suspected that there was a moped heading his way, like the ones used by pizza delivery men.
Daryl ducked into some bushes and waited as the vehicle sputtered towards him, its rider bent over the handlebars and not wearing a helmet. Comically, there was a large white plastic container attached to the front of the moped, the words PIZZA YOU, PIZZA ME, stencilled across it in bright red letters.
“You’ve got to be kidding. End of the world take-out food?” This whole situation just got funnier and funnier, as if the movie of Daryl’s life were morphing from a low-budget horror movie into a knock-about farce.
He took a short crowbar from his bag and waited until the farting, belching machine drew level with him. Then he threw the crowbar as hard as he could, aiming for the front wheel. The projectile fell short of its target, hitting the asphalt road. But, absurdly, the ten-inch long piece of machined metal bounced when it made contact and then flipped up and caught the rider on his knee. The bike swerved, the rider shocked and hurting, and then it went down, skidding into the gutter a few yards along the road.
Daryl ran out and reclaimed the crowbar. Then he jogged to where the young man was sprawled in the road, clutching his knee and trying not to scream yet still making an awful din. Glancing around, Daryl was all too aware that dead things might arrive at any moment. Bushes rustled. Someone – or some thing – began to wail. A metal gate screeched not far from where he was standing.
Acting quickly, Daryl headed immediately for the moped. He righted the small, unwieldy machine and climbed on. The engine was still running, so he simply slipped the clutch, revved the handle, and set off in the direction of the canal. He glanced once in the rearview mirror and saw the dazed young man sitting in the street, still holding onto his knee. Behind him, advancing at varying speeds, there approached three dead people. One of them was a small child; the lower part of its face was crimson with whatever it had been feeding on prior to the idiot moped rider announcing himself with his pitiful cries.
“Pizza you, pizza me,” said Daryl, unable to resist. It was a shame that such high humour was wasted without an audience.
When the man finally began to scream Daryl could not help but stop the moped. He kept the engine running and climbed off, turning to watch. The three dead people had already set upon the young man. He was flailing beneath their combined attentions. Two women – one fat, the other slender as a rake with either clothing or flesh hanging from her in strips – were busy disembowelling him, while the small child buried its face in his crotch.
Daryl watched for as long as he felt safe, then climbed back on the moped and set off. The last thing he’d seen was the dead child playing with the young man’s head and the two women fighting lazily over a length of grey intestine. The fat one was winning by weight advantage alone.
This was going to be easy. Things had reached such a stage that Daryl could move unnoticed through the world, killing whoever he pleased. Like a virus moving through the bloodstream of a butchered body, the greater damage would mask his presence. It was every killer’s dream come true: an avenue of hurt opening up before him, stretching ahead towards a distant blood-red horizon.
He pushed the little moped as hard as it would go, passing the occasional mutilated corpse in the road. Often he encountered dead people. They reached out for him as he passed them by, but no contact was ever made. Daryl was now untouchable. He had travelled so far away from humanity, and had become such a different beast, th
at he moved among them like a chill wind, slipping through their fingers and barely even registering in their vision.
A police car was parked on the corner of Whittington Road and Commonwealth Avenue, its doors flung open. The body of one officer hung out of the driver’s side, his belly opened, ribs sticking out like accusatory fingers. He was stirring, trying to move, but the lower half of his body had been so ravaged that it would no longer respond to whatever was driving his brain. His mouth gaped, the jaws clicking from side to side like a feeding cow. His eyes were white, turned back in his head, and his useless hands grabbed at his ruptured abdomen, dragging out chunks of bloody meat and stuffing them between his teeth in a horrific act of auto-cannibalism.
The other officer was on the ground, not much left of him but bones. The flesh had been chewed away, and the ruin that was now trying to crawl across the road and join his partner in the nightmarish feast could barely move without more of it falling away.
Daryl rode on, feeling like he was journeying through a Hieronymus Bosch painting: scenarios of damnation plucked directly from Mother’s Old Testament picture books unfolded around him. But whatever god walked here was one of blood and brimstone, a vengeful maniac, a self-unaware psychotic.
“You would have loved all this, Mother.” Daryl threw back his head, the wind in his hair; the stench of death was in his nostrils. “It’s all your warnings come true, your dreams become reality.”
He dropped down onto the familiar canal towpath, guiding the moped along the rutted route much used by weekend walkers and mountain bikers. He heard splashing sounds in the water but did not glance away from the track. He had to be careful. If he fell and was injured, he might die alone here... and to die meant that he would rise again, hungry for human flesh and with no memories of how to do anything but search for food.
