Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  Shit. He’d neglected to tell them about Sally. “That’s my wife.” He spoke steadily, keeping his nerves under wraps. “She was injured earlier this evening – had her face burned in a fire when everything started going crazy. I’m trying to get her to safety.”

  Rohmer put down the bag he’d been holding and turned to face Rick. His face was solemn, unreadable. Did he know that Rick was lying? Had he seen through the deceit? “I’m sorry to ask you this, but... well, was she bitten?”

  Rick frowned. “What do you mean, bitten?”

  “By one of those things. The dead people.” Tabby took a step back, moving away from him.

  “No. No, she wasn’t bitten.”

  “You sure?” Rohmer’s grip tightened around the bat’s handle. His arms were rigid.

  “I’m absolutely positive.” Rick’s hand rested on the butt of the Glock.

  “I’m sorry. I really am, but I’ve seen a grown man get bitten on the hand and die within half an hour. Then he came back... came back and killed his wife. Killed my daughter.” His comedy eyes swelled, almost pressing against the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  Suddenly Rick understood the depth of what these people had been through, and felt sorry for their loss, for everyone’s loss.

  “Anyone who dies comes back. If you’re bitten you die – why wouldn’t you? They’re dead, and dead things carry infections. So, you get bitten, you die, you come back. Everybody comes back.”

  “Unless you chop off their head,” said Tabby, at his side, once more feeling safe enough to stand close to him. Her hand slipped gently into his. Her mouth worked on another chocolate bar.

  Rick nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I...” he didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’ve seen so much over the last couple of days... so much horror. Dead bodies dragging themselves out of graves, murdered neighbours in turn murdering their own children, men and women I have known and loved eating the ones they knew and loved. We’ve entered dark times, son. Dark and insane times. Those of us left, the ones who survive... we’re gonna have to rebuild it all, from the bottom up.”

  Rick reached out and laid a hand on Rohmer’s shoulder. The old man looked at it as if it were something he no longer recognised. Then, slowly, with great affection and dignity, he placed his own hand over the top of it and nodded.

  “My wife’s hurt very badly. I’m keeping her on morphine, just to ease her pain. She isn’t dying, but the burns were bad. I have them under control, but eventually she’ll need proper medical care.”

  Rohmer squeezed Rick’s hand. “Don’t worry, son. I know of a place, somewhere we can get all the help we need. It’s where we’re heading.”

  Tabby wandered to the rear of the shop, picking sweets off the shelves. She was singing a simple child’s tune, something Rick remembered from school but couldn’t name.

  “There’s an island,” said Rohmer, his eyes staring beyond Rick. “I know someone who works there. It’s a mile or two off the northeast coast, not too far from the Scottish border – Northumberland. You know: Hadrian’s Wall and all that? Off the coast between two little villages called Bamburgh and Seahouses, a place called the Farne Islands. The whole mass of islands is a bird sanctuary, with the inner islands and a few other, smaller islets scattered around them.”

  He paused, swallowed, and then continued.

  “They’re doing all kinds of experiments there, on one of the smaller land masses. The last I heard from my friend was to warn me that something was happening, and if I could make my way to the island he’d take good care of me. Told me to bring along my family, my friends... the next day, all this happened. I realise now that he was warning me, but I was too slow to act.”

  Rick stared at the old man, hypnotised by his words.

  “There’s help there. I know there is. He even told me to try and bring along the bodies of anyone who died. I thought that was a crazy thing to say... at the time. But now I know better. Now I realise that they must be working on a cure, that they probably need test subjects to develop an antidote or something.”

  Rick could barely believe what he was being told. If this old man’s friend had known about all this before it even happened, and then contacted Rohmer to warn him, what did that really mean? That this whole thing was man-made, or at least someone had prior knowledge?

  “What are you saying? What exactly are you telling me here?”

  Rohmer’s head swayed, as if he were about to faint, but he managed to pull it together. “I’m saying that I think my friend knew that this was about to happen, and that he tried to warn me. I even suspect that he and his colleagues might be responsible for at least part of it. Maybe they were working on some kind of chemical weapon – that happened during the war, you know: scientists working in isolation to produce new methods of winning the damn thing. Nerve gas. Poisons. Weird neurotoxins and compounds. It wasn’t just the Germans who carried out unethical tests. I know because my friend was part of it.”

  Rick grabbed Rohmer’s shoulders, shaking him. “How do you know? Who are you?”

  Rohmer’s trapped eyes glazed over; they shrunk behind the chunky lenses. “Me, I’m nobody. But my friend – he and I were lovers once, a long time ago. He worked for the government, on all kinds of things. It’s why I left him and married my wife, trying to lead a ‘normal’ life. I couldn’t live with some of the things he told me he’d done in the name of progress. But we always kept in touch, all through these years, and finally he came through for me, only I was too fucking stupid to listen.” Then he fell silent, his head drooping, hair coming loose from the ponytail.

  “Granddad?” Tabby was back at their side, her face pale and terrified.

  “It’s okay, baby.” Rick leaned down and picked her up, hugging her to his chest, stealing her warmth. “He’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine, when we get to this island of yours.”

  Tabby wrapped her arms around his neck, almost choking him. It was the closest thing to affection he’d experienced in days, and the shock of it sent him reeling.

  Seahouses. The Farne Islands. He’d never heard of these places, but by God he’d find them. Even if it was the last thing he did. Even the slightest hope of a cure was enough to make him change his plans. He’d keep these people safe so that they could all travel there together, and when they reached Rohmer’s unnamed island, everything would be better. It would be fine.

  It was all going to work out okay.

  Rick dropped Tabby to the floor, where she stood between him and Rohmer, holding one of their hands in each of hers. And as they watched, something truly magical happened: flowers of colour lit up the heavens, exploding in the darkness like a thousand tiny sparks of crystallised hope. Distant detonations peppered the night; the sky bled spots of fire.

  Yes, thought Rick, it really is going to work out okay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  EYES OPEN SEE nothing dark smell not hope food hunger promise stirring bang pretty sky bang imagine flowers loud colour memory opening heart soon gone bad head bang live smell hunger moving past present gone now end hunger

  PART THREE

  TRUE LOVE WAYS

  “But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

  Chaos is come again."

  - William Shakespeare, Othello, Act iii, Sc 3

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DARYL FELT THEIR gaze upon him as soon as he entered the bar, crawling across his face and body like swarms of insects, picking at his clothing and trying to get underneath, under his skin.

  “This is Daryl,” said the girl... what was her name again?

  “Who is he, Claire?”

  Ah, yes, that was it: the lovely Claire.

  “I just told you, he’s called Daryl.”

  “I don’t care about his name, I just wanna know who the fuck he is.” An old woman stepped forward, away from the wall, where she’d been sitting on a pile of blankets.

  “I’m no one,” he said, at last. “Just another survivor, l
ike you people.”

  A low murmur passed through the group of nine or ten people; most of them were nodding, and Daryl knew he’d said the right thing. After a lifetime of being verbally challenged, at last he seemed capable of saying the right thing, and at the right time.

  “I said we’d help him, Rose” said Claire. She looked a lot like Sally, which was why Daryl had stopped to help her when he’d spotted her running along the road in her bare feet. She’d been trying to escape a group of youths, who’d decided it would be fun to rape her, and when she clambered onto the back of the moped Daryl had enjoyed the way her arms went around his waist and her chin pressed into his back.

  “If you vouch for him, then I suppose I can’t argue with that,” said the old woman, retreating to her nest of blankets. “Just keep out of my way – both of ye!”

  Claire grabbed his hand, her grip warm and tight. She possessed Sally’s build, and had similar cat-like eyes. But her hair was short, and the wrong colour. Instead of Sally’s ash-blonde bobbed style, this girl had a dull brown mop-top cut far too close to her skull and above her small ears. She wore clothes that Sally would never buy, too. Trendy rags Daryl wasn’t exactly taken with.

  But she would do for now, until he could have the real thing. Then he would dispose of her, and enjoy doing so, but right now she was merely an adequate substitute.

  “This way,” said Claire, pulling him away from the others. They turned away, he had ceased to be of interest. “My stuff’s over here.” There were no lights on in the pub, but he could still see well enough to make his way behind her.

  Just as they approached a booth near the back of the bar, there was the sound of gunfire outside, distant yet close enough to be heard clearly.

  “Somebody’s shooting,” said a male voice. “Is it the police?”

  “Will you look at this?” This was spoken by a woman, her voice rising with excitement. “Come here, Penny. Come and look at the loud colours in the sky.”

  A short, stocky Downs girl with her hair tied in bunches moved forward and approached the window. Her face reflected the fireworks outside and her eyes were filled with tears. “Beautiful,” she said. “The loud colours are beautiful.”

  That phrase... it triggered something in Daryl’s memory. When he was ten years old Mother had taken him to the dentist to have a tooth removed. He’d been eating too many sweets, drinking too much fizzy pop. This was back in the days when dentists still used gas to knock out their patients, and Daryl recalled the stale rubbery smell of the mask as it was lowered onto his face, the way it had smothered the world with its cruel odour. Then, the gas: it smelled of rubber too, because, of course, it was odourless.

  While he was under Daryl had a vivid dream, so real that it was really a hallucination. He’d been sitting in a small wooden rowing boat, looking up at a bearded man dressed in a long white robe. The robed man was using a long paddle to push the boat through what looked like quite shallow water. But the water was black, and it was impossible to see what lay beneath it.

  The man, Daryl had known instinctively, was Christ. But he was the Christ as pictured in Mother’s picture books: tall, robust, serene, and very white. A picture-perfect Anglo-Saxon messiah, with clear blue eyes and a big white smile.

  Daryl had looked around him, peering into the darkness that surrounded the boat. He noticed that they were sailing through an arched chamber, and before long he realised that the low, vaulted roof and ribbed walls were in fact the ribcage and vertebrae of a huge fish, or possibly a whale.

  This strong caucasian Christ was steering them through the belly of a whale.

  “Why am I here?” the question had seemed perfectly natural at the time; the right thing to ask.

  Christ looked down at him, smiling that toothpaste ad smile, and spoke softly: “The loud colours will smell of the universe.”

  The phrase troubled him, and just as he was about to ask for clarification, he’d woken up in the dentist’s chair, minus one back tooth. Daryl had experienced nightmares about the dream for weeks, and had wept in confusion, wondering what Christ had meant. He had not thought about it for years, but now he felt as if one of life’s mysteries had been answered.

  He moved to the window, with Claire at his side, and watched the impromptu firework display. At the edges of the city, in all the estates and suburban communities, people were letting off fireworks. They appeared in small pockets, ripping up the sky. Other areas answered with their own brief displays, like small signs of life amid all this marching death. Who knew where it had started, but it continued for quite some time, mystical and magnificent, a crude form of magic.

  “Oh, God. Do you realise what day it is tomorrow?” Claire held his hand; her fingers were warm.

  Everyone gathered around the windows, opening the shutters and staring out at the display.

  “No,” he said. “What day is it tomorrow?”

  “It’s November fifth: Bonfire Night.”

  Daryl smiled. “And that, of course, makes this Mischief Night.” The irony was almost painful, and he saw it as yet another example of how comedy and tragedy were intrinsically linked, like two chords tied into an impossible knot.

  Mischief Night.

  Twenty-four hours before bonfire night, or Guy Fawkes, as it was more commonly known when Daryl was a boy; the evening when the youth of Yorkshire were expected to play pranks in the streets, egging cars and houses, letting down tyres, playing all manner of practical jokes and causing low-grade problems for their neighbours. It was a tradition, something he’d even feared as a boy.

  “Oh,” he said. “How fucking perfect.”

  All too soon the fireworks ended. People shuttered the windows, pulled the heavy drapes, and drifted back to their positions, none of them willing to speak and break the momentary spell.

  A man was drinking at the bar; he was the only member of the group who had not watched the fireworks. His face was set into an expression of determination, as if he were insistent upon getting drunk. His hand rose and fell like a metronome, its rhythm compelling. Daryl watched the man for a while as Claire made up a bed on the long velvet-lined seat. The man’s chin was covered in a thick layer of dark stubble and his eyes were darker still. He narrowed those eyes and glared at Daryl, then nodded once. Daryl nodded back before turning away.

  “We can rest here,” said Claire, settling down onto the cushions she’d piled up on the seat. She had on a short skirt which showed off her bare legs. Her feet were bare, too, and dirty from the road.

  “Thanks,” Daryl lay down next to her, unsure of how to act. He’d never had a girlfriend, had never even had a girl as a platonic friend. Females were strange to him; all he knew was Mother, and he knew just enough to gather that she was not typical of her gender.

  Claire cuddled up close, her arm going around his waist; the other hand crept into his lap, where it rested like a contented house pet. “Where were you going when you saved me?”

  Her use of the word ‘saved’ was weighted with significance, but he failed to understand what that meant. He was wary, yet at the same time her body was warm and soft, and he felt a new sensation stirring within him, a sense of closeness; a sort of heat that he had never before experienced.

  “Mmm...” she murmured, burying her face in his side.

  “I was just driving, looking for somewhere safe.” He could barely form the words; his lips felt like rolls of rubber and his teeth had grown suddenly too big for his mouth. “What about you? How long have you been here, in this place?”

  “We all sort of gathered here last night, when everything went wild. Tonight, I got caught out looking for supplies – we’re running low on food – and I got separated from the others.” Her hand spread out across his lap, teasing him erect.

  Daryl shifted his body, trying to protect himself from her touch. This was all too much; it was way beyond his narrow understanding of human relationships. He felt more comfortable thinking about murder than he did sex. “I need to pee,�
�� he said, getting up and crossing the room, eyes searching for the bathroom.

  “Over there,” said the man at the bar, the heavy drinker, as Daryl passed his position.

  Daryl headed for the bathroom, barged through the door, and leaned his back against it. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, willing his erection to go away. He thought about Sally’s battered body, but that only aroused him more, so instead he thought about Mother and the prayers she had muttered every day of his life. The darkness in the bathroom pressed in on him, faces lunging out of its depths: Mother, Sally, Richard Nixon (of all people!)... Daryl gritted his teeth and wished them all away.

  When he re-entered the main room, the drinker at the bar motioned him over. “Drink?” he raised a spare shot glass.

  Daryl approached him, not yet willing to return to Claire. “Thanks,” he said, reaching for the glass. The man grinned. His eyes shone, spit glistened on his brown-stained teeth. He was pissed.

  Daryl sipped the clear fluid – was it vodka? The taste was awful, like strong medicine, but he enjoyed the way it burned his throat, cleansing it. “Cheers,” he croaked.

  “She’s had them all,” said the drinker, motioning his head towards Claire. “All the young blokes. She used to be a regular in here. I’d watch her chat ’em up, take ’em home, and then ignore ’em the next night in favour of some other stud.” His eyes rolled in their sockets, dull and unfocused. “She’ll show you a good time, mate. Give her one for me.” He raised his glass, belched.

  Daryl staggered away, back to the girl, her flat, lifeless eyes, her base lust, her small soft, breasts and the unknown wetness between her legs. She reached for him, her fingers like claws, and he could do nothing but succumb to her hunger. Her lips, when she pressed them against his mouth, were bland and moist and puffy; her hand grabbed at his cock, pawing him like a piece of meat. He thought of the dead things out there, the way they pulled bodies apart, and only then did his erection return.