Mortal Skies Omnibus

by Rebecca Fernfield

  The back stairs clear, he makes his way to the ground floor. Triangular shelves are tipped onto their sides, and brightly coloured tubes of lipsticks and mascaras are strewn across the floor. Fragments of face powder, eyeshadow, and blusher, lie broken and sparkling on white tiles.

  Barked words add to the noise. “Moist! ... Moist!” Banging his head against a thick supporting column is the man with a love for carrot cake. “Moist.” He bangs his head again. “Moist.”

  Nate moves to the camouflage of a tall, potted fern. Startled, a child squeals as their eyes meet. The woman crouched beside her jumps up, grabs the girl’s hand, and pulls her across the tiles. Eyeshadow squashes beneath their shoes. The woman’s heel catches on a metallic red cylinder and she loses her footing, flails, and lands with a thud. The child stares back at Nate, her eyes clear, her lips pink, no sign of infection.

  “Moist!” The man’s head continues to thud against the iron pillar. “Moist!” Blood smears across its paint. “Moist!”

  The woman screams, scrabbles to her knees, and pulls the child to the door.

  “No!” Nate hisses. “No! Not that way!”

  Too late. The woman pushes through the doors. Her body jerks and spasms as bullets tear into her flesh. The child falls too. Nate steps back against the potted fern, and retreats to the back stairs, to the repeated call of ‘moist!’.

  JOSH JUMPS INTO THE doorway of the nearest house to avoid the police car. It mounts the kerb alongside the row of terraced houses, and screeches to a bumpy halt to avoid the man running out into the road. His leg knocks against the front bumper and he crashes to the road. The car’s door swings open and a police officer steps out just as a small group of men and women surge from across the street. They sprint over the verge. The injured man scrambles to his feet, runs with a hobble, and disappears into the next street before the police officer has a chance to reach him.

  A tall male with a balding head, and a deep gouge along his cheek, breaks from the group and veers towards the police officer. As the officer raises a hand to protect himself, then falls beneath the beating fists, Josh squeezes his eyes to slits against the violence.

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  Knuckles rap at the window only inches from his head

  Shh! Breath catches in his chest.

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  Curtains twitch, then footsteps sound. Josh stumbles against the door as it opens.

  “Get off my step!”

  “Please. Shh!”

  “I said get off my step.”

  “No, I-”

  The woman pushes at Josh, and he stumbles onto the path. Alerted by the sudden movement, the attacker jerks his head, stares across the road, steps over the prone body of the police officer, and heads straight towards Josh. Startled, Josh pushes past the woman and into her house.

  “Hey!”

  Ignoring her complaints, he sprints past the stairs and down the hallway, barging through to the living room. Footsteps thud behind him as he pushes through the door to the kitchen then throws open the final door to the yard. Behind him a scream rises. Without looking back, Josh runs into the yard and down a concrete path. A dog barks and a squat shape flies from the corner of the yard, snapping behind him as he runs. The dog, a muscle-bound Staffie, chases close behind. In a massive burst of energy, Josh powers forward, and, in one smooth movement, vaults to the top of the wall. Rotten mortar crumbles, and the bricks beneath his hand give way. He tumbles to the narrow walkway. Winded, he lies among the grass and gravel, listening to the dog bark. In the distance, gunshots fire. His muscles burn and ache from the relentless and deadly game of cat-and-mouse he’s been forced to play since leaving the department store.

  He crouches, checking along the pathway for any signs of movement, pulls out his phone, and dials Tina’s number. It rings. A tangle of people crosses the road; he pulls back against the fence. There’s no sign of the hobbling man or the group that chased him. The phone continues to ring. Vicious barking from the backyard starts up again as glass shatters in a window. He presses the phone to his ear. Pick up, Tina! Pick up. The group disappear further along the street. Across the road, deep in shade, another narrow walkway stretches along the back of the houses. Each way clear, he runs across the road to the safety of the pathway. The phone stops ringing, replaced by Tina’s voice.

  “Josh!”

  “Tina!”

  “I tried to ring you earlier, but I couldn’t get a connection. I thought that perhaps ... I thought you might not be coming.”

  “I am.” His voice is little more than a whisper. “I’m nearly there.”

  “Thank God!”

  “I should be at yours in less than an hour.”

  “Josh, be careful. They’re everywhere.”

  “You’re in the first block, right?”

  “Yes, floor five, Apartment 6B. Be careful!”

  “I will. Just wait there and don’t go outside.”

  “I won’t. It’s too dangerous, there are gangs of them and-”

  The phoneline clicks to dead. “Tina!” White noise feeds back. “Tina!” he checks the screen ‘Call Ended’. “Damn!” He slips the phone back in his pocket, checks for movement, then picks up his pace until he’s running at a comfortable jog, rucksack knocking against his back.

  BARBARA LICKS DRY LIPS as she hobbles at a distance, the laces of her trainers dragging on the ground, her grey sweatpants smeared with blood, grime, and a brown liquid that now seeps from her innards. She yearns for the flash of ecstasy that had hooked her, and bound her to the thing in the dark.

  NATE SCANS THE ROAD ahead. The progress he’s made has taken him hours of crouching behind commercial dustbins, and hanging back in the shadows. The infected were everywhere, and, he’d come to realise, they weren’t just driven by a need to kill, they were hunting.

  There were two types: The Lone Infected and The Infected Horde. Whether loner or horde, their behaviour was the same: they walked the streets searching for prey. Their heads would snap to movement, and then they’d sprint, running at their victim with incredible speed. Among the general carnage, he’d witnessed two incidents that stood out: the first a young girl, the second a young couple.

  The young girl, earphones in, walked with eyes glued to her phone, unaware of any danger as though the city wasn’t being torn apart. It was bizarre, Nate thought, how there was such utter chaos and yet there were those, stuck in their own little bubbles, who didn’t have a clue; bombs were falling, but they were deaf to the claxon.

  Nate had seen the monster standing at the corner along the road, head held high, alert and watching, his senses far more in tune to the world than the girl’s; a predator waiting for its prey. A whiff of sulphur, rotting and putrid, carried on the wind, and Nate had pulled to the side of the building, pushing up against a shop window. He’d wanted to shout to the girl, scream at her to run, but the words stuck in his throat. His silence was selfish, despicable, but he had to survive, for Josh’s sake. Survival, he’d quickly realised, didn’t always live in harmony with the finer nuances of morality like saving a stranger’s life.

  The girl had crossed the road, parallel with the thing, and then it had pounced, knocking her to the floor, digging fingers into her hair, and smashing her skull against the kerb. She only had time for a single yelp. Her legs had kicked once, shuddered, and then it was over. Nate hated himself in that second, loathed his cowardice as she had died, but watched in fascinated horror as the monster picked up her feet and dragged her away.

  The second incident came only twenty minutes later and was clear evidence of pack behaviour. A young couple made the mistake of pulling into a supermarket car park and walking to its entrance, complete with ‘forever’ shopping bags tucked under their arms. They’d rapped at the huge plate glass doors in disbelief; the man had checked his watch as the woman jabbed a finger at the notice listing opening times. From a copse of trees separating the car park from the usually busy, but now quiet, road, a gang of them had appeare
d.

  Nate could hear their chuntering as he cowered behind the bulk of a black BMW. The couple were oblivious to their approach, arguing in front of the entrance, the woman’s voice carried as a wheedling complaint, the man’s as a gruff and irritated bark. Three of the monsters had sprinted across the carpark towards Nate, another two moved opposite the couple, another group closed in from the side. As the woman rapped again on the glass door, and her partner gesticulated to the car, the three groups spread out and tightened their circle. The couple’s instincts had finally kicked in, or perhaps they’d been alerted by the grotesque chuntering and clacking, or the reflection of eight jerking men and women closing in on them. The chuntering rose as the monsters drew closer. One of the females cackled, a male shrieked, the noise piercing Nate’s eardrums, and then they’d charged.

  For a desperate second, the pair had attempted to reach their car. A door was flung open and the woman clambered in, but a male caught her heel and dragged her out. Her boyfriend had grabbed for the door handle, realised he wouldn’t make it, and turned to run back to the supermarket. Too late, the net was too tight, and he had run straight into a female. Though smaller than him, she had jumped onto his torso, locking legs around his waist, digging fingers into his face. The other monsters had ploughed in, grasping and grabbing, and Nate had crouched down beneath the BMW’s bonnet, hands covering his ears, a useless effort to block the couple’s tortured screams. Like the man with the girl, the monsters dragged their kill behind them and walked towards the east of the city. Thankful that they were heading in a different direction, Nate had made his way towards the towers to a backdrop of screams, shrieks, pulsing sirens, and intermittent gunfire.

  As the sun begins to lower, bright streaks of flame sear the sky, and the meteors’ crash to earth is felt as shockwaves through the city.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The four towers sit as dark and stubby blocks, one a snapped crayon, against the lowering sun as Josh squats behind a parked car viewing the scene. Sirens whine with the mangled harmonies of dying cats as they run on waning batteries, and blue lights flash, headlights on full-beam, but weak against the still bright day. Ambulances, police cars and fire engines sit with their doors open. An abandoned stretcher lies skewed against the open door of an ambulance, one end on the floor, its blanket a heap in the dirt. Huge chunks of tower block litter the area.

  The pain in his belly is intense, hunger mixing with the bile of fear as he watches ‘them’ move between the debris. When he’d finally arrived, a fireman, obvious from his black protective jacket and trousers with their yellow bands at cuffs and hems, had led a small group from between the towers. At first, he seemed to be heading towards one of the fire engines and Josh had pushed up from his hiding place, only to squat back down in the next second; like the others, the man’s lips had been black, his eyes dead pools beneath his helmet.

  As the group had passed the car, their chuntering, and an odd clacking, had becomes audible. Some seemed to be mumbling, their words incoherent, others gnashed their teeth, their heads jerking with odd spasms. One had tripped on the pavement, its head crashing against a wall. It was still there now, unmoving, its legs only ten feet away. A putrid stench, a foul mixture of rotting fish, rancid potatoes, and stagnant water wafts, thick and stinking from its corpse, the particles clinging and sticky inside Josh’s nostrils. He covers his nose, the stench adding to an already queasy stomach, and gags.

  The road ahead clear, he moves to the next car, and then the next, until he’s within twenty feet of the first tower. Along with piles of rubble and massive blocks of broken building strewn across the grass and street, glass has sprayed in a wide perimeter, whilst curtains flap in now empty windows, and rubbish litters the space. A sheet lies half-hidden beneath a slab of concrete, the visible half, blood-stained and grey with dirt. A single tattered trainer lies next to a child’s T-bar shoe, its leather scratched. A broken picture frame sits on a splintered chunk of wood, the hanging door of a smashed sideboard. A velvet and padded bedhead, buttoned to diamonds, lays propped against a wall, a green and ragged curtain flaps above it, notebooks, schoolbags, teacups, packets of cereal, a thousand random items ripped from the flats the meteor had obliterated.

  The base of Tina’s apartment block is clear of the larger chunks of debris, its doors intact and open. The only hindrance to Josh sprinting into the building and taking leaping strides up its concrete stairs to her home, is the group of monsters that have returned. He eyes the open door of a fire engine as a body is dragged past the car. If he can get into the engine, he’ll be safe, have time to figure out how to get from crouching behind the car and through the doors to Tina, without being killed.

  As Josh tracks the movements of the creatures, a figure bursts from the door of the third block. Their reaction is instant. Heads snap to the stumbling efforts of a dishevelled man, shirtsleeves torn, nose bloody, as he scrambles among the debris. Suddenly animated, the creatures sprint towards him. With their attention on the man, Josh takes his chance, sprints to the fire engine, and pulls himself into its cab. Ignoring his instinct to slam the door and lock it, he pulls it closed with an unbearable slowness then gags, retches, and vomits in the footwell.

  GUNFIRE RINGS OUT SOMEWHERE deep in the city, and Nate’s gut twists with each bullet fired as he thinks of Josh. What if he gets caught up in it? Gunfire had started at the shopping centre, the soldiers seeming to fire at anything that moved, and had continued during the rest of the afternoon. As he’d made his way through the city streets, he’d seen several units on patrol, blasting the warning to obey the curfew over a loud speaker. Another alert had been messaged to his phone, a repeat of the earlier warning to stay inside, though there had been no mention of the ‘shoot to kill’ policy he’d witnessed at the shopping precinct. The directive must have come from the top, a government shitting in its pants, willing to gun down its own citizens. To Nate, it wasn’t a show of strength, but the desperate efforts of an administration out of its depth.

  He tries calling Sam again, but the phone clicks to answerphone. As another army truck, blaring its message about the curfew, comes into view, he crouches between parked cars and makes a phone call to the one man he knows can tell him the truth about what is happening, the one man who may be able to help. Gareth Smaller, an old colleague who had grabbed a cushy position at the Cabinet Office and now works for the Civil Contingencies Secretariat. The mobile rings, Nate’s mouth becoming drier, hope fading with each second. It clicks to answer.

  “Nate!”

  “Gareth. Thank God!”

  “It’s been a while, mate. How’s civvy street treating you?”

  “Long story, but right now, total hell.”

  “What’s wrong? I thought you had it made, Melanie, the business, Bristol-”

  “Bristol didn’t work out. We moved back to town.”

  Silence.

  “Shit!”

  “Exactly. What’s the situation? There are armed units, tanks-”

  “The place is in lockdown, Nate. The emergency has been classified as a level five, but ... shit! ... it’s off the scale if I’m honest.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “I can’t talk to you about that, Nate. I’m sorry.”

  “Christ, Gareth! There’s a shoot to kill directive isn’t there?”

  Silence.

  “Gareth!”

  “Nate, just get inside. You’ll be safe if you stay inside.”

  “Nowhere’s safe. And I can’t; my boy is missing.”

  “Josh? Jesus! Where exactly are you?”

  “I’m heading for the Stacks.”

  Gareth mutters something Nate doesn’t catch as sirens blare in a neighbouring street.

  “What? I didn’t hear that.”

  White noise interrupts. “... Nate. Get the fuck out of there ... carnage. They’re talking about ... extermination.”

  “Gareth!”

  “... dropping A-234 on ... to save the north
... respiratory failure ... within minutes ... ”

  Nate presses the mobile close to his ear, the crackling interrupting Gareth’s rapid flow of words.

  “A-234? What’s that?”

  White noise.

  “Novichock 7 ... death within seconds ... infection is spreading ... Nate ... They’re losing control.”

  “Shit! When are they dropping it?” A shriek splits the air and white noise bristles in his ear. “Gareth!” White noise. “Send someone in for us,” he shouts. “Come and get me and my boy.” He listens to the disjointed syllables through the fizz of white noise. “We’ll be at the Stacks!” He shouts into the receiver. “Gareth!” No reply. “Come get us.” He checks the screen, ‘Call Ended.”

  “Jesus. Fuck. No!”

  AS THE SUN LOWERS, Ellie grabs a sandwich from the footwell along with a cereal bar and hands them to Mimi. As she returns to watch the road, her breath catches; the young boy has reappeared at the doors of the tower block. His brown eyes stare directly at her.

  “Fitz, what’s that boy doing?” Mimi leans into the cab as he steps out, and away from the safety of the building’s alcove.

  Movement to the left. He takes another step out.

  “Don’t move, Mimi. Stay very, very still.”

  A group of ‘them’ appears from between the buildings, back along the same track they’d followed, like a flow of workers from a factory, in and out, out and in.

  “They’ll see him!” Mimi’s breath is hot on Ellie’s cheek, the waft of unbrushed teeth, and egg mayonnaise unpleasant. “Move into the back very slowly. I think they’re triggered by movement.” Mimi draws back without question.

  “But they’ll see him. Can’t we help him?”

  “Shh!” Perhaps noise will trigger them too.

  Too late, the boy realises the group have re-emerged. He stiffens as they continue towards him, but makes no effort to run. Instead, he stays exactly, precisely still; Ellie’s breath catches as she watches the hideous game of statues.