The following morning, waking to hear nothing from the other bedrooms, Peter reached out to find his school clothes.
Dressed and warm, he crept downstairs to hear muted voices in the kitchen. His father was dressed, drinking something steaming from a cup, whereas his mother was wearing a dressing gown, holding a glass and a lit cigarette and still looking as drunk as she had in the evening. Peter’s father saw him first, a twitch of his eyebrows his only reaction to him entering the room. He fetched a bowl and a spoon, keeping himself out of reach and as small as possible, like he always did, then reached out across the table for the cereal.
As he poured fresh milk from the jug on the table, skimmed from the milking tank on the farm that morning as always, they seemed to jointly decide to ignore their son and carry on.
“Right,” his father said after draining his cup and pushing back his chair to stand, “I’m off. I’ll be back later.”
His mother’s only response was to huff at him and turn away and stare out over the kitchen sink into the back garden. Peter sank a little lower into his chair, crunching his cereal as quietly as he could. He looked down the hallway, seeing his father pause at the cupboard and replace the shotgun. Evidently, he must have thought twice about taking the weapon towards the distant towns and away from the safety bubble of the land they occupied. Without another word or even a casual glance, he went out of the front door and left.
Peter continued to crunch as silently as possible, not wanting to incur the wrath of his mother, who was still staring out of the window at nothing as the cigarette burned a long, drooping stick of ash, which eventually dropped onto the kitchen side. Finishing his breakfast and shooting her a quick glance to see if he was being watched, Peter raised the bowl to his mouth to drink the sweet milk left at the bottom. She didn’t see him, otherwise he would have earned another slap around the head, so he rose and went to wash his bowl in the sink as he always had to. Only she was blocking the way as she continued to stare out of the window. Seeing the slight rise and fall of her shoulders as her face was turned down, it took Peter a moment to realise that she was crying. Not sure how to respond at first, he gently set his bowl down and put a small hand on her arm.
“It’s alright,” he said nervously, “Dad will come back an…”
“Who bloody asked you?” she snapped as she rounded on him, wearing a furious, red-eyed look of hatred, “get back upstairs and take your school clothes off. You’re not going to school again.”
Having taken an instinctive step back so as to be out of striking range, he was already half-way to the door, so he turned and fled the remainder of the distance.
“And you can stay up there!” he heard her shriek in her grating voice from the kitchen, just as he could make out the clink of a bottle against a glass.
Back in his room, Peter did as he was told and put his school uniform neatly back where it had been before, and he got dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He got out the few toys he owned, either donated or found cheap and second hand when one of them was feeling generous or guilty, and played in silence as he mouthed out the words the figures were saying to one another.
Lunchtime came and went, as indicated by the blue and red hands of his watch, which his sister had taught him how to read, and still no summons had been yelled from downstairs. On his third day of being hungry, he could no longer bear missing a meal and creaked open the door to sneak down the staircase with careful steps.
At the foot of the stairs he paused, still unchallenged, and listened to the sounds. The television was on, as it often was throughout the day and night, but he listened long enough to hear nothing but the sounds of the programme. It was a film by the sounds of it, and one that made him think it was supposed to be funny from the musical noises probably designed to make people laugh as much as the jokes were. Risking discovery, Peter crept to the door and peered around to find her still wearing her dressing gown and sleeping in the grubby chair she occupied and forbade anyone else to sit in. The bottle lay empty on the carpet, and the glass had tipped out of her hand to rest lazily against the arm of the chair.
He retreated silently, stealing into the kitchen to grab slices of bread and scrape a slab of margarine onto each one before stacking them to creep back upstairs. As soon as he got back to the relative safety of his room he ate hungrily and continued to play until the sun sank outside his window. But then, two things happened simultaneously. His belly growled, reminding him that he was still hungry after barely eating for three days, and then his stomach lurched because Peter realised that his father hadn’t returned before dark.
FIVE
John, father to a daughter and a son, and husband to a vile shrew of a woman who he hated when she was drunk, but despised beyond comprehension when she was sober, had driven sedately towards the big town where the hospital was.
He drove slowly, not through being careful, but because with each mile he travelled, he felt himself growing ever more suspicious. That suspicion was caused by a dawning realisation that he hadn’t seen another moving vehicle yet. It was very common to never see a moving vehicle, as the only thing down their lane was the farm and it wasn’t a shortcut that led to anywhere. But out on the main roads it was usual to pass five or six cars by the time they came to the first buildings. Those buildings, bizarrely a large pub and a small police house, sat side by side and seemed abandoned.
Shaking his head as though to dismiss the twin thoughts of stopping in for a drink and wondering why nobody was there, he pressed on and settled his mind back to the road. Driving in that area didn’t take much in the way of concentration, he knew because he drove drunk almost every week without fail, and the chance of stumbling across the two policemen who patrolled their corner of the county was slim. What also made it easy was that there were usually very few other cars on the road, so giving way to another vehicle was a thing of rarity; so much so that he had to concentrate especially hard if he ever drove anywhere else. And when he did, he was scared if he let his concentration slip, he might just carry on as if he was the only person driving.
That morning though, his belly sour from the previous day’s alcohol and the insufficient breakfast, his unease about the road situation was growing in intensity. Not one car, not a single other moving vehicle was on the road. Trying and failing to ignore that fact, he continued through a village which was merely a collection of a dozen houses centred around a crossroads where the road met the rail line, a thatched cottage and a small shop-cum-post office. Deserted. Slowing the car, he saw that the window to the shop was damaged and the heavy plate glass was smashed inwards. Deciding against stopping to investigate, he pushed down on the accelerator to propel the car towards the hospital.
Arriving fifteen minutes later, having seen the same disturbing tale in three other hamlets, he reached the hospital to see chaos, and evidence of a fire at the main entrance. It had been small, otherwise the whole building would have been ablaze, but it had been sufficient to blacken the glass front and prevent him from seeing inside. Ignoring the main entrance in his growing fear, he headed for the side of the main building to drive around to the psychiatric unit out of sight of the main hospital. These things were usually kept away from the public eye, as unsightly reminders of such things weakened a person’s resolve.
Finding the single-storey building which he knew was the psychiatric assessment unit, he stopped and slowly ratcheted the handbrake on. He stayed in the car, unable to shake the now obvious sense that something was very wrong but trying his hardest to refuse to believe that any disease or rioting in London could affect them this far away already. He decided that the emergency workers had probably all been drafted in to the capital, and he nodded to affirm that assumption to himself before climbing out of the car and striding towards the doors.
This place, he had been told, would keep his daughter for up to two weeks to do an assessment on her before either sending her home or, more likely they believed, admitting her to an in-patient facility
somewhere nearer the coastal towns.
They, or more accurately he, had decided to bring her home due to the crisis they had heard about on the news channels. She could be sorted out another time, but it mattered to him that the family stay together on their farm until all that London nonsense subsided; a sentiment very common to people who’d resided all their lives in the country and had a deep mistrust of such things that went on in cities.
That sentiment, as false as it was, evaporated as soon as he pushed open the doors of the hospital unit.
The receptionist, her white blouse and the pale skin of her face sheeted with dried blood, turned slowly, almost mechanically, around to face him as he walked in.
“Hello,” he said gruffly, “I’m here for my…” he trailed away as the horror scene of the woman finally connected with his brain. He said nothing, merely stared at the woman waiting for some kind of explanation which never came. Letting out a crackling noise somewhere between a hiss and a groan, she began to mount the reception desk separating them. Moving one limb at a time like a drunk, she continued to groan in and out, the sound like a comedy impression of a creaking door in a horror film as her eyes stayed fixed on him, unwavering and resolute.
John involuntarily took a pace backwards, then two more as the impetus of the receptionist took her off balance and she fell to plough her face directly into the hard floor in front of him. She didn’t react, didn’t pause or cry out or waver, she simply reset herself and continued to move towards him. He backed up as far as he could go until his back met the glass doors, which opened inwards and blocked his escape. Letting out a small cry of horror as he tried to push his way outside once again, he froze as the woman stopped and climbed to her feet unsteadily.
Now that she was upright and away from the furniture, his unobstructed view showed that her right calf muscle had been torn almost completely away. That horrible injury didn’t seem to debilitate her, nor did the evident blood loss stop her from stumbling towards him to close the gap to a mere arm’s length. Finally, his fear snapping, he threw out a jab of his large fist with all the easy strength of a man who had worked outside his whole life, and he connected with her face. Her nose crunched, her head snapped back on her neck like a slow-motion replay of a car accident, and she toppled backwards to slam into the ground again with a broken nose.
Straightening himself, John shrugged off the confrontation as he rolled his shoulders backwards and told himself that he hadn’t been scared after all, and that the woman merely needed putting in her place before she got herself hurt. Just as these foolish, misogynistic thoughts reaffirmed his arrogant belief in his own superiority, the receptionist groaned again and flopped over onto her front, where thick, dark, congealed blood poured like oil from her shattered nose onto the shiny floor. With evident difficulty and poor co-ordination, she regained her feet and shuffled slowly in a circle again to re-acquire John in her sights.
The teeth pulled back from bloody lips, the hands rose up to point directly at his face as though she were accusing him, and she lurched towards him again, hissing a louder groan than before. John curled a lip, knowing that he wouldn’t pull his punch this time, and drew back his hand with narrowed eyes as his body rocked back in preparation to deliver a huge blow.
Then he stopped, frozen in wide-eyed terror as he looked into her eyes. Those eyes, he now saw, were clouded over in blindness. They were milky orbs set inside sunken sockets, and the sight of them hit him in the chest with such a stab of fear that he was powerless to move. Some instinctive sense, however, sparked movement in him, and his body took up the backwards rocking motion with greater effort than before to build the power, and his fist rose again to rocket his upper body forwards behind the punch as his hips swung through to deliver the maximum amount of force possible. The crunching noise echoed loudly in the confines of the small atrium, and the woman crumpled backwards like a felled tree. The left side of her face, crushed inwards by the uneven battle between stationary cheek bone and large, rapidly moving fist, was a mess of bone and gore. She didn’t get up a second time.
Satisfied in some small sense, if not totally confused and terrified, John straightened himself and stepped over her body. He had no idea that he was stumbling around in shock, that his own mind had created a kind of fortress around itself to protect him and keep him moving, despite the things he had just seen and done, and he had no idea that there was worse still to come.
Pushing through the double doors behind the tall desk, he walked down a corridor and ignored the streaks of brown, dried blood which had filled the air with an almost metallic tang. He ignored the broken furniture and the cracked windows held intact by their reinforced mesh to prevent the shards from being used as weapons. He even ignored the hissing moans coming from behind the closed doors he passed as his presence stirred up the occupants. Keeping his eyes focused on the end of the corridor ahead where he could see the glass bubble of a nurses’ station, he stopped before it to take in another scene that his brain couldn’t process. He leaned forward, placing his hand against the glass to shield the light away from his eyes, to peer through the streaked blood and through to the other side.
A hand slapped hard against the glass, making him jump backwards and utter a strangled cry of alarm. The hand, blood-soaked with torn nails and the index finger missing from a ragged wound at the first knuckle, squeaked slowly down the pane as the rest of the body rose upwards into sight.
John’s mind, already on desperately thin ice, lost the battle and shattered the remaining fragile protection surrounding his wits.
The young girl, a teenager by her size and build, was sheeted with blood from a gash on her head which obscured her features. Her face tilted to the side in curiosity as it tried again with its ravaged hand to push through the invisible force field keeping her from the living body that intrigued her so much. Blinking involuntarily, the blood wiped away from the eyeballs to show the same blind, milky, soulless things he had seen in the receptionist’s eye sockets.
Hitting her hand harder against the glass and finding that it didn’t yield, she turned her head towards the door next to her and slowly, shakily, reached out for the handle.
John, his own eyes drawn to the opposite side of the door, stared in horror as the handle began to depress before it flung back upwards as though the slippery hand operating it had lost traction. Hearing the hiss from the other side raise in intensity, he looked on as the handle was pushed down again. Too late, John snatched for it to keep the thing shut inside and away from him, but the door had already opened and a hand shot through the gap to reach for him. He drew himself up to slam the door using all his body weight, only the blood-slickened floor betrayed him and took away his footing. Slamming down to the ground in shock, he looked up just in time to see the thing fall on him, forcing his hands out in front of him on instinct. The girl, chomping her teeth down onto the side of his left hand painfully to pierce the calloused skin of his rough hand, fixed him with her milky eyes.
He froze again, mouth open in pain and horror as the two locked eyes before hers turned away to get a better purchase on him. In that moment, he drew up one foot, placed it into her hip, and shoved hard to send her through the air and back through the doorway. Already on his feet but unaware of getting up, he slammed the door shut and ran the length of the corridor, now terribly aware that other doors were rattling and opening, before bursting out and tripping over the body of the receptionist to fall hard.
Scrambling to his feet again, he wasted precious seconds as he tried to push open the doors to the outside world before his brain took some semblance of control and he pulled instead to be instantly rewarded with fresh air. Running to collapse against his car, he looked at the neat row of teeth marks crimping the outside of his left hand, which already welled with blood and seemed to be turning the skin surrounding it grey.
Fumbling for his keys, he tried to start the car to return home, to tell his wife that the hospital staff had gone insane and blind a
nd they had bitten him, but the weakness and dizziness and nausea took over, making him slump over the wheel into eventual unconsciousness.
SIX
The sun set fully, and Peter heard movement downstairs. The drink had obviously worn off, and he heard the downstairs toilet flush as the pipes in the bathroom opposite his room gurgled in echoing answer. The familiar clink of glass on glass travelled upstairs, making him feel less than hopeful for a meal that evening. He was starting to feel really hungry, to the point that hunger was almost overriding the sense of dread he felt at being left alone with his mother. That concept alone was terrifying enough, but when added to the knowledge that his father was supposed to be back by then with his sister, it made the boy’s heart drop.
If his sister came back, at least he would get some food cooked for him, and he would probably get told more of what was going on. If she didn’t come back, then feeling hungry all the time was probably going to be the least of Peter’s worries. That his father hadn’t returned was also a concern, but not as much as being left alone with the evil witch.
Peter and his sister used to play, safely away from the house in their secret den underneath the low branches of the pine trees, pretending that they’d been adopted by an evil step-mother who hated them. He thought that those games were just her way of helping him come to terms with their situation, and she always promised that as soon as she was old enough, she would leave and take him with her. Peter’s sad reverie was burst like a balloon by noises firing up the stairs like a rifle crack.
“Get down here! Now!” she screeched up at him, making his legs respond with an instant obedience borne of fear to lift him from the carpet and towards the door before his mind had even comprehended the order. Peter scurried to the stairs, stepping down them one at a time and slowing with each step as she waited at the foot with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. She waited until the boy had reached the bottom step and paused before pointing with a single finger to the carpet directly in front of her feet.
Death Tide Page 4
