by Luke Duffy
His denim jeans were no longer recognisable. They had once been a stonewashed blue, but now they were a grey colour with a greasy sheen. They were ripped in places, showing the green and brown mottled flesh within and the many creatures that lived off his slowly deteriorating body.
In a way, he had developed his own ecological system. A swarm of all manner of flying insects hovered around him, their lava burrowing deep into his flesh until they matured and then repeating the cycle.
Scavenging birds flocked overhead, darting in and out with speed and stealth, plucking the flies from the air around him and the bloated grubs from his flesh, then quickly fleeing to a safe distance, always careful to keep away from his clutching hands and gnashing teeth.
His decomposition had slowed substantially. His movements were no longer hampered with fluid-filled and swollen limbs, and his skin had dried to something resembling old leather. His face had lost its plumpness and his body was nothing more than skin and bone with sinew and the remnants of muscle holding it all together.
Nevertheless, he moved much more freely than he had before, as though his body consciously kept his joints lubricated. Gone were his clumsy uncoordinated movements; now he moved with a slow-paced walk, unable to manage anything more than an uncoordinated and clumsy stagger should he feel the need.
From one day to the next, he wandered aimlessly. Now and then, something would distract him and grab his attention. Things that triggered a faint memory from his life, such as a work of art hanging in a window, or a building or street that somehow seemed familiar to him, would cause him to stop. Eventually the memory would fade and he would continue his endless walk, completely forgetting whatever it was that had encouraged him to halt in the first place.
In one quiet and seemingly deserted town, he had spent hours mesmerised by a particularly attractive car, very much like the one he had owned in life but a much more expensive model. Even after months of sitting neglected and exposed to the elements in the partially destroyed showroom, the car's beauty, even to Andy, was undeniable.
Below the light sprinkling of dust, he could see the shimmer and gleam of the highly polished gunmetal grey paintwork of the body. The sparkling silver spokes of the alloy wheels dazzled him. His reflection, distorted and obscured, stretched and curved with the shape of the wheels as he leaned in to admire them.
The sleek shape of the car, its muscular yet feminine curves, sang out to him almost soothingly through his misted mind. He moved to the front of the car and gazed down at the grill.
He heard something; a low growl. Stepping back, alarmed, Andy looked around him and about the damaged shop. Nothing stirred. Glancing back down at the grill, he heard the noise again. It was a low hoarse rumble and very close.
The noise was coming from within him. An instinct, a faint memory of him doing it in the past, something made him feel the urge to growl each time he looked at the grill. No clear picture presented itself and there was no conscious effort to piece the puzzle together. Andy just accepted that the wide silver grill that spanned the entire width of the car like a large snarling mouth full of fangs, made him want to growl and he continued to growl for a while as he admired it.
The car was unlocked, and Andy felt something surge inside him as the door opened in his hand. It was a feeling he had experienced something similar to before. He paused and looked up, his teeth clashed together and he began to gulp, as though swallowing something. He stopped and looked down at the car's interior and repeated the action of gulping something.
He had felt a similar sensation when he had last fed.
When he saw the living creature he had felt lust, desire, an engulfing want and need for it. As the blood had gushed over his cheeks, down his chin and into his mouth, he had been overcome by a feeling of excitement and euphoria. Then, as the chunks of flesh slid down his throat and his teeth gnawed on hard bone, he had felt contentment and peace.
Such was his feelings for the car.
For the better part of a day, he sat in the driving seat of the luxurious sports car and felt the wheel in his hands and the hand-stitched leather seats beneath him. The dials and the dashboard clocks hypnotised him and he growled once more as he expected to see the needle of the speedometer rise and fall and hear the roar of the engine in his ears.
The car was beautiful. Even in his deteriorated state, and with a misfiring brain, Andy still appreciated beauty. It was what he had based his previous life upon and he had carried his admonition of beauty into death.
He would have stayed there forever, but he made the mistake of adjusting the mirror. The reflection he saw revolted him. The ugliness of himself and the beauty of the interior of the car around him were in stark contrast. He looked away, repulsed. He stared down at his hands; the ragged and blackened skin of his palms and the dirty broken fingernails that had no place in handling the smooth clean surfaces of the car, was like a desecration to him.
He climbed out, slamming the door behind him, a low rasping and sorrowful moan hissing from his throat.
He continued on his long slow walk.
He never had a particular goal or destination, but he did prefer to be alone. He tried to avoid the others like him. They tended to congregate in the towns and cities in tightly packed groups, and Andy always found himself turning and heading in the opposite direction when he saw them.
If anything, he felt repulsed by them.
Andy had changed. He was self-aware. He felt things, emotions. He did not understand them fully, but he was aware of them and they were strong enough to guide him. From the appreciation of the natural beauty of the rural areas that he travelled through, to the disdain for the others like him that he constantly saw around him. He watched them as they roamed the roads in packs and swarmed the cities. They devoured anything they could get their hands on. They trampled the gardens and the flowers and left a wasteland in their wake.
Even fear was an emotion that Andy knew. He had seen fire and felt the searing heat against his skin as he had passed too close to it and he knew that it could end his existence. It had scared him, and like all animals he now kept his distance from the beautifully mesmerising, but deadly orange and yellow glow, that he saw from time to time on his travels. Others failed to hold the same respect for fire as Andy did, and he watched on a few occasions as they were engulfed in its flames, staggering around and colliding with walls and others like them as the fire consumed them.
He also knew that the emaciated and ugly forms that he saw were not how things were supposed to be. The shadowy figures he saw were supposed to be agile, beautiful and full of energy, vibrant and animated. They were supposed to be living people.
Now, they were wrong and unnatural, nothing like the people he saw all around them in the slowly decaying and fading pictures and posters hanging from the walls or on display in shop windows.
Andy felt a loathing for them, even for himself to a degree. He understood that he was one of them, but something inside him pulled away from them and encouraged him to keep his distance.
Sometimes, he would stop and watch them. They were dull and lifeless to him. They did not fascinate him and as well as loathing, he felt pity towards them. He understood that like him, they had not always been that way. They had once been like the people in the pictures as he had once been like the beautiful smiling face in the picture hanging from the wall of the shop he had once owned. Now they were vulgar and wretched, unlike the birds and the trees he saw when he was on the roads and in the country lanes.
The people that swarmed the cities and infested the towns, they were wrong, grotesque and deformed. They staggered and tripped along, continually colliding with one another and the moan they perpetually emitted was like a sadness that came from within them, as if in protest of their existence and wanting a release.
The flowers that lined the hedgerows were bright and colourful and they danced in the wind, hypnotizing him as he stood and watched them for hours at a time. The birds, though he could nev
er get close to them, sang to him, and he could never resist watching them flutter through the air as they zipped from tree to tree. They were beautiful and warm.
There were no flowers in the cities. The only birds he saw were the ones that were brave enough to swoop down and feast on the bodies that lay motionless in the street, festering and decaying in the sun. Andy never liked being in the cities and he would stagger from building to building and street to street until he found his way out and back into the country.
Now, he was in a city again.
Everything was in shadow, or at least it seemed that way. The buildings were grey and dreary, stretching up in the sky like giant tombstones of civilisation. What windows remained were caked in filth; long smearing handprints and bodily fluids from the thousands of decaying figures that had pressed themselves against the glass barriers of the shops and buildings.
The streets were littered with the relics of days gone by. Rustling newspapers, displaying the last headlines of man, drifted along the windy streets as the tall buildings channelled the air around them; creating currents that lifted the smaller pieces of debris and made them glide through the streets.
Shop fronts were broken and smashed, doors hung from their hinges and windows were shattered, open to the elements. There were cars and trucks scattered all around, some parked and locked at the side of the road, others turned on their sides or nothing more than blackened and charred skeletons from when they had burned during the panics that had engulfed the world as the dead invaded and multiplied, attacking and ravaging all before them.
Andy continued to walk, uninterested by anything that he saw around him.
Others walked with him, automatically tagging on behind him as he passed them. With nothing else to distract them, sometimes it took little more than a body to pass in close proximity and they would wander aimlessly after them, as though they were being led to somewhere of importance or interest.
Most remained where they were, either standing still, their eyes fixed on the floor beneath them or staring up into nothingness. Some remained sitting and slouched in shop doorways. Others just roamed the street in an endless slow shuffle until their path was blocked and they would then change direction. Many were trapped within the cities due to this very reason, endlessly wandering through the maze of buildings and shops that would never allow them to leave.
Others meandered through the shops, studying the things on display and even trying to use them. Cups were lifted and pondered over before being placed against cold and brittle lips, or books were opened and the pages stared upon with dead and misty eyes as instinct reminded them of what the items were.
Some of the dead even attempted at dressing themselves in the clothes they pulled down from the shelves and hangers. Normally they would end in either a tangled heap of grey flesh and garments on the floor, or a ludicrous vision of a figure walking around, its festering skin blistered and green and falling from its body, yet wearing an extremely elegant and colourful hat, artificial flowers and all.
Andy wanted away from them. He felt a sense of urgency pass over him and he increased his slow shuffling pace to a more uncoordinated, but speedier stagger. His legs forced him forward and his arms swayed from side to side in front of him as his body jerked and settled into a rhythm.
The bodies that followed behind him did the same. They began to moan as they watched Andy move away from them, as though they would be missing something and wanted Andy to slow down and wait for them.
He suddenly felt hunted. They were following him and their wails were becoming louder as he staggered and shuffled as fast as he could from them.
More of them spilled from the buildings around him as they heard the din of the ever-increasing group. It was herd behaviour and they all began to join in with the chase and the chorus of the dead song.
Andy glanced back over his shoulder, fear gripping him.
The figures were all around him now. Thousands of eyes were focussed on him and he felt vulnerable for it. He had nothing they wanted, but still they followed. The noise of their moans was becoming louder by the minute and it was constant. There were now so many of them that the street could no longer be seen. They poured from the buildings and alleyways. They were in front of him and behind, all the while closing in.
Andy was trapped. He turned on the spot where he stood in the open street, vulnerable as the mass of bodies closed in around him. Their cries became a deafening roar as they staggered closer on their battered and tatty feet along the hard surface of the high street.
Somehow, he had become the focus of the entire city's attention. He was one of them, he knew that, but still he feared them. He knew what a crowd like that could do to his frail and delicate body. Teeth and hands could soon leave him in pieces or, at best, severely damaged and more fragile than he already was.
He stopped and looked around him. They closed in; the first grasping hands reached him and began to tug at his clothes. They gripped his arms and even clawed at his face. Andy fought back, knocking their hands away from him as he tried desperately to protect himself.
Soon, the entire swarm had enveloped him. Andy was being pulled and jostled in all directions. He heard the material of his clothing tear as the seams gave under the strain. Their fingers dug into his flesh as they pulled him in different directions. Clumps of hair were ripped from his scalp and a large gash was torn from the flesh on his neck in the melee.
The grasping hands stopped and bodies and faces being pushed up close to him replaced them. The horde was too big now, and so tightly packed that they were pressed shoulder to shoulder.
Andy became confused.
One moment they had set upon him, intent on tearing him to pieces, and then suddenly they carried him along with them. Their attention no longer focussed on him but on something else and they pushed him along in the same direction.
With so many bodies screaming and pushing against each other, and even though they were no longer interested in him, Andy knew he was still in danger. He knew his body was vulnerable and weak, especially in a crowd and he desperately wanted to protect it, to preserve it.
The crowd was surging. Arms flailed and an atmosphere of excitement rippled through the mass of bodies around him. They all pushed in the same direction and he found himself being carried along on a tide of rotting flesh and wailing voices.
Bodies fell and were trampled as they struggled to climb to their feet. Bones crunched underfoot and skulls were smashed as the crowd forged forward relentlessly.
Andy fought against the others around him, against the wave of dead. He tried desperately to get away from them, but there were too many and more and more were spilling from the doorways around them.
The entire city had become a hive of activity due to Andy's sudden increase of pace.
The cries and wails grew in intensity and bounced from the buildings as they echoed along the street. The mass of bodies that were packed on the roads was so thick that anything in their path as they moved forward would be swept up by them and carried along. That was now happening to Andy.
The entire putrid population was on the move, an exodus of the dead. Flying insects swarmed above them and birds flocked overhead and swooped in to grab the buzzing flies that were thick in the air.
Suddenly, Andy found himself close to the wall of a building. Bodies still pushed against him, but he was able to get through and into the relative safety of an empty doorway. He peered out and watched as the crowd charged by him. It was a blur of grey as they staggered past.
Broken and lifeless forms were crushed and spat out from the mass. They lay broken and smashed in the gutter where they would remain to rot away.
Eventually, the crowd lessened and Andy peered out from the cover of the shop doorway. The street seemed deserted compared to how it had been just moments before. There was still movement as those that were too slow were left behind to stagger after the throng of moving bodies. Some even crawled or dragged themselves as their
broken and twisted legs trailed behind them. A sea of rancid sludge followed in the mass' wake. Internal organs had erupted from numerous orifices and limbs had been ripped from sockets, leaving a scene of revulsion behind.
Andy stepped out and watched in the distance as the last of them disappeared from sight. He looked around at the streets of the city, the filth and detritus of its new occupants disgusted him.
He turned and walked away, headed for the open country again.
Then, he stopped and looked up.
10
Johnny watched, as he always did. He had made a life of watching people and their ways. Shunned by society, Johnny lived on its outer fringes. Most failed to understand him and know the real man beneath the shaggy beard, woolly hat and Wellington boots. Instead, they labelled him as just another crazy down-and-out and no one bothered to look any deeper than that.
His real name was David, but someone had once nicknamed him 'Johnny Boots' because regardless of whether it was raining or clear blue skies above, he never failed to wear his Wellington boots. He could be seen trekking about the town at the height of summer sporting his knee-high rubber boots and the name had stuck.
He was always eccentric and because of the way he dressed, people assumed him homeless. Therefore, he became the local 'celebrity' tramp as it were. Everyone knew Johnny Boots. People saw him everywhere in the town, in all the districts and boroughs. He would wander from place to place, dressed in his old Wellington boots, carrying a stack of newspapers under his arm. Just by his appearance, people could be forgiven for mistaking him as homeless.
There was much more to him than met the eye. He was an intelligent and quick-witted man who had once had a prospective career in marketing in his younger days. He had been considered as something of a prodigy. His talent was boundless and he never ceased to surprise and impress colleagues and bosses with his ability to reel in even the most difficult of sales. His future was looking bright. He was successful and set to be at the top of his game at a young age.
