Clifton Falls

by L A Taylor

  CLIFTON

  FALLS

  L A Taylor

  Warning, this horror novel contains strong language & gruesome violence.

  ONE

  Christmas should be a time of joy and shopping for that perfect turkey, but not this Christmas, not in this small town, and not this year.

  Customers queued in the bank, each having their own objective, but most were taking cash out for seasonal reasons. Staff members hurried around, keeping up with the constant lines of people.

  The bank manager stood by the door and produced one of his glowing smiles as another visitor left the building, but his smile changed rapidly when two, Afro-Caribbean strangers entered the bank. With long, heavy, thick coats on, the men slowly joined the queue, standing in line with the other people. This wasn’t the time for the bank manager to question them. If they were here to open an account then why would he want to stop them?

  “Good morning, gentlemen. How are you today?” asked the manager, in his obsequious tone of voice.

  There was no answer, not even an acknowledgment to show he was heard. The manager turned, walking away, but one of the strangers briskly removed a metal bar from beneath his coat and violently smacked him across the back of his head. This terrifying moment forced the manager to cower down on the floor like a frightened, bullied child.

  The other stranger rushed to the door, shouting words of no meaning, well it meant something to him, but whatever rushed from his lips wasn’t of the English language. The violent, darkskinned, thin man waved the object in the air while also shouting strange words.

  The customers were confused at first, but realized they were in danger once the item crashed against the face of a second victim. This unlucky man shrunk to the floor, screaming in agony as blood gushed from a split cheek and busted nose.

  The crazy eyed assailant grabbed the bank manager by his hair and nastily hauled him off the floor. More threatening speeches whipped at the petrified man’s eardrums, forcing him to beg.

  The second stranger remained watching the door as his partner pushed his chosen target toward the hidden staff.

  Customers scuttled to the back of the room like sheep being rounded up by a sheepdog. They weren’t used to this kind of behaviour, especially in this town, the town where nothing like this ever happened. This town was like a ghost town for serious crime, but today that was about to change.

  The metal object battered against the door leading to the workers and it was quickly opened. The manager was thrown to one side. The weird speaking sounds erupted, indicating danger again.

  Frightened staff silently emptied cash drawers into fake-leather moneybags. No one was stupid enough to question the robber unless they too wanted to taste metal.

  The second foreigner became impatient, close to losing his nerve. One of the customers noticed this and tried calming the situation. “Can I leave, please?”

  The stranger turned, staring at the middle-aged lady with an expression of sympathy on her face. The woman held out a friendly hand, working a magic smile that made the scruffy male move away from the exit door. The other customers watched the lady from a safe distance but remained glued to each other.

  “You’re a nice man,” she continued, her hand touching one of his hands. “You don’t need to do this.”

  She moved past him, almost touching the door handle, but the stranger’s crazy vision was back. He wrapped his left arm around her throat, blocking the air that was feeding the spoken words. The frightened woman spluttered as the snake-like hold slowly suffocated her. It was released only after she was forced back into the centre of the room.

  The other customers became agitated, standing up for themselves after witnessing the traumatized lady gasp for air. “You can’t do this to us,” one of them shouted, while another screamed a random selection of swear-words at the vicious thug, but soon realized that the robber didn’t understand the words and so stopped. Everyone decided to close in on the foreigner, hoping this would frighten him, but it didn’t.

  The man pulled out a small sword from beneath his coat which immediately froze the petrified onlookers into submission. Their eyes now rested onto the one foot long by two inch wide steel blade as he lunged it at the lady who’d spoken to him by the door. She was given no time to retreat. The knife smashed through her teeth, sliced away facial tissue before tearing out of the back of her neck, snapping the bone. The shocked woman fell to the floor, red spillage pouring from her wounds within seconds of the blade being extracted, but the growing puddle ceased once her heart stopped pumping it out.

  The screams from the scared customers forced the other robber to return to the open. He’d done his part by retrieving the bags of cash. Both men scowled at the noisy people, fleeing the scene before the alarm was raised.

  The robbers raced away from the bank, heading in the direction of the nearby forest, but one of the robbers ran into a wandering, vagabond-like male. He could easily see the other person but decided on charging into the scrawny figure. He was left sprawled on the pavement as the foreigners made their escape.

  Waiting in a car at the end of the street, just out of sight from the bank, sat Norman. He’d been hatching a plan with his girlfriend for a few months now, which involved using the foreigners to carry out the bank job.

  Norman was a tall, white male of around thirty years of age. He had a small, distinctive scar on his chin. He was the local gravedigger, but always dreamed that somewhere there was a better life waiting for him.

  His partner’s name was Cheyanne. She was a petite, darkskinned, pretty lady, who was in her late twenties. She worked in the hospital morgue.

  The alarm from the bank signalled pleasure, but also nerves for Norman because now the job was done. He saw the frantic men heading toward him, they moved at speed, turning their heads to stare at the recent escape route. He honked the car horn, rushing them more. “Come on, get in,” he screamed, as he reached over his seat to open one of the back doors.

  The first robber threw the bags onto the back seat and dived into the vehicle, but the second was left half in and half out as the car drove away. With his feet moving as fast as he was able, the man held the door with one hand and clambered inside.

  Norman inspected the area, and after seeing no sign of any police-uniforms, sped off with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face. He took a detour away from the main road, heading for the private dirt-track that split the farming fields from the edge of the forest. Once there, parked the car next to another one. Cheyanne rushed from the second vehicle and transported the stolen cash into her car. The plan of switching the money had been concocted between the pair earlier that day. The unknown men, who she had nicknamed Chip and Dale, knew what was needed from them. Their English may have been poor, but their ability to produce the goods was good enough to keep them on board. The foreign men also knew that they had a place to stay and were less likely to be shipped back home if they did what they were told.

  “They did well,” Cheyanne shouted.

  Norman turned around, witnessing crazy hand gestures coming from the men as they panted for air. This left the English couple in a state of surprise. The gestures indicated someone being attacked. The latest movements from the robbers showed them acting out the attack on the poor woman.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure,” Norman replied, as he witnessed one of the foreigners reeling around in the back seat after the other one got the knife out again. “But that looks quite nasty.”

  Cheyanne’s face suddenly dropped into another emotion and it wasn’t a good one. “What the fuck did they do?” she screamed.

  “I don’t know,” Norman replied, shrugging his shoulders. “I’ll find out.”

  He tried talking to the foreigners, but they were n
ow giggling with pleasure at what they’d done. The couple now knew their plan was turning sour. Robbery was a serious prison sentence if caught, but now there was a good chance that they could be charged with planning a murder.

  The exasperated female calmed down enough to help her think about the plan again. “This doesn’t look good, Norman,” she said, prodding a finger into thin air.

  Norman knew she would be slapping him if he was outside the vehicle.

  Cheyanne re-entered her car and sped off with the money before any sign of the police were witnessed. Norman did the same. He’d studied the movements of the local constabulary and knew that the alarm from the bank would probably take a while to be accepted as a serious crime. For a town with so little crime, an alarm going off would be diagnosed as a prank by some kids at first, but eventually, the distraught phone call from the bank would convince the police otherwise. He also knew that the police would look for two, unknown characters, so if he could drop the men off at the designated safe-house then could get back to Cheyanne without being suspected.

  It took another thirty minutes before he entered the town again. He’d missed the traumatized customers shedding tears during the removal of Mrs Austin’s body but noticed that the police were still at the bank, so, carefully drove past.

  A police vehicle pulled out of a side street. Norman watched it closely through the rear-view mirror. He wasn’t panicked, but his heart skipped a beat as the other car followed him. He stopped his car, hoping that the police vehicle would drive past, but it slowed down, coming to a standstill just in front of him. The police officer exited and reached for his firearm. Norman was hauled from his vehicle and thrown onto the road. The gun was pressed against the side of his temple and he felt the ice-cold metal against his skin.

  “I’m not going to arrest you,” the angry faced officer screamed. “I’m just going to blow your fucking brains out”

  The officer laughed when he said it. Norman closed his eyes, waiting for the bullet to kill him, but nothing happened. He opened his eyes again to see that the officer wasn’t standing over him, wasn’t standing next to him and wasn’t trying to shoot him, as he never even had a gun. Norman’s imagination had worked overtime.

  The officer exited his vehicle, for real this time, and walked over to Norman. The electric window lowered and Norman’s nerves appeared. “What’s up, officer?”

  The uniformed man closed in, placing his elbows onto the frame of the opened window. Norman dripped sweat from his brow. “All right, Norman. Did you know that you have a broken back-light?”

  “No,” Norman replied, as the sweat decreased.

  “Well, you need to get it fixed.” The officer looked thoughtful for a few seconds. “I should be giving you a ticket but there’s been a major incident here today. I really don’t need more paperwork to deal with so just take this as a reminder.”

  Norman wasn’t even going to ask about the incident, he just wanted out of this situation. “Thanks. I’ll get it done today.”

  The officer removed himself from the car and slowly returned to his own. Norman waited for the police vehicle to drive off before returning home. He met up again with Cheyanne, but she was still fuming about what the robbers had done. “You said they were just going to scare a few people,” she hollered.

  “Maybe they didn’t understand what I said,” a baffled looking man replied.

  During the drive back to his girlfriend, Norman did nothing but think about the possibility of there being a murder at the bank. He needed to soothe Cheyanne’s anger and so came to the conclusion that if there’d been a death then the body could become useful. He explained the link between the cash and the corpse, hoping to change her state of mind. “Let’s go through it again,” he said. “You find out if there’s a dead body, if there is, then we can stash the cash inside the coffin.”

  “Okay,” Cheyanne replied, looking down at her watch. “Shit. I’d best get to work. I’ll phone you later, once I know more.”

  Norman placed a comforting kiss on her lips. He knew that the angry side was fading and she was now warming to his idea. She grabbed her work stuff and exited the room.

  Cheyanne scurried around at the hospital, trying not to seem too keen on whether or not there was a body recovered from the bank. She was very pleased though that there was one. “Okay, we have a corpse,” Cheyanne said, sneaking a phone call to Norman from the morgue room.

  “Good. We’ll wait for the right time. The police will be too busy searching for those clowns to even think about checking a coffin for the cash.”

  The local Chief Inspector sat at his desk, soaking up the horrifying events of the last few hours. Not only did he need to find the culprits behind the robbery, but also needed to find the heartless killers of an innocent lady, a lady who had a son that he would rather avoid.

  TWO

  Three months had drifted by, slowly burning away the horror memories from the brutal bank robbery. The Chief Inspector of Clifton Falls had managed to gather clues but hadn’t been able to arrest anybody over the incident. He was now getting earache from residents of the town, plus, constant grief from Mrs Austin’s son.

  There’d been another major-catastrophe recently which had wiped out all investigations into the robbery. This new breed of shock had the police force on its knees in fear. It was something inexplicable and had hit the local Farm Manager hard. The vicious events had washed away the memories of last Christmas for this man as he sat, soaking up the past week’s trauma.

  It was a kill or be killed situation for Blake. He’d survived the zombies so the answer was clear. He now choked from thoughts of a suicide scenario as his mind drifted back to the night that was best left forgotten.

  Smashing his way through one of the living-dead reincarnates while protecting an injured human, he’d stepped too close to feeling the brunt of a zombie attack. The sadistic, stalker-like creature had snapped out at him and Blake knew he could easily have been its next victim. Deep, way deep in the back of his mind a tiny trace of guilt lay. This had sent a frightened signal to his brain, forcing him to nearly explode during the returning memories. Blood, blood, blood was all he saw now as palms opened up for him to witness what no one else could.

  He sat inside a restaurant, in a town called Westbrook County. It was based only a few miles south of the Yorkshire Countryside. With the traumatized man were his closest friends.

  A recent newsflash channelled from a television that was situated high up in the corner of the room. This caused previous visions of horror to flicker in Blake’s mind yet again.

  The time was 9.00am, and a reporter was at the site of a serious incident. He seemed frantic, but at the same time happy to be alive. The man turned, watching a mutilated corpse being placed inside an ambulance by worn-out survivors. Something major had happened in this spot recently, a terrible catastrophe that ended with too many fatalities to even try and count. The police had been in a battle with an unknown terror, a battle between the living and the un-dead. A sadistic murdering spree that’d left ripped bodyparts behind as victims were brutally eaten by vicious, man-eating maniacs who were supposed to be resting in their new homes inside the cemetery.

  The reporter announced an update on what’d happened. A crazy and an un-explainable few days had gone by, and deep scarring memories were to be remembered by not only the survivors of this war but also by the families of the departed.

  Dave approached the friend who hadn’t moved his eyes away from the television since the reporter first appeared on it. “Blake. Is everything okay? What do you see?”

  “Death everywhere, that’s what I see and it won’t go away.”

  Dave knew Blake had been at the centre of this recent disaster as he’d given him brief accounts of what’d happened, but Blake had left the uncut version on the shelf. For how long, who knew?

  “If you want to talk about it, then we’re here to listen.” “Thanks, but I don’t think you can stomach what I’ve seen.” A seco
nd later and Blake turned from looking at the screen, glaring at his friend. “Or can you?” he snarled.

  Tony interrupted the conversation before Blake did something stupid, like lose control. He suggested that everyone leave the premises, as it was obvious that the distraught man wasn’t coping after witnessing a reminder of the nightmare. The four men stood up. Dave recommended that they head back to his place, that way, if Blake was ready to tell his story, then the fresher, more welcoming environment would make it easier for him. Everyone agreed to this proposal.

  During the journey, the man with the demons inside his mind had gone through the process of several changes. The others watched him perform a wrestling match between telling and not saying anything. Dave could tell that Blake was struggling to continue the plan, so a few comforting words needed saying in order for Blake to feel safe again.

  It wasn’t long before the men entered Dave’s premises. The atmosphere suddenly dropped as each guest entered the living room. They settled onto the three-piece-suite before staring at Blake, as if unsure of how to treat him. Were they really ready for what was about to unfold before their eyes?

  “Do you want me to tell you how it all began or shall I not bother now?” Blake asked sharply.

  Gary left his seat, placing a hand on top of Blake’s shoulder. “It’s your decision,” he said.

  What else could he say? Blake said nothing for a minute before exploding the volume of his voice to the limit.

  “If I don’t get this fucking nightmare off my chest then I’m going to detonate from too much anger. God help someone when I do.”

  “Okay, mate, cool it yeah. If you’re ready to talk then we’re ready to listen. I’ll just go and make us all a coffee.”

  Blake mellowed down again, feeling embarrassed by the sudden outburst. “Thanks, Gary, but it’s going to take more than one cup by the time I’m finished.”

  He’d released some pressure from his system. He was still nothing like his original self, but it was however a massive improvement from how he’d been last night and first thing this morning. Dave had let into his house a clone-like figure of his friend. Blake’s hair colour had changed from the golden-red waves, to grey, and it looked like he’d wrapped a shaking, frightened casing around his body, which needed to be cracked open in order for the real Blake to return.