There were six, eight, more ...lots more. All loping along, mouths gaping and too big.
Their heads deformed. Their hands wrong, fingers too long and pointed.
She fumbled the gun out of the hoody pocket, had to wrench it free. Felt the fabric of the garment rip as the gun caught somewhere. The hoody was old and faded, worn out like she was. She hadn’t thought to dress for Armageddon. Finding dead mothers could do that to a girl, make you fail to observe rudimentary fashion rules and forget the practical. Like if a gun would fit comfortably in your pocket.
Useless, useless. This is all so fucked up and useless. Don’t know how to use this ...don’t know if it even has any bullets left.
Roaring engine noise and then the shrill scream of tires protesting at the sudden breaking as the utility vehicle overshot her and partially blocked her view of the runners.
A narrow miss.
She felt the tug of disturbed air as the vehicle slewed around in front of her.
And then the big four-by-four was simultaneously twisting and turning to present the passenger side, the woman leaning across the passenger seat to open the door and beckon.
Adalia didn’t remember getting in, but did always recall that solid thunk of the doors locking.
Thunk.
Heavy and reassuring.
Heavy and safe.
Beautiful.
The rest of her life was plagued by nightmares of the thumps and rocking that followed. The motion of the car as the running things collided with it. Attacked it like mad dogs trying to bite past bone to get at marrow.
Swarmed it like flies on shit.
Dreams where she sees a tooth filled face launch itself at her side window. Gouge multiple grooves down the glass as it tries to bite through and get to her.
She thinks it might have been a woman, but it’s hard to tell. Maybe something about what remains of the clothes and hair.
Sees that again and again in dreams, is haunted by that in particular.
She never knows precisely why but that has its very own little mini-series of nightmare. Perhaps it’s the strange dichotomy of its head.
Thick, tumorous tubes melding over a skeletal thinness.
Distorted, mutated human features that retain an air of humanity whilst being utterly alien.
Utterly repulsive.
That and the hands with fingers that are too long, too strong looking somehow. Ending in nails that are no longer nails but pointed, thickened, talons.
There’s also a radical nightmare soundtrack which accompanies that dream. An industrial squealing unlike anything she’d choose to listen to.
She hears those talons screeching against the car as they skid across its painted skin.
Hears the shallow puncture pop as they’re mercilessly hammer down against the metal.
Hears the horrible skidding sound as glass is scored.
“Go. Go. Drive for fucks sake,” Adalia shouted at her saviour.
Accelerating and shimmying to dislodge the things that had managed to gain purchase, the woman looked to her new passenger with a raised eyebrow.
“I’ll take that as a thank you then, shall I?”
Chapter 6.
Caroline Takes a Knock.
As she approached, Caroline Denning was relieved to see that the entrance to the estate wasn’t closed. One gate was open and secured in place, the other swinging untethered in the light breeze.
Which was ... kind of weird.
Rose Road was a private, gated estate. Very select, very upmarket and very expensive. So exclusive that most of the people that lived there would have been offended to hear it referred to as an estate. Good Lord, that word, estate, carried connotations that were distinctly down market. Poor people lived on estates and that wasn’t what Rose Road was all about. No, definitely not. Not at all. At the very least, Rose Road was a gated community of exclusive dwellings.
And the residents of Rose Road took the gated part of that just as seriously as the terminology used to describe the place. In the twelve months that she’d been coming here to visit her boyfriend, Caroline had never seen those gates anything but tidily secured.
Open or closed, but never swinging.
And boyfriend? Really?
Who was she kidding? She was twenty-six and Dennis was old enough to be her father. Boyfriend might define the essential nature of their relationship but the boy part of that was about as inappropriate as you could get. Like saying boy-up, you big girl’s blouse. Or boy-bag. Or, conversely, man-band. You kind of got the gist, but it wasn’t right.
And manfriend sounded about a century out of date.
She was becoming less and less sure about the friend bit for that matter.
Caroline accelerated to make sure that she beat the narrowing of the swinging gate. To make sure she hit the gap at its widest point.
Maybe that partly explained it.
Maybe she was simply preoccupied and not concentrating. Between her personal concerns and the weird state of the world, there was plenty to be preoccupied about.
Whatever the reasons, she was completely unprepared for the car that ploughed into her shortly after she’d turned into the road.
Breaking glass, crunching metal, as the passenger side of her small city run-about was crushed by a wildly accelerating family saloon.
The seat belt kept her alive. Her car was old and the few air bags it had were defective and in need of fixing, along with a number of other faults, before the next certificate of roadworthiness was issued.
Something that was never going to take place now. May not have taken place in any event because Dennis had hinted at another present, one with four wheels. Dennis liked his cars and liked his presents.
Despite the belt, she was still hurled against the door as the car spun and impacted with fencing on her right. The little vehicle teetered for one awful moment and then bounced to rest on someone’s grass lawn, surrounded by splintered sections of that same someone’s destroyed fence.
Caroline was stunned.
Spat glass from her mouth thinking it was her teeth. Was relieved to find that it wasn’t, that it was just glass.
That realisation in itself was wondrous. A touch of the miraculous in the midst of a less than wonderful situation. Caroline loved her teeth. To her mind, they were the only near perfect thing that she had.
She inspected herself and found nothing alarming. Felt her body and head and it all seemed to be complete. All still there, all intact.
She found she could move and exited the car rubbing her right side where she could expect some black and blue sometime soon she thought. But thank the lord, bones weren’t broken.
The car itself was a crumpled wonder.
A write off.
They must be designed to do this, even the old ones like mine, she dazedly thought. To absorb impact and destroy themselves in order to save the occupants.
It really is a marvel of engineering Caz.
She was still somewhat awed at the fact that she had just got out of that twisted mess of metal and glass and, unbelievably, didn’t seem to be badly injured.
She looked over at the home she had inadvertently invaded and saw no movement.
Considered walking to the door and trying to explain the accident and dismissed that in favour of the lure of confronting the complete and utter wanker that had hit her.
And the hope that they were as badly shook up as she was.
She knew that was a thoroughly bad thought but lord, it just about summed up how she felt right at that moment.
She limped back onto the road across torn grass.
Stepped on splintered fence panels and wobbled precariously as the panels buckled and broke beneath her work shoes.
Saw a man coming towards her from a car further up the street. The car sitting diagonally across the road, its rear wheels having mounted the pavement. Other than a concertinaed front wing, it looked to be in pretty good condition compared to her own.
I’m alright Jack, mine is a pretty tough old chunk of rolling real-estate. Reflects my real estate if you get my meaning, haha. Sorry if I fucked you up a bit ...but them’s the breaks. That’s how the cookie crumbles and all that.
She waited, dazed and vaguely furious.
Watched the man approaching, wanting to lie down on the road and cry and wanting to run at him, ranting and outraged.
Doing neither because neither would work, neither would be right.
As the man got closer, his blood splashed appearance revealed itself in the early morning light. He was a mess. A bloody mess, you could say.
She waited, rooted and slightly numb from shock as her mounting fury began to subside and be replaced by a growing unease.
There’s something amiss here, she thought in that disassociated way that can follow on the heels of an unexpected adrenalin burst.
He’s not just splashed with blood, he’s covered in it, soaked in it. Too much for the accident surely? His car is barely damaged, so where the hell has all that blood come from? Not from him surely? He doesn’t seem to have sustained major injury, he’s walking okay anyway.
Her anger and shock were being diluted by confusion and uneasy interest.
I think you could say confused curiosity Cazza.
But that curiosity was mixed with a good old shot of premium-quality, top grade, cold hard fear.
It’s that same curiosity that killed the cat.
Part of her clamoured for movement, clamoured for a little bit of good old fright-fuelled, running away flight.
Yeah, I know your legs are wobbly and disconnected but we could still manage a little jog couldn’t we? Yeah, yeah, you’re sweating with more than the early morning heat. It’s certainly shaping up to be one of those late May days that does a passable impression of full-on summer. But let’s forget all that, shall we? Let’s just boogie on out of here and get our slightly too fat ass over to our not so boyish boyfriend’s house shall we? However much we don’t really want to see him.
“Are you ...are you alright?”
She asked the question as the man stopped a few feet away and she began to see he was more damaged than she’d first realised.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you ...I was just trying to get away,” he said in a wavering weak voice.
“When they wake up they’re different,” he said as he took a step nearer, closing the gap between them so that they were within touching distance. Said it in a confidential, hoarse whisper.
“They attack.”
This close, he was breathless. Smelled coppery hot and crazy.
Greying at the temples, rivulets of sweat runnelling down the careworn, three-holidays-a-year tanned lines of his forehead. He lifted a ruined hand.
Three dripping stumps instead of fingers.
Clumsily motioned at a gaping red wound on the side of his neck, his blood soaked business shirt and his bloody maroon stained suit trousers.
And just like that, the curiosity was gone, burned away like early morning mist in the sunlight.
Caroline was properly scared. Not a little bit, not a sense of unease. Properly scared. Scared-shitless, tight sphincter fucking scared.
There was a wedding ring somehow still in place on one of those stumps. Cinching the red soaked bone loss of what used to be beyond it. Missing two joints of a finger that Caroline knew would have ended in a soft pad and a manicured nail.
She wanted to tell him to stop waving his hand about like that, he’d lose his ring. It’d fly away because the rest of that ring-retaining finger had gone walkabout, gone solo, left the other guys for adventures in the somewhere unknown.
It struck her then that this guy might well be the genuine article.
A real-life, authentic and certified, murdering nut-job.
And here she was, shocked and dazed, watching what was left of his fingers.
Or more accurately, being hypnotised by one particular bejewelled finger stump. Better yet, she had advice on the tip of her dry tongue about how easy it would be to lose his wedding ring.
“My wife ...the children. They collapsed like everyone else. This bug, you know. It changed them ...they’ve changed now alright. The collapse, it makes them different, they’re ...savage.”
He whisper-shouted the last word, his voice loaded with an incredulous conviction. There was something in his tone that, for just a moment, made Caroline question her initial reaction. Made her think that there was always a chance he might not be a lunatic, he might just be in shock because something awful had happened.
Might actually be the victim here. The victim of something awful.
“Whatever you’re doing here, just leave it and go. Just get away now,” he said.
His eyes skittering over her shoulder as he glanced around.
His gaze stopped and lingered on his own car. He looked back at her when she spoke to him.
“I’m visiting my ...chap, my boyfriend. He lives here. What do you mean, they attack? The people who’ve got the City Flu? I’d heard a lot of people were pretty badly affected but I don’t really know much about it. Look, you’re injured, you need a doctor, hospital. We need to contact the police ...or ...or an ambulance ...the emergency serv...”
He interrupted her before she could continue.
“Where have you been for the last few days? In a fucking coma? Hibernating? Residing in splendid isolation? Don’t you get it?”
He spoke rapidly, spat the words at her like they tasted bad in his mouth.
“It’s everywhere, the hospitals are gone. The police are gone. They all collapsed and now they’re waking up ...and they’re ...different.”
He stared at her with spittle on his lips and Caroline thought that maybe her first impression had been right after all.
He was as nutty as the nuttiest and fruitiest fucking fruitcake. Any minute now, he was going to whip a chainsaw out of his back pocket and come at her with murder in his heart.
“Just get out of here. Get away. Come with me if you like ...whatever. Whatever you want to do. I don’t know where I’m going, but you can’t stay here ...it’s insane, beyond insane. They’ll kill you. I mean that. They’ll kill you.”
Get into this guy’s car?
Really?
Drive off into the wild blue yonder with him?
Really?
He paused briefly but he seemed to sense that she wasn’t about to accompany him. Shaking his head, he turned and ran-stumbled back to his car and was gone in a squeal of tires, his front wing raising sparks from the road as he disappeared.
Caroline stood and watched him go, light-headed with a cocktail of adrenaline and relief.
Holding her right shoulder, which had begun to ache.
What the fuck is going on?
She was beginning to think that dropping off the grid to write some stupid reorganizational proposal for work and contemplate a relationship with a man whom she might actually find repulsive has been ...well, poorly timed shall we say.
Utterly fucking ill-advised if we’re going to have a rare bout of self-honesty Caroline.
That moment of reverie was broken by the sounds of breaking glass.
Somewhere close. She couldn’t tell where exactly where but it made her realise how quiet it was.
That sound had carried from nearby but it seemed eerily quiet other than that.
Really? Is it really that quiet? If you open your ears and shut your head down? Simply listen for fuck’s sake.
Err ...no, it’s not.
Distant warbling. Sirens.
Alarms.
Burglar alarms perhaps? Fire alarms? Who knows but those are bells baby. And them bells are ringing.
The fear returned then. Returned and slammed home with a weight that made her unsteady on her feet.
There was something seriously wrong here she thought again and started walking quickly to Dennis’s house. So quickly that she was nearly running in the short time it took to reach the driveway.
Bi
g old shared driveway.
Because that’s the beauty of Rose Road. It’s all private even when it’s shared. That’s what you pay for. The private sharing. That, and the name of the road.
Dennis’s drive was open. Not unusual, it was shared with the house to the right and as she neared the porticoed entrance, she spied movement in the garden over there, beyond the trees that separated the two properties.
She was distracted from that as she looked into the ink black Range Rover that was parked in the drive and saw the keys were in the ignition.
That’s quite weird now isn’t it? Another weird thing. Not quite as weird as being shunted by a blood-soaked crackerjack mental-job but equally as weird as the swinging gate back there at the entrance to Rose Road.
Dear fucking Lord, what was going on here?
Dennis had a fair sized stick up his ass about making sure his precious motors were secured.
Fair-sized? That stick is a whopper log of a stick baby.
She’d have bet next month’s salary that the Aston Martin in the garage didn’t have the keys left in the ignition. Even though it was locked away in the garage.
It was very unlike him to leave the keys in the ignition of the Range Rover.
No, let’s be completely straight again here, shall we Caroline? Dennis doesn’t leave keys in cars. As sure as he has to shower after you’ve blown him.
Christ, Dennis would lock the car and shove the keys safely in his not so slim hip pocket if he got out to take a leak on an empty country lane. Pop the locks even if you were still in there.
He’d done that once, hadn’t he? Early on in the relationship. Caroline had laughed and waited while he shook it off.
She looked at the wide front door and saw that it was open a few inches.
Dennis had to be around.
Because he didn’t leave doors open and he didn’t leave keys in cars.
He was security obsessively compulsive and would no more leave his front door open and unattended than he’d defecate in the middle of his own hand woven lounge rug.
Hand woven Cazza in deepest paki-land and shipped to my order. The best you can get, direct from the bleeding hands that made it.
“Dennis?” She said in a small voice as she entered the hall and gently closed the door behind her.
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