David gathered what he needed from around the house and piled it into his reliable old Volkswagen Passat.
The he armed himself. The trusty lump hammer and a variety of implements and items that he judged would be effective.
Last, he returned to the bedroom he had shared with Rachel for all those years. The room was a nightmarish scene of stinking carnage.
In David’s eyes, it had become a consecrated place. Sanctified by his life history and the enlightenment that he had gained. And the blood that he had shed.
He said a short prayer and continued with his work. Massed combustible material around the bed and poured a selection of flammable liquids onto it.
Paused at the door.
Fished a box of Cook’s Matches from his jacket pocket, struck one, studied the flame until it caught and then dropped it onto the line of lawnmower fuel that he’d dribbled to the door from the homemade funeral pyre. He closed the door on the whump of ignition and hurried to his car.
His first act of cleansing, the immolation of his wife’s mutilated body.
With the fire of your wrath Lord. With the fire of your wrath. Cleanse the filth and stain with your spirit, your judgement and your burning.
David Monkton stood in his dim garage with light pouring through the sunburst windows set high in each door.
He thought he could hear the fire already devouring the upper part of the house but he might have been imagining it. Whether real or merely wished for, the sound made him smile.
He prepared to leave. He doubted that he’d be coming back.
As he hefted the double doors wide, he was confronted by one of those abominable creatures hunched in his drive. Huddled over something on the ground.
Feeding.
He despatched it to hell without pause or reflection.
To a casual observer, if such a thing could now exist, it would have been difficult to believe that this coldly efficient slayer of monsters was a mild mannered head teacher.
More likely a veteran of some far-flung conflict.
A skilled soldier technician, trained for dispassion and proficient in arts of a dark but necessary kind.
And mayhap that was closer to truth now. David Monkton had become a soldier of his god.
His next mission was to address the vexing issue of Angela Skorecki.
It was clear to him now that she was at the very least an unwitting servant of evil, a debauched harlot, a vile temptress. It was conceivable that she was something infinitely worse than that.
An actual envoy of the devil. A herald of the plague of demons that had been visited upon mankind. Not that it really mattered. David was clear on what action was required.
Angela lived nearby.
A short drive, and oh, how that short drive was further confirmation for David, if any was needed, that the world was moving through the final days. The streets teemed with demonic abominations.
How plain to see now the extent of the wickedness that had grown in man.
How many had left open doors for Satan to fill their hearts and transform their skins.
How few were the virtuous in spirit.
<><><>
Fewer still those that would survive this tidal wave of evil, would have the courage to stand and fight with God as their witness and his fiery justice at their side.
As David would.
Chapter 5.
Adalia Was Here.
Adalia Baker may have forgotten her manners when she gratefully climbed into her saviour’s four-by-four, but it wasn’t a true reflection of her usual standard of behaviour. Normally, she was a thoroughly decent and polite young woman. Of course, these weren’t normal times.
At sixteen, Adalia Baker was on the cusp of adulthood, nearly finished with secondary school education. Whilst being glad in many ways, she would miss it in others. Sharp witted and athletic, she secretly enjoyed much of her time at school. Secretly, because when you came from the Isherwood Park Estate, the obvious opportunities for advancement seemed fairly limited. It was all good if your ambition involved crime, things related to crime, or sex. Otherwise, it didn’t always pay to be seen as embracing the system. Not in that less than salubrious part of Birmingham. Not if you wanted to survive amongst your peers anyway.
Adalia was intelligent and certainly smart enough to suspect that she was capable of escaping that life. A life that most of her friends and acquaintances accepted as the only option available to them. To say that Isherwood Park was a shithole would have been skirting around the edges of understatement, and Adalia didn’t believe that she belonged there.
What she hadn’t figured out yet was exactly how she was going to escape it. There were fantasy careers that offered a slim chance of success and there were real careers that offered a lifetime of what appeared from the outside to border on drudgery.
The unattainable and the unattractive.
She had a growing feeling that she was approaching a crucial time in her life where the decisions that she made might not only affect her future, but possibly determine the entire course of it. That feeling was probably accurate before the collapse. After the event, it took on entirely new dimensions.
On the first day of the ‘flu’ outbreak, Adalia had been in school to sit an examination but by mid-afternoon school was suspended, the majority of staff and pupils too ill to continue. A few had actually collapsed there in the school. Adalia walked home, public transport was intermittent, and arrived to find her mother also unwell. Lying prone on the sofa until Adalia helped her to the bedroom.
She tried to make her comfortable, asking if she wanted food or drink. Her mother simply shook her head and said she wanted to rest.
Tina Baker was a strong woman. Second generation West Indian, she’d instilled in Adalia an enquiring, independent mind which reflected her own upbringing. That Tina was poor and without prospect did nothing to alter her conviction that her daughter might flourish and find a successful, satisfying place for herself in the world. She believed that honesty and hard work could unlock doors for Adalia if the girl had the quality of character to see it. The good sense and good fortune to avoid being sucked into the mire that was all around her. Like a lot of people who end up underneath, Tina had never imagined her life turning out this way, at the bottom of pile, with nowhere to go.
She’d raised Adalia largely on her own with little or no help from her parents who had died shortly after their granddaughter was born. Adalia’s father hadn’t stayed around when he’d learned that Tina was pregnant. A budding musician from a middle class background. Traditional family man wasn’t what he was destined for or what he would ever have been able to accept. Tina had understood the reality of that better than he had. She hadn’t tried to hold onto him. She’d loved him enough to not want to snare them both in a trap of their own making. She didn’t resent him for leaving her with a baby planted inside her and not much in terms of support or provision. Couldn’t resent him for being who he was when it was that very nature that had attracted her in the first place.
On the few occasions that Adalia asked about him, Tina may have been vague on detail but she was never blameful or accusing.
“You father was a good man, a kind man. He took joy in life and gave it out just as freely as he found it but he wasn’t ever cut out to settle down and be a doting daddy. He went because he had to go. No choice really. He left me with a beautiful honey coloured child and I’ll be grateful for that for as long as I live.”
She didn’t deviate from that line and Adalia accepted it with an equanimity that was born of its essential truth. That her mother had loved her father and was able to recognise that life sometimes took its own course, a course that was more often than not difficult and imperfect, made growing up without him sad but tolerable.
As Adalia matured, she and her mother supported each other in a way that was profoundly honest and simple.
They had few secrets. They lived in a hard place. A low down place if truth be told. A place w
here brutality tended to bleach the beauty from that which should have been beautiful, and desperation leeched the decency from those disposed towards goodness.
Living there didn’t mean that they had to become that place.
They were affected by it and their actions were undoubtedly influenced by it, but at the core of themselves they retained a respectability that transcended their circumstances.
When Adalia made the conscious decision to lose her virginity at the age of fourteen, it was something which could have divided them. Could have heralded that all too common separation that occurs between parent and child as the scrambling ascent into adulthood accelerates with unstoppable momentum.
The divide failed to materialise, the wedge found no gap to penetrate. Unlike a particularly lucky young fellow with whom Adalia was acquainted and chose for an act as old as time itself. There was no divide simply because Adalia told her mother about it. Admittedly with a rare and haltingly hesitant voice, but nonetheless with a candour and sense far beyond her tender years.
Tina had listened in silence. Not asking who or when or did you take precautions.
“And was it what you expected honey?” Was her soft comment.
“I don’t really know what I was expecting mom. It was...well, it wasn’t much. Nothing too awesome really,” Adalia had replied.
“When you boil it right down Adalia, I think there’s only ever two reasons a woman lets a man have her. One is because she wants that man. Might be love or it might just an itch that needs scratching, but either way she lets it happen or sometimes makes it happen more like.
That can be awesome.
Two is for power. His, if he’s that kinda man and the girl is too dumb to understand that he is. Or hers if she’s that kind of woman.
Which was the reason that you did it for?”
“It wasn’t love,” Adalia said.
“I guess there might have some itch in there but maybe not exactly the way you mean. I guess it was mostly the second one.
Power.”
She had looked at her mother with a mixture of shame, gratitude and defiance.
“Well, in that case, I hope it doesn’t become a habit honey-girl, because that’ll eventually take you down to a place where it never gets any better,” Tina Baker said gently.
“There won’t ever be a shortage of men sniffing round you Addy. You have a pretty face and legs to match and those two things together generally have a way of making men sit up and take an interest ...lord, those two together have been known to make men a little doolally more than once.”
“It won’t be a habit mom,” Adalia replied with more than a little of the defiance back in her voice.
“I did it for a lotta reasons but I wasn’t dumb about it. Mostly I did it because it had to done. I don’t intend being that sad virgin girl that’s picked on for being odd, but I’m not gonna be the easy-for-anyone girl either. Peter isn’t a bad boy, he’s not nasty. And he knows we aren’t gonna be getting married anytime soon.
Whatever. I’ve done it now and nobody can say I haven’t. Nobody can use not having done it against me ...and I wanted to know how it was anyway.”
And when Adalia did it again a year later it was for love. On her part at least. Jayd Carter, an eighteen year old boy with thirty years of hard time in his eyes, might well have been approaching things from another angle. He was definitely a power kind of guy. A boy-man who was bad and really quite nasty to boot.
It wasn’t too long before the delightful Jayd told her he had had his fill of milk and honey and wanted some proper dark chocolate now darlin’, thank you very much, and walked away without a backward glance.
Her mother held her and dried her tears and Adalia learned the lesson well enough. She wasn’t stupid and experience is the best teacher if you have the good sense to pay attention and the wits to understand what’s being demonstrated.
Adalia had both in spades.
So, when Tina Baker was on the verge of collapse, she had every faith that her daughter would ward her well.
She lapsed into unconsciousness troubled and scared, but confident in her child’s care and capability.
<><><>
Adalia, understandably, was also troubled and scared and she slept badly that night. She woke the next morning unrested and grainy-eyed. Checking her mother, she found her unconscious in a vomit covered bed.
Tried to rouse her without success.
Her mother was breathing but unresponsive.
Adalia ran to find her phone.
Went through the contacts. Rang those who might help and got no response.
Repeatedly rang emergency services and was met with an engaged tone.
She ran to the building landing and knocked, then hammered on doors. No one answered.
She screamed in a small bewildered voice and began to cry. Frustrated and helpless.
Looked out over the railing of their third floor flat and wondered at the silence.
The lack of movement.
The lack of people.
There should be more movement and there wasn’t and that was wrong in a way that she didn’t understand.
Something was wrong, fundamentally wrong. The tears dried up as she pondered how things had got so wrong so quickly. She thought about the bigger picture until she couldn’t think about it anymore. Then she shook herself and attended to her mother. Cleaning things as best she could, sponging vomit from bedding and carpet, airing the room to rid it of a smell that contained more than a hint of corruption.
Cleaning, as best she could, the woman whom she loved above everything else in the world.
Wiping her mouth and face and sick-splashed arms.
And all the while her mother lay there breathing like something that was wounded.
Shivering. Feverish.
Hot and wrong. Above all else, wrong. It was wrong.
And Adalia really didn’t know what to do.
“Come on, come on, you get better,” she muttered to her mother and to no one. A combined imploration and incantation that, not surprisingly, had no effect. Other than to amplify the sense of solitude, the lonely sound of her lone voice.
She went to the bathroom, emptied the bowl of filthy water into the sink and threw the cloth in the bathtub. Walked into the lounge and sat down.
Tried to think of what to do and couldn’t think of anything beyond what she’d already done.
You’ve got to eat honey child. You need to drink ...it’s not healthy to be dehydrated even if it is the end of the world.
Adalia made badly buttered toast and too strong coffee and consumed them without truly tasting either.
Sat agitated and frowning.
Couldn’t sit any longer so walked to the door of her mother’s room and stood silent sentinel to a sweat ridden, twitching impersonation of the person she knew. Stood there so long that her calves ached with a coiled tension that she hadn’t realised was there.
Sitting again, she turned to the television. Found a mixture of blank screens, no service messages, useless looped programmed repeat broadcasts. And then, eventually, a live talk show.
“...don’t think we have ever encountered a crisis like this. To use the term unprecedented is an understatement. We don’t have many staff here at the moment...we’re, telling you what we know but that’s ....err, limited to say the least. To recap, massive numbers of people are very ill, people are dying without aid. Services are at standstill, running at hugely depleted levels, non-existent in many areas.”
Adalia watched until what little real information there was began to repeat itself, the repetition irritating her more than it should.
She returned to her mother.
Repeated that routine until the broadcast stopped and became another dead channel.
Ate and drank and looked and scanned and finally slept as daylight faded across the windows.
<><><>
Awoke to find her mother dead.
Both strangely shrunken yet bloated
looking.
The worst moment of Adalia’s short life.
<><><>
After some indeterminate period, time had ceased to have any tangible meaning, she wandered the estate, dazed and unbelieving. Her mother was gone and that was a concept beyond anything she’d ever considered. There seemed to be no one to tell and no one to help her.
As she drifted, feet slow and aimless, her steps echoed in a strangely dead world. Normally busy walkways and squares were empty and quiet. She thought she saw one or two people at windows, it was hard to be sure because they seemed to withdraw from view as she looked at them. Or she imagined them and they were never there at all. That was possible.
Which made it all the more surprising when she spotted the two men sitting outside the bar. It was the Aston Tavern on Bloomsbury Street. She’d wandered to the edge of the Isherwood Estate. Concrete canyons behind, equally forlorn houses ahead. The men were drinking beer and kicking back, shooting the shit like it was just another day on the Isherwood. She recognised one of them.
Kalvin James shouted to her as she unthinkingly drew nearer to them.
“Adalia ain’t it? Adalia Baker?”
Greeted her with a wave of his beer bottle.
“Yeah.” She replied.
Stopped a few feet from him and his companion.
“Yeah, I thought so. Known since you was this high.”
He laughed as he indicated a level approximate to the height of the scarred café table at which he sat.
“You’ve grown up now girl.”
She knew Kalvin James more by reputation than anything else. Isherwood Park was a closed world if you grew up there. You knew most people by sight or status. It didn’t mean that you were on speaking terms with them.
Kalvin wasn’t somebody you spoke to unless he invited it. He was connected to gangsters. Scratch that, he was a gangster. High in the pecking order by all accounts. Jayd, her badboy boyfriend, had been connected to them as well, and he was scared shitless of Kalvin. Tiptoed round him like you would mince round a venomous snake with a personality disorder. The mysterious hierarchy of the Isherwood gang had a fluid unpredictability. The people in charge had a tendency to change, apart from Michael Dodds of course. Folks got arrested, got locked up or, more often, they just disappeared. Kalvin had been around for quite a while which made him noteworthy. He may not have been top boy, but Adalia had an idea that he was on the Christmas card list of the man who was.
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