Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse

by Leonard, John F.

  “Want a drink? It’s all on the house today.”

  He invited her to sit and join them with another rotation of the beer bottle.

  She shook her head but sat in one of vacant chairs. She didn’t have a lot else to do and walking talking human beings seemed to be as rare as rocking horse shit on the Isherwood at the moment.

  “This is Scozzy, he’s from out of town,” Kalvin said. Motioned with the ever-moving beer bottle at the nearly Albino white man sitting with him.

  “He extended his stay ‘cos of the crisis. No noise from his crew in Madchester, so not much rush to get home.”

  The man looked like the kind of guy that you’d cross the street to avoid. White rasta, long mangy dreads, genuinely ripped, genuinely dirty jeans. The fingers holding his spliff were yellowed and stained to match the teeth revealed when he smiled in welcome.

  The smile was like a shark’s grin. That’s what he reminded her of most, a scabrous, down on his luck, shark that had gobbled up so much nastiness that the poison squeezed out through the skin and bled vaguely baleful light through bloodshot eyes. Washed into the shallows of the Isherwood Park Estate, a little lost, unsure of the depth, and all the more dangerous because of it.

  “Scozzy was visiting us on business when this craziness kicked off and he’s decided to hang ‘round ‘til stuff settles down.” Kalvin half smiled languidly at both of them.

  Adalia had a pretty good idea that whatever business Scozzy was involved in probably didn’t include any blue chip companies. The familiar aroma of marijuana floated across to her from his huge misshapen cigarette. A smell as commonplace as disinfectant in a hospital around this neighbourhood and a decent indicator as to the broad sector in which his business interests lay.

  What had she wandered into, what was she doing? Her mother was lying dead and unattended back there. She wasn’t even vaguely comfortable here, she was lost and alone. Was she just grateful for people unaffected by the disease?

  What do you do? Where do you go?

  She told them about her mother, fighting to hold back tears and was on the whole successful in that at least. She didn’t cry too much. If the tears started again in earnest, she didn’t think they’d stop. She thought they would come in a vast never-ending flood, a great torrent that would slowly erode her substance and eventually wash her away.

  “Adalia, that’s hard. Tough for anyone to take. I’m sorry for you girl.”

  Kalvin’s sympathy was as easy as his posture, but his eyes were hard and distant.

  “I seen a few dead people. Most seem just seem to have collapsed, flaked out, you know.” Scozzy offered.

  Exhaled an enormous jet of smoke as he got the joint going.

  “Guess you got some fuckin’ raw luck there.”

  Yeah, Adalia thought, that surely must be some bad luck. Thanks for the insight Einstein. Felt that sense of dislocation again. The world was falling apart. Her mother was dead.

  Dead.

  And she was sitting outside some dive bar. With a serious criminal and some other guy who was, at best, an asshole with dreads that looked like they could support their own eco system.

  The three of them sat in silent contemplation of the stilled world. She remained because she couldn’t think of what else to do.

  <><><>

  Kalvin James cast an appreciative eye over the girl.

  Adalia was young and she was fine, of that there was no doubt.

  Like some piece of fragile ceramic he’d seen in those arty craft stores. Valuable shit but liable to damage if handled carelessly. No doubt about that either. Sure as the sun comes up in the morning, even if skies are grey and you can’t see the elusive yellow bastard.

  He kind of wished that Scozzy would shut the fuck up though. Most of the planet looked to be cold cocked and he got landed with this stinking northern wigga prick. Go figure that out. What are the odds?

  It was pure luck that he’d come across the guy at the Garage. Bad fucking luck, he was beginning to think.

  When everyone started collapsing, Kalvin made for the Third Floor. A crack house constructed of four flats in Wentworth House that had been knocked through into a series of interconnected rooms, dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and profit as envisioned by the Isherwood Park Boys.

  If you lived in Wentworth House, you never stopped the elevator on the third floor unless you wanted some action. And you didn’t linger on that particular stair landing unless you were ready to part with some good cold cash. Not that you’d be allowed to linger without good cause. The Third Floor was strictly policed by the boys.

  The first thing that struck him when he got there was the lack of security. Where the fuck were the guards?

  He strolled in through unlocked, and more to the point, unmanned, doors and was greeted by room after room of comatose forms.

  Not too much different from usual.

  He actually laughed before looking harder. These people were seriously fucked up in a way that was different from the normal fucked up.

  The smell of shit and puke was pretty bad as well. He got zero response when he slapped and shook some of the forms. They looked messed up as well.

  Faces and arms kind of ...vacuum packed and yet swollen in places.

  They had weird hands.

  Weird shit all round.

  Two of the guards, Smithy and Stevie Dee, were slumped in the video security room.

  Vomit and faeces pooled around them.

  Still breathing but in the same vacuum shrunken state as the punters. And the same lack of response, even when he shook Smithy and then shook him a little more vigorously.

  Vigorously enough to crack an enormous chunk of plaster from the wall behind the peeling wallpaper as that nigger’s head bounced off the surface.

  He might have lost his temper there.

  Yeah, lost his temper somewhat. A bit of a tiny temper tantrum for sure, but it didn’t make a whole load of difference to anything. Smithy didn’t even bleed that much as his ugly fucking veiny head knocked out rotten plaster.

  He certainly didn’t wake up and give Kalvin the explanation that he wanted.

  That things were bad was clearly without question.

  Kalvin always thought twice about visiting Michael Dodds garage. Thought twice and then had another little ponder on the matter if truth be told. But that was where he headed next.

  The garage was the headquarters. Dodds was the boss and the garage was where Dodds lived a lot of the time. Kalvin wasn’t exactly scared of Michael Dodds. He’d been working for the man since he was a kid, since he was eleven years old in point of fact. In many ways, Dodds was the daddy he’d never had. He knew him about as well as anyone knew him. So no, he wasn’t exactly scared. He couldn’t have been that scared because he had every intention of killing and replacing the fucker when the time was right. Even so, Dodds was as dangerous as an Aids loaded hypodermic squirted into an Ebola filled cocktail glass. ‘Fuck with Michael Dodds and Die’ may have been a saying that began and was perpetuated by Dodds himself but that didn’t detract from the essential truth of the phrase.

  Michael had once smilingly confided to Kalvin that he was a community leader. And where Michael led, you followed. If you had any sense between your ears. Otherwise you were apt to find yourself being forcibly led down a dark alley where you’d end up accidentally overdosing on an illegal substance. Or simply disappearing into some landfill site somewhere.

  And if you didn’t like that shiny shinola? Well, you could have word with yourself or you could move, the further the better. Oh, and maybe grab yourself a new identity while you were at it, just to be on the safe side.

  Dodds controlled everything. Drugs, prostitution, gun running, counterfeit merchandise, labour, illegal gambling. Even housing and accommodation fell under his dubious purview. The truth was, law enforcement and local government colluded with him. Michael Dodds offered them an answer to the chaos. He held it in check and kept it quietly contained within agreed p
arameters, locked it within boxes that insulated the majority from the worst excesses. In the hive-like reality of modern existence, Dodds was the perfect paradox. Bad and violent enough to control the malevolence that he helped perpetuate.

  When Kalvin got to the Garage it was similar to the Wentworth crack house. Nothing conscious. Two of Dodds girls naked and collapsed in the bedroom of his private quarters on the top floor of the building.

  A guard in the foyer entrance to his suite. Dead and desiccated looking. No sign of Dodds himself. Kalvin took one of Dodds handguns and some extra ammunition and returned to the ground floor workshops and offices.

  Sat and considered his options.

  That was where he was when Scozzy turned up. The guy was an acquaintance, he knew him but wasn’t tight with him. Scozzy was down here to do some sort of deal with Dodds that involved Dodds extending his influence in Manchester. Fuck alone knew what Dodds was thinking about, they had plenty to contend with here without getting kissy fucking kissy with those loose cannon northern cokeheads.

  <><><>

  Kalvin’s reverie was broken by Scozzy hurling his empty Budweiser bottle across the street. It flew high, glinting in the sun, little drops of amber liquid rainbowing out as it landed and shattered.

  Adalia jumped. The noise was echoingly loud and it brought home just how quiet it was. She could see columns of smoke in the distance. She hadn’t registered it until then but she guessed things were burning somewhere.

  It was going to be a hot day. The sky was cerulean blue, no clouds.

  The sky is blue and my mood is black ...and my skin is honey. I’m the honeychild, my mom says so, so it must be true.

  Adalia didn’t want to cry again but it was a struggle.

  Said so. My mom said so. She won’t be saying it again anywhere but in your head Adalia. That voice is gone from the world, except when it ricochets around your brain, reverberating and rebounding with a relentless energy that may make you crazy. Do you think it’s possible that you’re already crazy?

  Maybe, just maybe.

  Nonsense thoughts but she could hear her mother’s voice. Hear it as clear as she could see the beautiful blue sky up there.

  “Want another beer K-man?”

  Kalvin wanted to reply that if Scozzy called him K-man one more time, Scozzy was apt to find himself eating the broken remains of his buddy-bud-bud bottle. Perhaps with a little side order of his own discoloured teeth thrown in for good measure.

  Instead, he shrugged and smiled and suggested an alternative.

  “Why don’t we check out the Estate? See if we can’t find some more people who haven’t got sick. Got to be more folk who haven’t fallen over. Can’t be that we’re the only three across the blocks.”

  “I checked my landing,” Adalia said.

  “No reply anywhere. I guess I need to go back anyway. I have to do something about my mother. Her ...her body, you know? She’s just there. Lying there.”

  “Not a lot to do right now, Adalia girl.” Kalvin replied.

  He gestured at the smoke in the sky with a ghost of a smile.

  “Who ya gonna call? Whatever this is, it don’t discriminate. Colour or profession ain’t any insulation, from what I can see. London’s burning baby, but you don’t hear no sirens do you. Folks dyin but there ain’t no ambulances, no nice policemen buzzin round, flashing their lights and makin a fuss. They all down, across the board. Funeral directors as well I expect, lying where they fell when they got ill.”

  She nodded dumbly and stood, strolled with them back into the heart of the estate.

  Concrete runways and grim, grey plazas. Cold and sterile at the best of times, now ghostly, eerie in their abandonment. The occasional body. They didn’t investigate whether the bodies were dead or unconscious.

  Scozzy stopped them as he spotted a lone figure emerge from a block entrance.

  “Hey, isn’t that Minuteman?” He asked.

  Kalvin squinted at the distant figure. It staggered and then stood, stooped and still, and stared back at them. If it was Taylor, there was something not right about him. Something very different.

  “It is. Minuteman Taylor. I was with him a few days back and he was wearing that same fuck-awful Armani jacket. Can’t be two cunts that ugly and with taste that bad,” Scozzy said.

  “He looks properly rough though. He was never that pretty, but man, he has seriously let himself go.”

  Scozzy whooped out a derisive laugh and began walking towards the man.

  “Minuteman, what the fuck happened to ya. You look like shit man.”

  The figure stiffened and then began running to meet him. As it got closer, Scozzy got a clearer view and his laughter choked off.

  Man, he really did look messed up.

  And he only had one trainer. What the fuck was that all about?

  And his face was all wrong. All sorts of liquorice allsorts wrong baby. Fuck, he looked like he was wearing a badass Halloween mask, a proper scary job, guaranteed to make kids cry and get your bird wet and ready.

  And what the fuck was up with his hands? Fucking claw gloves? Jesus, that wasn’t going to turn anyone on. Still, they did look pretty fucking authentic.

  What used to be Minuteman Taylor, AKA Stephen Taylor, dubbed ‘Minuteman’ after once jacking a car in the legendary sixty seconds, and incidentally cabbaging the rightful owner in the process, was running full pelt now. He actually flew the last six feet and a strangely enormous jaw latched onto Scozzy’s left shoulder with a sickening squeeze and spurt of blood.

  Scozzy, original name now long lost, these days only seen and used in association with his impressively numerous police files, tumbled and turned. Wrenching himself free at the cost of a large section of sweat stained tee shirt and a not inconsiderable amount of shoulder flesh.

  He righted himself as his attacker did the same.

  At the age of thirty-three, Scozzy had spent his entire adult life in a variety of nefarious pursuits. He reacted to this attack in a manner that was so engrained in his nature as to qualify as a reflex action.

  The wicked six-inch blade appeared in his hand like some lowlife conjurers trick and he plunged it to the hilt into the slavering Minuteman mutation’s chest, shoving with his free hand as the thing’s head lunged forward on empty air. It stumbled backwards and buckled at the knees, grotesque head drooping, clawed hands flexing.

  “Did you see what that mad bastard did to me? Look at my shoulder man. Look at my fuckin shoulder. What the fuck is goin’ on here?” He screamed as he whirled to his companions, disbelief stretching his features wide and open. Probably the nearest approach to innocence that his expression had achieved in the last five years.

  Kalvin slowly stepped back, Adalia behind him. He didn’t answer Scozzy, indeed gave the man’s sopping red wound only a cursory glance, enough to satisfy himself that it was the real deal.

  Instead, his eyes went to the Minuteman thing. It was creaking back to its feet.

  And it looked pissed.

  Hissing and spitting, it launched itself at Scozzy’s back. The man squealed like a stuck pig as taloned fingers sank into his head and arm and a savage mouth found purchase on the back of his neck.

  Kalvin wasn’t sure but he thought he heard the crunch of bone as the thing bit at the white rasta’s collar. Thought it could have been the poor guy’s spine being chewed. He wasn’t sure and it didn’t really matter either way. Scozzy was fucked, dead meat, as far as he could see. Just add another one to the no-loss column there.

  He pulled the gun from the waistband of his joggers and had the barrel up against the Minuteman’s head without any deliberation. In Kalvin’s world, sometimes you just had to act. If you masticated, cogitated and deliberated as they used to say in that crappy cookery reality show, well sometimes you were apt to end up dead.

  He squeezed the trigger and a fair proportion of Minuteman’s skull and its contents exploded across the concrete.

  Kalvin glanced briefly down at Scozzy, bu
t neither the gun nor his full attention completely left the abomination on the ground as it writhed and twitched. Not much blood but definitely dying.

  Scozzy, not dead, was weakly trying to staunch the blood flow from a neck that looked like it has been mauled by something out of the dangerous enclosures at the zoo.

  “You don’t look too good Scozman,” Kalvin said quietly, his attention drawn to several more figures that were materialising from the blocks around the courtyard.

  “But then, you never did look too good to be honest.”

  The figures seemed to be attracted to their tragic little tableau and, in Kalvin’s estimation, they were in a similar condition to Minuteman.

  They weren’t near enough yet to get the full 4k ultra high definition, and he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to be that close in the current circumstances, but near enough to see they were wrong. Badly wrong, screwed up. Mutated if you want to get all scientific.

  Fucked up bad-beast faces and evil-alien hands.

  Near enough for Kalvin to not want to be there anymore.

  Should we move on up, move on out?

  Oh yeah, that that seemed like the kind of idea that was soaked in 24 carat baby. Pretty as a briefcase full of cash or a gleaming new ride.

  He grabbed the girl by the upper arm and whispered from the side of his mouth, eyes measuring distance and movement.

  “We got some sort of heavy alien zombie shit goin down here and we need to make tracks Adalia girl. These things look like they bite first and don’t ever get round to the questions. You get me?”

  Adalia dumbly nodded.