“Yeah, okay. Yes, I get you.”
Whispered when Kalvin’s eyes flicked in irritation to hers.
“When I run, you stay close with me, yeah?” Kalvin breathed.
Then bolted. Led them a convoluted route out of the estate. They could hear the things pursuing them, inhuman snarls and yelps and the slap of feet echoing off the concrete canyons.
They paused when necessary, sneaked when they had to, darting and hiding to avoid encounter. Terrified of detection and the confrontation it might mean.
Breathing hard, Kalvin brought them to a halt by a wall that opened out on to an adjoining street.
“Dodds garage is only a couple of streets away. We get there and I’ve got keys so we get secure and lay low ‘til we figure out what to do.”
Adalia mutely agreed again.
Kalvin may not have been her idea of the perfect friend but she had no better ideas right now. Had no ideas at all as it went. She was pretty much overwhelmed by everything. The City Flu, her mother, people dying or turning into things that were straight out of horror films.
Too crazy. It was all too crazy. She’d get her head together at some point, she knew herself well enough to think that would happen. But right now she just had to survive.
When they reached the garage, they entered through a steel door that Kalvin quietly latched behind them, finger to his lips.
“There may be some of those things in here. Wait while I check it out.”
He produced the gun again and disappeared into the building.
Adalia moved a little further into the room and nervously waited. Some sort of waiting room come lounge, comfy sofas, big flatscreen, coffee and water machines. Workshop partially visible through a doorway. Bright sunlight from a small row of high windows spangled off two gleaming BMW saloons and a shiny Porsche Cayenne. Expensive cars for a back street garage, even one as apparently big as this.
A noise behind her and she swivelled, heart in mouth, convinced that one of those things had crept up on her.
Just Kalvin, gliding, gun in hand.
“All clear. There were people her but they must have woken up and got out. Gone hunting. That’s what I think is happening everywhere. All the folk that got ill, went into a coma, they’re turning into monster-munchers.”
Kalvin smiled his half smile.
“I scare you then when I came back?”
“Yeah. I got ...distracted, didn’t hear you. Stupid. Sorry,” she replied.
He shook his head, dismissed it.
“We can hole up here Adalia girl. Be safe and sound ‘til this shit sorts itself out.”
She nodded.
“This place is tight. Got everything we need for now. Fort Knox style ...and some luxury upstairs. A suite, great bedroom ...everything we need.”
She sat and put her head in her hands. The run to the garage had been nightmarish. What had happened to the white guy from up north was nightmarish. Her mother lying dead in their flat was beyond that. And now to add bizarre to surreal, she was stuck in some gang boy’s paradise hangout with a man who thought nothing of pulling a gun and using it to kill.
He’d fled from his friend without a backward glance, like something nasty he’d wiped from his shoe.
“Adalia girl, I need you take care of me.”
She looked up and was astonished to see that he’d lowered his trousers and was cupping his genitals.
“Do me girl. Come on. I need some sweetness.”
Ridiculously, the first thing that occurred to her was that he wasn’t wearing any underwear. As he fisted his swollen penis and moved his hand back and forth, the thought paled into insignificance.
“Are you fucking mad?”
The words were out of her mouth before she could think.
“The world is full of monsters, people are dead ...dying. It’s ...it’s like some sort of apocalypse. And you want me to suck you off? You want a fucking blowjob?”
She actually laughed. Derision mixed with disbelief. A shot of fear swirling down there at the bottom of the glass.
“Ain’t nothing to be afraid of Adalia girl. I’m gonna look after you and you gotta look after me. That’s the new deal. That’s how this is gonna work.”
He raised the gun in the hand that wasn’t occupied elsewhere and pointed it at her. Her eyes were torn between those hands. They each held something repulsive.
“New reality girl. This is real, right here, right now. Old times, I’d have bust you up a bit and had what I needed. New day now. You blow me ...or I blow you away.”
He smiled at his own wordplay and gestured downwards with the gun.
She moved to her knees in front of him. Her heart racing, a feeling of numb unreality threatening to engulf her.
Surely none of this was actually real was it?
He smelled earthy and unclean. Piss and sweat and old oily dirt.
She took him in her mouth. Gagged and moved with the thrust of his thighs.
Tasted him and felt sick. Flicked her eyes up to his face.
“Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s good. Do it like that, just like that.”
His groin cupping hand shifted to stroke her hair, gently dirtying it, wiping his smell onto her.
He began to rock on the balls of his feet as his hand slid off her head, across her face, to rest on his upper thigh.
Adalia’s eyes moved to watch his right hand as the gun floated away from her head and limply waved off to her left.
He moaned and mumbled words of encouragement and fantasy as his motion increased in frequency, became more urgent.
Pummelling thrusts that pounded her throat. Tasted his essence and inhaled the unwashed rawness of him.
Hated it. Hated him.
Her right hand moved to cup his balls, mirroring his own actions from moments before. He moaned louder and thrust harder. His gun hand dropping, the handle limp and loose in splayed fingers.
Grasped his testicles. Gentle pressure that extorted even greater moans of pleasure. Sensual squeezing massage that turned into a sudden savage wrench and twist.
Bit and pulled on his cock, a raking finale that tore and ripped.
Spat blood and semen as she squeezed even more savagely on his balls. Squeezed harder and then harder still, nails digging, hand clenching. Her mind brimming with disgust, overflowing with anger and fear.
The popping palm-wet pain that she’d inflicted roared up and out of him, a howl of dismayed incomprehension and agony torn from his throat.
Adalia’s left hand plucked the gun from him like relieving an inebriate of a smouldering cigarette.
Screaming and stunned, he wobbled back as she rose to her feet, her knee moving upwards on its own unplanned path of misery.
A path that crunched his nose and mashed his mouth, fractured teeth and filled his head with further pain. He instinctively folded to protect ruined testicles and shrieking penis, cover his bleeding mouth and clogged nose.
Adalia reeled backwards as he tangled in his own legs, his blood dripping hands clamped to his mouth and groin.
Transferred the gun to her right hand.
Spat and spat again. Coppery, dirty earth-foul taste assaulting her senses. Sickened and enraged.
Kalvin squirmed on the floor, red and wet, face and genitals a flaming cauldron of pain. He looked up at her, eyes hooded and lethal.
“Oh ...girl ...you gonna ...be sorry. So sorry ...you did ...that.”
Voice slurred and slow, filtered through fingers clutched to his broken mouth. Raspy, laboured breathing.
“Come near me again and I will shoot you dead,” she spat at him.
He held her gaze and then regarded the gun shaking in her hand.
Struggled to his knees.
“Bitch. You ...will ...beg me ...to kill you.”
She backed to the door and fumbled the lock, gun arm swaying, awareness see-sawing between him and the exit. Panic mounting. Had to get out, had to escape. At last felt the lock flick.
Looked b
ack at him, on his feet now, leaning against the wall. Blood dripping, eyes gleaming and hot.
Furious.
“Adalia ...you best ...shoot me.”
Crouched over in pain but recovering himself, concentration centred on her. Dangerous and wild.
“Because ...you have no ...idea ...how much I’m gonna ...hurt you. Whole world ...of hurt.”
Noticed tiny white fragments on his hand, glued there with blood. Fragments of his teeth.
Registered a dull ache in her knee where it had impacted with him.
“Fuck off Kalvin.”
Her arm extended.
The gun wavered, jumped in her hand. The half-smile reappeared on his face, incongruous and sinister amidst the blood and ruin.
She whirled and fled into sunlight, flinging the steel door wide behind her.
Terrified of the monsters out there.
More terrified of the monster behind her.
Chapter 6.
Caroline and Adalia Make Contact.
Caroline Denning had stopped at the Food Local store because it was part of the plan she’d formed after the near fatal encounter with her new and improved boyfriend Dennis. The doors to the store were wide open and the area seemed abandoned. Get supplies and get to her office was the plan and she’d hoped to be in and out and on her way before anyone, or anything, noticed.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best that she could manage. Picking the girl up, saving the girl, wasn’t part of that plan, but when did life ever go according to plan.
At twenty-six, Caroline was bright and relatively successful. Diligently climbing the dull career ladder in the multinational telecoms company for which she worked.
After leaving university, it hadn’t exactly been her dream job, but in an age where a university degree was as common as the common cold, she’d taken what was available. That, and if truth be told, she still didn’t know what her dream job actually was.
Most of the time, things were okay.
Not exactly amazing but okay. It wasn’t that difficult to ignore the slightly tart flavour of disappointment, almost an aftertaste, left in her mouth by work and personal life. Maybe that taste could be acquired if you didn’t dwell on it for too long. Maybe that taste would fade into the background. Chew on something long enough and you had to get used to it? Surely?
At least some of the job was easier than her personal life. The technical side of work was usually something that she found stimulating and enjoyable. Hard facts and people who dealt in hard facts ...well, that was lovely. Just great. Minimal grey areas, as close to black and white as you could hope to get in the real world.
Managing people, staff and bosses ...oh my, that was an ongoing headache. No wonder she couldn’t manage her personal life very well.
Professionally, she managed to cope despite feeling totally uncomfortable most of the time. She’d realised early on that having a decent idea of what might work in any given situation and then acting decisively, with assurance, had a way of impressing those below and above you. It didn’t mean you were right or that you knew precisely what you were doing but as long as you gave the impression that you were and you did, things moved along quite nicely thank you.
It helped if you did get it right a lot of the time, smiled a lot and were tough at the right moments. Whether you felt tough or not.
Her current role was a contact centre executive, a job title that she’d found utterly absurd even as she set her sights on attaining the position. It meant that she was on the top tier of management for the workforce of over eight hundred people in the centre building. She developed a habit of jumping on technical issues to avoid anything related to personnel.
On the day that the crisis broke, she’d arrived at the huge office to find a situation that unravelled as the hours flew by. Massive numbers of staff were absent and more went home ill as their condition worsened. By early afternoon, the fault board was lit up like one of the sad Christmas trees from her childhood.
Auto alerts that signified problems with the network. The alerts went unactioned in the centre and unattended by engineers in the field. Not to worry, it didn’t look like many complaints would be generated. Network activity was incredibly low and dropping with each long tick of the clock.
When she left for the day, she had no way of knowing that she was effectively bidding farewell to her budding career and the life she had crafted for herself. If she had known, it wouldn’t necessarily have been any big deal. There was a barely concealed part of her that detested it.
<><><>
The following day and the days after that were supposedly holiday. In reality, it was time she has set aside to work at home, isolated and free from distraction. And to think about where she was and where she was going.
Her all-powerful company smartphone, her laptop, the tablet, the television, they echoed with dim stories of rampant sickness. So she turned them all off. Played music in the background, wrapped herself in the envelope of sound. When she needed a break from work, she watched DVDs, comedy compilations and favourite movies.
She was focused on the slippery career ladder.
She had an important presentation coming up and had planned this time to shutter herself away and work it up to the finished article. For a while she needed to disconnect from the world. Not give a fuck about work, in order to transform it into something that she could find acceptable. Something that conformed to her vision of who she should be.
An amorphous thought drifted at the back of her mind that if she had to spend another year in that contact centre ...well, she might be tempted to just drive her old car off a cliff ...with her inside it.
<><><>
That was one version of what she was doing. More importantly, playing the hermit for a while provided a rest from what, to her mind, was a chaotic life. A chance to try and gain some perspective.
Caroline got a flavour of the tsumanic tide that was sweeping the world but it wasn’t registering on her fully. It hadn’t hit the sweet spot of her attention with enough force to activate her action mode.
The presentation occupied her but there was were other nagging anxieties. The worry that seemed to surface most regularly was her personal life ...her boyfriend.
Whilst she might refer to him as her boyfriend, Dennis Green, the man that she’d been seeing for the last twelve months, was in fact twice her age. The affluent owner of a property development business. He was a major part of her life and for some time now, a looming cloud of doubt had been forming at the back of her mind that suggested he was majorly wrong part on a lot of levels. Maybe all the levels.
In truth, her relationship with Dennis was something that she spent a lot of time trying not to think about.
A source of disquiet that kept creeping into her thoughts more and more of late, despite her best efforts to dispel it.
We’re here, we’re still here.
Those thoughts would pipe up with an annoying and increasing frequency but she really didn’t want to face them squarely and have to think about her and Dennis as a complete concept.
She’d known for some time that she didn’t love him, continued seeing him as much due to inertia than anything else.
He was also rich and they did nice things together. Went to expensive places and ate at expensive restaurants. She enjoyed driving his luxurious Range Rover.
When he lets you ...when he’s playing with the Aston Martin.
She enjoyed it but a little part of her felt uncomfortable at what she thought of as the almost immoral cost of the vehicle ...and the charade of her driving it.
You didn’t buy it babe.
That didn’t stop her feeling ridiculously superior when she did drive it or climbed in beside Dennis on the rare occasions that he picked her up from work.
Just as she couldn’t help but love the designer gifts he gave her.
That Raymond Weil watch was just divine and diamond necklaces don’t grow on trees you know.
&nbs
p; And even then, that same little part of her confusedly wondered at the cost versus genuine value of those things. Especially when true value was relative and depended on a fuzzy logic equation that she couldn’t quite get her head round. Love, affection, habit, fear of being alone. Reciprocity of feeling divided by subjective need factored by desire. Easier to tackle the thorny issue of world peace or provide definitive proof of the multiverse.
She wanted to closely examine her feelings toward Dennis about as much as she wanted to insert a pin under a fingernail and wiggle it about a bit. Caroline had a fairly good idea that those feelings consisted of an ugly ball of materialism and loneliness that, if scrutinised in detail, picked at and unravelled, would not only leave her feeling rather ill-disposed towards Dennis. Worse still, reveal an image of herself that wasn’t very pretty at all.
Was actually kind of ugly.
The truth was that she didn’t know why she was seeing him. But she had a growing suspicion that she didn’t really like him that much and probably had never liked him that much.
She thought that she had a decent idea, however unacceptable to her sensibilities, of why he was interested in her. She wasn’t a stunner. A slightly plump girl next door in her own considered opinion ...and she’d considered it at some length.
Admittedly, she made the most of herself, good make-up.
Can’t beat a touch of Lancôme dear.
And the most expensive clothes that she could afford.
Is that made of silk dear?
But she had no delusions that she was any kind of trophy. She suspected that his interest was down to the fact that she was intelligent and had energy. And her flesh, whilst being more giving and more full than she’d like, was still fresh and essentially young to his touch.
It fuelled whatever fantasies filled a middle-aged man’s unfulfilled desires.
Sex had started out as awkward, progressed to tolerable and then begun a descent into what she worried might eventually end up in revulsion.
More and more, the thought of running her hands over his hirsute back was becoming something that she had to not think about.
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