Class Four: Those Who Survive

by Duncan P. Bradshaw

  The curtains fell, the spotlight constricted like an iris having a torch shone into it and the tannoy fizzed into life once more…

  ‘NOOOOO, NOT DAISY, NOT MY DAISY…YOU WILL ALL PAY FOR THIS, SHE WAS THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE, HOW DARE YOU TAKE

  HER AWAY FROM ME. WE USED TO HAVE TO DRUG VIOLET SO

  WE COULD BE TOGETHER,

  YOU WILL ALL DIE!

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, YOU TEST MY PATIENCE, I PICKED YOU ALL UP TO FEED MY MENAGERIE NOT TO KILL IT, WE HAD DREAMS YOU KNOW, DREAMS! AND THIS IS WHAT WE GET?

  WELL, LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO…SHARK BOY. HIS BACK IS DEFORMED WITH A FORBIDDING FIN, BUT IT’S HIS MOUTH YOU BETTER WATCH OUT FOR,

  LINED WITH RAZOR SHARP TEETH, AND A KILLER’S INSTINCT, YOU WON’T NEED A BIGGER BOAT.

  YOU JUST NEED TO DIE.’

  “Thank you,” Blondie whispered into Francis’ ear. She wiped the tears onto her sleeve. Francis smudged his with the palm of his hand.

  “Do me a favour, before the next act is released. We need to find a way out of here. Everyone else is not capable of dealing with them. See if you can use that and cut us a way out of here.” Francis thumbed towards the gore-soaked metal spike. Blondie nodded and jogged to the back of the tent. She pushed people out of the way and started to try and cut her way through the inner shell and to freedom.

  A wavering voice screeched from one side of the big top. “Mister Man, I think something’s coming out for their noon feeding.” The spotlight widened once more; the curtains were pulled up like an elegant dress in a curtsy, and a clang rang from the void beyond.

  Francis walked to the middle of the chamber, pushing chairs out of the way, trying to make barricades for the remaining survivors. “You, keep a watch on her. If she turns, shout, okay?” he shouted at a man in his mid-twenties. He nodded slowly and edged his way around the blood-splattered tent to one side of the flourishing abattoir.

  “What the…” a woman’s voice trailed off. Francis looked for the source and saw a lady standing guard over an elderly couple and their carer. She held an umbrella like a club, and was transfixed by something emerging from the far end.

  A wail was the first thing that signalled the arrival of the next zombified freak, followed by an extended upper mouth. It was like someone had opened up the head, stuck half a dinner plate in above the upper gum, stretched the skin over it and then sewn it shut. Below the growth was a large, tooth-filled maw; each one glistened in the light. It had no nose to speak of, save for two holes at the prow of the face.

  Trading Standards could’ve received complaints from people about the term, ‘Shark Boy’, as the thing that stumbled out was anything but.

  Francis estimated he must’ve been in his late teens when he added one to the zombie total column. His once muscly frame had withered since reanimation, but he still lumbered out with purpose and poise. His jaw never stayed closed, snapping and clacking at the array of food on offer.

  Francis braced himself, picking chunks of matter off the baton. Before he had a chance to finish, an almighty yell drowned out the chattering of Shark Boy’s jaws.

  “Have this you wee bastard,” the woman shouted, admonishing the beast with the closed umbrella. The woman was a blur of activity, weaving this way and that. No sooner had she twatted him from one side, she would duck under his lazy grab and attack him from the rear.

  She had just manoeuvred herself back to the front and was trying to ram the pointy bit into one of his nostrils when her wards were showered with arterial spray.

  The umbrella landed on the floor in a puff of sawdust, quickly followed by her arm, severed at the shoulder. The woman shrieked like a hedgehog on date night and clamped her free hand over the stump where she now had half an armpit and an unwelcome blood fountain feature.

  Shark Boy grabbed her around the waist with both hands, tilting her towards him. He leant in and took a gargantuan bite. Shaking like a dog with a length of knotted roped, he yanked the woman’s head off in one go.

  Passing the severed noggin to the back of his mouth, he ground her skull with the pressure of a millstone. After a few solid crunches, he tipped his head back and swallowed the remnants of her bonce in one.

  With his hands still clamped round her waist, it looked for all the world as if he was learning the cha-cha-cha with a headless mannequin. Though this dummy had a pulsating stream of blood being pumped out of the place the throat should be. Shark Boy, bored with his dancing partner’s lack of finesse, released her and the body fell to the floor, the sawdust absorbing the abating liquid.

  The monster trudged towards the elderly couple, Cyril and Tabitha Talbot of Eastbourne. They had survived to date through blind luck, a locked caravan, and Tabitha’s food hoarding instincts. They had only ventured outside when their supply of butter beans and potato flakes had finally expired.

  Promised sanctuary and a slap-up meal, they, along with Dana, their carer, and Harriet, the now headless woman, had accepted eagerly. The road was not the place to be for two old people who had the combined total of one birth hip between them.

  Dana moved behind the couple, shouting, “Take them, take them, they’re old and knackered, don’t eat me Mr Shark, please don’t eat me!” Once behind the octogenarians, she started to push them forwards, towards the thresher-like jaws of Shark Boy.

  The monster grabbed one of the chairs that were barring entrance to his follow-up serving of skull. Between his dragging and Dana’s eagerness to offer up the people whose arse’s she had spent the last two years wiping, the way ahead cleared quickly.

  Francis waded through the sawdust and tonked Shark Boy on the head. The beast looked around at his attacker; even bereft of emotional reflection, he looked a little miffed.

  Swirling like an elastic band whirly thing, Shark Boy roundhoused Francis and sent him to the floor. In two minds, he turned back, his impulse telling him that two behind the chairs was worth one in the sawdust.

  His jaw cranked open again. Lines of insanely sharp, blood-rimmed teeth loomed towards Cyril. Dana let out an almighty scream. Time slowed down as Shark Boy moved in for the kill. Falling back on his basic training for the Suez crisis, Cyril thumped the abomination right on the snout.

  The monster reeled backwards, howling with primal anger. Dana, having finally grown a pair, shoved the old folks aside and went to seize the initiative.

  “Hit ‘im on the nose, kid. Sharks don’t like it too much if you hit ‘em on the nose,” Cyril rasped through the upper set of his false teeth; the bottom half were currently on loan with his good lady wife.

  Dana rolled up her sleeves and advanced on the zombie. It was stumbling backwards, yowling and bawling. “You stay away from them, you…you…you nasty man.” She wound back her arm and let fly a fearsome right hook. Shark Boy had recovered from the blow. In truth, Cyril’s jab had merely pissed off the few remaining impulses he had left.

  As Dana’s fist flew towards his face, he simply jacked open his jaw further still. She missed his nose and connected, tamely, with the rotting uvula at the back of his throat.

  Shark Boy simultaneously bit down on her arm and vomited pieces of jaw and brain matter through his nose. Dana screamed, squeezing her arm, which was now missing the bit after the elbow, and covered in a viscous film of Harriet. Before she could try and break the world screaming record, the monster gorged himself on the top of her body. His jaws locked around her shoulders. The scream still echoed within his vast mouth and emerged out of his wet nostrils.

  He shook his prize like an eager apple bobber and her head and shoulders separated from the rest of her body. This collapsed with a dull thud onto the floor, adding yet more lashings of blood into the now soaked wood dandruff.

  Shark Boy crunched his way through the mouthful he had torn off, the scream finally dissipating with a gurgle. A few chomps later and he again gulped back his catch of the day. Tabitha collapsed under the stress. Cyril knelt down and tried to pick up her skeletal frame. She felt like a lead
weight in his hands. He managed to pick his wife up only for her to slip from his grasp.

  Tabitha’s unconscious body fell onto a chair, sending her and the seat careening over onto the stodgy floor. Cyril could feel that his back was wet. Slapping his hands around behind him, he felt nuggets of enamel and gum clamped around his waist. All of a sudden he felt a whoosh of air, and then he felt lighter.

  For the first time in years, he could see properly; the indistinct details which he had long since given up on seeing now jumped into focus. He could make out the intricate hem on Tabitha’s petticoat, the grooves in the chair leg, the plush faux velvet cushion, stitched with a golden thread. He chuckled in wonder and awe as he made out the bulge in the back of his trouser pocket where he always kept his wallet.

  Wait a minute.

  How was he seeing his trouser-encased butt cheeks unless…? Looking down, his suspicions were confirmed as he saw the teeth embedded in his guts. “Oh bugger,” he muttered as Shark Boy tilted his head back and tipped the top half of Cyril into his mouth. He crunched down on him and felt the eighty-one-year-old matured meat slip down his gullet.

  Francis pulled himself to his feet. His legs felt like he’d been doing the running in an eighties training montage. He saw the zombie freak tip back what was left of the old man into its gob.

  Shaking away the grogginess, he girded himself and thought back to his school days. Ignoring 98% of it, he launched himself at the monster with a rugby tackle, catching him in the sweet spot at the back of the knees, he tumbled onto the monster’s back.

  The meeting of head against floor, whilst halfway through swallowing, was not the best thing. Half-chewed old man was spat out, covering Tabitha with her husband’s squashed head and broken mangled arms.

  Francis was overcome with pent-up aggression. Nine month’s worth of biting his tongue and patience washed away as he started to pummel the back of the beast’s head.

  Divots of skin and flesh were gouged away with furious and frantic flaying. Through the grey skin, lined with coagulated blood-filled veins, he saw the shiny white of bone. Pressing fingers into the decomposing muscle and tissue of the neck, he reached in and grabbed hold of the spinal column, just below the skull.

  With one hand pushing down on the neck bone, his other hand slipped up into the base of Shark Boy’s skull. The beast began to shake and shriek, sensing that the invading things in its head should not be there. Pushing through chunks of gristle and nobs of bone, Francis felt a bobbly ridge of something that felt like a pastry-less pork pie. He squeezed his hand and pulled and clawed away at the brain. Shark Boy went up and down the octaves like a schoolboy learning the oboe.

  Pushing the neck bone down further, Francis started to grab fistfuls of decaying encephalon and threw it behind him. To the casual observer, it looked like this madman had misplaced something inside the zombie freak’s skull, possibly his watch, and was frantically trying to find it amongst reams of that weird Quaver-like packing material you get with electronic equipment.

  Shark Boy’s extremities quaked as if low-voltage electricity was coursing through them. Still, Francis pulled clumps of grey chunks of brain out. The twitching stopped and Francis mirrored the movement by ceasing his cranial assault. Panting with a surge of adrenalin, he looked over his hands.

  As he studied the pieces of brain under his fingernails, he heard a munching sound. Looking over to the unconscious old woman, he saw the severed mangled head of her husband chewing through the back of her calf. A jet of blood flew through the air and added a swish to the messy puddle which had already formed. Francis jumped up and took Cyril’s head on the half-volley, sending it through the air where it disappeared into the vacuum beyond the stage.

  Like an alligator at feeding time, the curtains snapped shut and the spotlight concentrated its gaze again. Francis checked Tabitha’s pulse. It was still strong, but time was not on his side. He pulled the belt from Cyril’s trousers and lashed it around her leg as a tourniquet. He put her in the recovery position and dropped what was left of the old lady’s carer over her legs.

  Just in case.

  “I’m nearly through,” shouted Blondie. Francis checked Tabitha’s pulse one last time and headed over to where the woman was.

  “What the hell is this stuff?” Francis asked, trying to make the hole in the membrane wider.

  Blondie wiped the sweat from her brow. “No idea, but it’s one tough bastard.”

  Francis nodded. “Look, I can’t keep referring to you as Blondie, or ‘woman number three’. I’m Francis, you are?”

  “I’m Zena,” she said, picking the hair off her forehead, “and before you say anything, do not even ask if I’m a warrior princess, or I will fucking end you.”

  Francis chuckled. “No problem, sister. You carry on with that, I’m gonna get Nate, and we can—”

  A burst of static belched from the PA system, the tannoy clicked and spat into life once more…

  ‘HE WAS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, HOW COULD YOU DO THAT? WHEN FATHER FOUND HIM, HE WAS EATING SCRAPS OUT OF

  BINS BEHIND LA COSTINA. MAYBE THE ODD DOG OR CAT HERE

  OR THERE,

  BUT HE WAS GOOD PEOPLE, MISUNDERSTOOD.

  AND YOU COME IN HERE, AND YOU CARRY OUT THE CRUDEST OF LOBOTOMIES. I HATE YOU. WHY DON’T YOU PEOPLE JUST ADMIT THE TRUTH AND DIE ALREADY?

  FINE, I NORMALLY SAVE PEARL FOR LARGER GROUPS, BUT YOU’VE LEFT ME NO CHOICE.

  PEARL MANTICE WAS A REAL HIT WITH THE MENFOLK, BY THE TIME THEY FOUND OUT ABOUT HER AFFLICTION, IT WAS TOO LATE. I SAVED HER FROM INVESTIGATION.

  HOWEVER, SINCE SHE CHANGED, WELL…LET’S SAY OLD HABITS DIE HARD.

  UNLIKE YOU, YOU WILL ALL DIE EASY. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, I GIVE YOU THE PRAYING MANTIS.’

  “For the love of…” Francis moaned. He looked across to the chair corral on the other side of the Big Top. Two men stood wearily behind the flimsy barricade; an older woman cowered behind them. It was located between the remains of Hugh and Shirley and the hole that Zena was trying to make.

  Francis bounded over to them. “Hey, guys, look. We have no idea how many more freaks of nature our host has for us. We have to work together now, or we’re all going to end up like these poor souls.” A wiry arm swept around the blood-stained circle of death that they were all inhabitants of, as if the point needed further labouring.

  One of the men stood forward. He was tall and thin; a San Andreas baseball cap kept a mop of greasy hair in check. “Man, me and Chris here, we ain’t fighters. We’re just looking after our mum, ya hear? She’s all we got left now,” he stammered.

  Francis placed a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Slim, look, let me lay this out to you. Everyone else in this chamber is either dead or dying. If you don’t help now, then you, your brother, and your mum are going to die.”

  Chris comforted his mother and took a step forward so that he was standing by the other man’s side. He was the same height, but his metabolism worked a little slower, adding a bit of filler to his frame. “Okay, pal. Me and Russ can help out, but we’re not leaving our mum, deal?” He offered a hand to Francis who gratefully shook it.

  “Good choice, pilgrim. I’ve got a plan. Zena is trying to get out the way we come in, but I got a sneaky feeling our friend here hasn’t made it that easy. I’m going to see what lies beyond there.” Francis nodded towards the parted curtains. “Don’t point, don’t point, there’s a camera on the rail, he’s watching us. I’m going to have to sneak around the side and under it to avoid him seeing me, which means…”

  Russ pulled his cap off by its peak and ran his fingers through his slick hair. “You need us to keep this Praying Mantis busy, huh?”

  Francis nodded glumly. “Afraid so, slim. You’ve seen pictures of lion tamers, yeah? Grab some chairs, keep her attention on you and keep her at bay. Hopefully that’ll give me or Zena enough time to get us all a way out of here. Nathan, come here.”

  The child scampered across the ring to Francis.
“Nate, this is Chris, Russ and their mum. I want you to stay with them, okay? They’ll keep you safe while me and Zena try and find a way out of here. Stay with them, and listen to what they say.”

  The spotlight flooded the butcher’s yard once more. A metallic clang sounded from beyond the parted curtains. Francis nodded and jogged back to Tabitha’s still body. He pushed himself flat against the canvas and held his breath.

  Russ turned to his brother, each of them picking up a chair and holding it so the legs pointed out, towards the forbidding entrance. “Hey bro, it’ll be fine. It’s only a bird. What harm could she possibl—”

  The chair legs thudded into the floor as a six foot tall, lithe woman stalked out onto the wooden stage. She was wrapped in a tatty black silk robe. The only things visible were her cue-ball eyes and a band of grey skin. She seemed to float to the middle of the stage. The robe covered her limbs, but even with it, she had a strange allure.

  Her head turned slowly, across to the caterwauling of Russ and Chris. Like an automaton, she glided off the stage and made her way towards them. “Come here, you bint!” shouted Chris. The brothers had regained their poise and were banging the chair legs together.

  As she got closer, her head snapped to the right. Eyes like a laser-guided missile looked to the bloody corpses from the initial attack. Ignoring the name-calling and gesticulating, she slid across the floor towards them.

  “Where am I?” Shirley groaned. The words came out all slurred, with a degree of surprise. She ran a hand across her tacky face. As her eyes took in the sight that greeted her, a sheet of coagulated blood and skin, she screamed. Frantically, she started patting her face. She couldn’t work out why some of it was fine, and some of it was not open to the possibility of having salt applied to it.