by Mark Morris
'Can you turn that down a bit, please?' he asked a girl with dyed red hair and a nose stud, who was clutching a bottle of cider. The girl complied without a murmur, and Andy pointed at an open door in the far corner, which afforded enough of a glimpse of the room beyond to suggest that it led to a brightly lit kitchen. 'Cellar through here, is it?'
Heads nodded dutifully. As Andy and Dawn crossed to the door, the crowd parted before them.
The kitchen was narrow, and looked out on to a bricked-in backyard. Beside the greasy oven, cans and bottles bobbed in a plastic bath full of iced water. There were more bottles stacked on the work surfaces, and two black plastic dustbins full of empties stood by the back door. There were six guys in the kitchen, looking tense. One was swigging red wine out of a bottle; the rest were clutching cans of beer. Two were smoking roll-ups. A thin haze of blue-grey smoke hovered near the ceiling.
'Hello, fellers,' Andy said amiably. 'I gather you've got a bloke locked in your cellar?'
As if on cue, there was an irregular tattoo of thumps on the blue-painted door tucked away in an alcove at the back of the room. Accompanying the thumps was a low moan.
'Is he all right in there?' Dawn asked.
'He's a mentalist,' one of the guys muttered.
'Stinks an' all,' added another.
Andy crossed to the door and rested his forehead against the wood. 'Hello in there,' he said. 'This is the police. We're here to investigate an alleged assault. Could you tell me your name, please?'
There was a renewed barrage of thumps and moans from the other side of the door. Andy looked briefly at Dawn and raised his eyebrows, before trying again.
'I think you need to calm down, sir. Getting aggressive won't do anyone any good, least of all yourself. Now, can you please tell me your name?'
This time the thumps were accompanied by the sound of violent scratching. The moans became a series of guttural snarls.
Andy sighed and stepped back from the door. 'What can you tell me about this bloke?' he asked.
The six students all looked at each other. The one with the wine bottle said, 'He just burst in. He was growling and, like, slashing at people. Then he grabbed Hayley's arm and bit it. She screamed like hell.'
The tallest and broadest of the boys said, 'Me and Martin jumped on him and got him on the floor. But he was totally crazed. It took six of us to get him in there.'
'You six?' asked Dawn.
They all nodded.
'So what's he like, this guy?' asked Andy. 'Describe him to me.'
'He looks rough,' said the gangly, bearded youth who had been identified as Martin. 'He's about. . I dunno, thirty maybe. Not thin, but he looks like a junkie. White skin and weird eyes. And like Jace said, he stinks like he's been sleeping in a rubbish dump. His clothes are disgusting.' He pulled a face. 'We all had to wash our hands after touching him.'
Andy nodded. 'OK, well we'll take it from here. If you could clear the kitchen and close the door.'
The boys trooped out, evidently grateful to relinquish responsibility for the gatecrasher.
'You ready for this?' Andy said.
Dawn smiled thinly. 'Cuffs at the ready.'
Andy approached the door again. Taking a deep breath, he said, 'I'm going to open this door now, sir. I want you to come out quietly and keep your hands where we can see them. If you show any aggression towards either myself or my partner, we'll be forced to arrest you. Do you understand me?'
The only responses were further thumps and snarls.
Andy pulled a face at Dawn, who smiled back nervously, and then he reached out and slowly slid free the bolts at the top and bottom of the door. Equally slowly he twisted the key in the lock. Then he pulled the door open and stepped smartly back.
Without preamble the man lunged at him. Andy saw only a glazed stare and an oddly slack expression on a face so horribly pale it was almost blue, before hands were clawing at his face.
He reached up and grabbed the man's forearms. Stepping back, he used the man's forward momentum to twist him round and bear him to the ground.
The man landed on his stomach, hitting the floor with a thump as Andy twisted his arms behind his back. It should have been a standard arrest, but as Dawn was kneeling to slap handcuffs on the man's wrists, he suddenly surprised Andy by twisting from his grasp like an eel. Seemingly unaffected by having just had all the breath knocked out of him, he flipped around, reached out and grabbed Dawn's hand. She was so shocked that she dropped the handcuffs, which hit the linoleum floor with a metallic clatter. Before either she or Andy could respond, the man half sat up, dipped his head forward and sank his teeth into Dawn's hand.
She yelped in pain and instinctively punched the man in the side of the head with her other hand. It had no effect whatsoever. The man was like a dog, his teeth locked into Dawn's flesh, snarling as blood bubbled out of the wound. Andy scrambled across the floor, getting behind the man and wrapping an arm around his neck. He grabbed the man's nose in his other hand and wrenched his head up and back, not caring if he broke the bastard's neck.
It did the trick. The man's jaw unlocked and Dawn wrenched her hand free with a cry of agony. Still the man snarled and writhed in Andy's grasp. He seemed impervious to pain, his lips curled back over bloodstained teeth, his jaw still working to bite any flesh that came within range. The lower half of his face was a mask of Dawn's blood; his white shirt was speckled and streaked with red.
Considering how wasted the man seemed, Andy was amazed at his tensile strength. He could only assume it was drug-fuelled. Certainly he had to use every ounce of his own strength to heave the man onto his front and wrench his arms behind his back. Dawn's hand was bleeding copiously, but she scooted forward to help, grabbing the handcuffs and securing them around the man's wrists.
Finally they had him restrained, though even now he bucked and twisted like a fish in a net. Andy stood up, sweating and panting. Dawn stood up too, but almost immediately staggered over to a chair and sat down again.
She took deep breaths, looking almost as pale as her attacker. Her injured hand hung between her knees, blood running down it, dripping onto the floor.
'We need to get that cleaned up,' Andy said.
Voice low and scared, Dawn replied, 'What if he's HIV positive? What if he's. . infected me?'
There was a beat of silence. Then Andy said, 'We'll get the paramedics to check you out. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be all right.'
She looked up at him, scowling. 'You don't know that,' she said.
Andy's face twitched into an expression somewhere between compassion and apology. 'No I don't. Sorry. But try not to worry, OK? Chances are, you'll be fine.'
She nodded, took another deep breath, and then stood up shakily. Andy helped her wash her hand at the sink and wrap it in a tea towel. Together they hauled the still-snarling, still-struggling man to his feet and then Andy frogmarched him towards the kitchen door.
'There's something really wrong with him,' she said.
'Tell me something I don't know,' replied Andy.
Dawn shook her head. 'No, I mean, really. Look at him. His skin's all marbled. His eyes are sunken and dead, like there's nothing there, like he's blind or something. I've seen corpses that look healthier than him. And he smells like death too.'
It was true. The man smelled like a week-old cadaver. Even when Andy had been grappling with him, he'd been uncomfortably aware of how the man's skin felt beneath his hands — damp and somehow greasy.
'Let's just get him down to the station,' he said. 'The doc can look at him there. Clear a way through, will you, Dawn? We don't want him biting anyone else.'
She nodded and opened the door into the crowded front room. 'Please move back,' she shouted, sweeping her uninjured hand left and right, as though parting curtains. Partygoers glanced at her and then stepped hurriedly aside, many clearly alarmed by the sight of their snarling, bloodstained captive.
They were almost at the door into the hallway when they heard
shouts and screams from outside. Next moment, people were pouring into the house, stumbling and falling over one another in their haste.
'Hey! Hey!' Dawn shouted, as she was pushed and jostled. Instinctively, she reached out with her bandaged hand and grabbed the arm of a thin guy, who was running past. She winced at the pain, but maintained her grip. 'What's going on?'
The guy's wide-eyed alarm turned to momentary anger. Then he registered Dawn's uniform and said breathlessly, 'They appeared from nowhere. They're attacking people. Tearing them apart.'
'Who are?' asked Andy.
The guy's attention shifted to look over Dawn's shoulder. His gaze fixed on the slavering creature that Andy was holding in an arm lock, and his eyes widened.
'They're like him! They're all like him!' Then he was gone, running towards the back of the house, overcome with panic.
Andy and Dawn exchanged a glance, and pushed their way through the now-dwindling inrush of people to the front door. They could still hear screams from outside. One series of raw, agonised shrieks chilled Andy to the core, before it was abruptly cut off. Shoving their captive before them, he and Dawn exited the house — and there they froze. The scene before them was one of such appalling carnage that for a moment they could do nothing but stare.
In the overgrown front garden, not five metres away from them, two men with the same dead-eyed, slack-jawed expressions as the arrested gatecrasher were delving into the gaping stomach of a young girl with their bare hands. The girl was still twitching, but clearly beyond help. The men, drenched in gore, were scooping out handfuls of her innards and eating them.
In the middle of the road, soaked in the pumpkin-orange light of the overhead street lamps, a young, dark-haired man was lying on his front, kicking and whimpering as a crowd of five people — three of them women — tore and slashed and gouged at his exposed back with their bare hands.
Yet another murderous crowd were clustered around the back of the still-open ambulance, bumping and blundering into one another as they tried to get at the vehicle's contents. Andy couldn't see what had become of the paramedic and the young girl with the bite on her arm, but he could see that the hands, faces and clothes of the majority of the attackers were stained with fresh blood.
It wasn't until a naked man reeled clumsily away from the back of the ambulance, however, chewing on a chunk of raw and bloody meat, that Andy realised exactly what he was witnessing. With a dreamy kind of horror, he saw that not only did the naked man have a gaping black hole in the left side of his face, but also that his chest and stomach, stretching from his groin to his collar bone, bore an ugly Y-shaped post mortem scar, stitched with black thread.
I'm looking at a dead man! he thought. Oh Jesus, I'm looking at a dead man! The sudden realisation hit him like an express train, and all at once he was noticing further details about the attackers. He was noticing how dishevelled they were, and how slowly and awkwardly they moved. He was noticing how sickly many of them looked, their complexions ranging from ghastly white to an awful greyish-green. He was noticing that one of the women attacking the young man had black, cancerous growths on her arms and legs. He was noticing that at the back of the crowd clustered around the ambulance was an eyeless child, shrivelled to the point of starvation. He was noticing that some of the attackers had skin so dried and puckered that their lips had drawn back from their mouths to reveal dark gums and yellow teeth. He was noticing bones poking through flesh; gaping wounds; canker and rot.
And he was noticing the smell. The high, sickening stench of a plague pit or charnel house.
'No,' he murmured, 'it's bloody impossible.'
He was so shocked that he didn't realise he had loosened his grip on his captive until the man suddenly twisted and lunged at him with a snarl, mouth gaping wide to bite.
'Andy!' screamed Dawn, but Andy was already jerking backwards. He heard the man's teeth clack on empty air.
Instantly the gatecrasher came at him again — and now the two men who had been eating the girl (the two zombies, Andy thought with a kind of horrified wonder) were rising to their feet, alerted by the commotion. They turned their heads. One of them let out a low, guttural moan, blood and drool spilling from slack lips.
Andy sidestepped as the zombie, its hands still handcuffed behind it, lunged again. He put up his hands to fend it off, and the zombie snapped at his fingers. Then Dawn was behind the creature, a clench-teethed look of revulsion and determination on her face. She jumped forward, shoving the zombie with all her might. Off-balance, it stumbled sideways and fell, crashing head-first into an overgrown rhododendron bush.
'Thanks,' Andy breathed, but already the two blood-drenched creatures who had killed the girl were stumbling towards them. One was wearing a checked shirt and jeans; the other had gore matted into its beard and was draped in a tattered white burial shroud.
Andy ducked as the zombie in the checked shirt made a swipe at him. He sensed rather than saw its clawed hand, fingernails caked with blood, passing over his head. Then Dawn was grabbing his arm, pulling him towards the gate.
'We've got to get away from here,' she said.
'But all those people in the house-'
'What are the two of us going to do against this lot? We'll have to call for back-up.'
Andy nodded, and they ran towards their car. In his peripheral vision he saw zombies registering them with whatever passed for cognisance in their dead brains. He was aware of the creatures abandoning their meals, converging on this new living prey with lurching, lumbering steps. He and Dawn dodged a girl in a green dress who had had part of her face torn away; a balding man in a mechanic's oily overall, his face bloated with rot.
As they neared the car, Andy fumbled for the key fob in his pocket, found it with sweaty fingers and pressed the button. He and Dawn wrenched the doors open and threw themselves inside. Andy rammed the key card into the slot and pressed the button which started the engine. All he could see around them were dead faces, slack and vacant, but also livid with a kind of relentless, idiot hunger. As he slammed the car into gear and they screeched away up the road, his only thought was that as soon as they'd requested back-up, he'd call Gwen. She and her Torchwood mates would know what was going on.
FIVE
Trystan Thomas spooned Horlicks into his mug, added a little milk and stirred vigorously. He glanced at the cooker, where more milk was heating up in a small pan for Sarah's hot chocolate. His wife hated Horlicks with a passion. She said it smelled like 'the Devil's vomit'. She always insisted Trys brush his teeth immediately after drinking it. In fact, she maintained that if it came to a choice between kissing a dog's bottom or her husband's Horlicksy mouth, she'd go for the dog every time.
They had been up watching a Tom Cruise movie, and now Sarah had hauled her bulk upstairs and was getting ready for bed. Trys still found it hard to get his head round the fact that in a matter of days they'd have a new addition to their household, a tiny human being who would be linked to them for the rest of their lives.
How many more nights would they spend in this house as a 'couple', Trys wondered. How much longer until they officially became a 'family'? And until he officially became a 'dad'?
Sometimes the thought frightened him. Sometimes he'd lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, with Sarah moving restlessly beside him, and he'd feel utterly overwhelmed. He'd feel too young to be a dad, not much more than a kid himself. How would he cope? What would he do? At those times he would get an overwhelming sense both of life rushing onwards, and of a door — the door leading back to his own youth and freedom — slamming firmly shut behind him.
But then in the morning, in the daylight, he would look at his beautiful pregnant wife, at the woman he loved, who had their baby growing inside her, and he would feel that surge of joy all over again, that sense of wonder and excitement.
The kettle and the milk boiled at the same time. Trys tipped the steaming milk into Sarah's favourite mug and added two big spoonfuls of instant hot chocolate. He
was stirring it in when he heard his wife call his name. No, not call — shout. It was only one syllable, but Trys heard the urgency in it, the trace of panic.
He threw the spoon into the sink, and was out of the kitchen before it had even stopped clattering. Their house was small, two up, two down, with a narrow hallway. He bounded up the stairs two, three at a time, and burst into the bedroom, panting.
'What's up?'
Sarah was sitting on the edge of the bed with her nightie on and a look of alarm on her face. She was not conventionally attractive — her nose was a little too big, her eyes slightly too deep-set — but to Trys she was fascinating and unusual, and therefore twice as gorgeous as all those boringly pretty girls with their dyed hair and regular features.
'My waters have broken,' she said. 'It's starting, Trys.'
He noticed that the bed was wet, that there was a puddle on the carpet between her bare feet. 'Oh hell.'
'Phone Rianne,' instructed Sarah. 'Tell her we'll meet her at the hospital. My bag's in the hall. I just need you to help me get changed and get downstairs.'
'Course,' Trys said. He raised his hands, as if indicating she should stay put. 'Back in a minute.'
He ran downstairs, snatched up the telephone and punched in the mobile number of their midwife, Rianne Kilkenny, reading it from the post-it note that had been stuck to the wall for the past two weeks.
His mind was racing, thoughts tumbling over one another. Now that it had actually started, he couldn't quite believe it was happening. He thought of the abandoned mugs in the kitchen, one containing hot chocolate, the other a smooth paste of Horlicks powder and milk, and he thought to himself, Next time I see those mugs, I'll be a dad. It was amazing, incredible. He started to grin. He was still grinning when Rianne's gentle Irish voice said, 'Hello?'
