by Tim Lebbon
“Mary, we’ve got-”
“I’ll go,” Peer said. “I could do with some fresh air.”
“Come on then, girl,” Gerald said. “Milk, then eggs. Two sheds, next to one another. I’d have been out in the fields by now.”
“On any normal day,” Mary said.
He looked at the strange girl and nodded. “Yep. On any normal day.”
They scanned the yard from the windows as best they could, then opened the door. Nothing rushed them and the noises outside did not change. Strange noises, Gerald said. Weird. Peer could see the truth of the statement in his eyes.
Crows picked at the bodies of two dead cows in the yard. Their hides lay open, glistening pinkly in the fresh air. It reminded Peer of the artwork she had seen on the War of the Worlds album cover, but the analogy suddenly made her shiver. At least in that story, the enemy was visible. Here, whatever was arrayed against them had come from the dark, and remained there still.
“Come on then, girl,” Gerald said, and stepped out into the yard.
The smell hit Peer as soon as she passed through the door; shit and rot. Guts and blood. The dead cows displayed the pepper-shot scabs of Gerald’s shotgun, but they were also holed in other places, their insides trying desperately to escape through the fresh, fly-covered wounds. “What did that?” she asked, but Gerald only shook his head. Peer was sure he was crying and he did not want her to see. She did not ask any more questions.
The doors to the milking shed hung half open. Inside there was silence; all the noise originated outside, seemingly beyond the boundaries of the farmyard. Coughs and snorts from the fields. Loud cries from miles away, human or otherwise they could not tell. Heavy breathing from the cesspit, which was probably the popping of gas bubbles. And laughter. Everywhere, the sound of nature laughing at them.
Peer wondered whether she was the only one to hear this and identify it. Since nodding off in front of the fire and dreaming of the safe world behind the locked door, she had felt even more removed from what was happening. It was not just the unreal feeling of waking up after an afternoon nap, when the body seems to protest at an unusually short sleep, but more a sense of being singled out. She had seen past all the badness and into the good which, perhaps, resided beyond. The problem lay in where to find the key … and then, more importantly, the door.
She felt chosen, true, but that terrified her. It made her wish that she could tell the others of the hope she had glimpsed. And it made her wonder what there was to do the choosing.
Perhaps the dream had been her own peculiar nightmare. Torturing her with impossibilities, while all around the world had died in its sleep.
They reached the milking shed and Gerald plunged into the dark. Peer halted in her tracks, suddenly terrified, feeling ashamed at her self-indulgent fear but still unable to go any further. She heard the sound of the farmer scampering through shadows, felt the gaze of Paul, Holly and Mary urging her on. And she tasted the danger in the air.
Imminent danger.
“Gerald, let’s get back,” she said.
“Nearly there, girl. Just tasting.” There was the sound of fluid splashing onto the ground, then a satisfied grunt from the farmer. “Hmm, milk’s fine. Good herd I’ve got here. Always said that. Always said I’d spent my money well. Good machines, too. A clean tank is important. Keeps out all the bugs.”
Laughter again from over the hedges, as if the landscape was finding leading them astray amusing. “Gerald, let’s get back. Something’s coming.” She turned and stared desperately at the farmhouse. Paul tensed at her expression, looked around with the shotgun pointing out from his waist, raised his eyebrows when he saw nothing. She did not know what to say. “Gerald!”
“Eggs,” he said. “I’ll leave the churn filling while I find us some eggs.” He was back in his element, out of the house and into routine, his attention grabbed once more by his farm rather than distracted by the strangers who had so rudely disturbed him last night. He leant his shotgun against the shed wall and hauled open a squealing door.
The secret noises from around the farm continued, but were interrupted by a rhythmic snapping sound. Gerald plunged into shadow once more, leaving Peer in the yard. She hated herself, but she just could not follow him in. In there, things could be hiding.
A bird called, mockingly.
Gerald burst back through the door, a dozen huge moth-shapes silently jumping at his head.
He did not make any noise. The chickens could not remain airborne for long enough to do much damage, so they were an annoyance rather than a threat. He waved at them and Peer kicked out, covering her face to protect her eyes. It was almost comical, but Gerald’s tears were not funny. Tears of anguish, not pain.
“What’s wrong with the world?” he asked desperately, when the chickens had at last calmed down. “What’s gone wrong?”
The snapping noise finally resolved itself. A bull sauntered into the farmyard, glaring at them with rabid eyes, hide caked with mud and filth. Its breath was ragged and uneven, the clipping sound the steady impact of its hooves on the pitted concrete. A series of spines stood out along its backbone. Sparrows and blackbirds were impaled there, some of them still fluttering uselessly. Teeth curved from its mouth, pushing the lower lips down and out. Fresh blood dripped from their self-inflicted wounds.
Gerald’s jaw dropped.
Peer felt much the same. She heard Paul whisper something from the farmhouse door, but he was too far away for her to make out, and Peer did not want to turn her attention away from the bull. It was huge, a mountain of meat, and it was about to move their way.
“Gerald,” she whispered, but the farmer was already reaching for his shotgun. The bull followed his movements with terrible, intelligent eyes, seemingly gauging distances, weighing chances. Breath snorted from its muzzle, and it lowered and raised its head several times.
“He’s coming,” the farmer said. “In the shed when he does.”
“Hey!” Paul had stepped into the yard and stood with the gun held above his head. Holly was aghast behind him. Mary’s expression was an unreadable blank, her eyes centred on Peer, not the bull.
The animal charged. Paul shouldered the gun clumsily, paused with his eyes squinted, then looked in disbelief at the stock. The bull was nearly upon him when an explosion came from Gerald’s gun and the creature’s rump darkened with blood. It spun around, amazingly agile for such a huge creature, and charged its new aggressor.
Gerald fired the second barrel and a hole appeared in the bull’s shoulder, blood hazing the air. It seemed not to notice.
Peer screamed. She could almost smell the breath of the thing, and like a painting in a large room its eyes seemed constantly to bore into her. She wondered what it saw. She could not move. Her feet were twin flames of pain.
Gerald had broken his gun, and now struggled to pluck out the spent shells. A strange keening was coming from his throat as he worked.
Paul fired twice in quick succession. The bull slipped and stumbled as one of its back legs snapped and spewed blood. Peer blinked in surprise as she felt stinging pain in her lower legs.
“Come on!” Holly was shouting.
“Run!” Mary screamed.
Peer looked up and saw Mary waving her towards the farm. Her. Not Gerald and not Paul. The bull was roaring in pain, and for a surreal moment she thought the sound was coming from Mary’s wide-open mouth.
As the angered creature shivered and raged, Gerald managed to load his gun once more. “Run,” he said. Peer shook off her paralysis and obeyed. Her legs burned as she hobbled in a wide arc around the edge of the yard, trying to keep close to the buildings in case the bull rushed her.
Paul raised his gun again, but once more blinked in surprise as nothing happened. Gerald’s twin barrels coughed into the stricken animal. And it chose that moment, when both guns were empty or out of action, to come at Peer.
It seemed to have been feigning the amount of damage done it, because it was upon her
in seconds. Shouts came from the farmhouse, the sound of running feet, metal scraping on stone. But Peer could see nothing, because her daylight was blocked out by the bleeding beast.
It slid to a halt before her, regarding her with rolling, mad, sad eyes. Its malformed teeth dripped pink saliva. A constant shiver rippled through its body, shaking its jowls and sending a fine patter of blood to the ground. Peer could not breathe, she could not move. Shouts came from a million miles away – or from behind a thick door – and the pounding of running footsteps could not out-do the thumping of her heart. The bull stared, blood now flecking the foam of every snorted exhalation.
For an instant there was just her and the bull. The sense of dislocation she had been feeling for weeks thrust her towards infinity, the bull following, everything else left behind. She held the bull’s gaze; it held hers’. She was certain that to break contact would allow it to complete its stampede and crush her into the dirt. Its legs were covered with its own blood. She felt her own blood trickling down her shins.
The wounded animal turned away and charged Gerald once more. Explosions shook the yard as four barrels emptied themselves into its body, but still it raged and bellowed in anger.
Peer ran for the farmhouse, the spell broken. She felt nothing as Holly hauled her through the door, no emotion at all as Mary knelt by her side and looked carefully into her eyes, as if to make sure she was still alive inside. Spike scampered across her stomach and raced into the yard, joining in the fray by snapping at the bull’s heels. The taste of blood seemed to excite him; he became as frenzied as the dying beast.
“Christ, Peer!” Holly gasped, tears running down onto her top lip. Paul shouted outside, a gun roared metallic death against the side of the farmhouse.
Mary ducked, a glint in her eye. “Almost had you then,” she said. “Bastard almost had you.” She reached out and laid a casual hand on Peer’s shoulder, watching the slaughter in the yard.
More gunshots, more roars of pain, the slippery sound of something dragging itself wetly across the ground. Gerald said something with a hitch in his voice, then there was the sound of the guns being reloaded and another volley of shots. Then, after a dull thump, nothing more.
Peer lay back on the kitchen floor, staring up at the cracks at the ceiling and trying to make sense of things there. Spike trotted in and sat at Mary’s feet, foam drooling onto the quarry tiles.
“You were so lucky,” Holly gasped, kneeling at her side and putting her hand on Peer’s forehead.
It didn’t feel like luck, Peer thought. It didn’t feel like luck at all.
When they cracked the eggs to scramble them for lunch, they were all bad. The yolks were a sickly pink, spotted with dark flecks, leaking through split membranes into the greyish white. It was as if they had been fertilised by the corruption in the air, and then left to rot.
26. Crying Blood
Blane stopped outside the village. From a distance it could have been an optical illusion, but this close in he could see the truth of things. The place was abandoned and had the appearance of a lost Amazonian city.
Nature had smothered it.
Directly before him an ancient stone bridge spanned a chuckling stream, the Tarmac road crossing it as incongruous as a striplight in a cathedral. The stream itself was a dirty brown colour and as thick as oxtail soup, visibly heavy with the load of silt and mud it carried. Its banks were comprised of raw rock, soil and plants having been washed away in a surge. The bright scars of recent exposure to the elements were still evident on the stone. The gulley it had formed was deeper than it should have been, as if the waters had taken on some exaggerated abrasive quality. In the bank nearest the town an old stone structure had been uncovered; solid walls, a portion of a staircase, hints at foundations. An archaeological oddity that no one would ever have the chance to study. Detritus still tumbled into the stream from the unsteady, sheer walls of the gulley, causing lazy splashes in the thick water.
Blane leant on the parapet and stared down. He felt as if he was seeing something never meant for human eyes. Something time had abandoned for a while to leave to its own devices. Turning, he walked into the village.
That same thought struck again and again, at every sight.
The road ended at the bridge. At first it was cracked into crazy patterns, but only slightly further on it had been completely clothed in a carpet of grass, crawling weed and low, wide shrubs. In places the pitch was still visible, frozen into fluid snapshots as if trying to escape its own suffocation. The spread of vegetation did not stop at the road but hauled itself up garden and building walls, skirting them with bright green and occasional splashes of coloured flowers which looked all wrong. The colours were there, as bright and attractive as usual, but the flowers themselves were deformed out of shape, pointing away from the sun, swollen as if full of pus. There were some colours which Blane had never seen.
The first few houses on the left had been demolished by trees. Moist, creamy trunks sprouted through walls and roofs, darkened areas of weathered bark yet to appear to protect the sudden growths from the elements. One tree was twice as tall as the house it impaled, holding twisted scraps of carpet and broken furniture high in its branches like trophies of some age-old conquest.
But this was not age-old; none of it. This was all recent. Trees growing in a day. Plants spreading and breaking the ground, the stream carving itself a deep niche in the sick land. All in one day. Blane was terrified; but he also felt something else, something which tugged at his melancholy heart.
Pride.
Fay was unafraid, yet she did not follow him in. This was all for him to see. It had only taken her a brief visit the night before to arrange the messages for him, and now it was down to him to wander through the village and find them.
Then he would find the messengers.
Fay watched him at the bridge and wished they could talk. But that time would come soon; for now she had to prepare for it.
There was a chance that she would not live for much longer. She could almost feel her flesh being consumed by her own body, in whatever frantic hunger it mistakenly felt. Her clothes hung on her like rags, defining narrow shoulders, stick-like arms, points of bone stretching the skin fit to burst. Blood leaked from every orifice, a bastard mockery of the rhythms she had once been the mother of. She let it congeal and harden into crisp brown scabs. Life was fleeing her, slowly but surely, but she did not care.
Inside, she felt wonderful. She would be with Blane again soon, if only for a short time. She would tell him her secrets. Then, let nature do as it would. Let it finish the job.
It was Blane’s turn to go mad.
There was a body stuffed into a thatched roof next to the village pub, perhaps to keep cats at bay. A tree had pierced it with its rapid growth, lifted it from its resting place like some divine miracle-worker, and hauled it Heaven-ward until the roof structure caught it. Blane could not make out whether it was a man or a woman, but he could see where the tree had grown straight through the still-cooling flesh and exited the body in a claw of ribs. He was tempted to go closer to inspect, but other sights called him. And something else was here, niggling at the back of his mind with insistent whispers. A laugh, half cackle and half song. Something from before his memory began, struggling to break through.
He had a sudden image of the woman, coughing up whatever secret lay in the pit of her stomach, hauling on the thin chains and gagging on blood as it revealed itself. Would she show him, when they met? Was he meant to see? He tried to picture the song-like laughter coming from her mouth, but the image would not gel.
There were three more bodies in the shattered windows of the pub, but these seemed to be arranged. Each stood naked, spread-eagled, pressed into the frames by whatever grew inside and pushed them outward. It was as if nature was trying to exclude them from the building, and only the remnants of the window frames kept them in place. Wood pressed into their flesh and puffed their skin into spacesuit-bulges. Pale green wee
ds had wrapped around their legs from outside and now pulled in concert with the expanding foliage within. The pub had been called the Crown & Anchor; its sign was still visible atop a white pole in what used to be its garden. A magpie sat on the sign and set it swaying. The black and white bird had two sets of wings, one feathery and natural, the other a thin, brightly veined affair. It had something in its mouth, but it was wet, not shiny.
Grass grew in the gutters of buildings, thick and green, resembling prairie grass more than the shorter, brighter version found in Britain. Its edges looked sharp. It gave the dilapidated buildings a punkish fringe, shimmering in the breeze like lines of green fire. Cracks in walls had been found, aggravated and expanded, belching forth gouts of purple moss in malignant profusion.
Blane followed the road, although he could barely see it. He stepped carefully, always certain that in this bastardised version of the nature he so loved he would find, by accident, a mutated Venus trap or other vengeful plant. Each time his foot set down he waited for pain to intrude into his shock, acid to start eating at his old shoes. Most carnivorous plants killed by slow digestion, he knew. Once, he had thought that this was simply the most efficient way, that there was never any cruelty intended by nature. Now, doubt pressed in. What more terrible way to kill something? Humans often felt guilty about the remains of cute lambs or cuddly calves on their plates, but at least these animals were killed quickly. Nature was not nearly as efficient in killing its food, often stretching a death out for hours on end while the hunter ate into the living belly, gnawed through bones even as the victim writhed in agony.
He had never thought this way, and it was uncomfortable. But now it seemed right. In this place, nature had gone mad. Here, a hunter would toy with its prey instead of using it to fulfil a need. A fox may chase a human for hours until exhausted; a stag likewise. They had already seen what farm animals were capable of.
