by Ben Stevens
The priest was again facing forwards. He nodded, but said nothing, obliging Parker to continue –
‘Do they still have a memory, Father, of their life before?’ Parker almost demanded.
‘They do,’ he said then, answering his own question. ‘This now proves it – when they talk, sometimes, it proves it. And maybe...’
‘Maybe?’
‘Maybe my wife Carrie is a thing, and maybe she remembers,’ declared Parker, his voice flat and dead. ‘Maybe she now shuffles around our house, the small town where we lived, and she knows, even in that condition, that I left her. That I abandoned her. I could – I should – have spared her that agony, but I was too damn gutless to do so.’
‘And now you feel that you have to go back – that you have to know.’
The priest’s words came as a statement – not a question.
‘Yes,’ returned Parker in what was barely a murmur.
‘Is it far?’
‘I’ve been walking the best part of two years,’ shrugged Parker. ‘I don’t know, exactly. Never followed any maps. But must be at least a thousand miles. Probably more; always I’ve been moving away – trying to escape, to forget, as it were. But never succeeding, of course.’
The priest said nothing. Again, Parker felt somehow obligated to fill the silence –
‘Yes,’ he said then. ‘I know now. I have to go back. I have to know.’
The words he’d so often thought, now finally spoken out loud.
‘You have survived this long, John, on your own,’ stated the priest then. ‘Were you this ‘worst type of coward’ – to quote your words of earlier – I don’t believe this would have been possible.’
The old couple were departing behind them, realized Parker abstractly. He glanced over his shoulder to see them leave the pew and shuffle back out of the door, the woman’s pink, dry-looking coil of intestines dragging along the tiled floor. The husband used his remaining hand to dig into one pocket, pulling out a single coin he then deposited into a box marked For the poor by one of the open wooden doors.
‘Thank you, Father,’ said Parker then, the sunlight flooding through the entrance into the still, peaceful interior of the church. ‘Thank you.’
‘A pleasure meeting and talking to you, John,’ returned the priest. ‘I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I last had... human... company.’
‘Father,’ said Parker, as the two men began to rise. ‘There’re gangs out there; vicious, murdering gangs. If they pass this church, see these doors open... I feel I should warn you...’
The priest patted Parker twice on one arm.
‘For the things,’ began the priest, ‘I used the improvised clubs. Even in this church, I felt certain that God would grant me a special dispensation for... Well – an act of violence.
‘But,’ said the priest then, ‘that was just to show those things – those poor, unfortunate damned beings – that they could only visit this place if they were prepared to behave in an appropriate manner. As – as you have just witnessed – they now largely do.
‘But for true evil – evil that can now grow like the most virulent of cancers with this near-death of civilisation – I employ more extreme measures. Please believe me, John; for I have also survived the same amount of time as yourself...’
Parker met the narrow blue eyes that now shone like polished steel, and he knew that this priest kept only his gentler weapons of chastisement for those poor unfortunate things here inside this church...
He’d other weapons, elsewhere.
‘Good luck, Father,’ said Parker, as the pair walked towards the open doors. ‘And thank you.’
‘You do not need anything before you go? Some food – water?’
‘I have everything, thank you anyway,’ returned Parker.
‘Then farewell yourself, and God be with you,’ declared the priest, as Parker walked out into the sunlit morning. There was a feeling of lightness in his chest that he’d not felt in...
He didn’t know how long.
But this was mixed also with a stern, almost empowering feeling of resolution.
You have to go back.
You have to know.
Whenever Parker thought back to that brief, glorious time he’d spent with Carrie after mankind had all but ended, it seemed in his mind to have always been autumn. The leaves turning red, orange and yellow and falling to land in crisp piles on the sidewalks of the deserted town. The power still on; nuclear reactor still running. Hot meals in the evening, lamps shining low. Curtains pulled across the windows, on the outside of which Parker had nailed thick wooden panels anyway.
Only a few things. Just a few. Parker learnt to kill them quickly and humanely with his gun and to get them buried in the school’s sports’ field. Sometimes he found himself wondering if the gun-store owner, Hank, hadn’t become a thing, now trapped down there in that cellar he’d told Parker he’d kitted out as his own personal survival fortress...
But it was hardly as though Parker was actually going to go looking for things. He killed when he absolutely had to and then he did so with zero hesitation. For that could prove fatal – to Carrie as well as himself. She refused even to hold the gun, far less fire it. Any number of times Parker pleaded with her to toughen up, to accept the fact that she would have to be able to kill a thing instantly if something were ever to happen to him.
‘I can’t, John,’ she always said quietly, in reply. ‘I just can’t.’
The sun set glowing and orange in the late afternoon of those strange, misty, autumnal days. Parker and Carrie soon discovered that they mainly enjoyed going to bed early, getting drunk and making love. Sometimes they got silly, like teenagers. Broke into old George and Ann’s place just nearby, searching for supplies, and there behind a panel in the bathroom found some magazines that they bet George never showed his wife, that sour old bastion of the church.
They laughed and laughed, picturing George frantically beating his wrinkled old meat over Cum-slaves #2 and Young Sluts as his wife sat downstairs knitting. Felt bad afterwards – respect for the dead and such (George and Ann were dead, of that they were certain, though for whatever reason there were no bodies within their house) – but sometimes they just went a little nuts.
Sometimes, it was important just to have fun.
And then one day, having just had a shower (water was still running, too), Carrie was strangely silent.
‘Carrie, what’s up?’ asked Parker, sat on the edge of the bed.
‘John, look,’ she replied, lifting up her bathrobe to show the ugly purple boil that was just below her left kneecap.
‘Oh... Oh, no,’ murmured Parker involuntarily.
And then Carrie began to cough.
Parker pulled himself out of his thoughts and again wiped his hand across his eyes. Goddamn it, but he couldn’t afford to indulge himself in that shit. Getting lost in such memories while walking out in these potential badlands...
...He’d left Carrie lying on the bed when she’d started to get really sick and that made him a fucking coward and all the rest of it – but still he was now going back. So no more stupid daydreaming for that could cost him his life, before he’d even the chance to finally return to that small little town where (all things considered) he’d once been pretty damn happy...
...He’d scarcely even realized that he’d strayed into what had been some sort of huge construction site. Now he began seeing the piles of earth, machinery, tools, bricks, sand, rotting bags of concrete stacked on pallets and other building supplies that lay everywhere. Rusting scaffolding rising up half-finished block walls...
The sheer scale of the project made Parker think they’d been constructing a shopping mall, or something similar. A large portacabin was close by, its heavy steel door partially open.
Parker walked cautiously towards it... Peered inside the gloom...
It had been a dining area for the workers. A few chairs were upended. A yellow hard hat lay on one table. A news
paper open beside it; Parker could just make out the headline –
England Falls to Virus.
Shit, he thought – by that time, a country being taken over by the plague hadn’t even made the front page. There had just been so many of them, every damn day. The same pictures of people screaming, rioting; a plane coming crashing out of the sky in one city, this time not because of religious terrorists or the sort but because some of the passengers had got sick, died and then come back as things.
Some people had died real quick. Others had taken quite a bit longer...
Parker was just considering this fact, still staring inside the portercabin, when the sound of a shotgun being cocked behind him made his guts drop.
‘Just step back there, and turn round so’s I can see you,’ rasped a voice that now made Parker’s testicles tighten. Doing as told, he came face-to-face with an obvious hog. Dressed in the usual, dirty denim and leather, his beard braided, his hair long. Across his forehead tattooed the word Cocksucker.
That was unusual, considered Parker almost abstractly. Hogs did commonly have facial tattoos, though this one seemed a little...
What, exactly?
Self-critical?
‘You carrying a gun, nigger?’
As he frantically considered as to exactly how he should answer this question, Parker was still careful to keep his face impassive. He was damned if he’d show any reaction to that racial slur –
‘I said – you carrying a gun, nigger?’ repeated the hog, his face registering both anger and amusement as he raised his voice, as though Parker might be a bit deaf, or stupid.
‘You better reply,’ went on the hog, ‘’cause if I then search you and find out that you are carrying a gun, after you’ve kept your mouth shut, I’ll blow off one of your hands with this.’
He held the shotgun in front of him, finger firmly on the trigger.
‘Yeah, I got a gun,’ returned Parker, doing his best to keep his voice low, steady. ‘In my jacket pocket.’
‘Then just slide that jacket off – real nice and easy now. That rucksack too, of course.’
Parker was getting a real sense of déjà vu here. Seems he’d done all this already for that night-watchman named George, back at that factory. Parker had got out of that one virtue of a minor miracle; but this now looked desperate...
‘You been in the wars, nigger,’ noted the hog, staring at Parker’s bandaged arm and torn trousers. ‘Well, unfortunately your luck’s just got even worse.’
The hog grinned, showing broken brown teeth. He scratched his nuts with the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ declared the hog then. ‘You’re thinking – ‘Now how in the world did old Sammy here get himself a tattoo on his forehead like that’?
‘Ain’t ya?’ demanded ‘Sammy’ then, the smile abruptly vanishing and the murderous, wrinkled brown eyes blazing madly.
‘Yeah, guess I was,’ nodded Parker.
‘Well,’ said Sammy then, smile again appearing but the eyes remaining dark, evil and mad, ‘the story of that’s going to prove to you just what a bad motherfucker I am, before we even start having ourselves some fun.
‘You know I’m a hog; I can see you’re having to fight real hard not to shit in your pants right now. Well, nigger, rest assured – you soon will be. You ain’t the first rabbit I’ve run to ground; fact is, the last one I caught was a nigger too! And a woman. I had some real good fun with her, before we were finally through.
‘Look over there,’ said Sammy, pointing with his free hand at an area of the construction site that was still earth. ‘She’s lying there; maybe you can’t see it, but she got her grave there.’
Now, Parker thought that he could see it. A disturbed area of earth, hastily backfilled.
‘I got her to dig it, before I then got busy with her,’ declared Sammy, pulling a packet of smokes out of his jeans pocket, selecting one and lighting it all with the same hand. ‘Then I chucked her body in, and backfilled it. Wasn’t that nice of me?’
Parker stood absolutely still, careful that his face betrayed zero expression. But still it felt as though a thousand ravens were beating their wings inside his mind. He thought he smelt whiskey on the hog’s breath. Wafting over, as it were, along with the tobacco smoke. Chances were this fucker had a bottle stuffed in the back pocket of his stinking jeans.
Which possibly gave Parker a chance...
‘Anyway,’ said the hog, ‘I was saying ‘bout this tattoo, and how the story of it – or more exactly what happened after I got it – shows how I’m one of the meanest, most evil motherfuckers ever to walk the face of this planet. Quite ‘part from what I did to that nigger bitch, before I stuck her down in that grave I made her dig and poured a load of soil on top of her. She wasn’t quite dead when I did that – same as you won’t be quite dead, either. My finishing touch, as you might say.’
Parker’s brain and body were like ice. Cold, focused. Determinedly disregarding any emotion right now. He’d call up the rage, horror, grief and all the rest the moment he got a chance to strike. Until that point – whenever it might be – he had to keep his thoughts as uncluttered as possible.
He was a machine, 100 percent focused on survival.
That was all. Never mind anything else.
‘But!’ said the hog, his eyes blazing as they stared at Parker. ‘I keep getting sidetracked – was telling you about this tattoo. See, I once ran with a gang –’
He once ran with a gang (hammered out the thought in Parker’s mind). Translation: seems he’s on his own right now.
‘– we liked to play tricks on each other. Shave off eyebrows and shit like that, on brothers that were drunk asleep and such. But then I got real pissed, passed out and woke up to find this tattoo had been put on my forehead by one of the others. Their idea of a joke.
‘Yeah – that guy, and all the others, laughed real hard. I laughed too; but I knew right then that I’d have my revenge. Oh boy, would I just...’
The hog was no longer giving that evil little smile. His mouth was shaking with the grave insult he’d received; an insult recalled every time he caught a glimpse of his face in some reflective surface...
‘I let some time pass... then one night everyone got real boozed. Except for me – I made out I was drinking, but secretly kept a sober head. I had work to do, once everyone got so loaded they passed out, as would often happen.
‘So,’ said the hog, continuing to stare at Parker. ‘What’d you think I did, nigger? Got the guy who slapped this tattoo on my forehead, and did the same sort of thing to him? Maybe also to a couple of others – those who’d laughed the hardest at me?
‘Uh-uh; like I already said, I’m the worst kind of motherfucker you can hope to meet. Everyone was going to pay – pay big-time. You think I’ll just accept a fucking insult like what was inked on my forehead, and not pay it back in spades?
‘...We had a big fire burning that night. Sat around it drinking and such. Found a couple of things to fling on the flames, but they didn’t make much noise ‘cept to grunt and such. The others were kind of disappointed; which gave me an idea...
‘I waited till they all passed out. Then I got a tank of gasoline, and splashed it all over the clothes of each one of them. They were so drunk they didn’t even realize what was going on. Just continued lying there, snoring.
‘But they woke up all right when I got a burning stick from the fire and touched it to each one of their bodies! Ha ha! Those motherfuckers jumped up and started running around, screaming! Damn near twenty different great balls of fire, all running round! And while they did, I shouted at ‘em. Let ‘em know that I’d done this to them, and let them know the reason why.
‘I timed it – took just over five minutes for the last one of them burning to fall to the ground, twitching. I may have had the word ‘cocksucker’ tattooed on my forehead for a joke, but I wasn’t the dumb son of a bitch who’d just been burnt to death.’
&
nbsp; Parker was continuing to stand still, taking slow, measured breaths through his nose. Brain dispassionately scanning all he was being told for any information that could possibly be useful to himself; to his current situation.
Never mind anything else...
For now.
‘Anyway, nigger,’ yawned the hog named Sammy. For a moment Parker almost started; then he realized that he wouldn’t stand a chance. If he attacked now, Sammy would just blast him down.
No, Parker had to wait for another chance...
But am I going to get it?
Sammy took a few steps back, and still keeping his eyes on Parker bent down to pick up a spade lying on the ground with the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun.
‘Here,’ he said, throwing the tool over to Parker. ‘Take this and start digging.’
I’ve just been given a weapon.
‘Dig what?’ asked Parker tonelessly.
‘Don’t start getting smart, nigger,’ returned Sammy, his eyes blazing again. ‘You’re gonna dig your own grave, same as I got that black bitch to do. And then I’m gonna have me some fun.’
Parker merely nodded, and stuck the spade hard in the earth.
‘You... you kinda nuts, nigger?’ asked Sammy almost curiously. ‘You don’t seem all that worried.’
‘How deep you want me to dig?’ was all Parker said in reply, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
‘Goddamn it,’ snarled Sammy, obviously irritated by Parker’s lack of any discernible emotion. ‘Just get digging, ‘till I tell you when to stop.’
Parker stuck the tool into the earth. Woomp... Woomp... Woomp... – a pile of earth began accumulating beside him. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground, even as he sensed rather than heard or saw Sammy produce that hip bottle of spirits (whiskey, most likely) that he’d so hoped was tucked in the hog’s back pocket.
He’s under the influence of alcohol. That’s going to slow him down some, both physically and mentally...
