Demise of the Living

by Iain McKinnon

  “Would Nate have written that?” Karen asked.

  “That’s Nate’s scrawl all right. Looks like an invitation to make ourselves comfy.” Shan took another long draw of her rapidly dwindling cigarette. She turned and opened up the kitchen cupboard, “Bet we passed him on the way here. You want a coffee?”

  “Yeah, why not,” Karen answered. She didn’t really want one, but at least it would give them something to do until Nate got home.

  She felt her shoulders relax. Maybe Shan was right. Maybe Nate did want them to come into the house. She felt more at ease having read the note; less like an intruder, more like a guest.

  “I’ll get the milk,” Karen said, walking to the fridge.

  “Not a single clean cup,” Shan said, banging the cupboard door shut.

  Karen opened the fridge and was struck by the temperature. There was a waft of cool air, but not as cold as she had expected and the light didn’t flick on.

  “Fridge is on the blink,” she said. She picked up the milk carton and stuck her nose in the neck and took a deep sniff. “Milk smells fine. Can’t have been off that long.”

  Shan flicked the switch on the wall socket up and down. “Shit. The power’s out.”

  “No coffee then.”

  Shan flicked the switch up and down, as if by doing so she could pump a few watts of power from the grid.

  “Fucked,” she said. She turned to the door connecting to the garage. “Maybe Nate’s still got a few brews in the garage.”

  She opened the door and stepped through.

  “Will he mind?” Karen asked, looking for an excuse to not start drinking so early in the day.

  “He’ll go ballistic,” Shan replied, her voice echoing off the garage’s cold walls.

  The garage wasn’t just a workspace for Nate to tinker with his pickup or trail bikes. There was an old sofa and two tables made from empty beer crates and plywood. There was a paint-splattered ghetto blaster, a fat old portable cathode ray TV, it’s black plastic casing cracked and dented, wired into a DVD player, and an array of tools and spare parts that might come in handy one day. This was the gang’s bat cave. Nate’s Grandmother owned the place, but she had no use for the garage. She had no car and was too deaf to hear the rowdy gatherings that spontaneously happened most weekends. She was also too trusting or too senile to care what her grandson and his friends were up to. They could play their music loud, smoke and drink and do all the other forbidden things they couldn’t do under their own parent’s roofs. As long as things didn’t get wild enough for a neighbour to call the police, this place was Nirvana. Karen pulled out her phone and slumped down on the sofa.

  “Still no reception,” she said. There was the clink of glass as Shan searched for alcohol. She moaned, “Just empties back here.”

  She straightened up and turned her attention to the shelves that ran along the back wall, trawling for something. She put her hands on a green and white striped tin and pulled it down. The lid twisted off easily.

  “Savage!” Shan exclaimed, fishing out a lump of something dark wrapped in cellophane.

  “What have you found?” Karen asked.

  “Nate’s stash.”

  “He’ll murder you for stealing that,”

  Shan pressed the play button on the CD player. Harsh thumping industrial music roared to life. She cupped her hand to her ear and smiled. “What?”

  “He’ll kill us both for totalling that.” Karen said, pressing down hard on the volume button. “And how’s that music playing if the power’s off?”

  Shan swayed her hips and raised her hands over her head in a slow, seductive dance. Lowering her hands she grabbed hold of the stereo and turned it around. There was a strip of black duct tape slashed across the back. Behind the tape was a stack of fat blue and silver batteries. She made a hand gesture like a magician’s assistant showing off a trick and then turned the stereo back round.

  “Here. Roll that,” Shan said, tossing over the resin and a packet of skins.

  Karen, caught unawares, fumbled the catch and had to sweep the couch to find the cigarette papers.

  “We can’t smoke his weed,” Karen said.

  “He won’t mind. Anyway, he owes me an eighth,” Shan replied, still dancing.

  “What for?”

  “He just does. Now roll one up. You do it neater than me.”

  ***

  The door swung open and the sound of laughter danced across the office. John flicked from his web browser to the product matrix and looked up from his screen.

  Sharon, the department head, was being ushered into the office by Stephen Flynn. Whatever he had said to her on the way up, Sharon was enthralled with it. Her normally harsh, angular face was broken up with a beaming grin.

  The department head smiled at the new boy, silver thermos coffee mug in one hand a bulging handbag in the other.

  Stephen gallantly held the door open for her, letting his boss squeeze past at an overly intimate distance.

  “Smarmy little shit,” John said under his breath. “She’s old enough to be his mother.”

  Stephen started as an office temp less than a year ago. He had quickly been made permanent and since then went up a pay grade. John hadn’t gone up a pay grade in nine years. Now this little shit not long out of university was being fast-tracked on the postgraduate program.

  John had a degree. He’d spent four years devoting his evenings to his correspondence course while doing his ordinary day job. Unlike Stephen, John didn’t have rich parents who could afford to pay for their son’s education. John had had to work for everything he had.

  “Good morning, Sharon,” John said, more cheerily than he actually felt.

  “Oh, morning, John. I didn’t notice you there,” Sharon said.

  “You’re in early, John,” Stephen said.

  “Well, it’s going to be a busy quarter. Thought it best to get the jump on it.”

  “Very good, John,” Sharon said.

  To John’s ears it sounded snide.

  “I’ll see you at the eleven o’clock meeting,” Sharon added.

  “Eleven?” John said.

  “Not you, John,” Sharon said, frowning.

  “Meeting room B1,” Stephen said, giving a nod and a smile.

  John watched them walk off to their separate desks.

  Sharon wasn’t an attractive woman. She had a slim, gym-toned figure, but take away the salon-pampered hair, stick on a pointy hat and some green face paint, and she could do a passable impersonation of the wicked witch of the west.

  John looked hard at her. Under the orange glow of fake tan was the crusty exterior of a career-minded bitch. He didn’t know if on the inside she was sad or lonely or just a centre of gooey pure evil like most middle management he encountered.

  She’ll be gone in six months, John assured himself.

  In his nine years of office purgatory he had seen six managers come and go. Sharon had lasted longer than most. Drafted in to revitalize a flagging division, she had turned things around on paper. They were now running a profit, but the real reason for that was the layoffs she had instigated. John had seen the figures. A dozen colleagues had been axed and the wage savings used to offset the poor sales. It was a sleight of hand trick and one that would only be convincing for a short while. But by the time anyone noticed, Sharon would be in a new department and some patsy would be given the role here just long enough to take the blame for an understaffed department under performing.

  John toggled back to the job application opened in one of the tabs on his browser.

  He briskly typed in his employer’s information.

  “Reason for leaving” sat there empty beneath the list of dates and inflated job roles with grandiose-sounding achievements.

  John thumped into the field the usual spiel about challenges, working for a market leader, and wanting to utilize his woefully undervalued abilities.

  He pressed send and the page hung, the only movement being a hypnotic little swir
l in the browser tab.

  “Come on,” he said, staring at the frozen screen. “I don’t want to type that shit in again.”

  He toyed with the idea of hitting the refresh button, but worried this action would obliterate all his hard work, so he held off.

  “John?”

  Startled, John whipped round, frightened he’d been caught.

  “Your internet down, too?” Stephen asked, oblivious to why John looked so surprised. He placed a hand on the back of the chair, throwing John back with a jolt, and leant in.

  “At least you’ve got something up. I can’t even get that,” Stephen said, looking at the browser’s busy symbol spinning around. He called across to Sharon, “Is the internet okay with you?”

  “It seems fine,” Sharon answered. “Why, has John got a problem again?”

  Stephen lifted his hand from the back of the chair and John jolted forward.

  He sauntered over to Sharon’s desk. When he got there he didn’t push her chair down; he pulled up another chair and again sat far closer to her than John felt appropriate.

  There was a soft conversation and Stephen pointed at something on the screen. He smiled and stood up.

  “It’s not just you, John,” Stephen said. “We’re all in the same boat here.”

  “I thought you said yours was fine, Sharon?” John said.

  “Oh, I was looking at the intranet,” Sharon replied.

  John clicked onto Portal, the company’s internal web pages. An arty montage of smiling employees doing different yet equally important rolls popped up on screen.

  “Yeah, I can look at the company’s own internal web pages, just nothing online,” John said. He double-clicked the icon that launched their database front end and the web-based application sparked to life. “It’s not going to impair productivity though. We still have the intranet and I’ve just booted up Finesse.”

  “Oh, Finesse works,” Sharon said, a note of surprise in her voice.

  “Runs off our own servers, so we can still make outbound calls and take orders.”

  “Yeah, but external email will be down if the Interweb is down,” Stephen said.

  John hated Stephen for calling it the Interweb. It was puerile and once someone had said it one time it wasn’t funny anymore. More irritating than that was the fact that Sharon had started calling it Interweb, too.

  Stephen was worming his way in with her. When she inevitably moved on, John was in no doubt Stephen would wangle his way out with her.

  “I’ll get onto IT and try to find out what’s going on. We can’t afford a down day—not with the level of sickness we’ve seen in the past week,” Sharon said, picking up the phone.

  A screech followed by a loud crunch made all three of them look to the office window.

  Chapter 3

  Collision

  Colin jolted forward. The book and phone on the seat next to him catapulted at speed, smacking against the glove compartment. Then there came the explosion and something grabbed at him.

  He gasped and a membrane of fabric was sucked into his mouth. Fearing he may be smothered he lashed out with his hands.

  The airbag reluctantly started to deflate, allowing Colin space to see over its shroud.

  He looked out of the cracked windscreen to see a second car firmly embedded in his own. The airbags had deployed in the other car, too, but hadn't yet deflated enough for Colin to see the other driver. He pulled the handle of his door and a spark of pain bolted up from his wrist. Pulling his hand back, he rubbed at the joint, trying to feel for the source of the pain. As he did he became aware of the ache in his other wrist and running across his shoulders.

  “Whiplash,” Colin mumbled. “Just great. The full summer holiday ahead of me and now I have whiplash.”

  More cautiously so as not to aggravate his injuries, he undid his seatbelt and slipped out of the car.

  Standing up he could see the damage more clearly.

  He barked, “Crap!”

  The colliding car had penetrated a full foot into the passenger side of his.

  The driver’s door of the other car was opening. A woman in her early thirties stepped out, hair wild and dishevelled, wearing a floral summer dress with strange red smears across the front of it.

  “Lady, what the hell were you thinking?!” Colin shouted.

  The woman ignored him and instead opened the rear door and bent in.

  “You got insurance?” Colin asked. “I bet you don’t.” He shook his head. “Just my frigging luck. Hey lady, are you even listening to me?”

  Colin walked up to the woman, who was bent half over the rear passenger seat.

  She stepped back, cradling a young girl.

  Colin blurted, “Oh, Christ...I didn’t realize.”

  “Melissa? Melissa, are you okay, honey?” Liz asked.

  The girl was sobbing and appeared dazed.

  Liz stretched an arm over and tapped her son on the thigh.

  “Grant? Grant?” she said.

  The young boy slowly turned. Blood was cascading from his nose. He wiped a hand across his top lip and looked at the blood-smeared skin.

  “I’m bleeding,” he said, as if disappointed.

  “Come on, kids. We have to get out of the car,” Liz said in as confident a tone as she could.

  She then became aware of a voice behind her.

  “Can I help? I’m a first aider.”

  Liz turned, feeling the growing crick in her neck, to see a young, well-built man. He was dressed casually in a pair of summer shorts and a T-shirt with some trendy Japanese characters and stripes of clashing colours.

  “You can check out Grant. He’s bleeding,” Liz said.

  “Okay.” Colin scuttled round the back of his car and up to the boy’s door. Opening it, he said, “Hi. Grant, is it?”

  The boy nodded, blood oozing from the fingers that covered his face.

  “I’m Colin. I’m a first aider. I’m going to help you. Okay?

  The front door of an office block flew open and a security guard came jogging over.

  “You people all right?” the guard asked.

  “You got a first aid kit?” Colin asked.

  “Sure, I’ll fetch one. I’ve been trying to call for an ambulance, but the line’s busy.”

  The guard turned and jogged back to the office.

  “Okay, Grant, can you pinch the top of your nose like this?” Colin said, demonstrating the action.

  “Tip your head back, honey. That’ll help,” Liz called over from across the seat.

  Colin could see that the mother had managed to get her daughter out of the car.

  He said to Grant, “No, son, keep your head forward. We don’t want you swallowing your own blood; it’ll only make you feel sick. We want to stem the flow of the blood so it can clot naturally.”

  It had been a few years since he’d taken his first aid course. Now that the rare event of having to use it was actually happening, he didn’t feel as confident as he was during those workshops.

  There was the pounding of feet and Colin looked round to see the security guard return with a green plastic box in his hands.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Um, I think we’re okay here. Maybe just a tissue,” Colin said, looking at the young boy.

  “You okay, ma’am?” the guard called over the top of the car at the woman.

  She was looking off down the street, as if in a daze.

  “It’s them,” Liz said.

  “Sorry ma’am?”

  “It’s more of them,” Liz said, staring off down the avenue.

  “More of who?” the guard pressed. He started walking around to the rear of the car.

  “Get back in the car, Melissa,” Liz said.

  She closed the door behind the young girl, all the while looking back in the direction they had come from.

  Liz flumped in the driver’s seat and closed the door, never breaking her gaze.

  Colin watched the back of her h
ead as she turned the keys in the ignition.

  “Lady, don’t do that,” he said.

  The woman ignored him and continued turning the key. The starter motor screeched and wheezed.

  “Lady, it’s not going to start,” Colin said.

  The car still whined and coughed.

  “Lady, please stop that—you could start a fire.”

  Colin glanced up at the security guard, looking for support. The guard nodded and opened the driver’s door.

  “Ma’am, the car’s busted,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

  “We’ve got to get away,” Liz said, shaking her head. “Okay children, let’s go.”

  “Go where?” Melissa asked.

  “We just need to get away from here,” Liz replied.

  Colin stood up from his crouched position tending to the boy. He placed a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the warming sun.

  Down the street were three people. They moseyed up the middle of road, not caring for any possible traffic.

  “Who are they?” Colin asked.

  “Were they chasing you, ma’am?” the guard asked.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Liz said, ushering her children from the car.

  “Maybe we should talk to them—get their take on things?” the guard said hesitantly as he watched the silhouettes draw nearer.

  “Look, you can’t just go,” Colin said to the mother. “At the very least we need to swap insurance details. If you don’t, I’ll have to phone the police.”

  The security guard called out to the approaching group, “Hey, you guys involved in this?!”

  Colin turned from watching the woman scurrying away with her children. The security guard was walking towards the people down the street.

  He furrowed his brow, trying to make them out against the glare of the sun. There were now five or six figures staggering towards them like drunks.

  “What’s going on, Gary?” a woman’s voice echoed down the street.

  Colin looked around but didn’t spot the source until he looked up. The office building the guard came from had a first storey window open. From it a woman’s head poked through.