Royce ran.
*
The trees dwindled and the woods turned into open ground. Royce held George by the arm and urged him onwards. There were raised voices behind them, back through the trees. Royce risked a glance over his shoulder and saw flickers of movement past the thin trunks.
A sprawling grassland estate. At the top of a shallow slope Starling House was a dark shape against the fading sky.
“Nearly there,” George muttered, and he hunched into a coughing fit, but there was no time to stop so Royce dragged him even as he hacked onto the ground. Royce gasped and clutched his side as a stitch formed under the skin. Breath given and taken through gritted teeth. Their feet dug into the ground as they started up the incline. Someone called from within the trees. A gunshot rang out and it almost stopped Royce’s heart. His legs burned; the wasting muscles in his thighs felt tight enough to explode from the epidermis. He pushed George ahead of him and they approached the house, struggling and slipping up the slope, and when they reached the top, the mansion was before them with its windows dark and recessed, walls strangled with ivy. An overgrown lawn with crochet hoops. Topiary animals were slowly losing their shape. The men paused on the large gravel driveway and looked up at the top windows, looking for movement, for anything. For help. The oak front doors were shut. Royce prayed they weren’t locked. The shotgun nearly fell from his hands and his legs felt like they were about to give way, but he stumbled towards the doors with George at his side. The old man was wheezing, bent over with his hands on his thighs. He spat and wiped his mouth.
Royce looked back down the slope and saw the first of the hunters emerge from the trees. He counted seven men, and there would be more behind them.
He wrenched the great doors open just as a bullet hit the wall close to his head and scraps of masonry flew at the side of his face. George cried out and ducked. They fell into the house as more bullets hit the outer wall and the doorframe with sharp cracks. With one last surge of effort, Royce turned back and slammed the doors shut, and then there was only the darkness.
The sound of their harsh breathing in the dark was panicked and scared. Royce felt for the cigarette lighter in his pockets but was startled when George switched on a torch from his rucksack and the light bloomed into his face.
“Sorry,” George said, and his face was beyond pale in the torchlight. He lowered the torch to the floor. Their surroundings were revealed. Royce blinked and frowned as his eyes adjusted to the dark. He imagined the sound of the infected scrabbling across the floor to meet them, but as he raised the shotgun the only sound he heard was a baby crying for its mother somewhere in the deep folds of the house.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It can’t be a baby,” George whispered. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped the torch. Royce reloaded the shotgun and looked around, his eyes refusing to settle on any single point of their surroundings. They were in a large hallway with chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings, glimmering in the torchlight. A suit of armour from the Middle Ages mounted on a plinth. Oil paintings of lords, ladies and assorted gentry lined the walls. A portrait of a man in an officer’s uniform from World War One, with an Irish setter sitting obediently by his legs. Family lines, old blood, deep history.
Mounted animal heads stared down at Royce. The torchlight returned some life to their eyes as it swept over them. Oak wainscoting, seasoned timber, musty carpets and ornamental rugs. Royce coughed at the dust in the air; it was like the inside of some old church unopened for decades. The dust agitated the lining of his throat and coated his teeth. He needed a drink.
The baby was crying, still.
Doors to other rooms lined the hallway. A stairway to darkened heights. George stood in the stairwell and aimed the torch upwards, but its beam couldn’t pierce the darkness beyond the third floor.
“Let’s go,” Royce said. “The men will be here soon.”
They moved deeper into the long hallway, which narrowed into a corridor where the walls were decorated with relief carvings of old battles. George held the torch over Royce’s shoulder so it lit the way ahead. The torch was the only light. Their feet clacked on the wooden floor. Royce shouldered the shotgun and looked down the barrel. The torchlight made cruel, spidery shadows.
The single corridor slowly became a warren, and they were lost. Lightless spaces, like moving through the abandoned confines of an old ship.
“It can’t be a baby,” rasped George, his rank breath at the side of Royce’s face. “It can’t be. That’s not possible.”
They moved further into the house, following the torchlight and the baby’s cries into the dark.
*
Minutes or hours had passed – time felt different inside the maze of corridors. Royce felt like they were falling back into the past when he took in their antique surroundings. He used the sleeve of his coat to mop the sweat from his face. They hurried along one of many pitch black corridors and narrow passageways. Some of the walls were covered in blooms of black fungi, slick and bulbous, glistening in the torchlight. The fungi seemed to tremble when the light drew too close to it, and Royce detected a subtle pulsing within the black corruption, as if there was something readying itself to emerge.
The baby’s cries sounded closer. George was muttering something to himself – a prayer or poem, it didn’t matter. His voice wavered. The floor became slippery with an oil-like fluid that smelled organic and faecal. Far behind them, the sound of the front doors being forced open echoed through the empty corridors they’d fled through. Royce and George looked back then carried on into the house. They turned a corner and were hit by the stench of something ripe and sickly putrid. It tainted the air and coated Royce’s mouth as he inhaled; he closed his mouth and breathed through his nose. The baby’s cries filled the corridor ahead of them. One of the doors was open. Royce didn’t want to go any further, and when he looked at George’s fear-stiffened face he saw the same reluctance and apprehension he felt. But there was no choice.
“Stay close, George,” Royce whispered.
They crept forward until they reached the open door and looked inside the room at the thing that called to them.
Royce sagged against the doorframe, filled with shock, horror and despair. George stood frozen, his face slack, small sounds in his throat.
It was a bare room in which a glistening amalgamation of flesh bleated and babbled in the far corner. It finally stopped crying when the torchlight revealed its form.
“Oh god,” George muttered.
Babies and infants had been melded and conjoined in the plague’s vile blueprint for life. A horrific totem of twisted little bodies writhing and gasping, broken and contorted into obscene positions where their movements were puppet-like and slow. Glazed eyes and idiot mouths gaping open. Low moans and pitiful yelps. Wet skin tore in places and leaked ghastly fluids that preceded the birthing of new limbs with maws and pale eyes. Pustules and strands of flesh all shuddering in the light. Some of the bodies were without skin, half-submerged in the mass of limbs and wet flesh that almost reached the ceiling when it rose to its full height. Tentacles tore the translucent skin along its vertical flanks and emerged to push at the ceiling.
George backed against the opposite wall and opened his mouth, but all he could do was let out a strangled whimper that died in the stinking room. He seemed boneless and tragic, and there were tears in his eyes. Royce looked at the abomination; it possessed no legs or any other way to propel itself. It was stranded in this room, and he saw that parts of its vile, heart-breaking form were attached to the wall. Its maggot-white body rippled with tremors and pulled oxygen from the air using all of its stolen little mouths.
The younglings, trapped in a purgatory of disease and flesh, called out to the men. The eyes of the abomination settled upon Royce. Baby blue eyes. Tiny fingers feeling at the air. Squirming legs and coils of liver-coloured sinew. One of the eyes was livid with the agony of self-awareness. A living hell of meat and pain.
The f
loor was stained with meconium and small drifts of moulted skin. Some of those small arms reached for him and he remembered his daughter and how she used to grasp his finger and enclose it with it her hand. His heart sank and his legs seemed to unravel from beneath him, and then he was on the floor on his knees with the shotgun beside him because he could not withstand the sorrow and the pain any longer.
The abomination let out a high-pitched gurgle, spat from red apertures and shivering clefts. From underneath the creature’s body, within epidermal folds, several thin tentacles emerged and sampled the air. Then they made for Royce, their blackened tips quivering and flailing, keen to taste him.
There were myriad voices of children in Royce’s head, all of them calling for help and entwined with the cries of newborn babies.
Daddy. Mummy. Help me. Save me. It’s dark and cold, and I’m alone. I can’t hear you. I have bad dreams, Daddy. Help me, Daddy! Help me!
Royce screamed. He looked at the abomination, and he was forlorn and hollow. The thin strands of his mind started to break. He felt himself slipping away.
Save me, Daddy.
George threw a flaming petrol bomb at the abomination and it shattered upon its heaving body. A second of silence, petrol dripping from its skin, until it ignited and the creature burst into flames. It screamed and writhed as its body was consumed by the fire, limbs scraping against the walls and the floor, and some reached for Royce but George pulled him away and they retreated to the far wall out of the creature’s reach.
Its tentacles retracted and curled up. Royce was crying. Part of him wanted to crawl to the creature and embrace it while it burned. The screams of dying children and babies filled his mind.
Royce came to some sense of lucidity when George slapped the shotgun into his hands. He looked at the old man and said nothing, because there was nothing to say while the abomination in the room behind them burned and screeched and died in flames. Smoke poured from the room. The fire would spread.
“Let’s find a way out of this fucking house,” said George.
Smoke followed them down the corridor. Royce’s eyes were stinging and streaming. George was coughing. Within ten yards something came out of the dark ahead and opened itself to them with shaking hands. An awful, pale shape of a woman emaciated to the bone. Royce’s finger jerked on the trigger, and there was thunder between the narrow walls. The woman fell back against the wall with the top of her cranium so much pulp and fluid. They hurried past her quivering remains.
The carpet was damp and mushy. Royce didn’t look down, especially when something brittle snapped under his foot. They heard gunfire far behind them, near the front of the house, and a man’s scream spilling along the receding walls.
In the frail torchlight, meandering figures emerged from recesses, nooks and stinking holes. Claws scratched on the floor. An excited chattering from the upper reaches of the great house. Screeching cries among a series of wooden thumps. A naked man twitched and murmured in a doorway, gnawing at his own fingers whilst nearby a woman’s face erupted into a nest of pink spiky tendrils; she crouched in the weak edges of the torchlight and screamed.
Abhorrent forms gesticulating in the shadows. The stink of things dripping in grand hallways.
Down hallways and corridors. Panic and terror swam in Royce’s head, leading him to hopelessness in the dark. Mind-numbing horror at the suggestion of cocooned bodies on the walls. Awful sounds echoed through the house, changing direction, rising and falling, growing louder and then dying away into whispers. A chorus of wet screams rose from deep within secret rooms.
More gunfire behind them. The hunters were fighting through the house. George shouted something unintelligible, and the ceiling seemed to fall towards them and the walls hemmed them in, as if the mansion were constricting. Murmuring shapes withdrew from the torchlight. Royce and George ran blindly down the corridors. The torchlight caught frenzied, mad faces. A glimpse of lumpy reddened skin and staring eyes. Things suspended from ceilings, reaching down with long arms. Staccato gunshots echoed around them. The hunters must have entered from another side of the house. Smoke was creeping through the corridors.
Something gangly and pale shambled from the smoky darkness and the shotgun roared in Royce’s arms. A screech of pain and the creature stumbled away. Royce reloaded while George stared at where the creature had disappeared.
Twenty yards on, they halted when a man with a pistol appeared ahead of them. Blood spatter on his face. He was breathing hard. He raised the pistol, coughing into his other hand. “You fucking bastards. You shouldn’t have run.”
He barely closed his mouth when a tall shape emerged from the doorway behind and impaled him through the chest with some sort of black stinger that enlarged within his chest cavity and turned his screams into choking gasps. He dropped the pistol and grabbed the dagger-like appendage, and he looked down at the bits of himself on the floor as the creature behind him wrapped long pale hands around his face and dragged him through the doorway it had emerged from. As Royce and George ran past the doorway, they heard sucking sounds from within the room. Royce was glad for the darkness.
After running down a long corridor they emerged into another hallway. A broad floor of the finest wood. George inhaled sharply when the torchlight picked out several infected people kneeling on the floor, feeding on torn and crumpled bodies. Fresh kills. Blood on the floor, the smell of it like copper. One man, although badly injured, was still alive and pleading with the terrible faces surrounding him. They silenced his pleas when they tore into him, and he came apart in their hands like soft bread. A man was slowly being absorbed by something with multiple tendrils and mouths. Another unfortunate soul was being dragged up a stairway by a woman in a stained nightdress, who hissed at the torchlight that revealed the knotted veins under her face.
The inside of the house was filling with smoke. The air was getting warmer with the spreading of the fire.
The infected were too busy feeding to notice George light the last petrol bomb. And when he threw it amongst them, their cries as they burned and jittered on the floor would not be forgotten.
*
“We have to find a window,” Royce said. “Some way to get out of here.”
“We’re lost,” said George. “This place is going to burn down with us inside.”
Down more corridors and through stately rooms. A huge kitchen where bones mouldered on the floor. The sounds of raking claws and gunfire. Royce led George down a passageway that smelled of brine and raw meat. He was sure they were near the back of the house; there was a draught on his face.
“Nearly there,” Royce said. He was breathing hard. His legs felt like heat and pain.
They halted when a bloodied man stumbled towards them. One of the hunters. A bite mark glistened on his neck. The man saw them and grimaced, raised his hands as if in surrender.
Royce raised the shotgun and centred it on the man’s chest.
“He sent us after you,” the man said. His voice was wet and he slurred his words. “He said you can’t be allowed to escape after what you did to Matthew. And look what happened to us…” He took the hand from his neck and looked at the blood on his fingers. “I won’t become one of the monsters. The plague will not have me. I won’t let it.”
Royce noticed that the man’s right hand was enclosed around a small object. The man saw Royce notice and grinned.
“Too late,” he said, and put his hands together.
He pulled the pin from the grenade.
*
Royce found himself among the swarm of thrashing bodies. The infected roared at the sky. There were bones on the ground. Small bones. And they were being trampled and broken by the feet of the infected.
A blood red sun rose over a spiked horizon of ruined cities. The infected looked to the sky, and the sky answered them.
*
Royce came to in the dark with the sounds of gunfire, screams and howling shrieks around him. He felt dusty and shrivelled, a dried out
cadaver in a museum tomb. There was no breath in him and his limbs gave him agony when he tried to move.
George crouched over him, eyes manic and starkly white inside a face filthy with dust and smoke. His nose was bloodied and the blood had dried above his upper lip. “You hit your head pretty nasty when the grenade went off. I was worried you wouldn’t wake up.”
Royce turned onto his side and vomited on the grass. Then he lay back and squeezed his eyes shut. He remembered the hunter pulling the pin from the grenade and the shotgun bucking in his hands. The hunter died without a face, but the grenade rolled from his hand and rested against the wall. Royce had pushed George into a nearby room and followed, as the grenade detonated in the passageway.
He checked his stomach and chest for shrapnel wounds. Then his groin. He was intact.
“We were lucky,” said George.
“Where are we? How long have we been here?”
“We lost the daylight.”
“What?”
“Take it easy, Royce. You might have concussion.”
Royce pulled himself up and sat with his back against a tree. He looked around. They were hidden in the treeline to the side of the house, and through the trees he saw Starling House aflame, fire reaching from its shattered windows. There were crashing sounds of collapsing rooms from within. In the night, the only light was the fire that revealed the area around the house where figures fought and died. Pops and cracks of gunfire. The surviving hunters were retreating into the darkness, chased by the screaming infected. Gradually the gunfire dwindled and the last of the screams echoed into the sky, and then the grounds were empty except for the bodies on the grass. Some were still moving. Wounded infected, many with severe mutilations and burns, picked through the remains and fed on the scraps.
Royce looked around at the ground. He looked at George. “Where’s all our stuff? Our rucksacks? The shotgun?”
The Last Plague (Book 2): The Last Outpost Page 11
