Dead Beat

by Remy Porter

  I had arrested the owner of the voice five times in the past five years. I went up to the heavy metal door and pushed back the sliding window panel. Lying on the blue plastic mattress on the raised sleeping platform was Lester Caul, a vagrant who smelled so bad he could make your eyes water. He was a wiry man of forty five, with receded mousey hair and a pair of broken spectacles held together by wire and Sellotape. On a good day he looked like a crazed professor. Often I would find him in the public toilets, a bottle of cheap stolen wine at his feet. He had once managed to set himself on fire and was only saved due to the fact he wore more layers of clothing than skins on an onion, each one of them as brown and soiled as the last.

  ‘I want a doctor and a lawyer, you fucking pig.’

  I could see a food tray scattered on the floor of the cell, splashes of blood too. Lester seemed to be cradling his hand like it was injured.

  ‘What’s happened, Lester?’

  ‘I’m not speaking with any more fucking biting pigs.’

  ‘Did sergeant Dolan bite you, Lester?’ Summer asked him.

  ‘For your information yes he did, he did. Wait till my lawyer hears about this,’ he slurred.

  If I was going to write a statement describing Lester Caul’s drunken state I would say things such as his eyes were glassy and he was unsteady on his feet, perhaps adding in he smelt of intoxicating liquor for good luck. The reality was that when Lester was pissed he was a total nightmare to deal with. I knew Dolan was a police officer from the old school and wasn‘t above throwing drunks into our cells to sober up despite there being a raft of rules to say he couldn’t. Dolan had bitten him.

  ‘Listen Lester, we’ll get you some help,’ I told him, although I doubted if it was the truth.

  ‘We can’t just leave him in there,’ Summer whispered. ‘I’ll get the first aid kit.’

  She came back with the kit, looked at me nervously. I held the twelve bore in my hands, the grip wet with my sweat.

  ‘If he turns we run and slam this door,’ I whispered back. I really didn’t want to go in there. I changed my mind.

  ‘Lester, listen to me. We want to help you, believe it or not. Where does it hurt?’

  ‘It fucking hurts where that cock sucker of a police officer bit me. What the fuck is going on? I’ve never seen so many piss heads on the street before. All I can hear in here is screams and shouts and bangs. What the hell are you people doing?’

  ‘We’re not doing anything, Lester,’ I said. ‘The things out there … we haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘Listen, lad,’ he said, his voice barely over a whisper. ‘Just let me out will you. The booze has gone. I ain’t going to do anyone no harm. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Can’t do it, Lester,’ I said and took the key off Summer.

  ‘Come on Johnny,’ Summer said to me. ‘We can’t just leave him in there.’

  ‘You’ve seen those things out there. We can’t be sure it’s safe. We shouldn’t go near anyone we think might be infected. Sod the rules; there’s no one else here to help us.’

  ‘Okay, Lester,’ I said turning back. ‘I’ll get you some food and a warm blanket. But you are staying put in there until I know what the fuck is going on.’

  I closed the metal slide and muffled the swear words coming my way.

  Summer looked at me.

  Daggers.

  CHAPTER 6

  It was dark outside the police station. Peeping around the window blind in the upstairs refreshment room I could see dozens of bodies bumping around in the shady glow of the back car park. They moved stiffly as if fighting off a cramp, resisting the rigor mortis by means unknown.

  Summer was sitting, face in her hands. On the table was a CB radio hissing out static. We’d found it in the property store and as far as we could tell it was either broken or nobody used CB radio anymore. We had fiddled and twiddled every switch and dial without the slightest hint of success.

  The airwave radio sets, phone lines and mobile phones seemed equally dead. There was no TV in the station and we couldn’t find where the old stereo radio was packed away. We felt what we were; cut off from the world we knew and surrounded. I wondered when we were going to wake up.

  ‘I just want to go home,’ Summer said again and again.

  I knew Summer lived with her parents and sister in a terraced house, ten miles down the country lanes, in a smaller village than Haven, called Wick. My wife had loved the place, and all the dainty tea shops. I wondered what it looked like now.

  ‘Can you wait one night? We’ll go in the morning, okay?’

  ‘I don’t want to, Johnny.’

  ‘Look, it’s late. We’re safe here and we should at least try to get some rest. Let’s grab some blankets and make up some beds.’

  Summer looked a bit dazed and out of it. It was the shock, I figured. I went down to the custody area and grabbed the bedding. Looking in on Lester through the cell door spyhole, I saw he was on his back on the plastic mattress. His skin looked pale and clammy in the torch light, his eye lids flickered as if he was having some sort of vivid dream or nightmare. Part of me wondered what he would be in the morning. Up the stairs, the weariness hit me.

  We made our beds up in the inspector’s office, as it was the biggest and felt the most secure. The room also had a loft access hatch that we both agreed could be a good escape route if the dead got inside. Summer stayed quiet and went to sleep quickly. I wasn’t far behind.

  Waking, cold and stiff on the office floor, I didn’t know where I was for a second. The moans of the dead brought reality crashing back in. Summer’s blanket was empty, and I stared wildly around the room. Flicking the light switch, nothing happened.

  I fumbled for the torch on the floor and managed to bang my elbow painfully on the inspector’s desk. Had she gone home, left me alone in the world with the drunken vagrant called Lester? The thought was crushing.

  I went down the stairs, heard a shout.

  ‘Summer,’ I shouted back, running for the cell block, my torch swinging wildly in front of me. I caught the glimpses of the grotesque faces in the windows, and the banging rose up around the station in a wave.

  I could hear Lester pounding too from inside the cell door and pulled the metal slide open. Cold terror slipped down my spine when I saw who was inside.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in there,’ I said to Summer.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… thought I should check on him,’ she said as I shone the torch behind her further into the cell.

  ‘Where is he?’ I managed; my mouth dry.

  ‘He got out.’

  Turning the torch beam, I found him behind me, like a horrible statue.

  ‘Lester?’ I said.

  He ambled forward.

  ‘Get back,’ I tried to shout, but it came out weak.

  He loomed over me, Nosfaratu. I drew back my torch to strike the head.

  ‘Lad,’ he said. ‘You look like you need a drink.’

  I started to breathe.

  ‘Johnny,’ Summer said from the cell. ‘What the fuck is happening and can you let me out? Please? I came down to check on him while you were sleeping and he asked for a drink. I stupidly went in the cell ’cos I couldn’t see where he was. He dodged out of the toilet area and shut me in. That was over half an hour ago.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t very nice, Lester,’ I said, wary.

  He just gave me his stare and shrugged.

  Upstairs I found the first aid kit for Lester’s arm. Summer set up some candles and Lester sat at the kitchen table and eyed up the CB radio. He was picking at a cold microwave prisoner meal with a custody issue spork.

  ‘I can fix this,’ he said.

  ‘Sure you can. We have no power,’ I replied.

  The man ponged; there was just no getting away from that fact. And the stench rose richer as all five layers of dirty brown upper clothes came away in a heap.

  ‘I’m burning them,’ I told him. More staring.

 
Summer started on the wound, dabbing on cotton wool soaked in antiseptic lotion. She wore clear latex gloves for protection. It looked plain nasty; a tear of flesh obliterating a faded shoulder tattoo of a thorny rose. In the future, it would just be a mess of scars.

  The guy didn’t even flinch. I guess you don’t survive on the streets without the tough streak. I was surprised the booze hadn’t killed him off by now.

  Lester continued to fiddle with the CB radio, now unscrewing a panel on the back of the set. I watched him intently, knowing I had that twelve bore close at hand. Back to the window, nothing much seemed different out there, but then a new one, a shambling wreck of a fireman. I sighed and turned away, as the CB crackled into life.

  ‘Is anybody getting this?’ the radio voice said.

  ‘Loose connection,’ Summer explained with a shrug.

  ‘Breaker, breaker,’ shouted Lester excitedly. ‘Do you fuckers out there have any booze? I’m gagging for a drink!’

  ‘Give me that thing,’ I smiled and pulled the transmitter from his hand.

  ‘Fucking eegit.’

  ‘PC Johnny Silverman to last caller. We are three in number at Haven police station. Did you receive last?’

  ‘PC Johnny, we read you alright.’

  Saved.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jack Nation scraped the last dregs of porridge off the side of his bowl. He sat at the head of the kitchen table in the old farmhouse, the house his father had left him and had been in his family for generations. The room temperature was tropical from the Aga stove that sat proud and red against the kitchen wall. Outside, wind rattled at the flaking, white, single pane windows.

  5.30am was early for some but not for Jack, who had risen at dawn for as many years as he could remember. He stared blankly out of the window and across his green fields and acres. Lines creased around his eyes like dry bark and his bulbous nose was a light patchwork of red and purple. Relaxed now, he always enjoyed how the tendrils of morning mist danced over the fields, almost playfully inviting him for his day’s work. Today was different, he felt, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. The feeling sat there in his stomach, heavy as lead. The old Border collie Jess sat watching from the corner of the room, gloomy and subdued. Feel it too, don’t you girl, he thought.

  ‘Grand day for the fields, Da,’ his oldest son Griffin said from across the table, his lazy eye off at an odd angle.

  He didn’t reply; he never did.

  ‘Shall I fix up the excavator?’ his younger son, Dexter, asked.

  He was the younger and the weaker one, the one who stuttered and disappointed him the most. Pale and freckled, ginger hair on top, sometimes Jack wondered if he was even his own child.

  ‘Aye,’ he told the pair at last.

  They picked up their heavy coats and Wellington boots from the porch. A small part of him was dismayed at leaving another meal’s worth of unwashed dishes next to the sink. Plates piled high, with food fused to them like rust on a car. Mostly he didn’t care anymore not since his wife Millie had died seven months ago. Heart attack the doctor told him. Of all the things to kill a woman who was as strong as a shire horse, he thought. A woman who could toil from dawn to dusk to make the house shine and put three hot squares on the table every day of the week. She made him go to church too, but he didn’t miss that much. Mostly he missed her warm bosom in bed at a night time. He missed the wet purr of her snore, although at the time it had annoyed him no end.

  As the three of them trudged over the muddy excrement that filled the farmyard, he remembered finding her. She’d been in out of the house for hours and it had crossed his mind she might have gone into the village on an errand or perhaps to see one of the old dears she sometimes gave a hand with shopping. Then he had seen her car, the little Fiat still parked next to the willow and his old barn. He knew she kept things in the barn, in tea chests up at the top of the loft. With two grown lads in the house, sometimes there just wasn’t room for everything amongst the clutter of the house. Wandering in there, he had called out her name. ‘Millie. Are you up there?’

  When he’d got no reply he had climbed the creaking ladder into the hay loft. In their younger days, he had enjoyed many a young spurt up there, away from the eyes and ears of his own father. Father had been a hard and cruel man but was now long fixed in the earth. At the top of the ladders, he had fully expected to see the floral dress stretched across his wife’s wide behind as she bent into one of those boxes for some nic nac or other. Instead, what he saw was his wife lying still on those wooden boards. Her fingers were strained and gripped like claws, as if she was reaching or tearing for something. Looking down, her face had turned purple and unnatural. The back of her bare arms looked black from the pooling of the blood. Her false teeth had slipped out of place to hang out one side of her open mouth. It had made him want to be sick. Punching her on the chest. Hadn’t really known what to do. Only a stupid man would know she was far beyond saving. His eyes had stayed dry but inside he had wept ever since. Everyday was empty for him now.

  The daydream fell away and he climbed onto the crooked tractor seat. The engine started on the second push of the button with a throaty cough and a plume of dark exhaust smoke. The noise rolled down the valley in a wave. The younger collie dogs ran around the yard excitedly in anticipation of another hard working day.

  The hours ticked themselves off as he and his sons ran the ploughs up and down the largest of their fields, cutting long, raw furrows into the earth that would later be ripe for seeds. At lunchtime he felt the familiar sinking feeling that Millie wasn’t over there in the distant court yard waving them in. There would be no hot meal waiting, just cold meat sandwiches thick with butter and fatty taste. Up above the farmhouse he could see the tower. He could make out some movement and flashes of red, the tourists up there as usual. Squinting back to his farmhouse a half mile away, he saw something was wrong or out of place. The front door was wide open, and he whistled to his sons like he would call in the dogs and gestured. They set off back, three minds as one. He felt the anger in his veins. The faint bark of Jess told him there was somebody in his house.

  Jack marched in through the front door full of purpose with his two sons close at heel.

  ‘Who the fuck is in here? Show yourself.’

  He stopped dead at the threshold to the kitchen and just stared. There was man in there with a red waterproof jacket. He must have been middle aged but it was hard to tell for sure. His hair was thin and had an ugly, wet comb-over look. He could be a banker or anybody who liked to wear a suit to work he thought. His skin had an awful grey, waxy look, not like he was just poorly but as if he was mortally ill.

  Jack couldn’t stop staring at his lips which were all torn and fleshy, teeth that were broken into yellow bladed points. Mainly what made him just stand and stare was the irrefutable fact that this man in red was greedily sinking that disgusting mouth into his beloved dog Jess. The man held the dog’s torso high, whilst the poor dog’s intestines looped to the floor as if sausages strung in a butcher’s window.

  ‘The gun,’ he hissed at Griffin.

  Griffin turned and eased it down from behind the archway behind, two shakily placed shells into the twin chambers. He handed it back to his father.

  What happened next was a blur, as the thing in red dropped the dog and ran at the three of them, causing them to scatter back into the expansive hallway of the farmhouse.

  The youngest son tripped over a heavy brass door stop and fell flailing onto his back. The creature fell on top of him and immediately started trying to latch its mouth onto his neck. Dexter pushed down on the creature’s shoulders with both his hands, and it took all his strength to hold it no more than a few centimeters from his adrenalin pulsing jugular.

  ‘Get. That. Thing. Off.’

  Jack hovered with the gun but couldn’t risk the pellets killing his son. He swiveled the twelve bore round and swung the heavy wooden stock at the head of the creature. The sound was akin to cracking
open a coconut. Brains splattered a two metre square patch of wallpaper and pooled against the skirting board like lumpy marmalade. The body was still on top of Dexter but looked quite dead now.

  ‘Get it the fuck off me,’ Dexter screamed rolling away.

  His other son Griffin was already on the phone. Always the more practical one, Jack thought.

  ‘It’s not working. Phone line is dead.’

  Jack checked his own mobile phone. He squinted and saw that the screen on the old brick phone showed no network.

  Two more walking corpses trundled in through the open front door. They flung themselves in tandem onto Dexter, who was still not back to his feet. It was as if they sensed he was the weakest target.

  The teeth found their mark this time. Dexter’s right hand was suddenly missing two fingers and blood was jetting out of the raw wound. Jack got behind the female body who was clawing and biting at Dexter’s heavy coat, trying to rip through its stuffing to get at his chest meat. He pulled her backwards and realized her body weight was actually light. He improvised, lifted and swung her entire body in a 180 degree arc until her head collided with a door frame.

  Beneath the blonde hair pulled tight in a ponytail, he saw her skull fracture like a broken egg. She went limp and he dropped her.

  Dexter was busy with the man who had two of his fingers lodged in his mouth like a pair of bread sticks. He was exhausting himself punching it in the ribs with his free hand whilst the thing tried to latch back onto his ruined mitt.

  Jack lurched forward to help, wondering if Griffin had run away, when the same appeared with a large kitchen knife and promptly drove it down to the hilt into the last man’s cranium. Griffin gave the knife a turn, the sound was crunching gravel.

  ‘Got to go for the head,’ he said breathlessly.

  They bandaged Dexter’s hand the best they could. He was crying a lot and told them he felt sick and sleepy.

  ‘Griffin, go and get Doc Phillips,’ Jack said. ‘He’s always been good to us. He’ll know what to do.’