The baseball bat slammed into the side window by his head, there was barely a pause before it swung again, fast and vicious.
More kids swarmed over the bonnet, too many hands to avoid reaching in through the cavity. Only when they started to drag him out of his seat did Scott break the paralysis and begin struggling to save his own life. He bucked and jerked in their small hands, twisting and thrashing as he tried to pull away from the laughing mob of children.
The metal club went up again, hammering in savagely. The blow left a crater the size of an apple in the side of Scott’s head. The first of the kids on the bonnet was first through the windscreen and into the car, snarling like some feral animal scenting the cloying hot blood in the air. He sunk his teeth into Scott’s cheek, tearing out a mouthful and chewing on it as he unfastened the seatbelt holding his body in the driving seat.
Small hands hauled the body out through the window, dragging it into the middle of the road where they tore his throat out and opened his chest with glass shards to get at the wet meat inside. Sharp nails tore Scott Jordan into steaming streamers.
Still the rain came down, the only element of the village’s life not to have changed in the last twenty four hours.
The young girl walked back to her bicycle and wheeled it away from the front of the empty car. Balancing it on its pedal, she propped it up against the kerb and walked back to the car.
Opening the door, she brushed the glass off the driver’s seat and slid in behind the wheel. She had to concentrate on what they were saying. She was blissfully ignorant of the knowledge that the strange sickly sweet smell slowly filtering into the car was petrol.
She reached out for the gear stick and tugged until the car slid into neutral before twisting the ignition key. She had to stretch to tip-toes to reach the first pedal like they wanted her to, but she knew it was important she did everything right first time, so she stretched. Despite its sorry state, the Ford started first time.
Standing on the accelerator she watched the revs arc rapidly upwards, then concentrated on steering.
As one, the Kid Pack looked up from Scott’s corpse, their eyes moving to focus on his flame red Ford as it ploughed into the telephone junction box at the end of the street. The explosive mix of chemical death trapped under the bonnet reacted violently. The first kiss of the fireball blew out the windows of two houses less than ten feet from the crashed car. The second, when the petrol tank went up, buckled the bonnet before ripping it free and sending it spinning and bouncing the length of the junction between the High Street and Brewer Street, taking the phone lines and the last link to the outside world with it. The oil in the Ford’s sump was the next to join the conflagration, its ignition cracking the engine block.
The fire stripped the car as efficiently as the Kid Pack stripped Scott Jordan, plucking sheets of thin aluminum loose and tossing them high into the air, eating the soft outer skins of the upholstered seats until nothing but the thinnest metal skeleton survived.
Within seconds the brilliant red blaze was lighting up the eager faces of the Kid Pack twenty feet away on Brewer Street, dancing shadows of blood across their rabid faces.
Inside the sarcophagus, the little girl was already being consumed.
- 65 -
Ben held Kristy back – there was nothing either of them could do except watch the car go up in a series of fireballs – but even before the third explosion had shattered the front end of the red Ford she had wriggled out from under his restraining hand and was running straight for the wreck. Ben cursed under his breath and forced himself to chase after her. He pulled up just short of the entry onto Brewer Street. Twenty, maybe as many as thirty kids were staring straight at Kristy as she ran across their line of sight; hunkered down in the middle of the road, they looked like a pack ready to pounce. Eerie laughter ran with the breeze, just carrying over the sounds of the rain and the lessening detonations of the blazing car fire. There was something about these kids that instinctively scared Ben. He felt it instantly, no matter the distance between them. The wrongness rolled off them like a shockwave.
One fluid movement seemed to take the kids from the ground and into chase. More than half were wielding makeshift weapons. He saw at least one form of bat swing up over a kid’s head and didn’t hesitate; he screamed for Kristy to keep on running, past the car, past the fire, and as soon as his own legs recovered from the shock of running head on into a pack with violence and death on its mind, charged right across the danger ahead; the car going up in flames on one side, kids racing hell for leather and his skin on the other. Taking his own advice very seriously, Ben ignored the cold rain striking his face, the fire beating at his back and burning in his lungs, swallowed deeper, harsher gasps and forced himself to keep going even when his legs wanted to buckle.
Coming up on The Railway House, he started to turn when a full bottle of milk sailed inches over his head, shattering on the road in front of him, spraying white liquid and glass in a wide treacherous arc. He heard Kristy’s voice a few feet behind him, but didn’t have the breath to tell her to save hers. He wanted desperately to believe that the headlights trapping them like rabbits belonged to the cavalry, but the car behind them wasn’t slowing down.
- 66 -
Todd Devlin was a mess and he knew it. That only made it worse for him. He checked the needle on the fuel gauge; down below a quarter of the tank and almost into the red line. He’d made it as far as Nottingham, then spent an uncomfortable night sweating the fever out in a layby on the Motorway unable to sleep because his body wouldn’t let go.
For an hour, when the moon was dwarfed by cloud and the night was as close to true black as it ever gets, he’d half-succeeded in convincing himself that he might actually make it to wherever it was he was running to – but the hour proved precious short time when the lights of a patrol car slowed and a fresh-faced officer gave a rap on his window and a nod that said, “I’m being good to you, so move on, pal, while I am still feeling good.”
Devlin climbed out of the car, taunting the young officer to recognize him, and when the constable made a move for his radio, savaged him, tearing strips out of his face, slamming his head off the bonnet of his patrol car again and again. He left both body and car to be found on the hard shoulder.
He drove in circles for the remainder of the night, thinking about a farmhouse in a Welsh valley and the one summer he’d spent there before joining the force. It was as far away as Nirvana now.
Before dawn, having slept for less than an hour, Devlin came to a decision. Fat raindrops rattled against the windscreen, falling with such insistency he could hear them splashing down through the trees lining the roadside. The wind pressed belligerently against the car, whispering with a thousand tiny voices that made up a select part of his memory. At the next junction he came off the slipway, drove over the flyover and rejoined the northbound traffic, turning his back on Wales.
The clock on the dashboard said it was a quarter to six in the morning, but he doubted its accuracy; his own watch placed it at ten past five.
A would-be hitch hiker was hopefully holding a piece of cardboard with the word ‘Newcastle’ written across it in thick crayon. The hitcher looked well used to rebuffs, so Devlin didn’t slow down. He was, however, hungry, and the car wasn’t going to make it back to Westbrooke without petrol, so, come the first sign for a ‘Welcome Break’ service station, he found himself leaving the motorway a second time.
He pulled up as close to the forecourt’s dripping canopy as was possible, then got out of the car and stood still in the rain. He didn’t lock the car.
He hesitated at the glass doors, watching himself shrivel in the glass; objectively fascinated with the way he appeared to be anyone but himself; as if he were watching a complete stranger, a down-at-heel, hard-luck case weighing himself up. He didn’t like what he saw, but he wasn’t a man preoccupied with the need to like himself. A few scabs were sprouting where the stubble was coming through greyly.
&n
bsp; “Excuse me, but I wonder if you could help me?” A girl of about nineteen or twenty asked, taking him completely off guard.
More aggressively than he wanted to sound, Devlin let out a short cynical laugh. “I doubt that very much,” he said, not waiting for her next line. He pushed through the glass doors into a quadrant of more glass and a long white concourse; the shop on the left was in darkness behind rolled down metal shutters, a cafeteria on the right, overhead idiot-signs with telephone, toilet and arcade pictures pointed off down different shoots of the quadrant. Devlin wandered through to the cafeteria, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness as he crossed the marbled floor, and bought himself a lukewarm and tasteless latte.
He sat in a booth beside one of the long gallery windows overlooking the motorway and watched for dawn, to see if he really had it in him to make the long drive back to Hades.
Two hours later he was back in the driver’s seat, tank full and heading north.
* * * * *
Five miles from Westbrooke the yammering inside his skull transcended incessant and unbearable. He pulled over.
“Just tired,” he told himself, not believing himself for a minute. He could almost close his eyes and see the babble of words on the inside of his lids. Darker clouds had begun to plate up the sky. If anything the rain was harder now than it had been that morning. He rested there an hour with no let up before moving on.
He came into town with the dying day – in time to see the first of the explosions.
He took the bend a shade too quickly, re-adjusted in time to see headlights fall upon the barrier of what had been The Arches. He stood on the brake, stopping fifty yards back from the trees. Mopping the sweat from his brow he took the cigarettes he’d bought from the booth in the service station from his coat pocket while he stared hard at the grinning figure of Billy Rogan, the shotgun resting easily over his knees.
Things went from bad to very much worse in that one, crazy, timeless second. He fumbled a cigarette out before realizing he hadn’t bought anything to light it with. He dropped both cigarette and full box bar one onto the floor of the car, and then killed the lights. He knocked the switch for the overhead door-light off.
His temper was on a one-second fuse, burning rapidly toward explosion point, which was why when all he wanted to do was run away, he opened the car door and eased himself out into the teaming rain. He didn’t risk the noise of closing the door behind him, even though he was ninety-nine point nine percent sure Billy knew he was there. Billy had had plenty of opportunity already to both see and hear his approach – one door slamming was going to make precious little difference. Even so, he left it hanging open, not wanting to antagonize Lady Luck any more than he already had.
Devlin could see the forest as only a darker black, bristling mass vaguely silhouetted against the slowly rising moon and the marginally paler sky. He crouched low and scuttled for the slight shelter of the tree line, looking for a way into the woods that would take him around the felled barricades before Billy looked up and saw him.
He heard no one behind him, and didn’t waste precious seconds checking back into the darkness. He kept low and moved fast, grateful for the rain as he pushed through the foliage onto a worn strip of deer track. Everything around him now was as black as a shroud, and as eerily quiet as the funeral service itself. Devlin stretched, knuckling his back. He guessed he was still twenty yards the wrong side of the barrier.
Head down, he crept on, watching where he put his feet and trying to look everywhere else at the same time, conscious of every little sound despite the fact that the light fingered patter he could hear above him was nothing like the sound of the rain out on the road.
Devlin had covered another ten yards through the trees when he pulled up short; he could hear laughing. Not normal laughter. There was no genuine humour behind the sound filtering through the trees. It was the sort of insane idiot laughter he mentally associated with the asylum. An explosion followed by a scream ripped the darkness, further away, a sound like a man dying under the slash of sharp knives. He didn’t stand still long enough to dwell upon it.
Ducking low enough for his head to clear the low hanging branches, Devlin took a breath and ran headlong into the darkness in front of him.
Billy would have to catch him; and shotgun or no shotgun if he caught him maybe it would turn out to be Billy’s bad luck, not his. Stranger things had happened already.
- 67 -
Jenny Lockewood was in the kitchen making herbal tea, peeling potatoes for chips and listening to Paganini's Grand Sonata in A. The last time she had listened to these sweet swelling melodies Annie had been upstairs getting ready to go to school. Not today.
She set the fat to boiling in the deep fryer.
Only faces can show real pain, loneliness, fear, hunger, she thought, catching her reflection in the convex bowl of the pan. Her eyes had become hollow, dark and, ironically large and lifeless at the same time. She tried not to be too scathing with her appraisal, but all she saw was a slack mouth and tight skin. There was no movement in her face. It was as motionless as stone, but not stone because she could see the outlines of her skull pushing through from beneath. Unlike stone, there was a brain inside the confines of that skull. Again unlike stone there was a scream taking shape in that brain – silent, endless and deafening.
For a second, just a second, she had thought, no, it was ridiculous . . . but with the doubt sown it was impossible for her to ignore it. Her own husband, Annie’s father? How could he even think of doing something so . . . so . . . horrific? And to his own flesh and blood?
Her hands rattled through the potatoes, chopping them into quarter inch slivers, the blade scoring deeper into the work surface with each successive slice.
Jenny was seeing rats in her mind’s eye; rats will eat anything and everything available, and their digestive systems are more than capable of handling the very worst crap they can chew and keep down. Sneaky critters, rats. Always sniffing around things they shouldn’t.
She knew why she was drawn to thinking about rats; she’d married the king of the scavengers when she was still innocent enough not to know otherwise, and he was upstairs now, trying to shake off whatever bug it was he’d picked up sticking his snout into trash cans. Couldn’t keep yourself happy just killing our little girl? At that moment she hated him more than anything else in the world. She wanted to go upstairs, press her thumbs up against both sides of his windpipe and keep pressing until he quit gargling and choking and the bones caved in.
She slid the chips back into the sink’s muddy water, moved over to the chip pan and turned up the heat, watching the yellow oil slowly begin to crackle and spit as the heat worked through it; watched it cook until the boiling fat sizzled and spat and the reek became so thick and unbearably cloying in the kitchen she had to get out or choke. She took the pan off the heat and carried it two-handed as she tip-toed up the stairs to the King Rat’s hidey-hole.
Graeme stretched out across the mattress, a cold flannel laid over his eyes. He didn’t move. She assumed he was still out for the count; probably dreaming about what he did to Annie. It felt good to be doing something positive to redress the balance. The rats had ruled the roost for too long in this house. She giggled at the thought of herself as a Rentokil girl, but that was exactly what she was, pest control getting rid of the vermin that had plagued her family for too long.
Taking one hand from the chip pan’s handle, Jenny reached out and whipped back the duvet cover from her husband’s feverish body. He moaned groggily, caught up in his own nightmare. Jenny glared down at her husband’s body with genuine hatred. No way was she about to let him sleep through it.
Gently, so she wouldn’t cause his heart to rupture with the shock of it, she poured a trickle of the boiling fat into the hollow of his navel. Watching him buck suddenly into repugnant, scared, painful wakefulness Jenny thought it was her that had gone insane, not that bastard on the bed that had raped and murdered her baby, then the r
age welled up out of the blackness in her heart where her Annie had lived and she upturned the contents of the pan on Graeme Lockewood’s naked body and watched him burn, content that thanks to her there was one less rat in the world. One less rapist. One less murderer.
His screams were terrible to hear, and they lasted for a surprisingly long time, considering how long it took him to die.
- 68 -
Johnny Lisker swaggered back into the village of the damned amid a fanfare of fireworks, screams and explosions that left his ears ringing.
He couldn’t deny the strange, sudden rush of excitement he felt walking back into the battleground of his hometown. He laughed, knew he was grinning, knew then just how much Alex hated that grin, and didn’t care that Alex had gone off looking for Beth. Johnny had his own fish to fry.
Jim Beckett, the first of the paybacks Johnny was hungry to make good, was busy pulling the bolts on the Railway House doors. Johnny walked in behind the rioting kids, picking his way through the debris strewn across the High Street. He kicked aside the twisted, still smoking shank of an exhaust pipe, sending it skittering into the gutter across the street where Scott Jordan’s Ford was an unrecognizable smoldering husk.
Headlights speared the night.
Johnny didn’t wait to see who they belonged to. He ducked into the recessed mouth of the alleyway running up the side of Beckett’s pub. Out on the street, bricks and bottles were being hurled back and forth like insults; for a full twenty seconds all Johnny could hear were the sounds of breaking glass and kids on the rampage. Then one of the police caravans in the youth block playground went up in an almighty whummpff as a meths bottle with a lit soaked rag stuffed in its neck went spinning through its window. Johnny gazed at the peaks of the flames with morbid fascination, counting off the different colors he saw trapped within the blaze.
Sufferer's Song Page 42
