The hands behind her let go, letting her collapse over the windowsill. Her arms flapped like ineffectual wings that couldn’t slow the speed of descent. Blades of glass still embedded in the frame tore into her throat. Her screams didn’t die until she did.
Arms wrapped around her, pulled her out into the rain and the screams of the lunatic crowd. Fresh bodies followed blindly.
Ben was the first to see the breach and ran toward the window. He stopped abruptly when he saw that the doors were starting to buckle in on the few defenders struggling to hold them. He flinched at the sound of a gunshot.
The restaurant was suddenly a madhouse, everyone inside the asylum reaching the same level of dreadful understanding of their predicament. Slaughter was beating down the doors to get at them, and there was nothing they could do to distance themselves.
Billy Rogan came round with a scream that couldn’t have been worse if the Devil had been reclaiming his soul for the damned. He thrashed and bucked, twisted, fighting against the belts anchoring him into the dining chair; jerked his head violently enough to snap one of the leather restraints.
Ellen wouldn’t be pacified. Evie picked her up onto her knee and petted her, then let her stand. She led Ellen and carried the baby over to her husband and the others in the no-man’s land between the doors and the windows.
Kristy came up to stand beside Ben, slipping her hand into his. “This is it, then.”
“Not exactly where I would have chosen to die,” Ben said, trying to make it sound relaxed if not resigned. He turned to the window. A pair of painfully thin arms began reaching through, pulling an emaciated body behind them.
“Who said anything about dying, Benjamin Shelton,” Kristy said, racing to bridge the gap between them and the window. She used one of the carver’s Evie had distributed earlier to slash at the hands, the ferocity of her attack driving the would-be intruder back through the opening. “Now you’ve seen how well I can handle a difficult man, you do realize we have to get married, don’t you?” She called back breathlessly.
It was a stupid thing to say. Ben knew exactly what she was doing, and he could have kissed her for it. Coming back from the doors, Jack Kemp offered a smile. He was carrying Billy’s confiscated shotgun casually, but Ben had no doubts about whether if called up he could use it. “I would say congratulations, but I plan on saving them until we get out of this place,” Jack said with a wink.
“I would accept,” Ben responded. “But I am not so sure I deserve them.”
Doyle laughed, needing the distraction. He ruffled Ellen’s hair. And then, seriously: “How long are the doors going to hold?”
“Five minutes? Ten? One? Your guess is as good as mine, but they will give.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Evie said.
“Amen to that, but I don’t fancy taking my chances out there, do you?”
“Not if I don’t have to.”
And then one of the two porch doors tore free from the other in an explosion of shattered wood and gushing clouds of rain. The door hit the barricade, punching a hole straight through their last line of defense. For a long second it seemed to hang there unsupported. Ben heard Kristy cry out “Jesus Christ,” neither in prayer nor blasphemy the way it came out of her mouth. A statement made vocal by her terror.
Everyone seemed to be in front of the doors.
The lunatics were already in, the terrifying sub-human rabble throwing themselves through the breach, onto the few diners that had stayed to fight, faces black with dirt, smoke and ashes and yet alight with madness, trampling those who refused to flow underfoot.
“Can both of you swim?” he didn’t have time to wait for them to answer. A homemade petrol bomb exploded in the middle of the restaurant. Snowflakes, Ben realized sickly. The detergent had been used to convert the already lethal cocktail into homemade napalm. He grabbed up a chair, bracing the backseat against his midriff, charged, shrieking at the huge plate glass of the patio doors.
The flames clung to everything they touched. Diners and rioters alike began to writhe. The air was ripped into shreds with screams and shouts and cries. Clothes were being torn from bloody victims. Bodies were being hacked, slashed, and killed again and again. A head ducked down, following a knife slash to gorge itself on streaming entrails like a dog, even as a second blade lanced in, stabbing the ducking head in the furrow between neck and shoulders. No one saw Billy Rogan shift his balance enough to send his prison chair crashing and start using the floor as a brace to struggle against his bonds.
Jack Kemp saw immediately what Ben was trying, thought: it can’t work, but threw himself into motion behind him, to add his own momentum to Ben’s barrel-charge, simply because he didn’t want to die here, not like this. Barney Doyle caught on in time for the three of them hit the window – the chair’s four legs the only true points of contact – and keep on going through the explosive hail into the blessed sting of the rain out on the veranda, gasping, not caring that the slivers of glass made ribbons of their skin.
Behind them the slaughter raged, the jabbering of the throng intensified. All of them trying to get away from the restaurant’s main doors. The fire had spread. Bottles of alcohol were detonating in mini-explosions. The surfaces of the tables warped and bubbled. The fabric of the seat covers and the curtains ignited like tapers.
“Fire!” but that was one of the lunatics screaming – it had to be.
“Come on,” Kristy yelled to Evie, grabbing up Ellen. The girl had no resistance left in her small body. Someone snagged out a hand to try and slow her, almost succeeding in tripping her but somehow she kept her footing and made it to the shattered patio door, risking a look back.
The desperate hand snagged out again, snaring Evie’s ankle. The old woman went over heavily, her head cracking off the corner of a table with a horrifying impact. Her body fell protectively over the bundle in her arms.
Kristy stood paralyzed in the doorway and the filthy drizzle as Billy Rogan surged out from under a half-toppled table and swarmed over Evie, covering her body with his.
“Noooooo!” Barney Doyle wailed desperately, behind her, too far away to stop Billy from feverishly tearing Evie’s body apart.
Ben seized Kristy, pulling her away. He buried Ellen’s sobbing face in his chest. “Don’t look. Oh, sweet Jesus, don’t look.”
Ben could see Evie’s face, see it crumple as the life was shorn from her chest, the blood drain away to spill down Billy’s burrowing hands. His wickedly spindly fingers dug at her throat. Moved. He pulled something out of her chest, held it to his mouth.
Doyle’s eyes were fixed on Billy too, and they flamed hot midnight. No smile in the world could have softened the flood of fury, the rage pouring out of them as his wail hardened into a moan, into a cry of despair and finally grief made solid in a howl of madness.
“No!” he roared again. No fear hampered him as he hurled himself at Rogan, slamming his huge fists into Billy’s face over and over and over again, screaming, wrestling with Billy, forcing him into a bear-hug, catching Billy as he tried to squirm out of the hold, around the neck, bringing the massive strength of the venom seething in his blood to bear on the simple man’s neck, snapping it clean.
Ben scanned the crowd quickly, and between the milling bloodshed he saw old Daniel Tanner reloading a shotgun in a swamp of thrashing bodies, his head down as he jammed cartridges into the chamber.
Christ, no, he didn’t want to go for Daniel, not a friend, and risk riddling his own skin with perforations in the process, but if he didn’t Doyle was going to take the lead spray in the back of the head.
So maybe he was damned.
Jack Kemp saw Daniel too, and raised his own shotgun to aim it, but could not get a clear sighting on him because of the bodies cutting across his line of sight. He almost risked it anyway. His finger tightened on the trigger guard but there was no way he could get a shot off without half of it spraying into Doyle. He started to move, but Ben was quicker.
&
nbsp; Ellen shrieked.
Ben went for it. He shoved Kristy out of his way and started to run. He saw the shotgun come up and blow a hole in his stomach even before he had passed Doyle on the floor – but that was in his head and he didn’t have room for those kind of thoughts. If he reached Daniel before he could fire maybe he could take him down –
Ben hurdled a fallen body, landed awkwardly turning his ankle, but kept his balance even as it lanced its own firebrand of pain the length of his leg.
Daniel Tanner was still too far away. He snapped the split barrel together, locked it off and brought it up to shoot in one smooth movement.
People were screaming.
Someone slammed into his side. Ben grabbed at them, pulled them across his body. Hugged them against him.
The detonation crashed.
And the gun bucked and blasted yellow through the blue-black air.
“Ben!”
Felt the gravel like quality of the shot tear into the side of his face. The lunatic he’d used as a shield spasmed violently as the shot smacked into his chest and shoulders, the shot tearing a cavity out of his chest. It punched holes in the flesh of his arms, gouging his sides. Ben didn’t let him fall. The full force of Daniel’s second shot was taken by the corpse in Ben’s arms. Ben felt it like a runaway train punching into his stomach, trying to drive him off his feet. The shot twisted the body of the lunatic out of his hands. Ben didn’t try to hang on to him.
Disconnected from his senses, Ben saw the blood on his shirt, the spray of ragged perforations in the sleeve, but gritted his teeth and threw himself at his friend. Even as Ben was launching himself the recoil of the blast rammed the shotgun up and back in Daniel’s grasp, jerking its stock from his grip. The recoil snapped his index finger inside the trigger guard, then Ben ploughed into him. He tackled him low, ducking under the arc of the gun, the tackle’s momentum sending the pair of them sprawling backwards.
Daniel gasped, Ben knew he’d hurt him, at least a little, and that made Ellen’s father suddenly vulnerable. Daniel tried to bring the gun up and around to club at Ben’s skull.
“Ben!”
He brought his arm up to block it, slammed his elbow into his friend’s teeth, made a grab for the shotgun. Daniel bucked, thrashed, dislodged Ben, twisted him onto his back. The fall cracked the back of his head against the floor.
Footsteps off to the side, and heavy, rasping breathing.
Screaming.
Daniel jabbed the shotgun barrels into Ben’s face, pulled the triggers on dead cartridges. Howling, he threw the gun aside and raised his hands up. He pummeled Ben’s face.
Ben failed to ward off the punches raining down on his face. The chicken bones in Daniel’s hands were cracking and breaking as his punches landed with more weight behind them than his body could stand to take, but they effectively blinded Ben.
He didn’t see the specter of Barney Doyle loom over Daniel’s shoulder, nor did he see either of the two things in his hands. Evie’s bundle was one, an axe he’d scavenged from the carnage the other.
Jack Kemp was at his side, shotgun aimed into the throng of fire, crackling, burning skin and bodies.
The axe went up, flashed down, a mysterious sliver of light as it embedded itself in the back of Daniel’s skull.
Daniel Tanner’s scrawny body jolted as if barraged with a shocking assault of electricity, then collapsed across Ben, his forehead smacking off the floor beside Ben’s head.
Doyle stood over them, looking down with dead eyes. No tears. Grief was for somewhere else.
He reached out with his free hand to help Ben to his feet, then breathing hard, supported him for the walk out into the air, Jack guarding their path back to Kristy and a hysterical Ellen on the verandah with Billy’s shotgun.
Across the room a lunatic tugged the axe out of Daniel’s head, charged, holding the axe high overhead like a tomahawk. Blood streaked the crazy’s face like war paint. Jack waited until he was sure he couldn’t miss and then unloaded both barrels into him.
He backed out into the rainy night.
- 91 -
As Johnny’s body began to flake away, so too did his mind. He opened his mouth to the rain, and tasted something mild, coppery, like blood and it made him crave blood – but that was what he meant by flaking away. The murmur of the voices refused to die. He sang when he walked, loud and out of tune. Anything he could think of. AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, Faith No More, anything he could shout along to.
Three times on the way up through the tunnel of trees that was Moses Hill the cramps had him doubling up and puking into the verge. Coming down was like burning out; a blitzkrieg of sensations. Nausea, cramps – those same fucking cramps, like everything had to revolve around his fucking stomach all the time – the pain scouring the backs of his eyes was worse than the nails being driven into his scalp. The voices of withdrawal kept on whispering his needs, insinuating, flat out telling him the cure to all of his ills, but he couldn’t believe them. Wouldn’t.
Meat.
He could smell meat dogging his footsteps. The sick, rancid aroma coming to him with the slight breeze. Kept looking back, and thought that he did see someone back there sometimes.
For the beast.
And that scared the shit out of Johnny. It was as though everything were coming home to roost.
If he had been able to think straight Johnny Lisker might have appreciated the irony of the situation, as it was he was surprised to discover that he felt no satisfaction, no anything, at the meat following him. Even his massive hunger seemed to have abated. Groggily he pushed himself on. He was soaked, his trainers felt like lumps of squelching newspaper wrapped around his feet. The wind howled down the funnel. Feeling dizzy and sick and terribly cold, Johnny shambled on.
His vision drifted slowly in and out of focus. He felt his body burning up. His metabolism accelerated wildly. He felt his body withering beneath the onslaught of the searing fire.
Johnny was frightened. He didn’t have the moisture for tears. Gasping, he dragged himself past the old hillside caravan. Hangman’s Oak waited like the Pain Man on the hill, arms outstretched to bring home the burden of sorrow, its lure undeniable. Johnny had thoughts for one place, the Judas Hole. The smell of meat was repugnant and compelling, driving him on.
Johnny started to run.
Looking back over his shoulder, he couldn’t decide if he could see anyone chasing him but he didn’t dare stop. His feet dragged.
The stench of meat.
Johnny’s anger swelled and boiled out of nothing. Meat. Johnny whirled away from the path, cart wheeling head over heels into the longer grasses. Johnny was drunk on his anger and starting to feel good again, the horrors offered by the voices anaesthetized by the black hate. Madness was only seconds away. He pushed himself to his feet, in a crouch, ripping the palm of his hand open on a rusty nail left sticking out of a plank discarded in the grasses.
He felt nothing. Raising the cut to his lips, he tongued blood out of the gash. There was a hint of amusement in the mocking gurgle of voices as the scrabbling inside his head reached a frenzy.
With peripheral images whirling around his mind, for an instant there was a blinding shaft of startling clarity; he might return to the hills and hide in his hole or he might raise the rusty nail to his throat and draw it viciously across his veins. But there was a third retreat. Committing himself to the lilting, sweet-haunted song in his blood. He put his fingers in his ears, but still heard the mesh of wailing laughter like roses and thorns enmeshed on the same vine; heard someone whimpering, someone else saying calmly, “Come to us, be with us . . .”
With the whispering, scrabbling sounds of undead voices in his head, Johnny pushed himself into a run, struggling along, his feet and face turning bitterly cold, over fallen brambles and outcrops of stone, and didn’t look back until he was hauling himself up the ruined limbs of Hangman’s Oak.
The scent of the meat had followed him.
Johnny bided his t
ime, waited it out.
Dropped like a stone.
- DEVLIN’S FALL -
Utterly mesmerized, Devlin could only stare at those bottomless, hell-hole eyes. He couldn’t move for the scream echoing in his head. When he had come to a stop beneath the arms of the dead oak, he raised his head, and was frozen by a menacing sickness staring down at him.
Johnny swung down hand over hand between the branches with the nimble agility of a gibbon, swinging his legs out, snaring Devlin around the head. Devlin tried to fight back then, snapped out of the mesmeric trance by the entanglement constricting around his neck. He sunk his fingers into Johnny’s thighs, aching to prize them apart and slacken the pressure blocking his air passages. Part his flesh. Taste it, tainted, salted jerky.
Devlin’s fingers sank in to the bone, paring the flesh like a knife, but Johnny’s sick determination and strength was awesome.
Johnny kicked back, releasing one hand from the branches to rake down at Devlin’s eyes; sunk his fingers into the orbs; used the ridges of his eye sockets for leverage as he yanked Devlin’s head back.
The only sounds were Devlin’s screams and the crackle of bones slowly breaking. Sounds which swiftly diminished. Johnny hung there between heaven and hell with something approaching a profound sadness, longing and loss. The tiny demons inside his mind recognized that sadness, built on it, began to emit a solitary hissing roar that had Johnny clapping both hands to his temples, falling out of the tree – into hell – feeling no transforming heat, but afraid of the intensity of the fire in his system.
So very afraid. But in that dwindling, in that shrinking of his essence, which was reflected in a massive escalation in fear and horror, Johnny recognized a kindred spirit trapped between his legs. Like a sailor lost on the fickle seas of fate he thrashed for that illusive something that had reared then plunged downwards, waves crashing over his head. A face swam up to meet his own. And another, and another.
In that static, timeless, instant Johnny recognized them, seized them to him in a desperate clutching embrace. His eyes were lost, their eyes were lost, glazed. But theirs were the way. Johnny felt a spark of something other than fear and horror – hope. Flimsy and insubstantial, but more honest than the rage fuelling his body, dragging him downwards.
Sufferer's Song Page 48
