by Guy N Smith
His eyes smarted with tears that would not come; he could not remember the last time he had cried. Probably when he was a young boy. He had not even cried when his parents had died and God knows he had tried hard enough. Burning grief inside him that could not escape, knotting him up. The only two funerals he had ever attended.
Morbid, so unnecessary. A grave like this one only much, much deeper, a roll of artificial grass hiding the mound of earth for some obscure reason. Civilisation went to a lot of needless trouble. A coffin that had cost a hundred quid in those days, high-quality polished oak that would only rot away in the ground. Pointless in the extreme.
His mother's wish had been to be buried in the same grave so they had to dig it all out again. The same rigmarole, plastic grass and a meaningless ceremony because nobody except himself really cared. That night he had almost cried. Almost, but not quite.
He paused. He was sweating heavily. The sides of the grave were up to his thighs. It would do, it would have to. So long as he got the corpses underground that was all that mattered. He debated going and fetching one of them; no, he would dig the other graves first, try and get finished before dark. Filling them in would not take long.
He worked right through until mid-afternoon. The fog was beginning to creep in again and he could only just make out the outline of the cottage. Probably Sylvia still slept. He wouldn't be long now.
There was no way Jon could carry the bodies across to the graves, he would have to drag them by the legs, unceremoniously. Ignominious. Like the time he had buried Nita, the old milking goat. He had put a piece of rope on her back legs, pulled her in stages out of the shed, across the yard and into the field. He would have to do the same now.
He took the nearest first, looped the rope over the man's ankles, pulled it tight, took the strain. Stiff and resisting, a rigid arm becoming caught on the gatepost. He sweated, had to go and free it. Damn it, the eyes had come open, were staring balefully at him.
Murderer!
No, I didn't want to kill you, please believe me. I'm sorry. Oh God, I'm sorry!
It took him ten minutes to lug the corpse to the graveside, turned his head away as he fumbled to undo the knots. Don't look at me please. I'm sorry.
He pushed, the corpse slid, took a small avalanche of soil and stones with it, fell awkwardly, face downwards. No, I'm not going down there to turn you over. It doesn't matter anyway because you're dead.
Maybe he should have dug deeper, one big grave, buried all three together. Funny how you thought of these things when it was too late.
It was dusk by the time he had all three of them in their graves, took the spade again and began to shovel the earth back in with dull thumps. Finality. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away, He could hear that young curate's voice at his mother's graveside, rushing through the words as though he had to get it all over as soon as possible. Maybe he had been scared too. Secretly everybody was frightened of death because no matter what you did in life you ended up like this. All efforts were in vain.
He finished, smoothed the slight mounds over with the flat of the spade and stood back. It was almost dark now, the fog seeming to have melted with the coming of night. The sweat was chilling fast on his body, an icy shirt clinging damply to his flesh. It felt like there could be a frost tonight.
Jon Quinn retrieved his gun, headed back to the cottage. He kicked his boots off in the porch, went inside and locked the door behind him. Silence. No movement, no faint glow of a candle burning.
He grabbed a storm lantern, lit it and waited for the flame to settle. The wick needed renewing; he would see to it tomorrow. Always tomorrow but deep down you found yourself hoping that tomorrow never came.
Upstairs, almost afraid to go into the bedroom. Maybe Sylvia had gone, crept out whilst he was engrossed in his gruesome task, had just walked away into the fog and wouldn't be coming back. Or else she was dead. Last night might have proved too much for her; there was a bottle of aspirins by the bed.
Nausea compressed his stomach, tried to force him to vomit. Don't go in there, don't look. That way you won't ever know. If she's dead then you'll have to bury her too.
He kicked open the door, held the lamp at arm's length, the yellow circle of light quivering and casting weird shadows. The bed, a still form beneath the crumpled sheets. Alive or dead?
Then the bedclothes moved and Sylvia came into view, propped herself up on an elbow, blinked in the sudden wan light. He scarcely recognised her, she seemed to have aged a decade, her eyes black-ringed and sunken, deep contours etched into her skin. Sheer hopelessness, and something else—grief.
'Jon?'
'Are you OK?'
'Eric's dead, Jon.'
A jumble of replies crammed his confused brain. Don't be silly. How could you possibly know? He's OK, I'm certain of it. But they all sounded hollow so he said nothing, just stood there looking at her.
'He's dead,' she repeated.
Jon moved into the room, set the lantern down on the dresser. She moved again, sat up, and he saw that she was still fully dressed.
'I know he is.' She spoke flatly, not even a tremor in her voice. 'I wish I could have seen him one more time though. Just to say I'm sorry.'
He lowered himself down on to the edge of the bed, suddenly saw how she had changed during these last few hours, almost drew away in horror. The texture of her skin was different, blotched, coarser, her hair wiry, the soft silkiness gone out of it. The pertness of her features was gone too; lips thicker, nose less pointed. An unmistakable resemblance to those corpses which he had interred today!
'You're ill.' He had to say something, must not alarm her unduly. He hoped the revulsion, the shock, did not show in his expression. He tried to tell himself that it was a trick of the light, that if he went and fetched a torch and shone it on her she would be all right. In the end he accepted what he saw, let his brain go numb, didn't try to find reasons, or hope. Somehow Sylvia was undergoing the physical change which had thrown back the population of the rest of the world thousands of years. Mentally she seemed to have all her faculties. At the moment anyway.
'I know he's dead.' Her voice was a dull whisper now. 'I just know.'
Panic hit him as he sat there. Like the time Jackie (oh God, how 1 need her now!) had been suddenly ill in the middle of the night soon after they were married. It had turned out to be an allergy to a drug which the doctor had prescribed but he did not know that at the time, was certain she was having a heart attack. Wanting to rush downstairs and phone the doctor but he was afraid to leave her. Sure that she was going to die. If she did then he would kill himself because he couldn't bear to be without her. He couldn't bear being without Jackie now. But he hadn't killed himself because she had been al! right.
There was no doctor to phone, no help of any kind. Nothing. He just had to stay with Sylvia.
'I'll get you a drink.' His voice seemed far away, a faint echo coming from downstairs. He stood up and his legs felt weak. He swayed, had to hold on to the dresser.
He groped his way downstairs, found a torch; the battery was going and he didn't know whether there were any spares left but it would do for now. A glass, holding it under the tap, leaning on the sink.
Sylvia groped for the tumbler, slopped some of it down herself, drank the remainder in one gulp. She stared at him, did not seem to recognise him-, her eyes vacant.
He took the empty glass from her, backed towards the door. Til be back in a bit.' A mumbled excuse for leaving. You visited a senile patient in hospital, were grateful to take your leave, told them you'd see them again. You hoped you wouldn't but you did not want to be cruel.
Downstairs he would have thrown up had his stomach not been empty. He didn't want to eat; couldn't. His head was spinning, a wave of dizziness had him staggering towards the frayed sofa in the kitchen, flinging himself full-length on to it. Exhaustion was an illness, you had to sleep it off. A release valve to stop you from going mad; you re
ached a point where you didn't care any more. So you slept.
Morning; not early, comparatively late by the way the weak sunshine was patterning latticed diamonds on the wall. Much colder too. Jon Quinn shivered, lay there and let his recollections of the previous day come back in their own time. He listened, couldn't hear anything, didn't want to. He wished he could go back to sleep, divorce himself from reality. Hide.
In the end he swung his legs to the floor and made his way to the sink. A glass of water, not the same glass that Sylvia had used, he made sure of that. There was a sour taste in his mouth, the taste of damp earth. Grave soil?
He would have to go upstairs, it was his duty. Better now, get it over with; if he put it off any longer he wouldn't go. He would walk right out of that door and up the steep hillside opposite. I can't beat you so I've come to join you. Maybe the change will take me, too, and then I won't know any different.
He mounted the stairs a step at a time. In the cold light of morning there would be no shadows to hide the awful facial details. You're not Sylvia, you're something else.
Just like Jackie is.
He stood on the landing, almost turned back. How could it have happened? That storm months ago had cleared the atmosphere of any remaining micro-organisms, blown them on westwards. What damage was done was done, there wouldn't be any more. You were just left to live with what remained. In theory.
The mating, the rape . . . That was it, he was sure. Eric had passed the change on in his semen, given Sylvia new life in a different way. Oh Jesus God! A husband's revenge on his unfaithful wife and her lover!
No, I don't want to go near you, Sylvia. Thank God our relationship has been platonic these last few weeks. Or else . . .
He hit the bedroom at a rush otherwise he would never have gone through that door. Revulsion, curiosity. All right, let's get it over, let me look at you and . . .
The room was empty!
He stood there just inside the door, his brain trying to accept that there was no horror lying there on the bed, no disfiguration, no creature that might have been four thousand years old. Nothing but a pile of crumpled sheets and blankets, an empty bed in a room that stank of stale sweat and urine.
Instinctively, dazed, he checked the wardrobe, looked under the bed. Just to satisfy himself that she wasn't there. She wasn't, he didn't expect her to be.
She had gone because the call of the wild was too strong for her to resist; she had returned to her own kind.
It was some time later when Jon Quinn went outside. The sun had been obliterated by a bank of dark clouds and the temperature had dropped several degrees. He grimaced. Winter had replaced autumn overnight; those were snow clouds, maybe only a shower, a light ground covering but nevertheless snow.
He filled the hayracks in the goat shed. The animals were becoming accustomed to being shut in now, didn't stampede round the building in an attempt to get out of his way. The young billy was ready to be slaughtered for meat but there wasn't any point anymore. In all probability he would just turn him loose, let him go to the hills. He could have his freedom for what it was worth.
As he came out of the buildings a flock of rooks suddenly rose into the air, cawing loudly, circling, wanting to drop back down on to whatever they had been feeding on.
Jon stared in amazement. Something on the cultivation patch had attracted them, he couldn't think what; there were few growing crops to interest corvines at this time of the year. He picked up the gun, changed his mind. He did not have cartridges to waste. Ali the same he would go and take a look.
They were probably scratching in the soil after wire-worms ... He stopped, almost turned and ran. God, no, not that.
Two of the newly-dug graves had been disturbed, the loose soil scratched out, scattered all around. And lying there, partly out of the ground, exposed to their waists, were two of the corpses! They stared fixedly in his direction out of bloody eyeless sockets, flesh hanging from their faces in scarlet ribbons. Rigid in rigor mortis, stiff arms pointing in his direction.
Murderer!
If his limbs had responded Jon Quinn would have turned and run. Instead he was forced to stand there, cringe before the mute accusations of the partly exhumed dead.
Murderer! You cannot be rid of us so easily.
Gradually logic, cold reasoning infiltrated his sheer terror. Those . . . things . . . were dead, they could not harm him, repulsive as they were. This was not Haiti where the witch-doctors summoned the dead from their graves to enslavement as zombies. It was Britain and things like that did not happen. You just got poisoned and thrown back into your ancestry.
Nevertheless, somebody or something had dug the bodies up. He moved a few paces nearer, ran his eye over the dispersed soil. Footprints, large animal ones with claw imprints. Dogs!
He laughed his sheer relief aloud. The starving wild dogs from the hills had scented death and come during the night hours, had scratched up the human corpses from their shallow graves, had feasted on the dead meat. And when the canines left at daybreak the crows had flown in to a banquet of carnage, pecked out the eyes, scraped the flesh off with their talons. And now the sinister birds were wheeling overhead, demanding a return to their feast before flying back to their roost. Jon turned away. Let the bastards come back and feed.
That was the role scavengers played in the world of death, preventing putrefaction and disease. After dark the dogs might come again, foxes too. It was the law of Nature when things got out of control.
One last look up at the dark forest on the skyline before he went back indoors. The first few snowflakes were starting to drift down. Sylvia was somewhere up there.
Maybe Jackie, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS morning again. Jackie stirred, instinctively clutched at the tree branches, experienced a dizzy bout of vertigo. Sickness; fear, and the fact that she had neither eaten nor drunk for almost two days.
She was going down there today, down below to where death awaited her. She either died up here slowly of starvation or gave herself up to the pack. The latter would be relatively quick. Her mind was made up.
A flap of huge wings close by, a huge brown bird taking off, gliding and settling again in a tree further away, A buzzard. It was waiting for her to die so that it could feast; it wasn't in any hurry.
She released her hold on the big bough, felt the branches beneath her starting to bow, yielding to her full weight.
Sliding, slippery . . .
She tensed as she felt herself go, closed her eyes, braced every nerve in her body for the impact. Seconds seemed an eternity. A brief flash of inexplicable memory: that face again, so smooth like Phil Winder's, eyes that were filled with sorrow, lips moving. Please don't die. Then it was gone.
She hit something soft, rolled, sprawled. A cushioned landing, she had fallen on the wild dogs, amongst them. She closed her eyes tightly. I'm not going to look, I don't want to see them. Kill me quickly.
Jackie could feel the rough hair of the dog underneath her, a still form that did not move. One of the dead ones. She was lying there waiting to die but death did not come.
It was the silence that had her opening her eyes in bewilderment. The snarling pack should have been on her by now but there was not so much as a warning growl. She should have been dragged to and fro like a rag doll caught up in a canine tug-o'-war, pulled one way then the other, teeth biting and tearing as they savaged her.
It took several seconds for understanding to filter through to her confused brain, rejecting the fact that she was not going to die. Glancing from one animal to another. She lay on the big one, the one which had hunted her, had killed her companion. Two more close by, a third by the human corpse. Another some yards away. All of them dead. The rest had gone.
For some reason the dogs had left. They had fought and feasted on human carrion, satisfied their hunger. Become bored. It didn't matter why they had left, just that they had.
Jackie sat there staring about her, noticed for
the first time that it was snowing, odd patches of open ground beneath the trees already sprinkled with a soft white covering. She shook herself, sat up, still listening in case the dogs were close by but there was no sound. An empty forest, devoid of all life except that buzzard still perched in the tree.
She tried to stand but her legs were weak and she fell, crawled a few yards away from the scene of the bloody carnage. She couldn't stop here, the animals might come back or else others scenting death might appear. She had resigned herself to dying but instead she lived and now she had the will to fight again.
After some time she found she could stand, walk a few paces, holding on to low branches to support herself. It was bitterly cold and she was hungry, thirsty. Also she was a fugitive. Those who hunted her would not have given up the trail.
She followed a well-trodden path through the trees. The thick overhead evergreen foliage was preventing the ground from being covered with snow and it made travelling easier. All the same she could not remain in the forest. She had to keep moving.
It was midday when she finally emerged from the big wood, stood and looked across at snow-covered hills and valleys. It was still snowing lightly but the clouds to the west were breaking up. She knew that she had to find food and shelter before nightfall.
She headed across the ridge of hills, wary, hiding in the bushes whenever she spied other people. Once a group of five men and a woman passed within yards of her. The men were struggling to support the woman, two of them carrying her a few yards, setting her down to rest. She was coughing badly, her breath wheezing and rasping its way out of her lungs. A conference between the other three men; they were worried and Jackie thought that they looked ill, too. Eventually they moved on and once they were out of sight Jackie continued on her way. But overall she sensed that something was dreadfully wrong.
Some time later her foot caught against something, almost caused her to fall. With a start she saw that it was the body of a man that the snow had covered. She saw his face, stepped back in horror. Sunken eyes, the flesh blotched as though some disease had ravaged him, a trickle of dried blood from the open mouth.
