by James Plumb
LITTLE MONSTER
by James Plumb
Copyright © James Plumb 2016
All rights reserved
The right of James Plumb to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organisations and events portrayed in this novel are
either products of the authors’ imaginations
or are used fictitiously.
First published in 2016 by Infected Books
www.infectedbooks.co.uk
@infectedbks
Cover design by David Naughton-Shires
www.theimagedesigns.com
www.madsciencefilms.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE
LITTLE MONSTER
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE
ALSO FROM INFECTED BOOKS
MONTH SIX
LITTLE MONSTER
PROLOGUE
BLEEP BLEEP
Muttering, I jam my hand into my pocket and fish around for my mobile. I squint to read the text message from Jen:
GARETH, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?
I roll my eyes. Gripping my phone I punch in a curt, semi-literate response while sidestepping a gaggle of schoolkids.
On way to station
Looking up, I nearly collide with a chugger, who performs a jokey little dance as I try to avoid him.
‘Hi there, buddy. Can I—’
‘Sorry. Train,’ I tell him.
As I enter Cardiff Central Train station, sweat beads on my brow.
Taking two steps at a time, I sprint up to Platform Three to be greeted by the news that the train home is delayed.
BLEEP BLEEP
EVERYONE’S ALREADY HERE
I jab more letters into my phone.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ME TO DO ABOUT IT?
I’m about to hit send, but a rare moment of sense descends on me and I reconsider, my thumb already pushing the delete key.
Train delayed
Optimistically I put the phone back in my pocket, casting my eye up and down the platform.
Eventually the train arrives and I, along with my fellow wage slaves, play the worst game of human Tetris that you can imagine in order to get home.
BLEEP BLEEP
I ignore the phone, weighing up the effort it’ll take to retrieve it from my pocket without accidentally molesting one of the many passengers pressed up against me.
But the phone’s having none of it and BLEEP BLEEPS and VIBRATES.
A middle-aged man in front of me turns around to face me, our noses almost touching. Smiling, I attempt to move my hand to my pocket without copping a feel of him. Or anyone else.
PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE ON THE TRAIN. SHE KEEPS ASKING WHERE YOU ARE
I look around.
I AM ON THE FUCKING TRAIN
I don’t bother putting my phone away. Instead I count down from three.
Three.
Two.
O-
BLEEP BLEEP
THANK ALL THE FUCKS FOR THAT. COULDNT YOU HAVE WORKED LATE ANOTHER NIGHT???
That’s not exactly how the employer/employee relationship works
I’m quite proud of that one.
BLEEP BLEEP
DONT BE SUCH A FUCKING PRICK
Yes, dear
Checkmate.
BLEEP BLEEP
GO FUCK YOURSELF
Spilling out of the train, I dodge other commuters surging off the platform and heading for the main road.
BLEEP BLEEP
ITS HER FIFTH BIRTHDAY, GARETH
BLEEP BLEEP
YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO BE LATE
BLEEP BLEEP
FUCK YOU
After that barrage, I feel my anger rising.
I go for the cheap shot.
Yes, dear
Not so proud of that one.
BLEEP BLEEP
DSHDUGFEUIWGSUXYDH’*&£IK’!!!
I think I broke my wife.
BLEEP BLEEP
YOU PROMISED
And just like that, I realise I’m the kind of wanker who’s late for his own daughter’s fifth birthday party.
***
Phone in hand, I walk into the community hall and see Jen huddled with some of other mums. She’s smiling, but I can tell it’s strained. I hit send on my phone.
I’M SORRY
She looks down at her phone. Then looks towards the entrance. Towards me.
She looks relieved.
Then angry.
Then sad.
Then angry again, she starts walking over, gaining speed, but just before she opens her mouth—
‘Daddy!’
Ana dives into my arms and plasters me with little kisses.
Jen adopts a sad smile and enters into a group hug.
‘Told you, Mummy.’
I kiss Jen on the top of her head.
ONE
Gareth looked back in the car rear view mirror to see the birthday girl passed out; head back, mouth open, dead to the world.
He smiled. In the end, Ana had had a whale of a time; ate too much sugar, stayed up too late and crashed as soon as they had got her in her car seat.
He looked over at Jen, who had twisted her body so it was faced towards the passenger window. She stared out of it, even though it was now pitch black.
‘I am sorry,’ Gareth attempted.
No response.
‘The other guys in the office are either young or gay, not family men. So there’s just an expectation that sometimes we have to work late to get the job done. Do you think I’d rather be stuck there instead of with you and Ana?’
‘I understand that sometimes you have to work late, I do, and sometimes I work late. But your daughter turns five only once.’
Well, we could lie and tell her its her birthday tomorrow, she wouldn’t know the difference, five year olds are stupid, was what went through his head.
‘I know, I’m sorry,’ was what came out of his mouth.
They drove in silence for a while longer, interrupted only once by a plain white van dangerously overtaking them.
‘You’ve got to spend some quality time with Ana. I’m worried she’s only going to end up seeing her dad on the weekends and I don’t want that for her.’
Neither did Gareth. He loved his own dad dearly. The two of them talked on the phone often now, but growing up his dad had always come home after Gareth had fallen asleep and left for work before he’d woken up.
‘You’re absolutely right. Look, I’ll take her to the park when she gets up in the morning, then take her out for a Happy Meal or something afterwards. Give you a chance to have a lie-in for once.’
Jen’s body visibly relaxed and Gareth knew that, somehow, he had averted another disaster.
She rested her hand on top of Gareth’s on the gear stick and it remained there for the rest of the journey home.
As they pulled onto the driveway, Gareth silently passed Jen the keys and got out of the car. While Jen unlocked the front door, he unstrapped his daughter from her car se
at and lifted her unconscious form. She rested her head against his shoulder, a small pool of dribble leaking onto his shirt.
Gently, he carried her through the front door and directly up the stairs, avoiding the steps which he knew would creak underfoot, passing the family photos on his way up towards the landing. This was a routine Gareth had performed hundreds of times, now choreographed to perfection.
Opening the door to Ana’s room with his foot, he circumnavigated dolls and crippling Lego and stickle-bricks to get to Ana’s stuffed animal menagerie of a bed.
Placing her down, nestling her amidst the wild beasts and stuffed cartoon characters, he tucked her in, stroked her hair and kissed her forehead.
Before leaving the room, he turned on Ana’s night light, bathing the room in red.
Slowly he pulled the door to.
TWO
Gareth didn’t understand how he could feel hungover with only one beer in his belly from last night, and yet he felt rough. The screaming kids and toddlers hurtling around him didn’t help, screeching at the laws of gravity as they threw themselves onto swings, seesaws and roundabouts. Among it all, Ana happily bobbed up and down on the opposite end of the seesaw from a boy with a permanently leaking nose.
Things had been tense with Jen last night. They’d been tense for a long time. When he woke this morning, he decided it was easier to let Jen sleep-in while he struggled to get Ana fed and dressed before taking her to the park. Gareth thought back to when he and Jen were a couple, two emotionally stunted twenty year olds. She with her 80s nostalgia, worshipping the kids films of her youth, and him with his love of punk bands that had imploded before he was even born. They had complimented each other. And eighteen months later when they had got married, the first of all their friends, people had thought it cute.
And then they did what people do after they get married: they tried for kids. It hadn’t been easy. They’d tried for over two years with no luck. Terrified of doctors at the best of times, they didn’t book an appointment with their GP, but instead visited countless websites and internet forums giving all sorts of crackpot advice. And they tried it all.
When Jen did finally fall pregnant, Gareth did everything he could to wrap his young wife in cotton wool and protect her from the outside world.
Gareth looked over at Ana, at what he and Jen had tried for so long and so hard to create together. There was no denying that he loved his little girl. He loved her at a primal, paternal level. He loved her at a chemical level, he understood that. But he couldn’t help but feel a degree of resentment as well. What nobody had told him was that after having kids, you no longer had the right to get ill. You no longer had the right to be tired, because a screaming baby had no time for such concepts. What was worse was he knew that Jen felt the same way. They had ceased to be a couple and had become parents, a delivery system for their daughter until she reached adulthood. Their identities eroded, they were no longer Jen and Gareth but Mummy and Daddy.
They both realised that as Ana got older and gained more independence, they would have to re-evaluate their own relationship. To try and determine whether there was anything left between the two of them, besides being parents. Gareth was terrified that if he looked too hard, he’d realise that although Jen was a wonderful mother and a close friend, he didn’t love her in that way anymore. Or worse, that Jen would realise that her feelings had changed.
Deep down, Gareth hoped that he still loved Jen and that the two of them hadn’t strayed too far from what made them fall in love with each other in the first place.
Gareth’s thoughts were interrupted when his phone bleeped.
Fishing it out of his pocket, he saw it was a work e-mail.
‘Fuck sake…’ he muttered, perhaps a little too loudly for the mums sitting next to him on the playground bench.
It was from his line manager.
‘Fucking Saturday, Ian.’
Attached to the e-mail was a spreadsheet which came out garbled when opened through his phone’s browser.
‘Tosser…’
While Gareth was deciphering annual statistics on his phone, Ana moved on to the roundabout with some other kids.
Unseen by either of them, a figure staggered along the pathway leading to the playground.
Despite still being a few hundred yards off, some of the more alert mothers started moving towards their children, perhaps sensing on an animal level, the odd otherness of the gaunt figure stumbling towards their offspring.
It was hard to estimate the age of the figure. Its sunken features were capped by glassy eyes which seemed to rattle in their sockets with each barefooted step it took. Its trousers glistened with an unknown dark wetness and through the un-tucked and stained white shirt it wore you could count each of its pronounced ribs.
Ana continued to spin on the roundabout, every few seconds seeing a blurry figure which she guessed was her father. Gradually the other children jumped off and rejoined their parents, leaving the roundabout all to Ana. It gradually started to slow.
She could see her father sat on the bench, playing with his phone. The world spun some more, shining bright warm sunlight into her eyes, alternating with shadow. She could make out her father still in the same pose. She narrowed her eyes in anticipation of another blast from the sun’s rays but something cast a dull shadow over her instead.
As her eyes adjusted, she smiled up into the face of the figure in front of her.
Gareth was busy drafting an angry e-mail back to his line manager when he heard the first scream. At first it sounded like the playful screams that he’d been subjected to all morning, but instead of ending in a playful yelp, it continued.
And continued.
And then died off in a croak.
Tearing his eyes from his phone, Gareth noticed some of the mums cowering in the corner of the playground. Others had starting waddling quickly out of the park, checking back over their shoulders as they disappeared. Assuming somebody’s precious little monster had grazed their knee, Gareth glanced over to the seesaw where Ana was playing with the snot-nosed boy.
Except she wasn’t there.
The last of the mothers and their spawn had now fled.
A cold, sickening feeling slid up Gareth’s spine, passed the base of his skull and crept onto the back of his neck. His mouth wrenched open, forcing air into his lungs.
Gareth looked around as if seeing the playground for the first time. Something wasn’t right.
He scanned back and forth before settling his eyes onto a figure by the roundabout.
It had its back to him, and it took him another moment to realise that it was holding something. Swinging something in its arms.
Gareth got to his feet. Part of his brain was shouting at him to find Ana, but another part knew that he was already looking in the right direction.
Gareth looked down at the figure’s bare, bloody feet. Beyond its knee, he saw a glimpse of something he recognised. Half of his brain had shut down but the other reptilian half was working overtime.
The something was Ana’s shoe.
With this piece of information, Gareth’s body reacted.
He took half a dozen steps and launched himself at the figure, spinning it around. Ana’s body dropped from its arms.
Gareth shoved the figure backwards, sending it stumbling to the ground.
He followed up with his foot, stamping on its head. A reassuring crunch under his heel.
He repeated the action.
Again.
And again.
He threw his full weight and anger behind each vicious stomp.
As the crunches turned to squelches, his brain started to reboot itself. Gareth regained control over his body and looked at the mess in front of him.
A torso with a mass of gore and splatter marks where the head used to be.
A moment later Gareth was trying to remember why he had acted in this way.
Ana.
Spinning around, he saw her.
A limp body. Part of her neck missing, replaced by an angry red wound.
Gareth picked her up.
She seemed lighter than she had for years.
He ran.
She bounced on his shoulder as he ran down the pathway.
He ran on to the main road.
His senses narrowed. Focused only on the horizon and the hospital somewhere beyond and the sound of his own ragged breathing.
The sound of his heart beat filled his ears as he sprinted down Bridgend Road. Soon all the other noise was drowned out by the sound of a siren.
Gareth was still trying to run even as the paramedics tried to load him and Ana into the back of the ambulance.
THREE
Gareth answered the consultant’s questions, even though they were identical to the questions already asked by the paramedics. His answers were identical to the ones he had given the receptionist at A&E, identical to those he’d given the series of nurses and the doctor who seemed too young to be a doctor. He sat by Ana’s hospital bedside, barely looking away from the small creature who used to be his daughter. When Jen finally appeared, he only registered her presence by the sound of her voice.
Jen asked Gareth the same questions that the police had asked. He gave the same answers, even though he himself didn’t know.
He didn’t know what had happened. Not really.
