“We saw your signs.” The stranger’s voice was thick with phlegm, and sore. “Was hoping for a place to rest up.”
“You trading?”
“We–” the stranger began to cough. I could smell his illness from the barn.
“Excuse me,” said a woman’s voice. “Sir? If we could trade, we would... but there’s barely enough to keep us alive as it is. Your walls... they look safe. We haven’t been safe for days. Please.”
Father tapped at the gate again with the barrel of the shotgun. “This ain’t no charity.”
The first man stopped his coughing fit. “Listen. You want trade? We done you a service. Can your guys up there shine a light?”
I watched Father back up and call out to my brothers. “What is it?”
Aled scanned the forward area, grabbing a second torch to highlight something almost out of range. “Looks like a mutate,” he called down.
“What do I want with a mutate?” Father asked through the gate.
“We took care of him. Saw him down by the last signpost. Must’ve been on your radar for a while.”
The woman called out again. “Please, sir. You put out those signs for a reason, yeah?”
“How many are there?” Father called out.
“I’m counting six,” said Aled.
Jack joked quietly; “You can count that high?” but not so quiet I couldn’t hear.
“Only six,” replied the coughing man.
“And you took out a mutate?” Tap, tap, tap went Father on the gate with the shotgun.
“That’s gotta count for something?”
Father turned around, beckoning his boys to come down from the scaffold. I heard them whispering in their little exclusionary huddle, as if they could hide anything from me. It was the usual weighing. The usual desires. “Any food?” he called out.
“A little. Not much.”
“And munitions? Or did you take out a mutate with your bare hands?”
“A rifle. A handgun. Not much ammunition that we can spare, but if you let us in we can show you everything. We’d be real appreciative of the protection. It’s dark and been a long walk up here.” That it was – from the second signpost it was a two hour walk, and another two before that. They must’ve started the trail too late, not realising how far they’d need to go. Before you knew it, the sun be falling behind the next hill and you were walking into darkness. More than once I’d smelled corpses on the trail, too weak to make it.
Father whistled and I jumped down from the hatch, hanging from the pulley before dropping through the rain with a wet thud. “You know what to do,” he grunted towards me.
“We don’t always need her,” Aled moaned. I gave him a wink and climbed to the platform and peered over, catching a spotlight in my face which I shielded with a hand. This wasn’t the first time a visitor had tried his luck with the corpse of a dead mutate. Six indeed stood below, shivering in long trenchcoats, thick with woollens beneath. Their faces were thin but the wool fattened them; three men and three women. Didn’t see many children up here – those who had them tended to be settled, not on the roam. Hard to tell age through the men’s beards, and one woman at least had grey hair falling from the hem of a beanie hat. I had to gesture with my hand for them to spread out and reveal the corpse they dragged behind them.
I sniffed the air. The six had been together for a while, for they all smelled the same; mulch and brown water and bad breath. Not too far away, a squirrel slept deep within a hollowed bough. I tasted the clouds on my lips, and blood like the back of a cold spoon. That metallic scent was thick and painted everything else with its stain. The kill was indeed fresh.
Impressive.
And at night.
Couldn’t have been more than an hour, two at most. If I focused I could just about see the gaping slash across the neck, so deep only the spine was keeping the head attached to the body. The flesh was paled by the rain and the cold and the force of the initial gush of blood that would have near-drained it.
Dropping back to the ground, I stood before Father and told him the kill was old. Over a day, at least. He grunted and nodded and Jack whispered; “Ain’t that always the way.”
Yes. Normally.
“Okay,” Father said quietly. “How did it die?”
“Starvation, I’d say.”
“Hmm.” He looked to my brothers. “They’ll be tired. They pose no threat. Agree?”
Jack nodded while Dylan asked me; “How many women?”
“Enough,” I replied. “I’ll take care of the body.”
Father approached the gate, his keys clanking from the long chain wrapped around his belt loop. “We’re gonna be kind,” he said quietly. “Just remember you are guests. You do as we tell you and there’ll be no trouble. You start trouble, and my shotgun will have something to say about that. And not just mine.”
A chorus of thank yous murmured from the other side as the gate opened inwards, the shotgun rat-a-tatting on the fence. A little over-the-top from Father there – the idea was to make them feel comfortable, not more on edge.
“Thank you so much,” said the coughing man. “Name’s John.” He held out his hand.
Father looked at it and shook his head. “No need for names. One o’ my boys will take you to the outhouse. Water and a roof and one o’ my other boys’ll bring in some bedding. In the morning, we’ll divvy.”
“Any food?” asked the female who had spoken earlier, the one with greying hair.
Father was about to open his mouth but he saw me shake my head. Mother’s words still sat with me. “We’re done for the night. P’raps at breakfast.”
One of the following men moaned. I could almost hear his growling belly – and taste the bile emptiness of it on his breath. Hunger, I’d learned, could drive you to the unthinkable. P’raps a scrap of something just to keep them sated would be the best thing to do.
“Quiet, Greg,” scolded the woman. “Be grateful for the roof.”
Father held out his shotgun to stop the third man walking by, nudging it inside a flapping trenchcoat. The wind picked up just then and everyone shivered or clenched their jaws but me. “Weapons?”
This man had age in his eyes and streaks of white in an otherwise thick, black beard. Hair tucked beneath a woollen hat, if he had hair at all. Same height as Father but not as wide in the shoulders, they stood eye to eye for a moment. The stranger looked Father up and down, and then cast his eyes about the farm. “How secure we talking?”
“Fort Knox.”
“You can understand how a man is hesitant to give up his arms in these troubled times.” He gave me a glance, brow creasing as he noted my lack of wool; no hat, open jacket, tank top and slender frame. About three inches shorter than him. He was a lot like Father in the way he stood, like a piece of furniture that had not been moved for decades.
Father nudged the man’s jacket open further and tilted his head. “You can understand how a good, family man is hesitant to accept armed men in his own home in these uncertain times.”
“Don’t be difficult, Dale,” ordered the grey-haired woman. “We’re tired. We’re all tired. Let’s just thank the stars and get out the cold.”
“Dale,” said Father, holding his empty hand out.
Dale filled it with a handgun and the woman behind handed over a rifle, and then the pack were through. Father turned his back on me as I ventured out into the silvery field. When the torchlight left me to the darkness, the grass and mud glistened under the dim moonlight. Cocking an ear, I entered what I called Vigilant Mode. Mutates – they were clever, not your average mountain lion, though we had a few of those prowling the woods too. Visitors told tales of tigers, leopards, lions and other cats breeding in some towns and cities back in England; those places with zoos and safari parks, and gatekeepers kind enough to free them. Predators. Quite how the United Kingdom’s food chain looked these days was uncertain – and certainly, humans were no longer at the top. I wondered though... listening to the wind break the bones fr
om distant trees... I wondered where I sat in the chain.
The mutate lay below me, scent of blood and flesh stronger now. Patches of clothing still remained where time and brawling had not torn it away; the top of the right arm, half-hanging down across the torso, unrecognisably black and brown; a denim waistband without the rest; a piece of denim trouser across the upper right thigh so tight it must almost have been acting as a tourniquet. The rest of him was thick-skinned and veined with coagulating blood, pale and slick, muscles taut and pumped. This one had been brunette, so the body hair was dark and long, for it was winter and malting season was a few months off. The shaft of his penis had receded, as they did for all the male mutates, but his testicles were large. His claws were sharp, like talons really. I rubbed my thumb across the point of my second finger. Looking down, I realised how much he was shaped after an hourglass, with his thin waist and abnormally wide shoulders. His second mouth gaped wide below his real mouth, the one spiked with irregular canines. His cheekbones and flattened nose were almost one, while sunken red eyes searched the night clouds for patterns that would never be found. As I always did, I tried to imagine how he might have looked before the change. Perhaps he’d been a farmer, like Father, or worked in one of the big cities that fell so quickly. Perhaps he’d turned there, and fought off the savagery of the bloodlust, winning victory after victory, only to end up chasing the wrong meal up some far-off hillside.
I slung him over my shoulder, trying to decide where best to bury him. Where had I left gaps in my circumference of graves? To the south of the farm, I decided, and traipsed back along the fence, making my way around. His head thumped against the small of my back with every step, and I remember thinking it was going to fall away completely, but it never did. The cut had been a clean one, made with one quick and powerful slice of a machete that had only faltered when it hit bone. I bet it was Dale, though any of them had room to hide a machete beneath their trenchcoat. Father had put a lot of trust in their word, though maybe right now they were searching rucksacks and waistbands. Wouldn’t have been easy, at dusk, to take out a mutate moving on them at speed. Round here, they tended to bide their time and work their way close, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Dale – or whoever – had reacted quickly. If I’d told Father the truth, he would have turned them away for being too dangerous. He was not much of a gambling man, he was fond of saying, especially not when it came to the lives of his family. Myself excluded, of course. If he deemed a group too dangerous he would rarely allow them within the walls, telling them to go away or perhaps making an exchange in the meadow. They’d deserved the right, though, right? To shelter? Least I thought so at the time.
About two hundred metres to the south of the farm, as the hillside began to slope down towards the woods, I stopped and sniffed. Fifty metres or so to the right was an unmarked mutate grave, and to the left, another one about forty metres away. Even buried so deep I could still smell them; not entirely unpleasant, growing earthier as the worms fed. Dropping to my knees, I placed the body down carefully and pawed the ground, slicing away the upper crust to the crumbling dirt beneath, and dug. The rain fell heavier and swelled in the cavernous neck of the mutate. All sorts of scents lifted from the grass as the droplets disturbed them, and I closed my eyes, breathing deeply to take them in. I was still an adolescent back then, nascent in my senses, unaware from one day to the next how powerful one sense might be over another. Too dictated by the circadian rhythm of my blood and the rise and fall of the balance of my bodily chemicals. I could return tomorrow and only know the graves by the sight of the mounds. Or I could smell the nesting birds in the woods down below. I’d seen the mood swings of my brothers as they grew through puberty and into adulthood; teenage tantrums and fits of irrationality. Growing pains, I’ve seen them called in books. Well, at sixteen, mine weren’t so much growing pains as mystery boxes to be unlocked, and sometimes locked away again.
A little later and the hole was big enough for the body, so I rolled him in. He landed with a squelch, since the ground was sodden now. Ozone wafted up from the cool rain. Was anyone watching? I wondered. Or anything? The wood-line was dark and undisturbed; the wind swirling so much that at some point I would have been downwind of anything lurking there. Let them watch, I thought, if anything is there. Watch, and understand. This territory is mine. I urinated on the body before pushing the mound of soil on top of it, and then I urinated again above that. Not quite an unmarked grave.
Candleflame flickered in the outhouse where the guests were staying. I walked by on my way back to the gate. With all the windows closed or rattling in their frames, there was little to eavesdrop on. Surely they’d be sleeping by now, anyway. At the gate I rang the bell and waited to be let back inside.
Dylan, huddled inside his coat and beanie and scarf, appeared with Father’s shotgun. He’d been outside, waiting for me or for something else? “Took yer time,” he said.
“You can dig too.”
“Couldn’t have waited ‘til the morning?”
“No.”
He stepped up close to me, and I saw how he sniffed then held his breath. If one of my abilities was to sweat on cue, I’d have done so right there. Instead I pushed out a slow, lingering breath towards his general vicinity. “They’ve posted a guard,” he said, turning his head. Flat forehead that seemed a straight line down his nose, in profile.
“They’re not stupid.”
“Could you tell?”
“What? That they’re not stupid.”
“No,” he said, tilting his head down towards me. “You know what I mean.”
I shrugged. “Never can tell.” I moved to head back towards the farmhouse, but Dylan put a hand on my chest, and pulled it back just as quickly when I snapped my eyes at him. “Careful. You don’t want to be dinner.”
“Father wants to make a move.”
All the same these Adies: no fun. All business. I licked my lips and sucked saliva around my mouth, running my tongue across my teeth. Easy to see why Father was keen to kill them so soon – rarely did we get such a large group as this. Even if their rations were low, with six of them, there must be something of interest in their rucksacks. Each one of them had carried something hefty. Why bother with the usual smalltalk? It was always the same anyway: We heard about this place by the sea, a marina, and a boat you can take to an island. A safe island. Or, We’re just looking for somewhere the mutates haven’t killed every last animal. Or, I’m lost. Alone. Scared. Afraid. I’m just waiting for the end.
I had no interest in the killings themselves, but that didn’t make me any less useful. “Give me a minute.”
Dylan nodded and skulked towards the farmhouse, keeping to the shadows. The night had grown colder, with the rain still a light drizzle. Past midnight, I gauged. The wind moved the clouds on overhead, but there were more to replace them, heavier and greyer. There’d be no clear moon tonight.
The outhouse was one-and-a-half stories, similar to the barn. It had been converted from a barn and retained the loft space, though it had a glass skylight nestling between the slate tiles instead of a side-hatch. The guard Dylan mentioned was probably sat near the front door, back to the wall, half-asleep, but listening to the wind and pricking at any unusual sounds. You didn’t make it alive this long without good situational awareness. So I climbed the drainpipe as deftly as I could, and was quickly on the roof. The skylight window was rigged to enable opening from the outside. The room it opened into was a mezzanine storeroom. Ten seconds and I was in, crawling to the trapdoor on all fours. I crawled a little further, towards the edge of the mezzanine that overlooked our guests below, the sound of their quiet breathing filling the space. A portable heater glowed yellow in the corner, casting a modicum of heat; the only light beside the candleflame on the windowsill. The shadows of the lumpy camp beds stretched out across the concrete floor.
Dale walked into view, glancing up. I ducked. Couldn’t have been as quiet as I thought. The light was so poor he almos
t certainly didn’t see me, and anyway, the only way up was the trapdoor, and the pull cord for the steps was missing. After a while I heard him pace the room, doing laps; his heartrate was the quickest in there, but then he was the only one active.
He made a quiet, grunting sound. Seemed to me it had an inquisitive edge to it, rising at the end. “I don’t like the unknown,” he said quietly. Was he talking to me? Or was he in the habit of talking to himself? Humans, I’d discovered, were quite fond of talking to themselves; often and frequent and rarely realising they had an audience.
Dale grunted again, in obvious unease. There was something to be admired here, I realised. I can say it again, over and over, for it never ceases to be untrue in this world we live in. You didn’t live this long without being cautious. Without having some instinct for safety, and danger. There was something prickling Dale’s hackles up, and I wondered briefly if it was something more...
I was here in case of that something more: Father’s contingency plan for the unknown. I existed: therefore I could exist elsewhere. Mother once recounted the story of my birth and said; “There is no-one else like her, you can put money on that, Father.”
“Don’t pay to gamble in this world. You of anyone should know that.”
July 2025
I sat in the shade of the great farmhouse, the sun beating down all around. Seemed like everything I touched was on fire, from the brick to the grass and even the water from the well. I wore a thin white dress and dipped periodically into the makeshift pool, a cleaned out trough filled with water, to cool down. Summers were always a struggle for my hot blood. I could see the water vapours as my skin dried in thirty seconds flat.
We had guests. It didn’t happen very often and I liked to keep my own company whenever possible in those days; shy and still unsure of so much. They were over by the conservatory sitting beneath the umbrella at the round garden table. Mother and Father were with them, and together they were talking about The Outside World. They spoke of finding the seaside and a quiet space next to a quay or a beach, of finding a boat and learning how to fish.
The Risen ( Part 2): The Risen, Part 2 Page 2
