“There must be quite the community out that way by now,” said Mother. “Everyone who drops by is going west. Nobody wants to go east.”
“The mutates – they don’t swim,” said Father.
“Aye, ain’t that right,” said the taller guest, a red scar down the side of his left cheek.
The shorter man toasted to that. “So we hope.”
There was a woman with them too, but she kept quiet. All three of them were somewhere between twenty or forty years old – the harsh countryside and the wind, the cold rains and the snow, the outside in general, it sheered and bit at skin and took off years. Whatever sights they’d seen had drained any glint of joy from their eyes. They were haggard in face but their clothes were too big, too clean-looking, as if they had recently raided a clothes store and had looted what used to fit them, back before the lack of food had turned them gaunt. They ate what we gave them with gratitude and a straight face.
Aled burned too easy and so liked to spend the hottest part of the day inside, which suited him just fine, wasting the hours away on his computer, playing games. With the sun so strong, we had the power reserves at least. Some guests a summer ago had sunscreen, but it didn’t last long. We all ended the summer looking like beetroots, anyway.
Dylan and Jack; they’d be around somewhere, finishing chores or sharpening their knives for a scavenging run. Funny thing was, sometimes the scavenging came to us.
“I swear I could eat everything you have,” joked the short man. “Nothing but berries and twigs for weeks.”
“Last night was the first night we’ve been able to sleep good for a long while. Between that and the food, you don’t realise how grateful people like us are for your kindness.” The taller man offered the woman a chicken wing which she snapped from his fingers.
“Someone’s hungry,” said Mother.
“A state of permanence,” the tall man said. “Though you seem to be pretty settled here. Lived here a while?”
Father flicked his hand towards the farmhouse. “Been in the family generations. And I aim to keep it that way.”
“Well you’ve done a good job of the fence. Ain’t nothing getting through that.”
“Thanks to my boys. We keep it tight. Not for the lack of trying, fucking things. They ain’t getting us.”
“Must be hard,” said the shorter man. “Children. A daughter especially, in this world.” He looked at me and I shrunk back into the shadows further. “Least your lads look like they can take care of themselves.”
“She can give as good as she gets,” said Mother. “Don’t worry about her.” Had that been a warning? A little… motherly love?
They carried on talking, with the short man casting his eyes my way every now and then. I would have moved inside to my nest before now, to escape the heat, perhaps fill my private bath, but there was a scent that kept me around. Over the food and the meadow and the smell of the farmyard animals was something deeper. A corruption, is the way I came to think of it. Our guests had been around death and not yet washed it away, despite the soak they all took this morning in the barn. There were things that soap couldn’t scrub.
Thing was, it was getting worse.
And Dylan and Jack; I could hear them rustling around in the outhouse now, going through our guests’ bags. I hoped they found something to read, like the Spider-Man comic books the last visitors had. Or anything, really… I was reading quite a lot by this time and just to have something new would have been like hitting the jackpot. For me. The others – they couldn’t give a shit. It was food and weapons they wanted, or something else in the case of my brothers.
The sun inched into view from the farmhouse roof, burning my feet. I wanted to move; not sit there with the dry, sandy ground beneath my hands and elbows, grass worn like the carpets inside the farmhouse on the second floor. So eventually I did, taking a chair to the living room window and sitting behind yellowed nets that smelled of nicotine, watching as Mother and Father kept our guests busy.
The two men talked and gesticulated with their hands quite often, while the woman shifted in her seat and eventually shed what layers she could, stripping down to shorts and a loose fitting T-shirt with long sleeves. After a while, she got up and dunked her body in the trough of water, and around that time my brothers walked by and came inside. Father got up and followed them, and they congregated inside the kitchen.
“So, what are we looking at?” asked Father.
Jack spoke up. “There was a hidden pistol in a secret pocket of one of the rucksacks. Tucked between the lining. Some old World War II thing by the look of it, with only a handful of bullets. Bloodied tactical knives from an army surplus. Dried rations. Old tins. Pills of some kind – big, white tubs. ‘For pain’ written on the side.”
“That could be useful,” said Father.
“Almost-new boots, too. Size ten.” Shoes had become a commodity in the after-world. As my brothers had grown, shoes had become one of our main things to trade for – or scavenge for. Half the time I was barefoot in those days, so it didn’t bother me so much. I’d rather wear no shoes at all than Aled’s old hand-me-downs, any day.
I stopped eavesdropping by then – I’d get my chance at the loot later on – and tucked my head under the netting. The sash window was open a few inches, not a bit of draught coming through from the still, dry air. The woman glanced my way and nodded her head as she climbed from the trough and returned to the table to eat. Mother tried the small talk thing but soon got tired of that and came inside, leaving our guests to themselves. The short man smiled and waved at me. I remember giving one last sniff and returning to my room, where it smelled of springtime; grass, dandelions, meadow cranesbill, yarrow and heath speedwell, instead of corruption. I sat on my bed thinking, or playing, I’m not sure. It seems crazy now that I didn’t give much thought to the things my family were up to, or the areas of grey morality they moved into. But then, how could I have known any better? I had nothing to go on. I was young and undeveloped. And aloof. There was always that. I just didn’t care.
Later that night I watched my brothers from the comfort of my bedroom window. My brothers. No-one else’s. My father. My mother. Whatever we did, we did it together. I watched them sneak into the outer barn (before they remodelled and decorated it a year later), and pushed up on my window, just far enough to crawl out. Something howled down towards the woods, I remember that, thinking perhaps it could smell me as I entered the outside. Perhaps it could. Across the yard, I shimmied up the drainpipe and entered the mezzanine, leaving the purple star-speckled sky behind and entering the musty smell of old hay and even older shadows. Something here smelled foul. Mother hadn’t offered to wash our guests’ clothes, so their bags were probably brimming with all sorts of odours. With the well out-of-bounds for them, they hadn’t done any washing themselves today.
I blinked a few times, adjusting to the depth of the shadows. Saw Jack’s outline down there, confident steps stalking towards the furthest camp bed. Dylan just behind, moving towards the one next to it. The occupants were bulky, lying on their sides, oblivious. I scanned the room for the other camp bed and saw it just below me. The woman lay there, cover off, on her back with her arms above her head. It was such an odd position that I looked closer, and it was then I noticed the handcuffs.
One of the men started to groan loudly, and the other yelped. Jack hung like Death’s shroud over the body, hiding his means of murder, while Dylan was on his knees, knife slicing through neck with smooth cuts. Gurgling filled the room as the blood came and my nostrils flared with the smell of it all… and then the corruption. Rotten eggs and week-old meat. A fresh badger corpse stripped to the bone, marrow of maggots. The woman had kicked off her light blanket. My brothers both turned towards her, and when they reached her, they looked at each other.
“Handcuffs? Good thinking. Didn’t know you had a pair. Where’d you get them?” Dylan whispered.
Jack shook his head. “Wasn’t me.” They both looked at
the dead men, then gave each other a glance and a shrug. I remember wondering, How can you not smell that? I mean, it was pretty bad. Dylan moved to the end of the camp bed and didn’t even stop after he pulled down the woman’s shorts and underwear, causing her to writhe and moan. He got down on his knees and I had my first lessons of the birds and the bees as he dropped his trousers, his penis a black arrow in the din that had me squinting, questioning; my palms sweaty with the nerves of being somewhere I shouldn’t be, heart pounding. The killing had been nothing, but this – the grunting and squeaking of the camp bed springs – I understood that this was something more. It wasn’t quick, like a knife. It was ongoing. And if the woman had been alive she would have been screaming. Instead, she groaned and twisted so ferociously that Dylan was thrown halfway across the room. She swung her arms over her head and stood at the same time, using the camp bed – still attached via the handcuffs – as a weapon. It landed just short of Jack, who had taken a step back, with a metallic clank. Her groaning turned into a shouting hiss. Looking left, then right, she thrust the bed at each of my brothers in turn, and was about to lunge at Jack before I dropped from above and clamped around her shoulders. My surprising weight flattened her. My fingers tore at her throat, becoming wet with blood, but still she moved beneath me. She’d all but turned, motivated now by a singular hunger for flesh unmarred by bloodloss. She pushed at the floor with her increased strength, My brothers gasped and shouted at me to get off her, but they didn’t act. Didn’t get near.
The woman spun, trying to throw me off, teeth clacking together as she gnashed at my forearms. She got me a couple times, the final bite releasing such a rage in me that I raised my legs against the nearby wall and pushed away, clamping my arm around her neck. The momentum twisted her head from her neck, and as I tumbled away, I may or may not have let go at just the right time for the head to hit Dylan squarely in the chest. He screamed as though I’d thrown him a spider, and wiped at his body as though it remained hidden on him. When I landed I rolled a few times and came to a stop on my backside in the middle of the room, panting, face and arms covered in blood.
“You’re bitten,” said Jack.
It was odd; raising my arm and seeing the puncture wound, the circle of teeth, and not feeling worried. “So was she,” I said.
“She’ll turn,” said Dylan, revulsion still writ on his face. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, heavy panting.
“Maybe not,” said Jack. “Ffion; to the cellar. Clean up first if you want.”
I rose and wiped my arm across my salivating mouth. As hungry as I was, the blood was tainted, sour. Mutates would not make for a great meal.
February 2029
Dale, the lookout, remained anxious. He’d moved towards the far corner of the room and leaned against the wall, as though he thought all sound would converge there. Mother and Father used to send me to the corner, only I’d have to face it and think about my terrible actions and their consequences. What nine-year-old wouldn’t go out and get themselves something to eat if they were hungry? It’s not like we never had enough chickens hen-pecking around, and I’d watched Mother closely, learning how to pluck the feathers clean. And now I was the designated plucker, so it had all been practice! Apparently, making my own fires and cooking my own chickens wasn’t fair on everyone else – I had to share. I hated sharing.
Three men who also hated sharing were Dylan, Jack and Aled. I imagined them sitting in the darkness of the kitchen around the table, curtains open with a view of the barn, waiting for my signal. Well, there’d be no need to share tonight.
Dale walked over to the heater and knelt on his haunches before it, rubbing his hands together for warmth.
“All okay, Dale?” whispered one of the women. Her body turned over, head popping out from the covers. Her hair was long and dark, but I suspected in daylight she was blonde. Up in a ponytail, it fell across the pillow.
“Sleep, Bess. All’s fine.”
John, the one who had a cough, stirred and coughed.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Ask me in the morning.” His head turned to face her, half cold and half hot and shadowed eyes.
Bess lay her head back down, pulling the blanket close. “Lie with me, when you’re done.”
Dale gave her a nod and paced back to the window, to peer out between the curtains. I began to wonder if I’d ever get round to giving the signal – and why I even needed to at all. Not that I could complain, I enjoyed surveillance and the feeling of watching and not being watched. It caught the truth of moments. The truth of people. From digging around in noses to masturbation, I’d seen it all from this vantage; and I learned most of what I knew about the outside world this way too. It was like reading a story, in a way; sometimes the conversations were entertaining and full of peril, leaving me with blanks I had to fill in (and I so often wanted to ask our guests to fill them); other times our guests died having taught me that a nearby village was swarming with apexes, or that there was a place to hole up in the basement of a disused petrol station a few miles away. All the while, filling a mind-map of the hills, of Wales, of distant England. Except the west – no-one ever came from the sea.
Since rescuing Dylan and Jack from the girl who turned, no brook to caution had ever been made again. When we killed, we did so as they slept, after I confirmed that all were indeed sleeping. It was cleaner, quieter, less risky. Above all, less of a risk. Mother had almost had a heart attack learning they had let in someone who was slow-turning, and worse, that she had almost lost one of her babies. Knives only… inserted quickly into the brain. Why use ammunition against humans and risk attracting unwanted attention when blades were just as effective? Sound had a way of carrying on the wind up here.
Someone else stirred. The grey-haired woman moaned and sat up on the creaking bed. “What’s got you so agitated, Dale?”
“It’s not time,” he answered, dropping the edge of the curtain.
“Oh, you know how I am in new places. Nerves get the better of me.” She stood and joined him at the window.
“All the same. You should rest.”
“Resting is resting,” she said, giving his cheek a pinch. “After the last few days I’ll take a fence and a roof and a bed.”
Dale gently put an arm around her and led her away from the sleepers. Someone snored to confirm that indeed, at least someone was asleep. “Listen. You hear anything, you wake me, okay?”
“You’ll hear my screams.”
“I’m not talking about screams. I mean the slightest whisper. A scuff like a boot. A click like metal on metal.”
“Deadbolt’s drawn. We’re fine – look around you, it’s like a lodge. You think anyone’d go to this kind of trouble just to off us?”
I couldn’t see them, but Dale’s voice quietened, and I imagined him leaning close to the woman’s ear. “Exactly.” There was a pause, and then he concluded, “I mean it. If anything happens to us, then it’ll all be for nothing.” His head came into view and I watched as he lay back on his own camp bed, above the covers. Lying on his back, he brought his forearm to his forehead and closed his eyes. The woman came back into view herself – as she passed beneath I could smell rain in her hair. She went to warm herself by the light, huddled in woollens. A weird kind of peace settled on the room, filled with a tide of quiet breathing and the slow, disparate convection currents of warmth and cold swapping sides. Chests rose and fell. Time fell away into an abyss that could stretch for thousands of years, or just a few minutes. All I had to do was flick the light switch.
Without much thought, that’s just what I did. I could be so impulsive sometimes – part of me wonders if I thought the grey-haired woman would be easily subdued if still awake. As though curiosity overrode reason and this was a hypothesis I wanted to test out. Father would be angry – I could see his red face now – but what was done was done.
Then a glimmer shone through my darkness. Dark versus dark. I pictured the buried mutate out in the field
and the freshness of its blood, the bones and the flesh (comparatively speaking). I saw the unbeaten look in our guests’ faces, the endurance – not weather nor mutate had knocked them down. They would be worthy opponents.
“What could I do, Father? As soon as I signalled, one of them woke up!” Not that he’d actually get more than just a shrug from me.
I retreated back to the window and peered out. The light was in Mother and Father’s upstairs window, curtain drawn. A candle flickered in the kitchen, too dim to see the table now unoccupied. Rain started again, tapping the windowsill. As the eye of the coming storm, I felt that rain within, slowly filling me with stillness and coldness, only the smallest of twinges in my gut. Hardly a nest of butterflies.
Back at the other end of the mezzanine, I peered down, attention focused on Dale. His arm was still draped across his forehead. In alternate circumstances I imagined he would have taken Bess up on her offer to share her bed, but he was too on edge for that. He was still awake, his breathing not yet softened. Neither was he completely awake though – somewhere between. The grey-haired woman was now seated cross-legged, book in hand. Definitely not on alert. I shook my head, a little confused by my disappointment. Perhaps expecting better.
Then in unison both the woman and Dale moved their heads; Dale lifting his slightly, as though to angle his ear. My brothers would be quiet, through experience – but would they be quiet enough? I shifted my view to a small peephole that allowed me a view of the trapdoor through which my brothers would appear. Three summers back they had built a tunnel from the farmhouse cellar to the outhouse, and designed a discreet trapdoor that could only be opened from below. I could hear their footsteps now, the question was, could our guests? The trapdoor opened inside the walled off lavatory (with a chemical toilet and water pumped from the well), and the light inside was off. However, I spotted the rising trapdoor from the light of the tunnel as it slipped through, followed by the top of a head. Jack had rigged the trapdoor to balance open on a well-oiled lever system that fell into a catch, enabling them to climb out with ease. The space was tight but one moved out of the way of the other as they came through, bells ringing below suddenly; their heartbeats striking hard. Stale cool air wafted my way – a draught that could almost certainly be felt in the main room.
The Risen ( Part 2): The Risen, Part 2 Page 3
