New Title 1

by Millard, Adam

  She pointed herself at the door, and was about to limp toward it when something big and dark walked across the front of the building, casting the room into darkness not once, not twice, but three times, thanks to the trio of windows lining the façade.

  Abigail swallowed (which was also her nickname the first year on the game) and took a dainty step back. Part of her wanted to scream out for help, but something told her that it would be a bad idea, that there was something going on here today a little different to the norm.

  The room went dark once again as the windows were blocked by the giant shape. Abigail whimpered and slapped a hand to her lips to prevent anything more substantial from falling out.

  It’s an elephant, that’s all…a lost elephant…in the middle of the desert…lost…fuck…

  Stumbling along the edge of the bar, Abigail couldn’t take her eyes off the door, and the thing just beyond it. There was a back way out of The Barrel, and she had used it on many occasions, when ashamed punters stole her away in the dead of the night, desperate for a little action, and yet not so desperate for the whole town to know that they had crossed Abigail Sneve’s palm with silver, and various other stuffs (of a much sticker nature).

  Walking backwards, Abigail’s foot came up against something heavy and yet malleable. She tripped, almost went arse over saggy tit, and only just managed to stabilise herself thanks to the overturned table in the gangway.

  “!” she said, which was more than she’d anticipated. Staring up at her from the semi-adhesive floor was a dead something or other. “Reverend?” she whispered. “Is that you?” It certainly looked like him, albeit a lot bigger, and with some sort of wooden stake buried in his forehead. “If you are under duress, knock once for…”

  The door flung open, cutting Abigail off mid-sentence. Sunlight flooded the room. Sand danced along the floorboards on a barely noticeable breeze, and Abigail’s heart leapt up into her mouth, choking her scream.

  She managed a step back, where her feet found something smelly and gooey and not at all nice to tread in, and then she went down like a sack of spuds, hitting the floor with a meaty thud and cracking her head a good one in the process.

  Stars...

  Beautiful stars…

  Her vision filled up with them, but Abigail was abundantly aware that she was no longer alone in the deserted pub. In fact, referring to it as a deserted pub, now, was like calling it a lived-in ghost town.

  Somewhere down by her feet, something snarled. Abigail could feel its warm breath – could smell what it had for breakfast, too – as it hovered above her.

  Stay…very…still…

  In the months following The Event, Abigail Sneve had made a decent living from hijacking refugees as they fled the surrounding towns in search of survivors. She would lie down in the middle of the street and pretend to be dead, and then when people came to help, she would threaten them with anything from a sloppy kiss to full-on sexual intercourse. She’d made quite a lot of money out of it, and had got real good at lying still for extended periods of time.

  But that was a very long time ago. Since then, she’d been infected with more STDs than your average high school sorority. Not a second went by when she wasn’t subconsciously raking at herself, scratching at itches that would never go away, trying to figure out whether it was her warts, her crabs, or her thrush giving her gyp. It was like a ticking timebomb down there, and unfortunately for Abigail Sneve, she would be there when it finally blew.

  “Oh, fuck it!” Abigail said, climbing to her feet and aggressively scrubbing at her crotch. “You want a piece of me? I’m your worst fucking night…” She trailed off, as she realised that she was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the worst nightmare of the thing standing before her.

  If anything, it was hers.

  A morbidly obese grizzly – thirty-plus stone of unbridled terror, with a thick coating of black fur and claws sharper than a wolverine – snarled at her. She thought about snarling back, but quickly realised she was out of her depth.

  “Nice puppy,” she whimpered. “You don’t want to hurt little old Abigail, now, do you?”

  The beast roared, beat at its chest like that mythical ape from Skull Island. In other words, Yes, I do want to hurt little old Abigail, and I’d be ever so grateful if she would shut up and let me do the killin’.

  “Now, now…” Abigail took a step back. Her legs – a pair of veiny stork legs jutting out from a far-too-short-for-her-age skirt – trembled, and she had to fight to remain on her feet. “I’ve got diseases,” she said. “One drop of my blood might be enough to drop you like a pickled cabbage. I know I don’t look like much, but I’m telling you, I’m more polluted than the Thames.”

  The creature, for a moment, looked uncertain. Not because it understood what she was saying (all it heard was eat me, eat me, eat me!) but because it had spotted the fallen creature a few feet away.

  The clergy-monster.

  One of its own.

  Had this woman, this vile looking thing with stringy legs, hair-lip, and a hole in her face where there should have been a second eye, taken down the priest-beast on her own? Was there something special about her? In other words, was she some sort of geriatric ninja? The grizzly-monster had seen no-one else enter the pub, and there didn’t appear to be anyone around now, other than the woman standing in front of it. To be honest, she made the mutant very nervous indeed.

  “Look,” Abigail said, backing away just a little more. She was almost at the window. She could feel the sunlight boring into her neck, its magnificent power augmented by the glass. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but you’re obviously…” What was it? Really? It looked like a fat bear, but there was something about it – something almost human. “You’re obviously pissed off for some reason or other. Hey, we all have bad days.” This was one of hers. “So, why don’t we make a deal, huh? I’m going to leave now. Forget that I ever laid eye on you, and you can go ahead and get out of town before Kellerman and his goons have a chance to mount you and hang you on the big man’s office wall.” One more step back. The creature remained still across the room, huffing and growling as it tried to fathom just what was going on, and what it was going to do next.

  As a young whore, Abigail had found herself backed into many a corner. Punters didn’t like to have their jewellery removed while they slept post-coitus. They often woke up during said theft – she wasn’t the stealthiest of dollymops – and not many of them believed her when she said ‘I was just going to give it a polish, me lovely’.

  This – being backed into a corner by an angry, hulking monster – reminded her of that. The only difference here, though, was that she hadn’t taken anything from the grizzly-beast. But the way it was scrutinizing her, you would have thought she had stripped it of everything it possessed and then slapped it across the fizzog.

  “Okay,” Abigail said. “I’m going to take your silence as an acceptance of my offer. Try not to savage anyone else on your way out of town. I’ll be off, then…” She edged along the wall, slowly, not taking her eyes off the grizzly-beast. “You wouldn’t happen to know what happened to Roy, would you? Little fat fella, stands on the other side of the bar…”

  The grizzly-beast straightened up, roaring once again, beating at its chest hard enough to send coarse, black hairs across the room. And then it dropped to all fours and began bounding toward her.

  Abigail screamed.

  The grizzly-beast roared.

  An unbiased onlooker would have been hard pressed to tell you which was scarier.

  28

  “We need to get back to Lou’s,” Smalling said. “He’s responsible for all this. Maybe he knows how to stop it.”

  “What do you mean, he’s responsible?” Red said. “What, like, he’s some sort of mad scientist? Like Dr Moreau? These things are his genetically-enhanced creations?”

  “He’s leaking titty-milk,” Harkness said, still nursing his face, which was now completely swollen on on
e side, as if he was plagued with abscesses.

  “What?” was all that Red could manage, and she asked it of Smalling, for he seemed to be the most senior of the two men.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Smalling said, slapping a mosquito against his neck. “The guy’s been selling his own titty milk to the ‘haveners, but there must have been something wrong with it.”

  “I’ll say,” Red agreed. “So you think this milk has been turning the townsfolk into savage mutants? Is that what you’re telling me?” It was as good an explanation as any. She’d seen first-hand what these things were, how they went from human to monster in ten seconds flat. If she hadn’t witnessed it with her own two eyes, though, she would have told this pair of slapheaded misfits to go bother someone else.

  “If we can get back to Lou’s, we can at least hunker down until we figure out what to do,” Smalling said. “I mean, most of the town’s food is there anyway. If we’re going to get through this, that store is the best place to be. And I know damn well what he’s got in that basement of his. I sure could use a drink or two right about now.”

  “What about Kellerman?” asked Harkness. “He’s going to be pretty pissed off at us if we don’t get back to the office and start protecting his ass.”

  Red pulled the horse to a halt. “Actually,” she said through gritted teeth. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Your boss turned into one of those things and killed the rest of my crew. I had to put him down.”

  “He drank the milk!” Harkness said, wiping a tear from his eye. “We gave him the milk and he…it’s all our fault.”

  “Now, don’t be like that,” Red said. “You weren’t to know that the milk would turn him into a raging walrus-beast, now, were you?”

  Harkness nodded sorrowfully. Smalling patted him on the back. It was the most tender moment they had ever shared, and one that would not be repeated any time soon.

  “Okay, so let’s get to this store, talk to this Lou character, and see what we can do to put this shit right,” Red said, tapping Mordecai with her heel. The horse cantered along once again. “Sound like a plan?”

  “As good as any,” Smalling said. “Let’s just hope that—”

  Suddenly, a window across the street erupted, and through it came a tiny, skinny woman wearing a short skirt, and what looked like a giant grizzly bear. They hit the sand at the same time, but it was the grizzly-beast that got to its feet first.

  “Fuck!” Smalling said. “Is that Abigail the whore?”

  Harkness squinted through the sunlight. “Nah, she was hairy, but not that hairy.”

  “Not that one,” Smalling said. He jabbed a finger toward the tiny form climbing up from the sand. “Her!”

  “Oh,” Harkness said. “Yeah, that’s Abigail. I’d know that limp anywhere. What’s she doing fighting a giant grizzly?”

  “That’s not a bear,” Red said, climbing down from Mordecai, who shuffled backwards, once again loath to get involved. “It’s one of those things. A milk-mutant. And it’s about to rip that poor woman’s head clean off.”

  Abigail rocked back and forth on unsteady legs, one of which was twisted, broken in several places. A jagged shard of bone jutted out through the flesh. Blood sprayed out, raining down on the sand with a gentle pitter-patter. Mordecai vomited on his own hoof.

  “You’re messing with the wrong hooker!” Abigail said, adopting the only stance her legs would allow – the broken ankle posture. Her foot hung listlessly from the end of her leg as she waved it around, trying to confuse the beast. It hurt like hell, but it was also strangely hypnotic. The grizzly-monster, oddly, couldn’t look away.

  “What’s she playing at?” Harkness said. “She’s going to get herself killed.”

  “She’s doing the broken ankle hypnosis manoeuvre,” Red said. “She’s trying to put the monster to sleep, and I think it’s working. Look!”

  The grizzly-beast followed the dangly, busted foot with its eyes, grunting softly. The more rotations the floppy appendage did, the sleepier the grizzly-beast appeared. It even yawned, a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth.

  “Has this ever worked before?” Smalling asked. “Because I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Shhhhhh,” Red said, mesmerised by the display. “Just keep watching. Any second now, that thing’s going to fall asleep. That whore is a fucking genius.”

  “Yeah, because geniuses usually wind up selling their saggy tits and infected pussies for money,” Harkness said.

  “You’re feeling very sleepy,” Abigail sighed. “Picture yourself floating down a stream. You’re in a large basket. Just you and the water, and the trees either side of you.” She couldn’t believe this was working. Hypnotised by a broken foot; who would have thought it? “The water is still. Ooh, look, there’s a frog. ‘Hello, you big grizzly bastard,’ says the frog. You ignore it, because talking frogs aren’t to be trusted.”

  “Is she talking about frogs?” Smalling said.

  “I think so,” Red replied. “Look, it’s working. That’s all that matters. She’s going to get out of there in one piece.”

  “You’ve got a sword there,” Harkness reminded the bandido. “Pretty sure she would appreciate the help.”

  Red looked at the whore, at the swinging ankle, at the giant grizzly-beast, and said, “No point interfering at this point. If it makes a move for her, I say we take it down. She seems to have it under control.”

  Harkness and Smalling shook their heads in unison.

  “There’s a waterfall ahead,” Abigail continued. She hadn’t been expecting to encounter a waterfall, which just went to show how ridiculously improvised this whole thing was. At the mention of the word ‘waterfall’ the grizzly-beast snorted. Even from twelve feet away, Abigail could smell its breath – a harsh combination of rancid cream and jellied eels. She gagged, but managed to stifle it. “Your basket is not going anywhere near the waterfall. It’s floating toward the riverbank, where a badger walks by smoking a pipe and reading a copy of the Financial Times.” See, totally unrehearsed. Her leg was getting tired; not to mention very sore indeed. The amount of blood she had lost was apparent, thanks to the circle of red sand between her and the monster.

  Just then, something happened. The creature managed to blink itself out of its trance. Maybe it didn’t like badgers, or fiscal newspapers, but whatever it was, the grizzly-beast was back, compos mentis, and judging by its expression, not best pleased at being duped by the old broken ankle hypnosis trick.

  “Shit, she’s fucked now!” Red said, unsheathing the samurai sword.

  “Give her a chance,” Harkness said. “She might beat the thing. She’s a feisty one, is Abigail Sneve.”

  The grizzly-beast leapt forwards, bringing its giant paw around in a wide arc. Abigail shrieked, and somehow continued to shriek as her head flew from her body, somersaulted through the air, and landed at the feet of the gobsmacked onlookers. Smalling kicked the head away, for the blood squirting from the stump was making a right mess of his shoes.

  The grizzly-beast dragged the headless body of the whore to the sand and began to drink from the geysering neck, lapping at the blood as if it was the best thing since blue Slurpees.

  Harkness doubled over and unleashed a torrent of spew toward the sand. A disorientated scorpion looked up at just the wrong time, and instantly drowned in the bile.

  The grizzly-monster had gnawed its way down to the whore’s sagging breasts, but seemed to be keeping away from them, as if the flesh there was rotten. And maybe it was.

  Red, with the sword held tightly in her grasp, said, “I can’t watch this. It’s fucking disgusting.”

  “Are you going to kill it?” Smalling whispered, hoping that she said yes, yes she would kill it, because then there was less chance it would kill them, either now or later.

  “I’m going to try,” said Red. “And I’d appreciate a little help this time. I almost got my ass handed to me back there while you and your buddy viewed from afar.”

  “Now, wa
it a minute…” Smalling said, about to explain that they had not been, as she so delicately put it, viewing from afar, but anticipating the right moment to get involved, when…

  The beast groaned. It slumped back onto its haunches, meat falling from its mouth, blood seeping from the corner of its mouth. As if angered at its apparent ability to stomach anymore, it punched the savaged body aside. It landed face-down in the sand, or would have had it still possessed a face.

  The plaintive whimper that came from the grizzly-beast was not what anyone would expect from such a large and brutal freak, but the day, in general, was an odd one. It seemed nothing was beyond the realm of possibility.

  “Is it injured?” Smalling asked, helping the bilious Harkness to straighten up.

  “It doesn’t look well,” Red said. “Maybe it ate too much.”

  “Please die, please die, please die,” Harkness mumbled, over and over again.

  The grizzly-beast howled at the sun, as if it had been wronged by the giant star. Before it had chance to finish its complaint, though, something popped, and then the creature was flying in every direction, in many pieces. White ichor and black fur fountained up into the sky before raining down again.

  A huge paw flew through the air toward Red, but she saw it coming and managed to swing the sword up, slicing it into two. Both pieces flew past without making contact, but there was a dot of white goo on her shoulder that hadn’t been there a moment ago, which she quickly wiped away with the heel of her hand.

  Smalling and Harkness were over by Mordecai, all three of them trying to decide how quickly they could flee the godforsaken town, before they, too, succumbed to the milky disease, or the madness that now clawed at them like Lovecraftian elders returning from the abyss…

  “So, I think it just exploded,” Red said, perhaps a little more cheerily than she should have. “Just when I thought today couldn’t get any more fucked up, too.” She walked over to where the others stood, silently gazing toward the crater in the sand and the fur and milky goo surrounding it. “Did any of you see that coming?”