by Rich Hawkins
“Hurry up!” Ralph said.
A soft thump upstairs.
“Hurry up!”
The attic’s occupants were on the landing. Shadows moved, reaching and long-limbed.
Ralph helped remove the Welsh dresser from the front door. It crashed onto the floor.
Magnus opened the door.
Cold air rushed into the house.
Joel and Ralph looked up the stairway.
Two figures stared back at them. A man and a woman. They were all limbs and bruises. Wounds like mouths on their bodies. Wet tumours and weeping cysts on their skin. Eyes shining in the torchlight.
“The boy’s parents,” Magnus said. “They were nesting in a corner of the attic.”
The monsters began to descend the stairs. Their movements were avian-like and twitchy, their eyes set upon the men with ravenous intensity. A hunger. A need. A desperate craving for something unspeakable. Their skin glistened wet and milky.
Ralph pushed Joel out the doorway. Magnus was trying to start the car.
“We’ve left our bags in the house!” Joel said.
“You want to go back in and get them?” Ralph growled. He shut the front door behind him.
From the house, the two creatures shrieked and wailed for them to stay, to come back inside.
Joel reached the car, jumped onto the backseat. He banged his head on the door frame. Ralph sat in the front passenger seat. He shut his door. Locked it.
“We have to leave this place,” said Ralph.
“What about Frank?” said Joel.
“He’s dead, for all we know.”
“We can’t leave him here. We could go back to where we left the woman.”
Ralph turned his head to stare at Joel. “We haven’t got time. He made his choice. Feel free to get out and start looking for him.”
Joel looked away, said nothing.
Ralph turned back and wished he hadn’t.
From all around them, out of the shadows and the dark gardens, pale mewling things rose from their hiding places and emerged into the street. They were people, but not people. Not anymore.
“Fuck me,” said Ralph. “This is nuts.”
Magnus was still trying to start the car. When he turned the key in the ignition, the engine only responded with a desperate chugging sound.
“Start, you bastard!” Magnus cried. He kept glancing up at the creatures approaching the car.
“Be careful,” said Joel. “You’ll flood the engine.”
“Hurry up!” Ralph said, watching skittering shapes moving across the street. “Come on!”
“I’m trying,” he said, and his voice broke. “I’m trying…”
“Try harder.”
Magnus banged his hand against the steering wheel; the horn blared. He exhaled, twisted the key so that the dashboard went dark. He waited, his eyes flicking towards the advancing things.
“What’re you doing?” said Ralph. “Start the fucking car!” He checked the rear-view mirror and saw the front door of the house open. The boy’s parents stepped outside towards the car.
Joel was whimpering.
“Just wait,” said Magnus.
“If you don’t start the car I’ll stick this knife up your arse,” said Ralph.
Magnus ignored him; he turned the key and the dashboard lights turned on. “Here goes…”
The parents clawed at the rear windscreen, attempting to gain entry. White tortured faces peered in at Joel and he screamed.
Magnus turned the key towards the engine; it spluttered, almost giving Ralph a coronary, but then growled and revved as Magnus pumped the accelerator. Magnus whooped, punched the air.
From the CD player recessed in the dashboard, Johnny Cash began to sing about walking the line.
Magnus let out a delirious laugh.
“Put your foot down,” said Ralph.
Magnus nodded. He looked at the swarm of villagers filling the street, released the parking brake, and gunned the engine.
With a screech of tyres the car bolted down the driveway, knocking aside a man whose face was drooping on one side and knotted with swollen blisters. His left arm was a glistening appendage of coiling sinew and spikes erupting from epidermal layers.
Magnus turned onto the road. The villagers screamed to the sky; some crouched and stared, eyes shining and gleaming. Some grinned at the car as it rushed past them. Men, women, and children. Some were holding hands; others didn’t even have hands. Impossible limbs grew and retracted from twitching bodies. Bloated abdomens glistened in the headlights. Other forms reached out to the car, as if begging for help. These poor creatures staggered on emaciated legs wasted down to bone. Groans and screams echoed from around the street.
Joel was shivering on the backseat. Magnus was staring straight ahead, ignoring the monstrosities.
“Fucking hell,” said Ralph. “What happened to everyone? What are they?”
Neither Joel nor Magnus answered. And when Ralph thought about it, he didn’t want an answer. He dropped his knife in the footwell and held his face in his hands. The edges of his mind weakened and buckled. His body wanted to shut down and hibernate. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be at home, safe in bed, snacking on Hula Hoops and Jaffa Cakes.
“Jesus Christ,” Joel was muttering. “Jesus Christ…”
Magnus glanced at Ralph, daring to look away from the road. “Do you really think Frank is dead? Do you think those things killed him?”
“Maybe they ate him,” Joel whispered.
Ralph looked down the road. There were still ragged figures emerging from the houses and stalking towards the road. There were bodies on the lawns. He looked down at the pavement and saw bones scattered upon it.
The car passed out of the village, down the long, straight road.
When they’d travelled just less than a mile, a sudden light bloomed on the road ahead. Headlights.
Magnus stopped the car. Gripped the steering wheel.
“Who is that?” asked Joel, as if the others knew.
The light approached. The sound of an engine. Heavy and chugging. A large vehicle. Some type of truck.
It stopped twenty yards from them.
Several figures stepped into the light. Human. Normal, Ralph thought, but he had been fooled already today. They moved towards the car. Ralph stiffened in his seat. He had the urge to flee.
“Soldiers,” Ralph muttered, finding his voice, although it sounded pathetic.
“We’re saved,” said Joel.
Ralph eyed the gas mask-clad soldier moving to his side of the car. The barrel of an assault rifle centred upon him; his bowels became liquid. He stared into the soldier’s black, apathetic visage.
“I hope so, mate. I really hope so.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Frank was hiding in a garden outside a darkened house. His thighs throbbed and his calves ached. He was shivering. His heart was a manic, escalating slab of muscle. He held the crowbar tight to his chest, but it gave him no comfort, and the cold grass under his feet sucked all of the warmth from his body. He didn’t want those things to catch him. He didn’t want to die screaming. No person should die screaming.
Far off, over on the next street maybe, something screamed like a pig caught in a steel trap. He flinched, tried not to imagine what had birthed the sound. Exhaustion pulled at his body. He waited for what seemed like slow hours of torture.
He remembered the sights he had seen on his way here, running for his life through the empty streets of this dead village: human remains scattered on a road; stomachs opened up and steaming in the cold air; a crying man kneeling on a pavement, his body juddering as if caught in a seizure, bones snapping as arms and legs were bent into unnatural angles. The man had screamed when his spine protruded through the back of his shirt like an emerging dorsal fin; a tall, gangly-limbed apparition moving from house to house, peering through the windows.
A terrible, bulbous-eyed face had stared at him from the shadows of an overturned
car and beckoned him inside with a long, bone-white finger.
Frank had managed to escape his pursuers, weaving down alleyways and side-streets without regard for what might have lurked within them, but the maniacs were still hunting him, wherever they were right now. Maybe they had found another unfortunate to hunt. Maybe they had forgotten about him.
Maybe they were waiting for him to emerge from his hiding place.
He gritted his teeth as nausea bloomed in his gut. He tensed his stomach muscles, fought the urge to vomit. He could still smell the corrupted stink of his pursuers; it was everywhere. They had marked the village, this ground, as their own.
Frank listened for any slight whisper or hush of movement from nearby. He dared to move his arms to restore some circulation.
There were clicking sounds out on the street. Light footfalls. The scuff of shoes upon tarmac. A low, rattling growl from a half-man’s mouth.
Frank stiffened, bunching up his body into a tight ball.
The cloud cover shifted to reveal the pallid half-moon. The glimmer of stars. The galaxy revealing itself. Silver light and metallic gleam.
The road adjacent to the garden was crawling with near-human shapes.
Could they smell him? Could they hear his heartbeat?
His eyes had adapted to the dark, and now with the added moonlight he could observe the creatures in more detail than was good for him. Some of them were naked, and this lack of inhibition showed him the black spines that had erupted from their bodies and colonised their flesh. Some were crouching and sniffing at the road, trying to pick up his scent. Men and women. No children, thankfully. Pale figures that reflected the starlight. Others skittered and moaned; one of them raised its face to the sky and wailed. The sound of claws with nothing to rip or shred.
One of the creatures was gibbering to itself; Frank thought he could discern words amongst the nonsense, but nothing that made any sense.
Then they moved away down the street.
What were they? Had there been a radioactive or toxic leak somewhere nearby and the people were mutated?
Frank waited until they were long gone. He stood and looked out onto the street, took a few steps towards the road then stopped, listened. Muffled thumps and booms in the distance, like the noises he had heard earlier when he’d cowered underneath the van. Sounded like fireworks. They resonated under his feet. He thought he saw a white flash in the sky to the north but he might have imagined it. He was quite sure it was coming from the west, but the houses blocked every horizon. He was in the centre of the village. He had to get back to Ralph, Magnus and Joel.
Frank slipped through the open gateway and onto the pavement. Pools of stinking fluid on the road. A smell like vinegar and eggs. Spoor or urine. Maybe something else. He thought of the pickled eggs Catherine would eat when she was drunk. They always made her breath smell, but he would gladly give her a lingering kiss now, just to be away from this place.
Something moved behind him. He pivoted, raising the crowbar.
A fox emerged from one of the gardens down the street. It saw Frank, but it wasn’t worried about him; there were deadlier predators on the streets tonight.
Frank watched the fox scamper across the road and into another garden.
“Good luck, mate,” Frank said, and he meant it.
He went back the way he had come, back to his mates. He crept along for a few minutes, scanning the gardens and houses brimming with ocean-floor darkness. His imagination told him of dangers in every hush of the breeze and listless shadow draped over the ground. He considered entering one of the many houses around him, but something told him there would be things inside their silent dark rooms waiting for someone like him. No, he would keep walking. He contemplated running, but realised he would make too much noise with the pounding of his shoes on the road.
Dead streetlights. Empty driveways. He saw a woman’s body slumped across a car bonnet; the dark stains that had leaked from her and pooled in clotted slicks. She had been opened up and emptied out. He kept moving. He walked past something that looked like moulted skin, sloughed off by some unknown thing. He prodded it with a foot, disgusted and intrigued.
He heard a car engine from the next street. He stopped. Brakes shrieking. Tyres scraping on the road. The crash of metal against something heavier and immovable. A scream cleaved the night.
Frank ran towards the scream, resisting the temptation to run the other way. He rounded the corner and stopped. He panted, his shoulders moving with each breath he gave and took.
A car had crashed into a stone wall outside a house. People were inside the car. There was an excited screech from nearby. He swallowed to wet his throat.
There was a man in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel. A woman was in the front passenger seat, crying between her screams. A girl sat in the back, stunned and reeling.
An old man pulled open the driver’s door and dragged out the man. The woman screamed again, made a futile effort to stop him being pulled outside.
The old man laid out the driver and knelt over him.
“Hey,” Frank shouted.
The old man turned. His body was misshapen, his bones jutting from under his clothes. He was shaking like an addict. Frank halted.
The old man’s face was blank, almost moronic. Sunken eyes. He turned back to the unconscious man and bent his head towards the man’s face. There was a wet scraping sound. He looked like he was kissing the man, his back arching as he bobbed his head to batten onto the younger man’s face.
The woman screamed when she saw what the old man was doing.
Frank stumbled over to the old man and hit him on the back with the crowbar. The old man came free from his victim with a moist rip and turned, a wheezing rattle coming from his open mouth. He had no teeth. On his neck, flaps of skin parted bloodlessly to reveal a nest of black tendrils no longer and thicker than shoelaces. The tendrils stretched and lunged at the air, wanting to envelop Frank’s face and squirm into his mouth. Frank smashed the old man’s face with the crowbar; he collapsed, as did his skull. The tendrils danced erratically, even as the old man stopped moving, his face a desiccated mask. His eyes had caved in and his nose was all bent cartilage and crumbling bone.
The tendrils flopped wetly onto the old man’s chest, like something washed up on a beach. Frank stepped away, repulsed.
The woman was still screaming. The girl stared at Frank, her palm pressed against the window.
Frank ran to the car, opened the back door. “Come on, get out.”
“That was Mr. Stewart,” she said. She had red hair, and he had a sudden image of another girl with red hair. A girl he loved.
On the other side of the car, two men had opened the woman’s door and grabbed her. There was something wrong with the men’s faces and their hands. They ripped the woman from her seat just as Frank pulled the girl from the car. She didn’t fight him. She only looked back at the car and called for her mother.
The woman screamed. The men piled upon her. The sounds of paper being torn, but it wasn’t paper. She stopped screaming.
“We can’t help her,” Frank told the girl as he led her away. “I’m sorry.”
Frank looked down at the man, whose mouth was too wide and bloody for him to be alive. His eyes were open. He must have awoken when the tendrils invaded him. His teeth were stained red and his tongue was gone. The flesh on his cheeks had been gnawed away. His throat was a red wound.
The stink of vinegar and rotten eggs.
“That’s my dad.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is he dead?”
Frank didn’t answer. He was looking down the road. A group of people were running towards them. He couldn’t see them clearly. He didn’t want to see them clearly. He looked the way the car had come and saw the church tower looming above the houses a few hundred yards away. He remembered the church bells had rung earlier. Maybe someone was there.
The girl was crying.
Frank pick
ed her up and ran down the road. A loose-faced woman wearing a stained cotton nightdress stepped from the darkness. The girl yelped. The woman’s arms trembled and jerked. She stared at the ground and vanished back into the shadows.
He kept running, getting closer to the church; the spired tower tall and dark.
The main gates appeared ahead of them.
Things that were once people screamed and cried behind them. Getting closer.
Frank could feel the girl’s small body shaking against him.
They reached the gates. A row of sentinel-like trees around the graveyard’s periphery, deep shadows beneath them. Frank pushed through the gates onto the stone pathway winding through the graveyard. In the pale moonlight he could make out gravestones jutting from the ground and a war memorial to the men who’d died in both World Wars. The church was darker than the sky. There was light inside, visible through the stained-glass windows. Hope flared inside him.
“We’re nearly there,” Frank whispered.
He stopped.
There were people in the graveyard, mewling and crying to one another amongst the graves. The church’s large, arched double-doors were thirty yards away. They could make it, but what if the doors were locked?
Shapes moved like mourners trying to find the right grave at which to grieve. Frank looked towards the stone pathway and saw a figure on its hands and knees, crawling away from the church. A woman. He would have to get past her.
Frank moved. He kept some distance between them and the woman. She was making a clicking sound in her throat.
They reached the church doors. Frank twisted the ring-shaped metal handle. There was movement to his right; a teenage boy stepped from a pool of shadow into the moonlight. His shoulders were slumped and narrow. His face was a riot of wounds and writhing barbs. Frank opened the door and rushed inside the church. The door shut loudly, but he was just relieved to be inside. They found themselves in a small vestibule.
