by Rich Hawkins
He envied her for it.
Frank stopped, looked at the road sign.
“Home,” he whispered.
* * *
Frank stepped inside his house. It was like coming home from work. But no one came to greet him and there was no smell of cooking food from the kitchen.
He knew Catherine was gone.
He stood in the hallway, amongst the gathered mementoes and artefacts of their life together, and breathed in slowly. Where had Catherine gone? Had she been taken? His heart kicked fast in the hollow of his chest as he searched the house. The shadows cast by the grey light gave him the feeling he wasn’t alone. He thought he could hear Catherine singing and wondered if it was her ghost returning to where she shared her life with him.
The singing faded away. He sat on the edge of their bed, one hand laid upon the mattress, hoping there would be some residual warmth from her body. He said her name. A whisper. It was good to have her name on his lips; his mouth was a perfect fit for her name. His body felt heavy with adrenaline and disappointment, and his lungs were tight and strained from inhaling smoke. His skin was tender from the heat of the fire. He gained comfort from the familiar surroundings. At least there was still comfort left in the world. He looked through Catherine’s wardrobe, touching her clothes, holding them to his face and thinking about her.
“Where are you?” he asked.
He looked at the photos in the house. Then he emptied the almost-bare cupboards of the few tins of food remaining. He and Catherine were supposed to have gone grocery shopping today. The food in the fridge-freezer was already going bad; an opened pack of ham was growing stuff upon it.
Frank locked the door when he left the house. The possibility of never returning burrowed a gaping hole inside him.
The others were waiting by the road. Joel’s face was full of foolish hope.
Frank shook his head.
* * *
Magnus’s pace quickened and he wheezed out a moist breath. “Debbie. My boys. I’m almost home.”
Frank glanced at Ralph, who was watching Magnus. Ralph took a swig of vodka.
They followed Magnus down the street. Parked cars lined one side of the road. There were a few trees whose forms were perfectly still, as if painted there by an artist’s hand. The breeze had died.
Magnus stopped on the road and faced his house. Tears on his face. He was slightly hunched, his spine becoming rigid and bent. Trembling limbs. Fever and heat. Glistening skin. His eyes were growing larger, becoming piscine.
They gathered beside him. Frank put one hand on his arm, and Magnus jumped, as if woken from a daydream. His smile was heartbreaking and defeated. But he was home. The muscles moved under his face. His shoulders seemed thinner and his neck scrawnier. Veins pressed against the skin like they were trying to escape the prison of his body.
Magnus was steadily collapsing, so slowly that it was impossible to see, so discreet was the plague’s workings within him. He was becoming something else; something that would make the man known as Magnus Heap as simple memory. He would be dust.
Magnus closed his eyes, and they could be seen dancing behind his eyelids, as if he were dreaming.
Then he opened his eyes. “They’re inside the house. They’re at home. They’re waiting for me.”
“How do you know they’re in there?” asked Joel.
Magnus started towards his house. Frank placed one hand on Magnus’s uninjured shoulder, made him turn around.
“Are you going in there alone?”
He nodded. “I have to.”
“Let me come in with you.”
Magnus thought about it.
“For old times’ sake, mate?” said Frank.
Magnus nodded again. He looked at his friends in turn, offered them all a smile that was like a grimace painted onto a corpse.
He turned away and stared at his house.
Frank told Ralph and Joel to stay with Florence. He fell in behind Magnus.
The darkness within the windows watched them. It was oily and dense, full of unseen eyes.
* * *
The garden was a small jungle. Grass left to grow too long. Weeds were blossoming. There was a deckchair on the lawn, tilting to one side, its metal legs rusting and bent. A deflated football with some of its skin missing. Magnus bent down to pick up something from the grass: a green plastic toy soldier. Magnus put it in his pocket.
They continued to the front door. Magnus produced his keys from one pocket, fiddled with them in his hands. The clink of metal; his hands were shaking. He went to stick the key in the door but missed the keyhole. Frank offered to take the keys, but Magnus shook his head.
“No. I have to do this.”
On the second attempt, Magnus unlocked and opened the door. Frank followed him inside.
The hallway. A carpeted floor worn from the tread of feet. A small table with a cordless telephone nestled in its cradle. He picked it up, put it to his ear; the phone was dead. To the left, the stairway and its stained steps leading upstairs. Straight ahead was the kitchen, shrouded in dim shadows. To Frank’s right was the living room. The door was closed.
Magnus headed to the kitchen, treading softly on the carpet and onto the linoleum. Frank followed him, more than willing to let Magnus take the lead.
There was nobody in the kitchen. The sink was brimming with dirty plates, stained mugs and stagnant water. Forks and spoons and knives encrusted with food and dried fluids formed a mound of skeletal metal upon the worktop.
The window above the sink showed them the back garden. Out there were the boys’ bicycles and a trampoline. The window was smeared with grime and dirty fingerprints.
The house stank. When Frank took a deep breath he had to stop himself from gagging.
He grabbed a serrated bread-knife from the rack. Magnus eyed him, then the knife.
“Are you gonna kill my family with that?”
“I never said that. Just in case something happens. We don’t know what’s in here with us.”
“My family are here.”
“Where are they?”
Magnus turned and nodded back the way they had come. “They’re in the living room.”
When Magnus stepped forwards, Frank retreated from him.
* * *
The Magnus Heap of old was fading. He was becoming something else. He was changing.
I’ll become a beautiful butterfly, he thought, and almost laughed.
He could hear Debbie’s voice inside his head. No words, just a gentle humming. She sounded happy. But she hadn’t been happy for a long, long time. Not since before the twins were born.
Magnus placed his right hand on the door handle, turned it slowly and pushed with his leading arm. Frank didn’t move from the doorway. Magnus stepped into the room.
The sickly-sweet stench of blood and shit hit Magnus.
The room was dimly-lit. The curtains were pulled shut. Shapes and suggestions lurking and unmoving. The sofa and the two armchairs had been moved against the walls, clearing the centre of the room. The television was lying on its face, dead and useless and smashed. The natural light from the hallway brought a dull definition to the room. Magnus’s eyes adjusted. There were soft things under his feet. Damp raggedy strips of newspaper and a mulch of mushy organic matter covered the floor. One of the boys’ shoes. There were small bones amongst the litter and waste. Animal bones gnawed clean by little teeth to a gleaming shine.
Something moved on the far side of the room. He didn’t react. Frank was at Magnus’s shoulder, his breathing shallow and tense.
Magnus’s family was waiting for him.
His sons, Grant and Adam, were crawling around in the filth, naked and covered in offal and a pale oily substance. They were tragically thin. They moved like animals. Their little faces were like dolls’ faces, puffy and pale and tinged with a red bloom like rouge upon their cheeks. Their eyes shone. Their mouths shifted open, displaying their small teeth, which were like ivory. The boys coiled tog
ether, sniffing the air, and they swung their heads towards Magnus and Frank.
Were they grinning?
They hissed, and eyed Frank, and made to move towards him, their fingers extended into sharp hooks, their mouths curled back to show the teeth that would sink into his body and rip bits away.
Magnus stepped in front of Frank, held out his hands.
The boys halted, hissing. They began to mewl and whimper. They looked at Magnus, tilting their heads to one side. They approached him cautiously, sniffing at him, clicking sounds coming from their throats.
“It’s okay, boys,” Magnus said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The boys sniffed at Magnus’s outstretched hands, licking his fingers tentatively, almost affectionately. It tickled. Magnus felt such a swelling of warmth and love for his boys that he nearly burst into tears. He looked down at them and smiled.
His boys looked up at him. Then they darted away from him, feet scrabbling and squelching on the waste-filled floor.
Behind them was their mother.
Magnus felt tears sting his eyes.
The boys scampered towards Debbie. Her clothes had been removed. She was a writhing mass of blubber and white skin. Her scalp was bare apart from a few wisps of hair. Her neck was a trunk of fat. Her wedding ring had vanished into blubbery fingers, of which the nails were long and dirty. Her legs were covered in lesions and sores and blisters that wept fluid. She was lying on her left side, facing the room, cooing softly as the boys knelt by her side making small yipping noises and patting their excited hands on the floor.
Debbie’s breasts had sagged and drooped until they resembled empty water bladders. Punctured flaps of skin without a use. Her nipples were sore and red, blooming into leaking pustules. Her face was as he remembered it, save for the dried blood and scraps of meat around her mouth and down her chin. Around her were the scattered remains of four, maybe five, children; their bones stripped clean, yellow-white, and discarded. Leftovers. Mixed in with them were more animal bones and tufts of fur.
It was a nest.
Debbie had grown six large udders, which were hanging from her torso, pale and wrinkled above the matted, tangled patch of pubic hair. Her teets were weeping some sort of milk from the bloated tips. Tips that would slip into a mouth quite easily. The milk looked greasy, like warm ejaculate.
Magnus watched as his boys lowered their heads and started to feed from her udders. They were eager, biting down with their jaws hard enough to make Debbie whimper and moan. She quietened as the boys began to suck. They squirmed and mewled as they fed from their mother, their shrivelled genitals shivering and their mouths working quickly, their tongues lapping at any milk that missed their mouths. They gripped their mother’s grub-like body.
Magnus felt their slowly-fading hunger and Debbie’s maternal satisfaction. He heard her heartbeat, its slow rhythm; the blood swimming through her veins. He felt the swell and rush of her insides adapting to the plague. But she was still Debbie. She was still his wife. And she still loved him.
“I’m sorry for everything,” Magnus whispered.
This was his family. He felt proud. He felt humbled.
This was his home.
Magnus couldn’t help smiling.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Magnus and Frank returned outside.
“I’m staying here,” said Magnus.
The others looked at him. Frank was the only one who didn’t look stunned. There was only acceptance in his eyes.
Joel looked hurt. “You can’t leave us. We stay together. There might be a cure. We can get you help.”
“I’m too far gone,” Magnus said. “You can see that for yourselves. Look at me.” He could feel the plague needling his insides, changing his chemistry and his thoughts.
“You don’t know that,” said Joel.
“There’s not enough time, even if there is a cure. I’m changing. I’ll be a danger to you. I’m contagious. I can feel it pulling at me now. I can feel it in my blood and in my brain.”
Joel shook his head.
“I can smell everything under your skin,” said Magnus. For a second, all he wanted to do was slaughter his friends and the little girl with them. He wanted to open her up and see what she was made of. He had known Frank, Ralph and Joel since childhood, since they were able to wipe their own arses, but when he looked into their faces he felt an urge to kill them and drag their bodies back to the house so his family wouldn’t go hungry.
There was an itching sensation behind his eyes. He looked down at his hands and they looked like a stranger’s. His skin was damp and glistening, but not with sweat. His body throbbed. His teeth felt too big for his mouth. There was a growing darkness in his chest and it was spreading outwards, and when it reached his extremities and his brain, he would finally succumb and be transformed.
He looked at his friends and saw their insides; saw their beating hearts and their digestive systems working. He saw their blood.
“So this is it, then?” said Joel. “That’s it? Just like that?”
“Yes.” Magnus felt a twinge of hot pain across his back.
“We’ve come all this way, and that’s it. You’re done?”
“Yes, mate.”
“This is madness.”
“Magnus is right,” said Frank. Joel shot him a glare. “And it’s his choice. His family is in there, waiting for him. It’s too late for a cure.”
Magnus nodded.
“Frank,” said Joel, “you can’t be serious.”
“Frank’s right,” said Ralph. “It’s Magnus’s choice. He doesn’t have long left. If he stayed with us, we’d have to kill him eventually.”
Joel was shaking his head. “No, no, no.”
Magnus smiled ruefully and shrugged. “I guess this is goodbye, lads. I’ll forgive you if you don’t want to shake hands with me.”
The others stayed where they were. Joel was crying silently. Ralph was staring at Magnus. Florence offered Magnus a little smile and it comforted him.
“The infected are everywhere,” Magnus said. “There aren’t many places left to run to. The light is fading, lads. Time is running out. We are dying out.”
The thought of never seeing his mates again made his chest ache. Magnus wiped his mouth.
“See ya, mate,” said Ralph. “Sorry it had to end like this.”
“Me too.”
Joel wiped his eyes. “Bye, Magnus.”
Frank said, “Go and be with your family, mate. Take care of them. Maybe we’ll all cross paths again one day.”
“I hope not,” said Magnus. “It wouldn’t end well for any of us.” He wiped his eyes. “I remember when we were kids and we used to spend our summer holidays playing football and cricket, building tree houses and bases in the woods, pretending we were in the army. I never thought those days would end. I thought they would last forever. Maybe our younger selves are still doing that right now, in another time. I wish we could go back there.”
“Same here,” said Frank. Ralph and Joel nodded.
“Now there is nothing to say, I suppose.”
“We won’t forget you, mate,” said Frank.
“I hope I don’t forget you lot either.”
Thunder rumbled far away.
“I hope you find your families, lads,” Magnus said. “Frank, I hope you find Catherine. Joel, I hope you find Anya. I hope you all get to safety. I hope you all survive.”
The others nodded.
“Cheers, lads,” Magnus said. “Thanks for everything.”
He limped back to the house. By the time he walked inside and joined with his family, the old Magnus Heap was gone and a new one was born.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
“So what do we do now?” asked Joel. “Where do we go?” He wrapped his arms around his chest.
Ralph swigged vodka. He swallowed then grimaced. “Fuck knows.”
Frank said, “We could go back to my house.”
“And then what?” Joel said.
&n
bsp; “We figure something out.”
“Anya and Catherine could be dead, Magnus is gone, and you want to figure something out?”
“You have a better suggestion?”
“We have to find help.”
“Find help where?”
“I don’t know. There might be other survivors somewhere. Maybe the army will find us.”
Ralph grunted. “Keep on dreaming, Joel.”
“Shut up, Ralph,” said Joel. “You’re drunk.”
Ralph grinned and it wasn’t nice. “Not yet. But I plan to be.”
“This isn’t helping,” said Frank. “We need to decide what to do next.”
Ralph said, “Might as well get drunk while we still can.”
Frank ignored him. He was still reeling from the loss of Magnus. He couldn’t believe he’d never see Magnus again.
Magnus was gone.
Frank missed him already; missed his sniffles and the way he chewed the inside of his mouth. Frank hoped Magnus was happy with his family in his new existence.
A great emptiness bloomed inside Frank when he thought of Catherine. He could not give up hope of finding her alive. If he did that he might as well sit down on the road and wait for something hungry to find him.
“We’re fucked,” said Joel. “What are we going to do? Are we going to just wander around the village all day? What if there’re infected still around?”
“Calm down,” said Frank.
“We’re fucked.”
“Stop it.”
“Have a drink, lads,” Ralph said.
They both ignored him. They were staring down the road. So was Florence.
“Don’t want a drink?” said Ralph. “Fair enough. More for me.”
Florence pointed ahead of them.
There were people gathering down the road, emerging from passageways, doorways and gardens, twitching and snarling. Some of them were transformed beyond recognition. Some of them Frank did recognise. Some of them were his neighbours. His friends. People he once passed on the street. People he used to wave at as he drove by in his car on the way to work every morning. Those he used to get drunk with in the pub, enjoying a pint and a laugh and watching the football. He saw Jim Bottomley and his wife Emma, both growling through stained mouths, their clothes torn and dirty. He saw the Field brothers, Pete, Tom and Addy, snarling at one another over a severed arm that Tom was trying to eat. He saw Josh Fade, Luke Oliver, Tom Brister, AJ Carvell, Rich Pippin and Josh Wilkinson. They were deformed and pale, glistening skin and growing tumours on their shivering bodies. Josh Fade was wearing a white dressing gown tainted with yellow stains; it opened to reveal his pyjamas bulging with wet growths and tendrils. Tom Brister was on all fours, his jaws swollen and dripping, his fingers raking the road. They were staring at Frank and the others with a naked hunger. The last time he had seen Luke Oliver was the Sunday before last, when he’d gone to the local shop to buy a newspaper and had spoken to him outside; now Luke was crouching by a car gnawing on his own fingers. He saw Rosie Milton, a young girl who lived four doors down from his house and had been friends with Emily. She was shaking with hunger, her eyes drilling into his face. Her neck had extended, swelling with fluids and gases, and scythe-like appendages twitched and jabbed from her shoulders.
