The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories)

by Saunders, Craig

  *

  ‘Stupid fuck,” said the kid.

  Frank wondered, right then, if the gun in the kid’s hand was the same revolver that’d fired six shots, or if, while he’d been turned around, the kid had picked up another gun.

  “What do you want?” said Frank. Kind of stalling for time, because he’d given the kid a chance, and now he’d pretty much lost all patience.

  “You think I’m a fucking idiot?”

  Frank didn’t. He didn’t think the kid was an idiot, or stupid. In fact, if anything, he thought the kid was probably very, very, smart indeed.

  “I don’t get you,” said Frank, because it was true and because he was stalling for time, wondering how big a calibre the gun was, and if he could take a shot, and looking hard at the gun, but the barrel, the colour, were the same, and even at ten feet, he couldn't judge the size of the black hole looking at him from the end of the thing.

  “No witnesses.”

  “I didn’t kill the fat guy on the bed, kid. There weren’t any witnesses.”

  “Are you really dim?”

  Frank was beginning to wonder if maybe he was.

  “You killed him?”

  “Duh,” said the kid.

  Duh, thought Frank. I’m the fucking witness.

  “Kid, you’re free. Scot fucking free. You really want to fuck it all now, with the door right there?”

  The kid didn’t answer the question, but carried right on talking, like he had all the time in the world. Which he did, pretty much. Because he had a gun, maybe holding six bullets, or maybe holding none. Frank didn’t know. Frank was also in a corridor with nowhere to run.

  The kid did, in fact, have all the time in the world.

  Smart.

  Smarter than Frank? Frank wasn’t under any illusions. He didn’t think he was smart. He wasn’t an idiot. But he wasn’t a candidate for mensa or NASA or anything.

  Fucking outsmarted by a little kid.

  Bluster? Bum rush? Throw his knife?

  No. Not yet. See it through. See it pan out.

  “I don’t kill kids,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” said the boy. “I kill grown-ups.”

  Kid’s going to shoot me.

  Frank tried to remember if anyone had ever got the drop on him quite so perfectly as this little bastard. He didn’t think anyone ever had. But the boy wasn’t done surprising Frank. Frank was ready, in his soul, for the bullet. But it never came.

  “Fuck you,” said the little kid, and put the barrel of the gun in his mouth.

  “No!’ Frank shouted. He didn’t understand himself, right then. It was him, or the kid.

  He just didn’t want it to be the kid.

  The kid pulled the trigger.

  Turned out, it wasn’t the same gun he’d done Marikova with. He’d taken it off one of the bodies while Frank had been out in the hall. The gun wasn’t a dud. The bullet wasn’t a dud.

  The kid was free.

  *

  Frank burned the whorehouse to the ground. Then, smelling of petrol and smoke and blood, he walked across London town and burned down the house with the purple Buddha.

  When he got home he turned his heating on high, showered for a long time, and then, as the sun rose, sat naked on his couch, reading his book.

  Muller called.

  “Fucked that up, didn’t you?” Muller said.

  “I’m reading,” said Frank. “Shh.”

  “What?”

  “Murakami,” said Frank. And thought, fuck you.

  The End

  This is new material just for this collection. I didn't send it anywhere but here, and I didn't mean to, neither, so there. I wrote it just to make you squirm.

  Maggots

  Numbers become irrelevant when they squirm and shift. As letters on a page run wild for the dyslexic, numbers cavort for those with dyscalculia; the bodies in the pit were innumerable. A vast trench, perhaps as far as a kilometre in distance, a hundred metres in width, and too deep by far, walls too steep, to climb from. Corpses heaped atop corpses, then again and again. On weekdays the bodies were pushed in with bulldozers. A thousand or more fresh dead to feed the earth. On weekends they rested. Perhaps they went home to their families and ate well at a round table with a spouse and children, or maybe drank the work-week away with colleagues or friends on the Friday night. They did the things humans do.

  The people below were no more than maggots. An infestation to be scoured away.

  Adeline Madison wasn't a maggot, no longer. She was a fly, reborn, fed on the flesh of the dead and those things that lived inside. Fed on rot and putrid, fat-dripping flesh, she became a ghoul made by grave hunger.

  Such a grave as this, such an awakening, could do nothing but make a revenant, and one who remembered each slight - the small, like the eating of flesh and fat worms and flies and yes, maggots. The large?

  Her people in a grave a kilometre long, and others like it across the breadth of England.

  *

  In 2035, the seas rose and the rich proved buoyant, like money was a yacht or raft that would always float above the sea or the effluent that bobbed on England's many rivers and canals. The poor, the beggars, the disposed, the shanty-people - they had no such rafts. They waded through the detritus and found what they could. Anything to exist, subsist. They could not be said to live. The poor grew more numerous and resources more sparse. In the fourth decade of the 21st century, high ground was premium. Low-lying land, flat land, anything below the new sea level was abandoned to fate and the people to themselves. They determined their own course. Not the apocalypse many imagined, more like time turned back to a feudal state of Kings and Lords and Knights. As always, the peasant and the peon were heavier in numbers, lighter in strength and power and perhaps will. But peasants grow bolder the hungrier they become. Fear of one death, sometimes, outweighs fear of another and like in those distant times of castles and hovels, they turned their eyes toward the castles of their high and mighty Lords - castles made of hills and mountain up there, way above the waters. The high grounds - few, in such a small isle - were ringed and walled. Fortifications against the rising tides and the poor, so full of hate and hunger.

  Moneyed men and women and their families, political luminaries, the military, financiers, industrialists...these people were important. Farmers and factory workers and call centre telephonists and supermarket checkout men and women and sandwich artists in Subway were not. They were just people, once. The vast majority of humanity, a tide themselves. Worldwide, they numbered billions, and those mere millions who deemed themselves worth saving did not have bullets enough for all.

  *

  Have you seen my father?

  Adeline asked this of the people in the pit often, when she first fell.

  Of course, no one replied. In the first days, she asked aloud, but what point in speaking to the dead? She held those conversations in her head, instead, so that she would not think herself mad. A fortnight passed, and she forgot she had decided against insanity.

  The urge to find someone living, to find some escape, slowly slid away from Adeline. The pit, a kilometre long, became more than a grave. It became a quest without end. She could have easily travelled from one end to the other and back again by clambering over and through the piled bodies, but she did not. She turned her mind away from the possibility of rising again to the simplest tasks, instead, as though this vast tomb was her personal apocalypse, and at some point perhaps she even became possessive of her kingdom. When the bodies fell, shoved over the edge, she feared another living human might fall down among them and steal her rightful crown.

  Your father? In his halls, I should imagine. Have you tried the castle?

  And those bodies fell often - like a giant played two-penny machines at the seaside, and one that always won.

  Thank you, she told the dead man. Have a nice day.

  Sometimes the dead would reply to Adeline. They were rarely as smart as her, and often deluded, like t
his man. She, at least, understood the castle must be lost and no amount of wishful thinking would return the days of Kings and Lords.

  In the first days inside the pit, she was thirsty and drank from the sparse rare pools of rain. She became sick. She got better at finding water, and she had been privileged to know an education, which perhaps made surviving in this place easier...though maybe, she wondered, if it was not made harder because she would not give up. Living wasn't as easy as dying.

  Since the 2040's, schooling was much as it had been - the province of the rich, and those strange cult-churches that sprang up in the wake of the waters. She remembered some, though not all, of her lessons. Biology. Anatomy. The useful things, it turned out, when all you had was biology and anatomy.

  Snippets from books sometimes pushed themselves on her, remembered and horded for such times as this.

  A person without water would die more quickly than a person denied food. The bulk of a healthy body was comprised of something like 60% percent water. Eyes were mostly fluid. Urine was a water balloon and, with no will left to piss, it stayed a while in the freshest dead. Not sterile, the water in those bags hidden in men and women's tummies, but nothing coming out a corpse was going to be especially healthy and Adeline figured being ill was always healthier than being dead.

  Outside the pit, water would seem plentiful, but it was salted, and far from clean now, nearly thirty years since...this.

  But a young girl with a burning will to live could find a way.

  Evaporation, rot, decay - these things drain a body of its nutritional value. But lower down, in the older bodies, fluid leaked and because of the warmth lower down, some of that moisture tried to rise up and join the heavy skies. But this pit had a lid - another layer of the dead...and then, another.

  Adeline remembered clingfilm and tupperware pots with brightly coloured lids in awkward cupboards. This lid was people-coloured. Their clothes were stripped (from those who had them) because material was important and valuable. But the skin on those bodies above collected life saving moisture just as a vast sheet of canvas might.

  *

  It had been maybe twenty years before the notion of democratic rule and Prime Ministers had been supplanted with military rule - almost feudal, definitely barbaric and cruel. To those with the better arms fell leadership and glory and the trappings of power. To the powerful flowed all those little things they wanted and those people they wanted, too.

  Adeline had been the second child born to her father's fourth wife. He had her killed, she seemed to remember, when Adeline had been seven years old. She didn't ask the dead where her mother might be. She wouldn't be in this place. She'd died and been thrown outside the hill (castle, she thought stubbornly, like a girl who imagined herself a princess to a King) and Adeline had been forced to watch the gathering armies tear her mother to pieces and share out the spoils.

  In this wet world people consumed what they could and survived. Them, and now her.

  The castle, of course, fell. The uprising breached the walls and took the high places, here in the Pennines, and anything that remained of use.

  The rich were of no use. They had no more skills than the remnants of humanity left to the seas and the salt, discarded below those walls to starve and kill themselves and fuck and mutilate and change back to barbarian with nothing but spoils and conquest and bestial urges.

  Be wary, Princess, said one of the dead back in those early days. The horde have no honour and no love of your family. You must find a champion. You must...

  Those rough beasts had no Lords. They were a horde, and in that lay their strength and their power - because it was a tide, not a sword. They washed over everything and split and reformed. A Lord could be killed in one stroke, and a King's head could be taken from him just as easily. Yet the horde could bear the loss of one, or a hundred, and their purpose was unity.

  Thank you, she told the corpse back then, for your kind suggestion. May I?

  I have no need of it, your Highness, it replied and she thanked it again and took what she could of the meat. It was still wet. Hard to chew with her weakening teeth, but better than death.

  Maybe it that was even true.

  Adeline crawled on, over the dead, toward the castle she remembered of old, but of course she'd never get there. This pit was hers to rule, and she this dead land's rightful heir.

  Perhaps, she wondered, I will need to raise my own castle, and call my people to my banner.

  *

  The mass exterminations began in 2062. A cleansing, but not ethnic, or religious, or even the by-product of a death toll paid for by military contractors.

  The thing about guns is that they need ammunition.

  The thing about rude forts and palisades built from a shambles of hewn trees and scraps and burned cars and behind high and safe and never leaving? At some point, those besieged require food, and more food, and clean water, and clothing and air and all the things that humankind longed for. shuttered inside their castles as they were.

  Nothing lasts forever. Stores that are not replenished fail. People that do no repopulate dwindle, and guns that run dry are no more use than clubs. Guns were civilised, perhaps...more so than bows and swords and weapon of a medieval age. Hunger and fear were not civil at all, but desperate and reckless. These things needed no language or barter or trade. They took what was needed.

  The rich folk never did understand that they did not stand above everyone else, but on top of them. And when they went away there was nothing beneath but a kilometre long black maw.

  *

  Some weeks later, there were no more of the wealthy to push into the pit. Later still, the pit was forgotten.

  Up above, in the air and rains, the poor who had thought to dig this maggot-riddled trench fought themselves, because some must always strive to be above and few pull their brothers and sisters along with them.

  The pit fell quiet, and still, but for a small girl that moved slowly, and carefully, among them.

  *

  Sores erupted from Princess Adeline's body, and it seemed in her delirium that the pain of them pressing against her skin would come like the storms that blew over her and her raggedy subjects. Those sores around her scalp and her lips split first. She had no clothing to hide the myriad other pustules that covered her body. Sometimes they would leak or ooze, other times they would burst like birthday balloons - pop! She didn't jump. It wasn't loud and sudden and unexpected, and not a rare balloon to weep over. As those sores burst, she imagined she was getting better. Yet when a heavy hard rain passed up above and lightning flashed brightly, until it was lost behind the high dirt walls of her Kingdom, she found the rain made her hotter, not cooler. She wondered if perhaps she might be dying of the self-same plague that had laid her people so low.

  Princess? Please, your people...may I be so bold?

  Of course, Sir Jeffrey, she told the man. At some point, she had named her people -every one of them.

  I fear no champion comes, my lady.

  Adeline bowed her head, and her neck hurt to move. Her body, she saw, in each harsh flash, had become painfully thin, hard-shadowed beneath her stark bones.

  I fear you may be right.

  Then I pray, lady, let us raise you up! A castle in your honour. The castle is lost...but a new...

  For a moment Sir Jeffrey seemed to lose his thoughts, then he remembered and smiled broadly.

  A new throne!

  Adeline granted the good knight a smile, for she had no favour to give.

  I will think on it, Sir. I thank you for your wise counsel.

  Tired just from a simple conversation, Adeline pulled a body over herself, so that all that remained in the thunder and rain was her thinning, lank hair.

  *

  In the morning, beneath a light both distant and sullen, Adeline found her body burning and aching at every joint. Those teeth that remained to her chaffed her gums and the insides of her cheeks. Her lips split, dribbling blood and pus which s
he licked at greedily with her rough, white-speckled tongue.

  What must they think of me?

  How can I ask them, these poor people, worse used than myself, to raise a mighty castle in my name?

  Adeline closed her eyes again, and there was no one there to open them for her. No servant or maid, no serf indentured to her service or any Lord above.

  Will I die here? Deposed? Usurped?

  She thought perhaps the time of Lords was done, and the time of Kings and Queens and royalty might not be far behind. Dimly, she remembered the progression of history.

  Computers, she thought. I heard of those. Engines. Mills. Now? Metal? Farms? Stone tools, perhaps?

  Royalty was no more. How could she, a thing of a past that no longer mattered, hope to persuade her people to build for her, to love her, if she could not aid them at all?

  I can't, she decided.

  She pushed aside the woman who sheltered her.

  My lady?

  Do not stir, handmaiden. I have business alone this day.

  She crawled, carefully, because the carpet below was old and slick with strange oils and pitfalls, until she reached the very edge of her domain and looked up at the immense walls which held her people, and her, subservient to the earth.

  No more, she said.

  No more.

  *

  Worms crawled, sometimes, from the sheer dirt walls. These she ate over the flesh below. The flesh, in turn, rose beneath her. She burned, and ached.

  Day turned to night, night to day. Each night, each morning, her tower rose a little higher.

  Her people whispered, below.

  Perhaps, they said, Kings and Queens might come again.