by David Moody
Eddie dragged the knife sideways through skin and meat until it sheared something that felt like rubber. Blood sprayed across Eddie’s arms and shoulders. His gloves were covered. He withdrew the knife then brought it down again. And he stabbed at the boy’s throat until the hands weakened on Eddie’s clothes, and he turned away and closed his eyes, letting go as the boy fell down, gurgling in his throat.
Eddie stumbled away and fell to one knee, vomiting onto the grass. He spat bile and tears streamed from his eyes. Hot feeling of panic as he checked his face for infected blood. His shoulders were dripping. He’d left the knife in the boy’s throat. Then he rose and stood with his chest hitching and prayed for his heart to slow. He waited until his vision straightened and the ground stopped moving before he took the hammer and smashed their heads in and left their bodies beside the ravaged grave, the rain falling softly upon them.
When he turned away to return to the house he looked across the fields and his heart sank into despair when he saw dozens of infected emerge from the trees and black thickets.
‘Oh God. Oh dear God.’
◆◆◆
As soon as Eddie got inside the house he pulled off his coat and gloves and dumped them in a wicker basket once used for laundry in that long-ago time. Then he made sure all of the curtains were drawn. He double-checked the bolts on the doors and told Sam to stay away from the windows. They pushed the dining table against the front door and when Eddie saw Sam crying, he put his arms around him and said he was very brave and it’d be alright in the end.
‘Pack all the food and water you can. As much as you can.’
‘Are we leaving?’
‘Just in case.’
‘The infected are coming, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. But we’ll be okay. You have to be brave.’
Sam nodded, his face wet and loose, shoulders juddering with each breath through his little mouth. Eddie tried to smile for the boy. Guilt nestled in his throat, his stomach, his chest, and behind his eyes. It manifested in the shaking of his hands. He looked down at the boy. His kin. His last reason and hope.
How much easier would it be to simply use the pistol on Sam then himself?
Could I do it?
Would my heart see it through?
◆◆◆
While Sam packed food and water, Eddie went to Yost’s room where he found him huddled in the corner of the bed, staring at the photo of the woman.
Eddie closed the door behind him. He stopped short of the bed and stood with the pistol in his hand. Yost looked up from the photo. A distant look in his eyes. The thin line of his mouth within his stained beard.
‘There’s a flock of infected heading this way,’ Eddie said.
Yost nodded. Picked at a patch of skin beneath one bloodshot eye.
Eddie stepped towards the bed. ‘Were they tracking you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’
‘I think I know why more infected have begun appearing in the area. I think I know what’s happening.’ Now Yost was staring at his hands. He blinked his damp eyes. ‘It’s because of me; what’s inside me.’
Eddie stepped back. ‘What’s inside you?’
‘Something is wrong with me.’
‘Explain,’ Eddie said.
Yost looked at him. Such sorrow in his eyes. All the pain of the world. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, Eddie. They won’t leave me alone. I can hear their thoughts and see their memories. In my dreams I see who they used to be; the people they once were, before they became monsters.’
‘How is that possible?’ asked Eddie. ‘That’s not possible.’
Yost made a sound that was almost a laugh. But he didn’t smile. ‘I was bitten.’
Eddie raised the pistol. ‘You’re infected.’
Yost glanced at the gun. ‘In a way.’
‘This doesn’t make sense. If you’re infected, why aren’t you like the others? Why haven’t you tried to kill me and Sam?’
‘I would never do that, Eddie. I have a conscience and I have no wish to harm, infect or eat you. I’m still a person.’
‘Are you infectious?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How is this possible?’
Yost shook his head. ‘I’m still a person, Eddie.’
‘When were you bitten?’
‘Five months ago. I was searching a house near Oxford, and this woman came at me from out of a bedroom.’ He held out his left arm and pulled down the sleeve of his fleece. Eddie kept the pistol up. On the inside of Yost’s forearm, a healed-over bite mark. Scar tissue. ‘I killed her, but she got me good. I was so scared. I thought it was game over. For days I was puking my guts up and passing out, but then it all passed and I woke up and I felt fine and I wasn’t a monster. How amazing is that? I thought I was immune; some kind of genetic fluke. But then I noticed that wherever I went, the infected seemed to be drawn to me. They wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to home in on me. And I saw their thoughts and their dreams and I knew their old names. Flashbulb images of their old lives. I wondered if they knew that I could see these things and wanted me to tell them who they once were, because they’d forgotten when they’d become infected. Who knows?’
Yost rolled his sleeve down. Despondent. Shivering.
‘What the fuck are you?’ Eddie said.
Yost smiled a sad smile and wiped his eyes. ‘I don’t know what I am. There’s no purpose or design. I think I’m stuck halfway between human and monster. Can you help me, Eddie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’
Eddie shot him in the chest.
Yost slumped against the wall and his hands fell to his sides. He coughed. Made a sound like there was too much fluid in his throat. He looked at Eddie then his head dropped to his chest and the last breath passed from him like a whisper.
Eddie lowered the pistol. His ears rang. He looked at Yost and then screwed his eyes up and let out a pained whimper. His heart like faulty machinery. He bowed his head and said sorry. Then he turned away and left the dead man behind, and this time he didn’t lock the door.
◆◆◆
‘Did you shoot Yost, Grandad?’ There were tears in Sam’s eyes, and a darkening to them, like distrust.
‘He attacked me. I had no choice.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Grandad?’
Eddie reloaded the pistol. Only seven rounds left; six in the cylinder and one spare, which he kept in his pocket and hoped he wouldn’t have to use.
‘Grandad?’
‘I would never lie to you, Sam.’
The boy turned away and dropped two cans of soup into the rucksack. He was trying to stop the tears from falling down his face by wiping them away, and there was a low sobbing in his throat. He put his favourite Transformer action figure in his pocket and followed it with his knife.
Eddie stood there and felt impotent. A fool with a gun. ‘Do you think I’m a bad man?’
Sam looked at Eddie and paused in the entrance to the hallway. ‘No, Grandad.’ In that moment Eddie felt such a surge of love for the boy that he was close to tears. He opened his mouth to say sorry.
Sam smiled.
A shape moved in the hallway behind the boy and rose from shadow to show its face. Sam must have heard it scraping on the floor, because he turned around and stood and stared.
It was Yost, or what had once been Yost, because he was not as Eddie remembered. Black spines and pulsing tumours had split his skin and his bones were bent into obscene angles. Sharp mouths opened on his body. Tendrils burst from his torso and writhed in the air. His clothes fell away from his pulsating form until he was naked and shuddering. He was covered in glistening lesions and cilia, insectile pincers and barbs. A mewling monster with a man’s face. And then that face stretched taut and split dow
n the middle for a long stinger, pale and dripping, to emerge.
All of it happened in matter of seconds.
Eddie levelled the pistol at the abomination, but it was too late. The Yost-beast seized Sam with its spindly limbs and lifted him into the air. The boy screamed as those hands and limbs dragged him down the hallway and out of reach.
Behind Eddie, the front door rattled. The infected had reached the house. Hands slapped and pawed at the walls. The raking of claws. He spoke Sam’s name. Repeated it until it sounded like something different.
The kitchen window shattered inwards. Glass fell into the sink and across the floor. Eddie shot an infected woman already halfway through the window, and she slumped dead with her head in the sink until the other infected pushed her body into the house and tried to follow. Pale hands and raw faces. Skeletal limbs and black claws.
Banging on the door. Screams and shrieks. A thin, black tentacle burst through one of the glass panes, and when it sensed Eddie its tip opened into a slick maw with teeth. Awful sounds. The barricade shook. It wouldn’t hold. Nothing held, in the end.
Eddie stumbled down the hallway and when he reached the back of the house he found that the back door had been ripped from its hinges. He followed drops of blood outside and tried not to think it was Sam’s.
The sound of more windows smashing from the front of the bungalow. The cracking of wood as the front door began to splinter under claws and mouths.
Eddie saw that the blood-trail led into the woods beyond the back garden. The light was fading from the sky. Dusk would be soon, and then night, and by then Sam would be lost in the cold dark.
Eddie left the house behind and he did not look back.
◆◆◆
Into the woods with the night on his heels. He stumbled through scratching branches, shielding his face with his arms. Far behind him, the infected were upon the house and there would be no going back there. His legs were heavy and throbbing, and the pain in his knees would only end when he collapsed.
Through stinging limbs of bracken. Dense thickets and wet, rotting foliage. Broken branches and sticks where the Yost-beast had travelled. Eddie looked for blood but there was none, not even on the floor of dead leaves. He turned around and became lost and all about him was the dying light and tall trees. The canopy thickened and the animals of the wood fell into silence and there was nothing but the gasping of his mouth and the failing of his heart. He cried and called for Sam. Called for Yost; called him a monster and a coward. Kicked at the leaves and wept into his hands. Then he clutched his chest and stumbled, and when he finally fell amongst the trees and surrendered to the ground the last thing he saw was Sam’s face.
◆◆◆
He woke shivering violently in the frost of the next morning. For a moment he had no recollection of himself and the world, and he was all instinct and fever in the detritus of the woods.
A glimmer of grey light through the trees. Songbirds chirping and calling. The pistol was cold in his hand. Insects scurried beneath the brown and brittle leaves. Spiders lived there. Tiny beasts. The canopy saved him from dying of exposure during the night. He sat up and pulled his limbs into his body and tried to massage some feeling into his arms. There seemed to be no moisture in his throat. He gasped for water. Hunger scraping at his insides as he struggled to take the whiskey flask from his back pocket and unscrew the cap and tip the bottle to his mouth.
He thought of Sam and it only brought tears to his eyes. He rocked back and forth until he could work his legs and stood. And then he swayed on his feet and turned as he pointed the pistol at the surrounding trees. He waited for the infected to arrive, to finish things at last. But they didn’t. He was alone.
Eddie walked, even though some part of him wanted to return to the place where he’d slept and accept a quiet death.
◆◆◆
When he broke through the edge of the woods and into the fields, he saw crows circling in the far away sky.
He checked the pistol and moved on.
◆◆◆
He wished it to be over. He wished for the sky to fall and the sun to come down and burn the earth. Turn it all to ash.
He walked with his head down, only glancing up to make sure he was heading towards the place the scavengers circled above.
It took him most of the morning to walk there and when he arrived the sun was at its highest in the sky. Eddie prepared himself, each foot following the other, the frost crackling under his boots. For a while his mind went away and he was back in the shoe shop with Ruth and there was nothing in the world to separate them.
Several yards to his right, he noticed something small on the ground. A shape of red and blue amongst the dull shades. Eddie went over and stood looking down at it, biting his lip.
He picked up the Transformer and held the toy close to his face. Then he continued towards the horizon.
It was Yost’s body that he found in the hard field further on. Sprawled and half-frozen. The fallen beast. Tendrils and limbs coated with frost. Split open by his transformation.
A knife was buried in his forehead.
‘Sam,’ Eddie whispered, and the fields took his voice, but gave him hope.
◆◆◆
Eddie held the toy in his hand and close to his chest, as if to summon a figment of Sam. His heart hurt.
He stopped and swept the low countryside with the binoculars. His breath knotted in his throat when he saw the figure of the boy beyond a line of blackened ditches. Sam stood facing the falling sun and he didn’t move even when Eddie called out to him.
◆◆◆
Eddie staggered over the ground and didn’t take his eyes from the boy. He would not look away because he would not lose Sam again.
He halted several yards away from Sam and held out the toy, like an offering, whispering Sam’s name.
The boy was staring at the darkening sky as the stars began to appear and constellations formed and glimmered coldly. His clothes were filthy and wet, as though he’d been running through ditches and hedgerows. His hands dangled by his sides and the fingers were busy. Dirt smeared on his palms. He was trembling. Eddie just wanted to hold and comfort him.
‘Sam…’
The sudden movement of the boy’s head, jerking to one side. Eddie spoke again. Told Sam he was loved. Offered him his favourite toy.
And Sam turned around to show Eddie what he had become.
◆◆◆
The days passed in the slow toil of winter. Eddie found another house and it became a shelter. Rain upon rain and the sky never brightened. The sun was never seen and was forgotten.
Eddie stood in the old kitchen and took the last of the food from the cupboard. A tin of corned beef. He started to open the tin with the little key taped to its side but gave up halfway through and threw it against the wall and before he’d even thought about it the whiskey flask was at his lips and he drank. There wasn’t much left, and he had looted all the houses in the area.
The rain upon the windows. The shadows on the walls. In the small light of the candle he climbed the stairs and walked to the bedroom where he spent the best of each day. He closed the door after he entered and sat down on the nearby wooden chair. He put the candle on the floor and looked to the far side of the room where Sam crouched wheezing and fumbling.
The boy regarded him but made no move towards his side of the room. He had learned he could only move as far as the chains holding him to the radiator allowed.
‘Hello, Sam.’
There was no reply; there never was and never would be. Eddie swigged from the flask and watched the boy and wondered what he would do when the whiskey ran out.
He didn’t know.
◆◆◆
THE YACHT
Iain Rob Wright
ONE
The sun licked hungrily at the back of Emily’s neck, drawing beads of sweat like a thousand invisible syringes. When she rubbed her hand there she felt hot pinpricks and realized she’d sunburned. No surpr
ise, really. Sailing the Costa de Morisco in July was a recipe for peeling skin and sweaty armpits – but stay in the oven long enough and you’d eventually be a crisp, golden bun. The real joy of tanning on the sundeck of your own private yacht was that you didn’t have to rub elbows with an obese family from Croydon like you would on a typical Spanish beach. The days of package holidays and all-inclusive booze were behind her. Only the finest plonk would do nowadays for Emily Tyler.
She’d struck fried gold when she’d met – and married – her husband, Ross Tyler. The nature of his business – farming equipment – was unsexy, certainly, but the profits were a massive turn on. During their first year of courting, Ross had taken her all over the world, driven her around in his Maserati, and allowed her to taste lobster for the very first time (she hadn’t cared for it, but had pretended otherwise). For a butcher’s daughter from Redcar, it was a massive step up in the world, and she had fallen into the role of middle-class girlfriend so comfortably that she hadn’t hesitated in accepting Ross’s marriage proposal when it had come. In the three years they’d been wed, she’d wanted for nothing, which was why the yacht she currently lazed on bore her name. The EMILY-DEVINE.
She glanced up at the sky, watching the clouds drift along gently like fluffy sheep in a line, and wondering how she had got there. More importantly: what did the future hold? Right now she had no clue.
Boredom had been a surprise to Emily. She’d spent so much of her youth – her student days right through to the moment she married Ross – dreaming of success and fortune, that when she finally got it, she was left feeling… unfulfilled. Her friends no longer held anything in common (most of them now hated her), and Ross worked often. It was lonely, and there was no longer anything to strive for. If she wanted a new necklace, she bought it. New car, bought it. New anything? Bought it.
Money removed the yearning from life.
Ross wasn’t all he’d cracked up to be either. Emily stared at him now while he crouched on the 100ft Sunseeker’s rear deck, next to the anchor recall and fishing perch. Emily was up top on the sun deck, struggling to relax – although what she was really doing was making a point. She and Ross had kept their space for the last twenty-four hours after what had occurred yesterday afternoon. He had tried to hurt her, but had been the one who ended up suffering.
