Woodlouse crawled through the swollen decay. Matt would normally leave the bugs because he’d had a fox, but with only a small taste of it, and the fact that he’d left it behind, his appetite had been whetted. His stomach rumbled; he pulled one of the small armoured creatures free, popped it into his mouth, and crunched it between his teeth. No matter how many times he ate something that scuttled, he couldn’t block out the sensation of its little feet. Be it against his tongue, teeth, or gums, the memory of the experience stayed long after even the bitter taste of it. Locked in a battle with his body to reject the horrid thing, Matt swallowed it down.
After he’d liberated another one from its wooden home, he passed it to Louise, who ate it without hesitation. The simple act tore at his heart; a child of this world thought nothing of it. He could almost feel Scarlett looking down on him from above. He could almost hear her ask How can you make our daughter live like this? But their daughter knew no different.
When people entered the warehouse, the desire to run balled in Matt’s muscles, but he held his ground and watched the three men and two women.
Like Matt and Louise, their clothes hung from them in rags like they’d been shredded. No one had time to make garments nowadays.
“Oh look,” one of them—a blonde lady with hair the colour of stale urine—said as she pointed at the fire and laughed. “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” Two of the men and the other woman laughed too. One of the men didn’t. He clearly didn’t belong to the group.
“How do you know they’re bad people, Dad?” Louise whispered.
“I don’t, which is why we’re keeping our distance.” The five of them walked over to the smouldering fire. Matt’s stomach rumbled as he stared at the cooked meat. They could find another fox. Rain water and the supplies in his backpack took priority—after Louise’s safety, of course. He’d taken the right things. Besides, the fox had grabbed the attention of the group. Hopefully it would stop them before they’d even tried to look for the owners of the cooked canid.
Matt continued with a sigh. “They could be working for the ruling elite, and even if they’re not, how many good people have you met in the past few years? We’ve only seen a handful. All the others have been horrible.” He looked behind at Louise and held her stare for a moment before he said, “I don’t want to have to kill anyone else.”
Sadness tugged on her features. She obviously didn’t want to witness it again either.
When Matt looked at the ruins behind his daughter and the wide-open darkness beyond, he said, “We need to keep our wits about us. Be careful of drones out here. I’ll watch the people, and you watch our surroundings, yeah?”
After a stoic nod, Louise looked around. A few months ago, Matt wouldn’t have trusted her with such a responsibility, but his daughter had changed. The start of her periods seemed to bring a new level of maturity with it; nature’s way of forcing her to grow up some more. Despite Matt’s desire to hold onto his little girl, he couldn’t ignore the young adult that now stood before him.
A masculine scream came from the warehouse and Matt spun around to look inside. The piss blonde woman and a thickset dirty man with a dark beard and dreadlocks had dragged a man over to the wall with the metal loops drilled into it.
The man—who clearly didn’t belong—kicked out at the piss blonde woman. One of his kicks caught her in the gut. It drove the air from her in a deep bark that boomed in the enclosed space. She’d hit the floor before the echo had died. The other man took her place and helped restrain their prisoner while she lay on the floor, her mouth wide as she gasped for breath.
Despite her clear discomfort, the woman glared at the man who’d kicked her. The other two men picked up the rope and tied his wrists to the rings.
The prisoner opened his mouth to speak and thick blood seeped from it. It coated his chin, which glistened in the poor light. He screamed again; a primal, broken scream.
“Shut up,” one of the men said. “If you make too much noise, they’ll hear us. None of us want that.”
Louise appeared next to Matt. “What’s wrong with him?”
The restrained man opened and closed his mouth several times and more blood spilled from it. “It looks like they’ve cut his tongue out.”
A shudder snapped through Louise, and Matt looked out into the dark streets behind them; nothing—or nothing yet, at least. Regardless of what the savages had done, and were about to do to their prisoner, he and Louise hadn’t run into a gargantuan. Things could be much worse.
The piss blonde woman got to her feet slowly and stared at the man who’d kicked her. Her shoulders wound up and she clenched her fists then took a step forward and drove a swift kick to his crotch.
The man screamed a demented and tongueless scream before he fell limp. The ropes held him up like a puppet hung from a shelf.
The piss blonde woman spat at her prisoner before she followed the others over to the fox that still roasted on the fire. The extra few minutes had probably cooked the thing to perfection. Hopefully they’d choke on it.
After one of the men had taken a bite from the roasted creature, he passed it across and spoke with his mouthful. “Where do you think they’ve gone?” He ran a sweep of the warehouse with his eyes and added, “They can’t be far; this thing was ready to eat.”
The other man shrugged. “Maybe one of the drones got to them?”
“Or a gargantuan,” Piss Blonde offered.
The first man shook his head. “No, I think they’re nearby. We would have heard a gargantuan.”
A flutter ran through Matt’s chest. He may have been enshrouded in darkness, but he still pulled farther back from the window. Better to be too hidden than not enough. Louise shuffled closer to him. For all of her womanly traits, when she got scared, the little girl resurfaced. A shake ran through her as she pressed into her dad and whispered, “We should go before they come out.”
Before Matt could respond, Piss Blonde spoke again. “Who gives a fuck where they are? Seriously. Why would we need to chase them?” A look at the chained man and a wicked smile stretched across her face. She pulled his severed tongue from her top pocket and waved it at him. “A bird in the hand and all that.”
The beaten and restrained man, his chin streaked red, looked up and said something unintelligible.
Piss Blonde laughed, put the tongue back in her pocket, and lifted the cooked fox. “Shush now, little bird. There’s no need to get jealous of foxy here. Your time will come very fucking soon.”
Matt looked back at the pile of bones in the corner of the warehouse. Human bones; bones that had been picked clean of every scrap of flesh.
After she’d passed the fox to the other woman, Piss Blonde walked over to the chained man. Her heels clicked against the hard floor and she moved with a swagger as she kept her focus on him.
So close their noses almost touched, she repeated, “Your time will come.” Her foot moved so quickly, Matt almost missed it.
When it landed squarely between the man’s legs, his mouth flew wide and he sprayed blood all over her.
Despite the darkness, the fire gave off enough light for Matt to see the spatters on the woman’s face.
The man had fallen limp yet again.
With her head tilted to one side, Piss Blonde stared at the broken man. She then ran her tongue around her lips as if to taste the spray of his blood. An evil smile lifted her features.
Chapter 12
While he kept a hold of Louise, Matt continued to peer through the rotten window at the four people and their prisoner. Piss Blonde had gone from her position in front of the restrained man to help build the fire with the others.
Before they’d built the fire, Matt and Louise had collected logs and sticks. Over half of the stash still remained on the floor. The gang laid them on top of the embers. The thickset man kneeled down and blew on the fire. They’d need to get the fire burning much hotter if they were to cook something as large as a human.
Halfway t
hrough the process, Piss Blonde abandoned it and walked over to their prisoner again. Matt flinched when she pulled a machete from her belt. Despite the darkness, he should have seen it before. A couple of feet long at least, the shiny blade glowed orange as it caught the fire’s reflection. The blade seemed well taken care of. It looked like it had received the love and attention that very few things in this new world had been given. The love and attention that only a psychopath could give to an inanimate object; a machete wouldn’t let her down like people had. Although, to be fair, as one of the most vital for a cannibal, maybe it needed that kind of care.
When the man without a tongue looked up, his eyes widened and he screamed his demented scream.
Piss Blonde laughed. “You remember Rosita then? Hard not to when she takes your tongue from you. Well, she hasn’t finished yet.” The scrawny woman looked down at her prisoner’s crotch. “There are plenty of body parts she needs to remove before she’s done with you.”
The man shook and twisted as rivulets of blood cascaded down his chin. The rings chinked against the warehouse wall.
Matt felt Louise push tighter into him and he hugged her close. He’d bite Piss Blonde’s throat out before she had a chance attack them with that fucking thing.
The wicked cackle of Piss Blonde echoed through the open space of the warehouse and joined the man’s screams as they shot up into the night air.
The noise snapped tension through Matt’s back and he looked behind them out into the ruined London streets. At this rate, a—
“Drone!” The man with the dreadlocks said. He repeated himself in a hissed whisper. “A fucking drone. Can you hear it?”
When Matt looked back into the warehouse, the smile had fallen from Piss Blonde’s face and her machete hung limp at the end of her arm.
Matt pulled himself and Louise down behind the wall. With their backs pressed into it, they faced out into the city and listened. The strong smell of the bonfire came their way; strong enough to tighten his throat, but not strong enough to make him cough, not yet anyway.
“What shall we do?” the other woman asked. Panic fluttered through her words.
No one replied. The drone hummed and the man without a tongue whimpered quietly. He seemed to fear the drone more than he did the prospect of being eaten alive.
After he’d leaned close to his daughter’s ear, Matt whispered, “We have to sit this out. To run now would attract far too much attention. With the drone’s focus on those four arseholes and their prisoner, we should be able to go undetected.”
“Should?” Louise asked.
Matt shrugged. At times like this, Matt’s heart hurt more for Scarlett than ever. She’d always made the tough decisions. Pressure didn’t faze her and she slipped into the leader’s role in a heartbeat. Louise would have fared so much better under the guidance of her mother.
“I’m sorry,” Matt said as his eyes burned with the start of his tears.
Louise’s reply came back as a whisper. “What?”
“I’m sorry about your mum. I should have done more to save her.”
“You can’t do anything about it now. It is what it is. She’s dead.”
The statement ripped Matt’s chest wide open and his vision blurred. “I should have done more.”
Still gripped by a violent shake, Louise didn’t have time to reply before the other man in the abandoned warehouse said, “We should take the drone down. That’ll stop the gargantuan.”
A second later, a shill alarm sounded. Piss Blonde hissed at the man, “Why the fuck did you say that? Are you trying to get us killed?”
Matt felt it before he saw it; a bass boom that ran through his feet as the first step of a gargantuan landed. Dirt and debris fell from the window ledge above them and dropped down the back of his shirt. His skin crawled as he felt the shifting of several woodlice against his bare back.
Another deep boom ran through the floor as the thing took another step. Although he already held his daughter in a tight grip, Matt pulled her in closer.
The time between each footstep shortened. The heavy thuds grew louder and more debris shifted around them. Whole bricks fell to the floor.
Although Matt looked up from where he sat, he held firm. To look through the window could be to give their location away. They say curiosity killed the cat, but not even a cat would risk the wrath of a gargantuan.
Despite the darkness of the night, when the gargantuan got closer, its shadow stretched over the warehouse and out across the city in front of Matt and Louise. A darker patch in what already seemed like pitch black—something beyond black on the light spectrum. If they’d been out during the day, the thing would have created an eclipse.
A deep groan like the moan of a whale shook the ground. It sounded like the gargantuan had leaned over.
Piss Blonde finally spoke again. “No. No. No, no, no, noooooooooo.”
The sound of her voice started on the other side of the wall and then lifted from the ground. The gargantuan must have had her in its grip.
“Nooooooooo.”
A ching sounded out on the other side of the wall; the sound of her machete as it hit the ground. A second later, her voice echoed like she’d been dragged into a tunnel. Matt imagined a huge, open, cave–like mouth pulling her in.
A loud snap like a thunderclap and the woman fell silent.
The screams of the others went the same way. As one, they all lifted from the ground. None of them even tried to run. Instead, the band of degenerates all pleaded for their lives as if the gargantuan had a heart to appeal to. Like Piss Blonde, one loud snap silenced each one of them.
For some reason, Matt had expected that to be it. He let some of his tension go. What a fool he’d been to think the gargantuan would leave anyone alive.
The demented scream of the tongueless man called out and the rattle of the metal rings followed.
Matt listened to the man’s cries. Louise pushed so tightly into him, the rough brick wall dug into his skinny back. The tongueless man screamed some more.
With a pop and then the sound of a wet tear, the tongueless man screamed louder than ever at the pain of whatever had just happened to him. He sounded like someone being skinned alive. The warm dampness of Louise’s urine spread over Matt’s lap.
The tongueless man’s shrill cries rang through the city until the snap of massive jaws cut it dead.
Chapter 13
Matt remained hunched down behind the rotten window for so long, trails of fiery pain streaked through his kneecaps. His legs shook as he kept his daughter gripped in a protective embrace. He’d listened to the footsteps of the gargantuan disappear into the distance. It had been ten minutes since he’d heard the last thunderous thump of a heavy foot against the ground. In an ideal world he would have waited another ten, but if he stayed hunched down for much longer, his fatigued body would seize like a rusty hinge.
He tapped on Louise’s shoulder and she pulled out of the ball she’d curled herself into. She looked up at him through bloodshot eyes. “Come on, darling,” he said, “it’s gone.”
The bright green of her irises shifted from side to side as they looked from one of his eyes to the other. “Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be; you can wait down here if you like. I’ll check first.”
She gulped but didn’t reply.
The cold night air stung Matt’s lap from where it was still damp with Louise’s urine.
The second Matt stood up, his shaky legs nearly gave out beneath him. He used the debris-strewn window ledge for support and took several deep breaths as he stared at his feet.
Once he’d levelled out, he looked into the warehouse and his blood ran cold. At once, nausea churned through his stomach and his palms turned clammy with sweat. Despite the dark evening, the fire in the corner lit up the entire warehouse.
Blood glistened as pools on the floor and streaked the walls. A storm of chaos had torn through the place, chewed the people up, and spat them back out a
gain. A pair of shoes lay strewn across the concrete; someone’s trousers had even been left behind. The darkness made it hard to tell which body parts were which—not that it mattered.
When Louise tried to stand up, Matt put a gentle, yet firm hand on her shoulder. She didn’t need to see it, not at her age. The voice of his dead wife then ran through his mind. It urged him to let her look. And she was right. Louise had to grow up at some point; sooner rather than later in this world.
Matt took his hand away and Louise stood up.
His attention went from the carnage to his daughter. Her jaw hung loose. When she got to the worst part of the lot, she pulled away and vomited on the floor.
At the sound of her deep retch, Matt checked around. The next drone could be just metres away. When she looked up, he silently implored her to keep quiet. She didn’t heave again; she understood the consequences—of course she did. She had lived in this world, after all.
When she looked back into the warehouse, Matt watched her eyes return to the same spot—the metal rings on the wall. They hung limp from where the man had vacated the space. Although not all of the man had left. Still chained to the wall, his arms hung down, lumps of flesh and bone visible at the end of them.
The pop and tear they’d heard returned to Matt’s mind and his stomach locked tight. The pop of shoulder joints, the tear of limbs as they separated from a body. Matt sighed and shook his head. “Poor bastard. First his tongue and now his arms. He probably would have been better letting the people eat him.”
“They were going to eat him?”
Matt wanted to honour the woman his daughter would inevitably be, but how could he? All that time and she hadn’t worked out what the people planned to do with him. She needed to get smarter if she stood any chance of survival. Although, now wasn’t the time to address it.
Matt moved away from the cannibalism conversation. “This is why we need to get out of here. We need to find the people in the north of London and join with them. If we’re with like-minded people, we can help the revolution. If nothing else, we need extra sets of eyes so the drones don’t get us. Safety in numbers, darling.”
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