by Rich Hawkins
Ralph couldn’t help but laugh.
Frank hesitated. “It means they’re nice people.”
“Inbred,” she said slowly, trying out the word in her mouth.
“We have to get out of here,” said Joel. The colour of his face was like curdled milk.
“We will,” said Frank. “Be patient.”
Joel scratched a rash developing on the side of his neck. “Anya and I came to Salisbury last year for a day out shopping. I bought her some nice earrings. We waited on this platform for the train back home. The train was late, if I remember correctly.”
“Sounds about right,” Frank replied. “I’ve never liked trains.”
“I need a cigarette,” said Magnus. “Ralph stole my last one.”
An Apache helicopter flew over then hovered above one of the streets to the north, releasing its missiles at unknown targets on the ground. The people on the platform flinched from the explosion. Flames bloomed and then died. The Apache banked to its left and wheeled away out of sight.
“Boom,” said Ralph.
Magnus spat onto the tracks. “It’s like it’s not really happening.”
“I hear a train coming,” Joel said.
A rush of expectation and raised voices swept through the crowd. Someone laughed in relief.
“This next train isn’t stopping,” said a soldier cradling his rifle. “You’ll be on the next one.”
There were complaints and dissenting voices, and a few insults were thrown, but the soldier ignored them all.
“Where will our train take us?” said Joel. “Will it stop to let us off in Somerset? The train might go straight through Somerset. Do you think they’ll let us get off at Yeovil Junction or maybe Crewkerne station?”
No one answered him. No one had a clue.
A train appeared from around the bend in the track, the ugly noise of its engine growing louder.
People were screaming on the platform. Ralph saw the train driver and realised why. The man looked terrified.
Frank turned Florence away from the train as it went past them. Joel held one hand over his mouth. The train, all five carriages of it, was filled with the infected and their victims. Blood painted the windows. Snarling faces smashing against the glass. Red handprints. Windows busy with writhing flesh. The infected screaming to be let out, driven into a frenzy by the proximity of fresh victims.
A great silence descended on the platform as the train went past.
“Infected must have gotten aboard one of the carriages,” said an old man next to Ralph. “A fucking slaughter.”
Joel appeared ready to burst into tears. A ripple of sheer panic spread through the crowd. A woman was crying, saying “Oh god, oh god,” over and over until she buried her face in her hands.
Voices spoke up from the crammed bodies on the platform, high-pitched with fear as the possibility of being stranded at the station became very real.
“Are there any more trains?”
“We can’t stay here!”
“Please help us!”
“All those people are dead!”
The same soldier from earlier addressed the crowd: “There’ll be another train along in a minute. Please remain calm.”
“Can we still use the track if that train is on it?” said a middle-aged woman carrying a toddler.
The soldier held out his hands. “Yes. It’s been diverted onto another track and it’ll be dealt with. There’s no need to panic.”
“Thank fuck for that,” said Magnus.
Joel sniffed. “What if our train has infected on it?”
“It’s either that or stay here,” Ralph replied.
Joel looked at him, said nothing.
The sound of a train approached the platform.
“Get ready,” said Frank.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The sky above Salisbury was stained with smoke rising from the fires. The train groaned and picked up speed as it headed out of the city with its four carriages packed with human cargo.
With all the seats taken, people resorted to standing in the aisles, holding onto seats to keep their balance. Barely any space to move. The combined smell of dirty bodies, wet hair and waterlogged clothes thickened the air. The sense of relief was palpable, but tempered by fear and anxiety. Whispers of elation were guarded like secrets below the low thrum of muttered prayers.
Ralph watched a young boy, sitting on his father’s lap, pick his nose and examine the stringy mucus on the tip of his finger. The man called him Sam. Ralph wondered what sights the boy had seen in the last few days. Sam glanced at Ralph, blessed with the total absence of adult manners and ego, and wiped his finger on his father’s jacket without the man realising. Ralph forced a thin smile. Boys would be boys, even as the country fell into ruin.
Glancing around, Ralph tried to settle the erratic beat of his heart. All these people around him, suffocating him. He closed his eyes, counted to ten then opened them and took deep breaths. His fingers felt tingly. He had been fine earlier when he was on his feet and his mind was occupied. Now, crammed into this metal coffin, his discomfort with large amounts of people and their close proximity was unsettling him, raising his hackles and drying his mouth. A man’s groin was four inches from his face, and he kept completely still so there was less chance of his nose or mouth accidentally brushing against it.
Magnus was sitting next to him. Behind them were Joel and Frank, with Florence sitting on Frank’s lap.
“You all right, mate?” said Magnus.
“Fucking rosy.”
“Did you count to ten?”
“First thing I did.”
“Did it help?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I forgot to let you have the window seat, mate. Sorry. Do you want to swap?”
“No, I’m okay. Cheers, anyway.”
Magnus patted him on the arm. “We’re going home. Never thought I’d be so glad to get on a bloody train.”
“The last few days have been surreal,” Ralph said.
“I thought we were going to die out there. We were lucky.”
“We’re not home yet. Not by a long way.”
“Always the optimist.”
“It’s always best to expect the worst, mate.”
“And then anything else is a bonus?”
“Spot on.”
“That’s one way of looking at things.”
“It’s the only way.”
“You’ve always been a ray of sunshine.”
“I try my best.”
Magnus snorted and cleaned his glasses. “Some of the things I’ve seen…” His voice trailed off. He was shaking his head. “Part of me still finds it hard to believe they’re real. I had never seen a dead body before.”
Ralph looked at Magnus, let him continue.
“I’ve been constantly terrified for the last few days. Terrified beyond anything I could’ve imagined. It exhausts you, digs into your sanity.”
“You’ve done well.”
“Really?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
Magnus’s face creased with confusion.
“Try to get some sleep, mate,” said Ralph. “A nap will do you good.”
“I am pretty tired.” Magnus looked out the window as the train rushed past fields, houses and roads. “Wake me if anything happens, Ralph.”
“Will do.”
Magnus closed his eyes.
*
“I’m never going home again, am I?” said Florence. Exhaustion strained her voice. Her lips were cracked. “I’ll never see my house again. I’ll never go home. I’ll never go back to my bedroom and sleep in my bed.”
Frank tried to smile for her, but didn’t want to give her false hope. She would never return to Wishford. Her old life was dead.
“Maybe one day we’ll go back there. When this has been sorted out.”
“My parents will never come back.”
“I’m so sorry, Florence.”
“She’s right,” said Joel. “You do. Stop saying sorry. It’s not your fault.”
“What will happen to me now?” Florence asked. “When the train stops…”
“You can stay with me and my wife. Her name is Catherine. She would love to meet you. I reckon you’d both be great friends.”
“Do you and your wife want to be my parents, now?”
Her question took him by surprise. “No one will ever replace your parents, Florence. That wouldn’t be right. We’re just trying to look after you.”
She looked at the floor. “I’m hungry and thirsty.”
“So am I,” said Frank. “We’ll get something when we get off the train.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Magnus woke to the squealing of brakes and the world shuddering around him. Then there was a hard jolt and the shock of recoil, followed by stillness and inertia as the train stopped. Voices and panic. The cry of a child being hushed by its mother. The carriage creaked around them. Faint hiss of rain.
He’d been dreaming of Debbie and the boys again. He blinked his eyes clean, wiped them with the back of one hand. His back and legs ached fiercely.
The other refugees were looking down the aisle. Whispered words passed back and forth.
“What’s happened?” Magnus asked.
Ralph spared him a puzzled glance and shrugged.
Magnus pressed his head to the window, tried to see the front of the train, but couldn’t make anything out. Fields flanked both sides of the train, and beyond them were deep ranks of trees into which he stared for a while. Shadows moved, stopped, and moved again. He got the feeling of something stirring within the inky darkness within the trees. His skin broke out in gooseflesh.
He looked away.
“What’s going on?” Joel asked from behind. Frank was reassuring Florence.
Anxiety and pent-up anger began to take hold on the collective emotions of the refugees; a single pulse composed of their combined heartbeats, growing faster with every second that the reason for the train’s stop was not revealed.
Voices rose from the next carriage as arguments began.
The speakers in the carriage buzzed with static, and a tinny voice announced: “Please stay calm. Do not panic. There is an obstruction on the track. Do not panic. In a moment the driver will be passing through the carriages to the other end of the train so we can reverse... ”
Cold sweat broke out on Magnus’s back.
The carriage rocked gently on its wheels. At the back of the carriage, a woman screamed. She was pointing out the window, towards the trees on one side of the train.
“There’s something out there!” she cried. “Something in the trees!”
Magnus looked at the trees, and moved towards the window until his nose was touching the glass. The shadows were moving again. Gaining shape.
Coming towards the train.
He retreated from the window.
A man burst from the trees, sprinting towards the train. Dark lesions covered his naked upper body and his left arm was withered into a hooked appendage. Magnus couldn’t hear him, but he could tell that from the shape of the man’s mouth and the crazed intent in his eyes, that he was screaming.
“Infected!” someone said.
Another man bolted from the trees, running for the train, followed by four more spindly figures. All of them were horribly deformed.
“They’re on the other side as well!” a woman cried.
Heads turned. Magnus managed to peer between the scrum of bodies blocking the aisle, and saw men and women tearing down the field towards the train.
“Oh shit,” he said.
More infected emerged in swarms from both sides. Panic broke out on the carriage as the infected kept coming, the fields on either side of the train filling with them.
Magnus looked past the infected people. He was so scared that his heart almost stopped.
Something large was coming through the trees.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The thing began as an amorphous shadow skulking within the tree line. Frank’s hands tightened around Florence in an instinctive act of protection as the people around them began panicking. A lone voice begged God for help.
The train driver, a plump and sweaty man, tried to make his way up the aisle towards the other end of the train, but was struggling to wriggle through the bodies crowding the carriage. He shouted and swore at them to let him through.
They ignored him, staring at the thing coming at them from out of the trees.
The creature, a spindly pale abomination, stood almost thirty feet tall. Frank couldn’t take his eyes away from the creature as it broke through the trees, pushing away branches with the tendrils attached to its main mass. Then it opened its mouth, and despite the carriage interior’s muffling effect, its screech was high-pitched and anguished.
Joel’s eyes were wide and shivering with tears. He rubbed the rash on the side of his neck and looked at Frank, opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him.
The infected people reached the train and began to pound, scratch and claw upon it. The refugees looked down at them, safe for now.
The tall thing skittered across the field on rows of insect legs. It moaned dully as it moved.
“What the fuck is that?” said Ralph.
Frank saw its body in detail for the first time. The creature loomed over the train. Its tendrils were tipped with stingers or sharpened claws. There were human faces partly-submerged within its mass, and the flailing naked arms of those people were hanging from its flesh, their fingers grasping at the air. Faces and body parts dripped a pale fluid onto the ground. The beast was a growth of half-absorbed bodies and screaming faces, still alive and part of the creature, assimilated into its infected flesh.
Those human eyes, so many of them, appraised the contents of the train. One of the eyes, bloodshot and staring, seemed to find Frank and focus on him. It didn’t possess a face, but there was a mouth, and it opened just a little into a vulva-like aperture showing pink gums and a glistening passage leading to somewhere he didn’t want to visit.
The beast had no teeth. It didn’t need teeth.
One of the tendrils scraped against the window, its claw scoring a line in the glass and leaving behind a smear of sticky fluid.
“We’re fucked,” said Joel.
The tendrils shot forward to grab the carriage, shaking it, sending people colliding and falling into the aisles.
Magnus’s face was bloodless. “I can hear the people inside it. They’re talking to me. Can’t you hear them?”
“What are they saying?” Frank asked.
“They want to absorb us. Eat us.”
“That’s good to know,” said Ralph.
The beast shuddered and the faces within its body opened their mouths and screamed. It was the sound of a hundred people suffering, trapped in a feverish half-existence of agony and hunger.
Joel raised his hands to his face. “Those poor people. Dear God.”
The ceiling of the carriage trembled, and then there was a ripping, screeching sound and several of the tendrils plunged through the roof. Part of the ceiling directly over the middle of the carriage was ripped away. The beast caught the scent of the people inside the train. The refugees retreated from the ragged hole, scrambling away, panicking and screaming.
The tendrils descended. A woman screamed until one whipped forward and wrapped around her neck. Two men tried to grab her, but the tendril took her up through the roof. She screamed until she was silenced by something wet and sucking. Frank thought of those pink gums and that vaginal mouth and shivered. Bile rose in his throat. He put himself between Florence and the hole in the ceiling. She was crying.
The two men who’d attempted to save her were grabbed by other tendrils and taken. Then more of the roof was ripped away with a screech of metal, foll
owed by a rush of cold air. The sudden stink of the beast was like raw meat.
More tendrils crept through the hole, twitching and jerking at every human heartbeat.
The beast screamed. The refugees screamed. It wanted them all.
The tendrils claimed other refugees, including the driver, and plucked them from the carriage. Neither the tendrils nor the people returned. The beast put its wet mouth to the hole in the roof. There was a gurgling, gagging noise as the fleshy maw widened until it covered the hole completely. A clear fluid dripped from the mouth. The gagging sound grew louder. Something pale and wriggling appeared inside the mouth and then dropped into the aisle with a moist slap. The refugees stared at it as they retreated, screaming and shouting
“It’s like it’s just been born,” said Frank.
“Newborn,” Ralph said.
The pale thing – the newborn – was a collection of white pincer-limbs, a segmented abdomen and a glistening thorax of mottled flesh. It was about the size of a large dog, its skin wet and coated with mucus. And it unfolded itself from the carriage floor and opened its mouth, which was something that shouldn’t have existed beyond the pitch-black fathoms of the seas. Sharp mandibles and clicking jaws. It stood on multiple legs, wobbling like a baby giraffe, and cried out in a high pitched shrill that turned Frank’s insides to jelly.
The newborn’s eyes were like white grapes upon fleshy stalks. A shadow of a dark pupil within each eye. The newborn turned towards a man to its right who was cowering in his seat. The man looked back at it, his eyes wide.
The creature let out another shrill cry.
The man screamed.
The newborn pounced on him, stabbing him with its pincers, making itself part of the man’s torso. The man spluttered blood from his mouth as the creature needled him, puncturing his internal organs and slicing him from groin to neck. His insides fell out like a sloppy surprise.
Screams filled the carriage. The newborn separated itself from the dead man and dropped to the floor, skittering underneath the seats.
Frank looked back at the hole in the roof; into the beast’s mouth as it gurgled and gagged.
