by Perrin Briar
“How do we get it off?” Stan said.
Frank took a knife out from his pocket and slipped it between the trap’s jagged teeth and pried them open. Jessie pulled her leg free. Frank set the trap up once again, its jaws wide open like a Venus flytrap. He took Jessie’s foot in his hand and lifted up the hem of her torn trousers. A thin sliver of blood ran down Jessie’s leg.
“It’s just a nick,” Frank said. “She’ll live. You’re lucky. It could have taken your foot off.”
Jessie just stared, not even looking at him.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Anne said.
Together Frank and Anne helped Jess up.
“Just what were you doing, wandering through here?” the farmer asked.
“We’re heading for the coast,” Jordan said. “We’ve got a boat waiting.”
“I meant through here.” He tapped the ground. “Didn’t you see the signs?”
“What signs?”
Then Jordan noticed something odd about the land. There were hundreds of tiny mounds dotted about the place – just like the one that Jessie had stepped on.
Stan whistled. “It’s a wonder we didn’t all get snared.”
“I suppose I ought to invite you in,” Frank said. “I’ve got a first aid kit inside.” Without waiting to see if they would follow, he trudged toward his house.
Ivy crawled up the white painted walls, stretching almost to the roof, where a converted attic skylight looked out on the English countryside in all directions. The front door was like one of those you might find at a horse stable. The bottom was closed, the top hooked back wide open. Birds hopped across the tile roof, watching those below. Frank led them inside.
129.
Monitors and blinking lights greeted them the moment they stepped inside. The equipment hummed. Wire bundles ran the length of the ceiling beams. Jordan turned to find the others wore matching expressions of incredulity.
“Tea okay?” Frank asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Jordan said.
Frank sat the gun down, letting it lean against the polished mahogany dresser. He shrugged off his green duffle coat, hung it on a carved stand, and headed into the kitchen. The kitchen was far less ostentatious; plain wood panel cupboards and chipped sideboards. Frank flicked on the kettle. He bent down and took out a first aid box from the cupboard under the sink.
“Come here then,” Frank said to Jessie.
“I can do that,” Anne said, a slight abrasiveness in her manner.
Frank shrugged. “As you please.”
As Anne washed and dressed Jessie’s wound, Frank took five clean mugs out of a cupboard and set them on the table.
“We’ll have to share teabags, I’m afraid,” he said, putting a bag in alternate cups. “I’m running a little low. So, how is the world these days?”
“Pretty much the same,” Jordan said.
“Lurchers still trying to bite your faces off?”
The kettle rumbled, almost boiled. Jordan peered at the kettle. Just as he opened his mouth, Stan said, “You’ve got power?”
Frank smiled, as if he’d been waiting for them to notice. “I’ve got a back-up generator out back. Powers most of this stuff. The hot water’s a bit patchy, but-”
“Hot water?” Anne said, pinning the bandages tight to Jessie’s calf.
“Sure. You can help yourself to a shower, if you like.”
Anne turned to Jess. “How would you like a nice hot shower, Jess?”
Jessie’s mouth twitched and she squeaked with excitement. Anne took her by the hand. “Come on then.”
“The best shower is upstairs. Towels are in the cupboard.”
As Jessie and Anne disappeared up the stairs, Frank reached into a drawer and came out with a packet of sweets. “Sweet?” he asked. “Good thing about sweets: they keep damn near forever.” He tucked them in his pocket.
130.
Armed with their cups of weak tea, Frank led them up the staircase. Two threadbare sofas and a worn armchair took up the space. Taking up one corner of the room was a bank of security monitors looking in and outward of the farm in just about every conceivable direction.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Frank said.
Jordan nodded, not wanting to disagree. “Why have you got cameras in the rooms upstairs? If there were Lurchers that close, you’d already know.”
Frank shrugged. “I’m a cautious man. Count yourself lucky you came from the west. If you had come from the north or east, you would have arrived in meaty chunks.”
“Why’s that?”
Frank gestured to a monitor. The image was a little grainy, but peering close, Jordan could make out small goose bump-like mounds of earth.
“Mines,” Frank said, chest swelling with pride. “Hundreds of ‘em. A Lurcher couldn’t get within five hundred yards of this place without setting one off. But the traps – they are the best. With the lightest touch they go off, and the Lurcher’s mine. I leave them there. They call out, you see. They attract others who get trapped like the first.”
“What happens if there are too many for the traps?”
“That’s never happened.”
A pause as they sipped their tea.
“Where does this lead?” Jordan asked, gesturing to a door built into the wall. The door was clearly a recent addition – it still hadn’t been painted yet.
“To the barn.”
“Do you mind if I open it?”
“Go ahead.”
Jordan opened it, and was immediately assaulted by light farmyard smells. A giant square of light with his silhouette inside stretched across the floor, and barely grazed the barn doors opposite.
“To keep an eye on bovine,” Frank said.
“There aren’t any.”
“Right now they’re in a field grazing.”
“They’re safe out there? Lurchers will attack anything with a pulse.”
“The cows have their own defences, don’t you worry about that.”
Jordan nodded and sipped his tea. It felt good to be civilised again. “Do you mind if I use the toilet?”
“Down the hall, on the left.”
“It’s indoors? Sorry. I’ve spent so long crapping outside it’s hard to remember what it’s like to do it inside.”
After relieving himself, Jordan re-entered the corridor leading back to the computer console room.
“Jordan.” Anne stepped from a darkened room. Her hair was still dry and she hadn’t taken her dirty clothes off yet. Her eyes darted up and down the corridor. “I don’t think we should stay here.”
“Why? What’s wrong? I thought you were taking a shower with Jess?”
“She’s in the room. She’s fine. I wanted to get you alone. We’re not safe here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you see the way he looked at Jessie outside? When he looked at her earlier, there was something… I don’t know… wrong. In his eyes. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“Frank? He was probably surprised at seeing someone so young. Children are rare these days.”
“Yeah…” Anne said, sounding unconvinced.
“He’s been living on his own for a long time. Might that be it?”
“Maybe.” Anne shook her head. “I don’t trust him, Jordan.”
“All right, look. It’s almost dark. We’ll stay the night, then leave in the morning, okay?”
Anne nodded. “Okay. Just keep him away from Jess. I’ve got a bad feeling.”
They were interrupted as Jessie stepped out of the darkened room. She at least had taken a shower.
“Go back in, Jess,” Anne said. “I’ll be in in a minute.” She shuffled away. “We have to get out of here, Jordan. For Jess’s sake.”
Jordan returned to the upstairs den, finding Stan and Frank deep in conversation. Jordan looked Frank over. He looked like a regular old man. A little rough around the edges perhaps, but who wasn’t in the New World? Jordan approached hi
m and waited for a gap in their conversation.
“Listen, Frank. You’ve already been too kind in taking us in, but I’m afraid all we’re going to repay you with is trouble. There are some Lurchers chasing us. They’re… different from the others. I’m afraid that they might follow us here, and attack. It’s probably best if we all go to bed, get up early in the morning and leave you in peace. I hope you understand.”
A spark of interest flashed in Frank’s eye. “Different? Different how?”
Jordan looked closer at Frank’s expression. It wasn’t interest, but excitement.
“You already know…”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“How?”
“No doubt in a similar way to you. By observation. And unlucky circumstance.”
“Will you tell us what circumstances?”
“Sure,” Frank said. “But that is a tale requiring something a good deal stronger than tea.”
131.
“I used to be in charge of the defences at a large compound at Diss – that’s in south Norfolk. They attacked us constantly. We had watchmen posted on every wall at all times. Sometimes they met strong defence and never even made it to the wall. Other times they managed to scale it and get inside. They attacked at all times of the day and night, giving us no respite.”
Frank reclined back in his armchair, hands gripping the armrests tight like he was in a plane going down.
“Our soldiers grew weak and weary and morale was low. Constant attacks like that grind you down until you’re little more than Lurchers yourself. At first we thought they were just random attacks, but as time went by we realised they never attacked the same place twice or even at the same time.”
“Did you ever hear of them having a leader?” Stan asked.
“There were rumours of a Lurcher, different from the others, able to bend the un-dead to his will. He became a kind of bogeyman to scare children. We called him the Overlord.”
“The Overlord…” Jordan repeated to himself. “What did he look like?”
“No one ever saw him – if he was ever alive in the first place.” Frank frowned. “No wait. Now that I think about it there was one who claimed to have seen him. A young boy. He turned up at the compound one day, half-dead, beaten and bloody, pounding at the front gate with his fist. The soldiers nearly shot him for being a Lurcher. He raved about a Lurcher who spoke and was ‘cloaked in death and darkness’. Those were his words. He died soon after.”
A shiver ran through Jordan.
“The boy was obviously mad,” Frank continued, “but I managed to convince our commander to send scouts out to investigate. I made some tracking devices and gave them to the soldiers. They were really just a way for us to collect their bodies if they were killed so we could bury them later. That, or track their zombie selves to anticipate an attack. But what we found we could never have imagined. When the Lurchers killed the soldiers, they dragged them away – always to the same place. This in of itself is a strange thing to do, don’t you think? Why would mindless animals take someone they intended to eat to the same place? Something was going on, and we needed to find out what.
“Each time the Lurchers took another of our men, their attacks became more effective, more strategic. Somehow they knew our defences, and there was only one way – or so we thought at the time – that they could have known that-”
“Torture,” Jordan said.
Frank’s eyes sparkled. “Precisely. They hadn’t killed our soldiers at all, but captured them for interrogation.” He steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “But how could something with the intelligence of a cockroach torture people to get information? It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t possible. Was everything we knew about Lurchers wrong? Had they greater reserves of intelligence than we knew? Such were the questions we bandied between ourselves.
“One day, we followed the tracking device signals. A scouting team had been waylaid, killed, and dragged somewhere into town. We suspected the Lurchers might have a nest, or hive – rather like ants or bees – and if we could get in there and destroy it we might be free from these organised Lurcher attacks. We knew that sooner or later they would group together, exploit our weaknesses and smash us. It could happen at any time, and we didn’t have enough men to defend ourselves. We decided on a pre-emptive strike – to destroy them before they could destroy us. At least, that was the plan.
“We took half our soldiers with us. It was a massive operation. We followed the signals down into a sewer. When we got there, we were right – it was a hive. The tunnels ran this way and that, deeper and deeper underground. During the whole journey, we never met more than three or four Lurchers. That should have alerted us to something strange going on, but it didn’t. We pressed on.
“When we finally made it to the main room, we found tables with straps. It was dark, the smell overpowering. A mixture of faeces and rotting flesh. Hell on earth. I’d served in the army in the Old World, but never on the front lines. I was an engineer. I spent most of my time around circuit boards and fuses. But I’d heard my father talking about war, the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. You can never quite understand what something like that is like until you experience it for yourself.”
Frank raised the cut-glass to his lips and gulped a mouthful of whiskey, ice cubes clinking. Stan and Jordan took the cue and sipped their own. Jordan instantly felt it hit his head and make him dizzy. He put the glass down.
“There was still one soldier strapped down, body strewn with open gashes. He presumably bled to death. Another soldier had been left in a cell and killed in a more…. shall we say, traditional Lurcher fashion. Clearly, Lurcher intelligence was significantly more developed than we’d thought, but by how much? Furthermore, the Lurchers were now gone. But gone where? To another location? Were there other hives? Was this one of many such chambers? We’d gone all that way and discovered evidence of strange behaviour… and yet had no way to identify what they had done or what they were looking for.
“When we returned to the surface we could see wisps of smoke in the distance. As we marched through the empty streets we could smell burning. It got stronger the closer we got. Then we could hear the screams. The compound was ablaze. We were just a few hours too late. They had hit our weak spots – the spots they had been scouting. They pried at every corner, at every weakness until they found a way in. It was just a matter of time.
“Then it struck me. I realised that despite the soldiers who’d been consumed in the Lurcher catacombs, there had been no blood. Tearing open a body should have produced a great deal, but there had been none. Everything came back to me at once: the choreographed attacks on the compound, the capturing of soldiers, bringing them down into the sewers, little blood remaining once they had been consumed…”
Frank quietened, gulped down the last of his whiskey and stared into space.
“What?” Stan said. “What was it?”
“They found a way to get our soldiers to tell them everything they knew about the compound’s defences. After all, who else knew more about it than them? But our soldiers had been trained not to yield under torture – no matter how severe. I believe they must have gotten the information by another method.”
He leaned forward in his chair.
“Tell me, have you ever heard of something called ‘blood memory’?”
132.
“You don’t honestly believe blood memory exists?” Stan said.
“I not only believe it exists,” Frank said, “I have proof it works.”
Frank led them to the door under the stairs. It opened on squeaky hinges. An empty doorway of black. Frank reached up and pulled a string. Darkness gave way to a fuzzy orb of light that barely illuminated the first dozen splintered steps. Frank led them down. Their footsteps echoed off the cold stone walls. Gooseflesh popped up on their arms.
Frank tugged a dangling cord. Harsh lights plinked on. On a large square table decorated with blobs of various coloured stain
s like a patchwork quilt, test tubes bubbled and pots chuffed away. A combination of chemicals filled the air, creating a noxious cocktail. A large empty cage half-hidden in shadow sat to one side.
“It was well-known that blood – or rather DNA – contains the entire history of human evolution. We can trace back all major developments. The forward-facing eyes, the opposable thumb, walking upright… Each milestone the direct result of some forgotten turmoil, and we had to either evolve or die. Species die out all the time, of course. It might be that humanity has had its day. Or perhaps humanity is simply evolving. Who’s to say blood memory isn’t the next step in our evolution?”
Stan shook his head. “No. I can’t accept that. How could a species like ours create Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Mona Lisa, and then ‘evolve’ into monsters?”
“They’re only monsters to us. And you’re forgetting, not all change is for the best. Perhaps the earth got sick of being home to such a neglectful species. Humans are every bit as dangerous as Lurchers, I assure you. When it really comes down to it, and you’re fighting for your survival, there really is little difference between us and them. Human beings have been playing the role of Lurchers for years. We just had the decency to call it war.
“You know where we are in our course of evolution, don’t you? This isn’t even the first time this has happened. We are now where we were seventeen hundred years ago when the Roman Empire fell. All our advanced knowledge and technology razed to the ground by barbarians. Will we survive? Will we rise again? I don’t know. But I do believe that our best hope lies with blood memory.”
Bang!
Something smacked against the empty cage wall, rattling it. Jordan tripped, falling back. “Jesus Christ!” He looked up at the empty black eyes, the fleshless lower jaw bone and protruding ribs.
“My God, man,” Stan said, helping Jordan up. “You keep a live Lurcher down here?”
