Eat Local

by King, Danny

Nothing moved on the road in either direction, including Sebastian, so he jumped to his feet and started chasing down white lines until they took him around a bend.

  Sebastian stopped. There, parked on the hard shoulder, was an army truck. The lights were off and no one seemed to be at home but Sebastian took it one step at a time. He hadn’t come this far just to run into a bayonet now. He peered into the cab and saw that it was empty. He did the same in the rear and clocked only ammo crates and wanking socks. The truck was his for the taking if only he could get it started. Of course he might look a bit conspicuous driving up Balham High Street in it but it would do for the first fifty miles just to get him out of here, so he climbed in and ran his hands around the cab feeling keys. Whoever had parked here was obviously a fan of tradition because he’d left them in the sun visor and Sebastian caught them as they attempted to flee.

  “Back of the net,” he smiled.

  Sebastian had never driven a truck before but he was willing to give it a go. After all, trucks were only big cars with more wheels and no rear view mirrors but he wasn’t planning on reversing anyway so what did it matter?

  He twisted the keys in the ignition and woke the engine up with a roar. It sounded powerful. It sounded fast. And it sounded very fucking noisy. He stuck the truck into first and started pulling out onto the road.

  THUD!

  Sebastian had barely gone two feet and he’d hit something already, but what? He couldn’t see anything out there. There was no other traffic, he was clear of the trees and he was steering away from the fence.

  A pair of legs stepped down from the roof off the cab and onto the bonnet and Angel crouched down to smile in through the windscreen.

  “Going somewhere?” she asked with a smile.

  Sebastian was played-out. He’d got so close to getting away only to be pegged back on the home stretch. He was no longer fearful, just exasperated.

  “Oh come on, let us go, will you? After all we’ve been through,” he sobbed, feeling like a condemned prisoner who’d received a Royal Pardon on the morning of his execution only to discover it was invalidated because of poor punctuation.

  Angel swung through the passenger window to take the seat next to him. Against the glare of the dashboard dials he could see her mouth and chin glistening with something wet that wasn’t sweat. She wiped her face with a sock she found in the footwell and threw it out of the window.

  “We need a ride,” she told him.

  “You’ve got cars, ain’t you? You came in cars,” Sebastian reminded her.

  “The sun’s coming up,” Angel said, pointing to the orange hue in the east. “We can’t drive in daylight.”

  Sebastian drummed his fingers against the steering wheel and thought on the predicament. At least they needed him for something. As inconvenient as this was, it was preferable to not being needed at all. He still had a few cards to play yet.

  “Then will you let me go?” he asked.

  “Of course Sebastian,” Angel reassured him. “We’re nothing if not appreciative.”

  Sebastian restarted the truck and drove back towards the farm. They stopped at the gates and waited. Both he and Angel were reluctant to go any further and they stared at the old Thatcher’s place from a distance. It looked even grimmer in the early dawn’s light. The house was swathed in shadows and masked with mist. The outer barns had burnt to the ground to leave nothing but ashes and old girders twisted in a smoking heap while the hillside was littered with dead. Had he really only arrivedhere eight hours earlier? It seemed like a lot longer.

  “Are you a betting man, Sebastian?” Angel asked.

  “I like a flutter from time to time,” he admitted, wondering what she was proposing he put up as a stake.

  “Then I’ll bet you £10 that you never read about any of this in tomorrow’s newspaper.”

  Sebastian wondered why this might be. Was it because dead men read no newspapers or was she hinting at something more sinister? Sebastian chose to play dumb. It was a tactic that had got him this far while all the smart guys were sleeping out there in the mud so why change now?

  “I might need to go to a cashpoint,” he said hopefully, only to have his hopes dashed by a distant scream.

  Sebastian reached for the ignition but Angel steadied his hand.

  “Relax,” she told him. “Just some friends of ours.”

  A moment later they saw movement in the trees. Two figures stepped out and started towards them. Even from this distance they could see that one was Henry and the other was Boniface, albeit wearing Sebastian’s clothes.

  Angel jumped down when they reached the truck.

  “You made it,” she said, giving Henry a relieved embrace.

  “Just about,” he shrugged then looked up into the cab. “Hey Sebastian, thanks for sticking around.”

  “No problem, you know me,” he tried to smile.

  It was then that Boniface noticed Sebastian was wearing his suit. It had taken him a moment because it no longer looked like his suit; it was battered and torn, muddy and soaked. It was going to require the dry cleaning equivalent of Victor Frankenstein to save it from being cut into tea towels now.

  “You want to swap back?” Sebastian explained when he saw Boniface gawping.

  Boniface growled but was sanguine. “Keep it,” he replied. “Something to remember me by.”

  “Vanessa?” Angel asked more in hope than expectation.

  Henry shook his head sadly. “We’re all that’s left.”

  Angel looked to Sebastian and suggested: “You can still change your mind and stay with us if you like. Can’t he?”

  “We have had a few vacancies crop up of late,” Henry admitted, putting it mildly. “Mr Boniface?”

  When this same question had been put to him at the start of the evening, Boniface could only object. And it wasn’t because of what had happened with Thomas or because of who Sebastian was, it was simply because he hadn’t been consulted beforehand. Boniface was a man of immense pride. But looking around the smoking ruins on Thatcher’s farm and the valley of death it sat in, Boniface was ready to concede that satisfaction had been done. Honour had been restored – to him, at least.

  “Up to him,” he shrugged as disinterestedly as he could. “I withdraw my objection.”

  Sebastian didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or attempt to run them all down in his truck, but he tried to look pleased all the same, if only for their benefit. They might have been mindless killers but they were curiously touchy with it.

  “So Sebastian, how about it? Ready to join the family?” Henry offered with a smile.

  As tempting as it was, eternal life, superhuman powers, nice teeth, there was a downside too. And that wasn’t just meeting up with Boniface once a century. There was the nocturnal existence, religious persecution and eternal damnation to take into consideration, not to mention his holiday to Corfu that he’d already paid the deposit on.

  “Can I think about it?” Sebastian asked.

  “Think about it while you drive,” Henry told him, climbing into the back with Boniface and Angel and pulling the canvas flaps down to keep the rising sun out.

  Sebastian started up the engine and turned the truck around. The open road beckoned but not all roads led to Rome and someone had nicked the Satnav.

  “Where to?” Sebastian asked.

  Henry’s called through from the back and echoed Sebastian’s own thoughts. “Anywhere but here, Sebastian. Anywhere but here.”

  Sebastian couldn’t have agreed more and gunned the accelerator to leave Thatcher’s farm far far behind. It was only once they rejoined the main road a thought occurred to him.

  “Here, what about my bag?”

  EPILOGUE

  The farm lay still in dawn’s early light. The only things to move were the smoke drifting across the fields and the fox scampering between the ruins, now free to fill his belly with as much barbecued chicken as he liked. Nothing else stirred.

  The shadows got shorter and
the mists burnt away. It had been an eventful night for the fox but for someone used to running from buckshot and dodging dogs it was not entirely without precedent. Death and desperation went with the territory when you were a fox. But the object of the game was to ensure it always landed at someone else’s door.

  The fox’s ears twitched. He could hear something approaching in the distance: more cars and heavy trucks, but it wasn’t the same truck that had left an hour ago.

  The fox decided to quit while he was ahead and slunk back into the woods taking one last fried chicken with him. He wasn’t hungry but it was free and only going to waste. And who didn’t love a takeaway at the end of a long evening?

  Two bright white cars and one impossibly clean lorry stopped at the entrance of the farm. They could be seen for miles and looked conspicuous amongst all the mud and mayhem.

  The occupants of the cars climbed out and surveyed the scene before them. Like their cars the clothes they wore were spotlessly white and package fresh. How could anything be so clean in this pit of hell?

  The truck honked its horn several times and attempted to make contact via its radio but all efforts failed. The fox had already fled and there was no one left alive to hear it.

  The back of the truck rolled up and several men in bio-chemical suits jumped out. They spoke with the person in charge, an immaculately dressed young woman of indeterminate age. Like everyone else she was dressed entirely in white but she had an air of power about her. In a different setting you might’ve taken her for a businesswoman or a lawyer or a politician or a powerbroker but here, in amongst all the death and destruction and blood and bones, she looked more like a concentration camp commandant, which was probably the closest comparison to the truth.

  She dispatched the men in bio-chemical suits and watched as they headed into the contamination zone. Six men dispersed in six different directions, some towards the barns, some into the house, some into the woods and a couple up to the top of the hill.

  The sun continued to climb, shooting brilliant yellow rays through the skeletal branches of the trees to reveal more bodies scattered around the grounds.

  After several minutes the woman in white’s radio burst to life.

  “You’d better get up here, Ma’am. It looks like we’ve got a live one.”

  The convoy drove into the grounds and parked beside the farm but they didn’t head inside. Instead the woman in white and her entourage climbed the hill towards the rise, passing what was left of several soldiers and a very disappointed-looking Mr Thatcher along the way. His eyes stared straight up into the sky, unseeing and unblinking, the image of Angel etched into his corneas for all eternity. He’d lived a violent life and he’d died a violent death. It might’ve seemed a fitting end for him but there was more to his story than that. He hadn’t always been a killer. In fact he’d been a very happy child until that fateful night in 1986 when he’d stumbled upon Melissa, roaming naked in the woods, looking for…

  But what did that matter now?

  He was dead and so was she. And after the woman in white was finished with this place no one would ever see or hear from them again. It would be as though they’d never existed at all.

  “This way,” a voice called out as the woman in white made her way up to the crest of the hill. Here she found three A-frames, two of which were empty but for rags and dust. But the third, the frame in the middle, contained the figure of man who could’ve passed for 200 years old. His face was crinkled and cracked, grey and grizzled, desiccated and decrepit. She could tell by his uniform that he was a soldier. And she could tell by his pips that he was an officer. But she couldn’t tell anything else from looking at him. Not even if he was alive. Not until he spoke.

  “You took your time, you fucking bitch!” he hissed, his cracked lips parting to reveal a fearsome set of pearly whites, a parting gift from Henry and Boniface.

  “Colonel,” the woman commanded, snapping her fingers in his face to get his full attention, “where are the others?”

  “Gone,” he croaked, every effort causing him exquisite new agonies. He felt as though he was on fire, but not ablaze. Not yet. The sun had yet to make it over the crest of the rise so Bingham had been left to roast over a slow flame. And he was nearly done. “Get me down and I’ll share what I’ve got with you,” he told them. “I’ll share it with you all.”

  But it wasn’t exactly the most enticing offer in the world. Bingham was literally crumbling to dust before their very eyes. His lips split as he spoke and several teeth fell away but with little or no signs of blood. Just agony and ash accompanied Bingham’s disintegration.

  “Quickly,” the woman said, summoning an assistant forward who held a silver briefcase. The case was opened and the woman in white removed a syringe from a Styrofoam surround.

  “Cut me down!” Bingham ordered, but the woman was no longer listening. She had but a few seconds left to save her sample so she plunged the syringe into Bingham’s neck and stirred it around as she looked for a vein, untroubled by her subject’s screams. Liquid blood began to squirt into the syringe so she drew back to plunger to purloin as much as she could while the Colonel hollered in fury.

  Her sample retrieved, she yanked out the needle and handed it back to her assistant who placed it into the briefcase and closed it to shield it from the sun. On the lid of the case a logo curled around some letters that read: “Jeunes by Infinity”.

  “Now cut me down. You’ve got what you came for so set me free,” Bingham demanded but this time the woman didn’t reply. She merely stepped back a safe distance and cocked her head, curious to observe what happened next.

  The rest of the white-suited brigade joined her on the hill but no one went to Bingham’s aid as his charred skin began to crackle.

  “You have no idea how this feels. It’s so incredible. I’ll share it with you all, just cut me down!” he gasped as the first few rays of sun streaked across the hillside, over the trees and onto his back, casting his shadow across the woman in white.

  Bingham screamed. He’d never known an agony like it and yet still the power that surged through his body was intoxicating. If he’d not been restrained he could’ve run up sheer mountains, smashed through walls, stalked anything that moved and swam through rivers of blood. His appetite was matched only by his ferocity and yet it wasn’t a savage rage. His mind now functioned on a higher state of consciousness. He no longer identified with the beings opposite. In fact it was hard to believe he’d ever regarded himself as one of them. He was so much more in every possible way – a higher species even.

  A fox amongst chickens.

  “It’s so powerful. So beautiful,” he cried out as he burst into flames before them.

  The woman in white barely batted an eyelash. No one did. And as Colonel Bingham burned to nothing in the first light of dawn, his screams brought to a close the 59th meeting of the 13th Coven of Nightwalkers (British Chapter).

  Until the next time.

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  STORY ORIGIN

  I first wrote Eat Local back in September 2005. Back then, and for most of the next eleven years, it was called Reign of Blood, a title it never suited and one I simply cobbled together out of several random scary words. Blood? Something Blood? Vampires like blood so it should probably have Blood in the title? House of Blood? Night of Blood? Son of Blood? Reign of Blood? That’ll do.

  Director Jason Flemyng came up with Eat Local. I didn’t like it at first. Vampires suck, they don’t eat. But it has since grown on me and I can honestly say that it fits the film, certainly more so than Reign of Blood, or as we came to know and abbreviate it, ROB.

  Up until this point I’d only written a couple of screenplays. A meandering unfilmable version of Milo’s Marauders and a straight-from-the-book adaptation of The Hitman Diaries, neither of which set the film industry abuzz. But they were helpful learning experiences nonetheless. They were my practice efforts and I was improving all the time, mostly how to structure screenpl
ays and how to write without resorting to endless voiceovers to narrate what we were seeing onscreen. I’m not Mozart. This stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. I wish it did but the truth is most of my writing is the product of years of trial and error, mostly error.

  Back in 2005, The Hitman Diaries was optioned by an actor/producer called Martin Malone. Martin was sadly unsuccessful in his efforts to get the film made but I learned a lot from him, not least of all the restrictions a budget can place upon a film. Martin told me that more and more micro-budget films were being made because they offered less of a risk to investors.

  This made perfect sense and yet bizarrely it had never occurred to me. I’d simply worried about story and dialogue and set pieces and explosions and left paying for it to someone else. But Martin was right. A film that could be shot for (eg.) £100,000 could be a more attractive proposition for a potential producer than a movie that cost £10million. Particularly from a first-timer like myself. So, taking a blank piece of paper and my new-found expertise in production budgets I sat down and tried to think of a scenario that might be shot cheaply. Or at least not prohibitively expensively.

  Moving between multiple locations is apparently a very expensive exercise and time consuming. As is shooting in or around the general public (how much did a couple of scenes in central London cost the makers of 28 Days Later? I don’t know but I bet these few iconic scenes added up to a fair old chunk of the budget). So a single location, somewhere isolated and away from Joe Wave-At-The-Camera Public would make sense. Somewhere the crew could get in, set up their equipment and film the whole thing without having to pack everything away and move somewhere else.

  A deserted farmhouse for example.

  This is the reason deserted farmhouses and deep dark woods are so abundant in horror films. Not because they’re scary. But because they’re cheap. Horror films are generally made on lower budgets and deserted farmhouses and deep dark woods offer the producers the chance to keep their budgets down (eg. Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead and The Blair Witch Project, etc). In all honesty, you’re probably a lot safer in a deserted farmhouse or the deep dark woods than you are on most city street but thanks to the straight-to-video industry we’ve come to associate these places with horror and death.