King Carrion

by Rich Hawkins

  He imagined what was happening on the streets as he hid in this little room. More attacks. More converts. More vampires. And soon the number of survivors would be down to a handful.

  King Carrion.

  He thought of Ellie for a long while, and pictured her as something carnivorous and without mercy. It reduced him to tears.

  He fell asleep with those tears still upon his face.

  *

  He dreamed the same dream of Ellie and the figure in the cloth mask. But now Ellie spoke its name with the reverence reserved for a god. They danced in the same cavernous room with the same audience of monsters. And then King Carrion, the thing of rags, released her and she crawled into the dark to commune with her brothers and sisters of blood.

  Come to me, Mason, her voice called from the shadows. We can be together again. Cease your fighting against the converted ones. Be at peace and accept what is inevitable.

  A pause, and then: I still love you, my husband.

  *

  Mason woke and pawed at his throat to check for wounds. He slumped and exhaled, then grabbed the bottle beside him and sank most of the water inside. He sat there gasping, heart crashing and irregular, sweating under the blanket around his shoulders.

  Pete and the soldier were still asleep. Mason rose stiffly, groaning and sighing, and went to the mattress against the window and pushed it to let in the first light of morning around the edges of the closed curtains. He peered outside, squinting at tepid sunlight as a wave of relief passed through him at surviving the night. But then he remembered the dream and the words Ellie had spoken. And a great swell of longing for his wife consumed him until he sagged with his back against the wall and bowed his head.

  *

  They left the house to watch the sun rise above the town. They moved through back streets, watchful and jittery, glancing up and down narrow roads and past grey buildings.

  Mason found a short-handled axe discarded on the road, and stopped to pick it up. Its blade was encrusted with dried blood. He kept it with him.

  “Good find,” said Pete.

  The swelling in Bluth’s ankle had lessened, and he was able to walk with only Mason supporting him. He smelled of stale sweat and old vinegar. Pete walked in front with the pistol at his side.

  They passed a man in white underpants loitering in a doorway with a bottle of supermarket brand lemonade clutched to his chest. He cackled to himself when they looked towards him. He was a shrivelled thing.

  “The monsters took more of us last night,” he said, with a witless glaze in his eyes. “Soon we’ll all be bloodsuckers!”

  Pete glared at the man for a moment then turned away.

  After that, they encountered no one else on the streets. Mason looked up to the blue sky hazy with cloud. Winter sun, cold breeze, chill air.

  The town was silent and dead.

  *

  They found the church doors hanging from their hinges, and when they stepped inside the air was spoiled with coppery blood and offal. The morning light spilled through the doorway and revealed the broken, mangled shapes and wet meat left out for them. Further inside the nave there was a deeper stench of rancid dairy and rotten eggs.

  The people in the church had been slaughtered. Mason, Pete and the soldier stared at the remains strewn around and upon the pews and the floor. Headless bodies arranged on the benches, with heads placed on their laps. Severed arms and legs. Hearts stolen from chest cavities and smeared over the walls. Frothing viscera. Blood had dripped down the back of pews to pool on the stone floor. The head of a little girl had been planted on a metal candleholder. Her face was frozen in sheer terror and pain. Her mouth was stuffed with communion wafers.

  Bluth hunched over and dry heaved. When he straightened, his face was beaded with sweat and taut with what looked like shame or guilt.

  Pete sat down on an empty pew and bowed his head. He looked at the pistol. “They came here in the night. Fucking leeches.”

  Mason walked up the aisle, glancing at the bodies to either side of him, and stopped before the altar, where ropey intestines and sloppy flaps of flesh were strewn around its base. The altar frontal had been torn aside. Upon the front of the altar, a name had been scrawled in blood.

  KING CARRION

  His eyes drifted to the top of the altar. He tried to speak, but the words crumbled silently out of his mouth. And he reached out and picked up Ellie’s wedding ring from atop the altar. He didn’t need to read the inscription on the inside, but he did, and it moved him to tears to see the words he’d given to her to mark their union.

  He put the ring in his pocket.

  It had been left here for him, as a warning, a promise, or a reminder that Ellie would wait for him until he relented and joined the converted.

  He was startled when a faint, wavering and indistinct voice drifted out of the shadows at the back of the chancel beyond the altar. He froze. Pete walked up the aisle. Bluth followed, using the edges of the wooden benches for support.

  “Did you hear that?” said Mason, gripping his axe.

  Pete nodded. “A survivor?”

  Bluth looked at them. “Or a trap.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  They followed the voice to a black door at the rear of the chancel. Mason assumed that it led to the transept and the rooms within. He looked at Pete and Bluth then opened the door and pulled it back on its old hinges.

  Pete directed his torch into the darkness through the doorway. Mason stepped back and did the same. Bluth stood behind them and said nothing. A musty smell came out of the dark, like old shoes and yellowed newspapers. Mason went to step forward, but Pete looked at him and held up the pistol and took the lead instead. Mason followed. Bluth fell in behind them as they passed through the doorway and edged into a room. They stood in the swarming of dust particles caught in the sweeping torch beams.

  The voice had stopped.

  The room – the sacristy – was empty of life or the undead. Pete opened a white wardrobe and pawed through a rack of hanging vestments. Mason threw back the curtains to let dim daylight into the room.

  They went through the next door, into a corridor full of shadow. Torchlight creeping along the floor and walls.

  “I can hear the voice again,” muttered Pete.

  “I can’t hear anything,” Mason said.

  They moved along the corridor until they reached another door. It was painted red.

  “The voice is inside,” Pete said. “I can hear it.”

  Mason listened, but there was just the stutter of his own heart. He glanced back at Bluth, who frowned and shook his head. Pete opened the door and crept forward with the torch and pistol held out. And then they were in the room just as dark as the corridor and the room before that.

  The smell of corruption immediately hit Mason and he wrinkled his nose and looked around for the source. Pete was already moving in small steps within the room, sweeping his torch around the walls and over his shadow painted by Mason’s torch behind him.

  It was the reverend’s office. A small desk stood near the back of the room. On the desk was a silver-framed photo next to a dull white computer. A dusty keyboard and mouse. A pot of pencils and pens. On the wall behind the desk was a reprint of a Turner watercolour.

  The voice whispered out of the dark, and seemed to flutter in the air about them.

  “You’ve all come to save me, I see…”

  Mason froze. Then he and Bluth looked up at the same time that Pete aimed his torch at the ceiling.

  Bluth muttered something and stepped back against the wall.

  The torchlights revealed a girl clinging spiderlike to the ceiling, her red eyes blazing, mouth yawning open and struggling to contain the rows of fanged teeth. Her lank hair hung down around her face as she hissed and grinned. An undead and diseased thing that should not be.

  “Holy shit,” Pete said.

  They were the last words he spoke before the girl reached down and grabbed his head and snatched him from
the floor. As he was pulled towards the ceiling, his pistol discharged and its report filled the room. His torchlight bobbed across the ceiling as he screamed. The girl giggled wetly.

  Mason reeled away when the sickening sound of ripping flesh ended Pete’s screams. Sudden splashing of blood down Pete’s front. His pistol fired again. Then he was released and fell to the floor. His neck was slashed open, the wound deep and haemorrhaging blood. He spluttered and then his head slumped to one side and his eyes centred upon Mason as he opened his mouth and his eyes glazed over.

  Mason turned back to the girl and watched her detach from the ceiling and land on all fours then look up to him and grin through a filthy, dripping mouth. Her hands were stained red. Her limbs clicked.

  Bluth was telling Mason to kill her, to use the axe and take her head from her shoulders.

  The girl dragged Pete to the far side of the room and crouched over him. She licked at his neck and shivered and then raised her face to the ceiling. The low moan from her mouth was one of utter joy. Her tongue worked over her lips. She looked up at Mason, scarlet eyes bleeding, and clambered over Pete’s body to get to him.

  Mason raised the axe in one hand. The girl leapt at him at the same moment that he swung for her, and it struck her in the shoulder and embedded in flesh and muscle. She screeched and flailed, spitting flecks of black saliva and blood, her arm extending to swipe at him with jagged nails.

  A thin line of heat and pain was scored across his chest. His hand slipped from the axe handle and he looked down to see his jumper torn almost to his armpit. He backed away, flinching from the girl’s slashing claws. He felt the warmth of blood upon the skin of his chest. He hunched over, grimacing, not taking his eyes from the vampire girl padding towards him with an expression of hate and rage upon her face.

  Bluth was shouting behind Mason; his voice was a mess of syllables and nonsense in the near-dark. Mason retreated on heavy feet, and had almost reached the wall, when the girl pulled the axe from her shoulder and threw it; the axe struck the wall between Mason and Bluth and embedded in the plaster.

  The girl skittered forward faster than seemed possible and pounced upon Mason and dragged him to the floor. She straddled him as he struggled and tried to wriggle free, but her strength was too much for him. She planted one hand upon his face and pushed it to one side and angled her mouth for the killing bite at his throat.

  Mason screamed, pawing at her, thrashing underneath her weight. Her unholy strength sapped him until his cries dwindled to terrified pleas.

  The girl arched her spine and drew her head back and opened her mouth. Her teeth dripped with bloody saliva. Dark grey gums and a necrotic tongue. Mason could smell the raw meat stench of her breath.

  The muscles in her neck tightened to snapping point and she hissed wetly.

  Bluth appeared behind the girl, wrapped his arms around her neck and hauled her from atop Mason. She screamed and wriggled as Bluth dragged her across the floor and threw her against the wall. She immediately sprung back onto all fours, glaring at the soldier.

  Mason stood and reached for the axe in the wall. He glanced back to see Bluth take the revolver from Pete’s hand and raise it and pull back the hammer as he aimed at the girl hissing from the corner of the room.

  “Stupid bitch,” Bluth said.

  The first round took the girl through the chest and pushed her back like she’d been shoved. He fired again, and the girl’s right ear was torn away by the bullet. She screamed, and it rose to an agonised screech as her hands scraped and gouged plaster from the wall.

  Mason pulled the axe free and staggered and turned as Bluth took one step towards the girl and shot her through the mouth. She slid down the wall and slumped on her buttocks, and her head lolled to one side. She made a gurgling sound from the back of her throat as she snapped her mouth uselessly.

  Bluth pulled the trigger again, but the revolver was empty. He checked the cylinder. Then he tossed the gun to the floor. He looked at Mason.

  “Finish it.”

  Mason hesitated, swallowed, and looked from Bluth to the girl.

  “Do it!” Bluth said. “Put it out of its misery.”

  Mason inhaled sharply then went to the girl and stood over her. She looked up, snarling through her broken face, and as she reached out to him, he swung the axe downwards and cleaved her skull. And she finally died again, released from un-death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Mason crouched by Pete’s body and looked at his face. His eyes were open and dulled. He had died sometime during the fight with the girl.

  “I’m sorry, Pete.”

  Bluth stood over Mason’s shoulder. “He’s going to rise again.”

  “I know.”

  “We have to cut off his head or destroy the brain.”

  “I know.”

  “You want me to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  *

  Mason stepped away as Bluth used the axe to separate Pete’s head from the flesh of his neck. And when he was done they left the room and its two corpses and went back out into the church to stand near the scattered remains of the people who’d once taken shelter there.

  *

  Mason found a First Aid box in the sacristy. Bluth helped him disinfect and slap some gauze over the cut across his chest. Mason asked if vampirism could be transmitted through a scratch. Bluth wasn’t sure.

  Afterwards they sat on the steps outside the front of the church, in the waning sunlight. The temperature was dropping. A frigid breeze swept down the silent street. They passed a bottle of water between them and drank between pulling on their cigarettes.

  “How’s your ankle?” said Mason.

  Bluth watched the houses across the road. “Better, I think.”

  Beyond the roofs, plumes of white-grey smoke rose from deeper within the town. Faint voices echoed between buildings.

  Mason looked at Ellie’s wedding ring in his hand. He turned it over. He noticed Bluth watching him.

  “It was my wife’s.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She’s a vampire.”

  “Undead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bluth.

  “You married?”

  “No.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Gay.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m gay.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m still in the closet.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Good point.”

  “Am I the first person you’ve told?” said Mason.

  Bluth exhaled. “Yeah.”

  Mason almost laughed. “I feel honoured.”

  Bluth threw the last bit of his cigarette down the steps. “Strange how things work out.”

  “Very true.”

  It started to rain cold specks of drizzle.

  “I’m leaving,” said Bluth.

  “You’re leaving the town?”

  The soldier nodded. “The situation’s hopeless. I don’t want to become a vampire. I’ve no wish to live forever as a monster. I don’t want to lose my soul. I’d rather kill myself, but as I’m Catholic, suicide is not really an option. Then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if the military bombs the town before we’re all transformed into bloodsuckers.”

  “You think you can get past the quarantine?” said Mason.

  “I’m going to walk down the road to the outskirts of town and try to talk my way out. I’ll probably get a bullet, but it’s a better death than the other choices.”

  Mason took the last pull from his cigarette then dropped the smoking butt and crushed it under his foot. “It’s a good choice.”

  “You’re welcome to come with me,” said Bluth.

  Mason looked at Ellie’s ring. “Much obliged, but I can’t go.”

  “I understand. Good luck, Mason.”

  “Good luck, Corporal.”

  Bluth stood. He descended the steps and looked up at the dark
ening sky. “I’ve always liked walking in the rain.”

  *

  Twenty minutes later Mason had retreated to sit in the church doorway when he heard the gunshot from the edge of town. He looked down the road in the direction Bluth had walked. Then he lit another cigarette and bowed his head.

  “Hello,” a small voice said.

  Mason raised his face and looked towards the little boy standing in the road. The boy was very thin and pale, dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and black trainers with loose laces. Blonde hair that was almost white, slick with rainwater.

  Mason said nothing and watched the boy. The boy climbed the steps and sat next to him in the doorway. He smelled of ammonia and old flowers.

  “You look tired,” the boy said, without looking at him. “Maybe you should stop fighting, Mason.” The boy’s voice seemed older than his appearance.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I’m a familiar.”

  “A familiar?”

  “I serve the vampires. I serve King Carrion.”

  “You serve them?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “King Carrion came to me. I saw the light. After he killed my parents and drank their blood.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Steven.”

  “So how do you know my name, Steven?”

  “The vampires let me know things. They have their ways. King Carrion has his ways.”

  “Fair enough, Steven.”

  The boy wiped his mouth. “You should convert willingly. Or become a familiar, like me. I can take you to a place. The last people in the town are steadily being converted.”

  “I’m okay. Thanks for the offer.”

  Steven turned to him and reached out and touched Mason’s chest where the girl had scratched him. Then he withdrew his hand and looked out at the street.

  “King Carrion sees all,” said Steven. “He has seen you, Mason. You are known as a survivor. King Carrion admires you.”