The Bad Game

by Adam Millard

  “Calum,” Jamie said, calmly, hands held out placatory. “What’s wrong with you? We can help. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  Calum growled. His bountiful tits rose and fell, glistened in the streetlight as the rain continued to fall upon his naked torso. He seemed to consider Jamie for a moment, though his pitch-black eyes gave nothing away.

  In the street behind, people continued to run past, escaping the madness taking place on the promenade, at the fairground, on the beach, everywhere.

  Behind Calum, Liza shinned Lee Kurtz in the head. The emaciated boy staggered to the side, dazed and confused, shaking his head in an attempt to bring himself back round. Liza cast Jamie a look which said, Help!

  How could he help her, though? He couldn’t even get to her, not without going through Calum, and that simply wasn’t an option. The maniac was bigger in every way. In fact, he seemed to be growing with each passing second. I have to do something! Jamie thought. I can’t just leave her there to die!

  Suddenly, something whipped past Jamie’s head. He felt the wind from it, even heard it—wiiiistttttt!—as it went by. Out in front, Calum roared like something from a bad horror movie. The dart protruding from his right eye was the reason he was kicking up such a fuss.

  Jamie turned to find Scottie running across the road, dodging fleeing people and leaping over the ones who had fallen. In his left hand he held what looked like a broken pool-cue, and in the other were several darts. Jamie could see the flights.

  “Get to the fucking pub!” Scottie yelled as he arrived in the tiny alleyway.

  Jamie had never been so pleased to see the arcade owner in all his life. “Scottie—”

  “We don’t have time!” Scottie said, putting himself between Calum and Jamie. “Go!”

  “What about—”

  “I’ll bring her,” Scottie said, as if he knew what Jamie was thinking. “Now go!”

  Jamie turned and ran for the pub across the street. It didn’t look open. There were no lights on, but Jamie could just about make out the faces of several people in the downstairs window, and as he neared, the door opened ever-so-slightly. He practically fell into The Lacon Arms, crashed through several inconsiderately-placed chairs, bounced off a fruit machine, and landed on the sticky carpet with a bump.

  “Lock the fucking door!” a man wearing a hard hat yelled.

  “Scottie!” a woman staring out through the front window screeched.

  *

  “You want a piece of this, you chunky shit!” Scottie said, swinging the pool-cue from side to side. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was Calum—a bully, a tormentor, a complete and utter bastard, if Scottie was being honest—and yet, there was very little of the boy left in there. Behind him, Lee Kurtz was the same. Eyeless. Snarling. Inhuman.

  Hellions?

  The girl standing on top of the bin screamed. Scottie could see that Lee Kurtz had sunk his teeth into her calf, was chewing on her leg as if it was the best meat he’d ever tasted.

  Without thinking, Scottie surged forward. Calum was a big lad for his age, but when the broken pool-cue connected with his jaw, the boy went down like a sack of potatoes. Scottie wasn’t taking any chances, though, and followed it up with another crack, and another. Calum moaned gutturally and spat teeth out onto the alley floor. Blood was now geysering from his head, spraying up and into the air like a fountain in the Devil’s front garden. When he was sure the fat fuck wasn’t getting back up, Scottie turned his attention to Lee Kurtz.

  “Hey! Skeletor!” Scottie waited for the prick to turn around. His mouth was seemingly filled with flesh, and yet there didn’t appear to be too much missing from the sobbing girl’s leg. “Eat this!” He slammed the butt of the splintered pool-cue into Lee’s face, hoping to knock the freak out. But the cue went on straight through with an awful squelch, came out the other side with strings of flesh dangling from it. Lee’s mouth fell open, his jaw dislocated, and the meat he had been chewing on dropped out and landed on the ground with a sickening smack.

  For almost three seconds they stood like that, with Lee Kurtz on the end of that half a pool-cue and Scottie Lipman wondering how much jail-time he was going to get for killing the scrawny runt. It was only when Lee dropped to his knees—taking the pool-cue with him—that Scottie snapped out of it.

  “We’ve got to go!” the girl was screeching. She was down off the bin, pulling Scottie away from the body with the pool-cue through it.

  She limped, Scottie staggered, but they made it back across the road alive, and into the pub…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  For the longest time Scottie couldn’t speak. He panted, boy did he pant, but words were beyond him after what he had just seen.

  What he had just done.

  The workmen hefted the barricade back into place and collapsed against the fruit machine just as fingers clawed at the door from the other side, a terrible sound, far worse than claws down a chalkboard. Then came the howling—a sound like glass marbles swirling around a ceramic mug—and the survivors (for that was what they were for the time being) listened as the gooseflesh began to pepper their skin and the hairs rose up all across their bodies.

  From his place on the floor, Jamie managed to speak, though it was low and not at all confident. “Does anyone have the slightest idea what is going on out there?”

  One of the workmen—the one wearing the bandanna—cleared his throat. “We think it’s terrorists,” he said. “You know? Al Qaeda? ISIS? The Talibans?”

  “It’s not fucking terrorists.” Though it was dark, Jamie saw Scottie rise on the other side of the room. “What I just killed out there, they were kids. They were just fucking kids.” To Jamie, Scottie sounded distraught. He had never heard the man’s voice crack like that before.

  “Scottie’s right,” Jamie said. “This has nothing to do with terrorists. This is… something else.” But what? What could possibly turn ordinary youngsters into maniacal savages, and all in less than a day?

  “It’s fucked up, is what it is,” Scottie said. Somehow he had found his way across the room to the bar. Not only that but he had located a bottle of something indiscernible and a glass, which he placed down on the counter.

  “Is anyone going to pay for drinks today?” a woman’s voice said. The landlady, Jamie thought. She certainly sounded like one.

  “So what do we do now?” the woman by the window said. “Do we just stay here, hiding while everything goes to shit out there?”

  “Do you have a better idea, Angela?” the workman wearing the hard-hat said. “I mean, you saw what those things are capable of. I say we stay put, let the police do their job—”

  Over at the bar Scottie snorted. “You think the police are going to be able to deal with that lot?” he said. “Those things—those little fuckers—aren’t just kids anymore. There’s something wrong with them. There’s something… changing them.”

  “Barry,” Jamie muttered. All eyes were on him, now. He was sure of it. Could feel them boring into him, awaiting his next words. “That explains what happened to Barry today.” Of course! Barry wasn’t capable of murder. Jamie had been right all along. Something had happened to the boy, something had taken him over, the way it had taken over those outside, tearing through the streets of Hemsby and its tourists. Barry wasn’t a lunatic, after all. He was… possessed!

  “Maybe it’s some kind of government thing?” Bandanna said. “I’ve never trusted those sonsofbitches, not since Roswell.”

  “Have you heard yourself?” Hard-Hat said. “You sound just like one of them… conspiracy nutters.”

  “Aliens don’t exist,” Scottie said, though Jamie wasn’t sure he believed that. Sure, contact hadn’t yet been made with extra-terrestrial life, but to think humans were the only life-forms in the universe was just arrogant. “And whatever’s happening to those kids out there, I can guaran-fucking-tee it has nothing to do with E.T.”

  A loud bang prevented Jamie from voicing his opinion on the m
atter. The woman at the window whimpered, for there was a face pressed up against the glass on the outside not twelve inches away from her own. It was Calum Rowe, or what was left of him. The brutal beating Scottie had administered a moment ago had left the boy with only half a head. One of his eyes hung down on its optic nerve; it swung to and fro in the wind like Ed Gein’s swingball set.

  “What the fuck?” Scottie groaned. “I killed that fucker. That’s not possible.”

  “Look at his head!” Jamie said. “There’s no way he could be up and walking around. He’s missing half his brain!” And he didn’t have a full one to begin with, Jamie thought, though he kept that to himself.

  “Don’t look at him, Angela,” Scottie said, rushing to the woman’s side. “I don’t think he can see in.”

  The woman—Angela—turned away from the face smearing itself across the glass. Blood and rain mingled together; the thing’s eye broke off and disappeared from view.

  Liza took out her phone.

  Of course! Jamie thought. They could call for help, or at least let the police know that they were trapped in the pub and that… what? Evil bastard kids were trying to get in? To kill them? Sure, it made perfect sense.

  “No signal,” Liza said. “Shit, my mom and dad are still out there.” She dropped the phone back into her handbag.

  “They’re not in Hemsby, though,” Jamie said. “You don’t think this… whatever the hell it is, is happening everywhere?”

  Liza shrugged. “I hope not. They were really looking forward to that show.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, but no one called her on it. She was in shock; they all were. What they needed to do was calm down, think rationally, figure out what the hell was going on.

  “This is dead, too,” the landlady said. She had the pub’s private phone pressed to her ear; the ominous tone could be heard throughout the room. She placed the handset back into its cradle and sighed. “Anyone have any bright ideas?”

  “I always knew I’d die before fifty,” Hard-Hat said. It was an unwelcome topic, and several of the survivors let him know this by groaning in unison. “Hey, I’m just saying! Look, those things out there, I think it’s safe to say they’re no longer human, right?”

  Silence, as if none of them had considered that possibility yet. How could you? The human brain wasn’t built to withstand such an outlandish concept. That children—human children—had somehow become something… other. It was the plot of an EC comic book, not the kind of thing which happened in real life.

  “That thing out there,” Angela said as the creature formerly known as Calum Rowe staggered away into the rain, “is not human. I saw its eyes earlier today.”

  “Yeah, all black, they were,” added Bandanna. “I could see my own fucking face in them.”

  “There was nothing human about those eyes,” Angela said. “There was nothing human about what they were trying to do, either.”

  “So, what are we saying here?” Scottie returned to the bar, to where his drink sat calling him. “Are we saying that something took over those kids, stripped them of their humanity, and turned them into mindless savages? Is that what we’re saying here? Because if it is, I’m not okay with that.” He became more upset with each spoken sentence. “There is nothing out there that could do that to those people. We’re talking about people, here, for Christ’s sake. Children with parents, with families, and now those kids are murdering the people that love them the most in the world?”

  Jamie stood and made his way across the room to Scottie. “Barry Mills is not a killer,” he said, “and yet we saw him throw that baby onto the dodgem arena. And I didn’t mention this before because, well, I didn’t want to sound like a complete and utter crackpot, but I saw his eyes just before he did it. I saw the evil in them. It wasn’t Barry that did it; it was whatever was inside him.”

  “And what was that, Jamie?” Scottie asked. “What do you think was inside of Barry Mills, huh?”

  Jamie winced, for he hadn’t anticipated such a brusque reaction. “I—I don’t…”

  “If this isn’t just riots,” Scottie said, “and those kids out there are attacking Hemsby folk because they’re no longer in control of their own fucking bodies, then what? How do we even begin to stop something like that?”

  “Zombies,” Bandanna mumbled.

  “Okay, you’re not allowed to speak anymore,” Scottie said, jabbing a finger toward the workman. Bandanna took a step back, turned around and walked to the opposite corner of the pub. “We’re not dealing with fucking zombies, okay? Like aliens, zombies don’t fucking exist! Does anyone have any reasonable suggestions, and why the fuck have the sirens stopped?”

  It was true. Jamie could no longer hear the sirens wailing in the distance. Were the police coming? Had they decided it wasn’t worth it, that they weren’t paid enough to go interfering in small-town zombie/alien infestations?

  “Maybe they got them all,” Hard-Hat opined.

  Jamie shook his head. “There were too many of them,” he said. “Liza and I saw at least twenty of the fuckers, and that was just between the fairground and here.”

  “Language, Jamie,” Scottie said.

  “Sorry,” Jamie said. Even his own mother didn’t reproach him for swearing. That was a point; was his mom safe? Maybe she didn’t even know what was happening. They were off the seafront, away from all this mess. Jamie imagined her sitting at home, watching Coronation Street and working her way through a box of Terry’s All Gold, oblivious that Hemsby was going to hell in a handbasket. She wouldn’t be worried about Jamie, because some nights he stayed out until nine, some nights he stayed out until ten. His mother knew he liked to hang out at the arcade, the bowling alley, JoJo’s Ice Cream Parlour up on the promenade. She didn’t have to worry about him because he was too sensible to get himself into trouble, too smart to let his mother down. She wouldn’t be expecting him home for at least an hour, and even then it would be no big deal if he didn’t show up for another hour.

  “Things have gone quiet out there,” Angela said. Apart from the occasional person running past the pub window, nothing moved. The body across the street, that poor woman with half her skull scooped out, certainly didn’t move. She just lay there, getting wet, like one of those single discarded gloves you were apt to find as you walked around a park.

  “I don’t like it,” the old man landlord said. Jamie didn’t know his name. “All that mayhem and then quiet. That’s not right.”

  “People were running away,” Scottie said. “Maybe they found somewhere to hole up.”

  Like we’re doing, Jamie thought.

  “Should we try the television?” Hard-Hat said, motioning to the set hanging over in the corner. “It could be on the news. They might know what’s going on.”

  Scottie rubbed feverishly at his eyes. “It’s not going to be on the news,” he said. “Small-town stuff never is.”

  “But this isn’t some cat stuck up a tree!” the landlady said. “There’s something very wrong going on out there.”

  Scottie lit a cigarette.

  “And now we’re flouting all laws, apparently,” said the landlady. “You can’t smoke that in here.”

  “Well, Deirdre, I can tell you this for free. I am not going to stand out-fucking-side.” Scottie took a long hard pull on his cigarette before exhaling a plume of blue smoke into the atmosphere.

  “Give me one of those,” Deirdre said. “Shit, if you can’t bar ‘em, join ‘em.”

  As Scottie handed the landlady one of his cigarettes, Jamie said, “Yeah, I’ll take one of those, too, mate.” He held his hand out expectantly.

  “You’ll bloody well not,” Scottie said, stuffing the pack into his trouser pocket, out of reach to anyone unless they wanted a broken wrist.

  The sound of something smashing caused them all to fall silent again. None of them moved; they all just stood or sat there, listening, trying to determine where the noise had come from. To Jamie, it had sounded distant, a window breaking in the ne
xt street, perhaps, or someone lamping seven bells of shit out of one of those things with an empty beer bottle.

  “Please tell me that was outside,” Angela whispered, moving away from the window for the first time since Jamie and Liza’s arrival.

  “Sounded like it,” Scottie said. “I don’t—”

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence as a shrill wail cut him off. Jamie’s heart leapt up into his throat, though whether it was still beating or not, he didn’t know.

  “That sounded closer,” Deirdre said, latching on to her husband’s arm, as if he might somehow protect her from the monstrous beast about to make itself known.

  “It sounded like it came from out back,” the landlord said.

  “But the back door’s locked up, right?” Angela said, fear drenching her voice. “Ted?”

  Scottie put his glass down on the counter. It had been empty for quite some time, Jamie had noticed. “Ted?” he said. “The woman asked you a question.”

  Ted seemed to shrink in that moment. “I’m pretty sure it was locked up nice and tight,” he said, “but…”

  “The window!” Deirdre screeched. Scottie held a finger to his lips, shhhh, and urged her to continue in a quieter manner. “There’s a little frosted window next to the back door. It’s only small—”

  “Too small for one of those pricks to get in?” Scottie said, keeping his own voice low despite his palpable anger.

  The landlord and landlady exchanged a glance, and then Ted said, “Kids these days are tiny. I mean, there are some leaving school who don’t look old enough to buy a lottery ticket.”

  “Shit!” Scottie said. He knew, Jamie knew, they all knew what this meant. One of them was in the pub, had smashed the frosted window next to the back door and squeezed through it.

  “Well this day just keeps getting better and better,” Bandanna said.

  “Everyone just stay calm,” Scottie said. “Okay?” Out there, beyond a door leading to… well, Jamie didn’t have a clue where, the thing howled again. It sounded like an injured animal, a cat with its paw stuck in a luncheon-meat tin, a fox being molested by another fox. It was an awful noise, and Jamie shuddered at the sound of it.