by Morgana Wray
My gleeful outburst was to be short-lived. The game changed. More of the blacked-eyed fucks came trooping in. Every onward step that they took drove real anxiety through me. I really struggled to keep my thoughts from going haywire and descending into a really bad place. That would have been very bad timing for a nervous breakdown.
I spun my pocket knife around and wiped the sweat from my brow. I was ready for the next onslaught. Some black-eyed dude donning a green helmet came at me. He seemed to be wearing the local rugby jersey. He charged at me with great speed behind those bulging calves on him. He was a fucking bull. I got tackled and I was knocked flat on my arse. I felt thick fingers suffocating my airway.
“Get off!” I coughed with great unease.
I could barely string any words together. Those firm hands were choking the life out of me. The black eyes behind the face under the helmet did not care. Remorse was the last thing on my attacker’s mind. He wanted me dead and that was exactly what he set out to do with ruthless fervour.
Straining under the rugby dude’s choke hold, I scrambled to reach is face. I could barely get anywhere near that. I had to think fast. I had to save myself from sudden oblivion. I stabbed at everywhere I could get at. The holes I made in his chest only made him leak some reddish-black, disgusting blood unto my face. I kept my mouth tightly shut. I didn’t want any of that gunky fluid ending up inside my stomach.
The puncture wounds to the chest did not make the black-eyed rugby dude withdraw or flinch in agony. He kept on choking the hell out of my neck. In a last-ditch attempt at avoiding death by strangulation, I dug my knife under his chin. His hands slackened on my neck, allowing me to plunge the knife up into his brain. I twisted the knife in deeper while it was buried in his jaw, causing more blackish-red blood to trickle out from him. The rugby dude’s hands thrashed about on the floor for a short while and then he was as still as a dead duck.
“Fucking asshole! Nearly took my damn head off!” I rubbed my sore throat, as I crawled backwards, away from the approaching groups of black-eyed crazy people.
The black-eyed crazies were crashing into everything in a frenzied bid to get to us. They were aware we were there but they weren’t coming directly at us for some reason. I wasn’t entirely sure what that reason was. I wasn’t the brightest spark in the shed so I failed to pick up on the important shit.
“Are you good for one last fight?” Miss Maple offered me a hand.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that one. Everything sort of hurts really bad.” I grimaced, grabbing hold of her outstretched hand.
We held up our weapons. They weren’t very impressive but they were all we had. Scores of black eyes rushed towards us. They had encircled us. There was no escape in sight. We seemed sure to be ripped to ribbons at their hands. I was saying my last prayers inside me. My hands were already so strained from fighting off dozens of black-eyed sick people that I had to put down.
The black-eyed horde’s mouths gaped wide and chilling screams ripped through their facial orifices. They intended to have us scared. I intended to bring us to our knees before they ripped our guts out. I couldn’t read Miss Maple’s emotions but I knew I was scared. I was scared shitless. I knew I didn’t want to die. I just wasn’t ready yet.
They came charging at us. They came charging hard and fast. I shielded Miss Maple in a tight embrace. I had had my life. I hah had my sins. I thought she at least deserved the chance to get laid. I could smell virgin all over her. She might have flaunted her goods in the past put I could tell she had never truly been involved with anyone. Some of her rather juvenile moves gave that away.
We were a cold finger away from being ripped into. The drooling, snappy jaws of death was close to our skins. We had given up hope and were preparing ourselves for a pretty messy end when the screeching of something moving very fast resounded in our ears. Our attackers got rammed into by a speeding bus. It was our bus.
“Diane? What the fuck? Didn’t I tell you to get your arse out of here?” I gasped loudly, wearing a relieved look on my face. “How did you find us anyway?”
“I couldn’t just abandon you guys. That would be totally selfish. I figured it would be you idiots when that alarm rang. I could hear the damn thing a mile away.” Diane giggled from behind the wheels of the bus. “Get in already!”
“Can’t argue with that, kid! We’re coming!” I raced towards the bus.
I had reached the bus before Miss Maple but I paused in front of the door to allow her passage. It was the polite thing to do.
“Ladies first!” I waved a guiding hand.
Miss Maple shot me a stern look and shook her head playfully at me. “Why thank you for being such a gentleman.”
She waddled up the bus, clamping her fingers around the railings either side of her, as she ascended the steps of the bus. Once she was in, I followed hurriedly behind her.
“Motherfucker! Get the fuck off me, man!” I howled, stumping hard on the head of the black-eyed crazy guy who had popped out from beneath the bus and grabbed me by the ankle.
I stumped on him again and again. I stumped with all my might until that stubborn skull of his caved in. His head was mush under the soul of my feet. I swiftly yanked my foot away from his slackened grip, pushing myself unto the steps of the bus.
“I told you to fucking get off!” I spat at the guy whose head I had just stumped all over.
I was on the bus. I slammed the door shut before more of the black-eyed sickos could get at us. Their fists pounded furiously at the other side of the door of the bus. I paid no attention to them. I yanked Diane out of the driver’s seat and took over the wheels. I hastily threw the gear into reverse and my foot stumped on the accelerator. The bus rolled backwards very quickly, mowing down body after body, until we were finally out of the shop.
The bus brushed past scores of people that were just walking casually into us. They looked as if they were under some sort of mind control. Their eyes were completely spaced out and unresponsive.
“Those people? They all have the same weird black in their eyes!” Diane shrieked.
“Yup, that’s why I am not fucking stopping! If they won’t clear off then they’ll get flattened!” I swerved furiously at a bend.
We had driven a distance without much incident. The roads were quiet and Miss Maple was recovering from exhaustion. She had gone through more of those black eyes than I did. Not that I was really keeping count of all the heads that she cracked open.
“We need to get to the Jones fabric factory.” Diane raised her voice.
“Why? What’s at the factory?” I glared intensely at her reflection in the mirror above the dash.
Diane got a bit agitated when I threw the question at her. She thumped her palm with her fist and her lips trembled rampantly. “My mum. She works there. There wasn’t enough time. I think she wouldn’t have had enough time to get out of there. She might be trapped in there.”
“And you want us to get her out, right?” I slapped my fingers on the wheels, glaring at Diane through the corner of my eyes.
She nodded her head. Her brows sunk lower and she seemed more worried than enthusiastic. I gave jn to her request. Not that she was really asking. She needed that closure and it would have been wicked of me not to have granted her that small mercy. If her mum was dead or sick. She needed to see it and deal with that in whichever way she chose to do so.
It was a long drive. The factory was at the south end of town. My eyes were tired but I had to keep them open. Darkness had come and the rains hadn’t stopped pouring. It didn’t do much good for smooth passage through the cobbled shortcuts that I was forced to use. The main routes to that part of town had been blocked off by abandoned cars littered across wider roads.
CHAPTER 9
Rosewood was looking like a freaking ghost town. The streets seemed desolate and lacked any signs of life or human activity. Shops were either shut or unmanned. Banks didn’t have the usual cues. The ATM's had nobody pressing any button
s to withdraw cash. Not that that would be much use, given the state of affairs in Rosewood.
I could barely see the road ahead of me now. The road was blanketed in darkness and the streetlights were failing. They blinkered on and off in a very erratic pattern. The lights blinked off momentarily. When they came back on, there was a tram track cutting through the road ahead of me.
A tram soon came rolling by. It creaked very clumsily across the track. I soon found out why. There was some lady sat on the driver’s lap. At first I thought she was being amorous with him but then I saw blood racing down his neck. The lady soon went from soft nibbling to a full on biting frenzy and took a huge chunk of flesh off his neck. Her cold, fish eyes looked straight through me as she chumped on the piece of human flesh between her teeth.
The tram was in the way. It had stopped right in front of us. I was moving too fast to stop. The damn tram had just popped out of nowhere and made a forced unscheduled stop at a very inconvenient time. This was very crappy timing. Unable to make an evasive move, our bus collided very quickly with the immobile tram, knocking it over, sending the bus lunging forwards, over the tracks. Our bus skidded and bashed into a lamppost. The impact halted the onward skidding of the bus.
“Are you guys okay?” My lips trembled.
I had a few cuts on my forehead but nothing major was damaged. The others seemed to be a bit concussed and out of it. There was a few broken windows on the left side of the bus. I could see the tram ahead of us. The woman that had bitten chunks out of the tram driver crawled out of the overturned tram. She sniffed the air in front of her face. Then her face shifted suddenly towards our overturned bus. She screeched loudly and dragged her feet, as she walked towards us. She seemed to have busted her knee but that slight impediment didn’t seem to slow her down much.
She reached the bus in minutes. I flinched and yanked at my seatbelt, as she climbed into the bus through a gap in the shattered window. Her eyes almost flashed a shade of light blue in the darkness. The strikingly intense black pupils in her eyes stalked the vastness of the space within the large school bus.
It seemed as if she was in some sort of human buffet party. The black-eyed woman’s head rotated indecisively from side to side. She seemed to be confused as to which of us to gnaw on first. Her teeth were bared and her fingers recoiled into a firm ball. She snapped her teeth aggressively and soon scurried towards the backseats.
Miss Maple was in the back. The black-eyed bitch must have chosen to go for the biggest morsel. I could have chuckled at the comedy in all this but the situation was as serious as serious could get. Our necks were all on the line. The flesh-hungry bitch would feast on Miss Maple’s juicy fat but what would stop her from coming back to take a bite out of me and Diane.
My hands rubbed down on my pockets. I searched frantically for it but my knife wasn’t there. It wasn’t on me. The damn thing must have fallen out during the crash. I looked up at the ceiling of the bus. There it was resting at a distance from my reach. I tried stretching out to reach it.
“Come on! Just a little closer!” I yelped, as I tried desperately to pull the knife closer with my finger tip.
My reach was just not lengthy enough. I couldn’t make contact with the handle of my pocket knife. I wasn’t strong enough to break loose from the belts and I couldn’t get hold of the knife to cut through the belt. I was in a really odd pickle.
“Get the fuck away from her! Come on! Come get some! Its me you want! She is full of bad cholesterol, anyway! Come get some juicy protein served on a platter!” I banged my hands on the dash.
The black-eyed woman froze in her tracks. The noise I was making seemed to have drawn her attention. I was motivated by this. I kept on banging and yelling on top of my voice. I yelled till my lungs got sore. And even then, I kept on yelling.
She came for me. The black-eyed woman trod over shattered glass on bare foot, leaving a trail of blackened blood behind her. I could smell the foul odour of something dead approaching. She definitely smelt of the grave. My eyes slammed shut. I was ready for oblivion. I wanted it to be quick. I had hoped my altruism would have bought the others time to shake off their dizzy state and get themselves to safety.
Her jaws were open. She was ready to sink those foul, rotted teeth into my pulsing neck. And she would have done so if a blade had not dug into her brains from behind. I heard her body drop to the ground.
I could see a face behind me. He was pale skinned and thin. His black hair was slightly receding and he was probably younger than me by a decade or two. There seemed to be an apron hanging over his chest. He had a rifle with a blade on it.
“You guys are going to be just fine.” The guy in the apron grinned, as he cut through my seatbelt with the blade on his rifle.
“Diane and Miss Maple? Are they okay?” I coughed, as I crawled to my feet after a bumpy fall to the surface of the ceiling of the bus.
“I already let them out! There is smoke building up in here! We have got to get out of this death trap!” the guy in the apron beckoned on me.
I struggled to my feet and walked shakily behind him. He had offered a hand but I declined. I was going to get out of this on my own two feet. Yes, I was that prideful. We got out in time before the bus burst into flames behind us. Black plumes of smoke gushed through the windows as balls of fire ripped through open spaces of the bus.
“It sure is good to see you guys!” I hugged Diane and Miss Maple.
My arms clung tight to them as if they would disappear if I were to shut my eyes, even once. I dared not shut my eyes for those few daunting but rivetingly joyous moments. Tears of joy streamed down my face. I was glad that they were safe.
“We are not going to melt in your hands, you know! But if you keep squeezing like that, you might break something useful!” Diane squirmed under the strain of my tight embrace.
“Sorry about that, kid. Guess a man doesn’t know his own strength.” I unlocked my hands from their sides.
I watched them gasp for precious air as soon as I had disentangled from them. They seemed relieved to have a little distance between them and my clingy hands. I shifted my gaze to the guy in the apron. He was wiping blood from the knife on his rifle. His hands were covered by yellow plastic gloves. They didn’t look like your typical cleaning gloves. They looked like the kind used to handle chemicals or something.
“What do you make of all this madness? Do you think armed police would be called in?” I slid my finger under my nose, sniffing the air nervously.
“You see any police? You see any emergency services?” The guy in the apron smirked, almost gloating as he did so. “All that shit is gone. And it is gone deliberately. Someone doesn’t want anybody surviving this shitstorm that has kicked this town in the nuts.”
“That can’t be true! Our government wouldn’t allow something like that to happen!” Miss Maple interjected, as her eyes widened in disbelief.
“They allowed Iraq to happen! They allow drug conglomerates get away with all sorts of illegal testing as long as it was not done on home soil!” guy in gloves moved quickly, signalling us to follow behind him.
“This is all business to the guys behind the big curtains. The people getting sick. That would just have been a tragedy if they just died of their illness. But them coming back and massacring anything that breads. That sounds like a weapon to me,” guy in apron arched his lips, wearing a prideful grin on his face, as he turned the keys in the big padlock on the gates in front of him.
We trooped in behind him. We all gave him this perplexed but defiant look. We were not willing to believe that our government would have the temerity to poison us just to test a weapon. That sounded very unpalatable. Contemplating such a possibility felt like chewing on bile inside one’s own mouth. I had seen armies do unspeakable things in the name of serving their country but doing such things against their own people wasn’t something that I often came across. It would take a heart dead to any human sentiment to be capable of such horrific inhuman acts.<
br />
“That talk about the government doing this! That’s bullshit! You know that?” I laughed off his wild allegations. “you shouldn’t fill your head with such nonsense. That shit will fuck you up for life.”
“I am afraid its too late for that. I am already fucked up.” The guy in the apron coughed, dragging his feet towards the steel roller shutter door of the large building ahead of him.
The door was pulled up and we all stooped down and crawled under it. We were greeted with the sight of a very large space littered with dozens of spinning machines. There were some vacant seats in the corner. It didn’t look like there had been much activity at the factory that day.
“My mum? Has she been here today? Have you seen her?” Diane chirped loudly, tugging on our helper’s white shirt. “This place, right here! This is where my mum works! You have got to know something!”
The guy in apron pulled away from her grip. He flashed her a displeased look. He seemed like he wasn’t keen on being touched. It almost seemed as if he had felt defiled by Diane’s touch.
“I’ll go fetch the register. Then we can work this out.” His lips tilted into a bow.
“Thanks. That would be kind of you.” Diane shook her head approvingly.
The guy in the apron took hurried steps towards a desk at the far end of the large working space we were stood in. He pulled out a couple of drawers and soon had a white book in his hands. His heels made this annoying clacking noise as he approached us. He stopped in front of Diane and cleared his throat, “Her name? What was it?”
“Clarice Dearlove! That’s her name!” Words rolled off Diane’s tongue snappily.
Turning through the pages of the white book, one page after the other, the guy in the apron scanned every letter very meticulously. His fingers moved up and down the pages. He had an irritating knack for dipping the tip of his finger on his tongue after he turned each page over. If he hadn’t saved us from being feasted on by that black-eyed, crazy wench I would have had a good mind of slapping him over the head for doing the finger thing.
