Death City

by Sam West

  For the first time, she was thankful that it was dark – thankful for the fact that she didn’t have to see the bloody ruins that had once been his enviable, six-pack stomach.

  A small cry of terror escaped her lips

  (eating him they were eating him)

  and just as she spun around on the spot to leg it inside, the sound of a woman crying out for help made her freeze:

  “Help me! Somebody help me,” came the quivering, hysterical female voice. “My husband attacked me.”

  Zara was so terrified out of her wits, she came close to ignoring the cries for help. It would just be so easy to go inside and lock the door behind her, but common decency won out.

  Trembling, she turned around, to be met with the sight of an unfamiliar woman – possibly middle-aged, although it was hard to tell in the dark – who stood right next to Jean-Paul’s head. If the woman was aware of the two figures at her feet, she showed no sign.

  She stepped past Jean-Paul and the writhing man – Mr Tyldesley, she reminded herself – and stretched out her arms towards Zara:

  “He attacked me,” she said between hitching sobs, the note of incredulity in her voice suggesting that she herself had in no way come to terms with this one, all-too pertinent fact. “I was cooking dinner and my own husband bit me on the shoulder. I didn’t think, I just hit him. I was holding the frying pan and I just hit him with it and then I ran…”

  Her voice gave way to sobs, but Zara was no longer looking at this plump woman thrown into silhouette against the occasional passing car; her gaze was drawn to the teenage zombie who had turned around and was heading right for the newcomer.

  “Look out,” she cried, but it came out a harsh, breathless gasp.

  Not that it would’ve had any effect anyway, because Mr Tyldesley had reached out from his position sprawled on top of Jean-Paul and had grabbed the woman’s foot. She went crashing to the ground, landing with a nasty smack where her forehead bounced once on the concrete. Even from the twenty or so metres distance from the woman, Zara flinched in a mix of horror and disgust, because she could feel that smack deep within her own bones, that sickening crunch reverberating through her skeletal structure.

  Then, two seconds later, zombie-boy was on top of her.

  And, if she didn’t know better, she would have said that he was ripping out her jugular with his teeth.

  Mr Tyldesley used the woman’s shins to haul himself up her body, where he proceeded to bury his face in her midriff.

  Zara couldn’t look at the horrific spectacle a second longer. The woman didn’t make a sound, but her arms and legs spasmed violently. Mr Tyldesley was unmindful of this fact and body surfed her flapping legs, his face latched onto her guts like a leech.

  With a gasp of terror, she turned around and fled for her front door.

  But in the split second before she turned to lunge for her front door, she thought that she had glimpsed Jean-Paul sitting up. She threw herself through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jean-Paul had sat up. He’s not dead. I need to help him.

  But Zara remained slumped against the door – she was trembling so violently she feared that she might collapse should she attempt to move. It was impossible that he had sat up the way that he had – surely she had imagined it?

  Only when the hammering started did she jerk into action, staggering backwards away from the door which shuddered in its frame with the force of the banging.

  Except it wasn’t hammering as such, but more of a thudding, as if someone was ungainly flinging the full weight of their body against the other side of the door, over and over. Or bodies, more likely, where anger and aggression had clearly reduced the people on the other side to nothing more than human battering rams.

  The door was plastic, not especially thick, and panic washed through her, causing the hallway to lurch around her. Would it hold? It was only an ordinary Yale lock, it probably wouldn’t take much to bash it in.

  “Shit,” she gasped, in response to an especially loud thud that caused the door to rattle against its hinges.

  That loud thud spurred her into action and she staggered into the living-room, where the landline phone was perched in its cradle next to the television. She snatched it up, shakily punching in nine, nine, nine.

  Please hold the line, an operator will be with you shortly, said the calm, recorded female voice on the other end.

  Zara wailed in frustration, casting her gaze around for her mobile phone, figuring that she should call someone else while the emergency services had her on hold. She wasn’t sure who, exactly, she might call that could possibly help her right now. She had no family to speak of, no siblings, and her parents had recently retired to the south of France.

  Caroline, she decided.

  Caroline was her second in command at the shoe shop, a girl her own age who also happened to be her closest friend. More importantly, she had recently moved in with her boyfriend a couple of miles away on the other side of the city. He was the big, burly type, and would surely be helpful in a situation such as this?

  Still clutching the cordless phone, she paced the room, searching in agitation for her smartphone. A few seconds later, she spied its green casing on a middle shelf of the floor to ceiling bookshelf next to the living-room door. Just as she went to lunge for it, the sound of shattering glass made her cry out in shock.

  Her back smacked into the edge of the doorframe, but she barely felt it. The glass that comprised the middle section of the bay window had shattered, and, like something out of a cheesy horror movie, two sets of swaying arms with hands grabbing at empty air extended past the slatted blinds into the room. One of those grabbing, filth-caked hands entwined in the wildly swinging blinds and pulled. The whole middle section of the blinds parted from the uppermost portion of the window and came crashing down to the cream-coloured, living-room carpet.

  A horrible, contorted, fat face with a snapping mouth and the glassy eyes of a fish loomed into view, also smeared with filth.

  Mr Tyldesley, she thought, swiftly followed by; that’s not filth, it’s blood and gore.

  Or, more specifically, the contents of her boyfriend’s guts. For the first time since this nightmare had kicked off, a great tide of nausea rolled over her, making her stomach clench and her tongue float in a sudden flood of mouth water.

  She clasped her hand to her mouth, the phone slipping from her trembling fingers – she would not puke now.

  Her gaze glued to the horrific spectacle, she edged around the doorframe.

  This can’t be happening.

  For a terrifying few seconds that felt like an eternity, terror had rendered her paralysed. Mr Tyldesley’s blood-streaked, fat face and bald head didn’t look real – it was one thing seeing him outside in the dark, and quite another seeing him under the bright lights of the living-room. He truly did look like an extra in a zombie movie, and that sense of incredulity tightened its grip more assertively around her. This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t be.

  Snap, snap, went his mean little mouth, his teeth clattering together as their eyes locked. Snap, snap.

  I’m going to eat you up, she thought in sick terror.

  A high-pitched wailing noise reached her ears, and she slowly realised that the sound was coming from her.

  The windowsill was waist height, and Mr Tyldesley was now leaning more aggressively into the living room, his arms flailing around as he reached out for her, his mouth continuing to snap.

  A sense of incredulity so strong washed through her, momentarily blotting out everything else. Now Mr Tyldesley appeared to be in the process of swinging one short and fat, pin-striped leg over the windowsill, but a second later he jerked backwards, disappearing from view.

  Jean-Paul loomed in the space that he had just vacated, his dead eyes fixing on her. Being considerably more nimble than Mr Tyldesley, he effortlessly swung one leg over the window sill and hoisted himself up with his long, muscular a
rms.

  In the moments before he swung into the living room, his torso was fully displayed to her. Stark terror swamped her brain, inducing tunnel vision and dizziness. The front of his t-shirt gaped, revealing his torn-open stomach.

  It was too much – she simply couldn’t comprehend the macabre sight. His revealed stomach wasn’t just slashed, it was gaping wide open. His guts were spilling over – horrible, glistening lumps of gore in shades of red and brown. They bulged out of this hole, obscene and impossible.

  There was no two ways about it – with a gut trauma like that, he shouldn’t be alive. Just as he swung both legs over the windowsill, another pair of hands sunk into his guts.

  Jean-Paul’s expression remained unchanged with that same glassy cast to his eyes, his jaw constantly moving like a cow chewing the cud and his mouth chomping. Seemingly unmindful of the hands clawing at his innards, he dropped into the living-room, wobbling slightly as he landed, knocking over the freestanding lamp by the leather armchair.

  Mr Tyldesley’s hateful, fat, gnashing face loomed into view behind him, also with his dead eyes fixed on her.

  Jean-Paul took an unsteady, lurching step in her direction, and in a numbed state of terror that had rendered her temporarily paralyzed, she watched his guts unravel. And, even worse than that, as Mr Tyldesley also attempted to heave his fat body over the sill, one of his hands rested on Jean-Paul’s greyish-pink, sausage-like intestines that were smeared with glistening, solid lumps, pinning that portion of his guts in place.

  With every step that her boyfriend took, so more of his intestines came undone. He trailed his guts behind himself as he staggered towards her, arms outstretched like he was auditioning for a part in the latest zombie movie.

  Because none of this felt real – not for a second could she wrap her head around what was happening. And all the while, that incessant banging against the front door grew more and more insistent.

  At last, her paralysis broke. It felt like she had been standing there forever, when in reality it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.

  Things didn’t improve for her out in the hallway. Once there, she stood rooted to the spot, dithering. Her gaze was helplessly drawn to the door, shuddering in its frame.

  That’s not going to hold, she thought in alarm.

  Sure enough, as soon as she thought it, so the door swung inwards, battering against the hallway wall with an almighty thud that had her moaning in terror. In the newly revealed space stood the teenager and the middle-aged woman who less than a minute ago had been begging her for help.

  Like her boyfriend, her midriff was a bloody, pulpy mess; a sight which Zara refused to let her gaze settle upon.

  With the hallway tilting dramatically around her, she turned heel and staggered towards the kitchen door, which was only a short distance away.

  Even before she reached the backdoor at the end of their small kitchen, the sense of doom had curled more tightly around her. She was trapped. The key to the backdoor was on her keyring which was currently inserted into the lock of the kicked-in front door. She never left the key in the lock of the backdoor out of sheer paranoia – what if she one day lost the key to the front door, and then she couldn’t unlock the backdoor because the key was clogging up the lock from the inside?

  Yeah. That’s worked out really well for you, hasn’t it?

  “Fuck,” she screamed, thumping her fists against the kitchen door.

  Now fucking what?

  Frantically, she looked around the kitchen. Her gaze settled upon a tea towel hanging from the oven door. Snatching it up, she wrapped it around her fist.

  Blinking away the tears, and not allowing herself to think too deeply on what she was about to do, she smashed her wrapped-up hand into the glass pane that made up the uppermost portion of the door. The sound of the shattering glass made her flinch and cry out, but she persevered, smashing out as much of the glass as she could until only the jagged, shark-like teeth of the glass remained around the edges.

  She surveyed the newly revealed hole. It was waist height and technically wide enough for a body to squeeze through.

  Technically. It would be bloody awkward and more than likely result in lacerated flesh.

  Fuck it.

  Without further thought, she gripped the sides of the frame, trying to hold onto the parts where there was less broken glass and poked her head through the gap. Awkwardly, she twisted her body, thinking that she might be able to hoist herself through the gap until she was sitting on the bottom part, then after that she could thread her legs through the gap, one after the other.

  Grunting with the effort and hissing in pain when the glass dragged across her skin, she attempted this… with no joy whatsoever. All it resulted in was her cutting herself. Ignoring the sharp pain that right then was more of an irritation than any real concern, she threaded herself back through the hole again. Gripping the sides of the gap once more, this time she lifted her leg until her ankle was resting on the ledge.

  So far so good. Gritting her teeth and wincing in shock when the glass bit into the tender flesh of the backs of her legs, due to the fact that the flimsy pyjama bottoms were no protection against the splinters of glass, she slid her leg over the ledge until the back of her knee was hugging it tight. All she had to so now was hold on tight to the sides of the gap and thread her other leg through. After this, it was just a case of easing her rump up onto the ledge and slithering through the hole, preferably remembering to sufficiently bend her spine on her exit, lest she should drag the skin of her throat on the glass that hung there like icicles from the uppermost portion of her escape hatch.

  Something clattered behind her – she didn’t turn around to see what it was, but it sounded very much like one of the kitchen chairs crashing into the tiled floor – and she hastened her escape attempt, not caring anymore if she should rip open her flesh in the process.

  Those horrible, growling, groaning, inhuman noises grew louder, and terror tightened the skin at the back of her neck.

  She had anticipated the hands on her before it happened. It came as no surprise, but it was still utterly horrifying. Fingers entwined in her hair before viciously yanking back her head. She lost her balance and toppled backwards, clinging onto the sides of the smashed window for support, unmindful of the blood that poured from the palms of her hands.

  She caught a waft of something fetid and foul as more hands pawed at her, and then she was freefalling backwards through the air, before landing with a resounding thump on her back.

  The air knocked out of her lungs in an aggressive whoosh, and the tunnel vision from before narrowed even further as the kitchen rocked and swayed around her.

  Groaning, she allowed her eyelids to flutter closed, knowing that she needed to attempt to roll away from the monsters crowding in above her, but unable to find the strength. She hurt, dammit – bastard everything ached and throbbed in protest.

  When she managed to prise open her eyes again, she saw them through her swimming vision. Them, as in the teenaged boy, the middle-aged woman, Mr Tyldesley and Jean-Paul. They were leaning over her, descending upon her.

  Their disgusting, blood-streaked faces loomed ever closer, their eyes dead and their mouths snapping – each one of them otherworldly in their monstrousness.

  But it was her boyfriend’s face that her gaze latched onto. It was beyond comprehension to her, that the face she had once loved so dearly had distorted into something so hideous. A sickness that was more than merely physical churning in her guts – a soul-deep illness that ripped her apart from the inside out. His darling face was now nothing but an image dredged up from her deepest, darkest nightmares, a visage utterly devoid of all humanity.

  Hands tore at her Grumpy Cat t-shirt, she heard the rip of the fabric, then felt those hands on her bare skin.

  And then that disgusting head was on the lower, softest part of her stomach, the teeth sinking in.

  Pain exploded there, brilliant and stupefying, blottin
g out all else.

  This is how I’m going to die, came the sure, yet strangely abstract thought, like it wasn’t her thinking it, but as if the thought had been planted in her brain by a mysterious, outside source.

  The intensity of that initial burst of pain subsided somewhat, allowing her the presence of mind to latch onto the notion of survival once more.

  With an adrenalin-fuelled scream of terror, she managed to draw up her knees and twist onto her side. She clawed at the tiled floor, dragging her throbbing, pain-racked body away from them.

  Only then did she realise that there was no longer any pressure on her body. No groping hands, no weight of bodies.

  No teeth.

  A horrible sound reached her ears, and to begin with, she thought that it was just her own sobbing. With great effort, she lifted her spinning, violently trembling head to peer over her shoulder, to see that the noise was coming from Jean-Paul. He was lying on his back, his arms and legs spasming, his own guts a sea of gore surrounding him. He was making noises unlike anything that she had ever heard before – not quite groaning, not quite screaming, and utterly devoid of humanity. The sound made her mind want to cave in under the sheer weight of it, and she screamed louder herself to drown it out.

  When she stopped to draw breath, she realised that he had fallen silent. That his limbs had stopped spasming.

  And not only that, the other three were shambling away from her, back through the kitchen door.

  With a sob of agony and terror, she allowed her head to fall back on the tiled floor with a smack that made her teeth clunk together.

  Get up! she screamed inside her head. Get up. Get help.

  Crying in agony, she heaved herself into a sitting position, her hands cupping the wound on her stomach.

  She looked down at it. It wasn’t as bad as she had been expecting. Sure, it hurt like fuck, and she was bleeding there like a stuck pig, but nothing was hanging out of her that shouldn’t be, the skin was mostly intact.

  I’m alive, she thought in a rush of gratitude that left her light-headed.