by Kolin Wood
“She’s Becca,” Juliana interrupted. “And she’s with me.” She cleared her throat and then followed with “And this here… is John… my son.”
Even saying the words out loud brought tears to Juliana’s eyes. She never thought that she would say them again.
Charlie pushed the flame in John’s direction and smiled, nodding at him. “Son, huh? Well, ain’t that something.”
Juliana looked back at John, who forced a small smile.
“Well,” Charlie continued. “No point in us all standing around down here with our dicks in our hands now, is there? I fancy me some fresh air. Whadd’ya say?”
Juliana nodded and Charlie handed Becca the bow. “You be careful with that, Becca. It ain’t no toy.”
Juliana opened her mouth to speak but Becca beat her too it. “I’ll be sure not to shoot anybody in the dick that doesn’t deserve it, Dad.” Then she slid free a bolt, loaded it in the bow, and set the tension on the string before clicking off the safety.
Charlie chuckled. “Well, okay then!”
Juliana caught his eye and gave him a look to tell him to behave himself.
Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew the half-melted candle and offered it up for Charlie to light. He obliged her.
Suddenly, the space around them came into view. Tubs of dirty water and piles of clothing, hair, plates, cups and other utensils lay scattered all around, everything covered in blood.
Turning to look at first John and then Becca, Juliana said, “You ready? Let’s go.”
***
Outside, the bruised and moody sky twisted light and dark with smudges of purple and grey. The wind still blew rife and held court amongst the tall trees and skeletal buildings of the broken city. The low clouds moved quickly, offering occasional glimpses of the moon that cast everything under a blanket of surreal, white light.
The three of them moved quickly: Charlie out in front, Becca and John behind him, and Juliana following at the back. They traversed the vomit-covered steps and hurried through the building yard, pulling in deep breaths as the air around them changed, becoming sweet once more. As they stopped next to the downed fence panel, Juliana stood for a few seconds longer than the rest, her eyes closed, breathing it in. If the years locked up had taught her one thing, it was to appreciate the small things.
After checking the side street and finding it clear, they jogged to the end and peered out into the main road. Ahead of them, the huge wall of the park acted like a defence to the darkness beneath the trees, its presence comforting. Years of neglect and a steady supply had left the street cluttered with banks of decaying leaves; now, the wind raced through, stripping the dry tops off the piles and spilling them like ants, infesting the surface of the road with movement.
Juliana shielded her eyes from the flying dust. The gate sat some way up the road, beside a crumpled bus shelter. “That’s the gate,” she said, pointing. “It leads you into the park.”
Charlie stepped in beside her, pulling a camouflage scarf from the bottom of his face. “I think we should keep away from that whole section and try to cut back through the city that way,” he said, pointing in the other direction. “The square is due east of here. The main road that brought me down here was alive with them.”
For the first time, Juliana noticed the blood covering Charlie’s clothing. It coated the lower half of his torso, legs, and even his boots.
Charlie saw the look and shrugged. “I might have run into a few on the way here.”
She looked up into his face and his dark eyes sparkled at her. He was enjoying this. He wore two knives sheathed upside down under each arm, and both handles were thick with blood. Otherwise, he appeared to have no gun.
Behind them, Becca clung to John, whose large, bandaged hands were crossed over the front of his chest. If they came under attack, her boy would need to be quick on his feet, or he’d be a sitting duck.
Doubt crept in, and suddenly Juliana found herself questioning her decision to head back to the square. The open space, alive with people, would be like a school dinner bell to the things; she was sure of it. Perhaps nobody would even still be alive! But again, she pushed the nagging doubts away. Tanner was there; Charlie had said so. He’d made it back, and therefore, people would have been warned about the danger. Besides, she thought, where were they running to anyway? She’d seen what the rest of the country had to offer: the splintered groups, living hand to mouth on the fringes of existence, nobody trusting anybody else. How long would they last if the girl, Becca, was right, and this disease was the product of some fucked up brain parasite? No, even with Tanner aside, the community and the glimpse of the future that she had seen here was worth the risk of going back.
“You lead the way, Charlie,” she said, offering him a compliant smile. “We’ve got your back.”
Charlie nodded, casting a wary look behind to John. “Roger that,” he said. “We need to keep quiet and move fast. I’ll take point. Hopefully, by staying off the main streets we can avoid any contact.” He pulled his two knives and held them out to either side of his body. “Right then, ladies, if it won’t tuck in, leave it behind. Let’s go.” And without saying anything more, he turned began a gentle jog up the street.
Behind them, the Church of Ruin stood like a huge black smear against the night. Juliana took one last look up at it and then followed the line of the tops of the buildings next to it, hoping for a glimpse of a creeping dawn, but saw none. She motioned for Becca to follow with John and then fell into step behind them, tired but ready to defend them with her last breath.
Chapter 34
Tanner clicked the button on the torch. A crisp beam of white light cut through the darkness of the room, spearing the face of the person crouched on the floor just outside the door. The beam reflected from the bald head and cast a yellowish smudge on the painted, white doorframe. Blood smeared its mouth like the badly applied makeup of a clown, dripping in flowing rivulets from its glistening chin. He noticed with some revulsion that its nose was missing.
Speared by the light, the thing dropped the hunk of flesh that it had been chewing on to the floor and screamed. It was that same horrific, breathy scream that he’d heard on his run to the square earlier that night. Blood-covered fingers clawed the air between them as it shifted awkwardly on its haunches and attempted to shield its eyes.
In that split second, Tanner thought he saw something in those eyes that he recognised, but the feeling was short lived as the thing suddenly lurched and sprung toward him.
Aware that he would need his hand free to reach for the gun on top the barrow, Tanner stepped in to meet the attack and swung the torch as hard as he could in the direction of the creature’s head. He heard a crack. The force of the blow reverberated up his arm as the glass face of the flashlight shattered and the bulb popped, plunging the room into darkness once again.
Tanner had no idea how badly the thing was injured, but he knew that he had only one chance to reach the gun. He stepped back, ignoring the heavy sway of his head and thrust his hand up over the tightly packed bags of the cart, relieved as his fingers closed around the heavy handle of the pistol. His heartbeat thumping in his ears, Tanner aimed the barrel in the direction he believed the thing to have fallen and fired.
The shot lit up the dark. Tanner shrunk back as he saw its deformed face flying toward him, only a metre away at most, those eyes that he knew somehow, staring at him from above the black hole in the middle of its face. The bullet caught it in the sternum and ruptured its body, snapping it away from him like a twig in a storm. The tightness of the room held onto the explosion, slamming it from the walls and covering any other sounds.
With the face of the thing still burned into his retinas, Tanner stepped away until his back struck the wall behind. His eyes stretched into the shadows at the bottom of the walls, searching them for horrors, but nothing moved. Old curls of partly-peeled wallpaper tickled the back of his head and neck.
He waited, sucking in brea
ths of hot air and fighting the urge to collapse. Around him, the sounds from outside began to find their way back into the room, screams of anger and yells of pain.
Confident that the monster was either dead or too injured to move, Tanner shuffled around to the other side of the cart. The pistol in his hand hung down like a lead weight by his knee. His legs were now so heavy that he was forced to drag his feet, every step laborious. Once through the door, he turned in the direction of the main entrance at the bottom of the stairs.
All around him, the noise and chaos continued. Outside was aflame and it cast the entire foyer in a moving, orange glow. Thick smoke pumped in through the doorway, strangling him.
About five metres from the entrance, he stopped, turning his head to the side. Something big was sat at the top of the stairs, blocking the door. At first glance and partly blinded by the smoke, Tanner thought that it might be a small dog, but when he saw it raise its paws and run them down its long, slender snout, he realised what it actually was: a huge rat.
The rat turned to face him, its nose twitching with the promise of food. It was at least two feet long, not including its tail—the biggest rat Tanner had ever seen. Beady red eyes fixed on him, reflecting the fire behind like mini-infernos. It shivered, and Tanner watched the sleek black hair on its back rise up like the hackles on an angry dog.
Another scream rang out, this one closer. Tanner heard the sound of a struggle followed by banging as a body came cartwheeling down the stairs behind him. He snatched a look back in time to see that two more of the huge, black rats had attached themselves to the woman writhing on the floor a few feet from him. One of them, its fur slick with crimson, was chewing on the fingers of one of her hands while she desperately tried to fend off another that was snapping ferociously at her face and neck.
Tanner raised the pistol and squeezed off a round. The bullet hit the rat in the side, almost severing it in two, as its now-limp body spun away into the shadows under the stairs. The woman lay there panting for a second in a state of total shock, long enough for the second rat to release its hold of her fingers and launch itself at her face. Tanner raised the gun again, but this time he could not risk the shot, as the second rat attached itself to her nose and began a frenzied shake of its entire body. He could only watch, horrified, as its back legs kicked out, and sharp claws raked apart the skin of her lower face and her lips. When the woman tried to scream, blood filled her mouth and all that escaped was a high-pitched, gargled whine.
Unbelieving as to what he was seeing, Tanner kept the pistol aimed at the woman until her arms fell limp. He saw the bloody stumps of two missing fingers on one of her hands. Although he’d not actually witnessed the killing of Cole in the New Capital, he was under no illusion that rats would feed if given the opportunity. The man had been hung over their lair, bleeding, like a fresh meat buffet, after all. But for rats to actively hunt and attack people? That was something he’d never witnessed, not in any wretched corner of the planet.
Unable to help, Tanner left the rat busily feasting on the woman’s spoiled face. When he turned back to face the front, where there had been only one rodent before, there were now three. They sat watching him, their noses twitching at the scent of freshly spilled blood.
Tanner raised the gun and fired it at the middle rat. The shot struck it in the stomach, and sent it flying from the step in a cloud of blood. But the other two did not flinch. It was then that another, even bigger monster, climbed into view.
Unsure as to exactly how many bullets he still had in his gun, Tanner glanced around. Behind him, the rat looked up from the hole where the woman’s face had been, it’s muzzle slick with blood and brain matter. Another sat about halfway up the stairs chewing on something, its crimson claws holding the morsel greedily to its face.
With nowhere to go but back the way he’d just come, Tanner began to tread slowly backward. The rats did not move, watching him intently as he kept to the far wall, away from the staircase. His arm had begun to shake under the weight of the pistol.
On his right, the smell of something rancid flooded out from the buckled doors of a non-working lift shaft, but he didn’t even bother to look in; he just kept moving as calmly as his exhausted body would allow him to, pain-laden step by pain-laden step. He knew, without any doubt, that should he slip and fall now, the beasts would be all over him in a second.
The smoke from outside suddenly intensified, billowing in through the door and filling the corridor with more choking fumes which made his eyes run. Unable to see, but aware that the room with the cart laid only a few metres away, Tanner turned on his heel and ran. He reached the door and ploughed through it, falling headlong to the floor, groaning as his face scuffed along the threadbare carpet. Unable to roll his body over, Tanner could only swing his leg in the direction of the door and kick out, hard. His boot heel caught the edge of the door and it closed with a shuddering bang just as something heavy slammed into it from the other side. But the latch held firm.
Tanner lay on the floor, panting. His face burned from being skinned on the carpet, but it barely registered next to the hellfire that was now the entire left side of his body.
He set the pistol down and used his working arm to push himself onto his back. He looked up. The room was so dark that he couldn’t see the ceiling. In the strip under the door, the faint flicker of flames acted as the only light source. The sling holding his useless arm had torn free, a fact Tanner only realised as he tentatively reached out to find the flapping appendage loose and twisted down behind his back. With tentative fingers, he reached underneath his shirt, and felt the ruffled, slippery edges of the bandages. The wound had split open again.
It was then that he heard it: a loud scratching noise coming from the other side of the door. It started slowly at first, and Tanner thought that his mind might be playing tricks on him. But the longer he waited, the louder the sound became. It was soon fanatical, a continuous sound of scraping and snapping wood.
Semi-delirious, Tanner forced his pounding head up from the carpet. Something was moving outside, blocking the light from the fires. The door shuddered on the frame, and Tanner realised with horror that the rats were trying to chew through it.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he shouted, but the words came out as a croaky, garbled slur.
Every muscle in his body ached as he strained to sit. His head rolled like a snooker ball around a pocket, heavy on his neck. With the pistol in his hand, he began to shimmy backward, not stopping until his back struck one of the cart wheels. Dried mud rained down on him.
Still the scratching continued.
Tanner could barely hold himself upright. His breathing wheezy, he was unable to properly oxygenate his body, and his dry throat felt swollen and stuck on both sides with razor blades. Sweat continued to soak his shirt. He needed a drink so badly. Maybe, like before, it would help to clear away some of the poisonous mist. The barrow behind held all manner of items, probably some more water too, but it might as well be in another room. There was no way that he could stand. Not anymore.
Resigning himself to his fate, Tanner laughed, ignoring the pain. He’d survived some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on the planet and here he was, about to fight his last battle with a rat.
The scratching had turned into a constant gnawing now. As he watched the door, he was sure that he could see the light around the bottom of the frame increasing. He thought about Juliana and Charlie. If they had survived the Church, then hopefully they would realise in time not to come back here. If. His wife’s smiling face projected like a cinematic image on the wall, driving a nail deep inside that sprung tears to his eyes. He squeezed them shut. He’d answer for that soon enough.
He guessed ten or so rounds in the clip.
His arm shook as he used the last of his energy to raise the pistol up and point it at the door, just as the corner splintered inward with a crack.
Chapter 35
The man, Charlie, moved quick
ly and with purpose, barely stopping to wait as they twisted and turned their way through the maze of alleys and backstreets that led to the square. The explosion had lit up the sky and now painted the underside of the clouds a deep orange—a beacon to them in the darkness. Screaming carried on the wind, a constant and harrowing barrage of sound like nothing that he’d ever heard before.
With every jarring step, the pain in John’s hands worsened. Already the make-shift bandages were wet through with his blood. Becca moved with him, one hand hooked around his waist and the bloody knife in the other.
Behind them, Juliana prowled with the gun. She called out ‘Keep moving!’ every time the pace dropped off. More than once, John had been forced to look back at her, just to check that she was really there. He remembered her, and yet he didn’t—not like this anyway. She looked different from anything he imagined; hard and serious, but there was no doubting that it was her. When he’d first looked into her eyes it was like scales had fallen away and he’d been able to see right into her soul. He couldn’t explain it. Some deeply genetic connection felt by them both.
Suddenly, Charlie stopped. He held up a hand to halt them, and then unclipped his knives. John’s heart pounded. Becca pulled him into a rubbish-cluttered doorway and Juliana stopped outside of it, blocking them from the street. He heard a commotion followed by a gargling sound and then nothing.
“Clear.”
It was Charlie.
Juliana signalled for them to move, turning with the shotgun to cover the entrance to the alleyway behind.
When John stepped out, he saw Charlie standing there, both knife blades now black with blood and that same crazy grin on his face.
“Bald bastard didn’t even see it coming,” Charlie said. “We must be close, kids. Stick to me like shit.” And then he was away again.
The end of the alleyway opened up into a street. John and Becca drew in behind Charlie, using a pile of rubbish as cover while they surveyed the area. Tarps and pallets lay stacked along the wall in front of them. Tables, chairs, and barrels, some chained together, others not, lay piled up ready for the morning trade. They were close.