The Cold

by Rich Hawkins

  “What the fuck?” Seth said. He kept the torchlight upon the woman, who didn’t shy away or even blink.

  Mack raised his machete.

  The woman wheezed, her blackened teeth chattering, as her swollen hand undid her coat down the middle to reveal her full glory. She arched back her head and cried out in pain. She was naked beneath the coat, and her entire torso was infested with red tumours, inside which some kind of black insectoid larvae squirmed and coiled. Parasites within membranes. She twitched and shuddered with their movement.

  She looked at Seth and Mack and smiled dreamily. Then she raised the pickaxe above her head and staggered towards them on tottering legs.

  They reeled away as the axe swung down and clanged upon the hard floor. The woman shrieked, lifted the axe again, and jerked her head around to locate the men as they backed away. Within the hood of the coat, her face was sagging from her skull.

  Seth stood back against the plate glass of a shop window. The torchlight swayed around. Mack lit a flare, lunged forwards and jabbed it towards the woman’s head, but she dodged him and swung the axe horizontally, narrowly missing his chest. She stumbled. Mack raised his machete before she could regain her balance and sliced a deep cut across her swollen forearm. The woman stepped back, holding the wounded arm close to her side, blood and pus pattering onto the floor.

  Mack retreated two steps, waiting for her to attack again, when the woman made a low gurgling sound and dropped the axe. Her entire body fell to violent trembling and she collapsed to her knees, gazing down at her stomach as the larvae burst out, chittering and writhing. She laughed, and it was one of the most insane sounds Seth had ever heard.

  Mack slashed her throat, and she fell down with the newborn worms squirming beneath her.

  Mack grabbed Seth and pulled him along.

  Then they stopped. Looked around at the large windows of the shopfronts.

  “Christ,” said Seth.

  The other people had come to look at them. They were naked, hand-in-hand behind the plate glass. And the black larvae infesting their stomachs slowly awakened.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  Seth and Mack stumbled through the back exit of the service station and into the falling snow outside. They didn’t stop until the building vanished into the distance behind them, and then they collapsed to the ground, panting and wheezing. Those people, Seth thought, left behind in some sort of hell, hosts for the black larvae.

  “I didn’t see Quinn,” Mack whispered. “He wasn’t there. None of our people were there.”

  “I know,” said Seth.

  Mack sat in the snow, head lowered to his chest. The machete lay by his feet, gleaming with the dull light. His voice was barely audible when he spoke. “It’s fucked, Seth. It’s all fucked. What sort of world is this now? All those people back there…incubators for whatever those things were. It just gets worse and worse.”

  Seth crouched beside him, shivering in the cold. “We have to keep moving north, like you said before. We can’t stop.”

  Mack looked at Seth. The machete was in his hand again. “How many people have you seen die?”

  “What?”

  “How many people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’d know if you thought about it. But you don’t want to think about it. I don’t blame you, lad. It’s too much; it’s all too fucking much.”

  They stood, dusted the snow from themselves, and moved on, hunched and staggering as the north wind bore down on them.

  *

  An hour later, a sign at the side of the motorway slowly coalesced out of the falling snow. Seth and Mack halted, tired and sagging like drunkards. The sky howled. Mack checked the compass in his hand.

  According to the sign, the army base was two miles away, so they took the narrow exit road from the motorway and headed into country roads and weaving tracks. They walked in silence, waiting to reach the end, slogging over the snow, watching for signs of their people.

  Seth shook his head to clear his vision, and wiped bits of snow from around his eyes. The pain in his legs was just below tolerable, but the cold numbed his gloved hands and slowed his thoughts. He lagged behind Mack on the exposed roads amidst the white hills. The falling snow dwindled to a drizzle of grey flakes.

  In the adjacent field to the right of the road, a dead beast lay fallen. They stopped to stare at it, this broken titan. It was some kind of arachnid thing. Its corpse spanned almost the length of the field, its legs were splayed and crumpled, and as long as telephone poles. Black blood stained the snow. The bulbous mass of its central body had been torn and ransacked, spilling fluids and insides.

  Mack snorted. “Just imagine the thing that killed this thing.”

  Seth dragged his eyes from the carcass to glance about. “How far to the army base? Please tell me it’s nearby. There can’t be much further to go.”

  “Less than a mile. Somewhere around here.”

  “I’d kill for a cheeseburger.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be serving those at the base.”

  “I’d take the thinnest, most pathetic, burger going. I don’t care.”

  “A decent steak wouldn’t go amiss,” said Mack. “And chips.”

  “And onion rings?”

  “Definitely.”

  Seth almost laughed. His stomach clenched with cravings for cooked meat and carbs. Saliva gathered at the back of his mouth and sluiced over his molars. The phantom taste of salty McDonald’s fries, summoned up by some half-buried memory, made his chest ache with a maddening pang.

  “Come on,” said Mack. “Let’s find that fucking base.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  “Oh God,” said Mack. “Christ Almighty.”

  They’d slipped through the broken front gates to stand on the tarmac track that led towards the heart of the base. The wind had died to a murmur during a lull in the falling snow. Everything was beset by a lifeless silence.

  Seth and Mack walked amongst the ruins within the demolished perimeter fence.

  Something terrible had visited the base and brought devastation and death. The buildings were smashed to pieces, leaving only a few disparate walls standing amidst toppled masonry and fields of debris, fallen wooden beams and lengths of splintered timber. There were great gouges in the ground, carved by monstrous strength and rage.

  They searched through the remains. There were no bodies, just the occasional lump of frozen, unidentifiable flesh. Meat detritus and bone trash.

  Seth prodded with his foot a fist-sized piece of rubble. He looked over at Mack, who stood motionless near the burned-out barracks and stared out towards the far side of the perimeter where part of the fence still remained standing.

  Picking his way through the wreckage, Seth walked over to Mack. They regarded each other for a moment, Seth’s dismay and numb horror reflecting back from Mack’s eyes, which were reddened and miserable. Seth had to look away.

  Faraway booms that could have been monsters or quakes within the earth, rose and reverberated, then faded into the distance.

  “So, that’s it, isn’t it?” said Mack. “The end of it all.”

  Seth stared off into the white fog beyond them, a part of him hoping that some immense terror would emerge to finally claim them, release them from this state of purgatory.

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  Mack glanced around. “I reckon the attack happened no more than two days ago.”

  Seth rubbed at his face, one hand grazing over his darkening stubble. His skin felt blotchy and dried out under his fingers. His forehead felt like it’d been scoured by sandpaper. The compulsion to lie down in the ruins and accept his fate was suddenly all he could think about; it was an itch inside his head. Tears brimmed in his eyes. He thought of Andy, Ruby, Delia and Jack. He bowed his head.

  “What do we do now? We have nowhere to go.”

  “We’ll have to stay here tonight,” Mack replied, not taking his gaze from the surrounding white
fog. “There’s nothing else to be done.”

  *

  Mack found a metal hatch in the ground, but despite both of them working at it, trying to pull it open, it didn’t budge or even shift on its hinges. The hatch was approximately the size of a manhole cover, but square and made of thick steel.

  They gave up after twenty minutes, both of them slumping to the ground with aching arms and hands. Mustering the last of their energy, they scavenged for supplies in the ruins, and found enough to construct a makeshift refuge in one corner of the half-collapsed husk of an outbuilding. The roof was gone, so they hung sheets and lengths of ragged tarpaulin as shelter against the elements, pinning and fixing them with pieces of timber and metal poles. It would hold for the night.

  Mack built a small campfire and kept the flames low.

  They sat inside the shabby den they’d made, wrapped in their blankets, drinking water and eating crisps. The wind picked up, wailing as darkness fell with flurries of snow, and soon the night was upon them with all its swarming shadows.

  *

  When Seth woke in the dark, the fire had burned out and Mack was missing from the shelter. Panicked, he pawed about for his torch and finally found it buried under the blankets Mack had apparently cast aside. Then he grabbed the axe.

  He switched on the torch and clambered from the shelter. The snow fell against his face. He gritted his teeth, breathed hard through his nose, then swept the torchlight around the surrounding wreckage and toppled walls.

  There was no sign of Mack at all.

  When Seth emerged outside, the wind pulled at him and filled his ears with its white noise. It stole his breath and stung his eyes, made it hard to think or gather his bearings. He gulped, swallowed, grimaced in the blizzard. The darkness was all about him, suffocating and dense, working at his nerves and thickening his fear. For a moment he felt like the last person in the world. This made him think about his chances of survival on his own, and if he was capable of survival on his own. And then he wondered if his life was, in fact, even worth saving. His inconsequential existence. His worthless life. He could be the last person left alive and be utterly ignorant of it.

  He wanted to scream.

  *

  A red flare ignited ahead of Seth. Mack was standing in the snow not far beyond the destroyed buildings of the base. He raised the flare above his head as he looked out at the night. Like he was signalling for something, Seth thought. The flare spat and sizzled.

  Seth shouted to the man, but the screaming wind and falling snow muffled his voice to a useless murmur. With one hand to his face, he trudged towards Mack, moving past snow-shrouded debris and jutting metal beams, weaving through the destruction. Floundering like a man in the throes of an illness. He called out, his throat scratchy and dry, the axe wavering in his hand.

  Mack turned around when Seth got within fifteen yards of him. His face was impassive within the frame of the coat hood, his mouth a straight line. In the burning of the flare, he looked older than before, somehow. Something was wrong with his eyes; they were too pale and his pupils had shrunk to black pinpricks.

  He told Seth to stay back.

  Seth halted, confused and bleary-eyed, shivering as the wind lashed against him. “What’s wrong, Mack? What’re you doing?”

  “Something is here with us. Nearby.”

  “A monster?”

  Mack glanced over his shoulder at the darkness behind him, and then returned his gaze to Seth. “We can’t let this be the end of everything.”

  Seth had opened his mouth to reply when a shattering roar boomed out of the darkness. He flinched and stepped back, almost tripping on a piece of debris. Then he froze, looking at Mack, who merely bowed his head slightly and turned towards the giant shape.

  The ground trembled all around them. And, with the sound of the front gates being swept aside, the monstrous thing took form. It was as tall as a seven-storey block of flats and just as wide, teeming with bioluminescent lights that writhed upon its dark bulk. It bellowed and barked throatily, utterly alien and terrifying. The titan’s massive lungs took inhalations with deep, tremulous bursts. The air around it seemed to quiver.

  Seth dropped to a crouch and peered out from behind a pile of debris. Slack-mouthed, he gawped in silence, trembling like a scared child. His bones felt like brittle sticks.

  Mack shouted up at the monster, goading it, shaking the flare in his hand. He stood ready, waiting, in acceptance.

  Black tendrils shot down from the entity’s bulk and seized Mack by his arms. He dropped the flare, and it lay in the snow, spitting out its glowing red spray. He cried out something Seth couldn’t hear over the keening wind, and was snatched away, into darkness.

  Seth was near-witless, beyond terrified, and he fled to their shelter where he hid in a nest of blankets and old sheets, crying and whimpering.

  The monster roared, shaking the remains of the base and its foundations.

  Seth clasped his hands over his mouth and tried not to scream as the world slipped away.

  *

  He woke shuddering and panicked into a half-light between worlds. That familiar deathly silence.

  A tall figure stood over him in the collapsed wreck of the shelter, while wind rattled about the ruins. The figure shone a torch at his face. The storm had died, but the snow still fell steadily.

  “Mack?” Seth managed to mutter through his dry mouth and chattering teeth. The pain in his head had him worried that his skull was splitting open. He thought about the god-monster, the thing that had taken Mack, and suppressed the urge to cry.

  The figure crouched, directed the torchlight away from Seth’s face. It wasn’t Mack. The figure wore a black balaclava and army fatigues. An automatic rifle hung over one shoulder.

  Two other armed figures were standing several yards away, watching him.

  “Help,” Seth wheezed. “Please help me. There’s no one else left.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” the man said. His voice was harsh, but not unkind. “There’s shelter for you here. Come with us.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Seth came out of a deep, dreamless sleep in a bed within a darkened room. Silence, except for his panicked breathing and the grinding of his heart. He looked around, dislocated and floppy-limbed, as he sat up, the bedsheets falling away from his chest. His head swam and most parts of him ached and burned with muscle fatigue. The cold air prickled his face and forearms. He cleared his throat and coughed up a yellowish lump of phlegm.

  The bare lightbulb overhead gave detail to his surroundings. The walls, ceiling and floor were grey and bare, like a cell, and that troubled him. A black door on the other side of the room. No windows. The faint smell of bleach.

  He wore a t-shirt and boxer shorts that weren’t his own. The implication that someone had undressed him and seen his naked body made him feel strangely ashamed. He swivelled and sat on the edge of the bed, his movements sluggish and poorly-coordinated.

  The room swayed when he stood, and he breathed slowly, rubbing his eyes. The floor was cold. When he took his hands from his face, he stepped slowly to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. He shook it in both hands, then stood back, shaking his head. He was about to start banging his fists on the door when the lock clicked and the door opened. He backed away, hands half-raised, tense and anxious. One hand formed a fist.

  Andy entered the room, closely followed by a man in a dull white lab coat. Seth suddenly wondered if everything before had been a dream of madness and this place was a refuge for the insane. He stepped away, glancing back and forth between the men.

  “Seth,” Andy said. “You’re awake, at last.”

  Ruby walked in with an armful of clothes, and gave a wan smile. “How are you feeling?”

  Seth rubbed his face. “What’s going on? Where am I?”

  “Everything’s fine,” said Andy. “You can relax, man.”

  “I thought all of you were dead,” said Seth.

  Andy glanc
ed at Ruby. “We made it. Not all of us. But we made it.” He indicated the clothes and boots to Seth. “These should be the right sizes for you.”

  Seth took them from Ruby. He stepped back again, holding the pile in front of his body and thanked them all.

  The man in the lab coat was waxen-faced and painfully thin. He blinked, pursed his flat mouth, which was framed by an untidy goatee beard, then leaned forward, appraising Seth with bloodshot eyes. His hair hadn’t seen a brush in a while, and his clothes hung loosely upon him. He dropped his hands into the pockets of his lab coat.

  “Hello, Seth, I’m Doctor Felton. I hope this isn’t too much of a shock. How are you feeling?”

  “A bit rough. Bit blurry around the edges.”

  Andy offered Seth a sympathetic smile with something like relief in his eyes.

  “That’s not surprising,” said Felton. “You were in quite a state when you were found.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two days.”

  “I’ve been unconscious for two days?”

  “More or less,” said Andy. “You woke up yesterday for a short while, muttering about random stuff.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in the bunker,” Felton said.

  *

  Seth dressed in the clothes Ruby had given to him. A thick jumper and jeans, plus a pair of frayed socks, all of it creased but clean. He pulled on the boots, which were a little tight around the toes but comfortable enough for him. The clothes had seen previous owners, but he was just glad to be warm, despite the niggling thought that he was wearing a dead man’s ensemble. Warm at last.

  Felton gave him a small bottle of water, and he downed half of it in one go. Then Andy and Ruby hugged Seth, bringing him close to tears.

  Now they walked a narrow corridor, which to Seth appeared exactly the same as the first corridor they’d gone through. Felton limped beside him, with Andy and Ruby following close behind, hand-in-hand. Seth was pleased for his new friends. In the cramped confines, Seth could smell his own body odour, sour and musky. There were no windows and the grey walls radiated cold. Grainy dust and grit crackled under their shoes. Intermittent bare lightbulbs hung from the concrete ceiling and grew pitch black shadows from the men.