Pushing through the double doors behind the tall desk, he walked down a corridor and ignored the streaks of brown, dried blood which had filled the air with an almost metallic tang. He ignored the broken furniture and the cracked windows held intact by their reinforced mesh to prevent the shards from being used as weapons. He even ignored the hissing moans coming from behind the closed doors he passed as his presence stirred up the occupants. Keeping his eyes focused on the end of the corridor ahead where he could see the glass bubble of a nurses’ station, he stopped before it to take in another scene that his brain couldn’t process. He leaned forward, placing his hand against the glass to shield the light away from his eyes, to peer through the streaked blood and through to the other side.
A hand slapped hard against the glass, making him jump backwards and utter a strangled cry of alarm. The hand, blood-soaked with torn nails and the index finger missing from a ragged wound at the first knuckle, squeaked slowly down the pane as the rest of the body rose upwards into sight.
John’s mind, already on desperately thin ice, lost the battle and shattered the remaining fragile protection surrounding his wits.
The young girl, a teenager by her size and build, was sheeted with blood from a gash on her head which obscured her features. Her face tilted to the side in curiosity as it tried again with its ravaged hand to push through the invisible force field keeping her from the living body that intrigued her so much. Blinking involuntarily, the blood wiped away from the eyeballs to show the same blind, milky, soulless things he had seen in the receptionist’s eye sockets.
Hitting her hand harder against the glass and finding that it didn’t yield, she turned her head towards the door next to her and slowly, shakily, reached out for the handle.
John, his own eyes drawn to the opposite side of the door, stared in horror as the handle began to depress before it flung back upwards as though the slippery hand operating it had lost traction. Hearing the hiss from the other side raise in intensity, he looked on as the handle was pushed down again. Too late, John snatched for it to keep the thing shut inside and away from him, but the door had already opened and a hand shot through the gap to reach for him. He drew himself up to slam the door using all his body weight, only the blood-slickened floor betrayed him and took away his footing. Slamming down to the ground in shock, he looked up just in time to see the thing fall on him, forcing his hands out in front of him on instinct. The girl, chomping her teeth down onto the side of his left hand painfully to pierce the calloused skin of his rough hand, fixed him with her milky eyes.
He froze again, mouth open in pain and horror as the two locked eyes before hers turned away to get a better purchase on him. In that moment, he drew up one foot, placed it into her hip, and shoved hard to send her through the air and back through the doorway. Already on his feet but unaware of getting up, he slammed the door shut and ran the length of the corridor, now terribly aware that other doors were rattling and opening, before bursting out and tripping over the body of the receptionist to fall hard.
Scrambling to his feet again, he wasted precious seconds as he tried to push open the doors to the outside world before his brain took some semblance of control and he pulled instead to be instantly rewarded with fresh air. Running to collapse against his car, he looked at the neat row of teeth marks crimping the outside of his left hand, which already welled with blood and seemed to be turning the skin surrounding it grey.
Fumbling for his keys, he tried to start the car to return home, to tell his wife that the hospital staff had gone insane and blind and they had bitten him, but the weakness and dizziness and nausea took over, making him slump over the wheel into eventual unconsciousness.
SIX
The sun set fully, and Peter heard movement downstairs. The drink had obviously worn off, and he heard the downstairs toilet flush as the pipes in the bathroom opposite his room gurgled in echoing answer. The familiar clink of glass on glass travelled upstairs, making him feel less than hopeful for a meal that evening. He was starting to feel really hungry, to the point that hunger was almost overriding the sense of dread he felt at being left alone with his mother. That concept alone was terrifying enough, but when added to the knowledge that his father was supposed to be back by then with his sister, it made the boy’s heart drop.
If his sister came back, at least he would get some food cooked for him, and he would probably get told more of what was going on. If she didn’t come back, then feeling hungry all the time was probably going to be the least of Peter’s worries. That his father hadn’t returned was also a concern, but not as much as being left alone with the evil witch.
Peter and his sister used to play, safely away from the house in their secret den underneath the low branches of the pine trees, pretending that they’d been adopted by an evil step-mother who hated them. He thought that those games were just her way of helping him come to terms with their situation, and she always promised that as soon as she was old enough, she would leave and take him with her. Peter’s sad reverie was burst like a balloon by noises firing up the stairs like a rifle crack.
“Get down here! Now!” she screeched up at him, making his legs respond with an instant obedience borne of fear to lift him from the carpet and towards the door before his mind had even comprehended the order. Peter scurried to the stairs, stepping down them one at a time and slowing with each step as she waited at the foot with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. She waited until the boy had reached the bottom step and paused before pointing with a single finger to the carpet directly in front of her feet.
As instructed, and careful not to show any reluctance or fear, Peter stepped forward, anticipating the clip around his ear which usually came with the orders to step within range of her.
“What do you want to eat?” she snapped, a heavy hint of reluctance in her voice, as though she were fighting against her instincts to both nurture and abuse him at the same time.
“Anything,” he said quietly, hoping that was the right answer.
“Anything?” she sneered back at mockingly, “anything isn’t a meal. I asked what you wanted.”
As she spoke, that sickly-sweet fermented smell of alcohol hit him. He fought hard to keep his face neutral as his eyelids fluttered despite the battle to keep them still.
“Pasta?” he tried, hoping that would assuage her anger at his previous incorrect answer. She huffed, reluctantly allowing that as an acceptable response, and stalked away to the kitchen where she picked up another cigarette from a packet and lit it from the burnt-down nub between her fingers. Given no further instructions, Peter stepped gingerly into the lounge where he perched on the edge of the itchy, brown settee and watched the television screen. The program showing was saying nothing about what was happening, and he stood to switch the channel after first turning down the volume so that the sudden change was less likely to be noticed. Pressing in the first button on the top left of the control panel, which was unmarked but that he knew was for BBC One, Peter walked backwards to the settee again to watch the static logo on the screen and strain to hear the words.
“…stay in your homes, do not interfere with military operations and do not try to attend hospitals if affected by the disease. You are advised to stay in your homes, do not interfere…”
The recording looped again, repeating the same information over and over.
What kind of disease was it? Peter thought. Why can’t you go to hospital if you’re ill? Isn’t that the reason for hospitals?
“What do you want with it?” came the shout from the kitchen, making Peter jump.
“Cheese,” he answered, adding “please,” before he earned punishment for poor manners.
Grumbled noises came in response but nothing which required him to move or answer, so he switched the channel again. On the third button he found a live broadcast, or at least not a sound recording on loop. This one had a man in a suit and with a moustache that was distracting when he spoke. He looked slightly dis
hevelled and very uneasy, scared even, and his eyes kept flickering away from the camera to look around the studio that wasn’t shown on the screen. He shuffled some papers on the desk in front of him and asked someone behind the camera if they wanted him to go again, then he nodded when he got an answer, before clearing his throat and trying to make his face serious and commanding.
“Good evening, and welcome to the ITN News. An epidemic is sweeping the streets of Britain, after a virus was inadvertently released from a London laboratory, we believe late last week. Experts state that the mysterious illness causing the chaos is similar to the rabies virus. Those affected by it display extremely aggressive behaviour towards others, and there have been numerous incidents of…” the eyes flickered again before the throat was cleared a second time, “incidents of cannibalism. Transmission of the illness is also believed, experts claim, to be via bites and saliva from the infected. The London Metropolitan Police Force made a statement yesterday urging everyone to stay in their homes and not to interfere with the efforts of police and military personnel. Footage from the capital.”
The screen suddenly went black, shrinking to a slowly dying dot of white in the very centre of the box, just as loud swearing came from the kitchen.
Power cuts so far away from the towns were a regular thing for the farm, but the timing of this one made Peter jump. He could hear the sound of drawers being pulled open and slammed closed from the kitchen, making him think that she was looking for candles to light and carry on with the meagre meal preparations. It was only really the lights which ran on electricity, as the heating and cooking was fuelled by the large oil tank outside. Because that was apparently expensive, the heating was rarely used. Peter wondered the last time he was told not to even think about turning the fire up, and how much their endless supply of oil cost.
The television screen was in total darkness now, the tiny dot of residual light faded into nothingness, and he was left in the dark room alone without any link to the outside world.
“It’s ready,” came an annoyed shout from the kitchen, and he stood to walk fast into the other room where he took a seat at the table, to be presented with a messy pile of undercooked pasta and not enough grated cheese to match it. He ate in silence, being watched the whole time as she smoked her way through three cigarettes until he had cleared the plate.
“Please may I get down from the table?” Peter asked meekly but with enough confidence to hopefully avoid any accusation of mumbling. She nodded once, so he stood and carried his plate and fork to the sink where he began to run the water to wash them.
“Oh, just leave that,” his mother snapped out of annoyance as she waved her hand in his direction, “I’ll do it, you just go to bloody bed.”
He went without a word, and much later as he lay awake, Peter thought he could hear her crying downstairs alone.
Waking the next morning, Peter did as he was told and didn’t put his school uniform back on. Instead, he wore the same clothes as he had been wearing the day before. They weren’t dirty, nor had he been wearing them for long enough to fall into that immeasurable bracket of ‘dirty enough to wash’. He went downstairs to find that she hadn’t risen yet, so Peter let the dog out of the back door where it was whining pitifully, and slipped his feet into his boots to follow.
The morning air was brisk but not cold, but that wasn’t what made his brow furrow. It was something else; it was the noise of the morning which was wrong. Normally, there would be some sounds from the farm, and the absence of those regular noises felt alien. Not that the morning was silent, but instead of the distant hum of the dairy machinery working for the morning milking session, there was the constant and distressed cacophony of cows.
His young brain recognised that they should have been milked by now, as that process started when the sky was still just in darkness at this time of the year, but their braying complaints rolled across the yard behind the house to spell something very out of sorts. In light of the dawning realisation that his father was probably never coming back, and therefore not in a position to reprimand him for going over there, and the realisation, too, that his mother was still sleeping off the bottle or two she had gone through the day before, Peter walked to the gate and made his way on to the farm, with the dog trotting easy circles around his slow progress.
Peter found the milking parlour in silent darkness, something that the power cut shouldn’t affect, because it had its own generators as testimony to how often the electricity grid failed their remote location. He carried on past towards the sound of unhappy cows. Creatures of habit, all the black and white cows with their heavy, swinging udders all crowded in the field at the gate, expecting it to be opened and to file in to be milked and fed. Peter doubted whether they really understood what happened each morning and why, but even a creature as simple as a cow could understand a routine.
He knew then, that with his father gone, none of the others would work on the farm. One had already left, he knew that much, but the others had either quit without telling anyone or had also abandoned the farm.
Or worse, he thought, before he banished that thought from his head, but that can’t be, can it? That’s in London and it’s miles and miles away from here.
Walking back to the house, Peter had been back inside for less than a minute before he heard the sounds of her walking down the stairs, surrounded by the cloud of her first cigarette of the morning.
SEVEN
Peter’s life evolved into something resembling more freedom than he had ever enjoyed, but the cost of that was a crushing loneliness which gathered more force daily. The knowledge that his father and sister weren’t going to come back escaped his young mind most of the time, and he found that he was banishing the facts that he didn’t want to recall to the fringes, where they could be almost ignored.
He filled his days with walks on the farm, sometimes with the dog at his side; not out of any loyalty to him but another force of habit that dictated its place was outside. The dog was no pet and seemed to ignore Peter most of the time as it clearly felt its own spot on the family hierarchy was well above Peter’s own. Only now, with the father and the dog’s master gone, did a reluctant companionship emerge between the two.
That bubble of freedom was burst after four days, when his mother woke him with her screeching voice from downstairs as she raged and broke things. Pulling up the covers a little tighter, he hoped that she would contain her rage to the ground floor and not remember him.
Early on the fifth day that they were alone, Peter woke to a sensation that something was wrong. His eyes fluttered open; first the left and then the right until the bright light streaming in through the open curtains was manageable. The thing that was wrong, as he realised with sudden fear and panic, was his mother standing in his room wearing an exasperated look of hostility. She picked at her nails, something she did when she couldn’t smoke, and her red-ringed eyes bored into him menacingly.
“Get up,” she snarled, “we’re going out.”
Doing as he was told, he dressed under her watchful and malevolent gaze, then tried to inch past her in the doorway. She did this often, blocking his way to force him to ask – to beg – for her permission to pass.
“Excuse me, please,” he said in a humble voice.
“Speak up,” she snapped at him.
Raising his eyes in defiance, then as his nerve abandoned him at the last minute, he dropped his gaze and asked again in a louder voice that still showed what he hoped would be enough deference to avoid being hit.
She smirked unkindly and stepped aside to allow him enough room to get through the gap by her elbow. As he passed, she leaned sharply towards him and caught the side of his head with the elbow, as though it was his fault.
Numb to the pain and almost immune to her bullying tactics after so many years, Peter regained his footing and walked to the bathroom where he did what he needed to do and brushed his teeth afterwards. Realising that breakfast would obviously be bypassed, he was h
ustled out of the front door and towards the farm. She shoved him in the back towards the battered pickup, as their family car was now missing, and she fumbled with the unfamiliar keys to get in. Spending almost a minute adjusting the seat back, she left him standing outside the passenger door until she reluctantly leaned over to let him in. Settling into the seat and making himself small and insignificant, he pulled his seatbelt and clicked it home. As the squeaking, rattling engine whined, the pickup bucked slightly as she failed to anticipate how low the clutch was on the unfamiliar farm wagon.
Stopping at the edge of the driveway onto the road, more out of habit than actual care, she paused to look right before turning left to go down the narrow and overgrown track that led to nowhere special.
The roads, as unmaintained and rough as he was used to, bounced Peter around in the passenger seat uncomfortably as his mother mithered and muttered under her breath beside him. He kept quiet and looked out, unable to open the windows to allow in any fresh air because of the overhanging greenery scraping and bumping off the cab intermittently. Staring out of the dirty glass, Peter found solace in doing something and moving somewhere, instead of just waiting at home barely getting fed.
He wanted to ask where they were going, what they were looking for and to quiz her about the reasons, but the risk of her responding as she usually did was too great and would spoil his mood. He kept quiet and waited to find out the answers to the questions which were too risky to ask. When they reached a T-junction, devoid of any traffic or obstructions, he held his breath as her muttering became louder. Glancing across, he saw how she gripped the wheel with one hand as the other shook almost uncontrollably at her mouth, while she intermittently bit at the nails in between uttering words he couldn’t make out. Too scared to move, he stayed still and quiet as he always did around her when she was within striking distance. Without warning, she snarled something to herself and turned right in a chirp of tortured tyres as the pickup bucked with the change from first to second gear. Keeping her foot hard down on the accelerator, she crept the speed up into the next gears, as Peter stayed still and quiet. Slowing after a while, she turned right off the road into a small car park. He recognised the place, having been dragged there in the past to collect their car, or even once in the darkness when his father carried her bodily out of the small brick building.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 5