He Runs (Part One)

by Owen Seth

  ‘Emma,’ says Man, directing the suggestion at Hound. ‘What do you reckon?’ The dog is sat patiently, his mangy paw held out, begging for some beef. Man obliges him, watches the dog’s black eyes glow as meat enters his mouth.

  ‘Emma is nice. My girl was called Emma. I never told you that, did I?’ The dog looks up, mouth wet with saliva, the patched paw rising again. ‘I keep forgetting that we don’t know each other very well. Emma it is, though.’

  Man turns to the infant, the newly christened Emma and she cries even louder.

  ‘Don’t think she’s a fan,’ Man says to Hound.

  The dog growls lowly, a reminder that he is after some more beef.

  ‘Okay, okay, you’re lucky I heard you with all that noise over there.’

  And Emma cries.

  *********************

  Standing over Emma’s cot, Man smiles. He’s watching her sleep, her tiny ribcage rising and falling with each breath.

  She cried herself to sleep. An old trick that Man’s used before. They all get tired eventually.

  Emma’s room is large for a girl of her age. It is dust covered and the floor is strewn with battered toys. The window is boarded up, only the tiniest sliver of light squeezes its way in. Looking at the state of this room Man is of the opinion that Emma used to sleep with her parents.

  Man slept in the master bedroom, the one belonging to Daniel and Celeste. It took him a few hours to settle, to get used to the bouncing embrace of the mattress, but then sleep took him and he dreamed, an alternate world where everything is safe and beautiful and painless. He dreamed of Claire and Emma, living together as a happy family in the farmhouse, untouched by the outside world, their own paradise to lap up. In his dream they spent their days going for long walks and playing in flower-littered fields and feeding the cows and swimming in rivers and chasing lambs. Indeed, the dream was so vivid and brilliant that when he woke he cried out for them, expecting to see them in bed with him. Then the realisation of reality set in, the ominous cloud that lingers over him every day.

  Emma’s lips quiver as air is pushed out from her mouth. Man giggles at how absurd they look and also at how cute she is. He sips at some coffee he’s made, a cocktail of boiled rainwater and some instant coffee that is a year past its best before date. Still tastes good to Man. It’s been too long since he’s experienced the sort of comforts that this rustic, beaten up farm house provides.

  A cold air forms in his gut at the realisation of this acquisition, picks up momentum and swirls like a hurricane; killing Emma’s parents was an act of preservation, nothing new to Man. But now, in the midst of the reward that their murder yielded, he can feel the gut wrenching vortex in his abdomen. And then underneath that, like a tiny sun, rutilant and warm, he can feel the thrill of relief.

  ‘Eggs,’ he says to himself. ‘Maybe the chickens will have laid some for me.’

  As he moves along the landing, the glow of sunlight fills the space around him and he begins to take everything in. His environment, his inherited home. He’d been so tired, so keen to rest that he’d just accepted, with open arms, the gift of shelter.

  Next door to the baby’s room is the master bedroom where he slept. It is large and spacious, with an antique four-poster bed dominating the centre of the room. The view from the window looks eerily out onto the forest where its previous inhabitants are decomposing. An en-suite bathroom sits derelict; no running water renders it useless. A satin ottoman mopes at the foot of the bed, threadbare from the feet up. The curtains that hang loosely are long and black and mouldy along the edges.

  The corridor on the landing is painted in British racing green and speckled with dark rectangles of varying sizes where photos and paintings once hung. Man understands that ridding oneself of painful images is a necessity these days. Usually the visual stimulation helps with the grieving process but when it’s not just one person but millions, for most people, it’s better to forget.

  At the end of the corridor is a guest bedroom, an inch of dust covering the bed and cardboard boxes piled high. Opposite this is another bathroom with lime scale swarming the ceramics and a deep red bucket filled with antiseptic fluid and piss and shit.

  Man walks down the stairs, taking note of even more missing memories on the walls. The living room greets him. Apart from the kitchen it is the only room in the house that was kept clean and tidy. In the living room a three piece of faded leather engulfs the floor space, partnered with a glass coffee table stood on spiralling cast iron legs. A deceased flat screen TV, DVD player and satellite box adorn a black wooden unit, positioned in the corner of the room. A drinks cabinet is stacked against the back wall, bottles of empty, top shelf whiskey standing inside it like a vacant glass army, the faint smell of malt lingering in the musky air.

  Man moves back to the kitchen, pours another coffee from the pot he made earlier and is pleasantly surprised that it is still warm. An unused AGA stands as the king of the kitchen and thick, wooden countertops act as used dish stands. An old hearth dotted with silver horseshoes faces the AGA, black and smelling of burned wood. An iron rail shoots from one wall of the chimney to the other, a cauldron of steaming water hanging from it.

  He sits at the kitchen table and drinks, wishing he had some tobacco and papers. A coffee and a smoke was the way he used to start every morning. It gave him the necessary buzz, loosened the bowels. Of course, he only started after his dad had been killed. He was promoted to being the man of the house and although his mother protested, she was too weak to stop him from smoking. She used to say that he had his father’s blood running through his veins, the same angry stare. Man has always doubted this. He’s calmer than his father. Saves his aggression for when it really counts. Quick bursts, controlled and necessary to survive.

  Hound snores by Man’s feet, kicking his balding legs out as if he’s dreaming. Man smiles as he remembers a debate he once had with a teacher about whether or not animals can dream.

  ‘I think you’re dreaming,’ whispers Man. ‘Think about it. If my theory that it was possible in an alternate universe for dogs to be selected by nature for evolving into the dominant species instead of humans, then it’s entirely possible that dogs can dream. I mean, we all evolved from the same organism, the same single cell so in a way, every species’ sensory experience could be interchangeable!’

  Man releases a raucous laugh at the fact that he could have no idea what he’s talking about. Hound is woken by the laughing and scurries to his feet. Man slaps the table, shaking the coffee pot and the dog retreats to the hearth, his tail down, growling.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ says Man. ‘I thought we were past all that. It’s really funny actually, because now that you’ve got me thinking, I wonder what other animals dream about. I can see those cows outside, closing their cow eyes at night and picturing some hunky fucking bull in their minds. Jesus! Imagine that!’

  Hound growls, unimpressed with Man’s humour. In an effort to make amends, Man grabs his beef-covered plate and removes a slice, puts it on the floor next to his feet. Hound trots over and eats sloppily, and Man rubs the dog’s hairless shoulders. An age old trick. Works every time.

  And they are friends again.

  *********************

  It takes a couple of days but Man settles in to his new house, eating meat and drinking and trying to keep the baby alive. When the cooked meat comes to an end his interest in the farm house makes him search through it for anything he can take with him when it is time to leave. A nagging thought breaks through from the recesses of his mind, asks him if he has to leave.

  ‘I do,’ he says to himself. ‘I do. I do. I do.’

  His first investigation leads him to the pantry, a large, walk-in room that clings to the kitchen like an unnoticed birthmark. He opens the brown, oak door and steps back, amazed at the Aladdin’s cave before him.

  Tins of soup; at least fifty, a mix of four different flavours. Tins of mixed vegetables, of peaches and pineapple rings in syrupy gloop. A
large plastic container filled with salt, useful for curing the meat. Man stops for a second and wonders where they found all of this food. Had they been scavenging? Had they always been here? Had they been Doomsday preppers? They could have once been like him, weary travellers who stumbled across the farm when other people lived here. Maybe they took it from them, just as he had done to them.

  Man dismisses the thought as irrelevant and peruses the soup collection. His eyes flit up and down, scanning the options and eventually they stop on oxtail. He retrieves the tin and inspects it. What sloshes inside could be out of date but he doesn’t care. He knows that his stomach has hardened over time. And luckily for him, this tin comes with a ring pull on the lid. No need to hunt for a can opener or fuck around with his rusted blade.

  He returns to the kitchen, rips off the lid and pours the contents into a small cauldron that hangs over the glowing fire. The thick brown liquid slaps against metal and then sizzles quietly.

  Man stirs the soup and watches Emma in the high chair, wriggling around, happy and content.

  ‘Hey, little girl!’ says Man. She ignores him, grabs at her curly hair and pulls. ‘Emma. Emma.’ Still nothing. So Man decides to give up. At least she isn’t crying. It took a few days but she learned to stop when Man ignored her. She only cries when she truly needs something. If everything goes to plan she’ll forget her initial programming and Man will fill the surrogacy void.

  Man sits at the table, a mug of steaming oxtail soup clutched in his hands. Earlier, while searching through the guest room for photos or clues to disprove his theories regarding ownership of the house, he found a selection of books. He sifted through them, one by one, tossing some aside and keeping the others in front of him. He took four books from the guest room and on the kitchen table sits his first choice, a novel he picked out of sheer irony. Slaughterhouse Five.

  Man flicks through the pages, having read Vonnegut’s work at school, and stops at a random page. He looks over the browned paper and what appears before him is enough to pull his eyeballs from their sockets. And fill them with tears. Six words. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

  He feels the space behind his face starting to burn, the searing friction of mental cogs, the screeching of rarely used joints, all coming together in an anti-nihilistic harmony. In his throat he can feel his voice box revving, readying itself to join in the despair. He clenches his teeth and shakes his head until the feelings subside. A hysterical bout would have guaranteed Emma’s vocals springing back into action, a sound that he does not miss at all.

  His mouth slurps at the soup and he flicks through the book, being careful not to stop on the same page as before. After a minute he gets bored and tosses the book to one side. He lifts the mug to his chin, lifts it so that the brown sludge trickles down his throat. All he can taste is Bovril, the drink he saw all of the other parents quaffing on cold winter mornings as they watched his under ten’s rugby team slowly catch pneumonia.

  Man lifts his legs, quietly props them on the table and does his best to enjoy the memory. His mind is like a slide projector; quick flashes of places, of faces of people he once knew, but all in still motion. No moving reel, just tiny glimpses of a bygone era, a time when people spent most of their lives trying to make everything around them beautiful and painless. Man laughs, a chuckle that he would normally let roll but stops for fear of the child crying. He was seventeen and it was a year after his father’s murder. Man, like everyone else, knew nothing of what had happened until he woke one morning, his alarm clock dead, rushed and panicked voices in the streets. Most people thought a transformer had malfunctioned. Little did they know of the disturbing truth.

  A vivid memory, etched on to his mind like a key-scratched car. Like Vonnegut, Man understands that moments spent transcending time and space, of travelling through time to other eras are nothing but beautiful and painless. There’s a sense of glorified nostalgia in the journey. But it’s what lies on either side of the journey, those seconds where you pause and see things you do not wish to remember, that are the most painful of all.

  Man slurps the soup, the viscous gloop escaping the mug and matting his beard together. Emma stops pulling her own hair and points at Man, starts to giggle. He looks at the child then closes his eyes and listens; giggling, the purest form of enjoyment and ecstasy that anyone will ever know. And he gets to hear it again.

  Man sticks his finger into the soup, pulls it out and blows on it, cooling the searing sauce. Emma continues to laugh. He stands up, moves to the counter and retrieves a small spoon. He dunks it into the soup, blows on it and holds it to the little girl’s mouth. Her smile arcs and her hands writhe in joy. A small, pink tongue appears and tests the liquid, pushes some of it off the spoon and onto the floor. She looks confused and then smiles again, deciding she likes it, her lips pursing to attack the food. With each lick more soup lands on the floor, and her chin and chest.

  ‘No more mashed veg for you,’ says Man. ‘Not now that we’ve got this.’

  ************************

  Man walks the grounds of the farm, Emma strapped to his chest in a blanket, Hound trotting loyally behind. Man is dressed as a new man, his old clothes burned on a bonfire, the putrid stench of body odour incinerated in a blaze of liberation. He and Daniel, it seems, are the same size. Man took a pair of green corduroy trousers, cut them down to shorts, as well as a black polo shirt and blue, quilted Barbour jacket. He looked through Daniel’s shoe collection and quickly realised that he preferred his red Chuck Taylors.

  In these new clothes, minus the jacket, he walks the grounds, round the chicken coops, poking his head in to see if any eggs have dropped and then past the vegetable patches, ending up in the cow paddock. Hound is kept on the other side of the wall for fear of disturbing the cows. Man bends down, making sure that Emma is secure, and pulls a daisy from the earth. He smells it, savouring the flowery freshness and puts it under Emma’s nose. The small, white petals tickle her skin and she laughs and sneezes. He drops the flower and stands up, breathes deeply and the taste of the world around him rushes in like a tidal wave. He smells grass and heat and cow shit…the countryside. When he breathes out he sees the little girl sink into him, her arms widening as she latches on like a baby monkey.

  The reason for this rural outing is simple: Man is running out of meat and wants to butcher some more before he sets off once again into the wilderness. As he moves among the beasts, looking for number forty four, he becomes more aware of the tiny human strapped to his chest, wriggling and squirming, giggling at the sight of the brown, grass-eating monsters. It’s not that he didn’t know she was there. He did, but in a different way, a detached way. He knows how he feels when she is on him and feels ashamed to admit it to himself. Man feels as though they are one; two beings brought together by nothing more than violence and circumstance. He enjoys the feeling as his chest warms and his stomach flutters. He looks at the child, sees her thin blonde hair, her mother’s eyes, wide and brimming with interest. He thinks about her mother and father, wishes that he hadn’t had to kill them. He wishes that things had been different and that Claire and Emma, his Emma, had left the settlement and found this place. In this place he could’ve protected them. Deep down, he knows that. He wouldn’t have been out hunting. He would’ve been home, tending to his farm. His presence would’ve been enough to put him off doing what Smith did. Smith, in retaliation for what Man did, wants Man’s head on a spike. Smith, who ruined Man’s existence, who cast him out into the shadows of life and forced him to run and kill and survive.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Man to the little girl. ‘I’ll protect you. I’m all you’ve got and you need me. And in a way, I need you.’ The little girl smiles, her gummy mouth opening, her lips curling in a way that breaks his heart.

  A bark averts Man’s gaze and he turns, sees Hound scrambling over the wall, squeezing his patchy body through two strips of barbed wire.

  ‘STOP!’ screams Man. ‘STOP!’

 
; But it’s too late. He should’ve been watching. Should have tied the dog up but now the beast is out, snout pointed like an arrow, ready to hunt.

  Hound, although a ferocious killer, is not adept at stealth. He barks as soon as his raggedy paws hit the hard ground, sending the docile herd into a frenzied stampede. The dog catches up to a slow cow, snaps at its shit-covered tail, misses by an inch. A pair of hooves fly backwards, glance the dog’s ribcage. A trial of misjudged distances. That’s all it boils down to.

  Man’s programming tells him to run as fast as he can, get to the nearest wall and bolt over it. A fast and belated thought flashes through his mind…he should’ve stayed close to the wall. But Man, unlike many of his human brethren, has taught himself to deny his programming, to act in total defiance of the flight instinct. His method is simple and sloppy: he closes his fingers, makes two fists and closes his eyes and opens them quickly if he can. If that doesn’t work, doesn’t shock him into action, he breathes deeply, filling his lungs until his diaphragm aches. Three breathes is usually enough to harness the adrenaline that pulses through his body. It is a potent source of energy that, for a few minutes, turns him almost superhuman.

  Man holds his arms out, the baby protruding from his chest like a conjoined twin and closes his eyes. Most animals will avoid a collision and for ten seconds Man must put his faith in that instinct.

  He opens his eyes just as a rushing cow comes up on him, its back legs scuffing in dusty circles. His arms wrap around the tiny human on his chest and he puts pressure on his back foot, uses the other to spin out of the way of the marauding beast like a seasoned matador. A flurry of disgruntled cattle engulfs him but he stays light on his feet, breathing as slowly as he can, pirouetting when he needs to, using his arms to shield the baby and alternately deflect the smaller animals. He spots a clearing and moves to it, his head turning so quickly that it sends his world spinning. A glance at the herd, a brown and black mass of agitated meat and then separately, two individual animals, Hound right next to them. The dog moves in, clamps his jaws around the smaller cow, a calf, and drags it to the ground. The juvenile’s black eyes glaze over, hypnotised by a fear that it is unable to rationalise. What Man presumes to be the calf’s mother is circling, worrying the grass with her mouth and short horns, moving towards Hound in clumsy attempts to save her infant. But Hound is quick and wily, moves back and puts the calf in between them. When the mother turns around Hound bites harder, rags the calf’s head from side to side, tearing flesh. The calf makes a strange sound, a bleeting sound that is more like a lamb than a cow. The mother turns, rushes at the dog who is again, too quick. Man watches this continue until the calf’s body lies limp and lifeless, the earth around it turning cherry-red, the mother shuffling from side to side. He can see it in the beast, the heartbreak and sorrow, the instinct of a parent clawing through, an urge she acts on but doesn’t understand. Man looks at her and a tear forms in his eye. A mother’s instinct. The same instinct that Claire felt and understood and acted on when their child was taken from them. When she was pinned to the ground and her eyes looked nowhere but at the screaming girl. And she felt nothing but the pain that her daughter was enduring.