Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  He ran a hand across the spines of his books, closing his eyes and sensing the company of murderers. He longed to join their ranks, to accept membership into an elite band of men (they were always men, at least the ones he admired) who had actually taken a human life – more than one; scores of victims. It was his dearest dream to be like them, his heroes, his fathers. His first experience was so close that he could almost feel it brushing against his skin. Someday soon he would act, and the line would finally be crossed.

  His attention was drawn by a sound from Mother’s room. He stood and listened, waiting for it to come again. A slow, lazy thumping, like someone banging on a distant door. He knew that she was trying to move, shifting her wireframe body in an attempt to sit up in bed. Maybe she was thirsty, or simply craving his company.

  Daryl left his room and went downstairs, ignoring her feeble movements. Let the bitch suffer, just as he had suffered for so many years, unable to cut the leash and get a girlfriend, not allowed beyond the doors of the big old house he’d been born in.

  His heroes had all tasted the fruits that he desired – sex, death, adventure. Daryl was yet to glimpse such fascinations: his scope was limited, the level of his life experience pitiful.

  In the living room he turned on the television. A news broadcast flashed onto the screen, something about a series of unprovoked attacks in Leeds city centre. The newsreader was pretty, blonde, and aching to be slashed. He imagined cutting her, peeling off her insincere skin to reveal the truth of the musculature beneath.

  “… police are advising Leeds residents to stay indoors and lock themselves in. Episodes of civil unrest are increasing throughout the night, and an official spokesman has said that these events seem entirely random and unorganised. When asked about the possibility of terrorist activity, he stated again that the events are not linked. In other news…”

  Daryl muted the set and went to the stereo, glancing out of the window as he did so. The curtains were open; he could see the stretched sheet of the sky, a shooting star crossing it like an animated image. Wow, he thought, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a comet.

  He watched the fiery nova until it flared briefly and then faded, feeling an obscure sense of loneliness deep within his core. Was this an echo of what everyone else experienced when they fell in love, had babies, made a home together? Had he just been offered a glimpse into the world they inhabited, like a shooting star himself, coming close enough to see but not quite touch?

  He forced his attention back to the stereo, disturbed by such maudlin thoughts.

  Mother hated any music other than old time jazz, the kind played by big bands with busty female singers, and her beloved hymns. Daryl had smashed all her jazz records in front of her the day after she’d come home from hospital, and urinated on the remains. They were collectors items – most of them – and it had felt good to rob the world of their worth.

  Selecting a Madonna CD from the stack, he slid it into the player and cranked the volume up way beyond what Mother thought of as acceptable.

  Madonna: there was another slut who wanted killing. He failed to understand why no one had ever tried.

  Daryl danced around the large room, his movements almost comically uncoordinated. He would never dance in public; the shame would be too heavy to bear. Anyway, Mother had not once agreed to him going anywhere that he could dance, even at the age when all his schoolyard acquaintances (never friends; Daryl had no idea how to form and maintain conventional relationships) had gone to the pubs and clubs in town. But here, alone, he was happy to kick off his shoes and boogie on down to the murder bop.

  He knew this was no way for a twenty-three year-old man to act, but he was celebrating his newfound sense of freedom. Before Mother had fallen ill, when she had ruled over his world with a sharp tongue and a hard fist, he would never have dreamed of doing anything to upset her. Now that she was unable to fight back, he was prepared to do whatever the hell he wanted. No: whatever the fuck he wanted.

  Yes, that felt good. Profanity, even in the privacy of his mind, was forbidden. He never understood exactly how Mother knew when he was thinking bad words, but she always picked up on it.

  “Fuck you, Mother.” He giggled and spun, spun and giggled. Madonna sang about a holiday, and Daryl realised with no little irony that he was currently embarking on a permanent vacation from all that had gone before. A further irony was that he didn’t even like Madonna’s music.

  When the song ended he sat down on the couch, sweating and panting for breath. He picked up the remote control and flicked off the stereo, preferring silence for a little while. Too much freedom was making him giddy. He needed to regain some composure.

  He reached under the floral print cushion and brought out a small, worn hardback book, a volume of poetry he’d never read. Mother had given it to him as a gift when he was a boy, expecting him to respond to culture. Unfortunately, his idea of culture was something that grew in a Petri dish, and would ooze foul-smelling liquor if you stabbed it with the nib of a pen.

  He opened the book to the middle pages and took out the single photograph which lay inside. He handled it carefully, like a religious artefact, touching it only with the tips of his fingers. He would never forgive himself if he smudged the image, defaced the immaculate face in the photograph.

  There she was. His proposed first victim. The woman he’d been thinking about killing for six months. He’d first seen her at a petrol station forecourt on Kirkstall Road, filling up the tank of her green Mini Cooper. Something about her had attracted him, but not in a sexual way. Like most of the men he sought to emulate, Daryl did not have a conventional sexual drive. His needs were much more esoteric than those of the average citizen.

  He remembered following her home that first day, trailing her to the nice city centre flat where she lived with her husband. They had not been married long, and still seemed flushed by the excitement of simply being together. Daryl could not understand such things. Emotions like love and compassion were off his radar.

  He’d kept a close eye on her after that; then, coming to a decision, he’d upped the surveillance and begun to stalk her. For the past three months he had charted her every move, keeping a dossier on her. He knew her husband’s shifts, her routines, her patterns. Monday, Tuesday and Friday mornings she went to the gym. Every week-day afternoon she worked part-time at an Accountants office, walking the short distance from the flat. Weekends were changeable, but still followed a basic routine: a brisk morning walk down by the canal, breakfast muffins bought at Greggs bakery, then back to bed for a mid-morning nap – or, if her husband was not at work, a long work-out session between the sheets. Such creatures of habit, these people; they were so much more like him than they might like to think.

  He’d taken the photograph early one morning when she was heading off for her usual visit to the gym. It was a full body shot, catching her just as she stepped out of the door, turning on her heel to close it behind her. Her almost shoulder-length blonde hair caught gems from the morning sun and her face glowed with what he could only describe as a supernatural radiance. There was magic in the picture. The sort of commonplace mysticism other people – normal people – might notice at sunset, or perhaps as twilight fell upon the land like a fine mist. Daryl loved the photo, and he loved the image it contained. As far as he was concerned, that also meant he loved the woman it represented. But it was not a natural kind of affection; no, it was something only he could understand, and to speak it out loud would end only in disaster.

  Love, for Daryl, was a twisted thing, a malicious shadow tugging at his heels. Not for him the hearts and flowers of the rest of the world. He preferred knives and spleens, or skulls and hammers. Smiling, he brought the photograph up to his lips, kissed the air in front of it, and felt what passed for emotion in his dark world flood his senses like a short burst of bitter juice.

  Daryl wanted to kill this woman so much that it manifested as an ache inside his gut, a low pulse that he could n
ot deny. Lately the pulse had grown stronger, more difficult to ignore. The time was rapidly approaching when he must either shit or get off the pot. It was a crude metaphor – one he’d heard in a film – but a very apt one.

  It was getting late. He knew he should be thinking about sleep, but these days he felt energised at night, as if he drew inspiration from the darkness. He thought he might torture Mother for a while before retiring to bed. Perhaps the flame of a lit match applied to the soles of her feet, or small slices from a razor blade directly under her armpits. There were so many methods to cause another human being pain. He’d researched them all, in books and on the Internet. The information was out there, in a variety of forms, if you looked hard enough, and wanted to find it badly enough.

  He climbed the stairs and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and washed his face in the sink. The bowl of the sink was greasy with dirt; since Mother’s illness took hold, he’d not bothered to clean the house. He considered using the toilet, but did not need to. He stared at his face in the mirror, reaching back behind him and to the left to turn out the light. His round, bespectacled face darkened, becoming something more sinister: a mask, with blackness peering out from the eye, nose and mouth holes. It was a wonderful illusion, and he marvelled at the fact that such hard truths nearly always presented themselves when one was least expecting them.

  The truth, Daryl knew, rarely ventured out of its hiding place. But when it did… oh, when it did, huge changes were bound to follow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RICK WAS SHOCKED into immobility for a fraction of a second – certainly no more than that, but possibly even less – before his training kicked in. Hitting the floor, he rolled smoothly across the landing and kept close to the wall. If you stayed low you made a more difficult target, and moving in a straight line was out of the question. Confuse the enemy: do what is least expected.

  Screaming and gunshots tore the air. Bodies tumbled by him, guns swinging up into active positions. Rick made his way back to the stairs, where Hutch was trying to aim at something through the dissipating smoke. “Good job,” he yelled, his pistol twitching, shifting, eyes scanning the area for someone or something to target. He took off his helmet to scratch his head, sweat glistening in his hair and on his forehead.

  Rick tucked himself in behind the thick concrete newel post, ensuring that he created as small a target as possible. He reached out to grab Hutch’s arm, to tell his friend what he’d seen – the kids throwing smoking missiles, the laughing mad woman urging them on – but Hutch pulled sharply away, his movement violent and final. Rick felt a warm, moist sensation against the side of his face. His lips were pasted with hot fluid.

  Hutch’s body sagged. His gun fell to the floor; he began to inch backwards, down the stairs, his empty hands grasping at the air. When what remained of his face swung lazily into view, Rick saw that half the man’s head had been obliterated. Bone was caught in a frozen spray; blood still spurted like strawberry syrup pumped through an air hose. Hutch’s mouth was agape, but there wasn’t enough of it left to describe a silent scream… his remaining eye had already rolled back into his shattered skull, and the other socket was filled with red.

  Rick watched his friend fall, not even attempting to catch him. Hutch’s slack body tumbled down the short flight, slamming into the wall on the half landing below, leaving bloody smears on the whitewashed plaster. Rick closed his eyes, pictured the scene, and started planning his next move.

  Somehow finding a point of calm in the chaos around him, Rick rose and edged towards the mass of bodies around the door of the flat that was the subject of the raid – number twenty-four. Several police officers of various ranks formed a semi circle around the shattered entryway, most of them coughing; others ran along the landing, grabbing bystanders and pushing them back into their flats. Rick’s emergency measures had not lasted: the doors inside certain buildings never remained closed for long.

  “– fuck off me!” screamed a man who was backing out of number twenty-four. It was Tennant, the big man who’d been first inside the block. A woman hung from his chest by her hands; her feet dragged along behind her. She was spitting and snarling like a wild dog.

  “Careful! HIV risk!” Rick did not recognise this second voice, but everyone seemed to take an unconscious step backwards, away from the woman who was trying her best to attack Tennant.

  “Bitch!” said Tennant, swatting her away as if she were a small animal nagging him for food. The woman shot sideways, her head making contact with the door frame. Her eyes rolled back into her head and her tongue pushed between her swollen lips. She was tiny – almost a midget. Her hair was large and bushy, either completely unkempt or teased into some fashionable retro style.

  Another officer emerged from the flat, his eyes streaming. Vomit speckled his lips and chin. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, Jesus. Don’t go in there.”

  The shooting had stopped. The hot stench of battle stung Rick’s nostrils, but it was a smell he was used to, and even enjoyed in a twisted way. “What is it?” he said, stepping forward, taking the initiative.

  The newcomer stared at him. His face was pale, bloodless, and his expression was one of utter despair. “I can’t even tell you… it’s a mess in there. A real fucking mess.” The man stumbled off, heading for the stairs. Rick wondered if he’d puke again when he saw Hutch’s body.

  Hutch. The last of the guys he’d met all those years ago in basic training. They’d served their first tour of Iraq together, helping each other through, and left the forces at roughly the same time, but for different reasons.

  How the hell was he going to break it to Hutch’s wife, Jenny? It would have to be him; he’d known the woman for years, and liked her a lot. The baby was due in a month. The baby Hutch had left the army to be near.

  Tensing his jaw, Rick moved into the doorway. No one else seemed willing to enter, and the superior officers were already inside. Without receiving further orders, Rick guessed that he was on his own. Maybe this was his chance to shine.

  Someone pushed him forward, eager for another rookie to be thrust into the mix. Rick allowed his forward momentum to carry him across the threshold, and he was immediately struck by the sight of bloodstains on the floor and walls. So much blood. As if the short entrance hallway had been decorated with it. Smears and stripes and spatters – a Jackson Pollack configuration leading right up the wall to the tobacco-yellowed Artex ceiling.

  The body of a man lay half in and half out of what he supposed must be the living room. He could only see the legs and buttocks. The upper half was inside the other room. The white slacks on the skinny legs were covered with blood. One shoe and its corresponding sock were missing (blown off in the fire-fight, or not put on in the first place?) The left buttock was a mess of raw meat where he’d taken a hit in the arse.

  Glancing across the felled victim, Rick saw that the television was playing in the darkened room. It was tuned to a news station, and a series of images showing mobs attacking police vehicles filled the screen. Words scrolled beneath the footage: LIVE FROM MILLENIUM SQUARE, LEEDS.

  The volume was turned down low and some sort of dance music was playing on a sound system he could not locate. He resisted the urge to step over the corpse to closer investigate the news report.

  Rick eased around the lower extremities of the corpse. He tried hard not to look, but when he drew level he was unable to keep his eyes from straying back into the room. Cheap wallpaper. Thrift shop furniture. Clothing scattered on the filthy wooden floor. The top half of the body had been almost severed at the hip. The man had taken several rounds before going down. A tiny bleb of creased intestine poked out from his side, just above the beltline. His dark shaven head was turned to one side, the cheek squashed against the laminated floor and one eye frozen open to stare into infinity.

  Keep going. Let it all wash over you like a river over pebbles.

  It was a mantra he’d heard during his final tour of Afghanistan, from
a mate who’d been heavily into martial arts. The mate was dead now, like the rest of them, but his voice hung around like so many others inside Rick’s head. Sometimes he thought those voices might never shut up; only fade into the background, a constant choral hum.

  The voices of the dead; the voices of the dead men he had called friends; the voices of the dead friends whose lives had been wasted while his had been saved.

  An open bedroom door further along and to the left offered him another glimpse of horror. Two members of his unit were kneeling beside the corpse of a young Asian man, this one with designer tram lines shaved into his close-cropped hair. Their victim was still twitching, gasping out his last breaths. The officers were silent, almost respectful, as they watched the man die. Blood on the floor; gasps in the air.

  Moving on, he approached the kitchen. That was when things got bad.

  “Nutman… that you, Nutman?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s Nutman, D.I. Harper, sir.” Rick stopped outside the room, the familiar aroma of recent death in his nostrils. He removed his helmet and placed it on a shelf by the door, next to a long-dead prayer plant in a grubby plastic pot.

  “Get in here, Nutman. You’re not going to believe this, but try to keep your dinner down, yeah?” A large bulky frame hovered in the doorway. Behind him, a light began to flicker.

  “Shit,” said another voice. “All we need.”

  Rick stepped forward, his hands clenching into fists. His stomach was calm but his heart was beating double-time. He was sweating under the heavy riot gear; the stab vest stuck to his T-shirt; the T-shirt adhered to his chest.

  The first thing Rick saw was D.I. Harper’s ashen face. The huge man was leaning against a kitchen work bench, his head down but turned towards Rick. His eyes were hollow, lifeless, and his mouth was a grim slit. “Fuckin’ animals,” he muttered, shaking that large head in disbelief.

  There was a severed head in the stainless steel kitchen sink. What looked like viscera sat in a lumpy mess on the draining board – looking closely, Rick thought he could make out a lung, a heart, lengths of looped intestine. He tried to look away but was unable to unlock his gaze from the nightmare. He stared at the head. Its eyes were gone, the sockets smooth and empty. There were teeth marks in one cheek – they couldn’t be anything else – and the nose was gone.