Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  “Cannibals,” said D.I. Harper, his voice thin and reedy, the exact opposite of his build. “Cannibals.” He began to repeat the word, not even aware that he was doing so. Two other officers stood against the wall. One of them was covering his mouth with his hand and staring down at his feet. His shoes were covered in vomit.

  The fridge door hung open, its hinges broken. The shelves were sparsely stocked: a few pieces of cling-filmed meat, half a pineapple, an opened can of baked beans. At the bottom, where the salad shelves should be, there was an open space occupied by several human hands.

  “Sir… this isn’t terrorism. What’s going on?” Rick felt like the floor was rushing up to meet him, but he composed himself by thinking of Hutch, his wife, their unborn baby. “What is this?”

  D.I. Harper straightened, his head almost touching the low ceiling. The dim light flickered again, lending his features an unearthly tint. “I don’t know, son. I really don’t know. We have four suspects dead inside this place, and every room contains what seem to be partially consumed human remains. We’ve either stumbled on a gang of serial killers here, or some sort of weird cult. I’ve never seen anything like it…” he finished lamely, shaking his head and rubbing his neck with a big square hand.

  Time stood still for Rick. He was trapped in someone else’s nightmare. The blood hardly bothered him now; there was so much of it that he stopped noticing it. What hit him hardest was not the wet pile of guts on the draining board, nor was it the head in the sink that almost broke him… no, it was those hands. Clean dainty human hands. Six of them: three pairs all lined up like crab claws in a neat row along the bottom of the fridge. What kind of insanity did it take to cut off those hands and then store them for later?

  What stopped him vomiting was the piercing sound of screams erupting suddenly from the other room. At first he thought it was a woman, but then remembered that their particular unit was famously made up of all male officers. The only woman in the vicinity was the fuzzy-haired maniac he’d seen earlier, but Tennant had silenced her.

  “What now?” D.I. Harper looked wasted, as if he could face no more of this night. The other two officers glanced at each other, then at Rick.

  “I’ll go,” he said, turning away and walking back along the hallway. After three or four steps he saw where the screaming was coming from. Another rookie – someone whose name he had not been told – was shuffling backwards towards him, his backside scraping the floor and his hands clutching at the skirting boards. He was moving fast for a man on his arse, mainly due to what was pursuing him.

  The designer-skinhead gunshot victim who’d been dying only moments earlier – the young man almost surely slain during the initial shoot-out – was slowly making his way along the hallway, lying on his belly and dragging himself forward with bloody hands, the bullet-addled lower half of his body spilling intestines onto the scuffed floor boards.

  There was no way on earth the man could be doing this. He was dead, gunned down. But here he was, moving clumsily, inch by inch, and gaining ground on the screaming rookie.

  “Shut up,” said Rick, reaching down to grab the guy’s shoulder. The rookie twitched, then managed to climb to his feet, using Rick’s legs and torso as leverage.

  The man – the dead man – moved relentlessly forward. His eyes were flat, dull, like old pennies, and his upturned face hung loose on his skull. He was grinding his teeth, just like Sally used to whenever she was nervous, before the dentist had fitted her with a bespoke gum shield to help her kick the habit.

  But the dead man had no gum shield – he barely had any teeth. Those remaining in his head were shattered and projected from his lips like snapped pieces of wood.

  “Shoot it!” Yelled the rookie. “For God’s sake, just shoot it!”

  Rick raised his pistol, aimed carefully, and put a shot in the dead man’s shoulder. The dead man jerked like he was pulled by strings, but kept on coming. Rick put another round in his opposite shoulder. That didn’t stop him either.

  “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God…” The man at his side chanted like a Buddhist monk, fading from the scene, turning in on himself.

  Rick aimed again, this time at the dead man’s back, right above the heart. He pulled the trigger, feeling the gun buck in his hands. A chunk of flesh flew out of the dead man, blood tracing an arc in the air. He did not stop. His hands reached out; they were inches from Rick’s boots. He shuffled backward, shoving the rookie out of the way. Then he aimed his Glock at the top of dead man’s carefully crafted haircut, right between two of his carefully shaved tramlines.

  Why doesn’t he die? Rick thought, his mind focused, nerves strung as tightly as guitar strings.

  The dead man looked up at him, nothing in his gaze.

  This time when Rick squeezed the trigger blood and thick clotted matter sprayed in an elegant parabola, turning the wall and floor behind the dead man dark red. The dead man raised his eyes, and then lifted himself almost to his feet before toppling forward onto his face. The top of his skull was level with Rick’s feet. He stared at the wound, at the grey-purple brains bulging out of the hole. They looked like those disgusting meat things Sally’s granny used to eat – what where they called, faggots? Yeah, that was it: braised faggots.

  The rookie started to cry. Rick turned just in time to see a dead woman emerge from the bedroom and grab the rookie’s arm. She was Afro-Caribbean, with big eyes and thick lips, but her skin was curiously pale. Her teeth were shockingly white when she opened her mouth and bit down on the rookie’s neck, scraping easily through the flesh to puncture his carotid artery. The spray of blood was majestic: a bright geyser. The rookie tried to slap her away but already his strength was failing; his arms flapped uselessly, his hands sliding off the dead woman’s face.

  Always a fast learner, Rick reacted instantly and shot her through the right eye. This time the blood misted, forming an ethereal pattern in the musty air – crimson dust motes caught in the meagre illumination. Rick watched it, enraptured by its slow-moving dance, the way the flickering kitchen light caught like rubies in its diaphanous mass.

  He stared at the Glock, hypnotised by the sluggish movement of smoke as it poured from the muzzle and traced a grey puzzle in the air directly ahead of him. Then he looked back at the woman, tilting his head to one side in an odd unconscious mannerism that, unbeknownst to him, he’d last done as an inquisitive child of seven. She was laying face-up on the ground, her eye socket enlarged and red matter hanging in strings from the damaged orbit. Blood pooled around her pasty features even as he watched, shining dully on the floor.

  He shot her again, just to make sure she stayed down, and the top of her head was vaporised in a bright shock of blood, brain and bone. Rick felt something in his head click, as if a switch had been thrown – he was not sure what it was, but it felt like some old, long-neglected mechanism was once more becoming operational.

  He thought of the desert. The screams. The friends he had lost. Somehow, the memories did not hurt even half as much as they had fifteen minutes before.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SALLY HAD THE feeling that something was terribly wrong.

  It wasn’t the sirens, or the fact that the electricity kept threatening to cut out for minutes at a time, or even the intermittent shouting she kept hearing somewhere out in the city streets as the lights inside flickered nervously. No, some internal barometer was telling her that Rick was in some kind of trouble. Ever since they’d first met, Sally had felt some inner tugging whenever he was in jeopardy. During Rick’s army days, she’d known about it when things got tough; when he was seriously injured during a Taliban attack in Afghanistan, she’d felt a terrible pain in her guts.

  The television was on but Sally was barely watching it. The show was sub prime-time filler: some kind of imported American talent contest between people whose only proximity to talent was by watching other performers on better TV shows. Sally wished that they’d all just demonstrate the good taste to take a r
unning jump through the fuck off door, but sadly that didn’t seem like it would happen any time soon.

  She grabbed the remote control and switched channels to an old film. Robert Mitchum. Gregory Peck. Good stuff, but she wasn’t quite in the mood for film noir. Sighing, she took a sip of wine, closing her eyes as the wonderfully cool liquid traced a pathway down her throat.

  She glanced around the small seventh floor flat, her gaze restless, moving from object to object like a butterfly in a garden. Despite all the familiar things around her, this place had never quite felt like home. A photograph on the mantle, showing Rick and several buddies just before the attack in Helmand Province. The odd-shaped stone he’d brought her back from the desert – a rock shaped like a heart. The framed pictures hanging on the walls. The books and ornaments on the shelves. None of this stuff actually meant anything if Rick wasn’t here with her, close enough to touch, to hold, to kiss...

  The wine was making her maudlin, and along with the noise coming from outside it was also putting her on edge. She drained the glass but did not refill it.

  When the telephone rang at first she thought it might be Rick, or worse still, someone calling on Rick’s behalf to tell her that he’d been hurt, perhaps shot during whatever operation he was involved in. She rushed to the table by the door and picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

  “Oh, thank God. I’ve been trying to get you for ages. The lines have been busy.”

  “Mum? What’s wrong, Mum?” Sally felt the tone of her own voice rise to match that of her mother’s.

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Just a bit… well, to be honest I’m a bit unnerved.” Her mother’s voice sounded strange, strained.

  “Tell me, Mum. What’s up?” Sally’s hand gripped the receiver, making her fingers ache.

  “There’s something going on. The lights keep flickering and going out; the TV won’t come back on. The radio is reporting riots in London and Luton.” Her mother was close to tears. Since Dad died, she’d been on her own and it didn’t suit her.

  “Calm down, Mum. I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “I know, I’m probably being silly. But I’m sure someone was outside earlier, creeping around in the back garden.”

  Sally suddenly pictured her mother’s house, located back from the road in a very quiet area just outside Bedford. The nearest main road was miles away; the surrounding countryside was beautiful during the day but at night could hide a hundred assailants. “Listen, Mum, please call the police and lock the doors and windows.”

  “I did all that ages ago.” Sally held her breath, suddenly afraid. “The police said they’d get here as soon as they could, but they’re busy on other calls.”

  “Call Derek, then. Right now. He’ll drive out to get you.” Derek was the nearest neighbour, another widower who had a soft spot for Sally’s mother that everyone but her could see.

  “You know I don’t like to be a bother… it’s late; he’s probably in bed.”

  “Call him, Mum. Promise me you will. You know he’ll be happy to drop by and sit with you until the police arrive. I’ll feel better if he does, too.”

  There was a lengthy silence, and then her mother reached a decision. “You’re right, darling. I will call Derek. He’ll know what to do. He always does.”

  Calmer now, Sally made her mother promise again that she would call her suitor, and then she reluctantly hung up. It was horrible being miles away from her family at times like these. On the rare occasions that her mother needed her, Sally was never close enough to do much about it. The best she could offer was a promise to visit the following weekend.

  During the phone call the TV had gone off. The lights began to flicker again, but more slowly, dipping the room into darkness for brief periods that seemed longer each time it happened. Sally felt her chest tighten. She knew, just knew, that one of these times the lights would go out for good. She picked up the phone again and called Rick’s mobile. As expected, a recorded voice told her that it was switched off.

  “It’s me. I’m scared. Mum just rang, and there’s something going on outside. Come home soon?” She pressed the button to end her message, then returned to her chair.

  Sally was used to fear. It was almost an old friend. When she had been younger, her life had been made a misery by local bullies – her weight and her unusual looks had led to her being called names like ‘Fat Cat’ and ‘Slit-eyed Slut.’ The name-calling had progressed to physical abuse, and she’d sported scrapes and bruises for most of her school years. As an adult, once she’d grown into her looks, things had changed and she became popular with the opposite sex. Those early days, however, left deep scars, and she found it difficult to form relationships, hard to trust anyone.

  Rick had been different. They’d clicked immediately. But he had come with his own fears, and his tours of duty with the army had brought terrors like none she’d ever experienced.

  She recalled vividly the call from a corporal to inform her that Rick had been shot in Helmand Province, in a region whose name she could not even pronounce. He’s alive, they’d told her, but more than that we cannot say. It was a week before she knew for certain that he would survive, and by then she’d been allowed to visit him in the military hospital.

  It all made her childhood fears seem so trite, so pathetic, but when she saw him lying in that hospital bed, his body thin and bandaged, it opened the old scars and made them into fresh wounds.

  Rick’s body had healed but his mind remained damaged, a flawed tool of his trade. There was the depression, of course – the constant night terrors and the way his eyes narrowed at the slightest sound outside – but worse than that was the fact that he could never settle. That was why he joined the police force – to focus all the nervous energy he gave off like a damaged battery. She also suspected that he missed the action.

  Headlights splashed the walls, turning the net curtains white. She glanced over, caught off guard, and listened intently to the sound of squealing breaks. Whatever the vehicle was, its driver had lost control. The brakes continued to scream and the sound was followed by a huge, rending crash of metal and a low, hollow explosion.

  Sally ran to the window and peered through the partially opened blinds. Two hundred yards along the street, by the glow of firelight, she saw that a car had crashed into the concrete bollards along the side of the canal. Black water flared with reflected fire; yellow flames clawed at the dark sky. Someone was crawling from the wreckage. It was a woman, and she was moving slowly, clumsily, as she dragged herself through the shattered rear window. Another figure was slumped behind the wheel, but it was too obscured by smoke for Sally to make out if it was male or female.

  The passenger squeezed out of the car and slumped heavily to the ground. She raised her head, staring at the night sky, and clutched at her cheeks, scraping them with her nails.

  Sally stepped back, just half a step, and shot a glance at the phone. She knew that she ought to ring the police, an ambulance, but something about this scene struck her as all wrong. She looked back at the woman, and then it registered. Instead of screaming in pain, the woman was simply sitting there, on the ground by the canal, tearing at her own face. It was a weirdly compelling sight, and one that was unnatural in so many ways. After such an accident, the woman should surely be as dead as her driver – but there she was, out of the car and mutilating herself.

  Sally held her breath, barely even realising that she was doing so.

  The woman, as if sensing Sally’s scrutiny, looked up and stared along the length of the canal, directly into the flat. Glimmers of firelight brightened her narrow face, and Sally could clearly see that the woman was smiling. But it was not a smile that held any trace of humour; instead, it was the slack-jawed idiot grin of someone whose mind was simply no longer operating as it should. An alien smile: a smile that should never be seen by human eyes.

  The woman then began to drag herself back towards the car. The flames were dying, burning themselves out. No fuel had ignited
, just the paint on the bodywork. Small bright tongues licked at the smoke-blackened wings and wheel rims, the tyres were thick molten rubber bands. The woman slumped round to the driver’s side, pulling her weight up by the door handle. Then, settling against the door, she reached in and pulled a fist-sized chunk of still smoking flesh from the side of the driver’s neck. Her hand went to her mouth; the cooked meat slipped between her lips, her reddened teeth. The woman began to chew, slowly and methodically, as if she were sampling nothing more exotic than a handful of foie gras.

  Sally wished that she could look away, but her eyes were glued to the scene. There was still enough of the guttering fire left alive to allow her to witness exactly what was going on, but she could barely believe it.

  “Oh my God,” she said, shocking herself by speaking out loud. “What the hell…?” She walked quickly to the phone, remembering Rick’s oft repeated advice about keeping your head in a crisis. When she picked up the receiver, the line was dead. Not even the dull hiss of white noise on the line.

  She fished her mobile out of her jeans pocket and pressed the button to, once again, call Rick – she had him on speed dial, in case of an emergency. If this wasn’t an emergency, then she didn’t know what possible situation might qualify for the title.

  Now she did hear white noise, followed by a series of clicks and fractured bleeping sounds. Then a recorded message told her in a smooth female voice that the number was unavailable. Either Rick’s mobile was still switched off or the networks were all busy.

  “Shit. Shit.” She crossed again to the window. The car was no longer alight; it was now a smoking shell. The body behind the wheel looked misshapen and… well, incomplete. Sally peered along the canal in both directions trying to catch sight of the woman, but could see no one lurking in the vicinity. That was unusual in itself, as the canal at night was usually a regular hangout for drug dealers and homosexual pick-ups. She and Rick often stood at the window to watch the show, using it as a substitute for bad TV. She’d lost count of exactly how many times they’d seen what were probably illicit trysts and illegal transactions. Like most big cities, Leeds was packed with what Rick for some reason always called the ‘Scum of the Hearth.’ He always found that funny, but Sally had never really understood what it meant. Nor had she ever felt like asking. Sometimes Rick could be almost wilfully obscure and in a way that scared her, and she preferred to ignore those occasional glimpses of a somehow complex darkness making itself known to her.