Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  Sirens wailed far off in the night, either approaching or moving away at speed – it was impossible to tell. As she watched, a fire started in the east of the city, its wan glow reflected in the cloudless sky, shimmering against the heavens like a misdirected spotlight. Shouts and blunt screams were carried to her on the light breeze, as if they’d been waiting for her to act as an audience to their grim proclamations.

  Sally checked the window and shut the curtains. Then she went round the entire flat, ensuring that all the door and window locks were secure, wishing that there were sturdy shutters instead of thin curtains across the window glass.

  When she was finished she sat on the floor in the middle of the living room. The TV was showing a pre-recorded interview with some MP she’d never heard of, and he was talking about riots across the city, lootings, rapes and murders. Sally had the telephone clasped between her knees. Intermittently, she checked it for a signal, but all she got was a dead line. She tried to ignore the sounds coming from outside, knowing that on the seventh floor she was too far up for any passing psycho to bother with, and the main doors to the apartment block were time-locked anyway.

  The night stretched ahead of her, unfurling like a ribbon quilted with myriad atrocities. She wished that Rick was here, at her side, and wept because she could not reach out to him for comfort. Her old fears returned, mutated into something much worse: demons that leered from the corners of the room. She wondered, briefly, if she would ever see her husband again, and then hated herself for such a display of weakness. Rick would expect her to be strong, to hold things together until he got back.

  And he would get back to her – of this single fact she was absolutely certain.

  That was the last thought she had before the lights in the flat flickered a final time and then went out for good.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RICK STOOD IN silence and surveyed the damage. There were bodies everywhere – the gunned down remains of the people who’d been in the Dead Rooms (that was what everyone was now calling this place) and several of his fellow officers. It wasn’t good. In fact, it was appalling. A deep, heavy silence had drifted in to replace the chaos of screams and gunshots; that silence was all wrong, as if he’d gone deaf after being caught in a bomb blast. Then, bit by bit, it was punctuated by the occasional stifled sob.

  A grown man was crying. More than one, actually, but he couldn’t see who or how many. Smoke hung in small drifting clouds, dissipating gradually. Voices became clearer; other tenants were being herded either back into their own domiciles or down the stairs into the parking area outside the block. Rick was clutching his gun so tightly that his fingers had begun to ache. It felt like he might be unable to break the grip when the time came to put the weapon down.

  “Sally,” he whispered, unsure why. Her name held an almost mythical resonance, a calming influence. He said it again: “Sally.”

  “You men,” said D.I. Harper, his eyes still glazed, his face too pale beneath the dark riot helmet. He’d unbuttoned his stab vest, probably to help him breathe, to allow him to fill his lungs with the putrid air. “Start getting this place cleared up.”

  The remaining on-site Constables moved efficiently considering the circumstances, checking bodies, searching the Dead Rooms, pulling plastic bags filled with drugs, body parts and all kinds of street weapons from various drawers and cupboards. Rick watched a young, fresh-faced lad heft a bread bag containing at least a hundred grams of cocaine from under the living room sofa. The body Rick had seen earlier – the first one he’d encountered, not the somehow reanimated madman – was still wedged in the doorway, its ruined buttocks standing proud.

  Rick looked away. Blinked. The dead woman in the hallway – the one he’d shot through the eye – was being moved by two other officers who’d come in from outside. Their faces were grim; they worked in silence. Taking a leg each, they hauled her out through the front door and then disappeared into the haze of smoke.

  It was such a mess, the whole damn situation. Even D.I. Harper, a seasoned veteran of countless operations, looked haggard and ineffectual. All they could do was mop up the mess. The inquest would come later, when everyone was out of there and out of trouble. For now, the main objective was to control the situation, to resist any attempt by civilians to encroach on the crime scene, and to effectively calm everyone down.

  He glanced back into the living room, wondering what the fresh-faced Constable was doing now. Had he found something else in there?

  The dead man was no longer in the doorway.

  Somehow he’d managed to pull himself to his feet and stagger across the floor, where he was now closing in on the otherwise occupied officer.

  Rick tried to remember where his gun was – in his hand? Yes, that was it. He raised the Glock, took aim, and shot the dead man in the back of the head, near the base of his skull. The air turned red. The dead man faltered, then froze. Finally, he dropped heavily, his face slamming bluntly into the floor.

  The fresh-faced Constable turned around, shock twisting his face into a weird white mask. “Thanks,” he mouthed silently, unable to drag real words from his stunned mind.

  The silence had lifted. Sound rushed back into Rick’s ears, filling his head.

  D.I. Harper had obviously regained some of his composure, but he still sounded like a bad impression of himself as he barked orders in the other rooms. “Come on, let’s get this sorted. Fire and ambulance crews are on their way – we need to minimise any shock value here, troops.”

  Rick was still staring at the Constable. The young man calmly lifted his hand and placed the barrel of his pistol between his teeth. He smiled around the dull metal, his eyes looking far beyond the scene, perhaps seeing some other landscape where he felt more at home: a land of the living and not the walking dead.

  Rick turned his back on the officer just before the sound of detonation tore the air apart.

  Things got a lot worse from that point on.

  Out in the hallway a dead police officer was rising from the floor. It was the one who’d been attacked by the Afro-Caribbean woman what seemed like hours ago but in reality had only been about thirty minutes before.

  The dead officer moved in twitchy slow motion, like something from an old German vampire film Rick had once seen on TV – was it Nosferatau? He thought it might be, but he always got these things mixed up. Sally would know; she always remembered information about books and films. The accuracy of her memory was one of her many strengths.

  Rick watched calmly as the dead man began to stand. His gun was ready; he had plenty of time to take a bead on the fucker and put him back down. So he watched with the casual interest of an impartial observer, not feeling part of the scene but nonetheless fascinated by what was happening.

  The dead officer jerked once, an oval chunk of flesh flying out of his shoulder and hitting the wall, where it stuck like a thrown turd. Rick had not even heard the gunshot. He raised his eyes, peering over the dead officer’s head, and saw Tennant standing there in the doorway, sweat on his broad face and killing in his eyes.

  Tennant stared back at Rick.

  Nodded.

  “The head,” Rick heard himself say. “I think you need to shoot them in the head. Just like in the movies.” Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Creeping Flesh. Rick had watched them all on video as a teenager, laughing and screaming in equal measures at the absurdly bloody onscreen spectacle. Not once had he ever entertained the thought that something similar might occur in real life. It was madness. The whole damn world had gone insane.

  This time he heard the gunshot.

  He closed his eyes and felt blood kiss his face, warm and wet and sticky. He heard the sound of a body slumping to the floor.

  “Thanks,” said Tennant, and when Rick opened his eyes again the other man was no longer there; the doorway was an empty frame with thin fingers of smoke billowing through it.

  More acrid smoke drifted in through the doorway; people yelled out on the landing. Someone had se
t another fire in one of the flats, perhaps in an attempt to confuse them. It was working: officers ran like headless chickens across his line of view, guns cocked and ready, fingers like coiled springs on the triggers.

  More gunshots. Someone screaming, their voice rising in pitch... going on and on and on, as if it might never end. It rung in his ears like the bells of hell.

  Smoke curled around his legs like oily grey serpents, and he backed away, as if recoiling from their touch.

  The Dead Rooms. He didn’t know who’d said it first – it might even have been Rick himself – but the name was perfect. These rooms, this building – they all contained the dead. The dead that refused to lie down.

  Then, a voice: “This way, man. Get the fuck out of there.” He stepped forward, towards the voice, and Tennant’s meaty arm shot out of the flat slab of smoke-filled doorway to grab him. Rick let himself be hauled out of the flat and onto the smoky landing. Figures barged past, pushing him aside; screams filled the air. The stench was unfathomable: a combination of burning tyres and cooking flesh.

  “There’s more!” Tennant was screaming into his ear, trying to make himself heard above the cacophonous roar that now filled the upper storeys of the building. “In the other flats... rooms filled with dead bodies. Some of ’em are rotting, others are fresh... but they’re all standing up and attacking people.”

  “What? Are you insane?” He felt his mouth moving, the shape of the words caressing his lips, but it didn’t feel like he was speaking. Rick once again felt detached, apart from it all. There was an inner core of calmness, a small, bright place he’d always retreated to during battle. His own private Dead Room.

  “The fuckers,” said Tennant, his eyes wide, almost popping out of his large bull-like head. “They’ve been hiding their dead relatives, keeping them holed up in more Dead Rooms. Keeping them safe and sound and away from prying eyes.” He began to laugh, but it was a hideous sound, even worse than the constant screaming Rick could still hear coming from somewhere off to their left.

  Another gunshot. The screaming stopped.

  Rick pulled away from Tennant and watched as the other man waded into the churning wall of smoke, aiming his gun at something Rick could not make out – just a bulky shape, crouching low to the ground. Tennant was still laughing; his massive shoulders were hitching and he even threw back his head like a bad actor in a shitty melodrama.

  Rick picked his way slowly along the landing, remaining calm, cool and collected. He glanced through each of the open doorways he passed, looking into other rooms – other Dead Rooms. In one, a young woman was wrestling with a small child. The child was covered in blood that clearly wasn’t his own. In another, a man he didn’t recognise but who was wearing riot gear sat on an old man’s chest, dipping his hands into his abdomen to scoop out what was inside.

  Rick made it across the landing without further incident. He had a sudden mental flash of when he had been about twelve years old, a bad time in his youth. His best friend had lived in a block of grotty council flats a lot like this one. The boy, Murray Smith, had been a budding artist. He drew pictures that made Rick believe in something beyond the grimy streets, the rotten neighbourhood, and the borderline poverty.

  Murray Smith had been killed by another local youth, a drug dealing maggot aged thirteen; his throat had been slashed with a broken bottle on a narrow stairway just like this one. Murray had died slowly, and in agony. Not one of the neighbours had come out to investigate the sounds of his dying.

  Rick failed to understand at first why he was recalling the awful memory. It was something he’d put behind him, a trauma he’d purposefully not thought of for years.

  When he saw Trevor Hutchinson’s body, he suddenly realised why Murray Smith had come lurching back into his mind.

  Hutch had fallen face down, onto his front, but now he sat leaning against the concrete wall, blood down the front of his stab vest. The left half of Hutch’s head was missing from the nose up. Rick could see Hutch’s pulped brain through the gap in his skull.

  “Oh, no,” he said, pointlessly. “Oh God, mate. No.”

  He’d served in the Paratroopers with this man, had even followed him out of the army and into the police. His friend; his comrade; his fucking blood brother.

  Hutch moved slowly, awkwardly, like a man suffering from severe brain damage. He was pulling at the rim of his wound with a twitching hand, stringy matter stretching like pizza cheese between the long, white fingers. His one good eye blinked mechanically. He reminded Rick of one of those Disney World animals, the robot bears and raccoons playing banjos and pianos during matinee performances. It was creepy – even creepier than those terrible severed hands in the bottom of the fridge – and for a moment Rick could think of nothing to do but watch.

  Then he knelt down by his friend. His dead-but-alive friend.

  No, not his friend... something else. Something unnatural.

  His friend had in fact vacated this shell.

  Reaching out with a tenderness that he felt was entirely appropriate to the moment, he slammed the dead man’s head into the wall, mashing what was left of Hutch’s brain. The body slipped down the wall, the limbs limp as spaghetti. Red pasta-sauce smears on the chipped plaster rendering. That single eye locked into a cold stare.

  Unlike the things on the floor above, Hutch had not returned fully from his early death; like some idiot inbred offspring, he’d been only partially there, a fragment of a being. Rick was aware enough of his actions to consider this second death a mercy killing.

  “Regroup! Retreat and regroup!” D.I. Harper’s voice boomed down the stairwell, echoing like the voice of an angry god. He was back in control now, getting things sorted, just like he was paid to do. “Down to the ground floor, and then we fucking regroup outside the main doors! Now! Move! Move! Move!”

  Rick did not need to hear the order again: he took the stairs two at a time. His boots thundered against the concrete but the sound they made was lost amid the deafening uproar of the approaching apocalypse.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THIS TIME DARYL knew he’d gone too far. He hadn’t meant to cause that much damage, but there was something in the air tonight that made him feel reckless. He stared down at Mother, at her blank face and spit-frothed mouth, and felt a strange blooming sensation in his chest. If he had possessed any kind of normal human emotions, he supposed he might have recognised the complex reactions he was experiencing, but as it stood he was simply puzzled.

  Mother’s feet looked terrible.

  Staring at the cigarette lighter in his hand, he wondered again how he’d managed to lose control so easily. Perhaps it was those earlier thoughts of Sally Nutman, or the fact that the city seemed to be exploding in waves of violence – the radio on Mother’s bureau was reporting yet more riots breaking out to the south and west of the city.

  Mother’s feet were weeping blood and some sort of clear fluid that might easily become infected if he left them untended.

  The voice on the radio said that police resources were at full stretch and the emergency services were unable to contain the outbreaks of civil unrest; that they were in danger of being overrun.

  Those feet… the wounds were terrible, blackened around the outside and moist and meaty at the centre.

  All other crimes, said the not-so-calm voice on the radio, were being left unattended. The violence and looting on the streets of Leeds were taking up all police time and effort. The fire service was struggling to cope with the blazes starting up across the skyline. The ambulance crews were at breaking point.

  Daryl turned away from Mother’s bed. He caught sight of fire in the sky outside; a pale yellow glimmer lightly painted the horizon. If he slowed his breathing and listened intently, he could just about make out the dull roar of an undisciplined crowd some miles away, like the sound of a football match being played at Elland Road Stadium.

  Mother’s room suddenly seemed so desperately small: the ugly patterned wallpaper pressed in on him
, the badly plastered ceiling bowed towards his head, the hideous brown carpet bulged as if the floorboards beneath were buckling. The bibles and religious pamphlets on the shelves twitched forward, threatening to fall, and the posters of Catholic saints slipped from the walls, tumbling through the air like fragments of all the Christ-dreams Mother had ever forced upon him.

  “Bitch,” he said, enjoying the way the word filled the small space. “You. Bitch.”

  The world was changing. Not just his world, with Mother gradually but stubbornly leaving it. No: the whole world – the real world. His inner existence changed a little every day; the closer Mother edged towards death, the nearer he got to his dream of killing. He lacked the courage to take that final step, but Mother’s eventual passing might see him transformed into another being, a man who could reach out and take what he wanted because the ties that bound him to banality were finally gone.

  On the window sill there was an old framed photograph. It showed Mother with the man she had always told Daryl was his father. The couple stood smiling on a narrow promenade at some northern seaside resort, maybe Whitby. He reached out and picked up the photo, caressing it. As a child, he’d never been allowed to touch Mother’s things – specifically her photographs – but when she started ailing, the first of his many tiny rebellions was to go through all of her stuff.