Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  The drinker sat alone, twitching, still muttering darkly.

  Daryl wasn’t sure how long these people had been here, but it seemed that the beer was yet to run out. There were still plenty of bar snacks on hand – crisps, pork scratchings, salted peanuts – and the water supply had not yet been cut off. If they were careful, this lot might just be able to ride out the worst of it in here, rationing their supplies and going out on reconnaissance missions like the one Claire had been running when he encountered her. If they were organised, and did not make any silly mistakes, they were onto a good thing here.

  He inspected the bar, taking note of the solid oak doors, the old-fashioned leaded windows, most of them with wire mesh security barriers attached to the outside, set a few inches back from the glass. Yes, he could see the appeal of staying here... but it was not for him. The old Daryl would have been happy to cower in the shadows, finding protection in numbers and allowing himself to be one of the sheep. But the new Daryl... oh, he was a lone wolf, a man on a mission. The new Daryl would hear nothing of crouching in the darkness, waiting for the storm to pass. The new Daryl was the storm – at least part of it, a significant element within the overall terror.

  Daryl eased himself from beneath the thin blankets Claire had provided and slowly picked his way across the room. He was not quite sure why, but he felt drawn to the solitary drinker at the bar. The man had a presence about him; he stood out from the crowd, and not just because of his actions (or lack of them). He possessed the air of a minor celebrity now gone to seed, someone who might once have been important but was now just another nobody in a grimy parade of nobodies.

  Daryl slid sideways onto a worn barstool beside the man, watching him as his head dipped forward once again, and then jerked abruptly upwards. “I think you might have had enough.” He reached out to take the glass from the man’s hand.

  “Fuck off,” said the man, surprisingly lucid for his apparent state. “I’ll have had enough when all this shit goes away.” He made an expansive gesture with his free hand, and then gulped at the glass, emptying it completely, before pouring himself another. It looked like whisky, but the label was peeled off the bottle, so Daryl could not be sure. The result of idle hands; a nervous drinking habit, like the way some people tore up beer mats.

  “Sorry. I thought you were about to black out.” He kept his voice low, unwilling to disturb anyone else in the large room, but the acoustics made the words seem louder than they actually were.

  “That’s what I’m aiming for: total fucking oblivion. Unfortunately, the void is yet to swallow me up.”

  Daryl examined the man properly for the first time. He had shoulder-length brown hair, which had turned greasy. His dark eyes were intelligent yet dulled by alcohol. His narrow face was shadowed by stubble and there was a faint air of nobility to his features. The dark shirt he wore was stained with dried blood and one of the sleeves was torn. Visible on the wedding finger of his drinking hand was a pale, untanned band of skin.

  “Cheers,” said the man, sipping slower this time, savouring the drink.

  “What you said earlier. About Claire. What did you mean by that?” Daryl felt at once defensive, slightly on edge, but could not understand why. She was nothing to him, this girl, just something to cling to for a while. Yet still, he felt the need to stick up for her, to protect her honour – if indeed she had any, which seemed doubtful.

  The man smiled. His teeth were coated brown; his tongue resembled a slug coiling in the wet cave of his mouth. “She was a regular here, came in all the time. In the few years I’ve been coming here, I must’ve seen her dance with every man in the place.” He raised his eyebrows: fat slow-worms wriggling across his brow.

  “Dancing?” Daryl felt dumb, as if he were a child struggling to decipher the codes and ambiguities of an adult’s conversation.

  “Come on, you know what I mean. The dance. The horizontal mambo. She fucked them all, sometimes more than one at a time.” He swayed on his seat but managed to correct his balance by grabbing the edge of the bar. The ends of his fingers were yellowed with nicotine, but Daryl had not yet seen him smoke. “She’s nothing but a filthy whore.”

  “She fucked everyone,” said Daryl. “But she didn’t fuck you.” Finally, understanding dawned upon him. He had cut to the quick of the man’s hurt. He smiled, pleased at gaining the upper hand. “You sad old bastard. You’ve been letching after her forever, just wishing she would look your way, give you more than a drunken smile. But she never did. She took on all comers… apart from you.” He laughed softly, enjoying the man’s silent rage and the way he was now asserting his will upon the sorry old sop.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said the man, his voice dropping. “I did have her once. Just once.”

  He stared at Daryl, his red-rimmed eyes moist.

  “Outside in the alley, up against the wall. She kept calling me by another name, but I didn’t care. Not while I was inside her.” He paused, regaled by the power of the memory. Then his face took on a pained expression, as if the recollection was not in fact everything that he had wished. “She called me all kinds of names, before, during and afterwards. But she never called me by the right name. The one that would hurt the most.” He winced, clutched at his side with a beefy hand. “She never called me Daddy.”

  Daryl at first thought he’d misheard the man, but there could be no mistake. He stood up and backed away, terrible memories of his own threatening to burst through the mental dam he had spent so many years constructing. Mother’s bare thigh, the feel of her hands on the bones of his hips, the slow journey her tongue had made over his face, down across his chest and lower, lower, until she had him right where she wanted…

  “No!” he lashed out and grabbed the bottle with the peeled label, striking instinctively. The bottle caught the man on the backswing, making contact with the side of his head and knocking him sideways off the stool. The sound it made was almost surreally loud.

  The man hit the floor heavily, a sack of meat; as if there was already no life left in his body.

  Then Daryl was upon him, gloved hands going for his soft, exposed throat, fingers closing around the frail trachea and crushing it as easily as he might bend a plastic pipe, feeling little resistance to his grip.

  “Not again. Never again, Mother!” He squeezed as tightly as he could, a sense of power surging through him. Mother’s face overlaid that of the man, her mouth open, a thin white trail of fluid snaking from between her lips to stain her chin. Blood flowed from the wounded temple, pouring onto the grubby boards. The man made an odd croaking sound; it seemed to go on forever.

  At last the man’s hands came up in weak defence, but it was much too late to matter. They batted lamely at Daryl’s forearms, bouncing off like small birds flying into a brick wall. His face was already swelling, the skin turning a bright shade of crimson, and his blue-black tongue pushed between his ugly teeth to loll horribly across his lower lip, like a sodden flap of untreated leather.

  Hands grabbed at him, clutching his shoulders and tugging uselessly; pointless voices screamed in his ears. But Daryl would not, could not release the man until he was dead. It really was that simple.

  Finally, the body beneath him went limp, and the stench of fresh shit drifted into his nostrils. The yelling continued around him, and when he blinked his eyes and turned around everyone had taken a single, almost choreographed, step back, as if put off by the terrible faecal odour.

  “It wasn’t me,” said Daryl, needlessly. “He crapped himself. They sometimes do that as they die.” Again he felt on the verge of hysteria, as if crazed laughter was building up inside him and demanding release. He was giving these people data from the books he had read, offering up snippets of information like an eager student.

  “What have you done? He wasn’t doing anything.” The old woman from earlier had once again assumed the role of mouthpiece for the small band of survivors. “He was just drunk. Not causing any harm.” She made the sign of
the cross, her eyes flashing wide. “You’re evil. A devil. No better than those things outside.”

  Feet shuffled on the boards. Someone shoved Daryl back onto his knees.

  Sighing theatrically, Daryl righted himself and got slowly to his feet, well aware that these people were frightened of him. The reality of the situation flared before him, bright lights at the frayed edges of his vision. This was the power he had always felt that he deserved, the awe to which he was surely entitled.

  “Oh, I’m a lot worse than them.” He chuckled, adding to the effect, bringing yet another dimension to the character he was still in the process of creating.

  “Please.” Claire approached him. “Leave him alone,” she said to the onlookers, her hands held out before her, palms open. “I know why he did this. He did it for me.” She eased to Daryl’s side, one arm snaking around his waist and the other held outwards as if she were stopping traffic. “That rotten bastard had it coming.”

  This turn of events confused Daryl even more. He would never get the hang of human emotions. Every time he felt that he’d made up some ground, grasped something of vital importance, the rug was deftly pulled from under him by someone acting completely the opposite to the way he’d come to expect. It was fascinating, really; a profound learning process.

  He stared at Claire, saw something cold and terrible flick like a snake’s tail behind her eyes, and was suddenly drawn to it.

  “Get out,” said a man Daryl could not identify in the gloom. “Get out now.”

  “Leave,” said the old woman, moving sideways and setting off a chain reaction so that the others followed suit and an opening appeared in the small, agitated group. “Make your own way. You’re more suited to this world than us.”

  “Go.”

  “Get out!”

  “Fuck off!”

  The chorus was raised; they sung their little hearts out. Even those not part of this immediate group joined in, shouting from their cosy hidey-holes.

  Claire gripped Daryl’s leather-clad hand as he began to walk towards the main door, trudging like an ancient warrior leaving the battlefield. He paused so that Claire could grab her things, and then turned to face his audience. “Don’t think you’ve seen the last of us,” he said, making it up as he went along. “It’s a small world and it’s about to get even smaller.” Then, with Claire at his side, he concluded his dramatic exit, silently congratulating himself on improvising such a good last line.

  A short man with muscular arms unlocked the main door, and the two of them strode out of the building, arm in arm, like a nice modern young couple.

  The street was empty, but that state of affairs might not last for long. Daryl went to the alley where he’d hidden the moped when they’d arrived, kick-started the machine, and waited for Claire to hop on behind him.

  He thought that he might keep her for a while; at least until she got boring. He’d originally intended to either leave her in the morning or kill her when he got the chance, but her strong performance in the pub had changed his mind. There was more to this girl than met the eye, and the more she appealed to him the more her resemblance to Sally Nutman grew.

  Every star needs a leading lady, even if she is the understudy.

  Then, feeling like he’d just given a triumphant performance, Daryl resumed his epic journey to nowhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE QUEEN ANNE moved at a sedate pace, but sitting on its cramped deck Rick felt safer than he had for some time. He’d moved Sally down into the rear cabin, out of sight of the shore, but could still hear her occasional soothing communications.

  I love you.

  We’ll be safe.

  He hoped that she was right about the latter, and that it wasn’t just wishful thinking – dead wishful thinking.

  Can you still hear me, lover?

  Hear? Was that the right term to describe how he picked up her thoughts? He didn’t really hear her voice, just caught an echo of it in his mind, like a series of vibrations on the surface of his brain. Yet as their journey continued, that voice became increasingly real – more solid and meaningful than anything else going on around him.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  Rohmer’s question pulled him out of himself, dragging him back into the immediacy of their situation. “Sorry?”

  “God,” said the old man, still facing forward, his eyes on the water. “Are you a believer?”

  Tabby was in the main front galley, trying to find a broadcast on the portable television or the old transistor radio Rohmer kept onboard, so the two men were alone up there on deck. The sound of the diesel engine was now a gentle rumble, and the sound of the water lapping at the sides of the vessel was strangely soothing. Rick had never been on a canal barge until now, but he could certainly see the appeal. There was a strange beauty here, a sense of being apart from the crowd.

  “I never used to believe in God,” he said, flexing his hand, trying to relax his fingers where they were stiff from clutching the gun for so long. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “I’ve been a believer for ten years, since my Anne died.” Rohmer still stared ahead. The darkness before them was lifting, making way for faint glimmers of early daylight. “Faith helped me through some dark times after her death. It got me off alcohol and made me start to engage with people again.”

  There was a pause then, during which both men simply listened to the throbbing of the engine and watched the black and undulating surface of the canal.

  “It’s like this whole thing has changed me in ways I never thought possible,” said Rick, glancing at the wooden floor and imagining Sally down there on a bunk, her bandaged head resting on a soft white cushion. “My wife and I drifted apart, but this thing brought us together. It’s made me realise that my entire worldview was naïve. I’ve come to appreciate that there must be something else to the world than what we can see and feel.”

  Rohmer grunted and nodded his head. His ponytail swung like a pendulum.

  Rick continued: “When I was in the army I saw a lot of men die. Some of them were my friends and the others were enemies that I killed.”

  The lapping of the water against the boat. The soft fuzz of pre-dawn light spreading like a film across the canal.

  “The first man I shot was a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan. I was in the Parachute Regiment, third battalion. It was during Operation Mountain Thrust, July 2006. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The Yanks were leading us into the hills to oust Taliban insurgents. We were ambushed. Snipers pinned us down. Eventually we got the upper hand, and I shot a man in the head. I cradled him in my arms as he died, and as I watched him something went out of his eyes – a light dimming, going out. Call it what you will: his soul, his life-force, his essence. I just call it his presence in the world. Once it had gone, there was nothing left of him. Just meat.”

  Rohmer turned around then, and there were tears in his eyes. “What about these things? The dead. Are they just motorised meat, or is there something – that presence you mention – trapped inside them? Are they more like walking ghosts, with a sliver of their soul stuck inside their bodies, or is it a case of the soul being partially reactivated like a damaged computer hard drive?”

  Rick glanced behind and over to his left, out over the water. Two people stood on the canal bank, waving and shouting as they jogged along the towpath, but they were too far away to hear. He raised his hand; shards of brightness were visible through the gaps between his fingers, but when he let the hand fall the light had all but vanished.

  “There has to be something human left inside them, powering them.” Rohmer’s attention was focused elsewhere. He did not even notice the couple on the bank. “I mean, they look like us, move like us, were once exactly like us. Just because they’re dead it doesn’t mean they’re monsters.

  The couple continued to wave, their movements frantic. They were running now, clearly in distress, trying to catch up with the barge.

  “Why are th
ere no dead animals running around attacking us?” said Rohmer. “It’s only humans who are coming back. That must mean something”

  Rick stared at the couple. The woman was still waving, but the man was now bent over and rummaging inside a bag. Was she trying to summon help? Did she want them to guide the barge ashore so that they could come aboard? There wasn’t enough room on the boat for passengers, and Rick wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of exposing Sally to the scrutiny of yet more strangers.

  “I think God is responsible. Perhaps he’s had enough of what we’ve become – violent, warlike, empty of everything but the hunger to accrue and amass more and more money and useless items. Maybe He wants to punish us, make us pay for forgetting about Him.”

  The man on the canal bank stood upright and brought up his arms in a rigid yet amateurish shooting posture. Before Rick could move, the man had opened fire.

  “Get down!” he yelled. “Shooter! Get down in the boat!”

  But the sound of gunfire was distant and the handgun was too small a calibre for the bullets to reach them. Rick peered up from behind the faded wooden rail that ran around the craft, then when he was certain that he was in no danger, he raised his head into the open. The woman looked like she might be weeping; the man kept firing the empty gun, long after the ammunition was used up.

  Rohmer resumed his station at the wheel. The couple retreated into the tree line, moving away from the canal and out of sight. The man had his arms around the woman, comforting her.

  The barge kept moving, sticking to its own steady pace. Tabby popped up her head from below deck and asked if anyone else was hungry. Both men shook their heads, and she went back down into the galley to prepare herself something to sustain her until the next meal time.

  Dawn broke slowly, as if the day were reluctant to emerge. Once again the sun was weak and the clouds were heavy. It grew colder as the light bled across the land and the water. Rick thought it might try again to snow, and the thought depressed him more than he could express.