Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  The thought disturbed him, yet he was overwhelmed by the fondness he felt towards these people after such a relatively short amount of time in their company. He had allowed himself to grow close to the man and the girl, and keeping them alive came second in importance only to the safety of Sally.

  He dropped to his knees when he reached the upper landing, keeping the rifle at the ready. He wished he’d swapped it for the pistol in such a confined space, but it was too late now to regret thoughtless decisions. The secret of success was to work with what you had, to focus on the moment and nothing more.

  The thumping sound continued.

  Thud... thud... thud...

  It was coming from behind the closed door that lay directly at the top of the stairs.

  Rick peered along the landing in both directions, noting that all the other doors were also closed. If anyone was hiding up there, he would be signalled of their intention to attack by the opening of a door. It might just give him enough time to gain the upper hand: the difference between life and death, survival and extinction, often hung on such minor details.

  Thud... thud... thud...

  He shuffled forward in a low crouch, keeping his head down below the level of a stray gunshot. The rug shifted beneath him, inching across varnished boards, but he had faith enough in his sense of balance to overcome the matter.

  When he reached the door he stood and quickly slipped to one side, taking a deep breath. He waited. Listened. The timbre of the sound had not altered, nor had its rhythm changed in any way. Either whoever was making the sound was locked into some Zen-like state, or it was simply the sound of a loose pipe knocking against the wall or a faulty window latch shifting in the breeze.

  Thud... thud... thud...

  Rick moved smoothly and quickly. He faced the door and kicked it open, ready to fire.

  The room beyond was small – more of a storeroom than a bed chamber – and sparsely furnished. There was a single bed pushed against the rear wall, a low cabinet piled with papers and magazines to his left, a narrow wardrobe to his right... and at the centre of the room the reanimated body of a young boy hung from his neck by a noose.

  Thud... thud... thud...

  It was the sound of one of the body’s feet clattering against the back of the wooden chair which he had clearly used to climb up to the noose. He must have kicked the chair away as he stepped off it, his body plummeting, and the chair had fallen not quite far enough away from the body to leave the floor beneath clear. Then he’d come back and found himself still hanging there.

  So as he swung in place, clawing at his throat and trying to escape the noose, his foot came into regular contact with the chair back.

  Thud... thud... thud...

  Rick’s vision blurred, and only when he blinked to clear it did he realise that he was crying. He adjusted his aim and fired a single round, taking one side of the boy’s head off and sending part of the skull spinning across the room. It came to rest like a little bowl near the wardrobe.

  The thumping sound came no more and Rick had never been happier to hear the end of something. He knew that he would hear that sound in his dreams, probably for the rest of his life. It would sound behind the voices he carried within him, a low-tempo backbeat to their unending screams.

  “Rick?” Tabby’s voice drifted up the stairs, soft and tentative, yet with an edge he could not identify. Was it terror? He realised that so far he’d not seen the girl truly afraid. It was as if she had the utmost faith in her grandfather, and now in Rick. As long as they were by her side, she would never be completely afraid.

  But now she sounded lost and alone in the dark, just like everyone else.

  “I’m coming.” He ran down the stairs, making sure that the door to the small bedroom was closed firmly behind him. “What is it?”

  Her face was wet; fine red veins stood out in her eyes, a tracery of pain. “It’s Granddad.”

  “Where is he? I told him to stay outside with you and keep watch.” Rick moved to the door, the hot barrel of the M16 nosing before him, sniffing out danger. The front door was closed.

  “There were sounds... something was moving out there. He pushed me inside and said that he’d get them away from here.”

  “Where’s Sally?”

  The girl shook her head, her eyes growing even wider. “With Granddad. She sort of stumbled off... and he followed her. He told me to come and get you.”

  The old fool. He was planning to take on the dead in numbers in order to keep them away from his granddaughter... and from Rick.

  “Stay with me. Don’t leave my side.” He grabbed the girl roughly by the shoulder and opened the door. “I don’t know if it’s safe in here, so we need to stay together.”

  Tabby nodded just as the gunshots began.

  Rick headed for the back of the cottage, the girl keeping pace. He could hear her breathing, sense her panic as it rose within her tiny frame, but she moved with the speed and grace of a gazelle. He wanted to cry; he refused to let the tears come but they came anyway, washing down his cheeks like warm rain.

  “Where’s Sally?” Panic was rising in him, too. It made his limbs shudder and his resolve harden. Like always, he used a typically negative reaction in his favour, drawing strength from it and using it as raw fuel.

  I’m here, darling. Don’t worry.

  Sally was wandering around in the open, a few yards away from a low barn. She looked like a lost sheep, turning in slow circles, unable to locate herself and pick a direction. The morphine must still be working.

  “Stupid old man! I told him to stay put. I told him...”

  When he reached Sally he gently guided her away from the barn and sat her down on a tuft of grass at the base of a slight rise. He kept one eye on the open barn doorway, and both ears open for anything that might signify trouble. Rohmer must be in there: it was the only logical place he could have gone. Perhaps he’d chased one of his runners in there, and that was the source of the gunshots.

  “Rohmer! I’m coming, mate. Just keep cool!”

  Sally flopped onto her back, the morphine still doing its job and dulling her senses. Her hunger.

  I’m okay. I just went for a little walk. Tired now...

  Rick stroked her bandaged head, feeling the rough contours of whatever was left of her face. The wrappings were grubby, but he had not been able to bring himself to remove them again, not yet. Maybe later, when all this was over and done with and they could rest for a while.

  Standing, he walked straight towards the barn, not even pausing on his way through the doorway. Whatever was in there, it was going down.

  Tabby was behind him, her view blocked by his body, so thankfully she did not see what had happened to the old man.

  Rick turned, angling his torso so that she would not catch sight of what now lay behind him, almost unseen in the dim interior. “Go and stand outside. I need you to do this – you have to do what I say. Stand over there and look the other way. Keep an eye on Sally and scream like fuck if you see anything.”

  Tabby’s eyes widened... then she knew; she was not a stupid girl, and she knew immediately that something had gone badly wrong. She pressed her lips together, being a brave little girl, and Rick’s heart tensed as she took a few steps away from the barn’s entrance.

  Rick made sure that she was still in plain sight yet unable to see deep inside the barn. Then he turned his attention back to Rohmer, poor, poor Rohmer.

  The old man was on his back and holding his throat. Blood had sprayed the front of his jacket and even now continued to seep out of the ruptured artery in his neck. His eyes were almost fully closed, but he nodded once, signalling his approval at Rick’s actions regarding the girl.

  Two bodies lay nearby, each of them sporting gunshot wounds to the head. A woman in a long skirt and a short coat was missing the front of her face; a man was sprawled face down, most of the back of his head splayed outward in a white flower of bone.

  The pistol was still in Rohmer’s
hand. He lifted it and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked onto an empty chamber. His eyes were wide and tearful. If a man could apologise without words, then this was it.

  Rohmer closed his eyes and removed his hand from the side of his throat. Blood gushed at an alarming rate, there was so much of it that it looked black in the dimness.

  “Oh, fuck.” Rick shot Rohmer in the face and turned quickly away. He did not want to see this man die. He could not bring himself to witness what he had been forced to do. As he stepped outside he heard the distant groaning of a small engine – perhaps a little motorcycle hammering away in the distance. He went to Tabby, fell to his knees, and held her. Her grip was slack at first, but soon she clung to him with a force and an immediacy that was terrifying in its intensity. Rick waited for her sobs, but they did not come, and when finally he pulled away her face was vacant, her eyes staring into the middle distance.

  It was a look he’d seen before in the desert: the face of pure clinical shock.

  When he turned back to look at Sally, the place where she had been was empty. His gaze returned to the barn doors, and what lay beyond.

  Rick stood and walked back inside the barn, gun loose at his side.

  She must have crawled in there on all fours, like an animal, perhaps smelling Rohmer’s blood through the bandages. She was kneeling before him, both hands on his leg, and attempting to take a bite out of his thigh. Because of the double layer of bindings, and the fact that her mouth and throat had been stuffed with cotton wool, she was unable to do much else than scrape her mouth against his trousers. Rick could see her jaw muscles working; the motion beneath the bandages was strong and deliberate, despite the fact that her body was still floppy because of the drugs.

  Even doped up to high heaven, his wife was trying to eat.

  Rick walked towards her, grabbed her by the neck, and dragged her away. There were no tears now, nor was there any room for rage. He felt numb, empty, bereft of human feelings. Even the love he felt towards Sally was mutated, a shapeless thing twisting away into an inner darkness.

  Tabby had not moved, so he grabbed her with his other hand and guided both his girls back to the cottage, his face slack, eyes seeing nothing but what was directly ahead of him. He felt like he was crossing some imaginary border and entering a place where few men had ever been: a blasted zone where the dead walked and he loved a hungry corpse with all the compassion that remained in his withered heart.

  Back at the cottage he barricaded them in. Sally was on the sofa, dosed up with yet more morphine; Tabby stood in a corner, refusing to sit, just staring at the wall.

  Thank you, darling. That feels good... safe.

  He tried to ignore Sally’s voice, but was unable to shut it out. Each time she spoke in his head, he felt that dark love pulsing like a cancer.

  He checked every inch of the house and proved to himself there were no other bodies present. He cut down the boy and disposed of him in a ditch out the back, where he found the tattered remains of three more cadavers. There was not enough left of these to get up and walk, but he stamped on their skulls anyway, reducing them to flattened pulp. As little as a few hours ago his actions might still have disgusted him, but now he saw these remains only as meat.

  He surmised that the boy’s parents must have died and come back for their son, and that they had perhaps fed on a couple of passing strangers – maybe people hiking to safety, or a wounded man and wife who had stopped by for help. The boy had probably hidden from his dead parents, and taken the only way out he could think of when he realised that no one was coming to his aid and his mother and father wanted to devour him.

  Rick admired the boy’s single-mindedness. It took a lot of courage to leave behind all that you loved, however much they had changed.

  What a fucking mess. And not just this situation: the whole world was a calamity, an ongoing mindfuck.

  He found a bottle of wine in a kitchen cupboard, then some medical supplies in another. There were plenty of bandages.

  It took him quite some time to coerce Tabby up the stairs and into the bed in the main bedroom. She was stiff and unresponsive; her eyes remained open but she was asleep on her feet. He left her clothes on and covered her with fresh blankets from a drawer. He stroked her forehead and sang to her – not a real song, just a strange tune that occurred to him, possibly a jingle from some advert he’d seen back when the world was still in one piece.

  Once he was sure that she was finally resting, he left the room and went back downstairs.

  He positioned Sally at the dining table, propping her up in a high-backed chair. Then, acting out of impulse, he loosely tied her legs and arms to the chair. Her head rolled on her neck and she was making tiny grunting noises.

  Hungry.

  Rick closed his eyes, resisting the urge to answer.

  He cut off the bandages with a pair of medical scissors he had found in the kitchen, being careful not to cause any more damage to Sally’s face. The cellophane-wrapped wounds were completely bloodless by now. Because her heart was no longer pumping, any blood remaining in her system would probably have pooled in the lower cavities, congealing there and forming bruises on the dead flesh of her back, abdomen and upper legs.

  He averted his gaze as he applied the fresh dressings, preferring not to examine too closely what her features had become. He was reminded of the aftermath of atrocities he’d seen during his tours of duty in war-torn trouble spots: the shredded corpses of bomb blast victims; dry dead flaps of skin; slashes of yellowing bone.

  As he was working, the neck of Sally’s top slipped sideways and down, baring the upper part of one still-perfect breast. He wasn’t disturbed to find that he had an erection, merely surprised that he still had the energy to be aroused.

  “There, there... soon be safe. Once we get to Rohmer’s island everything will be different.” He no longer even believed it; for all he knew, the island itself was little more than an urban myth, a hopeful dream concocted by a desperate old man to calm his terrified daughter and provide meaning in the madness the world had become.

  I know, baby. I trust you. Always have, always will.

  He finished up with the dressings and emptied the wine bottle. Standing, he crossed the room and grabbed another from a shelf just inside the kitchen doorway. He downed half this second bottle in a single mouthful, and only when he closed his eyes did he feel the buzz of the alcohol.

  Not too much, baby. You never could stomach a lot of red wine.

  It was dark now, so he secured the shutters and closed the curtains across the small cottage windows. Nothing moved outside; even the air was calm and still.

  He inspected the bookcase along one wall, finding mostly text books, and then stumbled upon a record collection. No CDs here: just an array of old vinyl albums. It felt like fate when the third one he slid off the shelf was a double-album collection of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits... and, yes, Solitary Man was on there. Side one, track four.

  Perfect. What could be better on a night like this? The kid’s in bed and we have the whole night ahead of us...

  Rick felt the magnet-pull of attraction, and with it came a strange guilt. This was his wife, the woman he loved, yet she was also another woman, someone with which he was having some twisted kind of affair. Was it even possible to be unfaithful to the dead?

  He’d noticed some candles in a kitchen drawer – the kind he thought might be called tea lights. He fetched them and brought them into the main living room, then dotted them around the vicinity, lighting each one with matches from a box he found in the same drawer.

  On one level he knew exactly what he was doing, but on another he watched the whole thing play out like a stage performance, a sad, melancholy drama.

  Romantic light caressed Sally’s white-masked features, soft shadows creating new dips and hollows across the clean padded surface of her face. It was like seeing another woman – or seeing Sally for the first time, stripped of all artifice and illusion. She had become
the meat behind the mask, the reality beneath the torn veil.

  He approached the table and poured her some wine. She was still tied into the chair, and he decided to leave her that way. Back in the day, they’d both enjoyed a little light S&M as foreplay.

  “Merlot... it’s your favourite.” He smiled, touched her cold arm. There was nothing inside him but a screaming wind, and at the heart of the storm rested a kernel of desire.

  Thank you, baby. You always knew how to take care of me.

  He put on the record, and the sound of Neil Diamond’s husky voice sent shivers across the exposed flesh of his arms and neck, making the small hairs there stand up to attention in the same way as his dick now stood proud.

  Our song.

  “It always will be. No matter what happens, we’ll always have that night... and I’ll never stop loving you. I love you more every second of each day we’re together. I know things are different now, and you’re a different person...” the wind within howled and then dipped, leaving behind a void “...a different... being. But still I love you.”

  I love you more.

  He sensed her smile beneath the bandages, even imagined that he saw the faint twitch of movement at the lower part of her face.

  Slowly, he moved towards her, the world dimming and the edges of the room fading to a soft-focus blur. He felt exactly like he had on that first night, when they’d entered the bar and danced like no one else was there. He and Sally became the focal point of the universe, the pivot on which the heavens tilted.

  “I never stopped loving you and I never will. Nothing can separate us... nothing. Not even this.”

  His hand gently traced the line of her shoulder, feeling the still ice of her skin. The flesh rippled, slipped, folded... lacking its former elasticity, it remained that way, curled up like crepe paper. It was new and interesting; he thought he might even like it.