Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  He lifted the camera to his eye and did just that, grinning at the silly dead bastard. “Action!” he said, trying not to laugh.

  Alan pushed off his back leg, lurching towards Daryl. His hands were quick, and his jaws snapped at the air. Daryl jumped to the side and jogged around his attacker, entertained by the developing scenario.

  He continued this mad dance for a few minutes, but soon grew bored. Alan slashed at the air with his hands, moaned and made other decidedly inhuman sounds, and continued to fail at every attempt to capture Daryl.

  The dead man was teaching Daryl nothing; all he demonstrated was that once a human being was dead whatever intelligence he or she had possessed simply left the scene. These things were like idiot animals, absurd creatures existing only to feed. They had no reasoning, no sense of the world around them. They were simply eating machines.

  “God, you dead people are dumb. It’s all very disappointing.” He pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. There was no boom or recoil; either the gun was jammed or it had run out of ammunition. Daryl knew absolutely nothing about firearms, so made no attempt to examine the weapon. Instead he threw it to the ground, annoyed and impatient.

  “Fucking hell! You are bothersome, aren’t you, Alan?”

  He moved in close, dodging Alan’s clutching hands, and kicked the broken leg out from under the corpse. Alan fell to the ground, his red eyes wide and panicked. He clawed at the earth, grabbed at bushes and the bases of trees.

  Daryl looked around, and when his gaze fell upon a long stick with a pointed end, he smiled.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” he said, and moved in for the kill.

  He stabbed Alan through the right eye and twisted the branch as it went in, grinding it thorough the gristle and deep into the brain. Alan’s hands stopped clutching; his jaw dropped open; his eyes sunk into their sockets. The pointed end of the stick penetrated Alan’s skull, emerging out of the back to sink into the soil. Daryl leaned on it, pressing it down until he was bent over at the waist. Alan’s mouth snapped open and closed like the beak of a demented turtle.

  Daryl left the corpse and climbed onto the moped, lamenting the loss of the handgun. He had not had anywhere near enough fun with it. Perhaps he’d get lucky and come across another; next time he might even stumble across something bigger. If he’d been thinking straight back at the power station, he could have taken the rest of the guns. But it was too late now to regret the omission. He could never go back, only keep moving forward and into the third act of the motion picture of his life.

  He patted the bag, feeling the bulge of the camera through a side pocket.

  Then he started the moped and headed east, towards the coast. He had worked out by now that must be where Nutman was heading. It was a good idea: most other people seemed to be going in-country, trying for the woods and the open fields. The coast was a sensible option; it presented opportunities for crossing the ocean, if suitable passage could be found.

  He thought of Alan as he rode towards the rising sun. What a pathetic excuse for a being. Even the dead, it seemed, were useless. Daryl had briefly hoped for more – that they might exhibit more potential than the living. But that was not to be. Meat was meat and dead was dead boring.

  His story was the only interesting one left; all it lacked was an appreciative audience.

  He hit the road and kept an eye out for danger, expecting attackers from all sides. Empty cars littered the roads, bodies were scattered here and there, a lot of them partially eaten. Smears of red marked the blacktop.

  Daryl stopped at a petrol station and filled the moped’s tank to the brim. He also filled two plastic containers and strapped them to the side of the vehicle. This was one reason he should have upgraded to a bigger machine: the moped hardly held much fuel, and if he failed to keep an eye on the level he risked being stranded.

  He passed a family laid out neatly in the road – mother, father, son, daughter, their bellies opened and cleaned out, their faces gnawed off, their limbs stripped clean. It struck him as odd that their positioning was so tidy. Rather than sprawling like broken dolls, their corpses were set in a row, each facing the same way.

  Beyond the disturbing familial frieze, a small roadside house was in flames. Daryl stopped the moped to watch it burn, and he was perversely pleased to hear the windows shatter and pop from the intensity of the heat. The fire must not have been going for long.

  A naked woman ran out of the front door, her hair aflame. Her hands were raised above her kindling head, clutching at the heavens, and as she ran by him she did not even notice Daryl. She passed by so close that he could feel the heat of the flames and smell her burning hair. Her screams were thrilling, a polymorphous perversion.

  The woman made it a few hundred yards along the road before she went down, thrashing at the asphalt with her fists. Eventually she grew still. Then, after something like five minutes, she calmly stood up and kept walking in the same direction, hair smouldering, the skin of her neck and back blackened from the flames.

  The time between life and death was but a fraction, a sliver; a journey so brief that it was barely consequential. Daryl wondered if she had remained sentient as she had passed between states, or if the transformation had been like a switch first flicking off and then turning on again, but with something missing.

  “What are you?” he whispered, awed by the sight. He watched the woman as she padded into the distance, vanishing over the brow of a hill. The molten flesh on her shoulders had looked like a shawl.

  Was she still alive in some way or truly dead? What powered these corpses when they returned? He refused to believe in the fairytale of the soul, but could think of no alternative theory.

  Mind. Body. Soul. Surely they were all the same thing; and the living brain was a filter for the body’s interaction with the world in which it existed. The human machine, as Daryl had come to understand it, was a combination of all these elements, and they were merely a function of the body reacting in and to the world.

  But what did that theory mean when you applied it to the walking dead?

  “What are we?”

  Nothing answered. So he rode on, perplexed by his own inadequacies and his inability to understand the subtleties of this damned entertaining apocalypse.

  DARYL JOURNEYED THROUGH a landscape that Mother might have referred to as Hell: small villages and towns either taken over completely by the dead or populated by only a handful of survivors, the rest having fled to the imagined safety of the countryside. He passed wan faces at boarded windows, peering out through narrow gaps and pleading for aid.

  If this were a movie, he thought these images might be part of some lengthy slow-motion montage. Classical music playing on the soundtrack. The dead plodding through empty streets, looking up as he motored by, reaching out for him...

  He saw the occasional police or army vehicle, usually parked at the kerb or pulled up on the verge. None of the officials he caught sight of looked sane; each of them had a look in their eyes that was a glimpse of madness. He passed through unmolested. The atrocities being committed – people dragged out of burning houses, the dead used as target practice, women and children raped on the front lawns of country houses – were enough to keep these bastions of a dying civilisation busy for now.

  Daryl knew that if he ever stopped at one of these places he would become a victim, just like all those others he saw kneeling before uniformed madmen, screaming at the sky, or staring blankly at the moped as he roared through the epicentre of their agony.

  Often he raised the camera to one eye as he rode, logging countless images of bloodshed: a pack of dead men and women bringing down and tearing apart a small boy; two men in uniform raping a teenage girl while a uniformed woman leaned across the bonnet of a police car smoking a joint; a dead schoolgirl, still dressed in her pleated skirt and blazer, walking along the footpath holding onto a severed head by its hair.

  None of this stirred him; it did not move him at all. Daryl remain
ed intrigued yet distant. It was all background to his story, secondary characters crossing the scene. He was the focus.

  Then, after what seemed like years of travel, he began to near the coast. Seagulls flew overhead, the salty air stung his nostrils, the horizon flattened out and turned a shade of grey which held a sullen dash of blue.

  Figures moved in the fields to his left and right, their ragged silhouettes giving away nothing about their state. Alive or dead, it didn’t really matter, not to Daryl. He had begun to realise that everyone was dead; it was simply a question of how far along the process each individual was. A line from an old song crossed his mind: born to die. Yes, that was exactly the truth of the human condition.

  Humanity was a dead species, a race born into instant obsolescence. Only those who stepped to one side and abandoned the herd were ever truly alive. Men like the killers Daryl had once idolised and now only looked upon with a form of pity, as even they had not completely realised the essence of what it is to live, to be alive, to exist.

  Daryl was the first of a new breed. Once he had killed Sally Nutman for the second time, he could accept his crown and rule as king of the dead. His entire life had been but a preamble to that moment, every step along the way bringing him closer to what he had always been meant to do.

  The sun glimmered behind a sheet of grey. The flat fields stretched into forever. Daryl roared ahead into a world he was busy recreating with every mile he travelled, every piece of black road that unfurled before him.

  It was a world of infinite possibilities.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  RICK NO LONGER felt like himself. It was a strange sensation, but not an unpleasant one. People spent small fortunes on drugs, alcohol and new age religions to achieve the same thing. All it had cost him was the world.

  He’d driven all day, across and up, always parallel with the sea, keeping a few miles away from the coast as they headed in a north-easterly direction, towards Northumberland.

  Rohmer’s directions, given during the memorable boat trip along the canal, had proven sound. Rick had kept away from the larger towns and cities, hugging the jagged coastline as they skirted places he’d never before heard of, and soon began to notice road signs for Sea Houses, the place Rohmer had told him to head for.

  A lot of the small towns and villages they passed through were deserted. Burning buildings, broken windows, abandoned dreams. Relics of a now dead age littered the streets and footpaths: images like snapshots; of a child’s bike, a school blackboard, scrawled with obscenities, a burned and blackened sofa, a row of stuffed toys lined up outside a house with shattered windows.

  The dead roamed in the ashes of this dying way of life, feeding off scraps and hunting down stragglers. Rick had not stopped to help anyone; his focus remained on the road ahead, and the promise of a perhaps fictitious sanctuary.

  Now it was dark again, and Rick was exhausted. He had not slept well last night. After the failed seduction, he had lain awake staring at the ceiling, listening to Sally’s subtle movements in the dark. He had not dared sleep next to her and had instead lain on the floor beside the sofa. She was always within touching distance; he had reached out several times in the dark just to feel her cold skin against the back of his hand.

  Rick couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He was surviving on a combination of whisky and adrenalin.

  Not long now, he thought. Then I can finally rest.

  He was surprised at how easy it was to continue the myth, to keep believing that Rohmer’s island was the answer to everything. He supposed that when the alternatives are unthinkable, any scrap of faith is worth clinging to. He had never believed it in the past, but now he was certain that faith was the only thing that could save whatever was left of humanity.

  He prodded the camp fire with a stick, turning the embers and sparking fresh flames. It was a smaller version of the blaze he’d started back at the cottage, the one which had served as Rohmer’s funeral pyre. He was sure the old man would have appreciated it.

  The camp was in the middle of a small grassed roundabout. Rick had lain out blankets and built the fire. He was more comfortable out here in the open as it would allow him to see anyone who wandered by, both the living and the dead. After the cottage and what had happened there, he wasn’t quite ready to be crowded in, blocked on all sides. Open air was better, it felt freer, less restrictive.

  Tabby sat at his side, unmoving, and stared at a point beyond the fire. She had said nothing since her grandfather’s death; nor had she moved very much, apart from when Rick had coerced her into some kind of action. She was limp and unresponsive: it was a classic symptom of shock fatigue. Rick had seen this all before, out in the field, but still it unnerved him.

  They weren’t very different right now, his dead wife and his surrogate daughter. Neither of them spoke, and each had their own strange hunger.

  The sky was black and starless, with thin clouds hovering overhead. The transition between day and night had been almost seamless. The only significant alteration was that the shadows had become longer before vanishing, and the moon was a segment of the pale circle the sun had been.

  We’ll be fine when we get there.

  Rick smiled. “I know we will. It will all be different then.”

  They’ll cure me. We can start again.

  They. It was always They. Whenever things went wrong, or when people needed someone to blame, they called out to the mythical They: They put a hole in the ozone layer; They started the War on Terror; They put the chemicals in our food; They destroyed the environment; They brought the dead back to kill us.

  “We did it,” he whispered, once more stoking the fire. “We fucking did it all.”

  He looked up at the sky, peering into the blackness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a plane, or a police helicopter. Back on the road he’d passed various groups of refugees, both large and small, and none of them seemed to have any idea what the powers-that-be were doing to solve things. For all anyone knew, there were no powers left; the government were all dead and roaming around Westminster looking for people to devour. Just as they’d done all along, but in a less literal manner.

  Among the people he had seen on the road, one or two of them had even mentioned the island. He hadn’t stopped to talk to anyone for long, but had felt compelled to pass a few words with the occasional stranger, if only to pretend he still had a link to the remains of a crumbling society.

  One man had spoken of a small island in the Outer Hebrides.

  An old woman had told him of a land mass located off the coast of Ireland.

  Two children – a boy and a girl – had passed on the story of a supposed sanctuary on the Isle of Dogs, in London.

  It was like the old game, Chinese Whispers, where the truth was mauled in the passing of information. Each time the tale was told, it was altered: parts were added or taken away, even changed completely to fit the world view of the teller.

  The island was an urban legend, a story that might be told forever, by dirty survivors huddled around dwindling campfires; a modern myth sent down the generations to comfort those as yet unborn. Santa Claus. Jesus Christ. Rohmer’s Island.

  Rick smiled, and the expression felt funny, like it didn’t belong. He was no longer used to smiling...

  “I know she’s dead.”

  Rick twitched in shock when the girl spoke. It had been so long since he’d heard her voice that he had almost forgotten what it sounded like.

  “What do you mean, love?” He was afraid to turn and look at her in case it made her lapse back into silence, so he stared ahead at the flames, making mental pictures in their midst.

  “Your wife. She’s dead. I’ve known all along.”

  Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them again his vision was blurred, as if he was crying... but there were no more tears left in his body. “Why didn’t you say?”

  “Because I liked you. We liked you, Granddad and me. We both knew that she was dea
d, but we just let you get on with it. We had no right to judge you.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” His amazement was not directed at what the girl had said, but at the tears now rolling down his cheeks. It seemed that there were some left after all, and they had arrived in abundance.

  “I’m sorry.” Only now did he turn to face her.

  The side of her face was bathed in firelight; her eyes were wide, expressive, but he could not decipher what secrets they held. “It’s okay.”

  “No it isn’t. I should never have lied to you. Not to you...”

  But she said no more, and it was dark and it was cold and the heavens were empty of everything but the suggestion of a deeper darkness, an empty void that even now was curling around the edges of the sky, threatening to swallow it all.

  She’s lovely. Our daughter. The one we can never have. I’m glad I haven’t been able to get to her. To eat her.

  Rick felt like screaming, but he bit down on his tongue, keeping it all inside. The darkness he’d been aware of only moments before hovered, poised on the brink of complete destruction, and then slowly receded, going away for now, yet more than capable of returning at any time. His illusion was so fragile; none of this was ever meant to last.

  He stood and crossed the roundabout, the M16 in his hand. The roundabout was located at the top of a rise, which was why he’d chosen it. An elevated position was always easier to defend: you could see whoever was approaching a long time before they announced themselves, and taking the high ground was difficult when it was already occupied.

  He thought again of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Old friends screamed inside his head, their long-dead voices struggling to be heard amid the uproar. No words made it through, it was just so much mental white noise.

  “I’m going to secure the perimeter.” He marched across the road and into the trees, heading towards the open land beyond. Sounds were muted; the air was thick and pregnant with expectation. Rick’s senses became attuned and he heard the struggling of night creatures through the landscape: their constant endeavours for survival never ceased, despite the state of the humans who thought that they ruled over the earth.