Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  Sally was moving. Her legs twitched, the soles of her feet drumming on the deck, and she was writhing against her bonds. The bandages had unravelled and he could now see most of her butchered features. As he watched, she somehow managed to get one hand free. She began to claw at her face, pulling away the bandages, and then tugged at the wadded remains of the cotton wool he had forced back into her throat.

  She was awake.

  And she was hungry. Oh so very hungry.

  He moved over to where she flailed on the deck and grabbed a long rope. He lassoed her, and then carefully wrapped the rope around her body, working it like the coils of a spring and lashing her arms to her sides.

  Sally seemed to realise, dimly, what he was doing, and she began to fight against him. But it was too late: she could barely move her arms. The bandages had fallen off completely, and lay at her feet like party favours. Her face was puckered, unrecognisable, and the deep cuts opened and closed, sending him gruesome air kisses. Her mouth, now bereft of teeth, gaped like that of a landed fish. The gums were raw, and they snapped together like a beak.

  Once he was satisfied that she was properly restrained, Rick tugged the rope and encouraged her to walk ashore. She stumbled, her co-ordination long gone, and he had to be patient as she limped after him. It would make a comical sight, he thought, if anyone were to see: a man walking his dead wife like an oversized and disobedient dog.

  He tied the rope to a sturdy rock and went back for Tabby, lifting her gently and carrying her off the craft. She stirred, her eyes flickering open. “Granddad...” Her eyes held a panicked look, and it took the girl a few moments to get her bearings and recognise Rick. She said nothing more, but at least she was awake and partially focused.

  Rick set her down on the ground and grabbed his bag and the rifle from the boat. When he returned ashore, Tabby had moved away from Sally, who was walking in small circles around the rock to which he had tethered her like an unruly beast.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say, or how to say it.

  It’s okay. We’ll be home soon. A new home, where we can be happy. The three of us.

  He had finally emerged from the grand illusion that Sally was communicating with him, and realised (or admitted) now that he was putting the words in her torn and twisted mouth. But just because the words were his, and he was making her say what he wanted to hear, didn’t mean that they were untrue.

  If Sally was in fact capable of speech she would be saying all this, and all he was doing was providing her with a voice.

  “Are you okay to walk? It’s bit of a hike.” He stared at Tabby, thinking for a second that she might answer. The girl said nothing, but she did glance up at the craggy rocks they were about to climb.

  Rick untied the end of the rope from the boulder and took the lead, heading up. “Stay close to me, but I’ll go up first. If there’s any trouble, I want to be the one to tackle it.” He held the Glock in one hand and the loose end of the rope in the other. Tabby followed in silence, her feet firm on the uneven rock.

  A group of small boats had been dumped behind a large granite shelf, their hulls punctured. Whoever had been staying on this island had not intended to leave. Now he knew what had happened to the other boat, the one they’d passed earlier.

  He peered over his shoulder at Tabby. The girl was doing okay, keeping up the pace.

  If he and Sally had at any point been blessed with a daughter, he would have wished that she were exactly like this girl. Tough, resilient, and filled with so much love that she almost glowed.

  It was a steep climb but not a long one. Rick managed it without letting go of the pistol or the rope, but Tabby often had to bend over and drag herself along with her hands, grabbing onto small, dry shrubs and spiky boulders.

  Along the way Rick saw several instances of a shape carved into the rock. It was clearly not a natural occurrence; the carvings where too regular, too deliberate. Soon he recognised it as the Egyptian ankh; the symbol of eternal life.

  He smiled at the irony.

  At the top of the crag sat two small prefabricated sheds, one on the edge and the other set slightly back. A hillock linked the two structures, which signified to Rick that there was some sort of underground compound beneath the sheds. It reminded him of the places they’d used during army training: temporary barracks hastily assembled in far-flung locations. For more than one reason, the end of this journey felt increasingly like he was coming home.

  A few signs were attached the sides of the sheds, and there were yet more ankh symbols embossed onto the external walls. One of the signs read Hummingbird Inc. Another was a hazard warning announcement detailing what looked like a list of emergency procedures, but it was so weather-beaten that Rick could hardly make out any of the text. Words like ‘danger’ and the phrase ‘ultimate precautions’ stood out, but the rest was a faded blur across a disfigured grey board.

  The doors of both of the sheds stood open. The far one was charred, as if a fire had been set inside. There was no smoke, no heat, so Rick assumed that the blaze had gone out days ago. The closer shed, the one he now stood beside, showed no signs of destruction, but there was a lot of litter in the entrance. Boxes and cans of food, various torn textbooks, broken medical equipment and computer terminals... someone had really gone to town here and smashed the place up.

  Rick at first thought that a dead body was lying half concealed inside the shed. It had no head. The body was badly mutilated, as if it had been flattened somehow; the hands and feet were missing. Rick could not even tell if it were a man or a woman: a body, just another body.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the murk inside the shed, he realised that the body was in fact a pile of clothing – a uniform of sorts, consisting of a rumpled grey boiler suit. Other clothing was piled next to it, overflowing from several receptacles and spilling onto the wooden floor. He could now see that the breast pocket had been torn from each suit, as if someone had removed the name tag of these missing workers.

  “Wherever we go, we see death. We can’t escape it. It’s everywhere, in every little thing, at every junction. I can even taste death.”

  At the sound of her voice, Rick turned towards Tabby, but her face was once again blank, as if she had not uttered a word. Was he simply imagining that she was speaking now, just as he’d been doing all along with Sally?

  Madness was now a comfort, a warm bed, a perfect home. He never wanted to be sane again.

  The wind was wonderful up here; a sharp, cool phantom that coiled around his head, clearing his mind of the clutter it had accumulated over the past few days – the past few years, if he was honest. He imagined that wind entering his ears, nose, mouth, and cutting through the matter of his brain, scouring his soul.

  “Come on,” he said, squeezing the Glock. “We have to get to the end of this, if only for your grandfather’s sake.”

  Then he stepped across the threshold and moved inside the shed, and was swallowed by an unearthly darkness.

  “Welcome to Sanctuary,” said a voice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE CELL WAS six by ten paces; Daryl had walked it repeatedly to measure the dimensions of the room. The man who had brought him here seemed reasonable enough, but there was the whiff of madness and neglect about him. He wore a dirty grey boiler suit with the name ‘Tim’ etched onto the breast and his beard was long and straggly.

  Tim had been waiting for Daryl at the top of the bleak rock finger he had climbed, sitting on the stubbly grass and drinking water from a plastic bottle. He’d guided Daryl into the shed and then down into the low tunnels beneath, saying little. Daryl had followed because he could not think what else to do.

  They had eventually come out into a wide passage with a series of doors on either side. Each of the doors had windows set into them at head height, but Tim had artfully diverted Daryl’s attention so that he could not look inside.

  He’d been brought to this cell to ‘wash and brush up’ in the
tiny bathroom, and Tim had quietly disappeared, mumbling something about preparing some food.

  Daryl realised immediately that this was some kind of military or government compound, but it was all so basic that it felt like a forgotten relic from the Cold War. With its low ceilings, steel doors, stone walls and floors, there was very little that was even remotely high-tech about the whole set up, and Daryl was even more confused as to what Nutman actually wanted here.

  He walked to the door and tried the handle. The fact that it was unlocked startled him; he’d expected to be locked inside like a criminal.

  He opened the door.

  The corridor outside was cold and bare, and curved away at each end so that he could not see where it led. He went back into the room and picked up the digital camera from the bed. The red warning light was flashing to inform him that the battery was just about flat. He felt sad that the movie was almost over… but perhaps there would be a sequel.

  He returned to the door, examined the corridor through the camera lens, and picked a direction at random. Left: the way of all things evil.

  The rock platform upon which the compound was seated was tall and narrow, so Daryl estimated that the corridor must curve around in a circle, possibly forming a perimeter to the central rooms. He guessed that Tim had brought him right through the middle, and then led him part of the way around the outer ring.

  Soon enough he came to the junction with another corridor, this one straight and lined with grey doors. It was the tunnel he’d walked down earlier. Now he would get his chance to see what was inside those rooms.

  He heard the sound of water dripping, the groaning of hidden pipes, and the fractured wheezing of a cheap air conditioning unit. Behind all these were voices; soft, flat, monotonous, they seemed to be chanting. Was this, in fact, the home of some kind of religious cult, hermetic monks hiding out from the end of the world?

  “Shit,” he muttered. “That old man. He must have been like Mother, clinging to some stupid religion.”

  Cool air buzzed through poorly installed vents, the sound like a chorus of whispers.

  The chanting remained constant, the volume neither increasing nor decreasing; it was eerie, particularly in this banal setting. If he closed his eyes, Daryl could imagine that he was deep within the catacombs of some Italian church vault and not crawling around inside a hollowed out, bird-shit-covered rock.

  He came to the first door.

  Slowly he approached it, reaching out to touch it with the palm of one hand. The steel was cold, impersonal, a barricade meant to keep something in as well as deny prying eyes. He had to stand on tiptoe to see through the glass; the weirdoes who made their home here must all be taller than him. Everyone was taller than him, it had always bothered him.

  The glass was grubby but he was able to see into the room. It was sparsely furnished with a bank of old fashioned computers, the free-standing kind like those in early James Bond films. They looked ridiculous: ceiling-height towers of flashing lights and tape decks, with tickertape print-outs piled in wire-mesh baskets on the floor.

  Against the far wall there was a gurney, and on it was a painfully thin, naked woman. She lay flat on her back. There was a sheet draped across her lower torso, but her bony upper body was bare. The low temperature had made her nipples hard; gooseflesh striated her pale skin. Daryl gaped at the woman, unsure what to think of the scene. There were wires taped to her temples and between her breasts; they trailed back to the absurd computers, where they were connected to black plastic terminals.

  Daryl moved on without trying the door. He did not like the look of the woman, and was damned if he wanted to be on the other side of the door if she woke up.

  The next door was more promising. Through the small glass window he viewed more modern equipment: desks and chairs, laptop computers, flat screen monitors, slim-line terminals. The walls were covered with computer printouts – graphs and bar charts; 3D graphic models and photographs – and religious iconography. There were wooden crucifixes, paintings of the Madonna and child, even a Day-Glo Jesus standing on a crowded bookshelf, arms held aloft to welcome the righteous.

  Daryl pushed open the door.

  He liked unlocked doors; they were welcoming.

  The room was very cold; the air conditioning was obviously set at a level to cool the computer apparatus. He walked around, examining the posters and pictures and cheesy religious artefacts. Mother’s room had contained similar items, and over the years he had grown to loathe them. His vision shimmered, blurring, so he raised the camera and took it all in through the lens. That was better: things were clearer when viewed as a sequence of isolated images.

  A central desk was flanked by two main filing cabinets, and on the shelves were hundreds of box files marked with dates. From the files he examined, the contents went back to the mid nineteen-sixties, and those were just the ones left out in the open.

  He picked a file at random. It was dated a few years before.

  Opening the file, Daryl saw that it was filled with reports and memos. They outlined some kind of medical tests, pertaining to a major breakthrough. Something called ‘The Ankh Derivative’ was referenced throughout. From what he could make out, the experiments involved some kind of toxic plant from the Amazon, something discovered in the late ’50s by a German anthropologist named Hoffman. The plant had been synthesised and a drug produced.

  He went through more files. One of them outlined US army test subjects in Vietnam: they had been given the drug and went on a killing spree, mutilating the bodies of VC collaborators in a small village called Tai-Mah.

  There was a memo from an American government official, which essentially presented the plan for covering up the massacre.

  Daryl put down the file and picked up another. Here he read about a political uprising in Italy. 1976. Bodies from a morgue in central Rome that got up and walked, attacking the general public, causing a minor riot. Another major cover-up was orchestrated, blaming the Cosa Nostra for everything.

  There were too many to count. The governments of the world had been hiding this information for decades, conducting their immoral tests and burning the evidence of their failures.

  Daryl was impressed by the ruthlessness of what had been going on.

  “It all started so well.”

  Daryl spun around, dropping the file on the floor, where it clattered like a gunshot. Another man – not Tim, but someone equally as spaced-out – stood in the open doorway. His face was etched with black cruciform tattoos; holy wounds that ironically contorted his features into something devilish.

  “We meant well at the start… at the beginning of all this.

  “Hoffman’s plant was first used by a lost tribe to make their enemies into zombis: not the type you see in films, but shuffling, somnambulistic echoes of people who were used as slaves.

  “When we first brought the plant into the civilised world, it was meant to be used to synthesise a new drug, an anaesthetic inherent in its sap. It took patients so far under during surgery that they were almost dead. They became very cooperative, and open to suggestion. Life signs were minimal. The heart rate dropped alarmingly. By the end of the ’60s the drug was almost ready – we called it ‘The Ankh Derivative’ because it represented a step towards extended life. If we could put people that far under, then who knew what medical miracles could be performed…”

  The man’s eyes were blazing above his inked cheeks.

  Daryl backed up, his hands scrabbling across the desk at his side. He fingered a staple gun, pens, pencils, a pencil sharpener, Post-it notes.

  A letter opener.

  “Like all things that start off being about the greater good, it was hijacked by those seeking power. There was an accident... a mistake. A team working with the plant somehow managed to extract a further toxin from the root. This one was much more powerful. They were all deeply religious, this team, and they worked in an atmosphere more like a cathedral than a lab. They brought in members of the clergy
at gunpoint and had enforced prayer breaks, they read their bibles... and something happened. It was like a synthesis of science and the supernatural, and what they created was a fusion of the two ideals. All kinds of holy relics were ground down to powder and synthesised – the finger bones of Saints and martyrs, a supposed drop of Christ’s blood from a church shrine in Bruges, even what was meant to be a cutting from the Turin Shroud. It was crazy.”

  Daryl clutched the sharp little blade, wrapping his fingers around the cold shaft.

  The man lowered his head. “They blurred the limits between life and death and tore a hole into the eternal. What leaked out of that hole then combined with the Ankh Derivative to produce something – well, something terrible.”

  Daryl took a step forward. He noticed then that the man was weeping: a holy fool shedding tears for what he had done – what they had all done.

  “I’m sorry. We’ve brought many people here and used them. Used them as guinea pigs, test subjects to help us go further; deeper, darker. Then we used them as meat for the ones we keep in the corral. The dead ones we examine, chart, and vivisect, trying to find some kind of meaning in their condition.”

  Just as Daryl raised the blade, the man looked up. His eyes were beatific, as if he had seen the face of something wonderful; the face of God or the Devil or something between the two.

  “Why are you telling me this?” said Daryl, ready to strike the man down.

  “Because there’s nobody else to tell. We’re finished here. A joke. A handful of broken men looking to God for an answer… but we don’t even know what the question is.” He paused, catching his breath before the big finish.

  “Two weeks ago the transformed and mutated Ankh Derivative was released into the atmosphere. I thought it was another accident, but it wasn’t. There are no accidents. They did it on purpose, as part of some larger, top secret test. Once it was let out, there was no turning back.” He fell to his knees and exposed his throat. “There can never be a way back, not now. This is just the beginning, the curtain raiser: what follows it through will be so much worse. ”