Hungry Hearts

by Gary McMahon

  He dragged her backwards, moving across the stone floor on his backside. The dead people were crowding the doorway, jamming themselves into the narrow gap. Luckily this meant that they were stuck fast, and could not make headway into the room. It was a slight delay, but all he really needed.

  He knew what he was going to do, and he required very little time to finalise things.

  His madness had come full circle and become instead a new form of sanity: for the first time in his life he saw things clearly, as they really were, and he was almost happy.

  “I hope you’re okay, Tabby. My daughter. I hope you got out alive.”

  He backed up against the far wall, expertly untying the rope from around Sally’s waist and midriff. He released her with ease, and then pushed away from her, taking a deep breath to prepare himself for what came next.

  The corpses in the doorway were struggling free, as if fighting against their own decay. Eventually one of them collapsed inside the room, his momentum carrying him over the threshold. He stood and stared, inspecting his new surroundings. A woman joined him, one arm missing, and half her face in crimson ruin. Together they began to advance upon Rick, smelling the meat of him, dancing the dead dance and eager to satiate their hunger.

  “Sally. I love you, and I have always loved you. I give you everything. I offer you my heart and my soul... and my flesh.”

  He tore off his stab vest and the shirt beneath, baring his heaving chest, exposing the wounded heart that beat beneath his aching ribs.

  “I give you my heart.”

  Sally struggled to her knees, suddenly keen and alert.

  The dead moved ever closer, groaning and hissing.

  Sally leaned in close, her jaw dropping, the tortured gums bared. Her dead breath chilled him, penetrating the muscle and going in deep, straight for the innards.

  “Eat me,” said Rick, closing his eyes and giving himself over to true love.

  “Eat. Me.”

  As long as she left enough of him to return afterward, they could still be together again, undead and happy and existing on this rugged island, hungry for all eternity.

  She fell upon him, her gums barely penetrating the flesh despite the strength of her jaws as they worked at his chest. He felt them nipping at his arm, his shoulder, his throat. He threw back his head to aid her, opened his arms in a wide embrace. Sally’s hands raked at the soft flesh of his throat, finally breaking the skin. She tore at the flesh, tugging the slit wider, pushing deeper, and then she hauled her arms down, ripping off his skin like a thin layer of clothing.

  Rick ignored the agony and felt the love... so much aching love.

  Surely it was meant to hurt this way; the blood-bright agony was the price you paid for feeling so deeply, loving so truly.

  He bled for her, for his darling wife, and thought that he could not imagine a more fitting end, a better way to die; and when at last she tore the fluttering heart from his shattered chest, he opened his eyes and stared into her lovely wreck of a face, watching her consume the very best part of him – the part which had belonged to her all along.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  DARK ECHOES RELEASE falling stopping hungry quiet rising faster light up bright white feelings gone hungry pain gone life none sound fury hungry room motion smell hungry meat husband rick

  rick?

  EPILOGUE

  THE YOUNG GIRL lay on her back in the wooden boat and looked up at the sky. It was pale blue, almost grey. Wispy white clouds hung motionless, strung across the faded expanse like fine cobwebs in an attic.

  Enormous faces seemed to form above that cosmic ceiling, peering down at her with vague interest. A group of birds wheeled overhead – seagulls foraging for carrion – but they remained at a height, afraid to fly any lower. Their cries were muted by the distance, the tiny screams of lost souls.

  The sun was weak and insubstantial; a light slowly going out in that huge attic, perhaps forever.

  The faces receded, disinterested for now in her lowly existence.

  The girl could not remember her name.

  She had no memory of how she had got here, in the little rowboat.

  Her arms and legs were aching and there were cuts on her knees and shins. The skin of her hands was lacerated. Fresh blood stained her clothing.

  She sat up and stared at the distant shoreline, blinking as she examined the lines of the dead who stood calmly looking out to sea, as if waiting for something. They stood in neat rows, stiff and unmoving; their white faces were a series of smudges atop their ragged shoulders. One or two of them raised their arms and pointed out to sea, towards her; others followed suit, setting off a chain reaction. Before she turned away, most of them were pointing at her, singling her out. For an instant the girl thought that she recognised one of them, but could not be certain.

  The girl’s boat was moving away from the dead, drifting gradually out to sea, buoyed on the strong current. She was glad: they looked scary and threatening.

  They seemed ravenous.

  The girl hoped that she would be lucky enough to run into a ship and be rescued. Otherwise she might simply drift until she starved to death. And then she would return, weighed down with a hungry heart that could never be satisfied.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GARY MCMAHON’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and US and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters,Rain Dogs,and has edited an anthology of original novellas titled We Fade to Grey.

  Forthcoming are the collections Different Skins,Pieces of Midnight and To Usher, the Dead. You can visit Gary’s website at www.garymcmahon.com

  The Concrete Grove - Out now, from Gary McMahon, the author of Hungry Hearts

  Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Think of dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else, a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove. It knows where you live... Gary McMahon's chilling horror trilogy shows us a Britain many of us will recognise, while whispering of the terrible and arcane presences clawing against the boundaries of our reality! Book One in the Concrete Grove Trilogy.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Now read the first chapter from the next

  exciting Tomes of The Dead novel:

  “SORRY, FRANK. NO more fish.”

  Frank stared over his empty beer glass at Lazlo Oliver, the bartender and owner of the Space Station Restaurant. Frank’s used car salesman expression melted. His eyes narrowed. His grin receded, exposing a mouthful of broken and grimy teeth. “What do you mean, no more fish?”

  “No more. Sorry, Frank.” Lazlo squared his shoulders. At six foot three, he was a big man for all of his seventy years and still in pretty good shape. He hoped there’d be no trouble, but with Frank you never knew. Sometimes the drunk would teeter off into the night, and sometimes he’d go off like a roadside bomb.

  “But it’s fresh fish. It’s real fresh, Laz.” Frank reached down and jerked a string of tilapia from a battered Styrofoam cooler and held them over the bar. Somewhere between the hard-drinking age of thirty and sixty, the years slipped away as he grinned like a teenage boy, proud of a day’s catch.

  Lazlo looked at the milk white eyes of the three tilapia, mouths gaping around the waxed yellow stringer. The scales were still a mosaic of bright greens. Sometimes Frank would get red tide fish he found rotting on the beach and try and pass them off as freshly caught. Not this time. These had been caught this afternoon, probably between Frank waking up after passing out last night and this evening’s dinner and beer. Such was Frank’s drunken cycle: drink, sleep, fish, drink, sleep, fish.

  “Listen, Frank. I’d love to take your fish, I really would, but I have three freezers full of t
he damned things and, if I were to bet, half of them would be from you. Honestly, Frank, I have fish coming out my eyeballs.”

  Frank looked back and forth from his fish to the bartender. For a moment he seemed as if he was going to cry.

  Lazlo stepped away and wiped down the bar. Gertie was in the kitchen. By the looks of it, she was almost finished closing it down for the night. Business had been brisk until dark, then had fallen off like usual, leaving only locals and the occasional tourist too stunned by the reality of the Salton Sea to know that they never should have stopped here.

  He refilled beer for Andy, their local daft. The man claimed to be a rocket scientist but looked more like a mad scientist. The only thing more guaranteed than Frank trying to trade fish for beer was Andy sitting in his usual spot, mumbling to himself, doodling in his little notebook as he sat, with his ever-present tortoise shell glasses and clothes so wrinkled it was as if he’d bought them that way.

  José sat by the door. Laz didn’t know if the man was illegal or not, but he was the all around handyman no one could do without. He didn’t talk much and had a haunted look in his eyes. Whatever the reason for the expression, the rail-thin Mexican took his own counsel.

  The Cain and Ables, their real surname was Beachy, were sitting at their own table. They’d come in for fish and now sat and talked low amongst themselves. The Space Station was the area bar, restaurant, and general store, which is why the Amish family of five more often than not found themselves in for a night’s dinner.

  Then there was the tourist from Maine, who’d stopped on his way to Los Angeles, and ended up sitting down next to Frank. Laz never caught his name, but it didn’t matter. In the morning he’d never see the man again. He could tell by the look in his eyes and the eyes of the other seven tourists who sat at tables, that none of them would ever return.

  Laz had seen it a thousand times. A tourist family tired of the long trip through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, riding along Interstate 10 or 8 towards the Pacific Coast, too blitzed to drive any farther, saw the old signs pointing to the Salton Sea promising resorts and fun in the sun. Instead of driving another four or five hours to their destination, they’d convince themselves that staying the night in an ‘Ultra-Cheap’ Seaside Resort would be a reward for long hours in the car. Their intent would be to wake up the next morning, and maybe after a morning swim at the resort, drive the rest of the way at a leisurely pace. But when they finally saw the dark, beer-colored Salton Sea and rolled down the windows to breathe the ever-present bouquet of rotting fish, they probably hadn’t known what hit them. Most of the time they turned their cars around and continued on their way, eager to be free of the awful stench and horrific sight, but there were always a few who decided to tough it out.

  How bad could it be? they thought.

  The smell will go away, they told themselves.

  But it never did, the smell of dead and rotting fish working its way into everything — their clothes, the fabric of the seats, the carpet, their hair, their skin, even into the depths of their luggage.

  “Get away from me!”

  Lazlo grabbed his bat from beneath the bar and rushed over to where Frank was manhandling the man from Maine.

  “Come on, one beer,” Frank begged. “Three fish for one beer. My God, man. Can’t you people do math in Maine?”

  “Let him go,” Laz commanded in his characteristic deep voice.

  Frank had one hand on the man’s collar and his other holding the fish up between them. The tourist’s nose seemed to touch the middle fish, while the lowest on the string rested against the man’s T-shirt.

  “But Laz, he wants to trade.”

  “Frank, if I have to tell you again, I’m going to knock that head of yours right out the door.” Laz brandished the bat. “Do the math, Frank. One bat! One head!”

  Frank glared at Laz like a cornered rat.

  “Go sleep it off, Frank.”

  Frank hesitated another moment, then let the tourist go and backed away. His eyes narrowed as tears converged. With a sob, he grabbed his Styrofoam cooler, cradled it like a child, then ran out the door. Everyone was silent for a few moments, then resumed their conversations.

  Laz hated when Frank got this way. He wouldn’t remember what he’d done the next day, but damned if Laz was going to let him come back in as if nothing happened.

  He replaced the bat and hollered at Maude.

  “Watch the register, sugar. I’ll be back in a few.”

  His fifty-five year old ex-girlfriend, who still worked as a waitress, glared at him. He grinned in return. Their relationship, along with Gertie’s, his other ex-girlfriend who was the cook, was one predicated upon stoked anger.

  Laz walked past the walk-in freezer and continued out the back. He grabbed the trash Gertie had bagged by the door and hauled it to the cans across the sand-covered alley. He tossed the bags in, returned to the back door, reached inside, and brought back his cigarettes and a notebook.

  Laz took a short walk to a retaining wall and sat on it. He lit a cigarette and deeply inhaled the welcome smoke. One thing that could be said about the smell of cigarettes was that it hid the stench of rotting fish.

  From his vantage point on the wall, it was ten meters to the edge of the water. In the moonlight, he could make out a dozen small shadows. Fish. More dead fish. Would it never end?

  In the light of the bar’s sign, he opened his notebook and turned to the first unused page. He pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote today’s date and, after checking his watch, added the time beneath. He wrote a few sentences in what appeared to be a nonsensical code, then sat back and began to watch the sea.

  He’d been keeping track since he first noticed the lights. It hadn’t taken long for him to find a pattern to them, so on nights when he knew they were going to occur, he made sure to bear witness and record the events as he saw them. He wasn’t a scientist, nor was he very smart in a bookish sort of way, but he knew that if he watched and listened long enough, he might understand what was going on.

  He didn’t have long to wait.

  First it came as a gentle lightening of the water. From a black to gray, the water brightened as if it were powered by an invisible source. He inhaled the last of the smoke, held his breath and tossed the cigarette into the sand. The pressure began to build in his chest, but he kept the smoke trapped. He knew it wouldn’t be long. As the pressure built and built, he hoped it wouldn’t be long.

  Then it happened.

  The water flashed a brilliant green, then returned to gray.

  He exhaled slowly, relishing the taste of the menthol cigarette. He grinned as he watched another flash. Lasting less than a second, if he blinked at the wrong time, he’d miss it.

  Then a third time, it flashed.

  Then darkness.

  Then nothing.

  Whatever it was, it was over.

  Laz looked at the time and began to scribble down his observations and thoughts. It took longer than plain writing, because of the code he used.

  A faraway scream made him look up for a second. He waited to see if the sound would come again, but he didn’t hear anything except the gentle lapping of the almost dead sea. As Laz thought about the sound be became certain that it had sounded like Frank. Laz shook his head. There, but by the grace of God, goes a drunk. Laz knew that it could have just as easily been him had he not been able to conquer his own demons.

  He heard the sound of the back door opening and closing, probably Maude or Gertie looking for him, wanting to rehash some old slight or beer-soaked memory. He’d let them have at him once he finished. The sound of feet shuffling through the sand was accompanied by the horrible stench of rot.

  “Frank, is that you? I told you to go sleep it off.”

  The sound came closer.

  “Frank, you really need to get –”

  Lazlo was jerked from his perch.

  “What the fuck?”

  He was hurled to the ground so hard his ribs cracked
. The air left him and he gasped, desperate to breathe. Framed by the neon sign of a space station, that served as the restaurant’s logo, stood something man-sized, green skin a match to the green on the sign.

  “Who–?”

  Instead of answering, the strange man fell upon him. Lazlow fought to keep him away, but the other’s strength was unbelievable. Laz gagged at the smell of decay. His attacker’s glowing yellow eyes stared through him. Part of his brain registered the glow and wondered how.

  Laz kneed the thing in the side, sending it off balance and into the sand. Rolling the other way, Laz struggled to his feet, then began to run. But instead of back inside, he headed off down the beach because the thing blocked his way.

  After a dozen meters, Laz turned to look, hoping the thing had been a figment of his imagination, or perhaps his body’s opening salvo of dementia. But he wasn’t to be so lucky. It was after him.

  Laz kept running, but felt his strength already beginning to wane. He was seventy years old and not made for flight. He could take care of himself with the likes of Frank, but against... against... what was he against? A black and white image came to his mind of black water and a lagoon and a creature rising to the surface to carry away a vivacious blonde. The Creature from the Black Lagoon?

  He was breathing heavy now and his legs were on fire. He felt himself slowing against his protestations. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep going. So with a cry of desperation, he stopped, turned and brought his hands up like a professional boxer.

  And still the thing came on. Laz couldn’t make out its features in the darkness, but the eyes glowed an unearthly yellow.

  When it came near, Laz swung and hit it in the side of the head. It was like hitting rotting fish. He swung again and hit, with the same result. He tried to dance out of the creature’s way, but tripped on the sand and went down in a sprawl.