by Ryan Casey
Mr. Ainsthwaite smiled. He smiled at Miss Appleton, and then at the others. The others. How had they found him? What brought them here? So many questions. So many questions he’d never get the opportunity to learn the answers to.
“You know, it’s not so bad, this ‘Turnstone,’” Mr. Ainsthwaite said. He crouched down and leaned over Mr. Belmont. Mr. Belmont could feel his breathing against his face; he could see his eyes scanning every part of his body. “It’s not so bad, really. In a way that you can only understand when you have it.”
Mr. Belmont’s entire body was shaking, but he tried his best not to show it. “Get it over with then. Get it over with.”
Mr. Ainsthwaite smiled. As he smiled, so too did his companions. The two holding Mr. Belmont down. The two behind him. And Miss Appleton. Miss Appleton, with the chunk of meat missing from her neck. Miss Appleton, who had just recently been savaged.
She was smiling.
And he had absolutely no idea why.
“You were right about one thing,” Mr. Ainsthwaite said, rising back to his feet. He reached for the decontamination receiver on the floor. Shit, Mr. Belmont had been so close to activating the system. He’d been so close to filling the room with highly toxic acidic chemicals. Chemicals that would’ve turned the bodies of Mr. Ainsthwaite and Miss Appleton to mush. Chemicals that would’ve turned everything in each and every Quarantine room to mush. A system that only he knew the code for, in case of absolute emergency.
“And what was I right about?” Mr. Belmont asked. He could feel the defeat in his own voice now, and he knew the others around him could too. He could see it in the hungry eyes of the young boy to his right, digging his fingertips deeper and deeper into his shoulder. He could see it in the endless string of saliva dangling from the girl’s chapped mouth.
But most of all, he could see it in the smile of Miss Appleton.
“You were right about things being different,” Mr. Ainsthwaite said. “About this being a ‘new world.’ Because it is a new world. A world with… with new standards. With new requirements. And a world that now I’ve seen it—now I’ve really seen it, and I don’t expect you to come close to understanding that with your tiny untapped brain—now I’ve seen it, I’m looking forward to existing in it. To… to helping lead it.”
He paused. He looked like he was waiting for Mr. Belmont to say something, but in truth, Mr. Belmont was completely confused and resigned to defeat. Maybe Mr. Ainsthwaite was fucking right all along. Maybe being a classic human with classic morals was all about to go out of the window with the onset of dawn. But he wasn’t going to allow himself to be a part of this disease. He’d kill himself right after they savaged him. Yes—that is what he’d do. He’d throw himself out of that cracked window. Stab himself in the heart. Smash his brains in. That was the only option now. He’d lost everything. TCorps credibility would be destroyed if they didn’t decontaminate the evidence in the quarantine rooms. And without TCorps, he was nothing.
“I’d rather die than be one of you,” Mr. Belmont said. Anger vented up in his chest. He moved himself upwards as far as he could and stared Mr. Ainsthwaite right back in his glazed eyes. “I’d rather stick a gun in my mouth and swallow a bullet than be… be one of you sick, sick creatures. You won’t win. You might gain temporary traction, but you won’t win. I’d rather rot in hell than become one of you things.”
Mr. Ainsthwaite held his smile. A few seconds’ pause. Absolute silence.
Then: “Good.”
The next thing he knew, Mr. Belmont was being yanked to his feet by the girl and the boy either side of him. He tried to push back with all the force he could but it was no use. His feet folded in front of him. They kneed him in the back and in the legs whenever he managed to stand still. They pushed him towards the door of the quarantine room, through the doorway and back into the room where Mr. Ainsthwaite had been held for the last few hours.
“What are you doing? What are you—”
“I’m decontaminating,” Mr. Ainsthwaite said. A smile was on his face. Not the kind of forced smile that Mr. Belmont pushed himself to make every minute of every working day. But a genuine smile. A smile of victory. Teasing victory.
And he was holding the decontamination receiver in the air.
Mr. Belmont’s stomach turned. “You… You won’t activate it. You don’t know the code. I’ll die before I give it up.”
“I’ll bet I can make a pretty good guess,” Mr. Ainsthwaite said.
With that, the two infected who had forced him into the room let go of his arms and dashed out of the door.
Mr. Belmont threw himself at it. Threw himself at it with all he had, every bit of energy he had left in the tank.
The door slammed shut.
It was too late.
“You’ll never do it,” Mr. Belmont shouted. The room was completely silent. He looked up at the spray hoses above him. Static. Unmoving. His heart pounded. “You… You don’t know the code. You won’t—”
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
“Please!” Mr. Belmont shouted. He bashed his fists against the door and then at the window. Piss dribbled down his leg. Somehow, he knew. The little shit knew. He’d called his friends and now he knew the code and he—
“We’re doing just what you wanted, ‘Humphrey,’” Mr. Ainsthwaite said. “We’re destroying your evidence.”
Humphrey. Nobody knew that name. Not in the workplace. He didn’t tell anybody that name. How would Mr. Ainsthwaite know? How would he—?
But he didn’t have time to ponder the question, because he heard the final bleep, and the warning alarm sounded in his ears.
“Warning: decontamination in process. Please vacate the area.” Red lights spun around the room. They reflected against the mirror—the reflective glass—making the room seem even bigger.
“Please!” Mr. Belmont bashed his hands against the door. Tears ran down his face. “Please! Please! Please!” He couldn’t think what else to say. He couldn’t think, in the most important, words-worthy situation of his life, of any words to get out of this one.
He crumbled to his knees and closed his eyes as the alarm rang in his ear like heavy metal music.
The red lights lit up in his eyes.
He waited. Waited. Waited.
The first thing he noticed when the hydrofluoric acidic spray kicked in was just how much the sound of it reminded him of his old shower at Brooks Close.
The second thing he noticed was the pain.
He screamed out at the top of his lungs as his hair squealed and crackled on his head; he screamed and rolled over in the burning acid as agony engulfed his body. He felt skin peeling off his hands, sizzling away like they’d been placed on a frying pan. He felt it in his eyes and his ears and his nostrils and his chest and throat and lungs and balls and arse and he screamed and screamed and screamed as the pain got worse and worse.
Jonny Ainsthwaite and the rest of his group—because they were “his,” Jonny understood that now—watched through the window as Mr. Belmont rolled on the floor. Licked their lips as blood drained from his body, made even redder by the spinning red light, turning the acid bath into a pool of blood.
“Waste of a good meal,” David, the skinny, vested man said.
“There’s better meat out there,” Jonny said. “Believe me.”
They watched as the skin dropped from the flesh and the flesh dropped from the bones of Mr. Belmont’s arms and legs, as he still rolled and struggled around the floor. They watched as his testicles shrivelled up; as his cock, which was for some reason erect and bulging, split into multiple parts and dropped onto the floor, where it too was swallowed by the intense acid.
They watched for a whole one minute and thirty-four seconds, because that’s how long it took for Mr. Belmont to stop screaming.
V: NEW WORLD
— We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world.
We will see it when we believe it.
�
�� Saul Alinsky
47.
The sun was rising over the grassy horizon. Beads of light crept over the landscape, touching the world with their delicate, soft touch. It was a nice day. A pleasant February day. The first signs of spring were showing, so people would say.
Well, they wouldn’t say that at all. Any other day with weather like this, they would. But not today. Today, there was far bigger news.
Today was the start of the New World.
Jonny Ainsthwaite stared out at the fields. Behind him, TCorps Pharmaceutical Labs stood tall. Tall, and once proud, but not so much now. Not now his new friends and he had tapped into what TCorps had. Not now they’d enjoyed their first great feast together.
Sarah Appleton stared out at the fields too, watching the sun grow from a quarter to a half as it peeked over the perfectly flat land ahead. She knew something was different inside her. Something terrifying at first. Something that she really wanted to fight. She wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t a cannibal.
But no. No, she wasn’t. She was just a member of the New World. Jonny had explained it to her so clearly. How he knew, and how he spoke the way he did through her mind… she didn’t know how he did it. But he’d done it. He’d communicated with her. He’d helped her see the truth.
There was no use in resisting the hunger because the hunger always found a way, one way or another.
The group of four who had saved them were still in TCorps. Every now and then, somebody let out a scream from a high floor. Another window smashed. Alarms rang on every corridor. The place was tearing itself apart. Consuming itself from within.
And all that time, as she stood there and stared out over the frosty grass, Sarah felt an unfamiliar sensation inside her.
Pride. She’d created the New World. She was the Mother.
“Do you think they know yet? All of them?”
The question came from within. Deep within—the human part of her. The human part that still wondered how Harry was doing. How her friends—old university friends, college friends, school friends—were getting on. She wondered if they knew, and if they’d managed to get themselves to a safe place before the hunger arrived on their doorstep.
But these thoughts were meek. Minor. Because primarily, she wondered what they’d taste like when she sunk her teeth into their flesh.
“Probably,” Jonny said. To Sarah, he seemed calmer and more confident since he’d been infected with Turnstone. He looked healthier too, in a strange sort of way. The bags under his eyes were gone, replaced with pale skin. Not deathly pale though—a vibrant pale. A distinctive pale that contrasted with his blue eyes, really bringing out the colour in them. She looked at him and she knew she’d succeeded in her initial goals.
The HIV was gone. It had to be. That was something, she supposed.
Jonny Ainsthwaite did feel better. Inside, his headache was gone, his eyes no longer stung. The nausea and anxiety that used to haunt his every waking moment were but a tingle somewhere in his body that was irrelevant now. All that mattered was the hunger. The hunger that was always there. The hunger that he could communicate—lead—through.
The hunger that he was nourished through.
“I am… I am sorry,” Sarah said.
She didn’t have to continue. Jonny knew exactly what she was referring to.
“You don’t have anything to apologise for. I’m free of HIV. I’ve got a new purpose. I feel better than ever before. Ever before in my life.”
A momentary pause. “But your… your parents. Your friends. They didn’t have to—”
“I’ll move on.”
His words were cold and sharp. Sarah looked for a suggestion in his face that he was acting defensive, or that he mourned his losses, but she didn’t see it. Nothing beyond that momentary flinch, anyway. A momentary suggestion that there was still something remotely human inside him.
A dangerous reminder of what she too was going to become the more she ate.
“It’ll get easier,” he said. He turned to her and smiled. “I promise.”
Then he held out his hand, as the alarms grew in number and volume; as the screams continued behind them; as TCorps, Britain, the world, woke up to Turnstone.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Sarah turned around. She stared at TCorps’s gherkin-shaped exterior. Smoke plumed out of smashed windows. Red lights flashed every floor or two. The place was finished. Mr. Belmont’s evidence had been buried, after all.
Just a shame for him that that meant burying TCorps.
“What are we waiting for?” she asked.
Jonny held his smile. He knew they were coming. He could feel them. Feel them coming towards him. Feel their heat, their familiarity, radiating towards him as he called out to them. His people. His world.
“We should…”
And then she saw it. Or saw them, rather. First, just one of them. A man dressed in a white labcoat much like the one she wore. He looked like he was just walking out of work after a normal day.
Except he was bleeding from a gaping wound on his shoulder.
Then there was another. A woman. Short. Dark hair. Again, normal, except for the wound on her neck.
And another and another and another. All of them walking in Jonny and Sarah’s direction, eyes focused on them. All of them with gaping wounds of various shapes and sizes. Some of them she thought she recognised—the black man with the bitemark in his chest looked familiar. In fact, she swore she’d grabbed a coffee with him once upon a time.
And Alex. Alex who fancied the shit out of her. He was there, his once yellow teeth stained with blood, the mousy hair torn from his scalp.
All so focused. A little scared-looking, some of them crying, some of them confused, but all heading in Jonny and Sarah’s direction.
And then, as if there was an invisible wall in front of them, they stopped. All of them. All hundred, thousand, couple of thousand of them stopped right there, twenty feet or so from Jonny and Sarah. They stopped, and they muttered to one another. Muttered to one another and shouted to one another, but all of them stayed focused on Jonny and Sarah.
Then she heard it. The voice in her head. Jonny’s voice. Except he wasn’t speaking. He was communicating. Doing his… well, his thing.
She saw everything flash in front of her eyes in a matter of seconds. The hunger—what it was, what it required, and how there was nothing that could be done about it, so a person either complied or was forced by the hunger into compliance.
The muttering stopped. The focus amongst the crowd grew.
Jonny told them more. Gave them more information. Made them understand what was happening to them. Told them they were experiments, all of them. Experiments of TCorps. A lie, but a necessary one. The remaining humans, the media, the government, they would need somebody to blame.
Turned out Mr. Belmont’s “secrets” weren’t going to be buried after all.
Then, after a pause for these people—these new Turnstone-infected—to get their heads around their situation, instead of communicating by thought, Jonny opened his mouth and spoke.
“So you understand what’s next, now?” Jonny asked. “You have heard everything as it is, and you understand the next step?”
More muttering. Understanding muttering, though. Contemplation. Weighing up the facts.
“What is next?” Sarah whispered to Jonny.
Jonny looked at Sarah and smiled.
Then, he grabbed her hand and lifted it. The eyes of the crowd watched, focused, transfixed, unwavering.
“We take what’s ours,” Jonny said. He spoke with such power. Such unfamiliar authority. “We take what’s ours and we elevate humanity to the next step. We go to the cities and we go to the towns and we do what we have to do.”
An uprising of voices. Cheers. Shouts. Cries.
“The New World starts here,” he said. “We nourish. Together.”
Jonny and Sarah turned around and faced the field. The sun had just about risen now, br
eaking free of the horizon and lighting up all in its path. Behind them, footsteps started. Footsteps and cries and shouts and euphoria.
“Are you ready?” Jonny asked.
Sarah took a deep breath, then stepped onto the frosty grass with Jonny, the thousand-strong crowd of infected following behind in unison.
“Let’s feed,” Jonny said.
Then, led by Jonny and Sarah, the thousand-strong army of Turnstone ran into the rising sunlight. Towards the horizon. Towards the first day of the rest of time.
Together.
SO, WHAT NEXT?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Casey is the author of over a dozen novels and a highly successful serial. He primarily writes post apocalyptic fiction, and also has a series of mystery novels. Across all genres, Casey's work is renowned for its dark, page-turning suspense, unforgettably complex characters, and knockout twists.
Casey lives in the United Kingdom. He has a BA degree in English with Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham, and has been writing stories for as long as he can remember. In his spare time, he enjoys American serial television, is a slave to Pitchfork’s Best New Music section, and wastes far too much of his life playing Football Manager games.