Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse

by Leonard, John F.

  Sam and John clung to the fact that Sean appeared stable despite all of these horrible signs. What was undeniable was that they needed to find qualified help.

  John drove to the Manor, their local hospital, and found it effectively closed. It radiated a smell like a blocked sewer. He ventured inside anyway, only to discover two friendly but strain-ridden staff.

  An orderly and a nurse, who were unable to offer help, indicating that the hospital was full and staff were thin on the ground. The patients in the same state as his son. They didn’t have any answers or any idea of what was going to happen.

  The nurse, a petite young Asian woman called Soo, had walked back outside with him. Lighting a cigarette, preferring the acrid smoke to the cloying odour of waste behind her, she told him that her own family was also affected. She was spending her time helplessly shuttling between the hospital and her home. Incapable of doing anything constructive in either place but compelled to attend both.

  “I think there are more staff who are okay but have chosen to remain with their loved ones. I can understand that, but this is my responsibility, so I must be here. It’s crazy, my whole family is unconscious,” she said between heavy draws on the cigarette.

  “The only one who I’ve managed to contact, who definitely isn’t down with it, is my cousin in Leeds and it’s exactly the same there. He’s the only one of the immediate family, the close family, you know, who’s not affected. And he doesn’t know what to do.”

  Her eyes squinting in the sun and her lips pursed around the filter of the cigarette as she spoke.

  “Nigel, the guy inside, he’s an orderly. Only had his father and the poor man has died from it. Oh, I’m sorry, that was ...indelicate. Don’t be alarmed please, we’ve had some deaths here but not the majority. Most have gone into this ...this coma, I guess you’d call it. Nigel’s trying to decide what to do with his father’s body and he simply doesn’t know at this moment. Other than that, he doesn’t have anything else to do so he’s staying here and doing what he can to look after the patients. Impossible task, but I guess it’s his way of ...grieving, keeping going, you know. For the rest of us, well, we just have to hope that people come out of it.”

  She’d shrugged, drawing deeply on the last of the cigarette and tossing the butt away. Watched it smoke on the concrete a few feet distant. Seemed lost in thought. John didn’t smoke but at that moment considered taking it up.

  She spoke again after a while.

  “My advice is to go home, try and keep your boy cleaned up and try and get some fluid down him. He’s lucky, he has you to care for him. Most people are just lying where they fell, where they were when they became unconscious. It’s horrific really. I’ve driven past bodies in the street. We found three people in the car park here and transferred them into the hospital. There’s no room on the wards, they’re on the trolleys, still in the corridors. We can’t do any more for them than we can for everyone else but at least they’re inside now.”

  She sighed.

  “I have to go back in. We must keep trying to do what we can. Take care and ...good luck.”

  Touched his arm in a gesture that managed to convey both goodwill and a sense of hopelessness.

  She left him standing alone on the steps of the hospital.

  When he arrived home later, he explained to Sam about the encounter at the hospital and also his fruitless trips to three doctors’ clinics and two police stations.

  John, usually composed and resourceful, equipped with a natural inclination towards the optimistic, had seemed genuinely at a loss. For Sam, seeing him with nothing to say was the same as looking at a table with a missing leg or a car down on three tyres. In their years together, Sam had grown used to John, if not always actually having the answers to problems, at least being convinced that there always was an answer.

  They were good friends with the older couple who lived in the house next to theirs and they determined to try them again. Knocking and still getting no answer, John decided that uninvited entry was justified and they went in through the unlocked back door.

  They found both of them upstairs, unconscious. In a similar condition to their son. They could also hear the old couple’s yappy, irritating dog, closed in the lounge area.

  “We ought to make sure Bertie is alright,” Sam said to John, making for the lounge door.

  “Leave it for now love.”

  His statement was flat, uncompromising.

  “We have bigger problems than their dog. I don’t want to spend the next however long looking after that thing.”

  He ushered her out of the house.

  She was dismayed.

  “We can’t just ...leave him there ...leave them like they are.”

  “Sam, can you imagine how many millions this is affecting?” John replied as they went back outside.

  She shook her head numbly as he continued.

  “Well, I’m beginning to get it. I mean, I kind of understood in theory, but the enormity of it is beginning to hit home. We need to worry about ourselves ...and more importantly, Sean.”

  After checking their son once again, they’d sat in disconsolate silence until Sam had determined that she had to move, had to feel like she was taking some sort of action.

  Pulling on her coat, she told John that she was going to check more neighbours. After futilely roaming the neighbourhood for an hour and a half, knocking on doors, actually going into a couple of houses where she knew the occupants well enough to feel emboldened, she returned home to find John asleep in a chair at their son’s bedside.

  Feeling defeated and thoroughly weary, she went back downstairs. Slumped on the lounge sofa and drifted into an exhausted, restless slumber, still dressed in her outdoor coat.

  <><><>

  Sam was awoken by a terrible squealing, a whining howl that pierced her unremembered dreams like a drill skidding over steel. Rang alarms in her sleep thickened head and set her teeth on edge. Squirted a metallic twist of fear into her sleep stale mouth.

  It was coming from above.

  The noise. It was coming from upstairs. Upstairs in their house.

  It took a moment, but that noise resolved itself into what she could only comprehend as screaming. That terrible sound was a person screaming.

  There were only two people that could be upstairs.

  It wasn’t her son, she knew that somehow. It was difficult to believe that sound was coming from John’s throat, but she knew that it was him, his voice. She’d never heard him make that sort of sound, hadn’t heard that sort of sound from anyone, but it was him and in her heart she knew it. Like she’d recognise the rhythm of his breathing as he lay next to her at night, or know the taste of his skin on her tongue.

  “Oh my God, John? John, what’s wrong? What is it?” She shouted as she ran to the foot of the stairs.

  What greeted her there was some sort of nightmare scene that, initially, her mind quite simply refused to process.

  It looked like her husband was at the top of the stairs and that her son was attacking him. That John was trying to fight off their son who was ...well, he was trying to bite him or something.

  But that couldn’t be what she was seeing, no way, uh-uh.

  That doesn’t make a whole heap of sense does it now Sammie-girl. Why would Sean be biting his dad?

  It didn’t really even look like her son anymore but it was dressed in his clothes. And in her heart she knew it was Sean in the same way as she’d known the whining howl was coming from John.

  She shrieked as the two of them began to fall-stagger down the staircase, her husband bending back, away from Sean. Arms locked, holding him away, then flailing at him, striking their boy.

  Shouting.

  “Get him off me, get him off, Sam please get him off me.”

  Turning and falling the last few steps, locked together, coming to rest at the foot of the staircase with Sean on top, her husband pinned to the hall floor, his face desperate and wild.

  Blood on h
is arms and neck from what looked like punctures and wounds in his skin. Blossoming blood stains on shredded shirt and torn trousers.

  His eyes finding hers, dismay written on his face. Dismay and a shocked bewilderment that would never be voiced or explained, just a dumb and complete lack of understanding. A black hole that had opened where there used to be order and the chance of certainty.

  “Stop him, please, please.”

  Pleaded and breathless.

  She grabbed Sean’s shoulder, like seizing a pliant piece of sculpted timber. Tried to drag him off her husband and was thrown backwards by the swipe of an arm like a unwanted toy discarded in a temper tantrum.

  Looking down at the sleeve of her thick outdoor jacket she dimly registered that the fabric was shredded, sliced by his claw-like hand.

  She’ll always remember, but try to forget, that her son’s shoulder had felt like rippling wood through his tee shirt. That his face had been ravenous and alien looking as he glanced at her. Before flinging her aside to bite and snap at his father.

  Chew at him. It was chewing. Chewing and ...and ...and swallowing.

  Alien looking. Inhuman. There was nothing that she knew of her son in that face.

  She runs to the kitchen, her cosy, character-filled kitchen, and casts her panic-stricken gaze all around the room for a weapon. For something to use to stop her son and to save her husband.

  Thinking is receding now, there can be no thought for this. Impossible to consider hurting your own flesh and blood in order to save your partner. That way lies madness girly-girl, go down that road and the machine will crunch its gears and fly apart in a welter of contradictory forces.

  Surely you just have to act, be propelled forward by instinct, by what the circumstance inflicts upon you.

  Sam grasped a heavy iron frying pan. Sitting obediently on the stove, cleaned and washed, waiting and ready for the next use. Sitting there waiting like recrimination, gleaming in all its volcanic red splendour. The matching colour-coordinated, heart-shaped casserole dishes sitting off to its left.

  She’s cooked meals for them all here, using these things. Meals prepared with love and shared with the quiet contentment of those who realise that they’re a unit, a circle that can close when reliability is required and the outside world needs to be put at a distance.

  The pan felt as heavy in her hand as it always did.

  Don’t think ...thinking will undo you, undo it all as surely as God made little green fishes.

  She ran back to the hall then.

  With that heavy pan in her right hand and there, in the hall, the madness took a big slamming step closer as she saw her son was biting, tearing at her husband’s neck and head.

  Biting pieces off and eating them.

  Saw that his talon hands were digging blood filled holes in her husband’s biceps.

  This thing wasn’t Sean any more. Whatever this monstrosity was, it surely wasn’t Sean.

  Not beautiful, bright shiny Sean.

  John was screaming again. He may have been screaming all the time.

  Screaming in a shrill, indescribable timbre that was nothing like a sound that would issue forth from the throat of a man. More like the noise from some intolerably wounded animal.

  Thought is at last gone now. She swings the heavy, sharp edged weight of the pan and feels it connect with Sean’s shoulder.

  To little effect, the blow slackens his grip on John but does nothing to prevent those fearsome jaws pistoning forward to rip and rupture, pull and tear at vulnerable flesh and scrape against exposed bone.

  She swings again, at Sean’s head this time, and ignores the sickening sound of the impact and, she thinks, swings once more after that. Then everything goes a little grey. Yes, it’s definitely all a little bit greyscale there for a while but as the colour washes back into the world, she’s on her knees in blood. A lake of blood, an overwhelming flood of it. Talking to John, begging him to be alright.

  His breath was making gurgling, whistling sounds and his eyes had a dull sheen.

  “He woke up.”

  Murmured, barely audible.

  He may have smiled after saying that, before he stopped breathing. Sam wanted to believe that he did. That he smiled one last time at her. But she can’t be sure. So much of his face is gone.

  Looking at him is awful but Sam can’t tear her traitorous eyes away. The attack has ravaged him to the bone in places, his face and neck and chest. Blood seeps and pools everywhere.

  When she did avert her gaze, it came to rest on her son, lying prone a few feet away, wedged against the front door of the house.

  The damage done to him was visible at the top left of his skull where a concave indentation leaked fluid and small fragments that she knew must be brain and bone.

  The damage she had done to him.

  A hideous little voice chiming in her mind.

  She howled in anguish and it went on for longer than she can ever remember, even when she later summoned the courage and actively tried to recall those awful moments. It went on until her throat was raw and painful. Until her throat felt as though some essential part of her had torn loose and left, flying and snapping on a blood moist tornado of sound.

  In the space of a few heartbeats, Sam has become something else, something new.

  Born of adversity and dreadfulness.

  She doesn’t consciously recognise this fact but it will become apparent.

  Semi-spontaneous transformation into widow, grieving mother and murderess ...forming a strange alloy with the old Sam. The Sam that existed before her world collapsed.

  The change certainly isn’t in evidence during the next few hours. Hours that disappear into a yawning gap in her memory as she attempts to hold on to her sanity with blood slick hands. That sanity nearly slips through her fingers at times, but she manages to keep the precious object in the air, performing a desperate cut glass juggling act ...don’t let it touch the floor and shatter-break into a thousand irreconcilable pieces. Don’t let it touch the floor where the blood lies thick and immense.

  When the dark mist clears, she retains a tenuous hold on her slippery yet seemingly resilient sanity.

  <><><>

  The light had faded and night had drawn on while her mind was lost in that unthinking nowhere place. She was still in the hall with the ruined bodies of the two people that she loved most in all the world.

  That won’t do, oh no, not all, can’t stay here.

  True, it was harder to see details now, which was a blessed relief, but she was becoming aware that it smelled bad here. She’d known for a while but it hadn’t seemed important when she was in the lost place. Now, as she returned to reality, the coppery spoiled waste melange of odours were too much to bear. Filled her mouth and nose and made her want to throw up. If she started being sick, puking like some wretched dog, she thought she might never stop.

  Moving was hard. Her body ached as she struggled upright and almost fell, staggered her way into the lounge and dropped on the sofa. She fell into a sleep that was disturbed by noise from outside.

  Screams and howls.

  Dimly heard shattering sounds.

  Jagged and cruel noises that wanted to drag her awake but couldn’t quite overcome the exhaustion that had swamped her.

  At least twice shadows flitted across the big window behind the sofa on which she lay sweating and quietly moaning.

  It was only when she woke that she realised that she may not have been dreaming away the nightmarish events of the day before.

  Those sounds might just have been real, not the merry insanity dance in her head.

  A shriek eventually woke her.

  It was light again.

  “Wha’ the fuck was that?” she mumbled, sitting up and looking out of the window.

  Groggy and unreal feeling, mouth dry and head pounding.

  Twenty feet away through the slightly smeared window, what looked like it might once have been an old woman was ...attacking a middle-aged man on
the lawn.

  Her lawn.

  It didn’t really look like an old woman anymore, apart from the remnants of the old lady nightgown. And attacking wasn’t quite right.

  He was being ...ripped and bitten.

  Gored.

  This window really needs cleaning, she thinks, before the freight train load of memories from the previous few hours slam back home with a shuddering intensity.

  The man on the ground rallied and threw the attacker to the side but two more figures appeared. Hairless, hideous things that radiated an animal ferocity despite their skeletal leanness. Probably men, judging from the stained clothing that hung on them like a fading memory. They joined the old woman-thing.

  Teamed up without hesitation.

  Circling the man, twitchy and sudden. Jerking, amateur video filmed through a greasy screen.

  Pinned and bit at him.

  And then it was over. Before very long all three were eating him as he twitched and juddered and then lay still.

  Other than the involuntary movement from the pulling and rending of his attackers.

  “Oh my God,” Sam moaned. “They’re eating him.”

  They tear and claw, shredding his clothes, and dip and rear, ripping chunks of him, sometimes snapping the rendered lump of spattering flesh from the air above their misshapen heads as it escapes from their teeth on the upward arc of their feeding motion.

  “Fucking wolves, they’re like fucking wolves,” Sam said to herself as she rolled off the sofa and painfully knee-crawled to the hall.

  Her family is there in all of its bloody dead glory. She had to be sure that she hadn’t imagined this scene and she’s appalled to find that she hadn’t. The smell is stronger here and she dry heaves, partly the stench and partly the brutal early morning clarity of light spilling on the tableau in hazy shafts from the part glassed door.

  Outside, a few feet beyond her porch, she can vaguely hear the horror of predators feeding. Her murder weapon, the heavy, fiery red pan, lies on the sticky mess that is seeping into the fake wooden hall floor and she grabs it without thought.