He opted for the stairs.
The stairwell was somewhat grand, suiting the building.
Wide. Large double landings at each floor. Elaborate balustrades and thick carpet pinned with ornate gold carpet rods.
Joe wiped sweat from his hand and clenched a fist around the baton. Unwittingly let the door bang closed behind him as he entered the stairwell.
Winced.
Christ on a cart, he felt rough. No condition in which to be doing this silly-shit insane nonsense.
Just what the fuck was he thinking here? People eating each other, turning into cannibals? It was nuts. His head was in some nowhere land, lost in space after a wild tour of too many bars and an even wilder consumption of too much booze.
What do you want to title this sequence, Joey-Joe? Forty-Eight Hangovers Later ...or perhaps Dawn of the Stone Cold Sober?
Footfalls. Odd-sounding footfalls, but definitely footfalls.
Approaching, increasing in volume, but strangely syncopated, different in tone.
Odd.
Joe waited at the top of the stairs.
Frozen if he was honest. Scared shitless, if he was being even more brutally candid.
And did he hear growling as the footsteps got closer?
Low and almost sub-audible, but growling nevertheless?
That wouldn’t have made a whole load of sense but nothing was making much sense right then.
Unbidden, adrenalin coursed through his body ...and he remained rooted to the spot.
Fight or flight hey Joey, but who’s running here fella? That other bloke, whoever he is, not you.
The man, or whatever it was, appeared suddenly around the turn in the stairwell.
On a subliminal level, Joe now understood the uncertain noise of the footsteps. Had translated the sound into one of those pictures in his head.
The runner only had one shoe.
A trainer. His other foot was bare.
The fact that the bare foot was clawed became mere background horror in light of its face, something to be recalled in moments of quiet contemplation. The face, that was the showstopper alright.
Inhuman.
That was the word for the face. Inhuman.
A maddened animal face, growling mouth agape, slavering, somehow too full of teeth, saliva flying.
Hands digging and pulling to speed its upward progress like some diseased climber with twisted pitons for fingers.
That progress was swift without any doubt. Oh yeah, he was coming fast alright. All snarl and spit and claws.
They say God loves a drunk and Joe had always thought that, if true, it was probably because it was so hard for any other poor fucker to do it. Whatever, perhaps God did favour the inebriate breed, along with a few other unfortunates.
Or perhaps it was because when you were a dedicated, died in the wool, bad-to-the-bone drunk, even the episodic type, if you wanted to live longer than the average world war two fighter pilot, you had to develop a heightened sense of self-preservation.
A danger radar that was attuned to real threat, life and death stuff. Not particularly bothered about a scalded hand from a boiling kettle, or a bit of a kicking from some small-town toughies, or a broken nose from a helpless stumble. A radar that only really shrilled when genuine darkness loomed, unfathomable and deep and outside the realm of prediction.
Joe had that radar, honed to a purely intuitive level by years of practice.
He was in many ways a veteran survivor, albeit of circumstance largely engineered by his own actions.
Now, his hands remained by his side, the baton limp and forgotten as the figure hurtled upward, teeth bared.
At the last moment, Joe swung his right leg outward as if taking a forty yard free kick and met the attacker with an enormous, instinctive, killing force. His booted foot connecting mercilessly beneath the thing’s chin, snapping the head back and sideways with sickening crunch.
The body seemed to hang for a moment in the air, and then fell and twisted back down the stairs.
Awkwardly tumbling and crumpling to a halt on the landing below in a twitching, jerking misshapen tangle.
Joe stood perched above.
Unbelieving and appalled.
Descended warily and prodded the prone thing with the baton.
Wondered if he really had finally managed to drink himself into an alternate reality.
That’s what you do after all isn’t it son? Alcohol simply changes your reality, takes you to a different place.
Was it possible that if you drank enough, and did it frequently enough, that it translated beyond your mental state into a solid place? Another physical space where the world was changed and nightmare fantasy swapped with normal world? Solid enough for your ankle to ache when you mullered the fuck out of one the native inhabitants.
He studied the figure.
It was a man but not like any man Joe had every laid eyes on before. He, it, was ...altered, and kind of ...unreal because of it.
“Real enough though fella,” Joe said to himself in a flat little voice.
Felt the incipient pain from the kick spreading from his ankle up into his shin and down into his toes and the top of his foot.
The man, or whatever it was, twitched and then went still.
A thick drool of blood and sputum spreading across a face from some dark illustration. A page from an abstract anatomist sketch book.
Patchy hair, scalp showing through. More scalp than hair.
Ridged. The face was kind of ridged. Features distorted, like someone has carefully stripped the skin, carved away at the musculature below and glued strips of rope over their handiwork before shrink-wrapping the skin back.
He was wearing a filthy tee shirt and his arms were similar to the face. Disgustingly corded and defined, ending in hands that seemed gross exaggerations.
Unusually long fingers that ended in nails that had thickened and extended up the finger to become lethal-looking weapons.
<><><>
Joe has done some bad things, a shed load of bad stuff if truth be told. If he ever had cause to once again duck into that long abandoned, dusty old confessional, he hoped the priest had a spare slow afternoon that could maybe extend into early evening. But he’d never killed anyone before.
This creature that he’d kicked down the stairs, this warped parody of a man, looked like he was pretty close to that. Pretty much dead. To say Joe was stunned would have been an understatement. He didn’t know whether to feel profound guilt at having quite possibly murdered a man, or absurd relief at having escaped the ravening jaws of a monster.
Thank Jesus for that fabled self-preservation instinct though. Because it was that which got Joe moving on down the really quite exquisite staircase and emerging into a dim entrance foyer.
Where he would meet Sebastian and begin to get a much fuller picture of his new world.
Chapter 3.
George was Here.
As the monster that had once been his mother slowly expired, twitched and jerked less and less violently, the mesmerising ring glinting on her mutated finger, George Lowton struggled to come to terms with a new world.
A difficult world for a twelve year-old, however capable and intelligent he was. A world where the utterly dependable was, without much warning, transformed into the very opposite. A world where those that you loved most dearly could change into something that meant you harm. Become a creature that could and would, he thought with absolutely zero uncertainty, kill you.
A death dealing ...thing.
He’d hidden in the loft in a moment of extremis. It hadn’t been consciously planned or considered. It struck him now that it wasn’t going to be somewhere he could stay. Certainly not stay for any length of time and probably not even for a short time.
A lesser boy would have been in a state of shock, paralysed beyond any type of coherent thought. But then, a lesser boy wouldn’t have survived at all. That George wasn’t shocked into catatonia was a testament to the fact that
he was actually a quite remarkable boy. It was true that he was enshrouded in a comforting blanket of numbness that insulated him from the horror of the situation. That state was maybe a distant cousin of shock, but it didn’t preclude lucidity in his case.
In reality, George didn’t have the slightest inkling of just how remarkable he was.
For all that, the fear wasn’t abating. Oh gosh no, that fear was a big old indigestible lump that seemed to have taken up residence in his chest. If anything, it seemed to be getting bigger as he considered the implications of his position.
From what he could tell, some sort of virus or disease had made most of the people in the world collapse.
And then begin to change.
And when the changing was done, they woke up and were something else.
Mutated and murderous.
Including his parents. His mom ...well, at least his mom was ...at peace.
That was it. At peace.
There couldn’t have been any peace in what she’d become.
His dad, oh God, he didn’t want to think about his dad.
And he didn’t want to see his dad when he woke up, changed and monstrous. Not because of the danger, but because he thought his heart would simply break into pieces. Lots and lots of little pieces that nobody would ever be able to put together again. However many men or horses the king had, they’d shake their heads and whinny and walk away and give it up as a bad job.
His parents weren’t perfect. Not even near.
They drank too much, he knew that for sure.
He could calculate alcoholic units and he knew the guidelines and they were way outside those guidelines. His dad had laughed when he’d broached the subject, telling him the guidelines were a complete fabrication, just the government trying to control the proles.
Geo, let me tell you a short story. Nanny State married Big Brother and then they sat back and bathed in the power ...and counted the cash.
Smiling when he said it but looking irritated as well.
That didn’t alter the fact that when his parents over-indulged, they changed. After drinking wine club vino, that 15 percent red is simply superb, or beer or scotch or the Deadly Vodka as dad referred to mom’s favourite excess, they could become sort of monsters. Less reasonable and even handed. More shouty-loud and argumentative. But not monsters like this though. Not genuine, scary faced, real-to-God, bad-eff-wording demon-monsters from some gruesome, is this going to give George nightmares, late night movie.
If only his elder brother had been here instead of being away at their god parents place in Wiltshire. Wherever Wiltshire was.
Why did Elliot have to be away when this happened?
Elliot would have known what to do.
Elliot had called before their parents had collapsed to reassure them that he was feeling fine. Said that he hoped mom and dad got better soon. Said that Jane and Jason, their god parents, were also ill and he was doing his best to look after them.
Being a model god son in goddamn Wiltshire just when George needed him most.
Being away and not there at home where he belonged.
Away was bad enough in the normal scheme of things. George didn’t feel completely comfortable when his brother wasn’t around. Didn’t even like it much if Elliot was present but essentially absent, locked away in his bedroom. That wasn’t as bad, being within easy reach was a reassurance, but it still didn’t sit easy. His dad picked up on it in the same way that his dad picked up on most things.
Elliot is four years older than you Geo. That’s a lot at your age. He’s growing up so you have to give him some space. A few years down the line and that four year gap won’t mean diddly-shit but right now it’s gonna seem bigger than it is.
And later at another time, his mother quietly fuming that Elliot was senseless in his bedroom in that basically untouchable state that teenage boys apparently adopt in the later stages of the condition and his dad just shrugging in a way suggested he wasn’t going to do much other than listen to her.
Elliot not being there when things went completely effing-spacker-mental was beyond the pale.
George understood alone in the conceptual sense, but for him it translated into his mother, father or brother being temporarily absent. Not him being completely, actually alone and without guidance. Especially if things went all can’t-login, blue-screen meltdown. Mom and dad were differentiated by adult status, he got that. Adults did stuff that put them beyond reach at times. He got that as well. Work, responsibilities, he didn’t necessarily understand all of the eccentric details, but he knew it meant that they were obliged to be absent sometimes. Being at school, even though his brother attended the same school meant being alone in some ways because Elliot was in different classes with different demands, distanced and therefore not immediately available. Being dropped off to spend time with friends of his own age was kind of being alone because Elliot was excluded. Not always bad in itself, but not the ideal scenario.
Alone, as in really alone and without support, was something that he simply hadn’t experienced in his short existence. Even when he went to bed and there was a spider, if it was big enough to cause him qualms about exterminating it himself, he’d simply go and find his father, who would solve the problem with delightful brutality and an ingenuity that avoided too much mess.
Now there was no one to help and the spiders were monsters, big enough to break down doors. And they wore the adornments of people that you loved.
The collapse and turning of his parents threw George into an unheralded state of self-reliance. Foreign territory inside of his own little world, inside his own house.
The cancellation of school alerted him to something very out of the ordinary but before he had chance to feel more than a creeping uneasiness, his world, the world in general, spiralled off into the realms of horror unreality. The streets outside were unusually tranquil and the television channels were a hotchpotch of static and programmed repeats. Alarm bells had begun to sound as his parents both became noticeably more ill and the loud clanging has started in earnest when they slipped into an unconscious and unresponsive state.
George thought he may have lost it for a while when both parents collapsed.
Lost it with capital letters.
Lost It.
Probably some babyish wailing. Head in hands blubbering. A sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Yeah, he may have lost it a little bit.
Sure, he was upset, deeply troubled in fact, when his dad dropped. Just ...fell over. He couldn’t really think past the fact that his dad was ill.
Truly ill. Properly ill.
As his mother rapidly followed, slid beyond his reach, he became frantic.
It was all wrong.
Bollocksed up beyond any comprehension. Don’t repeat that language Geo.
They lay in a horrible puke covered repose. Watery strings of vomit decorating their collapse. And him unable to help in any real way. He hovered around them like a pathetic ghost. Ethereal and without substance, unable to affect anything. Anything at all.
When he noticed that they were physically changing, he initially doubted his own eyes. Doubted his sanity. Going crazy-mad, if he’d have been pushed to put it into words.
Within hours, they seemed to be morphing into things that bore only a passing resemblance to his parents.
He was fairly certain he lost it again during that period. Fairly sure that panic held sway over him. Dazed unbelieving immobility interspersed with a quietly screaming hysterical bewilderment. Not sure how long it lasted or what he did in any detail but he felt that he lost it.
You’ve lost the plot Georgie
...don’t call me Georgie. It’s a baby name.
Twelve or a hundred and two, mewling infant or drooling senior citizen, there’s only so long that the waterworks can be keep going. Only so much snot and tears can be swallowed or wiped on the back of your hand and across your sleeve before, if nothing else, exhaustion brings a certain c
alm.
As the hours wore on and the calm took a firmer hold, George did what any twelve year old would inevitably do and decided that he was hungry, thirsty and needed the toilet.
The lavatory was easy enough and raiding the fridge for coke and chilled chicken bites did the job on the other fronts. Throw in a Kinder chocolate bar plus a Milka or two, the continental brands were his favourites. And a Twirl because this was crisis. The food didn’t go down easy but his system welcomed it nevertheless.
What to do about his fallen loved ones was an infinitely more puzzling problem, one that would, and indeed did in many instances, faze the mental acuity of fully grown adults. He found the number for his brother’s mobile but got no reply.
George went online because that’s where he was accustomed to finding answers when left to his own devices. His parents imposed few real restrictions on him. Limits were half-heartedly enforced on his time with laptop, tablet and game console. Hard for his dad to be too strict on that front when he himself appeared to have had devices surgically attached to himself. And his mom left the administration of the rules to his dad unless it ruffled her feathers for whatever reason.
Like most kids his age, George felt at home online.
Comfortable.
There wasn’t that much that was virtual about this reality to his generation.
It was as real as the mouse you held or the smears you left on the screen you swiped. The fact that you couldn’t actually wrap your fingers around virtual wasn’t really a fact at all, just an irrelevance.
He’d been warned of the perils of social media and treated it with a degree of caution. In truth, totally social sites were platforms for which he could as yet only summon mild distain, although that might change in time, as it had with his older brother.
Reading the comments sections online was as amusing as actually posting. Most of the time. Sometimes, you couldn’t resist joining in and goading some idiot into further idiocy. Skype was a useful tool for enhancing other pursuits. An adjunct to PC gaming. A great addition to a session of Minecraft with a remote friend. Not something he’d use to talk to someone just for the sake of talking to them.
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