Wrestling the wheel, Joe aimed it into the remaining three runners. Bunched together in heedless pursuit, oblivious to threat as they hunted their prey. They were decimated as one and a half tons of metal and glass ploughed through them. Scattered and flung away. The small SUV slewed and skidded to rest.
You’re pushing it Joey-Joey-go-more-slowy. Keep that up, and you’ll be sitting immobile. Immobiliare you feckwit. In a lump of steaming metal ...or you’ll flip the fucker completely and be in shit deeper than way-on-down-deep shit.
Joe turned in the seat and reversed to stop not far from the man who was at the side of the road.
Panting, eyes flicking between Joe, the first creature on his left, and the three to his right.
Looking at the man through the passenger window, Joe understood why he’d initially taken him for one of the mutated.
Young and tall. Skinny as a high jump lath and corded with defined muscle. Long greasy hair scraped back into a pony tail.
Joe got out and walked over to him.
“Thanks ...thanks for that,” the young man said between heaving breaths, indicating the fallen creatures.
Bent over with hands on hips. Exhausted but eyes wary and calculating.
“Thought ...”
Huge inhale and exhale.
“Thought I’d run out of luck this time.”
The young guy moved to massage his right knee, the kicking leg, and as he did it, his gaze shifted to the left and stayed there.
Joe looked the same way and watched as the first creature he’d hit lurched upright again and began a slow dragging hobble towards them.
Mangled, leg askew and arm disastrously broken. Its relentless advance continued nonetheless.
Joe went back and grabbed the machete. Irrationally offended by the creature, by its refusal to be knocked down and to stay down, its refusal to be destroyed.
More than that, all of a sudden, more than offended. Joe was enraged by it. The anger that had simmered since this all began, bubbling quietly in the back of his head like a forgotten pan, abruptly overflowed. As if the source of heat had unexpectedly flared and brought it to the boil.
“Don’t know when ta fecking-well stop do ya? Ya dirty fecking things.”
Words mouthed to himself but nevertheless registered by the tired young man that he’d just saved.
Joe and the creature met halfway. His angled swing of the blade slicing a respectable way into its tuberous skull and halting its progress once and for all. He had to use both hands to wrench the blade free. Walked to the verge of the road to wipe the blade clean on the grass. His walk back to the car was tired and heavy legged.
The skinny boy-man waited by the side of the road.
Joe dropped the knife down the side of the seat and dug a battered box of cigarettes from his pocket. Extracted a twisted example and offered the pack.
The young guy, no more than a lad when you got up close, pulled an equally sad specimen from the proffered box and straightened it, eyes never leaving Joe’s face.
Joe lit both and watched as the lad grimaced and then coughed into a grimed hand.
“You don’t smoke do you fella?” Joe asked with a mystified smile.
A shake of the head, the merest twitch really, and the ghost of a grin.
“It’s bad for your health.”
<><><>
Elliot watched the man from the corner of his eye and activated his mobile phone, searching for a signal that wasn’t there. He turned the phone off to conserve the battery and tried to relax enough to appreciate the comfort of the seat.
He was whacked, wrung out like a sad old mop.
Into the bargain, like he needed it, he thought he might have pulled or, worse still, torn a muscle with that last kick. The least of his worries but that didn’t stop it hurting any.
The man had clothes that would have been expensive when he’d purchased them but he looked like he might have been sleeping rough in a black market abattoir for the last few days. That, and fighting anyone or anything that wanted to steal his cardboard box and half bottle of paint thinner. Short hair filthed with who knew what and unshaven hollow cheeks.
Not that Elliot could look much better if he thought about it.
There were groceries strewn around the vehicle. A hell of a lot of booze and fags compared to stuff you could eat and drink without getting off your head and messed up.
Nothing wrong with getting messed up ...but was now the best time? Priorities and all that. He was pretty sure that getting messed up wouldn’t be recommended in the surviving the apocalypse handbook.
The steamrollering stunt with the runners had been pretty neat but the ...butchering? Running up to that thing and splitting its skull with that bastard of a knife when they could have gotten into the car and just driven away.
It seemed a bit unnecessary and ...well, nutty, if he was honest.
Deranged maybe.
Mind you, who wasn’t deranged now?
Since this had started, Elliot had done stuff he wouldn’t ever have dreamed of doing in his worst nightmares. So who could say what constituted deranged nowadays.
Still, the last ride he’d hitched had turned out to be a bad call. Yeah, a real bad call. If he was going down that road again, he might as well just open the door and jump. Take his chances with the runners and get where he needed to go on his own.
Any which way he could and without help if that was the way the cards fell.
“My name’s Joe Byrne. Are you okay? Did any of those things bite you? You know ...hurt you?”
The man glanced over at him briefly as he asked the question and then went back to gauging the road.
“I’m Elliot Lowton. Thanks for ...all of that. No, I’m good. Well you know. Not good exactly. Okay. I could do with a shower and some antiseptic. Got plenty of scrapes and cuts. I didn’t get bitten. Not entirely sure how I didn’t get bitten, but I haven’t.”
As he stared ahead at the quiet country road, Elliot saw Joe’s head twitch in his direction again and study him before replying.
“Good. That’s good news fella. Don’t. Don’t get bitten. I think their bite carries the infection. Or some form of it anyways.”
Joe didn’t elaborate further and Elliot didn’t push him.
“Okay. I’ll keep it mind. Thanks,” he replied.
“Where are we going Joe? Somewhere specific or are you just trying to find somewhere safe?”
“I’m headed for a friend’s house just outside a little village called Bishops Caining. Nearly there now. We’ll hit the village very soon. That’s only a small old affair. A wide space in the road, blink and you’ll miss it sort of thing. The house is after that. Pretty isolated and easy to secure. No close neighbours or any of that type of stuff. I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t have hundreds of those fucking things milling around it. Somewhere that’d give me a chance to get my head together and come up with a longer term plan. There might be some of them in the village I guess, but we’ll try and just breeze through, leave them in our wake.
I’m not sure if the house is occupied right now ...or by what for that matter. We’ll just have to play that ear I suppose.”
Joe chewed his lip as he spoke, a frown playing across his profile.
“Uh-huh. Okay,” Elliot replied.
He tried to mentally prepare himself to play it by ear if the guy’s destination was inhabited and the inhabitants were infected. If his recent experience was anything to go by, playing it by ear would entail either running like Usain Bolt after a cocaine burger or killing something. Elliot was too tired to run much more and he wasn’t getting used to the killing.
The thought of more fighting made his mind flinch and his heart beat harder in his chest.
No, he wasn’t becoming accustomed to the killing. Not at all. Not yet anyway, but this messed up new world offered ample opportunity to become acclimatised and he thought that if you didn’t get the hang of it, there was a high probability that before too long you’d
end up dead yourself.
He’d lost his last remaining weapon, a moderately heavy strength bar with spangly blue end caps, escaping the nut-job with the Land Rover and the wandering hands.
He wasn’t going to think about that. Not in detail anyway. He’d take the lesson from it, but would bury the memory in a deep grave and find some big rocks to put on top of the earth.
“If we ...encounter some of them, have you got anything I can use? A weapon? I had stuff but ...I lost it ...with one thing and another,” he asked Joe.
“There’s a stick, a police baton, behind the seat there.”
Joe replied as he scanned the road. The reply was distracted, awkward almost.
Elliot leaned back and found the baton. A strange bit of kit for the guy to have but no more strange than the current situation. Not that bizarre when he considered it objectively. He assessed the weight and feel of it. Alright he supposed. Not ideal but better than nothing.
Joe slowed the car.
“Here we go fella, this is the village.”
The countryside gave way to sporadic houses and cottages.
What struck Elliot was that this little collection of dwellings barely qualified as a village. It could only be sparsely populated because there simply wasn’t enough of it to be anything else. They skimmed past it too fast for him to see a great deal but it was affluent.
Large well-maintained properties or small picture postcard places that would cost all the zeroes despite the size. Most with lots of land around them, not crowded together like chocolates in a box.
They didn’t spot any of the mutated.
More lanes followed until Joe stopped at a turning on the right that was virtually concealed by foliage. If you looked closely, the strip of road beyond was newly tarmacked. No signpost or indication that it led anywhere of interest.
“Right. The house is up here. I’m hoping that Andy, it’s his place, either isn’t there or if he is, that he’s okay. Normal. Unchanged. If he’s been infected ...well.”
Joe paused, seemingly lost for words.
“We’ll see soon enough I suppose.”
Elliot didn’t know for definite but he had a feeling that Joe had yet to encounter friends or family that had changed into those things. The guy seemed troubled by the prospect of meeting up with his mate if the man had been infected. Which was understandable but Elliot still hoped that he wouldn’t freeze if the situation arose.
If he did, they both might end as dog food. Or mutant food to be more precise. Gosh, the world really had gone crazy. Minutes ago, he’d been worried by the cold rage he’d sensed in the man, Joe, and now here he was, hoping that some harnessed version of that anger would resurface if necessary.
Joe started the car and drove into the turning. The lane was wider than Elliot had expected and enclosed by trees and bushes. A blindly rising black ribbon bound by greenery that abruptly terminated in an open space, in the middle of which sat an ultra-modern building.
It really was a jaw-dropping piece of architecture. Seemed to almost float amidst the profusion of vegetation and sky that surrounded it and yet not be dwarfed by that natural beauty, was instead a contrasting counterpoint to it.
The ground floor was minimal, solid planes of concrete and metal with an undeniable sense of form that still somehow suggested naked space, smaller than what sat on top of it. The upper levels looked too heavy in spite of the more apparent use of glass in their structure. Elliot understood why Joe thought it might be a safe place to rest. It had an essence of the industrial caressed by the refined hand of an artist. Both beautiful and ugly, it managed to emanate the impression of a fortress and the lightness of a ballerina. It could even be somewhere more permanent, a safe base to secure against the unpredictable, if the situation didn’t improve, and Elliot didn’t believe improvement was likely in the short term.
Not in his heart, he didn’t.
How could it improve? Something momentous had happened. The world had become a different place. Fundamentally different. Most of humanity had undergone a catastrophic mutation and most of the rules had changed along with them. This house might have offered more than temporary respite.
It was a shame that he couldn’t take more than temporary advantage of it. Perhaps he might come back after he’d found his brother.
If he found his brother. But that wasn’t a question was it? He’d find George if hell froze over and the sun imploded. George was all he had left worth breathing for.
“Wow. That’s some house,” was all he said to Joe.
“Yeah, it is isn’t it? The old bender knows how to spend his money alright. Andy may not have any class but he always had more style than you could shake a fucking stick at.”
Joe’s introspective smile lifted the corners of his mouth and reached upwards to light his eyes. The smile faded as quickly as it had appeared.
“Let’s see if he’s in, shall we?”
He got out of the car, plucking the blade from beside the seat as he did so.
“Yeah. I suppose so,” Elliot muttered under his breath.
Gripping the baton, he joined Joe in front of the vehicle. It was eerily quiet. In the distance, the pall of smoke from the town spoiled the otherwise flawless blue above them. At least the wind was blowing the smoke away from their position.
They were facing a span of concrete that made up the ground floor of the building on this side. This wall was broken by a long section of tightly perforated matte black metal. A deeply recessed double metal door sat off centre in the metal segment of the wall. Elliot studied the tiny rollers at top and bottom of the metal wall and thought it likely that it was a reveal which disguised and protected floor to ceiling windows.
The floor above was an expanse of concrete studded with apertures. Above that loomed a steel and glass level that projected beyond the lower floors.
“It looks locked ...and empty,” Elliot said.
Joe moved toward the steel doors, speaking over his shoulder.
“One way to find out. There’s a coded box that has the keys, hidden in the alcove there. Andy lets friends use the place when he’s not around. Andy’s a pretty sociable guy.”
They walked over to the doors, the noise of their footsteps inordinately loud on the smooth grey surface of the asphalt. The hush of the air seemed to magnify the sound disproportionately.
It was the sound of footfalls that alerted them. That made them pull back from the doorway and spin to their right.
Not their footfalls, other footfalls that slapped and echoed. Strange how the simple sound of running can ring with a sense of hunger and savage abandonment.
<><><>
There was very little time in which to react. The thing must have noticed their arrival. Heard the car or sensed the movement. By the time they paused at the entrance, it was running. Barefooted, its feet snapped on the ground like gunshots in the air.
Joe couldn’t be sure. It was difficult to be sure because the transformation disfigured, it changed and warped what it touched. But he thought the running figure was what remained of his old friend Andy. The thing was partially clothed, trousers the last vestige of its humanity.
Balded headed and strangely shrunken, distilled body. The trousers were what made him think it was Andy. The ridiculously muted red fabric was precisely what his old mate would have considered perfect for a day at home. A business day would have seen him dressed soberly but with a flourish. Outlandish socks or a bright handkerchief in the breast pocket. A discrete nod to his propensity for the flamboyant. Out of the office, red trousers were as likely as scruffily distressed designer denim or an outrageous drag-act dress.
Joe took a step backwards as the thing ran at them. The blade hung at his side, limp in his hand. The gun was forgotten in his pocket. Seeing Andy this way conjured images of too many people that were perhaps like this now.
Family.
His ex-wife and child.
People that were gone. Dead in essence but still breathing as t
hese new outrages.
Can you really hack Andy Pells to pieces Joe-Joe? Can you perform that bastard barbarous act? Is somebody somewhere swinging a sword at Kirsten’s mutated head? Slicing mercilessly at Eddy’s once trusting face? Is there some fucked up synchronicity at play here. You kill an old buddy-bud-buddy and someone offs one of yours?
Whatever instinct for self-preservation existed within Joe, it deserted him then. In the face of confronting someone genuinely close to him, he froze. Fear was undoubtedly an ingredient but a larger component was repugnance. That and plain simple overload. His decision making switch got flipped to off. The boss went AFK and nothing was going to get done until the boss got back.
Elliot seemed to glide past him.
A casual observer would might have noted how perfectly timed the move was but Joe was in no position to appreciate it fully at the time. To him, the young man merely moved with an almost uncanny speed.
Not supernaturally uncanny but a fluidity of motion that spoke of years of practice and repetition. Action fired by muscle memory and honed to something exquisitely machinelike in its efficiency. An efficiency achieved by the drill of discipline and tempered by the grace of intuition.
Elliot sprang ahead of Joe and intercepted the creature before it could reach him but too late for the things focus to switch to a new target.
The baton hooked the thing’s head as Elliot dropped and swept his leg to deflect it away from Joe and over and behind himself. His pirouette and rise tracked the thing’s progress in the same motion. The grimace that rictussed his features was all that betrayed the pain in his leg and his revulsion at what he was about to do.
The creature was incredibly fast but not fast enough to avoid the blurred frenzy of the baton as Elliot battered its head. Denied the opportunity to spring, it advanced nonetheless, driving Elliot back until he performed another momentum wrenching twist and redirection that threw the thing to the ground.
Gasping for breath and drained, Elliot was dismayed at its monstrous resilience.
A psychotic flurry of blows that should have proved lethal had only caused it to slow down. Dulled its reactions. However skilled, Elliot was a miserly seventeen years of age, whip thin and without reserves. Nearing the point of his emotional and physical capacity.
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