In desperation, he swung the baton overhead with all his strength and delivered what could only be a killing strike. The nightstick shattered over the thing’s head and he reeled back clutching the remnants. Legs failed him and he collapsed painfully to the ground.
The thing loomed in front him.
Staggered and slow but still coming. Goopily thick blood welled sluggishly to lend it a curiously liquid Mohican. It was over him as he dropped to his back, the hard surface scraping skin and jarring his bony spine. Just one more injury added to a growing list.
The hunger was still in its eyes.
The shine of avarice and desire without reason. Wet teeth flashed glints in the brilliant sunlight. It didn’t so much leap as fall onto him.
And he was still fast.
However tired, however spent, that speed remained. As it pitched forward, teeth bared to bite, Elliot whipped the jagged point of the broken baton upwards and stiff-armed through its eye with such force that the baton exploded out of the back of its deformed skull.
Chapter 3.
George Coming Down.
A chirruping cricket awakened him.
No. Not a cricket.
A cicada. That was it. A cicada from one of the holidays.
One of the holidays where there were thousands of cicadas. The Guia holidays in Portugal, where they did that fantastic chicken.
Hot. Hot chicken. Wow was it hot, but it tasted so good. Your lips tingled with the heat and drinking coke just made it hotter still.
The cicada wasn’t a cicada. Or a cricket. It was his phone, vibrating and chirping against his hip, a muted ringtone chosen by his dad which George had never possessed the heart to change. Snug in the pocket of his navy blue Adidas joggers. An old hand-me-down HTC phone from his dad that he was advised didn’t have all the bells and whistles but would take a few knocks and do a job until he got a bit older.
George’s lips were kind of burning though. Tingling. It took him a moment or two to identify that it was thirst. There was sweat on his skin because it was pretty hot.
Stiflingly hot in fact. The air had that thick syrupy feeling you get when you disembarked from a plane that had landed in a warmer climate than the one from which you departed. That shock of heat in your lungs after thin cold plane air.
It’s always gonna be hotter in an enclosed, unconditioned higher space Geodude. A space like a loft.
His dad’s voice in his head.
George didn’t mind his dad calling him Geodude, the very first online username he chose for himself ...alright, chose for himself with his dad’s help. He guessed it was probably a bit babyish now but it still had some cred. He hated being called Georeg, pronounced Johreg with a hard Gee at the end, as his brother liked to explain when asked.
It stemmed from a username he created on YouTube. Under his own steam, he’d spelled his own name incorrectly and then compounded the mistake by showing it to the guys without noticing the spelling error. Thomas and Alfie and, worst of all, Elliot his own brother, pounced on it like cats playing with a slippery fish. A way to bait him that he couldn’t refute.
He was wedged against a soft cardboard box in a dark hot space. Heeling himself into a more upright position, further squashing the pliant box, he groggily manipulated the phone out of his pocket and dragged a sweaty digit down the small screen to activate the call.
Rammed it to his ear.
“Yeah ...hello.”
“George?”
“Yeah. Elliot? Is that you?”
“Listen Gee, I don’t have long. Are you alright? How are mom and dad?”
Elliot’s voice sounded oddly tense and urgent. Edginess spiced with fear.
George couldn’t speak, couldn’t capture what he needed to say or even assess what those words might be.
“Ell, I need you here. I need you here now. Do you ...bloody-well understand? Now. It’s bad. Mom and dad ...aren’t mom and dad anymore. I ...it’s ...”
“I’ll come. I know. I understand,” Elliot interrupted.
“George, I understand. Stay in the house and lock the doors. Get some stuff. Food, water, and hide. Stay quiet. Wait til I get there.”
Words sputtering across the void like sparks in the darkness.
George saw his surroundings, saw the loft.
Saw the desiccated thing wedged in the trapdoor.
Nailed in place with a red handled screwdriver.
He snatch-brushed cobwebs off his forehead with his left hand and uttered a subdued mewl of disgust as he batted an inch wide spider from his chest.
“I can’t stay here Ell. They’ll get me. It’s not safe, they’ll get me.”
The phone clanked and grumbled against his ear. He moved it in front of his face and pressed to light the screen. The green phone symbol was still showing. The duration counter still turning over. Nearly three minutes? Was that right? Just three minutes of conversation with his brother?
He put the phone back to his ear.
“George go to the Church Rooms. I’ll come for you there,” Elliot said.
The Church Rooms were where they had their weekly karate classes. George desperately tried to envision where they were located and how he would get there. They didn’t walk to karate, they were ferried there by an adult. He didn’t walk there. The location didn’t register.
“How? Elliot, how do I get there?” He whispered plaintively into the handset.
“By our junior school. Go down to the shops at the bottom of our hill and turn left. Get to Oakhill village centre and go left again. If the rooms are locked go round the back to the toilet window. You remember? They always leave the bog window open. We got in that time with the guys. Bonfire Night, you must remember,” Elliot replied.
His voice fading in and out as the connection seemed to stretch and thin.
“Gotta go Johreg. It’s bad here as well mate.”
The phone went dead in George’s hand. The screen hot and slick and sliding against his ear.
<><><>
Getting out of the loft was something George had little pleasure in recalling. The creature was wedged in the hatch. That was how he had to think of it.
The creature.
Better to think of it that way instead of thinking of it as ...as his mother. Their mother. He and Elliot. It had ceased being that as soon as the mutation had set in properly. As soon as she collapsed really. After that, their mother had effectively ceased to exist.
She’d passed away as he’d heard his parents refer to a family friend that had died. His mother had passed away long before he delivered the killing blow. If he remembered that, and prevented himself thinking of it differently, there was a chance that he might not go completely nuts.
And he’d go nuts, and possibly die of dehydration into the bargain, if he didn’t get out of the loft. There wasn’t any choice from what he could see. The obstacle had to be removed.
Gosh, obstacle might be an even better term than creature. Definitely better than mother.
His course of action was logical, unavoidable really, but still horrible in execution. He considered that problem and did what was necessary to solve it. Removing the screwdriver that pinned her hand took longer than he expected. Was so much more difficult than he would have wanted.
The corpse slid but wedged on the loft hatch. Fractured wooden edge snagging the hideous skull of the corpse. George wrenched and grappled with it, ignored the sharp stabbing splinters that buried themselves in his hands, and fell back as it eventually gave.
The sound as the body thumped to the carpeted floor below turned his stomach. He rolled onto his side and silently vomited.
Light headed and weak, George rolled back to the hatch and surveyed his handiwork. Stared at the prone form below. He gathered himself and swung by fingertips onto his bed to avoid landing on the corpse. Squatted there on all fours, staring at the dead form. Glanced back up. The loft door was open. If need be, he could climb from the bed, step onto his windowsill, grab the curtain ra
il and boost himself back into the loft. But there wouldn’t be much safety there, the hatch was beyond closing.
His gaze was drawn back to the body. He was momentarily overcome by nausea again. Sick in his guts. His bowels felt hot and squishy.
He had to get out of here.
He crept to the bathroom next to his bedroom and emptied his bladder and bowels. Left the pan full and stinking and went carefully down the stairs. Trepidation in his step and the dry taste of dread in his mouth.
His father was gone, the back door broken and swinging. The house was empty. He closed the door as best he could and guzzled glass after glass of water from the tap. At the back of his mind, George had secretly hoped to find his dad recovered and ready to help. Ready to order this terrible mess into some sort of sense. But that wasn’t to going to happen. His father was gone.
George knew what he’d told his brother was right. He couldn’t stay here. It didn’t feel remotely safe, but it was more than that. It felt desolate and ruined. Something good that had gone bad, like the milk they’d accidentally left on the kitchen counter once when they went away. Two weeks later, the whole house reeked of that sickly sour smell. That smell eventually went away, but George didn’t think this smell would ever dissipate. This smell was in his head as well as the fabric of the building.
Getting to the Church Rooms should be possible in theory. There were closer options, Thomas and Alfie lived nearby. So did Amy Miller for that matter, but he’d already tried contacting them all and they hadn’t responded. To his mind, no response meant they had been ill ...and if they had been ill, they could be changed or in the process of changing. Elliot’s suggestion, the Church Rooms, made total sense. It should be empty of people and it was away from other houses.
He guessed that it was, at most, a walk of twenty-five minutes to the church in normal circumstances. Not that this was in any way normal. Not that he’d ever walked it either. He’d always been taken there in a car.
He mapped the route in his head and then applied what he knew of the roads and short cuts and how they worked with that route.
George gathered what he thought might be useful, packing the messenger bag he used for his laptop, not including the precious laptop itself. There was only so much he could carry and right now the computer didn’t seem that important. He had a backpack that would probably have been more sensible but it was in his bedroom and he didn’t want to go back up there. Not there, where the body lay.
He was aware that he ought to have a weapon. Anything would be better than nothing. The thought of arming himself brought the nausea bubbling back to the surface again, but he knew he had to consider it. He went to the kitchen and gingerly plucked the biggest knife he could find from the drawer.
Don’t go rummaging around in there George, they’re really sharp.
A wicked looking Henckels cook’s knife, nine inch blade gleaming in the diffuse light bleeding between the blinds. It belonged to his mom. She liked cooking although she burned a lot of stuff. Said she was like that woman in butterflies but he never really understood that. An old comedy show or something.
“She used to like cooking,” he corrected, the words so quiet he could barely hear them himself.
He wanted nothing more than to drop the knife back into the drawer and lie down. Lie down and close his eyes, sleep, and wake up to find all of this was just a vividly bad dream. A nightmare of truly titanic proportions.
He shuddered in revulsion. Swallowed. The lump in his throat close to painful, the black handle of the knife cold against his palm.
A steel strip ran along the spine of that handle and it was cold.
He didn’t put the knife back, instead added it to the front zip compartment of the messenger bag.
<><><>
The Lowtons house was an aging semi-detached but it bordered a newer housing estate. That estate had an unusual design, lines of bungalows alternating with lines of link-detached houses. Vehicular access was generally at the rear of these properties, a footpath and garden at the front. The result was a warren of interconnected paths and very few actual roads. George had figured out a course whereby he could cover the first part of the journey using these paths and the passageways between buildings. He wasn’t sure if it was safer but it would be more direct. More than that, the idea of being out in the open, on the roads, felt too exposed.
Too open. Fewer places to hide.
Pausing to check the back garden, he edged outside and quietly closed what was left of the door behind him.
This was it then.
He felt as though he were setting out on some expedition fraught with danger. Which, although he had no way of truly comprehending the extent of that danger, was entirely accurate. He looked at his house and garden and a wave of emotion passed over him causing tears to prickle his eyes.
The dilapidated shed.
Two mismatched and mildewed plastic soccer goals with nets bleached grey from years of sitting in the sun and rain.
A spread of discarded footballs in various stages of deflation. The tattered trampoline that they no longer used, waiting patiently for his dad to dismantle and remove it. George and Elliot had outgrown it. They were getting too big now, and too old really, too preoccupied by other distractions and new things.
George didn’t think anyone would be dismantling it now. It would simply sit there forever until it collapsed and then the remnants would in turn simply lie where they’d fallen.
There was a sense of finality to that moment. He scrubbed at his eyes, irritated with himself for feeling so stupidly emotional about leaving his house. He knew it wasn’t just the house, although it was true that he had always loved living there. It was the whole thing. What his parents had turned into and what he’d done to one of them. The unspeakably awful conflict in the loft.
The absolute change that had taken place in such a staggeringly short span of time.
There was no going back from that or any of this. It wasn’t a dream and he wasn’t going to wake up and find everything normal, sunlight streaming through the gap in his curtains and either his mom or dad handing him a glass of milk and asking what he wanted for breakfast when he went downstairs.
They were both gone. One completely, dead in his bedroom if you wanted to check. One in a way that he didn’t begin to understand but which left a slimy metallic dread in his mouth.
He wiped his eyes one more time and made his way to a gate at the bottom of the garden. The gate led onto an alley that separated this row of older residences from the newer estate. He silently exited the garden into the division that ran along the back of the gardens and the new estate.
He hunkered by his gate and tried to get a feel for things. It was a bright day, end of May freshness that felt totally inappropriate to the situation. George should have been excitedly thinking about the imminent summer holidays. Six weeks of freedom with the prospect of an early hours flight to the sun, followed by fourteen days of swimming pool and mosquito repellent, sun block and night swims. Instead he was crouched in an alley, a dead body behind him and a carving knife holstered in his bag. Fear sweat on his upper lip and the shadow of despair on his heart.
Now that he was outside he could almost touch the strange quiet that filled the world. Not silence but a scary mix of the everyday and the disturbing. Birds in the tress and a scream in the middle distance, still near enough to make his blood run cold. The roar of an engine, wildly accelerating and then receding. The more distant crash of breaking glass and further screams that culminated in a horrible wail.
The alley where he squatted was open at both ends. One, the direction that he intended going, led to the newer houses. The other was intersected by another pathway that led to more entries behind the older houses. It was there across the junction that he saw movement. A cat prowled into view, moving with the feline caution that they always seemed to exhibit, irrespective of whether the situation demanded it or not.
George thought that this situation proba
bly did.
He recognized it, the cat. A ginger tabby that belonged to a neighbour a few doors down. Inexplicably named Spot.
George wasn’t crazy about cats but his brother was enamoured of them and on the occasions that Elliot fussed her when George was him, Spot would wind around George’s ankles in a way that was pretty charming. She hadn’t ever tried to scratch him and most of the time was genuinely affectionate.
George kind of liked her. Spot was cute.
Without thinking he made that high-pitched kissing sound which his dad had told him never failed to get a cat’s attention.
Extended his arm and rustled his fingers to attract her. The cat stopped stock-still and fixed George with a penetrating stare. Then moved a little towards him.
What happened next was very fast.
Scarily fast.
A blur of motion.
The thing was stooped and thin. The point-tipped hand at the end of the thin twisted arm seemed too big, disproportionate to that somehow gnarled arm.
The arm blurred and the hand snatched the cat.
The talons seeming to punch into Spot’s body and lift her away as the thing disappeared from view. The cat gone with it.
A tortured squeal spiralled into the air. A horrible scrawl of sound that hurt his ears and offended his senses.
George found it hard to believe a sound like that could issue from the cute little cat. Hard to believe that noise such as that could be produced by a friendly little ball of ginger fur.
Spot scrabbled back into sight, dragging herself, body broken and desperate. Coat splotched and matted with blood.
Wauling in pain.
Pathetic and appalling.
He wanted to shut that sound out, clamp hands over his ears, but he was too terrified to move. Crouched hypnotised with horror and fear as the thing leapt back into view. Seized its prey and tore at it, ripping and eating. It was similar to the thing that his mother had morphed into but less ...less human.
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