by Ian Woodhead
God, what he would do right now for a pint of ice-cold lager…
“Any better?”
He nodded. The ache in his lungs had lost some of its edge and the stitch wasn’t too noticeable as long as he kept perfectly still.
“We need to get a move on Damien, it might have followed us.”
Bollocks to that, Damien wasn’t going anywhere. Besides, he didn’t think it would stray too far from its nest. The fucker had been as big as them, plus it had eight legs, it could have run them down while they were fleeing from that shop.
He didn’t bother mentioning this to Jennifer, he had no wish to pick another fight with her, and not when it was his fault in the first place that they’d nearly been killed.
Damien had only said that considering the circumstances that they should get tooled up, they needed weapons. She was having none of it, telling him that their only option was to keep running and to get out of Holburn as soon as they could. She had told him that this was no fucking video game and to stop acting like a big kid. Damien took her advice on board, then put a brick through the DIY store.
He’d been in here last week with Tony, drooling over the hunting knives kept in a glass display case near the fishing gear. He’d decided to liberate the biggest one. He was so focused on his glittering prize at the back of the store; he hadn’t noticed the body of the woman until his foot sank into the side of her head.
He felt like he’d just stood in an ice-cream shaped ball. Thick grey porridge-like goo oozed from the hole his Adidas trainer had made. His numbed mind couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. The bones in his legs melted and he grabbed the first thing his grasping hands found to stop him falling into the glutinous ruin before him.
This just wasn’t possible. How could a body be no longer solid? Dozens of clear, plastic packets of screws rained down from the shelf, some of them fell onto the corpse and sank out of sight. He couldn’t take any more of this, fuck the knife, he should have listened to Jennifer, and he turned and ran back the way he came.
Jen was picking her way through the hole. She saw him running towards her then looked past him and screamed. He shouldn’t have stopped and turned around but he couldn’t help it. What he saw scuttling towards them at high speed across the ceiling almost stopped his heart.
A spider-like creature the size of an Alsatian dog had them it its sights. Four front legs hung down, the thick, black bristled legs clicking together like knitting needles, constructing a silken sheet.
Damien nearly lost control of his bladder at the sight of the tattered brown overall hanging off its bloated body. A white plastic name tag pinned to the material bumped against one of its legs every time it moved. Oh my God, that was Jerome; he was the dork who’d told him and Tony to bugger off out of the shop.
A tin of oven cleaner arced over his head, hitting the spider thing between the eyes. The movement broke the spell it had cast over him. Jen grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the shop. This time he didn’t look back.
Damien pulled away from the bus shelter window. His head left an impression in the plastic. Everything of human origin was living on borrowed time. How long would it be before the stuff started to eat into the metal? How long before he was eaten away or changed into one of those monsters? He scraped off the green slop that had collected over the pink gauze and flicked it onto the dissolving window.
“Help me up, Jen.”
She pulled him up with little effort, and he resented the fact that she seemed to be coping with this better than he was.
“Are you ready for the next bus shelter dash?”
He shook his head. “We can’t go on like this Jen. This stuff is getting thicker, if we don’t get out of this damn fog; I think it’ll kill us.”
“We should be at your house in a few minutes, it can’t be that far now.”
He put his weight against one of the metal columns. The plastic window wobbled but the metal didn’t move.
“We need to get higher. A footbridge will do, or maybe the fire exit ladders on the side of a building.” He tapped the post in the bus shelter. “Has to be metal though.”
She stopped writing her name with her finger in the soft plastic window and slowly turned to face him, Damien could tell from the look on her face that she had guessed.
“If I get above the fog then I’ll be able to tell where we are,” he told her.
“So we’re lost”
He nodded.
“Fuck.”
Damien peered out of the bus shelter to where the road should have been. This weird green stuff was now so thick that almost all details were obscured, but it was still clear enough to see that the road was no longer smooth. Dark barbs of huge plants had started to push up through the ground, tarmac and stone losing the fight against this new and aggressive plant life.
He knew that it would soon be almost impossible to travel anywhere.
“What about the fire station?” she asked. “There’s bound to be loads of ladders in there.”
“I’m sure there is. But we’re lost. How do you expect us to find it? Ring 999 and ask for directions?”
She dug her nails into his sleeve and pulled him away from the kerb. “Despite what you may think Damien, I’m not a total balloon head. I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t know where it was.”
He allowed her to drag him out of the bus shelter and up to a high brick wall and told him to look up. A large metal sign reading Holburn Fire Station stared down at him.
Jennifer might be pleased about her discovery but Damien sure as hell wasn’t. The fire station was on the opposite side of town to the DIY shop, almost three miles away; it also meant that they were even further away from his house.
“A lucky find,” he murmured, not believing a word of it. This fog had buggered up his sense of direction but it sure as hell hadn’t buggered up his geography as well and this should not have been here.
Damien hurried to catch up with her as he followed Jennifer through the open gates. He looked back, watching the bus shelter vanish behind the thick green fog.
This just wasn’t possible, how could they have moved three miles across town? Damien couldn’t explain his fears to Jennifer, she wasn’t a local. The daft cow would just call Damien a balloon head again and tell him to stop being so stupid.
He was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to notice that his girlfriend had melted into the fog, the spore clouds were now so thick he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. He found himself alone, lost and blind.
“Jen?” he whispered. “Where are you?”
Damien received no reply.
“Jennifer?” he shouted. “Where the hell are you?”
He fished his phone out of his pocket intending to ring her, gratified to see that there was no sign of plant corruption on it. But there was still no signal.
As Damien dropped the phone into his pocket, a pair of hands picked him off the ground. They threw him into the rusted hulk of a VW campervan. His dazed and shaken brain catalogued the black furry syrup pooling around the wheel rims before Jennifer bent over him. This time, her hands took hold of the front of his shirt and she lifted him off the ground, as if he weighed less than a bag of feathers. Damien gazed at his girlfriend’s luminescent green eyes and the papery fronds growing out of the corner of her mouth. She had started to change, to become one of them. His darling Jennifer was now going to complete the job her brother had started.
He was a dead man.
“What the hell are you playing at Damien? There’s no bloody need to shout when I’m stood next to you!”
What the hell? How could she be not aware that she was changing? He couldn’t believe it. Perhaps there was a God after all.
“I’ll tell you what, you docile twat. Why don’t I give you a megaphone so you can shout out our position to the rest of the planet?”
“I c- couldn’t see you,” he stammered. “I thought you’d left me.”
Her features soft
ened. If she wasn’t aware of what was happening to her, what would happen when she did? It wouldn’t take much. Catching a reflection in a window, brushing her hand across her face would be enough. Damien wanted to trust her, believe that despite the changes she was essentially the same person inside.
“I’m sorry Damien, I didn’t mean to shout.”
“No, it’s my fault. I panicked, that’s all.”
Jen brushed her hand down her face, his heart pushed up into his throat when she grabbed the stuff between her fingers and pulled it off, leaving a dark, green slimy looking hole by her mouth. The wound closed up and healed before his eyes. Jen gave the thing a puzzled look then dropped it onto the floor, forgotten. She let out a soft laugh.
“This isn’t how I envisioned we would spend today.” She sat down beside him and placed her hand on his thigh. He did his best not to recoil from her touch.
The stuff she had pulled off was right by his ankle, even at this distance, he could tell that there was nothing in the human anatomy that could compare. So how come she couldn’t see that when it was right in front of her eyes? He gazed at Jen, trying to smile while looking for any more abnormalities.
Whatever was doing this to her must have some sort of built in defence mechanism that stopped the host from realising it was being altered.
He raised his own hand when the consequences of his thoughts hit home. If she hadn’t a clue then what if the same thing was happening to him? Should he have this many digits? Should his skin be that colour? Fuck, should he even have hands? Jesus, he could go crazy thinking like this.
“What are you doing?”
He dropped his hands to his sides feeling as guilty as hell.
“Nothing,” he said. Damien sat there, desperately trying to think of some convincing lie to allay her suspicion when she jumped to her feet.
Jen sniffed the air around her, the movement looking more simian than human. She then spun around and ducked back behind the van with her eyes peering through the windowless driver door. She motioned him to get up with a frantic wave of her hand. Moving from where she had thrown him proved more difficult than he thought; his battered body just wanted to stay where it was. He considered giving in to his body’s wishes but he knew that pissing off the new and improved Jennifer would be ill-advised; he’d rather get up of his own accord than have her dragging him up.
He sidled up beside her, trying not to dwell on just how much pain he was in.
“Can you see them?” she asked.
He shook his head, for him, visibility stopped at the other side of the van.
“There’s nothing there,” he said. “You must be seeing things.”
“And you need your bloody eyes testing,” she muttered. She put her hands at either side of his head and twisted it to one side. Two sets of crimson lights stared back at him.
Damien forced himself to relax. They couldn’t get him, not out here. They must be looking out of a window or stood beside a door.
“Can you see them?”
“I can now.”
“We need to get out of here before they spot us.”
“No chance. I’m too shagged out to go anywhere.”
She looked at him as if he had grown a new head.
“I need to rest Jen. Those things won’t come out of that building until it gets dark and by that time we’ll be with Alan.”
Jen just stared at him, not moving and not speaking.
“Where are you looking?” she asked. “The fire station’s over there. Those things are stood out in the open.” She tensed up. “Oh shit, I think they can sense us, we really do need to get out of here!”
“No Jen, we can’t leave yet, it’ll be like running around in a lion enclosure with a blindfold on.”
“But I can see through it.”
“I fucking can’t.” He pulled her towards him. “We need to stay.”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
He nodded then grabbed the end of the pink scarf and pulled. The fabric fell apart like ash, Damien knew he was taking a huge chance here but he was betting that whatever was changing her would not prevent Jen from seeing the bloody obvious.
“This stuff is eating into everything. Look at those tyres, for crying out loud. These scarves are falling apart. How long do you think we have before we start breathing this poison in? Ten, maybe twenty minutes?”
Jennifer gasped. She pulled him up, slammed him against the side of the van then covered his body with hers. He immediately presumed the worst. He’d pushed her too far. Jennifer realised she was different and now Damien was about to find out that the warranty on his life was invalid.
“Stop moving,” she hissed. “They’ll see us.”
Damien ceased his struggling; she wasn’t going to eat him after all.
Quite the opposite, he watched the dozens of red lantern lights streaming past the campervan, seeing thirty before he stopped counting. His heart thudded hard against the inside of his chest; he was sure that if any of them made the slightest twitch that endless procession of armour-plated monsters would break ranks and rip through them like starving piranhas. The chances of him moving anything but his eyes were remote. Jennifer had him pinned, his tortured muscles screaming out in agony at being locked into position. Her hand searched out his and she gave him a comforting squeeze. His hand was being held by a miner or a builder, hard and calloused. Damien wasn’t comforted, she squeezed tighter, oh god, and she was fucking crushing it. Through watering eyes he saw why.
One of the demonic things wasn’t following its colleagues through the mist, it stood as still as a statue, its bright red eyes reflecting off the metal above his head like twin red lasers.
His heartbeat accelerated to the speed of a pneumatic drill. It couldn’t see them, he remembered that from the encounter with Tony, but he suspected that it may be able to smell them. Why not? Jen could smell them coming.
The black demon’s curiosity may have got the better of him if it hadn’t been for another one behind it pushing it. The first one hissed then continued onward, apparently forgetting why it had stopped in the first place.
Jen stepped back and he flopped to the floor like a stringless puppet.
“Right, that’s it!” she announced. Jennifer seemed oblivious that he was face down in filth and creased up in agony. “We’re getting out of here right now. Are you coming or not?”
He was no fit state to even crawl out of here, could she not see that? He feared that if he pushed her hard enough then she really would just walk out and leave him here. After all, this was the new and improved Jennifer, half human, half fuck knows what.
“Help me up,” he croaked.
Jennifer rolled her eyes, sighed, and then with no effort at all lifted him up onto his feet.
“If you did a little more exercise then maybe you wouldn’t feel so tired.”
He just nodded and agreed. “If we’re going to leave then maybe you can carry me out” Damien was talking to himself, she wasn’t even looking at him.
“Jen?”
“That wasn’t there a minute ago, I’m sure of it.” She murmured.
He looked around and saw a metal pole leaning against the side of the van. She was right, that wasn’t there earlier. It would make a good weapon though. Not quite as effective as that Klingon sword but certainly better than nothing. He reached over, intending to grab it to take a closer look.
“Leave it.” she said.
“Why?”
“We don’t know where it came from.”
He looked at the tiny mushrooms growing out of the puddle of tyre rubber, the yellow vines trying to find purchase around her boots and finally at the frond that had re-appeared on her face and wondered if she knew how stupid she sounded. Well, if she thought that he was going to follow her around in the fog like some defenceless mole without the ability to defend himself she had another thing coming. He reached over and put his hands around the thin metal shaft.
The ice cold
metal glued itself to his palm. Panic gripped him when he was unable to unclench his fist. He turned to Jen for help but she wasn’t even moving, her features frozen.
This wasn’t a metal pole; it must be some other strange life form. The pole texture in contact with his skin altered from smooth to ridged, it was like holding a cylindrical cheese grater. He imagined hundreds of hollow spines about to thrust up and suck out his blood or inject him with a poison. Oh God, he should have listened to her.
Jen’s hand moved toward the pole in a painfully slow motion, he couldn’t stop her and they were both going to die. A rush of endorphins burst into his brain, blocking out the panic and terror and replacing them with a supreme sense of calm and peace. He closed his eyes and grinned, feeling his energy levels rise from nothing to max out full.
Some of that sense of wellbeing left him, just for a moment. It transferred over to Jennifer, she giggled like a school girl. Damien didn’t want to share, he wanted it back.
He opened his eyes and saw Jen in stood in front of him, her hands tight around his looking like she was on the verge of orgasm. He now knew that what was buzzing through his body was just a drug high and very soon he’d be back to feeling like shit again, but at least now he knew that he wasn’t going mad.
Alan was indeed watching over them.
“Oh my word,” she whispered. She dropped down and kissed him full on the mouth. She pulled back, her eyes shining.