Lennon joined his brother by the window.
‘What d’ya think Sherlock? What’s caused this?’ Lennon asked, smiling much more than the situation dictated. Dylan didn’t mind that Lennon was always smiling for some reason or another. He had no worries. No commitments. A free agent. No mortgage. No income tax. No VAT. No money back, no guarantee. Somehow, he envied his unshackled, wandering nature. Lennon Keene was a relentless shyster and a sofa crashing layabout who fumbled from one situation to the next without much thought for the dire consequences. Like a big eyed, wag tailed puppy in a china shop. He guessed it was the constant flow of weed in his system that fuelled his happy-go-lucky nature and cushioned him from reality.
‘Mass hysteria, without the hysteria, poison gas cloud, bad signal from mobile telephones frying people’s brains? Christ, who knows?’ Dylan let the pondering loose, a wounded beast that had no cure.
‘Someone does, we just have to figure out who.’
‘Brother,’ Dylan slapped a hand on Lennon’s shoulder, ‘that may be the smartest thing you’ve ever said.’
‘Do I get a sticker?’
‘You get to stay another hour, good enough?’
‘Hardy ha! I ain’t going nowhere bruv.’
They both sighed as the town bus that passed by the house roughly every forty minutes from 6:11am onwards, pulled up across the road, blocking out the old man at the bus stop who had stood in the rain.
The bus, which was half filled with OAP’s en-route to run errands in town and students who hadn’t passed their driving tests, was a collage of faces, each of which turned round in unison and stared directly and casually at the house. The driver stalled the bus with a gentle jolt, He turned toward the house, following the gaze of his passengers.
Dylan shivered.
Kirsty stepped into the living room and handed them both a glass of orange juice. Dylan and his brother both sipped the cool, tangy liquid sunshine whilst contemplating the situation that was unfolding outside. The citric acid cut through the clag that had formed in their mouth since last night’s session.
‘So we can’t drink the water then?’ Kirsty whispered.
‘I wouldn’t. Not until we know what’s going on, there could be anything in it.’
‘Should we bottle some up. Y’know just in case?’ Kirsty asked.
‘That might not be such a bad idea. Preserve what we can…’
‘While we can,’ she finished the sentence for him. They smiled at each other.
‘It’s a flash mob, it must be. Some kids have organised it on Face Space or something? Maybe they’ll start dancing in a bit.’ Lennon theorised, nodding to himself, ‘yeah?’
‘No,’ Dylan responded. Lennon’s forehead furrowed. ‘One, why would they invite old people, and two, there’s a guy out there who got smashed by a car and nobody seems to be doing a damned thing about it. Even flash mobs gotta have a heart somewhere.’
‘True. Good point. Duly noted,’ Lennon returned to sipping his juice, pondering further.
‘We should fill up every container we can find with water. We’ve got a few empty bottles under the sink, we’ll fill every pan, every cup, the bath, every old takeaway container we can find. Before this gets worse.’
‘Why?’ asked Lennon.
‘Well, we don’t know how long this’ll last, do we?’
‘It’ll be over by this afternoon, tonight the latest. Everything is temporary.’
Dylan gave his brother a glaring look. ‘Like the water supply?’
‘Again, good point. I retract my statement.’
‘I’ll get started on that, why don’t you check the news, see if there’s anything related to what’s going on outside,’ Kirsty left for the kitchen. Pots and pans rattled, water gushed intermittently from the faucet.
Dylan turned on the television whilst Lennon continued staring outside the front window, straight back at the Starers.
The news was usual and boring. A footballer cheated on his wife; again. More deaths during a violent protest in the war ravaged Middle East. An earthquake in the Atlantic puts the west coast of Africa on a tsunami warning. A hurricane in the States kills fifty in the Florida Keys, the usual crap. But nothing about what was going on outside. It must be local.
The newscaster staring straight at him unnerved Dylan a bit. He thumbed the red button and turned off the television. He didn’t want to be stared at anymore. He’d check the news in half an hour or so.
Dylan headed back into the kitchen. Kirsty was at the sink filling the large pan she usually used for boiling spaghetti while his daughter sat down at the table nursing a glass of orange juice, gazing blankly at the wall.
‘It’s just us,’ Dylan told her, ‘It’s a local job. Nowhere else is experiencing the same weirdness as us.’
Kirsty stopped filling the heavy pan and placed it on the worktop. ‘Strange. It’s giving me a bad feeling, the fact that they just stand there. It’s like they’re all waiting for something to happen. Poised.’
‘Maybe they’re waiting for us to come out so they can eat our brains.’
‘I think if the crowd harboured any hatred or hunger towards us they would have attacked the house already, don’t you reckon?’
‘Possibly.’ Dylan drained the orange juice with a long gulp and placed the dirty glass on the counter top beside the sink.
‘Hey, you gonna wash that up?’ Kirsty questioned with a raised eyebrow.
‘I don’t think we can afford to waste the water, darling,’ Dylan responded with a grin. He even managed a comforting rub of her bum while their daughter had her back to them.
‘Hmmm . . . any excuse,’ Kirsty whispered. She turned from the sink and embraced him, giving him a comforting peck on the cheek.
‘I think that guy’s dead out there,’ Lennon called from the window.
Kirsty followed Dylan into the living room. Even Lucy showed concern and left the table to join them at the window. All four of them looked out at the circus of people gathering outside. The young guy with the dead dog lay on the road, legs twisted round awkward and misshapen, a shining puddle of dark blood formed around the tarmac beneath him. His eyes were open, still staring at the house. But he was dead; life had left his eyes despite them still being fixated on the house, his head now rested in broken peace on the kerbside. More strangers had gathered outside. Now well over fifty, all spaced out, in mind as well as location. Scattered was the word Dylan was looking for, they were scattered.
A policeman.
A lady with twins in a silver cross, the toddlers looked over the side of the pram, dummies still in their mouths, both mirroring each other’s placid, cherubic gaze.
A cyclist had stopped, now he leant on one leg whilst still sat on his bike, his gaze fixed earnest and unrelenting upon the house.
He didn’t recognize anybody he knew. All strangers. They didn’t live in the largest of towns, but it was impossible to know everybody nowadays.
‘This is getting weird,’ Lennon said with a shake of his head.
‘You’re saying that now?’ Kirsty managed half a broken smile.
‘Yeah, it’s starting to sink in that we’ve woken up in the Twilight Zone.’
‘It looks that way, brother,’ Dylan replied.
‘You guys mind if I smoke?’ Lennon asked; his voice went high when he found himself under stress. He sounded like a trumpet blown by a baboon. He searched round anxiously for his cigarettes, patting his pockets down, his face grimacing in disappointment. Lennon then headed over to his jacket that he’d slung over the back of the sofa.
‘Not in the house,’ Kirsty warned, ‘I hate the smell.’
‘Bathroom window mate,’ Dylan pointed upstairs, he didn’t smoke in front of his wife, not since he’d told her that he’d quit. She thought it was a waste of money; which it was. Dylan went to great effort to hide his secret habit; only smoking outside so the odour didn’t penetrate his clothes, washing his hands after each cigarette and chewing gum to take the
taste of ash from his breath.
Lennon left and headed upstairs. A brief worry materialized that he might let in whatever was causing the weirdness outside. But if it wanted to get in, it would be inside already. Dylan shrugged the thought off and turned the television back on in time for the local news.
Kirsty and Lucy continued to gawp at the Starers outside. Transfixed by the mass that had accumulated outside their house; even as they watched, ten more people joined the crowd. Animals it seemed, were unaffected by what was going on as a stray Labrador roamed the crowd, sniffing each individual’s shoes with weary interest. Oddly, the dog’s tail was tucked firmly between its legs as it investigated the crowd. Sulking at their feet, a worry pained the canine.
The local news brought up little of interest as the female newscaster droned on about local events; a twenty-year-old goldfish that had died and an up and coming rock band made up of eleven year olds. Dylan was about to turn off when halfway through handing over to the weather girl, the female newscaster stood up and left the screen without explanation, noisily dropping her notes all over the desktop in the process. The camera remained fixed on the empty chair and the desk of scattered papers.
A spike of ice split Dylan Keene’s spine in two as he shivered from the image on screen. This wasn’t right.
‘Girls,’ Dylan said, his voice on the verge of breaking down. They both turned round from the window, ‘I think it’s spreading. The local television studio is what . . . Ten miles from here?’
Lucy and her mother turned round and looked at the empty studio on the screen. They watched as it remained that way for three minutes before a message scrawled across a blue-sky background appeared and said:
We are experiencing a technical difficulty.
Normal programming will return shortly.
Even after Lennon returned downstairs from his fourth cigarette, the screen remained the same. Dylan got the feeling they weren’t coming back, so he turned off the television and begrudgingly let the cloud of worry that was forming around his mind grow just that little bit bigger.
Suffocation
Lennon paced, maybe for an hour or so. Back and forth, back and forth from the bay window to the kitchen.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Forth and back.
Forth and back.
Soon his ambling repetition had carved out a vague desire line into the beige carpet. He hungered for a cigarette but he’d already smoked his last four within the space of an hour out of the bathroom window. He had a perve over Mrs Loughery from above, but he gained no pleasure from knowing she was completely out of her mind. An obese elderly woman had appeared in the back garden. She stood three feet behind Mrs Loughery, except she had a bright pink dressing gown on, covering her no doubt grotesque flabby curves. Thank Christ, thought Lennon.
***
Curled up by the bay window, Lucy stared outside. At first she had been unmoved by the unfolding strangeness of the day, but now, whilst everyone around her fretted and worried, the reality of the situation had dawned on her. She had tried to put it down to shock, her carrying on as if it were just a normal Saturday; get up, bitch at dad while she ate breakfast, bitch at dad until he gave her a lift into town.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
Every Saturday she’d head into town with Poppy Smith, Whitney King and Sammi Knowles. She was head of their little clique, whatever she said, went. If she wanted to see a film, they’d all go see a film. If she wanted to go shopping, they’d all go shopping. They just agreed with her. It was a gift.
Or maybe she was just a bitch.
With her ever so poor grades at school, bitching at people was the only thing she was good at really.
Vicky Hartlet from school once said she should take a G.S.C.E in Cow. She’d easily get an A+*. She pulled Vicky Hartlet down to her knees by her hair that day and pulled her through a muddy puddle. She’d never told anyone, neither of them had. Her parents knew she could be a bitch, but they weren’t privy to the full extent of her irritable ways. It was in her nature, it was a struggle to be nice sometimes.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
She repeated it to herself in her head.
She’d seen a man get run over. And she wanted to carry on as normal.
Christ, she was such a bitch, why couldn’t she just react like a normal person? She heard her mum and dad talking a few nights back about how she might have ADHD and asparagus syndrome or something like that.
Maybe she should give her dad a hug. Today seemed liked the kind of day he’d need it, families should stick together, right? She’d heard him the other day saying that he was having a bad time at work.
Should she change because the situation dictated it?
No, he had enough going on with the people outside. She’d leave it, talk to him later when the people go away. If they go away, she hoped.
She looked over at her mum and smiled. Kirsty Keene tried to smile back, but Lucy didn’t believe it. Mum was faking it.
Lucy shivered as a tiny ghost danced down her back with icy tiptoes.
A sense of déjà vu settled over her. She’d felt the same when she saw the man get run over. She put it down to tiredness. Blame the dream.
Parts of it came back to her. Flashes, scenes, half-spoken sentences lost to the abyss of sleepy thoughts.
The man getting run over.
Her mother’s fake smile.
The man in the coat.
An ache in the pit of her belly, a sense of straining fullness that burned her insides like acid as it pressed against her.
That was all she could remember. Just flashes, a sense of the scene, nothing more. She had definitely dreamt about today last night.
It frustrated her.
But not the man in the coat, he outright scared her. He was what woke her up so urgently. His smile gave her a shiver of cold dread. She hoped that she didn’t have to dream about him again.
***
Kirsty Keene had grown irritated at her brother-in-law’s pacing about five minutes in. That was over an hour ago. She felt right to not say anything as she didn’t want to come across as a nag, and the situation had put enough stress on them already. Even now, she still wasn’t sure what was going on.
It started like any other day, she mused to herself. Arguments, a drunken husband, and her late period had her bound up with enough worry. She was going to tell Dylan today, soon as Lennon had left and Kirsty had vanished off to her friends. She’d bought a pregnancy testing kit, she just hadn’t the guts to use it yet. She wanted Dylan beside her when they found out. When she found out about Lucy, he hadn’t been there. He’d been working late as usual, stuck on some desolate road in the middle of nowhere trying to find his destination. But it had been her fault, she could have waited but her impatience had got the better of her and she peed on the stick without him and regretted it ever since. It wasn’t something couples did often, finding out they were to have a child together. But this time she would make sure that Dylan was with her to share the joy. When eventually she told him about being pregnant with Lucy, he got down on one knee and proposed straight away, saying that it was the right thing to do. He sold his car and she pawned some of her grandmother’s jewellery that she’d been bequeathed, scraping together enough money and put a healthy deposit down on the house. The rest was hard-earned history.
Now it had led them all up to this extraordinary point in their lives with a strange crowd of people outside their home. Not battling hoards hungry for flesh like Dylan and Lennon’s dumb zombie films, smashing windows and battering down doors to eat their succulent brain jelly. Just a crowd, absent of free thought and expression, strangely hypnotised by the house and its occupants. For whatever reason, Kirsty didn’t like the way this was going to end. There had already been a death and it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning. The caring nature of society expected that they go outside and help the poor lad who had been run down; but an unnerving sense of concern, s
omething that whispered it was somewhat dangerous outside; they should stay where they were. She followed her gut, not her head, and not her heart. Her gut, that primeval membrane which forces us to flee any apparent dangers we sense in certain situations. Even when we could be brave, the gut is always right. They’d left the boy to die to guarantee their own safety.
She looked at her husband. Dylan stared out the window, his stance thoughtful and frozen, mirroring that of the Starers outside. Except Dylan blinked, she had noticed that none of them blinked. Had anyone else noticed this? Kirsty sidled up to Dylan and held his hand. It was cold and damp with sweat. He turned and smiled. She knew he didn’t mean it.
***
Dylan had taken his wife’s hand out of habit. In reality, he wanted to run, get in the car and just go. If they made it, well good for them.
You selfish bastard, he told himself. You can’t leave them, they’re your family. They might bicker and annoy the hell out of you but as the alpha male in this pack, it’s your job to protect them.
I know.
Even in an absent-minded manner, he nodded in agreement with himself. Protect the family. Besides, who said outside was safer than inside. Nobody, because everybody he cared about was in this house, and they had no more of a clue of what was happening today than he did. The only people to know anything about what was going on were the people outside. And they were remaining rather tight lipped on the subject.
Dylan reached down, picked up the house phone, and dialled 999. Pressing the speaker to his ear, he heard the phone at the other end just ring and ring.
‘Are you trying the police again?’ Kirsty asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Anybody answering?’
Dylan turned off the phone after twenty or so impatient rings and replaced it back in its holster. ‘What do you think?’ he responded with a grim intention.
Lucy’s laptop sat on the kitchen table, even though he’d told her a thousand times not to leave it there enticing burglars to break in.
Starers Page 3