Starers

by Nathan Robinson

  Dylan tapped a few keys and the screen glowed to life. He clicked Internet Explorer, first checking the news, which revealed nothing new since yesterday. He quickly fired off a group email to a few friends, both asking for their help and warning them not to come near the house as something strange was going on. He couldn’t say anymore as he didn’t know any better. Disappointed, Dylan closed the laptop down. It seemed the world didn’t care or just didn’t know about their predicament.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Will you stop asking questions?’ Dylan snapped, making Kirsty jump back. ‘Christ woman, d’ya think I’ve got the answers? Do you really think I can come up with a solution? To this?’ he swept his hand wide, indicating to the Starers beyond the bay window, ‘to them outside? How? What can I do?’

  ‘Dylan…, I’m scared. That’s all. I just need some reassurance that everything is… gonna be okay.’ Kirsty’s face crumbled into a distraught, teary mess. She turned heel and ran upstairs. Dylan cursed and ran after her.

  ***

  Lennon and Lucy looked at each other, and then back outside.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Lucy asked as a strange lady dressed only in her underwear casually walked up to the house and stopped on the lawn; again, like the others, the lady stared at the house with the same vacant expression. A hairy man with a protruding potbelly, nude except for a pair of flip-flops and a heavy gold chain around his neck stood proudly next to the stalled bus, kindly balancing out the male-to-female nudity ratio.

  ‘Bath salts probably. Or maybe a military experiment gone wrong,’ Lennon theorised firmly, settling his elbows on the windowsill, trying to out stare the new arrival. He lost.

  ‘Must be some kinda nerve agent. Incapacitates the victim, renders them dumb, easier to make them surrender. You could take over any country without firing a bullet or bomb. What’s your theory?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s like the end of the world,’ she half whimpered through tightened lips, ‘I expected it to have a bigger bang. Y’know, a meteorite or nuclear bomb maybe.’

  ‘So what do you think? What’s your take?’

  Lucy narrowed her eyes as if pondering some great equation; then, ‘I had a dream last night, it was weird. Like I’ve seen this before.’

  ‘In your dream?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s déjà vu, that’s all.’

  ‘Nah,’ she dismissed, ‘I dreamt everything. These people, my mum’s fake smile and the guy getting hit by the car. All these blank faces. Everything.’ In fact, the more she thought about it the more she remembered. Though not in the order it was happening.

  Fingers breaking against aged rocks in the soil.

  Buckets of water.

  Cold beans.

  Fire in the darkness, faraway, but too close.

  Blood on the windows.

  Screams curdling the night air.

  The Ache.

  ‘Déjà vu is just a process of the brain, like a computer running a system check. It makes you think you’ve experienced something before, whereas it’s just a similar object or place or situation that triggers the feeling.’

  ‘Is that your theory?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Lennon answered, ‘Wikipedia. I got side-tracked whilst researching some song lyrics.’

  ‘Well . . . what I dreamt was this, it was déjà vu over and over again. More than once. Not just a moment, but an event, like a full movie I had seen, not just snap shots.’

  ‘Okay then Psychic Sally. What happens next?’

  ‘I don’t know, but the last thing I remember is a man.’

  ‘Oh yeah, a boy from school. Or a teacher this time.’

  ‘Shut up, Len.’

  ‘I’m kidding. Sorry. What does this dream guy look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can see him but I can’t really describe him. He’s white but sorta tanned. Good looking like a film star or something. He looks like he could be famous, but at the same time he could just fit into the crowd like an everyday bloke.’

  ‘This crowd?’ Lennon pointed to the mass of people outside. ‘Your description doesn’t help us much. I mean what was he wearing?’

  ‘I think he was wearing a coat,’ Lucy replied with a glum croak, ‘a coat made of skin. I think it’s human skin.’

  And that silenced Lennon. He stared back outside, dreading whatever came next.

  ***

  Kirsty had been a Goth the week Dylan had also dipped his toe in those black eye-liner waters. Her blonde hair had been stained raven black during her teenage years, as was Dylan’s brown, greasy mop. That had been how they’d met, through similar circles of friends, same interests and they both liked the same music. Whilst Dylan wore black to fit in with a crowd he hoped would accept him, Kirsty wore it because it made her feel better, somehow the allure of black made her dark world brighter. Having lost her father when she was ten, Kirsty hadn’t seen much point in revelling in any joy in the world; in fact she thought she didn’t deserve any happiness. As the years passed by, they got closer and closer. Apart from one brief spell where Dylan had a girlfriend, they’d been childhood sweethearts. And when Kirsty fell pregnant, she soon forgot about the darkness that haunted her, she had her own impending family to be concerned about. She didn’t have time for fashionable depression; life was moving on and sweeping her along with it.

  Though despite her now grounded nature, Kirsty was sometimes prone to going off into the deep end when some form of disaster struck the Keene household. The Corsa failing its MOT was followed by a fit of tears, an electric bill she’d have to ring up and split because they couldn’t afford the full amount, Dylan had to dial the number and tell her not to be a baby about it. Whilst Dylan enjoyed being the less mature and least responsible in the relationship, sometimes he had to step up to the plate and take charge when she couldn’t contain herself. Her overreactions to some situations were sometimes not the healthiest response; today being one of them.

  ‘I’m sorry darling; this situation is just getting to me. It’s getting to everybody.’

  Kirsty nodded, nuzzling into her husband’s chest, staining his t-shirt with dampened Rorschach blots.

  ‘I mean look at Len,’ Dylan continued, ‘I don’t know how he’s gonna cope when his system is depleted of nicotine. He’s been smoking since he was twelve . . . months.’

  Kirsty managed a weak smile, a slight laugh, but still Dylan could see that the situation outside and inside was getting to her.

  Their bed squeaked as she shifted her weight, cuddling deeper into his warmth.

  ‘It’s just so bizarre. Why us? Why now?’ her voice went so high Dylan thought it sounded like it would break.

  ‘Why not, it’s got to happen to somebody, why not us?’ Dylan reasoned.

  ‘I suppose. I just can’t figure it out. They scare me. I know they haven’t hurt us or tried to get inside the house. But still…’

  ‘Would you rather be one of them, or one of us? I prefer being inside.’

  ‘God no!’

  ‘Let’s just see it as an adventure; try not to get on each other’s nerves. Stick it out, see what happens.’

  Kirsty pulled away and smiled at her husband, still smiling she said, ‘what if they try to get in?’

  Dylan moved his hands up to her face and pressed his thumbs into her forehead, and started to rub in slow, circular motions. Kirsty closed her eyes and groaned as the moment of stress melted away beneath his touch, her shoulders slumped and she fell into him, chin on his chest.

  ‘We’ll deal with that if it happens,’ Dylan said in a delicate, soothing tone, running both thumbs up the centre of his wife’s forehead, his index fingers crept towards her temples, aiding the relaxing motions.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be making spears or something, y’know getting ready to defend our home?’ she said lazily.

  ‘If it makes you feel better, we can do that.’

  She smiled, ‘strangely; I think it would.’

 
‘You wanna spend the day making weapons? Like Rambo?’

  ‘Not just weapons. I’ve got the horrible feeling that this isn’t going to be over anytime soon.’

  ‘How would you know that?’

  ‘Just an unlucky guess.’

  Dylan smiled this time.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the water.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Kirsty replied, pushing away his tenderising hands, cuddling back into the warmth that her husband offered.

  Outside and high above, Dylan’s ears attuned to a dreaded sound that only a rare percentage of the planet’s ears ever hear.

  Instinct told them both to look up at the ceiling as the drone squealed harder and closer by the second. He imagined a giant steel pterodactyl zoning in and screeching as it poised its talons ready to tear the roof from the house, plucking them out to grind and mash their salty flesh and bones to a still squirming meal.

  It was the sound of a passenger jet in free-fall, droning violently, the pitch increasing towards a deadly crescendo as it neared the ground, piling on more velocity as gravity grabbed hold, never failing to relinquish its stubborn grip. The reverberation got louder and he hugged his wife tighter, praying to whatever god was left that it was only a cargo plane, two pilots tops. Not rows of dumb downed holidaymakers wandering aimlessly about the cabin in search of a house on Westfield Road they’d never find.

  Please don’t hit the house.

  Please don’t hit the house.

  Please don’t hit the house.

  A pocket of air boomed against the house causing the windows to thump inwards but not to shatter. The entire building shook with the impact as metal met soil and jet fuel met the open air and a million blinking sparks. A mushrooming cloud of bright, bright light exploded out on the playing field. The plane had come down that fast and that sudden; they hadn’t even seen it hit the ground. By the time their minds had processed what they had just witnessed, the fireball had grown to an immense size, dwarfing the house beneath its yellow shadow; a giant emerging beast from the brittle earth. The resulting pressure wave had knocked down the nearest gathered crowd in dumb droves. Some managed to stand back up, those closest to the flaming crater still awash with the falling gush of hungry orange fire. They didn’t seem to care; they just stood burning away, dark chess pieces hiding amongst the awful light, a raging hot ball stirring up a melting soup of souls. Chunks of blackened and twisted metal erupted from the inferno, spiralling into the air and cart wheeling across the grass, towards the house. A few large pieces of shrapnel hit some of the bystanders, but nothing too large hit the house. A policeman took a hit to the back of the neck, the razor sharp sheet of metal cleanly taking the helmeted head completely off. The decapitated body slumped to the ground with an urgent spurt of blood that became the profile of a black geyser in front of the flames. They heard the odd, tinny clunk of a bolt or rivet rain down upon the roof, cracking the odd tile. Apart from that, structurally they’d been lucky despite their proximity. The fireball punched higher up into the sky and then collapsed in on itself, falling down into its own crater. It felt like an eternity, but what they’d just seen had been over in seconds, barely a blink. A new monster was born of the inferno; black, bloated and towering, a domineering presence that carried what was left of the vacant dead up towards the empty heavens.

  Don’t look. It will depress the hell out of you and make this day far, far worse than it already is . . .

  He stroked Kirsty’s hair, wiped a tear from her eye and said, ‘don’t try to think about them, it will only make it worse.’

  Kirsty started crying again, Dylan joined her as the stress that he had thought he’d vanquished came flooding back in droves. They sat for a while just holding each other as tight as they could without hurting one another.

  ***

  When they returned downstairs, Lennon just looked at them and asked ‘plane?’ A silence fell between their eyes as the unimaginable had happened, plaguing their every thought. Mass death on their doorstep and not a damned thing they could do about it.

  With wide eyes ready to cry, Dylan shook his head looked to the floor in disbelief. He couldn’t look.

  Although it was all they could think about, there seemed no good reason to speak of it. So they didn’t. They couldn’t even begin to comprehend the burning bloodshed outside their front door.

  A consuming numbness swept through the house, silencing them whilst they watched the playing field burn. There was nothing they could have done. The flames continued to burn. They were rubbernecking. Dylan remembered back to a co-driver named Whitworth he once had a run out with, reminding him of every human’s obsession with the vision of death. They were passing a bad smash-up involving a coach and a lorry on the other side of the motorway and naturally, every car was slowing down so the gore fiends could gawp in the hope of spotting a severed arm or a pile of entrails; sadly they were all satisfied. A body had fallen from the front end of the coach as it veered up the embankment and tipped over; smearing what was left of a human along the hard shoulder.

  “I’ll take the pictures, you count the dead,” Whitworth had said, his eyes fixed on the scene of destruction as they ambled past.

  You can’t count the dead here, Dylan thought. The pyre was a human jigsaw of ashes, DNA and melted metal attachments such as fillings and false hips.

  The oh-so-wrong stench of charred flesh filled their noses as the breeze leant the hungry inferno towards them, disturbing each of them on some deep primal level, ticking off alarmed sensors in their brain. That smell meant death. And somehow, they all knew it was coming for them.

  ***

  A grim survival instinct took over and they all spent the day filling up every available container they had, whilst ignoring the scene of devastation outside. The mental blinkers did nothing to block out the smell that permeated every pore of their being. It was a smell their senses had never experienced before.

  Burning human flesh.

  When Dylan and Lennon had their parents cremated, they suffered no effects such as this one. The stench was ghastly, evil even, bringing a sense of a grisly war to the whole situation.

  This is what Auschwitz must have smelt like, maybe even Ground Zero, not many Septembers ago, Dylan thought. Souls lost to dust.

  They continued in earnest with their task, anything to take their minds off the scene of death outside the living room window. A few times Kirsty started crying without any provocation. Then she’d clench her jaw and fight back the tears for dead strangers and the worry of her own mortality.

  Cups and mugs, pans and saucers. Even their collection of hot water bottles and thermos flasks were utilised. Lucy helped her mother with this in the kitchen, gently placing pan after pan after mug after cup on the table and worktops. She didn’t mention anything of her premonition to her mother as she knew it would only upset her more.

  Dylan cleaned the bath out and filled it to the brim with cold water, as he’d seen disaster experts do on a documentary he’d watched on worst case scenario survival. Immediately he felt better. They would use the bath water for washing and flushing the toilet, topping it up as long as they had running water. They had a separate shower, so Dylan urged Kirsty to have a wash whilst they still had power and hot water. Dylan even managed a shave. If this was how the world was to end, the least he could do was make an effort. Lennon batted the idea of having a wash away, whilst Lucy just huffed and shrugged her shoulders. It appeared that the threat of the loss of hot water and electricity hadn’t quite sunk in yet with his belligerent little daughter.

  Showered and shaved, Dylan gave Lennon the task of twiddling with the radio, which brought up expected results. Nothing but static and random tunes; set into motion when dead air is broadcast for more than thirty seconds, the emergency broadcast sequence is initiated automatically. These songs would continue playing until the power to the station was finally cut off. They kept the radio on, as these three-minute songs were more than likely the last contac
t they would have with the outside world. It brought a strange sense of normality to proceedings.

  The day reached noon and they all decided that they needed sustenance of some sort. Naturally, they used up what fresh stuff they had. It was a pessimistic thought that they should spare the tins in the cupboard for a later date.

  Tomato pasta with bacon, broccoli and spinach was what Kirsty served up. They each had a coffee. Everybody cleaned their plates, though the meal sat uneasily in their stomachs as if they’d all consumed some dire, poisonous sludge.

  At one o’clock, Dylan leant on the front window sill with Lennon whilst the girls cleaned up the kitchen. In the space of a few hours, more than a hundred more people had joined the mob outside.

  ‘Getting to be quite a crowd out there,’ Lennon remarked, ‘wonder what they’ve come to see.’

  For some reason, Lennon’s innocent comment chilled Dylan Keene to the core of his very soul.

  ‘Say, Dyldo, have you seen who’s joined your fan club?’ Lennon grinned in his typical moronic manner at a face in the crowd with a knowing nod.

  ‘No, who?’

  ‘Celeste.’

  ‘Shhh . . . Celeste, Celeste?’ Dylan shushed and quietened his tone so the ears in the kitchen wouldn’t hear.

  ‘Yeah, your Celeste.’

  Dylan scanned the crowd, until he found her white form standing by the garden wall, pure alabaster, untouched by the burn of the sun which she never liked, flowing red hair down past her shoulders. She’d put a little weight on, the breasts mostly, a little round the hips, a slight jowl, but she looked good for it. Dylan always thought she’d been too thin, needed some meat on her bones.

  ‘What’s it been?’ Lennon asked, quieter this time.

  ‘Fourteen years since I’ve seen her.’

  ‘I thought she moved away after you broke up?’

  ‘So did I? Didn’t think I’d see her again. Not like this anyway.’