Starers

by Nathan Robinson

Celeste Marks was wearing nothing but matching La Senza black lacy bra and panties, brazen and as beautiful as the day she left him, she had aged well. She would be what Lennon would describe as a Milf or even a Cougar. It appeared whatever sudden fixation with his home that struck down the crowd, had happened to Celeste in a state of undress.

  ‘Why’s she back?’ Lennon asked.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I think her parents still live round here somewhere, I see her dad at the pub occasionally, never speak to him though.

  ‘Humph,’ Lennon shrugged, ’Why would you?’

  ‘Not a word to Kirsty, understand? She never met her.’

  ‘Right-o,’ Lennon replied with a quick salute for his brother, ‘what a shame.’

  Preparation is the key

  Heeding his wife’s suggestion, Dylan decided that getting ready to defend his home wasn’t such a bad idea. They put the idea to Lucy and Lennon who agreed. So they set to work.

  Firstly, they reinforced the outer doors, screwing them shut; top, middle and bottom of the door frame using some spare screws and a Phillips. They didn’t even bother with the windows, there were too many, and if they really wanted to get in, they’d get in. In the main bedroom, Dylan and Lennon shifted furniture, positioning the big wardrobe beside the door, so in the event of a forced entry from the crowd outside, they could tip the wardrobe on its side, utilising the main bedroom as a makeshift panic room. Kirsty took this one-step further by storing food and spare containers of water on the windowsill. Just in case. She even tidied up the mess of clothes that decorated the bedroom. Before, Dylan had christened this her ‘floordrobe’.

  Next came offence. Raiding the kitchen cupboards and drawers, they grabbed knives, brooms and mops. Detaching the broom head, Lennon securely duct taped a steak knife to the end, concocting a crude spear.

  Dylan sprayed a mop head in air freshener, turning it into a makeshift torch; fire, one of mankind’s greatest and devastating weapons. He hoped the dumbstruck dolts outside recognized the flaming threat.

  Meanwhile, Kirsty and Lucy scoured the house for anything else that might come in handy. Batteries, torches, first aid kits. All these were stock piled in the main bedroom at the front of the house. Sensing that the stairs were a vulnerable point of entry, Kirsty and her daughter eagerly pushed a chest of drawers to the top of the stairs, ready to block off the landing. It was a meagre defence, but it might slow them down should they get inside the house. All these preparations were being carried out with a grim sense of doomed irony. If the crowd did storm the house, would they even get a chance to fight back, or would the shock of the fight strike them down as dumb as rocks.

  ***

  ‘Dyl, what are we getting ready for exactly?’ Lennon asked his brother as they both scoured the shelves in the adjoining garage. He moved his stickered guitar case to one side. It had been living in Dylan’s garage for the past three years. Lennon leant it on top of the case containing Dylan’s bass. Thankfully Harry took home his drum kit after each practice, so the garage wasn’t too cramped.

  ‘An attack,’ Dylan said, grabbing a flat edged screwdriver and placing it in the red plastic tub they’d placed on the floor to collect their arsenal.

  ‘But they haven’t done anything yet.’

  ‘But they might. Wouldn’t you rather be prepared?’

  ‘But we’re getting ready to fight innocent people.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What have they done to us?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Dylan responded, dropping low to rummage around the junk on the bottom shelf, then turned back to face Lennon, ‘yet.’

  ‘So why don’t we just start killing them now? Y’know, set fire to them or something?’ Lennon ventured.

  ‘Because Len, that would be murder.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that we’ve got to wait for them to attack us before we can do anything?’

  ‘Yep. It’s called the rules of engagement. We can’t fight them until they fight us. It’s what makes us the moral superiority.’

  ‘Doesn’t make us smarter than them though does it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, they’re just waiting. They’re not preparing themselves, sharpening sticks and reinforcing their defences.’

  ‘Len, they don’t need to. They’ve got numbers. They can swarm us and give us a stomping. The best we can do is to deter them.’

  ‘Deter them? There’s like two hundred of them with more every hour. At this rate, we’ll be outnumbered a hundred-to-one in no time. What’s the point?’ Lennon motioned to the rusty carpet knife he held in his hand, ‘they won’t even have to try.’

  ‘I’m doing this for Kirsty. She’s worried. Doing something constructive will make her feel better.’

  Lennon swept his arm around the garage, ‘all of this is just a psychological deterrent?’

  ‘Unless you come up with a worthier way to spend our time?’

  ‘We could fire up the Play Station?’

  They both managed forced laughs, then looked at each other with mutual unease for a few seconds.

  ‘I’m worried bro,’ Lennon confessed. He toyed with the knife in his hand, sliding the rusted blade back and forth. Click. Click. Click.

  ‘We all are,’ Dylan responded.

  Lennon took a step back shaking his head, ‘Christ, I need a tab!’

  Dylan stood up from his fruitless delving on the bottom row of junk boxes and miscellanea, ‘top shelf behind you, look behind the ant powder. Don’t tell Kirsty.’

  Lennon shot his brother a look then investigated the hiding place. His fingers emerged with a crumpled cigarette packet. Lennon smiled as he opened the packet, revealing the remaining five.

  ‘Dyl . . . you’re a life saver.’

  ‘Don’t tell Kirsty . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell Kirsty what?’ his wife interrupted from the kitchen.

  Dylan shot round, Kirsty was staring at him from the kitchen table where she stood with a torch. Think . . .

  ‘Doesn’t matter darling.’

  ‘No, what? Tell me.’

  ‘I thought we had some petrol, so we could make some petrol bombs, y’know just in case.’

  ‘Why would that bother me?’

  ‘Because I told Len I was going to take the aerosol from your hairspray, make a weapon that way.’

  ‘Why would that bother me? I’m fine with that. I’ve got loads of half empty bottles that I don’t use because I switch brands so damned often. You’re welcome to them.’

  ‘In the bathroom cupboard?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll have a look in there next darling.’

  ‘No worries,’ Kirsty turned her back and began changing the batteries in the torch she had, ‘You guys fancy a coffee?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the brothers responded in unison, both glaring relieved faces at each other. But Dylan knew that his wife finding out he was still a secret smoker would be the least of his worries today.

  Lennon gave his brother a reassuring tap on the shoulder and a wink that showed his gratitude for the smokes, picked up the box of potentially dangerous wares and headed back to the kitchen, where the kettle bubbled away happily.

  As he moved to leave, Dylan noticed a dull blue glint in the corner of the garage. Curiosity got the better of him and he headed over to investigate. Resting his hand on the slim painted blue handle, he pulled out the baseball bat from the dusty corner of the garage. He’d bought it years ago for Lucy, just to see if he could get her involved in sports of any kind. She’d tried trampoline lessons, dance, kickboxing, judo. None of which she took to. The baseball bat however had provided Dylan with an afternoon of joy with his daughter. They’d gone to the park and played a lazy game of rounders, he pitched while she batted and Kirsty fielded. She had managed a few good swings, knocked a few over their heads. She’d had a go and they all had a good time during a sunny day in the park. When they got back, Dylan put the bat in the corner of the garage where it had
rested until now.

  It had been a day of smiles, she showed no further interest in pursuing the sport any further, yet Dylan was proud and content that she’d tried. That had been about three years ago. Now she was a teenager, anything and everything was a massive, disrupting effort for her. He thought back to the last time they’d had a proper laugh together. Nothing came to mind until he remembered the day last summer when he took her for a driving lesson on the disused Brambleby airfield. He had a day off work and Lucy was off for the holidays, so as long as she didn’t tell her mother about it there was nothing to worry about.

  She stalled the Corsa pretty much ten times on the trot, but once she grasped the concept of the biting point they were away, even managing a larger incident free complete lap of the runway.

  Afterwards she gave him a hug, probably the last time she had shown such affection towards him. He wondered if he’d ever get a chance to take her for that second drive. He’d being looking forward to it. Imparting knowledge was a gift to the elder as well as to the youth that learns.

  Dylan looked out of the small window that looked out onto their back garden. Mrs Loughery was still there with a few other strangers. Still nude and staring at the house, their gazes appeared to be tilted upwards, towards the upstairs window. He watched as her head slowly tilted down back to the ground floor.

  What was she looking at?

  Dylan’s line of sight shifted to the shed behind them at the bottom of the garden.

  He had shovels and spades in there. Fuel as well, a small fire axe for chopping wood, weed killer. Hell, he had a hundred different ways of killing and incapacitating people locked up in the shed.

  He looked at the bat. This will have to do for now.

  Dylan picked up a rusty decking screw from an old margarine tub destined to harbour odds and ends of hardware trinkets; using a Phillips screw driver he worked the long screw into the fat end of the bat; the wood creaking as it split and made way for the addition, the cords in his arm straining as he forced metal through wood. It took him a few minutes of straining labour but he had made the slugger a little more deadly.

  Christ, he thought. This has only been going on for half a day now and he was already preparing to murder strangers and neighbours. He had a right, he considered. He felt threatened in his own home. Surely that would be reasoning enough for an Englishman to have the right to defend his castle. Yeah, if somebody attacks it. So far, the only blood he had seen spilt was a guy getting run over; and that had been his own stupid fault, and the plane crash, which was more than beyond their control.

  Dylan waved to Mrs Loughery, expecting to be surprised if she took notice. She stared dumbly ahead.

  He took the modified bat into the kitchen, where a fresh coffee was waiting along with his brother rummaging through a box of tricks, his wife digging out a biscuit tin and his daughter, fresh from a shower and in a clean change of clothes from her nightwear. With a weary sigh, Dylan placed the bat on the kitchen table and drank his hot coffee, savouring the taste while he could.

  ***

  As the afternoon dragged on, they had more coffee to pass the time and the crowd got larger. A few more had passed through the side gate and joined the nude Mrs Loughery in the back garden. Dylan now counted twenty strangers standing blank faced. Kirsty was always chiding him for not locking the back gate, now her warnings had come to fruition. It would have been nice to have access to the back of the house, get some sun and stretch their legs.

  Lucy had come down stairs after her shower, clad in a sleeveless SpongeBobSquarePants t-shirt that she had customised herself, and ragged jeans, the knees scuffed away by a cheese grater, the thighs sliced open by scissors; again her own design. She’d forfeited the garish purple eye make-up she usually wore on a Saturday. Nowadays, since his daughter had approached womanhood quicker than he thought possible, he resisted the urge to comment on her dress sense, as he preferred life with as few arguments as possible whilst in the vicinity of a teenage girl under the influence of raging and turbulent hormones.

  Kirsty came up to him and gave him a hug, smiled at him, and then went over and hugged her daughter, who half-heartedly returned the embrace. Lennon had headed upstairs, to smoke out the bathroom window. After the hug from his wife, Dylan went upstairs to check on his brother.

  Lennon had finished his smoke, now he peered out the front bedroom window onto the expanding crowd below; grimacing at the crater the downed plane had dug out of the field. Various pieces of smoking grey shrapnel decorated the land between the house and the hole. Strange streaks of red and blackened bodies that’d been felled by the fire now lay down like scattered playing tokens of some horrific board game that played for people, not points. New strangers filled in the gaps that the dead had left, those charred and burnt becoming a carpet of corpses and assorted human shrapnel for the new arrivals to wipe their feet.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts?’

  ‘How about a tenner,’ Lennon responded, ‘or a helicopter. This is crazy. It’s beyond fucked up.’

  ‘No shit. You know how to fly one?’

  ‘I could have a go, beats waiting for these weirdos to move on.’

  Dylan grinned. ‘I haven’t got a helicopter.’

  ‘I know. Be nice though, could go wherever we wanted.’

  ‘We don’t know how far this has spread.’

  Lennon turned from the window and crumpled his brow. ‘What a way to cast a dark cloud over things. I thought the situation was bad here, now you’re suggesting this has happened all over the country, maybe even the world.’

  ‘I’m just speculating. Who knows?’ Dylan joined his brother’s stance beside the window. Christ, there were a lot of them. It looked like a concert audience out there. And the Keenes were the main attraction.

  ‘Reckon there are other people like us? Y’know trapped and not all weirded out?’

  ‘I could almost guarantee it. The chances of us being the only ones. A billion to one. At least.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be reassuring?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be.’

  ‘What do we do Dyl? I know it’s only been a few hours, but I’m already getting cabin fever.’

  ‘Just try to relax and keep calm. Don’t get worked up, this can’t go on forever. These people have to eat at some point. We have food, enough maybe for two-three weeks with the four of us. Maybe longer, if we ration it out. They have to go home sometime. We can outlive them. They’re not zombies y’know.’

  Lennon nodded in agreement, then leant forward and opened the window to scream, ‘Why don’t you lot just fuck off home?’ Go on! Get out of here!’ Lennon closed the window and smiled. None of the crowd flinched.

  ‘What did that achieve?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lennon grinned, ‘but it made me feel better.’

  The Darkening Of The Day

  As the sun began to melt out a dying red into the western horizon and disappear for the day, so did their appetites. They’d eaten heartily at lunch and now as tea time approached, no one felt particularly hungry. Lucy had a bite of a banana, Kirsty nibbled an apple, while Dylan just had coffee and Lennon finished his final cigarettes straight after one another, flicking the glowing butts into the awaiting crowd below. The final one landed in the thatch like hair of a skater kid. It smoked and burned for a while, singeing out a black circle the size of a fist in the mass of hair before extinguishing itself. The kid didn’t flinch as his forest of hair burned his scalp away. Lennon shuddered at his hazardous apathy and returned downstairs.

  Dylan tried the radio again, getting nothing but pre-emptive pop songs playing the voices of what now seemed like ghosts. He took it as his duty to try the television again; most stations had false messages saying that normal programming would resume as soon as possible, others stated that they were experiencing technical difficulties. A few simply had shots of empty news desks or skewed angles of desolate television studios. Dylan turned off the television and turned to his family who all sa
t on the sofa, hoping for a semblance of sentient life outside the four closing walls.

  ‘I think we should sleep in shifts tonight. Just to keep an eye on our friends outside, I don’t want to be taken by surprise.’

  Lennon narrowed his eyes and nodded at his brother’s suggestion, as did Kirsty. Lucy did nothing except remain slumped on the sofa with her arms crossed, doing that terrific impression of a moody teenager she accomplished so well.

  ‘I’ll take first shift, then Len, then Kirsty and Lucy to see us through until morning. Everybody okay with that?’

  Again, a nod, a nod, a sullen face.

  ‘You okay Luce?’ Dylan asked, ‘you okay with that?’

  ‘I want to see my friends,’ Lucy said as blunt as a rock.

  ‘You can’t darling, the people outside might hurt us.’

  ‘They haven’t tried to hurt us. Not yet anyway,’ Lucy reasoned.

  ‘Your father’s right honey, there’s no telling what they’d do. I don’t trust them. Even if some of them we think of as friends and neighbours are out there.’

  Dylan looked outside. Mr Singha, the Spar shop owner, stood in the crowd, his dark skin slack with passive seriousness. Next, he recognized Mrs Williams, the kindly old lady from three doors down who used to babysit Lucy; Gary from work; Kirsty’s friend Lisa; Lennon’s druggy mate Bazza; all locals amongst a sea of strangers. A young familiar face stood out; Lucy’s best friend Poppy.

  ‘Luce, if you really want to see your friends, Poppy’s outside.’

  ‘What?’ Lucy said, rising up from the sofa.

  ‘It’s Poppy, look she’s one of them now. I’m sorry,’ he said flat and morose; apologising for something that wasn’t even his fault.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  Lucy stepped up to the window and pressed her palms against the glass. Maybe forty people were crowded onto the front lawn alone; you could see all their faces as their garden sloped down from the road towards the house. Immediately, she picked out the face of Poppy Smith, catatonic, wearing nothing more than a dressing gown tied loosely at the waist. Her eyes glared into the house towards Lucy, who began to cry.