Starers

by Nathan Robinson

  ‘Well, looking at it straight and being totally honest, it can either go two ways. If they don’t move they’ll starve of malnutrition and drop down dead one by one. But if they don’t succumb to starvation and outlast us, we’ll die first. But before that happens, I’d happily go out there with a burning torch and start to set alight to the bastards.’

  ‘You’d do that?’ Lennon asked.

  ‘If it meant my family surviving I would. But only as a last resort. When we’re on the last tin of beans.’

  Lennon smiled to himself, ‘the last tin of beans scenario. I like it.’

  ‘Well I don’t.’ Dylan yawned, stretched his arms, letting his elbows pop with gratitude, releasing pent up energy gathered from the strain of the day.

  ‘If you wanna finish your shift early, you can. I’ll keep an eye on things down here,’ Lennon offered.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll flick through the television channels; see if I can find anything. I’ll holler if anything kicks off.’

  ‘Cheers man, I’m beat. Just let me get a few hours in and I’ll be back down.’

  ‘Get some shuteye, you’ve had one hell of a bad day.’

  ‘Thanks bro. We all have. Okay, g’night’

  Dylan drained the dregs from his Bud then pushed himself wearily up from the table. His legs wobbled from sitting down for so long. He smiled once at Lennon, and then headed upstairs to bed.

  Kirsty was sharing the bed with Lucy, his place taken up by his daughter’s slight frame. He considered sliding into bed with them, but they looked so peaceful he had no immediate desire to wake them. He’d let them be. He’d already spent a night on the sofa and wasn’t that entirely keen on repeating that cramped position. He needed a bed tonight, he deserved it. He’d take Lucy’s bed.

  First, seeing as they still had water, Dylan washed his face and brushed his teeth. He grabbed a glass and filled it, drinking a pint of water just to hydrate his body while he could.

  The floorboards creaked in protest as he made his way into Lucy’s room. She hadn’t made the bed, but he was too tired to care. Dylan opened a window, his eyes catching the gaze of the forty or so random people that congregated in the rear garden, their blank eyes reflecting the bright light of the high moon. He watched for a second as two more strangers filed in through the back gate and took up position by the shed. He didn’t recognize them, they were unknowns to him.

  He stripped down to his boxer shorts before slipping beneath the cool covers that instantly began absorbing the heat from his body and reflecting it back. He kicked the covers off to expose as much of himself to the sticky night air as possible. He lay for a while, thinking how strange it was not to hear the susurration of passing car tyres on the road outside. Usually at this time on a Saturday night, taxis would be ferrying drunken revellers back from town. He heard nothing but the deafening hum of tearing silence in his own ears. He couldn’t hear what Lennon was up to downstairs. The utter quiet was unnerving. Soon his breathing slowed enough as tiredness took over and Dylan Keene began to melt away into deep and welcome slumber.

  An Unfamiliar House

  Dylan stands in the middle of the road; he is barefoot, wearing only jeans and a white t-shirt. He doesn’t own a crisp white t-shirt this clean, he muses. He can’t see the white lines that divide the road in two as discarded clothes surround him, male and female, adult and child, each arranged in crumpled piles. Strangely, socks are stuffed into shoes; shirts still have ties on round collars. Watches, handbags and spectacles litter the field of garments. He thinks rapture, and assumes that he’s been left behind to clear up the mess.

  In his ears, he can hear the pop and crackle of what sounds like Rice Krispies snapping up moisture as they drown in milk. It’s a familiar noise that he’s heard somewhere else.

  Before him stands his home, his neighbours’ properties seem plain and uninteresting compared to his house, grey almost. He ignores them and concentrates on his. Some windows are broken, guttering hangs off; the front lawn is chewed up from wear and tear. Their car is missing. Again, clothes litter the driveway and what’s left of the lawn.

  A voice calls that makes no noise, but he feels the impotent sound wave stroke his eardrums, causing him to turn. His looks north, up the road towards the Catchwater junction about a hundred metres away. The Green Tree sits on the corner, the pub car park empty of cars, but chock full of clothes.

  Across from the pub, stood in the middle of the road parallel to Dylan, stands a figure, stark against the parade of empty garments. The figure looks like Kirsty, she’s stood there, wearing similar attire to him. She stands still and stares at him with grey eyes. Not moving. He offers a hand and waves, she remains stoic and Golem like.

  Dylan moves towards her, she turns and starts to walk away from him. He breaks into a jog, strangers clothes grab at his ankles like tentacles, congesting his path and clogging his run. He looks up, Kirsty is further away. A pair of jeans bunches up around his ankles, he trips and falls into the jumbled carpet of clothes. His head lands next to a set of yellowing false teeth; he can make out smears of food caught between the lone, grinning gnashers.

  Dylan gets up, pushing himself up of off the garmented lawn; Kirsty is gone. Vanished. He spots a white t-shirt floating to the ground up ahead, melding into the colourful tapestry of denim, cotton and polyester that now make up the hidden surface of Westfield Road.

  Another sense of sound vibrates mutely against his eardrum, a voice calling. He looks down Westfield Road, where the lay of the land dips as it nears the edge of town. Lucy stands there in the middle of the road. White t-shirt, blue denims.

  He gets up to chase her, but like her mother, she too turns and runs in the opposite direction. Dylan makes more of an effort this time. Leaping over the piles of clothes, he will catch up to her.

  The faster he runs, the quicker he’ll make a mistake and soon his bare foot snags a shoe and he tumbles, but he keeps his balance and bounds on. In front of him, Lucy’s glossy obsidian hair flaps and bounces like the wings of an escaping bird. Dylan draws nearer; he’s going to catch her. He cries out her name, but no sound voices from his neutered throat. He stretches his fingers; index finger and thumb come into contact with the fine filament of Lucy’s silken black hair. Then without any clue or commotion, Lucy vanishes, her clothes continue for a few more steps without her then cascade to the ground as if she were part of a conjurer’s illusion. Dylan runs into them, grabs them and holds onto them, a prayer wishing that she would suddenly inflate back into her clothes. She doesn’t. He cries out, a still, mute scream forced up against an unfamiliar sky, stilted and swirling like a grey whirlpool, momentum gaining, soon it will become a vortex.

  Another voice, calm and collected, hums a sweet old tune. He senses that it comes from inside his house. Now alone and with a definite concern about the turbulent sky, Dylan gets up, reluctant, he leaves Lucy’s empty clothes to be lost amongst the rest of them. He treads steadily, careful not to trip again as he moves down the drive. A glint despite the grey light. His car keys rest on someone’s shoe. Keys but no car. He must have parked it somewhere else, he shrugs.

  Some of the smashed windows are bust outwards, some lean inwards. Whatever happened here happened inside and outside the house at the same time, he reasons.

  The lock is broken on the front door; the handle hangs limply, pointing downwards like an impotent appendage. With a push, the door swings inwards, inviting Dylan in like a hungry open mouth.

  The gloom swallows him as he steps inside. Behind him he feels the sky darken, the light fades from grey to black, rushing forward like a black wall. Dylan closes the door behind him, knowing that he can do nothing to secure it now. If something wants to get in, it’ll get in. He ventures further into his home, except this can’t be his house, as it’s impossibly black, like striding into a wall of black oil.

  ‘Evening bro,’ a disembodied voice calls as he enters the living room. Dylan feels the cool blackness c
hill his skin.

  Dylan mouths a response but no sound emits from his lips.

  ‘I understand,’ the voice seems to smile, ‘sit down, it’s your house after all.’

  Where? Dylan thinks.

  A light erupts from the nothingness, Lennon’s smile appears over a Zippo flame, it’s his smile but the face isn’t his. It’s mostly skull with the occasional patch of dark sticky flesh attached to the smooth bone of the skull. He still has eyes, which stare at Dylan from above the single eye of a dancing flame, sitting in the roomy sockets of his face. His eyes are lidless pools.

  Christ what happened?

  ‘Got in a fight, but I’m okay. A few scratches. Nothing more.’

  A few scratches? It looks like someone’s kicked your face off! Who did this?

  ‘Who do you think? It was a little fight, I’ll be fine. It’ll heal.’

  Dylan looked down at Lennon’s clothes; they too were stained with blood. Thick, black blood cloaked him like tar. When he talked, Dylan could see the bruised tendons that held his jaw together stretch and retract with each forming word. He could even imagine what the smell was like; not yet rotting, but an unpleasant fustiness that offended the nostrils. A human knowing that death was in the air. You don’t know it until you smell it. And when you do, it chills you to your core.

  Hope you got a few punches in.

  ‘I’d like to say that, but there were too many of them. You know that.’

  Dylan nodded.

  What do you want?

  ‘I want you to be safe, bro. I want you and your girls to get through this alive. That’s all that matters now, understand?’

  Did you think that I didn’t want that?

  ‘Ha, god no. But you’ve got to get out of the house, you’ve got to escape, get as far away from here as you can.’

  Why, what do you know that I don’t?

  ‘I don’t know much, but I know one thing, you’ve got to get away from this place, just run, move as far away from here as you can as fast as you can. You think I’m joking when I say get a helicopter.’

  How? There’s too many of them.

  ‘You’ll find a way. Fight through them, it won’t be easy but you’ve got to try.’

  Why what’s happening?

  Lennon looked at his blood soaked shoes for a second. Dylan followed his gaze. The floor was soaked with black blood as well, maybe a good inch thick, now soaked into a ruined carpet. It didn’t smell fresh. It smelt like autumnal dead leaves and a copper penny on the tongue. Kirsty would go mental.

  The television flickered on, the screen was cracked, but Dylan could still make out Celeste Marks dancing in an abandoned warehouse, she wasn’t wearing the bra and panties. She wasn’t wearing anything, yet somehow her nudity, her nipples, the fire tinged redness of her crotch seemed to remain blurred and out of focus. Like he hadn’t paid enough to view everything, he wasn’t privy to the full subscription just yet.

  You can’t have her and you can’t have this! A strange voice screamed at him inside his head.

  ‘He’s coming. And when he gets here, he’s going to hurt anybody who stands in his way. And I mean really hurt. He wants you to beg for death. He likes it.’

  Who?

  ‘I can’t say, just don’t be here when he arrives. They’ve already started. It won’t be long, there’s a lot of them, so a day or two, maybe less, and he’ll be here.’

  Who?

  ‘I think we both know who I’m talking about. . .’

  And with that, a brilliant white light exploded into the dream, the skinless Lennon’s last grim smile was lost with the darkness. Dylan tripped through the darkness, stumbled over himself and fell awake with a breath clawed from dead, tasteless air.

  ‘Dylan? Dylan?’

  A New Dawn, A New Day

  ‘Dylan? Dylan?’

  The earth moved, he was in an unfamiliar bed, which briefly unnerved him as he came too. A voice, familiar and tinged with concern, seemed to be the centre of the movement. He was moist with sweat, the bedclothes tangled around his limbs in fusty, damp twists.

  ‘Dylan wake up darling,’ the voice said with feigned sweetness, ‘how many beers did you have last night?’

  Groggily and weary, he sat up. His throat had closed somewhat and his eyes felt dry and used up. He felt tired, as if the sleep had done nothing to aid his rest. If anything, he felt worse. It wasn’t as dark as when he went to sleep, but the grey light of dawn had started to seep through the fabric cracks in the curtains.

  ‘Whatsamata?’ Dylan croaked, twisting the ball of his hand into his eye socket.

  ‘You best come down stairs. It’s Lennon.’

  The dream came flooding back in a startling wave. Imagining flurries of blood, Dylan shot bolt upright in bed. Alertness washed through him and he opened his eyes. He had slept in Lucy’s bedroom. When he realised why, the whole horrible nightmare came rushing back to him. Kirsty stood over him, her expression tight and grey with concern. His eyes ticked left and right, taking in the room, asserting any immediate danger. He discovered none, just the calm and peace of the tranquil morning, yet he detected a hint of smoke and sulphur in the air. Then he remembered the plane and a shudder ran through him.

  Had all those people really died?

  ‘What?’ he asked, blinking away the tired ghost of sleep that still haunted him.

  ‘It’s your brother.’

  ‘What’s up with him?’

  ‘You’d best see for yourself.’ Kirsty warned, her expression softened a little bit.

  Dylan jumped out of bed, grabbed his jeans and pulled them on. Still buttoning his fly, he rushed downstairs, nearly tripping in the process.

  Lennon was on the living room floor. Lucy stood over him, arms crossed with a face like thunder, a deep scowl that made her look older and more like her mother on a bad day. Beer bottles littered the floor, about eight in total, as well as an empty Jack Daniels bottle and half a bottle of Navy rum. The cap was missing and a portion of the sweet stickiness had flowed from out of the bottle and onto the living room carpet, creating a brown stain that resembled a disfigured and bent Jesus. Dylan bent down and got closer to Lennon’s face, which rested in a drying puddle of his own dark yellow vomit. This phlegm infused rejection of beer and bile looked less like Jesus and more like a Jackson Pollock creation.

  ‘Len?’ Dylan spoke with croaking weariness. He nudged his brother once on the shoulder, then a little harder when he didn’t respond. Kirsty joined her daughter in a judgemental pose. Arms crossed, face taut, mainlining that severe beauty that they both exuded.

  ‘Lennon?’ He gave him another shove, harder this time.

  Lennon groaned. His face moved a little, pulling the vomit away from the carpet like melted cheddar stuck to his cheek. He groaned again, moved a hand up to his forehead and slapped it gently.

  ‘UH?’ a single grunted syllable, a poor attempt at a word.

  ‘What happened bro? You’ve finished the beers and my birthday whisky. Why?’

  ‘Uhh . . . no.’

  ‘What, no what?’ Dylan asked.

  ‘No . . . more . . . beer. Not for me . . . urrr, thank you.’

  ‘No, I’m not asking if you want another beer. I’m asking why you drank the rest of the beer, the rum and spewed it up all over the carpet?’

  ‘I’m in trouble, yeah?’ he growled

  ‘Even I’m pissed at you Len. Now get up you fucking dolt!’ Dylan’s tone became sharper, a little more unforgiving.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Get up Len!’ Dylan only called Lennon Len when he meant business. But because he loved his brother, this was a rare occasion.

  ‘No . . .’

  Dylan slipped his arms underneath Lennon’s and hoisted him up to his feet. A groan of protest was followed by Lennon becoming rigid. He then spun round and swung out. A slack fist caught Dylan in the mouth, vomit stained knuckles scratched flesh away as two fingers poked slickly over his tongue, chafing against his incisors
.

  ‘Gerrrofff!’

  Lennon punched again with his other arm, a little more power this time, catching him under the jaw, bruising his throat. Dylan gagged, not just from the invading fingers but from the rancid, bitter smell they gave off. He reared up and fell, a foot slipped over a beer bottle that rolled smoothly and efficiently beneath the arch of his foot. He tried to turn but fell back hard against the flat expanse of the tiled fireplace. His brain rattled and thumped around the confines of his skull. A blinding burst of pain exploded through the grey light of the approaching dawn as Dylan recounted and struggled to come to terms with what had just happened. He played the situation over and over again, wondering when he could have got a parting shot in at his brother. The grey light spun away like dirty bathwater down a plughole. Then barely three minutes after waking up, Dylan was forced back to sleep as his brief consciousness ebbed away, stolen from his shore like a secluded moonlit tide.

  ***

  Light had fully arrived when Dylan came to. He felt wet on the side of his head. A jarring coolness dribbled down the back of his head, causing him to shiver, which brought him round further. He tried to get up. A soft hand forced him back down.

  ‘Stay,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve bumped your head.’

  ‘Len?’ he questioned.

  ‘He’s sorry,’ Kirsty said. ‘He’s ashamed of what he did. He said he didn’t mean it.’

  Dylan opened his eyes to see that the curtains were open, fresh light spilled into the living room. He was laid on the sofa; Kirsty was knelt before him, pressing a cold flannel to the left side of his head. He squinted, and then closed his eyes again.

  ‘Len?’ he asked again.

  ‘He went upstairs. Don’t fight. We don’t need it.’

  Dylan pushed himself off the sofa, Lucy entered from the kitchen with a glass of water.

  ‘I thought you’d like a drink.’

  Dylan smiled at his daughter’s kindness and took the glass, taking a sip. His throat glistened with thanks at the brief dreg.