Dylan reached out to his brother, ‘Please Len, come back inside. It’ll be okay.’
Lennon finally turned his gaze to Dylan and the rest of his family. ‘You forgive me for fucking up?’
‘Yes,’ the three inside said in urgent unison.
Lennon smiled, and wiped away the tears with his wrist, smearing the blood into weepy streaks across his face. The little girl who stood before Lennon, who’d turned her strange gaze towards him seconds before he was ready to kill her, reached her little arm out and touched him lightly on the head with her minute fingers. What happened next made everybody jump back. Even as Dylan rewound and played the event over and over in the hours that followed afterwards, he still couldn’t make sense of what he had seen, no matter how he tried to comprehend.
The little girl leant forward, index and middle finger outstretched; Lennon hadn’t seen her move until the last moment when her tiny, gentle fingers stroked his temple. He’d said something, but it was lost in the bursting noise that followed, so Dylan never heard his brother’s final words.
They didn’t see the blood coming; it hit the window in a gush, their faces (insiders and outsiders) and the living room carpet like a rapid nano-wave from an exploding star. It felt like a wet slap, unusually hot and coppery. There had been a popping sensation, Dylan even felt the force of the blast touch heavily on his cheeks. Aghast, using the ends of his wrists, Dylan cleared the blood from his eyes, his brother’s blood. Lennon’s body was still crouched down, headless, spurting what life force remained inside of him out of his neck like a fountain. The torn white root of his spinal cord stuck out of the gushing wound, the car keys remained gripped tight in his hand, the shiny silver becoming engulfed with the flurry of blood that cascaded down Lennon Keene’s shaking body. His hands were outstretched as if to say What? What have I done?
‘Len? Len? He . . . he’s . . . gone,’ Dylan managed to whimper only hearing his voice inside his head. Kirsty cried out, as did Lucy. Horrible mournful cries that Dylan didn’t hear as his ears were still popping with tinnitus after the force of the blast.
What was the word?
What was the word?
Human something. Spontaneous . . . Human . . . Combustion. Was that it? He’d seen part of a documentary about it once. Did it really happen? The little girl with pink bows had done this, Lennon hadn’t; it had been her. She’d caused this.
The little girl’s once pleasant face was now awash with Lennon’s blood, it diluted the whites of her eyes, which were now back fixed on his shrieking daughter. As were the voided expressions of the surrounding crowd. Every face within a ten-foot radius was decorated with a ghoulish splattering of crimson face paint, reiterating the fact they were now a tribe, besieging the remaining Keenes in their home.
Despite her screaming tears, Kirsty took charge; someone had to. Lucy had collapsed to the floor in breathless hysterics whilst Dylan had started screaming obscenities at the blood stained girl. He was halfway from climbing out of the window with a fist clenched into a tight ball of skin, bone and vengeance, when Kirsty grabbed him by his blood-slickened shoulders and tried to pull him back. The little girl took a step forward, index and middle finger outstretched towards Dylan’s forehead. Kirsty lifted a foot and shoved it against the sill. With a guttural heave, she reined her husband back in, reached forward and slammed the window shut, falling back onto the carpet in a jumble of hot slick gore and gushing red tears, just as the little girl pressed her blood slick fingers up against the glass. She pressed her hand flat against the pane and looked inside the house, blinking once. Tiny flecks of pink brain and blood stained bone seeped slowly down the smooth glass, spreading the red sheet further over the expanse of the window. The blood filled, staring eyes of the little girl peered over the edge of the sill and through the translucent curtain of gore, every shred of innocence and trust now lost from the child’s cherubic expression.
Dylan was shivering and shaking his head, every second or so he’d roar with rage, punching his fists into the carpet. Lucy was now in a ball, curled up as tight as a foetus, rocking back and forth, head shaking, muttering, ‘No, no, no, no, no . . .’ with a bloody thumb wedged in her mouth. Her teeth bit down on her own digit.
Kirsty stood up and watched as the mass of crowd all took a step forward to take the places of the fallen, standing on bodies, to get closer to the house. Blood-wet, once familiar faces pressed up against the glass, where fragments of Lennon’s bone, hair and teeth had stuck fast like chewed up and regurgitated fleshy lumps of watermelon.
The queue had gotten a little shorter, but the crowd was still the same.
The Girl With The Electric Eyes
Dylan spent the day blood stained and catatonic. The crowd outside showed more emotion than he could have managed. Slumped in the expanse of the bay window, back against the radiator, he stared at the space between his feet with eyes as wide as the Starers.
Lucy stopped crying about an hour after the Lennon incident, Kirsty brought her daughter a glass of water to soothe her parched throat from all the screaming she had put herself through. Dylan’s glass remained as still as a millpond beside him.
‘What are we gonna do, Mummy?’ Lucy asked, pathetic and weak, her eyes pools of shimmering anguish. She hadn’t called her mummy in years and seemed to genuinely mean it. Kirsty didn’t dwell on the fact.
‘We should get cleaned up and just keep calm until help arrives, that’s what your father would want.’ Kirsty looked over at her prone husband; the blood had dried near black on his face. As he had been closest to the blast, as it were, Dylan Keene had taken the force of his brother’s head exploding. Now his face resembled a macabre death mask, the crimson paint still drying.
‘But what if help doesn’t come?’
‘We won’t know that until they arrive sweetie,’ Kirsty tried her best to comfort Lucy.
‘But what if help never comes? What if it’s just them and us? Forever?’
‘Let’s get cleaned up first, then we’ll decide what’s next.’
Lucy pushed the living room door open as far as she could whilst her mother, armed with a broom handle adorned with a steak knife, wedged it through the gap between the door and jamb. From here, she managed to dislodge the bookcase and push its weight away from the door. Within a minute, they were in the hallway.
The front door was closed but not locked.
Beloved and unread books lay scattered on the floor; amongst the various tomes were the screws that had held the front door firm. Seeing as Lennon had taken the front door keys with him attached to the car keys, Kirsty took it upon herself to replace the screws in their rightful place, ensuring the false safety of the house once more. She couldn’t get them all the way home but she tried her best.
Kirsty and Lucy took it in turns to take showers whilst the other kept a check on Dylan. They changed clothes, brushed their teeth and hair, doing their best to remove every trace of Lennon’s dark DNA from their person. They could do nothing for the startling images etched forever into their minds.
After boiling the kettle and grabbing some flannels, Kirsty and Lucy cleaned Dylan as he sat slumped and forlorn in the bay window bleeding his brother’s blood onto the carpet. As he’d been topless all morning, the majority of the gore was caught in his chest and head hair, as well as encrusted to his stubbly face in dark congealing islands. He didn’t protest or barely blink when they changed his jeans. Kirsty binned the blood-crusted denims. They dressed him in jogging pants and a baggy t-shirt, as these were the easiest to pull on him. When they were done, they pulled him away from the window, leaving him laid in the centre of the room, staring blankly at the ceiling, where he continued his catatonic protest.
Kirsty stroked the side his face, ‘Darling, you talk when you’re ready okay? No rush. We’re not going anywhere.’ Kirsty smiled then leant in and kissed Dylan’s head. A brief taste of Lennon’s coppery scent remained about Dylan’s person. Kirsty wiped her lips with the back of her hand. It di
d little to remove the memory from her mouth.
‘What do we do now, Mum?’ Lucy asked.
She sighed, ‘I don’t know, read a book?’
‘I couldn’t read a book if I tried. I’m too tense. I need to do something.’
‘Sleep?’
‘Too wired to sleep, I need to keep active.’
Kirsty shrugged and looked at the window. The staring faces looked back, blank and inhuman, their expressions revealing nothing about the character that the faces once belonged to. Not anger nor hate, just an A-type, blank field of eyes, nose and a mouth. Without malice, without humour, without anything.
‘I want to experiment.’ Kirsty said with a grin, ‘Get me a wire coat hanger.’
Lucy narrowed her eyes in distrust, ‘Why?’
‘Just an experiment. Coat hanger, now!’
Lucy gave a devilish smile then ran upstairs, returning with a coat hanger. In the meantime, Kirsty had moved back over to the window and carefully opened it to the next setting. The window was open half an inch but still secure from the latch.
Lucy handed her mother the wire coat hanger. Kirsty took it and started undoing the twists that held the hook together, straightening it out the best she could.
‘What’ll this prove?’ Lucy asked, moving closer to her mother.
‘I don’t know. Let’s find out.’
Kirsty threaded the straightened wire through the gap between the window and pane, over the head of the deadly little girl, and towards the blood-stained bearded man behind her. She couldn’t bring herself to harm the little girl, despite what she’d done to Lennon.
The wire snaked towards his face as Kirsty threaded it further out the window.
‘What you gonna do? Poke him in the face?’
‘No, the eye,’ Kirsty responded, ‘It’s a natural human reaction to blink. If they don’t blink, we know that they’re no longer human, or at least in control of their faculties.’
‘That doesn’t make sense, what if an alien has taken over them, y’know like a worm that burrows into your head while you sleep.’
‘I don’t think that’s what’s happened darling,’ Kirsty paused her advancement of the wire, briefly fearful that the Starers would pull the window open without warning and snatch her from out of the living room whilst her attention was diverted. She flickered her gaze between her questioning daughter and the vulnerable window.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re still compus mentis, are we not? Why hasn’t your worm made a nest in our heads?’
‘Err . . .’
‘If they blink, it means that at least a shred of humanity still exists inside of them. They should still have basic human reactions, pain, reacting to temperatures, etcetera and so on.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘Good, let’s see what happens.’
Kirsty threaded the wire closer and closer to the bearded man’s left eye. Both deep in concentration with their breath held tight in their lungs, tying alveoli into bloodless knots, the pair of them shrieked when a hand jumped out and grabbed Kirsty by the wrist, clamping tight.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said hoarsely.
Kirsty and Lucy turned, to face the owner of the hand. Dylan glared down upon them gravely, a vein in his hand popped up like a meaty worm as he held Kirsty’s wrist as tight as he could without hurting her.
‘If what that little girl did to Len is applicable to all of them, then you’re about to make a terrible mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kirsty replied, strangely fearful of her husband’s gnarled and grisly tone.
‘The wire is metal; metal conducts electricity and heat extremely well. The way Lennon died must have involved at least one of them.’
Kirsty pondered for a second. She looked at her daughter who simply shrugged, then back at Dylan.
‘What do you suggest? I want to see if they still have human reactions.’
‘Wait here.’ Dylan headed into the kitchen, a cupboard banged then he returned wearing pink marigolds on each hand. ‘Insulation,’ he said knowingly.
Dylan took the wire from his wife’s hand and took position by the window, then began to thread the wire towards the bearded man’s face. Closer and closer, until the wire was barely an inch from the guy’s left eye. Blood had crusted on his eyelashes. Dylan looked closer and could even see thin streaks of blood decorating the white of his eyeball. He hadn’t even blinked when Lennon’s head had exploded in front of him. Dylan pushed forward, the end of the wire jabbed into the jellied flesh of the eyeball, indenting and threatening to pop the delicate lens. Still, he didn’t blink or falter his gaze from off Lucy. The guy was plainly obsessed with his daughter, and not even a needle to the eye would curb his fascination with her. Ominous light blue electricity danced along the length of the wire and towards Dylan’s hand. Fearing further reaction, he drew the wire back in and closed the window. The electricity was pulled back into the Starer’s eye. Almost immediately, Lucy gasped.
‘Look,’ she pointed outside, her voice bound by a cautious whisper, ‘the little girl’s eye!’
Dylan dropped the coat hanger wire next to the radiator and looked down following the direction of his daughter’s finger.
The blood-stained little girl with bows in her hair, the very one who’d laid that deadly hand upon Lennon’s head, had a problem with her left eye. Dylan bent low and peered into her dumb, peaceful gaze. Something flashed, ever so brief, but it remained etched on his brain. It flashed again, a tiny snap of blue lightning behind her eye, giving clues to whatever storms that raged inside her head.
The flash came again, this time green electricity circled around her pupil like a positively charged whirlpool. The colour snapped to red, then black, white, purple then back to green. Looking up, Dylan could see that every member of the crowd had the same affliction, but only in the left eye.
That confirmed it for Dylan; he was dealing with a hive mind. Many bodies controlled by a single source.
One by one, the electricity faded in the crowd’s eyes, and all was relatively peaceful with the mass of bodies once again.
‘They’re all connected somehow . . .’
‘What do you mean?’ Kirsty asked.
‘I poked one in the eye, but they all felt it in the same place. Did you see their eyes?’
Both Kirsty and Lucy nodded in unison.
‘They are legion, for they are many,’ Dylan muttered.
‘What’s that?’ Kirsty asked, confused.
‘A stupid quote from somewhere, can’t remember. Probably a TV show.’
‘You want to call them Legion?’
‘I still prefer The Starers, a little bit more apt.’
Kirsty turned back to the crowd outside and slipped an arm round Lucy and kissed the side of her head.
‘If they’re plugged into the mains, can’t we just throw water on them and short circuit them?’ Lucy theorised.
‘Can’t see it working. Every human has a miniscule amount of electricity in them. It’s what keeps the heart beating. Besides, we’d need a fire truck.’
‘Can’t we at least try? We know they’re electric.’
‘Sure but do it from upstairs,’ Dylan warned, ‘I don’t want any more surprises.’
Lucy nodded and smiled grimly, then ran upstairs.
‘What if they all explode? The glass . . . it could . . .’ Kirsty asked.
‘Then they explode,’ Dylan responded, ‘an idea is an idea. It beats sitting round until we starve to death.’
A rattle came from upstairs, like Lucy was removing the plastic bucket from the bathroom swing bin. Then came the sound of taps being turned on and rushing water collapsing into a hollow space. The water stopped and Lucy’s footfall carried across the ceiling above their heads.
A second passed, then Dylan and Kirsty watched as a cascade of water splashed down on the closest row of the crowd near the front door.
Nothing happened.
No ele
ctrical storm, no epic splattering of blood and guts erupting against the window. Nothing.
‘Oh my God!’ Lucy gasped from upstairs. The black bucket fell from the upstairs window, landing squarely on the head of an elderly woman. It rattled around, before settling still. The old woman made no attempt to remove her newly acquired headwear.
‘What is it sweetie?’ Kirsty called.
‘The crowd, they’re moving . . .’
Dylan and Kirsty looked at each other for the briefest of heartbeats then stormed upstairs.
The First Movement
Out on the playing field, the crowd was on the move, spilling into the middle of the crater, swallowed up as they left the Keene’s line of sight. Some hung around the edges, staring at their feet. Her parents joined Lucy by the open landing window. Lennon’s Zippo remained on the windowsill. Dylan let it be, he didn’t want any mementos of his brother haunting his pockets.
‘What do you think they’re doing?’ Lucy asked.
‘Not a clue, but it can’t be good.’
The hundred-strong crowd had taken their gaze from off the house and now crouched down, concentrating on the burnt grass and soil at their feet.
‘Maybe they’ve lost interest?’ Kirsty pondered.
‘Doubtful . . . but.’ Dylan left the girls by the window and headed towards his bedroom. Crouching down by the bedside cupboard on his side of the bed, he began raving through the collection of objects.
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