Sick Bastards

by Shaw, Matt

  I closed my eyes as she started bouncing on top of me - grunting like a woman possessed. My mind took me to a better world. A world where everything was normal. A world where we were all able to keep a hold of our humanity and stop from turning into whatever we had mostly changed into.

  “You’re fucking pathetic!” she spat at me when she realised what I was trying to do. A far shout from how she was when we first laid together...

  PART TWO

  Before

  Days Gone By

  “I thought you were a deer!” Father exclaimed to someone out of my line of vision. He lowered the axe in his hands as clearly the person wasn’t a threat or something we could take back as food. Suddenly his eyes went wide as though he couldn’t quite believe (or make sense) of what he was seeing.

  For some reason (perhaps down to the look on his face) I was rooted to the spot.

  “What the fuck?” said Father.

  He sounded alarmed. Whatever was behind the tree, out of my line of sight, was enough to make him take a step back. In all the time that I could remember, I could never recall seeing Dad actually take a step back from something. Whatever it was, he would always be the one there, at the front, standing his ground.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer me. He just raised his axe high in the air - the head of which glistened in the last remnants of the fading sun.

  “Stay there!” he ordered. His voice was filled with threat but his body gave him away. His hands - even his legs - were shaking violently.

  “Father, what is it?” I asked. “Father?” Both times I called out to him he ignored me. Either that or he didn’t hear me - too pre-occupied with whatever it was that had his undivided attention. “Father!”

  And then I saw what it was which had him so transfixed. It came lurching forward from behind the row of trees which had previously blocked my vision. At first I thought it was human but then I realised it couldn’t have been. Yellow skin, red-faded eyes, a thick black tar drooling from its curled lips.

  My hand tightened around the handle of the knife.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked Father.

  With no warning the thing suddenly lunged forward with alarming speed. Father had no time to react and was knocked to the floor within the blink of an eye. The axe slid across the muddied floor into a pile of foliage out of his grasp.

  “Father!”

  The creature was on top of him. The pair became a frenzied blur of movement. Father trying to defend himself against the monster who was trying to bite and claw at his face with a relentless level of aggression I had never witnessed before.

  I dashed forward with the knife raised and jumped on the back of whatever the hell it was. Within seconds I plunged the knife down into its spine. It didn’t scream. It roared. Before taking the action, I foolishly believed it would have stopped it in its tracks but it didn’t. It sprang to its feet launching me clear from its body. I landed in a crumpled heap completely unarmed. My knife still in its back. Another haunting roar echoed through the seemingly beautiful scenery.

  I tried to climb to my feet but was instantly knocked down by the creature as it pounced on me just as it had done so with my father. I screamed as I fought desperately hard to keep it from tearing my face off.

  “Dad!” I kept screaming.

  “Push him up!” I heard my father yell.

  I summoned the last of my strength and pushed the creature up - away from me. I turned my head to the side and saw my father running towards us, the axe back in his hand where it belonged. I watched the blade as he took a wild swing. As the blade neared us, I closed my eyes.

  The creature stopped struggling with me. In fact - it stopped fighting completely. Its body was just limp. Slowly I opened my eyes. The creature was still on top of me but minus its head...

  I pushed the body away. My father helped me to my feet.

  “What was that?” I asked him.

  He was staring at the head. It was on the floor - its mouth still violently gnashing and eyes still wildly fixed on us; a look of hate rooted deeply within them.

  “What is it?” I asked him again.

  A noise distracted Dad before he had the chance to answer me. He looked up.

  “We need to go!” he said. “Now!”

  I followed his gaze and there - in the distance - a number of creatures similar to the one we had just killed. Male and female. At least - what used to pass for male and female. All of them looking directly at us.

  “Run!” said Father. “Just run! Back to the house! Go!”

  Father hadn’t even finished before I was running back towards the house with him hot on my heel. We had hardly covered any ground when both of us were breathing heavily. The time locked away in the house, living of what we had been left by the previous occupants, had done nothing for our levels of fitness.

  We couldn’t hear anything coming behind us and yet I didn’t dare turn around to look. I just kept focused on running; kept focused on not tripping over one of the many broken twigs which lay upon the muddy floor.

  Father took the lead slightly. Even if I had been able to overtake I wouldn’t have. I’d let him lead the way to the house so there was no danger of me steering us in the wrong direction.

  “It’s this way!” he shouted. I wondered if he could sense my apprehension about knowing the correct route back. The problem with being in the thick of the woods was that everything looked the same. Probably should have left some sort of trail for us to follow back. Funny the things you think about when it is too late.

  * * * * *

  Unsurprisingly the route back to the house seemed quicker than the journey away from it. No doubt based on the belief that we were being chased by those things still. Father was first in and I was second. No sooner than I had stepped over the threshold he was already slamming the door shut and putting the security chain across.

  “Get something to block the door!” he called out.

  Mother and Sister appeared from out of nowhere. Both of them looked scared, probably because of the look on our faces. It didn’t take a genius to know something was wrong.

  “Don’t just stand there! Get something to block the door!” Father shouted again.

  I hurried through to the lounge. There was a large bookcase in there, filled with books on a wide range of random subjects. I called for Sister to come and help me move it. She didn’t need asking twice.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked as we struggled to slide the bookcase out of the lounge and over to the door. “What happened?”

  Father came over and helped us whilst Mother waited by the door unsure of what to do for the best. I looked at Father and wondered whether he was going to take the lead and tell them something (other than the truth) which might make them feel a little more at ease.

  “Looters!” he said, quick as a flash.

  Looters were dangerous enough to worry about and yet not as bad as what the truth was. Mother and Sister were already worried (you could tell by their faces) and there was no sense in worrying them further. They didn’t need to know. Not yet. I looked over at Father. He caught my glance and turned away - no doubt embarrassed by the fact that he had to tell a lie to the family. He didn’t need to be embarrassed though. I know why he did it. He did it to protect them. I understood that.

  With the bookcase in place, Father went through to the lounge and looked out of the front window. We hadn’t been followed. Outside everything looked normal. Everything looked peaceful.

  “We can’t go out there again,” he said as he continued to try and catch his breath back, “under no circumstances. It’s too dangerous. You hear me?”

  We all nodded.

  None of us wanted to ask what we were supposed to do about the dire food situation.

  A Prison

  The day after we stumbled into whatever the hell it was that we ran into in the woods, Father instructed me to help him secure the rest of the house whilst the girls worke
d away in the kitchen trying to make a meal from the remaining crumbs.

  “We can’t just stay in here,” I told him as we tipped the bed-frame against the window - having put the mattress on the floor - in the room he shared with Mother, “we need food!”

  “You saw what was out there. One of those things nearly killed us. Had the other ones been closer - or taken more of an interest in us - we wouldn’t be standing here now!”

  “But we have no food!”

  “Someone will come. Everything will be okay.”

  “What if everyone out there has changed into one of those things? Can you imagine what they’d do to your sister? Your mother? You want to see that happen?”

  I didn’t want to see that happen but I knew we couldn’t stay in the house for much longer. Not without starvation killing us. At least death at the hands of those things would have been a quick way to go - and that was only if we bumped into them again although I knew the chances are that we would.

  I asked what he thought we should do. “What do you think then?”

  “Someone will come. We’ve all seen the planes flying overhead. Sure, they aren’t frequent but it does show they’re out there. Survivors. Military, no doubt. People working on a way of getting everyone to safety. That’s what happens in situations like these.”

  I wanted to ask my father if he had been in these situations a lot but I knew that to do so would be crossing a line. He is my father and I needed to keep respect for him. I couldn’t challenge him. It would only lead to more problems and more issues between everyone. We didn’t need that. No one did.

  “What are you two talking about?” Mother asked as she walked into the room.

  “Nothing,” Father answered quickly and changed the subject, “how’s the food looking?”

  Mother didn’t need to tell us. We could see from the look on her face that it was a bleak situation and that there was hardly anything left. Even so, “Not good. We probably have a couple of days left and that is if we have tiny portions. And I mean tiny. We can’t stay here, we need to leave and see if we can find somewhere else.”

  Father sighed. We both knew he was going to have to tell Mother and Sister what we had seen outside; that it wasn’t just the looters we needed to fear.

  “There are these things out there,” he said with a heavy sigh. I waited to back him up as I knew it would be hard for Mother to believe, considering she hadn’t seen it herself. Hell, if Father had come home and told me, I would have thought it to be another of his tall stories made up for entertainment purposes.

  “Things?” Mother interrupted.

  “Humans? I don’t know. They looked ill. Infected with something,” he continued. “One of them attacked us. It was strong. It was like a rabid animal. We managed to kill it but...There were a lot more of them just on the horizon. I mean a lot. There’s no way we can fight them all. No way. They would tear us to pieces.”

  “Well what are they?”

  Both Father and I shrugged.

  “But we have next to no food left. Literally crumbs. We can’t stay here.”

  “We just need to wait it out a little longer. I’m sure someone will come by...”

  “That’s your plan? To sit and wait? What if no one comes?”

  Father didn’t have an answer for her. I did but I kept it to myself. No one would want to hear that - if no one came - we’d starve to death eventually. An experience I’m sure is unpleasant.

  “And what’s to stop them coming to the house?”

  “They didn’t follow us.”

  “But you weren’t exactly far away. What is to stop these people from coming here during the night? Or tomorrow? Or the day after?”

  “What do you want me to say? I don’t know. I don’t. We’ve made the house as secure as possible. We just need to give it a bit of time and see what happens. Whatever we decide, though, we can’t leave tonight. If we do - we’re dead. If we try again tomorrow - or the day after - if these things don’t come by this way then maybe, just maybe, they’ve gone in the other direction.”

  Everyone fell silent just as Sister came into the room. Not because we were hiding anything from her. It appears everyone just ran out of things to say. Mother clearly wasn’t happy about staying in the house, with or without the things out there, and Father obviously had no intentions of letting us leave yet.

  The world had ended and now we were in a prison too.

  Questions

  That night (after everyone had been filled in with regards as to what was happening outside) Sister and I were lying wide awake in the bedroom that we shared. She was on the bed and I was on the floor where I had gotten used to sleeping. After the first uncomfortable night I actually found it more bearable than I had first imagined.

  I could tell by the moonlight spilling in through the gaps in the barricade by the window that she was wide awake. She was staring through the same holes which allowed the light into the otherwise dark room.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked her.

  My voice made her jump. She had presumed I had fallen asleep. Like her, though, I found sleep to be the last thing in my mind.

  “I’m can’t sleep,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  “And scared.”

  I hesitated.

  “Me too.”

  “How do you think this will end?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Someone will come by. Probably in a day or two. Like Father says. They’ll take us to where the other survivors are.”

  “What if they don’t come?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. There was little sense in lying to her.

  “Why can’t we remember anything?” she asked.

  “The bomb, I guess. Something to do with the blast radius?”

  “If it weren’t for that picture, I wouldn’t even know to call you Brother.”

  “Be thankful for the picture then.”

  “Those things out there in the woods,” she said, “what if that is all that is left?”

  “It can’t be.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Because we’d be one of them too. If they turned into...Into whatever they are...We’d have turned as well.”

  “What do you think they were?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think they’ll come to the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they do, the barricades won’t hold them forever.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ll kill us.”

  I didn’t say anything. She was right and I wanted to agree with her but it wouldn’t have helped the situation. If anything, it would have made it worse. At the same time I didn’t want to lie to her and tell her that everything was going to be okay.

  We sat there, for a while, in silence.

  “Brother?”

  “Yes, Sister?”

  “Did you want to share the bed tonight?”

  I looked at her. I could tell by the pale moonlight that she was crying. Tears glistening on her cheeks. I got up from the floor and sat on the edge of the mattress where she was lying. I put my hand on her side for comfort - a little gesture to let her know that I was there for her.

  “Everything will be okay,” I told her. I hadn’t wanted to lie but found myself doing just that. “Father is right. Someone will come for us and everything will be okay...”

  “I don’t know what I am more scared about,” she said. “What is happening outside or the fact that my own mind is so confused I don’t know who I am or what has happened.”

  “You’re my sister,” I told her, “and I am your brother. Your protective brother!” I gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

  “Please cuddle me,” she said.

  I positioned myself to lie behind her. I put one arm under my head for support and the other I wrapped around her. I gave her another gentle squeeze. We both
just lay there in silence - staring out into the world beyond the gaps in the barricades.

  It’s funny. It looks so beautiful out there. So peaceful. You could almost be fooled into thinking that everything out there is perfectly normal.

  Almost.

  The Hunger

  The following morning Sister and I awoke in each other’s embrace to rumbling stomachs and an overbearing feeling of despair. Yesterday, we had hardly eaten anything and yet we knew that (what we did eat) would be more than what we were going to see today. I’m sure that I read (somewhere) that you could survive for a longer period without food than you could last without water and, at the moment, the taps were still working. I didn’t care though. I was hungry, not thirsty, and I already felt as though I was getting weaker by the minute (even though I was sure it was mostly in my head).