Mirror of the Nameless

by Luke Walker

  My face flamed. Seemed much easier to forget a few people like Derek were still all right.

  “We should get a move on,” Tom muttered behind me.

  “Yeah. Hold on.”

  I found a battered bag sitting on boxes of bottles and filled it with a few items I thought we might need on the way to Ashleigh: a couple of bandages, a knife, matches and so on.

  We joined Derek at the till. The boiling sunlight cooked the tatty seats and scratched tables. It cooked us and I had to wipe sweat from my thinning hair.

  “Hey. You.”

  One of the drinkers had risen and staggered halfway across the floor. He waved a pint glass, yellow liquid spilling to splat at his boots. “You,” he said a little louder and looking towards me.

  “Sit down, Max. You’re being a twat again,” Derek said without looking up.

  “Fucking barred me last week,” Max said to me. He was right—sort of. We never barred anyone. We just told them to get out if they were being too obnoxious as Max had been the previous Monday morning. I’d thrown the skinny shit out and thought no more of it. Now here he was, lurching towards the bar at me.

  “Sit down,” Derek said in a clear warning.

  “I fucking won’t.”

  Max threw his glass at us. We all ducked although the glass missed by a couple of feet. It exploded when it hit a lager pump. Max threw a fist at me and hit Tom’s shoulder.

  “Right,” Derek bellowed. He slammed the till shut, walked around to the other side of the bar while Max attempted to climb it, swearing and spitting at us, telling us he’d give us to Segoth, to Naz Yaah herself; he’d cut our throats and drink us; he’d—

  Derek grabbed Max by the neck, yanked him backwards and threw him at a table. Glasses shattered; the table broke and beer splattered onto the floor and other men. Derek pulled Max upright, punched him in the face and spun him around to face the other drinkers.

  “Max’s leaving now,” Derek shouted. “Who’s going with him?”

  The men sat back down, brushing their wet legs, murmuring promises to be quiet if only they could sit in the sun and drink all day long. Derek shoved a weeping Max to the door and passageway. They vanished from sight; their voices remained: Derek telling Max to behave next time, Max promising he would.

  “Is that usual for here?” Tom whispered.

  “More often than not,” I said, abruptly tired of the pub, my job and my life there.

  Derek unlocked the front door; we caught another few seconds of Max’s sobbing promises and Derek telling him to come back later. Then Max’s sobbing became screams and Derek’s voice was a panicked shout, screaming at Max to get back, to get away.

  Then a noise I’d only heard on the news.

  The meaty, wet slap of huge pieces of rotting flesh raining to the ground.

  Segoth was with us.

  8

  We all ran for the windows even though everything inside me said to run the other way. The noise outside was louder than the screams and shouts from the drunk men in the pub but not by much. I tried to shout at Tom and got nothing out. There was no need. He knew.

  In the pub doorway, Derek frantically waved at Max to come back inside, but Max was too terrified. He ran to the center of the road; a ball of rotting brown muck hit the ground close to him and splattered its filth over him.

  Shrieking, Max collapsed and I looked away as the decaying flesh consumed him.

  Through all the noise of the screaming drunks and screaming people outside, Tom shouted against my ear. “We have to get to Ashleigh.”

  The front doors banged as Derek sprinted back inside. He ran into the bar and bellowed at all of us. “Downstairs, now.”

  “I’m going.” One of the drunks, looking much more sober than a moment before, ran from the windows to the doors. Derek grabbed hold of him.

  “You’ll die if you go outside,” he shouted.

  “You’ll die here,” the man said, struggling.

  In disgust, Derek shoved him away. From outside, another few wet splats hit the ground. In my mind’s eye, I saw the putrid flesh of our zombie god spilling into dozens of sliding smears, all on the hunt for fresh flesh. Because that’s what Segoth did: rotted and regenerated. A constant cycle. And if he came walking, you got out of the way. Or you were part of him, forever and ever.

  “Anyone else?” Derek said.

  Two others joined the first. Derek booted them to the door; they left and the heavy bolts slid into place. He rejoined Tom, me and the remaining men. Six of us locked in the pub.

  “I—” Derek began. He got no further before the men who’d left seconds before howled.

  They were right by the windows. We watched their desperate hands hammer at the glass as the sliding flesh made its way over them, sinking into their skin, slipping into their ears, noses and mouths to drown their insides. Pieces of their flesh sloughed off, burned to red meat, and their screams turned into husky grunts as the flesh of our god seared their vocal cords.

  Their hands fell from the glass, leaving smears of muck and flesh on it. Their shuffling shapes moved away, all heading north towards their new, eternal life as part of Segoth.

  “Nobody leaves until this is over,” Derek said. “Now, downstairs.”

  We headed to the other end of the bar and the cellar steps. When more wet flesh landed outside and more desperate hands smashed on the windows, all of us ran down into the cellar.

  9

  Derek poured beer straight from a barrel into pint glasses, handed them to his remaining customers and offered one each to Tom and me. He declined. I took one. Despite the time barely being six in the morning, I needed a drink. If Derek had offered me the whole bar, I probably would have taken him up on it. Except that would have meant going back upstairs to the horrible noises from the street.

  Derek squeezed next to me on the little ledge Tom and I were using as a seat. Silently, Tom showed me his iPad. I nodded and Tom brought up a stream of the news. As expected, it was all about what was happening right outside.

  It seemed Segoth was on the march in celebration of the PM’s plans to rename Christmas Day in his honor. It also appeared our decaying god was pleased by our offering and wished to spread his magnificence throughout the land. He was currently walking fifteen miles from where we hid and his flesh had been reported over an area of thirty square miles. As many as three thousand people might have had the glory of becoming part of him and many more were supposedly taking to the streets and fields in hope of joining that number.

  I tuned out the rest. Three thousand screaming people and hundreds more hiding. And a rotting figure, two hundred feet tall, striding over the land.

  Standing, I took a few paces around the cellar, almost banging my head on low beams and the bare bulb that did little to illuminate the darker corners.

  “You okay, Dave?” Derek asked me.

  “Not really.”

  “You want another drink?”

  “Not really.”

  I did, of course, but I couldn’t.

  “What’s your story, kid?” Derek said to Tom.

  I stopped my pointless pacing and looked at the others. Even the drinking men were giving Tom the once-over. Maybe he was too fresh, too clean. He clearly didn’t belong in our little world of dirty streets, constant drinking and constant fear. He belonged with hopeful people, the same people who could hope because they still knew how to pretend. That’s the only reason people still went to university or got married or did anything but get by. All the pretense that our lives mattered. All the pretense we had any chance beyond the chance our gods chose to give us.

  Beyond the time they chose to give us. Because that’s what everything came down to. Time. We had no idea how much of it we had left and so we didn’t give a shit. We broke the meaningless laws; we stole; we cheated; we did whatever we wanted without much fear of consequence. And all because three gods ruling over us could wipe us out as soon as they liked, as soon as they stopped playing with us.

>   “My story?” Tom said and I came back to myself.

  “Yeah,” Derek said.

  “Not much. I’m at school with Dave’s daughter. We’re friends. She’s…she’s in a bit of trouble, so we were on our way to her.”

  “What sort of trouble?” Derek asked me.

  “The usual trouble these kids get into. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  He grunted, not believing me, then returned his focus to Tom. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty? Good age. A lot going on at twenty.”

  Derek winked at me and I thought of the screams and thuds of the falling flesh outside.

  “How long do you think we need to stay here?” Tom said to the ground.

  “As long as it takes,” I replied. “You know who’s out there and you know what it means.”

  He shook a little. I wondered if he really did know. While our gods were everywhere, some peoples’ level of pretense that everything was okay meant they simply couldn’t deal with the reality when it came for them.

  “I’d rather face Gatur than that mess outside,” one of the men said, voice clear.

  “Keep it down, Billy,” Derek said.

  “I would. I really would. At least with Gatur, you’ve got more of a chance. If you can run.”

  “Yeah,” his mate said. “If you can outrun the people who’d be trying to kill you.”

  “That’s enough,” Derek shouted and I had to wonder if his anger was born from fear.

  A noise boomed into life somewhere above us and we all instinctively ducked.

  “Was that an explosion?” Tom muttered.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Derek and I crossed to the stairs and gazed up to the bar door. Derek had bolted it shut and it remained closed.

  “What do you think?” he said to me, voice low.

  “No idea, D. You’re the landlord.”

  “We go and check it out?”

  “Stay here,” Billy shouted. He tried to stand but couldn’t quite manage it. “Too dangerous.”

  Drunk or not, a wreck of a man or not, he was right. Derek and I made no move to investigate. Much too easy to picture the windows blown in and the wandering revenants brought to life by an awful god clambering through the frames, coming on the hunt for fresh flesh to offer up to their maker. Much easier to wait it all out in the gloom. Except my daughter needed help. Even if she wouldn’t admit it and even if she didn’t know it.

  “Wait a sec. I’ve got something,” Tom said. He held up his iPad; we joined him and gazed at the little screen.

  “Oh, shit,” Derek said.

  The news was broadcasting from no more than five miles away. The police were doing what they did best: keeping everything as it should be.

  And they’d done that by bombing a run-down housing estate. They’d turned a few hundred homes into sacrifices for our zombie lord.

  We watched for another few minutes, all of us quiet. And I don’t think any of us were too surprised when the noises from above came. Nor when the image on Tom’s screen changed to show us the city center.

  The police were here. And they were looking for more sacrifices.

  10

  Derek wasted no time as I’d known he wouldn’t. He crossed to the row of barrels against the far wall and pushed aside the two secretly empty ones.

  “A hand, Dave.”

  I joined him, crouching at the wall. He pulled at a section of the brickwork. It slid open, revealing an alcove.

  “Tom,” I shouted without turning back to the boy.

  He ran to us, squatted beside me and swore under his breath.

  Derek pulled a couple of baseball bats free. Tom took one. Derek took more bats from the pile in the alcove along with several knives, three cricket bats and two police batons.

  “I would kill for guns,” he said to me.

  “Me, too. We’ve got one with a whole five bullets.”

  “These’ll do nicely, though.” He held the cricket bats to the two men. “Lads? Joining us?”

  They mumbled towards their feet and drank.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “What are we going to do?” Tom said quietly.

  “We’re going to fight our way out. Because if we don’t, the police will be down here in a few minutes and you know what happens then.” Derek kept his voice level. There was no need to shout. As if in reply, the maelstrom of shouts and fighting from above broke through the ground to drop on us. And all through it, people screamed. The dead flesh was still up there.

  “This is…” Tom shook his head, out of words.

  “Agreed.” Derek smiled. “Come on. Me first.” He jabbed a knife towards his two drinkers. “You two stay here if you like, but you might not like what comes down the stairs once we open the doors.”

  They just kept on drinking.

  The three of us grouped at the foot of the stairs. Although the spot was less than twenty feet from where we had been standing, the noise was much clearer.

  “One thing, Dave,” Derek said. He pulled a wad of crumpled notes from his pockets and handed them to me. “Consider it an advance.”

  “Thanks, D,” I muttered.

  “Up, then,” Derek said and led us to the bar door.

  He led us to a nightmare.

  11

  You might think what happened back in the pub and out on the street would be hard for me to remember or that the memories would be fuzzy.

  Not the case, I’m afraid.

  I remember everything.

  At the door, Derek pressed an ear against it, listened, then signaled for me to undo the lower bolt as he took the top one. We did both at the same time. He yanked the door open and we dashed back to the bar.

  Most of the windows had been broken, scattering glass all over the seats and floor. Out on the street, people ran, screaming, calling for each other and all trying to avoid the flaming cars and the falling flesh.

  “Outside, now,” Derek yelled over the noise.

  Bats and knives held high, Tom and I followed him as he shoved open the hatch to the bar and headed to the door. From the side passage, a figure shuffled towards us. It couldn’t move any faster than that shuffle: its legs were two burned stumps somehow still keeping it moving. From the waist up, it was made of exposed muscle and tatty sinew. Segoth’s touch had claimed it and rotted it as it stood. Now it wanted us for its new master, to be part of the dead flesh forever.

  Yelling, Derek hit it in the neck again and again. Its head fell, lolling on its shoulder. Despite us now appearing to be standing at a slant to the thing, it kept coming. And when Derek hit it again, spilling flesh to the floor, that flesh crept towards us, leaving red and brown smears behind.

  “We have to get back downstairs,” Tom shouted, trying to push past me.

  “Too late,” Derek said, hitting the shape again.

  At the side passage door, another walking monster had appeared. A woman, once. She reached the hatch and howled through the cavern filling her face. She had no eyes or nose, just a torn hole exposing the center of her skull. Muscle and flesh hung in ropey strands. Her chest and stomach were a mass of deep rents, her skin burned into holes. Horror-struck, I saw the damage extended farther down her body. Our god’s appetites were the stuff of nightmarish stories, but it seemed they were true. His falling flesh had been at her before eating into her, turning her into a walking scream.

  Derek hit the first figure in the head. Bone and blood flew to spatter on the floor and wall. The thing collapsed and attempted to crawl to Tom and me, pulling itself along with torn nails as its globules of flesh aimed for my shoes. Tom and I sidestepped the flesh; blackened fingers reached for my ankles and I stamped hard on them, hating the crunch below my foot.

  At the bar, Derek shoved his bat deep into the woman’s face. It cracked through the wound filling her head, punched out the other side and she dropped when he yanked his bat back.

  A tremendous thud hit the main doors and all of us backed
up.

  “What now?” Tom shouted.

  “Out the windows,” I said.

  We ran to the seat, kicked glass out of the way and Derek smashed aside the last of the remaining windows. We had our first clear view of the street.

  Across the road, buildings burned. Heat ate our skin. Most of the cars were now scorched wrecks, and our dead god’s new servants wandered around, their bodies ruined messes of broken bones and scorched flesh.

  The thud hit the doors again, and beyond the thud, sirens rose with the screams. The police were on their way.

  Derek clambered through the frame, took Tom’s hand as he followed, and I came last. Standing together, we saw what was thudding against the pub doors.

  Five or six of them. I couldn’t be sure how many any more than I could be sure whose mouth was where.

  Their flesh had pooled into one mass of black and red goo. A ten-legged monster. A nightmare.

  What had been their limbs, all waving in roughly the same direction despite the strain it put on broken bones, hit the door. An eye growing on a stalk from what might have been a foot blinked, and a scalp complete with strands of hair covered a small patch of a chest. Their mouths opened and closed, chewing at their own skin, drawing blood through the burned tissue. Again, they hammered at the door. And why not? It was drinking time. And Derek’s customers had always been loyal.

  Mad laughter fell out of my mouth. Derek pushed me hard. The sirens drew closer.

  “We have to go. Right now. Where’s your van?”

  Tom pointed through the smoke and milling bodies. “Just over there.”

  Across the street, windows blew out, the noise almost burying the screams that followed it. Smoke parted, offering me a view of the walking monsters pushing their way through holes in the walls, stumps of fingers and arms reaching for the screaming people inside.

  At the end of the road, the first of the police cars skidded to a halt. Officers left their vehicles, firing at people within seconds. Overhead, a helicopter skimmed the roofs and a voice, magnified through its speakers, fell with the smoke.

  “Do not panic. Our god is with us. You are offerings to Segoth. Give yourselves to him. Praise him.”