by James King
“GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE MAN!” Shaun screeched in his mad and broken voice, “OUTTA HERE!”
Dave, who had recovered from the blow and the push, leaped forward again, but Shaun responded quickly. He whirled around and lashed out with one foot, catching Dave a blow on his shin. Dave cried out in fresh pain and fell to the floor clutching his leg. Jenny stepped forward toward Shaun, crying, placing one hand on his arm in an attempt to placate him, but he shoved her roughly away. She stumbled over Dave and fell to the floor with a shrill cry, her hands groping against the carpet. Shaun then went back to the wardrobe, putting his shoulder to it, shoving against it, beginning to move it with his mad and desperate strength.
Ted watched all of this in a kind of still-half-asleep daze. Then, finally, he recalled himself, and hurried over to where Shaun struggled with the wardrobe. He didn’t physically assail him – he knew that he would be no match for the younger man – but he said in a voice that he hoped sounded harsh and shocking:
“What the hell are you doing?”
Shaun briefly paused in his assault against the wardrobe and glanced over his shoulder at Ted. His face was bathed with the moonlight, and as soon as Ted saw it, he knew the score. That look of sheer craziness: eyes that glittered with more than moonlight, lips twisted into an expression that was primitive and feral, a human being pushed to the upper limits of his endurance. Ted had seen it in the face of many a soldier over time, men who had endured all the bombs and bullets and terror that they could, and now just wanted out – even if it meant their death, and the death of those around them. A dangerous situation: one that had to be dealt with quickly, decisively, maybe even ruthlessly. But Ted was not the young man he had once been. He wasn’t sure that he was capable of quick, decisive and ruthless anymore. Still, he would have to try. And then, when Dave had recovered perhaps they could both take him down...
“Well?” Ted shouted, and pleased to hear that he still had some of his military bark, “what the hell’s this about? Step away from that bloody wardrobe!”
“Stay away from me!” Shaun more hissed than said. He once more balled his hands into fists, and he slashed at the air in front of him: insane, pointless, but still dangerous, “stay away!”
Then once more, he put his shoulder to the wardrobe and pushed furiously. The wardrobe rocked, tilting away from the door, and only being prevented from crashing over by the dresser and bed that was jammed up against it. For a moment, Ted could see the door behind the wardrobe – and did he hear something fumble and bump against the door? Yes, of course he did. They were out there, and only too eager to get in. All that it would take would be for them to figure out how to operate the door handle. Or maybe find a battering ram...
“Shaun, for God’s sake....”
Ted glanced around, and saw that Dave had made it to his feet. He was still clutching his shin, and seemed to be in considerable pain. Jenny had also made it to her feet, but she seemed shocked, dazed, unwilling to engage with the situation.
“Dave...” Ted began, whispering, although he supposed that Shaun would be able to hear him, “...we’ve got to take him down before he does anything too crazy. Rush him, grab him; pull him backwards. Beat him up if need be. Just incapacitate him.”
Dave nodded, but then said, “the gun... can’t you threaten him with that? Force him to stop?”
Ted shook his head, “no... the situation’s too volatile, and at too close quarters. Someone could end up getting badly hurt. And given the state he’s in, I doubt that he’d listen to me, even if I was waving a gun in his face. No, this has to be done unarmed. We rush him, grab hold of him, pull him away from the door and incapacitate him. Okay? On the count of three...”
But Ted never even made it to one, because then, there came a demented roar of triumph from Shaun. Ted peered desperately around, and saw that the other man had succeeded in pushing the wardrobe about half a foot away from the door, and was now reaching behind it and grappling with the door handle like a man possessed. Without bothering with any of the countdown, Ted leaped forward, followed by Dave.
But it was too late.
Before Ted had been able to so much as make a single pace over in Shaun’s direction, the bedroom door popped open. It opened only a few inches before coming to rest against the wardrobe. But it was wide enough for something to pass through. A man’s hand: many hands, groping through the circumference of the doorway, pale and deadly in the moonlight, seeking, questing, finding...
With the door open, Shaun once again uttered a roar of triumph. But the roar soon transformed into one of pain and fear as the hands gripped onto him, pulling toward the opened doorway, and the monstrosity that lurked behind it. Shaun shrieked, kicking and writhing wildly against the part opened doorway, hands groping at his clothing, clutching and pulling at his hair, probing across his face, screwing his eyes tight shut as fingers clawed toward them.
A split second later, Ted and Dave arrived, clutched Shaun, and began pulling him away from the doorway. But the hands were fastened tight upon him, holding him there, squeezing him against the narrow opening. Dave and Ted pulled harder, the hands from the doorway pulled harder from the other direction, and the situation became a kind of grisly tug-of-war that might have been humorous if it hadn’t been so deadly.
Suddenly, there came a harder shove from behind the door. The wardrobe leaned further forward like a collapsing tombstone: the dresser and bed the only things stopping it from collapsing entirely, and the gap between door and doorframe widened to almost a foot. Then, like some awful puppet in a Punch and Judy show, a head popped through the gap between the door and the doorframe. Blank eyed, slack jawed, half rotted, it goggled around the room for a moment, as if trying to get its bearings. Then it looked around at Shaun whose face was only inches from its own. The living and the dead regarded each other for a moment. Then, with an infernal howl of famished insanity, the dead gaped its dripping jaws wide, darted forward like a striking snake, and buried its teeth in Shaun’s neck.
Shaun shrieked in agony and revulsion. His entire body clenched in a kind of hideous spasm, as though some powerful poison had been injected into it. Blood spurted from his neck in a hissing gush that was black and glistening silver in the moonlight. Ted, who had been trying to pull Shaun away from the door, was spattered with it. It felt warm, sticky, and by the way it was flowing it seemed as though the jugular vein might have been ruptured. Once again he thought about blood squirting from a ruptured artery in a broken leg, but he pushed the thought aside. This wasn’t the Falklands. This was here, now, a desperate situation where life and death hung in the balance.
Ted turned to Jenny who stood in the middle of the room, her hands clutched to either side of her head, shrieking.
“The gun!” Ted roared, “bring me the gun – NOW!”
For a split second, Jenny gazed at him as though she had not comprehended. Then a kind of dismayed understanding settled upon her, and she gazed around, located the gun where Ted had left it on the floor, seized it up and brought it across to him.
Ted took it off her. He let go of Shaun and stepped backward. Then, making sure that the safety catch was on, he seized hold of the barrel and, wielding it like a club, he brought it high over his head, and then brought the butt of the gun crashing down upon that other head that was attacking Shaun.
Immediately, the head released its bite grip on Shaun’s neck. It peered around at Ted, its face a mask of blood and viscera in the moonlight, its eyes glittering, and it offered him a hiss of vicious hate. Shaun, meanwhile, slumped against the doorway, half conscious, his neck a mangled spurting horror of chewed and ruptured flesh.
Quickly, Ted whirled the gun in his hands so that the muzzle was pointing toward Shaun’s attacker. He snaked his finger around the trigger and took aim. It was all too possible that by shooting the gun he might injure Shaun – maybe even kill him – but it was too late for such concerns now. And Shaun might be far beyond saving anyway. No, once again the time
had come for survival. Minute by minute, second by second, bullet by bullet...
With the monster in his sights, Ted squeezed the trigger. The sound of the gun’s detonation was deafening in the small confines of the bedroom, the flash momentarily blinding. Then the gun had done its work, the bullet discharged, and the creatures head exploded in a viscous spray of blood, brains and bone. It spurted across the doorframe, across the wall, and across Shaun, painting the area like some sickly work of modern art. Then the monster was gone, its body slithering away into the landing beyond the door, the remains of its head dribbling and drooling down the wall to soak the already blood-saturated carpet.
Hastily, Ted reloaded the gun. He stepped forward, raised the gun so that it was pointing into the gap between door and frame, and fired it again. He heard loud moans of anguish from the landing beyond, and the hands that had been groping around the circumference of the doorframe withdrew. Dead they might be, but they seemed to still have that innate instinct for self-preservation, an understanding that danger was close and they must do what they could to avoid it.
With the hands withdrawn, Ted shoved Shaun unceremoniously out of the way, then put his shoulder to the door and pushed. It slammed shut, and Ted had time to take pleasure in hearing the lock snick shut. He cast a desperate glance across his shoulder over to Dave and Jenny.
“Help me!” said Ted, his voice a strangled, horrified gasp.
Dave and Jenny hurried over, and between them they manoeuvred the wardrobe back against the door. They shoved the dresser back up against the wardrobe, and then the bed back up against the dresser. Then they paused, panting from their exertions, listening hard for any further sounds of attack. There came the relentless sound of moaning from behind the door – louder now than before – and the occasional thump, scrabble and grope from behind the woodwork. But there were, as yet, no sounds of a concerted attack. The gunshots had dissuaded them momentarily, although Ted doubted that the respite would last for long.
“Oh God, Shaun...” Jenny’s voice: sickened, horrified, full of sorrow. Ted stepped around to where Shaun lay, a crumpled mass, his face turned toward Ted, the eyes half open but unseeing, seemingly in a catatonic state. His neck was a horrific mess of blood and exposed muscle that glinted sickly in the moonlight. His shoulders rose and fell as he breathed, but they were shallow breaths: wet and ragged and sick.
Jenny turned her face up to Ted. Her face was pale and streaked with tears, strands of hair plastered across her forehead.
“What can we do...?” she asked.
Ted recalled himself. It seemed that he had descended into a daze, a kind of stupor. He wasn’t thinking things through like he should. Now, he gathered himself together, thought as quickly as he could, and then hurried over to the clothes that he’d tossed to one side when he’d emptied the wardrobe. He grabbed a jumper, rolled it into a ball, and then squatted down next to Shaun. He pressed the jumper firmly against the flowing, spurting neck.
“This will stem the blood flow,” said Ted, keeping the jumper firm against the wound, “buy him some time – but time for what I don’t know. There’s no ambulance to call, and we haven’t even got a bloody first aid kit. There’s a few first aid bits and pieces, but they’re all downstairs. Should have thought to bring them up here but didn’t. Ah shit...”
Ted glanced down, and saw that the jumper was almost saturated now. Christ, who would have thought that a body would have so much blood in it? It never failed to amaze Ted, despite all of the blood that he’d seen spilled over the years.
“We’ll just have to keep the wound plugged,” Ted went on, “keep the pressure on it, give the blood some time to clot, then maybe he’ll stand a chance. Maybe - ,”
But Ted was cut short. Because suddenly Shaun convulsed. His entire body from head to foot was clutched by a huge spasm so intense that it might have come from a powerful electric shock. Jenny cried out, and Ted flinched away from the body.
“Hey you guys...” said Dave, “...get away from him... get away from him now!”
Ted cast a confused glance at Dave, then looked back at Shaun. He looked at Shaun’s face, turned toward him, bathed with moonlight. The eyes were fully open now – but Ted could see that they were not Shaun’s eyes. They were blank eyes, pale eyes, eyes with no iris and no pupil. Dead eyes...
Another great convulsion wracked Shaun’s body, and he twisted around so that he was now lying on his back. The blood-soaked jumper slithered off his neck, and Shaun’s head tilted backward, his neck straining, his mouth gaping, a hideous retching, gargling sound emanating from his throat. His hands crawled into claws and clutched at the carpet, gouging it, raking it in utter anguish. Another gigantic convulsion wracked through him, and suddenly, as though ejected by the physical spasm, a huge gout of black vomit erupted from Shaun’s mouth. It flew almost a meter into the air before splattering downward onto Shaun and across the floor. Ted heard Jenny scream in horror, and Dave swore loudly, but Ted paid no attention to what was said. His concentration was absolute: upon Shaun, upon the horror that was engulfing him. That was engulfing them all.
Convulsion after convulsion ripped through Shaun in the space of less than a minute. More vomit erupted from his mouth like black lava from an evil volcano, while yet more black slime or mucous leaked from his eyes, his nose, the very pores of his skin, and from beneath him too. A monstrous stench that seemed to concentrate all decay and putridity and sickness seized the air and forced Ted to fight against his rising gorge.
Then the convulsions subsided, and Shaun rested against the saturated carpet. Slowly, his mouth, a stinking hole of rot and vomit, dropped open. His lungs filled with air, his throat gasping and rattling wetly at its passage. Then the air was released in a single, long, dirge like moan. It was a sound that they all knew only too well. It was a sound that went on and on in the night air beyond the house. It was a sound that echoed through the chambers of the house, downstairs, upstairs, beyond the bedroom door. And now here it was, in this room, with them: had become one of them.
And then, slowly, still uttering that maddening graveyard moan, the thing that had been Shaun began to rise. It lifted the upper half of its body until it came to rest in a sitting position. Its head turned toward them, and the full light of the moon fell across it. They saw the blank pearl-like eyes, the pale deathly skin, and the thin tracery of black veins that snaked beneath the skin: veins that carried now not blood, but whatever inscrutable poison it was that brought the dead back to life and made them walk the earth like refugees from Hell. Its mouth fell open like a trap, and black slime drooled from between teeth that had grown long and crooked and deadly. Its moan went on and on – but now it had attained a new sound, a new timbre, a new meaning.
Now, it sounded hungry.
“Oh God,” Dave groaned, “the gun, Ted. Load the fucking gun and kill it. Now!”
With trembling hands, Ted reloaded the gun and snapped the barrels shut. He put the butt to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel, once more preparing to deal death to one who was already dead. But this was different now, because he was about to kill one of his own men. He thought that way about Shaun, he realised. He thought that way about Dave and Jenny too. They were his comrades, his brigade; his allies in battle. And now he was going to have to kill one of them. That was something that he had never done before, in all his years of soldiering, and it was something that he never would have thought that he’d have to do. But now here he was, with the butt to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel, ready to kill one of his own. What a dark hell the world had become. What a dark fucking hell...
The thing that had been Shaun gazed across at Ted. Its mouth fell open wider yet – Ted was sure that he could hear the muscles splitting, rupturing – and the sound of its moaning became a deeper, more urgent gargle. Its hands groped outward, batting the air in front of it pointlessly, like an infant. Did it know what was about to happen? Was this a plea for mercy? And if so, what mercy did it crave? To be all
owed its continued existence? Or the final oblivion of a bullet?
Ted drew a deep breath, calmed himself; tensed his finger around the trigger. Then he squeezed. Again the hellish crash of gunfire in a confined space, again the blinding flash, and Shaun’s head disappeared in a cloud of flying blood, bone and brain. For a moment, the upper half of the body remained upright, the hands still groping in that obscenely babyish manner. Then it finally got the message that it no longer had a head, and it flopped sideways, splatting downward onto the soaked carpet. A last few shudders of sickly life worked through it, and then it was still: the mercy of oblivion, the kindness of death had claimed Shaun Hopkins...
And then, rising shrill and despairing in the air there sounded the lament of one for whom the mercy of oblivion had not yet come. Jenny: her cry loud and anguished, a desperate wail of sorrow for the man who had been her friend, and her lover.
* * *
Ten minutes later. Dave stood by the window, gazing out at the last of the night. Ted sat on his chair, his gun rested against one knee. And Jenny knelt by the remains of Shaun, where Ted and Dave had dragged it, somewhat unceremoniously, to the far side of the room. After her first wail of sorrow, Jenny had rushed to Shaun’s body, Dave only just stopping her before she touched any of the blood. Then, seeing what had become of Shaun, she had been wracked by retches, vomiting frail liquid from an empty stomach. But now such extremities had subsided, and she just knelt there on the bloody floor, gazing down at the shattered remains, her shoulders slumped, her head bowed, almost as if she was herself ready for execution.