Red forked sardines into her mouth, chewed thoughtfully for a second, and then said, “If I was one of those things, that’s when I’d attack. They’re pretty good at sticking to the shadows during the day. They’re obviously wary of us, otherwise we would be dead already.”
“Have you always been good at pep-talks?” Lou said, his voice drenched with sarcasm. “I’ve got goosebumps over here.”
“Just saying it like it is,” Red said, tucking blonde hair behind her ears. “If those things want to get in here, they will. Ain’t no amount of barricade going to keep them out. There’s too many of them.”
“Seriously,” Lou said. “Keep it up, girl. I’m about ready to take them on singlehandedly.”
Red pushed herself up from the chair in which she sat and wiped tomato sauce from her lips. “What do you want to hear? That everything’s going to be okay? That the effects of your titty-juice is temporary, and that each and every one of those fucking things is going to go back to normal?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Lou said.
“Well, it ain’t going to happen like that.” Red brushed the blade of the sword with her hand. “It’s going to get messy, and we might not all make it out of here in one piece, but we have to try. We have to fight back. We have to.”
Mordecai, over in the corner of the room, whinnied, for no other reason than to get a word in edgeways.
“Well, I think we’ll be okay here,” Smalling said. “At least until morning. I say we wait it out and then make a run for the hills.”
“I agree,” Harkness said. “I’d rather be out in the middle of the desert, putting some distance between us and Oilhaven, than hiding out here. It’s only a matter of time before they come a-looking.”
“Well, I ain’t going nowhere,” Lou said, climbing to his feet. “I was born here, and I’m going to die here.” The trouble was, he hadn’t expected it to be so soon. “If those fuckers get in, then I’m going to take as many of them with me as I can.”
“That’s your choice,” Red said. “Just don’t expect us to do the sa—”
A sudden thump on the roof above caused her to choke on the rest of her sentence. Smalling and Harkness leapt to their feet. Lou lunged for the duel pistols beneath the counter.
Another thump, and another, and several more, and then footsteps, like there was a small army up there, looking for a way in.
“Shit!” Lou said. “Well, I’d like to say it was nice knowing you, but you ate the last of my sardines and parked a horse in the corner of my shop, so I can’t.”
“Shhhh,” said Red, moving around in the semi-gloom. The last of the day’s light trickled in from above, through a small skylight, projecting a perfect square on the store’s floor. Red couldn’t believe that she was only just noticing this. It was a way for those bastards to get in, and they hadn’t done a damn thing to seal it up.
Tiny footsteps rushed from one side of the ceiling to the other. Lou followed them with his antique pistols, resisting the urge to shoot, to blow a hole through the roof and subsequently the thing up there trying to find a way in.
“Stay back,” Red mouthed, which was not a problem for Smalling or Harkness, who were about as far back as they could be without stepping outside.
A small shadow appeared in the illumined square on the floor, and then another. A gentle rapping of the skylight’s plastic suggested that something was about to come through it. Something big, with the intention of killing those within.
Tat-tat-tat…tat-tat-tat…tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, went the rapping, which was enough to make Lou frown.
“Was that The Lone Ranger?” he said.
Red shrugged. What the hell was he talking about?
Lou sighed. Youngsters these days. You couldn’t have a conversation with them about anything if it didn’t involve sand, heat, The Event, or bandits…
Tat-tat-tat…tat-tat-tat…tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…
“It is!” Lou said. “It’s the fucking Lone Ranger theme tune. Grab that ladder!”
The ladder to which Lou referred was leaning up against the racking behind Kellerman’s henchmen, and after a bout of intense confusion, the men brought it forward, carrying it like a World War One stretcher.
Lou, seemingly unconcerned that the milk-mutants were trying to gain access via the skylight (not only that, but also knew the theme tune to an old show or film neither Red or Kellerman’s goons had ever heard of), placed himself directly under the clear, plastic square. Squinting up into the semi-gloom, he smiled and said, “I don’t believe it.”
Friendly faces stared down at him, if one could, in fact, be friendly while maintaining the look of abject horror.
“Who is it?” Red said, sword gripped tightly in her hand, still awaiting the moment anything remotely mutated came through.
“’haveners,” Lou said, smiling. “We might not be dead just yet, after all.
33
Outside, the milk-mutants gathered. Hundreds of them, all differing in shape and size, all ugly as sin. Their raucous clamour was impossible to ignore – it sounded like there was a conkers tournament going on out there, but instead of conkers, they were using hyenas. Occasionally, something – an appendage, a hulking arm slathered in blood and milk – would slip across the blocked-out front window, screeching like nails down a chalkboard. No-one had had the temerity to take a looksee through the small hole in the door, in case they were spotted. As far as those things knew, the store was empty, sans people, sans food, and thusly completely useless to them. They could loiter around all night, as far as the survivors were concerned, just as long as they didn’t get curious.
Curious would be very bad indeed.
In the darkened store, where they could defend the rest of the building and the neighbouring apartment against attack, the ‘haveners sat around in a circle, as far away from the front of the store as possible, just in case that whole ‘curious’ thing happened.
Clint and Tom Fox had fallen asleep, nestled up against their mother like piglets. The sick one – Clint – had been medicated by Lou, which might have played a small part in his unnaturally quick descent into unconsciousness. Mickey had thrown on a pair of Freda Decker’s granny-pants, for no other reason than to make everyone else comfortable, and was sitting closest to the door, one of Lou’s historic pistols in his hand, trained on the front of the store. If anything came through, he would blast it to kingdom come, or whatever the milk-mutant alternative was.
“Sounds like they’re having a party out there,” said Roger Fox, who was eating decades-old raisins from a bowl. “Reminds me of Metallica ’92.”
“Oh, I remember that one,” Rita Fox said, grinning like the Cheshire cat on mushrooms. “Back when they were good, before Lars got really, really ugly.”
“I’m just glad they don’t know we’re in here,” Mickey said, sleepily.
“Oh, I doubt Metallica survived The Event,” Rita said, but the thought sent a shudder down her spine all the same.
There was a moment of silence – one to add to the many already endured – as the ‘haveners tried to figure out, in their own heads, how best to escape this madness.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Lou finally said. “Dead or…turned?” He was having a hard time coming to terms with what he’d unleashed upon Oilhaven. Sure, he wasn’t to know that his milk was bad, but that didn’t make it any easier. Now he knew how those big corporations felt, having to recall batches of glass-peppered yoghurt or cars with no brakes.
“Pretty much,” Red said. “Not since the monks brought whiskey to the Irish have so many lives been ended prematurely by a simple beverage.”
“Thanks for that,” Lou said, bitterly. “Another one to add to your forthcoming book, Words of Great Comfort: A Brief History of Putting One’s Foot in One’s Mouth.”
Red sniggered. “Hey, you asked. I think the sooner you all come to terms with the fact that your dusty-ass, piss-ant town in the middle of nowhere is now a lot less crowded
, the better. Now all we have to do is figure out how to kill those fucking milk-mutants.”
“Can they be killed?” Lou said. “I mean, sure, I killed my m…I mean the mother-beast, and you took a few out on your way over, but so many? How could we possibly take them all out at once?”
“Don’t suppose you’ve got an old nuke knocking about, have you?” Smalling said, glancing across his shoulder. “That looks like a missile. What is it?”
“That’s the Lady-Pleasure 3000™,” Lou said, “and I’m pretty sure that’s not going to work on the milk-mutants.”
Mickey sat forwards. “Lou’s right,” he said, animatedly. “There has to be a way we can take them down all at once. Something we’ve missed.”
“Short of going out there with swords high and guns blazing,” Roger said, “I don’t see that there is.”
Mickey sighed and relaxed. “I just wish we could blow the fuck out of the lot of them. Paint the town red, so to speak…and a little bit white…”
Since the beginning of time, people had been hit by the eureka effect (otherwise known as a eureka moment, or the aha! moment: see also: fuck me, how could I have been so bloody stupid?). Archimedes was the first after discovering how to measure the volume of an irregular object. Subsequently, he ran home from the local swimming baths screaming “Eureka! Eureka!” Since then, millions upon millions of people have had eureka moments, including Barry Chester from Wisconsin, who had managed to figure out how to dunk a cookie in his coffee for more than five minutes without it drooping, breaking, and falling in. And now, it was Red’s turn for a eureka moment.
She jumped to her feet, her face filled with wonderment. “There might be a way!” she said.
Everyone shushed her, for she was making far too much noise for their liking. Still, they were intrigued.
“How?” Lou whispered. He hoped she was right; that they could do something, anything, to begin putting this mess right.
Red turned to Smalling and Harkness. “When we were out there earlier,” she said, “and the whore was fighting that big sonofabitch. What happened?”
Harkness shrugged. “She had her head batted off as if it was a balloon,” he said.
“After that?” said Red, slightly aggravated.
“The milk-mutant blew up,” Smalling said. “What’s this got to do with anything?”
“What caused the milk-mutant to explode?” Red said, so excited now that she had changed colour. She was making little loops in the air with her hands, urging the goons to catch her drift.
“Well, the only thing I remember was that it was chewing on Abigail’s neck-stump,” Harkness said. “And then it went all moany and burst all over the place like a TNT-stuffed watermelon.”
“Exactly!” Red said, once again checking her volume. “The thing blew up because it drank the whore’s blood. She must be infected to high heaven, riddled with enough STDs to turn one of those things into a giant bomb.”
“So we should all get STDs and let them eat us?” Rita said. “That doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”
“The whore’s body, or most of it, is still out there,” Red said. “If we can get it and bring it back here…” She paced across the room to the filled tarpaulin. “We can chop it up. Mix it in with this lot, and feed it to the fuckers. They want more milk? Well, we’ll give it to them!”
Everyone was up on their feet now, except for Rita Fox, who was bogged down by two very tired little boys.
“So what you’re saying is that if we go out there, past the army of mutant giants, and pick up the headless dead corpse of the geriatric prostitute, then bring it back here, without being gobbled up by the mutant giants, chop it up into little pieces, then drag it outside, without being killed once again, and wait for them to eat it, and then explode, we might have a way out of this?” Lou liked the sound of that.
“In theory,” Red said. Lou didn’t like the sound of that. “We’re pinning a lot of hope on the fact that your town whore was extremely diseased.”
“Oh, she was!” Harkness said. “Even her warts had warts.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
“Then we might…just might…have found a way to take those fuckers down.” Her spirit lifted, Red smiled.
“Okay, so how are we…I mean, how are you going to do this?” Smalling said. “Sounds awfully dangerous.”
Red exhaled. “Well, the best way would be to take Mordecai,” she said, nodding toward the horse in the corner, which huffed and took a few steps back. “Gallop on out there, pick up the whore, gallop on around the back of town, avoiding the main streets. There’s more sand out there, so you won’t hear the horse’s hooves as much. We’ll come around back, but we might need a diversion to get those things away from the front of the building so that we can get back in.”
“I can take care of the diversion,” Lou said. “Hell, I’m thinking I should be the one going out there. All this is my fault—”
“No offense, old man,” Red said, “but I wouldn’t let you ride a carousel horse.”
“None taken,” Lou said, secretly relieved that he had been let off the hook.
“You kept saying ‘we’,” Harkness said. “’We’ll come around back’…’we might need a diversion’…Who the hell are you taking with you?”
“I’ll go,” Mickey said, stepping forward with his hand raised. How they were expected to take him seriously dressed in a pair of Freda Decker’s huge panties, they didn’t know.
“Yeah, Mickey should go,” Smalling said, nodding frantically. He sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer for what was starting to sound like a suicide mission.
“You sure?” Red said.
Mickey nodded. “I’m a lot fitter than these guys,” he said, gesturing to the rest of the ‘haveners. “If all we have to do is grab the decapitated body and bring it back here, I think I can manage that.”
“You going out there dressed like that?” Red said, pinging the elastic waistband on the huge panties.
“Overdressed?” Mickey said, grinning. “If those things come after us, we can always use these as a net.”
“Okay, then let’s go corpse-fishing,” Red said. “Mordecai, come out from under that shelf. Honestly. If we don’t do this, we’ll have no choice but to eat you, and you don’t want that, now, do you?”
The horse reluctantly came forward, head down, a look of defeat in its eyes.
When this is over, it thought, I’m running for the hills, and I’m leaving your crazy ass behind…
34
“MIIIIIILLLLK!” one giant arachnid milk-mutant growled into the darkness. Once, it had been Petulia Clark, a delightful woman of fifty years whose charity work in Oilhaven was unsurpassed. Pity, then, that she was reduced to this hulking beast of many legs, craving something it neither understood nor truly liked the taste of.
Cries of MIIIIIILLLLLK! came from all around; a horrible chorus that made Reverend Schmidt’s choir sound like angels.
More mutants arrived in front of the store, each with their own peculiarities. One was a big slobbering mess of teeth and eyes; another was much smaller, but with a wingspan to rival any of the great flying beasts from mythology. One had two heads, another had none – the one with none regarded the double-headed creature with contempt, and would have frowned had it had the tools to do so.
Suddenly, the door to the store flew open, and out galloped a horse with two riders. The milk-mutants turned to see what the kerfuffle was about, but by the time they realised their food was escaping, it was too late. The horse, though clearly nervous, was like shit off a shovel, heading up the street and into the darkness faster than the milk-mutants could muster, despite their many-legged advantage.
The door to the store slammed shut just as a four-armed mutant crashed against it. It was all over in less than ten seconds, and several of the milk-mutants were left shaking their heads, moaning and groaning, wondering if the whole thing had been some sort of clever illusion, a side-effect, perhaps, of the great milk which h
ad birthed them.
*
“Can this thing go any faster!?” Mickey called from the back of Mordecai. He didn’t know the workings of a horse, but there must be a second gear somewhere below all that hair.
Red slowed the horse down, which was not what Mickey had had in mind. “It was around here somewhere,” she said, surveying the ground for the mangled remains of Abigail Sneve.
“Great,” Mickey said. “Whatever happened to ‘pick up the body and get back, no fucking around’?” There were bodies everywhere, scattered along the road, lining the street like macabre Christmas decorations, but none of them were missing heads. “Are you sure it was here?” he said. “I mean, the streets around here all look the same.”
“It was here,” Red said, confident that she had the right spot. “Something must have dragged it away.” She climbed down from the horse, pulled the sword from its sheath, and began checking through the bodies strewn across the road. What if she was gone? If one of those things had eaten the whole thing? It would have killed just one, then, instead of the hundreds Red had hoped to take out.
“This fucking sucks,” Mickey said. He was sweating terribly, through heat and nerves. “We can’t stay out here all night. Those things will come for us; it’s just a matter of—”
Something thumped into the sand a few feet in front of Mordecai. The horse reared up, tipping Mickey from its back end. Red rushed across, grabbing onto Mordecai’s reins, trying to calm the beast down before it worked itself up to the point of running away, very fast, in any direction…
Once she had managed to calm the horse (Mickey was back on his feet, scraping sand from his butt-crack and cursing the practicality of Lou’s mother’s knickers) Red shuffled toward the thing in the sand, the projectile that had spooked Mordecai so badly.
A headless corpse wearing a short skirt. Its shoulders were now missing, too, along with both arms, but Red recognised the rest of it as belonging to the whore.
Not too far away, there was a deep gurgling sound, and then a meaty pop.
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