It wasn't long before the boys who had originally been in awe of Jason, and terrified of his size, realised just how fragile he was, and how easily led.
To an outsider, the notion of this giant being bullied by kids that he dwarfed would have seemed preposterous, but Jason's mental maturity lagged way behind his physical. Maybe it was because he was so embarrassed about standing out; maybe it was just karma, some form of cosmic balance that denied him the awareness to understand the mind games and cruelty that form a large part of high school, and to leverage the power he did not know that he held.
He found himself in trouble often, his attempts to fit in leading to his hanging out with the kind of kids who sniff out weakness like bloodhounds. Nothing major - after all, this was still St. Davids - but whether it was getting caught smoking by the teachers, or shoplifting, or dabbling in drink and drugs, Jason always seemed to end up involved.
It was Rachel who was the strong one, always had been, and Jason understood that even as his biceps began to bulge and his neck thickened.
Two years Jason's senior, Rachel manoeuvred her way through secondary school with a clear mind and enviable focus. Jason's sister was determined, single-minded, and had balls of steel. When one lunchtime she found Jason on the verge of tears, being mercilessly tormented about girls by a group of his so-called friends, cruel guys who knew the gentle giant would never respond in the only way they would respect, Rachel waded in, slapping one guy so hard Jason thought it sounded like a gunshot ringing out across the yard, and then delivering a solid knee to the testicles of the smirking ringleader.
“Who's afraid of girls now, bastard?”
He remembered the diamond-hard edge to her voice as she spoke those words often, the way her jaw jutted out, challenging the bully to get back to his feet, showing no fear whatsoever, and it always made him smile.
They became closer that day, the day that Rachel realised that her little brother needed protecting despite his physique, and he leant on her a lot over the next few years. Even when he grew into himself a little, leaving school and starting a decent career in construction, he'd call or text her most days, and when he sought advice or reassurance or validation, she always provided it.
Rachel was a pillar of Jason's life.
Looking at his sister now, sitting on the tiled floor, covered in blood and crying, damn near hysteria, Jason felt that pillar crumble a little, as though someone had pulled back some great curtain to reveal that the world he knew was just some illusion, some software being played out on a vast computer.
“Dad's dead.”
He understood the words, but they made no sense to him. Dad's dead. Dad's. Dead.
He shook his head a little, as though it needed rebooting.
Their father couldn't possibly be dead. Jason had driven down this morning to celebrate his dad's birthday. There was a cake. Jason had bought a funny card, one that said I wanted to buy you a Ferrari on the front and then when you opened it up you found one of those packs of tiny screwdrivers that you get in Christmas crackers and the words but I could only afford the tool kit.
It was funny. Jason knew dad would find it funny, and he had driven there that morning thinking about how his dad would roar with laughter when he saw it, looking forward to him clapping Jason on the shoulder and grinning broadly.
How could Dad be dead?
He rubbed his head, feeling a small bump forming at the edge of his hairline where Rachel had pounded him with the wrench. She must have hit me harder than I thought. Sounded like she said Dad's dead.
“I don't understand,” Jason said. “Where's Dad? Where's Mum? Is that blood?”
Rachel sobbed, and nodded, and Jason felt his stomach drop like an elevator.
*
A storm of shredded bark whirled around Michael's head, falling softly on his hair and face like dry snow. He breathed in, feeling the dust coat the inside of his mouth and throat, and coughed painfully.
He'd felt the impact of the shotgun blast, though not as he had expected. Instead of the shredding of muscle and flesh, it felt more like a hammer blow, vibrating through his back. The hooded man had aimed high, blasting the trunk of the tree that Michael was tied to.
A warning shot.
"Let's try that again, Officer, and remember that I have a fondness for fast learners. Why are you here?"
Michael coughed again, working saliva around his mouth, clearing out the dust.
"You shouldn't have done that."
"Oh?"
The hooded man sounded amused.
"They'll be coming."
The hooded man's voice dropped to a sibilant whisper.
"Who will be coming?"
Michael drew in a deep breath, and took the only option he had. The truth.
"I am here because I was running for my life. From two men I have known for years, one of whom I would have trusted with my daughter’s life until this morning. Two men who ripped out their own eyes and began killing people with their teeth. I ran from them, I ended up here. The end."
The gun lowered, just a fraction.
"How were they chasing you if they had no eyes?"
"They move like animals. Seem to navigate by sound. They weren't that far behind me, half a mile or so I'd guess. That little show you just put on with the shotgun? They'll have heard it, and they'll be coming."
The hooded man said nothing. After a moment, he stood, striding over to Michael, looming over him.
"Then it has started. Eight years of waiting, and when it finally happens, I feel unprepared. Funny, huh?"
"What do you mean?" Michael asked. "What do you know about what's happening here?"
The man pulled back his hood. When the grey light diffused through the ocean of mist fell upon it, Michael found that the man did not look like the grim reaper, or some sneering caricature of a terrorist. He looked about fifty: a craggy, nondescript face under a thick tuft of hair long since turned a dull grey. Just another guy; someone that would not receive a second glance in a crowded bar or on a busy street.
There was something in the man’s eyes though, some slippery quality that made Michael’s nerves jangle.
"What I know," said the man, "is that there is little point now in me killing you, no more point than shooting a beached whale. The die has already been cast, and there are already enough voices whispering at my conscience to add yours to the list. All I really need to do is persuade you to leave my property in a manner that ensures you will not find your way back."
Michael's brow creased.
"What? I don't understa-"
The butt of the gun filled his vision again then, moving at lightning speed, and the lights went out.
*
Rachel's heart twisted in fresh agony as she watched her brother's face contort in dismay and incomprehension. They stood in the cellar, staring down at the ravaged body of their father. The air felt thick, as though she couldn't quite get enough oxygen from it.
Jason's eyes misted up.
“What happened?” He said, his voice heavy, as though the words were a little too wide for his throat to comfortably accommodate.
Rachel reached out and squeezed one enormous shoulder.
“I don't know, Jase. I got here and he was...like this. And the dog was...the dog went crazy and attacked me. That's all I know.”
“What about Mum? Where's Mum?”
In a way, Rachel found herself feeling glad that she had no answer for him. Jason had always been much closer to their mother than she had, and the thought of leading him to her lifeless body was too much to bear.
“I don't think she's here. I haven't been upstairs yet, but-”
Jason didn't hear the rest. He turned, and shot up the basement stairs, heading quickly past the blood in the kitchen and out into the hallway.
By the time Rachel made it to the kitchen, he was already upstairs. She could hear heavy footfalls as he pounded into each of the three bedrooms and the bathroom that made up the first floor.
She followed him up, trepidation increasing with each step.
When she reached the upstairs landing, she found Jason, face flushed and eyes wild, emerging from his old bedroom.
“Empty,” he said. “She's not here. Everything looks normal.”
His voice broke on that last word, and Rachel wanted to hug him.
“We have to call the police, Jase,” she said. “Whoever did this might still be close by. Mum might need our help. We have to get help.”
Jason nodded slowly, almost absent mindedly, as though the words had made it through his ears, but his brain was having trouble making sense of them.
“No signal,” he said, his voice clotting again.
“Same here,” Rachel replied. She put a hand on his arm and led him into the nearest room, their parents’ bedroom, and sat him on the bed.
“I'm going to use the landline, okay? I'll get them to come out. In the meantime, just stay here. You're in shock. I'll get you some water.”
Jason nodded, eyes fixed on the floor.
“I'll be right back,” Rachel said, and hurried downstairs. The house, previously so terrifying, seemed much smaller now that Jason was there, and so much less intimidating. She recalled how the prospect of searching the upstairs had scared her so badly, and gave silent thanks that her brother had turned up. It was awful seeing him so heartbroken, the normally grinning face stunned and frozen in misery, but his presence in the house gave her courage, like carrying a formidable weapon.
The house phone was in the hallway, sitting on a small side table that served no other function. Reaching it, Rachel cast another quick glance around the ground floor, just to check that nothing had crept inside while they were in the bedroom, and lifted the receiver, keeping her gaze firmly focused on the back door, which still stood ajar.
She knew as soon as she pressed the receiver to her ear that something was wrong, the dial tone she had expected replaced by harsh undulating static, yet still she pressed the buttons anyway, hoping for a miracle. None was forthcoming.
The beeps that accompanied each button push dissolved back into the static.
Clammy fear gripped at her again. Had someone cut the phone lines?
Suddenly Rachel felt trapped; like she was having difficulty breathing.
During her first year at university, long before the requirement to do any actual work kicked in, Rachel and her house mates devised a drinking game, brilliant in its childish simplicity. The catchily-named drink and hide and seek incorporated two floors of their halls of residence, ample square footage to find a spot to evade someone who was, in all likelihood, already seeing double. The rules of the game were thus: play hide and seek. If you get found, you do a shot of tequila. If, after ten minutes, not everyone has been accounted for, the seeker has to do one shot for every unlocated hider.
Rachel had played the game enthusiastically, almost always getting caught due to her inability to stifle the giggles when the seeker drew near. Until the last time she took part: an ill-advised game that took place when she returned with all her friends from a heavy night out. With all the participants already in various states of disarray when the game commenced, it proved to be an unfortunate time for Rachel to squeeze herself into a trunk that just barely encompassed her slight frame, and which, it turned out, could not be opened from the inside.
Months later that night became something she could look back and laugh at, but the night she spent locked in that trunk, while everyone else involved the game either fell into a stupor or just plain forgot they were playing and wandered off, gave Rachel her only glimpse into claustrophobia, and it was an experience that, even when she thought of it months later, sent icy chills through her.
Echoes of that feeling came back to her now, and Rachel was suddenly certain that she could not stay in the house, feeling so vulnerable and trapped, for a moment longer.
She dropped the phone receiver back into its cradle and hurried back upstairs to Jason.
He didn't look up when she entered the bedroom, holding his hands to his temples and staring, wide-eyed, into the carpet, as though the fibres held the answers to the mysteries of the universe.
“We have to go, Jase,” she said, a little disturbed to hear a note of panic in her voice.
Jason, still lost in the carpet, didn't respond.
“Jason,” she said firmly, wincing a little as she saw him jump at her harsh tone. “The phone's dead. We have to go. Now.”
Jason nodded for a second, seeming to mull it over, then stood.
“Get your bag,” Rachel continued, trying to keep a lid on the hysteria clawing at her gut. “We're going to the police station. I don't think it's safe here.”
Jason's eyes clouded over, as though this was beyond his understanding, but then he seemed to snap out of it, and nodded again, more vigorously.
Rachel ushered her giant brother down the stairs. His bag – a huge and surely unnecessary rucksack sat in the hallway next to her suitcase and shoulder bag. He swung the bag easily up onto his shoulder with one bearlike hand. Rachel decided to abandon the suitcase. Everything she might need – phone, purse, keys – lived in the shoulder bag. It was as she slipped the strap over her shoulder that they heard it, a sound that cracked the silence of the morning in two, entering the house like an intruder, stopping them both dead in their tracks.
A huge roar, louder than anything Rachel could remember hearing in her entire life: a sound that shook the house, making the windows shudder in their frames.
Rachel whipped her head round toward Jason, and saw her own panic reflected in his haunted eyes.
The roar rolled and echoed, fading away like the rattle of a spinning coin on a hard surface.
“What the hell was that?” Jason said in the swollen pause that followed; his voice barely a whisper.
Before Rachel could respond, the world erupted with noise as people flooded out onto the streets, screams of fear and confusion filling the misty air.
It was that exodus, that sudden emptying of all the houses in town, as people sought what they thought was the safety and comfort of the herd, that truly marked the beginning of the end.
*
Victor kept a vehicle, an old flat bed truck, about a mile away from the entrance to his bunker, buried under foliage.
The truck was carefully blemished, dented and scarred so that anyone who might happen across would simply think they had stumbled upon an abandoned wreck. Distressed, he thought with a grim smile, like the fashion for artificially-aged clothing that the internet informed him was currently all the rage.
He cut the cop loose and hefted his slack body. The guy wasn't small, and the journey to the truck would be arduous. He briefly considered leaving him where he lay but decided against it. Just wouldn't be sporting.
Victor had spent years wondering what it would look like, when it all went down. If it went down, though his research – the pitiful, cautious net-trawling he had been restricted to by his isolation and paranoia - had always suggested that they would go through with it. To deny himself now would make it all so much foreplay. All preparation and no end product. The cop provided an excellent opportunity, one that he just could not pass up.
A chance to get eyes on the beginning of the end.
He wouldn't get too close to the town, Victor promised himself. Curiosity, after all, would kill even the most cautious cat.
In the trees, buried somewhere in the mist, he heard the rustling and cracking of people approaching, fast, and nodded in satisfaction. The cop hadn't lied. No one lies to the shotgun.
A thrill coursed through him, and he placed the limp policeman back on the ground gently, like a mother returning her child to its crib.
Then Victor lifted the shotgun, aiming it in the direction of the approaching noise, and waited for them to appear.
6
Derek Graham knew Paula Roberts well, having been her source of minced beef and sausages for fifteen years.
Trade had slowed down for Derek in
the last few years as the supermarket in the next town pulverized the competition with impossible prices and buy-one-get-one-free offers. Loss-leaders, for Christ's sake. Special offers designed to lose money. The free and fair market was a smirking misnomer, a barely-concealed sham.
Derek's father had been a butcher, a man who taught Derek to take pride in his work, to make the last slice of the day as carefully as he had the first, and it bewildered him that the majority of people flocked to the giant, soulless food warehouse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every chicken breast looked identical and every slice of bacon was watery mush. After all, if you weren't going to pay care and attention to the things you put into your body then what would you pay care and attention to?
Derek stuck to his principles and his higher prices. Living creatures had died to make his produce, and to his mind, the least they deserved was to be prepared correctly for the next - and final - stage of their lives and their usefulness.
All of which meant that Graham and Son's Butchers didn't have a huge amount of customers, but the ones that did remain did so loyally, and Derek got to know them all. He knew what most would order as soon as he saw them opening the door.
Mrs Christie wanted gammon, sixteen Lincolnshire sausages, a rack of lamb and six free range eggs. Mr Bale was a poultry man: chicken and duck for week nights, a pheasant for Sunday roast and an eight pound turkey every Christmas Eve.
Mrs Roberts...well, she just wanted gossip. She was Derek's least favourite customer, always hovering around his counter for too long as though she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted (though in reality, Derek knew, she simply stayed in the hope that more people - and thus more gossip - would come in) and she never complimented him on his cuts in the same way his other patrons did. Derek worked hard to ensure that as much fat as possible never made it from animal to customer, and a little appreciation of that fact would not have gone amiss.
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