by Luke Duffy
It seemed that the entire city was on the move. People ran in panic, grabbing their loved ones and what belongings they could. Every car in the area was filled with terrified faces, all trying to get out from the built up area.
Within thirty minutes, the whole city had come to a standstill. Businesses closed their doors and many of the people responsible for the smooth flow of the metropolis, deserted their posts, all headed for home.
Soon, the streets were gridlocked.
Horns blew and angry voices cried out. A lot of people, overcome with fear, began to hear screams that were not there, leading to many cars, unable to move, being suddenly abandoned as their owners took to their feet and ran from the impending doom that they imagined was approaching them, leaving the road system almost impossible to negotiate.
It took Matthew the better part of three hours to travel the five miles from his office to his home. As he pushed his way along the packed roads, he looked on in shocked silence, unable to comprehend how quickly things could fall apart within such a short space of time.
By the time he got through the front door, he was shaking uncontrollably and almost collapsed in the hallway. Emily had propped him up, guided him into the living room, and placed his quivering body on the couch.
She had seen the news shortly after Matthew had phoned her in a panic from the office, and was up to speed on current events. Although she was terrified and still not sure whether or not to believe what she was hearing and seeing, she took the lead and began to organise things within their home.
Something had clicked inside of her. Being confronted with a global scale disaster and a horror that she could never have imagined, had awakened with a kick, a survival gene that she was unaware she even had.
Coupled with her husband being almost catatonic, she had no choice but to step up to the mark and take control.
The children were brought down from their rooms, being forbidden to move anywhere without her, even if they needed to use the toilet. She began checking all the windows and doors of the house and even taking stock of the food they had.
Bags were packed with essentials and left close to hand in case the situation arose were they would need to consider fleeing. Water was stored, anticipating possible utility failures and candles, torches, and batteries were dug out from beneath the kitchen sink and the store cupboard under the stairs.
For most of that day, she ran from one room to the next, organising and double-checking their preparations, not allowing herself too much time to begin pondering what the government had announced and its ramifications. She had not even allowed herself the time to see to her own needs, remaining unwashed and still in her bed clothes.
All the while, Matthew had remained frozen to the couch, having not spoken a word since he arrived through the door. He sat there, staring blankly ahead of him. His mind was a tangle of thoughts, mixed in with fear and remorse.
Michelle.
He pictured her lifeless body lying there, being forgotten and left to rot, after all the intimacy that they had shared over the past ten years.
She deserved better, he thought to himself. What if it was just a cold that she had, and I murdered her?
No matter how hard he tried, he was unable to shake the memory of her gruesome death from his mind. He could still feel the club in his hand, and hear the sickening thwack, as he smashed the life from her body, and the dull thump of her face crashing into the desk.
He shuddered internally.
It was a number of hours before he had begun to react to his surroundings again, and finally, swallowing his guilt down into his stomach, to deal with on another day, had forced himself to become a functional member of the family again.
Three days had passed and since that morning, they had all remained within the house, not daring to venture outside its protective walls.
Standing by the window, still holding on to Emily, he made his promises to her; that all would be okay and they would make it through the catastrophe together, as a family.
Finally, they released one another.
At that moment, their daughter, Paula, entered the room.
“Mum…?” She croaked.
“What is it, honey?”
Emily and Matthew turned to see her standing by the doorway, appearing unsteady on her feet and rubbing the palm of her hand against the side of her head. At first, they thought that she had just woken up and was slowly coming to, but they soon realised that their assumptions were misplaced.
Even through the semi-darkness and from the other side of the room, Matthew and Emily could both see how pale she had suddenly become. Her eyes looked swollen and her brow glistened with sweat from fever as she swayed from side to side.
She coughed, her chest sounding phlegmy and her throat rasping.
Matthew and Emily looked at one another with horrified eyes, feeling their throats tighten and their hearts become heavy as tendrils of dread began to creep through their nervous system.
“I don’t feel well,” Paula replied, weakly.
17
“Shut up,” he growled into his forearm as he lay on his back, shielding his eyes and nose, and trying to ignore the endlessly shifting and moaning infected in the room below him.
“Fucking shut up, you puss filled walking piles of shit.”
Every muttered demand, or movement that he made, regardless of how slight, was answered with dozens of shrieking excited voices. For a while, he had attempted to remain still and silent, in the hope that they would lose interest and go away, but they remained, crammed into the open area between the cubicles and sinks of the hospital’s public toilet. Their attention focussed solely on the pipes above their heads.
He was tired, dehydrated, and starved. Most of all, he was battling with despair. It felt like he had been trapped there for weeks, abandoned and forgotten, but it had been two days. Intermittent screams still rang out through the building as survivors were discovered, and set upon by the meandering bodies staggering through the corridors in search of fresh victims within the wards.
There was nothing he could do to aid the people he heard, crying out in agony and pleading for help. He was just as trapped, desperate and forsaken, as they were. It was only a matter of time before they would finally get him too.
He lay on his makeshift mattress, on top of the pipes that ran the length of the ceiling, and attempted to sleep. It was no use. Sleep had only come to him in fits and starts and for extremely short periods. No sooner had he drifted off, he would awake, startled, after only closing his eyes for a few minutes. Despite his exhaustion, sleep was evading him and his body and mind were beginning to suffer.
On the first day of his ordeal, within hours of finding himself stranded, a low rumble had vibrated along the conduit that acted as his island of safety above a sea of snapping teeth and haunting eyes. Soon, the pipes had begun to heat up, carrying boiling high pressure water and steam through the maze of the hospital. His howls of pain and anger, as the flesh of his hands and knees suffered from the extreme temperatures, fell on unsympathetic ears and only fed the exhilaration of the swarm below him.
For four hours, he had endured the agonising pain brought on by the scalding steel and iron pipes, searing his palms and the skin of his legs as he continually shifted his weight in an attempt to prevent his flesh from melting. When it had abated and the building’s automated heating systems had clicked on to ‘standby’, Bull vowed to himself that he would never undergo such torture again, at least from something as inanimate as a water pipe.
“Right, you horrible bastards,” he sneered as he hooked his legs around one of the supports that fixed the ducts to the wall and ceiling and carefully lowered his upper body down into the room.
“Who wants to join me up here, and keep me company?”
The crowd below, a collage of pale and grey faces, smeared in blood and bearing ghastly wounds, erupted with wails as they reached up for the warm meal that hovered just above their heads. They surged,
pushing and pulling at one another, their fingers digging deep into the tissue of the bodies around them as they fought to get closer.
Bull watched them for a while, carefully measuring each one of them up and choosing his target.
“You’ll do nicely,” he announced as he singled one of them out.
He reached behind him and grabbed his jacket, having already prepared it to form a noose. He checked the knots, tugging at them and making sure that they could take the strain. Directly below him, a man’s torn face snarled up at him. His right eye was missing, as was the flesh from most of that side of his face and neck, and exposing the glistening white bone of his skull. The image reminded Bull of an album cover from a Heavy Rock group he had once seen. The man was big, broad shouldered and thick set, and almost a head taller than all the others. Perfect for Bull’s needs.
Carefully aiming his jacket noose, Bull lowered it over the man’s head. It was a relatively easy task, because no matter how hard the bodies around him pushed and jostled against one another and his massive frame, he remained rooted to the spot, like a stubborn old oak tree.
Once it was in position, Bull gave the jacket a quick jerk, causing the knot to tighten around the man’s neck. Immediately, he began to struggle and pull at the material, thrashing his arms and shaking his head in an attempt to break free, but Bull’s grip was too strong and he remained snared and at his captor’s mercy.
With all of his might, Bull heaved, lifting the body from the ground and hanging from the noose. Adjusting his grip and reaching further down the sleeve of his jacket, Bull began to drag the dead man up towards him.
He growled and grunted with the strain. The muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged, threatening to split the skin, as more oxygenated blood was pumped into them. His back screamed at him as it bore the sudden weight increase of the struggling body on the end of the improvised rope. As his biceps and deltoids burned with the build-up of lactic acid, the supports and brackets of the pipes groaned and juddered in protest against the rusted bolts that held them in place.
Bull could feel the increased blood pressure rushing to his brain, forcing the veins in his neck to protrude from below the flesh, his face began to burn as his vision blurred, and his head swam. He clenched his jaw muscles and screwed his eyes shut to prevent them from popping out from their sockets.
With a long growl, through teeth that were gritted so tightly that it felt as though they were about to shatter, Bull heaved again.
The man in his grasp continued to squirm and pull at the noose, but Bull had no intention of releasing him. Despite the fact that his shoulder joints were close to dislocating and his back was screaming at him to let go, he tightened his grip.
“Come on, you big bastard,” he gasped.
By now, it felt as though his spinal column was about to break in two. With one eye, he risked a glance down and saw that the man’s face was now just below the ducts. Bull shifted his weight, allowing the excess of the jacket to become wedged beneath him and enabling him to release his grip with one hand. He pressed his body against the pipes, ensuring that the majority of the jacket was secure beneath him and unable to slip.
Next, with his free hand, he pulled his Browning pistol from his waistband and raised it above his head.
“Okay,” he huffed, looking down into the pale flat eyes of the reanimated corpse. “Keep still for a minute, please.”
He steadied the jacket with his left hand, just centimetres away from the man’s chin and gnashing teeth. With all the power that he could rally, he smacked the man with the pistol. The magazine housing smashed down against the bone of the skull, and even above the racket of the bodies below, Bull heard an audible crack as the cranium split.
For a moment, the dead man’s face stared back at him, bewildered, then as the thick dark blood began to seep from the large gash in his head and down over his face, he renewed his efforts to break free from the noose and reach for the man above him.
Again, Bull brought the weapon down, feeling the impact vibrate along his arm and causing the joint in his shoulder to jolt. More blood spattered outwards, splashing on to his hands and forearm, smearing the butt of his pistol in the glistening deep red fluid. A dark fissure appeared as the man’s skull split further, opening up like an overripe watermelon being dropped on to a hard surface.
The man fell limp and Bull began to heave him upwards again. It seemed to take forever to get the upper part of the corpse onto the pipes and allow Bull to take a moment to catch his breath and let his heart slow down to a rate that was not on the verge of causing it to explode through the walls of his chest.
As he sat back, panting and sucking in all the air that he could, stars began to float through his vision. Every muscle in his body throbbed and he became dizzy, causing him almost to lose his balance and the grip on the body that he had fought so hard to keep.
“Fuck me,” he gasped, “I hope this works.”
With renewed effort, he pulled the dead man the rest of the way on to the conduit. He paused for a moment and studied the pistol in his hand.
It would have been so much easier just to shoot him, he thought, but he wanted to save his ammunition for when he really needed it.
With the carcass sprawled out, flat on its back, Bull took rough mental measurements of the gap between the man’s chest and the ceiling of the room.
“It’ll be a bit of a squeeze,” he concluded after a minute or two. “Looks like I’ll need to flatten you out a little, mate.”
He rose to his knees, stooping over with his own head just millimetres from the ceiling, and leaned over the body with the mangled face head between his thighs. From that position, he had a good deal of leverage and a stable platform to work from with minimal risk of losing his balance and falling from the ducts.
He lowered both his hands to the corpse’s chest and locked the fingers of both his hands together to form a single fist. Again, he checked his position and looked across at the brackets holding the network of pipes to the wall. Somehow, despite the added weight, they remained tight and secure.
Bull took a deep breath and raised both his arms together, up over his head. At full stretch, he paused for a moment, steadying his aim then, forced his shoulders around and brought his arms down with all the power he could bring to bear. His fists crashed against the man’s sternum and Bull felt the bone shatter beneath the blow. He raised his arms again, this time, aiming for the ribs on the right hand side of the man’s chest. Again, all of his weight and strength were thrown into the impact, crushing and snapping the bones as he continued to rain down blow after blow along the entire midriff of the cadaver.
The ribs splintered and crumbled under his assault. Some exploded beneath the flesh, slicing their way through the tissue and protruding up through the torn skin. Bull was careful with his aim and maintained his self-control, observing the area of each impact and avoiding crashing his own hands into the jagged shards of ribcage that would splinter into his own flesh.
He still did not know much about the infection, but he was pretty sure that allowing their blood to mix with his own bodily fluids through a cut, would be deadly.
He continued to pummel away at the carcass. It shook under each blow and the pipes beneath them vibrated noisily. Again and again, he smashed his fists at the torso of the dead man, until, every bone from the shoulders to the waist, was broken and crushed.
Finally, with blood dripping from his aching fists and spattering his clothing, Bull sat back and studied his workmanship.
Again, he took mental measurements.
“Good,” he nodded to himself with satisfaction and an air of pride at his own ingenuity. “Good. I think that will just about do it.”
The body was a mess. Its arms hung limply from either side of its mutilated torso and dangled from over the pipes, dripping with blood and fragments of bone, but Bull paid no attention to that. He viewed the grotesque scene with a different eye.
“Right then,” he
announced as he crawled forward, sweeping the largest pools of blood from the man’s chest with his hands. “Let’s give you a try, then.”
He untied the knots from his jacket and laid it out over the body.
Within seconds, he was sprawled out on top of the mutilated corpse, facing up towards the ceiling and grinding his hips as he adjusted his position. His head rested on the area of the pelvis, using its natural shape as a cradle, and his legs were stretched out along either side of the pulverised skull.
“Oh yeah,” he groaned, “this should be bob-on.”
He paused for a moment, considering his actions and current predicament. After some reflection, he burst into laughter. It was uncontrollable and no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop.
“Fucking hell,” he howled, his voice echoing through the room and out into the vast corridors of the hospital. “I’m using a dead man as a fucking mattress.”
Through the sound of his own laughter, he failed to notice the distant rumble, but a minute later, he felt the vibrations as the pipes beneath him began to carry their boiling hot cargo from one end of the building to the other.
Bull’s hilarity subsided and he stared up at the ceiling, concentrating on whether or not he could feel any heat through his crude and monstrous organic mattress. He could feel a degree of warmth, radiating through the cold lifeless corpse beneath him, but the searing heat was gone. He waited for another twenty minutes, praying that the high temperature would be countered by the cool flesh of the dead man.
Eventually, Bull began to find the experience quite pleasant, to a degree. The body did not get too hot, and the pipes prevented it from cooling too much and reminding him that he was lying on top of a corpse. With a little effort, he was able to push it from his mind and forget what his makeshift cot was made from.
“I reckon,” he suddenly announced to his dead audience, speaking to them as though they had been eagerly awaiting for his verdict on the matter. “That if this thing gets any worse, and you lot down there, end up taking over the world, I’ll patent this idea. It’s better than an electric blanket.”