by Rich Hawkins
Ralph considered checking the boy’s pulse. He didn’t. “It’s as though he went to bed just so he could die.”
“But what did he die of?”
“Maybe the same thing that was wrong with the woman we found.”
Magnus covered the boy with the duvet then stepped away, clearing his throat. “What if the boy’s contagious?”
Ralph didn’t answer.
They returned to the landing.
Ralph looked up at the attic hatch. “So what was he doing up there? Was he hiding?”
“We’ll never know,” said Magnus. “There’s no need to know. Let’s just go back downstairs.”
“Someone should go up to the attic.”
Magnus blinked. “What? Are you mental?”
“Think about it. Do you want to return downstairs knowing there might be someone else lurking in the attic? There’s that thing outside that crashed against the door, and the thing that was shrieking when we first arrived in the village. Those things, whatever they are, are outside. We need to make sure that we’re safe inside.”
“We’ll need a stepladder to get up there.”
“Not necessarily,” said Ralph.
“What do you mean?”
“You get on my shoulders.”
“Fuck off.”
“We have to know if the attic’s empty. We might have to stay here until morning. Would you rather stand guard here all night?”
Magnus looked up at the hatch. “Bollocks.”
“Come on, then.”
“How do you want to do this?”
“Either you stand on my shoulders or I give you a lift up with my hands.”
“You choose.”
“I’ll lift you up.”
“Okay. Don’t let me fall.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Not at all.”
Ralph put down his knife and crouched beneath the hatch. “Ready?”
“No,” Magnus said as he stepped forward, placing one foot into Ralph’s cupped hands and the other upon his right shoulder.
Ralph took his weight and wobbled, shifting his feet to steady himself. Lifting with his legs, he hoisted Magnus up to the hatch; Magnus gripped the hatch edges.
Ralph shook under his friend’s weight. “You’re heavier than you look, you skinny bastard.”
“Maybe you’re weaker than you look, fat bastard.”
“Funny. What do you see?”
“It’s pretty dark up here.”
“Use your fucking torch, then.”
“Shut up.”
Ralph kept hold of Magnus’s legs, keeping him steady. His strength held as he heard Magnus shifting around above him.
“What the hell are these doing up here?”
Magnus lowered a set of keys in front of Ralph’s face. “One of them must be for the car out in the driveway.”
“Who keeps their keys in the attic?”
Magnus didn’t answer. His legs went rigid.
“What’s wrong?” Ralph asked, peering upwards.
“I think I see something,” Magnus said, finally. “There’s something moving up here.”
“What do you see?”
“Let me down.”
“What’s up there?”
“Fucking let me down, now!”
Ralph lowered into a crouch and released Magnus, who stumbled onto the landing and into the wall, his face bloodless.
“There’re two of them,” Magnus said.
Ralph picked up his knife, looked up at the hatch. The sound of shuffling footsteps approached from above.
“What’s up there?”
“We have to leave.”
“What the fuck is it?”
“Just move, for fuck’s sake.”
Magnus stumbled down the stairs. Ralph turned back and saw a face appear in the open hatch and regard him with piscine eyes. He stared at the face until its mouth curled into a grey-lipped grin. He felt his bowels drop. He ran down the stairs, jumping the last two steps, while Magnus and Joel were removing the barricade from the front door.
“Hurry up!” Ralph said.
A soft thump came from upstairs.
“Hurry up!”
The attic’s occupants were on the landing. Shadows moved, reaching and long-limbed, as the men heaved the Welsh dresser away from the front door.
Magnus opened the door. Cold air rushed into the house.
Joel and Ralph looked up the stairway, where two naked figures crouched at the edge of the landing, staring down at them. A man and a woman covered in wet tumours and weeping cysts. Their eyes shined in the torchlight.
“The boy’s parents,” Magnus said, before fleeing the house. “They were nesting in a corner of the attic.”
The monsters started down the stairs, their movements twitchy and awkward, eyes set with ravenous intensity upon the men. Their skin glistened wet and milky.
Ralph pushed Joel out the doorway. Magnus was trying to start the car.
“We left our bags in the house,” said Joel.
Ralph shut the front door, breathing hard. “You want to go back in and get them?”
From within the house the two creatures shrieked and wailed. Ralph slumped in the front passenger seat, then shut and locked his door. He winced as his chest seemed to constrict around his lungs.
Joel jumped onto the backseat. “What about Frank?”
“He’s dead, for all we know.”
“We can’t leave him here. We could go back to where we left the woman.”
Ralph turned his head to stare at Joel. “We haven’t got time. He made his choice. Feel free to get out and start looking for him.”
Joel looked away, said nothing.
When Ralph turned back to face the front, his mouth dropped open in shock and terror. “Oh, holy fuck.”
Figures emerged into the street from shadowy gardens and side roads. Things that mewled and screeched and snarled. They were people, but not people. Not anymore.
Magnus turned the key in the ignition, but the engine only responded with a desperate chugging sound.
“Be careful,” said Joel. “You’ll flood the engine.”
“Hurry up, Magnus!” Ralph said, not taking his eyes from the once-human creatures skittering across the street. “Come on!”
“I’m trying!”
“Try harder!”
The horn blared when Magnus banged his hand against the steering wheel. He exhaled, and twisted the key so that the dashboard went dark, then waited, his eyes flicking towards the advancing things.
“What’re you doing?” said Ralph. “Start the fucking car!” In the rear view mirror he saw the front door of the house open to reveal the boy’s parents, who stepped outside, hunched and twitching, with clawed hands drawn towards their crooked bodies.
Joel was whimpering.
“Wait a moment,” said Magnus.
“If you don’t start the car I’ll stick this knife up your arse!”
Magnus turned the key and the dashboard lights turned on. “Here goes…”
The parents clawed at the rear windscreen, attempting to gain entry. Their tortured faces peered in at Joel, who screamed and flinched away from the glass and their sharp mouths beyond.
Magnus turned the key towards the engine; it spluttered, almost giving Ralph a coronary, but then growled and revved as Magnus pumped the accelerator.
From the car stereo, Johnny Cash began to sing about walking the line.
Magnus let out a delirious laugh.
“Put your foot down,” said Ralph.
Magnus nodded. He looked at the swarm of villagers filling the street and gunned the engine.
With a screech of tyres the car bolted down the driveway, knocking aside a man whose face was drooping on one side and knotted with swollen blisters. His left arm was a glistening appendage of coiling sinew and spikes erupting from epidermal layers.
Magnus turned onto the road and put his foot down. The car picked up enough speed to outrun
the faster creatures bolting after it. And all around the villagers screamed to the sky, while some crouched and stared, eyes gleaming. Some grinned at the car as it rushed past them. Men, women, and children, all transformed into abominations. Some were holding hands; others didn’t even have hands. Impossible limbs grew and retracted from twitching bodies, and bloated abdomens glistened in the headlights. Other forms reached out to the car, as if begging for help. These poor creatures staggered on emaciated legs wasted down to bone. Groans and screams echoed from around the street.
Magnus stared straight ahead, ignoring the monstrosities.
“Fucking hell,” said Ralph. “What happened to them?”
Neither Joel nor Magnus answered. And when Ralph thought about it, he didn’t want an answer. He dropped his knife in the footwell and held his face in his hands. The edges of his mind weakened and buckled. He wanted to be at home, safe in bed, snacking on Hula Hoops and Jaffa Cakes, not fleeing for his life in a stolen car.
“Jesus Christ,” Joel was muttering. “Jesus Christ…”
Magnus glanced at Ralph, daring to look away from the road. “Do you really think Frank is dead? Do you think those things killed him?”
“Maybe they ate him,” Joel whispered.
Ralph looked down the road. There were bodies on several lawns and scattered bones upon a pavement.
They fled. No one spoke.
They were less than a mile out of the village when headlights flared on the road ahead.
Magnus slowed the car to a halt, gripping the steering wheel with trembling hands. The headlights approached. The sound of a large engine grew louder. It was some type of truck.
The headlights stopped twenty yards away and several figures stepped into the light. They appeared to be human. Normal humans, Ralph thought, but he had been fooled already today.
They moved towards the car.
“Soldiers,” Ralph muttered.
“We’re saved,” said Joel, his voice wavering.
A gas mask-clad soldier with a rifle walked to Ralph’s side of the car. The rifle was raised towards him.
“I hope so, mate. I really hope so.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Frank hid in a garden outside a darkened house, clutching the crowbar tight to his chest. The cold grass under his feet leeched the warmth from his body. Exhaustion ached in his bones.
In a nearby street something screeched like a pig caught in a steel trap. He flinched, tried not to imagine what had birthed the sound. He remembered the sights he’d seen while running for his life through the empty streets of the village: human remains and splintered bones; a man kneeling on a pavement, his body juddering, limbs snapping into unnatural angles; a woman in a torn dress crouching in a driveway, biting at the dead cat in her hands.
Frank had managed to escape his pursuers, weaving down alleyways and side-streets without regard for what might have lurked within them. But the maniacs were still hunting him, wherever they were right now. He tensed his stomach muscles and stifled the urge to vomit. The corrupted stink of his pursuers was everywhere. They had marked the village, this ground, as their own.
He listened for any slight whisper or hush of movement from nearby. He dared to move his arms to restore some circulation.
There were clicking sounds out on the street. Light footfalls and the scuffing of shoes upon tarmac. A low, rattling growl from a half-man’s mouth. Then the cloud cover shifted to reveal the pallid half-moon and the glimmer of stars. The galaxy revealed itself in silver light and metallic gleam.
The road adjacent to the garden was crawling with near-human shapes.
His eyes had adapted to the dark, and now with the added moonlight he could observe the creatures in more detail than was good for him. Some of them were naked, revealing the black spines erupting from their bodies. Some were crouching, sniffing at the road and trying to pick up his scent. Others skittered and moaned. One of the creatures raised its face to the sky and wailed. Another gibbered to itself, and Frank thought he could discern words amongst the nonsense, but nothing that made any sense.
Eventually they moved away and disappeared into the dark. Frank waited until they were long gone until he stood and looked out onto the street. He took a few steps towards the road then stopped and listened to the muffled thumps and booms in the distance. They sounded like the noises he had heard earlier when he’d cowered under the van. Like fireworks.
White light flashed once in the sky to the north. It wasn’t lightning.
He emerged onto the pavement and stood before small puddles of stinking fluid on the road, wincing at a stench that reminded him of the pickled eggs Catherine would eat when she was drunk.
Something moved behind him. He pivoted and raised his crowbar.
A fox emerged from one of the gardens down the street. It saw Frank, but it wasn’t worried about him because there were deadlier predators on the streets tonight.
The fox scampered across the road and into another garden.
“Good luck, mate,” Frank said, and meant it.
He went back the way he had come, back to his mates. He crept along for a few minutes, scanning the gardens and houses brimming with ocean-floor darkness. His imagination played tricks on him, making the moon-shadows dance and quiver. He considered entering one of the many houses along the street, but the thought of monstrous things lurking in dark rooms dissuaded him. He contemplated running, but realised he would make too much noise with the pounding of his shoes on the road.
Dead streetlights and empty driveways flanked him. A woman’s body slumping across a car bonnet had been opened up and emptied out. Flaps of moulted skin fluttered in the breeze on the road.
He stopped when he heard a car engine from the next street. Brakes shrieked and tyres scraped on the road, followed by the crash of metal against something heavier and immovable. A scream pierced the night.
Frank rounded the corner and stopped, his shoulders moving with each breath he gave and took. He swallowed to dampen his throat.
A car had crashed into a stone wall outside a house. A man slouched over the steering wheel as the woman in the front passenger seat tried to wake him. She cried between each scream. On the backseat, a little girl sat stunned and reeling.
A spindly figure in a bloodied tracksuit pulled open the driver’s door and dragged the man outside. Then it laid the man on the road and knelt over him.
“Hey,” Frank shouted.
The figure turned and hissed at Frank. It was a man, or what used to be one, his mouth misshapen with jagged teeth and his bones jutting from under his filthy, blood-streaked tracksuit. Sunken eyes and wispy hair. He was shaking like an addict. One of his trainers was missing.
Frank halted.
The man turned back to the unconscious driver and bent his head forward. It looked like a kiss.
There was a wet scraping sound, and the woman screamed when she saw what the man was doing.
Frank stumbled over to the man and hit him on the back with the crowbar. The man came free from his victim with a moist rip and turned, a wheezing rattle coming from his open mouth. On his neck, flaps of skin parted bloodlessly to reveal a nest of black tendrils no longer or thicker than shoelaces flailing at the air.
With all his strength, Frank smashed the man’s face with the crowbar. There was a horrific cracking sound and then the man collapsed. The tendrils danced erratically then flopped onto the man’s chest. The man’s face was crumpled and broken, his nose all bent cartilage and crumbling bone.
Frank stepped away, repulsed.
The woman was still screaming. The girl stared at Frank, her palm pressed against the window. He ran to the car and opened the back door.
“Come on, get out.”
The girl didn’t move. Red hair reaching to her shoulders. He had a sudden image of another girl with red hair. A girl he loved.
On the other side of the car, two men had opened the woman’s door and grabbed her. They ripped the woman from her seat just
as Frank pulled the girl from the car. She didn’t fight him. She only looked back at the car and called for her mother.
The woman screamed. The men fell upon her with snapping mouths. She stopped screaming soon afterwards.
“We can’t help her,” Frank told the girl as he led her away. They looked down at the driver lying on the road. His eyes were gone from their sockets and the flesh on his cheeks had been gnawed away. His throat was a red wound.
“That’s my dad,” the girl muttered, tears streaming down her face. Shivering sobs filled her chest.
“I’m sorry.” It was all Frank could say. His attention was caught by a group of people running towards them from down the road. They were indistinct in the moonlit dark, but their twitching movements and gasping sounds of hunger betrayed their intentions. Frank looked back in the direction the car had come and saw the church tower looming above surrounding houses. It was only a few hundred yards away. He remembered the church bells had rung earlier. Maybe someone was there.
The girl was crying.
Frank picked her up and ran down the road, away from the chasing group, dodging a loose-faced woman in a stained cotton nightdress. Her arms trembled and jerked. She stared at the ground and vanished into the shadows.
He kept running, getting closer to the church, the girl becoming heavier in his tired arms, and when the main gates appeared directly ahead, he almost cried in relief.
Things that were once people screamed and mewled behind them. Gaining on them.
They reached the edge of the churchyard, where tall trees lined the periphery. Deep shadows beneath the boughs. Frank pushed through the gates onto the stone pathway. In the pale moonlight he could make out gravestones jutting from the ground and a war memorial to the men who’d died in both World Wars. There was meagre light beyond the stained-glass windows of the church. Hope flared for a moment.
“We’re nearly there,” Frank whispered.
There were people in the graveyard, gibbering and crying to one another amidst the headstones. Shapes moved like mourners trying to find the right grave of their loved ones.
Frank and the girl reached the church’s arched double-doors. He twisted the ring-shaped metal handle just before a teenage boy stepped from within a pool of shadow to his right. Frank flinched and the girl let out a short scream. In the moonlight, the boy’s shoulders were slumped and narrow, and his face was a riot of wounds and writhing barbs. Frank opened the door and rushed inside, then slammed it shut with his shoulder. He stood with his back against the door, breathing hard, on the verge of tears. The girl said nothing.