by Ryan Casey
Then it dawned on me…
“Wait,” I said. “You do realise there’s been an event, don’t you?”
“What kind of event?” Margery asked.
“A blackout,” Haz cut in, eager to explain. “Well, not exactly a blackout. More an EMP strike. It’s fried the electricity. Could be country-wide, could be global. Could be… can I just say, this stew is delicious?”
Margery chuckled. “Oh, don’t thank me,” she said, patting Bill’s arm. “Thank the girls, here. Those are the ones you should be grateful to.”
Haz looked at them and nodded. A couple of them giggled childishly, even though they had to be in their late teens or early twenties.
This entire dinner was getting weirder by the second.
“So,” Hannah said, dipping some crusty bread into her stew. “What you’re trying to say is, you’re self-sustainable anyway, or something?”
“Off the grid, well and truly,” Margery said. “And we have been that way for the best part of a year now.”
Lionel looked up at the table hopefully, eager for more scraps.
“Timed that right,” Hannah said.
Margery frowned like she didn’t really get the reference. Then, when Bill laughed a little, she started laughing too as if she’d just realised Hannah was telling a joke all along.
“And this safe zone we hear about,” Remy said. “I’m assuming you won’t know much about that, then?”
“Oh, safe zones,” Margery said, topping up her glass of wine. “That’s what they tell you, isn’t it? That’s what they promise you. But really, dear, nowhere is safe. Not when it’s in the eyes of the government. Not when they are spying on you, putting poison in your food and trackers in your skin.”
Everyone went silent. It was clear now that Margery and Bill were the kind of paranoid, tin-foil hat types that would flourish in a world like this.
“Mummy, I hate this.”
Aiden’s voice cut through the silence, puncturing the atmosphere like a pin to a balloon.
Bill’s head swung around, and for a moment, just a fleeting moment, I saw a glimmer of sheer disgust in his deep brown eyes as he looked judgmentally at Aiden.
“I’m sorry,” Sue said, clearly embarrassed. “We’re really grateful for the food. Really. Aiden’s just a fussy eater.”
“No he’s not,” Holly cut in. “You always say it’s me that’s the fussy eater. Remember?”
Sue looked between her children like she was caught between a rock and a hard place. Margery and Bill looked like they’d been personally insulted. I was growing keen to get out of this place as quickly as possible, even if it meant camping out in that storm tonight. Something about this whole setup just didn’t ring true, like we were dining on top of an iceberg, unsure of what secrets hid beneath us.
“It’s been a long day,” I said. “We’re all just tired. Truly, though, we’re very grateful for your delicious food.”
The faith seemed restored to Bill and Margery’s faces. They all smiled, and a couple of the girls giggled. “Thank you,” Margery said. “You really are such a gentleman. A handsome gentleman, at that. You’d be ideal for Beatrice.”
I chuckled a little as the dark-haired girl, Beatrice, made eye contact with me, then looked back down at her food.
“You should try her out.”
Bill’s voice itself was jarring and disorienting.
So much so that it took a few seconds for the actual contents of his words to make sense in my mind.
“What?” I said.
Bill’s eyes were dead set on me now. “You should try Beatrice out. See what you make of her. She’s yours if you enjoy each other.”
I lowered my fork, feeling my face turn red. Hannah, Remy, Haz, and Sue all looked just as stunned as I was. The children didn’t look all that fazed.
Lionel was still looking for fallen scraps.
“I’m sorry,” I said, clearing my throat and swallowing a lumpy piece of meat. “I… Do you have a bathroom?”
“I’m sorry if my husband offended you,” Margery said. “He’s very old-fashioned about these things. Toilet is upstairs, on the far left. We’ve got a septic tank attached to it, so you should have no problems.”
“Thank you,” I said, hurrying to my feet.
I felt guilty about abandoning the rest of my friends at the table with that bunch of nutters. I mean, Bill had been pretty clear in what he’d said. Beatrice was mine if I wanted her.
And Margery apologised and defended it as an old-fashioned attitude.
Maybe that’s all it was. An old-fashioned misogynist.
But still, there was something inherently unpleasant about what I’d been offered. And it made me want to vomit up my food.
I walked up the stairs, past a dressing table. On it, there was a photo of a young couple. They looked vaguely like Margery and Bill, but it must’ve been taken some years ago.
I made my way up the stairs, then headed for the bathroom.
When I reached the door, I stopped.
There was a noise coming from the room on the right.
My body froze. Part of me wanted to believe they had a pet. That’s all it was. Or the wind. The wind was just creaking the house foundations. That had to be it.
I made a move to the bathroom door again when I heard something else.
This time, it was like a mumble.
I turned around, hairs on my arm standing on end. I could hear plates and knives clinking downstairs as everyone continued with their dinner.
I wanted to look in that room.
I wanted to see what the noise was.
But the thought that there could be something in there terrified me.
Still, I took a deep breath. I crept over to the door, being sure to keep glancing downstairs in case anyone came out and caught me.
I put a hand on the handle. Turned it. And as the wind roared and the rain fell heavily, I felt more and more stupid about what I was doing.
When I opened the door, the first thing that hit me was the smell.
The room was dark. The windows were boarded up. Flies buzzed around.
I’d never smelled a decomposing body. I wanted to believe I still hadn’t.
But I’d heard and read descriptions of what they were like.
And this was it.
I stepped into the room. I lifted the torch, which I’d kept secret to the hosts, out of my pocket. I could see something on the bed. A mound. I didn’t want to know what that mound was.
But I had to know.
I lifted the torch with my shaky hand. Downstairs, I heard more plates clinking. More laughter.
I lifted the torch higher, held my breath as nausea crippled me.
Then, I switched on the light.
When I saw what was on the bed, I couldn’t keep my food inside of me for a second longer.
I just knew one thing, for certain.
We had to get out of this place.
We had to get out, fast.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I walked back into the dining room trying my best to look as calm and collected as I possibly could, especially after what I’d just seen in the upstairs bedroom.
The candlelight of the dining room cast a terrifying glow over the place. When I walked in, it was Bill’s eyes which met mine first, and they seemed to have taken on a whole new level of intensity. He looked at me like he was trying to figure out how much I knew; whether I’d gone snooping. Shit. Had I failed to clean some vomit off myself, which I couldn’t keep inside me? Was I making it too obvious that I’d just seen something that I hoped I’d never see, and I’m pretty sure nobody else would hope to see, either?
Then Margery interrupted and broke the tension of our stare.
“Scott, my dear. Would you like some dessert?”
I took my seat, sat down in it, but doing so just brought an overwhelming spectre of dread right over me again. “I’m okay. Thanks.”
“Are you okay, Scotty-boy?” Haz
asked. “You look pretty pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“Look like you’ve seen a ghost!” he repeated.
I glared at him. “Really. I’m fine.”
I hoped he could tell from the tone of my voice that I wasn’t fine. I hoped he’d realise that something was desperately wrong and that I was giving him a cue to prepare for… well, prepare for what exactly?
What could we do?
What options did we have?
“That’s a shame,” Margery said, scooping up some cake and dishing it out between the guests. “It’s fruitcake. My speciality.”
“Got that right,” Hannah muttered.
“What did you say?” Margery asked.
She smiled and raised a hand. “I said I’d love some, thanks.”
As I watched the rest of the meals get served, all I could think about was what I’d seen in that room upstairs.
First the smell.
Then, when I’d switched the torch on…
“You don’t look well at all,” Margery said. “Would you like me to get you some water? A paracetamol, perhaps?”
“I’d… actually I’d appreciate that. Thanks.”
I had no real intention of taking that paracetamol. After all, I could end up just like the people I’d seen in that bedroom.
The couple chained to the bed.
One of them, the man, dead.
The woman, alive, barely.
Margery and Bill weren’t who they said they were at all…
I lifted my head as the rest of the table ate, and I saw Bill was staring right at me.
I moved my finger around the trigger of the gun. We’d given up our two other guns when we’d first been welcomed inside, but I’d kept hold of this one. I’d made sure nobody knew that.
I’d already used the gun once and wasn’t too pleased about having to use it again.
But I had to, didn’t I?
I had to.
“You might as well be honest,” Bill said, leaning back and smiling. When he leaned back, I saw he had a little pistol. It might well have been one of our own.
Sue squealed when she saw it, grabbed her kids and held them tight.
“Whoa,” Hannah said. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“On your feet,” Bill said.
“But seriously,” Hannah said. “What’s—”
“If you ask questions, I’ll have you on your feet too. Scott. On your feet. Now.”
I felt my hand shaking on the trigger of the gun. I couldn’t shoot someone else, could I? I couldn’t kill another person.
“Now!” Bill barked.
I stood up. But I kept my hands in my pockets as I stood.
“Hands in the air.”
“Seriously,” Haz said, looking around for some kind of support that his confusion was justified. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Someone’s been looking around where they shouldn’t have,” Bill said. “And if they’d just behaved… if they’d just gone to the toilet, like a good boy, maybe they’d have made it. Hands in the air. Now!”
I realised then I had no choice.
It was now or never.
I lifted my hands and pointed the gun at Bill.
His daughters—or whoever they were—all five of them, shrieked.
I went to fire.
A shot blasted past Bill’s head, smashing the window behind him.
“You bloody bastard…”
He stormed towards me, and I don’t know why but I dropped the gun. I raised my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was just—”
“You smashed our windows. You any idea how much those windows’ll cost to replace?”
The women around the table, all five, looked afraid.
Bill walked towards me, slowly, gun raised.
He stopped right in front of me and kicked my gun away. Then he pushed the gun to my chest and looked at me with those distant, glassy eyes.
“You made a big mistake just then,” he said. “A big mistake.”
“Bill?” Margery said.
He didn’t turn around. Not at first.
“It’s Jenny, Bill. She’s not in her room.”
He turned around then, confusion on his face.
Just for a second, I saw him glance at Margery in misunderstanding.
Then a woman stepped up behind Margery and put a knife to her throat.
The woman I’d uncuffed from the bed without them knowing.
Jenny.
“Whoa!” Bill shouted.
I punched him, then. Knocked the gun right out of his hand. I pointed it at him.
“Don’t move.”
“Wait—”
“Don’t move a muscle! Someone—someone grab the other gun.”
Nobody moved.
“Someone grab it!”
Remy rushed for it. He stood up, pointed the gun at Bill as he stood beside me.
“Please,” Margery mumbled, as Jenny—the woman I’d freed from the room upstairs—held a knife to her neck. “We just wanted a nice dinner with nice people.”
Hannah went to help Jenny hold Margery. Haz, reluctantly, kept an eye on the girls around the table, who looked more afraid than anything.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” I said to Bill. “You came in here, and you locked that couple up in their own home. You left the man to die. And you’d have left Jenny to die, too. Wouldn’t you?”
For the first time, Bill looked at me with a glimmer of normalcy that frightened me.
A smile stretched across his face, tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I did what I had to do. Now you’ll do what you have to do.”
He looked at the gun, and I knew what he meant.
“No,” Margery begged. “Please. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt my angel.”
Part of me wanted to, for what he’d done to that man I’d found in the bedroom, and for the emaciated figure he’d turned Jenny into.
But another part of me didn’t want to kill someone else.
“Turn around,” I said.
Bill chuckled. “You can’t do it, can you?”
“Just—just turn around.”
“You don’t have the strength. You can’t face up to the ugliness. And that’ll get you nowhere.”
I tickled the trigger tighter than ever before.
“Please!” Margery begged.
Then I stopped. Because as insane as these people were, they were still just people, and someone else could bring them to justice. I wasn’t a self-appointed law. I couldn’t—
Then, a gunshot cracked through the room.
For a second, I wondered if my gun had malfunctioned when I realised that smoke was coming from the end of Remy’s gun.
A bullet hole drooled blood down the front of Bill’s head.
The glassiness returned to his eyes as if he’d just gone back to his normal self.
Then he dropped down to his knees in a heap.
Margery looked on with wide-eyed terror. “No!” she screamed.
But not for long.
Not when Jenny pulled the blade across her throat.
And when she’d pulled that blade, Jenny too fell to her knees herself and collapsed, unconscious.
Silence filled the room. Blood oozed from Bill and Margery’s bodies. I shook as I held the gun in my hand, not responsible this time but a part of what had happened, of what I’d witnessed. More of the food crept up my throat as Sue held on to her crying children, covering their eyes, and Lionel cowered in the corner.
I looked around at the five women, pale, shocked in the middle of the table.
“It’s okay now,” I said. “You… you’re free now.”
Beatrice made tearful eye contact with me. “But they were our saviours. We… we don’t know what to do without them. They were our saviours!”
“You can come with us.”
“No!” another of the women screamed. “We won’t leave them. We’ll never leave them.”
As Hannah checked on Jenny, we all stood around and watched as the five women gathered around the bodies of the dead and mourned them.
I wished we could do more for these women. I wished we could at least begin to understand what they’d been through, how long they’d been here, and what they were so afraid of.
But in the end, these people were caught up in their own myths, their own lives. And we couldn’t begin to understand what they’d been through, whether this was some kind of cult or whatever, we just couldn’t be sure.
“Don’t go far,” I said, as I walked over the bloodstained carpet. “When we reach the safe zone, we’ll send someone here to help you.”
“We don’t want your help,” Beatrice spat.
But in her grief, I could hear nothing but desperation, as we walked out of the dining room, together, away from another bloodbath, all of us changed people all over again.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The sun beamed down from the cloudless sky, and as I inhaled, I felt the scars of last night being cleansed right from my system.
We had been walking since sunrise. We were all tired and exhausted after last night’s ordeal with Bill and Margery. To be honest, none of us had really spoken about what had happened. It felt like if we brought it up, it would tear away the scabs that had temporarily formed over our wounded minds.
There was a problem, and the problem was our weapons. We’d searched high and wide for the guns we’d handed over, but they were gone. In the end, we were left with just the two guns and not very much ammo. Nine bullets between us, in fact. But I supposed those nine bullets could be the difference between life and death.
I could tell from the way Remy was clenching his jaw that what he had done troubled him.
But he’d spared me having to kill someone else. I didn’t have that on my conscience.
At least, that wasn’t the plan.
But of course I did. I was a part of this group. I was a killer; all of us were killers, even if by extension.
Our main concern was Jenny. She had come around not long after her collapse, but she had been severely dehydrated and malnourished. We let her have some of our supplies, but we knew they weren’t going to keep her alive forever. She needed medical attention, really. She needed proper food and proper shelter. Walking out here, camping, none of that was going to make her better anytime soon. It was only going to worsen her condition.