by Rich Hawkins
“Time to leave,” he said.
Ellie was nodding absently. “Okay.”
Agnes reached out to them with one crooked hand. A ravenous ghost, all trembling and wretched. Her face held an expression of need and yearning as she spoke to them in a voice pulled from the wet muscle of her throat.
“I’m so hungry. So hungry. Will you help me?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They fled back to Agnes’s house as the old woman rose to her feet and called to them in a pitiful voice. Once inside, Mason slammed the door behind him and threw the bolt. He stood with his back against the door, breathing hard and grimacing.
Ellie leaned upon the dining table, the light of her torch wavering on the wall across from her. Shuddering breaths in her chest. Her eyes watery with shock and fear.
“Agnes,” she said, voice trembling. “What the fuck…?”
When the door handle began turning from outside Mason moved away and retreated in silence. He grabbed a carving knife from the draining rack next to the sink and held it out from his body, ready for Agnes to enter the house.
The handle stopped moving. Mason and Ellie looked at each other. They didn’t move or make a sound.
Seconds later came the scratching of fingernails upon the other side of the door. And then Agnes’ whispered voice, begging to be let in.
*
They stumbled through the front doorway and out onto the road to hear the first screams rise from the houses around them. The candlelight in windows was snuffed out, leaving only darkness.
A barked voice from behind a door. The shattering of glass. Something that sounded like a wet growl.
Mason caught a glimpse of movement above the street. He looked up to see dark figures crouching upon rooftops either side of the road. Silhouettes against the silver-moon sky. Silent and watching. Their red eyes were like glowing coals.
Ellie saw them and muttered something under her breath.
Distant voices and high-pitched laughter echoed from down the road, carried on the breeze, followed by a guttural, wordless exclamation. Then there was an animal-like cry.
Screams came from down the street. Distressed shouting and crying. A baby wailed.
“They’re in the houses,” Mason said.
“What the hell is happening?” Ellie asked him.
“We have to get off the street.”
And when Mason raised his face again, the rooftops were empty, and the many screams rose to a chorus in the flickering darkness of the street.
He took Ellie’s arm and pulled her with him as he broke into a staggering run.
*
They ran from the screams behind them and returned to Ellie’s house. Mason closed the front door quietly then made sure to lock it. He searched for a makeshift weapon to use with the knife, and found a lump hammer in the cupboard under the sink. Then he followed Ellie into the living room. They left the candles unlit, leaving them with just the thin torchlight. Ellie sat on the sofa and Mason went to the window and peered from one side of the curtains.
When he noticed a tall figure on the roof of the house directly opposite, he shrank away from the window and retreated to the middle of the room.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Ellie, her head in her hands, leaning towards the floor with her elbows on her thighs.
“I can barely believe it myself,” said Mason.
“They were on the rooftops. I saw their eyes. I heard the screams.”
Mason stood against the wall. He craved a cigarette, but doubted the ability of his hands to roll one.
Ellie looked up at him. Her face seemed gaunt and sickly in the torchlight. “Sit down, Mason.”
“I’m okay standing.”
“Sit next to me.”
He looked at her and hesitated. “Okay.” He did as she told him. In their proximity he could feel the shivering of her body above even his own. The urge to hold her, comfort her against the dark, pulled at his heart. But in the end he did nothing, and looked down at his hands as they sat in their silence, listening to the intermittent screams in the night.
Distant sirens. Distant shouts.
And Mason thought that if he were to die with Ellie beside him, it would not be the worst death for a man.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Less than an hour later the vampires came sniffing at the living room window. Mason tightened his hands around the knife and the hammer. Ellie gave out a shuddering breath.
Clawed hands scratched at the outer walls. The shuffling of feet. A low hiss. Something that could have been a word was spat from a mouth brimming with teeth and low to the ground.
Ellie placed her hand on Mason’s arm.
They looked at each other. A spark of understanding.
The door was attacked, and it soon splintered and crashed inward. A low growl and scrabbling claws. Wet mutterings and the sounds of deep hunger. The vampires entered the house and skittered into the living room. There were two, standing side-by-side, slightly hunched and deathly pale. A man and a woman. Stained with fresh blood that wasn’t their own. Snapping jaws lined with ghastly teeth. One of them shrieked from its horrid black mouth. Wretched things. Gleeful monsters in the dark.
Mason wondered if they were husband and wife, and if Ellie knew them.
He rose to meet them with the knife and hammer. Ellie stood behind Mason and directed her torch upon the creatures; they squinted and hissed in the light, but did not retreat or even step back, trembling with excitement and the craving of their awful appetites. They were freshly turned, recent converts dressed in casual clothing. Their eyes held a certain arrogance that infuriated Mason and made it easier to travel to that ugly red place in his mind. That place of heat and witless anger he remembered from drunken fights outside pubs and nightclubs.
And the vampires came at them, swift and snarling and screaming. Mason stepped back from the speed of the male vampire’s attack and fell onto his back as the creature pounced upon him. He kicked out with his legs and pushed the vampire away, then sat up and slashed with the knife as the vampire lunged forward again. The blade caught it in the stomach. It reeled away hissing, but then countered with a swing of one clawed hand that Mason narrowly avoided. And before the vampire could strike again he swung the hammer and connected with the side of its sharp mouth. There was a sudden wet crack. The male fell to its knees against the wall, one side of its jaw hanging loose. It spat razor teeth from its mouth as it blindly flailed long arms and tried to rise, but Mason was already bringing down the hammer with all the strength he could gather.
With its crippled mouth the vampire looked up at the last moment to greet the hammer against its face. A sound like a brick being smashed as the hammer impacted between its eyes and caved in the front of its skull.
The male vampire fell onto its ruined face and slapped the floor with its hands. Its legs kicked. Mason finished it with a strike to the back of the head, and it finally went still.
Breathing hard and sick with the smell of the vampire’s blood, he turned away to find the female vampire straddling Ellie and looking to angle its mouth for a bite to her neck. Mason took two steps forward, raised the knife and plunged the blade into the back of its skull.
The vampire shrieked. The blade snapped in Mason’s hand as the vampire jerked to one side. He took hold of the female’s hair and pulled her away from Ellie, who just stared up at him, moving her mouth silently. He pushed the creature to the floor and dropped what remained of the knife. He raised the hammer.
The female vampire struggled around on hand and knee, shaking its head and pawing at its skull as it made a low keening. Thrashing claws slashed strips from the carpet.
Mason stood back from the wounded thing. Ellie scrambled to her feet and leaned against the nearest wall, out of the vampire’s reach.
“Kill it,” Ellie said; her voice little more than a whisper.
Mason said nothing as he stepped forward and brought the hammer down again and again, until the vampire’s head w
as a pulped bowl of hair, splintered bone and the remains of its shrivelled and blackened brain. And once he was done he staggered away to the other side of the room and bent over and vomited a weak pale gruel onto the floor. Coughing and retching until his throat was sore and his stomach was empty.
When he stood and turned around to face Ellie, she had backed away to one corner of the room. Her upper body was hidden in shadow. She was sobbing quietly, clutching her right hand to her left shoulder.
Mason picked up his torch and turned it upon her. She flinched from the light, reluctant to raise her face to him. And when she finally did, her eyes were bloodshot and glistening with tears. Her mouth trembling at one side as she spoke. Her voice was sad and pained.
“I’m sorry, Mason.”
“Why?”
She lowered her hand from her shoulder. Held out her palm, all wet and red. Wincing, she exposed to the torchlight the wound in her shoulder. A bite wound. Blood soaked the fabric around it. “Fucking bitch.” The words came out in a tired drawl. “Does this mean I’ll become one of them?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She shivered. “I think I can feel it inside me.”
“Don’t say that. You’ll be okay.”
She tried to smile. “I don’t think it’ll be okay, Mason.” She hunched over and spat blood on the floor. Coughed and spluttered. She straightened, wiped her mouth, and studied the blood on her hand. The look in her eyes was something between curiosity and disgust. Then she raised her face to him, and a shudder passed through her body.
Mason couldn’t speak. The room narrowed until it was just them amidst the thick darkness that curtained them like a black fog. His stomach quivered. His throat tightened and he had to concentrate just to keep his legs from giving way beneath him. He stood against the wall, shaking his head, whispering her name.
Ellie clasped her head with both hands and screamed. She began to convulse, backing against the wall and arching her spine to open her mouth towards the ceiling. When she screamed again, such was the agony and raw resonance in her voice that it sounded inhuman.
She collapsed to the floor, slumped in a crouching position, head bowed to her chest.
“Ellie?” Mason took one step towards her. Held out his hand to her.
A slow movement of her head, swaying to one side then back again. Her whispering mouth. A movement in her throat.
Mason was about to take another step when Ellie looked up at him. And his heart faltered and almost stopped when he saw her face and her teeth and the hunger in her eyes. A feeling like hands squeezing his chest. He let out a sob and shook his head, trying to deny it all and pretend everything was okay.
“Ellie…” His voice no more than a breath formed into her name.
Her skin was like porcelain and threaded with red veins. She rose from the floor and stood facing him as he stepped back. With a note of caution she regarded the hammer in his hand. She held her hands together to her chest. Her tongue, already blackening, lurked at the threshold of her mouth and the sharp teeth there. She looked down at the bodies of the two vampires then appraised Mason with an expression of fear and uncertainty.
“Mason, what’s happened to me?” Her voice sounded different; a change in her vocal chords.
Mason couldn’t answer.
“Won’t you help me, Mason?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“You let them hurt me. You let them turn me into a monster.”
“I tried to protect you. I tried. I…” He put one hand to his face and stifled a sob in his throat. “I tried to keep you safe.”
“It’s all your fault, Mason.”
“No it’s not.”
“Liar! Yes it is! You’ve damned me to Hell!” And with that she fled from the room and the house, too fast for him to stop her even if he wanted to. He let her go. Let her go into the dark, to join others like her. The converts.
Mason called after her, but his voice was lost in the silence around him. There was no more screaming from outside, just the moonlit night and the reddish glow of a nearby fire. Even the sirens had stopped.
He dropped the hammer and slumped upon the sofa. Looked down at the floor. And he sobbed gently for his crimes, aching with regret and miserable with heartbreak, dwelling in the dark like a forgotten ghost.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In the dark of the night Mason left the house behind and walked on the road with his torch sweeping about the shadows and the dead bodies he passed.
Even now he struggled to comprehend the night’s events. He expected to wake from a nightmare or find himself restrained upon a bed in a room in some kind of institute for the deranged.
Beyond the street, parts of the town were burning. Plumes of smoke rising to the sky. Distant cries with the breeze. Darkened houses on either side of the street; some with their doors open or ripped from the hinges. Smashed windows and wrecked cars. A blue Volvo had crashed into a garden wall. There was a corpse without a head sprawled on the road near the driver’s door. A set of keys in one hand. The head was nowhere to be seen.
Mason kept walking, stepping around pools of blood slowly turning black. He passed one house where a muffled voice called out for help; but the author could not disguise the laughter in its voice, and Mason was not foolish enough to take the bait.
He sat upon a wooden bench near the river running through the town, and listened to the water flow and whisper. He looked at the row of houses across the road. Tall trees were listing with old age. Dead streetlights. A silver gleam from the light of the moon and the stars. The smell of smoke on the air.
He felt numb, but not from the cold all about him. Part of him knew he was in considerable danger out on the streets, but he didn’t care too much about that. The vampires had attacked the town, and fed well. If they found him here and fell upon him, he would just be another dead man.
Unless he rose again as a heartless, hungry thing.
Countless thoughts of Ellie filled his mind. He remembered their wedding day and the years that followed. The good times. The bad times. The things that drove them apart and left them separated and miserable.
It had all gone to shit.
To distract himself from the siren call of alcohol in his blood, he rolled a cigarette with the last of his tobacco and smoked it while he watched the street, waiting for some monster to come along.
Maybe Ellie would come to find him.
He ignored the approaching sound of a car, and did not look up as it sped past. Then there was the scream of brakes as it came to a stop. The crunch of the gearstick being wrenched, followed by a gentle whine as the car reversed and stopped directly opposite him with the engine idling.
A man’s voice: “This isn’t a good night to be out on the streets, my friend.”
Mason raised his head and looked through the open passenger window at the man in the Ford Fiesta. There was apprehension in the man’s eyes. A chubby face flanked by dark brown mutton chops. He wore a baseball cap and a bomber jacket.
“I suppose it isn’t,” Mason said.
“Are you okay?” the man asked. His eyes searched for signs of injury or bite wounds on Mason. He eyed the hammer lying on the bench.
Mason took a long drag of the cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “I’m not sure.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Fair enough, man. You should duck.”
Mason frowned. “What?”
The man pointed an old service revolver at him. “Get down. There’s something nasty behind you.”
Mason glanced over his shoulder just as a teenage boy reached for him with blood-slick hands. He dropped his cigarette and fell from the bench and onto his knees, grasping for the hammer as he tried to scramble away from the vampire.
The boy snarled.
The crack of a gunshot. The boy’s neck was wrenched backwards and the back of his head blew out. He collapsed, his b
ody slumping over the back of the bench. The insides of his skull spilled like hot soup onto the seat.
When Mason looked back at the car, the man lowered the pistol and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. No expression on his face.
“Fucking leeches,” he said.
Mason rose to his feet, wiping dirt from his jeans.
“I’m getting out of the city,” the man said. “You need a ride?”
Mason nodded, glanced back at the teenager’s body. “Cheers.”
“Good choice. This place is fucked. Don’t forget your little hammer.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The man was called Pete Smith, and he sweated in the driver’s seat as he grasped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands. His bulging stomach was visible past the unzipped bomber jacket clinging to his thick limbs. He told Mason he had already killed his parents earlier that night, after they became, as he called them, ‘leeches’.
The inside of the car smelled like stale junk food and old grease. Something like the musk of body odour was ingrained into the upholstery. A dried up air freshener hung from the rear-view mirror. The floor was littered with food wrappers and scrunched-up McDonald’s burger wrappers. A Costa Coffee cup rolled around in the back of the car. The backseats were taken up with two duffel bags and several bottles of water.
The car moved through streets of wrecked vehicles and murder scenes. A flaming figure staggered from within a building consumed by fire and collapsed on the pavement, still flailing in its death throes. Smoke from the fires made the night air hazy.
A dog trailing its collar bolted across the road. Mason watched it vanish into an alleyway. He wished it the best of luck.
They passed blocks of flats where candlelight still glowed in some windows. On a street corner lurked a gang of youths armed with baseball bats, knives and axes. One had lit a flare that burned with eye-watering red light. They swigged from bottles of vodka and cider. Some were masked up in scarves and hoods, jittery with adrenaline. They eyed the car as it went past.