King Carrion

by Rich Hawkins

  “Admires me?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Well, King Carrion can fuck off.”

  The boy looked at him and rose from the doorway. He walked halfway down the steps before he stopped and turned around. “King Carrion may come for you tonight.”

  “I’ll be waiting for him,” Mason said.

  The boy smiled, but it was without humour. A cold expression. “You won’t be disappointed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Mason walked the pavement with the axe in his hand. The rain had stopped. Litter and scraps of paper ran on the breeze across the damp road. Rubbish bins had been knocked over. Burnt out cars contained blackened skeletons. Melted tyres and the smell of charred rubber and plastic.

  An ice cream van had crashed into a set of black iron railings, which were now twisted and broken. Mason paused to pick up a six-inch iron spike that had snapped off from the railings. Its tip was sharp enough to be useful, so he put it in his pocket and carried on.

  The houses on either side of the street looked abandoned. Front doors hung ajar. Splintered doorframes and smashed glass. Occasionally he glimpsed a white face in an upstairs window. Just two days ago the street would have been bustling with activity and noise, but now it was all dead, and the only people that remained were the survivors living on borrowed time.

  Mason passed a man sitting on a doorstep and dabbing a stained handkerchief to his mouth. He squinted past eyes that were circled with bruises. One cheekbone was swollen and puffy. He was flanked by twin girls who stared at Mason with grimy faces and sad eyes. Further on two teenage boys were trying to start a car by the roadside. They sneered at Mason as he passed.

  Down the street an old man stood in his front garden and raised a Union Jack to the top of a flagpole. The man looked up at the flag and saluted, then lowered his head and his hand and turned away to walk up the garden path to the doorway of his house. The Union Jack flapped in the breeze, tattered and creased like old skin.

  Raggedy children scampered in a playground, but there was no laughter and they kept glancing at the sky to note the falling of the sun.

  The police station was on fire. A few dead bodies in the car park outside. Dark smears on the tarmac.

  Upon a wall, someone had scrawled OLD TOOTH WILL DRAIN YOU.

  While walking through the centre of the town he passed the library and watched people throw books into piles near the front of the building.

  Further on, when he rounded a corner in a street lined with looted shops and restaurants, he came upon a man forcing himself upon a woman over the bonnet of a car. The man was trying to take off her jeans even as she scratched at his face and screamed.

  Mason walked up behind the man and pulled him away from the woman and pushed him to the floor. When the man rose to his feet and bunched his fists, Mason held up the axe. The man noticed the axe and spat then turned away and fled.

  The woman thanked Mason and ran in the other direction.

  Mason kept walking.

  *

  He arrived at Ellie’s house towards late afternoon, crumpled, tired and afraid of the approaching night. The house hadn’t changed since he last visited, and he walked amongst the rooms in silence and looked at the things Ellie had left behind. He went upstairs and found that the body of the vampire he’d killed was gone. There were just dried bloodstains on Ellie’s bed. He checked all the hiding places and cubby holes and found them empty. No sleeping vampires for him to execute.

  Under Ellie’s bed he found a cardboard box and pulled it out. He sat on the carpet. Inside it was a photo album, and also a jewellery box filled with old trinkets and memories from their relationship. The stubs from cinema tickets. A conch seashell. A shiny pebble. Other things he remembered from past years.

  He put it all back in the box and opened the photo album. Pages full of photos. He and Ellie in happier times. Wedding day photos. Images from their early days together. Their younger selves.

  He was amazed Ellie had kept them. But in the end he put them back in the cardboard box and pushed the box back under the bed and said goodbye to old memories and good times. Then he went downstairs, sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette as he watched the light outside begin to fade into dusk.

  *

  The candle flame flickered and made black shapes on the walls. He was still smoking when night fell. The front door creaked open and a shadowed figure entered the house. His only reaction was one hand reaching for the axe at his side.

  He turned his head slightly to the kitchen doorway as Ellie stepped from the darkness, moon-faced and pallid, moving with the assurance of an apex predator revealing itself to its prey. She stood there, her scarlet eyes never leaving him, and smiled.

  Mason’s heart shuddered into bits as he looked up at her. He wondered if she could hear the pulse thumping inside his head. She was still clad in the clothes she wore on the night she’d been converted, but now they were torn and dirty, streaked with grime and dust. Some of her hair was matted with dried blood, and fell about her face in feathery strands. The teeth in her grinning mouth gleamed darkly in the candlelight, already stained from her recent feeding habits. She was a monster in stolen clothes.

  And yet he still loved her.

  “Hello, Mason,” she said. Her voice was quiet and rasping, but there was something of her old self within it.

  “Hello, Ellie.” He swallowed, held her gaze, and his hand tightened around the axe’s handle.

  Ellie sat on the opposite side of the table and faced him. She placed her dirty hands together upon the table top. Her fingernails were blackened and jagged, like she’d been pawing at hard ground. The cold that radiated from her was enough to stir the hairs on the back of Mason’s neck.

  “Shall we talk?” she said.

  Mason smiled wanly. “Yeah, why not?”

  “Good.” She rearranged her hands so that they were laid flat on the table, palms facing downwards. Her fingers twitched. “It seems that you are alone now. What do you plan to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Mason replied. “I was just sitting here trying to think of something.”

  “I know you have the axe under the table. Do you plan to release me?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “That’s only natural.”

  “There’s nothing natural about this.”

  “Nature is tooth, claw and flesh. So are we. We hunt and we feed, just like humans and other animals. We are no different.”

  “I found the photo album and the jewellery box under your bed. I looked inside them. You still loved me, didn’t you?”

  A shadow passed over Ellie’s face. Her red grin barely concealed a shimmer of anger in her mouth. “Maybe I did, when I was still a person. But once I was converted I realised that there is no love or warmth; there is only the cold and the dark. King Carrion has shown me that. His gospel is the word of truth, and there is no escape from it.”

  Mason felt his throat tighten. His chest filled with heat. “Fuck your king,” he said.

  Ellie’s grin stiffened at the edges. “He’s fucked me.” It was a taunt. “Better than you ever did.”

  The words found a tender place inside Mason and spread with sharp tendrils. He looked away from her. Pressure behind his eyes. His scalp tingled. His free hand clenched into a fist and the fingers dug into his palm. He let out a long and tired breath.

  “Does that hurt your feelings, my husband?”

  Mason didn’t answer.

  “We can be honest now,” she said. “All of those old problems are gone. They’re irrelevant. That’s the beauty of this. To be converted is to accept the darkness.”

  Mason looked at her, trying to keep his face clear of emotion. He felt his lower lip tremble.

  “King Carrion wants to meet you,” said Ellie.

  Mason snorted. “I’ve already been told. Lucky me.”

  “You shouldn’t be so facetious. It’s a great honour.”

 
“I couldn’t give a shit,” he said.

  “He’s waiting for you at the abandoned glue factory on the other side of town.”

  “Let him wait.”

  “Mason, not many have been given the chance to convert willingly.”

  “I’d rather die. I don’t want to be a monster.”

  One side of her mouth curled upwards. “We’re all monsters. Humans destroy other species and environments. You’re destroying the planet right now. You murder animals for pleasure. You keep animals in factory farms. Your slaughterhouses are awash with blood. All for your consumption. Vampires are certainly monsters, but at least we admit it.”

  Mason didn’t reply.

  Ellie threw the table aside and she fell upon Mason and dragged him to the floor with her mouth close to his throat. Her hand squeezed his wrist until he dropped the axe and the bones within his forearm felt like they were close to snapping. From her mouth came fetid and rotten breath.

  She opened her jaws wide.

  But then she stopped. She sniffed his throat. Pulled her head back from him and looked at his chest.

  Mason didn’t move. Stale air shuddered from his lungs.

  A gleeful grin stretched the lower half of her face. “There’s no need to bite you, husband. You’re already on the way to becoming one of us.”

  His breath caught in the base of his throat. “I was scratched.”

  “Sometimes that is enough to spread the gospel, such is its power.”

  She started laughing, and threw her back towards the ceiling. She was still laughing when Mason slipped the iron spike from under his sleeve of his jacket and into the palm of his hand.

  And he stabbed the spike upwards into the soft flesh under Ellie’s chin and rammed it further up into her skull. Dark blood ran down his hand and onto his wrist. Ellie’s laughter turned into a gurgled cry. Mason pushed the iron spike with all his strength until it punched through her brain and scraped against the inside of the top of her skull. Her hands gripped onto him until she let out a low whimper and fell away and landed on her back on the floor. She pawed at the iron spike embedded in the underside of her throat and pulled it free. It clanged to the floor.

  Mason knelt beside her. She looked up at him with her eyes of blood and tried to speak, but no words came from her mouth and in the end she just stared at him as the dark life-force inside her dwindled and died.

  Mason held her hand and wept for his lost wife, heartbroken and relieved. He stayed with her into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  He made his way through the streets as the vampires cavorted and fed around him. They were picking off the last survivors now. King Carrion ruled the town.

  The vampires left him alone. They knew he was close to being one of them, a brother in blood. When he noticed a group of them feeding on a woman, it took all his will to keep walking and not stop to join in. His stomach ached with hunger. Mouth burned with thirst. He was not completely turned, but it would not be long before his humanity was lost to the craving for hot blood and slaughter.

  In his mouth he tasted raw, briny meat marinated in stinking fluids. Wetness between his fingers from blood that wasn’t there.

  From the night sky far above, a helicopter watched the town. He stopped and looked up at its blinking light, wondering how the infrared camera interpreted his changing form.

  He reached the industrial estate not long before midnight and crossed the scrubland and building sites around the abandoned glue factory. It was a tall, broad building, a structure not far removed from something erected in Soviet-era Russia. An ugly cube of concrete and metal. Everything derelict and crumbling, rusting and corroded.

  He ducked through a hole in the chain-link fence and approached the great hulk of the factory across the empty and windswept car park. Leaves crisped and curled by winter crackled around his feet. He glimpsed faint lights inside the factory. Looked like candlelight. His stomach shrivelled when he thought about what awaited him. His heart was slow, already slowing as vampirism spread inside him. He imagined black tendrils as thin as twine wrapping themselves around his major organs and choking his arteries. Soon his heart would be a blackened thing.

  Jets passed overhead at high altitude. He couldn’t see the helicopter anymore, but the thud-thud-thud of its rotor blades echoed around the industrial estate. He sensed more activity in the air, like static buzzing on his skin. Dread and anticipation turned his legs weak and clouded his thoughts.

  Part of him wished for fire to fall from the sky to scorch the earth. It would end tonight, he was sure.

  The growling that came out of the surrounding darkness stopped him cold. The dogs emerged on all sides of him. He counted five of them. Their eyes glowed red. Their mouths opened, misshapen with gnarled fangs and long incisors. Their growls quietened and then they turned away and trotted towards the front of the factory. Mason looked around, and then followed the dogs.

  A figure appeared before him, blocking the way. A face he knew. A voice he knew.

  “Evening, lad.”

  He halted. “Hello, Calvin.”

  “Why are you here, lad?”

  Mason sucked in his breath and raised the hatchet in his hand. “I’ve come to pay my respects to King Carrion.”

  *

  He entered the factory holding Calvin’s severed head by a tuft of matted hair. Calvin’s eyes were open, as was his mouth, from which his black tongue protruded all slack and glistening.

  The converts waited for him in the great cavern of the building, lurking in shadows thrown by sparse candlelight, watching him from behind great rusting shells and wrecks of old machines and the skeletons of derelict production lines. Some of them peered down from metal walkways near the ceiling. Red eyes in the darkness. Mason threw Calvin’s head towards a pack of vampires creeping towards him, and they scattered like rats, mewling and muttering, hissing and stamping their feet.

  The walls were smeared with blood, shit and urine. Rank fluids dripped from metal beams and scaffolding to form reeking puddles on the concrete floor.

  He shivered in the dusty air, which held the stench of sewage and slaughterhouses. Bile frothed at the base of his throat. He sensed King Carrion nearby – how he did, he had no idea – and moved in slow steps as dozens of vampires stared at him. Their anxiety and fear were palpable, and gave him strength as he made his way through them. They had seen him kill Ellie and Calvin. They were either cowards, or King Carrion had told them not to attack him.

  He walked among them like a brother. Like family.

  Eventually he stopped in the centre of the floor and stood before a large mound of human remains and scraps of rubbish that reached ten feet into the air and was at least ten metres wide. Stinking offal and viscera. Rubbery tubes and fleshy valves. Awful meats. Bones, even complete skulls, mixed with refuse. Dripping grease and animal fat. Ragged tufts of hairs and soaked cardboard, dirt and blood-clotted rags. Parts of it steamed like compost.

  Mason watched the mound and waited, aware of the vampires slowly surrounding him, circling him. And after a while of watching the mound, it began to tremble and something stirred from within. With a sharp inhalation of the stinking air he shifted his feet and bit his lower lip and held the axe ready. He tasted his own blood.

  Two thin hands emerged, and from them a pair of bone-white arms shrouded in filthy sleeves of rotting fabric. Then a cloth-shrouded face appeared, squirming free from the mound, dripping juices as it looked up to Mason and grinned through its mouth-hole. The creature pulled itself free of the mound and slithered to the floor on its knees. A thing that trembled and muttered in stinking rags, head lowered as if in dedication to other gods of filth in their reeking nests. It rose to stand, and loomed above Mason and glowered down at him with the grin still frozen upon its face.

  Mason swallowed, stepped back, and then held his ground when he remembered the vampires lurking behind him.

  The crown of bones sat atop King Carrion’s head. The beast snapped its
jaws and raised its withered arms. Its eyes burned with demonic energy and glee. And it spoke directly into Mason’s mind in a low voice imbued with arrogance and cruelty.

  Is this your way of paying tribute, little one? Killing my converts and disciples?

  “I’ll kill you,” Mason said. “I’ll kill you for bringing your disease here.”

  I think not, little one. I think you are more vampire than human now.

  “I still have my humanity.”

  Not for much longer. You think you can kill me with that little axe? Men tried to kill me with axes untold years ago, and they failed. I slaughtered them and killed their families. Do you have the will to destroy me? I think not. I have survived many threats over the countless years. Little men always die when they defy me. I will abide, little one. These isles will become a vampire nation.

  In his head Mason glimpsed a series of images transferred from King Carrion’s mind. Flashbulb memories in stop-motion. He saw Britain in the past, when it was a pagan land; a tribe paying tribute to King Carrion by the offering of young men and women. He saw an old pagan priest standing in a forest clearing, waiting for King Carrion to arrive. He saw the Roman invasion of Britain, and felt King Carrion’s fear. He saw the priest and King Carrion descending to a hidden underground chamber. A tomb. And then the vampire king went into hibernation after draining the priest of blood. There was the passing of years as King Carrion slept.

  “You can’t hide this time,” Mason said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “You won’t be allowed to escape the town. Fire will rain down from the sky and you and your children will burn.”

  He sensed some confusion behind King Carrion’s eyes.

  Then you will die, too, little one.

  “I’ve already accepted it,” said Mason. He felt a tremor under his feet. When he glanced about at the surrounding vampires, they looked uneasy, sniffing the air and looking at the floor. King Carrion regarded them too, and Mason chose that moment to attack.