Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction

by Craig Saunders

  The girl on the doorstep smiled at me, at first. Said she was from some charity, looking for donations, but I didn’t know anything about that. Anyway, it was a nice smile and a good way to start a conversation. I invited her in because I was hungry – the last of Dad was gone by then – and later on I ate her. She didn’t smile then, not so much, but she was food and stupid at that so it didn’t really make me sad, not like when I ate Dad. Well, maybe it made me sad, a little. She had a nice smile.

  When I opened the door to her and pulled her inside I checked the perimeter. We’d burned all the trees within a ten miles radius for warmth over the years we’d been stuck in the manor and the grounds. I had a clear line of sight. I didn’t think it was a trap, and all the other entrances were nailed shut, just in case. Used to be, me and Dad kept watch, but now there was only me.

  Dad tried to eat me first. We were both pretty hungry by then.

  We’d both eaten our share of people. When it came down to it, I guess I was just the hungrier of the two of us.

  Dad used to do the hunting. Said it was too dangerous for me to do it. He went out in the sun, wearing a heavy coat with a big knife in the pocket. Said it was best to let the food think he was safe, a runner away, just like them. He wore this big hat and had a beard, too, so the sun wouldn’t burn. I’d tried to grow a beard but I was still too young...I think I’m sixteen years old, maybe twenty, but I’m not too sure.

  Dad always brought the food home, laid a good table, but for the last few years food became more and more scarce. He told me the people who ran from him were getting wise. He shaved his beard off and made his hair a different colour to fool them, but he still didn’t bring food home as often as we all would have liked.

  He cooked the food first, of course. We’re not feral, like some I’ve heard of. I missed Mum’s cooking. Dad didn’t do anything fancy and it was usually burned. Did brains a treat, though. He pickled them by for winter.

  I can eat my way through a leg in five minutes flat. Pickled brain? I’d almost swallow that whole.

  I told you I’m a hungry bastard.

  I ate the girl who told me about the scientists raw, but that’s the way of things.

  2012. That’s when it all ended. A little while before my Dad starting hearing things about 2012. How the world was going to end. He put by some provisions, but they didn’t last long enough. I must have been pretty young, back then, because I don’t really remember it. There’s a calendar on the wall, says 2020, but I think the calendar’s been there a few years.

  At first it snowed, at the end of 2012. I think I must have been around ten years old, or six, or eight, and it snowed a treat. It was going to be a white Christmas. I remember that. But then the snow didn’t stop, and then Dad said it was dangerous outside and kept us all in. He kept Mum locked in the basement for a while, and they argued, but eventually she gave in to him. My sisters were younger than me. Me and my sisters, we took to it soon enough.

  We knew cannibalism was wrong, but when the provisions ran out we were so hungry...

  I think Dad was a little bit insane there, for a while, but then he saved us. It seemed nuts to all of us, at the beginning, but it’s surprising what you get used to at the end of the world when you’re so hungry you’d eat leather just for something to chew.

  Dad read a lot in the year before 2012. He read something on that laptop of his, back when it worked. Said the sun was sick, and could kill you stone dead, burn you up, burn your skin to black.

  I didn’t mind not seeing the outside world again. I didn’t want to burn up like I had before. After a while, never seeing the sun, eating people...well, it was just what I was used to. You know, how people back before the end of the world might have had spaghetti Bolognese every Tuesday. Maybe they liked it, maybe they didn’t. It was just a thing they did.

  I haven’t seen a person for three days, since the girl. Like I said, people tend to be of two types – those who run from people, and those that run after them. I’m one of the later. The rest of those saps, well, they’re just food.

  I didn’t feel bad about any of them except maybe the girl, a little. She’d tasted all right, but she’d cried a bit when I ate her. I was really hungry, so I ate her while she talked. She screamed a little bit, too, but I really wanted to know where the city was, but more than that, I was hungry.

  The hunger’s a part of everyday life. You kind of wait for someone to stray into your zone, someone idiot on a quest for other people. Trouble with that kind of thinking is that people are a resource and they’re running out. Everyone, when you get right down to it, is food. Maybe the world ran out of resources – I know shit like that because I’m educated – my old Dad was a strict teacher. Said we might be cannibals, but we didn’t have to be feral.

  I never feel bad about eating the feral cannibals. They’re not really people. They’re kind of like zombies. I read a few books about zombies. They made me laugh. I liked them. I liked the thought that they couldn’t die. I knew I could, though, because Dad ate one of my fingers when the hunger was on him and it hurt like all fuckery.

  I got my own back, though.

  *

  So, end of the world. It ended a while back. Someone said the world was only a hot meal and twenty-four hours away from barbarity. I read that. Can’t remember where. I don’t suppose it matters a hell of a lot, either way, because I think all the people have gone from around the manor, and I’ve got to go hunting.

  We live up in what used to be Scotland. It’s kind of pretty. I found a deer up here once. I killed it and ate it, but it tasted like shit and made me puke it up. I much prefer people meat.

  The end of the world didn’t happen overnight, of course. Daddy said there were no more shops. He had a mobile phone and a laptop he kept around the house. He cleaned them off from time to time. They were all dusty but they were made from this thing called plastic that scientists made. It didn’t look old, so you couldn’t tell the passage of time from it.

  So I guess the end of the world took a while. Granddad said there had been plenty of food for everyone at one time and you could get beans any time you wanted. But not anymore.

  Mummy ate my sisters but I don’t think they tasted very good because Dad had to force her to eat them. Me and Granddad and Dad, well, we ate Mummy. Me and Dad ate Granddad, and I ate Dad, so I guess at one time or another I’ve shit out a little bit of my whole family.

  Where’s the food going to come from, at the very end? We can’t eat ourselves. No, I think I could, if I was hungry enough, but that’d be suicide, and suicide’s a sin.

  Sometimes when I was growing up I thought maybe the whole cannibal thing was a lie, but it’s not. People eat people. That’s the way of it. It’s not like some great big trick. Dad seemed pretty upset when he ate Mummy. I don’t think he could put that on, but then there was the girl.

  *

  ‘Please, God, no, please,’ she said. I held her down. I was always strong.

  I bit off one of her fingers, to get a taste of her, see if she was going to make me ill because she was darker than me, and I thought she might have been poisoned by the sun.

  The finger stayed down alright, though the bone gave me a gip the following day and tore my arse up something chronic.

  She screamed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m really hungry. I know it seems a bit rude...’

  I kind of shrugged. She didn’t seem all that interested in my apology. She head butted me and my nose broke. I put my tongue out to catch the blood. Wastefulness is a sin. Everything needs to be used and used again. There’s not enough of everything to go around.

  She screamed and begged.

  ‘You were saying about the scientists?’ I asked while I was chewing.

  Maybe my words were muffled and she didn’t answer my question.

  ‘No, you fucking psycho. I’m from Inverness! It’s a city! You lunatic! It’s not...’

  I bit another of her fingers off. I was interes
ted, but I hadn’t eaten in a while.

  She screamed and passed out. I waited for her to wake up and helped myself to a bit of leg in the meantime, but she didn’t wake up. I don’t know where Inverness is, so she wasn’t all that helpful.

  But before I started eating her she told me about a land where people had plenty, despite the sun killing off all the food.

  At least, I think that’s what she said, but I’m not sure. I think I might be confused, sometimes, because Dad still talks to me, but his voice comes out of my belly.

  Three days with no food and nothing to do but head off to this place, this Jericho, Babylon, Jerusalem, the holy land, whatever the fuck it was. Inverness.

  *

  I left the manor on a Thursday, according to the calendar in the kitchen which was out of date, but it didn’t have anything written on it. I walked for ten miles until I came to the boundary of our domain. A great wall that ran round the whole of the estate, broken only by one massive iron gate.

  I’ve never been over that wall. It was up to Dad to go and hunt down the food. He always put on his best suit under his big coat. Funny thing was, in the years since the end of the world, that old suit looked just as new as the mobile phone and the laptop, and his Range Rover worked fine.

  I shrugged and jumped the fence. Didn’t really matter. The end of the world was the end of the world. Daddy told me so. Mummy told me so, after a little persuasion from Dad. Granddad, well, he liked to talk about the time he had a can of beans but he had something called Dementia and Dad said I shouldn’t bother talking to him. Granddad swore a lot.

  Come to think about it, he was always eating beans.

  I left in the daylight because the torch I had ran out of batteries and I didn’t want any feral cannibals sneaking up on me. Dad said they hunted day and night, but it was easier to see them in the day.

  I don’t know, sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could eat a tin of beans.

  Now I was out of the house during daylight for the first time in maybe eight or ten years, though, and the sky didn’t seem all that dangerous. It was brighter outside that inside. It hurt my eyes and the cold wind stung my smooth cheeks, but it didn’t burn or anything.

  It looked, in fact, just the same as it had in the books I’d read. I imagined it like this, back in biblical times, when Jesus walked the earth. But then if cannibalism had been good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for me. Communion, eating of the blood and flesh. That sounded like a good argument, and I loved baby Jesus just as much as Dad had.

  Wasn’t anything wrong with it, eating people. I was just hungry, and Dad always said it was OK to eat the food he brought back, and not to worry about them complaining. Said that was the way of it. Some people ran from, some people ran to.

  I climbed up the wall because I didn’t have a key for the lock on the gate. But then I remembered, over the other side, about the girl coming in. I tried the gate, and it swung open with a squeal.

  That made me think for a bit, but Dad spoke to me from my belly and told me it didn’t matter, so I set off for Inverness. I didn’t have a fucking clue where it was, but I figured if I could find some food I could always ask them first before I ate them. Maybe take it a little slower than the girl who’d told me about the scientists. At least, I think she told me about the scientist, though like I said, I get confused sometimes.

  It was bright, but it was fucking cold. I wished I had some more clothes, like the girl who I’d eaten last. A skirt would have been nice. Her skirt looked nice, on her legs. But then my legs would have got cold. I wore a thick pair of Granddad’s long johns, Dad’s old big coat with the knife in the pocket, and Dad’s old hat. I wore my Mum’s bra, too, because sometimes my nipples got cold. I wore that bra a lot, come to think of it. I think maybe because I missed her.

  I didn’t know how to drive the Range Rover, so I walked down the long road for an hour or so, freezing, hungry, until I heard something roar.

  I turned to look at it and I heard a bang that was this fucking great thing (lorry, I remembered for a second) smashing into me, and I didn’t remember anything for a while.

  *

  I woke up in a hospital, and screamed and screamed because it hurt so much, partly, but mostly because I was absolutely surrounded by people.

  At first I thought someone had eaten my left leg, because it wasn’t there anymore. I was terrified, because a woman came by and took my blood. I was in some kind of people farm. I’d become one of the ones who ran from, instead of too.

  The next time she took my blood I had enough sense to bite her and let her know I wasn’t cattle.

  She screamed.

  ‘Serves you fucking right,’ I screamed back at her. ‘I’m not food!’

  The other people in the farm were missing limbs, too. They cried out, and these nurses and doctors, as they pretended to be, their lords and masters, roamed, checking that their food wasn’t dead.

  But since I’d bitten the nurse, I was chained to the bed and I couldn’t get out.

  She didn’t come in again, but they brought me a television. A television.

  I cried, then, because although I get confused sometimes, I realised that I’d made it to Inverness, and that the girl I’d eaten had been lying all along. It wasn’t a haven for scientists. It was a trap.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness for a while. They didn’t eat any more of me, and I refused to eat what they tried to give me. I didn’t know what the food was. The other cattle in the room ate it, but I thought it might be drugged, to make me sleepy so they could eat me while I didn’t fight.

  I fought every time they came near me and managed to bite a few. Someone in a blue uniform came in and tried to ask me some questions about where I came from, but I wouldn’t tell him, because I thought I might need to get back to the manor. I didn’t know how, with a leg missing, but I thought I’d crawl if I had to.

  I didn’t even know where the manor was, but Dad had been out and about enough so that he could tell me. He wasn’t far away, and I could ask him if I needed to. He was only in my belly, but he was sleeping, I think, and wouldn’t talk to me. Maybe he was angry at me because I’d been stupid enough to become food.

  And then, on the news, on the television that I watched sometimes, there was something about an outbreak. I knew what an outbreak was, because I’d read a lot of books while the sun burned up all the food back in 2012, but according to the television it was only 2020 and people were eating people all over Scotland, and starting to eat people in England and Wales, too, even France, which I knew wasn’t that strange, because back before the end of the world they’d eaten snails. People have got to be better than snails.

  *

  The nurse I bit didn’t come back around anymore. No one tried to eat anymore of me. They’d just eaten my leg, but I’d been unconscious, and fair’s fair, I guess. Everyone’s got to eat.

  I lay chained in bed for a long time after that. People talked about the outbreak on the news. People started to look frightened about the farm. The farm was a hospital, they called it. I knew what a hospital was. Back in the old days, it had been a place to heal people. But now it was a farm. At least, I think it was. But then I thought it was the 22nd century for while, and once I had this thing for about a year when I wore my little sister’s face because I missed her and I liked seeing her in the mirror, and of course I thought Dad had been talking to me from my belly, and I’d been wrong about that. I get confused, but not that confused.

  It wasn’t Dad talking, it was just my stomach rumbling because I was hungry.

  People looked frightened, and then terrified, because someone said the word zombie on the television, and then everyone was saying the word zombie on television, over and over again, and there was a kind of running book under the picture that said the same news over and over until I got bored and switched it off.

  Apparently some nurse had bitten someone, and they’d bitten someone else, and then everyone was biting everyone, just like
Dad had told me was happening in the world, so some was true, some wasn’t.

  I think he lied about the cannibals, and the feral cannibals. I think maybe what we’d been doing out in the manor was a mistake, because I could have been having beans when I’d been eating my family and all the people Dad brought back in his Range Rover.

  I felt bad about the girl all over again, but I got confused again for a while then, maybe because of the hunger, but maybe because of all the pickled brains. I really wanted pickled brains, right then.

  I think I might be insane, but I know what I like.

  I didn’t know what was true anymore, but then this guy came into the people farm and I knew well enough that the world might not have ended in 2012 like Dad had told us, but it sure as hell was ending in 2020. Because I might be a cannibal, but the guy who started in on us, stuck there in our beds missing our arms and legs, well, he wasn’t a cannibal, because he was dead.

  *

  They said the name of some disease on the television before the dead guy in the farm started eating people. It was a disease that I didn’t know. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, they said, but they also said the disease that was making people eat other people was a variant of a sickness brought about by eating human brains. I didn’t know what that meant, but it gave me a funny feeling, somewhere under the haze that takes my thoughts, sometimes.

  Dad laughed in my belly while I watched the news, but I ignored him, because he was insane, too. Always had been, and he was still crazy in my stomach.

  The thing on the news on the television was shortly before the man came into the farm, and I recognised the look on his face. It was hunger.

  People screamed as he ran toward them. He was full of some kind of rage. There was a guy in a bed near to the entrance. The crazed dead cannibal started in on him first, and the guys in the farm fell out of his bed and stumbled at tried to get away, though he was missing two limbs and couldn’t move too fast.