“What you plannin’ on?” asked Wallace.
Focusing the torch back on the racist, Nate said “I’m gonna go back the way I came.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You obviously came here for something. What’ll it be?” Lifting the spanner and portraying it like some television hostess showcasing gameshow prizes, “Perhaps you’re in need of some DIY? How about this spanner? Need to tighten some bolts? What else could you possibly come here for?”
“Food.”
“Well we’re fresh out of groceries, boy, don’t ya know this is a hardware store? No, weapons, that’s what you need. Come here, let me show you something.”
With only the artificial torchlight and his nerves to sense by, Nate began stepping backwards, and with each step, Wallace inched forwards, muttering and then bellowing, about how he had the finest goods in the county and how he could vouch for each and every nut and bolt and hammer; “… it’ll slide right in and you won’t even have to try hard.” And “satisfaction guaranteed,” kicking the fallen, betraying trolley to the side, “no refunds, mind.” And “even got some batteries for that torch, wouldn’t want it going out on you.” Nate raised the light to his face. “Hey now,” holding his unburdened hand in front of his eyes, “you aim that down, nigger,” taking large steps, larger, “get that shit outta my face,” the wall now against Nate’s back with the coldness of the night on his neck. “Nowhere to run.” Nate felt for an instant, the chilled fingers brushing the raised hair on his neck, pulling, but there was not enough time; it was fight or run, so he ran, bolting to the left and switching off the torch at the same time, rounding the fork-lift and… stopping. He threw the torch towards where he remembered the corridor to be and waited… breath held against the wishes of his tightening chest and heart and every sense that shook his frame. His left hand rested on the hilt of his other knife.
“You run, nigger,” shouted Wallace, his boot-falls landing hard and fast as he chased the distraction. After they receded far enough away, Nate released his tension and took deep breaths. He turned back towards the window.
We need food. You’ve got to get some food. And gas. A camping set. Something like that.
“Shit,” Nate whispered, thoughts of the grocery store back on the main road flitting through his mind. Maybe, he thought. A few tins to keep them going.
Echoing down the corridor, yet strangely amplified in the room so that it seemed as though Wallace was standing right next to him, came the words, “Quiet now, girls, nothing to worry about.” The air grew suddenly warm, or perhaps it was just the air immediately around Nate; his heart thumped hard again and heat rose to his face. A sweat, perhaps fresh – he hadn’t noticed it before – tickled his brow. What is this guy up to?
Turning his back to the window, Nate pulled the second knife from its sheath and held it out in front, taking quiet steps. His lips were dry. Self-preservation was absent, and he recalled to mind his mother’s words about being safe, as she kissed him goodbye and locked the door behind him.
Don’t do anything stupid.
Where did ‘safe’ enter the equation now though? Did it even have a meaning anymore?
Wallace had gone silent, finally, like the predator he thought he was – but he was still learning, perhaps, as his footsteps still arrogantly thumped slightly. To his detriment, it would be, decided Nate, inching forward, legs slightly bent, right hand with a reverse grip on the knife, left with a forward grip. His elbow brushed a wall and he let it lead him. It was near total darkness; up ahead, the corridor opened into the main shopping area where clear corrugated roofing allowed daylight to enter, but now only the minimal of starlight. His elbow hit a door jamb and then brushed nothing. To his left he sensed an open room, and then heard muffles. He stopped. Wallace, still bumping around, said “Fuck it,” and turned on a torch. The spotlight of its arc highlighted the tops of shelves all but barren, where someone or some people too desperate to think straight had cleaned them of loot; who needs a blender in an apocalypse? The muffles to Nate’s left intensified, and he turned and saw two sets of eyes staring at his silhouette. He ducked instantly and hoped Wallace hadn’t caught sight of him. He made his way inside the room; the dim light revealing bruised legs bound at the ankle on a mattress fresh from the bedroom section, only not so new; and where the light barely reached, just the outline of two women, shaking and leaning shoulder-to-shoulder against the back wall. Nate took his knife and tore the cable-ties open. He scrambled closer, whispered “Give me your hands,” and clasped onto first one set of wrists, then the next, freeing the cable-ties that held them. He could see lashes and bruises on skin, and no doubt if he wasn’t wearing gloves, their hands would be like ice. He looked up into the eyes of the woman closest as colour returned to the room; her eyes were brown and ringed with darkness; and in them darkness; in them anger: in them rage. She screamed, a muffled anguish, and then Nate noticed the circle of light from the torch glowing on the wall before him. She pushed at his shoulder and sent him flying, leaping forward, arms outstretched towards Wallace who was rushing into the room. As Nate tumbled, he turned; Wallace’s torch flew from his grasp and came to a spinning halt, its crescent of light illuminating the woman’s flailing arms as they scratched and beat upon Wallace’s head, who in turn brought down the spanner upon her head. Nate rose and leaped at Wallace, but was met by the return swing of the spanner, square across the side of his brow. He fell and his knives fell with him.
Be safe, okay, dear? If anything were to happen to you, I couldn’t take it. Not after everything else.
It was a different kind of darkness pressing itself against him now. He could feel its pull, through the screams, through the throbbing pain and the pouring blood pooling on the floor. He turned his head and it slid around. He forced his eyes open – who put glue in my eyes? – to see a naked girl, half in darkness, half bathed in the yellow glow of the torchlight, burying a knife into the chest of Wallace, over and over and…
*****
After Ruby was done, she bent over his face and tore her teeth into his nose, ripped it off and spat it out, screaming. The hilt of the knife dripped with blood, down onto the forehead in which it was buried.
She scrambled over to her mother, shouting her name and shaking her, but there was no response. Shuddering, cold, naked, she curled her legs under her and buried her head in her mother’s shoulder, crying.
After a while, she sat up. Another knife cast a long shadow along the blood-drenched floor. She picked it up and stared at it for a long time.
In shadow, the boy lay on his back, and she could hear him breathing.
She turned to her mother and closed her eyes. She positioned the knife on her mother’s temple and thrust it in.
After, she placed the steel of the knife against her forearm. Instead of making her shiver, she found its temperature warmed her. Perhaps it was the blood on it. Heat coursed up her arm, conversely making her shiver. She imagined drawing its sharp edge across her wrist.
The boy took a series of quick breaths, and then one long one, before resuming his normal breathing.
She placed the knife back on the wet floor. Grabbing the finger guard, she span it. It slid around in the blood but didn’t hit an obstruction; any white trail left behind it was quickly refilled. When it stopped, the sharp end faced the door.
She rose. She wrote in the blood and left.
*****
Nate woke sharply, reaching out, but his hand slid in the blood and he fell back down, hitting his head on the floor. As if it didn’t hurt enough already. Slowly, he turned, examining the situation. Wallace was dead with one of his knives sticking out his head – thank fuck for that – and his nose displaced, lying in the pool of blood. One of the women was also dead –
naked girl, stabbing Wallace over and over and…
– yes, she was gone, but where? “Hello?” he said, with sand in his throat. He coughed and repeated his plea, but there was no response. Wallace’s torch continued to shine
light on the tableau, but not a lot else.
He noticed his other knife on the floor, and then, next to it, scrawled in the blood; ‘Thank you.’
This made him sit him up. His head pounded, worse than any teenage experiment with alcohol had ever caused. He took deep breaths through squinted eyes until it subsided. He opened his eyes again and saw bloodied footprints leading out.
He got up, grabbed his knives and Wallace’s torch, and followed them.
They turned left, towards the shop floor. They passed racks of lightbulbs, rolls of masking tape and Sellotape, bags of copper clasps, boxed plates, unwritten Christmas cards and bird-feeders waiting for seed. Where the food had been, the shelves were empty. Camping equipment; gone. Cutlery, all of it; gone. Bedsheets; gone. Two-by-fours and ready-cut shelving, even the cheap plastic shelving good for nothing but DVDs; gone. The Essential Guide to Outdoor Living; not quite gone – one left. Nate grabbed it and put it inside his backpack. Drills, saws, bandsaw blades, drillbits; gone. Still here; door handles, drawer knobs, wallpaper, paint, tile adhesive; sticky with dust. Here and there on memorial shelves; either aesthetics, or the construction of aesthetic, rendered pointless.
The bloodprints ended on the carpet of the small clothing section; steel-toe-capped boots and Dickies workwear still hung from clothes rails and sat on shelves. Guess people already knew how to dress for the apocalypse.
A pair of boots were missing from one shelf, and probably the rail was light of a coat or too.
“Hope you’re okay,” said Nate, resigned. He checked the time on his wristwatch. 2PM. Time to be getting back.
He turned and headed back to the fork-lift room. Nothing else caught his attention in the aisles.
He came to the room and paused. Without knowing why, he flashed the torchlight inside and stared at the bloodied words. The two dead bodies lit up; they had become a common-place feature of the new world, but were still unnerving to see, life reduced to meat, particularly since he had so recently seen them breathe, felt their breath. Touched their warm skin.
Turning, he noticed a half-open door on his left, a bloody hand-print on the door handle. He pushed it open and found a supply room; cardboard boxes were stacked at one end of the room, while on the shelves, still encased in plastic, were cartons of canned goods. A box of Snickers lay empty on the floor. “Thank you,” he whispered, and pulled his backpack from his back. He noticed it was stained with blood and recalled the bags in the clothing section.
After he had swapped bags, he filled it as much as he could and closed the supply room door behind him.
He pulled himself out of the window and breathed in the fresh, clean air. He hadn’t realised until then how acrid, how iron, the air had been in his nose.
Clouds had formed, and a mist was settling. He started home, tired, his head throbbing dully. The weight of the backpack was heavy and pulled on his shoulders, and it was this weight that reminded him of his cause. He had to get home.
Focused, he continued through the dark, listening again for any sounds. He absently stepped on a Snickers wrapper and looked back. There was nothing to be gained from looking back.
At the T-junction, he spotted another Snickers wrapper – she must be hungry – and turned away from it, left, back towards town.
The closer he got to town, and the river basin, the more preternaturally the mist seemed to sit. The road’s centre markings were the only indication that he was going in the right direction. In spasms; bells, like the warning sirens in Nate’s favourite horror game, Silent Hill, rang through his temple, and for a moment he could imagine monstrous shapes, contorted hairless dogs with elongated snouts, emerging from the mist and attacking his heels, or flying pterodactyl-mutated swans diving from above for his wares. The irony was not lost on him.
It took the reassuring hard surfaces of houses and fences to shake this feeling loose. He made his way back towards the main bridge by keeping his mind on the goal.
At the bridge, The Smell was fainter, perhaps because of the mist, though still strong when he actually had to pass the beheaded man.
Up the street, back onto his estate; the intoxicating mist and falling temperature had cleared his head. When he felt his temple, it felt tacky under his glove and throbbed, but no longer hurt.
*****
Sitting in the dark with his back against the wall of his house, the distant growling of animals now ceased, he turned on his torch and pointed it at the dislodged garden wall. Beneath it, a board, usually hidden under the ash and rubble of the house, was slightly askew. He wondered if he’d really left it like that.
He moved it aside and climbed down, into the hole he had dug, and then moved the board back across his head. The other board, protecting the entrance into their garden, had been completely removed.
Nate grabbed a knife.
He climbed out and shone the torch on the back door, which was open, then turned off the light. Leaning against the side of the house, he listened for noises inside.
There were wet, slapping sounds. Candlelight glow flickered beneath the gap in the door as he pushed it wide. With its back to the door, a human-who-was-not-a-human was hunched over the dead body of Nate’s mother; his brother, but eight-years-old, was lying bloodied between the kitchen and the living room threshold.
Nate shrugged the weight of his backpack from his shoulders, and it landed with a tin-clunking thud. Screaming from the diaphragm, he cried. His eyes swollen and bloodshot with tears, obscenities spewing and punctuated with spit, he took lunging steps towards it, as it turned and rose towards him. Its mouth gaped with dripping blood (my mother’s blood); its cheekbones protruded with muscle for clamping its victims; its hairline was receded; the nails on the end of its reaching hands had grown like claws; its eyes were blood-red too, but not through tears.
Screaming, Nate pounced and knocked it flying, using his weight and landing on top of it. His knife pummelled into the things neck, just as the things teeth bit into his. He cried out in pain, but continued to pound the knife into flesh, over and over, and pretty soon, the clamped teeth and scissor-like claws that had scraped themselves down his back, loosened. The thing was dead, for good.
Collapsing, Nate pulled the knife from its brain. He felt his blood draining from his neck, and felt the nausea sweeping tides of darkness towards him. Looking around, he noticed his mother and brother and their state. They had to be killed properly before they would wake again.
He rolled towards them with his knife, even as the first tide fell upon him, managed with little strength to plunge the knife first into one temple, and then the next. His eyes and nose at this point were permanent geysers. He rolled over and lifted his arm, but the knife slipped from his grasp.
*****
“Punch me,” said Karl.
“What?” asked Nate, turning his head. They were in the park on a blue-sky day, sitting beneath an Elm.
“Punch me, land one on me.”
“I like my knuckles.”
“I like my face, but I still want you to punch me.” Karl rose from the ground and stood akimbo in front of Nate. The sun glowed behind him, causing Nate to squint.
“I’m a pacifist.”
“All the more reason to hit me.”
“How do you work that out?”
“Have you ever hit anyone?”
“In anger? No.”
“How can you be a pacifist if you’ve never hit anyone? To take one side, you need to understand both.”
“Well, I still like my knuckles how they are.”
“And I still like my face.” Karl turned and began to pace. “Look, do you think what we did last night was right?” he continued.
“We did what most people would do,” replied Nate, turning to his phone.
“We did what everyone did do.”
“It wasn’t our fault.”
“No, but we could’ve done something else, don’t you think?”
“It takes a certain type of person to intervene, an
d as it happens, that type of person wasn’t there last night.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?” Karl turned to Nate. “Nate?”
Looking up, “I’m a pacifist.”
“Or a coward...”
“Self-preservation. Call it what you will. “
“I call it cowardice.”
Turning back to his phone, “Then that makes two.”
“I know, don’t you think I know? I am a coward. It makes me sick.” Karl began to pace again.
“Blah, blah. Some are born with a heightened sense of self-preservation, others are born stupid. Don’t worry about it. Let’s throw the disc.” Nate stood, grabbing the Frisbee from the ground.
“That’s what cowards do ¬¬– carry on like everything is fine.”
They began throwing the Frisbee between each other, stretching to a distance, but close enough to still talk.
“The world goes on,” said Nate.
“And then one day it won’t.”
“At least we’ll be old and senile.”
Karl wound his arm back and released the Frisbee with force.
“Stinger,” smiled Nate.
“Watch your knuckles.”
“Caught it fine.”
“Pussy,” accused Karl.
“What?”
“Pussy. Chickenshit. “
The Frisbee continued to go back and forth, picking up pace.
“I’m not playing your game,” said Nate.
“Coward.”
“Enough. If you don’t wanna just throw I’ve got some work to do.”
“I want you to hit me, damn it!”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“That’s half the problem – not knowing what it feels like to be hit.”
“Probably painful.”
“Yeah, but how painful? People get hit all the time and they get over it.”
“So it can’t be that bad!” Nate aimed the Frisbee at Karl’s head, which Karl deflected painfully with his hand.
The Risen (Book 1): The Risen, Part 1 Page 2