CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

 

TWO-TIME KILLER.

No, too cheap and pulpy, like an old 1950s film noir.

The Man Who Killed Her Twice.

Ditto.

Daryl smiled as he packed his bag, amusing himself by imagining alternative titles for the TV-Movie-of-the-week that would never be made about his exploits. He knew that he should be shaken by what had happened with Mother; but, as usual, human emotions were beyond him, as if separated from his body by a plate glass window. He could see them capering around in the outside world, and even believe that others experienced them, but to him they belonged to an unknown culture he did not understand.

Instead, all he felt was… well, a bit tired.

He finished packing and went to the bedroom window, looking down into the drizzle-damp street. Only a few people had passed by since he’d despatched Mother, and they were either racing along in bashed-up vehicles or running on foot. Most of these latter were carrying weapons – garden tools, table legs, cricket or baseballs bats: anything they could get their hands on.

For now, the street was once again quiet and empty. The embers of dying fires were reflected in the sky but there were no more sirens tearing through the evening air. Daryl remembered reading somewhere that society was always no more than four days away from absolute chaos. This was at least the second day; perhaps that estimate had been off by about forty-eight hours.

Daryl passed Mother’s room on his way to the stairs. He paused outside the door, trying to feel something. His body felt like an empty canister; nothing stirred in there but the blood pumping through his veins. His mind, however, was a nest of vipers, a coiling mass of madness.

“Goodbye, Mother.” He continued to the stairs and descended to the ground floor, where he headed straight for the front door. There was nothing left here – not a single thing to keep him or even to delay his journey. The only thing that mattered lay somewhere out there, in the gathering darkness: Sally, his first, his one true victim.

The absolute love of his life.

He had a rough plan to retrace his steps along the canal and see if the Nutmans were still at their apartment. He imagined that the husband might have committed suicide when he came home to find his new wife slain. That would make things so much easier. If, when he got back there, she had risen and was occupied feasting upon her husband’s corpse, he could move in for a swift second kill. Or, better still, he could somehow incapacitate her and enjoy himself, making the second time last longer than his first stab at killing.

First stab. That was almost funny. And the perfect title for his imaginary biopic!

He reached the garden gate without incident, then heard a strange sound. He paused, listened, and identified it as the sound of eating. Standing beside the high line of privet bushes that separated Mother’s property from next door, he remembered the neighbours and their earlier battle. They must have ordered out for food, and were now enjoying an open-air meal.

He smiled. Then crept softly to the end of the garden and turned right out of the gate, heading for the end of the street where he could access the canal.

At first he thought that someone was coughing, or more likely struggling to breathe. Then, as the sound became louder, whatever was making it drawing closer, he realised what it was. The noise was too muted and belching to be coming from a motorcycle, so he suspected that there was a moped heading his way, like the ones used by pizza delivery men.

Daryl ducked into some bushes and waited as the vehicle sputtered towards him, its rider bent over the handlebars and not wearing a helmet. Comically, there was a large white plastic container attached to the front of the moped, the words PIZZA YOU, PIZZA ME, stencilled across it in bright red letters.

“You’ve got to be kidding. End of the world take-out food?” This whole situation just got funnier and funnier, as if the movie of Daryl’s life were morphing from a low-budget horror movie into a knock-about farce.

He took a short crowbar from his bag and waited until the farting, belching machine drew level with him. Then he threw the crowbar as hard as he could, aiming for the front wheel. The projectile fell short of its target, hitting the asphalt road. But, absurdly, the ten-inch long piece of machined metal bounced when it made contact and then flipped up and caught the rider on his knee. The bike swerved, the rider shocked and hurting, and then it went down, skidding into the gutter a few yards along the road.

Daryl ran out and reclaimed the crowbar. Then he jogged to where the young man was sprawled in the road, clutching his knee and trying not to scream yet still making an awful din. Glancing around, Daryl was all too aware that dead things might arrive at any moment. Bushes rustled. Someone – or some thing – began to wail. A metal gate screeched not far from where he was standing.

Acting quickly, Daryl headed immediately for the moped. He righted the small, unwieldy machine and climbed on. The engine was still running, so he simply slipped the clutch, revved the handle, and set off in the direction of the canal. He glanced once in the rearview mirror and saw the dazed young man sitting in the street, still holding onto his knee. Behind him, advancing at varying speeds, there approached three dead people. One of them was a small child; the lower part of its face was crimson with whatever it had been feeding on prior to the idiot moped rider announcing himself with his pitiful cries.

“Pizza you, pizza me,” said Daryl, unable to resist. It was a shame that such high humour was wasted without an audience.

When the man finally began to scream Daryl could not help but stop the moped. He kept the engine running and climbed off, turning to watch. The three dead people had already set upon the young man. He was flailing beneath their combined attentions. Two women – one fat, the other slender as a rake with either clothing or flesh hanging from her in strips – were busy disembowelling him, while the small child buried its face in his crotch.

Daryl watched for as long as he felt safe, then climbed back on the moped and set off. The last thing he’d seen was the dead child playing with the young man’s head and the two women fighting lazily over a length of grey intestine. The fat one was winning by weight advantage alone.

This was going to be easy. Things had reached such a stage that Daryl could move unnoticed through the world, killing whoever he pleased. Like a virus moving through the bloodstream of a butchered body, the greater damage would mask his presence. It was every killer’s dream come true: an avenue of hurt opening up before him, stretching ahead towards a distant blood-red horizon.

He pushed the little moped as hard as it would go, passing the occasional mutilated corpse in the road. Often he encountered dead people. They reached out for him as he passed them by, but no contact was ever made. Daryl was now untouchable. He had travelled so far away from humanity, and had become such a different beast, that he moved among them like a chill wind, slipping through their fingers and barely even registering in their vision.

A police car was parked on the corner of Whittington Road and Commonwealth Avenue, its doors flung open. The body of one officer hung out of the driver’s side, his belly opened, ribs sticking out like accusatory fingers. He was stirring, trying to move, but the lower half of his body had been so ravaged that it would no longer respond to whatever was driving his brain. His mouth gaped, the jaws clicking from side to side like a feeding cow. His eyes were white, turned back in his head, and his useless hands grabbed at his ruptured abdomen, dragging out chunks of bloody meat and stuffing them between his teeth in a horrific act of auto-cannibalism.

The other officer was on the ground, not much left of him but bones. The flesh had been chewed away, and the ruin that was now trying to crawl across the road and join his partner in the nightmarish feast could barely move without more of it falling away.

Daryl rode on, feeling like he was journeying through a Hieronymus Bosch painting: scenarios of damnation plucked directly from Mother’s Old Testament picture books unfolded around him. But whatever god walked here was one of blood and brimstone, a vengeful maniac, a self-unaware psychotic.

“You would have loved all this, Mother.” Daryl threw back his head, the wind in his hair; the stench of death was in his nostrils. “It’s all your warnings come true, your dreams become reality.”

He dropped down onto the familiar canal towpath, guiding the moped along the rutted route much used by weekend walkers and mountain bikers. He heard splashing sounds in the water but did not glance away from the track. He had to be careful. If he fell and was injured, he might die alone here... and to die meant that he would rise again, hungry for human flesh and with no memories of how to do anything but search for food.

When he reached the apartment block he had a gut feeling that he’d already missed them. His initial thought was that Sally had killed her husband, but then another idea struck him. What if the man had not even found her, and she was roaming the area for prey?

He parked the moped and ran into the building through the unlocked main entrance, ready to bolt if anyone approached from behind the closed apartment doors. He heard somebody weeping, saw a discarded child’s doll in a corner, smelled the bland aroma of gas – the result of some poor bastard putting their head in the oven or gassing their children as they slept. He wondered, if he kicked down a few of these doors, would he find behind one of them a family curled up together like sleeping animals, their faces blue and elongated, their knuckles white as they’d clutched each other in their death throes?

To Daryl, the whole idea of suicide had always seemed like an easy way out, an escape route that offered nothing but brief pain followed by infinite darkness. And besides, he thought, if you topped yourself you might miss all the fun when all the idiots who claimed to care but never really did found you dead.

The door to Sally’s apartment was open. He knew the place was empty even before he stepped inside. The floor beside the sofa was littered with bloody bandages: they lay in a coiled heap, like the shed skin of an ugly snake. A lot of the kitchen drawers and cupboards were open, their contents spilled out onto the floor. Someone had packed in a hurry.

In the bedroom, behind the main door, a wardrobe hung open. The back wall of the wardrobe contained a wooden hatch, which was also ajar. Daryl reached out and pulled it fully open. He saw a couple of leather gun holsters and some empty ammunition boxes on a shelf, but nothing more.

“So,” he said, impressed. “You think you can save her?” Shaking his head in the mirror on the dresser. “And I thought I was fucked up.”

Daryl went through a chest of drawers, upending each drawer until he came to one containing women’s undergarments. He ran his hands through her underwear, bringing up to his face sports briefs, thongs, lacy dress-up panties with see-through gussets: a cornucopia of knickers that sent him reeling back on his heels.

Raking with his fingers to the back of the drawer, he discovered an old threadbare pair of granny knickers with a stained crotch. These, he thought, must be the pair she wears when she’s on her period. Oh, God... he held them up to his nose, inhaled, and took in the coppery scent that still clung stubbornly to the worn material.

Grabbing a second pair – blue, frilly, scanty – he retreated to the bed, where he lay down on his back and loosened his trousers. He was already hard, so began to stroke himself, wrapping the blue panties around his fist. The other pair – the stained, dark-gusseted period pants – he pressed against his nose, pushing his finger against them and into one nostril.

He tried hard enough, but was unable to climax. Even the scent of her blood didn’t do it. He came close when he recalled cutting off her face, but the memory remained at a distance, too far away to engage with.

Disgusted with himself, Daryl stood and pulled up his trousers. He tossed the underwear into a corner, pretending that it did not exist.

He heard Mother’s voice in his ear, her awful brittle laughter; then he felt her warm breath on his neck as she whispered to him that she was the only girl he would ever need and hers was the only true love he could know...

“No!” His voice hung in the air, a mockery of negation, a sad, wasted energy that even now seemed weak and inconsequential.

Blocking out the ancient memory, he left the room and surveyed the living area. The laptop was dead, the TV lifeless. The lights were out. The local electricity supply must have been interrupted, either by the dead or by vandals. If he was honest, the only difference between these two groups was the hunger... they were identical in every other way: mindless, moronic creatures with no real purpose to their existence. Only the form of their hunger differed.

He spotted on the coffee table, by the window, a pair of leather gloves. Slim, brown, obviously belonging to a woman: Sally’s gloves. He strode over and picked them up, forced them onto his small hands. The fit was tight, but they were not uncomfortable. He stroked his cheek with her fingers, licked the end of her thumb. The old, faded leather smelled wonderful.

Daryl left the apartment and descended the hollow staircase. Outside, he climbed back on the moped and thought about where they might be heading. He glanced away from the city, along the new blacktop road that led towards the motorway. Lights flickered in the distance, beyond the trees. He glanced at his hands, wrapped up tight in Sally’s gloves. He imagined that they were still warm from her flesh.

Revving the small engine, he set off, certain that he had not seen Sally Nutman for the last time, and that their paths would eventually cross again. He did not know where this certainty originated, but he trusted it implicitly. If he was honest, there was little else to do now but follow such hunches. Who knew where they might lead, and what blood-filled adventures he might experience?

Once again, just to occupy his racing mind, he imagined the titles of the popular paperback volumes that would never be written about him: Kill Me Again, Death in Double Doses, Murderer of the Living Dead...

If anyone living had been around to hear it, the high, whooping sound of his laughter would certainly have chilled them to the core. This thought, when it came to him, just made him laugh all the more.