Part III

‘Respect your mother and father above all things . . .’

Statement taken from Mason Brand’s journal, dated September 21st, 2001

17

Together, Ray and Delilah watched for the garbage man and his followers.

They looked for signs of him in the back alleys of Shreve and along the winding pathways of the Country Park. Sometimes Ray drove them to the local tip and recycling centre where they threw small bags of rubbish they’d brought from their homes - merely as a reason to be there. All the while, they watched the skips and bays for signs of movement.

Telling Delilah about what he’d seen felt like a confession. He’d been surprised by her reaction. She’d listened closely and nodded from time to time as though she understood something he did not. She seemed to draw meaning from what he said as though interpreting a dream for him. She was silent for a long time after he finished. When she finally responded he was terrified she was going to tell him he was a psycho and she never wanted to see him again. He compared this fear to the feelings he’d had for Jenny. Not even the jealousy he’d felt at The Barge had been as strong as the fear that Delilah might no longer want him. Before she said a word he realised he loved her.

It had started out as fun, a kind of accident.

And now, well, here they were: pleasantly, nakedly tangled in her bed. She was explaining Gaia theory to him and almost welcoming the rise of a new supernatural force. He wasn’t fully concentrating; he wondered if he had the guts to ask her to marry him. He didn’t, it appeared. Not right at that moment. But the idea was now never far from his mind, the unspoken words lingering around his lips.

‘It’s such a privilege to be alive now,’ she said, stroking his shoulder.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In times like these. When elemental forces are manifesting on our plane.’

‘Huh, I thought that was the cabin crew handing out the headsets.’

She cuffed him over the head.

‘It’s a new era, Ray. The long-awaited age of Aquarius.’ He reached to the bedside table to retrieve a Marlboro and her matches. He lit the cigarette, took a pull and passed it to her.

‘Isn’t the age of Aquarius meant to be a time of peace, love and harmony?’ He asked.

‘Sure. But these things never come without a struggle. This is the dawning. The garbage man and his kind are some kind of message to us. A catalyst perhaps.’

‘But they . . . you know . . . they’re hungry.’

‘I’m not saying it’s going to be pleasant. Change never comes without pain. Things are not born without the agony of labour. But afterwards . . .’

‘What then?’

‘Who knows? That’s up to us, I suppose. We’ve gone fairly far astray. Look at how we live these days. It would take a hell of a wake-up call to get people to change. Even a little bit. Everyone’s too comfortable and too removed from the outdoors. They’ve forgotten how to touch the Earth.’

‘You’re losing me now, hippie-chick.’

‘I’m serious, Ray. You need to understand this.’

‘It’s a little difficult to take it all in.’

She stopped caressing him.

‘Yeah? Well make the effort.’

‘Ok. Sorry. But, come on, D, what do you mean by “touch the Earth”?’

‘Almost exactly that. Living in a house with double glazing and central heating, and sleeping in a bed raised up from the floor, and buying food in packets instead of growing it or hunting it; all these things disconnect us from the Earth.’

‘But why should that matter? We’re all still healthy - healthier than we’ve ever been. Besides, wherever we go, the Earth is all around us. We can’t get away from it.’

She regarded him with a playful contempt.

‘I don’t have to explain this to you, you know. Not if you’re not interested.’

He thought about it.

‘I want to understand. I’m just playing devil’s advocate for a moment. I mean, I see myself as fairly broad-minded but do you think anyone else will listen when you start talking about connecting with the Earth? If you can’t persuade me, what hope have you got?’

‘That’s easy enough. It won’t be me explaining it. It’ll be your friends. The ones I haven’t met yet.’

Ray knew she had a point. No one was going to listen to a voluptuous Goth girl - except him of course - but they might listen to a thundering, man-shaped tower of scrap and living tissue. Especially if he was backed up by the ‘friends’ Ray had seen.

Or maybe the prime minister would simply call in the army and blow it off the face of the Earth everyone was so averse to touching. Destroy it, like people did with everything else they were too stupid or too lazy to understand.

He was still puzzled though.

‘When the one I saw with Jenny bit off her toe, it was ravening. Do you think it would have stopped before it killed her if we’d just let it carry on?’

‘Absolutely not. It wouldn’t have left a scrap of her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t know for certain but I’m fairly sure. This thing - these things - it sounds like they start out as small groupings of waste. I bet they don’t survive long if they don’t consume living things. But if they get enough of what they need, they grow up like the one you saw coming out of the landfill. God knows what that one’s had to eat.’

‘Then they’re evil,’ said Ray. ‘Predatory, carnivorous, evil beasts. We’ve got to stop them.’

Delilah pushed him away.

‘You can’t mean that. They’re not evil, Ray. Are bears evil? Or lions or crocodiles? All of them are capable of killing people and many of them do. But does that make them evil? They’re just trying to survive.’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

He took the cigarette back and smoked it quietly. She watched him.

‘I haven’t convinced you, have I?’

‘To a degree, you have. But you haven’t seen the bloody things, D. Maybe they’re not actually evil but how will they know when to stop . . . adding to themselves? What if they don’t? Ever?’ He turned to look at her. ‘What will happen to us?’

He knew she would try to make light of it. She wanted a future with him too - he could read it in her face. As glad as he was of that, he began to experience a clean and simple dread. Here was something real and valuable, right here with him now. Real love. He recognised it because his mind and body were hard-wired to recognise it. Upon the strength of this emotion, the lives of human beings were built. But with this wonderful, joyful thing - intertwined with it - came this new possibility, the possibility that he could lose it all before he’d had the chance to truly be part of it. He couldn’t accept the cruelty of it.

But whatever witticism she’d hoped to use never came. Perhaps she didn’t want to dishonour what they were feeling with jokes and avoidance of the truth. She took the cigarette away from him and put it in the ashtray, still burning. She slipped down the bed a short way so that their heads were level. She held his face and kissed him. He gave himself to the kiss without thought. Lost himself to her.

What choice was there?

***

The canal towpath was overgrown with weeds only just beginning to die back after the long summer. Nettles leaned in from both sides of a narrow green corridor, kept open only by the regular passing of walkers and fisherman. On the walks Kevin and Jenny had taken since he’d moved in, they’d seen kingfishers, woodpeckers and even a few grass snakes. Over the last few days, however, the incidence of any wildlife seemed to have diminished. He assumed it was the onset of cooler, shorter days making the animals less active.

They kept away from Shreve Country Park. Kev didn’t want to be anywhere near his old home and he’d assumed Jenny wouldn’t want to run into Tamsin. She’d protested, though.

‘Why should we change our routines? What’s she going to do?’

‘It’s not that, Jen. I need the space for a start. And I could do without a nasty confrontation. I want some time to get my head together, plan something for us.’

She hadn’t pushed him further.

Now, as they walked in single file to avoid nettle stings, Kev felt that all things were in place, life was simple and good. He reached behind and Jenny took his hand for a few paces. Not far beyond, the path broadened. On their left was an ancient hedgerow and on their right, growing out of the canal, were crowds of rushes. As soon as there was space, they walked beside each other. Kev put his arm around her shoulder.

‘I’ve been thinking, Jen. Why don’t we move? Somewhere that’s got countryside all around it. Miles and miles of land and trees and rivers and hills.’

‘What’s wrong with Shreve?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with it, as such. But what have we got? We’ve got a stinky, silted up old canal. We’ve got a reservoir disguised as a park. And we’ve got one of the biggest landfill sites in the country. The rest of it is industrial estates and council houses.’

‘What about all these fields?’

‘Yeah, but we’ve had to drive to get here. And all this land is cultivated. I want to go to a place where you look out the window and it’s wild. You step outside your front door and you’re surrounded by nature. Untouched. As it was meant to be.’

‘What about your sports car?’

‘I’ll flog it.’

‘What about your wife?’

‘She could use a good flogging too.’

He watched Jenny’s smile and thought that it was reserved somehow. A little cautious. He stopped walking and turned to her.

‘Listen to me, Jen. This is not one of those situations in which the husband has a long-term mistress but never leaves his wife. Tamsin is out of my life forever as far as I’m concerned. She’ll do everything she can to take half of everything I’ve got but I don’t care about that if you don’t. I want to be with you, Jen. Full stop. End of story. Start of new book. Whatever we’ve got - love, money, dreams - let’s take it all and go somewhere we can enjoy it. Somewhere beautiful. I don’t know how it’s happened but being with you has opened me up to seeing the world in a different way. I feel alive like I never did before.’

If he’d expected a teary, joyful acceptance of his outpouring, he didn’t get it.

‘Is this the “something” you’ve been “planning”?’ She asked.

‘I suppose it must be. I didn’t really know what it was until it came out.’

‘Look, Kev . . .’

Jenny trailed off and looked away.

He’d hoped that it would go so much better than this. That she’d be keen to escape with him. Escape what, though? Was that all he’d come up with in the time he’d been thinking about all this? Was he just finding a way to run away from it all? To avoid it?

‘Jen, I’m sorry. Maybe this is all too soon. I just thought. . . I mean I really believed that we were . . .’

Jenny wasn’t listening to him any more. She was staring at something in the rushes. He was about to lose his temper with her for taking no notice when he realised that her face had drained pale.

‘Jenny, what’s wrong?’

The rushes were shifting, rustling. Something in the canal was making them do that. Something large and heavy. Jenny was backing away.

‘Babe, hold on. It’s probably just -’

Her scream, disgusted and terrified, cut him off.

He stepped in front of her to see down from her angle into the rushes. Something writhed there, trying to heave itself up from the water. Its movement reminded him of a seal or walrus that was close to drowning. The thing had no grace of movement. It merely rolled and floundered, pulsated almost, in its attempt to be free of the muddy canal water and the clinging reeds. He had the feeling he’d seen something like this, something he could make no sense of, before.

But this was no déjà vu. Down in Shreve country park that morning, months ago now, the dogs had attacked something similar. This coiling, juddering shape gave off the same rank odour of effluent and trash. This time there was no mistaking the facts. It really was moving. The thing was alive and independent in its own right. Unless someone was playing a practical joke on them - he wanted so much to believe that was what this was. The thing’s movement was so jerky and so mechanical; it could easily have been some kind of home-made machine. He glanced around hoping to catch sight of someone with a remote controller, someone else with a hand held camcorder. They were alone.

And the thing was making progress. Part of it was on the towpath now. Shit. What was it? He could see eyes. Too many of them and none of them the same. He could see skin and animal pelts. He could see polythene bags of various colours, wrinkling and stretching taut as the thing heaved itself up. And then he saw an opening that could only have been a mouth. And in it he saw two horizontal, parallel knife blades, one in the upper part of the opening and one in the lower. The mouth hole closed and opened again. A shearing sound came from the blades.

Finally, Jen spoke in a whisper:

‘Run, Kev.’

‘What?’

‘RUN.’

***

They slept as they lay when it was over, tangled, sticky, elated. But Ray knew they’d both felt the first wounds of impending heartbreak. Their love, their lives, were fragile. Never more so than now.

A scream woke Ray. His eyes flicked open and he listened. For a very few seconds he was able to indulge the idea that he might have dreamed it. He’d dreamed so many in the last few days. Then he heard another. The first had been fear. This one was pain. Delilah was awake too by then. They both jumped out of bed.

There were other screams now, further away. Shouts of panic and shock nearer by. The sound of people running in the street. Ray looked out of the window as he zipped up his jeans. For a moment he was absolutely still. Delilah joined him.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. Delilah was more specific.

‘It’s started.’

***

All along the canal side of the towpath, there was movement. The weeds shook and trembled and the water rippled.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kev thought he saw shapes swimming in the murky water. Up ahead, Jenny was sprinting. He’d never seen her move so fast. There was an unevenness to her running gait because of the missing toe but it didn’t slow her down. Every few paces she hurdled some agglomeration of rubbish that had squirmed into her path and moments later he was forced to do the same.

Bloated black worms of rubbish overflowed from the canal every few feet. Kev thanked God they were so cumbersome but he was afraid too that their lack of mobility was some kind of bluff and that, at any time, they might lash out and bring both him and Jenny down.

They reached the canal bridge where the towpath let up onto the road. Jenny hammered up the slope and he followed, already fishing for the car keys. He pressed the fob, the locks sprung open and they shut themselves inside. He fumbled the key into the ignition with shaking fingers, started the car on the third attempt and left rubber on the tarmac as they screeched away.

***

There was no sustained sense of relief. As Kevin drove, he saw more crawling, writhing shapes in the fields and, as they neared town, in the alleys and streets of Shreve. Groups of kids poked some of the bags with sticks or laid into them with booted feet. In other places people backed away when the numbers of trash things seemed too great.

‘Where the hell are they all coming from?’ he said, not really expecting an answer.

‘From the landfill,’ said Jenny.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I just know it.’

He was about to ask her again when she said,

‘Kev, where are you taking us?’

‘Home.’

‘Why? Don’t you think we should be trying to get as far away as possible?’

She was right, of course. She was thinking. He was panicking.

He took a left turn, heading for the ring road. From there they could reach the motorway and go north or south. Anywhere, as long as it was away from Shreve. But the traffic was mounting. Kev didn’t think anyone in the cars and trucks had realised yet that it was time to leave town, but the sight of the trash things invading Shreve was causing accidents. In front of them two cars had smashed into the back of a local bus. The driver had got out to dispute whose fault it was but now all parties were merely watching the laboured progress of the landfill creatures converging from every direction.

Kev drove around the knot of gawping drivers from the accident, almost colliding head-on with a speeding Land Rover. They both braked and Kev pushed through the gap, ignoring the horn and abusive shouts from the other driver.

They hit the ring road and the driving was better. There were no landfill creatures to distract anyone. Kev took the slip road that led off the bypass and out towards the motorway. Up ahead another car had done the same. The driver had seen the pile of ‘rubbish’ spilled all across the road and had tried to drive over it. Kevin imagined the man’s annoyance as the nails and blades hidden inside the self-sacrificing creatures had punctured all his tyres like a stinger trap. The man had stepped out of his car and was screaming now. Something in the mass of trash at his feet had a hold of him. He was trying to tear his leg out of its grip. Kevin saw blood welling through the man’s trousers, a whitening of the man’s face. The man stumbled and fell to his knees. He put out one hand to stop himself going down all the way and when he regained his balance he brought the hand up again. All four fingers were gone.

Jenny stifled her scream with two hands over her mouth.

‘We’ve got to help him,’ said Kev.

‘No. It’s too late. Turn around, Kev. Turn us around before we get stuck out here.’

He checked his mirrors. Another car was pulling up behind them on the slip road. He flicked on his hazard lights and put the Z3 into reverse. A second turn put him onto the hard shoulder. He passed the approaching car of a woman making wank signals to him through the glass. Down on the ring road he rejoined the flow of traffic to more blaring horns.

‘I’ll try the next exit.’

Jenny said nothing. She didn’t even nod.

Half a mile further along he signalled and pulled off the ring road again. This time he was ready for the road block and saw it long before they came close. A moving tide of rubbish had stretched right across the slip road. None of it moved. It was waiting. He turned the car around between the hard shoulder and the gravel verge.

Back on the ring road traffic was building up.

‘Where the fuck are we going to go?’

‘I’m thinking,’ said Jenny. ‘Just give me a minute.’

‘I’m not sure how many minutes we’ve got.’

***

Mavis Ahern lay in bed with damp cotton pads over her closed eyes. She was dressed in a white blouse and navy cardigan, a calf-length grey skirt, tights and flat shoes. The curtains were drawn shut to keep out the light.

She’d come back to bed and lain this way since the sparkles at the edge of her vision had begun that morning. The sparkles had become streaks of blue lightning. Thunder followed in the form of pulses of agony that burst inside the entire right-hand side of her head. Her coffee and cornflakes made a swift reappearance. Traces of them stained her cardigan. She didn’t care. After seeing herself in the mirror; her face grey, the vein in her right temple raised by internal pressure, she’d gone directly to bed.

It was years since she’d had a migraine. She thought she’d outgrown them. This one had started as she watched two boys kissing behind the pavilion. They couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. One boy had unzipped the other’s baggy cargo pants. Put his hand inside. Flash. Crackle. The auras had begun.

Why had the migraines returned? Was it some kind of punishment?

Maybe it was because Tamsin had gone as far as threatening her with a knife. Perhaps the shock of that was only now sinking in. Her plan to reunite the Dohertys in the sight of the Lord had failed utterly. Kevin had left the marriage home. It could not have gone more wrong.

She was filled with doubts.

Had God deserted her? Left the neighbourhood? The whole town? Given up and abandoned it to eat itself away from the inside?

She was so sick now, she hadn’t the energy to look for a sign that He still loved her. The room pressed in around her. Icy sweat dripped from her head, palms and armpits. Her sense of smell was enhanced to the point where the insides of her nostrils felt stripped raw. She tried to breathe only through her mouth because the slightest smell made her nausea worse.

Her pulse was erratic. Each beat was a clap of agony inside her head. The irregularity of it was frightening; her heart not beating the right time, losing its rhythm. She tried not to worry about it. She tried not to think. Thinking only made it all worse. Keeping the image of the two boys from her mind was almost impossible. It hung there at the edge of her consciousness, waiting for her guard to come down. Whenever she drifted close to sleep, instead of being released from the pain, she saw the boys. The furtive glances, their innocent, inexpert hands, their trembling excitement. She would snap back to wakefulness and sickness and pain.

She didn’t know how long she’d lain there. Hours, it had to be, but how many she didn’t know. She ignored the urge to urinate at first and even succeeded in convincing her body it didn’t need to go. Twice she’d managed the trick of it but now the urge had returned, insistent and demanding. She would not be able to trick herself again nor sleep through it. Sooner or later she’d have to get up and face the agonies that a sudden change of blood pressure would cause her.

It was time.

She turned her palms to the mattress, ready to ease herself upright.

From downstairs came the muffled sound of glass breaking and wood, the door-frame perhaps, being - what? - kicked?

More glass shattered. There was a scraping sound. She recognised it: the back door had been opened.

Strange how both the urge to pee and the intensity of pain receded as she listened. From downstairs she heard thumps and dragging sounds. Deliberate, determined movements. She imagined a man, deformed somehow, limping from the back door across the lino in the kitchen and onto the hallway carpet. Was someone hurt perhaps? Mr. Siscombe from next door having a heart attack and struggling to find help? She couldn’t just lie there. She had to check.

More quietly than she would have done minutes earlier, she pushed herself into a sitting position and swung her legs out of bed. The pads fell from her eyes. Her vision turned gritty white and the room spun away from her. The pain struck her like a tsunami. For several moments she didn’t even know if she was still sitting or if she’d fallen back onto the bed. She couldn’t stop the sickness then. She just sat forward and let her stomach clench and cramp. There was nothing in it and she racked one dry spasm after another until finally a dribble of pale green bile rose and slipped from her lips onto her grey skirt. This seemed to satisfy her stomach and the retching ceased. The chartreuse liver-mucus seeped into the rough fabric.

The white-out must have robbed her of a few seconds because now the noise of dragging and stumping was on the stairs. Nearing the top. There was definitely an urgency to the movement. A kind of desperation.

Her bladder was a bag of needles. Even so, she didn’t believe she’d be able to stand.

The smell of sewage and rot hit her and her eyes widened in utter revulsion. The vomiting began again. This time the bile was dark green and coagulated. Its bitterness made her nausea worse. She heaved and heaved until it seemed her head would burst.

And then the thing that had broken into her house and dragged itself up the stairs came into view and she knew what it was. God had sent His retribution. She had failed Him despite every effort to serve. Now He had sent a creature to escort her downwards, away from Him forever, unblessed and discarded.

She didn’t know what it was. It had no name. It had five ‘arms’ which it used as legs. It was fashioned of junk and animal parts and filth. It dragged a long fat body and left a wet trail of excrement on her carpet. A long-bodied spider without enough legs to move properly. It was searching for something. It used its arms to point its front end in one direction and then the other - hers. Its eyes were the loops from the handles of scissors. Its teeth were the ends of dozens of knitting needles. They clicked as it saw her. It dragged itself into her bedroom.

The thing was almost comical. It was impossible to believe it was real. The pain had elevated her awareness and reality had become a kind of farce now. Here came the shit spider with its stunted arms and comedy teeth. Here came its leaking body behind it. Clickety-click went the shit spider’s chattery teeth. Snip, snip went its scissor-hole eyes. It was no higher off the ground than a small terrier. Along it came and she watched. She might have giggled if she knew it wouldn’t have hurt her to do so.

The shit spider crawled closer, all the while blinking its eyes and clacking its remnant jaws. It took hold of her left leg with surprising strength; the grip was as sudden and strong as a sprung animal trap. The comedy went out of it all when it bit off half of her left foot. Until then, there’d never been pain worse than a migraine. The scream that had been waiting in the wings like an actor with only one line made its entrance.

The shit spider was hungry.

It bit and swallowed but did not chew.

She watched all this with inquisitive terror. The smell of waste filled her nostrils until they burned ammonia white.

Both her feet were gone.

Mavis Ahern allowed her bladder to release.

She thought of her roses. How from the muck good things would come. She had been wrong. So very, very wrong.

18

He wasn’t happy with her decision but he couldn’t think of anywhere better. Time was the only factor and so he agreed.

The Shreve Tertiary College car park was only a quarter full. It was Saturday, a day mainly for adult learners and weekend courses of a less academic nature. Kev pulled up right outside the front entrance and Jenny got out. When he didn’t follow her, she walked around to the driver’s side. He lowered the window.

The sound of sirens came from every direction. Smoke rose from various points on the horizon. Whether people realised it or not, Shreve was beginning to come to a halt. On the main steps of the college, students stood in frowning groups, not yet aware of what was happening.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ She asked.

‘Yes. But not yet.’

‘You’re going to get her, aren’t you?’ He looked away.

‘I can’t just leave her there with these things. I can’t just let her die, Jenny. I’d never forgive myself. Trust me, babe. I love you but I have to do this. I’ve got no choice.’

‘Kev, please . . . I know she’s your wife . . . I know you probably still love her but -’

‘Jen, it’s not that. I just -’

‘What I’m saying is, I don’t care about her or what happens to her. I care about you. You’ve got to come back to me, Kev. Promise me you’ll come back.’

He took her hand.

‘I’m coming back, Jen. I swear it.’

***

Morning found Mason Brand shaved and dressed in clothes that had not come out of the wardrobe for several years. They smelled musty at first so he’d aired them on a ladder outside the back door.

In the predawn light, the garden was nothing more than untended fruitfulness turning into waste ground. Nothing moved out there. Whatever tide had drawn so close to his shore had ebbed far, far away.

The shaving didn’t go well.

He cut off as much of his beard as he could with scissors. Then he used the only thing sharp enough in the house to finish the job - the knife he’d honed intending to kill himself. It did not lack for keenness - it was merely the wrong shape and several times he poked himself with the sharp end, eliciting a wince and a very willing blood flow. Finally, he managed to get most of his face smooth. He left long sideburns and a tuft under his chin where he’d nearly taken the top off his adam’s apple.

The brown suit was loose because he’d lost weight so he punched extra holes in an old Swedish army belt and pulled the trousers tight around his waist with it. He wore a white shirt and an old, broad-ended tie. He had no dress shoes so he wore his walking boots, also brown, and pulled the bottoms of his trousers down to cover them as best he could.

Standing dressed outside the back door it was easy to believe that he’d imagined or hallucinated the things he thought he’d seen out there. It was such a long time since he’d eaten that his mind might have played any number of tricks on him. One thing it hadn’t done was let him forget his morality. He had done wrong - ultimate wrong - and he intended to do something about it before the end came. What exactly he would do, he wasn’t certain, but he felt a small power left within himself, as though he’d discovered a final crusade worth pursuing.

He neither drank nor ate anything. When the sun came up, it burned into his eyes for several seconds before he turned away. Something made him take off his boots and for several minutes he stood barefoot on the soil of his garden before brushing his feet clean and putting the boots back on.

He walked away from his suburban lair with determination.

***

Kevin’s drive back to Bluebell Way was worse.

Small accidents had occurred on many roads, mostly because of the distraction caused by the animated waste that crawled or slithered in every street. But some people, the small and the slow, perhaps the overly inquisitive, had already been unlucky. He passed a mobility scooter on which sat an elderly man. The man wore a flat cap and a dirty coat but his face was obscured by a creature half rabbit and half spoilage. Evidently the man had been trying to scream for help when the rabbit thing had extended a pseudo limb of some kind and thrust it up through his exposed palate. Now the old man stared ahead while the rabbit educated itself on his aged brain and other limping chimeras of junk and flesh crawled over him. They disassembled him, added him to themselves.

Too occupied with the fate of the elderly man, Kevin himself almost hit a cyclist who had wobbled into the centre of the road. He resolved to keep his mind on the journey.

Armed police had arrived at the top of one terrace where the rubbish seemed to be invading in force. He remembered that this street had both a home for the elderly and a day nursery. He wanted to stop then and do something to help. The thought of the rubbish cannibalising parts from children barely old enough to stand made his stomach turn over and his anger ignite. But what could he do?

He pulled onto the kerb to watch the police operation. It was clear that though they had their routines and training, it didn’t fit the situation. The group converged on a large knot of resurrected debris, their rifles and pistols aimed downwards into them. Officers glanced at each other and shook their heads. Someone gave the command to open fire and the street echoed with the unfamiliar sounds of war. Automatic bursts and single shots popped and clattered into the rubbish. Here and there Kevin saw puffs and bursts and tears in the amalgamated flesh and plastic, the tin and bone. But the majority of the rubbish kept moving, seething forward. It was slow because it lacked the limbs to propel itself properly. But it came forward without fear, unaffected by the threat of bullets that could rip through it so easily. Many of the individual creatures that had been hit were still moving - evidently, the bullets had missed the vital components or hadn’t torn big enough holes in their ‘skins’.

Kevin remembered the way Ozzy and Lemmy had chewed open the fat tadpole-shaped thing he’d seen at the reservoir. That had been enough to end its life. The bullets were making only small holes and probably passed right through their targets. They’d need something less precise to stop the landfill creatures. He pulled back into the road and put his foot down for home.

Correction, my ex-home.

Bluebell Way was an invasion site. Kevin couldn’t believe it.

It looked as though the landfill had been airlifted in ten tons at a time. But looking closer he could see dozens of individual landfill creatures moving in their hesitant, fumbling way. Christ, he thought, they’re so much more dangerous than they look.

Dozens of them were besieging his house. Tamsin was upstairs looking out of the window in pale-faced terror and disbelief. Before he parked, he turned the car to face back the way he’d come. If they made it back out of the house they needed every advantage. Lumbering, crippled assemblies of rubbish and animal flesh assailed the door, climbing over each other to break in. One of the panels in the frosted glass had already shattered and something was pouring itself in through the space. Kevin had no weapons.

He spent several valuable moments thinking before he jumped out of the car. Tamsin had seen him by now and was jumping up and down at the window in desperation. She looked like a child. He saw another look on her face too, one he’d never seen before. Remorse. She was sorry. Sorry for what she’d done or sorry for what he’d done, he couldn’t tell.

The garage was clear of creatures; it was the living they craved. He ran to it, unlocked it and hauled the door up. As soon as they sensed he was there landfill creatures converged on him from every direction. Panic rose and swelled in him. It was like an urge to piss with time running out. How long could he hold himself together? He hauled the door down behind him. It creaked as they pressed themselves against it.

In the garage he grabbed the tool with the longest handle, a rake they’d never used - it still had the price sticker on it. In the corner there was a five-litre plastic petrol can in which he kept the two-stroke fuel for the lawn mower. He picked it up and shook it. It was less than half full. Would it be enough? Was two-stroke even flammable without a wick? He couldn’t remember.

Something scratched the leg of his jeans and he shook his foot violently. With a pathetic mewl, something unrecognisable crashed back against the wall. Whimpering, it began to crawl back to him. They’d lifted the door enough for some of the smaller creatures to slip under. More of them were working their way through the gap.

He let himself out the side door of the garage, shutting the things inside, and went to the back of the house, watchful and twitchy. There were two or three landfill creatures crossing the garden towards the back steps but the main body of attackers was still at the front door. He crept quietly to the front of the house, now, along the side wall. Several of them had already found him. They swarmed down the alley formed between the house and the garage but they were all small fry. He pushed them back with the rake as though sweeping. Some of them tore badly and a filthy plasma leaked out. Kevin choked on the smell but kept pushing.

Most of the landfill creatures were slow moving and ungainly. He knew if he was nimble enough, he’d be able to do enough damage to buy some time.

At the front of the house he risked hopping over several of the things to get closer to the main entry. Fumbling and shaking, his knees jittering as he stood on the spot, he unscrewed the lid of the petrol can and splashed the fuel out towards the front door and all over the converging landfill creatures. They shivered at the touch of the liquid as if knowing what would follow. Darting between other creatures on the lawn he spilled fuel out behind him as he sprinted back to the side wall. He hoped the trail of fuel was unbroken and he tried to douse as many of the creatures in his path as he could. When he reached the back garden he took the pink Bic lighter from his pocket and thanked God he hadn’t quit smoking. It was so low on gas he couldn’t hear any fluid inside when he shook it. He flicked it beside the fuel-glistening grass but there it had no effect. He flicked it again and again.

‘Come on. For God’s sake, come ON.’

The fuel caught, not from the lighter’s flame but from a spark hitting it. It leapt to life burning his eyelashes and the front of his hair. He fell backwards onto the grass. The fire was already around the corner to the front of the house. Every landfill creature the flames touched caught light and began to melt. Every one of them made such desperate, haunted cries he almost wanted to turn the hose on them. The leaping flame and the writhing of the dying creatures mesmerised him for a few seconds as he lay on his side. The sound was hard to bear. It interrupted his concentration.

There was a searing pain in his ear and then he was screaming and rolling away from it. He struggled to his feet and put his hand to the side of his head. Most of his left ear was missing. It had disappeared inside the razorblade mouth of a tiny trash freak.

‘You dirty fucker,’ he screamed.

He used the rake to tear it apart. Scattered and broken it was soon still. There in the liquid shit of its blood, lay his severed ear. He didn’t dare touch it.

Crying at the pain, he went to the back door and used the rake on the other creatures that were scrabbling at the glass, killing them easily. Then he let himself in and locked the door behind him. Terrified that the wound would be infected, he turned the tap on, bent down and bathed what was left of his ear under it. The water made the pain worse but he gritted his teeth. With the damage had come a kind of hyper-clarity. The creatures outside were an obstacle. He would find a way around them. Getting Tammy to safety was a problem he would solve. The insanity of the situation no longer screamed at him and slowed his thinking down. Everything was simple now.

Pressing a clean tea towel to the side of his head he ran up the stairs.

She was waiting at the top, tearful and overjoyed.

‘Oh Christ, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you so much.’

‘I only came back for a change of boxer shorts.’ She noticed the bloodstained tea towel.

‘Was it . . . one of them?’

He nodded then pushed past her to the bathroom to search in the cabinet. The things he didn’t want he threw on the floor. When he found what he was looking for he unscrewed the cap and handed it to Tammy. This was the feared and respected remedy his own father had put on all their cuts when they were little - hydrogen peroxide.

‘I won’t be able to do this to myself.’

‘What do expect me to do?’

‘Just tip a bit on when I take the towel away.’

Their eyes met for a second and he saw she’d have no problem doing what he’d asked. There was still enough hate in her to power a city. He took the towel away and she upended the bottle over what remained of his ear.

‘Aaaarrgh! Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIIIITTT.’

The exposed flesh turned white as it fizzed. He forced the urge to hit her back down again. They had to concentrate on getting out. But it did cross his mind to wonder again why he’d come back for the bitch.

Never mind, Kev, just keep it moving.

He dropped the tea towel and when he looked at her again, she was crying.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t want us to hurt each other any more, Kevin. I’ve had enough. Enough for a lifetime. And I . . . I can’t believe you came back. I know I don’t deserve it.’

‘We’re not out of this yet, Tammy. The whole town’s infested with these things.’

‘The whole t -’

The sound of smashed glass and something heavy landing on the kitchen floor came from downstairs. It was a terrifying sound. The sound of an intelligent action, part of the landfill creatures’ plan.

Kevin took her hand.

‘Come on, we’re leaving.’

He ran from the bathroom to the spare room. He looked down into the back garden but couldn’t see anything out there. From the front door came the sound of writhing, moaning creatures on fire and the smell of burning plastic and charred meat.

He led Tammy to the top of the stairs. At the back door, he heard the lock being turned and the handle being pushed down. He cursed himself; in his haste, he’d left the rake in the kitchen. There had to be something in the house he could use. If the creatures weren’t very strong, keeping them at a distance would be enough. Perhaps they could reach the recess under the stairs. Then he could use the sweeping brush to keep whatever was in the kitchen at a safe range until they got out.

He descended the stairs more cautiously than he’d come up them, bringing Tammy by the hand behind him. Smoke was seeping in around the frame of the front door. It smelled like the paint and wood had caught fire; the whole house would catch soon. He didn’t plan to hang around long enough to see their home go up in flames.

At the bottom of the steps, he looked over the rail and into the kitchen. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by shattered glass, was a flower pot. It had also smashed when it hit the floor, scattering compost and jettisoning a geranium. But there was no movement in the kitchen and no sound inside the house other than his own breathing and heartbeat.

He motioned to Tammy that it was safe to move and together they stepped down into the front hallway. He signalled for her to stay behind him and then edged forwards towards the door of the storage recess under the stairs. He had to turn his back on the kitchen to open it. Even though he was stealthy, the hinge creaked because the wood had warped. It took three tugs to get the door open. Inside it was too gloomy to see what he needed.

‘Where’s the broom?’ he whispered. Tammy shook her head then remembered.

‘Outside the back door.’

‘Shit. There must be something else in here.’

Tammy leaned across and flicked the light switch for him.

Vacuum cleaner. Dustpan and brush. Bleach. Feather duster. Flimsy plastic mop.

‘Come on, come on.’

Then he saw the tool box.

‘Thank you, Lord.’

He crouched down to unsnap the latches. Inside was the nearest thing to a weapon he was going to find, his claw hammer. As he reached into the tool box he heard Tammy’s scream cut short. He leapt up with the hammer in time to see Tammy being dragged into the kitchen by her throat. Not all the creatures crawled any more. Not all of them were slow and small.

The thing had raised Tammy up off her feet and she was already struggling to stay conscious. She had both her hands around the creature’s arm, trying to lift herself out of its grip. The thing was hanging her alive. It had five arms and stood on two legs like an inverted centaur. A long, fat tail whipped wetly across the kitchen floor leaving smears of excrement. It was only when one of the thing’s free arms extended towards Tammy’s belly that Kevin finally moved. The arm ended in a pair of secateurs.

He swung the hammer down onto the arm holding Tammy and felt something break inside it. Tammy fell to the ground and staggered back against the wall. The limb that held her came away from the landfill creature, spilling stinking brown blood onto the tiles. Still the hand gripped her but now she could fight to tear it off. The landfill creature turned all its attention towards Kevin, reaching out with its remaining four arms. Scissors, pliers, meat cleaver and secateurs.

Kevin smashed the hammer sideways against the secateur arm but it was more resilient. The creature moved towards him, dragging its heavy tail. It didn’t really have a head, just an opening above what passed for its torso. Kevin could hear the shearing of blades coming from inside it. It walked on mostly human legs that appeared to have been cut into dozens of pieces and stitched back together with twine and green garden wire. He struck at it again, this time breaking the pliers hand so that it hung uselessly. The creature let out a moan of pain and misery.

With a grunted scream, Tamsin tore the dislocated hand and forearm from her throat and threw it across the kitchen. It fell into the sink where both of them could hear it scrabbling to escape. Edging around behind the thing, Tammy reached for the biggest implement in the wooden knife block, her Global carving knife. The blade was twelve inches long and sharp enough to cut bone. She moved into position behind the thing and lunged.

The creature screamed again, a howl of torment and frustration. It tried to turn towards Tammy but its tail slowed it down. Already she’d lunged again, this time with more confidence. But the deep thrusts seemed only to cause further leaks from the thing’s body, not real damage.

‘You’ve got to slash it, Tammy. Tear it open.’ She nodded.

Kevin swung the clawed end of his hammer across the flank of the thing, opening up skin and plastic to reveal a mess of cobbled organs and rubbish.

It was then, perhaps knowing that it would not survive, that the thing’s chest split to reveal a human head with the eyes missing. Those eyes, he now realised were set inside the creature’s shoulders. Despite the wet mess inside the creature they both recognised the face.

The head hissed one word,

‘Sssssssinners . . .’

Tammy’s eyes widened in recognition and then she lashed out with total fury, sweeping the blade from side to side and opening the thing up again and again. The screams of protest became weaker. Kevin tore at it with the claw hammer. The thing lost its physical integrity and began to fall apart, dropping dead parts to the tiles. It collapsed to the floor, sighed and was still.

Panting, Tammy spat on it.

‘Trashy bitch.’

In the sink, the creature’s still-living hand still flailed and tried to climb out. Kevin picked it up with a pair of barbecue tongs, threw it into the microwave and slammed the door.

‘How do like your garbage, Tammy?’

‘Cremated.’

19

There was something very sick, something cowardly, about watching it all from the bedroom window. But Ray couldn’t pull himself away. The scene outside was so similar to Revenant Apocalypse it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover a film crew parked up the street shooting a scene for the movie version of the game.

Accepting it was not a game took bollocks he wasn’t sure he possessed. If he wanted to survive and keep Delilah safe too, he knew he had to sharpen up, start taking it seriously. He had to come up with a plan. But from the safety of her bedsit, he was still removed enough to live in a bubble. Almost. The screams from the street and nearby houses were real. The creatures from the landfill were real. Their hunger was real.

But it was so tempting to roll a joint and take a step back even farther from it all. That would be the simplest, easiest thing to do. And maybe, if they stayed very quiet and locked and bolted everything, the creatures would leave them alone until the government sent in the troops.

Delilah seemed to sense his thoughts and she pulled him away from the glass.

‘Let’s find something to fight with.’

‘We’re not going out on that street, D.’

‘No, but they might come in here. I want to be ready.’

He didn’t want to accept it but he knew it was true. He pulled on his Converse All Stars and tied them tightly, tucking the spare lengths of lace away inside them. If he was going to run, he was going to run fast. No silly mistakes. Delilah was pulling on one of her long, flowing, velvety dresses. Her boots had three inch soles.

‘D? Babe. Are you sure that’s appropriate attire?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘What I mean is, if we’re sprinting down the high street being chased by a throng of zombie cyborg trash, you don’t want to go tripping over your hem, do you? Haven’t you got some jeans?’

‘Denim?’

‘Well . . . Yeah . . . or, like, trousers or something.’

For a moment Ray thought she was going to lose her temper. He’d never paid her anything but compliments about the way she dressed before this.

‘I’ve got some combat trousers. But I dyed them black.’ Ray shook his head in disbelief.

‘I don’t give a toss what colour they are, D. What matters is can you run in them?’

‘Kidding, Ray. Okay?’ She was laughing now.

‘Very funny. What about those boots. Got anything . . . lower to the ground?’

‘Will trainers do?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘I dyed them black too.’

‘Delilah . . .’

She was already getting changed into her combats and she hadn’t lied, they were mottled charcoal and black. He watched her as she dressed. She filled her trousers in exactly the right places. On top she wore a tight black roll neck jumper over a sports bra, also black. Her trainers were silver; she winked and stuck out her tongue as she Velcroed them up.

‘What now?’ She asked.

‘Have you got a backpack? Black is fine.’

‘There’s one in the bottom of that wardrobe.’

‘We need some kind of weapon,’ said Ray, ‘and spare clothes in case we get stuck outside. Warm stuff, waterproofs, that kind of thing.’

She shook her head.

‘I’ve got nothing like that.’

He glanced out of the window.

‘Judging by the look of things out there, we should be able to borrow what we need from the shops without anyone getting upset.’

‘There’s an outdoor equipment place just up the road.’

‘Perfect.’

A thump from downstairs made both of them start.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Delilah with her hand on her heart. The thump came again, louder.

‘That’s the front door,’ she said.

‘Yeah. You’d have thought they might knock before trying to break it down.’ He peered down from the bedsit window.

‘I can’t make out what’s down there.’ Delilah chewed her lip.

‘It could be someone trying to escape from them,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Ray. ‘Here, let me open this.’

The window only opened far enough for him to stick his head through. It was enough.

He pulled back in, pale in the face.

‘Fuck knows what it is but it’s not a someone. It’s a some-thing. How strong is your front door?’

‘I’ve never needed to test it.’

‘Is there another way out of here? Like a fire escape or something?’

‘No. Just the main door.’ Ray was aghast.

‘Isn’t there a back garden?’

‘Well, there’s a small patch of paving and a load of weeds but no one ever seems to go out there.’

‘There has to be a back door, D. It must lead out there from one of the downstairs bedsits.’

‘How do you know there aren’t more of them out the back?’

‘I don’t.’

Whatever was outside the front door got more serious about coming in. The next impact sounded as though it had damaged the door. Ray grabbed the rucksack from the cupboard and slung it, empty, across his back. They’d have to stock up later.

‘Isn’t there anything we could use to defend ourselves?’ he asked.

She squatted down and groped under the bed for a few moments.

Another crash came from the front door.

‘Forget it, D, we’ve got to leave right now.’

‘Wait.’

With a sigh of satisfaction, she drew out a long, flat wooden box, carved with twined serpents. She flicked the two hasps and lifted the lid. Ray forgot all about the creature downstairs.

‘Where the fuck did you get that?’

‘Ex-boyfriend gave it to me. He was into Karate and jujitsu.’

‘Is it real?’

‘As far as I know.’

She handed Ray the ornate scabbard and he slipped six inches of steel into view. He was no expert but it certainly looked like a very real and very well looked after katana. Probably the kind of trophy taken by American soldiers from Japanese officers at the end of the Second World War. He kissed her.

‘This’ll do,’ he said. ‘This’ll do very nicely indeed.’

The front door came off its hinges. Ray stuck the scabbard through his belt, unsheathed the katana and opened Delilah’s bedsit door.

‘Whatever happens, stay a long way behind me until it’s clear, okay?’

‘Have you ever used one of these before?’

‘Yes. Kind of. Well, no, not really. But I’ve . . . it doesn’t matter. Just stay back.’

He edged out of the door onto the landing. It was a tiny house converted into four bedsits - two upstairs and two down. From the landing, the stairs led straight to the front door and the downstairs entry where the other bedsit front doors led off.

But Ray had stopped worrying about how to find and get out of the back door. Blocking the downstairs hall was something bigger than he’d expected. Much bigger. Filling the doorway from shattered lock to ripped-out hinges was a giant, black centipede raised up on its belly like a snake ready to strike. All along the exposed lower part of itself were two rows of human fingers that waved like cilia. Its face was an upside down satellite dish and set in the middle of it was a single cow’s eye. The transmitter protruded above it like a carrot and stick and at its tip was the centipede’s other eye. The mouth was below all of this, a twelve inch vertical slit lined with the tips of a hundred or more serrated bread knives, three rows deep. They reminded him of a shark’s maw.

The thing gurgled at him, more satisfied now to have its prey in front of it. The centipede wheezed like leaking bellows as it breathed but when it moved forward it was surprisingly fast. The severed fingers had become its legs and as they flickered, it glided along as though on a cushion of air. Its front half remaining upright cobra-like, it moved forwards and up the first three steps. The unblinkable eyes stared and swivelled. The shark’s-teeth knives clashed against each other.

Ray lifted the katana and chopped downwards, closing his eyes at impact, like a novice firing a handgun for the first time. When he opened them he saw he’d merely taken off the thing’s protruding eye. The creature shrank back, hissing and turning its ‘head’ from side to side until it could see the severed eye. It backed up on its hundreds of fingers, lay down on its front and when it raised up again, the eye that had been lying blind on the stairs was gone inside the thing’s gnashing mouth. Shit, thought Ray, they even recycle themselves. The creature didn’t look happy to have lost a piece of itself and its remaining eye now appeared bloodshot with anger. It approached again more slowly and then lunged at Ray’s feet.

He brought the katana down in the centre of the thing’s concave head and spilt it open, but in trying to step back at the same time, he fell over, sitting down hard on the top step. The creature, he now realised, was the length of the whole staircase and almost as wide. It swarmed up towards him, its radar dish split almost in half but its teeth clamping shut again and again like machinery.

Ray scrabbled backwards and stood on the top step. Delilah had retreated back into her room to keep out of his way. Ray’s hands were shaking. His knuckles were raw, bone white.

He took a deep breath, raised the sword up and over his right shoulder, as he’d made his character do so many times in Revenant Apocalypse, and brought it down in a diagonal arc. Whatever he cut through in the movement was enough to finish the creature. It immediately sagged and deflated and a wash of foul, brown gore spilled down the cheap stair carpet. Hundreds of fingers from God knew how many previous victims twitched and were still.

He poked the mess with the tip of the katana but it no longer stirred. He sank to the floor.

Delilah edged out behind him.

‘Nice moves, Ray.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Where’d you learn to do that anyway?’ He glanced up at her.

‘Never let it be said that computer games are a waste of time. Or that they promote antisocial behaviour.’

‘That wasn’t exactly a friendly thing to do, babe,’ she said.

He looked up again, not amused. Delilah grinned

‘Sorry, Ray. Thanks for saving my life. You can put down the sword now.’

Ray looked at his hands but didn’t disarm.

‘Actually, I can’t seem to let go of the bloody thing. Can you help me?’

That was the first time Delilah had to peel Ray’s fingers from the katana’s haft. It was not the last.

***

Mason Brand walked through the estate in awe and horror.

Everywhere, versions of the shed-thing he’d found in his own garden many weeks before were crawling, slithering or walking, depending on what they’d eaten or scavenged. They made use of absolutely everything, not a scrap was wasted. Some of the creatures were as fragile as the paper that formed their skins; others were sturdy with boxes or crates forming an efficient carapace. They’d copied themselves from the living things of the world or attempted approximations of them. Some were more successful than others but at each new taking-in of living tissue, they re-forged themselves into something better, something stealthier, something faster.

Mason considered the consequences of this. Right now it was probably possible to contain this invasion because it was a land-based advance. But how long would it be before some of the creatures caught a bird, one of the gulls from the landfill for example? Then they’d be able to go anywhere they wanted. They could let the wind spread them like seeds.

The pets of the neighbourhood, the ones that had been outside when the influx began, had not fared well. In several front gardens Mason saw dogs being assimilated a piece at a time or cats still hissing and clawing at the advancing menace. None of them would survive unless they had the sense to hide and even those, in the end, would be absorbed - their very cells re-educated.

He walked among them like a visitor to a zoo and it was only after almost an hour of watching and wandering that his situation fully dawned on him. They had no interest in him. He stopped then and observed in a different way. Did they not sense he was there? He tested the idea by getting in the path of one of the more embryonic ones, something that looked like a large black comma with a single eye. He stood in its way and when it came within a foot of him, it turned its eye upwards and then changed direction. To go around him. In case the thing was blind or it was a fluke, he placed himself in the way of a larger creature, one that had used a feline template and a box of car spares to shape itself. The thing clanked along on four shaky legs and had a tail of unravelling steel cable. When Mason stood in front of it, it paused, regarded him then turned and staggered away in the opposite direction.

That was all the proof he needed. They saw him and they left him be.

Why?

Heavens. Wasn’t it obvious?

He shouted at the retreating cat creature.

‘You know me, don’t you? It’s told you to leave me alone.’

He’d been so ready to die that morning, so ready he’d have willingly lain down in the road and let them take him apart after he’d done what he came to do. It wasn’t going to be like that, he now realised.

There was something to be done and he’d perhaps wasted too much time already. From all around came the sounds of a new mayhem. The cries and calls and snuffles of thousands of landfill creatures, no two of them the same. And over these cries, the howls of animals being dismembered and disembowelled one useful piece at a time and the screams of disbelieving people suffering the same end or fighting to avoid it. Sirens chittered and screeched from several directions, though there were no rescue vehicles in view. When he looked around, he saw the smoke from fires both accidental and deliberate.

Somewhere overhead but still out of view, he heard the distant thump of rotors cutting the morning air.

Despite his diminished weight, he felt no weakness. There was a lightness and resilience in his entire frame. If he was to be in time, he had to hurry and so he ran, dodging between the slower landfill creatures, jumping over the larger ones. There was still time to atone.

11 Bluebell Way was no less besieged than any of the houses around it. Landfill creatures blundered, some crippled by their choice of manifestation, others a little more agile, across the wrecked front lawn. They climbed over each other in their eagerness to get inside the house. The front door appeared secure - it was one with no glass but the downstairs windows were vulnerable and might last only minutes depending on the strength and numbers of creatures assailing the place.

He decided the best course of action was to try and get in from the rear of the house or at least make contact from there. There was a six-foot wrought iron gate on the walkway beside the house. It separated the back from the front and didn’t appear to have been breached. In fact, none of the creatures seemed to have tried to gain access that way. Of course, there was always the possibility they knew something he didn’t. He wasn’t about to start underestimating them. He might not have understood their intelligence but that did not mean they didn’t possess it.

He walked calmly past the Volvo in the driveway, beside the garage and down the block-paved walk. He lifted the latch on the gate and walked through, shutting it behind him. As he’d hoped, the back of the house was undisturbed. He paused for a few seconds to make certain of this before approaching the back door and trying the handle. It was locked, which he took to be a good sign.

Standing back from the door he cupped his hand around his mouth to direct his voice and called quietly to the upper windows.

‘Mr. Smithfield? Mrs. Smithfield? Are you up there? If anyone can hear me, come to the window.’

He waited for only a few seconds. Three faces appeared at a rear upstairs window; father, mother and daughter - the incomplete family. Aggie acted as though she didn’t know him. She looked gaunt, aged and frightened. He felt a rush of shame but stayed where he was. At first the parents looked hopeful, relieved to see someone had come for them. Then the obvious got through to them: he was no policeman, no soldier. He wasn’t even armed. They saw a skinny man in a suit too big for him. A gaunt man with too much hair on his face to suit the times and enough fresh cuts to make him look like he’d walked away from a traffic accident. Or a fight. But still they must have hoped, in spite of this, that he could help them. He was, if nothing else, a friend when all about were enemies.

The window opened and Mr. Smithfield leaned out.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m here to get you away. You can hide here for a while, but they’ll break in soon enough. If you want to be safe you should come with me.’

The man looked doubtful.

‘Why aren’t you helping anyone else? How do I know you’re not here to rob us or worse?’

‘You don’t know that and I can’t prove it. But what could be worse than what’s happening already. Believe me, I want to help you.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘My name is Mason Brand. I . . . I knew your son.’

He wasn’t sure if he should have told them that. Equally, he didn’t believe they’d have come with him if he hadn’t mentioned it. In time he’d know if the risk was worth it.

The wife pushed her husband out of the way and leaned through the window.

‘Did you say you knew Donald? How?’

‘Please, Mrs. Smithfield, there isn’t very much time. If you want to survive this, if you want your daughter to be safe, you must all come with me and you must come now. Otherwise I cannot guarantee that any of you will live to see another sunrise.’

***

Kevin had never imagined that he would end up using his sports car as some kind of battering ram but as they drove through the changed streets of Shreve he realised he had no choice. The trick was to knock the landfill creatures out of the way without letting them get under the wheels. He’d already seen the damage they could do to tyres. But the streets were crowded with the things and sometimes they were unavoidable.

He’d never taken the car to a circuit, though he’d always told himself he would. Now he was driving the equivalent of a high speed cone test through the town’s streets. There were other obstacles to avoid too; wounded people he had no chance of assisting, stopped or overturned cars - some of them on fire, goods spilled from the back of half unloaded vans. The various emergency vehicles and personnel he passed were too busy attempting to stay alive to bother to try and slow him down. To them he was just another terrified driver about to wipe himself out through sheer panic.

But Kevin wasn’t panicking.

He had set a goal - two goals, actually - both of which would be fulfilled by his arrival back at the college. There, inside the building and removed to the highest floor, Tamsin would be safe and he would have done his duty to her. There, too, he would be reunited with Jenny and, live or die, they would be together. That was all he cared about. It was, therefore, not a time for panic but a time for focus and determination.

He swiped the car across into the empty oncoming lane, clipping one of the largest landfill creatures he’d seen yet. It was the size of a motorbike and seemed to incorporate motorcycle parts, but strange legs propelled it along on its two wheels instead of a motor. He hit it with the passenger side of the BMW, denting the door badly and making Tammy scream. Her window cracked but did not shatter and the creature was thrown onto its side. He straightened the car up and in the rear-view mirror saw it leaking a wash of dark fluid onto the tarmac. It was still.

The split second glance up had taken his eye off the road and he didn’t even see what he hit next. He felt it pass under the wheels and chassis on his side.

Tammy screamed again.

‘What was it? Did you see?’

Tammy had her hands over her mouth to stifle her sobs.

‘Tammy, what did we hit?’

She shook her head, all the while staring through the windscreen; staring into some place he couldn’t see, a place that likely wasn’t there.

He reached over and took one of her wrists, squeezing it hard enough to bend the bones. She looked at him wide eyed.

‘I need to know what went under the car, Tamsin.’

‘I . . . I don’t know what it was.’ It was becoming obvious, though.

The Z3’s handling had softened and the car was pulling to the right.

‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He could see Shreve Tertiary College partially obscured by trees and houses and probably less than half a mile away. He no longer knew if he would make it. Though he tried to contain it, panic broke the surface and wouldn’t go back down. His face prickled, irritated by a sudden heat. Beside him Tammy was rocking in the car seat like a bomb blast survivor and repeating a strange, low moan over and over through chattering teeth.

Christ, just let me hold it together a little longer.

20

With the front door hanging off and open, other landfill creatures were attracted to the scene.

Ray couldn’t help wondering what sense they were using; how did they know where to come to? Was it smell or some kind of perception people didn’t have, some kind of intuition?

He and Delilah knocked on the door of the downstairs bedsit - the one that had to lead into the back ‘garden’.

‘Quick, Ray, they’re coming. Loads of them.’

‘If anyone’s in there, for God’s sake let us in,’ Ray shouted. Then he hammered. ‘Here, D, you’ll have to help me break it in.’

They shoulder-barged the door together and it was tougher than they’d expected. Ray jarred himself painfully and had to turn and use his other shoulder. The lock gave on the fifth attempt and they staggered into the bedsit. A skinny lad with bad acne stood holding out a steak knife in both hands. His whole body was trembling.

‘Get out. This is my place. I’m hiding here. You can’t come in.’

The kid saw Ray’s katana and backed up a little.

‘If you’d opened the door for us, you’d still have a hiding place. As it is, you’ve got fuck all.’ Ray looked past the shaky kid’s shoulder. ‘That door unlocked, is it?’

‘Leave it alone.’

‘Didn’t think so.’

Holding the katana towards the boy’s face, Ray let Delilah pass behind him to open the downstairs back door.

‘Don’t open that,’ said the kid. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘Looks clear at the moment,’ said Delilah. Ray backed towards her.

‘Sorry about your door, mate,’ he said. ‘Needs must and all that. If you want my advice, it’s this room that’s not safe. You’re better off getting higher up - somewhere they can’t reach. Good luck.’

In the tiny outdoor back space, Delilah had already clambered onto a rusting, disused washing machine and pulled herself up onto the wall dividing the back garden from the next property. Ray handed up the katana and followed. From there they balanced along to the rear wall. Beyond it was an alley separating them from the back gardens and houses on the other side. None of the landfill creatures appeared to have found their way into the narrow alley yet but it would become a trap if they did. Ray decided to play it safe.

‘Let’s stay up here for as long as we can. Don’t want to be in a position we can’t climb out of, do we?’

Delilah shook her head. She was already working out a way up onto the roof of a house a few properties along. From there they’d be able to assess their next move.

The kid appeared in the garden behind them. He was backing away from something and calling over his shoulder.

‘Hey, where are you going?’

‘Away from here,’ called Ray.

‘I . . . I want to come with you.’

‘I thought you wanted to stay there.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’ Ray looked at Delilah.

‘Can’t stop him, can we?’ he murmured.

‘If he can’t keep up, we’re not waiting for him,’ she said. The kid was already up on the washing machine

‘No, I suppose not. Hey, you, whatever your name is, make sure you kick that washing machine a long way from the wall after you climb up.’

‘It’s Jimmy.’

‘I didn’t ask for an introduction. Just do it.’

In the back garden, several small landfill creatures had appeared, each waving their various forms of sensory equipment around to get a lock on their prey. Jimmy kicked the washing machine but all it did was fall on its side not far from the wall.

‘Fuck,’ said Ray. ‘Let’s get moving.’

He and Delilah were agile along the wall running beside the alley. They came to the house they liked the look of and glanced back. Jimmy was wobbling along the wall like a drunk on a high wire. He’d only come a few yards. Ray looked disgusted.

‘We should have said no to him.’

‘Too late now.’

The house they’d reached had a stepped wall leading up to within a metre of the roof. From there they’d be able to climb to the apex for a better view. Ray was going to offer to go first but Delilah was already nearing the top of the ‘steps’. She took hold of the guttering and used it to pull herself up.

‘Hey, be careful, that won’t take much weight.’

‘Watch your mouth, Ray.’

‘You know what I’m saying. Just go steady.’

She was up and waving for him to follow. He ran along the rising wall and tested the guttering. It was strong and secure. Once again, he handed her the sword. Pulling himself up was easy. Halfway between them and the bedsits, Jimmy was walking with his arms stretched out to either side for balance, staring at his feet as he heel-toed along.

‘We’re not waiting,’ said Ray.

The tiles seemed thick and strong but the two of them crawled on all fours to spread their weight out. Ray made it to the apex first, balanced his way to a large chimney and climbed onto its ledge. Delilah stood below him, gripping the chimney hard.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine. What can you see?’

Ray scanned in silence for several moments.

‘I think I’ve got a plan.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s a bit sketchy.’

‘Any plan is a good plan right now, Ray.’

‘Okay. From here we can walk to the end of the street on the rooftops. There’s a high wall at the last property. It’s a bit of a drop, but I think we can get onto the wall and then down to street level again. Park Street is on the left, where the outdoor shop is.’

‘Let’s hope they haven’t closed early today.’

‘Ha ha. From there we can cross the park to the river, over the bridge and then we’ll be on the grounds of the College. I’ve been meaning to turn up for a few lectures.’

‘Liar.’

‘Whatever. Once we’re there, we can go up to the higher levels. Lots of rooms with decent locks on them. Plenty of equipment for dealing with all this trash.’

‘What about the things?’

‘There’s plenty of them down there but most of them seem interested in getting to the people and all the people are hiding indoors. The shops and the park look pretty clear.’

‘Ray.’

‘What?’

‘That’s actually a really good plan.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I have to admit, I’m kind of surprised.’

‘Well, it was just a matter of . . .’ Ray looked down and saw the grin on her face. ‘You know, if we do make it to the College, I’m going to slap your arse.’

‘That’s all I need to keep me going, babe.’ Ray climbed down from the chimney.

Behind and below them, Jimmy wasn’t even halfway along the alley wall. Following him, three large landfill creatures with the right kind of appendages for climbing were catching up. The kid still held his ridiculous, plastic-handled steak knife in his right hand as he faltered along the two-bricks-wide wall.

‘This kid is really bad news, Ray.’

‘I know.’ He turned his back on where they’d come from.

‘Let’s get moving.’

They walked along the apex, skirting around each chimney with extra care. When they’d made it across two houses, Ray stopped to look back. Jimmy had managed to get as far as the stepped wall. He knew something was behind him but Ray could tell he was too scared to disrupt his balance by looking round, in case he fell. Jimmy got a hand to the guttering, put the knife in his mouth like some gangly pirate and tried to pull himself up. He seemed to lack the necessary strength to do it. The first of the landfill creatures had reached the alley end of the same wall.

‘Christ,’ said Ray.

‘We said we’d leave him.’

‘I know what we said but look at him. He’s fucked. What if it was you down there, D? Or me?’

‘It isn’t.’

‘How can you be so cold?’ She took hold of his hands.

‘What about us, Ray? What if, because of the kid, you and I don’t make it? Or only one of us makes it? I want a life, Ray, a future with you in it. I don’t want to survive all this for nothing.’

‘I want the same thing, D. Believe me. But if we can’t take care of people like him, we don’t deserve a future. Anyway, think of the guilt you’ll feel knowing you could have helped but didn’t.’ Ray pushed past her. ‘He’s coming with us.’

She watched him balance his way back to the first roof they’d climbed. Jimmy was still trying to climb onto the guttering. The way he was doing it would surely bring the whole structure down. Instead of using it to assist a jump, he was letting it support his whole body weight while he tried to get one leg up. It wasn’t working. The landfill creatures had reached the first of the steps in the wall. Ray was descending the roof towards Jimmy.

Delilah watched, refusing to move.

‘Shit,’ she said.

And then she was hurrying back to them.

***

Mason watched the family come out of the back door like animals testing the air of a new dawn. Mr. Smithfield led the way followed by his wife and then Aggie. This was no longer the world they recognised, certainly not the world they wanted it to be.

From every dwelling in the Meadowlands estate came the screams of people fighting off an army of nightmares. More helicopters circled in the sky, still uncoordinated. Mason saw an air ambulance hesitating to land, a couple of circling TV choppers, a police surveillance helicopter and the arrival of something that looked more military - something big enough to contain troops perhaps. He didn’t believe any of the aircraft or their crews could do much good. He doubted anyone really understood what they were faced with.

He’d instructed Mr. Smithfield to bring his car keys. All they had to do was get inside the Volvo and they’d be safe. For a while.

‘Follow me,’ he said to the Smithfields, ‘And stay as close as you can. We’ll have to move quickly so don’t get separated.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Mr. Smithfield.

‘I’m not sure yet. Do you have much fuel?’

‘I filled it up yesterday.’

‘Good.’

Mason walked to the gate and opened it. The others hesitated.

‘Please, you have to stay right with me. Close enough to touch me or you won’t be safe.’

Richard and Pamela Smithfield exchanged glances then, wondering at the idea of touching this man. Was he some kind of deviant here to kidnap them? Mason saw the look but he didn’t let it bother him. Nor did he wait. He opened the gate and walked quickly towards the car. Immediately the Smithfields appeared at the front of the house, all the living garbage on their front lawn and on the two neighbouring properties swarmed towards them.

Mr. Smithfield looked around in incomprehension.

‘Please hurry,’ said Mason.

Mr. Smithfield pressed the key fob and the doors unlocked. Aggie and his wife jumped in and closed their doors but he stood a moment longer watching the creatures approach with a look of horrified curiosity. Mason opened the passenger door and got in. Creatures converged on the car from all sides.

‘Mr. Smithfield, get in the car. NOW.’

Richard’s reverie broke and he walked around to the driver’s side. In front of the door was a creature with six desk-lamp legs and the teeth of a dog in its hinged head. It snapped at his leg and he jerked away as if realising for the time that he was in danger. Animated refuse approached from every direction. The dog-thing was not put off and it advanced, causing Mr, Smithfield to retreat towards the front of the car. Looking behind him, he realised just how many creatures were now coming his way.

In the car Aggie screamed,

‘Dad! Hurry up!’

His wife’s hand went to the door handle but Mason spun in his seat and pulled her away.

‘You help him, then,’ Pamela yelled. ‘For God’s sake, do something.’

Not knowing what exactly he would do if one of the creatures got hold of Mr. Smithfield, Mason stepped out of the car again, careful to shut the door behind him immediately. The creatures nearest to him hesitated. He put himself between Mr. Smithfield and the ones approaching from the front of the house. They stopped moving.

In front of Mr. Smithfield, the six legged thing was advancing fast. Mason touched his arm.

‘Let me get in front of you. I’ll block it.’

The creature didn’t wait for that. It lunged, snapping its canine jaws. Mr. Smithfield jerked his leg out of the way reflexively, stumbling back into Mason. A strange laugh, like a popping bubble escaped his mouth.

‘Bloody thing tried to bite me.’

With the laugh came realisation. Mason saw a new tension tighten Mr. Smithfield’s frame. The next thing he saw was

Mr. Smithfield’s right foot arcing up under the dog-headed creature’s front section. It broke open on impact and the thing flew back to land among the dozens more behind it. Mr. Smithfield launched himself around the front of the Volvo and snatched the door open, turning the engine over before Mason was properly back in his seat.

‘We have to go away,’ said Richard Smithfield, more to his steering wheel than to his family. ‘Far, far away from here.’

Mason looked at him and then at his wife and daughter. They were not special. They were just people. Living things from the old world succumbing to the dead things of the new. He wondered why he’d bothered to come back for them when they couldn’t think properly, couldn’t see what was really going on here. Didn’t they even begin to understand what all this meant? What it was leading to? Aggie, at least, should have known better but she didn’t care any more than her family. All she’d done was sever contact with him.

‘I don’t think that’s going to work, Mr. Smithfield. What we really need to do is find somewhere nearby where we can be safe for a while. A place where we can wait.’

‘Wait? What the hell are you talking about, “wait”? Wait for what?’

‘To be certain about their motives. To see if we can . . . communicate, construct . . . relationships with them.’

‘We don’t talk to shit - whether it walks or crawls. Someone should be down here blowing these freaks into fart-clouds.’ As though he’d summoned his own angels into view, two hovering blots appeared over the houses of another street on the estate. ‘See those? They’re helicopter gunships. That’s what’s going to save us. That’s what’s going to turn this around.’

Aggie giggled at her father’s language and then shut up when she saw he wasn’t being funny. Something crawled up onto the bonnet of the car and both she and her mother screamed. Mr. Smithfield slipped the Volvo into reverse and pounded the accelerator. Everyone’s heads snapped forwards as the car leapt back. The smell of rot and excrement was heavy in the small space - it came from Mr. Smithfield’s fouled right shoe. No one was prepared to roll down the window to let the smell out, however. The thing on the bonnet, something black with light bulb eyes, slid back onto the driveway where its eyes shattered. Mason heard it scream but he didn’t think anyone else did. Perhaps he’d only felt it. Perhaps he’d only imagined it.

‘You know, Mr. Smithfield,’ he said as the head of the family reversed the car around in a tight curve and thrust the gear lever into drive, ‘That’s the kind of attitude we really need to dispense with if any of us are going to survive this.’

The car screamed out of Bluebell Way, dodging obstacles all the way. Behind them came the whine of high-speed chain-gunfire and the whump of a gas tank exploding. Mason strained around in his seat in time to see a black smoke cloud, with fire bursting inside it, roil skyward. He’d been a fool to come here, he realised. What was he doing delaying his final moment this way? And for these people who thought - or failed to think - in just the same way everyone else did? There was no point to it.

Mr. Smithfield had turned his car onto the main road into Shreve, but he was driving away from town. Mason turned to him.

‘Stop the car.’

‘What? No. No way.’

‘Stop and let me out. Then you can continue with your family wherever you want to go.’

‘You said you were here to help us. You’re not going anywhere until you get us to safety.’

Mason took a deep breath, pushed his lips out as if deciding something.

‘How do you know you’re safe with me?’

He felt the atmosphere in the car shift and swell.

‘How do you know you can trust me? Aren’t you curious why those things out there never came near me? Don’t you think it’s strange?’

Mason looked into the back of the car and his eyes met Aggie’s for a few brief moments. He knew she didn’t intend to keep her promise. Her mother must have seen the look passing between them but, for the moment, she ignored it. Perhaps later she’d question her daughter about it. Discover that this was not the first time they’d ever met.

Already the car had slowed to below the speed limit. Richard

Smithfield looked at his gaunt passenger.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t think you really want me in your car, Mr. Smithfield. Not with your family.’

The car slammed to a halt.

‘You’d better explain.’

‘I know where your son is.’

Mrs. Smithfield stifled a strange whimper in the back of the car. In it, Mason heard the twined hope and despair of a mother wishing her child safe, of a mother not knowing.

‘Donald’s . . . alive?’

‘That’s very difficult to say, Mrs. Smithfield.’

Mr. Smithfield’s voice was flat and direct, barely contained.

‘Well, you’d better find a way of saying it, or it’s going to be very difficult to say whether you’re alive or not.’

‘I didn’t kill him but I might as well have,’ said Mason, more to himself than to the boy’s family. ‘It’s my fault he’s where he is now.’

Up ahead, swarming over the hedges were more landfill creatures, larger ones that had been feeding longer and on more varied prey. They moved in jerks and stumbles or humped along like sea animals trapped on land. But they were faster, stronger than the others. They moved with more certainty. There were enough to block the road. Mason glanced behind. More were waiting in the direction they’d come from. Mr. Smithfield followed Mason’s eyes.

‘Shit.’

‘Let me out, Mr. Smithfield. I’ve got you and your family this far. Let me out and I promise I’ll tell you where Donald is.’

‘Richard, let him out, for heaven’s sake. Those things are everywhere. They’re coming!’

‘Christ.’

The locks flipped open and Mason jumped out before the man changed his mind. He slammed the door and the window slid down. Creatures converged on the car in front and behind. The road was half clogged by them already.

‘Where’s our son, you maniac?’

Mason leaned down, caught each of their gazes for a moment.

‘I gave him to the fecalith so that all this could begin. I gave him for the new world, for this world to have a chance.’

Mrs. Smithfield’s hands were over her mouth. Aggie’s mouth was a black hole of shock. Mr. Smithfield, Mason could tell, was weighing up whether there was time to leap out of the car and beat him to death before the landfill army blocked the Volvo’s escape route. There wasn’t.

‘We’re going to get through this and when we do, I’ll be coming back for you, Mason Brand. Remember that.’

The window slipped shut as the car sped away. The space in the road was closing fast. Mr. Smithfield drove into the oncoming traffic lane to get past the creatures, running over limbs and pseudopodia and tearing open fragile bodies as he went. But the car made it through and Mason listened to its engine fading up the road for a long time.

Long enough that when he returned from the reverie to the moment, he found himself surrounded by the life forms born of the landfill.

21

The car was drivable but directing it demanded full concentration. One lapse and the BMW’s responsive steering would swing the car off course. The tyre flapped around and occasional sparks came from the steel rim. Kevin knew the wheel would be heating up with the friction and pretty soon the sparks would be flying as though from an angle grinder. Then they were at risk of catching fire, of exploding.

‘Come on, just a little farther.’

He dropped his window and leaned out to see the damage. The car swiped around and he brought it back on track. They were down to fifteen miles an hour. The tyre came off altogether and was left behind in the road. A stray spark caught his cheek and stuck there, burning.

‘Fuck.’

He brushed it off. The car wobbled badly in response.

‘Okay, okay. Concentrate.’

Down to ten miles and hour. In his rear-view mirror he caught sight of something coming down the road behind them. He couldn’t make it out clearly because the mirror was vibrating too hard.

‘Hold the mirror steady.’ She didn’t respond.

‘Tammy!’

She put a hand to the mirror and the image in it settled down. He wished he hadn’t seen it.

Behind them taking up the whole road was a flood of landfill creatures, mostly in shiny black bin liner skins. It looked like some kind of mutant army hunting them down. The noise from the damaged wheel worsened, got louder.

Eight miles an hour. He stopped the car.

‘Get out.’

She didn’t move.

He jumped out of the driver’s side, crossed to hers and ripped the door open.

‘They’re coming. Hundreds of them. If you don’t get out and run, they’ll have you.’

Still she rocked, not wanting to hear, not wanting to accept any of it.

‘Tammy, for fuck’s sake, I’m going to leave you here if you don’t get out of the car right now and come with me.’

When she didn’t move he took hold of her hair and dragged her from the seat. He pointed her in the direction they’d come from.

‘See that? Quick, aren’t they? You want to stay here, fine. I’m leaving.’

He turned and ran toward the college main gate. When he turned back she still hadn’t moved. He ran back to her and took her hand.

‘Tamsin, I know it’s over with us but we’re still married. I don’t want to see you die out here. They will kill you, you know. And they’ll eat you. And then you’ll be one of them. Is that what you want? Are you committing suicide?’

She looked into his eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Kevin. I’ve screwed everything up. Nothing ever made me happy, not even you.’

‘Make it up to me. Run with me. Will you do that?’

He pulled her and she came a few steps.

‘I can’t. I killed our baby.’

The words didn’t fit the situation. He didn’t understand.

‘You did what?’

‘I was pregnant. It was our baby, Kevin. I killed it. I went to the hospital and they cut it out of me like it was cancer. I could never be a mother. The only thing I ever cared about was myself.’

The strength went out of Kevin as he understood what she was telling him and realised it was true. He remembered now all the nights she’d woken up sweating with a scream forming in her throat, how she’d cut the scream short as she reached consciousness. It had been so deep in the night he’d never really remembered it too clearly in the mornings but now he recalled, now that it mattered. Sometimes Tammy had mumbled through her nightmares. Poor little baby, she’d said that many times, hadn’t she? And once: why can’t you just let it die?

Oh, Christ, not this. Not now.

This was not the time to be sorting out the past. If they didn’t shift, there wouldn’t be a future. All this - was it more of her lies? there was no way to tell - it had to wait until they were both safe. He had to make her move.

‘Tamsin, listen to me. Whatever happened, we can talk about it later. Right now we have to run.’

Still she stood there like a drugged lunatic.

‘Tammy, please. Come on, you’re a competitive girl. Fight one more battle for supremacy with me. Race me to the front of the college. Think of the satisfaction you’ll feel if you win. Then we can talk.’

She smiled through messed-up mascara and shrugged like it was a bet for a pound. Behind her the army of landfill creatures were coming up fast, some of them could run now, not well but well enough to cover ground efficiently.

Suddenly regaining herself, she broke first, tearing away like the cheat she always was. He didn’t hesitate. Soon he was beside her, about to pass.

Unable to bear the idea that she might lose, she made it a sprint.

He rose to the challenge.

Some of the things behind them broke rank, running faster than the rest. Kevin, looking over his shoulder, saw them, humanoid cripples they were, but somehow powered by hunger and determination and ignorance of pain. They lumbered on their makeshift, cobbled-together legs.

And they gained ground.

Kevin could hear every kind of sound when their limbs impacted the pavement - cracks, slaps, knocks, judders, thumps. The fastest ones were only twenty yards behind them now. He gave it everything and powered past her knowing she’d have no choice but to give everything she had to the chase. He looked back again. She was only five paces behind him. It was a good two-hundred metres to the first of the front steps of the College. Another twenty bounds from there to reach the safety of the doors at the top of them.

He wanted to call to her, to scream encouragement, but he didn’t have the spare breath. As he glanced back, he let her see his eyes and hoped his expression was enough. And then he pounded the pavement, pounded it like never before. His lungs were raw and sore and aching and a sharp pain dug upwards from under his ribs on the left side. He cursed every butt he’d ever tugged on but still he ran. Despite his lack of fitness, he was faster than Tammy. Maybe a simple competition was no longer enough to goad her. Perhaps he was more frightened than she was, had more reason to live. Jenny was waiting for him just a few more steps away; a few more seconds and he’d be holding her in his arms again and saving Tammy too.

He angled in from the main gate, leaning over to make the corner like a racing driver. He found new strength he didn’t know he possessed, broke through into a new reserve of power. He gave it everything he had; heart and soul and pure animal instinct.

He was going to make it. He knew it.

He reached the bottom of the steps for the hardest part, the final upward dash. He took the steps three at a time. At the top he saw the faces watching through the steel-framed glass doors. They were urging him silently on, waiting to unlock the doors and let the pair of them through before slamming and locking them again straight away. Then he heard a scream and the slap of hands on concrete. With it the muffled click of something breaking. He could hear in her voice she wanted to make it now, he knew she wanted to survive. He looked back and Tammy was down. She’d tripped on the first step and was flat out on her front, already trying to lift herself up.

He reached the door as she lifted her face to him and he saw that she’d smacked her mouth on the corner of one of the steps. The impact had snapped her front teeth off at the gum line. Even with death as close as it was he could see in her eyes the disgust with her sudden ugliness. Her lips were lined red and glossy, but smudged. As she pulled herself upright he saw her stop and wince as the pain in her knees flared. She’d taken the rest of the force of the fall across both patellae as they smashed into the edge of a lower step.

There was time for Kevin to look forward again and see the many faces beyond the glass and the look of dismissal in every pair of eyes - she’s history now - they were all thinking. But no, he could still go back for her. There was still time.

He turned away from the doors - doors opening to let him pass into safety and back to Jenny - and started back down the steps.

It was impossible.

The landfill army had arrived and there weren’t hundreds, but thousands of them. And now that they were this close he could see how big they were. Some of them were twice the size of people, more like cows. They came on legs of timber, legs of steel. They scrabbled along like millipedes on the claws of a hundred hedgehogs. They ran on two legs, galloped on four. They waved their arms and tool-hands like winning ticket holders. They were here for the flesh that would allow them to add to themselves from the crud of Shreve, the crud of the world.

They had Tammy in their hooks and pincers before he could take another step.

As she disappeared among them he saw the nearest ones inspect her with eyes of flesh, eyes of glass, eyes of plastic. And then their cutters appeared, made from hedge trimmers and hacksaws, the tiny blades from inside food processors. They mobbed her for her limbs and organs, took them while she still breathed. Her softened manicured hands were snatched from her in a single shear, her eyes were sucked out, the tongue clipped out from deep in her throat and he found himself wondering,

Why? What the fuck do they need that for?

She wasn’t enough for them. They tumbled up the steps towards him. Instead of moving he was simply thinking, considering. Was there any point in running and hiding any longer? Wouldn’t it be easier if he just let them take him now?

Hands grabbed him and yanked him back through the doors before he could finish the train of thought, before the landfill creatures could finish it for him. The locks were flicked shut and the crowd of faces retreated from the door with his now safe among them. He collapsed to the floor, panting, all the strength haemorrhaging from him.

‘Kev. Oh, Kev.’ Jenny held his head in her hands, cradled his face into her lap as she leaned over him. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

‘What just happened out there, Jen?’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Just tell me it didn’t happen.’ She held him tight.

‘I can’t do that, Kev. This is real. All of it.’

‘But . . . Tammy . . . I mean, she was right there with me. She was right behind me and then . . . Christ, what have I done?’

‘You did everything you could. You risked yourself. You risked us, Kev. There was nothing more you could have given.’

‘I did it, Jen. I got her here. All the way here. But she . . . she just wouldn’t try. It was like she didn’t really want to make it.’

‘Maybe she didn’t. Don’t think about it now, love.’

‘What else is there to think about?’

‘Staying alive.’

‘Yeah, but for what? What’s going to be left? They take everything.’

‘We’re not going to give up, Kev. We’re not.’

***

Ray reached Jimmy just as the guttering gave way.

The kid threw up his hands as he fell backwards and Ray caught hold of one of them. Jimmy steadied himself with the other hand as one foot landed back on the top step of the wall and the other slipped off the side. Jimmy grabbed the steak knife out of his mouth as though it would save his life.

‘Listen to me, Jimmy, and do exactly what I say. I’m going to haul you up here but you have to help me. On the count of three, you jump and pull yourself up with your free hand. I’ll pull at the same time. Nothing to it. Talk to me, Jimmy.’

The kid just nodded, wide eyed. He could hear the things right behind him, scraping and scratching as they came.

‘One . . . two -’

‘No! It’s got me. It’s got my LEG.’

‘Shit.’

Ray let go and looked over the edge of the roof. The first creature did have the kid’s calf in its grip - a claw made of rusted barbecue tongs. There couldn’t have been much strength in it.

‘Hold on to the roof, Jimmy.’

Ray unsheathed the katana and aimed. He severed the thing’s ‘arm’ with one sure stroke. It released a pathetic shriek and recoiled, backing into the one behind it. There was a struggle and both landfill creatures fell off the wall into the bushes below. The remaining one moved forward eagerly to take their place. Ray sheathed the katana, feeling fairly impressed with himself, and reached out to the kid again.

‘Okay, here we go again, Jimmy. No hesitation this time. One, two, three.’

Jimmy weighed nothing and he popped onto the roof like

Peter Pan.

‘Go up to the apex. Carefully, Jimmy.’

Ray waited, sword drawn again, for the last creature to reach the top step of the wall. It extended concertinaed arms to grip the roof tiles and Ray slashed them off. The thing screamed but from underneath its body, two more arms reached up. These were larger - human arms with curtain hook fingers on one side and an edging spade blade on the other. Ray stood back this time and allowed the creature to get a purchase with its hooks. Seeing a pair of arms which probably belonged to someone in this very street, he couldn’t bring himself to damage them. The landfill creature was fast and once its body was on the roof it launched itself at Ray. The loss of two arms had done nothing to deter it. Ray let it come forward and merely held the katana in front of himself. The thing gored itself on the blade in its eagerness to have him and then, finally, something more important damaged within, it stopped. Ray drew the blade out of it and the dead thing slid back to the edge of the roof before falling into the garden below.

At the apex, Jimmy was looking down at his feet. Delilah had an arm around him. Ray shot her a look that said, ‘you’ve changed your tune’ and she gave him a barely perceptible shrug in return. When he reached them the kid said,

‘Th . . . thanks, mister.’

‘I’m not old enough to be a mister. My name’s Ray. This is Delilah. Now you can come with us to the college but you’re going to have to pull your weight, understand?’

The kid nodded.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Let’s hope that’s good enough.’

Ray led the way the end of the terrace of houses. He’d hoped for the last wall in the row to be usable as a way down to the street level but he’d completely misjudged its height. It was a challenging drop from the roof to the top of the wall and a dangerous one from there to the ground. He peered over the gable end of the last house, following the guttering. There was a black downpipe, not plastic but cast iron. It was bracketed to the bricks and looked secure. Even if it wasn’t, it was their best and safest escape. The problem was it led straight down to the street. Ray had hoped to get into the garden and make a run for it from there when they were all ready. As it was, they’d be arriving one at a time at street level in plain view of every creature nearby. He scanned the distance between the bottom of the down pipe and the row of shops they planned to loot on the way to the college. It was fairly clear at the moment. If they were fast they could dodge most of the landfill creatures in their path - none of them looked particularly large or agile. Between the shops and the expanse of parkland leading to the college there were far less creatures visible.

He turned back to Delilah and Jimmy.

‘It’s this pipe or it’s nothing. I’ll go first and keep things clear at street level. Come down one at a time or the pipe may not hold. Jimmy, you follow me, I’ll need your help at the bottom.’ He kissed Delilah hard and fast. ‘I’ll see you down there.’

It wasn’t a graceful descent. Between each bracket the pipe had no hand holds. It was a matter of stopping himself sliding so fast it became a fall. About two thirds of the way down, before he was ready to jump, Ray lost his grip. He fell and landed awkwardly, jarring his ankle before landing on his arse in the road. He jumped up quickly testing the injury. He’d twisted it badly enough to make him swear, not badly enough to stop him walking. A sweat broke on his face just thinking about what would happen if he couldn’t run. As soon as he hit the ground, creatures turned and made their way in his direction. He drew the katana, testing his ankle again and again. Running was going to be a problem.

At the top of the pipe, Jimmy struggled just to get his legs over the edge of the roof. The kid was obviously frightened of heights. Ray didn’t care.

‘Get your arse in gear, Jimmy.’

A ragged semicircle of monstrous garbage creatures had already formed before Jimmy was a quarter of the way down. Ray turned to face the interlopers. What am I waiting for? He went out to them, choosing the largest and most dangerous looking ones first and wielding his Japanese blade with as little force as possible. It was a lot heavier than he’d imagined it would be. There were dozens of them and he needed to conserve his strength. From time to time he glanced back to assess Jimmy’s ‘progress’. It was like a watching a slug cross a garden path.

‘Come on, Jimmy! You’re making it worse for all of us. Just fucking slide down.’

The creatures he’d killed formed a protective crust around them. The ones still approaching had to crawl over it, bringing them nearer to his sword. Even so, keeping the gaps plugged was like playing Tetris on level nine. Every time he moved around the perimeter his ankle expanded with pain.

Finally he heard Jimmy hit the pavement behind him. Delilah was already on her way down.

‘Come here,’ said Ray. ‘When you see one of these bastards get near the edge of this ring, slash ’em. Got it?’

The kid nodded, knuckles white around the handle of his steak knife.

‘What are you waiting for? There’s one right there.’ Jimmy looked at the small creature scaling the growing hump of its now inanimate brethren. It mewled like a starving kitten. He didn’t move. The thing reached the top of the mound and made faster progress down their side of it. It hoisted itself along on the thrashing tails of dogs and cats.

‘Jimmy, do it.’

‘I . . . I’ve never killed anything before.’

‘Even if you waste a thousand of them you still won’t have killed anything. They’re not living like you and me.’

‘I know but . . .’

Delilah arrived behind them having slid down the pipe like a fireman.

‘Forget it, Jimmy,’ said Ray. ‘Time to go.’

Ray found the least busy part of the ring of trash, took a run up and leapt over. On landing he fell to one knee. Delilah was right behind him.

‘What’s the matter, babe?’

‘I’m okay. Just twisted my ankle a bit.’

Jimmy still hadn’t joined them. Creatures had breached the wall of rubbish and were closing in on him. He looked at Ray and Delilah with desperate eyes. It was obvious that in the greatest part of his mind, he didn’t believe in himself. Or perhaps he didn’t believe he was worthy of surviving. Whatever it was, the instinct that was driving Ray and Delilah had not surfaced in him. Jimmy was thinking instead of acting. Ray beckoned him frantically.

‘Jump them, Jimmy. For fuck’s sake. Do it now or they’re going to dismantle you for spares.’

The idea must have affected the kid. He took a run up and leapt the trash wall like a hurdler. Then he stopped to look back, barely able to take in that he’d come this far.

‘Right,’ said Ray. ‘Let’s see if we can get into that outdoor shop.’

***

When Mr. Smithfield saw the wall of garbage strung across the road he knew there was only one course of action.

‘Belt up and hold on.’

Aggie and his wife braced their arms against the front seats. Pamela cried out:

‘Oh God, Richard.’

‘I know.’

It was the first time he’d ever put the accelerator to the floor. The Volvo responded with enthusiasm, pushing him back into the seat. He resisted, leaned forwards, kept his eyes open. If there was a weak point in the swathe of living trash up ahead, he couldn’t see it. It was a straight section of road beyond; plenty of time to correct and slow down after the impact. If they made it through. He looked at the speedo. Climbing towards ninety already. Was that fast enough?

They hit the rubbish, tore through it. Rumbles, snaps and louder impacts vibrated up through the foot wells. The Volvo shimmied on the uneven surfaces, slithered on unnameable substances but stayed straight. Richard Smithfield, elbows locked, jaw vicelike, prayed. They cleared the roadblock and the car settled down onto smooth tarmac. White-faced and rigid in the back seats, Aggie and her mother cried hesitant tears of relief.

Richard was laughing in tiny, machinegun bursts.

‘Hu hu hu hu . . . hu hu . . . hu hu hu.’

The road curved and he realised he was doing a ton. He touched the brakes as gently as he could. The bend sharpened.

‘Darling, look ou -’

Something popped and the car sank on the front passenger side. Richard hissed through gritted teeth.

‘Shit.’

Not knowing what to do, he stepped harder on the brakes. The car began its spin, no longer following the road.

Full brake. Hand brake.

Three interwoven trails of black rubber and something like a curl of stripped black hide.

Whirligig G-force.

The world smearing to green all around.

For all of them an awareness of the car moving beyond its proper environment.

Flying briefly, peacefully.

Tearing and scratching as the Volvo erased a section of hedge.

Blackout.

22

They set off but Ray couldn’t run. Jimmy and Delilah tried to put their arms around him and help him along.

‘I’m fine. I can walk fast. I just can’t run yet. I need a couple of minutes off the pitch and then I’ll be fine. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.’

They reached the front of the outdoor shop quickly and safely. Someone had half closed the shutters but hadn’t finished the job. Ray expected the main door to be locked but it wasn’t. There was no need to smash the display window. They all just ducked under the shutter, pushed on the door and walked in. Ray locked them in for safety.

It was gloomy inside but there was enough light to see by. It seemed safer not to use the electricity and draw attention to themselves. Ray went to the rucksack display.

‘Why don’t we ditch your old backpack and get some nice new ones, D?’

‘Good idea.’

‘Pink? Light blue?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Black it is, then.’

Ray started filling their backpacks with anything he thought might come in handy.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Stocking up. Being prepared.’

‘You’re stealing,’ said the kid.

Ray stopped and turned to Jimmy.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Well, it’s not right, is it?’

‘Let me explain something to you, Jimmy. Law and order have succumbed to the vicissitudes of survival. Primal urges are to be encouraged.’

‘Come again?’

‘We’re trying to stay alive. Nothing else matters now.’

‘I think the owner of this shop might take a different view.’

‘That’s my point, Jimmy, we’re not thinking that way any more. I’d have thought the owner of this shop is probably dead by now. Either that or trying to escape. I don’t think he’ll miss a few items.’

‘I’m not going to be drawn into criminal activities.’ Ray and Delilah exchanged a glance.

‘What?’ said Jimmy.

‘If you don’t stop living by the rules, you’re going to stop living. At least find something better than that stupid bloody steak knife.’

Jimmy saw the penknife display - all the items locked behind glass - and had a close look. He put the steak knife down and, for the first time since he’d escaped from his bedsit, Ray saw the kid smile.

‘You might want something a bit . . . bigger . . . than a Swiss army knife,’ said Ray. ‘You know, so you can stay out of reach.’

Jimmy looked disappointed and wandered away towards the darker part of the shop.

‘Alright. Don’t listen to me, just take whatever you think you can use.’

***

Aggie comes round to the screech of a disk cutter chewing through steel panelling. She smells the scorched rubber, engine oil and petrol.

There’s been an accident. Yes.

They were running away but they’d made it. They were free.

Images queue up in the wrong order.

The firemen are cutting someone out of the car. Her father or . . .

Please, God, no. Not Mum. Let them be alright. Let them be alive.

She can’t understand why she suddenly cares about them. They are the most precious things in the world to her. She’s weeping, realising what a stupid, deluded bitch she’s been. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t need them to be hurt for her to admit to herself she loves them. Through the rising haze of her own pain, she resolves to be a better, more loving daughter.

Oh, God, please don’t let them be dead. Please, please, no.

Wait, Aggie. Think. Don’t be stupid. They cut people out because they’re still alive.

Yes. Yes. They’re alive. They’re both alive.

She tries to call out but there’s no breath in her. Feels like someone’s forced a lead football right through her guts. Can’t breathe. The world shrinks again.

That’s when she notices she’s not in the car any more. On her back. In the grass. Indifferent sky far above. Vision contracting as she suffocates.

Suddenly something releases inside and she draws in a huge breath.

It hurts very much but the sky expands again.

She is not dying.

‘Mum?’

It’s a whisper.

‘Mum? Dad?’

The steel disc ceases to whine. Metal is wrenched apart. The firemen are setting her parents free from the wreckage.

The paramedics will help them.

She turns her head towards the sounds. Just a glimpse of them will be enough until the paramedics come to attend to her. A vision to keep her going through the pain. Strength transmitted by the sight of her begetters.

She sees no emergency service personnel. Only two monsters, each half the size of the car. One towers over her father. The other over her mother. She can’t tell if her parents are alive. Neither of them is moving but they appear to be uninjured by the impact. Her instinct is to scream. She overrides it.

Tools and instruments open from the aberrant bodies of the creatures. Facsimiles of hands - too many hands - arrange the adults with finicky precision. On their backs, to attention, like sleeping guardsmen. Faster than Aggie’s eyes can follow, blades split her parents’ clothes open and mechanical fingers sweep them away. She is embarrassed to see them this way. Then embarrassed for them. Now nauseous with anticipation of what may follow. This would be the time either to save them or run away. She tests her body’s ability to move. Hands and ankles move but she winces; everything works, everything hurts. Worst of all is the pain in her chest and solar plexus. Something there is adrift, grinding against itself. She uses her arms to push herself up and the pain makes her vomit into her own lap. She keeps the spasms as quiet as she can, squeegees away mucus from her chin with her fingers and wipes them in the grass. The monsters don’t seem to have noticed her. They’re busy about their work.

She has to make her assessment and act.

The creature thieving from her mother has some kind of reel inside it. This wheel ratchets and clicks several times a second. It’s spooling something into itself. A slippery rope of pale pasta, dripping blood and fluid, an impossible rainbow of blue and pink. Her mother’s abdomen is emptying fast. Aggie’s mother is conscious now, violated and indignant. Entering wide-eyed shock but not yet death. The reeling stops with a tug that lifts Pamela Smithfield partially off the ground. Secateurs snip and she drops again, her stomach flatter than a supermodel’s.

The creature operating on her father is holding up his penis and testicles - three wrinkly nubs of skin. The ‘hand’ holding them disappears downwards towards the creature’s middle and Aggie loses sight of it. The emasculation has roused her father from unconsciousness. He screams now, not a howl exactly. Something hoarse and torn from deep within him. Aggie doesn’t recognise his voice in the sound. Richard Smithfield keeps screaming as though that alone will be enough to set him free. The creature doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe it can’t hear, she thinks. Systematically, it dismembers her father, like a kid pulling apart a model aeroplane, prising open the plastic panels, overcoming the glue and snap-jointing. And all the time her father screams his unrecognisable protest.

Aggie has one option left.

Behind her, is a small coppice of recently planted pines. It’s nearer than the road. The road equals suicide.

She rolls onto her hands and knees and in her chest, something separates. This time she can’t prevent the scream. Neither does she have much breath for it. A yelp instead. She can’t crawl, not grating her insides this way with every movement. So she stands up and the pain eases just a little. The creatures have seen her but they aren’t following. Not yet. She falls towards the coppice, each footstep merely preventing her from going down on her knees again.

She makes it to the trees. They reach a foot or two above her head. She risks a look back. The two scrap monsters are still committing surgical larceny on the bodies of her parents. But they’ve seen her through swimming goggle eyes, through lead crystal tumbler eyes. She knows she has to make the distance while they’re still busy.

She pushes through the rows of pines, trying to protect her chest from the branches. A couple of dozen paces bring her to the other side of the trees. She staggers into the open. She’s in a field. On the far side of it there’s a five-barred gate. Her choice is made. Every step sends lightning through her sternum. Breathing is getting harder. Straps tighten around her chest. But she’s moving regardless, putting one foot in front of the other, making headway.

Near the gate, the earth is churned by huge tyre tracks, now dried into deep ruts. Twice she stumbles. Twice she stops herself from hitting the deck. She knows that if she goes down, she may not get up again. The gate is held closed with orange baling twine, easy to undo. But hauling the gate open prises something open in her chest and her vision mists over for a few seconds.

She hears snapping from across the field and looks back. As her gaze clears she sees the body-thieves smash out of the coppice. She does not understand what they are. How they move, what they are doing; none of it makes sense. She doesn’t try to shut the gate with the twine.

She’s on a farm track. One way will lead to the farm she assumes, the other back to the road. She hopes she’s picked the right direction.

The farm track curves one way and another. It meanders through the fields. Aggie realises now that she may not make it. She may become another living organ donor for these creatures that have erupted like a plague from the landfill. She’s doing what she can - not running but walking fast - and that’s all she’s capable of. She doesn’t even know if she’s going in the right direction. It’s all up to someone else now. She’s given it her best shot.

The farm track is made of pounded stone. First she hears the rending of the timber in the gate - sounds like the creatures didn’t bother to open it. Then she hears crazy footsteps on the stone still some way behind her. It sounds like a crowd chasing her in every kind of shoe - clogs, hobnail boots, flip-flops and brothel-creepers. Despite believing she’s trying harder then ever, Aggie realises that she is no longer walking fast. She has nothing left to give to her escape. Now she is just walking.

Now she is plodding.

Up ahead is the road. The main road her father was driving on. She can make it that far before they catch her, she thinks. Her mind tells her it doesn’t really matter whether they catch her here or out on the road. Her instinct tells her it is better to flee, to stay alive as long as possible. Suddenly, there’s a little more power in her steps, a small reserve of magical energy to keep her moving. She walks faster, almost jogs, ignores the pain because nothing matters now except escape. There will be pain no matter what happens.

She reaches the road and turns onto it away from Shreve. The road is flat and hard and easier on the legs. She breaks into an agonised trot, almost believing there’s a chance now. Almost seeing herself in some kind of future. Any kind. She forces the thoughts away.

Up ahead there’s a road sign. Distance to a couple of nearby villages, distance to the motorway. Beyond that is a brown sign with the name of the neighbouring county in white. She’s almost out of Shreve.

She can’t look back at the monsters because it would waste energy and slow her down. Anyway, she can hear them, clattering faster than before now, abusing the tarmac with their stolen, mutant limbs. She passes the road sign running with everything she has left. She passes the county border and keeps moving.

The pain in her chest is unbearable now, breathing is becoming impossible. Her steps slow from a run to a trot and from there to a walk and the Earth itself seems to suck the very life from her.

She stops, utterly spent.

She turns to face her pursuers.

There on the border of the county, twenty yards away, they’ve halted. They’re not moving at all. Not breathing or panting though they should be. They watch her through their crude eyes for a long time.

Then they turn away, back to Shreve.

***

Delilah found a rack of ice axes and picked a matching pair which she tucked into her belt. Ray handed her a full backpack and she slipped it on. He pulled his own on and then looked around.

‘Where’s Jimmy?’

‘He was over there a second ago.’

‘Jimmy? You there? We’re leaving.’

Some shuffling came from the back of the shop.

‘He must be in the stock room,’ said Delilah.

Ray walked after him and into the almost dark back room. He had to switch on a torch to see properly. Boxes were stacked to well above head height but a path led through them. Beyond his line of sight, Ray could hear movement. Something about the sound made him draw his katana. It emerged with a whisper. With the torch in his left hand the sword was a lot heavier and felt far less useful. If he wanted to see what was in there, though, he had no choice but to use both items.

As he neared the first right-angle bend in the corridor of stock boxes, he heard the sounds from beyond more clearly. If the lights hadn’t have been off, if he hadn’t learned in the last few hours that nothing was how it seemed any more, he’d have sworn there was someone working back there. Not trying to keep quiet at all but bashing and clattering around. Someone constructing something.

Ray relaxed a little. It was the kid, weird as ever. He’d found a box with something useful in it and he was putting it together.

‘Hey, Jimmy, when we call you, you’ve got to answer. Don’t just fucking ignore us. We’re meant to be sticking together. Trying to stay alive. Jimmy. Jimmy?’

Ray looked back at Delilah.

‘We should never have brought him with us, you know.’

‘I know.’

Ray rounded the first corner and shone the torch. Nothing there but more stacked boxes. The noise was coming from further back. Maybe Jimmy wasn’t in here, after all. Maybe someone had left a machine running back here in their haste to get away. He could see light up ahead. There must have been a small window letting a little glimmer in from an alley or car park behind the shop. A little further with the torch and then he’d be able to see. He took the last few steps, aware of Delilah right behind him, and turned the final corner in the maze of boxes.

It wasn’t someone constructing something. It was something deconstructing someone.

Jimmy was dead and they’d never even heard him scream.

Maybe that was because the thing that killed him had one limb stuffed into Jimmy’s mouth. His jaws were stretched so wide that his cheeks had ripped open from the corners of his mouth to his back teeth. The limb was pulsing as it searched around inside Jimmy’s body like a kid rummaging for the prize in a bran tub. Kev could see the movement inside Jimmy shirt as the limb ferreted for what it needed. Then there was a contraction along the whole limb and a slurping sound. The creature’s limb was some kind of industrial vacuum cleaner attachment or the pipe from a large water pump. Something slipped along inside this hollow limb making it bulge. Ray thought of anacondas eating wild pigs.

The other limbs were busy cutting Jimmy’s body into useful pieces and attaching them to itself. Then Ray realised it wasn’t one landfill creature he was looking at but three. They were working together melding flesh and waste with the tools they had amongst them. Bones were attached to steel frames, plastic and skin were clamped or stapled together, veins and tubing were welded with a festering ichor that blurred the distinction between flesh and inanimate material.

The creatures made Jimmy fall apart. They made him disappear.

Then, right there in the torchlight, the three of them made themselves one. In an act of reverse fission, the three became a huge junkyard amoeba. The newly-fused thing rose up, delighting in its new frame and extra mobility; humanoid in shape but with extra appendages no man would ever wish for. The fat, flexible hose that had been thrust inside Jimmy stretched towards Ray like an exploratory trunk. He backed away and the creature advanced. It was fast, more agile than any of the others they’d seen.

Ray heard Delilah run back to the shop but he didn’t dare turn away. He walked backwards, torch shining right at the creature, reflecting on a film of fresh blood and oily effluent. He kept his katana stretched towards it, though his right hand was now aching from holding the sword unassisted for so long. His back came to rest against a wall of boxes and he adjusted. One more corner to negotiate and he’d be within reach of the stock room door. It was tempting to make a slash or stab at the thing but he didn’t trust himself to make a decent job of it with only one hand. On top of that, the creature moved with a fluidity and grace that scared him. He had a terrible feeling that it could overpower him the moment it decided to lunge.

He backed around the final corner and this last corridor of boxes was light again. Still he didn’t turn the torch off, just shone it into the compasses the thing was using for eyes. The needles inside them spun and flashed, reflecting the beam. Delilah’s hand reassured him as he backed to the doorway. He stopped. Surprised, the creature stopped too.

Then Ray dived through the door and let Delilah slam it shut.

Before it closed and she could lock or block it, the creature slipped a couple of limbs between the door and the frame, pushing it open.

‘Shit, Ray.’

‘I know.’

Ray launched himself back at the door but both their shoulders were doing little to deter the creature. It was forcing its way out.

‘We’ve got to run, D.’ She nodded.

‘Go!’ he shouted.

She made straight for the front door of the shop. Ray kept his shoulder wedged against the stock room door but he was slowly being pushed backwards. Delilah was fumbling to open the lock and still hadn’t succeeded when Ray decided to give up and run for it. He pulled down every rack of goods that was loose as he made for the door. Behind him, outdoor products scattered across the floor along with their toppled display units. He turned and threw the torch at the creature, amazed when it ducked to avoid the impact. He reached Delilah, pushed her out of the way and flicked the lock in a single turn. He hauled the door open. She darted out.

He followed her and together they dragged down the steel shutters. Bizarre limbs appeared between the shutters and the pavement. Ray and Delilah looked at each other.

‘Run,’ he said. ‘And don’t look back. I’ll be right behind you.’

She kissed him and sprinted away.

Things reached for his ankles and he let go of the shutters. Already other creatures in the street had seen him and were coming his way. A few yards away and making good speed, Delilah was drawing attention of her own. Ray limped after her, through the park gates and across the well-kept lawns. Leaves had fallen since the last raking, so the grass was a tapestry of ochre and chestnut over green. The trees were almost naked and ready for their long months of sleep. Ray wanted to see the spring more than anything else he’d ever wished for. He paid his screaming, leaden leg muscles no mind, fought against the threatening pain in his ankle and, still holding the flashing katana in his right hand, he gained on Delilah.

***

They moved as a huge mass with a space at their centre, a space like the eye of a storm, and in that space, walked Mason Brand, untouched and unharmed. They took him to the landfill, a place he’d seen from a distance every day, a place he’d touched with his bare skin on so many nights.

The stench from the army of creatures around him was so strong he didn’t notice the smell of the landfill when they reached it. What he noticed was how the level of rubbish in every part of the site was now sunken far below the lips of the vast pits dug to enclose it. The whole site, acres and acres of it, in canyons hundreds of feet deep, had been stirred up. The areas already buried under compacted topsoil had become active, the earth becoming mixed in with the crushed waste below. Huge manmade trenches extended away in many directions from the main pit of what had once been one of the deepest and broadest coal mines in the country. The army of creatures encouraged him to the very edge of the largest trash-filled chasm, parted and retreated preventing him from backing away.

Mason scanned the surface of the rubbish in every direction. Standing this close to it in full daylight, it was hard to imagine where so much waste came from. How much was brought here each day, he didn’t know. How many sites there were like this around the country, he didn’t know. How long it would take for the rubbish to degrade and disintegrate, he didn’t know. Nor did he know what kind of damage the decomposition would do to the land and life around the site. He’d spent years wondering about it and now, here he was, standing at the mouth of the place and still without answers. What he did know, what he still believed, was that the Earth was still transforming all the garbage as best it could and that here was one of the places where that transformative power was strongest.

Below him the surface of the rubbish billowed and swelled; the waves on an ocean of decomposing filth. Something broke through.

Rising up from the sea of detritus, rising as though levitated, came the fecalith, the thing that had begun its life on the night of the storm, the thing that had survived because Mason Brand had taken it in and nurtured it. It was huge now. It stood at least four storeys high, its giant feet floating on the trash beneath it. Mason remembered the pathetic, mewling embryo he’d found in his garden and wondered what had drawn it there. Was it merely coincidence that it had found in Mason the only possible way to grow safely? He would have liked to believe that - if it was true he could still turn his back on all this, take no responsibility for it - but he knew it wasn’t true. This was some kind of natural pre-destiny that could never have been avoided. The farmer had seen all of this, Mason was sure about that. That was why he’d forced an education in the ways of nature upon him. And on every page of the A4 pads Mason had filled to clear his head of the calling, was the intelligence behind the creation of the fecalith and its legions of living garbage. There was no point in trying to deny it now; if he was honest with himself, it was the foretelling of these very events that he had been trying to ignore ever since the calling among those Welsh oaks first began.

The fecalith was a monstrous humanoid tower. It was fashioned of steel and timber and plastic and glass and circuitry and was welded together with the flesh of a thousand living creatures. It had begun life as a human foetus, removed from its mother’s body and discarded here in a new and acidic amniotic fluid. Since leaving Mason’s shed, it had hidden here in the landfill, growing, thinking and plotting. Staying safe until the correct moment arrived. Now, Mason was certain, the fecalith would make its presence known to all.

A hand reached down to him, a giant hand of vile reclaimed machinery and gore. It closed around Mason’s chest and lifted him away from the ground until he was staring into one of its eyes. The eye was an old television screen. It studied him, turning him this way and that like a toy. Still, Mason was not frightened. He and the fecalith shared the same blood.

Its inspection complete, the hand dropped to the fecalith’s chest and there a rusted panel the size of a door slid open. The smell from inside was so rotten, Mason choked. The hand pressed him into darkness and there, inside the fecalith’s torso, he heard the beating of its giant, borrowed heart. The door slid closed behind him. Wires and tubes reached out towards Mason in the resounding blackness. Copper and rubber arteries pierced his head and neck. Animal veins and capillaries melted through his skin and attached themselves to his own. The plasma of poisonous excrement and homogenised bloods which flowed through the fecalith’s vessels began to flow in his. And now, finally, Mason hoped and believed he would die.

Instead, the fecalith showed him something.

And Mason perceived it with every part of himself.

23

Shreve Tertiary College was one of the few places to escape the kind of destruction wreaked upon the rest of town by the fecalith’s legions and the troops called in to quell them. The two campus maintenance men, trapped there on the first day of the attacks, re-wired the canteen television to run off a car battery. The teachers, students and other residents who had taken refuge on the campus therefore had two versions of what had happened to their town.

On the one hand, the trapped survivors had their own personal experiences and the things they could still see from the windows of the main building’s upper floors.

On the other, was the fiction broadcast by the news teams of every terrestrial and satellite channel. The lies were so unanimously broadcast, it was almost possible to believe them, even for the people who’d experienced otherwise - the news stories were far more feasible than the truth, after all.

What would have caused awkwardness in any other situation brought Kevin, Jenny, Ray and Delilah together as allies, at least to a degree. They respected each other for making it this far alive. And they were incensed by the fabrications on the news.

‘Look at this bullshit,’ said Ray as the four of them sat together in the front row of plastic chairs.

In the television version of reality, the ‘incident’ was pitched as a disease outbreak with massive loss of human life. There was no mention of the monsters that roamed the streets. The only footage, repeated again and again, was of people running, people trying to hide. Editing made some groups of frantic survivors look like they were chasing the others: the diseased attacking the uninfected. Quarantine was the ideal solution. It was demanded by surrounding councils, terrified the outbreak would destroy their communities next, and the government was only too happy to comply.

Kevin sat there shaking his head.

‘Can they really get away with this?’ he asked.

‘You can tell the newsreaders believe it,’ said Ray. ‘Why shouldn’t everyone else? There’s no one out there to tell them any different. No one that’s seen what we’ve seen.’

Jenny was crying, hot angry tears.

‘No one would listen even if there was.’

Ray knew why she was so upset. They’d had to lie about her toe because no one would ever have believed the truth - and now the same thing was happening on a national scale. Kev put his arm around Jenny to comfort her and Ray, for the first time since they’d broken up, didn’t care. He was happy for Jenny and he was happy for himself. They were all still alive; that was what counted.

‘We’ll always know what happened here,’ said Delilah. ‘We should promise each other right now that we’ll keep the truth alive. Government cover-ups have a habit of resurfacing. One day we might get a chance to share this.’

‘I’m in,’ said Ray.

‘Me too,’ said Kevin.

Jenny wiped the tears away from her cheeks and the corners of her eyes and nodded eagerly.

‘Absolutely. I promise.’

The helicopter gunships were successful in their way; every landfill creature they fired at was immediately neutralised, becoming inanimate trash once more. Paper and plastic and all manner of rotting animal tissue littered the streets. The gunships left the suburbs worm-eaten with chain-gunfire, houses half torn down by missile strikes. They killed the landfill creatures and they killed the people hiding from them.

They could not, however, find and destroy all of the fecalith’s forces. And, no matter how many they gunned down, more of them returned to take their place. As soon as it was clear that this kind of tactic wasn’t going to settle the issue, the army arrived on the ground in force. They gathered what intelligence they could.

It soon became obvious that the problem began and ended with the town’s waste disposal area. The quarantining of the county made it easy for the army to set up a fully functioning mobile headquarters not far from the centre of the incident, The Shreve Landfill. Not fully understanding what was causing the creatures to spawn wasn’t seen as a problem by the top brass.

And all the while, military intelligence, backed up by dozens of its own scientists, epidemiologists and game theorists, came up with their own carefully planned solution.

***

Olive drab tankers arrived in convoy at the landfill and emptied their liquid loads into the pits of rubbish. Infantrymen in breathing apparatus lined the edges of the quarry. Live ammunition was not issued. Anything rising out of the pits was slashed open with bayonets and pushed back into the landfill. For days the trucks came until the haze of petrol vapour shimmered over the expanse of the vast rubbish pit like a mirage.

All army personnel on the ground then retreated to a safe distance. A lone gunship rose into the sky from a mile away and fired a single missile into the centre of the trash. In a searing, gargantuan hiss, air was sucked towards the ensuing fireball as flames boiled upwards three hundred metres high. The burning fuel and waste vomited pure blackness even higher on the still, cold air. The smoke mushroomed upwards, leaning westward when it hit the air currents higher up. From a hundred miles away, people saw Shreve erect its own leaning tombstone against a chilled sky.

In the town, creatures and people alike watched the flames consume the trash that had been dumped in their landfill. Twenty years of the filthiest, least degradable rubbish from all over the country burned. The fields and hedges and trees around the landfill were scorched by the heat. For three days the site was unapproachable by any living thing.

Meanwhile, armoured units supported by ground troops mopped up the remaining landfill creatures street by street and house by house. Much of Shreve also burned at their will. The troops were efficient and indiscriminate. Human bodies lay alongside the bodies of the landfill creatures in every street. Only the larger concentrations of survivors were safe from stray bullets and twitchy trigger fingers.

On the third day, the streets, now silent and safe, the fire dwindling to a glow from below the edges of the landfill canyon, the army advanced to assess the outcome of their action.

***

Ray was drawn to the landfill. He persuaded the others to go with him.

Sneaking out of the college and away from the skeleton crew of troops ‘protecting’ them wasn’t difficult at all. The four of them slipped out via the covered glass corridor to the science block and from there it was yards to the perimeter hedge. Keeping low, they stayed in cover out to the woods, past the secret place that Delilah had shown him and onward to the edge of the tree line.

From their vantage point they looked down over the smouldering landfill.

No longer was it mounded with trash and well-packed soil. Now there was nothing but blackened gouges in the earth where the trash had been incinerated in white heat. The trenches and pits were almost as deep as the mine had been when it was abandoned. The surrounding land looked scarred and wasted, as though nothing would ever grow there again. It was the charred stump of an amputated limb, the socket of a burnt out eye. Overhead, the smoke column still rose up but it was a ghost now, riddled and twisted by the slightest breeze. The smell of blackening was still in the air, the very soil itself smelled scorched. Everything was silent but for the diesel engines of the tanks and trucks and the shouts of soldiers watching each others’ backs.

‘Fuck,’ said Ray. ‘It’s just . . . gone.’

‘Too right,’ said Kevin. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ They all ignored him.

Delilah looked pale, sick.

‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘What they’ve done. It can’t be the answer. Just burn everything? Children would do that. Stupid little boys.’

‘Come on, Delilah,’ said Jenny. ‘The whole landfill’s been obliterated. They did the right thing. What other solution could there be? Those things were . . . feral. They’d have hunted us all down in the end.’

‘What makes you think a big bonfire is the end to this?’ asked Delilah. ‘Do you think they’ll never come back now? Maybe there are seeds of them scattered in the bottom of every one of those pits just waiting for something to set them growing again. Maybe they’ll be stronger next time. Smarter.’

‘They weren’t smart,’ said Kevin. ‘They were hungry. It’s different.’

‘They were smart enough to set up road blocks,’ said Ray.

Kevin wouldn’t be persuaded.

‘Every carnivorous animal can hunt. It doesn’t make them intelligent.’

‘Intelligent enough to hunt is way too intelligent for trash, as far as I’m concerned.’

Kevin shrugged.

‘Let’s not argue about it, Ray. It’s over now. What does it matter?’

‘It matters,’ said Delilah, ‘because there’s some meaning behind all this, some reason for it.’

‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘No way. Look who’s cleared the mess up. I reckon the army are responsible for all of this. Some military experiment, some war machine that got out of control. Maybe it wasn’t out of control at all. Maybe they meant for this to happen as a kind of live test.’

Delilah looked disgusted.

‘That’s the most cynical suggestion of all.’

‘It’s sick,’ said Jenny. ‘But it’s certainly possible. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. No one’s going to believe what happened here even if someone starts telling the truth. The government and military will spin it as some kind of mini plague that they’ve had great success in containing. They’ll look like saviours and anyone speaking out against them will look like fools.’

Ray pointed down into the centre of the largest pit.

‘We are fools. All of us.’

Something was moving in the blackened depths. Tanks and men were backing away from the edge of the fire crater.

An incinerated colossus rose from the ash. Ray, the only one of them to have seen the fecalith before, recognised it in spite of the conflagration it had survived. It was larger than he remembered, though damaged and fused in a way that made it look more human. All its constituent parts had run together making its blackened form elongated and sinuous. Glass and plastic, steel and rubber, concrete and wood, organs and skin. Cauterised more closely than ever by fire. It did not appear wounded. The fecalith looked strong.

The four of them watched as it reached into a cavity in its own chest and drew something out, something pink and ragged that dripped dark fluid into the ash several metres below. The fecalith was holding out a kind of doll in front of it as though it were a talisman to ward off the military and their weapons of war. It proffered this charm to the retreating troops.

On the scorched air they heard a man’s voice shouting out from the pit. The fecalith, speaking through its mannequin mouthpiece, his voice tiny and human, agonised and imploring.

‘What’s it saying?’ asked Kevin. Ray shook his head.

‘I can’t quite hear it. Looks like it’s reasoning with them, though.’

The pink doll was, in turn, holding out its hands to the soldiers in gestures of pleading and placation. He looked as though he was trying to explain something. He reminded Ray of speakers he’d seen on the news in places of deep human conflict. He was passionate, inspired, cautionary.

Suddenly the pink doll’s body went limp. A second or two later, they heard the triple burst of machine gun fire. More followed from many men kneeling or lying on the ground. The doll’s body jerked and reddened. Pieces dropped away from it into the pit. The fecalith drew the doll back, placed it once more inside its chest. The gunfire continued, intensified. The fecalith didn’t seem to know what to do. It stepped back and away, its lower legs still obscured by the pit in which it stood. Like the mannequin, it held out its blackened hands to the soldiers to make them stop.

The tank’s gun recoiled, rocking the whole vehicle and sending up a billow of dust from all around it. There was an explosive flash at the fecalith’s shoulder, spinning the giant a quarter turn to its left and pushing him backwards. The sound of the blast reached the four onlookers, followed by a push in the air. Kevin lost his footing and sat on the ground.

‘Jesus Christ.’

Smoke erupted around the fecalith’s head after the impact, obscuring it.

The gunfire ceased. The giant swayed.

‘No,’ said Delilah. ‘No, no, no. This is all wrong, Ray. Can’t they see that? They can’t just blow him away like this.’

Kevin shook his head as if he’d heard her wrong.

‘Him?’

‘It’s alive,’ she said.

‘It’s not a fucking person, Delilah. It’s a freak of nature. And it’s a killer too.’

Jenny felt the same way.

‘They have to destroy it. It’s the only one left. It’s probably the one that controlled all the others.’

‘We should definitely move into some cover,’ said Ray. ‘If the army realises they’re being observed I doubt they’d think twice about wasting us.’

Another flash burst on the fecalith’s hip. The noise reached them as they watched it stagger away half bent over. The damage to its shoulder was obvious now that the smoke of the first impact had cleared; black splinters protruded from a rend beside its neck. Its left arm hung, apparently useless.

The four of them backed into the trees to watch from safety.

***

The fecalith shared everything with Mason, just as Mason had shared everything with it.

It was the basic needs that came through most obviously and most strongly. Things Mason could have imagined: the terrible hunger the fecalith felt, a drive too strong to resist. The pain of its existence and its inability to express that pain. Every time it grew or added to itself, its wounds were raw. Physical development was like a series of operations without anaesthesia. New limbs and organs were agony to install and the places where flesh and trash met never completely healed. The fecalith walked perpetually in a filthy grey cloud of agony. It had done so ever since it was conceived by the wrath of the storm. But pain and hunger were things Mason could understand easily. They were human characteristics, human sensations.

What was not human, or what seemed no longer to be, was the sense of wonder that made the fecalith’s pain bearable. It was enchanted by its very existence, lived with a permanent sense of the miraculous, like some agonised saint witnessing the hand of God in everything. Each tiny moment of consciousness was a rapture and a joy at the living fact of itself.

If only people felt the same way, thought Mason, what a different world it would be.

In the chest of the fecalith, Mason changed. The filth that flowed in its veins now flowed in his through the many tubular and canular connections between them. The fecalith’s chest had become a kind of womb in which Mason grew in knowledge. The fecalith fed him of its own strange plasma, nurtured him. Kept him alive. Every union with the fecalith was painful, each penetration of wire or silicone or steel or glass an abhorrence. Mason was deeply fulfilled, though, for he had become one with the new life, the new nature and that was more than he could ever have hoped for.

The consciousness of Donald Smithfield was gone, as were the consciousnesses of the dozens of animals he’d fed the fecalith in his shed. They were simply dead; everything physical that remained of them was in use by the fecalith. But their spirits - it had let those go. Donald Smithfield was dead but he was free. This and the knowledge the fecalith shared with him assuaged Mason’s sense of guilt. The boy had died for something great.

The fecalith showed him what it was. It showed him the planet’s history. Mason found himself unable to be sceptical about what he saw, it made such simple sense. The fecalith displayed for him the many ages in the world’s growth, the coming and going of many species that had survived mere thousands or hundreds of millions of years. Many of the species had become too successful and the Earth, in its own time, had destroyed them to save itself. The Earth was a huge living organism, within and upon which many tinier organisms lived out their tiny lives. Like the cells of the skin or the bacteria in the gut, these tiny lives were meant to exist in harmony with the whole ‘body’ of the Earth. When a group of cells became too successful or too prolific, disturbing the delicate balance of the whole organism, the organism cleansed itself. In this way, many creatures had come and gone since life on the planet began. Most amazing of all to Mason was the uncountable times that humans had existed, flourished, become destructive and been wiped almost totally away. Each time humanity had survived the Earth’s self-cleansing process, it had changed, become better in some way, learned some lesson about harmonious survival.

The world was about to self-cleanse again, the fecalith showed him. Its birth in the depths of the landfill was only an early sign of the change. Mason had been right all along, the fecalith was a new order of life. It came from the dead things humans threw away. Human trash had accumulated to a globally toxic level. Now the Earth was working hard to get rid of the toxicity and its cause. She’d sent a new species to facilitate the operation. The new species could not be destroyed or stopped by humans but that didn’t matter. There was new hope - as there always was and always had been - because the Earth would not destroy humankind totally. It would merely bring it to the edge of extinction where, as a species, humanity would learn a valuable new lesson and then rebuild itself better than before. The whole organism of the world would benefit from the cleansing. There was a bright future ahead.

Mason was happy in the darkness of the fecalith’s heart, learning and grasping the secrets of new realities, seeing new hope for the world and being at the very centre of it.

Then the fire had come.

The fecalith knew it was coming when the tankers began to fill its ocean of rubbish with fuel. But he didn’t pass this on to Mason - there would be no point in filling the man with fear. Mason, who had been like a father to him, was now like his child. When the flames came, it did everything it could to protect him.

Mason felt the physical shift all around him when the fire began with a huge explosion. But the noise was so muffled he didn’t know what it was. Not until the temperature began to climb inside his cool heart-womb. Not until he began to cook. When the heat melted off Mason’s hair and his screams were too much for the fecalith to bear, the fecalith extended fleshy tubing into Mason’s mouth and nose and cut him off from the air. The fecalith oxygenated Mason in other ways, with fluids instead of air; it pumped the coolest of its liquids into Mason to keep him alive as best it could. Meanwhile, the fecalith could not help but be burned and therefore changed by the fire. It knew, though it could experience and endure endless pain, that it could not die. Not ever. And so it had faith in the world that made it. Faith that it would survive. Faith that the world would become a better place.

Mason’s consciousness became an awareness of nothing but burning. Burning and not dying, though he begged and begged for its cool, black release. In that fire of three days they were both re-forged.

Facing the soldiers as the fecalith’s mouthpiece, Mason had felt no fear. Instead an evangelical frenzy took him as he tried to convey to the men, the men who had not and could not live through fire, what the future held for them if only they would lay down their weapons and listen. If only they would take heed and change.

He didn’t believe it when they opened fire. The bullets hurt as badly as the flames. He held out his hands to stop them but they took no notice. It was then, when so many machine gun volleys hit him that his very limbs began to drop away, that Mason began to die. It was both a terrible shock and a glad relief for his life to be over.

Withdrawn once more inside the fecalith’s chest, he felt all the interfaces being withdrawn, the makeshift tubules and veins receding, his awareness ebbing.

‘You said we could not die.’

‘You are not we,’ replied the fecalith.

An explosion sent Mason sliding around in his own blood inside the chamber of the fecalith’s chest. He sensed the creature’s terrible pain increasing. Suddenly it seemed that he might have been wrong about everything, that the fecalith was insane or, at worst, a liar.

‘They’re killing you, aren’t they?’

‘We cannot die.’

Mason grunted, a laugh of sorts.

‘You’re delusional.’

‘No, Mason Brand. You can die. You will die. But we will live on. This fire is simply a beginning.’

Another shell, nearer to Mason this time. The black world shook and reeled. Light came in from somewhere. The fecalith’s body was breached.

24

The four of them watched the army blow the fecalith to pieces. More tanks rolled to the edge of the landfill pit. They fired at will, sending shell after shell into the already charred hulk. It came apart. One side of its head disappeared in a single impact. Its right arm fell away at the elbow. No longer could it hold up its hands in supplication. It stood, resolute and fearless, one television-screen eye watching it all.

The soldiers on the ground fired until their muzzles were hot and their magazines empty. Then they reloaded and started again. They aimed at every part of it; limbs and thorax, head and neck, even its sexless groin. But it was the tanks that did the real damage, each shell breaking the fecalith open, tearing it down. Finally they broke one of its legs and the four onlookers watched it topple into the ash.

The tanks and troops retreated swiftly from the landfill, pulling back towards the main road. Seconds later, whining thunder swelled in the distance and three jets approached the site. Each loosed two missiles that left smoking trails as they hissed into the pit and ignited. White light burst upwards followed by a crackling roar. They felt the heat even in the trees. Whatever was in the missile burned with an almost purple whiteness, flashing and giving off a much lighter-coloured smoke.

They watched for most of the morning as the flames died down to nothing. When it was cool enough, convoys of huge trucks began to arrive, tipping and leaving mounds of earth and hardcore at the edge of the largest pit. Green bulldozers arrived to push the earth over the remains. Hour after hour the trucks brought in a mountain of soil for the earth movers to push into the smoking void. They didn’t stop until that section of the pit was filled level. By then it was cold and dusk was approaching.

‘We’d better go,’ said Ray.

He took them to his place because it was the closest. Around the streets of Shreve the army presence was far less obvious. Nevertheless, they checked around every corner and stuck to the quietest routes.

Inside his flat, away from the chaos of the streets, Ray handed everyone a can of cider. No one raised their drink for a toast. Ray watched Kevin sit with his arm around Jenny’s shoulders, no longer even surprised by his lack of reaction. It didn’t matter that she was sitting there with another man. Ray was glad to be a survivor. He was in love with Delilah. Now that they’d made it through the worst of this nightmare they could have a life together. They’d fought for it. They’d made it this far. They’d earned it.

‘Don’t know about you lot,’ he said, ‘but I’m walloped. I’m going to crash. You two alright with the sofa? There’s plenty of extra cushions and stuff.’

Kevin nodded.

‘We’ll be fine.’

In bed, Ray held Delilah tight. She’d been very quiet all day.

‘Are you okay, D?’

It was such a long time before she replied he thought she’d fallen asleep.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid?’ he asked, half-asleep himself. ‘You haven’t been afraid of any of this. What’s changed?’

‘It’s the way they dealt with it. Burning him. Burying him. Doesn’t seem any different to what we would have done before. It doesn’t seem any smarter.’

Ray was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

‘I’ll have to talk to you about this in the morning. I’m too tired to make sense of any of it.’

She squeezed his hand.

‘You’re right. Let’s forget about it until tomorrow.’

***

The army left as quickly as it had come.

The clean up operation in Shreve was carried out by local services and thousands of volunteers. Truckloads of waste, now mingled with human and animal flesh, were ferried from the town to the landfill site where they too were burned in petrol and then buried. Thick black smoke rose and drifted wherever the wind took it. In the aftermath of such tragedy and destruction, complaints from neighbouring communities and villages about the stench and fumes were ignored.

Even though Shreve was now regarded as a ‘plague’ town, most of the survivors stayed, imbued with a sense of pride at their staunchness and finding ever more beauty and simple wonder in a town that had woken up from a nightmare. Their town. Shreve.

It was quiet in the streets. Many people had died. And it was quiet in the surrounding countryside where so much of the wildlife had been taken and ‘used’.

Ray and Delilah agreed they’d see Kevin and Jenny for drinks, maybe dinner, very soon. It seemed right, after all they’d been through, that they should remain friends. But the days after the fecalith was shot and burned gathered as quickly as autumn leaves and the four of them didn’t make contact.

Ray was philosophical.

Perhaps we all need time to heal quietly. Perhaps we’ll come out of ourselves when we feel brighter inside.

***

Aggie Smithfield woke up in warm, clean sheets in a hot room.

Tubes in each nostril blew a steady but fine stream of pure oxygen into her. Each time she breathed out, her nose hissed as two jets of air collided. In her left hand was a syringe driver that she could squeeze to alleviate the pain in her chest. In her right arm a saline drip kept her from dehydrating.

The nurses were kind to her, their faces full of concern. The doctor, a young, dark man with far too much beard, spoke to her softly. Inspired her to feel better with his intense, confident eyes.

She did not know what day it was.

She could remember running away from something but she didn’t know what it was. The doctor told her she’d had a terrible shock and serious injury and that she wasn’t ready to remember. One day, soon, when she was stronger, her mind would let her recall what had happened. In the meantime, he said, she was to lie still, relax and let him and his team take care of her.

The pain in her chest - due to her cracked sternum, broken ribs and punctured left lung - was very bad at times. She used her syringe driver a lot. Depended on it for sleep. But the morphine had its dangers; it was in her sleep that the monsters came. Nameless, shapeless things that dragged themselves along after her with endless determination.

Screaming hurt the most. She screamed often, always on waking.

***

After so long without contact, the text from Jenny came as a surprise.

Ray and Delilah were drinking in the pub but both of them felt off colour. The lethargy and heaviness of their limbs had come on overnight. They had stomach cramps and couldn’t face food. Ray suspected the previous night’s Chinese takeaway. He awaited the diarrhoea and vomiting without enthusiasm. As there was nothing better to do, alcohol had seemed the only solution. They were both drinking whisky with ginger wine to ease their stomachs when Ray’s phone had bleeped.

‘Who’s it from?’ Asked Delilah.

‘Jenny. Asking us if we feel all right. She says they’re both laid up. They must have ordered from the same place last night.’

‘Text her back. Ask her what the symptoms are.’

As Ray keyed his phone, Delilah looked around the pub. It was quiet. None of the people there looked particularly happy. In fact, several looked quite pale. Maybe it was the light. Doug, the landlord, always a cheerful sort in his laconic way, was sweating in the gleam of the bright bar lights. She was about to shout over to ask him what he’d been drinking the night before when he leaned down and vomited into the bottle trolley behind the counter.

‘Shit,’ she whispered, and then: ‘Ray?’ He looked up from his phone.

‘What?’

‘The landlord just chucked up. Look around. Everyone’s ill.’

Ray stopped texting and glanced around.

‘Nah . . . they’re probably just . . .’

‘Just what?’

He studied the other patrons more carefully.

‘Fuck,’ said Ray. ‘This is not good. Drink up and let’s take a look outside.’

Beyond the pub car park the streets were deserted. Ray shrugged. More to himself than her he said:

‘That doesn’t prove anything. It’s been like this for weeks.’ He walked quickly towards the main road. Already he could see there was little or no traffic on it. Then they heard an ambulance siren. Then two.

‘Christ, D. What’s happening?’

‘It’s starting again.’

‘No. This is something different. It’s -’

A gut spasm cut him short and, utterly unable to control himself, he vomited onto the pavement. The stream of puke was dark, almost black. The puddle it made was oily. Not a bean sprout or water chestnut to be seen. Not the ghost of a spring roll. He looked at it, trying hard not to think about what it might mean. His body was shaking.

‘I’m freezing, D. I need to get inside.’

Walking back to her bedsit, Delilah was sick too - so suddenly there was no way to prevent it. All she could do was turn her head away from the pavement and retch over a small brick wall into someone’s front garden. Ray couldn’t stop himself from checking out what she’d produced. It was the same stuff. He remembered the smell from somewhere but he said nothing.

‘Maybe there’s an outbreak of stomach flu. E-coli or something.’

He didn’t believe it, though, and he knew she wouldn’t either. At her place they took turns in the shared bathroom. Then, as they weakened, they allowed themselves the use of bowls next to the bed. By the time the black puke overflowed, they were too frail to get up and empty their bowels. The vomit seeped into the carpet.

Ray watched it from the corner of his eye.

Each time he fell asleep and woke up again the puddle had changed. Grey threads appeared in it like rootlets or tendrils. They gripped the bowl and wormed into the threads of the dirty carpet. They spread like veins. Soon they pulsed and Ray felt the rhythm inside himself.

He turned to look at Delilah.

Her beautifully pale skin was turning black, the black of rubbish sacks. Her hair, silky as crow feathers, was whitening, the same colour as the vein-like threads expanding from his sick-bowl. To find happiness, to survive the landfill war and then to lose it all like this . . . He wasn’t too sick to cry. The tears that seeped from his eyes were viscous, dripped too slowly too be natural. It only made him weep more. He didn’t want to know what he was becoming, didn’t even want to assess himself in the mirror. She was silent beside him. Very still. The effort of lifting his arm to reach out to her was great. Like he was wearing lead armour. His hand was coal black shot with grey, dendritic capillaries. What flowed inside those veins now? The chalky veins had grown from his fingertips, protruding like shoots. His hand was shaggy with hair-like extensions.

He rested this strange hand on her chest. He wanted her to know while he still meant it, while it was still him talking. Her chest rose and fell intermittently. Her heartbeat seemed distant through his fingertips.

‘Love. You. D.’

***

Kevin and Jenny sat in her tiny white Mini with a length of green garden hose drooping in through the window. All the other windows were tightly rolled up. Kevin had used half a roll of duct tape to seal the hose inside the exhaust pipe. He didn’t want there to be any mistakes. No brain-damaged comebacks.

They reclined the seats and held hands but there was nothing comfortable about breathing engine smoke. They lay there coughing and crying. Kevin was dizzy and nauseous but he didn’t know if that was the fumes or the disease. They’d had so much to look forward to, had already put so many bad things behind them.

When the sickness had first hit them, Jenny was iron-hearted in a way he’d never anticipated.

‘Whatever made those things rise up, it’s in us now. I’m not having it. I’ve survived once and there’s no way I’m going to give in to them now. We have to kill ourselves before whatever’s inside us takes over.’

He’d argued with her for the whole day and all the while they both got sicker. He couldn’t believe they’d bickered away their final hours together. Nothing beautiful there to remember. No, for good memories he had to go back further. Back to when being with Jenny was adultery. For some reason, that was when he’d been happiest. Not knowing her, only knowing something was developing between them. Something stronger than he could deny. Something bigger than both of them. Too suddenly, too quickly, their happiness was ending.

‘How do you know?’ he’d asked her. ‘How can you be certain this is anything to do with what happened.’

‘Oh, come on, Kev. Don’t be so fucking ignorant. How many diseases have you heard of that turn your skin and vomit black? That turns your veins grey? That continues to live even when it’s outside your body? This is all connected.’

‘But how in God’s name did it happen?’

‘Delilah was right. She’s not just some stupid Goth chick. She was tuned in. Burning the landfill and the fecalith was the wrong thing to do. What if all it did was release what was inside those things into the atmosphere? What if it turned the smoke into a cloud of germs or spores? We’re turning into human trash, Kev. Can’t you smell it?’

He could. They’d both begun to reek of shit and decomposition the moment they’d begun to feel queasy. They’d made it to the toilet to be sick but soon the toilet was overgrowing its bowl with heaps of grey threads that strained outwards across the whole bathroom, crept under the door.

It was only when Jenny’s now grey hair began to move by itself and her screamed pleas became those of the insane that he did what she asked. He’d rather they fell asleep together in the car than watch her slit her throat with a carving knife as she’d threatened to do. That would leave him there to die alone, too frightened to finish himself off.

So now they held hands. And the car filled with smoke. Kevin was afraid to die and he hung on. More than once he lost consciousness and came back with a start, the interior of the Mini whirling around him. He tried to take his hand away from Jenny’s to steady himself but they had grown into each other somehow, the veins twining them, plaiting their arms together.

He’d stopped coughing by then. The inside of the Mini was like the inside of a cloud. Not so frightening as it had been at the start. He allowed his eyes to close.

25

The gaps between visits from the nurses became longer. Their faces when they did come no longer had the look of compassion and empathy they’d had before. The nurses looked preoccupied. They were thinking about something else.

One day the doctor didn’t come. The doctor with his sparkling eyes, his face a mystery behind his beard. Aggie thought she was falling in love with him but didn’t know how to tell. When he didn’t come she panicked a little. The pain in her chest had receded but she still pressed on her driver for hits of morphine, more out of habit than of necessity. When the doctor didn’t come, she put herself to sleep. Later that day, when the nurses didn’t come, she knocked herself out again. Her dreams were of vivid, patterned silence as vast as space, terrifyingly quiet, terrifyingly huge. She awoke sweating and needing to pee.

It was night. The hospital was noiseless but for the hiss of her breathing against the oxygen flow. She was wide eyed, more awake than she’d been since she’d found herself in the hospital. Certain things were very clear in her mind. Her mother and father were dead. That was why they hadn’t visited her. There was something wrong in the hospital, otherwise there would have been nurses to pass her a bedpan.

Tomorrow, she would have to get up and she was fairly certain she’d be doing it by herself. She listened to the hush of the hospital and clung to it. Somehow, silence was safe. The urge to urinate came and went in waves. She decided she could probably hold it until morning - another incentive for her to get up when it was light. She pressed the syringe driver control to help her sleep but nothing happened. Carefully, she reached a hand to the side of the bed where the cylinder containing the morphine lay. She picked it up and inspected it in the dim glow from her nightlight.

The morphine was all gone.

***

The urge to pee had become part of her pain at some point in the night.

Now, as the light rose across the high dependency unit, she could no longer ignore it. She looked up behind her head to the stand from which the saline hung. The clear bag which had held it was also empty. She peeled the micropore dressing from the back of her right hand and removed the needle that had supplied her with the fluid. She did the same on her left hand, slipping out the morphine needle. The hissing in her nose had ceased; even the oxygen had run out.

The back of her bed was already partially raised. Instead of trying to push herself upright, she used the electronic controller to raise the back of the bed and bring her into a sitting position. It hurt but not as much as she had expected. Once sitting, she dropped the safety bar away from the bedside, braced her hands under herself and swung her legs to the edge.

A bolt of pain tore through her chest and she almost pissed herself right there on the sheets. She waited, surprised how quickly the pain receded. She pushed her legs over the side and waited to recover from the next onslaught of chest pain. Finally she edged her feet to the floor and stood up. Her legs were very shaky. She wasn’t sure she would be able to stand unaided. As her bare soles touched the cold flooring, a huge draining sensation sank through her body. The room faded to white and receded, her ears whined. She collapsed.

***

Pain brought her around and she had the impression that it could only have been a few seconds of blackout she’d suffered. Her chest, having been something approaching comfortable for many days as she lay in bed, now raked her with hot claws. As bad as it was, she knew it wouldn’t stop her from getting up.

Using the plastic chair by her bed, she hauled herself upright again. Again the room spun but this time she held it together until the spell passed. She looked around for something to help her walk. Not far away there was a Zimmer frame. For the moment she didn’t care how that would look to anyone coming in. She had to find out what was going on. Sliding along the wall she reached the walking frame and from there she crossed, a shuffle at a time, to the window.

She stood there a long time trying to understand what she saw.

The dreams she’d suffered under the influence of the morphine were not just nightmares from her imagination. What she saw outside reminded her of the things she’d tried not to remember through all the time she’d been stuck in the hospital.

Down in the hospital car park and in the streets and parks beyond, nameless things shambled once more. Only this time she could recognise what the things had been. Each of them looked like black scarecrows. Their heads sprouted white roots instead of hair and these roots hung down like the tresses of a witch, tangled and matted. The hands and feet were the same but smaller, nothing more than shaggy outgrowths of grey and white stalks that might once have been veins. It was obvious that the things had once been people. Their shiny, black bodies thronged the streets like crowds of partygoers all wearing the same costume.

But their movements weren’t random or confused. They seemed to be searching for something. They looked lost and forlorn.

Aggie was afraid, remembering what the other creatures had done, what they’d been searching for. As she watched, it became clear she probably need not be afraid of these new creatures. They were foraging for leavings. And they were hungry.

Very, very hungry.

A group of six or seven had found the large dumpsters at the back of the hospital. All of these waste containers were now overturned. The scarecrow witches lay among the mess holding refuse sacks to their black faces and tearing large bites out of them. They chewed down everything: glass jars and tin cans. Paper towels, tissues and food wrappings. They ate leftovers from the kitchens. Nothing was passed over, not even the plastic bags.

One of them had discovered the medical waste dumpster. It was eating a gangrenous lower leg, having no difficulty biting clean through the bones. As Aggie watched, it opened its mouth unnaturally wide and chomped off all the toes and half of the foot. Others soon arrived. They tucked into the bags as though they were giant haggises. Crunched through boxes of disposable scalpel blades and used hypodermics. Their faces, a tangle of white veins over unctuous black skin, bore one simple expression: voraciousness.

On the pavement on the opposite side of the car park, one of the scarecrow witches stopped and looked down at the concrete it was walking on. A dog had fouled the pavement, leaving a crusted-over pile of sausage-like excreta. The creature dropped on to all fours, dipped its shaggy grey head down and sucked up the turd in one enthusiastic bite. Having found something so good on the floor, the thing crawled away into the shrubbery to see what else it could find at ground level.

Aggie remembered she had to pee then.

She struggled across the chilly linoleum to a unisex toilet. Inside she used the frame to help her sit down. She peed for a long time but the relief she felt was overshadowed by what she’d seen of the world outside. She stood, more easily this time, turned and flushed away her waste. Where would it end up? she wondered. In the belly of one of those things down there? Things that had once been people?

She began to think very hard about how to keep everything clean around her. She was fairly sure the creatures weren’t interested in what was living - that much she’d worked out from watching them. All she knew was they were ravenous. With no one left to stop them, they’d eat every last scrap of garbage in the world.

***

She stayed in the high dependency unit for a few more days eating the food left in the nurses’ station and then, on the ground floor, she found the staff canteen and devoured what was still edible from the refrigerators. The electricity was off. She’d always been too warm in the hospital but now the cold was penetrating every room.

The hospital was deserted. As her strength returned she searched every room from roof to basement. No one was left. When she was well enough, she risked crossing from her unit to another building. The scarecrow witches still roamed the grounds, some on their hands and knees, others sniffing the air as they searched for refuse. They ignored her as she passed.

Every building in the hospital was empty.

As soon as she was able to walk without feeling faint she stole some clothes from a locker in a staff changing room. They were men’s clothes - jeans, tee-shirt, jumper and jacket, all too large - but she didn’t care. She needed to be war m. The shoes were never going to fit and she ended up having to use a pair of slippers from one of the wards. The slippers were pink and fluffy. She wept when she thought of her mother and the agony in her chest returned twofold. There were painkillers in the nurses’ trolley and she took a bottle of Cocodamol with her to help with the pain. It was when she was still that the ache in her broken chest was at its worst. Once she was on the streets and walking, it eased.

She wasn’t as strong as she’d thought. It took her two days to walk to the Meadowlands estate. She had to spend the night in an abandoned house. Even though the scarecrow witches didn’t even seem to see her, she still locked all the doors. The following evening she arrived at her own house, deserted now and the back door still wide open. She found the key she was looking for in a box under her bed, changed into some of her own clothes and walked to Mason Brand’s house.

The garden had gone to seed, the overgrowth beginning to die back now the cold weather had come. In the bottom corner of the garden where they’d knelt together in the moonlight there was still a patch of bare earth. At the centre of it grew a plant, some kind of weed she didn’t recognise. It had flowered and where the flowers had been were small knobbly pods. The pods had split and their seeds lay on the ground. She picked a pod and shook the dry seeds into her pocket before heading up the garden to Mason’s back door and unlocking it with his key. In the cupboard of an upstairs bedroom, she found a small pine chest.

It was time to take responsibility, to grow up and keep the promise she’d made him. She would learn the Earth’s ways. She would pass them on.

***

Day by day, winter put the world to sleep.

It chilled the sap of the trees, chasing it deep into their hearts. It sent the animals to their burrows to wait for warmer days. It forced the human survivors to go to ground in their own way; finding safe places, places to be warm and quiet. Places where they could think about survival and the future, if there was to be one. Places to remember all they’d possessed - and all they’d lost because of it.

They hid from the new breed of creatures, born of the fecalith’s spirit and of the ashes of its children. They hid from the winter’s long season and they hid from the Earth as she cleansed herself.

They hid and they waited.