CHAPTER THREE

 

 

RICK WAS SHOCKED into immobility for a fraction of a second – certainly no more than that, but possibly even less – before his training kicked in. Hitting the floor, he rolled smoothly across the landing and kept close to the wall. If you stayed low you made a more difficult target, and moving in a straight line was out of the question. Confuse the enemy: do what is least expected.

Screaming and gunshots tore the air. Bodies tumbled by him, guns swinging up into active positions. Rick made his way back to the stairs, where Hutch was trying to aim at something through the dissipating smoke. “Good job,” he yelled, his pistol twitching, shifting, eyes scanning the area for someone or something to target. He took off his helmet to scratch his head, sweat glistening in his hair and on his forehead.

Rick tucked himself in behind the thick concrete newel post, ensuring that he created as small a target as possible. He reached out to grab Hutch’s arm, to tell his friend what he’d seen – the kids throwing smoking missiles, the laughing mad woman urging them on – but Hutch pulled sharply away, his movement violent and final. Rick felt a warm, moist sensation against the side of his face. His lips were pasted with hot fluid.

Hutch’s body sagged. His gun fell to the floor; he began to inch backwards, down the stairs, his empty hands grasping at the air. When what remained of his face swung lazily into view, Rick saw that half the man’s head had been obliterated. Bone was caught in a frozen spray; blood still spurted like strawberry syrup pumped through an air hose. Hutch’s mouth was agape, but there wasn’t enough of it left to describe a silent scream… his remaining eye had already rolled back into his shattered skull, and the other socket was filled with red.

Rick watched his friend fall, not even attempting to catch him. Hutch’s slack body tumbled down the short flight, slamming into the wall on the half landing below, leaving bloody smears on the whitewashed plaster. Rick closed his eyes, pictured the scene, and started planning his next move.

Somehow finding a point of calm in the chaos around him, Rick rose and edged towards the mass of bodies around the door of the flat that was the subject of the raid – number twenty-four. Several police officers of various ranks formed a semi circle around the shattered entryway, most of them coughing; others ran along the landing, grabbing bystanders and pushing them back into their flats. Rick’s emergency measures had not lasted: the doors inside certain buildings never remained closed for long.

“– fuck off me!” screamed a man who was backing out of number twenty-four. It was Tennant, the big man who’d been first inside the block. A woman hung from his chest by her hands; her feet dragged along behind her. She was spitting and snarling like a wild dog.

“Careful! HIV risk!” Rick did not recognise this second voice, but everyone seemed to take an unconscious step backwards, away from the woman who was trying her best to attack Tennant.

“Bitch!” said Tennant, swatting her away as if she were a small animal nagging him for food. The woman shot sideways, her head making contact with the door frame. Her eyes rolled back into her head and her tongue pushed between her swollen lips. She was tiny – almost a midget. Her hair was large and bushy, either completely unkempt or teased into some fashionable retro style.

Another officer emerged from the flat, his eyes streaming. Vomit speckled his lips and chin. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, Jesus. Don’t go in there.”

The shooting had stopped. The hot stench of battle stung Rick’s nostrils, but it was a smell he was used to, and even enjoyed in a twisted way. “What is it?” he said, stepping forward, taking the initiative.

The newcomer stared at him. His face was pale, bloodless, and his expression was one of utter despair. “I can’t even tell you… it’s a mess in there. A real fucking mess.” The man stumbled off, heading for the stairs. Rick wondered if he’d puke again when he saw Hutch’s body.

Hutch. The last of the guys he’d met all those years ago in basic training. They’d served their first tour of Iraq together, helping each other through, and left the forces at roughly the same time, but for different reasons.

How the hell was he going to break it to Hutch’s wife, Jenny? It would have to be him; he’d known the woman for years, and liked her a lot. The baby was due in a month. The baby Hutch had left the army to be near.

Tensing his jaw, Rick moved into the doorway. No one else seemed willing to enter, and the superior officers were already inside. Without receiving further orders, Rick guessed that he was on his own. Maybe this was his chance to shine.

Someone pushed him forward, eager for another rookie to be thrust into the mix. Rick allowed his forward momentum to carry him across the threshold, and he was immediately struck by the sight of bloodstains on the floor and walls. So much blood. As if the short entrance hallway had been decorated with it. Smears and stripes and spatters – a Jackson Pollack configuration leading right up the wall to the tobacco-yellowed Artex ceiling.

The body of a man lay half in and half out of what he supposed must be the living room. He could only see the legs and buttocks. The upper half was inside the other room. The white slacks on the skinny legs were covered with blood. One shoe and its corresponding sock were missing (blown off in the fire-fight, or not put on in the first place?) The left buttock was a mess of raw meat where he’d taken a hit in the arse.

Glancing across the felled victim, Rick saw that the television was playing in the darkened room. It was tuned to a news station, and a series of images showing mobs attacking police vehicles filled the screen. Words scrolled beneath the footage: LIVE FROM MILLENIUM SQUARE, LEEDS.

The volume was turned down low and some sort of dance music was playing on a sound system he could not locate. He resisted the urge to step over the corpse to closer investigate the news report.

Rick eased around the lower extremities of the corpse. He tried hard not to look, but when he drew level he was unable to keep his eyes from straying back into the room. Cheap wallpaper. Thrift shop furniture. Clothing scattered on the filthy wooden floor. The top half of the body had been almost severed at the hip. The man had taken several rounds before going down. A tiny bleb of creased intestine poked out from his side, just above the beltline. His dark shaven head was turned to one side, the cheek squashed against the laminated floor and one eye frozen open to stare into infinity.

Keep going. Let it all wash over you like a river over pebbles.

It was a mantra he’d heard during his final tour of Afghanistan, from a mate who’d been heavily into martial arts. The mate was dead now, like the rest of them, but his voice hung around like so many others inside Rick’s head. Sometimes he thought those voices might never shut up; only fade into the background, a constant choral hum.

The voices of the dead; the voices of the dead men he had called friends; the voices of the dead friends whose lives had been wasted while his had been saved.

An open bedroom door further along and to the left offered him another glimpse of horror. Two members of his unit were kneeling beside the corpse of a young Asian man, this one with designer tram lines shaved into his close-cropped hair. Their victim was still twitching, gasping out his last breaths. The officers were silent, almost respectful, as they watched the man die. Blood on the floor; gasps in the air.

Moving on, he approached the kitchen. That was when things got bad.

“Nutman… that you, Nutman?”

“Yes, sir. It’s Nutman, D.I. Harper, sir.” Rick stopped outside the room, the familiar aroma of recent death in his nostrils. He removed his helmet and placed it on a shelf by the door, next to a long-dead prayer plant in a grubby plastic pot.

“Get in here, Nutman. You’re not going to believe this, but try to keep your dinner down, yeah?” A large bulky frame hovered in the doorway. Behind him, a light began to flicker.

“Shit,” said another voice. “All we need.”

Rick stepped forward, his hands clenching into fists. His stomach was calm but his heart was beating double-time. He was sweating under the heavy riot gear; the stab vest stuck to his T-shirt; the T-shirt adhered to his chest.

The first thing Rick saw was D.I. Harper’s ashen face. The huge man was leaning against a kitchen work bench, his head down but turned towards Rick. His eyes were hollow, lifeless, and his mouth was a grim slit. “Fuckin’ animals,” he muttered, shaking that large head in disbelief.

There was a severed head in the stainless steel kitchen sink. What looked like viscera sat in a lumpy mess on the draining board – looking closely, Rick thought he could make out a lung, a heart, lengths of looped intestine. He tried to look away but was unable to unlock his gaze from the nightmare. He stared at the head. Its eyes were gone, the sockets smooth and empty. There were teeth marks in one cheek – they couldn’t be anything else – and the nose was gone.

“Cannibals,” said D.I. Harper, his voice thin and reedy, the exact opposite of his build. “Cannibals.” He began to repeat the word, not even aware that he was doing so. Two other officers stood against the wall. One of them was covering his mouth with his hand and staring down at his feet. His shoes were covered in vomit.

The fridge door hung open, its hinges broken. The shelves were sparsely stocked: a few pieces of cling-filmed meat, half a pineapple, an opened can of baked beans. At the bottom, where the salad shelves should be, there was an open space occupied by several human hands.

“Sir… this isn’t terrorism. What’s going on?” Rick felt like the floor was rushing up to meet him, but he composed himself by thinking of Hutch, his wife, their unborn baby. “What is this?”

D.I. Harper straightened, his head almost touching the low ceiling. The dim light flickered again, lending his features an unearthly tint. “I don’t know, son. I really don’t know. We have four suspects dead inside this place, and every room contains what seem to be partially consumed human remains. We’ve either stumbled on a gang of serial killers here, or some sort of weird cult. I’ve never seen anything like it…” he finished lamely, shaking his head and rubbing his neck with a big square hand.

Time stood still for Rick. He was trapped in someone else’s nightmare. The blood hardly bothered him now; there was so much of it that he stopped noticing it. What hit him hardest was not the wet pile of guts on the draining board, nor was it the head in the sink that almost broke him… no, it was those hands. Clean dainty human hands. Six of them: three pairs all lined up like crab claws in a neat row along the bottom of the fridge. What kind of insanity did it take to cut off those hands and then store them for later?

What stopped him vomiting was the piercing sound of screams erupting suddenly from the other room. At first he thought it was a woman, but then remembered that their particular unit was famously made up of all male officers. The only woman in the vicinity was the fuzzy-haired maniac he’d seen earlier, but Tennant had silenced her.

“What now?” D.I. Harper looked wasted, as if he could face no more of this night. The other two officers glanced at each other, then at Rick.

“I’ll go,” he said, turning away and walking back along the hallway. After three or four steps he saw where the screaming was coming from. Another rookie – someone whose name he had not been told – was shuffling backwards towards him, his backside scraping the floor and his hands clutching at the skirting boards. He was moving fast for a man on his arse, mainly due to what was pursuing him.

The designer-skinhead gunshot victim who’d been dying only moments earlier – the young man almost surely slain during the initial shoot-out – was slowly making his way along the hallway, lying on his belly and dragging himself forward with bloody hands, the bullet-addled lower half of his body spilling intestines onto the scuffed floor boards.

There was no way on earth the man could be doing this. He was dead, gunned down. But here he was, moving clumsily, inch by inch, and gaining ground on the screaming rookie.

“Shut up,” said Rick, reaching down to grab the guy’s shoulder. The rookie twitched, then managed to climb to his feet, using Rick’s legs and torso as leverage.

The man – the dead man – moved relentlessly forward. His eyes were flat, dull, like old pennies, and his upturned face hung loose on his skull. He was grinding his teeth, just like Sally used to whenever she was nervous, before the dentist had fitted her with a bespoke gum shield to help her kick the habit.

But the dead man had no gum shield – he barely had any teeth. Those remaining in his head were shattered and projected from his lips like snapped pieces of wood.

“Shoot it!” Yelled the rookie. “For God’s sake, just shoot it!”

Rick raised his pistol, aimed carefully, and put a shot in the dead man’s shoulder. The dead man jerked like he was pulled by strings, but kept on coming. Rick put another round in his opposite shoulder. That didn’t stop him either.

“Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God…” The man at his side chanted like a Buddhist monk, fading from the scene, turning in on himself.

Rick aimed again, this time at the dead man’s back, right above the heart. He pulled the trigger, feeling the gun buck in his hands. A chunk of flesh flew out of the dead man, blood tracing an arc in the air. He did not stop. His hands reached out; they were inches from Rick’s boots. He shuffled backward, shoving the rookie out of the way. Then he aimed his Glock at the top of dead man’s carefully crafted haircut, right between two of his carefully shaved tramlines.

Why doesn’t he die? Rick thought, his mind focused, nerves strung as tightly as guitar strings.

The dead man looked up at him, nothing in his gaze.

This time when Rick squeezed the trigger blood and thick clotted matter sprayed in an elegant parabola, turning the wall and floor behind the dead man dark red. The dead man raised his eyes, and then lifted himself almost to his feet before toppling forward onto his face. The top of his skull was level with Rick’s feet. He stared at the wound, at the grey-purple brains bulging out of the hole. They looked like those disgusting meat things Sally’s granny used to eat – what where they called, faggots? Yeah, that was it: braised faggots.

The rookie started to cry. Rick turned just in time to see a dead woman emerge from the bedroom and grab the rookie’s arm. She was Afro-Caribbean, with big eyes and thick lips, but her skin was curiously pale. Her teeth were shockingly white when she opened her mouth and bit down on the rookie’s neck, scraping easily through the flesh to puncture his carotid artery. The spray of blood was majestic: a bright geyser. The rookie tried to slap her away but already his strength was failing; his arms flapped uselessly, his hands sliding off the dead woman’s face.

Always a fast learner, Rick reacted instantly and shot her through the right eye. This time the blood misted, forming an ethereal pattern in the musty air – crimson dust motes caught in the meagre illumination. Rick watched it, enraptured by its slow-moving dance, the way the flickering kitchen light caught like rubies in its diaphanous mass.

He stared at the Glock, hypnotised by the sluggish movement of smoke as it poured from the muzzle and traced a grey puzzle in the air directly ahead of him. Then he looked back at the woman, tilting his head to one side in an odd unconscious mannerism that, unbeknownst to him, he’d last done as an inquisitive child of seven. She was laying face-up on the ground, her eye socket enlarged and red matter hanging in strings from the damaged orbit. Blood pooled around her pasty features even as he watched, shining dully on the floor.

He shot her again, just to make sure she stayed down, and the top of her head was vaporised in a bright shock of blood, brain and bone. Rick felt something in his head click, as if a switch had been thrown – he was not sure what it was, but it felt like some old, long-neglected mechanism was once more becoming operational.

He thought of the desert. The screams. The friends he had lost. Somehow, the memories did not hurt even half as much as they had fifteen minutes before.