CHAPTER TWELVE

 

 

RICK STOOD IN the middle of the street and watched the flames as they reached towards the sky, his eyes dry from the heat and his face touched by a peculiar sensuous warmth. The kiddies play park lay behind him, hidden by shadow; the light of the fire barely reached the footpath at the base of the high wall, the top of which he’d dropped down from as he left the park.

A small group of people stood watching the church burn. It was a new building, one of those recent houses of worship built to service contemporary housing estates. Redbrick walls and geometric enclaves; a white plaster Saviour stuck to a black plastic cross; tasteful stained glass windows depicting not scenes from the Bible but simple pretty patterns.

Rick approached the conflagration, his hand straying to the holster on his belt. His boots crunched on broken glass. A few cars had been parked, crashed or abandoned at the roadside. The one closest to Rick contained a dead man who was slumped over the steering wheel, his hair a mess of coagulated blood and gore.

It had stopped snowing before it had even had a chance to begin in earnest. The air remained crisp and sharp but was not yet close to freezing.

A tall man in a shabby brown overcoat stood apart from the crowd, his hands in his pockets and a thin dog lead hanging from one wrist. He was about six feet tall but he stood with a slightly slumped posture, as if ashamed of his height. His brown hair was messy. Firelight shone on his intelligent face, creating dark hollows beneath his eyes.

“Quite a fire,” said the man as Rick walked up to him. “It’s the prettiest thing I’ve seen in days.” His voice was on the verge of breaking.

“Why are they burning the church?” Rick glanced at the side of the man’s sombre face, at his round cheeks and his unshaven neck. The man turned to face Rick, and for the first time he saw that there were tears in his eyes. Rick glanced at the dog lead, hanging as loose and pointless as a scarf from the man’s clenched hand.

“These people no longer have need for churches. In case you haven’t noticed, heaven is now full and closed for business until further notification.” He flashed a grim half smile. “The dead are stranded here, with the rest of us.” He blinked. His eyes shone with a terrible sick-house brightness.

“I see,” said Rick, not really seeing at all. He was utterly unable to understand what was going on and why these things were happening. “So they’ve turned their back on God?”

The man shook his head, a rueful smile on his thin lips. “Oh, no. I think it’s more a case of God turning his back on them. On us. All of us.” He turned back to watch the capering yellow-gold fingers of the flames, his smile becoming a sad, strained expression, like a grimace of pain.

“What happened to your dog?” Rick wasn’t sure why he asked the question. It was just something to say, a few empty words to fill the unearthly silence.

“My girlfriend ate him. She died earlier this evening, from a wound sustained when we were attacked by a dead man.” Again that rueful stillborn smile flashed across his weary features. “Then she came back and ate the dog. I had to kill her when she tried to eat me, too.”

Once again, Rick was aware of that thin, wavering line between the absurd and the horrific. This entire situation was like a bad cosmic joke, a trick played by bored omnipotent entities making up some kind of awful game for their own eternal amusement.

Rick moved off as the man began to weep. He held the dog lead up to his face, his mouth, kissing it, smelling it. Then he dropped his head and let the battered leather lead fall to the ground, and walked away, shoulders slumped, feet dragging on the cracked asphalt. Rick wished him well, hoped that he found some kind of peace, that he survived.

He paused and watched the fire for a few more moments, and when the other onlookers began to drift away he headed back towards the car he’d seen earlier, the one with the dead man sprawled behind the wheel.

He surveyed the vehicle, noting that – as he’d first suspected – the keys were still lodged in the ignition. The windscreen was cracked, but not to the point that it had shattered completely, and it would still be possible to see perfectly well through the glass. He only hoped that the engine wasn’t damaged and there was still enough petrol in the tank to get him on his way.

Behind him, someone screamed. He took out his pistol and dropped into a crouch, scanning the streets and the shadowy, flame-licked houses. The scream did not come again. The people who’d been watching the fire had all gone elsewhere. He wondered if they had been the ones who’d set fire to the church, or if they’d simply turned up to watch it burn.

Holstering the Glock, he turned once more to the car. It was a small four-wheel drive, one of those nippy little Nissan jeeps favoured by hairdressers and young sporty types. He stepped over the rubble and grabbed the dead man by the shoulder, half expecting him to spring to life and attack. The dead man did not budge. As Rick pulled him into an upright position, he noticed the wounds in his skull. The entire top half of the dead man’s head had been smashed in, the bone collapsing like egg shell to pierce the exposed brain matter and turn it into what resembled strips of shredded beef.

He tilted the body and hefted it from the car. Straining, he then dragged the corpse a few feet away from the vehicle and shoved it into the gutter. He wiped his hands on his trouser legs, feeling that the blood of this night would never wash off. He was stained forever, destined to walk in a red shadow for the rest of his days – however long or short that might eventually prove to be.

Rick spotted a rag tucked into a map pocket in the driver’s door. He took it out and cleaned most of the blood and matter off the steering wheel, dashboard and torn seat cover. Pausing for a moment to ensure that no one was sneaking up on him, perhaps a dead person drawn by the smell of blood, he then climbed into the car. He turned the key in the ignition and was almost overjoyed when it caught first time. The relief he felt did not last long. He had other business to attend to, and could afford no time for a self-indulgent show of emotion.

The engine roared, healthy and eager to go. Looking at the dashboard, he saw that the tank was half full – more than enough to get him home and then a good way out of the city. All he need fear was the roads being blocked. He knew the area well enough to map out a route via the lesser known police rat-runs and backstreets, but when it came to leaving Leeds itself he expected to run into trouble on the motorway.

He pressed his foot down on the pedal, enjoying the sound of the engine as it soared. “Come on, my sweetie,” he whispered, allowing a slight smile to twist his lips.

Then, not even bothering to indicate or check his mirrors, he screamed out into the road and set off for home, where he hoped that Sally was waiting for him, cowering behind locked doors and barred windows, or perhaps even hiding in a closet or the cramped section of storage space beneath the kitchen counter.

He knew that he’d taught her well. He had no doubt that Sally would do her best to maintain her own safety, and that she would have faith in him coming to get her as quickly as he could.

The roads were empty of traffic, but he passed the occasional figure as he sped towards the city centre. Some of those he saw were raging, waving their arms in the air in unfocused acts of aggression. Others were running, looking for hiding places. Of these, only the latter caused him to doubt his flight from what he thought was the epicentre of the troubles. His sense of duty screamed at him to stop and help, to act like a police officer and do what he could. But then, with the unbidden intensity of a religious vision, he saw Sally’s face: her open lips, her wide, fearful eyes.

Rick drove on, fighting against his training, following instead his instincts towards the one he loved – the one he had always loved, and who had saved him from himself when he’d suffered tremendous physical and mental injuries during a war he had never truly understood or entirely believed in.

He passed the smoking, burned-out carcasses of cars and vans, the blackened spidery-shapes of wrecked motorcycles. Houses burned, too, along with shops and places of business. It seemed that these insane events had inspired within the populace a latent love of fire. Like firebugs, they’d moved across the landscape, lighting things and watching them burn. When the novelty wore off they moved on; or perhaps they fell foul of roaming bands of the hungry dead.

Occasionally he was forced to take a different route, to circumnavigate fiery ruins or impassable pile-ups in the road. Once, while skirting a famously rough estate, he encountered a gang of youths who were, for some reason, in the process of stripping a vehicle down to its chassis. The car’s owners sat on the kerb. They were naked and shivering, too terrified to get up and flee as two boys casually urinated on them, laughing and chiding one another into further acts of depravity.

A weeping woman stared at Rick as he passed, her eyes pleading. Her male companion stared at his feet, piss running down his face and neck to pool in the gutter. Resisting the urge to lean out of the window and start shooting, Rick kept moving. The youths hurled bricks and pieces of wood at the speeding Nissan.

He regretted not stopping to help those people for the rest of his life.

Rick witnessed the dead, too, moving like ghosts – or demons – through the strange fire-lit darkness to scavenge scraps of burned meat, plunder abandoned corpses, and chase down ill-hidden victims. A few of them stumbled like drunkards, their movements clumsy and uncoordinated. Others ran at speed, nimble and graceful, and displaying great strength and agility. Most fell between these two extremes, walking stiffly yet unhindered and searching the night for food. He noted the differences in posture, movement and physicality for future study: when he had the chance, he’d try to examine why the dead did not stick to an established set of physical characteristics.

The journey was tricky but not impossible. Vast tracts of the city lay in darkness, while other areas remained brightly lit, possibly by flames. His speed ranged from a slow crawl through debris-lined avenues to a foot-down sprint along wide, empty boulevards. He kept away from the inner ring road, expecting it to be blocked. As long as he remained focused, and kept his mind alert, he would make it home before daylight.

Sally beckoned to him like a needy ghost. He saw her standing on every street corner and crouching in every shadow. Her presence was a constant; her need was like a drug. The only thing on his mind was her safety. If he failed to get to her before anything happened, before their home came under attack from either the living or the dead... then he was lost; lost forever.

“I’m coming,” he muttered under his breath, barely aware of doing so. “I’m coming for you. I’ll get there. I promise.”

The canal sparkled like a ribbon of diseased body fluid, tracing a putrid course from the morgue slab to the drain. He stared straight ahead, his eyes picking out the apartment block against a black slab of sky. The lights were out – like a lot of the lights around the city, other than the constant sparks and flashes from the many fires that washed the skyline like hellish searchlights. His eyes were drawn to these lurid bright smears in the otherwise darkling sky; huge smudged sections of flickering red-gold illumination.

He swung the Nissan into the parking area under the apartments, jumping out and running across the cold concrete surface towards the locked doors. He searched his pocket for his swipe card, and then barged into the building, drawing his gun and heading for the stairs. The doors clicked gently shut behind him.

Something made a soft thudding sound behind a closed door; a voice called out from the floor above; gentle sobs echoed along the hallway to his left, then abruptly ceased.

Due to its isolated location by the mostly ornamental channel that branched off the main canal, the apartment was a relatively safe base. Away from the rough areas, set back from the main roads, it had always been a quiet retreat from the chaos of the city; yet the city began in earnest just opposite, across the canal, where office blocks towered over the narrow stretch of water.

If the apartment block had been situated a mile or so to the east or west, it might have come under attack. As it stood, the place seemed intact. There were no tell-tale signs of forced entry, nor could Rick smell smoke or – worse still – blood.

Rick moved up the stairs, remembering Hutch’s messy demise. The memory hurt, just like most of his memories, and he pushed it aside for later. Shadows stirred ahead of him, curling strands and shuddering bulges of blackness. Turning the corner at the top of the stairs, he continued upwards, climbing through the heart of the building.

Finally he stood on his and Sally’s floor. The landing was empty, its perspective seeming weirdly telescopic in the darkness, making it look like a constricting throat. Rick blinked, shook his head to dispel the illusion. Then he walked slowly forward, heading for his own door.

His heart dropped like a stone when he saw the open door. His hands began to shake as they clutched the gun. He was suddenly unable to move any farther along the landing; his legs seized, the muscles turning to hardening slabs of concrete. He heard Hutch’s dying breath hissing through shattered lips; he felt the blast of an explosive charge in the dry desert heat; he heard the firewatcher’s voice as he spoke of God abandoning his people; and once again he watched the twitching corpses in the Dead Rooms as they got up and walked, attacking his unit.

“Please,” he said, not really knowing who he said it to, just repeating the words, like a mantra. “Please.”

Finally he was able to move. He forced his feet onward, sliding them across the tiles. They made a horrible whispering-swishing sound, like a knife blade slicing through the air.

Gun held out, he kicked the door all the way open, watching as it slammed against the wall, the handle leaving a dent in the plaster. Darkness forced its way out of the apartment, enveloping him. He smelled the coppery aroma of freshly spilled blood.

A whining sound came to his ears, startling him as it rose in pitch, and it took him several seconds to realise that it was coming from his own lips, his dried-out throat. He swallowed; the spit hurt on its way down his oesophagus.

Let her be okay. Let her be alive and waiting for me.

Clomping along the hall, feeling heavy and lacking in any kind of grace in his movements, he rounded the sharp corner at the end of the entry passage. The living room beckoned like an opening fist. Darkness squatted like beasts in the corners. Reflected fire limned the edges of the window frames, turning them a shade of umber. Shadows inched along the floor towards him.

Sally was stretched out on the floor, face-up, her arms flat and her hands lying limp at her sides, as if she’d been laid out to rest in a peaceful position prior to a dignified funeral. She was wearing a pair of old blue jeans, faded at the knees, one of his ripped gym sweatshirts, and her feet were bare. There was blood on the floor, near her head. It looked black in the dim light, like a puddle of tar, or crude oil.

Rick felt the room tilt; it spun like a fairground fun ride. Nausea built within him, filling his gut with heavy bile. It rose slowly up his throat and edged into his mouth, finally bursting, hot and bitter, between his clenched teeth. The hot puke spattered and rolled down his chin, staining his clothing, but he ignored it. His eyes burned. His hand shook. The gun went off, puncturing the silence. He stared at the gun, at his finger still pressing down on the trigger. It took a substantial amount of mental effort to take his finger away and lower the gun.

There was no one else here: he could see that. The apartment was empty. But for him. But for Sally, sweet dead Sally. Whoever had done this – whatever kind of opportunistic murderer had broken in and destroyed his life – was no longer present; only his or her workmanship remained.

His gun hand dropped to his side, still hanging onto the weapon. He would not let it go; the pistol’s work was not yet done.

Moving across the room, he went to her, kneeling down at her feet and caressing the cold skin, rubbing the hard nub of her ankle, his hands travelling slowly upward, towards her thighs, her waist, and her flat belly. He paused there, palm open across her tiny taut stomach, trying to summon some remnants of warmth through the frayed material of the old sweatshirt.

None came. So he moved on, running his fingers along the nape of her neck, gently stroking her chin... then, at last seeing what was left of her face, he stopped, unable to go on any further.

As Rick suspected when he’d first seen her body, Sally’s death was not the result of a clumsy attack by the reanimated dead. No, human hands had been at work here, and they had done their worst.

The skin of her face had been inexpertly peeled away from the bone, laying bare swathes of smooth red muscle. Her nose was gone completely, sawn off with careless hands wielding an unsuitable blade. Her hair was bloody, hanging around this horror-mask in tatty crimson ropes. Her skull was flattened into an oval, mashed and elongated by the force of whatever blows had fallen onto her unprotected head; the bones had un-knitted and returned to their separate shards, like the soft, as yet unformed skull of a newborn baby.

No bite marks. These wounds were thought out, orchestrated, despite being messily executed.

“Oh, God. What have they done?” His breast felt like it was filled with a thousand tiny metal balls; he found it difficult to breathe as they rattled around in his chest cavity.

His reluctant hand hovered over Sally’s ruined face, her tattered features, a mile of open space concentrated into an inch of air between his sweaty palm and her brutally ravaged flesh. He held it there, shaking, as if trying to counteract an unimaginable weight. Then, soon, he began to realise that the hand was caught fast and he could not shift it. He struggled against whatever held it there, but the dead weight of Sally’s passing was simply too much to resist.

So he waited. And eventually the weight lifted, moved on, allowing him to release his hand from the tender trap.

He wailed like an animal, raising his head to the ceiling, reaching out beyond the structure of the building and into the sky and the stars and towards the cold dead light of the white-faced moon. He realised that the moon was death, too: a stark dead planet where nothing stirred, no life existed. He felt like he was sitting deep inside a crater on that moon, ensconced within a hollow formed by his own grief, and if he did not attempt to move he might remain there forever, trapped in this perfect moment of absolute loss.

Sobbing now, Rick dragged Sally’s body up onto the sofa. One hand still held the gun, so it was difficult to manoeuvre her lifeless form. He struggled, pushing and tugging and finally shifting her, pulling her on top of him as he collapsed onto the cushions. He sat there with her poor flensed face in his lap, the stripped lips pressing against his crotch. He stroked her matted hair, singing to her in a language no other human lips had ever formed, not once in the entire history of mankind’s grieving.

Rick was no longer aware of the passage of time. He had no idea how long he sat there, cradling his wife’s torn head. He stared at her candyfloss hair, then at the shiny gun; long moments spent examining each, trying to come to a decision. He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, feeling it click against his teeth and rest on his tongue. Then he took it out again, setting it down on the cushion but not quite yet ready to let it go.

He raised his hand and put the gun in his mouth again. Took it out. Repeat. Pause. Then repeat.

Again.

He thought of the song that had been playing the night they’d first met, pumping out of the jukebox of a boozy little joint up in Newcastle: Solitary Man by Neil Diamond.

Again.

A Solitary Man: that’s what he was now, all right. Solitary. Alone. Left behind.

Again.

He tried to recall the words to the song, but all he could think of was the rhythm of the music, the way it had become the smooth, calming heartbeat of the whole wide world as they’d danced to the song in the middle of that half-empty bar, no one else on the dance floor that wasn’t even a dance floor at all, just a wide empty space near the back of the room. Dancing, together, for the first time...

Then, achieving some kind of final insight on that ratty two-seater sofa, Sally’s dead head resting in his unresponsive lap, he carefully placed the tip of the shaking barrel against his wife’s smashed skull, his quivering, bloodless finger resting heavily on the trigger.

The lights came on, shocking him and bathing everything inside the room in an almost unreal level of illumination. The television hissed static. Over on the dining table, Sally’s laptop clicked loudly and emitted a single loud bleeping noise before once again falling silent.

Rick stared at the gun.