CHAPTER THIRTY

 

 

DARYL HAD FINALLY grown tired of the stupid bitch.

“Will you please just shut up for a moment? I’m trying to think.”

Claire sat on the moped, her bare feet dragging in the grass. She was pouting, putting on a ridiculous show to stir his emotions. If only she knew that Daryl did not possess emotions; that would be a laugh. Oh, how he’d laugh... right before he cut off her head and used it as a hat.

“I just want a little attention,” she said, folding her arms across her perky breasts. She pouted again, a pathetic council-estate Monroe. It probably worked on most of the men she’d ever been with – but Daryl was not like most men.

Daryl tried his best to ignore her and watched the cottage through the binoculars. It was located on the other side of the canal, and the old barge was moored at a shitty little jetty right near it. They must be inside the cottage, hiding out for a while, taking a breath. All of them. The policeman, the old man, the little girl. And Sally, his one true love.

He looked again at Claire, and wondered why he’d thought she even slightly resembled Sally. She didn’t. She was crude and cheap... and stupid. That last was the most unforgivable thing of all. It made her just like everyone else, one of the mindless swarm of humanity Daryl had always felt separate from.

At first he’d thought that her hurt had singled her out and formed a connection between them. Now he realised that it made her the same as the rest of them – everyone has their own private parlour of pain, the place into which they like to retreat and act like a martyr.

“Silly bitch,” he said, almost snarling the words.

“What was that?” She stood, hands on hips, and tried to act like she was strong. Her legs were shaking and her face was pallid. She looked about as strong as a child’s doll.

“I said,” he advanced towards her. “Silly. Fucking. Bitch.” He slapped her across the face before she could respond, taking her by surprise. Her feet went out from under her, and she fell on her scrawny arse, a look of pure shock on her face.

Daryl’s hand stung from the contact, even inside Sally’s increasingly tattered gloves. He began to laugh, flexing his fingers and staring at them as if they’d suddenly taken on a life of their own.

The look of shock on Claire’s face turned quickly to one of fear, and she tried to shuffle backwards, retreating from him. “What’s wrong? Why are you doing this? I thought we were... friends. You know – a couple.”

“A couple of cunts,” Daryl snapped, between bouts of girlish giggling. His mind was strung between high wires, stretched so thin that it just might snap. He could picture it spread out above his head like a fleshy sheet.

Once the bout of uncontrollable hilarity had passed, he grabbed Claire by the hair and dragged her to her feet, gritting his teeth against the death lust that rose up his throat and into his mouth like bile. He could almost taste her extinction, and it was wonderful, growing within him like the shivery stirrings of an orgasm.

“Get on the bike,” he said, pushing her towards the machine. “We’re going.”

“Where?” she whined.

“Just going.” He nipped her arm, prodded her left breast, kicked her up the backside.

“Ow,” she said, rubbing at the spots he was casually abusing. “That hurts.”

“Good. It’s meant to. Much more of this nonsense and it’ll hurt a lot more than that.”

Their relationship had entered a new phase. Now that the thrill of sexual conquest was over and done with, Daryl felt nothing but disdain for this snivelling little bint. She was an annoyance; a mere sub plot in the ongoing script of his life. The sooner he wrote her out of the story the better he would feel about the whole thing.

Carefully he steered the bike along the track, dodging large stones and heading for the footbridge he had spotted some time ago. He didn’t want to enter the cottage and spook them. All he required was a safe vantage point, a place from which he could continue to watch the show. They were doing fine, this shabby band of survivors, and watching them was like viewing a film running in conjunction with his own wonderful cinematic adventures.

Daryl was not yet ready to switch the channel.

The gunshot was close. He heard it as he pulled up the moped at a fallen tree trunk, bringing the rear end around in a looping skid in the loose earth. It sounded to his untrained ears like an old blunderbuss, or something, so he guessed that it must be someone’s inherited shotgun. He’d never been educated in firearms, so all big guns sounded the same.

He sat on the bike and listened, waiting for the sound to come again. Claire’s hands pressed into his sides, hurting him because of her unnecessarily tight grip. He shifted on the seat; her grip tightened. The sound of laughter was carried on the breeze, putting him on edge.

“Bloody hell,” he said.

“What is it? Are we in danger?” Her voice was quiet, fear-soft. He liked it that way.

“I don’t know. It could be the police or maybe some yokels messing about with a gun. We need to be careful.”

She whimpered like a hurt dog. Daryl was not even sure that she was aware of making the sound. It made him dislike her even more. Jesus, what had he ever been attracted to? Ah, yes... he remembered now: her ease, the way she had given herself up to him in a flash.

He got off the moped and pushed it over to the grounded tree trunk. Claire got her leg stuck as she swung it over the seat, but managed to dismount before he forced her off the vehicle. She scowled at him, arms crossed and feet splayed outward. Her forearms were folded across her chest, as if barring the way.

“I’ll check this out,” he said, not even looking at her. What on earth had possessed him to let her tag along with him in the first place? Could the unaccustomed attention of a female have given him such a buzz that he was blinded to her obvious flaws?

Yes, he admitted to himself. That’s exactly what it was.

“Don’t leave me here...” She took a few steps towards him and then stopped, torn between maintaining her pained demeanour and following him into the trees. The undergrowth rustled, and somewhere above them a bird took to the air, rattling the dry branches like castanets.

“I won’t be long. Just hang around here, and yell if anyone comes along. Yell and I’ll come for you.” He pushed through the undergrowth and headed towards the approximate area where he thought the gunshots had originated. There was no more commotion, but the air felt pressurised, as if a thunderstorm were approaching. There was a sense of unresolved anxiety, of violence waiting to happen.

Small animals scurried before him, following unseen trails and fleeing from his approach. Daryl enjoyed the sense of power. It was an echo of how he felt when he ordered Claire about, and he realised that this was also part of the reason he had allowed her to hang around for so long. But the novelty was wearing off; her questionable allure had become stale. She did not have long left as his side-kick: it had always been a temporary position, a mere cameo role in the film he was creating.

Up ahead there appeared, out of the limp greenery, the grey bulk of a single-storey structure. It looked like a disused power station, an old reinforced concrete shell once used to contain electrical apparatus that had long ago been abandoned and left to rot. Parts of the structure were missing – rusted steel rods stuck out of the crumbling concrete like lethal booby traps. Daryl recalled the public information films he’d seen in school, vicious shorts made in the 1970s and featuring bowl-cut teenagers coming to dire ends in such derelict properties. There was a famous one about the ‘spirit of lonely water’ that had fuelled his fantasies for years... a hooded figure that hung around isolated ponds and lured kids to a death by drowning.

The young Daryl had masturbated over that commercial, filling his mind with images of dead boys and girls floating face-down in shallow water.

He smiled at the memories. This type of recollection was rare from his school days – most of the time he’d been bullied and pestered – so when good thoughts came to mind he felt that he should always take the time to enjoy them.

“Fuckin’ hell!” The voice came from just up ahead. It was dull, uneducated, lacking any favourable qualities as far as Daryl was concerned. It reminded him of the voices of kids he’d attended school with and the moronic adults they had developed into. Ugly boys usually brought up in single parent families, who would rather hit someone than discuss any potential differences in a calm, sensible manner.

“Took its bastard leg right off!”

Daryl crouched down and moved slowly, not wishing to be seen by the owner of the voice. He suspected that despite the changes currently reshaping the world, his presence was still something a certain kind of person might not exactly cherish. It had always been this way, and Daryl never expected it to change. Some things would remain the same forever; some people were incapable of transforming themselves into different personalities.

Thankfully Daryl was not one of these people. He was changing all the time, with a regularity that made him feel frightened and thrilled in equal measures. A few days ago he would never have treated a woman how he was treating Claire; today he could just as easily slit her throat as offer her a kiss. Tomorrow... well, who knew? Daryl the ever-changing was an unreadable entity, and he was quickly learning to live life day by day instead of as one long, unbearable sequence of hours (as it had been with Mother).

He watched the two men as they drank beer from cans and giggled. They were wearing winter clothes, some of which still had the price tags attached – gear they had obviously looted from a store. Their faces were ruddy from drink and their postures were loose and unpredictable. They laughed like madmen, slapping each other on the back and dancing in little circles, shuffling their booted feet on the hard dirt.

Daryl was more afraid of these men than he was of the walking dead.

There was a doorway in the side of the concrete power station: a rectangular opening made irregular by vandalism. The door itself was long gone, leaving just a dark hole. The concrete slab floor at the centre of the doorway had been broken away by the ravages of time and the elements to reveal a shallow basement, and suspended above this dark space, tied into a makeshift harness, was a severely mutilated body.

Daryl realised immediately what was going on here and the knowledge sickened him, despite his own recent activities.

The two men were using the woman’s reanimated corpse as a target for shooting practice. Both of her legs had been blown off, leaving rough-edged stumps, one of her arms was missing below the elbow, and there were several huge wounds in her naked torso. Her head remained intact, but her face had been slashed to ribbons.

The dead woman made tiny moaning noises as she swayed on the harness. Loops of rope had been wrapped around her shoulders and under her armpits, the other end looped over the steel lintel above the broken door opening. Some of the rope coils were red, and it took Daryl a little while to realise that her stomach had been opened and her intestines looped around her body along with the hemp.

“Get her in the head,” said the smaller of the two men, lighting up a hand-rolled cigarette. “Get the bitch in the fuckin’ mush! She’s asking for it.”

His friend laughed, and then tried to aim, but his hands were unsteady – probably due to his alcohol intake. Cans and bottles littered the ground at the men’s feet, and there were a couple of crates of beer leaning against a rotten tree stump. “Can barely see the twat,” he said, swaying slightly from side to side.

The small man laughed; a manic chuckle that chilled Daryl more than the cold and the sight of the guns.

A selection of weapons were laid out a few short yards away from Daryl – guns, knives, a machete, even a bow and arrows.

He eased forward, keeping his eyes on the two men. They were too drunk to even notice as he inched through the undergrowth, heading towards the makeshift armoury.

“Your turn... I can’t even see, I’m so pissed.” More laughter.

Daryl reached out carefully. His fingers grasped the handle of an old-fashioned shotgun and he lifted it, glancing at it briefly to register that the barrel had been sawn off half way down its length. He knew enough from movies to realise how much damage such a weapon was capable of doing to the human form at close range.

He brought the shotgun into his hiding place, cocked the hammers, and then stepped into the open, hoping that he’d done enough to arm the thing – and that it was loaded.

It took several seconds for the men to notice him, and Daryl waited until they had turned to face him before opening fire. He wanted to see their faces as their bodies were torn to shreds by the wide spray of pellets.

After he had let rip with both barrels, Daryl stood shrouded in smoke and the stench of cordite burned his nostrils. The two men lay on the ground, one of them still twitching. His torn clothes were bright red from the blood and as he raised his head, his eyes rolled in their sockets. His screaming was loud and wordless, like a siren. Daryl listened to it for a while, amazed that the throat could contort enough to make such inhuman sounds.

Then he stepped over to the man and brought the stock of the shotgun down on his skull with all the force he could muster, the bone cracking in a straight line down the centre of his brow. He repeated the process until the man was still and his head was reduced to a red mush, and then moved on to the second motionless moron: he did not want these two to come back. Even the dead had standards, and these two scumbags would bring down the entire group.

Daryl was sweating, his arms ached. He had an erection.

“Fuckers,” he whispered, all-too aware that by killing them he had been venting his hatred of the people who had made his life so empty. For all his days he had been harassed by men like these; his every move mocked, each word he’d spoken turned into a joke. Manual workers, office drones, every so-called ‘real man’ he had ever encountered: stupid muscle-headed fuckwits with more machismo than common sense.

But now it was Daryl’s turn to assume the role of the alpha male, and if he could reduce a few of these idiots to shredded meat along the way, then that was fine by him.

“Gnnnnnnn...” The dead woman moaned again, her bloodless torso thrashing. Daryl had forgotten that she was even there, and her movements dragged him back to reality. She was twisting on the rope, her shattered body moving like a bizarre mobile or weather vane.

Daryl bent down, retrieved a small handgun from one of the men’s cold hands, and shot the rope that held her. She fell into the hole that led to the basement, cracking her head on the rim as she vanished into the darkness. The accuracy of the shot had been a result of pure luck, but it made him feel once again that certain scenes had already been written for him to enact.

Daryl heard shuffling sounds, and then other moans emerged from down there in the black basement. He realised that there must be more dead people beneath the ground, perhaps deliberately trapped by these two men to provide more savage sport to amuse them. He actually appreciated their methods, and thought that if they had not been such arseholes he might even have joined in their fun. Unfortunately, men like these were not worth the trouble. They were better off out of the picture.

Daryl walked over to the hole and leaned over it, staring down into the basement. The floor was formed of compacted earth and there was just enough light that he could see the space was relatively small and sealed off by further underground walls. It was more like a pit than an actual room, and as far as he could see there were at least three or four other dead people in there beside the twisting torso he had released from the harness. He caught a glimpse of pale limbs, dirty clothing, and thin, shadowy faces with gaping mouths.

Daryl smiled. An idea had begun to form, and it seemed to him that he could have a little fun while ridding himself of a problem.

“Claire!” He doubled back and pushed his way into the bushes. “Claire, get over here.”

He glanced at the men’s bags and his eyes widened when they fell upon a small digital video camera. He picked it up and located the power button. The compact hand-held machine whined and then the lens cap slid back and the tiny screen flared into life.

Daryl pointed the camera at the power station and watched it on the screen, one remove from reality. It was the way he had always felt before these events: separated from everything by a camera lens, as if his life were being projected onto a vast screen for the amusement of others. Only this time he was the one being amused; the film was turning into something of his own devising, and whoever had scripted the first act was long gone.

He listened, heard the clatter of Claire’s clumsy approach through the undergrowth, and stepped back, smiling.

“What is it?” She was breathless when she broke through the trees.

“It’s okay. I’ve taken care of these jokers, so we can have a look around and see if they had any supplies.” He watched her through the camera, sizing her up for the next scene.

Claire was already rooting through their bags, her face lighting up at the sight of the beer. “Well, they have this.” She lifted a whisky bottle from the pack, grinning and smacking her lips.

The little camera whirred. There must be something broken inside, but it still worked well enough to allow Daryl to view the events around him. Even if the playback function had been disabled, it was enough that he could experience this all through a viewfinder. It felt more real this way.

Claire was standing so close to the pit that Daryl was amazed she did not hear the sounds coming from down below. It just went to show how unobservant she was, how up herself. If it wasn’t directly beneath her nose, then the bitch remained unaware, utterly absorbed in her own activity.

Daryl raised the pistol he had taken from the dead men’s stash.

“Claire?”

She looked up, her eyes shining, cheeks full of rose petals as she drank deeply from the whisky bottle.

Daryl shot her once in the left leg, knocking her sufficiently off balance that she fell right into the pit. For the second time that day he was pleased with his aim, considering that he was a total novice, and was holding the camera to one eye as he pulled the trigger. A second shot went astray, missing her completely. Claire screamed his name, her hands grasping at the uneven edge of the pit as her body weight pulled her down. She stared right at Daryl, a look of dawning horror on her face, and then she slipped beneath the surface of the earth. Screaming.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” said Daryl, walking softly towards the pit, filming it all. “But you were getting right on my fucking nerves.” The sounds of her screaming were already dying out; they were soon replaced by those of feasting.

Daryl peered into the pit but could only make out a large shape being torn apart by other shapes. Even the camera’s screen showed only a hazy image. The best was kept from him by darkness: he barely even caught sight of the blood as Claire was stripped to the bone. However long the dead people had been down there, it was long enough to make their hunger insatiable. The sound of their feeding frenzy was repellent, and Daryl had soon heard enough. He turned off the camera, the scene at its end.

Slowly, he walked back to the moped. There was a tin of corned beef in Claire’s rucksack. He fished it out, opened it, and began to eat. By the time he had finished the meat, Claire was a distant memory. Her name, her face, the echo of her words no longer made an impact on the surface of his life; not even the slightest ripple.

He packed up his stuff, slid the camera into his bag, climbed onto the moped, and set off towards whatever future he chose to create.