From the CD player recessed in the dashboard, Johnny Cash began to sing about walking the line.
Magnus let out a delirious laugh.
“Put your foot down,” said Ralph.
Magnus nodded. He looked at the swarm of villagers filling the street, released the parking brake, and gunned the engine.
With a screech of tyres the car bolted down the driveway, knocking aside a man whose face was drooping on one side and knotted with swollen blisters. His left arm was a glistening appendage of coiling sinew and spikes erupting from epidermal layers.
Magnus turned onto the road. The villagers screamed to the sky; some crouched and stared, eyes shining and gleaming. Some grinned at the car as it rushed past them. Men, women, and children. Some were holding hands; others didn’t even have hands. Impossible limbs grew and retracted from twitching bodies. Bloated abdomens glistened in the headlights. Other forms reached out to the car, as if begging for help. These poor creatures staggered on emaciated legs wasted down to bone. Groans and screams echoed from around the street.
Joel was shivering on the backseat. Magnus was staring straight ahead, ignoring the monstrosities.
“Fucking hell,” said Ralph. “What happened to everyone? What are they?”
Neither Joel nor Magnus answered. And when Ralph thought about it, he didn’t want an answer. He dropped his knife in the footwell and held his face in his hands. The edges of his mind weakened and buckled. His body wanted to shut down and hibernate. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be at home, safe in bed, snacking on Hula Hoops and Jaffa Cakes.
“Jesus Christ,” Joel was muttering. “Jesus Christ…”
Magnus glanced at Ralph, daring to look away from the road. “Do you really think Frank is dead? Do you think those things killed him?”
“Maybe they ate him,” Joel whispered.
Ralph looked down the road. There were still ragged figures emerging from the houses and stalking towards the road. There were bodies on the lawns. He looked down at the pavement and saw bones scattered upon it.
The car passed out of the village, down the long, straight road.
When they’d travelled just less than a mile, a sudden light bloomed on the road ahead. Headlights.
Magnus stopped the car. Gripped the steering wheel.
“Who is that?” asked Joel, as if the others knew.
The light approached. The sound of an engine. Heavy and chugging. A large vehicle. Some type of truck.
It stopped twenty yards from them.
Several figures stepped into the light. Human. Normal, Ralph thought, but he had been fooled already today. They moved towards the car. Ralph stiffened in his seat. He had the urge to flee.
“Soldiers,” Ralph muttered, finding his voice, although it sounded pathetic.
“We’re saved,” said Joel.
Ralph eyed the gas mask-clad soldier moving to his side of the car. The barrel of an assault rifle centred upon him; his bowels became liquid. He stared into the soldier’s black, apathetic visage.
“I hope so, mate. I really hope so.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Frank was hiding in a garden outside a darkened house. His thighs throbbed and his calves ached. He was shivering. His heart was a manic, escalating slab of muscle. He held the crowbar tight to his chest, but it gave him no comfort, and the cold grass under his feet sucked all of the warmth from his body. He didn’t want those things to catch him. He didn’t want to die screaming. No person should die screaming.
Far off, over on the next street maybe, something screamed like a pig caught in a steel trap. He flinched, tried not to imagine what had birthed the sound. Exhaustion pulled at his body. He waited for what seemed like slow hours of torture.
He remembered the sights he had seen on his way here, running for his life through the empty streets of this dead village: human remains scattered on a road; stomachs opened up and steaming in the cold air; a crying man kneeling on a pavement, his body juddering as if caught in a seizure, bones snapping as arms and legs were bent into unnatural angles. The man had screamed when his spine protruded through the back of his shirt like an emerging dorsal fin; a tall, gangly-limbed apparition moving from house to house, peering through the windows.
A terrible, bulbous-eyed face had stared at him from the shadows of an overturned car and beckoned him inside with a long, bone-white finger.
Frank had managed to escape his pursuers, weaving down alleyways and side-streets without regard for what might have lurked within them, but the maniacs were still hunting him, wherever they were right now. Maybe they had found another unfortunate to hunt. Maybe they had forgotten about him.
Maybe they were waiting for him to emerge from his hiding place.
He gritted his teeth as nausea bloomed in his gut. He tensed his stomach muscles, fought the urge to vomit. He could still smell the corrupted stink of his pursuers; it was everywhere. They had marked the village, this ground, as their own.
Frank listened for any slight whisper or hush of movement from nearby. He dared to move his arms to restore some circulation.
There were clicking sounds out on the street. Light footfalls. The scuff of shoes upon tarmac. A low, rattling growl from a half-man’s mouth.
Frank stiffened, bunching up his body into a tight ball.
The cloud cover shifted to reveal the pallid half-moon. The glimmer of stars. The galaxy revealing itself. Silver light and metallic gleam.
The road adjacent to the garden was crawling with near-human shapes.
Could they smell him? Could they hear his heartbeat?
His eyes had adapted to the dark, and now with the added moonlight he could observe the creatures in more detail than was good for him. Some of them were naked, and this lack of inhibition showed him the black spines that had erupted from their bodies and colonised their flesh. Some were crouching and sniffing at the road, trying to pick up his scent. Men and women. No children, thankfully. Pale figures that reflected the starlight. Others skittered and moaned; one of them raised its face to the sky and wailed. The sound of claws with nothing to rip or shred.
One of the creatures was gibbering to itself; Frank thought he could discern words amongst the nonsense, but nothing that made any sense.
Then they moved away down the street.
What were they? Had there been a radioactive or toxic leak somewhere nearby and the people were mutated?
Frank waited until they were long gone. He stood and looked out onto the street, took a few steps towards the road then stopped, listened. Muffled thumps and booms in the distance, like the noises he had heard earlier when he’d cowered underneath the van. Sounded like fireworks. They resonated under his feet. He thought he saw a white flash in the sky to the north but he might have imagined it. He was quite sure it was coming from the west, but the houses blocked every horizon. He was in the centre of the village. He had to get back to Ralph, Magnus and Joel.
Frank slipped through the open gateway and onto the pavement. Pools of stinking fluid on the road. A smell like vinegar and eggs. Spoor or urine. Maybe something else. He thought of the pickled eggs Catherine would eat when she was drunk. They always made her breath smell, but he would gladly give her a lingering kiss now, just to be away from this place.
Something moved behind him. He pivoted, raising the crowbar.
A fox emerged from one of the gardens down the street. It saw Frank, but it wasn’t worried about him; there were deadlier predators on the streets tonight.
Frank watched the fox scamper across the road and into another garden.
“Good luck, mate,” Frank said, and he meant it.
He went back the way he had come, back to his mates. He crept along for a few minutes, scanning the gardens and houses brimming with ocean-floor darkness. His imagination told him of dangers in every hush of the breeze and listless shadow draped over the ground. He considered entering one of the many houses around him, but something told him there would be things inside their silent dark rooms waiting for someone like him. No, he would keep walking. He contemplated running, but realised he would make too much noise with the pounding of his shoes on the road.