“Kill me,” Pulver said. “I’m begging you.”
The pustules on the man’s back throbbed violently. Something moved under his skin. Pulver’s back rippled. He moaned softly and a thin sliver of drool slipped from his wet mouth.
Frank turned back to Florence. “Stay in the kitchen. Don’t come in here.” He closed the door, stepped towards the man, the sodden carpet squelching under his shoes. Hot itchy air pressed at his skin.
Frank stood over the man.
“Please kill me.” Pulver looked up at him.
Frank hesitated.
“Please kill me.”
Frank opened his mouth. No words. He felt his mind weaken, as if the man’s insanity was infectious. He felt his face drain white.
“Please kill me,” said Pulver. “Or I will kill you, then the little girl you’ve left in the kitchen. I will go out to her and do such terrible things to her. I will rip her open and eat the best parts of her; every soft bit of her.”
The pustules throbbed and swelled. The man’s eyes went wide. A little smile. He opened his mouth.
Frank raised the crowbar and, before the man could thank him, brought down the wrench with all the power he could summon into his shaking hands, and kept hitting Pulver until the strength had drained from him.
They walked the road. Man and girl. The world was quiet.
Frank had thrown away the crowbar after dispatching David Pulver. He could not face wiping it clean. Skull fragments and blood had stuck to the business-end of the wrench like melted confectionary.
He remembered Pulver’s mad face. Those eyes like dark stains. Taking the man’s life was easier than he thought it’d be, and he felt ashamed and guilty. He had killed twice, now. But he was not a killer.
But he would kill for Florence.
He’d found an axe out the back of the Pulver house, forgotten in a corner amongst other tools and discarded things. It was still sharp. A tinge of rust. It could still cut and chop.
He carried a rucksack containing some tins of food, a few cans of fizzy drink, and two packets of ready salted crisps. A blanket for Florence, a torch and a pair of binoculars. He’d emptied the cupboards in the house while Florence sat at the kitchen table, forbidden to enter the living room. He had no qualms about looting a family’s home. Not now, anyway. Things had changed.
Frank’s shadow shivered. He watched the mist, expecting faces to emerge from within it. He observed Florence in his peripheral vision; her head was down, the hood of her jacket over her head. Scuffling her feet on the tarmac. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the house.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at him.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“That man was sick, wasn’t he?”
“He was sick with something. Infected. He said he was changing.”
“What does ‘infected’ mean?”
“It means to be sick.”
“Like the flu?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s something worse than the flu?”
“Looks that way.”
“Will we get sick? Infected?”
He had considered this already, and managed to convince himself they were safe from infection, or whatever it was.
What if it was airborne?
“We’ll be fine,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the uneven tone of his voice.
She looked at him for the first time in a while. “But everyone else is dying or becoming monsters, aren’t they?”
Frank thought of Catherine waiting for him back home. How many people were dead or turning into monsters?
“I don’t know.”
There was gunfire in the distance.
They moved on towards Horsham. Frank led the way. Florence stayed by his side, but she was monosyllabic. Frank knew enough about loss and mourning to understand her reaction.
Thunder in the sky. Clouds, grey upon grey. The suggestion of something else in the sky, moving in silence. They both sensed it. Frank found himself staring at the sky a few times in response to some perceived threat.
They sheltered under an oak tree during a rain shower and ate lunch as they watched the downpour. Frank realised he should be at work. He wondered if he would ever return to work. He should be home, he thought. He should be with Catherine. She must be terrified right now. Did she know what was happening? Did she think he was dead?
He wanted a drink of something strong. He wished he’d taken that bottle of vodka from the Pulver house.
The rain stopped. No sun, just grey and ashen misery colouring the countryside. At least the air felt clearer, cleaner. They walked on. They found what was left of a body by the side of the road, sprawled on the grass verge. A man, judging by the size of the remains. He had been stripped and flayed. Not much left of him except tatters of meat and bone. His eyes had been taken. A ravaged corpse.
Florence said nothing. Maybe she was used to such sights.
“Let’s go,” Frank told her when she lingered by the body.
“Okay,” she said, looking back at the remains as she followed him.
Later they heard a deep growling coming towards them. Frank halted, took hold of Florence’s hand. She looked to him. Frank scanned the road ahead.
“What is it?” asked Florence.
Scuffled footfalls on tarmac and gravel, beyond the bend in the road.
Frank put his finger to his lips, shook his head. He pulled her through a gap in the hedgerow and into a field, where they crouched behind the thicket. They stayed low. The grass was wet. Frank peered through the small partings in the hedgerow, towards the road.
They waited. Florence’s breathing kept pace with his heartbeat.
The scuffling footfalls became louder.
A woman shambled into view. What had once been a woman.
She was deformed. She growled at the air, rabid, hunched over and limping. Ripped jeans showing glimpses of mottled flesh on her thighs. Shoes crusted with dirt and something tinged red. Spikes of black bone had torn through her blouse, colonising her shoulders and back.
Florence stiffened beside him. The woman sniffed the air. She wheezed from her ruined mouth; the sound of air being pushed from her lungs was like metal scraping on metal. The spikes on her upper body seemed to quiver, as if they were linked to her respiratory system by tendrils of nerve.
The woman’s mouth opened. Turned to the hedgerow where they hid, but she didn’t see them. She was blind; her eyes were red lesions, glistening like welts. She snarled, exposing crooked, sharp teeth. The inside of her mouth was coated with black, like tooth-rot left to spread and thrive.
She knows we’re here, Frank thought. He took hold of the axe. Dread in his stomach and a flutter of panic in his chest. His heartbeat surged. His mouth was dry.
The woman seemed to look directly at him. Her body went rigid, like a hunting dog sighting prey.
Frank didn’t move.
A jet flew over, the roar of its engines distracting the woman, and she raised her unholy face to the sky. The jet moved away. The woman continued down the road and disappeared from sight.
Frank exhaled. Florence did the same. They looked at each other. Frank smiled. She did not return it. They waited to make sure the woman had gone before they emerged back onto the road.
Frank wondered if he should go after the woman and put her out of her misery. But he could not stomach taking another life so soon after smashing in David Pulver’s skull.
The light was fading.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“We have to leave,” said Joel. “This place is going to implode.”
“We’re a long way from home,” said Magnus. “We wouldn’t last five minutes out on the streets. Do you want to die out there?”