Mackie sniggered. “Yeah, we’re really sorry.”
The back of the van opened and a man in a black balaclava and a black jacket leaped out. Frank only noticed the baseball bat in the man’s hands as it was swinging towards him, and he managed to raise his arms just as the bat connected with the side of his neck, nullifying the force of the swing. The man’s assault was clumsy and mistimed, but effective. Frank went down and hit the back of his head on the pavement. He dropped his axe and the rucksack.
The man in black swore and spat at Frank. The bat fell upon Frank’s ribs, stomach and legs. Frank shielded his face and tried to kick at the man.
“Florence!” he shouted.
Florence screamed. Bertram had hold of her. Mackie was giggling. Florence was thrown in the back of the van.
Frank called out to her.
A glancing blow from the bat on his forehead, and everything blurred. He groaned. He called out to Florence. She was yelling for him, begging him to help her.
The man with the bat stood over him and laughed, snatching Frank’s bag from the ground.
“Come on!” said Bertram. “Leave him. The infected will hear all the noise. Let’s go!”
The man kicked him in the stomach and returned to the van.
Frank watched them drive away. He was sprawled on the pavement. The sound of the van’s engine receded. His eyelids were heavy. He looked at the sky. The world around him swam in fluid; shapes were distorted, dancing like squalls. The darkness behind his eyes was dotted with pinholes of light. He felt tired. The pavement was cold underneath him.
He had let down Florence. He had failed her. His daughter was dead. Emily…Florence…Emily…Florence. Both of them were gone, now. His fault both times. His fault he had lost them.
Somewhere, maybe far away or maybe nearby, the infected were screaming. The sounds of monsters gathering for a hunt.
Frank passed out.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Faces formed around him, shifting out of the darkness like pale stains seeping through cloth. Loved ones and old friends. Catherine smiled at him, but there was something wrong with her face. Something wrong with her mouth and how it opened to tempt him with its slick tongue. Her breath was the stench of spoiled meat and digestive juices; bile and rot and all things torn from quivering bodies.
He saw Ralph, Magnus and Joel. They were charred skeletal corpses with white eyes and ivory grins. Their bones clicked as they shuffled their limbs to welcome him.
He saw Caitlin, the woman he’d abandoned to the infected. She was now a monster, all glistening spikes of black bone and a snapping mouth opened just for him.
He saw David Pulver stuffing bits of his children into his mouth.
He saw Corporal Guppy and his lads. They were all dead, piled atop of one another, flies droning around them and rats squirming between their decomposing bodies, chewing and gnawing on their soft meat.
Then he saw Emily, his dead daughter. But she was alive, here. She slowly assumed the shape of Florence. They were the same, both of his girls. They came to him as shivering, naked forms and they embraced him, burying their little mouths into his tender stomach. They loved him. And he loved them back.
He loved his girls.
A white room. Catherine was sitting next to him. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. Plastic chairs creaking with every movement; metal legs that scraped the floor. The smell of strong disinfectant and rubber gloves.
Catherine was crying as Frank held her. He was crying, too.
A heart monitor was beeping.
Emily was a withered body under white sheets, riddled with tubes and tumours. Her hair had fallen out. Ten years old. She was as pale as the room she would die in. Dark shadows under her eyes. She had faded into a paper-thin form of skin and bone. A rag doll with a little girl’s face. The drugs kept her in oblivion. It was better this way. She would slip away and she wouldn’t even know.
They whispered their daughter’s name.
The beeping of the heart monitor stopped and became an uninterrupted wail.
Frank’s eyes snapped open. His head throbbed with each heartbeat.
Dark shapes overhead.
The infected were upon him.
Cold hands flailed at his arms and legs.
One of the infected said his name.
That was not possible.
His name was spoken again. Louder. Clearer. A voice he recognised.
“Frank! Frank, are you okay? Talk to me, Frank!”
He opened his eyes. Three figures crouching over him. He was hallucinating, surely.
Ralph, Magnus and Joel looked down at him.
“Ghosts,” Frank muttered. “Lots of ghosts…” His mouth was dry, his tongue swollen like a ripened fruit. His gums were tender and his jaw felt bruised and sore. His stomach was a broiling mess of stinking juices. He raised one hand to a lump on his forehead and winced, then threw up on Ralph’s shoes. Coughed up bile, spit and the undigested dregs of that morning’s breakfast.
“Charming,” said the ghost of Ralph. “Ain’t seen you in ages, and you chunder on my best trainers.”
“Sorry,” Frank slurred, forgetting what he was sorry for.
“Is he okay?” said Joel’s shade. “I thought he was dead.”
“Broken bones?” said Magnus. He looked into Frank’s face. “Frank, are you okay? What happened to you?”
“Looks like he got in a fight,” Ralph said. “And lost it.”
“Let’s move him,” said Joel. “Get him off the street.”
“The monster’s nearby,” said Magnus. “It followed us.” His face was loose like a poorly-made mask.
Frank smiled at his dead friends. Ralph and Magnus hoisted him to his feet. The street around him was a spinning carousel. His bones felt brittle, his skin so tight over them it might split if his friends moved him too suddenly.
“Hurry up,” said Joel. “It’s coming.”
They dragged him down the street and climbed aboard an abandoned bus. Frank’s eyes bulged at the dead driver sagging over the steering wheel. The dead man’s uniform was straining at his swollen body.
“I used to ride the bus to school,” said Frank.
“We all did, mate,” said Ralph.
He swooned, and the world became dark.
Frank came to on the seat of the bus. He could smell piss and vomit. Staleness. The peculiar musk of public transport that birthed images of sagging pensioners, grey-faced women, and chavs scowling at thin air. Then his own odour of old sweat and clammy hands.
Ralph held him down. He shook his head and put his finger to Frank’s mouth. On the other side of the aisle Magnus and Joel cowered behind a seat.
Something creaked at the front of the bus. Something had joined them. Frank peered around the side of the seat in front of him and looked down the aisle.
In the aisle was a grey and naked bipedal creature with mottled skin and spindly legs. Once a man, but now something else. The sound of its breath was a wet gurgle. The top half of its skeletal body was all writhing tentacles dripping gelatinous fluids onto the floor. The creature turned its body towards them. Tentacles dotted with tiny suckers, and at the centre of the tentacles was a human face, grey and anguished, pulled tight across angles of bone. And, as Frank watched, the face opened like a fleshy flower to reveal a circular pink maw rimmed with tiny sharp teeth. An inner face. A whip-like red tongue squirmed within the maw.
Frank felt his legs go weak.
The creature turned away and appraised the dead driver. Its tentacles latched onto the man’s back, dragged his bulk from the seat towards its pink maw and red tongue.
The dead man’s head vanished within the clutch of tentacles. His body jerked, trembling to the sounds of grinding and sucking.