Magnus headed to the kitchen, treading softly on the carpet and onto the linoleum. Frank followed him, more than willing to let Magnus take the lead.
There was nobody in the kitchen. The sink was brimming with dirty plates, stained mugs and stagnant water. Forks and spoons and knives encrusted with food and dried fluids formed a mound of skeletal metal upon the worktop.
The window above the sink showed them the back garden. Out there were the boys’ bicycles and a trampoline. The window was smeared with grime and dirty fingerprints.
The house stank. When Frank took a deep breath he had to stop himself from gagging.
He grabbed a serrated bread-knife from the rack. Magnus eyed him, then the knife.
“Are you gonna kill my family with that?”
“I never said that. Just in case something happens. We don’t know what’s in here with us.”
“My family are here.”
“Where are they?”
Magnus turned and nodded back the way they had come. “They’re in the living room.”
When Magnus stepped forwards, Frank retreated from him.
The Magnus Heap of old was fading. He was becoming something else. He was changing.
I’ll become a beautiful butterfly, he thought, and almost laughed.
He could hear Debbie’s voice inside his head. No words, just a gentle humming. She sounded happy. But she hadn’t been happy for a long, long time. Not since before the twins were born.
Magnus placed his right hand on the door handle, turned it slowly and pushed with his leading arm. Frank didn’t move from the doorway. Magnus stepped into the room.
The sickly-sweet stench of blood and shit hit Magnus.
The room was dimly-lit. The curtains were pulled shut. Shapes and suggestions lurking and unmoving. The sofa and the two armchairs had been moved against the walls, clearing the centre of the room. The television was lying on its face, dead and useless and smashed. The natural light from the hallway brought a dull definition to the room. Magnus’s eyes adjusted. There were soft things under his feet. Damp raggedy strips of newspaper and a mulch of mushy organic matter covered the floor. One of the boys’ shoes. There were small bones amongst the litter and waste. Animal bones gnawed clean by little teeth to a gleaming shine.
Something moved on the far side of the room. He didn’t react. Frank was at Magnus’s shoulder, his breathing shallow and tense.
Magnus’s family was waiting for him.
His sons, Grant and Adam, were crawling around in the filth, naked and covered in offal and a pale oily substance. They were tragically thin. They moved like animals. Their little faces were like dolls’ faces, puffy and pale and tinged with a red bloom like rouge upon their cheeks. Their eyes shone. Their mouths shifted open, displaying their small teeth, which were like ivory. The boys coiled together, sniffing the air, and they swung their heads towards Magnus and Frank.
Were they grinning?
They hissed, and eyed Frank, and made to move towards him, their fingers extended into sharp hooks, their mouths curled back to show the teeth that would sink into his body and rip bits away.
Magnus stepped in front of Frank, held out his hands.
The boys halted, hissing. They began to mewl and whimper. They looked at Magnus, tilting their heads to one side. They approached him cautiously, sniffing at him, clicking sounds coming from their throats.
“It’s okay, boys,” Magnus said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The boys sniffed at Magnus’s outstretched hands, licking his fingers tentatively, almost affectionately. It tickled. Magnus felt such a swelling of warmth and love for his boys that he nearly burst into tears. He looked down at them and smiled.
His boys looked up at him. Then they darted away from him, feet scrabbling and squelching on the waste-filled floor.
Behind them was their mother.
Magnus felt tears sting his eyes.
The boys scampered towards Debbie. Her clothes had been removed. She was a writhing mass of blubber and white skin. Her scalp was bare apart from a few wisps of hair. Her neck was a trunk of fat. Her wedding ring had vanished into blubbery fingers, of which the nails were long and dirty. Her legs were covered in lesions and sores and blisters that wept fluid. She was lying on her left side, facing the room, cooing softly as the boys knelt by her side making small yipping noises and patting their excited hands on the floor.
Debbie’s breasts had sagged and drooped until they resembled empty water bladders. Punctured flaps of skin without a use. Her nipples were sore and red, blooming into leaking pustules. Her face was as he remembered it, save for the dried blood and scraps of meat around her mouth and down her chin. Around her were the scattered remains of four, maybe five, children; their bones stripped clean, yellow-white, and discarded. Leftovers. Mixed in with them were more animal bones and tufts of fur.
It was a nest.
Debbie had grown six large udders, which were hanging from her torso, pale and wrinkled above the matted, tangled patch of pubic hair. Her teets were weeping some sort of milk from the bloated tips. Tips that would slip into a mouth quite easily. The milk looked greasy, like warm ejaculate.
Magnus watched as his boys lowered their heads and started to feed from her udders. They were eager, biting down with their jaws hard enough to make Debbie whimper and moan. She quietened as the boys began to suck. They squirmed and mewled as they fed from their mother, their shrivelled genitals shivering and their mouths working quickly, their tongues lapping at any milk that missed their mouths. They gripped their mother’s grub-like body.
Magnus felt their slowly-fading hunger and Debbie’s maternal satisfaction. He heard her heartbeat, its slow rhythm; the blood swimming through her veins. He felt the swell and rush of her insides adapting to the plague. But she was still Debbie. She was still his wife. And she still loved him.
“I’m sorry for everything,” Magnus whispered.
This was his family. He felt proud. He felt humbled.
This was his home.
Magnus couldn’t help smiling.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Magnus and Frank returned outside.
“I’m staying here,” said Magnus.
The others looked at him. Frank was the only one who didn’t look stunned. There was only acceptance in his eyes.
Joel looked hurt. “You can’t leave us. We stay together. There might be a cure. We can get you help.”
“I’m too far gone,” Magnus said. “You can see that for yourselves. Look at me.” He could feel the plague needling his insides, changing his chemistry and his thoughts.
“You don’t know that,” said Joel.
“There’s not enough time, even if there is a cure. I’m changing. I’ll be a danger to you. I’m contagious. I can feel it pulling at me now. I can feel it in my blood and in my brain.”
Joel shook his head.
“I can smell everything under your skin,” said Magnus. For a second, all he wanted to do was slaughter his friends and the little girl with them. He wanted to open her up and see what she was made of. He had known Frank, Ralph and Joel since childhood, since they were able to wipe their own arses, but when he looked into their faces he felt an urge to kill them and drag their bodies back to the house so his family wouldn’t go hungry.
There was an itching sensation behind his eyes. He looked down at his hands and they looked like a stranger’s. His skin was damp and glistening, but not with sweat. His body throbbed. His teeth felt too big for his mouth. There was a growing darkness in his chest and it was spreading outwards, and when it reached his extremities and his brain, he would finally succumb and be transformed.