By the time he arrived at the window the attack had already begun. The afternoon sunlight gave the scene a frighteningly surreal quality, something he had grown familiar with lately but never accustomed to. With a listless, drug-numb curiosity he watched as two people savagely mauled a third. The unfortunate appeared to be a young man in his twenties while his tormentors were two women, one elderly and the other a teenager. Thankfully the double-glazed windows softened most of the screaming, but the sheer inhuman sound of it was enough to shake him to his core. Not even in the bleakest horror films had he heard screams like it, and he only hoped his girlfriend’s dozing had spared her from them. By now the women had disembowelled the man and during the frenzy had somehow managed to tangle his intestines around a nearby lamp post. Now the three of them, doused in blood and gore, engaged in what looked like a grotesquely laboured maypole dance. He had witnessed many of these slaughters in recent weeks and, as with the most repellent of horror films, often found it difficult to look away. Filled with sickening guilt he reached to draw the curtains just as more screeching attackers flocked to the carnage.
Despairingly he turned and limped out of the bedroom. As he passed the closed door of the bathroom he felt the usual draft come from under the door. His girlfriend was in the living room asleep in her bathrobe on the couch, surrounded by her anatomy books. She had been a third year medical student at the city’s university before everything happened. She would’ve been well on her way to a successful career too if the world hadn’t suddenly disintegrated around her. Around them both. She had been one of the lucky ones though, managing to escape the annihilation not only with her life but with a cache of vital life-sustaining supplies. The first wave of attacks had happened during one of her lectures on an otherwise ordinary Monday morning, a day on which he had been working from home. Some fringe websites had started reporting on strange collective behaviours across the city but nobody really took any notice. The Sunday evening before her class news of a violent death at an A&E down the road from the campus had spread throughout the student body. A cocktail of anxiety and awkward humour had permeated the hallways that morning as she arrived on site. The lecture started off just like any other, but nobody there could have anticipated how it would end. Some of her friends she was sitting beside and whom she had known for years were no longer living by the time that hour was up. Some kind of unfathomable instinct got her out of that room, out of that building, and back to her car with a medical kit full of critical drugs and treatments. It was that split second decision-making that was the sole reason they were still alive.
As she slumbered it always struck him how peaceful and delicate she looked, despite the unremitting chaos that surrounded her. But she was anything but delicate. The way she fought to stay alive and made it home that terrible morning was a display of courage unlike any he could imagine. For that alone his love was deeper than it ever had been. As he knelt down and curled an errant strand of hair behind her ear he noted that she looked almost like she was hibernating. A protective dreamless torpor she could shelter inside of until all this was past.
He winced as he rose again to his feet, scratching absently at his bandaged arms until he remembered not to. None of the clocks now worked but despite the hushed timelessness a faint gnawing in his stomach told him it was nearing dinnertime. The sensation was like a distant cousin of hunger, the morphine haze making it both familiar and estranged, as if the feeling belonged to somebody else. He made his way to the bathroom and opened the door. The anticipated rush of cold air jarred him as it always did. Their bathroom was no longer tethered to what once characterised it. Things happened in here now that never used to, and the things that did seemed like they had barely been part of any tangible routine. Shuddering against the breeze he heaved one of the coal bags over the fire pit and emptied a layer into the concave hollow. Spreading out the coal evenly he ignited the rubble with some firelighters and a match. Eventually satisfied with his work, he reached for the cooking grill and fixed it over the pit. Then he lifted the terracotta pot off the floor by its makeshift handle and lowered it on top of the grill to warm. He had seen this as a method of high-temperature cooking on YouTube once, when YouTube was still a thing in the world. Welcoming the growing heat of the fire he rubbed a little warmth back into his hands. He sidestepped the slop bucket and moved over to where the gently billowing blanket acted as an improvised curtain. Whipping the blanket aside and securing it open he braced himself against the stark chill. The yawning windowless space was a voided portal onto the naked sky beyond it. He leaned against the crumbling brickwork and peered out of the ragged hole into the stillness of the afternoon. Nothing stirred outside but the bronze-yellow leaves that rustled on the nearby trees. No birds or birdsong. He couldn’t be sure whether they had all migrated somewhere safe or succumbed to the infection like the cats and dogs had.
A doleful sound caught his attention and he turned his gaze downward to look upon what he already knew to be there. One storey below, the trapped victim was all but motionless beneath the inert weight of the enormous window frame. Pinned to the concrete, the hopeless being would still claw and scrape at the ground with its one free arm. This more than a month after the rickety, single-glazed window was bashed out and had toppled squarely onto the prowler’s head. A small but amusing victory, not least thanks to their negligent landlord, how a pragmatic attempt to ventilate the room had resulted in a point for the human race. Now and then one of its demented brethren would approach to inspect the paralysed curiosity. None would attack it or in any way attempt to engineer a rescue. It was a curious spectacle at first to watch what its fellow murderers would do to it. But all of them did the same thing in the end – nothing. They would stand close by and stare for a while, waiting for some altruistic transmission to reach them from another life. Then something approximating boredom would come over their distorted faces and they would flee to some other place. As ribbons of smoke began to rise over his head and twirl out through the windowless opening he too grew weary, so left the creature to its static torment. Before leaving the room he lit all of the candles that were evenly positioned around the bathtub.
In the kitchen, by the dying golden light of the afternoon, he took out the items he needed from the cupboards and set about preparing dinner. Rolling up the sleeves of his bathrobe he combined flour, salt, sugar and a jar of foaming yeast in a large bowl; the yeast he had started to mix when he heard the outside commotion minutes earlier. He stirred the mixture until it was doughy and then tipped the dough onto the countertop to begin kneading.
Food had always been one of their shared passions. It was the reason behind how they initially met. One summer they were separately invited to a garden party by a couple they mutually knew. Both single at the time they attended with their respective friend groups, but it wasn’t long before one caught the other’s eye. Later that day as she navigated toward the toilets he intercepted her and made their collision seem accidental. She knew it hadn’t been and he knew that she knew. Their attraction was instant and in those moments the ease with which they spoke had not seemed to fit their newborn acquaintance. Work, fitness, music, books; an excitable flurry of topics jostled for attention. And of course, they talked food – their favourite places to eat, what they had indulged in that afternoon and, coincidentally, their decisions to have recently gone vegetarian. By the time they parted the contacts in her phone had increased by another. As neither one of them had been particularly forward people it was difficult to focus on their plates after that. The butterflies each of them felt played havoc with their appetites and with every mouthful it was a fragment of their encounter that they swallowed.
Pulling and rolling the malleable ball he remained mindful of how much flour he used to dust it. After this one they had six packets of flour left, in total. That would probably make around twenty-five meals, thirty at a push, depending on how much they could skimp. One food rations a day for the next month. And after that, well, he could scarcely bring himself to think about it.
That was if the water lasted that long at any rate. He cast an eye at the stockpile they had on the floor next to the wall. A random assortment of bottles and containers stood in rows three-deep from the skirting board. Some large, some small, together they resembled a sort of ramshackle plastic skyline. The two of them had hastily amassed these containers during that first wave of panic, the same day she had narrowly escaped her doomed university class. It was much later in the day, however, when the thought occurred to them to consider taking this measure. A frantic, tearful phone call from her immediately after her getaway had frightened the life out of him. He had then waited for her return, pacing the flat in a near-narcotized fugue of terror. Her last three words before she hung up echoed endlessly in his head: “Don’t…go…outside!”
Their embrace when she finally did arrive was as if a kidnapping had gotten between them. She wept for her friends and for their families and she didn’t know how to stop. He guided her trembling shoulders through to the lounge and they huddled on the sofa as she tried to breathe past her grief. Next thing they knew the television was on and they were transfixed by the rolling news of what was being inflicted upon the city. Two hours passed and their postures screamed at them to move but neither one could. The horrors coming through the screen seemed to be spreading; infecting more and more channels like the virus was with living bodies.
By the afternoon a blood-chilling pragmatism had gripped them and they were back in their car heading for the nearest supermarket. The threat and panic of being outside their apartment made them feel sick to their stomachs. The last thing they wanted to do was embark on a potentially lethal shopping trip, but the apocalyptic scenes they had witnessed on television told them they might never get another chance.
As they cautiously pulled into the supermarket car park nothing seemed particularly out of place. A handful of people were moving around a little more briskly than usual, as if trying to beat the store’s closing time, which was hours away. Aside from that vague urgency, everything appeared normal. Having parked up they grabbed a trolley and then warily approached the shopping centre entrance. Two burly police officers in yellow high-vis jackets stood either side of the sliding doors. The fluorescent sentries were making a cordial show of marshalling the unusual steady flow of shoppers. It seemed like the young couple hadn’t been the only ones to make this similar judgement and the local law enforcement had duly anticipated it. The crowd looked visibly anxious but despite some pockets of pushing and shoving the officers appeared to be doing a reasonable job of maintaining order.
Once inside, adrenaline powered the couple up and down their chosen aisles. During the car journey the two of them had agreed upon only the most practical, long-term selections. They made beelines for the dry-store goods – tins and jars of vegetables, as many as they could carry. Then flour, sauces, long life milk and hard cheese. Bathroom supplies were next. As they raced to the bottled water they swerved to narrowly miss a pregnant lady struggling with a bag of potatoes. He stopped momentarily to help her lift the heavy sack into her trolley and she thanked him with the warmth of her smile. Moving around the shop floor they absently became aware of a change in the general atmosphere. Raised voices were getting louder as more people filed into the complex. The sound of glass objects smashing as they were knocked over slowly increased and with it the couple could detect a rise in the tense energy of the place. At one point they passed two elderly men in a tussle for the last loaf of bread, one of whom slipped and fell heavily onto his side. Somebody, a few aisles down, started screaming as if being attacked, a noise made all the more distressing against the genial supermarket music. Haunted by this the couple stepped up their pace further. As the shelves became more and more spartan they resorted to now grabbing whatever items were left on their way to the tills. The approaching and then receding cries of an unseen child created a disturbing Doppler effect as they hurried toward the front of the store.
Upon reaching the checkouts they discovered that most of the cashiers had fled, leaving one solitary floor manager to constrain as best he could the increasingly lawless customers. With nobody to serve their imposing number the people now began vaulting over the panel barricades with armfuls of shopping. Realising the level of pandemonium the pair threw caution to the wind and wove through a bottleneck of braying shoppers. With their trolley out in front they accelerated straight into a display stand of cosmetics and charged through the collapsing wreckage towards the exit.
With the police guards nowhere to be seen the relative tranquillity outside the store felt somehow more threatening than the mayhem building inside it. They quickly assessed their surroundings and seeing no immediate danger made a break for the car. No sooner had they bolted when another deathly scream emanated from the supermarket. Seconds later a barrage of shrieking shoppers came tumbling out of the store entrance, falling over each other to escape whatever was inside. Then the thing they were attempting to flee was suddenly upon them. A slobbering jerky shape exploded out into the open and ploughed straight through the scrambling crowd. She glanced behind her as they rapidly traversed the car park and caught sight of the rabid blur tearing the throat out of a man in overalls. Dark gouts of blood jetted across the windshield of a nearby van the man had been approaching. She gasped as hot tears smeared her eyes and screamed at him to get the boot open. People were now sprinting in all directions and it sounded as though the whole town was screaming. With numb shaking hands they hurled their goods into the back of the vehicle and pushed the trolley aside. By now the attacker was out of sight but constant guttural wailing told them it was brutally dismembering someone close by. Once inside the car he gunned it and practically took off backwards out of the parking spot. As they careened towards the exit something caught their eye and they turned to see one of the police officers hunkered down over something on the ground. Relief swept over them as the car drew parallel and they realised it was the pregnant woman he was helping.
That feeling soon evaporated when her contorted, bloodied face came into view and they heard the woman’s harrowing cries. Spinning around in her car seat she saw out of the rear window a thing she would never be able to stop seeing. The policeman, deranged with infection, pulled the child from the guts of its mother and held it aloft. His yellow high-vis now awash with crimson, the uniformed creature studied its blood-slick possession at arm’s length. Like some luminous midwife from hell, or monstrous new father, full of equal parts awe and uncertainty.
He put his foot to the floor and they screeched out of the car park and away from the hellish scene forever. If she had been in shock then she never showed it, not least until much later. The things she witnessed that day would have consigned a lesser soul to a state of glass-eyed mutism for the rest of their lives. Instead of traumatic stress a piercing clarity again came over the couple and they suddenly knew what they had to do. Upon arriving home they unloaded their supplies into the apartment and made their way to the communal garden shed out back of the building. Nobody appeared to be around so they took this as an invitation to raid the place, stuffing whatever they considered useful into carrier bags: tools, containers, seeds, compost. Propping the bags up outside the shed they then re-entered to grab the thing they had come for – the fire pit. Once they had managed to carry it indoors they made several more trips to collect the bags, a column of nested terracotta pots and around half a dozen sacks of coal. Once the items were safely inside their apartment they set about barricading themselves within it. Heavy articles of furniture got dragged up to the locked front door and jammed against it. Practically everything from the spare room was commandeered and wedged together to form a makeshift rampart which loomed almost to the ceiling. When they were done they stood back and examined the structure which kind of resembled a landslide of domestic appliances. As surreal a task as it had been they now at least felt some modicum of security. They spent the rest of the afternoon filling bottles and arranging the things they had gathered. When evening came they found themselves exhausted and jittery, so dosed up on Valium from the medical box. As night drew in they followed the unending news horror in bed and couldn’t escape the perverse feeling that they were watching the end of the world. She drifted into a restless sleep so he stayed up alone, listening to the distant anonymous cries seeping up from within the building. They unnerved him deeply and made him feel as though he were spending the first night of many in prison.
As he finished up patting the dough into a smooth lozenge shape he heard the sound of a yawn coming from the lounge. Shuffling footfalls announced movement behind him and before long her bandaged arms were coiled around his middle in a gentle embrace. The familiar tang of her unwashed body reminded him of his own potent smell, an odour he could no longer detect.
“Whatcha doing,” she asked, yawning again.
He laughed through a weak sigh, “Guess.”
“Is it bathtime already?” she said after a pause.
He felt her head rest sleepily on his shoulder.
“That’s right, baby.”
The couple had rediscovered their taste for meat not long after the virus broke. That summer friends of theirs had left some chicken and pork in their fridge one day following a barbeque and had forgotten to take it with them. She had put it in their freezer for safe keeping but the occasion never arose to give it back so in their freezer it stayed. It took around eight days for the electricity and water to cut out entirely following the outbreak, by then they had long forgotten about their frozen meat stash. After a week of sharing one meagre veggie meal a day their physical strength diminished so much they found they could do little else other than sleep. Around that time they eventually did find the leftover meat. It didn’t take them long to rethink their carnivorous abstinence. Almost immediately their energies returned and they could get back to cooking, playing board games and tending to their seed crops. It even boosted their libido and enabled them to enjoy intimate moments with some regularity. But of course, the nutritious scraps did not last long and they were soon faced with the same predicament as before.
Days after the meat ran out and they were back to lethargically napping throughout the day, something unexpected happened. One afternoon as they dozed in bed a heavy object hit their bedroom window and then scrambled up to where it was hung open. Before either of them could move the shape clambered noisily through the gap and jumped onto the bed. She let out a shriek and the cat darted away. Then another shape flapped against the window and clawed its way into the room. The snarling creature tumbled out of sight beyond the foot of the bed and the couple leapt to their feet in the opposite direction. They clung to each other in the centre of the room not knowing where to focus their attention. The feline spat and mewled loudly under the dresser. The thing on the other side of the bed was violently hissing, its breaths ragged and coarse like they belonged to something far larger. Something injured. Suddenly the unseen intruder exploded onto the bed in a hail of blood and filth and she screamed a second time. They both gawked powerlessly as the infected pigeon gurgled and staggered across the duvet, strings of pink mucus bubbling from its splintered beak. With each jerky motion it appeared to shed more of its gore-crusted feathers, the bones of its wings and rib cage already exposed like the skeletal remains of some undead pterodactyl. Her look of terror spurred him to find a weapon as the beast lurched into a grotesquery of flight. He seized the bedside lamp just as it thrashed into the air coming directly at them. A detonation of vile plumage erupted when the heavy end of the lamp connected with the avian threat. The lamp’s plug was yanked from the wall as he followed the spinning raptor to the floor and pummelled it mercilessly into the carpet. When the screeching stopped the room resembled a snow globe of softly swirling blackened feathers. The two of them peered under the dresser to see that the cat, although terrified, was healthy and free from infection. Under different circumstances they would’ve done the natural thing and let the animal go, this being the kind of people they were. Or the kind they had been. That was a little under three weeks ago. The cat meat lasted them four days.
He placed a tea towel over the dough ball to prove and turned to face her. In their bathrobes they caressed each other tenderly, like a carefree couple in love. One with a future together and dreams of pursuing it. They lent against one another for support and hobbled steadily forward, towards the bathroom.
The now settled coals were gently smouldering and the heat from them emanated out of the blanket-framed window hole. The combined pools of candle light around the bathtub steeped that half of the room in a calming honey-coloured ambiance.
“Need any help, baby?”
“Just a moment,” she smiled and unfastened her robe. As it fell away from her he went to gather it up and then hung it on the back of the door. When he turned back around she stood facing him, waiting for his assistance to enter the bath. The sight he beheld was one that had increasingly shocked him in the early days, repulsed him even, often making him question his eligibility as a protective lover and a human being. But now, through his opioid fugue and all they had endured, he looked upon her with something approaching worship. The flesh of her thighs was all but gone, the width at the top of each not much broader than at her knee. Rust-coloured recycled bandages swaddled the upper halves of her legs, glistening wetly in the candle light. Her hips and torso were equally ravaged, dark patchworks of musculature showing though more criss-crossed layers of sticky dressing. Higher up exposed ribs could be seen where the fat had been sliced away. His gaze ascending, he briefly regarded the knotty horizontal scars of her double mastectomy. Self-administered a week ago, the gnarled flesh shone purple and yellow around the heavy stitching. In some places the tissue was beginning to heal, in others it would split and weep continuously. He moved over to her and gently propped her up, careful not to graze against her bandaged forearms. Slowly manoeuvring her toward the bath he helped lift her legs over the side, taking her full weight as he lowered her into the empty tub. When she was comfortable he took the morphine syringe off a nearby tray and gave her a shot in the arm the way she had shown him. When she gave him indication that she was ready he picked up the scalpel, positioned it so that it was comfortable in his hand, and then pushed it into her bicep.
Later they dined as they always had; she laid the table while he finished up and then served the food. The wine had long run out so they had their customary three fingers of room-temperature water instead. Dinner was, as always, a beautifully cooked barbeque pizza. They had gained much practice in recent weeks. Toppings were in short supply but their strict portion regime allowed them a few jarred olives and grilled peppers. The meat which decorated the pizza looked and smelled delicious. It wasn’t uncommon for the cooking aroma to waft out of the windows and attract one or two visitors to congregate outside. There they would crane their rotting leathery necks toward the smell and idly salivate as though the behaviour was born of appetite. On this occasion, like those others, the couple were serenaded by the mournful groans of a wandering creature that had followed what was left of its nose. Drowsy from the morphine, they ate between smiles and small talk and wondered, as they always did, if there were others out there doing the same. Despite the drugs her arm felt sore, but it made her feel better when she would see him slip around his chair on the one remaining buttock he had left. It brought a smile to their lipless faces whenever it happened.
[bctt tweet=”TOM OVER winner of OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award!!! With his entry #49 ‘The Vegetarians’!!! – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight!” username=”theboldmom”]
