Hyenas (4 page)

Alternately spitting snow and gasping in air, Jay
stood swaying, almost embarrassed, despite the fear and panic, to see that the
snow drift only came up to an inch or so above his knees and was no more than
four feet wide. He kicked at the remnant of the tunnel he had created, clearing
the area around the doorway. He could see Dempsey’s boot-clad feet, his
fingertips as he tried to lift the shutter higher and the strap of his own
backpack. He crouched down grabbing the pack and dragging it out, and then he
noticed that the bottom corner of the shutter had popped out of the runner on
one side, jamming it in place.

He looked up and down the street, scanning doorways,
snow encrusted dumpsters and abandoned cars, and he knew if he saw any hyenas,
even a single hyena, loping towards him, he would turn and run, and even though
it would sicken him, haunt him forever, he would abandon Dempsey to his fate.
Because he was all fear now, all fear and nothing but, his heartbeat the
epicentre of his own personal earthquake. But there were no hyenas, just
desolation and a constantly shifting polka dot fabric of falling snowflakes.

He kicked the corner of the shutter. It shifted a
little but not enough to realign it with the runner. The slamming of the door
continued unabated, accompanied by the slathering growls and laughter of the
hyenas and Dempsey barking, “Move for fuck’s sake, you stubborn bastard!
Fucking move!”

Jay kicked the corner of the shutter again. Then
again, and again, and suddenly it jumped back into place. Dempsey lifted the
shutter a couple of feet with a cry of, “You beauty!” He dropped to his knees
and crawled out, just as the slamming of the door ceased and a filthy arm
swiped out after him, clawing with black fingernails. More grimy arms followed,
then the top of a head, hair matted with blood and God alone knew what else.
Dempsey stood, placed a foot on the lip of the shutter and stomped it back
down. Hyenas shrieked. Blood, unexpectedly bright and clean, spattered the snow.

Dempsey turned to face him, grinning. The grin only
lasted a second or two, replaced by a look that was equal parts embarrassment
and panic.

“I hope you’re good with your fists, boy,” he said.
“I’ve left the harpoon gun behind and I’m not that keen on going back for it.”

Chapter 5

“What? Oh, Christ.” Jay buried his face in his frozen
hands.

Dempsey slapped Jay’s arm and belly-laughed.

Jay glanced up, suddenly aware of how much he looked
the drama queen in humiliating contrast to Dempsey’s no-nonsense man of action.

“Never mind, lad. Could be worse, eh?” He gestured
back to the shutter which was shaking and buckling under a sustained hyena
assault. “Let’s get moving.” He jogged to the middle of the road, where the
snow was only a foot or so deep. Weaving in between abandoned cars, he headed
down Wood Street toward Hanover Street.

Jay followed. He passed an Italian restaurant, Villa Romana,
on his left; the double doors beneath the round arch were ajar and the stench
of rotten food leaked out into the cold air: ripe garlic, something like
sulphur and other odours he just didn’t want to think about. As they neared the
bottom of the street, there was nothing but pubs and bars on either side of
them. The smell of musty ale wafting out through broken windows was almost
pleasant.

At the right-hand corner of the street, Dempsey came
to a standstill, held a hand up, palm out, and Jay stopped. A second later,
Dempsey moved off again and Jay followed. They ran diagonally across Hanover
Street. A multiple fender bender meant they had to scuttle over the bonnets of
abandoned cars. Jay was glad of the snow covering the windshields and windows
of the cars. He didn’t doubt for a second that there were bodies inside some of
them. An Arriva double-decker bus, capped with snow, its turquoise paintwork
slapped with bloody handprints, had mounted the pavement and almost ploughed
into the Lloyds TSB. There was about a foot between bus and bank. Wading
through a knee-high snowdrift, Dempsey and Jay slid through the gap sideways
and followed the perimeter of the building round onto Church Street. Jay cast a
glance back up Bold Street. There were nine or ten hyenas milling around the
front of Waterstones, their attention utterly held by the bookshop and whatever
it was they thought was in there, whatever it was they were looking for.

Jay turned his attention back to Church Street. There
were few vehicles on this wide pedestrianised thoroughfare — the odd van, a
police car that appeared to have taken shelter under the glass-arched entrance
to Clayton Square. But there were bodies. Most of them were under the snow,
limbs protruding here and there, and Jay thanked God for that, but the
shop-window dead remained very much on display. In Oasis, a woman, her face a
thick mask of dried blood bracketed by lank blonde hair, sat in the middle of a
nest of clothes with what looked like a metal chair leg jutting from the top of
her head. In Hallmark, a shaven-headed young man in a short-sleeved shirt that
might have been white once but was now predominantly red, knelt with his head
bowed against the glass in what could have been an attitude of prayer, if only
he’d had hands to clasp together. There were more, and worse, but Jay refused
to allow his gaze to linger, tried to throw it all out of focus.

He forgot all about Dempsey’s instruction to check
behind him every fifty paces or so and simply stumbled in the older man’s wake,
just trying to keep up.

They moved down the left of the street, keeping as
close to the buildings as the drifts and debris would allow. At Primark, they
had to arc round a tangle of mannequins and corpses that the snow had only
succeeded in half concealing. The mannequins retained a rigid elegance and a
healthy lustre which the dead — twisted, grey and doughy — couldn’t hope to
rival. Jay kept his eyes fixed on Dempsey’s back and tried to ignore the
feeling that the dead were fixing him with stares of their own.

They passed the high-walled, canyon-like Keys Court
arcade, with its boutique stores, connecting Church Street to Liverpool One. As
they approached the wide intersection with Whitechapel, the smell of rotten
meat — despite the freezing cold — coming from McDonalds and Burger King
thickened the air. They were about to cut across onto Lord Street when Dempsey
stopped abruptly and, sweeping Jay along with him, backed into the doorway of
Vero Moda and dropped down into a crouch. Jay did likewise, although he
couldn’t see anything. Then, from further along Whitechapel, out of sight,
toward the Met Quarter, he heard sobbing, then the unmistakeable cackle of
hyenas, a lot of them.

Dempsey reached into his bag, pulled out a bowie knife
and unsheathed it. Jay noticed dried blood speckling the otherwise gleaming
blade.

“There’s probably nothing we can do,” said Dempsey,
his voice flat. “Not without the harpoon gun, and probably even with it. Might
be a good idea to avert your eyes, boy.” He sighed, slumped a little.

Jay experienced a tremor in his gut, an inkling of
what Dempsey was talking about and what was going to happen next.

Seconds later, an overweight, balding man in a duffle
coat ran into view. His face was purple with exertion and his breath trailed
behind him like the ghost of a scarf. Even at a distance of some sixty feet,
Jay could see the tears glistening on his cheeks.

The man staggered, stumbled then fell face-first into
the snow. He jerked back to his feet an instant later, as if someone had yanked
on an invisible rope, then started running again. It was obvious to Jay that he
was almost out of steam, struggling to lift his legs, his arms limp, head
swaying from side to side, mouth hanging open.

“We should help him,” Jay whispered.

But then the hyenas appeared; six of them. The
frontrunner, bounding along on all fours, had long hair — once blonde, now
yellow as plaque — held back with a luminous pink Alice band. It leapt, the
remnants of its flower-print dress flapping like an unravelling bandage. It
landed on the running man, its feet striking hard against the small of his back.

In the split second before he went down, a blur of
flailing limbs and a flash of snow, the man locked eyes with Jay.

“Help me!” he cried, spitting out bloodied snow and
trying to rise to his feet despite the weight of Alice Band on his back.
“Jesus, you have to help me!”

The hyena brought both fists down on the back of the
man’s head, driving him back down into the snow.

“Jesus!” His arms flailed. “Christ!”

Again, both fists, and this time there was a loud, wet
crunch, a brief spurt of blood and the man went limp.

A second later, the other hyenas caught up, but Alice
Band was already moving on, along Whitechapel. The rest of the pack, seeing
that the killing was over, followed.

Except one. It was tall and gangly, with a face that
was mostly nose counterbalanced by a stiff-looking pony tail. It looked down at
the leaking mess that Alice Band had left behind. In one spindly hand it held a
paperback
Collins English Dictionary
with most of the pages missing. It knelt next to the
corpse and began poking a long index finger into the hole Alice Band had smashed
into the man’s skull.

Jay wanted to look away but couldn’t. He felt as if
something was about to be revealed, just as he had when the Waterstones hyena
had begun eating pages from Byron. It was another
what-the-fuck?
moment.

The hyena pushed its finger in up to the last knuckle,
all the while peering into the hole, as if looking for something hidden inside.
It had the expression of a child — a crazed, urchin child — trying to get a
coin out of a drain. It wriggled its finger and the dead man’s left arm
twitched and flopped about for a few seconds, like a landed fish.

When the hyena began breaking off pieces of cranium
and throwing them aside, Jay had to look away. His legs became boneless. He
abandoned his crouch and sat back. The snow crunched beneath him. Convinced it
must have heard, Jay turned his attention back to the hyena, but it was still
engrossed by the contents of the dead man’s skull. It had made a hole large
enough to accommodate an entire hand now and was rummaging about, sifting through
grey matter. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, it pulled out a steaming chunk
of brain and popped it into its mouth.

Jay’s vision fogged at the edges and he slumped to his
left, his head striking the glass of the Vero Moda door with a dull but
resonant chime.

He heard Dempsey growl, “Shite!” But the older man’s
voice sounded like it was coming from inside a tin can and down a length of
string. Further off, hyena laughter. He knew the brain eater was coming but he
could feel himself slipping deeper into darkness.

“Oh, for the love of God, don’t fucking
swoon
on
me, boy!”

It was the word ‘swoon’, with its humiliating
aftertaste, that brought him round, consciousness returning on a wave of
embarrassment. The fog receded and he saw Dempsey standing his ground, one foot
pointing forward, the other back and at a right angle to the first. He held the
knife at his side, the arm swaying a little, back and forth, in readiness. The
hyena was loping toward them, kicking up snow, its pony tail lashing about
behind it. It was spitting out gobbets of brain; apparently, it
hadn’t
found what it was looking for. Perhaps it thought it might have better luck
rooting through the contents of Jay’s and Dempsey’s skulls.

Jay tried to stand — though just what he intended to
do, he had no idea — but his legs failed him and he flumped back down into the
snow. The hyena was closing the distance. Jay noticed it was missing its right
ear, and then it leapt. Dempsey brought the knife up in a smooth, taut arc. The
blade sunk into the hyena’s sternum and it gargled blood, its eyes rolling back
into its skull. Momentum carried it into Dempsey and both he and the hyena went
into then through the glass of the Vero Moda door.

Dempsey, his back arched over the aluminium door
frame, tried to shove the writhing hyena off him but only succeeded in driving
the knife further into its chest. Jay managed to stand, grabbed the hyena’s
shoulders and tried, unsuccessfully, to free Dempsey.

“Christ, for a lanky streak of piss, he’s a heavy
fucker!” said Dempsey. He relinquished the knife, planted both hands on its
shoulders and pushed. Still twitching, but only a little now, the hyena lifted
and Jay grabbed the back of its collar and dragged it to one side, allowing
Dempsey to clamber out from under its all-but-dead weight.

Dempsey was wincing as he stood, one hand planted on
his lower back.

“Are you all right?” asked Jay. “Did you pull
something?”

“Pull something? You cheeky bastard.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean... you know.”

“That I’m an old cunt? I’m sure you didn’t.” Dempsey
took his hand from his back and showed the palm to Jay. It was slick with
blood. “I just went through a plate glass window. This isn’t the films, boy. No
sugar glass here.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to swoon again. I
might be needing you.”

“No. Well... no, I don’t think so. What do you want me
to do?”

“Nothing just yet. I think there’s a first aid kit on
the boat. Now let’s get moving and
do
try to stay conscious.”

Grimacing, his face pale and beaded with sweat,
Dempsey bent down and drew the bowie knife from the hyena’s chest. Not
bothering to wipe the dripping blade, he set off across Whitechapel and up Lord
Street.

As he followed, Jay couldn’t help noticing that
Dempsey wasn’t moving at quite the pace he had when they’d first escaped
Waterstones. And he couldn’t help noticing the large slash in the back of the
older man’s black Crombie. The fabric surrounding the ragged hole glistened.