Sick Bastards (6 page)

Meet the Family

Walking back through the woods with the man by my side felt both strange and comforting at the same time. On the one hand I didn’t know him and he could have been anyone. On the other hand it was nice to have a bit of company.

“So it’s your house?” he asked. “Your father’s, I mean?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t want to tell him that we took it from someone who was either dead or had run away. I couldn’t help but think it would have potentially painted us in a bad light. More to the point, I didn’t want him thinking it would then be acceptable to take it from us. After all, if we had done the same to someone else then surely it would be okay for someone to come along and take it away from us again.

“So you can tell me where we are then?”

“What do you mean?”

I looked at the man and could tell by his face that he had no idea where he was. The whole place was alien to him.

“I just woke up here in the woods. I have no idea where I am or even how I got here.”

If I hadn’t lied about owning the house then I could have put his mind at ease and told him that my family and I were the same. We woke up in the house, moved there by Father who woke up in a car in the middle of the woods.

“I believe it’s something to do with the blast. The
things
, the memory loss - I believe it’s all connected. My family and I have gaps in our memory too,” I told him, skirting around the question of where we were.

He actually looked relieved to hear he wasn’t the only one with memory loss.

“I don’t even know about any fucking blasts!” he said. “What the fuck happened?”

We still had a way to walk so I figured now would be as good a time as any to fill him in with what had happened (according to my father at least). “I’m not sure of all the details,” I started, “my father told me about this so I can’t answer any further questions you may have but apparently political arguments escalated. One thing led to another. It started with rockets, then invasions and then - eventually - someone just dropped a bomb and ended it all...”

“A nuke?”

“I guess.”

“I thought there’d be a dust cloud, or something. Ruin for miles and miles but look!” he pointed skywards. Past the trees (overhead) and out into the blue sky, the sun was still shining brightly despite making efforts to go down for the night. “I thought things like this were supposed to vanish behind layers of radioactive smog?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen. All I knew was that it had happened and this is how we lived our life now. We were starving and it was us and
them
.

The man stopped asking questions. He looked pale. I’m not sure whether he had run out of questions or because he didn’t want to hear any more of the answers I had for him. I wanted to ask him whether he was okay but didn’t bother. It was a stupid question. Of course he wasn’t okay. He had woken up, in a strange place, and discovered his world had more or less ended. Suddenly it dawned on me that I might have had some good news to share with him.

“Planes!” I blurted out. “Occasionally, back at the house, we see planes flying overhead.”

The man looked at me blankly.

“It means we aren’t the only ones alive. There are more survivors. My father thinks they’re military. He says they’ll be looking for people like us and that they probably have somewhere safe to take us. That’s something, right?”

The man didn’t look as impressed (or hopeful) as I had hoped he would.

“They’re up there and we’re down here. It’s a lot of ground to cover and I doubt they can even see us from up in the skies,” he said.

I didn’t let his words bring me down. I’d rather have a little hope than no hope.

“My father said that if we’re to survive, we need to remain optimistic.”

The man didn’t respond. I could tell by his face he had lost all hope already. We continued the rest of the walk in silence with only the noises of our footsteps crunching on the woodland debris underfoot to break the uncomfortable atmosphere.

* * * * *

By the time we reached the house I couldn’t help but think I had made a mistake. The man’s silence was uncomfortable and made me feel nervous. At first I thought he was a victim but now I had the unpleasant feeling he was nothing more than a looter; someone who was out to take what he could get in this shitty world.

I stepped up onto the porch, by the front door. The man waited on the drive a step or two behind me. He looked apprehensive too. I raised my hand to knock on the door but it swung open before I had the chance to do so. Father was standing there. Mother and Sister were behind him - watching from further down the hallway.

Mother and Sister looked relieved to see me but Father - he wasn’t even looking at me. I was invisible to him. His eyes were transfixed on the man standing behind me.

“So...” he said.

His voice was quiet. I hadn’t seen him like this before.

“Did you return as the hero? Some food for us? Some help? Or did you return with your tail between your legs and another mouth to feed?”

I couldn’t help but feel it was a rhetorical question.

“Who’s your friend?” he asked.

With no words (or warning) I spun round on the spot, with the axe in hand, and struck the stranger’s neck with so much force that his head separated clean from his body. The body just stood there for a moment with a fine jet of red mist spurting from the stump painting the blue skies (and then splattering the floor). After a couple of seconds the body then slumped to the floor in a crumpled heap.

Father jumped.

The girls screamed.

The severed head rolled to a standstill.

“What the hell are you doing?” Father shouted.

He stepped from the house and closed the door behind him to stop Mother and Sister seeing anymore than what they had to - even though we both knew they had already seen more than they needed to.

Father snatched the axe from my hand and asked me again, “What the hell are you doing?”

“There’s nothing out there!” I told him. “Nothing but those
things
and whoever this was...I bumped into him in the middle of the woods. He told me he had seen those infected people too. He said there was a lot of them and not a lot of anything else...”

“So you killed him?” Father hissed.

“He was going to come this way with or without me!” I said. In truth, I hadn’t planned to kill the man. It was only because of the change in his personality that I realised he couldn’t be trusted. Too unpredictable. Too dangerous. I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind of the man being a looter; the worry that he’d attack my family and me just as soon as we entered the house. “I didn’t have a choice!”

Father didn’t say anything.

Another thought (albeit disgusting) flashed through my mind. I could see from Father’s face that he too had had the same troubling, yet necessary, thought.

“And now we have something to eat.”

I dropped the bloodied axe onto the floor of the porch.

PART FIVE

Now

A Welcome Solitude

I couldn’t take my eyes off the broken bowl and strips of meat next to where I had thrown them, before Father had come into the room. My mind was continually telling me that they were there because of me. Had it not been for me trying to be the big man and rescue our family - we would never have gone down that dark path. I knew there was little point in thinking about it. I couldn’t turn the clock back no matter how much I had wanted to. And yet I couldn’t stop from procrastinating about what had come to be and where I (the hero) had led his own family.

My mind was always louder when I was by myself. A constant chattering in my brain about things I’d rather forget about yet, today at least, I preferred it to the warped wittering of my mother, father and sister. A guilt-filled break from the crazy.

“Without Father we would have starved!” Sister had been known to tell me on down days.

Down days? It seems they are becoming more and more frequent now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we had an
up
day. Was there even such a day since waking up in this prison?

Anyway - if it wasn’t for me - Father wouldn’t have stopped us from starving. The meat I brought up that day was at least a week (maybe two) before the second piece of meat stumbled in from the cold; just as confused and scared as the first piece. Had it not been for the piece I walked home I’m pretty sure the second person would have come by a house filled with the bodies of four family members.

Can’t turn the clock back, stop wishing it possible
.
What’s done is done.

My mind drifted to thoughts of leaving the house. I could just turn my back on the whole family and go off and find some help by myself. There has to be something out there. And if there isn’t, and I do end up dying from starvation or running into other forms of trouble...Would that be such a bad thing? It wasn’t the first time I’d had such thoughts. Staying here can only end badly too. Survivors aren’t frequent and we can’t rely on them stumbling into the house forever. Soon they’ll stop coming and we’ll be faced with starvation again. Then what? Would Father turn on his family? I couldn’t say for sure but if I were a betting man - I was pretty sure I know what he’d do...

The door opened and Sister walked in.

“I had to tell him!” she said. There was a defiant tone in her voice. Her defiance was also obvious by the way she strode into the room without daring to knock first. No chance of an apology then. “He had already suspected something was wrong by the way you behaved at the table. You only have yourself to blame!”

“Yeah well, it doesn’t matter.”

My mind was already telling me that leaving the house (and finding my own way) was the right thing to do.

“You’re not angry?”

I stood up and walked over to a stained mirror which hung on the wall. I beckoned Sister to join me until we were both standing side by side looking at our reflections.

“How old do you think I am?” I asked.

“What?”

“How old are you?”

Looking at our reflections, hers in particular, I reckon I could have given a good guesstimate to her age easier than my own age. Her skin was smooth, without so much of a single wrinkle and there was a shine of innocence (dulling with each passing day we stayed in the house) in her eyes which suggested she wasn’t a day over eighteen.

My own reflection, though, was a different story: a worn, tired face; wrinkles around my dark eyes. I know a lot of that was down to stress but, even so, it made it hard to give an accurate age. Was I just wearing badly and only in my teens like my sister? Was I older? Twenties perhaps? Maybe even early thirties?

“I don’t know how old I am. I don’t know my name. There’s lots that I don’t know. There is something I
do
know though...”

“What’s that?”

“I know that I
want
to remember and that is something I’ll never do all the time I stay in this house.”

Sister smirked, “You’re leaving again?”

It wasn’t the first time I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to leave. The first time I mentioned it and Father said I couldn’t go anywhere. I had to stay with the family - where it was safe. The second time he said the same thing. The third time he told me that I knew where the door was. The other times the thoughts crossed my mind, I kept it to myself. Looking back - I guess the first few times I mentioned anything were just a cry for help. Now I felt different though. Inside. I meant it. I wanted to leave. It was the best thing to do for the sake of my own survival and sanity (what was left of it).

“I mean it this time!” I told her. I tried to explain my reasons even though I had no idea whether she’d even want to hear them. “People won’t keep stumbling into this house from the outside world. Father doesn’t go out looking for them and nor does anyone else. The fact we’ve had a few people come by this way in the first place is a miracle...”

“God is looking out for us!” Sister shouted.

“Damn you with your God. There is no God. If there was then we wouldn’t be in this position. No one would. The world wouldn’t be ruined.” I continued, “What happens when people stop coming by? We starve to death? I don’t think so. How long before Father - or Mother - decides their survival is more important than ours?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you love them? Mother and Father, do you love them?”

“Yes!”

“Really? And they love you?”

“Yes!”

“Because I feel like I don’t know them and I wonder whether they feel the same about us.”

“They wouldn’t turn on us.”

“What about each other? What about going downstairs one day to find Mother on the table with Father standing above her with that knife in his hand?”

“He wouldn’t!”

“You can’t say that for definite.”

She didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could say. She knew - deep down - that what I was saying had an element of truth in it. Neither one of us had heard Mother or Father tell us that they loved us. Not that we could remember anyway. And despite what Sister said - she couldn’t pretend there wasn’t the possibility of Father (or Mother) turning on either one of us (although I think it was fair to say they’d probably start with me).

“So that’s it then? You’re going?”

There was a hint of sadness in her eyes which reminded me of how she used to be before things turned ugly for us. Not a lot. Just a hint. Enough to make me realise that (perhaps) she was still in there - deep down lost in the blackness consuming her soul. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I couldn’t help but wish she would...

“Come with me!” I said.

“What?”

“We can leave - together...Mother and Father can’t stop us. We can just leave and try and find some help. We can come back with the army, if we find them, and collect Mother and Father or we can just start again by ourselves - just the two of us.”

“You tried to leave before. Remember what happened?”

“That was before. We just need to be more clever about it - go out there quietly and try and sneak past anyone that we stumble across as opposed to fight them.”

“I don’t want to go. I like it here.”

“No you don’t. Not really. You just think you do. This is a prison though. Not just for me and you but for Mother and Father too. They think it’s a sanctuary but it’s not. Come on - come with me. We can start afresh. We can choose ourselves names - it’s clear our own names are lost. We can start a new life. One which is better than this...”

“What about Mother and Father?”

“They won’t leave with us.”

“I could talk to them.”

“They won’t.”

“I can try. I don’t want to leave without them.”

The poor girl still thought they were her mother and father. I had long since come to the conclusion that they weren’t. They were monsters. Mother and Father were as lost as our names.

“It needs to be you and me. They’ll slow us down...We have to do this.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But...”

Father’s voice boomed from the doorway, causing me to jump. I hadn’t even noticed him standing there.

“She said she doesn’t want to go!” he said.

I spun around to face him. His eyes were black again. His skin red as though flushed through with rage. This wasn’t good.