Undead at Heart (12 page)

Andy, the chef from
the pub, glanced at her only quickly before fixing his eyes back on the
doorway. “Dan and Daz went in to see if anyone was in there. Maybe someone was
hurt, I think Dan said. There was nothing, and then one of them just shouted.”

“It wasn’t a shout, it
was a scream!” Charlotte was upset, and Sam noticed that Sandra seemed to be
holding her back. “Alan went in to see what was going on. I told him not to.”

“A
scream?
Was it
one of them or someone else? Did they say something or was it just a scream?”

“It sounded like Dan,”
volunteered Sandra. “He cried out, that was all. Then Alan ran in.”

“Should we go and
help?”

“I don’t think so,”
Andy shook his head. “If there’s something in there that the three of them
can’t handle, then I don’t think there’s much point the rest of us rushing to
our death.”

Sam looked at him,
incredulous. “And would you want them saying that about you if it was you in
there? God, are all men cowards?”

She ran for the house,
and Charlotte broke free from Sandra and followed her. As they reached the
doorway, however, they saw Alan running towards them. He was looking behind him
and nearly ran straight into them. They moved back, half catching him as he
stumbled on the threshold. He was quickly followed by Dan and Daz bundling
through the door after him.

Alan threw his hand
out and dragged Charlotte by the arm towards where the others were standing.
Daz did the same for Sam, leaving Dan behind them, watching the door warily.

“Is it following?” Daz
called back to him.

“I can’t see it! I
don’t think so!”

“Move back, you saw
how it could leap, for God’s sake!” called Alan.

“I can’t see it!” Dan
sounded panicked.

“You won’t.” The voice
came from behind them. It was quiet and unsure, but it carried across the
courtyard, causing even Dan to turn.

Tony had emerged from
the barn with the young man – not much more than a boy, really – who had been
hiding under the harvester. It was the boy who had spoken.

“I don’t think they like
the light. I’m not sure, but I think as long as we’re out here in the sun,
we’re safe.”

“Who?
What? What is in there? What are
you talking about?” Sam had caught the panic that was emanating from the three
men who had been in the house.

“It’s my mum.”

Nicola knelt on the
tarmac of the road running past the farmhouse with no memory of how she had got
there. The pains in her knees told her she had dropped to them, but the last
thing she could remember was being in the courtyard with no sign of anyone. No
sign of Dave and certainly no sign of Alyssa.

She remembered
screaming but then nothing until finding herself here, panting, in the middle
of the road. She got up, needing to search, needing to find her daughter, but
her legs were weak and wobbly. She sucked in air, steadying herself, and
started to remember running from building to building around the farm,
searching, and realised that she had already tried to find her daughter and
been unsuccessful. From the position of the sun she had lost an hour or more.

She stood in the
middle of the road, looking up and down its length, trying to decide what to do
next.

She walked slowly back
into the courtyard, more of her memories of searching returning to her. There
had been no sign of disruption, no sign of a struggle, no explanation for the
disappearance of thirty or more people.

She looked again but
could see nothing that she wouldn’t expect in a farmyard: scuff-marks on the
cobbles; scatters of grass and miscellaneous animal feed; muddy patches with
paw and hoof marks printed in them; various types and amounts of animal dung;
nothing unusual.

She walked back around
the buildings, remembering more clearly now her dash as she went in and out of them
all. She hadn’t stopped to consider the possibility of meeting another creature
like the one in the farm house, but she had been lucky and the rabid pensioner
seemed to have been a one of a kind.

She walked back into
the darkness of that kitchen once more, driven by a morbid desire to look again
at the woman. Part of Nicola wanted to make sure that the woman had been real,
and that she hadn’t been hallucinating. Another part wanted to make sure that
the woman hadn’t moved.

The body was still
there. Her head had been caved in by the weight of the pan Nicola had wielded,
and she could see bone and brains showing. She looked closer at the damage
which had been there before Nicola had encountered her. Even in the thick of
the battle she had noticed that the woman’s left eye seemed to have been gouged
out, but amongst the mess of Stan’s blood which had been trailing from her
mouth, Nicola had failed to notice the large part of the woman’s own neck which
seemed to have been bitten away.

Not for the first time
today, she wondered just what the hell was going on.

She made to leave the
kitchen, remembering again the scene that had greeted her when she first came
in: the old lady gorging herself on Stan’s
throat,
and
she realised something that had been tickling at the back of her mind. Stan?
Where was Stan?

She went over to the
patch of floor where he had been. It was increasingly dark in the room. The sun
was dropping down below the trees. But she could still see the patch of blood
that had been left on the floor when the woman had torn his jugular. She could
see that so clearly because there was no Stan in the way. He was gone.

Then, looking closer,
she saw the hand-prints he had made in the blood when he had struggled back to
his feet. And she could see the footprints which led from the puddle to the
door in the far corner of the kitchen. A bloody handprint was smeared on the
white woodwork of the frame.

She started to follow
after him. He had only been hurt and needed her help! And then she stopped. She
looked down at the copious amounts of blood washed over the floorboards. No, he
had been more than hurt. He had been dead.

She didn’t know what
the hell she was going to do next, but she knew that following the dead into
the depths of a strange and increasingly dark house was not one of them.

She went back out into
the light, listening carefully for any movement. She had seen how fast the old
woman could move, but at least she was small and light. If whatever had
happened to her had happened to Stan, she did not want to be present if he
decided to take to the same kind of activities.

She stood in the
farmyard for a moment, and then came to a decision. Her daughter was not here.
Neither were any of the other people she had been travelling with. If they
weren’t here they were somewhere else. In that case, she decided, she also
needed to be somewhere else. It was the only way she would find them.

She walked from the
farmyard back to the road where she had come back to herself after her panicked
fugue. She looked left and right up the road and with nothing to choose between
them, turned to the right and started walking.

“Dad had only just
started the tractor when the power went out. At first he thought it was just
the tractor playing up. It’s getting old and we can’t afford a new one, and it
does cut out from time to time. He had the bonnet open and was jiggling the
wires when I came out to tell him that the power had gone off in the house.”

They were sitting on a
grassy bank on the edge of the field beyond the farmhouse. It was raised enough
that it would be last place around to lose the sun, and James had told them he
thought they would be okay in the sun. Dan had also approved because it was
high enough to see anything coming to them from any direction. They had sat
themselves in a circle around the boy to hear his story, but Dave told them to
keep an eye out for anything. He didn’t say what and he, Daz and Alan still
hadn’t told the others what had happened in the house. All Tony knew was that
these previously fearless men were badly shaken and didn’t want anything
creeping up on them. Although James was facing him, and Dan was on the far side
of the circle, as they listened Tony kept looking behind him, just in case.

“When I told him he
came in and checked the fuses and tried all kinds of things, but nothing did
any good. Then I told him that my phone and my iPod had both gone off at the
same time and he looked worried. I didn’t know what was going on, but he said
he was going outside to have a look around.”

James shook his head
and looked to be on the verge of tears. But he looked so tired; Tony wondered
if he had already cried himself empty. “I wonder if he’d have been all right –
if we’d all have been all right – if he’d just stayed indoors with me and mum.”
He shrugged and gave a humourless laugh. “Or maybe I’d have been trying to rip
your throat out too.”

At this, Tony felt Sam
gave a start next to him.
Rip your throat out
? What was the boy talking about?
Tony wanted to confront him, make him start talking sense, but Sam must have
realised he was approaching an outburst. Her squeeze of his hand stilled him
and he carried on listening.

“He was gone about ten
minutes and when he came back in, my first thought was that the tractor had
blown-up. He was red, like he had been badly burned. His skin was blistered and
even seemed to be smoking. He didn’t smell of diesel, though, but like cooking
meat. He smelled like the middle of a really good barbecuing session.” Now he
did give out a low sob, but he carried on talking. “It actually made me hungry,
but then the thought of food made me sick. I just stood there, looking at him,
feeling all these crazy things. I couldn’t move. But my mum could. She didn’t
notice, and neither did I, the crazy look in his eyes, nor the fact that his
throat had been ripped wide open and his shirt was covered in b-b-blood.”

Debbie, who had left
her baby with her husband to sit next to the boy, put her arm round his
shoulder and held him to her while he sobbed. It was soft and muted: tired, and
it soon ran itself out.

He wiped his eyes with
his thumbs. “Sorry,” he mumbled to her.

“Don’t be daft,” she
said, and pulled a tissue from the pocket of her jeans, which she passed to
him. He wiped his eyes again, and blew his nose. He went to offer it back, but
then realised that she probably didn’t want it now. He held it in his hands and
looked down at it as he continued, talking to the tissue.

“My mum ran over to
him, asking him if he was okay, asking what had happened. He didn’t say
anything, but when she got to him he kinda snarled and then he b-bit… He bit
her. Here.” He touched his throat and then pulled his hand away as though
burned. “And he kept biting.
And biting.”

His breathing hitched,
and Debbie gave him another one-armed hug, but he pulled back and nodded to
show he was okay. “He dropped her on the floor and there was blood all over the
place, and then he turned to me. I was frozen in place. I should have run, or
hid, or something, but I couldn’t think; couldn’t believe what I’d just seen.
He took a couple of steps towards me and then I realised that I could barely
see him. His skin was really smoking and by now it was almost black. With his
next
step
he…. well, he crumpled, melted. A second
later there was nothing left but some kind of dirty slime.”

He looked up, his
expression asking everyone to believe his tale, even though it was plainly
insane. Tony wanted to disbelieve, to call him a liar, but he couldn’t. He’d
seen enough strange things today that he thought he would believe anything now.

“What happened then?”
asked Sam, softly.

“I still couldn’t
move. I just looked at the mess on the floor which used to be my dad, and the
body which had been my mum. I couldn’t even scream or cry or anything. I just
stood there.”

He drew in a deep
rattling breath. “And then she moved.”

The shadows of trees
and hedges lay full length across the road as Nicola walked. There were the
sounds of birds and the occasional rustle in a hedgerow which she thought could
have been a squirrel or a hedgehog or a field mouse. Part of her brain kept
trying to throw the word racoon into the mix, but she beat it back. Hell, for
all she knew the noise was made by rats. They had rats in the country, didn’t
they? She wasn’t sure.

She realised she
wasn’t sure about anything. She’d been back in the country for a couple of
years, but her brain still thought in American. All her references, all her
knowledge of laws, and customs, and even wildlife were for a country thousands
of miles away. She was adrift in a country which, when she lived in the US, she
had always claimed as her own. Now she realised she didn’t know it at all.
Hell, what does a 14 year old know anyway? They know their friends, their back-gardens,
the boys at school and that’s about it. Before she’d left she’d never really
had to interact with the world, she’d always had her mum for that.