Class Four: Those Who Survive (31 page)

Chapter Forty-One

The three above-ground dwellers turned slowly on their heels and looked upon five men who stood in a loose semi-circle around them. Each wore the front half of a human skull as a mask. Eyes circled with ochre made it look as though their ocular orbs were bathed in flame.

They all wore a waistcoat of packed together, brushed clean ribs, affixed with thick wire around a bleached breastbone. Three hefted human femurs, which they wafted menacingly like clubs, sanded down to an immaculate sheen, a handle woven around the thin end, fashioned from tendon and ligaments.

The other two held arm radius bones, which had been whittled into a vicious point at one end, and a handle at the other, wrapped in inch wide strips of flayed skin. The appointed leader took a step forward, jabbing the air in front of them with his makeshift shiv, “Dun’t try nuffing or I’ll stabs ya,” he lisped.

Rough hands grabbed the group and dragged them away from the pit entrance and forced them to the ground. “Gwan and git their stuff yous lot,” grunted the leader. Whilst two stood guard, the other pair pulled off the bags and weapons from the trio. Nathan was shaking like a shaved pig in winter.

Casting their belongings aside into a heap, the leader pointed at them. “Best gets them inside. I just hopes we got enough room fur ‘em, specially little ‘un. Likes the looks of ‘im, I do,” he drawled.

As the savages loomed over the stricken gang, a voice echoed out from the poop chute. “What’s going on up there? You guys got anything yet?”

The leader gestured to the captives. They peeled off into two pairs, one grabbed Zena under the arms and started dragging her towards the door, which was still banging nonchalantly against the extension. Russ followed after, cursing and struggling, but to no avail. Nathan remained kneeling, eyes wide with terror. His brain told him to run, but his body was closed to submissions.

“Hey! Come on, you’ve had your fun, get me something to get out of h—”

A leering face, the top half of which was covered by a yellowing skull, glared down the canyon at Francis. “Ha, you stuck down vere silly man, I don’t fink you’ll be getting owt some’ow. Vere’s fings down thar you dun’t wunt to be coming across. Best being quiet, I’s reckun.”

The face grinned and then disappeared from view. Francis tried to find some gaps in the mortar, something to use as a handhold. Scrabbling around, he managed to prise fingernails into the minutest of gaps and start to climb up the sheer wall, to freedom.

From above, there came the sound of grinding metal, like a devilish robot eating household appliances. Francis had only made it a few feet off the floor; his own height and a half again of sheer breezeblock lay ahead.

A shadow waved above him. Looking up, he saw the face smiling back down at him, broken up into tiny squares. “No, don’t you dare,” Francis said through gritted teeth.

The leader let out a pleasured yelp and let the slurry pit cover use the full benefits of gravity and slam down into place. A kick and a squeaking of metal dropped the heavy lid into its housing.

“I ‘ope that didn’t wake up the uvvers. Vey is worse than us.” With that, the skull-covered face vanished.

Francis could hear a smacking sound, followed by a kid sobbing. “I’m gonna get you, pilgrim,” he bellowed. He scrambled for another divot above him, but in his urgency he missed and plunged back onto the dried faecal matter.

He lay on his back, panting and heaving with exertion. Through the sound of his heart thudding in his temple and the rage buzzing around his nervous system like a trainful of pissed off bees, he heard a creaking sound behind him in the gloom…

Chapter Forty-Two

The lantern swinging from the rafters cast a pale glow over the desolate interior of the barn. A loud clunk signalled the padlock snapping shut. The savage tugged on the chain to make sure it was secure. “Vat shuld holds ya,” he sneered at Nathan, before strolling down back where they had come in, running the bone knife hilt against the row of metal cages.

“Hey kid, it’ll be fine,” Zena called over to the kid, who was snivelling in the cage directly opposite her.

“Ha, you reckon? This lot go for the little ones first. Say they’re a rare treat,” a man tucked in the recess of his cage cooed. “Ha ha, no way, it’s
you
lot. Well, isn’t this a turn up for the books?”

The cage forced anyone over four feet tall to scuttle around its straw-covered interior like some kind of bug. The man bum-slid over to the front of his cage. “It’s you, the eater of old men,” Russ said, as if he’d just sat in vomit-flavoured chewing gum.

The train station cannibal shot them a tooth-filled smile. “Much obliged to you for leaving him outside. Had to fight off a couple of feisty squirrels, but I managed to finish him off. Though he did repeat on me for a few days.” He thumped his chest with a balled fist as the memory made his stomach turn.

“Nasty.”

Nathan held onto the bars with chipolata fingers. He flicked his head around, taking in the musty barn; the smell of the previous porcine inhabitants scratched against the back of his throat. The roof was a black sky. Lines of brown rust ran up and down its flanks, with equidistantly spaced out lanterns throwing out light like orange dwarf stars on a pendulum.

As far as he could see, cages ran to either side of him. Some were empty, doors ajar like a sleeping yokel, others contained hunchbacked denizens of despair. Some rocked like a weeble in a perpetual motion study, others stared blankly from corners which they never ventured from. Worn faces, creased like fish-and-chip paper, open mouths with rows of soot speckled teeth and diseased meat for tongues.

In one cage, five down from Zena, he could see one of the captives had turned. Muck-covered digits probed a festering wound in his neighbour’s back as he sat there. Like a malnutritioned kid being pestered by flies in a commercial for food aid, the man sat there nonplussed. Arms which were no more than folded bones hugged his pointed mountain knees to his barely moving chest.

“I’m scared, Russ,” Nathan whimpered, trying to peel his eyes off the myriad of degenerate sights on offer, but finding that for every desecration he skipped, he settled on another, as twisted and obscene as the last.

Russ was in the cage next to him. Since their incarceration, he had spent the time testing the security features of his new living space. The bars, though they looked like they could barely contain an irate duck, were unyielding and tough. Several stern kicks to the padlock failed to provide freedom, and the weathered chain brushed off the assault with ease.

“Don’t worry, kid. We just gotta find a way outta here. Keep a look out, okay? Let me know if any of those bone bastards come back, ya hear me?” Russ barked, before scrabbling in the filth laden straw beneath him, looking like a cornered rabbit.

He scooted from one patch to the next, certain that in the next plot there would be a weakness, a chink in the armour he could expose and extricate them all from.

The train station cannibal piped up, “Go ahead, man. Try, like none of us have done that, eh? Might as well just accept it and make peace with it. One good thing is that the food here is top notch. Just you wait, they wanna keep you big and strong.”

“Russ, someone’s coming,” Nathan hissed, eyes widened with terror and trepidation as the sounds of heavy boots clip-clopped down the concrete floor.

“Oh, goody goody, I hope it’s feeding time,” the cannibal simpered, “…though it could be…nah, they only got fresh ones yesterday, even they can’t have gone through that lot already.” He chuckled nervously.

Russ scattered the pile of straw over the floor, wiping his hands on his jeans after, as if on autopilot.

“Looks at that one. He’s a bit too fresh. Best makes sure that Dick takes care of him, never likes them biters me,” rasped the voice that had accosted them outside. The footsteps began again, coming to a stop by the new arrivals.

The skull-covered face bent down and peered into Nathan’s cage. Nathan staggered backward until he hit metal covered wall. “Free little piggies went to market, one wuz a runt wiv a stupid face,” he looked down on Russ who was sitting calmly in the middle of his pen. “Ve ova was a hat-wearing city boy wiv a body ma would like to get ‘er ands on.”

The man grabbed the top of the cage and started to dry hump it, eliciting the appropriate grunts and warblings. After a minute, he stopped, unfulfilled, and turned to Zena. “But vis little piggy...well, papa said that gurls were sugar an spice an all fings nice. We don’t get many do we, ‘Url?”

One of the other bone-adorned savages grunted in the negative and started to pick off a piece of flesh he had missed from his knife.

“Nah, we don’t. Still, it’s the festival of the night, so we’ve got a liddle feast to prepare.” The lisping savage stood up and re-joined his inbred brethren. From a leather loop on his belt, he untied a large ring of keys, all different sizes and, much to an OCD sufferers chagrin, not all around the same way.

He plunged a finger into his nostril and began to nose-mine, seemingly lost in his current ‘To-Do’ list. After failing to extract anything of note, he wiped his digit against his leg and fingered through the keys. He settled on a small silver one, before turning to address the rows of captives. “Url, Vints, get ‘im and ‘im, vey will do nicely.”

Chapter Forty-Three

As a kid, Francis’ favourite film was
Jason and the Argonauts
. In particular, it was the effects that dug their talons into him and won a place in his infant heart. Whilst he gazed in awe at the mighty form of Talos, it was the skeletons raised from the teeth of Medusa that dropped his jaw.

The sound that rang through his ears reminded him of Harryhausen’s creations. He rummaged through his rucksack and dug out the torch. Clicking the power on, he swept the beam across the dried slurry pit.

The floor was a mottled brown colour. Contained within its mortar was straw, ragged flaps of polythene, pieces of broken masonry and many solidified liquids that he hoped to never find out about. The ground itself was like a beach; mainly flat but with dips and mounds. The light gutted out above the craters and cast long shadows in the distance against the rises.

The cracking sound rumbled through his feet, like a fracking drill on low speed. It unsettled him and caused his cheeks to wobble. The light shone onto a patch of dried filth about twenty feet away from him. The top layer split and formed into a feculent crevasse. Francis swallowed, spit with traces of ammonia slid into his gut, causing a surge in acid production.

From the fissure, a rigor-mortised hand rose. Fingers, bent and stiff like an arthritic claw, pawed the air. Francis rooted through the bag once more and found the metal hatchet he had picked up from the freakshow of death. Pushing the bag behind him, he shone the light over the limited horizon. The hand had ceased moving, as though it had done all it had meant to accomplish and was waiting to be withdrawn back to its display case, under the hardened animal waste and assorted farm debris.

“Ha,” Francis guffawed.

The ground resumed its vibrations. The beam of light searched again. He spotted another rift forming to the left of the rather creepy human pincer. This time, a full blown human head, complete with rictus grin, rose from the underground.

It seemed to convince the talon that now was the time to finish what it had started, as the arm it was attached to appeared from its tomb and started to excavate the ground around it.

Not content with the other two having something to eat, for the first time since their lifeless bodies were thrown into the liquid slurry pit, Shrill, or
Cheryl
as she was known to her brothers, sisters and extended family, decided to exercise her woman’s prerogative, and break free of her putrid shallow grave.

Aside from
Jason and the Argonauts,
Francis had also watched a fair few horror films in his time, and spent a lot of that time shouting at the television to either ‘get the hell out of there’ or ‘finish them, off you idiot’.

Not wanting to add himself to a weird edition of the Darwin Awards, Francis gripped the hatchet and stormed across to Shrill. She had managed to free both of her arms and torso and was testing out her mouth by chattering at the thing which looked very much like food in her zombified brain.

Having been well versed in splitting logs for his grandparents’ fireplace, he brought the axe down with a dull thud directly on Shrill’s crown. Her skull burst open like the foulest-smelling, rotten meat-filled piñata in all of creation. Teeth stopped clacking together and her body fell back into the cold embrace of pig shit.

Jed, or ‘The Claw’, had managed to scrape away the hardened gunk from half of his body. A wan light filtered into eyes that had not seen daylight for seven months. The last thing his memory had stored was a pair of headlights hurtling towards him, headlights belonging to an out of control car.

If it had any ability to recall this memory and enjoy the simple things of human existence, such as emotion, Jed may well have remarked on the similarity of seeing another light shining into his eyes before meeting his maker.

Again. This time for keeps.

Francis smashed the axe down again, for good measure. With the amount of crap on top of the half-submerged shit-zombie, he wanted to make sure it was dead-dead. The axe head came out slick with black gore and thick strands of brainghetti.

Mick, though, well he was referred to by his nine brothers and sisters as ‘one tough sunnovabitch’. With Francis busy administering a non-denomination approved series of brutal last rites, Mick had managed to rise from the crap fabricated barrow and, after shaking free a number of burrowing insects, turned to face the fratricide instigator.

Francis ducked beneath the lunging arms of the last shit zombie. As it stumbled on the follow-through, sheets and flakes of dubious origin fell off Mick. As his death shroud disintegrated, Francis could make out a large wound through his assailant’s stomach. It reminded him of a cored Goldie Hawn from
Death Becomes Her.

Strands of decaying flesh swung within the tatty crater. Mick turned with all the speed of a mobility scooter and lurched towards Francis once more. A hasty swipe shaved off the top of a shoulder, slicing it as if he were an eccentric butcher.

Like a zombie matador, Francis
Olé’
d the zombie and Mick ambled towards the patch of ground where Francis had made his rather unceremonious entrance.

Seeing his chance, he slammed the axe into the back of Mick’s skull, and Mick sank to the floor like a mannequin on a hot tin roof. The shit zombie plunged face down, the axe still embedded deep within its manky head.

Francis tried to heave the weapon out, but it was stuck fast. Seeing it was still moving, he stamped on the axe head, which bit further into the soft liquefying brain mulch. Mick quivered like a cold Elvis impersonator and was returned to sender.

Thinking to himself about the ease in which he had dealt with these poor wretches, Francis turned his attention to removing the axe from the properly dead zombie’s head. Despite a boot on the back of its skull, and his best Excalibur removing techniques, the axe held fast.

He punted the handle side on and heard a promising crack of bone. A few more meaty kicks later and he felt the shit zombie’s hold on his weapon relent.

“You are one tough son of a bitch,” Francis muttered as he knelt down to retrieve the axe. As he waggled it out of the cranium, his nose twitched in disgust. Before he could put two and two together, the hatchet was liberated, along with a pocket of bog gas which had been fermenting within Mick since his internment in the slurry pit.

The fog engulfed Francis and stole the air from his lungs. He reeled from the stench. Gasping for breath, he staggered backwards, and as he moved clear of the noxious fumes, his body shut down, starved of oxygen.