Ferine Apocalypse (Novella): 4 Hours (5 page)

He swerved into the street. Used everything the Jaguar had to offer and pushed it that little bit further.

Hoped that the road was open.

Please God, no monsters, no obstructions. A clear run for just a few minutes. Let me get closer to the objective before you throw anything else in the way. Just a little break from the crap.

The mission had become a dangerous wound.

Bleeding and all too likely to kill him. A trial of resilience and ingenuity, something he needed to endure and overcome.

Survive and then recover from.

Carlton Pearcey was tiring.

<><><>

As they’d come off the bridge, it had been reasonably free of creatures. To begin with at least.

The creatures were there of course.

The mutated people, the monsters.

They saw several of them, but always far enough away that Pearcey was able to blow past before they could approach within attacking distance.

As they entered more residential areas, it all changed.

The roads became increasingly full of activity.

None of it was good activity.

At intervals, the streets seemed to swarm with them. Snapping predatory things that reacted to noise as if it signalled the proximity of prey.

Food.

Pearcey detected a pattern to their reaction.

First, a stillness.

Poised.

Motionless, but alert.

It was evident from their peculiarly angled stance.

An almost feline position.

Reminded Pearcey of the way a cat gets when it spies something it wants to catch. To run down, paw and play with.

Until it tires of the game and bites.

Those once human creatures stood, jaws gaping, alien eyes scanning for the source of the sound. If they locked on to the car, identified the movement, they invariably began pursuit.

At times, Pearcey had no choice but to crash into them. Smash through one or more of them.

The car was already dented and scratched.

Smeared with their thick blood. A lumpy maroon liquid.

Those instances terrified him.

The times when he had to crash through them left his heart rate soaring and his armpits dripping with sweat. He could feel it under his shirt, running down the sides of his body.

They scared him more than he let on to Gallagher.

Pearcey let little show on the surface.

It wasn’t his way.

He’d never been inclined to displays of emotion, and his early life had hardened the characteristic. Engrained it so deeply into him that it moved beyond any conscious thought or decision. Carlton Pearcey was essentially honest by nature, but wearing his heart on his sleeve was another matter entirely.

At one point, one of those monstrous skeletal things caught under the Jaguar, threatened to halt them. Or worse still, cause them to crash.

The collisions horrified him. In that type of vehicle, despite its high-end spec, it would be all too easy to come to grief.

When he judged the density too great, he had to backtrack.

It became a dismal cat and mouse dance of evasion. They were constantly moving, but actual progress towards the objective was laughable. A painfully small distance covered.

In reality, there was nothing laughable about any of it. Pearcey fancied that he could see the shadows lengthening.

Hear the tick of each second as the clock relentlessly counted down to night.

The thought of darkness out there left a slick sheen on his skin.

<><><>

He didn’t see the name of the street. He thought they were in Lambeth.

Wasn’t sure because he’d become disorientated by the nightmare run of the last few minutes. The continual switching back and forth.

He drove London a lot, it was a daily part of his life, but he generally followed proscribed courses.

Familiar routes.

He knew short cuts, but he was off the beaten path now.

As he entered it, the street with no name, it was blissfully empty. Empty of prowling monsters. Empty of immediate threat.

He accelerated. Felt the engine purr.

It was rundown.

A street that didn’t have much to do with the new shiny London. There wasn’t a great deal of gleaming steel and contemporary glass.

A mixture of three and four story buildings that seemed to crowd out the darkening sky.

Casting shadows and mystery like aspersion.

At street level, shops lined both sides of the road.

Some obviously derelict and abandoned.

Some still going concerns, albeit grim and somehow despondent. The entire length of it brooded a sense of desperation.

Dirty brick and fading frontages.

Pearcey didn’t care about urban degeneration and decay. It wasn’t heaving with monsters. That was all that mattered.

“Thank fuck for small mercies.”

Murmured under his breath.

That empty bit of road, it was like a drink of cold water on a hot day. It wouldn’t last, not if their progress so far was any kind of guide.

“Carlton, pull over, I need the toilet.”

Pearcey heard Gallagher speak and, for a moment, grappled with the words. It didn’t really compute.

His stolid, no nonsense engineer, the man he’d chosen as a partner, wanted him to stop in order to go to the lavatory?

Pearcey shot a glance at his companion.

“Are you pulling my leg? Tie a fucking
knot
in it Sonny. Wait til we get to your place. You’ve got a fucking toilet there surely.”

Later, he’d wonder if the distraction might have made a difference. Possibly slowed his reactions, blurred his thinking enough to be partly responsible. It was nonsense of course.

Sometimes things simply happen.

It’s useless to ponder it.

<><><>

Gallagher was opening his mouth to reply when the world went crazy.

It was like an explosion.

Shock and impact.

The thing hit the ridiculously long bonnet of the Jaguar and bounced up. Smashed against the edge of the windscreen and roof.

Disappeared.

A detonation that crushed metal and splattered fluid like spilled paint. Squirted it across the glass in ropey strings.

Obscured Pearcey’s view.

Not that it mattered.

The steering wheel left his control and the car veered left, weighed down and wild. His foot hit the brake.

An instinct for self-preservation.

He registered Gallagher being hurled forward.

No seat belt.

Gallagher’s head thumped the glass but Pearcey had no time to think about it. The car was slip-sliding away. Like the man said, the closer you get, the more the crap seems to conspire against you.

The car shuddered as it hit something else.

Something fixed and unyielding.

Airbags inflating.

The aroma of chemical burning.

Powder in the air.

Chaos and confusion. He’d slowed sufficiently for the crash not to be calamitous, but it still jarred him in his seat.

Gallagher was thrown against him.

Blood spotting the beautiful leather.

A random moment. That was all it ever took. Unpredictable was everywhere and he ought to be used to the fact, but it still crept up on you. However prepared you thought you were.

Pearcey cursed the world and cursed himself.

Cursed the smell of oil and electricity.

He tried restart and got nothing. It was dead, the car had become an expensive piece of sculpture.

He roughly threw Gallagher out of his way, into the passenger side.

The man groaned and held his head.

“Sonny, are you okay? Are you able to move?”

Incoherent mumbling and a thumbs up.

There was movement.

Outside. Through the dust, beyond the red tinged glass, Pearcey could detect movement.

“Good, because, we’ve gotta go. Make like a tree and leave. Ditch the car and run. Find somewhere safe. Get our shit together and move on.”

Gallagher might have understood, even agreed.

Pearcey didn’t care. He wrenched open the driver’s door and dragged his friend out.

Things had started out bad and hadn’t improved. They’d just taken a distinct turn for the worse.

Angela Gacek had stopped running.

Not because the fear had receded. If anything, the fear was growing at an exponential rate. No, she hadn’t stopped running because she was less scared, she’d simply decided that conserving energy was a priority.

She was thirsty, hungry and tired.

So tired.

Lightheaded.

A little while back, for a moment, the world had greyed out. Everything had gone topsy-turvy. The pavement had suddenly been close to her nose and her hand had trailed down a wall.

The pain in her fingers had brought her back to reality.

On her knees.

When she’d inspected her hand, a nail was gone and blood was leaking from the place where it used to be.

Leaking at an alarming rate.

Not exponential. Just a lot.

She’d sucked that bleeding finger and come back to herself.

The pain became intense enough to bring tears to her eyes.

<><><>

She was walking.

Sort of.

Stagger creeping might have been a better description.

She lived in Southwark but she was lost now. Had run and run and found herself lost.

Run away from home because home had ceased to be home. It had become a house of horrors, where terrible transformations took place and dreadful events were perpetrated.

Home had become an unknown place.

That might have been the case for a long time.

She didn’t know, she couldn’t think properly.

The horror of being there and being who she was.

If her home was really what she classed as a true
home
. It was difficult to say when your nightmare-grey world had suddenly turned blood red reality. Hard to know for definite if what you were experiencing was the real world or something forced into your mind by exposure to brutality.

Angela Gacek kept going because she might rediscover it.

She might find it again.

A home.

The vague thing she remembered from childhood.

It seemed an unlikely prospect at that point, but it was still a possibility.

<><><>

Angela came to the end of one road and edged into the next.

It felt radically different. The character had changed without warning. Or perhaps she was simply too self-absorbed to notice.

It was a thoroughfare, whereas up until then, she been rattling along deserted roads.

Mostly abandoned places.

Unexpectedly, she found herself on some sort of high street. A street full of shops and shadows.

Thankfully, it was empty of people.

Empty of monsters.

She must be heading away from the river.

It was too rough, too much decline evident in the buildings and atmosphere, for it to be otherwise.

There was a stationary bus at the bottom of the road but she couldn’t see the number. That might have given her a clue. Informed her of a route and possible location.

She walked slowly.

Eyes continually scanning.

Pausing to take faltering steps and then turn on the spot.

Check behind her and stumble back to the front. It hadn’t been long, but she wondered if her flight might last forever.

Wondered if running was her new existence.

Wondered how long she could keep moving without going insane or if that had already happened.

In her heart, Angela had always felt that the world was a hellish place. And now it was really was.

Hell.

She could smell smoke in the air and flickers of hot light in the darkening sky.

London was burning, turning into a nightmare place.

The masks had fallen away. People had morphed into monsters. Feral things with animal claws and terrible teeth.

It was like being inside a Beksinski painting.

<><><>

She’d seen packs of those monsters roaming. Had hidden and prayed not to be seen by them. One could kill her, a pack of them would rip her to pieces. She’d seen cars roar past, pursued by predators that were once human.

Not many cars, but enough to know she wasn’t the sole survivor. It was little consolation because they didn’t stop.

And she wasn’t sure that she wanted them to.

In their own way, those other survivors scared her nearly as much as the monsters. The people that could endure this must be mad. They had to be.

She was alone. Now more than ever, she was alone.

She’d have to stop. Find somewhere safe to hide.

Rest.

She was exhausted, mentally and physically. Wasn’t thinking straight. No energy left in her limbs. She felt heavy and dull in every sense.

And it would be dark soon. The idea of being out here at night was too dreadful to contemplate.

Perhaps one of these dingy shops that she was scuttling past. They were darker than the street. It nearly made her laugh, the thought of entering one of these buildings and exploring it as a temporary refuge.

What refuge did it offer?

Even if it were miraculously empty, she’d be a rat trapped in a maze. They were everywhere, those creatures. Prowling the streets, searching for anything breathing.

Anything like her.

She’d seen a dog, an enormous Doberman, cornered and torn apart.

Devoured.

Dogs like that, attack dogs, had always scared her. Compared to these things, it was a harmless rabbit.

Something she could hug and love.

She needed to get out of London, but she had no idea of how to do it.

On foot?

That was beyond ridiculous. So preposterous that she felt like slapping herself for even considering it. A senseless, absurd concept. Yet she couldn’t think of another option.

She couldn’t drive, had never learned, and now didn’t seem like the best time to teach herself.

She needed help.

Other people who hadn’t been changed by whatever this was.

Before the Collapse event, if asked, Angela Gacek would have characterised her life as a grim, dismal affair. She often felt despondent, sometimes hopeless.

At that point, on that rapidly darkening city street, she was experiencing a much deeper understanding of hopelessness.

<><><>

The thing lurched out of a recessed shop doorway.

Was on her before she had time to breathe or scream.

It hadn’t completely mutated. Straggles of hair remained on its head, although the jaw and claws had developed into lethal weapons.

It had been curled in the doorway. Angela’s slow progress gave it opportunity to lunge at her legs.

She didn’t feel its talon slice through her black jeggings and open her calf.

She was already falling as its emaciated arm tangled with her legs. The arm was knurled and corded, a texture more akin to wood than flesh.

The creature had been hideously wounded. An entire side of its body twisted and broken. Nevertheless, hunger smouldered within it.

It dragged itself on to her as she lay prone. Slithered up her with one barely functioning arm and one half-good leg.

Heedlessly raked her stomach as it snapped ever closer to her face.

Angela swung the knife from the side. Desperation lending her energy that she didn’t think she had.

Buried the blade in its temple more by luck than skill.

Gasped as it collapsed on her.

Appalled by the pulsating shivers that racked its body as it died on top of her.

Crawled out from under it until she was free and then lay on her back, staring at the sky. The quivering of it had been awful.

Almost sexual.

She turned her head and weakly threw up. Water vomit dripping into her black hair.

Lay and looked at the unforgiving sky again.

Heard the low rumble of a car and then a splintering boom that seemed to fill the gloomy air like judgement.

She began crawling again.

The knife was gone.

Hilt deep in the monster’s head.

It didn’t matter, she still had the bag, clutched in her white-knuckled fist. There were more knives in there.