Sinister Sentiments (14 page)

It strikes me that the next time I die, his fear of me will probably be the last thing on my mind.

The Day The World Ended

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It’s amazing what stupid, particular things you remember from the days that change your life forever. I know, for example, that I’d found a hole in the toe of my onesie on the morning of April 3rd, four years ago. It was the Wonder Woman one, my outfit of choice for a Saturday morning when I was thirteen. My hair was in need of a wash and its light brown stands kept flopping into my face as I tried to eat my cereal. I was sat cross-legged on our black leather sofa, watching cartoons with one eye and studying the toe-hole with the other.

It could have been the start of any of the other boring Saturdays I had lived in the thirteen years prior to April 3rd. But it wasn’t. This was the day that everything changed. This was the day the world ended.

Dad burst into the living room, wearing his usual shirt and tie for work, but he still had his trackie trousers on his lower half. I remember ignoring him back then, because he was always half-dressed and late for work at the software developers. Now, I wish I’d paid more attention to his health and strength as he buzzed about the room. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen my father with so much life in him.

“Cherie,” he said, waving a hand in front of the telly to get my attention. “I thought you were going into town to do some shopping?”

He moved to the mirror, trying to force the curl out of his dark, greying hair with a plastic comb. I frowned, but he didn’t notice it.

“I dunno,” I replied. “My friends haven’t texted me yet.”

“I was going to drop you at the arcade on my way to work,” Dad continued. “D’you want me to leave you a key instead?”

My brow drooped. “Can’t mum take me?”

Dad shook his head as I watched him straightening his tie.

“Your Mum’s still at A and E,” he told me. “She called me at about one this morning, something about an epidemic. I don’t know, I was half-asleep when she called. But I know that when she does get home, she’s not going to want to ferry you around, princess.”

He only called me ‘princess’ when I made what he thought were unreasonable demands. I rolled my eyes at him, but he still hadn’t really looked at me once. He was picking up his car keys, ready to head out towards the porch.

“Dad!” I called.

He froze in the doorway, checking his watch.

“What Cherie?” he asked. “I’m going to be late.”

“Are you jogging to work or something?” I asked, trying to hold back my grin.

Dad mumbled “What are you on about?”, but he had already looked down at himself before the question was through. Trackie trousers, complete with paint flecks from the numerous D.I.Y. projects of our last summer, still adorned his legs.

“Oh Hell,” he said. And then he looked at me, really looked at me, and grinned his massive toothy grin. “Thanks darlin’.”

I can still hear the mirth in his Scot’s accent now. I remember how he used to sound, when all he had to worry about was me and Mum and work. When we grinned at each other that morning, we didn’t know what was coming. We couldn’t know that it was the last time we’d ever grin like that. We could never have guessed that in twenty-four hours’ time, the world would have nothing left in it worth grinning about.

When Dad left for work, I had one of those, rare tense moments when a kid is left home alone. I immediately raided the fridge for chocolate and sat down again at the telly, tapping the screen of my phone every few seconds as I waited for someone to message me. Ideally, Cariad and I were going to Queen’s Arcade to try on shoes, then we’d probably end up sitting by the river in Sofia Gardens, as usual. But I had only moved to Cardiff a year ago, and Cariad had a lot of other friends that she had known since she was four years old.  Occasionally, they managed to convince her to ditch me for a better offer. I was really, really hoping that April 3rd wasn’t one of those times.

Now, I wish it had been.

My phone buzzed and I grabbed it eagerly, sliding the message into view.

Cariad:
omg hav u seen the news? crazy!!! call 4 u in 1 hour n we’ll go town. C x

Cariad never watched the news, so if something had gotten her attention, I needed to see it. It took me ages to actually find the news channel, having never searched for it before, but when I got the right page, I studied it hard. Headlines were breaking in bold, flickering letters at the bottom of the screen. The picture showed a reporter with a deep Welsh accent, who was standing in front of some murky grey mountains in the faint spring rain. The legend scrolling below him read:

SKINS SPOTTED IN BRECON BEACONS NATIONAL PARK.

I had caught him mid-report, but I tried to make sense of what he was saying.

“Experts suggest that the creatures must be moving through uninhabited areas to seek shelter. The public is strongly advised to remain only in densely populated areas until police have contained the threat.”

The Skins were the whole reason that we’d moved away from Carlisle last year. Nobody really knew what they were, but the government had labelled them as “a dangerous new breed of animal”, and they were popping up in countryside areas. Up north, there had been a new threat every week, but South Wales had never had any sightings. Until now.

The Brecon Beacons were about an hour from Cardiff by road. It was strange to think that those animals could just suddenly appear there without someone seeing them travel that far south, but I didn’t ponder it much at the time. I texted Cariad back.

Cherie:
freaky! looks like shopping is the safest place eva ;) c u soon x

*

Dad worked six days a week at some fancy computer firm, and Mum was an emergency room doctor at the hospital on the Heath. Back then, I used to get a fair bit of pocket money, which Mum deposited into my bank every week from her account. She and Dad used to call it ‘guilt money’, because they weren’t usually around to watch me spending it. At the time, I didn’t mind. I saw them for breakfast and dinner and I could buy most anything I wanted. It was fun to be ‘the rich new girl’ at school, and it seemed like money was a great quick fix to solve my problems and lift my mood.

If I’d known that April 3rd was the last day the nation would ever care about money, I’d have spent the contents of that little bank account in one go.

Our house was only a short walk from the city centre, so when Cariad knocked for me, I put on my cutest wedge heels to hit the town. A terrible idea, in hindsight, but then I was just a kid who wanted to show off. I couldn’t walk very fast in the wedges, but we arrived at Queen’s Arcade in a bright and giggly mood. Cariad donned her G-Star t-shirt, her prized designer possession, and her dyed pink hair was curled up under a New York Yankees hat.

“You wanna go break our ankles trying on stilettos?” she asked me, her grey eyes glittering with mischief.

Cariad was cool. She had two piercings in each ear and her mum was going to let her get her nose done for her fourteenth birthday. She talked about dubstep like she actually knew what it was, and she advised me on what not to mention about myself at school, so that I’d stay popular. She had swagger, style and a good friendly heart. Every minute with her was full of laughter.

I miss her laughter so desperately now. It’s one of those sounds that I wish I’d committed to my memory better, whilst I still had the chance to hear it.

Mum would have murdered me if I’d bought sixty-quid stilettos, so I settled for a pack of funky socks after Cariad and I had had our fun. When we paid at the counter, the cashier had her phone streaming a radio station as she beeped my purchase through. I remember there being a problem with the barcode, because we were stood at the counter long enough for me to hear an update on the discovery of the Skins in the Beacons. The announcer’s faint voice emanated from the little speaker:

“Rangers at the Pembrokeshire Coastal Park have added to concerns in Brecon as further reports come in. A missing dog-walker on the coastal path has led to the sighting of two more Skins near…”

I thought I was just being paranoid, and I kept trying to push the thought of the Skins from my mind as we carried on browsing the shops. Pembrokeshire was a lot farther away than Brecon; it had to be pure coincidence that both national parks had reported Skin sightings at the same time. Back at the beginning of the epidemic, the Cairngorms in Scotland were reporting them every single day, but there was never any danger. Not so long as you stayed in places with plenty of other people around.

“Let’s get a cake at the castle,” Cariad suggested.

I nodded eagerly, all thoughts of danger dissipating at the prospect of a sweet treat. Cariad was not only cool at school; she knew people and she had connections everywhere. Her mum worked a few days a week at the tea shop inside Cardiff Castle, and Cariad had recently made friends with George, the old man who worked on the castle gate. So long as George and Cariad’s mum were working on the same day, we could get in for nothing and grab a free bite from the kitchens. It was a short trek back from Queen’s Arcade to the castle, made all the shorter by the fact that it was starting to rain.

“Are you sure you want to stay out?” I asked Cariad as we walked towards the castle’s ancient drawbridge entrance. “We could carry on back to mine and stay there ‘til the rain’s gone.”

“Nah, it’s cool,” Cariad assured me. “It won’t rain for long.”

She was wrong about that. She was wrong about a lot of things that day, especially the decision to stay in the city centre. If we’d gone home when I’d suggested it, then some of the worst things I’ve ever witnessed might never have happened.

George had a booming voice, which rumbled out from under a bushy black moustache that jumped when he shouted. You could tell when he was on duty in the ticket booth, halfway up the castle’s drawbridge, because of all the yelling. George was a great fan of cupping his dark hands together and hollering at the tourists on the street, enticing them to come and see the castle. Sometimes, Cariad and I lingered on the street, just to giggle at people being startled by his voice.

The sight of people in fear was funny to us back then. I’m not sure I even understand that kind of humour now.

“Come to the magnificent Cardiff Castle!” George cried with great enthusiasm. “Come see history inside these amazing fortified walls! Come see - oh!”

George’s voice barely dropped a bar in volume when he saw us coming.

“Hello Cariad! You want to bring your friend in, huh?”

He stamped our hands with the special, red visitor ink and waved us off merrily as we went up the drawbridge. He was right about the castle’s walls. I remember that day as the one where I first noticed how indestructible the castle must have been. Out of all the ancient structures that had been and gone in this city, the austere stone barriers of Castell Caerdydd were still standing firm.

“I’ve always wanted to live in a castle,” Cariad said. “It’d be so cool.”

At the time, I was in total agreement with my best friend. But, for the record, it’s nowhere near as cool as you imagine it’s going to be when you’re thirteen. We went straight to the tea shop, which had glass doors and modern tables and chairs that were gathered in pairs. Cariad’s mum was taking a hefty tea-tray over to an old Malaysian couple who were bickering about their digital camera. She spotted us as we took a corner table, winking one of her blue eyes as she went back to the counter to fetch us a treat.

To my distress, the news was on the TV here too, and it seemed now that the simultaneous sightings in Brecon and Pembrokeshire were not the only ones to have happened. This time, the report was focusing on a little town that I vaguely recognised, where a long, lumpy thing was lying in the middle of the road, covered by a sheet. Cariad had her back to the telly and she was totally engrossed in her phone. I’m not sure I could have alerted her to what was on the screen if I’d wanted to; I was so transfixed by the sight of the mysterious covered lump. Bright yellow subtitles delivered broken chunks of what the reporter was saying.

THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH WALES ARE SAYING THAT THIS IS THEIR WORST NIGHTMARE REALISED. A SKIN HAS BEEN DISCOVERED IN THE BUSTLING CENTRE OF TOWN. THE CREATURE WAS ATTACKED AND KILLED BY MR GWYLL POWELL, WHO IS NOW BEING DETAINED BY LOCAL AUTHORITIES.

The subtitles must have been a few seconds behind the pictures, because suddenly the lump in the road was gone, and a sobbing woman was talking.

WE GO NOW TO MRS POWELL, WHO WITNESSED HER HUSBAND’S ACTIONS.

In an effort to catch up with themselves, the yellow words became a sudden scramble of letters. What replaced them was green text, which must have been part of what the crying woman was telling the reporter.

AND I REMEMBER ITS SKIN. NO WONDER THE POLICE CALL THEM SKINS. IT HANGS ON THE THING’S BONES LIKE IT’S READY TO FALL OFF. PALE AND SEE-THROUGH, JUST LIKE A GHOST.

A loud clatter made me jump and I nearly had a tray full of tea and cakes spilled over me. Cariad’s mum gave me a panicked look as she set down our snacks. She put a hand to my brow, and it took me a moment to remember where I was. Everything was normal in this little tea shop. Everything was safe here.