DEATH CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE NOVELLA

(BOOK ONE OF TWO)

BY

SAM WEST

DEATH CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE NOVELLA

(BOOK ONE OF TWO)

BY

SAM WEST

COPYRIGHT SAM WEST 2019

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews. The characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

CHAPTER ONE

“Jesus, what’s with those bloody sirens?”

Zara Hudson snuggled her face more firmly into her boyfriend’s chest, not particularly caring one way or the other what his answer might be. Tonight was their night, and nothing or no one was going to intrude upon it.

“It’s eight O’clock on Saturday night, the pissheads are out in full force. You English, you like your lager, yes?”

Zara pulled away slightly, playfully swatted Jean-Paul on his stomach, and he flinched as surely as if he had been disembowelled.

“Hey, that hurts, mon petit lager lout.”

“Says you, who drinks his own weight in red wine on a daily basis. Besides, I only drink lager when I’m out.”

“It will make you into a fatty. Hey!”

This time the playful swat was nearer a hard slap, but with Jean-Paul’s six-pack, she figured that her hand would be the equivalent of a fly battering against a pane of glass.

“You’re a bastard.”

“And you are the most beautiful, non-fat mademoiselle in the world.”

“Whatever,” she grumbled, keeping her face resolutely flat against his chest, lest she should give him the satisfaction of seeing her smile.

She knew he was lying, although perhaps lying was too strong a word. Love was blind, and all of that. The truth was, Jean-Paul was gorgeous, and she considered herself to be average looking at best. She thought that her figure was a shade too large at a size twelve to be considered model-beautiful, even if she was secretly rather proud of her D-cup breasts. Her light brown hair was perpetually lank, seemingly incapable of holding a curl and she felt that her features were rather plain. Not ugly, exactly, but just bland.

She wasn’t a vain woman, however, and mostly didn’t give her looks much thought. She scrubbed up okay, and only now that she was with such a gorgeous man did her perceived plainness bother her.

Sometimes, in an occasional fit of insecurity, she didn’t feel special enough to be with a man like Jean-Paul, for it wasn’t like she had a brilliant career to offset her rather pedestrian looks, seeing as she was a manager of a shoe shop. Sure, she got paid more than the minimum wage, hence she could afford the rent on this place even before Jean-Paul moved in, but she knew perfectly well that she was neither brilliant nor beautiful. Jean-Paul, on the other hand, was beautiful and brilliant – he was a neurologist in the private sector where his bosses in Paris had sent him over to the UK to be the frontman of their start-up venture in Ashburn.

“I feel your smile through my t-shirt,” he said.

Yes, she was just an ordinary girl, even if Jean-Paul did manage to make her feel like a million bucks.

“Don’t be stupid. I am merely grimacing from your French garlic fumes. Hey!” She burst into helpless giggles when he removed his arm from around her shoulders, pinned her to the brown-leather sofa and tickled her waist. “Okay! Okay, stop, please stop.”

Jean-Paul did, because for all his playful arrogance and dominance, he always knew exactly how far to push her. Sitting up once more, he shuffled forward to retrieve his glass of red wine on the glass coffee-table that was level with their knees. As he sipped his wine, Zara also hauled herself into a sitting position, watching him watch the film, finding herself admiring the strong lines of his profile – the strong, typically Mediterranean nose, dark complexion and heavy-lidded, deep set eyes. At twenty-eight, he was the same age as her, but in many ways she always thought that he seemed much older. It was nothing to do with sagging jowls or wrinkles – quite the contrary, in fact – but merely the knowing look in his dark, soulful eyes and the gravitas with which he carried himself.

“You are staring at me,” he said without turning to look at her.

She reached for her wine. “Am not.”

A smile twitched at a corner of his full mouth. “I feel your eyes boring into me. You cannot get enough of my handsome face.”

“Jesus, your arrogance knows no bounds.”

He turned to smile at her then, and, despite the fact they had been an item for seven months and living together for two of those, her heart kicked like a mule. Jean-Paul got to his feet, laughing as he did so, pushing back his thick mane of chin-length, black hair off his forehead with both hands.

“Why don’t you find another film for us to watch?” he asked, still standing there with his hands entwined in his hair, his feet planted some distance apart like he was posing for a photoshoot. “I need a cigarette.”

She couldn’t help but laugh – he really was the limit and she had never met a man quite like him – as in, a guy who was so up himself but in an entirely ironic way.

“It was you that chose this lame movie, and you shouldn’t smoke. It’ll kill you,” she called after his departing back. “I mean, really, you’re supposed to be a health professional.”

“You ex-smokers, you are the worst.”

Except he pronounced it as ze vorst, and she couldn’t help but laugh. She watched him disappear through the living-room door and out into the hallway, where she promptly heard the click of the front door opening. As soon as he did so, the noise of the sirens grew louder still – a whole army of emergency service vehicles screeching up their street, by the sound of things.

She frowned. Sure, Ashburn saw its fair share of violence and just general, siren-filled misery that one would expect from living in a city, but shit. There were a lot of sirens tonight. It wasn’t like they even lived on a main road; Tontine Street could hardly be classed as a side street, but as a general rule, neither did what seemed like the entirety of Ashburn’s emergency services scream down here at one-hundred miles per hour on a daily basis.

Sighing heavily, she turned her attention to the laptop, which was perched on the glass coffee table and plugged into the back of the TV by a USB cable. She red-crossed the movie – some lame action movie that Jean-Paul had picked then had the audacity to moan about it in that arrogant way of his that should’ve been annoying but really wasn’t – and opened the search engine to find another.

“A romcom it is, then,” she muttered, smirking to herself as she sipped her wine.

Jean-Paul wasn’t outwardly the most romantic soul, but she knew that he was a big softie at heart. The moment they had met still felt like a dream to her. There he had been that night, a man who could’ve had anyone in that pub, but he had wanted her. It was every cliché going when their eyes had met across that crowded room, and ever since that moment they hadn’t stopped laughing together. He had chosen her, so who was she to argue?

The heart wants what it wants.

The smile dropped from her lips as those bloody sirens felt like they were going on for-bastard-ever, cutting through her loved-up, vaguely euphoric haze. And not only that, against the backdrop of the wailing sirens she could hear shouting.

Although, the shouting was nearer screaming.

It’s just the drunks going up to The Hare and Hound, she told herself. The pub next door to the corner shop at the very end of their street could get notoriously rowdy, but even so. The pissheads didn’t normally make this much noise about it all.

She was just about to type When Harry Met Sally into the search bar, when the cries intensified. And it sounded like they were coming from the front garden.

Not only that, it sounded like Jean-Paul.

Her blood turned to ice in her veins, and her heart instantly started to hammer.

“What the hell is going on out there?” she muttered, jumping to her feet.

It couldn’t be Jean-Paul, she told herself. It was just the drunks.

But something was wrong. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she could feel it, just the same. At least the blaring immediacy of the sirens had diminished somewhat, even though she could still hear them in the middle distance – lots of them, seeming to come from everywhere all at once.

Yes. The sirens, the shouting, all of it; wrong.

Barefoot, she padded over to the living room door, peering around it. Annoyingly, the front door at the end of the short hallway of their three-bedroom semi-detached had swung almost completely shut, obscuring her view. A wave of irritation swept through her; why couldn’t Jean-Paul go out the kitchen door to smoke? Why did he always insist on standing in the bloody front garden?

It is because I like to watch the life on the street, he always said.

“Jean-Paul?” she called.

No answer.

Where the bloody hell was he? She told herself that he had probably just wandered down the garden path, as he was apt to do, when smoking. Unlike her, he wasn’t dressed for bed, and still wearing his jeans and a plain, black t-shirt. He hadn’t even taken off his Converse trainers tonight.

And she told herself that it wasn’t him screaming.

“Jean-Paul?” she called again, more urgently this time, pausing to listen.

The drunks causing the commotion were silent now, clearly having moved up the road.

Shivering, despite the warmth of the August night, she wrapped her arms around herself in the flimsy, near threadbare and tight, Grumpy Cat t-shirt she wore, teamed with the chequered pink pyjama bottoms.

Maybe he’s lying dead on the street.

What was wrong with her? Why would she even think such a thing?

The more she strained her ears, standing there clutching the living-room door, she realised that she could still hear shouting – not in their street, perhaps, but from somewhere relatively nearby. Raised voices and car horns blared, and the constant wail of sirens in the middle distance wrapped coldly around her, chilling her to the core.

It sounds like bloody Armageddon out there.

Once again, the distinctive wail of an ambulance’s siren came screaming down her street, making her jump.

“For Christ’s sake,” she muttered, striding the short distance over towards the front door.

Her hand rested on the doorknob, ready to fling it open, but a sudden, cold rush of fear surged through her, paralysing her in its intensity.

And only then, now that just an ajar door separated her from the street, and the immediate wail of the passing sirens had passed off, did she hear the other noises of the night.

At first, she thought the noise was that of a snuffling dog, then she thought that maybe those wet, smacking noises were being made by some other animal – like a fox feasting on the contents of an overturned dustbin.

Why the hell hasn’t Jean-Paul shooed the bloody thing away?

Because he’s dead, came the sure, but sickening thought.

“Jesus,” she muttered, flinging open the door once and for all, horrified by the turn her thoughts were taking.

She stared in unseeing horror at the sight which greeted her, seeing it, but not immediately able to take it in. The gasp of terror lodged in her throat and the small porch tilted around her.

Jean-Paul lay on his back on the pavement just beyond their opened, wrought-iron gate. Crouched over him were two figures with their faces mashed into his guts.

CHAPTER TWO

It looked like the two figures crouched over her boyfriend were eating him. And it sure sounded like it too. Those disgusting, wet smacking noises were undeniably coming from them.

She blinked. She was hallucinating, complete with accompanying auditory soundtrack, there was no other explanation. The nearest streetlight opposite the next set of conjoined houses down from theirs had been out for a few weeks now, plunging their front garden into shadows at night. And that’s all this was – a trick of the shadows.

Even when the fatter of the two figures raised his head to look at her, she still believed that she was seeing things; she still refused to acknowledge the way in which he continued to chew. His jaw bobbed and swayed dramatically, his lips opening and closing with all the grace of a masticating bovine: Smack, smack smack.

It was too dark to make out his expression, or indeed, the details of his features, but there was no mistaking the emptiness in his eyes. In the gloom, they appeared as empty sockets, and the dark smudges smearing his cheeks and ringing his mouth sent a chill coursing through her. A distant part of her recognised that those dark smudges were blood – Jean-Paul’s blood.

Yet still she didn’t act. Even when this chomping man lurched unsteadily to his feet, still she didn’t move. He stood there swaying on the spot, eyeing her up, and chewing.

Now his friend stood up as well, also noisily smacking his lips. In a fleeting second, she took in his relative youth – seventeen if a day, if she were to hazard a guess – all gangly limbs, pencil neck, narrow shoulders and the seat of his baggy jeans hanging obligatorily somewhere above his knees.

Her gaze darted to the unmoving body of her boyfriend. That numbness shrouded her, pushing back the panic and terror that she could sense, somewhere in the distance.

“Jean-Paul.” His name lodged in her throat, emerging as a harsh whisper. “Jean-Paul,” she said again, louder this time.

“Ugh-rurr-gurgh,” the shorter, older man said, between that disgusting – quite insane – chewing.

Familiarity tugged at the edges of her mind – there was just something about that bald head and the thickened girth in the cheap, pinstripe suit that she felt she knew…

“Mr Tyldesley?” she gasped in a sudden rush of recognition.

She didn’t know his first name – all she knew was that he lived four doors down on the right, that he was unmarried, and that he worked in finance, or some such thing.

“Urgh,” he said, taking a stumbling step towards her.

As he took that step, he tripped over Jean-Paul’s body and landed flat on his face as surely as a felled tree, seemingly not even attempting to stick out his hands to break his fall. He lay there unmoving, his face mashed into the concrete pavement, his fat body lying on top of Jean-Paul.

“Jean-Paul,” she cried again, that numbness still permeating her body and mind, preventing her from thinking clearly – preventing her from doing anything.

The horror was too much to take in, and, not even when the teenaged lad took a step towards her – managing not to trip over her boyfriend like Mr Tyldesley had done – did she so much as move a muscle.

Dimly, she became aware of more shouting drifting her way from beyond the front garden – shouts and screams that were too close for comfort, set against the backdrop of the constant sirens in the middle distance. The wail of a car alarm coming from somewhere to her left punctuated the air, joining in with what she was slowly realising to be the utterly insane sounds of this Saturday night.

The boy took another, lurching step towards her.

“Stay back,” she called out to him. “Stay back, or I’ll call the police.”

The threat was pathetic and she knew it, further belittled by the fact she was dressed in her pyjamas and her smartphone was back in the living room.

He groaned in reply, and her blood turned to ice in her veins.

What the fuck is happening tonight? What is wrong with them?

She didn’t even want to think about what they had done to Jean-Paul

(they were eating him dear God help me they were eating him)

and the fear was slowly but surely taking hold, seeping coldly through her bones, rendering her too scared to call his name.

Because on some level, she knew that he was dead. It wasn’t something that she was consciously ready to admit, but deep down, she knew it.

“Urgh gerr rurgh,” the boy said, shuffling towards her.

Yes, she thought. Shuffling. Because he looked like a shuffling, lurching zombie, straight out of The Walking Dead or a Romero movie.

Every ten seconds or so, a car swooped down her road, as was roughly the normal volume of traffic for Tontine Street. The boy was now halfway down her driveway and had less than ten metres to go before he reached her.

Her limited options ran through her mind in a matter of seconds; the way she saw it, she had two choices – flag down a car or get herself inside, lock the door, and call the police.

Flagging someone down might prove to be a challenge, as the only way out of the front garden was through the gates at the end of the short and narrow driveway, and she really didn’t fancy stepping over Jean-Paul and Mr Tyldesley, who was currently writhing on top of her boyfriend, like he was trying to get to his feet. Not to mention that this would mean navigating her way around zombie-boy.

Next to the driveway was the small front lawn, which was edged with six-foot-high conifers that also separated her from the adjoining house next door – there was no way that she would be able to squeeze herself through that dense foliage.

Fleetingly, her gaze settled upon her car, which was parked in front of the garage where Jean-Paul’s was stashed. His company car – a brand-spanking-new Alfa Romeo – was infinitely grander than her beat-up old Corsa, so his got pride of place under shelter. But it wasn’t like she had her car-keys on her, so that idea was dismissed in less time than it took for her to glance at the vehicle.

That left only one option – get the fuck inside the house and call the police.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed to Jean-Paul, knowing in her heart of hearts that he couldn’t hear her, anyway.

For the first time, she was thankful that it was dark – thankful for the fact that she didn’t have to see the bloody ruins that had once been his enviable, six-pack stomach.

A small cry of terror escaped her lips

(eating him they were eating him)

and just as she spun around on the spot to leg it inside, the sound of a woman crying out for help made her freeze:

“Help me! Somebody help me,” came the quivering, hysterical female voice. “My husband attacked me.”

Zara was so terrified out of her wits, she came close to ignoring the cries for help. It would just be so easy to go inside and lock the door behind her, but common decency won out.

Trembling, she turned around, to be met with the sight of an unfamiliar woman – possibly middle-aged, although it was hard to tell in the dark – who stood right next to Jean-Paul’s head. If the woman was aware of the two figures at her feet, she showed no sign.

She stepped past Jean-Paul and the writhing man – Mr Tyldesley, she reminded herself – and stretched out her arms towards Zara:

“He attacked me,” she said between hitching sobs, the note of incredulity in her voice suggesting that she herself had in no way come to terms with this one, all-too pertinent fact. “I was cooking dinner and my own husband bit me on the shoulder. I didn’t think, I just hit him. I was holding the frying pan and I just hit him with it and then I ran…”

Her voice gave way to sobs, but Zara was no longer looking at this plump woman thrown into silhouette against the occasional passing car; her gaze was drawn to the teenage zombie who had turned around and was heading right for the newcomer.

“Look out,” she cried, but it came out a harsh, breathless gasp.

Not that it would’ve had any effect anyway, because Mr Tyldesley had reached out from his position sprawled on top of Jean-Paul and had grabbed the woman’s foot. She went crashing to the ground, landing with a nasty smack where her forehead bounced once on the concrete. Even from the twenty or so metres distance from the woman, Zara flinched in a mix of horror and disgust, because she could feel that smack deep within her own bones, that sickening crunch reverberating through her skeletal structure.

Then, two seconds later, zombie-boy was on top of her.

And, if she didn’t know better, she would have said that he was ripping out her jugular with his teeth.

Mr Tyldesley used the woman’s shins to haul himself up her body, where he proceeded to bury his face in her midriff.

Zara couldn’t look at the horrific spectacle a second longer. The woman didn’t make a sound, but her arms and legs spasmed violently. Mr Tyldesley was unmindful of this fact and body surfed her flapping legs, his face latched onto her guts like a leech.

With a gasp of terror, she turned around and fled for her front door.

But in the split second before she turned to lunge for her front door, she thought that she had glimpsed Jean-Paul sitting up. She threw herself through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

CHAPTER THREE

Jean-Paul had sat up. He’s not dead. I need to help him.

But Zara remained slumped against the door – she was trembling so violently she feared that she might collapse should she attempt to move. It was impossible that he had sat up the way that he had – surely she had imagined it?

Only when the hammering started did she jerk into action, staggering backwards away from the door which shuddered in its frame with the force of the banging.

Except it wasn’t hammering as such, but more of a thudding, as if someone was ungainly flinging the full weight of their body against the other side of the door, over and over. Or bodies, more likely, where anger and aggression had clearly reduced the people on the other side to nothing more than human battering rams.

The door was plastic, not especially thick, and panic washed through her, causing the hallway to lurch around her. Would it hold? It was only an ordinary Yale lock, it probably wouldn’t take much to bash it in.

“Shit,” she gasped, in response to an especially loud thud that caused the door to rattle against its hinges.

That loud thud spurred her into action and she staggered into the living-room, where the landline phone was perched in its cradle next to the television. She snatched it up, shakily punching in nine, nine, nine.

Please hold the line, an operator will be with you shortly, said the calm, recorded female voice on the other end.

Zara wailed in frustration, casting her gaze around for her mobile phone, figuring that she should call someone else while the emergency services had her on hold. She wasn’t sure who, exactly, she might call that could possibly help her right now. She had no family to speak of, no siblings, and her parents had recently retired to the south of France.

Caroline, she decided.

Caroline was her second in command at the shoe shop, a girl her own age who also happened to be her closest friend. More importantly, she had recently moved in with her boyfriend a couple of miles away on the other side of the city. He was the big, burly type, and would surely be helpful in a situation such as this?

Still clutching the cordless phone, she paced the room, searching in agitation for her smartphone. A few seconds later, she spied its green casing on a middle shelf of the floor to ceiling bookshelf next to the living-room door. Just as she went to lunge for it, the sound of shattering glass made her cry out in shock.

Her back smacked into the edge of the doorframe, but she barely felt it. The glass that comprised the middle section of the bay window had shattered, and, like something out of a cheesy horror movie, two sets of swaying arms with hands grabbing at empty air extended past the slatted blinds into the room. One of those grabbing, filth-caked hands entwined in the wildly swinging blinds and pulled. The whole middle section of the blinds parted from the uppermost portion of the window and came crashing down to the cream-coloured, living-room carpet.

A horrible, contorted, fat face with a snapping mouth and the glassy eyes of a fish loomed into view, also smeared with filth.

Mr Tyldesley, she thought, swiftly followed by; that’s not filth, it’s blood and gore.

Or, more specifically, the contents of her boyfriend’s guts. For the first time since this nightmare had kicked off, a great tide of nausea rolled over her, making her stomach clench and her tongue float in a sudden flood of mouth water.

She clasped her hand to her mouth, the phone slipping from her trembling fingers – she would not puke now.

Her gaze glued to the horrific spectacle, she edged around the doorframe.

This can’t be happening.

For a terrifying few seconds that felt like an eternity, terror had rendered her paralysed. Mr Tyldesley’s blood-streaked, fat face and bald head didn’t look real – it was one thing seeing him outside in the dark, and quite another seeing him under the bright lights of the living-room. He truly did look like an extra in a zombie movie, and that sense of incredulity tightened its grip more assertively around her. This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t be.

Snap, snap, went his mean little mouth, his teeth clattering together as their eyes locked. Snap, snap.

I’m going to eat you up, she thought in sick terror.

A high-pitched wailing noise reached her ears, and she slowly realised that the sound was coming from her.

The windowsill was waist height, and Mr Tyldesley was now leaning more aggressively into the living room, his arms flailing around as he reached out for her, his mouth continuing to snap.

A sense of incredulity so strong washed through her, momentarily blotting out everything else. Now Mr Tyldesley appeared to be in the process of swinging one short               and fat, pin-striped leg over the windowsill, but a second later he jerked backwards, disappearing from view.

Jean-Paul loomed in the space that he had just vacated, his dead eyes fixing on her. Being considerably more nimble than Mr Tyldesley, he effortlessly swung one leg over the window sill and hoisted himself up with his long, muscular arms.

In the moments before he swung into the living room, his torso was fully displayed to her. Stark terror swamped her brain, inducing tunnel vision and dizziness. The front of his t-shirt gaped, revealing his torn-open stomach.

It was too much – she simply couldn’t comprehend the macabre sight. His revealed stomach wasn’t just slashed, it was gaping wide open. His guts were spilling over – horrible, glistening lumps of gore in shades of red and brown. They bulged out of this hole, obscene and impossible.

There was no two ways about it – with a gut trauma like that, he shouldn’t be alive. Just as he swung both legs over the windowsill, another pair of hands sunk into his guts.

Jean-Paul’s expression remained unchanged with that same glassy cast to his eyes, his jaw constantly moving like a cow chewing the cud and his mouth chomping. Seemingly unmindful of the hands clawing at his innards, he dropped into the living-room, wobbling slightly as he landed, knocking over the freestanding lamp by the leather armchair.

Mr Tyldesley’s hateful, fat, gnashing face loomed into view behind him, also with his dead eyes fixed on her.

Jean-Paul took an unsteady, lurching step in her direction, and in a numbed state of terror that had rendered her temporarily paralyzed, she watched his guts unravel. And, even worse than that, as Mr Tyldesley also attempted to heave his fat body over the sill, one of his hands rested on Jean-Paul’s greyish-pink, sausage-like intestines that were smeared with glistening, solid lumps, pinning that portion of his guts in place.

With every step that her boyfriend took, so more of his intestines came undone. He trailed his guts behind himself as he staggered towards her, arms outstretched like he was auditioning for a part in the latest zombie movie.

Because none of this felt real – not for a second could she wrap her head around what was happening. And all the while, that incessant banging against the front door grew more and more insistent.

At last, her paralysis broke. It felt like she had been standing there forever, when in reality it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.

Things didn’t improve for her out in the hallway. Once there, she stood rooted to the spot, dithering. Her gaze was helplessly drawn to the door, shuddering in its frame.

That’s not going to hold, she thought in alarm.

Sure enough, as soon as she thought it, so the door swung inwards, battering against the hallway wall with an almighty thud that had her moaning in terror. In the newly revealed space stood the teenager and the middle-aged woman who less than a minute ago had been begging her for help.

Like her boyfriend, her midriff was a bloody, pulpy mess; a sight which Zara refused to let her gaze settle upon.

With the hallway tilting dramatically around her, she turned heel and staggered towards the kitchen door, which was only a short distance away.

Even before she reached the backdoor at the end of their small kitchen, the sense of doom had curled more tightly around her. She was trapped. The key to the backdoor was on her keyring which was currently inserted into the lock of the kicked-in front door. She never left the key in the lock of the backdoor out of sheer paranoia – what if she one day lost the key to the front door, and then she couldn’t unlock the backdoor because the key was clogging up the lock from the inside?

Yeah. That’s worked out really well for you, hasn’t it?

“Fuck,” she screamed, thumping her fists against the kitchen door.

Now fucking what?

Frantically, she looked around the kitchen. Her gaze settled upon a tea towel hanging from the oven door. Snatching it up, she wrapped it around her fist.

Blinking away the tears, and not allowing herself to think too deeply on what she was about to do, she smashed her wrapped-up hand into the glass pane that made up the uppermost portion of the door. The sound of the shattering glass made her flinch and cry out, but she persevered, smashing out as much of the glass as she could until only the jagged, shark-like teeth of the glass remained around the edges.

She surveyed the newly revealed hole. It was waist height and technically wide enough for a body to squeeze through.

Technically. It would be bloody awkward and more than likely result in lacerated flesh.

Fuck it.

Without further thought, she gripped the sides of the frame, trying to hold onto the parts where there was less broken glass and poked her head through the gap. Awkwardly, she twisted her body, thinking that she might be able to hoist herself through the gap until she was sitting on the bottom part, then after that she could thread her legs through the gap, one after the other.

Grunting with the effort and hissing in pain when the glass dragged across her skin, she attempted this… with no joy whatsoever. All it resulted in was her cutting herself. Ignoring the sharp pain that right then was more of an irritation than any real concern, she threaded herself back through the hole again. Gripping the sides of the gap once more, this time she lifted her leg until her ankle was resting on the ledge.

So far so good. Gritting her teeth and wincing in shock when the glass bit into the tender flesh of the backs of her legs, due to the fact that the flimsy pyjama bottoms were no protection against the splinters of glass, she slid her leg over the ledge until the back of her knee was hugging it tight. All she had to so now was hold on tight to the sides of the gap and thread her other leg through. After this, it was just a case of easing her rump up onto the ledge and slithering through the hole, preferably remembering to sufficiently bend her spine on her exit, lest she should drag the skin of her throat on the glass that hung there like icicles from the uppermost portion of her escape hatch.

Something clattered behind her – she didn’t turn around to see what it was, but it sounded very much like one of the kitchen chairs crashing into the tiled floor – and she hastened her escape attempt, not caring anymore if she should rip open her flesh in the process.

Those horrible, growling, groaning, inhuman noises grew louder, and terror tightened the skin at the back of her neck.

She had anticipated the hands on her before it happened. It came as no surprise, but it was still utterly horrifying. Fingers entwined in her hair before viciously yanking back her head. She lost her balance and toppled backwards, clinging onto the sides of the smashed window for support, unmindful of the blood that poured from the palms of her hands.

She caught a waft of something fetid and foul as more hands pawed at her, and then she was freefalling backwards through the air, before landing with a resounding thump on her back.

The air knocked out of her lungs in an aggressive whoosh, and the tunnel vision from before narrowed even further as the kitchen rocked and swayed around her.

Groaning, she allowed her eyelids to flutter closed, knowing that she needed to attempt to roll away from the monsters crowding in above her, but unable to find the strength. She hurt, dammit – bastard everything ached and throbbed in protest.

When she managed to prise open her eyes again, she saw them through her swimming vision. Them, as in the teenaged boy, the middle-aged woman, Mr Tyldesley and Jean-Paul. They were leaning over her, descending upon her.

Their disgusting, blood-streaked faces loomed ever closer, their eyes dead and their mouths snapping – each one of them otherworldly in their monstrousness.

But it was her boyfriend’s face that her gaze latched onto. It was beyond comprehension to her, that the face she had once loved so dearly had distorted into something so hideous. A sickness that was more than merely physical churning in her guts – a soul-deep illness that ripped her apart from the inside out. His darling face was now nothing but an image dredged up from her deepest, darkest nightmares, a visage utterly devoid of all humanity.

Hands tore at her Grumpy Cat t-shirt, she heard the rip of the fabric, then felt those hands on her bare skin.

And then that disgusting head was on the lower, softest part of her stomach, the teeth sinking in.

Pain exploded there, brilliant and stupefying, blotting out all else.

This is how I’m going to die, came the sure, yet strangely abstract thought, like it wasn’t her thinking it, but as if the thought had been planted in her brain by a mysterious, outside source.

The intensity of that initial burst of pain subsided somewhat, allowing her the presence of mind to latch onto the notion of survival once more.

With an adrenalin-fuelled scream of terror, she managed to draw up her knees and twist onto her side. She clawed at the tiled floor, dragging her throbbing, pain-racked body away from them.

Only then did she realise that there was no longer any pressure on her body. No groping hands, no weight of bodies.

No teeth.

A horrible sound reached her ears, and to begin with, she thought that it was just her own sobbing. With great effort, she lifted her spinning, violently trembling head to peer over her shoulder, to see that the noise was coming from Jean-Paul. He was lying on his back, his arms and legs spasming, his own guts a sea of gore surrounding him. He was making noises unlike anything that she had ever heard before – not quite groaning, not quite screaming, and utterly devoid of humanity. The sound made her mind want to cave in under the sheer weight of it, and she screamed louder herself to drown it out.

When she stopped to draw breath, she realised that he had fallen silent. That his limbs had stopped spasming.

And not only that, the other three were shambling away from her, back through the kitchen door.

With a sob of agony and terror, she allowed her head to fall back on the tiled floor with a smack that made her teeth clunk together.

Get up! she screamed inside her head. Get up. Get help.

Crying in agony, she heaved herself into a sitting position, her hands cupping the wound on her stomach.

She looked down at it. It wasn’t as bad as she had been expecting. Sure, it hurt like fuck, and she was bleeding there like a stuck pig, but nothing was hanging out of her that shouldn’t be, the skin was mostly intact.

I’m alive, she thought in a rush of gratitude that left her light-headed.

But why didn’t they kill me? Why did they just leave me?

Her gaze flickered to Jean-Paul. He was lying unmoving on his back, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.

Zara spun around in her sitting position and vomited on the ground next to her. That done, she struggled to her feet.

Act first, questions later. She was alive, and that was good enough right now. She was going to get help. She staggered from the room, leaving her boyfriend dead on the floor behind her.

CHAPTER FOUR

“What’s with those bloody sirens tonight?” Luke Jones said to his brother as he knocked back the last of his pint of Doomsday.

He stood with his brother Jon in the much smaller, back bar of The Hare and Hound, a spot usually reserved for the older crowd. Sounds of beyond were muted in here, and the wail of sirens was only faint, mostly thanks to the thickness of the small door that separated this section of the pub from the main drinking area. Also, the other, main part of the pub separated this back bar from the beer garden which overlooked the main road, further cushioning outside noise.

He didn’t know why, but that faintest wail of sirens bothered him.

“What sirens? I can’t hear anything,” Jon replied.

Luke strained his ears, but now he couldn’t hear anything, either. Probably because the dopey barman had just cranked up the music.

He looked around himself. There was currently a lull in this small room, although it had been filling up in fits and starts, old fart bar, or not. It was mostly people briefly spilling in from the beer garden to be served, but still, it would get far too busy in here for Luke’s liking. It was, however, eight p.m. on a Saturday night, and there would be no escaping the revellers from this point in. Inwardly, he sighed, wishing this moment’s peace in here would last.

People, he thought. Not really a fan.

“Why are you getting all uptight about a passing ambulance or something?”

“I’m not getting uptight,” Luke lied.

“Yeah, you are. There’s always bloody sirens in bloody Ashburn. It’s called life in the city,” Jon retorted. “Not something you would know about since you live in the back of beyond in bumfuck country.”

Luke bristled, despite knowing full well that his brother was just goading him. “Truro is hardly bumfuck country. It’s a proper city.”

“Dude, it’s in Cornwall.”

“So? Ashburn isn’t exactly London, is it?”

“It’s the second biggest city in the Southeast.”

“That’s not saying much. I mean, there’s London, and then there’s Canterbury and Ashburn. They’re not much bigger than Truro.”

“Whatever, dude. You’re still a country hick. And it’s your round.”

Luke sighed. Why did they always have to bicker? And why were they arguing about their respective cities like they were comparing penis size, or something? It was just so immature and draining. He turned away from his brother and leaned more assertively against the wooden bar-top in an attempt to catch the barman’s eye, but he had lost out to the stunning blonde that had just that second waltzed up to the opposite end of the bar, where a solitary barfly separated them – an elderly, thin gentleman, perched on his stool, nursing a tumbler filled with two fingers of amber liquid with a little jug of water next to it.

Jon’s stunning blonde, he reminded himself. It was the very same girl that his big brother had been drooling over since they had arrived at The Hare and Hound half an hour ago. Okay, so his brother hadn’t put the moves on her yet, but that was surely just a question of time, and when he did, she would inevitably fuck him. They always did.

Jon nudged him excitedly in the ribcage. “Fuck, it’s her. Excuse me, little brother, but I think I need to get that gorgeous woman’s round in.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “I doubt Cathy would share that sentiment.”

“Yeah, well, Cathy’s not here, is she?”

“No, she isn’t,” Luke shot back. “She’s at home, looking after your perfect children, in your perfect house, waiting for her perfect husband to come home after a night out down the local.”

“Are you starting again, bro? Why did you even come to stay with us if you’re gonna be a prick about stuff?”

“For fuck’s sake, you know why. And I’m a prick, now? I’m not the one that fucks around behind his wife’s back.”

“My relationship with my wife is none of your business. You know nothing about what goes on between us, or what kind of a woman she really is.”

His reply left him stumped for words. There was so much he could reply to that – as in, yes, he knew exactly what kind of woman Cathy was. She was the beautiful, gentle, intelligent kind of woman that most men would give their left nut to be with. The kind of woman, in fact, that he’d been harbouring a crush on since Jon had first introduced them ten years ago, back when he’d been a spotty, weedy seventeen-year-old, still living at home with their mum, and Jon had been a strapping, spot-free twenty-year-old, away at Ashburn University studying Structural Engineering.

Luke knew that Jon loved Cathy in his own way, that even he understood how special she was, which was why he took great pains to keep his numerous infidelities from her. Luke would’ve given anything to trade places with Jon, the ungrateful, two-timing man-whore.

“Please don’t speak ill of Cathy,” Luke said primly. “You’re bloody lucky to have her.”

Jon shot a knowing look his way – a look that was equal part smug and equal part sneer. “Yeah, well, we all know your feelings on Cathy, don’t we?”

Despite being a relatively together twenty-seven-year-old, Luke felt himself blushing like he was bloody seventeen again – an effect that his big brother always had on him. He always made him feel inadequate – the less attractive of the pair, the less confident, the less successful; always, just lesser.

“I dunno what you’re going on about.” He reached for his pint of Doomsday bitter, momentarily forgetting that he was dry, then cursed under his breath. “We’re here for Mum, remember? She made us promise.”

Jon’s handsome features softened somewhat. “Yeah. You’re right.”

They both fell silent for a moment, Luke lost in thoughts of their mother. Before her death two years ago, after a long, drawn-out battle with cancer, she had made them promise to meet up every year, on the anniversary of her death. Not so much to remember her, she had said, but to nurture their relationship. They had no one else, she had said: no father, no aunts, uncles or cousins. No other siblings.

Luke let out a soft laugh – a sound that was filled more with sadness than humour. “Mum was fixated on the idea of us having a strong relationship, wasn’t she? Said she couldn’t bear for us to fall out and not be a part of each other’s life.”

“Yeah, she did. Probably ‘cos we were always at each other’s throats growing up.”

“We weren’t at each other’s throats. You were always beating me up.”

“Fuck, do you have a selective memory or what? The amount of times I sorted out those bullies for you at secondary school.”

“Only because you hated them, too. You wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

“You’re a real ungrateful nob, you know that?”

The gorgeous blonde was now paying the barman, and Luke smiled across at him, awkwardly raising his hand as he did so, which only made him feel like a kid in a classroom asking teacher for a bathroom break.

Next to him, Jon sighed heavily. “Great, I’ve missed my chance to get her round in. Thanks a lot.”

Both he and Jon were watching the beautiful blonde, when she turned to smile at them.

Or, more to the point, to Luke’s utter dismay, she smiled at him. At first, he thought that he had to be mistaken, for no woman looked at him when his brother was around. Whilst Luke understood that he could not be described as ugly by any stretch of the imagination, he felt that his looks paled in comparison to his brother’s. They were both tall, with the same piercing blue eyes that they had inherited from their mother, but that’s where the similarity ended.

Jon was all man, where Luke was decidedly effeminate. Jon had inherited his father’s sturdy bone structure – not that he could remember much about his father for he had walked out on them when Luke had been seven – but from his faded memory and a handful of photographs, Jon was clearly the spitting image. He had a movie-star jaw, complete with the obligatory dimple in his chin. His nose was just on the right side of big, and the planes of his cheeks were flat and masculine. He wore his dark hair cropped close to his scalp and he hit the gym hard.

In comparison, Luke looked like a reed. Being naturally smaller boned than his brother, he figured that it would largely be a wasted effort to put in gym time. He would never get as big as Jon, so what would be the point? He was also as blonde as Jon was dark – a trait from his mother’s side of the family – and his bone structure was decidedly feminine. He hated his big cheekbones, delicate chin and narrow, turned up nose – he thought it made him look like a girl. So many people thought he was gay, probably because of his ‘pretty’ face, which pissed him off no end. Plus, the fact that he was a computer programmer didn’t help his cause with the opposite sex, or so he thought.

And that stunning blonde couldn’t be smiling at him, she just couldn’t.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Jon said when she made her way over to them, all smiles.

Luke couldn’t believe it either, because it was definitely him that her big blue eyes had latched onto.

“Hello,” she said to him, and him alone.

“Hello,” he replied, his voice cracking on that second syllable.

“So, me and my friends are in the beer garden, and we were wondering if you guys would like to join us?”

Yet is was still him that she was addressing.

“We would love to join you outside, wouldn’t we, Luke?” Jon said, elbowing him in the ribs.

Luke flinched, irritated. “Er, yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Great,” the girl smiled. “My name’s Leslie.”

“I’m Jon,” Jon said, although she clearly wasn’t talking to him. “And this is my little brother, Luke.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Luke,” she said, smiling warmly at him.

She has the most incredible blue eyes, Luke thought dazedly. In fact, in that moment, the girl barely seemed real to him. She was like a gorgeous, blonde angel, otherworldly to him in her beauty. She was even dressed in a white flowing dress that fell to her knees, and, if he didn’t know better, he would say that it was undulating in an invisible breeze, as was her long, flowing blonde hair.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked stupidly.

“I’ve just got a round in,” she said, eyes twinkling.

“Um, yeah. You did.”

Luke felt the heat rushing to his cheeks.

Well, that’s just marvellous.

“I have five drinks to carry, maybe you guys could help me carry them out to my friends?”

“Sure, sweetheart, we’re just getting a round in ourselves,” Jon said, smooth as always. “Are you sure we can’t tempt you with anything?”

The beautiful girl turned her attention onto Jon, and Luke felt a sudden, stabbing loss, like a cloud had passed over the sun.

“Well, a glass of water might be a good idea since you ask.”

“Fizzy? Still?”

“Oh, tap will be just fine.”

“So,” Jon began, all smiles, standing slightly back from the bar so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to get the round in and therefore interrupt the conversation with the delectable Leslie. “Do you live here?”

“I do, yes.”

“Really? I haven’t seen you around.”

“Oh, I mainly stay on campus. I’m a third-year student. Computer Science.”

Luke’s head snapped round to look at her. “Really? Me too.”

“You’re a student?”

“No, I mean I did my degree in Computer Science six years ago. In Ashburn.”

“No shit,” Leslie laughed, her blues shining in the most pleasing way.

He slowly became aware of a presence next to him on the other side of the bar; the barman had clearly run out of other patrons to serve in this establishment.

“Best get the drinks in, little brother.”

Prick.

“Same again, please,” Luke muttered, his neck feeling uncomfortably hot – his neck always flared an unattractive shade of red when he was embarrassed. Well, that’s just perfect. “And a glass of water too, please, if you don’t mind.”

Jon was chatting to the girl about the new nightclub that had just opened in the city centre as he dealt with the barman, and he gritted his teeth in irritation.

“Your water,” he said, when he had paid up, glad of the excuse to interrupt them.

“Thanks.” Her fingers brushed his as she accepted it, and a little jolt of electricity flared in his hand.

And outside, he thought that he heard screaming.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Did you hear that?” Luke asked.

“Hear what?” his brother replied.

“I thought I heard screaming.”

Jon rolled his eyes. “It’s called having fun on a Saturday night, dear brother. You should try it sometime.”

“It’s pretty raucous out there,” the girl said, but not at all bitchily, unlike Jon. “My friends really wanted to come here for the karaoke, there’s a whole bunch of people out there waiting for it to start.”

Luke watched the beautiful girl sip her water, the strangest feeling curling around him. It was too hot in here, too stuffy, too sealed. He had never been one to suffer from claustrophobia, but the back of his neck was beginning to prickle and he was breaking out into a cold sweat.

The music seemed to be getting louder in this sealed little room, too. But why it should, he did not know. The action happened next door, this was supposed to be the quiet area. Sure, people spilled in here from the beer garden to order drinks, but there was no one settled in here as such, apart from them and a few of the old timers, sitting at the back of the room. And that solitary old guy at the bar, nursing his whiskey, or brandy, with his little jug of water. Next door was where the action happened, be it a live band, or some function, or, in the case of tonight, karaoke.

“You shouldn’t leave your drinks hanging around unattended, someone might spike them,” Jon said.

He strode the short distance to where they were on the bar and scooped up four of them. That left Luke to carry his brother’s and his own pint, and Leslie to carry a glass of what looked like lemonade mixed with some short or other.

Luke followed his brother’s lead, picking up the two pint glasses as the girl drained her glass of water.

“Let’s go, then,” Jon said cheerily.

Ordinarily, Luke would be mightily pissed off at this point – all he wanted was a quiet drink, for his mum’s sake. But there was no denying it, he was more than happy to follow this stunning creature wherever she may wander.

Just as he turned to leave, the solitary old man propping up the bar began coughing violently. Luke winced at the harshness of his hacking – it sounded bad, like deathbed bad.

He turned to look at him. Luke hadn’t given the old guy more than a cursory glance when he had first entered the pub, but he was pretty sure that the man hadn’t been quite that grey looking a few minutes ago.

He continued to bark, hunched over the bar with the ferocity of the coughing fit, his back clearly so tense and quivering beneath the red plaid shirt.

“Are you okay?” Luke asked, placing his drinks down on the bar again.

The man didn’t answer, just continuing with that God-awful coughing that sent his body into fits of spasms. Then, just like that, he keeled over. His face hit the bar, landing with a dull thunk that was as sickening as it was almost anticlimactic. His arms hung loose, dangling straight down.

The man was now completely still.

“Fuck,” Luke and Jon said in unison.

“Is he dead?” Jon asked incredulously.

“How the fuck should I know?” Luke snapped back.

He pressed his fingers to the man’s neck, wincing at the feel of this stranger’s skin. For some reason, it made him think of an uncooked chicken carcass, and it took much willpower on his part not to snatch back his hand.

“Can you feel a pulse?” the young barman asked as he swung up the bar hatch and came over to join them.

“No,” Luke said. “But I’m no doctor, there could be one, for all I know.”

Frantically, he patted himself down for his phone, only then remembering that he had left it in the pocket of his other jeans back at Jon and Cathy’s place. Jon remained standing there gaping at the old guy, still holding the four drinks in front of him, his usually tanned face sheet-white. Leslie did the same, although she was swaying on the spot, and was even whiter than Jon. It looked as if she was about to pass out.

“Call a fucking ambulance,” Luke shouted – not just to his brother, Leslie and the barman but to the handful of older people sitting over on the other side of the room.

His request was met with a flurry of raised voices, and then the opposite side of the room was a blur of movement, but just as Luke uttered those words, so Leslie dropped the glass that she was holding. Luke’s head snapped in her direction, finding himself positively reeling with the speed at which this insanity was unfolding.

She hunched over, vomiting on the ground. In that moment, Luke was as paralysed by events as his brother. The music seemed to be even louder now, wrapping around him and bludgeoning his brain. He felt so sure that he was dreaming, that this simply couldn’t be real.

And in his nightmare, the girl called Leslie vomited on her white sandals. And the vomit was red and black.

Take on me…. sang the distinctly eighties voice, accompanied by the blaring synths.

Jon dropped all four drinks he was holding, glass and liquid exploding around him.

Take on me….

The old man, who, mere seconds ago had faceplanted the bar, sat bolt upright on his stool. The barman, who was still standing next to him, reached out a steadying hand. Luke rushed over to the vomiting girl, gripping her shoulders reassuringly. As he did so, the stench of her vomit wafted under his nose and his stomach lurched in protest, his mouth instantly filling with water. It was foul – sweet yet decaying – like rubbish that had been left to rot in the heat of Summer for weeks on end.

I’ll be gone….

Behind him, the barman let out an ear-splitting scream. Still clutching Leslie, Luke turned around to see why the barman should scream.

In a day or two…

It was because the old man had his face buried in the side of the barman’s neck. It made no sense, because, if he didn’t know better, Luke might’ve said that the old guy was biting him. That he was taking a big old chunk out of his neck – that he was eating him.

Dimly, he was aware of the commotion behind him – raised voices, more movement. Leslie went slack in his arms, a sudden dead weight that slipped out of his embrace and went crashing to the floor in a spray of pungent black vomit.

The joyous synthesisers of the song’s chorus reverberated in the air around him, mingling with the sound of screaming.

“Come on,” Jon was shouting at him, tugging on his arm. “We’ve got to go.”

Luke swatted his hand away, staring from the barman, to the girl who lay unmoving on the ground, covered in red and black vomit, and back again to the barman.

The barman thrashed wildly in the old man’s grip, and, with a final glance at the unmoving girl, Luke rushed over towards the struggling twosome. He grabbed one of the pint glasses that he had abandoned on the bar just now, and, without thinking too deeply about it, he brought it crashing down over the back of the old man’s head.

The glass shattered in his hand, ripping open the fleshy part of his thumb. Blood instantly welled there and flowed down his forearm, but he didn’t even feel it. The old guy staggered away from the injured barman in the direction of the door…

…he bit him dear fucking God he bit him…

…but he didn’t go down.

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the old men shouted from right behind him.

“Who fucking cares,” someone else replied. “We need to leave, now.”

Luke didn’t even turn around to look at them, and the barman thumped to his knees, clutching his neck, groaning something incomprehensible. Blood pumped angrily from the bite wound, squirting out in great jets between the gaps of his fingers. In a rush of sickening horror, he realised that the barman’s hands appeared to be clutching at something solid, something that protruded from his neck…

The old bastard’s false teeth.

In a fear-soaked daze, Luke watched as the man plucked them out of his neck, where they were wedged. A great geisha of blood erupted from the wound, and the barman howled, rocking on his knees.

Jon called over to him from the door, his body jerking sideways as a trickle of the remaining, older clientele barged past him: “Are you fucking coming, or what?”

Luke ignored him, sinking to his knees next to Leslie. Her white dress was saturated with dark vomit. Death vomit, came the dark thought.

“Leslie?” he cried, cupping her face. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were closed, her complexion devoid of colouring. Devoid of life. “Leslie, wake up.”

“Leave her, for fuck’s sake, we need to get help. And you can fuck off, you old bastard,” Jon shouted.

He swung a punch at the old guy, who had been making a beeline for the door. Or, more specifically, for Jon. The old guy staggered backwards, again, but yet again, he didn’t go down. He just continued to smack his gums together in the toothless mouth that dripped blood, and Luke fought down the urge to throw up.

What the fuck is wrong with him, thought Luke. The worst kind of dread curled around him – the old man had been clouted around the head – the resulting wound bleeding heavily – taken a punch from a guy forty years his junior, and, just a heartbeat ago, he’d been passed out at the bar.

And he had bitten someone, wedging his false teeth in someone’s fucking neck.

Yeah, let’s not forget about that.

But worse than all of this, was the fact that his mouth wouldn’t stop snapping. Or gumming, in his case. Wrong didn’t cut it. There were so many shades of fucking wrong here, that Luke couldn’t even begin to get his head around it.

Neither was this the time. All of this flashed through his mind in a matter of seconds as he tried to rouse the girl. Dimly, he was aware of the barman falling forward from his kneeling position, smacking gracelessly face first into the floorboards.

At that precise second the barman hit the floor, so the girl lurched upright, her eyes pinging open, like one of those plastic toy dolls.

“Jesus fuck,” Luke cried, scrambling ungainly to his feet.

“Come on, Luke, for fuck’s sake.” Jon shouted over to him. But Luke didn’t look at him as his gaze was transfixed on the girl. Like with the old guy, the look in her eyes had all the warmth of an animal carcass on a butcher’s slab.

And her mouth, ringed as it was by that disgusting dark vomit, chewed sloppily on nothing.

“Leslie?” he asked, his voice strained, barely discernible over the acoustic crescendo of the pop track.

She turned to fix her dead gaze on him, her face and hair matted with sickly black blood, her mouth constantly moving, and his bowels turned to ice.

“Fine,” Jon cried, “suit your fucking self.”

Just as the fucking rabid old geezer with the snapping gums closed in on Jon, he hurled himself through the door. At the same time, Leslie lunged for him, mouth snapping, and Luke danced backwards.

She’s beyond help, he realised. Something he should’ve worked out sooner, he knew that now. Whatever it was that had affected the old guy, had also affected her. Something had turned them crazed, given them fucking rabies, or something.

He went to lurch after his brother, dodging Leslie’s outstretched hands that clawed at his Salad Fingers t-shirt, but the old guy was blocking the doorway, facing away from him. The door was closed and the old geezer was clawing at it.

“Jesus,” he gasped. What the fuck was wrong with them?

And why the fuck didn’t he just turn the handle?

“Fuck off!” he cried, when Leslie closed the gap between them, her vomit-smeared mouth snapping.

Luke had never hit a woman before – not even now could he bring himself to do so. Instead, he sidestepped her and grabbed the high, wooden barstool that the old guy had been sitting on.

“Stay back,” he warned, gripping the seat and jabbing the wooden legs at her.

It was as if she hadn’t even noticed that he was brandishing a barstool at her, for she kept on walking towards him. The ends of the legs dug into her torso, and her arms stretched out to grab him – arms which thankfully were shorter than the stool legs.

“Jesus fuck,” Luke complained, staggering backwards with the weight of the woman leaning into the barstool.

It was just beyond bloody bizarre and creepy, that it apparently hadn’t even occurred to her to walk around the damn thing.

Over the flailing figure of Leslie, Luke watched bug-eyed as the barman got unsteadily to his feet. Sweat dripped into his eyes as the woman continued to push into the barstool, his arms trembling with the effort of fending her off.

An almighty crash made him scream and stagger backwards until his back smacked into the wall next to the bar. The air jolted out of him in a painful rush, and his head snapped in the direction of the commotion.

And all the while, the woman continued her insane attack on him and his barstool.

“Fuck!” his brother screamed, lying in the doorway on his back, kicking his arms and legs and trying to wriggle onto his front so that he could stand up.

But the figure kneeling over him wouldn’t let him. Luke could feel the way his eyes bulged as he took in the horrible – and impossible – sight.

This is just a fucking nightmare, he thought, not for the first time. This is a nightmare, so will you please just wake the fuck up?

Except he didn’t wake up.

“Help me,” Jon sobbed.

Clearly, on attempting to leave the back bar, he had been accosted by one of them, by someone afflicted by the same thing as the old guy, Leslie and the barman. He had managed to grab the door handle, then had sprawled into the back bar with that that thing on top of him.

Because they were no longer people, they were things. This was something that he had finally twigged, and now all bets were off.

Jon howled and dramatically arched his back, tilting back his head so that Luke was viewing his face upside down. He reached out towards him, blood flowing from his opened mouth, his scream turning into a wet gurgle.

Above him, the man’s face was mashed into his guts.

The bar tilted around him when he realised that the man – an entirely ordinary-looking guy who was around their age – was eating him. Jon’s t-shirt was rucked up around his chest, and blood spurted from his guts, the man’s head spasmodically rearing up to reveal the snapping mouth smeared with red.

Luke screamed his brother’s name, stupefied by the way in which the man was also scrabbling around in his guts, like a dog digging up a favourite bone. Stupefied by the innards that spilled out from him; those solid, gore-smeared lumps that were accompanied by the spectacular and sporadic fountains of red.

Dimly, he became aware that the pressure had lifted from the barstool, that it was now as light as air, and it clattered to the ground. The old man – who had temporarily been rudely shoved aside by the door that had swung open – shuffled on over and dropped to his knees next to Jon, opposite the other man.

More blood erupted from Jon’s opened mouth, trickling down over his round eyes and forehead.

He was no longer screaming, just making those horrible, wet gurgling sounds, his lips forming around words that wouldn’t come, blood pouring from his mouth.

Now Leslie had joined the threesome, and she too dropped to her knees at Jon’s head.

Luke’s paralysis broke, and he lunged for his brother, aiming a kick at the girl’s head just as she was about to lower her stretched-wide mouth over his exposed throat. She toppled sideways, and now that his view of Jon had been cleared, he saw for the first time the full extent of the damage.

Clinging to life he may have been, but he was as good as dead. His stomach had been reduced to a gory pulp, organs exposed with glimmers of cracked ribs – an unexpected white in the bloody carnage.

Luke’s head span, his stomach heaved, but with a roar and a sudden burst of adrenalin born of terror and anger, he lunged for the nearest fucker feasting on his brother. This happened to be the toothless old guy, who was sucking up Jon’s insides as if he were a toothless old dog lapping at a well-forked bowl of Friskies.

“Get away,” he screamed, fisting the bastard’s collar, throwing him off with a strength that surprised even him.

Almost immediately, the old guy was upright again, and staggering towards them once more. So too, was Leslie.

“Jon!” Luke screamed.

But his brother had fallen silent, his body floppy and unresponsive, jerking back and forth across the floor as the man above him clawed at his destroyed stomach, his face simultaneously mashed into his exposed guts.

The stranger feasting upon him reared his face, gore dripping from his lips, his eyes glassy, devoid of humanity. Luke was dimly aware of the man getting to his feet, but he couldn’t tear his gaze off his brother’s unmoving body, nor his glazed, wide-eyed stare.

His brother was dead.

Through his swimming vision, he realised that the man was lurching in his direction. Not only that, but so were the other three – Leslie, the barman and the old guy.

“Get away,” he screamed at them, to no effect.

Scooping up the barstool at his feet, he dodged around them. They moved slowly, and he moved fast. He was already at the small, frosted glass window at the far end of the small bar before they had turned around. Clutching the barstool like a battering ram, he smashed the legs through the window.

The glass shattered, revealing a brick wall less than a foot away.

The back alley, he realised.

A quick glance over his shoulder told him that they were closing in on him.

His heart plummeted and the room lurched dramatically around him when he realised that there were now four figures shuffling towards him.

That his brother was now amongst them.

With a terrified whimper, he dropped the stool and all but leapt through the window.

Not having a clue where he was going, he ran into the night.

CHAPTER SIX

Hurting the girl hadn’t felt as good as he thought that it would. Sure, parts of it had been good fun, especially the way she had squirmed when they were fucking and he was doing the other stuff to her at the same time, but overall, the experience had left him feeling a bit flat.

The most fun part had been the watching, rather than the doing – the weeks that he had spent planning his move, watching Claire Eames go about her day to day life, oblivious to his ever-constant presence. Yes, that had surely been the best bit.

Ryan Clarke sighed, paused the game, then dropped the handheld controller on the cushion of the designer, brown leather armchair that he was sitting on. Once upon a time it had been his dad’s favourite chair, but that prick was long dead, so Ryan was free to sit wherever he damn well pleased.

He smirked. It’s mine, now. Everything is mine.

He stood up from his comfortable armchair, arching his back as he did so. He’d been sitting there for the past part of two hours and he was beginning to seize up, plus he was thirsty and hungry. Briefly, he wondered if Claire was also thirsty and hungry. Probably. Not that he could give a shit about her comfort, but he didn’t want her dying on him. Not yet, anyway.

She’d been chained up in his basement for almost three days now, and he hadn’t given her a glass of water since yesterday lunchtime – it was now eight p.m. the following night. Not that she’d drunk much of the water yesterday. In the blink of an eye, the ungrateful bitch had proceeded to smash the glass against the basement stonewall and had brandished the jagged edge of it before her as if it were a fucked-up little knife, swiping at him like a fucking lunatic. If the length of chain screwed into the wall and attached to the metal cuffs around her ankles hadn’t already been pulled taut, then the tart would’ve had him. He had only just managed to step back in time, the shattered glass narrowly missing his jugular.

Yes, it had been a close call, all right – he could’ve easily been lying dead on the floor of his own basement right about now.

“I hope you’ve learnt your lesson, bitch,” he grumbled to the empty living-room. “No one fucks with Ryan Clarke.”

He’d roughed her up real good since then, to teach her a lesson. He hoped that she’d learnt it. And next time, he’d make sure to give her a plastic beaker of water.

He glanced at the screen of the stationary game console he’d been playing, a wave of irritation stirring in his guts, before striding over to it and pulling out the plug. The screen went black, making him feel weirdly lonely.

Usually, he found the slightly kitsch graphics of these older games from the early noughties soothing, especially this one Dr Venom, Zombie Killer! but tonight he couldn’t get into it. He was definitely a traditionalist when it came to games, and he definitely wasn’t into online gaming, the whole thing striking him as one massive circle jerk.

But tonight, not even his beloved zombie game could ease his jangled nerves. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. All he had wanted was an hour or so break from Claire to get his shit together and clear his head, but instead, he was undeniably rattled.

Maybe this was guilt he was feeling.

Instantly, he dismissed the idea. Not once had Ryan known a second’s guilt in the entirety of his twenty-four years. Not even three years ago, when he’d found someone on the darknet to tamper with the brakes of his parents’ car the day before they were due to travel together and they had subsequently died in a fatal car accident, did he feel so much as the smallest pang.

They had deserved it, the sanctimonious, do-gooding twats. Always trying to make him see professionals. Always trying to get him to talk about his feelings.

Well, he didn’t fucking have any, did he? Maybe they realised that, the second that they died. He hoped that they had. He hoped that they finally understood it was him who had killed them.

Not only were his parents annoying and always trying to help him, they were also loaded. His dad had owned a printing company that he had built up from scratch, which had gone on to employ over three-hundred people.

It certainly didn’t help their cause, that, not long after Ryan had turned eighteen, he had overheard them talking about him. He had overheard them saying, that, as he was their only child, he was set to inherit the lot should they meet their untimely demise. During this conversation, they had also expressed how worried they were about him, how concerned they were by his lack of empathy and ambition. Oh, how they fretted over the way they had spoiled him, the fact that he wanted for nothing in life, and how it had made him lazy and selfish. His life was too easy – they had ruined him.

Ryan smirked as he recalled their private conversation. Because they were right, and more fool them. It was their fault that he was the way he was, not his. Because as soon as the fuckers were dead, he had sold the shit out of his dad’s bollocks company – the one the stupid bastard had expected him to take over one day.

As if. Christ.

The sneering smirk dropped from his lips as the sound of more wailing sirens coming from far away reached his ears. The house may have been set well back from the quiet, residential street, but there was no escaping the fact it was situated near the city centre, as well as the mouth of the motorway. The distant blaring of car horns, or the occasional screeching hiss of the hydraulics of a heavy goods vehicle trundling along the not-so-far-off ring road could sometimes be heard if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.

Despite the fact he couldn’t see anything from the living-room window, apart from the vast front garden, he strode over to the sash window to take a look.

The view never got old. Two years had passed since his parents’ tragic demise, yet the view still made him tingle.

It’s mine, now. All mine.

Technically, the house wasn’t a mansion, but it wasn’t far off. His six-bedroomed, detached house was on Willow Road – easily the most upmarket, residential street in Ashburn.

The carefully-tended front lawn – tended to by a gardener, not by him – was shrouded in darkness. His gaze flickered to the oak tree to the left of the garden next to the pond. For a second there, he thought that he detected movement, but no, it was just the gentle sway of the branches in the light breeze.

He frowned, resting his hot forehead against a cool pane of the sash window, not knowing why he should be so on edge.

Probably because you’ve got a dehydrated, beaten woman in your basement.

Except it wasn’t that, it was something else, something other.

Even thinking that confused him no end, because he really wasn’t following his own train of thought.

I’ve been playing too many video games, he decided, his head apparently still being firmly stuck in game-land – in zombie outbreaks due to leaks in top-secret, government, chemical labs.  He didn’t interact with people all that much anymore, unless he included kidnapping Claire in that – admittedly small – list of human interactions. Most interaction, such as it was, was conducted online, specifically in forums on the darknet.

Sighing heavily, he turned away from the glass. He had to get his shit together. He had a guest to see to, and that guest was thirsty.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Drink your water.”

The girl groaned, her eyes rolling back in her head. It was funny; he was no longer thinking of her as Claire, but just as The Girl. Somewhere along the line, she had become dehumanised to him. Maybe this process had started after he had first ejaculated inside her. Not immediately afterwards – it had perhaps been a more of an insidious creeping, but happen it did. His obsessive crush had gone and deflated like an old party balloon.

Perhaps it had happened when she had tried to slash open his jugular, when she had morphed into that crazed, wild animal. And that’s all she had been to him since then; an animal.

Yeah, that’ll do it.

“I said, drink your fucking water, bitch.”

He studied her, irritated no end that she was choosing to ignore him. She lay slumped against the stonewall, naked, her head lolling on her neck, her legs splayed in a most undignified manner. To think, the hours he had spent fantasising about what lay between those long, elegant thighs, and now that it was displayed to him, he was largely indifferent.

Leaning over her, he fisted her once lustrous mane of honey-hued hair. It was quite amazing really, how only three days into their relationship, her hair had turned into a bird’s nest. It was really rather unappealing.

He rattled her head by her hair until her face wobbled and a low, moaning noise escaped her lips.

“Leave me alone,” she groaned, although that might have been what she said, because it was hard to know for sure.

“Drink.”

Still holding her hair, he shoved the glass against her cracked lips. Her hands curled over his forearms, like a new-born clutching its parent’s fingers for the first time – so delicate, so vulnerable.

It left him singularly unmoved.

Her eyes fluttered open – eyes that had once been the colour of a clear, summer’s sky, a shade not unlike his own. Her pretty eyes had been one of the things that had first attracted him to her.

She drank, her throat bobbing. When she coughed, he removed the glass from her lips for a moment, not wanting her to choke to death. One that little fit had subsided, he made her finish off the tumbler of water.

He stepped backwards, staring impassively down at her. She was a mess. She had soiled herself – piss and shit – her inner thighs and vagina smeared with brown, sticky lumps, and his stomach roiled in disgust. He didn’t have a problem with blood, not the freshly-drawn kind anyway, but stale blood, and shit especially, did him in.

Truth was, he couldn’t for the life of him fathom what he had ever seen in her.

She glared up at him, as much as a girl could glare, seeing that he had got to work on her left eye with a lighter, and it was swollen to such an extent that it had closed over completely and was a blistering, redraw mess…

A waft of foulness hit his nostrils – the fetid, sweet stench of excrement, and rank BO, mixed with that indefinable odour of despair – and he backed further away from her. Maybe he should get a bucket of soapy water and give her a good drenching.

“Please let me go,” she whined, albeit more coherently now. That drink of water must have revived her somewhat, dragged her back from the point of no return.

“If you’re a good girl, I’ll let you go,” he said.

That was a blatant lie, of course, but the simple fact was he liked toying with her, both mentally and physically. It was why she was here, after all.

“Tell me something,” he continued, genuinely curious, now. “Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

She was sounding more with it by the second. Ryan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. At the end of the day, he supposed it was just a thing. Either way, her days were numbered.

“Did you know that I was following you?”

Now that she was more with it, she had clamped her legs shut and pulled them sideways under her body so that her bare feet tucked in under her rump. She pressed the side of her body against the wall, wrapping her arms around her chest, hiding her small breasts from view.

“No. I didn’t know.” Despite everything, that familiar note of defiance had crept back into her voice. It pissed him off no end, but he also grudgingly admired her resolve. She was a feisty one, there was no doubt about it.

She swivelled her head to look at him once more, her face steaked with grime, which was weird, because it wasn’t as if the basement was even dirty. She peered up at him with her one, good eye, the rat’s nest of her hair framing her ruined face.

She’s lost a lot of weight, came the indifferent thought. Was it possible to lose weight after only three days of not eating?

Yeah. Apparently, it is.

There wasn’t much meat on her to start with, but now she looked about as attractive as a concentration camp victim. He liked them thin, but this was just too much. Hunched over the way she was, her ribcage resembled a rack of lamb, and the shoulder blade he could see in profile looked as if it were about to pierce her skin. When he had first clapped eyes on her in the chain clothing-store in the main high street, her tall, slender, rather boyish figure had driven him wild. It had certainly been one of the main attractions when he had started following her home after her shifts at work.

He smirked at the memory. It had been so easy to stop and ask for directions at a spot where he knew there were no surveillance cameras. The stupid cow had passively watched him and done nothing when he had got out of the car, walked all the way around it and had come right up to her.

It was as if she had wanted this to happen to her, that it was some subconscious wish fulfilment.

The bitch was gagging for it.

“Why are you doing this?” she whined, although her voice was certainly now getting into the realms of normal.

He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. That was a good question, one which he had often wondered himself. He decided that honesty was the best policy, figuring that it might be cathartic. She was as good as dead anyway, so where was the harm?

“I’ve always wanted to take a girl, you know? Take her, and have some fun with her, but I never had the guts to do it before. I guess now I finally grew a pair and actually did it.”

The girl had begun to sob, clearly trying not to make a big deal out of it and hide it, and he wondered in an entirely detached kind of way if the act of crying aggravated her fucked up eye, or if the tears maybe soothed it.

“Please, just let me go,” she cried, her voice suddenly weirdly thick and deep. “No one has to know, I won’t tell. I promise I won’t tell.”

Ryan smirked. Surely she didn’t really believe what she was saying?

Maybe she does. Maybe she really is that stupid.

“I’ll let you go if try and get into things a bit more. You know, enjoy it, and stuff.”

She just sobbed all the harder. She looked ugly when she cried, the fucked-eye aside. With her dirty face all blotchy and swollen, and the snot bubbling in her Rudolph nose, she was quite the sight.

He sighed deeply. “All you have to do is relax, get into it. We could be good together, you and me. If you please me, we can go upstairs, and you can have a shower and get dressed. I’ve got some nice clothes for you, and then we can have dinner together. Come on, baby, buck your ideas up a little bit, and things could get really good for you. And after that, maybe I’ll let you go, if you promise that you’ll come out on a date with me this weekend.”

The lie tripped easily off his lips. If she believed a word that he was saying, then she was even stupider than he thought.

So far, he had only used his fists on her. And his cock, of course, having fucked her in every orifice. He had only used the lighter on her eye because he hadn’t liked the way she had looked at him. There was a whole bunch of other tools that he couldn’t wait to use on her. He supposed he was waiting for the grand finale to do that other stuff. He wanted her to go out with a bang, not drear on forever.

Better to burn out than to fade away.

And that was the part that he wanted to record. His very own snuff film. It was going to be brilliant, especially if she cooperated. Especially if she acted like she was into it, if she thought that it was going to save her life. With the things he had planned for her, he supposed that her acting abilities were going to be pushed to the max.

“Okay, I’ll do whatever you want, if you just promise that you’ll let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

“That’s my girl. And I know you won’t, baby.”

He couldn’t seem to wipe the smirk from his face. This was going to be so much fun.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A few minutes later he was upstairs, getting his things together. He had one huge, fuck off toolbox, like a proper little workman, complete with a foldout top lid, which he thought was particularly nifty. This box of delights was jampacked with special goodies, from hammers to chisels, pliers to electrical sheers and handheld saws to an assortment of knives with the sharpest of blades. There was even an unopened packet of five mousetraps, which he thought might also be especially hilarious to use.

He also had a couple of guns hidden in the house, but he didn’t think that they would be appropriate for this endeavour. He had brought them from his regular coke dealer – two 9mm handguns – not that he had ever fired one before. Theoretically, he knew what went where, but he hadn’t got the chance to play with them yet. He just liked having them around – it made him feel very gangsta.

He put down the toolbox at the top of the basement stairs and made his way back down the long hallway with the gleaming floorboards – again, the immaculate state of the interior of the house down to the cleaner who came in every Monday and Thursday to give the place the once over – and entered the living-room.

The tripod and the latest, state-of-the-art camera sat perched on top of it behind the red-leather sofa. Striding over towards it, he plucked the small camera off the stand with the intention of folding up the tripod and carrying everything down into the basement.

Instead, he looked down at the camera in his hands. Sheer vanity made him pause to replay the little video that he had made of himself yesterday – a short video which was intended to serve as an appetiser to the main event.

The little screen at the back of the device filled with an image of his face, and he couldn’t help but grin. He was just so good-looking, although he conceded that he perhaps might be better described as beautiful rather than handsome. One would never guess that such an evil, twisted soul lurked behind that angelic face.

The ironic fact that he even looked a little bit like Ted Bundy was not lost on him. Or not Ted Bundy, perhaps, but Zac Efron, playing the part of Ted Bundy. They had the same shiny dark hair that flopped onto a smooth, broad forehead, and both of them had pale blue eyes that sparkled with good humour and mirth. It wasn’t good humour and mirth, but one would never know that just from looking. He just couldn’t help but marvel at how young he looked, at how fresh-faced and innocent he outwardly appeared, yet there he was, internally Satan.

I really am quite something, he thought with a stab of satisfaction, followed by, Maybe I should’ve filmed myself from the waist up, instead of just the shoulders up.

One couldn’t see how thoroughly worked-out he was from this talking headshot, because boy, did he work out hard to look the way he did. When he wasn’t playing computer games, or watching snuff films and discussing the ins and outs of them with fellow deviants on the darknet, he was hitting the weights hard in a bedroom that he had converted into a home gym. He kept a careful eye on his diet to ensure that he didn’t put on weight or get too bulky, and he loved how it resulted in his sinewy, defined body that positively rippled.

The fact was, he could have any woman he wanted, but he had never wanted women in the regular way – he only wanted them in an irregular way, in the cutting, hurting kind of way.

Yes, maybe I really should redo this introductory bit. Get more of my torso in frame.

Or not, he decided. His perfect body would be in view just fine when he got to the nitty-gritty of the film. And who was going to see this film anyway, apart from him? Well, the next girl after Claire might, which he supposed was the whole point of this little exercise. Because there definitely was going to be a next girl, he had already decided that much.

Just thinking this caused the blood to rush to his cock, making him harden instantly.

Sighing deeply, he pressed play:

“My name is Ryan Clarke,” said the handsome and smiling talking head with the square jaw and sparkling blue eyes on the camera screen. “And this is my first movie, starring the beautiful and very talented, Claire Eames. She’s my first, so this is will be a very special moment for me, hence I want to record it for prosperity. I concede, it’s possible that I may one day share them with like-minded people on the darknet, but for now, this is my own private, little venture. One day, I hope to have a whole collection of films, just like this one. I’m sure I will, because I’m the type of guy that always aims high, that always tries to make his dreams come true. You have to realise your potential in life, don’t you? You have to do what you were born to do, whatever it is you believe that you were put on this on Earth to accomplish.

“It was my destiny that I should meet Claire Eames, and that I should fall in love with her from afar. They say that we always destroy that which we love the most, and believe me, I do love Claire the most. I have never wanted to love someone so badly.

“Let me tell you a little bit more about Claire. And when I say you, I guess I’m either addressing the next love of my life, or my kindred spirits online. Perhaps I am addressing both. Or maybe I am in prison and there are a bunch of po-faced, police cunts watching this right now, and maybe later on this video will do the rounds on the surface net, and I am now as famous as my idols, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. I am certainly better looking than them, so should I be caught, I will be a million women’s secret masturbatory fantasy… Although I doubt very much that I shall be caught, because I am good at this.

“No matter. I digress. Let us get back to the point, and the point is Claire...”

The image of his face on the screen cut to jerky footage of a beautiful girl with flowing, honey-blonde hair, standing behind a till in a clothes’ shop. She was oblivious to the fact that she was being filmed from afar through the shop window, and every so often, a customer obscured her view. She looked like such a happy girl, smiling for the customers, like she genuinely gave a shit about their sad little lives and their pathetic shopping experience.

And all the while, Ryan’s smooth upper-class twang provided the voiceover…

“Behold Claire Eames, an object of extreme beauty, as I am sure you will agree. I first saw Claire when I popped into this shop to buy a couple of t-shirts. It was only sheer fluke that brought me in here. Normally, being as rich as I am, I wouldn’t lower myself to buy such trashy attire, but seeing as I was passing after a pleasant afternoon walk to clear the cobwebs, and an impulse buy of a rather lovely Rolex, the t-shirt on the mannequin in the window caught my eye.

“‘Why not,’ I said to myself, so in I went, and lo and behold, there she was, the delectable Claire. I was at the foot of the escalator when I first clapped eyes on her, folding some rather nasty, three for two, summer t-shirts, and I was instantly smitten. From that moment on, I was in love and I kept a very close eye on her. I followed her home to her sad little flat, which she shares with her best girlfriend, who is also a student like her, who, incidentally, is also studying English Literature, just like my Claire. Not that she will even get to finish her education, but I don’t suppose that it matters, because it would’ve been a bloody useless degree anyway.

“Although really, I am a fine one to talk, seeing as I read Art History at University, and I only did that because it was a piss-easy degree, and it got my parents off my back until I turned twenty-one. After I turned twenty-one it was a different matter, so I just killed them.

“Anyway. I am digressing. Again. It’s talking to the camera, it’s very cathartic.”

As he spoke, the image on screen cut to his handsome face once more. He was grinning at the camera, revealing straight, white teeth.

“Who knows why I am the way I am? I’m not one for analysing myself too deeply, I suppose that there is just something missing from me, something missing from my genetic makeup. My parents are quite normal, I have never been abused or mistreated in any way, yet here I am, your bona fide, coldblooded psychopath. I look normal. I look better than normal, I’m sure you agree, and I have no problem attracting women, it’s keeping them interested that’s the hard part. One night stands are hardly a problem, but I confess, they do get a little tiresome after a while. And even if I do attempt going on a date, we never seem to get beyond the first one. I suppose I don’t like them in the conventional way, and none of them are interested in the real me…”

Ryan’s onscreen face suddenly looked uncomfortable and the real Ryan frowned in confusion. It was at around this point that he had lost the thread and gone and ruined what could’ve been a beautiful introduction:

“I mean, it might be quite nice to actually meet a woman who understands me. Somebody who gets me. Isn’t that what everybody wants, when it all boils down to it? That soulmate type of someone – someone who loves you for what you are, not despite what you are? It would be kinda cool to meet a girl like that…”

Onscreen Ryan suddenly fell silent and then the screen went black.

“Well, that’s just great,” Ryan grumbled to himself, staring in irritation at the blank screen.

He was totally going to have to redo the whole thing.

I’ll do it later.

Holding onto the camera, he folded up the tripod and slotted it under one arm, then made his way across the living room.

“Oh, what am I doing?” he said with a small chuckle.

He was still wearing his clothes.

Idiot.

Resting the camera apparatus against the wall next to the living-room door, he quickly shrugged out of his plain white t-shirt. Next, he prised his feet out of his red converse trainers by stepping on his heels, then he unbuttoned his expensive, designer jeans that didn’t necessarily look expensive. Ryan may have been loaded, but his style was understated. He liked to look good, but at the same time, he didn’t want to go around dressed as immaculately as Patrick bloody Bateman, drawing attention to himself. Being a coldblooded psychopath was one thing but advertising this fact by dressing like the stereotype of one was quite another.

Am I so coldblooded? he wondered.

Because after watching that recording of himself, if he didn’t know better he would’ve say that he was going soft.

It was just self pity, that’s all.

But was it? There was no denying it, there was a part of him that was lonely – a part of him that thought it would be nice to share stuff with a special someone.

A special someone who was into pain. He wasn’t thinking about that naff, BDSM bullshit – none of that crap with the role-playing and the whips and the leathers and all that other sad equipment.

Ryan wanted the real thing. A girl who liked being beaten. Someone who would actually enjoy it when he used his fists on her.

When he cut her.

He didn’t suppose that a girl like that existed.

Stop it.

Assertively, as if to dispel the intrusive thoughts, he slid his jeans down his long, nicely-muscled legs, taking his snug-fitting, black undershorts with them.

That done, he was ready. Scooping up his tripod and camera, he padded barefoot out of the living-room.

CHAPTER NINE

“Are you ready to be a movie star, Claire?”

Claire, however, didn’t answer, she was too busy crying and trembling.

He gazed thoughtfully down at her. She was leaning against the wall and shivering violently, dripping wet from the bucket of soapy water he had tipped over her in an effort to sluice away the shit.

At first, he had assumed that she was shivering because she was cold and wet, but that couldn’t be it because it was warm down here in the basement. Not only that, the water had been warm as well. Not for her comfort, mind, but because hot water was better at removing lumps of shit than cold water.

Something was wrong. Sure, she was drenched, but that simply couldn’t be why she was shivering so violently.

This basement was warm in the summer, and cold in the winter. At this precise moment, it was the perfect non-temperature temperature – just right for his upcoming filming session.

Only then did it hit him.

She’s not cold, she’s running a temperature.

Fuck.

Now that he looked at her more closely, there was no doubt about it; in the fifteen minutes or less that he’d been gone, she appeared to have developed a fever. Her colouring was high, although it was hard to tell with how generally blotchy she was, and the bitch was positively rattling against the stonewall.

Ryan gritted his teeth in irritation. This was just bloody marvellous. Shit, she had to be contagious, and the last thing he bloody wanted was a dose of flu.

Too late now, you’ve already got up and personal with her. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it, nothing you can do about it now.

But still. He was bloody seething.

“Why, bitch, why? Why would you do this to me?”

She didn’t answer, and just sat there rattling her sticky-out bones. Christ, she was looking less attractive by the second. Maybe he should just kill her now and be done with it. Chalk this one up to experience and next time, remember to start making his movies straight away before they lost their looks and got bloody sick on him.

Selfish fucking bitch.

He took a step closer, peering down at her. Gently, he prodded her with his big toe. She was largely unresponsive, her body slack and her eyes closed. She wasn’t asleep though, or passed out, if the little whimpering noises she was making were anything to go by.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, turning his back on her and striding over to his camera equipment that he had dumped in the corner of the vast, barren basement.

He began to set everything up, muttering to himself about how unfair it all was.

“I expect you did this on purpose didn’t you?” he called over to her as he fiddled with the tripod. “Bloody women, how do they do it? They’ve got a bloody knack for ruining things.”

Once the tripod and camera were set up to his satisfaction, he stooped down slightly and peered into the camera, making sure that everything was okay. Claire was nicely in frame, and he didn’t have to fiddle with the lighting settings as the overhead, fluorescent strip lighting illuminated proceedings just fine. In fact, it was perfect. The harshness of the lighting lent the whole thing an industrial, callous vibe, and a little shiver of pleasure coursed through him.

It was fucking perfect.

The smile dropped from his lips when he looked at the shivering girl; perfect, apart from the fact she was sick, that was.

Sighing deeply, he went over to his toolbox and carried it over to Claire, making sure to keep it arm’s length from her, lest she should get any bright ideas like last time.

The camera was now rolling, and a rush of sexual pleasure gripped him. His cock stiffened and he tingled all over in anticipation at what he was about to do.

Opening the toolbox, he gazed misty-eyed at the array of tools within.

“Choices, choices,” he murmured, his fingers hovering for a moment, before wrapping around a pair of pliers.

Experimentally, he snapped them open and shut – snap snap, like a hungry little piranha.

With his free hand, he reached out to fist the girl’s hair, irritation churning in his guts at the fact her eyes were still closed.

He rattled her head. “Open your fucking eyes.”

Or eye, rather, seeing as she could only open one, but he figured that would be nit-picking.

She didn’t respond, and her shivering now appeared to be even more pronounced.

His erection softened somewhat, but not completely.

A low moan escaped her cracked lips, a foul stench emanating from her mouth. It was the stink of decay and…

And what? he wondered.

Decay and desperation. The stink of despair, he realised.

And it wasn’t altogether unpleasant.

“Hey, Claire, want to make your movie now?”

She just remained hunched over, her side mashed against the wall, shivering and whimpering like a beaten, rain-drenched dog, chained up and forgotten outside on a wet winter’s night.

He fisted her hair and dragged her away from the wall, flexing his biceps for the camera as he did so, being sure to suck in his stomach so that his six-pack undulated.

She was mostly floppy, still whimpering in that pathetic way. Roughly, he shoved her backwards so that she lay sprawled on the floor. Immediately, she rolled onto her side, curling into the foetal position and drawing up her knees so that they were level with her hips.

Ryan, however, was having none of that.

He pushed her onto her back, unmindful of the long chain that connected her ankles – the chain was long so that her legs were still able to be spread, leaving her always available to fuck. He straddled her stomach, and brought the pliers down to a nipple, gently sliding the opened blades over the puckered bud.

But she remained unresponsive. The sweat that sheened her body and face was no longer in individual beads, but in one joined-up, glistening sheet. Neither was she moaning quite so loudly.

It was as if she was fading away.

Ryan slapped her round the face and her head snapped sideways. A low moan escaped her lips, but her good eye remained closed.

“For fuck’s sake,” he said through gritted teeth.

Then he closed the jaws of the pliers. The girl bucked, jerking as if she had been electrocuted, a fountain of blood erupting from her nipple.

The rubbery tip dangled loosely from her breast, a smooth, red sheet of blood gliding over her breast and ribcage.

Then, without warning, she projectile vomited. Some of it hit him in the chest, scorching hot, narrowly missing his face. It was streaked with blood, and wet strings of black that didn’t look at all right.

And the foul stench of it made him gag.

“Fuck!” Ryan shouted, scrambling to his feet. Where the fuck had that come from?

He stared down at her, but now she was lying still, caked in that multi-coloured vomit. Her stomach could only be empty – and that vomit looked suspiciously like she had puked up her own fucking stomach-lining.

Jesus,” he said, alarmed to discover that he was trembling.

What in the fuck was wrong with her?

“Claire? Claire?”

Leaning over, he shook her by the shoulders, but there was no response. Her mouth hung open, dripping that disgusting shit she had just puked up, her good eye staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.

No. This couldn’t be happening.

But it was.

The bitch was dead.

CHAPTER TEN

He shook her more vigorously, refusing to believe that she was actually dead. Her body wobbled like a ragdoll’s and a wave of anger crashed through him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to have many glorious hours together of torture and sex, but she had gone and died on him?

“Wake up,” he screamed into her face. “Will you just fucking wake up?”

And then he slapped her around the face – hard. Her head snapped sideways, the angry red imprint of his hand marking her cheek.

“Fuck!”

After that, things got blurry. The rage descended over him, a mist that clouded his brain. He wasn’t thinking straight as he laid into her with his fists. Each blow that landed on her face and torso had no effect – it was like hitting a punchbag made of flesh.

Eventually, he stopped. Dismounting her, he sat on the floor next to her, panting loudly, his heart hammering. Only when he stopped, did he realise that he had been crying.

Hastily, he wiped his eyes, glancing at the camera.

Well, this movie has got to go…

The bitch had gone and ruined everything.

He remained sitting there, elbows on bent knees, head in hands, flaccid cock dangling between his thighs.

He let out a shaky breath, feeling utterly stupid for shedding a tear. He had no idea why he had been crying. Disappointment, maybe?

Just breathe, he told himself. You need to get your shit together.

His thoughts turned to the clean-up job. There was always going to be a clean-up job, he knew this, hence he was in the basement with the easily cleaned, stone-floor.

But still. He didn’t exactly relish the task that lay ahead – it wasn’t as if had gotten to do the fun part before the shit part. But first, he had to chop up the body. This was stage one of his disposal plan.

Chop her up, put the bits in industrial-strength black sacks and burn her in the open fireplace over the course of the winter. Simple. The bones he would pick out and dispose of with the regular rubbish. Or maybe he would keep some of the smaller ones and make a necklace, or something. A souvenir. That could be cool.

Just as he was thinking about the dreary tasks that lay ahead, a guttural moaning reached his ears, causing him to near jump out of his skin.

“What the fuck…” he gasped, swivelling around and scooting backwards from Claire on his arse.

He stared in disbelief at the woman who he had just violently attacked for daring to die on him before he was ready for her to do so.

Except she clearly wasn’t dead.

But that’s impossible.

He had been so sure that she had been dead. But then, he reasoned, it wasn’t as if he had checked for a pulse, something he really should’ve done when she had fallen silent the way that she had.

I am an idiot.

Another wave of irritation washed over him as he appraised her body and face – because beneath the vomit, he had gone and ruined her looks before the filming had even properly started.

But what the fuck is wrong with her?

The uneasiness continued to roil in his guts. She was just wrong, there was no other word for it. The way she was snapping her mouth like that was just deeply weird. Just gnashing her teeth together, not chewing, exactly, but just kind of snapping. It put him in mind of a crocodile, and he shuddered.

He gasped in shock when she lurched into a sitting position, swivelling her head to fix her one, good eye on him. That crocodile analogy further took root in his mind when he saw the cold, glassy cast to that eye – it was the look of a coldblooded, hungry predator.

She lurched unsteadily to her feet, despite the beating he had given her. Incredulously, he watched her take a step towards him…

And consequently fall flat on her face when the chain jerked against her ankle.

“Jesus,” he gasped, truly stunned.

She sat up once more, her expression unchanged, her mouth snapping at him. Once again, she got to her feet.

Her body was kind of lopsided, like she had broken bones. Not that it seemed to bother her in the slightest. A low moan escaped her lips, but it didn’t sound like a moan of pain.

It sounded hungry.

If anything, it sounded like the moans of the zombies in the video game that he had been playing earlier.

He studied her, cocking his head to one side. She stretched out her arms towards him, but this time she didn’t try to walk towards him… Like she had learned that she couldn’t.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Claire? Huh? What’s happened? Are you a zombie now?”

He took a step towards her, just out of reach of her flailing arms, peering deep into her eyes. There was no doubt about it, she looked dead. Her teeth snapped at him, her mouth chomping on nothing, her fingers snatching at the empty air just in front of his face.

“Are you dead, Claire?”

Only one way to find out.

Turning his back on her, he made his way over to his toolbox, and pulled out the biggest knife in there – a hunting knife with a gently curving blade that was so sharp it could cut skin without applying any pressure whatsoever.

He carried it over to Claire and stood before her once more, his head cocked to one side as she reached for him. He sliced at her hand, a great long gash appearing from the base of her middle finger all the way to the wrist bone.

And not for a second did she stop trying to grab at him. His gaze fixed on the wound with interest. There was no explosion of blood, as one might expect, but more of a steady trickle.

A great calmness descended over him as he put two and two together. The blood wasn’t gushing out of her because she had no blood pressure.

She had no blood pressure because her heart wasn’t pumping.

“You really are a zombie, aren’t you Claire?”

With a nimble grace, he lurched forward and stabbed her in the chest, stepping back again at lightning speed.

The knife, being as sharp as it was, slipped into her heart with ease. Once again, the blood didn’t spurt and pump, but just gently oozed.

Her heart had been ruptured, but she was still standing.

She didn’t die because she was already dead.

“Well, I guess the zombie apocalypse is upon us,” he said to the girl. “Unless you’re a one off. But I doubt very much that you are.”

He felt no fear, no anger or sadness, just an all-consuming sense of inevitability. It was as if he had always known. Like he had been waiting for this his entire life.

“But what turned you?” he said to the dead-eyed girl with the snapping mouth and the blood oozing from her ruptured heart.

It was that which troubled him more than anything. He had seen every inch of her body – she hadn’t been bitten before he had captured her. Something had turned her during her captivity in his basement.

And during that time, the only thing that had passed her lips was tap water.

Ryan never drank tap water, having always stuck to bottled water and coke. He drank coffee, but that was made with boiled water.

“Interesting,” he murmured to himself. Because it just had to be the water then, that had killed her, then turned her into the living dead. “Very interesting indeed.”

He looked at the pathetic trickle of blood between her small breasts, his gaze travelling up to her dead eye. If he was right about this – and he had no reason to doubt that he wasn’t – then the only way to finish her was by trauma to the brain.

He shrugged. “Let’s see if I’m right, shall we?”

With that, he stabbed her in her open eye, ramming in the knife all the way up to the hilt, then snatching back his hand before she had time to react. For a second she just stood there, swaying on the spot, then she crumpled to the ground, taking his knife with her.

Ryan gazed with a sense of smugness down at her body. She wasn’t moving, and blood gently fanned outwards around her head in a puddle.

“Guess I was right.”

He stared at the now thoroughly-dead girl, his brain buzzing with cool, calm, logic. It was entirely natural to him that he should find himself in a world that had gone and morphed into his favourite video games. He was born for this; if anyone was going to survive a zombie apocalypse, it was going to be him.

But survival had to stem from preparation. He must prepare himself for this new world. He already had the advantage in so many ways, not least of all because of his personality type, as in, cold-blooded psychopath. He smirked, secure in the knowledge that his bloodlust set him apart in this brave new world.

A world that he would be king of.

He had two guns in the house, stacks of bullets and plenty of other weapons that he wasn’t afraid to use. His advantages over joe-public were tenfold. He felt sure that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people would be in a state of denial and terror as loved ones and strangers alike turned into rabid beasts around them. It would be chaos out there. He doubted that most of the idiots would even have worked out that it was something in their water supply.

Which reminded him, he didn’t know if this event was exclusive to this area, or if it was happening the world over. Either way, if this epidemic hadn’t yet spread, he felt sure that it soon indeed, would.

“Sorry, Claire, but there are things I must attend do,” he said to the dead woman, before leaning over her and levering the knife out of her eyeball.

Undoubtedly, he would be needing that later.

Knife in hand, he turned to leave the basement.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ryan sat on the red leather sofa watching the television, wearing a pair of black cargo pants and a black shirt, sipping thoughtfully on a can of coke.

The breaking news was on every main channel, and a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he watched it. This really was it – the beginning of the end.

In fascination, he watched the jerky filming and the CCTV footage of the city of Ashburn in uproar. People attacking other people in the street for no apparent reason. Falling on top of them and mashing their faces into the nearest bit of the other person. Brazen looting in the city centre. All the while this played out, the female newsreader narrated:

“…of the unprecedented levels of violence that have broken out in the city of Ashburn. Residents have been instructed by government officials to stay in their homes, to lock all doors and windows until further notice. People who are not in their homes tonight are instructed to find a place of safe refuge immediately.

“Under no circumstances must anyone approach a stranger in the street. If anyone is spotted acting in a strange or violent manner, then that person under no circumstance must be approached.

“Riots are currently breaking out on nearly every street corner all over the city. As yet, no one knows the root cause of this violence, although the emergency services, armed forces and police are doing their best to control the situation.

“All roads leading in and out of the city have been blocked until further notice…

But Ryan was barely listening anymore, and he jumped to his feet in agitation, the smirk dropping from his lips. Things were quickly escalating out of control. The roads were closed, the Ministry of Defence was involved.

He knew enough to know that requesting military aid was the absolute last resort as far as the UK was concerned. Their involvement told him all he needed to know – that Ashburn, if not the rest of Britain too – was clearly fucked.

The army would be ruthless, undoubtedly instructed to shoot anyone on sight should they believe them to be infected. There was also a good chance that the military would end up bombing the city, should the powers that be decide it was for the greater good and the infection was unable to be contained.

Yes, the government would do anything within their power to contain this. The fact that the newsreaders weren’t mentioning the zombie word, or that people were biting other people in the street, or anything about the water being unfit to drink, all led Ryan to believe that the government would do anything to cover this shit up. To make the whole, nasty little problem go away.

A conspiracy to silence, by any means necessary.

I need to get out of here.

But this was easier said then done, with the roads being blocked the way they were.

A car’s no good…

But a motorbike is.

Instantly, he thought of the older man next door – another fellow millionaire and a recent widower who used to be a keen motorcyclist. He kept his Harley in the garage – his pride and joy – which he rode occasionally with some other biking weirdos. He had even named the fucking thing Flossie, he seemed to recall.

Hopefully, he was wrong, and Ashburn wouldn’t be incinerated in an attempt to cauterise this problem at source.

But it was better to be safe than sorry.

It was no longer safe here, and it was time for him to go.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Zara had stumbled upstairs, where she had drunk out of the bathroom tap and cleaned up the tender bite wound on her stomach as best she could. That done, she had thrown on a pair of jeans and the first jumper she had seen, shoved her feet into the nearest pair of trainers and, after trying to call the emergency services multiple times on the landline, and calling various friends and acquaintances on her mobile, she had given up.

During that interlude of five minutes, as she clutched a phone in each hand, she had switched on the TV to see if Ashburn had made the news.

Sure enough, it had. It was on every main British channel, in fact. She had stared in bug-eyed disbelief at the television, watching the carnage on the screen that was unfolding right outside her front door.

Her bashed-in front door.

I am so fucked.

The newsreader on the TV was urging the residents of Ashburn to stay in their homes and lock all doors and windows, and, as she said it, Zara glanced miserably at her smashed-in living-room window, at the missing middle pane of glass, further highlighted by the fact that the blinds were also gone. Her window was as about as subtle as a missing front tooth in a smile – a beacon for all and sundry to come on in.

Now the newsreader was going on about roadblocks, and Zara’s head reeled. Why were they trapping the inhabitants of Ashburn in the city? What the hell was happening here?

Zombies, she thought, in a detached, flat kind of horror. We’re all turning into zombies. Her hand fluttered to the wound on her stomach, gently tracing her fingers over it through the cable-knit, cream jumper she wore.

But, if that really were the case, why wasn’t she now like Jean-Paul, and the others?

In irritation, Zara strode over to the TV and pulled out the plug at the socket.

All I know is I can’t stay here.

Pocketing her mobile phone, then grabbing her wallet off the bookcase, she headed for the front door.

*

As soon as she was outside, she immediately doubted the wisdom of her decision.

I don’t have a choice.

It wasn’t as if her house was a safe refuge anymore. It was very much in her head that she could perhaps find a charitable neighbour to hunker down with, to wait out this nightmare with.

Someone that she could feel safe with.

But things had escalated at breakneck speed since she had last been outside. That had felt like a lifetime ago – had it really only been less than half an hour?

She stood on the pavement at the end of her driveway, feeling very much like a little kid that had lost her parents in a big, strange place.

The first thing she noticed five or so houses down to her right were two cars, parked sideways and at odd angles across the road. Between them, they blocked the street entirely.

Only then did it occur to her that there were no other cars on the road. She squinted down to the left of the dark street. A good distance away, at around one-hundred metres or so, she thought that she saw another blockage, although from this distance she couldn’t be sure.

Despite the lack of cars on her street, the constant wail of distant sirens permeated the air. Not only that, now she could smell smoke too – just a trace of it, drifting under her nostrils, so faint it was barely perceptible.

She gazed around herself, convinced that this was a nightmare. Over the road, she saw a man walking slowly, dragging his feet as he made his way along the pavement.

Something was wrong with him.

He’s one of them.

She froze in terror, heart hammering. He didn’t seem to notice her, and she intended to keep it that way. As she stared at the man, the door of the house opposite burst open and a man stumbled out of it.

Light from the hallway flooded his driveway, throwing him into stark silhouette, making it impossible for her to pick out details. The man lurched down the driveway as another figure appeared in the doorway behind him.

“Get the fuck away!” he screamed over his shoulder.

The man was limping badly, clutching his arm to his chest, and she watched in rapt horror as he drew level with front gate.

Her attention was drawn to sudden movement on the other side of the hedge. She could see the figure lurching along the pavement, only a short distance from the gate, but the man couldn’t.

“Look out,” she called over to him, but, as if she really were in a nightmare, her voice came out reedy and thin, swallowed up by the wrongness of the night.

Now the man had stepped beyond his front gate, and, as if she were watching the drama unfolding in slow motion, she saw the man on the pavement dive on top of him.

The two figures went sprawling to the ground, the man’s angry protests giving way to high-pitched screams of agony that curdled in her brain and made her cry out. A few seconds later and the person that had been in the house – a young woman, she only then noticed – also threw herself on top of the screaming man.

That was when the man with the gun appeared. For the life of her, Zara didn’t see where he had come from, all she knew was that he was suddenly part of the commotion, standing in the middle of the road and pointing his gun at them. He was dressed in army fatigues, and his gun was long and thin – a rifle, she realised.

His voice was loud and clear, deep and firm, easily drifting her way from the other side of the street: “Cease and desist! Stand up and put your hands behind your head!”

The scene on the ground didn’t change, then the man fired three shots – a bullet for each of them. The man’s screams abruptly stopped and the three figures fell still.

Only then did her paralysis break, the gunshots jolting her into action.

She lurched up the road, heading in the direction of the pub at the end of the street, rather than the other way which led into town, because even in her frazzled state, she knew that a higher volume of people could only spell more misery.

“Hey, you! On the other side of the road! Stop right now and put your hands behind your head.”

“Fuck.” Mid-stride, she lurched to a shuddering halt, heart hammering. “Don’t shoot!”

Lacing her hands behind her head, she turned around to face the army man who was still standing in the middle of the road and pointing the rifle at her.

“Name, age and occupation,” the much younger man barked at her.

For a moment, all she could do was stare stupidly at him, her mind a blank.

“Zara Hudson,” she then managed to gasp. “Twenty-eight years old, shoe shop manager. And could you please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

But the army guy was no longer looking at her, and she swivelled her head to follow the trajectory of his gaze. To her right, a man was jogging in her direction.

“Halt!” the army-guy bellowed at the newcomer. “Hands behind your head! State your name, age and occupation!”

The man grew closer, and Zara’s heart clenched in terror. “Do as he says,” she screamed at the stranger. “He’s just shot three people.”

The man ground to halt a few metres from where she stood. He hunched over his knees, gasping for breath. “The pub,” he managed to wheeze out. “My brother… The people, they went crazy…”

“Name, age and occupation,” the army guy shouted at him once more, interrupting his rambling.

The man straightened up, and now that he was closer, Zara got a good look at him. He was around her age – a little younger perhaps, with blonde hair that flopped onto his forehead. He was tall thin, and very attractive, if in an effeminate way.

The lad straightened up, his clear blue eyes wide with confusion and obvious fear as they settled on the nozzle of the rifle which was trained on him. “Luke Jones, twenty-seven, and I’m a computer programmer, what is this? There are people back there that need help…”

“Get inside, lock the doors and stay hidden.”

“I don’t have a front door,” Zara protested.

“And I’m staying with my brother, who is now dead,” the boy called Luke added. “Or if not dead, then a fucking zombie, or something.”

“Get to safety and lock the doors and windows,” the army man replied.

Then he walked up the street in the direction of the town.

“You’re just going to leave us here?” said called out incredulously to his departing back.

“Get inside, or you’re liable to get shot. This is a clean-up mission. Do not antagonise the armed forces.”

“A clean-up mission?” Luke repeated, but the man was now a good way away, acting as if he couldn’t hear them.

Zara looked helplessly over at Luke, who strode over to her. “We should leave,” he said.

She nodded, going to head right in the direction that she had originally been travelling.

Luke gently touched her arm. “No. Not that way. It’s carnage around the pub.”

“But we can’t go into the city. It said on the news to keep away from other people as much as possible.”

Distant screams drifted their way, and she shivered, wrapping her arms tightly around her torso.

“Where do you live?”

She gestured behind her with the faintest flick of her head. “Just there. But there’s no door and the living-room window is smashed in.”

“I think the army guy was right. We need to find a safe place and lay low until this all blows over.”

This is never going to blow over, came the entirely sure – and utterly chilling – thought.

“I was going to knock on someone’s door, ask if I could stay with them…”

Her voice trailed away when she saw that Luke was no longer looking at her, but instead gazing down the street in the direction from which he had just come from.

Her stomach clenched in terror and her heart instantly started to hammer. “Fuck.”

“We have to move. Now.”

“Fuck,” she said again, allowing Luke to grab her hand and drag her down the street in the direction of the town.

Because shambling down the middle of the road in the opposite direction were a group of ten or so people.

Except they weren’t people anymore, and she knew it.

They were zombies and they were heading straight for them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Luke tugged on the woman’s arm. She wasn’t running fast enough, they had to get out of those things’ line of sight.

“Slow down,” she panted next to him. “They don’t move as fast as us.”

That wasn’t the point, but he was in no position to argue the toss of that right this second.

A few seconds ago, the army guy that had accosted them had ran past them, straight for the pack of zombies. He continued to drag the woman down the street, not wanting to listen to the commotion that was happening behind them. Some shouting, screaming – he knew not whose – a gun firing.

Dimly, Luke realised that he was already thinking of the turned as zombies. He knew that they couldn’t possibly actually be such a thing, but the word had taken root in his mind and he couldn’t shake it.

“Please,” the girl sobbed next to him.

Luke slowed down. They had to be a good one-hundred metres away from the shit that was going down behind them, although he still had no intention of looking.

Up ahead, two cars were parked at odd angles in the middle of the road, blocking any potential flow of traffic. And all around him, he thought that he heard screaming. Sometimes, he thought that the screams were coming from inside the houses, sometimes, from unseen streets beyond this one. Screaming and sirens, and gunshots.

“We have to keep moving,” he said, indeed wanting to be far away from the commotion behind them. To find a safe haven, ignoring the little nagging voice in his head that told him that no such thing existed anymore.

But, despite his desperation to get the fuck away from those things behind them, he ground to a halt at the same time as his new companion.

“What the hell is that?” she gasped, clinging onto his arm.

Luke didn’t reply, for he was thinking the very same thing. At first, he thought that he was hearing the engines of unseen, approaching cars – what surely had to be a whole fleet of cars.

But the sound was wrong, somehow, the purr of the engines too deep, too clunky. Too loud and heavy.

He realised what it was in the second before he saw it, and, as such, he yanked on Zara’s arm, pulling her through the front gates of the house they happened to be standing in front of, dragged her behind the bushes of the front garden, and pushed her down by her head.

The only problem was, this stretch of hedge was only hip high.

“Hey,” she protested, but she still allowed to be manhandled in this way, as if she had overall resigned herself to trusting him.

As she complained, the deep, industrial roar of those engines was joined by the ear-splitting screech of metal on metal as the two army tanks ploughed straight through the abandoned cars in the road. The two cars skidded sideways as if they were nothing more than toy cars, and the army tanks just toy tanks wielded by an unruly toddler playing a fun game of smash-up-the-cars.

“Stay down,” Luke said as he peered through a gap in the hedge, not removing his hand from the back of her head.

The tanks continued to thunder up the street and Luke’s heart pounded in abject terror. So intent was he on watching the receding tanks, he hadn’t noticed the figure that had been shambling down the garden path towards them. It was some sixth sense that caused him to spin around on his knees, rather than any real noise that the woman had been making, for the commotion out on the street had easily drowned out this bitch’s moaning and groaning.

But still he didn’t notice her until she was on top of him, and sinking her teeth into his arm.

“Fuck,” he screamed, instinctively throwing her off him the second the brilliant pain exploded in his bicep; pain that shot through his arm like he had been electrocuted.

Being elderly, small and frail, she was easy to throw, but the damage had been done. She had bitten him.

A state of absolute incredulity curled around him, the shock of this all too pertinent fact far outweighing the pain.

Zara, no longer being pinned down by him, scrambled to her feet.

“Stay down,” Luke ordered, struggling into a sitting position and clutching his throbbing arm, peering over the short hedge as he did so.

The tanks thundering down the street seemed oblivious to them, and the last thing he wanted was for that fact to change.

Because things were different now. The army wouldn’t help them, they would kill him, because he had been bitten. And just like his brother before him, he knew that he was as good as dead.

The old woman lurched back to her feet after briefly sprawling on the ground. She was wearing a pink frilly dressing gown that hung to her ankles, the belt of which had come partly undone, revealing an enormous pair of flesh coloured knickers and long, narrow breasts that hung to her shapeless waist, her nipples grazing the waistband of her underwear.

Her dead eyes fixed on him beneath the frizzy white hair that was coming loose from its bun, her mouth chomping on the night air.

Luke struggled to his feet, wincing in pain. He didn’t feel at all right, and not because of the pain radiating out from his bicep. He felt light-headed, suddenly shivery and like he wanted to throw up.

Is this how it starts? he wondered.

Despite his terror, a cold resolve hardened in his heart.

There was no way that he wanted to end up like his brother.

Through his swimming vision, he watched Zara lurch over towards the driveway. She bent over and retrieved something by the gatepost.

A rock, he realised.

With a war cry, she lunged forwards onto the grass and lobbed it at the woman. It was the size of a small brick, and hit her square in the chest. It sent her staggering backwards, but she didn’t fall down.

And not for a second had she stopped looking at him with her cold, dead, hungry eyes.

“Get away from him,” Zara screamed, but his brain was kind of fuzzy now, and he barely heard her over the chattering of his own teeth.

Not having much choice in the matter, he allowed himself to flop backwards, a great tide of nausea washing over him. Over the ringing in his ears, he was aware of Zara shouting, of movement above him, although his vision was rapidly dimming, and everything was blurring.

Extraordinary pain flared in the side of his neck, shooting through his body, crippling him with the intensity of it.

“Kill me,” he said.

Or maybe he had just thought it, he couldn’t be sure.

The blazing pain dialled down a notch, and a curious sense of floating overwhelmed him, as if he were drunk, and on the deck of a boat out at sea.

An image of Cathy’s face flared briefly in his mind. Except it wasn’t Cathy, he realised. It was Zara.

And then there was nothing at all.

*

Zara grabbed the old bitch’s white bun as she dropped to her knees next to the guy called Luke, but great clumps of her hair came away in her hands. The woman didn’t even seem to notice as clearly nothing or no one was going to stop her from biting Luke’s neck.

Anger washed through her, momentarily blotting out all else as she aimed a kick at the woman’s head. The woman fell sideways, then almost immediately righted herself again, latching on to his ruptured neck once more, like the disgusting leech that she was.

“Get away from him,” she screamed, dimly aware that she was hysterical but beyond the point of caring. “Get away from him you fucking bitch.”

She screamed in shock when the woman did just that. She straightened up, her blood-rimmed mouth still chewing, her dead eyes fixing on her.

Zara staggered away from her, casting around herself for a weapon of some sort, but there was nothing, and a howl of angry frustration escaped her lips.

The deep rumble of an approaching engine snapped her attention away from the approaching woman, and she watched in a bug-eyed state of disbelieving shock as a man on a motorbike drew level with the hedge.

He grinned at her, revving the engine.

Zara blinked. Where the hell had he come from? He was film-star handsome – improbably so – and he wore a long leather jacket that made him look like he had stepped straight off the film set of The Matrix. To complete the look, he even had some harness contraption slung around his shoulders, and what looked very much like a samurai sword resting in a holder at a rakish angle between his shoulder-blades.

“Hop on, sweetheart. What say we blow this city?”

The woman continued to lurch in her direction, unmindful of the handsome, dark-haired stranger on the motorbike. Still smiling, the stranger reached into the waistband of his black cargo pants, pulled out a gun, and shot the woman in the side of the head.

She went down in a spectacular eruption of blood and gore, flopping face-first onto the grass.

“You have to destroy the brain,” he said, still with that boyish grin plastered on his face. “It’s just the way it is. They’re dead already, and that’s the only thing that will stop ‘em.”

All she could do was stand there stupidly, unable to move, to so much as draw breath.

He revved the engine again. “Are you coming or not?”

“Who are you?” she managed to get out.

As she spoke, so Luke sat up, and fixed his dead gaze upon her, his mouth chewing on nothing. Without a moment’s hesitation, the stranger shot him in the back of the head, and down he went again in a spray of blood.

“Just your friendly knight in shining armour. But you can call me Ryan. Lucky for you that I was passing by.”

“Jesus,” she sobbed, staring at Luke in horror. He had been a good man. He had tried to help her.

For the first time, the grin dropped from the man’s face and he looked beseechingly over at her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t have a choice. She stopped eating your friend because he was dead, and they don’t taste as good when they’re dead. They don’t eat their own kind.”

Someone screamed close by, the sound mingling with more gunshots and shouting, drifting to her from down the road where the army men were. The insanity was all around her; it was everywhere, chaos that was breaking out all over the city.

“We have to go. Now,” he implored.

She nodded, and, without further hesitation, ran the short distance around the hedge and hopped onto the back of his bike.

“Hold on tight,” he shouted over his shoulder. “It’s okay, we can get around the roadblocks.”

She gasped in shock at the speed with which he accelerated away, swerving left in the opposite direction to the army tanks. She wrapped her arms tightly around his rock-hard middle, thanking her lucky stars that this stranger had come along when he had.

“Thank you,” she said into his leather jacket where her face was pressed, but her voice was lost beneath the roar of the engine.

My knight in shining armour, indeed.

She closed her eyes and clung on tight as they sped off into the waiting darkness.

The End.

Hello, dear reader, you’ve reached the end of Death City. If you enjoyed the tale, please look out for the sequel, which is coming soon.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your support more than I can say. Below, I have enclosed a sample of The Nanny, which is available now on Amazon.

Thank you again, I wouldn’t be doing this without you.

Sweet nightmares to you all,

Sam West.

THE NANNY

AN EXTREME HORROR NOVELLA

BY SAM WEST

CHAPTER ONE

The sight of the mansion at the end of the winding, gravel driveway took Lauren Elliot’s breath away. Her architectural knowledge was somewhat limited, but, judging from the clean lines of the white building and the neat rows of perfectly symmetrical, long, sash windows, the place had to be Georgian.

“Wow,” was all she could say, gazing up at its imposing, white façade through the windscreen.

The grandeur aside, the sheer size of the place was dizzying and not at all what she had been expecting. The three-storeyed building was seven sash windows wide on the second and third floor. The wide, red porch leading to the front door was flanked by two large, white pillars which extended all the way up to the roof. Sure, she knew that the Hiddlestons were millionaires, but this was simply something else.

I can’t believe that I’m actually going to live here.

With a trembling hand, she turned the key in the ignition and severed the engine, swivelling around in her seat to look out of the rear window as she did so.

At the end of the long, gravel, tree-lined driveway, either side of which could be glimpsed acres of immaculately landscaped gardens, the high, wooden gates that she had just driven through were closing automatically, sealing her inside as surely as a rat in a trap.

For a ridiculous moment panic swelled in her chest, a sense of impending doom curling around her.

A shaky little laugh escaped her lips. Stop being so melodramatic.

But it as sure as shit was liking stepping into another world, making her feel very much like she was Alice falling down the rabbit hole. She put her overreacting down to a simple case of nerves, to the reality of starting this new job finally hitting her. An acute sense of woeful inadequacy manifested itself as butterflies in the pit of her stomach, causing her to softly groan.

Come on, Lauren, get a grip, for Christ’s sake.

But a mix of nerves and the sheer awe-inspiring splendour of her surroundings kept her pinned in place, a million doubts assailing her. She was out of her league here. She wasn’t posh enough for a place like this, not good enough to be working for the Hiddlestons…

Fleetingly, she glanced down at the knee-length, blue and green, small-floral print dress she wore. At the time of dressing this morning, she had thought that the slightly loose-fitting, cotton garment, pulled in at the waist with a green-cloth belt had been the embodiment of casual elegance. Now, however, she felt decidedly shabby and girlish – a far cry from the image of ‘professional young woman’ that she wished to project.

Too late now, she thought, trying not to think about the fitted, dove grey, formal woollen dress which she had decided against wearing at the last minute.

Gathering herself together, she pushed open the door of her light green, beat-up Vauxhall Corsa, her ballet-pump clad feet connecting with the gravelled ground. Was she all right to leave the car here? she wondered. She was parked at the point where the gravel driveway opened up to an area roughly half the size of a football pitch in front of the mansion, right next to the fountain. This fountain was complete with a life-sized, naked, stone woman standing in the middle of the circular pond, the water cascading from what looked like a large plant pot which was balanced on one shoulder. Its opulence struck her as bordering on vulgar.

Wrenching her gaze away from the stone woman, she walked around to the back of the car, popped the boot and retrieved her little black suitcase on wheels. Just as she slammed the boot and glanced once more in the direction of the mansion, she saw Mr Hiddleston descending the short flight of the stone, porch steps.

He cut an imposing figure, and her heart instantly started to hammer as he approached. He was an undeniably handsome man. Far too old for her, of course, and not to mention married, but a girl couldn’t help but look. As unprofessional as it was, she found herself admiring the hard lines of his ruggedly handsome face as well as the sheer width of his shoulders in the immaculately cut, dove-grey suit. He was a refined kind of guy, but there was an air of danger about him, something incredibly tough and streetwise behind the languid, icy-mannered confidence that bordered on arrogance which only extreme wealth and privilege could bestow.

“Miss Elliot. Lauren. Welcome. I’m delighted that you’re here.”

He spoke in clipped tones, extending a smooth, large hand towards her. His grip was firm, and a shiver ran through her at the dry, hard feel of his palm against hers.

“Hello, Mr Hiddleston. I’m very happy to be here.”

“Please, call me Wilbur.”

He smiled broadly at her, displaying perfect teeth. Her heart fluttered at the way his pale blue eyes glittered, the fine lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks only heightening his sex-appeal, lending his face a near-cruel edge rather than a worn look. She guessed him to be in his late forties, an age where some guys, as in, the non-pretty-boy types, reached the height of their good looks.

Stop it, she chided herself. Mooning over her new boss simply wouldn’t do.

“Wilbur,” she said, feeling the heat rush to her cheeks when she said his name, like it was taboo to do so, despite his assertions to the contrary. She cleared her throat. “Am I okay to leave my car here?”

She glanced over at her old rust bucket, cringing at how shabby it looked against the backdrop of these opulent surroundings.

Just like me, she thought mournfully.

“Yes, it’s just fine on the forecourt for now, but you may move it into the garage a little later. Come, let us not worry about such trifling matters at this moment, you must meet the family. And your new charge, of course.” He smiled, and, if she didn’t know better, she would say that the look in his gleaming eyes was more predatory than friendly. “It’s time to meet the family.”

CHAPTER TWO

Fenton Hiddleston rested his hot cheek against the cool window pane, watching the girl on the forecourt with his father.

The girl was pretty. No, scrap that, he decided, she wasn’t pretty, she was beautiful – there was just something so incredibly fresh and vibrant about her. She was as blonde as his father, her long hair gleaming in the mid-morning, summer sun. She even looked a bit like him, too – the same classical good-looks, strong jawline and tall, statuesque figure.

In fact, from what he could see, she probably looked more like his own father than he did. But maybe he was wrong about this, seeing as he was peering down at them from the second floor, so some detail was lost.

Why can’t I look more like Father?

Fenton took after his mother. The face that was so cute on her was near gerbil-like on him. He longed for his dad’s height and big bones, for even a hint of that devastating face in his own – a face that wasn’t unlike Daniel Craig’s, with its aggressive lines and piercing blue eyes to match. Instead, he had his mother’s big, brown eyes, delicate features and thick brown curls. He was twenty-one but looked about twelve, an effect further enhanced by the fact he was barely five foot eight.

Life really was a bitch sometimes.

“Fenton? What are you doing?”

He spun around guiltily, even though he wasn’t doing anything wrong. His mother was glaring at him – as much as any woman could glare with the amount of Botox she had pumped into her forehead – her arms folded across her small chest in disapproval.

For a somewhat diminutive woman, she had presence. Fenton felt sure that one icy stare from her would be capable of making a seven-foot heavyweight wrestler tremble in fear.

Or maybe he was merely projecting, this just being the effect that she had on him.

“I asked you a question, Fenton.”

“I am only looking out of the window, Mother. I was curious to see Mrs Barton’s predecessor.”

“As it happens Fenton, I was just coming up to get you. Your father wishes to formally introduce the nanny to the family, so your curiosity is about to be assuaged.”

Fenton’s stomach flipped at the thought of seeing the beautiful girl up close. He frowned slightly at this sudden bout of positively school-boy arousal. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of beautiful girls at Uni – he even had his pick of most of them, seeing as he came from such good stock. There was more than a trace of bitterness at this thought, for what good was wealth without love?

Fenton’s childhood had been a cold one, having been sent away to boarding school at the age of seven, only coming home at the longer holidays. And even then, he was often sent off on various, organised trips. Skiing in the Alps. Diving holidays in the Caribbean. Anything so that his parents wouldn’t have to look at him for all those such long weeks on end.

Yes, Fenton had always wanted for nothing; he was the quintessential poor little rich boy – the kid who had everything apart from the one thing he truly needed – his parents’ affection. He smirked humourlessly at the self-pitying turn his thoughts were taking.

“Is something funny, Fenton?”

“No, Mother, I was just thinking.”

She gazed at him coolly – heaven forbid, he thought, that she might actually give a shit what, exactly, he had been thinking.

“Please don’t be long. We’ll be in the main drawing room.”

With those words she left his bedroom without a backward glance, leaving him standing there feeling like the lost little boy he always secretly felt like inside. Sure, he had that casual arrogance of the super-rich, that air of breezy, over-entitlement that would undoubtedly open many doors to him in life, but all he really wanted was a show of kindness from his mother, no matter how small. Just one kind word. A hug, maybe. Even a genuine smile would do. Was that really so much to ask?

Sighing deeply, he pushed aside the sudden bout of melancholy – it really wasn’t like him to dwell, to let his thoughts amble down the badly-done-to-child road. He knew perfectly well that he was lucky, that he had been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, that he had a glittering career ahead of him in law, and, in the unlikely chance that he should screw that up given his enviable social connections, there was always Daddy Dearest’s  money to fall back on.

But still. Sometimes, like right now, such melancholy gripped him. He wished he hadn’t bothered coming back, but his mother had been quite forceful on the matter. Something about a big party that she insisted he attend. Something, she said, that would be very important for his future.

He looked around ‘his’ childhood bedroom. It occurred to him that he had probably spent less time sleeping in this room than he’d ever had in the various institutions that made up his childhood. In the greater scheme of things, he spent such little time with his parents, he figured that the mere fact of being back here must be triggering his deep-rooted, usually deeply buried insecurities.

Thank God I’m only here for another week.

A sense of cold detachment seeped through him as he looked around himself. The room looked like every other room in the nine bedroomed mansion – all gleaming, dark-oak floorboards, high ceilings, chandeliers and painstakingly-restored, antique furniture.

There was no sense of him in this room. His childhood toys had long been ‘lost’, and all that remained was an antique, painted, wooden rocking-horse that his mother had never let him ride as a boy because it was too valuable.

He thought of Tabitha, quite probably sleeping in her cot down the hallway. He pitied her. At least he was now a young adult. He was out of it, unlike Tab, who had their entirety of her childhood spread out before her.

Fenton found his attention drawn to the window once more, but the girl, along with his father, was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

“Let me take that for you,” Wilbur Hiddleston said, reaching for the suitcase which was propped up next to her on the gravel forecourt.

For a moment, she was rendered paralysed by the wave of inadequacy that washed over her due to the fact her suitcase was so tiny and pitiful. She felt quite sure that, should Mrs Hiddleston venture anywhere, her many Louis Vuitton cases would be heavy and bulging at the seams, positively groaning with high fashion, designer attire. Her solitary, shabby little suitcase contained just a few changes of clothes until such time that she could return to her flat share in the centre of Broadgate and get the rest of her stuff. That was if she should complete her week’s trial without a hitch, of course.

Mr Hiddleston took the suitcase from her – she still couldn’t quite bring herself to think of him as Wilbur – and gestured over towards the porch with the faintest flick of his head.

“Shall we?”

“Sure.”

On trembling legs, she followed him inside.

*

Mrs Hiddleston greeted her in the large hallway, which did nothing to help with her feelings of inadequacy. She was beautiful. At first glance, she looked around her own age of twenty-five, partly perhaps because she was so short, and partly because she was so smooth-skinned and perky, but Lauren very much doubted that she was so young. It was hardly impossible – plenty of handsome, successful men paired up with much younger women, but Mrs Hiddleston carried herself with the self-assured grace of someone much older.

She wore a plain, knee-length navy dress that showcased her tight curves – the type of body that left Lauren sick with envy.

“Lauren Elliot, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Anoushka. Welcome to our home.”

“Thanks,” she said, accepting the woman’s offered hand. “I’m so happy to have been offered the job.”

Mrs Hiddleston, or Anoushka – she really had to get used to the idea of calling these people by their first names – swept an appraising eye over her body. The faintest sneer curled her upper lip, but just as quick it disappeared again…

END OF SAMPLE