Chapter 6, Howling mad drums
“Dad, dad?!” shouted Zak.
“What?” I said tearing my gaze from the group running down the corridor towards us.
“Fight or run?” It was a good question and one I needed to answer quickly. I listened to the sounds of the rapidly approaching group. They howled as they came. It was not a friendly greeting.
“Run” The decision was made. I was panicking, we all were. In my indecision about whether or not to lead the charge away from danger or hang at the back to make sure it never caught us I drifted between the two, which was probably a bad idea. We ventured down one of the corridors which led into the west wing of the prison. We turned this way and that.
Without saying anything the torches had all been lit up, it looked like a disco was making its way down through the stained insides of the old hospital. The fact that we had run only seemed to excite the group behind us, their hollering and feral bellowing had become more enthused and filled with perverse joy when we'd bolted.
The place was a maze of confusing twists and turns. We ran up and down stairs, around corners and down long narrows which led to more of the same. We fell at times, we staggered. With each step I heard the pack closing in. They chanted as they came, not words, just grunts and growls like designed to inspire more fear and add to their own lust for the hunt. It worked.
My poor Ellie she was struggling, her legs were dragging and her ailing lungs were finding it hard to keep up. This was not the girl who I'd watched cross the line in first place in her school cross country a few years ago, this was a sickly ghost who I could love no more than I did but for whom I grew more afraid with each passing moment.
In the end we ran into a large room on one of the upper most levels of the hospital. The frosted windows all along one wall at least let in a fair amount of the grey light from outside, enough of a light to see that this was a dead end. Had I been in the frame of mind to analyse small details then I would have noticed that the windows in here, like all those which we'd seen in Ravensburg hospital so far, had thick wrought iron bars across them.
Neither of the two other doors in the room opened. It was empty bar for what looked like the ragged ruins of some playing dolls which lay here and there, perhaps this was some sort of child's playroom. These dolls had seen better days however, most were twisted and quashed and had suffered the tread of many a foot.
We turned to retreat but too late, this was our dead end, this was out last stand.
They did not hurry through the doorway. We backed up slowly towards the windows weapons at the ready. They entered the room with at a purposefully leisurely pace. They sauntered and strolled in to face us.
Since the world ended I'd looked upon the many horrors, since before then I'd seen things gazing back at me from the other side of a television screen that petrified me. I'd seen the dead walk and I'd seen things which should never have existed this side of damnation come running at me in the night. But this group, these foul creatures exuded an air of malice and dark intent that could not even touch upon the foulness that the world had thrown at us so far.
They were all male. Every one of them was dirty beyond belief, covered in their own filth, in each others, sweat and blood and piss and shit, they smelled as bad as they looked and they looked like they'd just crawled up out of a well of blood and faeces. Some of them moved with catlike grace, some of them jerked spasmodically. Some of them fixed us with hungry level glares, some of them twitched and shuffled and could barely keep their eyes on us.
Like a procession of doom they seemed to keep coming through the door. With each one of the pack who stepped into the room a little bit of my hope that we would get out of here faded. Fifteen, in the end there were fifteen of them.
For a long time no one spoke. They sized us up and we glared right back at them. The air between us filled with all sorts of unspoken dialogue. With their eyes, with their lingering stares they filled the space with threats of all that they planned, all that they desired to do with their hapless prey. And we retorted, with the steely eyed gaze of a group that was far from hapless. A group which had hacked and cleaved its way for many miles across the war torn land and would hack and cleave its way out of this room if need be. The problem was the yawning pit of fear in my stomach that told me this was a long way from an even fight, no least because of the great worth of all we had to lose. These men, these beasts, they'd had very little to lose before the apocalypse, all that it had robbed of them was their fear of persecution, their fear of punishment.
“Come to join the crazies, the crazies, the crazies, the crazies, the crazies..” the speaker, who emitted a certain amount of crazy himself with his manic grin and contact bouts of furious nodding, only stopped when cuffed round the back of the head by one of his pack.
“We want no trouble” I said immediately regretting the words, they sounded hollow and ineffectual, they sounded afraid and they bounced off the walls and spoke back to me in low mocking tones of the power I'd given up by speaking. They knew then that I was afraid, they could not see it in my stance, nor the faint glint of the sharp, sharp blade I held between us, but they could hear it in my wavering voice.
“No one ever wants trouble” said one of the men, the poor and threatening attempt at humour drawing out a few grunting laughs from his fellows.
“Most people who don't want trouble refrain from driving around in storms” said another.
“We were looking for shelter” I retorted. Sue was just behind me, I felt her try and reach a hand into my, looking for some hope, some solace to still the trembling. I pushed her hand away, I wanted to maintain an façade of strength, I am an idiot. Several of the pack laughed at my words. One of them, a hulking brute at the back who had a number of hideous scars around his eyes rumbled in a deep thunderous voice “What kind of madman looks for shelter in a loony asylum”. There were several more laughs and I closed my eyes and cursed myself a thousand times within a split second.
The rumbling giants statement brought together a number of faint warnings and obvious failings which had been dancing around the edge of my subconscious ever since that stupid bastard old man had died mid sentence in the woods. I'd been ignoring these shouting voices but there was no ignoring them any more.
A huge hospital in the middle of nowhere, bars on all the windows, very little in terms of that which you would class as normal medical paraphernalia. Then there were the jump suits, the faded blue, covered in blood and dirt, identical jumpsuits that the men before me were wearing. It was the loony asylum remark that hammered the last piece of the puzzle into my stubborn mind. I saw myself, five years ago, sitting on the sofa channel hopping on one of the rare quiet evenings, I remembered the hour I'd whittled away watching 'World Most Dangerous Criminals'. I recalled with grim clarity the section on Ravensburg Secure Hospital, home to some the United Kingdoms most notorious killers who had deemed to be suffering from insanity by the courts. And now here they were, standing between my family and the door, and every one of them held a razor sharp scalpel in their hand.
The lunatics seemed quite content to continue the standoff, allowing the tension to build. Then she coughed. My little girl. A scraping, harsh cough which danced around the room in a similar fashion to how my words had done a few moments before.
“She's sick” said one of the pack, “She's infected” said another, “We can't allow sick people in the hospital”. Piped up a third with a wicked smile on his pockmarked face.
I charged. And I screamed. A horribly spotty man with thin ginger hair was the first to go down, he stared dumbly at the stump where his hand had just been attached as he sank to the floor. The blood was a red flag to the chaos which surged into the room. They went in with me, my brave Locklears, my brave family. I'd held each one of them to my chest many times in my life, they'd all listened to my beating heart and had I hoped known comfort in the fact that it beat for them. Now I watched them go to battle as they'd done many times over the
past year, my heart beat still but they could not hear it above the cacophony of screams.
Mrs Robinsons hatchet took half a face off. Everything was so lucid, there was no mist this time, no rage swallowed me, the part of my mind that was still thinking realised that it was because this time I was more afraid, too afraid to be angry.
I saw Mac and Zak leap in at the madmen, hacking, cutting, but they were cut back, scalpels lashed out, they draw blood like steel fangs from the soft skin of my children. Then events spiralled beyond my control. I saw the slight form of my teenage daughter dart through the opening in the enemy ranks which had occurred in the fighting. She fled the room, out of immediate danger, my relief was short lived however as I saw three of the pack chase after her.
I slashed my way through to the doorway. As I looked back I could see that half a dozen of the mad men were down, it was not enough. Then I saw the hulking brute deliver a right hook to my wife's face which sent her sprawling to the floor, my sons were overwhelmed, their fight had descended into an on the floor grappling match which they would not win. There were shouts and screams and cries of pain and then there was me having to make the most agonising decision I'd made since this whole nightmare started. I ran out of the room, I ran after my sick little girl and I choked on the guilt for the ones I'd just left.
I had no idea where I was going. I followed the screams, I followed the feral laugher and the furious footsteps racing away from me into the darkness. I had a dozen cuts that pained me, and dozen more I didn't know about such was the cocktail of adrenaline pumping around my body. I left my blood upon the walls here and there, leaving it to dry and join with others who had suffered the hunt, I left my sweat to mingle with the cracking paint, the only evidence that I was ever there.
I stumbled in the gloom and realised after a time that the screams and the laughter were getting further away with each moment. I ran up and down stairwells hopelessly. Too many minutes had passed. Too much time had gone by, hope breathed its final breaths, this was not right, this just was not right, after all we'd endured. Then I stopped dead before a shadow filled doorway.
I was at the bottom of a flight of stairs. This was below ground level and the darkness was almost total. My heart beat so fast I could barely hear the still raging storm outside. I felt my way into the shadows, it was a long corridor again, one in which I feared to tread but knew that I must. There was a pinprick of light in the distance which grew bigger as I stumbled towards it. The light was red, or maybe that was just the blood in my eyes. Either way it felt like I was walking into a photography dark-room.
I still could not see the source of the light, but in the low ruddy glow which it cast I could make out the large underground vault into which I'd walked. There were row after row of metal tables, each one held a body which might once have been a person but was now a mound of gore and bone. I heard a cry, a sniffle, I would recognise that sniffle anywhere.
“Ellie” I whispered.
“Dad” she whispered back. I crept to the back of the vault and saw her huddled there against the wall. Then I saw him step from the shadows, the brute, the big man from upstairs who looked like he could snap me in half like a twig. Well he could try. But he didn't look ready for a fight, he smiled a gap toothed smile at me as he stood over my little girl. Then I heard another whisper, very faintly from behind, words I'd heard before “Are you feeling better” came the sibilant hiss. I turned too late, I saw nothing of the snake as a blow was struck and my world descended into darkness.