Blood Crazy

  Shit, shit, shit! ‘Sarah,’ I shouted into the mike. ‘Listen very carefully to me. This is important. You are in danger. They have begun massing. When there are enough of them they will attack you. I’ve seen it happen. They will stop at nothing until they have killed you all. Curt won’t be able to defend the hotel from them. You must get away from there … Find a way to run for it. You’ve got to—let go of this fucking mike. Let go or I’ll fucking kill you …’

  Murphy said gently, ‘Nick … Nick. You’re wasting your breath. They’re no longer transmitting.’

  ‘It keeps happening,’ said Gary. ‘They cut out for a few hours before they can get back to us.’

  I could say nothing. I marched out into the snow-covered yard. There I stared out across the mountains, my heart punching away at my chest. I wanted to scream down the sky.

  After a while I rubbed snow into my face, then I went back inside.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I find out my girlfriend is still alive. I find out I’m a father. Then I find out that they’ll probably be dead in the next few hours.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And I didn’t even get a chance to warn them.’

  They watched me silently. Mrs Murphy leaned across and hugged me. ‘I’m sorry, Nick. If I was in your place, I’d want to grow wings and fly home.’

  For a second I looked at her then I planted an earth-shaking kiss on her forehead.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Murphy. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  ‘What’re you talking about? You haven’t got wings?’

  ‘I know … but I’ve got two damn good legs. I’m going now. Don’t try and stop me.’

  Murphy smiled. ‘We won’t, lad.’

  ‘If Del-Coffey manages to get that set of his working again, warn him that any time now they’re going to be attacked by the adults … That they’ve got to get away from the area. And tell him I’ll be back in Eskdale in three days.’

  Seventy miles in arctic conditions? In three days? Impossible.

  But right then I made up my mind. From now on I would force the impossible to become possible. We all have to – or we are dead. It’s as simple as that.

  Ten minutes later, haversack on my back, rifle on my shoulder I was on my way, waving to the Murphy clan as I went.

  When I reached the main road East that’d take me to Eskdale, I said aloud: ‘Okay, you in there, number two mind, the wise old man or whatever we call you, listen to me. You know we’ve got to get back. We’re talking about the survival of the human race here … If you’re as powerful as Bernadette says, I’m going to give you a challenge: get us both back to Sarah. Fast. And in one piece.’

  I hit the road, following it as it hugged the shore of the great river.

  At long, long last, we were going home.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  On Through Madland

  Head down, I went for it, ploughing through mile after mile of snow drifts. To my left, the river thick with drowned Creosotes. To my right, frozen mountains.

  Sometimes the drifts on the road were so deep I’d have to detour across a field.

  There were no settlements. No surviving ones, anyway. I did pass a burnt-out church. A broken-down barbed wire fence surrounded it. People like us had lived there once but they’d either fled or were dead.

  I didn’t stop but powered on. I felt like a loco with a roaring fire in its belly and a head full of steam. Nothing could stop me now.

  The map told me that in three miles I’d reach a suspension bridge that would take me across the river. Then it was downhill to the flatlands: the next hills I’d see would be Eskdale.

  Two miles on and I saw why there were so many bodies drifting down river.

  For a full five minutes I had to stare at what spanned the river from bank to bank. I saw it, but what I did see took some time sinking in.

  Running across the river in a C-shaped curve, fifteen feet wide, a hundred yards long, was a causeway. It was built out of human beings. There must have been a thousand or more of them. At first I thought that corpses had been tied together but as I edged nearer I realized that the causeway was made out of living adults, standing chest deep in the water, their limbs woven together to form a solid bridge of flesh and bone.

  As I watched, one of the adults let go, probably killed by the cold water. The body drifted away downstream.

  So this was what I’d seen floating by the house. Discarded parts of the causeway.

  From the trees on my side of the river, a Creosote walked out across the living causeway. Without any kind of hesitation, he took the place of his dead colleague in the freezing water.

  The process continued. Dying adults would crumble away from the causeway; immediately they’d be replaced by a fresh one.

  See a line of ants across your back yard? Scrub out a hundred with your foot. The line of ants reforms with more ants from the nest. And they carry on just as before. They ignore their own dead. No pain, no remorse, no grief. The new species of Man behaved like those ants.

  As I watched, I saw a steady stream of adults begin crossing the causeway to the other side of the river.

  The causeway did have some mad purpose. They needed to cross the river – so this is how they did it.

  I carried on, carefully now. Creosotes were coming out of the forest to my right, crossing the road then heading down to the causeway.

  The bastards were migrating north. I knew why. To snuff out every community of their children they could find.

  Eskdale. How long before they targeted the three hundred kids there?

  I got through the Creosotes’ lines without them seeing me and pushed on quickly to the bridge.

  When I saw it I realised why the Creosotes had built the living causeway.

  The suspension bridge now lay in a tangle of steel cables down the valley side. It didn’t take a genius to guess what had happened. There’d have been a bunch of kids living somewhere on the other side of the river. In an attempt to stop the Creosotes swarming over the bridge and wiping them out they’d managed to dynamite it. But the Creosotes, driven by that remorseless, indefatigable instinct to kill their own young had found another way.

  This left me in deep shit. I pulled out the map. I had to cross the damn river to get back to Eskdale. There was another bridge twenty miles upstream but there were no guarantees that that hadn’t been blown too. Probably the next one as well. It might take me a week to find a way across.

  The other alternative, Nick? Swim for it. In summer maybe, but this water’s so cold it kills as sure as a knife.

  With luck there might be a boat somewhere along the banks. Then again, there might not. This place was pretty remote. It could take a week to find a stupid boat. In a week everyone in Eskdale might be food for the birds. Including Sarah and my son.

  The idea I had then took my breath away.

  ‘You suicidal cretin,’ I said to myself. But there was no other way.

  If the people bridge was good enough for the Creosotes, it was good enough for me.

  The light was beginning to fade by the time I reached the causeway. In half an hour it’d be dark. If I was going to do it, I’d have to do it now.

  As I cut down through the wood to the causeway, wondering how the hell I could pass for a Creosote I walked into two in a clearing. They were standing, staring into space, in that switched-off way they had.

  If I kept going then maybe they’d not bother me.

  No such luck. The tallest one with long grey hair went for me like a wrestler on acid. Swinging his arms, mad, blazing eyes locked onto mine.

  I wasn’t ready for the ferocity of the attack, the rifle was still strapped across my back, the pistol in my belt.

  When he hit me, I fell back.

  Deliberately, I continued to roll back, finishing the roll with an upward stamp.

  The sole of my boot smashed upward into the guy’s chin as he came after me. His hand snapped up, then he went down.

  As I struggled t
o my feet the other Creosote grabbed me. He was short and dumpy, but was he strong.

  He got in front of me and held me in a bear hug so tight I thought my spine would snap. As he crushed me in his ape arms he pushed me back. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see where he was pushing me. For all I knew he was pushing me into the arms of a whole mob of Creosotes.

  I felt the ground slope up sharply behind me. He kept pushing, his face turned up to stare at mine. His breath stank like shit.

  My heels hit something as he pushed and I fell back. He didn’t loosen his grip and he came down on top of me knocking out what breath still stuck in my lungs.

  I was going to die. There in the muck, crushed by this psycho. I stopped trying to punch his face and stab out his eyes with my thumb. Nothing hurt him.

  I felt the ground around me, hands going like frantic crabs, searching through snow and sticks and Creosote shit.

  My left hand closed over a cold lump the size of a football. It was hard.

  With the world starting to turn dark and faraway as I suffocated, I gripped the rock with both hands behind his head.

  Then I brought the mother down.

  Hard.

  I felt his head kick forward to thump into my chest.

  Suddenly the pressure around my spine was gone. I pushed him off and stood up, ready with the boulder to hit him again.

  No need. I’d done a good job. The back of his skull curved inward in a mess of blood and brain.

  This was the first man I’d killed.

  For a second I stared at him, trying to hold down the feeling that was coming up inside of me. I couldn’t hold it for long. Up it rushed.

  The feeling was good, very good indeed. The old man inside was congratulating me.

  I ran down to the river bank. It was do or die now.

  Now I was closer to the living causeway I could see it was low in the water and every so often it would move – a kind of undulation as the people shifted slightly to get a better grip on the next, causing the causeway to dip down into the water.

  If I got my boots wet I’d never get them dry again. One thing I did need now was to keep my feet in good condition. Quickly I took off my boots and tied them onto the haversack by the laces. Then, rifle at the ready, I walked barefoot down to the river bank through the snow.

  This time I kept my wits about me looking for any sign of Mr Creosote coming through the forest.

  I worked along the banking until I was perhaps thirty yards from the causeway. Creosotes were still walking across, but there weren’t so many now. I counted only four on the causeway itself. All walked in the same direction from this bank to the next, then they climbed a hill at the other side and disappeared over the ridge. No doubt homing in on another bunch of kids.

  I inched nearer to the causeway, trying not to be freaked by the weird sight of all those men and woman hanging onto one another to form the meat road across the water.

  When the causeway was clear and there were no more Creosotes heading down toward it, I ran across the frozen mud to where the causeway began at the water’s edge.

  For a second I hung back. The idea of walking across all those people was repulsive. You wouldn’t stuff worms into your mouth – I didn’t want to do this.

  I looked back to see a dozen more Creosotes walking down through the wood toward me.

  This’s it.

  Like I was walking on light-bulbs I gingerly stepped on the first human link in the causeway. The man shifted under my bare foot and turned his face to look up at me; it was a swollen mask punctured by two red holes where the eyes had been.

  I walked on to the causeway, bodies shifting slightly. I didn’t stop now, walking as quickly as I dared across the slippery backs and heads of hundreds of men and women.

  To my left a woman died with a groan, released her grip on the people next to her and floated away in the current. The causeway dipped and suddenly I was ankle deep in freezing water.

  The people braced themselves beneath my feet and lifted up out of the water again. A wave of coughing spread through the living causeway, make it shudder from end to end, but still they gripped each other tightly, so tightly I couldn’t tell where one man ended and another began.

  In the middle of the roadway a few of the people were already long dead, held there only by the those around them. I trod on one belly that was so rotten my bare foot went through with a crunch. Like stepping onto a rotten melon, fluid squirted up my leg.

  Shit to this.

  I ran across the yards of skin, and the heads packed as tightly as street cobble stones, my boots swinging crazily from the haversack, my feet thumping down on chests and backs and stomachs and faces, knocking the breath from their bodies. As I ran I was followed by winded

  uh-uh-uh-uh-uh

  sounds, and the meat road writhed and groaned and panted beneath my feet.

  uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh

  My pounding feet would smash down on a nose or a finger or a forearm, snapping them like dry sticks.

  By the time I was three quarters of the way across, the meat road was gripped by convulsions, bucking out of the water like a sea serpent. Hands clutched at my ankles but I didn’t stop.

  And I didn’t stop when I hit the beach at the other side. I ran on through the forest until I’d left the river and the thing in the river far behind.

  For the next forty-eight hours I was a walking machine. Nothing stopped me – night, snow, gales, hunger, exhaustion. They should have been obstacles but I drove through them like a tank drives through solid walls.

  I ate as I walked – sometimes I think I even slept as I walked.

  After I left the mountains the snow turned to slush and it rained for mile after mile.

  When at last I knew I had to stop and rest, soaked and exhausted, I found a car on its side against a stone wall. I took my rifle and put a bullet through the tank. As the fuel streamed like piss from the hole I lobbed a match into it.

  For the next two hours I roasted myself in front of the inferno. It was so hot it melted a circle of snow fifty feet in diameter. My face burned and my clothes steamed until they were dry.

  Then I walked on through the night, through deserted towns alive with dogs and cats gone wild. Across empty countryside. I saw no communities of kids – only signs there had been once. Mr Creosote is a thorough bastard.

  As I walked I imagined what I’d find in Eskdale. The pictures that came into my head pushed me on faster.

  On the second night of my journey, at five to midnight, I came across a road sign that seemed to shine in the moonlight.

  ESKDALE COUNTRY PARK

  I’d done it. I was home.

  Before I could go on I had to reach out and touch the sign to prove to myself it was real.

  It had taken four months to come less than a hundred miles. A year ago a leisurely drive would have taken a couple of hours.

  The hotel and Del-Coffey’s house were three miles away.

  What now?

  As I walked on, slowly now, I realised I hadn’t got the remotest idea what I was going to do when I arrived.

  Broadly the plan was to kick out Curt and his Crew and take charge. Then get rid of the Creosotes. How I’d actually do it … God only knew.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  If One Green Bottle Should Accidentally Fall…

  I walked up the road with the moonlight shining on what was left of the snow.

  After a quarter of a mile I heard the whistling begin.

  I carried on walking, thinking maybe it was some kid far off in the distance whistling in the dark. But these days what kid would be out in the countryside at midnight?

  Ten Green Bottles Hanging On A Wall, If One Green Bottle Should Accidentally Fall …

  I’d just walked through an Arctic wilderness but I’d never felt as cold as I did then. I knew who was whistling.

  And I knew I’d been seen. And that the whistling was some kind of mind-twisted greeting, or warning. Or threat.

/>   ‘Yes, I hear you, dad,’ I said to myself. ‘Your son’s come back.’

  With the whistling floating across the moonlit fields and woods I carried on up the hill.

  I was just two miles from Del-Coffey’s house when I saw the fire as I crested the hill. It lit a group of farm buildings about a hundred yards to my right.

  Follow your instincts, Bernadette had said, listen to the quiet voice inside. I wanted to hurry down the hill into the village and see Sarah – and the baby; my son; for Chrissake’s I didn’t even know his name yet. But instinct told me to check on the keeper of the fire first.

  This is what I saw as I approached. Sitting around the bonfire in the farmyard were seven teenagers. Six of them looked wild bastards, dressed in army gear.

  The seventh I knew instantly.

  Tug Slatter. He sat on a log in front of the fire.

  As I crossed the yard toward the fire the six kids stood up, surprised to see someone come strolling into their bonfire party in the middle of the night.

  Tug Slatter just glanced up, then took a long pull on his cigarette. Far from being surprised he looked as if he’d been expecting me all along.

  I crouched on the opposite side of the fire and held out my hands to warm them.

  The firelight sent flickers and shadows prancing across Slatter’s ugly tattooed face. He looked back at me and said nothing.

  We sat like that for a minute. Slatter’s army-style buddies looked at one another, then at Slatter for a lead.

  I stared at Slatter’s bad-beast eyes. And I knew something had changed. Something was missing.

  I searched my mind for it.

  That’s it … I nodded. When I looked at Slatter I knew I was no longer afraid of him.

  Before, fear of him, though I wouldn’t admit it even to myself, forced me on the defensive. I’d insult him, make a cutting remark or even physically attack him.

  Now, for me anyway, Slatter was a monster no more.

  Bernadette had told me about all that software lying around in the back of your mind. Most of the time you don’t use it, you’re not even aware that it exists at all. But if you hit the right keys it comes to life and transforms you.