Blood Crazy

Simon Clark

For Doreen and Peter Clark, my parents.

Get this message into your head.
You, too, have a monster to kill.
– And this book just might save your life.

The First Part
The Day the World went Mad This Happened:

Chapter One
The Start of the End of Everything

Chapter Two
Who the Hell's Nick Aten?

Chapter Three
All Calm Before the Storm

Chapter Four
Life Is a Bastard

Chapter Five
I'm Going to Kill Slatter

Chapter Six
The Sound of Killing

Chapter Seven
Stay Tuned to this Station.
An Important Announcement Follows this Message

Chapter Eight
Inside Me I Feel Alone and Unreal

Chapter Nine
Food and Drink and Hope

Chapter Ten
You've Never Seen a River
Like This One

Chapter Eleven
This Is What Happened to Sarah Hayes

Chapter Twelve
Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?

Chapter Thirteen
The Fifty Million Dollar Rug

Chapter Fourteen
Slatter

Chapter Fifteen
A Kind of Normality

Chapter Sixteen
Bad Dreams Never Go Away

Chapter Seventeen
Do You Want to Live or Do You Want to Die?

Chapter Eighteen
Organization

Chapter Nineteen
Does It Always Have to Be This Way?

Chapter Twenty
They're Chasing Us

Chapter Twenty-One
They're Coming to Get Me

Chapter Twenty-Two
Attack

Chapter Twenty-Three
Another Message, Another Death

Chapter Twenty-Four
A Different Kind of Pain

Chapter Twenty-Five
Remember This: Don't Play the Hero

Chapter Twenty-Six
Surprising How Quick the Rot Sets In

Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Mexican Stand-Off

Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sex

Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Return of the Beast

The Second Part

Chapter Thirty
Do This, Because There's No Tomorrow

Chapter Thirty-One
‘If We're Going to Survive, Need to Learn More'

Chapter Thirty-Two
Sex and Murder

Chapter Thirty-Three
Tyranny

Chapter Thirty-Four
Harem

Chapter Thirty-Five
Carrying the Can

Chapter Thirty-Six
Life Is Grotesque

Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cut and Run

Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cruising Eternity's Way

Chapter Thirty-Nine
Croppers

Chapter Forty
Breaker of the Dark

Forty-One
Breaker of the Light

Chapter Forty-Two
Ghost Town

Chapter Forty-Three
Stairway to Heaven

Chapter Forty-Four
Heartbreak Highway

Chapter Forty-Five
This Cold Will Kill Me

Chapter Forty-Six
This Is Where We Start to Get Answers

Chapter Forty-Seven
This Is What Drove Adults Insane

Chapter Forty-Eight
The Mysteries

Chapter Forty-Nine
The Revelations Come Thick and Fast

Chapter Fifty
Make Love to Me

Chapter Fifty-One
Ghost Music

Chapter Fifty-Two
Out of the Dark

Chapter Fifty-Three
Into the Light

The Third Part
Here Comes the Climax

Chapter Fifty-Four
Start of the Third Part

Chapter Fifty-Five
On Through Madland

Chapter Fifty-Six
If One Green Bottle Should Accidentally Fall
…

Chapter Fifty-Seven
Start of the Longest Day

Chapter Fifty-Eight
Just Like Old Times

Chapter Fifty-Nine
Carrying The Can Again

Chapter Sixty
Here It Comes

Chapter Sixty-One
Some Kind of Reunion

Chapter Sixty-Two
Midnight, the Longest Day

Chapter Sixty-Three
This Is It – the End Bit

End Note – Year Three
Appended by M. C. Del-Coffey

A Note on the Author

‘What happened?'

Baz stared at the blood.

Fresh and red and wet, it drenched the paving slabs in a slick that looked big enough to paddle your canoe through.

I elbowed him in the ribs.

‘I said, what happened, Baz?'

He looked up at me, his eyes egg-size with shock.

‘I've just watched them shovel the poor bastard off the pavement … Christ. What a mess. That cop there puked all over his car … They've seen nothing like it, Nick. They can't handle it.'

Baz talked like he was firing a machine gun at nightmare monsters. If you ask me, he had a psychological need to tell me what happened.

‘They say – they say he'd just walked out of Rothwell's, crossed the street when – slam! slam! Poor bastard never knew what hit him. He was dead before the ambulance got here.'

All around us Saturday morning shoppers stared at the blood. That mess of red had got them by the short and curlies.

On the balls of their feet, cops ran, directing traffic, cordoning off the street with candy-striped tape or repeating that famous lie that no one ever believes: ‘Move along. There's nothing to see.'

They sweated in the Spring sunshine. On their faces weren't the usual expressions of our seen-it-all policemen.

‘An axe, Nick … A bastard axe … Can you believe that? Laid into him with it right there outside the shop.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Jimmy … Jimmy somebody. You'll have seen him round town plenty. About seventeen. Went to the art college, had a pony tail. Always swanned round with a green guitar under his arm … Smashed that up, too. Like they wanted to kill both of them … him and his guitar.'

‘You saw it happen?'

‘No. I got here just as they scraped him off the street. I saw the people who'd seen it happen, though. They were flaked out across those seats over there like they'd been neck-shot. Just flat out from shock. I tell you, Nick, it was like a fucking war or something. Blood on the street. People shaking and throwing up. You know, like you see on the news or … or …'

The charge that fired the words like silver bullets from his lips suddenly exhausted itself. His red face turned white and he said no more.

From a hardware store came two old ladies carrying buckets of water. They poured them onto the blood which was setting to jelly in the warm sun. It took four more buckets before the blood slid off the paving slabs and into the drains where it was swallowed with a greedy sucking sound. There were solid chunks of red in there. Like cuts of raw meat.

Eventually only wet pavement reeking of disinfectant was left. Now there really was nothing left to see. But Baz still stared at the wet slabs.

I said, ‘Someone must have really hated the kid to do that to him.'

‘They did. Jesus Christ they did. They unzipped him like a holdall.'

‘Do they know who murdered him?'

‘Yeah.' Baz looked up. ‘It was his mother.'

The day the world went mad I was on my way to McDonald's' with two things on my mind.

One. The
Big Mac
I was going to stuff down my throat.

Two. How was I going to hurt that bastard, Tug Slatter?

Normality oozed through the town as thick as toothpaste through its tube. People shopping; little kids in buggies; big kids hunting down the record and game stores, their pocket money red-hot in their hands. Total, utter, complete small town normality.

That was until I saw the blood on the street.

They tell you this at school.

Every so often in history, there will come this colossal event that splits time in two. You know, like the birth of Jesus Christ. Everything before – BC. Everything after – AD.

On my way to McDonald's it happened again. After two thousand years the old Age, Anno Domini, had died a death.

Naturally, like everyone else at the time I didn't know it. Any more than a passer-by seeing that baby squawking in a manger somewhere in suburban Bethlehem would have known that the world was going to change PDQ.

At that moment, as I left Baz watching five slightly moist paving slabs, life – on the surface – was returning to normal. New shoppers flowed into town, kids in buggies got stuck into ice creams, lovers walked hand in hand. And they saw paving slabs wet with nothing more than water.

So, I showed the wet stretch of street my back and I headed toward the building with the golden arches that formed the magic
M
.

Now I was hungry. All I wanted was that
Big Mac
, fries and a monster coke rattling with ice.

Of course, I was ignorant as shit. I didn't know the truth. That before long I'd look back and call this:

DAY 1
YEAR 1.

Before we get any further into this, something about me.

I'm seventeen. The name's Nick Aten (yeah, yeah, it rhymes with Satan).

Mother Nature sprang me on middle-class parents. Father: an investment advisor. Mother: an accountant.

Things changed a bit when I was born one Sunday morning, 3 March. My mother had already given up work when she fell pregnant so the Atens had to shave back on some of life's luxuries. Not that they didn't want a baby. They'd been trying for years. There had been three miscarriages before me. And one son who had lived two weeks before the doctors gave up the fight and let him die. My parents called him Nicholas and cremated him.

In my mother's drawer there's a bundle of cards, the deepest condolences kind with angels and babies sleeping ‘safe in the arms of the Lord.'

They are for a dead boy called Nick Aten. People sometimes ask if it feels weird to see your name on these cards. There it is in black and white. Documents to say you're dead. A bit like seeing a video of your own funeral.

I laugh it off.

As a snotty-nosed two-year-old, I would spend my days stalking
around the garden carrying a stick. With this stick I'd whack the ground, bushes and Mum's prized bedding plants.

When they asked, ‘Why are you hitting the bushes, Nicholas?'

I'd reply, ‘Nick killing monsters.'

When I was three a rat somehow sneaked into the dining room. There I was, sat on the rug, happy as Larry, playing with my bricks. My new baby brother snug in his layback chair.

Ten minutes later when mum came into the room, she screamed and sprayed a mugful of coffee across the wallpaper.

Because there I stood, a statuette of Aphrodite in my hand, watching the rat. It lay twitching its legs, with its rat brains looking like pink cottage cheese stuck to the head of the statuette.

Unusually tidily for me, I'd picked out its titchy rat eyes and dropped them into my Dad's tankard he'd won in some tennis tournament a million summers before.

That passion for killing monsters is probably my most valuable asset.