Demise of the Living (2 page)

The man stumbled back a pace
before renewing his attack.

“Leave him alone!”

Liz was shouting and
crying as she tugged at the man’s jacket, trying to lever him off.
The fabric was damp, soaked in Harrison’s blood. Undeterred by the
warm stickiness, she pulled so hard that the arm of the jacket tore
away at the seam. The sudden loss of tension sent her tumbling
back, her grip lost to the viscous blood. She staggered a few short
paces before slipping and falling to the hard tarmac. She landed
painfully on her coccyx, a scream shooting up from the impact
point.

As she sat in indignation, legs
splayed in the middle of the road, the attacker renewed his assault
on her husband.

The rear car door sprang open
and Grant jumped out.

“
Get back in the car,
Grant! Now!” Liz screamed.

The young boy looked at his
mother and then at his step dad. He shouted, “Dad!” and threw
himself at the attacker.

“Get back in the car this
instant!” Liz screamed, scrambling to her feet.

Grant ignored her.

As Liz dashed back into the
fray she spotted a man across the street.

“Help! Help, over here!”

The man turned in the direction
of Liz’s voice and upped his pace, making a beeline for her.

“Grant, get back in the car
now!”

The boy continued to ignore
her, punching and kicking furiously.

Liz slapped both hands on
the attacker’s shoulders and yanked hard, trying to prize the two
apart. She pulled with all her strength, but it made no difference;
the pair was locked in an inseparable brawl.

Harrison’s screams were less
coherent now. He coughed and burbled as the man attacking him
robbed him of his strength.

Grant was at the side,
thumping repeated but ineffective blows against the assailant.
“Leave him alone!” he screamed in his high-pitched, adolescent
voice.

Liz renewed her grip on the
attacker’s shoulders, pulling hard. The man’s suit felt wet and
cold and there was slipperiness to the cloth that made it difficult
to hold onto.

The coppery smell of
blood mingled with the cool morning air.

Grant was now screaming and
viciously kicking the attacker in the shins.

A palm landed firmly on
Liz’s shoulder. She turned, expecting to see the man she had called
on for help. It was him, but he wasn’t help. She found herself
staring at a set of snarling teeth set in a face of shredded
crimson flesh.

The man lunged at her.

She felt her knees give
way and she slumped to the ground, effetely ducking under the
assailant’s grasping hands.

She heard Grant cry, “Let my ma
alone!”

Her son switched targets
and was bringing the full force of his eight year-old fury on the
second attacker.

Liz scurried back, twisting and
kicking. Stumbling up from all fours, she grabbed Grant’s
wrist.

“
Back in the car now!”
she screamed, red-cheeked and furious.

Not waiting for his
reaction, she pushed him in the direction of the open car door. She
could see Melissa scrunched in a tight ball on the back seat,
shaking with terror, but she had no time to comfort her.

She turned and sprinted
to the rear of the car. Grabbing the handle, she yanked open the
hatchback to reveal the family’s neatly-packed suitcases and other
holiday paraphernalia.

She reached past the bag
of golf clubs and seized Harrison’s golf umbrella.

As she dashed back to the
front of the car, she was horrified to see her son hadn’t returned
to his seat. He had instead instinctively followed her.

“Grant!”

The second attacker grabbed the
boy and lunged at him.

Liz stepped forward,
using the momentum of her run, and like a medieval pikeman she
thrust the point of the umbrella into the man’s chest. The blow
ricocheted off the bone of his sternum, chiselling out a flap of
skin and forcing the silver tip of the umbrella up and into the
underside of the man’s jaw. The point vanished under the skin and
slid deep into the stubbly flesh between his neck and
chin.

The man stumbled back, but was
unperturbed by his impalement. Now held upright by the makeshift
spear, he was no longer able to bend down and bite at the child in
his grasp. He let go of Grant and turned as best as he could to
focus on Liz, his eyes pale and unblinking.

Liz stood there, firmly
holding the handle of the golf umbrella. The point must have been a
good four or five inches into his jaw, deep enough to have pierced
his soft palate and even further through the roof of his
mouth.

The reality of what she had
just done hit her. She had just impaled a complete stranger.

Liz looked into the man’s eyes,
expecting to offer him an apology for what she had just done. But
in spite of the excruciating pain he must be feeling, he simply
gazed at her with empty white eyes.

His shoulders shifted and he
threw out an arm, pawing stiffly at her.

Liz screamed at the
unexpectedness of the renewed attack. In sheer panic she gripped
the hilt of the umbrella tight and thrust it upward. The point
slipped deeper, then met with something hard and resistant. Liz
bobbed her head to avoid being caught by his flailing hands and
shoved harder. The shaft of the umbrella flexed and threatened to
give. Grunting, Liz shoved harder. The umbrella buckled and there
was a wet-sounding snap, but instead of it splitting in two the
spike lurched forward and slithered further up into the man’s
skull.

The attacker became
heavy. His arms dropped to his sides, letting go of the boy. He
fell forward, finally collapsing at Liz’s feet.

Liz grabbed her son by the
scruff of the neck and physically threw him into the back of the
car, slamming the door shut behind him.

She now turned to help
Harrison. The first attacker had succeeded in hauling him through
the open car window and onto the road. He was bent down on top of
her husband, snarling and chomping.

Harrison was motionless
except for the few trembles caused by the attacker’s
gnawing.

Grant’s muffled crying
could be heard from within the car. “Ma... Ma...”

Liz looked back at the
sobbing children and mouthed the word
stay
to them.

She then looked back at
Harrison.

“
No
,” she whispered.

She cautiously crept over to
the body with the umbrella wedged under its chin.

With her eyes on the man
gnawing at Harrison, she grasped the handle of the umbrella. She
pulled and the dead man’s head nodded with each tug, but the weapon
remained imbedded.

She placed a
blood-spattered court shoe on the man’s face to brace against the
force and heaved backwards.

The umbrella slithered free
with a loud slurp. The silver tip was masked behind a sheen of red
and grey gloop.

With one hand on the
handle and the other halfway along the shaft, Liz thrust her
makeshift weapon side-on into the man on top of
Harrison.

The umbrella penetrated half a
foot through the man’s ribs.

Liz let go and the firmly
embedded spike bobbed around as the assailant continued to rip
chunks from her dead husband.

She grabbed the shaft
again and leaning into it as hard as she could, pushed it further
in. The umbrella slid deeper into the man’s chest until Liz felt
the solid clunk of rib cage on the far side.

She stepped back in
disbelief. A good third of the golfing umbrella was stuck inside
the man.

She slipped to the side
to get a better look at her husband. The cannibal was bobbing in
and out, taking chunks of flesh with each peck. Harrison lay
unmoving, his eyes staring off into the distance as if he were
having an absent moment of thought.

“Oh God.”

Liz clamped her hand over
her mouth to quell the rising bile. The enormity of everything that
had just happened slowly crept its way into her conscious
mind.

A hoarse moan echoed between
the canyon-like buildings.

Liz turned towards the
sound and saw another shambling figure emerging from the shadows.
This person was a woman about the same build as her, but it was
impossible to put an age to her. Her hair spilt down, covering most
of her face, but the one feature Liz could see clearly was the
fresh blood dripping from her mouth.

As she looked deeper into
the shadows she saw more movement. More and more figures with the
same swaggering gait were making their way towards her.

She took one last look at
her dead husband before sliding into the driver’s seat and starting
the car.

***

“Morning, Gary,” John said.

“
Good morning, Mr. Lund,”
the security guard replied. “You're in early."

John gave the ritual flash of
his I.D. badge. It was too short a glimpse for the security guard
to register anything about it, but it was a formality. John worked
here for nearly nine years now, a career that had ground to a halt
in this regional office.

“Traffic was quiet today,” John
said.

The traffic had indeed been
light, but that wasn’t the reason he’d come into work so early. He
had in fact been woken several times in the night by sirens and
rowdy drunks outside. The Glen, a beautiful new housing estate when
he’d transferred here, was not as nice an area as it had been, and
year upon year the number of police call-outs increased. Although
he’d become somewhat hardened to the noise, last night was the
worst he’d ever known. The sirens seemed to never stop. After one
particularly protracted bout of hollering died out, John had found
himself unable to get back to sleep. So rather than lying awake and
worrying about getting back to sleep, he decided he would go to
work. It would be quiet for two or maybe even three hours. He could
make a lot of headway into the team’s quarterly reviews without
Sharon’s constant pestering.

“
Start of the holidays,
most schools finished up on Friday,” Gary said. “That’ll be why the
roads are so quiet.”

John looked out onto the
deserted street through the tinted glass of the reception’s
facade.

”
It always amazes me how
quiet it gets on the roads during school holidays. I mean, just how
many kids drive cars?" he asked with a shrug.

“
Oh, quite a few these
days, Mr. Lund,” Gary replied.

“
And all those parents
who drive their kids to school—n0 wonder they're so fat these days.
I don't know about you, Gary, but I had to walk four miles every
day to get to high school. Not once did my father give me a run up
to school.”

John failed to see the irony in
his statement. He had never been lean in his school days despite
the walk, and thirty years of office work and sales jobs had
steadily added to his girth.

“
I hear you, Mr. Lund,”
Gary said. “Spoiled so they are these days.”

”
Why’s it busy on the
roads at eight in the morning when school doesn’t start till nine?”
John asked, shaking his head. “It’s beyond me.”

“
Suppose a lot of parents
have to take time off during the holidays, too. Childcare’s
expensive. That could explain why there are less cars on the roads
during holidays. Why, our youngest—she’s got two—she’s forever
dropping them off with my Carina. Plays havoc with my night shifts
them shouting and screaming in the next room.”

John had tuned out well
before Gary finished talking. “That would explain the racket
outside. Damn kids with no parental control out drinking and
causing trouble,” John said. Continuing with his own train of
thought, he went on, “How the hell do they get the drink? For that
matter, how do they get the money for drink?”

“Older kids or stolen from
their dads, I guess,” Gary said. “In my day we’d sneak a glass or
two out of my father’s whiskey bottle and top it up with water. Oh
I got my backside tanned for that.”

John cut the security
guard short. “Well, no point getting in early to stand around here
chatting all day.”

He looked at the stairs
leading to his first floor office, then down at the bulge around
his waist. He stepped forward and pressed the call button for the
lift. It illuminated with a circle of white. He looked up to see
the counter and the arrow pointing downwards.

Fourth. There was a grumbling
of machinery from somewhere beyond the closed doors.

Third. John run his tongue
around his teeth, feeling for rough spots he might have missed when
brushing this morning.

He glanced over and
caught Gary’s eyes by mistake. The chirpy security guard smiled at
him.

John returned the gesture with
his own awkward smile. He knew that in the time it had taken for
the elevator to arrive he could have made the hike up the
stairs.

Gary was still smiling at him
like a puppy wanting a treat.

The discomfiture was killing
John.

“
You on for the day?” he
asked.

“
No, I knock off at
eight." Gary said. He unhooked his thumb from his belt and glanced
at his watch. “As soon as Mo gets in I’m off to bed.”

“Oh,” John said.

There was a soft ping and the
clunk of the doors releasing.

“
Well, have a nice day,"
John said, lost of anything else polite to say. “You too, Mr.
Lund,” Gary said.