Demise of the Living (4 page)

“Got any smokes?”

Karen frowned. “Nope. You
scorched the last of mine last night.”

“
Oh,” Shan grunted. She
took a massive bite out of the bread. With her mouth still full,
she mumbled out between chews, “Got anything to drink?”

Karen trotted back into the
kitchen and re-emerged with a half carton of orange juice.

“Thanks,” Shan said, hand
outstretched, ready for the drink.

“
So, what’s up with you?
Why are you up and about this early?” Karen leant up against the
side of the house, shoulder to shoulder with her friend. “Wait—your
dad didn’t kick you out thinking it was a school day, did
he?”

Shan shook her head and
swallowed.
“Nah. Why would he care if I
ever went back?” She took a second enormous chunk out of the bread.
In two mouthfuls half the sandwich was already gone.

“So why the alarm call?” Karen
asked, taking the first bite from her identical breakfast.

Shan sloshed the mouthful
down with a gulp of orange juice. “Douche got into a fight again
last night.” She pushed herself away from the side of the house.
“Came in real late shouting his head off about getting jumped and
reeking of beer. Asked me to phone the whole fucking world, like
the police and the hospital and the army. He grabbed my phone and
when he saw it was out of credit he tossed it across the living
room.” She pulled out the device and showed its cracked and weeping
screen. “It still switches on, but I can’t see a frigging thing,”
she said, demonstrating the phone lighting up.

“What about your dad?” Karen
asked.

“Eventually he passed out on
the couch. I went back to bed—but get this: the next thing I know
he’s clattering about the living room like some stoner. I came out
of my room to tell him to shut up.”

“Tell?” Karen asked.

“
All right,
screamed
at him for waking me up, but he fucking went for
me.”

Shan raised her arms and lunged
for Karen.

Karen batted away the
half-hearted attack.“Yourdad went for you?”

“
It was that drunken
windmill thing.” Shan flailed her arms in circles, mimicking the
attack. “I dodged that real easy. The fucker was still hopped-up
like he was on bath salts or something. I bolted back to my room
and slammed the door shut, but he just kept banging on it. I
thought he was going to batter the thing down so I snuck out the
window.”

“And here you are,” Karen
said.

“Yeah. Here I am.”

“So what do you want to do
until your dad cools off?”

Shan looked around the
well-kept back garden and its boring suburban ornateness. “Don’t
know.”

“
Pop up to Nate’s—hang
out in his garage?” Karen asked.

Shan thought about it for a
moment before grunting out, “Suppose.”

“Will he be up this early?”

Shan took a swig of the
orange juice and washed down the last of her sandwich. “Don't
know,” she said, “but he’s bound to have some smokes.”

Chapter
2

Screams reverberated inside the
car.

Liz was in the driver’s seat,
turning the keys in the ignition while leaning over, almost lying
on the passenger’s seat.

A pair of arms stretched
through the half-open window, clawing at her summer dress with
blood-stained hands.

Snaking her hand past the
attacker’s snatching fingers, she found the button for the window.
She flicked it. The motor whined and the window started to go
down.

“No, no, no!” Liz
spluttered.

A cold, wet hand clamped
round her arm just below the elbow.

She stifled the urge to
pull back and nudged the button in the other direction. The window
stopped rolling down.

The two children screamed
in the back seat, a shrill siren that rasped at Liz’s
concentration, but she knew she couldn’t tell them to be
quiet.

A fist caught her hair and
pulled. Her whole head jolted towards the window and the ravenous
attacker who was squeezing his own head through the gap.

Liz yanked herself back and a
flash of pain stung her as a chunk of hair was ripped free.

The attacker stumbled backward,
thrown off-kilter by the extrication of the clump of hair. But it
didn’t go far—it maintained its grip around Liz’s arm.

Liz’s fingers found the
window control again and flicked it forward. The window started to
glide up.

The hand holding her arm
drifted upwards, winched away by the ascending window. Liz pulled
against the attacker’s grip, but her arm remained in its grasp. She
tugged her arm down again and again.

Lubricated by the blood, Liz
finally managed to jolt her arm free.

Blindly, she groped for the key
in the ignition. Her hand swiped the house key that dangled from
the key chain and she followed it up.

The window motor stopped
cranking, the force of the resistance against it greater than the
torque it could muster.

Slimy, gore-covered arms
thrashed through the gap. As they waved around, splatters of blood
were flung into the car.

Still hunkered down low,
trying to duck under the clutches of the mad man outside, Liz
turned the key. The car sounded like it, too, was screaming out a
resistant plea, begging her to stop.

“Shit!” Liz cursed, realizing
what was wrong.

The engine was already on.
Harrison hadn’t turned it off when he stopped the car.

Liz stomped her foot
down, threw the car into gear and the car flew forward. The arms in
the window disappeared and she was forced deep into the passenger
seat.

Something moved at the
side of her vision. She turned to see a shaving of sloughed skin
stuck to the window. The left-behind skin was about two inches
square. As she watched, the skin lost purchase on the glass and
flopped off and onto her lap.

Liz screamed. The car hit
a bump, jolting the family inside, then came the squeal of metal.
The steering wheel bucked in Liz’s hands. She pulled herself
upright and took her foot off the accelerator. The car was already
off the road and careening towards the shop fronts. It smacked into
a row of street furniture and a fountain of debris went cascading
high into the air.

All the time, the three
occupants screamed.

A figure lurched at the car as
it hurtled past. The man’s face was an indistinct blur other than
the glisten of wet blood.

Liz hauled herself upright and
with a bump she steered the car back onto the road. She shouted
over her shoulder, “You kids okay?!”

“
Grant’s bleeding,”
Melissa said.

“He bit me,” Grant
whimpered.

“How bad is it?” Liz asked.

“
Bad,” Melissa
replied.

Liz turned to the sat
nav. A thick, green arrow charted her progress down the unknown
street. She looked franticly out the windows to try to catch a
glimpse of a familiar landmark.

“
Where are
we?
” she hissed.

She popped the sat nav
from its holder. Without looking, she passed it to the back seat,
offering it in her open palm.

“Melissa, do you know how to
work this?”

“I do, mum,” Grant said.

“Can you find a hospital?” Liz
asked, feeling the device being taken from her palm.

“
What’s the address?”
Grant asked.

“
I don’t know. Can’t you
just type in
hospital
?”

Liz was driving less
aggressively now, slowing down at junctions while trying to spot a
street name she recognized.

From one of the streets a flash
of red and blue caught her eye.

“
There’s a police car!”
she exclaimed.

Rather than taking the
time to reverse, she whipped the car around in as tight a circle as
she could manage, bumping the wheels up onto the sidewalk. The car
crunched off the kerb with a rasping bounce and the tinkle of
something metal breaking loose.

Melissa leaned forward to
look through the gap between the front seats.

“I don’t see any policemen,”
she said.

Liz scanned the scene. The
patrol car sat at an angle across the road. The two front doors
were splayed open, but there was someone inside.

She brought her car to a
halt a few metres behind the police car. She could see the
silhouette of someone bobbing around in the back seat.

Liz opened the car door and
stepped out. She looked around tentatively. She felt more like a
thief trying to avoid the law than a victim searching for help.

She walked towards the
abandoned vehicle.

An invisible thread
tugged at her. The further she walked from her car the more often
she had to look over her shoulder.

Melissa looked like she was
making a move for the door. Liz held out her flat palm to her and
shook her head.

A hiss of static caused
Liz to snap back round. A garbled voice blared out over the police
radio and the man in the back bolted forward, trying to burst
through to the driver’s seat. The ferocity of the attempt stopped
Liz in her tracks. The whole car shuddered as the prisoner hurled
himself with raw optimism at the mesh screen. Again and again he
threw himself at the screen with utter disregard for the physical
damage it must be causing.

A gunshot scorched the
morning air. Liz instantly hunkered down beside the police car, not
knowing where the shot had come from.

She squatted there, her head
pulled as deep into her shoulders as her bones would allow. The
police car still rocked and shuddered at her back.

She looked over at her
children. They were both still transfixed by their mothers
skulking, and other than being terrified they looked to be in no
immediate danger.

Liz listened for another shot,
but as the seconds accumulated there was nothing other than the
squeaks of the police car’s suspension and the thuds of flesh on
glass from behind her.

Something struck her as
being out of kilter. Slowly she turned.

The movement and the blood
caught her by surprise. She reeled back at the sight and lost her
balance. On her haunches as she was, she placed her palm flat onto
the rough tarmac to stop herself from teetering over.

The person in the car was
now pounding their head at the door window. With every successive
impact a little more blood and grime was deposited there. A mass of
dark, greasy hair obscured the person’s face; Liz couldn’t be sure
of their gender.

Over and over they slammed
their head full force into the window. By the odd position Liz
surmised they must have their hands cuffed behind their back.
Whatever drug this person was on—or should be on—Liz was grateful
they were handcuffed and imprisoned in the back of the police
car.

She picked herself up and
was about to start back to her own vehicle when she remembered why
she had stopped here in the first place. She looked around the
street for a clue as to the whereabouts of the police officers who
had surely abandoned the car. The street, although flanked by tall,
four-storey buildings, was mainly residential apartments close to
the centre of town. The noise of a distant car engine drew Liz’s
gaze back down the street to an open door to one of the blocks of
flats. From here the inside of the entrance looked dark and gloomy.
Liz called out, “Hello?”

Upon hearing her voice, the
psychopath in the police car ramped up its attacks on the
glass.

“Hello?” Liz called again.

There was movement.

From the open door came a
policeman.

“God no!” Liz gasped, clamping
her hand over her mouth.

Bereft his hat and his
hair mussed up, the policeman lumbered towards Liz, his arms
outstretched. His stride was hampered by the gash carved down one
leg. His face was pale, his jaw slack, his eyes rolled back in his
skull.

“Officer,” Liz said in a firm
voice.

The policeman made no
response.

“Officer, are you okay?”

The man limped his way towards
her, a growling moan issuing from his slack lips. It was all too
plain to Liz that the man was far from okay. She turned and started
back to her own car.

As she moved, the police
officer changed tack to stay on his intercept course.

Liz looked over her shoulder.
There was no way he would catch up with her, but she ran back to
the car anyway. She yanked the door open and dropped into the
seat.

The children in the back threw
a cacophony of questions at her.

“
Shut up! Shut up!” Liz
cried. “I need to concentrate.”

Shocked by their mother’s
outburst the two children went silent.

The police officer was still
limping his way towards them, although his laboured pace hadn’t
increased.

She slipped the keys back in
the ignition and started the engine.

The police officer pawed at the
air as the car sped away.

For a few drawn-out
seconds there was a strange silence in the car, the only noise the
over-revving engine.

Grant found the courage to
speak first.

“Ma, my hand hurts,” he
said.

“Oh shi… Sorry, honey,” Liz
said.

She pulled the car over in an
empty street.

“
I’m so sorry.” Liz
scrambled in the seat to turn round so she could take a look at her
son’s injury. In her most compassionate tone, she said, “Let me
see, honey.”