Sick Bastards (3 page)

A Trace of Humanity

I was sitting on the edge of my bed in darkness. I had left the candle with Sister. Just as food had been rationed, so had the candles been. One per bedroom. Those were the rules put in place by Father and it so happened Sister and I were forced to share rooms (no choice really, given that there were only two bedrooms in the house). Even if there had been more rooms, Father would have still insisted that we shared. Safety in numbers; he was ever paranoid some lowlife scum was going to creep into the house - in the middle of the night - and slit our throats whilst we slept. Less chance of that happening when we all share rooms. Sister and I in one room, Mother and Father in the other.

Sister had stayed downstairs with Mother and Father; talking of times gone by as only they could imagine them (shopping, trips to the pub, going out with friends - the usual). She was giving me my space. I hadn’t asked her to but she knew, after a meal, I liked a little time out to myself. A little bit of quiet time to try and forget about what we had just done. By that I mean the person we had just disposed of.

They all knew I struggled with my thoughts after a big family meal. On some level I’m sure they felt the same too. I guess they just handled their thoughts better than I handled mine.

My thoughts?

Not so much my thoughts that I struggled with.

It was my guilt.

Father helped with the thoughts of course. He’d say, “If it wasn’t one of them on the table, it would be one of us tied there and one of them sitting at the head of the table with the carving knife.”

He was right too. We all knew it but it didn’t matter. It still played on my mind. They were still a person after all.

“No - they’re not. They’re meat. Nothing more and nothing less. Remember that!” Father had shouted the first time I tried to make the family see we couldn’t live as such.

I had told them we needed to make a run. We needed to leave the house. We needed to try and find a city - some camp at least. I had told them we were there living as savages and for all we knew there was civilisation right around the corner. Some kind of rebuilt society living in the wreckage of the cities which once stood. Father had an answer for me though. He always had an answer.

“They’re out there. We won’t make it through the first night!” he said.

When he said that, I didn’t argue with him. There was no point. He was right. Of course he was right. They were out there waiting for us. When it was just one of them and my father and me - we struggled to keep it back. And when we saw more on the horizon we knew that we didn’t stand a chance against them. They would have torn us apart, limb from limb. Mother and Sister wouldn’t stand a chance against them. No way. Father was right. We wouldn’t make it through the night.

The door opened and my sister walked through the door clutching the candle in her hand. She smiled at me sympathetically. She knew what I was going through. She had gone through it herself after all - just like Mother and Father. I don’t remember much but I remember the look on everyone’s face the first evening we sat around some meat. Everyone looked repulsed by what we had come to do. Father’s hand - steady on the knife nowadays - was shaking like an autumn leaf hanging onto the branch of a dying tree.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She walked over to the sideboard and placed the candle in one of the waiting holders before coming over to sit with me on the bed.

“Do you ever think about whether there is anyone else out there? I mean other than
them
and the odd survivor?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you ever think there are families living out in the country living their lives as we live ours?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe? Why?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew that - if I did - it would only turn into an argument between the household and I couldn’t be bothered with that. Especially when I knew it was just the post-meal guilt speaking. By tomorrow I’d be fine. By tomorrow I’d be back to doing anything and everything just to survive; the reason why we ended up going down the road we were traveling in the first place.

“Come here!” she pulled me close and tenderly kissed me on the mouth. Her hand snaked its way down my chest to my jeans where she - no doubt - expected to feel a bulge starting to strain against the fabric. She was in for a disappointment. She looked at me as though to ask what was wrong.

“You mind if we leave it tonight?” I asked her.

“You owe me!” she hissed. She rubbed my crotch harder, in an attempt to kick start the beginnings of an erection, before unbuttoning my jeans. She moved off the bed and onto her knees in front of me where she ripped the jeans down around my ankles. I should have known the kind caring sister wouldn’t have been there for long before the animal took over. Her warm mouth wrapped around my flaccid penis as she started to bob up and down - clearly determined to force me to an erection.

I shuddered. Not because what she was doing was painful. It was actually fairly pleasant despite my best intentions to ignore it. I shuddered because of what she has turned into because of the state of the world. I shuddered because of what we had all turned into. We had gone where - before the bomb - none of us would have ever dreamed of going. As the days and months continued to dissolve before us, all traces of humanity were going.

With my sister’s hand and mouth actions it wasn’t long before I had an erection. She got up and pushed me back on the bed. Without any words, or anymore foreplay, she removed her own jeans and pulled her knickers to one side before impaling herself on my shaft.

“And you’d better make me cum!” she demanded.

I closed my eyes as she started bouncing on top of me - grunting like a woman possessed. My mind took me to a better world. A world where everything was normal. A world where we were all able to keep a hold of our humanity and stop from turning into whatever we had mostly changed into.

“You’re fucking pathetic!” she spat at me when she realised what I was trying to do. A far shout from how she was when we first laid together...

PART TWO

Before

Days Gone By

“I thought you were a deer!” Father exclaimed to someone out of my line of vision. He lowered the axe in his hands as clearly the person wasn’t a threat or something we could take back as food. Suddenly his eyes went wide as though he couldn’t quite believe (or make sense) of what he was seeing.

For some reason (perhaps down to the look on his face) I was rooted to the spot.

“What the fuck?” said Father.

He sounded alarmed. Whatever was behind the tree, out of my line of sight, was enough to make him take a step back. In all the time that I could remember, I could never recall seeing Dad actually take a step back from something. Whatever it was, he would always be the one there, at the front, standing his ground.

“What is it?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer me. He just raised his axe high in the air - the head of which glistened in the last remnants of the fading sun.

“Stay there!” he ordered. His voice was filled with threat but his body gave him away. His hands - even his legs - were shaking violently.

“Father, what is it?” I asked. “Father?” Both times I called out to him he ignored me. Either that or he didn’t hear me - too pre-occupied with whatever it was that had his undivided attention. “Father!”

And then I saw what it was which had him so transfixed. It came lurching forward from behind the row of trees which had previously blocked my vision. At first I thought it was human but then I realised it couldn’t have been. Yellow skin, red-faded eyes, a thick black tar drooling from its curled lips.

My hand tightened around the handle of the knife.

“What the hell is that?” I asked Father.

With no warning the
thing
suddenly lunged forward with alarming speed. Father had no time to react and was knocked to the floor within the blink of an eye. The axe slid across the muddied floor into a pile of foliage out of his grasp.

“Father!”

The creature was on top of him. The pair became a frenzied blur of movement. Father trying to defend himself against the monster who was trying to bite and claw at his face with a relentless level of aggression I had never witnessed before.

I dashed forward with the knife raised and jumped on the back of whatever the hell it was. Within seconds I plunged the knife down into its spine. It didn’t scream. It roared. Before taking the action, I foolishly believed it would have stopped it in its tracks but it didn’t. It sprang to its feet launching me clear from its body. I landed in a crumpled heap completely unarmed. My knife still in its back. Another haunting roar echoed through the seemingly beautiful scenery.

I tried to climb to my feet but was instantly knocked down by the creature as it pounced on me just as it had done so with my father. I screamed as I fought desperately hard to keep it from tearing my face off.

“Dad!” I kept screaming.

“Push him up!” I heard my father yell.

I summoned the last of my strength and pushed the creature up - away from me. I turned my head to the side and saw my father running towards us, the axe back in his hand where it belonged. I watched the blade as he took a wild swing. As the blade neared us, I closed my eyes.

The creature stopped struggling with me. In fact - it stopped fighting completely. Its body was just limp. Slowly I opened my eyes. The creature was still on top of me but minus its head...

I pushed the body away. My father helped me to my feet.

“What was that?” I asked him.

He was staring at the head. It was on the floor - its mouth still violently gnashing and eyes still wildly fixed on us; a look of hate rooted deeply within them.

“What is it?” I asked him again.

A noise distracted Dad before he had the chance to answer me. He looked up.

“We need to go!” he said. “Now!”

I followed his gaze and there - in the distance - a number of creatures similar to the one we had just killed. Male and female. At least - what used to pass for male and female. All of them looking directly at us.

“Run!” said Father. “Just run! Back to the house! Go!”

Father hadn’t even finished before I was running back towards the house with him hot on my heel. We had hardly covered any ground when both of us were breathing heavily. The time locked away in the house, living of what we had been left by the previous occupants, had done nothing for our levels of fitness.

We couldn’t hear anything coming behind us and yet I didn’t dare turn around to look. I just kept focused on running; kept focused on not tripping over one of the many broken twigs which lay upon the muddy floor.

Father took the lead slightly. Even if I had been able to overtake I wouldn’t have. I’d let him lead the way to the house so there was no danger of me steering us in the wrong direction.

“It’s this way!” he shouted. I wondered if he could sense my apprehension about knowing the correct route back. The problem with being in the thick of the woods was that everything looked the same. Probably should have left some sort of trail for us to follow back. Funny the things you think about when it is too late.

* * * * *

Unsurprisingly the route back to the house seemed quicker than the journey away from it. No doubt based on the belief that we were being chased by those things still. Father was first in and I was second. No sooner than I had stepped over the threshold he was already slamming the door shut and putting the security chain across.

“Get something to block the door!” he called out.

Mother and Sister appeared from out of nowhere. Both of them looked scared, probably because of the look on our faces. It didn’t take a genius to know something was wrong.

“Don’t just stand there! Get something to block the door!” Father shouted again.

I hurried through to the lounge. There was a large bookcase in there, filled with books on a wide range of random subjects. I called for Sister to come and help me move it. She didn’t need asking twice.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as we struggled to slide the bookcase out of the lounge and over to the door. “What happened?”

Father came over and helped us whilst Mother waited by the door unsure of what to do for the best. I looked at Father and wondered whether he was going to take the lead and tell them something (other than the truth) which might make them feel a little more at ease.

“Looters!” he said, quick as a flash.

Looters
were dangerous enough to worry about and yet not as bad as what the truth was. Mother and Sister were already worried (you could tell by their faces) and there was no sense in worrying them further. They didn’t need to know. Not yet. I looked over at Father. He caught my glance and turned away - no doubt embarrassed by the fact that he had to tell a lie to the family. He didn’t need to be embarrassed though. I know why he did it. He did it to protect them. I understood that.

With the bookcase in place, Father went through to the lounge and looked out of the front window. We hadn’t been followed. Outside everything looked normal. Everything looked peaceful.

“We can’t go out there again,” he said as he continued to try and catch his breath back, “under no circumstances. It’s too dangerous. You hear me?”

We all nodded.

None of us wanted to ask what we were supposed to do about the dire food situation.

A Prison

The day after we stumbled into whatever the hell it was that we ran into in the woods, Father instructed me to help him secure the rest of the house whilst the girls worked away in the kitchen trying to make a meal from the remaining crumbs.

“We can’t just stay in here,” I told him as we tipped the bed-frame against the window - having put the mattress on the floor - in the room he shared with Mother, “we need food!”

“You saw what was out there. One of those things nearly killed us. Had the other ones been closer - or taken more of an interest in us - we wouldn’t be standing here now!”

“But we have no food!”

“Someone will come. Everything will be okay.”

“What if everyone out there has changed into one of those things? Can you imagine what they’d do to your sister? Your mother? You want to see that happen?”

I didn’t want to see that happen but I knew we couldn’t stay in the house for much longer. Not without starvation killing us. At least death at the hands of those things would have been a quick way to go - and that was only if we bumped into them again although I knew the chances are that we would.

I asked what he thought we should do. “What do you think then?”

“Someone will come. We’ve all seen the planes flying overhead. Sure, they aren’t frequent but it does show they’re out there. Survivors. Military, no doubt. People working on a way of getting everyone to safety. That’s what happens in situations like these.”

I wanted to ask my father if he had been in these situations a lot but I knew that to do so would be crossing a line. He is my father and I needed to keep respect for him. I couldn’t challenge him. It would only lead to more problems and more issues between everyone. We didn’t need that. No one did.

“What are you two talking about?” Mother asked as she walked into the room.

“Nothing,” Father answered quickly and changed the subject, “how’s the food looking?”

Mother didn’t need to tell us. We could see from the look on her face that it was a bleak situation and that there was hardly anything left. Even so, “Not good. We probably have a couple of days left and that is if we have tiny portions. And I mean tiny. We can’t stay here, we need to leave and see if we can find somewhere else.”

Father sighed. We both knew he was going to have to tell Mother and Sister what we had seen outside; that it wasn’t just the looters we needed to fear.

“There are these things out there,” he said with a heavy sigh. I waited to back him up as I knew it would be hard for Mother to believe, considering she hadn’t seen it herself. Hell, if Father had come home and told me, I would have thought it to be another of his tall stories made up for entertainment purposes.

“Things?” Mother interrupted.

“Humans? I don’t know. They looked ill. Infected with something,” he continued. “One of them attacked us. It was strong. It was like a rabid animal. We managed to kill it but...There were a lot more of them just on the horizon. I mean
a lot
. There’s no way we can fight them all. No way. They would tear us to pieces.”

“Well what are they?”

Both Father and I shrugged.

“But we have next to no food left. Literally crumbs. We can’t stay here.”

“We just need to wait it out a little longer. I’m sure someone will come by...”

“That’s your plan? To sit and wait? What if no one comes?”

Father didn’t have an answer for her. I did but I kept it to myself. No one would want to hear that - if no one came - we’d starve to death eventually. An experience I’m sure is unpleasant.

“And what’s to stop them coming to the house?”

“They didn’t follow us.”

“But you weren’t exactly far away. What is to stop these people from coming here during the night? Or tomorrow? Or the day after?”

“What do you want me to say? I don’t know. I don’t. We’ve made the house as secure as possible. We just need to give it a bit of time and see what happens. Whatever we decide, though, we can’t leave tonight. If we do - we’re dead. If we try again tomorrow - or the day after - if these things don’t come by this way then maybe, just maybe, they’ve gone in the other direction.”