THE END
 
Adam M Booth
 
 
 
 
 
For Lucy 
There are things I never said out loud…
 
CHAPTER 1
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This is where the end begins, here in the
fluorescence of a supermarket petrol station
on the fifth day of a bad week. I could not
imagine a more mundane place for a story to
start but it is always from here that I choose
to begin. I don’t know why... Perhaps I
find comfort in the illusion of safety its
buzzing brightness cast about. Perhaps it’s
just through honour for the last few moments
of a shared humanity. Either way, in my mind,
this is where it begins.
 
I stood caffeinated and fidgety in a queue
of nine, swollen feet tight in high stilettos.
Outside a pink sun was setting and the busy
door batted cold air against hot as people
who just wanted to go home grabbed beers and
milk and bread. Racks of magazines sold cakes
and cars and bras to the side of my face and
it was ok, because we all needed to eat, and
we all needed to dream.
 
 
Time hung in the air, and anxiety itched in
my veins. I wanted to get out. I wanted to
get going, but I wish now that I’d savoured
my time there a little more. I wish I’d
revelled in the normality for a while longer,
but I could not have foreseen the sharp, neck
cracking left turn life was about to take.
Indeed, knowing what was just around that
obtuse corner would have only banished me
from my blissful ignorance sooner. Now I look
back at this tiny beat in time with reverence.
Not because it was unusual, but simply because
it was so usual.
 
More queuing.
 
I stood now fifth in line, my right arm weighed
down by a wheeled basket filled boxes of frozen
brown things I'd never eat and the radio played
a pop song about love and fame and need and
I hummed along and sagged with exhaustion.
Two days would not be enough, my bones needed
more, but I knew that come Monday all those
boxes would need to be ticked again and my
many debts recompensed, so life's relentless
march forged me onwards. For a moment I felt
trapped by circumstance. It gripped my heart
and stole my breath. It was feeling I’d
come to know intimately.
 
To distract myself from the vice of responsibility
and this eternal queue I focused on her, a
glint of light in the pitch. Beautiful, distant,
Lucy.
 
I see her in my mind’s eye as all the versions
of her I have known. She is newborn and infant
and adolescent all at once. I can’t make
a distinction between these shades of her
because she is all things to me. She is in
the tick tock of my watch and in the moisture
on my tongue. She is stars and sea and breath
and blood, but at this point in time more
than anything else she exists as a space in
my life, absent as she is from it whilst at
school in the countryside. I would try not
to think that she chose to go there to avoid
her remaining, broken parent, but I would
never be successful. I hate myself for so
many things but none more than the pain I
caused her. It wasn’t meant to hurt. Quite
the opposite. It was all for love.
 
And still we queued.
 
The man before me lurched two steps toward
the checkout as a middle-aged lady shuffled
down the line towards the sliding doors, dropping
change into her purse. Her hands shook madly
with the signs of what I assumed to be the
early onset of some crippling degenerative
disease. The one holding the purse was freshly
bandaged. She was ashen grey. I took a step
forward into the space left by the man in
front and my arm dragged behind me, pulling
the wheeled basket of artificial flavours,
textured proteins and modified starches past
a two metre tall cardboard cut-out advert
for crisps. It showed a sun in a blue sky
setting over a field. There was a farmhouse
on the horizon. My mind fell backwards through
time.
 
France in late August.
 
Lucy rolling in long grass.
 
The three of us feeding a horse over a fence.
 
Thick blood being coughed into a tissue.
 
Clouds obscuring the sun.
 
The radio broke in, ending a story with the
words "....against girls, nine to seventeen.",
before cutting to loud static. The cashier
said, "Next", without feeling and lifted up
the small radio, turning it over and around
in hoary hands. It just crackled and spat.
There was nothing she could do to make it
sing again, so she killed the power at the
wall.
 
I approached the till, chipped, pinned, then
left for the forecourt. Outside I saw the
curved blade of the red sun dip behind a spine
of dead trees. They ate away at the fire in
the sky as it turned away from us one last
time, leaving only the ultra-bright petrol
station and an encroaching absence of light.
 
I loaded up the four by four, got in and accelerated
down the road away from the shrinking pool
of light in my rear view mirror. The Sat Nav
sprang to life, directing me towards her,
down that tarmac, down the back of that that
greasy black python, away from my life and
towards the warm embrace of my own genes made
flesh, to her company, her conversation and,
eventually, perhaps, some rest. How I longed
for it. How I longed to be with her. Safe
in our space. Quietly within each other with
only the hum of the fridge and the sound of
her breathing and scratching and living.
 
 
Into the dark I drove. I drove for hours and
hours until the last coffee had all but left
me and fatigue hung heavy round my shoulders.
For years I had existed in that narrow, edgy
space, where caffeine clashed against fatigue.
You know the place. It’s 4:17 pm on a Tuesday
in January. It’s already dark outside and
rain streaks the world into lines. You breathe
the sour tang of hours old Columbian roast
and burnt milk onto a stained keyboard you’re
punching too hard with dithering digits. The
muscles in your back bunch into bricks and
they hurt, damn it, they hurt, but it doesn’t
matter. All that matters are numbers on a
page. Those numbers on that page. The phone
is ringing, and the people on the other end
of it hate you. Don’t look back Zoe. Just
drink more coffee. Just drink more coffee.
 
I put on the radio to stimulate my brain into
something resembling alertness. Radio 1 was
nothing but infinite static, just like it
had been in the petrol station back there.
With an absent mind I padded and probed through
my little brown bag looking for my iPod. Distracted
by minutia I didn't consider what that static
might mean. I didn't imagine that maybe somewhere
the end had begun...
 
I tuned through the rest of the stations and
got nothing but the same so I pulled over
to the side of the road of the silent small
town I was passing through and plugged in
the iPod I retrieved from the bottom of that
leather bag of detritus. Somewhere a siren
sounded. I scrolled through my music collection,
hit shuffle and sped off.
 
Her music had been on my laptop. Two lives
lived through overlapping eras, twisted together
and told through music. Played at random they
told a story of the truth in us. Our desires
and secrets confessed in song by other voices.
 
A stranger sang about blue skies and Saturdays
into the intimate vibrating darkness of my
beastly car. I didn’t know the words and
the sentiment felt like a taunt.
 
As our music played I raced down that open
tarmac, road markings pulsing in my lonely
light like arteries pumping faster and faster
as darkness chased me into itself.
 
A pair of red eyes grew quickly out of the
ink. I slowed for the traffic lights staring
me down and the heartbeat of the road held
still, as if in anticipation of the scene
about to be played out before me. My headlights
lit the stage. A man was face down on the
pavement at the other side of the four lane
carriageway. He was dragging himself along
by his hands. Even from this distance I could
tell he was injured. His blonde hair was slick
and glinted ruby in the cold halogen light.
My hand found the door and held it closed.
His mouth twisted open as if he was calling
out in slurred pain but I heard nothing through
the aspartame pop song and deadening insulation
of the car. It was duty, not instinct that
instructed me to call for help and I dialled
999 with suddenly shaking fingers and thumbs.
The hands-free cut out the music and I told
the automated voice on the other end of the
phone that I thought I needed an ambulance.
I was transferred to an operator, my eyes
flitting between the injured man and my dashboard.
I tried not to see his face. The line clicked
as it connected but instead of the efficient,
concerned greeting I expected all that arrived
was an ambient sound, like a faint wind.
 
"Hello?".
 
No response, just the movement of air.
 
"Hello?!” I said again, shouting slightly
this time.
 
Now only silence. I listened hard.
 
"Baagggagaagagagaaa......” gurgled a low
tone. I shuddered as the noise exhaled down
the line, filling the car.
 
Unnerved, but mostly just annoyed, I hung
up, and started to call back, but before I
could dial the number I noticed the light
catch a small group of people approaching
the obviously injured man. A group of around
nine. I saw and heard him scream once loudly
before I disconnected and allowed the music
to start up again, erasing his pain from my
ears.
 
They approached bent over, forming a messy
circle around him. Arms outstretched, they
appeared to slowly but deliberately administer
first aid. My mind made quick assumptions...
 
All nine people must surely have mobile phones….
 
One of them would no doubt eventually get
through to an operator who took their job
seriously enough to actually take the call….
 
There was nothing a tenth person could do
to help.
 
And so there, in the greedy excess of my unnecessarily
large vehicle I made a selfish decision that
allowed me to live an extra ninety minutes.
 
The lights turned amber, then green and I
turned left and drove off into the distance,
the crowd of helping hands taking care of
the injured man still visible in the rear
view mirror as I ran away into the night.
 
That would be the last time I would see another
human being and not try to eat the brain out
of their skull.  
CHAPTER 2
 
It was 7:30pm on a Friday night in late October
and I was driving in the dark to collect my
daughter from a remote train station, and
bring her home from boarding school for the
only weekend of the month that brought me
any solace. Driving through that final night,
singing along to the last music that would
ever play, I had no idea that what I wanted,
what I expected out of that day and the rest
of my life would be replaced so soon and so
finally with cracked bone, smeared gore, and
eternal death.
 
I arrived at the train station and was glad
to see that the car park was quiet for a Friday
evening. The lights inside shone out through
the plate glass windows and separated the
dark night from the harsh blue waiting area
within. The air was still and cold and I could
hear a slow rhythmic click from some complicated
piece of train equipment, the name and function
of which eluded me, and would continue to
do so.
 
I jumped out of the car with purpose and walked
a quick pace towards the station building.
The sharp heels of my stiletto shoes clicked
and pecked at the gum stained paving as I
half ran, half skipped toward the future.
Double automatic doors slid open in a breathless
yawn. I walked towards them and let them swallow
me whole.
 
I stopped for a moment as the doors closed
behind me, letting the relative heat of the
foyer permeate my flimsy clothes. I was still
wearing the outfit I had worn to work that
day, a cream button up shirt, open at the
top, and a knee length figure hugging beige
skirt with the aforementioned heels and a
pair of sheer tights. I was well aware that
this was not appropriate autumn/winter work
wear but Steve had been visiting from Head
Office and I very much wanted him to want
to have sex with me. I doubt I would ever
have gone through with it but he had big arms,
dark stubble and a knowing look that set alight
a chemical reaction deep down inside me, down
there where our bodies can’t hide their
secrets. I looked back towards the doors I
had entered through, remembering that I had
left the warm jacket I had brought for the
journey in the back of the car. A version
of me looked back from the smooth, even glass.
She was washed out in the pale blue light
but looked trim and taut. Her breasts continued
to defy gravity, sitting front and centre
on her chest, just like the magazines said
they ought to. The dark glossy hair I had
dyed and dragged back tight into a ponytail
helped old, tired eyes look bright, despite
feeling anything but. Despite my best efforts
life had carved its stories into my face.
I hated the way they exposed me. I had applied
all the petrochemicals they said I should,
but those bastard lines still gave me away.
I pictured Steve bearing down. Me, the woman
in the glass, bent over the edge of my desk,
skirt hitched up. Him, running a rough hand
over the stretch marks she gave me, then past
the scars on my inner thigh where their jean
studs had torn my soft teenage skin. But don’t
worry; familiar guilt bled into my mind soon
enough, tainting the image. Like a haemophiliac,
I could never stem its flow for long.
 
I walked out onto the platform, which was
without anyone else.
 
I was only peripherally aware of the people
on the other side of the track, huddled behind
the glass wall in the warmth of the cafe.
The yellow dotted sign above me informed me
that the train was due in at 8:45pm. It was
now 9:03pm and I was cold and the sign was
a liar. I went back inside to talk to the
information desk to find out what the holdup
was, only to find it unmanned so I returned
to the platform and sank sulkily against the
hard, uncomfortable arse high shelving that
now seemed to pass as seating in public transportation
stations throughout the land. Its metal curve
felt cold against my thighs and I shivered
as my heat left me. Across the track I noticed
more bodies arrive and join the figures behind
the glass, forming a small crowd. One of them
raised a hand, and seemed to give me a slow
wave. I smiled thinly at this rare train station
camaraderie and gave an awkward half-wave
back. The waving person, who looked to be
wearing a torn t-shirt, dropped his hand,
but still stared squarely in my direction,
his head cocked to one side. Blushing slightly
from the attention I turned away and propped
myself against the wall of the platform. My
mind meandered from Steve's thick forearms
and well fitting suit to the inappropriateness
of a torn t-shirt in October before finally
settling on Lucy and her extreme lateness.
And in between I saw blood. All the blood.
My mind flickers like a slideshow. It's always
been that way. At 9:10pm I decided I’d try
to call her to find out where she was so lifted
my phone only to see that I had a voicemail
from my Mum.
 
The voicemail introduced her message to me.
It was from “seven fort-ty five pee emm”.
 
"Zoe? Can you hear me?" she was breathless
and hearing it made my heart seize, her panic
a contagion that infected me through the phone
line.
 
"There are people in the house Zoe. They were
on the lawn. They looked hurt so I went out
to see them but...”, she whispered to me
with an intimate urgency I hadn't heard from
her since…
 
She had loved me so purely as a child that
it was as though she had been made out of
light. Diffused light, the best kind of light.
The kind that finds its way to you through
leaves. Sunlight through blonde hair and an
embrace of pink musk. Fixed knees. Days with
paint. But nothing stays perfect forever.
Life will see to that. A clawed face, a kicked
bin. A white knuckle trembling in the dark.
He fixed his stare into the distance and took
the best parts of her away with him, discarding
them like they were rubbish.
 
Like we were rubbish.
 
He threw us away into that pit of his, that
endless, lightless pit of loss where he thought
we’d never find him, or her, or them, or
us.
 
But I would find him.
 
I did find him.
 
And I only did what I had to.
 
 
A slow thudding emerged beneath her words.
She heard it too and for a few seconds all
there was was the thud and her increasingly
laboured breathing.
 
"The young man bit me. The one with the jeans
and the dark hair. On my shoulder. Do you
thinkgllgg I shoulddd...".
 
Her voice came as if spoken through treacle.
 
"I don't know why g-g-g I callggglled"
 
Three thick, short breaths.
 
"Zoe, your Dad.......” she conspired, finally.
 
I heard her breathe in one last time.
 
The message went on but all that could be
heard was the thudding, which grew louder,
then paused for a long moment before fading
again into the perceived distance.
 
I blinked hard against the shadowing that
crept in at the sides of my vision. My ears
thrummed as my body tried to fix this sudden
and complete mental anguish by flooding my
system with a cocktail of hormones that made
me shake and thump.
 
All I had ever wanted was to protect her...
 
The biggest gift I could have been given in
that moment was oblivion but in what I wish
I could say was a final act of cruelty my
body kept me alert, clearing the encroaching
ink and bringing my hearing back to full clarity
just in time for me to become aware of a distant
squeal that grew and grew and grew before
adding a deep and increasing rumble to its
suddenly terrible chorus. My eyes focused
down the track in the direction of the noise
which was now not over there, but all around
me. My gaze followed the burning train as
it tore into the station, tilted to the left,
grinding metal against concrete as fire spilled
out of broken windows. Orange flecks through
a smoking metal hurricane. I spun on my spiked
heel and watched the world end as the train
crashed and twisted into the bend where the
track exited the station, before becoming
obscured by its own black emissions and an
acrid smell of fused brakes and burning plastic.
My reality became replaced by smudged abstraction.
Through the black smoke I made out a shade
of a man in a torn t-shirt on the same platform
as me. The incinerating train threw sparks
into the blackness and illuminated the approaching
figure. I saw him stretch out his arms towards
me, as he seemed to walk in slow motion through
the surreal world I had been suddenly born
into. A flash illuminated his face and he
was smiling! Relief weakened me and I dropped
to my knees and held my arms aloft to receive
him.
CHAPTER 3
 
My mind has erased almost all of the time
between my prostration at the feet of my shadowed
saviour and the time I regained my consciousness,
but found I had lost everything else. Only
a few memories remain. I would say mercifully
so but there is nothing merciful about the
parts I remember, the first being the moment
I looked up at the face of my smiling rescuer
only to see that he wasn't smiling at all,
rather the tissue of his cheeks was torn and
flapped meatily at each side of his face,
exposing his teeth right up to his ears in
a humourless grimace. A black liquid leaked
out of each side of his exposed jawbone and
from a torn hole in his windpipe, splattering
down onto my face and chest like the last
rainy day in hell. I see him lurch forwards
and he bites down on me and his teeth, those
powerful, god awful, yellow teeth, connect
with the arm I offered up to him. I smell
his breath.
 
It is gastric plastic.
 
I can remember a flash of bruising heat then
a warm slickness as the teeth kept at me,
slow but deliberate like a kiss that had gone
too far. I came apart like slow cooked lamb
as the meat slipped off the bone. My meat
just slipped off my bone! “That's mine!”
I said,  “Give it back to me!”
Trying to cling to normality I apologised,
“Sorry! No! Sorry!” excusing him mutilating
me, before changing tactic, kind of crying,
kind of begging for him to stop, ple-e-ase
stop, please...
 
Then it's just me squirming in a pool of thick
juices. Red and black and blue. I hear more
than feel his teeth grind against my skull
and then the images blur together, silent
and vague with horror, like a Monet painted
in bile and faeces.
 
I make a sound like a goat, over and over
and over again.
Into the blackness.
 
Somewhere my heart stopped and I wasn’t
surprised. I had always asked too much of
it.
 
Then for a while there was nothing, just a
deep emptiness. Not sleep, just a peaceful
absence. I could perceive nothing at all just...
the essence of me, only.... elsewhere. There
is no better way for me to describe it. It
was what it was, but that experience or lack
thereof, proved something to me. That there
is something more to existence. Something
profound and beautiful and something that
I would always be excluded from. Something
I excluded myself from all those years ago.
I had no idea what I was sacrificing...
 
After too short a time in that peaceful void
I became aware of a light in the darkness.
A stab of silver to the extreme left of what
I gradually saw was an inky blue background.
It dawned on me that the silver I saw was
the curve of the moon and the inky blue background
was a clear night sky. It was out of focus
and blurred and I couldn’t connect to its
beauty. To the left the dotted yellow of the
train station display reflected in glass.
The sudden familiarity brought a flood of
memories.
 
That answer machine message.
 
Being attacked.
 
Then Lucy. Lucy!
 
“Where was she? Was she safe?” the thought
ricocheted around my skull.
 
How long had I laid here? I spun over onto
my other side to see the clock that had mocked
me with her lateness before everything had
changed.
 
But I didn't move.
 
I couldn’t.
 
I remained motionless on the concrete, my
eyes still transfixed on that supposedly beautiful
night sky while my mind thrashed with urgency.
What had happened to me? With haste I deduced
that I must have been paralysed during the
vicious attack by that deformed madman. My
mind rang with fear and panic but physically
I gave none of it away. To calm myself down
I tried to hold my breath only to find that
I had none to hold. I wasn't breathing. The
realisation exploded inside me, an attack
of acute panic so extreme that I imagine had
anyone been there to witness it they would
have seen sparks coming off me. But there
was no-one there, and I was still just an
inappropriately dressed woman led paralysed
on her right side, with her bloody arm twisted
beneath her.
 
The panic continued with constant agonising
intensity until the dark blue night became
the pale grey morning. At some point after
what I imagine was about lunchtime the fear
in me dissipated and was replaced by ridiculous,
hysterical optimism, the minds Plan B when
faced with insurmountable bad news. I recalled
in detail stories I'd read in cheap magazines
of people who woke from comas after twenty
five years, or who experienced temporary paralysis
at inopportune times only to recover miraculously
on their birthdays and managed to be buoyed
by the recollection. I convinced myself that
at some point someone would find me and fix
me and take me to receive medical help. At
the very worst I would spend six months in
a wheelchair whilst receiving physiotherapy.
Hours later when the possibility that I might
never recover glistened into my cerebrum I
retreated from it to the place in my head
where pop culture got stored. I replayed whole
episodes of Friends, episodes I didn’t know
I’d seen; as my mind did it's best to insulate
me. But of course worse was still to come.
The worst was still to come, and my ultimate
horror hung on the dark horizon of my life,
dancing in its own grim inevitability.
 
CHAPTER 4
 
 
After many hours of Chandler and Rachel and
fake Manhattan apartments I felt a single
point of cold cut through the fiction behind
my right eye. At first it was just a tickle,
enough to draw my attention but no more. But
soon the tickle was an ache and the single
point was a golf ball sized orb of freezing
agony that grew to encompass the whole eye
and the right side of my face and brain. It
was like an ice cream headache but without
the ability to blink hard against it, and
without the yin of the taste of sweetened
cream to counter the yang of its searing neurological
cold. I braced against it mentally but it
didn’t recede. And I could only brace for
so long, eventually I had to relent and as
I did the white cold spread through my face
and down into my arm and leg, making my entire
right side awash with electric agony. The
pain settled into its new home and I knew
with awful certainty that it would not be
temporary. The contrast of the numbness on
my left and pain on my right was too much,
each sensation reminding me of why the other
was unbearable. I wheeled between torments,
feeling the pain until I was a freezing furnace
of suffering before escaping into the suffocating
numbness where I huddled until I needed to
feel something again. I repeated this insane
internal pirouette for many agonizing hours.
Everything we ever experienced was just an
alteration between these two frequencies,
one high, and one low. On off. On off. 
 
I estimate that it was early evening of that
first day when I felt the first movement.
The pain in me began to vibrate at a higher
frequency, building up to something. I found
out what when it reached an electric peak
and my right shoulder move tugged backwards,
causing my chest to hit the charred tarmac.
It was a feeling not dissimilar to the one
you get as you’re drifting off to sleep,
and then feel yourself falling and jolt awake.
Violent and involuntary. Violently involuntary.
An hour passed with me in this new position,
hunched up with my face against the ground.
My right eye open and the ball pressed against
the rough hardness of the gum pocked tarmac.
Then, an hour or so later the vibration began
again and built once more to a nerve shredding
crescendo, the peak of which brought my right
knee up in a spasm. I was now half knelt up
and could see through my knees, backwards
down the track. On the flipped horizon a fire
was burning. The vibration began again and
my right hand was forced down into the ground,
flipping me onto my left. With this the pain
caught fire and burned through my middle and
into the left hand side of me, eliminating
the numbness for good. I remember being glad.
I deserved all that pain. I knew as it tore
through me that it was dissolving my organs
and with a heavy liquid nausea I felt myself
become hollow where once I had substance.
With that the pain took control and with a
spastic series of forced jerks and twitches,
I was stood up. It dawned on me, as my dead
body animated itself upright that I was no
longer in control. Body and mind had split
into two separate entities. Both ached in
their own way, but only one had any control,
and though I could still feel everything I
was now just a passive observer. A witness
to a changed reality. As my body shifted and
lurched to gain a new kind of balance I felt
my liquefied insides drop, then drain out
through the now useless holes between my legs.
The fluid seeped through my tights, leaving
a black puddle between my stilettos and a
cold cavern in my core. A cavern where a lustful
eternal hunger would soon take up residence.
 
I stood and swayed in the darkness, all angles
and awkwardness. My eyes swung loosely in
their sockets as the world spun in orbit.
I had no volition over them, but dutifully
they continued to relay information to the
brain in which I was now held captive. In
and out of focus a scene painted before me,
an apocalyptic version of the station I had
arrived at a day earlier, blackened and shattered.
Machinery still clicked and whirred. An automatic
door kept trying to close on a chunk of melted
train and sunlight, diffused through low cloud,
broke over the rough grassy embankment. I
felt its weak warmth but could take no comfort
in it. Like an infant opening its eyes for
the first time to find she’d been born in
hell, I had no expectation. Panic and pain
had stripped it from me. I only knew that
everything was new and everything was bad.
The thin light grew through grey cloud and
I caught my reflection in an advertising board.
The picture behind the plexiglass was of an
old woman smiling whilst talking on a mobile
phone. I saw my Mum in her. I imagined that
black tar smile looming above her as it had
me. I hope she died. Good god I hope she stayed
dead. My reflection was rippled in a plastic
frame. I was dressed as I had been when I
arrived at the train station but now black
and red lines ran down from a hole in my skull,
streaking my face and blouse. My stilettos,
still somehow attached to my feet, stood in
the pool of the black gunge which had fallen
out of me, and the arm I had used to defend
myself hung stripped of flesh, the bone bleached
white in the new sun. I was spoiled meat.
Road kill. Dog food.
 
As I looked at the old woman in the advert
and the reflection of the new, putrid me a
deep yearning for connection began where my
womb once was. I worried about my mother and
needed to find my daughter. I yearned for
people. For my people. I felt a pull towards
them spread out into each limb and give them
purpose. I hungered to be with them, to hold
them close to me, to know them completely
and get lost in their warmth. It was such
sweet agony and it bubbled up through me.
As it got to my neck I heard myself groan
pathetically, a thin moan, like a frail orgasm.
It was a hateful sound. No sooner had it left
my throat than my body lurched forwards, using
my desire as its motivation. It took me stumbling
down the platform and into the station; the
automatic doors sliding open to receive us
more graciously than our abomination deserved.
Turning left out of the station we jerked
and clattered down the long straight road.
Far in the distance other bodies stumbled
and fell, but all in the same direction, the
fire on the horizon. The stilettos lasted
till the end of the car park.
 
CHAPTER 5
 
Once in my sleep I saw her as a little girl,
spinning in a huge white room, glossy walls
reflecting fluffy pink clouds and little white
coins.
 
Her face was frowning but she pulled her mouth
up into a smile and I could tell it was hurting
her, but she did it anyway.
 
In the middle of the room was a giant white
dome, and I don’t know why but it was a
nightmare.
 
CHAPTER 6
 
It took two cycles of the sun for us to reach
the end of the road, and with each passing
hour the terrible hunger for company doubled.
Shuffling down that long straight road I imagined
that perhaps when we did finally meet someone
they would have the answers I was looking
for. I fantasised that they would put their
arm around my shoulder and say, “shhh Zoe,
don’t worry. Everything's going to be ok”,
and fill me with medicines that didn’t exist
and clean me and cure me. Of course I was
naive. I honestly thought that the maddening
want for company was a natural human instinct
brought on by the terrible sequence of events
that had led me here, but I was about to learn
otherwise.
 
At the end of the long road was a house. It
was a wooden house with an upstairs and a
downstairs. Upstairs a dim light flickered
through twilight and a large, square window.
The house was surrounded by a low wall. It
offered her no protection. Quietly my body
dragged itself forwards until it was up against
the meagre stack of bricks, and then slid
along it to where the gate hung ajar. Up the
garden path we went and onto the decked porch
where my foot kicked over a milk bottle. It
spun and made that delicate distinct noise
that a spinning bottle makes. A weak female
voice whispered from upstairs, “Hello?”,
“Is that you Eddie?” I couldn’t reply
obviously but the body quickened itself and
I felt the yearning shift into expectation
and I was so thirsty.
 
The front door was open and swung on its hinges
and we entered into a dark hallway. Four coats
hung on a stand to the left and a small table
beside it had a neat stack of letters and
a cradle for a phone but no phone. The smell
of a recently extinguished candle arrived
in the air. I only wanted to hug her. I wanted
to share her warmth. The stairs went immediately
up in front of us and we lurched towards them,
bare feet padding on the thick carpet. Leaning
against the wall we made it up the stairs,
stopping briefly to sway at the top before
turning left down the hall. I just didn't
want her to be alone anymore. There were three
doors. One was open. I don’t know why she
left it open. We stopped in the open doorway.
I could feel her living and breathing inside.
My empty core filled up with lustful thirst
and I felt the black bile rise up for the
first time, burning plastic and battery acid.
It stung the soft tissues of my throat and
filled my mouth until it drained down my chin
and over my tits, mixing me into the pitch.
With hope, she said, “Eddie?”, and flicked
on a reading lamp with shaking hands, knocking
it to the floor, this woman of fifty something
crouched in the corner of her room clutching
a leather bag to her cream blouse.
 
The light laid bare the truth to both of us.
I was not her Eddie. And her expression, a
silent vacuum of horror, let me know with
a crushing, violent certainty that we were
not there to make friends. The lamp cast flickering
shades of us both backwards. They loomed over
us and wrote her fear of me, and my threat
to her, in bold on the walls behind us. My
body took jagged steps towards her and she
whimpered and begged, “No, please god NO
no no NO, please please please don't PLEASE
don’t”, but she didn’t move. I don’t
think she could. Sometimes fear animates,
sometimes it paralyses.
 
Terror held time still. Three, two, one.
 
I screamed inside for her but it came out
as a gasping moan, like an emphysemic laugh.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I didn't
mean to laugh, that I just wanted to hold
her and know her and... My pale white arms
reached out and grabbed loosely at her face
and hair until they made purchase and as soon
as they did they gripped hard and held her
still. She stopped pleading when we held her
tight and then the teeth started their journey
through her, crunching through bone and chewing
through cartilage for hours and hours and
hours until she was all gone. My eyes were
open the entire time.
 
I wish she’d never turned on that lamp.
 
We knelt in the wet area she left behind,
the old woman now a ball of bones and brain
scratching around inside me, and a thick pool
of vital fluids on the old maroon and blue
carpet. Images of the bleeding layers of her
being stripped from her yellow skeleton strobed
through me into the part of the brain that
really, truly makes us who we are. The secret
area where our worst deeds hide and where
our proclamations of innocence hold no substance.
That shaded corner where you cannot score
out the things you did to your husband. The
place that made me swap those tablets and
that gapes abject terror into our nights.
The images of her stricken face as its loose
skin came away affect me more than the tsunami
of gore that followed, so new to me was the
red truth inside her.
 
My body wallowed in its first kill. It bloated
and gassed and smeared itself with its own
black effluence, rolling in her remains, staining
itself with the heavy metal scent of the gore
that had so recently been a terrified wife/sister/mother
of someone. Then the teeth began to chatter,
wracking my brain and we stood up with an
enlivened sense of purpose. We made it down
the stairs and away from the house, walking
that shuddering walk through a thin hedgerow
and across a playing field, past a blood stained
playground and onto a dual carriageway, falling
over the metal barricade designed by someone
to keep wayward vehicles within its confines
but now entirely devoid of purpose. We thrashed
a little but soon found our feet and were
back up and on our way, always falling towards
the burning town less than a mile away. We
passed an abandoned minibus and I saw in the
reflection of the glass that I had a thicket
of grey hair hanging out of my mouth and red
neck, chest, arms and hands. There were no
more cars on the road, no people in the houses,
but there were people in the town ahead and
I felt my belly swell black in anticipation
of them.
 
 
I am sat at my desk. My face is bathed in
cool blue light. Half a smile and one eye
from your old face observe me between windows
on my desktop.
 
It’s too late.
 
I will never be free of these coils of lead.
 
Don't jump Zoe.
 
Don't jump.
 
CHAPTER 7
 
The bones in my neck cracked and clicked as
we jolted and stumbled without grace or equilibrium
towards the town ahead, piloted as I now was
by the gangrenous amateur who had taken me
over. His presence violated me, his violence
a pure, annihilating lust. As he shuffled,
I moaned, through once familiar places that
existed now only as a shade of a recent past.
In my memory I see a tin of off brand baked
beans roll out of an open door of a ransacked
grocery. A step, a lurch. I hear the sound
of water running and as my head lolls I catch
a glimpse of a torrent pouring out from beneath
the door of a dental surgery, the door and
windows of which had been hastily, clumsily
boarded over. We fall against a phone box,
the handset hangs loosely and beeps an alarm,
and I recognise the cliché as I see a severed
hand holding a car key on a bench covered
in blood. Little horror stories ended everywhere
my gaze fell; a series of events that made
up a life, then ended suddenly. Up ahead a
car was jack-knifed across the road. As we
got closer I noticed that the door was open
on the driver’s side and the footwell was
full of blood and bone and bile and blackness.
Signs on the rear window said something about
Essex and, “Baby On Board”. I regret so
many things. I was only a child, how could
I have felt so much hate? On the other side
of the car I heard heavy wet squelching cut
up with whines and moans. I slid around the
back of the van, where three figures were
getting shakily to their feet. One was a teenage
boy, skinny and slight with fair hair and
a blue hooded top, he looked like any teenage
boy, except he had a space where his forehead
used to be and a face streaked red. It looked
like his brain had been crying and he whinnied
like a foal watching its lame mother take
a shotgun to the head. The other two figures
did not appear to be faring so well. A man
and a woman, both extremely overweight and
almost completely naked except for some torn
dirty rags bunched up around their middles.
Heavy, grey, lacerated fat hung in rancid
thick ribbons from the woman's guts, exposing
purple and green matter and her yellow pelvic
bone in full technicolour gore. She had no
lower jaw and so her tongue hung out of a
rough hole where her bottom teeth used to
be and it convulsed erratically against her
neck making a wet slapping sound. He had suffered
a deep cut to the outside of his right thigh
and the weight of the flesh beneath had pulled
the tissue off the bone. It collected around
his ankle like a baggy stocking full of pus.
All three were smeared in black. My body lurched
me into their midst. Their eyes were stricken
and I cried out for them, for us, in a long
high moan that asked for us to die, now, please.
 
But we didn’t die. No more than we had already.
 
And then there were four. 
 
We walked on through the suburbs toward the
town because our stomachs knew there were
brains there, the boy and I slightly ahead
of the other two, who kept getting caught
up on bits of the environment. Even a low
curb caused them to drop to the ground and
with each fall they would leave a smear of
themselves behind. They thrashed and whined
against their own ineptitude but still, the
boy moaned the most.
 
Our tragic little group pressed ever forwards
following streams of rats through the vacant
streets and alleys, down a ramp into a car
park, through its echoing chamber into a shopping
precinct where they teamed in their hundreds,
gnawing and chewing their way through the
fabric of our society. The precinct gleamed
with marble and chrome and up above daylight
cast itself through a pyramid of glass onto
the serrated teeth of an escalator, rotating
downwards.
 
The fat man had been at the front of our group
when we arrived at bottom of the descending
mechanical stairs and his sagging girth blocked
our access to its persistently temporary bottom
step. For days we fell against him and it,
as it bit at his thighs and knees taking chunks
of him into itself until it was a turning
band of the blood and bone and skin that his
body seemed so willing to give up.
 
The sun came and went, lighting us occasionally
through the atrium above.
 
During the daylight hours there was a certain
comedy to the slapstick klutzing and we lolled
and tripped like broken marionettes, but comedy
was all too absent during the nights when
all that was left was the boys crying and
the wet sound of fat man smearing against
metal. I don’t know why the lights were
off and the escalator on. Maybe someone got
eaten somewhere between the two switches.
Eventually our serrated tormentor had eaten
enough of the fat man and slowed to a juddering
halt. Amidst the smell of fusing gears and
melting man matter we fell and climbed over
what was left of the back of him and ascended,
finally.
 
It was dusk when we fell through the broken
glass of a once sliding door and onto the
street. My body scrambled and thrashed against
the glass and tarmac and I saw shoes and legs
and feet. Lots and lots of shoes and legs
and feet. Some in white trainers, some in
black boots. Some bare, some in torn socks.
Some were green and purple and some were missing
entirely and hobbled forwards on blooded,
soggy stumps, and some were the feet of children,
but all were going the same way and my body
pulled itself up against them as we moved
as one unstoppable sea of clattering teeth
and whining hunger towards a two storey grey
building on the corner of the street we occupied.
 
CHAPTER 8
 
I killed her dog. His name was Sam. He was
old and I throttled him in his sleep. And
it wasn’t spontaneous, nor an act of mercy.
I planned to do it, and I did. You see, in
the mornings I would see her look down at
him in his basket with increasingly questioning
eyes and she'd ask why he didn't go outside
to the toilet anymore.
 
I could see where this was going and I couldn't
answer. I just stood there, holding the tea
towel with familiar white knuckles, waiting
for the moment to pass, waiting for her to
just stop talking.
 
When she was a baby she would call him "Dokk",
and laugh, and he would be patient whilst
she brushed his tail too hard with a little
purple brush from that cheap doll we bought
her from that toyshop in Spain. She came home
from school one day and I told her he had
jumped over the gate and run away but as my
lie pierced her world the dead dog was wrapped
in a rug in the boot of my car, flaking and
leaking it's last onto the black felt of my
grey estate and staining the air with my crime.
She cried all night and most of the following
day. Her misery was a cloying grey felt that
filled me up. I was only trying to protect
her. She’d already lost too much.
 
I want to tell you our dog didn't wake up
and look at me with streaming, questioning
eyes that asked why the hands that fed him
all these years were now crushing the cartilage
in his windpipe. I want to say that he didn't
squeal and gasp, legs flailing, tail whipping
this way and that whilst I clamped his neck
to the floor, that he didn't bite through
his own tongue and that it didn't flap around,
spraying bright blood over my rigid, shaking
arms, arms that betrayed the part of me that
cried for him and arms that held him firm
till he gave up and just let himself die.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was, but I couldn't
let anymore light leave her, John.
 
We pressed against the rain slick grey police
station, situated at the point where two wide
roads crossed. Inside me I felt the hunger
lust flip and turn, trying to get out, trying
to get us through these jerking corpses, through
that wall and in there, into the room beyond
where I could feel those warm dry bodies strut
back and forth and round in circles. We ached
to break through their thick skulls and into
the warm, wet complexity inside. Their brains
had to stop being in their heads. They just
had to.
 
I could not count us, but I listened to our
collective wail fill the grey afternoon and
bounce between the buildings, echoing and
emphasising our horde. The pressure of each
of us multiplied until there was no space
between, we were just a tsunami of hunger
that had to be fed. We would not leave until
their effluvia were smeared down our chests
and the hairs on their heads were clogging
our throats and nails. This I knew. 
 
For days we pressed and thronged. The passage
of time distorted and the sun seemed to flash
above as it fell in and out of an indifferent
sky. In its light I caught slivered glimpses
of us, not as the mass of shambolic rot we
must have appeared as to the harried faces
that sometimes looked out from behind the
gridded windows, but as an organised swarm
that ebbed and flowed around its prey, tiring
it out, confusing it. There was a beauty in
it. There is beauty in everything, if you
look deeply enough into it.
 
Into one shattered night I heard someone scream
fuck you, you fucking fucks, and a slight,
grey man fell into us from an open window.
We dismantled him quickly. Fibula to the left,
clavicle to the right. I felt shards of his
skull crunch and mix with his blood and my
spit all around my mouth and under the tongue
I wanted to say sorry with, but couldn’t.
A stockier man appeared from behind a heavy
blue door and made a run for it through the
empty space we left behind as we scrummed
over the thin one. The stocky man got a few
metres further but came apart just as easily.
The door he burst from swung idly on its hinges
and we surged and glugged through the hole
it left and into the station.
 
We clattered down the narrow blue corridor,
toppling plastic chairs and boxes of paper,
passing through the empty reception area where
a blue fire burned in a metal bin. Beyond
were two cells separated by metal bars, each
occupied. In one was a single man who wore
a police uniform and who had scabs on his
face. His head hung low and he grinned a thin
grin as we entered and surrounded him. In
the second cell were another two men both
dressed in dirty jeans and t-shirts. They
pulled away from us knocking a few neatly
stacked cans of food and bottles of coke to
the ground, their revulsion to us as strong
as our attraction to them. They shouted god
no! Fuck! Oh fuck no!
 
We forced ourselves towards them, a thousand
strong. My body pressed hard against the bars
forcing parts of me through. I felt my ribs
crack and rearrange in my chest, my once beautiful
torso becoming just a wet, misshapen bag of
human parts, but no matter how hard we pressed
against those flaky green bars they succeeded
in keeping us apart. Our arms reached only
a third of the way into the cells and we tried
to snatch their hair or clothes but we did
so without success, for now, and so we reached
an impasse.
 
The prisoners in the cell to the right sat
and held each other’s gaze, reassuring each
other, telling each other not to look, don't
look, just don't look at them, close your
eyes and cover your ears and they're gone!
You're at home and the fire is on and Zac
is lying on the rug and you're falling asleep
and tomorrow you're going to wake up in our
bed and they'll all be gone!
 
But he wouldn't, and we wouldn't.
 
We protruded grey green limbs through the
bars towards them, sometimes scraping the
side of these imprisoned people with our relentless
horror as they tried to pretend everything
was going to be ok. For the first day they
blocked us out and hugged each other like
children. The older man called Alex comforted
the younger one called Mike. He said, “Everything
is going to be ok in the end. Just remember,
if it’s not ok, it’s not the end”.
 
They clutched and reassured and fed from tins
with their eyes shut and for a while it worked
and the two men managed to hold onto themselves
and each other and all the time the Officer
in the cell to the left just sat cross legged
and smirked. Soon though the food ran out
and several new days dawned, each one worse
than the last, and now we at least had our
hunger in common with the men in the cells.
Gradually, between the stench of sweat and
shit a vinegar tone arrived, like a triangle
in the air that no one could see but everyone
knew was there, a spiked miasma that meant
nothing good. We still gnashed and pawed and
moaned but the urgency had gone out of our
animation as a certainty arrived amongst the
dead, and the soon to be. These weak, flawed
and hungry human beings would do our work
for us.
 
Alex stopped comforting his friend, and an
angled darkness arrived in Mike's eyes with
an obtuse twitch that pulled his knees up
to his chest. He hugged them tight like he
knew he'd be separated from them soon. Like
he was saying goodbye to himself. The dark,
dark man in the dark, dark, dark cell to the
left beckoned a weakened but still reluctant
Alex over to the bars that separated them
and whispered diesel into his ear. Sensing
the tone change (too late, what could he do?)
Mike started a low wail. Hungry and sleep
deprived and out of time, I saw the madness
catch in his soul like a fire and he rocked
and whined and ground his teeth as their end
began.
 
The Officer, speaking aloud for the first
time, convinced Alex to put his hands through
the bars. That's it, all the way in. Alex
cried like a child being punished as he pushed
his hands in as far as he could, then the
thin man, that horrible, thin man, gripped
him tight and cuffed him hard with a pair
of silver handcuffs to the bench. He stood
up and put his hands on his hips and said,
"Little Pig, Little Pig", then bent down and
ate the warm flesh off Alex's arms.
 
The tightening band in Mike snapped and he
screamed a scream from the end of time, till
specks of blood sprayed out of his mouth.
Then he tore off his shirt and pants and clawed
at his own face until the blood streaked down
his big chest then, mewling, bent down and
chewed and tore at the flesh on the neck of
the man that had hugged and fed and reassured
him only hours earlier. The sun split the
acrid grey steam in the air through the narrow
slit of a window and Mike, now just animal,
bucked hard against the older man caught in
the bars, who had gone limp and just wobbled
and jerked as the two men plucked and boned.
After Mike had filled his stomach with human
flesh his face went grey, then slack and as
his hunger left him his humanity returned
and he fell back against us and offered no
resistance as we punished him for his gluttony.
He remembered himself as his head came away
from his neck and he cried through what remained
of his windpipe and mouth until it was just
bubbling blood. Alex bled out into a pool
and the officer of the law laughed as he stripped
bare and finished himself over the orchestra
of viscera he conducted with one final flourish,
then, as his laughter diminished and his face
lost its wicked animation, he unlocked the
gate and walked amongst our forest of arms
with his own outstretched, and let us crucify
him. We cracked through his skull and I saw
a dead version of a man in an ambulance drivers
uniform delicately eat only some of the brain
within. He tongued and nibbled at the grey
matter visible through the cracked hole in
the Officer’s head with something approaching
surgical precision, then dropped the body,
leaving it jerking on the cell floor with
only the hole in its head and bite marks to
its neck. We shuffled away from the place
where these three unlikely lives terminated,
and a kind of new one was beginning.
 
CHAPTER 9
 
 
Twenty two.
 
In between, you left me.
 
I sat in the dark as your red lies bled under
my door and those four blue walls pressed
in against me.
 
So tight.
 
I clung to our life like it was worth clinging
to, like there was anything I could do to
keep you.
 
My fingers were bleeding.
 
Did you see that?
 
Did you care?
 
I didn't know you had already gone so I just
kept running.
 
Always getting faster.
 
Looking but not finding.
 
Alive but not living.
 
CHAPTER 10
 
We made it into a hospital where nurses took
care of our survivors, young and infirm.
 
You know how I came to hate the hospital.
 
I will not think of what happened there.
 
(They were all red.)
 
I just won’t. 
 
CHAPTER 11
 
This nameless town was now dead. The black
saliva that dried in my mouth and settled
in my belly confirmed what was already obvious.
We meandered this way and that, following
faint instincts and whispers of desire that
arrived on cold winds from distant places
where people survived. The black swarm ebbed
around then away from the town, following
tiny forces of magnetism, each at that moment
no nearer or no more pressing than the next.
Once I caught the eye of another and let myself
wonder who was in there? What had they done
to deserve this? It was a pointless question,
one I could never know the answer to, but
I did know that it would be a while till we
would find anyone else to end and this dawning
knowledge allowed me a sort of peace, which
of course wasn't peaceful at all but isn't
everything relative?
 
I drifted away from the madding crowd, my
twisted legs taking me at an almost leisurely
pace down a lane lined with big, old houses,
each with a grand set of stairs leading up
to it, and each now a violent shade of itself,
dressed in fire or blood or broken glass.
Streetlights flickered on and off, trying
not to look. For a while a ragged brown pup
followed me. Its frothy pink tongue flapped
and lolled and it panted like it was laughing
at my inertia.
 
The space between the houses increased as
the buildings themselves got bigger, and eventually
I found my body dragging its carcass over
a wide avenue and down an embankment into
a field of hard, ridged dirt dark under a
bruised sky. An empty coldness arrived with
the night winds and penetrated me. I felt
it as I would if I had been in a quickly freezing
field on a night when my life was my own,
only now I was powerless to find shelter;
unable to remove myself to a place of warmth.
I couldn't even shiver against it. Instead
my body carried me deeper into the silver-plating
moonlight. Light which seemed to be crystallising
around me. The biting wind cracked its lash
and I felt the movement of my body slow a
little before I felt the hard spikes of intense
sub-zero transmute anywhere in me where moisture
met air. At first it was my bottom lip. A
mixture of bodily fluids, some my own, some
new to me, dribbled down over it and I felt
it flare in cold heat. The thin skin there
hardened then the ice spread into my flesh.
The weight of my newly frozen lip dragged
it down exposing my cracked and broken teeth,
onto which the ice spread too, bringing a
pain like a thousand burning needles into
the centres of the teeth I had killed people
with and making the ice cream headache I felt
on the train station platform seem like something
to be desired. Rapidly the iced pain spread
deep into me, past my tonsils, down my throat
and into what offal remained in the core of
me, then through that even and into the marrow
of my bones. Finally the surface of my eyes
iced over, sealing me in, and for the first
time in many, many days my body stopped moving.
I was still, but now in place of movement
I had only pain. A pain so vibrant and intense
that it seemed to become a sound inside me
that rang out at an unwavering pitch and my
whole body was now just an instrument that
could play only that one note, and I was its
audience of one. There was nothing else to
experience. No thought could enter, no emotion
be felt. Only the pain existed and I existed
only for the pain to be felt.
 
It cannot be put into words.
 
It is too much suffering.
 
I don't know how long I stayed there in the
reverberation of that ecstatic note. Days?
Weeks? Does it matter? When time stands still
all you have left are the images in your mind’s
eye, and these were the images in mine.
 
Seventeen little years…… still so smooth.
Life ran through me, a torrent. Flowed through,
clear and deep. I was so beautiful reflected
naked in that glassy blue lake. She smiled,
and turned away from him and dove down into
herself, that girl in the glass.
 
She is me but I will never be her.
 
Down.
Blue.
Green.
Black.
 
She couldn't have known that other men had
arrived in the shade of the trees.
 
The kind of men that scare and scar.
 
Men that now rippled above her with granite
fists and swollen intent.
 
They forced her and tore her a tear so deep
it would reach her soul.
 
Part of her would never resurface.
 
From then on part of her would always be drowning...
 
At some point the frost on my left eye melted
as the errant sun caught it and I saw out
through a damaged cornea over a white field
that glistened like acres of finely broken
glass. Please don’t imagine beauty. There
was none to see. The screeching note of pain
quietened for an hour to let me take in the
scene. Then the sun dropped away, my eye froze
back over.
 
The music played on.
 
CHAPTER 12
 
 
Midday, one day. The sun's pathetic warmth
broke through the needle pitch and I finally
felt my repugnant flesh begin to thaw. I stood
on the spot, still largely frozen to the ground
as my awful body tried to retrieve itself
from the ice. Suddenly I felt the air ripple
around my head with expectant urgency. A black
bird dropped out of the sky, landing on my
head. It bounced and pecked at my face, cooing
and clawing through a flurry of black wings,
plucking at the lice in my matted hair, trying
to find meat on me worth eating. It found
none, and beat an exit to the skies, leaving
me alone.
 
“Take my eyes!” I thought.
 
“Please! Come back and take my eyes!”
 
Constant agony had faded to a dull ache and
the slackened thawing flesh on the side of
my head slid down my face and hit the floor
with sick wet thuds. Under a low brow I looked
out over that now filthy brown field and saw
the world anew; as punisher and aggressor.
The whole universe existed only to crash element
against element, to create infinity out of
endless collision. Everything was born of
violence, I saw that now. The only thing that
ever truly existed was cruelty and I was here
to feel all of it and to inflict more.
 
Movement.
 
My scarred matter spoiled in the weak sun
and within an afternoon the ice in my marrow
had defrosted enough for my body to regain
its lurching momentum and soon I was out of
the field and trembling down the banks of
a clear stream of melt water. The recent loss
of the thin flesh on my skull and chest and
arms somehow helped me move with less impediment,
but caused elbows and ribs to clatter like
a voodoo glockenspiel.
 
Weeks pass. I am alone in many fields. The
countryside so hard to navigate with these
bones and this brain. Horror and hatred give
way to boredom and despondency. Eventually,
a hedge.
 
On the other side of the hedge was a road.
I fell forwards, slack. A weak tug taking
me somewhere this road no doubt had taken
countless others under better circumstances,
but I knew I wasn't going anywhere good. All
of a sudden the hunger sparked hard in my
belly. Through the hedge I could hear the
screech of rubber on Tarmac then doors slamming
shut and equipment being moved hastily, all
the while people shouted and screamed and
argued.
 
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON'T LEAVE ME.
 
JUST GO KAREN, GET IN THE CAR.
 
I felt my eyes widen and my arms scrabble
against the muddy embankment. I fought against
the hedge, looking for a weakness to exploit
so I could get to them and sink my teeth into
the wonderful, complex brains inside those
glistening white skulls…..
 
MUM DON'T GO. PLEASE! Please...
 
… so I could slide my dirty, torn tongue
round the warm, smooth dome behind the place
where their eyes had so recently been and
spill acrid black death down upon them, all
over their bastard torn faces.
 
But before I could get through I heard the
engine speed away and I felt two of the bodies
draw into the distance and I was consumed
by despair and sadness. My god the sadness.
It was the melancholy felt by colliding planets.
It was the sadness the universe felt as an
eternity of expansion slowed and reversed
into crushing contraction. It was everything
that had ever been wrong and I had let this
happen by letting them get away. It was all
my fault. As if I hadn't caused enough despair...
I moaned a long deep moan that filled the
early spring air and was the summation of
all the pain that had ever been felt, but
I could feel that there was someone still
left up there on the roadside. With rage I
spasticated and spat pitch through my rough-hewn
mouth. I would bring down the full fury of
the despair I had been forced to endure upon
that person up there on that road. There would
be no mercy. Ever again.
 
I fell through the hedge; face down on a patch
of once mown grass now just a hash of brown
weeds and scrub. As my body jerked and jolted
I heard the sound of a weak motor and seized
into an upright position. With a cocked head
I saw a car park with a short beige building
with the word "Toilet" painted on pebbledash
in green. Another said "NO TIPPING" in red.
A long straight road disappeared into the
distance in both directions, lined by the
hedge from which I spewed forth.
 
The body I wanted was inside that little beige
box up ahead. Just one person, all alone.
My eyes bulged again at the opportunity. The
muscles around my left, soggy and gangrenous
since the thaw, gave way and I felt the globe
drop lower with a sickening wet slurp that
echoed a little in the dome of my skull. My
vision doubled and stayed that way. Now everything
was twice. I could hear him sob as I slowly
made my way over the grass and into the car
park. His cries reverberated in the cold damp
rest room and gave me pause. For a moment
I remembered the humanity that had been so
quick to leave me. For a minute I was a mother
again. The instinct to nurture bubbled inside
me and that thin, gasping moan left me again,
now with a high pitched whistle that played
through a hole in my neck, of which I had
been previously unaware. The noise silenced
the crying beige box and I felt the wind still
as he held his breath. Then through that stillness
a steady beeping began and he reversed into
view in an electric wheelchair.
 
I moaned and lurched towards him, my arms
outstretched, tugged forth by the sex of his
meat. He heard me and looked back over his
shoulder towards me and his clawed right hand
manipulated the joystick on the arm of his
special blue chariot. He spun around and for
a moment we locked eyes. His were red and
swollen, mine apparently too awful to contemplate.
Dark hair stuck to the moisture that formed
in beads on his brow. A shade of stubble betrayed
his youth. He could have been handsome, had
he not been so withered. His face twisted
up into a grimace of disgust and fear as he
took in my image, panting. I felt parts of
me flap loose as I lurched forwards again
but this time down a high kerb, jolting hard
on the lower ground. I felt my right foot
twist then pop as it dislocated and swung
uselessly at the end of my leg, then I fell
flat on the tarmac. I spent so much time face
down on tarmac...
 
Seizing the opportunity he hit the stick that
manoeuvred him and tore down the gravel path,
past my thrashing, snatching corpse and clunked
off the kerb and onto the long straight road
that led him away from me. My inelegant frame
found itself again and I went after him, gnashing
and falling on one good foot and a right-angled
ankle. Despite his speed I persevered as he
diminished into the distance, the whir of
the electric motor that had helped him survive
me carried off in the warm, gentle breeze
of the sunny afternoon. I heard him laugh
and whoop into the crystal clear sky as he
disappeared from view.
 
But still I pressed on. As long as the abyss
inside me knew he was there I would always
press on because I was eternal and he was
not and I had only one need and it was him
and his flesh and bones and eyes and brain.
And progress was slow, but it was still progress,
and after an hour or so my loose swinging
eyes agreed for a moment on the same blue
chair in the middle of the same long, straight
strip of dark grey. However, now instead of
diminishing he grew bigger with every floundering
step I took as the distance between us altered
in my favour. The wind carried the sounds
of him towards me, like a child telling tales.
I heard him shout and hit out at the blue
bumper car that was now motionless in the
middle of the long, straight road.
 
I shuddered on through broken bones.
 
"Come on you piece of shit!”, he shouted,
crashing his ambulant limbs into the sides
of his tragic little vehicle. Thrusting his
torso he tried to lurch the car forwards with
a clumsy determination. He looked back over
his shoulder, but I was hidden in his blind
spot.
 
"Are you still there?” he said into the
wind.
 
Fear stained his words but beneath them I'm
sure I heard a layer of quiet resignation.
Relief even, but I may be projecting.
 
The wind retreated for a moment and a two-tone
moan emitted from the holes in me.
 
He heard it and began to sob. The sob turned
into a cry, then a scream, then a sob again
before he began to talk.
 
"Is this where I'm going to die?” into the
breeze. He didn't need the answer I couldn't
give him, and for a beat in time there was
just the two of us, the warmth of the sun
and a lilting bird song. It wouldn't be long
now.
 
He hung his head low for a moment. From here
his skull looked thick.
 
"I was crushed by a car." He threw the sound
over his shoulder, back at me.
 
"I was walking into a petrol station and had
to squeeze past the front of a parked Mondeo.
We needed milk. It was blue, the car, like
this”, he said of his wheelchair, and his
hand stroked its gleam.
 
"The engine was idling and the man inside
said he had the clutch down and the stick
in first. But he was old and his legs were
weak. He turned to get something off the passenger
seat but his foot slipped and the car jumped
forwards and crushed me into the wall. I was
kind of sideways..."
 
Closer now. I could see the back of his head
quite clearly and could make of the vertebrae
in the ridge of his spine where it appeared
above the line of his t-shirt.
 
"I was ten”, he said, but I didn't care.
 
"The man in the car came out round to the
front and held my hand till the ambulance
came. He couldn't stop crying"
 
His shoulders moved up and down.
 
"Did you see the people who left me at those
toilets back there? That was my Mum and Dad.
Well, he's not my real Dad but she's always
made me call him Dad. His name’s Steve"
 
"When I was little I remember her holding
me still and it burned and they were laughing.
I remember them laughing..."
 
Space and time.
 
"I'm not scared of you you know! I can hear
you; I know you’re getting closer! Slow
down though, please. There are things I want
to say. There was a woman at the hospital.
A nurse. I told her I was frightened of going
home. She knew but she let them take me anyway.
Her eyes when I was leaving..." He sobbed
a while longer. He needed to.
 
"We had good days too…..” he trailed off
as he contemplated his clawed hands.
 
He was so close now.
 
"So is this all I get? Just a couple of minutes?”
I was almost upon him. He looked back and
saw me. My teeth chattered and sprayed black
spit into the air. His face registered no
revulsion. He’d seen worse.
 
"Wait", he said, but I couldn't.
 
"Just give me one more minute", and he lifted
his head up to the sky and I think he smiled.
 
"I should have looked up more"
 
"It's so blue up there, isn't it?”
 
My hands found his shoulders and held tight.
For a second I felt them loosen in my hands
as I pulled us together. My arms wound around
his chest and the teeth clamped down on the
top of the spine that had failed him so long
ago, and as they crunched through those remaining
vertebrae I felt him relax in my arms. He
had no choice. We ate him in a frenzy of tooth
and nerve, and the sheets of his scarred pale
skin gave testament to the many abuses inflicted
upon him. And then he was gone, and the world
was no better or no worse, it was just as
bad as it had always been, but it was all
coming to an end.
 
There is an echo in time just after you kill
someone; and that echo creates a space. It’s
a space that draws you in and in which knowledge
collects. All the pain and all the love. All
the bombs and the sideways glances. The taste
of fish and the cut of a blunt knife and the
light in the morning at the bottom of the
sea. It's a never ending library, and if you
spend long enough in its echoing chambers
you see that we're all just really chapters
in a book that we both read and write until
our red ink runs dry and our eyes turn to
dust in our skulls.
 
So slow now. So little of me left. Just teeth
and bone. I rattle like a junkie on a Sunday
morning. The rattle brings a decaying old
man out from under a bridge and I lead him
on. I don't know how long it took to get down
the road and over another featureless field,
past another deserted petrol station, collecting
time and rotting corpses. Three. Eleven. Fifty-nine.
Three hundred and seven. Forwards. Onwards.
Always.
 
She was waiting for me.
 
The hill on the horizon looked familiar.
 
Just one more to climb.
 
CHAPTER 13
 
Over the hill now but not far away. The black
block that rose up before me was unfamiliar
from this angle but I already knew where we
were. I didn't need its recognition. I had
known I would end up here since I lost that
last stiletto. The school she ran away too
looked so alien from this angle as I descended
the hill behind it. I recalled satchels and
P.E. kits and the parent’s evenings. Do
you remember? She would talk too much, they
would say, and I would try not to be jealous
that they could hear her voice.
 
They were so hard to go to alone.
 
Inquisition burned through feigned sympathy.
 
Now thousands of mothers and uncles and cousins
and dads were here already, moaning up into
the shattered night sky and I led a gaggle
of their rot down the grassy knoll with my
need and my love.
 
Love.
 
Love will tear us apart they say, but so will
tooth and nail. And I had all three. She was
there and she was mine and I had to show her
who I had become.
 
No.
 
I had to show her who I always was.
 
I free fall into the end.
 
I see grainy footage of bodies falling from
fiery towers, not quite dead yet but with
no life left to speak of. Just a persistent
downward movement, tortured thought and one
wet, red inevitability.
 
In the scrum now. Pushing forwards through
the weak gangrene, purple, brown it gave way
like tender lamb. Weeks pass. Often it rains.
Galaxies spin a web overhead. One night the
moon peers over burst blue clouds and bores
into me with its lidless gaze. Its infinite
stare says only,
 
"YES".
 
The weak and the old break apart and their
remains become mush beneath my feet, piles
of moaning offal and bone.
 
Stepping stones.
 
I rise up over their slackened bodies toward
the window and press against the streaked
glass. It shatters under our legion and I
fall hard against the battened boards inside.
Through the boards I hear young voices make
desperate noises, but I keep pressing. Days
later the boards give way too and we fall
inwards into a dining hall and I know that
she has sat in the leather seat by the fireplace
because I can taste her sweat on the air around
it. My ragged tongue flicks through the air
and the black bubbles up out of all the holes
in me. The floor is wet with my gastric slick
and I slide forward in it as I follow her
sweet scent. It smells like night time honeysuckle
on a salty beach and I can't do this anymore!
I don't want to fucking be here or there or
me or anything! I want to smash my fucking
skull in and be spilled across these boards
and have my soul mix into the thin air and
dilute away into nothing! I want to be nothing
and nowhere and no one and wash away into
the sea where mermaids swim and comb their
hair and I had never killed you or her or
them or us. My god why!? Why did this become
me?! I had been a child once!
 
Forwards.
 
Through arms and legs and burning black spittle
I make it out of the battalion of hungry dead
and into the corridor. The first through,
I hear the door swing shut behind me and the
bodies pile up against it, gnashing and clawing,
but it sounds heavy and it doesn't give. Not
for a while at least. At the far end of the
corridor are two large double doors that lead
out into the garden and away, into the changed
world. I remember walking through them on
her first day, her two steps ahead. They creak
and groan under the pressure of the hungry
horde outside. I move on fractured legs down
the shattered corridor to where I know I need
to be.
 
And then there she is.
 
She rounds the corner of the common room clutching
a plank of wood with nails in one end. Her
thin face is streaked with grime and grit
and salt and I ache at her hunger. I am consumed
by a mothers need to feed her young. Two skinny
teenage boys run past her, down the corridor
then up a wide staircase. One shouts, "Lucy
you fucking idiot, MOVE!” but she stops
still. She is harder than I remember, almost
a woman now. She looks at me with diamond
eyes. They glisten and soften for a moment
as she sees through my black masque and the
tears that streak it and recognises me by
the skull we both share. My eyes fight each
other. One can't look at her, one can't look
away.
 
Oh god Lucy, I am so sorry.
 
A scream arrives from around the corner, followed
by the familiar sound of wet meat hitting
the floor. The sound of progress being made.
Lucy looks back over her shoulder, considering
her options. She blinks through tears with
eyes that have seen too much pain in the sliver
in time since they first opened. Pain that
I tried to save her from. Pain that I admit
that ultimately I inflicted. Skinny, dirty,
older, harder. She drops the plank and comes
closer. We want her to. We are reaching out
to her. We groan because we know but we don’t
want to stop. I feel moisture clear a course
through the many dried fluids on what’s
left of my face. She follows the black tear
down then looks into my loose, wet eyes and
I know she sees me.
She sees all of me.
All the hidden things.
She always did.
And then it's time. Her shoulders loosen and
she moves forward one last time and we embrace.
We hold her in our arms of bone. I see our
old lounge. The TV is on and I hear the telephone
ring in the next room. She answers it. Now
I see Lucy on her way to bed. I kiss her goodnight
on the top of her head, but I kiss her too
hard and my teeth grind against the skull
we made. She doesn’t struggle. I watch as
we undo her, put her back where she came from.
I see a red flower opening, then unravelling.
I see all of her hidden beauty. Beauty I made
and beauty only I will ever appreciate in
its component parts. When she was born she
was so good. She was such a good girl. Good
girl Lucy, good girl. She never screamed and
cried like the other children.
 
She never screamed.
 
* * *
 
You lay naked on the cold white tiles surrounded
by a foam of pink froth and dissolving vitamins,
which lay scattered around the giant ashen
dome of your gaunt, bald head. The heavy musculature
that had attracted me to you in that waiting
room all those years ago had long since drained
down a catheter and into a plastic bag beside
the bed, as the cancer that had recently eaten
into your brain dissolved the best of you
and now left you convulsing in a pool of epileptic
spit, tinged pink with tongue blood. After
about seven minutes you came round. Your eyes
swam and as you fought for the ability to
focus you looked up at me, sitting on the
closed toilet lid. I knew those eyes so well.
Every fleck and vein. They flickered between
me and the pills on the floor asked the question
your useless, twisted mouth couldn't.
 
"Because it’s taking too long, John.”,
I picked at my flaking nails stained red.
 
"This isn't about you anymore. Just go quickly
and let her have her life back".
 
You just gawped and gasped, like a goldfish
dying in the remnants of its shattered tank.
 
Your beautiful eyes raged, then pleaded, then
rolled back in your head.
 
As your pathetic body wracked with its last
convulsion I turned away from you one last
time and said, "I loved you", into thin air.
 
An hour later I called the ambulance.
 
* * *
 
EPILOGUE
 
Time, everywhere and nowhere, creates to destroy.
It is its only purpose. In then out. In then
out.
 
And I am The End. I have always been The End.
I ended you and her and him and them and us.
I tore through our collective history like
a plague of memory and now only mine remains,
and ultimately comes down to this…
 
I wrapped her, then unwrapped her, in a blanket
of red.
 
The pull inside has gone. For a while after
I ate our daughter the magnetic desire remained,
bloodlust pulling us forward past the school
toward another genocide, but my body was trampled
by the ravenous stampede and my twisted legs
became mush beneath me. Scrambling arms could
not release us from where we had become caught
in the broken floor and so here we remained
whilst other dead bodies tumbled towards new
mastication.
 
For years the pull was ecstatic agony. Limbs
and digits frenzied day and night to free
themselves, but fingers are just meat and
meat is weak and after only a few days of
thrashing an unlikely possibility became an
impossibility.
 
Here we would remain.
 
Me, a thought, a collection of memories, a
notion of humanity.
 
My body, my prison, and my monster.
 
And Lucy, a light, a daughter, and a ball
of bones and hair in my gut.
 
She was back where she began and this was
as close to a happy ending as I could ever
have hoped for. Gracelessly we groaned and
gnashed through several aching decades, trapped
in the crumbling school, which was slowly
burying us alive, or dead, or whatever we
were. Then, during one starry night, just
before the falling building extinguished the
sky completely, somewhere the last human light
went out, and with it the pull stopped abruptly.
Soggy stumps dropped down to the ground with
a thud, and fell still.
 
"Listen", said the wind as it found me through
the cracks in the building, "They are all
gone.”
 
Peace.
 
Over the next several hundred years I looked
out through degrading eyes and watched as
the building that would become my casket crumbled
and flaked. I never understood how fragile
the things we created were. Like fine spun
glass. Just sandcastles. 
 
It fell in fits and starts, the school, as
insect and breeze brought the outside in and
upholstered me in weed and moss. Through the
gaps in mortar and oak I watched as glorious
unbounded nature unfurled, released from the
burden of our humanity. It danced and created
and expressed itself in beautiful new strokes
over wide blue canvas. Through the falling
building I saw, and heard, trees of silver
thread play a deep vibrato into the air, and
a flock of metallic orange birds danced a
zig zag for me through turquoise.
 
A thousand more years of change.
 
The school became just another part of the
mossy hill. A beetle burrows into my eye socket,
chewing through those deflated white globes
and bringing with it a seed that bursts into
a tree. Its roots crack open my skull from
the inside and, finally, I am blind. But somehow
in these endless days I see more than I ever
did. I spread into the dirt and become it
and it me and I don't know how to describe
how I perceive this but we are each other.
 
Underground I join the mycelium. Spiralling
structures tell me how they pushed us up into
the world, crafted us from their own parts.
Just an experiment, they say. Just a game
they played. But the experiment failed and
the game lost its humour and so spore and
air aborted their baby, conspiring at their
cellular level as we smeared ourselves over
the surface of their planet. They animated
our dead through virus and instinct and, with
their beautiful cruelty, made the problem
into the solution. Finally, they trapped people
like me within their grotesque soldiers, perhaps
to bear eternal punishment for the mistakes
of a species, or perhaps to preserve us like
butterflies in a glass case. They would not
say, but I accept our fate.
 
All I have left is the thought of you. Our
story is etched on our DNA, into the fabric
of our bodies combined.
 
You and I, in her, in me.
 
Through web and mould our molecules carbonise
and replicate forever.
 
Nothing is wasted.
 
Your lives had value.
 
I recount every detail.
 
The way motes of our skin mixed in the air
of our home and fell through coloured light
cast through spindles and that stained glass
window halfway up the stairs. The heavy, soft
feeling just before you fall asleep on the
couch on a Wednesday afternoon, as the TV
casts flickering lies onto a threadbare carpet.
The freckles on our beautiful daughters arm,
a constellation in a universe we created.
 
The privilege of loving her enough to kill
you.
 
I honour the best parts of humanity by never
forgetting. I must honour the worst in the
same way.
 
For millennia I do. This tale, I tell it.
Never out loud, but the trees hear me and
they know what I did.
 
They forgive me, then they die.
 
Heat.
 
Our remains calcify and stratify between layers
of dirt and ash. Memories become grit become
stone. Pressure immense. Constant. No room
here for anything but broken compression and
this thought.
 
Bone is rock is me.
 
The inferno above. The terrible cracking and
we're torn apart. Many splintered fragments
of ourselves.
 
Many.
 
Spinning.
 
Cold.
 
Fragments.
 
Time.
 
No time.
 
One time...
 
The end.
