Resurgence, p.3
Resurgence, page 3
part #5 of Hell on Earth Series
A funeral pyre.
The scene of a massacre.
Mass froze. Honeywell came up beside him, and then placed a hand over his nose. “Jesus Christ!”
Mass stared at the pyre in horror. Multiple blackened bodies were encased in what appeared to be rings of melted rubber. The substance had fused with their bones and made their skeletons appear inhuman, more alien.
“Tyres,” said Honeywell evenly. “Somebody shoved tyres over their heads and chests before setting fire to them.”
Mass screwed up his face in horror. “What? Why?”
Honeywell glanced around the fields as though he suddenly feared being ambushed. Once he settled, he shook his head and said, “There was a South African gang in London that used to execute their rivals this way. They call it necklacing. You shove a tyre soaked in petrol over a person’s shoulders to incapacitate them and then set light to it. It’s brutal. It’s sadistic. Christ, even now, we’re still finding reasons to kill ourselves. There must be a dozen bodies in this pile.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Mass, shaking his head and wondering if he needed to bend over and be sick. The smell horrified him most. It reminded him of freshly cooked chickens at the supermarket rotisserie – a smell that once made his mouth water. “People wouldn’t turn on each other like this. Not now. Not after everything.”
Honeywell shrugged and turned away, shaking his head in disgust.
Tox grunted and got Mass’s attention with his thick Scouse accent. “Boss, summin’s moving over there. You want me to kill it?”
“What? No!” Mass jolted and hurried away from the pyre, wincing as his boot crunched on a charred bone. There was indeed movement ahead, partially obscured by the long grass. A soft moan came from the same spot, so subtle it could’ve been the wind.
Honeywell barked a warning. “Mass, be careful.”
Mass waved a hand at him to be quiet. He had his Uzi at the ready, a weapon he’d found while searching the office of a Portsmouth strip joint. (He’d also found a shitload of blow but had left it right where it was. Growing up on the streets gave him a natural wariness of taking drugs that weren’t his). It soon became obvious that the movement was coming from a person crawling in the grass. Mass lowered his weapon and rushed to help.
Honeywell shouted again. “Mass, get back!”
Mass skidded to a halt, horrified by what he saw. The woman’s face was so utterly charred on her left side that her eye had melted inside its socket. The burns covered her neck and spread across her shoulder and arm. Only half a tyre encased her, and when Mass searched the grass, he spotted the other half lying nearby. It had split apart, leaving the woman only half-burned to death. How long had she been like this? The pyre was cool. The fire had ceased burning at least twelve hours ago.
“H-Help me…” the woman moaned, her voice raspy and ruined.
Mass knelt beside her, the stench of her seared flesh making his eyes burn. “Who did this to you? Tell me and I’ll make them pay.”
“Deserved it…” Mass shook his head, but the woman hadn’t finished. “He said we deserved it.”
“No one deserves this. Who did this to you? Tell me!”
“The… The Reclamation.”
Mass frowned, wondering if he’d heard her correctly. “I-I don’t understand. Who did this to you? Where can I find him?”
“H-Help me.”
“I will, but I need to know what happened.”
“Help me… please.”
Honeywell spoke. “You can’t do anything for her, Mass. She’s suffering. It’s a miracle she made it this long.”
Mass waved him off. “Just a minute, Rich!” He looked back at the injured woman. “I can only help if you tell me what happened.”
The woman reached out weakly for Mass’s Uzi. For a moment, he thought she was trying to take it, but then her arm flopped back into the grass. “P-Please.”
Mass shook his head. He needed to know what monster had killed these people. Mankind was at war with a colossal enemy and needed every soul. If someone was out there killing people… It was more unforgivable than ever.
“Just try to concentrate,” said Mass. “I need you to tell me—”
Honeywell took a step forward, levelled his shotgun, and blew the woman’s head open. Then he glared at Mass and shook his head. “Enough!”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“There’s sufficient suffering in the world without letting it linger. She needed you to help her and you refused.”
“I didn’t refuse, you sodding idiot. I was trying to help her.”
“Well, you were failing. I’m sorry if you don’t see that.”
Mass wiped the woman’s blood from his face and stomped away. He would get the person responsible for this, and Honeywell wouldn’t be able to put a stop to the suffering that followed.
“What the…? Dog shit! You have got to be dicking me?” Smithy lifted his foot and grimaced as the stench slid inside his nostrils. He’d survived the end of the world, but dog shit was still the worst.
What did this dog eat? A goddamn burrito!
In a temper, Smithy wiped his tatty Reebok against the kerb. He took it personally. Not much happened during a typical day, so something like this was enough to ruin his mood all week. The day he stood in dog shit would forever occupy a space in his mind beside ‘that day he cut his lip trying to drink out of a broken beer bottle’ or ‘that day he sprained his ankle trying to climb a roof’. The good days included such things as ‘found an entire box of Peperami’ and ‘found a porno mag under a bed’. There were far fewer good days than bad.
The demons had never showed interest in stray dogs – only people – which was why packs of them now roamed the landscape like starving hooligans. In the early days of the apocalypse any breed was a rarity, but it was clear now that the hounds had only been hiding until starvation left them with no choice but to re-emerge. Nowadays, they rooted through bins and dug their way through empty kitchens as if the world was theirs. Now and then, one would take a nip at Smithy, but he was always happy to reply with his ice hockey stick. He’d taken it, along with his once-white Reeboks, from a sports shop many months ago.
Smithy’s tummy rumbled. While trainers and hockey sticks were easy to find, food was getting scarce. Most of it was rotten or spoiled. He was rapidly losing weight, but luckily he’d been three stone too heavy to start with. He was far from skinny, but hunger was a growing concern. Starvation, for the first time in his life, was a possible reality.
God, deliver me a kebab with hot sauce and jalapeños, and a bottle of Lucozade to wash it down.
He didn’t know the name of the town he was in – it was easy to wander these days without paying much attention – but it was just like most others. A row of shops lay ahead and formed the high street, but they all had smashed-in windows. Torn-up bodies littered the pavements, along with boisterous weeds and fading litter. During the summer, the bodies would’ve hummed with flies and stink, but the recent winter had frozen their rotting flesh and sent the flies and the smells away. Now the corpses were stale and greasy like oily cardboard. Smithy wore a scarf across his face most of the time, but he didn’t know for sure if the bodies were pestilent. Eventually, he supposed, they would become harmless bone and dust.
If only he could find some living people. Not the odd stranger here and there, but a town full of hardy survivors with cool nicknames like ‘Dutch’ or ‘Ryker’. He constantly envisaged rounding the next bend and finding a working farm with armed soldiers on the walls and a tank guarding the heavily fortified entrance. Surely some part of civilisation had survived.
The bloody strays have managed it! I can still smell shit on my Reeboks.
Eight months had passed since the gates first opened, but it seemed like a decade. Smithy knew it had been less than a year because of the gold Seiko around his wrist – an eighteenth birthday present from his old man. It had both the time and the date, and it was the only thing he owned of any importance. Keeping the calendar alive seemed important.
Eight months.
Eight months since I watched a footie match. Eight months since I had a Sunday roast.
Eight months since I had a sodding shag.
How much longer can I do this?
Loneliness had never been an issue in Smithy’s former life. He’d been a qualified web designer with his own fledgling business and two younger brothers. He was popular – the life of the party – and while he’d had no girlfriend when the gates had opened, a long list of conquests filled his past. Life had been good. Not amazing, but good. Now he was a ghost haunting a dead world, digging through trash with stray dogs.
At the last count, Smithy had killed fourteen demons. In the early months of the apocalypse, the monsters had travelled in packs, but a while ago things had changed. Now they wandered in dazed stupors, seeming not to know where they were or what they were doing. Some didn’t even attack when they saw you – they just mumbled and fidgeted like lost children. On the odd occasions when he couldn’t avoid a fight, his advantage came from the fact that demons rarely thought to arm themselves. It was simple to take them out with a claw hammer or the sharpened butt-end of his ice hockey stick. There was something sad about putting them down, almost like he was giving them mercy.
Christ, he was lonely. To have a companion would be great, but whenever he found other survivors, they were half-starving and mad. Just a few days ago, he’d come across a skinny woman chewing on a tree branch. Perhaps she thought the bark would give her sustenance. She hadn’t spotted Smithy, so he’d snuck away without saying hello. He needed a survival buddy, not a burden. He could barely feed himself.
But he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that woman since. She’d survived as long as he had, so perhaps she knew a thing or two. Maybe he should have said hello.
Yeah, right. We could have gone halfsies on some bark. Sorry, but I’ll pass. Give me a Big Mac any day.
Christ, I’ll never get to eat another Big Mac. Not even the gherkin. I’d even take a Filet-O-Fish at this point.
Smithy felt close to tears. The previous him would have been embarrassed, but when you lived each day in complete solitude, it actually helped to have a cry. It was cathartic. The lads weren’t there to laugh at him, so what was the harm? No sobs escaped him then though, only a voiceless trickle of tears. The chilly nip at his cheeks was rousing. Emotion was the only thing that reminded him he was still human in a world full of monsters, beasts and corpses.
When he stepped in another slopping pile of dog shit, his tears turned to curses. “Oh, you have got to be joking me? My Dog’s Trust membership is hereby revoked. Jeez, it smells like day-old curry. That dog needs a vet.”
Disgusted, Smithy started wiping his stinking Reebok against the kerb again, when he heard a shuffling sound to his right. It was a surprise to see a demon standing right there in the doorway of a charity shop, and at first he didn’t even realise it was one. Only the blistered flesh of its cheeks showed it was undead – or whatever.
Smithy gripped his hockey stick in both hands and rushed at the demon, but he skidded to a stop when it pointed a finger at him and growled. “You come near me with that, blud, and I’ll make you eat it, you get me?”
Smithy frowned. He’d heard demons talk before, in varying degrees of fluency, but none so clear as this. “W-Who are you?”
“I’m Frankie Walker, innit? I’m looking for my little bro. You seen ’im?”
“I, um…” Smithy cleared his throat. “What’s his name?”
“Davey. Blonde, short, nothing impressive, but he’s my blood. I need to find him, you get me?”
“Yeah, I, um, get you. Sorry, I haven’t seen anyone. Is he… Is he dead like you?”
The demon – or was it a zombie? – shrugged awkwardly. One of his shoulders seemed to pop in and out of place. “Dunno, blud. Waited for him in the other place, but he never came. Don’t remember how I ended up there, but Davey wouldn’t turn his back on me. He’s my little bro, innit?”
Smithy swallowed a lump in his throat. This sudden, unexpected conversation had left him off-balance. “Oh, um, well, maybe he didn’t end up in Hell then. That’s good, right?”
The demon suddenly changed. His oily face contorted and his bony hands bunched into fists. A knuckle broke through the skin. “The fuck you on about? I weren’t in Hell, was I! Why would I be in Hell? Was just some other place.”
Smithy gripped his hockey stick and looked left and right, wary of more demons appearing from shopfronts and alleyways. “Easy! I don’t know where you’ve sodding been, do I? Was just making conversation. But you are, you know, dead or whatever?”
The demon stopped being angry and sighed. “I dunno, mate. It’s a proper head fuck. I remember hanging with my crew, smoking bud and chillin’ like normal. I remember being banged up in the nick for a while too. Other than that though… It’s all blurry. There ain’t no memories of how I went from my old life to… this.” He motioned to his body, rotting away beneath a black T-shirt and jeans. “You asked me if I’m dead, but it don’t feel like it. I’m still me, yeah, but it’s weird. Like I’m wearing my body instead of it actually being part of me. And there’s this tugging… like I’m supposed to be somewhere else.”
Smithy lowered his hockey stick and relaxed. This demon – as with all demons – was obviously dangerous, but it wasn’t a mindless monster like most of the rest. “I’m sorry, man. That sounds horrible. Did you, did you come through one of those gates?”
The demon ran a hand over its moulting scalp and coughed. The sound was like wasps escaping a drainpipe. “Last I remember is waking up in a pile of corpses. There were these soldiers putting bullets in anything that moved, so I got up and did one. Trust me, I’m gunna go back one day and take ’em all out. Fucking murderers. You reckon they killed Davey? He might have been with me in Portsmouth. If they hurt him…”
Smithy raised an eyebrow. “You were in Portsmouth? There were soldiers there?”
The demon kicked at the ground with a pair of heavy tan work boots. “Pussies with guns, innit? I’d like to see how hard they are without ’em.”
“But you were in Portsmouth, right?”
“Yeah, blud. There were signs that said Portsmouth everywhere, innit? The pile of corpses I woke up in was by the sea. There were boats. Dunno where I am now though. Lost track a while back.”
Smithy chewed his lip and lost himself for a moment. So there were still soldiers around? Still some remnant of humanity? Was Portsmouth a safe place? The type of place he had been dreaming of finding?
“You need to help me find my little bro.”
Smithy flinched as he realised the demon had walked right up to him, close enough that the odour was dizzying. The stench was worse than the dog shit.
Smithy took a step back. “I, um, I have to get going. You’ll find your brother, though, I’m sure.”
“Got better things to do, ’ave ya?” The demon waved a rotting arm, indicating the ruined town around them. A mud-caked border collie slunk out from behind a tipped-over wheelie bin and appeared to watch them for a while before heading into an alleyway next to Argos.
Smithy raised his hockey stick but was startled when Frankie lashed out and snapped it in two. Both pieces clunked against the pavement. The demon was strong. Angry. “Whoa, what the hell, man?”
The demon was trembling with rage, but it stayed rooted to the spot, almost like it was trying to calm itself down. After a few moments passed, it put its hands up. “Look, I’m sorry. My temper is… It’s a little up and down right now. I just need to find my little bro. Davey needs me. Please, man, can you help me? I don’t know where to start.”
Smithy nodded – partly because he was afraid to tell this thing no, but partly because he felt sorry for it. “It’s Frankie, right?”
“Yeah, blud. What’s your name?” The demon offered a hand. Mindful not to show his revulsion, Smithy reached out and took it. Oily skin soaked his palm.
“I’m Smithy.”
“Good to meet you, Smithy. You seem like a good bloke, innit? You’ll help me, yeah?”
Smithy gave a thin-lipped smile, wishing he’d chosen to make friends with the woman chewing on bark and not this shambling corpse. Nothing about this seemed like a good idea, but he had to admit it was nice having company. “Yeah,” he said, “looks like I’ll be helping you, Frankie. Let’s go find your brother.”
Maddy paced her office, unable to do anything but wait. She knew that at any moment someone would barge in and announce the worst news – that some stuffy old general, once probably weeks away from retirement, had arrived. While Wickstaff might not have taken command conventionally, Portsmouth was hers. She had fought for it. She had won it. The spoils of war belonged to the victor. Maddy feared for her place in the world if it wasn’t by Wickstaff’s side.
From what Maddy had heard, General Thomas had helped liberate a large chunk of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, so he was someone to be respected. That didn’t mean he could just waltz into Portsmouth at a moment’s notice though. Rationally, Maddy knew Thomas was coming home to help. After securing the Middle East – and the stability of the new German Confederation – Thomas was clearly turning his focus to where it would matter most. Perhaps he should be received as a hero for that.
And not as an unwanted guest.
Wickstaff had reclaimed less than ten per cent of the United Kingdom, but people still hailed her as the great saviour. It was good PR, but built on sand – Wickstaff had confided as much. One more combined, focused assault by the demons would topple Portsmouth, and only luck had seen it prevail this long. Most of their larger munitions were spent, and a majority of Portsmouth’s professional soldiers had died in the Great Battle. Luck had followed luck, however, and the demons had scattered and become confused after Portsmouth defeated the fallen angels. But if they found a new leader to guide them, war would reignite.
