The dead spore collectio.., p.3
The Dead Spore Collection, page 3
“I wonder why they’re not moving.”
Yeah, that was a little weird. All four of them were stood as still as statues. They looked as smashed as what Donny wanted to get. Something else bothered Dominic, that weird chemical smell were coming from the kids too. “What is that?” He coughed. “Whatever it is, it might be best not to light up.”
He turned and cried out in shock when he saw Donny had frozen up as well. “Dude!” He waved his hand past Donny’s face, then clicked his faces. “Come on, man, stop arsing about.”
The four youths at the other end of the cutting all slowly turned their heads. An orchestrated groaning emerged from their mouths. He grabbed Donny’s shoulders and violently shook him. “Come on, you. Snap out of it!” Dominic was aware that the kids were now lurching towards the pair of them. He groaned himself and tried to pull Donny back over towards the metal railing. He had to let go when blonde Hair got close enough to lunge at Dominic. He easily dodged out of the way and pushed the kid forward.
“Get yourselves home,” he shouted. “The lot of you, before I really do kick your fucking arses!”
Blonde Hair merely turned back around and went for him again. Dominic fought down the panic when he saw the boy’s lifeless eyes. Whatever he had taken, reasonable threats weren’t going to work. Dominic launched his foot forward, his boot slamming into the boy’s testicles. It was like kicking a bag of potatoes. The boy just stood there, unaffected.
Panic gripped Dominic by the throat. He backed away from the approaching boys. Completely forgetting about Donny, until a lone voice of anguish caused him to spin around.
Donny was fitting on the ground. His back arching and his legs and feet drumming against the floor. Dominic dropped to his knees and placed his hands over Donny’s ears, while keeping a close watch on the four boys. He tried to keep his head still. “Come on, man. You need to snap out of this!”
The man suddenly stopped moving, he exhaled a cloud of vile noxious vapour before lying totally still. “What the fuck is this?” Dominic moaned. It was totally clear that Donny had just died. He had no pulse.
He moved back, still watching the four kids. At the back of his mind, the unthinkable was beginning to take form, that those four were no longer alive too. No matter how much he dismissed that notion as complete bullshit, the dreadful idea just clung on.
Dominic slowly got to his feet and backed away. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, intending to do exactly what one of the kids threatened to do earlier, to call the police.
His mate, Donny then turned his head towards Dominic. He got back onto his feet, the man’s doll-like eyes staring directly at him.
“Donny?” He approached his mate. “It’s me, man, it’s Dominic.”
The man suddenly dived at him, his outstretched fingers finding purchase on Dominic’s jacket. Before he was able to react, Donny’s mouth fastened over his upper arm. Dominic cried out in utter agony when the man’s teeth bit into his soft flesh.
He grabbed Donny’s hair and managed to pull his head away, the man’s bloodied jaw chewing on the lump of meat, he’d ripped out of Dominic’s arm. He pushed Donny into the other four and ran past them. His arm had already gone numb. He knew he was bleeding out, and if he didn’t get this sorted, Dominic would lost consciousness fast.
The five of them had picked themselves off the floor and were giving chase. His mind was having difficulty processing any coherent thoughts. All he could focus on was that he’d be dropping at any moment and if that happened. All of those things would fall on him and five sets of jaws would be ripping into his body.
Dominic went for the only options available to him. He jumped onto the fence next to him and threw his body over onto the other side. The last thing he heard before darkness claimed him was the howl of frustration from the creatures on the other side of that cutting.
Chapter Two
Shards of bright sunlight turned the insides of his eyelids bright red. He screwed up his closed eyes before turning away from the unwanted intrusion. Coming out from his deep sleep should have triggered enough warnings to push him straight into full alert but right now, all his muddled senses wanted to do was to listen to birdsong and to enjoy the heady scent of flowers drifting up his nose.
It was only when another smell burrowed through the flower aroma that pushed him further away from dreamland. It smelled a little like burning meat. That lingering smell refused to go away.
He snapped open his eyes and found his aching body lost in a vast sea of green. Dominic turned onto his back then sat up, resting the palms of his hands on the long grass behind him.
Recollections of the previous night refused to fully solidify. He got flashes of his fists striking flesh as well as Donny mentioning going out for a few drinks. Considering that his head currently felt like there was a German dancing around in there and he’d just woken up under this bright sun, Dominic concluded that the pair of them must have put away more than a few pints.
“Why are my feet wet?” He guessed that at some point, he and Donny must have gone and had a play in the beck, yet that little memory nugget stayed hidden away. He took his eyes off his soaking wet boots and scanned the horizon. Several columns of black smoke rose up into the sky. He frowned. Somewhere deep inside him, he knew that something really bad had happened. An event which certainly eclipsed waking up outside with wet feet. It didn’t matter how hard he tried though, Dominic couldn’t remember anything other than what his stubborn mind had already shown him.
Judging from all those columns of smoke in the distance, it looked as though half the next town was on fire. They’d been burning for some time as well, yet he saw no evidence of human activity over there. He should have heard the sirens from half the county’s fire engines rushing towards those fires.
He turned his head and softly moaned at the sight of a couple more columns of smoke close by. What the hell had happened? Dominic got onto his knees and slowly rose up, managing to stand without falling back down. He was weak. His stomach growled. It felt as though he hadn’t eaten for days.
It took most of his strength to struggle up the grassy slope and to reach the shoulder heath hedge. He ran his fingers along the wooden, hidden behind the greenery and considered his limited options. There was a narrow cutting on the other side of this barrier that would either take him up to the edge of the estate or he could go the other way and walk through the rough patch of spare land that was once a park. Dominic glanced down at his feet and decided to head for tarmac and buildings instead.
Why the hell was he down here I the first place? He couldn’t think of a single reason as to why he’d want to stray into the town’s most notorious housing estate. Brecken Gardens held nothing for him.
Did Donny somehow persuade him to visit a couple of the pubs around here? It sounded plausible, knowing his mate. How was he going to get over this damn hedge? Dominic lifted his arms, intending to push his hands through the bush and grab the top of the fence. He stopped moving when his eyes caught sight of a mass of dark bruises at the top of his arm.
“What the fuck?”
The bruises surrounded a crescent-shaped wound. What concerned him more than anything was it wasn’t recent. The skin was already growing back. Dominic didn’t bother lingering over how he’d received the wound, despite some inner voice suggesting that some fucker had taken a bite out of him.
He breathed in a lungful of air and stretched his arms. His weakness was gradually dissipating. His hunger didn’t seam to be as prominent either, the urging to tuck into a huge fried breakfast had just faded away. It’s as if his appetite saw the wound on his arm and suddenly decided to be somewhere else.
Dominic pushed away these unanswerable questions and focussed on getting over the hedge. He grabbed the top of the fence and hoisted himself over. His feet buckled and Dominic fell onto the hard-packed mud.
Perhaps his strength hadn’t fully returned after all. He sighed to himself and got up, brushing the dust from his trousers. He wished he could remember what the hell had happened to him. What he did remember made no sense, frankly, it was more than a little frustrating.
He reached the edge of the cutting and stopped dead, gaping in utter shock at the sight directly in front of him. He saw an untidy pile of charred human bodies in the middle of the road. His knees threatened to give out. Dominic grabbed the metal railing and turned away. His guts performed a slow tumble when the wind changed and he unwittingly swallowed a mouthful of air tainted with the heavy stench of burning meat.
“Oh my God, what the fuck has happened here? Dominic looked back, forcing himself to drink in this vile travesty and to try and come to terms with the fact that the limbs were still moving.
Missing pieces of recent memory now slotted into place. Dominic remembered the four boys lurching towards him. Their eyes like dead fish. He then recoiled at the recollection of Donny’s strong teeth clamping down on the top of his arm.
Dominic took a shaky breath, holding his nose to avoid that vile smell from assaulting his nostrils anymore.
Despite the unreal situation, despite the horror that he was seeing, this didn’t add up. These bodies had been here for longer then a single night and his arm wound was certainly older than a week, so if that was the case, where the fuck was his missing memories, more to the point, how could he still be alive? It’s pretty difficult to survive without eating and drinking for more than a few days.
Dominic’s body had all but given up telling his he was hungry. He dug out his phone and sighed when it would switch on. The battery was obviously as flat as a fart. “Come on, man, get your shit together.”
Whether he’d be out of it for a few hours, a week or a month, right now, stood here watching all those blacken limbs moving about like a mountain of dying spider legs, none of that mattered. What mattered more than anything was for him to get his priorities right.
He’d woken up in a different place and for the first time in weeks, Dominic missed the comforting weight of his side-arm. It was such a weird sensation and yet it was at least, a sensation that he could understand. This was no longer a tame land.
Dominic slowly walked towards the writhing bodies, their erratic movements were almost hypnotic. There must have been over two dozen bodies in that pile. A pair of thin arms pushed out from under a naked torso, the fingers walking down the bodies, until the fingernails found the tarmac.
He didn’t dare get too close to those limbs. The last thing he wanted was to get dragged into that pile. Dominic turned around, refusing to allow his head to linger over how those things could still be moving about. Instead he cast his gaze over the rest of his immediate vicinity, looking for any other clues as to what might have happened. There were two more plumes of black smoke close by. He guessed that they were close to the town centre.
He saw no other signs of movement, nor did he hear any signs of civilization, no shouts, no voices, not even car engines disturbed the silence. The feeling that he was the only person left standing was difficult to shift.
“No, that’s bollocks. There’s got to be others about.” Dominic looked past the bodies and examined the four houses in front of him. Whoever lived in two of the houses had left in a hurry. They hadn’t bothered shutting the front doors. He shifted to the side, trying to look inside the first house.
The walls were splattered with what could be dried blood. Dominic decided against checking it out. He needed to get home and check on his dad. Everything else would have to wait. He also didn’t really want to go into any potential danger zone without tooling himself up first. Checking on dad wasn’t his only reason for heading back home.
He had hidden a weapon under his bedroom floorboards. It wasn’t his side-arm, for some reason, the army wouldn’t let him take that home when they discharged him. That complication hadn’t been that much of an obstacle. He’d made friends with more than one guy in the forces that had contacts on the outside, and a quick trip to some seedy pub in the north of England, three weeks ago, reunited him with a weapon, complete with enough ammunition to fill a supermarket carrier bag.
He tried not to think about how a three decades old East German pistol would be able to protect him against people that refused to stay dead. He glanced down and spotted something very familiar. “Okay, so that’s weird,” he muttered.
Dominic bent down and picked up the bicycle chain. Was this dropped by Mr Baseball Cap? If so, how on earth did it end up over here? He shrugged to himself, another question without an answer. Still, this was better than nothing. It would make do until he grabbed his gun.
Holding the chain did make Dominic make him feel a little safer. Safe enough to check out a couple of those houses over there? What harm would it be to take a shift peek to see if he could find out what had happened? A recent newspaper would see to that.
The way he saw it, there was about a mile between him and his home. How many buildings would he have to pass before he arrived at his destination, a hundred, two hundred? Who knew what potential dangers could be out there waiting to drag him down to hell.
Dominic walked around the moving bodies and made his way towards the first house. He pushed open the gate and slowly walked along the stone path, his eyes not moving from the house’s dark interior.
The closer he got, the more convinced he became about the mess on the two walls was blood. There was so much of it though. It looked like somebody had thrown several overflowing buckets of gore against the wallpaper. Dominic shivered, or somebody pulling the cord on a suicide vest. He knew from bitter experience that the aftermath he was seeing only hinted at the horrific violence and mayhem that must have happened sometime in the past few hours.
He found himself lifting his hand in readiness to knock on the door. Dominic suppressed an hysterical giggle before forcing his arm back down to his side. “Christ on a bike,” he said.
Dominic stepped over the threshold and gingerly tip-toed around the small lumps of wet, glistening flesh which littered the dark coloured carpet.
Had this been some kind of terror attack, or an outbreak of some new and virulent disease? Was it local, and if so, had the authorities contained it? He stopped next to the first closed door and pressed his ear against the wood. After about a minute of listening to nothing apart from his own breathing, Dominic quietly pushed open the door.
He found himself staring into the interior of a modern kitchen. By the looks of it, nobody had been in here for a while. A thin layer of dust covered every surface. Unlike the abattoir scenes in the hallway, the kitchen was untouched by violence.
Dominic placed the chain on the black tiled island, he took out a cook’s knife from the cutlery drawer and slid it under his belt. The way he saw, you couldn’t have too much protection.
He wandered over to the window, grabbing his bike chain as he passed. Nothing looked out of place in the occupant’s back garden, at least that was the case until Dominic noticed a severed hand lying in the bird bath in the middle of the lawn. “This is fucking crazy!”
With everything he’d seen since waking up, that hand, just lying there, in it’s own blood-stained water affected him the most, He had no idea why either. Dominic closed his eyes and leaned against the side of the fridge. It felt as though he was walking through someone’s nightmare, it couldn’t be his, how could it be? Dominic knew he was awake.
He opened the fridge door, staring into the darkness. He wrinkled his nose against the smell. Was he totally sure that this wasn’t his own private nightmare? After all, he’d already established that there’d been a significant gap on his memory, who’s to say that this wasn’t a waking dream? Who’s to say that it wasn’t drink that he’d thrown down his gob the night before? He knew for a fact that his mate had become quite the little drug addict since Donny was discharged two months before the fuckers threw him out on his heels.
A drug induced nightmare? He had to admit, the idea did comfort him, in the way that he could wake up at any moment to find everything make to normal. He picked out a tub of margarine. According to the date on the side, this ran out yesterday. If, that is, this was the day after he got back. “Fuck, this is making my headache return.” Apart from the margarine, every other food item was in Tupperware containers, making it impossible to work out the real date. He slammed the door and hurried out of the kitchen. He stepped through the mess and opened the next door. This one led him into the living room.
“At least,” he said, grinning, at the sight of a newspaper lying on the glass coffee table. It was dated a week after he blacked out. “Jesus.” He felt his legs go weak again. All the signs had already pointed to his prolonged sleep, but to see it in black and white felt as though someone had dunked his head into a bucket of ice-cold water.
So, here it was. That paper could answer so many questions. Dominic got to the brown leather chair and flopped into it, his shaking fingers gripped the edge of the paper and he pulled it towards him. Dominic read the screaming headline three times seriously wondering if he’d gone back in time. The biggest new item that they could find was of some member of parliament fiddling his taxes. “What the fuck is this?” He flicked through the rest of the pages, failing to find anything about any attacks, articles about mass deaths or anything about burning fucking bodies. “This is utter bollocks.” Dominic threw the paper back on the table. The end of the world had arrived and all this paper cared about was the antics of some minor government official.
He rested his hands on the cool leather arm rests and listened to the birds outside. His dad had a chair very similar to this one. He’d lost count of the times he’d fallen asleep in his dad’s chair. That had been before he’d joined up though, before the incident that sent his life into a downward spiral. The only difference being back home, he had the buzz of the fridge and the noise of the dad’s clock to lull him to sleep.
In here, he had nothing but the birds. Dominic so wanted this to be some drug induced fantasy, he so wanted to go to sleep and wake up in his dad’s chair, with the comforting home-like sounds he missed.
