Date: 2016-09-17 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: In a town in southern England, people are going missing. Mason, a homeless ex-con, arrives in the town to beg his wife for a second chance and atone for past mistakes. A vampire god once worshipped by ancient Britons has awoken from hibernation and plans to turn Great Britain into a vampire isle. But first, people of the town must be converted, and the gospel spread. Within a week, the town is quarantined by the military, and the nights belong to the undead. There will be no escape for the survivors.
Publisher: Sinister Horror Company

PRESENTS

KING CARRION

RICH HAWKINS

KING CARRION

First Published in 2016

Copyright © Rich Hawkins 2016

Written by Rich Hawkins

Edited by Daniel Marc Chant

Published by The Sinister Horror Company

Cover art by Vincent Hunt
www.jesterdiablo.blogsport.co.uk

Twitter: @jesterdiablo

The right of Rich Hawkins to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9935926-6-9

DEDICATION

For my Dad. I miss him every day.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks and gratitude to everyone who’s supported my work, since I emerged shy and whimpering into this genre they call horror. Much appreciation goes out to the beta readers and those who’ve offered advice and wisdom. And last of all I salute my family, without who I’d probably lose what little sanity I possess.

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations . . . then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." - Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“Videogames are bad for you? That’s what they said about
rock-n-roll.” —Shigeru Miyamoto

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good
men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

PROLOGUE

Northern England, 49AD

The day waned into shadows bleeding with bitter cold. This was the last light before dusk.

The painted men worked quickly to restrain the women against the stone pillars. Four sacrificial victims for the god who walked in the forest. The victims didn’t struggle or resist while the potion administered to them earlier still coursed through their blood. They were placid and compliant.

Hunched and wheezing under a thick cloak of wolf fur, the old shaman stood away from his acolytes and watched them while keeping one eye on the darkening sky. Once the ropes were secure the men checked each knot and binding, then fell into line before the shaman and awaited him with solemn faces and downturned eyes.

The forest clearing was silent except for the low whisper of the wind through the surrounding trees. This close to dusk the shaman sensed the animals of the forest retreating to their dens, burrows and nests, to hide from what hunted in the darkness. He saw the fear in their wild hearts.

The shaman blessed each of the men in turn with his antler-crowned staff. Young men in stained furs, their faces and chests painted white. Their hair was spiked with lime. They were devout, loyal acolytes, and the old man considered them as kin. His successor was among them, ready to be chosen by the elders. By tomorrow, there would be a new priest for the tribe.

The sun had fallen beyond the forest. Hushed breaths turned to mist in the numbing air. A glacial wind rushed through the trees and across the clearing. Wolves in the distant hills cried at the emergence of the pallid moon.

The shaman stood before his acolytes and leaned upon his staff. Each intake of air prickled at the inside of his chest. His bones grew more brittle as the days passed. But this was of little importance, as there would be no more days for him after tonight.

The young men watched him. Some of them wept openly, and he comforted them with the old words and simple prayers of their tribe. They touched heads. And then he bid them farewell and watched them depart. The men vanished into the trees with their burning torches and short blades to keep away the sharp-toothed things.

He hoped they reached the village before nightfall.

*

The shaman pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and walked within the clearing. Below the knee-length grass his bare feet padded on patches of moss and dead leaves degrading into mulch. In the bare dirt between the stones he drew shapes and symbols with the end of his staff. The ground was spongy from the previous day’s rainstorm. Underneath the cloak, his dirty robes shrouded the frail and withered form of a man waiting to die. He looked up at the first stars appearing in the sky. The wind mourned the loss of another day.

The women in their sacrificial robes murmured in their stupor. They were dreaming. The shaman watched them for a short while. Theirs was an envied fate, and their names would be spoken in dreams and memories for as long as the tribe endured.

Privately, for the last few months, he had worried about the rumours coming out of the south, about an invading army making its way northwards. Romans, they were called, and eventually they would wipe out or convert the shaman’s tribe. He had seen it in visions and fugues while kneeling by the fire inside the temple. The mushrooms he’d ingested only made the visions more vivid and terrible, but they’d shown him the truth of things to come. His dreams told him of tribes all over the isles falling to the sword of this army and their new god. And what would happen to the old gods then? Who would be left to worship them?

These thoughts made him sad and angry. Maybe the old ways would survive, somehow, but he held little hope. The rites and customs of his people would be ground to dust.

He downed the last of the water from his drinking horn and watched the trees. Beads of water ran down his long beard. It was almost full dark. He shuddered.

Then, deep in the forest, something let out a mournful wail that echoed through the trees and reached into the sky towards the moon. A warning to all the animals and beasts of the land. He dropped the drinking horn and it clattered by his feet.

His voice trembled with awe. “I hear you.” Then he recited parts of an old song under his breath and spoke the names of his God, because his God had many names.

A gust of wind slipped across the grass. In the silence that followed he listened to his heart flounder and stammer, old and tired and waiting for the end.

*

The shaman retreated to the eastern edge of the clearing and stood amongst the trees and bracken, motionless next to the thin trunks. He raised the cloak over his head and kept watch. Straight ahead of him, fifty paces away in the middle of the clearing, the women slept within their bindings. The stone pillars appeared almost black. He prayed that the women would not be aware when the God of the Forest fell upon them.

The stars burned above the silent land.

And in the moonlight a shape emerged from the trees at the northern side of the clearing. The shaman put one hand to his mouth as he stared at the thing that was no more than a shadow within shadows. He felt a nervous smile twitch at the corners of his mouth. The song of his heart, of terror and joy, rang inside his skull. He watched as the tall shadow lowered to the ground and skittered through the long grass like an animal. Then it raised itself and stood among the sleeping women, muttering into its hands as it looked upon them with eyes the priest could not see. It stepped closer to the nearest woman and began sniffing at her, drawing in deep breaths through the holes in its face.

The woman stirred, then woke with a gasp and raised her head, and she barely had the time to scream before the shadow enshrouded her and for a moment the only sound was of her bones cracking beneath its writhing mass. Then a gurgling as its mouth worked at her skin, followed by a wet ripping as her throat was torn away.

The God of the Forest fed slowly, at leisure.

The woman was the only one of the victims to wake. The God accepted the offerings and visited each of them in turn as the shaman cowered and watched from the treeline. And when the God was finished and left its victims as nothing more than drained and broken corpses, unrecognisable as the women they’d been before the sun had fallen, it stood tall in the clearing below the moon and turned its unseen face towards the sky. It released a shrill cry that filled the night air and seemed to travel far beyond the clearing and the forest and the high hills. The shaman’s legs turned to water and he had to lean against a tree. He stared in wonder and awe, his heart pounding, his limbs trembling. Since his childhood he’d learned of King Carrion, the God of the Forests and Hills. Old Tooth was another of its names. A creature that had been worshipped from before the days of his early ancestors.

The shaman gasped at the air, and his wheezing breath became a wet rattle in his chest. It it was enough to draw the attention of King Carrion, the God, the Killer of Men. And the shadow lowered near to the ground and slipped through the grass until it was bearing down upon him. It raised itself to its full height. The shaman whimpered, and it was all he could do not to drop his precious staff. His bowels became slop. He let out a childlike whine as he fell to his knees before his God. Numb with terror, he said its name twice and looked up, tears stinging his eyes.

Its face, except for the red eyes and sharp mouth, was hidden behind filthy dark rags and linen. A thing of writhing shadow. There was a horrific stink of spoiled meat and battlefields, blood and offal. And beneath that was a mustier reek of livestock, rotting straw and old bones. It muttered an old language beyond the shaman’s knowledge. Words older than the tallest of trees. Then it fell silent and just stood there, looming over him. The flapping of dirty rags and cloth upon a thin body partially revealed in the shades of moonlight. The suggestion of horns or stunted antlers upon the scalp; or it could have been the tip of a crown made of animal bones. A twitching mouth of black gums and yellow teeth dripping with blood. Its breath smelled of dead things.

The shaman drew back from the stink and coughed until his old chest could take no more. He vomited milky froth onto the leaf mulch and dirt. When he was done, he bowed his head and placed his hands together in prayer as his mouth formed an expression of supreme joy mixed with absolute terror.

The towering figure, this taker of souls, reached down with long arms, placed its bony hands upon his head, and lifted him from the ground. He knew better than to struggle, and bit down on a cry that rose from his throat. The God drew its bloodied face to his ear and without moving its mouth asked something of its highest priest. The words were inside his head, in a voice mimicking his dead father. His eyes went wide. Bone fingers scraped against his scalp.

Loyal Priest, you know of the Romans and the might of their empire. And they know of me and what I am. They both fear and hate me, and when they arrive here they will hunt me to death, as they will those who worship me. Their army will chase me down with hunting dogs. They will find me among the trees and burn me out of the forest and impale me in the sunlight. Then they will scatter my remains to the winds. I must retreat into the earth to save myself from Roman swords. You are my most devoted follower and you must hide me away and never speak a word of my resting place.

The shaman listened, nodding his head as tears fell down his face and into his mouth. Through his connection to his God he saw those things in his mind and he wanted to scream.

Those long arms lowered him back to the ground.

The shaman, trembling and weak from the sickness inside him, raised his head from his chest, stood on weak legs and offered his undying service.

CHAPTER ONE

The rain had already stopped when Mason reached the address scribbled on the scrap of creased paper in his hands. He stood outside the house and pulled the hood of his coat back from over his head. He absently ran one finger over his wedding ring as he walked down the cul-de-sac’s main road, which was lined either side with red brick homes and winter-bare gardens. Most of the driveways were empty this close to midday, but he was aware of the occasional twitching net curtain in upstairs windows.

Crows and gulls wheeled and glided overhead, dark shapes against the grey sky.

Mason looked at the front of the house and swallowed a sour knot in his throat. His heartbeat filled his ears, drowning out the sounds of the meandering day. He put the piece of paper in his pocket and wiped his mouth, his hand scraping over the bristly stubble on his chin. A gust of wind slipped down the road and pulled at his shoulders. He winced as he appraised the windows and the front door. Exhaled a tired breath that tasted of cigarettes and sour nerves on an empty stomach.

He walked up the pathway that split the dark lawn of patchy grass. His legs felt rigid and brittle. He kept his head lowered because the thought of seeing Ellie’s face in one of the windows almost induced in him a panic attack.

A bearded gnome with a conical red hat smiled gleefully at him from beside a bird table heaped with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. The fence that separated the garden from the next one had been recently creosoted, and he wondered if some male friend had done it for Ellie. He put the thought aside and stopped at the front door. Churning in his stomach. The flutter of his heart. He closed his eyes for a moment before he knocked slowly on the door three times and then stepped back until he was halfway down the path. He stood with his arms at his sides, glancing at the front door. Anxiety frothed in his stomach, rising into his chest. He suddenly felt very exposed.

He was looking at his boots when the door opened, and for a second he didn’t want to raise his head. But he did, and he opened his mouth to talk but the words never left the back of his throat.

Ellie stood in the doorway, frowning with something like disdain in her eyes. She folded her arms across her chest and stiffened. Her mouth was flat and bloodless.

Silence except for the breeze whispering through the tall trees behind the houses.

Mason’s heart winced. He fidgeted with his hands. Looked at Ellie, blinking rapidly. His eyes watered. She had lost some weight since he’d last seen her. Her hair was cut shorter and dyed a little darker. She wore a dark green woollen jumper and blue jeans. Dull white trainers. Size six, he remembered.

“What are you doing here, Mason?”

He wanted to move, to step towards her. Be closer to her. But it felt like he was submerged in cold water up to his knees.

“I just wanted to see you.” The moisture seemed to have been leeched from his mouth.

“We’re not together anymore,” she said.

“It’s not official yet.”

“How did you find me?” She didn’t move from the doorway.

He cleared his throat. “We still have mutual friends.”

“I wish that weren’t the case.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Mason.”

“I had to see you.”

A shadow passed over her face. “Well, now you have. Please leave.”

Mason bit his lip to hide the trembling of his mouth. “I’ve come a long way to see you. I had to hitchhike here from Devon, for fuck’s sake.”

“Don’t swear at me,” she said. “Don’t tell me how you’ve had a hard time. I don’t want to know.”

He sighed and had to glance away from her.

Ellie coughed into one hand. “I came here to start again, and to try and forget what happened. And most of all to forget you, Mason.”

“Ellie, listen…”

She shook her head. “Please leave.”

“But…”

“Leave or I’ll call the police. You shouldn’t be here. You’re not supposed to be here.”

Mason sagged and looked at the ground. His throat tightened as he raised his face at her. He blinked at the cold breeze and shivered. The sky seemed darker than before. Far away thunder echoed from the west.

“I haven’t got anyone else,” he said, hating how pathetic his voice sounded. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

She shook her head again. “That’s not my problem. You’ve burned all your bridges, Mason. You did a terrible thing.”

“I made a mistake.”

“And now you’re paying for it.”

“Please, Ellie. I’ve stopped drinking. Haven’t touched any booze in months. I’m sober.” And with that he felt a pressure behind his eyes and a sudden craving for anything from the finest scotch to a bottle of the cheapest cider from a corner shop. His teeth itched and he clenched his hands into fists; Ellie noticed and stepped back behind the threshold.

“Please go away, Mason,” she said. “And don’t come back. Never come back.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Eyes downturned, he slowly turned away and went back down the pathway and onto the pavement outside the garden. When he looked back, Ellie was already closing the front door. He was sure he heard the click of a lock and the scrape of a bolt being thrown.

He stood in the street with the silent houses around him and looked up to the sky. Rain began to patter upon his shoulders and the ground. The concussion of thunder above the city reminded him he was far from comfort and shelter.

CHAPTER TWO

Mason walked the streets as the day wore on, even as the rain worsened and the high-up echoes of thunder boomed past the blanket of ashen clouds. He weaved through crowds of shoppers and pensioners. Young mothers pushed prams within which infants squirmed or slept. A bearded man rebuked his son for stepping into the road.

The smell of takeaway food and cooking meat mixed with damp clothes. Cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. Tall old buildings loomed over narrow streets where different languages were overheard and dismissed. Stray words caught in his ears. Gossip whispered past creased mouths. The squawking of old women gathered under the changing lights of a pedestrian crossing.

Car headlights reflected upon the wet roads. The blare of a horn. A thumping stereo muffled by tinted windows. The squeal of tyres. The sound of a barking dog from beyond an open window.

He was shivering in his clothes, treading along slippery pavements, past frothing gutters and drains. His head spun and his vision watered at the edges, distorting the faces of the people he passed. He sheltered in a doorway, and then under a bus stop where he received odd looks from other people when he began muttering to himself and rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. The image of Ellie’s face taut with an expression of mixed distaste and pity replayed in his mind and left him feeling hopeless as he wandered down unknown roads. He passed windows aglow with light from lamps and flickering television screens. The warm interiors of pubs and restaurants lured him to their doorways, but he paused at the thresholds and slumped at the sour musk of his own scent underneath his dripping coat. He watched the people eating and drinking, smiling and laughing.

It all seemed so far away.

He meandered to a nearby park and stood on the grass, blinking in the rain and the cold. Hunger pawed at the walls of his stomach, so he sipped from the water bottle out of his rucksack and hoped that would be enough for a little while. He checked how much was left in the bottle then put it away, and rubbed his hands together to warm his palms, glancing around as the park slowly emptied. A few people loitered on the pathways, taking photos with their phones. There was some laughter. When he saw a young couple walking hand-in-hand he had to look away and exhale slowly to quieten the anger in his gut. Then he found himself alone in the rain, with the wind sweeping across the grass.

He sighed. Bit his lip. He was stupid to come here, to the town. Had he expected Ellie to welcome him with open arms and forgiveness? To still feel something for him? Desperation had made him foolish. Maybe he was losing his wits and going a little mad. That would not surprise him. He sometimes thought about those things when the night was darkest.

Dusk was falling around him, past the skeletal trees and sloping roofs of old buildings. The spire of a nearby church darkened against the fading sky, like a tower of onyx raised from the earth.

*

As darkness fell he ducked inside a shop doorway and checked his pockets. Aside from a few sticks of chewing gum, a pouch of rolling tobacco and a pack of Rizlas, there was only some spare change and a rumpled five pound note. Certainly not enough for a room in a hotel or a B&B. Maybe enough for a few cups of tea and a chocolate bar.

The surge of office staff finishing work had receded, and the streets quietened as the temperature dropped. For a while he loitered under an empty bus shelter, sitting in a corner with his hands in his pockets and head bowed against the icy wind. Hours passed in tedium and cold, humming the tune of an old song under his breath. The rain had slowed to a soft drizzle seen in the sodium glare of the streetlights. Cars splashed through the puddles and standing water on the roads. Pubs and restaurants were filling with life; laughter, loud voices, and the clink of wine glasses. Mason yearned for that world and yet detested it, even as he tried to stifle the urge for a cold pint of Stella.

He thought about Ellie and wondered if she had company; someone she’d met at her place of work or in a bar. Maybe they were in one of the restaurants or pubs, enjoying a meal or a drink. Maybe she was in bed with someone; the image of her gasping and delighted beneath the movement of a faceless man made him senseless with anger. He shook his head, spat phlegm onto the pavement, and dug his fingernails into his palms so hard they left dark indentations in the skin. It did no good to think like that; it would drive him back to the comforting haze of supermarket brand vodka, if he wasn’t careful.

Mason left the bus shelter and traipsed down the street, weaving around a group of laughing teenagers outside a set of large iron gates. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact. After he’d passed the group, a few of the boys spat insults at him, but he didn’t turn around. He just kept walking.

CHAPTER THREE

Mason found a twenty-four hour café and sat at a table near the large window in the shopfront, watching the street while he nursed a cup of tea. He picked the crumbs of a digestive biscuit from the saucer and dropped them into his mouth. When the waitress wasn’t looking he slipped sachets of sugar into his pockets. On the other side of the room, an overweight man bulging inside a dark fleece was hunched over an all-day breakfast, stuffing scraps of sausage, hash browns and bacon hurriedly into his mouth like he was scared someone would steal it from beneath him. Mason tried not to stare as his mouth watered for hot food.

The smell of his damp clothes and drying sweat had left the two tables closest to him empty. When the staff began glaring at him, he finished the tea he’d already spent over an hour looking down on, picked up his rucksack and left.

*

After roaming the streets in the hours during both sides of midnight, avoiding drunks and belligerent young men looking for confrontation, he could take no more and sought refuge in a tumbledown churchyard. He took the penlight torch from his coat pocket and stepped amongst the old graves, running the thin beam over the names of the long-dead and forgotten. Derelict and scarred gravestones. Most of the burial plots seemed to have been left untended amongst the overgrown grass.

He walked along the outside of the church, treading through clumps of thick weeds, and found a side doorway recessed within an arched stone porch. The door was locked when he tried the black metal handle, so he unshouldered his rucksack and sat upon the cold stone floor with his back against the wall. On the opposite wall was a corkboard pinned with church announcements and events. He pulled the blanket from his rucksack and covered his legs and drew his knees to his chest and watched the incessant fall of the rain beyond the doorway.

He wished he was with Ellie, in a warm bed in a warm room under a safe roof. His joints scraped whenever he shifted his limbs. The hard wall found the tender spots of his aching back. Needling pain behind his thighs and knees. And before he fell asleep, all of the guilt, shame and painful memories of the last few years replayed in flashbulb images behind his eyes.

*

In dreams he saw the wreck of the car by the side of the road and the people screaming inside. Then he saw the tyre marks on the tarmac and the gouges in the earth where the car had veered from the road. Flashing blue lights all about him in the waning light of a summer’s day. Electric blue. Someone was calling his name with a voice stripped down to panic and horror. The indistinct forms of sheep bleated from the field beyond the road. Smell of smoke and burning rubber. Torn metal and shredded plastic.

The last thing he saw was the small girl in the backseat, slumped across the seat with a neck that seemed too loose and boneless. There was blood in her hair. Her eyes were open and staring at Mason without sight.

She was the Dead Girl.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the morning he woke trembling with fragments of the dream still vivid in his mind. Like shards of glass he could not remove. He moaned with his hands over his eyes, and the sudden self-loathing he felt made him nauseous, close to tears and hopeless for the day ahead.

A short bearded man in an ankle-length coat was standing over him, looking down with a concerned expression and pale eyes set within the creases of an old face.

Still emerging from sleep, Mason raised his hands in an instinctive reaction and muttered wordlessly through a dry mouth.

“It’s okay,” the man said, holding his hands out as he backed away to the opposite wall. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The blanket fell from Mason’s legs as he stood. He cleared his throat and looked at the man. “What do you want?”

The man made something like a nervous smile through his greying beard. He pulled at one side of his woollen hat then adjusted the strap of the satchel over his shoulder. “I was just seeing if you’re okay, lad. Last night wasn’t a good night to be sleeping rough. This is my usual spot to kip, but I spent last night at a friend’s place.” His words were softly-spoken in a Scottish accent.

“I’m fine,” Mason said. “Thanks for your concern.” He coughed and slapped his chest. His throat was dry and raw, so he drank from his water bottle while he kept one eye on the man.

“You a newbie?” said the man.

Mason returned the bottle to its place in the rucksack. “A newbie?”

“I haven’t seen you around here before. I know all the vagrants around here.”

“I’m not a vagrant.”

“Then why are you sleeping in a church doorway?”

“I think you should mind your own business.”

The man looked away. “Fair enough, lad. Didn’t mean to pry.”

Mason gathered his belongings. “Sorry to have taken your spot. You can have it back now.” He shouldered the rucksack and walked outside. He took four steps before the man spoke behind him.

“You wanna get some breakfast, lad? I know a place, if you haven’t got any food. No one should go hungry.”

He halted. His stomach groaned. He looked up at the miserable sky and the rainclouds approaching from the west. Car engines and exhausts rumbled and coughed from nearby streets. The cawing and squawking of unseen crows. The click of heels on a pavement beyond the trees at the edge of the churchyard. A dog was barking at the early morning.

Mason turned around and eyed the man warily.

The man had stepped onto the pathway, hands in pockets, grimacing at the same sky. He looked at Mason. “Don’t worry, lad, I’m not after your arse.”

*

The old man was called Calvin, and he took Mason to a supermarket down the road and led him around the back of the building. Stacks of wooden pallets stood against the wall. Cardboard boxes dismantled and piled in disarray. The smell of damp. A dripping gutter pipe.

When Mason asked, with some anxiety in his voice, why Calvin had brought him there, the old man simply smiled thinly and opened a large wheelie bin with his gloved hands. He bid Mason forward as he took a bulging refuse bag from the bin and placed it on the ground. He opened the bag and stretched the hole wide enough for him to push his hands inside.

“They bring it out every morning,” Calvin said. “A free breakfast.”

Mason peered into the bag. It was full of out-of-date cakes, pastries and bagels. Calvin began to fill his satchel with food from the bag. When he saw Mason looking, he said, “They’re for friends of mine.”

“Okay.”

Once Calvin finished loading his satchel he delved again into the bag and took a bite from a chocolate croissant. He looked up at Mason. “Tuck in, lad.”

*

After a breakfast that left Mason with a bloated stomach and a dose of heartburn, the two men walked to a nearby greasy spoon. Mason waited outside, rolling a cigarette as he watched people flock and hurry to work. The roads were busy with vehicles travelling in all directions. Buses crammed with passengers, their heads bowed towards newspapers, paperback novels, mobile phones or magazines.

A few minutes later Calvin emerged with two coffees in Styrofoam cups. He handed one to Mason. “Milk and two sugars.”

Mason nodded. “Thanks.”

Calvin blew the steam from his drink. “It’s nothing, lad.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know. It’s not what most people do.”

“I’ve been in your position. I know how difficult it is.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you’re desperate. You wouldn’t be sleeping in a church doorway if you weren’t.”

Mason said nothing, sipped at his coffee.

“You from around here?”

“No.”

“Where you from?”

“A few places.”

“Fair enough. How’s the coffee?”

“Scalding. But good.”

Calvin snorted, wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. “Best coffee in town. Puts hairs on your balls. Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”

*

They sat on a low wall at the edge of a car park and drank their coffees under the skyward-reaching bough of a sickly birch tree. Mason smoked the thin cigarette and stared at the ground, while Calvin hummed a tune under his breath and fingered the tiny cross on a silver chain around his neck. He watched people waiting in line at a ticket machine.

“Poor bastards,” Calvin said.

Mason looked up, blowing smoke from his mouth. “Who?”

The old man nodded towards the queue of people. “Them. They do that each morning. Buy an overpriced ticket so they can park their cars on property already paid for by the money they pay in tax. Then they spend the rest of the day working for companies that regard them as nothing more than numbers on a payroll, easily replaced if they don’t meet the made-up requirements of their jobs. They’re lost souls, like the rest of us.”

“You’re not trying to convert me, are you?” said Mason.

Calvin smirked and tucked the silver cross back under his jumper. “I try not to do that.”

“That’s a relief.”

“You’re not a believer?”

“Not since Sunday school.”

Calvin laughed. “Did you have a job, lad?”

“When?”

“Before you came here.”

“Not for a few years.”

“Couldn’t find any work?”

“Hard to find a job when you’re in prison.”

Calvin turned his head towards him. “I see.” He looked back at the slowly-dwindling queue of people. “Well, we all make mistakes, lad.”

Mason scratched one side of his mouth. “It was a bit more than a mistake. What I did was unforgivable.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“You don’t even know what I did,” replied Mason. “I could be a child molester, for all you know.”

“Are you…?”

“Of course not.”

“I thought so. You don’t look the type, lad.”

A man in a business suit strode past, checking the expensive watch on his wrist. His gleaming black shoes clacked on the tarmac. Overhead a flock of pigeons wheeled in the air and vanished beyond the roof of a tall apartment building.

Calvin said, “So, if you’re not a kiddie-fiddler, what are you?”

Mason almost laughed. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Not this early in the morning.”

“What does it matter to you?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“So you buy me a coffee and expect me to give you my life story?”

Calvin looked at him without a trace of humour. “That’s the deal.”

“Fuck you.”

Calvin smirked. “I already told you, I’m not after your arse.”

“I’m hanging out with a fucking comedian…”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Really?”

“Yes. In another life. Used to do the working men’s clubs. Tough crowds. Drunken hecklers. Hard men. Loose women. My wife caught me getting a blowjob in the ladies’ toilets.”

Mason inhaled smoke through his nostrils and coughed until his eyes watered. “Oh…”

Calvin folded his arms and looked at Mason. “Now it’s your turn to tell me something.”

Mason finished the cigarette, dropped it by his feet and stamped it out. He felt his heart fluttering as he ran through memories of the last few years. Blinked to cure the stinging in his eyes. All he could taste in his mouth was smoke and coffee. He bowed his head a little against the chill breeze and breathed into his hands to warm them. The juddering of his heart was all he could hear.

“I’d been driving home drunk from a night out. Most of it’s a blur apart from a memory of singing along to some shit Nineties pop song on the radio. I hit another car, a little Ford Fiesta, travelling in the opposite direction. My car hit it side-on. There was a family inside. A little girl…”

Mason put his hand to his mouth. He felt his face crumple. He bit down on his lip and looked at the ground.

Calvin said nothing.

Mason blinked rapidly and folded his arms. He spat by his feet. “One count of causing death by dangerous driving, and driving with excess alcohol. My wife left me while I was in prison, and moved here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Calvin’s voice was quiet and solemn.

“You probably think I’m condemned to Hell, don’t you? Do you believe in all that?”

Calvin looked at him. “I’m not sure. That’s not for me to know and not for me to say, lad. It’s out of our hands. We do what we do, and then the Big Man decides.”

Mason nodded. “No offence, Calvin, but I hope you’re wrong and there’s only oblivion waiting for us.”

“We’ll all find out one day.”

“True.”

“How long were you inside?”

“Four years. Let out early, three weeks ago, because of good behaviour. Spent some time in shitty bedsits, trying not to get beaten up by pimps and crack addicts. I’ve spent most of my money. I arrived here yesterday and went to my wife’s house, but she told me to leave and never come back. Said she’d call the police if I pester her again.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Calvin.

Mason looked at the sky. “So am I.”

CHAPTER FIVE

They walked the backstreets and travelled through underpasses until they reached the outskirts of the city. Then they crossed a stretch of wasteland to a derelict house partially hidden behind a copse of gnarled trees. Calvin led the way. Mason kept thinking about Ellie. There was a bad taste in his mouth.

They stopped outside the house, in an overgrown garden of nettles, weeds and yellowing grass. The windows were covered in lengths of wood or chipboard. Whitewashed walls strangled by pale ivy that entwined around the crumbling guttering and spread onto the underside of the roof. Mason was surprised to see the chimney still intact, squat and weathered against the grey sky.

“What is this place?”

“A friend of mine squats here,” Calvin said. “He’s ex-army. Served in the Falklands. Not all of him came back, in a way.”

“Poor bloke.”

“He’s a bit unstable.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“That’s true.”

*

Calvin knocked on the door. Mason stood behind him, wondering who lived behind the boarded windows; he pictured a human representation of a deep sea fish dwelling in the dark.

The door opened little more than an inch. A lone eye appeared and appraised them, flicking from Mason to Calvin and then lingering on Mason, all watery and bloodshot like its owner had been crying. The eye narrowed in its bone socket and the pale skin around it.

Then the door was pulled back and a man emerged, tall and thin in a ratty brown overcoat. Mason reckoned he was in his late fifties or early sixties. When he frowned, the skin stretched tighter across his face. He nodded at Mason.

“Who’s this, Calvin?”

“Someone in need of help.”

“We all need help, brother. Some of us more than others.”

“He’s sound,” Calvin said.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The man raised his eyebrows at Mason. “Are you sound?”

“What?”

The man rolled his eyes. “Are you sound?”

Mason looked at Calvin and back to the man. He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I think so.”

A thin smile broke across the man’s mouth. “You haven’t converted him, have you, Cal?”

“Just let us in,” said Calvin. “It’s fucking cold out here.”

The man stood to one side of the doorway and gestured inside the house. “I was just making some tea. You were lucky to get here before nightfall.”

*

The downstairs floor had been stripped of any furnishings and utilities, leaving only exposed floorboards and bare walls. Plaster flaked from the ceilings of the downstairs rooms. The wind moved through the hollows and recesses of the house, sounding like distant voices. The air smelled of autumnal decay and bad feet.

“Wipe your feet,” Zeke said, as they stepped into what had once been a living room. He looked at Mason and grinned with a mouthful of yellow teeth. When Mason had entered the house, Zeke eyed him up and down then, after a few seconds of awkward silence, grabbed Mason’s hand and shook it warmly. He greeted Calvin with a hug, wrapping his long arms around the little man.

Two candles burned on porcelain saucers in the middle of the room. Grey daylight slipped through the thin cracks in the boards over the outside of the windows. Cobwebs trembled in the corners between the walls and the ceiling.

“Cup of tea?” Zeke asked them.

Mason nodded and tried to smile. “Thanks.”

Zeke took a large flask from underneath some old clothing. “Make yourselves comfortable, lads.”

Calvin reached into his satchel and began pulling out the pastries he’d taken from the bin behind the supermarket. “I got these for you.” He handed the pastries to Zeke, who thanked him and eyed an apple turnover with something like adoration.

“You’re a good bloke, Cal.”

Calvin sat and slumped against the section of wall under the boarded up window and pulled his trainers from his feet. His socks were filthy. The big toe on his left foot was poking through a hole in the fabric, and its nail was pale yellow and brittle-looking.

Mason removed his rucksack and sat down nearby.

Zeke poured tea into two chipped mugs and handed one each to Mason and Calvin, then sat on his bedding in the corner with the apple turnover in his hands. He took little bites, like a small mammal, chewing slowly. Calvin watched and shook his head, smiling over his steaming mug.

Mason sipped at his tea and sank into his coat. The air inside the house was warmer than outside, but not by much, and he shivered at a draught that ghosted across the room and into the cracked walls.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Calvin.

Zeke chewed the last mouthful of apple turnover and swallowed. “I have to be careful the police don’t find me here. They don’t take kindly to squatters, for some reason.”

“He doesn’t like the police very much,” Calvin said to Mason.

Zeke frowned. “Neither would you if they gave you hassle all the time.”

“It doesn’t help that the last time they stopped you, you tried to kiss both officers. And they were blokes.”

“I was only messing around.”

Calvin laughed. “You were high as a kite. Lucky they didn’t throw you in a cell for the night.”

“Whatever. Fuck you.”

Calvin laughed again, and Zeke joined in.

CHAPTER SIX

As the daylight faded through the cracks in the wooden boards, Zeke regaled them with a variety of conspiracy theories and his views on politics, religion, and Sylvester Stallone films. When Zeke asked Mason if he was married, Mason merely shook his head and looked away. Calvin gave Zeke a look, so he changed the subject.

“Let’s get baked.”

“You’ve got some?” Calvin said.

Zeke smiled smugly as he pried one end of a loose floorboard open and reached down underneath it. When he pulled his arm back there was a small polythene bag of weed in his hand. He shook the bag between two fingers and grinned.

Calvin gave a round of applause. “Good man.”

Zeke chuckled. “I know you love me.” He looked at Mason. “You want some, too?”

Mason finished his tea and placed the mug on the floor. “Might as well; I haven’t got anywhere to be.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Zeke rolled a thick spliff with expert yellow-stained fingers, humming a cheerful tune under his breath. He wet his lips then placed the joint between them and lit the end with a plastic lighter. Zeke closed his eyes and inhaled, and when he opened them he took the spliff from his mouth and blew a ring of smoke into the air.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“Where did you get the weed?” Calvin asked.

Zeke coughed into one hand. His eyes watered. “Usual place.”

“Mental Mike?”

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

Zeke took another hit on the joint then passed it to Calvin. “Absolutely fucking mental.”

“Haven’t seen him in a while.” Calvin sucked on the joint. He closed his eyes for a moment and turned his face towards the ceiling as he exhaled. “Last time I saw him, he was in trouble with that Russian gang from Southampton.”

“That’s all settled now,” Zeke said. “The Ruskies only took a finger from him.”

“He was lucky then.”

“Fuck, yeah. They were gonna cut his dick off. Now he’s freaking out because of the disappearances.”

“The disappearances?”

Zeke shrugged his bony shoulders. “He said some people have gone missing in the last few days.”

“Who?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Sounds like bollocks, Zeke.”

“I dunno. He was pretty unnerved.”

“It doesn’t take much to unnerve Mental Mike.”

“I know,” Zeke said. “But you didn’t see him. He was afraid he’d be taken next.”

“Taken by who?” asked Mason.

Zeke looked at Mason like he’d forgotten Mason was in the room. “Mike didn’t say. All he said was the people were taken at night.”

Mason folded his arms to hide the shiver that passed through them. “Sounds like a fucking ghost story.”

Calvin passed the joint to him. “All yours, lad.”

Zeke scratched at his face.

Mason hesitated with the joint at his mouth. When he realised Calvin and Zeke were watching him, he took a drag and held it in his chest. Then he breathed out a long drawl and wiped his eyes. He coughed to clear the smoke from his throat.

Zeke looked at him. “Good stuff, eh?”

“It’s been a while.”

Zeke snorted as he took hold of the joint. “Just make sure you don’t throw up on the floor.”

*

Within half an hour the room was filled with a haze of smoke that turned the air thick and spongy.

Night fell outside. The candlelight waned.

Mason felt the world soften and grow numb. His eyelids were heavy and he found the shape of his hand amusing. And then he fell asleep smiling for no reason at the ceiling.

*

Sometime in the night Mason woke to someone muttering breathlessly outside the house. A low voice speaking the words of an unknown language. He imagined desiccated vocal chords and a face pressed close to the door.

He looked at Zeke and Charlie, both passed out and oblivious, then considered going to the front door to listen closely to the voice, but in the end he rolled onto his back and looked at the swaying ceiling and let his eyes close to return him to sleep.

*

Mason woke groggy and desperate for water. A lone candle threw shadows at the walls. He sat up from the floor, dizzy and confused, gasping with a mouth leeched of moisture, and glanced around the room as he pawed at his chest with numb hands. The air smelled of weed smoke and the burning candle. There had been dreams of the Dead Girl in the car. Visual fragments lingered behind his eyes. Tormented by the vision of her face, he banged one fist on the floor and gritted his teeth until she went away and his heart quietened.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. He put his head in his hands.

When he went to grab the water bottle from his rucksack, he noticed that Zeke was gone. Charlie was asleep with his mouth open to the ceiling. Zeke’s bedding was crumpled, discarded.

“Zeke?”

No answer. He was probably in another room. Taking a piss, probably.

A memory came to Mason. Or was it a part of a dream? Someone outside the house, muttering against the front door. Wanting to be let inside. Desperate to be greeted at the threshold. He thought it must have been a dream, as he sipped water and swilled it around his dried mouth. But then he turned towards the front of the house, and a cold breeze from outside slipped over his face.

The front door was open.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mason stepped through the doorway, glimpsed Zeke walking away from the house, and called out to him.

Zeke vanished into the darkness.

Mason called after him again, but there was no answer. The night was silent. Mason followed, fumbling with the penlight torch from his pocket. He looked up. Endless stars filled the sky. The moon was made hazy and indistinct by a thin sheet of cloud, and when it was revealed again it gave definition to the wasteland around him. Shadows formed from the shapes of trees. Mason looked towards the distant town centre and the faraway streetlights. He switched on the torch and pointed it ahead, but its reach was meagre and did little to help him pick his way across the sodden ground. And he scanned the way ahead, and glanced around, but there was no sign of Zeke. No trace of him at all.

Mason halted, shivering in his clothes, teeth chattering from the cold. He cupped his hands to his mouth and called out to Zeke again. There was no answer. Just silence and the ghosting breeze.

“Where did you go, Zeke?” he whispered. He considered returning to the house to wake Calvin, but something in his gut told him to keep moving and he would find Zeke soon enough.

Away to the left, there was something like a burst of breathless laughter. When he pointed the torch that way and squinted into the dark, he was sure he had imagined it, because no one was there. The night was merely broken shapes. Or someone was mocking him. Maybe Zeke and Calvin were playing a joke on him. He exhaled and tried to gather some spit in his throat. Then he called Zeke’s name again. He looked towards the sky and wished he was away from this place.

The Dead Girl appeared before Mason, startling him. He let out a little cry. Her mouth was open in a silent scream as she pointed at him. There was blood trickling down one side of her face. Her neck was twisted to one side.

Mason stepped back, shaking his head to cast away the apparition. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, the Dead Girl was gone. He sighed with relief then smacked his forehead with the heel of one hand. He looked around again, mouth trembling, eyes darting inside their sockets.

When the figure coalesced out of the darkness ahead of him, he assumed it was Zeke returning from wherever he’d gone. But as the figure approached, Mason realised it was a tall hunched thing covered in rags. It raised its cloth-covered face towards him to show eyes blazing with red light.

Mason almost wished to see the Dead Girl again.

He froze. A voice announced itself in his head, promising him great kindness and an embrace he would never want to escape. The figure reached towards him with one crooked hand upon a long thin arm, and bid him to stay.

Mason almost didn’t see the sharp teeth emerge from that wet black mouth.

*

He stumbled back towards the house, too scared to look over his shoulder, gasping for breath as he tried to stay on his feet upon the damp ground. Once he was inside the house he shut the door behind him. There was no lock, or even a bolt to throw. No furniture to use as a barricade. He stood there with his hands near his face. He stared at the door and backed away, then went to rouse Calvin.

The old man woke with a grumble and one swipe of his hand, which Mason managed to avoid as he crouched next to him. He looked at Mason with reddened eyes and frowned. His breath stank of smoke and bad teeth.

“Zeke’s gone,” Mason said. “There’s something outside. I think it did something to Zeke.”

Calvin rubbed his eyes and yawned. Then he looked at Zeke’s crumpled bedding against the wall. “Outside? What’s outside? Where’s Zeke gone?”

“I think something took him.”

“The police?”

“No, not the police.”

“What are talking about, lad? Are you still stoned?”

“I wish I was. I woke up and saw that Zeke was gone. I went outside and saw him walking away. He vanished. Then this figure appeared. Something in rags and a cloth mask, that beckoned to me. I heard its voice in my head.”

Calvin put his hand on Mason’s shoulder. “Calm down, lad. You’re sure Zeke isn’t playing a joke on you? It was probably just him dressed up in an old Halloween costume he’d found somewhere.”

Mason wiped at his watery eyes. His heart floundered in the cold cavity of his chest. His voice wavered. “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

Calvin smiled with sympathy and rose to his feet. “Let’s go and sort this out. Don’t worry – I’ll give Zeke a bollocking when I see him.”

*

What occurred next happened so quickly that Mason simply stood near the doorway with his hands at his sides and his mouth quivering in shock.

Calvin paused at the front door with his torch in hand. He craned his neck to listen. An expression on his face Mason couldn’t identify. Maybe amusement or disbelief. Then he looked at Mason.

“What is it?” Mason said.

The door was ripped away from its frame, and before Calvin could retreat or even raise a hand or a question, something thin, incredibly swift and made of shadow reached out from the darkness, plucked him from the floor and pulled him outside. And he screamed only once. Then there was just silence and the night spilling through the doorway.

Mason backed away, mute with terror, and raised his penlight torch. The darkness gathered around him. The cold seeped into his bones. He was caught in a fit of tremors, murmuring idiot sounds of anguish.

When Calvin’s body was returned, thrown through the doorway to land on the floor all broken, and ripped at the throat, Mason could only stand and stare. Calvin’s eyes were open, his beard and clothes soaked with his own blood. The ruin of his opened throat glistened in the torchlight.

A low voice drifted from beyond the doorway, out in the night, close to the house. A glimpse of movement outside; a shadow-shape flitting through the rain.

Come outside. Be of my flesh and blood. Receive my blessing. Receive the gospel.

Mason turned away and fled deeper into the house.

*

He tried the back door with grasping hands, even as he glanced over his shoulder and waited for the shadow-thing to appear and come for him out of the dark corridor.

The door finally gave when he went at it with kicking feet, and it burst open out into the night. He stepped outside and started into a staggering run across uneven land, too scared and witless to worry about tripping over and falling. He only looked back once at the house. Once was enough. After that, he fled, and the only light was that of the torch swaying about his feet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

He ran away from the house and the shrieking of awful mouths until his lungs failed him and he hunched over with his hands on his thighs, coughing and retching to the ground. His vomit was thin and acidic. Wiping his mouth and sniffling into his hand he staggered onto a narrow track that led to a house with lights in its windows. He cried with relief.

*

The door was ajar when he arrived at the house. No one came to greet him when he knocked. He pushed the door open and stood in the doorway, casting a glance back at the darkness behind him. Trembling with cold and fear, he stepped into the small hallway and looked around.

Coats hanging on a rack. A throat of stairs led to a darkened landing. The smell of floor polish. Past the cramped hallway and the kitchen, a television flickered in the darkened living room. A jumble of tinny voices.

He opened his mouth to call out, but his voice failed him. It was a struggle to move his feet, but in the end he did, and he stepped slowly through the kitchen and into the living room, where he found a man and woman sprawled on a sofa, their lifeless eyes still intent upon the black-and-white film on the television. Their throats had been torn open and their clothes were stained with blood. The woman had lost a slipper. Her dressing gown was open down the middle. Mason’s eyes didn’t linger. The man was leaning to one side, his head upon the armrest. The wound of his neck still gleamed wetly.

Mason stepped back until the wall stopped him. He put his hands to his mouth. A flashbulb image of the Dead Girl in his mind only helped the bile rise in his throat.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” His voice faded to a whisper then to nothing but the movement of his mouth.

He tried the telephone on a table in the corner, but there wasn’t even a dial tone when he placed the receiver to his ear. Nevertheless he dialled 999 and waited, but there was nothing. His heart shivered in bursts and hitched with each breath. The pit of his stomach fell away. He put the phone down then returned to the bodies on the sofa, and considered going through their pockets for their mobiles before he realised he was standing in a crime scene.

He stood shaking in the middle of the room, facing the darkness past the patio doors. Blood spray on one of the white walls and upon the cream-coloured carpet.

When he heard the creaking of floorboards upstairs, he looked towards the ceiling then noticed the framed photos on the shelves at the edges of the room. Family photos.

A man, a woman, and a boy.

A little boy. Shit.

He raised his face again to the ceiling. A breath caught in his throat. Then he went to the foot of the stairs and looked up to the landing with one hand upon the globe-shaped finial at the foot of the bannister.

Beyond the top of the stairs and the landing, soft footsteps padded across the floor. The brush of fabric against a wall. And then a soft voice, drifting out of the dark, wordless and almost mewling.

Mason waited, unable to move, covered in cold sweat.

The boy appeared on the landing and looked down. He was dressed in blue pyjamas and his hair was combed to one side above his moon-white face. Mason raised his torch towards him, and the boy shied away too late to hide the awful wound on the left side of his neck, that had bled onto his pyjama top and down one leg.

Mason’s heart sank. He lowered the torch.

The boy took the first step down. He showed sharp teeth inside his curved mouth.

“What the fuck?” Mason gasped. “What’s happening?” He felt the world shrink until it was just them both, facing each other. The edges of his vision fluttered and shook.

“You should stay,” the boy said, descending the stairs. “We can wait for my parents to wake up.” He grinned, but it was a cold thing, devoid of any warmth.

“Wake up?” Mason said. “But they’re dead.”

“Death is not death anymore, not when you’ve been blessed. Not when you are visited by him. Because he came here, to this house, and gave us his blessing. His gift. It’s beautiful and terrible and wonderful. But the gift is hungry, and that hunger burns and craves. And I am so very hungry.”

Mason’s knees locked rigid with fear.

Something moved in the living room. He took his eyes away long enough from the boy to see the man and woman rising unsteadily from the sofa.

“Stay with us,” the boy whispered. “Be of our flesh and blood.”

The man and woman made low sounds of yearning when they saw Mason at the foot of the stairs. They started towards him with intent, stalking across the floor on bare feet.

Mason turned back to the boy just as he lowered and reached for him. He shrank away from the grasping hands and lurched towards the door with a terrified cry in his throat. His foot slipped, he almost tripped on a fallen umbrella, and he knew that if he fell down now that would be the end of him.

He stumbled into the door and pulled it open. The night air pricked at his face. The starless sky above was indifferent to his terror.

“Stay,” the boy said, grinning. “Please stay.”

Mason staggered from the house, back into the dark he’d previously fled. The boy and his parents called for him to return with their tender voices and promises of comfort.

*

He emerged gasping and without thought into the streetlights of a suburban street and narrowly avoided a speeding car as he fell into the road. The car’s horn blared, and the driver’s reflection glared at him from a side mirror before the car dwindled to a small shape down the street and took an adjoining road at a mini-roundabout.

The sudden silence. The cold pavement. Air so frigid that his teeth ached with each breath. The houses to one side of the road, their windows dark. No one came out to help him.

Mason swayed on his feet and squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened his eyes, his vision swam and the voice of the boy echoed inside his head. The peel of a distant siren somewhere in the city. A helicopter rattled overhead and disappeared beyond a row of houses.

Hunched over next to a streetlight, he dry heaved onto his feet and wiped his eyes with shaking hands after he was done. He thought of Calvin and Zeke, and the family in the house. Dead people. But they weren’t really dead, were they? They were something else. He put his hands to his face and cried, and realised he had left his rucksack at Zeke’s place. He bit at the tips of his fingers when he thought of returning to that house for his belongings.

Not tonight. Not ever.

Mason shambled down the pavement, slipping in puddles, beseeching the darkened windows of the houses. He was lost and half-delirious, glancing about like a frightened animal. He thought of Ellie, and his face creased and his heart winced at painful memories. The cold air and the exhaustion in his limbs slowed him until he was barely at a shuffle. His teeth chattered.

The moon was revealed from behind the clouds, and he stood and stared at it for a long while until the sky spun away from him. He reeled like a drunk. Stumbling about, he found a cramped nook between some recycling bins and a stone wall outside a community centre. He cowered next to stinking refuse bags and curled up against the wall, muttering to Ellie as if she were there beside him.

*

Two police officers found him some time later and directed questions towards his makeshift shelter of refuse.

“Excuse me, sir…”

“Are you okay, mate?”

Mason looked up at them and flinched from the torchlight. Words stuck in his throat. He sobbed. He shouted. Then he rose from his pungent nest, and before his legs buckled to send him back down, the officers held him by the arms and lowered him gently to the tarmac of the windswept car park. And he sat there, his shoulders trembling as he rambled and muttered, pressing the knuckles of one fist against his forehead.

He talked of monsters.

CHAPTER NINE

Mason woke to grey daylight, in a soft bed positioned against a white wall. There was a door on the far side of the room. He eyed the glass of water next to the alarm clock on the nearby table. Then he lay there listening to the palpitations of his heart and the stirring of his loose insides. He held his hands before his face and turned them over, examining them in the dim light, as if they were newly-formed appendages.

Beyond the foot of the bed was a window, with curtains pulled back to the edges of the rail. Floral wallpaper. A carpet coloured somewhere between white and cream.

Weak and aching, he sat upright, and the thick duvet fell to his chest. He rubbed his eyes, ran his tongue over his teeth. Scratched at his throat with dirty fingernails and swung his legs from underneath the duvet. He sat on the edge of the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes to let the dizziness pass from his head. And when he was done he looked at his bare legs, because someone had undressed him down to boxer shorts and his Metallica t-shirt. His clothes were draped over the back of a wooden chair near the end of the bed. He was flexing his toes on the carpet when the door opened.

He started, looked up, and was surprised to see Ellie enter the room.

*

In the awkward silence they regarded each other, and it was only broken by Mason’s nervous voice. “Is this real?”

Ellie didn’t move from the door, her face barely hiding her discomfort. Her hands were clasped together. She shifted on her feet. “How are you feeling?”

“What happened?”

“The police brought you here. They found you lying behind some rubbish bins.”

Mason exhaled into his hands. “I remember that part.”

“The bins?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you doing?”

He didn’t answer, for fear of being thought mad.

Ellie frowned. “They said you were delirious when they found you. Scared of something. Apparently you sat down on the pavement and cried. Told them that monsters were after you.”

His face burned red, and he couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the floor between his feet. “How did I end up here?”

“They found my address on a piece of paper in your jacket pocket. So, here you are.”

“I’m sorry,” Mason said.

“They knocked on my door at three in the morning. Woke me and half the street. You were almost passed out in the back of the squad car.”

He groaned and shook his head. “I am really sorry.”

“I told them you were homeless. They were going to put you in a cell for the night.”

“Thank you.” He kept his face lowered.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “But you’ll have to leave soon. You can’t stay here. You know that, right?”

He finally looked at her. The pensive shape of her mouth and the way she appraised him, with what was could only be embarrassment, broke his heart.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll leave once I’m dressed.”

Ellie drew in a breath and released it slowly through her mouth. She stayed by the door, keeping her distance.

“What happened to you?” There was genuine concern in her voice, and Mason loved her for it. But that unreciprocated love was like cold tendrils around his spine. Feelings change. Love dies. The remains of lost relationships were blackened hearts and broken promises.

Mason felt sick.

Ellie said, “You stank of weed when you arrived. Had you been drinking? I know it’s none of my business what you use now…” Her voice trailed away and she folded her arms.

“I’m not using anything; I only smoked a bit of weed.”

“Were you high?”

“Are you my mother now?”

“You’re a dickhead, Mason.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

“You’re a mess.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Mason dipped his chin to his chest. He was accustomed to being ashamed, and self-hatred was a familiar travelling companion these days.

“You can stay the night, if you want,” Ellie said. “It’s late in the day, and I can’t throw you out on the street this close to dark. I’ll make you a cup of coffee and something to eat, if you want. You stink to high heaven, so feel free to have a shower and get cleaned up. Then I want you gone first thing in the morning, Mason, understand? I don’t know what happened to you last night, and I don’t much care, but you can’t go on like this. You need to sort yourself out and move on.”

He opened his mouth to speak, because he wanted to tell her about the things he’d seen last night, but in the end he just nodded in silence as she left the room.

The door shut. He sat there and listened to her walk away.

*

Mason showered and dressed. Last night’s memories came in stop-motion images. Being hunted. Being chased. Calvin’s scream as he was taken. The dead family that wasn’t dead.

His limbs began to tremble, and he sat on the bathroom floor for a short while. Acid frothed in his chest; the worst case of heartburn in living memory. A haze of steam obscured the ceiling. The warm wet air. The dripping in the shower.

He thought about returning to Zeke’s place to try and retrieve his rucksack. He wondered if Zeke and Calvin would ever be seen again, and if anyone would miss them. Would anyone even notice? Would the world notice if he went missing? He didn’t like to think about that too much.

Maybe the police would return later and ask him questions he couldn’t answer.

He retched and vomited stringy saliva into the toilet. He lowered the seat then placed his brow upon it and closed his eyes. Afterwards he went to the misted mirror and wiped away the condensation. Stared into his face, his eyes, and saw a broken thing pretending to be human.

He turned away from the mirror because he couldn’t look at himself any longer.

*

After handing Mason a coffee, Ellie cooked bacon and scrambled eggs. There was silence as she worked. When she was done she placed the plate before him on the dining table. Despite the aching hole in the pit of his stomach, he ate slowly and forked small amounts into his mouth. She watched him from across the table, a mug of milky tea steaming between her hands.

Winter sunlight through the window above the sink. Mason glanced at the wall clock. How long until dark? He tried not to think about it.

“Why are you still wearing your wedding ring?” Ellie asked him.

He paused with a forkful of scrambled egg at his mouth. Looked at her. “I don’t know.”

“Really?”

“Does it matter?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

She placed her mug on the table. “On what you’re after…”

“I’m not after anything.”

She shook her head. “You came to the town to see me. Did you think we’d reconcile or something? You’d sweep me into your arms and we’d live happily ever after?”

“No,” he said, and sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know much, Mason.”

He chewed his food and swallowed. “I know.”

She finished her tea then stood and put her mug on the draining board. She rearranged the dirty plates and bowls in the sink.

“I have to go out in a minute,” Mason said.

“Okay.”

“I won’t be gone for long, I hope.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to ask me where?”

With her back to him, she turned on the taps. Thin streams of water fell into the sink. Her hands moved in the basin. “None of my business. Like you said, I’m not your mother.”

He looked at her. She didn’t turn around.

CHAPTER TEN

Mason stood before the abandoned house. The sky had darkened. Specks of rain fell against his face. The bread knife he’d taken from Ellie’s kitchen was in the pocket of his jacket. In one hand was the penlight torch. He took a deep breath. Cramps in his stomach and bile in his chest. He looked around then started towards the house.

*

The front door had been thrown into a large patch of weeds and brambles. Despite the rain Calvin’s blood stained the grass. Mason stood at the doorway and pointed the torch inside. It was a struggle to move his feet over the threshold and the dried blood just inside it, but in the end he did, then walked deeper into the house.

The downstairs rooms were empty of life. He swept the torch over the bare walls. He recovered his rucksack and went through it to check nothing was missing. Calvin and Zeke’s bedding was still on the floor. Their belongings were still stored in one corner and along the wall.

Mason stood in the sorry little room that still smelled of smoke and dust, and listened to the quickening rain upon the old house. Such sadness passed over him that he had to crouch upon the floor and bow his head for a moment.

And then he heard the creak of an upstairs floorboard.

*

Mason took the stairway one slow step at a time, his legs trembling, and mouth open as if he were preparing a scream.

The shifting of the walls around him. The voice of the wind through nooks and recesses. The flapping of something loose on the rain-dashed roof.

He stood on the landing in the dark, and the torch only lit a small patch of floor ahead of him. The bacon and eggs sloshed heavily in his gut.

He found them in a room at the back of the house, sprawled around one another on the floor. Sleeping or dead. Or both. Calvin, Zeke, and the family from the other house. And in the corners at the far end of the room were two women and three men huddled together, limbs entwined in rest, like creatures in a nest. All of them were pale to the point of being bloodless, and wearing the same clothes as last night, streaked and matted with dirt. There were dead leaves and black soil scattered around them. Twigs in Zeke’s hair, and scratches under his eyes. There was dried blood around Calvin’s mouth and on his beard, and smeared on parts of his face. A spider skittered across the little girl’s stomach and vanished into shadow. Her parents were locked in an embrace, their heads resting on the other’s shoulder.

Mason stood there for a while, too scared to raise his breathing above a whisper. The rain stopped. The torchlight waned, flickered for a heart-stopping second and then returned to its original brightness.

He stepped towards them. He crouched next to Calvin. The old man lay on his back; his face held an expression like the satisfaction of a long hunger had been sated. He looked at peace. His hands were clasped together over his stomach, raggedy fingernails filthy with blood and dirt.

Calvin’s silver cross hung limply from his neck. Mason thought about that for a minute.

“Are you asleep?” Mason asked. He reached out to check the pulse on Calvin’s neck, but hesitated when he saw the opened mess of the man’s throat. The wound was blackened, drying out, and if Mason wasn’t mistaken it was already healing around the edges. He winced, staring in fascination, as rational thought began to ebb away on tides of fear and primal dread. He said the word he’d been thinking since entering the room. He considered the wounds in the victims’ throats. The teeth. The suggestion of an awful hunger.

“No, no, no,” he muttered, sweat beading on his face. And with all the effort he could muster he placed his forefinger on Calvin’s neck to feel the carotid artery. The old man’s skin was cold. No pulse, no beat, no ticking of the signal from the heart.

He checked again. And again, there was nothing.

Calvin opened his eyes.

Mason fell back onto his arse and let out a boyish yelp.

Calvin grinned. His eyes were blood-red, bulging from their sockets. He reached out with one claw-like hand and grabbed for Mason’s feet, but Mason scuttled backwards against the wall, keeping the torch upon him.

Making a low sound, Calvin rose slowly to his knees, holding his wrists to the sides of his head and swaying from side to side. In the thin blade of light, his mouth yawned open like that of an enraged primate, to show stained yellow teeth sharp enough to puncture aluminium tins. The light glinted in his cruel eyes.

Mason scrambled to his feet, holding the knife out before him. “What happened to you, Calvin? What’s going on?”

Calvin sniffed the air, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. His mouth formed a malicious smile, and the voice that came from it was different, somehow, wheezed out of his dead chest. There were only a few yards between them. Close enough for grabbing distance.

“You’ll find out, lad. Why don’t you stay for a while and we can talk? Our King has been in town for a few days and nights, spreading his gospel, sharing his flesh and blood. The ones he’s converted will convert others in turn. It’s beautiful, is it not? This isn’t the only nest, Mason. Our King was very busy last night; I suspect there have been many absences from work and school in the last few days. By the end of tonight, there’ll be hundreds of us.”

Mason caught the sulphuric gust of Calvin’s breath. He edged towards the doorway. “I have to leave. I have to go…”

Calvin shrugged like he didn’t care, like it was a small matter, and said nothing. Then he lunged for Mason to claim him with eager hands.

*

The clouds had retreated from parts of the sky when Mason stumbled outside, and he felt something like elation at the last light of the winter sun.

Mason fled from the terrible house and across the wasteland, fear steaming from his skin; desperate to reach the streets of people and traffic and get away from the horror that had nearly claimed him. Calvin had been on his heels all the way from the room and down the stairs to the hallway and the threshold of the doorway. Mason had barely escaped; a few times Calvin’s fingers had swiped close to the back of his head. And if the chase had lasted any longer he would have been caught, like terrified prey, to join the others in that dark room.

Once Mason had staggered clear of the doorway and away from the house, he had stopped with his rucksack over one shoulder and turned back to see Calvin hunched over in the doorway, staring out at him and hissing at the pale sunlight.

Mason emerged onto the streets, heading back to Ellie’s house as Charlie’s last words announced themselves in his mind.

“I’ll see you soon, lad.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

During his flight from the dead house he noticed several missing person flyers taped to walls and stapled to wooden posts and fences. He stopped only to glance at them, because he didn’t want to look at their faces any longer than he had to.

*

It was near dark when he returned to Ellie’s house. He was relieved to get inside while there was still some light in the sky. He locked the front door behind him and stood in the hallway with his hands worrying at each other. Coldness crawled over his skin. His heart pumped erratically and the contents of his stomach curdled.

Ellie’s voice startled him. “Why have you locked the door?”

She was waiting for him at the kitchen table, cradling a mug of coffee. He sat down across from her, took out a Rizla and opened his pouch of rolling tobacco to make a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Ellie watched him.

“You don’t know who’s out there.” He felt like laughing, but he knew it would only come out half-mad and hysterical, and there was nothing to laugh at, anyway.

“What’s going on, Mason?”

He looked at her then had to look away. “I thought you don’t care what happens to me?”

She took a mouthful of coffee then sighed deeply. “Don’t start that, okay?”

Mason snorted. “You were the one who said it.”

“Just talk to me. Where did you go? What’s happened?”

He gave up trying to roll the cigarette and dropped it on the table. He looked down at his lap. “I’m in trouble, I think.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Let me make a cup of tea and I’ll tell you.”

*

“Vampires?” she said, half-smiling.

“Yes.”

“Vampires?”

He nodded, swallowed, exhaled. “Yes.”

She scoffed. “Are you serious?”

“I told you what happened last night and today.”

“You also told me you weren’t on drugs.”

Mason sucked on the cigarette he’d finally managed to roll. Ellie had opened the kitchen window to let out the smoke.

“Of course I’m serious. I think the red-eyed thing attacked and turned them all.”

“And you expect me to believe you?”

He shook his head, felt his face crumple and redden. “They were dead. It was like a nest, all of them in the room. I checked Calvin’s pulse, but there was nothing.  His throat had been torn out last night, but when I found him today it was already healing.”

“How was it healing if he was dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. Maybe they heal quicker than people.”

“This is madness,” Ellie said. “They? The vampires? Jesus Christ, Mason, do you hear what you’re saying? These are the ravings of someone delusional.”

He shook his head. “I’m not mental.”

“Well, you’re either mental or vampires exist,” she said. “I know which one I believe.”

Mason scratched at his face. “Calvin came after me, Ellie. He tried to grab me. I was lucky to get out of there. His teeth. Christ. His eyes were red like the thing that killed him, for fuck’s sake…”

Ellie didn’t look convinced. “This sounds ridiculous, Mason. This is horror movie stuff. Maybe your friend Calvin is fucking around, playing a joke. Contact lenses and Halloween make-up. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. This could be some prank he and this Zeke bloke play on newcomers.”

“It’s real, Ellie. I swear.”

“You need help.”

“I agree, but not for the same reasons. Calvin said he’d see me soon.”

“Calvin the vampire?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. “Of course.” Then she eyed him, tapping one finger on the table. “Did you take one of my bread knives?”

The question caught him off guard, and he just sat there and avoided her gaze. He took the knife from his pocket and placed it on the table.

“Oh my god, Mason. This is getting worse and worse. If the police found that on you…”

“I know. But it’s a risk I had to take, so I could defend myself.”

“You didn’t…hurt anyone, did you?”

“I didn’t. I was too scared.”

“This is madness.”

He tapped ash into the dregs of his tea. Ellie glared at him. “I know it sounds mental. I’m aware of that. But you weren’t there. You weren’t there last night or today. You don’t know what happened.”

“You’re scaring me, Mason.”

“You’re scared?” he said, staring at the floor. “You have no idea.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Darkness had fallen by the time they’d finished talking.

Ellie remained unconvinced by his talk of vampires. When she looked at him, it was with distrust and pity in her eyes, and it made his heart sink into his stomach.

Now he stood on the upstairs landing and watched the deserted street outside the front of the house. His insides jittered and broiled. The streetlights flickered on, but they gave him no comfort. Beery light filled windows in the houses across the road. He glimpsed people preparing dinner; families gathering and talking. The glow of televisions past net curtains. Domestic contentment and warmth. Something he longed for and craved. But it was a pipedream, a forlorn hope, something to be nurtured inside his mind and never exposed to cold reality.

For a while he just sat on the top step, lowered his head, and whispered the name of the girl he’d killed on that remembered summer’s night. His punishments for destroying a family were to never be allowed a family of his own and to always remember the face and name of the girl in the car. The Dead Girl. He understood and accepted the penalties; he even considered them lenient. If his mother were alive, she would have told him about the hellish afterlife that awaited him. And if that were true, then his only hope was that the bitch would be already down there burning when he arrived.

Glass shattered downstairs. A stifled shout from Ellie. Mason stumbled down the stairs. When he entered the kitchen, panicked and twitchy, he found Ellie crouching on the floor, sweeping broken glass into a dustpan. She rose and walked over to the bin in the corner and tipped the glass inside.

“I thought something had happened,” said Mason. “I thought…” He saw Ellie shake her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

She put the dustpan and brush in the cupboard under the sink. “I dropped a wine glass. Nothing to worry about. No bloodsuckers tried to seduce me with their brooding good looks.”

“Don’t joke about it.”

“I’m not, believe me. I wish I could joke about it. You’re lucky I’m letting you stay tonight after stealing that knife and telling me a load of crazy shit.”

“Fair enough,” said Mason, too tired to start an argument or try to convince her.

He turned to walk away, but froze in place when the lights in the house went out.

*

Ellie clicked on the torch she’d taken from the cupboard under the sink and then lit two candles in the living room while Mason stood and watched. He made sure to stay away from the doors and windows.

Immediately after the lights had gone out, he’d gone around the inside of the house and checked each light switch and electrical socket without success. After that he had peered from between the curtains over the living room window and saw that the streetlights were out. Darkness out there except for the moon’s faint illumination and the soft glow of candles in the neighbours’ windows. When he thought of the entire town without power and shrouded in the dark, he felt his insides rear and judder with anxiety.

He listened for screams out in the night and placed one hand to his churning and gas-bloated stomach. The back of his arms prickled as if covered by needle-limbed insects. The back of his mouth watered with nausea. He imagined Calvin, Zeke and the others rising from the floor of that room in the abandoned house, trembling with hunger and awful cravings. He imagined them going out into the night, in the blackout, to hunt.

He thought he could hear a distant ambulance siren somewhere within the town. Ellie heard it, too, because she looked at Mason with something like a concerned frown creasing her brow. She was putting on her coat.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“I’m going to check on Agnes, the old lady who lives down the road.”

“You shouldn’t go outside.”

“Agnes will need help. She gets confused.”

“Please stay here, Ellie.”

She zipped up her coat and looked at him. “Stay here if you like. You don’t have to come.”

Mason turned his face towards the curtained window, shook his head as he sighed. Then he reached for his jacket.

*

The thin beam of Mason’s torch was feeble against the darkness below the sky of stars. They walked down the road, past darkened houses and windows of meagre candlelight. A face peered out at them from an upstairs window.

There was the occasional glimpse of car headlights flashing past buildings. A horn sounded from somewhere in the next street.

Mason shivered in the cold, glancing around, as he walked behind Ellie. She directed her torch straight ahead, her breath misting the air before her face.

Inhaling through his nose, Mason tried to calm his jangling nerves and rapid pulse. When a hoarse voice shouted something indistinct from behind a row of houses, he flinched. His eyes scanned the dark.

They reached Agnes’ house. Ellie nodded at a blue Ford Fiesta parked by the kerb. “That’s the nurse’s car.”

Mason stopped beside her. “Then Agnes is being looked after. Nothing to worry about. Let’s go back.”

“The nurse is only a young girl,” said Ellie. “She’s just started the job. I want to make sure.”

Mason’s heart sank as he followed Ellie up the garden path that cleaved a lawn of patchy grass and flattened molehills. The house was dark inside, with no light beyond the windows. The curtains had been pulled back.

Ellie knocked three times on the door and waited. Mason cleared his throat then glanced back at the street, shining his torch about. He listened to the suggestion of distant voices carried on the night breeze. They sounded distorted, as if spoken underwater. And then a loud metallic bang from out of the town centre startled him.

Ellie looked back at him, but said nothing. She knocked again on the door, and when there was no answer she tried the handle, but it didn’t give, and she stepped back from the front step to direct her torch at the ground floor windows and those upstairs.

No one appeared. The house looked empty.

“Maybe she’s gone out somewhere,” said Mason, eager to return inside.

Ellie took a key from her pocket. “Agnes never leaves the house.” She unlocked and opened the door, hesitated at the threshold, then stepped inside and called out to the old woman. Mason followed her into the dark interior of the house, through a cramped hallway to the living room. The air was redolent with the smell of musty furniture, hints of old lavender and varnish. His torch beam chased shadows around the walls and over the ceiling. He looked reluctantly into the corners of the room, expecting to find the old lady cold and dead in threadbare garments.

Magazines were scattered around a clay bowl of polished pebbles on a coffee table in the centre of the room. Glass ornaments on a shelf caught the torchlight. A vase of dried flowers. On one of the dour walls hung a woodcut that depicted men working in a wheat field. An empty tea cup was left on the carpet, next to the armchair in front of the television. The armchair was patterned with a design once fashionable in the Seventies.

Ellie swept the floor with her torch. “Last month Agnes collapsed and twisted her ankle. The nurse found her the next morning, still lying on the bathroom floor. I hope she hasn’t hurt herself again.”

They checked the kitchen but found it empty, and were about to go upstairs when Mason noticed a draught coming from the back of the house.

*

The back door was ajar. Ellie pushed it open and stepped out to the garden, aiming the torch about her feet then straight ahead. Mason followed.

“Agnes?” Ellie said. “Are you out here?” Her voice slipped into the darkness.

They moved further into the garden and soon their torchlights revealed the body of the young nurse sprawled upon the lawn.

“Christ,” said Mason. He wiped his mouth and stepped back to escape the metallic reek of recently-spilled blood. Ellie didn’t take her eyes from the body exposed in the trembling beam of the torch.

The nurse’s pinafore was speckled with arterial spray, as was her face. Her mouth gaping open. Deep lacerations at her throat and both wrists, as if she’d been attacked by a wild animal. Wounds made by small sharp teeth. Blood dampened the ground around her broken body. Her eyes were glazed and dull in death.

“Did a dog do this?” Ellie said. “A feral dog?”

Mason said nothing.

A low sound, like a throaty whine, came from the foot of the garden. Mason fought the urge to turn away and return to the house and leave whatever waited for them in the far shadows.

They walked to the end of the garden, halted on the sodden grass and pointed their torches into the dark.

They found Agnes crouching by the wooden fence separating the garden from the lane beyond. A tattered housecoat like a shroud over her thin shoulders. Her skin pale to the point of translucence. Little grunting sounds spilled from behind the hands held to her mouth. She raised her face to the torchlight. Eyes liquid-red and crazed with hunger. Fresh blood smeared around her mouth and down her chin. A small puddle of blood formed underneath her from the dripping of her face.

Mason’s knees locked rigid. “Do you believe me now, Ellie?”

She didn’t answer him. Her face was slack and pallid. She put one hand to her mouth, where her bottom lip trembled. “Oh, Agnes, what have you done?” Ellie’s weak voice, barely a whisper, distracted the old woman from licking her own bloody fingers. Agnes glared at them through the few damp strands of white hair over her face. She opened her jaws slowly, letting them see the deformed sharpness of her teeth and grey gums stained pinkish red.

Mason stared at her black tongue, reptilian and moist at the back of her mouth. He watched it slither forward until it was past her teeth and licking at her lips.

“Time to leave,” he said.

Ellie was nodding absently. “Okay.”

Agnes reached out to them with one crooked hand. A ravenous ghost, all trembling and wretched. Her face held an expression of need and yearning as she spoke to them in a voice pulled from the wet muscle of her throat.

“I’m so hungry. So hungry. Will you help me?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They fled back to Agnes’s house as the old woman rose to her feet and called to them in a pitiful voice. Once inside, Mason slammed the door behind him and threw the bolt. He stood with his back against the door, breathing hard and grimacing.

Ellie leaned upon the dining table, the light of her torch wavering on the wall across from her. Shuddering breaths in her chest. Her eyes watery with shock and fear.

“Agnes,” she said, voice trembling. “What the fuck…?”

When the door handle began turning from outside Mason moved away and retreated in silence. He grabbed a carving knife from the draining rack next to the sink and held it out from his body, ready for Agnes to enter the house.

The handle stopped moving. Mason and Ellie looked at each other. They didn’t move or make a sound.

Seconds later came the scratching of fingernails upon the other side of the door. And then Agnes’ whispered voice, begging to be let in.

*

They stumbled through the front doorway and out onto the road to hear the first screams rise from the houses around them. The candlelight in windows was snuffed out, leaving only darkness.

A barked voice from behind a door. The shattering of glass. Something that sounded like a wet growl.

Mason caught a glimpse of movement above the street. He looked up to see dark figures crouching upon rooftops either side of the road. Silhouettes against the silver-moon sky. Silent and watching. Their red eyes were like glowing coals.

Ellie saw them and muttered something under her breath.

Distant voices and high-pitched laughter echoed from down the road, carried on the breeze, followed by a guttural, wordless exclamation. Then there was an animal-like cry.

Screams came from down the street. Distressed shouting and crying. A baby wailed.

“They’re in the houses,” Mason said.

“What the hell is happening?” Ellie asked him.

“We have to get off the street.”

And when Mason raised his face again, the rooftops were empty, and the many screams rose to a chorus in the flickering darkness of the street.

He took Ellie’s arm and pulled her with him as he broke into a staggering run.

*

They ran from the screams behind them and returned to Ellie’s house. Mason closed the front door quietly then made sure to lock it. He searched for a makeshift weapon to use with the knife, and found a lump hammer in the cupboard under the sink. Then he followed Ellie into the living room. They left the candles unlit, leaving them with just the thin torchlight. Ellie sat on the sofa and Mason went to the window and peered from one side of the curtains.

When he noticed a tall figure on the roof of the house directly opposite, he shrank away from the window and retreated to the middle of the room.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Ellie, her head in her hands, leaning towards the floor with her elbows on her thighs.

“I can barely believe it myself,” said Mason.

“They were on the rooftops. I saw their eyes. I heard the screams.”

Mason stood against the wall. He craved a cigarette, but doubted the ability of his hands to roll one.

Ellie looked up at him. Her face seemed gaunt and sickly in the torchlight. “Sit down, Mason.”

“I’m okay standing.”

“Sit next to me.”

He looked at her and hesitated. “Okay.” He did as she told him. In their proximity he could feel the shivering of her body above even his own. The urge to hold her, comfort her against the dark, pulled at his heart. But in the end he did nothing, and looked down at his hands as they sat in their silence, listening to the intermittent screams in the night.

Distant sirens. Distant shouts.

And Mason thought that if he were to die with Ellie beside him, it would not be the worst death for a man.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Less than an hour later the vampires came sniffing at the living room window. Mason tightened his hands around the knife and the hammer. Ellie gave out a shuddering breath.

Clawed hands scratched at the outer walls. The shuffling of feet. A low hiss. Something that could have been a word was spat from a mouth brimming with teeth and low to the ground.

Ellie placed her hand on Mason’s arm.

They looked at each other. A spark of understanding.

The door was attacked, and it soon splintered and crashed inward. A low growl and scrabbling claws. Wet mutterings and the sounds of deep hunger. The vampires entered the house and skittered into the living room. There were two, standing side-by-side, slightly hunched and deathly pale. A man and a woman. Stained with fresh blood that wasn’t their own. Snapping jaws lined with ghastly teeth. One of them shrieked from its horrid black mouth. Wretched things. Gleeful monsters in the dark.

Mason wondered if they were husband and wife, and if Ellie knew them.

He rose to meet them with the knife and hammer. Ellie stood behind Mason and directed her torch upon the creatures; they squinted and hissed in the light, but did not retreat or even step back, trembling with excitement and the craving of their awful appetites. They were freshly turned, recent converts dressed in casual clothing. Their eyes held a certain arrogance that infuriated Mason and made it easier to travel to that ugly red place in his mind. That place of heat and witless anger he remembered from drunken fights outside pubs and nightclubs.

And the vampires came at them, swift and snarling and screaming. Mason stepped back from the speed of the male vampire’s attack and fell onto his back as the creature pounced upon him. He kicked out with his legs and pushed the vampire away, then sat up and slashed with the knife as the vampire lunged forward again. The blade caught it in the stomach. It reeled away hissing, but then countered with a swing of one clawed hand that Mason narrowly avoided. And before the vampire could strike again he swung the hammer and connected with the side of its sharp mouth. There was a sudden wet crack. The male fell to its knees against the wall, one side of its jaw hanging loose. It spat razor teeth from its mouth as it blindly flailed long arms and tried to rise, but Mason was already bringing down the hammer with all the strength he could gather.

With its crippled mouth the vampire looked up at the last moment to greet the hammer against its face. A sound like a brick being smashed as the hammer impacted between its eyes and caved in the front of its skull.

The male vampire fell onto its ruined face and slapped the floor with its hands. Its legs kicked. Mason finished it with a strike to the back of the head, and it finally went still.

Breathing hard and sick with the smell of the vampire’s blood, he turned away to find the female vampire straddling Ellie and looking to angle its mouth for a bite to her neck. Mason took two steps forward, raised the knife and plunged the blade into the back of its skull.

The vampire shrieked. The blade snapped in Mason’s hand as the vampire jerked to one side. He took hold of the female’s hair and pulled her away from Ellie, who just stared up at him, moving her mouth silently. He pushed the creature to the floor and dropped what remained of the knife. He raised the hammer.

The female vampire struggled around on hand and knee, shaking its head and pawing at its skull as it made a low keening. Thrashing claws slashed strips from the carpet.

Mason stood back from the wounded thing. Ellie scrambled to her feet and leaned against the nearest wall, out of the vampire’s reach.

“Kill it,” Ellie said; her voice little more than a whisper.

Mason said nothing as he stepped forward and brought the hammer down again and again, until the vampire’s head was a pulped bowl of hair, splintered bone and the remains of its shrivelled and blackened brain. And once he was done he staggered away to the other side of the room and bent over and vomited a weak pale gruel onto the floor. Coughing and retching until his throat was sore and his stomach was empty.

When he stood and turned around to face Ellie, she had backed away to one corner of the room. Her upper body was hidden in shadow. She was sobbing quietly, clutching her right hand to her left shoulder.

Mason picked up his torch and turned it upon her. She flinched from the light, reluctant to raise her face to him. And when she finally did, her eyes were bloodshot and glistening with tears. Her mouth trembling at one side as she spoke. Her voice was sad and pained.

“I’m sorry, Mason.”

“Why?”

She lowered her hand from her shoulder. Held out her palm, all wet and red. Wincing, she exposed to the torchlight the wound in her shoulder. A bite wound. Blood soaked the fabric around it. “Fucking bitch.” The words came out in a tired drawl. “Does this mean I’ll become one of them?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She shivered. “I think I can feel it inside me.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll be okay.”

She tried to smile. “I don’t think it’ll be okay, Mason.” She hunched over and spat blood on the floor. Coughed and spluttered. She straightened, wiped her mouth, and studied the blood on her hand. The look in her eyes was something between curiosity and disgust. Then she raised her face to him, and a shudder passed through her body.

Mason couldn’t speak. The room narrowed until it was just them amidst the thick darkness that curtained them like a black fog. His stomach quivered. His throat tightened and he had to concentrate just to keep his legs from giving way beneath him. He stood against the wall, shaking his head, whispering her name.

Ellie clasped her head with both hands and screamed. She began to convulse, backing against the wall and arching her spine to open her mouth towards the ceiling. When she screamed again, such was the agony and raw resonance in her voice that it sounded inhuman.

She collapsed to the floor, slumped in a crouching position, head bowed to her chest.

“Ellie?” Mason took one step towards her. Held out his hand to her.

A slow movement of her head, swaying to one side then back again. Her whispering mouth. A movement in her throat.

Mason was about to take another step when Ellie looked up at him. And his heart faltered and almost stopped when he saw her face and her teeth and the hunger in her eyes. A feeling like hands squeezing his chest. He let out a sob and shook his head, trying to deny it all and pretend everything was okay.

“Ellie…” His voice no more than a breath formed into her name.

Her skin was like porcelain and threaded with red veins. She rose from the floor and stood facing him as he stepped back. With a note of caution she regarded the hammer in his hand. She held her hands together to her chest. Her tongue, already blackening, lurked at the threshold of her mouth and the sharp teeth there. She looked down at the bodies of the two vampires then appraised Mason with an expression of fear and uncertainty.

“Mason, what’s happened to me?” Her voice sounded different; a change in her vocal chords.

Mason couldn’t answer.

“Won’t you help me, Mason?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You let them hurt me. You let them turn me into a monster.”

“I tried to protect you. I tried. I…” He put one hand to his face and stifled a sob in his throat. “I tried to keep you safe.”

“It’s all your fault, Mason.”

“No it’s not.”

“Liar! Yes it is! You’ve damned me to Hell!” And with that she fled from the room and the house, too fast for him to stop her even if he wanted to.  He let her go. Let her go into the dark, to join others like her. The converts.

Mason called after her, but his voice was lost in the silence around him. There was no more screaming from outside, just the moonlit night and the reddish glow of a nearby fire. Even the sirens had stopped.

He dropped the hammer and slumped upon the sofa. Looked down at the floor. And he sobbed gently for his crimes, aching with regret and miserable with heartbreak, dwelling in the dark like a forgotten ghost.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In the dark of the night Mason left the house behind and walked on the road with his torch sweeping about the shadows and the dead bodies he passed.

Even now he struggled to comprehend the night’s events. He expected to wake from a nightmare or find himself restrained upon a bed in a room in some kind of institute for the deranged.

Beyond the street, parts of the town were burning. Plumes of smoke rising to the sky. Distant cries with the breeze. Darkened houses on either side of the street; some with their doors open or ripped from the hinges. Smashed windows and wrecked cars. A blue Volvo had crashed into a garden wall. There was a corpse without a head sprawled on the road near the driver’s door. A set of keys in one hand. The head was nowhere to be seen.

Mason kept walking, stepping around pools of blood slowly turning black. He passed one house where a muffled voice called out for help; but the author could not disguise the laughter in its voice, and Mason was not foolish enough to take the bait.

He sat upon a wooden bench near the river running through the town, and listened to the water flow and whisper. He looked at the row of houses across the road. Tall trees were listing with old age. Dead streetlights. A silver gleam from the light of the moon and the stars. The smell of smoke on the air.

He felt numb, but not from the cold all about him. Part of him knew he was in considerable danger out on the streets, but he didn’t care too much about that. The vampires had attacked the town, and fed well. If they found him here and fell upon him, he would just be another dead man.

Unless he rose again as a heartless, hungry thing.

Countless thoughts of Ellie filled his mind. He remembered their wedding day and the years that followed. The good times. The bad times. The things that drove them apart and left them separated and miserable.

It had all gone to shit.

To distract himself from the siren call of alcohol in his blood, he rolled a cigarette with the last of his tobacco and smoked it while he watched the street, waiting for some monster to come along.

Maybe Ellie would come to find him.

He ignored the approaching sound of a car, and did not look up as it sped past. Then there was the scream of brakes as it came to a stop. The crunch of the gearstick being wrenched, followed by a gentle whine as the car reversed and stopped directly opposite him with the engine idling.

A man’s voice: “This isn’t a good night to be out on the streets, my friend.”

Mason raised his head and looked through the open passenger window at the man in the Ford Fiesta. There was apprehension in the man’s eyes. A chubby face flanked by dark brown mutton chops. He wore a baseball cap and a bomber jacket.

“I suppose it isn’t,” Mason said.

“Are you okay?” the man asked. His eyes searched for signs of injury or bite wounds on Mason. He eyed the hammer lying on the bench.

Mason took a long drag of the cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “I’m not sure.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Fair enough, man. You should duck.”

Mason frowned. “What?”

The man pointed an old service revolver at him. “Get down. There’s something nasty behind you.”

Mason glanced over his shoulder just as a teenage boy reached for him with blood-slick hands. He dropped his cigarette and fell from the bench and onto his knees, grasping for the hammer as he tried to scramble away from the vampire.

The boy snarled.

The crack of a gunshot. The boy’s neck was wrenched backwards and the back of his head blew out. He collapsed, his body slumping over the back of the bench. The insides of his skull spilled like hot soup onto the seat.

When Mason looked back at the car, the man lowered the pistol and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. No expression on his face.

“Fucking leeches,” he said.

Mason rose to his feet, wiping dirt from his jeans.

“I’m getting out of the city,” the man said. “You need a ride?”

Mason nodded, glanced back at the teenager’s body. “Cheers.”

“Good choice. This place is fucked. Don’t forget your little hammer.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The man was called Pete Smith, and he sweated in the driver’s seat as he grasped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands. His bulging stomach was visible past the unzipped bomber jacket clinging to his thick limbs. He told Mason he had already killed his parents earlier that night, after they became, as he called them, ‘leeches’.

The inside of the car smelled like stale junk food and old grease. Something like the musk of body odour was ingrained into the upholstery. A dried up air freshener hung from the rear-view mirror. The floor was littered with food wrappers and scrunched-up McDonald’s burger wrappers. A Costa Coffee cup rolled around in the back of the car. The backseats were taken up with two duffel bags and several bottles of water.

The car moved through streets of wrecked vehicles and murder scenes. A flaming figure staggered from within a building consumed by fire and collapsed on the pavement, still flailing in its death throes. Smoke from the fires made the night air hazy.

A dog trailing its collar bolted across the road. Mason watched it vanish into an alleyway. He wished it the best of luck.

They passed blocks of flats where candlelight still glowed in some windows. On a street corner lurked a gang of youths armed with baseball bats, knives and axes. One had lit a flare that burned with eye-watering red light. They swigged from bottles of vodka and cider. Some were masked up in scarves and hoods, jittery with adrenaline. They eyed the car as it went past.

Gunshots rang out from behind a row of shops.

Dead bodies in moonlit gardens. Forms crouching by the bodies, heads lowered as if to kiss them. One of the forms raised its head for a moment to glance around, and Mason had to turn away from the terrible face of shockingly-white skin and red eyes.

Mason glimpsed people peering from windows, clearly terrified, waiting for help that would never come on this night. Men stood in doorways, looking out at the streets, clutching crowbars or cricket bats.

Pete’s car wasn’t the only vehicle on the roads. Other people were trying to flee the city. There were no more speed limits. They had already witnessed two collisions.

Two men had been fighting near a crashed car, swinging wild punches and kicks. The fight had ended when several vampires emerged onto the street and dragged the men off into the night.

Looters smashed the window front of a newsagent’s and spilled inside to ransack the insides of snack foods, cigarettes and alcohol.

Revealed in car headlights, people stumbled around the streets, some of them in shock and capable of nothing more than listless expressions. Easy prey for the vampires. Others just sat on the kerbs and cried with their heads in their hands. Some people ran from unseen horrors. Families in cars laden with belongings, trying to evacuate in the blackout. People swept torches about them and watched for the creatures out in the night.

A man on a bicycle pedalled as fast as he could, his face stricken with panic and fear, before something with a yawning mouth and powerful hands pulled him screaming into the shadows.

Chaos and murder down every road and avenue. Vampires chased down their victims and fell upon them with glee. Locked doors would not be enough to thwart them.

A few houses further down the road, several vampires dragged a screaming family from the shattered windows of their home and went at them on the front lawn. The father tried to fight, but his strength dwindled against the bloodthirsty monsters and he was dismembered upon the ground. There was much screaming from his wife and daughters until they succumbed to sharp mouths.

A woman jumped from an upstairs window to flee the intruder inside her home. She fell with a terrified cry until she hit the ground, and the snap of her ankle turned the cry into a shrill scream that only attracted the attention of vampires from other houses and gardens. And they feasted upon her.

An injured man staggered from a house in which the windows were aglow with dancing flames. He managed to reach the pavement before he collapsed to his knees and raised his face and wet eyes to the sky. Blood flowed through his fingers from the large, deep wound on the side of his neck. From the house he’d fled, a skittering figure with glowing red eyes emerged to sniff at the air; a blonde-haired boy in bloodstained pyjamas. And when he saw the man slumping on the pavement he closed the distance between them and pounced upon the man and buried his mouth in the gaping wound. The boy bit deeper into the man’s opened throat while his hands gripped either side of his head to hold him fast.

More vampires were glimpsed in torchlight, their ecstatic faces dripping with blood. Grinning mouths full of needle teeth sighted in alleyways, lurking in shadows, watching from the dark.

Mason occasionally caught a glimpse of the Dead Girl staring at him from the streets. He had learned to ignore her.

*

Pete negotiated the chaotic roads, glancing about, never taking his hands from the steering wheel. “Who’d have thought it, eh?”

“What?” said Mason.

“Vampires!”

“Yeah.”

“Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “At first I thought it was terrorists. But terrorists don’t drink people’s blood and keep sprinting at you even after they’ve had three bullets put into their chests. At least not any terrorists I’ve ever seen.”

Mason tried the stereo, and it flared to life with glowing lights. He cycled through the frequencies, greeted with voices from radio stations and old songs. No mention of chaos on the streets and people being slaughtered.

Mason frowned. Pete switched off the radio.

“The outside world continues as normal,” Pete said. “Nothing about the town, eh? I think we’re on our own.”

Before Mason could reply a vampire bolted out from behind a crashed lorry and went for the car with outstretched hands. Pete put his foot down on the accelerator and there was just the scrape of the vampire’s nails upon metal before it was left behind.

“Where’s the police?” said Mason. “Where’s the army?”

“All the police in the town are dead; or undead.” Pete coughed into one hand. “Haven’t seen any sign of soldiers on the ground. All I’ve seen is the helicopters flying over and around the town. It doesn’t bode well, my friend.”

“Military helicopters?”

“All sorts of them. Even Apache gunships.”

“Why aren’t the gunships doing anything?”

“Maybe it’s hard to kill vampires from the air, unless they’re in large numbers. I’m no expert.”

“Neither am I,” Mason said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The car moved down the main road which would take it out of the town. Pete kept the speed down because of the bodies and wreckage scattered about.

The law courts were on fire. A headless corpse was propped upon the front steps. There was no traffic coming into the town.

Pete slowed the car to a stop at the end of a line of stationary traffic. Red lights glowed. Both lanes were filled with vehicles heading out of the town. Helicopters droned directly above, rotors shuddering, sweeping the ground with searchlights.

“A lot of people had the same idea as us,” said Mason.

Pete smacked his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s all we need. Fucking gridlock.”

They climbed out of the car. The lines of vehicles stretched away in the distance. Frustrated drivers and passengers had disembarked from their cars to stand in the road and on the pavements. Some people were arguing. Tempers flared and boiled over. Horns blaring. Raised voices.

“At least it isn’t raining,” said Pete. He kept the revolver close to his body, hidden under his jacket.

Mason looked around at the darkness to either side of the road. If the vampires found and attacked the stalled traffic, it would be a massacre. He stood near a group of people gathered in a circle and listened to the conversation. They were talking about the road being blocked by the army and stopping anyone from leaving the town. Then Mason stepped away, and he was walking back to Pete’s car when the first gunshots rang out from down the road. He turned to face down the lines of traffic, the blood draining from his face to gather in the pit of his stomach.

The screams came next.

More gunfire followed.

And then the people were running back up the road, away from the gunshots, swarming amongst the vehicles and back into the town. Several cars tried to turn in the road, but there was no room to manoeuvre and they only succeeded in getting stuck between the vehicles left behind.

More helicopters appeared in the sky above the road, swooping lower.

“Oh shit,” said Pete. “Gunships.”

Mason was shaking his head, numb with disbelief.

An explosion from far down the road sent tremors through the ground beneath them. They staggered when a shockwave moved through the air. A distant fireball bloomed in the aftermath of the screaming and sounds of people dying. Mason felt the heat against his face.

“They’re firebombing the traffic,” said Pete. “Holy fuck.”

More explosions as the helicopter gunships incinerated anyone still in their cars or on the road. The roar of the firestorm, swarming flames and streaming smoke. The rolling thunder of deep detonations as they flashed and echoed.

Mason saw people burning. He put one hand to his face and let out a prolonged sob.

Pete grabbed him and pulled him back up the road, and they barely escaped the raging fire that consumed the lines of traffic and desperate people.

The gunships wheeled away into the distance to leave nothing but a road of roaring flame and metal and bones.

Mason only looked back once, and wished he hadn’t looked at all.

*

“Quarantine,” said Pete, between two drags of his cigarette. “We’re not getting out. The army’s got us sealed in, my friend.”

They had found refuge with a small group of survivors in a nearby Methodist church. Now they were sitting slumped in the pews and on the floor, every door locked and barricaded with whatever had been at hand. They had refrained from lighting the candles placed next to the walls. The only child in the group, a little girl huddled and shivering next to her mother, was sobbing quietly in the dark. Some people were asleep, while others trembled and whispered, still in shock from the night’s events. Coats, jackets and linen altar sheets were used as blankets. Prayer cushions as makeshift pillows. An old married couple muttered together to their God.

From the stained glass windows the faces of saints and holy men stared down at the survivors.

“I wonder if the vamps will find us here,” Mason said.

“We should be okay, as long as we keep our heads down,” replied Pete.

“Sounds like the best thing to do.”

Pete finished his cigarette and crushed it under his foot. “I lost all my supplies.”

“You’ve still got the pistol?” Mason kept his voice low. Pete had given him a cigarette, and he nursed it in his fingers, savouring the nicotine in his blood and the precious smoke in his lungs.

“Only got six rounds left though.”

“Where did you get it?”

“My grandad brought it back from the Korean War.”

Mason pulled on the cigarette. “Surprised it still works.”

Pete snorted. “You wouldn’t be if you knew my grandad. He didn’t leave it neglected.”

“Is your grandad…?”

“He died of cancer last year. Gave me the pistol before he went. He taught me to shoot with an air rifle when I was a kid.”

“Sounds like a good bloke.” Mason didn’t know what else to say.

“He certainly was. I wish he was here to help us kill vampires.”

“Seems a ridiculous term to describe them,” said Mason.

“But that’s what they are,” Pete said.

“I know. Vampires.”

“Exactly. Fucking exactly.”

Mason shook his head, exhaling blue-grey smoke from his mouth.

“I wonder if the old myths are true,” said Pete. “Or the movies…”

“The Hammer Horror films? Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee?”

“Yeah, totally. Sunlight and wooden stakes.”

“Crucifixes?”

Pete lit another cigarette and scoffed. “Nah. I saw a bloke try to hold off a vamp with one. It didn’t work.”

“I never understood why all vampires were scared of crucifixes.”

“You gotta destroy the brain,” said Pete. “Like zombies. That or decapitation. Or you have to burn the fuckers. I suppose you could dismember them, too.”

“Sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,” Mason said.

Pete nodded, grinning. “I’m a bit of a horror buff.”

“Fair enough.” Mason tapped ash from his cigarette into a small clay bowl Pete had found. “So do you think sunlight harms them?”

Pete looked at the floor. “Hopefully. Then we might have a chance against them. Especially if they sleep during the day.”

Mason frowned. “You want to attack them while they sleep?”

“Fuck, yeah,” said Pete. “Better then than when they’re awake and trying to rip your throat out. Don’t you want to kill them?”

Mason breathed out and felt his chest deflate. He was silent for a moment. He thought about Ellie. “I suppose so.”

“Completely,” Pete said. “If you became one of those monsters, wouldn’t you want to be put out of your misery?”

“Probably.”

“Damn right.” Pete examined the glowing tip of his cigarette then looked back to Mason. “You from around here?”

“I was just visiting.”

“Bad timing.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Any family here? Friends?”

“My wife.”

Pete hesitated. “Is she…?”

Mason rubbed at his face. “She’s one of them, now.”

“I’m sorry, pal.”

“So am I.” Mason was relieved Pete didn’t ask for details.

Pete looked around at the walls. “Do you think they can come inside churches? Hallowed ground and all that bullshit. I don’t think they have to be invited in, either.”

“I noticed that, too,” said Mason. “They can go wherever they want.”

Pete finished his cigarette and scowled. “The motherfuckers. The absolute motherfuckers.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Just after midnight, and the streets outside were quiet except for the occasional distant scream. Mason stretched out on a creaking pew and closed his eyes. Most of the other survivors were asleep. The little girl had stopped crying a short while ago. Something metallic clattered in the road beyond the churchyard. Faraway sounds from the town, like metal falling onto concrete and the cackling of some awful thing capering through the street.

He looked forward to the dawn and the daylight, no matter how grey and dour it might be.

Shivering, he thought of Ellie as he drifted into an apprehensive sleep, wondering if she ran in the black streets or stood in the shadows of a ruined house. He wiped tears from his lowered eyelids and remembered her when she was younger and optimistic about all things.

The last image in his mind before he was lost to waiting dreams was of Ellie in their old garden in the height of summer, beautiful and barefooted in shorts and a t-shirt, laughing as he switched on a water sprinkler to catch her by surprise.

*

And Mason dreamed of her dancing with the terrible creature of rags and limbs. They were inside a great building made indistinct by shadows as vampires crawled up the walls to stare downwards. Tortured faces and cruel eyes; vile and lipless maws dripping with fluid.

In alcoves and under stone archways, pale-faced monsters with mouths red from their last kill applauded and grinned for their King and his bride.

*

He woke exhausted to the grey morning light that fell through the stained glass windows. He sat up and rested his spine against the back of the bench, rubbed his eyes and breathed out a long sour breath. When he remembered where he was, and what had happened last night, he slumped with his hands over his face while his heart fluttered and leapt under his skin. His bones felt heavy and aching.

Part of him hadn’t expected to wake up.

Most of the other survivors were still asleep, huddled in small groups. Some snored gently and wheezed little breaths through open mouths.

“Morning,” Pete said from behind him.

Mason turned around. The other man was on his feet, a cigarette dangling between his lips. He was checking his revolver.

“Morning,” Mason croaked.

“Sleep well?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither. If you want some water, I’ve got some left in my bottle.” He picked up the bottle from the floor and tossed it to Mason.

Mason unscrewed the cap and drank.

“You wanna go outside?”

Mason pulled the bottle from his mouth. Wiped his lips. Screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Now?”

“Make the most of the daylight. And we need to see how bad things are.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“We can bring back some food and water for the others.” Pete reached into the back pocket of his cargo trousers and pulled out a scrunched up and half-eaten tube of Polos.

“Mint?”

Mason shook his head. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.” Pete thumbed one from underneath the wrapping and flicked it into his mouth. He made a sucking sound that Mason found hard to tolerate so soon after waking.

*

Pete had woken up one of the others and told her that he and Mason were going out for supplies. The woman merely nodded, bleary-eyed and trembling, and then as Pete walked away she told them to find some painkillers.

Pete nodded and told her not to open the doors for anyone but them.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They emerged into daylight and crossed the churchyard until they emerged onto the street. The overcast sky had receded slightly to reveal winter sunlight. They stood and listened, glancing around in the silence. Plumes of smoke still rose from within the town, but most of the fires had burned out. The air smelled of ash and scorched plastic. Grains of charcoal on the cold breeze brushed against their faces as they started down the road away from the church.

They found the first corpses soon afterwards. Crooked and broken forms twisted in the last moments before their life was snatched away. Ripped open and flayed. Skulls crushed and shattered.

Mason couldn’t look at them for long, the children least of all. Due to the damage upon their skulls, he didn’t think they would rise again.

Pete appraised at a woman’s head impaled upon a wooden stake stuck in the ground. “Fuck’s sake.” He shook his head and spat.

They passed a children’s playground and noticed the decapitated corpse in a business suit on one of the swings. The front of the suit was open and showed claw marks on the corpse’s chest. When they reached a traffic roundabout they just stood and looked around. Human arms had been loosely piled upon the bonnet of a yellow Lexus. A few of them wore watches, wristbands or bracelets. The hands at the ends of the arms wore rings of gold, silver and palladium.

Pete kicked a motorbike helmet at the kerb, then realised it contained a head. He laughed dismally. “The vamps had a blast last night.”

“Is anyone left alive?” said Mason. “Did anyone survive?”

“I’m sure we’ll run into someone sooner or later.”

Mason walked onto the roundabout, between the abandoned cars and those crashed into metal railings and streetlights. The traffic lights were out of action. A line of crows gathered on gable roofs, watching the men.

Blackened bones in a burned out shopfront. Pigeons were dabbing their little beaks in a corpse’s spilled intestines. The stench of corruption stifled the air in meaty breaths that thickened the bile at the base of Mason’s throat.

He looked about, frowning in the weak sunlight spilling through the clouds. His eyes scanned the streets and roads, searching for movement. Pete crouched by a dropped and torn plastic bag of groceries and picked through it until he had two chocolate bars in his hand. He gave one to Mason.

Mason ripped the wrapper and bit down on the chocolate. He chewed and swallowed, glad of the sugar rush in his blood. He noticed a tabby cat slouched by the roadside, licking at its bloody paws. It turned and fled when the men approached on the way to check an abandoned police car. The inside of the police car was filthy with dried blood and grime. There was a severed tongue on the driver’s seat, trailing red roots slowly drying into jerky.

Pete seemed oddly intrigued by the tongue. “This gets better and better. Jesus.”

Mason turned away from the police car and looked to the roofs of buildings from nearby streets. “I have to go somewhere.”

*

Twenty minutes later they stood outside Ellie’s house. An ash-flecked wind careered along the street. Brief snatches of sunlight.

“You sure you want to do this?” said Pete.

Mason nodded, tightening his hand around the hammer.

Pete shrugged. “Okay.”

*

Mason was first through the front door. He halted, sweeping his torch around the walls. He entered the living room and Pete followed. Their torchlights fell upon the two dead vampires on the floor.

Pete whistled. “This your handiwork?”

“Yeah.”

“Nicely done.

They walked the downstairs rooms in careful steps, watching the shadows, but there was no sign of Ellie or anyone else. Mason climbed the stairs with a cluster of anticipation broiling in his stomach. Pete followed, his shuffling feet brushing on the carpet.

They checked each room until they arrived at Ellie’s bedroom. Mason asked Pete to wait outside. Pete nodded and stood with his back against the opposite wall.

After Mason opened the door and stepped inside the room, he stood at the foot of the large bed and stared at the shape of the sleeping figure under the blankets. The curtains were drawn to block the daylight. He walked to the side of the bed and looked down, his hands limp and heavy at his sides. He had to concentrate to keep the hammer from dropping from his hand.

Had Ellie returned here during the night? Returned here hoping that Mason waited for her, to share the gospel with him?

He readied the hammer, breathing harshly through his mouth, his blood quickening as he reached down to the bed. And with one shaking hand he took the blanket between two fingers and pulled it away from the sleeper.

Ellie wasn’t there.

Mason looked down at the vampire lying on its back in Ellie’s bed. A young woman, pretty and dark-haired, early twenties at most. There was a piercing in her left ear and a brooch around her neck. The smallest dot of dried blood by her mouth. She wore a loose-fitting t-shirt and jeans streaked with grime. No shoes on her feet. One sock.

The healing wound on the left side of her neck told of her recent conversion.

“I’m sorry,” Mason said.

She opened her eyes and shrieked, her lamprey-mouth ringed with ranks of vicious teeth.

By the time Pete had stumbled into the room with his pistol raised, the woman had been released by the downward swing of Mason’s hammer. Pete stood next to the bed, staring at the blood on the blankets and the pillow, on the wall above the headboard and on Mason’s hands. And Mason slumped breathless and slick-faced against the wall and dropped the hammer, which hit the floor with a dull thud.

He walked out of the room.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They walked the streets again as midday approached and the sun rose to its highest point in the sky. They began to see other survivors in the streets, milling about the roads and pavements, still in shock from the night before. Raggedy people with no idea of what to do. Drifting shadows. Pale, slack and confused faces. An old woman asked them if help was coming, and before Mason could answer she walked away muttering to herself with her handbag swinging over the crook of her arm.

He wondered how many survivors were hiding in their houses, too scared to come out, dreading the fall of darkness. How many buildings contained vampires waiting for the sun to go down? He imagined hundreds of nests and lairs across the town. Cellars, basements, attics. He looked down at the road and pictured dozens of vampires asleep in the sewers under his feet.

With no police to enforce the law, looters stripped electronic shops and sporting goods stores. Fights broke out in the street, and many of them ended in awful bursts of violence and grave injuries.

Some civic-minded survivors attempted to clean the streets of wreckage and human remains, but it was a thankless task.

The news of the quarantine had spread around the town, and angry people gathered to protest, even though they had no one to protest at. Groups of people went to the edge of town to beseech the military, and after the gunfire they returned less in number or not at all.

It was all chaos and rage, confusion and fear. And with all those things was the realisation that monsters would be on the streets once darkness fell.

There would be more death that night.

*

Helicopters buzzed over the town. A fighter jet screamed through the sky and vanished into the east. The sky clouded over and soon afterward rain began to fall. Mason hoped it would wash most of the blood and filth from the streets.

In the early afternoon, wandering through the town centre, Mason and Pete rounded a corner in the street to find a dead soldier hanging on a rope from a streetlight. They walked until they were below the streetlight, and stood back from the body, watching it sway in the breeze.

“Fucking hell,” said Mason.

It was a young man, probably no more than a teenager. His neck was limp and crooked after the wrenching of the noose. His eyes were bulging in their sockets, and his face was puffy and bruised. Arms hanging loose by his sides. His boots had been taken and his uniform was ripped open.

“Looks like he got lynched,” Pete said.

“He’s just a kid.”

“People are angry at the quarantine. Doesn’t take long for things to fall apart. As a species, we’re pretty mental.”

“Poor lad,” Mason said.

Pete cut the soldier down then laid him by the roadside and covered his face with a sheet of newspaper taken from a nearby rubbish bin. Mason watched the street.

“Let’s go,” Pete said. “We haven’t got much daylight left.”

*

There were disembodied shouts from nearby as the sunlight waned beyond the sloped roofs of buildings.

They were in a back street, on their way back to the church and shelter for the night, when a man stumbled out of an alleyway and collided with Pete. They both fell down. Mason went to Pete and helped him to his feet as the other man groaned on the pavement, clutching his ankle.

The man was a soldier, sans a helmet and rifle, bleeding from a wound on his forehead and breathing hard through gritted teeth. His face was grimy and beaded with sweat. With eyes wet and rimmed with pink he looked up at them, his mouth forming into a pleading shape.

“Please help me. Please…”

“It’s another squaddie,” said Pete.

“They’re hunting me.” The soldier dragged himself across the pavement and sat against the wall. “They’re trying to kill me.”

“Who?” said Mason. “Who’s trying to kill you?”

With a sharp intake of air, the soldier winced and glanced at his injured ankle. “The men. The fucking lynch mob.”

Mason and Pete exchanged looks. Pete frowned.

“They said I had the choice of hanging or beating. They said it was our fault, that we’d left the town to the monsters. They’ve already hanged Foster. Hung him from a fucking streetlight.”

“We’ve already seen,” said Pete.

They helped the soldier to his feet, and he hissed through his teeth when his injured ankle took his weight. They half-carried him as he switched the weight to his other ankle, and hauled him along the street.

Behind them, from the adjacent street on the other side of the houses, angry shouts and calls echoed. A gunshot rang out, followed by a sound that was like someone banging a stick on a metal surface.

“They’re well-armed,” the soldier said. “They took my rifle, and Foster’s.”

“We have to get off the street,” said Pete.

They found a house that looked abandoned and stumbled through the back doorway as the lynch mob emerged into the street to search for the soldier.

*

The downstairs rooms were bloodstained and wrecked by signs of violence, but there were no bodies. Outside, men with makeshift weapons – bludgeons, cudgels, blades and axes – appeared in the streets.

“Upstairs,” whispered Pete. They helped the soldier up the stairway, moving carefully and quietly, dreadfully aware they could be walking into a nest of vampires.

Raised voices outside. Staccato bursts of anger and frustration. Trampling boots in the back garden.

Once they reached the top of stairs they halted on the landing and listened for any footfalls inside the house.

Pete looked up at the thin cord hanging from the attic hatch. Then he looked at Mason.

Footsteps approached the front door.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Mason swung the torch around the attic and tensed himself for something awful to emerge from the dark; but instead the light revealed VHS tapes of action films from the Eighties in cardboard boxes, and bin bags of baby toys. There were thick books in dusty stacks. Trinkets and old ornaments. Halloween masks and paper plates. Forgotten things. A large mound of musty old blankets and cloth sacks rose from the middle of the floor.

Pete helped the soldier sit down. He winced as he laid out his leg then rolled back the trouser leg to his shin and gently pawed at the swollen, reddened skin around his ankle.

Mason and Pete sat opposite the soldier and watched him. The floorboards muffled the clatter and thumping of the men searching the house. Mumbled voices. Scrapes and bumps, creaks and knocks. Footsteps ascended the stairs and wandered through the rooms below them.

“He couldn’t have got far,” a man’s voice said right beneath them on the landing. “Not with an injured ankle. Bastard squaddie.”

Mason hoped they didn’t notice the attic hatch; or thought it unworthy of investigation if they did. He switched off the torch, and the three of them waited in the silent dark while the men returned outside to search other places.

“Thank fuck for that,” Pete whispered, sighing.

Mason flicked on his torch. Pete did the same. The sudden light stung Mason’s eyes. In the colliding beams the soldier’s face was sickly white as he stared at the large mound of blankets and sacks.

Mason followed his gaze with the torch. The mound was trembling and rustling.

“What the hell…?”

A naked old man emerged crawling from within the mound, his eyes gleaming in the torchlight. His face contorted into a snarl; sharp teeth jutted from the bloodstained horror of his mouth. His body was sagging and withered.

“You’ve come to play with me,” the old man said, grinning. “You’ve come to play with me on my birthday.”

“Oh fuck,” said Pete. “It’s Uncle Fester.”

*

They fought at close-quarters in the semi-darkness, the old man swiping his clawed hands at them and hissing like a lizard. Torch beams swayed and fell. Scrambling movements and grunted breaths.

They finally dispatched the vampire when Pete pulled a blanket over his head and dragged him to the floor. And while the old man kicked and thrashed and tried to break free, Mason knelt beside him, and with Pete’s knife stabbed the old man in the head multiple times until he stopped struggling and dark blood began to bleed through the gouges in the blanket.

The soldier watched them without emotion. “Good work.”

*

They waited in silence until Pete thought it was safe to climb down from the attic. Despite his reluctance to leave the comparative safety of the attic, Mason was glad to leave behind the stinking remains of the undead old man.

They descended to the upstairs landing. Mason glanced out the window at the dusk falling over the town.

“We won’t get back to the church before dark,” he said.

Pete looked outside then checked his pistol. He wiped his mouth. “Looks like we’re having a sleepover.”

*

With the light bleeding from the sky they barricaded the doors and closed the curtains. They holed up in the living room, where there wasn’t as much blood as in the other downstairs rooms. Pete pushed a mattress flat against the living room window; it was a paltry defence against a vampire attack, but it was better than nothing.

Mason glanced at the framed photos of the family who had, until last night, lived here in relative comfort. The bloodstains in the kitchen and the hallway told an awful end to that story.

The soldier lay across the sofa, his injured ankle raised on two cushions stacked upon each other. He sipped from a bottle of water and avoided eye contact with Mason and Pete, who sat on the floor and against the opposite wall, facing him. They had questions for him that would have to be answered eventually.

Mason had found a candle, and lit it against the darkness. A long night awaited them, and they would wait in the shabby little room until sunrise.

*

“I think you owe us an explanation,” Mason said to the soldier. “Who are you?”

The soldier looked at the floor and swallowed. He let out a slow breath. “Corporal Tom Bluth.”

“Pleased to meet you, Corporal. Now please enlighten us as to what the fuck is happening. The quarantine was put in place very, very quickly. As if the army knew what was happening before the public had even the slightest clue.”

Bluth didn’t look at Mason. He was wringing his hands.

“It would be polite to answer, Corporal,” said Pete. “We did save your life today, if you remember.”

“I remember.”

“Good,” said Pete.

“Did you get left behind?” Mason asked.

Bluth looked up at them. “No.”

“Elaborate, Corporal.”

“I led a squad into the town on the first night. Strictly recon, with orders not to engage the creatures or interact with civilians, and then report back. There were four of us. Gibbs and Webster were taken by the creatures. Foster and myself were caught by that lynch mob. I managed to escape, but he didn’t, as you saw.”

Pete placed his hand near the pocket holding his pistol. “Does the army know how this all started? I saw a few army vehicles passing through town the day before the quarantine.”

Bluth stared at the floor. “I’m just a grunt.”

“If you know something, tell us,” said Mason.

“I’ve only heard rumours.”

“What rumours?”

“I can’t say.”

“You can, Corporal. Help us out here. We saved your life. You owe us something, at least, even if it is just rumours.”

Bluth looked away from him and sighed, then ran his hands over his face. “King Carrion.”

Mason felt his heart falter. “What?”

“Like I said, it’s a rumour.” Bluth leaned forward. “I heard that the military found something buried deep in the ground. In some sort of tomb. A hibernating creature. A vampire.” He paused, looked at Mason.

“Go on,” Mason said.

“Apparently they brought it to a military base a few miles away from here. It’d been there for several months until it woke up, and then escaped…”

“And came here,” Pete said.

Bluth nodded. “That’s what I heard.”

Mason remembered the thing of shadows and rags he’d encountered on the night Calvin and Zeke died. The creature that danced with Ellie in his dreams.

King Carrion. The vampire King…

“So what do the military plan to do now they’ve quarantined the town?” asked Mason. “More firebombing? Scorched earth? Wipe the town from the map?”

Bluth didn’t meet his eyes. “Depends how bad things get.”

“I think things are already bad enough,” said Pete.

“So, there’s no chance of rescue?” Mason said.

“I can’t give you an answer,” said Bluth. “I’m just a fucking squaddie and I’m in exactly the same position as both of you. They won’t let me out of the town now.”

“We’re pretty fucked, then,” said Pete.

No one replied. There was just silence inside the little room.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The candle died not long after midnight, and they sat shivering in the dark of the house as the vampires stalked the streets outside. Horrific screams and shrieks accompanied cruel laughter and the dwindling cries of the hunted. Staccato gunshots lasted for a few minutes then faded away, to be replaced by the drone of a reconnaissance helicopter.

Mason wondered what would be done about the diseased town once the government and military had worked through their scenarios and plans. The vampires would not be allowed to spread, no matter the cost. Civilian lives were expendable. Collateral damage. If need be, the town would be bombed out of existence, reduced to a smoking crater in south Somerset.

He imagined what was happening on the streets as he hid in this little room. More attacks. More converts. More vampires. And soon the number of survivors would be down to a handful.

King Carrion.

He thought of Ellie for a long while, and pictured her as something carnivorous and without mercy. It reduced him to tears.

He fell asleep with those tears still upon his face.

*

He dreamed the same dream of Ellie and the figure in the cloth mask. But now Ellie spoke its name with the reverence reserved for a god. They danced in the same cavernous room with the same audience of monsters. And then King Carrion, the thing of rags, released her and she crawled into the dark to commune with her brothers and sisters of blood.

Come to me, Mason, her voice called from the shadows. We can be together again. Cease your fighting against the converted ones. Be at peace and accept what is inevitable.

A pause, and then: I still love you, my husband.

*

Mason woke and pawed at his throat to check for wounds. He slumped and exhaled, then grabbed the bottle beside him and sank most of the water inside. He sat there gasping, heart crashing and irregular, sweating under the blanket around his shoulders.

Pete and the soldier were still asleep. Mason rose stiffly, groaning and sighing, and went to the mattress against the window and pushed it to let in the first light of morning around the edges of the closed curtains. He peered outside, squinting at tepid sunlight as a wave of relief passed through him at surviving the night. But then he remembered the dream and the words Ellie had spoken. And a great swell of longing for his wife consumed him until he sagged with his back against the wall and bowed his head.

*

They left the house to watch the sun rise above the town. They moved through back streets, watchful and jittery, glancing up and down narrow roads and past grey buildings.

Mason found a short-handled axe discarded on the road, and stopped to pick it up. Its blade was encrusted with dried blood. He kept it with him.

“Good find,” said Pete.

The swelling in Bluth’s ankle had lessened, and he was able to walk with only Mason supporting him. He smelled of stale sweat and old vinegar. Pete walked in front with the pistol at his side.

They passed a man in white underpants loitering in a doorway with a bottle of supermarket brand lemonade clutched to his chest. He cackled to himself when they looked towards him. He was a shrivelled thing.

“The monsters took more of us last night,” he said, with a witless glaze in his eyes. “Soon we’ll all be bloodsuckers!”

Pete glared at the man for a moment then turned away.

After that, they encountered no one else on the streets. Mason looked up to the blue sky hazy with cloud. Winter sun, cold breeze, chill air.

The town was silent and dead.

*

They found the church doors hanging from their hinges, and when they stepped inside the air was spoiled with coppery blood and offal. The morning light spilled through the doorway and revealed the broken, mangled shapes and wet meat left out for them. Further inside the nave there was a deeper stench of rancid dairy and rotten eggs.

The people in the church had been slaughtered. Mason, Pete and the soldier stared at the remains strewn around and upon the pews and the floor. Headless bodies arranged on the benches, with heads placed on their laps. Severed arms and legs. Hearts stolen from chest cavities and smeared over the walls. Frothing viscera. Blood had dripped down the back of pews to pool on the stone floor. The head of a little girl had been planted on a metal candleholder. Her face was frozen in sheer terror and pain. Her mouth was stuffed with communion wafers.

Bluth hunched over and dry heaved. When he straightened, his face was beaded with sweat and taut with what looked like shame or guilt.

Pete sat down on an empty pew and bowed his head. He looked at the pistol. “They came here in the night. Fucking leeches.”

Mason walked up the aisle, glancing at the bodies to either side of him, and stopped before the altar, where ropey intestines and sloppy flaps of flesh were strewn around its base. The altar frontal had been torn aside. Upon the front of the altar, a name had been scrawled in blood.

KING CARRION

His eyes drifted to the top of the altar. He tried to speak, but the words crumbled silently out of his mouth. And he reached out and picked up Ellie’s wedding ring from atop the altar. He didn’t need to read the inscription on the inside, but he did, and it moved him to tears to see the words he’d given to her to mark their union.

He put the ring in his pocket.

It had been left here for him, as a warning, a promise, or a reminder that Ellie would wait for him until he relented and joined the converted.

He was startled when a faint, wavering and indistinct voice drifted out of the shadows at the back of the chancel beyond the altar. He froze. Pete walked up the aisle. Bluth followed, using the edges of the wooden benches for support.

“Did you hear that?” said Mason, gripping his axe.

Pete nodded. “A survivor?”

Bluth looked at them. “Or a trap.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

They followed the voice to a black door at the rear of the chancel. Mason assumed that it led to the transept and the rooms within. He looked at Pete and Bluth then opened the door and pulled it back on its old hinges.

Pete directed his torch into the darkness through the doorway. Mason stepped back and did the same. Bluth stood behind them and said nothing. A musty smell came out of the dark, like old shoes and yellowed newspapers. Mason went to step forward, but Pete looked at him and held up the pistol and took the lead instead. Mason followed. Bluth fell in behind them as they passed through the doorway and edged into a room. They stood in the swarming of dust particles caught in the sweeping torch beams.

The voice had stopped.

The room – the sacristy – was empty of life or the undead. Pete opened a white wardrobe and pawed through a rack of hanging vestments. Mason threw back the curtains to let dim daylight into the room.

They went through the next door, into a corridor full of shadow. Torchlight creeping along the floor and walls.

“I can hear the voice again,” muttered Pete.

“I can’t hear anything,” Mason said.

They moved along the corridor until they reached another door. It was painted red.

“The voice is inside,” Pete said. “I can hear it.”

Mason listened, but there was just the stutter of his own heart. He glanced back at Bluth, who frowned and shook his head. Pete opened the door and crept forward with the torch and pistol held out. And then they were in the room just as dark as the corridor and the room before that.

The smell of corruption immediately hit Mason and he wrinkled his nose and looked around for the source. Pete was already moving in small steps within the room, sweeping his torch around the walls and over his shadow painted by Mason’s torch behind him.

It was the reverend’s office. A small desk stood near the back of the room. On the desk was a silver-framed photo next to a dull white computer. A dusty keyboard and mouse. A pot of pencils and pens. On the wall behind the desk was a reprint of a Turner watercolour.

The voice whispered out of the dark, and seemed to flutter in the air about them.

“You’ve all come to save me, I see…”

Mason froze. Then he and Bluth looked up at the same time that Pete aimed his torch at the ceiling.

Bluth muttered something and stepped back against the wall.

The torchlights revealed a girl clinging spiderlike to the ceiling, her red eyes blazing, mouth yawning open and struggling to contain the rows of fanged teeth. Her lank hair hung down around her face as she hissed and grinned. An undead and diseased thing that should not be.

“Holy shit,” Pete said.

They were the last words he spoke before the girl reached down and grabbed his head and snatched him from the floor. As he was pulled towards the ceiling, his pistol discharged and its report filled the room. His torchlight bobbed across the ceiling as he screamed. The girl giggled wetly.

Mason reeled away when the sickening sound of ripping flesh ended Pete’s screams. Sudden splashing of blood down Pete’s front. His pistol fired again. Then he was released and fell to the floor. His neck was slashed open, the wound deep and haemorrhaging blood. He spluttered and then his head slumped to one side and his eyes centred upon Mason as he opened his mouth and his eyes glazed over.

Mason turned back to the girl and watched her detach from the ceiling and land on all fours then look up to him and grin through a filthy, dripping mouth. Her hands were stained red. Her limbs clicked.

Bluth was telling Mason to kill her, to use the axe and take her head from her shoulders.

The girl dragged Pete to the far side of the room and crouched over him. She licked at his neck and shivered and then raised her face to the ceiling. The low moan from her mouth was one of utter joy. Her tongue worked over her lips. She looked up at Mason, scarlet eyes bleeding, and clambered over Pete’s body to get to him.

Mason raised the axe in one hand. The girl leapt at him at the same moment that he swung for her, and it struck her in the shoulder and embedded in flesh and muscle. She screeched and flailed, spitting flecks of black saliva and blood, her arm extending to swipe at him with jagged nails.

A thin line of heat and pain was scored across his chest. His hand slipped from the axe handle and he looked down to see his jumper torn almost to his armpit. He backed away, flinching from the girl’s slashing claws. He felt the warmth of blood upon the skin of his chest. He hunched over, grimacing, not taking his eyes from the vampire girl padding towards him with an expression of hate and rage upon her face.

Bluth was shouting behind Mason; his voice was a mess of syllables and nonsense in the near-dark. Mason retreated on heavy feet, and had almost reached the wall, when the girl pulled the axe from her shoulder and threw it; the axe struck the wall between Mason and Bluth and embedded in the plaster.

The girl skittered forward faster than seemed possible and pounced upon Mason and dragged him to the floor. She straddled him as he struggled and tried to wriggle free, but her strength was too much for him. She planted one hand upon his face and pushed it to one side and angled her mouth for the killing bite at his throat.

Mason screamed, pawing at her, thrashing underneath her weight. Her unholy strength sapped him until his cries dwindled to terrified pleas.

The girl arched her spine and drew her head back and opened her mouth. Her teeth dripped with bloody saliva. Dark grey gums and a necrotic tongue. Mason could smell the raw meat stench of her breath.

The muscles in her neck tightened to snapping point and she hissed wetly.

Bluth appeared behind the girl, wrapped his arms around her neck and hauled her from atop Mason. She screamed and wriggled as Bluth dragged her across the floor and threw her against the wall. She immediately sprung back onto all fours, glaring at the soldier.

Mason stood and reached for the axe in the wall. He glanced back to see Bluth take the revolver from Pete’s hand and raise it and pull back the hammer as he aimed at the girl hissing from the corner of the room.

“Stupid bitch,” Bluth said.

The first round took the girl through the chest and pushed her back like she’d been shoved. He fired again, and the girl’s right ear was torn away by the bullet. She screamed, and it rose to an agonised screech as her hands scraped and gouged plaster from the wall.

Mason pulled the axe free and staggered and turned as Bluth took one step towards the girl and shot her through the mouth. She slid down the wall and slumped on her buttocks, and her head lolled to one side. She made a gurgling sound from the back of her throat as she snapped her mouth uselessly.

Bluth pulled the trigger again, but the revolver was empty. He checked the cylinder. Then he tossed the gun to the floor. He looked at Mason.

“Finish it.”

Mason hesitated, swallowed, and looked from Bluth to the girl.

“Do it!” Bluth said. “Put it out of its misery.”

Mason inhaled sharply then went to the girl and stood over her. She looked up, snarling through her broken face, and as she reached out to him, he swung the axe downwards and cleaved her skull. And she finally died again, released from un-death.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Mason crouched by Pete’s body and looked at his face. His eyes were open and dulled. He had died sometime during the fight with the girl.

“I’m sorry, Pete.”

Bluth stood over Mason’s shoulder. “He’s going to rise again.”

“I know.”

“We have to cut off his head or destroy the brain.”

“I know.”

“You want me to do it?”

“Yes.”

*

Mason stepped away as Bluth used the axe to separate Pete’s head from the flesh of his neck. And when he was done they left the room and its two corpses and went back out into the church to stand near the scattered remains of the people who’d once taken shelter there.

*

Mason found a First Aid box in the sacristy. Bluth helped him disinfect and slap some gauze over the cut across his chest. Mason asked if vampirism could be transmitted through a scratch. Bluth wasn’t sure.

Afterwards they sat on the steps outside the front of the church, in the waning sunlight. The temperature was dropping. A frigid breeze swept down the silent street. They passed a bottle of water between them and drank between pulling on their cigarettes.

“How’s your ankle?” said Mason.

Bluth watched the houses across the road. “Better, I think.”

Beyond the roofs, plumes of white-grey smoke rose from deeper within the town. Faint voices echoed between buildings.

Mason looked at Ellie’s wedding ring in his hand. He turned it over. He noticed Bluth watching him.

“It was my wife’s.”

“Is she dead?”

“She’s a vampire.”

“Undead.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bluth.

“You married?”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

“Gay.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m gay.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m still in the closet.”

“Not anymore.”

“Good point.”

“Am I the first person you’ve told?” said Mason.

Bluth exhaled. “Yeah.”

Mason almost laughed. “I feel honoured.”

Bluth threw the last bit of his cigarette down the steps. “Strange how things work out.”

“Very true.”

It started to rain cold specks of drizzle.

“I’m leaving,” said Bluth.

“You’re leaving the town?”

The soldier nodded. “The situation’s hopeless. I don’t want to become a vampire. I’ve no wish to live forever as a monster. I don’t want to lose my soul. I’d rather kill myself, but as I’m Catholic, suicide is not really an option. Then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if the military bombs the town before we’re all transformed into bloodsuckers.”

“You think you can get past the quarantine?” said Mason.

“I’m going to walk down the road to the outskirts of town and try to talk my way out. I’ll probably get a bullet, but it’s a better death than the other choices.”

Mason took the last pull from his cigarette then dropped the smoking butt and crushed it under his foot. “It’s a good choice.”

“You’re welcome to come with me,” said Bluth.

Mason looked at Ellie’s ring. “Much obliged, but I can’t go.”

“I understand. Good luck, Mason.”

“Good luck, Corporal.”

Bluth stood. He descended the steps and looked up at the darkening sky. “I’ve always liked walking in the rain.”

*

Twenty minutes later Mason had retreated to sit in the church doorway when he heard the gunshot from the edge of town. He looked down the road in the direction Bluth had walked. Then he lit another cigarette and bowed his head.

“Hello,” a small voice said.

Mason raised his face and looked towards the little boy standing in the road. The boy was very thin and pale, dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and black trainers with loose laces. Blonde hair that was almost white, slick with rainwater.

Mason said nothing and watched the boy. The boy climbed the steps and sat next to him in the doorway. He smelled of ammonia and old flowers.

“You look tired,” the boy said, without looking at him. “Maybe you should stop fighting, Mason.” The boy’s voice seemed older than his appearance.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m a familiar.”

“A familiar?”

“I serve the vampires. I serve King Carrion.”

“You serve them?”

“Yes.”

“How did that happen?”

“King Carrion came to me. I saw the light. After he killed my parents and drank their blood.”

“What’s your name?”

“Steven.”

“So how do you know my name, Steven?”

“The vampires let me know things. They have their ways. King Carrion has his ways.”

“Fair enough, Steven.”

The boy wiped his mouth. “You should convert willingly. Or become a familiar, like me. I can take you to a place. The last people in the town are steadily being converted.”

“I’m okay. Thanks for the offer.”

Steven turned to him and reached out and touched Mason’s chest where the girl had scratched him. Then he withdrew his hand and looked out at the street.

“King Carrion sees all,” said Steven. “He has seen you, Mason. You are known as a survivor. King Carrion admires you.”

“Admires me?”

“Very much so.”

“Well, King Carrion can fuck off.”

The boy looked at him and rose from the doorway. He walked halfway down the steps before he stopped and turned around. “King Carrion may come for you tonight.”

“I’ll be waiting for him,” Mason said.

The boy smiled, but it was without humour. A cold expression. “You won’t be disappointed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Mason walked the pavement with the axe in his hand. The rain had stopped. Litter and scraps of paper ran on the breeze across the damp road. Rubbish bins had been knocked over. Burnt out cars contained blackened skeletons. Melted tyres and the smell of charred rubber and plastic.

An ice cream van had crashed into a set of black iron railings, which were now twisted and broken. Mason paused to pick up a six-inch iron spike that had snapped off from the railings. Its tip was sharp enough to be useful, so he put it in his pocket and carried on.

The houses on either side of the street looked abandoned. Front doors hung ajar. Splintered doorframes and smashed glass. Occasionally he glimpsed a white face in an upstairs window. Just two days ago the street would have been bustling with activity and noise, but now it was all dead, and the only people that remained were the survivors living on borrowed time.

Mason passed a man sitting on a doorstep and dabbing a stained handkerchief to his mouth. He squinted past eyes that were circled with bruises. One cheekbone was swollen and puffy. He was flanked by twin girls who stared at Mason with grimy faces and sad eyes. Further on two teenage boys were trying to start a car by the roadside. They sneered at Mason as he passed.

Down the street an old man stood in his front garden and raised a Union Jack to the top of a flagpole. The man looked up at the flag and saluted, then lowered his head and his hand and turned away to walk up the garden path to the doorway of his house. The Union Jack flapped in the breeze, tattered and creased like old skin.

Raggedy children scampered in a playground, but there was no laughter and they kept glancing at the sky to note the falling of the sun.

The police station was on fire. A few dead bodies in the car park outside. Dark smears on the tarmac.

Upon a wall, someone had scrawled OLD TOOTH WILL DRAIN YOU.

While walking through the centre of the town he passed the library and watched people throw books into piles near the front of the building.

Further on, when he rounded a corner in a street lined with looted shops and restaurants, he came upon a man forcing himself upon a woman over the bonnet of a car. The man was trying to take off her jeans even as she scratched at his face and screamed.

Mason walked up behind the man and pulled him away from the woman and pushed him to the floor. When the man rose to his feet and bunched his fists, Mason held up the axe. The man noticed the axe and spat then turned away and fled.

The woman thanked Mason and ran in the other direction.

Mason kept walking.

*

He arrived at Ellie’s house towards late afternoon, crumpled, tired and afraid of the approaching night. The house hadn’t changed since he last visited, and he walked amongst the rooms in silence and looked at the things Ellie had left behind. He went upstairs and found that the body of the vampire he’d killed was gone. There were just dried bloodstains on Ellie’s bed. He checked all the hiding places and cubby holes and found them empty. No sleeping vampires for him to execute.

Under Ellie’s bed he found a cardboard box and pulled it out. He sat on the carpet. Inside it was a photo album, and also a jewellery box filled with old trinkets and memories from their relationship. The stubs from cinema tickets. A conch seashell. A shiny pebble. Other things he remembered from past years.

He put it all back in the box and opened the photo album. Pages full of photos. He and Ellie in happier times. Wedding day photos. Images from their early days together. Their younger selves.

He was amazed Ellie had kept them. But in the end he put them back in the cardboard box and pushed the box back under the bed and said goodbye to old memories and good times. Then he went downstairs, sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette as he watched the light outside begin to fade into dusk.

*

The candle flame flickered and made black shapes on the walls. He was still smoking when night fell. The front door creaked open and a shadowed figure entered the house. His only reaction was one hand reaching for the axe at his side.

He turned his head slightly to the kitchen doorway as Ellie stepped from the darkness, moon-faced and pallid, moving with the assurance of an apex predator revealing itself to its prey. She stood there, her scarlet eyes never leaving him, and smiled.

Mason’s heart shuddered into bits as he looked up at her. He wondered if she could hear the pulse thumping inside his head. She was still clad in the clothes she wore on the night she’d been converted, but now they were torn and dirty, streaked with grime and dust. Some of her hair was matted with dried blood, and fell about her face in feathery strands. The teeth in her grinning mouth gleamed darkly in the candlelight, already stained from her recent feeding habits. She was a monster in stolen clothes.

And yet he still loved her.

“Hello, Mason,” she said. Her voice was quiet and rasping, but there was something of her old self within it.

“Hello, Ellie.” He swallowed, held her gaze, and his hand tightened around the axe’s handle.

Ellie sat on the opposite side of the table and faced him. She placed her dirty hands together upon the table top. Her fingernails were blackened and jagged, like she’d been pawing at hard ground. The cold that radiated from her was enough to stir the hairs on the back of Mason’s neck.

“Shall we talk?” she said.

Mason smiled wanly. “Yeah, why not?”

“Good.” She rearranged her hands so that they were laid flat on the table, palms facing downwards. Her fingers twitched. “It seems that you are alone now. What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know,” Mason replied. “I was just sitting here trying to think of something.”

“I know you have the axe under the table. Do you plan to release me?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“That’s only natural.”

“There’s nothing natural about this.”

“Nature is tooth, claw and flesh. So are we. We hunt and we feed, just like humans and other animals. We are no different.”

“I found the photo album and the jewellery box under your bed. I looked inside them. You still loved me, didn’t you?”

A shadow passed over Ellie’s face. Her red grin barely concealed a shimmer of anger in her mouth. “Maybe I did, when I was still a person. But once I was converted I realised that there is no love or warmth; there is only the cold and the dark. King Carrion has shown me that. His gospel is the word of truth, and there is no escape from it.”

Mason felt his throat tighten. His chest filled with heat. “Fuck your king,” he said.

Ellie’s grin stiffened at the edges. “He’s fucked me.” It was a taunt. “Better than you ever did.”

The words found a tender place inside Mason and spread with sharp tendrils. He looked away from her. Pressure behind his eyes. His scalp tingled. His free hand clenched into a fist and the fingers dug into his palm. He let out a long and tired breath.

“Does that hurt your feelings, my husband?”

Mason didn’t answer.

“We can be honest now,” she said. “All of those old problems are gone. They’re irrelevant. That’s the beauty of this. To be converted is to accept the darkness.”

Mason looked at her, trying to keep his face clear of emotion. He felt his lower lip tremble.

“King Carrion wants to meet you,” said Ellie.

Mason snorted. “I’ve already been told. Lucky me.”

“You shouldn’t be so facetious. It’s a great honour.”

“I couldn’t give a shit,” he said.

“He’s waiting for you at the abandoned glue factory on the other side of town.”

“Let him wait.”

“Mason, not many have been given the chance to convert willingly.”

“I’d rather die. I don’t want to be a monster.”

One side of her mouth curled upwards. “We’re all monsters. Humans destroy other species and environments. You’re destroying the planet right now. You murder animals for pleasure. You keep animals in factory farms. Your slaughterhouses are awash with blood. All for your consumption. Vampires are certainly monsters, but at least we admit it.”

Mason didn’t reply.

Ellie threw the table aside and she fell upon Mason and dragged him to the floor with her mouth close to his throat. Her hand squeezed his wrist until he dropped the axe and the bones within his forearm felt like they were close to snapping. From her mouth came fetid and rotten breath.

She opened her jaws wide.

But then she stopped. She sniffed his throat. Pulled her head back from him and looked at his chest.

Mason didn’t move. Stale air shuddered from his lungs.

A gleeful grin stretched the lower half of her face. “There’s no need to bite you, husband. You’re already on the way to becoming one of us.”

His breath caught in the base of his throat. “I was scratched.”

“Sometimes that is enough to spread the gospel, such is its power.”

She started laughing, and threw her back towards the ceiling. She was still laughing when Mason slipped the iron spike from under his sleeve of his jacket and into the palm of his hand.

And he stabbed the spike upwards into the soft flesh under Ellie’s chin and rammed it further up into her skull. Dark blood ran down his hand and onto his wrist. Ellie’s laughter turned into a gurgled cry. Mason pushed the iron spike with all his strength until it punched through her brain and scraped against the inside of the top of her skull. Her hands gripped onto him until she let out a low whimper and fell away and landed on her back on the floor. She pawed at the iron spike embedded in the underside of her throat and pulled it free. It clanged to the floor.

Mason knelt beside her. She looked up at him with her eyes of blood and tried to speak, but no words came from her mouth and in the end she just stared at him as the dark life-force inside her dwindled and died.

Mason held her hand and wept for his lost wife, heartbroken and relieved. He stayed with her into the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

He made his way through the streets as the vampires cavorted and fed around him. They were picking off the last survivors now. King Carrion ruled the town.

The vampires left him alone. They knew he was close to being one of them, a brother in blood. When he noticed a group of them feeding on a woman, it took all his will to keep walking and not stop to join in. His stomach ached with hunger. Mouth burned with thirst. He was not completely turned, but it would not be long before his humanity was lost to the craving for hot blood and slaughter.

In his mouth he tasted raw, briny meat marinated in stinking fluids. Wetness between his fingers from blood that wasn’t there.

From the night sky far above, a helicopter watched the town. He stopped and looked up at its blinking light, wondering how the infrared camera interpreted his changing form.

He reached the industrial estate not long before midnight and crossed the scrubland and building sites around the abandoned glue factory. It was a tall, broad building, a structure not far removed from something erected in Soviet-era Russia. An ugly cube of concrete and metal. Everything derelict and crumbling, rusting and corroded.

He ducked through a hole in the chain-link fence and approached the great hulk of the factory across the empty and windswept car park. Leaves crisped and curled by winter crackled around his feet. He glimpsed faint lights inside the factory. Looked like candlelight. His stomach shrivelled when he thought about what awaited him. His heart was slow, already slowing as vampirism spread inside him. He imagined black tendrils as thin as twine wrapping themselves around his major organs and choking his arteries. Soon his heart would be a blackened thing.

Jets passed overhead at high altitude. He couldn’t see the helicopter anymore, but the thud-thud-thud of its rotor blades echoed around the industrial estate. He sensed more activity in the air, like static buzzing on his skin. Dread and anticipation turned his legs weak and clouded his thoughts.

Part of him wished for fire to fall from the sky to scorch the earth. It would end tonight, he was sure.

The growling that came out of the surrounding darkness stopped him cold. The dogs emerged on all sides of him. He counted five of them. Their eyes glowed red. Their mouths opened, misshapen with gnarled fangs and long incisors. Their growls quietened and then they turned away and trotted towards the front of the factory. Mason looked around, and then followed the dogs.

A figure appeared before him, blocking the way. A face he knew. A voice he knew.

“Evening, lad.”

He halted. “Hello, Calvin.”

“Why are you here, lad?”

Mason sucked in his breath and raised the hatchet in his hand. “I’ve come to pay my respects to King Carrion.”

*

He entered the factory holding Calvin’s severed head by a tuft of matted hair. Calvin’s eyes were open, as was his mouth, from which his black tongue protruded all slack and glistening.

The converts waited for him in the great cavern of the building, lurking in shadows thrown by sparse candlelight, watching him from behind great rusting shells and wrecks of old machines and the skeletons of derelict production lines. Some of them peered down from metal walkways near the ceiling. Red eyes in the darkness. Mason threw Calvin’s head towards a pack of vampires creeping towards him, and they scattered like rats, mewling and muttering, hissing and stamping their feet.

The walls were smeared with blood, shit and urine. Rank fluids dripped from metal beams and scaffolding to form reeking puddles on the concrete floor.

He shivered in the dusty air, which held the stench of sewage and slaughterhouses. Bile frothed at the base of his throat. He sensed King Carrion nearby – how he did, he had no idea – and moved in slow steps as dozens of vampires stared at him. Their anxiety and fear were palpable, and gave him strength as he made his way through them. They had seen him kill Ellie and Calvin. They were either cowards, or King Carrion had told them not to attack him.

He walked among them like a brother. Like family.

Eventually he stopped in the centre of the floor and stood before a large mound of human remains and scraps of rubbish that reached ten feet into the air and was at least ten metres wide. Stinking offal and viscera. Rubbery tubes and fleshy valves. Awful meats. Bones, even complete skulls, mixed with refuse. Dripping grease and animal fat. Ragged tufts of hairs and soaked cardboard, dirt and blood-clotted rags. Parts of it steamed like compost.

Mason watched the mound and waited, aware of the vampires slowly surrounding him, circling him. And after a while of watching the mound, it began to tremble and something stirred from within. With a sharp inhalation of the stinking air he shifted his feet and bit his lower lip and held the axe ready. He tasted his own blood.

Two thin hands emerged, and from them a pair of bone-white arms shrouded in filthy sleeves of rotting fabric. Then a cloth-shrouded face appeared, squirming free from the mound, dripping juices as it looked up to Mason and grinned through its mouth-hole. The creature pulled itself free of the mound and slithered to the floor on its knees. A thing that trembled and muttered in stinking rags, head lowered as if in dedication to other gods of filth in their reeking nests. It rose to stand, and loomed above Mason and glowered down at him with the grin still frozen upon its face.

Mason swallowed, stepped back, and then held his ground when he remembered the vampires lurking behind him.

The crown of bones sat atop King Carrion’s head. The beast snapped its jaws and raised its withered arms. Its eyes burned with demonic energy and glee. And it spoke directly into Mason’s mind in a low voice imbued with arrogance and cruelty.

Is this your way of paying tribute, little one? Killing my converts and disciples?

“I’ll kill you,” Mason said. “I’ll kill you for bringing your disease here.”

I think not, little one. I think you are more vampire than human now.

“I still have my humanity.”

Not for much longer. You think you can kill me with that little axe? Men tried to kill me with axes untold years ago, and they failed. I slaughtered them and killed their families. Do you have the will to destroy me? I think not. I have survived many threats over the countless years. Little men always die when they defy me. I will abide, little one. These isles will become a vampire nation.

In his head Mason glimpsed a series of images transferred from King Carrion’s mind. Flashbulb memories in stop-motion. He saw Britain in the past, when it was a pagan land; a tribe paying tribute to King Carrion by the offering of young men and women. He saw an old pagan priest standing in a forest clearing, waiting for King Carrion to arrive. He saw the Roman invasion of Britain, and felt King Carrion’s fear. He saw the priest and King Carrion descending to a hidden underground chamber. A tomb. And then the vampire king went into hibernation after draining the priest of blood. There was the passing of years as King Carrion slept.

“You can’t hide this time,” Mason said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “You won’t be allowed to escape the town. Fire will rain down from the sky and you and your children will burn.”

He sensed some confusion behind King Carrion’s eyes.

Then you will die, too, little one.

“I’ve already accepted it,” said Mason. He felt a tremor under his feet. When he glanced about at the surrounding vampires, they looked uneasy, sniffing the air and looking at the floor. King Carrion regarded them too, and Mason chose that moment to attack.

He swung the axe with all the strength he could muster, but King Carrion grabbed his arm and crushed the thin bones in his wrist. Mason dropped the axe and screamed as searing bolts of pain ran up his arm and into his shoulder. He thought his arm would be wrenched from its sockets. The air was taken from his lungs. And he watched, utterly helpless, as the vampire king took his broken arm and with one movement of its mouth bit his hand clean off, so that all remained was the squirting stump of his wrist.

Mason only had time to clasp his remaining hand over the stump before King Carrion used its black claws to slash open his stomach. He stumbled away, screaming with white-hot agony with his bleeding wrist tucked in his left armpit while he tried to keep his guts from spilling over his feet. Underneath him, the tremors and vibrations grew stronger. The building shook and dust fell from overhead beams.

He was halfway up a metal stairway to the upper walkways when the windows blew inwards. The vampires screamed, lacerated by flying glass, then scattered. Mason cowered on the stairway, dipping his face to his chest and closing his eyes.

When he opened them and looked across the floor below, he saw King Carrion skittering towards him, flitting between concrete and steel pillars like a dark apparition. Mason got to his feet and climbed the stairs. On the metal walkway, feet clanging, he staggered towards another, shorter, stairway that gave access to the roof.

When he reached the second stairway and climbed out onto the roof, he didn’t shut the door behind him; King Carrion would reach him anyway.

He witnessed a burning hell that surrounded the building on all sides. Hot ash and embers swirled in the air. He halted. The town was burning. Explosions and detonations. Towers of flame and smoke. Fireballs bloomed and rose. Buildings collapsed in the inferno.

The Dead Girl was waiting for him. She smiled and looked away.

He flinched as jets screamed overhead and dropped payloads, cleansing the town. Streets swarming with a sea of fire, consuming vampires and survivors, wiping out all life. The heat singed the hairs on Mason’s face, stung his eyes and drew the moisture from his body to leave him dried out and on his knees as he stared out at the conflagration closing in. The oxygen was sucked from the air, and he only survived because of the vampirism inside him.

And now the factory was shaking, foundations trembling, as more bombs were dropped nearby. The explosions left him half-deaf and dizzy, witless and manic, screaming as he rolled away from the cracks appearing underneath him. The inside of the factory was on fire. Vampires screamed. He crawled to the edge of the roof and turned back to face King Carrion.

The vampire was overwhelmed by grief as it realised that it and all its converts would die. Mason sensed this in King Carrion’s mind. The creature looked around, then at Mason, and gone was its arrogance and pride; now it could only wait for the end to come.

Mason faced the vampire across the roof. His throat felt like it was cooking from the inside. He was shivering with pain, clenching his teeth as waves of nausea passed over him and his vision whitened from the wounds he’d received.

Flames climbed into the sky from the furnace of the town.

They regarded each other, and there was acceptance for them both. And as King Carrion reached out to him, the roof beneath its feet collapsed and the vampire fell into the fire inside the factory.

Mason huddled in a corner, away from the hole in the roof. He waited for the end, and he thought of Ellie and all that could have been.

The Dead Girl crouched beside him and screamed silently into his face. The flames reached for him. He closed his eyes.

*

Mason woke to darkness and an unbearable agony wracking his body. Then there were glimpses of daylight breaking through the dark, which turned into a burning white light as he was pulled from the rubble by soldiers in gas masks and body armour. He screamed as the daylight stung his charred and weeping skin. They dragged him into the shadow of a gutted building and levelled rifles at his head. His wrist stump had been cauterized and ropes of intestines hung from his stomach. He sank to his knees and cradled his stump against his chest. He was sore, blackened and bleeding. Blood seeped from his broken mouth and torn lips. Shuddering and mewling, covered in ash and brick dust.

The soldier forced him onto a gurney. They strapped him down and restrained his limbs. He looked at them and felt the urge to rip their throats out and drink their blood. The hunger inside him was all he could think about.

They fitted a muzzle over his mouth and wheeled him over cleared pathways and around mounds of rubble, and into the back of a black transit van. He was relieved to be out of the daylight.

The soldiers departed, and once they were gone two men climbed in and stood beside Mason, looking down at him. One was old and dressed in an expensive suit and overcoat. The other man was younger and wore a jacket over a polo shirt. They both looked like military or some branch of government. The older man smiled and seemed almost kindly, but Mason saw the cruelty in his eyes and knew that this was not a kind man. The other man was expressionless, appraising Mason as if he were a newly-discovered species of animal.

Then the older man spoke.

“Looks like we lost King Carrion.”

The younger man nodded. “We’ve searched for him. It’s been weeks.”

“So he’s been destroyed, you think?”

“More than likely. It’s a shame. He was an incredible specimen.”

The older man leaned closer to Mason and stared into his eyes. “Luckily we’ve found this chap, whoever he is. He’ll make an excellent replacement. The experiments will proceed as planned.”

“Indeed,” the younger man said. “My superiors will be very pleased.”

The older man smiled again and spoke directly to Mason. His voice was full of pride and righteousness.

“You have no idea how wonderful you are.”

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Hawkins hails from deep in the West Country, where a childhood of science fiction and horror films set him on the path to writing his own stories. He credits his love of horror and all things weird to his first viewing of John Carpenter’s THE THING when, aged twelve, he crept downstairs late one night to watch it on ITV.

He has a few short stories in various anthologies, and has written one novella, BLACK STAR, BLACK SUN. His debut novel THE LAST PLAGUE was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel. Its sequel, THE LAST OUTPOST, was released in September 2015.

He currently lives in Somerset, with his wife, their daughter and their pet dog Molly. They keep him sane. Mostly.

He can be found on Facebook (www.facebook.com/rich.hawkins.98) or his official blog richwhawkins.blogspot.co.uk.

Also featuring Rich Hawkins

The Black Room Manuscripts Volume Two

Featuring stories by Shaun Hutson, Graham Masterton, Laura Mauro, William Meikle, Lindsey Goddard, Matt Shaw, Sam Stone, Rich Hawkins, Jasper Bark, J R Park, Duncan P Bradshaw, Daniel Marc Chant, Lily Childs, Nathan Robinson, Jack Rollins, Dani Brown, Dr Lynne Campbell, Paul M Feeney, Rebecca S Lazaro, Tim Clayton and Stuart Park.

A foreword by Chris Hall (DLS Reviews) and an afterword by Howard Gorman (Scream magazine).

All profits made from this book will be donated to Alzheimer’s Research UK.

.

"The Black Room Manuscripts Volume 2 is a blistering anthology." – Ginger Nuts Of Horror

"A collection of 21 short stories written by a virtual who’s who of the UK’s indie horror scene." - The Slaughtered Bird

“The Black Room Manuscripts: Volume Two more than just delivers top quality horror fiction – it floods the veins with a concoction so imaginatively varied and versatile that the genre’s never looked more alive.” – DLS Reviews

The Sinister Horror Company is an independent UK publisher of genre fiction founded by Daniel Marc Chant, Duncan P Bradshaw and J R Park. Their mission a simple one – to write, publish and launch innovative and exciting genre fiction by themselves and others.

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Table of Contents

- KING CARRION
- DEDICATION
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

- "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out befo...

- PROLOGUENorthern England, 49AD
- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
- CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
- ABOUT THE AUTHORRich Hawkins

- Also featuring Rich HawkinsThe Black Room Manuscripts Volume Two

- Featuring stories by Shaun Hutson, Graham Masterton, Laura Mauro, William Meikle, Lindsey Goddard, Ma...

- The Sinister Horror Company is an independent UK publisher of genre fiction founded by Daniel Marc Ch...

- SINISTERHORRORCOMPANY.COM