Diary of the Displaced (11 page)

Then I found out why they were still there.

There was a door at the back of the counter, this one also barely hanging off of its hinges. It was slightly open, a light coming from inside, and a noise that sounded like wasps swarming.

Or flies.

Masses of them buzzed around.

The room was only small but the devastation was huge. Whatever had happened in there had happened quite recently, like within a few days, or a week at most. It was all disgustingly fresh. Blood was scrawled all over the walls and collected in little, congealed pools across the floor. Scattered here and there were the remnants of someone or something, chunks of bones and flesh, and other stuff that I couldn’t identify, didn’t want to identify. In the corner a small electric lamp lay on the floor, plugged into some kind of battery. It was still on.

Then the smell hit me. I stepped out of the room and threw up all over the counter. I felt my heart rate screaming and panic about to take over.

“Rudy… ”

He was already there.

“Oh, my god.”

It took me a minute or so to regain control of my faculties, hanging off of the side of the shop counter with my head spinning, and my stomach lurching.

“This was recent, wasn’t it?”

I looked up. Rudy was standing in the doorway, staring at the mess.

“Do you think it was… a person?”

“Had to be… ”

I turned away. I couldn’t look at it again. Zombie bits were one thing, but a real person I couldn’t handle.

“Wait though. No.”

Rudy had gone into the room.

“This skin, it’s not human skin, it’s like lizard skin. It’s all scaly.”

That brought me to my senses. It wasn’t a person.

 I walked back to the door and stepped inside. Rudy was kneeling down near the back corner of the room. The stench was terrible. He pointed at a piece of the body, and when I took a closer look I could see exactly what he meant. Not only was the skin not human, but what I was looking at was the jaw of a lizard or cat-like creature.

“What the hell was it?”

Rudy stood up and left the room. I followed him.

“There are more than zombies, gargants and the maw here. Adler always said there was. Come to think of it, he claimed he had seen the maw, like your DogThing, fighting against another creature that was slightly larger, and covered in grey coloured scales, like a maw but not hairy.”

“I see. Well that looks greyish doesn't it? I can’t tell with all the blood.”

“Yes, like a lizard’s scales even.”

It was then that I noticed the footprints. I hadn’t seen them when I was searching the shop. I guess I had been too busy checking what was on the shelves to take any notice of the floor. Starting from the carnage room behind the counter, and running straight in line towards the entrance were bloody footprints. Human footprints. There were also other footprints that might have been paws, lots of them.

Someone had run out of the place after the lizard thing had been killed. Someone in a hurry, and they might have had maw with them, or chasing them.

I followed the footprints out of the shop and further along the street, but they soon disappeared on the wet cobbles, twenty yards along the street. They ended in the middle of a street crossing, right next to a manhole cover. The paw prints split off and went in all directions.

Rudy was right behind me, as was DogThing, who seemed to be over his scare from the noise of the collapsing door.

“Do you think?”

Rudy’s eyes shone in the dim glow. They said exactly what I was thinking.

“They escaped.”

“Yes.”

“Whoever it was that was in that room managed to slaughter that lizard thing and then escape this way.”

“Chased by the maw? Or maybe more of the lizard cat things? I’m not much of a tracker. Wasn’t in the scouts when I was a kid.”

Rudy stood frowning at the manhole cover and then back at me.

“You’re not seriously thinking of going down there are you?”

I shrugged.

“There’s a chance of finding someone else, someone alive and recently here. I can’t ignore it!”

“Oh, crap.”

Rudy sighed.

“You have no idea what’s down there. It could be crawling with god knows what. Zombies and, well there are a lot of other dangerous things in this place that I can’t even begin to describe.”

“You think I shouldn’t look?”

Rudy was pacing the ground now.

“I’m not saying that. Just, well, you only have that spiked stick, and whatever went down there… ”

“Whoever went down there.”

“… whoever then. You don’t know that it’s a person. It could be a zombie. It could be CutterJack.”

I nodded. I’d forgotten about CutterJack. Don’t ask how. I just had.

“It could be Adler.”

We set up for the next night in one of the buildings across from the shop, hoping that whoever had gone down the manhole might come back up again at some point, then we could check them out at a distance. Rudy was on watch again as I spent the rest of the day poking around in the half dozen other derelict shops on the street.

Found a box of cigarettes! Ten packets! They’re a bit dry, and they don’t smell so good, but I tried one and they smoke pretty well. Guess I’m not the fussiest of people these days.

You know, I'd forgotten that I had run out. I guess I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it, but I think I had my last smoke sitting under the ten feet tall mushroom in the rain. Back before I crossed the plateau. It seemed as good a place as any.

Something strange was bothering me as I thought of my “last cigarette” moment, something niggling in the back of my mind. I can’t figure out what. I remember sitting there under that enormous mushroom, smoking, and frowning at the empty packet. I kept thinking that there was something odd about the brand. Nothing really odd, they are just Mayfair cigarettes. I really can’t figure out why it’s been bothering me ever since then.

I don’t recognise these new cigarettes. The name on them is in Chinese, or some other glyph-like language, maybe Korean?

Found two packets of unopened dry noodles in the last shop and a harmonica, but nothing else of real use. I can’t play harmonica. Maybe I need to learn.

Decided to take a quick inventory. Figure out what I have left.

DIY backpack

“ZombieBane” Mace

Harmonica. (It works! I just can’t play it.)

Pair of petrol lamps

4 bottles petrol

18 bottles water

9 torches

Electric lamp + Battery

Torch (no batteries)

Screwdriver, 3 hammers (1 broken), spanner.

12 tins of food + Pods (lots) + Mushrooms (3 big ones)

2 packets of noodles.

2 DIY knives + Kitchen knife

Cigarettes / Wallet / Car keys

Journal + Pens

Deodorant + 3 towels

Namibia travel guide (Why?)

Mouthwash (Nearly empty)

Sunglasses + sun tan lotion (Nearly empty)

Sofa pillow + Blanket

Plastic bottles x 13 in sack

2 bits of hose pipe

Half a Curtain

A dozen magazines

Lots of plastic sheeting

Adler’s diary

Rusty saw

Can’t believe I actually named my mace. What am I? Conan the Barbarian?

I suspect that my cigarette lighter is going to run out soon. It’s stuttering and taking several attempts to get a flame, and even then it’s a weak one. I hope the petrol from the car wreck works in it. I’m sure I heard somewhere that it does. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Day 27

I think I nearly died last night.

I was in a deep sleep. I know that because I was still dreaming some strange dream about glowing spiders when I woke up, even though the noise was loud enough to wake even the dead.

Rudy was standing inside the door, his hand to his mouth and one finger over his lips.

A voice in my head, that wasn’t Rudy, spoke.

"Silence
."

"Don’t make a sound
."

Something was trying to get into the building, and as the last of the spiders from my dream drifted away, the door shook violently. I’m so glad I propped that broken chair up against the handle.

Another violent shake. I was up, grabbing my mace and my knife. I crept quietly towards where Rudy was standing, fighting panic as my heart tried to leap right out of my chest.

Then it spoke. Not the voice in my head a moment before, warning me, no, this was another one. It was speaking in plain English and I understood everything that it said, but it was raspy and deep, the accent like none I had ever heard. Russian sounding, but not quite.

“I know you are in there. Rat.”

I almost bit off the end of my tongue stopping myself from calling out in fear.

The door shook again, this time even more violently. I heard something crack, and realised that whatever was out there was going to get in, and something told me this was no clumsy zombie.

Crack. The top hinge of the door broke. Bits of wood scattered across the floor.

Then there was growling, and a lot of it. I recognised DogThing’s deep growl over the noise, but it wasn’t just him out there. The others must have returned. Whatever it was that was trying to break down the door hissed in reply.

“Another time then. Rat.”

Footsteps echoed away from the building and the growling followed it. I pulled the chair away, opened the door, swung my mace back ready to strike, just in case, and stepped out.

DogThing was sitting in the middle of the street. I followed the direction of his gaze and was in time to see a bunch of maw, a dozen or so I think, vanish round the corner of a building two blocks away.

Across the street the manhole was lying half open.

“I guess that answers our mystery,” said Rudy.

I sat down heavily on the pavement, breathing deeply.  “Screw this. That was CutterJack wasn’t it?”

“Yes. That was CutterJack.”

“I’d recognise that voice even if a hundred years had passed.”

Rudy was standing in the doorway, watching the road.

“What the hell do we do now?”

“We leave.”

We had to. If CutterJack came back and the maw weren’t around, I didn’t stand a chance. I’d seen his shadow and the sheer size of him when the door began to break. For a moment the top corner of the door had leant inwards, giving me a glimpse of the monster that stood outside.

He was huge, tall enough to have to crouch down to be able to hit the door. Roughly? I’d say eight feet tall, and that’s only a guess.

People don’t grow that tall, do they? Not normally anyway. DogThing must have been out there the whole time, but it took a whole pack of maw to scare CutterJack away. Now if that had been me, one DogThing would have had me running.

The mess in the shop had to have been made by him. I was convinced of it. Unless there were others around here, or the maw and the lizard thing had a set to and CutterJack had arrived afterwards.

I don’t know. I don’t know.

I packed my stuff back into the cart as fast as I could, dumping a lot of stuff to make it lighter. The travel guide and the magazines went, making a surprising difference. I’d not realised how heavy they were until I left them behind. Why had I been keeping them anyway?

Distance.

We had to put some distance between us and CutterJack, and then hope we hadn’t left enough of a trail for him to follow. I wouldn’t have a clue about tracking someone, but I also didn’t know how skilled CutterJack was either. I had a horrible sickly feeling that he would be able to follow us anywhere, if he wanted to.

I reckon it was less than two minutes later when I hauled the cart outside onto the pavement.

Rudy was waiting for me, watching the road where CutterJack had fled.

“Which way?”

“The way he didn’t go.”

We headed along the pavement as quickly as the cart could go. DogThing eventually caught us up and followed us, always twenty or so feet behind, always scanning behind us and sniffing the ground.

We crossed a road, Maldon Street. I had to pull the cart backwards to get it over the cobbles, and haul it back up onto the pavement on the other side of the road. I stopped for a moment and looked down Maldon. Shop after shop lined the street, twenty of them, at least, and no time to look.

We hurried for another block and began to cross Merriwether Avenue. Odd name.

Rudy stopped in the middle of the road, frowning.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Be quiet.”

Then I heard it too.

Music.

Somewhere nearby music was playing. It was quiet and echoed faintly down Merriwether Avenue. It sounded like it was coming out of a window high up somewhere, and I could see that further down Merriwether there was a row of three and four story Victorian style townhouses.

One of the buildings, right in the middle of the row, had a window wide open on the top floor. Long drape curtains were hanging out, swaying like they were caught in a breeze, even though I could feel no wind from down on the street.

There was a light on in the room.

“Is that?”

“Yes. Music. What the hell?”

I started walking down the street towards the house, for the second time in as many days wondering if I had found someone else alive, someone else other than CutterJack.

“Is this a good idea?”

Rudy was following me, but I could see he was hesitant. Why would a ghost be scared? It’s not like he could die twice. I didn’t consider until now, whilst I’m writing this, that if I died he would be trapped again, probably for a long time.

“I have no idea.”

We approached the building slowly, checking every alleyway and door as we went. CutterJack had gone the other way, but he was tall, and I imagined he could move fast.

I stopped. Now I was my turn to be hesitant.

“What if we’re just walking to CutterJack’s house?”

“I’m with you. I say we just run.”

We both started back down the street again, away from the house, but we only travelled a few feet when DogThing lowered himself to the ground and started growling. Nearby I heard more growling, and my nerves hissed as I saw two other maw dart out from an alleyway that both Rudy and I had checked moments before. Neither of us had seen them.