Last Days, page 43
‘We gotta find her real quick, Max.’ Jed’s grinning days were over. Their current situation had finally called time on his levity. ‘This is the penthouse floor. Chet’s gotta be in one of the big rooms. There’s twelve up here. Left or right?’
‘I don’t know!’ Max screamed.
‘Gimme one of those flares!’ Kyle called to Jed and shoved the camera back inside the bag. ‘You find the room. Max in the middle. I’ll take the rear.’ Jed threw a flare to Kyle. He snatched it up, said, ‘How does it bloody work?’
‘Light the frigging touchpaper. Strike it like a match.’
‘They’re coming up the stairs.’ It was Max; he fired two rounds down and blindly into the darkness they had just ascended.
‘Make them count, Max.’ Jed threw his flare down to the next landing. Shadows fled until the magnesium burst sputtered on the marble. ‘Let’s move.’ Jed walked to the arch on the left. Crouched, fired twice at the ceiling inside the corridor. A shape dropped from the darkness and smacked the floor. ‘On me.’ Jed walked. Max followed, almost squashed into Jed’s back. As they moved past the kill, Jed smashed a brittle skull under his boot heel to stop it twitching. Kyle looked down at the thing Jed had shot from the ceiling. It wore a smock so soiled with age and blood the old linen had plastered and dried around a prominent ribcage. He looked away.
Moving as fast as they dared, they moved through another between-decks corridor. The doors were grander: peacocks fanned over the top of each gilt-edged door; a willowy silhouette of a beautiful woman, inlaid into the wood with lacquer, curved around the door handles.
Jed turned the handle of the first penthouse suite door. Stood back and kicked it open. The beam of his torch flashed back and forth in the dark, before he went in side at a crouch and ready to fire. Max followed Jed inside. Kyle heard Jed say, ‘Jesus Christ.’
Kyle remained in the corridor, directly outside the doorway, and held the dripping white flare aloft. It illumined the entire corridor down to its end, where occasional whistles and barks echoed from the mouth of the connecting passage. Back in the lobby, on his left, he could still see through the arch they had just run through. And a thing raced around the surge and retraction of chemical light, bent over and using its hands like feet; the limbs were as thin as a dog’s. The face was turned away, the back of the head was pale and strung with laces of dark hair. He gripped the Gloch’s handgrip tighter.
Behind his back, he heard Max talking frantically to Jed or to himself. He sounded unhinged. ‘The blood is drunk quickly. It keeps them here. In France, Lorche’s angels even cultivated the tastes of the town under siege. They became cannibals. Their suffering was so terrible, they marked the sky, the air, the world . . .’
Kyle glanced over his shoulder. And saw plasma bags hanging from a long steel rail on wheels, the sort of rail seen backstage at a fashion show. Flat but stained plasma bags from a blood bank hung and dripped feed from plastic tubes into a trough, as if to suckle piglets. Beside the rail, two elderly women sat side by side on white chairs. Their eyes were wide open and glassy. ‘Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona. The last of The Seven,’ Max said. ‘Katherine’s most beloved. Most fanatical . . . they gave themselves. Even after . . .’ Max never finished, his voice died out into a wheezy hopelessness.
In strobes of torchlight the two bodies were robed in habits like nuns; the red uniforms of The Last Days’ blessed Seven. But once the plasma bags were empty, they had been drained to their sinews and fibres and bones where they sat; emptied by many broken teeth that made incisions in their thin legs, their arms, and finally their throats. It appeared the sisters had let their own blood flow from their wrists, like hellish mothers feeding their young. But it only seemed to have oiled a frantic collusion of the living and the dead; the rusty fragrance of their aged blood must have begun a frenzy; the visible results of which made Max’s knees give way. Jed had to hold him upright and drag him from the room.
Silent with horror and shock, they moved off in formation. Kyle walked backwards and wondered if he would freeze or fire when one of them came at him from down there, from out of the vast lightless tunnels. In that room they had just seen their own end if they made one mistake, up here, in the darkness. Their exhalations were deafening. They all breathed heavily through open mouths, to stifle the nauseating stench.
‘She’s been collecting them.’ Kyle heard Max say in the next large room they broke into. There were no retorts from either handgun so it must have been clear.
‘Holy shit, Max, we need more firepower. Could be hundreds of them up here.’ At that, Kyle did turn his head, to look at what he really did not want to see. But his first view of the room was anticlimactic. He screwed up his eyes and took another look. It resembled a room in a museum. Display cases lined the three walls he could make out. Beneath their glass screens a suggestion of fragments, of brownish remnants, came back to his imploring eyes.
‘Signs,’ Max said. ‘Artefacts from the beginning. From those Lorche’s angels collected at St Mayenne.’
Kyle put his head inside the room. Glanced into the nearest cabinet. Saw a horrible shoe; small and blackened and pointy. Beside the shoe was a smock small enough for a child, marked with ruddy-brown stains. And further along, a crudely hewn crown of wood was placed on white card, as if with reverence. He wondered if it had once belonged to Lorche, the Father of Lies. It was surrounded by blackened bones mounted by steel pins on purple baize. Heavenly letters. The rain of black bones.
He looked back to what the dying flare lit up in the corridor. A shriek of rage or hysteria pierced the far darkness of the corridor on their right. Bony hands and feet drummed against one of the closed doors. Sounds that made Kyle’s stomach soften as he imagined such a fury howling against his face. He aimed the Gloch down there; the end of the torchlight speared a shape thinner than the starving and as naked as the newly born. Before he could take the first gunshot of his life, it slapped at the side of a head mercifully bowed and staggered away on bowed legs stained a dysentery-brown. ‘They’re down there,’ Kyle said to Jed as he came out of the exhibition room.
‘They’re everywhere. Come on. There’s another ten suites up here on the plans. Three flares left. Then we’re down to torches. Gonna draw some fire then, boys.’
The sound of what appeared to be a child’s distress gave them pause outside the next room. ‘In there, the child!’ Max shrieked. ‘Get it open.’ Jed tried to catch Max with a swipe of his free hand, but missed his shoulder. ‘Careful Max!’ Jed slapped at a side pocket; tore a photograph from it. ‘The kid. Make sure it’s this kid, Max. Spielberg, get your ass outside. Cover the corridor!’
‘You’re not killing a child. No! You are not killing a child!’
‘Stay outside, Spielberg!’
‘Fuck you!’
Max scrabbled at the handle and threw the door open. Jed crouched into a firing position.
A child. A child. They are not killing a child. Unthinking, compelled by a surge of reckless energy, before he even realized what he had done, Kyle ran at Jed and threw his weight into the man’s back. Falling to his knees, he watched Jed stumble forward with a grunt, into glimpses of a luxury suite lit up by Max’s probing torch. A place decked out in purple, the bed vast. Giant mirrors on each wall reflected their chaotic entrance, expanded their torchlight.
The infant cries descended into a canine growl. Max gasped in shock, then screamed as something came over the bed in one bound and leaped onto Jed. Who stayed down under a busy mouth and sharp fingers, the snarls of the attacker more terrible than the shaking of the threadbare skull.
Jed screamed. Mottled legs raked at his stomach, like a starving cat trying to empty the abdomen of its prey. An eruption of dark liquid across Jed’s face coincided with a gargle inside the throat of the leathery thing no bigger than a ten-year-old child that hung from him.
In his horror, in his paralysis, Kyle heard the thump and bump of bony limbs in the corridor outside, as if a crowd now rushed towards the room. Jed fired a shot through the little skull tearing at his neck. Twisted onto his stomach. Came up silent, mouth open, a hand clutched to a wet black throat. Their eyes met; there was nothing he recognized in Jed’s but fear and pain. Max screamed again as a scampering of thin bodies came through the door and into the room with them.
Kyle fell against the wall beside the top of the bed. Remembered he had a gun. Raised his arm. Lit Jed up on the ground with the Maglite bolt-on. Two ragged shapes scurried through the thin beam of shaky white light to growl about the feed. One dull retort came out of the scrum as Jed’s Gloch went off, and then he stopped moving of his own volition.
Max shrieked and shot at the crowd upon the floor. Missed. The Blood Friends dug clawed toes into the rug and yanked Jed’s limp body backwards, out of the room and back into the fathoms of darkness.
Kyle lit up their hasty retreat, but couldn’t sight the weapon or squeeze the trigger in time, at those things no bigger than children, hauling a grown man like a toy across their nursery floor. He clutched at his belt for a flare and realized the last three were attached to Jed’s belt.
‘We’ve got to get out!’ Max’s entire face was a quivering of pale flesh about an open mouth. Drool hung from his bottom lip. He ran out of the bedroom and left Kyle pressed into the wall, as still as an art deco lampstand. Kyle found his voice. ‘Max.’ It came out a whimper.
Max’s feet thumped in the corridor outside, heading towards the lobby. Straight into a chorus of avian shrieks. Shots rang out in quick succession. Dull slaps followed the salvo.
Kyle moved to the door, flashed the torch attached to his gun to the right. Saw frantic limbs rake and wet hands slap about in the gloom over the recently felled quarry: Jed. A mottled face rose to show the torch its bleached eyes and a forehead papered in shrivelled flesh. It hissed once before its foul head re-engaged with the grisly business upon the moist carpet.
Kyle looked to the left, following the thin beam of the gun’s Maglite, and sucked in his breath. The lobby suddenly resembled CCTV footage of hell glimpsed through a single ray of light: dark shapes on the walls, the floor, the ceiling; dirty teeth, eyes rolled back and white as billiard balls amidst a writhing around where Max’s little gun still barked and flashed in panic. Kyle dropped his gun hand and put the lobby back into darkness.
His mind screamed: Out! Out! Out! Out! He had to get out. How? He crouched in the darkness, still in the doorway, and used everything he had left to suffocate a scream and to prevent his body breaking into a thrashing rout right into those flitting bones of the dark. Shook the camera from his shoulder bag and changed the function to night mode, killed the spotlight. Which way? He turned the camera and looked through the viewfinder towards Jed’s remains.
The world in the viewfinder was underwater-dark, green, black, relieved with patches of milky luminance. In it he saw the approach of another Blood Friend across the floor on all fours, from the far end of the corridor, clad in some unrecognizable motley of stained shroud and what must have been Chet’s clothes. It had managed to get inside a tailored shirt. And the figure leaped like a leopard intended for the haunches of a gazelle. It reached its target and fell upon it, kicking and raking, its face snapping at Jed’s wet shape. Kyle couldn’t feel his legs; his wide eyes filmed with tears.
But the trio of Blood Friends were too busy with Jed’s remains to notice his fretting in the dark so near. It was the only reason he was still alive. Trying to keep the contents of his stomach in place, Kyle turned and staggered towards the lobby, using the camera’s viewfinder as his eyes to see if there was a way through to the staircase.
He shuddered to a standstill before he’d taken four steps. Max had not made it very far or cleared any kind of route.
And at first Kyle wasn’t sure whether the grunts and squeals originated from Max or the pale but indistinct bulk that must have recently arrived, or been hiding down there, to snatch Max from his feet as he ran for the stairs. A thing the size of a bear, on its hind legs, now held the executive producer’s small body aloft. Away from those others that Kyle was grateful he could not see in any great detail, who jerked around the rear legs of the bulk, all eager to join the feast. Additional snarls and cackles and cries of bestial delight issued from the scrum of small emaciated silhouettes to fill the second-floor lobby, and accompanied the sounds of wet leather strops and gristle pops that emerged from whatever was being done to Max’s diminutive body.
The conclusion of the night vision’s furthest reach disintegrated at the top of the staircase, and yet upon the large figure the night vision’s dimming found a wet snout at head height. Beneath that, the great blackened belly of a sow, the teats wet with brine.
A terrible splash beneath its mass was followed by inhuman snuffles and a snatching clomp of a mouth upon what fell wetly from its prize. In his twitching dismal light, Kyle saw an impression of small black eyes too, set deep behind great dark bristles. A suggestion of a wet maw grunted. Tusks were awash with fluid, parts of the moist bulk enshrouded in vestiges of tatty cloth; it was upright and festooned with what may have been the rags of a bishop dispossessed four centuries before this night. And as the Unholy Swine swayed on its rear trotters, about the blasphemous hierophant of St Mayenne, the congregation of scarecrow parts shrieked and wailed and snatched upwards with thin hands and renewed vigour at what began to fall from the noisy feast in progress above them.
Max’s thin ankles twitched, or even still kicked, until the porcine squeals were cut through with the final shriek of a man opened alive. The second wind of Max’s agony and terror only served to increase the spidery antics of the figures that continued to swarm into the lobby from the floor below and from the opposite lightless archway. Maximillian Solomon was gone, was no more, had found his end trying to finish what he unwittingly started in 1967.
Of more concern, the lobby and connecting stairwell were blocked. Nothing would get through to the stairs alive. What little reason still flickered in a head swimming with nausea and terror told Kyle that he would have to run the other way, back across Jed’s remains and amongst those who were busy upon his fallen comrade. The thought of which made his entire being shudder, while his face screwed up for tears he did not have time to shed. Panic electrified him. He knew he had to run now, somewhere, deeper inside the building, but could only fight the desperate competing urge to just sit down and shake until they came for him too.
End. The end. The end of him right here. Katherine wins. Goes into the child. The child. Another child. Kyle whimpered. Then snapped alert the very instant a clear idea broke from the maelstrom in his mind.
Holding the camera with one hand, he raised the Gloch and aimed it at the squealing commotion in the lobby. Kyle took aim at the indistinct bulk and talked out loud, but was unsure what he said or to whom he spoke. Acting on some instinct he could barely account for, he stood with his legs apart and pumped five rounds down the corridor in the direction of what fed so intently and greedily down there in the dark.
A wet thump sounded as the great shape went down to its haunches. A scream seared then muffled Kyle’s ears like gloved hands. Inside the trembling viewfinder, the black-haired flanks of the swine shuddered in the pallid light and between the green-white walls that juddered as if it were they that had been hit. But the wet bulk, that had been so busy with Max’s carcass, turned heavily upon the floor, and rose unsteadily to what might have been all fours, with the limp remains of the old man still clutched to its belly.
In a heartbeat, the wounded bulk was covered by an opportunist scramble of the thin limbs and clawing hands that had previously only been able to clutch and snatch at the prize held above them. Kyle turned his face and camera away as the vile parish pulled out the first parts of their Unholy Swine.
He withdrew back to the room where Jed had fallen. He was still trapped. The lobby represented an orgy of pain and dismemberment; behind him, the old friends still stripped Jed down to wet bones. But as he’d hoped, Jed’s assailants began to rouse, stirred from their increasingly meagre fare by the sounds of fresh excitement bursting from the lobby. In the viewfinder he watched three dark heads emerge like hyenas from the ribcage of something felled, whinnying, on the grasslands of Africa. The faces were stained but within their white eyes Kyle identified a desire to satiate their mindless appetite elsewhere, to feed anew using those dirty fingers and what black teeth they could summon within their mouths. At the sight of their distraction, and then their eager scurry through the corridor, and right before the toes of his boots, Kyle thought of putting the gun inside his mouth. But on they scraped and bumped and raced to the lobby, where the felled swine bleated and splashed and flopped amidst the scrum of old bones.
From hopeless despair and grief, Kyle passed into lunatic hope, and before it fully registered that he was even moving, he was engaged in a stagger away from where so many small brittle figures now crouched and noisily suckled.
He stopped a few feet before Jed’s now insubstantial silhouette on the carpet of the hallway. He looked down through the viewfinder, and tried not to see, and then un-see, what was left of Jed and his one eye that still stared upwards. One of the flares that he sought was broken, the other two were wet, but intact, and still attached to the discarded utility webbing. Kyle retrieved them both. Wiped them on his jeans. Clenched his teeth as he did so, to stifle the desire to sob.
He let the camera swing away, under his shoulder on the strap. Gripped the Gloch tight and lit one of the flares between his knees as quickly as he was able. Thrust it above his head in enough time to see three figures pause in a stalk across the ceiling towards him from the lobby, their jaws black with blood.
Kyle lurched to the end of the corridor, peering back over his shoulder at those that had paused and clutched at their faces in shock and pain before the flare. Turned right. Remembered what Jed had said about there being twelve rooms. How many had they checked? One, two, three. ‘Shit!’ He had to break into another nine before the two flares ran out. The clip inside the Gloch gave him another ten rounds . . . he thought. Should he go back and find Jed’s weapon and spare clips? He hadn’t seen any weapon or magazines back there; Jed’s gun could be anywhere in the corridor too, or even in the last room they checked, where he fell. And without night vision goggles, once the flares were gone Kyle would have to hold the camera again with one hand and look through the viewfinder while shooting at thin, fast-moving targets at the same time; he’d be dead in seconds. He was no marksman; fighting his way out was not an option. He carried on.
