Decay Inevitable

She noticed the badge on his shirt pocket first – Come ride my long vehicle – then his sunglasses and an unattractive beard as tight and curly as sheep’s hair. The boy-in-a-sweet-shop smile. Those lenses could not hide from Cheke his long gaze into the valley between her breasts. She leaned over and let him have a better view, then she killed him. He jerked and bucked as if he were a robot and she a technician, trying to reattach some faulty wires in his CPU. His glasses fell off revealing a new expression for her burgeoning library: it was neither repulsion nor relief and probably wasn’t even a combination of the two. When she’d taken it from him she rested, trying to bring some harmony to the constant ripple of her body. Finally, he was still and she could begin.

The last thing she had been expecting as she closed in on Will was that her job would be executed for her by someone else, and a weak-looking invalid at that. She had dogged them, the man in the scarf and his extraordinary wife, intending to kill them both, but it was clear that the couple were going home. They had no impact on what was about to be played out here because they were oblivious to the situation, that much was clear from their expressions as they hurried from the hospital. Their agenda with Will was separate, inspired – judging from the abject look on the woman’s face – by pity. Fair enough. She would claim the kill for herself. Gleave would be none the wiser. It angered her a little that she had been dispatched to get rid of this runt of a man, this no-hoper, this failure. Will was nothing special, she felt. He was just somebody who stumbled upon horror and reacted as anybody might react, if their hand were forced. But, as Gleave had pointed out to her, to get to Will was to get to all of them. It was for such reasons that she was a doer, and not a planner.

As she fed on the gruel that had once been the driver, mopping up juices as his baseball cap deflated on a baked-vegetable head, she considered her next move. She had the scent at last, for the quarry in which she was most interested. It tingled in her nostrils like pepper. It was so fresh and near she could almost envisage its owner, sitting at a midnight table with a glass of something warming, riffling a newspaper, listening to the radio, his muscles squirming gently against each other, built for action.

Cheke brought the trucker back, scooted over behind the wheel and let his driving instincts take her over. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. That God-awful beard! She erased it, replacing it with Derek’s smooth jawline. Better. Much better.

THE FOREST HAD changed since their initial recce. Its purple boughs were streaked with moss. Mushrooms clustered in moist creases like rashes of acne. It seemed much denser, much more forbidding. Emma said as much as they strode deeper into it.

“I know,” Sean said. “Something’s happened. Something’s brought this on. Be careful.”

He wasn’t just pleading with her to be cautious because of the more menacing aspect of the forest, she saw. Great swathes of the thing just didn’t exist any more. Like blighted tracts of land in an otherwise green, rolling plain, the forest had suffered losses. It was difficult to stare into the abyss gouged out of the loam. It was plumbless, brimming with a vast pacific nothingness that was beyond anything that death could possibly mean. Looking into these vacuums was too much like studying one’s own heart. Emma shivered and hurried after Sean, who was picking his way over a series of collapsed branches. Magnificent trumpets of fungus had erupted across the timber, exuding a rich, meaty odour and a sweat too, which dribbled across the flesh of the growth and ringed its uppermost parts before lifting, weightless, into the black like some sort of strange, anti-gravity rain.

“Don’t touch a thing,” Sean cautioned.

There was death in the forest, as he had expected. How could there not be, in death’s homelands? This was death’s acres, death’s back yard. Death came out to play Ring-a-ring-of-roses and What time is it, Mr Wolf? Death told sick jokes in its own playground, where it was bully and best friend.

The corpses were lined up neatly for a while and then strewn higgledy-piggledy as though the person laying them out had grown tired of his own methodical approach. But they were not corporeal. They had owned the ephemeral nature of old cobwebs or dandelion seeds. Just walking past them caused enough of a draught to lift half a dozen of them into the air and separate them to the extent that it was hard to believe they had had any recognisable form to begin with. They were like candyfloss shells, a playtime dead.