Decay Inevitable

“Excellent,” he said, noticing that the man hadn’t tried to make a noise. He regarded Sean calmly with the black, shark’s eyes they all possessed; even held out his arms when he was reached for. He had been waiting for this. Perhaps he had been wishing for it.

The old man didn’t cry when he saw his damaged family. As they left the flat he seemed to sigh with contentment.

“Too right,” growled Sean. “Anything you come to now is a blessing. Consider this a rescue.”

At the car he paused a while to search the horizon. No lights anywhere. Once this place had been a riot of colour and bright windows containing families watching television or eating supper, laughing or fighting, but always together. Now the population had thinned out. Those who had survived had run or tried to protect their dead. Those who were dead were directionless, without anchor. They wheeled around like seagulls playing on thermals, or like a confused compass. When Sean came to call, they pretended they were normal human beings leading normal lives. Normal people, with pieces of them dropping off while he chatted amiably with them in a doorway, the rope coiled around his shoulder burning with intent.

After the man was hanged and the shaved fibres from the rope deposited between his ash-grey lips, Sean dumped the body over a fence separating the rear gardens of a terraced house from a stream which dribbled along at the bottom of a deep gulley. Back in the car, he had barely started the engine before the next one came through to him.

It lives alone, Will said. It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’ll go without a struggle. It needs this. And it’s this way, Sean. Come on...

He powered the car too quickly for an hour and a half until he had reached the outskirts of a conurbation hanging on the edge of Birmingham like a wart on a scarred face.

Make a left here, Sean. Keep going. Just keep going...

There had been months of this. Closed doors, lonely motorways, miles and miles of self-doubt and nausea. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He asked Will once, do the dead breed? and Will had laughed hard and for a long time without answering him.

...keep going...

He knocked at the door this time. He knew he didn’t need to break it down. He waited for an age, but that was okay. He didn’t mind waiting. It gave him something else to do. Something different. He clenched the rope in his fist as he heard footsteps approach the door.

She opened it wide. Late at night, all alone, but what did she have to be frightened of? He gazed at her for a long time.

“I wondered if it might ever happen,” she said.

“I have something I need to do,” he told her.

“I know. I know.”

She didn’t fight him, or plead with him. She even helped him to get the rope over a branch of the ash tree in the garden. He kissed her beforehand because she asked him to, and he would have backed out of it if she hadn’t coaxed him to carry the job through.

As she swung, just before the end, she reached out her hand and he took it. He held it until it closed and shuddered into a fist. Lifting it to his face, Sean pressed his lips against the tiny aperture that her forefinger had made behind the curled thumb, and whispered a message and a promise.

A proposal.

First published 2009 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN (ePUB): 978-1-84997-309-0

ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-310-6

Copyright © 2011 Conrad Williams.

Cover image by Dave McKean.

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted 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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CONRAD A. WILLIAMS was born in Cheshire in 1969. He sold his first short story at the age of eighteen and has gone on to publish around eighty more to a variety of magazines and anthologies. He is the author of three novels, four novellas and a collection of his best short fiction. His book The Unblemished won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. He is also a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize.

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