Decay Inevitable

As he reached the crack in the door, he moved only his neck, stretching to make sense of the movement within that narrow gap. He saw the nurse half-undressed. But then, how could clothes be expected to cling to her when her own flesh could not? She was gamely trying to gather loops of subcutaneous fat as they peeled apart from the muscle, like so much molten cheese. But her true focus was elsewhere. It looked as though she were kissing Christopher. Her mouth was fast against his, but surely her face should not be journeying so deeply. He heard her trying to talk again, as she burrowed further. The tall man’s body hung slackly from the powerful joist of her neck. His leather flying helmet jiggled around his throat.

Will turned and ran when he saw her teeth begin to inch their way out of the back of Christopher’s skull.

“My God,” he moaned, as he hurtled for the exit doors, waiting for the crash of her pursuit. “God.”

Outside he pounded across the car parks, past a gaggle of white-coated doctors bewildered by his haste. Climbing the rise that took him onto the cricket pitch, he risked a look around and saw the nurse’s arm like a prop from a horror film, reaching out through the brick wall.

“Fuck.”

The cricket pitch was greasy from the previous night’s downpour, and Will forced himself to traverse it before he checked again as to her whereabouts, lest he slip. He felt horribly exposed on this huge square of lawn, the naked trees surrounding him, rattling in the wind. The space made him aware of the frantic schuss of his coat and the hiss of his breath as he sprinted. The colour and shade of the grass merged and separated under the insistent wind, like the nap on a suede coat when it is brushed. He was almost at the other end of the pitch when he saw the nurse emerging from the grass: a swimmer hauling herself from the deep. She even shook her head a little, as if to rid her ears of water. He viewed, with nausea, how scraps of Christopher’s face clung to the uncertain flesh of her own, how green blades from the pitch slashed her skin as she dragged herself clear and turned to look up at him.

He wouldn’t meet her gaze; not until he had to. Not until she had him and he could look nowhere else. He swerved right and scampered for a ramp that would take him into the laundry department of the hospital. Large, lidded skips queued outside, bulging with yellow plastic bags awaiting incineration. The smell of shit and disinfectant hit him like a shovel as he shouldered the door open; he heard the ratty clitter of what could only have been claws moving fast across the road in his wake. Elbowing past great steel cages rammed with dirty linen, Will ducked into a mess room and forced himself to freeze. A kettle was boiling on a Baby Belling, funnelling steam into the face of a chimp on a calendar. That day’s Sun fought for possession of the small table with a series of coffee rings and a bowl of labelled keys. Will silenced the room by removing the kettle from the hotplate. Sweat blinded him. He blinked it away. What if she was smelling him out? As if to confirm the fear, he heard a snuffling in the corridor, as of a dog pinning down the location of a hidden bone.

When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was her. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.

“Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.

She made to rub her hands together but the mime only resulted in her gluing the muscles of the two limbs together. Her flesh stretched and tore as she attempted to separate them, and, her concentration lost, she made herself fully known to him, shedding the hastily donned disguise of whichever hapless cleaner she had devoured outside. Will took two steps towards her and swung the kettle, connecting with her head just above the right eye. There wasn’t any sense of jarring, just a sickening giving way of the meat, as if there was no bone beneath to support it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Boiling water spattered her face, and poached an eye in an instant, turning it opaque. Her shriek, Will guessed, as he dived for the doorway, was not of pain but of frustration. He didn’t hang around to see how that fury would manifest itself.

He clattered through corridors, turning left and right at random, hoping that the sickly-sweet smell of medication, disinfectant, and mental decay would unhinge her and shake her off his tail. He thundered out onto a tarmac drive that led to the carriageway. He was half-way up the gates, trying to cock his leg over the evil spikes without skewering himself, when he heard her behind him, mewling like a lost pup. He watched as she staggered after him, and feared that there would be no respite until she had him dead and ingested.