Decay Inevitable

They scuttled over the wooden walkway, Sean peering into the distance but seeing nothing. He eased up on the opposite bank and, keeping his gaze fastened on the only access point across the canal, pulled on his trousers and shoes.

“Who is it?” Emma demanded, breathlessly.

“I don’t know, but Will, remember Will told us about that crippled thing that was chasing him? I think that’s her. I think. Maybe.”

“Fuck,” Emma said. She seemed impressed. “She, she...” Emma waggled her hands, trying to put it into words. “...she moved.”

“I know. Come on.”

The thick nest of terraces were formed like a maze. Darkness helped them move through it, sucking them into the core of green at the centre of confused streets and pathways. Few of the streetlamps were functional. Around half of those that did work spat and fizzled chancy orange light, a poor man’s disco. It did strange things to colour, this sodium pulse. It turned the skin into a dappled, beaten armoury of greys. Twenty minutes of rat-runs saw them hunkering down behind a squad of wheelie bins by a creosoted fence. The house at their rear was still awake. The sounds of laughter and glasses chinking. A smell of curried food. Beyond that, the night was silent but pregnant with something that felt like anticipation. It prickled the skin.

“How long do you think we’ve been waiting?” Emma asked after another twenty minutes had expired. “I’m cold.”

“Oh, not long enough,” he replied, drawing her under his arm.

“How long before we can go? How much longer do we have to wait?”

“Bit longer,” he said, and turned to smile at her. “Helpful, aren’t I?”

“Marshall’s dead, isn’t he? We couldn’t have saved him?”

“I don’t think so. He had lost a lot of blood. He was coming to warn us, remember that. He wasn’t coming to us for help. He saved our lives.”

“What do we do now?”

Sean squeezed her arm. He felt better. The wounds were knitting together quickly now. He could feel the fizz of repair coursing through his body.

He remembered something from his childhood. His mother leaning over him with a wad of cotton wool dipped in TCP.

“Where does it hurt, love?” she had asked him. “Show Mummy.” And he remembered laughing and trying to pull the cotton wool out of her hand. What had he done? Tripped on the road and grazed his knee? But in the time she had pulled his trousers down to sterilise his cuts, the wound had healed. A quick healer, they had said about him. It’s because he’s got good blood. He’s a strong lad, that one. On the football pitch, hoofed into the air by reckless defenders, he had picked himself up and plodded on. Tin legs, they had nicknamed him. Sean had believed it all. If you weren’t used to injuring yourself every time you fell over, you didn’t question your lack of bumps, bruises, breaks.

“When Marshall came in,” Sean said, “what was it he was covered in? I mean, what was it in the doorway? The colours.”

“While we were fucking?”

“Yeah. The colours. The light.”

Emma kissed his cheek. “Maybe you were dizzy. I was that good.” She kissed him again. “It was that good. Had to be we were disturbed on our first time, though, hey? I was ready to knock Marshall’s block off, before I saw what had happened to him.”

Sean returned his attention to the opposite edge of the lawn, where the pale narrow houses huddled together as if mirroring or mocking them. “I think, maybe, it was a way through. Being, I don’t know, born.”

He felt Emma drop away from him, an infinitesimal collapse. “Because we were fucking?”

Sean shrugged. “Jesus, why not? It was our first time. Remember what Pardoe said about ripples happening when we met up. Well, having sex... maybe it’s intensified the ripples. It’s triggered off something else. Something new.”

Emma digested this for a moment and then giggled, drawing herself into his protective warmth again. “You shouldn’t be throwing such big stones in,” she said.

Emma was having trouble trying to stop laughing now, but it was bitter, edgy laughter that threatened to spill over into madness or tears. Sean stopped it by kissing her hard. He wished he could pass something on via the kiss, as if in his saliva he possessed some balm that could help Emma make this transformation and help her cope with the immensity of the changes in her life.

Sean

He whipped his head up.

Emma, sobered now, said, “What is it?”

“Shhh.”

Sean

“Someone’s here,” he said. “Can you hear?”

Emma stiffened. Her hand rose out of the shadows between them and a finger pointed. Out of a black cumulus of hedges, Marshall stumbled. Now they both heard him, his voice weak, almost childish.

“Sean?” He sounded unsure, as if the mind controlling the utterance could not fully appreciate the awful prospect that he was still alive. “Sean. Help. Me. Emma. Emma. Save. Me. Oh. God.”

Emma began to rise, her breath coming in stitches, her eyes filled with tears.