7
Don't blink… keep looking. Don't close your eyes. If you close your eyes it just gets worse when you open them again. Ignore the screaming. Ignore the shouts… don't trust that kid beckoning you over… keep walking… nay… start jogging! What you fucking walking for?
'I'm too hot. It's too hot to run.' Floyd muttered to himself. Like Spencer had noticed, Floyd could also see steam pouring out from in between some of the paving slabs. It looked as though some great underground water vat had boiled over and was venting through the ground… through the storm drains… except the stuff crawling out of the storm drains didn't look like steam. It had an almost solid appearance to it and looked yellow at the core. Floyd broke into a loping run as he caught his reflection in the window of a closed store. All the shops were closed. Locked up. Had they ever even been open? As his feet clattered over the stone floor and as he hopped and skipped over the places where the steam was shooting out of, some of the shop awnings began to smoke and blacken. The yellow and red one which had given shoppers shade outside LeMarie Boutique for all Occasions… burst into flame just as Floyd passed it. The next shop was a shoe shop. He knew that because it had Tansy Shoes written across the front, but that's the only way Floyd would have known. The actual shop was empty. The glass grubby and if he'd stood and really looked closely, Floyd would have thought that the glass was rippling and maybe even melting… it was certainly thicker at the bottom than the top and a small shiny puddle had begun to form next to the barred doorway.
He knew that whatever enchantment had been used to fascinate and fool them was slowly disintegrating. The streets were almost empty. The people who were still there watched him run by with a lethargic curiosity. Sores ran over their skins like a disease. One young woman with a very short skirt and a vest top on, had lifted her skirt as Floyd ran towards her. He glanced at what she was doing… picking at scabs in places nice young ladies shouldn't have a scab… he shook his head at her, not really knowing why… surely she wasn't propositioning him? He thought it was more of a My god you're disgusting shake of the head he gave her. He heard her cries and obscene catcalls as he carried on running past the empty shops… Somewhere something else went pop and there was a loud clatter and a tinkling of glass. It might have been a shop window giving in or one of the apartments above the shops maybe.
He skidded around the next corner and came to a stop. Something up ahead was belching out black thick smoke from the front and shooting red and orange flames from tiny… too small windows… there was a charred body hanging out of one of those windows and another draped over the fire escape… the latter body looked as though it was partially eaten.
'This could all be another enchantment. It could all be in my mind. I might still be on my knees somewhere. This could all be a test.' But there was no time to test his theory… he ran onwards, holding his breath for part of the way, to avoid inhaling too much stinking black smoke.
There is a certain smell in the air when human flesh is cooking. A rich delicious smell which is almost, but not quite, like pork. Floyd distinctly remembered many eons ago when he'd been in a capricious mood, he'd been out and met up with a strange guy… probably in his fifties… They had some jars together and went for a walk through summer fields… crushing daisies and buttercups under their feet. Floyd sort of encouraged the feeling of moroseness… he even cried a bit to get the guy (sorry cant remember his name.)… to cry with him. By the time they reach the railway tracks which cut through the fields the bloke was suicidal.
'Go stand on the third rail.' Floyd had said.
So he did! That easy… but the smell! Floyd watched the electricity kill the man. I could hear the fat and blood and other fluids sizzling. He watched the eyeballs explode and the tongue fly out all swollen and black. He'd sat there and taken in that sweet scent of burning death for a while and then walked away and bought a burger from a van in the high street…
That was the same smell he could feel filling his senses now… That delicious sweet smell of human flesh being cooked. Thus, he could say on very good authority that it wasn't himself he could smell and nor was it Sam.
The rest of his journey to recover his bike and the guns he had there was not uneventful, but if someone had asked for a minute for minute account he'd not have been able to deliver. It was more like a few separate incidences which had nothing to connect them. He remembered piling out of the smoke. He remembered the shattering of windows above him… and then nothing but the high red brick walls until someone walked out in font of him. Floyd let out a disgusted groan and a large man wearing speedos and nothing else but brown sandals with blue socks, made a grab for him.
Floyd took in a lot of information in the few seconds that the guy had a hold of him. He was burned red, his skin was lumped up in huge yellow blisters the size of dinner plates. The man didn't seen to have eyes as such, but weeping slits in his swollen face where his eyes should have been. His lips were swollen and it looked as though if the man spoke that they'd slip and fall right off his face. He was standing in front of Floyd with a hand on each of Floyd's shoulders. It was a headbutt which Floyd decided to do and he instantly wished he'd not. It was like forcing you head at some speed into a rotting pumpkin. The guy's face collapsed and the bones which had been holding his face in place gave way easier than if they'd been made of a thin layer of wax… Floyd didn't mind eating brains. It had never revolted him the way it seemed to revolt most people… all people actually, but suddenly finding that your head was now encased inside someone else's rubbery melting skull wasn't much fun. Floyd pushed the man away and he seemed to slide for a while… leaving his skin behind like it had been some sort of soggy loose fitting garment.
'Fucking fuck.' Were the words Floyd mumbled as he wiped brain and bits of half cooked skin off his face and pulled bits out of his hair. 'A lesson learned. Fuck it.'
And onwards he jogged. He missed the place where the man hole covered had popped up and out of place and long skinny sick looking tentacles were crawling from. He jumped over a rotting thing… couldn't tell what it had been but he was sure if he kicked it over it would have been fully cooked on the under side. He thought it was a woman though. 'Gross.' He kept on going.
The warehouse he had his bike stored in was standing with open doors and no one around to keep an eye on the contents. His heart sunk as he thought about the horrible things which could have happened to his beautiful bike… I would fuck that bike if I could… thoughts went through his head. There was an alleyway and a small lane and the other side of that lane were the open gates to the complex and then the warehouse. There seemed to be no one around. He thought he could hear a car revving a motor somewhere but the traffic here was zero. Cars were parked up along the edge of the road, some of them at strange angles as though the driver had just dumped it there and run. Or maybe they were there waiting for someone to cross the road and they'd do what that other vehicle was doing… and would run him down. Squash him into the slightly bouncy blacktop. Before crossing the road he checked it out. He walked quickly down the smelly hot sidewalk. It was much narrower here and the paving was cracked and old. Green ooze was bubbling its way out from between some of the cracks and smoke… it was smoke here and not steam… was issuing out of others. They were easy to avoid though. Floyd had a funny feeling that the green stuff would glow in the dark. He had no problem with the temptation to bend down and inspect it closer. The first car he looked in was empty, but there was something black spilt over the diver's seat and splashed up the window. Floyd assumed rightly that it was baked on blood. He dreaded to think of the temperature inside that metal coffin. The following one had a body in it slumped over the steering wheel and a bloated rotting something strapped into a car seat in the rear. He didn't bother looking at others. There was no one alive enough around here to drive a car.
Still he looked both ways before crossing the road at a run, and then slipped silently through the gates where behind the warehouse stood. There was dried yellow grass and some dead plants which had once been growing around the edges. Carefully and without making sudden movements he hunkered down and put his fingertips onto the ground. The first time he did it he flinched back and spat on the tips of each finger and then he tried again. He felt for vibrations of people walking or running. He felt for the humming thrum of machinery and there was nothing.
He slipped into the hellish furnace of the warehouse. His bike was stored in a container. He knew which number it was… some of the containers had been emptied. The locks smashed and the contents removed. Maybe by the owner. Floyd didn't know or care as long as his bike and the guns were safe. He'd paid a lot of money to store it here. He laughed at that. It echoed around the warehouse and made it sound like the insane cackle of someone who had lost his mind. 'HA!' Floyd shouted. A protest. He wasn't insane. He thought he was the most sane he'd been in a long time.
The bike was safe, but whether he could ride it back to the motel on those slightly giving roads he didn't know. He firstly strapped on a shoulder holster, then stuffed a loaded automatic pistol in it. He added a gun belt and after tying the holster to his leg he added another loaded pistol to that. Then he stopped. If this was not real… if none of this had been actual… if they were still in hell… then his promise would still stand.
'Fuck'
He was about to remove them again and remembered Spencer saying that it was OK… the promise was no longer binding. 'Well fuck.' Floyd muttered again and after checking the contents of the panniers and transferring it all into a couple of backpacks… he slipped them over his shoulders and mounted his bike. 'My darling.' It felt hot between his legs. Not a nice comforting hot but a rather nasty burning heat. 'And what are the chances that I'll turn my darling on and it'll explode?' This comment made him laugh again and this time he had to accept that yes that was the laughter of someone who had lost him mind.
The bike thrummed happily between his legs… the temperature gauge shop up into the red immediately and the gas was low, but it would get him to the motel.
At least as he left the warehouse and moved slowly over the broken up ground with the dead plants around it, he thought it would get him back to the motel.
He was wrong.
Luckily he was being sensible. Had he been in a car all sense would have left him and he'd had driving like the devil, but this was his darling bike and he was being more cautious. Sometimes though you can be as cautious as you want and disaster will still strike. It wasn't his fault. He would say that until the day he died… which he had a feeling was going to be right there on the corner of Appleton and Felix. He took the corner with grace and ease and was keeping a very careful eye out for things which go BOO! He was glancing in the store windows… one of them had a blazing fire going on inside of it. He moved the bike a bit faster because he didn't want the glass to suddenly blow out and fill him with a million shards of glass, but as his attention wavered from the road and he looked into the next store to see what was happening in Starbucks (nothing was happening as it happened) he missed the open manhole in the road. The front tyre dipped, the bike slewed sideways and Floyd instinctively threw himself aside. His instincts were there for a good reason it seemed. The hot melting blacktop ripped through his clothing and though he'd not been going over 30 it was plenty fast enough to dish out considerable damage. He felt the fabric of his shirt being ripped up out of the way and he let out a long howl of pain as the limp tarry road glued it self to his skin from his hip to his armpit. He felt one of the backpacks being torn off his back and something like hot wax oozed over his bare skin.
He had no time to lay there and feel sorry for himself. He rolled to his knees and yelled out in anger and pain.
The vermin always arrive when something is weakened.
And they arrived.
Floyd managed to get to one knee, pull his lost backpack towards himself and open fire. He wasn't even sure if he was hitting anything and gunfire from an unsuppressed weapon makes a bit of a noise. This was no good if you were being sneaky, or trying to be sneaky, but it worked wonders when you were better off scaring the fuckers away. The things coming for him were much like the guy in the speedos, only these were partially dressed. Their skin was peeling back off their bodies in long (tasty) strips. A couple of them got a round in the head. Two of them were hit the leg and someone got a round in the neck. He then fired at the shop windows as he slowly got to his feet. And with one hand holding onto the backpack with the ripped straps he moved back. 'Get the fuck away from me!' He shouted at them. 'Get the fuck away or you're all dead!' He howled at them now and fired again for good luck, taking a grey haired man in the remains of a business suit in the arm. He had been aiming for the head and in his weird panic, and grief at the loss of his bike which was sinking down into the blacktop. He spun on his boot heels and ran… a terrible agonising painful run it was too.
The door to the motel room was closed. He lifted a hand and started to hammer on it. 'Let me in! Unlock the fucking door you sodding arses!'
