Kristin Read online

She seemed to move ... to stand and go to the window. And yet she still sat beside him. ‘It has to be stopped, one way or another. You must stop it, Thomas.’

  Clad in a loose-fitting, white robe he sat at a large table in a warm, airy room. All around, he could feel the affection, the unequivocal loyalty of many close friends and allies. He divided the loaf of bread before him into equal parts and passed them around. Then he sipped red wine from a wooden chalice and handed it on.

  He’d left his friends and was deep in prayer in a peaceful garden when the soldiers came and manhandled him away into the night. The vision faded.

  He was on trial before many people, could feel conspiracy, a travesty of justice. A man in authority exonerated him time after time, but he sensed persecution and treachery from unexpected corners. He was made to carry a great weight upon his shoulders and to walk, doubled over, through narrow, cobbled streets lined with hysterical crowds. There followed prolonged, tortuous pain, agony that finally ended high on a hill, overlooking a great walled city, as his friends and relations wept helplessly at his feet. But he didn’t die.

  The droplets hitting the carpet ended the dream abruptly. He opened his eyes, but crippling fear stopped him from lifting his head to see what was present in the darkness of the lounge.

  Lungs rattled.

  ‘Thom? Are you awake? Please talk to me, I’m so alone,’ whispered a clear, familiar voice.

  He pulled himself up in the armchair.

  Kristin stood naked, her arms outstretched. The pores of her skin secreted watery blood that streamed down the length of her body. ‘I’ve tried to be strong, but I can feel it winning. My hands are already stained with the blood of thousands.’

  He tried to answer her.

  ‘Please, Thom, please listen. There isn’t much time left. This is only the beginning. I know what it wants to do, what it’s capable of doing. It won’t stop until it’s murdered half the human race and enslaved the remainder. It may turn to means already here to speed up it’s plans. You should look to the West, and to the Eastern World. I can’t tell you any ... ’ Be quiet, bitch, thou hast said enough as it is! it interrupted, venomously. ‘I won’t be able to speak to you for very much longer.’

  ‘ ... What do I do?’

  ‘Kill me.’

  ‘ ... Kill you?’

  ‘And make sure that I’m dead.’

  ‘I could never hurt you.’

  ‘Do it for humanity.’

  ‘But I love you.’

  ‘You must find a way of living without me.’

  ‘You couldn’t die by your own hand, how would I succeed?’

  ‘Find its achilles heel, you’re ….’ Hold your tongue, bitch!

  He braced himself against the sudden onslaught of pain that surged through his hands and feet. When it had passed, she’d gone.

  Nineteen

  Thom opened his eyes slowly. He was standing upright. Sparkling, crystalline frost had bonded his forehead to sharp, rusted metal and his knees were locked solid, numb.

  He separated himself from the ridged steel, tearing his skin. Icy rain fell, stabbing at his face like needles. He lurched against the garage door, saw he was at the end of a dank, narrow access road. And he realised he was entirely alone in the world. He headed for the light at the end of the road.

  At the junction he veered left and tried to focus his eyesight through the sheet of fine rain. He knew this area, recognized the parade of small shops and bistros on the other side. Somehow, he’d returned to the streets of Greenwich. But the parade no longer bustled or welcomed, its shops had long since closed. Charcoal shadows, bristling with disquiet, pitted its frontage and its drenched roofs spiked the night sky with gothic horror.

  Thom crossed the road and passed slowly along the row until he came to a delicatessen, cursing his stupidity in not having eaten when he’d had the chance. He stepped towards the darkened entrance, tripped on something and a foot lashed out at him.

  ‘You made me fucking jump, you bastard!’

  ‘I ... I didn’t see you, I’m sorry,’ he stammered.

  Three legs trailed from the doorway.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Some food, that’s all, I want to get into the shop for some food, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ the well-spoken, faceless man growled.

  ‘Do you mind if I look, I’m starving?’

  ‘We’re all fucking starving! There’s nothing inside, I finished off what was left three days ago. All these places were cleaned out soon after the siren.’

  ‘You heard the siren?’

  ‘Of course I fucking heard it! Didn’t all civilisation? I’m just lucky I retained my mind. My wife wasn’t so fortunate,’ he said, sucking on something wet.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She had no resistance to it. She couldn’t live with it inside her head. She smashed a bottle and gouged out her own eyes, and then cut through her wrists. I found her afterwards.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’ So am I. Sorry I didn’t join her.’

  ‘How have you lived, how have you survived?’

  ‘From one day to the next, what other way is there?’ He swore, spat, and a chunk of bleeding gristle landed on Thom’s shoe. Then a face emerged from the darkness, a mouth coated with bloody saliva. ‘If you’re truly starving maybe I can help you,’ he smiled. His top lip retracted, revealing long, reddened teeth, and he hauled something into view. ‘Please, join me in my feast.’

  The green eyes of the dead girl stared at Thom. She was naked apart from a pair of flowered briefs, and her left arm had been eaten down to the bone.

  ‘This is my lovely daughter, Anna,’ he whispered, smoothing a hand over her belly. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? I’ve only just killed her … the meat is still warm.’

  With madness burning in his eyes he produced a rusting penknife and slashed open her abdomen. He forced his fingers into the hole, extricated a bloody mass of organ and connective tissue and held it out in offering.

  Thom reeled. Then he ran, faster then he’d ever run before. And from somewhere he knew he’d summon the strength to keep on running.

  Thom ran along abandoned streets, through pedestrian areas littered with with debris, human waste and human bodies. He ran through terrifying, unlit parks, fending off attack after attack from the deranged. He tried to put the memory of the cannibalistic father behind him, to forget what he’d seen, but strength of the image had claimed a permanent place in his mind. His legs tired, begged him to rest them for a moment but a brick, flung from the upper window of a townhouse forced the to keep moving beyond their limit.

  ‘FUCK YOU! Bawled the woman. ‘FUCK ALL OF YOU! PISS ON YOUR CHRIST! SHIT ON YOUR GOD!’

  Near the burned out ruins of the Maritime Museum his legs capitulated and he collapsed onto the wet ground beneath a telegraph pole. He looked up. A body dangled from the top: The victim had been crucified — fixed in position by metal stakes driven through the feet and between the eyes, and then burned, so badly he couldn’t tell if they’d been male or female.

  The icy wind blustered and sodden flakes of carbonized skin settled upon him, got into his hair. Frantically, he brushed himself clean of their contamination and moved on at a crawl for another hundred yards before accepting he could go no further. He wedged himself beneath the stairwell to a block of grey council flats, drew his coat over his head and slept.

  Twenty

  When Thom woke it was still dark. His body had seized. Painfully, he straightened his limbs, back and neck, extricating himself from beneath the stairwell. Loud music was pounding from a brightly lit bar ahead. How could he have missed it? In front of the building a naked figure lay motionless in the gutter, an elderly woman with white hair.

  He crossed the street and stood over her. Was she alive? She wasn’t even shivering. Green and purple lights from the bar pulsed on and off, reflecting in the dull sheen of her
frozen back, confusing his eyesight. But the wisps of raven hair that grew from the nape of her neck, the gentle musculature of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, they were all things familiar to him.

  He held her shoulder and rolled her over. Glimmering black optics opened and stared up at him unblinkingly, the white-haired woman mirrored in them. He gasped. Gruesome letters had been branded across her chest in ancient Hebrew: “Thou shalt not murder”. He tried to help her up but she slipped through the substance of his arms.

  ‘Ugly digits, poisoned fuckers!’ a voice snuffled, as she slapped his hands away, gashing them with her dirty talons. ‘Where are my coverings?’

  ‘Here,’ he replied. He took off his coat, wrapped it around her shoulders and buttoned it. The coat turned a brilliant white.

  ‘Why dost thou stare?’ she mouthed, silently.

  He sat down on the soft kerbstone. ‘Don’t you know me?’

  ‘This covering is too big.’

  ‘ Thom.’

  ‘What dost thou speak of? Is thine organ of thought impaired?’

  ‘My name is Thom.’

  She eyed him with distrust.

  ‘Do you know who you are?’

  ‘I am Kwang, from Koreans. I fight others, kill them. It is my purpose and my pleasure.’

  ‘No, you’re ... Kristin.’

  ‘Fucking shit!’

  ‘You’re somebody I loved, somebody who loved me. Your name is Kristin.’

  ‘Love? Love is shit, a fanciful notion concocted by humankind to safeguard its emotions. Love is disingenuous, poisoned. Hatred is honest, unadulterated.’

  ‘ … Do you feel cold? It will be warmer in there.’

  ‘I like the cold, it brings me solace. It is where I belong. Why must thou disturb my reverie?’

  ‘Then I’ll go inside.’ He picked up a length of wood studded with protruding nails and opened the doors. She would follow. Before long her overlord would realize she was cold and hungry, and she would follow. Indestructible memories of her life and love on Earth would prove stronger than its will, and she would follow.

  The space was cavernous. It was dominated on the left by a gleaming bar without end, behind which a vast array of liquor bottles sparkled. The garishly coloured carpet swept away to dark corners enlivened by the dancing lights of slot machines. Shining, round tables and chairs were positioned in a pattern of precision. Above the bar an oversized screen hung, bearing the image of a dancer whose semi-naked body gyrated and jerked to a tuneless, thumping rhythm.

  He couldn’t recall this place, it was entirely foreign to him. It had appeared from nowhere, pristine, unaffected by everything happening outside, like an oasis of normality. It reminded him of a dream where he’d discovered a secret room, a basement, in his old home.

  Was he now exploring an unknown area of his mind? Might he be afforded an insight into his place in the scheme of things here, a glimpse into any future resolution of the maelstrom afflicting humanity? By the time he left here, perhaps he would understand the essence of the hellish entity that had claimed, and destroyed the soul of the beautiful young woman who should have frozen to death on the other side of the doors, the sinister force that persisted to strangle life from the world? Would he learn how to end her torment? Had he been brought here deliberately, to learn these things?

  Starving, he made his way behind the bar and pushed the swing door to the store room. On his haunches, he opened the large refrigerator. It was crammed full of black food. He gorged himself until he spewed. Then he returned to the bar, filled a glass with pure alcohol and waited.

  The heavy doors parted no more than a crack and she slithered inside. ‘She needs food,’ the terrible, throaty voice grouched. ‘Get her some.’

  He turned his back. The glass had refilled, and he sipped from it. ‘Get it yourself, it’s in there.’

  She hissed at him like a snake and glissaded towards the door. ‘Where is the food?’

  ‘Look for it and you’ll find it.’

  ‘What should I consume?’

  ‘She once asked me that question.’

  ‘What was thine answer?’

  ‘Eat anything you want.’

  She passed into the room and silence fell as the doors closed behind her. When she came out, her arms were full. She dropped the load onto the bar, ducked her head and closed her jaws around a raw joint of lamb.

  ‘No,’ he warned. ‘That will make her ill, it must be cooked.’

  ‘Cooked?’

  ‘Heated, to kill off harmful bacteria.’

  ‘Useless shit!’ she cursed, tossing the meat to the floor. Her teeth gnashed fruitlessly at the thick glass of a condiment bottle until they were chipped ragged. Furious, she smashed it open against the bar and wrapped her lips around the lethal fracture.

  ‘That will hurt her. Cut her mouth open.’ He forced the bottle from her hands, and she seethed with anger.

  ‘Why may I not eat of my own flesh?’ she glowered.

  ‘It defies logic. How could you survive if you consumed your bodily ... ?’

  ‘Why may I not drink lifeblood?’

  ‘It’s not for consumption, it’s an essential element of human ... ’

  ‘Who is Kristin?’.

  ‘A girl.’

  Her jet eyes doubled in size and their perfect surfaces reflected the image of his wet face back at him.

  A young woman. Whose body and soul you stole.’

  She smiled in sudden realization and moved her face close to his. He felt darkness envelop him. ‘ ... We were lovers? When I was wholly human?’

  ‘ … Yes.’

  ‘We fucked?’

  ‘We made love.’

  ‘Made love? I have known love?’

  ‘She knew love.’

  ‘Did I experience pleasure?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘FORGET THE SLAG, SHE’S DEAD! Did we fuck each other senseless, like two dog creatures of this Earth? Did the seed of man spatter and waste, or did I take this beginning into my depths to meet with the ovum there?’

  He opened the front of her coat. ‘Who did that?’

  She looked down and screamed like a vixen when she saw the gruesome burns, ‘WHO HAS IMPAIRED MY BEAUTY, MY PERFECTION?’

  ‘It’s a message, a warning.’

  ‘Who would dare warn me?’

  ‘It says “Thou shalt not murder.” Someone wants to ensure you don’t forget what you’ve done, what you continue to do. They want you to stop. When will you stop? Tell me, I need to know.’

  ‘I will never stop! Eternal damnation is thy fate!’

  ‘Why can there be no salvation?’

  ‘Man has engineered his own destiny, set his own future in stone. I am inside all of thee, and for millennia sometimes a last, desperate shred of righteousness has prevented my renaissance. But such is the magnitude of man’s aggression, his insatiable avarice in these times, that I am reborn. Dost thou not understand, dumbfuck? Thee all made me.’

  ‘Take the body of somebody else, return her to me, I can’t live without her.’

  ‘Thou art symptomatic of humanity’s greed. Such selfishness. Thou wouldst see me continue to destroy thy race, as long as thou art are content, as long as thou hast thy precious love. But she will never return to thee.’

  ‘Why ... why not?’

  ‘The bitch’s soul is dead.’

  ‘ ... Take my body, let her live life.’

  She leaned back, faded from view and returned. ‘Such sacrifice. Humankind could have done worse than appoint thee as its leader. I might have faced a worthy adversary. But thine idea lacks logic. Thou wouldst be without thy love, thy Kristin. She would live in my world. Thou wouldst condemn her to a lifetime of interminable suffering ... why?’

  ‘You could never understand. You don’t believe in the concept of love and you don’t acknowledge its existence. Love has so many facets; love for a woman or man, love for parents, brothers and sisters, love for fellow man, love of life ... I wan
t to give Kristin more life. I waited so long for her love, now your selection process has torn us apart.’

  ‘I feel nothing for thee. Nor for her. Nor for humanity. There is only emptiness.’

  ‘How empty must you be? You would give your life for nothing.’

  ‘Incorrect. I would surrender my soul for these things; absolution, and the love of my father.’

  ‘Then you wish for love … maybe you’re capable of giving love too? If you seek absolution then you must feel guilt, you must have a conscience? But how can you expect to be exonerated when you continue to annihilate everything good in this world? You must stop, then plead for redemption for your atrocious crimes.’

  ‘Plead? To whom?’

  ‘To God.’

  ‘My father will not speak to me. I am unforgiven. I shall never stop, the Christ will be found and slaughtered.’

  ‘The Lord died two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Now he is risen for a second time and walks amongst thee as thy would-be saviour. Why else dost thou think I am here?’

  An icy wind blew through his soul. Could it be true? Could Jesus have been sent down to save humankind as it teetered on the brink of oblivion? The Beast had already more than proved its credentials as the antipode of the son of God, there was no reason to doubt it.

  A sickly smile split her face from ear to ear, until it seemed the top half of her head would separate from the bottom. She closed her eyes and sighed as the evil at her core murdered. ‘Ahhh ... such a feeling should be felt by all, at least once!’

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Burned young.’

  ‘You murdering bastard!’

  ‘See their tiny bodies smoulder. Will they survive? Who knows? Who cares? One thing is for certain, they will know no more love.’

  ‘Love transcends everything,’ he countered. ‘Even death. They will know the love of their mothers and fathers again. I’ll be with Kristin again. I’ll love her once more, in this life or the next, and you’ll have no place in that future.’

  Her shoulders shook with mirth. ‘The next life? Ah yes, nirvana. She who bore thee waits for thee there, I believe.’