Rich Hawkins: The Last Plague

There was an infected man with eyes and mouths on his naked back, and the mouths were opening and closing, sensing prey and movement, something they could batten upon, something to suckle and drain.

There was a bloated, wheezing figure, neither man nor woman, but something in-between. Its sightless eyes were vestigial, distractions from the rest of its slippery, greased form.

People were falling.

Frank was pushed one way then the other. He tripped, fell, managed to land on his back. He was kicked in the back of the head. Things blurred. Florence was screaming. He saw dead bodies on the ground, and the infected battening upon them. More infected were coming, chattering and shrilling. He couldn’t see Joel or Anya or Ralph. Florence knelt by him and helped him up. He stood, picked her up again. An infected man barrelled towards him, mouth lined with teeth growing over his lips. His hands were raking claws. Things squirmed underneath his skin. Frank dodged him at the last moment, and the man jumped upon a screaming woman and ripped at her face until her eyes were gone and her skin was hanging like a sloughed mask.

Frank looked around, breathing hard. There were injured on the ground, their hands clutched to bleeding wounds and bite marks. A man was having what appeared to be a seizure. He was becoming infected, his skin paling and his flesh shifting on his bones, which were snapping and reforming until the seizure passed and he flipped onto all fours, snapping his mouth at the air. His eyes filled with scarlet and black, and he leapt away into the crowd.

Hot blood sprayed Frank from a teenage boy who fell with an infected man’s dark tendrils puncturing his throat.

Frank put his head down, held Florence tightly, and shoulder-barged through the crowd. He glimpsed wet mouths and squirming tongues flicking outwards. Horrid, malformed faces shrieking and covered in blood. There was a severed arm on the ground, still with a wristwatch. People were dragged back up the beach, clawing at the sand.

He saw a blond-haired girl ravaged by two infected men. They pulled at her and she came apart easily like tender well-cooked meat slipping from the bone. An old woman, bleeding from her stomach, crawled on her hands and knees, reaching out to Frank, until a girl with a serrated mouth, moving like an insect, with fleshy vestigial limbs emerging from her torso, pulled the old woman towards her. Frank watched. The infected girl’s limbs developed clawed fingers and began pulling apart the old woman’s mouth until her face tore with a sound like ripping fabric. Then some kind of dangling stinger emerged from the girl’s torso and slid between the old woman’s legs. The stinger began to thrust, moving slickly and deep. The girl’s body sagged and she let out a soft moan, both tortured and pleasurable. The old woman bucked and writhed, her hands flailing vainly at her assailant until the life drained out of her and she went still as the infected girl violated her.

This all happened in the space of five seconds.

Frank turned away and vomited onto his shoes.

Florence was screaming.

Frank turned back and held the girl.

A man stood before them, his clothes torn and his body shaking. His mouth stretched wide and a glistening proboscis emerged from between his teeth. Frank stepped back. The proboscis probed the air. A clear fluid dripped from its tip and its sheath pulled back like a foreskin revealing a pink, thin appendage with a sharp, wriggling point.

The man lunged at them.

Florence cried out.

The man’s head exploded and he collapsed.

Ralph walked over to the man and stepped on the still-wriggling proboscis until it was crushed beneath his foot and leaked white fluid onto the sand. He was holding a pistol. Army-issue. He looked at Frank and nodded.

“Where did you get that gun from?” Frank asked.

“Belonged to a soldier. He didn’t need it anymore.”

Frank tightened his grip on Florence’s hand.

Ralph put a bullet through a growling woman’s face as she lunged at him. Then he turned back to them. “Follow me.”

The infected man opened his stinking mouth and snapped his teeth towards Anya. She recoiled, stumbling. The man let forth a growling roar and the fleshy needles on his face quivered. A dark fluid dripped from his eyes.

Joel smashed him in the face with a rock he’d found on the sand. The infected man fell to his knees, clutching his face with one gnarled hand.

Joel brought the rock down on the man’s head. The man slumped on his back as his shattered skull leaked a putrescent liquid onto the sand. Joel discarded the rock, grabbed Anya and ran for the shore, pushing people out of the way. He saw one of the landing craft straight ahead. Navy crewmen were loading people onto it, and there were Royal Marines alongside them, shooting any infected that got too close. Other craft were getting swamped by the desperate refugees. One craft was a heaving mass of bodies, infected and uninfected, the marines lying dead in the surf.

Some of the craft were leaving. Joel pulled Anya with him, bursting into a sprint.

A young boy bolted towards them, his body festering with coiled tentacles and rupturing tumours. Joel and Anya halted as the boy blocked their path. The boy wailed through a contorted mouth. His head split open into teeth-lined halves and a nest of trembling wormlike feelers rose from within his cranium like snakes from a charmer’s pot. The feelers, each one of them approximately three feet in length, possessed clusters of tiny sucking mouths upon their forms, dilating at the close proximity of prey. Joel and Anya backed away, and the boy-thing followed. Pale, milk-white spider-legs grew from the boy’s flanks and came to rest on the ground lifting him from his original height and supporting him in his new form.

Joel put himself between Anya and the boy-creature. People were running past them. The infected boy reared up and wailed a terrifying and painful sound and came towards Joel and Anya.

Then Joel did something he never thought he would have done.

A middle-aged, chubby man stumbled next to them, and Joel pushed the man towards the boy-thing. The man screamed and looked at Joel with an expression of undiluted terror and fear.

“I’m sorry,” said Joel, but the man didn’t hear him.

The boy reeled the man in and wrapped dripping tentacles around his body. The man begged to be released. The boy pinned him on the sand.

The man screamed again.

The boy’s feelers elongated from within his head and clamped upon the man’s face. The man wriggled and squirmed, clawing at the feelers as they drilled into his eyes, his mouth, and the soft tissue of his cheeks and chin.

The man stopped moving. The feelers detached, then retreated, leaving only a skull and a few scraps of skin and muscle.

Joel and Anya ran for the shore. The craft was almost full, getting ready to leave.

“Wait for us!” Joel shouted.

One of the marines turned and fired at them. They both screamed, then glanced back to see a bloated woman collapsing onto the sand behind them, a red wound where her face had been.

“Quickly,” the marine said. He shot two more infected advancing towards them.

Joel pushed Anya onwards. His legs felt like they were on fire. One last push. All he could hear was the screams of the infected.

The marines pulled them on board over the lowered ramp, and they collapsed among the other refugees who had made it. Many of them were crying and sobbing; others were in stunned, traumatised silence.

Joel turned back to the beach. He couldn’t see Ralph, Frank or Florence. The shoreline was a field of slaughter. Blood stained the sand and made the water red. Body parts floated in the water. Most of the craft were leaving. So many people left behind. The majority of the refugees still on the beach were either dead or too badly injured to move. Arms and legs torn away. Severe mutilations. Grisly mounds of meat still alive and begging for mercy. Packs of the infected were feeding.