Mark Morris - Dead Island

She was four, maybe five, and she had a long, stringy lump of chewed skin and meat dangling from between her clenched teeth. She might once have been cute, but now she looked savage, demonic. Her pyjamas and her blonde hair were clotted with chunks of shredded flesh and skin. Sam saw that even now the girl’s fingers were buried deep in the bowl of pulped, bloody meat that the woman’s back had become. In fact, the girl had ripped so many layers from the woman’s back that she had exposed the white, blood-smeared nubs of her vertebrae.

Sam took all of this on board in one, maybe two seconds. Then Purna swung her chair leg with both hands and smashed the girl across the face with it. There was a crunch and the girl’s face seemed to cave in. As she fell backwards into the carpeted hotel corridor, limbs flailing like a giant white spider that had lost half its legs, Sam saw with a kind of dreamy horror that beneath the coating of blood and gore she was wearing My Little Pony pyjamas.

Without hesitation, Purna followed up her attack, jumping over the woman and battering the girl around the head again and again with the chair leg, not giving her time to recover. Despite the ferocity of the attack, the girl’s body twitched and heaved and scrabbled, as if she was not only trying to raise herself but also trying to fight back. Grimly Purna kept whacking the girl’s head until her skull was nothing but an un recognizable pulp and her body was still. By the time she stood back, panting and sweating, she was spattered with blood from head to toe, and the chair leg was coated with a viscous gruel of blood, flesh, bone, hair and slick, porridgey gobbets of brain matter.

Sam glanced at Logan, who was shaking, white-faced. Catching his eye, Logan muttered, ‘Man, that was intense .’

Stepping over the still-twitching, keening body of the woman, grimacing at the gore squelching beneath his size eleven Reeboks, Sam walked up to Purna and put his arm round her shoulder. She flinched slightly but didn’t resist.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you OK?’

She looked at him. Her eyes were over-bright, her face a little too composed. ‘Fine,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to be,’ he told her. ‘I’m not sure I am.’

Purna clenched her jaw and looked almost callously down at the sprawled, now-pathetic body of the little girl. ‘Then I guess you’d better learn to be. This is something we’re all going to have to get used to.’

Shrugging off his arm, she turned and marched back to the woman, who was gasping and juddering now, her eyes wide with trauma, her breath coming in wheezy, panicked gasps.

Squatting beside her, Purna said, ‘We can’t leave her like this. Either she’ll turn or more of those things will get her.’

‘You think we should take her with us?’ asked Sam, frowning.

Purna shook her head. ‘She’s beyond help and she’d only slow us down. We need to put her out of her misery.’

Sam blinked. ‘You serious?’

‘No, I’m joking,’ she snapped. ‘There’s nothing better than a good laugh to lighten a serious situation.’

Sam raised his hands. ‘OK, OK. Sorry.’ Turning his head and lowering his voice, he said, ‘So … how we gonna do it?’

‘We haven’t got time to debate or draw straws,’ Purna said. Then, putting her gore-covered chair leg aside, she reached out and took the woman’s head almost tenderly in her hands. Leaning over her, she murmured, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry.’ Then, with a practised twist, she broke the woman’s neck.

‘Jesus,’ muttered Sam.

Standing out on the landing between staircases, Logan looked as if he was trying not to throw up. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ he asked in a faint voice.

‘Girl Guides,’ replied Purna. She picked up the chair leg and without another word stepped back over the body of the woman and started down the next flight of stairs.

Logan scurried after her, Sam bringing up the rear.

‘You think that’ll be enough?’ Logan said. ‘Breaking her neck, I mean?’

Purna halted briefly to glare at him. ‘You wanna go back and hack her head off? If so, be my guest.’

Logan tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. ‘That’s OK. I’ll pass.’

They descended the next few flights in silence, Sam all too aware of the stink of blood and raw meat coming off Purna’s clothes. He was aware too that Purna was still at the head of the group, and therefore would be in the front line if any more action went down. Pushing past Logan, he caught up with Purna a couple of steps ahead of him.

‘First to the bar buys the drinks,’ Logan called.

Sam glanced back at him. ‘Just thought I’d take pole position, if that’s OK with you? Figured Purna here had done her share of zombie-bashing for now.’ He looked askance at Purna. ‘That fine with you?’

Purna was looking straight ahead, face set, jaw clenched. When she caught Sam’s eye her features softened slightly. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘My arm is pretty tired.’

Sam gave a nod and stepped in front of her. They were descending the stairs below the landing to floor three when he halted, holding up a hand.

‘What is it?’ Purna asked.

‘This time I do hear something,’ Sam said. ‘Listen.’

They all stood still and listened. From a flight or two below them came a shuffling, snorting sound.

Immediately Logan was reminded of a football camp his mom and dad had sent him on when he’d been twelve or thirteen. One night he and a couple of guys had gone camping up in the hills and had been awoken in the early hours by a bear snuffling around their tent, looking for food. Logan had been shit-scared, but like the other guys he’d scrambled out of the tent and run at the bear, yelling and waving his arms. The bear, which it turned out had been only a cub, had taken fright, turned tail and fled. Logan and his friends had stayed awake the rest of the night in a state of nervous excitement. Next day, back down at the camp, they had bragged to the rest of the guys about how they had faced down a full-grown grizzly and survived.

Logan knew that the thing below them now was not a bear, and nor would it run if they yelled at it. For the first time he wondered how much of a survivor he truly was, and how far he would have to push himself, both mentally and physically, in order to get through the coming ordeal. Could he bash the brains out of a little kid or snap the neck of a fatally injured woman like Purna had just done? True, he didn’t give much of a shit about anyone but himself, but that didn’t automatically mean that he’d be prepared to do anything to save his own skin. He usually liked to leave the dirty jobs to other people, to operate under the radar, so to speak. However, he had a feeling that wouldn’t be an option from now on. Like he’d told Sam, it was a dog-eat-dog world now; kill or be killed.

All the same, there was nothing to be gained in inviting trouble, or rushing headlong into it. Sidling up to Purna, he whispered, ‘Maybe if we stay quiet, that thing, whatever it is, will go away.’

Purna, still spattered with the girl’s blood, shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s coming towards us.’

Sam turned and glanced briefly at her. ‘Maybe it can smell all that shit on you.’

‘Let’s head back upstairs then,’ said Logan. ‘We can go through the door and wait in the corridor. Maybe it’ll lose the scent.’

‘I’m not going backwards,’ said Purna. ‘If we keep hiding from those things we’ll never get anywhere.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Sam, and hefted his multi-pronged coat-hanger weapon. ‘Let’s do this.’

Leading the way, he descended towards the sounds of movement, step by careful step. Reaching the curve of the banister, he whispered, ‘Y’all ready?’