Stephen Jones: Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

After a long moment he turned back to us.

His face had shattered… just like glass.

Mary was calm, remarkably calm. We stood back from the gates, watching the others go through one by one. None of them were turned back. Mary said, ‘It’s the same decision we faced… talked about facing… in the jail. If someone should come…’

‘It’s not the same,’ Jerry rasped. But it was.

Then everyone else had gone through and the faceless man was looking at us.

Mary said, ‘Jerry… please go through.’

‘Well, I’m just likely to do that, ain’t I?’ he said.

Mary gave a little whimpering sigh. It was impossible to tell if it expressed relief or frustration; emotions were blurred in all of us now, our senses confused by anomie. It was worse for Mary, if anything, with an edge of guilt on her disorientation — without her, we could have gone through the gates.

The visored man said, ‘Anyone else?’ His voice was soft; he didn’t like what he had to do.

‘Jack… no sense in you staying,’ Jerry said.

I wanted to go. My muscles actually lurched in the direction of the gates and I had to restrain my body. I could feel my bones distinctly within my flesh, the scaffold of my skeleton fixing me in place. I shook my head, refusing my own instincts rather than Jerry’s suggestion.

‘Please go,’ Mary said. ‘It will be easier for me…’

And Jerry said, ‘Our supplies will last longer with just the two of us, Jack…’

It was so tempting I feared my honour would prove weak.

‘No one else!’ I called.

The visored man regarded us. Then he nodded and turned away. The line of men in uniform began to retreat, keeping formation and closing the crescent in around the pier. They moved as if executing a formal manoeuvre on the parade grounds, functioning exactly in a world gone mad. They had left the canvas shelter where it was; it snapped in the breeze, like a tent abandoned on a holiday in Hell.

Jerry’s big hand closed on my shoulder in gentle gratitude.

‘If it had been your girl…’ he said.

Maybe, I thought.

One by one the guards were filtering out of the line and boarding the landing craft. The men in protective clothing were already aboard. The three of us stood there by the gates and a line of faces gazed at us from the boat. It looked like a row of disembodied heads posted around a stockade. The last uniformed man had started up the ramp when a ghoul came loping out of a sidestreet and flung himself onto the fence…

Like a demented monkey, the ghoul began to scale the barrier. He was moving with purpose and I was reminded of Jerry’s tale of the solitary rat in the bag. His groping hand reached the top and clamped over the barbed wire. Blood ran down his arm. He jerked himself up. The other ghouls watched him, as if impressed by a virtuoso performance and envious of his agility.

The last guard was halfway up the boarding ramp when he looked back and saw the ghoul. His face set. The others, on board, were calling for him to hurry, but he turned back and sighted his weapon. He took aim as stolidly as if he’d been on the shooting range. I understood it. It was not a human target upon which he sighted. There was no need to kill the ghoul, the guard could have boarded in plenty of time, but he was guided by some instinct older than reason and deeper than logic. He squeezed off a burst from his automatic weapon. Cartridges spun over his shoulder, glinting in the sunlight. Splinters of bone and gore cascaded from the ghoul. Blood hung in a thin mist around him. He jerked; his body heaved up, then dropped back. He hung suspended from the top of the fence, his hand impaled on the barbed wire. Thick drops of blood fell from him and he swayed like some carnal fruit, bursting with red ripeness.

The guard grimaced — with satisfaction.

He turned back up the ramp. Spent cartridges were scattered at his feet and he looked down at them for a moment, as if they were runes which he had cast. Then he kicked at them. They spun off the ramp and dropped into the water. The guard went on up the ramp and then the ramp drew up and three of us were alone.

Mary buried her face in Jerry’s chest, clinging there, as if using his body as a shield against the sight of the dead ghoul. He stroked her hair.

‘We’d better get back to the jail,’ he said.

‘Again?’ The word was muffled against his chest, carved into his body. ‘Go through them again?’

‘It’s the safest place.’

I said, ‘Jerry… when we left… I didn’t close the door. I didn’t think… they might be in there now.’

He winced.

‘What about one of the vans?’ Mary said.

‘They seem attracted to them…’ I said.

‘Still, if we drive around without stopping,’ Jerry said.

Mary said, ‘I meant to drive back to the jail…’

‘Jack left the door open, goddamn it!’ Jerry snapped. Then: ‘Why shouldn’t he have left the door open? How did he know we’d be going back?’

He spoke as if it were an exercise in logics. He was looking around, standing with his back to the fence. Further down the fence, towards the jail, the dead ghoul was still hanging by his spiked hand… as if, like the swordfish, he had been suspended there to be weighed and measured and mounted. Blood still dripped from his erupted body, not spraying out — his heart no longer pumped — but falling in heavy globs obedient to gravity. The living ghouls still milled aimlessly about.

Jerry said, ‘If we drive around they won’t be able to catch us… as long as the gas holds out. But after that… those vans aren’t as strong as the jail. They could break into a van and we’d be confined, unable to manoeuvre… Damn! If only we knew how long we have to hold out here… how long we’ll be isolated before they… before they do whatever they’re going to do about the island. We have to get to some place we can defend.’

‘What about the compound?’ Mary said. ‘Take the van to the compound? The telephone is probably working from there, at least we could be in touch with… the world.’

Jerry considered that.

He was bareheaded now. He had lost his hat somewhere along the line. The sea breeze ruffled his fair hair.

‘What’s it like in the compound, Jack? Defensible?’

But I couldn’t remember what the compound was like. I could remember only that small whitewashed room… and the stinking pit. Black smoke rose from that pit, a tower of smoke like…

‘The lighthouse!’ I cried.

‘Why… yes. That’s right!’

Mary was nodding enthusiastically. ‘There’ll even be supplies there. Sam Jasper’s things. We won’t have to go back to the jail. ’

‘The tide?’ I asked.

‘We’ll take a boat,’ Jerry said, then paused, glancing out at the harbour, where John Tate had been rammed. The destroyer stood at the approaches, attended by gunboats. It would not be wise to take a boat.

Mary thought for a moment; said, ‘We can cross by the reef in half an hour.’

‘And so can they,’ said Jerry.

‘But only one at a time… we can shoot them down one by one, if we have to… if they come…’

‘If they come in daylight.’

‘Oh, Christ… I don’t know.’

‘But wait!’ Jerry said. ‘They won’t cross water, right? They won’t go into water. That reef is none too solid. There must be a tyre iron or something in one of the vans… if we could lever a couple of rocks out of place, make a break in the line… it should work.’

‘I think it’s our best bet,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be there than here. And someone might be more inclined to rescue us from there… in a day or two they must realise we aren’t infected… a boat or helicopter…’