Clive Barker - Books Of Blood Vol 1

This is not happening. This is a dream of death, not death itself.

But reason could find no weakness in the wall. This was true. It was death indeed. Podujevo had fallen.

Thirty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five citizens were spread on the ground, or rather flung in ungainly, seeping piles. Those who had not died of the fall, or of suffocation, were dying. There would be no survivors from that city except that bundle of onlookers that had traipsed out of their homes to watch the contest. Those few Podujevians, the crippled, the sick, the ancient few, were now staring, like Mick and Judd, at the carnage, trying not to believe.

Judd was first out of the car. The ground beneath his suedes was sticky with coagulating gore. He surveyed the carnage. There was no wreckage: no sign of a plane crash, no fire, no smell of fuel. Just tens of thousands of fresh bodies, all either naked or dressed in an identical grey serge, men, women and children alike. Some of them, he could see, wore leather harnesses, tightly buckled around their upper chests, and snaking out from these contraptions were lengths of rope, miles and miles of it. The closer he looked, the more he saw of the extraordinary system of knots and lashings that still held the bodies together. For some reason these people had been tied together, side by side. Some were yoked on their neighbours’ shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horse back riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads of rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in some insane collective bondage game.

Another shot.

Mick looked up.

Across the field a solitary man, dressed in a drab overcoat, was walking amongst the bodies with a revolver, dispatching the dying. It was a pitifully inadequate act of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the suffering children first. Emptying the revolver, filling it again, emptying it, filling it, emptying it —Mick let go.

He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the injured.

‘What is this?’

The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as dead-grey as his coat.

‘Uh?’ he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers through his thick spectacles.

‘What’s happened here?’ Mick shouted across at him. It felt good to shout, it felt good to sound angry at the man. Maybe he was to blame. It would be a fine thing, just to have someone to blame.

‘Tell us —‘ Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice. ‘Tell us, for God’s sake. Explain.’

Grey-coat shook his head. He didn’t understand a word this young idiot was saying. It was English he spoke, but that’s all he knew. Mick began to walk towards him, feeling all the time the eyes of the dead on him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in broken faces: eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for voices. Eyes in heads beyond howls, beyond breath. Thousands of eyes.

He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty. He had taken off his spectacles and thrown them aside. He too was weeping, little jerks ran through his big, ungainly body.

At Mick’s feet, somebody was reaching for him. He didn’t want to look, but the hand touched his shoe and he had no choice but to see its owner. A young man, lying like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child lay under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink sticks. He wanted the man’s revolver, to stop the hand from touching him. Better still he wanted a machine-gun, a flame-thrower, anything to wipe the agony away.

As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw Grey-coat raise the revolver.

‘Judd —‘ he said, but as the word left his lips the muzzle of the revolver was slipped into Grey-coat’s mouth and the trigger was pulled.

Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The back of his head opened like a dropped egg, the shell of his skull flying off. His body went limp and sank to the ground, the revolver still between his lips.

‘We must —, began Mick, saying the words to nobody. ‘We must ...‘

What was the imperative? In this situation, what must they do?

‘We must —‘Judd was behind him. ‘Help —‘ he said to Mick.

‘Yes. We must get help. We must —, ‘Go.’

Go! That was what they must do. On any pretext, for any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out of the battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a wound in place of a body.

‘We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get help —‘

‘Priests,’ said Mick. ‘They need priests.’

It was absurd, to think of giving the Last Rites to so many people. It would take an army of priests, a water cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the benedictions.

They turned away, together, from the horror, and wrapped their arms around each other, then picked their way through the carnage to the car. It was occupied.

Vaslav Jelovsek was sitting behind the wheel, and trying to start the Volkswagen. He turned the ignition key once. Twice. Third time the engine caught and the wheels span in the crimson mud as he put her into reverse and backed down the track. Vaslav saw the Englishmen running towards the car, cursing him. There was no help for it

— he didn’t want to steal the vehicle, but he had work to do. He had been a referee, he had been responsible for the contest, and the safety of the contestants. One of the heroic cities had already fallen. He must do everything in his power to prevent Popolac from following its twin. He must chase Popolac, and reason with it. Talk it down out of its terrors with quiet words and promises. If he failed there would be another disaster the equal of the one in front of him, and his conscience was already broken enough.

Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek. The thief took no notice, concentrating on manoeuvring the car back down the narrow, slippery track. Mick was losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to pick up speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury, Mick stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and sobbing.

‘Bastard!’ said Judd.

Mick looked down the track. Their car had already disappeared.

‘Fucker couldn’t even drive properly.’

‘We have ... we have ... to catch ... up ...‘ said Mick through gulps of breath.

‘How?’

‘On foot...‘

‘We haven’t even got a map ... it’s in the car.’

‘Jesus ... Christ ... Almighty.’

They walked down the track together, away from the field. After a few metres the tide of blood began to peter out. Just a few congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the main road. Mick and Judd followed the bloody tyre marks to the junction. The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The tyre marks showed a left turn. ‘He’s gone deeper into the hills,’ said Judd, staring along the lonely road towards the blue-green distance.

‘He’s out of his mind!’

‘Do we go back the way we came?’

‘It’ll take us all night on foot.’

‘We’ll hop a lift.’

Judd shook his head: his face was slack and his look lost.

‘Don’t you see, Mick, they all knew this was happening. The people in the farms — they got the hell out while those people went crazy up there. There’ll be no cars along this road, I’ll lay you anything — except maybe a couple of shit-dumb tourists like us — and no tourist would stop for the likes of us.’

He was right. They looked like butchers — splattered with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their eyes maddened.

‘We’ll have to walk,’ said Judd, ‘the way he went.’