My Name Is Monster Read online

  I roll away and try to sleep again.

  Dawn comes shyly. I get up as soon as it is light enough to see.

  My leg is infected. The flesh is purple and huge, and the bite-marks themselves have turned deep red, ringed with yellow. Something thick and white oozes from them. With my last dribble of water, I wash them gently with the tips of two fingers, and the pain shoots up to my head and I have to force myself not to be sick again. I think of all the cuts and grazes I have given myself over the years, how liberally I rubbed in antiseptic. I eat another digestive biscuit and pack my things back into my bag. Somewhere, waiting for me to discover it, there is food. I tell myself there must be food.

  *

  I walk for three days. I try not to count them, but they tally themselves up on the wall of my brain and I cannot help myself. I measure distances in days now, each one shakier and smaller than the last. I am three days away from the abandoned truck, four days from the room my parents died in. Four days away from the dog pack. Surely that is enough?

  I walk along narrow country lanes, their unkempt verges nodding towards one another and almost meeting in the middle. I skirt the edge of a blasted town, a charred maze of half-toppled walls and unnecessary possessions. A few hours later, I start to climb. The rise is steady at first, then gradually steeper, till I’m hauling myself up the slope and my pack is a dead weight trying to tug me back down. I do not know where I am going any more, but as I climb, the air becomes purer, brisker. I suppose this is a sort of ascension.

  I fill my bottles whenever I find water: tannin-dark streams chattering downhill, a rain barrel, the clear top half of a silted animal trough. Once, when my reserves are low, I manage to squeeze a few precious drops from the moss clinging to an old wall. The drops are cloudy and bitter-tasting, and I am not sure if the effort is worth it. I toe the scattered green clumps into a pile then continue walking.

  I can feel my steps growing scanter as my body grows lighter. I find no food, except the flat tan discs of mushrooms growing from the black bark of a tree. I stare at them for a long time.

  I break a segment off one. The inside is white and fresh and smells of earth, and I touch my cracked lips to it. But I know nothing about which fungi might be safe to eat, so I drop it. For good measure, I kick them. They offer no resistance to my boots, so I kick the mushrooms over and over, till big flakes of their flesh litter the grass. Then I turn my back on them.

  *

  I am not sure in which direction I have been walking. I am not sure if I have been walking in just one direction, or in many. My stomach has stopped making noises. Now it is only a pain like a clenched fist, and a ceaseless searching.

  *

  Night is approaching. I can feel it coming on the way animals can sense a storm.

  I’ve walked too far again today. My stomach is light with lack of food. Somehow, my pack feels heavier.

  My pace has slowed to a funeral march along the rocky path. The pain in my leg is sharper. The throbbing is up to my thigh now, and what I need is medicine. My water bottles are both empty. My throat is dry and my tongue feels too big for my mouth. Already I am finding it hard to swallow.

  The grass and heather are thick on either side and the moorland stretches away into nothingness in all directions. The sky up here is endless – a great grey dome, too pale for rain, too impenetrable for sun. Somewhere beyond it all, night is falling. As the grey dome darkens, the sky feels as though it’s contracting, squeezing everything beneath it into a tighter, blacker space, till even the air feels thick and heavy. Still the only sounds are my laboured footsteps, my own irregular breathing.

  The straps of my backpack feel as if they’re branding my shoulders. My feet grow and swell till they are too heavy to lift. I sit down in the middle of the path. There is nowhere to go. I take off my boots and dig extra socks out of my pack. In this treeless landscape, there is no chance of a fire. I climb into my sleeping bag and try to sleep.

  My stomach grumbles. It is two days since I ran out of food, and the few houses I have found since then have been empty. I keep telling myself there must be something soon.

  The hollow feeling deepens. It spreads up into my ribcage.

  I curl myself as small as I can. I press my fists into my stomach to trick myself into feeling full. After what feels like a long time, I start to drift.

  *

  I wake in the dark. A faint glow where the moon is hidden behind a thick layer of cloud. Otherwise, only blackness, the moor stretching away unseen.

  My body is heavy and cold. My toes ache with it. My bones are made of ice. I will never be warm again. Still my leg burns.

  I feel for my pack beside me on the path. My fingers are so numb that I can barely unzip it, but I force myself to get up. As quickly as my clumsy hands will allow, I dress in all my layers and climb back into my sleeping bag. The cold is still inside me, not quite tamed. I wrap my arms around my chest and tuck my hands under my armpits. Somewhere close, a fox screams. I strain my eyes but there’s nothing – only the dark. The fox screams again. I lie awake and listen.

  *

  I drift between fog and oblivion. I open my eyes to uncertain white, then close them again. In this small circle of existence, I sleep. It is all there is.

  *

  My mother in my student flat, the War already on home soil – on all soil, everywhere. The three Warhammer geeks I live with have already scuttled home. I spread myself through their empty rooms. I am enormous. I am bigger than the city.

  My mother saying: ‘Come home – it isn’t safe – come home—’

  Her face is blotchy, no make-up, turned up towards me like a leaf desperate for sun – and running with tears. But here in this city I can be somebody, so I say no.

  My mother saying: ‘Who do you have here?’ My mother saying: ‘You have nobody – come home—’

  And I say, ‘Myself—’

  ‘Please—’

  I say, ‘I have myself.’

  *

  I am chasing something. Someone. The lane leads to my parents’ village. It’s night and my bag is heavy – I call out to it wait – come back—

  I round the bend but there’s no one, just a dog – a snarling dog with long teats, its hackles raised, mouth dripping. It lunges, its hot breath and rough tongue on my face—

  And its mouth is a hand – my mother’s hand, her palm on my forehead. She is singing.

  I’m too old to be sung to.

  She brushes the hair from my face.

  ‘Wait—’

  I reach out but she’s gone.

  *

  I never understood the idea of total absence. I thought there must always be something. The alternative was too big to comprehend.

  Now there is nothing. It is vast.

  I sleep. I wake. I sleep.

  *

  I wake and the fog is gone. In its place is weak sunlight, an empty sky, and sprawling moorland covered in sharp brown grass. My body aches and my stomach heaves. The cold is still there, lodged deep inside me, but I am still here, too.

  The path stretches on further than I can see. In the distance, like a bright shell washed up and left behind by the retreating fog, is a white spot in the landscape. It is too far to tell if it is a building.

  I try to sit up. Everything tilts and I grab out to steady myself. My hand comes away wet. The fog has left each spike of grass covered in minute droplets. They coat the ground so thinly that the world looks out of focus.

  I run my hand across it and again, dampness. A single pearl of water running down the centre of my palm. I lick it off, and it tastes of salt and earth and my own skin. I do this again and again, drop by minuscule drop. It is almost nothing. Perhaps it is enough.

  I wriggle out of my sleeping bag and stand.

  The movement sends a wave of nausea crashing through me. I retch up bile and spit it into the grass. My tongue is bitter. My throat burns with acid and thirst. My lips are cracked and the inside of my mouth feels cavernou
s and rasping. My head throbs with dehydration and I have to clench my teeth and breathe through my nostrils to stop myself vomiting again. In the face of this new pain, my leg has given way to a sapping ache and a vicious itching. My trousers are hard where the scab has broken wetly and then dried and broken again. I cannot bring myself to look. I force myself not to scratch.

  Over the space of what must be an hour, I pack away my sleeping bag. I look at my backpack for several minutes before heaving it onto my shoulders. As soon as it’s in place, the straps rub and my knees threaten to buckle. I drag myself away.

  The world spins. Every few steps, I stop and concentrate on breathing. I count my breaths until I can walk the next uneven steps, and then the next.

  *

  I do not know how long it takes to reach it: a soot-smeared wall, which is all that remains of a cottage. I imagine its occupants contracting the Sickness, dying inside and everyone too afraid to remove the bodies to burn them on an outside pyre. Easier just to stand outside the door and light a match.

  Bits of rubble stick up like blackened teeth. A mish-mash of objects in what must once have been a homely yard. An iron boot-scraper. A flowerpot filled with earth. A jumble of perished wellies. An old stone sink, a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom.

  The water is brown and thick-looking. A few dead leaves are suspended in its murk. I scoop them out and my hand comes away smelling of plant rot. I clench my teeth again. I do not know what this water will do to me, if it will make me vomit until there is nothing of me left, if it will dry me out completely so all my organs stop functioning and I am lost. I also do not know when I will next find water.

  I dip a bottle into the sludge. The sediment swirls against my hand as it glugs into the open neck.

  I take a deep breath, then lift the bottle to my lips, trying not to smell the rancid rot I am drinking. I force my constricted throat open, drink in trickles, ignore the sour taste filling the raw cavern of my mouth.

  There is a high ringing in my ears and I can no longer hear my heartbeat. The itch in my leg is a dull constant.

  *

  At the edge of the moorland, I drag myself, metre by metre, to the top of a hill. My leg still shakes at every other step, but the hill is a vantage point. There’s a stitch in my side and the climbing tugs and pulls at my muscles. It reminds me I am still here, that I am still human. I sit on top of the hill, regaining my breath, with the landscape unfolded below me. The world rises and falls around me, always keeping me at its centre. I need to understand my place in the world, even now, even if this is where my days run out.

  In the distance is a city, a pre-War metropolis bristling with abandonment, a dark river winding through its centre. Beyond it, like a grey brushstroke, is the North Sea. Slumped here on this hilltop, I consider all the possibilities a city like that might hold: shops and warehouses, tool sheds, homes to scour for secret stores of food or medicines. Anything that might be useful. And on the edge of it all something I am too tired to understand nudges into the depths of my brain. A faint electric glow – machinery surviving even where life has failed.

  The potential of it all swells and builds inside me, battling back at the aches and nauseating hunger. All that fortune, all those things, all mine, whenever I choose to claim them. It is as if I have stumbled on my own personal market where no money is demanded, where the only price is being alone.

  From up here, I cannot tell how complete the city might be – how heavily it was bombed in the War, at what point its population was eviscerated by the Sickness, or whether anyone from here was evacuated to the Safe Centres to make it as far as the Last Fall. A city like this is an unknown element. Who knows what might be hiding in the shut-in buildings, what bombs were dropped here and are lying unexploded and full of dispersing Sickness, waiting for the touch of a boot to set their mechanisms working? And who knows how many dog packs fiercely guard the narrow streets? Animals, like people, are drawn to cities – to the stuff and mess of them, to the hiding places and the mounds of waste. I try not to think it, but I know they will also be drawn to the bodies that must be down there somewhere, too – laid out in beds or slumped on sofas, or perhaps trapped beneath exploded walls and waiting for the rubble to shift. I wonder how long ago this city’s people died. Despite myself, I wonder how much remains.

  Left in the open air, a human body can break down to only a skeleton in as little as two years. In the ground, it can take as many as twelve. I remember researching these details as a child, filled with fearful curiosity as I looked for facts to write on little white cards for my museum. I never expected to be thinking about it like this, so many years later, overlooking a museum the size of a city. It feels like childhood, and a fear of falling asleep.

  At night there is always a feeling of being watched – a feeling like an eye in the dark. As a child I would sit in bed with my back against the cold plaster, running the torchlight across the familiar objects of my room. Now, that eye is a bright blue. Now, when the darkness closes in around me, I like to curl in on myself and keep close to the fire or lie wrapped in my sleeping bag. The city, with its black streets and hidden alleyways, would be the worst place for feeling watched. In the city there would be no solid edge to put my back against, no protective wall that might not also be a hiding place for something else. The city has become a place for daylight, and daylight only.

  I scour the landscape, the unfamiliar vastness of it. Away from the city, at the bottom of the next valley, there is a grey smudge of buildings. A farmhouse, perhaps also a barn. A safer place to sleep but can I make it there in my current condition? And if the buildings are empty, will I have the strength to make it to the city on an empty stomach tomorrow? In the city, there is bound to be food. There is also bound to be danger.

  With the sweat cooling on my back, I look between the two. Safety or possibility? City or farm?

  I cannot stay here. I haul myself up from the rock and thread my arms back through the shoulder straps of my pack. The sun is low in the sky and my shadow stretches away in front of me.

  *

  The sun has already gone behind the hills and there are shivers beginning to build inside me. The cobbled yard is quiet, an anticipatory hush like a library or a church, the only disturbance a murmuring that sounds like running water. I know it’s fanciful and stupid, but it feels as though the farm has been waiting for me – or maybe I have been waiting for it.

  I mutter my silent prayer, though I do not believe in anyone who could hear it. Please no bodies. Please no death. Tonight I need to concentrate only on living, on being alive.

  I open the door.

  Here is an inventory of what the farmhouse contains:

  A kitchen with faded yellow walls and a laminate floor.

  A big wood-burning stove on a stone hearth.

  A table missing a leg.

  A red electric cooker.

  A faulty clock, ticking at irregular intervals.

  Scrubbed wooden cupboards, filled with crockery and iron-ware pans.

  Some foodstuff, mostly inedible – black and mushy vegetables, their juices seeping onto the shelf below. A hard mouldy lump that might once have been a heel of bread. An open pack of crackers.

  But there are treasures I can salvage: a bag of rice, two tins of kidney beans, half a box of Cup-a-Soup, stock cubes, vinegar and a bottle of red wine. For a while I sit and cradle them against me.

  A living room that smells of decay. Two armchairs. A shelf of Reader’s Digests.

  An old-style larder, with cold stone slabs for preserving food. The larder is empty.

  Stairs. Up them, a bathroom with an avocado suite. A wilted spider plant. Six dead woodlice in the bath.

  Across the hall, two bedrooms: a double and a twin. No clothes in the drawers or wardrobes. The beds are all unmade. In the airing cupboard, folded blankets and flowery bedding, the kind my mother used to keep as spares in her own airing cupboard, ‘Just in case.’

  I heave one of the s
ingle mattresses downstairs to the kitchen. It takes more strength than I think I have left to tug it into place. I go back up to fetch a single set of bedding. It smells of the must inside the cupboard, but underneath that, locked into the cotton’s weave, is a smell of washing powder, and of breezy days drying on the line. For a moment I am at my parents’ house helping my mother fold the bed linen, and I press the sheets close around my face.

  I light the fire with one of the books and the drawers from the kitchen table, and make up a bed beside it. Once I am confident the fire will not go out, I take one of the heavy iron pans from the cupboard and go outside. In the last light of the day I clamber over the fence and discover a small stream to the side of the house. I set the water to boil on top of the wood-burner and finally let myself look at my leg.

  The itch has been screaming louder with every step. The urge to scratch is so strong that if I gave in to it, I can picture myself clawing away whole chunks of flesh, tearing myself to pieces. I sit on the edge of the mattress, tug off my boots and start to peel away the grime-soaked fabric of my trousers.

  The individual toothmarks are gone. In their place, where the skin was raised and infected, is a red wet wound like a shallow dish. At the centre of it, an infestation of wriggling grey maggots.

  I cry out and brush them away – my hands are wild and it’s agony as I brush and batter at my legs, tumbling them all to the floorboards where they flounder and squirm. My leg smarts from my fingers and the cold air, and I force myself to take deep breaths.

  I look closer. The tissue is a soft pink, like the inside of a lip, and all that remains of the infection is a small grey and yellow swelling. I touch it and my whole leg throbs. My finger smells of dead animals.

  I look at the maggots still writhing by my feet. Maybe it’s being in a farmhouse, and the faint smell of land and lanolin that still pervades the place, but there’s something . . . something I read or heard once, perhaps from one of the old farmers who brought their accounts to my father. Something about maggots and sheep. Something about a cure.