Mortal Sin - Sin Book II

Chapter 7

A scream.

My own?

Silence. A vacuum of sound after the yelling from a second before.

The weight was gone. The acrid breath was now a fresh see breeze, lazily stroking my face. There had been no impact from the fist and no splintering of broken bones as it connected with my face.

I held my own breath for fear that to take another would invite them to attack me again. I kept my eyes closed for fear that to open them would invite the entrance of a gouging finger. The finger would be dirty, the fingernail chewed.

Slowly, sounds swam into the void. The soft sway of the sea. The trees moving hypnotically in time with the waves. A gull, somewhere. Not close. For some reason its distance was comforting.

I opened my eyes, a crack at first then fully. The boys had gone. But where? How?

If this was an episode of Star Trek, I'd have believed they may have teleported away. Scotty was tapping screens to disintegrate and reintegrate them way up above the atmosphere, where the air was clear and they could go fly a kite. I was sure this wasn't Star Trek, however. I was pretty sure there was no Scotty, Kirk or Spock and I was pretty damned sure there was no such thing as teleportation.

A seagull flew down suddenly, narrowly missing my face. It landed by my hand and its head dipped down. With something long and stringy in its beak, it flew off.

I blinked and went to went to rub my eyes.

Red. There was red on my hand. Red? Where...?

Of course it was blood. It had to be. What else? I was potentially thousands of miles away from my nearest B&Q store and it was highly unlikely I'd been finger painting in the last micro-second. Likewise, though there's a McDonalds on every street corner and three in between nowadays, I doubted my hand was covered in ketchup. Besides, I didn't like ketchup - at least I didn't think I did.

I pushed myself up. This was getting to be a habit. I looked around, first at the trees and then out to the sea. The boys were gone. Then I looked down.

Then I saw where they'd gone.

Then I threw up.

Sprayed across the lower part of my body and my legs, covering my hands and seeping between the grains of sand, was blood. Lots of crimson, life giving, blood. Mixed in with the liquid was a gooey mucous much like the jelly from a pork pie. If I'd had an appetite for savoury pastries, it had vanished with the young men.

Had Scotty's transportation beam from the Enterprise somehow had a 'moment' and turned into a Mars Attacks blaster? Had a bus come rampaging through the trees, way off route, and smashed into them? Were they the result of some obscene terrorist attack that had split them apart like fresh fruit in a smoothie maker? I didn't know. I couldn't guess.

I didn't want to know or to guess.

I could see what had so delighted the seagull however. Splattered with a milky red, as if there'd been a collision between a Ribena delivery truck and a milkman, the hand seemed to be crawling out of the sand. If the ending of Carrie had been set on a beach or the deceased were buried, pre-zombification, beneath the sand, I could imaging their hands thrusting forth into the air. The wrist was embedded in the sand. The fingers - what was left of them - were bend over, tip-to-grain. The thumb, missing the nail, hung to the side, hitching a lift into the afterlife. Did the Ferryman come by here? Probably not but if he did, perhaps he'd drop me off at the nearest town, outpost or petrol station.

For a brief moment, I wondered if Charon had use of a satnav. Was there a 21st Century version of his boat and would it even show local petrol stations, restaurants and ATMs? Maybe, if I asked, he'd tell me where to Styx it.