Autumn: The Human Condition (38 page)

Skin kicked a football around the gym. He threw empty beer bottles out of the window and watched them hit the bodies below. He spray-painted the bland grey-brick gym walls. Now and then he took out one of the guns and took pot-shots into the festering crowd. He slept. He ate. He began to get bored. The novelty of his situation was beginning to wear dangerously thin. A person of sound mind and average intelligence might well have been able to rise above the boredom, or put up with it in view of the potential danger outside the gym. Skin, however, although possessing sufficient intelligence, was also still driven by a hormone, alcohol and drug-induced anger. The remarkable power he suddenly seemed to have was incredible, and yet he still wanted more. The strength of his feelings was increasing by the hour and none of the distractions he could find seemed able to alleviate or reduce his frustrations. In spite of all he suddenly had, he still felt incomplete.

It was late one night � around midnight � when the way forward came to him and things suddenly became clear. Revenge. That was what was missing. It was the ultimate expression of his superiority. Hell, why hadn't he thought of it before? Here he was in this incredible position of power and authority, and he hadn't used it properly once. Sure, he'd fired a few shots and got rid of a pile of bodies and he'd defaced about ninety percent of the school, but he'd not yet taken out his anger on the people who deserved it most, had he? Christ, he had a list of names as long as his arm of people he wanted to get even with. His parents topped the list, then his ex-girlfriend, then the so-called friends who'd slept with her after she'd dumped him, then his teachers... Fucking hell, he thought, what an idiot. All that time he'd been sat there, letting those fuckers wander about free.

This was his time. He was in control. Time for retribution.

There would be little satisfaction in just finding these people and destroying what was left of them, he thought to himself next morning as he walked through the dawn shadows back towards his parents' house. What I need to do, he decided, is make them suffer. What I have to do is make things as difficult and painful for them as they did for me. I have to make them hurt.

His mother and father were still in the kitchen of the house where he'd left them on the first morning. His mother lay dead on the ground, slumped between the defrosted fridge-freezer and the dishwater. Her soggy body stank. She was going nowhere, but a whack to the back of her head with a rolling pin made it completely certain that she wasn't going to get up again. He hated his mother marginally less than he hated his father. It didn't matter unduly that he was going to leave her, as long as he got to take Dad with him. Skin's dead father followed him around the kitchen, occasionally lunging at him and lashing out with sharp, twisted hands. Skin brushed aside the body's pathetic attacks and slipped a dog collar and lead around its neck. He tied its hands together with the washing line from the overgrown garden and half-led, half-dragged it the quarter-mile or so back to school. He threw the body into the empty ground floor gym and watched it scramble around aimlessly for a while. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the damn thing's face.

`Bet you wish you hadn't been such an uptight fucker now, don't you Dad?' he sneered as the corpse stumbled towards him again. `Who's laughing now?'

Dawn was in her bedroom back at her mother's house. She was Skin's next victim that afternoon. He slipped the lead around her neck and then tied her to the bed in which he'd lost his virginity earlier in the year. Before leaving he spent some time going through her belongings. He wasn't sure whether that made him feel better or worse. In her underwear drawer he found the kind of things he'd always hoped she'd wear for him, but which she'd obviously saved for his friends. To humiliate the dead bitch he stripped her bare before dragging her back through the streets and dumping her in the gym with the remains of his dad.

He'd had a feeling that he'd seen the bodies of Mr McKenzie, Mr Miller and Miss Charles wandering around the school. It was getting harder and harder to distinguish between the bodies but he knew that he had to look. It was while he was searching for them that he came across what was left of an ex-friend (and one of Dawn's recent conquests) Glenn Tranter. Tranter's face was pretty badly decayed, but he could tell from the body's general build that it was him. Although his skin was a blotchy blue-grey, he could still see the tip of a tattoo he'd recently had done on his shoulder and neck, just below the collar of his blood-stained school shirt. The corpse's neck was scrawny and emaciated and the shirt hung unintentionally loose, revealing more of the tattoo than he'd ever been allowed to show at school. Another one for the gym.

There was no sign of Mr Miller. Damn, if there was one fucker who deserved a little dismemberment and torture, it was him. It was of some consolation when he found what remained of Mr McKenzie, his dictatorial modern languages teacher, dragging itself along the corridor outside the main assembly hall. Stupid fucking thing was still wearing the same damn tweed jacket it had worn to school every bloody day. He took great pleasure in wrapping the dog collar around the dead teacher's neck and dragging the body twice round the school before throwing it into the gym.

Miss Charles, his twisted, sadistic, sour-faced ex-head of year, had been trapped in the stock cupboard next to her office when she'd died. Skin found her still crashing around the room, half-buried beneath text books and papers. He'd hated this bitch more than any of the others, and she'd hated him too. He tried to drag her to the gym by her wiry grey hair but it wasn't strong enough and it kept coming away from her rotting scalp in sickly clumps. Instead he resorted to the dog lead and another drag through the increasingly crowded school grounds.

Over the course of the next day and a half he gathered together another fifteen bodies. Some of the rapidly putrefying, reanimated corpses had belonged to people who had, in one way or another (according to Skin), wronged him. Others were just unfortunate cadavers which just happened to have been picked out of the faceless masses and flung into the gym.

So what do I do with them now, he thought to himself as he lay on his makeshift bed at the far end of Gym 1. Music blared out of the CD player that he'd now hung from a basketball hoop with skipping ropes. He thought it sounded better like that, although the volume was so loud that getting the right acoustics didn't really matter. The room was filled with a haze of smoke from cigarettes and improvised spliffs. The smoke helped disguise the increasingly obnoxious stench of death, decay and putrefaction that filled the gym building and the world beyond its walls.

It was hard to believe whom he'd managed to shut into the gym downstairs. The incredible fact that they were all trapped in there and that their fates were completely in his control was almost harder to believe than what had happened to the rest of the world. This was an opportunity for revenge on a massive scale that he wasn't about to pass up. He was determined to make the most of every last second and make these fuckers suffer in the same way they'd tortured him for years. They had no idea what they'd done to him. None of them had given a damn.

I'll start tomorrow, Skin decided as he drifted into a nauseous, drink-fuelled sleep. One by one I'll take each of those fuckers to pieces.

He didn't wake up until early afternoon. He woke with a hangover of immense proportions which, he decided, could only be eased by more alcohol. Damn, he was getting low on booze. He'd need to go out and get more soon, but not today. He had more important things to do today.

After he'd taken a piss out of a first floor window onto the heads of the crowd below (and thrown up too � he was feeling particularly bad today) he ambled down to the ground floor gym and opened the door. The twenty bodies he'd shut in there immediately began to move towards him. He pushed his way through them with an ignorance which bordered on contempt. With complete disinterest he pushed them away whenever they made to lunge towards him. He was preoccupied with his plans for the day and, ultimately, for each of them. He wanted to spend a reasonable amount of time with each body and not be rushed into destroying any one of them too quickly because of unwanted attention from one of the others. These fuckers were all due some uninterrupted personal service from him.

Still coughing (and occasionally retching and vomiting) he began to build a barrier around one corner of the gym with various pieces of apparatus he found lying around. The bodies, although still very animated, were also clumsy and their coordination was desperately poor. It didn't take very much to keep them restrained. Using benches, vaulting horses, trampolines, crash mats, weight training equipment and anything else he could find he built a division around the far left corner of the room, leaving the rest of the gym clear.

Who first?

He'd had a late start and getting the gym ready had taken longer than expected. The sun was already beginning to set as he stood breathless and looked across the room at his motley collection of corpses. Which one of these fuckers has caused me most pain? Which one hurt me most? Which one showed the most complete disregard for me and for everything I ever stood for or believed in or wanted? It was a close call between two of them. It was either Dad or Dawn. Just because he preferred the idea of messing with Dawn's body (it made him feel slightly excited in an uneasy, perverted kind of way) he chose her. He reached out over the barrier he'd built, grabbed hold of his ex-girlfriend's corpse and threw it back onto the other side.

`Okay, Dawn?' he asked, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. Dawn's dead body lumbered towards him, twisted arms outstretched. For a moment he was close to panicking and he almost lost his nerve. What did he do? Did he hit it or push it over or...? He took a deep breath and instead of looking at the unsteady bulk of rotting flesh which staggered towards him, he instead remembered her as she used to be. More specifically, he remembered what it was she'd done to him. Even more specifically, he remembered what it was she hadn't let him do to her. Bitch.

Christ, just look at the state of her, he thought as his dead ex-girlfriend slipped in a puddle of blood or vomit or something equally unpleasant. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours the floor of the gym had become covered with various noxious spillages, both from the corpses and from Skin himself. The corpse dropped heavily to its knees in front of him and then managed to pick itself up again and continue moving towards him. She was an appalling sight but, knowing her strange tastes, she might have approved of the look. Her eyes were hollow and sunken, her skin green-hued and ruptured and pockmarked in places. She had a deep cut on her bare right shoulder and, in the low light, Skin was sure he could see squirming movement in and around the lesion. Was it just blood or decay glistening, or was it something more foul? Maggots, flies or larvae feeding off her dead flesh perhaps? Whatever it was, the thought of it was disgusting, too much even for the twisted mind of Skin to handle. The sight of her standing there, naked and practically falling to pieces as he watched her, was too intense. He pushed her back over the barrier and grabbed another body from the other side of the divide.

Mr Read! Bloody hell, it was Mr Read, the head of the music department at the school. He'd forgotten that he'd managed to get Read's body. He hadn't set out to find this particular teacher but he was glad that he'd got him. He'd been one of the last corpses he'd collected yesterday. He'd found three bodies at the end of the corridor and this was the one he'd taken. The others were just kids. Now this bastard deserved to suffer. He was the one who made kids sing on their own in front of the class and play endless bloody glockenspiel solos in his lessons.

Skin hadn't liked Read, but there was no real emotional attachment to this teacher. He felt sure he could damage this body without giving it a moment's thought. Maybe the strength of his hate for Dawn, his dad and certain other ex-teachers somehow made it difficult for him to do justice to their bodies. He needed to practice. He needed to start with someone who had been fairly neutral and then build himself up to the bastards who really deserved to incur his wrath. The body of Mr Read seemed ideal.

What could he do to him? He glanced around the gloomy gym and his eyes settled on a pile of weight-training equipment in the corner of the room. As the body dragged itself after him pathetically he took hold of a short bar (the kind he'd seen used before for single arm exercises) and stripped the weights off it. He was left with a bloody heavy, fourteen inch, chrome plated metal bar. He turned back around to face the body of the dead teacher and swung the bar at its head. He'd expected to feel the impact but he hardly felt anything. The bar seemed to cut through the flesh like a hot knife through butter, such was the level of the creature's decay. And fucking hell, look what he'd done! The damn thing's jaw had been ripped right off its bloody face!

Suddenly feeling more confident and in control again, Skin circled the helpless corpse. He was moving at several times its lethargic speed, and it had no idea where he was. Standing right behind it he chopped down viciously at its legs. He hit the right knee cap, shattering it and sending the body crumbling to the ground. Too bloody easy! He smashed down with the bar again, this time coming down directly on its pelvis. He could feel the bone smashing and crunching under the force of the metal.

Whatever tensions, frustrations and fears had been building inside Skin were quickly released by the therapeutic destruction of the school teacher's dead body. If the truth be known (and Skin wasn't the slightest bit interested in why it made him feel better) it was the sudden physical exertion of the attack that revived the feelings and power he'd felt since the rest of the world had fallen. Whatever the reason, in his confused, immature and na�ve mind, he knew it felt good, and he knew he wanted more. By the time he'd finished with the first body it had all but disappeared. Mr Read had been dismembered and spread around virtually the entire gym.