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  The Attic

  THE ATTIC

  A short story of 6,832 words by Derek Prior

  Copyright © 2015 Derek Prior. All rights reserved.

  The right of Derek Prior to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  THE ATTIC

  Mom was thump, thump, thumping on the door, but Dad wouldn’t let her in. It was raining cats and dogs out there. The rat-tat-tat on the roof was a gazillion BB guns firing, one after another. Thunder cracked and rolled away; I’d always been told it was angels dropping coal.

  Inside, the TV was chattering, and Dad was nailing planks across the windows. My breaths were raggedy gasps, and my heart was bouncing in my chest. Under it all, I could hear the groaning of the zombies, and the screaming and the sirens, and the bang, bang, bang of the policemen’s guns. I couldn’t help myself. My fingers fumbled with the door chain.

  “Don’t!” Dad dropped his hammer and shoved me out of the way. He checked the latch to make sure Mom couldn’t open the door from the outside, then he looked through the peephole.

  “It’s her,” I said. “You have to let her in.”

  He snarled as he turned and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “It’s not. Don’t you get it? It’s not her. Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, Wes. I’m not … I mean … I’m not angry with you. We just can’t let her in, is all. She’s bit.”

  “Then make her better.”

  He pinched the top of his nose and screwed his face up. I thought he was gonna cry.

  “I can’t, Wes. I fuckin’… I can’t.”

  I ducked under his arm so quick, he couldn’t stop me.

  “Wes—”

  Pressing my face up against the door, I squinted through the peephole. Mom looked sickly and grey, and there was stuff coming out of her mouth, all foamy and disgusting. Her teeth kept snapping together, like she was saying something, but all I could hear was her growling.

  “You little …” Dad yanked me back and squeezed my cheeks with one hand so I had to look him in the face. “She ain’t speaking, Wes. Don’t you see? If it was really her, don’t you think she’d be yelling or screaming? She’s bit, I tell you.”

  My face was on fire. I stared him out, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I slapped his hand off me and went to look through the gaps in the planks covering the window.

  I could see the side of Mom’s coat. There were shopping bags on the driveway next to her. Back a little way, there was a policeman all in black with one of them bulletproof jackets. He had a rifle gun pointed at her and was shouting the same thing over and over, only I couldn’t make out what it was.

  Something shambled past the window. There was a shot and a spray of red on the glass.

  “Get away.” Dad’s voice cracked, like he was crying. “Get back from the window. You don’t want… you don’t want them to see you.”

  Mom hit the door real hard then, thump after thump after thump. The frame shook, and Mom’s growls turned into angry screams. All I could do was cover my ears and shut my eyes really, really tight.

  The policeman called out again, this time from closer by. Mom must’ve thrown herself against the door, because the frame split. Thunder crashed, rain pattered, things moaned, the TV chattered.

  Someone else shouted, “The head, you tosser!” and there was a deafening bang.

  I screamed and fell to my knees, trying to breathe. I felt Dad’s arms around me, heard his sobbing, felt his warm tears on my neck.

  “It weren’t her,” he said through sniffs. “She was already gone, Wes. It weren’t her.”

  He didn’t try to hold me back when I stood and looked through the peephole. It was smeared with blood, and I couldn’t see out.

  “Wes…”

  “I might be nine, Dad, but I’m not stupid. Got it?”

  I pushed past him and headed through the lounge into the kitchen. I tried the back door. It was locked. I could see out into the conservatory through the kitchen window. I knew that was locked, too. We’d checked it earlier, after bringing the planks in from the shed. I heard Dad behind me as I took the key out of the lock.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  “They break the window, they might reach in and turn the key,” I said.

  He nodded at me. “Too clever for your own good, Wes. Good boy. Should be safe now. Front’s all boarded up, and there’s no sign of them out back.”

  “We need to barricade the doors,” I said. “You, know, with chairs and stuff.”

  “I’m on it.” Dad went back to the lounge and upturned an armchair.

  “… still no official word on where it came from,” a reporter was saying on TV. He’d been saying the same thing for hours, and they kept showing a clip of zombies lumbering after a cameraman before they cut to the studio, where they asked a bunch of stupid people the same stupid questions and got the same stupid answers.

  While Dad dragged the chair to the front door, I watched another scene of blue-grey zombies walking all stiff and creepy-like along a London high street. People were screaming and running from them. Then there was a still picture of pigs and birds, and it was back to Will Turner in the studio.

  “Professor Worsley,” Will Turner was saying, “we’ve had dozens of emails asking whether the virus—that is what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly,” said a little round man with a silly beard and glasses. “It’s still early days. It could be a bacillus; it could be a freak manifestation of a latent mutation; it could be terrorists. No one knows.”

  “But do we know if it’s spread by animals?” Siobhan Smith asked. She always did the show alongside Will. She had plastic hair and fake teeth, Dad said, and her chest weren’t natural.

  “It could well be.” Professor Worsley took off his glasses and rubbed them on his jacket. “But it might not be, as well.”

  “Richard Dawkins said it was an act of God,” Will said.

  Worsley huffed at that and put his glasses back on. “Professor Dawkins was being ironic.”

  “What do you say to the people who claim it started in a Verusia Labs facility? Do you think it’s fair to blame—”

  I switched the TV off.

  “What’s ‘ironic’ mean, Dad?”

  “Metal,” he said, walking into the lounge and looking like he’d forgotten what he was doing, same as Granddad John used to.

  “The back,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Dad dragged the other armchair through to the kitchen.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, dropping the chair as the cat flap banged shut and our cat, Watson, hissed. His fur was standing on end, and his eyes were all white and milky. Dad let out a sigh and bent to stroke him.

  “You scared the crap out of me, kitty-cat,” he said. “Ow!” He snatched his hand away when Watson bit him. “Fuck. Shit. That really hurt.”

  Blood was seeping between his fingers and pooling on the floor. He grabbed a tea towel to wrap around the bite, but Watson hissed again and pounced. Dad fell backward into the armchair, and the cat was on top of him, biting and scratching.

  “Get him off me!” Dad cried, thrashing about with his arms and legs. “Wes, get him off!”
<
br />   I half-screamed, half-cried as I grabbed a bottle of wine from the rack and clubbed Watson with it. He turned and snarled at me, and I hit him again, right in the face. Blood sprayed onto the cabinets, and Watson flopped to the floor.

  Dad pushed himself out of the armchair and crunched his foot down on Watson’s head. He kept it there until the cat stopped moving.

  I put my hand to my throat as sick burned its way up my windpipe.

  “Go upstairs!” Dad shouted.

  His face was all scratched up, and his neck and arms were bleeding.

  “But he’s dead.” I pointed at the cat’s splattered head.

  “Now!” Dad yelled, and shoved me back into the lounge.

  I stumbled at first, but then turned and ran upstairs. He followed me, and he had that look about him you didn’t want to argue with. When we reached the landing, he fetched a chair from his room to stand on. He reached up and unbolted the trapdoor to the attic, then pulled the wooden ladder down.

  “Go on,” he said.

  I did as I was told while he threw the chair aside.

  “Dad—”

  “Just go!”

  When I reached the top, I looked back and saw him head downstairs.

  “Are you coming?” I called, but there was no answer.

  I paused in the opening, straining to listen. Dad was crashing about in the cupboard under the stairs by the sounds of it. When I heard his heavy footfalls returning, I crawled into the attic and lay on my tummy so I could watch.

  He appeared on the landing with the big hammer he’d used to break up the decking last winter, when it went all rotten and slimy and someone might have slipped on it and broke their neck. When he reached the ladder, he didn’t start to climb up like I’d thought, but he took a swing with the hammer and went right through the wood. He swung again and again, cracking and splintering the ladder until the bottom half fell away.

  “Dad, please!”

  He kept on bash, bash, bashing till there was a pile of broken wood in the middle of the landing. Then he righted the chair and climbed on it.

  “Love you, son,” he said with tears in his eyes as he started to close the trapdoor. “Stay still and keep real quiet. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  In that moment, I realized what he was doing. Dad, my daddy, always said he’d protect me from everything. He knew what was going to happen. I did, too, only part of me didn’t want to believe it. It was like when I kept trying to believe in Father Christmas, even after everyone at school said it was just my parents pretending. As the trap shut and he slid the bolt across, I was left in the dark.

  The air was dusty and smelt of wood chips. I heard Dad jump down from the chair, then there were more bangs, cracks, and snaps. He was smashing the chair so he couldn’t climb up. He was making sure I was safe.

  I did as he said and kept as still as a statue, not even daring to breathe. I could hear him moving around for a bit, but then there was a loud thud and nothing more.

  I sat back against something soft and giving. It rustled like a plastic bag. I lay there for a while, my mind all horrid pictures and no thoughts, body shaking so much I had to hold my knees tight to my chest and rock myself to make it stop.

  I kept seeing Mom’s crazy face, those empty eyes like puddles of milk; the dribble running down her chin. I imagined what it must’ve looked like when her head exploded all over the door. My brain wouldn’t stop playing it over and over, as if I’d really seen it. Bang. Splat. Bang. Splat. Bang.

  I became aware of the rain cascading against the roof. There was still the odd gun shot, muffled and far off. People occasionally cried out, but the moaning and groaning never went away. I went from only hearing the sound of my breathing to being deafened by the noises from outside. I wanted them to stop. I needed to hear what was happening indoors. I needed to listen out for Dad. I got back on my tummy and pressed my ear to the trapdoor.

  “Dad?” I called out in a shaky voice. “Daddy, are you there?”

  My heart started flapping about in my ribcage like a bird trapped in the chimney. I sat up and tried to suck in some air, but none came. I squeezed in a tiny breath, then another, till I was panting like a dog. As my breaths got faster and faster, my heart speeded up, too. I could hear it inside my head, big sloshy whooshes, like when you’re underwater. What was happening to me? Was I ill like those people on TV? Had I got Watson’s blood on me? Was I gonna turn into one of them? I needed to see. Had to see.

  I tore into a plastic bag, spilling its fluffy contents. I rummaged about, looking for anything that might help me see, but it was useless. They were just teddies, my old toys that Mom had put out of the way. I recognized them all by touch, ran my hands over them, worked out which ones they were by the feel of their fur, the size of their eyes. Mr. Penn! I found Mr. Penn, my old green dog teddy and hugged him tight. I let out a big sigh and felt my eyes tearing up.

  “No time for crying, Mr. Penn,” I said. “We’ve gotta find some light.”

  There was a light switch somewhere near the entrance. I’d seen Dad turn it on when we came up here to play treasure hunt once. With Mr. Penn tucked under one arm, I crawled back toward the trapdoor and felt around in the dark. I found the cold brick wall and ran my fingers along its rough surface until I found the switch. I flicked it and felt a moment’s panic when nothing happened. But then the two strip-lights in the ceiling started to flicker and hum, like they were grumpy about being woken up. With a ping and a flash that had me blinking, they snapped on, casting a dirty yellow light over the piles and piles of junk that we’d hidden away up here.

  Apart from my teddies, it was mostly boring stuff near the entrance: bed linen, pillows, ugly patterned blankets. Stacked baskets ran down each side of a central aisle, all brimming with odds and ends that no one would ever use.

  There was a canvas wardrobe halfway along, bursting with Mom’s old clothes she wouldn’t throw away. She said they might fit again one day, once she’d lost a bit of weight. I used to think it was a TARDIS when I was little. That all seemed ten thousand million years ago now. Nine was so much older than eight, especially when the world was going mad, and the grown-ups couldn’t help you anymore.

  I still felt the tug of the TARDIS, though. Part of me wanted to believe I could squeeze in among all those clothes and escape to another planet. Better still, I could travel back in time and tell Mom not to go shopping, so she wouldn’t get bitten and turn into a zombie. I could tell Dad to tape up the cat flap. Then they’d both still be with me, and we could hide away indoors till the police killed all the zombies and told us it was safe to come out.

  Kids are stupid like that. I started to feel warm and cozy. Everything I daydreamed about was real, right up until I gave the TARDIS a good look and saw it was just make believe. I turned away from it and dropped Mr. Penn. I had to be tough to get out of this. “Ain’t got time to be scared,” Dad used to say, when I thought there were monsters under the bed. “Too busy trying to sleep. Ain’t got time to cry,” he’d say whenever I grazed my knee. “Too busy playing.”

  Toward the far end of the attic, there was a big fluffy donkey we called Oswald. He was standing guard over the fake Christmas tree, the one we used to bring down to the lounge every year. My tummy twinged when I thought about it. We would have been doing that in a week or so. Now it would just lie there gathering dust.

  I made my way along the aisle, careful to keep to the boards so my foot didn’t go through the ceiling. Something squeaked, and I stopped, holding my breath. There was a loud rustle, and I turned to stare as a stack of full black bin liners tumbled down. I strained and strained, but couldn’t hear anything else above the drumming of the rain on the roof tiles.

  My eyes were drawn to something glinting behind where the bin liners had been stacked. I grabbed a plastic sack and heaved it out of the way, and then stepped carefully between the others. The glint disappeared as I drew nearer. When I craned my neck to look back, it was obvious why. The strip-ligh
t in the ceiling was now behind me. It must have been reflecting from something.

  I pressed on into the shadows, one foot either side of the foam insulation between the beams. I was never allowed to play near the edges of the attic, because they hadn’t been boarded over. One wrong step, and I’d break my bleeding neck. Least that’s what Dad always said.

  Just thinking of him was like a punch in the guts. I felt all mangled up inside. The tears wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let them. Times like this you need to be strong. No one was coming to save me now. I knew that as sure as I knew Mom would never be stepping through the door and telling me to carry the shopping bags. Dad and I would never form our little chain gang, so we could put the cans away in the cupboards while Mom fixed the tea.

  A sniffle escaped, but I ignored it, peering into the darkness until I could make out a shape blacker than the rest. I reached out, and my fingers found something cold and hard. It felt like metal. I crouched down and ran both hands over it. It was a box of some sort, with a lid and handles either side. I took hold of one of the handles and gave it a tug. The box shifted easier than I thought, and I fell backwards. I threw my hand out behind and struck foam. My heart jumped into my throat, and I shut my eyes, waiting to fall through the ceiling. I must have gotten lucky, because nothing happened. After a few raspy breaths, I inched back onto the beams and found the handle again. This time, I took little steps backward as I dragged the box into the light.

  It was painted black, but chipped all over. It looked a thousand years old. Maybe a million. There was a tiny key in the lock, with a ripped brown tag attached to it. Wesley J. Harding, it said in swirly joined-up writing.

  Except for the J., that was my name, but I’d never seen the box before in my life. Then I remembered something Dad had told me when I was really little. I was named after his great, great, great granddad, but my middle name was different. Mine was Xavier, after this saint Mom liked. Dad once told me he was eaten by cannon-balls.