BLOOD CRAZY
Simon Clark
For Doreen and Peter Clark, my parents.
Get this message into your head.
You, too, have a monster to kill.
– And this book just might save your life.
Contents
The First Part
The Day the World went Mad This Happened:
Chapter One
The Start of the End of Everything
Chapter Two
Who the Hell’s Nick Aten?
Chapter Three
All Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Four
Life Is a Bastard
Chapter Five
I’m Going to Kill Slatter
Chapter Six
The Sound of Killing
Chapter Seven
Stay Tuned to this Station.
An Important Announcement Follows this Message
Chapter Eight
Inside Me I Feel Alone and Unreal
Chapter Nine
Food and Drink and Hope
Chapter Ten
You’ve Never Seen a River
Like This One
Chapter Eleven
This Is What Happened to Sarah Hayes
Chapter Twelve
Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?
Chapter Thirteen
The Fifty Million Dollar Rug
Chapter Fourteen
Slatter
Chapter Fifteen
A Kind of Normality
Chapter Sixteen
Bad Dreams Never Go Away
Chapter Seventeen
Do You Want to Live or Do You Want to Die?
Chapter Eighteen
Organization
Chapter Nineteen
Does It Always Have to Be This Way?
Chapter Twenty
They’re Chasing Us
Chapter Twenty-One
They’re Coming to Get Me
Chapter Twenty-Two
Attack
Chapter Twenty-Three
Another Message, Another Death
Chapter Twenty-Four
A Different Kind of Pain
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Surprising How Quick the Rot Sets In
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Mexican Stand-Off
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sex
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Return of the Beast
The Second Part
Chapter Thirty
Do This, Because There’s No Tomorrow
Chapter Thirty-One
‘If We’re Going to Survive, Need to Learn More’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sex and Murder
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tyranny
Chapter Thirty-Four
Harem
Chapter Thirty-Five
Carrying the Can
Chapter Thirty-Six
Life Is Grotesque
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cut and Run
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cruising Eternity’s Way
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Croppers
Chapter Forty
Breaker of the Dark
Forty-One
Breaker of the Light
Chapter Forty-Two
Ghost Town
Chapter Forty-Three
Stairway to Heaven
Chapter Forty-Four
Heartbreak Highway
Chapter Forty-Five
This Cold Will Kill Me
Chapter Forty-Six
This Is Where We Start to Get Answers
Chapter Forty-Seven
This Is What Drove Adults Insane
Chapter Forty-Eight
The Mysteries
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Revelations Come Thick and Fast
Chapter Fifty
Make Love to Me
Chapter Fifty-One
Ghost Music
Chapter Fifty-Two
Out of the Dark
Chapter Fifty-Three
Into the Light
The Third Part
Here Comes the Climax
Chapter Fifty-Four
Start of the Third Part
Chapter Fifty-Five
On Through Madland
Chapter Fifty-Six
If One Green Bottle Should Accidentally Fall…
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Start of the Longest Day
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Just Like Old Times
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Carrying The Can Again
Chapter Sixty
Here It Comes
Chapter Sixty-One
Some Kind of Reunion
Chapter Sixty-Two
Midnight, the Longest Day
Chapter Sixty-Three
This Is It – the End Bit
End Note – Year Three
Appended by M. C. Del-Coffey
A Note on the Author
The First Part
The Day the World went Mad This Happened:
Chapter One
The Start of the End of Everything
‘What happened?’
Baz stared at the blood.
Fresh and red and wet, it drenched the paving slabs in a slick that looked big enough to paddle your canoe through.
I elbowed him in the ribs.
‘I said, what happened, Baz?’
He looked up at me, his eyes egg-size with shock.
‘I’ve just watched them shovel the poor bastard off the pavement … Christ. What a mess. That cop there puked all over his car … They’ve seen nothing like it, Nick. They can’t handle it.’
Baz talked like he was firing a machine gun at nightmare monsters. If you ask me, he had a psychological need to tell me what happened.
‘They say – they say he’d just walked out of Rothwell’s, crossed the street when – slam! slam! Poor bastard never knew what hit him. He was dead before the ambulance got here.’
All around us Saturday morning shoppers stared at the blood. That mess of red had got them by the short and curlies.
On the balls of their feet, cops ran, directing traffic, cordoning off the street with candy-striped tape or repeating that famous lie that no one ever believes: ‘Move along. There’s nothing to see.’
They sweated in the Spring sunshine. On their faces weren’t the usual expressions of our seen-it-all policemen.
‘An axe, Nick … A bastard axe … Can you believe that? Laid into him with it right there outside the shop.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Jimmy … Jimmy somebody. You’ll have seen him round town plenty. About seventeen. Went to the art college, had a pony tail. Always swanned round with a green guitar under his arm … Smashed that up, too. Like they wanted to kill both of them … him and his guitar.’
‘You saw it happen?’
‘No. I got here just as they scraped him off the street. I saw the people who’d seen it happen, though. They were flaked out across those seats over there like they’d been neck-shot. Just flat out from shock. I tell you, Nick, it was like a fucking war or something. Blood on the street. People shaking and throwing up. You know, like you see on the news or … or …’
The charge that fired the words like silver bullets from his lips suddenly exhausted itself. His red face turned white and he said no more.
From a hardware store came two old ladies carrying buckets of water. They poured them onto the blood which was setting to jelly in the warm sun. It took four more buckets before the blood slid off the paving slabs and into the drains where it was swallowed with a greedy sucking sound. There were
solid chunks of red in there. Like cuts of raw meat.
Eventually only wet pavement reeking of disinfectant was left. Now there really was nothing left to see. But Baz still stared at the wet slabs.
I said, ‘Someone must have really hated the kid to do that to him.’
‘They did. Jesus Christ they did. They unzipped him like a holdall.’
‘Do they know who murdered him?’
‘Yeah.’ Baz looked up. ‘It was his mother.’
The day the world went mad I was on my way to McDonald’s’ with two things on my mind.
One. The Big Mac I was going to stuff down my throat.
Two. How was I going to hurt that bastard, Tug Slatter?
Normality oozed through the town as thick as toothpaste through its tube. People shopping; little kids in buggies; big kids hunting down the record and game stores, their pocket money red-hot in their hands. Total, utter, complete small town normality.
That was until I saw the blood on the street.
They tell you this at school.
Every so often in history, there will come this colossal event that splits time in two. You know, like the birth of Jesus Christ. Everything before – BC. Everything after – AD.
On my way to McDonald’s it happened again. After two thousand years the old Age, Anno Domini, had died a death.
Naturally, like everyone else at the time I didn’t know it. Any more than a passer-by seeing that baby squawking in a manger somewhere in suburban Bethlehem would have known that the world was going to change PDQ.
At that moment, as I left Baz watching five slightly moist paving slabs, life – on the surface – was returning to normal. New shoppers flowed into town, kids in buggies got stuck into ice creams, lovers walked hand in hand. And they saw paving slabs wet with nothing more than water.
So, I showed the wet stretch of street my back and I headed toward the building with the golden arches that formed the magic M.
Now I was hungry. All I wanted was that Big Mac, fries and a monster coke rattling with ice.
Of course, I was ignorant as shit. I didn’t know the truth. That before long I’d look back and call this:
DAY 1
YEAR 1.
Chapter Two
Who the Hell’s Nick Aten?
Before we get any further into this, something about me.
I’m seventeen. The name’s Nick Aten (yeah, yeah, it rhymes with Satan).
Mother Nature sprang me on middle-class parents. Father: an investment advisor. Mother: an accountant.
Things changed a bit when I was born one Sunday morning, 3 March. My mother had already given up work when she fell pregnant so the Atens had to shave back on some of life’s luxuries. Not that they didn’t want a baby. They’d been trying for years. There had been three miscarriages before me. And one son who had lived two weeks before the doctors gave up the fight and let him die. My parents called him Nicholas and cremated him.
In my mother’s drawer there’s a bundle of cards, the deepest condolences kind with angels and babies sleeping ‘safe in the arms of the Lord.’
They are for a dead boy called Nick Aten. People sometimes ask if it feels weird to see your name on these cards. There it is in black and white. Documents to say you’re dead. A bit like seeing a video of your own funeral.
I laugh it off.
As a snotty-nosed two-year-old, I would spend my days stalking around the garden carrying a stick. With this stick I’d whack the ground, bushes and Mum’s prized bedding plants.
When they asked, ‘Why are you hitting the bushes, Nicholas?’
I’d reply, ‘Nick killing monsters.’
When I was three a rat somehow sneaked into the dining room. There I was, sat on the rug, happy as Larry, playing with my bricks. My new baby brother snug in his layback chair.
Ten minutes later when mum came into the room, she screamed and sprayed a mugful of coffee across the wallpaper.
Because there I stood, a statuette of Aphrodite in my hand, watching the rat. It lay twitching its legs, with its rat brains looking like pink cottage cheese stuck to the head of the statuette.
Unusually tidily for me, I’d picked out its titchy rat eyes and dropped them into my Dad’s tankard he’d won in some tennis tournament a million summers before.
That passion for killing monsters is probably my most valuable asset.
Since it happened – that BIG DAY ONE – I’ve had plenty of time to wonder if that passion – that obsession – to kill monsters was somehow imprinted onto my mind in the womb. That it was my destiny.
Before I sat down with a pile of paper to write this, I looked at manuals to see how you’re supposed to write a book. They say it’s important to make you understand what I’m like. What makes me tick. So you will understand why I did the things I did.
Here goes.
I’ve no real life-time friends. But I had a life-time enemy. Tug Slatter. We fought one another on our first day at school. The first time he tried to kill me – I mean actually terminate my existence on planet Earth as opposed to merely ruining my face – was when we were fourteen. I’d aerosolled TUG SLATTER’S QUEER on the wall of the local scout hut. Slatter broke three fingers of my left hand with a fence post.
Broken fingers don’t sound life-threatening, but I was using them to protect my skull at the time.
I left school at sixteen. No qualifications. I’ve had three jobs: glass collector in a night club. Trainee plastics extruder. And, last of all, driving a pick-up for a general dealer.
So. If you’d seen me walking down the street on that Saturday morning what would you have seen?
A seventeen-year-old, dark hair, jeans, trainers, leather jacket. Your first impression would be, ‘He’s a cocky bastard.’ (And I was).
You’re thinking now I’m nothing more than a small-town bad boy. Maybe. Maybe not.
Mum and Dad watched me grow into what I am with a bemused expression. They knew they could do nothing to change me. My dad’s response was, ‘Nick’ll either end up a millionaire – or in jail.’
Sometimes my antics would wear down mum’s stamina, then she’d grumble, ‘Do you know the sacrifices your father and I have had to make for you?’ You know the rhythm of it. You’ll have heard it all before.
But I was never in serious trouble. I didn’t torture cute animals. And probably the only person who knew the way I ticked was my uncle, Jack Aten.
He was a lot like me. Left school with no qualifications and no desire to join the rest of the pen-pushing Atens. Ambition sizzled inside him. He wanted to be a rock guitarist. For fifteen years he toured with one of those bands who although they play honest to goodness rock music never make it as far as a recording contract.
When I was eleven Jack Aten came back. Starved bony thin, he made you think he’d been somehow scorched.
I guess now he’d married himself to heroin. So it was a case of return home, get off it – or die.
Jack used to spend a lot of time at our house. Sometimes we’d play crazy golf (for some reason he loved crazy golf – then he liked crazy things and crazy people). When we went out on these jaunts he’d always carry a can of beer from which he’d take little sips. He’d make one can last two hours. I thought it was great. I was with this rock rebel.
Now I know he was drip-feeding alcohol into his blood. It knocked just enough of the sharp edges off reality to make life bearable.
Now and again he’d ask in a joke upper-crust accent, ‘I say, Nick-Nick. Am I alive?’
‘You’re alive, Jack.’
‘Thanks, old man. Sometimes I forget.’
Nights he’d play his guitar in his room, so softly you could hardly hear it. Whenever I heard the music my skin would prickle cold. The music reminded me of a documentary I’d seen about whale songs. I’d hear the tones of the electric guitar floating down through the floors and I’d remember the part about the whale with five harpoons through its back and how the whale sang as it died. The dying whale song
– Jack Aten’s gentle guitar sounds. In my head the two things were one and the same.
When I was fourteen life killed Jack Aten. He was thirty-eight. Cancer of the bollocks.
They say some cancers are a kind of suicide, grown by men and women who can’t change their shape to fit into the narrow slot that society inflicts on them.
For twelve months I didn’t open doors like you and the Reverend Green. I kicked them open. Ask me a question, I’d snarl you an answer. I was a balloon full of rage stretched tight to rupturing point. All I wanted to do was run to a mountain top. Then roar at the sky to bury me.
I was the little kid who wanted to kill monsters. As the years passed the monsters disappeared.
I grew up to enjoy a night out with the lads, a few beers. Happiness was a Big Mac. Ecstasy two Big Macs.
Now all that’s changed.
The monsters have returned.
And I’ve got the biggest monster of all to kill.
It’s not a monster you’d recognise immediately. It doesn’t look like the ones you see in kids’ books, with leather wings, claws and teeth like steak knives. But it’s a monster all the same. And if I don’t kill it it will eat my bones as sure as you shit tomorrow.
In a way, this book is an instruction manual on how to kill that monster. Because remember this.
You, too, have your own monster to kill.
That’s why I’m locking myself away in here for a month. I’m just going to sit down and write the bloody thing as it comes, all right? No frills, no poncey literature. But nor am I going to cut corners, or cut the bad things. This is what happened to me. Also it’ll help clear my mind for what I’ve got to do next.
No one’s likely to find me here. It’s February. It snows like someone’s torn a hole in the sky. The house is miles from anywhere. On three sides of it there’s thick forest. In front there’s a dirty great river that’s more than a mile wide.
Sometimes, to clear my head after hours of word crunching, I go down to the shore to skim stones. There are still a lot of things floating in the water. They look like rotting logs, hundreds of them, day and night, going with the flow of the river down to the sea. I’ll throw pebbles or snowballs at them. In the same kind of way any other seventeen-year-old would.
The only time it looks bad is when the undertow rolls them over. One end of the rotting log lifts smoothly out of the water. Then you know what it really is. You see the holes where the eyes were.