Issue 1: The Mornings After

23-year-old Blake Trueman wakes up to find that the world has changed, and is left to fend for himself in a dangerous new London...

21 Dixon street 1/9/2014 01:04

On the first of September 2014, the world ended. Or at least, adjusted permanently, changed for good so that almost nothing was the same and, despite all cold refusals to admit so in front of others on pain of appearing pessimistic, would almost definitely never be the same again. That I can be sure of. But every single one of the seven billion people alive to see it had a different story to tell of how. For Blake Trueman, this story began with a hangover on an early Monday morning. Staggering back from a late party at one AM, he had closed the front door with the key still inside, released the empty glass he had forgotten to put down before he left, pulled himself up the steep, bare stairs and gone to bed fully clothed. His jeans were crumpled and his shirt was messy, as was his hair. The hours leading up to the precocious demise of humanity had, For Blake, been wild, exciting and eventful; he would, however, remember none of it when he woke up. He only knew that he had, at some point, consumed a fair amount of alcohol. This was not uncommon. In fact, any Sunday (Or Saturday… Or Friday) night when he had failed to do so could be considered largely abnormal.

Blake’s eyes opened slowly two minutes after he got into bed. He threw off the covers, looked at his fully dressed body and shook his head.

“How did I forget…? Am I that drunk?”

And he staggered back across the room to close his bedroom door.

“That’s better.”

 

21 Dixon street 1/9/2013 05:12

Blake awoke suddenly to the sound of pandemonium outside. Screams seeped through the walls, in through the under-protective window. For the second time in six hours, he crawled from beneath his covers, still completely dressed, this time opening his blood red curtains. It was still dusky outside, but the scene was illuminated both by the street lamps and the staggering brightness of distant fire. Through the relentless darkness, figures wove across the street, some dashing in a panic, others seemingly uncaring who moved at a much slower pace. All the while, a fire bigger than any Blake had ever seen blazed in the background.

BANG!

A small rock- or an object the size of one- hit the window. Another flew casually towards the glass pane.

BANG!

Like a broken elevator, Blake shot down to his knees, huddling against the wall. Glass flew over his head, a flock of birds, and peppered the sandy carpet.  Retrieving his breath, he lay prone on the floor and crawled towards his door.

“Oh Christ!” he yelled, brushing shattered flecks of glass away with his right arm. They stung his flesh like thorny bristles. He crawled with his face down, so until he slammed into his oak wood door he was unaware how far he had travelled. His hand snaked to the side so he could pull it open without standing up and making himself vulnerable. There was no side to be found.

“Damn” he muttered. Somehow the door had closed during the night. Or he had he closed it? He really couldn’t remember, and his throbbing headache seemed to explain any gaps in memory. “No time for that, I just need to open it.” He lunged upwards and grabbed the dirty brass door handle, yanking the oak door open. It creaked to a halt as it hit the pile of dirty clothes behind it.

For a terrible moment he paused, really hearing the terror in the screams from the riots outside. He looked behind him at his ruined room, the thrashed window and the ragged carpet. If his mother could see this…

“Screw that…” He moaned, and threw himself into the landing.

 

21 Dixon street 1/9/2013 05:14

Tripping then double-tripping, Blake made his way across the landing, clutching at the wooden railings.  He prepared to fly down the stairs two at a time, but he froze in his tracks in shock. There were shadows at the bottom, silhouettes loitering at the bottom of the stairs, moving ever-so-slowly, casually, slyly. Men had gotten into the house! Behind them, the front door lay in splinters, the glimmer of a metal key still sticking from the lock socket.

“Wrong way, wrong way!” He span on his heels and, almost slipping, ran to the corridor by the spare room. Hanging above him, dead in the centre of the room, was a length of thin string dangling from a painted white hatch. In a crazed cross between fear and confusion, he yanked it hard.

The hatch slid open and an expandable ladder slid out, hitting the door with a thud. Frantically, without even a second glance that, if taken, would have revealed the advancing of the slow-moving men down the corridor, he climbed up the ladder and into the battered, cluttered attic. Below, the grabbing hands of three insane humanoids reached up, hungrily, seductively, before the ladder slid up in reverse and the hatch slid shut, closing the door on the last roomful of sanity and order left on Dixon Street. 

 

21 Dixon street 1/9/2013 05:15

Blake collapsed in an exhausted heap on the floor, trying and failing to process the events of the last few minutes. He could come up with only three thoughts:

·        There were people in the house.

·        They wanted to get to him.

·        This probably wasn’t a good thing.

Heaving himself painfully upright against an old guitar case, he could tell immediately that he was in no position to escape any time soon. Two things told him this. The first was that there was no visible exit that wasn’t blocked by insane shadows.  Secondly, his head hurt like hell. In an attempt to silence the groaning and banging from downstairs, he grabbed a large rug and dropped it over the hatch. Although his efforts muffled the noise effectively, they did nothing else to help his situation. Blake glanced desperately around (Though he knew that no escape route would prevent itself) and, eventually resigning his tired brain to defeat, sat down.

Underneath him, he could hear hungry noises and feel the vibrations of greedy hands banging on the floor. The windowless attic was almost pitch black, and Blake half expected something lurking in the shadows to come shambling towards him. The truth was he had no plan of action in that event. Broken, Blake wasn’t even sure he could stand up. Truthfully, he had no plan of action right now.

He had suddenly begun to feel very dizzy. Very very dizzy, and sick.  His eyelids drooped closed, each time being snapped awake again, each time drooping further still. A series of thoughts bobbed through his head.

You can’t fall asleep…

Why not?

Those people are downstairs…

And?

They’ll get in…

If they knew how they would have done it already!

You can’t be sure…

Maybe not. But I’m so tired…

So…

 

21 Dixon street 4/9/2014 10:02

Twin rays of sunlight flew through the corroded hole in the corner of the roof, hit the creaky floor and cast shadows across the attic. Within half an hour, the beams had gone, and the sun had moved high up in the clouds, far beyond the hole in the roof. In its place shone a weak radiance that could be compared in strength to that of a glowworm.

The decomposed wooden mess above 21 Dixon Street that Blake had to call an attic was an L-shape, with the hatch leading up to it on one leg and the other jammed to the point that it was hard to walk through with useless junk. From the front you could view empty suitcases, a box from an unused rowing machine, the unused rowing machine (which had been shoved there soon after the box) and a pitiful Christmas tree among other things. There was also another group of objects and possessions that Blake was less proud of. Somewhere at the back, hidden out of shame behind the heirlooms and ornaments and litter, was a box filled with money he had earned from driving a friend away after a bookmakers robbery.

Blake preferred not to think too much about this side of his life.

Blake Trueman had been in the attic for four days.

He had first awoken seventeen hours after he passed out, heavily ill and with almost no memory of the events of that morning. After giving himself the shock of his life when, upon shifting the rug to exit the attic, the sound of groaning had drifted up into his ear, he had finally begun to recall why he was not able to simply climb down the stepladder. Dehydrated and exhausted, Blake soon fell back into a heap against the guitar case.

This time, his eyelids did not reopen until two days later, when he had found himself with a mouth drier than a corpse and barley able to walk. Though he had discovered half a bottle of ancient water he had left up there whilst attempting to reinforce the hole in the roof, it was lukewarm and nowhere near enough to keep him going. It was never going to be long until he collapsed for the third time in three days.

Blake dreamed that night (If it was night, he couldn’t tell). He dreamed that he was in the park, with his friends, when suddenly, a massive black cloud passed overhead, and the world went dark. Although Blake found he could not, his friends ran, and suddenly a man and a woman were beside him, grabbing his arms, desperately attempting to move him, to save him. Then Blake saw a tall man walking towards him, in a black suit and tie, with an old man and a boy carrying a whip… There was a fire, a big fire, people screaming, and a pitchfork flew through the air, out of the ash. Abruptly, the vision went black.

Now he was resurrected yet again. Blake got up groggily, peered at his watch (01:02) and shuffled to the hatch hopefully. Pulling the rug out of the way without much enthusiasm, he was shocked and overjoyed when, after dedicating four seconds with his left ear on the oak wood, he heard nothing. The silence was loud and salvaging.

With hasty glee, he pulled up the hatch, stuck his head out and laughed; the corridor was empty. Not bothering with the ladder, he leapt down onto the thin carpet, and slowly, hoarsely, laughed as he ambled towards the corner not three meters away. Exhausted, Blake barely noticed the frayed carpet, or indeed the cracked walls. The stairs were a challenge; he refilled his bottle with tap water three times before he felt ready to stop drinking. Grabbing a box of napkins to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he unlocked the heavy front door and stepped outside.

He thought nothing of the nightmare he had had last night, and even less of what it meant.

 

Dixon street 4/9/2014 10:07

It was hot, very hot, so hot that if you stepped outside and touched the black Fiat of Blake’s Romanian neighbours you would burn yourself. Too hot. This in itself was bad enough, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that devastated Blake: the street was ruined. Glass lay calmly across the once busy road; Windows had been shattered in the rioting. A crashed car- a Mini- was wielded into a lamppost, smoke filtering from its wrecked bonnet. Not far off, an overturned bin sat on the double yellow lines, its scattered litter lying still in the windless atmosphere. 

The peace was terrifying.

Blake stood staring at his reflection in the car window. His brown spiky hair looked as dry and messy as it felt. Grey eyes like pebbles spoilt the image for him. He had always hated grey. Grey was boring and ugly; he had always wanted contact lenses to make his eyes blue or green. Feeling much less confident and gleeful than he had been ten minutes ago, Blake began the long, tiresome, even painful walk down the long city street towards the distant corner. Although he was clearly far from fit and healthy, he knew that he had to get to safety. To humanity and sanity and safety. He knew that the place most people were likely to be was the DED shopping centre, which couldn’t be more than two kilometres away. That would mean food, drink, shelter and some sort of explanation of the last four days’ worth of events.

Dixon Street had been named after some far off rich businessman and created six years ago as a place mainly for cheap housing. Blake had been living at number twenty-one for nineteen months now, basically living off his mother’s will. She had been an orphan, who was fostered by a kind couple, the Truemans, a decent pair of folks who were killed brutally in a car crash. Months later, his mother, who had recently given birth to Blake himself, won the lottery. Not the jackpot, not by a long way, but enough to really set her up for life. When she died at the age of forty-four, taken out by hypothermia on a sailing expedition, half her money had gone to Blake, whilst the other had been split between various charities.

Now Blake lived alone. He never gave himself the time to feel guilty, but blew the money on beer, and yes, he admitted it, drugs.

Eventually, Blake passed the house that belonged to the family who owned the corner shop across the road. The house had a dry, Brown-red splotch Blake didn’t dare to think about splattered across the brickwork. Wafting from the inside was a dark, repulsive scent, a smell Blake had encountered whilst walking past a bloody, filthy butchers shop when he was six and never forgotten. The sound of white noise blurted from the TV set inside like a desperate scream, carrying through the doorframe. Blake looked down, shocked. The door itself lay on the floor, dark red and cracked.

Had it been dark red when he had walked past it on that night barely four days ago?

Was he strong enough to reflect on the most likely answer to that question?

Probably not.

But unbeknown to Blake, at that very moment inside that very house, a man lay on a blood-soaked bed with a gaping, u-shaped hole in his shoulder. His hair lay torn in petrified clumps, his skin paler than the winter snow that had been resting on the ground a week ago. The man, the brother of the Korean who owned the corner shop, had been through hell, unimaginable pain, and seen a lifetimes share of death all around him in the space of an hour that had been only three days ago.

The man was dead.

But not for long.

Despite the danger he knew he was in, Blake Trueman walked on.

Author's Note

My question of the Issue for readers: Do you think this instalment provides a good story opening?