Meadowside (2 page)

But Amy knew better. She had read all the information in the New Mother’s Welcome Pack she picked up at the chemist, and knew she could carry on working for at least another seven months, maybe even longer. Which was just as well, considering the amount of debt they were in, and all the new things they would need to buy for the forthcoming baby.

And now here Amy was, in Mothercare, looking at baby-grows, buying last minute items in preparation for the big day. Just two more weeks and the round lump Ryan had christened Bumpy would be cradled in her arms wearing one of these outfits. The nursery was all prepared, decked out with the best equipment they could afford. They hadn’t wanted to know Bumpy’s sex, they wanted it to be a surprise, so the nursery had been decorated with neutral colours, the cot mobile chosen because of its genderless dangling farm animals.

A baby-grow with green scales caught Amy’s eye and she picked it up, smiling at how cute the gurgling baby on the packaging looked wearing the outfit. The baby looked like a tiny smiling dinosaur, with built-in scratch-mitts designed to look like claws, and a hooded crown-cap with large buggy eyes printed on the sides. There was even a small tail growing out of the back of it, with a bright yellow triangle of soft material at its tip. Ryan would love this one, Amy decided. He was like a big kid himself as far as dinosaurs were concerned.

“You’ll love it too, won’t you Bumpy?” Amy said, rubbing her hand over her distended stomach. As if in reply, she felt the baby wriggle inside her. She smiled, and patted herself gently. “That’s good enough for me.”

Amy hummed to herself as she took the baby-grow to the pay desk. A movement outside the shop caught her eye and she turned to look. A small group of people ran by. Amy shrugged, and turned back to the counter. She placed the dinosaur baby-grow down in front of a young shop assistant.

“Oh, that’s so cute,” the young girl said, scanning a barcode on the packaging. “How long have you got now?”

“A couple of weeks,” Amy said, smiling. “I’ve already started having Braxton Hicks, and I can’t wait.”

The shop assistant smiled back as she placed the baby-grow in a carrier bag. Amy took out her purse and paid for it, then took the bag and turned to leave.

“Bye then,” the shop assistant said, “have a nice day.”

“You too,” Amy said, still smiling to herself.

A woman ran by outside the shop, casting furtive glances over her shoulder as she ran. She looked terrified of something. Amy stopped and watched the woman through Mothercare’s shop-front window until she was out of sight. More people ran past, shouting and screaming. Amy glanced quizzically at the shop assistant. The girl shrugged and smiled, shook her head slightly. Then her eyes widened. Her mouth hung open and she gasped.

Amy turned back to the window. A man in a wet, crumpled suit stared in at her. His hands were bloody, his face too. His eyes were wild and staring, as if he were in shock.

“Are you okay?” Amy asked, raising her voice so she would be heard through the thick glass.

The man lunged at the shop window with a snarl. Amy startled, then stepped back in horror as he hit the glass face first with a dull thud. His head bounced off the glass and he staggered back a few steps before launching himself forward again. The man’s nose shattered against the glass, leaving behind a dripping red smear when he reared back for another charge.

Amy screamed. She backed away, unable to take her eyes off the man as he repeatedly launched himself at the window, impervious to the pain he must be causing himself. Her fingers uncurled from the handle of the shopping bag and it dropped to her feet as she raised her hand to her mouth.

Blood poured down the man’s face as he continued battering his head against the window. Then he stopped, and pounded on it with his bloody fists instead. The window shuddered in its frame with each blow. The man bared his teeth and snarled like a dog. He stared in at Amy with malevolent, bloodshot eyes, then resumed banging his head against the glass.

Amy didn’t know how much more of this punishment the window would take. She didn’t understand why the man hadn’t already rendered himself senseless from the repeated blows to his head. And why didn’t he just walk through the door instead?

An ice-cold shock of fear ran down Amy’s spine. She spun to face the shop assistant in panic.

“The door!” Amy shouted, her eyes wide. “You need to lock the door!”

The young girl stared past her, open-mouthed, at the man pounding on the window. Amy walked up to her and shook her by the shoulders.

“You need to lock the door before he gets in!”

The girl shuddered, then blinked several times. She shook her head slowly. “What?” she asked, her voice barely audible over the noise the man outside was making.

“The door,” Amy yelled. “Where are the keys?”

“The … keys …?”

“Yes, the keys. Where are they?”

“I … they’re in my pocket.”

Amy released the girl’s shoulders and reached into her uniform’s left hip pocket. The girl stood immobile, staring past her, her face deathly white. Amy pulled out a bunch of keys and looked at them. They were labelled main door, alarm, store room and staff toilets. She shuffled the main door key to the fore, and turned back to the shop front.

The window shattered inwards. The man stumbled and fell into the shop. He writhed around on the carpeted floor, glass shards tearing through his clothes and slicing into his flesh. Amy and the shop assistant both screamed simultaneously. The man snarled through blood-stained teeth and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Glass sliced through his wrist and red arterial blood gushed from it. He crawled toward Amy and the girl, leaving a thick trail of blood behind him.

Amy backed away, brandishing the keys at the man as if they somehow held the power to stop his advance. She sensed, rather than saw, a movement behind her. The shop assistant ran past, heading for the entrance door. She wrenched it open and ran out—

—straight into the grasping hands of another man lurking there.

The shop assistant cried out and beat at the man’s head with her fists, raked her fingernails down his face. The man snarled and lashed out at her, knocking her sideways into the window frame. A jagged shard of glass still clinging to the frame pierced her neck and her screams turned into a choking gurgle as she coughed blood. The man grabbed her shoulders and pulled her down. The glass shard tore up through the shop assistant’s neck toward her ear as it resisted for a few seconds, then came loose from the window frame and fell with her.

The man dropped down to his knees and pulled out the large sliver of glass, slicing through his own fingers as he did so. He threw the glass to one side and lowered his mouth to the gaping wound in the girl’s neck. He slurped and smacked, drinking the life-force pumping from her veins with relish.

Amy watched it all from inside the shop. She trembled in fear, frozen in place, unable to tear her eyes away from the horror outside. Her legs turned to jelly. She reached out for the counter to steady herself. Something warm and wet ran down her legs and soaked into the carpet. Amy didn’t have time to worry what that meant. A snarl came from close behind her, to her right. The man in the suit crawled toward her, a look of determination on his battered and bloody face.

“Help me,” Amy yelled when she saw someone running by outside Mothercare. But the running figure didn’t even look in her direction.

The man in the doorway looked up and hissed. The shop assistant’s blood dripped from his chin as he locked eyes with Amy. He stumbled to his feet and stepped through the broken window, his arms swinging by his sides.

Amy backed away further into the shop, unable to look away. She felt something dig into her back and cried out in alarm. She spun around, fearing the worst, expecting to come face to face with another psycho lurking within the shop. Expecting her life to end at any moment in a savage attack she would be powerless to defend herself from. But it was just a clothes rail, filled with coat-hangers displaying brightly-coloured maternity dresses.

Amy reached out and grabbed the clothes rail to steady herself. She felt it move on tiny wheels as she leaned against it. The man lumbered toward her. As he got closer he reached out with both hands, his fingers grasping. Amy backed away, edging herself around the clothes rail. When she reached its far side she pushed it as hard as she could in the man’s direction. The man hissed in anger when the clothes rail collided with him. His hands flailed at the maternity dresses, pulling them from their hangers. One wrapped around his face and he roared as he thrashed around, trying to free himself from it.

Amy ran to the back of the shop, where she saw a solid wooden door bearing the sign Staff Only. She pressed down on the door’s handle frantically. She cried out in frustration and banged her fist on the door when it refused to open. Angry snarls came from behind her, the sound of coat-hangers clashing together.

Amy remembered the keys she had taken from the shop assistant, and uncurled her fingers from them. Her hands shook as she located the store room key and inserted it into the lock. The key turned impossibly slowly, as if time were coming to a standstill. Amy wrenched down on the handle and stumbled through into the store room, almost losing her footing. She tried to pull the key from the lock but it was stuck.

The man was close. Very close. Amy was sure she could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he hissed and snarled at her. She screamed and tugged at the key. She glanced over her shoulder. The man was even closer than she thought, only a few feet away. Wide-eyed and hysterical, Amy wrenched the key from the lock and slammed the door behind her just as the man lunged at the doorway.

But the door wouldn’t close. The man’s fingers curled around its edge, trapped in the doorway, flexing and unflexing. Amy pulled the door open a few inches and slammed it back. Bones crunched and the fingers stopped moving, but the door still wouldn’t close fully. The man hissed again. Amy heard scratching sounds, as if he were trying to claw his way through the wood. She leaned her shoulder against the door and pushed with all her might, barging it into place. A severed finger slithered down the door and dropped by her feet. The others hung down from flaps of skin holding them in place for a few seconds before they fell to join it. The man pounded on the door, his guttural snarl turning into a wail of anger.

Amy inserted the key into the lock and twisted it. She leaned back against the door and slumped down to her knees, sobbing with her head in her hands while the man’s pounding vibrated through her back. Her stomach tightened, like the worst menstrual cramps she had ever felt. She cried out and clutched her stomach. Tears ran down her face as she panted through the pain, knowing there was a lot worse to come.

3

Kylie had seen 18 rated movies on TV, but none of them had been as intense as the one showing in Meadowside’s cinema. She didn’t understand why Tom was more interested in playing on his phone than watching the movie. He’d been tapping away on it all the way through, giving a running commentary on what he found people saying about the movie on Twitter.

Bare Knuckle Bitch, the movie was called. The poster outside the cinema described it as a romantic comedy with lashings of ultra-violence, the perfect date movie for feral underclass. Kylie found that an accurate description. Abby, the movie’s main character, was certainly one tough bitch who took no shit from anyone, but she had her gentle side too. Abby’s best mate, Shaz, reminded Kylie a bit of Britney the way she acted around boys sometimes, and Abby’s skinhead boyfriend had a little bit of Tom’s loveable goofiness about him.

Britney seemed to be enjoying the movie too, and cheered Abby on as she stuck the boot into some toffee-nosed students who had been giving her some lip earlier on. Mike laughed and sneered, saying three blokes, even wimpy ones like those, would be more than a match for such a skinny looking bird as Abby. But Kylie knew better. It wasn’t strength that mattered in a street fight, it was what you did with your fists. Kylie’s arms and legs twitched as she imagined herself in the movie, punching and kicking someone unconscious just like the girl on the cinema screen.

Then Tom nudged Kylie in the ribs and broke her concentration. “Check it out,” he said.

“What?” Kylie whispered. She didn’t want to look away from the screen. The posh students were covered in blood, lying groaning in the street while Abby rifled through their pockets and stole their wallets.

“There’s some sort of riot going down in Shefferham,” Tom said, holding up his phone. “Check it out.”

Kylie glanced at Tom’s phone and shrugged. “Yeah, so?” She turned her attention back to the movie.

“Let’s get down there,” Tom said.

“What for?”

“For the looting, what do you think what for? Shit’s just there for the taking when there’s a riot going on, I’ve seen it on the telly.”

“Yeah?” Britney said, leaning forward to look past Kylie at Tom. “I could do with a new phone, my old one sucks.”

“I don’t know if we should,” Kylie said, shaking her head. “There’ll be coppers everywhere, and people fighting, we wouldn’t want to get caught up in all that.”

“Nah,” Tom said, “the coppers aren’t doing fuck all, Twitter says so. People are just smashing stuff up and getting what they can. Come on, let’s get down there before all the good stuff’s gone.”