Seeing this, Kingsley suddenly found himself reliving the worst moment of his life.
Speeding down a country road in his car, laughing. Emma laughing with him, then shrieking in thrill as they flew over a small rise, telling him to slow down through her giggles.
Kingsley’s arms started to tingle.
A bend ahead of them. His foot staying on the acceleration, both of them chuckling like maniacs as they neared the turn. A truck swivelling round the bend at the last moment, veering slightly into their lane. Squeezing the brake – too late.
Kingsley heard the ringing of the collision in his ears.
His car slamming into the truck’s left headlight at over forty miles per hour. Spinning, the airbag pressing him into the seat... a silence as powerful as death.
They say that memories become distorted over time, small details rewritten in the mind with each recollection, until they are inaccurate to the reality. But the memory of that accident was something more than a recorded piece of data in Kingsley’s brain. It was as if every image, smell, sound and feeling from the memory had become part of his flesh. He could relive the moment and physically feel the jolt of the collision, smell the seared rubber of the tyres.
Kingsley felt certain that if he turned his head to the left right now, he would be able to see Emma slumped in the passenger seat of his car, a shard of glass lodged in her stomach.
Right where their unborn child was.
He asked himself again how he had come away from that accident with nothing but a concussion. Why did Emma have to be the one to lose the child they had tried for so long to make? Why did she have to carry around that scar on her stomach as a reminder of her loss when he was the one who had been driving too fast?
A loud gasp brought Kingsley’s attention back to the present.
“Stop! What are you doing?” Sammy was yelling.
3.
Eric, James and Sammy were investigating the wreckage to see the extent of the damage. Sammy had stepped over the low barbed wire fence and circled the crashed hatchback to look at the other side.
When she gasped and started to yell, Eric and James jumped the fence and ran to join her, startled at the urgency in her voice.
But what they saw when they got there startled them even more.
The source of the screams they had heard from the woods was immediately clear; a dark-haired woman lay motionless on the ground next to the open driver’s door of the car. Her pale face gaped, unseeing, at the sky while a man crouched over her and tore into her belly with his teeth. She had clearly been the one they heard screaming. But she wasn’t screaming anymore, and it didn’t look like she was breathing either.
They all froze in utter disbelief.
The man was a rugged sight, with a beard like a dead cat and a tattered white shirt. Completely engrossed in mutilating the woman, he didn’t even glance at the three of them.
Eric snapped out of his stupor as a chunk of stomach tissue was ripped from the woman. He lunged forward and swung a kick at the man’s forehead.
The kick threw the man off the woman’s body and onto his back. It was then that they glimpsed his eyes for the first time. They looked like two grey-blue marbles in their sunken sockets, translucent and red-rimmed like he had cataracts or something.
The man didn’t appear to be hurt by Eric’s kick. He lay there in the road for a few seconds, then simply picked himself back up off the ground, his facial expression unchanged.
The man resumed his attack – this time targeting Eric.
Eric looked physically shaken for the first time in years. It was probably only the adrenaline coursing through his body that enabled him to dodge the man’s lunging arms. The man stumbled, then turned to face Eric again, blood dribbling from a fresh cut on his forehead where the kick had landed. He didn’t seem to be pained by it.
James was spurred into action by the troubled expression on his friend’s usually calm and calculating face. He flung his arms around the man’s neck from behind, trying to restrain him.
James misjudged the man’s strength, though. He gripped James’ wrists with iron hands and twisted his head down at an unnatural angle, cartilage audibly popping in his neck. Then he opened his mouth and snapped at James’ left arm.
His teeth – still coated in a film of blood from the woman on the ground – struck James’ lower wrist near the elbow. The man bit down through his flesh. James howled in agony, his arm locked in the man’s mouth.
Eric wasted no time now that his friend was being attacked. He raised a leg, brought his heel crashing down on the side of the man’s knee. The man lost balance and fell, releasing James from his jaws.
Eric drew in a deep breath as the insane man squirmed on his back and started to rise once again. He kicked the man back down, exasperated – then he raised his leg again and stomped on the head, letting out a furious roar.
Silence followed, the only sound Eric’s heavy breathing as he watched blood pool around the man’s skull, finally still.
Sammy had stopped screaming, but now tears poured down her face and she began to sob mutedly, her shoulders rocking.
After a long moment, Eric began to mumble to himself. "That wasn’t... that man can’t have been..." Kingsley couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Eric at a loss for words.
James just stood there in the middle of the road, clutching his wounded arm and gawking at the deep red craters in his skin. The colour
