The church had the mustiness of reluctant childhood Sunday mornings, when the sermons and hymns had robbed him of cartoon time before another week's sentence at school. In here, however, all was quiet and still. It was a peaceful stillness, different from the tomblike brooding of the town. It seemed a world apart from the urban decay outside the heavy old doors.
The lofty, broad expanse of ceiling pointed skyward, borne by stone pillars that were towering, majestic and luminous, painted in immaculate white. The walls glowed with the rising dawn and the colours that flickered into life from the stained-glass windows on each side. The pews and pulpit were the dark colour of teak, as were the mezzanines suspended to each side and the grand, towering pipe organ at the front.
Jack dragged himself down the aisle and sat against the choir stalls. He looked up at the stained-glass windows that reached up to the apex of the vaulted roof as the morning sun rose behind them and illuminated them. Depictions of saints and an image of Christ glowed calm and benign between the pillars of the golden canopy, guarded over by its angels.
The colours came to life – crimson, violet and ultramarine – and the figures' golden embroidery glowed with the breaking day. Each facet seemed to shimmer and the lustrous colours set long ago were as brilliant as it they ever had been throughout the centuries. For a while there was a timeless calm, and Jack watched the colours shift and metamorphose from the gloom of the pre-dawn.
His suit stank. Jack couldn't help but breathe a waft of it with the slightest movement. It had a noxious odour of damp, sweat-greased leather and metallic, sulphurous flecks of old blood that were crusted brown and putrid all over it. They peeled off in tacky clumps. With his dull, uncomprehending stare, Jack noticed fresher and redder blood covering his hand, wrist and forearm. It swept along in patches by his thigh and side where he peeled it away. Where had that all come from? he wondered, then he remembered that he'd spiked his hand on the park railings. His fingers were purple-blue as he'd kept his hands clenched shut all this time.
Jack fumbled with his helmet. It took all his strength to push it off. The fingers of his right hand were stiff and cramped. The madness of his anger was gone and all that was left was a frailty that made him as weak and tender as a lamb. He gazed up at the lofty reaches of the ceiling, shook his head and gave a wretched sniff as tears prickled.
The blood on the outside of his hand was dry and rust-coloured, but between Jack's fingers it was sticky and made a wet noise as he opened them up. Two parts of the fleshy part of his palm separated from each other as he moved it. The layer of skin was roughly split open and hanging loose. He could actually see inside his hand. The meat inside was dark, red and stringy.
With the tender probing of his left finger, he could lift a whole flap of skin from the base of his right index finger. Pain twisted sharply though his hand when he nudged the raw flesh.
It didn't actually hurt that much, considering. It was numb and there was a strange tingling as the air reached places it had never reached before.
'Oh God, what was I thinking?' Jack whispered. It would definitely need stitches, and there was no way he could do that. 'I've got to go back. That does it then. I've got to go back,' he mumbled. 'No way round it.'
There was no way he had the energy to make the journey. His eyes rolled about as his vision swayed. His head still reeled with the disgusting afterglow of the night's excess.
All the rage and the whirl of angry thoughts were expelled from him and left a kind of tenderness, a gentle kind of weakness now he had no room left for anger. As he sat there, chewed up and spat out by the world, by its madness and his own, an odd sense of peace filled him. Jack apologised to God and asked how it had all gone so wrong. How could he make it right?
He clasped his hands and, something he had never considered before, made a prayer that he sent out to the world. He prayed for a fresh start and another chance. He asked for God to take him back so he could rejoin the world of the others, to accept them and be accepted in return.
While his body still ached, the sunlight from the windows was warming and wholesome, cleansing and healing. There was a clear beam from the floor to the heavens and Jack was at the centre of it as it lit his insides and chased away all the shadows within. It felt good to confess through prayer and send those pure wishes out. It was strange – only in defeat did he find this salvation. Jack drifted off into something between sleep and unconsciousness.
When he woke, sometime later, he knew he had to go back to the others and could only pray that they would actually have him back. He wouldn't get any stronger, only weaker with time now. He was frail, brittle-thin and shaking, but he had a clear purpose – to make his way home.
He made to get up but slumped back down and held his head. He felt sick and dizzy.
The door to the vestry was open, and on the desk there, Jack found water and a bottle of energy drink among the vicar's robes and the various other accessories and paraphernalia of the clergy. Such a fascinating way of life, and yet he knew so little about it. What if there was no-one else in the world to carry belief on in it? Maybe he'd ignored religion all his life, but he hadn't considered a world where faith or even spirituality didn't exist and there was no concept left of God or an afterlife beyond death. The idea seemed terrible.
He hadn't attended church since he was about ten years old. The sermons and ceremonies seemed unnecessarily protracted and tedious. The hymns left him ever more disaffected. What a fool, here was a place of sanctuary that had been here for him, waiting and unchanging all these years, and he'd neglected it. What a relief it was to find solace from that awful outside world.
He ran a finger over a hymn book and looked at the trail he made in the dust. There was a silver necklace on the desk. It had a fine, delicate-looking chain and a cross as a pendant upon which a tiny figure of the body of Christ was affixed. It was small, vulnerable-looking and beautiful. Divinity looked so fragile and mortal right now – what could he do to make sure it didn't flicker out? Jack picked the necklace up with reverence and put it on.
There were a couple of bottles of communion wine by the desk.
'The Lord provides,' Jack remarked, and took one.
The wine was alright. It was refreshing when there was forty days of desert between his teeth.
Jack thanked the Messiah on the windowpane and the saints around him. He needed water to wash off the dark, crusty muck that itched around his head and hands. The best place he could find to do so in was the stone basin they had at the back of the church. He couldn't remember what it was called. The water was cool and soothing as it washed the dirt of his misdeeds and cleansed his wounds. Several times he invoked the name of Christ as he snagged one.
When he was as ready as he ever would be to attempt the journey home, he left the church and shut the door behind him. He was feeling shaky and lurched along. His footsteps dragged and he slouched forward as his reserves were all but burnt out, so it was as much as he could do to place one foot in front of the other. Deep breaths of the fresh morning air were dizzying.
The old fella Charlie mentioned that if you covered up and walked like one, the townsfolk might leave you alone. Well, he didn't have to try hard. With his helmet back on and the visor down, Jack tried to conceal his bare hands and steer as far away from any locals as he could. They seemed thinner on the ground in the daylight. Some figures moved faintly in the gloom of the high street shops and only a few of the spectres stopped to turn their deathly glare at him as he limped by on the other side.
With each step it was like he was walking with feet of lead and a body like jelly. On the way he found and retrieved one of his mallets, among the tattered ruins and bones on the street, and furtively he holstered it. The movement brought a reaction from a couple of youths who were standing outside a newsagent's, so he quickened the pace.
A few isolated Dead were being harassed by crows or rats on the next street. The Dead flailed and thrashed at the crows or stomped down at the rats that got too close. One let out horrible yells and bellows in rage at the creatures that plucked at its shins and ankles. Jack stumbled on and fought the urge to run, which would give him away.
There was some unremembered point in a quiet part of town where he floundered on the pavement. He lay in agony, and when he looked up, a couple of figures stood over him. They helped sit him up,
'Are you badly hurt? Who are you and where have you come from?' They asked. They offered him water and said they had been following him for some time now. They spoke halting English with East European accents.
They led Jack into an open house, and while one stood watch, the other took a look at his injured hand and tended to it with supplies from a first aid kit. After attempting conversation for a short while and getting little coherent in return, they turned their backs on him for a moment to discuss what to do and he ran away.
Jack had to sit down to rest several times on the painful journey, which had never seemed so incredibly long and difficult before. He finally rounded a bend in the road that brought him to Church Street. He crossed the street and found he wasn't alone.
Several figures were on the road and pavement. Jack could barely make out their shapes as they were blurred in his vison. It seemed they wore biker leathers like he did. They seemed familiar. One dropped a canister of water as they huddled close by the shopfronts and held weapons at the ready. Closing in on them from behind and from either side were several other figures, who growled, staggered and reached for them.
Home was straight ahead, but after the journey back, he was met with a dead end as ghouls approached on all sides. They had followed him all this way and he hadn't realised. Jack saw that he would never get through the barricades in time, let alone those who were trapped against the shopfront. Jack had been running on empty for far too long and thought he might give up and drop at any moment.
The friends saw an armoured, helmeted figure standing and swaying in the road ahead of them. It was covered in gore that was flecked and smeared all over the biker suit and ranged from a rotten black to brown and vivid crimson over its warpaint. This ghoulish apparition drew a hammer from its tool belt and charged the nearest of the Dead that had closed in on them. The figure rushed in, clumsily rammed it back, then dropped it to the road with a heavy crack over the skull with the weapon.
This got the attention of the others and the figure was immediately set upon. The nearest of the ragged, feral creatures struggled and wrestled with the figure as it bashed another over the head with the butt of the mallet's handle until it lurched over and was then booted to the floor with a kick to the ribs.
The figure was immediately grabbed from behind by two more ghouls. It twisted to break free as it kicked and headbutted two more that had left the group of friends who were surrounded against the shopfront. The figure floundered as it was grappled from all sides and was unable to move as it took thumps and bites from all over and threatened to go down at any second. It managed to spin and clip one of the Dead over the temple with its weapon but the snarling cadaver grabbed the figure's ankle and twisted it as it took a thrashing and bludgeoning from all sides. The group of them collapsed to the floor as they wrestled.
All attention had been drawn away from the group that was trapped against the wall and now they snapped into action.
They ran in and beat down the monstrous townsfolk until only the helmeted one in the foul biker suit remained, sitting upright.
The fight was over. Jack flipped up his visor and got to his feet.
A distant droning noise far above made him look up. To his amazement, way up in the beautiful, clear sky an aeroplane traced a white path through the heavens, thousands of metres up.
Jack watched the plane carve its brave, steady course. Sunlight glinted from its surface.
So high they were, so unreachable. So untouchable. The people in the plane would never see or hear them, all the way down here.
Jack, the street, the people on it, all his troubles and his recent epiphany, seemed very small and very insignificant down there on the ground among the ruins, the mess and the filth of Huddersfield.
Apparently, Jack couldn't remember this bit. He was later told that he pulled off his helmet with his bandaged, gory hand to expose his smeared, gory face, and said, 'Well now I know. I'm neither a lover nor a fighter,' and then passed out.