A Town Called Benny: Volume One - The Beholders

By Gary Kittle

A surge in savage attacks, random and always at night, stretches police resources to the brink of collapse.
Joe Hawthorne has been a copper for twenty years, so he should have the experience to deduce what’s happening. But time is against him, as the brutal, motiveless attacks threaten to shred the very fabric of civilisation before his eyes.
Fighting to save his colleagues and family, Hawthorne must find a way to escape the carnage. With his luck and courage close to breaking point, only a miracle can prevent him and his band of survivors from becoming infected too.
For what he is witnessing must surely be the rise of the undead. If the devastation looks like a zombie apocalypse, and the screams sound like a zombie apocalypse, then what other explanation could there be? Despite the devouring flames, the sickening violence, and the rabid insanity he encounters at every turn, there’s just one snag, however.
Joe Hawthorne hasn’t seen a single zombie anywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary Kittle
• Release date: Apr 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005014339

Gary Kittle

Gary Kittle is the author of thirteen eBooks. He was twice shortlisted for the Essex Book Festival Short Story Competition and his play 'Walking Through Wire' was staged (and filmed) in London in 2014. Many of his shorter screenplays have been filmed by Film Colchester and DT Film Productions. 'Data Protection', written by Gary for Dan Allen Films, was shortlisted for the Sci-fi London 48 Hour Film Competition. He has won the 1000 Word Challenge with 'The Uncertainty Principle', and twice been shortlisted, finishing runner-up with 'Kismet'. He was also runner-up in the Storgy Halloween Short Story Competition with 'The Gag Reflex'. He is also the author of a serial horror novel, 'A Town Called Benny', with episodes published fortnightly. Outside of self-publishing, Gary is also heavily involved with DT Film Productions. Their first full feature film, Dragged Up Dirty, on which Gary is an executive producer is due for release in 2023. The full-length documentary, Hearts Without Homes, on which Gary contributed as a writer, is also out this year. 'Crowded House' follows on from the success of 'The Hanging Rail'. Gary lives and writes in Wivenhoe, Essex, and strongly suspects that given his frantic writing schedule, he has developed the ability to travel through time. Visit him now at https://gkittle.wixsite.com/gary-kittle-author Where darkness rises.

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Chapter One

Hawthorne offered Peters the packet of mints.

‘Not another one?’

‘Looks that way.’ Hawthorne stared down at the dark stain soaking through the blanket.

‘What’s your money on, then?’

‘What’s my money on?’ Hawthorne let out a laugh, like a fart held back at a funeral.

‘It’s got to be terrorism, right?’

‘No. Too senseless – even for them.’ They both looked up at the sound of running feet. ‘Nothing connects these people,’ Hawthorne mused.

‘Except for the obvious...’ Peters answered.

A panting WPC spoke before she’d reached them. ‘You’d best come. It’s happening again.’ Peters raised his eyebrows. Hawthorne stared over at the ambulance, which had cut up the park’s manicured lawn like a downhill skier: It was swaying like a drunk. Hawthorne and Peters sprinted.

The back doors swung open. Inside, Hawthorne caught sight of a body strapped to the gurney and a paramedic slipping a needle into an exposed thigh. The frenzied movements gradually slowed and the two sweating officers sitting on its chest began to relax, the patient’s screams diminishing to phlegm-filled grunts.

Job done, thought Hawthorne; only that was what he’d said last time. And the time before that.

One officer nursed a bloodied nose that might be broken.

‘So, we can add resisting arrest, can we?’ Peters asked.

Hawthorne shot him a disapproving look, though he knew Peters was scared. These assaults were becoming regular as well as indiscriminate.

‘Peters. Just now, what did you mean by ‘the obvious’?’

Behind them, the pale-faced WPC was slowly shaking her head.

‘Obvious? Oh, I meant the time of the offences,’ Peters clarified.

Hawthorne stared.

‘They’ve always been at night.’

Chapter Two

‘She is dead this time, isn’t she?’

‘Jimmy!’ his mother hissed. ‘Keep it down. He’ll hear you!’

Jimmy’s grandfather was still at the cliff edge, clutching the urn like his life depended on it. ‘Bit late for either of them, if you ask me,’ Jimmy muttered.

‘Show some respect,’ his mother sighed.

‘Well, first we had the open coffin, then we had to watch whilst they burned the bloody thing, and now we have to watch him throw what’s left of her out to sea. How much more dead can she be?’

‘Jimmy!’ The wind ran icy fingers through his mother’s hair, tugging at the greying roots. ‘She was your Gran!’

‘Here we go,’ he said, nodding towards the cliff edge.

His Grandfather slowly unscrewed the lid, waiting for a lull in the wind before he dared release the contents.

‘Hope she wasn’t afraid of heights.’

His mother’s hair dropped onto her shoulders, and her father quickly poured the ashes out in front of him. They dropped out of sight and it was done.

Not before time, Jimmy thought to himself.

The old man stared down at his feet momentarily and then screwed the lid back onto the urn, his shoulders shuddering with a final melodramatic sigh.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Jimmy murmured.

Turning, the old man looked up at his waiting daughter and grandson, and suddenly froze.

‘What now?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Don’t tell me he’s changed his mind.’

‘It’s a big deal for him. They were married for over forty years.’

‘Almost as long as today, then.’

But his mother wasn’t listening. ‘Dad? Dad, what is it?’

The old man’s head shook vigorously, his free hand pointing at Jimmy. The wind had risen again. He tried to step backward; then seeming to realise his precarious position, hurried forward instead, arms waving in distress. He was shouting something that the wind kept throwing out to sea.

‘Dad!’

Oh, God, thought Jimmy. They’re about to have a ‘moment’ together. Could the day get any worse?

The old man was running now, running and screaming, his face ashen and eyes staring; already the distance between them halved.

‘Shit a brick, she must be haunting him,’ Jimmy sniggered, but the twisted grimace on his grandfather’s face quickly changed his attitude. It was hard to believe he was in his seventies, his charging feet were eating up the remaining few metres. It looked like his Grandfather had gone mad.

‘What the...’

It was all over for Jimmy in a second. One moment he was shivering in the wind, bored, unsympathetic but now slightly alarmed; and the next the urn that had contained the remains of his Grandmother crashed through his spotty face.

Chapter Three

Dave’s nickname was ‘9.8.’ but he didn’t consider himself a diver. If there was contact in the box, he felt it justifiable to go down. ‘If they want me to stay on my feet, they won’t have to kick me,’ he told his teammates. No one argued against this philosophy, not even his manager. And considering how many penalties and free kicks he won for the team that was not surprising. Still, the slightly critical nickname stuck, and Dave felt duty-bound to honour it.

He’d already been (‘sort-of’) fouled twice (‘honest’), but not got the decision he’d been looking for. On both occasions he’d raised his hands to the heavens, appealing to the referee for justice. But his reputation had spread from the playing to the refereeing fraternity in recent seasons and the expected decision hadn’t come. Instead he’d got himself a booking and some verbal abuse that tried to marry certain sexual acts with yoga postures in ways usually only viewed using a satellite smartcard decoder. Perhaps the referee had been deceived by the floodlights? Maybe he’d been unsighted? You didn’t always get what you deserved on the field of play, even on those (rare) occasions when you legitimately merited it.

This time, however, it seemed his luck was finally in. His left leg had definitely been snagged as he’d been about to shoot from just inside the area. The sound of the whistle through the crowded penalty area could surely only mean one thing this time.

Dave rolled over onto his side and watched as the referee’s black socks became surrounded by the muddied white ones of incensed defenders. But the black socks were trotting away from the penalty spot not towards it and a second later he realised that the referee was standing directly over him. Knowing he had already been booked he understood that his part in proceedings might be ending there and then. Several defenders had turned to sneer down at him, clapping their hands in mock applause as the referee’s hand disappeared into his breast pocket.

Two yellow cards make a red, Dave thought gloomily. Perhaps his teammates would re-christen him ‘9.7’ after this. He got slowly to his feet, conscious of a numb patch on his leg where he had been kicked. Not the end of the world, though. In truth he’d been feeling off colour all week and could think of nothing better than an early shower. Most times he shrugged these things off, being young, well-built and possessed of a rugged constitution. But this week had been different. He could feel whatever virus was cruising round his bloodstream draining him of energy whenever it sensed his defenses were vulnerable, especially in between meals. Two early nights hadn’t sorted it, fruit binges and extra vitamins had failed to revive his flagging immune system, too. Even his mum’s Lancashire hotpot had succeeded only in giving him indigestion. No, this was far from a disaster personally, and the team itself was winning three-one with twenty minutes to play. God, he suddenly felt like he could sleep for a week. A wave of nausea and giddiness swept over him like a bucket of ice water in the showers.

More verbal abuse was thrown his way, this time involving animals in the sex act. ‘All right, all right. If you really want to get wound up, check the fucking score, dickheads.’

As players from both sides surrounded him angrily, Dave glanced up at the referee as he put his whistle back to his lips to restore order and herald his inevitable dismissal. The world became instantly silent as Dave tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The nausea and dizziness intensified. But the other players seemed not to have noticed what had happened, which was almost as incredible as what had actually occurred. Maybe they’d been deceived by the floodlights? Maybe they’d been unsighted?

But no, it was clear enough what had just happened: as he expelled air from his lungs into the whistle, most of the referee’s brains had shot out of both nostrils in an effervescent grey stream.

Chapter Four

Seriously, who cared how an oxbow lake formed if his dad had already lined him up with a job in the family business? And apparently it took years anyway, decades even. By the time an oxbow lake had made its first bend he would be sitting on a beach somewhere whilst a manager back home ran the business for him. But Mrs. Flitkin was determined to teach him about meandering. In fact, she had decided to show him and his fellow detainees a video on the subject in their detention period.

But young George had other ideas. Time for a much-needed snooze, he’d decided.

‘Please, Miss, can we have the lights dimmed a bit? I can’t see proper.’

‘You mean, properly,’ Mrs. Flitkin sighed. ‘Oh, all right. If it helps you concentrate.’

But I’ll be asking questions afterwards, George thought to himself.

‘But I’ll be asking questions afterwards.’

Ask what you want. I’m not interested.

The lights dimmed and the film began on the flat screen television bracketed to the wall. Should have brought some popcorn, he mused, even if there isn’t surround sound. George slipped gum into his dry, rancid mouth. Silly cow. Why would anyone choose teaching geography as a career anyway? Where could you take it? Presumably, the best a geography teacher could hope for was to produce more geography teachers. And the pay must be shit, if the way Mrs. Flitkin dressed was anything to go by. Unless she was a lesbian, of course. There was nothing he hated more than lesbians, mainly because his mother had turned into one and left home when he was seven. The bitch.

Dimming the lights didn’t help his concentration at all, because as soon as the light faded George felt instantly sick. Yes, the light had given him a blinding headache, but the pain had made him forget his recent fear of the dark, the hours lying awake imagining shapes moving in the shadows and the vivid nightmares that came when he finally did fall asleep. He’d nearly wet himself twice last night, alone.

Now his eyes kept searching the far corners of the detention room, the inky spaces beneath the desks, the wall of darkness behind him. He kept hearing ragged breathing beneath the drone of the film narrator’s voice, sometimes close to his ear, at other times seeming to come from the shadows between his feet. But after a few anxious moments, he realised the wheezing breaths were his own.

The nausea intensified. His head felt light, but his body was slumping slowly into his chair. Mrs. Flitkin’s attention was fixed on the film, of course, as if she hadn’t already seen the bloody thing a hundred times already.

Unbidden, an image jumped into his mind of his mother and Mrs. Flitkin engaged in a passionate kiss. Some of his lunch skirted back up his oesophagus as he caught sight of their tongues twisting together like eels. His own tongue felt engorged and alien. He let out a low groan, which thankfully no one seemed to hear. George had not felt right for a couple of days now and could see himself climbing straight into bed when he got out of this shithole.

Something darting through the darkness registered in the corner of his eye, but when he snapped his neck round to look, it was gone.

Mercifully, the film was brief, and he was too overwhelmed with relief at the return of the light to realise that not being able to remember a single thing he’d seen would have unintended consequences. The ordeal had only just begun, then. Bollocks.

‘Now, then,’ began Mrs. Flitkin, turning back to her mini class of petty delinquents.

George could only stare. The light was renewing his headache with a vengeance, and his lunch couldn’t make up its mind whether to comply with digestion or not. But something was happening that made those worries seem inconsequential.

‘Let’s see what we’ve learned, shall we?’

Mrs. Flitkin’s right arm was already a good twenty centimetres longer than its twin, slowly emerging through the sleeve of her dreadful homemade woolen cardigan. As he watched, the area of material where her right shoulder should have been collapsed, leaving a limp space next to her neck. The exposed white arm was now thirty centimetres long and growing.

George moaned.

‘What was that?’ Mrs. Flitkin asked, mistaking his expression of disgust for positive engagement.

The cardigan was now collapsing in the area where the upper arm should have been. The right hand, meanwhile, was now level with her knee, and trickles of blood were starting to run down it.

‘I’m glad to see you taking an interest at last, George,’ she smiled. ‘Now can you tell me what happens first in the formation of the oxbow?’

With a disgusting slurping sound that reminded George of an acute episode of diarrhoea, Mrs. Flitkin’s arm slid fully out of her sleeve and landed by her right foot, splattering her skirt with blood. Her empty sleeve, now dangling uselessly, was heavily soaked in blood, too. And the floor around the detached arm was covered by a sticky red pool.

He opened his mouth to speak but instantly felt his entire lunch squirting upward for good this time. But stopping its ascent was the least of his worries. The other boys in detention were staring at him, sniggering.

Mrs. Flitkin’s arms were on her hips in a gesture of irritated dismay. No, George corrected himself, not both arms, just the left. Standing there with her left hand on her hip and her right sleeve dangling vacantly, she resembled someone performing a bizarre impersonation of a teapot. It might even have made him laugh, too, were it not for the fact that the fingers of the severed arm were starting to move.

George leapt to his feet with a scream.

‘George Jones, whatever is it?’

The fingers of the hand were dragging the bloodied arm across the floor towards him; slowly at first, and then at a greater pace.

‘Keep it back!’ he bellowed. ‘Keep it away from me!’

The other pupils in the class were now silent, and Mrs. Flitkin’s face was white with shock.

‘George? George!’

‘Your... your arm, miss...’ George spluttered, his half-digested meal hitting the desktop and meandering downward towards the floor.

There was a lightning strike of pain in his head, and a second later he could neither speak nor move. Only his bladder worked, staining the crotch of his grey school trousers dark. Meanwhile, the one-armed Mrs. Flitkin was moving towards him, but he barely noticed.

His teacher’s arm had already crawled up onto his desktop, where it sat pensively in a pool of stomach acid and ravioli, ready to spring.

Just as George’s bowels let go too, the reanimated arm launched itself through the air, curled fingers reaching for his naked, screaming throat.

Chapter Five

Green Dayz nightclub was packed for a Thursday. Wasn’t there supposed to be a recession or something? The local economy was obviously doing a lot better than other parts of the country; but then wasn’t that why she’d moved down here two years ago? Judging by the way the beer and wine was flowing, it looked like she’d made the right decision, though her love life was still a disaster.

Mel inched her way forward, pirouetting past glass-laden punters every few seconds. Despite the fire exit doors being open, it was stiflingly hot.

She’d need a tray coming back, of course; there were eight friends to buy for. Her progress towards the bar had stopped. More punters had drifted in. Bodies pushed and jostled her from all sides. She felt hotter still now. Sweat covered her face and neck, and beneath her clothes she felt something moist trickle down her back. What if she fainted? She imagined collapsing to the ground and being trampled by revellers who would assume that someone had just dropped their coat. Panic sent her heart into a higher gear, but when she looked around again she realised the crowd was no bigger than earlier.

Thank goodness she had work tomorrow to use as an excuse to leave this sardine tin by ten o’clock. Hell, she might not even make it into work the way all her energy seemed to be evaporating through her skin. She was definitely coming down with something. Most of the warmth she felt was rising up from within her, she realised.

Mel moved forward at last; just one girl between her and the bar now. Which was a blessing only if the girl in front wasn’t ordering for eight people, too. Mel wrinkled her nose. What was that smell? She tried to move away but there were too many thirsty mouths pushing her forward, pushing her into the smell. Mel held her breath, but the smell seemed to register in her brain regardless. It was so overwhelming, she had to put a hand over her mouth as discretely as she could. It smelled a bit like rotten fish and a lot like drying cat sick.

She looked around the ring of faces surrounding her. Surely other people must be catching a whiff of this. Mel just hoped no one thought it was her. Everyone else was roughly her age, determined to enjoy a disposable income that would be eaten up by the responsibilities of ownership and parenthood only a few years from now. She saw a range of expressions indicating youthful high spirits, alcohol-fuelled excitement (even though the weekend didn’t officially start until tomorrow night), and even a few whose blank features could have been attributed to drugs, boredom or both.

What she didn’t see was what she’d expected to see. There were no frowns of disgust, no wrinkled noses, no U-turns back towards the dance floor; and, thankfully, no accusing eyes glaring straight at her. But that didn’t help her explain the fact that the smell of fish and feline vomit was even stronger. Her own stomach contents rolled over, as if they felt neglected inside her.

Sod the drinks. She might have to call it a night right there and then. Or at least step outside for some fresh air if she didn’t get served right away. She turned back towards the bar, only to find that somehow her mouth was touching the girl in front’s hair. The stench intensified. Which was surprising given how well-presented the other girl otherwise was. She knew the type: late teens, a gold gym member, good-looking, confident, sexually adventurous. This was exactly like that bitch that had stolen her last boyfriend from her. And they were everywhere, too. Unless she started dating a monk, it seemed inevitable that sooner or later a girl just like this would effortlessly lure the man of her dreams away with just the pout of her lips and the flutter of a false eyelash.

Not if she smelled like this one, mind…

At last the girl spun round, a pint glass in each hand. Mel’s legs slid from beneath her, only the bodies around her postponing her fall. The girl froze, staring straight at her, as if unsure how to get around the white-faced Mel. She could feel bodies pressing in hard behind her, all of them sensing a gap in the queue ahead. But no one screamed or shrieked in horror or added the smell of their own vomit to the mix.

Is everyone else blind? she wondered.

This poor cow wasn’t going to steal anyone’s bloke anytime soon. Chances were she’d be lucky to find someone willing to date her for cash. But it didn’t make any sense. There must be cosmetic surgery available if she had the money; and masks or covers, if she hadn’t. But to leave the centre of her face exposed like this was beyond comprehension. Who the hell had let her through the front door, for God’s sake? Some skin-headed bouncer with a sick sense of humour, presumably.

The girl moved to Mel’s right with a polite smile. No one could doubt the poor girl’s courage in trying to overcome facial deformity, that was for sure. But in moving so suddenly, the girl