Free Mr Mumbles by Barry Hutchison Page A

chandeliers were gone. No surprise, as they no longer had a roof to hang from. Up above me, a billion unfamiliar stars looked down from a cloudless sky, occasionally winking, as if they all knew something I didn’t.
    Ameena. Where was Ameena? She’d been there beside me, but now…I whispered her name into the darkness, butno reply came back. She wasn’t here. I was on my own.
    Or was I?
    Through one of the gaps in the collapsed wall, I could see a street. Dark, misshapen figures skulked, stalked and skittered back and forth across the road, illuminated here and there by the flickering flames of burning wreckage.
    Keeping low, I crept across to a mound of rubble, crouched down behind it, and peeked through a gap. None of the people – no, they weren’t people, they couldn’t be people – none of the
things
which were moving around outside seemed to know I was there, so if I could stay out of sight for long enough I might be able to figure out what the hell was going on.
    The street outside was the same one Ameena and I had run along to get to the church, only now – like the church itself – it was completely different. The houses which lined either side of the road had all been either boarded up or torn down. Those which were still standing appeared to throb and move as if alive.
    It was only when I looked more closely that I realised theeffect was caused by hundreds of insect-like creatures, which crawled as one over every surface, poking and prodding at the barricaded windows as they tried to find a way in.
    The things out on the street, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be moving with any shared purpose. Some seemed to be in an incredible hurry. They would appear from an alleyway on one side of the street, and then in the blink of an eye would disappear into another across the road.
    Other figures were in less of a rush. These ones took their time. They strolled lazily along the length of the street, stopping occasionally at the flaming remains of a car, warming themselves, or maybe just appreciating the destruction.
    Still others were involved in brief, violent battles which came out of nowhere. Groups of two or three of the creatures would suddenly lunge and begin tearing each other to pieces. I watched, dumbstruck, as one spindly figure was torn clean in half by two larger beasts. It thrashed and howled like a demon, and I realised this was the screaming I had heard just before I’d opened my eyes.
    What were they? I couldn’t be sure. A lot of them were vaguely human-shaped, but even from this distance it was clear that none of them were
all the way
human. They were either too large or too small, had too many arms, too many heads or too many
tails
to qualify as a member of the human race.
    Some of them wore clothes – dirty, torn rags for the most part, serving very little purpose. The naked ones moved like animals, scurrying around on however many limbs they happened to have.
    Categorising them like that was wrong, though. They couldn’t be divided into humanoid and non-humanoid, or naked and clothed, or anything like that. They couldn’t be categorised at all, because not one of them looked the same as the others.
    I saw one creature covered in thick, coarse hair, another with scaly skin that shimmered in the pale moonlight. Yet another slithered along the street, leaving a silvery, slug-like trail in its wake.
    They roared. They whispered. They hissed and howled.Some laughed. Others sobbed, or snarled, or screeched or screamed.
    Watching them, I realised there was one category they could all fit into. One word that could be used to describe them all:
    Hideous.
    Tears ran down my cheeks as I turned away and slunk down behind the rocks. What had happened? The church, the street – probably even the whole village – had been turned into some twisted, hellish version of itself, but how? And where was Ameena? Was she here somewhere, too?
    All those questions. So many questions which I couldn’t answer.