Chapter Nine

Something moved in the bushes. Something large and alive. By the pale glow of a single streetlight, Cindy Flabster could see it, and yet not see it at the same time. She hadn’t visited an optician for a number of years, and she knew her sight had deteriorated, but that wasn’t the reason. It was dark. She was tired. The bushes were six metres away, and her blood glucose levels were fluctuating.

She rubbed her eyes and looked again. There it was, unclear and yet visible, in the dense undergrowth behind the street sign. The sign read ‘Clay Hill Road’, and was conveniently printed in block capital letters which, from where Cindy was standing, indicated a precise visual acuity of 6/36. She could read it. But only just.

Her heart-rate increased in the way it did when she climbed a flight of stairs, walked up a hill, or tried to carry too many cakes home from Lidl. To be honest, she only did one of those things on a regular basis, and it wasn’t either of the first two, but nevertheless, her heart was pounding now, and she could feel it.

Cindy reached into her handbag and felt for her personal attack alarm. It wasn’t there. With horror, she realised where it was. Half a mile away, in Basildon town centre, sitting on the counter in Greggs. She’d set it off in the hope of clearing the shop before they sold out of Belgian Buns. It seemed a foolish decision now. She kicked herself. Or she would have done, had it not required physical effort.

Nervously, she searched the bag for something useful: a nail file, scissors, deodorant spray – anything that could be used as a weapon. She found nothing, save for six glacé cherries in an icing-soaked paper bag. She’d read somewhere that fruit acids could harm her tooth enamel, and decided to take no chances.

A noise made her look up sharply. Was it a groan, a growl, or merely the rustling of undergrowth? She stared intently at the bushes in front of her. They moved again, then briefly, tantalisingly, the foliage parted. It was for the briefest of moments, and she caught no more than a glimpse, but Cindy Flabster knew what she saw. At once it seemed both impossible and certain. A reality and a dream. Fact, and yet fiction. She strained her eyes to see through the darkness.

“A cow..?” she whispered, incredulously.

She might be the wrong side of forty, with glaucoma in the family, but she wasn’t blind. The white leathery skin and large black patches could mean only one thing: there was a Friesian in the flowerbed.

She breathed a welcome sigh of relief. A sigh which turned almost immediately to a scream as a blood-curdling howl filled the cold night air. Cindy’s eyes darted left and right. There was nowhere to hide, and God knows, she couldn’t run. At best she could waddle at low speed, preferably downhill. She cursed her decision to go out that night. Why hadn’t she followed her blind mother’s advice and stayed in on the sofa? She could be back there now, watching America’s Next Top Model with a Key Lime Pie and a bun in each hand. Why had she been so stupid?

She knew why. It was greed, pure and simple. Only one thing could persuade her to leave the safety of her sofa on a cold Thursday evening in November. It was the night they chucked out the pre-packed sandwiches round the back of Marks & Spencers.

Cindy Flabster lived for convenience food. And now, she shuddered, would she die for it too? Admittedly, it wasn’t that convenient to spend half an hour in the service road at the back of the shopping precinct with your head in a communal bin, but it sure as hell beat paying for the stuff. She looked down at the three carrier bags of sandwiches at her feet. She could move faster if she left them, but she wasn’t sure her life would be worth living. She reached down to pick them up. A second howl stopped her in her tracks. More guttural, more desperate, and coming straight from the bushes in front of her, which shook violently with every rising decibel.

Cindy’s heart had been pounding before. The only thing now stopping it from leaping out of her chest was a roll of fat, some furred arteries and a bust the size of two airbags. She turned, and fuelled by fear, adrenalin and the six Belgian Buns she’d eaten earlier, she took flight, crossing Clay Hill Road, and heading for the school on the corner.

As she waddled, she heard heavy footsteps behind her, to the left, to the right. She couldn’t tell from which direction they came, as each footfall merged with the pounding of her heart in her mouth. But they came closer with every step and every heartbeat.

Moving at full speed, she could not - dared not - look behind her, but she could hear the voice of her hunter. A deep, animalistic and somehow primitive growl, rasping and spitting, almost mocking with the ease in which it gained on her.

The night was still, and the chase furious, but as she ran, Cindy Flabster felt the waft of a breeze on the back of her neck. It reminded her of the delicate fan with which she cooled herself after one of her increasingly frequent hot flushes. It was almost the last thing she thought. Almost, but not quite.

As Cindy looked ahead to the school gates she was making for, a hulking shape loomed large from the left. It went unseen in her peripheral vision. Closer and closer it came, invisible to the fleeing fatty as she waddled furiously on. Not until the creature was upon her, did a split-second view of her fate register on her retina and travel down her damaged optic nerve. As a cow-coloured figure opened its largest mouth and bit down hard on her neck, one last thought flickered across her brain:

“I should have gone for that free glaucoma check.”