Jack Bosco was old and proud, a veteran of a World War, he wore his Navy medals in the house with pride and they dangled above his heart like a pageant of old-fashioned glory and honour.
He'd fought for King and Country on his ship; a patriotic gunner who had dodged the enemy salvos, loaded the eager barrels, dreamt of getting married and puked as his mates were blown apart, scattered in the water like mad confetti.
With Lady Luck on his side and We'll Meet Again echoing in his bruised eardrums, he'd made it back, just, to Blighty and was demobbed in '46.
A sensible and gracious man, Jack had married his childhood sweetheart Elspeth, also demobbed from naval service and given her everything she'd ever wanted, which wasn't much really, but above all he'd given her his undying love and affection. Together they enjoyed a frugal but happy life and had two lovely children and four precious grandchildren.
Living within their means always and eschewing the latest fads and trends, Jack had worked at the GPO after the war and had remained loyal to them ever since, right up until his retirement, when he and Elspeth, a lifelong mother and housewife, had for the only time splashed out and enjoyed a beautiful cruise along the serene fjords of Norway for their 60th wedding anniversary, a return to the exciting waters of their naval training.
It had been the holiday of a lifetime and shortly afterwards Elspeth had sadly passed away. As per her wishes she was buried at sea, his parcelled love drifting to Heaven, leaving Jack alone in their small detached pre-war red-brick house at the end of Honey Blossom Lane, where they had lived happily for 65 years. The Queen had even written them a letter of congratulations as they celebrated their Diamond Wedding. He was alone there now in his own prism.
Now in his 90's, Jack had felt the burden of solitude for a whole lonely decade and had keenly missed his beloved Elspeth every single day. The pain was palpable and he felt lost in the home they had both fought to create, both nearly died for as teenagers to forge the liberty needed to give them and their children the room to be free and battled to give them the very air that they breathed, they and all that followed.
Their two children had emigrated years ago, taking their grandchildren with them and had lived a splendid life on the coast of Auckland. He and Elspeth had visited twice in their younger days and spent a glorious month each time with their kith and kin under the warming sun of the New Zealand spring.
One grandchild had returned to England, their granddaughter Annie. She'd had a family of her own, sadly a way away in Northumbria and too far for either her to visit her Grandfather often.
And so Jack, still independent of body and mind, had resigned himself to a simple life of peace and quiet alone in the winter of his life at the end of the lane. And he sensed that with each passing season the world around him was growing ever more alien, confusing and downright hostile.
Despite trying not to, he found he had to engage with the outside in order to get his pension, pay his bills and keep his house. But what had once been a relatively basic process, involving face to face transactions at the Post Office and the Bank, had morphed into faceless, impersonal phone calls talking to a variety of machines.
Elspeth would have been better at it he knew; calmer, less erratic and certainly not as flustered. Annie was no doubt like her but she lived miles away near Lindisfarne, where Christianity had rooted on the mainland like filaments of God, the God Jack and Elspeth had held dear and the God for whom they'd braved the oceans and faced the tumult of war.
Jack watched the world from his bedroom window and saw slovenly youths gathering across the road, smoking, swearing, pissing and shitting in his front garden and throwing their greasy refuse over his hedge: chip wrappers, burger boxes, chewing gum and sometimes filthy condoms, wet and slimy, were stuffed through his letterbox, their lazy seed congealing on his mat.
He hated those youths.
Yes, he'd been one too, of course, but it was a different time back then.
Jack had been a well-mannered boy, who helped his parents and his neighbours in a street, where no-one had anything yet shared everything they had. Honour, grace, kindness and rationed food were given freely. Humble and civilised, the salt of the free earth they were.
Yes, things were so very different then.
These boys in the street had it made, everything on a plate and what did they choose to do with their gifts of freedom? Squander it on drugs, booze and backyard sex. Even worse, they were mean, selfish and seemingly as dim as dodos.
What the hell had happened?
Jack was pained and perplexed.
Where had it all gone so wrong, the truth and justice he and Elspeth had donated their youth for, sacrificed their tender teens to the carnage of a war, where millions of their sacred peers had sacrificed their lives.
These modern kerb-shagging rattling streaks of piss were a stain on his generation's hard-won honour, a blemish on the sun-lit glory of the nation's greatest triumph and a hardening carcinogenic growth beneath the sheen of Jack's medals.
The evening news, which he had watched religiously over decades, was descending into a maelstrom of incomprehensible royal scandals, gender bending childhoods, a myriad failed states, egotistical billionairing, a slide into nuclear doom and injustice after injustice after ....
The old gunner was angry, angrier than ever, a red-hot anger hammered in the silos of unfathomable bitterness, disappointment and grief.
The phone calls made things worse. Council Tax talk with robots, electricity bill chatter with a cyborg and pension blather with a droid bleeping and repeating "Sorry, I don't quite get that!".
Jack got nowhere fast and the smartphone Annie had set up for him added to the sense that he lived on another planet.
When the tax office quibbled his inheritance from Elspeth, years after the event, they asked Jack to take a photo of his face using his mobile, in decent light without his glasses, making sure to keep his ancient hands still, place his smartphone on his invalid passport and stand his expired driving licence on top of them like a tech-glaced cherry. Absolutely none of it worked and after the local tax man Mr. Balony, demanded all of it back and rendering the old man entirely penniless, in an unstoppable fit of rage, Jack threw his phone across the room, where it connected with his favourite photo of his beloved wife and smashed the glass to smithereens, the portrait of Elspeth shredded forever.
That was the last straw. Broken and belittled, he let himself go.
Jack stopped eating properly, he lost weight, the house suffered badly and refuse began to deposit and smell awful. Rubbish and old food accumulated in all the rooms. Mould bloomed on the ceilings, a black, glistening stain expanding into every nook of the once pristine red-brick house.
The inquisitive spores reached Jack himself, now sedentary and a gelatinous layer of fungus and filth began to evolve across his body. He'd abandoned bathing altogether and toileted wherever he could find some space in the impossibly cluttered confines. The interior reeked to high heaven of a growing slick of shit, piss, rotten meat, fluid and mildew.
Soon there was little boundary between the pressing midden of his home and Jack himself, both now a single dreadful morass of wet putrescence.
The thing that was once Jack slithered within the quivering detritus, a hateful grub slowly consuming any necrotic proteins clinging to the floor with his red puckering mouth.
This was no longer the old sailor, rather a colloidal tumour within the pit, a despicable and ravenous man-mould, a grex.
The only vestige of his former humanity were his war medals, shivering on the jellied surface of his mass like yesterday's washing and slowly falling away.
Through hearing probosci the Jack slime heard laughter through the front window.
It coagulated on the sill and peered outside, where to his absolute and barely human horror he saw the yobs from across the street terrorising a young woman.
"You the old bastards daughter?" Yelled one.
"Fit ain't ya!" Slurred another clutching a bottle of cheap cider.
"Show us your tits like!" Grunted another as he pushed her over the bonnet of her Punto and began to rifle under her jumper.
It was when she screamed for help, for her Grandad to help her that the Jack thing knew who it was for sure.
His granddaughter Annie.
An all-consuming crescendo of fury convulsed through the quaking man-slime and with herculean amoebic power it pushed through the window glass with ease, the frame and pane splintering to a thousand shards and burst into the front garden like a gigantic ulcer.
"What the fuck is that?" Screamed the teen with his trousers down.
"Christ fuckin' knows!" Shrieked another getting on his bike.
"Quick, get the fuck outta ......"
The youth's warning was cut short by viscous cilla wrenching him from his Raleigh, the moving fungal mass now completely smothering him.
The other three watched in terror as their friend writhed within the thing, screaming for his life as the hungry vessels of the creature dissolved his defenceless skin and quickly absorbed his twitching muscles, guts and naked bones.
They howled in desperation as the monster turned towards them, sliding across the road with impossible speed and folding over the boys like a wave of lethal semen, taking them in and melting away their soft wet flesh and marrow until there was nothing left but fillings.
Undulating with satisfaction, the being squelched to face Annie by the car, buttoning up her cardigan.
She screamed and screamed but then went still, as the creature had simply stopped a few feet in front of her, stationary, bubbling.
It was then that Annie noticed the medals, her Grandfather's prized possessions, hanging off the glutinous frontage of the thing.
"Grandad?"
The slime shook as if nodding and slowly sent out a long thin jettison of gel towards the woman, a fungal arm holding the clasp of medals.
Realising she was being offered them she hesitantly took the objects with her hand.
A tiny globule of wet material touched her fingers and she at once knew that this pitiful pile before her had once been her grandfather Jack, the valiant sailor who came back from the war.
The unctuous heap seemed to bow before it's granddaughter and Annie was certain a tear had formed and fallen from its bulging face.
"Oh Grandad, what have they done to you?"
The bulk stared at Annie as she wept. It shivered and turned, where it slid rapidly down the street towards the centre.
In its waning humanity, the erstwhile Jack, driven by the animus of raw hatred, fingered it's way to the tax office in the town, where it would linger a while with that fiscal fucker Balony and from there his final sentient wish was simply to reach the unchanging ebb and flow of the reliable river and in that unending truth of the ocean from their youth, re-join his beloved wife,
His Elspeth.
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