Authors: Nathan Kuzack
How could this have happened? There was just no way. No way! It had to be a dream. A nightmare.
He surrendered to the urge to lie down. This bed was where he’d always felt safe and warm and cocooned from the world, but there was no warmth or sense of safety to be found here now, only the memory of them. He felt exhausted. Maybe if he fell asleep he’d wake up and things would be back the way they were. The way they should be.
He never knew how long he slept, nor even if he’d slept at all. It felt as if he’d closed his eyes for just a moment, but something told him an indefinably longer period of time had passed. What he was sure of was that, when his eyes opened again, his mother was standing in the doorway. She was barefoot in a white silk nightgown, hovering there like an apparition, her slept-upon hair forming a tangled frame about her starkly pale face.
He leapt up from the bed, his heart pounding.
“Mum!” he cried. “Oh, Jesus Christ! Thank God! I thought you were dead, I thought…”
His voice trailed off. She wasn’t hearing him. It didn’t look like she was seeing him either. Her stare was fixed ahead, into the mid-distance, piercing straight through him. At the same time, her lips were moving as if to form words, but none were audible; in their place was a soft whimpering that sounded like it was coming from the back of her throat.
It must be some kind of shock, he thought.
She looked about ready to topple over, so he grabbed an arm to steady her. She didn’t respond to his touch.
“What is it?” he said. “Mum? Tell me: what’s wrong?”
He leaned in close, attempting to make out what she was trying to say. After a few seconds, the words started to become clear: she was saying “why me?” over and over as if it were a mantra.
Why me? Why me? Why me?
Her hands moved slowly up to his chest, the backs of her hands grazing the lapels of his jacket.
“What do you mean?” he asked her. “I don’t know what you mean, ‘why me?’”
A clarity suddenly crystallised in her eyes, as if she’d only just realised he was standing before her. Her chanting ceased, she stared at him with all the blank pitilessness of a masked executioner surveying the condemned, and David passed through a surreal moment when it seemed as if everything – the cy-vi alert in the news last night, the inoperative technology, the motorway with its clutter of cars and their mannequin-like occupants – had been one big, carefully orchestrated practical joke; a joke solely on him, the culmination of which was this crucial moment, when his mother would deliver some clever punchline and everyone – his father and the people lying in the streets and the passengers sitting limply in their cars – would come back to life, the machines would start working again and they could all, at last, begin to laugh about it.
The moment when all that somehow seemed possible came and went as her cold fingers touched his neck and she spoke, without a trace of emotion, words he never thought he’d hear coming from her lips.
“
You dir - ty … fuck - ing … dead - head.
”
The voice wasn’t hers, but it was the eyes that were the giveaway. They told him everything. There was nothing left of his mother in them, for behind them she was gone too, deleted from existence. Now her body was just a soulless shell, its moving mass of corrupted cells no more than a vehicle for the weapon of mass destruction that had ended its rightful owner’s life. His mother was gone, and standing in her place was a member of the living dead. A walking corpse. A
zombie
. Reanimated not by witchcraft, but by the technological trickery placed inside it centuries ago.
A vice of utter horror seized him in its foul jaws. He was looking into the eyes an unknowable non-entity, one whose deranged impulses and unfettered amorality would be enough to make the angels weep, putting lie to the notion that God would never turn his back on man.
There had been many cybernetic viruses before (“cy-vi” was the abbreviation favoured by tech firms and the media; most people just used the generic “virus”), but never one as devastating as this. It travelled on radio wave-borne data streams, radiating out from its point of origin like a silent blast wave, circumnavigating the globe via satellite in a matter of minutes. It gained access to anything with an uplink for updating software (which was just about every piece of modern technology), skating past computerised systems’ sophisticated defences as if they weren’t even there, rendering each system inoperable before transmitting itself onward to the next.
It didn’t spare the technology human beings had placed inside themselves. The virus leapt from one cybernetic brain to the next at the speed of light. Once infected, the computer systems that had been designed to enhance and prolong human lives ended them instead. With digital dispassion, commands were given telling hearts to stop beating and lungs to cease breathing. Centuries-long lifetimes were wiped from memories.
By the time anyone realised the scale of what was happening it was too late. There was no stopping the virus; the brainware in people’s heads, powered by the body’s own bioelectricity, could not be switched off.
Mankind had software-engineered its own downfall.
Outside it was raining; not heavily, but probably enough to keep them off the streets. They didn’t like the rain. He wondered what sort of processes were going on in their infected brains, pulsing through their nanotechnological neurons and synthetic synapses on a microscopic level, yet just as unfathomable now as the vast universe itself. Was their aversion to rain related to memories from their former lives? Was it a programmed response? A survival instinct? Did they even have memories of their former lives, or had they all been deleted? Then he remembered what his mother had called him and thought, yes, some things they remembered. Or, at least, some of them remembered some things. There were patterns to be deduced in the way they behaved, even though sometimes, just when he thought he’d learned something about them for sure, along came one of their number to buck the trend. He could never be sure-footed when dealing with zombies. The voids in his knowledge were like hidden sinkholes underfoot, the ground ready to crumble and swallow him up if he didn’t keep running, didn’t keep learning. To become complacent about such a thing would have been more than merely dangerous. He needed to understand the bastards the same way he needed food for sustenance: it was essential if he wanted to survive.
Often he wondered what they saw; or, rather,
how
they saw. Having never had first-hand experience of cyberneticism, it was difficult for him to imagine what it was like. Trillions of nanotechnological cells coursed throughout a cybernetic’s body, all coordinated and controlled by brainware, the cybernetic equivalent of computer software. To him, the only way he could imagine the end user experience of this was to imagine having his mobile computer inside his head, only with levels of integration and capacity he could scarcely dream of. His mobile was an incredibly powerful device, able to pull off a multitude of tricks, but it was nothing in comparison to brainware. But now the virus had taken over, what did they see in their field of vision? Were the same old readouts and functions still there, or were they corrupted into gibberish? And what had the virus done to so radically change the look of their eyes? Did it affect the way they perceived the world?
David stood motionless at his bedroom window for a long while, watching the rain come down and mulling over other questions that plagued him. Why had only some of them become zombies? And why were there more males than females? As far as he could tell, the majority of people had simply died when they’d been infected, never to move again, rotting away wherever the virus had struck them down. But others – the ones he saw walking around – lingered on. They had been
reanimated
. They moved around, doing unspeakable things, not rotting, and yet they didn’t seem to have heartbeats or normal circulatory systems. It didn’t make any sense.
But how was he supposed to work it out? A lowly clerk in an insurance company. More than that, he was surely the person most ill-equipped to deal with a tragic end-of-civilization event there was. An acybernetic: that was the kind word for him; there were a plethora of unkind ones and he’d heard them all. If it was down to him to work it out then all hope really was lost. As if to exacerbate the situation, it often took a huge mental effort for him to focus on any one thing. His senses seemed less acute than before, as if dulled by a veil that had slipped between himself and the rest of the world the day the sickness had swept across the earth. This veil – ethereal though it was – felt very real. It billowed and moved and sometimes appeared to be less dense, but it was always there. He suspected the veil was a symptom of depression, prompting the addition of antidepressants to the list of items he was eager to find during his searches of the city. The end of the world could be such a downer. Who’d have thought it?
He checked his watch. It was 10:30 a.m. All this trying to think was just a delaying tactic, and he knew it. It was no use, however; the rain wasn’t showing any signs of abating. He turned from the window and started getting his outdoor gear together.
* * *
He went in a direction he hadn’t gone in for a while: north along Alexandra Road, then left onto Grove Green Road. Dogs barked intermittently in the distance. Former domestic pets ran wild now – those that had survived. And they weren’t alone. The genetic anti-ageing of non-endangered animals had long been banned, as had animal cyberneticism, but that hadn’t stopped black markets thriving in both. Some people simply hadn’t been able to bear the thought of being separated from their four-legged friends, meaning the city was now dotted with a small, and mercifully ever-dwindling, menagerie of zombified pets.
He walked with his hood down (it was too restrictive, both visually and aurally), but with a baseball cap on to protect him from the rain, which was halfway between a drizzle and a downpour, its trajectory perfectly vertical due to the lack of wind. The sound of it was preferable to the city’s silence or the dogs’ chorus, even if it did increase his vulnerability, and therein lay the unavoidable trade-off: fewer zombies on the streets versus a greater chance of not hearing one approach. Sometimes the sound of rain could be more than merely distracting: it could be nerve-jangling too, dripping and echoing in the innocuous stillness of the city in a way he could never have experienced before the apocalypse.
Grove Green Road seemed to stretch on for ever. Now he remembered why he didn’t come in this direction very often: there were fewer shops this way. He really ought to try more houses. Despite everything, he still felt uneasy about breaking into other people’s homes, even though there was no one to know about it, let alone complain. The reminders of lives suddenly erased in mid-flow made some houses as eerie as the
Mary Celeste –
either that or they tugged at the heartstrings in ways he liked to kid himself he was inured to. As stoic as he’d become since the calamity, it was hard not to notice a child’s jigsaw puzzle left half finished, or the remains of a party not yet cleared up, or a handwritten card –
many happy returns, love so-and-so
– so certain of a future that wasn’t to be. Picking over it all just felt wrong. It was sifting through the detritus of lives people had been cheated out of. Stealing from the stolen from.
You have a conscience, he thought. Don’t feel bad about it.
But there was another reason why he preferred shops to houses: they were less likely to contain decomposing bodies – festering, fly-harried, rat-gnawed, bird-pecked masses, the stink of which alone was enough to prevent him from searching a house properly, or even from entering it in the first place. Often they were barely recognisable as human, and he chose not to regard them as such, though this demanded a constant mental effort that was draining on him. Most of those he saw were lying in bed or sitting in cars, though some were contorted into strange poses, frozen in place by rigor mortis, as if something terrible had gripped them in their final moments. Once he’d tried wearing an old World War Two-era gas mask in an effort to combat the smell, but the noisy, claustrophobia-inducing contraption had been more irritant than aid.
Presently he came upon one house whose front door was, for some reason, wide open. There was no food in the kitchen whatsoever, but he found some toilet rolls and a couple of paperback books he liked the look of in the downstairs toilet. In the dining room a circular dining table was laid out neatly with crockery and cutlery, chairs spaced perfectly around it, the perfection of the whole thing destroyed only by one thing: one of the chairs had been overturned. For some reason, the sight of this bothered him, causing him to stare at the chair for a long while, studying it closely as if it were a coded message he’d been tasked with decrypting. Eventually, he righted the chair and placed in its proper position beside the others, stepping back to admire his handiwork. Only then did he realise why it had bothered him: it had spoken more eloquently of unexplained disaster than the sight of a mouldering cadaver. Without making a sound, he returned the chair to its original position on the floor. He didn’t venture beyond the ground floor; the reek of death was wafting down the stairs.
Back on the street he skirted the area of a melting corpse and took a left onto Elm Road. He couldn’t remember if he’d been in this direction before and thought about checking the
A to Z
, but the rain put him off. He’d look at it under cover somewhere if he needed to. He ignored the tree-lined side streets (except to see if they were free of zombies) and kept walking straight on.
On the next corner, where Elm Road became Richmond Road, there was an old house. Four storeys high, cylindrical in shape and made of granitic stone, it was completely separate from its terraced surroundings, and stood out like a grand old lighthouse perched in the middle of a hostile sea. He was drawn to the place immediately, and gaining entry was easy: each pane of glass on the front door shattered at first blow, allowing him to reach in and undo the locks.