Authors: Nathan Kuzack
The fox trotted off into a nearby alleyway. David watched it go, feeling an ineffable affection for the animal.
The world belongs to you now, he thought.
* * *
That afternoon he was woken from his nap by the sound of wild shouting and grunting going on outside. Bleary-eyed and foggy-headed, he got up and went over to the window. The first things he noticed were two bare buttocks, the pelvis they were attached to thrusting to and fro, beneath a grubby white T-shirt. The zombie the buttocks belonged to was instantly recognisable: Everard. The creature had bent another zombie – a male – over a hip-height garden wall and was busy having sex with it. Only the other zombie’s pulled-down pyjama bottoms and its arms were clearly visible as it flailed about helplessly.
David watched in a kind of stupor, feeling vaguely aghast. So Everard was a rapist. He didn’t know why he should be surprised. Everard stomped around with a permanent erection; it stood to reason he’d put to it use. Besides, rape was nothing compared to what they were capable of. As if he’d just read his mind, Everard grabbed a handful of the other zombie’s hair, yanked its head back and bit into the side of its neck. The zombie snarled and cried out, though not in pain. It was curiously like watching two big cats mating. But there it was: the thing that made them so despicable, that had cemented in his mind his view of them as zombies, as “thing” or “it” rather than “he” or “she”.
Their desire for human flesh.
He guessed it was a primitive instinct, a residue of their former lives, that drove them to seek out sustenance, and with the morphers out of commission they had turned to a food source that was in such plentiful supply it was unavoidable: the dead. The dead and each other, which were essentially the same thing.
He’d resisted the notion of calling them zombies at first. They didn’t exactly fit the description of zombies he had in his imagination, and, besides, zombies were for B-moviemakers and superstitious believers in the occult. But what else could you call them? “The undead” called to mind
Dracula
and countless other vampire tales; “revenants” smacked of a grandeur they didn’t possess and certainly didn’t deserve; “walking corpses” was two syllables too long.
He went through to the living room and put some music on before making himself a coffee in the kitchen. The cat mewed for food, but was only trying its luck; it wasn’t feeding time yet.
As he drank, he thought about the zombies. If sexual intercourse was going on between them – rape or otherwise – would they fall pregnant? No child licences were being issued now, but would that make a blind bit of difference anyway? What about women who’d been pregnant when the virus struck, and had gone on to become zombies? It didn’t bear thinking about. He’d yet to see a pregnant zombie and he prayed he never would.
When he returned to the bedroom window an hour later there was no sign of Everard or the other zombie.
* * *
His mind active with thoughts about his failure with the gun, he lay awake in bed that night for a long time.
Eventually he drifted into sleep that was shallow and restless, waking long before dawn with an erection so persistent and bothersome that he masturbated himself just to be rid of it.
Afterwards he fell almost at once into a deep and dream-filled slumber.
Her eyes somehow managed to look vacant and hate-filled at the same time. He’d never seen such a look on his mother’s face – nor on anybody’s face. He staggered backwards, away from her, grabbing at the hands around his neck. She went with him, her mouth half open to reveal the pristine white enamel of her teeth, her eyes gleaming like two sapphires set in a bloodless face. He tried to prise her hands away, but it was no use; the amount of force he was using was too small. He was trying not to harm her, regardless of the fact that she wouldn’t feel it if he did. Virus or no virus, she still looked like his mother, and he couldn’t harm her. He
couldn’t
.
Bracing himself, apologising to her mentally, he pulled forcefully on her arms. They came away, but instantly they latched onto his tie and pulled downwards, cinching the silk tightly around his neck like a hangman’s noose, her strength aided by gravity and the weight of her body. For a second he was too stunned to do anything. Then he grasped her hands. They were hard and cold like windblown stone, and clung to his tie as if it were a lifeline, her purchase on it the only thing separating her from an imminent demise. Subconsciously he cursed himself for opting to wear a tie this morning.
He tried to move away from her again, and at the same moment she barged into him, the momentum sending them plunging backwards into the mirrored wardrobes. A crunch told him the mirror had broken, and the back of his head screamed in agony. Her limpet-like hold on the tie was unrelenting; it tightened further, its knot pushing against his Adam’s apple. She was choking him. Trying to kill him. With his own tie.
My own mother!
The woman who’d given him life was trying to take it away again, like a dreadful mistake she was desperate to correct.
He slid down the shattered door, barely noticing the shards of mirror falling to the floor on either side of him, horrified by the look on her white, wraithlike face as much as anything else. On the floor, their hands locked in a struggle for possession of the tie, he brought one leg up and placed the sole of his foot against her chest. Slowly, he pushed her away with his foot, but her grip on the tie remained steady, and he only succeeded in increasing the tension on it. Now he was choking in earnest, and strange starbursts started appearing in his field of vision. If this went on much longer he would lose consciousness. There was nothing else for it, no other option.
Acting half on instinct, he brought his leg back as far as he could, readying it like a piston, before releasing it, kicking her hard in the chest. She gave a little grunt as the air was knocked from her lungs and went reeling backwards, losing her grip on the tie. The kick had been more forceful than he’d anticipated and he wondered if he’d broken any of her ribs, straight away feeling a bolt of remorse, but the relief when she’d let go of the tie had been just as instantaneous. He grabbed at it frantically, trying to undo it, but its knot was now so incredibly small and tight the only way he’d get the damn thing off would be by cutting it.
Distracted, thinking she couldn’t possibly recover that fast, he almost didn’t notice in time when she came at him again. She’d picked up a large shard of mirror the shape of a scalene triangle, and by the time he managed to grab her its pointed tip was only inches from his face. Her strength astonished him now; it seemed to take every ounce of energy he had to stop her driving the improvised weapon into his face, a face he knew she – his real mother – adored.
Then her eyes started to change. He noticed the whites darkening first, followed closely by the hazel colour draining from the irises. Finally, the cataract-like stains erupted in each pupil, completing a transformation so hypnotically terrifying he almost forgot about the glass shard she was trying to plunge into his face. The centres of her eyes looked as if they were glowing from deep within cylindrical hollows, as bright and hard and lifeless as diamonds, each one outward evidence of the corrupted technology it was bound to.
This isn’t my mum, he thought. She’s dead.
She’s gone
. He hadn’t fully accepted it before, but now he had no option but to let the fact in, to welcome it even, in the face of what was to come. The quasi-robotic thing that was no longer his mother couldn’t be reasoned with, and there was no question it was doing everything in its power to try and kill him. Only one of them could possibly walk out of there.
He was thinking the unthinkable.
He hated the Tube. The questioning looks, the suspicion, the sometimes open hostility. These ten-times-a-week necessities barely given a second thought by the vast majority of people were like mini public trials for him. Trials at which the verdict was always the same: guilty. A long time ago the Tube might have been a safe haven, a relaxing place where he could have become the same as everyone else, but the advent of underground transmitters had put an end to that idea. There was virtually nowhere you could go where ordinary people’s global positioning capabilities didn’t work, allowing them to expose him for what he was. Cybernetics were able to – they called it a human right now – scan their immediate surroundings for other brainware signals. The scan took the form of a readout that materialised in their field of vision, summoned with a thought. It had been intended to be a seldom-used security measure, but a surprisingly large number of paranoiacs kept the readout in view at all times. Of course he, as an acybernetic, didn’t appear on such scans, provoking reactions that ranged from mild curiosity and confusion to outright fear and a flight away from him that was as ungainly as it was unnecessary.
On a chain around his neck he wore a disk announcing that he was a registered non-mon, a term that had its roots in police work and was a contraction of “non-monitorable”. Since brainware recorded everything a person saw, heard and did, once the appropriate search warrant had been obtained anybody could be checked to see if they had committed a crime. They were “monitorable”, and could be “caught red-headed”, as the saying went. Non-mon had originated as a straightforward policing term, but had since become a derogatory label, courtesy of the fact that it lent itself to being said with the tongue rammed into the lower lip, giving the impression of someone who was mentally defective. Depending on how it was pronounced, non-mon joined the long list of insulting names for those with his condition: deadhead, lamebrain, no-brainer, numbskull, brain-dead, a-head, sap (from Homo sapiens).
The monitorial capabilities of brainware had proved to be a boon to crime-fighting, and had been met with a suitably radical solution: tampering with brainware to, in effect, switch it off. The procedure itself – some dubbed it “self-lobotomy”, though more often it was called “going offline” – was fraught with danger, rendered a person susceptible to pain, and was irreversible, meaning it was undertaken only by those who were either desperate to be beyond the law, or who were simply beyond desperate. Brainware gifted a person with far too many benefits to be given up lightly. Elective non-mons were generally hardened criminals, whose crimes were so serious they would have gotten the death penalty if exposed by brainware, or the marginalised on the peripheral tips of society, who felt they had nothing to lose by not conforming to societal norms. As a consequence of all this, people who didn’t know him often presumed he was some sort of criminal, this presumption unaffected by his usual working dress of a suit and tie. Even crims attend funerals, as somebody had once told him.
If it wasn’t the criminal connotations of acyberneticism that scared them it was the perceived link with disease. Cybernetics were so accustomed to the control over illness and infection and pain their brainware afforded them they couldn’t conceive of how a person survived without it. It didn’t matter that he’d never suffered more than a severe cold and a mild case of tonsillitis his entire life; the perception was there, firmly rooted.
Either way – old-style lawbreaker or new-style leper – he was a member of a secretive and discomfiting underworld, and sometimes this could be blackly amusing. When he was in a foul mood he almost enjoyed his phoney bad boy image, staring down wary Tube travellers and jumping queues without fear of confrontation. But other times he wore the disk over his clothing so that it was prominently displayed, feeling the way a Jew wearing their Star of David must have felt in Nazi Germany. Once he’d asked why they couldn’t make him a disk that mimicked a brainware signal, and had been met with a shrug of the shoulders and a retort along the lines of “what’s the point of that?” It was virtually impossible for anyone other than a fellow acybernetic to understand what it was like. He was a different species altogether. A subspecies, to be exact, one the superior race regarded as deviant and distasteful, unenviable and often unemployable.
The train hummed through the Underground, the tunnels’ wall lights streaking past like comets. This morning he’d had the misfortune of taking a seat opposite what was, to him, a distasteful and infuriating spectacle: a couple in love. They sat crammed against each other, hand in hand, conversing without words like a pair of telepaths, smiling and giggling at each other’s transmitted thoughts, the man gifting her every couple of minutes with lingering kisses. There was no telling how old they were, nor how long they’d been together, but it had to be a considerable length of time since the woman was pregnant; couples didn’t stand a chance of being granted a child licence unless their relationship had stood the test of time. David silently fumed, trying to ignore them but failing miserably, willing them to get off the train at every stop. Why the hell hadn’t he noticed the bastards before he’d sat down? It wasn’t the unabashed intimacy on display that made him angry; it was the fact that they had everything he never would: somebody to love and share life with, a child to fuss over as it grew up and carried forth their genetic legacy, the acceptance and peace of mind only being unassailably normal could provide. Above all, a life without shame. And there they were flaunting it all right in front of him without a moment’s thought. They were so blatant about it. He could have quite happily gotten up and knocked their heads together like a pair of cymbals – baby or no baby. He imagined doing such a thing and them continuing to stare and coo at each other, failing to react at all, not even breaking eye contact, as immune to his resentment as they were to the savagery of life. And they wondered why people like him became bitter.
He was glad to finally arrive at his stop, and felt instant relief at being out of their sight. Music blared in his earphones, drowning out the chatter, as he made his way through the bustle of Liverpool Street Station. Outside it was clear-skied and cold. He buttoned his long winter coat, concealing the disk, but he was less conscious of himself here, where there was less chance he’d be picked out of the ever-moving crowds. Even so, he walked quickly, head down, like a scandalised politician eager to avoid the hounding of the press.