Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (23 page)

I left the car, making sure I locked it up, and headed towards the black maw of the alley. Straggly bushes, like clasping skeletal fingers, had stretched across the entrance, forming a natural barrier that I was forced to duck beneath. It was dark in there, the solitary streetlamp shedding no light. Had it been sabotaged, or was I just tapping into that vein of paranoia and distrust? I stepped gently along the length of the alley, expecting dark shapes to jump out in front of me, their slack limbs waving at me, blanched hands grabbing for my throat…

But I reached the other end without incident, and found myself in a small square surrounded by shabby box-like cluster homes that had probably been grafted onto the estate in the mid 1970s. I registered movement at the periphery of my vision, and spun around to face whatever had caused it; a dark blur slipped away into another narrow alley, followed by two more. It was them, the same lurching figures I’d seen that night.

I followed, keeping to the edge of the square, hugging the rough outlines of privet bushes and lopsided garden walls. The figures were turning right at the other end of the alley, and I waited until they were out of sight before following any further. My heart beat double-time and my mouth went very dry; I felt afraid yet exhilarated.
I was doing something.

I stalked the men through the estate––I could now tell that they were male by the clothing that I glimpsed beneath the muted orange glow cast by the few working sodium lights: hooded sweatshirts, baseball caps, gaudy tracksuits. They shambled through labyrinthine passages and beneath arched stone walkways, never speaking, not even glancing at one another. I treaded oh so softly, but still the crumbling concrete beneath my feet seemed to mock me: shifting like tectonic plates as I walked and crunching loudly in the heavy silence of deep night. The men didn’t hear me; the forces of good seemed to be on my side.

The vast night sky pressed down on me like a huge sheet of black ice, threatening to trap me in the moment until I could be discovered shivering in the pale dawn. Stars blinked out one by one, like heavenly lamps being switched off. The men entered a boxy flat somewhere near the heart of the estate, not far from those glowering grey tower blocks that watched dispassionately from so many broken and boarded windows far above. I hid in a garden in sight of the flat, and waited for inspiration.

Much later I woke without even realizing that I’d nodded off. I was cold and my lips were beginning to chap. The estate was in total darkness, and I estimated the time to be well into the ungodly early hours. The sky was still pitch-black, but the stars had turned themselves back on. I let go of the hedge that I’d been cuddling, and climbed over the low garden wall, making no sound and feeling justifiably proud of my stealth. Not once did I stop to ask myself what I was doing; I didn’t even pause to think of what might happen to Tanya and Jude if any foul deed befell me. I was focused, determined to do what was right.

I inched across to the building the men had entered. It was a ground floor flat, with dirty net curtains barely visible through the crudely whitewashed windows. The small front garden was weed-choked and littered with empty beer cans, takeaway wrappers, clots of old food. I spotted a thin strip of flagstone walkway along one side of the building, and followed it round to the back. The rear door stood ajar, hanging from rusty hinges. Obviously security wasn’t a priority here; but, saying that, they were safe on their own ground, surrounded by their own people, so probably felt no need to lock doors and bolt windows.

I pushed open the door, and waited for the squeal of those hinges. It didn’t come; the door swung silently open on a vaporous cloud of dust to reveal a messy galley kitchen that led onto a cluttered hallway with mildewed cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. To the right of this hallway was another door, this one a homemade affair constructed from thick lengths of timber and painted a dull yellow. I rode my luck, expecting this door to be unlocked too. It was, so I opened it.

A steep concrete staircase led down into a fathomless darkness; as I stepped down I briefly questioned my actions then pushed the thought away. I was acting on pure impulse now, shutting off my mind and going with my gut instinct. If I stopped, I would panic: if I panicked, I would bolt––probably drawing attention to my presence in the process. All I needed was one look, a single glimpse into what I knew must be the control room of this sinister organization. Then I could go to the police armed with proof, and bolstered by the knowledge that I wasn’t imagining some convoluted conspiracy and these people actually existed.

The stairs led into a large basement, and it was blacker than night down there; there was no natural illumination, and I doubted that I would find a light switch even if I were foolish enough to try. So I walked into the gloom, so afraid by now that I couldn’t halt my momentum, like a man running full-tilt down a very steep incline. I was simply a series of actions, with little thought behind them.

Soon I was lost in the dark, unable to even guess at which direction was out. After a while I began to see shapes form out of the darkness: sketchy figures propped against the seeping black walls. There was no sound in there but that of my own ragged breathing, so I knew that the figures were corpses; immediately after this realization, I became certain that they were the bodies stolen from the morgue. I slowly counted the outlines that sat slumped against the bowing brickwork: there were six of them.
Half a dozen.

My feet slipped on the slimy earthen floor as I advanced further into the room, looking for an object to take away with me as solid evidence. Something crunched loudly underfoot, and I pitched sideways in a clumsy fall. As I went down my right hand pushed against, then slid off some vaguely familiar shape on the floor. My fingers poked into moist holes, and I felt teeth rattle against my wedding ring. A face. There was a face on the floor.

I looked down, unable to help myself. Blind eyes stared back at me, an open mouth yawning emptily into the chill air of the room. It was only then that I realized I’d been walking on the dead all along; mutilated bodies lay in a thick carpet of decay on the basement floor, and as my eyes at last became accustomed to the darkness I realized that not one of them was Caucasian. I was lying on a crust of murdered immigrants.

And that was when I saw al-hakim. Or rather what was left of him. The top half of his torso stood upright amid a heap of severed limbs to my immediate left, his torn face sporting what were obviously teeth marks. Bleached bone showed through like plastic where hungry mouths had scooped out hunks of his wrinkled golden brown cheeks.

I looked again at those six immobile figures that leaned against the wall, at their lurid sports casuals and stained Burberry baseball caps. Something strained at the centre of my mind, a thought that couldn’t quite escape its cage. And then they moved. The bodies. All six of them, twitching and jerking like marionettes as they attempted to get to their feet. But still not breathing, not any of them. They were dead; but they moved. Towards me.

It was only then that I managed to regain control of my senses, and ran blindly across the corpse-layered floor, looking for an exit. The figures reached for me as I fled, loose white fingers groping for my living flesh, but I kicked them away, screaming now and not caring who heard. It was only through blind luck that I stumbled upon the stairs, my flailing hands bashing against the chipped concrete and three fingers breaking against the jagged treads. I climbed them in a blind frenzy, wanting only to get out. To be away from that place and those things…

Nobody accosted me on my way back to the car; it was as if I didn’t matter, they didn’t care what I’d seen because nobody would believe me anyway. I sat behind the wheel for an hour, just waiting and watching the greasy sun struggle up from the eastern rim of the world. If they wanted to silence me, they had only to come for me. As I sat there attempting to set my broken fingers I thought about how easy it would be to steal a few corpses, especially if the authorities were in on it. And I thought about what it might take to raise the resentful dead. To focus all the rage and the bitterness, the hostility and xenophobia that exists at street level to something higher, something darker. Call it urban magic, ghetto voodoo.

If you could bring back the dead you could do anything, even use the undead puppets at your command to cleanse your town, your country, and whip up even more crude bigotry and warped nationalism along the way. Dress them up in England shirts and tracksuit bottoms, and send them out to feast on the foreign invaders, to
consume before we are consumed.

When I finally started the engine a watercolor dawn was smearing itself across the steel-grey sky. Curtains were opening in windows on the estate––early risers getting ready to face the new day. As I drove back to my family, to my own imperfect little world, I knew that I wouldn’t ever fully understand what I’d seen. But what exactly had I seen? Even now, eighteen months later, I cannot be fully sure. But I’m certain that it’s still out there, in some form or another, perhaps biding its time in some fetid basement darkness, growing angry and hungry and waiting to be unleashed.

It was only when I arrived home that I realized they––whoever
they
are––had known about me all along. They must have been monitoring me, waiting to see how much I would learn. Someone must have tipped them off about my interest in the disappearance of al-hakim. Perhaps it was Claire, consuming before she herself was consumed by whatever the fuck stalks in darkness. I just don’t know. I’m not sure of anything anymore; I don’t even know what is real and what exists only in my mind.

The front door was ajar, and as I walked into the hallway my heart stopped beating. I felt dead; as dead as those things that must have come lurching through the twilight towards everything that I held dear.

Tanya was lying face down on the stairs, her left arm stretched out before her as if she’d been reaching towards something upstairs. The nursery. The back of her head was red and matted, the ivory bone of her skull showing through in patches. I didn’t turn her over; didn’t want to see the expression on her face. I looked up, towards the upstairs landing. The bathroom door had been kicked in; it hung from its hinges like a bomb had gone through it. I felt my body move, taking each stair as if it were a mile high. I knew what I would find when I walked into the nursery, and I wanted to delay the sight as long as I could; forever, if that was possible.

Tears streaked my face, but my throat was too constricted to release any sound. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see, but still I had to ascend and acknowledge what had happened. As I stepped onto the landing carpet, I imagined Tanya moving behind me, raising her head and opening her mouth to reveal a gaping darkness at the centre of her. Lifting herself to her feet and shambling up after me.

But that didn’t happen; not yet. Hopefully, it never will.

By the time the police found me cradling Jude’s cold, cold body in my warm hands, the tears had finally stopped. The world spun around me like some mad, gaudy carousel, and I could sense things hiding in the shadows of the world. I looked up at the uniformed officers, and had a vague recollection of summoning them with the mobile phone that now lay on the floor under Jude’s crib. I looked at my daughter’s pale face, smiled at her and wished her pleasant dreams and prayed to God that her sleep would last forever.

I told the police officers about the house in Wishwell––of course I did; but it was no use. They didn’t see what I had. The apocalypse in the cellar was still there, although nothing else remained but the images in my mind. Their colleagues had probably been there first, hastily shepherding those un-breathing things into the back of a van and relocating them to somewhere else in the depths of the estate.

I didn’t do it: I didn’t kill my all of those people. But nobody will believe me, not the police, the psychologists, or the friends that have deserted me since my arrest. I miss my family, my babies. They would have believed me.

And somewhere out there––in the shithole squalor of a broken-down housing estate––it’s still happening. I read the newspapers with interest, specifically the stories of attacks on foreigners. Last week, an Asian child went missing. The week before that, it was a Serbian mother of three. It’s started again.

It’s getting dark outside, and nights are the worst. That’s when I hear uneven shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside my cell, and hear my name whispered, as if by the wind.

Muddy Waters

BRIAN KNIGHT

The big man was not photogenic; he was a conglomeration of sun burnt scalp, greasy red facial hair, and sallow, liver spotted skin. Mona watched the tape, listening to her questions and his grunted, mumbled replies with a mixture of awe and disgust. After the interview he had grabbed her ass and asked her out.

She would use the footage anyway, it leant her piece the rustic roughness it needed. It was only a five minute story, and not even a lead, but she meant to upstage KLUTV’s star reporter, the bitch Susan Potter, every chance she got until the producers either promoted her for her efforts, or she got a better offer.

Her crude interviewee, a saw shop owner named Harris Baugh, stood beside the seldom traveled highway outside the little town of Pierce, Idaho, next to the narrow dirt side road and a sign that said
Campbell’s Pond - 5 Miles
. All around them was the green of Spruce and Pine, supported by a thick base of Huckleberry bushes and other underbrush. The narrow road to Campbell’s Pond was like a dim corridor into nowhere. Above them the sky was gray with clouds, it had rained only minutes after the conclusion of her interview with Baugh, who was returning from a fishing trip at the pond when they talked him into the interview.

“It ain’t a natural pond,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows for sure how it got there, but legend has it old Preacher Campbell did it in the early eighteen hundreds when Pierce was called Oro-fino City.” Baugh turned from the camera, stared down the shaded pond road, eyes narrowed and beard bristling. “His old church house is still out in the woods, there’s a trail that goes to it, but folks around here mostly leave it alone.”