Demise of the Living (11 page)

“
Well, there’s been a
constant to and fro of cars since that explosion, but they’re all
over the place. Doesn’t look like anyone’s got any idea where
they’re going,” John said. “But look, now there’s at least a
hundred of those fuckers down there.” He pointed out the shambling
figures on the road. “See those ones there?”

He singled out a small
group at the end of the street. “Yeah,” Colin said.

“They’ve just all come out of
that apartment block. Came tumbling out all at once, tripping over
each other to get out of the door.”

“Huh.” Colin shrugged.

“
I guess they were
chasing some guy with a backpack who came sprinting out of there
just ahead of them,” John said.

“
Where?” Colin asked,
looking around the street.

“
Oh, he’s long gone,”
John said. “He disappeared round the corner at that end of the
street. A dozen or so of those trancers went wandering after
him.”

John gently nudged the
man next to him with his elbow. “Bet you’re glad you decided not to
go for that walk.”

“Um, yeah,” Colin said. He
hesitated before adding, “I really should have tried to get to the
school. There might be kids waiting there.”

“
You’re kidding, right?”
John said. “What parent would take their precious darlings to the
school with
that
going on outside?”

“
You don’t know the kids
we were supposed to be taking,” Colin said. “Anyway, I guess you’re
right. The headmaster was calling the parents to tell them the trip
was cancelled. I was just going as a precaution.”

“
I used to work with this
guy once. Nice enough, but you knew something wasn’t quite right,”
John said, giving no indication he was talking to Colin. “He was
part of some Christian group. Said the world was going to end. The
nutter went and sold everything he had—house, car, all his
possessions, quit his job, the whole lot.” He shook his head.
“Don’t know what he and his wife were doing at the turn of the
millennium, but I doubt they had as much as the rest of
us.”

“Before my time,” Colin
said.

John snorted, “Forgot how
young you are.” He pushed himself up onto his tiptoes for a second
like he was stretching his calves out. He went on, “I bumped into
him on the street a few weeks later. I didn’t say anything
outright; I just asked how it was going. He didn’t mention anything
about the fact we were all still here. Turns out his ministry was
sending him and his wife to Russia to spread the ‘Good Word’. Guess
they were too embarrassed to stay. But you’ve got to wonder if he
saw all this coming or if he was just as boned as the rest of us.”
John took a bite from his sandwich. A sprinkling of crumbs cascaded
from his mouth as he talked. “I guess if God wasn’t talking to him
in two thousand, why would he start now right?”

Colin looked across at
the sandwich held between podgy fingers and watched it being
quickly devoured by those slobbering lips.

“
Hey, I’m getting kind of
famished. Is there somewhere I can get something to eat?” he asked.
He was genuinely starting to feel hungry, but there was something
repugnant about John that impelled Colin to leave his
company.

“
Well, I guess the deli
down the street is out of the question, but there is a vending
machine in the canteen downstairs, behind the reception desk where
you came in,” John said without taking his eyes off the carnage
outside.

“Where the TV is?” Colin
asked.

“Oh yeah, I forget you’ve been
down already. Yeah, down there,” John said, stuffing another
mouthful in.

Colin bobbed his head a little
to acknowledge John’s answer and then made his way to the door.

He walked past rows of empty
desks. There must be space for a hundred staff in this office, but
only a handful of them made it in this morning and one of them had
left already.

He got to the door and pulled
the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He pulled again, wondering
if he’d done something wrong, but still it stuck fast.

“
Hey, John,” Colin
shouted down the office. “Is there a knack to this?”

John started to say something,
but his mouth was too full. Instead he waved and started over. He
was still chewing when he reached Colin.

“How do—” Colin began, but
stopped speaking when John raised a finger in the air to silence
him.

John made an overly pronounced
swallow and smacked his lips. He said,

“
It’s a swipe thingy.” He
held out his ID badge on its lanyard.

He pressed it up against a
small grey box at the side of the door and there was an audible
clunk. He pushed the door open.

“There you go,” John said.

“Thanks.”

Colin stepped through.

It was only after the door
closed behind him that he began to consider just how would he get
back in. He thought of rapping on the thick windowpane to get
John’s attention again and ask him what he should do, but he
decided not to worry about that just yet. Instead he skipped down
the stairs to the ground floor and the staff canteen.

When he got there he had a
shock. There were three people sitting at a table watching the
satellite feed. They all turned to look at him as he entered.

Colin recognized Mo the
security guard, but there were two women sitting with him, smoking
and drinking coffee. They both looked gaunt and pale, not unlike
the insane people outside. Each wore a blue apron and one had a
matching blue bandana that kept her hair out of the way. The
younger of the two wore a distinctive red and yellow shirt under
her dull tabard.

“Um, I came to see if there was
anything to eat?” Colin said, transfixed by the two newcomers.

Mo stood up and gave Colin a
nod before he walked to the back of the room. Instinctively, Colin
followed.

“Vending machine is here,” Mo
said, pressing a button.

There was the whir of a motor
and the carousel slowly turned. The machine had a number of
compartments stacked five high. The motor clunked to a stop as the
next compartment drew level with a sliding perspex door.

“
Not much of a choice,”
Mo conceded. “It hasn’t been restocked after the weekend
yet.”

“Thanks,” Colin said.

“No problem.” Mo started to
walk back to his seat.

Colin stuttered, “Um…?”

Mo stopped.
“Yes?”

Colin nodded over at the
two women. “Who are they?”

“
Oh, that’s Magda and
Alex, the cleaners,” Mo said. “They decided to wait it out here
awhile before going home.”

“Oh, okay,” Colin said.

He turned his attention
to the vending machine. The selection was indeed poor. After a half
a dozen turns of the carousel, each time hoping something tasty
would miraculously appear, Colin gave up and settled for the cheese
baguette. He poured the change from his wallet into the coin slot
until the machine beeped at its fill.

Colin unwrapped his meal and
stood behind the three at the table, transfixed on the screen.

“
Anything new?” he asked
before taking his first bite.

The bread was stale and had a
rubbery texture that reminded Colin more of jerky than bread. The
cheese on top was dried out and flaky, but beneath that crust it
had retained a modicum of freshness.

“
No, nothing new,” Mo
answered. “It’s still saying to stay in your homes. No real
information.”

“What about the other
channels?” Colin asked.

Mo picked up the remote control
and started flicking through the stations.

“
A lot of them are off
the air,” Mo said while clicking the remote. “Some are just showing
pre-recorded programs.”

He put the remote down within
easy reach of the two women and patted it in a subconscious invite
for them to change the channel to something of their choosing.

“What about the news channels?”
Colin asked.

Mo picked up the remote control
and gave a nod to the two women. They nodded back and with their
approval. Mo switched to a news channel.

An unfamiliar newscaster sat
square in frame and there was a ticker of information scrolling
along the bottom of the screen.

“She new?” Colin asked.

None of the three replied.

“…unrest throughout the
country,” the newscaster was saying. She pressed a finger to her
ear. “I’m just being told we can go live to our outside broadcast
unit.”

The screen flickered to a test
signal, then back to the studio before finally bringing up the
image of a reporter. The camera angles was slightly Dutch, set off
true.

“Are we on?” the reporter asked
someone off-camera.

“Where are they?” Colin asked,
trying to make out a landmark behind the reporter.

There was a crowd of jostling
people behind the reporter and it didn’t take long to realize the
people in the background were policemen in riot gear.

“
I’m told we’re live
on-air, but I can’t hear you back in the studio. The police here
have been reiterating the government advice to stay off the
streets. Stay in a secure location. All morning the police here
have been effectively operating snatch squads, but we have just
been overwhelmed. They started the day making arrests and subduing
those people refusing to disperse, handcuffing them with plastic
restraints and then tying them down inside police vehicles. This
tactic doesn’t seem to have lessened the mobs of angry rioters and
all during the morning their numbers have increased.”

“
Move! Move! Move
over!”

The reporter was knocked out of
the way and two policemen manhandled a restrained maniac past the
camera. The prisoner snarled wildly and thrashed against his
restraints.

“
Breach!” someone cried
off-camera.

The picture bobbed and
shuddered as the obviously inexperienced operator tried to find the
shot.

“They’re in!” someone else
shouted.

The camera spun round
just in time to see a blood-drenched civilian throw himself at the
reporter. Sprays of crimson fluid jetted skyward and the reporter’s
screams filled the air.

An unknown voice came
across the broadcast: “Cut away! Cut away, studio one!”

The camera didn’t cut away. The
reporter slapped out, the microphone still in hand. Loud crunches
and pops could be heard as it was used to bat away the attacker.
The cameraman stood transfixed by the fight, too unwilling or too
uncaring to intervene.

“Cut to studio!” the
disembodied voice shouted.

Over the reporter’s screams
there was a crisp sound like fresh salad being crunched and blood
started spurting into the air.

“For Christ’s sake, cut it! Cut
It!”

The screen went blank,
but the audio continued, all the more visceral without the picture,
the sounds of screaming and wet gnawing up close.

A test card flickered
onscreen and the sound cut out. It hung there for a few seconds
before the view switched back to the studio and a visibly shaken
announcer.

She sat silently, her mouth
wide open aghast at what she had just witnessed.

There were off-camera sounds,
voices filled with panic and chaos.

Suddenly a channel
identification burst onto the screen. A pre-recorded voice boomed,
“All the news from across the globe, brought to you twenty-four
seven.”

Colin whispered, “Fuck.”

He looked over at the others.
Mo had a hand in front of his mouth like he was trying to hold in
sick. The two cleaners sat unfazed, still smoking their
cigarettes.

“Anything more?” Colin asked.
“I mean, is there an explanation as to why this is happening?”

Mo toggled the remote control
and started surfing through the channels for another live feed.

Colin pulled his phone out and
looked at the signal bars. There was still a no service line
through the icon.

He slipped the phone back into
his pocket. Then it struck him. He pulled the phone back out and
opened up the operating system. He clicked through a couple of
icons and found what he was looking for.

“
Turn the volume down on
that a minute, would you?” he asked.

Mo obliged. hitting the
mute button on the remote.

With the TV turned down, a
light hissing could be heard in the room. Colin sat down opposite
Mo and the two cleaners.

“What you got?” Mo asked.

“
I forgot there’s an FM
radio on my phone,” Colin said, playing with the settings. “I’ve
never used it before, but there might be a radio
station.”

He quickly worked out how
to use the scan function and started trawling through the
frequencies. Occasionally the hiss of static was broken by a
high-pitched whine or the unintelligible bleeps of machine
code.

“There's nothing there,” Mo
said.

“
You might be right. I
don’t even know if it works,” Colin replied. “It’s picking up some
weird Morse code or something, though.”

“Interference from something
electrical nearby?”

“
Maybe...Wait!” Colin
thumbed the volume control up. “Did you hear that?”

“What?” Mo asked.

Colin cycled back down the
channels.

“
There!” He held the
phone up to the side of Mo’s face.

“
Ahh, I hear something,”
Mo said hesitantly. “It could be a voice.”

Colin pulled the phone back to
his ear and strained to listen.