Doomware (17 page)

The assault came to an abrupt halt, without him being conscious of a decision to stop. He let go of the candlestick and it tumbled to the floor, landing with a resounding clang like a death knell. It was only now he realised how exhausted he was, and for a moment he sagged against the bed, breathless. Then he got to his feet and reached for the boy, who leapt into his arms. David hugged him tight and kissed him on the temple, a hard, fatherly kiss that was like the seal on a new lease of life. The boy was crying hard, his little heart pounding away against his.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, rocking him to and fro. “It’s gone, it’s gone now.”

They stood like that for a time, the boy’s feet dangling above the floor while his tears ebbed away, David whispering “okays” as much to himself as to the boy. Inside, he cursed his own foolishness. He’d allowed a misplaced sense that the Lighthouse was somehow sacred to make him reckless. Nothing was sacred in this world any more, he knew that – or at least he ought to have known. Especially now he had a child to think about. He was aghast at his own negligent behaviour, his dereliction of duty. He could have lost the boy – so soon after finding him! It made him ache with a tiny taster of the grief he would have felt had it actually happened.

Never again, he told himself.
Never
.

“I’m sorry,” David said once their heartbeats and respirations had returned to near normal. “I should’ve checked this place when we arrived. It was my fault.”

“I’m okay,” the boy said as David released him from their embrace. “He didn’t hurt me … he just scared me.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know where he came from. I was looking out the window, and I turned around and he was just… there.”

“I should never have left you alone.”

“No, it was my fault,” the boy contradicted him.

“No it wasn’t.”

“You said I was never to leave your sight – it was one of your conditions.”

“Well, yes, but–”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

David looked down into the boy’s blue-eyed face, upon which the expression was earnest and pleading, and felt such warmth flood into his heart, such gratitude over what they’d just escaped, that he had to restrain himself from scooping the boy up in his arms again.

Instead, he looked away and said, “Okay, little man. I’d better clear this mess up.”

He cleared the mess up by throwing the zombie’s body out of the nearest window, a task that wasn’t easy given the dead weight of the thing. The boy insisted on helping, unfazed by the corpse’s smashed and bloodied state; on a daily basis he was witness to far worse. In the commotion David’s note had gotten bloodied and trampled on, and the boy smoothed it out and cleaned it up as best he could, before carefully folding it and slipping it into his pocket.

Downstairs they discovered the zombie’s point of entry: the back door in the kitchen, where it had smashed a pane of glass. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d been packing the holdall, which surprised him since it was plain to see, yet another indicator of how lax he’d been about security.

Outside he dragged the zombie’s broken body down the street and left it on the pavement, not wanting it to sully the vicinity of the Lighthouse. Someone or something would undoubtedly come along to pick the meat from its bones.

It wasn’t until they were halfway home, huddled close to each other against the rain, that he wondered whether the zombie had been a former occupant of the Lighthouse – maybe even the owner himself – and he felt a short-lived twinge of regret at having left the body to the vultures of the new world.

* * *

Close to midnight that night David woke with a start to find his door slightly ajar and the boy peering at him.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was husky and his eyelids were drooping with sleep.

“I heard something,” Shawn said, absent-mindedly toying with the door handle.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did it sound like?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

At that moment, the sound Shawn must have been referring to came filtering through the vent: it was the howling in pain and fear he’d heard many times before. It came reverberating through the night like something out of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
; there was no denying it sounded absolutely dreadful. It was about time he blocked up the bedrooms’ vents.

“Oh that,” he said, shrugging it off. “It’s nothing to worry about. It happens all the time.”

The boy shuffled his feet nervously. “I don’t like it.”

“Did it wake you up?”

The boy shook his head. “I had to go to the toilet.”

“Well, whatever it is it can’t hurt you, can it? So go on back to bed, okay?” When the boy didn’t move, he added, “It’s okay – go on. It’ll stop in a bit.”

Still the boy didn’t go. He hovered in the doorway, looking more timid than David had seen him in a long while. What was he hanging around for?
 

Finally, the penny dropped.

He pulled the bedcovers back and said, “You wanna sleep in with me?”

The boy dashed across the room and hurriedly snuggled under the covers, folding himself into the space in front of David, who wrapped his arms around him, noting the thinness of his body with a power of calculation that was entirely instinctual. The inflated little belly he’d had was gone, giving the impression he’d lost, rather than gained, weight. Still so thin, he thought. Even after all that food.

He was probably too old for sleeping in an adult’s bed, but who was he to deny him? All those months alone the kid had had no one to turn to when he’d needed comforting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to turn him away now. Besides, as far as he knew this was the first time the boy had woken during the night; normally he curled up with the cat and didn’t make a sound until morning, so there was slim chance that sleeping in the same bed would become a habit.

The boy seemed to fall asleep straight away, leaving him wide awake and listening to the awful howling outside, which he felt had less to do with the boy’s newfound desire to sleep in his bed than the earlier events of the day did. It felt strange lying next to another human being. It had been years since he’d last experienced it. Who’d been the last person to share his bed? Petra? Or that red-headed woman he’d met online whose name he couldn’t recall? What a lacklustre encounter that had been; yet another one for whom the novelty of acybernetic sex had quickly worn thin. That was more than 20 years ago now. Unaccustomed to sharing a bed, he knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily now. He would sacrifice his sleep; the boy deserved it.

He was surprised the next morning when he woke after a restful night’s sleep, having drifted off after only a few minutes’ daydreaming.

* * *

It happened suddenly, with no foreshadowing, or at least that’s the way it felt. In reality, all the signs had been there from the start; he had simply refused to acknowledge them.

They were in the living room, playing a game that consisted of forming words from a selection of random letters, when suddenly Shawn chirped, “Didactic! See? Eight letters.”

“That’s good. What’s it mean?”

“Adjective: intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruct...”

The boy’s voice trailed off; he’d caught himself, but too late. In the silence that followed David knew the reason for the abortive sentence. He knew it as suddenly and as surely as he would have known a glass of iced water dashed in his face, even without the boy’s expression, which was a picture of someone who’d just inadvertently given the game away.

David started to state the obvious out loud, but before he could even get the first word out the boy jumped up and ran from the room. David watched him go, too numbed by what had just happened to stop him. The boy had been quoting the dictionary definition of “didactic”.

The definition that was stored away in his brainware.

Being cybernetic gifted a person with information and abilities, but not necessarily the knowledge with which to interpret or utilise them. In a way, it was a fact he knew better than anyone. And it was never more evident than in the mannerisms of cybernetic children, who were prone to quoting definitions and descriptions, philosophies and equations, without really comprehending what they were saying. They were limited as all immature beings were: by their lack of experience, their nanotechnological brain cells as much in need of connection to each other as their biological counterparts. The boy reciting, parrot-fashion, such an obvious dictionary definition of a word that was beyond the vocabulary of an average pre-teenager had finally exposed the truth. He was a fool for not having realised it sooner. How much he had assumed! How much he had chosen to disregard, entrenched in his belief that there had only been one method of surviving the virus.

When he thought about it there had been a litany of signs, and they came at him in a rush like a film on fast forward. The boy slept like a cybernetic: in and out with the ease of a switch being thrown, no hint of insomnia. He was far too good at anagrams and sums, often better than him despite the age difference. His hair and fingernails hadn’t needed cutting since he’d arrived, their growth controlled by brainware. Of course he wasn’t interested in physical books: the world’s library was already there in his head. He’d been reluctant to talk about acyberneticism because there was nothing for him to talk about, while David had misread this reticence as a hallmark of the inner turmoil his own life had been blighted with. Then there was the fact that he was alive in the first place. Would he have survived on his own for so long had he been acybernetic? Brainware worked to optimise bodily functions, including the benefit derived from the consumption of food and water in times of shortage. Without it he would probably have succumbed to starvation or disease.

But how on earth was he alive at all? Why wasn’t he either dead or zombified like the rest of them?

David got up and trotted through to Shawn’s room on legs that felt slow to respond. The boy was sitting on his bed with head down and fingers knitted together in his lap, his whole demeanour limp and downcast, as if he’d just been reprimanded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” David asked him from the doorway.

Slowly the boy shook his fair-haired head from side to side: he didn’t know why. David took a seat beside him, and for a moment there was an awkward silence between them.

Then the boy said, “Are you gonna get rid of me?”

“What?” David blurted out. “Get rid of you? Why on earth d’you think I’d wanna do that?”

The boy took a while to answer, and when he did his voice was vibrant with barely controlled emotion. “I’m not one of them … I’m not a zombie.”

David reached for the boy and pulled him close. “Of course you’re not, I know that. You’re not going anywhere, little man.”

If he was sure of anything it was that the boy was uninfected. How it could be, he didn’t know. But it did beg the question: would it last? What if the miraculous immunity wasn’t permanent? If so, he could turn into a zombie at any moment, a fear the boy must have been living with since this whole nightmare had begun.

“You’re fine,” David said, tousling the boy’s hair. “Absolutely fine. You only have to look at you.” Then he manoeuvred himself until he was looking into the boy’s eyes and said, “I’m gonna ask you a few questions now, and I need you to answer honestly, okay? I just need to know. It’s nothing to worry about, okay?”

The boy nodded.

“Has your AVS picked up anything?”

“No.”

“Nothing since the start of all this? Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“What do your diagnostics say?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“All your libraries and files and stuff: they’re okay?”

“Yes.”

“What about connections?”

“There’s no streams, no Cybernet, no TV … I can’t call anyone – well, I can try, but there’s never any answer.”

“Central Data?”

“Gone.”

“You mean you can see it, but you can’t download?”

“No, I mean it’s just… gone.”

“So you’re completely cut off?”

“Well, there is one thing I can still get.”

“Yes?”

“The Eridani.”

“How’re you picking them up?”

“Directly. I’ve got a signal-boosting app.”

“Oh, okay.”

It was ironic, but the one thing the boy still had access to was so distanced from their reality by space and time that it might as well have been non-existent. He sensed there was something else the boy wasn’t telling him.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

The boy nodded. “There was something … the day it all happened … a number.”

“A number? Where?”

“Everywhere: on the Cybernet, in my email, on my system.”

“What number was it?”

“Nine three seven.”

“Nine three seven?”

“Yes, sometimes on its own, sometimes over and over in a long stream, never-ending.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. It was only there for a while and then it disappeared.”

David pulled the boy to him again. “Okay. That’s it for now.”

* * *

That night David lay in bed awake, his mind too active for sleep. He fought against the notion that he was thinking differently about the boy, but it was a losing battle. Why had the boy kept it such a pertinent fact from him, lying by omission as if it were a dirty secret? It made him think of
The Turn of the Screw
and Miles, the angel-faced boy who’d cultivated an outward appearance of faultless wholesomeness while concealing a dark truth. He knew he shouldn’t blame the boy, who was no more to blame for being cybernetic than he was for not, but the whole thing left him feeling uneasy and disappointed, as if the boy’s appearance had been too good to be true after all.

Part of him mourned the commonality of shared acyberneticism, the mythical bond he’d always dreamed about but had never experienced. But the world had changed. Cybernetics were no longer the master race, nor he the downtrodden outcast. Their blessing had become a curse, and his curse a blessing. So he and the boy hadn’t been brought together by their computer-less brains in the cosy way he’d always fantasised about. So what? They had something far more important in common, something that eclipsed all else: being the only survivors in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-ridden world.