Doomware (19 page)

Mind? He was thrilled. In a relatively short period of time he and the boy had connected in a way he would never have dreamed possible prior to their meeting. It was a revelation just to have found somebody who didn’t foster within him feelings of resentment and frustration. Here was somebody who depended upon him without making him feel obliged, who didn’t mind one bit that he was acybernetic, who didn’t constantly remind him of what he lacked. And to top it all this special kid, this beautiful, innocent survivor against all the odds, wanted to call him dad. Who in their right mind wouldn’t have been proud to be his surrogate father?

As he watched over the boy playing, the issue of parenting resolved with one question, he determined to be different sort of father than his own had been. A better father. Not that his father had been bad exactly. He hadn’t abused him or failed to provide for him; he’d done everything that was required of a father on a practical level. It was rather that he’d been distant and undemonstrative, hesitant and ashamed, never allowing himself to get too close to the son he could neither understand nor explain away. He thought he was doing a pretty good job of being a better father already, but he would intensify it. He would shower the boy with love and affection, making up for the loss of the boy’s biological family and healing the wounds his own father had left behind.

He looked at the ring the boy had given him and turned the inner band, making silver move within gold. They’d talked about the boy’s real father many times. He had no doubt he’d been a good man. A decent man. He wondered what he’d have thought if he could have seen them now: his only son, the apple of his eye, the only cybernetic survivor in a zombified world, being cared for by another man – an acybernetic – who wore a ring that was rightfully his, and answered to the title tripping from his son’s lips that was also rightfully his.

Maybe the boy somehow sensed this internal dialogue, because he looked up from his play and said, “My dad would’ve liked you.”

* * *

The cold weather continued through January and into February, although the snow didn’t return. Instead, strong winds howled through the city, joined occasionally by sleet or hail so vicious it stung like a cat-o’-nine-tails. David wondered if the conditions had caused any zombies to expire. Their numbers didn’t appear to have reduced, so he assumed not. Everard still paraded up and down the streets with his hard-on, much to Shawn’s amusement, and the others, most of them ill-dressed against the cold, still fought over scraps and rent the night asunder with their cries. He hadn’t spotted Varley in a while, but it was too much to hope that the bastard was gone. For all he knew zombies preferred the cold, and would still be going about their mindless business all through the next ice age.

The first week of February it rained without the accompaniment of strong winds, the first time it had done so in a long while it seemed, so they paid a visit to the Lighthouse. Ever since the zombie attack on the top floor David was paranoid about security, making the boy wait by the front door as he checked in cupboards and under beds. When he was satisfied it was safe the boy played records in the drawing room while he busied himself in the kitchen. The Lighthouse’s store of food was all but gone, and he placed the meagre remnants in the holdall. It had been good while it had lasted and he was thankful, especially for the turkey, which had been the icing on the cake of a surprisingly successful Christmas Day.

The rain was still coming down but had slackened to a drizzle by the time they headed back to the flat. As they walked the boy read aloud from a book he’d selected from his brainware’s library (
Lord of the Flies
), David interrupting him every now and then with questions about the narrative in an attempt to get him to think about, rather than just recite, the story. What did the conch symbolise? Why wasn’t Piggy chosen as leader? What was the Beast? David didn’t know the first thing about teaching, but he was willing to wing it and hope the boy didn’t complain. The years of proper schooling Shawn would miss out on would be replaced by this plus a different – and in its way just as valuable – type of education: life itself in this extreme environment.

They were walking along Ruckholt Road, within sight of the flat, when Shawn said, “I don’t get why they don’t do as Ralph says. I mean, he’s right about the fire, isn’t he?”

“Well, yes, if they don’t keep a fire going they’ll have less chance of being rescued.”

“Don’t they want to be rescued? Why are they going agai–” The boy never finished the word.

The first thing David was aware of was a faint whooshing sound, followed closely by the sensing of movement behind him. He wheeled, grabbing for the rolling pin, but it was too late: the great bulk of Marcus Varley was already upon him, as unstoppable as a juggernaut. It lifted him clean off his feet, its face a terrifying mask of blood-smeared death. He barely had time to be afraid; his only thought was for the boy, who was letting out a long, high-pitched scream of terror.

“
Run!
” he shouted at him. “
To the flat!
”

The boy disappeared from his field of vision as Varley pitched him through the air and slammed him down onto the bonnet of a car. He landed painfully on the holdall strapped to his back, winding him. All thoughts of the rolling pin and the handgun went out of his head as Varley’s huge, hateful body loomed over him, its arms pinning him to the car’s slippery wet metal and glass. He struck out with clenched fists and feet, but it was like hurling pebbles at a hurricane.
 

Then Varley drew back a hammer-like fist and punched him in the face, causing his head to whiplash back, and he passed out instantly.

* * *

When he started to come to the first thing he was aware of was an intermittent sound like that of an alarm or a siren. It was coming to him from a long way off, vibrating through the air, escalating in pitch and tone as if the level of danger were on the rise.

Dad … Dad … Daddy
.

It was the boy’s voice, he realised. It was tremulous with anguish. His head swam sickeningly when he opened his eyes, but it didn’t stop several things from dawning on him, one after another. He was slumped against the car’s windscreen. The rain was coming down hard again. Varley was gone. The importance of this last one cut through his dulled senses. He had to get out of there while he had the chance. Now.
Quick!

He tried sliding off the car, but something prevented him from doing so. For a while he was at a loss to explain what was going on. Then pain from his left arm, which for some reason was elevated above his head, came filtering through, helping to defog his consciousness. His left arm had been lashed to the car’s roof rack at the wrist with a type of wire he’d never seen before. The holdall was gone, and so too was his jacket and the rolling pin.

With mounting horror, he realised that all of this had been planned. The metallic-blue car he was tied to was the one Varley had been hiding in, waiting for them to pass so he could sneak out and launch his surprise attack. He must have passed this car countless times and had come to ignore it, a familiarity Varley had capitalised on. Now it had immobilised him so it could attack at its leisure. The cool, calculated powers of deduction behind the thing’s actions made his blood run cold.

He looked up towards the boy’s voice. From this angle only the bathroom window of the flat was clearly visible, and the boy was standing on the toilet seat peering out.

“Dad!” the boy called. “I’m coming down.”

“Don’t you dare!” David shouted hoarsely, making him wince with the pain where his eye socket had been struck. “Don’t you
fucking
dare, you hear me? That’s just what he wants. You stay there, you understand me?”

The boy’s response was a quailed and frightened “okay”, and when he heard it he had to fight to keep his composure, to stop himself from breaking down completely. He’d never sworn at the boy before, not like that, but it was necessary now to get his point across. The only “good” thing about the situation was that the boy was safe; he couldn’t risk changing that, not for anything.

Getting his feet under him on the car bonnet, he positioned himself so he could examine the binding. The wire was encased in some kind of transparent plastic, and had been wrapped around his wrist perhaps dozens of times. It was knotted more than once, and seemed to cinch tighter whenever his arm moved. With his free hand he tried to untangle some of it, but it was hopeless, and he was hampered still by the fact that he was shivering all over and his hands were shaking – half with cold, half with nerves. The metal of the wire was thick and difficult to manipulate and it looked as if it would take a blow torch to break it. Maybe the gun would have worked, but it had been in the holdall so that was ruled out. Tackling the roof rack wasn’t an option either since the car had been made in a giant automotive morpher; there were no seams or bolts that might have allowed its removal.

His whole arm was aching and his hand had turned white, the wire bound so tight it was restricting his circulation. He tried to think. He had to get out of there now – it might be his only chance. But how? Think! The car was on wheels: move the car! No, he had no chance of moving it from the position he was in even if he could get the brakes off. Besides, what good would moving it do? He thought of the stories he’d heard about lone travellers who got pinned in a desert rockslide, their only means of escape cutting off an arm or a leg before they died of thirst. He had nothing to cut his arm off with even if he’d wanted to.

It was useless. Whatever he thought of was no good.
He
was useless and no good. How had he ever thought that something like this wouldn’t happen? He’d allowed himself to get carried away by all those stupid dreams of raising the boy in peace – a zombie-free island, a mountain city! What a fool he’d been. He felt like crying, but even that would have been as useless as he was.

Suddenly the boy screamed a warning. He looked around. Varley was approaching along the street, moving unhurriedly, the great arms swinging. David felt his lips draw back over his teeth back at the sight of the thing. It was incredible that the same great hulking mass that had tormented him in life still had him at its mercy in death, like a murderous ghost incarnate.

It stopped by the car and stared at him with its lifeless, quasi-robotic eyes. The rain had plastered its clothes to its body, accentuating its muscled form even more. Blood covered its pale face and stained its chest, while its enormous hands were like two great talons covered in cuts, bruises and blood.

“Get away from me, you fucking bastard,” he said under his breath, his voice thick with seething anger and the effects of his own rapid heartbeat. He’d never hated anyone or anything as much as he hated the creature before him now.

Varley stepped around the front of the car. David instinctively recoiled as far as he could, but there was no escape. It reached across the bonnet, grabbed his left foot and yanked his leg out from under him. He kicked furiously, bucking like a young antelope in the jaws of a lioness, but the thing ignored him.

“Get off me!” David shouted, aware that talking to it was pointless but driven to nonetheless.

Using both hands Varley twisted his foot violently, applying just a fraction of the brute strength within, yet still succeeding in making him cry out in pain. At that moment he saw something in its eyes – something familiar yet many, many times more terrifying than it had ever been before. It was the flash of twisted pleasure that had always shown itself in Varley’s eyes whenever he’d been deriding him for being acybernetic, or ridiculing him in front of his co-workers, or flexing his great muscles and intimidating him. That same old glint in Varley’s otherwise emotionless, cataract-clouded eyes made him realise the full horror of the situation he was in. The sadistic streak the human Varley had been prey to hadn’t died along with him; it lived on in this zombified creature, amplified and deranged, freed from all inhibition, as different to its source as Mr Hyde was to Dr Jekyll. Varley had grown tired of attacking other zombies, whose invulnerability to pain had stymied its desire to inflict true agony. It had grown tired of tormenting animals, whose dreadful howls and whimpers had robbed David of sleep in the middle of the night. What it wanted now was a human being who could feel pain, an acybernetic, a creature who would not only howl and whimper but beg for mercy too, and there was only one person in its memory who fell into such a category. The virus had turned the former trickle of sadism into a rampant deluge, and there was absolutely nothing now that could hold back such a flood.

With horrifying certainty, David understood that Varley was going to torture him to death.

And watching it all would be a boy.

A boy whom he’d promised never to leave.

Even now, when he was staring certain death in the face, he thought of the boy. If he could have cried the tears would have been for him. Poor Shawn. He had made the boy dependent on him, had made him love and trust him, to the point where witnessing his death might spell the end of him too. Why had he allowed the child to call him “Dad”? Why had he made that unthinking promise?
Why?
So many regrets now. What might have been! Forgive me, little man. Forgive me.

Varley let go of his foot and stomped off. His eyes closed, David listened to the creature’s heavy footfalls as they receded into the distance. It was just testing me, he thought. Making sure. Jesus Christ!

When he opened his eyes again Varley was nowhere to be seen. Maybe there was still time. Maybe there was still a chance to save himself. The swelling of new hope in his breast was quelled by the sight of fading daylight. Varley preferred night-time torture sessions, he knew that much. When darkness came so too would Varley, and he would die a death as slow and agonising as those of the animals he’d heard night after night. But until then he couldn’t give up the fight. He couldn’t give up on the boy. He had this one chance – right now – and he had to take it.