Doomware (2 page)

He hadn’t gone ten paces before something caught his eye and made him stop: it was the piece of litter he’d heard skimming along the ground. He crouched down to examine it. A photograph, probably a hard copy of an image recorded by somebody’s brainware. Though dog-eared and water-damaged, its subjects were still clearly visible: a dozen handsome-looking people, all bright-eyed, all smiling. It was a family portrait, but there was no telling parent from child, nor great-grandparent from great-grandchild; in vivo genetic engineering had long since eliminated ageing, along with alopecia and myopia and anything else parents lobbied hard enough to rid their offspring of. People reached a certain level of development – what would have marked a person as being in their mid-twenties in earlier times – and aged no more. The homogenisation of mankind they had called it, or the
Dorian Gray
-ing of mankind, implying that somewhere there were billions of portraits slowly withering away while their subjects never aged a day. He stared at the picture. There was something unbearably sad about it. It was the assuredness of their handsome, bright-eyed smiles. They were smiling because they would live forever – or so they’d thought. It made him recall something his mother had told him once.

Nothing haunts like a photograph. Nothing at all. A person in a photograph never moves or hides or dies. They’re a frozen ghost, trapped in two dimensions.

Emotion rose in his throat; he caught it, pressed it down. Even so, he felt himself tearing up.

Shit!

His head whipped back. He hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings. Looking around wildly, he stood upright again. It was okay, but he’d barely gotten ten paces before he’d allowed himself to be distracted by a stupid photograph. It was exactly the sort of thing that would wind up getting him killed.

Stupid.

Stupid non-mon, stupid non-mon.

Concentrate!

He screwed the picture up in his fist and tossed it. Useful stuff only, he told himself.

On Ruckholt Road he peered along the rows of silent houses with their rows of silent cars parked neatly on the road, deposited there either by their drivers or the Autoroad system. Disaster had swept through here in the dead of night, when there hadn’t been many people up and about; he’d come to realise it was one of the few mercies. He walked in the direction of the city centre, eyes constantly moving behind his glasses, ears alert for any sign of them.

At the first intersection he quickened his pace, averting his gaze from an area outside a half-demolished house on the corner of the street. It was a practised response, carried out on autopilot. He knew what was there well enough without looking at it; once seen it was never forgotten, its image having burrowed itself deep into his memory, stymieing all attempts at removal, its reproduction in his nightmares possessed of all the perfect detail of a hologram. The
“atrocity” he called it, though such a term could have been applied to a multitude of things his eyes had borne witness to over the past six months. The distinctive stench of it always managed to find his nose no matter how wide a berth he gave its source, making him gag involuntarily every time. Bloated blowflies – damnable flies, one of the undisputed winners of the new world – flew at him, and he swatted them away with unthinking contempt.

He turned right onto Oliver Road. Here somebody had pulled up at a traffic light six months earlier. Their car – its two-way windshields deactivated, allowing a clear view of the interior – hadn’t moved since, and neither had they: their sunken corpse still sat there, as oblivious to the unchanging signal as it was to the passage of time, as if a slow, rotting death had been preferable to running a red light.

Passing the junction, he scanned the blank windows of the houses lining the road, his eyes switching from one side of the road to the other in a regular pattern. Sometimes the only warning you got was a glimpse of movement beyond the windows, where a baleful ghostly memory of the house’s former occupants still haunted the place, eager to be unleashed in his direction if only it could find a way out into the street.

Obtaining food was becoming increasingly problematic. If he played it safe and stayed close to the flat he would search more only to find less, forcing him to venture deeper into areas of the city he was largely unfamiliar with, where his ignorance of the streets and the distance from the flat combined to ramp up the danger level to pulse-pounding proportions. There really was no easy reward without hard risk any more. But what else could he do? The imperative of food was all-conquering, whether he liked it or not. How he’d taken morphers for granted! Thank God for the people with money to burn who’d prized the cachet of “real” food; it was the niche industry developed to cater for them that fed him now. He knew he ought to relocate, move somewhere awash with shops stocked with food. The whole city was open to him now. He could be living in a plush penthouse in the wealthiest part of the West End. If only his flat didn’t feel so much like home. He was attached to the place. Despite everything, it was where he felt safest. What did it say about him as a person, the fact he hadn’t seized upon the opportunity to move, nor had even felt tempted to? He had no idea, save for the fact that it could be nothing good. This knowledge give him a vague feeling of shame that threatened to mushroom out of all proportion, but he suppressed it with a mental effort so often repeated in the past it verged on reflex.

On Church Road he entered an arcade – the type he normally avoided, but this one had numerous exits so he deemed the risk acceptable – and searched a shop named
Frederico’s Finest Foods
. He had visited the place many times in the past and had stripped it of anything useful, so he was pleasantly surprised when he found a packet of dried pasta and a couple tins of salmon wedged under an empty display rack. In the real world he never would have been able to afford stuff like this, but in this world that was the cat sorted.

The next shop had trendy signage featuring one word:
Zena’s
. He had no idea what the shop sold; it was locked up tight, and its two-way mirrored windows prevented him from seeing inside. He cupped his hands against the glass and leaned in close. No good. He pondered whether it was worth the effort of trying to gain entry as he studied his reflection. Boy, you don’t look good, he thought. Several days’ worth of stubble grew from his pale skin, accentuating his squarish jawline, while curls of greasy black hair hung down from his cap like the tendrils of ailing plants. If he didn’t know better he could have sworn he’d aged since the last time he’d caught himself in a mirror. His cheeks definitely had a more hollow look about them, causing him to worry briefly about illness. The threat of disease was ever-present now, the multitude of decomposing bodies dotted everywhere akin to biological dirty bombs, each a festering factory of contagion against which his pills were his main line of defence. It scared him more than he chose to admit to himself. If he fell ill now there would be no one to turn to, no doctor, no expert capable of assuaging his pain. Potentially, he might face a slow, lingering, howling death the likes of which countless people had been forced to endure in the times before cybernetic analgesia.

Slipping off the holdall, he took the rolling pin from his pocket and raised it, poised, before the shop’s door. He swung with great force, marble striking glass with a loud crashing sound that reverberated around the confines of the arcade like a gunshot in a shooting range. The glass cracked, but didn’t shatter. On the first few occasions he’d ever done something like this, he’d been seized by a sense of guilt, looking around sheepishly for the appearance of a shopkeeper, or a policeman, or
somebody
demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He still looked around, but only because he worried about the noise attracting hordes of
them
. He swung again, producing the same result: cracks but no real breach, nothing that gave him a chance of getting the door open. He swung again, and again, wincing at the effort and the noise, but still the glass refused to yield. What the fuck was this stuff made of?

Abruptly, he stopped in mid-swing and sagged against the door, breathing hard. The jaws of a terrible feeling of futility clamped around him. What was the point? It was useless.
He
was useless. He could feel the uselessness coursing inside of him. It flowed in his veins the way shit flowed through sewer pipes: hidden from view, but there nonetheless, stinking and repellent and unwanted.

He straightened up and took a huge, cleansing breath. Get a grip! he exhorted himself. You gotta be stronger than this, for Chrissakes. It’s just a door. No door’s gonna beat you.

When he finally managed to get inside, he stifled a humourless laugh at what the shop sold. Clothes. Sartorial concerns weren’t exactly high on his list of priorities.
Zena’s
now seemed to him like such an obvious name for a clothes shop he chastised himself, but he might as well check the place out now he was here. The walls were lined with massive blank screens on the right and cubicles on the left. Out the back would be the retail micromorphers for making items of clothing precisely to their buyers’ requirements. The morphers wouldn’t be working any more, of course. In an adjoining room were racks of vintage-style clothes on hangers. Made by loom and hand, these were of lower quality than morpher merchandise, but had higher price tags – fashionably high prices for highly unfashionable methods of manufacture. He looked through them. Women’s and children’s. No men’s.

“Typical,” he said under his breath.

When he returned to the main area he inhaled sharply, his heart missing a beat.

A zombie was looking straight at him.

No. Its godless eyes may have been fixed his direction, but it wasn’t seeing him at all, only its own image reflected in the two-way mirror. Seconds passed. He allowed himself to exhale quietly. Had it been attracted by the sound of the pin blows? Probably. The bastard thing.

He remained absolutely still as he watched the creature, one hand ready to grab the rolling pin should he need it. It was a fully grown male with longish, lank hair and filthy-looking clothes it had undoubtedly been wearing for months. Layers of blood congealed to the colour of damsons covered the lower half of its face, combining with its ghostly white skin to form a grotesque version of a clown’s face paint. But the most striking things about it were the things most striking about all of them: the eyes. The pupils were masked by starbursts of a metallic grey colour, like polished silver, as if mercury eye drops had been dripped into each one. The partially obscured irises were virtually colourless, while the whites were no longer white; they were all but black. The overall effect made them look like photographic negatives of normal eyes, and such a look was truly and unmitigatedly horrible, calling to mind a litany of dreadful things no matter how many times you saw at it. Disease. Unnaturalness. Evil. Death.

The zombie peered at its reflection as if deep in thought, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. The thinking man the thing had once been was gone for ever. Now it was just a collection of impulses and processes and reactions to stimuli, the range of which he was still trying to comprehend. He’d never seen one attack its own reflection, for example. They didn’t seem capable of mistaking their mirror image for a separate entity the way animals could.

The thing shuffled off towards the exit, dreary and desolate, with the aimless bovine gait most of them had when they weren’t reacting to something. He watched it go, fairly confident it wouldn’t change course as long as it didn’t see or hear him. He waited for what felt like a reasonable length of time before tiptoeing to the window. There was no sign of it.

Outside, the morning mist had dissipated a little. He couldn’t see the zombie, nor did he know which direction it had gone in. He would have to be careful.

In a shop further along the street he found three 50-year-old bottles of real red wine from the south of France. He whistled at the price of them – actual vineyards were all but gone, even in France – before slipping them into his holdall, wrapping them in sheets of plastic so they wouldn’t clang together as he walked. What he really wanted was a gun. Something old-fashioned that would still work. Old things were his lifelines now. He peered out of the shop window at the houses and tower blocks nearby. Did they look like the kind of places where antique weapons might be lying around, just waiting to be found? There was no way of telling. He decided against looking today. Just being outside was stressful and he felt drained already. It was time to start backtracking to the flat.

* * *

On the street leading to Trinity Court he froze when he saw a zombie up ahead. Its back was to him, but several things gave away who it was: the biceps that bulged like overstuffed sausages; the back that was as broad as a billiard table; the enormous hands that called to mind the powerful claws of a mechanical digger. Or, rather, these things gave away who it had once been: Marcus Varley. He hurried to hide himself behind a low garden wall. Varley had hated him in real life, had delighted in making his life a misery. Now the zombified Varley hung around the vicinity of his flat as if it were a starving paparazzo and he were a superstar. Was it a coincidence? Logic told him otherwise, but he couldn’t help feeling that Varley was out to get him. Him, personally.

My very own stalker, he thought. Just what I always wanted. It would have to be a 250-pound bodybuilding freak turned maniacal zombie though, wouldn’t it? Just my luck.

Varley’s only saving grace was that his great muscular bulk made him slow. The bastard was built for power, not speed, and he’d always been able to outrun him relatively easily. Not that his poor heart had enjoyed the experience. There was no way of knowing what the zombified version of Varley would do if it ever got its hands on him, but he felt he had a pretty good idea; it made him feel sick and light-headed just thinking about it.