Doomware (28 page)

“You can have it as long as you promise to stay out of one of the other rooms,” Tarot said, “‘cause that’s where the weapons’ll be.”

“I promise,” the boy chirped.

David stood watching the ocean waves. The apartment was so much nicer than his tired old flat he felt foolish for not having moved sooner. He consoled himself with the knowledge that most of the apartment’s shiny new appliances looked very nice but were completely useless; the stuff in his flat had been old, but at least it had worked. The only major appliances they’d managed to bring with them were a microwave oven, a hotplate and a music system. If they were going to stay here for any length of time they would have to search for a refrigerator and a freezer and a working television screen. He hoped there’d be an equivalent of the Lighthouse here – a home where lovers of the old had once lived.

He opened a sliding door and stepped onto the balcony. The sea air and the sound of the waves, so different to the airless silence of the city he was used to, were supremely soothing. Maybe we could be happy here, he thought. Or content, rather. Maybe this is our Promised Land.

Then he looked down. A zombie was dragging the body of a child along the ground behind it, hauling it by a handful of its hair. The child was a girl roughly Shawn’s age, with long blonde hair and a torso that had been torn open, revealing rows of broken ribs. From this height the girl’s eyes were just two shadow-filled hollows staring blankly up at him.

No, he thought. This was no Promised Land.

As Tarot had predicted, the tide came right in to pebble ridge and the rocky part of the beach in front of the apartment, forcing an influx of zombies into the town. As soon as sand started reappearing again they would be irresistibly drawn to it. Even heavy rain couldn’t stop some of them. David dubbed them “beachcomber zombies”, for that was what most of them appeared to be doing: just wandering the beach, heads bowed, as if hoping their lost souls had washed up on the sand. What actually did wash up usually fell into one of four categories: bodies, luggage, cargo or wreckage. The virus had caused container ships to run aground, while countless aeroplanes and drones had fallen from the sky, a large proportion of them into the sea.

The first few days at the apartment were spent beefing up security. They fitted locks to doors and built makeshift barricades. Tarot scouted the local area and found a Royal Marines’ base. He returned with a small arsenal of weapons and insisted upon setting up claymores on the landings and at the main entrance. The command-detonated mines gave David an uneasy feeling, but he consented to them on the condition that the boy was given strict instructions not to touch or go anywhere near them. Tarot also brought back machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and even a lightweight anti-tank weapon, all of which were placed in one of the bedrooms, a room that was off-limits to the boy.

No decision had been made about whether they were going to stay at Shanti Court long-term, but David started nest-building anyway. Once the apartment was as secure as possible they searched the surrounding area, scheduling their activities around the ebb and flow of the tide. Although there was no immediate candidate for Lighthouse replacement, they did find several caches of food and a surprising number of old, usable appliances. A television, a grill, a bread-maker and a fridge-freezer were all taken up to the apartment, a job facilitated by having access to a working lift.

To the west of the apartment complex they found an area David took a liking to immediately. It was a patch of coastline located just past an isolated, run-down house Shawn christened the “Shrieking Shack”, after the haunted house of
Harry Potter
fame. On one side of the coastal path were hills and wild heathland, while on the other were cliffs and rocky coves lapped by the ocean. There were two locations David liked in particular: one landward and up, the other seaward and down. The former was at the end of a steep path up a gorse-covered hillside. Here there was a small stone structure that was low enough to allow easy access to its flat roof. Inside it was just a bare shell, with a trio of glass-less windows affording magnificent views of the meandering coastline. It had undoubtedly been used as a lookout at some point in history.

The other spot was harder to reach, down a precipitous route they had to tread with the utmost care. At the bottom there was a small cove, the floor of which remained partially exposed even at high tide, forming a secluded beach. It was composed of rock and shingle rather than sand, but it received sunlight for most of the day and, more importantly, it was usually zombie-free.

They nicknamed these places the “Lookout” and the “Smugglers’ Cove”.

* * *

It was almost possible to forget that a deadly pandemic had ever swept across the face of the earth. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. The waves were crashing. Here at the Smugglers’ Cove it felt as if he did forget – for minutes at a time at least – even though a stark reminder was never far away. The birdsong drowned out by a zombie’s demented shriek. The waves crashing over a skeletal piece of flotsam. The sunlight striking the gun slung over Tarot’s shoulder. The memory of last night’s dream. That damn dream. The flood dream. It refused to go away. In real life zombies shunned the water, but in his dreams they
were
the water, contaminating it with their liquefied bodies. David tried to put the dream out of his mind. It was too nice a day for that. He was lying propped up on one elbow on a towel on the softest part of the shingle, dressed in summer attire: shorts, T-shirt and sunglasses. A short distance away the boy was searching through rock pools, occasionally scooping things up with a spade and placing them into a bucket. Tarot stood nearby, directing him, explaining things to him.

David watched them lazily. He never tired of watching the boy. His innocence and beauty were captivating. The youthfulness of his mannerisms, the hopefulness in the way he looked at things, the brightness of his eyes. Beautiful was really the only word for him. Sometimes the warm feeling the boy gave him made his insides ache. His eyes strayed over Tarot in a different, but no less agreeable, manner. He felt a strange kind of ownership over them. Was it ownership? He knew what it was; it occurred to him very powerfully as he watched them together. The virus had gifted him with something that he’d believed he could never have: a family of his own. It was a family he never would have imagined for himself – with a partner who was male and a son who wasn’t biologically his – but it was a family nonetheless, clinging by its collective fingernails to life and hope and sanity. His family. An unattainable goal had been attained. And it had only taken the end of civilisation to get there.

“Come and look at this,” Tarot called to him.

He got up and went over to the others. The boy had carved their names into a patch of shingle with his spade. Each name was five letters long, one on top of the other, the letters in perfect alignment.
David. Shawn. Tarot.

“That’s excellent,” David said, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Why that order?”

“It’s alphabetical,” the boy said.

“Of course it is,” he said. He pulled the boy to him and kissed the top of his head.

The boy quickly turned to something else, but David remained staring at the inscribed names. They seemed like a representation of what he’d just been thinking about, as if the boy had read his mind. A list of family members. But there was some other chord the names struck. They made him think how everything in life was like writing your name in shingle. You knew the tide would come and erase it, maybe not straight away but soon enough, but still you wrote, admiring your handiwork, leaving it there, knowing it couldn’t last. The tide of disaster had swept away all of man’s handiwork, taking with it every name that had ever been carved in shingle, never to return. Every name except for those of his family, at least for the moment, and this was both exhilarating and terrifying.

He had something to live for and something to lose.

It was low tide. They left carrying a selection of weapons, leaving the boy alone in the apartment. They were going to do something David had managed to avoid for months: weapons training. He knew Tarot’s shooting skills would put him to shame and he wasn’t sure if he could stand the embarrassment of it. He couldn’t aim worth a damn, while Tarot could drop zombies with a single shot. There was no escaping it now though. He had no choice but to face up to how useless he was.

Tarot had it all planned. They walked past the green and the small collection of shops to where there was a rare sight these days: a children’s playground. Beyond this was a pair of tennis courts surrounded by a tall wire fence. Tarot had already brought some cardboard cut-outs here from a surf shop to use as targets. They locked the gate leading to the courts using a chain and padlock, took the tennis nets down and positioned the cut-outs.

“We’re gonna start with a pistol,” Tarot said.

“Can’t we start with a machine gun?”

“No,” Tarot said evenly. “Glasses on.”

“Can I use yours?” David asked. His glasses didn’t have targeting aids.

“No.”

“But you’re better at this than me.”

“My glasses are calibrated to me,” Tarot said patiently. “Yours will serve you just as well. Come on. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

David shoved his glasses onto his face. He was in a bad mood already.

He stood where Tarot indicated in front of the first target: a smiling man wearing brightly coloured shorts and carrying a surfboard. After releasing the safeties he stood with legs apart, his left hand gripping his right wrist.

“That’s good,” Tarot said. “Now, take your time. Aim at the head, or the area just below the neck. You hit one of ‘em there they’ll definitely be pushed back, if nothing else. Don’t pull the trigger with your finger; squeeze it with your whole hand.”

He took aim, fired and, as expected, missed completely. The cardboard surfer continued to smile at him, unscathed, amused by his ineptitude. He consoled himself with the fact that he’d managed to pull off the trick of looking unsurprised by the gun’s report and recoil.

“Okay,” Tarot said, “you’re aiming too high and yanking on the trigger, that’s all. Most people do in the beginning.”

“That’s nice to know.”

Tarot stood behind him and adjusted his aim while looking over his shoulder. “There, that’s better,” he said. “Keep your arm loose so it can react to the recoil – almost like a gimbal. That’s it. Now, just exhale and squeeze.”

David fired. A hole appeared right between the surfer’s eyes. He punched the air and cheered. It was first time he’d ever hit something that wasn’t at point-blank range.

“Don’t get cocky,” Tarot said, smiling. “There’s a long way to go yet.”

Standing at varying distances from the targets, they ran through the different weapons. Handgun. Rifle. Semi-automatic machine gun. Semi-automatic machine gun with laser sight. Tarot’s teaching style was firm and only ever constructively critical, focusing on specific ways to improve, never giving him time to think about giving up. At some point something clicked. David found he was able to hit the target every time, and usually in the upper body or head, which was vital when it came to zombies. He grew in confidence, not only with shooting but with basic gun handling. Tarot was feeding him a stream of information about the weapons in the form of easily digestible snippets, making them more understandable and less daunting to use. In no time he found he was switching safeties, checking chambers and swapping out magazines as if such things were second nature.

He was lining up to shoot the head off a grinning, bikini-clad surfer when Tarot said in a monotonic voice, “We’ve got a live one.”

David turned in the direction Tarot was looking: behind them. Beyond the fence a zombie was approaching. It was a filthy-looking male, clad only in T-shirt and underpants. When it reached the fence it started clawing at the wire, eyes wide, an angry hissing sound issuing from between bared teeth.

Tarot flipped David’s glasses onto the top of his head. “Let’s see if you can hit it now.”

David took aim. He was using a machine gun with a laser sight, but without his glasses the laser was useless at this range. He fired. The shots missed, and he took a moment to correct his posture and relax his arms properly. The zombie jerked when his next shots hit its arm and shoulder, spraying dots of dark blood onto its face, but otherwise it didn’t react. Growling menacingly, it started climbing the fence. Although his shots had found their target, they had failed to put the zombie out of commission.

“You might be overcompensating for the loss of your glasses,” Tarot said. “Try to get it when it’s not moving; a moving target’s difficult to hit. If it’s constantly moving, try to judge where it’s headed and aim at that point.
Anticipate
the target.”

The zombie was halfway up the fence. He took aim again, waiting for when it was relatively still. At just the right moment he squeezed off a short burst of shots. The zombie’s head exploded in a bloody red mist and its body fell onto the tarmac with a sickening crunch. David flipped his sunglasses back on, grinning.

“Well done,” Tarot said. “That’s excellent from this range. Remember: short, controlled volleys – just enough to get the job done. You should always be conscious of ammo conservation.”

“Yes, sir!” David snapped in militaristic fashion. “Is that what they used to call you?”

“No, I wasn’t an officer. I was a sergeant.”

“Yes, Sergeant Dugas! Wait a minute! You mean you were a non-mon non-com?” He erupted into peals of laughter; he couldn’t stop himself.

Tarot smiled along with the joke. “That’s right,” he said. “A non-mon nom-com who’s non compos mentis. I’ve heard it all before.”

David laughed even harder, until a sudden rattling sound cut him off. Another zombie, female this time, was at the gate, trying to get in.

“Your second volunteer for target practice,” said Tarot, gesturing towards the zombie as if making a formal introduction.