Doomware (3 page)

Crouching on his haunches, he peered around the garden wall and watched as Varley’s broad, T-shirt-clad back slowly receded into the vanishing mist like some awful earthbound iceberg.

* * *

The cat wolfed down the salmon and spent the rest of the day lying motionless on the floor like a stuffed rug, looking pleased with itself. David could barely summon up any appetite and nibbled half-heartedly on some expensive handmade potato chips.

By the time daylight started to fade he had managed, however, to finish off a whole bottle of wine, the stuff having barely touched the sides going down. Revelling in the devil-may-care mood it gifted him with, he laughed so long and so hard that by the time he stopped he couldn’t remember why he’d started in the first place, which drew yet more laughter from his lips.

That’s it, smile and the world smiles with you, he thought. Laughter is the best medicine and all that crap. Why couldn’t they remember that?

“Just ‘cause you’re one of the living dead now,” he slurred, pointing at an imaginary zombie in front of him, “it doesn’t mean you’re not still the same great person – enjoy life!” He threw his head back and roared with laughter.

Then he sang an old sea shanty, the words dredged up from somewhere he couldn’t identify feeling apposite in the circumstances.
 

I’ll never make old bones

But I don’t care

I’ll hurry to God’s gate

And meet Him there

I’ll never make old bones

But who’s to say

We’re not all destined

To go the same way?

He sang it as a sea shanty should be sung: loudly and heartily, with a fist punching the air. But such forced levity was unsustainable, and the singing abruptly stopped when his chin fell onto his chest. Breathing heavily through his nose, his thoughts darkened. They deserved it, the zombies. Sometimes he chose not to admit this to himself, but a part of him believed it. They’d brought it on themselves. The bastards deserved to have been struck down by the one thing they had treasured most. They had loathed and persecuted and made fun of him and his kind, but what they would give to be like him now. The irony of it! But then his thoughts turned to his parents and his grandparents and his great-grandparents and his friend Michael – who’d been his friend no matter what, no matter how hard the tide of society must have pushed against him – and grief mingled with the anger, causing sudden tears to well in his eyes. But even his mother … even his dear sweet dead mother … even she had called him a–

His mind was far more receptive to anger than it was sorrow. With all his strength, he pitched the empty wine bottle across the room. It flew end over end and shattered against the wall, sending the cat sprawling for the door.

When the ill effects of the wine hit, they hit hard, uncoiling inside him with all the spitefulness of a spurned lover. He ran to the bathroom and vomited. It wasn’t long before an empty stomach left him retching helplessly.

I’m not used to wine, he thought feebly. I should never have brought it back here.

After the retching had subsided he went to his bed and lay down. The cat was there, its bottlebrush tail still proof of the fright it had received.

“Sorry cat,” he mumbled. God only knew how sorry he was. In every sense of the word.

Taking great care, he rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. His head spun so violently it was as if a torture device had been implanted directly into his brain.

Oh God!
If only he weren’t so alone. This whole thing might have been bearable if only he had a friend. Just one. Somebody to rely on. Somebody to talk to. Other than the cat. A fellow human being.

Gradually, he drifted off into a restless sleep, and dreamed about the start of it.

The lights came on as he opened the door to his flat and the music in his earphones was replaced by a voice repeating “Mum is calling”. He reached into his pocket and hit a key on his mobile.

“Hello?”

“Hello love,” his mother said cheerily. “I’m just calling to see what you thought.”
 

He closed the door and dumped his shoulder bag onto the floor. “About what?”
 

“You haven’t heard?”
 

“About
what?
” he said, more irritably than he’d intended. “Sorry, I’ve just been stuck in a basement all day cataloguing crap.”

“Aw, no fun?”
 

“It was hell.”
 

“Oh, love! Have you eaten?”
 

“I just got in.”
 

“At this time?”
 

“There’s something wrong with the Tube.”

“Oh dear! I hope it’s nothing to do with the news.”
 

In the living room he was met by a rare sight in this day and age: a television screen. It sensed his presence and turned on, and he switched it to a news channel with a wave of his hand. In the top right corner a holographic representation of the Earth showed a red dot pulsing over the area of the Balkan Peninsula, while a banner below the newsreader scrolled:
Level 12 Cy-Vi Alert
.

“Level twelve?” he said. “What’s that mean?”

“That’s the thing: there’s never been a twelve. The highest was a ten nearly fifty years ago.”

He went into the kitchen, where a smaller holographic television came on, tuned to the same news channel. Beyond the window shone the distant, hazy lights of Canary Wharf and the City of London.

“It’ll turn out to be nothing,” he said with confidence. As he talked, he took a brick-like block wrapped in a label marked
Blox
from a cupboard, placed it on a plate and put it in the morpher. “There’ll be reports about a couple of people being lobotomised for about ten seconds, a big hoo-ha, and then the whole thing’ll be forgotten about.”

“I expect so.”
 

The news programme was now showing a map of Europe with a red swathe sweeping across it.

“You should fix something to eat, love,” she said.

“I’m doing it now.”
 

His morpher was a “special” one with a touch screen, an addition that was unnecessary for the vast majority of people. He flicked through the different options, made his selection and pressed the start button; it bleeped confirmation and whirred into life.

“What are you having?” she asked.
 

“Fish and chips.”
 

“Lovely.”
 

“Anyway, I don’t have to worry, do I?”
 

His mother hesitated a moment before she said, “Well, that’s the good thing about it, isn’t it?”

Even she didn’t sound convinced by her own words. He decided to change the subject.

“How’s Dad?”

“Oh, you know what he’s like: always working. He was complaining he couldn’t get through to anyone in Budapest and thought it might have something to do with this level twelve thing. It’s very odd. I tried calling Marcia in Munich, just to see, and no joy there either.”

The morpher gave out a chime and died.

“It’ll be a satellite thing,” he said. “Look, my dinner’s ready.”

“Yes, you should have eaten by now, and make sure you wrap up warm tomorrow ‘cause it’ll be cold.”
 

“Mum, I’m ninety-eight years old,” he said tonelessly. He couldn’t think how many times he’d had to remind her of his age.

“I know, but you’ll always be a baby to me, won’t you? Look after yourself.”

“I always do. Bye, Mum.”

“Bye, love.”

He hung up and opened the morpher’s door. Where the Blox had been lay a steaming fishcake in breadcrumbs, chips and a mixed vegetable purée. He took the meal and sat at the dining table, his eyes on the TV. The newsreader was saying something about equipment malfunctions.

It’s always the same, he thought. They made such a big fuss over nothing; it was almost a form of entertainment for the listless ranks of after-work viewers.

He tucked into his dinner, not knowing it was the last of its kind he’d ever taste. Not knowing that by morning his mother and his father and everyone else he’d ever known would be dead.

He woke feeling as if he’d just been in a car crash. A dizzying turmoil clouded his brain. A jarring sensation reverberated deep in his bones. A fuzzy-headed acceptance of death gave way to an awe at still being alive. He’d never been in a car crash, but it was the way he imagined waking from one felt. This happened every morning, this car crash malaise. It was really quite appropriate when he thought about it; the whole world was one big car wreck now – why should he feel any different?

This morning the malaise was joined by something else: a hangover. He’d forgotten how much he hated them. They had always enflamed his envy of everyone else, the normal masses who’d been freed from the burden of physical pain, a state of painlessness that persisted in their zombified state. They never cried out in pain, no matter what. You could plunge a knife into them or set them on fire and they wouldn’t even react to it. This, of course, only served to make them more terrifying.

He felt awful. Eyes firmly shut, head pressed against pillow, he lay listening with one ear to the sounds that drifted from an air vent high up near the ceiling. A dog barking in the distance. The hush of a few spare trees swaying in the wind. The sound of a zombie as it wandered the streets outside. This last one was merely vocalised gibberish, uninhibited and incoherent, one random outburst after another, like a stream of Morse code tapped out by a madman, the guttural, staccato tone of it containing suggestions of the human, the animal and the machine, though no one of these was sufficient to categorise it on its own. It was a horribly unnerving sound, the effect made even worse by the eerie way in which it echoed off of concrete and timber in the still city air. As awful as it was, the vent had offered up far worse for his senses and his imagination over the past six months. Especially late at night. They never slept, as far as he could tell. Instead they roamed the city in numbers like angry nightclub rejects, making sounds so scary even the toughest guy would have hid, quaking, beneath his bedclothes, wishing himself deaf, for each was such a stark reminder that the world had descended into – quite literally – stark raving madness. Sometimes he felt quite certain that the sounds alone were driving him as insane as the rest of them. Only on rare occasions did they wash over him, leaving him untouched, as simple to ignore as the sound of his own breathing. He hated the vent. He would block it up as soon as winter bit.

He opened his eyes; the pain throbbing in his forehead doubled so he closed them again. Gregor Samsa must have had better mornings than this, he thought bitterly. Even after
The Metamorphosis
.

He wondered what time it was – until he remembered how it didn’t matter. Keeping his eyes closed, he shifted into a sitting position very slowly, like the kind of long-gone old-timer who’d had to mind his ageing bones. Water, he thought. I need water.

He clambered out of bed and padded through to the kitchen in his underwear, stretching his arms as he went, trying to shrug off the car crash malaise and the hangover as if they were heavy overcoats. In the kitchen, which was far too small for all the accoutrements of food-making he’d had to accumulate since the disaster – refrigerator, microwave oven, electric grill and hotplate combination, pots and pans and utensils of every description – he downed glass after glass of water while the cat let out a high-pitched mew and rubbed itself against his arm. He felt the cleansing liquid sloshing about his distended belly and started to feel better at once. A compulsion to pour the remaining bottles of wine down the drain nagged at him, but he resisted it. It wasn’t the wine’s fault; he had to learn some self-control.

After feeding the cat he rooted around in a cupboard for his pills. For decades he’d kept them in a special dispenser, dutifully sorting them into compartments labelled with the days of the week – until the calamity had struck, when he’d stopped using the dispenser and lost track of the days, making pill-sorting a useless gesture, a thing of the past. He thought today might have been a Tuesday, but there was no way of knowing for sure. There was something strangely pleasant about neither knowing nor caring what day it was. Every day was as nameless and dateless as the days before human history.

He swept up the pieces of the broken wine bottle like an automaton, his jaded eyes barely focused on the task, taking care not to cut himself out of habit more than anything else. Then he took a seat in front of the living room window and sat for a long while staring out over the familiar skyline of the sepulchral city. London: the great metropolis turned necropolis he called home.

Poor old Londinium, he thought. After all you’ve been through. To end up like this. It broke his heart to think of St Paul’s, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey wreathed in zombies, but wreathed they were. The cathedral was especially galling. He’d always loved the elegant dome that had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire, a constant on the London skyline despite the procession of world wars, a sight he’d particularly enjoyed at night, when its illuminated facade seemed to him like an edifice to all human aspiration. Of course, there was no going there at night any more, but he kept the image of it in his mind like a photograph of someone special tucked into a locket, one he chose to gaze upon now and again while immersed in mournful daydreams, allowing himself to swim in the bittersweet remembrance of a much sweeter time.

As he watched smoke from some unseen fire drifted into the air a long way off, near the Thames. In the beginning he’d dared to hope that such fires were signs of other survivors. He’d imagined people like himself setting them as a smoke signal, a kind of forced regression for the children of a ruined technological age. But now he knew better. The fires were started by electrical shortages, or the sun’s rays, or perhaps by the zombies themselves.