Doomware (9 page)

As he entered his building he switched off the earphones and immediately sensed something was wrong. A couple of people he knew by sight if not by name caught his eye as he waited at the central lifts. They avoided eye contact with him, hiding smiles as best they could. He decided to take the stairs; it was only three storeys. He took the stairs slowly, changing grip on his bag from shoulder strap to carrying handle as he usually did while negotiating staircases. There was a horrible feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, and he knew its cause: Marcus Varley. His pace slowed even more; not due to physical exertion, but due to a desire not to reach his destination. His legs were stiff and heavy, plodding on on autopilot. Had walking to the gallows or the firing squad felt something like this? he wondered bleakly.

When he opened the door to his department somebody laughed out loud at him. That clinched it. Varley was definitely up to something. He walked the length of the open-plan office to his desk, trying to retain as much dignity as possible as all around him people stared and exploded into poorly stifled laughter like a chain of booby traps triggered by his passing.

He’d barely been at his desk a minute before Varley appeared like an overgrown spectre with a Cheshire cat grin.

“How ya doin’, Knee-jerk?”

Varley had an array of pet names for him and “Knee-jerk”, a pathetic play on his surname, was a favourite. He placed a meaty hand on the desk and leaned over it, casting a shadow as oppressive as an invading spaceship’s. The size of the man was impossible not to take note of, no matter how many times you did so. David could almost hear the great muscles straining as they resisted their natural urge to pummel him senseless; the same muscles that always showed despite the outsized clothes Varley wore, that women whispered knowingly to each other about behind indiscreet hands, and that years later would strike unmitigated terror into his heart. His size was like another deliberate affront, something else to emphasise the contrast between them: Varley with his computer-enhanced brain and invincible strength, and he with his dead head and lean physique, weak in both body and mind. Varley was Hercules, while he was Sisyphus in comparison, doomed to keep rolling his boulder up the hill of acyberneticism. Punished for ever. Outwitted for ever. He ignored the huge body hovering over his desk and tapped at his computer console, the only one of its kind in the entire building, with which he accessed his poor man’s version of the Cybernet.

“What’s the matter with you?” Varley boomed after an interval of being ignored. “Cat got yer tongue this morning?”

Varley reminded David of First Sergeant Warden in
From Here to Eternity
: given to sudden outbursts, intimidating both physically and mentally, knowing almost preternaturally where to apply pressure, when to turn the screw; but, of course, without any of the Sergeant’s redeeming features.

“Whatever it is … I’m not interested,” David said, not looking up from his console.

Varley nodded sagely, as if sympathising with his point of view. “I see, okay … but it’s a shame, y’know? ‘Cause a lot of people are gonna be very interested in you now … ‘specially the fellas.”
 

“I said I’m not interested,” David said, more hotly than he’d intended to, looking up despite himself.
 

Varley raised his hands. “Okay, okay! Keep yer panties on, will ya?”
 

At that, a ripple of sniggering swept across the office. Varley’s eyes flickered with all the merciless fervour of a playground bully, one who knew there was no one sizeable enough to challenge him. The bastard was relishing this – whatever it was. Half an hour later he found out. A colleague on the next floor up emailed him the image Varley had been transmitting over the Cybernet. The image was of his head superimposed onto a man’s body clad in women’s underwear: lacy bra, panties, stockings and suspenders. This picture had been flashing up in people’s field of vision the moment their brainware had identified him. To top it all, there was a gormless look on his face in the picture, producing an overall effect that was even more comical, even more humiliating.

David silently seethed, but his anger was tinged with a type of melancholy. When it came to isolation, there was nothing in the world quite like a private joke, and being the butt of an endless stream of them was all but intolerable. It wasn’t just acyberphobia that made people act the way they did; Varley picked on someone like him simply because he was different, and that difference ensured he didn’t stand a chance against someone who was normal like Varley. It had always been that way, and it always would. He was an outsider, a freak, as separate from them as the stars were from each other. Through no fault of his own, no sin, yet often he felt the shame of sin as if it were a physical weight bearing down on him, or pulling down on him the way the One Ring had grown heavier and more burdensome on the chain around Frodo’s neck. Only, instead of a Ring of Power, he was the bearer of a disk. A disk that told the rest of the world he would never be one of them.

He was a long way from the flat, and beginning wonder whether it was worth it. It had been a toss-up between coming in this direction and returning to the Lighthouse, but he regarded the Lighthouse as being akin to a special delicacy: the consumption of it needed to be rationed, meted out in measured portions, with enough time in between for proper digestion. On Boundary Road he saw a small, odd-looking shop called
Hens’ Teeth
. The name suggested exotica inside, kindling a spark of optimism, and he set to work gaining entry with a sense of anticipation.

However, once inside, the more he looked around the cramped and dusty shelves the more deflated he became. This stuff was as rare as hens’ teeth all right, and about as useful. Movie memorabilia. Children’s toys. Framed photographs of pop stars. Autographed items of every description. Everything except anything he might have had a use for. He kept thinking there must be something valuable in the clutter, some precious gems amid the worthless tat, but the only things he could find were some vinyl records for the Lighthouse’s turntable, and even those were of questionable quality. Finally, he gave up searching and left, taking a few seven-inch records more to satisfy his desire to take something than anything else.

Outside it was a cold, miserable day that kept promising rain but failing to deliver. It felt like he’d walked for miles and he was bone-tired, with precious little to show for his efforts rattling around inside his holdall.

He was halfway along Northumberland Road went it happened. A male zombie suddenly appeared on the pavement ahead, about 30 feet away. He didn’t know where it had come from; one second the path was clear and the next it was there, as large as life and twice as vile. David froze, feeling the familiar adrenal response flood through his body. Fight or flight? Stun or shun? It didn’t look like the zombie had seen him yet, and there was no telling what it would do if it did. He could backtrack, try to make it to the previous junction. What kind of threat did it look to pose? It was tall, appeared to be well-built, and in its possession was a severed foot. It was holding the thing like an ice cream cone – by the ankle, the sole facing upwards – and taking huge bites from it. There was something particularly disturbing about the sight, as if it were devouring its own means of locomotion. Maybe it wouldn’t notice him anyway, distracted as it was by its revolting meal. All of this flashed through his computer-less brain in about a second.

Then it saw him. Immediately, it dropped the foot and ran towards him at full tilt. David shucked the holdall off his back and slipped the rolling pin from his jacket pocket. The decision had been made for him: it was fight time. He stood with feet apart, girding himself the way of a matador as the zombie, about fearsome as a deranged bull, charged. It was fast; he barely had time to think before it was upon him. It ran straight onto the tip of the rolling pin, which he drove deep into its solar plexus, causing a huge grunt of expelled air but little else. Close up its face was a horrid death mask smeared with blood and scraps of flesh. Saliva was running down its chin, beneath unholy, harrowing eyes that, despite their outrageous abnormality, had become the norm in this world. The smell of the thing was unconscionable; it was the fetidness of rotting meat, of the dead and the half-dead. It grabbed hold of the rolling pin and threw a wild backhand with its other hand, catching him both in the mouth and by surprise. Even after such a brief contact he could feel the clammy coldness of its skin, radiating like a frigid equivalent of body heat, and the blow itself stung like an ice burn.

He recovered quickly, yanking the pin free and unleashing a vicious uppercut with it. A gut-wrenching crack told him something had broken as the creature’s head whipped backwards and then righted itself, in a fashion that was almost comical. The thing looked dazed, but it was only an illusion; it was simply wearing the same moronic expression, unaffected. He was strongly reminded of film scenes where a powerful opponent absorbed the hero’s attack, deadpan, barely registering blows that would have poleaxed a real-life human being.

The zombie swung at him again, as wildly as before, and this time it managed to knock the pin from his hand. It clattered onto the road and went rolling away at high speed, as if making a dash for freedom.

“Shit!” he gasped. This had never happened before.

The zombie lunged at him with teeth bared, the same teeth that moments earlier had been dining on the arch of somebody’s foot. It latched onto his forearms, its hands like icy iron vices even through the thick padding of his clothing. The bastard was strong. He’d known it would be, but the level of strength surprised him nevertheless. He fought to control the panic rising in his chest, along with the nausea piqued in his diaphragm by the thing’s stench. He was too tired for this. Too horribly tired. Even with all the adrenaline, the emotions, the sensory inputs competing for attention, one thought cut through it all with the precision of a laser, and the thought was singular and irrepressible and gave him strength.

I am not going to die like this
.

If he was destined to die like this it should have been by his mother’s hand. He refused to let this stranger, this nobody, this reanimated
nothing
do it instead.

At that moment he remembered the gun. It was sitting in an outer pocket of his holdall, waiting for its first taste of real action. He just had to buy enough time so he could reach it. Bracing himself, he kicked the zombie in the groin once, twice, three times. Even brainware that was unaffected by a virus couldn’t completely nullify the effects of a well-aimed blow to that area of nerve-endings, the centre of male vulnerability. It doubled up slowly, looking vaguely confused by its sudden incapacity, allowing him to shake himself free. He wouldn’t have long; it would recover in no time. He ran to the holdall, tore the gun from it and struggled frantically with the safeties. Wilfred Owen’s line about “an ecstasy of fumbling” flashed into his mind. He knew
Dulce et Decorum Est
by heart now, possibly because he was fighting a one-man war, making him relate to war literature like never before. Maybe this was precisely the way Owen had felt as he’d rushed to protect himself from a gas attack.

When he focused on the zombie again it was still doubled over, unmoving. Maybe it was suffering a malfunction. He assumed that’s what happened sometimes; glitches in the infected programming turned them into motionless shop dummies for varying lengths of time. Then again, maybe it was just feigning a malfunction, trying to draw him in. Who knew what their powers of reasoning were? Stepping closer, he pointed the gun at its head. It had to be the head while he had the chance, and this was point-blank range; there would be no missing this time. The thing stared at him with eyes as cold and lifeless as it was, as unconcerned by the sight of the gun pointing at its head as a normal person would have been by the sight of a weather vane pointing in their direction. A harsh moan came from the creature’s mouth, dredged up from somewhere deep inside its body. It was a moan of nothingness, vocal white noise the likes of which he’d heard issuing from the lips of countless insane abominations such as this one.

He pulled the trigger.

The zombie’s head seemed to explode as it jerked in the direction of the bullet’s trajectory, and its body collapsed beneath it, striking the pavement with a meaty thud. David stood there, stunned and repulsed but morbidly fascinated, noting with dispassion how the bullet’s exit hole was larger than the entry one. The zombie’s brains, comprised of cells that were half biological and half nanotechnological – not that you could tell them apart; it was all just grey gloop – were splattered on the ground. Everything that had made it move and moan and murderous was lying there on the pavement, as harmless now as a burnt fuse. The creature looked so small and pathetic in this eviscerated semi-foetal position that a feeling close to remorse crept over him like a cold shadow. His mind replayed the moan it had voiced just before he’d pulled the trigger. Had there been more to it than he’d thought? Before he’d fired it had seemed like the kind of mindless emission he’d heard a thousand times, but now it transmogrified in his memory into a plaintive, plea-like “
nooooo
”. Had it been a final echo of the man the zombie had once been? A last suppressed protest against the calamitous events that had overtaken the world, and the injustice that had befallen him in particular? He pushed the notion aside, knowing it wasn’t true. There was nothing left of the man the zombie had once been, for God’s sake. Misplaced guilt: that was all it was. And it had been a mercy killing after all. Or a mercy termination of sorts, since the thing hadn’t been alive to start with.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, transfixed by the sight of the body, but it was too long. The gunshot wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, and an echoing cry from a neighbouring street brought him back to his senses. He collected the errant rolling pin, chastised it for having deserted him in battle, and made his way back to the flat.