by Nathan Allen
But in his highly emotional and agitated state, Elliott could almost feel Zombie Trent taunting him. This former human, and his former friend, had a look of smug self-satisfaction plastered across his rapidly decaying face.
That was all it took for Elliott to snap.
He jumped from the bus and stormed over to where Zombie Trent was standing. With little regard for his own safety, he punched him square in the face.
Zombie Trent went down like a slaughterhouse cow. It was as easy as knocking over a store mannequin.
Elliott continued to pummel him while he was on the ground, his hands and legs still shackled.
“You think this is funny?” Elliott shouted at him before unleashing a flurry of kicks to Zombie Trent’s midsection. “You think this is funny? I know you can hear me!”
Adam and Miles couldn’t get over there fast enough. Neither one could believe what they were seeing, or that Elliott would do something so reckless.
“You’ve been doing this to me for three years?!”
Miles grabbed hold of Elliott and tried to pull him away, but his blind fury seemed to give him superhuman strength.
Two more centre staff members rushed over to help. They were eventually able to drag Elliott away before he could do any further damage.
“Have you lost your mind?” Adam screamed at him.
But Elliott couldn’t hear him. His focus was exclusively on Zombie Trent.
There was every chance that he had lost his mind.
Fabian was growing restless. There was a war going on, but all anyone was doing was standing around and waiting for something to happen. The Zeroes had been protesting outside the processing centre for months now, and still nothing had been achieved. He knew that change took time, but he never really had the kind of attention span that would see things through to the end. If he knew it was going to take this long he might have had second thoughts about getting involved in the first place.
Another Z-Pro truck approached the processing centre, turning off from the main road and coming towards the front entrance. The assembled dead-heads put down their acoustic guitars and halted their games of hacky-sack to retrieve their placards and go through the motions once again. They chanted slogans. They laid down in the truck’s path. They pounded on the sides and rocked it back and forth, oblivious to the distress this caused the former humans inside. They did the same things they always did, and it produced the same result: the Z-Pro truck and the processing centre staff were inconvenienced for a few minutes, before the hired goons came in and restored order.
This wasn’t rebellion. They weren’t sticking it to the man. This was basically an officially-sanctioned protest. Everyone obediently remained inside their designated protest areas. This allowed them to think they were maintaining the rage, but it was about as effective as protesting the use of third world sweatshops and child labour by going into a Nike store and filling out a complaint form.
Fabian was sick of waiting. This was a cause that needed action, not empty gestures.
While everyone else was distracted by the commotion at the front entrance, Fabian managed to slip away unnoticed from the main group. He found a blind spot on the perimeter fence, unseen by any of the guards and hidden from view from the lookout tower.
He reached into his rucksack and fished out a pair of wire cutters.
His hands moved fast. A series of rapid snips, and he had cut a hole in the wire mesh fence big enough for him to slip through. This wasn’t all that difficult, since the processing centre was hardly Alcatraz. It had been erected in haste with temporary fencing, and its main function was to keep zombies in rather than humans out. It was surprising that it had taken this long for someone to actually try it.
He looked around to see if anyone had spotted him. No one had.
One fence was down, and there was one more to go. His pulse raced as he set to work on the second one. But this fence would prove to be a much greater challenge. It was made from galvanised wire, and it was significantly thicker and stronger. It quickly dawned on him that he hadn’t really thought this part through.
He pushed down hard on the handle of the cutters. Nothing. The blade barely made an indentation. The wire on this fence was five times the thickness than that of the first. He may as well have been using plastic scissors, for all the good the cutters were doing. Being a vegan with the biceps of a ten-year-old girl didn’t help either.
When it became blindingly obvious that he didn’t have a hope in hell of cutting his way through, he assessed his other options. Above him, a tangled mess of razor wire loomed menacingly. He knew this was the riskiest of all his options, but by now he was running on pure adrenaline. He scaled to the top of the fence, then carefully snipped away at the razor wire.
One minute later, and a section of razor wire fell away. He climbed over the top and jumped to the ground. His clothes snagged on the way down, and the razor wire mauled in his $400 designer jeans. Normally he would have been devastated, but on this occasion he didn’t have time to dwell on it. He was inside.
For a moment he just stood there, not knowing what he should do next. He was like the proverbial dog that had caught the car. He was inside the processing centre. He had made it further in than any other protester. Now what?
A wave of anxiety hit him. For all Fabian’s talk of civil disobedience he had never really broken the law before, aside from some minor vandalism. He wasn’t sure what sort of punishment he’d be facing for breaking into a government facility, but he assumed it would be more than just a light slap on the wrist. And with ginger dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back and his “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt, he didn’t exactly blend in with his surroundings.
But he knew he couldn’t just stand there and do nothing. So Fabian, the anti-corporate warrior, took out his Apple iPhone and filmed his surroundings.
What he captured was far from earth-shattering. Just a whole bunch of zombies being unloaded from the Z-Pro truck and taken away for processing. Over on the other side of the compound, a chain gang of zombies in orange boilersuits were led away to the transportation area, en route to one of the massive desert facilities where they all eventually ended up.
It was nothing he hadn’t seen on TV before, and there was none of the rumoured abuse and degradation that had been spoken about. Everything was proper and above board. No one was beating the zombies or breaching the NEVADA law. It was such an anti-climax.
He was about to give up hope of filming anything worthwhile when he caught some movement out of the corner of his eye. A UMC worker jumped from his vehicle and stormed over to where one of the zombies was awaiting processing.
Fabian whipped his phone around to film it. Viewing the events as they unfolded through the iPhone’s LCD screen, he couldn’t quite believe what came next.
The UMC worker swung his fist at the zombie and knocked it to the ground. He then unloaded a barrage of vicious kicks, screaming profanities and abuse at the top of his lungs.
Fabian crept closer to the action. He zoomed in as tight as he could. It was then that he recognised the deranged assailant. This was Elliott, Miles’ loser friend who he had seen hanging around Clea’s place a couple of times before.
Fabian held onto the phone with both of his trembling hands. His right hand was cramping after cutting through all that wire, but he ignored the pain. He was both terrified and exhilarated, giddy with nervous anticipation. He wasn’t sure what was happening or why, but he knew this was big. This could be the Zapruder film or Rodney King tape of his generation. This footage was going around the world.
“Hey!”
Fabian flinched when he heard a guard shouting at him from the other side of the compound.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the guard demanded to know. “You shouldn’t be in here!”
The guard saw what Fabian was doing, then what Elliott was doing, and quickly deduced the potential implications of what was about to happen. He sprinted towa
rds Fabian, while the other UMC workers and centre staff pulled Elliott away from the battered zombie.
Fabian knew he had to move fast. He fiddled with his phone, standing completely still as the guard came charging towards him like a wounded bull. He didn’t even try to get out of the way when the guard lunged and tackled him to the ground.
“How did you get in here?” the guard bellowed, shoving Fabian’s face into the dirt and twisting his arms behind his back. “This is a restricted area!”
Two more guards rushed over to lend assistance. They pulled Fabian to his feet and dragged him out of the area in a choke hold.
Once Fabian was taken away, one of the guards noticed the iPhone lying in the dirt. He picked it up and looked at the screen.
It said: “Message sent”.
Chapter 14
“I know I’m asking a lot,” Miles said, “but please don’t release that footage.”
“The world needs to see this, Miles,” Clea replied. “They need to know what’s going on inside those facilities.”
“I’m begging you, as a friend, that you do me just this one favour. I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.”
If Miles looked up the word “futile” in the dictionary it would probably include some description of what he was doing now.
Fabian had sent the video he had recorded to Clea, and Miles was praying that a miracle might occur and Clea would agree to let Elliott off the hook. He even considered offering Clea free rent for a year in exchange for deleting the incriminating footage, before deciding he couldn’t quite go that far. Besides, money never seemed to be a problem for Clea, and she was rich enough to turn an offer like that down.
“This is an issue that’s bigger than both of us,” she said. “When this is released, the public can see for themselves what’s happening inside those processing centres. It could change the way former humans are treated in this world.”
“You know what else it could do? It could make things a lot worse for them.”
“How do you figure that?”
“If that footage gets out, then it could put Dead Rite out of business.”
“And I’m supposed to care about that why, exactly?”
“Because if Dead Rite gets shut down, that leaves Z-Pro as the only remaining UMC contractor in town. You and I both know that they’re a hell of a lot worse than us.”
“The lesser of two evils is still evil, Miles.”
“What happened with Elliott was an isolated incident. But that sort of thing goes on every day at Z-Pro. They’re always being accused of mistreatment towards the undead, or torturing them for their own amusement. The only difference is that the charges never stick.”
Despite the frequent allegations of rough conduct levelled against them, Z-Pro had so far managed to avoid any charges or penalties. They claimed this was due to their disciplined workforce and strict adherence to correct protocols, but it probably had more to do with Jack Houston’s political connections. Whenever a potential controversy arose, it only took a couple of phone calls to the right people to make it disappear.
“Don’t worry,” Clea said. “Z-Pro are next on our hit list. We’ll take them all down, one by one if we have to.”
“Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive Elliott?” Miles pleaded. “You know, as a Buddhist?”
“Ha,” Clea snorted. “Nice try.”
Miles could argue with Clea until he was blue in the face, but he knew he was fighting a losing battle.
By the end of the day, those twenty-seven explosive seconds of wobbly cell phone footage would travel around the world at warp speed, appearing on thousands of news broadcasts and video blogs, and lighting up every media platform known to mankind. Critics who had long suspected that zombies were being abused inside processing centres now had irrefutable proof.
The video would spark new waves of protests from supporters of undead rights, and renewed calls for tougher penalties for anyone found guilty of mistreating zombies.
Steve flicked through the TV channels with the remote. Every network was running the same story – the shocking footage of the UMC worker caught kicking the crap out of a defenceless, semi-naked zombie. Several news anchors and pundits added their own commentary to go along with the footage, describing the “brutal” and “confronting” methods that UMC workers employed on former humans inside processing centres. Others simply let the vision speak for itself.
Elliott’s eyes remained firmly glued to the floor. The past twenty-four hours had been a never-ending sequence of miseries, and it didn’t look like things were about to get any better for him in the foreseeable future. It should have been a private matter; an act of betrayal by a friend, and the betrayed’s violent-yet-possibly-justifiable outburst. Instead, it had blown up and was now very public. If Trent had still been human, this sorry saga wouldn’t have been the least bit newsworthy. But he was now a former human, and so the story had exploded into the public consciousness. It seemed as though everyone had an opinion on the matter.
Steve switched the TV off once he decided his point had been made.
A charged silence filled the room. A pregnant pause.
Elliott wasn’t sure if Steve was waiting for him to explain himself, or if he just wanted Elliott to squirm a little while longer.
“Steve,” he began. “I know this looks bad, but–”
Steve held up his hand, and Elliott immediately fell silent.
“Let me give you some idea of the problems we are now facing,” Steve said.
He spoke in a voice that was outwardly calm, but a slight quiver suggested he was doing all he could to suppress an enormous reservoir of rage.
“We have been caught violating protocol in the worst possible way. There is no way we can talk or negotiate our way out of this one. So this is what’s going to happen. We’ll release a statement to the press taking full responsibility for the incident. We’ll plead guilty to any charges brought against us. And we’ll announce immediate measures to be put in place to ensure this sort of thing never happens again. Which will include terminating the employment of the UMC worker in the video.”
Elliott looked up. “You’re firing me?”
“I’m afraid you haven’t left us with much choice. If we do all that, we might escape with just a fine. But if they really want to make an example out of us, Dead Rite could have its contract torn up.”
Steve gulped down what remained of his glass of water. He took a series of slow, calming breaths. He could feel another migraine coming on.
“Although at the end of the day I doubt it will make much difference if they end our contract or not,” he continued, “since the fine is likely to be so astronomical that we won’t have a hope in hell of paying it.”
“So why don’t you keep me on and I can work off the fine?”
Steve almost laughed out loud at that proposal. “You’re not serious, are you?”
Once Elliott gave it a moment’s thought, he realised how preposterous his suggestion was. The fine coming their way was likely to be in the six-figure range. They would have to garnish Elliott’s wages for the next thirty years before it was even close to being paid off.
Steve shook his head sadly. He liked Elliott, and he understood the reasons behind his sudden brain snap, but he had no other option but to fire him. The cliché about being disappointed rather than angry rang true.
“I don’t think there’s anything more for us to discuss here, is there?” he said.
Elliott took that as his cue to leave. He stood up and left without saying another word.
Chapter 15
Bernard Marlowe stepped up to the microphone, and a hushed silence swept across the auditorium packed with twenty thousand greying baby boomers. After enjoying decades of wealth, prosperity and stability these people, who were older than a Rolling Stones audience and whiter than a Ku Klux Klan rally, were thrilled to finally have something to be angry about. That was what Marlowe provided for them, and they had all
given up their evenings of watching The Mentalist in their comfortable suburban homes for the chance to catch a glimpse of their idol.
“This is the most dangerous and incompetent government in our nation’s history!” Marlowe thundered. “The Prime Minister has blood on his hands!”
This, like everything that disgorged from Marlowe’s mouth, was met with raucous cheers.
Supporting Marlowe tonight was his loving family: wife Celine, proudly displaying her new surgically-enhanced shrink-wrapped face, and twin daughters Madison and Stephanie, both outfitted in the latest runway designs.
The girls had jumped at the chance to act as stage props in front of such a huge audience. The two of them had eagerly embraced the famous-for-being-famous lifestyle ever since they were thrust into the limelight, and wasted little time in taking advantage of their newfound celebrity-by-osmosis. Barely a day went by without their picture appearing in The Daily Ink’s social pages, whether they were modelling in fashion shows, attending glamorous A-list events, promoting their range of designer handbags, DJing in clubs, or whatever else people did when they had a high profile but possessed no discernible talent. Their enthusiastic partying had come at a cost, though – they were now the oldest-looking twenty-two-year-olds you were ever likely to see.
“When we are elected to government,” Marlowe continued, a statement that was met with a deafening roar. “When we are elected, we will repeal the NEVADA law and implement CADAVER. We pledge to reinstate the rights of ordinary citizens. We will not be held to ransom by enemies of democracy like the Former Human Defence League and the Tribe of Zeroes. Because I believe in democracy!”
Marlowe’s voice reached its crescendo as he built to a climax. “We will take back this country from the grip of horror! Because the undead don’t run this country – the people run this country!”