Holiday of the Dead

by David Dunwoody

  “We need to get him back to the ship,” I said.

  Mick walked up behind me and said, “No, we can’t. It looks like that creature was infected with something. It looks like Orlando has it too now. He needs to be quarantined immediately.”

  Austin had been cradling Orlando’s head, but now he jumped up. “We’re not leaving my brother like this! He needs help!”

  As much as it pained me, I knew that Mick was right. The creature was clearly infected and so too was Orlando. I looked over to John who had quickly put his mask back on. As the others followed suit, Orlando began to convulse on the ground. His skin was turning grey-green and black spittle was spraying from his contorted mouth.

  “Jesus, look at him,” Mick muttered, stepping back. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving him!” Austin yelled.

  I look from Mick and Austin back down at Orlando. He abruptly stopped moving and then his eyes turned black. He rose to his feet as I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

  Mick saw him first and quickly stepped back, raising his rifle.

  Austin spun around, saying, “Orlando?” It was on him in a split second and, in one swift movement, ripped Austin’s mask off and bit into his face above his right eye. He sucked the eye out of its socket and chewed down.

  Austin shrieked in agony and pushed his brother back, covering the gushing wound. Orlando lunged at him again. Mick opened fire. The bullet burst through Austin’s head and buried into Orlando’s temple. Both brothers crashed to the ground on top of each other as blood and black bile mingled on the ground.

  “Sorry …” Mick uttered, staring at his two dead colleagues splayed at his feet.

  He acted on instinct and his reasoning was sound, but it was still something to have to kill your own team members … your friends.

  “No need to be sorry,” I said finally. “You did what you had to do. You had no choice.” Tearing my eyes away from my two dead teammates, I said, “Listen up, we need to fall back to the ship. We take our Austin and Orlando with us. We don’t leave anyone behind. The comms clearly aren’t the problem here – I’m guessing that they had to isolate that thing in here. We’ll drop Orlando and Austin off at the ship and then head for the resort to get some answers.”

  After retrieving body bags from the ship, we moved our dead teammates to the ship’s cargo hold.

  “Shouldn’t we call this in?” John asked as we gathered outside the ship.

  “No,” I replied. “We need to get some answers first. We have to check out the main complex first.”

  From the landing zone, we could just make out the hotel structures about a mile away. We headed at a fast pace, concern etched into all our faces.

  “I can’t believe Austin and Orlando are dead,” John muttered, breaking the silence. “What the hell was that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It certainly looks like he was infected with something – something I’ve never seen before.” As an afterthought, I added, “Have you ever read The War of the Worlds? The Martians thought they could come and take Earth away from us. Despite everything humanity threw at them, it was a simple infection that ultimately killed off the alien invaders …”

  “So we’re the invaders here and the Moon wants us to leave?” Patrick asked.

  I managed a shrug and the group fell silent.

  We finally reached the main structure. The grey steel and glass building was three-stories high and curved like a giant dome. A sign that flashed the words MOONLIT RESORT was positioned just above main entrance.

  I took point and opened the first set of doors. As we entered the airlock, at the rear, Patrick closed the doors behind him. The soothing tones of a well-spoken woman welcomed us and instructed us to wait as oxygen began to fill the room.

  We readied our weapons as the automatic doors opened.

  What had been an exquisitely furnished lobby was now utterly decimated. Sofas were overturned, tables smashed and broken glass and pools of blood littered the once expensive carpet. Amongst the debris were severed limbs and torn chunks of flesh.

  Mouth agape, I slowly crept into the room.

  “This is crazy, man,” John whispered. “Everyone’s dead. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Stow it,” I hissed. The front desk was to my right. Straight ahead was a large dining room and to the left were stairs and elevators. “Hello?” I called out as the lights flickered overhead.

  Only our soft footfalls broke the silence.

  “This is Space Marshal Collins.”

  Nothing.

  We walked in a square shape formation, everyone covering their sectors. We checked the dining room first. The lights were off, but the gloom did not hide the destruction. Tables and chairs were overturned and dishes and rancid food was spread across the floor.

  “Hello?” I called. This time a reply came. Several collected moans echoed in the room. Figures began standing up from amongst the wreckage. Before we could react, the room was filled with dozens of infected creatures, shambling quickly towards the open doors. They stared with vacant, hungry expressions. There were men, women and even children. Some seemed to move quicker than others, but the children were quickest.

  “Fall back,” I ordered. As we backed back into the lobby, we saw more creatures pouring in from the stairs.

  Mick raised his rifle, saying, “Marshal?”

  I didn’t hesitate to yell, “Open fire!”

  Mick fired targeted headshots into the crowd emerging from the stairs to bring down the monsters closest to us. John and Patrick opened fire, spraying snapshots into the creatures pouring out of the dining room. They managed to drop a few, but most shots struck limbs and torsos and barely managed to slow them down.

  Mike and I tried to clear a path to the exit, but sheer numbers made it impossible. A sea of black glaring eyes descended upon us in all directions.

  We fell back to the front desk, firing and reloading constantly.

  “I’m running low,” Mick yelled. “We need an alternative exit!”

  As I opened my mouth to respond, music began to play from the PA. It was some kind of jazz. The creatures stopped moving and stared at the ceiling that had been painted like a summer sky. They stood still, with an expression not unlike confusion. Some sounded like they were humming along with the music.

  We resumed firing, dropping as many near the door as we could.

  “We’ll have to make a run through them,” I said, reloading once more.

  We ran for it, cutting down those nearest. The music suddenly stopped when we were only half way to the exit. As one, the creatures turned to stare at us.

  I was in the lead, with the others close behind. The creatures came at us from all directions. Spindly hands grasped Patrick’s suit. As he disappeared into the masses of outstretched arms, I caught glimpse of him pulling a grenade from his webbing. I heard him scream as they started tearing him apart and then a loud beep. We were pushing forward when the grenade exploded. Bodies and torn limbs flew in all directions and the floor beneath our feet shook. The blast threw me against the door.

  The doors swept opened and I fell inside. My rifle was empty, so I held it up like a club as I spun to around. I couldn’t see any of the others. All I saw were dozens of creatures spilling towards me, slipping and stumbling over the gore-splattered floor. I hesitated, shouting out, but the creatures pressed in and the doors shot back into place.

  Everything else was a blur. I do remember crawling all the way back to the ship. Patrick had prepped the ship ready for a quick departure, so all I had to do was set the autopilot and the ship would do the rest.

  When I made it back to Earth, I was instantly quarantined and put into the cell I’m in now. I was interrogated and eventually diagnosed as clinically insane and responsible for the murders of everyone in Moonlit Resort and my own team members. I have been sentenced to be hanged until I am dead. They refused to listen when I told them what happened at the resort,
about the strange lunar infection that killed everyone and turned them into mindless walking corpses. Deep down, I have a feeling that the Zilith Corporation knew what was happening on the Moon and they needed someone to blame. That someone was me.

  There was one thing I didn’t tell them. When I got back to the ship and took my suit off, I had scratches on my right shoulder that quickly healed before I landed on Earth. Maybe while I was making my escape, one of them scratched me. I’ll never know what kind of an effect it’ll have on me when I’m dead.

  Space Marshal Elroy Collins

  January 3rd 2060

  THE END

  A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A REST

  By

  Tom Johnstone

  Kevin got to see all sorts in his line of work.

  People would come up to him and tell him how lucky he was to work as a municipal gardener. Perhaps they imagined that he spent his days hovering around floral displays like an over-sized, green-clad bumble bee, or manicuring lawns with a pair of nail scissors.

  The things he would find in the park of a morning!

  Condoms (used and unused).

  Hypodermic needles (used and unused).

  Wine and beer bottles (broken and unbroken).

  Discarded boxer shorts smeared in the former owners’ faeces.

  It wasn’t all bad. From time to time he would find a five or ten pound note lying under a hedge or rose bush, discarded as casually as a sweet wrapper; on one or two occasions, he had happened upon a large bag of high quality skunk nestling innocently in the morning dew, its crumpled, grey-green fronds clasped around golden buds, with their sweet heady fragrance. Such finds made the job more rewarding.

  One rainy day saw him fishing a discarded snake from the pond, its scaly skin baggy like a punctured bicycle inner tube.

  One hazily sunny morning, he had to remove a bright red bicycle that some joker had seen fit to suspend from a lamp post in the rose walk. It hung there, wrapped around the black, cast iron post, like some demented Christmas decoration.

  But that was nothing compared to what he found hanging from a lamp post one Tuesday morning after the May bank holiday.

  He had expected an unholy mess that day – especially as the fun fair had come and dumped itself unceremoniously on the Green. But there was very little green about the large, flat expanse of worn, yellowing grass, criss-crossed by tarmac paths, in the town centre. On and around the benches surveying that area, planted on raised grassy banks behind cast iron railings, the winos would gather to watch and laugh and jeer at the spectacle.

  They had been getting rowdier and lairier, since their new tipple had hit the off licences. It was called Ultrabrew, and questions had been asked in parliament about its combination of a lethally high alcohol content (75%) and the rumoured presence of opiates and psychogenic substances within the beverage. Its toxic chemical fizz had very little to do with fermented hops and barley grains; about as much as the new white cider LHC had to do with the bucolic wassailing of rosy pippins.

  Kevin often saw the drunks huddled around their bench in the mid-afternoon, and he would think himself lucky that he had a secure job with the council, or about as secure as a job could be in the present climate. He often wondered how long it might be before the axe fell, and then he might be joining them around the bench.

  But lately he had been giving them a wide berth. There was a distinct atmosphere of menace about the way they lurched and swayed around their bench, this last week leading up to the bank holiday. And with a funfair and a children’s playground nearby! Kevin decided there was no way he would bring his kids to play here.

  He felt even more certain in this opinion when he came into work on the Tuesday after the bank holiday. It wasn’t so much the mess – he was used to that. It was more the nature of the thing he found on the lamp post.

  And what it was doing.

  It was a breezy morning, and the sun was still low in the sky, and when later questioned on the subject, Kevin put the phenomenon he witnessed down to the action of the wind and the play of the bright light dazzling his eyes, though he didn’t mention the effect of the contents of the bag he had found under a bench giving the incident a certain hazy, dream-like quality.

  At first he took it for an old-fashioned, upright vacuum cleaner bag, still attached to its hose pipe, which appeared to be waving like an elephant’s trunk in the breeze. Approaching closer, Kevin realized that there were in fact not one but two bags, and that they were wet; pinky-grey and organic in texture.

  The thing swaying and pulsating on the lamp post was a pair of human lungs, complete with wind pipe, though lacking the rest of the human body.

  Kevin noticed sooty black striations visible through the organ’s mucous membranes, reminding him of pictures of lungs displayed on packets of cigarettes and rolling tobacco.

  “I would say these lungs belonged to a heavy smoker.”

  “Great Heavens, Holmes! How did you–”

  “Simple deduction, Watson. These blackened, tarry deposits here point to a …”

  Kevin snapped out of his detective day dream, registering the thing that his mind had been trying to shut out: the lungs appeared to be breathing, expanding and contracting like a pair of spongy bellows.

  Kevin’s gorge was rising, and he felt a sudden urge to dash to the gardeners’ mess hut, vomit in the toilet and enlist the help of one of his colleagues. After all, he couldn’t just leave it up there on display for all the children and pensioners and other decent citizens who would soon be descending on the park on this bright May morning. It was an eyesore! Not to mention a health hazard. But as he strode rapidly in the direction of the mess hut, his stomach churning with each step, he remembered that he was alone in the park. His colleagues were nowhere to be found, probably off attending to other garbage-infested recreational facilities (either that or skiving off), and the council had not hired any seasonal staff due to cutbacks.

  However, he didn’t have to worry about the lungs hanging about up there. It turned out that they were able to extricate themselves from the lamp post without his help. Fortunately for his sanity, he wasn’t there to see the wind pipe winding its way down the post like a snake, the wheezing lungs flopping about like balloons full of water. After he had sat down in the hut for a few minutes to regain his composure, he returned to find that the thing had crawled under a privet hedge. At least, that was all he could gather from the agitation of its lower leaves and branches.

  That way, he was able to put the whole dreadful experience down to the wind, the sun in his eyes, etc.

  He carried on insisting on this explanation for a few days, before it became impossible for anyone to deceive themselves about what was happening around them. He might have found it harder to rationalize it in this way had he been in the park the day before.

  “The medical profession called it Death Immunity Syndrome – shortened to the acronym DIS. The red-top papers had a field day, bemoaning the new phenomenon of the “undeserving living”: the way that the “beneficiaries” of “infinite life expectancy” (another media buzz word) seemed to be alcoholics and drug addicts. Why should drugged-up scroungers and criminals live forever, while decent law abiding tax payers die? was the kind of headline that was to become typical in the months to come.”

  –Professor Charles Marcuse, We Belong Undead: ‘The Change’ and Social Change, Oxford University Press, 2013.

  WPCSO Jane Harvey was not without misgivings as she approached the group of shabby figures gathered around the bench on the edge of the park. Her colleague, PCSO Simon Craven was calling to her from a few yards behind her, where he was hanging back, his face tense and apprehensive, like a ferret, she thought.

  She glanced back. She couldn’t hear what he was saying over the cacophony of fifty seven different varieties of adolescent pop, R’n’B and dubstep pounding from the whirligig frenzy of the funfair. But she got the gist of it from the way his arms were gesturing her to come back, come back!

&n
bsp; “We can handle it!” she called back impatiently. “Are you coming with me or not?”

  Not far away, parked on the corner of the road adjoining the park, was a squad car containing two uniformed officers from the police proper. She knew that they were watching, eager to see the “hobby cops” fail. PCSO Craven’s attitude was: They’re the professionals; they’ve got the equipment and training, let them deal with it! Jane could see where he was coming from, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her bottle it.

  Anyway, it wasn’t as though she was going to confront an armed robber or something, she was just going to chat to a few drunks getting bladdered on the May bank holiday. In Iraq or Afghanistan, they’d call it the battle for hearts and minds. Not that this was a battle. It was just that it was going to get dark soon, and someone needed to ask them nicely to move on, before there was any trouble between them and the teens and casuals who frequented the fair.

  Better to approach them now, while there were just a handful of them scattered around the plinth where the bench stood. It was difficult to see exactly how many of them there were in the shadow of the elm that spread its darkening leaves over that corner. Was it the dying sunlight that made them appear so menacing, as they swayed to and fro lifting their cans in what looked like a mock salute to her?

  Jane noticed that the lurid labels on the cans: Ultrabrew, LHC. The new legal highs in a can, she had heard her colleagues mutter. How had the brewery got away with it? They still hadn’t disclosed all the ingredients. They’ve obviously got the government by the balls, she thought.

  A man stumbled out from the shadow of the elm, grinning at her with teeth like corroded tomb stones from beneath a leather cowboy hat.