Holiday of the Dead

by David Dunwoody

  “Simon!” she called, glancing behind him. As she thought, the weasel-faced PCSO had vanished. She stood her ground, and within a few lurching strides, the ridges of the man’s battered face were within inches of her own. She heaved slightly at the sour, hoppy reek of booze on his breath, and then breathed out with relief, as she glanced down at the brown bottle in swinging from his hand. He wasn’t drinking Ultrabrew.

  “’S aright, swee’heart,” the man slurred. Then he flung a long arm back towards the group she had been about to approach. “I’m no with them. Ye should stay awa’ fae them! Wha’s a nice wee lass like ye doin’ on duty on Mayday Monday anyway? Ye a for’ner, or summin?”

  He pressed his splintered face closer to hers in support of his interrogative, and grunted, “Hmm?”

  “No, I’m not a foreigner,” she replied. “I was born in this town,” she added. “Lived here my whole life.”

  “Prob’ly goin’ tae die in this town …” he muttered, and drifted off for a moment, then came back to himself abruptly. “Listen, hen, take ma advice …” He clapped his hand down on her shoulder in a rough but good-natured way. “Go home. Now! Choose life. Choose a sickie. ’S Mayday Monday for fuck’s sake, a friggin’ holiday–a holy day! Might be the last one an’ all …”

  “Ah well,” she replied evenly, wishing he’d go away, “a change is as good as a rest.”

  “A change is good as arrest! You gonna arrest me?” he demanded.

  “No, I–”

  “Well, listen tae this then! Back in the day, the workers never work’t Mondays. Follow Saint Monday, like me!” And he began to croon softly, “Saint Monday brings more ills aboot, for when the money’s spent! The children’s’ clothes go up the spoot, which causes discontent! For when at last he staggers hame, he knows not what tae say! A fool is mair a man than he, upon a fuddlin’ day! Tha’s what I’m sayin’ … It’s no’ healthy for a young lassie stayin’ around here, not with them aboot. It’s that muck they drink – sends ’em fuckin’ loopy … That and them solar flares we’ve been havin’! Did ye see the northern lights? I did. Point is, it’s messin’ with oor radar – human race’s, that is. Me, I drink decent muck! Gets me mortal, but no’ like yon muck they’re chuckin’ doon their throats.”

  He broke off again, lifting the dark bottle to his cracked lips, then tossing it aside with disgust when he realized that it was empty. It smashed on the path beside them, and the noise seemed to jolt the drunk into sudden sobriety.

  He gripped her shoulder.

  “Let go of me,” she said slowly, injecting steel into her voice.

  “Keep away fae them,” he hissed, nearly forcing her off balance as he let go of her, and lurched away with a sudden, frightened urgency.

  She shot a defiant glance at the squad car. Thanks for the backup guys. She headed for the shadow of the elm.

  As she moved closer to the dark figures under the tree, the first thing she noticed was how quiet it was. This came as something of a relief after the previous encounter. Though she wouldn’t have liked to admit it to her “superiors” in the squad car, the drunken Scotsman’s ramblings and unpredictable behaviour had left her just a little shaken. There was something almost soothing about the way the elm’s leafy, over-hanging branches seemed to muffle the shrieking hubbub of the funfair.

  Less soothing were the things wriggling in the dark leaf mould near the bench. Worms, Jane told herself, five of them.

  “Excuse me,” she began. She tried to catch the eye of a young, shaven-headed man in a black, hooded tracksuit top and shapeless, grey jogging bottoms, but it’s difficult to make eye contact with someone whose eyes appear to have shrunken inside his head, and whose pupils have been reduced to sub-atomic particles. She felt excruciatingly self-conscious in her high-viz jacket. She stood out like a sore thumb. A sore, fluorescent yellow thumb.

  “There’s been a complaint,” she continued, “about some anti-social behaviour.”

  She heard suppressed, asthmatic mirth from the bench.

  It appeared to come from another man sat sideways, facing away from Jane, bending over a woman whose head was thrown back over the top of the bench, jaw slack, mouth wide. Something about the attitude of the two figures unnerved her deeply, and she began to wish that she had not tried to approach the group alone. Still, there were only three of them, and she could always radio for back-up from the squad car.

  The woman on the bench let out what Jane thought was a faint whimper.

  Jane didn’t want to get any closer.

  “You alright, love?” she asked in a tentative murmur.

  The shorn, salt-and-pepper stubbled head of the man on the bench turned slowly towards her; eyes grey shadows, mouth smiling dimly.

  “She’s aright, officer,” he said. His voice was a rumbling growl, punctured by rusty barbed wire. “She’s had an overdose, that’s all. We all ’ave. Smack on top of alcopop’s smacked my bitch up!”

  Faint, smirking laughter played around her from the shadows.

  “Wanna join the party, officer?” he offered in his cracked, dusty tones.

  She saw that one of his hands was stroking the woman’s matted hair with a retracted Stanley knife; the other held what was left of her hand, which finished just before the knuckles like a sick joke without a punch line.

  “Look, she needs medical attention,” said the WPCSO, fighting to keep the steel in her voice. “It’s alright. I’m a trained first-aider.”

  “No need,” said the voice like a dry well, a bottomless pitch. “She won’t die. She can’t die. None of us can. That’s the thing we found with them new alcopops, see? None of us can die. Not one little bit of us.”

  He snarled the last thing with a terrified vehemence, perhaps realizing the implications at last.

  Then she glanced back at the five worms knuckling their way through the leaf mould that blackened the stubby fingernails, and her own hand groped for her radio.

  “Lady fingers, anyone?” continued the builder’s rubble voice, and sniggering, qualified the offer: “but you’ll ’ave to catch ’em first!”

  The woman suddenly giggled stupidly. “You’re welcome to ’em, love–I didn’t need ’em anyway!”

  Then Jane realized two things First that another three or four had joined the group, circling her to cut off her exit, with more lurking in the shadows of the elm, Stanley knives, machetes and screw drivers in hand; second that the dense, over-hanging foliage that muffled the fairground noise would also muffle her screams.

  “’Right, bruv!” the stubble-headed man grinned at one of the new arrivals. “Good to see you’ve skinned up – pass the joint around, will yer?”

  Jane’s head jerked around involuntarily at the mention of illicit substances. But it wasn’t that sort of joint, or that kind of skinning up. The new comer, the stubble-headed man had been addressing, was hopping on one leg, offering his other around for the others to gnaw.

  “There was also a great deal of scare-mongering about murderous cannibal ghouls. There was some truth in this. The chemicals that gave rise to the phenomenon did release latent homicidal, even anthropophagous tendencies in some DIS patients. But on the whole, these were people hell-bent on self destruction in their previous lives. In their new earthbound after-life, they carried on in the same vein.”

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

  PC Graham Bradley let out a loud belch as he wiped his hands on his empty kebab packet, then stuffed the ketchup crimson paper into the squad car’s globe compartment. At first, he thought his partner PC Harry Lowther had answered in kind, but it was a growl of static morphing into a woman babbling something that could have been “bath tub” in a tremulous voice, followed by less intelligible noises distorted by screeches, then a ripping, then a gurgling.

  Lowther snapped the radio off irritably.

  “Amateurs!” he remarked, rather smugly, Bradley thought. “Might have know
n they’d go to pieces if there was any problems …”

  Bradley tried to switch the radio back on, and regain the signal, but could only hear some sort of howling.

  “Damned radios,” he complained. “Been playing up for the last two months!”

  “Sarge thinks it’s something to do with them flare things,” remarked Lowther.

  “Flares?”

  “Solar flares. Radiation or something. Anyway, best kill it for now.”

  Lowther switched the radio off again, and pulled his cap down over his eyes. Time to catch forty winks before the fair got out of hand.

  “Hang on though,” said Bradley. “Did she say ‘back up’?”

  Lowther, the older of the two, lifted the peak of his cap above his eyes to glare at the other policeman.

  “Nah!” he said.

  Then he pulled the peak back down again.

  So he didn’t notice the lump of jelly thing crawling sluggishly towards the road nearby, a liver playing chicken with the traffic.

  “Scientists have been unable to agree on the exact trigger for ‘The Change’. While the nation’s self-appointed moral guardians were quick to blame the marketing of super-strong alcoholic beverages like Ultrabrew and LHC (named after the Large Hadron Collider, also named as a possible contributory factor to DIS), others have drawn a link between DIS and a recent intensification in solar activity, also associated with a notable more dramatic manifestation of the Aurora Borealis.”

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

  PCSO Craven told himself it was the wind blowing the leaves that gave the impression of sudden, frenetic activity in the shadow of the over-grown oak tree behind the cast iron railings. It wasn’t as if he had agreed to go with Jane to talk to the drunks. She didn’t need him to hold her hand. She had already made that perfectly clear. He still felt a gnawing resentment at her for failing to reciprocate his romantic approaches.

  That wasn’t the reason why he had refused to accompany her on her fool’s errand. He just thought that patrolling the funfair would be a much better use of his time. That was where most of the trouble would usually start; hormonal teenage boys trying to act hard in front of the girls they were competing over amidst the heady cocktail of flashing coloured lights, deep frying oil, candyfloss and darkness.

  A group of skinny-jeaned youths sniggered at him as they swaggered past him, their chunky belts glinting in the lights from the fair, their feathered haircuts fluttering in the breeze. A cage full of pinioned bodies rose high into the night sky, then plunged metres to the ground. While other rides had garish paint jobs, this one was a brutalistic, industrial steam press, with squealing human passengers. It was called “LHC”. He felt a heavy thump on his lower back then the sensation of something dripping down the back of his police community support officer’s trousers.

  A can of beer. He looked at the half empty can rolling away from him like a fleeing criminal, and it flashed its neon name as it spun, a kind of half-hearted advertising jingle: “Ultrabrew”.

  He glanced around, looking for the culprits, but they had melted into the darkness. Four girls stared at him, wet lips parted, representations of desirability crudely daubed in shocking pink and electric blue on the side of the Waltzer. Just ahead the Horror Tower loomed, and PCSO Craven saw a young man and woman secured into one of its cars, their pale hands brandishing Ultrabrew cans with distinctive neon logos. The leering, scarred, lobster face of Freddie Krueger and the fanged pout of Ingrid Pitt welcomed them into its portals.

  The man in the kiosk was too busy to notice that the couple didn’t come out, and couldn’t understand when subsequent customers complained of rats skittering around in the purple-strobed darkness.

  “You wanna get it checked out, mate,” one young woman said, tossing aside her diagonal fringe. “Must have been some kind of mutant. Five legs, it had, and no head!”

  Others complimented him on the new additions to his display. That eyeball that swivelled at you as you hurtled by in your car, from the skewer it was impaled on, was very realistic, although the pupil was a bit small. Some thought the exhibits were a bit too gross: the entrails that writhed, the slithering intestines. One man asked why that effigy of a half-dismembered cadaver sprawled in the rocking chair was wearing a high-viz jacket and community support police woman’s hat, though he did admire the attention to detail: there were even bite marks on what was left of the ragged borders of the dummy’s contorted limbs!

  The man in the kiosk simply shrugged: he didn’t set up the displays, he just took the money.

  You have to remember that it was dark, and many of the customers were half cut, so they didn’t notice the odd stains on their clothes until the morning after.

  As many people were to find out in the days to come, they weren’t the only ones who were half-cut.

  “If anything, the loss of their deaths, the prospect of endless lives of self disgust and despair increased their desire for oblivion. The super opiates associated with ‘The Change’ made them resistant to pain. So the Death Immune just went around trying to chop each other ever smaller, still living and sentient pieces. It was like slicing up a tape worm: you just end up with more of them. It was one, big, messy, futile suicide pact, distressing and a minor public order problem, but largely non-threatening to the mortal public, so safe to ignore.”

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

  Later the following morning, Kevin Williams sat in the back seat of the works van, listening to Paul and Barry as they spied on the acting senior gardener, Matt. Paul and Barry weren’t their real names, but Kevin had adopted the Chuckle Brothers’ first names as his own private nicknames for them.

  “Look, the Ranger’s still there.”

  “I knew it. He ain’t even left the yard! He’s been in the mess room the whole time.”

  “Bet you anything when we go in there it’ll be spotless.”

  Kevin imagined himself a fly on the wall to this exchange, during which the two brothers neither invited his complicity, nor even acknowledged his presence as a witness or possible dissenter. Their father, the senior gardener proper, would have done exactly the same as Matt had he been there. The fact was they just didn’t like taking orders from Matt – especially Paul, the younger and cockier of the two, who saw himself as the natural heir to his father’s petty fiefdom.

  “Pikies have gone then,” said Paul.

  “Yeah,” his brother confirmed. “Left a right bloody mess though! Found a load of offal lying about in the grass.”

  “What is this? A fun fair or a butcher’s?”

  “Funny thing was, I went back to the van to get a bag to put it in, and it had gone.”

  “Seagulls must have eaten it.”

  “Didn’t see none. Still it can’t have just crawled away by itself!”

  Kevin didn’t mention the animated lungs. They already thought he was a bit weird as it was!

  “Told you he wouldn’t do no work while Dad’s away,” muttered Paul.

  Kevin thought of the six billion pound bonus paid by some high street bank to its chief executive.

  No wonder they’re getting away with it, he thought. They’ve got us gnawing scraps off each other rather than tearing strips off the fat cats.

  Then he thought of those corny zombie movies that were always on, where the dead feed on the living. If the zombie apocalypse happened in real life, he reckoned, the dead wouldn’t unite against the living; they’d just rip each other to shreds!

  He didn’t know back then how close he was to the truth.

  What Kevin had seen that morning, after the funfair had been and gone, was an early by-product of this process; a pair of lungs, trying to hang themselves from a lamp post, and then crawling under a hedge to die.

  And failing.

  Some say a change is as good as a rest, but they just wante
d a rest. And the Change wouldn’t let them.

  “Perhaps the last hope for the Death Immune lies in the new project set up by a working group of particle physicists and molecular biologists. They are seeking volunteers among the DIS community for an experiment, in which they would be fired through a particle accelerator. The scientists would then test the resulting sub-atomic particles for signs of life. In this way, they hope to discover if they can finally cure Death Immunity Syndrome.”

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

  THE END

  STORM COMING DOWN

  By

  Iain S Paton

  The white-haired black man sat in the elegant parlour, seeking refuge from the sweltering summer. His unseeing eyes stared at the distant wall as the maid poured him a cup of chicory-scented coffee.

  The mistress of the house sat opposite. ‘That’ll be all, honey.’ A massive fat arm waved lazily, and the young white maid was dismissed.

  The man turned his face towards the woman, whose weight must have been over three hundred pounds, bulging out of her sweat-stained white dress. He couldn’t see her, but he sensed her bulk, and her presence. She was black, with a mass of frizzed grey hair, and she sat in front of a deck of Tarot cards.

  ‘Tower struck by lightning.’ She turned over one of the skull-backed card. ‘There’s a storm coming down.’

  The man sipped his tea.

  The woman turned over another card. ‘The second in the trinity. The Moon. The storm will come from the tides, bringing night without end.’

  She turned over a third card. The man’s cup clattered on the saucer.

  ‘Death.’

  Michael was annoyed. The flight to New Orleans had been delayed, and he was tired enough as it was. The lengthy queue at arrival control did little to improve his mood, a line of sullen-looking passengers who were supposed to be in holiday spirits in anticipation of Labour Day and the never-ending parade of festivals hosted by the city.