Holiday of the Dead

by David Dunwoody

  A naval man.

  I heard the distinctive sound of a Zippo being fired up.

  “Duck,” Duncan shouted.

  I ducked. Something flew past my ear, something that burned yellow.

  The hall beyond the door exploded into flame. The blue-serge clad figure fell away from the door. I slammed it shut and Duncan wedged a chair under the handle. Even though the door was firmly closed the smell of cooking meat seeped through the gaps.

  “Good plan,” I said when I'd caught my breath. “What did you use?”

  He looked sheepish.

  “A bottle of Smirnoff. Blue Label. I hid it up here so the missus wouldn’t catch me at it.”

  That was the first I’d heard of a Mrs. Duncan. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask, but I had to.

  “And where is she now?”

  He waved at the door, fresh tears in his eyes.

  “Out there for all I know. I put her out in the garden nearly a year ago now. But if I know her she’ll be up and about – she never missed a chance to give me a hard time.”

  My phone rang, saving me from having to get deeper into the conversation. It was Doug.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. In reply he got a thirty-second diatribe on the merits of not splitting up text messages. I may even have used several words my mammy wouldn’t have liked very much. Even then, he wasn’t particularly contrite, but I couldn’t afford the satisfaction of hanging up on him – Doug was our only chance to get out of this.

  “Come on then,” I said when he showed no signs of replying. “I know you. You wouldn’t have phoned if you didn’t have something for me.”

  “McLeod was a naval officer,” Doug began.

  I didn’t have time for the long version. Something had started pounding on the door again, rattling it in hinges that looked old and rusted.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve met the man. Very sprightly, considering he’s been dead these many years.”

  I heard Doug’s sharp intake of breath.

  “And have you seen the collection?” he finally said.

  “Seen it? I’m standing in the middle of it.”

  I didn’t have to see him to know he was smiling.

  “That’s good,” he said. “You need to find her hair.”

  “Her?”

  “Mrs. McLeod. He had her scalp and hair made into a headpiece after she died. There was a great scandal and …”

  “Enough,” I said, feeling as if I’d just kicked an excited puppy. “Just get to the point Doug. The undead are at the door, and they’re worse than the bible-thumpers.”

  The pounding at the door got louder as if to emphasize my point. The top hinge squealed, the screws starting to loosen in the sockets.

  I sensed his smile had faded, but he did speed up.

  “It’s a talisman,” he said. “Part of a Zulu necromancy ritual. It’s used in conjunction with …”

  “Let me guess… a map written on human skin?”

  “Right first time. And now that you’ve burned one, you have to burn the other. If you don’t all those affected by the curse will arise and walk the earth and …”

  “Yadda yadda yadda. I’ve seen the movie,” I replied. “Anything else I need to know? Like why this is happening now?”

  “Well old McLeod has been in the ground a while now. Maybe this is a last attempt at bringing his wife back before he is too far gone?”

  Just at that moment the door decided it had taken enough of a beating and gave way beneath the assault. The first thing to come through was an arm clad in blue serge – badly singed, still smoking, but unmistakably belonging to McLeod.

  “I’ll get back to you on that one,” I said. I threw the phone aside and tried to put my shoulder against the door. “Find a wig,” I shouted at Duncan. “It belongs to his wife.”

  Then I was too busy to talk for a while.

  It felt like someone was hitting me on the back with a large lump of wood … in fact, someone was. McLeod’s hand gripped at the edge of the door and tugged. I had to slam my weight back against the door, hard, to keep him out.

  Too far-gone my arse.

  “What exactly am I looking for?” Duncan called.

  “How the hell should I know? Just burn anything that looks like hair.”

  The weight behind me pressed even harder and I buckled. A withered hand grabbed at me, and I had to leave a clump of hair behind as I pulled away. The door fell in with a crash.

  “I’ve found it,” Duncan shouted at the same moment.

  I had to back away as McLeod came through the doorway, those who had paid for his obsession shuffling close behind.

  “You’d better be right wee man,” I said. “Quick. Where’s the Zippo?”

  That was when I remembered.

  He threw it out into the corridor.

  But hardened nicotine addicts aren’t stupid enough to be out without a backup plan. I held McLeod off with one hand and fished a box of matches out of my inside pocked with the other.

  McLeod’s teeth clacked perilously close to my fingers.

  I threw the matches in Duncan’s direction, hoping he was quick enough to catch them.

  Then I was in a fight for my life. McLeod showed no sign of being too far-gone for a fight. He took my best punch, right on the point of the jaw. His head rocked and a split appeared in the skin of his neck, gaping bloodless and grey. It didn’t slow him any. He came inside my swinging arm and grabbed me. He forced my head to one side and exposed my neck. Then he sniffed, twice, close together, as if checking my after-shave.

  “Where is it?” he said.

  His voice was rough, harsh, almost a bark.

  I tried to speak, but the grip around my throat was so tight that all I could manage was to keep breathing.

  “Where is it?” he said again, almost shouting this time. His breath smelled, of stale food and stagnant water, but I guessed now wasn’t a good time to tell him.

  With his spare hand he went through my pockets; fast and methodical, like a pro. When he didn’t find anything, the hold on my throat tightened further still. I tried to break the grip, but my strength was going fast. I punched him, hard, just below the heart, but he didn’t even wince.

  He laughed in my face.

  “Is that all you’ve got lad?”

  He threw me away, like a discarded rag. His hand barely moved, yet I flew, a tangle of arms and legs, crashing hard against the far wall and falling to a heap on the floor. Something gave way in my lower back; a tearing pain that I knew meant trouble.

  I hoped I’d live long enough to see it.

  I turned to see him coming for me again. I held up an arm, but in truth I had no fight left in me. McLeod came on, teeth clacking.

  Duncan saved my life.

  Just as McLeod reached for me, his minions right behind him, a forest of arms my only view, I heard Duncan shout.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  McLeod turned away from me, and I had a clear view across the room as the case came to its denouement.

  Duncan had what looked like a long wig in his left hand, and a burning candle in his right.

  “Burn it,” I shouted.

  But it looked like I was in no immediate danger. The undead were all focussed on Duncan. Nobody moved, the only sound the sputter of the flickering candle.

  “Burn it!” I shouted again.

  Duncan had other ideas.

  “I know how you feel,” he said to McLeod. “Every day, I want her back. Every day I miss her. But look at yourself man. Do you want her back like this? Could you stand it? Here …”

  “No!” I shouted, but couldn’t stop him handing the wig to McLeod.

  “Let her go,” Duncan said softly. “Set both of you free.”

  McLeod didn’t move, just stood there stroking the hairpiece as Duncan put the candle under, first the wig, then the navy man’s long beard.

  He went up like a piece of dry paper, consumed to ash in less time than I would ta
ke to smoke a cigarette. At that point I expected the others with him to fall to the ground, or wither and turn to ash themselves.

  That’s how it works in the movies.

  But this was Largs, on a holiday weekend. Things didn’t work like in the movies around here. The undead milled around the room, seemingly devoid of purpose, maybe twenty of them in various states of decomposition.

  “We should burn these too,” I said, but I knew already my heart wasn’t in it, and I was glad when Duncan disagreed with me.

  “Just leave them to me,” he said. “I’ll take care of them, like I’ve always done.”

  By the time I left he had them all in the dining room, sitting over cups of tea that would never get drunk, fancy teacakes that would never get eaten.

  That’s Largs for you.

  THE END

  BURJ

  Chelsea Tractor

  By

  Nigel Hall

  The following events were recorded by the Laikoseimas on November 5th, 2019 A.D. (Gregorian) and July 11th, A.Y. 31 (Tangential). Broad persistence of events is classified as Very Low (no documented reoccurrence).

  I

  I guess I had come to say goodbye. Fuck knows there was no other reason – plenty of authorities, even the Foreign Office, had advised against it. Abu Dhabi was fine, they said; but not here.

  The thing is, we’re gathered at a safe distance, so it’s not like we have our noses pressed against the scene. We know the virus dies under the conditions that are about to occur, too. And if the worse comes to the worst, we’re indoors, at least protected by walls and floors, and ventilation shafts that can seal up in seconds, and the relevant breathing equipment. We’ve switched off the air conditioning, making this the sweatiest party any of us have been to since any of us graduated. We’re more than prepared. We’re even on a damn island, for fuck’s sake. We’re going to be fine. Unlike the poor bastards in the centre of our view, if they’re still moving in that dhow-shaped building we’ve got our eyes occasionally trained on.

  Nothing’s kicking off for about an hour, anyway, so I focus on the occasion at hand, which is somewhere between a wake and party. With any luck, the world’s seven-year nightmare ends this afternoon, so that’s the party; on the other hand, more people have died than arguably needed to.

  Mourning the dead are the six of us – in here, anyway; there are probably loads of others, hundreds, maybe thousands, ghoulishly scattered outside the city, taking up temporary residence on all the abandoned artificial islands. There are media helicopters needlessly hovering over the scene, whilst reporters back in London, New York, Shanghai, Delhi, and Doha explain with an apparent lack of irony that their viewers are watching the news and nothing is currently happening.

  So there are six of us: there’s me, a survivor from the incident that set all this up, there’s my partner Laura – I say “partner”, but we’ve been together about seven months. It felt awkward dragging her here, actually, but having just moved in together, I’d have thought it would be even more awkward to bugger off for several days. So she’s here, and it’s awkward.

  There are my fellow survivors Tim and Zemyna; there’s Zemyna’s sister Ruta, and finally Tim’s brother James, who by a not-that-amazing coincidence happens to be a medical researcher with specialist knowledge of the virus, as well as a survivor who spent three days in the hotel before devising a sufficiently intelligent (and hence decided uninfected-like) plan to break out; those enforcing the quarantine took a chance on not shooting, and had their faith rewarded.

  Of course, now he’s out, and he’s spent a year not under the dominion of the Sombra virus, he is, today, naturally relieved at the thought of never having to experience what he’s experienced ever again, but also naturally a little peeved that science and willpower, the most grudging partnership in all of international politics, is quite possibly going to make a second virus dead, and of all the ones it chose, it chose his.

  “So Tim,” Ruta says, “how did this all start, anyway?”

  We’ve got an hour, so when the small talk lulls, we turn to Tim for, well, not big talk, exactly, but medium talk. Talk with a 32” waist, so to speak.

  “You mean my story or the virus generally?” he replies.

  “Well, the virus, I guess. It’s like it appeared from nowhere.”

  And with Laura’s verbal encouragement, Tim is given the legitimacy to take us on a lecture of how it all happened.

  II

  “It’s like you say, Ruta; these things do sometimes appear to come from nowhere. Even now, scientists are safely putting their best bets on HIV being from zoonosis–”

  He gets hit with a five-panel wall of blank faces.

  “From animals,” he translates, “but it’s still uncertain, even seventy years or so on. And it’ll be the same with Sombra. Much of what we have about the history of it, especially the origins, is rumour, is speculation, is idle talk amongst the masses. I remember when the first mention of it turned up in the lab; it was the first day back after Christmas; I’d claimed as much as holiday as possible, so it was after New Year. Anyway, rumour – not really much more than that – had passed from South Korean intelligence to the WHO of disruption on the DMZ, and of course, the weird thing was that it had gone to the WHO, not the Security Council.”

  He has all of our attention now; to the point where I am only dimly aware of the helicopters being ordered to move a safe distance away, out of the flight route.

  “As you can imagine, the rumour gets out, and the Internet’s all a-twitter, in a total fucking frenzy, because of course a deadly new virus may or may not have emerged and it’s–”

  “December 2012 when it happens,” I interrupt, because stupidity on the Internet happens to be my expertise, and whilst there’s an endless amount of it, it all falls into very finite patterns.

  “Exactly. And of course, it’s not the end of the world, just like SARS, just like H5N1 or H1N1, just like they all weren’t. But the rumours keep building. The virus, of course, moves into South Korea, and therefore the open, where we get a good look at it. And of course–”

  He’s moving into the bit we all know, but of course, he’s simply got to tell it again.

  “We eventually get the video, once the problem hits Shanghai. This grainy phone footage shows the victims walking around, apparently normally, but something isn’t right with them, there’s that blank-eyed stare, and where they should be speaking normally, they do so in a flat monotone.

  “We were clearly dealing with something that attacks the brain, and whilst the victims attacked in the late stages, by biting and tackling, it transpired that this was simply a death throe.”

  “How do you mean?” Ruta asked.

  “It’s like the way Ebola victims go into fits in their final stages, which can often conveniently throw a lot of infected blood around. They get the urge to bite people, sometimes even bite animals, which has the convenient effect of passing the disease around more directly. But it’s airborne anyway, which is how the trouble really kicked off.”

  The media choppers are still pushing their luck with that flight path, and the BBC and Al-Jazeera – why we have two televisions on I have no idea, but we do – are still pushing for some news out of none, all the while ignoring the infinitely more informative tickers in the lower tenth of their screens.

  “And even as Shanghai gets a quarantine slapped on it, cases are exploding all over the world, in America, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and it starts creeping into the Middle East and Europe too. The UK government goes into overdrive – they might be imbeciles but they’re not complete and utter idiots, and so we’re allowed to bring in as many experts as we can get. So we bring them in. Virologists, neurologists, philosophers …”

  “Philosophers?”

  I think it’s me who says it, but it could be anyone of us in the audience of five.

  “We were working on the theory that … well, I dunno. But it wasn’t entirely pointless, anyway. But that was
what happened, you know the rest, it went worldwide, it killed about three million, we got it locked down and then for four years it was in recession and the global economy finally wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, those were good times,” I quip. It gets a bit of a laugh.

  Outside, the skyline remains the same, for now. From our vantage point, we can see to the north-east, when we’re not dizzy from the heat, the hotel that most of us had to escape from; beyond that, the hypodermic spire of the Burj Khalifa and the surrounding skyscrapers are unmissable.

  Or at least, you’d bloody well hope so.

  III

  So we pass stories around the room, and for that matter pass around the vol-au-vents and beverages with them. Alcohol’s kept to a minimum, in part because of local law but also because we’ll need to be fully alert if it all goes wrong.

  The hour is ticking round swiftly and the stories are almost all told, helped in part by Laura and Ruta being a rapt audience without a story of their own.

  “You know,” Laura begins, before attention swivels round to me properly, “Jack never properly told me this story he’s about to tell until just before we got on the flight.”

  “Well, it wasn’t one I wanted to recollect too often,” I reply.