Holiday of the Dead

by David Dunwoody

  “Yes, but …” she gives me a funny smile, pitched halfway between about-to-laugh and about-to-hug-me. “It’s like when we went camping, and you were really keen not to stay in a hotel, or go abroad. Had to wrestle this out of you.”

  “Well, OK. I guess after it’s shared once it’s easier, right?”

  I get a few nods to this notion. Behind me, the BBC has turned to a profusion of CGI in order to cycle through the 2014 pandemic and the vaccine that was developed at its peak. No doubt the Dubai incident – which Al-Jazeera is naturally more focused on anyway, will come up shortly. In fact, it does, and so with that neat parallel in place, I begin my story.

  IIII

  Even by last autumn, the Burj Al-Arab was still probably the most extravagant hotel in the world. And why wouldn’t it be? The 2010s as a decade had been a zigzag of recession, the brief recovery from it, the pandemic, and the recovery from both of them. Beaten senseless by these twin blows, the world had perhaps become a slightly more cautious place, one where all these overblown gestures suddenly paled into insignificance. Dubai now stood as the last outpost of excess, the final place where architects and designers could deliver nonlinear and post-modern civic indulgences in wholesale batches. London, Shanghai, Mumbai and New York had given up this nonsense; there was no place left for it in their economies.

  And so, as a wealthy man, I had to go, and I had to experience this last outpost, before it also joined what similarly conservative-minded punters liked to call the Dourist zeitgeist. And I had to book into what I thought was its finest specimen.

  So I did, and for three days it was the standard holiday experience, albeit blown up to ridiculous levels. What wasn’t marble in there was glass, and what wasn’t detailed down to a sub-molecular level was probably a dumpster round the back. I could’ve spent half a day fiddling with the room settings or losing tennis balls over the side of the court, and in fact, I probably did. Those were three fantastic days, even if on some deep level they were probably a little empty. But I could stump up £5,000 a night, so I was well within my rights and it’s what I chose to do.

  It was the fourth night when things deteriorated.

  It was also in the early hours of the morning. I had gone to bed but not slept; not necessarily because of insomnia – well, maybe – but more because as soon as I stopped walking around, my head buzzed with thoughts. Not really relevant thoughts, to be honest, just my mind, skipping over all manner of things, making all kinds of tenuous connections, wondering about this, about that, about life, about work, for some sad reason. You can take the City out of the man, and all that.

  Naturally, I got tired of being tired and I wasn’t going to listen to my inner monologue’s bullshit all night, so I got up and left the room, in my pyjamas. Because why the hell not? That’s why. I moved around the floor I was on, came across the reception desk and stopped.

  Something was wrong with the receptionist; the phrase uncanny valley threw itself in front of my train of thought, a half-remembered phrase from my investments in computer games studios earlier that year. I spent a bleary couple of seconds wondering how they were doing before coming to my senses. That woman behind the desk? She wasn’t right.

  “Can I …” she said, paused, and then repeated it, over and over, like there was a glitch in her system. I should be fine, I told myself – I was vaccinated. But then, why was I worried? And why hadn’t the Burj Al-Arab vaccinated their staff? Of course they had. They must have done. Most of the whole damn world had got one.

  “Can I …”

  I kept at least five metres back, and looked behind me for extra walking space. She was probably in the mid-phase of the disease, if it was still the same disease. It quite possibly wasn’t.

  “Can I …”

  You fucking can’t, I thought to myself, and took a couple of steps back. She didn’t chase, she merely gave that weird, faded stare. She didn’t have to chase. If she coughed, sneezed or even breathed heavily, at least some of those viral spores would be out in the space of the room. They could’ve been already, I realised.

  “Can I …”

  “Shit,” I whispered, and made a run for it, all the way back to my room, slamming the door and locking it. Outside I heard a shout, and then another.

  I bolted to the bathroom, locked that, just to be sure, and pissed over the toilet seat. Better there than where it was going. I then found myself in the bath, simply lying down, having forgotten how exhausted I was. But I couldn’t sleep now, and I knew it, and my mind was still digging for thoughts, and it was working like a diamond mine, moving tonnes of shit and earth to find grams of rock that had to be chipped away in order to find something of value, or even, for that matter, the startlingly obvious.

  Like the way that I was now behind two locked doors.

  In every zombie film – not that I claim comprehensive knowledge of Russo and Romero; I have, at best, moderate knowledge of Boyle, and that’ll do – but in these films, there’s a theme, and that is that confined spaces are counter intuitively bad for the uninfected. And this knowledge had applicability, I decided, because the symptoms of mind-rotting debilitation minus accompanying loss of physical strength had worrying similarities. In the end, I concluded that like Lyndon Johnson, victims of the Sombra virus, or whatever the hell this mutation was, should be inside the tent pissing out, causing an expansion of welfare programs and direct intervention in proxy wars in south-east Asia.

  Well, that was a bad analogy, but it’d have to do.

  I unlocked the bathroom door and looked around. I was safe, and I heard no banging on the door, just a noise from upstairs I couldn’t figure out. I decided I wouldn’t bother to, either. It was hard enough to figure out what was in front of me.

  I got dressed. That much was sensible. I walked over to the window and glanced out at the view below me. It could’ve been a water landing, maybe, if I flung myself out far enough. The thing was, it was also a huge drop down, at least – was I halfway up? At least a hundred metres. Dropping that far onto a bouncy castle would break a leg. The window exit was a no-no.

  So I opened the door instead.

  “Can I …”

  I kicked her in the crotch and shut and locked the door again, then slowly, slowly let go of my breath.

  I needed a gun, I thought. Or even a longbow. Just some sort of range weapon. But I wasn’t getting one. It was down to me and the equally unarmed infected, the brain-addled versus the brain-rotted in the ultimate showdown, the rumble in the … hotel.

  I slapped that thought away too, and tried the door again. The corridor was empty; the receptionist had apparently wandered off.

  From the room, I found my way to the balcony overlooking the lobby. Along the way I checked the ventilation systems. No luck there; most of the time it was hard to tell what they even looked like. When I found a shaft, it was too small even for a baby to crawl through.

  Looking over the lobby revealed it to be a mess; debris was scattered across the floor. I heard gunshots, saw shadows sweeping across the floor. Someone had a gun. Someone was also on the ground floor, making me wonder why they hadn’t simply left.

  This changed things. Blinking hard and jabbing my fingers at the grit in my eyes, I realised that the man with the gun in the lobby’s motives were ultimately impossible to predict, so I’d have to have a plan for him. People who were asleep were probably wondering about the noise people like him were making, and hence were waking up, exposing themselves to infection earlier, so I had to have a plan for that. And obviously I had to get out, and have a plan for that.

  I got out, obviously. In fact, ninety per cent of the escape was easy; finding a lift, exhaling weary relief as the doors opened to nothing and then riding it down to the ground floor was simple enough. The ground floor, though, had turned into a warzone, and this was the hard part, where my journey had to become so indirect. This is the bit that both stays with me and becomes so incredibly hard to describe.

  It wasn’t that shit
I saw that was the problem, although there was enough of that to keep any sane person at night with their eyes jammed open and their cheeks flooded. Chunks were shot out of the walls and doors. Bodies were strewn about the place. What I hoped was blood was smeared on the walls that weren’t pockmarked. In front of my own eyes, I watched in real-time as the man with the shotgun was hoist with his own petard and then processed, for want of a better phrase.

  No, what really troubled me was what I had to do. Or what I justified as necessary, at any rate; the late-stagers are obvious enough, and there’s no cure – I had no qualms about that. The early-stagers, though, that’s a different matter. I found the weapon I was looking for, and I used it, but I could never be sure that I had been one hundred per cent accurate, or that I’d judged every case correctly.

  And when the massed authorities outside announced the quarantine, I found myself dashing past a definitely uninfected woman in the corner of the lobby. The man with the shotgun had been somewhat indiscriminate and hit her across both thighs. There were seconds to go on the deadline, it was a borderline case; certainly, I didn’t have to time calculate how much I’d be slowed down. I just had a gut decision to make, and I hesitated, but the injured, crawling mid-to-late stager heading my way sealed the deal.

  So I left the building and reached the massed ambulances, soldiers, police and press with less than a minute to spare, holding up my hands and shouting anything that sprang to mind as eloquently as I could. They lowered their guns on me as the barriers went up. A set of temporary metal panels, they were going to be replaced in due course, and work on the more permanent barbed-wire wall started within the hour.

  I was still shaking, though. The Sombra victims hadn’t laid a finger on me, and the choices I made I could probably justify, but that didn’t matter. What was trying to kill me was child’s play; what I had to live with was a different matter.

  V

  I tell the group all of that. What I don’t tell them is what happens next; how, having escaped from the hotel and jumped on the emergency flight back to London, I quit my job, moved down to a smaller house and spent quite some time in there, going out perhaps twice a week at most. After about three months, I gave this up, and that’s when I met Laura.

  There was something I just found intriguing about Laura, from the off. And it took me about a date or two to figure it out, but it came to me in a half-remembered flashback in the midst of a dream. She was the spitting image of the young woman in the lobby. I wondered briefly whether it was my memories and my thoughts mixing, but no, that didn’t seem right. The similarity was definitely real; it resonated with me too much.

  I have never told Laura this, and I’m especially not going to tell her now, ten minutes before the big event, as we whittle down those minutes with the world’s most impossible blame game.

  “Accident.”

  “No, Iran. Definitely Iran. Or some sponsored Islamist movement.”

  “Mossad. They have previous.”

  “CIA, if we’re going there.”

  “Lockheed Martin. Weapons testing. Apparently there’s some experimental shit going down today, what better test than this, right?”

  “The Qatari government,” Tim suggests.

  “What?”

  “You name me a bigger rival in this part of the world in the whole ‘building expensive hotels and stadiums’ business. Aren’t they hosting the World Cup in four years?”

  “Eight, I thought. They postponed one of them,” I point out.

  “Oh, right, the pandemic.”

  “How could you forget that?”

  “Yeah, true enough.”

  “Anyway,” I say, raising a flat diet coke, “never assume malice when an event can be explained by incompetence. Hanlon’s Razor.”

  “Well said, Jack.”

  “Something I had to constantly tell any non-colleague in my old line of work.”

  Well, that lightens the mood.

  VI

  “And so we come to this footage now, of the combined force of F-16s and B-52s about to come in, and hopefully they will be destroying whatever remains of the Sombra B virus, the Sombra A virus of course being contained by the widespread vaccination in 2014 and 2015. Now, Guy, I hear there is something different about this mission.”

  “Yes indeed, Alan, and it’s the new weaponry in particular, the High Utility Lethal Kinetics, or HULK bombs and missiles. The American military is hoping that this will demonstrate a new paradigm in military power, the stepping stone between conventional ordinance and tactical nuclear weapons …”

  The television – we decide that having two on is stupid – continues to burble away, but Guy has to be interrupted and the whole thing is drowned out as the first of the F-16s flies over our balcony, heads off to our left and lets off the first of those HULKs. The missile streaks towards the Burj Al-Arab and hits.

  The building flares with an almost blinding white light and collapses forward into the sea, with the wind taken out of the sail on that dhow shape. More jets fly in, singling out specific buildings, the taller skyscrapers and the grander projects that break up the homogeneity of the city.

  And then the B-52s drone in, they drop open their bellies and let loose, with steady, metered rhythms, those new HULK bombs. We can feel their detonation resonate through the balcony, and see mushroom clouds sprout up in place of the skyline.

  “It’s over, Jack.”

  “I know.”

  I embrace her and feel the tension slowly leave me.

  “Shit, you can really feel the heat from those things.”

  She laughs. The whole city centre is pretty much levelled by now, and the parts that aren’t are almost certainly filled with an inhospitable heat. Pundits on the news talk about how Sombra B as a virus should now be extinct, but they’re guessing as much as I am.

  Ruta gets up from her seat and heads inside. She pauses and turns. “Can I … can I …”

  I start to panic.

  “Can I get anyone anything?”

  “A diet coke and a kick up your ass,” I reply. Laura laughs again, and suddenly it’s all OK again.

  Mostly.

  THE END

  A DARK MOON HONEYMOON

  By

  Rob Smith

  I

  They had been married for twenty-seven hours and nineteen minutes.

  It had not been time wasted, Susan thought, alone now in the bed. There had been the ceremony, and she remembered every detail of that, even if Roy claimed it had all gone by in a blur. There had been the post-wedding meal, where the budget-constrained food had been redeemed by some excellent speeches. Mick, the best man, had told some long and rambling joke. It had culminated in the most feeble punch line known to man, at which point Roy had almost collapsed laughing, but other than that the speakers had all done well. The whole evening reception thing had been tiring, and Susan was dimly aware that she had got rather drunk and made a little bit of a fool of herself. But as she’d told her mother, ‘It’s my wedding, and I’ll get absolutely steaming shit-faced if I want to.’ She’d have to ring and apologise later.

  By contrast, the night in the hotel had been fairly quiet. They’d not consummated the marriage at that time, if only because Roy was past the stage of optimum efficiency and Susan had developed a very close relationship with the toilet bowl. They’d made up for it since, she thought, looking up at the ceiling and smiling to herself.

  It had been so nice of Uncle Ben to lend them his holiday cottage. It had given them the chance to have a half-decent honeymoon. They could have gone for a cheap package holiday abroad, but instead they had jumped at the chance of a week here, rural Wales, as far away from the city as it was possible to be. Both of them loved the quiet little villages, the bleak moors, the cold hills. Roy had been brought up in an area like this, though hundreds of miles further north. Susan was a city girl, but she loved the sense of peace that the hills brought her. It had been a lovely drive up, despite her worries that their old ba
nger of a car would not survive the journey. She’d told Roy that they needed a new one. He’d just laughed and told her that the old thing had plenty of good miles left in it. Maybe that was true, maybe not, but it had got them here. Tomorrow they planned to go walking, following the stream that trickled past the back of the cottage up into the thinly-wooded heights behind. She was already looking forward to that, just as she looked forward to every moment they spent together.

  “We ought to get Uncle Ben something nice, to thank him,” Susan mused aloud.

  “Yeah,” Roy agreed, emerging from the en-suite bathroom into the darkened bedroom. “Not too nice, though. That shower is a pain in the backside to get working. I bet the old bastard has never had it looked it since he’s owned this place. What time is it?”

  “Quarter past seven.”

  “No wonder I’m so hungry.” He pulled on a pair of creased trousers and dragged back the curtains. Neither had expected a beam of brilliant sunshine but it was still a little disappointing outside, dull and overcast, with the hills all but obscured behind fine drizzle.

  “Typical Welsh summer evening,” Roy muttered.

  “Never mind,” Susan said gently. “I’m sure it will be nicer tomorrow.” She ignored his answering look. “What do you want to do about dinner?”

  “We could go into the village. There’s a nice café there.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t really want to go out. I can’t be bothered to make myself look beautiful.”