by Joe McKinney
Just trying to look up takes so much energy. There are more bodies outside now, gazing in at me with their cold, vacant eyes. I feel like a bloody shop window dummy, but then I have done since the accident. People always stared at me since then. Perhaps I should have got used to it, but I’ve never been able to handle the sideways glances and the way they avoid me. They either used to patronise me or ignore me altogether and talk to Arthur instead. Either way, they made me feel like a freak. People always saw the wheelchair before they saw me sitting in it. I’m paralysed from the neck down, not up. I can’t move my body, but that was the only difference between me and everyone else. My arms and legs might be frozen, but I’ve always been able to feel hurt and to get scared and feel panic like everyone else. Christ knows I’m scared now.
I would have been all right if it hadn’t been for him, that stupid bloody husband of mine. If he’d left me there after the fall instead of trying to be a hero I would have been okay. It would have taken time to get well again, but I would have been okay eventually. But no, Arthur knew best, didn’t he. It was him trying to move me that did the real damage to my neck. He blamed himself and so did I. And now here I am, trapped in this cold, dark, empty place, starving to death with just his corpse for company. I can’t move an inch. What did I do to deserve this?
Come on death, hurry up. The joke’s over. I want this to finish now. I’m sick and tired of sitting in this bloody chair just waiting…
DIGITAL
Emily lived her life on the Internet. It connected her world, made her feel less alone. She thought it strange that the people closest to her were usually thousands of miles away, while the people she was physically nearest might as well have been in another universe. The Internet put Emily in contact with the people who knew her better than the rest of them. It made fantasy worlds feel real. And in those make-believe places filled with virtual versions of people, it made her feel like she belonged. Even now, even after everything that’s happened to the physical world, she’s still doing all she can to cling onto her virtual reality.
Without the Internet, Emily is just Emily. She lives with her nan in just another house on just another street. By looking at the faded blue front door, you’d never know that the girl upstairs in her bedroom is a fucking awesome killer, or that she races so fucking hard and so fucking fast that last month she ranked seventeen on a league table of several hundred thousand racers.
Nan says to Emily, you should get out more, find yourself a nice boy. Nan says she doesn’t spend enough time mixing with other people, even though Emily tells her she spends all her time with other people. How can she expect her to understand? Nan can’t even set up a programme to record on the bloody satellite TV box. She still checks the listings in the paper then sits there waiting for programmes to start instead of time-shifting and catching-up on demand like everybody else.
Or, at least, she did.
Nan doesn’t do anything anymore. Like the rest of the world, it seems, Nan’s dead. She went out to the shops last Tuesday morning, and never came home. There’s a part of Emily that thinks she should have gone out looking for her, but what’s the point? They’re all dead out there. As far as she can tell, she’s the only one left.
It happened in the online world too. One minute she was up to her neck in the middle of a grudge match with that little bitch Oko575 from Hiroshima, the next she was alone. She could still see Oko575 on the screen, of course, but she was frozen in space like a screen-cap. It was the same everywhere Emily looked, every game.
She tried to follow the progress of events via all her usual online social outlets, but it wasn’t the updates and tweets she tracked, it was the silence. One minute there was the usual chaos of activity coming from all directions, then there was nothing. A wave of quiet had spread out across the world. Nothing trending. Nothing happening. No one else left online.
Emily was comfortable with the real-world isolation. She was used to it. She didn’t need anyone else. She actually liked being alone like this. Okay, so she wasn’t so keen on the number of corpses she could see from her bedroom window, but that was something she knew she’d get used to eventually. The online quiet, however, was a different matter altogether. Wherever she went, whatever game she tried, she was alone. It was unnerving. It was unnatural. Online, she’d always had company available on demand.
It was several days in, long after the dead had begun to rise outside, that she finally found someone. An eight year old kid in Texas, by all accounts, as scared as she herself was beginning to feel. Emily found him by chance as she wandered the desolate streets of a virtual town once full of orcs, wizards and warriors. It was unsettlingly quiet there now, just a handful of frozen characters in view almost all the time. Those avatars she could still see, she decided, were the poor buggers who’d died playing.
Emily turned the music up to full in her bedroom to try and counteract the lack of noise everywhere else, then kept herself busy building an empire unchallenged, stripping virtual corpses of anything of value after one-sided battles, hoarding worthless treasures. She’d caught a glimpse of unexpected movement in the corner of her screen, and in the stillness of everything else it was as startling as if someone had sneaked up behind her in the real world and yelled in her ear. She chased the avatar through the streets, desperate not to lose sight of it. It didn’t feel like a game now. It felt like it mattered, that there was far more riding on this than achievements, experience points and upgrades. She was too fucking good for the kid in Texas. She knew this virtual place like the back of her hand and she soon had him cornered. They had a desperate conversation by text:
Don’t log off. You okay?
Okay. Scared
Me too
U know what happened?
Don’t know. Everybody dead here
Same here
Except me
And me
Must have happened all over
That’s what I figured. What we gonna do?
Emily paused. Then she typed. The obvious answer was the only answer.
Play
And they did. For hours. Every game they both had that they could still get onto. Time difference be damned – they spent every minute they could online together, clinging onto each other, in touching distance yet still thousands of miles apart.
Until this morning.
This morning, just before eleven-thirty UK time, the kid in Texas disappeared. Emily cried – she actually cried – when she realised her buddy had gone. She had no way of finding out what had happened to him, but her mind went into overtime just the same. Had he been killed by a crowd of increasingly vicious corpses the size of the crowd of increasingly vicious corpses now gathered outside Nan’s house? Or was the kid okay and it was just the computers that had failed them? Had the servers gone down? Had the Internet given up and finally stopped working? Emily knew there’d been a chance that would happen eventually, but she’d hoped it would have lasted a while longer yet. Surely there would have been systems in place to keep everything up and running? She wished there was something she could do, but there wasn’t. She could get her computer to do plenty, but she didn’t know how it worked under the hood. She’d been proud to call herself a nerd, but there were painfully obvious limits to her geekiness.
And now the power had died too. It was so bloody unfair.
Emily’s computer was useless. Just a plastic and metal box now. Completely bloody lifeless. As lifeless as the several hundred corpses outside, scrabbling at the windows to get in. Her constant music had attracted them, that much was clear, but even though it had been silenced with the power, they weren’t going anywhere. They seemed to know she was here.
But what hurt Emily most of all was the fact that if the kid in Texas did manage to get back online, she had no way of connecting with him. She had her phone, but it wasn’t the same. No signal. Battery half-dead. She didn’t have any means of calling or updating anyone, but she still clung onto the white glow of the phone scree
n regardless.
She knew she should conserve the power, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She wanted to stay online, wanted to preserve her last connection with the digital world. She held onto the phone until the battery drained to nothing, playing crappy games, flicking through old photos, messages, emails… anything. And when the last dregs of power disappeared, Emily felt a gut-churning emptiness the likes of which she’d never known before. She knew she was finally, completely, hopelessly alone. All bridges to her virtual world now burned, no way of accessing anything, no more updates or notifications, her digital self now as good as dead. Nothing but reality left.
She sat in Nan’s kitchen and sobbed, conscious that the noise she was making was having an ever-increasing effect on the ever-increasing hordes, but unable to stop. A little after midnight, the front door gave way under the pressure of the crowd, and the house quickly filled with cold flesh. Emily tried to get away and to fight but there were too many of them. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t escape.
The dead smothered her, suffocated her, cut off all her options. But it didn’t matter anymore. She’d preferred her virtual reality to this. Not online, she thought, not worth living.
DAY SEVEN
AMY STEADMAN
Part iv
It is now several days since Amy Steadman’s corpse took its first unsteady steps. It is a week since infection.
Her body continues to move at a lethargic pace, her mobility still limited. She has, however, been moving constantly and has now covered a considerable distance since leaving the crowd on the motorway. The dog trapped in the car – the cause of the disturbance which originally drew the large mass of cadavers to the scene – became quiet after several hours. Many of the dead, Amy’s corpse included, gradually drifted away. By pure chance Amy’s body continued to follow the route of the road forward. Although she has subsequently come across numerous blockages and occasional distractions, she has kept moving in the same general direction and has covered several miles.
As time has progressed so she has continued to regain further control over her movements. She now walks with slightly more fluidity and speed although her muscles and nerves are continuing to decay. Her limbs – previously stiff, awkward and largely inflexible – are now able to bend and flex to an extent, although her overall range of motion is still severely limited. She can draw her hands into fists and can move her fingers independently. There has been a substantial increase in the number of voluntary head movements she makes, suggesting Amy is aware of the direction of sound.
The long and wide motorway, straight for a considerable distance, slowly curved around to the right as it merged with another major road which skirted the centre of the city of Rowley. Amy’s body, however, did not change course. Instead, she continued to move in a relatively straight line, leaving the tarmac then tumbling down a grassy embankment. After managing to get up again, she crossed the width of a field, stumbled through an open gate, then found herself following a narrow gravel path which ran alongside an isolated bungalow. After walking the length of the gravel path, she reached another road. The steep banks on either side of the road have channelled Amy’s corpse and prevented her from going in any other direction but forward.
The process of decay, combined with the physical toll of the distance travelled, has caused the condition of her body to deteriorate considerably. Amy’s skin is now extremely discoloured. The chemical reactions continuing to occur throughout her body have manifested themselves as numerous weeping sores and lesions. In the fall down the embankment, her corpse sustained a number of lacerations to the right hand and arm, her upper torso and also her face. Thick, congealed blood has slowly seeped, rather than poured, from these cuts. Her circulatory and respiratory systems are no longer operational; blood is no longer being pumped around her body.
Amy’s self-awareness has increased. Although still at an extremely rudimentary level, she is now aware of her own general shape and size and compensates for her mass whilst moving. She can now use her hands (but not yet her fingers) to move obstructions with limited success. Her balance has also improved although she is still occasionally unsteady on her feet and has difficulty on uneven ground.
A sudden heavy downpour of rain has drenched Amy’s body and she’s struggling to cope with the steep gradient of a road down a hillside. A canopy of trees hangs overhead which, coupled with the increased cloud cover, has substantially reduced the amount of available light. The loud, echoing sound of the rain hitting the leaves overhead is confusing Amy. She is surrounded by noise. She moves her head constantly, trying to identify the source of the directionless sound.
Both of Amy’s feet are bare and the exposed flesh is wearing away. She leaves a bloody residue on the ground with virtually every footstep. Already there are insects feeding off her and the many other corpses scattered around the countryside. Amy’s body has just passed another corpse, this one trapped in the wreckage of a car. Over the course of the last seven days it has been ravaged by scavenging animals. The sheer amount of dead meat which is now available will inevitably prove an unexpected benefit to many millions of predators and parasites. It is likely that, over the coming months, the population of these creatures will increase massively. The lack of any form of pest control will further allow their numbers to multiply unchecked. It is still very early days, but it is already clear the removal of almost all of the human population is having an unprecedented effect on the ecosystem.
A brief burst of sunlight bathes everything in unexpected brightness and warmth. Although unable to detect or understand the change in temperature, Amy notices the increased light levels. Her eyesight is still poor – she sees shapes and detects movement but has so far been unable to make out any finer level of detail. Her ability to absorb and interpret what she sees is improving, but at the same time her physical condition continues to deteriorate. Her eyeballs and the associated nerves and muscles are rotting.
Amy’s body has reached a junction where the road she has been following joins a more major route. Here a crowd of bodies has gathered around a young survivor. Caught out in the open looking for food, a ten year old girl has become lost and has found herself dangerously exposed. With nowhere else to hide, she has shut herself in a telephone box. She is on the ground with her back pressed up against the door to prevent it from opening. There are already seven bodies surrounding the girl with a further three approaching. Amy Steadman’s corpse is also close. Whilst the young survivor is aware that by keeping quiet she can evade detection by the corpses, she is trapped and is struggling to contain her emotions. She is sobbing uncontrollably, and the bodies on the other side of the glass are reacting to every sound. Although they don’t understand why, they are driven to try and get closer to her. One of them begins to bang on the glass. Others copy, and this new sound attracts the attention of even more of the dead.
Amy’s corpse has now reached the telephone box. Although she doesn’t understand what she is doing, she has an instinctive, insatiable desire to reach the source of the noise at all costs. She grabs hold of the nearest corpse and attempts to take its place. Less decayed than some of the other cadavers, Amy viciously rips at them, pulling and pushing them out of the way. Their flesh is weak and is literally torn from the bone. Amy keeps moving until she is standing directly in front of the telephone box. She leans forward and presses her decaying face against the glass, staring down at the girl with dry, unblinking eyes.
As long as the girl continues to move and make noise, the bodies remain.
JACKSON
You can learn a lot about them by watching. Sometimes it pays to be slow like them. Bide your time. Take it easy. Don’t panic and you should be okay.
I’m not a biologist or a doctor. I don’t know what’s happened to them or why it hasn’t happened to me and to be honest, I don’t care. I don’t know if I’m immune or whether I’m just riding my luck and it’ll get me eventually. I might only have a day left, but I might last a
nother twenty years. I know hardly anything about this strange new world, but I’m learning how to survive.
I never had any training for this kind of thing. I did a couple of years in the Boy Scouts but that’s all. I could have done with a stretch in the forces, but it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t stand the shouting and the discipline. I’ve never been able to handle being told what to do. Unless I’m the one doing the ordering, then I work better on my own and I always have done. I used to get on with other people well enough but, given the choice, I prefer my own company every time. Especially now. I wouldn’t be able to trust anyone else to stay quiet or still enough when the bodies are about. The rest of the world is dead and everything I do is exaggerated by the stillness. I can’t take any risks.
If I move they’ll see me. If I make a sound they’ll hear me. They have numbers on their side and I know that if I give them half a chance, they’ll kill me.
So what have I learnt about them. They’re pretty simple creatures now, easy to read. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of conscious thought going on in their festering brains, but I have noticed them beginning to follow certain behaviours. And those behaviours are changing almost by the day.
It’s a week now since it happened. I checked enough of them at the start to be sure they were dead, but something inside them has survived and it’s growing stronger. It began when they picked themselves up and started to move again, then they were able to hear and see. Over the last twenty-four hours I’ve seen them become even more animated. They’re beginning to show rudimentary emotions too: anger, although that could just be a physical manifestation of frustration, and either fear or pain, I can’t tell which.