'We have the best system of government in the world,' said the Defence Secretary. 'Which is why it's about time we imposed it on everyone else again whether they like it or not.'
The PM didn't look so sure about that. The Foreign Secretary finally popped his head up.
'Somalia,' he said. 'It's years since they had a functioning government. Look at them. They are totally and completely fucked.'
Barney Thomson nodded. 'Fair point,' he said.
'And if you think that we in Britain would be able to all get along and run some kind of happy hippy commune where everyone traded chickens and cheese, then you're madder than a box of Andrew Marrs.'
Barney nodded again.
'Suppose you're right. That's us, the British, the human race in a nutshell. We're governed by a bunch of wankers, but we'd be even worse if we weren't.'
He stared at the PM, who was looking rather sullen and depressed, perhaps thinking of the bullets which he hadn't dodged, and which were at that moment merely hesitating before exploding in his face.
'You couldn't just have me arrested again, could you?' said Barney.
That Night, The World
The 1st Regiment of the Living Dead had become so large, so engorged by gobbling up regular humans into their midst, that they'd had to be split into seven different regiments. The first four regiments were quickly working their way through southern Africa, and had just munched their way through South Africa itself. In the wake of the zombie invasion, crime in the country had fallen by 90%, so in general no one was complaining.
The fifth and sixth zombie regiments had been sent to make a start on South America, while the seventh was dispatched to lay claim to Antarctica. World domination was on the cards. Europe and America were being left for the end, on the basis that they might both have imploded in debt and despair and be ripe for the picking by the time it came to send in the zombies.
Finally, however, the matter had been raised at the UN Security Council in New York. A motion had been put before members to object in the strongest possible terms to Great Britain's attempt to take over the entire world, but there had been disagreement between several members on whether or not the word 'naughty' could be included in the resolution, and so further discussion had been postponed until after the Committee For The Curtailment Of The Advance Of The Living Dead had reported back, some time in the autumn of the following year.
10 Downing Street, London, England
Barney Thomson was about to leave Number 10 when the PM tapped him on the shoulder and invited him back in. The Defence and Foreign Secretaries had already left and were, he hoped, unaware that Barney was being brought back in for further talks.
The two men stood alone in a small office. Barney hoped the PM wasn't going to suggest that they did the kinds of things that the PM did with his deputy.
'Now, Mr. Thomson,' he said, 'let's be absolutely clear about this. I'm beginning to see why the others, you know, Blair, Brown that lot, why they trusted you. Clear talking, none of the sycophantic bullshit that one normally hears around these parts. So, I need some help, and I thought you'd be the man to give it. You know, what with you being this famous serial killer type of chap.'
Barney had nothing to say. He'd been looking forward to going to bed. Then he could have looked forward to getting up and having breakfast. And then... then the rest of the following day would have been as lousy as this one. What he really wanted was for the PM to release him from duty.
'It's obvious that these bullets, as you say, are taking some sort of interregnum on their way to blasting a hole in my face. There's no doubt that there's all sort of disasters still to take place with the economy. There are terrorists around every corner, the Middle East will completely cave in at any moment, we've made more U-turns than a thousand toilets, I've lost control over the party – if I ever had any in the first place – Boris is positioning himself in a queue of one to take my job, and believe me we haven't heard the last of the whole News of the World business, we've still the Levenson thing to sort out, and it's more than likely that my perfectly sensible decision to employ Andy and have an affair with Rebekkah will come and bite me on the arse. It's going to be every man for himself. Things are going to get worse, and after they've got worse they're going to get much much worse. Before this is all over I'll be out of a job, the government will fall, about four newspapers will be shut down, countless editors and journalists will be in prison, the police service will be in turmoil, there'll be an Al Qaeda cell on every corner, every single British business will be owned by a Russian or an Arab, the PALP will be considered a statesman and the entire landscape of British media, politics and life in general will have changed forever.'
Barney had let him talk. He wasn't even looking at him, although he had been listening. Staring at the floor.
'You agree?'
'Maybe,' said Barney, 'but Britain as a whole is a pretty staid old institution. People like what they're used to. Market forces always triumph. It's like the News of The World closing down and being replaced by the Sun. Different, yet exactly the same. That's Britain. It takes generations to change anything. Anyway. What did you want?'
'Well, the point I'd like to make is this, Mr. Thomson. I've been in this job less than three years and I really don't want to lose it. Not yet, and not to the Pointless Adenoidal Little Prick either. Or Boris. Certainly not Boris. So, I need all those who are in a position to cause me trouble and who'll try to oust me from my position, dragged further into the slime and taken care of.'
There was a pause. A car drove noisily along Whitehall. Somewhere could be heard the sound of Hugh Grant laughing. A woman noisily unwrapped a bar of chocolate.
'Taken care of?' asked Barney.
'Yes,' said the PM.
'Killed?'
The PM put his fingers to his lips.
'That's a very bold word to use. Nevertheless....' He smiled. 'I thought, you know, a man of your experience.'
'How many people in the parliamentary party do you think might be plotting against you?' asked Barney.
'At a conservative estimate, I'd say about three hundred and three... you know, now that the junior defence ministers are dead'
Barney shook his head, stared at the ground for a few moments, and then clapped the Prime Minister on the shoulder in an almost fatherly gesture.
'You've done a fine job under difficult circumstances,' he said. 'Now you just have to accept that you've fucked up and go quietly. You'll be remembered more fondly that way.'
Barney gave him a small supportive smile, a final squeeze of the shoulder and then walked from the room, closing the door behind him. The PM was left alone in dark silence.
It swallowed him, and he was suddenly gripped by the most dreadful melancholy, even stronger than he'd felt when watching the last Harry Potter movie. Zombie war raged across the planet. Those two great pillars of the UK establishment – government and media – were collapsing. The world would soon be run by Twitter gangs. The old ways were changing. The world of men was about to crumble and fall.
'And it's happening on my watch,' said the PM, grabbing at one last desolate cliché.
Across Three Continents
Across three continents they marched. The living dead had been unleashed. And although each member of the elite fighting force had been fitted with the chip that allowed the British military to believe that they could be controlled, there just is no controlling zombies.
The contagion was spreading; there were now as many zombies without the chip as had been fitted. A metaphor for all that was wrong in the world, a metaphor for the disease of human greed, the zombie contagion was spreading around the planet with exceptional speed.
Flesh was being ripped apart, bodies crunched, faces torn off, stomachs ripped open, bowels disemboweled, arms and legs chewed and munched, blood drunk, heads crunched beneath slavering bloody jaws.
Soon the entire world was going to be run by zombies, and there would be nothing that the ne
w and glorious British empire could do about it. Only one man could save humanity. Only one man stood between worldwide zombie contagion and the thing we have now, which isn't worldwide zombie contagion but isn't actually all that much better.
And that man was currently lying in bed in his underpants. Sleeping.
The Next Morning, Somewhere in England, England
Barney could tell. The Prime Minister was quickly becoming a tragic figure. How could he not? It happened to them all, all political leaders; or at least, to all leaders in democracies, the leaders who had to pay attention to the media and to political opponents. The dictators could quash opposition, they could crush and kill anyone who stood in their way. They could do what they liked, answer their every whim. They could live in luxury, they could be as corrupt as they wanted, they could shag their way through the population, they could conduct cabinet meetings while eighteen year-old nymphs caressed their testicles. They looked relaxed, happy, in control.
Not in a democracy, however. In democracies you had to listen. You could do nothing without compromise. If there was an eighteen-year-old nymph caressing your testicles during cabinet the chances are it'd be in the papers the next day and the Daily Mail would insist that its readers were outraged.
President Obama was a perfect example. He arrived all brave and bold and full of promises, and then had been whacked stiffly in the knackers by reality. All those brave, bold plans had been completely impractical, or if practical, there had been someone to stand in his way to stop them. Four and a bit years later and he'd pretty much achieved fuck-all and the guy had aged twenty years.
The PM, even more hamstrung by circumstances, was finding the same thing. His power was limited by so many different things. He couldn't have a drink with a red-headed newspaper executive without it being all over the newspapers, and he was constantly confronted and having to comment on misery, heartache and pain. When scores of people were murdered in a small neighbouring country, he couldn't just be appalled like everyone else, and sink into some sort of deep misery about the human race. He had to be officially appalled, he had to officially think about it, he had to officially clear words written on his behalf.
As a leader in a democratic country you were constantly confronted with despair, hopelessness and the obdurate awfulness of the human race. No wonder they all plunged into premature old age, senility and depression.
'Dye my hair pink,' said the PM. 'And give me a Mohawk.'
Barney, standing behind him with a pair of scissors and a comb at the ready, raised an eyebrow.
'Would you like it shaved at the sides in the traditional sense, or just bouffed into a peak at the centre? That's kind of a Mohawk-lite.'
Even as the words had crossed his mouth the PM had started to lose the courage of his convictions. You could never do what you wanted as PM. You couldn't take Britain out of Europe, you couldn't make all the poor people get jobs, you couldn't have a mistress, you couldn't go on Britain's Got Talent. You couldn't dye your hair pink.
He waved a disconsolate hand in the air.
'Just, you know... make it a Jude Law.'
The PM's shoulders slumped a little further. Barney, already suffering from his own peculiar brand of deep depression, felt the PM's pain and set to work on the raffish quirkiness of the cut.
Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport, England
If the Prime Minister thought things were bad – and the fact that the morning papers were all over him and his government for the endless litany of disaster they had presided over since taking office – they were about to not just get worse, but to land in a shitstorming fuckbucket of disaster.
A businessman from Esher had briefly become embroiled with the zombie invasion of South Africa, but had managed to escape to the airport mostly unscathed. Having been cornered in his hotel by three of the living dead, he'd fought his way out using an ornamental spear he'd grabbed off a wall in the hotel lobby. He'd stabbed one in the face, and although it hadn't finished the zombie off it had at least knocked it out the game for long enough. He had then swung the spear like a baseball bat and clean removed the head of the second. He had unfortunately ended up in closer hand-to-hand combat with the third, and although he had ultimately managed to rip the zombie's head off, it was not before he'd received a bit of a bite to the upper arm.
He thought he'd be all right. He was wrong.
He caught a flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow. Gradually over the course of the journey his zombiefication had progressed. He hadn't noticed it himself until the flight attendant leaned across him to pick up his untouched lunch tray and he had found himself biting into her arm. He managed to stop himself just as his teeth touched her skin, but it was at best an awkward-turtle moment.
However, long before the plane touched down at Heathrow his zombification was complete, and for over an hour he had been roaming around the cabin indiscriminately biting the living and quickly transforming them into the living dead. The pilots, made aware of what was going on back in the cabin, made sure the door was firmly shut, did not let any of the flight attendants in, and made Heathrow aware of the contagion they were bringing with them into the country.
Once it landed, the plane was ordered to park in an area on the far side of the airfield, half a mile away from any of the terminal buildings. There was some discussion on whether or not the plane should be blown up on its arrival, but there was naturally some scepticism amongst the authorities that there was a zombie horde inside the plane waiting to be unleashed.
The plane came to a standstill and immediately the doors were opened. The living dead horde poured out, zombie after zombie plunging to the ground and splatting over the tarmac. Gradually, however, a small grotesque mountain grew as zombie piled on top of zombie, so that eventually the living dead began to slither down the mound as their fellows grabbed at them in their moaning, desperate misery.
Eventually the full cargo of the zombies was unloaded, a bloody, horrendous, mangled, mutilated, heaving pile of living flesh, grabbing and biting and chewing. Airport security and the police in attendance were not terribly well prepared. There were a few machine guns between them, and they unloaded the usual clusterfuck of death into the zombie midst, but they were quickly being overcome. As the cavalry arrived, sinister vans screeching to a halt on the tarmac to belch forth the black death of the security forces, they were met by a growing zombie army as it swallowed up resistance and absorbed the desperate men in uniform into their number.
Screaming mingled with heavy machine gun fire. Blood flowed, but no one died. Each victim was drawn into the zombie horde, and so as more and more people arrived – security forces, police, journalists, television crew, people wanting a decent view, Jeremy Kyle – they were greeted by zombies with machine guns.
*
Terminal 5 sat sedately in the sun, the most modern, beautiful, bright and clear terminal building in Britain. Still shiny and new, still plenty of space for all its passengers. They shopped in absurdly expensive designer shops, they bought alcohol and cigarettes, they drank £4.95 cappuccinos, they read airport bestsellers, they glanced at Time and Newsweek. The day sat happily upon them.
Unfortunately for the happy travellers of Terminal 5, the building was the closest to the zombie breakout from flight BA0187 from Johannesburg. The living dead arrived at the shiny new building and cared not for the elevators with glass doors and the wonderfully high ceilings and the atmosphere of expensive calm. They were hungry for human flesh, and they found it in abundance.
The zombie horde were out of control. They were eating people and they were spreading the contagion like, well, wildfire. More than that, they were getting on planes. The zombie contagion had been unleashed. The world was facing its greatest ever peril.
Hyde Park, London, England
Barney was back in position, sitting on a bench, looking at the Serpentine. The sun was shining. He was listening to Radio 3. Some people with instruments were playing a piece of music that might have bee
n used on an advert once. He was eating a chicken and lemongrass wrap, drinking elderflower juice. It was a mild day. Women in early summer clothes walked by, but he did not look at them.
No matter his situation, it seemed, wherever he was these days he would look around him and decide if there was a way to kill himself that would not drag others into his misery.
The water would be perfect. He could slip in. He could slip beneath the surface, and no one would notice. Except, they would notice eventually after his body had floated to the surface, bloated and dead.
Was that what was stopping him? Or did it not feel right for him to walk away from life? Was there some part he still had to play in the world? Did it need him more than he needed it?
He saw her across the water, a slight figure in a light dress of pale raspberry and cream. Low cut, thin straps. Her hair was cut in a neat, short, blonde bob. She was wearing sunglasses, yet he knew; she was staring at him.
Harlequin Sweetlips.
She'd been walking quite quickly, but when he saw her she stopped. She removed her glasses. She openly stared at him across the water.
She was the most beautiful women to ever walk the earth, and that marvellous, delicious beauty displayed the incredible evil that lay within. She wasn't so much a femme fatale, as a complete and utter cunt. She had killed every man she'd ever loved, every man she'd ever slept with and every man she'd ever woken up one morning thinking that she ought to kill.
Except Barney Thomson.
Slowly she lifted her hand and waved. She smiled.
Barney Thomson stared across the water and wondered if the end that he desired so much had just walked back into his life.
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