The Words of Their Roaring

by Matthew Smith

  He slapped the Escort's roof and indicated for them to continue. He slung his rifle over his shoulder, unhooked a two-way from his belt, and spoke briefly into it. Seconds later, the gates swung open. Gabe gave the guard the thumbs-up, and Ali edged the car through the opening and onto the main driveway, tyres crunching on the gravel that curled round in a semi-circle to the front of the mansion. Almost immediately, the gates clanged shut as soon as they were through.

  Positioned just inside them on either side of the driveway were two sentry posts, an armed guard stationed on each, equipped with infrared nightsights and high-calibre automatic weapons. The lawns that surrounded the house were a cat's cradle of tripwires - themselves interspersed with warning signs for the benefit of the living - triggering small bundles of dynamite. The perimeter fence could be electrified if necessary, and dog-handlers patrolled its length constantly, the animals particularly good at sniffing out approaching ghouls. It was the most well-defended building that Gabe had seen since the advent of the outbreak, and that included governmental offices: one of the many testaments to Harry's organisational skills as well as his wealth.

  The mansion's ivy-choked eighteenth-century facade belied the modern interior, Flowers having gutted much of the original fixtures and fittings to make way for the operations centre he required: libraries and studies were stripped to accommodate research labs, armouries and workshops. For an old geezer, he didn't seem to care for tradition or nostalgia; business in his opinion was all about staying one step ahead. To that end he was something of a gadget freak, and loved to drop in on the tech-boys, who would regale him with their latest developments.

  Ali pulled the car up alongside several others outside the garages. Gabe stepped out and opened the boot, removing the holdalls and passing them to Davis and Hewitt, who appeared at his side.

  "I'm going to see what Harry wants," he told the two men. "Take that lot down to the treasury. And make sure you get an inventory, OK?" Gabe locked stares with Hewitt, who grumpily spun away and trudged towards the house, before turning his attention to the ex-cop. "Keep an eye on him," he murmured. "Ensure everything's tagged and bagged." Davis nodded his assent and followed his colleague.

  Gabe turned to see Ali emerge from the vehicle; she locked it up and threw him the keys. He smiled in gratitude, but her hangdog expression didn't change.

  "There's about a quarter tank in there," she told him. "Might want to fill her up, in case you need to get somewhere in a hurry."

  "I'll do it in the morning, thanks."

  "You worried about him?" she asked, leaning against the side of the Escort and nodding towards the small figure of Hewitt climbing the stone steps to the front door.

  "I guess. A bit." He shrugged. "He's too reckless, and doesn't account for the consequences. I think he sees this all as one big videogame."

  "He'll never listen to advice. Take that from someone who's raised a pair of teenage boys." Gabe vaguely remembered her mentioning her children before, but had always refrained from enquiring what had happened to them. "The only time he'll take stock of his actions is if he puts himself in danger. If he nearly gets himself killed, then you might see a different side to him."

  "Wishful thinking," he replied, half joking.

  "Could be the best lesson he'll ever get," she answered, and strolled away towards the garages, leaving Gabe wondering exactly what kind of mother she'd been.

  He nodded to the two bored-looking guys standing guard just inside the entrance, and made his way through the stone-flagged reception hall, a cavernous space dominated by the huge carpeted staircase that swept up to the first floor. Despite the lateness of the hour, sounds of activity still echoed from the many corridors branching off the foyer; indeed, the headquarters of Flowers' outfit never really slept, the men working in shifts on various tasks, from the upkeep of the house to zombie procurement. Harry himself only caught a few zeds when it was unavoidable, feeling that he'd be missing something important otherwise. Gabe considered dropping in on the kitchen after he'd reported to the boss, which ticked over twenty-four seven for the benefit of those toiling through the night. He could do with a cup of tea and a chance to put his feet up; it was easy to forget how important these simple pleasures were when you spent much of your time putting bullets through the heads of decaying cadavers.

  He spotted a familiar face emerge from one of antechambers, twirling a dog lead in his hand.

  "Yo, Hendricks," Gabe called, smiling. "Taking your lady friend out tonight?"

  "Oh yes," he replied, glancing down at the chain with affection. "A chance to get away from you animals and spend an evening with someone a tad more civilised."

  "I'm sure her conversation's a blast."

  "Ella listens, that's the main thing. It's an underrated quality."

  Ella was his tawny German Shepherd, one of the handful of dogs kept in the kennels for patrol purposes. Hendricks had a particular affinity with all of them, but she was his favourite, and she was remarkably well trained. Affable and docile for much of the time, as soon as she caught whiff of a Returner her wolfen nature emerged. It surprised Gabe to learn that even the dogs hated the ghouls, without even knowing what they truly were, which made the stiffs something quite unique - a common enemy that bonded man and beast.

  "You want to try it some time, O'Connell," he continued. "You don't know how refreshing it is just to have a quiet few moments, just enjoying each other's company."

  "Hey, sounds beautiful. Me, I think I'll stick with the human race."

  "That's always been your problem: misplaced loyalty."

  "Talking of which, you seen the old man tonight?"

  "Yeah, he's with the boffins," Hendricks answered, swinging the lead towards an annexe behind the staircase. "Ashberry's there too. Harry seems quite excited about something the colonel picked up on the airwaves."

  "No shit?"

  "You know how he is; always got some bit between his teeth. Listen, I hear the call of the wild, so I better go."

  "Don't want to keep your canine chums waiting."

  "Fuck you, you're just jealous," he said, laughing as he headed towards the front gardens.

  Gabe strode down the dark, bare passage towards the lab complex, smiling to himself. He'd known Hendricks since he first joined Flowers' organisation and he hadn't changed in that time; a big, soft-hearted lug of a man, perhaps too generous of spirit for a professional thief and enforcer. He was defiantly old school, a generation and world away from the likes of Hewitt, and took no pleasure in violence, using it as a last resort and only under the specific orders of the boss. He was a natural to be in charge of the dogs, and seemed to genuinely prefer their company to that of his colleagues. Gabe often wondered what had led him to falling in with Harry and choosing a life outside the law when he appeared to exhibit none of the qualities one would expect, but Hendricks would not be drawn, merely stating that it was impossible for anyone to predict where they will end up. Instead he would turn the questioning onto Gabe, asking whether he could explain what he was doing being part of the firm, and Gabe could only shake his head, unable to answer. It was a bizarre situation to be in, but ever since the outbreak he'd known he'd made the right choice. If he hadn't joined the outfit, he'd no doubt be just another survivor at best, scratching out an existence amongst the ruins.

  The corridor opened out into the research facility, and he spotted Flowers and Colonel Ashberry watching the scientists through an observation window. Beyond the glass was the lab area, where a number of whitecoats were flitting between half a dozen morgue slabs upon which zombie subjects were strapped. Gabe paused in the doorway and cleared his throat. The two men glanced over their shoulders and raised their eyebrows in recognition, Harry immediately returning his gaze to the work being done before him.

  "Gabriel, my boy," his employer said. "All back in one piece?"

  "Safe and sound," Gabe replied, walking forward, nodding a greeting to the military man. "We didn't encounter any problems."


  "What about Michaelson's info? Was it accurate?"

  "On the money, so to speak. Store hadn't been touched since the deadheads rose. I think we came away with between fifty and hundred k's worth of merchandise."

  Harry finally turned to face him. "Impressive." The boss was an imposing figure in the flesh; lean and wiry with a grizzled, sandblasted complexion and a few white hairs still fighting the good fight on his crown. The watery blue eyes that peered out from the craggy folds of his face, however, indicated the intelligence that lay within that pensionable frame. Once you found yourself fixed in their glare, it seemed he was capable of sensing the slightest untruth. His mood too was never easy to judge at any given time, and that kept those around him nervous, a wrong-footedness he often used to his advantage. Gabe had never seen anyone who could switch from a beaming smile to a look of murderous rage with nary an expression in between. "But then you've always been one of my best thieves, Gabriel."

  "I just go where I'm pointed."

  "Indeed. What have you stolen for me over the years - guns? Money? Computer equipment? You've even kidnapped the odd rival, if memory serves."

  "On your orders."

  "Without question. But my point remains that you can be relied upon to get the job done with the minimum of fuss." Without taking his eyes off Gabe, Flowers motioned towards the lab with a swift nod of the head. "Do you ever consider yourself a remote-control creature, O'Connell?"

  Gabe flicked his gaze through the glass then back to his boss. "You mean, do I think I'm not much better than them? One of the mindless majority?"

  Harry's face bisected into a grin. "I'm pulling your chain, boy. Of course you're working towards the greater good, like everybody here. But similarly, they," he tapped the partition with a knuckle, "could be useful to us, could be directed by us."

  "We're trying to ascertain how the virus is working on the cadavers," Ashberry piped up. He was a stiff-backed, humourless goon in his forties that had decided, without a great deal of prevarication, to abandon his middle-ranking post amongst the governmental forces and defect to Flowers' outfit. The colonel believed that the power base had shifted to those with the vision to take back the city - in other words, Harry. Ashberry's military knowledge had proved invaluable in planning operations and procuring weaponry from army installations. He clearly hoped that if the old man's coup ever came off, he could grab himself a slice of the action and claim a position that his previous career had never afforded him. Gabe was sceptical that Harry would ever be that grateful; he could see the uniformed prick being hung out to dry once his usefulness had expired. "We have a theory that the bacteria is evolving inside the brain, slowly changing how the zombies behave. Their instincts are becoming less random, and they're showing signs of memory retention."

  By 'we', he meant the small team of researchers that had been removed at gunpoint from the secret MoD labs - the details of their whereabouts provided by Ashberry - and forced to work for Flowers. They were essentially doing the same work, but the difference was they were unable to leave the mansion and their findings were to be delivered directly to the boss. Gabe watched a whitecoat peel the top of a skull off a still-struggling stiff, careful to keep the organ inside intact. It was a horrorshow in there, a mix of butchery and experimentation that he couldn't stomach for long. Harry, naturally, seemed to revel in it.

  "If we could determine how the virus controls the dead," the colonel continued, "then there's a chance we could modify it ourselves, get it to fire up some of the neural connections that enable speech, the understanding of language, the basic implementation of tools. And most importantly, make them not want to eat us."

  "Turn them into your puppets, you mean," Gabe said.

  "Oh, Gabriel," Flowers murmured, "much more than that. We're giving life back to these poor wretches. Why do you think they moan and cry so? They hate their condition, hate what they've become, jealous of the sound of beating hearts and the touch of warm breath. They consume us to try to claw it back, to feel blood rushing in their veins once more. But it always leaves them unsatisfied."

  Gabe felt that had more to do with the fact that the dead's digestive tracts were unable to process what they ate, but bit his tongue. Harry was evidently in a poetic mood tonight. "And of course, unzombiefying makes them much less of a threat when it comes to taking London."

  "Better to win round enemies than tackle them head-on, that's always been my motto."

  Gabe could think of more than one occasion when he'd done just the opposite.

  "Our problem," Ashberry said, trying to steer the conversation back to the matter at hand, "has been isolating the virus from the brain samples we're examining. Once it gets into the nervous system, it embeds itself totally, essentially taking over the host. It's hard to see where what was once human ends and the thing the disease has turned it into begins."

  "What these backroom boys need is untainted cultures of the original virus to work from," Flowers said. "By reverse-engineering that, they might be able to get somewhere. And we've just had a stroke of rather good luck."

  "Which is?"

  "I was monitoring a line of encrypted military radio traffic earlier," the colonel told him. "Government forces are transporting a portion of their stock from their stronghold at St Thomas' Hospital to an MoD complex beneath Westminster. Obviously, they're desperately trying to look for an antidote too - but they want to find a way of defeating the plague and make the zombies fall down dead permanently, rather than our solution, which is to turn them into something else."

  "So what do you want me to do?" Gabe asked, knowing the answer even as the words left his lips.

  "Why, you're going to do what you do best, son," Harry said, putting an arm round the younger man's shoulders. "You're going to hijack it."

  CHAPTER THREE

  17.32 pm

  Gabe knocked gently on the door but entered without waiting for an answer. He didn't acknowledge the other occupant in the room at first, merely took a dining chair from beside the fireplace and carried it over to the bay window overlooking the gardens. He positioned it next to the woman in the armchair, silently staring out at Flowers' manicured greenery, equally unresponsive to her guest. Gabe sat down and gazed out on the lawns below for several hushed moments, the gloom of evening stealing in and sapping the light from the afternoon. Beyond the treetops at the far end of his employer's estate, blue-black clouds massed threatening a downpour, hearkening the approaching darkness. Already, shadows were gathering in the room, and when he turned finally to face her it was difficult to discern her expression; her profile was partially obscured by a heavy blonde fringe. She was propped against several cushions, and although her eyes were open she was utterly motionless.

  "Anna," he said, his voice catching in his throat. He felt uncomfortable breaking the quiet, and his words felt strange leaving his lips and inhabiting this place. A clock ticked in the background, spacing out the seconds. "Anna, I just thought I'd come say hello. I haven't had a chance to see you recently."

  No reply; indeed, if it wasn't for the slightest twitch in her pupils as they remained fixed on the view through the glass it would be impossible to tell if she was conscious.

  "I hope you've been keeping well," Gabe persevered. "I'm sure you're being well looked after, but if there's ever anything you need, you know you only have to ask and I'll do everything I can to help. You know that, don't you?" With the question hanging in the air between them unanswered, he tried another tack and followed her gaze to the gardens. "I must've said it before, but you do have a beautiful outlook to wake up to every morning. Especially at this time of year. The splashes of bright yellows and mauves, the scent of honeysuckle... Harry sure does have green fingers."

  Smiling despite himself, his expression froze when her head turned suddenly and she looked at him. There was no emotion behind her smooth, pale face; no anger, or longing, or disgust, just an achingly perfect mask framed by her blonde ringlets. Her skin was soft and delicate, b
ut painfully lacking in colour; even her lips were drained of blood. An observer standing at a distance might suggest that she was wearing foundation, so uniform was her whiteness, but Gabe knew that there wasn't a touch of make-up on her. Her ice-blue eyes were all the more startling for the contrast to her complexion, as sharp and flawless as a spring morning; he could not gaze into those twin shards for long without his own orbs pricking with a desire to hold, comfort and protect her. They looked instantly sad and knowing, innocent and troubled.

  "Anna?" he started, aware that the volume of his voice had dropped even further, now little more than a whisper.

  "What do you want from me?" she said tremulously, her stare unwavering. "What do you think I can give you?"

  At first he couldn't reply, as the accusation rang in his head. What possible recompense could he offer her for what she had lost? As ever, the suggestion nagged at the back of his mind that his interest in her well-being was as much a salve to his guilt as it was a natural wish to watch over her. At best it meant he could rest easy in his bed, satisfied that he had at least made the effort. The fact that there had been no visible improvement in her condition for the past five years was clearly evidence that his guardianship made no difference. Yet still he made these visits, attempting to engage her in conversation, but rarely waking her from her daze. Perhaps she was torturing him, conscious of him squirming beneath her cool gaze, aware that as long as she was withdrawn from him, she was forever beyond his reach... If it was punishment, did he deserve any less?

  "Anna... you don't have to give me anything, other than to accept that all I want is the best for you," he finally said. "I'm not here to demand or cajole anything out of you. I just want you to know that I'm always here for you."

  "You're looking for forgiveness; that's what you're after, isn't it?" He flinched at the flecks of spite that flew in his direction. She turned her head away from him, as if to dismiss his presence. "Don't you understand nothing can change what has happened? Not your words, not your actions, and not your honourable intentions. What's done is done and we're trapped in the consequences."