by Guy Adams
‘Nah, they’re kicking off,’ says Connor, who has moved out of the little hollow they’ve been sat in so he can get a better look. ‘They’re going mental over something.’
Mikey, deciding that anything’s better than nothing when it comes to passing the time, gives up throwing stones and moves to stand next to Connor.
Connor seems to have a point: whatever’s going on, it’s not a funeral. There are maybe ten or fifteen of them, men and women. Some are dressed in rags, some look naked. All of them are fighting, with each other or – seemingly – thin air.
‘They’re fucking mad,’ Mikey decides, laughing.
‘They don’t look right,’ says Connor. ‘Sort of shiny.’ He’s thinking of the dolls his sister used to have. She would dress them up in different clothes, make them marry each other, stupid shit like that. He nicked them once, tore all their clothes off and strung them up by their necks, hanging from the top of her bedroom door. She went mental, screaming and crying. He hadn’t expected her to take it so badly; he’d just meant it as a joke. She kept jumping up, trying to reach them, trying to pull them down. She got the bloke one by the legs and yanked it free, but its head popped off, making her cry even more. These people remind him of those dolls: the way they move, like their arms and legs don’t bend right, the way their skin shines like plastic.
‘Oi!’ shouts Mikey. ‘What’s your fucking problem then?’
As questions go it’s a fair one, thinks Connor, wishing his mate hadn’t asked it. The shiny people turn and start running towards them.
‘Dickhead,’ he says. ‘Wankers are after us now.’
‘Fucking let ’em.’ Mikey decides. It’s cheering up a boring day, as far as he’s concerned.
Mikey changes his mind as they get close enough to really see properly. He is not thinking of kids’ dolls, he’s thinking of the dummies they have in shop windows – their fixed expressions, their rock-hard arms and legs. How when he was a kid he used to freak out at the sight of those dummies. His mum would laugh at him as he ran away from the shop windows.
‘We should run,’ says Connor, ‘there’s something wrong with them.’
‘Fucking is, if they think they can scare me,’ Mikey replies, prepared to fight his corner if that’s what’s in store.
They’re only feet away now and they’re utterly silent, their faces holding on to one expression as they reach out for the boys. On some, that expression looks angry, on others it just looks confused.
‘What’s your problem?’ asks Mikey as a man grabs him. Mikey gives the bloke a kick and starts raining punches on his head. One solid blow causes a popping sound and a thick, cream-coloured chunk of plastic hangs free from where his jawbone used to be. It’s false, shoved in place to make the face sit right for an open-casket funeral. The hole it leaves behind reveals irregular teeth, splintered bone and a tongue that sticks straight out like the engorged stamen of a grotesque flower.
‘Fuck me, Mikey!’ Connor shouts. A woman, all but naked, bears down on him and he’s throwing punches. Her distended breasts topple from one side to the other as she takes his head in her broken hands and begins to dig her thumbs in.
Connor tries to pull her hands away, kicking out at her legs, but he’s being grabbed from behind now and he can’t fight them all.
Mikey is willing to try, but even he is now realising that taking on a group this size was stupid. He shouts and swears – and screams – as they kick and batter him. Soon he is a wet, shapeless mass.
Connor feels himself being pulled between three different attackers. They can’t do this, he panics, they’re going to kill me. The woman yanks at his head as the other two pull at his legs and arms. Connor recalls his sister’s doll. If the woman pulls at his neck any harder she’s going to …
f) Home Office building, Marsham Street, London
April Shining bursts into the Home Secretary’s office and immediately begins shouting. She’s almost unstoppable. She’s been told to shut up so many times over the last couple of hours a backlog of speech has built up.
‘Ms Shining,’ the Home Secretary says, ‘if you’ll just be quiet for a moment I think you’ll find we’re already aware of the situation.’
April looks at the three of them gathered around the desk. She recognises Sir Robin immediately and forces herself to quell her natural response, which is to storm over there and punch his lights out. The Home Secretary is a given; it is, after all, her office and April would be livid to have broken in only to find her absent. The second man, however, is a total mystery.
‘Who are you?’ she asks, trying her best to loom over him. He’s a dapper chap, in his late fifties. He carries with him a whiff of the country set.
He glances at the Home Secretary, either asking permission to tell April or hoping she’ll be removed, April can’t quite tell which.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ April says, ‘I’m an honorary member of most governments. You can say what you like when I’m around.’
The Home Secretary sighs. ‘Can I offer you a drink, April?’
‘That would be a step in the right direction.’
‘My name’s Kirby,’ says the stranger, holding out his hand to shake April’s.
‘Jeffery’s something of an expert in all this,’ says the Home Secretary. ‘We called him in as soon as it became clear what we’re dealing with.’
‘Oh, you’ve finally accepted it then, have you? I’ve had the runaround all morning on the phone … Hang on – an expert?’
‘In reanimation,’ says Kirby, ‘yes. Though, as I was just saying, this is entirely beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.’
‘Seen before?’ April takes the drink the Home Secretary hands her and drains it. ‘How can you possibly have seen anything like this before?’
Kirby shifts in his seat. ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’
April looks from one of them to the next. ‘Don’t tell me you silly bastards have been looking into something similar? Oh, I bet you have … My God …You’re all as bad as one another.’
‘It’s not like that, April,’ the Home Secretary says. ‘And even if it were, it would hardly be our pressing concern.’
‘It seems to me,’ Kirby continues, ‘and I’m speaking as a medical man as well as someone of knowledge in this field, that these things are not reanimated people. No … let me be clearer, they are empty vessels. They bear no relation to the people they once were. They are, in effect, inanimate objects given a semblance of life.’
‘And what difference does that make?’ April asks. ‘Do we really need to fret about the details?’
‘We do if we want to stand a chance of stopping them,’ Kirby replies, ‘though I’m afraid I was building up to explaining that I don’t think we can. They don’t seem to respond according to any biological rules. Hack them to pieces and they keep going. Their life essence – and believe me, using such a vague expression makes me as uncomfortable as you – is indefinable. It is therefore impossible to destroy it. All we can do is hit the things with brute force until they are no longer a threat. Which might be fine if we weren’t dealing with so many of them. Conservative estimates, based on the information you found, Ms Shining, suggests we could be facing up to half a million of the things. The south is saturated worse than the North, though both Manchester and Birmingham are also badly affected.’
‘Dear God!’ The Home Secretary stares into space, unable to think of a single constructive thing to say.
April Shining, for once in her life, is struck dumb.
g) Oakeshott Avenue, Highgate, London
Geeta Sahni grips the bench beneath her as the police van takes a speed bump too fast. Everyone sways and collides with one another like the steel balls in a Newton’s Cradle. If the passengers weren’t all so terrified they would be shouting at the driver.
Andrew, with sweaty, nervous palms and a false smile, is sitting to Geeta’s left. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this,’ he says. �
��This is a job for the SFC.’
‘You think they weren’t already called?’ replies one of the other officers. ‘From what I heard they’re drafting in everybody.’ Geeta recognises him: Leeson, she remembers – they were at training college the same year.
‘The union’s going to have kittens,’ says Andrew, ‘I’m not legally covered to carry this.’ He looks down at the Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifle he has been issued with, staring at it as if it might change into something else, something less terrifying.
‘You must have bagged decent training scores,’ says Geeta, ‘or they wouldn’t have given it to you.’
She has been thinking about this, trying to decide why she has been drafted in, and this is the only reason she can think of. Her performance during weapons training was deemed exemplary, much to her smug satisfaction and the chagrin of her male colleagues.
‘Not bad,’ Andrew admits, ‘but that’s a bit different, isn’t it? I’m shit hot on Grand Theft Auto too, but they didn’t ask me to drive.’
There’s a ripple of laughter at this, a brief release of nerves before the van draws to a halt and nobody is in the mood to laugh anymore.
There is the bang of a fist on the side of the van and the rear doors open.
The police officers step out, moving quickly but awkwardly, not sure of what they’re going to see once they’re on the street.
There is already the sound of automatic fire, the dull crack of munitions that is a world away from the rich, Hollywood noise of firefights. Gunshots are loud, flat and pinched – there is nothing romantic about them when they are in the air around you, rather than being piped from a Dolby 7.1 speaker system.
‘Come on! Come on!’ An SCO19 officer is herding them into formation, facing the oncoming crowd of aggressors. Geeta is looking for the enemy, head low, anticipating retaliatory fire. Then she realises the enemy are the civilians marching up the street toward them.
‘They’re not armed, sir,’ she shouts, then notices the bodies of those who came before her: fallen firearms officers being trampled by the advancing crowd, their black body armour glistening wet in the afternoon sun.
‘They don’t need to be,’ the commanding officer replies, ‘now pick your targets and fire. We’ve got to stop them overwhelming us.’
For a moment, Geeta can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. It goes against everything she knows, shooting into an unarmed crowd. Then she begins to recognise the civilians for what they are. They move in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion, their faces are unresponsive as shop window dummies.
Next to her, despite – or perhaps because of – his fear, Andrew is the first to fire and she watches as a couple of rounds hit one of the first of the crowd. The target is a young male, his baseball cap flying off as the bullet hits him in the face. He topples backwards, thrashing on the floor, but is soon back on his feet and advancing towards them, his face just a red whorl. Geeta thinks of James Hodgkins, of the impossibility of Harry Reid, and she opens fire.
The bullets are having little to no effect, the crowd drawing silently closer despite the hail of copper, zinc, steel and lead that the officers are hurling at them.
‘Hold the line!’ the commanding officer is shouting. ‘Take their legs out from under them!’
The officers try, and many of the crowd do fall, but that doesn’t stop them dragging themselves along the tarmac towards them.
‘Fall back!’
The officers don’t need to be told twice, running up the road to gain vital distance between themselves and an army that simply won’t respond to gunfire in the way they should.
‘What are they?’ Leeson shouts agitatedly. ‘Why don’t they stay down?’
Geeta knows. Even a bus didn’t stop Harry Reid, she remembers, so what chance do they have?
h) Various Locations, United Kingdom
It is something the world often talks about – the speed with which normality can vanish. Krishnin’s sleepers by no means attack at once – some have been quicker at digging themselves free than others – but they hit in such numbers, wave after wave of them, that the country goes from business as usual to borderline apocalypse within the space of single day.
Most people are slow to accept the sleepers for what they are. Words like ‘riot’ and ‘acts of terror’ are thrown around with wild abandon on the rolling news networks, until the footage of these strange, doll-like cadavers simply can’t be denied any longer. The emergency services are tight-lipped, the government maintaining a silence until early in the evening when the nation’s leader appears on every channel trying to reassure a nation already gone past the point of sane return.
Martial Law is declared. The streets fill with gunfire and death.
And, across the oceans, the rest of the world looks on and begins to wonder if the threat may spread to them. And if so, it wonders what precisely it should do about that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE FEAR
My mind was raging. I was beyond logical thought. I was white noise. I was fury. I was The Fear.
‘The countdown,’ said Jamie. ‘We can’t have been here that long.’
‘To hell with the countdown,’ said Krishnin, still lying on the floor. ‘I’m not an idiot. I was ready, so I sent the signal. There was always a chance something could go wrong. Shining might have told someone. He might have known more than he was letting on, even after I had been so … encouraging. Who waits for countdowns? It was an automatic system that would have kicked in if something had happened to me … Not that anything can happen to me that hasn’t already. I am dead. Lingering consciousness infesting old meat.’
I heard the words but they didn’t register. Like water hitting a fire, they flared into steam. We had failed. I had failed. Again. Over and over again.
‘What are we going to do?’ Jamie asked. I think he was asking me. As if I could possibly know.
And then I did.
‘Why haven’t you just vanished?’ I said to Krishnin.
‘Why should I? I’m enjoying the moment. Besides … what does it matter now? I think I’m better off here than in the real London right now, don’t you think? I don’t know how many hours have passed there – it’s always so difficult to tell. But either my little army is already leaving its mark on your country or they’re clawing their way up through the earth to do so. There’s nothing you’ve got that can stop all of them. Break one apart and another will take its place. Death only comes once. I’m the proof of that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing over him. ‘And maybe that’s something you should have thought about. We’re going back there. All three of us.’
‘You’re giving me orders? How British of you. I don’t think I have to do a thing I don’t want to.’
‘I can make you.’
‘Really? How? Are you going to threaten to kill me?’ He laughed at that.
‘No. I’m going to threaten not to.’
He stared at me, not understanding. I looked at Jamie and saw the same look of confusion.
‘You said it yourself. You can only die once. Sünner’s drug is a permanent solution. Did you ever think that might be a problem?’
‘The opposite, surely?’
I leaned down, pressed the barrel of the gun next to his left knee and fired. The recoil knocked the gun from my hand but that didn’t matter. I focused, then picked it up again.
Jamie was panicking, hands to his face. Krishnin was staring at me. Those dead eyes of his would probably show fear if they could.
‘The Beretta 92FS,’ I said, ‘a popular military weapon. Nine millimetre cartridge, not much in the way of stopping power, but when you have fifteen in the magazine you can afford to fling them around a little.’
I looked at Krishnin’s knee. While the entry wound was small, the impact had done its work; the knee was shattered. I pushed at his lower leg with my foot. Even with my lack of solidity it pivoted quite freely.
‘I don’t think you’ll be using that leg ever again,’ I
said. I aimed the pistol at his hand and fired again, taking out all four fingers and leaving congealed, useless stumps. The gun had jumped free of my grip again; there was no way my aim would be up to much over long distances, not with my inability to hold it firmly. That was fine. I planned on using the gun for surgery not target practice.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Jamie, his voice terrified.
‘I’m proving a point.’ I said, turning back to Krishnin. ‘If I can’t kill you like this – ever – then how do you think existence is going to be after I’ve really gone to town on you? What if I just cut those legs right off? The arms too? Or maybe I just set fire to you and we can all sit around and watch you pop and hiss for a while. You just became the easiest man in the world to torture. Normally, however bad it gets, you know that you’re going to be able to pass out. Or die. But I can make you nothing. A burned stump. A fucking soup of a man. Still alive. Still aware. Forever. Or …’
‘Or?’ Krishnin had lost his bravado now. While his doll-like face might not be able to show the emotion inside, I knew I had his attention.
‘Or I can actually end it for you. That’s my offer. That’s the reward I have at my disposal. I can make you cease to be. Sound attractive?’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Right now you don’t have much to lose do you? Do as I tell you. Do exactly as I tell you and I’ll keep my promise. Fuck me around and I’ll just start whittling bits off you.’
‘And what’s to stop me just traveling?’ he asked. ‘I could leave you two here at a moment’s thought.’
‘Yes, you could,’ I agreed, and shot him in the other knee. ‘But you’d have a real job dragging yourself out of the warehouse, the other warehouse, the real one, before we came chasing after you. And if you make us do that, the deal’s off. So think about it very carefully.’
‘But he’s already triggered the signal,’ said Jamie. ‘What’s the point? He’s already won!’
‘Then he won’t mind doing as he’s told for a bit will he?’ I said. ‘We’re all going back together.’