by David Moody
◆◆◆
Cole needed a friendly face fast so headed to the science block. Research Laboratory One was still empty but in Lab Two, Dr Bruce was hunched over a microscope in the same position as before.
He reached out. ‘Dr Bruce, you have to help me. The Captain’s gone mad. I think she’s going to flush me out.’
The virologist was like a statue. His patchy bald head hewn from some blotchy marble unfit for any sculptor.
‘Dr Bruce? I think we should team up. You’ll be next. I’ve already found that pretty computer girl downstairs with a metal bracket in the back of her skull!’
He felt a childish need to confess to the murder of Rita but didn’t want to add in the detail just yet. He wanted to seal the alliance first and then reveal the sordid back-story to his tiny revolution.
Cole reached out to touch his shoulder and as he did, the distended corpse rolled over onto the dusty tile floor. He could see the jagged pink gash across the doctor’s neck where his throat had been cut. Dr Bruce’s jugular had been slashed, and some time ago too judging by the looks of the gangrenous fungus blooming around the wound.
Cole heard the echo of angry footsteps in his head. The Marines must be searching the bunker. And with every exit blocked, it wouldn’t take them long to find him. He dashed down the corridor like a stalked deer, desperately seeking escape but too panicky to formulate any kind of plan.
Finally, he tapped on the office door of the chief medical officer Dr Howard. He hoped that he could reach out to whatever humanity was still there in the Ark medic, despite him being the Captain’s lover.
‘Dr Howard, you there?’ he whispered, not wishing to alert his pursuers to his whereabouts. The doctor was, perhaps, his last hope of reprieve within the bunker.
Cole didn’t bother waiting. The door wedged half-open as he pushed, something blocking it. He rammed it and managed to squeeze through the gap.
The smell inside reminded him of the stench of the millions of the corpses surrounding the bunker. He reached for the light only to draw his hand back quickly as he disturbed a giant blue bottle. He put his hand out once again and flicked the switch. This time the yellow strip light hummed into life, its noise competing with the vile buzzing of the engorged insects.
Inside the office, the remains of Dr Howard were slumped over his desk. Cole stared at the gaping hole in the back of his head. The lamp Cole had used to kill him lay on the bed, the blood now dried, the skin and bone fragments scattered across the room and walls like a charnel house.
Cole scanned through Dr Howard’s neatly labelled video cassettes. A complete record of the breakdown of life in the Ark. He found one labelled Psych Profile 388 and dated 1 December 1975. He leveraged it out, slotted it into the open top loader and pressed it down into the video player.
A grainy video of Dr Howard crackled into view. Cole thought about adjusting the picture to eliminate the dancing white lines but the world was far beyond an adjustment in Betamax tracking now.
Patient unresponsive to medication. Border-line psychosis. Indefinite detention not viable in current situation. Recommend exclusion from key systems and on-going review. Escalate to Captain Seaton. Expulsion to be considered.
Dr Howard looked drained on the video screen, with hefty dark bags under his eyes and shoulders drooped into an awkward and uncomfortable-looking hunch.
Cole kicked the TV backwards, sending it crashing to the floor but the picture was uninterrupted and Dr Howard continued to taunt him with expert psychological observations. Cole started to shake his pounding head, sweat pouring down his face. For the first time, he felt like a real psychopath. He felt validated. He had been assessed and measured, and he was off the scale.
‘No, no, no, no. You can’t do that to me. You can’t do that to me,’ he sang feverishly.
With that, he picked up the murder weapon lamp and ran into the corridor and towards the common room.
He screamed as he passed Green’s room. Underneath the pristine bed lay the half-dismembered remains of the technician, mutated beyond recognition. His face removed. His limbs clumsily hacked then left half-severed. Ears missing. Tasty pork scratchings.
Nothing in the common room bar moved apart from the angry swarms of flies. None of the corpses had moved for weeks. Farrell’s severed arm hung like a wonky pendulum on a taut rope of stringy white tendon.
‘Anything to say, Captain Seaton?’ he asked, searching her blank face for an answer. ‘That’s another one dead,’ he added bravely.
The captain just sat there, unmoved by his questions as if he was invisible. An invisible person who didn’t count in this place or warrant any response.
‘Well if you’re not going to do something about it, I will,’ he threatened.
The Captain remained hunched in the chair, suddenly looking small in her over-sized khaki jacket. Like a young girl playing dress up.
Cole entered the tiny egg-carton covered communications studio next to the common room, determined to bring things to a head. He switched on the Ark’s intercom system before grabbing the microphone and holding down the speech button. He swallowed, his throat seizing up with dryness in anticipation at disturbing the crackly silence across the bunker.
‘Attention all Ark Personal. There will be a general meeting in the canteen at 0700 hours tomorrow. Attendance is mandatory. I repeat you have to be there.’
He didn’t bother clicking the microphone off and the sound of electronic static joined the humming of the lights as the background noise to the bunker. Cole sorted through a herd of cassettes gathering on the communication desk, selected one and rammed it into the recorder. He pressed play and soon the agreeable Greek sounds of Demis Roussos flooded the upper floors.
“Ever and ever, forever and ever you'll be the one,
that shines on me like the morning sun.
Ever and ever, forever and ever you'll be my spring,
my rainbow's end and the song I sing.”
Cole strutted into the common room and sank in one of the flea-infested easy chairs. A corpse sat next him. From the filthy white lab coat, he deduced that it must have been one of the science staff. Cole looked into its shrivelled white eyes for a few seconds before announcing. ‘You know what; I don’t even know your name. Who the hell are you? You look possessed!’
Cole amused himself by humming the theme tune to the movie The Exorcist.
The corpse didn’t answer; its face twisted and contorted, as if paused at the point of its agonizing death on some immortal videotape. Its two hands clutched deep into its hollow stomach, puncturing the thin, veil-like flesh.
Cole stared into its vacant face, jealous of the gleaming white orbs in comparison to his own red-lined and bloodshot eyes. The corpse didn’t mock him but just silently soaked up the admiration. Cole slipped into a feverish sleep, with dreams full of sweaty Spanish discos, half-dressed dancers and flashing neon lights. Anything could happen under that pulsating blaze.
◆◆◆
Cole awoke to the angry sound of the morning klaxon indicating not only the start of a new twenty-four hour cycle, but also a new seven day rotation. He turned his head and cursed when he realised he’d fallen asleep in the open common room. He felt heady and half-drunk as he stood, his legs were stiff with a dull aching pain and his knees creaked. He put a grubby finger in his mouth and felt around his teeth to dislodge a chunk of food trapped between two stained molars. He’d broken one at the back a few weeks munching his way through a tough hunk of meat. The jagged enamel edge had left his mouth bleeding and leading to an ever-present ulcer which throbbed through his jawbone and into his cranium.
He remembered the meeting in the canteen but was bursting for the toilet. He relieved himself in the corridor, guiding a long stream of bright urine high up the walls and onto an unsuspecting fire extinguisher. Cole fastidiously rinsed his hands in a drinking fountain before heading downstairs to the canteen. He winced as he walked. He must have slept awkwardly. He felt the shar
p stabbing pain of a pulled muscle or trapped nerve underneath his shoulder blades.
By the time he arrived, the room was full. He was a few seconds late but not enough for anyone to notice. He slipped in quietly and took his place on one of the long benches at the back. Captain Seaton was standing at the front, leaning heavily on a food trolley in what looked to Cole to be a most unnatural position.
‘I think she’s had too much Campari,’ he whispered to one of the figures sitting in front of him. ‘She can hardly speak.’
There was no answer.
‘This meeting is to discuss survival,’ announced Captain Seaton ominously. ‘We’ve been down here eighteen months now and our patrols outside haven’t found a single survivor. It’s time for us all to be honest. I’ve had to make a tough call, but one which will ensure we all have a fighting chance.’
Cole sat listening. He knew what this meant. Someone was getting flushed. Getting sent outside. Given a backpack of supplies, a gun and a few clips and sent on their merry way to death. She just said it herself: there’s no one out there, nowhere to run to.
The four remaining Royal Marines sat in the front row like over-keen school boys, confident that they were members of the Captain’s inner circle and thus quite safe. Cole noticed that each of them still carried their weapon, perhaps expecting some payback or other reaction to the captain’s upcoming bad news. The bitch Rita was slumped at the end, her head still split open down the middle, messy cow.
The captain continued.
‘Now, we still have the supplies we need but we have to think long term. I’m enacting Ministry Emergency Directive 233/B which means we’ll be sending exploratory patrols and maintenance missions outside. This will enable us to extend the length of our mission from sixty months to ten years. We’ll be staying on lockdown for the full term of the cryogenic project. It’s the only way we can be sure.’
The canteen remained as still and quiet as the grave. A dank musk hung in the air. A sickly sweet scent of decomposing meat permeated from the maggot-infested corpses.
‘Our current headcount is eight plus the Marine contingent. I’m afraid that to guarantee the stability of the Ark and to ensure our long-term survival, we need to send five out on long-term search missions.’
She began reading out the list. The first two, including the cook Taylor, remained unmoved. Cole noticed one of the scientists sitting close to the Marines. She couldn’t run even if she wanted to, he thought.
Then it was his turn. ‘Technician Cole,’ she called. He knew it was coming but it was still a shock. He felt droplets of cold sweat breaking out across his forehead.
The Captain carried on lecturing but Cole had stopped listening, phasing it out like the humming of the lights. Some crap about finding survivors further afield, about being the first to link up with other survivor groups. It was all bat-shit and Cole knew it. He was being flushed out the doors. Excluded from the safety of his bunker home and left abandoned in central London, surrounded by five million walking and hungry corpses. It was a death sentence, no two ways about it.
The supply story was fiction. There was enough dried food to last hundreds of people for decades. The Ark had three bore holes for water buried deep into the London clay and supported by a modern filtration system which virtually ran itself. The captain just wanted the outsiders out. She wasn’t thinking about skills or maintaining the bunker. This was tribal and those she had selected were the outsiders. Cole decided there and then not to accept his fate without a fight.
The heat in the canteen was oppressive and he took gulps of stale air as he struggled to control his furious pulse. He got up and flipped the table over, sending dusty plastic plates and cups clattering to the floor, then dashed from the packed room. He looked around as he sprinted down the corridor to see if any of the Marines were in pursuit. The doors to the canteen were still and the corridor behind him empty. Elated, he raced down the central stairs and towards the entrance. With this kind of head start, they’d never catch him.
‘The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself!’ Cole sang as panted. He didn’t remember where the lyrics came from and didn’t know why he was singing them now.
He soon reached level two – ground-level – and searched his pockets, pulling out a crumpled sheet of paper on which he’d written several door entry codes in scratchy green biro. He took a couple of plastic punch-hole cards from his shirt pocket. He had everything he needed in his hands. Everything he needed to cleanse the Ark.
Despite the beads of sweating running down his face and soaking his overalls, Cole methodically worked his way through the numerous doors and security mechanisms. He’d wedged the central stairwell fire doors open, thousands of pounds of reinforced security door prevented from closing by a single fire extinguisher.
His main challenge was the twenty-five inch thick double steel doors known as the “castle gates” – the Ark’s primary security perimeter.
Cole opened a large electronics panel to the right of the doors and accessed a mainframe terminal, all flashing lights and switches. He entered the core subsystems and easily hacked into the security door logic programme. He re-started the systems.
One Boolean logic entry switched and a silent algorithm opened, and kept the castle gates open. Cole couldn’t help laughing to himself. The Marines couldn’t close them even if they reached the doors. His line of rogue code couldn’t have been any smaller. It switched a “0” to a “1” and the damage was done. Any door command would now equal “1” in the micro world of the command system. And in that tiny world “1” = “open”. And in the real world, “1” = “zombies”.
This left one last barrier. He could already hear the angry creatures outside, rattling the steel shutters which were closed down to protect the sizeable garage and workshop area.
He forced a giant lever up next to the doors and a warning light changed from green to flashing red. ‘Punchy, punchy, punchy,’ he screamed as he entered in the door garage door codes he’d got from the Captain after hours of torture. Actually, he thought, torture made it sound more formal that it really was. It hadn’t involved any electricity or water-boarding. You can get anyone to speak using only a sharp knife and knowing where to cut first. The eyes. Always the eyes. Fleshy and moist. Salty and succulent.
A Marine sat motionless in a deckchair opposite just where Cole had left him. A half-burnt cigarette still wedged between his stained fingers, his face frozen in an agonized death mask. The industrial cleaning fluid Cole has put in his tea had given the soldier’s skin a curious citron hue. Cole smiled. He almost looked like an alien. What a curious thing chemistry is, he thought. You just never know how things are going to react. Decaying sludge underneath the patterned cloth of his chair indicated that his intestines had at some point collapsed under the attack of the super-strength acid.
As the great outer steel shutter slowly began to rise, he could already hear the low moan of the horde, pushing against it as it moved.
Some of the creatures were dragging themselves underneath. Foul-looking children surged through first like rotting cherubs. Cole watched them. He’d never seen them this close up. There was something beguiling about them, like a fatal car crash on the motorway. He couldn’t look away but if he stayed, he knew he’d be their first victim. One desperate corpse-child, long greasy hair pasted to its translucent flesh, looked like a badly decayed Jimmy Osmond. Cole hummed.
I'll be your long haired lover from Liverpool,
And I'll do anything you say.
I'll be your clown or your puppet or your April Fool,
If you'll be my sunshine daisy from L.A.
Cole smiled to himself as little dead Jimmy became entangled in a hanging chain and started to tear himself in two in his desperation to reach him. Ah, the Osmonds. He’d always liked Donny far better than Jimmy.
Cole thought about making a break for it, of tearing through the corpses, but there was simply no way through. He remembered those he h
ated within the bunker. He wanted to teach them a lesson so headed back through the open inner doors into the Ark.
‘You’re in trouble now!’ he screamed down the open corridor as he reached the metal closet door marked maintenance and opened it. He stepped into a cupboard no larger than a few square metres and closed the door behind him, wedging it shut with a mop. He collapsed to the floor, and held his head in his hands whilst the dead filed past, polluting the Ark like filthy smoke.
Opposite him in the cupboard was a human figure with crude black stitches over both eyes and mouth. The badge on his overalls read First Technician Ahmed. Cole vaguely remembered something about putting him there. Was it him he thought? Maybe that dream-boat Marc Bolan did it? He couldn’t really be sure. Curiously, Ahmed was handless. Two dried out stumps were crossed and resting in his lap. Cole tried to remember what happened to them. He’d always had such delicate hands and fingers, had Ahmed. Very careless. Then he remembered the meat chutney.
The dead continued to flood into the Ark. Soon they were backed-up at one of the many security doors, but by then the main entrance and air lock had already been backed-up with the walking corpses. Sensing movement from within the small maintenance cupboard, they soon began pounding on the door. Cole couldn’t hear them anymore. The door was metal and opened outwards so as the walking bodies stacked up, they simply sealed it shut with their infected flesh. The dead couldn’t get in and Cole couldn’t get out.
The moaning from outside the cupboard became muffled as the horde piled up to form a blocking wall of festering flesh. Cole lazily recovered his senses. He was suddenly aware of his surroundings. He was hungry. He searched in his pockets, then felt around his cupboard bolt-hole. Apart from cleaning supplies, there was nothing to eat. He really should have thought things through in more detail. The orange bottle on the shelf was full of thick, burning liquid. It tasted like chemical whiskey. He looked over at the mummified figure of his handless lover and felt a bulge developing in his stained trousers.