by Pete Bevan
Jim had never been so close to a Zombie without running or shooting wildly, but they were here now, standing within grasp. They swayed and moaned slightly and involuntarily as they waited for their Master. In came the red armoured personal guard. Jim recognised them all, each sent after the Minister, each never to return. The plastic segmented armour looked scratched and bitten, the suits below ripped and torn with all the military insignia removed but they still carried their weapons, including the short sword in the scabbard at their back. Looking through the open door, Zombies crowded in the hallway behind. The two nearest Jim leant down towards him and clumsily opened his suit to look inside. Satisfied, they opened the drawers in his desk and rifled inside. Finding nothing, they pulled the drawers out until they fell on the ground. Jim was glad he hadn’t had a gun after all.
“Hur, hur, hur,” chuckled a voice in the corridor. The crowd parted and Jim could see a small figure in a ruined hooded leather cloak enter the room, slowly chuckling to itself. Head bowed, it flicked the hood back. Jim was shocked to see a Zombie raise its head. All the reports he had received and the MP3 where Joe Wyndham had described the Minister had said he was human. It unclasped the cloak and let it crumple to the floor.
The Minister cut a small thin figure in front of him, tattered black suit and bloodstained dog collar hung limply from his ectomorphic frame. One shoulder was hunched higher than the other, through choice or disfigurement. Jim realised this was why the TIC snipers hadn’t found him, he was already dead. What had been a needle in a haystack search had become an impossibility.
The Minister looked around the room and saw Miss Mitchell. His brow furrowed and he waved his hand gently in her direction. The three Zombies nearest her turned slowly in her direction. She looked up at them and finished her whiskey in a long swig. The Minister let his subjects go and they fell on her with all the fury of their hunger unleashed. She tried to fight them off as they ripped at her clothes and flesh but she wouldn’t scream. One grappled with her arm and gnawed on it like a chicken leg, another peeled at her torso to reveal the red morsels inside, and the third buried his face in her neck until a torrent of blood pooled on the floor around them. They slavered and chewed at her loudly until she stopped twitching and hung limply like a concubine pleasured by her hungry suitors. Jim watched in terror but would not let it show on his face. He was angry now, there was no need for this other than a demonstration of power. More psychological warfare. All the time, the Minister watched Jim’s face, until he had had enough and the murderers stood back to attention. Blood covered their tattered clothes and dripped lazily from their stained teeth. They were passive again, all trace of their fury gone.
The Minister sat slowly in the chair opposite Jim and his black eyes gazed into Jim's. Jim hesitated and wanted to run. His legs were weak, but he would not let it show.
“Ye looked taller in yer posters, Jim,” the Minister said finally in a low, cracked voice that still rang with a resonance around the room. Jim ignored the comment.
“So, are you another decoy or the real thing, because I’m done pissing about with this shit,” Jim spat. The Minister raised his eyebrows, and smiled a thin, wan smile.
“I walk straight into your city, just tae come and see you and this is the welcome I get? Nae way to treat a man of God, a pilgrim, is it now?” he said cheerily, crossing his hands in his lap.
Jim felt stronger. Dead or not, this was just a man. He paused, knowing the calm would make his enemy speak first.
“Well,” the Minister said, “I’m ready to hear yer confession. Time to make peace Jim.”
“I’ve nothing to confess to you, you murdering scum,” said Jim with just the right amount of control and contempt. The Minister feigned a hurt expression.
“Murderer? Me?” the Minister’s Scots brogue rolling the R’s in the word, “Well, only the once. I believe you know Paul here.” Jim saw the Zombie Paul Jollie step forward. He had known Paul since he was a lad and now he was just another puppet in the Minister’s Army, another victim in a world full of victims.
“It turns out I havnae really got the stomach fer it. Paul and I have a special relationship. He killed me and I killed him. Mutually assured destruction, they used to call it.”
“Shame he didn’t finish the job.”
“Jim. This antagonistic attitude won’t win you a place in heaven, now will it?”
“Then I’ll see you in hell,” Jim smiled sweetly.
Paul walked into Jim Bramer’s office full of trepidation about his latest mission. “At ease, Paul,” said Bramer.
“Sir,” said Paul, relaxing.
Bramer motioned towards a chair. “Whiskey?”
“No thank you, Sir,” said Paul taking a seat in the red leather high back in front of the old mahogany desk.
“The reason I have called you here is, unfortunately, not a social one,” said Bramer.
“It never is, Sir,” said Paul, smiling.
“No... No,” chuckled Bramer.
“I want you to listen to this recording and tell me what you think.”
Paul looked around, his brow furrowed. He was confused. He had been here before. He remembered this conversation. Jim leant forward to push the button on the Sony Vaio and Paul stretched and grabbed his hand. Jim just looked at him. There were two Jim Bramers. The real one he could see reaching forward with his hand and the ghostly image behind leaning back with a furious look on his face, talking silently. There were others around him too, dark shadows in the grey stood in the room with him and on the leather sofa over there, a ruined corpse. Paul could smell the fresh meat and a hunger rose in him. He wanted to grab Jim and consume him. He pushed the impulse away.
This didn’t make sense, why had he come here? What was the mission? How had he got here? The last thing he remembered was being in the hospital in a morphine fugue. What was the reality and what was the dream? Paul didn’t know any more, but behind this all he could feel the grey envelop him as he shone like a bright star, close, but behind the gaze of the black hole that stared intently at Jim Bramer.
Jim saw something from the corner of his eye as the Minister talked. Paul’s slack expression changed for a moment. It looked confused.
“Well, if I must confess to you, then at least answer me a question,” Jim said. “How did you do it? How did you make your Army appear from nowhere and how did an army this massive move through the country unseen by the helicopter patrols?”
The Minister laughed his hollow laugh, “You mean you hadn’t even worked that oot?”
Jim shrugged and stared into the obsidian black eyes of the Minister, sunk in his graying, ancient face.
“James, James. In the day I hid them. Simple as that. In town halls and cinemas, in sewers and houses, away frae the prying eyes o’ your whirlybirds. That wus the easy part. The hard part was training them to use the missiles tae take them whirlybirds oot. Hae you any idea how long it takes tae train a Zombie to fire a stinger? Bloody months, and it has tae be the right Zombies tae. An if they failed at that, they could use they RPG’s. The real brainwave wus the runners, did ye see that one coming, eh Jim? What yer real question should be was, how did I outsmart you and walk straight into yer city and intae yer office to sit here?”
“I already know the answer to that.” It was the Minister’s turn to smile.
“Don’t flatter yourself. Your tactics, if you can call them that, were juvenile. Cheap parlour tricks from your marionettes. You won through numbers and nothing else. Your armies aren’t brave or noble or have any of the qualities that a great army has. You aren’t God or the Messiah, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. You are just a freak. In fact you haven’t been granted this ability; it’s just fallen to you through random chance. Maybe there are others in this world with your ability that haven’t realised it yet, or they were killed before they knew they had the gift. No, you were just lucky,” said Jim, calmly. He paused, but didn’t give the Minister chance to speak. He could see the doubt in hi
s eyes now and pushed on.
“Each one of my men has given a good account of themselves and fought bravely until the end, each one of them is a hero and given enough time and resources we would have whittled your army down to nothing, found you and put a bullet through your ugly head. Look at the piles of corpses you left in your wake. My troops must have taken a hundred of yours to every one of my heroes. Every single one of my men would die for his brothers in an instant and every single one would die for his country to have things back as they were. Your troops aren’t loyal, they aren’t brave or heroic, they don’t recoil at the horror of war as they walk over their fallen comrades, they just are. You think God wants this? You think God wants his flock to die in screaming torment or turn into these monstrosities? No, Minister whatever-your-fucking-name-is. God is on our side and one day God will grant one human the chance to put you down once and for all. Then we will rebuild this world without you or your army, just as God intended.” Jim leant back in his chair and relaxed, smiling and in control of the situation. He had said what he wanted to say, let the bastard take him now. This was a speech for the personnel in Control, not the Minister.
Anger flashed through the Minister’s face. He tried to reply but fury robbed him of the words.
Thoughts rushed through Paul’s mind and try as he might he couldn’t remember the days between the dreams, yet the dreams ran on, longer than his waking hours. It didn’t make sense. In the dreams he was Dead, in his memories he was alive.
What if? What if he really was dead and the dream the reality, the reality the dream? Why would he think this? Why would his mind think this way?
Then it came to him. His mind had protected itself from the unimaginable horror of this reality the only way it could. Its living soul had retreated into the recesses of this dead brain so it could learn and come to terms with its new reality. He was dead. He had died with a sword in his belly in a kitchen in Edinburgh. Whatever the Minister had within him had mingled with the fake Minister’s Zombie blood and Paul’s human blood on the black and white tiled floor. This forced evolution created something new.
With an almost audible lurch, Paul was in the room with the Minister and Jim Bramer as they argued back and forth. The apparition of Jim stretching forward to start the MP3 was gone and Paul was there surrounded by the Dead in Jim’s office so many months after he had first received his orders to go to Edinburgh.
In the grey, Paul shone like a thousand stars in the murk, light poured from him like sunshine eating away at the edges of the black hole that raged at Jim Bramer, like bright dawn through skeletal winter trees.
The Minister sat forward in the chair and ranted incoherently at Jim while Jim sat back and watched impassively. The Minister spat insults and threats at him, promised tortures and pain to him and everyone who lived in the city or had fled in fear. Each sentence was unfinished, each threat worse than the last. Jim had hit all of the Minister’s buttons and he was giving it to Jim with both barrels. Jim’s failure to react did nothing to pacify him; in fact, it made the dead priest angrier.
Out of his peripheral vision he saw Paul’s arm move. Instinctively he wanted to look, but knew the Minister would notice. Paul raised his arm slowly towards the Union Jack sword in the scabbard on his back, the look on Paul’s face was grim and determined, yet filled with emotion. Jim was convinced this wasn’t the Minister in control, but Paul.
Paul reached slowly towards the sword on his back. He couldn’t afford for the Minister to see him. He had one chance to do this and he wouldn’t waste it. In the end it wasn’t Paul’s movement that alerted the Minister but his proximity in the grey. The light was close enough to eat away at the black of the Minister and the black hole span round to stare at the tiny star in front of it.
The Minister spun and looked at Paul’s arm halfway to the sword on his back. He reached out and grabbed Paul’s arm, pulling it down again.
In the grey, the full force of the Minister’s darkness was brought to bear against the tiny spark of Paul’s light. For a second it threatened to consume him totally. It overwhelmed Paul and he could feel himself fading against its might.
Paul pushed back, igniting his soul against the blackness. Paul raged in the grey. They would not be consumed. The hunger and rage of a Zombie starved, combined with the anger and fury of a man who could avenge his own murder created a fire storm of light that burned at the shadow. The black hole was fixated on Paul yet it seemed to struggle to turn away from him like a man forced to stare too long at the sun.
The Minister held onto Paul’s arm but couldn’t look him in the face, his head flicked frantically about and a gurgled cry escaped his lips.
Paul had one chance, and the fire storm of emotion filled his every point of being. He lunged forward and tipped the Minister’s chair over, spilling the skinny old man to the ground. Paul tried to scream in rage but air rushed from his dead lungs through his torn throat which hissed and gurgled ineffectually. He leapt over the chair and onto the Minister’s chest. There was no Zombie nor man here now: Paul was a being of pure fury.
The Minister struggled, turning his head furiously away from the light as the grey and reality became one. Paul plunged his fist through the brittle bones and into the Minister’s chest, grabbing at anything it could find. He ripped a lung from the old Zombie’s body and held it in his teeth, his other hand around the old man’s throat. He bit at the lung like an animal and ripped it away with his hand, shredding it. He discarded it like a rag and ripped at the Minister’s throat. Skin and sinew came free and he held the bits of flesh in the air like a caveman glorying in the hunt. He plunged his ichor blackened hands into the chest again and ripped out bone and decaying arteries that spat black fluid over the green carpet of the office.
Finall,y he grabbed the Minister’s flailing head with both hands and ripped his gargling, screaming skull from his body, twisting it, pulling it, as the vertebrae snapped and the ligaments tore until it was free in his hands, attached only by a few sinewy cords. He flung the head over against the wall where it lay blinking until its black eyes faded to milky white and its jaw hung limply from its pivot.
In the city the Zombies stopped and gazed blankly into the distance. Those humans still fighting hand to hand or firing from rooftops continued the battle, all caught in their own blood lust.
In the grey, the final vestiges of black dissipated like wisps of smoke and Paul’s soul shone like the sun in the gloom of a foggy morning. All the tiny twinkling eyes gazed unthinking at the new Godhead that spun slowly before them.
Paul crouched over the headless torso. Jim noticed he was panting with exertion, his Zombie lungs needlessly pumping air into his dead blood. It was a thoroughly human autonomic response.
Paul turned his head slowly to look at Jim, but there was no vestige of humanity there and for a moment Jim thought the creature would turn on him, but it lowered its head to stare at the headless torso below and it stayed crouched over the corpse.
Finally, slowly, its breathing slowed and gradually it stood, head crouched with clenched fists. Its eyes still focussed on its prey below. Then it turned its dark head, black fluid dripping from its chin and looked at Jim’s desk.
Jim stared aghast. The Zombie Paul, its long, dank hair hung over its face, raised its hand and stupidly shuffled the papers around until it found what it was looking for. It grasped the pen in its fist like a small child and raised its other hand to hold the paper in place. It raised the pen like a knife and tried to scrawl on the slippery page. The pen ripped the paper, so with its other hand it cast that paper to the floor and tried again. Slowly it drew on the paper and Jim noticed that its tongue was sticking out and Paul’s face was screwed in concentration like a small child.