Till You Drop

by Mat Coward

  And directorships. Seats on the boards of major companies. A box at Lord’s. And all they had to do was do what they wanted to do anyway: end the strike.

  Luckily, the human government didn't seem to know that they’d already called it off. They hadn't called it in the first place, of course, but as soon as they’d got to hear about it, they’d angrily, firmly ordered all monsters to stop being so silly. No-one had taken any notice.

  The Council of Seven had done some reading, however, in preparation for today’s meeting, and had learned that the normal form in such matters was for those being struck against to make some sort of concession to those doing the striking, at which point the strikers’ leaders would declare a victory and everyone would go back to work. Strange system. Very Fearful. But if monsters were determined to behave like humans – pickets and placards and showing themselves in the daytime – then they must learn to play by human rules.

  “If my ah – my members,” Reynold told the PM, “are to surrender their, ah ... excuse me.” He checked his notes. “Members, yes ... surrender their ... ah, yes. Surrender their inalienable right to withdraw their labour, then they will expect movement – I think that’s right – "

  “Movement, yes, yes,” said one of the government advisers.

  “Movement from your side of the table concerning their justifiable grievances.”

  “Absolutely,” said the prime minister. “Absolutely.”

  “Absolutely,” said the industrial strategy adviser, “and that is why we have asked to meet with you tonight. We’re all on the same page, here, I assure you – we all want the same thing. What’s good for the country is good for your members.”

  “Absolutely,” said Reynold. Quangos. They'd offered him quangos, too. Didn’t know what those were, quite, but he’d have some if they were going. Lord Reynold, entertaining: Have I ever shown you my quangos, Duchess?

  “Which is why,” the adviser explained, “we are ready and willing to play our full part in resolving this matter in a way that is transparently fair.”

  The next morning, a statement was issued to all news outlets on behalf of the Council of Seven. It said that, following exhaustive dialogue, the government had agreed to establish a Royal Commission to investigate issues of fairness surrounding both Restart and the shouting buckets, and to give serious consideration to any recommendations made in due course. As a result, and in a spirit of constructive engagement, the International Brotherhood of etc. was instructing all members to resume normal practices without delay.

  No-one took any notice. The peerage never materialised.

  ***

  A subterranean morgue with a holding capacity of one thousand: all agreed that it was a perfect place for the first full meeting of the International Provisional Strike Committee.

  It had been built just outside Milton Keynes ten years earlier, by private companies using public money; a secret project, for reasons of national security, and thus not open to any form of public or parliamentary scrutiny, no expense had been spared, or even logged. Designed for use in the event of a biological or chemical warfare attack, it was state of the art in every possible way except for one: nothing in it actually worked. Commissioned in secret, planned in secret, constructed in secret, it was subsequently closed in secret without ever having been opened.

  It was perfect, and Lanto and Orlandus almost grew tired of the stream of congratulations they received from their Cousins. In the permanent night beneath the ground, delegates representing almost every branch of the Nighthood, from almost every territory on Earth, convened in permanent session to discuss the state of the strike, and its future.

  The first sensation came when a Cousin spoke on behalf of what she was happy to refer to as the “underbeds,” (properly, Nameless Dreads; monsters who hid under the human’s bed and in his wardrobe, and in the shadows of his landing, thus providing a reason for sleepless night terrors).

  “The bloodtakers have taken our jobs, Cousins!” she cried. “We are on strike, proudly on strike, but vampires, collaborating with the human government, are doing our work. They lurk on our landings! They creak in our cupboards! How will the union deal with this?”

  There was outrage in the hall. The idea of demarcation was fundamental to the Nighthood; it had never been formalised because it had never needed to be. The question had never before arisen: monsters did not do what other monsters did. It was unthinkable. All eyes turned to the tiny smattering of bloodtakers present. Lanto stepped forward.

  “This is wonderful news, Cousins!” He held up his hand for silence; which arrived, but slowly. “I say it’s wonderful news. The disgraced former leaders of the MU, and their human government masters, have made a devastating tactical error.” He lit a cigarette, and waved a nonchalant hand at the assembly around him. “Tell me honestly, Cousins, what words come to mind when you think of my kind? Haughty? Superior? Up themselves?” Nervous laughter grew in confidence. “And that’s only when you're being polite! I take no offence, Cousins, I assure you – my fellow bloodtakers here, we take no offence. We are all as we are, we none of us made ourselves – with the exception, of course, of those who did.” Lanto smiled. “Now honestly, and intending no offence to our good Cousin who has just spoken, do any of you suppose these blacklegging bloodtakers, these self-imagined aristocrats, will be happy loitering behind doors in the spare bedrooms of suburban bungalows, waiting to give an old lady a bit of a turn?”

  The laughter was general now, and – Lanto was relieved to see – led by the delegate from the underbeds.

  “My Cousin is surely right,” said Orlandus. “This is our opportunity to persuade the mass of bloodtakers that, even if they won’t support the strike, they should at least take a neutral stance.”

  “And more importantly,” Shrak the moonhowler interrupted him. “This foolish, undignified move shows that the Fearful authorities, and their MU lackeys, are desperate. The extent of their ambition is merely to keep the most basic of all services going. They are conceding a night with no terror in it beyond the occasional creaking floorboard.” He drew himself up as tall as he could, and raised a fist in the air. “They know they have lost, Cousins - all we have to do is hold out a little longer.”

  ***

  The government suffered an embarrassment when a car full of vampires was ambushed on the M1 by four vanloads of riot police, forced from the road, and its inhabitants severely beaten with unauthorised weapons. The vampires’ pleas that they were in fact Young Conservatives on their way to a fancy-dress stag do went unheeded until much too late.

  The Commissioner for Policing in the North described the events as “genuinely unacceptable.” He said he would not be taking the “easy option” of resignation, and wished to offer “incredible assurances” that he was “passionate that lessons be learned going forward.”

  ***

  The monsters knew they were naive about industrial disputes, but that didn't stop them being naive. Holding out was not all they had to do.

  DI Pipe had been asked to devise a policing strategy which would be, as his immediate superior put it to him, “Short enough for a government adviser to read right through in one go without getting lost.”

  Pipe enjoyed the task. He started with twenty pages, and ended up, after a weekend’s work, with three lines:

  The state’s aim is to prevent humans from giving due attention to the things they ought to be afraid of.

  Historically, monsters have distracted humans from real fears towards semi-imaginary fears.

  For the duration of the monster strike, the state must replace semi-imaginary fears with entirely imaginary ones.

  “That’s fine,” said his boss, “but what’s that got to do with the police service?”

  “The usual,” said Pipe. “We’re the ones who’ll have to shove it through.”

  Ghouls were picketing a large cemetery in Leeds – cemeteries being the legitimate workplace of the ghoul. No ghouls were scabbing; by monster
standards, ghouls were social creatures, and once a collective decision had been made to join the strike, it would have been a strange ghoul indeed who broke ranks. The purpose of this picket line was not, therefore, to stop blacklegs entering the cemetery, but to reveal the ghouls to the diurnal world, thus removing their usefulness to what they were learning to call “the employing class.” Monsters absent at night, and visible by day, would no longer serve to distract humans from other fears, and this would render them less productive as labour units; the employing class would be forced to negotiate with the monsters to get their workers back.

  It was a reverse picket line; any Fearful who wished to enter the cemetery was welcome to do so – and would, indeed, be offered a ghoulish guide, escort or even porter. There weren't, in all honesty, very many takers.

  At twilight, on the night that DI Pipe’s recommendations were first put into action, three large coaches pulled up over the road from the ghouls’ picket. One was full of journalists. One was full of riot police. The third was full of scabs.

  The journalists obediently took the positions to which they were directed, and stood by to record what they were told to record. The riot police formed a human corridor leading from the third coach to the cemetery gates. The ghouls watched, mystified.

  If you ever find yourself needing to recruit an army of strike-breakers, remember this: scabs must be expendable. Do not use skilled workers, because you might need them in the future. Do not use workers loyal to the company, because you will lose their loyalty. Scabs can be bought, but buying doesn't last forever. Scabs can be coerced, can be made to feel they have no choice, but coercion can be overcome. In the end, this is best: buy the scabs, and buy them from amongst the most desperate, the most choice-deprived, the most afraid. Those who won’t be bought must be threatened, and those who won’t be threatened must be punished.

  And then make sure they're expendable, because history shows that every scab who ever crossed a picket line became disposable the day the strike ended. Scabs are inferior, damaged goods, and make poor long-term replacements for real workers.

  On DI Pipe’s advice, the coach had been filled with the sort of people that the government wanted the Fearful to fear, and had spent decades ensuring they did fear: illegal asylum seekers, benefit scroungers, adherents to unpopular religions, members of despised strata. Who better to replace monsters of the night, than monsters created in the day? Who would dare to enter a cemetery at night, knowing it was full of the types they had been programmed to fear? The powerful will always be powerful as long as they can persuade those with little power to fear those with none at all.

  Instinctively, the ghouls gathered in front of the gate as the scabs were shepherded towards them. The confused, frightened, desperate faces of the choiceless – their eyes blindfolded, their mouths slack with fear - advanced unwillingly but unstoppably, held erect in forced cohesion by tunnels of uniformed shoulders.

  As the ghouls’ stewards began to realise what was happening, the cry went up: “Don’t eat the scabs! Don’t eat them!” Non-violence was the golden rule of the great monster strike, but it had not been tested until tonight. In the melee, two, then three of the scabs fell to the talons and teeth of the pickets before the stewards were able to regain control. Limbs were ripped away, and marrow taken.

  Discipline restored, the pickets pushed back – but the weight of the sacrificial scabs with hundreds of police behind them was too great, and the line buckled and finally broke. The scabs were in; the cemetery had fallen.

  ***

  “When history is against you, even your victories are defeats.” The prime minister had heard that somewhere; possibly in his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. History had been his ostensible subject, though his actual activity had chiefly been the attending of formal dining clubs.

  Three days after the Battle of the Cemetery, a small group of vampires had joined the picket line – a first which had sent the government’s Emergency Planning Committee into something which was probably closer to embarrassment than panic. Or annoyance, perhaps.

  A horrible-looking zombie thing had been soundbited on internet news saying that following the “government's escalation into unprovoked violence” the bloodtakers “finally understood which side their bread was bloodied.” Intelligence reports confirmed that the monster strike was now almost 100% in the UK, and growing daily throughout the world. Younger elements at Number Ten went round saying things like “I hear the poltergeists are solid,” and trying to make their laughter sound cynical rather than nervous.

  Four days after the Battle of the Cemetery, a reporter described the financial quarter of the city of Bonn, in the middle of a working day, as “a ghost town,” which may (or may not) have amused the ghosts, but caused convulsive anger amongst the bankers and speculators who until then had been given to understand that they ran the universe.

  After six days, the nightly picket at the Leeds cemetery had grown to many thousands strong. It was swelled, not to mention diversified, by the arrival of some overseas delegates. From Japan came yurei ghosts and reptilian river spirits called kappa. The latter proudly carried a banner which read: “The Kappa Shall Not Bend.” There was an Ethiopian bull-monster, a catoblepas, with a head so heavy it was unable to lift it, and several giant leshy from eastern Europe.

  The police gave up trying to break the line, and the coaches were sent away without unloading. No-one knew what became of the scabs (expect for the three who’d been partially eaten that first night: one of them had died at the scene; the other two, bodily ruined, had been deported. A statement from the Provisional Strike Committee had vowed to “make amends,” though it admitted it had no idea how.)

  ***

  Josie arrived at work one evening to find that all her first-born colleagues had been sacked, and that the entire staff now consisted of restarts (from both phases). She herself, having been promoted officially to branch supervisor (more hours, no more money), was the only first-born remaining. She wondered how long that would last.

  Despite this, three things happened during that shift to cheer her up. Two more of the restarts asked her, quite out of the blue, for application forms to join the shopworkers’ union. DI Pipe popped in to “see how it was all going,” and stayed for a cup of tea. He told her what he’d learned in his evening class: that a capitalist economy, in order to survive, needs both low wages and high unemployment (to minimise production costs) and high wages and low unemployment (to maximise demand), and that it needs them both simultaneously. Which is, of course, impossible. “So where does that leave us all?” she asked, and he said “We haven’t done that bit yet.”

  And then, best of all, her nephew phoned to say that he and lots of the other unemployed bucket-shouters had applied for membership of the Monsters’ Union. “We’re all monsters now, Aunty,” he told her, and she told DI Pipe what he’d said, and DI Pipe smiled and said, “Well, that makes things interesting, doesn’t it?”

  ***

  More scabs, and better scabs. It’s important to have a strategy, a strategic adviser had told the prime minister, and the PM had said, “What? Even if it’s the wrong one?” and the adviser had assured him that, yes, the important thing was to have a strategy. To keep going forward. Not to retreat. If you change your tactics, you're flexible; if you change your strategy, you’ve surrendered. If a strategy isn’t working it’s because it’s not being pushed hard enough.

  More scabs, and better scabs. The government plundered the jails and the secure hospitals, scoured the police watch-lists. Psycho killers and race-hate hooligans and child molesters. Dog-fight organisers and convicted cannibals. And who could imagine it not working? People would surely be reluctant to go near a formerly-haunted house, say, knowing that it might well be occupied by a serial rapist.

  It certainly worked against the trolls under the Forth Bridge. Well, worked in the sense that the line was eventually broken, after dozens of deaths on both sides. Th
e new, better scabs, it transpired, were just as eager to eat trolls as trolls were to eat them.

  But here’s something else about government advisers: they often get sacked. Ostensibly, this is usually due to scandal or incompetence. Really, it’s because different corporations rise and fall, and fall and rise as well, and therefore different corporations are entitled to have their advisers advising at different times.

  It happened that the prime minister’s latest adviser on industrial strategy was able to explain to the PM why his predecessor had made a potentially disastrous error – the worst of all errors, an abandonment of core strategy.

  The whole point of managed fear is that it stops you being afraid of really frightening things - but these new scabs were really frightening things. If you take away a man’s irrational fears, he can only replace them with rational ones. Irrational fears can be contained, compartmentalised, overcome; they can be, if not ignored, then at least endured; teeth can be gritted against them. Humans can operate under the influence of irrational fears; but once rational fears dominate, they can’t. It is the fear of the night that keeps man from fearing the day. His fear is exhausted by daybreak, and takes until dusk to recharge.

  But rational fears, by definition, can only be overcome by altering the circumstances which give rise to them.

  If, to take an example, humans are fearful of unemployment, this fear can only be got rid of by abolishing unemployment: and the existing economic system depended on unemployment. Get rid of it, and the masters get rid of themselves.

  Using real fears to make people afraid was, in short, a blunder. But never mind, because the new adviser had new advice. The key point in any battle was always to attack, never defend. Identify the opportunity which the battle gives you, and fight for it. It’s either that, said the new adviser, or sooner or later you end up abolishing unemployment. See what I mean?