by Adam Millard
A beastly roar snapped him out of his reverie. He glanced over to the wall of frothy water that had once been the entrance, and there he saw the mysterious orange shape moving toward the stage. As it swam closer, Derek realised it was just a cat. A cat with an extremely large head. He was of two minds whether to jump in and help Tiggles when he remembered he didn’t, in fact, like cats, not since he’d been sexually assaulted by a ginger tom at the tender old age of eight.
As the cat reached the stage, pulled itself up with a gracefulness Derek hadn’t expected from a half-drowned moggy, he realised there was something very wrong with this particular cat.
For one, it was about ten times too big. Derek had never seen such a large cat; it looked like several cats stitched together. Secondly, cats usually go, “Miaow,” or, “Weahhh,” but this one didn’t. It roared like a bear, and each time it did, the stage rattled beneath him.
The water was still rising. Derek’s feet were covered over with what smelt like the ocean, and yet couldn’t be. Could it? He slowly backed away from the approaching monster, searching the stage for a way out, and the tiger—Ah, that’s what they call them, Derek thought, though he had never seen one out in the open, and definitely not in a Cromer bingo hall—prowled around him, sniffing the air like one of those pretentious wine connoisseurs you often had to punch in the face whenever you saw them.
“Nice kitty,” Derek said, nervously smiling, trying his best not to sound terrified. “Hey, I know where you can find some fresh dead folk. They’re probably a bit gristly, but—”
The tiger pounced and growled simultaneously, and as it thumped into Derek's chest, knocking him into the water. It sank its huge teeth into the top of his skull. There was a pop, a crunch, and Derek’s head came away from the rest of him with a sickly squelch.
The tiger fed well, better than it had for years. When it was finished, it swam back toward the doors, knowing there would be more where that came from in the melee outside.
*
Vera couldn’t breathe, and that was the thing with water. If you were under it, it was probably best not to try. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes; it seemed to drag by slowly, as if it were maimed. There was Jessica as a newborn, and there she was again on the slide at the park and there again at the shoe shop. On and on it went, a god-awful slideshow, and she’d lost the remote control to the projector.
It was then that she realised she was caught on something, an overturned chair perhaps. She was being held. She could feel hands tugging at her, pulling her back down into the salty abyss.
I’m going to die, she thought. I’m going to die and never know who my murderer was.
Vera threw out a hand, and it was about as weak as she’d expected. Her arm folded up at the wrist, and there was an audible crack, despite being beneath six feet of water. Damn arthritis! she thought, retracting her hand and accepting her fate.
Jessica’s first ride on a donkey, and then her first ride on a camel, and then she was getting older, and smoking, and drinking, and coming home with a pair of tits that would make Hugh Hefner cream himself, and then…
I can’t die like this, Vera thought. Not thinking ill of my daughter. Jessica was a good swimmer and was therefore probably still alive out there.
Throwing her foot out, Vera hit her assailant in the soft spot between belly and thigh. She’d popped her hip out of place, but it was worth it, for now she was free, floating upwards, six stone of crippled pensioner doing everything in her power to survive.
As her head broke the surface, she gasped, drew in lungfuls of precious air. All around, as far as the eye could see, was water. Somebody’s wooden leg drifted past her head as she kicked and flailed in an effort to stay afloat.
Then a head shot up beside her, and the face of her aggressor became clear for the first time.
“Judi…Dench!” Vera gasped. Of course it was. That hag thespian had had it in for her since day one. “You…you tried…to kill me!”
The desiccated actress shook her head. “I was saving you,” she said, surprisingly not breathless. She could probably hold her breath for years, Vera thought. That’s MI6 training for you.
“Saving me from what?” It was all Vera could do to stay afloat. Her dislocated hip didn’t help matters.
“The tiger!” Judi Dench said. “It ate Derek, and if you’d popped up, it would have come for you, too.”
Now, Vera had heard a lot of nonsense in her time. She’d been alive when Area 51 was more commonly known as Area 1. “What tiger?” she gasped, taking on board a litre or so of salty seawater.
“It’s gone now,” Judi Dench said. “Swam out through the door. Probably gone off in search of pudding. You kicked me right in the lady-nuts down there!”
Vera eyed her co-survivor with no small amount of suspicion. What the hell would a tiger be doing swimming through a bingo hall? It just didn’t make sense.
“I have to get…out of here!” Vera said, looking around, not knowing what she was looking for. The doors were several feet beneath them on the other side of the hall, and water was still surging into the room. It would be impossible to swim down and through them.
“Stay calm,” Judi Dench said. “You see that skylight?”
“This is no…time to talk about…your stupid films!”
“No! Up there.” Judi Dench pointed up to the ceiling, to a small square embedded in it, allowing light to spill in.
“I see it,” Vera said, though she couldn’t. Her glasses must have fallen off at some point.
“We’re going to wait for the water to fill this place, and then we’re going to smash our way through it.” Judi Dench reached for a Zimmer frame before it had chance to get away.
“What if I can’t tread water for that long?” It was a damn good question. Vera hadn’t been to the swimming baths for years, not since she heard about how the water turned purple if your bladder gave way. She’d reached that age where urination was no longer one of the things she controlled.
“Then I guess I’m on my own,” Judi Dench said. “But I won’t let that happen. You and I have had our differences over the years—”
“Differences!” Vera almost drowned her on general principal. “You had an affair with…my husband…my Larry!”
“No I didn’t! Who told you that?”
Vera was gobsmacked. After all these years, the bitch was still denying it. What if you made a mistake, Vera? What if, all this time, you’ve been hating the wrong woman?
“Larry told me,” Vera said, though now she wasn’t sure. “We were watching you…on…on that Wish You Were Here, and—”
“Judith Chalmers!” Judi Dench said. “Your husband had an affair with Judith Chalmers, not me. I was happily married for thirty years. When my husband died in 2001, I decided not to bother anymore.”
“Oh!” was all Vera Hunt could manage. “So why did I think it was you?”
“Because you’re old and mental,” the Dame said. “Is that why you hated me all these years? Because you thought I’d stolen your Larry away from you?”
“That and Tomorrow Never Dies,” Vera said. “Look, never mind that. I’m trying not to drown here. Can we just focus on getting out of here alive?”
“We’ll make it,” Judi Dench said. “I’ve been in tighter situations than this. Did I ever tell you about the time Javier Bardem asked me to kill him?”
*
Thad Bailey had been winning the tug-of-war single-handedly when the tsunami hit. The spectators had all screamed excitedly, and Thad had put their renewed enthusiasm down to the fact he almost had six members of the British Army over the line in the middle of the street.
Then the water had hit him, knocking him from his feet, and a second later something big and heavy landed on his back.
If you’ve ever been slammed into by a zebra at a hundred miles per hour before, then you have a good idea of how Thad felt in that moment. Confused. Hurt. Slightly concerned that he was giving a piggyback to a stripy hor
se.
The good thing about his height and mass, though, was that he kept his footing, even as the water rushed past him, even with a panicked zebra biting the top of his head. Chaos reigned all around as people were washed away on the terrible current.
And yet the water wasn’t the problem. Well, it was a bit of a nuisance, especially for those lying face-down in it. The problem was the animals. Where had they all come from? Why were they breast-stroking it through the street?
“What’s happening!?” one of the soldiers screeched, peeling a meerkat from his chest. The meerkat chirruped, dove into the water, and disappeared. “You’ve got a zebra on your back!”
Thad grunted and grabbed the beast’s hooves. With one quick movement, he flipped the zebra off his shoulders and watched as it swam across the street, toward Foxy’s Knickerwear Ltd. “I think we’ve been hit by a tsunami!” Thad bellowed. “Where are the rest of your team?”
The soldier pointed across the street, to where five members of the British Army were battling a tribe of howler monkeys. “Where did all these damn animals come from?”
Thad thought long and hard, which wasn’t his forte. “I guess the zoo,” he said. “Which means there are much worse animals out there than those monkeys.”
Just then, a large woman wearing dungarees emerged from the water. Her face was bright red, apart from one cheek where there were two bright green spots.
“Holy shit, a mermaid!” Thad said, flabbergasted by the woman’s sudden appearance.
“Do I look like a mermaid?” the woman asked breathlessly, and now that Thad had a chance to look her over more intently, he realised his mistake. “Do I have something on my face?”
The soldier leaned in, though not too close. There was a fine line between something on her face, and something leaping across onto his face. When he realised what he was, in fact, looking at, the soldier relaxed and said, “Don’t worry. It’s just a couple of frogs.”
“Ow!” the woman said, slapping one of the frogs from her face. “One of them bit…” She trailed off as paralysis took hold. A second later and she was underwater again, leaving Thad and the soldier incredulous.
“We need to get to higher ground,” the soldier said. He wolf-whistled to the rest of his team. The howler monkeys leapt from their respective soldiers and began swinging their way along the street on the lampposts, their deep hellish roars dopplering as they headed into the distance.
The soldiers gathered around their leader and Thad, who felt a little out of place, even though he had almost bettered the lot of them a moment earlier.
“Something terrible has happened,” their leader said. “There’s been some kind of tidal wave, which is why you now find yourself up to your waists in seawater.”
“What about the monkeys, Sergeant?” one of the soldiers asked. “I’ve been to the beach before, saw crabs and fish and whatnot, but never monkeys.”
“Hercules here reckons there’s a zoo nearby,” the sergeant said. All six soldiers turned to face Thad, who was still trying to figure out how a frog could kill a person. “If that’s the case, then there could be all kinds of nasty bastards out there.”
“Shit!” one of the soldiers said, sobbing. “That’s it then, man! Game over! Game over, man!”
“Get a grip, Hudson” the sergeant said. “The important thing is that we help as many people as possible. There are going to be a lot of trapped and scared people out there in Cromer, and what with the roads only accessible by dinghies, it’s our duty, as soldiers of this great country, to look after our own.”
“Erm, you’re not including me in that, are you?” Thad said. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help, it was—actually, yes it was. He was good at looking tough and acting tough, but when it actually came to being tough, he left that up to the soldiers, the firemen, the rozzers, and those burly guys in donkey jackets who decided whether you were good enough to grace their establishments or not.
“You’re one strong sonofabitch,” the sergeant said, patting Thad on the shoulder. “We could use a guy like you. Not many men could wrestle a zebra the way you just did. I’ll bet you could take down a moose.”
I’d rather not try, Thad thought. “I guess I could help,” he said, thinking about the outstanding parking tickets he’d accrued in Cromer. Surely they would waive those if he saved a couple hundred citizens from a horde of rampaging animals.
“Well alright then!” the sergeant said. “Let’s go bag us some zoo animals!”
As Thad waded after the soldiers, he tried to remember the last time he’d been so scared. Wrestling zebras was one thing; lunging headlong into a battle with a Sumatran Tiger, well, that was just fucking stupid.
10
Roger Whipsnade slowly opened his eyes. He realised he was lying on his back, staring up at the sky, and focussing on the birds up there, circling, soaring, eating the other birds?
Pushing himself up onto his elbows, he watched as a golden eagle took a chunk out of a sparrow. The one-winged sparrow plummeted toward the ground. I’ve been hit! I’ve been hit! I’m going down!
Roger wasn’t as knowledgeable when it came to birds as some of the other zoo staff, but he knew a hooded vulture when he saw one. He’d never seen one so far away though, flying freely across the Norfolk skyline, and he’d certainly never seen one dragging a half a human carcass behind it.
“Oh God, the zoo!” he said, clambering to his feet. The water had carried him away from his workplace, dumped him unceremoniously in someone’s back garden. On their shed roof, to be more precise. The North Sea surrounded him on four sides, and only the tallest of structures protruded from the water.
What had happened!? Where was the warning!? Surely someone, in some government office nearby, had seen this coming. But that was the thing with the government: unless they were going to make money out of something, they kept it to themselves. If there had been some way they could tax the sea, perhaps things would have been very different.
Brandie! She was out there somewhere, lying dead in a field or face-down in the water. What if a gorilla had got a hold of her? What if she’d already been stripped down to her underwear by an aerie of hungry hawks?
Now’s not the time to think about Brandie Stroman’s knickers, Roger reproached. There was a chance she was still alive. If anyone knew how best to protect themselves from wild animals, it was Brandie.
Stepping slowly off the shed roof and onto the adjacent fence, Roger felt like a real action hero. When he toppled off the fence and into the water a second later, he felt like a complete numpty.
*
Brandie was gently floating. She’d had dreams like this before, and they were always nice, soothing. In a moment, she would be joined by another. Johnny Depp would pull up alongside her in full Jack Sparrow get-up. “Does this lady need a good rogering, savvy?” to which she would reply, “She doesn’t half,” before climbing into his boat for a little how’s your father and a bottle of rum.
Unfortunately, something pecking at Brandie’s face dragged her kicking and screaming from her delightful snooze. When she opened her eyes to find a barn owl sitting on her chest, tapping at her cheek with its razor-sharp beak, she knew something was terribly amiss.
“Oh fuck!” she gasped, slowly sitting. The water was all around her, murky and rancid. She hadn’t been dreaming at all; the sensation of floating had been real. As the owl flew off, its immense wings almost knocking Brandie unconscious as it went, she tried to piece together what had happened.
I was in with the lemurs. She remembered because Lionel the lemur was being a bit of a dick, throwing faeces at her. It was nothing new as far as lemur behaviour went, but it was the first time she’d known any of them to embed six-inch nails in it first. So I was dodging shitty nail-bombs, and then what?
The water, it had hit the enclosure hard, sending her sprawling outside. The roof had come down a moment later; she’d watched as the lemurs leapt from the ruins, clambered over one another to reach t
he floating debris.
Then what? Well there had been something flying toward her, getting bigger and bigger, and then she’d seen its face, a screaming, contorted head which had disappeared into its shell the moment before impact.
I was hit in the head by a Galapagos tortoise. That was what knocked me out. Glad I figured that out. Phew, now I can stop worrying and go about my day. Oh wait, no I can’t because I appear to be in the middle of the ocean, floating on—
She edged across, and there, nailed to the piece of wood on which she floated, was a sign with the name Lionel painted on in elegant scroll.
—Lionel’s fucking front door!
Then it hit her. If the lemurs were free—if they’d survived the initial disaster—what else had been released? How many species of animal were currently running amok in Cromer? Were the tigers out? The anacondas? Those horrible little creatures that liked to wear smoking jackets and say “seemples” a lot?
“Are you okay down there?” a voice said. Brandie looked up, saw a face at a window. There was no glass in the window. It appeared to have blown inwards with the initial wave, and now the face at the window was sporting bloody shards like some incongruous new jewellery.
“I’m fine!” Brandie said, though she didn’t know why. There was water where there should be street, a post-apocalyptic stream carrying her along to god-knows-where. Fine she wasn’t.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” the face said. “You shouldn’t be floating around down there like that. I saw something long, thin, and very toothy about half an hour ago. You might want to get up to higher ground.”
Brandie sighed. “I’m not exactly doing this for shits and giggles,” she said. “I’ve only just woken up. Is there anything around me right now?”
The face peered down into the water. Brandie hadn’t yet determined whether she was talking to a man or a woman. All that pulped flesh made it hard to decide.