Zoonami

by Adam Millard

“Not that I can see,” the face said, “but the water’s not as clear as it was. I think it’s picking up all the shit in the streets. Who knew Cromer was so damn filthy?”

  “Okay, well, since I’m not in control of this piece of wood, I’m going to continue floating along until I either drop off the face of the earth or something long, thin and toothy comes up to eat me. It’s been nice chatting to you.”

  The face smiled. A few teeth dropped out and plinked into the water below. “All the best!”

  Brandie threw a blasé hand up. All the best? All the flipping best? That was the thing about being British. It took something really special to dampen the spirits, and even then a modicum of politeness and etiquette remained. If an asteroid punched through earth’s atmosphere, scorched the sky, and tore toward the ground at twenty-thousand miles per hour, while the rest of the world ran about screaming, panicking, and looting toasters from the nearest wholesaler, the British would stand gawping at the sky, a pipe in one hand and a cucumber sandwich in the other, telling passersby to mind their heads.

  As the door travelled along Baker Street, where the residents were now probably wishing they had never let that darned estate-agent talk them into buying bungalows, Brandie only had one thing on her mind. Well, if you disregarded the horrible feeling of wet socks, the door beneath her, the myriad zoo animals swarming about the place, and the fact it was hotter than a whorehouse on fifty-pence night, then she only had one thing on her mind.

  Roger Whipsnade. Where was he? Was he okay? Was he lying dead in a water-filled ditch somewhere being picked at by a clowder of ocelots? Brandie didn’t want to think about it, but the constant flow of dead bodies drifting past her floating door brought home the severity of the situation.

  They were up Shit Creek without a paddle. The trouble was, no one had ordered a creek.

  *

  Roger had made it all the way to the pier without being eaten, which he considered a cheeky bonus. Along the way, he’d passed hundreds of survivors. Some had managed to clamber up onto nearby rooftops; others drifted along on large chunks of debris. One group of youths had decided to make the most of the situation, cannonballing from Mick McManus’s Hardware Store roof into the water below.

  “We’re aaaaaaaall doooooooomed!” an old geezer with fewer teeth than a hillbilly’s chainsaw had yelled from the roof of Hand Job Nails & Spa. “God is punishing us! The rapture is coming for us all.” To which one of the cannonballing teenagers replied, “Shut the fuck up, you fucking fuck!” proving that not even a deadly natural disaster was enough to make unruly bastards respect their elders.

  Standing on the pier wall—getting his bearings and trying not to think about the zoo animals that were out there, running amok and eating children—Roger had time to contemplate what the old nutjob had said.

  Is this God’s work? Doesn’t he have bigger fish to fry than a small Norfolk town? What could we have possible done to inflame the Lord’s wrath? I mean, we’ve got a few inbreeders—Peter Linkletter and his wife-sister are just adorable once you get to know them—but you get that everywhere. If God went around throwing the sea at every little district which deemed internal relations as unpunishable, the whole of the British Isles would be submersed by now.

  No, this wasn’t God’s work. This was Mother Nature at her finest. They say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Mother Nature had plenty to be pissed about.

  “Whipsnade?”

  Roger started. He turned to face the pier, but couldn’t see anyone at first. Perhaps I’ve gone mental, he thought. An event of this magnitude was more than enough to push even the sanest of people over the edge, which meant that those who had already been borderline were now positively doolally.

  “Up here!” the voice said.

  Sitting on the pier, its base under two feet of water, was a fairground ride, its cars stationary, its usually blinking lights fried to smithereens. Roger searched the large, tubular column at the centre of the ride, followed it up and up, and there, sitting in a softly swinging spaceship, was a sodden William Chinn. He looked different without his toupee; less ridiculous, despite his surroundings.

  “I don’t think the fair’s going to open today,” Roger said, “what with all this water and the dead people floating around in it.”

  Chinn pulled what looked like a starfish from his shirt collar. “I’m not here for the fucking candyfloss,” he said. “Look, some of our animals are out there, loose, rampaging.”

  “You mean all of our animals,” Roger said. After what had happened, correcting his boss was no longer as terrifying as it once had been.

  “Whipsnade, I saw a bear a few minutes ago, and I’m not talking about those cute little Australian fuckers, either.”

  Roger glanced around, searching the nooks of the pier for any sign of Winnie, their resident grizzly. A frisson ran through his entire body, and he was in two minds whether to shinny up the fairground ride and flop into one of the miniature spacecrafts until this whole thing had blown over.

  They would send someone, wouldn’t they? The people in charge, the government, they would surely despatch a team of rescuers to evacuate Cromer. Helicopters and hovercrafts were probably already on the way; all they had to do was sit tight, perhaps find someone with a working kettle and a handful of teabags. It was only a matter of time before—

  A scream from above. Roger turned, glanced up at the car in which his boss had sat a moment ago. There was no sign of Chinn, but the car was rocking violently, swinging on a hook that Roger wouldn’t have trusted to hold the weight of his coat. Something was attacking Chinn, had dragged him down into the spaceship. Roger could hear the frantic flapping of wings as the creature (or angel?) brutalised his boss.

  “Are you okay up there?” Roger asked. It was a stupid question, but somebody had to ask it. “If it’s Snowy, just rub her belly. She likes that.”

  “It’s not…fucking…Snowy!” Chinn screamed. A hand came up, bloody, ribboned, before dropping back down into the ferociously swaying car. “Get off of me, you damn, dirty hawk!”

  Ah, it was Sybil, Bingham’s savage and widely misunderstood Red-tailed Hawk. In that case, Roger didn’t know what to do. Even the bird’s keepers were cautious when feeding or cleaning Sybil’s pen. She’d killed at least three curators since Roger had worked at the zoo, pecking them to death with that razor-sharp beak of hers, and he’d lost track of the number of times children had been rushed off to A&E to have fingers, toes, and noses reattached. Even the blood-spattered sign outside Sybil’s pen warned people off: “ALL BODY PARTS PICKED UP WILL BE KEPT IN LOST AND FOUND FOR A MAXIMUM OF 28 DAYS.”

  Chinn screamed one last time, and Sybil jumped up onto the chrome handrail, glanced nonchalantly around the pier, and flew away, heading toward the town centre.

  “Mr. Chinn?” Roger said, once the hawk was out of earshot. “Mr. Chinn, are you dead?”

  The car squeaked, rocked slightly, as William Chinn clambered to his feet. “Ah, Whipsicle, my favourite pterodactyl. How’s it hanging, peach?”

  Roger didn’t know what to say to that and so decided instead to regard his boss with an expression of utter incredulity.

  “Lovely day we’re eating,” Chinn said, tilting his head and admiring the sky.

  Something splashed into the water by Roger’s feet, and he lunged back, expecting some wild creature to emerge. Once the water settled again, Roger took a step forward and glanced down.

  “What have you friend, found?” Chinn asked from what was, unbeknownst to him, his final resting place. “Is it a pancake? I like pancakes!”

  There, sitting on the pier beneath the water, was half a brain. Roger could just about make out the grey ventricles through the shimmering seawater. It had been pecked almost to indiscernibility, and looked more like something a cat brought home as a gift than the most vital part of human anatomy.

  “Lot of water about today!” Chinn said. “Are we upside down?”

  I can’t leave him up there
like that, Roger thought. It wouldn’t be right. His boss’s head was hollowed out, his brain partially devoured by Sybil. The only reason he was still semi-functioning was because he hadn’t lain down yet. If it rained, the poor bastard’s head would fill right up like a toddler’s sippy cup. There was no way back for Chinn, which was probably for the best, given the circumstances.

  “Your wig’s going to fly away!” Roger suddenly screamed up at his smiling, aloof gaffer.

  “Wha—” was all that Chinn managed. As he reached for the toupee that wasn’t even there, his fist disappeared into the newly-gouged hole in his cranium. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he said, “Squizzfiggle,” before flopping forward, leaving the fairground spaceship behind as momentum carried him over the edge.

  Roger turned away, heard the splash as his former boss landed in the water enveloping the pier. After a few quiet moments of reflection—He could have fired me. He could have sacked me, but he didn’t because I’m stupid—Roger began to wade toward the town centre.

  Brandie was still out there somewhere. He could feel it in his terrified and waterlogged bones.

  11

  Despite being one of the greatest British actresses of a generation—or three, if we’re being entirely honest—Dame Judi Dench had quite a potty-mouth on her. Even Vera Hunt blushed as Dench cursed after hitting the skylight with the Zimmer frame for the umpteenth time. “It’s as if it’s made of cunting steel!” Dench said, breathless for the first time since Vera and she had joined forces.

  Water had almost filled the hall. It was amazing how airtight an old community centre could be. It appeared the only hole in the entire structure was the one allowing the water in, which just went to show that they no longer make them like they used to.

  “I can’t…doggy-paddle…for much…longer,” Vera said. Her arms and legs were like spaghetti, and every few seconds her head dropped below the water, only for Dench to pull her back up.

  “You can!” Judi Dench said, slamming the Zimmer into the glass once again. “We’re going to get out of here! And when we do, you’re going to make Judith Chalmers’ life a living hell!”

  Vera, freshly spurred on, began to kick and paddle more vigorously.

  “Now, if I could just make a cunting crack.”

  Dench launched the Zimmer frame upwards, which was easier said than done since it was all but submerged, and then…

  A tiny spiderwebbing crack appeared at the centre of the skylight, stretching outwards, random cracks beginning to appear off it.

  “You…gargle...did it!” Vera screeched. They were going to survive, and all because Vera had had the good fortune of hooking up with an MI6-trained thespian. If that wasn’t God’s way of saying live life to the fullest, she didn’t know what was.

  The next time Dench hit the skylight with the geriatric walking aid, glass rained inwards, peppering the rising water with hundreds of miniature shards. As she went about breaking the glass at the edges so that they could climb out without losing bits of their sagging bodies, she said, “Did I tell you about the time Pierce Brosnan bought me a fifteen-inch black vibrator for Christmas?”

  “Can we not do this right now?” Vera could practically smell the freedom a few inches above their heads. The sun was still beating down out there, and Vera wanted to get into it as quickly as possible. The heat would soon dry them off.

  “You go first,” Judi Dench said. She hooked a hand over the edge of the skylight and offered the other to Vera, who stared at it as if it were a bunch of rotten bananas. “Go on. There’re a lot of dead old people down here. The sooner we get out, the less chance we’ve got of catching Alzheimer’s.” Actually, the sooner they got out, the more chance they had of living long enough to get Alzheimer’s.

  Vera didn’t like the sound of that and so used Judi Dench’s hand to push herself up. Hooking a gnarled old elbow over the edge of the skylight, she managed to pull herself through, and the moment her trailing foot left the murky seawater, she felt instantly better. It was like being born again, only without the slime and crowd of overexcited doctors.

  She stood, arching her back, which cracked loud enough to send a nearby flock of sparrows into the sky. She took a few steps toward the edge of the building, forgetting momentarily all about Judi Dench. “Holy hell!” she gasped. She’d never seen so much water, at least not this far inland. If it wasn’t for the surrounding rooftops, she might have believed the community centre had been torn from its foundations and carried out into the ocean, where it now floated along, a mobile bingo hall with more dead players than regulation normally allowed.

  “Oi!” Judi Dench roared. “Never mind sightseeing. Pull me out of here before I shrivel away to nothing!”

  Vera made her way back to the skylight. As she dropped to her knees, allowing her skin-and-bone arm to drop through the opening, she saw something in the water below Dench’s frantically kicking legs, something that wasn’t a dead old person.

  “What?” Dench said as Vera retracted her arm. She could see the fear in Vera’s eyes. “What is it?”

  Vera watched as the dark shape beneath the water circled Judi Dench’s flailing feet. Whatever it was, it was big, and it was sizing up the actress, trying to decide whether she was edible or not. “Keep really still,” Vera said. “I think there’s a shark in there with you.”

  Bubbles began to appear at the surface of the water, which meant that Dench understood the predicament she was in. “How do you know it’s a shark?” the actress whispered, trying not to move whilst simultaneously trying not to drown. “How far away is it right now?”

  “I’ve seen sharks before,” Vera said. “Big bloody things, sharp teeth, like to chew up boats and eat drunken teenagers in the middle of the night. Oh, yes, I know a shark when I see one, and...”

  Just then, an alligator’s head appeared; all wide maw and stringy drool. Judi Dench threw an arm up to protect herself, but the beast was having none of it. It came down bodily on Dench, forcing her into the water, where it would no doubt make a meal of her.

  “Oh!” Vera said. “My bad!” It was an easy mistake to make. Crocodiles, sharks, giant crabs, they were all the same. Nice to look at from a distance, but you wouldn’t want to skinny-dip next to one.

  Staring down through the skylight, Vera couldn’t see much. She was waiting for a sign, perhaps a reddening of the water, anything to confirm that Judi Dench had been ungraciously devoured by the beast so that she could move on, put this whole nasty episode behind her. She wasn’t the greatest actress, Vera reasoned. The world wouldn’t miss her, not while they still had Maggie Smith, Glenn Close, and that one from Prime Suspect whose tits have apparently made a pact with the devil.

  After a few minutes of watching, waiting, Vera stood up and stared down into the water. “You saved my life, Judi Dench,” she said, making the sign of the cross. “You’re in a better place now, a place where they can no longer force you into making terrible films, a place where Brosnan and Craig can no longer get their filthy hands on you, a place where...”

  A severed alligator head flew from the water and hit Vera in the chest, knocking her back onto her bony arse. As she pushed herself up onto her elbows, she watched as Dench wearily pulled herself out through the skylight, her mouth caked with blood, her eyes wide and scary, as if she’d just been told she couldn’t return a faulty item because she’d lost the receipt.

  Vera was flabbergasted. “H-How? Y-You bit its head off?”

  “It was either me or it,” Dench said. “And my dentures were just too cunting strong for it.”

  “I thought you were dead!” Vera picked herself up from the rooftop.

  “Not today, little old lady. Not today.” Dench made her way across to the edge of the roof. “Does the tide usually come in this far only I’m not from around here?”

  Vera shook her head. “No, this is new. And we tend not to have crocs or tigers knocking around the town if we can help it.” She’d had enough of this nonsense, and wanted
nothing more than to be down off the community centre roof, where she could search for her daughter—her Jessica.

  “I’ll help you find your daughter,” Dench said, still scanning the streets below.

  “How did you know?” Vera hadn’t mentioned it once.

  “Let’s just say that they teach you all sorts of neat tricks at MI6 camp.” Dench smiled. Plus, the My Daughter, Jessica tattoo on the inside of the old lady’s calf was a dead giveaway, but she kept that bit to herself.

  12

  The sun was hot, the water was cold, and Jessica Hunt was scared shitless and hiding in the back of an abandoned articulated lorry. The power she’d felt immediately after putting the crown upon her head was gone; now she was just a teenager with a silly hat, a dress torn and tattered, and something crawling up between her implants that she was too frightened to investigate.

  Outside, beyond the temporary sanctuary of her semi-flooded artic, car alarms wailed, house-alarms screeched, and all manner of murderous beasties growled and roared. It was like being in some terrible SyFy movie. Any minute now, Martin Sheen would pop up as the president. Jessica didn’t know what was worse; being mauled to death by lions or bears, or being rescued by someone whose acting skills had regressed so badly, he was almost in Zac Efron territory.

  The tarpaulin at the back of the truck was secure, but it meant that she couldn’t see out. When the rescue team arrived—and they would, probably with Prince Harry in tow—she would have to untie the tarp and make her presence known. For now, though, she had no intention of revealing herself. Good luck to anyone dumb enough to swim through the streets out there, but not this girl.

  This girl was staying put.

  The tingling sensation across her breasts made Jessica squirm, and it was all she could do not to scream bloody murder. Slowly, she reached into her cleavage, hoping to find something benevolent, expecting to find something that could kill her in a matter of seconds: a baby tiger, perhaps, or one of those snakes that look like glowsticks.