Doomware

  In a cabinet he found a case of huge old vinyl disks – “records” he believed they’d been called. He hadn’t a hope of playing these. Or did he? He looked around the room. Then he realised that the top of the cabinet lifted up, and beneath it was a turntable. He grabbed the first record – the date on the cover said 1974 and the artist was somebody called Ella Fitzgerald; he thought he’d heard the name before but he couldn’t be sure – and carefully slipped the disk out of its sleeve. It took him a while to figure out how the turntable worked, but as soon as he did the room was filled with jazz-style band music. After a while Ella joined in, and he was immediately taken by the velvety beauty of her voice. He listened, entranced. 1974, he thought. An interwar period. If only they’d known back then. If only they’d known about the disaster that awaited mankind, the great technological holocaust that grew nearer with every passing year and every new advance. Would they still have played instruments and sung beautifully if they had known what lay ahead? He supposed you couldn’t really worry about the future when you were busy making music as gorgeous as this. It struck him that the music was the sound of a dead world playing in a world of the living dead, where there was no one to appreciate it but him, and for a moment it was almost unbearable. He made a move to turn the turntable off, but couldn’t bring himself to.

  The music faded softly into the background as he went up to the next level. In the first room, a smallish bedroom, he went through a chest of drawers. It contained clothes mostly, which he rummaged through so perfunctorily he almost missed it: in the bottom drawer, covered by vests and jumpers, was a grey plastic case a little larger than the average hardback book. It had a metal locking mechanism, but it wasn’t locked, and when he flipped it open he nearly whooped with excitement at what was inside; instead, he said, “Yes!”

  It was a small handgun, the old – and now illegal – type. He lifted it out of its case. It was made of dark, almost black, polymer, and was accompanied by a cleaning brush and two magazines that slotted into the gun’s handle. Each magazine held 17 rounds. In his hand the gun felt suitably death-dealing. Of course, his targets would be dead already, but he was certain headshots from this baby would stop them in their tracks nonetheless. He’d never fired a gun in his life, but he thought it couldn’t be that difficult. Besides, there was an owner’s manual. It gave the manufacturer’s name as being GLOCK. He searched for more ammunition, but there was none. He had 34 rounds. The chances of finding any more were virtually nil since the gun was such an antique. Old as it was, it was his only option: modern weapons interacted with brainware, only firing when in the hands of their registered owners, but this thing anyone could use. He prayed it still worked, and decided he’d use up to four rounds as test shots.

  The music continued to play as he went into the next room, which was probably the master bedroom. There was a large, iron-framed bed clad in a thick bedspread with a floral design, and a wooden dressing table with a tilting oval mirror attached. Despite the old appearance of everything, he was reminded strongly of his parents’ bedroom back home. He placed the holdall on the floor and took a seat on the bed. Something about the room and the bed, or possibly the music and the rain on the window, made him remember one morning when he’d been a boy. He didn’t know exactly how old he’d been, but it was the first time he could recall talking about a topic that was to dominate his life.

  His mother had been sitting in bed eating breakfast from a tray while his father worked downstairs. He thought that it must have been her birthday or Mother’s Day, since it wasn’t where she normally ate breakfast.

  “Why does everyone have a computer in their head except me?” he’d asked her.

  His mother placed her cutlery down purposefully, avoiding his gaze, looking as if she’d been expecting this moment yet was still taken aback it was here.

  “Well, they tried to put a computer in you when you were younger, but you rejected it,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Aw, it wasn’t your fault, silly.”

  “I don’t even remember it.”

  “You were just a baby, darling. Three times they tried, and every time you got ill so they stopped.”

  “But why?”

  “They gave up. Three strikes: you’re out, darling.”

  “No, why did I get ill?”

  “Nobody knows. They said it must have been something to do with the way your body was made up, but they couldn’t say what. So you’re a little ol’ mystery to medical science, darling.”

  “Won’t they try again?”

  “No, darling. You’re too old now.”

  He fell silent. She peered at him.

  “You don’t need brainware, you know?” she said gently. “The human race survived perfectly well without it for millions of years. The only thing is you can’t control sickness or pain so well, so that’s why you have to look after yourself and make sure you take your pills – to keep your immune system nice and built up.”

  “But there’s so much I can’t do.”

  “Like what?” she asked, though she didn’t wait for a response. “You’re just as capable as anyone else, just as good. In fact, you’re something most people would give their eye teeth to be … do you know what it is?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re special, darling,” she said. “You’re one in a million – more than one in a million. Don’t you see how special you are?”

  He looked at her. There was so much he wanted to say, but he didn’t have the words. He wanted to tell her about the way other kids played games he couldn’t join in with; about how they asked him questions and laughed at how he didn’t know the answers; about the unending multitude of insulting names they had for him; about how he was an exile in a world of telepaths, making him different, not special, and being different wasn’t good; about how he was only a kid but somehow he knew that what he lacked had handed him a lifetime of heartache in its place; about the doubt and distrust and pity he saw in other people’s eyes – even his father’s eyes. Especially his father’s eyes.

  There was so much he wanted to say to her, but instead he said, “Yes, I see.”

  He hadn’t understood back then just how much worse it would get. The dirty looks, the name-calling, the exclusion from play were just for starters. Kids were cruel. When he was older they’d started inflicting physical pain on him, just to be entertained by his reaction. No matter how many times they were told not to do it by adults the tormenting continued. Children couldn’t understand the true hatefulness of pain. Nor, for that matter, could adults. He believed that, secretly, they were just as entertained by his squirms and yelps and angry remonstrations as the kids were. His entire adolescence had been like being forced to walk a winding, tripwire-strewn path while wearing a blindfold. There was always something new to single him out, always some new cross he alone had to bear. The hair that kept growing, no one skilled enough to cut it properly. The braces on his wayward teeth. The terrible acne that had marred his teenage skin. How jealous he’d been of everyone else. He could still feel it now: the crushing, crushing jealousy…

  Well, no more, he thought. The time of Homo cyberneticus had come and gone, and the age of Homo sapiens had returned.

  Looking around the room, he thought about the house’s owners again, feeling a strange kind of affection for them, as if they’d left behind all these possessions – the food and the books and the music and the gun – especially for him. They were his anonymous benefactors. He didn’t feel bad about taking their things: he felt they would have approved, since they would have approved of him. Unlike everyone else, they wouldn’t have minded about the technology missing from his body; in fact, they would have revelled in it, and maybe, with their love of all things old and vanished, they would have even envied him. They would have seen him as being 100 per cent human, 100 per cent natural (apart from the genetic modifications). To them, he would have been like a time traveller, reminiscent of the way the human ra
ce had once been: those ghosts by the billion who had lived fast, brief and pain-filled lives, who had borne witness to the passing of time written on each other’s faces, and for whom history had bequeathed a slew of epithets: the agers, the diers, the short-timers, the mortals. The plain old unlucky. They would have regarded him as somebody who was fascinatingly whole rather than pitifully deficient. They wouldn’t have assumed he was a mental cripple or a criminal. Perhaps for centuries they’d been living here, within easy walking distance, but he’d never gotten to meet them. And now he never would.

  * * *

  In the ground-floor living room he tested the weight of his holdall. It was heavy. He’d have trouble running with it if he had to. It was still raining, so he hoped he it wouldn’t come to that. He hefted the holdall onto his back and made sure the straps were comfortable.

  He left the way he’d come in, slamming the door shut behind him. Instantly, he knew he’d made a mistake: he hadn’t even checked to see if the coast was clear before stepping outside. He felt eyes on him and heard a voice. He froze, eyes darting this way and that, the rain thudding irritatingly on the peak of his cap.

  It was a moment before he saw it. Across the road, sitting on the arm of a bench under the shelter of a porch, was a female zombie. It was oriental-looking, with a dark but sickly-looking complexion and thick matted hair plastered to its scalp. Its clothes were torn and frayed and its blouse had flopped down on one side, revealing a bloodied breast. One hand was behind its back, while the other was slipped down the front of its skirt. The mercurial pinpoints of its pupils were locked onto him.

  “You me fuck!” it shouted across the street in a coarse, heavy accent. “You me fuck! You want? You fuck!”

  The hand down its skirt was moving; evidently it was playing with itself. He bristled with contempt and revulsion. He’d seen this kind before. He called them “honeytrappers”. The hand behind its back would be holding a knife or a hand tool or some other implement, and if he got close enough it would launch a frenzied attack on him with it. He’d seen it happen to zombies more than once. He stared at the creature with hatred blazing in his eyes. It was trying to lure him with the one thing it thought he couldn’t resist, mocking his mindless uncontrollable maleness, taunting him with its sex the way women always had. It was representative of the lot of them. They’d all known that people of an acybernetic persuasion made poor lovers, or at least the male ones did. What good was a man without computer-controlled climaxes and erections as indefatigable as Everard’s? But the trap had never stood a chance. He wasn’t a hormonal youngster any more; he’d be in his 100s soon. He’d done battle with his impulses and conquered them a long time ago. He wished he could use his test shots on the creature, but the gun wasn’t loaded and he didn’t know how to work the safeties yet. He’d have liked to have put a couple of bullets right between the bitch’s eyes.

  As he watched, it brought the hand it had been keeping behind its back into view, as if it had realised he wasn’t going to fall for the trap and there was no longer any point in concealing the weapon. It was a huge, blood-stained carving knife. He had no doubt the sick thing would cut off his balls and eat them right in front of him if it was given half a chance.

  “You me fuck! You … fuuuucck…”

  The zombie’s voice went lower, slower, as it drew the blade across its exposed forearm. Old cut marks were there already, and he realised the torn clothes were the result of it stabbing itself. So it was a self-harmer too. As the blade moved across its skin, the new incision, a dark red line that looked black from a distance, produced no blood, as if every last drop of blood in the creature’s body had congealed like a corpse’s.

  He reopened the front door and squeezed through with his holdall. It would be safer to leave via the back door; the zombie was likely to follow him if it saw where he was going. He looked back. As he did so, the thing lifted the knife and drove it point-first into its crotch, tearing a new hole effortlessly through the ragged skirt. David winced, looking away too late. It didn’t react to the self-inflicted wound at all; it didn’t know what pain was – had never known. Instead, a grotesque leering grin played around its half-open mouth, as if it was trying to convince him that it was deriving pleasure from the knife. He’d seen enough. He closed the door and locked it.

  Brimming with rage, he stomped through the hall and into the kitchen. The disgusting thing had ruined his discovery of the Lighthouse (a name so appropriate he’d adopted it without thinking), tainting it with its deranged display. He’d been in a good mood until it had put in appearance, or at least what passed for a good mood these days.

  He unlocked the back door and stepped into the rain again. Beyond the cramped backyard, a wooden door opened onto a narrow lane lined with identical doors that opened onto more cramped backyards. Going down the lane would be like running the gauntlet on some freakishly real ghost train track, where a zombie might pop out and kill you at any moment. The dripping sound of the rain, echoing spookily in the confines of the lane, made it even more daunting. But there was no other choice.

  It’ll be fine, he told himself. Just walk.

  He went at an even pace, eyes moving to each door as he approached it, the weight of the marble rolling pin reassuring in his hand. Every nerve in his body felt ready to react, and he concentrated on the steady rhythm of his breathing to combat fear the way a person might have focused on the ticking of a metronome to block out unwanted noise.

  The lane offered up no unpleasant surprises, and he was relieved when he could take a left between two houses. Ahead was the main road, well out of sight of the zombie if it had stayed where it was, but before he got there something caught his eye: a phrase somebody had written in blue ink or paint on the walls of the houses either side of him, the first part on the left, the second on the right.

  Wealth and fame are our religions

  The rich and famous our gods

  He couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment, clearly a quote from somebody or something, but from whom or what he didn’t know. It was strange to see it here, where such a thing would surely have been quickly removed before the disaster. Had somebody daubed the quotation on the wall just before the virus had struck? Was this a final message graffitied by a member of a doomed race? If it was it seemed apt, since fame and wealth – the two things human beings had desired the appearance of most in life – had been amongst the first things to vanish so absolutely with the death of civilisation, exposed for the transient illusions they had always been. There could be no fame beyond the end of civilisation itself, and now even the most overflowing coffers and the most opulent assets were worth precisely nothing. Thanks to a single virus, wealth and fame were no longer religions, and the rich and famous were no longer gods.

  * * *

  That evening, after a meal courtesy of the Lighthouse’s excellent “real” food, he read the gun’s user manual from cover to cover, practised switching the safeties on and off, and loaded and unloaded the magazines. Then he dry-fired it over and over. He resolved to fire the test shots tomorrow, wondering how good a shot he’d be, glad – for once – there would be no one around to judge him.

  He went to bed relatively early, leaving a night light on as he always did; nowadays his nightmares – often they featured the church – were such that waking from them into total darkness was out of the question. He was woken before he’d entered deep sleep by a horrible noise coming from the vent. The rain had cleared up late in the afternoon and the zombies were making up for lost time. The usual sounds they made wouldn’t have woken him, but this was something else; a terrible, desperate howling that kept stopping and starting unpredictably, undulating in pitch and volume as it did. The howl was possibly of fear and unquestionably of pain, which all but ruled out a human source. He’d heard its kind several times before, and thought it must be the cry of a starving dog or some other creature. The disturbing sound dragged on and on, lodging itself in his consciousness, impossible to ignore. />
  Finally, after an hour that felt five times as long, it stopped. A long while passed before he was able to get back to sleep.

  CHAPTER 8

  D + 191

  It was a fine, clear morning. David Lawney walked along Marshall Road where it ran level with a set of train tracks. Straight ahead a flyover supported the motorway with its procession of motionless traffic. It could have been a snapshot of any normal day before the virus, if it weren’t for the rotting corpses looking out of their vehicles’ windscreens in mute indifference to the passage of time. He’d decided upon using a large open area for test-firing the gun, and the closest he could find on a map was formed by playing fields off of Temple Mills Lane. If any unfriendlies (he was feeling suitably military-minded for the occasion) were attracted by the shots, he’d see them coming from a mile off. Maybe they’d even volunteer to be targets for him.

  After crossing the train tracks via an old footbridge, he arrived at the playing fields, which were overgrown but not to such an extent that it posed a problem. In the middle of a field he trampled down a patch of grass and built a small tower using items that were both abundant and useless, making them perfect for target practice: Bloxes. The raw material that had once fed a world’s population was now nothing more than bullet fodder.

  He walked off a distance he estimated to be seven yards, where he loaded the gun and released the safeties. Standing with his feet apart, his left hand gripping his right wrist, he aimed carefully at the topmost Blox and pulled the trigger.

  Bang!

  “Christ!” he gasped.

  The gun’s report and its recoil had startled the life out of him. The sound of the shot rebounded for a long while; in the still morning air it had sounded loud enough to waken the dead – or the living dead in this godforsaken world. The pistol was nothing like modern-day weapons, which didn’t recoil and were all but silent. But what really bothered him was that he had no idea where the bullet had ended up, except that it was nowhere near the pile of Bloxes.