Doomware

  “Has it ever happened before?” the boy asked.

  “Well, there’ve been plenty of sicknesses before, but never anything like this, no.”

  It was true and it was incredible. The devastating gamut of a terrible plague had been concertinaed down beyond all imagining, unfolding as if time had slipped into fast forward, the whole thing over and done with in less than a day. There had been no race to identify the bug responsible as with previous epidemics. No struggle to locate its point of origin. No burning of the bodies to try and limit its spread (the bodies were too busy fighting each other over mouthfuls of cold flesh). No hope of a vaccine or a cure. The rapidity of the disaster reaffirmed his belief that the virus was man-made.

  Cy-vis tended to sort themselves into two categories: the “for gain” and the “for glory”. The latter were usually brainchildren of the disillusioned and the bored: those nameless, faceless exiles from reality who’d been hidden away all over the globe, dotted here and there from the deepest subterranean basement to the tallest high-rise. These people had frittered away their overabundance of time on brainware-enabled erotica, alter egos whose virtual lives were as thrilling as their real ones were mundane, and, occasionally, fantasies of virus-borne subversion; from the criminal elements excluded from mainstream society and the “messers with people’s heads”, who did it purely for personal amusement, to the offspring of the over-privileged bourgeoisie, striving for fame and kudos in a world where such things were ever more difficult to attain. Typically they were individuals who, for one reason or another, had gross misconceptions about the ease with which they’d be caught, or the severity with which they’d be punished – or sometimes both. It was easy to pin down the who – roughly – but the how and the why were different matters altogether.

  Nobody had foreseen a cy-vi designed for such utterly merciless destruction, and, if they had, they certainly hadn’t prepared for one with the means to carry it out. It had been a virus with a purpose: primarily, death. And death itself wasn’t what it used to be. For the greater part of human history it had been the great leveller, ubiquitous and inevitable, the unconquerable ender of all life stories. But in the pre-virus world of computer-controlled biological systems backed up by modern medicine, a world of the perpetually young and healthy, dying was passé. It wasn’t an accepted part of life any more, even if the acceptance had only come via symbolic defence mechanisms such as those described in The Denial of Death. Instead, death was an evanescent phantom haunting only the most unfortunate of lives: the misadventurers and the war dead, the murder victims and the irrevocably suicidal. For most people it was abnormal, unnecessary, irrelevant, and, if it did happen, truly tragic.

  For the virus’s creators to have caused so many tragedies in one go… He found it difficult to believe that anyone could have intended it to happen the way it had. He’d held a fairly jaded view of society before the calamity, but he’d never come close to wishing such wanton violence on the world. What possible reason, however prompted by madness or wrath or disconnection from reality, could ever have been motivation enough? Motivation for genius at that, since anything capable of defeating all the protections in place – all the firewalls and the antiviral measures and the heuristic algorithms – had to have been touched by the hand of genius. How the hell had they done it? Had genius and madness, the uncomfortable bedfellows they so often were, combined to bring about the ultimate act of genocide – or the ultimate act of genocide and suicide combined? For it not to have been suicide, the creators of the virus must have somehow made themselves immune to their own invention, but had they really been intent upon living in a world such as this, effectively as alone and endangered as he and the boy were?

  Then there was the whole question of zombification. Why turn half of the world’s population into zombies? There was no reason he could think of that didn’t involve the praxis of sheer evil.

  Of course, it was possible that human beings hadn’t created the virus directly, that instead it had been invented by some artificial intelligence, but he thought the chances of it remote. There were strict controls over such things – laws dictated by TITANN, The International Treaty on Artificial Neural Networks – to say nothing of inherent limitations. Human intelligence had evolved over millions of years, developing the ability to theorise beyond the knowable, to believe in things for which there was no tangible proof. God. Love. The soul. Truly self-aware AIs were too perfect, too bound by logic, too tormented by the pointlessness of their own existence. They were prone to madness and suicide, and were notoriously difficult to sustain and control, making viable AIs a long way off. Besides, who would have been crazy enough to unleash an intelligence so intent upon wiping out its creator’s entire race?

  There were many unanswered questions; the only thing David was certain of was the fact that these questions would remain unanswered.

  “Where are we going?” the boy asked.

  “Just a little place I know.”

  On Church Road they turned right into a small arcade.

  “That’s it,” said David, pointing. “Zena’s.”

  Inside the shop they rooted through the racks of clothes. David stuffed anything that looked like it might fit into his holdall, against the protestations of the boy, who denounced some of the items for being “too girly”.

  “I won’t wear them,” he said matter-of-factly.

  David gave a wry smile, feeling strangely reassured by the boy’s objections. Some things really didn’t change, he thought.

  “No arguments,” he said. “That’s the third condition, okay?”

  “Okay,” the boy conceded, his tone begrudging, reminding David of himself 90 years ago. “When are we going to my old place?”

  “When it rains next.”

  “Okay.”

  On the way back to the flat, the boy grabbed hold of his hand again and David looked down at him and winked.

  CHAPTER 20

  D + 229

  When he saw where the boy had been holed up for the past seven months his heart sank. A gloomy staircase surrounded by rusty railings led down to the front door of the place: a basement flat, the look of which gave David the ludicrous impression it was furious with the house above for being there, for squashing it down and keeping it interred. Even upon cursory inspection he could tell it was hopelessly indefensible, despite its bunker-like appearance. “Hole” would probably turn out to be a fitting title for it – either that or tomb-in-waiting. That the boy was still alive became more of a wonder as the days went by.

  There was something undeniably childish about the way the boy had gone to ground, like a rabbit burrowing beneath the terror of the hawks’ talons, while he had watched it all unfold from three storeys up. But, then again, he’d simply remained where he’d always been, whereas the boy had made it clear that staying at his parents’ house hadn’t been an option. He suspected the boy had suffered the same horror as himself: being attacked by his own zombified mother, but every time the boy was questioned about it he clammed up, and David was unwilling to press him.

  The street the flat was on – Tennyson Road, well outside of his previous search parameters – was strewn with litter being picked over by a couple of ragged-looking Patterdale terriers. The dogs watched them from a distance through sheets of rain, their movements jerky with apprehension; such animals had learned to give human beings, their former keepers, as wide a berth as possible. There were no trees here, nor greenery of any kind. There was an imposingly bad feel about the place. Unlike most parts of London, this area had never been what you could call sought-after; unless you counted the time the Olympics had visited long ago, in a time when the Games had been a challenge to a person’s physical capabilities rather than the prowess of their brainware programmers, the Olympic Park a short walk away only a distant reminder of its origins. Shawn said he’d lived with his parents nearby, making him think they hadn’t been a wealthy family, but the most he could get out of him when it came to their profes
sions was that his father had been a “manager” and his mother a “leader”.

  The boy bounded down the steps. Whatever misgivings David had about the place, the basement flat had been the boy’s home, had sheltered him through his darkest hours, making him as comfortable here as he was in his third-floor flat. There was an unmistakable note of enthusiasm in the boy’s demeanour, as if he couldn’t wait to share some secret with him, as he turned and said, “Come on – it’s down here.”

  Inside it was, more or less, the way he’d imagined it would be from the outside. The place was cramped and musty-smelling, its uneven mixture of natural and artificial light far from easy on the senses. Litter from the poor diet of foraged food the boy had been subsisting on almost filled one room, while another contained the items they’d come here for, which were precisely the kind of things he’d anticipated too: toys, toys and more toys, and a couple of items he suspected were improvised weapons. Toy guns and home-made cudgels lay side by side, forming a disquieting juxtaposition of the make-believe and the real: the new paradigm of must-have accessories for an uninfected child of Earth. There were no photographs, no books, no disks; the kid had clearly gotten no chance to take anything from his real home. David couldn’t help feeling a numb kind of resentment towards the objects; ever since he’d stepped inside the flat he’d felt cornered, making him edgy and eager to leave. We’re risking our lives for this crap, he thought. Not that he blamed the boy. Why shouldn’t he have these things? God knew he’d lost everything else.

  This thought was reaffirmed when the boy proudly held up a green plastic dinosaur and said, “Look: this is Jerry. I talked to him when I had no one else. He told me things, told me everything would be all right.”

  “That’s great,” said David. “Hurry up now; we can’t stay long.”

  “He said you’d come along one day … and he was right.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  David looked around the place as Shawn cherry-picked items for the holdall. He pictured the boy all alone down here for months on end, so close to death at all times, the only thing to talk to a plastic representation of a species that was almost on a par with mankind when it came to sudden extinctions. It was strange to envision the different perspectives from which they had regarded the period of post-apocalypse, from below ground and above, the boy in his warren and he on his battlement.

  When Shawn had finished with the holdall, David said, “Okay, now show me where your clothes are.”

  The tiny master bedroom had an en suite bathroom and smelt worse than the rest of the flat. Being so young, Shawn had yet to learn the basics of housekeeping such as washing clothes and cleaning a toilet. They quickly piled his motley collection of dirty clothes into bags. There wasn’t that much to take, all of it scavenged from one place or another, and the majority of it appearing to be, by David’s estimation, either too big or too small.

  They returned to the living room, where the boy asked, “Will we be back?”

  “I don’t know,” David said, before adding gently, “I don’t think so, little man.”

  The boy’s gaze swept around, his eyes mournful. The look he gave the place might have been the same look a shipwrecked sailor gave to their desert island as they watched it recede into the distance from the stern of a rescuing ship: glad to be leaving, yet ineffably saddened, conflicted by the equal measures of gratitude and resentment they felt towards the tiny patch of terra firma that had both saved their life and held them prisoner. Even though, by now, his desire to get out of there was verging on desperation, David didn’t have the heart to rush the boy. He could sense the importance of this moment. The boy’s departure from his warren had to have a certain decorum about it, so as to ensure a proper sense of closure. A dreadful chapter in the boy’s life was coming to an end, and their leaving would signal the turning over of the final leaf.

  When they eventually stepped outside, laden down with their haul, it was still raining.

  The boy didn’t look back so much as once as they walked away.

  * * *

  They spent the next fortnight talking and playing games in between lavish – by sans-morpher standards – meals and sporadic spells of redecorating Shawn’s new room. Above all, the time was spent simply getting to know each other. David was impressed by the boy’s resilience. When they’d first met he’d envisioned a painful, protracted struggle to reach him through a haze of post-traumatic stress, but thankfully it wasn’t so. The boy effortlessly engaged with him, his de facto guardian, laughing at his feeble jokes and asking him a never-ending stream of questions. Although there were moments when he seemed to drift off, disconnecting from his surroundings, undoubtedly thinking black thoughts, moments were all they amounted to. He didn’t tend towards long periods of moroseness or introspection, nor did he appear to be frightened when they ventured outside; as long as they stayed together, often hand in hand, he appeared to be quite at ease. It was hard to believe he was dealing with the same kid who’d hid, crying and wailing, under a lorry, and who’d sat, stony-faced and lifeless, in his bath. Shawn had adjusted quickly to his changing circumstances, welcoming the good and accepting the unavoidable, displaying the wondrous adaptability of youth. In all likelihood, he had adapted to the whole nightmare of Armageddon in a way only a child could.

  Any worries David had had about what had happened to the boy during the time he’d been alone faded away along with the thousand-yard glaucoma that had haunted his eyes, like scales falling from a snake’s eyes, revealing the renewed health beneath. He seemed to have stayed one step ahead of the zombies at every turn, more by luck than design, and for that he almost felt like thanking his Petri dish-gazing God. Even so, some topics of conversation brought the cold glaucoma back in full force, especially when he talked about members of his family or his pet dog Tammy, the black Labrador who’d been both adored and adoring, and whom his mother had killed with her bare hands the first day of the virus. Acyberneticism was also a subject that turned him glassy-eyed, something that David understood and accepted without question. He could feel the boy’s internal conflict, his awkwardness and embarrassment, his immature psyche branded with the shame of being different in the same way his had been. Such was Shawn’s discomfiture with their common affliction – now their common deliverer from death – that they barely spoke about it. When questioned about pills the boy just shrugged and went silent, eventually declaring that he “didn’t take them anyway”. David knew this was a lie, but didn’t pressure him, eager to avoid every topic Shawn found difficult lest he find himself groping around for a way of banishing the thousand-yard blankness again. They had all the time in the world to talk about such things when Shawn was ready.

  Although more streetwise and grown-up than an ordinary kid his age, Shawn had lost none of the quixotic enthusiasm of youth, which was as infectious as the virus that had wiped out every other instance of it. He loved playing games; any type of game, but especially those based on numbers or words, which he excelled at. David had an old flat-screen games compendium that still worked, and the boy amazed him by consistently solving anagrams and working out sums before he could. In terms of physical games the best they could do was playing with a ball on the second-floor landing, an activity the boy seemed to enjoy nonetheless.

  Getting Shawn’s weight back to normal came high on David’s list of priorities, and he spent more time preparing meals than he’d ever done in his life; the months spent alone hadn’t been conducive to cooking proper meals, and he had much to learn. He pottered about the kitchen, bouncing between a pile of old cookery books and his cooking appliances like a tennis ball between racquets, the boy watching the proceedings with hunger in his eyes and questions on his lips. Shawn would then be banished to the dining table five minutes before the serving of the food, which he would greet with wide eyes and clapping hands, wolfing it down gratefully, as amazed at the riches being bestowed upon him as Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy. For his part, David felt his appetite and hi
s palate returning, and there was always the boy’s excited delight as reward for his efforts. For the first time in ages David found himself looking forward to mealtimes.

  With Shawn’s input the second bedroom, so long neglected, soon took on a different look altogether: one of unapologetic boyishness. He changed the curtains and bedcover in favour of light-blue shades and arranged his action figures and dinosaurs on the windowsill, some facing out towards the zombie-strewn streets as if on watch. He rejected David’s suggestion of a bookcase, an item which had been a vital fixture of his own childhood. While his mobile computer containing his library of e-books had been his most prized possession, he’d still collected old-fashioned hard copies. There was something wonderful about them. The heaviness of them in his hands. The way the leaves turned. The smell of them. He’d been the epitome of an unhappiness-driven bookworm, treating his bookcase as if it were a shrine, the holy objects it contained the lined-up repositories of their authors’ imaginations. He hadn’t quite realised it at the time, but he’d been seeking to avoid reality via the classic ploy of engrossing oneself in the manifold escape hatches of fiction.

  * * *

  The days grew noticeably shorter and temperatures dropped, though it was still mild for the time of year. The zombies, of course, were oblivious to the changing seasons. They didn’t wrap up warm because there was no warmth left in them to lose. If the temperature had been below freezing they wouldn’t have even shivered.

  The third week after the trip to the flat on Tennyson Road brought heavy rain, and David raised the possibility of going to the Lighthouse, a suggestion the boy jumped at when he discovered that David had left a note for him there; for some reason he was anxious to see it.

  When they got there the note was just as it had been left. The boy peeled it from the window with great gentleness, as if it were an ancient manuscript that might flake into dust at the slightest mishandling. A grin played about his lips as he read and reread it, entranced. Then he looked up at its writer and said, “Thank you.”