Doomware

  Bemused, David said, “What for?”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders and shook his blond head; even he couldn’t verbalise the what for. Clutching his letter, he ran off, clattering up the wooden steps to the first floor. David followed him. When he thought about it more, he realised the thank you had been for the simple act of sending a message, once so common an occurrence and now so rare. The message had been intended solely for the boy, something he hadn’t experienced in a long while, and therein lay the root of gratitude, like the way you felt towards an old friend who’d sent you a birthday card when all others had forgotten – the power of a few words addressed only to you.

  On the first floor Shawn stood peering out of the drawing room window. “This is where I saw you first,” he said, looking in the same direction David had been, taking in the exchange of vantage points.

  “It was the second time you’d seen me – remember?”

  “Yes, I meant up close.”

  David showed the record player to the boy, who somehow seemed acquainted with how the otherworldly contraption worked. A record was already on the turntable from his last visit, and after he’d put the needle to it the boy said shortly, “That’s Ella Fitzgerald.”

  “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  Shawn merely shrugged again and changed the subject. “They really didn’t have a morpher? Even before?”

  “Nope. You’ll see for yourself.”

  “If they liked all this old stuff so much, did they have an old car that works too?”

  David was momentarily taken aback. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d have been driving around in it looking for you if they did.”

  He had to admit it was something he hadn’t really thought about, but it stood to reason: if anyone was going to own a vintage, petrol-fuelled car it would be the owners of this place. Maybe it was in a garage nearby, waiting to be discovered as the house had been, clues to its whereabouts squirrelled away if only you knew where to look.

  Shawn hurried off, intent on checking out the other floors.

  “What about the grand tour I was going to give you?” David called after him.

  “I just want a quick look first,” he called back.

  David left the music playing and went downstairs to the fill the holdall with items from the kitchen’s ever-dwindling supplies. Cooking for two, and cooking so well, had meant a dramatic change in his food-gathering routine. If he didn’t keep on top of it they’d be in serious trouble, even if Shawn proclaimed every time they ate that he was sitting down to a banquet that would have sustained him for several days during his time alone. There was no telling how much more malnutrition his system could take before he succumbed to some biological ailment, especially in the absence of prophylactic pills.

  He’d just slammed a cupboard door shut when something caused him to freeze, his eyes staring off towards the front of the house. Drifting from upstairs was a faint sound; a moment passed before he could separate it from the music, and another before he understood what it was.

  It was the sound of the boy screaming.

  CHAPTER 21

  D + 251

  David’s senses told him that his feet were carrying him fast – faster than he could remember, and there’d been times in the recent past when he’d had to move – while his brain told him something else: that he was moving in slow motion, slower than if he’d been running through water, and far too slowly to save the boy. The minimal reassurance he gleaned from each stair as it passed by beneath his feet was tempered by the fact that another replaced it. Ella was singing That Old Black Magic as he passed the drawing room, her voice swelling and then receding beneath him, being replaced by the boy’s cry for help, which to his ears was one long, unbroken ululation that made the back of his neck tingle. It proves he’s still alive, he thought fleetingly. Keep screaming, little man. For God’s sake keep screaming.

  When he reached the third floor he was out of breath but barely noticed it. The boy’s scream was coming from the first room, the small bedroom. Hyper-alert, he immediately took in what was going on. A male zombie stood with its back to him, its arms outstretched towards the boy, who was crouched on top of a wardrobe, his face bright red and streaming with tears of fear as he kicked out at his attacker. Fortunately, the zombie was shorter than average, but it was no less fearsome for it.

  David went to grab the rolling pin – and realised it wasn’t there. Shit! It was still in his jacket pocket, and he’d taken the jacket off downstairs. The gun was down there too. His eyes cast around frantically for an alternative weapon and locked onto one: an ornate brass candlestick sitting on a windowsill – yet another gift from the house’s owners. He grabbed it and stepped into the room. The zombie didn’t notice him and kept groping for the boy, a hiss of seeming agitation emerging from its mouth as its gaunt, jagged-nailed hands fought for purchase on the boy’s flailing legs. David moved behind it and raised the candlestick, gripping it by the holder so the weighted base would do the damage. He stood poised, the peculiar stench of the thing assailing his nostrils. It was the perfect opportunity to strike while it was unawares, but something stayed his hand. For some reason attacking from behind felt wrong – dishonourable almost, as if such a concept as honour applied to these bastard things. Maybe it was just because the boy was there; attacking from behind ran the risk of lowering the boy’s estimation of him. But deeper down was the desire, creeping and unspeakable but undeniably there, to see its face as he finished it off, to revel in its demise.

  “HEY!” he bellowed.

  The zombie turned, its sick, gimlet-eyed gaze falling across him like the shadow of a tombstone. Man and former man regarded each other. David stared into its eyes, both transfixed and repulsed. Looking into the eyes of a zombie was like looking into twin pools of evil; it was painful and soul-destroying, the Medusa-like stare turning a piece of your soul to stone with every passing second, hardening it into a lifeless mass, a state as irredeemable as the eyes’ owner itself. The boy stopped screaming, and the zombie opened its cavernous mouth and said something; it sounded like “who?”, but it might have been a thousand other things or nothing at all.

  David let loose with the candlestick, swinging with all his strength. Brass struck skull, producing a terrible bone-cracking sound, and the zombie’s legs went from under it. David continued the attack as it fell to the floor. He clubbed it furiously about the head with a regular rhythm like a jackhammer, the candlestick transcribing a great arc through the air, aiming for the source of all the trouble: the zombie’s virus-addled brain. He kept on pummelling as it lay prone, not relenting even after it had stopped moving, ignorant of the blood and gore and the boy’s tears, his mind hollering things like “how dare you lay a finger on my boy, you disgusting fucking thing”, and the more prosaic “die, die, die!” He might have been raining down blows on a cockroach for all the emotion he felt for the creature beneath them. He was conscious of nothing but the fact that he was an avenging angel, empowered by his need to protect the boy, insensible with indignant fury. Meanwhile, two floors below, Ella was now gliding through her rendition of I’ve Got The World On A String, the sound of it seeping through the floorboards, its graceful beauty contrasting horribly with the violence going on in the room, adding to the surreal horror of it all.

  The assault came to an abrupt halt, without him being conscious of a decision to stop. He let go of the candlestick and it tumbled to the floor, landing with a resounding clang like a death knell. It was only now he realised how exhausted he was, and for a moment he sagged against the bed, breathless. Then he got to his feet and reached for the boy, who leapt into his arms. David hugged him tight and kissed him on the temple, a hard, fatherly kiss that was like the seal on a new lease of life. The boy was crying hard, his little heart pounding away against his.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, rocking him to and fro. “It’s gone, it’s gone now.”

  They stood like that for a time, the
boy’s feet dangling above the floor while his tears ebbed away, David whispering “okays” as much to himself as to the boy. Inside, he cursed his own foolishness. He’d allowed a misplaced sense that the Lighthouse was somehow sacred to make him reckless. Nothing was sacred in this world any more, he knew that – or at least he ought to have known. Especially now he had a child to think about. He was aghast at his own negligent behaviour, his dereliction of duty. He could have lost the boy – so soon after finding him! It made him ache with a tiny taster of the grief he would have felt had it actually happened.

  Never again, he told himself. Never.

  “I’m sorry,” David said once their heartbeats and respirations had returned to near normal. “I should’ve checked this place when we arrived. It was my fault.”

  “I’m okay,” the boy said as David released him from their embrace. “He didn’t hurt me … he just scared me.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know where he came from. I was looking out the window, and I turned around and he was just… there.”

  “I should never have left you alone.”

  “No, it was my fault,” the boy contradicted him.

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “You said I was never to leave your sight – it was one of your conditions.”

  “Well, yes, but–”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  David looked down into the boy’s blue-eyed face, upon which the expression was earnest and pleading, and felt such warmth flood into his heart, such gratitude over what they’d just escaped, that he had to restrain himself from scooping the boy up in his arms again.

  Instead, he looked away and said, “Okay, little man. I’d better clear this mess up.”

  He cleared the mess up by throwing the zombie’s body out of the nearest window, a task that wasn’t easy given the dead weight of the thing. The boy insisted on helping, unfazed by the corpse’s smashed and bloodied state; on a daily basis he was witness to far worse. In the commotion David’s note had gotten bloodied and trampled on, and the boy smoothed it out and cleaned it up as best he could, before carefully folding it and slipping it into his pocket.

  Downstairs they discovered the zombie’s point of entry: the back door in the kitchen, where it had smashed a pane of glass. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d been packing the holdall, which surprised him since it was plain to see, yet another indicator of how lax he’d been about security.

  Outside he dragged the zombie’s broken body down the street and left it on the pavement, not wanting it to sully the vicinity of the Lighthouse. Someone or something would undoubtedly come along to pick the meat from its bones.

  It wasn’t until they were halfway home, huddled close to each other against the rain, that he wondered whether the zombie had been a former occupant of the Lighthouse – maybe even the owner himself – and he felt a short-lived twinge of regret at having left the body to the vultures of the new world.

  * * *

  Close to midnight that night David woke with a start to find his door slightly ajar and the boy peering at him.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was husky and his eyelids were drooping with sleep.

  “I heard something,” Shawn said, absent-mindedly toying with the door handle.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did it sound like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  At that moment, the sound Shawn must have been referring to came filtering through the vent: it was the howling in pain and fear he’d heard many times before. It came reverberating through the night like something out of The Hound of the Baskervilles; there was no denying it sounded absolutely dreadful. It was about time he blocked up the bedrooms’ vents.

  “Oh that,” he said, shrugging it off. “It’s nothing to worry about. It happens all the time.”

  The boy shuffled his feet nervously. “I don’t like it.”

  “Did it wake you up?”

  The boy shook his head. “I had to go to the toilet.”

  “Well, whatever it is it can’t hurt you, can it? So go on back to bed, okay?” When the boy didn’t move, he added, “It’s okay – go on. It’ll stop in a bit.”

  Still the boy didn’t go. He hovered in the doorway, looking more timid than David had seen him in a long while. What was he hanging around for?

  Finally, the penny dropped.

  He pulled the bedcovers back and said, “You wanna sleep in with me?”

  The boy dashed across the room and hurriedly snuggled under the covers, folding himself into the space in front of David, who wrapped his arms around him, noting the thinness of his body with a power of calculation that was entirely instinctual. The inflated little belly he’d had was gone, giving the impression he’d lost, rather than gained, weight. Still so thin, he thought. Even after all that food.

  He was probably too old for sleeping in an adult’s bed, but who was he to deny him? All those months alone the kid had had no one to turn to when he’d needed comforting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to turn him away now. Besides, as far as he knew this was the first time the boy had woken during the night; normally he curled up with the cat and didn’t make a sound until morning, so there was slim chance that sleeping in the same bed would become a habit.

  The boy seemed to fall asleep straight away, leaving him wide awake and listening to the awful howling outside, which he felt had less to do with the boy’s newfound desire to sleep in his bed than the earlier events of the day did. It felt strange lying next to another human being. It had been years since he’d last experienced it. Who’d been the last person to share his bed? Petra? Or that red-headed woman he’d met online whose name he couldn’t recall? What a lacklustre encounter that had been; yet another one for whom the novelty of acybernetic sex had quickly worn thin. That was more than 20 years ago now. Unaccustomed to sharing a bed, he knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily now. He would sacrifice his sleep; the boy deserved it.

  He was surprised the next morning when he woke after a restful night’s sleep, having drifted off after only a few minutes’ daydreaming.

  * * *

  It happened suddenly, with no foreshadowing, or at least that’s the way it felt. In reality, all the signs had been there from the start; he had simply refused to acknowledge them.

  They were in the living room, playing a game that consisted of forming words from a selection of random letters, when suddenly Shawn chirped, “Didactic! See? Eight letters.”

  “That’s good. What’s it mean?”

  “Adjective: intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruct...”

  The boy’s voice trailed off; he’d caught himself, but too late. In the silence that followed David knew the reason for the abortive sentence. He knew it as suddenly and as surely as he would have known a glass of iced water dashed in his face, even without the boy’s expression, which was a picture of someone who’d just inadvertently given the game away.

  David started to state the obvious out loud, but before he could even get the first word out the boy jumped up and ran from the room. David watched him go, too numbed by what had just happened to stop him. The boy had been quoting the dictionary definition of “didactic”.

  The definition that was stored away in his brainware.

  CHAPTER 22

  D + 274

  Being cybernetic gifted a person with information and abilities, but not necessarily the knowledge with which to interpret or utilise them. In a way, it was a fact he knew better than anyone. And it was never more evident than in the mannerisms of cybernetic children, who were prone to quoting definitions and descriptions, philosophies and equations, without really comprehending what they were saying. They were limited as all immature beings were: by their lack of experience, their nanotechnological brain cells as much in need of connection to each other as their biological counterparts. The boy
reciting, parrot-fashion, such an obvious dictionary definition of a word that was beyond the vocabulary of an average pre-teenager had finally exposed the truth. He was a fool for not having realised it sooner. How much he had assumed! How much he had chosen to disregard, entrenched in his belief that there had only been one method of surviving the virus.

  When he thought about it there had been a litany of signs, and they came at him in a rush like a film on fast forward. The boy slept like a cybernetic: in and out with the ease of a switch being thrown, no hint of insomnia. He was far too good at anagrams and sums, often better than him despite the age difference. His hair and fingernails hadn’t needed cutting since he’d arrived, their growth controlled by brainware. Of course he wasn’t interested in physical books: the world’s library was already there in his head. He’d been reluctant to talk about acyberneticism because there was nothing for him to talk about, while David had misread this reticence as a hallmark of the inner turmoil his own life had been blighted with. Then there was the fact that he was alive in the first place. Would he have survived on his own for so long had he been acybernetic? Brainware worked to optimise bodily functions, including the benefit derived from the consumption of food and water in times of shortage. Without it he would probably have succumbed to starvation or disease.

  But how on earth was he alive at all? Why wasn’t he either dead or zombified like the rest of them?

  David got up and trotted through to Shawn’s room on legs that felt slow to respond. The boy was sitting on his bed with head down and fingers knitted together in his lap, his whole demeanour limp and downcast, as if he’d just been reprimanded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” David asked him from the doorway.