Doomware

by Nathan Kuzack

  He’d believed that he’d killed her. The moment he’d plunged the shard of mirror into her body replayed itself over and over in his nightmares. For as long as he lived the horror of it would remain with him. But, of course, he hadn’t killed her: she’d already been dead. He hadn’t killed her and he hadn’t stopped her either. He thought he knew what the tapping sound was; she’d pulled the piece of mirror out and was carrying it with her, as if out for revenge with it. God only knew what her zombified body had been doing since that dreadful day almost a year ago.

  When he didn’t get up Tarot moved alongside him and took him by the elbow. He got to his feet unsteadily, Tarot’s hand supporting him rather than compelling him, responding to his movements rather than dictating them. He allowed himself to be escorted back to the flat. When he passed the windows he cast his gaze down. He didn’t want to see her, he realised. Nor hear her. On the top floor her muffled cries were more echoes of memory than anything else, but they pained him nonetheless.

  At the flat door he turned to say something to Tarot, but when their eyes met it stalled on his lips. What had he intended to say? It had evaporated from his head completely. He had a feeling it was something stupid like “don’t hurt her” – as if she were capable of feeling pain – but Tarot nodded anyway, seeming to understand whatever it was without being told, with that way he had.

  Inside, he worried about hearing something which might haunt him – gunshots, a final scream, his name being called – but he heard nothing. The boy wanted to play a game and he was happy to oblige, glad of the distraction.

  After a while playing the boy asked, “What’s Tarot doing?”

  “He’s taking care of something for me.”

  “What?”

  David didn’t feel inclined to lie to the boy. “It’s my mum. She’s shown up here. She’s ill like the others.”

  Shawn showed no sign of surprise. “Does she look bad?”

  “I didn’t actually see her.”

  “I see my mum, and my dad – in my memories,” the boy said, as if by way of compensation. “I play them all the time. Sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing it. Do you have memories?”

  David smiled at the question. “Yes, I have memories, but they’re not like yours – not as good, not as perfect.”

  “And I see them when I play back my dreams. It’s like they’re still with me.”

  “Oh, they’ll always be with you.”

  “It makes me sad sometimes though. Sometimes I have to stop them playing ‘cause it’s too much … y’know?”

  “Yes, I know,” David said.

  Tarot was gone longer than he’d anticipated. More than an hour passed before he returned to the flat. They barely spoke as they headed back downstairs. At the main entrance David couldn’t stop himself from checking the area. There was no sign of a struggle, no fresh blood, no brain spatter, no indication she’d ever been there. He didn’t know how Tarot had managed to pull that off, but he grateful for it.

  It was a cold, miserable-looking day. He assumed they would head for the Lighthouse as planned, but at the main road Tarot started striding off in the opposite direction.

  “It’s not that way,” David said dully.

  Tarot stopped and turned. He said nothing, but dipped his head in the direction he was going. David got the message: they weren’t going to the Lighthouse. He followed silently. It felt strange to be outside, but he wasn’t overly jumpy; he felt subdued, still in a semi-trance. A shiver of something swept over him when he looked in the direction of the grenade-destroyed car, followed by a pang of regret that Varley’s body wasn’t still there, not so he could dance on it, but so he could reassure himself that the bastard really was dead.

  They walked south along Ruckholt Road, past the intersection with the atrocity and the entrance to Ruckholt Close. Here they crossed the road and turned right into an alleyway. David couldn’t recall ever being here before. There was nothing of any interest here as far as he knew, and he wondered where Tarot was leading him.

  They came to a large house separated from the terraced houses and blocks of flats surrounding it by an ivy-covered wall. Tarot led them through the wall via a heavy iron gate and into a garden divided from the main house by a box hedge. The garden had evidently been somebody’s pride and joy. There was a flagstoned area with a pair of wooden benches and a stone sundial, rows of plants that had grown out but were still relatively tidy, and at the bottom of the garden an L-shaped pond from which the sound of running water drifted. Although hardly in the full bloom of spring it was still picturesque, quite out of place in the grey starkness of its surroundings. To David, it felt like an urban version of The Secret Garden.

  He had no idea why they were here until he saw it: a patch of disturbed earth in what had probably been a flower bed. At its head was a hastily constructed wooden cross with a name scratched into it: SOPHIA LAWNEY. At the base of the cross had been placed a bunch of white flowers; he didn’t know what type they were, but he thought they looked like snowdrops. He stared, dumbfounded. A grave. He hadn’t even thought of such a thing. He’d never attended a funeral nor visited a grave in his life. Of course, everywhere was one big grave now, but this was something else, something special, a place where he could mourn someone he loved. His mother, at rest at last, all that was mortal of her freed from the tyranny of the virus.

  Tarot appeared to be trying to gauge his reaction. “The cross is just temporary,” he said. “We can find a proper stone … or maybe cover the whole thing with stones.”

  David couldn’t speak. He was stunned that Tarot had done this – that anyone would think of doing this. How had he known about the garden? How had he carried the dead weight of his mother’s body here? How had he known her full name? It all amounted to an unspeakable act of kindness.

  “If there’s somewhere else you’d prefer…” Tarot said in a conciliatory tone. “I know it should be consecrated ground really – a churchyard – but there isn’t one near enough and I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Tarot was obviously concerned he was displeased with the grave. He opened his mouth to tell him it was fine – more than fine: it was wonderful – to thank him unreservedly, but the words wouldn’t come, despite his eagerness to dispel any misunderstanding. Instead, he fell onto his knees before the grave. He tried to hold back his tears out of habit more than anything else, but they were so long overdue there was no stopping them. He hadn’t allowed himself to cry properly since the whole nightmare had begun, hadn’t shed a tear for decades before that, but the sight of his mother’s grave had finally torn the floodgates open; he could do nothing but surrender himself to the flow. He felt Tarot’s arms go around him, supportive rather than restrictive, as before. He clutched at him with his good hand, as if he were afraid of falling, and in fact falling was the sensation he felt – or, rather, it was the sensation of being about to fall. Like in the heart-stopping fraction of a second when you tripped on something, or the weird, quasi-weightlessness of dreams. He was about to plummet straight through the earth, straight down, nothing whatsoever to arrest his descent.

  This, too, Tarot seemed to sense. “I’ve got you,” he said quietly. “I’ve got you.”

  Decades’ worth of tears came pouring out in one go. He did more than just weep: he sobbed into the crook of Tarot’s neck, all pretence at self-control gone, the sobs coming out of him in great roaring spasms that left him gasping for air. He probably hadn’t cried so hard the day he’d been slapped into life by a midwife, fresh from the womb of the woman whose grave he now knelt before. Had a zombie come upon him he would have been quite incapable of defending himself. He wept for his mother and himself and the boy and the world. He pictured the earth spinning in space and he wept for the beauty of it, for the shame of it, for the lunacy of the undead hordes traipsing its surface, for the awful, glorious, grief-inducing absurdity of life itself. Witnessing the raw power of these tears drew echoes of them, solemn and silent, from Tarot’s eyes.r />
  Had there been anyone to observe them in that moment it might have struck them that the whole of history had distilled down to this, the image they formed a perfect symbol of the essence of the human experience.

  Two human beings weeping in each other’s arms.

  CHAPTER 32

  D + 365

  He stared at the swelling waters. The sound they made struck terror into his heart: rushing, roaring, roiling. The waters were unstoppable. Inevitable. He kept running, to ground that was ever higher and higher, but still the waters kept coming. He had a terrible feeling they wouldn’t stop until every last spit of land had been devoured.

  And this was no ordinary water. It scoured everything it touched; it was like acid. When he looked closely at it, past the glints of reflected sunlight and accretions of foam, he caught flashes of things in motion: hands, feet, eyeballs, teeth, hair.

  Bodies.

  Zombies’ bodies.

  Each one intact, but their bones broken in countless places so they flowed like liquid. A flood of death itself, not one scrap of water free of one body part or another.

  He ran higher and higher until he was standing on a mountaintop. The fetid water rushed up on every side. When it reached his shoes he danced and yelped but the water was inescapable. It rushed up, soaking through his clothes and burning his skin. He screamed in pain and terror. The mush of liquefied bodies closed around him, immobilising him, squeezing the air from his lungs.

  Then the bloodless water reached his lips. It surged into his mouth, searing first his throat and then his stomach. His bones shattered. He died, but was not dead. He became one of them: a zombie – a minuscule part of the great mass of moving bodies, forever joined to them, forever lost. Just a nondescript cell in an undead organism.

  Infected at last…

  * * *

  The appearance of his mother, or possibly the occasion of the virus’s first anniversary, had prompted the start of the dream. The flood dream. He supposed it was more nightmare than dream, but it produced none of the effects of his usual nightmares. He never woke up feeling frightened or covered in sweat after having it. He recalled it time after time with a curious sense of detachment, like a scene from a horror movie rendered impotent by repeated viewings.

  The setting of the grave for his mother marked another change: a shift in his attitude towards Tarot. Never again would he feel jealous of him when it came to the boy, nor would he question his motives in the same way. Tarot had proved himself more than once, had probably saved his life more than once; it was time he let go of his jealousy and mistrust. Such things were petty considering the hugely beneficial impact Tarot had had on his and Shawn’s lives.

  The walled garden became a place of personal pilgrimage. He went there alone, partly because he felt guilty that the others didn’t have graves of their own to visit, but mostly because it felt like a place that was just for him, where he was supposed to mourn in private. He decided not to alter the makeshift cross Tarot had erected. The only changes he made to the grave itself were to give it a border of squarish stones from another house’s rock garden, and to place whatever flowers he could find on it. Tarot couldn’t have chosen a better site for the grave: the pleasant surroundings, the benches to sit on, the wall to keep roaming zombies out. But the pièce de résistance of the place was the pond’s water feature. The gentle tinkling of running water was incredibly relaxing, and as the days lengthened and the weather improved he sat there for hours listening to it, lost in thoughts that meandered as steadily as the water flowed.

  After repeated questioning, he discovered that Tarot had buried his wife and son up north. His wife hadn’t become a zombie, but his son had, meaning that before he could be buried Tarot had had to hunt for him and “put him out”, as he euphemistically put it. He’d laid them to rest side by side on a hill overlooking their hometown, a stone’s throw from where he and his wife had first met. David was in awe of the strength of character it must have taken to do such a thing, as well as the strength it took to leave the graves behind. When he’d expressed this, Tarot had merely shrugged, claiming that when the time had come he’d simply laid flowers on the graves and said goodbye. No histrionics necessary. David didn’t think he could give up his mother’s grave so easily. Now that he had it he didn’t want to leave it, which bothered him since Tarot was searching for a means of transport in earnest now. He disappeared for days at a time, often staying out overnight as his search took him further and further afield. David was sure it was only a matter of time before he found a working vehicle, and he would be faced with having to make a decision about whether to leave London.

  CHAPTER 33

  D + 423

  He told – virtually begged – the others not to mark his birthday, but to no avail. The decimal roundness of the number and the graduation to three figures were too important to ignore. A 100th birthday had to be celebrated, even after an apocalypse.

  The boy painted him a picture declaring Happy 1st Century and they gave him presents, mainly books and disks they’d found and thought he might like. Tarot cooked him a birthday dinner of braised steak and chips followed by steamed pudding with a candle in it, after which they insisted on singing him Happy Birthday, much to his amusement.

  When asked what he’d have for his birthday if he could have anything, the boy thought long and hard and said, “I’d like someone to play with.”

  “You’ve got us to play with, haven’t you?” David said, a little wounded.

  “Yes, I know, but I meant another kid.”

  “A girl?” Tarot asked, hinting at the possibility of romance, an intimation which Shawn completely ignored.

  “If it had to be, but I’d prefer a boy. Girls are boring.”

  The two men grinned at each other.

  After Shawn had gone to bed they watched an old film (A Clockwork Orange) and drank wine.

  Then Tarot said, “It’s time for your present.”

  “You mean I haven’t had it yet?” David said.

  Tarot stood up, shaking his head. “No. Get up.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to strip off.”

  David laughed. “What for?”

  “I’m giving you a massage – that’s my present.”

  “It’s okay: I don’t want a massage.”

  “You won’t be saying that after I’ve finished with you. Come on, don’t be shy.”

  David did feel shy, mostly because he felt a little self-conscious of his scars, but Tarot persisted. He stripped down to his underwear while Tarot set some background music and rubbed some lavender-scented aromatherapy oil onto his hands. Then he instructed him to lie face down on the sofa.

  As soon as Tarot went to work on his shoulders David felt relaxed and light-headed. He’d never had a proper massage before, but he suspected that Tarot was an expert masseur.

  “That’s good,” David said dreamily. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “You think I could’ve lived this long without learning a trick or two?”

  “I bet.”

  “You’re tenser than hell up here. You could probably do with having this done every day for a while.”

  “If you say so.”

  They made small talk as Tarot worked down his back, pummelling the stress from him, relaxing his subject with his lazy voice as much as anything else.

  David watched Tarot’s bare arms out the corner of his eye. “What’s the meaning of your tattoos?”

  “Well, one’s The Hanged Man. When it comes to Tarot cards most guys go for The Chariot or The High Priestess or The Magician, but The Hanged Man has always been my favourite.”

  “A bit depressing, isn’t it?”

  “No. You just need to read him right, is all. He’s a divine character. Being upside-down gives him a different perspective on the world, and the tree he’s hanging from represents a unity with nature. He’s often looked upon as an outcast and a fool, but in reality he’s an integral part of life,
both separate and joined to everything at the same time. He’s no fool.”

  “And the snake?”

  “That’s an Ourobosos, an ancient symbol for eternity and the cyclical nature of life. It also represents the human psyche, or the immortality of the soul. The snake is consuming itself, providing sustenance for itself for ever.”

  “I see.”

  The massage continued for a while in silence, Tarot’s hands moving gradually more slowly, applying less and less pressure.

  “I want you to turn over,” Tarot said.

  The words were heavy with meaning. David had a suspicion where this was all leading, and he felt no inclination towards stopping the course of events. He turned over.

  Tarot ran his hands up his lean body, from the base of his stomach to the top of his chest, his thumbs moving up the centre of his body and sweeping outwards, over his nipples, over the scars left behind by Varley, in what was a gesture that was undeniably erotic.

  “So this whole massage thing of yours was just a way of gettin’ into my pants, was it?” David said.

  The masseur lifted his eyes until they met those of his client. “There are still some pleasures left in this world, you know?”

  CHAPTER 34

  D + 430

  He turned the shower off and started drying himself. It was the warmest day of the year so far and the window stood ajar to allow a cool breeze to pull through. Slowly, he became aware of a sounding drifting to him from outside. He stopped to listen. The sound was distant and fluctuating. His ears strained to catch it as it travelled on gusts of wind, or possibly the source of the sound itself was in motion. For a while he thought he might be imagining it, but it grew in intensity until it was unbroken and unmistakable. He wasn’t imagining it.

  David stepped out of the bath and opened the window to its fullest extent as the vehicle came into view. Tarot had found what he’d been looking for. The vehicle was large, silver and black with a sunroof, box-shaped boot and five seats, as far as he could see. He didn’t know what type it was, but to his mind it was jeep-like. It looked to be in good condition despite its age. The racket the thing made was incredible: deep and throaty and mechanical, not at all like modern vehicles. He was surprised there wasn’t a swarm of zombies chasing after it.