Doomware

  “You don’t have any information about where the message came from?” David asked the boy.

  “No.”

  “Nothing whatsoever?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, this is what I want you to do: go to your room and get dressed as quickly as you can. When the timer reaches ten minutes, tell me. Just call it out, okay? And every minute that passes after that, got it? Good, now off you go.”

  He kissed the boy and sent him off, feeling his heart pounding in his chest as he watched him go. His ominous premonition had been correct: this was surely the trial they’d been hurtling towards. What did offliners want with the boy? Did they know he was uninfected? To them, a fully functional cybernetic brain would be a valuable asset, allowing them to tap into a source of vast information and uncorrupted computing power, perhaps the only such source of its kind left in the world. They wouldn’t think twice about turning the boy into a living computerised slave. But what if they didn’t know he was cybernetic? Maybe they wanted him for a different reason. The word “catamite” forced its way to the forefront of his mind, making him bite down on his lower lip in anguish. Maybe they were just growing tired of fucking dead flesh. He pushed the abhorrent notion aside furiously. No, they had to have known about the boy’s cybernetic nature. How else had they expected their message to be received if not via the boy’s brainware?

  In the bedroom Tarot was fast asleep. David pulled the covers off of him and hauled him into a sitting position. Tarot was so sleepy he didn’t put up much of a protest.

  “Get up,” David barked. “We’re in trouble.” He threw back the curtains and opened the door to the balcony. As expected, the wall of zombies completely surrounded the apartment complex. Beyond the wall, now cut off from them, was the Land Rover. “Look. When was the last time you looked out?”

  Tarot didn’t answer. Bleary-eyed, he got to his feet and shuffled to the balcony, squinting into the daylight. When he saw the ranks of motionless zombies a look of incomprehension fell over his face that might have been comical had it not been for the direness of the situation. For David, it was like watching a replay of himself from moments earlier.

  “What the hell..?” Tarot breathed.

  David spoke quickly. He told him about the message and the timer and the zombies being controlled by offliners. They stared at each other. It was a lot for anyone to take in, David knew, but he was worried that Tarot was still reeling from last night, that he was still overwrought and not himself.

  Tarot rubbed his face and blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Has he sent a reply?”

  This caught David by surprise: it hadn’t occurred to him to ask. “Er, no. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Good, make sure he doesn’t,” Tarot said, as he hastened to get dressed, causing David to do likewise. “Get together everything we need to take from here. This place is compromised; we won’t be coming back. I’ll get the weapons ready.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “It doesn’t look like they’ve touched the Rover. We’ll wait for them to make a move and then blow the claymores. They might not know how well armed we are; it’s the only element of surprise we’ve got.”

  “D’you think it’s those offliners?”

  “That’d be my bet. That’s why I don’t want him sending a reply. You can’t negotiate with offliners.”

  David breathed a mental sigh of relief. Tarot’s centuries-old brain was seeing things from a tactical perspective far superior to his own, and his usual steely composure seemed to have returned in full force. He was back to being the person they needed now more than ever.

  After dressing and making sure the boy hadn’t replied to the message, David began throwing things into bags. They would be taking only what they could carry, so he took only what was essential. There was no time to be very organised about it, and decisions about what was essential and what wasn’t were made on the spot. His prophylactics, the boy’s clothes and photographs of his family he deemed essential. Food he dithered over for a moment, before deciding they couldn’t carry it. They’d find some elsewhere.

  Before he knew it the boy was calling out that the timer would run out in ten minutes’ time. David rushed around the apartment, his heart thudding in his chest, trying not to let the unnerving scene outside catch his eye. The question of why they wanted the boy refused to leave his mind. What would they do to him? Just thinking about it made him feel sick with worry. He wouldn’t let it happen, zombie army or no zombie army. They’d have to take the boy over his dead body – and Tarot’s too, he was certain of that. Had they really thought they’d just hand him over? Had they really expected that he, David Lawney, would send the child – the beautiful Boy King unsullied by sickness who called him father – out like some sacrificial lamb to be carted off by hordes of the undead? The bastards were beneath contempt. They might have stooped to such a low to save their own skins, but not everyone was as spineless and morally bankrupt as them.

  Time passed impossibly quickly, the boy’s countdown increasing in volume as the number of minutes diminished. The three of them flew around the apartment, each in his own world of fear and frantic activity. Amid the commotion, and without being told to, the boy fetched Tom’s box and set about getting the recalcitrant cat into it; he clearly wasn’t about to leave the pet behind.

  When the boy called two minutes they congregated on the top-floor landing, where David caught sight of the claymores. Each was a flat, compact hunk of metal, curved horizontally and standing on its own little legs, one side bearing the admonition: THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY. Inside were metal balls that would become airborne when the mine detonated, spraying the entire area like buckshot from a gun. He’d never liked the menacing devices, had always been guiding the boy out of their presence, but he was grateful they were there now, now that they stood a chance of delivering them from evil, and equally as grateful for Tarot’s foresight in setting them up.

  Tarot had wedged the lift doors open. He was bristling with weapons and equipment, and from a holdall full of weapons and ammunition he handed David a sub-machine gun.

  “I don’t think they’re armed,” Tarot said, referring to the zombies. “At least that’s something.”

  David hadn’t thought of that: there was nothing to stop them from being armed to the teeth with all manner of weapons: clubs, knives, even guns. But the scant consolation he gleaned from such a thing evaporated when something else occurred to him.

  They wanted the boy alive.

  The puppet horde wasn’t devoid of arms out of a sense of fair play, to give them a sporting chance of winning; it was because the offliners weren’t prepared to risk accidental injury to their young prize. Then again, since when had zombies needed weapons in order to maim and kill?

  “Everyone get in the lift,” Tarot said. “I’m gonna look out. Shawn, I want you to count down the last thirty seconds loud enough so I can hear, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Tarot disappeared into the apartment. David ushered the boy into the lift, where Tarot had placed another holdall chock-full of weaponry. The lift wasn’t the most spacious, and it was obvious that once they were all inside, along with their belongings and their weapons and the cat box, there would be hardly any room to move. David understood what Tarot planned to do: they would ride down in the lift while the claymores took out some of the zombies and provided a distraction. They just had to hope they could find a way through them and make it to the Land Rover.

  “Thirty seconds, twenty-nine, twenty-eight,” the boy called out the lift doors.

  The cat mewed as David checked his machine gun and slipped some spare magazines into his jacket pockets. There were grenades in the holdall; he stared at them for a moment but decided against taking any. Tarot hadn’t trained him in their use and he worried he’d do more harm than good with them. If they were going to be used, Tarot would have to be the one to do it.

  “Twelve, eleven, ten seconds.”

  T
his was it. Time was almost up. David looked around the lift, its shiny walls haunted by eerie, elongated reflections. He was only mildly claustrophobic, but in these circumstances such fears were amplified into terrors fit to stay the heart. He noticed his hands were shaking, and he tensed his muscles, attempting to arrest it.

  At the countdown’s conclusion the boy gave a call of “time’s up”, which was followed by an expectant, nerve-shredding hush. David had to fight the urge to run into the apartment to see what was happening.

  Tarot returned in short order. “They’re coming,” he said calmly.

  “All of them?” asked David.

  “It’s hard to tell. I think they’re leaving a cordon.”

  “Damn!”

  From below them came a bassy boom they felt as much as heard, followed by another and another, and then the muffled sound of breaking glass. These were the sounds, the bad vibrations, of approaching mayhem. Tarot removed the wedge from the lift doors and stepped inside. It was so cramped David had to lift the boy up so he could stand on top of the cat box, which fortunately was sturdy enough to take his weight. The doors closed and Tarot pressed the lift’s hold button. Now they were enclosed in a metal box, as if entombed alive in an airless coffin, and David felt the stomach-churning quasi-panic of claustrophobia.

  “Why are they after me?” Shawn asked, his blue eyes glistening. “I haven’t done anything.”

  David wrapped his free arm around the boy. “Of course you haven’t. Don’t worry: they’re not gonna get you. We won’t let them.”

  Tarot pulled a small hand-held device from his pocket and switched it on. It was a radio controller, whose screen would tell him when targets were within the claymores’ blast zones.

  “It won’t take them long,” Tarot said, his gaze riveted to the controller.

  “Won’t they see when the lift moves?” said David.

  “I’ve smashed the displays on the other floors, and disabled the call buttons – just in case.”

  David looked at the grenades sitting in Tarot’s holdall. “Could we have lobbed grenades from the balconies?”

  “I thought about it, but it would’ve given us away; they’ll probably change tactics as soon as they know we’re armed. Besides, those things would’ve barely made a dent.”

  The booming sound stopped. Looking over Tarot’s shoulder, David saw zombies appear on the controller’s screen as red dots, one after another, quickly forming an amorphous red mass.

  “Take this, bastards,” Tarot said, deadpan, and he touched a button on the screen.

  The muffled explosion was less powerful than David had been anticipating, but the vibration of it still rattled the lift and travelled up through the soles of their feet. For a second afterwards there seemed to be total silence. The image on the controller’s screen flashed, adjusting itself. Some of the red dots had disappeared, but not many. Then they heard sounds again. Banging. Running footsteps. Doors being hammered on.

  The next few minutes were almost unbearable. The routine with the claymores was repeated twice more on the first and second floors. Each time the rumble of the blasts amplified and the shaking of the lift worsened. The third blast was so forceful, and the lift’s lights flickered so wildly, that the boy gave a little squeal of fright. David held him close, pressing his head against his chest.

  The invaders were now on the floor below them. Their footfalls echoed in the confined space of the stairwell, their voices forming a seething, sibilant drone like the roar of a raging tornado. The sound of so many of them so close was terrifying, made all the more worse by its crescendo-like progression as they grew nearer. It was clear the claymores weren’t stopping them. They didn’t even appear to be slowing them down. They were anti-personnel mines, after all; they hadn’t been designed to cope with opponents who were already dead.

  “I’m frightened!” the boy cried into David’s chest.

  Muttering something useless like “it’ll be over soon”, David tried in vain to cover the boy’s ears, but his attention was drawn by a sudden rush of noise outside the lift. The zombies were on the top floor, on their level. Tarot hit the button for the ground floor and they started descending. Seconds later, he touched the controller’s screen, detonating the final pair of claymores. This time the explosion shook them from above. The lift’s display panel counted down the floors: second, first. The boy was crying. He clutched at David, who kissed the top of his blond head.

  “You’re driving,” said Tarot. “Whatever happens, don’t get back in the lift. Just keep going forward, no matter what. All you have to think about is getting him to the car and getting the hell outta here. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I ain’t leaving you behind.”

  “You might have to.”

  There was no time to argue about it as the lift arrived on the ground floor. They braced themselves, weapons at the ready.

  The scene that appeared beyond the shifting lift doors was so bizarre and disturbing it might have been modelled on a crazy person’s nightmares of a hellish kind of underworld.

  CHAPTER 45

  D + 521

  Glowing in the smoke-tainted air like cats’ eyes, floating there as lifeless and as distant as stars, were the zombies’ terrible eyes. Pair after pair of them – a few were lone, Cyclops-like, having been robbed of their partners – turned their icy gaze in their direction. The floor was slick with blood and strewn with rubble and body parts. Shrapnel from the ground-floor claymores had torn into the first zombies who’d entered the building, tearing off limbs and “killing” only the few who lay motionless on the floor. The rest were still trying to carry out their mission ignorant of gruesome injuries, or were newcomers who were unharmed. The room was full of them; evidently the whole of Shanti Court was teeming with the undead.

  David was so struck by the scene he froze. Fortunately, Tarot didn’t hesitate: he opened fire before the lift doors had even finished opening, hitting two of the zombies nearest to them in the head. One zombie’s head seemed to fly completely off its shoulders, the sight of which thawed David’s frozen muscles in an instant. He released his gun’s safety, but soon realised that the position he was in meant he couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting Tarot. Instead, he concentrated on getting the boy and their belongings out of the lift. Shawn was clinging rigidly to his surrogate father, paralysed with fear, and David had to prise him away before he could level a stern look at him.

  “Grab Tom and your stuff,” he shouted, “and stay close to me.”

  Tarot had advanced into the reception, firing rapid bursts in different directions, allowing David room to manoeuvre. When he stepped out of the lift his senses were assaulted by a barrage of inputs. The stark roar of gunfire over the hissing cacophony of the zombies’ voices. The pungent aroma of explosives mixed with the ferrous scent of blood. The flashes from the barrel of Tarot’s gun illuminating the zombies’ hazy outlines in a manner which only seemed to make them more indistinct. He had to fight to control himself, to stop himself from freezing up again. Tarot was succeeding in keeping the zombies at bay, but David could tell they weren’t acting in their usual way. Their bearing was more purposeful, less demented. Something told him they were holding back, weighing up the situation; or, at least, whoever was controlling them was.

  David fired left as Tarot moved to the right, towards the rear exit. He needed both hands to operate the machine gun effectively, forcing him to kick his holdall along the ground as Tarot was doing. His other bags and the second holdall full of weapons were still in the lift; it was clear they’d never get everything to the car. He emptied his first magazine impossibly fast and fumbled for a fresh one; the pause in fire necessitated by reloading was interminable.

  When the boy emerged from the lift he was carrying the cat box and two bags, one strapped to his back and the other over his shoulder. The sights and sounds in the room, the overall atmosphere of the place, changed. A moment passed before David realised what was happening. The zombies were
making a beeline for the boy, ignoring them completely and charging recklessly into their fire.

  They made some progress towards the exit, the boy huddled close to his chaperones like a frightened foal. David kept up a frantic and increasingly desperate stream of fire, angered by the sluggishness that appeared to be afflicting his muscles. His targeting always seemed to be one step behind, a split second too late, leaving him incredulous at how difficult it was to deliver headshots at so close a range. Many times he shot a zombie and saw it drop, only for it to return, bloodied but still ambulatory, seconds later. His new-found marksmanship skills appeared to have wilted in the heat of battle.

  It wasn’t long before they were being encroached upon from all sides. Despite their rapid gunfire, they weren’t putting their assailants out of commission quickly enough; there were simply too many of them. As a sea of death closed around him David felt as if he were in his dream about the zombified flood. Everything had the surreal quality of a dream, even though painfully intense sensory inputs told him it was all too real. The tumult became a series of disjointed images and sounds, timeless and confusing, like a film on fast forward. A multitude of pale limbs attached to slender, semi-naked bodies merged to form one ever-moving mass. Pallid death mask after pallid death mask, the bearers of those hateful eyes, zoomed in and out of his field of vision. Tarot yelled something in his direction, but it may as well have been in an alien tongue for all he understood of it.

  The next thing David knew the boy appeared to be levitating horizontally: an onrushing tide of zombies had lifted him clean off his feet. The cat box clattered to the floor, its terrified occupant shrieking and spitting like a thing possessed. David’s pounding heart leapt into his mouth. He felt as if he might explode with his need to protect the boy, with his fury at the zombies for daring to touch him. Those same zombies were too close to the boy to shoot at, and within moments he was being swept out of reach. David was certain that if they lost the boy now they would never retrieve him. Letting go of his gun, allowing it to swing on its shoulder strap, he lunged frantically for the child. In what was an act of complete desperation, he latched onto the only thing he could get a purchase on: a handful of the boy’s hair, which stood out amid the dark tangle of zombies’ bodies with all the allure of the Golden Fleece. The hair tugged on his fingers, slipping through them, and he almost let go, reminding himself just in time that the boy couldn’t feel pain. He screamed for Tarot, doubting he’d be heard in the commotion, dismayed by the hopelessness of their situation. Don’t let go! he instructed himself. For Christ’s sake don’t let go! The horrifying ridiculousness of the tug of war he was engaged in made him roar with an atavistic rage.