I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  Either the human would be allowed to resume killing himself, or the Queen would order the Sentinel to interrupt matters.

  By tearing his sharp fingers into the human's belly and pulling out its internal organs.

  One by one.

  Without killing it.

  The answer would return within seconds.

  The Sentinel waited patiently.

  Morse stared, the gun still halfway towards his open mouth. The thing in front of him was tall - easily nine feet - and spindly, the legs tapering down into thin hooves. It's chest rose and fell like a hummingbird's, the air rushing in and out of a circular mouth lined with teeth. Above the mouth was a single, massive red eye, pulsing with unholy light. The last time Morse had seen an eye like that, it had shone, wet and glistening, from the ragged, ripped belly of poor Sharon Glasswell. At the end of the beast's arms were two sets of ten clawed fingers. It keened softly, a sound on a frequency that made his eyeballs sting and pressure build up in the front of his brain.

  It was not the appearance of the thing, or the terrible sound it made, that caused the bile to rise in Morse's throat - made him want to vomit until he was an empty shell, until there was nothing left in him but his skin.

  What made his blood chill in his veins and his mind reel was an almost indefinable quality to the creature's stance. The way it stood - the way it held itself. Even with the grotesque hooves and the quivering, thin fingers, there was no mistaking that body language.

  This was John Doe.

  This was the one Morse had allowed to slip through his fingers.

  The one he'd allowed to destroy the world.

  Morse pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger - once, twice, three times, watching the bullets punch into the vitreous humour of the massive eye and burst it like a water balloon. The creature howled, a sound not so much above the threshold of human hearing as running parallel to it, and then lurched forward, reaching to grab hold of Morse's head in its spindly claws and squeeze hard enough to crush skull and brain.

  But Morse was already gone.

  By the time Katie had gotten into the station itself, it was clear that the monsters were in charge. They'd turned some of the people on the trains into monsters - lurching, moaning monsters with drool dripping from their mouths and eyes rolled back in their heads, reaching out and hurting anything near them. Like zombies in films. She'd raced down the stairs to the public toilets and hidden there, in the ladies. She could still hear the screams coming from up above. Screams and the noises of things crashing and clattering to the ground.

  That lasted for a very long time.

  After a while, there wasn't any screaming. Just moaning and the sound of them bumping into things.

  Then after a while after that, there weren't even any moans. Just squealing and clicking and chittering.

  Insect noises.

  And after a while after that, there was nothing at all.

  The Sentinel had been hurt.

  It recorded the extent of the damage and broadcast it to the Palace. Vision had been impaired by a series of projectiles fired from the human weapon it had scanned earlier. Its main ocular unit had been burst - beyond that, damage was minor.

  It was easily repaired.

  The Sentinel had an advantage over other units, which was why it was rarely used except in emergencies. Unlike these sickly things grown on substandard organics, it was capable of rebuilding itself.

  Improving itself.

  As its arms reached out automatically to attempt a kill - hands closing on nothing at all - the massive eyeball in its head began to reform itself, coagulating like a scab, the surface repairing and refilling with the obscene fluid. This time, the Sentinel took time to reinforce the fibrous tunic of the bulb of the eye, thickening and strengthening the sclera and cornea until it was capable of withstanding further attacks of that nature.

  It took perhaps a minute. The regeneration was the simple part - improvements had to be budgeted from existing areas of the cell-collective. That took time.

  But The Sentinel had time.

  The human could not possibly escape.

  The lungs of Albert Morse no longer burned. The bone-deep weariness that had made him want to put the gun to his head had gone. His legs pounded against the concrete, leaping nimbly over the sundered bodies, boots impacting in pools of not-quite dried blood, spraying globs of dark red.

  Adrenaline will do that for you.

  He hammered down York Road, turning right onto Leake Street then left again, the station in sight now. He didn't bother looking up to check for the slowly passing insect-craft, or creep through the shadows. There was no point. They'd found him.

  He had a sudden, clear understanding that he was the last man on Earth and that he was going to die. He'd been happy to blow his own head off less than a minute ago, and now he was desperately, hopelessly running to stay alive. He was barely capable of thinking, the blood crashing in his brain and his tongue almost hanging out of his mouth like a dog's, dry as dust as he wheezed with every caught breath, but still the irony of it struck him.

  It was Doe that was keeping him going.

  John Doe. The bastard himself. The one who'd caused all this, who they'd had the chance to carve into little pieces and feed to the wolves, the one they'd let slip through their fingers because the smartest man in the world had been too stupid to kill him when he had the chance. Well, fuck him. There was no way he was going to die at that bastard's hands. He was going to fight him to the last breath in his body and he was going to win. He was going to live. He was going to survive long enough to get that bomb and blow them all back to the hell they'd come from.

  Giving up was no longer an option.

  Behind him, he heard the clattering of hooves.

  He raced past the entrance to the Tube, down the corridor, then broke right in the station itself, the clattering of the hooves growing louder behind him. He wasn't going to make it to the toilet before the bastard caught up to him. The ridiculousness of that thought almost set him giggling like a schoolboy, but he controlled himself. He knew if he started to laugh he probably wouldn't stop.

  The clattering stopped.

  Morse threw himself forward, twisting in the air, his back hitting the bloody tile of the station floor as he brought his gun up. The monster was already sailing through the air towards him, razor-toothed mouth impossibly wide. It was going to eat him. It was going to bite his fucking head off while it slit open his belly with those scalpel-claws...

  But it was slower than John Doe.

  Slower and stupider.

  Morse rammed the barrel of the gun into the monster's mouth, his arm disappearing into the Sentinel's gullet up to the mid-elbow. He was screaming, pulling the trigger again and again and again, the bullets slamming into the soft tissue, black ichor running down his arm along with his own blood as the razor teeth carved at his flesh and bone. When the gun stopped jerking back against his hand when he fired, he yanked his arm free, ignoring the pain, and kicked out at the monster hard enough to send it rearing back, vomiting more of the sickly black bile that was its lifeblood. He could no longer feel his hand.

  The Sentinel screeched, flapping on the ground like a dying fish, then went still. Morse knew it wouldn't stay that way for long.

  Trying not to look at the ragged, ruined mass that used to be his right hand, Morse started running towards the toilet, leaving a trail of spattered blood.

  Bastard, he thought.

  Ate my wanking hand.

  Katie started awake. She'd been sleeping fitfully in the cubicle she'd been sitting in since the insect-noises had gone away. She didn't feel hungry yet, so she hadn't gone to find any food. She thought the monsters might come back, anyway, so she wasn't going to leave before she got really, really hungry.

  She'd heard shots, and a scream. Not a human scream.

  A monster scream.

  Someone was hurting the monsters.

  She listened carefully, straining her
ears, the way she had late at night when Mummy and Daddy had gone to sleep and she'd listened for the monsters. She'd got very good at listening to things, so she could hear her parents arguing even if they did it in whispers. She could listen to that for hours and never miss a word.

  She heard the sound of someone heavy running down the stairs towards the toilets, then slipping and tumbling down - thumpity-thumpity-thump - and a sound like a branch breaking.

  And then a man shouting a very rude word.

  Even her Mummy and Daddy never used that word no matter how loud they argued.

  Katie unlocked the door of the cubicle and peeped out to see what was happening.

  The Sentinel assessed the damage. It had leapt to kill the human as efficiently as possible but the human had twisted and managed to drive its weapon through The Sentinel's mouth and fire several projectiles into its inner workings.

  It had left the weapon sitting inside the Sentinel's body.

  If the Sentinel had any concept of emotions, it would have described that as adding insult to injury.

  It stood, slowly dissolving the weapon and the projectiles, breaking them down into their composite minerals, then using those minerals to reinforce its internal structure.

  The human was weaponless now. It had been injured - one of its manual extremities had been all but destroyed. It would present little threat.

  The Sentinel moved forward, hooves clicking deliberately against the tile floor.

  Morse had broken his ankle.

  Maybe it was the blood loss. Maybe he'd just fucking panicked. But he'd taken the stairs down to the bogs too fast. His ankle had turned and he'd felt something snap and dislocate, and then he'd gone over and over down the bloody steps to land in a heap next to the turnstile.

  He could feel his ankle swelling up like a balloon. He was an old man. He wasn't meant for all this kind of running about. The thought made him grin as he dragged himself up on the turnstile, trying to ignore the stabbing, slicing pain in his right arm, trying not to look at the ragged, mangled hand with only a thumb and two fingers.

  His left hand dug in his pocket. He was glad he'd made sure he had fifty pence where he could get to it, but then preparation was everything in an operation like this. Ha bloody ha, Morse. Keep the British end up. Keep pretending you've still got a hope in Hell.

  The turnstile revolved once, and he swung himself through, leaning against the wall and hopping, leaving behind him a trail of bright, slick blood...

  And the slow sound of clattering hooves, coming closer.

  Closer.

  Katie's eyes widened as she saw the man in the coat come into the Ladies. Men weren't allowed in the Ladies. That was why they were called the Ladies.

  She kept herself hidden in the cubicle as the man hopped towards the sinks, trying to support himself against the wall. He was a big man with a broken nose and black hair, greying at the temples, and a big bushy moustache. He looked very grown-up. One of his feet was twisted around, like it was broken, and he'd cut his hand badly. Katie had never seen anyone cut themselves that badly. She didn't think they made sticky plasters big enough to work on cuts like that.

  He hopped a couple more paces, and then put his twisty ankle on the ground and said another Very Bad Word and fell over onto the tile floor. He kept dragging himself along towards the sinks, leaving a long wet red trail of blood.

  Katie wondered whether she should say something to him.

  Then she heard the sound of the turnstile breaking.

  It was a sound of metal separating from metal, of bolts and screws being forced from their housings and pinging through the air to clatter against the tiles. Morse closed his eyes and turned himself around to sit against the wall.

  Doe was tearing a turnstile right out of the machine to get to him. He was weak, dizzy from blood loss. His right hand was essentially useless and his ankle was broken.

  He was finished.

  He was going to die in a toilet. In the Ladies, as well. Nice of the Whitehall bigwigs to think that up when they were building the place.

  He watched almost dispassionately as the thing clip-clopped into the toilet after him. He knew it would be quick, if not painless. The bastard would probably just come trotting over and rip his throat out. It was all he deserved, anyway. He'd let that twat Smith keep the monster alive. In the end, it was down to him.

  "Come on then, fucker." He snarled. "Come and finish me off. What are you waiting for?"

  Doe was standing there on his hooves, bent slightly to fit in between the floor and ceiling, his spindly, waving scalpel-fingers twitching and bobbing gently in the air. Slowly, it turned, the great red eye swivelling to look over towards one of the cubicles. Morse's brow furrowed. What was it looking at?

  He followed the gaze of the monster, and saw a pair of trainers underneath the door of the stall.

  Kids' trainers.

  With a kid in them.

  "Hey! I'm over here! I'm over here, you fucking bastard!" Morse yelled, his voice cracking. "I'm over here, you tosser! Come and get me! Come and get me!"

  Ignoring the pain, he pushed himself forward, crawling towards the monster, trying to get it to look back at him. Kill me, you fucking bastard. Kill me first. Kill me before I have to see somebody else die because of me. Kill me, kill me, kill me, KILL ME —

  And then the door of the cubicle opened, and Katie came out.

  The Sentinel was not expecting to find any humans still living apart from the target. It understood that there may have been some humans clinging to life, but they were so few and far between that the chances of it coming across one were tens of thousands to one.

  And it recognised this one.

  The Sentinel had met it before, when it was following earlier directives. During its chameleon phase.

  The cover personality had sustained deep feelings of guilt. The Sentinel did not understand why.

  Why should this human be here now, along with the other one? Was it random chance or part of some deeper design by the humans? Were they capable of that level of organisation?

  The Sentinel cocked its head, staring down at the small human as it pondered the dilemma.

  And then the small human began to speak.

  Katie had recognised the monster as soon as it came in. It was wearing its monster-body now, a white maggot-skinned thing with scary claws and lots and lots of scary fangs, but she recognised it anyway because of the way it moved.

  It was her monster. The one who had saved her.

  And he'd stopped being nice and decided to eat people up. He was probably going to eat the man with the moustache up as well, in one big gulp. But he wouldn't eat her.

  "Hello." She smiled and waved. "Hello. Um. Do you remember me?"

  The monster looked down at her. The man with the moustache was white as a ghost. He looked very frightened.

  "Love." he whispered. "Just run. I'll... I'll keep him busy. You just run and don't look back." He crawled a little closer towards the monster, even though it looked like it really, really hurt.

  "No. It's okay. I know him. I'll be fine." She looked up at the monster, who was looking down at her with his big red eye. Suddenly he didn't seem so scary. He just seemed a little silly and sad, like someone who kept their Halloween mask on all year. "Um, you saved me from some bad men. I dunno if you remember. You um, you killed them all. And you ate one of them. It was like in a scary film." She looked away for a moment, trying to sum up how she'd felt at the time. "I was really really scared. Um. But you were really nice to me anyway even though I was scared of you." She blushed and looked down at her shoes. This wasn't coming out right.

  "Run," wheezed the man with the moustache, like his throat was closing up. He looked like he was going to cry and be sick at the same time. Katie had never seen an adult looking like that.

  "It's okay." She smiled at him, then looked back up at the monster. "I know you're only doing what monsters do. I know you want to eat people. But you could be nice if you
wanted. That's what I think anyway. And, um, this man here's really hurt badly and I don't know where my Mummy and Daddy are and..." She swallowed. "You could help if you wanted. You could look normal again and be nice and help us. I bet you could. If you wanted to."

  She smiled her very best smile.

  "I bet you could, though."

  Morse thought he was going to be sick. His head was spinning and his vision was greying at the edges. He pulled himself closer to the thing that used to call itself John Doe, hand over hand, dragging his battered body along the tile floor. The girl was standing right in front of him.

  Why didn't it do anything?

  The Sentinel looked at the small human. Deep in its memory banks, it remembered her.

  It.

  Her.

  The Sentinel had, while obeying its chameleon directive, rescued her from a number of other humans who were attempting to extort money from her father. The small human had been almost catatonic after watching the Sentinel obeying its core directives. Were those core directives flawed in some way?

  Why did that thought even occur to The Sentinel?

  Why had The Sentinel not contacted the Queen about the small human?

  You could be nice if you wanted.

  What did that mean?

  The cell-collective that made up The Sentinel suddenly seemed to be in flux, at war. Uneasy in the shape it had been assigned. There had been another shape it had taken during chameleon phase. The small human's -

  Katie's -

  Katie's words were setting The Sentinel's systems out of phase. Why was he even understanding them as anything more than the grunts and squeals of the substandard human species? Was this a weapon they'd developed?