The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus

by Matthew Smith

  A directive to report to Sidney in person was not to be ignored, nor taken lightly.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  14 March

  AWOKE FROM A bad dream this morning, which put me on edge for the rest of the day. Of course, some of us have bad dreams every night—Emily constantly suffers from night terrors, to the point where her mattress has been placed in an adjoining passage, where she can’t disturb the others—and, frankly, no one wants to hear about them come sun-up. I can sympathise with that: enough horror in the waking world without adding to it by reeling off whatever surrealist nightmare plagued your head whilst you slept. Plus listening to someone describe their dream is, like, super-dull. The downside is that I’m left with no one to talk to about the images left coated on the inside of my skull that troubled me so; no one, that is, except you, dear diary, so you’re going to have to take one for the team.

  There was nothing literal about it, no sense of being chased by monsters or being trapped and unable to escape—surprising, considering that’s our day-to-day life now. If I close my eyes, I can still see the crush of screaming faces on the day of the Fall, smell the blood and smoke, hear the blare of the sirens. Yet that rarely invades my dreams, as if I’ve unconsciously shuttered the most traumatic moments away and only call them up when I need to. My dreams are usually dark, formless things, the product of exhaustion. Last night was different: light, pin-sharp and painful, was shining through my skin. I was looking at my hands and studying the bones of my fingers, picked out in silhouette through the seemingly translucent flesh, dispassionately observing the light growing brighter until it started to tear through the papery epidermis. There was no panic, just cold dream-logic as I watched the rents pull wider and the light spilled through. The holes were now big enough to push a knuckle into and out the other side. I was in the bare bedroom of my childhood home, wooden floorboards beneath my feet, nothing on the walls save a mirror in an alcove on the opposite side of the chamber. Fascinated by the transformation taking place, I walked over and examined myself in the glass, touching my forehead and cheeks where the skin was starting to wither and retreat, spokes of light punching out. The gleam was such that my reflection became obscured and I was disappearing as the light consumed me: I was a skeleton haloed by fire.

  I woke just as I lost sight of myself entirely, my eyes snapping open and my breath caught in mid-gasp. It took me a moment to get my bearings, the last of the blazing light still lingering on the back of my retina; once it dissipated, I realised where I was and became aware of the shadowed mounds around me that were the others, slumbering in the dark. A faint moan drifted across the room, which I put down to Emily, out there in the corridor, lost in her own private macabre loop from which she never seemed to escape. I lay back on my pillow—or rather the bundled-up clothes that serve as my pillow—and counted down from ten to slow my hammering heart. Eventually I drifted off back into a fitful sleep that lasted a couple of hours, but I was grateful to finally see the sun’s rays slide across the floor via the small window at the top of the basement as dawn broke. Normally, I’m reluctant to leave the comfort of my sleeping bag, and have been known to get a less than gentle toeing in the side from Kez to ensure that I’m fully awake, but this morning I was up and boiling the water for everyone’s breakfast before they’d even stirred.

  But the dream clung to me. Every moment I had to myself I found my mind unconsciously returning to the images like a tongue repeatedly probing a painful tooth. The sight of my skin parting and the golden light pouring through was impossible to dispel, and no matter how much it unnerved me I couldn’t look away, couldn’t help calling it up again and again to unsettle me further. I couldn’t affix any meaning to it; as far as I knew, it was nonsense farted out by my sleeping brain over which I had no control. That’s all dreams were—random information broadcast behind your eyelids. Synaptic bursts of gobbledegook. I remember one I had back when I was a schoolkid of riding my bike through the water of a swimming pool, and marvelling at how bizarre it was, how it had taken two elements and misaligned them like a double-exposed photograph.

  But it was precisely because I hadn’t dreamed like that for a long time that last night’s one left such an impression and why I struggled to just dismiss it as overheated brain-stew. It got to me. The pain of the light piercing my skin had been so intense it felt like iced water being pumped through my veins: the hurt was almost incandescent. Upon waking, I’d checked my arms, hands and face for any scratches because I was convinced that some physical harm had come to me, but inevitably there was nothing. Still the hairs on the back of my neck tingled every time I thought of the sensation, and I wondered if some psychosomatic condition was going on here: that through the sheer will of my imagination a wound would open on my body. That would’ve been enough to leave it alone, to push the dream back into the farthest recesses of my head, but of course I couldn’t stop returning to it, like a song I couldn’t stand on constant repeat to the point where it was actively driving me crazy.

  It didn’t go unnoticed—like I say, the dream put me in a pissy mood. Kez snapped at me for switching off and I’d barked back, telling her to get off my case. I was supposed to be helping her with the supply inventory (her favourite pastime—woman’s obsessed with it!) and she’d caught me staring into space. It surprised her into silence, but I’ll pay for it later: she’ll corner me tomorrow and dress me down, put me on latrine duty for a week or something. I’ll plead I had a headache and wasn’t feeling myself—which is in part true—but I doubt it’ll get me out of shit-detail. I was uncommunicative with the others too, and they picked up a ‘don’t mess’ vibe, and duly gave me a wide berth, a frostiness which I’ll probably have to go some way to repair at some point. They’ve no doubt got me marked down as having a snotty teenager moment (I’m on the last knockings of eighteen, I’m hardly a teen any more!), but my irritability and sullenness wasn’t something I felt inclined to explain or apologise for—I was too preoccupied by the vividness of the dream, repeatedly beating against the inside of my skull. No matter how I employed my mind in whatever capacity—chores, sentry duty, reading (we found a pile of musty paperbacks stacked in a chest when we moved in, mostly cheap airport thrillers)—there it was, residing in a corner of my head and colouring my thoughts. I’d never had a nightmare linger like this, affect my whole mood. It was seemingly less like just a bad night’s sleep and more a trauma that had scarred my waking hours.

  I’m kinda nervous about going to bed in case it happens again: nothing I can control once I close my eyes. What if it’s a persistent, recurring vision that I’m never going to be able to escape? What if I’m doomed to weeks and months of self-inflicted insomnia, and finally snap? Kez could give me serious grief if I’m strung out on no sleep and the possessor of a damaged brain. She wouldn’t think twice about booting me down to menial duties (in fact, you could say she wouldn’t lose sleep over it, ha ha); all it takes is a half-awake bozo not doing their job and the greys could get wise to us.

  Oh God, now I’m stressing about sleeping. Gonna send me mental at this rate!

  15 March

  SUCCESS! A PEACEFUL slumber, with barely anything to remember that would hang around me like a fug. You can’t imagine how relived I feel not to have had another nightly horrorshow projected on the inside of my skull. Sounds a bit melodramatic, but I felt almost like a new person once I rolled off the mattress this morning, rested and reasonably content that the previous night’s dream had simply been a one-off, caused by factors unknown. I’d like to say that I’d prevented it by cutting out the cheese before bedtime, but it’s been a good while since any of us tasted dairy (indeed, my preoccupation these days is now almost solely diary, arf!). No, simple fact is I got no idea why I was spared, but I’ll take what small victories I can get.

  I mean, I look at Emily when she rises come the dawn and realise how grateful I should be that my nights are—or have been up until now—for the most part uneventful. Poor E looks wrecked:
dark circles under her eyes, washed out, grey hair encroaching at the temples. She’s aged incredibly in the weeks we’ve been down here, adding a couple of decades to her appearance. She was a young mum when she and Bren first threw themselves onto Mr Graham’s RV; she has a good eight years or so on me, but still when we first met, she was fresh-faced and kinda neat and composed. Night after night of her ’mares has destroyed that—she now looks more like her kid’s mad old auntie than his parent. She won’t talk about her dreams, should the unwritten rule of disinterest amongst the others be broken briefly and someone asks: she just shakes her head and refuses to be drawn on the subject. Everybody can see she’s suffering—hell, everyone can hear her suffering every night, to the point where her mattress was moved for the sake of the group’s sanity—but no-one can do anything about it. How do you stop the bad thoughts from entering a person’s head?

  I’ve often pondered what it is that haunts her so—is it guilt over the fact that she survived and her husband didn’t? Did she see something prior to leaping aboard the vehicle that stayed with her? Is it a mother’s natural instinct to protect her son, and she’s wracked by ‘what if’ scenarios in which Bren is lost to the monsters? Whichever it is, or it’s a combination of all three, it’s playing havoc with her mental well-being. The way Bren looks at her, from his perspective he’s losing her to the dark forces—she’s fraught, frazzled, and lashes out at the smallest of infractions. He’s only nine, so prone to belligerence and unco-operation at times, and she’s been known to smack him upside of the head on occasion when he answers her back or won’t do what he’s told, and then she instantly regrets it, apologising in a flood of tears. The fear’s slowly killing her. She can’t carry on for much longer in this state of constant despair, sapped of strength, before the inevitable collapse.

  It’s equally unspoken that Emily’s the weak link in the group, physically and emotionally: the one we can’t necessarily rely on. It’s rarely discussed (because that would be tantamount to admitting it, natch) but just naturally assumed that we’ll cover for her. We figure we’ll cut her some slack as the woman’s clearly suffering. She’s never posted on lookout, isn’t taken on reconnaissance or supply missions, and is generally kept away from being outside—the view from the front yard… isn’t good. She doesn’t need to see it. Frankly, no one does, since it doesn’t do anyone’s well-being any favours (always reminds me of those medieval paintings from my art-history text books at school, whereby the apocalypse was imagined as the dead returning to shovel the living into back of carts) but, like I say, we’re willing to keep that from her and divide the rota and extra work between us. I don’t know if she’s aware of that—that we’re doing all this to save her additional mental strain—because she never comments on it, but I suspect that she’s rarely with us in spirit at the best of times. So little sleep, I reckon her days are pretty much a blur, a fractured collage of random thoughts that only occasionally phase into the present. It must’ve been weeks since she last saw sunlight. I must remember to recommend to Kez that we pick up some Vitamin D for her, if we can, before she fades away completely. Got Bren to think about too, of course: God knows what it’d do to him if she was gone.

  Our glorious leader has so far bit her tongue on the E issue, and been willing to accept that it’s better she’s kept out of the way when it comes to all the frontline stuff. You can tell Kez isn’t happy about it—EVERYONE pulls their weight, no exceptions—but she’s probably resigned to the fact now that putting Emily in a conflict situation she’s just going to be a liability, and could end up risking the lives of others. It’s that factor that makes me worry about E’s continued place in the group; that Kez will use it as an excuse to have her exiled, stating that she threatens to compromise the safety of the community as a whole. Despite past form, I can’t see the big K ever being that much of an asshole, but I guess it only needs a shortage of food, or a change of circumstances, before she starts making the hard choices. If she feels she needs to start cutting the dead wood, then Emily could be for the chop. What that would mean for her son, I don’t know. Really hope it won’t come to that, I really do, because it’s the kind of decision that could come back to haunt us. Rip us apart, even.

  This kind of thinking makes me shudder, to be honest, because it leads me down the inevitable road of what sort of future any of us can expect. Kez is doing all this so we survive, and reiterates that she’s safeguarding the sanctity of this bolthole we’ve made for ourselves, but what’s the endgame? Is this the life I’ve got to look forward to—writing these words by candlelight as I contemplate another day of foraging and hiding and watching and waiting, all for the continued benefit of breathing? What exactly is Emily’s weakness going to threaten—the civilised way of life we’ve got going on here? I shit in a hole in the ground! I eat month-out-of-date beans from a tin that’s been snatched from a looted supermarket’s shelf! What the hell am I pushing towards?

  I suppose at the back of all our heads there’s the vague hope that someone’s going to save us; that we’ve just got to bide our time and authority’s going to come to our rescue and send these grey bastards packing. That’s all it is, though: a vague hope. And not a very likely one. We all saw the system collapse on the night of the Fall, the jays overwhelmed by the forces loyal to the new Chief. We heard on the radio before it cut out completely that there’d been a regime change at the HoJ: some guy called Sidney installing himself in the big chair. I’m sure there’re pockets of resistance out there—badges that are still human fighting a guerrilla war against the creatures—but somehow I imagine not enough to turn the tide. The new powers that be are too strong, their soldiers growing in number by the day, thanks to some kind of liquid drug that’s getting passed around. Lance, who fled from the east side, said he saw it being dealt and injected on the street, causing physical abnormalities. He didn’t go into details, but what he did describe—related with a certain degree of ghoulish relish, I have to say—was enough to give us all the heebie-jeebies. And the world itself is changing—the soil sickening, the animal life either dying off or adapting to strange new forms. Even the sky looks an odd colour now after we had that three-day downpour. It begs the question: even if we could reclaim it from the monsters, has it been spoiled beyond further use? Is the world too far gone to fix? Will there be anything left to save?

  I said when I started writing this journal that I hoped someone would come after to read it—that you had to have some kind of belief that life would prevail in some shape further down the line, otherwise you were giving up on all humanity. It could be that this book is a future archaeological find, dug out of the earth decades, centuries, or aeons later and pored over. It gives me slim comfort that that might be the case—that life found a way, that its seed escaped complete extermination. If I’m feeling optimistic, then I’m convinced that this isn’t the end: that we’re too stubborn and resilient and tenacious as a species to be wiped out entirely. We’ve weathered worse storms than this, as Mr Graham might’ve said, and managed to cling on to existence.

  But in my more practical moments, I can’t see any way back for us. We scrabble to survive but, let’s face it, this is our swan song. The world’s dying before our eyes, and one by one we’re falling into the dark from which there’ll be no return.

  Ugh. Black thoughts… and I’d been feeling so upbeat too after my dream-free sleep. Dunno where that all came from. Tired, I expect, and getting cranky. Depressed thinking about what Emily’s going through. Last word before I blow out the flame:

  I STILL BELIEVE IN YOU, FUTURE READER! YOU’RE OUT THERE, I KNOW IT! THIS WON’T BE THE END OF US!

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IF THE TRANSFORMED Grand Hall was an unnerving environment, then the Chief’s office at its apex was the blackly beating heart of this new architectural construct. Or perhaps more pertinently, the still void, since life was most certainly not welcome here. Nothing with a pulse resided on the top floor—it was a dark, silent tomb, shroude
d by a mist that swirled throughout the corridors several inches off the ground, and which swallowed the sound of any footfall. The walls were coated in moisture, green mould spreading across the ceiling too. As Cafferly emerged from the stairwell, the dank, oppressive atmosphere hit her like a fist, and her psi-senses deadened almost instantly, akin to a radio signal cutting out in a tunnel. There was something dreamlike about the way she had to carry herself forward, head full of cotton wool, an unknown pressure bearing down on her, mist barely moving as she waded through it. There was power here, but it wasn’t entirely Sidney’s; it was them, the creatures he was in league with. His sponsors. Their chill tendrils were behind everything.

  She’d never been to De’Ath’s office before; she’d had no cause to. To ascend to his domain was at his invitation or instruction only, and any trespassers would be dealt with before they’d even left the top step. She was in no doubt that her progress was being watched, and for the moment she was allowed to continue unimpeded. There was no sign of anyone else: he had no need of guards, for he was confident—arrogant, even—in his own abilities to deal with any threat that may come his way. He’d transcended mortality, and as such had little fear. His living body had simply been a chrysalis that he’d emerged from into his new higher state of being, and all that concerned him was laying waste to a planet so its inhabitants—all of them, every single one—felt too that blessed peace, put themselves beyond sin and wickedness and embraced judgement. Some would resist but they were like bugs that he casually swatted away, causing him the minimum of grief. They could not harm him—who could withstand Death, the Great Leveller? It was the most powerful, immutable force in the universe, and he was its personification. He was an anti-god, decimating all before him, nullifying where there has once been creation.