by Nathan Allen
Miles went to close the door, and he heard a rustling sound. He stuck his head outside to investigate. He couldn’t see anything. But there was definitely something moving out there, like an animal of some description.
He found a flashlight and took a few cautious steps into the backyard. The beam of light swept across the yard, scouring for movement. Nothing. It was probably just a neighbour’s cat, or maybe a possum.
He heard a grunt and swung the light towards the noise, down and to his left.
For a split second, Miles’ heart stopped beating. He dropped the torch and hightailed it back inside the house.
It took him a moment to calm down after receiving the fright of his life. Although what he saw was probably harmless, when you’re not expecting something like that it can be quite terrifying.
He opened the door to the lounge room. It smelled like a rapper’s tour bus.
Clea sat cross-legged on the floor in the centre of the room, and was midway through a prolonged soliloquy about whether animals were aware of their own mortality.
“Clea,” Miles said. “Could I have a word, please?”
Clea slowly climbed to her feet and stepped into the hallway, glassy-eyed from the all-day smokefest.
“W’sup?” she said.
“Fun night?”
“Oh, y’know, just another meeting.”
Clea was part of an activist group who called themselves the Tribe of Zeroes. Meetings were frequently held in Miles’ lounge room, although they had a tendency to get sidetracked once the ganja came out.
“We’re having another protest down at the courthouse tomorrow,” she continued. “You should come down and check it out.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” Miles said, knowing full well that he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “So ... is there any reason why we have a massive pig in our backyard?”
“Oh, that’s Squealer,” Clea replied, as if that sufficiently answered his question.
“Squealer?”
“Amoeba and some of his RAAT friends rescued him from a tattoo parlour.”
When she was stoned, Clea would speak in the vaguest of terms and provide as little information as possible. Miles knew that Amoeba was one of Clea’s hippie friends, a performance artist and professional weirdo, and RAAT was Revolutionaries Against Animal Torture, a radical animal rights group he was a member of. But he was still having trouble figuring out where a pig the size of a miniature pony fitted into all of this.
“What was a tattoo parlour doing with a pig?” he said.
“They use them to practice on.”
“What do you mean practice on?”
“They use the pig’s skin to practice their tattooing. It’s totally barbaric. So the RAAT guys broke in last night and liberated him. I said it’d be okay if Squealer stayed here until, y’know, the heat died down.”
Miles couldn’t help but be amused by Clea’s choice of words, as if the police were scouring the area on the lookout for a heavily-tattooed fugitive pig.
He was also amused that Amoeba and RATT had lowered their ambitions somewhat. A few months back, Amoeba was telling anyone who would listen about his plans to break into a medical research facility that tested their products on animals. He soon discovered that these labs had fortress-like levels of security and were more or less impenetrable. RATT were forced to seek out something more in line with their capabilities – hence the tattoo parlour.
“It’s not a problem, is it?” Clea said.
“I guess not,” Miles sighed. “As long as he doesn’t make too much mess.”
“He won’t. Pigs are actually pretty clean animals. Cleaner than some humans.”
Miles pictured what his lounge room would look and smell like tomorrow morning once the Tribe of Zeroes have had their way with it. He had no trouble believing that a pig would create less mess than twelve greasy potheads.
Miles awoke the next morning and found his house in the precise state in which he expected it to be in. Clea and her friends had moved on, but their scent lingered. It was a stale potpourri of mung beans, incense and bong water, and it was so thick you could almost taste it. It was on days like today that Miles had to remember to leave home immediately after showering, otherwise the smell would latch on to him and follow him around for the rest of the day.
He made sure his younger sister Shae left for school on time, then set about cleaning the place up. He took the beer cans out of the freezer, which had exploded and spilled over all the food, and the ice cream out of the refrigerator, which had melted and leaked everywhere. He disposed of the remnants of a peanut butter, bacon and M&Ms sandwich, possibly dreamed up by someone who had smoked so much weed that the spirit of Elvis stopped by to inhabit their body. He tossed all the empty bottles and cans into a big black garbage bag, emptied the overflowing ashtrays, then opened the curtains and windows to let in some sunlight and fresh air.
It was then he heard a tortured groan, coming from somewhere behind the couch.
“Hey, man ... ” the voice said. “Would you mind closing that?”
Miles looked across and saw that the pile of dirty clothes and towels in the corner of the room was actually a sleeping hippie by the name of Fabian.
In the harsh morning light, Fabian looked even rattier than usual. He was skinnier than a heroin-addicted cancer patient and whiter than an albino’s corpse. His ginger dreadlocks were splayed across the floor like a giant squashed orange spider. He wore his hippie uniform of tattered jeans and a hemp shirt that he never, ever changed.
“Sorry,” Miles said. “I didn’t realise anyone was still here.”
Miles wasn’t sure why he was apologising to Fabian, since this was his home and Fabian didn’t live there. Not officially, anyway. But in recent months he had become something of a semi-permanent resident, and he now spent more time at the house than Miles did. Fabian was used to living in squats, so the concept of overstaying one’s welcome was foreign to him.
“Where’s Clea?” Miles asked.
“She had to leave early to set up for the rally or something,” Fabian mumbled.
“So why are you still here?”
Fabian’s freckled brow furrowed, like he didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean?”
“I mean if Clea’s gone, then what reason do you have to be here?”
“Clea said I could sleep here a bit longer if I wanted to.”
“Don’t you have a home to go to?”
“What’s the big deal? I’ve crashed here before, yeah?”
“As a guest of Clea’s. If she’s not here then you’re just some dude occupying a stranger’s floor.”
Fabian sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “So what are you tryin’ to say?”
“I’m just saying this isn’t a hotel, Fabian I don’t mind you staying here occasionally, but every night for weeks on end is pushing it.”
“Geez, I’m sorry you have to deal with such pressing first world problems, man,” Fabian said, pulling a blanket over his head. “Send me an invoice if it’s that important to you.”
Miles shook his head and carried on with his cleaning duties. He opened up every curtain and window in the house and allowed the blinding sunlight to flood in. He made sure to make as much noise as possible while doing so.
Miles’ job as an undead management and control worker put him in direct opposition with the ethos of the Tribe of Zeroes. They believed that all former humans should be freed from the processing centres, and called for an end to worldwide zombie incarcerations. Despite this, Miles and Clea maintained something of an uneasy truce; she never hassled him about his job, and he allowed the group to host the occasional gathering at the house.
Some of the other Zeroes – Fabian in particular – weren’t interested in such niceties. Fabian was openly hostile towards Miles, and it never occurred to him that he should show at least a modicum of respect towards the owner of the house you’re currently living in rent-free.
Fabian and Clea me
t several years ago. They had a shared passion for social justice and organised complaining, although Fabian seemed more interested in Clea than in any particular cause. It was just a pity that Clea didn’t feel quite the same way about him. She regarded Fabian as something of a house pet, like a loyal puppy that trailed two steps behind her everywhere she went and did whatever was asked of him. Clea was well aware of Fabian’s feelings towards her, and she didn’t appear to be the least bit guilty about exploiting these feelings.
After the death of his parents, Miles moved back into the family home to look after his younger sister Shae. He decided to rent out the spare room to bring in some extra cash. The house was still a few years away from being paid off, and the mortgage repayments were surprisingly hefty. He discovered that his parents had somewhat overextended themselves by borrowing quite a bit more than they could afford.
Clea appeared to be the most normal and least threatening of all the candidates they interviewed. She had a pleasant demeanour, was reasonably polite and well-spoken, and when she offered to pay the first six months’ rent up-front it was obvious that money wouldn’t be a problem. Miles also thought it would be good for Shae, who was thirteen at the time, to have an older female presence in her life.
What he didn’t count on was the baggage that would come with letting such a “free spirit” into his house. Clea was something of a hippie – Miles probably should have figured that out for himself when he learned she was twenty-seven and an arts student – and hippies are not solitary creatures. They congregate in packs, and if you let one into your house you invite them all in. Kind of like termites, and almost as difficult to get rid of.
In the two-and-a-half years since Clea moved in, Miles had encountered an endless cavalcade of colourful characters who were now regular visitors to the house. There was Tariq, the Iranian chemistry student who was also the son of a highly-regarded heart surgeon. Tariq had recently dropped out of college to pursue his vocation as a hardcore anarchist. He looked forward to the day when the masses would rise up and revolt, tearing down the corrupt system and allowing outright chaos to reign. He kept these views hidden from his parents, though; they had risked their lives fleeing Iran when Tariq was a child to escape the very real anarchy that was enveloping the country at the time.
There was also Mai, a recent addition to the Tribe of Zeroes, although no one really knew exactly what she contributed to the group. All Mai seemed to do was hang out at the house and smoke everyone’s pot. She would occasionally hold up signs at protests and chant slogans for whatever cause Clea happened to be rallying behind, but her heavy weed consumption meant that her efforts were usually fairly lackluster. Some in the group believed the main reason for keeping her around was to fulfill a diversity quota. Clea insisted that the group have a Noah’s Ark membership policy, which meant that every minority group had to be represented at least twice. Since Mai was both Asian and a lesbian, she ticked two of these boxes at once.
And then there was Fabian, the twenty-two-year-old freegan and self-proclaimed “spanner in the corporate machine”. Fabian was an anti-capitalist warrior, committed to bringing down the inequitable system which was destroying humanity and making rich people even richer at the expense of the poor. His infatuation with Apple products and predilection for Nike footwear suggested that his ideals were somewhat flexible.
All these and more converged on the house for these rainbow gatherings, often leaving Miles to feel like an intruder inside his own home. He’d lost count of the number of times he had come home to find a bunch of unwashed dread-heads reading Kerouac aloud on his front porch, while a crew of crusty, rhythmically-challenged ferals bashed away on their bongos in the backyard. He once thought a “drum circle” was named due to the circular way in which the participants arranged themselves. He now knew it was called that because when you’re listening to one, it seemingly had no end.
For the most part, these people were a bunch of dropouts on a narcissistic crusade of ineffectual rebellion. Perpetual adolescents avoiding the real world for as long as possible. None of them had jobs, and few had worked a day in their lives. Most, like Clea, were eternal students undertaking arts degrees of some description, the kind of which had no practical application in the real word. Clea was majoring in Sociology and Contemporary Gender Studies.
Here were a bunch of future waitresses and bartenders with doctorates in philosophy.
It’s a known fact that one in six wait staff have college degrees, and the most common job for arts graduates is telemarketer.
For all their activism and socially-conscious rabble-rousing, what they were really protesting was their comfortable upbringings. Almost all of them were the product of stable upper-middle class families, a fact they now resented. In their eyes, growing up with no disadvantage was in itself a disadvantage. They had spent so much of their lives inside their safe, sheltered cocoons that they believed their personal growth had been stunted. This was their way of making up for it.
The reality was the whole thing was a self-indulgent exercise in class tourism. They could all dress in rags, let their unwashed hair grow long and pretend to be poor, safe in the knowledge that, unlike actual poor people, they could opt out at any moment. Once the perceived glamour of poverty wore off they could cut their hair, remove their piercings, put on a suit, and resume their position in bourgeois society with a collection of future dinner party anecdotes about their youthful adventures running with the underclass.
Chapter 3
“Harbouring an undead being is a crime,” the stern voice over intoned to the train’s passengers. “If someone you know is undead, it is your duty to report it immediately. Anyone found to be hiding or protecting a former human risks fines of up to one hundred thousand dollars and two years imprisonment.”
Sitting uncomfortably on the train’s hard plastic seats, Miles did his best to block out another public service announcement. The rail operators were reaping in tens of millions of dollars per year ever since they decided it would be a good idea to bludgeon commuters with non-stop advertisements during their journey, but evidently none of that money went into improving passenger comfort. He was already nursing a slight hangover, and these incessant announcements weren’t making things any easier for him.
“And remember: Be vigilant. Be vocal. Help us win the war on horror.”
In the seat behind him, two obnoxious teenagers giggled over a clip they were viewing on their phones. It was another of those sadistic viral videos, the latest online fad that featured comic violence against the undead. Last year’s craze had homeless people fighting zombies for money. This year, it was all about movie parodies. Amateur filmmakers would post shot-by-shot recreations of scenes from cinematic classics, but with zombies playing the role of the victim.
So far there had been the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs, followed by the toll both scene from The Godfather and the baseball bat scene from The Untouchables. Each video attempted to outdo what came before it in terms of violence and sheer depravity. The more extreme the footage, the more views it attracted.
The current record holder, with over two hundred million views to date, was the Casino head-in-a-vice clip.
Judging by the disturbing sounds coming from the boys’ phones behind him, Miles assumed this the latest one paid homage to the woodchipper scene from Fargo.
He put his headphones on and turned the music up.
Miles watched the needle as it penetrated his skin and entered the vein. He had a phobia of needles when he was younger, but seemed to have gotten over that now. Maybe it was because he’d seen plenty worse, and minor things like blood and skin lacerations no longer had any effect on him. It was a different world, and his idea of what was normal had been irreversibly altered.
When he was fifteen, he almost passed out when someone in his home economics class sliced their finger open and spilled blood everywhere. Now he had become much more desensitised. A few weeks back, when he was packing up after a parti
cularly messy job, he noticed a severed foot lying in the gutter and thought nothing of it.
The research lab was busier than usual today, and he had to wait over an hour for his turn. About thirty people had lined up before him, eager to sell their blood.
He sometimes felt guilty about selling blood for money when he could instead be donating it to save lives. He felt slightly better about it when he learned that he wouldn’t have been eligible to donate anyway, since anyone who worked with the undead was prohibited. The odds of him having infected blood were miniscule, but they still insisted on the extra precautions. If a healthy person was mistakenly contaminated with infected blood, the results are catastrophic. The recipient becomes a ticking time bomb who can turn into a zombie at any moment.
A local hospital had recently settled two lawsuits from plaintiffs claiming that family members had been turned into former humans after receiving transfusions with tainted blood.
They weren’t quite as fussy here at the research lab. Human blood had become a highly sought-after commodity in a post-zombie world, and the race was on between the biotech firms to deliver a vaccine or a cure for the infection. Their research required megalitres of blood which they used to study exactly how the infection reacted, why it behaved the way it did, and how they could stop it from spreading. Donors were paid $200 per pint. This was considered to be a rather generous amount, but since a successful vaccine was literally a trillion-dollar idea the companies involved didn’t hesitate in paying that much.
The search for a cure had been underway for almost three years now, but it was yet to produce any meaningful results.
Dr. Martin Bishop, one of the world’s leading authorities on the spread of the infection, believed that an effective vaccine could be developed within the next twelve months if only the biotech firms made their findings open to the public. He called on governments to force these firms to disclose the results of their trials, saying it was ridiculous to have the world’s greatest scientific minds competing against one another instead of collaborating and building on each others’ work. But his pleas fell on deaf ears, and at present none of them were any closer to finding a cure than when they began.
