by Nathan Allen
While Bernard Marlowe was the public face of the anti-zombie movement, it was Lawrence Devereaux who was actually the driving force behind it all. It was his idea to exploit the undead situation for political gain, and he was the one pulling Marlowe’s strings and telling him exactly what to say. Sebastian had frequently attended rallies protesting his father’s policies, and had even publicly burned effigies of him.
In all likelihood, there was a direct link between Sebastian’s current lifestyle choices and Lawrence’s career. Sebastian seemed to be going through the whole Freudian rebel-against-your-father phase that most males go through during adolescence. Perhaps he was just a late bloomer.
Miles put the paper aside when his phone rang. It was Stacey, his cousin.
“You’re probably worried about Shae,” she said. “I’m just calling to let you know she’s here.”
“Oh,” Miles said. “That’s a relief.”
The truth was that Miles didn’t even notice Shae was missing.
“She turned up on our doorstep last night and asked to stay for a few days.”
Miles gulped down the rest of his coffee. “Is that okay with you?”
“Of course it is. The girls love having her around.”
Miles fell back onto his bed and exhaled. This was what Shae thought of him now. She would rather hang out with Stacey and Alistair, an old married couple who danced to John Mayer at their wedding reception and were obsessed with home renovation TV shows, than live under the same roof as him.
“Is everything alright over there?” Stacey asked.
Miles sighed. “Things have been better, to tell you the truth.”
“I figured something was going on, but I didn’t want to pry too much.”
“Yeah, well ... she pretty much hates me at the moment.”
“She’s a teenage girl, Miles. If she didn’t hate you from time to time, you’d be doing something wrong. I know what I was like at her age. I nearly sent my parents to an early grave.”
“It just feels like I’m constantly fighting a losing battle. Like everything I say or do is wrong.”
“You’re doing fine. Remember, you’re raising a teenager. That’s something most men don’t have to deal with until they’re twice your age. And they’re usually not doing it alone, either.”
“I understand all that, but I don’t feel like she appreciates anything I do for her.”
“She will. Once we grow up a little, we realise exactly what we put our parents through.”
That was something Miles could relate to. He cringed whenever he thought of how petulant and self-involved he was at Shae’s age. He wished he could travel back in time to smack some sense into his younger self. Everything he was suffering through now was probably his karma paying him a belated visit.
The call ended. Miles looked at his watch and saw that it was almost time to go.
He made and then quickly drank his third cup of coffee, then grabbed his wallet and keys. He hurried out of the kitchen and almost collided with Clea.
He exploded with laughter when he saw what she was wearing.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Clea said.
Clea was dressed in a powder blue pantsuit. Her hair had been washed and coloured, and was tied up in a neat bun. She had removed all her facial piercings and had even done a surprisingly competent job of applying makeup. If Miles passed her in the street he probably wouldn’t recognise her.
“So what time does the real estate seminar start?” he asked in between fits of giggles.
“It’s just something we’re working on, alright? I have to look the part.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh or anything,” Miles lied, before laughing some more.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying this.”
“Oh don’t worry, I am.”
Clea managed a grin, and both were relieved that the ice had finally been broken. They were both too stubborn to ever properly apologise for what had happened the night before, but this was close enough.
Miles then quickly pulled his shoes on and hurried out the door with his laces still untied.
On his way out, he passed eight or nine Zeroes who had slept in the front yard overnight. A few were splayed out on the crusty old couches, and others laid around on blankets and in sleeping bags. Tariq the Anarchist slept on a gurney he had stolen from a hospital. Some were awake and enjoying their first cigarette for the morning.
Neil was there with a tray of coffees that he had thoughtfully purchased for everyone to share. They most definitely appreciated this kind and thoughtful gesture.
None of them seemed to mind that the coffee was from Starbucks.
Steve drove the minibus into the empty car park located adjacent to the Graves End church. He had decided they’d need a central set-up point to serve as their base of operations. The car park looked ideal for this purpose – it was located roughly in the centre of town, and there was plenty of room for the two vehicles and all their equipment.
One by one, the Dead Rite staff stepped off the bus and saw that Graves End was exactly as Elliott and Miles had described it. Zombies were everywhere, literally in every direction they looked. Roaming the streets, tending to gardens, congregating in parks. Some of the staff went a little weak at the knees, overcome with feelings of vertigo at the thought of all the money there was to be made. To them, every single undead being represented a new outfit they could buy, or a new pair of shoes, or a car payment. The streets of Graves End were paved with zombie gold.
“Okay, we all know what to do,” Steve said to his charges. “Two people to a residence, in sequential order, just like we discussed. If you find a house with four or more obits, do not attempt to do the job yourselves. Wait for another group to come along and help you. If we’re smart about how we do this, we shouldn’t encounter any trouble. Are there any questions?”
Only one hand rose, and it belonged to Adam.
“Are you sure this is an appropriate place for us to set up?” he said, pointing to the place of worship situated behind them.
“What’s wrong with it?” Steve said.
“I just thought it might be kind of, I don’t know ... sacrilegious?”
Steve bit his tongue and suppressed the urge to make a sarcastic comment, like he usually did whenever Adam brought up his Catholicism. Like so many gay men raised in the church, Adam was wracked with guilt from just about everything he did in his life.
“Adam, there’s plenty wrong with this job already,” Steve explained. “Maybe we’re all going to hell, but it won’t be for conducting our business on sacred land.”
Steve then clapped his hands together to signal that the working day had commenced, and each pair of workers dispersed to their first designated house.
The first place Miles and Felix were assigned to was a small semi-detached abode occupied by an elderly zombie woman and her deadbeat unemployed forty-something zombie son. Miles knocked softly, mostly out of habit, then tried the door handle. It was unlocked.
The two of them crept quietly inside and found the zombie mother at the ironing board, carrying on with her domestic routine, dutifully pushing an iron back and forth over her son’s white t-shirt. The shirt was now ruined, covered in dark brown marks. The smell of burning cotton wafted throughout the house. It was a minor miracle that it hadn’t caught fire and burned the place down.
The zombie mother wasn’t too much trouble. She was a little reluctant at first about leaving her chores unfinished, but after a couple of minutes Miles and Felix were able to coax her away from the ironing board and had her muzzled and bound. Felix escorted her out the door.
Her zombie son wasn’t quite so obliging. He was in the adjoining room, doing what he’d spent most of his life doing – sitting on the couch, watching TV with his feet up on the coffee table. The wrestling was on, and the zombie’s eyes were fixated on the screen. It seemed that the lack of a functioning brain in no way diminished his enjoyment of the sport. If anything, it was enhanc
ed.
But this presented a problem for Miles; like his previous human incarnation, this zombie didn’t appreciate being interrupted in the middle of his favourite pastime. Whenever Miles came too close with the snare pole, the zombie would let out an angry hiss and batter it away.
Miles could see that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with the TV on, so he grabbed the remote and flicked it off. Big mistake – this immediately sent the zombie into a fit of rage. He sprang up off the couch at a speed Miles was unprepared for and lurched at him with his teeth bared. Miles wasn’t expecting this sort of combative behaviour. It seemed that even in death, the worst thing you could do to a wrestling fan was switch the TV off in the middle of a match.
He stumbled back a few steps and lost his footing when he tripped over the ironing board. He threw an arm out in an attempt to steady himself, and his hand fell on the scalding hot iron. He screamed out in pain, then hit the ground.
The zombie son advanced on Miles with a look of pure murder in his eyes. Miles had misjudged the zombie’s height when he first saw him. Standing up, he was well over six feet tall.
He scrambled back into the corner of the room and looked for a way out, but there was none. Miles was trapped.
The zombie then stopped suddenly.
It was as if he had run into an invisible force field. He tried moving forward, but found that he couldn’t.
He looked down to his feet and saw two thin cables wrapped tightly around his ankles.
And then his feet were yanked violently out from underneath him. He landed on the floor, face first, with a solid thud.
Miles looked up and saw Felix standing behind the zombie. His cable-gun device was in his hands; the device he had invented, but had been disallowed by the UMC regulatory body.
“Are you okay there, Miles?” Felix asked. The cable slowly retracted back into the device, and the heavy zombie was dragged across the floor like a harpooned whale.
Miles scrambled to his feet, clutching at his scalded hand. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be using that thing on the job,” he said.
Felix shrugged and wiped the perspiration from his face. “If we get caught out here, I think we’ll be facing more serious indictments than the use of improper equipment.”
Miles couldn’t fault that logic. He hurried across to help out Felix, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts they finally managed to slip the muzzle over the zombie’s face. Felix fastened the cable ties around his wrists, and they both hauled him upright and led him outside.
That was the first house taken care of. They had spent more than thirty minutes there when it should only have taken ten. There were still another four hundred or so houses to go before they reached their target.
They were already running behind schedule.
Steve decided that no one would object if the business helped themselves to a couple of hundred litres of petrol from the local service station. Even though they hoped this job would be immensely profitable for them, it still made sense to make use of the free supply of fuel if it was just sitting there. Dead Rite could then add larceny to their rapidly-expanding list of misdemeanours, but compared to the myriad of other crimes they would be committing over the course of the next few days, this was a fairly minor one.
He had entrusted Marcus and Erin with the task of refilling the two buses. This may not have seemed like the smartest decision he’d ever made, as neither one was especially known for their diligence. But both had volunteered, and it was a relatively straightforward task. Steve figured that even a couple of complete idiots could manage this without screwing it up.
It wasn’t long after they arrived when Erin was hit with intense cravings for both nicotine and junk food. She lit up a cigarette (next to a sign explicitly warning her not to) then wandered into the shop in search of some free food.
Marcus stayed back at the bowser and filled the minibus’s tank. Thanks to his infinitesimal attention span, about ten seconds had elapsed before he found this task to be tedious beyond all reason. He alleviated his intolerable boredom by reaching inside the bus’s front window and switching the radio on. He scanned the dial until he came across Fusion FM, the only station that played SlamCore 24/7, and the only station Marcus ever listened to these days.
His mood instantly brightened upon hearing that familiar thumping beat. The song playing was “Acid Reflux” by Chemikal Ali, the phenomenon that had transported SlamCore from the underground to the top of the charts. Six months earlier, this kind of music was only ever heard at desert raves or on pirate radio. Now it featured in fast food commercials and Hollywood rom-coms.
Marcus found the volume knob and turned it up full.
When the “slam” hit, he felt the ground shake. The vibrations from every beat raced through his body. He loved the feeling this music gave him more than life itself. Listening to SlamCore was better than any drug he’d ever tried – although drugs would have further enhanced his listening pleasure.
He remembered back to when he first heard this song, at Chemikal Ali’s 4:00 a.m. set at the Gutterrave Festival a few months ago. He knew then and there that it was an anthem for a generation. Here was the soundtrack to the apocalypse; music that could melt your face off.
Erin appeared in the reflection of the car window, returning from her trip to the shop.
“Hey Erin,” he said. “Could you take over here for a minute and–”
But when he turned around he saw that it wasn’t Erin. He was instead face-to-face an eighty-year-old zombie in grease-stained overalls with a head full of wild grey hair. This was Zombie Lyle, the service station proprietor who was such a committed smoker that he refused to let a minor thing like throat surgery stop him.
Zombie Lyle lurched at Marcus, his yellow teeth going straight for the jugular.
Marcus threw his hands up in defence and did all he could to hold him off. This proved to be much harder than he had anticipated. Lyle was strong for an old dead guy. This kind of aggression took Marcus by surprise. Zombies were usually fairly easy to handle, especially when they had a few miles on the clock. But holding off Zombie Lyle was like trying to fight off an amorous Rottweiler.
Marcus used all his strength to shove him away, but Zombie Lyle just wouldn’t quit. He came back again, pouncing at him with frightening speed. Marcus grabbed the only thing he had at his disposal to defend himself with – the fuel pump.
He wasn’t deliberately aiming to shove the pump’s nozzle into Zombie Lyle’s tracheotomy hole. But that was where it ended up.
Marcus held onto the fuel pump for dear life, desperately trying to keep Zombie Lyle at arm’s length. The zombie’s decomposing face was now inches away from his own. Even when he was alive, Lyle was frightening enough to look at (Elliott once described him as having a face like a Ralph Steadman illustration). But undead he was truly terrifying, which Marcus was now discovering in explicit detail, from his sagging pockmarked skin to the burst capillaries in his eyes. This was like the worst acid flashback ever, multiplied by one thousand.
Zombie Lyle let out a guttural snarl and waved his arms wildly, trying to claw at Marcus, not at all put off by the fact that he had a fuel pump jammed into the hole in his throat.
Marcus was holding onto the pump handle so tightly that he didn’t realise he was squeezing the lever. He soon saw what he was doing when Zombie Lyle’s stomach filled with petrol, then overflowed and spilled out his mouth and nose.
And throughout it all, the zombie just kept coming and coming at him with a singular determination.
“Hey!”
The zombie’s head turned, just as a full can of Pepsi slammed into the side of his face. He let out an angry holler. Bile and combustible fuel spewed from his mouth.
Erin was standing nearby with three more unopened cans in her hand.
“Get ready to run!” she yelled at Marcus.
Erin threw a second can. This one hit him square in the face.
Marcus shoved Zombie Lyle b
ack. He tried to make a run for it, but slipped on a patch of oil. He fell down on the concrete, face first.
Erin moved in closer and hurled her remaining two cans. They hit the zombie in the shoulder and chest.
“Marcus!” she shouted. “You literally need to get out of there, right now!”
Marcus’s only avenue of escape was underneath the minibus. He executed a quick barrel roll, just as Erin flicked her cigarette at the crazed zombie.
The cigarette landed at Zombie Lyle’s feet, and he was immediately engulfed in flames.
Marcus watched on with a mixture of amazement and disbelief from underneath the minibus as the zombie staggered around area fully ablaze. Skin and muscle tissue melted away and dripped onto the ground like a grilled sandwich with too much cheese. Marcus almost passed out from the ghastly stench.
Zombie Lyle came to a spectacular end a few seconds later in an explosion of char-grilled rotting flesh.
Chapter 20
The stinging in Miles’ burnt hand was getting worse. He left Felix to take care of the two zombies, then returned to the house and went straight for the bathroom.
He ran his hand under the cold water tap for a couple of minutes, then rifled through the medicine cabinet. He found a tube of balm that was labelled arthritis relief. He didn’t know if it would do anything for burns, but by now he was willing to give anything a shot. He squeezed out a generous amount and rubbed it into his hand, then wrapped it with a bandage from the first aid kit. The balm proved to be mildly effective and made the pain slightly more bearable.
He carefully replaced the tube back in the medicine cabinet and noticed there were about two dozen pill bottles inside. The labels were old and yellowed, and had names like Exelon, Actonel, Claritin, Flomax, Voltaren, Zyloprim, Protonix, and many more that were too faded to read. Miles had no idea what most of these were, but he assumed they were the kinds of pills the old lady needed to keep her body going; blood pressure tablets, vitamin supplements, antihistamines, anti-Alzheimer’s medication. He couldn’t see any painkillers, which was what he really wanted.
