Ghost Virus

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Jerry. He was looking around for a gate or an alleyway at the back of the warehouse yard, but it was surrounded on all three sides by high brick walls, dividing it from the next-door gardens, and he could see neither. ‘I thought there might be a way out of here, but it doesn’t look like there is.’

  Although they could no longer see the coats, they could hear that they were shaking the gate so violently that it couldn’t keep them out for very much longer.

  Jamila took hold of Jerry’s lapels. The whites of her eyes were shining in the gloom, and the rain was sparkling on her headscarf.

  ‘Will they tear us into pieces, like those other people?’ she asked.

  Jerry looked over at the builders’ shed. ‘Not if I can help it,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s something in there we can beat them off with.’

  ‘Jerry – even if you shoot them they don’t die – and you haven’t got a gun.’

  Jerry crossed over to the shed. He peered through the window but the glass was too grimy and it was too dark to see anything inside. There was a heavy padlock on the door, so he went over to the warehouse wall and picked up a broken brick. He smashed it against the padlock as hard as he could, and after the third smash both hasp and padlock dropped off onto the ground. Jerry opened the door and stepped in.

  Inside, the hut smelled strongly of stale cigarettes and sweat and oil. A collection of picks was stacked up against the wall on the left-hand side, and piled on a shelf above them was a cluster of yellow and white hard hats. On the right-hand side, at least seven donkey-jackets stained with mud and brick dust were hanging from a row of pegs, and at the back of the shed there were more shelves, with long-handled mallets and crowbars and two chainsaws, one with no chain. A picture of this year’s Miss BumBum had been cut from the Daily Star and nailed to the front of the middle shelf.

  Jamila looked anxiously back in the direction of the fence. The shaking sound was growing more and more furious, and she was sure that she heard a metallic creak as if one of the gateposts were giving way.

  ‘Jerry! What are we going to do? Maybe you could hit them with one of those picks.’

  Jerry said, ‘Wait – the way we cut up that sweater and that dress, when Mindy’s parents came back to life. That worked, didn’t it? Just like your grandfather cut up that what’s-it’s-name.’

  ‘That jinn, yes. But maybe these are different. The sweater and the dress, they were attached to people. They were parasites. These coats, they have a life of their own.’

  ‘Didn’t the jinn have a life of its own?’

  ‘Jerry, I know that worked with Mindy’s parents, but that was a story! And listen – did you hear that? It sounds like they’ve knocked the gate down! They must be coming!’

  Jerry pushed his way past the donkey-jackets to the back of the hut. He lifted up the chainsaw and carried it outside. Jamila watched him as he set it down on the ground and put his foot on it to hold it steady, although she kept glancing nervously back towards the corner of the warehouse wall for any sign of the coats appearing.

  Jerry pulled out the choke lever, pressed the decompression button and then started to yank at the pull cord. He yanked it five or six times but the chainsaw still wouldn’t start, and he had the chilling feeling that it might be out of petrol.

  He was still tugging at it when the five coats appeared around the side of the last warehouse wall. They were floating towards them more slowly now, all spread out, like a gang of gunfighters in a Western. They obviously realised that the warehouse yard was totally enclosed and that Jerry and Jamila had nowhere to run.

  ‘Please, Allah, protect us,’ prayed Jamila, laying her hand on Jerry’s shoulder.

  Jerry tried pushing the choke lever back in a little, and yanked at the pull cord again. Immediately, the chainsaw roared into life.

  He picked it up and stood his ground, with his feet planted firmly apart. ‘Come on, then!’ he shouted, over the buzzing of the chainsaw. ‘If you want us, come and fucking get us!’

  The coats didn’t hesitate, and kept on coming. It occurred to Jerry that although they could probably sense him and Jamila, they could neither see them nor hear them. They had no eyes or ears, after all. But they were spirits. They were ghosts. They were desperate to come alive again, and that desperation must alert them to the presence of any living soul.

  Two of the coats suddenly came rushing towards him, their sleeves whirling. Jerry lifted the chainsaw and one of them flew right into it. One of its sleeves was instantly ripped into shreds, and then Jerry swung the chainsaw from side to side and the coat was torn apart so violently that it looked as if it had exploded.

  Jerry advanced on the second coat while fragments of the first were still fluttering all around him like a swarm of black moths. Now it was plain that the coats were either blind or suicidal, because this coat flung itself at him without any hesitation. He lopped off its hood before he zig-zagged the chainsaw all the way down it, reducing it to tattered grey ribbons.

  Now I’ve got the better of you, you bastards, thought Jerry, and his whole body surged with adrenaline. He stalked towards the remaining three coats and when they came flying towards him he swung the chainsaw in a criss-cross pattern so that he could chop up all three of them at once. For almost a minute the chainsaw screamed and gnashed and growled and Jerry almost disappeared from Jamila’s sight behind a blizzard of dark wool.

  At last Jerry switched the chainsaw off, and the warehouse yard fell silent, while the remains of the coats drifted slowly to the ground all around him.

  He walked back to Jamila and put down the chainsaw. They held each other tightly, so tightly that they could almost feel each other’s hearts beating.

  After a while, Jerry said, ‘There. It worked on jinns, and it worked on Mindy’s mum and dad, and it works on these buggers too. We need to find that SAS squadron and that anti-terrorist squad, and tell them.’

  ‘There is one more thing I think we should do,’ said Jamila. ‘My grandfather not only cut up the jinn into pieces, he burned the pieces, too. I believe we should do the same. Liepa said that the virus kept people’s spirits alive in the fibres of the clothes they once wore. If their spirits could survive their clothes being torn apart and spun into yarn and remade into other clothes, maybe they can also survive you cutting them up.’

  ‘Well, you could be right,’ said Jerry. ‘And who am I to argue with an onion?’

  He went back into the shed and found a rake and a plastic container full of petrol. It took him only a few minutes to scrape up most of the woollen fragments and heap them in a metre-high pile on the warehouse’s concrete floor. Then he poured petrol all over them.

  ‘Don’t happen to have a light on you?’ he asked Jamila.

  She stepped forward and handed him a book of matches from Samrat’s. ‘You’re lucky. I only took these today so that I could make a note of their number.’

  Jerry tossed a lighted match onto the heap of rags and with a soft whoomph it burst into flame. They stood and watched it, with Jerry’s arm around Jamila’s waist, holding her close. Raindrops spat and sizzled as they fell on the fire, and the flames threw shadows on the white-painted interior wall of the warehouse.

  Jerry looked up at the shadows and he was sure that he could see ghosts dancing and waving their arms, but in the state of mind he was in at the moment, he knew that he was prepared to believe almost anything.

  Jamila looked at her watch. ‘Now we need to go and find the SAS and tell them to equip themselves with chainsaws,’ she said.

  Jerry hefted up the chainsaw that he had left on the ground. ‘That shouldn’t be difficult. There’s a Screwfix shop on the High Street, only just up the road from here. They should have enough chainsaws in stock.’

  They left the fire burning and went out through the broken-open gates. They were both shocked by their experience, and feeling detached from reality, but they walked as quickly as they could, with Jerry lugging the chainsaw. They knew t
hat every minute could mean the difference between innocent people being spared or being savagely dismembered.

  What they didn’t see as they made their way up Park Road was a fiery figure floating out of the gates and starting to follow them. It was made entirely out of flames, but it had the vague appearance of a person walking. The figure hadn’t gone more than fifty metres, though, before the flames started to subside, and the last few flickers were quickly extinguished by the rain. Then there was nothing left except a wisp of grey smoke, and that soon drifted away.

  46

  It took them less time to find the SAS squadron than they could have hoped. As they walked up the High Street towards Tooting Broadway station, they saw at least eight khaki Land Rovers parked in a line, as well as three camouflaged personnel carriers. About forty blades were gathered around the station entrance, all wearing black helmets and black combat uniforms and body armour.

  Jamila took out her warrant card as they approached, and held it up so that the blades could see it.

  ‘Police,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me who’s in charge here, please?’

  A sergeant took her card and examined it carefully. Then he said to Jerry, ‘What are you carrying that for? That chainsaw?’

  ‘We can explain that,’ said Jamila. ‘Please just let us speak to whoever’s in charge.’

  An officer in a black beret came forward. Jerry thought he was far too young to be an SAS officer. He had blue eyes and a fresh face and he looked more like the captain of a public school rugby team.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Patel and Detective Constable Pardoe, both attached to Tooting CID. We only just managed to escape from the police station after the clothes broke in. You’ve seen the clothes? The coats and the jackets and the sweaters?’

  The officer nodded. ‘We’ve lost three men already. That’s why we’re here, to regroup. We’re all pretty stunned, to tell you the truth. We were told we were going to have to deal with rioters. We had no idea they were going to be – well, whatever the hell they are.’ He held out his hand and said, ‘Major John Wallace, by the way. SAS CRW.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Jerry.

  Major Wallace turned around and looked back along Mitcham Road. It was still jammed solid with abandoned cars and buses, and the pavements were still strewn with bodies, and it was still raining, hard.

  ‘We tried to call your control room to let them know that we’d arrived,’ he said. ‘There was no response. And then our own radios cut out. We haven’t been able to get into contact with anybody, not even with mobile phones.’

  ‘Same problem,’ said Jerry, lifting up his iPhone. ‘Dead as a dodo. No landlines working, either.’

  ‘I’m guessing that our rioters have set off some kind of electromagnetic pulse device,’ said Major Wallace. ‘They’re designed to knock out anything electric – phones, radios, as well as computers. We know that the Russians and the North Koreans have got them, but these aren’t Russians or North Koreans. For God’s sake, they’re not even people.’

  ‘How did you lose your men?’ asked Jamila. She spoke so sympathetically that Jerry thought Major Wallace was going to start crying.

  ‘We couldn’t get the Jackals anywhere near the police station because of all these abandoned vehicles, so we went on foot. We came across the – rioters, whatever they are. They were swarming in front of the police station and it looked like they were mutilating a number of dead police officers. We fired some warning shots but they came straight for us.’

  Major Wallace paused to take a deep breath. Then he said, ‘We shouted another warning and then we opened fire. There must have been about two dozen rioters, and it was only when they came closer that we realised what they actually were. I couldn’t tell you how many rounds we pumped into them but it didn’t make any impression on them at all. They kept on coming and they brought down three of my best men while they were still firing. Literally buried them. That’s when I called for an immediate retreat.’

  He paused again. ‘What we’re going to do now, I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you this,’ said Jerry. ‘Because they’re just clothes, they can’t be stopped by shooting at them. They can’t be Tasered, either, and I don’t think that tear-gas would have any effect, either. They haven’t got eyes and they haven’t got lungs.’

  ‘So how in the name of God can they be walking around, attacking people?’

  ‘It has been explained to us,’ said Jamila. ‘But it is a long and complicated story, and even then what we were told may not be true, or not completely true, anyway. It is some kind of virus which infects clothes and gives them the personality of people who used to own them, but are now dead.’

  Major Wallace frowned at her. Jerry could tell that if he hadn’t seen the clothes for himself, he would have thought that she was raving.

  ‘DS Patel and me, we managed to escape from the nick,’ he said. ‘We were trying to get here to meet you when we got spotted by five coats. They chased us into a building site and that was where I found this chainsaw. When they came for us, I cut them up into literally hundreds of pieces. DS Patel told me her grandfather used to do that to jinns when they tried to get into his house. A jinn – that’s a ghost, or a demon thingy.’

  ‘That was only a story,’ Jamila insisted.

  ‘Yes, but it killed them, didn’t it, cutting them up?’ said Jerry. ‘And just to make sure, we made a bonfire out of them afterwards.’

  Major Wallace said, ‘All right. And you think that we’ll be able to deal with the rest of them the same way? We’ve a chainsaw aboard one of the Jackals, but we’re going to need a lot more, aren’t we? These clothes – there must be hundreds of them.’

  ‘There’s a Screwfix shop just down the road there, and there’s a Wickes hardware store in Plough Lane, just the other side of St George’s Hospital,’ Jerry told him. ‘Between the two of them they should have enough chainsaws in stock, and if not there’s a Toolstation in Wimbledon.’

  Major Wallace said, ‘Did you catch that, sergeant?’

  The sergeant had been standing close behind his right shoulder, so Jerry thought that it would have been amazing if he hadn’t. ‘Yes, sir,’ he snapped. ‘Chainsaws, sir.’

  ‘That’s right, sergeant. As many as possible and as quickly as possible. You’ll probably have to ram your way into the shops but we’ll worry about that later.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The sergeant picked out half a dozen men. They all climbed into one of the Jackal armoured vehicles, started up the engine with a loud bellow, and U-turned across the road, colliding with three abandoned cars and forcing them, deeply dented, out of their way.

  Major Wallace said, ‘All we can do now is wait for them to come back. Let’s go and sit down and you can brief me some more about this virus.’

  Next to the station there was a Starbucks coffee shop. Its front window was smashed and its front door was hanging by its hinges. They went inside, their feet crunching on broken glass, and sat down at one of the tables.

  ‘Shame there’s no power,’ said Jerry. ‘We could have made ourselves a double espresso.’

  Another helicopter passed overhead, so low that that the whole coffee shop shook.

  ‘That sounded like one of ours,’ said Major Wallace. ‘Central command will have seen what’s going on so we’re sure to have reinforcements pretty soon. It’s so damned frustrating having no way of getting in touch with them. As I said, I can only guess that these clothes have an EMP device, although I always thought you needed a high-altitude nuclear explosion to fry a country’s electronics.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jamila. ‘But instead there is some extraordinary psychic power at work here. If the virus is able to give clothes the power to come alive, who knows what else it can do? My grandmother told me about a bhoot which could set fire to somebody’s house even if it was miles away. It could also kill people who had antagonised i
t during its lifetime just by dreaming about them.’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ said Jerry. ‘Too much of what your grandmother told you is coming true.’

  *

  More than an hour and a half passed before they heard the bellowing engine of the Jackal coming back, and a loud crunch as it drove over an abandoned motorcycle.

  Jerry and Jamila followed Major Wallace out of the coffee shop. The sergeant climbed down from the Jackal brandishing an orange Husqvarna chainsaw, and his blades came out carrying two chainsaws each. Three of them went back to the Jackal and brought out more.

  ‘Well done, sergeant,’ said Major Wallace, inspecting the chainsaws all laid down in a row on the pavement. ‘How many altogether?’

  ‘Twenty-three, sir. I reckoned that would be enough. They’re all petrol, and we’ve topped them all up. They had your cordless electric chainsaws, too, but none of them were charged and of course there’s no power to charge them up with.’

  ‘Right – plan of action,’ said Major Wallace. ‘We divide into three squads of chainsaw operators and we attack the police station simultaneously from the north, the centre and the south. The main doors in the centre have already been breached, so we won’t have any trouble gaining access there. The doors on the north and south sides you’ll almost certainly have to blow.

  ‘Any clothes we encounter on the way there we rip to bits, and when we attack there can’t be any hesitation, and I mean none. I want you going after those coats and jackets as if you’re berserk. The Tooting Chainsaw Massacre. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the blades, in unison.

  ‘Once we’ve chopped up these clothes, I’ve been discussing with Detective Sergeant Patel here what we should do next, because she’s something of an expert on bizarre happenings like this – well, more of an expert than any of us. She says we need to burn them, so that we make absolutely sure that the fibres they’re made of can’t come back to life. Yes, I know. None of it makes any sense. But they’ve already accounted for three of us, and if that’s what it takes to kill them off for good and all, that’s what we’ll do.