Their scout had certainly earned his commission, he thought with a smile, as he appraised the gold script upon the black sign above the door: HENDERSON & SON, JEWELLERS.
The other two men caught up with him. "OK, Davis, I want you on lookout," he ordered, glancing at them. "Hewitt, with me. This shouldn't take us more than five minutes."
Without a word, the former policeman passed the kid the two empty holdalls then positioned himself beneath the awning of a pizza restaurant, resting his machine-gun on a metal dining table. Gabe led Hewitt to the jeweller's entrance and tried the door - locked. Discerning nothing beyond the glass, he swung his rifle-butt and smashed the panelling, immediately setting off a shrieking siren that bathed the area in a blue pulsating light. Hewitt stepped out from the doorway and levelled his shotgun at the alarm several feet above them, blowing it off the wall. The strident wail was cut dead, devolving into an oscilloscope whine as pieces of the plastic casing clattered to the ground around them.
Hewitt shrugged as he returned to Gabe. "Might as well hear ourselves think."
The older man knocked the shards of glass free and stepped into the darkened shop. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a flashlight, sweeping its beam over the cases containing rings, necklaces, brooches and watches. The interior of the store was small, with just a counter and till at the far end, and a solid wooden door leading to a back room. Gabe strode over to it, but that too was bolted.
"OK, we haven't got the time to be graceful about this," Gabe muttered. "Grab as much as you can." He yanked a crowbar from his bag and shattered the nearest cabinet, silver and gold chains spilling out into his hands. There was a crash behind him as Hewitt did the same, tipping an entire display of pendants into the bag he had spread on the carpet. The two men worked quickly and efficiently, not stopping to separate diamonds from crystal but pouring them all haphazardly into the holdalls, occasionally casting a glance to Davis outside as he sporadically let rip with a burst of automatic fire. The groans of the dead seemed to be growing closer.
"You nearly finished there?" Gabe asked, zipping up one of the holdalls. He picked it up briefly to test its weight, wincing as his muscles strained, then wandered over to the till, breaking it open with a couple of blows from the crowbar. He pocketed a few hundred pounds in cash.
"Almost," Hewitt muttered, shaking a box of signet rings into his bag. He crouched, sifting a hand through the loot, then looked up at his companion. "What the fuck are we doing this for anyway?"
Gabe sighed. "We haven't got the time for this—"
"I mean, look at us - robbing a jewellery store like it fucking means anything any more." He held up a handful of necklaces. "All of this, it's worthless... pointless. The best we can do with it is melt it down into more slugs to put through their rotten fucking heads."
"Harry knows what he's doing."
"Does he? Seems to me we should be out there stomping on a few zombie skulls, making a concerted effort to be putting the bastards below ground where they should be, rather than stealing shit that's got no fucking value anymore—"
"You think this situation is going to last?" Gabe threw his arms up, impatient now. "You think the deadheads are going to be around forever? They're falling apart, you said so yourself. It's a plague, it's running its natural course, and the world adapts around it and learns to evolve. A fucking meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and the balance of the planet shifted, but it set off in a new direction. That's what Flowers sees is going to happen - the zombies are going to pass on and we're going to have to put ourselves back together again. And he's going to be in a position to be top of the heap." He kicked a jingling tangle of gold chains towards the kid. "And this stuff... yes, it means nothing now, but in five, ten years Harry's going to emerge as the richest, most powerful man in the city and everyone's going to have to barter with him for a slice."
Hewitt looked sullen. Gabe motioned to him to pick up his bag. "Come on, let's move. We're running out of time." He unhooked his two-way from his belt and spoke into it. "Ali, how's it going?"
"Few creeps trying to get in, but most followed you," the crackly voice responded. "Feel like a sitting duck out here. I think they're getting agitated."
"Understood. We'll be with you in a couple of minutes."
Gabe locked stares with Hewitt for a moment, then strode past him out of the shop, swinging his holdall onto his shoulder, shifting its weight until it felt comfortable. Davis raised his eyebrows and nodded towards the bodies of a half-dozen ghouls lying in the mouth of the square. More were trying to navigate past their fallen cousins.
"OK," Gabe murmured wearily. "Lock and load."
Hewitt emerged from the jeweller's, two bags strapped across his back, chambering shells into his shotgun. He barely acknowledged the other two men, merely walked towards the stiffs that were shuffling nearer, pumping the slide-action. "Come on, you fuckers," he called. "Who's first?"
Gabe shook his head. What was it like to feel young?
CHAPTER TWO
They drove in silence out of central London's narrowly clustered maze of streets, a tangible sense of relief flooding through the interior of the car as the roads became wider, the buildings sparser, and they headed into the outskirts. Davis and Hewitt sat in the back reloading their weapons, the former breathing a little hard, Gabe noticed. He hoped it was merely the weight of the body armour coupled with the frantic return to the vehicle that was the cause of his exhaustion, but he'd caught, out of the corner of his eye, the former policeman wiping his brow with a trembling hand, and wondered if the pressures of their situation were starting to catch up with him. Gabe had seen it happen to sterner stuff than Davis, and you could never predict how those nearing breakdown could affect future outings like tonight's.
If the last few years had taught him anything - if the plague had taught humanity anything - it was the importance of reliance on comrades, on knowing there's somebody with you to cover your back. Strange that it should be a crisis of this magnitude to deliver such a lesson, but its simplicity did not diminish its truth - operate as a tight unit, and you'll survive. Allow it to unravel a touch and you put everybody's lives at risk.
For all Flowers' failings - and he pushed those in his organisation hard in his pursuit of power, there was no question of that - Harry understood that a machine could only perform at its best if the individual parts were all working together. One loose screw could bring it crashing down, as previous experience has shown. Gabe mused that he would have to have a word with the boss about Davis, maybe recommend him for evaluation with the docs. Better to catch these things early.
He supposed he ought to have a whisper too about Hewitt's increasing belligerence and refusal to toe the line, but knew he would think better of it once they reached base. The idiot found favour in Flowers' court for some reason, and Gabe would undoubtedly be seen as making waves if he criticised Hewitt's conduct, no matter how obliquely. He couldn't quite ascertain what it was that Harry saw in the kid, but he clearly sparked something in him - some nascent paternal feelings, perhaps - that brought forth the highly rare qualities of indulgence and forgiveness from the old man. Flowers evidently looked upon him as quasi-family. Judging by Hewitt's outburst in the jeweller's, the appreciation was hardly mutual; the youngster clearly saw Harry's scheme as a sign that their employer was losing it, and probably spent many an evening dreaming what he would do with the outfit if it had him at its head. Flowers had seen off leadership challenges before, but this one could strike him close and deep if it wasn't nipped in the bud. Trouble was always brewing, Gabe thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
The zombies were less of a nuisance once they got out of the city, scattered mostly in groups of fours and fives in parks and residential districts, staggering between the privet hedges seeking living flesh to feast upon. Another primal instinct that seemed to be still blipping in their brains was a herding nature: the stiffs appeared to be naturally aware that, with supplies so close to hand, most human s
urvivors were found hiding in the big concrete tangles of the major conurbations ('cementeries', Gabe had heard one wit dub these overrun metropolises). Therefore, concentrated numbers of the dead gravitated there like predators drawn to a watering hole, hoping to chance upon something warm and tender, leaving the sprawling suburbs relatively empty and easier to traverse.
Ali guided the Escort with little effort through the smouldering, garbage-strewn streets of Catford and Bromley, casually avoiding the few cadavers that stumbled into their path. Watching the deserted semi-detached houses pass by - front doors standing wide open, children's toys left scattered in gardens, the odd splash of red on a window - Gabe felt tears prick his eyes. He pinched them closed for a moment. The dark, charnel terrors of the city he could cope with (he had long been inured to the day-to-day bloodshed by now) but it was the quiet reminders of life before the dead rose that tugged at his heart. What was once comforting familiarity now looked like a blackened shell with all the life, all the goodness, ripped out of it. These routes through suburbia never failed to affect him in this way, but while he could stem the tears from flowing he couldn't turn off his emotions entirely. Everything he'd taken for granted, everything normal, now looked alien without the context of the people who'd once lived here. They'd breathed life into it, and without them it merely became a place fit for the dead.
He'd like to think that what he told Hewitt earlier was true; that this was a phase they were travelling through, a footnote in history. He imagined the fourteenth-century peasants sprouting boils and seeing entire towns and villages decimated thought much the same about the Black Death - that their situation was surely going to get better, that this couldn't be the end for mankind. They had been facing species extinction, to be wiped from the surface of the earth, and humanity, resilient as ever, crawled through it, clinging tenaciously to life as it always had. Now it was staring down into the abyss once more, and the optimistic embraced the notion that there had to be an escape. Flowers was one such idealist, fervently having faith that it was only a matter of time before society would start to rebuild itself (of course, Harry had his own ideas of what that society would be, including instating him as its lord and master).
"All outbreaks have a shelf-life," he'd told Gabe once. "They ravage through an unprepared populace, laying waste to everything they touch. But they also consume themselves eventually, all that energy and greed directed inwards."
Gabe had thought that much the same could be said about humanity.
Flowers was waiting for the virus to burn itself out, when it could no longer sustain the corpses it had reanimated. Gabe wanted to believe that would happen, and he couldn't deny there were signs that the zombies were disintegrating - the bacteria that bubbled away inside each ghoul's cranium, that had awakened its motor functions, was no match for time and tide, after all. But could things ever really return to what they had once been? Could these homes ever be filled again without being a pale imitation of the life they had once contained? He wondered if he'd grown so used to the emptiness that the sight of people walking freely again might seem equally unreal, a simulacrum of civilization recreated from memory but with its soul indelibly bruised.
The streetlamps and boxy buildings of the suburbs faded away as the car picked its way through the Kent countryside. Gabe marvelled at the way nature still ran its course, unaware of the cataclysmic events that had taken place around it. If it wasn't for the quiet - even in the densest of forests, it was rare to hear birdsong - out here it was possible to believe that nothing was wrong. The woodlands and emerald fields were mostly untainted by the dead, though the odd lost shambling figure could sometimes be discerned on a remote path, looking from a distance as dangerous as a rambler. Even then, any ghouls you encountered within these environs had more than likely been released by a local farm for sport rather than being on the prowl; it had become a popular country pastime to take potshots at captured deadheads, occasionally even riding them down. Flowers had aspirations to get in with the horsy set, and had been on several of these hunts, though Gabe guessed that as a quarry they offered little challenge and not much of a satisfying kill. As with any of these shindigs, it was a social gathering with a touch of carnage thrown in. Harry had told him - typically eyes a-gleam like it was a barometer of a man of his stature - that one of the squires that had invited him for such a get-together had scores of stiffs locked in a converted stable, ready for whenever his friends fancied some target practice of a weekend. The resurrected had been rounded up in the city and carted back in cattle trucks.
This kind of attitude was symptomatic of the way some had adapted to living with the dead, Gabe thought as Ali turned the Escort off the winding lane and onto a narrow, conifer-lined track. Once the initial shock had dissipated, once it became clear that the authorities were not going to be able to solve it - indeed, once it was apparent that there was no authority left at all - people resorted to different methods of coping with the crisis. The immediate, predictable response for many was to go on a looting rampage, positively embracing the breakdown of order, reverting to turn-of-the-century outlaws; a few survived this way, living on the road, smashing and grabbing what they could, but most underestimated the numbers of the dead that were growing daily, and especially did not take them seriously as a threat. Stupidity was the chief cause of death within the first few months. For your average Joe, once they realised that there was nowhere to run to, that the plague was everywhere, they hunkered down like refugees in a war-torn state, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. They were still there now, years later, living in tribes in cellars and boarded-up tenements, scrabbling for scraps, still hoping to be rescued.
But for a few, he mused, as the track widened, the foliage cleared and the vehicle slowly approached the gates of Flowers' mansion, it's been a matter of staying in control. The ruling elite has always tackled disaster in its own fashion, far removed from the epicentre, and the emergence of the undead had been no different for them than any other form of social unrest. They used it for their own advantage, whether for recreation - in the case of the ghoul hunts, and any manner of unsavoury antics the aristocrats got up to within their lodges - or for consolidating their already powerful position. For Harry, it was the latter; once he saw past the ravenous zombies, the outbreak was a fortuitous means to an end. He'd always lived outside governmental authority anyway, and so the breakdown of the police and the strictures of the law courts were to him of little consequence; on the contrary, their collapse was to be rejoiced.
"What," he'd say, sweeping his arms about his opulent study, "I'm supposed to be crying because I don't have to pay tax anymore? That there's no longer some snoop from Customs and Excise investigating my affairs? That I'm going to miss my phones being tapped?"
Flowers viewed it as a golden opportunity, ripe for the plucking. His regular business shrank once the plague took hold - he gradually lost contact with his associates overseas, as Russia, Syria, Pakistan and the US all seemingly suffered similar fates, descending into chaos, and unsurprisingly the takings from his clubs and bars went through the floor in the space of twenty-four hours - but the boss man had always prided himself on seeing the bigger picture. He had no need for profit in the interim, and money was as worthless as the paper it was printed on. So he drew himself back, planned out his strategy and prepared for his own personal and financial resurrection once the virus was played out. He built himself a regular army to protect him and enforce his will, sent scouts into the city to uncover vital supplies, had scientists kidnapped from Ministry of Defence laboratories to conduct research into the epidemic to gain an understanding of how to destroy the dead more efficiently. This was a chance that had been handed to him, and he couldn't afford to fuck it up; never, in his twenty years as head of his firm, could he imagine a time when he might be able to legitimately call the whole of London his domain. What had once been carved up by various crimelords all angling for more territory was now there for the taking in its entiret
y, and he was determined it was going to be his. And of course, with the capital established, he could spread his tentacles north, east, west and south, engulf a country that had fallen into anarchy. Whenever Harry talked about such an eventuality with Gabe, he hugged himself, his excitement contagious.
"The possibilities," he would whisper, "the possibilities that have been presented to me..."
As Ali pulled up to the main gates, a guard opened a padlocked door set into the chainlink fence and strode across, a flashlight bobbing in hand, an M16 weighted in the other. He stopped at the passenger side, Gabe rolling down the window to greet him.
"Patricks."
"Hey, O'Connell," the guard replied, shining the light into the car. "Any problems?"
"No, went fine." Gabe winced at the glare of the torch. Patricks crouched and swept it left and right, pausing momentarily to rest the beam on each occupant's face, then gave the outside of the vehicle a casual perusal. "Stiffs seem to be falling apart more than ever."
The other man nodded curtly. "Tell me about it. Couple got through the perimeter out by the woods earlier on." He blithely motioned behind him to the dense wall of shadow to the rear of the great house. "Tripped a landmine and the remains been stinking out the gardens ever since. Poor old Sanderson has been burying that shit since sundown. Even the dogs won't touch it."
"Can't say I blame them. They've been known to refuse Barrett's fried breakfasts."
Patricks barked a laugh in agreement. "Oh, by the way, the old man wants to see you. Said you were to call in on him when you got back."
The Words of Their Roaring Page 4
