Year of the Zombie [Anthology]

by David Moody

  Gez removed the baseball cap he’d been wearing to shield his eyes from the sun and wiped his brow. His short hair was dark brown. His skin was lightly freckled, with the odd splotch of teenage acne, but he wasn’t a bad looking lad. The thing most people noticed about him were his piercing blue eyes which seemed to dance with life. Even at his most glum, those eyes hinted at a free-spirited and mischievous nature and, in spite of the state of things, he was a happy-go-lucky young man.

  Geraint had never really known his father, a soldier who’d died on duty while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when Gez was only a year old. After that his mother, Andrea, had done her best to raise the boy, despite the hardships that came from living in a country where the dead had come back to feed on the living. For the most part, life had been hard but bearable. Until, the harsh winter of 2019, that was, when Gez’s mother caught pneumonia and never recovered.

  Since then, Geraint had lived with his Uncle Billy, and had been pretty much allowed to get away with anything by his mother’s colourful, and less than honest, brother.

  Still grinning after his bulls-eye hit on the ‘Stench’ in the graveyard, Gez looked to his friends for some kind of compliment. Neil Staveley grinned back at him: ‘Hell of a shot there, Gez. He won’t be getting up from that one.’

  Gez winked at his friend, and turned to see if Bethan had anything to add, but she was using her binoculars to look deep into the heart of the cemetery by now. A sharp intake of breath was followed by: ‘Ohmigod, is he eating a cat?’

  ‘Where?’ asked Neil excitedly.

  ‘Over there, by that old tree,’ Bethan said, pointing as she spoke.

  Neil stood up, and leaned against the railing in front of him, for a better look. ‘Aye, definitely cat.’

  Bethan muttered under her breath, ‘That’s just minging.’

  ‘No’, said Neil, ‘it’s nice, actually. Tastes a bit like chicken… furry chicken. And the handy thing is, if you’re a family of four, you get a leg each.’

  Bethan looked at him in disgust. Neil couldn’t suppress his laughter anymore.

  ‘You’re weird, you are, Neil Staveley’, said Bethan, as a smile finally broke across her lips.

  Neil was the youngest of the three friends, by about a month. The best way to describe him would be scrawny, but his mother always maintained he just hadn’t had his last ‘growing spurt’ yet. Both Neil’s parents and his younger sister, Ellie, had survived ‘Rotten Monday’ without incident, and the whole family seemed to have adapted well to the new world order. Some would even say that the Staveleys led a charmed life. They’d never had to deal with any of the living dead ‘up close and personal’. As a fairly well-off family, living in a large house, surrounded by high fencing, in one of the more up-market suburbs of Cardiff, it wasn’t really surprising that a lot of the worst times had passed them by.

  If Neil was the joker of the pack, then Bethan Mair Callaghan was the more serious of the three friends. Had you asked Gez, though, he would have told you that Beth was the coolest, most sorted person he had ever met. The pair had known each other since they were toddlers, having grown up on the same street in the Cathays area of the city. Bethan’s parents had divorced when she was eleven, and her father had moved away from Cardiff to live in West Wales. Both had survived ‘Rotten Monday’, and even though Beth didn’t see her dad as often as she’d like, they still managed to keep in touch regularly, thanks to the miracles of modern social media.

  Throughout her parents’ divorce five years earlier, Beth had managed to show far more maturity than her mother or father. The reason that things finished so amicably was in no small part down to her willingness to make sure that her parents could still behave like civilised adults, while the family went through their turmoil. And considering the state of the world since the dead had returned, Bethan’s maturity and calmness had truly impressed her best friend Gez.

  There was the time, one summer morning a couple of years back, when a “Stench” (the name given to the shambling dead by most teenagers) had entered the school yard and all hell had broken loose. While most of the pupils behaved like headless chickens, scattering as soon as they saw the rotting creature, Bethan, who was in the middle of a games lesson, simply crossed the playground with her rounders bat in her hand, and hit the Stench in the head as hard as she could. The blow did the job, as the zombie went down like a sack of potatoes and didn’t move again. Not only had Beth saved the day with her quick (if violent) thinking, it also guaranteed that she became the girls’ rounders captain for the rest of her time in school.

  Gez said, ‘Right, I’ve had my go. Anyone else want to play “Sink a Stench”?’

  His friends looked decidedly unimpressed, and just shook their heads.

  ‘Oh come on’, said Gez, ‘We’re allowed to blast one more before we’re over quota for the month.’

  ‘But I’m bored with this’, whined Neil. ‘For the last three years, we’ve been coming down here shooting Stenches, once a month. Where’s the fun in it? It’s not as if they’re difficult to hit. I mean, that one you blasted was moving so stiffly he might as well have stayed in his coffin. Shooting fish in a barrel would be more of a challenge. And it’s not as if we’re spoilt for choice. There’s fewer and fewer of these buggers every time we come here. And I swear to God, some of them have started realising what’s going on, and they’re hiding in the crypts until dark.’

  Bethan nodded her head in agreement, ‘He’s right. This shooting range just isn’t doing it for me anymore. About time we found a new hobby.’

  Cathays Cemetery was established in 1859 and was one of the biggest in Britain with nearly one hundred acres put aside for its “guests”. Some local wags liked to call it “the dead centre of Cardiff”, but that joke had worn very thin after the mayhem of “Rotten Monday”.

  It was a few weeks after that event when home-owners living across from the cemetery had noticed the bodies starting to climb out of the graves. Luckily, there was a reasonably high, wrought iron fence surrounding the graveyard, but even in the early days people would see snarling ghouls impaled on the spiked fence-tops, desperate to get their rotting hands on some fresh meat.

  The council finally got its act together and dealt with the impaled zombies, before going on to build a much higher wall around the cemetery (as it did with the seven other major cemeteries in the city). Once the walls had been erected to keep the dead in, the council turned its attention to building another wall around the city, to keep the rest of the dead out. All this took three labour-intensive years, and no little cost in manpower either. There was a severe shortage of ‘brickies’ in the Cardiff area, after so many had lost their lives building the defences for the nation’s capital.

  Once the cemeteries were sealed, signs were placed along the walls at hundred yard intervals, clearly created by someone with a warped sense of humour: DO NOT ENTER – TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN!

  But all this building work didn’t come cheap, and Cardiff City Council needed to replenish the coffers quickly. And so it was Councillor Brian Leyland who had the inspired idea of turning the cemeteries into public shooting galleries. A monthly fee for each family, added to the council tax, meant people got some much needed practice in dealing effectively with the dead. On top of that it was a handy, and popular, money spinner for the city, and it also helped keep down the Stench population.

  It wasn’t just the council that were making money out of the Cardiff cemeteries. Local funeral directors were raking in the cash as well. Obviously, being an undertaker after ‘Rotten Monday’ was now a high risk occupation, but the financial reward made up for it.

  People still felt that the tradition of burying a loved one was important, and so undertakers adapted their practices in order to make sure none of their clients came back to complain. A bolt gun to the back of the head usually did the trick though, sometimes, the odd client like Raymond Arthur William Jenkins slipped through the net.

  Services at the cemetery
were necessarily brief, and the fewer mourners, the better. There were only a limited number of chain mail suits that the funeral directors could hand out to the family. Since bringing in the specialised clothing, no one had lost their life, but some of the outfits had the odd Stench’s tooth still buried in them, from when things had got a little fraught at the graveside.

  And so, despite funerals now looking like a meeting of the Knights of the Round Table, things went on as normal… or as normal as could be expected these days.

  None of this made much of an impact on Gez and his friends. All they knew was that taking pot-shots at slow moving zombies was a lot more entertaining when you were playing on a games console than it was in real life.

  ‘Bored!’ said Bethan, loud enough to startle the other two.

  Gez looked at her. ‘All right, all right. What do you want to do then?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Well, is there anywhere you fancy going?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Neil sighed, ‘Is there any chance you could reply to a question with more than one word?’

  Bethan gave Neil a sly grin before saying, ‘Dick… head!’

  Gez couldn’t help but laugh. But before it turned into a slanging match between his friends, he suggested they all went back to his place for something to eat, then they could decide on their next plan of action.

  The three climbed down from their gantry on the wall, and left the dead of Cathays Cemetery in peace, for now.

  ◆◆◆

  It was a journalist with The Sun newspaper that coined the term, “Rotten Monday”. A lot of media types and academics had come up with words and phrases like “Renewal”, “The Reckoning”, “The Great Curse”, “Death Day”, and even “Zom-ageddon”, but none of them caught people’s imagination half as well as “Rotten Monday”. Mondays were rotten enough anyway by definition, but throw a horde of flesh eating ghouls on top of everything else, and you were left with a real cow of a Monday.

  Obviously, it all started on a Monday – the 15th of July, 2016 to be precise. As someone would later point out, ‘Well, at least they had the weather for it.’ It began, as most things did back then, with rumours, vague reports, and then eyewitness tales on Twitter and Facebook. Corpses were coming back to life, and clearly no one was trying to pretend that this was some clever viral advert for Shaun of the Dead 2.

  A few hours after social media started spreading the news, the rest of the media joined in. The twenty-four hour rolling news networks were awash with on-the-spot reports from clearly terrified journalists, and video footage taken by onlookers was being aired every few minutes. The most gruesome attacks were kept away off the screens, just in case they sparked all-out panic.

  Experts were called in to try and explain the reason for the dead coming back to life, but no-one could give a satisfactory explanation. Act of God, ancient plague pits, bacteria riddled meteors from the other side of the galaxy, a military experiment that went badly wrong... every scenario possible was trotted out for a media craving answers; networks vying for the honour of being the first channel to get the scoop on what was behind the events of Rotten Monday.

  The most entertaining, if not exactly accurate, reason for all this was given by a red-faced, braying Trade Unionist, who blamed the Tory government for the return of the dead. As he pointed out, ‘This would never have happened under Labour.’

  Five hours after the initial reports started coming in, Twitter and Facebook were almost in meltdown. The clip that finally ‘broke’ Facebook was a mobile phone video upload from eight year-old Jason Lee Phillips of Cheadle in Staffordshire which proudly bore the caption “Here is my nana eating our cat.”

  In the days and weeks that followed Rotten Monday, social media was unavailable, and TV stations were providing emergency broadcasts only. But after five years of living with the dead, things slowly began to return to some semblance of normality.

  By 2028, Twitter was back to its entertaining and disreputable best. There were daily jokes and puns about zombies, and counless parody accounts, making the most of the situation. The most notorious of these being @DeadJimmySavile, who’s first tweet had been, “How’s about that then, guys and gals! I’m back!”

  In another time, this kind of dark humour would have been frowned upon at the very least, and the account quickly closed down for the sake of decency. But things had changed over the last fifteen years, and ‘Dead Jimmy’ now had several hundred thousand followers, each and every one of them hanging on his every foul word, and some who egged him on to be even more tasteless.

  It seemed that people had become as rotten as the monsters that walked among them.

  THREE

  Gez put the key in the front door lock of 24 Australia Road, and entered. Placing the hunting rifle carefully inside the door, he shouted, ‘It’s only us Billy. Is it all right if we make something to eat?’

  There was no answer. Not that that this came as much of a shock to Gez. His Uncle Billy was out more often than he was in, most days. Probably down in that lock-up of his, tinkering with an engine, or something similar. Gez had never been exactly sure what Uncle Billy did for a living, although he knew he was a talented mechanic. He also knew he was a former soldier, like his late father had been, and Billy seemed to be quite friendly with an awful lot of people who could be politely described as “being able to help the police with their enquiries”.

  The three friends made their way to the kitchen where Gez noticed the scrawled note on the table – Geraint, Fresh loaf in the bread bin and 50 rashers of bacon in the fridge (don’t ask). Help yourself. Back later. B.

  Neil read the note over Gez’s shoulder, ‘50 rashers? Bloody hell, that’s damn near a whole pig. Where’d he get all that bacon?’

  Gez just pointed at the note, ‘Like the man says, don’t ask.’

  ◆◆◆

  An hour later, bacon sandwiches demolished, the three moved into the living room and turned on the television. The hit television game show, “Dead Shot” was about ten minutes in, and they settled down to watch a dose of light entertainment carnage.

  Dead Shot, in essence, was a pro-celebrity clay pigeon shooting contest, with the “pigeons” replaced by zombies. It was a simple enough format, and again an idea that had helped with population control. The show had been an instant hit when it aired a few years earlier, and there were now a number of equally successful spin-offs – Junior Dead Shot and Celebrity Dead Shot being the most notable. Celebrity Dead Shot was usually rolled out for Christmas and other major holidays, and featured not only current celebrities shooting zombies, but also former celebrities who had now joined the ranks of the walking dead. These shows were huge ratings winners for ITV. Even after the unfortunate “Forsyth episode”, the public appetite for fun-packed slaughter was still as strong as ever.

  It was one of the Easter editions of Celebrity Dead Shot that caused a stir, when lively Geordie presenters, Ant and Dec – both now in their early 50s, and easier to distinguish than ever before with Ant’s high forehead having become even higher as a result of his receding hairline – blasted veteran light entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth in a tag-team effort of crimson messiness.

  Unfortunately for Ant and Dec and their production team, Sir Bruce hadn’t actually been a Stench. He’d just been invited on the show to celebrate his 100th birthday. Mind you, when you saw what a doddering old codger he’d become, it was an easy mistake to make, and no charges were pressed after the incident. Some people were actually grateful, as it meant there would finally be a new host for the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, when it returned later in the year.

  The three friends sat watching the latest edition of the show, despite not having a clue who the ‘celebrities’ were meant to be. As far as they could work out, there was a former professional footballer, an X-Factor runner-up, and for want of a better phrase, a “big tittied knicker model”.

  The footballer was an impressive gunslinger, the X-Factor contestant just want
ed to break into song all the time, and the knicker model was lucky not to have shot her own foot off. Neil was enjoying the show immensely.

  ‘Still bored,’ said Bethan to Gez. ‘The only thing even less interesting than watching you take pot shots at Stenches is watching other people doing it.’

  Gez nodded in agreement. This was turning into a dull evening, and it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. As luck would have it, the phone rang, and Gez sauntered into the hallway and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello? No, I’m afraid he isn’t… I’m not sure; he left a note saying he’d be back later, so it could be anytime really… Well, do you want to give him a message...? Ok, well if it’s important, I could head out and see if he’s in his usual haunts…Will do… Sorry...? Ah right, that was you, was it? Well, thanks for that, we’ve just had bacon sandwiches for tea now… yeah, lovely… Ok, I’ll give him the message as soon as possible… Right. Cheers. Bye.’

  Gez replaced the receiver, walked back into the living room, and looked at Neil and Bethan. ‘So, anyone fancy coming out for a walk?’

  Both Bethan and Neil turned their attention away from the television. Neil looked worried: ‘Mate, seriously? It’s nearly dark out there.’

  ‘It’s not that dark, Neil. Where are we going Gez?’

  ‘Down to the lock-up to find Billy. If he’s not there we’ll head off, and pop into the Heath pub for a quick look on the way back.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Beth. ‘What’s up, Neil, scared of the Stenches?’

  Neil gave a nervous laugh, ‘Me? Scared of Stenches? No way.’ Mustering all the machismo he could manage, he looked at his companions, ‘A stretch of the legs would do me good. Let’s go find Billy then.’

  There had been night-time curfews for four years after Rotten Monday, so that the authorities could get on with the job of erecting defences and dealing with the undead menace popping up all over the city. But once the walls had been built around the Cardiff cemeteries, and then the capital itself, those curfews were removed. Despite all that, people were still told that it was better if they didn’t wander too far afield after dark, just in case they bumped into any ambling cadavers that had managed to slip past the security measures set up by the city council.