by David Moody
‘If you can’t find Ahmed, go get yourself an inflatable doll. I’m sure Farrell would lend you one of his cast offs,’ he added, laughing at his own crude humour.
Cole closed the workshop door and stood silently for a moment in the corridor. Soon the low murmuring started up again from beyond the door. A conspiratorial muttering, thought Cole. His mind played hateful tricks as he waited, listening. Why were they even in his workshop? It didn’t make sense. Not unless they were learning how things ticked. Learning how to run the bunker without him. They’d already done for Hill and Green. Cole convinced himself he was next. He broke into a cold sweat as he realised the implication, his heart skipping like a feverish wasp. He postponed his normal charade of feigning work. Things were heating up in the bunker and he needed an ally. He had to find Ahmed.
Cole dropped down several floors, avoiding using either of the central lifts. The journey was exhausting despite being gravity-assisted and reminded Cole just how unfit he was and just how vulnerable.
Several of the floors were completely vacant. The sixth floor below ground was a blank concrete shell, devoid of any furniture and with cold white-washed walls. The fourth and fifth were more enticing for those seeking solitude. Both were fully equipped office and residential blocks, complete with desks, filing cabinets and plastic plants. These places away from the brutality of the Marines were a silent sanctuary for Cole.
Most of the Ark residents found it eerie, sitting for hours on one of these undisturbed floors, particularly with the crowd of mannequins the Ministry had left behind after some long forgotten exhibition. Green had spent a few weeks cataloguing the vast collection of technical manuals in the office section but even he’d eventually given up. Cole however had continued to spend many contented hours and weekends on these empty levels, particularly on the fifth where he had transformed one whole corner into a tranquil domestic scene – with dinner being served at a table by a grey-wigged plastic crone and two excited children sitting expectantly next to the never boiling fondue pot in front their recyclable gaze, but never moving in for the kill.
Cole decided to check on his other family. He knew they were only plastic. Ahmed was living flesh and nothing, especially not these days, could replace the warmth of human contact. Cole had always known Ahmed was straight but people change. And, here in the bunker, people were more real than ever. The lonely were desperate and even the blank void faces of the pliant dummies were preferable to an otherwise empty shelter.
The main doors to the fifth floor opened reluctantly, Cole using his weight to force them apart. He ran his hand down the metal bank of light switches and the floor hummed into life. He swept past the offices into the corner. He was tempted to say something out loud but felt uncomfortable disturbing the dusty silence. It had been at least a month and Cole felt confident that no one had found their way to his little refuge from authority.
The crone was still leaning over the fully laid out and decorated table. Her grey hair as neat and tidy as ever in a tight, librarian-like bun. The plastic flowers had not wilted.
But the two smaller figures had gone.
Where were the children in their polyester outfits and corn-cob haircuts?
It was possible someone else had been in here but nothing else had been disturbed. A generous layer of dust on the floor indicated that the air conditioning had been set to half-power, perfectly appropriate for an uninhabited floor of the underground complex. The dust revealed, like snow, Cole’s own footsteps approaching the scene of his plastic fantasy. He looked behind him. His footprints, and his alone.
Turning back to his carefully constructed diorama, however, he noticed two sets of tiny footprints leading away from the table in the opposite direction to his, and he thought he heard childish laughter from behind a long line of empty lockers.
Cole enjoyed the idea of his carefully placed figures coming to life and relished the fantasy for a few minutes before remembering Ahmed. He needed to find his lover. He had plenty of time to play chase with the infant mannequins. Once again he felt like calling something out but despite knowing he was alone on a floor of over six hundred square yards and hundreds of yards below ground, he felt vaguely ridiculous and self-conscious. He left the dummies, determined to return later and solve this most enticing mystery. He imagined the disappointed child mannequins cowering behind the lockers. They’d have to wait.
Cole dropped several more flights of stairs. There was only one floor below the sixth but it was one sunk even deeper into the red London clay. He passed blank wall after blank wall, empty spaces where he’d normally have expected doors to be. The walls were unpainted grey concrete, abrasive and damp to the touch.
He finally reached the large steel doors which protected the cryo-chamber complex known to the bunker population as “the Fridge” – due in part to its slighter lower temperature than the rest of the Ark and in part, due to the presence of thousands of dormant bodies in deep storage.
He entered a grey plastic computer punch card, a Christmas tree of buttons turned green and the doors clicked open. They were surprisingly light as he pushed them back and went through. In the six months he’d been in the Ark, he’d only done this twice before. The first was to repair the air conditioning fault control unit in one of the vestibules. The second was to check the fuses and replace a rusting restraining bracket on the mainframe cabinet in the control chamber itself.
A motionless figure in a shapeless woolly hat sat on guard duty on the main walk way; her round, bulbous face buried in a worn copy of Playboy she’d fallen asleep reading. Cole recognised her immediately. It was the repulsive Rita – the Captain’s right-hand and as violent a thug as Farrell. Seeing her asleep, Cole’s clouded mind considered a pre-emptive strike. Murder, in old-world speak. If he could take her out, it would at least give him a fighting chance. The Captain would be less of a threat with one more of her vicious guard dogs put down.
He crept backwards and down the corridor until he reached a fire cabinet. He opened it and took out a fire-axe before returning to his original vantage point. Rita hadn’t moved a muscle. The pig just sat there deep in some sick nightmare which seemed to amuse her judging by the leer cemented across her bulging face.
Cole clocked the vintage Enfield rifle on the floor by her side. It had a magazine but was covered in a thin layer of dust. The lazy cow hadn’t even bothered maintaining her weapon.
He lifted the axe in the air and crept up behind her. He had to get a good strike. This bitch was vicious and he wouldn’t stand a chance in a fair fight. He paused for a second with the axe hovering above her head like the sword of Damocles before steadying his nerve and driving it down into her head. The first strike was more effective than he could ever have imagined, the axe head driving deep into her skull. Cole panicked as he tried to pull the clumsy weapon out as it became wedged between a slice of her skull and the bony nobble at the top of her backbone. He wiggled the axe and the brittle bone fragments soon split. Cole hopped back to inspect his murderous handy work.
‘That’s right, bitch,’ he screamed at her. The echo of his insult echoed around the corridor, the reverberations startling him. He waited for the sound to fade before adding ‘You got it bitch.’ He was shocked by his own savagery but reminded himself that it was the Captain herself who’d said it’s a new world now. The morals of the old world didn’t apply anymore and, when he remembered that, the guilt evaporated like a puddle in the desert. Why feel guilty? It was him or her. Cole or Rita. And this time, he’d won.
The dried out, shattered remains of the Marine lay on the floor, crumbling as Cole scampered past. He grabbed her plastic punch card from the table and entered it in the front of the security panel. The mechanism flashed and he was able to push the door open to enter, a gust of cool air breezing past him as he broke the inner rubber seal.
◆◆◆
The cathedral-like cavern was vast and Cole couldn’t see the other side through the shrouded gloom. The construction to
ok advantage of a huge naturally occurring cave system deep under the London cityscape and, due to its massive scale, had developed its own mini-weather system. A dank mist hung in the air, offering a hint of an early morning in autumn. Occasionally, the precipitation levels were enough to create a light rain. Grey, long-eared bats had taken up residence in the upper sections of the cavern. In the early days, the team had tried to shift them after several of the metallic caskets had been all but buried in their waste. Somehow they’d never succeeded. The nests were too high and, after a while, the team just left the creatures alone. Besides, all of the cryogenic components were sealed against humidity. And acidic white bat droppings.
The cryo-chamber was quiet apart from the never-ending hum of the various mechanisms keeping the chemically-frozen residents alive. Liquid nutrients were fed in, minute quantities of bodily waste taken out. Tiny quantities of low voltage power in, barely readable life-sign metrics out. Heartbeat negligible. Pulse negligible.
There were no scientists on duty so, after surveying the bewildering mass of dancing lights, dials and indicators on the central array, Cole enjoyed a few minutes foraging in the Ark’s software. Even if his access levels meant he couldn’t make any amendments to the code, he could still admire its stunning conditional loops and the startling black and white of its Boolean logic. The software language was lost in time, some military code from the 1960s, but it was still a masterpiece of programming and its great age and relative simplicity had protected it as most of the world’s other systems had failed during the end times. He got bored as he waded through an eternity of machine code which formed the earliest part of the system.
He grabbed one of the powered scooters and headed off down the suspended metal walkway known as Pall Mall. That’s where Ahmed had been logged in for his last job. As an electrical specialist, he picked up all of the milk run jobs. Safe from the bullying Marines. Free to just get on with whatever repair the system needed. Cole was convinced he made half the jobs up but he felt for the boy. He didn’t really want to be there. None of them did. He’d rather have been with his family safe in the Texas Free Zone. Deep down, Cole knew this.
It was like riding in some vast chilled clinical tomb, with long shaky metal walkways snaking off in every direction from a central control station and towering stacks of individual cryo-chambers on every side. Cole weaved expertly around the odd crate left by the technicians as he sped into the coolness of the cavern. The sealed plastic chambers which surrounded him gave the impression of rows of neatly stacked coffins, rising high into the air. The endless walkways and tunnels ran deep into the rock like some futuristic necropolis; a dead place rather than the salvation of mankind.
Cole could see it from half-way down Pall Mall. A tiny figure collapsed next to one of the encased data banks. He slowed his scooter and pulled up to park a few yards from the body. He revved the machine loudly, watching for any movement. Finally, he built up the courage to lean over to check the face. The elf-like figure in the white coat was Ho, one of the Ministry’s computer science interns. Her body lay like a broken doll with her perfect skin offering the illusion that she had either passed out or was sleeping, a perception only ruined by the sizeable restraining bracket wedged into the back of her skull. So, Rita wasn’t the first casualty. The open civil war had already begun. He hadn’t struck the first blow. But why had the Captain murdered a harmless software engineer?
Cole decided to backtrack and leave the scene of the crime. He didn’t call it in and instead raced his way back to the cryo-chamber main doors, getting as far from the broken body as he could.
His last port of call was back up on the fourth floor and the vast storeroom known as the Supermarket. He usually left it to last because a couple of the guards could normally be found playing cards or smoking in a corner they’d turned into an informal mess room. A grubby plastic white table and several chairs had been dragged into a crude circle and empty cans and broken Blue Nun bottles littered the floor. Most importantly, the den was close to the liquor store which was now exposed for all to browse at leisure following the “disappearance” of the steel mesh gates which had previously protected it. This time it was as devoid of unfrozen humans as the lower floors.
With two long corridors running parallel to each other, each packed with shelves of supplies, there were enough provisions to last a small army for years. The sleepers were drip fed nutrient-rich plasma every six hours from a central tank in the cryogenic zone. The apparent over-supply in the Supermarket was actually a reserve for when the sleepers were re-animated. With only a dozen alive and unfrozen in the Ark, supplies were never going to be a problem, not that anyone would think it the way the Captain was bleating on about being careful with food.
Cole walked the hundred yards or so to the end of the first long corridor, passing shrink-wrapped skyscrapers of stacked pallets rising almost to the ceiling. Some had been pecked open by members of the Ark. Boxes of this and that requisitioned from the hundreds of tonnes of supplies kept there, leaving guilty hanging plastic shreds and noticeable gaps in the strict order of the neatly stacked pallet mountain range.
Cole planned to round the corner at the end inter-linking the two corridors and make his way back to the main complex if everything was clear. He felt exposed in the Supermarket. There were few places to hide, the gaps between the pallet towers scarcely large enough to fit his hand, never mind his whole body.
It soon became apparent that the walkway was anything but clear. He stopped when he noticed blood dripping from behind one of the stacked pallets. ‘Ahmed?’ he called out in a hushed tone. He spoke again but his throat was dry with nerves and he hardly made a sound.
There was a shiny black boot sticking out at an excruciating right-angle from a khaki covered leg. It was one of the Marines. Cole couldn’t even remember the man’s name. He wanted to say Jones but it didn’t sound right. Cole didn’t want to get too close to the body so he grabbed a nearby broom and prodded it firmly. He’d never actually seen one of the infected up-close. He’d gone into the Ark two weeks into the outbreak. The speed of the infection had exceeded any of the government mathematical models and so Cole had been assigned from some low-level maintenance contracting company to the Ministry during the final emergency days of martial law. He’d not been outside since the city had been overrun by the dead.
Necrophobia – an irrational fear of dead things such as corpses and the paraphernalia of death including coffins, caskets and cemeteries. Associated conditions include an uneasy fascination or obsession with death.
Cole had a phobia of corpses. Something more than the natural human instinct to stay free of disease or infection. He couldn’t even go to a family funeral. He’d missed his Nan’s service, sitting outside in the car in the crematorium car park. Necrophobia was a bad condition to have when you were trapped in a sealed bunker with five thousand barely-alive bodies underneath a city of the dead. But strictly speaking, he knew necrophobia was an irrational fear of the dead and whilst the sleeping meat in the chambers was harmless, the violent flesh eaters outside were anything but.
The body wasn’t Ahmed. The Pakistani engineer had been his companion for the last few months. The only one he trusted in this whole corrupt concrete cesspit.
Cole leant over and tentatively poked the body with the broom again. It didn’t move. He poked it a third time and this the corpse released a small explosion of gastric gas which made him heave. At least it wasn’t a zombie. Up to now, possibly-Jones had stayed dead. But Ahmed was still gone. Probably dead, possibly undead. Cole stared at the broken ankle of the corpse and felt more alone than ever. The remnants of a split box of confectionary bars with deep blue foil wrappers were spread all over the floor next to the corpse. The fool had fallen and died trying to reach those delicious minty bars of dark chocolate.
◆◆◆
‘The man’s a fucking liability,’ shouted Farrell as he loafed around the common room. The others sat surrounding Cole, oscillating bet
ween hurling crude insults about homosexuals and half-jokes about flushing him out of the bunker.
Cole phased out most of it. He hated the common room when it was busy. It reminded him of school and the smell was nauseating. He’d checked the air con countless times but somehow the sickly abhorrent smell of death still managed to permeate the base. It was as if one of the creatures outside had crawled into an air duct and became trapped, reeking their corrupt vapours throughout the bunker as they struggled and rotted. Cole knew this hadn’t happened. All of the external vents were shielded and he’d checked virtually every yard of the air duct network. No, this smell was something from within. Something rotting inside the bunker.
‘Why exactly is he here anyway?’ asked the Royal Marine from Belfast, who was curiously only ever known as “Mac”.
‘Fuck knows, Mac,’ answered Farrell.
‘Get whiny bitch out and his boyfriend when he turns up,’ Mac added to a murmur of general agreement.
Cole looked to the Captain, hoping for sanctuary from the growing claustrophobic insanity in the Ark. He got very little. She sat watching him with one hand squeezing a deflated Space Hopper and a lazily burning spliff in the other. She took a deep drag through barely open lips before breathing out a jet of fragrant mist.
His mouth engaged before his brain. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in here, Captain Seaton. It’s bad for the filtration system.’
There was silence for a few seconds before her face broke into a broad smile. She opened her mouth and mocked biting motions with yellow, tar-stained teeth.
‘Okay, Mac. Let me have a think about this poof. Maybe he is breathing too much air down here.’
Cole watched her face carefully, searching for any trace of humour. For sure, it was a black joke. Her thin face remained still, like some smirking waxwork. Cole stood up and scooted past the Captain, carefully keeping out of the grab range of any Marines and moved out into the grey corridor.
