Till You Drop

by Mat Coward

  As long as the distinction between night and day exists, the adviser explained, people will have an automatic expectation of entitlement to a rest period at some time during every twenty-four hours. This was unproductive. It was uncompetitive. It was unfair, too, because why should night-workers be the only ones to suffer? The fundamental basis of fairness was that everyone suffers, instead of only some.

  The continued existence of night, in other words, was a clear victory for the forces of darkness. The great monster strike was an unprecedented opportunity to make the abolition of night a publicly-acceptable policy aim.

  (The new adviser worked for a company which was intent on a predatory takeover of another company which had significant exposure in the leisure industry. A fall in the share price of the second company would be of great benefit to the first company. Modern politics was full of such coincidences.)

  ***

  It was around this time that DI Pipe resigned from the police, to take up a permanent, salaried position with the newly-formed Union of Police Inspectors – the first UK police union in more than a century to claim the right to strike.

  The UPI coalesced directly following an incident in Pontardawe. A 78-year-old police officer was chasing a nineteen-year-old burglar. He wouldn't normally have been chasing anyone, but all the younger officers were policing a scab attack on a jack-o'-lantern picket line in Swansea, and he was all that was available. Unsurprisingly, he lost the chase, but being an honest, hardworking and stubborn man, he kept going as long as he could. In the end, exhaustion claimed him in the middle of a dark road, and he was simply unable to move to get out of the way of any of the three cars which ran over him before he died.

  DI Pipe’s last police job involved an enhanced ropetirement, in which a man intent on suicide had managed to lock himself inside a medium-sized safe in a deserted warehouse, so that by the time he was found it was far too late for Restart. Pipe tipped his hat to the fellow for his ingenuity, arrested his corpse for the sake of the paperwork, and clocked off for the last time as a sworn officer.

  The next day he began work as UPI liaison with the monsters’ strike committee. The biggest difference in his working conditions was that his new employer paid the fees for his evening classes.

  ***

  At an impromptu meeting at an unemployment office in a former manufacturing town in the West Midlands, a steam spectre spoke without inhibition to dozens of long-jobless Fearful.

  “We are specialist locational haunts," she told them, “and since so few of your railway stations are still fully operational, we have been largely redundant for some time. But we will do what we can in this strike. And I say to you, we are monsters and you are Fearful – but are we not also a brother and a man?”

  And her audience, it was interesting to note, though startled by her presence and disturbed by her appearance, was sympathetic, too. It recognised her as one of its own. And things gather, and things move.

  ***

  There was no table; tables didn’t feature strongly in everyday monster life, Josie supposed, but it did feel odd. She and ex-DI Pipe were the only two sitting down. The zombies stood, the vampires leant, the various types of ghost hovered or zoomed. A bunch of hairy comrades in the corner – werewolves, she guessed – squatted. But only the humans sat.

  She’d attended countless committee meetings over the years, and she supposed Mr Pipe must have, too, but she’d never before known one without a table in the room. Sure, given the circumstances, that was perhaps not the most salient point. But it did make taking notes difficult, if you’d got bony knees.

  She stood anyway, as one of the handsome vampires – the older one, by the look of him, if such a thing had any meaning – introduced her. “The first of many,” he called her and Mr Pipe; the first delegates from Fearful unions to join the strike committee.

  The announcement of the government’s ambition to negate the night had vitalised the strike and sharpened its sense of purpose - now all monsters understood that only two outcomes were possible: total victory or total annihilation. It had also sent a chill through the blood of millions of human workers, and union recruitment had reached a hundred-year high. The government’s response was described in the news media as “firm.” It would, it said, recruit “more willing fear-providers from friendly nations.” An off-record spokesman was quoted as saying “They can’t eat them all. In the end, order will prevail.”

  “I wish to thank the committee for the welcome I have received here tonight,” Josie began, though in truth, she didn’t yet know her new colleagues well enough tell whether they were welcoming or not. They were staring at her a lot, which might or might not be a good sign. “I bring you a message from a woman I work with. She is an ordinary woman, an ordinary worker, old and tired, like countless thousands of others. Ordinary except for one fact – that she was one of the first of what our government calls ‘the beneficiaries of the Restart programme.’ She is a pleasant woman, a good colleague, and she would rather be dead than carry on working. But her government refuses her that choice. My union, as your union, says that is wrong.”

  They were paying attention now, that was for sure. A stack of chairs near the fire exit lifted into the air and banged back onto the ground several times. Luckily, the younger handsome vampire had warned her about that before the meeting began; it was how poltergeists applauded. So, apparently, she was winning the room.

  “This colleague, Cheryl, when I told her that I was coming here, she asked me to give you a message. I have written it down, because I want to get it right. She says that she is no longer human – she does not feel like an ordinary human. As a restart, Cheryl says, she is neither human nor monster – she is both, she is hybrid. Her interests, the interests of the restarts, are hybrid.” Josie nodded at ex-DI Pipe. “On the journey here this afternoon, our colleague from the Union of Police Inspectors told me something he learned at his evening class. Every system inevitably creates the means of its own destruction – it is forced to do so by economic necessities. And so it is, Cheryl believes, and I believe, and Mr Pipe believes – and my nephew Brad, who says ‘We are all monsters now,’ believes – that the restarts are the bridge between Nighthood and Fearful, between our two classes. They are a new class of worker which can unite the night and the day. They are the destruction of the existing system, created by the system itself.”

  Ex-DI Pipe’s speech was shorter, but more dramatic. It had started out at three pages of eloquence, but it had ended up as: “My union executive instructs me to inform you that UPI members will no longer take part in any police operations against the monster strike.” And with that he sat down, to a deafening ovation of chair-banging and howling.

  ***

  Chapter Five

  “Snacks, of course,” Orlandus explained, when Lanto asked him what was in the visibly overloaded Co-op carrier bag which he’d lugged all the way from his flat, through the Tube tunnels, to the initial rallying point at Hyde Park.

  Lanto rolled his eyes.

  “You can roll anything you want, Lo - if I can’t snack, it’s not my revolution.”

  “It’s not a revolution,” Lanto corrected him. “It’s a – what did you call it? Mass demonstration?”

  “The humans used to call them ‘monster rallies’ in the 19th century,” said Orlandus. “But I thought ‘mass demonstration’ sounded more ... inclusive.”

  Lanto grunted. “And you assure me the term demonstration has nothing to do with demons?”

  Orlandus sighed. “If you wish me to assure you of that for the fourteenth time, then I hereby do so.”

  “I just hope someone's told the demons,” Lanto muttered. “Anyway, whatever you call it, it’s not a revolution.”

  Orlandus looked around him, at the vast crowds already gathering in the chilly twilight – a time chosen for its symbolism, as being neither night nor day. “That depends,” he said. “Depends how many turn up. Depends if it’s all us, or all them. If it’
s both ... well, it’s not always possible to put genies back in bottles.” He added, after a thoughtful pause: “That’s not a disrespectful term is it? Genies?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Orly! A genie is a mythical being.” Lanto frowned. “As far as I know, anyway. I admit, there are branches of Nighthood here today I’ve never seen in dead flesh before – and some, I think, which I have never heard of.”

  At first, they marched by section, so a thousand-strong phalanx of moonhowlers might be followed by a long stretch of apparently empty space while the disembodied voices passed by in quasi-military formation, which in its turn would give way to a shuffle of silent greymen.

  At first, too, the Fearful – the humans, as they seemed to prefer being called – having assembled at different points of the capital, marched separately from the Nighthood. But as darkness fell, and routes intersected on London’s ancient, tangled streets, hundreds of thousands of humans and hundreds of thousands of monsters found themselves marching alongside and even in amongst each other. And not just humans with monsters; humans with different humans, and monsters with different monsters.

  Restarts, first borns, bucket-shouting kids, trolls, haunts, unemployed workers, workers who were employed but feared being replaced with restarts, people who longed to retire, ghouls, a small group of man-mades, comfortably-off folk who worried for their grandchildren – even a couple of ogres, who’d strode in specially from Naples.

  Some mingled more than others. Orlandus ran out of his hilariously expensive cigarettes within the first hour, and from then on had to make do with scrounging roll-ups from an almost disturbingly open-minded bucket girl. All that punitive shouting had obviously done her lungs some good as she led her section of the giant march in a call-and-response: “What do we want?” “Justice and fear!” “When do we want it?” “We’re going to eat your brains!”

  A wincing Lanto persuaded her to drop that one – or persuaded Orlandus to persuade her, at least – on the grounds that its tone was not entirely in keeping with the peaceful aims of the day. But the non-canonical chant virused its way along the miles-deep march for a while, even competing briefly with the popular “I am a polter-geist! I am an anar-chist!”

  Favourite of all, at first with humans and eventually with all the marchers, was the endlessly repeated banner, badge, T-shirt and shout: “We are all monsters now.”

  ***

  The new prime minister explained that it was nothing personal, but all the government advisers on loan from corporations were hereby a) sacked, and b) under arrest.

  She was telling the truth: it was nothing personal. It’s just that sometimes, during periods of great upheaval, sections of the ruling class suddenly understand the need to make dramatic concessions to those below them, and it is often the case that this involves putting the heads of unpopular figures on sticks and parading them around. Sometimes, too, pressure from below forces governments to govern as if they really were the government, temporarily ignoring the wishes of their corporate sponsors.

  As the Cabinet sat in emergency session, every few minutes another piece of paper would be placed in front of the PM, alerting her to the occupation of a factory, an office complex, a shopping centre or a school, in every town in Britain and many overseas, by monsters and humans, in support of the great London rally.

  “We’re going to have to talk to them,” the prime minister told her colleagues, around midnight.

  “If that’s all we have to do,” the Lord Chancellor replied, “then we’ll be very lucky.”

  ***

  There was only one regrettable incident of a major nature during the night, and since this involved the Secretary of State for Fairness at Work, it didn’t matter too much.

  Conspiracy theorists enjoy believing that the minister’s driver took a “wrong turn,” but the less intriguing truth is simply that he took a wrong turn. Along with many other leading players in recent events, the minister was leaving the city at speed, in the instinctively understandable, if mistaken, belief that he would be safer behind the walls of his country retreat.

  The Civil Service drivers once used by ministers – full-time, trained, vetted - had long ago been replaced by agency staff who rarely spoke English and who were sacked every nine weeks to ensure that they were counted as temporary and therefore had no employment rights.

  The driver took a wrong turn – as simple as that. By now the whole of central London was occupied by demonstrators; the minister was recognised by some in the crowd, and within seconds his car was surrounded and immobile. The agency driver – a pleasant young man from Ireland, who sent all his wages home to buy shoes for his siblings – panicked, leapt out of the vehicle, and ran, leaving his passenger sitting in the back.

  If Lanto and Orlandus had wished to intervene, the press of numbers would have made it impossible – so, mercifully, that was one decision they didn't have to make. They watched in some horror as the minister was winkled from his metal shell, and torn into pieces. Once the segmentation was complete, the bits were thrown back into the limousine, which was set alight. Then the marchers got on with marching.

  “Blood of hell,” said Lanto. “That was savage.”

  Orlandus shrugged. “Humans,” he said. “They take things very personally.”

  As Lanto’s mobile phone rang, a large banner went past them: UNDEAD: NOT DEAD, JUST DEAD TIRED = tired of all your crap!

  It was being carried by a human, a Fearful. “Bit undignified,” said Lanto.

  “Isn’t it?” Orlandus replied in delighted agreement.

  Lanto answered his phone. “Yes, Prime Minister,” he said, “we would be free for breakfast.”

  ***

  An empty taxi drew up outside Number Ten, and four ghosts got out.

  ***

  “Gentlemen,” the cabinet secretary began, and got no further.

  “We’re not very keen on being called gentlemen,” said Orlandus. “It reminds us too much of you.”

  Perhaps because the Cabinet room was not big enough to comfortably contain all the various members of the strike committee – or perhaps because the cabinet secretary felt it was not big enough comfortably to contain the symbolism of their presence there – a long table was set up in the Downing Street garden. The strike leaders stood along one side, the government along the other.

  The prime minister had spent hours wondering how she might approach these negotiations; what her aims should be, which concessions were inevitable and which avoidable; what she and the class she served could hope to gain, or at least not to lose. How to begin? What attitude to adopt? How much of her hand to show, how much to conceal?

  She was still thinking about it as she stood there now. Until suddenly she thought: “Not this time. This one’s gone. Getting out in one piece might be a result, this time.”

  She looked at the handsome vampire standing across from her, and said the only thing she could say: “What do you want?”

  Lanto smiled. “Sit down,” he said, “and we'll tell you.”

  ***

  MAT COWARD

  is a British writer of crime fiction, SF, humour and children’s fiction. He is also gardening columnist on the Morning Star newspaper. His short stories have been nominated for the Edgar and shortlisted for the Dagger, published on four continents, translated into several languages, and broadcast on BBC Radio. His website is https://www.matcoward.com/

  ***

  OTHER BOOKS BY MAT COWARD

  Cats & Crooks (2012)

  You Can Jump And Other Stories (2011)

  Neighbours From Hell (2011)

  Acts Of Destruction (2009)

  Soother’s Boy (2008)

  So Far, So Near (2007)

  Open & Closed (2005)

  Success ... And How To Avoid It (2004)

  Over & Under (2004)

  Classic Radio Comedy (2003)

  Do The World A Favour And Other Stories (2003)

  Twenty Seventeen (2002)

&
nbsp; In & Out (2001)

  Up & Down (2000)

  Cannibal Victims Speak Out! And Other Astonishing Press Cuttings (1995; 2011)