I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  Carefully, he took the severed head, the one remaining eye rolling back in the socket, lips twitching, and brought it down hard against his knee. Hard enough to shatter the thick, bony canopy of the skull.

  The ghost-brother reached into the skull with his blue-white fingers and scooped out a handful of the grey-pink matter inside, raising it to his lips. He tasted it, then tore into the rest, chewing, swallowing, pieces of brain and skull fragments sticking to teeth and chin.

  When the feeding frenzy was over, the ghost-brother casually tossed the severed head onto the grass, then stood and looked at the long-tooth, and the stick-with-tooth in its heart. If there had been a thought in the ghost-brother's ghost head, then perhaps he would have been disappointed. Perhaps he would have expected more from Ar-rah, with his strange thoughts, so quick and sure.

  Perhaps he would have wondered when the time would come.

  When they would be ready.

  But there were no thoughts.

  The ghost-brother turned and padded off towards the trees.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My Gun is Quick

  Time slows to a crawl.

  The broken glass around me hangs in the air like mountains of ice, floating in space in the science-fiction movie of my life. Like healing crystals in a new-age junk shop, hanging on threads, spinning slowly. Beautiful little diamond fragments.

  For five minutes - or less than a second, depending on your viewpoint - I drift slowly downwards, watching the glass shimmer and spin. It's moments like this that make this strange life-not-life of mine seem almost worthwhile.

  Moments of beauty in a sea of horror and blood.

  I'd like to just hang here forever, drifting downwards, watching the shards of glass spin and turn in the air around me, but eventually I have to relax my grip or get bored. And I'd rather not get bored of a moment like this one.

  I let go.

  Time snaps back like a rubber band.

  The moment passes.

  Time perception is a trick of the human mind. The average human perceives events at a rate of one second per second, so to speak, but that doesn't make it the standard. Hummingbirds and mayflies perceive time differently. It's much slower for them, to match their metabolism - I'm pretty sure that's the case. I read it somewhere. In a magazine.

  New Scientist, I think. Or Laboratory News. Maybe Discover.

  I read a lot of scientific magazines.

  It might have been Scientific American. Or Popular Science. Or just plain Science. I go through them all.

  I look for articles about decomposition, about autolysis and cell fractionation, about the retardation of putrefaction. About the factors that affect skin temperature or blood clotting.

  Things that might explain my situation.

  I know it wasn't the Fortean Times. Unless it was talking about an alien hummingbird kept under a pyramid. Or possibly building the pyramids. I read that one for the cartoons.

  Anyway. Time perception is a trick of the human mind. It's possible to slow down the perception of time in humans, to perceive things in slow motion, experience more in a shorter time. Shorten reaction time to zero. Anybody can do it with the right drugs, or the right kind of hypnosis.

  I can do it at will.

  I concentrate.

  Time slows.

  The glass hangs in the air.

  I look for articles about the basal ganglia and the superchiasmatic nucleus, about neurotransmitters and the subconscious. I've done research when I can. Heightened time perception burns a lot of adrenaline, apparently. A lot of energy stores. You can't keep it up for long periods without needing plenty of sleep.

  But I don't need to sleep.

  I don't need to eat either.

  Or breathe.

  Time rushes back in, like air into an empty lung that's never used.

  The moment passes...

  ...and then the soles of the converse trainers I wear to look cool slap loudly onto the concrete floor of a disused warehouse in Hackney and four big men in badly-fitted suits are pointing guns at me. But that's okay. I've got a gun too. And if they shot me, I wouldn't bleed.

  My heart doesn't beat, so the blood doesn't pump around my body. My skin is cold and clammy and so pale as to be almost blue, or green, depending on the light. My hair is white, like an old man's. My eyes are red and bloodshot and I keep them hidden when I can.

  Let's see, what else do you need to know before we get started?

  Oh yes.

  I've been dead for the last ten years.

  I don't have any memory of not being dead. The earliest thing I can remember is waking up in a cheap bed-and-breakfast in Stamford Hill. The room was registered in the name John Doe - the name generally used for an unidentified corpse. I'm sure somebody somewhere thought that was hilarious.

  Still, it was the only name I had, so I stuck with it. To all intents and purposes, it was mine.

  To all intents and purposes, the gun sitting by the sink was mine as well.

  It's strange. I don't have any memory of feeling different, of anything being out of the ordinary. I got up, brushed my teeth even though they never need it, took a shower even though I never smell of anything. People hate that more than BO, I've noticed. That smell of nothing at all, that olfactory absence. Cologne can't cover it, because there's just the cologne on its own, with that huge blank void beneath that rings all the subconscious alarm bells. Even your best friend won't tell you.

  I don't remember being surprised that I was dead. I'm actually more surprised now than I was then, surprised at not being surprised. What sort of person was I, that I woke up dead and took it in my stride?

  I remember that the first thing I did that day was shoot a man in the back room of a dingy pub in the Stoke Newington area.

  Why did I do that? What sort of person was I then?

  Obviously, I had a reason. I mean, I must have. I just can't remember quite what it was.

  I had a reason. I had a gun. I had a mobile phone that was a bit clunky and crap and didn't even have games on it, never mind anything useful, and occasionally it rang and then I had a job to do that fit someone who was dead but still moving around. I had a bank account, and I had plenty of money sitting in it for a rainy day. I had a low profile.

  No matter what, I always had a low profile. I always knew how to fit in, even though I was dead. Even though I killed people.

  Even though I have occasionally...

  Just occasionally... I may have...

  I may have eaten...

  You know what? I have better things to do right now than think about that.

  For a start, the bad men are pulling their guns.

  They're pulling their guns. My legs uncoil and I sail up, arcing forward, the first bullet passing through the space I've left behind me. I hold time in my mind, keeping it running at a reasonable speed, not too slow, not too fast. Behind me, the last shards of glass from the window hit the floor. At this speed, it sounds like wind chimes clanging softly in the breeze. The gunshots sound like the bellows of prehistoric monsters. The shells clang against the stone like church bells.

  Did you ever see The Matrix?

  Bit of a busman's holiday, I thought.

  My own gun roars and I'm almost surprised. The bullet drills slowly into the head of the nearest man, already fragmenting, leaving a bloody caste-mark in the very centre of his forehead, the flesh rippling slightly under the pull of an obscene tide. I watch the exact moment when the look of surprise freezes on his face, goes slack, and then the back of his skull swings open slowly like multi-faceted cathedral doors, and the pulsing chunks of white-pink matter float out, carnival-day balloons for a charnel-house Mardi Gras.

  Slow it down enough, and everything fascinates. Everything is beautiful.

  Little chunks of brain, flying through the air. Scudding like clouds. Floating like jellyfish. I'm casting about for a better simile here because I don't want to admit what they really look like to me.

  Tasty
little hors d'oeuvres. Canapès.

  The trouble with being able to slow down time for yourself is that it gives you far too much time to think. And I have better things to do right now than think about that.

  I speed things up a little, force myself back on the job as the bullets move faster, one cutting the air next to my left ear, another whispering against the leg of my jeans. My empty hand slaps on the concrete ahead of me and pushes my body up through space, somersaulting until I land on my feet behind a wall of stacked crates. I'm not sure what's in them, but hopefully it's something like dumb-bells or lead sinkers or metal sheeting or just big blocks of concrete. Something that'll stop small arms fire. I don't want to patch up any more holes in myself.

  There's a sound coming from close by. It's not wind chimes or church bells or a prehistoric monster. It sounds like some kind of guttural moaning, like a monster lost in an ancient dungeon.

  I let go of time and it folds back around me like bad origami. The moment passes.

  The sound makes some sense now.

  It's a child. Sobbing. From inside the crate I'm hiding behind.

  That's where they put Katie, then.

  At least it wasn't paedophiles. At least it wasn't SAY A PRAYER FOR LITTLE KATIE SAYS OUR PAGE 3 STUNNER. That's something in today's world, isn't it?

  It was an old-fashioned kidnap. Scrambled voice mp3 file, two days after she went missing, nestled in amongst the inbox spam with the fake designer watches and the heartfelt pleas from exiled Nigerian royalty. "Give us the money, Mr Bellows, or we give you the finger. Do you see what we did there? It's a pun." Then a time and a place and an amount to leave and no funny business, please.

  Mr Bellows runs a company called Ritenow Educational Solutions. He's the one who prints the certificates when you do the adult courses. This is to certify that MARJORIE PHELPS has achieved PASS in the study of INTERMEDIATE POTTERY. Marjorie won't get any kind of job with the certificate, even if she achieves DISTINCTION in the study of ADVANCED SHORTHAND. It's worthless, but she'll pay up to a couple of hundred pounds to have it on her wall and point it out to the neighbours.

  Mr Bellows doesn't run any of the courses. He doesn't make the sheets of china-blue card with the silvery trim and 'This is to Certify has Achieved in the Study of' written in the middle, with gaps. He just has a list of who's passed and what they got, and he runs that through a computer and then his big printer churns out ten or twenty thousand useless certificates a day. He has a staff of three single mothers and a temp who's just discovered The Specials and thinks that makes him unique, and all they do is collate the list of the gold, silver and bronze medal winners in these Housewife Olympics and then print them onto china blue with silver edging and sell them on for exorbitant amounts of money.

  Mr Bellows runs a company that does essentially nothing to make essentially nothing. He's the middleman for a useless end product. He's living the British Dream.

  And now, the British Nightmare.

  Doing nothing to make nothing is a profitable line of work. Mr Bellows has two houses and two cars, neither of which have more than two seats. He also has a flat in Central London which he's working up the courage to install a mistress in. Little Katie Bellows is going to Roedean as soon as she's old enough. If she gets old enough. Mrs Bellows collects antique furniture as a hobby. And Mr Bellows has my mobile number.

  That doesn't come cheap.

  "Find them, John," he said.

  He had whisky on his breath and his voice came from somewhere deep in his throat, rough and hollow, choked with bile. "Find them and kill them. Bring her back safe." There were tears in his eyes that didn't want to come out. A big, gruff man who could solve things with his fists if he had to, but not this. Standing in the drawing room he'd earned with graft and grift and holding my dead hand and trying not to cry. The echo of his wife's soft sobbing drifting down from an upstairs bedroom. An antique clock on the mantelpiece that hadn't been wound, silent next to a photo turned face down because it couldn't be looked at.

  Frank Bellows had my number because he'd used me in the past to do things that weren't strictly legal. He hadn't always had the monopoly on doing nothing to make nothing. He'd needed someone who didn't strictly exist to break into a competitor's office and burn it to the ground. Because if the perpetrator doesn't strictly exist, then it isn't arson, is it? Not strictly.

  I smiled gently behind my shades, a non-committal little reassurance. Then I stepped back and nodded gently. He only sagged.

  "Get them. Kill them. Get out." His voice was choked as though something was crawling up from inside him, some monster of grief that had made its nest in the pit of his stomach. I felt sorry, but what could I do? They only make promises in films.

  But then, they only make this kind of kidnap in films. If they'd been real crooks, well, she'd be vanished still. HUNT FOR MISSING KATIE CONTINUES PAGE EIGHT. "Saucy Sabrina, 17, holds back the tears as she keeps abreast of the news of Little Katie - and speaking of keeping a breast!" MISSING KATIE BINGO IN THE STAR TODAY.

  These weren't 'real' crooks. They were fictional. The script-written ransom note. The suits from Tarantino, the bickering and sniping at each other with perfect quips that they'd spent months thinking up, while I stood on the warehouse skylight, the one they hadn't even bothered to check, picking my moment to crash through the glass and kill them all because the customer is always right. The lack of any covering of tracks, because they were too busy being 'professional' to actually be professional.

  There's nothing more dangerous than a man who's seen a film.

  The police would have found them eventually, but by that time Katie, age six, probably would have been killed.

  They're keeping her in a crate and shooting at her, for God's sake.

  It can't be healthy.

  Bullets smashing wood, sending splinters and fragments into the air, puffs of shredded paper. The crates are full of catalogues, thick directories of dayglo plastic for schools. 'Teach your child about disabilities. Neon wheelchairs help kids learn.' Most of the bullets thump into those, gouging tunnels and trenches until their energy is spent.

  One comes right through the crate I'm hiding behind. Right through, and there's a little yelp. A little girl's half-scream, too frightened to come all the way out.

  The silly bastards have hit her.

  Instinctively, I grab time and squeeze it until it breaks. Dead stop.

  This is the slowest I can go. I look at the bullet, crawling from the hole. Slightly squashed but unfragmented. No blood on it. It missed.

  Oh, thank God.

  I'd never have managed to explain that.

  Time rushes past me like a tube train and my legs hurl me backwards, firing over the top of the crates at them. Follow me. Shoot at the catalogues. No father's going to mourn a listing of expensive fluorescent dolls with only one leg. Shoot the crates over here, you silly bastards, you wannabe film stars.

  And they do.

  I squeeze off a couple of shots at them, but they've found their own cover. More crates, more catalogues. Right now they seem to just be blazing away with their guns held sideways like they're in a music video. When they run out of bullets they'll probably chuck them at me. The trouble is, they're such rubbish shots, because of their crappy sideways gun shooting and their stupid unprofessional Tarantino mindset that thinks all they have to do is blaze away and the bullet will magically find its way into my face if they can only look cool enough doing it, that they're going to blow Katie's head off long before they put a hole in me.

  It's time I got a little bit creative.

  One of the advantages of being dead is that you can do things that people who aren't dead can't do. Actually, most people who are dead can't do them either, but never mind that for now. The important thing is that I can do them.

  For example, my left hand - the one not sporadically pointing the gun over the crates and keeping them busy - is severed. It's held on with surgical wire.

  I have no idea w
hen this happened.

  I mean, it must have been done after I woke up ten years ago. Surely. Nobody living has their hand chopped off and stuck back on the stump with surgical wire.

  I mean, you'd have to be insane.

  What sort of person was I?

  My memory is a little fuzzy on things like that - whether I'm insane or not. I do kill a lot of people.

  And I do eat... occasionally, I do eat people's...

  But I have better things to do right now than think about that.

  I shoot off three or four rounds to keep them busy, then put the gun to one side and grip my left hand in my right. And I pull. I'm a lot stronger than the average person, even the alive ones. Since I feel no pain and never need to rest, my muscles can work much harder, strain much longer. The wire snaps easily, link by link, and my hand pops right off in a couple of seconds, like a limb off a Ken doll.

  Now I'm holding my left hand in my right, feeling the dead weight of it. Only it's not dead. Well, it is, but it's still wriggling. Twitching. Flexing.

  I can still move it.

  I wiggle the fingers on my severed hand. I snap them, and the sound is like a dry twig snapping. Then I toss it over the wall of crates like a grenade - a hand grenade, ha ha. The fingers hit the floor first and skitter like the legs of a giant beetle. I can feel them tapping the concrete. And then - it's off. Racing across the concrete floor as the wannabe film star boys widen their eyes and make little gagging sounds in their throats. They know what kind of film they're in now. Oh yes.

  I can feel it moving. I can feel the fingers tapping. I'm reaching to pick up my gun, but I know exactly where my other hand is. Moving quickly across the floor, skittering and dancing, a dead finger ballet. I can see it in my mind's eye. Is it me, drumming my fingers, that's propelling it along? Or is it my hand, moving further away from me now, a separate entity crawling and creeping on its own stumpy little legs?