I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  The further away from me it gets, the more I think it's the latter.

  The more it moves on its own.

  That's pretty weird, if you think about it.

  What sort of person was I?

  I can still feel the fingers tapping, but I'm not directing it any more. It's close now. Skittering around the crates as they lower their guns and stare in horrified fascination. I can't help but hum to myself at moments like these.

  Their house is a museum... when people come to see 'em... they really are a scree-um... the Addams Fam-i-ly.

  Ba da da DUM.

  It leaps.

  I mentioned how strong I am. And when my hand is this far away from me... there's really no human impulses to hold it back. The fingers flex and push against the concrete and launch it forward like a grasshopper, onto the face of the nearest cinema tough-guy. He's in a film now, all right. He's in Alien.

  Where's your Guy Ritchie now, you tosser?

  Fingers clutch, sinking into cheeks. I can feel his lips against my palm, squashed, pleading desperately, trying to form words. I have no control over my hand, my evil hand. But I still enjoy feeling it squeeze... and squeeze... and squeeze... until the fingers plunge through the flesh and crack the bone, crushing the jaw, the thumb and the forefinger alone mustering enough pressure to punch through the temples, cracking the skull, sending ruptured brain matter seeping out of it.

  Brain matter.

  I've got better things to do than think about that.

  My hand drops away, sticky with blood and juice, as the last one starts blazing away at it, shrieking like a little girl. He misses with every shot. It's a hard thing to hit, a scuttling hand, and besides he's probably still holding his gun sideways. I'm trying not to laugh, I really am...

  Does that make me a bad person? Does that make me a monster?

  What sort of person am I?

  Crushing a man's face with my severed hand that crawls around on its own when I let it off the leash, that probably makes me a monster, I'll admit that. But I can be forgiven for the occasional chuckle at the death of a would-be child murderer. The News Of The World would canonise me.

  His gun clicks out. He's fumbling for ammo. He's in a whole other world now, the silly bastard. There's nothing so important to him as killing that thing that's come scuttling around the corner of his little school-catalogue fort and broken everything he thinks is real into little pieces. He's forgotten everything else in the world, which is stupid, because I'm in the world.

  And I'm coming for him.

  Grab time. Slow it down. Gunshots flatten and stretch into whale songs and I'm floating, somersaulting over the crates, converse trainers smacking the ground, propelling me forward as the gun comes round...

  And there aren't any bullets in the gun.

  How did I miss that? The slide's all the way back.

  Do I even have any ammo on me?

  How could I possibly miss something like that?

  What sort of person am I?

  He's seen me. He turns like a cloud formation revolving in a light breeze. The gun lifts like the thermometer in an unsuccessful TV telethon, one atom at a time. So slow. But so am I.

  That's the trouble with compressing time. It looks great, but there's no use in slowing time down if you're already too late.

  The gun goes off, slow and beautiful as sunrise, and here comes the bullet. Cross-cut head this time. I throw my weight off, but he's too close...

  You need a bit of space to dodge bullets.

  I don't feel pain, but still, it hurts. It hurts because there's no real way to patch the holes up when I get shot. I've been shot a fair bit, although not as much as I should have with the life I lead. In my arms and legs there are little tunnels and trenches where I've been shot with 9mm ammunition, a couple of nasty exit wounds packed up with clay. In my left breast, there's a big ragged hole from where some crack shot tore my heart open with a well-placed sniper round. I stitched up the hole as best I could, packed it with gauze... but my heart is sitting in my chest, not beating and torn apart. And that does hurt.

  Because I do try to know what sort of person I am.

  I do try to be normal.

  I really do, with my severed hand and my time senses and my strength and my speed. I try and be a normal guy, as much as I can. I drink. I eat. I go to the bathroom, though it's just to sit and think for a while - there's no pressing need for me to be there, if you get my meaning. I go to the cinema and watch the popular films. I get popcorn. I used to watch Big Brother but now I've stopped, like everyone else. I buy The Sun but I get my actual news from the Internet. I listen to Radio 2. I make up opinions about religion and music and television and political parties and I try to stick to them even if they aren't very logical or intelligent. I want to be like everyone else.

  I want to fit in.

  I try.

  I can feel the bullet press against my gut, then pierce the skin, boring into me, fragmenting, splitting, shrapnel shredding my intestines, cutting and tearing. Slowly and carefully, like surgeons' scalpels in a random operation, the surgery dictated by the roll of dice.

  My arm moves forward, pushing against time. It's like I'm underwater. The gun begins to arc slowly through the air, my empty, heavy gun. Rolling and tumbling through space.

  Chunks of tattered, bloody meat drift out of the ragged hole in my lower back. My T-shirt has 'The Dude Has Got No Mercy' written across it, and it's brown with kind of seventies lettering in orange and white. It's my favourite shirt and it's ruined. My shirt's ruined. My belly's ruined, because I was stupid and this silly film star-wannabe bastard got off his lucky shot...

  I watch the gun tumble through the air, turning over and over, like a space station on a collision course with a nameless, forbidding planet.

  I threw it very hard. The sound of his skull fracturing is like a great slab of granite, big as the world, being snapped in half by cosmic giants. It's a good sound. It makes me feel better about my shirt.

  Stitch that, bastard!

  I let go, and time closes over me like the case for an old pair of spectacles. The moment passes, and I stumble for a couple of steps, feeling more meat slop out of my belly and back, more scraps on the floor. There's a hard thud as a hundred and fifty pounds of flesh that used to be a human being crashes onto the concrete.

  I walk gingerly around the stacked crates and have a look. His legs and arms are thrashing, his eyes rolled back in the sockets. His skull is cracked and bleeding. His fragile, fractured eggshell skull.

  And the tasty yolk within.

  And all of a sudden -

  - all of a sudden my head is pounding and there's a hot metal taste in my mouth and I don't have anything better to do than think about -

  brains

  - and now it's later.

  How much later? How much time has passed?

  It feels like a long time.

  Mr Tarantino, the film star, the silly bastard, he's still lying at my feet. His position's changed. Like he's been shaken about like a rag doll.

  His head is... empty.

  Hollowed out. The top of it missing, cranium tossed across the room, and there's something... something is clinging to my lips. To my tongue.

  Something I've been eating.

  The taste is still in my mouth.

  And it tastes so good.

  Time is still slow, still in my grip. I look to the left, and I see a small, terrified eye staring at me through a bullet hole in the side of a packing crate. The eye slowly closes, like a curtain majestically falling, then rising, opening again. Blinking.

  There's a sound in my ears like lowing cattle. It's Katie's sobbing. I wonder how much she saw?

  I try to be normal. I really do. I try so hard.

  But I just can't seem to stop eating brains.

  And that's the sort of person I am.

  I let go.

  Time wraps around me like a funeral shroud.

  And the moment passes.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER TWO

  One Lonely Night

  Twenty-four hours and everything sucks.

  That's my golden rule. I don't care if you've just been elected the Lifetime President of Diamond-Studded Blowjob Valley, all it takes is twenty-four hours and everything in your hands will turn back to shit.

  Case in point - it's twenty-four hours after that damn warehouse job, when I put down a bunch of soulless little kidnapping pricks and rescued a little girl from being cut up and sent through the post piecemeal. I should be happy. I'm not happy. I'm stiff and cranky and guilty and I'm not happy at all, not one little bit.

  Is it any wonder?

  I got shot, which means I got careless. That hasn't happened in forever and it's not something I want to happen again. The reason I'm stiff is because I let my head get so far into the clouds that some gangster-wannabe with delusions of adequacy blew a hole in my belly. How would you feel after something like that?

  I know, I know, you wouldn't feel anything, you'd be slowly drying on a cold concrete floor as various kinds of bacteria had a get-together in your soft tissues, I'm actually very lucky blah blah blah.

  Humour me. A couple of pieces got blown out of me and went skittering across the floor. I had to stick them in my pocket - my own spine jangling around with the keys to my flat. Imagine how that felt. Not to mention I was sagging and slumping and wobbling all the way home, holding my ribcage straight by putting my hands in my pockets and keeping my arms locked.

  I didn't feel normal, is what I'm trying to say.

  I hate not feeling normal.

  So I ended up gluing my spine back together with superglue. It looks okay if I wear a shirt, but it feels stiff, unnatural. Every time I shift my weight, it's a reminder of what I am. So I'm cranky.

  I'm also cranky because I can't get my coffee. I mean, I drank it - I have a big jar of Gold Blend in the cupboard - but ten minutes after I swallowed it, most of it trickled out of the ragged hole in me and made a mess on my sofa. Normal people drink coffee, but I can't because I'm not normal. I can't even pretend to digest anymore.

  So where does that leave me? No more eating. No more drinking. No bacon and eggs, no bourbon. No steak, no champagne. Not unless I want to go and sit in the bath and watch it all slop out of me again. No more Sunday dinner at somewhere classy like a Berni Inn or a Harvester, no more McDonald's or Burger King or KFC. No more doing what normal people do.

  I haven't felt this low in a long time.

  Is it any wonder I feel like this? Can you blame me?

  I try so hard to be normal. I mean, here I am, sitting on my coffee-stained sofa, in a studio apartment full of carefully chosen crap. In the CD rack, I have Robbie Williams, Abba, Coldplay. A little Radiohead, before they got weird. Everything the Beatles ever did. The Kaiser Chiefs. It's all good music. It's all music that people like. The Sex Pistols. U2.

  I'm a big fan of Pink Floyd.

  They're very important.

  You see how hard I'm trying?

  The DVD shelf is above the TV. The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Star Wars - the old movies, not the new ones - Lord Of The Rings, Trainspotting... I mean, I don't watch them, I just own them. I've watched everything on there maybe once, if that, but they're all carefully arranged in alphabetical order to show how passionate I am about film and cinema.

  I'm normal.

  I am just like you.

  Behind the bookcase with the DVDs and the CDs and the John Grisham, there's an attachè case with my guns and some other equipment.

  I bought the last Harry Potter the week it came out. It's sitting next to a copy of Ulysses that I keep meaning to read but never get around to, and the Lord Of The Rings that I only read when the films came out.

  I am just like you.

  Except I'm leaking coffee out of a ragged, badly-patched hole in my stomach, and my spine is fused together with industrial-strength glue.

  And I'm cold and I'm clammy and I don't breathe.

  And sometimes I eat brains.

  Is it any wonder I feel like this?

  I'm sitting on my coffee-stained sofa and I'm stiff and I'm cranky and I'm guilty. Most of all I'm guilty. Because I remember that little girl.

  Little Katie, kidnap victim, six years old. I remember her eyes. Blank, looking straight ahead, her chest hitching and heaving to get out a scream as I tore open the crate she was in and scooped her up. She didn't make another sound all the way back to her father.

  Bellows was waiting in the driveway of his big fancy house, stood next to his big fancy car. He looked happy at first. Then he saw her and all the colour went from his face, flooding back in a deep, angry purple. Katie wasn't looking at him. She wouldn't look at him, or her mother. She was only little, but she understood.

  Her Daddy had sent a monster after her.

  Bellows reached out to take her out of my arms and she twisted loose, toppling down onto the gravel, scraping her knees and elbows. She scampered inside like a cornered rat and hid, making little snivelling, whining sounds.

  Bellows looked at me like he was going to tear my head off right there.

  "What did you do to her?"

  I just looked at my shoes.

  What's the normal reaction to that?

  I was angry for a moment - I bloody saved her life, you muppet - but then it all drained away. What had I done to her? I'd torn off heads and eaten brains from skulls right in front of her. I'd turned into a monster and then brought her back to Daddy and made him a monster too. I'd traumatised her for life. Mr Bellows asked me to bring back Katie, and I brought back a shell.

  I'd killed the Katie that used to be as surely as if I'd put a bullet in her.

  Under the circumstances, it didn't feel right asking for money.

  It didn't feel right doing this job anymore.

  I want to work in an office, doing nothing to make nothing. I want to work in a factory that makes cardboard boxes, pressing the same brown shape out day after day. I want to work behind a bar full of people who don't care if I live or die so long as I pour them the right kind of overpriced lager.

  I want to be normal.

  I want to be just like you.

  But the trouble with those jobs is that they don't make allowances. Next time you go to a job interview, try soaking your hand in ice water for three hours before you walk in the room. Grab the boss in a firm handshake. Say how excited you are to be there. Watch his eyes. It doesn't matter if you're the best education certificate printer on planet Earth, you're going home unemployed.

  Nobody wants to hire a corpse.

  Even if I get some work down at an abattoir or a skinning yard, somewhere they just don't care - and this is after spending thousands on false papers to fake that I've got a past - eventually, I'm going to slip. Go into a fugue state.

  Eventually, I'm going to get hungry.

  What happens then?

  What happens when it's five o'clock quitting time and all I can hear is the thunk-thunk-thunk of the belt moving past me and everything else is silent because twenty people are lying on the cold concrete floor of the factory with empty heads... eyelids flapping over empty sockets because I ate their brains down to the eyeballs...

  Maybe it's happened. I don't know. The first thing I remember is waking up in a cheap hotel in Mile End, cold, clammy and dead. Before that - nothing.

  Maybe when I was alive I killed people all the time.

  Maybe that's all I'm ever going to do.

  And as if by magic, the phone rings with another job.

  "Hello?"

  The voice on the other end of the line is fat and adenoidal, with a faint northern twang. It's Sweeney.

  Detective Martin Todd of the drug squad, nicknamed 'Sweeney'. He'll tell you that's because he looks like John Thaw, but it's not - it's because he's always got his fingers in a lot of very dodgy pies. If the contents of the evidence locker find their way into the pockets of a bunch of South London hoodies, Sweeney's been there. If the lab report
you needed to convict a local gangster gets shredded, chances are Sweeney was using the shredder at the time. If the man from Internal Affairs gets a phone call and drops the case before going off somewhere to piss himself - who was he investigating?

  Well, who do you think?

  Sweeney's a nasty customer, and I've done enough work for him to know. He's mean, sadistic, ruthless when his own interests are at stake, lazy when they're not - a King Rat festering in his own little empire of rubbish. He's my least favourite person to deal with. He pays well - well enough that I can forget about killing for a month or two and just pretend to be unemployed, like normal people are - but... the man's a monster.

  He says he needs help. Usually he just needs 'a hand' with something, or he wants me to do him 'a favour'. But now he needs help. I pause for a second and he starts begging.

  I've never heard Sweeney sound afraid.

  "Please... please... you've got to help me... just get over here, okay? Right now. Please - I'll give you anything. Anything you want. Get over here."

  Click.

  Dial tone.

  I still haven't said a word.

  Ordinarily I wouldn't lift a finger for Sweeney without money up front, but this situation isn't ordinary. Sweeney is out of his mind with fear. Someone, or something, has managed to terrify the demon copper of Fleet Street.

  There's probably good money in that.

  I tell myself it's about the money, anyway, as I pay the cab fare and step out into the pissing, pouring rain. There's no other reason I'd be out on a night like this - the rain slapping down hard against the stonework, splashing and running in torrents off the gutters and pooling in the dips in the pavement, soaking me to clammy bones the second I step out of the taxi. It's just money. I don't give a damn if Sweeney lives or dies.

  So why is my hand shaking as I walk up the street towards Sweeney's place? A terraced house on a good street, curtains drawn across the windows. Well-appointed from the outside. The kind of place that costs a pretty penny anywhere, but especially here in Central London. You could probably afford it on a copper's pay, but you couldn't afford the big, shiny Jag parked outside as well. The hammering rain just makes it look pricier - diamond-encrusted, a slick MTV pimp-ride in ostentatious cream. I shouldn't be afraid. It's Sweeney. It's a cash payment for whatever's crawled under his bed and spooked him. Good money, a couple of suitcases full of crisp notes. Enough to buy anything I want for a couple of months. A couple of months of being normal, being just like you...