by Al Ewing
Most importantly, Hughes knew that Morse's reaction to the werewolf meant that he could work with the man designated code red.
In a few years, when Morse was old enough and more steeped in the lore and learning of MI-23, it would be time for him to have an audience with code red... with the man named Mister Smith.
But that was long ago, and far away.
If the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over, thought Albert Morse, and his mouth gave that little twitch that wasn't quite a smile. But there are wolves and wolves, and it was nearly over now. Morse rubbed his scarred knuckles, as he often did while he sat with his coffee and waited for the door to the Red Room to open.
The clock on the wall ticked, dry and dusty like a beetle in a long-lost tomb. Not long now, thought Morse. Nearly over.
Twenty years it had taken him after Selwyn died. Twenty years of hunting the bastards in their hundreds, then their dozens, then one by one, and finally - John Bloody Doe. The last of the zombies, the last night-horror. They'd feed him to the wolves in the morning and then MI-23 was all done.
Morse was almost sad at that. He was his job now, he ate, slept and breathed it - and when it was done, what would be left of him? He thought of all the things he'd never done. He had a potting shed full of old dead geranium bulbs, bought at the garden centre - this year he'd get round to planting the fucking things, he always thought, and never did. Never any fucking time. He thought of Romper, poor bloody Romper who beat his tail against the floor and whined because he wasn't walked enough. He should never have bought a bloody dog anyway.
Sorry, Romper. You were the only friend I ever had after Selwyn went. Should have tried harder. Look how I fucking treated you. And Hilda at the Prospect, showing me a little kindness for the first time since I took this bloody job. Never showed her any in return. Just buried myself in fucking work. Never called, never wrote... you're a piece of work, Morse. You never even went to your Mum's funeral, did you? Useless bastard. And all the people I bloody did it for - Tom and Steph and Nancy - they're all grown and out of my life and they don't want anything to do with me. You're a real hero, Albert Morse. A knight of the fucking realm.
Morse sighed and swallowed coffee, black with no sugar, feeling as bitter as what went down his throat. Bollocks to it anyway. It had to be done. No sense whining.
He realised it was probably the last time he'd see Smith for any length of time.
He realised he was happy about that.
I did it, Mum. I saved the world, me and my men. Me and the wolves in the walls. Could be a lot fucking worse.
Beats Tommy and his poncy bloody art college, anyway.
Morse scowled, and set the empty mug on the little table next to his chair.
What kind of world lets a bloody dog die of cancer anyway?
Not one worth saving.
Morse sighed, leaning forward. At that moment, the speaker above the door crackled into life.
"Albert Morse, code orange clearance. Please proceed to the inner lock."
Morse stood slowly, stretching.
"About bloody time."
One door closed, another opened. In between, there was the inner-lock - security system, black-panelled room of flashing lights and lines, sweeping beams, scans and soft artificial voices, carefully programmed for the absolute minimum humanity.
Morse stood, bored, listless, fingers itching, eager for the process to end. The thought that the room could fill with cyanide gas at any moment never occurred to him. Once, it might have - when the novelty of the procedure was still fresh, when he was thirty, the thought of a malfunction or mechanical failure had been enough to wake him up in the watches of the night, sweating and shaking, the tang of almonds in his nostrils until he drowned them out with a swig of Glenfiddich - but those days were gone. Now all it was was a procedure that had to be endured in order to come face to face with his Lord and Master.
Neither did he look left or right at the automated machine-guns in their brackets on the wall, or down at the floor, which could have slid away at any moment, toppling him into an acid so pure and potent that it would have reduced him to a molecular soup in seconds.
To Albert Morse, the threat of death had become as ordinary as crossing the street.
He spoke his name, once, in a bored tone of voice.
Aside from the whirring computations of the room, there was silence for seven seconds before the door swung slowly open.
A moment of contemplation in the hour before the beginning of the end of the world.
Once, Albert Morse would have been shitting himself, but time has a habit of making the bizarre seem almost mundane.
And Mister Smith was bizarre.
The room was ordinary enough - a circular chamber, lined with oak-panelled bookshelves, with a desk in the middle, similarly styled, and a door at the back, leading to the system of antechambers that were home to Mister Smith. There were no windows, or mirrors, but the lighting was designed to be warm and cosy, and often the only light came from a fireplace set off to the side. There was an armchair in front of the fire, and an office chair near the desk - for guests.
Mister Smith did not need chairs.
The first time Albert Morse had met him, he had vomited into the waste-paper basket, then desperately begged forgiveness. Mister Smith was used to such reactions. He was barely four feet in height, his body wizened, shrivelled up like a toy balloon at a birthday party for a stillborn child, the Saville Row suit, sized for a ventriloquist's dummy, hanging grotesquely on his frame, a doll's shrunken corpse dangling horrifically from the vast, inflated head. Mister Smith's skull was a three-foot-wide balloon, bald, with blue veins pulsing in the corpse-white, almost green flesh. The face was small, in the same proportion as the shrivelled body, although the eyes were enlarged, vast, milky orbs with livid green irises that seemed to glow with a strange inner radiation. Mister Smith was simply a vast, pulsing brain, which had retained those scraps of flesh necessary for speech and the five senses - the rest was vestigial, the functions of the vital organs provided by the brain itself, the lungs used only to provide a wheezing gasp of air past the lips, so Mister Smith might spare his guests the rudeness of telepathy.
Mister Smith floated slowly towards Morse. The wrinkled mouth made an approximation of a smile.
"The nights are drawing in, Mr Morse. You must be cold."
He shot a glance at the logs in the grate, and they instantly ignited into a roaring blaze. The lights dimmed accordingly. "Please, sit. I should offer you a brandy."
Morse blinked, and frowned. "Brandy, sir? Are you sure?"
"The work is over, is it not? We have the last of them. Sit, sit."
Morse moved the armchair, taking only the edge of it, not allowing himself to get too comfortable. Something in Mister Smith's easy manner made him tense - not through fear of the abomination that floated in front of him, but fear of the very confidence he himself had felt in the corridor, fear of contemplating the end of the work before that end was in sight.
"He's still alive, sir. Begging your pardon, but it's not over until we feed the little bastard to the wolves and have a poke through what comes out the other end."
Mister Smith's not-quite-smile grew wider.
"John Doe is not going to give us any trouble. The only reason the creature stayed hidden as long as it did is because of its heightened chameleon response - and that was triggered by the death of Professor Roscoe in New York. It's much weaker than the others - remember Mustermann? Mengano? Doe's even weaker than Janez Novak and you didn't even need the wolves to finish that one. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think this might be an ideal opportunity to study one of them."
Morse choked, standing suddenly. "You have got to be fucking joking!"
Mister Smith looked at him. Morse realised he'd spoken very far out of turn.
"Pardon my French, sir. But... I mean, you can't be serious. We have been trying to exterminate these little bastards since the Middle Ages
. They're dangerous. You were the one who told me what Whiteside Parsons found out about them. You know what they're here to achieve -"
"End the world, yes, yes. You can stop there, Morse. I can tell what all of your arguments are going to be just by looking at you, and I appreciate everything you were about to say. But remember what these things are."
Morse shook his head. "The Dead Who Walk, Sir. Fucking zombies. The very things, if I can remind you, Sir, that we have been trying to wipe right off the face of the planet like a bloody Cillit Bang advert since the reign of—"
"Since Elizabethan times, yes, yes, good Queen Bess and John Dee and all that. But the current Queen Bess is not in full control of operations, is she? I am. We may be answerable to Her Majesty, but Victoria handed the duty of organisation and administration over to me, and it's a duty I take very seriously, very seriously... sit down, Mr Morse."
"Sir, please—"
"Sit down. I insist."
Morse felt himself sitting, leaning back in the chair, felt himself relaxing. Inwardly he seethed. He hadn't been treated like this in years, and it was an unpleasant reminder that while he did most of the legwork for the organisation, he was still the number two - both in terms of command and in the evolutionary chain. Morse was humanity as it stood now, and Mister Smith was the future - humanity several links up the chain of being, a product of Darwin's genius and Victorian eugenics. Almost from spite, he allowed himself to wonder whether humanity had simply exchanged one monster for another, knowing Mister Smith would catch the thought.
Mister Smith looked almost hurt, but carried on.
"The Dead Who Walk... it's a misnomer, isn't it? You've evidently swallowed our own propaganda on the issue - all those zombie movies we bankrolled to make the public react correctly to the mind-eaters in their midst... do you realise that before the wonderful Mrs Shelley wrote her novel, people would bring zombies into their homes? It was assumed they were suffering from the cold..."
"I'm well aware of that, sir -"
"Let me finish, let me finish..."
Suddenly Morse could no longer speak. He slumped back in his chair, fuming in silence and swearing loudly in his mind.
Mister Smith paused a moment until Morse finished. "There is no such thing as a zombie - not in the way we have allowed the public to construe it. The thing in that cell is not dead, is he, Morse? He was never dead at all. He has always been that way. He always will be that way. John Doe, Hans Mustermann, Jose Lopez... they have human names, but they were never human. They have the appearance of dead men, but it would be truer to say that their disguise as living men is incomplete - but perfect enough that we think of them as men, as individuals, as thinking creatures. Perhaps they even fool themselves. But, of course, they are neither human nor individuals in the way that you and I are."
He paused, running a dry tongue over dry lips.
"These creatures... these Dead Who Walk... they are collections of cells, much as we are. You could describe yourself as a collection of single cells banded together to form one being, but in your case that would be facetious. Separate your heart from your body, your brain from your head, and both parts would die. This is not the case with the being we're keeping downstairs. Mr Doe is a gestalt entity - millions of cells that form together to create a reasonable approximation of a human being. Even after centuries, it is not entirely accurate in its internal workings, but from the outside it appears human - even to itself."
Morse looked incredulous. Christ! He'd thought the bastard was acting.
"Oh yes, oh yes... I monitored your interrogation of the creature. According to its surface thoughts, it had no idea what you were talking about. I've noticed before that there is a dichotomy inherent within these zombies - on one level, a constant running chatter of thoughts, an imitation of human brain patterns, and on the other... the programming they follow. But let's return to their physical structure..."
Morse rolled his eyes. How many times had he heard this lecture? And all they had to do was throw the monster to the wolves and it was over.
"Please, Albert. I am getting to the point. These cell collectives cannot be damaged by normal means. Splitting them into smaller clusters won't help - even once the small parts have been brought out of communication range, they will act on their own. I understand Mr Doe has experimented with this property by using his own hand as a remote combat unit. However, his surface mind is still attempting to put it in terms he feels a human being could understand. Which brings us to the chameleon syndrome - the cell-clusters imitate the dominant culture in their immediate area as a camouflage mechanism. However, Doe murdered Professor Roscoe because Roscoe found something, and in response to that Doe effectively murdered himself - shutting his surface memory down to ten years, moving to a different country, boosting his chameleon reflex by several hundred per cent, and hiding his true nature even from himself - under a belief system that seems to be composed equally of our own 'zombie' propaganda exercises and old private eye films. The hitman with a heart of gold, as it were."
Morse furrowed his brow. There was something in this.
Mister Smith's lips twitched.
"You can speak again if you'd like, Albert."
Morse scowled. "I thought after twenty-odd years of working together we were beyond that little stunt."
"Albert -"
"Never mind, I'm starting to see where you're going with this. I'll have that brandy, though. I've a feeling I'm going to fucking need it once this is over." He leant back as a decanter floated across the room, pouring itself into a nearby glass.
Mister Smith set the decanter down with his mind and continued.
"These cell-clusters also possess full-spectrum time-sense - a control over their own temporal perception, allowing their minds to view the passing of time much faster than the one-second-per-second standard ordinary humans enjoy. However, since we've been able to create a workable version of this time-sense in our werewolves since the late fifties, it's ceased to be too much of an issue. But you know all that. Tell me, Albert, where do you think I'm headed with this?"
Morse smiled humourlessly. "Emmett Roscoe. Or rather, what Emmett Roscoe found out about John Doe. And making use of that secondary thought-stream."
"Good, good... I'm glad we're on the same page here, Albert. Thanks to Dee, and later Parsons, we know that if the zombies were to be left unchecked they would end the world - but we don't know how, or why... or when."
"When is the time. Your specially selected starter for ten."
"A question that would only have meaning to the secondary thought-stream, bypassing the primary. However, you were working under the assumption that the creature could not hide its true nature from itself. So when it refused to break..."
"It was already broken, but it didn't actually know what it was hiding. Christ, that little bastard even manages to stab itself in the back."
"Quite, quite... If it is the last of its kind, there's not much it can do. But if its not - or if it was put into motion by other hands - we need to know. We need to break it - that is to say, strip away the surface thought-stream so that all that is left of the monster is the basic id, the part that will tell us what we want to know."
"In other words, a nice spot of garden variety torture."
"I thought you'd like that part."
Morse took a sip of his brandy, then stood. "Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to electrocute that decomposing bastard in his dead nuts until he dances us a polka. But excess pain just seems to make the bastard pass out - shut down, whatever - presumably to protect itself from exactly what I'm trying to do to said testicles. So! Let's try another tack. Let's push that... 'primary thought-stream'... that bloody split personality it's got until it takes more of the fucker's energy to keep up the bullshit than it does to drop the mask like a hot fucking turd. Then we can have a nice cosy chat with the gestalt entity formerly known as John Doe. I'll do the talking and the arse-kicking, you monitor from here. Dig right i
nto that dead head of his until we've got everything we need to know."
Mister Smith raised one grotesque eyebrow. "What do you suggest?"
"Let's take a lesson from the Yanks. A spot of Torture Lite. Diet Bastardry. Sirens. Klaxons. Bright lights. Nothing's going to work on the little shit unless it's mostly in the mind. It doesn't need to breathe, so waterboarding's out. What about water torture?"
"Water torture?"
"Drip drip drip, little April showers. Rig up a tap or something so it's constantly dripping on the forehead of some poor bugger who you've conveniently strapped down so he can't move a fucking muscle. Very effective when it comes to making people go completely bloody doolally in a very short space of time. Also, it's well known. I saw it on the bloody Avengers once. Part of the culture. It'll work on John Doe because John Doe always tries to fit in because he thinks that's going to make him a human being instead of the fucking apocalypse waiting to happen. And because he's got such a bee in his bloody bonnet about trying to be human, he has to react to a torture that - according to us humans - breaks humans. Therefore, he's going to be helping us every step of the way." Morse paused. "Well? Am I talking out of my bloody backside or what?"
"Hmm." Mister Smith frowned. "It's worth a try. Do you want to be the one to set things in motion, Mr Morse?"
Morse looked at the wizened head of Mister Smith, eyes like storm clouds.
"I should fucking cocoa, sir."
