I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  Briscoe shook his head, back and forth, back and forth, gritting his teeth, tears flowing down his cheeks. "No. No, you're lying. Please."

  "You heard Paris die, Mister Briscoe. I hope you weren't planning on a holiday there anytime soon because I have to say that your travel plans are completely fucked. Don't visit Berlin either, unless you like wading. And you can forget Beckham playing for Madrid again - no Madrid to play for. Terrible shame, I understand he's got dazzling form now he's a rapacious half-insect killer with knives where his hands should be... do you want me to go on, Mister Briscoe? You look like you do."

  Tom Briscoe didn't look anything like that. He was sobbing like a child, great fat tears rolling down his great fat face. The others were staring. He had them now. "You heard me talk to the Yanks. You know they tried to nuke it. The Russians will have as well, and the Chinese. But nobody's got anything that can get through and put us out of our bloody misery. Anything hitting that wall just gets turned into component sludge - bombs, planes, people, the lot. Even the nukes. All the radiation just goes into the shield and all that's left over slops onto the ground. There's no help coming. We're marooned."

  He had them now.

  Time to make some use out of these malingering bastards.

  "So I suppose we're just going to have to help ourselves." Morse walked to the safe and twisted the dial - left, right, left, right... and then the safe swung open and Morse took out the guns. He passed the first one to Tom Briscoe, who was blubbering like a child. He gave the second one to Mickey Fallon. Then he handed them each three clips of ammunition, and slipped two into his own coat pocket. His gun was already loaded.

  "Where's mine?"

  Morse turned to look at Jason Glasswell, who'd let his wife go and was standing up. Sharon, with her big belly full of child, reached up her hand towards him. "Jase, don't -"

  "Shut it!" he snapped his head to the side, full of venom, like a snake striking. Then he turned back to Morse, beady blue eyes staring out of his face. "Where's mine? Eh? Don't I get one? How come fatso there gets one and not me? Eh?" He was leaning in, breathing hard. The posture would have been the same if he was accusing Morse of looking at his bird.

  Morse didn't say anything.

  "I'm, ah, I'm really not sure I can use one of these -" Briscoe stumbled, and reached out with the gun in his shaking hands. Without turning or looking, Morse lifted one hand. Tom Briscoe drew the gun back to himself and looked away. He looked sick.

  "See, he doesn't need one. Gimme one. Why not, eh?"

  Mickey Fallon stared, an ammunition clip in one hand and the gun in the other. His weathered old face was expressionless, but he weighed both objects in his hands, as though judging when to put them together.

  Charu shuffled backwards, slowly, unconsciously, her phone gripped tight in her hand. Her eyes flickered from the confrontation to the glowing screen. Someone might have left her a message. She had to check. She had to.

  Morse looked bored.

  "I want a gun. Gimme a gun. Gimme one."

  Jason Glasswell reached up to give Albert Morse a little push in the chest, a little starting push, a little are-you-looking-at-me push. A little prod with the index and middle fingers of each hand.

  Without blinking, Morse reached up and took hold of both his middle fingers and broke them.

  Then he kneed Jason Glasswell in the testicles.

  Then he grabbed the collar of his jacket and slammed him face-first into the side of the safe, breaking his nose and knocking him out cold.

  Then he tossed him onto the floor next to Sharon. Sharon opened her mouth to scream something and then caught the look in Morse's eye.

  Albert Morse coughed. "My apologies, Mrs Glasswell, for that dreadful display of violence. Do me a favour and when he comes round tell him not to be such a cunt."

  He turned back to the other three. And scowled.

  "From now on, do what I fucking say shall be the whole of the law. Here endeth the lesson."

  He looked at them all, one after the other, letting it sink in.

  "Now. Let's pull out fingers out of our arses and save the fucking world."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  And Then There Were None

  On the map of the Underground, the Northern Line is black. A solid, funereal scar running from top to bottom, bifurcating briefly in a nod to a history long forgotten. Black as the depression of a commuter elbowing his way onto a Waterloo train at half-past-eight, knowing that the day is already sinking in grim black quicksand and there is no escape. Black as the filth and grime that clings to the black moving handgrip on the escalators that drag you down and down into the crushing press of the rush-hour crowd. Black as the fur of a rat skittering in the darkness, searching for food in the gaps under the shuddering rails and the rumbling trains. Black as the armbands on the relatives of the suicide who threw himself under the wheels of the 11:18 to Morden. Black as the crows flying over the grave. Black as mascara tears. Black as a night without hope.

  A black line, going down.

  Albert Morse stood on the platform of Tottenham Court Road and looked down at his bloodied shoes.

  "Christ alive. I've heard of going to pieces, but..."

  Nobody laughed.

  The platform was covered with shredded bits of people. Burst faces and torn swatches of skin. Ribcages opened up like birdcages. Scraps of muscle still clinging to lumps of bone. Their torches made out bright circles of rotting skin in the blackness, and the odour of spoiled human meat clogged up their noses and mouths like thick black tar.

  Behind him, Morse could hear his band of five stop dead in their tracks, afraid to step, afraid to breathe in case they inhaled the stench of the dead. Sharon's breath hitched, a terrible gurgling noise as though she wanted to scream but couldn't force it out. Morse turned and saw that her eyes were bulging, almost ready to pop out of her head. Young Charu was luckier - Mickey had clapped a hand over her eyes at the first sight of it. His face was like ash.

  Tom Briscoe vomited copiously, a torrent of bile pouring over the drying blood. It seemed like he'd never stop.

  "What is it? What's going on?" mumbled Charu, a rising edge of hysteria creeping into her voice.

  Mickey swallowed.

  "Never you mind. Never you mind." He shook his head. "It's like... it's like one of them violent videos. That's all. Nothing you want to see. If you ask me, they should ban 'em." He swallowed. "You just hold on to me now and keep your eyes shut and we'll be getting out of here very soon." His eyes moved to meet Albert's. Won't we? They said. For God's sake, don't make a liar of me. For God's sake, we have to go.

  Jason was the last onto the platform. He'd been lagging behind, stumbling through the dark following the bobbing torch beams, pissed about his broken fingers and his broken nose. He'd only gone along because Sharon had begged him to. "I can't stay here alone," she'd said. She was crying even though he'd told her he hated it when she cried. Stupid cow. If she did anything to put that baby at risk she was getting a black eye. And as for that old twat who'd broken his—

  "Jesus Christ, what the fuck's happened here?"

  Morse didn't turn around. He was helping Sharon down from the platform onto the line, trying to keep the light away from the blood and bones. "Just get yourself down here, Glasswell. It's a long walk through the tunnels and we need to get—"

  "I'm not walking through this! And get your hands off my fucking wife!"

  Morse turned around, counting heads - Mickey, Charu, Briscoe - all here. He debated whether he should just move off and leave the Glasswell boy where he was. But then he'd have to leave poor Sharon as well, and leaving her alone with him would be a death sentence. At least this way she had a chance. The same chance they all had.

  Maybe he could be useful, anyway. Every pair of hands was useful.

  Morse didn't want to have to shoot the boy.

  "The larvae in them finished its metamorphosis. So it tore out of them like a chick hatching out of an egg. Take a l
ook for yourself." Morse tossed him one of the torches so he could do just that. There was no point in sugarcoating it.

  Jason caught the torch in scrabbling, sweat-wet hands, and took a good look. His voice was like tissue paper. "I'm not. Cuh-christ. I'm not. I'm not walking through that."

  Shannon looked up at him, staring into the beam of his torch like a startled deer. "You've got to. You've got to come with us."

  He shook his head.

  Mickey broke the silence with his soft, deep Northern tones, old and sad. "They should bring back the National Service. That'd help with a situation like this." He nodded to Sharon. "Come on, love. He'll catch up."

  I hope you're wrong, Mickey, thought Albert Morse as he shone the light down the dark black tunnel and led his random group of rebels into the darkness. I hope he stays on that platform forever. Because he won't take a telling and very soon he's going to put me in a position where I have to kill him.

  Stay on the platform, Jason Glasswell. Stay with all the blood and the shit and the filth. Let me get your wife and kid somewhere safe. Somewhere where you're not.

  Morse was almost praying.

  He heard Jason picking his way through the meat behind them anyway. But then, God had been dead for a long time.

  "Right," said Morse an hour earlier, "According to my notes, there's an armoury underneath Waterloo station - guns, ammunition, tinned food. Originally set up during the Cold War, decommissioned after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Except it wasn't completely decommissioned - we got it. It was to be used in the event of a situation just like this one."

  "How come you're not there?" Charu said softly, toying with her phone. Behind her, Jason Glasswell was lying next to the safe, nose broken, eyes blackened, unconscious with his little fingers twisted just so. "How come you're here and not there?"

  Morse smiled humourlessly. "I didn't know it was there, did I? All our eggs were in one basket. We all figured that when things went to the wall we'd have my head of division on our side, who happened to be a bit special even if he was a soulless fucking bastard, and we'd have all the equipment at the Tower as well, see? This here is what's known as the worst-case-scenario shelter. The one that never got funding, ready for the scenario we never bothered planning for."

  "Christ." Mickey shook his head. Morse nodded.

  "Well, we had God on our side, or something very close. And we were all fucking idiots. Anyway, when I got here, all the protocols were in the safe, and I spent a couple of hours following them. Lots of radioing people on top-secret frequencies, advising them that we were in a state of Infra-Red Alert. For all the good it did anybody. Most of the people I called will have been turned into a rich protein shake by now - the rest, well, they're not here. It's just me and the people I could drag off the street when everything hit the fan. And the worst case scenario that I cracked open a little while ago, after I talked to the Americans and they told me the fucking nukes didn't work."

  He paused, breathing in deep for a moment. This was above Top Level clearance and he was about to share it with a bunch of muppets he'd dragged in off the street.

  Old habits died hard.

  "There are a number of what we call suitcase nukes," he heard himself saying, "in the armoury under the station. Hopefully more than one. I'll be taking at least one and heading down the line to Green Park. Once I'm there, I'll set it up on a dead man's switch and get as close to Buckingham Palace as I can. Big bang, I get to die a fucking hero and we're shot of those chitinous tossers in one fell bloody swoop, mission accomplished and we can all go home. Or in my case to the lake of fire."

  "Won't..." Tom Briscoe stuttered out the words. His knuckles were white on the pistol he was holding. His thumb was pressed against the safety catch, keeping it pushed on as though it might switch over by itself. He'd been a good choice for the gun. "I mean... won't it..."

  "You'll be fine. Obviously you'll have to stay down there for a few years, but there's food there, literature, DVDs... It's set up to handle a battalion of one hundred for five years, so you're not going to run out of anything. I imagine it beats being left up here to be chopped into individual meat cutlets." Morse didn't have a clue whether this was true or not - the papers were frighteningly vague - but he knew for a fact they were going to die if they stayed here. Might as well give them some hope to keep them going.

  "No..." Tom shook his head. "I, I meant the creatures. The tunnels will be full of them. Overrun. We'll be torn apart." He shook his head again mechanically. "We can't go down there. We just can't."

  The tough-love approach hadn't worked. Neither had giving him a gun. He was still going to be slightly less use in this situation than a crisp iceberg lettuce. Morse looked at him carefully, then gently took hold of his shoulder. "Come over to the window, Tom."

  Briscoe shook his head, feet dragging, eyes squeezed tight shut, but Morse was stronger. He spoke quietly, gently, as though talking to a man on a ledge. "Look down, Tom."

  Briscoe shook his head, tears squeezing from the corners of closed eyes. Morse could feel him shaking. He continued to speak gently, softly, as if calling a kitten down from a high branch.

  "They're not there, Tom. It's okay. You can look. The whole street's empty. Promise." Morse was telling the truth - the wrecked street was deserted. Occasionally a rat would scurry across the cracked and broken pavement, or a pigeon with bloodied feathers would alight on the remains of a roof. Nothing else.

  "They've been moving down towards Leicester Square - heading for the Palace. I think they're massing there... waiting for instructions, maybe. No way of knowing." He patted Tom's shoulder. "But I know one thing. They're moving above ground, Tom. We've seen them coming out of the subways but they haven't gone back down, have they?"

  Tom shook his head. He couldn't speak.

  "It'll be all right, Tom. It'll be fine," lied Albert Morse. He could feel the eyes of the others burning into his back. He turned, bolstering his voice with all the authority he could muster. "We should get our arses moving, though, right fucking now. The sooner I can kick some alien arse, the better, and the sooner I get you lot to safety the sooner I can get on with the vital arse-kicking matters that are plaguing this nation. Come on."

  "What about Jason?" Sharon's voice was confused, fearful.

  "What about him?"

  "We're not going to just leave him here, are we?"

  Morse looked at her for a long moment, and in that moment he cursed her, and cursed her bloody baby, and especially cursed her bloody stupid husband. Jason Glasswell was going to be the death of them all. He knew it.

  "Perish the thought. Wake him up."

  Jason was awake now, and he followed them down the tunnel, torch pointed at their backs like a shotgun. They could feel his eyes on their backs, and, occasionally, Fallon or Morse would turn and look behind them, ostensibly to check if any of the invading creatures were following. Jason Glasswell's eyes glared back at them, cold and grudging, simmering like two hot coals.

  The tunnel was as silent and empty as a tomb.

  After long minutes of trudging that seemed like hours, they came to the dark empty expanse of Leicester Square.

  Morse stopped.

  "Wait. Turn your torches off."

  Jason tutted loudly as his flicked out. Tom's breath quickened, and he let out a soft, mewling whimper.

  "Look at that."

  The lights on the platform were glowing a soft, translucent green, sickly and hideous.

  "Torches back on. And keep away from the third rail. I think... I think they might be generating their own electricity somehow. No, not electricity. Some kind of alien energy. An alien form of energy, that radiates out from their Queen. From the Palace. Fuck." He considered keeping what he thought quiet. Fuck it. They deserved to know everything. "Something that doesn't follow human physics."

  Tom's voice was a high, thin whine. "They don't follow our physics?"

  Morse shook his head. "Come on, Tom. We need to keep moving."

&n
bsp; "If they don't obey our laws of physics, how... how's your bomb going to work? It could just, I don't know, fizzle out, and we'd be left down there in that bunker of yours in the dark and, and they'll be out there and your bomb won't work and they'll be crawling at the door -"

  "Shut it!" Morse roared. "I don't know about you, Briscoe, but I'm a citizen of Her Majesty and as far as I'm concerned I obey Her Majesty's proud and noble laws of fucking physics and so does my bloody bomb! Now you can throw your wobbly on your own time! Right now we need to get moving so fucking move!"

  "You don't need to shout." Sharon muttered.

  Morse softened. No need to take it out on her in her condition. He thought of Shirley, who that bastard Smith had hung out to dry like a sheet of bloody washing. His Shirley was somewhere out there in this bloody mess, and he'd never know what happened to her. If not for that fucking unspeakable idiot Smith with his bloody thirst for forbidden fucking knowledge, Shirley might be with him now.

  He sighed. That would be a fucking tragedy, wouldn't it? Because there was a very good chance that he'd have to watch her die. He'd been spared that, at least. But he didn't have to like it one little bit.

  He looked around at Jason. Take that lemon out of your fucking gob, cunt. My wife's fucking lost to me and yours is right here, and you're too busy pouting to fucking notice.