I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  Why had The Sentinel not contacted the Queen?

  On the island the humans called Japan, The Sentinel had chosen to remove itself from a community that accepted its existence without suspecting its true nature, in contravention of its basic directives, simply because its cover personality had dictated that it should follow 'a code of honour'.

  Why did The Sentinel access such memories now?

  Why was it so confused?

  You could be nice if you wanted.

  The Sentinel looked down at the little girl.

  It could be nice.

  If it wanted.

  Morse swallowed, watching as the monstrosity gently laid its killing hand on Katie's head, ruffling her hair.

  Katie smiled and closed her eyes. She knew it. She knew that the monster could be nice if it wanted to be. She felt the long, thin, spindly fingers gently ruffling her hair...

  ...and then The Sentinel tore her head from her body.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Long Goodbye

  The first thing I hear is the sound of screaming.

  A man screaming, yelling at the top of his lungs, calling me a bastard, calling me a fucking piece of alien shit, calling me everything under the sun... on and on and on.

  I can smell disinfectant. Urinal cakes and soap dispensers. And blood. So much blood.

  It's like I'm smelling it all through my skin. My breathing's different.

  Everything's different.

  Every part of me is different. Scents are coming to me through every part of my skin, each seeming to have its own texture. I'm hearing the screaming like I'm underwater - like I have my hands over my ears. My vision's changed. It's flatter, but clearer - like somehow my depth perception's been altered. Colours are different - blues and greens seem washed out, reds seem stronger, more vibrant. Everything I'm seeing seems like a collection of shapes with no connection between them. It's like things aren't coming into focus so much as coalescing.

  What am I looking at?

  I'm in a toilet. I'm on the floor of a big public toilet. I don't see any urinals, so it's the Ladies. There's blood everywhere - pints of it, all over the floor. Maybe I slipped and fell in it. I can't remember anything since... since the fight with that big-headed doll-guy. And even that's only in flashes.

  How long have I been here?

  What's happened to me?

  First things first. Who's doing the screaming? Some guy bleeding out on the floor...

  ...is that the Boxer?

  I should have worked that out. It's like I'm looking at his organs through his skin, seeing the heat centres pulsing. God, that's strange, that's... Jesus, he's badly hurt. It looks like he's stuck his hand into a woodchipper.

  What the hell happened here?

  "Mhhhrs...?"

  It sounds like something bubbling up from underneath a swamp. My mouth feels weird. It's hard to form words. Try again.

  "Mohhrse. Muh. Morse."

  It feels like there isn't a tongue in my mouth... like I'm making the sounds with some sort of other organ buried right the way down deep in my throat. He stares at me for a moment, bone-white, like he wasn't expecting me to say anything and now that I have it's the most frightening thing in the world. Then he starts cursing me out again. This is no good. I start to get up off the floor...

  ...and then I see my hand...

  The palm is thin and flat, with ten slender fingers branching off from it, each one ending in a little grey claw like a scalpel. The thumb ends in a merciless hook of bone. It's drenched with red blood, still dripping and oozing.

  Whose hand is that? Not mine.

  Surely not mine.

  My gaze lifts and something else comes into my field of vision and, Jesus Christ, it's the headless body of a child. A little girl by the look of it, in a jumper and jeans. Someone's torn her head off her body. Jesus. Did Morse do that?

  "Morrse... dih... dih yuuu..."

  That just sets him off again. Bastard this, fucking Godless that. I don't know why -

  Oh no.

  Oh God. Oh, look at all the blood on my hand.

  Look at the hand, for God's sake, it's tailor-made to tear off heads. The heads of little children.

  Oh God.

  Oh God who would never, never, never make a thing like me...

  It was me. I did it.

  I look around towards the cubicle stalls and her head's sitting there, on its side, eyes closed, the mouth frozen in a half-smile. A cooling child's head.

  She's aged, of course, but I remember that face. From my point of view, I only handed her back to her Dad a couple of days ago. How could I forget?

  Little Katie.

  And I tore her head off.

  And then I remember everything.

  I drag myself to my feet, to my hooves, and clip-clop over to a mirror. I want to be sick. No, that isn't true - I want to want to be sick. But I can't be sick anymore, of course. Being sick is a human thing. My one big red bug-eye stares back at me, a deep dark pool of blood sitting in white corpse-flesh, a circle-mouth full of shark's teeth opening and closing underneath. No wonder it's so hard to talk. That terrible face leers at me from the mirror. It's so ugly. Grotesque.

  When we look at ourselves closely, we always are.

  Or is that only true for monsters?

  I've never hated myself more than I do now. And I've never hated them more than I do now - the Insects, the Elder Gods who made a thing like me, the monsters who found out they had no use for our world and tore it into pieces so nobody else could have it.

  And it is our world. Me included.

  I remember everything.

  I remember little Katie, her eyes big and wide and mentally damaged - that would be down to me - looking up at me and telling me that I could be nice if I wanted. I remember all my programs fusing and melting together as millennia upon millennia of cover personalities - of individuality and decency and honour and love and all the other stupid human things - crashed against the cold, analytical hive processes of the Insect Intelligence. I remember reaching down and tearing her head off, one last attempt by the Insect to assume dominance. But all that did was make the system crash harder. I remember collapsing on the floor...

  It's almost funny. The Insect Nation thought that humans were worthless - biologically backward, unevolved meat-things, not even useful as foodstuffs. But they had a weapon that could beat the Insect Culture, that could infect it, dominate it, take it over. Humanity itself.

  What happens when the cover personality is stronger than the 'real' personality? When the imitation becomes more real than the real? Oh, maybe the Insect could take over for a while, long enough to do the damage... but in the end, the weight of humanity, the weight of idiosyncrasy and inconsistency and illogicality and commonality will overwhelm something as simple and stupid as an Insect.

  When this started, I thought I was a dead man. I know I'm worse than that now. Infinitely, horrifically worse - but I'm still me, for all the evil I've done. I'm still myself. Nobody can bury that, not even the things that built me.

  And now I remember everything.

  I remember calling the Insects here in the first place. Those parts when the Insect Nation were in control are like a dream - like sleepwalking. Like my body is walking and moving and I can't do anything to stop it. Like a nightmare. I remember standing and waiting patiently as buildings burned in front of me and white maggot-things scampered along the streets searching for fresh flesh....

  I remember being half-burned to liquid mush by Mister Smith, laying like a charred doll and feeling my flesh reform into something more suited to ending the world.

  I remember Sweeney and the wolves and Morse and rescuing little Katie.

  I remember performing a string of assassinations around London in 1997. A man named Bristol Terry had made a lot of enemies and wanted them dealt with. He was low on the totem pole, but he had something all the bigger bastards who wanted to kill him didn't - my phone number.

&nb
sp; I remember gutting a local paedophile with a kitchen knife in 1989. He was the real thing - he had polaroids. His brain didn't taste any different from any other I'd eaten. I felt like it should have tasted of sick and human shit, but it didn't. It wasn't the only time I was hired by the Neighbourhood Watch. I tried not to kill anybody who hadn't committed a serious crime, though. Overdue library fines didn't cut it.

  I remember snapping Emmett Roscoe's neck in an office in a gay club in New York. The Insects won that time. Sorry, Emmett. You were sweet.

  I remember solving cases in New York in the fifties. Divorce work, the occasional murder. 'Better Dead Than Red', they said at the time. They might have changed their minds if they'd known about me.

  I remember hanging out with Dorothy Parker. That verse of hers that ended 'how lucky are the dead' was written after she met me. Beat that.

  I remember walking across America before it was America, from the shores of the Pacific up to what became Canada. I remember being called Wendigo...

  I remember living on a cold hill in feudal Japan, taking what offers came my way, keeping the Insect inside under control with a will of frozen iron.

  I remember walking from one end of Russia to the other, through snow and ice, eating the brains of wolves and peasants and anyone else who crossed my path.

  I remember discussing the existence of the soul with the philosophers of Athens.

  I remember building pyramids for Pharaohs.

  I remember...

  I remember once I saw a man kill a tiger...

  Year after year, generation after generation piled one atop the other, so many memories, a lifetime of humanity. And the Insect Nation thought they could lock that away and erase it as though it had never existed.

  How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, now that they seen Paree?

  I don't care what I'm made of. I don't care who built me, or what they wanted from me, or what sort of physics I'm meant to operate under. I don't even care about the pulsing red eye I see through or the growled inhuman words that bubble up from the incomprehensible organs inside me.

  My name is John.

  And I am a human being.

  Morse has stopped cursing again. Probably just to catch his breath.

  "On yhrr feet, Mhhrs." I growl, trying to get the words out. "Ghht up."

  He looks at me. He doesn't understand. But I'll make him understand.

  I get down on one knee and haul him up to face me by the scruff of his neck, careful not to do any damage with these scalpel-fingers. I can't help but feel angry with him - he caused this. There was one man on Earth who could have triggered my programming and changed me into an Insect and this idiot brings me within five hundred feet of him.

  He could at least have killed me properly when he had the chance.

  I fix my great red eye on his and speak slowly.

  "I w-wnnt... want... the bomb. Mhh... Morse. I want..." It's coming easier now. It almost sounds human. "I want the nuke."

  Morse spits. "Go to hell."

  "We're already there. I need the bomb, Morse."

  "You can torture me all you -"

  "And I need to know how to make it go off."

  It took a lot to convince Morse I was serious. I think what turned him around in the end wasn't anything I said or did - what can you say or do after you've killed a child in front of a man's eyes? - it was that he didn't have a choice. Arming the thing took two keys - two good hands - and there was no way a man who couldn't even walk was going to get close enough to the Palace to be sure of using it.

  What did he have to lose by giving it to me?

  In the end, there was no bunker - there was a cache of handguns and one suitcase nuke, hidden in a large room behind a false wall, accessed by inputting a 20-digit code into a unit built inside one of the dryers. No food, no entertainment, no beds - anyone forced to shelter from a nuclear bomb in those circumstances would have died quickly if they were lucky. I asked Morse what he would have said if any of his motley crew had made it through the tunnels alive. He gave me a look and I realised that I shouldn't have spoken. He'd acted on data handed to him by a manipulative Victorian freak - the most he could be accused of was imparting a little false hope. He was trying to save as many people as he possibly could.

  People that I murdered.

  So I kept my mouth shut while he told me how to arm the bomb and set the timer for half an hour. I considered taking a handgun, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure these hands can actually hold or fire a gun properly - and frankly, these hands look dangerous enough on their own.

  So I left one gun with Morse and then cuffed the bomb to my wrist. And then I walked out of there.

  There weren't any goodbyes, or pithy comments - I didn't feel much kinship with the Boxer, and he certainly didn't with me. I'd murdered his whole planet and now I was carrying his last hope away with me because he was too weak - or too human - to do the job himself. I don't blame him for being sour.

  I took a last look at him on the way out. He didn't look good - he'd lost too much blood, and he'd lost something else as well. There's no way a human being can see the end of the world and stay sane - even someone as strong as Morse had to snap eventually, and his weak spot was his will to live. His responsibility had kept him going for a while, and then his hatred of me had kept him going a while longer, but now all his jobs were done, all his purpose was gone and he wasn't coming back. I asked him what he was going to do and he shrugged and said he'd probably go and see Shirley. She'd gone on ahead of him, but she'd wait for him. She always had. Then he hefted the gun in his left hand.

  You don't really get any more unambiguous than that. I just hoped he waited until I was out of earshot. I didn't want yet another death loaded onto my conscience - it was like Buckaroo already.

  And now here I am, perfectly-balanced hooves clicking quietly on the steps as I climb up out of that toilet tomb, and I hear a gunshot echoing, bouncing back and forth across tile. And then a slumping body.

  Thanks for waiting, Morse.

  I straighten up when I'm on the station floor. It's weird having your point of view so far from the ground, but in another way it feels right. I don't know what that says about me. I don't know what sort of person I am now, in this perfect and perfectly alien body.

  I've got about twenty-five minutes to find out.

  The floor of the concourse is littered with corpses, mostly bits of corpses - the remnants of ribcages and torsos. People torn apart from the inside.

  The reproductive cycle of the Insect is pretty simple. Larvae of various sizes are ejected from the motherships into the populace. They chew their way into hosts, taking control of the brainstem and sending the hosts lurching around like - go on, say it - like zombies. Then they feed on the flesh and fluids inside, growing along preprogrammed lines of development into soldiers, digger worms, eyes-on-legs and a thousand other slimy forms. And the nastiest of these is the Queen. A big, pulsing command centre, the main link between the Insect Intelligence out there and the creeping little bastards down here. I can feel her scratching away in the back of my mind right now, but it's like Radio 4 left on in another room of the house - just a constant murmur that means nothing to anybody. It's almost soothing.

  But it means they're on to me. The Queen doesn't need to send a larva into someone's womb to grow a little surveillance monitor with me. She's got me bugged twenty-four-seven. She's a smart cookie for someone one step up from a cockroach.

  She knows what I'm up to at all times. And so do the rest of them.

  This is going to be interesting.

  There's a skittering sound close behind me. And another from the side. And front.

  I'm not surprised that they've come for me so quickly. There can't be much else for them to do. There aren't any humans left to kill, after all. Not in London.

  In fact, I might be the last living thing in the world who knows what it's like to be human. Just John Doe - an imitation of a human mind locked in the body
of an alien killing machine, strapped to a nuclear bomb counting down from... about twenty-three minutes by now.

  The last detective in a world where all crimes have been solved forever.

  It'd make a good film if there was anyone left to direct it.

  They crawl out of the woodwork, circling slowly, padding out from watching-places inside Upper Crust and WH Smith, incongruous against the commercial element. Three of them. Black and chitinous. Man-like in proportion, between four and seven feet tall, spurs of black carapace jutting out from shoulders, elbows and knees. Instead of faces, they have masks of black shell with cruel mandibles clicking and clacking slowly - rapping out a who-goes-there in clicks and pheromones. Their ink-black shells seem to ooze under the sickly lighting. Their claws glitter like polished steel. It's their world now, and they know it.

  They're the soldiers of the New Insect Order.

  I take time in my fist and squeeze it down to a hard point. For a moment, the soldiers freeze still - then they move again, circling at the same slow, steady pace. I start to circle myself, and they blur for a second before I squeeze time tighter, slowing the moment further to catch up with them. They can do what I can do, of course. It's only logical that they'd be able to.

  In the back of my mind, I can hear the chittering of the Queen, wheedling, cajoling. The Insects don't understand what's happened to me. They think they can bring me back onto their side by reminding me of the hive, of the Queen, of a world where you do what you do simply because that's what you do, not for any higher reason.

  I won't deny it's tempting to live as an Insect. No ego, no emotions, nothing to do but exist and follow the path you're given, without questions, without conscience.

  Without guilt.

  I speed up slightly. So do they.

  I could just let myself go. Let myself embrace the Insect. But I have to ask myself, what sort of person am I?

  Am I a bad person?