The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus

by Matthew Smith

  BEEN KINDA LAX in keeping up the journal. Frankly, I think it’s a combination of fatigue and lack of motivation that’s been preventing me from picking up the pen—figure depression’s caught up with me. I don’t know, I can’t self-diagnose, and there’s no one here that’s got any kind of qualification in that department, but a few days ago I spent nearly twenty-four hours curled up at the back of the RV sleeping, or trying to (dreams have been weird again, which shouldn’t really come as much surprise. Even so, they weren’t graphic replays of the grey attack, but claustrophobic anxiety sequences involving small bare rooms and silhouettes burned onto walls). Had no appetite, no desire to converse with anyone, just felt sapped of energy. One of the others may have tried to talk to me, or get me to eat, but I’ve got no recollection of it, or whether I ever responded. When I finally emerged from under my blanket, I didn’t feel any more rested—I simply felt numb. The thought of trying to write this down and make some kind of sense of the jumbled stew of emotions slurping around in my head was exhausting enough—actually doing it required some concerted willpower. I started a couple of times—there’s a whole mess of torn out, scrunched-up pages over in the corner that are testament to my aborted beginnings—but nothing flowed, or made sense. I don’t suppose it has to, in the end; it’s looking increasingly like no one else but me will read it. Why should I care what these ravings amount to? But the truth is, the straighter I get it on the page, the better I feel. I’ve had to force myself to sit down and write this, and it’s given me a certain amount of purpose.

  Kez has let me have some space and pretty much tiptoed around me, which is wholly unlike her. I’ve noticed a change in her since we escaped from the farmhouse—she’s still taking charge, but some of the resolve has gone, maybe. She was always tough—still is tough—but there’s a fear in her eyes these days that wasn’t there before. She thought she was keeping us all safe, and was doing a damn good job of it—but they got to us in the end. No matter how careful we were, they got to us. That realisation has destroyed a little part of her, I think. But, like I say, she’s remained our leader and is keeping us alive from one day to the next. We’re a diminished group now, the last remnants of our original community—just the seven of us, including me (Kez, Riggs, Lionel, Katherine and her daughters Meredith and Holly being the others)—crammed into Mr Graham’s old motorhome, but she’s doing her best to find us a new haven. The options are thin on the ground, and it feels like we’re running in tighter and tighter circles, but we’re all aware we don’t have much choice. We flee and we hide, or we die.

  Like I said, I completely ran the fuel tank dry hot-footing it from the farmhouse. It gave us some distance, but left us stranded. All credit to Kez, she was as traumatised as everyone else, but she had the wherewithal to organise a foraging party to rustle up some gas; plenty of abandoned vehicles on the highways (and the Judges don’t seem concerned about moving them, just leaving them there on the road to rust), and she and Riggs were able to siphon enough to eventually get us off the main drag and into a stretch of woodland, where we were no longer visible from the air. Justice Department was still going to be looking for us, and were aware of what we were travelling in, so there was a lot of practical talk about ditching the RV, but in the meantime it was our base until something more secure came along. So far, that kind of bolthole has been in short supply—buildings are either wrecked, or in the hands of other survivors that don’t take kindly to sharing. The fact that we’re being driven to extinction you’d think would be a rallying cause, with a common enemy to band against, but no, cold hard human greed and self-preservation wins the day. We didn’t realise how lucky we were in that farmhouse cellar, locked away in our own little bubble with enough sustenance and water to last us—although I suppose we would’ve been the same if a large group came cap in hand, seeking access to our larder (others had joined us in the past, but only as individuals, mostly). Now, we are on the outside, asking for sanctuary, and likewise no one’s letting us come anywhere near their hideouts. Kez returns from her expeditions with tales of home-made signs strung on chainlink fences prohibiting further access, and unseen lookouts putting warning shots across her path. No one has the resources or the inclination to take on further mouths to feed, nor do they want the Judges led to their door (though that concern may be moot if our experience was any indication—they can find us wherever we go). So for now the RV is our halfway home from home.

  Our circumstances are reduced, there’s no question of that. Our meals are rationed out in meagre amounts, and restocks are proving difficult to find. Hunger is making people increasingly tetchy, though Kat is hardly eating at all, and acting worryingly distant with her daughters. Lionel, despite me thinking him a bit of a tool in the past, has actually been pretty sweet around the girls, and shouldered some of the parenting duties, not least sharing a good half of his dinner with them most nights. I have to admit, I’ve struggled to keep even basic foodstuffs down, and my digestion’s shot to hell—can’t remember when I last passed a solid…

  Ha! TMI, Future Reader? Well, fuck you. This shit’s important to me—literally. You think I want to die constipated?

  3 April

  UGH, REREAD THE last entry and I can’t believe I’m making toilet jokes, as if what’s happening around us is just a bad camping weekend—“OMG, had to totally piss in a bush yesterday,” etc.—and not, like, the complete end of the fucking world. Maybe the crazies are setting in, and before I know it, I’ll be daubing the walls with my excrement (should I have the good fortune to actually crap any). Would I even know if I was losing my mind? I seem to have enough self-awareness to feel guilt for cracking funnies when we’re in the direst of straits, so I’m fairly confident I haven’t gone ga-ga yet. Should I feel ashamed, anyway? It’s looking like the chances of anyone reading this are practically nil.

  A kind of despondency has settled over the group that we’re not going to make it out of this alive. Food and water’s really low, and we’re all suffering forms of malnutrition. Riggs has picked up some kind of infection (I think something bit him out in the woods), and he’s been vomiting, feverish. There’s not much in the med supplies that can treat it, despite Kez’s best efforts, and an ill smell now permeates the RV—of sickness, of human failing. The air’s stale and sticky, and reeks of resignation. Should we stay and starve, or take our chances on the road, given what we know is out there hunting for us? I’m not even sure some of us are fit to move—the girls are becoming as reserved as their mom, the three of them sitting on the banquette together, Kat’s arms around her gaunt-faced daughters, staring into space for hours. Kez gets some sips of water into them but not much else. If ever I wanted to witness at what point people give up, I’m seeing it now. Complete shutdown, minds and bodies traumatised to such an extent that they crawl into a corner of themselves like animals seeking a quiet place to die. I had a cat like that once when I was a kid—an old, ratty tom he was by the end, who knew in his bones that the end was coming and one day disappeared into a corner of the garden behind the apple-tree stump and curled up and went to sleep and didn’t wake up. We found him a day or so later, head tucked between his paws, tail looped around him, taking the long dirt nap, looking just like a creature that had made its peace with the fact that it was its time to vacate the earth.

  God, Bartleby—I haven’t thought about him for years. Why has he suddenly popped into my head? Weird the stuff that occupies your mind when mortality’s pressing down on it, as if life’s not so much flashing before your eyes as replaying in slow motion in little highlighted bursts. My dreams the last few days have been like that too, bogged down with past significance. I keep picturing the top of the stairs in my asshole parents’ house, the long corridor behind it leading to the bedrooms, the leaded window dominating the landing but allowing minimal light through. It was a place I was sent to as punishment, if I mouthed off or didn’t do as I was told, and I grew to fear that dark corner, like it held bad memories that had impregnat
ed the walls, indelibly stained the plaster and floorboards. I never knew why it gave off such a nightmarish vibe, and my dipshit mum and dad never intimated that there was any reason for it to be so, though it didn’t stop them using it as discipline when they needed to, aware of just how uncomfortable I felt sitting on that top step in total silence, knees drawn up, listening to the building shift around me. I could be up there for a couple of hours, depending on the severity of my transgression. I never quite got over it, even in my mid teens when I escaped to college—reluctant return visits were always marked by a nervous glance up the staircase as if I half expected to meet someone descending. I put it down to some childhood brainfart that I couldn’t quite dispel, and never gave it much of a thought away from the old place… but now the sensation I felt as a kid is back, oddly, as if I’m there again, hard wood beneath me, lengthening shadows crawling across the ceiling. I keep feeling in my half-sleep that I’ve been forced there, that my rule-breaking requires correction. In my dreams, I drift upwards towards the top step, fearful of what awaits me.

  It leaves me breathless and trembling when I wake, old anxieties born anew. Can’t understand why it’s come back now, and to such a degree. It’s as bad as when I first experienced it, and I’m, like, ten years older. Is it ’cause we’re all being punished now, every one of us? We’ve all been declared guilty—seemingly for the crime of simply being alive—and it’s only a matter of time before each of us receives the ultimate sanction. Having that hanging over your head could be responsible for these familial flashbacks, I suppose—the notion that we’re all just errant, rule-breaking juveniles for whom the law must be strictly administered. I can see some similarities in the black-and-white thinking between these monstrous fucks that have taken over the HoJ and my authoritarian folks. Both slapped down their version of how it was going to be, and there was nothing in the way of compromise.

  God, I can’t believe my bloody parents are infiltrating my diary. I’d done my best to get away from them—hadn’t even given them much thought since all this started; presumed at the back of my mind that they’d met a fate much like many caught in the suburbs, and dispatched on their doorstep with a bullet to their heads—and here they are, haunting the journal’s pages. I can’t grieve for them since by the last time I saw them, I barely had any feelings for them. They were people I recognised, nothing more—and a lot of people I knew have fallen in the days and weeks that followed the night it all changed, and I don’t have the capacity to weep for every one of them. That seems harsh, reading it back, but so many have died you become punch-drunk on it.

  Aargh, this is such bullshit. Eyes are pricking, cheeks feel like they’re burning. I don’t want to be thinking about this stuff, I really don’t. It still hurts. I didn’t realise how raw I feel inside. But a hot mess is being stirred up in my head, though, and I don’t know if it’s delayed trauma, or the hunger, or our impending inevitable demise, or what—but something’s triggered it.

  5 April

  DAMN DREAMS ARE getting worse, and even more personal. Made me wake with a gasp in the early hours, and took a while to fade—it was my viewpoint, looking up at my mum and dad, and they were glaring down at me, not saying anything, just regarding me with complete distaste, like I was a bisected rodent that Bartleby had semi-digested and then brought into the house and left on the kitchen floor. I tried to say something to them, ask them what was wrong, but no words emerged, and my limbs felt heavy and unresponsive when I tried to reach out to them. Very claustrophobic and suffocating, like I was trapped under glass. The angle that they were looking down at me suggested I was prone on the ground—either that or very small—which made me wonder if it was some early memory thing.

  But the expression on their faces... Parents wouldn’t look at their young kid like that, would they, somewhere south of revulsion? Need to keep telling myself that this crap doesn’t mean anything, that it’s just random images fed by my misfiring brain, but it’s all so vivid, so real—and so pointed. I can’t help feeling there’s a message in these dreams.

  Couldn’t get back to sleep, and felt dreadful all day. Haven’t eaten for over twelve hours so pretty weak and wobbly too. Kez has now started rationing out rainwater she’s catching in a disgusting old tarpaulin. No gas left to boil it, so I dread to think what bacteria we’re ingesting.

  9 April

  RIGGS DIED. I should be sadder, but my first thought was that it was one less mouth to feed—kinda felt a little bit jealous too that he’d skipped out early. No more suffering, no more pain; just peace, dark and dreamless. Blissssss…

  Whoa. Not going down that avenue. I don’t have the death wish just yet.

  Head’s so fuzzy from disturbed sleep my waking hours feel like a succession of still photographs laced with déjà vu. I remember seeing Kez remove the body from the RV, but it was as if I was watching it on a television. She told me she’d buried him in a shallow grave several feet into the woods and I struggled to recall who she was talking about. Minutes (hours?) later, I’d apparently asked where Riggs was.

  Don’t know what’s real any more.

  (No remorse.)

  A figure, standing in a bare room, haloed by fire. The punishment due.

  All this has been seen before.

  16 April

  MOM. I’M SORRY. Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to hurt you and Dad. I never wanted to disappoint you.

  Please stop haunting me. I close my eyes and there you both are. Judging.

  I can’t eat, can’t sleep. You’re in my head, always. Whatever I do, you’re there, disapproving.

  I don’t want to be punished any more. Are you listening? Can I talk to you through this diary?

  Don’t have the strength any more.

  Enough.

  (No remorse.)

  A figure, standing in a bare room, haloed by fire. The punishment due.

  All this has been seen before.

  17 April

  ENOUGH. PLEASE.

  Please…

  …take me with you.

  I’ve had enough. Tak e me h o me

  Darknessss callsssss…

  All this

  (is due punishment—)

  18 April

  if i knew the peace of the grave i’d rush towards it

  25 April

  HOLY CHRIST. HOLY fuck. What the hell was I tripping on?

  I have no recollection of the last five days. Literal blank. I’m writing this on the RV, but everyone’s gone—Kez, Lionel, the girls, all of them—and I’ve no idea where they are. Their stuff’s mostly all here, though it looks like there was some kind of altercation, or they left in a hurry: furniture’s overturned, a window’s smashed. There’s a bit of blood spray on the glass, which is freaking me out. If my handwriting looks like shit, it’s ’cause I’m shivering like hell—shock, fear, I don’t know which.

  Where did they go? Did they run, or were they taken? Thing is, no one gets taken—you just get executed. But there’re no bodies.

  There’s a Judge here. A human one, I mean, not a grey. She’s sitting just across the way from me, keeping watch by the driver’s seat (I don’t know what time it is, maybe early morning). She found me in the woods, she says, and she brought me back here. Said I was lost, incoherent, blundering about, raving. I was going to give away our location to Justice Dept; a patrol was close to the treeline. She grabbed me, made sure they didn’t hear me, and talked me down until I finally shut up. She didn’t say what I was blabbering on about, but I get the impression she thought I was trying to get myself killed. She said I wasn’t in a fit state of mind to be out there on my own.

  Why was I out there on my own? Did I leave when everyone else did? Were we attacked, and we all fled in different directions? My memory’s a void.

  Hawkins is the Judge’s name. She’s been out there on her own since this started, by all accounts. Face is all fucked up, a knot of burnt tissue—God knows what happened to her, looks like she stuck her head in a furnace. Sh
e doesn’t say much if she doesn’t have to (obviously hurts her—mouth is partially fused, so she keeps conversations short and to the point), and I’m not entirely sure she’s completely compos mentis—which is rich coming from me, right? Looking at my diary entries previous to this, talk about the balance of mind being disturbed. Hunger and stress must’ve sent me off the deep end. But she’s given me some of her rations, which I managed to keep down—first thing I’ve eaten in days—and I feel a bit clearer in my head.

  Still don’t know where the others have gone, though, or how I ended up in the woods. Hawkins reckons that we can’t stay here—greys are sweeping in apparently, going to be overrunning this area. When night falls, she’s going to get us out. I don’t want to abandon the others, if they’re around, but I can’t see I’ve got a choice. Got to keep moving, if I don’t want to fragment; if I want to stay alive.

  If…

  No, I do. I do. I really do. Not going to give up now.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SHE’D RARELY VENTURED beyond the walls of the HoJ in the days since the Fall, and frankly it was discouraged unless you were a street unit—for a psi-operative like her, her place was at her station. The belief was that there was no need for her to leave her post since anything outside the job in hand was simply a distraction. She—like so many of her colleagues in the new world order—was now in a state of being that should require next to no external stimuli; there was only the Chief’s orders, and the actioning of the global cull. That was their world entire, their reason to exist. If you weren’t putting Sidney’s words into deeds, then your attention was elsewhere and your effectiveness was consequently diminished. As such, Cafferly encountered some static from the uniforms standing guard at the Grand Hall’s entrance, and it was not lost on her that they were as stringent on who they allowed to leave the building as who they let enter. It seemed another manifestation of the man at the top’s paranoid insecurity, and it kindled a brief flame of anger at her core that she and the rest of De’Ath’s rank-and-file troops were as much under the threat of judgement as the living. They were prisoners; worse, slaves, enacting their master’s will.