All the Dead Are Here (2 page)

I sit under the tarp and watch single clouds drift across my vision in the summer sun. I stare at the girls on the deli roof. I throw gravel over the edge. I sit. I try not to think about how thirsty I am. I fail. I toy with the pistol. I stare at the sky.

A crash followed by glass hitting the floor. I can hear shouting. I fumble the gun and sweep with the scope. I miss it at first and have to sweep back. Music shop is stood on the first floor of the shop, shouting obscenities at the Dead below. Then he backs into the shop and breaks the next window, shouts some more and breaks another window. The Zombies below are wild with desire, they press up against the bottom storey, grasping and tearing at each other to get to the meat. Music shop carries on breaking glass and shouting as he moves out of view around the corner. I can hear the reverberation of him as he repeats his mantra, break glass, shout, break glass, shout all the way around the building. Then silence. Silence?

Then he is on the roof waving a whiteboard at me. He props it up where I can see it and I focus in with the scope.
“FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SNIPER WHATEVER HAPPENS DON’T SHOOT ME!!!!!”

What? Why would I shoot Music Shop?

Then he runs to some cabling and plugs something in. There is a massive electrical bass sound and I see movement on the first floor. I realise he has arranged every speaker in the shop to face outside and I can see the speakers react to the power. Then he sits at the keyboard that I didn’t see him bring up from the shop and he starts to play.

It’s quiet at first, barely audible above the roar of the dead below, but it carries. It carries so far the Deli girls can hear it and stand up to look, and I see others on buildings further away, others I haven’t seen before, other survivors coming to hear Music shop play. It starts gently, as if carried on the wind. Then each note takes it higher, it is the most beautiful piece of classical music I have ever heard and I don’t recognise it. It rises and I see all the dead turn, like a Cecil B Demille production of Thriller. It rises again and as I see the Zombies moan as one below, I cannot hear them over Music Shop’s perfectly set up sound system and I smile. They move as one towards the music.

Unconsciously, I close my eyes and suddenly I’m there on the river bank, with a girl whose name I don’t remember. Lying back on the grass with the ripple of the water washing gentle tones over me, her skin against mine, laughing gently at her jokes and enjoying the freedom that summer brings while Music Shop plays an unseen score over my memory. I feel my shoulders relax at the warmth over the sun on my face and the smell of her lying across me, a perfect moment, a perfect memory long forgotten but brought here to this place of horror by his beauty. I lie back against the wall as the music detoxes my soul, and then? Oh my days, and then he sings! A beautiful baritone lifts above the city streets in Italian, from some unheard opera and once again it caresses me from this place to my perfect riverbank and for brief moments I am there with the smell of wild flowers and still waters, I feel myself sigh unconsciously and dream of her skin, her smell, her eyes and one unappreciated moment in my life consumed with consumerism and lost to vagaries of everyday life. I lie there and let him wash over me, a thin smile on my face as each note lifts the terror away, and for one brief second all is as it once was.

I blink awake and feel the riverbank fade at the noise below me, a crash, I stand and peer over the edge to see the dead streaming from the streets around and from my shop below. The Dead run, shamble and crawl towards his lilting tones, towards the power of his music. They surround his shop banging pitifully against the glass and crushing together, frantic to taste the voice above them. I close my eyes again but the moment is gone and I realise I don’t know what he is doing but by God I have to protect him, just for the glorious possibility that he sings tomorrow.

I grab the mags and line them up on the wall, I grab the empties and frantically load them, dropping bullets over the sides of my island as my hands shake. I realise I have tears flowing down my face and quickly wipe them away. I haven’t saved anyone yet from my vantage point but I will save him. Somehow.

The street below is clear as I hear the crash. Thousands of Dead are so crushed up against the shop the sheer weight has shattered the safety glass and they pour in like ants over a dead bird. I glance at my watch to realise he has been playing for over an hour, long enough for each shambling corpse in earshot to add their weight to the number. I want him to stop so they will disperse and leave him be, and I want him to play to free my soul from this place for just one desperate second longer.

The crowd start to thin on that side as they enter the shop and I see a couple tumble stupidly from the smashed windows of the first floor. The rest rise up the sides of the building, clambering on top of each other in their desperation.

I ready myself by getting comfortable and breathing slowly and regularly to level the sight. Music Shop faces slightly towards me as he plays and I see his chest rise and fall with each lyric. His fingers play gently across each key as he creates, in this city of destruction, a pure thing, a human thing reminding us that humanity isn’t survival, its creation.

Then I see the first head rise from the stairwell onto his roof, snarling and crusted with filth, its milky eyes narrow at seeing him and it rises to its feet, mouth contorted in its snarling hunger. I hope my fingers can match the perfection of Music Shop’s playing.

It does and even from this distance I take the thing through the forehead, its skull shattering like glass and a wild hue of colours decorating the stairwell and Zombies behind. They come thick and fast now, having located the source of the sound.

Crack. I shoot. It spins and falls to the ground. Crack. It falls to its knees as others push it over. Crack. Pure luck takes one and ricochets through the eye of another. Over and over I squeeze the trigger, my rhythm matching his, and I hear Music Shop play as if he is at a recital. He doesn’t even see them scrambling up the stairs as I take each threat out. The pile of finally dead corpses grow, as does the pile of empty magazines at my feet. I will not falter. I will grant him every second before they take him.

“No. No. No,” I whisper to myself as the tide turns. They come up in twos and threes now and I have to swing wildly to target as they veer out of the stairwell, stumbling towards their goal, their heads bobbing as they slip on the fallen, I find it difficult to draw a bead and then, when the mag runs out, I realise they will be on him before I change it. One more I couldn’t save. I watch as they close in on him and for a moment I wish I had one bullet to save him the pain, and I remember the sign. They are barely ten feet away as he finishes. I see him pause and breathe out. Five feet. He picks something up and holds it in both hands, then he turns and looks at me, smiling and I drop the gun from my eye. I see the distant rooftop and the trail of Zombies cover him, and I want to look away but can’t.

Then I see a flash from the side of the building and for a second the tanker bulges and warps before exploding. The white light makes me squint as the shockwave takes a second to reach me. It knocks me on my backside and, as a wall of noise takes the air from my lungs, I see glass, body parts and a guitar fly over my head. The explosion seems to last forever and as I lie there I see a disembodied hand hit the roof not five feet from me. I wonder just how big an explosion needs to be to throw a hand a good quarter mile to my location.

Now the only sound I can hear is my ears ringing and I scramble up to the edge to see the source. I peek over and see that it wasn’t just gas in that tanker, whatever it was has levelled not only the music shop but also all the surrounding buildings and the buildings next to those, which are in the process of collapsing and finding their new shapes as the smoke rises into a mini mushroom cloud.

“Jesus!” I say to no-one in particular as I survey the scene. Papers and detritus fall languidly to the ground and small fires take root in amongst the red mist, Zombies turned to stains like their victims as the mist obscures the hole where the music shop used to be. I realise I never knew his name.

Then I look down. The streets are empty. No living or Dead. All I can see is the car below me and the empty street around me. I look up into the distance left and right along the road and realise they must have heard it and flocked to him, every damn one of them that could hear him. Shit, I could do ‘Walking in the Rain’ down there!

My mind reels, still shocked by the blast, and suddenly I’m running. I grab the backpack and fling the door open. For the first time in a week there are no hands below me, only the ruined stairs. I turn and look once again at where the music shop was and smile. He knew exactly what he was doing, and not just for me but for all my island neighbours. He gave us hope and opportunity, and as I jump down into my shop I realise, for him, I will not squander either.

/
T
ape starts

MB: “I’m in conversation with Joseph Wyndham, leader of the Eastnor tribe, and one of the longest running siege survivors in the UK
. I
’m also here with his daughter, Isla Wyndham..”

IW: “
H
i.”

MB:”We are in his farmhouse on the Isle of Mull, off the West coast of Scotland. Joe, you holed up in a little-known stately home...”

JW: “It was a castle.”

MB: “Erm.
Okay
.
I
n a castle in Worcestershire for nearly fifteen years
. I
n fact, Joe, is it true to say that the clearances were fully in effect and London was almost Zack free by the time you were discovered?”

JW: “
Y
up. We just got forgotten about. All you reporters put up stories on the net about some rednecks in Texas holed up with an arsenal of guns,
with
the military helping
. W
e had none of that, just British nerve and each other
. W
e didn’t even have a working radio for the last few years”

MB: “Er okay (nervous laugh) well that’s why I’m here Joe! To let you tell your story.”

JW: “Yeah. But you lot started it, I reckon.”

MB: “Well its generally accepted that it started in China, in a rural location...”

JW: “Bollocks... It was all over the place. You couldn’t turn over the TV without a new
Z
ombie film advertised, or some new book, or some game or such
. F
or fuck’s sake, Donald told me there were people writing stories and putting them on sites and that. If you ask me, we all wanted it, nature just provided it based on our collective belief. It had all gone wrong way before it started, what with the economy and the environment and all that.”

MB: “So we asked for it? Because of the media?”

JW: “Look. Everyone was pissed off at being a consumer, we all wanted to feel alive or ‘real’ or whatever the fuck that means. Well, we got it in spades, mate
. I
n fucking spades!”

(A scuffling sound we assume is Joe rising from his chair.)

IW: “Dad, please sit down. Look, can you just move on please?”

MB: “Well how did it start? For you, I mean.”

JW: “I don’t want to talk about that night.”

MB: “Oh.”

IW: “Dad, that’s why he’s here, that’s why you invited him.”

JW: “I didn’t fucking invite the wee fucker.”

/crack

(Analysis tells us the noise on the tape is Joe’s walking stick falling to the floor.)

IW: “Okay, that’s why I invited him then Dad... Because you wanted to tell him what happened... you said someone needed to know... needed to know... well... because we were the only ones left.”

JW: “I don’t want to talk about the first night, or the beginning, or... your mother. I want to talk about what we built
. Or a
bout what happened to the others
. Or
about him.”

IW: “Is it o
kay
if he just talks about that?”

MB: “Sure.”

JW: “I’ll tell you what we built. We built heaven in the the midst of fucking hell. That’s what we built. Of course we were lucky in the first few weeks, with resources that is, not the whole apocalyptic ‘everyone you have ever known is dead’ kinda thing.”

MB: “In what way?”

JW: “Well, Eastnor had a good defensible layout, and a fully functioning portcullis, so the few of us who were there in the first days could at least be secure. We then had a week of hard frosts at the end of the month which didn’t fully freeze the Dead, but made it impossible for them to move quickly or even walk.

During that time we picked up about a hundred survivors
. M
ost in shock, and we managed to get working vehicles, a generator, and supplies to hold out for as long as we could. Hell, we even got furniture, beds, sofas and tables
because we had just about everything else we needed and were running out of ideas. More than that though, most people, myself included, were just in massive amounts of shock and didn’t wanna think about what they had seen
. O
r what they had had to do to survive
. W
e had some weapons too, old medieval swords and maces, all sorts of things, just no guns.
W
e just kept busy building stuff, getting the power running, and of course we fucked up
. We weren’t
thinking about things we would need, and getting things we didn’t need, like fucking TV’s! Jesus, we had four TV’s at the end of that week all with nothing but static on them.