All the Dead Are Here (30 page)

With an almost audible lurch, Paul was in the room with the Minister and Jim Bramer as they argued back and forth. The apparition of Jim stretching forward to start the MP3 was gone and Paul was there surrounded by the Dead in Jim’s office so many months after he had first received his orders to go to Edinburgh.

In the grey, Paul shone like a thousand stars in the murk, light poured from him like sunshine eating away at the edges of the black hole that raged at Jim Bramer, like bright dawn through skeletal winter trees.

The Minister sat forward in the chair and ranted incoherently at Jim while Jim sat back and watched impassively. The Minister spat insults and threats at him, promised tortures and pain to him and everyone who lived in the city or had fled in fear. Each sentence was unfinished, each threat worse than the last. Jim had hit all of the Minister’s buttons and he was giving it to Jim with both barrels. Jim’s failure to react did nothing to pacify him; in fact, it made the dead priest angrier.

Out of his peripheral vision he saw Paul’s arm move. Instinctively he wanted to look, but knew the Minister would notice. Paul raised his arm slowly towards the Union Jack sword in the scabbard on his back, the look on Paul’s face was grim and determined, yet filled with emotion. Jim was convinced this wasn’t the Minister in control, but Paul.

Paul reached slowly towards the sword on his back. He couldn’t afford for the Minister to see him. He had one chance to do this and he wouldn’t waste it. In the end it wasn’t Paul’s movement that alerted the Minister but his proximity in the grey. The light was close enough to eat away at the black of the Minister and the black hole span round to stare at the tiny star in front of it.

The Minister spun and looked at Paul’s arm halfway to the sword on his back. He reached out and grabbed Paul’s arm, pulling it down again.

In the grey, the full force of the Minister’s darkness was brought to bear against the tiny spark of Paul’s light. For a second it threatened to consume him totally. It overwhelmed Paul and he could feel himself fading against its might.

Paul pushed back, igniting his soul against the blackness. Paul raged in the grey. They would not be consumed. The hunger and rage of a Zombie starved, combined with the anger and fury of a man who could avenge his own murder created a fire storm of light that burned at the shadow. The black hole was fixated on Paul yet it seemed to struggle to turn away from him like a man forced to stare too long at the sun.

The Minister held onto Paul’s arm but couldn’t look him in the face, his head flicked frantically about and a gurgled cry escaped his lips.

Paul had one chance, and the fire storm of emotion filled his every point of being. He lunged forward and tipped the Minister’s chair over, spilling the skinny old man to the ground. Paul tried to scream in rage but air rushed from his dead lungs through his torn throat which hissed and gurgled
ineffectually. He leapt over the chair and onto the Minister’s chest. There was no Zombie nor man here now: Paul was a being of pure fury.

The Minister struggled, turning his head furiously away from the light as the grey and reality became one. Paul plunged his fist through the brittle bones and into the Minister’s chest, grabbing at anything it could find. He ripped a lung from the old Zombie’s body and held it in his teeth, his other hand around the old man’s throat. He bit at the lung like an animal and ripped it away with his hand, shredding it. He discarded it like a rag and ripped at the Minister’s throat. Skin and sinew came free and he held the bits of flesh in the air like a caveman glorying in the hunt. He plunged his ichor blackened hands into the chest again and ripped out bone and decaying arteries that spat black fluid over the green carpet of the office.

Finall,y he grabbed the Minister’s flailing head with both hands and ripped his gargling, screaming skull from his body, twisting it, pulling it, as the vertebrae snapped and the ligaments tore until it was free in his hands, attached only by a few sinewy cords. He flung the head over against the wall where it lay blinking until its black eyes faded to milky white and its jaw hung limply from its pivot.

In the city the Zombies stopped and gazed blankly into the distance. Those humans still fighting hand to hand or firing from rooftops continued the battle, all caught in their own blood lust.

In the grey, the final vestiges of black dissipated like wisps of smoke and Paul’s soul shone like the sun in the gloom of a foggy morning. All the tiny twinkling eyes gazed unthinking at the new Godhead that spun slowly before them.

Paul crouched over the headless torso. Jim noticed he was panting with exertion, his Zombie lungs needlessly pumping air into his dead blood. It was a thoroughly human autonomic response.

Paul turned his head slowly to look at Jim, but there was no vestige of humanity there and for a moment Jim thought the creature would turn on him, but it lowered its head to stare at the headless torso below and it stayed crouched over the corpse.

Finally, slowly, its breathing slowed and gradually it stood, head crouched with clenched fists. Its eyes still focussed on its prey below. Then it turned its dark head, black fluid dripping from its chin and looked at Jim’s desk.

Jim stared aghast. The Zombie Paul, its long, dank hair hung over its face, raised its hand and stupidly shuffled the papers around until it found what it was looking for. It grasped the pen in its fist like a small child and raised its other hand to hold the paper in place. It raised the pen like a knife and tried to scrawl on the slippery page. The pen ripped the paper, so with its other hand it cast that paper to the floor and tried again. Slowly it drew on the paper and Jim noticed that its tongue was sticking out and Paul’s face was screwed in concentration like a small child.

Then it cast the pen to the ground, raised its head and lifted the paper to its chest. Jim stared in amazement as the creature raised its black, obsidian eyes to stare at him smiled a wide, twisted, scarecrow smile. Jim found himself, despite everything, smiling back at the monster before him.

Paul rustled the paper in front of his chest to get Jim’s attention. Jim stared at the crumpled form that it held to its chest and struggled to make out the words. In the city and all around Jim’s office, the Zombies stood stock still and smiled a big, twisted scarecrow smile.

Finally, Jim realised what the note said:

hElLO Jim

The scientist stared at the bundle of coloured wires that ran from the nearby cabinet up to his lap. His hands shook as he tried to solder what he thought was the positive detection wire to the multi pin connector. The smell of burning solder stung his nostrils and to his malnourished brain it smelt like burnt toast. The only light in the ruined laboratory emitted from the screen on his workstation. He couldn’t get the wire in position and solder it simultaneously so he put the soldering iron back in its cradle and took the bottle of water from the table. Its chemical taste was a remnant from its life in the cooling system of one of the now defunct supercomputers. Even the long process of filtering out the chemicals couldn’t improve the taste.

He used his thumb and fingers to rub his forehead. The headache was now a permanent fixture since the food had run out a few days ago. He looked down at his emaciated hand, now more like the Dead outside than his remembered self image.

“Joe? Are you online?” he quietly asked the AI.

“Yes sir,” the cool mechanical voice replied.

“Run through the video again. Please recheck the timings. Ensure that the Atomic clock in the view is synced with the Quantum wave initiator. Then compare it with the clock time on the video. Finally, ensure any errors are compensated for with the synchronisation algorithm I completed yesterday.”

“That operation will take four hours thirteen minutes.”

“Good. Will that impact on the main program compilation?”

“No sir. I still have twenty functioning cores that can be used for that operation alone.”

“Good. Thank you, Joe.”

“I thought you may want to know that the main program compilation will be completed in five hours, twenty-five minutes and eighteen seconds.”

“Ok,” the scientist muttered quietly. He picked up the wires and the connector and began to solder them in position. He reckoned that within eight hours he could be ready to go. It needed to be today otherwise he may not have the strength. Then, of course, there was the problem of the Dead.

“Joe. How many are there now?”

“Please specify.”

“How many Dead are trying to get into the LHC?”

“Approximately six point four billion.”

“All the Dead are here,” said the scientist quietly to himself. Joe interpreted this as a statement and remained silent.

On the screen the image played silently on loop. In the grainy CCTV footage the large LAX sign was clearly visible, as was the main clock on the concourse. The scientist had no way of knowing if it was an atomic clock, but had assumed it was. The image showed people running in panic and a line of FBI agents in black jackets pointing guns at the scruffily dressed man holding the vial. The man was ranting silently at them, his face red with rage. The scientist had watched the footage so many times the sound played through his mind even though it was turned down. The man’s motivation for releasing the plague was some vague and meandering hatred of society and humanity’s ability to destroy itself. The irony of this action was lost on everyone as he dropped the vial. The footage slowed to a crawl as Joe checked each frame remotely. Over a period of a few seconds the vial tumbled down. Simultaneously there was a flash from the FBI agents’ guns and slow bullets traced their way to the terrorist. Finally, they impacted into the man’s head and chest in several locations as the vial shattered on the floor. The terrorist tumbled as crimson blood sprayed in slow drops from the impact sites, each bullet taking seconds to trace through his body before exploding from his rear. Languidly, he fell to his knees and the FBI agents started their sprint towards him. In slow motion the screams of the onlookers became a low howl, not dissimilar to the noise he heard on his infrequent visits to the blast door that prevented the Dead from stopping his long months of work.

The video sped up to its normal rate. The FBI agents crowded around the body as the onlookers started to gawp in horror. As the final few seconds of footage rolled the terrorist jerked, as if having a seizure, and then lashed out at the nearest agent. They fired as if in a frenzy, sending further sprays of blood out of the corpse as it gripped the shin of the nearest agent and bit deeply into it before any of the shots found its head. The footage ran for a further three hours but what it showed was not worth seeing again and the footage looped back to the beginning as Joe continued the analysis.

Connector finished, he placed the snaking cables on the floor and slumped in his chair.

“Joe. I’m worried about hitting the spot. How confident are you of the final placement location?”

“There is a ninety-eight percent chance of hitting the right location, given local gravity variations in the rotation of the Earth. There is only a sixty percent chance of getting the exact time index,” said Joe. The scientist had become convinced that the AI had become more morose over time, almost as if it didn’t want to be left alone. He put this down to nothing more than his own fevered imaginings.

“Do you believe that there is anything further we can do to improve the accuracy of either parameter?”

“Given the lack of testing, I do not have enough data at this time to make a prediction.”

“So we need some luck then?” the Scientist smiled thinly. Joe didn’t have any parameters that coincided with the concept of luck and so remained silent.

The idea was to use the LHC to create a small wormhole. The quantum energy from that wormhole would then shunt the small pod mounted on the staging platform out of linear time into a non-linear state. The pod would then surf the quantum wave to the event horizon, where - and the theory was ropey here at best - it would flip back to the event at LAX and deposit the scientist in the scene, where he could influence the events that had led to the release of the plague. In his heart the scientist knew his chances of achieving the goal were slim, but given the situation it was either that or starve to death. Provided the billions of bodies crushing themselves to liquid at the blast doors didn’t finally get through.

Several hours later the Scientist sat in the pod, crudely made from interchangeable aluminium struts. The walk from his lab to the staging platform just off one of the detector corridors had robbed him of the last of his strength. He hoped the adrenaline from the jump would allow him to wrestle the terrorist to the ground or do whatever was required to stop the event. He shook his head. There were too many variables, too many intangibles. He controlled his breathing and shut his eyes.

“Joe. Initiate the countdown,” he said shakily.

“Sir?” said Joe.

“Yes?” said the Scientist, slightly confused.

“Good luck.” The scientist paused. He realised he would miss his companion.

“And you,” was all the Scientist could think to say.

“Jump in ten... nine… eight… seven… Wormhole power at one hundred per cent… five… four… Quantum wave initiation complete in… two… one… fireeeeeeeeee.”

For a moment the Scientist’s perception of time stood still and he thought that the wave had failed. Then, with a scream, his vision turned to grey and the pod disappeared around him. His entire nervous system turned to liquid fire and yet, for some reason, all he could think about was a large mahogany hat stand. Finally, the thought left him to be replaced with screaming pain and he realised it wasn’t him screaming. It was something else. The scream was inhuman and quickly he realised it was playing in reverse, like the video being rewound. It lowered to a bass rumble as the LAX coalesced around him. Finally there was a pop as he re-entered the time stream and he heard the screams, exactly as they had been on the video, but in glorious stereo. He was knelt behind the Terrorist and the cool, fresh air chilled him. His left hand was flat against the cool tiled floor and as his vision cleared he saw the FBI agents stare in wonder at him.