Doomware (11 page)

“Hey!
Heyyyyy!
Up here!
”

The boy heard him and froze, looking around apprehensively for the source of the sound. There were definitely no zombie cataracts in his eyes, the surest sign that the boy was uninfected. David pummelled on the window again and waved furiously, and the boy saw him. He looked scared. Even at this distance, he could see fear on the boy’s face and in his body language.

Zombies didn’t show fear.

David swung the window open and the gentle tinkling of the rain amplified into something like the roar of a waterfall.

“Hey!” he shouted over the rain. “Hey! Up here.”

The boy said nothing; he just peered out from under a curtain of dirty-blond hair gone straggly in the rain with wide, wary eyes. Then he reached up, pulled on his hood, and started backing away slowly, as if worried that sudden movements might provoke some kind of retaliation.

“No! It’s okay,” David called, trying to force what might be taken for friendliness into his overstrained voice. “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. Come on up here.”

At that, the boy turned on his heel and ran back the way he’d come.

“
NO!
” David roared.

He tore from the drawing room and onto the wooden stairs, nearly tripping headlong as he thundered down them.

Outside, the boy had already disappeared around a corner where the street turned sharply to the right. David ran as fast as he could through the rain, rounding the corner onto Richmond Road. Here there was a left turn onto St Mary’s Road, quickly followed by turnings onto Twickenham Road and Francis Road. David ran along St Mary’s Road, his eyes darting to and fro urgently, his mouth calling out greetings, but even to him they sounded hollow and half-hearted. He could sense it was no use. The boy had been quick on his feet, and he’d had too much of a head start. There was no sign of him, no telling which direction he’d gone in, and the weather hampered both vision and hearing. The torrent was coming down so forcefully it was creating a kind of grey haze, one that hovered above the ground and was capable of swallowing up the figure of a retreating boy in no time. Moreover, he’d run outside without stopping to put on his raincoat; he was getting absolutely drenched through.

After a short period of fruitless searching David reluctantly accepted that the boy was gone. Crestfallen, he returned to the Lighthouse with a limp body and an even limper morale, compelled to look over his shoulder every few seconds in the vain hope the boy might reappear. He castigated himself for not thinking before acting; he should have made his presence known far more subtly than beating on the window and hollering at the poor kid.

Back in the Lighthouse he stripped off his wet clothes, dried himself using a towel from the ground-floor cloakroom, and put on dry clothes he found in one of the bedrooms. All through this he shivered violently, shaking with a sense of angry self-recrimination as much as the cold.

In the kitchen he made himself a hot drink using an old-fashioned kettle, and sat warming his hands on the mug as he sipped from it.

“Stupid!” he muttered to himself. “So fuckin’ stupid.”

For a long time his thoughts were nebulous, clouded with dismay, exacerbated by his low opinion of himself. Deep down, the boy’s running away felt like yet another rejection. No one but freakish, murderous zombies in the world and the boy would rather go it alone than be with a freak like him. No, that bordered on blaming the boy. You couldn’t fault a child, especially when their reactions were born of fear in this hellish world adults had created. The boy would naturally harbour a distrust of all adults; he hadn’t understood they were both survivors – islands of humanity in a sea of the soulless. The fact alone that another survivor had been revealed to him ought to be buoying his spirits.

Look on the bright side, he instructed himself. So he’d fouled up their first contact – he was only human.
Still
human. Next time he’d know better. All was not lost: he would find the boy.

Slowly his disappointment in himself over chasing away the first living human being he’d seen in more than six months dissipated, giving way to a brand of optimistic anticipation the likes of which he hadn’t felt for so long it took him a moment to identify it. It was the feeling of having a goal in life, having something to look forward to. Although aware that his change of mood was being fuelled by this renewed sense of purpose, he also knew that he wasn’t thinking entirely selfishly. The boy needed help, and he was the only one around who could give it to him. He would search for the child day and night – well, probably not the nights, he conceded – until he found him.
 

How old was the boy? Seven? Eight? Older? He was hopeless as far as children’s ages were concerned. Instinctively, he knew the boy was alone; he had to be a fellow acybernetic, and what were the chances of him having a parent or guardian who was the same? Besides, who in their right mind would have let a child out on their own, even in rain? Plus there was the time on the flyover; the boy been alone then too. Of course, it begged the question of how a child that young had managed to survive six months’ worth of a post-apocalypse nightmare on his own. At this point a note of doubt crept into his mind. What if he was wrong? The boy hadn’t looked or acted like a zombie, but what if it was simply a type of zombie he hadn’t encountered before? One that had normal-looking eyes and showed fear, that loved the rain and ran away at the sight of another person. With a shake of his head he pushed the doubt aside, ready and willing to grasp firmly onto hope this time. He knew what he’d seen. The boy’s eyes hadn’t been reversed the way all zombies’ eyes were and, besides, zombies never showed fear and they never ran from you; ergo, the boy was no zombie.

David kept a vigil at the drawing room window for hours, relaxed by the fuzzy drone of the rain and the sedate ticking of the grandfather clock. By mid-afternoon any hope of the boy returning had faded, and it evaporated completely when the rain finally stuttered to a halt. He toyed with the idea of staying for the night, but soon rejected it. He probably wouldn’t sleep a wink anywhere other than the flat, and he wanted to be rested and energised. He determined to come back tomorrow. He would centre his search on the Lighthouse and the motorway, the two places where the boy had put in previous appearances.

He packed up his holdall and was about to leave when he decided to write the boy a note, just in case he should venture – drawn, perhaps, by curiosity – into the Lighthouse. The first one he did he tore up straight away, deciding it sounded far too wordy and formal. Instead, he wrote:

Dear boy in the blue parka,

Hi. My name is David. I called to you from the window upstairs. I’m really sorry if I frightened you. Please don’t be afraid. I’m not like the others. I mean you no harm, I promise. I only want to help you. Let’s be friends?

Yours, David.

P.S. I shall return to this house every day.

He left the pen and some blank paper for the boy to reply on – more in hope than expectation – before making his way back to the flat, dodging zombies who were crawling out after the rain like giant-sized molluscs.

Once home, he caught sight of himself in a mirror and was immediately brought up short. His hair was so long and lank it twisted into greasy curls, and the thickness of his stubble made the rest of his face look pale and gaunt. The swelling of his top lip had reduced, but was still noticeable. He looked a wreck – a
zombielike
wreck. No wonder he’d frightened the poor kid off.

That evening, after he’d eaten a substantial two-course meal, he cut his hair with some electric clippers, shaved and bathed. The transformation was nothing short of miraculous; in the space of less than an hour he’d gone from zombie impersonator to matinee idol. And the change went beyond mere appearance. His quest to find the boy – to save the boy – was generating within him a change in attitude the likes of which he wouldn’t have thought possible. Maybe it was just the fact he had something meaningful to focus on, but it felt like he was just beginning to come out of a long hibernation, or that he was only now learning to dig his heels into the slippery slope he’d been sliding down.

When he went to bed that night he barely noticed the sounds coming from the vent. His thoughts were of the boy, out there all alone somewhere. Alone and frightened and uncomprehending. He felt an overwhelming desire to protect the child, an urge beyond question that seemed to go deeper than some vague, quasi-paternal instinct. As he drifted off to sleep he thought about all the activities the men in his childhood – from his father to his great-great-great-grandfather – had dutifully engaged in with him. The bike rides and the football games and the bedtime stories, always with that overarching watchfulness of the prior generations, the subconscious searching for the echoes of themselves. He imagined playing games with the boy and teaching him things. He imagined tucking him in at night and telling him stories, oblivious to the zombies going berserk beyond the sanctity of their home. He imagined simply having somebody to talk to.

Nowadays such things dreams were made of.

As soon as he saw the note, pen and paper he could tell they had remained undisturbed during his absence. His heart sank a little, but he wasn’t overly dispirited; after yesterday’s fiasco it was too much to ask that the boy should dare to enter.

In the refined atmosphere of the drawing room he laid out the collection of maps he’d brought with him on the carpet. He looked at his current location – Elm Road – and compared it with the location of the flyover. It was quite some distance. Did the kid live somewhere between the two points? Had he been making his way back to wherever he lived yesterday, or had he been walking away from it? He thought the latter more likely, since that would have meant he’d run off in the direction of home. But there was no way of knowing for sure. Maybe the child had simply run in whichever direction had made the most sense viscerally, without really thinking about the logic of it. For all he knew the poor tyke had found himself making a long and arduous journey through the rain, all to avoid the Lighthouse and the zombie freak who’d shook its fists and shouted at him.

David felt another twinge of guilt. He swore to make it up to the kid. More than make it up to him. Once he found him.

After much thought he decided to start with the area to the west of the Lighthouse, electing to make a criss-crossing pattern of a route that would gradually wind its way south to the flat. Searching each house would be impossible, of course. He had to hope that his and the boy’s paths would converge again. Plus he should be alert at all times: the boy might have unwittingly left behind clues to his whereabouts.

He packed up his maps and stopped to rub his eyes, trying ineffectually to get at a dull ache that had been festering behind them ever since he’d woken. The painkiller he’d taken had had no discernible effect on it, and the pain was more an annoying distraction than anything else. As he’d been doing all morning, he shrugged it off.

For a while he kept watch again at the drawing room window, thinking there was a remote chance the boy might return to check the house out this morning.

It was about 11a.m. by the time he set out. He left his note taped to the inside of the ground-floor living room window, so the boy could read it without having to come inside, and the pen and paper weighted down by a plant pot in the front porch. The sky was opaquely overcast, the clouds a solid mass devoid of detail, and the temperature was just about right for long distance walking. As usual, the city’s silence enveloped him like a leaden shroud.

He walked the length of Richmond Road, turned left onto Pretoria Road and then double-backed onto Newport Road. That way he could check out the grid-like warren of side streets without having to traverse them. He walked and walked, seeing nothing but gloomy streets lined with motionless cars, litter and windblown piles of dead leaves – not to mention the equally dead zombies. All the while he looked so hard and so hopefully for the boy, picturing everywhere a shiny blue parka and a small pale face framed by blond hair, that he thought he might start hallucinating him.

After a couple of hours he stopped at a house and ate the packed lunch he’d brought with him. He’d managed to avoid any close zombie encounters, but it was tough going. Many a time he’d been faced with a decision whether to adjust his route or wait one out – they often went about their posthumous business as long as you stayed out of their sight.

His headache had worsened and he touched the back of his hand to his forehead. His skin felt clammy and warm; he was slightly feverish. Had yesterday’s excitement, combined with getting drenched, led to him coming down with something? It would have to be now, he thought. Just when I need to be fit and well. Then he remembered his pills, which he hadn’t taken for three days running now. It was unbelievable how completely he’d put such a lifelong ritual out of his mind in so short a space of time. The headache was probably being caused by withdrawal. He hadn’t known what to expect as far as withdrawal symptoms went, and he’d mistakenly presumed they would be easily manageable. He cursed himself, feeling he needed to restart the pills right that second. Would it make him feel even more ill? He had no choice but to risk it.

He curtailed his journey, but even so it seemed to take for ever to get back to the flat, and the barricades and multitudinous door locks infuriated him. Once inside he took two pills straight away and retired to bed, feeling dreadful.

His first real day of searching had been a bust, but what could he do about it?

The first thing he did the next morning was take another pill. He still felt fragile, acutely aware now of the power of the chemicals surging anew through his bloodstream.

He didn’t feel like going outside, but he’d told the boy in his note that he would return to the Lighthouse every day, and he didn’t want to let him down. It didn’t matter that there was every chance the boy hadn’t even set eyes on the note. After a breakfast that was just sufficient to sustain him, he made his way slowly through the silent city streets.