Doomware (7 page)

As he watched, it brought the hand it had been keeping behind its back into view, as if it had realised he wasn’t going to fall for the trap and there was no longer any point in concealing the weapon. It was a huge, blood-stained carving knife. He had no doubt the sick thing would cut off his balls and eat them right in front of him if it was given half a chance.

“You me fuck! You …
fuuuucck…
”

The zombie’s voice went lower, slower, as it drew the blade across its exposed forearm. Old cut marks were there already, and he realised the torn clothes were the result of it stabbing itself. So it was a self-harmer too. As the blade moved across its skin, the new incision, a dark red line that looked black from a distance, produced no blood, as if every last drop of blood in the creature’s body had congealed like a corpse’s.

He reopened the front door and squeezed through with his holdall. It would be safer to leave via the back door; the zombie was likely to follow him if it saw where he was going. He looked back. As he did so, the thing lifted the knife and drove it point-first into its crotch, tearing a new hole effortlessly through the ragged skirt. David winced, looking away too late. It didn’t react to the self-inflicted wound at all; it didn’t know what pain was – had never known. Instead, a grotesque leering grin played around its half-open mouth, as if it was trying to convince him that it was deriving pleasure from the knife. He’d seen enough. He closed the door and locked it.

Brimming with rage, he stomped through the hall and into the kitchen. The disgusting thing had ruined his discovery of the Lighthouse (a name so appropriate he’d adopted it without thinking), tainting it with its deranged display. He’d been in a good mood until it had put in appearance, or at least what passed for a good mood these days.

He unlocked the back door and stepped into the rain again. Beyond the cramped backyard, a wooden door opened onto a narrow lane lined with identical doors that opened onto more cramped backyards. Going down the lane would be like running the gauntlet on some freakishly real ghost train track, where a zombie might pop out and kill you at any moment. The dripping sound of the rain, echoing spookily in the confines of the lane, made it even more daunting. But there was no other choice.

It’ll be fine, he told himself. Just walk.

He went at an even pace, eyes moving to each door as he approached it, the weight of the marble rolling pin reassuring in his hand. Every nerve in his body felt ready to react, and he concentrated on the steady rhythm of his breathing to combat fear the way a person might have focused on the ticking of a metronome to block out unwanted noise.

The lane offered up no unpleasant surprises, and he was relieved when he could take a left between two houses. Ahead was the main road, well out of sight of the zombie if it had stayed where it was, but before he got there something caught his eye: a phrase somebody had written in blue ink or paint on the walls of the houses either side of him, the first part on the left, the second on the right.

Wealth and fame are our religions

The rich and famous our gods

He couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment, clearly a quote from somebody or something, but from whom or what he didn’t know. It was strange to see it here, where such a thing would surely have been quickly removed before the disaster. Had somebody daubed the quotation on the wall just before the virus had struck? Was this a final message graffitied by a member of a doomed race? If it was it seemed apt, since fame and wealth – the two things human beings had desired the appearance of most in life – had been amongst the first things to vanish so absolutely with the death of civilisation, exposed for the transient illusions they had always been. There could be no fame beyond the end of civilisation itself, and now even the most overflowing coffers and the most opulent assets were worth precisely nothing. Thanks to a single virus, wealth and fame were no longer religions, and the rich and famous were no longer gods.

* * *

That evening, after a meal courtesy of the Lighthouse’s excellent “real” food, he read the gun’s user manual from cover to cover, practised switching the safeties on and off, and loaded and unloaded the magazines. Then he dry-fired it over and over. He resolved to fire the test shots tomorrow, wondering how good a shot he’d be, glad – for once – there would be no one around to judge him.

He went to bed relatively early, leaving a night light on as he always did; nowadays his nightmares – often they featured the church – were such that waking from them into total darkness was out of the question. He was woken before he’d entered deep sleep by a horrible noise coming from the vent. The rain had cleared up late in the afternoon and the zombies were making up for lost time. The usual sounds they made wouldn’t have woken him, but this was something else; a terrible, desperate howling that kept stopping and starting unpredictably, undulating in pitch and volume as it did. The howl was possibly of fear and unquestionably of pain, which all but ruled out a human source. He’d heard its kind several times before, and thought it must be the cry of a starving dog or some other creature. The disturbing sound dragged on and on, lodging itself in his consciousness, impossible to ignore.

Finally, after an hour that felt five times as long, it stopped. A long while passed before he was able to get back to sleep.

It was a fine, clear morning. David Lawney walked along Marshall Road where it ran level with a set of train tracks. Straight ahead a flyover supported the motorway with its procession of motionless traffic. It could have been a snapshot of any normal day before the virus, if it weren’t for the rotting corpses looking out of their vehicles’ windscreens in mute indifference to the passage of time. He’d decided upon using a large open area for test-firing the gun, and the closest he could find on a map was formed by playing fields off of Temple Mills Lane. If any unfriendlies (he was feeling suitably military-minded for the occasion) were attracted by the shots, he’d see them coming from a mile off. Maybe they’d even volunteer to be targets for him.

After crossing the train tracks via an old footbridge, he arrived at the playing fields, which were overgrown but not to such an extent that it posed a problem. In the middle of a field he trampled down a patch of grass and built a small tower using items that were both abundant and useless, making them perfect for target practice: Bloxes. The raw material that had once fed a world’s population was now nothing more than bullet fodder.

He walked off a distance he estimated to be seven yards, where he loaded the gun and released the safeties. Standing with his feet apart, his left hand gripping his right wrist, he aimed carefully at the topmost Blox and pulled the trigger.

Bang!

“Christ!” he gasped.

The gun’s report and its recoil had startled the life out of him. The sound of the shot rebounded for a long while; in the still morning air it had sounded loud enough to waken the dead – or the living dead in this godforsaken world. The pistol was nothing like modern-day weapons, which didn’t recoil and were all but silent. But what really bothered him was that he had no idea where the bullet had ended up, except that it was nowhere near the pile of Bloxes.

He walked a little closer to the target and took aim again. This time he tried to counter the effects of his breathing. He squeezed the trigger. Knowing what to expect this time, the gun’s action didn’t startle him, but the bullet still flew way over the Bloxes, ending up somewhere in the grass beyond. He was aiming too high.

He moved even closer and tried again. Same result.

“
Damn!
” he roared.

How could he miss? Now there was only one test bullet left. He fought to marshal his thoughts, frustration threatening to mushroom out of all control.

Stop for a moment, he told himself. Check for movement in the vicinity. Turning in a slow circle, squinting into the sunlight, he searched for any sign of approaching zombies. There was nothing.

For his last attempt he added more Bloxes to the tower, creating a much larger target to aim for. He moved closer too, standing less than four yards away. After taking aim for a long while, certain he couldn’t fail to hit the target this time, he fired.

The Bloxes remained unscathed.

He didn’t shout; he went to throw the gun instead, but stopped himself just in time.

Stupid fucking thing! he raged inside. No, it wasn’t the gun.
It wasn’t the gun!
It was him. He was the worst shot in history. He couldn’t hit a zombie from ten paces – not to save his life. Why was he so fucking useless? Why?

At that moment something on the flyover caught his attention. An object was hovering just above the flyover’s wall: a small white face looking in his direction. It had to be a child. Damn. As had been the case in the pre-virus world, there were few of them around, but those he’d encountered had convinced him that zombie children were just as bad as the adults – worse, in fact. They had the same crazed immorality of all of them combined with a child’s persistence and disarming stature. Could he shoot a zombie child without hesitation, without qualm? He had a horrible feeling the answer was yes. If he could aim worth a damn, that was.

Then he remembered his glasses. He hadn’t worn them before since he’d believed they would have given him a false impression of his shooting skills. What skills? he thought sourly. He slipped the glasses on and turned a dial on the frame, zooming in on the flyover. The kid was gone. Or, more likely, was making its way towards him somewhere out of sight.

It was time to go. The shots were bound to attract more of them.

* * *

He made his way back from the playing fields via a circuitous route that was different to the way he’d come. He felt depressed and defeated. He knew it was possible to fire off more test shots in the hope of improving his technique, but something – some annoying sense of pride or, more likely, just pure bloody-mindedness – forbade it. He’d allowed himself four test bullets and that was what he would stick to. The whole world may have gone to hell, but there were some things he could still hold on to.

The handgun wasn’t such a great asset after all. What he really needed was a machine gun, something that would make up for his lousy accuracy with a sheer volume of fire. The only thing the pistol would be good for was killing himself, the thought of which was always at the back of his head; sometimes he acknowledged it, but most of the time it was just filed away, waiting for when the time finally came. The pistol was good for that, if nothing else: a quick, painless end. Even he couldn’t miss when the muzzle was pressed right against the target.

As he turned the corner from Buckingham Road onto Auckland Road, he was brought to a standstill by the sight of a red fox standing in the middle of the road. Its fur was bristling and beautiful in the sunlight and it was carrying something between its jaws – what it was he couldn’t tell. Neither David nor the fox moved a muscle. It couldn’t have been more than 20 feet away. It stared at him intently, no hint of fear in its eyes, as if it understood he wasn’t a threat. He could recall seeing a fox in the city only once before, and on that occasion it had been dark and at a distance. They were nocturnal creatures, weren’t they? It felt odd seeing one so close in broad daylight like this.

Beyond the fox a white van had come to rest against the trunk of a young tree, its branches sagging over the vehicle’s roof as if attempting to devour it. The van was the kind that extolled its own virtues on every available surface: energy-efficient, non-polluting, environmentally-friendly, and the scene – the combination of the fox and the van and the tree – caused a revelation to hit him, something he’d already known but had never fully acknowledged before, a state of affairs he knew to be true in the same way he knew that night followed day.

Mankind had been so preoccupied with threats that were natural or environmental in origin – an ice age, an asteroid impact, a runaway greenhouse effect – that an equally formidable danger to the human race had been overlooked. And that danger was the much-vaunted solution to any threat to man’s survival, and the problems of the world in general: technology. The ice would still creep over the earth and the asteroid would still strike and the temperature would still run away, but on a timescale so vast relative to the human experience it was all but irrelevant. Humanity had always been destined to unwittingly devise its own suicide pact long before any of it came to pass. The irony was that it had been while mankind had been standing at the pinnacle of accomplishment – no illness, pain nor famine, hardly any death or war – that it had failed to see its greatest folly: the technological osmosis that was to lead to an unprecedented, inescapable vale of tears. The evolution to cyberneticism had ended up pushing mankind that essential modicum too far, off the edge of the pinnacle and back down the precipitous drop into nothingness, unravelling the complex DNA it had taken countless generations to create like a beautiful bow being untied, rendering everything that DNA had given rise to void in the space of a single day. Brainware had become doomware, the ultimate harbinger of death, the ultimate traitor. Humanity’s greatest gift to itself had been an invisible noose all along, one it had been certain to hang itself with given enough time.

Nature was the only winner. And nature had no morals. It would reclaim the streets and the cities and the skies. It would indeed devour the vans and the cars, the bridges and buildings, until there was no trace of the creature Homo cyberneticus, nor the great plague it had brought on itself. No trace except for in the fossil record, preserved there for the next intelligent species to marvel at, in the same way man had marvelled at the dinosaurs. When looked upon in this light, all of the self-congratulatory proclamations on the van’s exterior turned darkly comical. Mankind had closed the barn door long before the horse had bolted, only for the horse to be blown to kingdom come by its own bridle.