I feel guilty too, for biting Sister Clare, knowing it was almost certain that she wouldn’t end up like me, that she’d become just another mindless revived.
‘The zombies would have killed me if I hadn’t done it,’ I whisper.
‘So? ’ I snort.
‘I needed to get out,’ I argue, ‘to hand myself over to the soldiers, so that they can use my blood to maybe find a way to defeat the zombies.’
‘Yeah,’ I retort cynically. ‘If they don’t shoot me first.’
‘I’ve got to think positively.’
‘In this world? ’ I sneer. ‘Get real! ’
The night passes slowly. I hear the dead milling around outside, searching for prey, but no screams or gunfire. If any of the living are heading towards the centre to be rescued, they’re lying low like me. That’s not surprising. Only the cunning will have lasted this long. Smart operators like that are hardly going to give themselves away cheaply this close to escape.
As the sun rises and the zombies return to the shadows, I move out and push on, hitting the Strand. Finding a radio in a shop, I tune into the news channel and wait. It’s not long before an excited presenter says that the rescue is scheduled for midday in Trafalgar Square. He tells anyone who is listening to make sure they’re present at twelve on the dot, but not to show themselves in the square before that, in case they attract unwanted attention.
I head down the Strand, taking my time. I swing right and check out Covent Garden, once a throng of tourists, shoppers and street performers. I’m half-hoping to find some zombie jugglers, maybe throwing limbs around instead of skittles or juggling balls, but the place is as dead as any other part of London.
I pick up new clothes for myself in one of the fashionable designer shops, so that I look fresh and clean. I think about tearing a hole in my jumper and T-shirt, to expose the empty cavity, but decide to leave it as it is for the moment, so that I can get close to the soldiers before they realise I’m a zombie.
I file down my teeth and the bones sticking out of my fingers and toes. The bones are harder to disguise than the hole in my chest. I pull on a pair of shoes which are three sizes too big for me, and gloves that are more suited to a giant. The shoes are uncomfortable, and the gloves won’t hide the shape of the bones up close, but they should get me near and give me a chance to make my case.
I also pick up a pair of watches which would have cost almost as much as our flat in the old days. They’re accurate to the smallest fraction of a second, resistant to shock, waterproof, and they automatically adjust for summer or winter time. I attach one to either wrist, so that I can be absolutely sure of the time. I don’t want to miss my shot at rescue because of a dodgy watch!
I get to Trafalgar Square five minutes before midday. I’m not the first to arrive. Seven people are already present, three men, a woman with a baby, a girl of eight or nine and a boy a bit younger than me. They’re huddled together in the middle of the square, between the two fountains, ignoring the warning not to arrive earlier than twelve. I was expecting warriors, tough men in leathers, carrying guns. But this lot look like any group of tourists that you would have seen here a year ago.
‘Are you one of us?’ the woman with the baby shouts when she spots me striding towards them.
‘That depends — who are you?’ I shout back.
They relax at the sound of my voice. They obviously don’t know about talking zombies or they wouldn’t be so trusting.
Others come out of the shadows as I draw closer to the group in the centre. Two from the direction of the Mall, one from behind the Fourth Plinth, three more – not together, but separately – from Whitehall. They approach cautiously, checking out the buildings as they creep along, keeping to the middle of the road.
I was worried that the people at the heart of the square might grow suspicious if I kept my distance, but to my relief the other newcomers hang back too, not willing to associate too closely with strangers, ready to make a break for freedom if anything goes wrong.
There’s no cheerful banter. Apart from the seven in the middle, who mutter among themselves, nobody speaks. Everyone looks wary, studying the others suspiciously, scanning the buildings around the square for signs of life — or, to be more accurate, unlife.
At twelve o’clock exactly, four helicopters buzz into view overhead. They’re military vehicles, armed with missiles and machine guns.
The helicopters do a few circuits over the square, checking to make sure that everyone beneath them is human. Some of the people cheer and wave. I don’t. I’m not sure if the soldiers will view me as a friend or an enemy, so I don’t want to draw their scrutiny until I have to.
Satisfied with what they see, three of the helicopters set down on the terrace at the top of the steps, between the square and the National Gallery. The fourth remains airborne, hovering ominously, the pilot keeping watch over the others, ready to support them from the air if necessary.
Four soldiers slide out of each helicopter. The pilots remain in place, engines running, rotors whirring. The noise is deafening, especially with my advanced sense of hearing. I grit my teeth and try not to show any signs of distress, not wanting to appear different to the other survivors.
The twelve soldiers advance to the top of the steps. Everyone in the square has started moving towards them. A couple of people are running. But before anyone can set foot on the stairs, two of the soldiers open fire with their rifles and spray the steps with bullets.
As we come to a shocked halt, one of the soldiers moves forward and addresses us through a megaphone.
‘No need to panic, people,’ he barks. ‘We’ve done this before, so we know what we’re doing. We’re going to get all of you out of here, but there are rules you have to obey. We’ve put them in place for your safety as well as ours, to ensure no infected specimens sneak through.’
‘We’re not infected!’ one of the men yells. ‘You can see that by looking at us!’
‘Looks can be deceptive,’ the soldier replies. ‘We don’t take risks. I’m sure you can appreciate our position, and the fact that the more cautiously we proceed, the safer you’ll all be. We want to get you out of here as swiftly as possible, so listen up and do what you’re told.’
‘This is crazy!’ the man roars, starting forward indignantly. ‘Zombies could be closing in on us while you’re wasting time. Let us through.’
‘If you take one more step, sir, you will be executed,’ the soldier snaps. As the man hesitates, he continues. ‘We’ll do all that we can to help you, but if we sense a threat, we’ll eliminate it, no questions asked. You do not want to push us.’
The man gulps, raises his hands and takes three big steps back.
‘OK,’ the soldier says. ‘Here’s how it works. First you’re going to undress. No need to be shy, we’ve seen it all before. Once you’re naked, you’ll approach one by one as we summon you, leaving your clothes behind. We’ll check you quickly, make sure you’re clean, then you can collect your gear and board the helicopters. When we’ve loaded everyone up, we’re out of here.’
The other people grumble but begin stripping off, wanting to escape this city of the dead more than they want to protect their modesty.
I don’t take off anything. Instead I wave my hands over my head and call to the soldier. ‘Sir!’
The soldier smirks at me. ‘I told you there was no need to be shy. Don’t worry, girl, nobody’s going to take photos of you.’
‘That doesn’t bother me. But I’m . . . I’m not like the rest of them.’
His smile disappears in an instant. He takes a closer look at me, my hat, the sunglasses, the gloves and shoes.
‘Take off your gloves,’ the soldier growls. Something in his voice alerts the others and everybody pauses and stares at me. The soldiers adjust their guns. They’re all pointing in my direction now.
‘I don’t want to cause any trouble,’ I cry, not moving in case I set off a trigger-happy marksman.
‘Remov
e your gloves!’ the soldier with the megaphone roars.
‘I will,’ I moan. ‘I’m doing it now.’ I lower my hands and start to peel off the gloves, slow as I can. ‘But you’re going to see bones. And when I take off my clothes, you’ll see –’
‘She’s infected!’ a soldier shouts, and some of the people in the square start to scream.
‘No!’ I shriek, raising my hands again and waving them over my head. ‘I want to help. I came here to offer my services.’
‘Screw that,’ the soldier with the megaphone snaps. ‘I told you we don’t take chances. Fire!’
Before I can say anything else, every soldier in the square starts shooting, and the nightmarish bellow of their guns drowns out even the ear-shattering thunder of the helicopter blades.
TWENTY-ONE
The soldiers’ reaction hasn’t come as a complete shock. I hoped this wouldn’t happen but I half-expected it. So when I was edging forward a few minutes ago, I carefully positioned myself by one of the fountains, just in case.
As the soldiers rain down hell on me, I hurl myself to my right, into the dried-out fountain. The bullets pound the base. Stone chips and splinters fly in all directions and the piercing whine makes me gasp with pain. But I’m safe for the moment. They can’t hit me from where they are, not unless I do something stupid like stick my head up.
The soldiers stop firing and the one with the megaphone shouts at the rest of the people. ‘This is why we have rules! Get your damn clothes off as quick as you can or we’ll shoot the lot of you!’
‘We didn’t know she was one of them!’ a woman screams. ‘We’d never seen her before. She spoke to us. How can she speak if she’s dead?’
‘The dead have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves,’ the soldier says. ‘Now show us your flesh, and hurry, before the noise brings scores of curious zombies down upon us.’
While the people are undressing, I roar at the soldiers, ‘There’s no need to do this. I want to help. If you don’t want my help, fine, I’ll leave you be. But I’m different to the other zombies. Maybe you can take some of my blood and –’
‘I don’t want to hear it!’ the soldier yells. ‘Just shut up and play dead, you damn zombie bitch!’
‘Up yours, numbnuts!’ I retort angrily.
‘Right, that’s enough,’ he snarls, then barks a command into his radio.
Overhead, the airborne helicopter buzzes forward. I’ve seen enough war movies to know what’s coming next. With a yelp, I throw myself out of the fountain. My right shoe flew from my foot when I leapt in, and now my left drops away too. But the shoes are the least of my worries. Because as I scramble clear, the pilot hits a button and launches a missile.
The fountain explodes behind me and I’m tossed clear across the square by the force of the explosion. I slam into a lamp post and slump to the ground. My ears are ringing. The hat and glasses have been blown from my head. I’m half-blind and all the way shaken.
Sitting up in a wounded daze, I catch a blurred glimpse of the helicopter gliding in for the kill. I’ve nowhere to hide now and no strength to push myself towards safety even if I did. Spitting out thick, congealed blood, I sneer at the pilot – just a vague, ghostly figure from here – and give him the finger, the only missile in my own personal arsenal.
There’s another explosion. I can’t shut my eyes against it, so I cover them with a scratched, bloodied hand instead. Flames lick across the sky and I feel like I’m being sunburnt in the space of a few sizzling seconds. There’s a roaring, maniacal sound, as if two huge sheets of welded-together metal are being wrenched apart. Then the dull thudding noises of an impossibly heavy rainfall.
None of this makes sense. The second explosion should have been the end of me. B Smith blown to bits — goodbye, cruel world. But I’m still alive and there’s a gap in the sky where the helicopter should be. What the hell?
Lowering my hand, I peer through a dust cloud which has risen in front of me like a shroud. As it starts to clear, I see the wreckage of the helicopter scattered across the ground, mixed in with the remains of the fountain. Some bones jut out of the mess, all that’s left of the pilot and any soldiers who were with him.
I gawp at the bewildering scene, then look up at the steps. And that’s when everything clicks into sudden, sickening focus.
A second armed force has spilled out of the National Gallery. Dozens of people, more appearing by the second, racing down the steps at the side of the pillared entrance, or leaping over the railing to land directly on the terrace. One of them has a bazooka. Smoke is spiralling from its muzzle.
The troops spewing out of the art museum are neither human nor zombies. Most are wearing jeans and hoodies. Their skin is disfigured, purple in places, peeling away from the bone in others, full of ugly, pus-filled wounds and sores. They have straggly grey hair and pale yellow eyes. I can’t see from here, but I know that inside their mouths their few remaining teeth are black and stained, their tongues scabby and shrivelled, and if they spoke, the words would come out snarled and gurgled.
These are the mutants I spotted in the Imperial War Museum shortly before the zombie uprising, the same monstrous creatures who stormed the underground complex. I know no more about them now than I did then, except for two things. One — they cause chaos whenever they appear. Two — they’re led by a foul being even weirder than they are.
As if on cue, as the mutants tear into the startled soldiers, I spot him emerging behind them, colourful as a peacock set against the grey backdrop of the National Gallery. He stands between two pillars, arms spread wide, grinning insanely, the pink, v-shaped gouges carved into the flesh between his eyes and lips visible even from here, through the dust and with my poor eyes.
I can’t see the badge that he wears on his chest, the one with his name on it. But I know that if I could, it would read, as it did when I first met him underground on that night of spiders and death, Mr Dowling.
Send in the clown!
TWENTY-TWO
The mutants swarm round the soldiers and helicopters. They’re soon joined by a pack of zombies, who follow them out of the National Gallery, shaded from the sun by long, Matrix-style leather jackets, huge straw hats and sunglasses. I’m sure the jackets, hats and glasses were chosen for them by Mr Dowling.
Two of the helicopters are overrun before their pilots can react. The third manages to clear the ground, but then the mutant with the bazooka reloads, takes aim and fires. It comes crashing back to earth, taking out the bottom section of a building where a bookshop once stood.
The soldiers fight doggedly, first with their guns, then with knives and their hands. But there are too many mutants and zombies. Within a minute the last of the human troops has been cut down and Trafalgar Square belongs to Mr Dowling and his warped warriors.
A few of the people who came to be rescued have made a break for freedom. They race from the square, hounded by a handful of whooping mutants and hungry zombies. The others are huddled together in the centre, surrounded, trapped, alive for the moment but undoubtedly doomed.
Some of the zombies focus on the humans and move in for the kill, but stop when a mutant blows a whistle. I’ve seen this before — Mr Dowling’s henchmen have the power to command the living dead.
The mutants jeer at the weeping, shrieking humans and stab playfully at them with knives and spears, not interested in wounding them, just in winding them up. I want to try and help, cause a disturbance, break through their ranks and create a gap for the others to escape through. But I can only sit, dazed, ears ringing, legs useless, and watch.
Mr Dowling trots down the steps of the National Gallery at last, doing a little dance as he descends. The mutants applaud wildly and screech at the humans to clap too.
As the clown nimbly waltzes down the steps from the terrace to the square, I get a clearer look at him. The flesh of a severed face hangs from each shoulder of his jacket. Lengths of human guts are wrapped round his arms, and severed ears are pinned to his tr
ouser legs. A baby’s skull sticks out of the end of each of his ridiculously large red shoes. His hair is all different sorts of colours and lengths, torn from the heads of others in clumps and stapled into place. The flesh around his eyes has been cut away and filled in with soot. Two v-shaped channels run from just under either eye, down to his upper lip, and the bone beneath has been painted pink. A human eye has been stuck to the end of his nose and little red stars are dotted around it.
The trapped humans stop screaming as the clown approaches and the mutants pull back to let him through. Like me, these people have seen a lot since the world went to hell, but nothing like this. Mr Dowling belongs to another dimension entirely, one even crazier and more twisted than this undead hellhole.
To conclude his dance, Mr Dowling leaps into the air and pirouettes, then drops to one knee and spreads his arms wide. The mutants howl their appreciation and stamp their feet raucously. One of them holds up a sheet of paper with a large 10 scrawled across it in red.
Mr Dowling bows his head and accepts the acclaim with false humility. Then he hops back to both feet and prowls round the humans, grinning at them like a piranha, his eyes twitching insanely, skin wriggling as if insects are burrowing about beneath the flesh.
One of the mutants steps up next to the clown and blows his whistle sharply, waving an arm for silence. I could be wrong, but I think it’s the one who tried to kidnap a baby in the Imperial War Museum on the day when I first learnt that this wasn’t just a world of normal humans.
When all of the mutants are still, the one with the whistle addresses the sobbing people at the heart of the crush in a choked, gurgly voice.
‘Ladies, gentlemen and children — it’s show time! Welcome to the weird, wild, wonderful world of Mr Dowling and his amazing cohorts. Thrill to the sight of the living dead and their masters. Coo as we rip you from head to toe. Cheer as we make intricate designs out of your gooey innards. Worship as we take you to Hell and beyond.’