Dead City Read online

  “Me help?” he said, as some vague memories returned, reaching into the hole in his head and pulling out a bloody notepad and pen.

  “Need help!” said the zombie.

  Dildo scrawled this down in the pad, as he had seen Jon do countless times.

  “Me help!” he replied.

  “Need help!”

  He continued writing.

  “Me help?” he asked, with intense concentration in his scribblings.

  “Need help!” replied the half-zombie.

  Dildo showed him his notes; a stickman with a hole in his head, and a half-stickman with a smile on his face.

  “Me helped!” said Dildo, handing his half-friend the picture and walking away, triumphantly stuffing the notepad and pen in his cranial cavity. Unfortunately, he poked the bit of brain that was holding on to the memory of any of that interaction, and forgot it instantly.

  He continued to walk through the streets, returning as best he could to the office. Passing the casino, he watched as monoliths from all over the city entered.

  “Keep walking, pig.” the bouncer said to Dildo, as he waited for the last of the giants to walk in.

  He followed them inside, closing the door behind, leaving Dildo out on the street.

  The Necromancer emerged from his lair to the address the assembled creatures.

  “Nice to see you all so prompt.” he hissed, as the bouncer locked the door and crossed the room to stand by the side of his superior. “We've got the liaison out the way for a short while, so it's time we stepped up our game, and reminded everyone in town who's in charge.”

  He walked over to a slot machine standing against the wall, and signalled for the bouncer to push it out the way, revealing a room full of meat.

  “One for everyone, tell them it's a gift to apologise for the liaison's errors in rationing these past months.”

  The monoliths entered and started taking meat by the handful, a luminescent yellow residue left on the shelves. The Necromancer smiled to himself, and began to cackle as his minions departed. Soon, the city would be his, and not just the Dead City, but the whole of London.

  15

  Ashley and the Jons had spent all night talking, catching up on their lives since his disappearance, and remembering the better times. Enjoying each other's company so much, they didn't even notice the sun had come up. Ashley's alarm rang from up in the bedroom, informing them it was 7am, and she darted to her feet.

  “Shit, I've got to get ready...” she said.

  “What for?” the Jons said.

  “I've got a meeting with the Minister For Unliving Affairs.”

  “George?” he asked.

  “You remember him?”

  “Of course, I see him every week...” said Jon.

  “Do you remember him before that? When he was friends with your father?” she asked.

  He didn't. Neither of the Jons did.

  “Then you're coming with me.” she said. “Shoving you in his face outside of the City walls is sure to rattle him, right?”

  “Yeah.” said Jon.

  “But have a shower first.” she said. “There's no nice way to say this, but you smell like someone shat on your pants, after you shat in your pants.”

  The journey to The Ministry For Unliving Affairs was swifter than the Jons' walk the previous night, as daytime brought with it the option of public transport. They took the train from Chalk Farm straight to Charing Cross and walked through the sea of people to Whitehall. The Houses Of Parliament were standing proud on the horizon as they approached The Ministry. The former War Office had been repurposed in the eighties, given that as the crisis moved into its second decade, wars were less of a concern than the return of the deceased.

  As they turned into Horse Guard's Avenue, a statue of Spencer Compton stared ahead at the Household Cavalry Museum with a steely gaze. He was draped in a long flowing cloak, a hand resting on the knife at his hip, a pose Jon was embarrassed he had adopted so many times when playing his noir-cum-action-hero persona.

  They entered and the Jons held back as Ashley approached the desk to talk to the man on the reception. He checked with the Minister's secretary, then led them up an ornate staircase, lit from above by a skylight at the centre of a stone dome. They walked through corridors that seemed to span longer than the length of the building.

  “There's over two and a half miles of corridors here,” he proudly and cheerfully informed, spouting off facts about the building to pass the time. “These were renovated when the building became The Ministry,” he added. “As you can tell, they don't quite match the elegance of the original 1906 features of the entrance and the facade.”

  They smiled politely, but he could tell they weren't interested. He turned a corner and gestured to the Minister's office. Ashley took the lead as the Jons waited behind the door, they wanted the Minister to be at ease before revealing their presence.

  “Miss Gilligan!” said the Minister, rising from his desk to greet her. He approached her and gave her a bear hug, which she was not expecting. “Such a pleasure to see you after all these years!”

  He pulled a chair out and smiled as he waited for her to take a seat. She did so, noting how the chair was significantly lower than his own, and watched as he returned to his side of the desk.

  The large man towered over her, arms resting on the old mahogany, fingers interlinked, with a warm smile on his face that she presumed was forced.

  “I heard of young Jon's passing and relocation to The Walls, I'm so very sorry.”

  “Are you now?” said Jon as he walked into the room, finally revealing himself.

  “Jesus fuck!” said the Minister, as Jon took a seat next to his wife.

  “Do the voters know you use that kind of language?” asked Ashley.

  “How can you be here?” asked the Minister. “What are you doing here? You can't be here!”

  “City's not as locked up tight as you thought it was.” said Jon.

  “But you can't leave! If you leave then there's no-one to keep him in line...” he trailed off.

  “Who?” asked the ghost.

  “Who?” reiterated Jon.

  “You've got to understand...” said the Minister. He was flustered, and beginning to perspire. “We only wanted what was best...”

  The ghost was getting bored, and threw the Minister's papers from his desk, blowing them across the room as if in a gust of wind.

  “Best not piss off my husband's ghost.” said Ashley. “He can be a bit of a dick.”

  The ghost nodded in agreement, and Jon did the same. The Minister looked around the room for the spectre he could not see, and composed himself.

  “It wasn't our fault. Jon's father and I had the best of intentions... two thousand of our boys were over there, not to mention all the yanks.”

  “Over where?” asked Jon.

  “Vietnam... You've got to understand, we couldn't officially do anything... our chaps were switching nationalities, signing up with the Kiwis and Ozzies to fight Communism, but we were chairs of The Geneva Convention! We had to be neutral.”

  “What are you saying?” said Ashley.

  “They were losing tens of thousands to the conflict, we had to do something...” he trailed off, trying to find the words. “We had reports from our boys in Malaysia. They had met a man who claimed to be able to help, keep the troops fighting --”

  “-- by stopping them being able to die.” Jon interrupted.

  The Minister was pale, sweating profusely. He tried to swallow with a dry throat, and went to his mantle, pouring himself a whisky from a crystal decanter. Without offering the others a glass, he knocked it back and attempted to compose himself.

  “At first it worked a trick, our boys, the yanks' boys, they'd get gunned down and jump straight back up... but then Charlie – sorry – the Vietnamese started getting back up too. Before we knew it, there were reports in our back yard about hospital patients being pronounced dead and walking straight out of the morg
ue, then the reports were coming in from all over the world...”

  He sat back in his chair and slumped down, staring at the floor.

  “We didn't know...” he said, running out of steam, the confession exhausting him.

  “But why me?” asked Jon. “Why did you put me in charge of the city?”

  “And what about me?” asked his ghost.

  “Yeah, what about him?” Jon added, indicating to his disembodied self.

  “Sins of the father...” said the Minister. “He kept it to himself for all those years... through the chemo and the surgeries, but when he finally gave in to the inevitable, when he signed the forms to have his body destroyed and spirit exorcised, and lay there on his deathbed, he confessed it all to you. Confessed his part in the return – my part in it all – and your first reaction was to make it public.”

  He looked at their faces, the guilt driving a dagger into his gut, drying his whisky-lubricated throat as he tried to continue.

  “He told me there was a way to fix it... a way to make you forget, not kill you, I never wanted that. We'd just repurpose you, put you to use elsewhere. It was a simple ritual in the end, barely took us twenty minutes...”

  “You separated him from his spirit?” Ashley asked.

  “Who?” asked Jon. “Who told you?”

  The Minister looked like he was either going to pass out or throw up, or perhaps a combination of the two. He breathed deeply, and coughed up the words.

  “The Necromancer.”

  16

  Sitting in his lair, the Necromancer smiled to himself. After his years of scheming, waiting, and minor hiccups along the way, his plan was finally coming to fruition.

  “Would you and the chaps be so kind as to run down to the sewers...” he said to the bouncer. “It's almost time to stop that pesky river from running.”

  As the monolith left, he watched the clock on his desk as the seconds ticked towards twelve. His tainted meat would have been delivered and devoured by now, and he withdrew a luminescent yellow candle from his desk draw, striking a match and melting the base, placing it upright in front of him.

  As the seconds continued to tick away, he lit the wick and began to laugh.

  Throughout the city the unliving rose, attention rapt by unknown forces. Their wills revoked one by one, and whether they normally acted with sentient minds or gut instincts, both were pushed to the back of their minds. They were locked in a glass box in which they could see through their own eyes, but their bodies were wiped clean of self-determinism. An army of tabula rasa, completely at his command.

  * * * *

  Outside the walls, Sarah sat at her father's bedside in the hospital, watching daytime television with the old man she had saved by means she would never reveal. She held his hand tightly, so grateful to have him in her life for more than the few days the doctors advised.

  His grip on her hand weakened, and the wails of the flatline screamed out across the room. She got up to find a doctor, but before she could call out for attention, he had grabbed her, pulled her close, and taken a deep bite out of her neck. Blood sprayed across the room as he devoured his daughter, and by the time the resuscitation team were alerted and entered, she too had risen, and the pair were upon them.

  * * * *

  In a train leaving Baker Street, passengers tried to look away and ignore three of their fellow commuters dropping to the ground. As reluctant volunteers left their precious seats to offer assistance, they swiftly regretted it, as chunks were taken out of their arms and faces.

  When the train arrived at Regents Park station four minutes later, the windows were thick with blood. The crowds on the platform took steps back as the doors lingered shut, moans and groans echoing beyond the threshold. With a mechanical sigh the doors parted, and the dead burst forth from the carriage, devouring everyone they came in contact with.

  * * * *

  All over London, those seemingly gifted with extra days of life from a friend or relative who had been so bold as to venture over the walls passed away. When they returned to unlife moments later, they were hungry for flesh, intent on spreading their condition as far and wide as they could.

  * * * *

  The Minister's confession had been over for minutes, and silence settled over the room. The Jons and Ashley had run out of questions, and were contemplating what to do with the information when their quiet was interrupted by the Minister's phone ringing, which he answered reluctantly.

  “Yes?” he croaked with a parched throat. “What?”

  The speaker only had time to say a few words before the old man was on his feet, grabbing his coat and making his way to the door.

  “What's happened?” asked Jon.

  “I'll be back. I've just got to... I'll fix this and I'll be back.”

  He rushed out, leaving the three clueless in his wake.

  Ashley went to the window and looked out over Whitehall. A man walked out of the neighbouring Department Of Energy covered in blood, and lunged across the street towards a group of tourists. He exploded in a mist of blood as an armoured police van descended the street at speed, careening straight through him, presumably en route to secure Parliament.

  “Contraband.” said Jon. “He's been having people break into the City, desperate people, and I overlooked it. Thought it was just about money or influence... but it was for this...”

  “So he's been helping people?” asked Ashley.

  “Until it was time to London into an all-you-can-eat buffet...”

  “How's the Minister going to 'fix' this?” she said. “Round them all up? Is that even going to work?”

  “Round them up and then open the gates...” added Jon's ghost.

  “And when the gates open...” said Jon. “He's going to be waiting.”

  17

  The undead had begun herding, but the early warning alarms were doing their job. The living population had migrated to shelters in public buildings, rammed into panic rooms under libraries and hospitals, offices and council departments. They had been assigned two guards and two guards only. Each had been instructed to stop any unliving that might enter, stop the living from leaving before the sirens stopped their cries, and take the other guard out should they be bitten.

  The police had run regular training regimes for an unliving uprising, and had cascaded on to the streets covered head to toe in riot gear. No skin was left bare, every point water-tight in case fluids started flying. And fluids were bound to fly.

  The team at Regent's Park had stormed the train tunnels from either end, forcing the herd out onto the street, where an 18-wheeler ice truck was waiting for them. Riot shields at either side from the door to the ramp, they were pushed into the back of the truck and sealed up inside. Armed escorts took them through the empty streets of living London, across to Waterloo Bridge, where they were joined by other trucks, honking horns to one another in celebration of their successful captures. The run had gone as smoothly as any drill they had ever carried out.

  As the trucks rumbled under the bridge to Waterloo East station, they stopped at the intersection of Waterloo Road and The Cut. The buildings nearby had long since been flattened, and at the former site of The Old Vic Theatre lay the gates to The Wall. The trucks lined up, awaiting orders to back up towards the gate one-by-one and deposit their volatile cargo. The Minister stood behind a wall of police, operating a walkie talkie with one hand and loud-hailer with the other.

  “No word from inside sir.” said an officer. “And the cameras seem to be down.”

  “When were they last checked?” the Minister inquired.

  “No idea sir.”

  “Just great... Is there a bird in the air? Get me eyes.” he said, lifting the loud-hailer. “Citizens of Dead City,” he said, his words amplified with a squawk of interference. “Please step back from the gates, we are about to induct new occupants.”

  He waited a minute for his orders to be obeyed and turned to the officer who was communicating on the radio.


  “Where are my eyes?” he bellowed.

  “Flying over now, sir.”

  A helicopter flew over the wall, despite the no-fly-zone that had been established for decades. Times like these meant rules were going to be bent. There was chatter from the radio, and the officer passed the messages on.

  “We've got eyes on one occupant, but he's well back from the wall.”

  “Excellent.” said the Minister, bringing the walkie to his lips. “Give the knock.” he said, using the code phrase he and Jon's father had come up with years earlier.

  From stations on either end of the living side of the gate, two guards inserted keys into slots and turned them. A further two men approached keypads and typed in six digit codes. The gate began to murmur and rumble, internal locks buried deep behind the rusting metal facade whined and twisted open, as did two cabins on either side of the gate. A further two guards entered each of the cabins, grabbing levers and waiting for the order.

  “Lower the drawbridge.” he said, the code phrase that the gate operators hated to hear. The levers were pulled, and the gate screamed mechanically as its cogs turned, begging for oil. Reluctant metal grated at itself whilst it struggled to hoist the gate aloft. Deep below the city, the opposite was happening, steel walls extending from the ceiling of the tunnels, a dam coming down to stop the flow of the re-directed Thames, halting its progress for the duration of the induction of new residents of the City. Above ground, as the steel began to lift into the air, a figure walked towards the opening, its cloak brushing against the ground behind every step.

  “We've got movement.” said the officer, relaying the helicopter's observation.

  “Is it still just one?” asked the Minister.

  The officer confirmed. The Minister bent himself down to look under the gate and saw the Necromancer's decrepit face beaming back at him from within the City.