It started very quickly, and precisely, and swept then across the country with an efficiency unsuited to the scale of the isle. “Society’s problem”, or just the problem – forever italicized – for short. It began as something for the media pundits and the chat show hosts, to latch onto and lampoon in comedy panel shows – as though the unexpectedness of the facts was or could be rendered humorous by the weathered tropes of comedic performance, by overplayed gestures and posturing and TV sanitized skits, tying the really real horror of the problem to the kind of vaguely politicized but always sanctioned (for fear of a Twitter reprisal) ritualistic mockery that now passed for comedy, tepid-left-wing stances sitting uncomfortably with any tangible lack of political acuity – but it was also desperately serious, made all the more so by the thermodynamic inexplicability of the infection.
Irish hosts as familiar as old friends were prized out of retirement by the handful with huge cash sums to front-up light and uninformed analysis shows on the unfolding issues (with pop performances and incorporating the lottery draw results), their well-blended Celtic homosexuality – of the British kind, always one step removed from the actuality of physical intercourse and clashing genitals and instead extending only as far as affected vocal inflections or considered grooming practices, primetime queers alien to their own rectums – considered the perfect counterpoint to national fear, until their voices reached such frenzied pitch themselves that they were untransmittable, ultrasonic, and sounded to viewers at home like silence amidst the ambient hum of the studio noise.
They skirted the problem as best they could, entirely at a loss as to how they could report it. It prolapsed panic like a pending cold snap. As long as the TV stayed on and broadcasting as normal then social life could continue also for at least a while, until the proper decisions had been made. Newsnight and similar were scrapped in the meantime, whole teams on sabbatical, it said in rounded font on a rolling banner at the bottom of the screen during the ‘golden-age’ repeat they slapped on in its timeslot. Too sombre was the truth; at a time of crisis broadcasters had a responsibility to protect the people from themselves, not to deny fact but to bury it beneath proudly saccharine human interest editorial slants. They remixed the theme tunes to the major news bulletins at one, six and ten o’clock to include handclaps and ukuleles, which put a weirdly positive spin on the implied gravity of a digitised globe, on the urgency of truth, and the anchors shed their suits and ties for altogether more casual attire, dressed for a night at the local more than the reportage of something bizarre and terminally serious, designer bleached jeans and untucked shirts, for God’s sake, you could smell the sickly aftershave through the screen, Fiona Bruce poured like a decoy into trousers so tight that it made you feel as though you’d been privy to some unalterable physiological truth. This was no crisis, it was amazing, it was beyond modern!
Even the most treasured of our TV scientists were stripped of budgets and relegated to the unwatched channels, took to uploading videos of their own social commentary online to be lost among the tat and animal clips. Producers found the vehemence of their panic and the uncertain severity of their hypotheses to be incompatible with their light broadcasting ethic, and so rather than provide a forum for dialogue, to piece together some kind of understanding of what was happening, they axed the lot of them, the nation’s brief flirtation with digestible popular science programming stamped out as quickly as it had begun. With neither the time nor the rigorous conditions in which to run tests and construct computer models and formulate data for peer review their words had sounded like the most corrupt kind of fantasy against the quintessentially British propriety of approved news items, like the blurted doggedness of militant atheistic fundamentalists – as if there was or even could be such a thing – out to disrupt the natural (which is to say traditional, blinkered) order of the world, to instil the doubt and fear of the century into a stagnated viewing populace all terrified of even the possibility of change and so, as in the case of even mild snow fall, left completely ill-equipped to deal with it. Speculation achieves nothing became the mantra of the media, a determined stance that ensured the widespread ignorance that allowed the problem to spread so quickly. And the problem remained: the dead walked.
2. Waiting for Linda
He waited for Linda in the front upstairs bedroom of his terraced house, watched for her in the street outside through the mostly boarded-up window, through minimal shafts between the affixed lengths of wood or through long cracks or circular holes left by dislodged knots in the wood itself. The road was packed three and in places sometimes four abreast with abandoned cars all smouldering in the morning, cars littering the pavement and wrapped around toppled front walls, a sea of twisted metal and exhausts, of sagging spent airbags and shattered glass that crunched underfoot like freshly packed snow, a silver-blue sea of automotive paint pigmentation in dappled crests that rose and fell with the moving sun, pools of near-black blood slowly drying on the pavements into gruesome assertions of territory and each flanking odd disembodied limbs left decomposing and overlooked in the frenzied abundance of ready meat.
Although he hadn’t been outside for several days he was sure that most if not all of the other houses on the street were empty. Once the problem had spread east the panic had been immediate and brutal and everything had quickly collapsed, the commonplace intricacies of modern infrastructure at once became something distant and alien, codified through then-incomprehensible Latinate symbols to be unearthed in some future archaeology, and even instinctive deep-rooted human traits, the propensity toward some structured society, towards a higher rationality or a moral sense, all were erased with devastating efficiency once order fell. People had tried to flee the city in huge swathes of senseless flesh with no plan and no foresight, had all bolted for the one final certainty that their vehicles represented. As the roads congested rapidly and traffic reached a standstill they sat in their thousands, bumper-to-bumper in cyclical futility around both ring roads and waited, blasting their horns in some new unlearnt but mutually existent communication method and shouting incomprehensibly into their own steering columns and wood-effect dashboard interiors, too confused to just leave their cars and run. They were easy pickings when the dead came, their still warm flesh torn easily from the bone like tender barbeque, the sounds of snapping ligament and stripped tissue and of snarled mastication all part of a hideous symphony, the car horns gradually silencing in rows with the advancing dead, eyes manic yet resigned darting from mirror to mirror and watching the inevitability of their fate as though a film, or as happening to somebody else.
He had known a guy whose wife worked low-level in local government and had received the official brief, essentially ‘do nothing’, that had outlined the fundamentals of the emergency, bare minimum kind of stuff that insisted on muting the threat, putting the word “emergency” in inverted commas throughout as though it was an act of incredible irony to even use it. It offered nothing in the way of guidance, or advice, or planned tactical responses. This is how things probably might be. By the time the brief had been circulated to local councils the problem had already spread too significantly to contain. It had at least given him the time to nail the boards up, more than most.
He had watched the neighbours go armed with kitchen knives and utensils, their two cats in transporters, a few bits of clothing stuffed into supermarket carrier bags, and make a run for their Nissan, but a couple of dead were on them before the engine had even turned over, their persistence taking out the windows and pulling the girl out through the shattered remnants, her legs snagged on the seatbelt, hanging upside down, her long hair reaching down to the road. It was hard watching but harder not, his forehead pressed against the cold wooden board. They bit down straight into her neck and he saw the vocal chords working with the screams that stopped when bare hands tore her stomach open, her guts spilt and slopping over her breasts and against her face so terribly apologetic as they then fell wet into the road like dirty washing, picked and eaten and she watched it before the end happened as it would. The boyfriend was paralysed in the pointless driver’s seat, one hell of a carving knife gripped in both his shaking hands, he stuck it into one of them when they had got his door open, right in the chest, and nothing changed, the knife sunk to handle in putrid flesh. An abundance to overcome and all of it for nothing. His slender sides gnawed. The dead shuffled unsatisfied away in isolated clusters that composed a dominant species, the two cats secured within their plastic transporters on the back seat of the car. He could hear them through the closed bedroom window, and somehow the synchronization of their pitiful and methodical whining over the screams and the engines and the groaning of the dead that like the very wind filled the air and so travelled for miles was much worse than anything else he had seen or heard in the hours preceding it. He wanted to rescue them from the car but knew he couldn’t, that it would be foolish to do so and that there was no kind of life for them now.
He spooned cold rice pudding from cans in his kitchen and ate it gratefully waiting for Linda. She arrived hours later sometime in the afternoon, he saw her picking her way silently through the street as though the soft soles of her trainers didn’t even touch the ground beneath them, her navy blue parka jacket ripped at the pocket just as he remembered and hood pulled right up over her head. She held a screwdriver in her right hand with blood stuck around the Phillips head and encrusted in neat lines like painstaking cartography down her fingers and hand. He rushed downstairs and prized the three boards from across his front door and let her in urgently, and they kissed watched only by armchairs and other equally absurd relics of past normalcy and hammered the boards back in place. They planned to head to the coast, to a house by the sea that Linda had seen on weekend walks, an abandoned place that clung to the fringes of the eroding cliff side and threatened to fall with every rainstorm, archly resigned to the inevitability of its own end, the frailty of its construction. He had a tandem bicycle and they were to leave the city on that, taking turns to pedal while the rear cyclist would carry a long metal pole that they could thrust in self-defence and keep watch. It was a poor weapon but they thought it would buy them the time to get away, and they could both pedal if things looked bad. They had attached one of those bicycle trailers to the back, the kind that people tow their dogs in, and filled it with basic provisions and other makeshift weaponry, mostly old tools or other DIY utensils in a way that felt like a fundamentally British response to the problem. He poured her a glass of water from a huge plastic container and watched her drink it, then he poured her another and they went upstairs. Without speaking they lay down upon a pile of blankets he had left on his bedroom floor. The first thing he had done on hearing about the problem was drag his cheap mattress into the front garden and set it alight, although he couldn’t remember why he had done so. It was probably something he had seen on a TV programme or in a film, as if the heat of the fire were some kind of repellent to the creeping cold of the dead. It burnt for hours in stuttered flames, its clouds of rank smoke from its melting synthetics and slowly warping springs huffed in billows to the sky like life leaving the city. On the blankets they lay side by side and waited for the darkness and the light that followed.
3. Mad Tom
In the morning they were in the back garden preparing the tandem. The alley behind his house was wide enough to cycle down and less full of abandoned vehicles, and he unlocked the gate to check it for safety. There were a handful of bodies each without heads and in varying stages of decomposition, and one of the dead was on the floor between them, very emaciated, the flesh of its cheeks attached by only odd bits of discoloured skin and hanging like pieces of macabre jewellery from the bones beneath it. It jerked its head toward the sound of the gate opening but he approached it quickly and holding its head still by the thickly blood-clotted hair carefully pushed a pretty useless knife through the left eye socket and all the way into the brain. It stopped moving right away and he left the knife in place and inspected the truth of what he had done. It had been much easier than he had imagined, in fact he had felt almost nothing apart from a certain kind of generic resentment of the world itself and not the individual parts that comprise it. Like everything it needed doing and that was it, he thought. Freed from the mundane spectatorial sanctuary his windows had afforded he felt at least as though he existed in a more reasonable, widely understood sense, outside of himself but within something substantial, as though he were cause or effect or both and not only unspoken witness and preserver, always seeing but never doing, more dead than the dead who strode those streets. He lifted the bodies to one side of the alley so they could fit the tandem past and went to fetch Linda. He told her all was clear and they mounted the bicycle; he would do the majority of the cycling if he could and took the front position, leaving her to handle any dead they might encounter, and she practised thrusting and swinging the metal pole several times while keeping one hand on the handlebars. Although she didn’t feel particularly comfortable with a weapon of such limited range they both agreed that it was their best option and that they had to make use of the things they had to hand, and that it would disable their potential assailants enough to at least give them sufficient time to make their intensely physical get away. They hoped that the same ancient primordial instincts and motor functions that motivated the dead into the dreadful perpetuity of their insentient hunger would slowly draw them away from the sparsely populated coastal regions where food source would be at a minimum and like rats towards the urban areas to scavenge on the half-gone and the trapped, fates cemented by the crushing sprawl of their cosmopolitan surroundings, by the rife almost viral transmission of ruin amongst municipalities so populous.
The day was warm when they left. The bike ran very quietly apart from an occasional rattle from the provisions in the trailer. It was arduous picking their way through the devastated streets and they made their way slowly north on quieter routes out of the city, but weirdly it was already difficult to remember it ever having looked any different. Dozens of corpses interrupted the landscape like crudely symbolic art installations, their placement seeming somehow deliberate and considered with lengths of intestine stretched like party streamers from torsos and into gutters, and faces gnawed and stripped back to just stark teeth fixed in rictus smiles, as though the humour in even this compromising and degrading public exhibition of the frailty and the hopelessness of the flesh was unavoidable and rich and immeasurably more permanent than the flesh was itself, which would and did rot in the great gaseous eruptions or viscous liquid oozings of escaping life that marked the concrete slabs of the pavement with an obstinacy unknown to all but the most archaic specks of discarded chewing gum, returned to the very nothing that had borne it, had made it of this world, the nothing it was always destined to become again. They were unmoved by the abundant dead, whose gnawed appendages and visible decay, whose sunken craniums and richly bruised surfaces depersonalized them somehow, their humanity belittled by perhaps the most human of all processes, left them remote and almost otherworldly, a kind of flawed mimicry of expectation. It was surprising how quickly the boundaries broke down, how quickly they adapted this pathologists detachment, how quickly death became meaningless on such an incomprehensible scale. The problem had undermined the sanctity of death that civilization had spent thousands of years constructing and left it instead with just the inevitable and organic occurrence that it unashamedly was. Without the social cohesion that death had always provided the near-instant decline of any shared morality or decency was remarkably efficient.
They turned into a street where one of his friends had lived and where they had as children played in the fading light of summer evenings. He can’t have been on this street for ten years at least but it was incredibly familiar. They had called the friend Mad Tom, everyone had; an ironic nickname, he supposed now years later, not because Tom wasn’t mad but because instead he was so mad that nomenclature so tentative seemed massively insufficient. He stopped the tandem outside Tom’s house, the front lawn trodden in roughly circular patches right down to the soil and scarred relentless with brittle yellow patches from dog’s piss and still littered with the bits of bike and cloth and coloured plastic that he so clearly recalled, and out of a compulsion he couldn’t explain to Linda he opened the flimsy wooden gate – all the struts but three were absent, stripped for who knew what reason – that had been conscientiously closed against the swell of the problem and took four or five steps up the path. He remembered breaking his foot in this garden in a foolish accident in the rain, and Mad Tom carrying him back to his parents’ house with the strength of a father, clutched against his sodden t-shirt and the intense smell of his underarms which even then he had found improbably comforting and full of life and promise. He remembered Tom falling in love incredibly hard with foreign exchange students, and how he had followed a particular German girl religiously from class to class and spoke to her in the most embarrassing and fractured kind of Anglo-German that made him sound like a villain in low-budget film, and tried to woo her with a discordant song of questionable lyrical content, the full version of which extended to about five A4 sides and was wholly sexually inappropriate and weird, and how when she got on the bus back to Germany without even a word and the inevitable failure sank in he would beg tearlessly to be hit as though without that stimulus he wouldn’t ever feel at all. He remembered the dangerous ramps that Tom built out of lengths of wood stolen from building sites over and around an old red car long-abandoned on his street that had weeds growing out of the grille of the radiator; fearlessly he would ride his bike over them, a different ramp each weekend, and it would always end badly but with Mad Tom smiling above the wheels that were buckled by the impact. He remembered schooldays where Mad Tom siphoned vodka and other clear spirits from his parents kitchen into the miniature glass booze bottles he had collected for years and then brought them into school in his bag, drank them down in determined swallows one-by-one right by his locker, and then ran frenzied from classroom to classroom howling with delight. The memories felt like falsehoods now, tainted like everything else by the problem.
He looked at Linda, who had dismounted the tandem also and was waiting impatiently, peering from one end of the road to the other, her knuckles white from holding the metal pole. The front door was detached, just jagged hinges and an open space where it once would have been, and from the corner of his eye he saw a figure walk past it inside the house. “Tom,” he called without thinking. It just came out. He had no real reason to think it was Tom but it was, it had to be. The figure shuffled hastily through the doorway with the urgency of a drunk at a wedding buffet, still tall, his stomach grotesquely distended, his flesh rotting away as though the skin was a burden all of a sudden too heavy for the body to bear, his very tissues foamed and frothing with verve from great gouges in his flabby skin and from open orifices; he saw there was a bite on his neck that rippled and throbbed with swollen larvae, and a kind of resolute authenticity about his expression that for some reason made him feel incredibly sad to think about. Tom grasped at him and groaned quietly and answered to only one authority, and sank to his knees from the force of Linda’s pole. She hit him a second time across the chest and they heard the rotten ribs crumble beneath the impact, and Tom slumped down onto his back, and Linda positioned the end of the pole just beneath his clavicle and slowly pushed it through the skin and flesh and bone to hold him securely in place. “Come on,” she said. Tom’s hands ran from only the purest instinct and even as caged as he was they continued to reach for the two of them, driven by something so incredibly fundamental it was impossible to understand. They both looked at him and for a moment the whole of the problem was crystallized in this one Norwich garden: the young man dead, the necessary violence, the fractured memories, the empty future. He picked up a bike wheel that was left on the grass, its tyre long-removed, and brought its metal-sharp circumference down hard into the centre of Mad Tom’s face. It went through easily just below the eyes, the soft tissues of which had for some reason remained remarkably intact through the decomposition process if cold and kind of inky black, and stuck fast into the damp soil beneath, and Tom’s hands were limp at his sides with a stillness that felt somehow more frightening. “It’s what he would have wanted,” he said, struck by the banal absurdity of the bicycle wheel, and laughed alone for seconds that felt like a lifetime or thought he did. Linda rested a hand on his shoulder. They could hear the groans of the dead carried through the streets like football chants, like threnodies. They were at great risk there. It was about twenty miles to the coast. They remounted the tandem. They rode on.
4. A Voice in the Dark
The sky was rough charcoal grey and heaved under the weight of its own possibility and the rain had come and fell hard with it and the wind blew violent and with great force lifted the waves and spat them crashing into the land when they arrived at the house by the sea. It crouched between telegraph poles, dirty white at the cliff’s edge, weathered by the salt and by the constant wind, the peripheries of its former garden now lost to the encroaching tides, an essential amputation that bought time in weeks or months if nothing more. There was a glass conservatory to the front of the house and through the glass he could see houseplants in black plastic pots still green and alive, the hopefulness of which somehow felt so inappropriate, and bottles thick with dust through the windows into the kitchen, of wine and different vinegars and plant feeder, whose labels had faded with time. A sign out front read: ‘This house is still occupied and will be until the sea gets too close’, painted in cheap white emulsion on a square of fractured hardboard whose edges had become papery in the rain; the neighbouring houses had all been sold off, bought by the local authority at knock-down prices so they could be demolished before the cliff gave in, part of an initiative to build a new car park and visitor cafe and reconstruct safe beach access. It had been the only choice left, said the distributed literature, as though the authority of sanctioned parking spaces could somehow put an end once and for all to the problems of unstable land, as though redistribution of the village some metres inland could in any way evade this awful certainty. The insurers wouldn’t touch it, and they’d cut the money they had once poured into sea defences which now rot on the beech like a fallen army, the remnants of a once mighty civilization, their wood and metal now twisted and corroded and powerless against the persistence of the water, leaving great chunks of East Anglia to sink back into the past in which it had always stagnated. The house was not occupied; the sign had been left along with everything else when the problem spread.
They pulled the tandem into the front garden and listened to the sea and longed for something less constant and less sure, but it was their best option. The village had a rushed feeling of emptiness and the cliff left the house defensible, with the only approaching road eroding in a sheer drop downwards like a dream, a project left on hold until the land could be built to accommodate it. In this desertion they would see neither living nor dead, they hoped together. It was the very end. There was a flatbed truck left along one side of the house and he opened the passenger door and popped open the bonnet but the engine had been taken. They walked to the end of the garden where the land stopped and looked down to the sea. The waves left heaps of foam in their wake. They could see a pile of four or five bodies at the foot of the cliff all snagged on bits of sea defence, their backs facing upwards, the darkness of their clothes breaking through the yellow foam in conspicuous streaks when the waves withdrew. The sea reached the very foot of the cliff and the violated defences jutted conquered from the water. Behind them the house almost whimpered with its own impermanence. The last time he and Linda had been there together had been two or even three years previous, when there was no the problem. A towering metal staircase had been erected, sunk into concrete in the centre of the beach and connected to the cliff by a walkway that creaked with every step and moaned in the wind and which you could peer down through to the sand beneath, the only route down to the beach around the subsiding soils. The staircase still stood but the walkway was gone, and he felt an affinity with the kind of haunting ridiculousness of the spectacle. Untouched by all but the sea it would remain for centuries, and form the foundation of future myths of morality or of creation, myths borne of its own neglected metallurgy, its corroded banisters still gasping above risen sea levels, and with the land receded all the further it would be just a speck in the still sea beyond the falling waves, a memorial to an affluence and arrogance that would never again compose a humanity, a memorial to certain failure. He felt Linda’s hand take his own and they felt the wind on their faces and stood for some time which didn’t feel lost but merely used. The bodies bobbed on the rising water with a good humour that belied the truth of their presence there.
He looked around at Linda whose eyes were closed and led her back towards the house. The door was open as he had imagined it would be. There were plates on the table with half-eaten meals still on them, the food spoiled and congealed into a coarse scab of gravy and sauce, piles of dirty washing dropped around the room, TV remotes left upturned on the arm of the sofa, as if whoever lived here had remembered something they needed to urgently do and had just gone out awhile. He went out to the tandem and started to unload their provisions from the trailer, passed a box of candles to Linda, who lit a couple with a cheap cigarette lighter and melted some of the wax onto two saucers and then stuck the candles into the cooling wax. He carried everything into the living room and piled it neatly onto the floor. The house was furnished sparsely and it looked very outdated but was more than adequate for their needs. There was a large open fireplace full of fine cold grey wood ash that looked like a landscape in miniature. Linda found a packet of cigarettes which still contained eight cigarettes and held it up for him to see. He looked inside the packet and nodded and then put it in his shirt pocket to save for some possibly appropriate time. Life itself looks outdated, he thought. They set to clearing things up, methodically piling all of the dirty cups and crockery into the kitchen sink and the dirty clothes into a laundry basket that they found in the conservatory. The water was still running but he figured it would only be good for another day or so. They filled up some containers and lined them up in the kitchen. He would have to break up some of the pallets he had seen outside so he could then fix the planks to the windows and to the door at night. He opened one of the kitchen cupboards which was clad with a custard-yellow melamine and found a bottle of supermarket scotch. He poured a good shot into two clean glasses and passed one to Linda and they drank in silence. The scotch burned but felt good. He found himself expecting to see people or cars pass by the windows but there were just brittle leafless lengths of spiralling bramble and clusters of huge green weeds as tall as he was that leant with the wind. He would enjoy boarding them over as there was no reason not to. Raindrops hit the corrugated roof of the conservatory and sounded like popping corn. Linda jumped when they heard a dull thump come from one of the rooms at the back, so loud out of the silence. He put his glass down and opened one kitchen drawer and then another, found a claw hammer and took it out. Linda was already holding the screwdriver she had been carrying when she arrived at his place yesterday. They walked in single file back out through the living room and into the hallway that led off of it. There was a dead kid on the floor of the first bedroom. His head was beaten in at the front and the skin of his face was limp over the sunken frontal bone and they could see the brain destroyed beneath it. There was a bloody table leg on the floor alongside the body and the kid’s eyes were half open and his face locked in this awful penetrating expression, and he knelt down and laid a blanket over the kid, which somehow rendered it as soft furnishing or decor rather than the dead kid they both knew it to be. They heard the sound again from the room next door and followed it. There was another kid, a little girl, he figured five or six but was bad with ages. The problem had got her. She was sitting with her back against a wall and a huge wooden wardrobe had been pulled down onto her legs to keep her from moving. He could see the legs almost completely flattened beneath the wardrobe, skin and flesh bunched up into doughy wedges like decorations adorning the raw tibias where she had tried to pull herself free, and she lurched her torso towards them in the doorway. This was what he and it had amounted to. He could see the tendons in the kid’s tensed arms where the skin had decayed and she snarled like an animal, the threadbare carpet around her left darkened by her slowly collapsing body. Linda was looking away, had her hand over her eyes. Five or six, he said to himself, and repeated it and looked at the kid. He barely noticed the smell in the room but saw Linda trying to throw up. “She’s a child,” said Linda. “Just a kid.” He put his hand on Linda’s shoulder and took her back into the living room, gave her another shot of the scotch and sat her down on the sofa as though they were visitors, family friends on a day trip. He returned to the second bedroom and closed the door softly behind him. The kid looked at him with vacant resolve, with guttural exclamations; like she knew that he himself was doing what he had to. No hard feelings. He pulled a soiled sheet from the single bed and rolled it up and carefully took hold of the kid’s lank hair and poked the sheet into her mouth with the handle end of the hammer to stop her biting down. He lined the hammer up in the middle of her forehead and then the centre of her cranium but he felt his arms heavy and weak and knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, that she was just five or six. The door opened and he could feel Linda’s eyes on him, could hear her crying. He put the hammer onto the floor and knelt in front of the kid, sounds dulled by the sheet, and he gripped onto her head with one hand on each side and slammed it backwards into the wall over and over and the decay-softened skull broke quickly and he kept on slamming until his hands were bloody and there was really nothing left but fragments of bone and diced brain and he realised his eyes were tightly shut.
He stood and walked wordlessly past Linda to the kitchen to wash his hands, then carried the two dead children outside and to the edge of the cliff, and dropped their bodies into the wind and the sea. He locked the door behind him and sat exhausted on the sofa. Linda’s face was pink and swollen from tears and she sat next to him and gave him the bottle of scotch which he drank from, and then took the cigarettes from his pocket and lit one for them to share, and after a while she kissed him very gently on the face and the neck and they made love slowly and quietly where they sat, and the candlelight flickered in the draught of the old house, and he listened to her voice encouraging him in the dark.
5. The Smell of Death
Some way along the coast was a caravan park that hugged the cliff edge in honour of civilization. Static homes glared silvery white in the dull sun, symmetrically lined in allocated pitches like creatures basking. From the house by the sea they could see a thin plume of smoke that rose like a faint pencil line from one of the caravans in the heart of the park and they both fixated on it as though in its frailty lay the solution to the problem. They ate tinned ham mottled with fat and anaemic and cut into thick flabby hunks with dried crackers which were light and easily transportable and watched the smoke rise through slight cracks in the boarded windows as though they were a television and the only sound was the breaking crackers. It drifted day and night for several days after their arrival and they watched it as intently as if they had never seen fire before. They found the prospect of other survivors to be almost as wretched as the problem itself, but knew that they would have to go to the caravan park because they couldn’t make it on their own for the indefinite future which felt so much longer when you put a name to it, because their resources would run dry or spoil, because two people would tire quicker than ten people or even five.
In the early morning they took the tandem and cycled peacefully on the deserted lanes and gravel crunched beneath their tyres, and they followed the coast road for just a few minutes until they reached the site, and he could feel the handles of the screwdrivers in his jeans pockets, could hear Linda’s breathing behind him. The sign said “Manor Caravan Park” and beneath it someone had written in thick brush strokes “survivor’s camp”. Linda held his arm and he looked at her but although her eyes spoke endlessly she said nothing and they rested the tandem up against the two metal gates that were padlocked closed and he helped her climb over and followed her himself and up a rough track which ended at what had been the reception office and a small convenience shop, both of which had been completely boarded up. He walked around to the back of the building with Linda close behind him. There was an awful smell in the air and the sound of insect wings was almost industrial. Laid out on the floor behind the building was a dead woman. She looked to be in her twenties and was very tall and quite heavyset and was stripped naked and her legs were far enough apart so they could see the shadows around her vagina, but she was patchily covered in a blanket of flies who feasted and laid their young beneath the surface of her rotting skin and did not fly off despite their presence because there death overwhelmed life and outnumbered it. There was dried blood caked to the insides of her thighs and her throat was slit and had bled heavily out and also dried in huge crusts across her chest and seemed to breathe with blowflies, but he could see no evidence of brain trauma or other signs of infection and impulsively felt his pockets for the bulge of the screwdrivers.
“You’re alive?” He and Linda both turned towards the voice and armed themselves clumsily. Three men were standing some ten feet from them. They were all unarmed and the middle of the three raised his hands in a well-meaning gesture that felt especially futile.
“She’s not,” he said. He pointed a screwdriver at the dead woman.
The three men looked at her regretfully. It started raining very softly and it was the sound of the drops on the leaves that betrayed its subtlety. “Shall we?” said the same gesturing man, this time inviting them to follow him into the camp.
He started to walk and Linda held him back. He took her hand and squeezed it and nodded and laid his palm flat against her cheek and she closed her eyes a moment and they walked together in the direction the man had indicated.
“We saw you,” the man said. “Saw you at the cliff edge several days ago. Saw you throwing those bodies over.” He and Linda walked in silence. “Are you holing up there?” the man continued. The other two said nothing and wore bright blue jeans that were short on their legs. “In the house over there?”
They walked through the empty camp. The caravans were all locked up, padlocked from the outside, metal security grilles fitted to many of the windows. He noticed how well protected the camp was, flanked by a large perimeter fence and by the cliff, and thought of the holidays of his past which had failed to cohere and of the dead woman resurrected in the squirming maggots that took nourishment from her botched tissues. They approached a caravan in the very centre of the park and they saw the trail of smoke still rising as it did from a tall metal chimney that had been rigged to its top.
“What happened to her?” he said. “That woman?”
The three men looked at one another and two of them wandered off to another caravan and climbed the three steps up into it and closed the door behind them. They were left with the third man.
“It was an accident,” he said. “It was one of those things. She was very sick.”
“The problem?”
The man nodded. He led them into his own caravan and invited them to sit down on a foam padded sofa, and offered them a drink which they refused. It was piled about with papers covered in thick pencil diagrams drawn so hard the paper had in places torn and that appeared to them both to be nonsense, as well as scientific textbooks that from the typography and photographs on their covers looked outdated, and these things spilled onto the floor and even into the plastic sink that in drought had turned orange in dry lines around a past water mark. The one fold-down table in the kitchenette was lined with bloody tools and utensils and there were flakes of skin and pieces of what looked like flesh caught in the teeth of the blade of a small hacksaw. The kitchenette units were the kind of flecked mottled brown in two or three tones that tended to betray an era of stagnant design. The man cleared some paperwork from a wooden crate that was upturned and examined the top few leaves of drawings and scribbled notes, and nodded intensely to himself as though they contained incredible truths or even spiritual revelations, and he placed them alongside one of the other piles and lowered himself to sit on the crate.
“Name’s Charles,” he said.
He and Linda looked at him. They looked to be about the same age but his beard was wispy and looked fragile against the caravan’s interior. “What is this place?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Research,” he said. He poured a small glass of water from a five litre container and drank it slowly. The caravan moved slightly in the wind and the door chattered in its frame like a deliberate protest. “Before all this,” he said, and held up a large carving knife that was thick with dried blood, “the problem, we worked at the university. ‘Wayward scientists’,” he said like an endearment, like a club name.
“Into what?” said Linda.
“Methane,” he continued. “Compressed natural gas. We were investigating alternative sources of fuel. I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve fucked the world over, built an unsustainable dependence on an unsustainable fuel source.”
The three of them were silent, as though out of respect or shame.
“We managed to escape the city for this place as soon as we saw the first dead. It was weird, as though for all these years we had expected this to happen. I don’t know why. I had to kill five of them. You?”
He felt Linda’s hand tighten around his and thought of Mad Tom and of the child and he nodded.
“I find it helps not to think of them as people. Whatever fragile connection we might claim to have with our personalities is pretty far gone by the time the problem takes a hold. The temporal lobe’s really the first thing to go.”
He thought of Mad Tom and of the child.
“They’re not people now,” said Charles. “In fact they might be something far more useful.” He stood up and looked outside. There was rain over the window pane and they could hear it on the roof of the caravan. The house by the sea waited patiently along the cliff and they both wished they were behind its walls. He pulled on a thin plastic jacket and fastened the hood tightly around his face. “Follow me,” he said. “I’d like to show you something.” He walked out of the caravan and towards a large wooden storage barn at the very edge of the site.
Linda shook her head no but his eyes told her they must go and must see what these men were doing here and he too stood up and took one of the dirty knives from the tabletop and they followed Charles towards the barn, and jogged a little to catch up with him. There were several oil drums with smouldering fires lit inside them and struggling against the wind and rain lined up along the gravel paths. Charles saw them looking.
“Beacons,” he said. “Let’s people know we’re here.”
Charles took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door to the barn. It was warm inside and there was a faint electrical light which must have been powered by a generator. There were piles of the dead all around the room, thirty or forty bodies. He held Linda’s hand very tightly and felt sick and afraid.
“This probably looks a little odd,” said Charles. “But this,” he said, kicking one of the bodies in the side, “and this,” he said, kicking another in the head, “are fuel. Dead bodies release methane. That’s what the awful fucking stench is.” He kicked another of the bodies in the front of the face and the toe of his tan leather shoes sank through the skin and was flecked with tissues when he pulled it out. He wiped the shoe with his hand and his hand on his trousers. “You see the problem is a wakeup call. A socio-economic crisis. An ecological crisis. We’ve put all of our eggs in one oily basket and now the party’s over. Preoccupied with oil, preoccupied with greed, with overdevelopment – it couldn’t continue at this rate, the world couldn’t sustain it. No resources, no space. We needed to wipe the slate clean, to reset the clock, to start again. The problem does all of it.”
“People are dying,” he said. His voice sounded very far away, over the cliff edge, under the sea.
“People are dying yes, and people are not dying, but a desperate situation requires a kind of desperate change. And it’s the bulk, the fucking wholesale consistence of the death that might just save some of us, that might make some of the thousands of years it took to get here worth the effort. We have to build a new society from the ground up,” he said. “And an intelligent society, one that’s going to last, does not forge a dependence upon an exhaustible resource that takes hundreds of thousands of years to form; no, it makes use of the abundant, the commonplace, of the very death and decay that brought its societal predecessor to its knees in the first place. We’ll use the methane produced by the decomposing dead to fuel the growth of a new social system, as vehicle fuel, as electricity, as the fundamental building blocks of a new utopia borne of ancient mistakes, one in which death is de-personalized and de-sanctified, a resource as ripe for exploitation as coal or oil once were. One thing the problem has driven home is that death is not special; it is arbitrary and cruel and remorseless, so let’s not hide behind tradition and taboo and shroud the whole filthy thing in ceremony. What better possible afterlife could there be than the knowledge that the gases from your own dead meat would aid the running and growth of a continuing society? It doesn’t get any more tangible than that. It’s the ideal response to the problem and it’s happening right here. This is what we’re doing,” he said and flung his arms back into the distant darkness of the barn, “we’re doing it right now. The threat is neutralized on two counts. The dead die and new life takes all the fuel it needs to stoke it aflame. You’ve been there, you know how many dead there are. Really dead and problem dead. Hordes of them just littering the ground. The resource is inexhaustible by definition. You said it yourself: people are dying. That’s the one fucking certainty in life, friend, the one thing you can sure as dark shit count on. Death’s coming. The biggest problem we’ve got now is how we can harvest it quickly enough to capture the fuel they produce. We need to run this right. We need all the help we can get. Leaving those dead to rot outside of a lab is as senseless as flushing crude oil down the toilet.”
They looked at each other, at the wood of the barn, at the piles of dead flesh.
“What happened to that woman out there?” he asked again.
“Woman? What does it matter? What does one woman matter now, what do a hundred women matter? The scale of the death and of the change out there destroys any meaning the individual might have had, which to be honest was negligible anyway.”
“Something has to matter.” Linda’s breathing was very loud and so was his own.
“It does. Survival matters. That much we owe to ourselves. We made this happen, the least we can do is to keep on going.”
“What do you plan to do?” he said. Charles smiled at him and then at Linda, and they felt his eyes on the shape of her body, felt them pierce her clothes and all over her skin.
“New society needs people,” said Charles, “to make it last. We need able-bodied men to join us and work with us.” It was all now inevitable. “And we especially need women.”
“We should go,” he said to Linda, and they walked to the door.
“Things have changed,” Charles said to their backs. “Everything. The old system failed. Relationships, monogamy, genetic exclusivity, it all failed. People no longer belong to one person. Breeding is imperative. It’s the way it has to be.”
He put his arm around Linda and pulled open the door of the barn and didn’t look back. The two men from the camp office were a few feet from the door with two others they hadn’t seen before and they blocked the pathway. “Come on,” he said to Linda quietly and they walked around the four men onto the thick wet grass and away from the path to follow the perimeter fence back around to the gate. The four men turned to watch them as they walked but none moved to follow and they both did everything they could to not run. He pushed Linda along slightly and glanced over his shoulder and saw that the men still stood beside the barn, and he gently pushed Linda again and in his mind urged her to keep going and felt the nervous heat burning through her clothes and glanced back over his shoulder a second time and saw that the men had gone. They cut between two caravans and he could see the gate a short distance away and Linda stopped dead, said “my God”, and he looked down at the path before them. There were the bodies of eight or nine women strewn in the grass that grew between their limbs and fringed their bodies as though their presence here were a fundamental part of the natural order, meat truck-stacked and ready for processing. They were all naked and like the woman at the camp entrance none showed obvious signs of infection and the smell of their rotting tissues was foul, and they had been beaten horrifically, their faces swollen over their eyes and beyond their features, and each had a small hole of equal size drilled into the centre of their foreheads, and there were finger shaped bruises over their throats and their thighs, and dozens of stab wounds were flecked over their chests and arms and faces. He and Linda looked silently at the bodies. Some were face down and their backs were tanned like an ancient pigment by the drying spilt blood. He tried to swallow and looked up and Charles and the four other men were around them and the bodies.
“They weren’t up to it,” said Charles.
“We need to go,” he said.
“No, you need to stay.” He looked to Linda as he said this. “We need women, women who are up to it.”
“This isn’t the way things should be.”
“It’s the only way things can be.”
One of the four men came at Linda with a hand extended, to take her arm and lead her away. She moved quickly, she grabbed him by the hair, she pulled a screwdriver and she stuck it into his neck, he gurgled and spat blood and they heard it sucking down his throat, and he started falling down and she still held onto his hair and pulled the screwdriver free and stuck it again through his cheek and then through the side of his head just above the ear. She let go of his hair and he dropped onto one of the dead women and his body twitched and the leaking blood steamed. Another came hissing bitch and he sank the knife he had taken from the caravan into his chest and his stomach and he died almost instantly. He looked at Linda and she was shaking but okay.
“You killed these women,” he said. Charles nodded.
“They couldn’t do it,” he said. “Give themselves over to the new society. Sacrifice the ego. They couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. This is how it is. You two are stronger than this. Stay with us here. Help us build something good out of all of this shit.”
There was blood on his fingers from the dead man and it ran slowly down the back of his hand to his wrist. It was already drying.
“I don’t think so. Society,” he said and took Linda’s hand, “is overrated.”
They stepped over the bodies of the women and the two men and made for the gate. The other two men looked at Charles who nodded and they then made a move for him and Linda and they stuck them hard with screwdrivers and watched them die. Linda’s screwdriver was stuck vertical from the top of the skull like a bizarre implant and was too imbedded to remove and blood had arced from the wound and the trauma to his brain was fast and grave, while his own had shattered windpipe like brittle plastic and the fractured edges of the trachea emerged slightly glistening and almost alien from the skin wounds that flapped somewhat and there was blood from the mouth and from the neck alike. Charles watched calmly and moved not at all.
“You needn’t leave like this,” he said. He was smiling. “We three – we can make it happen.”
“Everyone’s alone,” said Linda. “Please don’t pretend otherwise.”
He walked over to Charles and pushed him over onto the floor. He fell without resistance surrounded by death and reached without thought for the hand of one of the dead women which he clasped tenderly. Linda rushed forward and kicked the hands apart, then stamped down on his hand three or four times until they heard the dreadful sound of the bones breaking, and when she took her foot away there were odd bits of finger bone torn through the skin and it had sunk down a few centimetres into the soft mud. Charles had not screamed as the hand broke but he was crying and his tears looked very unfamiliar. He crouched alongside Charles and wiped his screwdriver on his jeans, then held it over his throat.
“Let me,” said Linda. The dead women seemed to rise momentarily and applaud. She picked a loose brick from underneath one of the caravans which was charred black along one edge from past barbeques and she knelt on Charles’s chest and looked him in the eye but he couldn’t see her because of his tears and she smashed the brick down into the middle of his face, and with one strike his nose caved in and with three his face was gone and only brain tissue and bone fragments remained, the components of a life.
She dropped the brick onto the floor and the sea groaned and they took each other’s bloody hands and they left.
6. Dead Father
His father had died several weeks before the problem. He had been there when it happened and had watched when he stopped breathing. His last rattled breaths had sounded like an insult, the body reduced to nothing. His father’s eyes stared at him with the fear not of death but of loneliness. He didn’t recognise him. Somehow even fixed his eyes looked bright and young and that seemed the saddest thing. He sat with the body for an hour in the hospital room. There was no sun but the venetian blinds cast striped shadows over the white blanket that shrouded his father. He didn’t speak or plead or pray, and the one time he rested his own hand on top of his father’s fingers the coldness of the skin had made him recoil. Life was replaced so quickly it was almost unbelievable. The room felt stifling, as though death had engulfed everything around it, and the soundlessness was immense and terrifying, and he looked a final time at his father, who was so still in the bed that he was like a faint imprint left behind, and he went to the nurse’s station and told them he was finished and thanked them for all they had done, and their condolences were efficient as they had to be. He met Linda later that day and told her everything that had happened and she stroked his head in her lap. He felt most sad, he had said, about the fact that he hadn’t felt that sad. That he had always imagined how it would feel to be that close to death and it would be humbling or somehow ennobling but it was instead simply cold and almost tedious. She said she understood. She said it was the certainty, the inevitability that made it so. Death is only another thing happening. He told her that while he had never been religious he couldn’t help finding a deep spiritual importance in the death of his father, as if it left him freer than he’d ever been, to make his own life, to structure his own thoughts and devise his own significances, that it was like being liberated from the oppressive familial regime that had mutely haunted him all through life. She said he gave death far more value than it deserved and called him an idealist in the way that most people would call someone a bastard. Death, she said, is the most terminal normality. When he fucked Linda later that night he pictured his father, cold and dead beneath the stiff white hospital sheet, his body sagging beneath the weight of its own lifelessness, and as he came soon after he noticed he was crying, a fact they both chose not to mention while they waited for the alarm to go off. The problem stirred only in nightmares, in fiction, in metaphor, in the inactive depths of our ancient genes, but in weeks it would reign, in weeks life would fall.
7. She Still Loves Me
They cycled back to the house by the sea. It was starting to get dark when they arrived back and they could still see the smoke rise from the caravan park and knew it would burn out soon enough. Linda pulled her clothes off and sat in the bathtub and drew her knees up to her chest, and he poured water over her body from a metal saucepan and gently scrubbed the blood and dirt from her skin and she sat limp as he did so. She held onto his shoulder as she stepped out of the bath and he passed her a towel and the smell of detergent made them both feel hopeless. He took his clothes off and climbed into the bathtub also, and Linda carefully measured the water into the pans and washed him clean. He wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the living room and lit a number of candles, and opened a can of pink salmon which he forked onto two plates along with some of the dry crackers from their provisions. Linda came in with clean clothes on and sat down on the sofa and he sat down next to her and poured them each a small scotch and they ate their meagre dinner together. When the food had gone he put the plates onto the table and put his arm around Linda’s shoulders and he felt her tense up as though it were some kind of unspoken agreement, that this was all too much, that although they didn’t know how long they could continue they at least knew it couldn’t be long. Their past romance felt extraordinarily inane, not because of the seriousness of the problem but for other reasons that their every gesture hinted at but never revealed. Before the problem they had both hated television and made a point of saying so, but now it was gone they mourned it like an absent lover, and imagined whole series of programmes whose neat and unchallenging narratives they could follow together from beginning to end. They still sat before it with dreadful expectation of the truth it might once again share.
The fallen darkness was ferocious and even the lighthouse some distance away that had shone electric for several generations stood pitch and untended. They heard through the persistence of the hustling waves what they thought was a car engine and without thought he blew each of the candles out and the dark of the room was total and he heard Linda shift in her seat and they both crept to the window which he had had wood enough to board only roughly with two planks and which was still mostly exposed and for which he now cursed himself and waited. Soon after headlights passed slowly and they could hear laughing and conversation and a pick-up truck passed the house and pulled into the grassy field just across the road that bordered the cliff, and stopped and the engine was shut off but the lights left burning. From the window they could see two men and two women climb out of the cab and they were drinking and acting drunk and they sprayed beer foam from shaken cans as though they had stumbled out of a long party and not yet realised what had happened to the world. The two men kissed the women and groped them roughly and rubbed the flat palms of their hands over the denim seam between their legs and the women laughed and seemed to talk to each other while they did so. They all opened another beer from a stack they kept under the seats in the cab and the men goofed around and sank them in only a couple of chugs and egged each other on and slapped each other’s backs like primates and tossed the cans away over the cliff, and the women sipped theirs and looked around at the silhouettes of the part-demolished houses that rose from the soil like skeletons. The men opened up the back of the truck and he could see them pick up a length of rope each and yank and pull and two bodies fell to the ground hard, and they were not dead but infected, their hands tied together and the ropes that the men held tight in two hands noosed around their necks. They pulled them up to their feet and they could hear the moaning from the house. They were females, their breasts wept from large wounds and their bellies sagged with death like aprons above their pubis, and he could see their torn flesh, the skin that had stretched over distended parts and had now split and showed dead bone beneath liquefying organ tissue, the mouth of one slashed wide open in a grotesque grin that blew limp around a kicked-in jaw. The men held them firmly like triumphant hunters awkwardly photographed, and the women took lengths of wood from the back of the truck and walked to the dead with considered steps and posed kind of sexy alongside them and the men cheered and then they started hitting them with the wood, swinging it with everything they had into their torsos and their legs but not their heads, not their brains, and the dead moaned but couldn’t fall because of the ropes, and the wood tore chunks of flesh off and a whole breast fell and they stamped on it in the wet grass. The women hugged and then they took the neck ropes from the men and kissed them and the men took a saw each from the truck and they hacked off the arms of the dead in stuttered ugly cuts, and fucked around with the felled limbs like horror props, and they punched and kicked them and the sound of it overcame even the sea and he and Linda felt nauseous and hopeless for what hope was there. They took the ropes back from their girls and dragged them over to the weak fence along the cliff, and looped the ropes around a couple of thicker fence posts, and with the dead bound they pulled out their genitals and raped them ecstatically, looked round laughing at each other, sizing up, and at the drinking women who laughed also, and their white buttocks were stark in the night, and they came immeasurably quickly soaked through with blood and weird body liquids, and they all laughed more while they picked parts of their dead insides that had broken off or been pulled out by the reaming from the ends of their pricks, and spent as they were they stamped onto the heads of the dead until their boots sank through brain and it was done. The girls kissed them like heroes and they ground themselves into their men, their real men, and the men went down on them there in the grass and did so until their cunts and their buttocks clenched and their thighs quivered trembling in the night. Linda went to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her and he head her crying, but he could only watch frozen, indifferent, and hope to something that no one would find them.
A couple of minutes after and they strode like lovers back to the truck and turned the engine over, and Linda returned from the bathroom. He took her hand but she pulled it away and he could understand why. Their eyes had adjusted well to the dark and he looked around the room and saw only a grave as he did outside. The truck crawled very slowly past the house and one of the men leant forward in his seat and stared and they both dropped to the floor under the force of his gaze and pressed themselves up against the wall beneath the window as flat as they could and they heard a voice say “hey stop the truck”, and in that instant they thought it was over. There was a slight squeak of brakes and one of the truck doors opened, and they could hear footsteps in the tall weeds out front and plant pots falling over, felt the slight shadow cast of a face and shoulders at the window. The boards, he thought. The boards scream inhabited like voices or lights. “Hey I think there’s people in here.” The screwdrivers were on the table. The knives were in the kitchen. “Hey,” the voice said again. They could feel him pressing against the window, adjusting his hand above his eyes to see better. Then footsteps around to the door. Tried the handle, knocked even, then tried his shoulder. “This place is fuckin boarded up from the inside. There’s people in here.” The man pushed the door with his shoulder again and inside he hugged Linda and said sorry but not aloud. Another voice said “who fuckin cares let’s the fuck go” and the women in the truck laughed. There was another kick at the door so hard the walls moved and a framed picture fell and smashed. “Shit,” they heard the first voice say, and the truck door closed and the sound of the wheels on gravel got further away then far away and then disappeared and only the sea remained and their breathing.
After an hour had passed they carefully pulled the boards from the front door and each took a long screwdriver and they crept from the house and looked for signs of people along the road and away down the cliff but there were none. The chimney smoke from the caravan park had ceased and its absence was prominent. It was cold in the wind and felt colder so late at night. They closed the front door and walked across the road and into the field, then over to the dead still tied to the fence. They looked at them in silence for a few moments and thought separately similar things. They thought how foolish it was to think that the problem made this happen, thought how this was already here, all of it, how the problem simply let it out. How that was the worst thing of all. He untied the ropes from the fence and lifted the bodies one by one and dropped them over the edge and they fell like substances and not bodies to the water below. When he turned around to Linda he had tears in his eyes because of the wind and she heard something and turned around but was so quickly bitten on the shoulder that earlier he had held in his hand and the noise of the tearing flesh was unreal. She screamed and fell backwards and clutched the wound as though she could pick the virus out with her fingers and then stood and ran back to the house. The dead came toward him with Linda’s blood the colour of life around its mouth and with one hand he held it tightly and his fingertips sank a way into the spongy flesh and he precisely pushed the screwdriver through the side of its head, and to his surprise he felt no malice or vengeance and only a kind of very fragile nostalgia for something vague and uncertain. He returned to the house like stepping back in time, or rushing forwards.
8. Too Many Questions
And what questions, all left tantalizingly unanswered by the films and by the literature. What is the virus and how does it work and where does it come from? The terror of ignorance is the constant in these stories, the pervading fear that underpins the rest, and the void of the dead, the immense emptiness left by the absence of life, allows for the imposition of a profusion of highly politicized meanings upon the dead themselves, making them the vessels for agenda that the decade demands. How they came to be becomes an insignificance; what matters is what they come to represent. The world falls apart and no one has an answer, and the nameless enemy is all the more dreadful for that reason, and for the familiarity of their bodies, their instincts, their humanity. Stripped back to some fundamental primal point they are us, a broken people with nothing but hunger and survival to take us forwards, all artifice and sanitization and reason long dissolved in hopeless nihilism. These are stories not of the dead but the living, of a desperate human failure to cohere and to respond, of the most ultimate collapse of the frail monoliths of civilization and progress that had blinded us all to our own injustices. Engulfed by the problem the social commentary of interpretive metaphor was hard to theorise and seemed barely to matter if at all, save for the committed anthropomorphizing of the broadsheets to try to lessen the sting of our failing narratives. They were the problem and it them, the horror of everyday life. There was no safe analytic distance and even concrete paradigms failed. It’s expected, invited, but not like this. Some things are and have to be or nothing is and can be. Death is death was the one thing they knew they knew and they knew now nothing. No one dared call a zombie a zombie because there are no zombies, as though to even utter the word would instantly invalidate the realism of their narrative case, as though to allude so blatantly to a mythos so widely acknowledged as fictional and to references so markedly low-end cinematic and to perceptions so culturally transcendent (i.e. fears so incredibly deep-rooted within the “human condition” and therefore universally [humanwide] potent: of cannibalism, terminal alienation, overarching lack of agency, contorted and frankly flawed notions of the very essence of mortality/what it means to live or to be alive/the revised place of a spiritual afterlife, &c.) would render the urgency and very tangible horror of the problem somehow false. The word itself signified fiction and that was how it was understood, as a device, a metaphor, a fictive layer; it undermined the severity of the problem, made light of such terrible darkness. To consider even the word was inappropriate to reality. The fact of the zombie’s non-existence is what made those films such fun to watch, bolstered as we were by the knowledge that such things could never happen. Now it had happened how wrong it would be of us to negate even a minor past pleasure by attributing its terminologies to this. The problem taunted language, defied it, it dared us to attempt meaningful reference and signification of happenings so very alien to our understanding of the world. There were no words for it; these were the limits of language, the incommunicability of horrors both unknown and inconceivable. How inadequate it becomes in times of trauma. Please tell me what turns the world upside down? There was word of language as ‘the cause’. Burgess said “it gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organises us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself”, and that “some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage”, but the problem swelled from the silent voiceless emptiness of the technological age, endless bytes of unvocalized information transmitting between servers that render the crudeness of oral interaction as outdated and dead as the cultures that relied on it, from the inorganic symbology reconstructed by binary coding that is immune to the dormant mutations that Burgess posits. Speculative causes multiplied like the problem in unverified mutters, evidence then a luxury or a pointless formality with no place in national accusation. It was the product of unnaturally high radiation levels resultant of an exploratory space programme that reanimated the dead with brains pared back to their most streamlined as necessary for – a nominal, purely physical – survival. This radiation had irrevocably altered the atmospheric makeup of the planet and our organic response to it and there was no going back. Or it was the planned impact of an incomplete biochemical weapons programme funded by government and military agencies that had leaked into the populace through accident or design, an ill-conceived conceptual weapon that like its forebears exponentially created more of a threat than it destroyed. Or it was the by-product of a genetically modified maize crop, or the inevitable endpoint of an accumulative ecological disaster. For others still it was a long-dormant trait of humankind buried beyond neuroscientific analysis within the earliest parts of the unused brain that had been reanimated as a side-effect of a widespread vaccination programme, perhaps the result of a corruption within the medicine itself. Or there was allusion to the Solanum virus replicating in the cells of the frontal lobe in hastily penned research papers thrown together with evidence negligible at best in desperate support of hypotheses pertaining to it, as though frequent and impassioned reference could somehow verify its fictive existence into hard science, as though the implausible efficiency of its viral properties and symptoms could be conversed into being, anything for an explanation at least vaguely suggestive of peer review and rigorous consideration and ugly biological fact and our own intellectual control of – and thus our measured response to – the situation, and not absurd speculation cloaked behind the temporary ignorance, the ‘un-blown paradigm’ of scientific method. Its very lexicon, of viruses and lobes and mutation and fluidic transmission, gave it an authority, a veracity conspicuously absent from other hypotheses all themselves equally untested. Convinced by vocabulary alone, social faith might be instilled in science in times of crisis, and edged toward religion only in times of out-and-out ruin. The most complex, incomprehensible explanation must be the truest precisely because we don’t understand it; we the masses shouldn’t understand these things, life and death and the pain between – they are for only the few to truly know. Or it was folkloric voodoo pharmacology at work, tetrodotoxin compounds sanctioned by government and issued to drinking water reserves at key locations around the country, a short-sighted attempt to pacify the violently discontented plenty. No one hypothesis seemed sufficient to explain the problem. It was as though the desolation and injustice of the of the 21st century had built to such heights that something had to give, and that the fundamental biological workings of the human organism were the only thing left to modify, and that from riots and poverty were borne the most dehumanizing infection, a complete annulment of our most essential and recognisably human traits, and all individualism and personality were crushed beneath the basest of instincts for which corporations had primed us for decades. Something changed. Regardless of its cause, as a blood-borne virus its rapid spread through the violent and cannibal relations it instigated in its sufferers was guaranteed. There could be no end. Does it help to know why?
9. Whose Fault is it?
Blame flowed like breaking waves along the shoreline, and become a national responsibility, a prerequisite to the survival of our patriotic spirit. It was the one thing as British we felt qualified for, and long-held prejudices barely contained beneath superficially progressive politics quickly swelled to the surface in public displays of symbolic otherness. They blamed the scientists, whose calculated and arrogant meddling was inevitably bound to great pain and loss when the progress of knowledge and intellect had reached their limits, for it is congenitally beyond all species to really understand themselves; this new prayer of the dumb and the afraid, this idiot prayer: please protect us from this wider contextual understanding and awareness and the proven benefits of the scientific method and please let the safety of ignorance prevail. They blamed the vocal atheists, whose spiritual void, they said, went hand-in-hand with cannibalism and bodily decomposition, and the private atheists for the same. They blamed the Catholics, whose most sacred beliefs seemed weirdly to mirror the facts of the problem: their fetishisation of the flesh, of consuming the flesh, bodies obscenely corporeal and yet supernatural, the ransacked temple, the decaying waste products of a soul’s altogether brighter journey. The response of organised religion to the problem was confused, distraught. Eternal life had became a real threat and not a vague hope, and the fact of its physicality called for the kind of urgent reappraisal with which no religious scripture is prepared to deal. Christian tears fell silent among the stammered news reports as millennia of guilt overwhelmed their faith. They prayed for it, here it was. They blamed promiscuity and the deteriorating morals of a corrupt society; they blamed sexual deviance, alcohol consumption, television, fast food. They blamed career women, unmarried women, childless women, women who drank on Friday nights or wore short skirts out or admitted to expecting more out of life than their mother’s before them. They blamed open homosexuality as being at the very heart of the rotten core of modernity which if practised at all should always be both secret and aggressive and fuelled by self-loathing. They blamed the elderly for refusing to give up. They blamed socialists, whose very notion of utopia they believed in stupidity to be synonymous with the relentless mass-mindedness of the problem. They blamed children for the pointlessness of their youth, for their lack of contribution, for their weakness, their dependence, and they blamed students for the kind of constant whimpering dissatisfaction that they assumed would make something like the problem happen. They blamed immigrants for not this alone but for all the big viruses, for bringing them here, for the primitive acts that mutated them into being. They blanket-blamed the arts – worthless though they thought them to be – that wrote these zombies into our popular consciousness, blamed the crumbling boundaries between our cinema screens and our city streets, said this would never have happened without artistic precedent. They blamed tirelessly. Everyone a cunt and everyone to blame. The British way. Trust absolutely nobody. Doubt any and all difference. Pockets of violence erupted among the uninfected, all taut with distrust and prejudice and media endorsed – expected – xenophobia. Paranoia ground out rationality. They were easily provoked into hatred and urged to stamp out diversity, a necessary evil to contain the problem. Not government sanctioned but the authorities turned a blind eye. The lynched swung rhythmic in the twilight like shared memories. The living left death in their wake like the problem they killed for. The problem grew with the dead, hatred and fracture opened the doors to it. Within hours they turned on each other. Everything endlessly lost.
10. The Yellow Dress
Inside the house by the sea Linda was lying face down on the sofa. She held a rolled up tea towel against the wound on her shoulder and the tea towel was wet with blood, and she was crying soundlessly and it was only the occasional heaving movements of her shoulders against the stillness of her body that were indicative of consciousness. She had taken her shirt and jeans off and they were in a ball on the floor at his feet and he could see thick dark lines of blood coursing down her back from beneath the tea towel. She wore the yellow dress from their memories. He remembered everything about it, every stitch and seam. He had kissed her in it in the dark of the empty street, had pushed it up and made love to her to the sound of passing night buses. He closed the door and knelt on the floor next to her and rested his hand on her flank and the heaving worsened, and he stroked her hair and lifted it up away from the wound, then held the hand that clutched the tea towel and lifted it carefully away. The wound was raw and deep and the tooth marks were unmistakable, and he could see the edge of clavicle beneath the tissues where they had been bitten away. He placed the hand still holding the tea towel back onto the wound and told her to apply pressure, and walked to the kitchen and dampened another towel with cold water. His hands were still bloody from the dead outside so he washed them and scrubbed them with an old kitchen scouring pad worn through with holes. He went back to Linda and helped her to sit up, and carefully cleaned the wound with the damp towel, wiping away the blood as best he could. He noticed that the wound was already starting to clot which he assumed was a result of the virus but he chose not to say anything to Linda. The flesh was discoloured around its peripheries, greying like spoiled meat. He didn’t know how long the problem took to develop. She was sweating and her eyes looked distant, as though she were very old and no longer recognised him. He rinsed off the bloody towels in the kitchen and held one to her brow to try to lessen the fever. He lit several candles and drank the last mouthful of scotch straight from the bottle and pulled a chair up alongside the sofa and watched Linda. The movements she could make were uncoordinated and when she tried to feel the wound she was unable to position her hand appropriately. He lifted some water to her lips and poured slowly but it made her sick and the vomit dripped onto the sofa and was laced with blood. He begged her not to look and carried the whole cushion away but she had seen it and he heard her crying as he threw the cushion outside.
“I’m very frightened,” she said. She was slurring her words like a dismal drunk. “Please don’t fall asleep.”
He told her he wouldn’t, that he would stay awake all night, that he remembered the dress and remembered everything, that whatever happened now they would still have what they’d had. And he thought of all the things they would never do, of their relatives and friends, of a future as empty as it was inevitable. He thought of Linda, of the day they had met and the years after that.
They sat quietly while Linda fell in and out of consciousness, and her joints cramped and she moaned with the pain but no longer spoke. Sometimes her eyes opened but she didn’t see him. The tone of her skin changed with the falling minutes. Her body was dying. The candles danced to the sound of the sea. He kissed her mouth and it was very cold beneath his lips.
When he awoke the candles had burnt out and the room was bathed in grey early light and Linda was still and silent. He felt for her pulse and raised her eyelids and there was nothing. Her flesh had already begun to decompose in great patches around her body. He stood and walked to the window and looked out to the sea and to the fields before it, and there were scores of the dead walking the fields and the road by the house as though nothing had altered, as though they were living their lives, and their groans echoed through the thin panes of glass. He heard movement behind him and turned to Linda. Her eyes were open and she was trying to pull herself upright. He stood next to her and laid his hand on her thigh and said he was sorry. She grabbed at him and the tips of her fingers sank far into the flesh of his forearm and he yelled out and she bit him and he watched her gnawing his flesh and his freckles working around her mouth and the convulsing tendons in his arm and his blood dripping down her chin like spilt sauce. Her moans were unrecognisable and merged inseparable with the dead outside. He heard the shuffling of their feet outside and they rattled the door of the house and their limbs pressed through the glass of the windows which tore easily through their flesh, and they hammered the boards with startling relentlessness. He held one of the screwdrivers tightly in his good hand and shoved Linda back onto the sofa and straddled her and held her still by her throat and pushed it through her ear and into her brain and she was motionless. He rolled onto the cushionless seat next to her and gripped the wound on his arm and listened to the breaking boards and the crumbling brickwork and the exquisite moans and the ever encroaching sea and waited for something to happen.
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