Doomware (31 page)

Whatever Tarot’s views on his possible role in the calamity, David didn’t like the idea that fellow non-elective acybernetics were involved at all, let alone that they might be directly responsible. He didn’t want to believe it. He saw acybernetics as being victimised and downtrodden, but not to the point of homicidal retaliation. Being a misfit, a black sheep, a poor relation whose existence mortified the rest of the family, didn’t automatically turn you into a murderer. Acybernetics were shy and lacking in confidence, like himself, or cerebral and brave, like Tarot. It was too much to think of fellow acy’s as being cold-blooded plotters of global genocide. Besides, he remained unshakeable in his belief that the appearance of the number 937 didn’t prove anything on its own. It wasn’t proof that the Acybernetic Initiative had massacred mankind. Although Lorch had espoused tactics that had verged on militancy, there was no hard evidence the Initiative had crossed over the line to terrorism. Tarot had severed ties with the Initiative more than 200 years ago, meaning his knowledge of its activities since then were limited, but surely they would have known about it if the AI had become a terrorist organisation. The AI certainly hadn’t made any highly publicised waves during David’s lifetime. Was it possible Lorch had acted alone? Or with the aid of only a few like-minded acybernetics? He thought it unlikely: it would have been too great a task to pull off.

He yawned and stretched. When he opened his eyes he was surprised to find the boy was in the room. Dressed in pyjamas and clutching Jerry, his plastic dinosaur, he was standing near the doorway on the other side of the room, not coming close, as if worried about disturbing them. There was an oddly blank expression on his face.

“What’s up, little man?” David croaked, sluggish with sleep.

The boy didn’t reply; he just kept staring in a trance-like manner, unblinking. Tarot stirred. David extricated himself from him and padded across the room in his underwear. He ushered the boy out and into the living room, where he knelt before him and said, “What’s the matter? Is something the matter?”

The boy nodded.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” David said, placing his hands on the boy’s hips and shaking him gently. “What’s wrong? Why the funny face?”

“I got a message.”

“A message?”

Another nod.

“From who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What kind of a message?”

The boy wouldn’t answer.

“Is it a voice message?”

He shook his head.

“A video?”

Another shake.

“Just text?”

A nod.

“What’s it say?”

The boy looked away, chewing nervously on the top of Jerry’s head. A glint of fear had appeared in his eyes, and it looked as if he might be about to cry.

“It’s okay,” David said. “You can tell me. We tell each other everything, don’t we? I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t wanna say it,” the boy said, his voice quivering, on the verge of cracking.

“Come on, little man. You can tell me. You have to tell me now.”

Shawn shook his head vigorously.

David took a moment to think. He hoped this was just a glitch in the boy’s brainware and not the precursor to something worse, but something told him it wasn’t a glitch. He needed to know the contents of the message, but he couldn’t force it out of the child. What could he do?

Then he had a brainwave: he scooped up the boy’s sketch pad, lying where it had been discarded the night before, and flicked to a blank page. “Here: write it down; then you don’t have to say it.”

The boy took the pad wordlessly. David wanted to read the message as it was being written, but the boy stymied that idea. He walked off, shielding the pad, clearly not wanting him looking over his shoulder.

With a sigh, David got to his feet and drew back the curtains. The sky was overcast and dismal-looking. He slid the patio doors open and breathed in the storm-scrubbed air. The rain was little more than a drizzle, and it, together with the fresh air, felt refreshing after the humid stuffiness of the apartment. He stepped onto the balcony, ignoring the wetness of the floor against his bare feet, and quickly scanned the town and shoreline for storm damage. Then he caught sight of them. Due to his height above ground level and their closeness to the building, he’d very nearly missed them. He advanced on tiptoes, treading as one might attempt to tread past a sleeping lion, revealing them in stages as he peered over the edge of the balcony.

Zombies. Lots of zombies. More than he’d ever seen in one go. Zombies as still and as silent as statues in their varied states of dress and undress. Standing ten deep, row on row, forming an unbroken line that stretched for as far as he could see around Shanti Court. He couldn’t take it in at first. The sight was too implausible, too spooky, for his mind to process. But, as soon as it registered that what he was seeing was real, his blood ran cold with terror. He backed away again, utterly shocked and speechless.

Shawn tapped him on the arm with the pad. He took it in a daze, barely able to focus on the words scrawled upon its screen.

Give us the boy or die.

He was aware of the look of incredulity fixed on his face. His muscles and mind seemed to have frozen, rendering him incapable of reacting to anything: not the wall of zombies, not the message, not the boy’s questioning stare.

“There’s a timer counting down as well,” said Shawn.

For a moment David looked at the child as if he’d just uttered some inane gibberish. “Have you seen what’s outside?” he asked numbly.

The boy nodded. “You’re not… you’re not going to… are you?”

The hesitant, abortive nature of the question, backed as it was by the kind of sincerity only a child could display, caused something within David to melt. He knelt before the boy again and grabbed his arms, only now realising how terrified he must be.

“Of course I’m not, little man,” he said. “Never in a million years. Never. Hold on! What timer? What’s it say?”

Once more, the boy became reticent.

“You must tell me, Shawn,” David said authoritatively. “You
must
.”

“It says seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds.”

“What did it start at?”

The boy’s expression turned overtly hangdog when he was asked this.

“Come on,” David said, shaking him a little. “It’s okay.”

“Forty-five minutes.”

David swallowed hard, resisting the urge to question the boy over why he’d taken so long to disclose the message. The poor kid was scared out of his skin. Besides, none of this was his fault. If he and Tarot had been keeping better watch they would have known there were zombies congregating outside. They would have been aware that much sooner of what was going on, the gist of which was relatively clear in his mind despite his shocked state.

Somebody was controlling those zombies
.

He didn’t know how on earth it was possible, but it was the only explanation. Normal zombie behaviour – insomuch as such a term could be applied to them – didn’t include surrounding a building and just standing there. They didn’t act in concert with each other, nor restrain themselves in each other’s presence. They were dead and deranged and beyond all that. Not to mention the fact that they were standing in the rain. Somebody else had to be pulling their strings, and whoever it was had sent the message too. The only suspects that sprang to mind were the offliners; they were probably the only ones deviously ingenious enough to pull something like this off anyway. They hadn’t missed the apartment after all. And somehow they knew about Shawn.

“You don’t have any information about where the message came from?” David asked the boy.

“No.”

“Nothing whatsoever?”

“No.”

“Okay, this is what I want you to do: go to your room and get dressed as quickly as you can. When the timer reaches ten minutes, tell me. Just call it out, okay? And every minute that passes after that, got it? Good, now off you go.”

He kissed the boy and sent him off, feeling his heart pounding in his chest as he watched him go. His ominous premonition had been correct: this was surely the trial they’d been hurtling towards. What did offliners want with the boy? Did they know he was uninfected? To them, a fully functional cybernetic brain would be a valuable asset, allowing them to tap into a source of vast information and uncorrupted computing power, perhaps the only such source of its kind left in the world. They wouldn’t think twice about turning the boy into a living computerised slave. But what if they didn’t know he was cybernetic? Maybe they wanted him for a different reason. The word “catamite” forced its way to the forefront of his mind, making him bite down on his lower lip in anguish. Maybe they were just growing tired of fucking dead flesh. He pushed the abhorrent notion aside furiously. No, they had to have known about the boy’s cybernetic nature. How else had they expected their message to be received if not via the boy’s brainware?

In the bedroom Tarot was fast asleep. David pulled the covers off of him and hauled him into a sitting position. Tarot was so sleepy he didn’t put up much of a protest.

“Get up,” David barked. “We’re in trouble.” He threw back the curtains and opened the door to the balcony. As expected, the wall of zombies completely surrounded the apartment complex. Beyond the wall, now cut off from them, was the Land Rover. “Look. When was the last time you looked out?”

Tarot didn’t answer. Bleary-eyed, he got to his feet and shuffled to the balcony, squinting into the daylight. When he saw the ranks of motionless zombies a look of incomprehension fell over his face that might have been comical had it not been for the direness of the situation. For David, it was like watching a replay of himself from moments earlier.

“What the hell..?” Tarot breathed.

David spoke quickly. He told him about the message and the timer and the zombies being controlled by offliners. They stared at each other. It was a lot for anyone to take in, David knew, but he was worried that Tarot was still reeling from last night, that he was still overwrought and not himself.

Tarot rubbed his face and blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Has he sent a reply?”

This caught David by surprise: it hadn’t occurred to him to ask. “Er, no. At least, I don’t think so.”

“Good, make sure he doesn’t,” Tarot said, as he hastened to get dressed, causing David to do likewise. “Get together everything we need to take from here. This place is compromised; we won’t be coming back. I’ll get the weapons ready.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“It doesn’t look like they’ve touched the Rover. We’ll wait for them to make a move and then blow the claymores. They might not know how well armed we are; it’s the only element of surprise we’ve got.”

“D’you think it’s those offliners?”

“That’d be my bet. That’s why I don’t want him sending a reply. You can’t negotiate with offliners.”

David breathed a mental sigh of relief. Tarot’s centuries-old brain was seeing things from a tactical perspective far superior to his own, and his usual steely composure seemed to have returned in full force. He was back to being the person they needed now more than ever.

After dressing and making sure the boy hadn’t replied to the message, David began throwing things into bags. They would be taking only what they could carry, so he took only what was essential. There was no time to be very organised about it, and decisions about what was essential and what wasn’t were made on the spot. His prophylactics, the boy’s clothes and photographs of his family he deemed essential. Food he dithered over for a moment, before deciding they couldn’t carry it. They’d find some elsewhere.

Before he knew it the boy was calling out that the timer would run out in ten minutes’ time. David rushed around the apartment, his heart thudding in his chest, trying not to let the unnerving scene outside catch his eye. The question of why they wanted the boy refused to leave his mind. What would they do to him? Just thinking about it made him feel sick with worry. He wouldn’t let it happen, zombie army or no zombie army. They’d have to take the boy over his dead body – and Tarot’s too, he was certain of that. Had they really thought they’d just hand him over? Had they really expected that he, David Lawney, would send the child – the beautiful Boy King unsullied by sickness who called him father – out like some sacrificial lamb to be carted off by hordes of the undead? The bastards were beneath contempt. They might have stooped to such a low to save their own skins, but not everyone was as spineless and morally bankrupt as them.

Time passed impossibly quickly, the boy’s countdown increasing in volume as the number of minutes diminished. The three of them flew around the apartment, each in his own world of fear and frantic activity. Amid the commotion, and without being told to, the boy fetched Tom’s box and set about getting the recalcitrant cat into it; he clearly wasn’t about to leave the pet behind.

When the boy called two minutes they congregated on the top-floor landing, where David caught sight of the claymores. Each was a flat, compact hunk of metal, curved horizontally and standing on its own little legs, one side bearing the admonition:
THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY.
Inside were metal balls that would become airborne when the mine detonated, spraying the entire area like buckshot from a gun.
He’d never liked the menacing devices, had always been guiding the boy out of their presence, but he was grateful they were there now, now that they stood a chance of delivering them from evil, and equally as grateful for Tarot’s foresight in setting them up.

Tarot had wedged the lift doors open. He was bristling with weapons and equipment, and from a holdall full of weapons and ammunition he handed David a sub-machine gun.

“I don’t think they’re armed,” Tarot said, referring to the zombies. “At least that’s something.”

David hadn’t thought of that: there was nothing to stop them from being armed to the teeth with all manner of weapons: clubs, knives, even guns. But the scant consolation he gleaned from such a thing evaporated when something else occurred to him.