Doomware (4 page)

Besides, there were no other survivors.

* * *

After a lunch of corned beef and crispbread followed by tinned peaches, all of which he’d had to force down as if they had been laced with strychnine, he went back to bed. He usually took a short nap in the afternoon, but today’s nap lasted for hours courtesy of his hung-over state.

When he woke he got up and drew back the curtains. A zombie was walking along on the opposite side of the street. He’d seen this one many times. It was one of the few he had a name for, since there was one thing that made it fairly distinctive: it had a permanent erection. He was sure he’d seen the man before the catastrophe on train platforms and City streets, looking immaculately groomed and important in designer suits and long winter coats. In life, he’d probably been a banker or a stockbroker or an underwriter. He’d probably been organised and businesslike, private and proud. In death, he stomped along, as oblivious to the fact that he was naked from the waist down as he was to the engorged member standing up from his groin.

David couldn’t help but christen him “Everard”.

Dependent upon his mood, he was either amused or enraged by Everard. Sometimes he could laugh at him and feel no shame over it, and other times he was angered by the zombie’s obscene parade, and angered even more by the fact that he’d ever been able to laugh at it. Whichever was the case, he was always rooted to the spot by the sight of him. He’d found that, no matter how often you saw a man walking around in broad daylight fully aroused, you never really got used to it; the spectacle demanded your complete attention every time.

At dinnertime he ate a light meal and listened to some music (a compilation of classics: Mahler, Elgar, Satie) on one of the few old-style disks that would play on his ancient entertainment centre. The disks had been collectors’ items and were like gold dust. At least he had music. And hot water. And lighting. And something to cook with. He was lucky there was no problem when it came to power. The micromorphers and televisions and everything else had power in them, there was simply no way of utilising that power. Likewise with vehicles, whose mass converter cells lasted for a thousand years. It was another of the cruel ironies: there was limitless power, but he was powerless to control it. Like having a thousand workhorses and not a single harness. Despite everything, he understood there were things he ought to feel grateful for. But gratitude was difficult when everything, every waking moment, was such a tortuous reminder of all that had been lost. The bleakness of it was unremitting. No respite. Like a permanent winter. He longed for the days when cataloguing in a basement all day had been his only concept of hell.

As daylight failed he allowed himself half a glass of wine. Another day had passed. Another day to add to all the rest. Listening to the music’s gentle tides, he felt more relaxed and serene than he had in a long while. But when he drifted off to sleep in his armchair it wasn’t long before the music ebbed entirely and he dreamed about something that made him twist and turn and cry out in terror.

He watched with one eye the blurred ringer clanging furiously against the squat brass bells. It was a quaint little thing, his alarm clock. People marvelled at it. They also sniggered at his need for it, of course. It was a wind-up anachronism in a world full of brain-based computers tuned to atomic clock signals. He switched off the alarm and rose from his bed, a part of him aware of the strange silence left in the alarm’s wake, while a more dominant part of him chose to ignore it.

In the kitchen he took a Blox from the cupboard and placed it in the morpher. Work was going to be a bitch today, he could tell. He had that feeling: a sense of foreboding. Whenever Varley was on the warpath he could almost feel it in his bones. What have I done to deserve someone like Marcus Varley? he asked bitterly. Nothing, that’s what.

The morpher’s screen didn’t react to the proximity of his hand as was customary, remaining blank except for a single row of glowing blue dots. It failed to respond to his touch too, his fingers producing nothing but dampish clicking sounds. Frowning hard, he stared at the device. It had never done this before. Ever. Mystified, he kept tinkering with the morpher’s screen for much longer than was necessary to ascertain that it no longer worked.

Slowly it clicked. The level 12? Surely it couldn’t be that.

In the living room he grabbed his mobile from the cluttered coffee table. It was the same as the morpher: nothing but damp clicks and dots.

This was serious, he thought. This might mean a day off work.

Drawing back the living room curtains, he peered outside. He couldn’t see anyone or anything moving, but a thick grey haze was obscuring everything, so he suspected it was just a false impression of stillness. He showered and dressed hurriedly, debating with himself whether to bother with a tie, deciding to wear one in the end. He had to at least try getting to work, but if morphers and mobiles were out of order what would the trains be like?

Gripping his shoulder bag by its carrying handle, he ran down the stairs of his block. Outside, the sound of the front door slamming shut behind him was like a cannon shot, magnified by a silence that closed in on him as if it were a physical thing, bringing him to a standstill, freezing him in place as firmly as an encasement of ice. A strong smell of burning was in the air, but for some reason he wondered whether he was imagining it. All around him everything was cold and grey and lifeless, the lack of sound and colour making it seem as if the world had been drained of its energy overnight, the very essence of an ordinary workday made conspicuous by its absence. Eyes searching the area, mouth fallen open, he looked like somebody who was only just realising they’d taken a wrong turn, and had inadvertently stumbled into a strange and dangerous place. What was going on? Where was everybody? Where were all the cars? He could hear no type of traffic at all. No cars. No trains. No delivery drones. It took a conscious effort to break out of his frozen state and disrupt the all-engulfing silence, which he did as he made his way down Dunedin Road towards the Tube station, his footsteps echoing off the pavement in a way he’d never heard before, even in the early hours of the morning when most of the city had been sleeping.

When he got to the main High Road, which led to the station via a bridge over train tracks and the motorway, two cars were motionless in the road. They’d been travelling in opposite directions and had come to rest about 50 feet apart, facing away from each other, a box junction between them. He approached the nearest one, a frown fixed on his face, craning his neck to get a good look at the driver.

God! The silence! It was unreal and dreamlike. Moving through it gave him a feeling of floating.

The nearest car’s driver was a casually dressed woman with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap and her head was flopped to one side against the headrest. There was no one else in the car. He edged himself nearer slowly, as if wary of invading the woman’s space.

When he got closer he could see that her eyes were open. His first thought was that she was in some kind of trance. There was an expression of vague contentment on her face, as if she were immersed in some kind of private reverie. It took him a moment to realise that her features were actually set in an attitude of practised attentiveness – the kind of expression you wore while driving a car; on the face of someone in a stationary vehicle, it had been out of context just enough for it to be hard to recognise. He waved a hand in front of the driver’s-side window, feeling foolish despite himself. The woman didn’t react. She looked like a statue: she didn’t even appear to be breathing.

He started for the other car, but something made him stop; he was being drawn in the opposite direction, towards the bridge and the station. He had no idea why.

He turned, and at that moment a dog started barking somewhere up ahead, the sound of it echoing through the ghostly grey mist like a baleful warning. The road seemed to telescope before him, drawing the bridge further away, the houses on either side crowding in menacingly like sentinels intent on blocking his path. The effect was more than nerve-jangling; it was the most eerie combination of sight and sound he could ever recall experiencing, so much so that he was conscious of his senses imprinting it onto his memory.

He started walking towards the bridge, slowly at first as if his legs wouldn’t cooperate, and then gradually accelerating. The invisible dog kept up its barking. The smell of burning got even stronger. By the time he reached the gently arching bridge he was almost sprinting.

“Jesus!” he said under his breath.

Below him, stretching away towards the urban sprawl of central London as far as the eye could see into the mist, were vehicles stopped haphazardly this way and that. Vehicles of all types and makes: cars, lorries, buses, vans. Some had rolled into the backs of others or had jammed up against the central reservation. One had crashed into the back of a large truck and was billowing thick black smoke from a crumpled bonnet. Never before had he seen vehicles so outrageously out of place; normally the Autoroad system kept every vehicle within a set path via sensors inlaid into the road or strung from cables above it. The Autoroad system had clearly suffered a complete failure. This was why he’d been drawn in this direction: the motorway was always busy, the noise from it forming a kind of constant background drone you grew accustomed to and ignored. Now the drone was gone.

He crossed the road, knowing before his eyes provided confirmation that it was exactly the same story in the opposite direction leading out of the city.

What the hell was happening? Was he going mad? Or was he, in fact, in a
 
dream?

Leaning over the railing, he could see into a car stopped almost directly under the bridge. It was a small blue transporter with three seats – a single-gen car – most family units consisting of no more than three members. Like all the other vehicles, the car’s two-way windshields weren’t activated, allowing him to see the occupants clearly: husband driving, wife in the passenger seat, a child of about three, a girl, in the back. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a child so young. None of them was moving.

He looked more closely at the other traffic. As varied as the vehicles were, they all had one thing in common: motionless occupants. Drivers sitting motionless at the controls. Passengers sitting motionless at desks. Other passengers in sleeper cars lying in bed, having set their vehicles to drive on auto. And everyone, drivers and passengers alike, was as statuesque as the first woman he’d seen back at the junction, as if playing a game of dead lions while waiting for their vehicles to stunt back into life.

It hit him then.

“
No!
” he gasped.

He’d known before that moment, but his conscious mind had refused to countenance it. Such a thing couldn’t happen. There were too many safeguards in place. It wasn’t possible! Never in a million years could it happen. Never.

Never! Never! Never!

Stumbling away from the railing, he turned and ran.

The streets were littered with stationary car after stationary car, and occasionally a person lying prone on the pavement. He didn’t stop. He barely looked at them. He ran and ran, his slapping footfalls echoing off of concrete and tarmac, the dog’s incessant barking receding behind him. It seemed to him as if he were running through a cold and misty dreamworld. None of it seemed real.

By the time he reached his parents’ house he was out of breath and sweating profusely. He struggled to make his key work, but it wouldn’t. Unlike his cheap flat, his parents’ house was completely computerised – a smarthome. He pounded on the door with clenched fists, but silence was the only response.

Around the back he hurried to open the conservatory door, which had an old-style lock, all the while thinking how pointless it was: the back door of the house was sure to be locked up tight. He hesitated a moment before pushing down on the handle. To his astonished relief, the door opened.

He called out for his parents as he went from room to room on the ground floor. Everything looked as it always did: the bowl of plastic fruit on the kitchen windowsill; the foot-high china lions either side of the fireplace; his father’s architecture printouts piled neatly on the dining room table. The only things noticeably changed were the picture-less photo frames dotted all over the place. It was only an illusion of normality and he knew it. Even so, he couldn’t stop himself from noting every normal little detail, as if the accumulation of enough of them might help to stave off some great terror.

He found them upstairs, lying in bed, looking as if they were sleeping; his mother with her long dark hair and fresh face, his father who, with no ageing process to distinguish him, looked so like David they might have been mistaken for twin brothers.

“Mum..?” he said, in a low voice that sounded horribly loud. “Dad..?”

He reached out and touched the back of his hand to his mother’s cheek. It was stone cold. He tried to find a pulse in her wrist, but there was none. Then he did the same with his father.

They were dead.

Inhaling a huge lungful of air, he backed away from the bed as quickly as he would have had it just burst into flames. What should he do? Who was there to call? He didn’t even have a working phone. He checked his mobile; it was still useless. His breathing came rapid and deep, and he was aware at the back of his head that this was something he was contriving with himself to do. What he really wanted was sit down and try to think, or maybe lie down and close his eyes, but neither of those felt like the right reaction to discovering dead parents. Tears would have been appropriate, but they felt a long way off. Hyperventilation was called for, at the very least.

He returned to the landing on trembling legs and went through to his old bedroom, where he’d done most of his growing up. The place was largely unchanged: a single bed and a tall bookcase rested against one wall, a desk and chair stood before the window, while mirrored wardrobes covered another wall completely. He sat on his old bed and wrapped his arms around himself. He was shivering; the sweat he’d generated on the run here was turning cold and clammy. Despite the persistent feeling that he ought to be crying, tears still wouldn’t come. Instead, he concentrated on slowing his self-imposed heavy breathing, looking around the comfortingly familiar room with wild and frightened eyes.