Plague Of The Revenants (2 page)

For the first week on the run I had real hope of fleeing abroad. It was a hope that soon faded and towards the end I realised capture was inevitable.
My face was on the front page of every newspaper, the tabloids were really running with it and I risked becoming something of a folk hero. I was hiding from everybody and everybody was looking for me. This was a triple murder on a slow news day at a time when the chief constable had made a pledge to get tough on gun crime. It took me five days to reach the Scottish Highlands but they had traced me all the way and I was only ever one step ahead. They knew I had stolen those cars and sightings of me had been numerous. I was pinned down. I lived rough for a few days in the wilderness, trying to catch my own food. But I was no survival expert and in the end I was reduced to scavenging from bins outside car parks. One day I was walking along a woodland path and I passed by a couple of hikers. I didn’t even try to avoid them and I noticed them looking at me closely. I just carried on walking along that path. It was less than an hour before the police helicopter was flying overhead, the booming voice from the megaphone telling me I was surrounded. I just lay on the floor and put my hands over my head before they had even told me to do it. This was the end of my criminal career. I was cold and starving, living from bins in the middle of nowhere when I should have been sunning myself in the Algarve. I was going to be a big time gangster, was going to lead the pack and have people in awe of me, the big man at last. Instead I was captured like a drowned rat, defeated and resigned and I knew then I deserved everything that was coming to me.
I pleaded not guilty because it was the thing to do. Even a thousand to one chance is better than none at all, and I had always been a betting man. The evidence was piled up against me. They had the gun, the scene and my fingerprints and DNA all over it. I had been stupid. I’d thought I’d covered every angle but instead I’d left open just about every base going. Strange how once you’re thinking up a great plan you can’t see any flaws in it but when it all goes to shit the mistakes are as plain as day. My barrister didn’t even try; come to think of it neither did I. In the witness box I was flippant and defiant, with one eye on my own legacy. The verdict was never in doubt. It took just two hours for the jury to find me guilty. I was warned what to expect and no longer cared when the time came for sentencing. My barrister told me to thing myself lucky if I only got forty years. In the end it was even worse than that. The judge called me one of the most dangerous men who had ever stood before him in the dock and told me he was positively chilled to the bone by the prospect of my ever finding freedom. He said I was completely beyond redemption and sentenced me to a whole life term. I would rot in jail for the rest of my life. Not one member of my family turned up throughout the course of my trial. Did I think I deserved it? Not really. I never had the slightest scrap of remorse. How could I? I’d killed scum. I’d gambled and it hadn’t paid off. Such was the way of the world. Still, the public needed to be protected from the likes of me. Truth be told I wasn’t particularly worried. I considered myself a big time gangster, a real hard man. Nobody was going to mess with me. I was going to rule that prison.
Belham Grange Prison had a reputation as the toughest slammer in the country, and it was a reputation it more than lived up to. It was here they sent the people who had no hope of rehabilitation, people who were never again to see the sun as free men. People like me. I thought I was going to be the number one hard man. The only problem was so did everybody else. Still, I was a big man and I was in good shape. I stood a better chance than most and because I was in it for the long haul I decided I might as well make myself at home. Some inmates used drugs to try and get themselves through it, but I was never one for that. Instead I went and worked out in the gym as much as possible, burning off my frustrations. First of all I became angry. Angry at white society, at my father for leaving me, at the gangsters for not handing over the dope when they were asked but most of all at myself for being so stupid. Towards the end I became resigned. My shoulders dropped and I became like those other dead eyed, prematurely grey losers who shuffled through the corridors waiting to die. I stopped trying to become a leader, stopped trying to be the big man. I was just Grant. There for life and waiting to die, the sooner the better as far as I was concerned. Eight years passed by. Time goes so slowly when you are without hope, the same thing day after day and only the occasional snatches of television and radio to indicate that time is passing by at all, the world still turning.
Then there was Blake. Had Blake not been a prison guard I had no doubt at all he would have ended up in here with the rest of us scum. Blake was a proper psychopath, a man of exceptional intelligence and no small amount of charm who both captivated and terrified guards and inmates alike. Blake manipulated and schemed, played both guards and inmates off against one another; encouraged dissent and division whilst somehow remaining aloof from it all. He never lost his temper with me, always hid his malice behind a veneer of friendliness. I thought I could take him on. After all, what did I have to lose? It wasn’t as if I was going to be up for parole any time soon. “Why don’t you be my eyes and ears, Grant?” He would tell me. “I could do with a man like you on the inside. Nobody would suspect a fine, upstanding individual such as yourself of being a snitch now would they? Come along, Grant, you might as well make your sentence a little more bearable.”
“I don’t think so Mr Blake.”
“Maybe a week or so in solitary would make you think again?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong, Mr Blake.”
“You’ve done plenty wrong you nasty little cunt, that’s why you’re in here, remember? That’s why you’re jerking off to pictures of the weather girls in the Sunday magazines instead of being out there in a real world getting some real pussy of your own. There’s some really nice pussy out there at the moment, Grant, did you know that? All the girls are wearing these really low cut outfits and every one of them is gagging for it in ways you can only imagine.”
Blake liked to provoke people. He was never violent himself, rather he was a master of manipulation. A quiet word from him could see inmates at one another’s throats, could turn guards against one another, could insight riots. He picked on everyone to a certain extent but he was especially hard on me. I suppose he relished the challenge.
Nobody knows what started the outbreak, only that it was pinpointed to a remote part of Siberia. Maybe it was an ancient plague unearthed by the retreating ice caps, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was the wrath of God visited on a corrupt and wicked world. Everybody had a theory. In those early days when the infection was isolated and faraway it was easy for the so called armchair experts to sit in the comfort of their studios and discuss the what ifs and whys. To begin with it was just something that didn’t affect us and was likely as not never going to. To begin with the general consensus which got reported on the news was that it was the result of some sort of designer drug driving people crazy and making them attack others. Later on it was declared a strange, rabies like virus. That is to say: people were bitten, died, and then somehow they came back again. The most sensible consensus, to me at least (and I had become very rational by then) was that it was some kind of parasite transmitted through blood and saliva that killed its host then took over its brain and brought it back again. Once you were bitten it was the end for you. You would undergo a brief period of death before the parasite re-established control over your brain and rose you up to live again in an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. How soon it took you to turn depended on how badly you were bitten, although even the slightest scratch from a tooth of one of the infected was invariably fatal in the end. There was no cure. I don’t think the governments ever got close before they too were wiped out. I remember the first time I saw a revenant on the television news report. It’s slow and shuffling walk, dead eyes, head tilted lopsidedly to one side and the low moan from the mouth from which speech would once have come. All the same I could not believe it would present so much of a challenge, could not believe it was right now toppling governments and leading to some of the biggest unrest the world had ever seen, could not believe anybody could be slow enough not to outrun them. This was before I discovered how quickly they could in fact move at close quarters, before I came to respect their sheer weight of numbers. I knew nothing back then, of course I didn’t. Soon the infection spread from Siberia to Moscow and from there to Eastern Europe. Every country in the world closed its borders but it was too late. Three weeks later the infection spread to France. A week later the first case was reported in Hastings. The army was sent in to close the place down. It was still too late. When it reached London we knew the country was fucked. Mass panic set in. People started rioting on the streets which had the effect of spreading the virus still further. Religious nut-jobs put signs around their necks and paraded around saying it was the ‘end of times.’ They were right, talked the most sense of anyone involved with the outbreak so far. When we went into the yard for exercise we could smell the fires and roasted flesh from where the government was desperately attempting to burn the bodies. Once we heard angry shouting and chanting outside the prison walls. We thought it must be the revenants come to claim us at last. It turned out it was just desperate people, begging to be let in. For myself I wished the revenants luck. I wanted them to destroy society. I did not at that point see the opportunity the catastrophe would present to me, just hoped I would live long enough to see everything crumble. The world could go to hell for all I cared. Some of the prisoners crowed at how safe we all were here behind bars but I knew it could not last. Worrying voices began to be heard and as the crisis went on their views started to gain more and more momentum. News was infrequent and unreliable. It was impossible to tell how bad things really were. Of course nobody told us lags anything. Towards the end we noticed fewer and fewer prison guards and we stopped being let out of our cells. Sometimes we would go days without being fed and would be reduced to drinking toilet water. It was clear the entire outside infrastructure was breaking down. I became frustrated. I was not afraid to die but I was not prepared to go down without a fight. I wondered if we might be abandoned completely by the guards and left to starve to death, locked in our cells. Blake somehow managed to get himself a gun and he armed the other guards as well. It was clear he was forming the prison into his own personal microstate with himself as the supreme ruler. Stanger still how some of the prisoners started to go missing, the weaker ones mostly; or the ones who were sick in the head; the nonces and the psychotic serial killers and those with the lowest IQs. I was sure Blake had something to do with it, but he was not quite the master yet.

Two weeks after the revenant plague first hit the shores of Britain we prisoners were herded outside into the yard and from there into vans, minibuses and
lorries. As we drove through the gates we were passed by long black cars I recognised as ministerial vehicles. The great and good now came to cower behind the thick walls of the prison protected by the army’s ring of steel. As we travelled to the town that day I looked out of the bus window and saw some terrible scenes. The highways were packed with traffic. The army cleared a path as best it could in order to let us through. Cars rushed past us, completely out of control, their occupants fleeing in a panic. We saw many of those same cars smash themselves up against trees or buildings. Houses were boarded up. Entire streets had been cordoned off. Cars and furniture formed barricades which were set on fire in a bid to deter the undead. It did not work of course. Nothing did. To see the revenants up close was as nothing I had ever seen before. The television could not do them justice. They shuffled and hobbled after us as we drove past, clawing with outstretched arms, their teeth chomping up and down in anticipation of their feast. Many of them had visible tears on their bodies, such as from their throats or arms from where they had been bitten. The most pitiful sight of all was that of those who had recently been bitten but were yet to turn running after the buses beseeching us for help. Their skin was already pale and washed in a cold sweat and their tongues lolled out to contrast obscenely with their infected, bloodshot eyes.

We had no idea where we were being taken. I wondered if it was to become decoys as the survivors were evacuated from the towns. Leastways I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out alive, especially not with Blake in charge. And yet the warden was pacing up and down the bus, gazing intently out of the window and he was actually smiling, as if he relished the chaos and was welcoming a new opportunity.

Eventually the convoy of vehicles pulled up outside a large football stadium guarded by what remained of the armed forces. We were let in through thick metal gates and the vehicles pulled up on a piece of waste ground in the stadium’s shadow. We were herded outside at gunpoint and lined up. I glanced beyond the fence and saw revenants already beginning to converge at the sight of us, rattling the chain links of the fencing as they sought to break through to us. Blake stepped out in front of us and held a megaphone to his leering lips. “Alright you cunts!” He exclaimed gleefully. “It’s time to get your hands dirty. So far you’ve been lucky. You’ve been able to sit in your comfy cells and listen to all this shit going on via the radios which means you should all be expects on our friends over here by now.” He gestured towards the revenants beyond the perimeter fencing. “But this ends now, do you understand me? The government, or what remains of it, has decided you’re all going to make yourselves useful. After all, why should good, honest people put their lives at risk fighting the worst plague we’ve ever seen in our history when we’ve got a whole other kind of living cancer putting their feet up in the warm?” He gestured towards one of the turnstiles which had been marked out in bright red paint. “Though that tunnel you’ll find hats, gloves, jackets and spades. You’re all to take one each and get to work. You’re going to be digging, and after that you’re going to be burning. You’re going to do this until you’re either dead or I tell you to stop. And don’t start getting the wrong idea my little heroes. There’s going to be no reprieve for good service here. You’re just as dead as the poor fuckers you’re going to be burying. The only question is how long will you get to live and will the Almighty pull off a miracle in the nick of time to see you rammed safely back into your own little pits of hell?”