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  On Church Road he entered an arcade – the type he normally avoided, but this one had numerous exits so he deemed the risk acceptable – and searched a shop named Frederico’s Finest Foods. He had visited the place many times in the past and had stripped it of anything useful, so he was pleasantly surprised when he found a packet of dried pasta and a couple tins of salmon wedged under an empty display rack. In the real world he never would have been able to afford stuff like this, but in this world that was the cat sorted.

  The next shop had trendy signage featuring one word: Zena’s. He had no idea what the shop sold; it was locked up tight, and its two-way mirrored windows prevented him from seeing inside. He cupped his hands against the glass and leaned in close. No good. He pondered whether it was worth the effort of trying to gain entry as he studied his reflection. Boy, you don’t look good, he thought. Several days’ worth of stubble grew from his pale skin, accentuating his squarish jawline, while curls of greasy black hair hung down from his cap like the tendrils of ailing plants. If he didn’t know better he could have sworn he’d aged since the last time he’d caught himself in a mirror. His cheeks definitely had a more hollow look about them, causing him to worry briefly about illness. The threat of disease was ever-present now, the multitude of decomposing bodies dotted everywhere akin to biological dirty bombs, each a festering factory of contagion against which his pills were his main line of defence. It scared him more than he chose to admit to himself. If he fell ill now there would be no one to turn to, no doctor, no expert capable of assuaging his pain. Potentially, he might face a slow, lingering, howling death the likes of which countless people had been forced to endure in the times before cybernetic analgesia.

  Slipping off the holdall, he took the rolling pin from his pocket and raised it, poised, before the shop’s door. He swung with great force, marble striking glass with a loud crashing sound that reverberated around the confines of the arcade like a gunshot in a shooting range. The glass cracked, but didn’t shatter. On the first few occasions he’d ever done something like this, he’d been seized by a sense of guilt, looking around sheepishly for the appearance of a shopkeeper, or a policeman, or somebody demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing. He still looked around, but only because he worried about the noise attracting hordes of them. He swung again, producing the same result: cracks but no real breach, nothing that gave him a chance of getting the door open. He swung again, and again, wincing at the effort and the noise, but still the glass refused to yield. What the fuck was this stuff made of?

  Abruptly, he stopped in mid-swing and sagged against the door, breathing hard. The jaws of a terrible feeling of futility clamped around him. What was the point? It was useless. He was useless. He could feel the uselessness coursing inside of him. It flowed in his veins the way shit flowed through sewer pipes: hidden from view, but there nonetheless, stinking and repellent and unwanted.

  He straightened up and took a huge, cleansing breath. Get a grip! he exhorted himself. You gotta be stronger than this, for Chrissakes. It’s just a door. No door’s gonna beat you.

  When he finally managed to get inside, he stifled a humourless laugh at what the shop sold. Clothes. Sartorial concerns weren’t exactly high on his list of priorities. Zena’s now seemed to him like such an obvious name for a clothes shop he chastised himself, but he might as well check the place out now he was here. The walls were lined with massive blank screens on the right and cubicles on the left. Out the back would be the retail micromorphers for making items of clothing precisely to their buyers’ requirements. The morphers wouldn’t be working any more, of course. In an adjoining room were racks of vintage-style clothes on hangers. Made by loom and hand, these were of lower quality than morpher merchandise, but had higher price tags – fashionably high prices for highly unfashionable methods of manufacture. He looked through them. Women’s and children’s. No men’s.

  “Typical,” he said under his breath.

  When he returned to the main area he inhaled sharply, his heart missing a beat.

  A zombie was looking straight at him.

  CHAPTER 2

  D + 188

  No. Its godless eyes may have been fixed his direction, but it wasn’t seeing him at all, only its own image reflected in the two-way mirror. Seconds passed. He allowed himself to exhale quietly. Had it been attracted by the sound of the pin blows? Probably. The bastard thing.

  He remained absolutely still as he watched the creature, one hand ready to grab the rolling pin should he need it. It was a fully grown male with longish, lank hair and filthy-looking clothes it had undoubtedly been wearing for months. Layers of blood congealed to the colour of damsons covered the lower half of its face, combining with its ghostly white skin to form a grotesque version of a clown’s face paint. But the most striking things about it were the things most striking about all of them: the eyes. The pupils were masked by starbursts of a metallic grey colour, like polished silver, as if mercury eye drops had been dripped into each one. The partially obscured irises were virtually colourless, while the whites were no longer white; they were all but black. The overall effect made them look like photographic negatives of normal eyes, and such a look was truly and unmitigatedly horrible, calling to mind a litany of dreadful things no matter how many times you saw at it. Disease. Unnaturalness. Evil. Death.

  The zombie peered at its reflection as if deep in thought, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. The thinking man the thing had once been was gone for ever. Now it was just a collection of impulses and processes and reactions to stimuli, the range of which he was still trying to comprehend. He’d never seen one attack its own reflection, for example. They didn’t seem capable of mistaking their mirror image for a separate entity the way animals could.

  The thing shuffled off towards the exit, dreary and desolate, with the aimless bovine gait most of them had when they weren’t reacting to something. He watched it go, fairly confident it wouldn’t change course as long as it didn’t see or hear him. He waited for what felt like a reasonable length of time before tiptoeing to the window. There was no sign of it.

  Outside, the morning mist had dissipated a little. He couldn’t see the zombie, nor did he know which direction it had gone in. He would have to be careful.

  In a shop further along the street he found three 50-year-old bottles of real red wine from the south of France. He whistled at the price of them – actual vineyards were all but gone, even in France – before slipping them into his holdall, wrapping them in sheets of plastic so they wouldn’t clang together as he walked. What he really wanted was a gun. Something old-fashioned that would still work. Old things were his lifelines now. He peered out of the shop window at the houses and tower blocks nearby. Did they look like the kind of places where antique weapons might be lying around, just waiting to be found? There was no way of telling. He decided against looking today. Just being outside was stressful and he felt drained already. It was time to start backtracking to the flat.

  * * *

  On the street leading to Trinity Court he froze when he saw a zombie up ahead. Its back was to him, but several things gave away who it was: the biceps that bulged like overstuffed sausages; the back that was as broad as a billiard table; the enormous hands that called to mind the powerful claws of a mechanical digger. Or, rather, these things gave away who it had once been: Marcus Varley. He hurried to hide himself behind a low garden wall. Varley had hated him in real life, had delighted in making his life a misery. Now the zombified Varley hung around the vicinity of his flat as if it were a starving paparazzo and he were a superstar. Was it a coincidence? Logic told him otherwise, but he couldn’t help feeling that Varley was out to get him. Him, personally.

  My very own stalker, he thought. Just what I always wanted. It would have to be a 250-pound bodybuilding freak turned maniacal zombie though, wouldn’t it? Just my luck.

  Varley’s only saving grace was that his great muscular bulk made him slow. The bastard was b
uilt for power, not speed, and he’d always been able to outrun him relatively easily. Not that his poor heart had enjoyed the experience. There was no way of knowing what the zombified version of Varley would do if it ever got its hands on him, but he felt he had a pretty good idea; it made him feel sick and light-headed just thinking about it.

  Crouching on his haunches, he peered around the garden wall and watched as Varley’s broad, T-shirt-clad back slowly receded into the vanishing mist like some awful earthbound iceberg.

  * * *

  The cat wolfed down the salmon and spent the rest of the day lying motionless on the floor like a stuffed rug, looking pleased with itself. David could barely summon up any appetite and nibbled half-heartedly on some expensive handmade potato chips.

  By the time daylight started to fade he had managed, however, to finish off a whole bottle of wine, the stuff having barely touched the sides going down. Revelling in the devil-may-care mood it gifted him with, he laughed so long and so hard that by the time he stopped he couldn’t remember why he’d started in the first place, which drew yet more laughter from his lips.

  That’s it, smile and the world smiles with you, he thought. Laughter is the best medicine and all that crap. Why couldn’t they remember that?

  “Just ‘cause you’re one of the living dead now,” he slurred, pointing at an imaginary zombie in front of him, “it doesn’t mean you’re not still the same great person – enjoy life!” He threw his head back and roared with laughter.

  Then he sang an old sea shanty, the words dredged up from somewhere he couldn’t identify feeling apposite in the circumstances.

  I’ll never make old bones

  But I don’t care

  I’ll hurry to God’s gate

  And meet Him there

  I’ll never make old bones

  But who’s to say

  We’re not all destined

  To go the same way?

  He sang it as a sea shanty should be sung: loudly and heartily, with a fist punching the air. But such forced levity was unsustainable, and the singing abruptly stopped when his chin fell onto his chest. Breathing heavily through his nose, his thoughts darkened. They deserved it, the zombies. Sometimes he chose not to admit this to himself, but a part of him believed it. They’d brought it on themselves. The bastards deserved to have been struck down by the one thing they had treasured most. They had loathed and persecuted and made fun of him and his kind, but what they would give to be like him now. The irony of it! But then his thoughts turned to his parents and his grandparents and his great-grandparents and his friend Michael – who’d been his friend no matter what, no matter how hard the tide of society must have pushed against him – and grief mingled with the anger, causing sudden tears to well in his eyes. But even his mother … even his dear sweet dead mother … even she had called him a–

  His mind was far more receptive to anger than it was sorrow. With all his strength, he pitched the empty wine bottle across the room. It flew end over end and shattered against the wall, sending the cat sprawling for the door.

  When the ill effects of the wine hit, they hit hard, uncoiling inside him with all the spitefulness of a spurned lover. He ran to the bathroom and vomited. It wasn’t long before an empty stomach left him retching helplessly.

  I’m not used to wine, he thought feebly. I should never have brought it back here.

  After the retching had subsided he went to his bed and lay down. The cat was there, its bottlebrush tail still proof of the fright it had received.

  “Sorry cat,” he mumbled. God only knew how sorry he was. In every sense of the word.

  Taking great care, he rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. His head spun so violently it was as if a torture device had been implanted directly into his brain.

  Oh God! If only he weren’t so alone. This whole thing might have been bearable if only he had a friend. Just one. Somebody to rely on. Somebody to talk to. Other than the cat. A fellow human being.

  Gradually, he drifted off into a restless sleep, and dreamed about the start of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  D - 1

  The lights came on as he opened the door to his flat and the music in his earphones was replaced by a voice repeating “Mum is calling”. He reached into his pocket and hit a key on his mobile.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello love,” his mother said cheerily. “I’m just calling to see what you thought.”

  He closed the door and dumped his shoulder bag onto the floor. “About what?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “About what?” he said, more irritably than he’d intended. “Sorry, I’ve just been stuck in a basement all day cataloguing crap.”

  “Aw, no fun?”

  “It was hell.”

  “Oh, love! Have you eaten?”

  “I just got in.”

  “At this time?”

  “There’s something wrong with the Tube.”

  “Oh dear! I hope it’s nothing to do with the news.”

  In the living room he was met by a rare sight in this day and age: a television screen. It sensed his presence and turned on, and he switched it to a news channel with a wave of his hand. In the top right corner a holographic representation of the Earth showed a red dot pulsing over the area of the Balkan Peninsula, while a banner below the newsreader scrolled: Level 12 Cy-Vi Alert.

  “Level twelve?” he said. “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s the thing: there’s never been a twelve. The highest was a ten nearly fifty years ago.”

  He went into the kitchen, where a smaller holographic television came on, tuned to the same news channel. Beyond the window shone the distant, hazy lights of Canary Wharf and the City of London.

  “It’ll turn out to be nothing,” he said with confidence. As he talked, he took a brick-like block wrapped in a label marked Blox from a cupboard, placed it on a plate and put it in the morpher. “There’ll be reports about a couple of people being lobotomised for about ten seconds, a big hoo-ha, and then the whole thing’ll be forgotten about.”

  “I expect so.”

  The news programme was now showing a map of Europe with a red swathe sweeping across it.

  “You should fix something to eat, love,” she said.

  “I’m doing it now.”

  His morpher was a “special” one with a touch screen, an addition that was unnecessary for the vast majority of people. He flicked through the different options, made his selection and pressed the start button; it bleeped confirmation and whirred into life.

  “What are you having?” she asked.

  “Fish and chips.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Anyway, I don’t have to worry, do I?”

  His mother hesitated a moment before she said, “Well, that’s the good thing about it, isn’t it?”

  Even she didn’t sound convinced by her own words. He decided to change the subject.

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Oh, you know what he’s like: always working. He was complaining he couldn’t get through to anyone in Budapest and thought it might have something to do with this level twelve thing. It’s very odd. I tried calling Marcia in Munich, just to see, and no joy there either.”

  The morpher gave out a chime and died.

  “It’ll be a satellite thing,” he said. “Look, my dinner’s ready.”

  “Yes, you should have eaten by now, and make sure you wrap up warm tomorrow ‘cause it’ll be cold.”

  “Mum, I’m ninety-eight years old,” he said tonelessly. He couldn’t think how many times he’d had to remind her of his age.

  “I know, but you’ll always be a baby to me, won’t you? Look after yourself.”

  “I always do. Bye, Mum.”

  “Bye, love.”

  He hung up and opened the morpher’s door. Where the Blox had been lay a steaming fishcake in breadcrumbs, chips and a mixed vegetable purée. He took the meal and sat at the dining table, his eyes on th
e TV. The newsreader was saying something about equipment malfunctions.

  It’s always the same, he thought. They made such a big fuss over nothing; it was almost a form of entertainment for the listless ranks of after-work viewers.

  He tucked into his dinner, not knowing it was the last of its kind he’d ever taste. Not knowing that by morning his mother and his father and everyone else he’d ever known would be dead.

  CHAPTER 4

  D + 189

  He woke feeling as if he’d just been in a car crash. A dizzying turmoil clouded his brain. A jarring sensation reverberated deep in his bones. A fuzzy-headed acceptance of death gave way to an awe at still being alive. He’d never been in a car crash, but it was the way he imagined waking from one felt. This happened every morning, this car crash malaise. It was really quite appropriate when he thought about it; the whole world was one big car wreck now – why should he feel any different?

  This morning the malaise was joined by something else: a hangover. He’d forgotten how much he hated them. They had always enflamed his envy of everyone else, the normal masses who’d been freed from the burden of physical pain, a state of painlessness that persisted in their zombified state. They never cried out in pain, no matter what. You could plunge a knife into them or set them on fire and they wouldn’t even react to it. This, of course, only served to make them more terrifying.