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  He felt awful. Eyes firmly shut, head pressed against pillow, he lay listening with one ear to the sounds that drifted from an air vent high up near the ceiling. A dog barking in the distance. The hush of a few spare trees swaying in the wind. The sound of a zombie as it wandered the streets outside. This last one was merely vocalised gibberish, uninhibited and incoherent, one random outburst after another, like a stream of Morse code tapped out by a madman, the guttural, staccato tone of it containing suggestions of the human, the animal and the machine, though no one of these was sufficient to categorise it on its own. It was a horribly unnerving sound, the effect made even worse by the eerie way in which it echoed off of concrete and timber in the still city air. As awful as it was, the vent had offered up far worse for his senses and his imagination over the past six months. Especially late at night. They never slept, as far as he could tell. Instead they roamed the city in numbers like angry nightclub rejects, making sounds so scary even the toughest guy would have hid, quaking, beneath his bedclothes, wishing himself deaf, for each was such a stark reminder that the world had descended into – quite literally – stark raving madness. Sometimes he felt quite certain that the sounds alone were driving him as insane as the rest of them. Only on rare occasions did they wash over him, leaving him untouched, as simple to ignore as the sound of his own breathing. He hated the vent. He would block it up as soon as winter bit.

  He opened his eyes; the pain throbbing in his forehead doubled so he closed them again. Gregor Samsa must have had better mornings than this, he thought bitterly. Even after The Metamorphosis.

  He wondered what time it was – until he remembered how it didn’t matter. Keeping his eyes closed, he shifted into a sitting position very slowly, like the kind of long-gone old-timer who’d had to mind his ageing bones. Water, he thought. I need water.

  He clambered out of bed and padded through to the kitchen in his underwear, stretching his arms as he went, trying to shrug off the car crash malaise and the hangover as if they were heavy overcoats. In the kitchen, which was far too small for all the accoutrements of food-making he’d had to accumulate since the disaster – refrigerator, microwave oven, electric grill and hotplate combination, pots and pans and utensils of every description – he downed glass after glass of water while the cat let out a high-pitched mew and rubbed itself against his arm. He felt the cleansing liquid sloshing about his distended belly and started to feel better at once. A compulsion to pour the remaining bottles of wine down the drain nagged at him, but he resisted it. It wasn’t the wine’s fault; he had to learn some self-control.

  After feeding the cat he rooted around in a cupboard for his pills. For decades he’d kept them in a special dispenser, dutifully sorting them into compartments labelled with the days of the week – until the calamity had struck, when he’d stopped using the dispenser and lost track of the days, making pill-sorting a useless gesture, a thing of the past. He thought today might have been a Tuesday, but there was no way of knowing for sure. There was something strangely pleasant about neither knowing nor caring what day it was. Every day was as nameless and dateless as the days before human history.

  He swept up the pieces of the broken wine bottle like an automaton, his jaded eyes barely focused on the task, taking care not to cut himself out of habit more than anything else. Then he took a seat in front of the living room window and sat for a long while staring out over the familiar skyline of the sepulchral city. London: the great metropolis turned necropolis he called home.

  Poor old Londinium, he thought. After all you’ve been through. To end up like this. It broke his heart to think of St Paul’s, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey wreathed in zombies, but wreathed they were. The cathedral was especially galling. He’d always loved the elegant dome that had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire, a constant on the London skyline despite the procession of world wars, a sight he’d particularly enjoyed at night, when its illuminated facade seemed to him like an edifice to all human aspiration. Of course, there was no going there at night any more, but he kept the image of it in his mind like a photograph of someone special tucked into a locket, one he chose to gaze upon now and again while immersed in mournful daydreams, allowing himself to swim in the bittersweet remembrance of a much sweeter time.

  As he watched smoke from some unseen fire drifted into the air a long way off, near the Thames. In the beginning he’d dared to hope that such fires were signs of other survivors. He’d imagined people like himself setting them as a smoke signal, a kind of forced regression for the children of a ruined technological age. But now he knew better. The fires were started by electrical shortages, or the sun’s rays, or perhaps by the zombies themselves.

  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.

  CHAPTER 5

  D

  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-bas
ed 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 t
he 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.