All the Dead Are Here Read online

  The street below is clear as I hear the crash. Thousands of Dead are so crushed up against the shop the sheer weight has shattered the safety glass and they pour in like ants over a dead bird. I glance at my watch to realise he has been playing for over an hour, long enough for each shambling corpse in earshot to add their weight to the number. I want him to stop so they will disperse and leave him be, and I want him to play to free my soul from this place for just one desperate second longer.

  The crowd start to thin on that side as they enter the shop and I see a couple tumble stupidly from the smashed windows of the first floor. The rest rise up the sides of the building, clambering on top of each other in their desperation.

  I ready myself by getting comfortable and breathing slowly and regularly to level the sight. Music Shop faces slightly towards me as he plays and I see his chest rise and fall with each lyric. His fingers play gently across each key as he creates, in this city of destruction, a pure thing, a human thing reminding us that humanity isn’t survival, its creation.

  Then I see the first head rise from the stairwell onto his roof, snarling and crusted with filth, its milky eyes narrow at seeing him and it rises to its feet, mouth contorted in its snarling hunger. I hope my fingers can match the perfection of Music Shop’s playing.

  It does and even from this distance I take the thing through the forehead, its skull shattering like glass and a wild hue of colours decorating the stairwell and Zombies behind. They come thick and fast now, having located the source of the sound.

  Crack. I shoot. It spins and falls to the ground. Crack. It falls to its knees as others push it over. Crack. Pure luck takes one and ricochets through the eye of another. Over and over I squeeze the trigger, my rhythm matching his, and I hear Music Shop play as if he is at a recital. He doesn’t even see them scrambling up the stairs as I take each threat out. The pile of finally dead corpses grow, as does the pile of empty magazines at my feet. I will not falter. I will grant him every second before they take him.

  “No. No. No,” I whisper to myself as the tide turns. They come up in twos and threes now and I have to swing wildly to target as they veer out of the stairwell, stumbling towards their goal, their heads bobbing as they slip on the fallen, I find it difficult to draw a bead and then, when the mag runs out, I realise they will be on him before I change it. One more I couldn’t save. I watch as they close in on him and for a moment I wish I had one bullet to save him the pain, and I remember the sign. They are barely ten feet away as he finishes. I see him pause and breathe out. Five feet. He picks something up and holds it in both hands, then he turns and looks at me, smiling and I drop the gun from my eye. I see the distant rooftop and the trail of Zombies cover him, and I want to look away but can’t.

  Then I see a flash from the side of the building and for a second the tanker bulges and warps before exploding. The white light makes me squint as the shockwave takes a second to reach me. It knocks me on my backside and, as a wall of noise takes the air from my lungs, I see glass, body parts and a guitar fly over my head. The explosion seems to last forever and as I lie there I see a disembodied hand hit the roof not five feet from me. I wonder just how big an explosion needs to be to throw a hand a good quarter mile to my location.

  Now the only sound I can hear is my ears ringing and I scramble up to the edge to see the source. I peek over and see that it wasn’t just gas in that tanker, whatever it was has levelled not only the music shop but also all the surrounding buildings and the buildings next to those, which are in the process of collapsing and finding their new shapes as the smoke rises into a mini mushroom cloud.

  “Jesus!” I say to no-one in particular as I survey the scene. Papers and detritus fall languidly to the ground and small fires take root in amongst the red mist, Zombies turned to stains like their victims as the mist obscures the hole where the music shop used to be. I realise I never knew his name.

  Then I look down. The streets are empty. No living or Dead. All I can see is the car below me and the empty street around me. I look up into the distance left and right along the road and realise they must have heard it and flocked to him, every damn one of them that could hear him. Shit, I could do ‘Walking in the Rain’ down there!

  My mind reels, still shocked by the blast, and suddenly I’m running. I grab the backpack and fling the door open. For the first time in a week there are no hands below me, only the ruined stairs. I turn and look once again at where the music shop was and smile. He knew exactly what he was doing, and not just for me but for all my island neighbours. He gave us hope and opportunity, and as I jump down into my shop I realise, for him, I will not squander either.

  The Minister Part 1: Genesis

  /Tape starts

  MB: “I’m in conversation with Joseph Wyndham, leader of the Eastnor tribe, and one of the longest running siege survivors in the UK. I’m also here with his daughter, Isla Wyndham..”

  IW: “Hi.”

  MB:”We are in his farmhouse on the Isle of Mull, off the West coast of Scotland. Joe, you holed up in a little-known stately home...”

  JW: “It was a castle.”

  MB: “Erm. Okay. In a castle in Worcestershire for nearly fifteen years. In fact, Joe, is it true to say that the clearances were fully in effect and London was almost Zack free by the time you were discovered?”

  JW: “Yup. We just got forgotten about. All you reporters put up stories on the net about some rednecks in Texas holed up with an arsenal of guns, with the military helping. We had none of that, just British nerve and each other. We didn’t even have a working radio for the last few years”

  MB: “Er okay (nervous laugh) well that’s why I’m here Joe! To let you tell your story.”

  JW: “Yeah. But you lot started it, I reckon.”

  MB: “Well its generally accepted that it started in China, in a rural location...”

  JW: “Bollocks... It was all over the place. You couldn’t turn over the TV without a new Zombie film advertised, or some new book, or some game or such. For fuck’s sake, Donald told me there were people writing stories and putting them on sites and that. If you ask me, we all wanted it, nature just provided it based on our collective belief. It had all gone wrong way before it started, what with the economy and the environment and all that.”

  MB: “So we asked for it? Because of the media?”

  JW: “Look. Everyone was pissed off at being a consumer, we all wanted to feel alive or ‘real’ or whatever the fuck that means. Well, we got it in spades, mate. In fucking spades!”

  (A scuffling sound we assume is Joe rising from his chair.)

  IW: “Dad, please sit down. Look, can you just move on please?”

  MB: “Well how did it start? For you, I mean.”

  JW: “I don’t want to talk about that night.”

  MB: “Oh.”

  IW: “Dad, that’s why he’s here, that’s why you invited him.”

  JW: “I didn’t fucking invite the wee fucker.”

  /crack

  (Analysis tells us the noise on the tape is Joe’s walking stick falling to the floor.)

  IW: “Okay, that’s why I invited him then Dad... Because you wanted to tell him what happened... you said someone needed to know... needed to know... well... because we were the only ones left.”

  JW: “I don’t want to talk about the first night, or the beginning, or... your mother. I want to talk about what we built. Or about what happened to the others. Or about him.”

  IW: “Is it okay if he just talks about that?”

  MB: “Sure.”

  JW: “I’ll tell you what we built. We built heaven in the the midst of fucking hell. That’s what we built. Of course we were lucky in the first few weeks, with resources that is, not the whole apocalyptic ‘everyone you have ever known is dead’ kinda thing.”

  MB: “In what way?”

  JW: “Well, Eastnor had a good defensible layout, and a fully functioning portcullis, so the few of us who were there in the first days could
at least be secure. We then had a week of hard frosts at the end of the month which didn’t fully freeze the Dead, but made it impossible for them to move quickly or even walk.

  During that time we picked up about a hundred survivors. Most in shock, and we managed to get working vehicles, a generator, and supplies to hold out for as long as we could. Hell, we even got furniture, beds, sofas and tables because we had just about everything else we needed and were running out of ideas. More than that though, most people, myself included, were just in massive amounts of shock and didn’t wanna think about what they had seen. Or what they had had to do to survive. We had some weapons too, old medieval swords and maces, all sorts of things, just no guns. We just kept busy building stuff, getting the power running, and of course we fucked up. We weren’t thinking about things we would need, and getting things we didn’t need, like fucking TV’s! Jesus, we had four TV’s at the end of that week all with nothing but static on them.

  It took us about five years to be in a position where we were doing okay with hard winters, it was the ones where the temperature didn’t drop below freezing and we couldn’t go raiding that were tough. We had some good people too, a good mix of everything, I mean some of the teenagers were a pain in the arse, like they just expected the net and TV and phones to work and shit like that, and when it didn’t they couldn’t adjust and started causing trouble.”

  MB: “When I spoke to Isla on the phone she said you had an unusual punishment for those that broke the rules.”

  JW: “He he. Well, the castle had a kinda round dungeon that led in from the courtyard, through a locked door, down into a stinking pit underneath the main building. There was a gate to the outside with solid steel bars going floor to ceiling in the stone. So if someone broke the rules we put them in there for the night. Sure enough a night of the undead howling and scratching to get in at a live one was just enough to make you think about what you’d done; and with no light down there you were shitting it that one would get in. You could just about see them moving in the moonlight getting more agitated the longer you were there, clawing and ripping at each other, biting at the bars. Shit, I even put Isla in there once when she was about twelve.”

  IW: “I broke the rules, stole some food and I knew it was wrong. As leader, Dad didn’t have any choice but to put me in there. I didn’t steal again though.”

  JW: “I didn’t tell you this, but I just sat with my back against the door all night listening to you cry down there. Broke my fucking heart...”

  (Unidentified bang, we believe it was the arm of a chair being hit.)

  JW: “Time for a Whiskey! Can you go get a bottle, hun? You want one son?”

  MB: “No, I’m fine thanks.”

  (Isla leaves and goes through to the kitchen, the background sounds on the tape for the next 2.45m is her fetching the drinks.)

  JW: “We stopped using it after a while, though.”

  MB: “Why?”

  JW: “About 6 years in, this young guy called Danny, who’d been with us since that first month, well, he’d been starting to go a bit stir crazy, you know. Just started going over the top about things. Reacting to anything said to him, you know what I mean? Well he’s sat in the main hall, which is this huge room with an old medieval fireplace and brackets on the walls where we had removed all the weapons, and huge maroon tapestries with hunting scenes and things like that on it, playing draughts... er... checkers you guys call it?”

  MB: “Yeah, same thing.”

  JW: “Ah, okay. Well, he’s playing chequers with John Edwards, an old guy who was in his seventies when it all went tits up. John couldn’t do much work, but he had a great sense of humour, knew some great jokes, and was just a real nice old fella. Well there’s no one else in the hall and Danny just ups and grabs John by the collar and starts to beat the crap out of him. I mean, just really pummels the old guy until his nose is all over his face, one eye’s blown up like a balloon. John’s teeth are all over the floor, and Danny’s screaming at him. Poor old John’s just sobbing and going ‘what have I done?’ over and over and over. So I hear this and come flying into the room, and Danny just won’t stop. He’s just punching, kicking and screaming stuff at him until me and Bill Mynott pull him off. He’s just a wild man. Just fucking insane. It took about three of us to hold him down. Emma took old John out and we dragged Danny to the dungeon and just fucking threw him in. I mean It was like a switch in the guy. It was completely unexpected.

  (Click of fingers)

  He went from human to wild animal. So he’s at the bottom of the stairs of the dungeon, still screaming and punching the wall. I’m watching him from the grate through the door and I’m going, ‘Danny, calm down man, you gotta calm down! What’s wrong...?’ Well he’s not watching what he’s doing and he’s just pacing about really agitated, shouting and waving his arms around. One of the zombies just catches his sleeve and pulls him in to the bars. I haven’t locked the doors yet, and I’m down the stairs quick as I can, but there must have been ten Z’s pulling at him. They just grab his arms and legs, and you can hear the bones cracking and Danny screaming. They just pulled him through the bars in bits and the last thing I see is his face stretching, and his jaw bone sticking out through his mouth, with the bones popping in his skull and deforming to get through the narrow opening. The scream just turns to air rushing out his lungs as his body is pulled through. He’s just bits of flesh being fought over... just bits of meat...”

  MB: “Jesus.”

  JW: “The worst of it was when we asked John why he’d done it, John didn’t know. Danny just stopped mid-sentence, he said, and his eyes glazed over and that’s all John could remember. Well, John was never the same after that and he died a couple of winters later. Poor old sod. We just put it down to mental pressure, you know? Just something you have to deal with. I’m sure you know mate, you lived though it too.”

  (The sound of Isla re-entering the room, the click of ice on glass can be clearly heard.)

  JW: “Where you been darling, you’re soaked!”

  IW: “That storm’s come in and the rain is peeing it down. I nipped out the back and locked the gate, so I don’t have to do it later in me jammies.”

  JW: “See, wisdom beyond her years, this one.”

  IW: “Oh Dad, shush... Here’s your whiskey.”

  (Sounds of glass being placed on table.)

  IW: “Can I have one?”

  JW: “Isla Wyndham. You know you’re too young.”

  IW: “Please?”

  JW: “She’s got me wrapped round her little finger (laugh) just like her mum did.”

  (Sounds of Isla fetching a glass from the Kitchen.)

  MB: “Look Joe... It’s getting late and I don’t want to beat about the bush any more.”

  JW: “Oh aye?”

  MB: “There was something you said in your TV interview when you were picked up. Something about a Minister?”

  JW: “... The Minister... yes.”

  MB: “When did he join the community?”

  JW: “He didn’t join the community. But I can tell you what happened when he left.”

  MB: “Please.”

  (Sound of whiskey being poured twice.)

  JW: “Last winter we had been in Eastnor for over fifteen years. We had gone from about a hundred people down to about thirty, through zombies, disease, injuries... you know what I mean. It would be fair to say, though, that we had it down to a fine art. This survivalism, I mean. We knew what we were doing and some of the kids, like this one here, grew up not knowing anywhere else... So it was a good winter for us, with some frozen weeks, and some good raiding. One afternoon, just as the sun is going down, this guy just wanders up to the castle. At first, Jim, who was on watch, thought it was a Zack that had somehow survived the freeze, but this guy’s just picked his way through the thousands of frozen Z’s outside and collapsed by the gate.”