All the Dead Are Here (27 page)

Jim woke with the early summer sun full in his face. It streamed through the window and made his face sweat precious water. He groaned and tried to get up but his old, stiffened neck complained loudly with a crack. He rubbed at the loosened flesh. The war of flesh was coming. The memory shocked Jim awake. He grabbed a half empty glass of water from his desk and drained it. He staggered to the toilet in the other room, drained himself, washed quickly and, just as he straightened his hair while returning to his office, there was a knock at the door.

“Come,” shouted Jim.

The door opened and in stepped Miss Mitchell, a short woman in her late forties and fiercely efficient. She had short black hair and a faded but smart twin set.

“Good morning, sir. I have Control on the line. They want to give you a sit rep but couldn’t get hold of you, probably because your phone is off the hook.” She strode over and replaced it, shaking her head slightly. It rang immediately. She picked up the receiver.

“Mr Bramer’s office... He’s here... Yes... No, I’ll have him call you in five minutes... Have the Zombies moved?... In that case, sir, I will have him call you in five minutes,” she said tersely as she plonked the phone down with just enough force to indicate to the caller on the other line they had been hung up on. Jim sat at his desk and Miss Mitchell wrinkled her nose at him.

“By the smell of you, you’ll need coffee and water. All non-military staff have left the building so there’s no breakfast but I’ll see what I can do about toast. That was General Jones.”

Without saying another word she strode out of the office. Jim had employed her simply because to her the Zombies were another obstacle to be overcome, like not having milk in your tea. He put his head in his hands and pulled his hair back. He picked up the phone and dialled.

“Control. General Jones speaking.”

“Jonesy, it’s Jim. What’s the situation?” There were too few Generals to not be on first name terms.

“No different. They haven’t moved all night but while you have been incommunicado we’ve pretty much got everything ready. I have a Division of troops at the gate, minigun and flamer crews ready. Everyone else is lined up on top of the wall or barricaded on the top of buildings along Birdcage Walk, the Mall and Buckingham Gate. We’ve also managed to get twenty choppers on the go, but no armour.” Tanks, like most military tech too big to be carried, hadn’t been used since The Fall.

“Any luck with the TIC Snipers?” The TIC snipers were Jim’s best hope. The Minister was the only one alive amongst the crowd and with Thermal Imaging Cameras, a sniper would be able to pick out the heat signature and take him out. Needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe the task.

“None so far and the BBC helicopter we outfitted hasn’t seen anything either,” said General Jones.

“Keep looking. Remember the TIC snipers can fire at will, but only at a signature. I don’t want that bastard walking up to the gate only to find they are out of ammo.”

“Righto. There are no reports of Z activity from the other gates too, so we’ve pulled a couple of Divisions over to the West Gate.”

“Good idea. Any luck with the heavy ordnance?” Jim asked.

“None. All the Tridents were made safe years ago and we know from The Fall what nukes would do to the Undead, even if we had any.”

“Radioactive Undead? Not Good.”

“No. All the bombs, tanks and heavy stuff were dismantled for parts years ago,” Jonesy said.

“It’s ironic. There hasn’t been a war between humans for sixteen years. Peace at last, eh?”

Jonesy didn’t know what to say to that.

“Also the situation at the Docks is getting worse, we estimate two hundred thousand trying to get out, we can’t contain the situation much longer,” Jonesy continued.

“Where the hell are they gonna go, Jonesy? Everything that’s got an engine, wings or sails has already left. Pull your men out. Get them deployed this side of the river. If the people want out the gate then let them go. It’s their choice.”

“You think they’ll think twice and calm down if we play ball?”

“It doesn’t matter either way, if we can’t stop him they might stand a better chance on their own, and all his forces are this side of the river.”

“Fair enough, but we’ll get him, Jim.”

“I bloody hope so. Call me if there is any change.”

“Will do.”

Jim put the phone down and picked up the remotes. He turned on the CCTV system and logged onto the Control network. Several different sized TV’s fixed to the opposite side of the office flickered into life. He could see what the commanders on the ground could see. The might not have armour but they had information, nothing moved in Greater London without it being picked up. Jim flicked on the BBC as well and watched the footage of the reconnaissance flyover again. He couldn’t comprehend the scale. He had hoped to feel more positive after he woke but in the face of these odds, how could he? The gate might hold until they ran out of ammo. The gauntlet that the Zombies needed to run to get to Westminster and Westminster Bridge might thin them down enough. With a stroke of luck one of the TIC crews might pick up The Minister and they were then into a straight fight, but Jim was a realist more than anything else, and he knew that battles throughout history were won by the army with the most troops. He didn’t expect this to be any different, and as Miss Mitchell arrived with his coffee and toast, he swung into action. He picked up the phone, and made some calls.

Paul knew that part of him was here in the dorm of the orphanage set up in the compound of Windsor Castle. He couldn’t move but he could feel the warm sheets, he could smell the dirty pillow beneath his head. Part of him was here, in the now, but part of him was in the dream. The same dream he always had. He was walking at night, surrounded by Zombies, through broken streets and overgrown fields; endlessly walking. He had no control over his movements but could see his hands and they were as dead as those around him. He screamed and sat up in bed. One of the other kids told him to shut the fuck up. Paul was eleven and his mum was long dead. He laid his head back on the pillow and sobbed quietly until he fell asleep into the grey.

“They’re moving. Yes, they’ve started walking towards the gate. I’ve never seen anything like it. God help us. God help us all,” the reporter commentated but Jim wasn’t listening. The whole nation of the Dead, moving as one, started to walk towards the gate, their footfalls a low rumble through the concrete and stone of the city’s foundation. Slowly, inexorably, they came. The images from the BBC helicopter showed them moving like an oily tide through the city, meandering over broken glass and rubble, around toppled street lights and rotting furniture, the discarded remnants of history.

In the helicopter the camera span around to show a line of twenty helicopters heading out from the city towards the massed crowd. It was a rag-tag collection of machinery, converted civilian and
military helicopters, older than the end of The Fall as the parts were easier to find or convert. They
stopped over the front line and waited for the order. Cannons exploded simultaneously at the crowd, flicking bodies into the air and splitting the concrete below into a fine dust that rose from the army, mixed with their black blood in an oily mist.

The BBC helicopter lurched sideways and the camera focussed in to see a covered artic trailer. It was being pulled by a line of Zombies, roped together like slaves moving a sandstone block for their Pharaoh. Suddenly, the covered side of the trailer fell away and inside was a row of Zombies holding tubes. The cameraman tried to focus in on what they were doing as they raised the green tubes to the sky, he zoomed in frantically to see that all the Zombies in the trailer had stinger missile systems crudely duct taped to their hands and as Jim realised what was happening, they fired simultaneously. Missiles streaked into the sky trailing ragged fingers of smoke. The helicopters had either had their chaff systems removed for parts, or the pilots were too young to have been trained in this pointless defence against Zombies. In the case of the two remaining military Lynx machines, their old pilots fired the chaff but in their surprise fired too late and, with a searing light and concussive blast that knocked the crowd below off its feet, showering the Zombie army with fiery helicopter parts. The humans’ air defence was removed with one stroke, along with the BBC helicopter as the screen in Jim’s office turned to static for a moment.

The phone rang, “Jim, its Jonesy. Did you see that?”

“He’s rolled through every military base in the country, picked up equipment and tools. You better expect more surprises,” Jim said, coolly. He realised now they had underestimated the Minister’s power and cunning. “Is there any news from the TIC snipers?”

“No,” replied Jonesy.

“Stick to the plan, Jonesy.”

“Yes sir.”

The nation of the Dead approached the gate. Miniguns and rifles exploded at the crowd as they came within range. Thick cordite smoke rose lazily past banners on the gate pronouncing ‘Work Hard: Live Safe’ and into the summer sky as the miniguns and ten thousand rifles picked at the crowd below. Like pushing oil on a table, the fingers of each minigun probed and prodded the mass only to be replaced by more dead as they surged forward towards the narrow opening.

The gate was sheet aluminium and steel, thick enough to protect against a multitude of banging fists but not thick enough to protect against the thousand Rocket Propelled Grenades that streaked haphazardly toward the gate, loosely aimed by their Undead troops.

The Minister relied on quantity, rather than quality of each shot. They slammed into the gate and the surrounding area with such a ripple of explosions that it shook the windows in Jim’s office. He looked towards the gate, past the ramshackle city, and saw the flash of light past Buckingham Palace. Some of the RPG’s flew ineffectually over the barrier and others hit the crowd of Zombies in front of the shooter, flicking them up like plastic soldiers taped to a firecracker, but most hit the gate or surrounding wall, which shattered like glass, sending shrapnel down Constitution Hill, shredding the home made poly tunnels that housed some of Greater London’s food source, with a ripping sound. The blast knocked over home made ploughs and farm equipment like a winter gale.

There was a calm after the explosion at the gate, as blackened shards of metal clanged and clattered to the ground, then the sound of injured troops crying out in pain, victims of the RPG’s or shrapnel blast that followed. This was followed by the sound of tramping feet as the Zombies breached the gate. The CCTV’s in Jim’s office switched to show the gate itself and, as the smoke cleared, the first
line of Zombies shambled casually through the breach. They marched round the ruined Portacabins
and markets used to process those coming into the city and provide them with food and water when they got there.

The grey was nothing: neither warm nor cold, neither dark nor light it just existed as a distance between two unspecified points yet it had character, Paul could see this now. There were areas of grey thicker than others, clouds of etherealness that he could use to hide from the black disc that spun in the centre of millions of black eyes. They watched it slowly rotate in rapture, these dead eyes, these soulless wells. All this time Paul hid from the dark. Then he could feel it, the road beneath his feet with the dead walking with him and the buildings that flanked them like broken monoliths. Ahead, he could see a gate explode as a thousand fingers of fire stretched from the dark hole in the grey to envelop it.

Paul juddered awake and could feel the warmth of Sarah against him in the cramped single camp bed and he wanted to stay here with her more than anything. They were young and in lust. He wasn’t dead, and it was just that dream again. He drank in her scent as she snored like a purring kitten. The fear finally left him, but he couldn’t sleep so he thought about passing his basic training in two weeks time and he rested his cheek against her soft, warm ribs as they lay together in the darkness.

Inside the gate lay Constitution Hill and the fields of Buckingham Palace gardens. Between that and the gate lay the semi circular ring of five bunkers, each equidistant to the gate. Inside, the guns spat rounds at the aperture where the gate used to be, tearing at the dead and those injured from the blast, without prejudice. The bunkers were constructed from rubble left over from the buildings demolished to make the wall but had never been used as the wall had never been breached. The mound of corpses grew, unable to pass the weaving aim of the gunners. Each gun was taken out in turn to cool and for a while it held back the Zombies until, pushing through from behind, scrambling past their older slower colleagues, the runners came. They shoved their way through from the back like commuters hurrying for a train, each desperate to get to the front line.

These were the freshly dead. To run as fast as they did they must have been turned within the last forty eight hours, before they started to slow and become as unstable as their more ancient brethren. Jim realised that they must have been pillaged from the myriad small communities that had lasted since The Fall, or recently formed strongholds as humanity pushed back. They had been kept alive by the Minister until the day before the Nation of the Dead appeared. They had been turned into his shock troops, undead suicide bombers in the Ministers’ jihad.

Figures sprinted through the thickening crowd, dodging and weaving towards the bunkers. Jim could see these were the young and fit dead, children and teenagers who had never known the world before The Fall, marched to the point of exhaustion and then turned to be moulded by the will of the Minister.