All the Dead Are Here (29 page)

Jim watched as the Zombies overran the entrance to the building below, slowly taking the gunners and their crew, falling and being replaced as if nothing had happened. The troops fought well and took many of the Dead with them, but the never ending well of Zombies replaced them immediately. The smell of blood and meat, both fresh and rotten drifted through the ill fitting window into Jim’s office and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. He watched The Ministers’ troops skilfully injure a stricken soldier by holding him down and biting his arm, ripping great ribbons of sinew from the bone. The blood ran in rivulets from the exposed artery. Then they wandered off in search of new prey leaving the man to stumble in shock and horror as the realisation of his fate overwhelmed him. More than one troop immediately raised the gun to his chin and pulled the trigger before the enormity of their fate could be realised.

Jim marvelled at the control the Minister had over his troops. He had expected a force of Zombies, thirty, forty, at the limit a thousand strong. This perfect army under the tacit control of the Minister was unimaginable. Each troop acting as they had since The Fall, yet operating within the boundaries set by the Minister, working as the individual hunger drove them on, yet reined in by the power of the will of the Minister to mobilise the biggest army the world had ever seen.

Now they were in the building, and the roar of gunfire shook the ancient door on its hinges. Shouts and screams echoed through the home of a government overrun a second time. Then as Jim looked lazily through the window and Miss Mitchell clinked bottle to glass on her mission to numb the forthcoming pain, he saw the battle move away from the window and towards Westminster bridge. Then through the smoke and surrounded by the crowd he saw the red armour and the black suit. They walked purposefully down St Margaret’s street and a rising panic took Jim’s drunken legs as the disconnect between the CCTV cameras and the reality outside his window was removed.

The Minister is coming

The end is nigh!

Jim chided himself and sat down in his chair. He straightened his tie and flatted back his hair. Suddenly he wished he had a gun but at that moment he didn’t know who he would use it on when the Minister arrived. In the end he was glad he didn’t. He waited.

Then he could hear the shots die down to a sporadic pop and the screams fade to a panic filled gabble. The moans of the Dead rose in response and then there was the singing. It rose in volume, pausing only to ask one of the dying troops the location of Jim’s office.

“All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all,” it rang out triumphantly as it approached the door.

Three knocks, widely spaced. Jim looked at Miss Mitchell.

“Come!” he bellowed with as much gravitas as he could muster, and the alcohol helped. He would stand up to the Minister. If it was a psychological battle the Minister wanted, it was a psychological battle he would get and Jim would not fold nor confess his sins. At that moment Jim would be everything he guessed the Minister despised in humanity. He would not fold; he would be the very essence of courage in the face of overwhelming odds. Good God, he would be the essence of England itself. Jim reached across his desk to the comms unit, turned down the volume and opened the mic. Everyone based over at the Department of Control, safely tucked away high up on Canary wharf, would hear his last stand. Miss Mitchell shifted nervously in her seat. The door opened. In shuffled a number of old Zombies, torn and shredded suits and dresses hung from their emaciated
frames. Pockmarked and grey-faced they moved silently into position around Jim and Miss Mitchell.

Jim had never been so close to a Zombie without running or shooting wildly, but they were here now, standing within grasp. They swayed and moaned slightly and involuntarily as they waited for their Master. In came the red armoured personal guard. Jim recognised them all, each sent after the Minister, each never to return. The plastic segmented armour looked scratched and bitten, the suits below ripped and torn with all the military insignia removed but they still carried their weapons, including the short sword in the scabbard at their back. Looking through the open door, Zombies crowded in the hallway behind. The two nearest Jim leant down towards him and clumsily opened his suit to look inside. Satisfied, they opened the drawers in his desk and rifled inside. Finding nothing, they pulled the drawers out until they fell on the ground. Jim was glad he hadn’t had a gun after all.

“Hur, hur, hur,” chuckled a voice in the corridor. The crowd parted and Jim could see a small figure in a ruined hooded leather cloak enter the room, slowly chuckling to itself. Head bowed, it flicked the hood back. Jim was shocked to see a Zombie raise its head. All the reports he had received and the MP3 where Joe Wyndham had described the Minister had said he was human. It unclasped the cloak and let it crumple to the floor.

The Minister cut a small thin figure in front of him, tattered black suit and bloodstained dog collar hung limply from his ectomorphic frame. One shoulder was hunched higher than the other, through choice or disfigurement. Jim realised this was why the TIC snipers hadn’t found him, he was already dead. What had been a needle in a haystack search had become an impossibility.

The Minister looked around the room and saw Miss Mitchell. His brow furrowed and he waved his hand gently in her direction. The three Zombies nearest her turned slowly in her direction. She looked up at them and finished her whiskey in a long swig. The Minister let his subjects go and they fell on her with all the fury of their hunger unleashed. She tried to fight them off as they ripped at her clothes and flesh but she wouldn’t scream. One grappled with her arm and gnawed on it like a chicken leg, another peeled at her torso to reveal the red morsels inside, and the third buried his face in her neck until a torrent of blood pooled on the floor around them. They slavered and chewed at her loudly until she stopped twitching and hung limply like a concubine pleasured by her hungry suitors. Jim watched in terror but would not let it show on his face. He was angry now, there was no need for this other than a demonstration of power. More psychological warfare. All the time, the Minister watched Jim’s face, until he had had enough and the murderers stood back to attention. Blood covered their tattered clothes and dripped lazily from their stained teeth. They were passive again, all trace of their fury gone.

The Minister sat slowly in the chair opposite Jim and his black eyes gazed into Jim's. Jim hesitated and wanted to run. His legs were weak, but he would not let it show.

“Ye looked taller in yer posters, Jim,” the Minister said finally in a low, cracked voice that still rang with a resonance around the room. Jim ignored the comment.

“So, are you another decoy or the real thing, because I’m done pissing about with this shit,” Jim spat. The Minister raised his eyebrows, and smiled a thin, wan smile.

“I walk straight into your city, just tae come and see you and this is the welcome I get? Nae way to treat a man of God, a pilgrim, is it now?” he said cheerily, crossing his hands in his lap.

Jim felt stronger. Dead or not, this was just a man. He paused, knowing the calm would make his enemy speak first.

“Well,” the Minister said, “I’m ready to hear yer confession. Time to make peace Jim.”

“I’ve nothing to confess to you, you murdering scum,” said Jim with just the right amount of control and contempt. The Minister feigned a hurt expression.

“Murderer? Me?” the Minister’s Scots brogue rolling the R’s in the word, “Well, only the once. I believe you know Paul here.” Jim saw the Zombie Paul Jollie step forward. He had known Paul since he was a lad and now he was just another puppet in the Minister’s Army, another victim in a world full of victims.

“It turns out I havnae really got the stomach fer it. Paul and I have a special relationship. He killed me and I killed him. Mutually assured destruction, they used to call it.”

“Shame he didn’t finish the job.”

“Jim. This antagonistic attitude won’t win you a place in heaven, now will it?”

“Then I’ll see you in hell,” Jim smiled sweetly.

Paul walked into Jim Bramer’s office full of trepidation about his latest mission. “At ease, Paul,” said Bramer.

“Sir,” said Paul, relaxing.

Bramer motioned towards a chair. “Whiskey?”

“No thank you, Sir,” said Paul taking a seat in the red leather high back in front of the old mahogany desk.

“The reason I have called you here is, unfortunately, not a social one,” said Bramer.

“It never is, Sir,” said Paul, smiling.

“No... No,” chuckled Bramer.

“I want you to listen to this recording and tell me what you think.”

Paul looked around, his brow furrowed. He was confused. He had been here before. He remembered this conversation. Jim leant forward to push the button on the Sony Vaio and Paul stretched and grabbed his hand. Jim just looked at him. There were two Jim Bramers. The real one he could see reaching forward with his hand and the ghostly image behind leaning back with a furious look on his face, talking silently. There were others around him too, dark shadows in the grey stood in the room with him and on the leather sofa over there, a ruined corpse. Paul could smell the fresh meat and a hunger rose in him. He wanted to grab Jim and consume him. He pushed the impulse away.

This didn’t make sense, why had he come here? What was the mission? How had he got here? The last thing he remembered was being in the hospital in a morphine fugue. What was the reality and what was the dream? Paul didn’t know any more, but behind this all he could feel the grey envelop him as he shone like a bright star, close, but behind the gaze of the black hole that stared intently at Jim Bramer.

Jim saw something from the corner of his eye as the Minister talked. Paul’s slack expression changed for a moment. It looked confused.

“Well, if I must confess to you, then at least answer me a question,” Jim said. “How did you do it? How did you make your Army appear from nowhere and how did an army this massive move through the country unseen by the helicopter patrols?”

The Minister laughed his hollow laugh, “You mean you hadn’t even worked that oot?”

Jim shrugged and stared into the obsidian black eyes of the Minister, sunk in his graying, ancient face.

“James, James. In the day I hid them. Simple as that. In town halls and cinemas, in sewers and houses, away frae the prying eyes o’ your whirlybirds. That wus the easy part. The hard part was training them to use the missiles tae take them whirlybirds oot. Hae you any idea how long it takes tae train a Zombie to fire a stinger? Bloody months, and it has tae be the right Zombies tae. An if they failed at that, they could use they RPG’s. The real brainwave wus the runners, did ye see that one coming, eh Jim? What yer real question should be was, how did I outsmart you and walk straight into yer city and intae yer office to sit here?”

“I already know the answer to that.” It was the Minister’s turn to smile.

“Don’t flatter yourself. Your tactics, if you can call them that, were juvenile. Cheap parlour tricks from your marionettes. You won through numbers and nothing else. Your armies aren’t brave or noble or have any of the qualities that a great army has. You aren’t God or the Messiah, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. You are just a freak. In fact you haven’t been granted this ability; it’s just fallen to you through random chance. Maybe there are others in this world with your ability that haven’t realised it yet, or they were killed before they knew they had the gift. No, you were just lucky,” said Jim, calmly. He paused, but didn’t give the Minister chance to speak. He could see the doubt in his eyes now and pushed on.

“Each one of my men has given a good account of themselves and fought bravely until the end, each one of them is a hero and given enough time and resources we would have whittled your army down to nothing, found you and put a bullet through your ugly head. Look at the piles of corpses you left in your wake. My troops must have taken a hundred of yours to every one of my heroes. Every single one of my men would die for his brothers in an instant and every single one would die for his country to have things back as they were. Your troops aren’t loyal, they aren’t brave or heroic, they don’t recoil at the horror of war as they walk over their fallen comrades, they just are. You think God wants this? You think God wants his flock to die in screaming torment or turn into these monstrosities? No, Minister whatever-your-fucking-name-is. God is on our side and one day God will grant one human the chance to put you down once and for all. Then we will rebuild this world without you or your army, just as God intended.” Jim leant back in his chair and relaxed, smiling and in control of the situation. He had said what he wanted to say, let the bastard take him now. This was a speech for the personnel in Control, not the Minister.

Anger flashed through the Minister’s face. He tried to reply but fury robbed him of the words.

Thoughts rushed through Paul’s mind and try as he might he couldn’t remember the days between the dreams, yet the dreams ran on, longer than his waking hours. It didn’t make sense. In the dreams he was Dead, in his memories he was alive.

What if? What if he really was dead and the dream the reality, the reality the dream? Why would he think this? Why would his mind think this way?

Then it came to him. His mind had protected itself from the unimaginable horror of this reality the only way it could. Its living soul had retreated into the recesses of this dead brain so it could learn and come to terms with its new reality. He was dead. He had died with a sword in his belly in a kitchen in Edinburgh. Whatever the Minister had within him had mingled with the fake Minister’s Zombie blood and Paul’s human blood on the black and white tiled floor. This forced evolution created something new.