All the Dead Are Here (7 page)

He had forgotten her face, he was sure of it now, but he remembered her touch and her smell. Suddenly, as before, his reverie turned to anger. This was someone’s fault, it had to be. There was no justice if it wasn’t, there was no hope. He flung the picture across the room in disgust and before it hit the ground the anger faded and he regretted it immediately. It smashed against the fridge and dropped to the floor, disintegrating as it did so. He rushed over to it, gently flicking the glass away to reveal the picture below, he took it in his hand and let the fragments slip from it. He lifted it away and blew the smaller shard from its surface.

The scraping started again, closer. John stopped and tried to locate the sound but it stopped again as he did so. The back door was still shut, locked by the greenery beyond. If it was raiders then they were being overly cautious.
“
It could be wildlife,”
he mused, unconvinced.

He looked around the kitchen, tidy except for coffee mugs still left in the sink, pans now rusted to their hanger, windowsill pots of herbs now just memories of twigs on the sill, until he saw the note on the kitchen table. It hadn’t been there when he left that fateful morning, he knew that as he had been the last one out of the house to go to school. He had used the key he had carried for eighty years, now back in the front door.

Fearful, he approached it, thick dust obscuring the writing. The scraping started again. He ignored it. Slowly, he lowered his head and blew across its surface to reveal his mother’s writing underneath. The scraping turned to a muffled thump, but the note was more important. He leant against the table to get the distance right for his failing eyes. It was addressed to him.

John,

His throat went dry. The scraping ate at his peripheral consciousness.

We got caught in a riot when I went to drop your dad off. One of the rioters attacked him. I’ve called Doctor Brown. If you get back before he gets here we’ve locked ourselves in the cellar as there seems to be some rioting outside.

With an arrow pointing to the cellar door.

The scraping stopped again. In a daze, John walked to the cellar door and looked down to see the faint impression on the ground. He screwed up his eyes and reached down, head inches from the door, to find the cellar key pushed underneath, and, before realisation emerged, the door shook violently, rattling in its hinges as a long drawn out howl, loud enough to shake the windows made him jump and fall on his backside. There was another high pitched howl as the door continued to rattle and shake, and then it was joined by another ghastly shriek. The door vibrated back and forth pounded from the inside.

John realised the Doctor never came, and neither had he, and his Mum had either been bitten or hurt and in her realisation of the horror to come had pushed the key out from under the door to prevent their escape.

The screws in the hinges began to loosen, the gap round the door increasing as the old wood creaked and snapped.

John stood as quickly as he could, wrestling the machete from his belt.

“
Only in the dark, dry places of the world, like damp-proofed cellars!”
he thought to himself. The door splintered along its length and he caught sight of wisps of black hair falling over the black, rotten sockets where his mother’s eyes should have been, yet somehow she saw him and howled the rage and hunger of eighty years of solitude. Behind her the nose and features he recognised from his father, twisted into a sneering ghoul’s hunger.

The final hinge burst, the top of the door fell forward at an angle revealing his parents beyond who paused, in anticipation of the meal ahead. Leather skin stretched taught against their long dead frames, and they stretched their grey, skeletal finger around the edge as they pushed against the splintered wood. Their mouths opened and closed soundlessly revealing blackened teeth and gums.

John steeled himself, machete in a firm grip. In the garden beyond, he heard ten thousand startled Starling wings lift from their perch on the old oak tree and rise into the crisp, spring sun.

John hopped around in panic. He had scrambled down the alley in hope of escape and found the end blocked. Turning, he saw a group of Zombies round the corner see him and start to advance with that guttural growl. Fear rose in John’s throat and frantically he tried to climb up the sheer wall but couldn’t find a handhold in the well pointed brickwork.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he repeated. The Zombies filled the end of the alley. He couldn’t run past them. Arms raised, they moved inexorably towards him with hungry lust in their rheumy eyes. Frantically, John tried to brace his back against the wall and shimmy up, but the gap was too wide and he fell on his ass. He had no means of escape. He huddled in the corner and the Dead closed the last few inches, bending down to grab him and feast. He raised his arm up to stop them and noticed that he could see through his hand. His whole body tingled as the moans rose to a crescendo, and as the Dead grasped at him, snapping their teeth and licking their lips, his arm seemed to vanish in front of his eyes.

“What the f..,” he said.

8.96 nanoseconds prior to John saying “what” Cadish once again surveyed the scene many miles below. He was perplexed and confused. This was almost the polar opposite to the effect he had expected. The simulations he had run had shown happy meat and a pleased population with a bright future for the meat creatures. No. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t right at all.

3.47 nanoseconds before John said “f,” Cadish reviewed the past few hours’ surveys, collated the anomalies, ran a series of simulations based on current and assumed data forward in time to several thousand years and came to the conclusion that he didn’t have enough data to assume anything. He would have to talk to one of the locals. Get their perspective on the situation.

“Yuck,” Said John as the transfer completed and he found himself crouched in the centre of a silver room. Myriad complex pipework in what looked like stainless steel formed the walls and as he looked closer he saw pipework on pipework like a fractal pattern. What looked like blades or butter knives appeared to be connected to the ends of some of these pipes or rods. The room was roughly square and dimly lit even though he could see no light source. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he realised he could see his breath. It was freezing cold but as he stood the temperature rose dramatically.

“What. The. Fuck,” John repeated, now completely confused and feeling slightly sick.

“Apologies meat creature. Interior space has oxygen content but the temperature will take several divisions of linear time. Bits of time. Pieces of time. Pieces of Eight? What?… seconds to achieve your ambient temperature,” said a low hollow voice that didn’t seem to come from anywhere.

“What the fuck?” John repeated.

“Are you stuck? Locked? Repeating? Looped?” said Cadish.

“If so, say, ‘What the’, if not say, ‘fuck’.”

“Eh?” said John. The room seemed to vibrate with a low rumble. John immediately thought it sounded like someone saying ‘Hmmm’ as if they were frowning in consternation.

John regained a modicum of composure. “Where am I?” he asked to the room.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Cadish. “You are not stuck. Looped in linear time! Communication can commence. Let us talk together/communicate in sporadic sound wave amplitudes.” John just blinked. “Would you like a seat?” said Cadish, emulating meat protocols he had observed.

John nodded. Cadish thought this was wonderful. Normally, transferred creatures became angry or panicked and had to be returned to their prior location before they hurt themselves. This creature showed a higher function.

John felt the ground beneath him move and stepped to one side. The pipework and blades below him seethed and writhed before rising out of the ground searching and feeling their way up to a height of about three feet. There was the sound of a thousand knives being sharpened as the rods flicked about, searching for something as if working out the best position to lay and for several seconds it flapped about ineffectually before finally settling into something that resembled a lopsided chair, or it would had there not been a nasty looking blade sticking up from the seat.

John didn’t sit.

“Oh sorry,” said Cadish and the offending blade flipped about as if searching for somewhere to hide, like a mouse caught by surprise in the corner of a shed with no immediate escape. Eventually, it forced its way under several other blades laying flat on the seat and nestled in as if getting comfortable. John sat down gingerly and the chair seemed solid enough.

“Good, good,” said Cadish. “I cannot offer you food, energy, fuel, sustenance...”

“Look. Where the hell am I?” asked John, trying to bring some sanity back to the situation.

“I have created this aperture to maintain your current life state. You are several divisions of distance above your previous position. Divisions of distance, millimetres, yards, chains, inches, kilometres, miles. Yes, miles. You are several miles above your previous position. Look.”

Two large rods folded out of the roof at one end of the room and an inky image coalesced between before forming an unbelievably high definition image of the Earth in 3D. The ruined Earth sparkled below John, it was so realistic, so beautiful and, with a sickening sensation, John realised he was in space.

“What the... what are you?” exclaimed John.

“I am Cadish,” said Cadish.

“What’s a Cadish? A Computer? A ship? A robot? An Alien?” said John.

“I am Cadish,” said Cadish. “I am not a PC, an ocean going vessel or an alien. Not to me, anyway.”

“Well, what do you want with me?” he asked.

“Good, good. Straight to business. No beating about the bush. Excellent,” said Cadish. “I need to enquire/ask/determine/assess/simulate/hypothesise/find out and torture several parameters with reference to the situation currently in progress through linear time on the surface of your home planet/homeworld.”

“You want to ask me a question?” summarised John.

“Yes,” said Cadish with uncommon brevity.

John shrugged and, with no small measure of glee, Cadish realised this was the meat gesture for ‘go ahead’. The image on the screen morphed into a street view. Zombies were chewing on a fresh kill, savouring the dark meat of the liver of what looked like some poor teenager. A rod shot up from the floor with a ‘snick’ and stopped in front of the image.

“What are these?” asked Cadish, tapping the screen with the blade pointer.

“These are Zombies, Cadish. The living dead, eating the flesh of the living,” said John, sickened by what he saw.

The physiological response of the meat creature confused Cadish. “Living Dead is an oxymoron, a conundrum. A paradox. Not… erm... right,” said Cadish.

“The dead started rising up last night, they started attacking and eating people. I don’t know why, Cadish,” said John sadly, thinking about the people he had lost in the last few hours.

“Maybe it was a disease, some type of swine ‘flu, or maybe the government,” he continued. Cadish saw the same sadness come over John that he had observed on his arrival and initial surveys of the planet.

“I do not understand. These Zombies are autonomous, moving, thinking, in the same way as you meat creatures. Why do you think they attack you meat creatures?”

“I don’t know, Cadish. I’m not a Scientist. They aren’t the same though, are they? They don’t bleed, they don’t think, they just eat human flesh,” said John.

There was a low rumbling ‘Hmmm’ from Cadish. “You are correct, meat creature,” it said after a moment’s thought.

“John,” said John.

“What?” said Cadish.

“My name is John. John Kendall,” said John.

Cadish remained silent. “JohnKendall. I do not understand death,” said Cadish eventually.

“Nor me.”

“When meat ceases to move/function/talk/speak/complain/analyse/think, what happens?”

John thought for a moment. “Everything stops, Cadish. The heart stops pumping blood, electricity stops going through the brain, the soul leaves the body.”

“The soul? I have not seen this on analytical diagrams of your meat structures. Where is this ‘soul’?” This was totally new information to Cadish and was very exciting.

“If you are religious you believe that the soul departs the body to move to a higher plane or a different dimension,” said John.

“Oh,” said Cadish. “Please remain here for 3 divisions of linear…sorry…seconds.”

“Do what now?” said John as the room dissolved around him. Panic gripped as the cold of space nibbled at him and the air was sucked from his lungs. He could see the Earth hanging like a jewel below him but pain shot through his eyes and he had to close them before they were forced from his body. The pain and cold increased exponentially until he realised he was sat, once again, in the spindly metal chair aboard Cadish. He breathed deeply, recovering his composure before screaming at his captor.

“Cadish! What the hell was that? You left me in space!”

“Yes. Apologies. I needed to check several trillion dimensions and as you can appreciate this can take some divisions of linear time,” said Cadish.

“Your meat structure ‘souls’ are not referenced in any pan dimensional literature, nor could I detect any evidence of a physicality of ‘souls’ in any dimension other than this one.”

“I don’t think it works like that, Cadish,” said John, still out of breath.

“Why?” said Cadish petulantly.

John sat and thought for a moment. “I wish I had the internet here,” John mumbled.

“The internet? What are the internets?”

“Our global information network on Earth.”

“Oooh!” Said Cadish who was actually quite impressed by this. “Where is it?”he enquired. The scene on the screen still played out but in the background John could see a shop counter with a PC on it. He stood and walked over to the screen.