Then the battering ram hit the door again, and the hinges gave way. Once the wood split, the weight of the doors lent its own momentum to the shock of the impact. As soon as the battens began to fall, it was obvious that nothing behind the double door was going to put up any significant resistance, even though the sheer bulk of the secondary barricade stopped the battens from crashing down immediately. We all stepped back.
Every man who was still there did exactly what he had been told to do—except me. Kevin went to put
Highway to Hell
on the blaster. Jim went to stand in the doorway of the kitchenette. Some of the others clambered up to the crowded mezzanine; the rest moved back into the corners. I guess I just hadn’t been doing rockmobility long enough to have got into the habit of following Stan’s orders. I wasn’t being insubordinate, let alone brave. I was just confused. I didn’t know which corner to head for, or whether to join the queue for the stairs up to the mezzanine, so I just stayed where I was, hesitating.
Where I was happened to be a couple of paces behind Stan, and a couple to his left, relative to the broken door.
I was still there when the battens were unceremoniously shoved aside and the monsters surged through.
The remains of secondary barricade were still in their way, but they flung it aside with the casual ease that monsters always manifest, when something is getting between them and their intended prey. None of the flying debris reached as far as me, and Stan only had to swat away one skidding chair, but any faint hope we might have had that the ED thugs would spend four or five minutes stumbling and tripping over like the Keystone Cops on acid went right out of the broken windows.
In fact, presumably following a carefully-prepared script, more than half of the thirty amply-booted brutes who’d brought the ram continued to hang on to it as they drew it back into the street, turning it through ninety degrees so that they could use it as a wall against the riot police, who still hadn’t contrived to get the van up the hill past the boozers from the Crown and Bells. More than half of the rest were holding a non-violent but conscientiously-obstructive discussion with the members of the police first-response team.
Thanks to the fact that the huge doorway was now wide open, I could see the distant riot-van and the ongoing discussion quite clearly—and a whole lot more. Suddenly, the deafening thunder of
Highway to Hell
didn’t seem so inappropriate—and it didn’t seen ironic at all. The monsters didn’t seem in the least surprised or alarmed by it. It was probably their kind of music—but Stan really did seem to be drawing strength from it, standing tall and firm like a true knight.
All the world really is a stage, and all the people in it merely players, but it seemed to me that a good two-thirds of the hundred-and-fifty-strong crowd now gathered outside hardly even qualified as spear-carriers. They were just swarming extras, intent on raising the arms in which they were holding their phones or dedicated cameras to get a better view. Their
avant garde
was crowding the steps of the Hall, but making no effort to rush in. I only hoped that when the riot cops eventually got past the telegraph-pole, they’d be able to force a way through in order to come to our aid, however belatedly.
Only four of the ED thugs actually crossed the threshold, although three more remained on the steps, as if to hold back the crowd. Given that they probably had paid employment as night-club bouncers, I figured that they were probably experienced men who knew what they were doing and could cope with the task—but anybody can be wrong.
One of the four who’d made an entrance stepped forward to confront Stan—who was, as he’d promised, simply waiting there to “front it out”. Unsurprisingly, the monster who stepped forward was the biggest of the four—big enough to make Jim look like a modest individual, let alone Stan.
The giant was wearing the standard khaki waistcoat and trousers, both garment bristling with oddly-shaped and bulging pockets, but unlike his followers he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt. His chest was bare, evidently to display his pride in his very extensive tattoos. He had a lot of them, including the obligatory flags of St. George, swastikas, daggers and dragons, but pride of place on his vast clean-shaven chest as a golden eagle with its wings outspread, perched on a cartouche bearing the motto:
Pro Patria Mori
.
I was tempted to ask him what kind of Englishman would walk around with a Latin motto sprawled across his navel, but I didn’t dare, Stan wouldn’t have approved.
“Where’s the girl?” demanded the patriot. “We’ve come for the angel of death. Hand her over, and nobody will get hurt.”
Stan didn’t bother to ask what they intended to do with Pearl if they got their grubby hands on her, or even to compliment his adversary on what was probably the longest speech he’d ever made in his life. Instead—and I have to admit that he took me completely by surprise, although I probably should have been expecting it—he simply reached up to the collar of his black T-shirt with both hands, and literally ripped it from top to bottom, following the line of the sternum.
Then he pulled the torn halves apart and said: “There’s no need for this, Brother.” Maybe the appeal to brotherhood would have sounded more convincing if Kevin hadn’t followed Stan’s instructions and put
Highway to Hell
on the blaster, but maybe not. The words were, after all,
supposed
to be ironic.
I couldn’t resist taking two steps forward, just to see what it was that Stan had tattooed on his chest—the broad chest that had always been covered by a black T-shirt during the fortnight I’d known him. That movement brought me to stand right beside him, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with him—a side-effect I hadn’t even considered, let alone planned.
As if in reflexive response, the ED Goliath’s three companions each took a diagonal step forward, in order to wind up virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with the monster-in-chief and one another.
More flying buttresses
, I could help thinking.
Stan didn’t tell me off for not obeying orders, but he certainly didn’t seem glad to see me there when he risked a brief sideways glance.
The tattoo on his chest was a phoenix. The cartouche on which it was perched bore the motto:
England Will Rise
Again
. It was a very impressive tattoo. The eagle, big and ferocious as it was, had something of the air of an old sepia photograph about it, by virtue of its suntanned background. Stan’s skin was polished ivory, delicately striped with blue veins. The accidentally-prophetic phoenix and the fire of its miraculous rebirth stood out beautifully, all their artificial colors flamboyantly ablaze. I only hoped that the cameras in the doorway could capture the full effect.
The reason that Stanley Blake was so convinced that he “knew how to handle these fuckers,” I belatedly realized, was that he had been one of them.
Had been
being the operative words. Becoming a zombie changes people.
It also, unfortunately, means that even your very best comedy moves fall flat.
Stan knew perfectly well that what he’d just done was absurd. He knew that it was beyond melodrama, way out in the realm of the ludicrous. I honestly believe that he expected it to raise a laugh, or at least a chuckle. He had never expected for an instant that his erstwhile colleague was going to respond to the word “Brother” by falling into his arms and declaring that the war was over—but he had expected a better and kinder pause than he actually got. He had expected, at least, a twinge of amusement, a recognition of the irony of fate.
Instead, the ED Goliath was actually spooked. He didn’t know what to do, or say. His prepared script hadn’t included any such possibility. Although there was no need, he panicked, and lost his rag.
He didn’t have a real actor’s talent for improvisation. His own reflexes were the monster variety. Had he had time to think about it, and half a brain to think about it with, he probably wouldn’t have done what he did, but the sight of the phoenix was like a trigger to his feral instincts. In response to Stan’s challenge, even though it wasn’t really a challenge at all, the marauding monster reached into one of his multitudinous pockets and pulled out a handgun.
If ever they make a movie of my memoirs, for which I shall naturally be asked to write the script, everything will be done on a much more lavish scale. Instead of being crammed so tightly against its neighboring buildings that there was no alleyway to the back yard, the hall where the heroic afterliving are besieged will be free-standing, and surrounded, and it will have the words
Kingdom Hall
on its lintel instead of
Salvation Army
, which is just as plausible, given that Jehovah’s Witnesses have built similar meeting-places and have also had to sell off many of them as their numbers have declined. At any rate, that legend seems more appropriate to me, for symbolic purposes.
The extras will be assaulting the Hall from every side, smashing shuttered windows and reaching inside with avid arms, trying to stab or grab anything within. Most of the extras will be computer-generated, of course, so there won’t just be hundreds of them but thousands: a veritable rabid horde rather than a mere drunken mob. And the siege will last for at least half an hour, rather than a lousy few minutes—not exactly the Alamo, but not your average inner-city street-brawl either. Epic, after its fashion.
I’ll insist that the tattoos be faithfully reproduced, and the stature of the Goliath really won’t need any exaggeration. He can’t have that gun, though, because, to be perfectly honest, the gun was entirely inappropriate to the situation. I’ll give him a samurai sword instead—a sword with which he intends to subject poor Pearl, our inexpressively lovely damsel in distress, to a public beheading right there and then, to demonstrate that England’s Finest can match any jihadists in the world, blow for blow, when it comes to crass bloodthirstiness.
I think I’ll arm the actor playing me with a brass candlestick, so that he can engage the samurai sword in a fencing-match. I know there aren’t many brass candlesticks around nowadays, but it’s not entirely implausible that we might have a supply of candles in the Hall and apparatus for their distribution, not so much because of our distaste for brighter light but because of the increasing frequency of “rationed power cuts.”
Anyway, you can get away with anything in a movie, as long as it’s violent and you keep up the narrative flow. Fencing matches are always okay—even fencing matches between a villain armed with a samurai sword and a hero with a brass candlestick. Never mind the thinking, and forget the explanations,
just get on with the bloody story
….
In a movie, you have to do a lot with the few words you have, especially the title. My movie will, inevitably, be called
Night of the Living
—not just because it’s about a horde of stupid malevolent drunks trying to break into a besieged building
at night
in order to slaughter a hapless flock of innocents who only want to get on with their afterlives in peace, but because the whole of the action will be symbolic. Because, you see, that microcosmic scene really will capture the very essence of world’s inevitable fate: of the impending night of the living, and the dawn of the risen dead. The whole point of the scene is that, even though the living far outnumber the afterliving, and are far nastier, the afterliving are going to withstand their assault. They’re going to pull through. They’re going to survive.
And simply by surviving, they’re planting a symbolic signpost to the future. The future, that signpost says—not in so many words, because this is a movie, and you can’t interrupt the action just to make people think, but tacitly—is ours. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but one day, we’ll be running the show.
We’ll be running the show because we deserve to run it, and because, after all, somebody has to, and we couldn’t possibly make a worse job of it than the living, even if we
are
only human.
That’s what the movie is all about, you see. It’s about arguing, however ludicrous it might seem in terms of the calculus of probability, that the candlestick really is mightier than the sword, because it’s capable, given a candle, of bearing light, and isn’t just a dedicated device designed to slice and dice human flesh.
The movie is about the insistence that everything will work out in the end, that Utopia is not only conceivable, but achievable, if only the right million-to-one shot falls out of the chaos of possibility. That’s a lot easier to contrive, of course, if you have a single scriptwriter with his heart in the right place than a committee of the whole world, but we mustn’t forget that, living and afterliving alike, we really do have the power to remake our world. We’re the ones who do things, the ones that make things happen.
It could be a great movie.
It won’t be anything much like the original book, of course, because the original book is an autobiography, and has to be true to afterlife, but movies never are.
* * * * * * *
The gun that Goliath pulled out was only a small gun—it had to be, in order to have fitted into his pocket, but it was still a gun, and it rewrote the script for the entire melodrama within the twinkling of an eye.
For one thing, it licensed the police to scramble a helicopter and an Armed Response Vehicle, without having to be called and asked—but that wasn’t really relevant to Stan and me, because we knew full well that whatever was going to happen now was going to play out a lot faster than the measured power-ballet that the cops were choreographing, and a lot faster than anyone had intended or hoped.
Stan actually began to say: “There’s no need…,” but he didn’t even have time to finish the futile sentence.
“Traitor!” spat the man with the eagle tattoo, who presumably didn’t know that the first half of his chosen motto was
Dulce et Decorum Est
. There wasn’t an atom of sweetness or decorousness about him—and he didn’t look as if he had the slightest intention of dying for his fatherland.
But he didn’t shoot right away. However bad he was at improvisation, he knew that this was still supposed to be a play, still a publicity stunt, still a parade of apparent strength and resolution, for the benefit of the cameras. He knew that it wasn’t supposed to turn into a massacre. He knew that there was no need…but now that his inner scriptwriter had lost the plot, his instincts were running riot.
Anything could happen.
The words to
Highway to Hell
faded away, leaving silence. It’s not a very long song.
Stan decided to change tack. He was a much better improviser than Goliath. “Go ahead, then, Brother,” he said, calmly and quietly. “Shoot me. I’m already dead. The only person you can hurt is yourself.”
It was, I suppose, an obvious gambit. Too obvious, perhaps.
Pearl suddenly shoved her way past Jim Peel—improbable as that sounds—and stood out in the open, about fifteen feet behind us.
“Stan isn’t the one you want,” she said. “I’m your angel of death. Let these two alone and I’ll go with you. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done already.”
I assumed that she was just playing for time, and that her inner scriptwriter was simply desperate. Remarkably, though, it provoked a riposte that actually scored a point for us.
“You might think you’ve been raped before, Honey,” the monster said—even the ED research their targets on the internet—“but you ain’t felt nothing yet.”
It was probably the most stupid thing he could possibly have said, precisely because it reflected his true feelings and his true identity. I’d already cast him as a monster, of course, be the whole point of his being there, and the whole point of his entire pathetic existence, from his own viewpoint, was to pose as one of England’s Defenders. Threatening to rape a damsel in distress—even a zombie damsel in distress—made him the Dragon, not St. George, Goliath, not David, a shambling, ghoulish wreck of a human being, not a hero.
As soon as he’d said it, he realized that it had been a silly mistake. Everybody watches TV, even if they favor shows that are much more violent and slightly more melodramatic than
Resurrection Ward
, and don’t have their hearts in the right place.
Still improvising, the giant rotated his right arm through thirty degrees or so, and dropped it by a few inches, so that the gun was pointing straight at my forehead.
“I can blow his fucking brains out,” he observed, with uncomfortable accuracy. “He won’t be coming back from the dead again then, will he? None of you will, if we do the job right.” Personally, I thought, was a low blow. It was also an invitation to his three flying buttresses to draw their own guns—which they did.
Now
, I thought,
things have really turned ugly. Now, it really is going to be a massacre. It
is
the Alamo, after all.
All Stan had to come back with, unfortunately, was: “Leave the boy out of it. He has nothing to do with this.”
“He walked the zombie nurse home last night,” the well-informed ED thug remarked, “and that green bitch Claridge too.”
It suddenly occurred to me, belatedly, that Mum and Dad would be watching the show—and Kirsten too. I figured that I owed it to the at least to put in a line of my own. They wouldn’t have wanted me to look like the kind of idiot who got stick with a non-speaking role. If I was going down, I had to go down as Davy Crockett, not an extra.
“I have everything to do with this,” I said looking Goliath straight in the eye. “And I have
you
to thank for that, don’t I? I was in the Oracle when
your
idiot bomber blew himself to bloody shreds. Obviously, you didn’t do that personally, but I’m sure you’d be glad to accept your share of the responsibility. I presume that it was some other expert rapist who drove poor Pearl to suicide, but you’ve just boasted about your willingness to do the same, and worse, so the fact that we’re here, and all that we are, really is
your
doing, isn’t it? Congratulations on a world well made.”
I was just playing for time. I wasn’t trying particularly hard to make him look bad, and I wasn’t really trying to goad him…well, maybe just a little bit. I still couldn’t quite believe that he was going to blow my brains while he was live on broadcast news. If he’d been that kind of martyr, I figured, it
would
have been him in the Oracle with a semtex vest and a battery-powered detonator.
As things turned out, though, I never got to find out whether or not he would have shot me, because we were interrupted.
The doormen, even though there were three of them, turned out to be absolute crap at their job, perhaps because their attention was focused exclusively on the riot police. Not that it’s easy to be brave and purposeful if someone is waving a Kalashnikov in your face—especially someone who looks plenty crazy enough to use it.
Actually, I can barely tell a Kalashnikov from a blunderbuss. Maybe it was an Armalite, or some brand of gun that I’d never even heard of. All I know for sure is that the weapon that was being waved—and I do mean
waved
—by the crazy person who came in through the broken doorway, the entire crowd outside having hurriedly made way for him, was
some
kind of rifle.
The crazy person in question was about five foot three and slightly-built. He wasn’t a day over nineteen. It was Pearl’s stalker, Timmy. He hadn’t made himself scarce at all when the ED turned up. He’d gone to fetch his gun from wherever he’d parked his silly little car.
I was flabbergasted to discover that he had a gun. So was Goliath.
I couldn’t imagine for a moment that he actually meant to fire it, or that he could possibly hit what he was aiming at if he did. Neither could Goliath.
Anybody can be wrong.
“Leave her alone!” Timmy said—or, rather, screeched. “Just get the hell out of here and leave her alone.”
“Take that gun off him before he hurts himself,” the man with the eagle tattoo said to one of his evil henchmen.
The henchman in question stepped forward, without an instant’s hesitation.
Suddenly, the rifle wasn’t waving any longer, Suddenly, it was perfectly steady, braced against Timmy’s shoulder. Suddenly, the henchman’s right knee exploded, and he collapsed like a ton of bricks, dropping his own pathetic handgun.
It’s surprising how quickly you can change your mind, under the right stimulus. I never even considered the possibility that the shot had gone wild. I knew that Timmy had hit exactly what he had been aiming for. And I
knew
, when he swung the barrel round to point it at Goliath, who was still in the process of turning round to face the new monster-slayer on the block, that if he fired again, Timmy would hit exactly what he was aiming at. He was only ten feet away, and I had the advantage of having heard Pearl reveal that his beloved mother was a member of the “County Set.” Although that didn’t necessarily mean that Timmy’s Dad was heavily into hunting and shooting, it certainly didn’t imply that he wasn’t. And what self-respecting member of the Berkshire Hunt wouldn’t have taught his little boy to shoot, especially if the kid was a bit of a runt?
The monster with the eagle tattoo, of course, had the disadvantage of not having heard that. Unlike me, he wasn’t sure that Timmy’s first shot hadn’t gone astray. He presumably knew the law—most people who carry guns know at least a little of it—and was well aware that if he shot Timmy now, he’d be able to plead self-defence. Perhaps he took that as a licence to kill. At any rate, he aimed his own pathetic little popgun at Timmy’s weedy chest.
That particular law, however, cuts both ways. Timmy could have blown Goliath’s brains out then, and gotten away with it. He didn’t. Instead, he altered his stance ever so slightly and shot Goliath in the knee, exactly as he had done to the henchman.
Goliath went down like a second ton of bricks, but he didn’t let go of his gun. He wasn’t dead, and he was too big and stupid even to lose consciousness—and he still had hold of his gun.
By this time, the monster’s other two evil henchmen were exercising their own stupidity by wondering whether might be a good time to use their own weapons. It wasn’t, but only one of them had presence of mind enough to figure that out, check the gesture, drop his weapon and raise his arms above his head instead.