All the Dead Are Here (24 page)

“Of course,” said the General. Mr Scratch stopped dead and held the General’s gaze with eyes as dark as a singularity. Then his face brightened and he continued with the cards. Shuffle. Place. Madman. Tower. Devil. Breezily, he continued.

“And after all, that can’t be right can it? A man of your deep held convictions. A Prayer for the Dead and all that. Looking after your merry band of troops. There isn’t an evil bone in your body is there?” The General shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Or is there?” said Mr Scratch narrowing his eyes and tone to a whisper. “A military man with all the morally ambiguous decisions that requires? Perhaps there is something of the sinister in you. Perhaps something you may wish to confess? Or have confessed?”

The General looked sternly at the ragged figure. “No. Everything I have done has been for God and Country. My record is unblemished and I sleep soundly at night.”

“Just so,” smiled Mr Scratch warmly. “Just so.” He looked down at the cards and slowly resumed the trick. Shuffle. Place. Madman. Tower. Devil.
“Then that only leaves us with one grim possibility doesn’t it, my darling General? That I am the Devil and you are the Madman.”

“You aren’t the Devil,” sneered the General at the ragged fool in front of him.

“No. I’m not the Devil. Let’s assume for a moment that I am though. Just for fun.”

“Then that would make me the Madman.”

“It would, yes my General. Of course, the very fact that we are sitting in a tin box, surrounded by the Damned, could of course mean that you lost your fragile mind and are sitting in a Breaker Island
Military Hospital in a jacket with too-long sleeves gibbering and dribbling over yourself. Could that not be a possibility?”

“No. My last psyche evaluation showed I was of sound mind,” said the General.

“Well... you think it did.” They paused and looked at each other, then broke into spontaneous laughter. Natural and high, it lifted the atmosphere in the room, but the muggy sweat filled air stifled it back and they faded quickly to seriousness.

Slowly, Mr Scratch resumed the trick, more now as habit than of any demonstration of the phenomena itself. The General watched the man’s hand flick in and out of the light as he nimbly continued. Shuffle. Place. Madman. Tower. Devil. Shuffle. Place. Madman. Tower. Devil.

“Of course, if you are mad, that makes me the Devil,” said Mr Scratch after an interminable period of time. The General looked up from the cards and sat back in his chair.

“Or very good at card tricks,” he said.

“Or very good at card tricks,” smiled Mr Scratch.

With a sudden, vicious speed, the General snapped the flat of his hand down on the table onto the pack that had just been placed there.

“Or it’s a rigged deck,” said the General flatly.

“Or it’s a rigged deck,” repeated Mr Scratch.

The General flicked the cards over and spread them out along the width, expecting to see repeating runs of the same three cards. They looked together at the deck. The entire shuffled Tarot deck was there, with the three cards in question randomly placed within.

The General goes pale. Mr Scratch takes the cards and resumes the trick. Over and over and over the cards turn and the General sits stock still staring at the yellowed hands as they turn and turn and turn. Unable to move, unable to tear his eyes away. Madman. Tower. Devil. Madman. Tower. Devil.

“Of course, there could also be another more mundane explanation,” said Mr Scratch, his eyes glinting in the darkness.

The last of the Zombies mill round in circles, tripping over the bodies of their army, defeated under the leaden force of the General’s Army. Finally a lone, dead college student looks up at the barrels above him and raises a blood stained arm to point at his aggressors. He opens his mouth as if to moan his lost comrades to him but is cut short as a hail of bullet rip through his skull. A sense of joy and relief fills the troops, another break before the final group is pulled, the bikes are readied to make their final sortie and disappear down the ramp for the final time. The chopper flies low over the compound, it wiggles by way of celebration to the troops below.

The Lieutenant reached the bottom of the tower and marched to the command vehicle to give the General the good news. As he went past the operators, they were leaning back and stretching, taking a little time before the next batch. He stepped through the door and the guard saluted him.

“The General still with our visitor?” asked the Lieutenant.

“Yes sir,” replied the guard unlocking the door. The Lieutenant stepped in to the room and stopped. The room was empty, save a small pool of blood that sat illuminated in the ray of light from the open skylight.

The Lieutenant looked wildly around the room before turning to the guard.

“No-one left here,” said the Guard before the lieutenant could ask the question. “And I haven’t stepped away! I haven’t! Ask those guys.” He pointed toward the Ops room.

The Lieutenant looked slowly up at the skylight to see a small wipe of blood on the roof. Electrified, the Lieutenant sprinted out of the room past the operators, one of whom he knocked from the chair, and out into the bright sunlight. He ran down the length of the truck to the back where he saw a long trail of blood down the back of the truck to the ground. He heard a low moan and saw the broken body of the General on the ground, lying in the long grass, half in half out of the stream whose grate had been removed to reveal a long tunnel running under the park. The General swam in and out of consciousness, his head battered and bleeding. The Lieutenant looked down to see that the General had lost the lower half of one leg and was bleeding profusely. He leant down to help and felt the breeze flow gently from up the tunnel before looking quizzically down it.

His radio crackled into life, “Bravo one two, this is Runner one. Come in.” Without taking his eyes from the tunnel he unclipped the radio. “Runner one, what’s the problem? Over.”

“Bravo one, we’ve looked all round this mall and there ain’t jack shit here. I don’t know where Zeke got to. Over.”

Kate, the chopper pilot broke into the channel.

“Bravo one I can confirm. They were here before but now they’ve just gone!”

The Lieutenant's eyes widened as he heard the moans approach down the tunnel, he heard the splashes of thousands of feet tramping through the stream.

“It’s ok, Runner one. I think we found them,” said the Lieutenant as the shadowy forms coalesced from the gloom ahead.

I am not the Devil. I am not mad. My name is not Mr Scratch. It’s very simple. I’m out for revenge. Pure and simple. I came over here to do my show. Magic. Sleight of hand. Escapology, hypnotism, NLP that kind of thing. Then, when I wanted to go home, after it all started, they wouldn’t let me. I had a ticket, a visa, everything. The soldiers told me it wasn’t safe to go back to England, back to my wife and children. I begged them to let me on the plane. I wept as I watched it take off. I was the only person not allowed and they never told me why. Now it’s all gone to shit I’ll never get home. So I’ll make them pay. All the military. All the Americans. I’ll make every one of them pay. All it takes is time and I got a load of that. That and two packs of cards.

Involuntarily, my face screws up in anguish. My eyes clenched to prevent escaping tears. I want to heave with sobs and shout and rage at the injustice, at the horror and at the loss of it all. I want to stand up and take my gun and fight until every last one of those things is a proper corpse. Just as it should be. I screw my face up harder. I can’t take this any more. I think of happier times. Her third birthday, on a beautiful summer, sunny day. Unlike mine in the depths of January, her birthday will always be full of sun and laughter. In a pretty pink party dress and light-up trainers, set off with a pair of Mum-made tissue fairy wings, she bounces around singing some inappropriate pop song while I try, and fail, to fashion a horse from balloons for her rapt friends. Here and now, my chest aches from holding back great, tearing sobs. I bury my nose in her soft blonde hair. It smells of smoke and grime but beneath that it still her unmistakable sweet smell. My girl. My daughter.

Slowly I calm, and using my free hand I wipe my eyes, letting tears flow down my arm into my sleeve. I can’t afford for even one to fall onto her sleeping head for fear even that may wake her from her disturbed sleep and rampant nightmares. She knows to be quiet, she has learnt and is a good girl, even when she dreams.

I open my eyes, breathing freely, the moment has passed again. I look around the room and take it all in. It seems important to remember it for some reason. A simple flat. A new build by the outside of it, and empty. A bit of imaginative climbing and daughter tossing got us in and the fourth floor should prevent too much sound from getting to street level. It’s cold but I didn’t get a chance to take this stolen mountain jacket off before she fell asleep. So we keep each other warm as she lies on my chest. I have one arm tucked between her back and the armrest to keep her safe. This sofa is new and smells of moist leather but not unpleasantly. The window was left open so I took the risk of closing it when we arrived, but it hasn’t rained too much since it all started, I think. When did it start? I try to think back to when we left home, but I can’t remember and haven’t worn a watch in all this time. My smart phone lies in a ditch somewhere between the city and our current location, becoming only extra weight after the internet and phone systems went down. I look at the layer of dust in the room, but as I have no frame of reference as to how long a layer of dust that thick takes to accumulate, I am left with only one measure of time. Too long. Too bloody long.

I long to switch on the TV and watch some crap eighties action film like First Blood or Commando but I’ve seen enough blood and besides the remote is over there, out of reach. I smile. Even now I don’t want to wake her even though it would be to grab a useless piece of plastic like all the other useless pieces of plastic in the world. Food, weapons, and water are the only things that matter now.

Whoever they were, they had nice taste in furniture. This sofa is very comfortable and part of me wants to sleep. I can’t. Some stuff to think about. Some stuff to do. I recognise the coffee table and some of the vases from our last trip to Ikea, although the art looks expensive and pointless. There are lots of coffee table books I can see, mainly of photography, and a rack of DVD’s. Mainly arty French and old kung fu movies. I don’t think I would have liked the person who lived here. A bit pretentious for my tastes, I think.

On my chest she stirs, brow furrowing, so I use my free hand to stroke her hair and it calms her down.

So, it was my fault. I was being stupid and greedy, I tell myself. In a old cellar I found a rack of tinned foods and army issued MRE’s but the Dead found us and crammed themselves through the tiny window as best they could. One fully got his head through, but I reached to grab one more tin, just for myself, just to fill my own belly for a change. I knew my hand was gonna be close to its snarling maw, I could see its blood flecked eyes scan the choicest parts of my flesh, but it was trapped at the shoulders with no way to get me. So I reached out and grabbed the tin of chilli just as
another one forced its arm through the corner of the window. It grabbed my wrist in a flash and pulled me towards its colleague yet even though it was easy to wrestle free, its snarling mate just pinched my skin with its teeth. Barely a nick yet I saw the drop of blood form from the scratch, slowly, laboriously, like my body knew the implications of the open wound and fought with all its might to resist. Now, in the candlelight, I look down at my trapped hand and see black veins tracing their threadlike poison through my system. My hand tingles. I want to think it is her weight slowing the blood flow, but I know that it isn’t. How much time have I got? Hours? Days? Minutes? I have no idea.

I sit here, with her breathing slowly on my chest, and I have to make a decision.

Well I wouldn’t have to make a decision if my wife hadn’t died. It was a stupid death, that’s the worst of it. It was pointless and I could have stopped it. All I had to do was look at how many of those things were beyond our tall hedge in the street beyond. It would have taken seconds. Just a few moments to run upstairs and check. We could have done something else to get us all to the car and past the two cadaverous things that looked disinterestedly around our garden like some supernatural flower show judges. On the signal from me, she ran out of the door, attracting our two critics and then went for the side gate. I got our little one in the car and, before I got in myself, I heard her screams. I reversed out and sped the car to the junction. I looked down the road expecting to see her sprinting to the car. Instead I saw her being pulled from side to side as more of them closed on her position. I saw them pull her arms apart wide so they could each access a part of her. I saw her look at me in stricken panic as I drove away from the creatures banging on our window, holding my daughter’s rapt interest in horror. I drove away before my daughter saw her mother’s fate. The question I can’t answer is, did I drive away because two days earlier she announced she was leaving? Running off after fifteen years to shack up with her fitness instructor. I laughed at the clich
é
of it. I didn’t laugh when she announced she was taking my daughter with her. No. I am not that vindictive, and she was leaving me, not the other way around. I still love her, and here we are again, face screwing up, chest tightening. I feel stupid, and foolish, and weak. I know I am not. The one thing I have learnt throughout this madness is that I am good at survival, good at running and good at looking after my little girl. Well, I was anyway. For a while.