(I took this in a different direction. I think it works. It's all entering the realm of cheesy anime pilot episode but I don't think that's necesasrily a bad thing.)
‘Obviously not honey,’ thought Gray grimly, closing the book. He didn’t need to look at the pages that followed to know that they would be empty. He shifted his weight awkwardly and wondered whether to call his sergeant; a secret dojo was certainly something that should be brought to his attention. If his sergeant and the others walked in now, they’d think he’d been holding out on them. He folded the sheaf of papers, stuffed them into his last empty inside pocket and blew three short blasts on his whistle.
‘Yo!’ he called over his shoulder and made as if he had just entered the room, raising his weapon and moving towards the centre of the dojo. Right on cue, two of his crewmates came into the room and fanned out behind him.
The younger of the two soldiers flinched slightly when he saw the girl’s mutilated body sprawled on the tatami mats, regarding the body with a prim distaste that sat clumsily with his coarse features. The expression contorted into a swift spit to the left. ‘Poor cow,’ he muttered noncommittally. He shouldered his gun.
‘Area’s clean.’ Gray returned his own weapon to its holster. ‘This chick had some food and stuff in the back.’ He realised his mistake too late.
‘How long you been here then? Been having first pick at what pickings there was to pick at have you?’ The soldier’s boyish features had clenched into a hungry, mean-eyed suspicion. ‘I’d search you if you weren’t such a big fucker,’ he muttered. ‘Or maybe I’ll wait ‘til you’re asleep.’ Gray snorted with laughter; not nerves, he had heard worse threats in his time, but the result of a state of near-hysteria that three sleepless nights in a row had consigned him to.
‘What the fuck you laughin’ at?’ the young soldier yelled, a too-shrill note of panic skirting his syllables. Tensions had been mounting all week, the situation had been crying out for an excuse to erupt. After weeks of trailing a faceless threat, Gray was edgy enough to let himself be pushed into a fight, even with a guy barely out of his teens. He was almost relieved when the enraged soldier took an awkward swing at him. Hindered by his weapons and pack, he dodged the punch with some difficulty and grabbed the soldier by his jacket collar. Despite his youth, he was built like a barrel; small and squat. Gray could barely lift him but he managed to bring the man’s face level with his own. ‘Don’t waste your energy, sonny’ he hissed through gritted teeth. Just then, their sergeant rushed in. Gray released his hold on the man’s jacket and the two of them stood to attention, straightening their clothes, teeth clenched.
‘Men, get the fuck out there. We’re down to 12 men in this entire 25 square ks. You fuckers represent a quarter of our vitality as a unit so I’d love to know why you’re up here bitching about a can of corned beef.’ He ducked out, followed by two other recruits. Gray noticed that the sergeant was limping badly on his left ankle.
’12 men?’ said the other, older soldier in a tremulous voice. He had not spoken throughout the scuffle and one look at his white face and huge, black, gleaming eyes told Gray that he would not last the night.
‘4 men, shitbag. And one of them just left, outranking and outrunning the lot of us,’ spat the young soldier, hurrying into the small room just off the dojo. ‘Let’s get what we can and fuck off.’ Gray and the older guy followed suit, emerging with armfuls of tins and water canteens. Together, the three of them ran for the lift shaft, following in the sergeant’s bloody footsteps.
He felt like shit for taking her stuff. He hated and berated himself for it but there it was. He’d accidentally killed a girl not four days previously; he’d shot her in a crowd of zombies, thinking she was one of them. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She would have been beautiful when she’d ripened but the way she’d been moving, lumbering from side to side, eyes wide and staring, mouth wide open, she’d looked like just another walking corpse. These girls, these women he couldn’t save. He loathed them for their weakness and resented the grief their deaths caused him. But this girl hadn’t been weak. There’d been more truth in those pages than he’d heard from his sergeant’s mouth in five years loyal service. Somehow, he couldn’t picture this girl dragging her boyfriend round the shops or demanding that they discuss the direction their relationship was heading in. Her body had looked so small, like he could have held her completely in one hand. He was overcome with a desire to reach out across the gulf to wherever she was now and grip her hands hard in his own, look her in the eyes and tell her that there WAS a point to it all, that he’d read and understood her message, that everything was going to be OK. With a cold water shock that dashed against his stomach wall he recognised the building sensation as homesickness, missing someone or something that constituted a solid place to leap from; safe arms to fall into. Dying with something left unsaid. This wasn’t something that had ever played on his mind before. Actually, he’d never had too much to say for himself: he was one of those guys who loves music, books and movies with a passion simply because he recognises them as monumental achievements that he could never have come up with himself. Perhaps he had always been dumb with gratitude for something vital and priceless that he knew could never have come from inside himself. Something from outside his mind, his claustrophobic, blinkered reality that spoke of wider worlds, senses and experiences he could only dream of. A universe breached and leaking deliciously into his own. He found himself wondering as he ran: thinking of all the songs and stories stopped up behind his lips as though he had an apple stuffed into his mouth and a cork up each nostril. It suddenly seemed very important to try.
They had reached the bare metal of the lift door and the older soldier with the mad eyes had begun to pry them apart with a crowbar. He was breathing hard and seemed close to tears. The younger soldier was looking at him thoughtfully. Then, it seemed as if a light had come on behind his eyes and all at once, he smiled warmly.
‘Your name’s Klaus isn’t it?’ he asked. Gray winced.
‘Yeah, but people call me Gray; I got sick of the Nazi jokes before I left secondary school.’
‘No man, don’t you recognise me? I shared a flat with Tom Johnson for about eight months. You were seeing him for four of them if I remember rightly.’
Gray was astounded. His relationship with Tom had been such that he had never really had the time or the inclination to note any of the peripheral characters. He remembered the boy’s face now: he’d come in drunk one night with some mates to find Gray and Tom asleep together in front of a screen full of static. There’d been some good natured jibes and watered-down homophobic comments from some of the hairier members of the group but nothing malicious. They’d all ended up sharing a big joint and watching Die Hard to reassert the collective masculinity of the group. Gray winced in retrospect.
‘Anyway, as you obviously don’t remember, my name’s Rob.’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t know this little wirefly though.’ He gestured towards the wild-eyed soldier who’d managed to get the doors to the lift shaft open like a can of spaghetti and was sniffing its contents gingerly.
‘I’m Cat,’ the older soldier said, half to himself, half to a handful of wires he’d pulled from the lift’s control panel. ‘Plan is, I’ll try and move the lift box itself up above us and then we can abseil down to the ground floor. I don’t fancy trying to go any higher until we’ve got some more ammo.’
Rob acquiesced with a grunt and flung himself down on the floor. He produced a dog-eared pack of Lucky Strikes and offered it to Gray.
‘That’s OK. I fucking hate Lucky Strikes,’ Gray grimaced, flashing a pack of Marlborough Reds.
‘Yeah, me too’ said Rob hoarsely round a lungful. ‘But it fits with the image, at least in my mind. Too much Tarantino and comic books during me formative years. I’m the tough soldier who smokes Lucky Strikes and slugs on Waaald Turkey!’ He drew a small flask from his inside pocket, grinning impishly and passed it to Gray.
‘A drink I won’t say no to,’ sighed Gray, catching the little flask. ‘Incidentally, this is Leeds, England. We call them comics over here. Or graphic novels. Fucking Yankophile.’
‘What the fuck did you just call me?’ Rob laughed. ‘Dude, “comics” to me says the bloody Beano and “graphic novels” sounds like porn or something. You know, like Daisy does Doncaster or whatever.’
‘Actually, no I don’t know.’ Gray smiled wryly and shrugged his shoulders. Rob recognised the gesture with a roll of his eyes.
A resonant clunk from the lift shaft and a throaty echoing curse from Cat turned their attention back to the mission. Whenever his body did something so automatic, Gray found himself wondering whether it would be better to be killed in action than to live on into old age and explore the full extent of your brainwashing at your extensive leisure. He hated to think of the prospect of retirement. For one thing, he’d forgotten how to dress himself outside of the constraints of a uniform: he could no longer co ordinate a colour that wasn’t beige or khaki. Plus, the though of being without a gun made him feel…well, wrong. Vulnerable. Guns were like drugs, any weapon was like a drug, it made life’s trials that bit easier to manage so that, in the end, you couldn’t operate to the full without one. Another burst of that bizarre, unclassifiable nostalgia; his analogy to do with his weapon was clumsy and vulgar in the face of the chick’s ‘sharpened swan’s wing’ or whatever it had been. Maybe the world of warfare and combat had been a pure arena once based on honour, skill and valour. Not dirty, weary little men and their messy little cannons spraying bullets like a wide open trap chewing and guzzling lives, dreams and futures and spitting out the bones. Grace and beauty; a fight as stylised and skilled as a formal dance. His gut ached with regret and yearning. A duel. He was sick of this cull, this obliteration of a faceless, formless enemy. One fight between nemeses: a microcosm of the eternal struggle between opposite forces. He was never sure what to call them: he certainly no longer believed in good and evil. He gasped in his frustration and agitation.
‘Don’t fucking start mate. There’s only the three of us left and I’m not dragging your lardy arse down that little hole.’ Rob slapped the side of his face good naturedly and Gray sprang to his feet.
‘FUCK that man, FUCK you. FUCK this place. FUCK this shit!’ His shame had spilled over into temper as it so often did. He was furious with the feeling in his heart: he felt torn between two things and he wasn’t sure what they were. His conscience, his temper and his tear-ducts were all pricking and he was once again inches away from using his fists. Rob and Cat were both staring at him. Cat inched forward and extended a conciliatory hand.
‘Look dude, I know this is shit. We all…three of us do. But we’ve come so far over the past week. We’ve achieved the impossible: we’re still alive and we‘ve killed enough of them so that if we stay clever and stay sharp we can probably clear and secure this area until reinforcements come.’ The insane black holes of Cat’s eyes had gone, replaced by the lined, shadowed eyes of a tired young man. They were green and weary and Gray felt his anger melting away.
‘I counted twenty-odd stragglers on the way up here.’ Cat continued, wiping a flat cheek and smearing it with oil like and Indian brave. ‘There’s three of us…’
‘She was alone.’ Gray felt close to tears and hated himself for it. I don’t even know, or particularly like you two but I’m fucking glad you’re here.’ Cat gave an incredulous half-laugh of agreement. Rob just grunted and put a hand to his belt to check his gun; an unconscious, telling gesture. He could tell they didn’t understand.
‘This way we get some assurance that we’re not mad; that all this is really happening. As long as I know another human being is alive out there, I can’t feel hopeless for a moment. We’re soldiers; all we need is a mission, an objective and we’re OK, we’ve got a reason, got meaning.’ Gray pulled the sheaf of papers from his pocket. The two men looked at each other and then Cat reached out and took the papers from Gray, maintaining eye contact, recognising the importance of the gesture.
‘Don’t tell me this is what you were hiding! I thought you’d found some cash or some tablets or something.’ Rob laughed, but stopped when he saw the look on Gray and Cat’s faces.
‘Read it.’ Said Gray. ‘Might take you a few minutes but I need a fucking cigarette before we go mow down those rotting cunts on the first floor.’
He leaned against the wall, nursing his cigarette whilst Cat and Rob passed the papers back and forth, looking over one another’s shoulder, watching their expressions lead on from one another like a Mexican wave as they took it in turns to read. They were both an identical shade of pale when they returned the papers to Gray.
‘That girl in white back there? Skinny little fucker. She did this?’ asked Rob, crestfallen.
‘Yep. Civilian student, I’m guessing. Her hands were bleeding; she’d probably never done a day’s real work in her life before yesterday night.’ Gray snorted derisively. ‘Like Sarge, I suppose, ‘cept his hands were callused to fuck from wanking in our faces every five minutes.’
Cat was shaking his head. ‘Fucking waste. Can’t believe she held out here for a week, all by herself. She must have killed the four zombies we almost tripped over on the way up here.’
Rob grinned, his eyes wild. ‘Of all the places to find yourself in the event of an undead uprising: five concrete storeys of weaponry! If it wasn’t for those plate glass windows on the ground floor, this place would have been just about unassailable.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘It’s even got a fucking moat: the canal runs right by here.’
‘If she’d had a week of basic training, she’s have known better than to let herself get chased into a corner like this. A layout like this building: one look at the plans with a professional eye would have been enough for her to have figured out at least six escape routes, depending on how well she handled heights.’
Cat nodded enthusiastically. ‘True that. Our only problem is numbers. If there were more of us, WHEN the reinforcements arrive, we could smash those panes of glass and install barriers.’
Gray completed the thought. ‘They’ll probably do that, you know. This would be an ideal base for troops to fan out from; easy to defend, we could bring surviving citizens here and keep the injured ones safe. With enough food and ammo we could hold them off indefinitely.’
Rob looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. ‘Can’t help but wish she was still alive to hear this.’ He sighed. ‘Like you said, one week’s basic training and she probably would have been OK. She shouldn’t even have tried taking them on. She should have just run.’
‘She did,’ said Gray. ‘She ran to meet the fate she thought was inescapable. She ran the wrong way. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Can’t fault the spirit and intention, just shitty tactics, that’s all.’
His mind suddenly glowed with a new concept; one he would never normally have given voice to. But it had been a pretty strange day.
‘The spirit of the army needs to change now. We need to turn back into knights. Humanity hasn’t had a common enemy since the dinosaurs. Empower, protect and train citizens: don’t just retreat behind lines and drop CG bombs from a safe distance.’ The words sounded like catechisms between his lips. He paused, self-conscious.
‘I like that. Anti-Zombie knights!’ Cat laughed, taking twelve years off his face.
‘All shall know and respect the AZK!’ cheered Rob, pounding his heart with a gloved fist and snapping his booted heels together.
‘Problem is,’ Gray mused ‘Whichever way you look at it, it would be desertion. AWOL. If Sarge decides on a different course of action, we’ll have to follow it or risk, well, who knows what. We couldn’t do it by ourselves; we’d need a certain amount of support. We certainly couldn’t stand up to actual hostility from the army.’
‘They might just let us go. We’re all staggering in the dark. Things are fragmenting.’ Cat said, his eyes betraying his lack of belief in the thought voiced.
‘Nothing’s working like it used to. Civilians are dying, we’re dying too, just slower and with more of a structure to it.’ Rob’s eyes were closed, one hand massaging his temples compulsively. ‘The world isn’t the same place. People aren’t going to be content with a faceless centralised government any more. Not after a bloody zombie plague. That’s science fiction. This is why people are scared of ghosts: it’s no longer knowing exactly where to draw the line between reality, fantasy, paranoia…’ He tailed off.
‘What do we have to lose?’ agreed Gray. His laughter was real, mirthless, but real.
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