‘Who are you?’ she asks, trying her best to loom over him. He’s a dapper chap, in his late fifties. He carries with him a whiff of the country set.
He glances at the Home Secretary, either asking permission to tell April or hoping she’ll be removed, April can’t quite tell which.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ April says, ‘I’m an honorary member of most governments. You can say what you like when I’m around.’
The Home Secretary sighs. ‘Can I offer you a drink, April?’
‘That would be a step in the right direction.’
‘My name’s Kirby,’ says the stranger, holding out his hand to shake April’s.
‘Jeffery’s something of an expert in all this,’ says the Home Secretary. ‘We called him in as soon as it became clear what we’re dealing with.’
‘Oh, you’ve finally accepted it then, have you? I’ve had the runaround all morning on the phone… Hang on – an expert?’
‘In reanimation,’ says Kirby, ‘yes. Though, as I was just saying, this is entirely beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.’
‘Seen before?’ April takes the drink the Home Secretary hands her and drains it. ‘How can you possibly have seen anything like this before?’
Kirby shifts in his seat. ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’
April looks from one of them to the next. ‘Don’t tell me you silly bastards have been looking into something similar? Oh, I bet you have… My God…You’re all as bad as one another.’
‘It’s not like that, April,’ the Home Secretary says. ‘And even if it were, it would hardly be our pressing concern.’
‘It seems to me,’ Kirby continues, ‘and I’m speaking as a medical man as well as someone of knowledge in this field, that these things are not reanimated people. No… let me be clearer, they are empty vessels. They bear no relation to the people they once were. They are, in effect, inanimate objects given a semblance of life.’
‘And what difference does that make?’ April asks. ‘Do we really need to fret about the details?’
‘We do if we want to stand a chance of stopping them,’ Kirby replies, ‘though I’m afraid I was building up to explaining that I don’t think we can. They don’t seem to respond according to any biological rules. Hack them to pieces and they keep going. Their life essence – and believe me, using such a vague expression makes me as uncomfortable as you – is indefinable. It is therefore impossible to destroy it. All we can do is hit the things with brute force until they are no longer a threat. Which might be fine if we weren’t dealing with so many of them. Conservative estimates, based on the information you found, Ms Shining, suggests we could be facing up to half a million of the things. The south is saturated worse than the North, though both Manchester and Birmingham are also badly affected.’
‘Dear God!’ The Home Secretary stares into space, unable to think of a single constructive thing to say.
April Shining, for once in her life, is struck dumb.
g) Oakeshott Avenue, Highgate, London
Geeta Sahni grips the bench beneath her as the police van takes a speed bump too fast. Everyone sways and collides with one another like the steel balls in a Newton’s Cradle. If the passengers weren’t all so terrified they would be shouting at the driver.
Andrew, with sweaty, nervous palms and a false smile, is sitting to Geeta’s left. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this,’ he says. ‘This is a job for the SFC.’
‘You think they weren’t already called?’ replies one of the other officers. ‘From what I heard they’re drafting in everybody.’ Geeta recognises him: Leeson, she remembers – they were at training college the same year.
‘The union’s going to have kittens,’ says Andrew, ‘I’m not legally covered to carry this.’ He looks down at the Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifle he has been issued with, staring at it as if it might change into something else, something less terrifying.
‘You must have bagged decent training scores,’ says Geeta, ‘or they wouldn’t have given it to you.’
She has been thinking about this, trying to decide why she has been drafted in, and this is the only reason she can think of. Her performance during weapons training was deemed exemplary, much to her smug satisfaction and the chagrin of her male colleagues.
‘Not bad,’ Andrew admits, ‘but that’s a bit different, isn’t it? I’m shit hot on Grand Theft Auto too, but they didn’t ask me to drive.’
There’s a ripple of laughter at this, a brief release of nerves before the van draws to a halt and nobody is in the mood to laugh anymore.
There is the bang of a fist on the side of the van and the rear doors open.
The police officers step out, moving quickly but awkwardly, not sure of what they’re going to see once they’re on the street.
There is already the sound of automatic fire, the dull crack of munitions that is a world away from the rich, Hollywood noise of firefights. Gunshots are loud, flat and pinched – there is nothing romantic about them when they are in the air around you, rather than being piped from a Dolby 7.1 speaker system.
‘Come on! Come on!’ An SCO19 officer is herding them into formation, facing the oncoming crowd of aggressors. Geeta is looking for the enemy, head low, anticipating retaliatory fire. Then she realises the enemy are the civilians marching up the street toward them.
‘They’re not armed, sir,’ she shouts, then notices the bodies of those who came before her: fallen firearms officers being trampled by the advancing crowd, their black body armour glistening wet in the afternoon sun.
‘They don’t need to be,’ the commanding officer replies, ‘now pick your targets and fire. We’ve got to stop them overwhelming us.’
For a moment, Geeta can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. It goes against everything she knows, shooting into an unarmed crowd. Then she begins to recognise the civilians for what they are. They move in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion, their faces are unresponsive as shop window dummies.
Next to her, despite – or perhaps because of – his fear, Andrew is the first to fire and she watches as a couple of rounds hit one of the first of the crowd. The target is a young male, his baseball cap flying off as the bullet hits him in the face. He topples backwards, thrashing on the floor, but is soon back on his feet and advancing towards them, his face just a red whorl. Geeta thinks of James Hodgkins, of the impossibility of Harry Reid, and she opens fire.
The bullets are having little to no effect, the crowd drawing silently closer despite the hail of copper, zinc, steel and lead that the officers are hurling at them.
‘Hold the line!’ the commanding officer is shouting. ‘Take their legs out from under them!’
The officers try, and many of the crowd do fall, but that doesn’t stop them dragging themselves along the tarmac towards them.
‘Fall back!’
The officers don’t need to be told twice, running up the road to gain vital distance between themselves and an army that simply won’t respond to gunfire in the way they should.
‘What are they?’ Leeson shouts agitatedly. ‘Why don’t they stay down?’
Geeta knows. Even a bus didn’t stop Harry Reid, she remembers, so what chance do they have?
h) Various Locations, United Kingdom
It is something the world often talks about – the speed with which normality can vanish. Krishnin’s sleepers by no means attack at once – some have been quicker at digging themselves free than others – but they hit in such numbers, wave after wave of them, that the country goes from business as usual to borderline apocalypse within the space of single day.