Year Zero (2000), page 21
Before the advent of the zombies, Wilson's seeming everpresence had been the only firm evidence Molly had that the world was not exactly as it seemed to be. Like her flat, she had allegedly been thoroughly disinfected, and she was mildly surprised to discover how little natural paranoia she seemed to have. Presumably, pharmaceutical paranoia was like heroin in the sense that while you were on it your body didn't bother producing its natural defences against the pain and indignity of everyday existence, so that when you came off it you had to give your own systems time to kick in again.
Even the knowledge that Wilson or one of his men was always close at hand and her temporary dearth of natural paranoia hadn't prevented Molly from taking great care as she walked home in the early hours, but it wasn't until she started noticing the zombies in the pub that the journey became truly nerve-racking. There had always been some funny people around at that sort of hour, but as soon as the zombie flu started doing the rounds their numbers began to increase nightly. Most of them were harmless, being the phantom kinds of homeless who used darkness as a cover for rooting surreptitiously around in the waste-bins of restaurants and pubs, but even the shyest phantoms sometimes strayed over the schizo line and couldn't help becoming a danger to themselves and everybody else. Molly wore high heels at work, as she was obliged to do for the edification of the customers, but she always changed into trainers when she started out for home in case she had to run.
She had been followed from the pub several times before the advent of the zombies, but stalkers of that tentative kind had tended to give up long before she reached home, being unable to match her pace while brim-full of lager. It was not until the flu epidemic had built up momentum that people who must have been lying in wait for her actually began to lurch out of the shadows into her path, groping inarticulately.
The first time this happened Molly was glad that the reaching figure was moving so slowly and awkwardly, because it made evasion that much easier—but when it happened again, and then a third time, she realised that the bar manager's observations about the effect of muted light on the victims of the epidemic did not tell the whole story. The darker it was, the more fully the symptoms were brought out and it was only in the faintest light of all that the sufferers revealed the true current extent of their physical and psychological degradation.
Their skin was not merely mushroom-white but palpably rotten; the pupils of their colourless eyes were shrivelled to mere dots in defiance of the normal reflex; their movements were not merely dulled but afflicted by a strangely jerky slowmotion; and their desire to enfold other people in their asexual but coldly affectionate embrace, as if they were longlost children, displaced every other motive and every qualm of conscience or common sense.
The spread of the disease through the capital soon became obvious to everyone, but it failed to generate any widespread alarm. TV news programmes, reflecting a solidly suburban view of life and spectrum of concerns, were unprepared to devote anything more than grudging token attention to the existence of an epidemic which had not yet caused a single fatality, and such items were always reassuring. It might have made a difference if cinematic zombies had not had the characteristics of ghouls unfairly foisted upon them in the name of melodrama, but no one who had seen Night of the Living Dead or any of its sequels was likely to get too excited about such mild-mannered zombies as the ones the new flu was creating.
Once Molly had convinced herself that it was frustrated affection and not addictive hunger that was motivating the avant garde living dead she decided that she ought to investigate the phenomenon a little more carefully, while always retaining the distance appropriate to an objective scientific inquiry.
48
The next day, when Molly left work at one in the morning, she caught sight of Wilson sitting in his Volvo reading a copy of the Telegraph. She marched over and tapped on his window. He lowered it and said: "No, I can't stop following you around. It's my job."
"I know," she said. "I just wanted to compare notes on the zombies."
"What zombies?" he repeated, warily.
"The ones who come out at night and try to hug people. Come on, Wilson, you've been out here two or three nights a week, and when you haven't been here in person you've had one of your legmen filling in. Their reports must have mentioned that the numbers of the local vagrants seem to be increasing exponentially, although the increase isn't putting any undue pressure on the supplies of scavenger-fare."
"Oh," said Wilson. "Those zombies."
"Something weird's going on, isn't it? Come on—you're a senior man in black. You know about these things."
"On the contrary," Wilson retorted, smoothly. "I used to know about these things, in the days when they were nice and simple, but that was before Chiliad Science took over. Now, I'm just one of the suckers who has to hang around waiting for you to flip. You are flipping, aren't you Molly? You're not just winding me up?"
Molly sighed. She almost wished that she had come up with the story herself, just for the sake of a practical joke. "I think it's beginning," she said, firmly. "I don't know exactly what it is, but it's started. The Devil's plan has been activated. I know there are still seven shopping days to Christmas, but the Antichrist is up and running, and if our side really is the Anti-Antichrist we'd better get our arses into gear. If Chiliad Science Incorporated can't cope with a lousy fake flu epidemic, what use are they to you, me or the world?"
"Couldn't have put it better myself," said Wilson, with weakly-feigned enthusiasm. "I have to hand it to you, Molly, when you flip, you flip all the way. You want to get in, or what?"
"I don't think so," Molly said. "I'm tired and I need some sleep. If I were you, I'd call for some back-up and round up a few of the zombies. They won't be able to tell you anything—they're only zombies, after all—but Hyde and De'Ath can get started on the job of figuring out how and why they tick."
Wilson opened the door of the Volvo and got out, towering above her as was his wont. His capacious chest bulged alarmingly. He walked round the bonnet to the passenger door and wrenched it open, then stood waiting beside it.
"Get in, Molly," he said. Oddly enough, he didn't say it as if he expected to be obeyed; he said it like a man who knew perfectly well that the menacing tone he'd worked so hard to cultivate was a broken tool.
"I don't want to," said Molly, although she had moved round the front of the car herself so that she could stand face to face with him on the pavement.
"I know," he said. "I know how it works by now. I have to force you, so you can blow your mind all the way from here to nowhere. How about this?" He reached out for her, almost as clumsily as a zombie—although his eyes couldn't begin to match the deadness of a real zombie's eyes and mere laziness was no substitute for authentic awkwardness. Molly evaded him easily enough and kicked him on the inside of the left knee, more in irritation than in anger.
"Damn it, Wilson," she said, "I'm trying to help you! We're supposed to be on the same side now!"
The kick must have shocked the ganglion, because Wilson started hopping as if his left leg would no longer support him. Molly seized the open door and slammed it shut with a bang.
"We've always been on the same side, you stupid cunt!" Wilson yelled. Molly knew that he wasn't going to include that in his official report. She would have stalked off up the road in the direction of the Caledonian Road, but she suddenly realised that the pavement was blocked by half a dozen zombies who had appeared as if out of nowhere. She was some distance from the darkest stretch of her homeward journey, but Wilson's training always made him park his car in a well of shadow, and the zombies seemed pretty far gone.
It only required one hasty glance behind to assure Molly that she and Wilson were completely surrounded and cut off. She began to regret the reckless kick. Even an expert martial artist wasn't going to be much use against an army of the living dead if he had to fight them standing on one leg.
"Wilson," she said, faintly. "Is that a gun or a mobile phone tucked under your arm?"
Wilson's scepticism on the subject of zombies had not only evaporated but turned to frank alarm. He reached into his jacket and pulled his weapon out of his shoulder-holster. The automatic pistol didn't look nearly as big as Molly had expected but the matt black metal of its barrel was reassuringly businesslike. Because these were not cinematic zombies but people who still turned up to work by the cold light of day, Molly assumed that shooting holes in them would do enormous and bloody damage, but because they were real zombies the individuals making up the crowd did not seem to be in the least intimidated by this prospect. Every last one of them wanted to give Molly and Wilson a great big hug, and the fact that he was threatening them with messy death was simply not getting through to their benumbed brains. They continued their lumbering advance.
"I told you to call for back-up," Molly said. "You left your phone in the car, didn't you?"
"And who was it that slammed the fucking door?" Wilson retorted, reaching out as if to pull it open again.
It was too late; the zombies were already pressing forward, and there seemed to be nearly a hundred of them now. Even if the man in black had got to the phone, no help he summoned could possibly have got to them in time to prevent ....
What?
As Molly backed up against the wing of the Volvo, she realised that the zombies didn't seem in the least bit hostile. Their eyes and complexions were as dead as eyes and complexions could be, but there was no animosity in them, and no hunger. They were not going to eat anybody, or even crush anybody to death. All they were programmed to do was embrace the uninitiated, presumably in order to pass on their infection.
Wilson screeched in annoyance as the first gripping hand touched the jacket of his suit and left a distinct smear of putrid flesh on the sleeve. He retaliated by pressing the muzzle of his gun to the zombie's shrivelled nose and pressing the trigger.
The zombie's head exploded in a bloodless cascade of oily grey matter, and the body obligingly fell away. Had the members of the mob been compos mentis they would have scattered immediately, but the zombies knew no fear. The rest continued to reach out with their avid arms towards Molly and Mr. Wilson, as generous and loving as ever.
Molly knew that the only thing that could possibly save the two of them was light—and suddenly, there was light!
There was, in fact, a veritable torrent of light which fell from above, lighting up the faces and the minds of the zombies, persuading them on the instant that there were more important things to do than cluster about these particular lost children.
Molly looked up gratefully into the luminous cascade, bathing in the eerie radiance. Mr. Wilson had obviously not been the only one delegated to keep close watch on her.
Unfortunately, Wilson had already given way to panic. As the zombies backed away and gave him room to manoeuvre he fired his gun again, and again, and again. More heads exploded.
A beam of even greater intensity stabbed down from the underbelly of the spaceship, and Molly felt herself growing lighter and lighter, until she was unable to keep her feet on the ground. She floated up into the air, and up and up, until she could see all the lights of north London laid out beneath her like a vast fairground. Because of the pollution-haze that never seemed to lift nowadays, the yellow lights seemed even yellower than usual; their glow was so sulphurous as to be suggestive of the fires of Hell.
The last thing Molly heard before the light soothed her consciousness away was Mr. Wilson's extremely distant voice saying; "Oh, shit!" She could not quite make out whether the aggrieved tone was that of a man whose suit had just been irredeemably ruined, a secret agent who had just blown his promotion prospects by losing the person he had been keeping tabs on, or an officer of the crown who had just committed four totally unnecessary murders in the line of duty.
49
"It's been a while," said Molly to the grey who was bending over her. "We've got a lot of catching up to do. " They were in the kind of bland white-walled and white-curtained room that the greys usually employed for intercourse with their abductees, because they knew that if and when the abductees told their stories sceptics would take its blandness and whiteness as evidence of a simple failure of the abductees' delusional imaginations. She was, however, laid out on a guest bed, not one of the unforgiving examination-tables.
"Things aren't working out quite as we expected," the grey replied, rather sternly. "There's a complication."
"Is that my fault?" Molly countered, combatively.
"To be perfectly frank, we rather think it might be. You made us certain promises."
"I made certain suggestions," Molly pointed out. "The instruments were all yours. I just offered you a strategy that might be worth trying—you were the ones who were supposed to put the plan into effective operation. If it's screwed up, you're the ones who've screwed it."
"There seem to be certain factors in the equation of which we knew nothing," the grey came back. "We take the view that we should have been warned. We had not realised that human belief in God and the Devil was so widespread, or so powerful."
"Well, I take the view that your methods of enquiry were seriously flawed, " Molly told the grey, determined not to give an inch. "If you'd spent a lot less time abducting people and subjecting them to minute physical examinations and a lot more talking to them about their hopes and fears you'd know everything you could possibly need to know about God and the Devil and all their works. You're too hung up on facts. You think you know everything about us because you've been through our bodies with a fine-toothed comb, but you don't know anything about our inner lives. I tried to help you over that as best I could, but I couldn't tell you everything in a mere matter of weeks, could I? I'm sorry I didn't mention the Devil, but I hadn't even met him back then and I didn't find out about the impending Apocalypse of Evil until I went to Faerie. I'm even sorrier than you are if that's what's getting in the way of your schemes for the evolutionary perfection of humankind, but the question isn't who's to blame—it's what do we do about the zombies?"
"What zombies?" asked the grey, innocently.
"The zombies you just saved me from," Molly said, weakly. She had been knocked right out of her conversational stride.
"Oh, those zombies," said the grey. "They wouldn't have hurt you. It's just some sort of flu bug that's going round—we've pulled samples out of half a dozen of our abductees. The symptoms are trivial but it does seem to drag on a bit. That's not why we pulled you up."
Molly recalled that the greys always examined their experimental subjects in very bright light. They hadn't seen the zombies the way she'd seen them. "Well then," she said, "why did you pull me up?"
"Because we've got someone here who says that you can confirm his identity. We can't quite believe he's who he says he is, you see, although our usual methods of analysis have turned up a few anomalies that might support his story. Either way, he's a complication."
Molly furrowed her brow. This was a turn of events for which she was completely unprepared. "Who does he say he is?" she asked, warily.
The grey levitated her from the bed—which wasn't particularly difficult, given that they were obviously back in orbit and quite weightless—and directed her out into the corridor. He floated her around the sinuous arteries of the ship, without pausing to let her enjoy the gloriously starry view from any of the portholes they passed en route. Eventually, they came to another white room, not quite as bland or as barely-furnished as the other but still not the kind of place the greys liked to relax in when they were on their own time. Its central feature was an unusually brutal cage with thick steel bars.
"Have you ever seen this person before?" asked the grey, pointing a slender finger at the human figure confined within the cage.
It was the last person Molly had expected to see, on or off Earth, and she was distressed to see that he was in a worse condition than he had been when she had last seen him. Dilapidation was too mild a word for his state of being, although he didn't seem in the least zombified.
"Hello, Molly," the angel said. "I'm truly glad to see you."
"I thought you'd gone back to Heaven," Molly said. "I honestly thought you'd made it—that I'd saved you from suffering the consequences of your fall."
"You did," said the angel, "and I'm very grateful. I was sent down again as a messenger, on a special mission. It was only supposed to last a matter of hours, and I shouldn't really have had time to lose my wings and fade to near-human, but you have no idea how long it takes to get an appointment with a major religious leader these days. Time was that when an angel turned up in all his glory on the Vatican steps, everybody jumped to it, but now even God himself would have to go through channels and kick His heels in waiting-room after waiting-room. Would you believe that the only one I got in to see the first time of asking was the Dalai Lama?"
"The Dalai Lama doesn't believe in angels," Molly pointed out.
"Considering the state I was in by the time I got around to him, he's seen nothing to shake his scepticism," the angel admitted. "He didn't believe that the world was about to end either, but at least he was polite. I should have gone home right then, but I had one last courtesy call to make. Salt Lake City, for Heaven's sake! Why didn't He just go the whole hog and add East Grinstead to the itinerary?"
"I said, do you know this person?" the grey interrupted, having obviously become tired of being ignored.
"Of course I do," Molly said. "He's an angel. He fell once already, but he got right back up again. I assume that you've contrived to prevent him from doing that again?"
"There is no such thing as an angel," the grey told her, firmly.
"There's no such thing as little grey men in flying saucers, either," Molly told him. "You really haven't got the hang of this business at all, have you? He's a projection of the human yearning for moral order, but the fact that he's imaginary doesn't make him any less important. Why do you want to stop him going back to Heaven?"
