Year Zero (2000), page 26
Camden High Street was as busy as it usually was on Christmas Eve, but it was difficult to think of any location to which a plague of zombies would have made less difference, at least in daylight. Before starting on the heavy shopping, Molly took time out to drop into the Laydownyer Arms to apologise for her long absence.
"That's okay," said the slightly-zombified bar manager. "Some tall guy in a black suit dropped in to say that you might not be in for a while. He said something about your being attacked on the way home—it was the same night four locals got their heads blown off in some kind of firefight. Drug war, they said, but rumour has it that they were all shot in the face with the same .44 automatic. You can come back on shift any time. It's been slow for Christmas so far, but it's bound to pick up tonight. If New Year's Eve's half as good as last year I could really use you then."
"I can't," Molly said. "My kid's staying with me." She nodded in Angie's direction and the zombie barman winked at the child.
"Okay," he said. "If you change your mind, though, just give me a ring."
Since moving to Barnsbury Molly had got out of the habit of doing a whole week's shopping in one go, but with Angie along to help out with the carrier bags it was easy enough to lay in abundant supplies. Sainsbury's was crowded, but under the glare of neon striplights zombies were sticklers for trolley etiquette and patient queuers at the check-out. When you got right down to it, Molly thought, that was what zombiedom was all about: queuing in an orderly, patient and supercool manner for the ultimate check-out.
"We'll be okay," Molly assured her daughter, as she let the two of them back into the flat. "There's plenty on TV. We'll be fine."
It sounded a trifle hollow, and when she actually turned on the TV it began to seem even more hollow. The zombie newsreader reported the rumour that the new flu epidemic was a biological weapon escaped from a military laboratory with all the contempt his lax face muscles could muster, and stressed that as the disease had not yet claimed a single fatal casualty it could not possibly be reckoned as anything more than a minor nuisance. He also assured north Londoners that the fire burning in the laboratories of Peaslee Pharmaceuticals was at last under control and that the North Circular Road would be reopened as soon as possible. Fire investigators would begin to investigate the source of the explosion that had ripped through the lab complex as soon as possible, and would also be able to confirm the final death-toll, currently estimated at thirty-seven, including world-famous genetic engineers Marjorie De'Ath, Edward Hyde and Nathanael Wingate.
"I should have done what Hyde told me to do," Molly murmured, when the weatherman finally came on. "If Wingate had gone in and picked up that package when he was supposed to ... but no, I had to feed his paranoia one last biscuit."
"Have you still got the big man's gun, Mummy?" Angie asked, curiously. "Will you get into trouble for taking it? Are you going to use it?"
"Yes I have," Molly admitted. "I don't think I'll get into trouble, because the other men in black will probably assume that Wingate took it. I'm not going to use it unless I have to, and I'm pretty sure I won't. The men in black probably won't come calling again now that Wilson, De'Ath and Hyde are all out of the picture—not until the holidays are over, at any rate —and the zombies can't do us any harm."
58
The phone didn't ring that evening, and Molly didn't try to ring out. It didn't ring on Christmas Day either. Molly picked up the receiver of her own phone half a dozen times, but she always put it back down again, because she knew full well that if she dialled she'd only get the Devil's mocking voice on the other end, saying that of course she could speak to Christine, insinuating all the while that he'd won yet again.
Molly and Angie had Christmas dinner á deux and they both tried hard to pretend that it was a festive occasion, but they couldn't muster the requisite conviction. They both knew that Christine preferred dancing with the Devil and that the world was due to end in a week, and this patchwork pall of depression was more than adequate to take the edge off the turkey breast-roast.
The Moment of Rapture passed without any unusual display of Heavenly Light in Camden, and it didn't make the early evening news—but that wasn't surprising. Nothing ever did make the early evening news on Christmas Day except the Queen's speech, whose banality would hardly have been affected by the defection of the Heavenbound even if it hadn't been pre-recorded.
Molly made no attempt to ring Christine on Boxing Day either, but she resolved that if Christine hadn't made the first move by seven o'clock on Wednesday, she'd take the bull by the horns and give the little cow and her diabolical boyfriend the satisfaction of savouring the extent of her desperation.
At six-thirty-five on Wednesday, the phone finally rang.
Angie picked it up before Molly could get there, but she had sense enough not to hang on to it. "Yes," "Hi" and "Okay" were the only words she spoke before handing the receiver to her mother, saying, "It's Chris. She says she wants to explain."
"Hello, Chris," Molly said, trying not to sound tearful. "I was just about to call you. You don't have to explain anything. I was fifteen myself once. I know how these things happen."
"I know you think he's the Devil incarnate," Christine said, "but that's because you don't understand him. That's what I want to explain."
"You don't have to," Molly said, again.
"But I do. You think it's the end of the world, and it's not. It's the beginning of something new, something wonderful."
"You're pregnant," Molly immediately inferred. She couldn't help remembering the old aide memoire: Mars implies; Venus infers. She'd quote it to Torquemadam once, but poor Sylv hadn't been able to see the joke. "What are plies?" she'd asked, mystified.
"No I'm not," Christine. "Or—well, actually, yes I am, but that's not the point. The point is that he's not really evil at all. That was just scapegoating. He's taken the blame for an awful lot of things that weren't his fault. All he needs is a chance to prove himself. That's what this whole thing is, to him—a chance to prove that he can look after the world far better than God ever did. All that temptation and torment business is behind him now. He's completely fed up with being a collection of negatives. He wants to do something positive now. He wants to remake the world, not just to pull it out of the horrible mess that the all God squads have left it in but to make it better—better than the likes of the little grey men could ever imagine, let alone contrive. You should never have listened to them, Mum. They're clever enough, but they're just scientists. They don't understand love. Those weirdos at Chiliad Science were just as bad—no different, really. They're all just androids, Mum—none of them understands what it is to have feelings. But you're a mother. You could understand, if you'd only try. If you'd only open your mind ... if you could only see him the way I see him, and really listen to what he has to say ... if you could only accept him for what he is, instead of thinking of him as the Devil ..."
"Chris," said Molly, softly. "He actually is the Devil. And I have seen him for what he really is, in the back of poor Dean's car."
"Well, he's sorry about that now," Christine said. "He was a bit pissed off because you were getting so chummy with his old friends—they let him down, you know—and he hadn't seen enough of the future at that stage to realise how important you were. He hadn't been the Devil for very long, you know. Well, in one sense, of course, he'd always been the Devil, but in another sense, he'd spent the first thirty years of his life as some perfectly ordinary bloke who just happened to bump into your friend Annie when she was at a low ebb, and then got tangled up with your friend Francine, and then just happened to be sitting on the couch in the front room of the B&B when zap!—eternity unwinds and the fallout from your miracle-machine sends him straight back to central casting for the role of the villain to end all villains. I mean, Mum, you're at least partly responsible for all this, and I know you're a bit jealous because you fancied him too, but have a heart, Mum. It's not my fault!"
"No, love," said Molly, very softly indeed. "It's not."
"They're just zombies, Mum," Christine went on, hardly having paused for breath. "They're not suffering any pain. They aren't even going to die, as such. They're just going to sort of biodegrade, peacefully and usefully, feeling nothing but love and joy and all that sort of stuff. The world doesn't need them, Mum—in fact, what the world needs more than anything else is to be without them. Chiliad Science never understood that, and nor did the greys. What the world needs, desperately, is a new start. A new Eden, a new humanity. It needs cleansing, Mum. Next time around, we'll do far, far better. We'll get a proper start, and we'll all have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It'll be great, Mum. Absolutely great. He doesn't even need the gun-thing for himself—all he really needs is for you to point it in the right direction. All he needs is for you to refrain from destroying him. He really likes you, Mum, and he really, like, respects you, but he's just a little bit worried that you won't do the right thing. People are only human, he says, and sometimes they can't help getting their knickers in a twist. If only you'd think about it, he says, you'd see what you ought to do ... what you have to do. He's not really the Father of Lies, Mum, but he is the father of my child and I don't want to lose him the way you lost my dad, and Angie's. You do understand that, don't you? You do understand?"
"Oh yes," Molly whispered, while the tears ran silently down her cheeks. "I understand."
59
Thursday's post brought Molly and Angie a gaudy invitation to a big party on New Year's Eve. It was accompanied by a handwritten note which informed them that a car would be sent to deliver their costumes at eight, and would wait to carry them to the venue when they were ready. It wasn't signed, but the RSVP phone-number was the same one that the Devil had given Molly. There was also a belated card from the thirteenth floor of Arcadia House, signed by the entire ex-Hierarchy of Hell. That too had a handwritten note enclosed, signed by Lilith alone, which simply said: "Sorry it's late. We've had a lot on our minds."
The lunchtime news on TV still had no mention of the Rapture or of any mysterious disappearances. It seemed that the thirty-seven humans qualified for Heaven had lived lives of such quiet obscurity that no one had yet noticed that they were gone. The zombie newsreader did, however, report unusual activity on the part of the US Air Force in several different locations, including the Iraqi no-fly zone, New Mexico and Guam. It seemed that missiles had been fired at a number of targets but no hits had yet been confirmed nor any reason given for the action.
"Oh shit!" said Molly. "That wasn't in the script."
"What wasn't?" Angie wanted to know.
"He's going after the greys. He's actually mobilised the US Air Force to go after the saucers."
"Is that bad?"
"It is if the action's successful. I was relying on the greys to pull our chestnuts out of the fire if all else failed. I thought that might be the Devil's only weakness—the fact that he's terrestrial and they're not. They perform on a much bigger stage, you see. They could have put the whole problem into a different and more productive context. Also, they could have beamed us up if things got really sticky. He's already taken out Chiliad Science—if he takes out the greys, we really are on our own."
The six o'clock news confirmed Molly's worst fears. Three extraterrestrial vehicles had been shot down. One had fallen into the Pacific and one into the inaccessible desert close to the ruins of ancient Babylon, but there was abundant footage of the inhabitants of Roswell dancing among the wreckage that was liberally scattered over four square miles. Senior USAF officers were queuing up to talk to CNN about the relief they felt at finally having completed Operation Softly Softly, which had begun fifty-two years before. The BBC was, however, careful to point out that it had been the British who had first alerted the initially-sceptical Americans to the fact that Earth was under observation by aliens, following the now-legendary Woking Encounter of 1897.
It wasn't until the IT N news at eleven that Molly finally obtained the one piece of information she had been desperate to hear. The US president had made a live broadcast announcing that the alien mothership had fled the system. It had gone into warp drive, he assured his rapt listeners, somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars. America—acting, of course, on behalf of all mankind—had just won the first interstellar war, so comprehensively that the enemy had not been able to fire a single shot. This, according to the president, boded well for the future conquest of the galaxy, which would provide the greatest challenge of the next thousand years. It might have sounded even better had the president not been in an advanced phase of the zombie flu.
By this time, Molly had put Angie to bed, so she had no alternative but to brood alone. She knew that with the greys out of the picture her last chance of an easy escape had gone. While they could have lifted her out of the nightmare at any moment the question of whether the nightmare was subjective or objective hadn't seemed to be of paramount importance, but now it was. Now she finally had to confront the question that Marjorie De'Ath had insisted she retain at the back of her mind: the question of whether all of this might be a drug-induced paranoid delusion.
It was, Molly knew, by far the simplest explanation. It was also the most comforting explanation. If all of this was happening inside her head, then the human race had not actually been turned into zombies, the presiding geniuses of Chiliad Science had not been immolated, Angie had enjoyed a quiet family Christmas with the Jarvises and Christine was not living with the Devil in a new Tower of Babel erected on the site of the Bank of England. If all of this was happening inside her head then the Moment of Rapture had not passed unnoticed on Christmas Day, Elvis was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the dead in Graceland and any little grey men that happened to be passing through the solar system would do so unintercepted by tomahawk missiles. Molly knew, however, that no matter how hard she might hope for this to be the truth of the matter, it was not something she could simply take on trust. She had never been easy prey to the temptations of faith, and she knew that no good evidence of the world's safety—let alone proof thereof—could possibly present itself to her senses if she were really as crazy as that hypothesis implied.
Whether her predicament were objectively real or not, she decided, she had no alternative but to play it straight. If the world did not need saving, all well and good, but if it did— and she would still require saving in either case—then it was up to her to do it. The Devil had carefully stacked all the cards in his own favour, but whatever else he had lied about he must have told the truth about the future being as yet unmade. His scheme could still be undone, if only she could figure out a way to undo it. Unfortunately, he had already anticipated the possibility that she might turn the deus ex machine upon herself—and by letting her know that he had already factored the possibility into his plan he had thrown the value of the move into doubt. Was he bluffing, or double bluffing, or triple bluffing? Did he really want to prevent her from doing what the universe had already assumed she would do, or was he trying to ensure, in his inimitably sly fashion, that she would do it, repeating a mistake that had already turned tragedy into farce and moving on to something even stranger?
It was quite a problem, and it was not obvious that she could ever work her way through it by logic alone. Unfortunately, it was equally hard to believe that she could obtain an appropriate result if she simply threw logic aside and trusted to her instincts and spontaneous impulses. If she had not trusted her instincts and spontaneous impulses far too much already, she wouldn't have been in this mess in the first place and if the Devil were merely a projection of some wicked and unruly part of herself, he was instinct and spontaneous impulse through and through. If he had a weakness, that weakness had to be approached via the cerebrum, by rational thought and cleverness.
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the poker-game to the clever, " she murmured, "but you'd have to be a complete idiot to bet any other way. Whether it's the whole world that'll comprehensively buggered, or only me, I'd have to say that the odds don't look good."
But that, she realised, was what deus ex machines were for. To them, million-to-one chances were routine. As long as she had the deus ex machine, the odds didn't really figure in the equation at all.
60
When the Devil's car turned up at eight o'clock on New Year's Eve, Molly wasn't entirely surprised to find that the driver was Elvis, looking somewhat older than when she'd first met him at Sainsbury's singles night, but not as old as he'd seemed when she'd glimpsed him in Chiliad Science's delusion-dressed research lab.
"It's good to see you again," she told him, sincerely. "How have you been?"
"Feelin's mutual, ma'am," he said, ruefully. "Not so bad, considering. In Pandemonium, I was part of the floor show, but that's all closed down now. Now I'm just the Devil's driver. Needs must and all. I hope you like your costumes—I told the boss you might like a choice, but he said that it was his party, and that these were the only ones he had that were guaranteed to fit."
The larger of the two outfits was a cowgirl costume complete with fringed waistcoat and mock-Stetson hat. Elvis told Molly that it was modelled on one from Annie Get Your Gun, with the obvious exception of the black mask, but Molly had only seen Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and she remembered only too well what had happened to the head cowgirl in that movie. It did fit, though—and the holster was exactly the right size to accommodate the deus ex machine.
"What the hell," she said, gathering it up so that she could change in the bedroom.
Angie's costume was a miniature Harlequin which rendered her peculiarly androgynous. She liked it, except for the little black hat.
"I'll be a joker, won't I?" she said, having only seen the bastardized kind of Harlequin you could sometimes find in a pack of cards.
