Barney Thomson, Zombie Killer: A Barney Thomson Novella Read online

  Two Days Later, Heathrow Airport, England

  Zombies. Can't live with 'em...

  Swindon was one thing, Heathrow Airport an entirely more serious proposition altogether. Ultimately the zombie attack had shut the airport down faster than two inches of snow. No flights had been allowed in or out since the weekend, although that had been too late to stop the zombie plague being spread far and wide around the world.

  The UK, with their brief experience of handling zombie incursions, had been able to contain the force of the living dead to the confines of the airport. Other cities had not been so fortunate, so quick to act, so credulous of the threat that they faced. Already capital cities as far apart as Bandar Sera Begawan and Tegucigalpa had fallen. The world stood on the brink of war, death, famine, pestilence, moral corruption and chronic fatal contagion. And then there was the zombie thing.

  Heathrow was in lockdown. Those few souls not already contaminated when the airport had been sealed off found that they were not to be allowed out. There were a few heroic tales, a few desperate people hiding out in locked cupboards and remote air vents, but by Tuesday morning they had all, every darn last one of them, been swallowed up by the horde. The zombies were in control. A few of them attempted to fly planes out, but for the most part discovered that while being a zombie was on some levels pretty cool, it totally fucked with your hand/eye coordination. Only a couple of the planes got off the ground and, while destined not to get very far in any case, they were swiftly downed by RAF Regiment anti-aircraft fire.

  The zombie threat in the UK had been contained at the huge expanse of Heathrow, but there could be little doubt that eventually it would spread. The UK was doomed. The entire world was doomed. It wasn't looking good for the new series of Celebrity Big Brother.

  Cabinet Offices, Whitehall, London, England

  The UK government COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) committee was meeting to discuss the zombie issue. As several of the regular members had gone off early for the holiday weekend, or were being told by their wives to look after the kids now that the school break had started, there were fewer members present than there normally would have been, and a couple of outsiders had been press-ganged into emergency COBRA service.

  The PM was almost happy having the zombie crisis to discuss, because it saved them having to spend too much time trying to put a positive spin on negative growth in the economy, which was absolute shit no matter how much you emphasised the word growth.

  Regular members present were the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary. Outsiders drafted in for the occasion were renegade barbershop legend Barney Thomson, Detective Chief Inspector Frank Frankenstein, and Hollywood screen legend Humphrey Bogart, brought on board for his expertise in dealing with tricky movie-type situations. Which was undoubtedly what they were in.

  Barney found himself staring at Bogart, thinking that his presence was particularly strange. Hadn't he died in the 1950s after all?

  'So,' said the PM, looking squarely at the Defence Secretary, 'let me make this absolutely clear. You made the decision to introduce this so-called zombie army to be used as a tool of government imperialism and therefore I feel that ultimately the responsibility must be yours. I expect your resignation on my desk within half an hour of the conclusion of this meeting.'

  The Defence Secretary stared angrily across the table. He would not, under any circumstances, be resigning, but at the moment it suited him to let the PM think that he would allow himself to be cowed.

  'Now,' said the PM, 'we all know the score. Zombies running wild, contagion spreading like wildfire, civilisation in danger, etc., etc. There's no need to harp on about it. We can still turn this to our advantage so that we come out the other end as the predominant world power. Let's hear some solutions.'

  He looked expectantly around the table.

  'I never saw a zombie yet that didn't understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45,' said Humphrey Bogart.'

  The Defence Secretary looked superior and shook his head. 'I believe we might have moved on from that. Too many zombies, not enough .45s. Not in Britain anyway. You're not in Los Angeles now, you know.'

  Bogart stared silently across the table.

  'Have you actually killed a zombie before?' continued the Defence Secretary. 'I mean, I know you're this movie hero type of thing, but you know, have you actually, you know, killed a zombie? In a movie even?'

  Humphrey Bogart smiled, but there was an edge to it. One of those Humphrey Bogart smiles.

  'Sure, I killed some zombies. I killed lots of people, lots of zombies. Drank a shot of whisky with most of them too. Don't you worry about me, Philip, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'

  The PM nodded, recognising that they could only push the high-priced Hollywood talent so far.

  'Do we have a police perspective on this?' he said, quickly turning to Frankenstein. 'You people have much zombie experience?'

  Frankenstein stared along the table at the PM. He had met previous Prime Ministers and was aware that there were far more daunting people with whom to deal in life.

  'Serial killers, yes, zombies... no,' he said. He glanced at Barney. 'I do have to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that I've met Satan himself.'

  The PM nodded. 'Ah, yes. Mandelson. Total wanker.'

  Frankenstein was going to gainsay him, but decided there was no point.

  'Does the Met have a zombie contingency plan?' asked the PM, seriously as far as anyone could tell.

  Frankenstein had embarrassed even himself by asking the question at the office prior to attending the meeting.

  'There's all sorts of stuff to do with riots, plague, invasion and even aliens, but no zombies. I guess no one really thought that this was going to happen.'

  'Given that what we're talking about here is some sort of invasion of a zombie plague alien riot type of thing, couldn't we cobble something together?'

  Frankenstein nodded.

  'We have people working on it as we speak.'

  'And?'

  Frankenstein raised an eyebrow.

  'So far they've come up with arming the populace with .45s.'

  Humphrey Bogart barked a laugh. 'My, my, my. Such a lot of guns around town, and so few brains.'

  The Prime Minister rubbed his chin. If possible he wanted to avoid hand-to-hand combat with zombies on the streets of London. It wouldn't look good.

  'Not on my watch,' he said mundanely to himself. The rest of the committee looked at him, as he slipped into a moment of introspection.

  He had waited five years to become Prime Minister and then it had all fallen apart and ended in disaster. No overall majority, constant compromise and fighting with the LibDems, the lingering spectre of the phone hacking shambles which had exploded and vomitted disaster and disgrace over his premiership, and forever saddled with the mountain of debt they'd been left by the previous incumbent, celebrated economist that he was. It had been one great total fuck-up from start to finish, and now he'd allowed the Defence Minister to introduce this absurd living dead regiment which threatened to overwhelm the earth, turning it into the zombie planet of death.

  The PM's head jerked up, as if he realised they were all staring at him, waiting for some sort of direction.

  'Barney!' he said suddenly. 'Barney Thomson. Tell me something I don't know. Tell us how we're going to straighten this out. Any zombie experience?'

  Barney shrugged.

  'I've seen Day of the Dead,' he said glibly.

  The PM nodded. 'That's a zombie film, is it?'

  'Yes.'

  'Super.' He glanced at Humphrey Bogart. 'Humphrey Bogart, were you in that at all?'

  Humphrey Bogart smiled ruefully and shook his head.

  'Well, look, give me us some options.'

  Barney glanced around the room. Weirdly up until that moment he'd been more concerned with the killer Harlequin Sweetlips. Indeed, he could barely get her out
of his head. She was waiting for him, somewhere in the city. He had seen her briefly a couple of days previously and then she walked on. But she was out there, ready to kill. And, undoubtedly, she had killed the junior defence ministers, which meant that there was something else going on here, something that even the Defence Minister himself didn't know about.

  'We need to get our shit together,' added the PM, as if that would prompt Barney into some great answer to the zombie apocalypse.

  'The trouble with getting your shit together is that it allows you to see just how much of it there is,' said Barney.

  'Yes, yes,' said the PM impatiently, no time for soundbite philosophy, unless someone had written it for him to say in a speech.

  'Two options,' said Barney. 'One, let it happen. The human race has been making such an arse of everything, is it really genuinely going to make things that much worse? And given that the zombie presumably is less technically minded, chances are they'd actually fuck up the planet less than we've been doing. So, you know, it might not be a bad thing.'

  The PM stared at him as if he was Adam Boulton.

  'And option two would be?'

  Barney glanced at the Defence Secretary. He wouldn't like this.

  'You can't harness the zombie force. You just can't, and it was absurd to think you could. Get every scientist in the country working on an antidote, if they're not already, and in the meantime use every piece of military hardware to eradicate them.'

  'No!' gasped the Defence Secretary.

  'Flatten Heathrow?' said the PM. 'How would that look?'

  'It would look bad,' said Barney. 'But you know, not as bad as a zombie takeover. Especially if some of those zombies aren't even British.'

  Romanian Zombies In New Benefits Scam screamed the Mail Online.

  A Travelodge Somewhere Just off The M25, England

  The former Defence Secretary stared gloomily at the morning's front pages. Child abuse, the elderly, horsemeatgate, the Pope, a pill to stop skin cancer, treatment rationing in the NHS; the Telegraph even had secrets of a perfect staycation for fuck's sake. The country's economic woes, the ongoing disaster that was supposed to bring down the Prime Minister and allow him to ease into the seat of power, was nowhere to be seen. Everyone had grown so used to it. No one cared.

  The zombie contagion sweeping the world and threatening to wipe out regular humanity, was the elephant in the room. None of the papers wanted to talk about it. They'd rather stick Jordan's latest boob job on the front page than acknowledge the fact that she was now one of the living dead. And none of them could acknowledge that this was the last day there would be any newspapers at all.

  He had been forced to resign his Defence portfolio the previous day, and now he was sitting alone in a cheap hotel room, facing up to the complete disaster he'd created. He had instigated the magnificent zombie army, intent on leading Britain to a new Golden Age, and it had all gone horribly, stupidly, disastrously wrong.

  As the end neared he had begun to realise that he had not been in control all along, as he'd thought. The zombies were out of control certainly, but even the plan, the whole magnificent strategy to rule the world, had been placed in front of him by a higher power, and they had used him every step of the way.

  He was fucked, completely and utterly fucked. And not just because the Travelodge was under siege from a zombie horde.

  The former Defence Secretary lifted the small hand gun and placed it at the side of his head. He swallowed. He looked in the mirror. He pulled the trigger.

  He missed.

  At that moment the door was broken down and three bloody, slavering zombies, intent on eating human flesh, blundered into the room, and although the former Defence Secretary turned his gun on them, he only managed to hit one zombie head in a bloody splatter of slime, then the others were quickly upon him.

  10 Downing Street, London, England

  Whitehall was under siege. The zombies were closing in. They had broken out from Heathrow airport late on Tuesday night and were spreading quickly throughout the country. The army had been stretched thin defending Heathrow, never mind the rest of the nation. Local police forces around the country were being overwhelmed. Britain was quickly being turned into a slime-ridden, putrified, zombie shit-tip.

  Yes. I know.

  All around the world the same story was being repeated. Many of the great capital cities – Antananarivo, Ashgabat, Paramaribo, El Aaiún, Washington DC – had already fallen. In most places it was a complete disaster, apart from in Washington, where the zombies had at least managed to come to an agreement on the budget deficit. Nevertheless, America – despite being more prepared for a living dead infestation than anywhere else in the world due to the large number of firearms held by the populace – had been quickly overrun.

  The world was falling. Rumours that the zombies might turn out to have inner depths, with a sensitivity for the arts, politics and music, were proving to be unfounded. For the most part they were only interested in eating human flesh. In large cities where the population had already been completely overwhelmed, the living dead had begun to turn upon each other. Zombie against zombie.

  Number 10 Downing Street was proving to be one of the last bastions of hope. All the thick metal doors had been sealed, and the Prime Minister was locked down with his senior advisors, and a crack security team of seven men.

  The PM and those senior advisors were sitting around a table playing cards. There was a feeling of the end of the party in the air. The PM, his chief advisor Logan, DCI Frank Frankenstein, renegade barbershop legend, Barney Thomson, and high-priced Hollywood talent, Humphrey Bogart. The guards were stationed at the two entry points to the sealed area two floors beneath Downing Street. From up above they could hear the vague sounds of carnage, murder and clusterfucking death. Barney was reminded of the afternoon tea sequence in Carry On Up The Khyber. But this was no classic 1960s British comedy. This was real. There were zombies at the gates of Sodom.

  Real? Perhaps not. Yet it was some strange netherworld he could not escape.

  There was someone else roaming the rooms of the bunker beneath 10 Downing Street, but none of them were aware of her yet.

  'Do you think I'll be remembered fondly?' said the Prime Minister wistfully, as he paused before picking up a card.

  The other four at the table stared at him. Three of them had no loyalty to him in the first place and the fourth – Logan – was feeling that there was little point in being loyal to the last Prime Minister, the man who had ultimately green-lit the destruction of the planet.

  'Zombies don't remember shit,' said Frankenstein, 'so you needn't worry. You blow a zombie's head off from a yard with a shotgun, his mate will watch it, and then he'll just come at you two seconds later because he's already forgotten that a shotgun can blow his head off. They don't think, they just eat flesh.'

  The Prime Minister looked a little annoyed.

  'I mean, by the regular humans left alive. The survivors.'

  He stared hopefully around the room. It appeared he was the only one of the five who thought that there actually would be any.

  'You'll be remembered,' said Barney, 'as the Prime Minister who was about to be the victim of an internal coup but avoided it by unleashing a zombie plague that took over the world and ruined Scotland's chance of ever winning the World Cup. If you think you'll be fondly remembered for that, then on you go...'

  Barney laid down his cards. He was tired, miserable. The end was coming, and hadn't he been looking for some kind of end for a long time? Now that it was near, he wished that at least he could be free again before it happened. He didn't care that he was about to die – or to be turned into some sort of cannibalistic, slobbering beast – but he just didn't want to die trapped. He wanted to see Scotland again, one last time. He wanted to smell the sea, feel free, look at the mountains. He wanted to imagine that the world was as beautiful a place to live as the landscape that surrounded him. One last time, that was all. And then he could be bi
tten; then he wouldn't care.

  He walked slowly from the room and stood in the corridor. Out here the sounds of slaughter, misery and death from up above were slightly louder. There were three guards at the end of the corridor, guns at the ready, looking nervous. Barney watched them for a second, and then walked into one of several small offices off to the side.

  He walked in, closed the door. Didn't turn the light on. The light would remind him that the room was tiny, enclosed, window-less. Drab. He leant back against the door and closed his eyes. If he imagined it strongly enough, if he really tried to put his head in the right place, he could feel the breeze on his face. Smell the salt water. Taste it on his lips.

  In the darkness he could be anywhere.

  She knew what he was thinking and stood in silence, only a few yards away, for several minutes before approaching him. He had no sense of her, no idea that there was someone else in the room.

  Slowly she came to him. The darkness was absolute. Barney had managed to lose himself, had no awareness of her whatsoever.

  She lifted her hand and gently ran her finger down the side of his cheek.

  *

  Up above the last of the British Army fought to protect the head of the government that had been so stupid as to unleash the zombies in the first place. Thousands had been reduced to hundreds, the hundreds were down to a last few desperate men and women.

  The zombie numbers had grown exponentially as they swept through London, and now there was a great, swarming mass of them closing in on the final few souls not yet killed or infected.

  They swarmed into the building as the door of Number 10 was overrun. The last remaining few fell further and further back until they were protecting the doors to the underground bunker. They banged on the doors, they demanded to be let in, their cries desperate and distraught. Pleading.

  The men inside had their orders. One of them, one of the seven guarding the bunker, thought he heard the voice of his wife, a fellow soldier. He was about to crack, he was about to fight his own comrades for the chance to rescue his childhood sweetheart, when he heard her scream, a dreadful, painful cry of anguish, and he knew it was too late. Quickly his mind got to work, telling himself that his wife had not been there, that she had escaped elsewhere. Somewhere that the zombies had not reached.