Remains of the Dead Read online

  Remains of the Dead

  Iain McKinnon

  Published by Permuted Press.

  Copyright 2011 Iain McKinnon.

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Cover art by Craig Patton.

  “The heavens roared as with thunder and from the earth came the sound of moans. Storm clouds blackened the heavens and the world was shrouded in the stillness of death. Lightning cracked across the skies and flames flared up from the ground. From the bloated clouds there came rain, and the rain washed all life before it. When the flashes in the sky had died and the flames had withered all that remained was as ash.”

  —Epic of Gilgamesh

  Foreword

  If you’re reading this, you probably get the whole zombie thing. You understand why legions of fans love them so, and how the genre manages to produce a glut of new books and movies and comics every month without its fan base going into terminal burn out. Others have already noted that there is a parallel between zombie fandom’s ability to devour an ever-growing amount of new material and the insatiable appetites of the zombie itself, so I won’t go over that ground here. Most fans shrug their shoulders at such commentary anyway. Suffice it to say that if you’re a zombie fan, you don’t need an explanation. You just need more cool zombie shit.

  Fair enough.

  But what of those people who are still mystified by the zombie phenomenon’s growing popularity? What can we say to people who look at the zombie craze, shake their heads in disgust, and say, in all honesty, they see no redeeming value there whatsoever?

  Well, first off, I’m not out to convert anyone. Some people just don’t get it, don’t care to, and won’t be bothered by any reasonable explanation of the zombie genre and what it’s saying about our lives and how we live them. More power to them. They are welcome to their opinion and I hope they have a nice day.

  But there are quite a few people out there who are legitimately curious. They have watched the amazing proliferation of zombie-related material shambling into our lives and wondered if there’s something of value there. Perhaps, if they’re especially sensitive to social trends, they’ve even noticed that zombies have gone beyond the commercial success of The Walking Dead, World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to infect our very language as well. They have successfully crossed over from mere pop culture references to accepted mainstream groupspeak. For example, following World War II we described people in shock as having the “2000 yard stare,” after the Tom Lea painting of a Marine from the Battle of Peleliu. But today, we’re just as likely to say “that person looks like a zombie,” or “has that zombie look in his eyes.” Going further, we see well respected professional economists such as Jeremy Grantham writing articles with titles like “Night of the Living Fed.” Professional forensic accountants, testifying before the Supreme Court and Senate select committees, speak of zombie businesses. Computer experts freely use terms like zombie terminals and zombie programs. And on and on.

  So what does all this mean? What’s the point? Well, at a minimum, I think it suggests that once a concept becomes so integral to a society that it pervades the very language that society speaks, we are no longer free to dismiss that concept’s significance. And with the zombie, we now seem to be talking about something more than yet another horror fiction trope. We are watching the apotheosis of a B movie icon into a full fledged member of our modern day mythology.

  That’s a grand claim, I know, but consider the shift in thinking behind the zombie’s recent elevation. Horror fiction has a long standing tradition of using monsters as metaphor. Frankenstein’s creature played to our fear of science without a sense of moral responsibility. Dracula was, for the Victorians, an intensely sexual book, and an uncomfortable indictment of their cultural sensibilities. The space invaders of the 50s and 60s were thinly veiled Communists. Godzilla was the bastard stepchild of the bomb. Kurt Barlow was Stephen King’s personification of the disease killing America’s small towns. In each case, the monster was not only interesting, but stood for something.

  The zombie too has been used as a metaphor. In fact, zombie writers have embraced this concept with gusto. George Romero used the zombie to criticize everything from racism to rampant consumerism. Max Brooks used World War Z as an amazingly subtle critique of world politics. Seth Grahame-Smith even managed to sneak in a little literary criticism with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The list goes on, but I think the point is made. The zombie as metaphor is simply part of a long literary tradition of making monsters matter.

  Likewise, the zombie is nothing new in terms of what it is, which is basically your run of the mill revenant. It is a dead thing that has come back to pester the living, same as every ghost that’s come before it, same as Dracula and his imitators, same as Frankenstein’s creature. All of which begs the question: if the zombie is just business as usual, how can I say it is something so completely new?

  The answer lies in the zombie’s plurality. All of the monsters named above are distinctive because they are singular. There is just one of them. They are monstrous because they are so different from the humans they torment, and yet we can humanize them because they have distinctive personalities.

  Not so the zombie. The zombie, as many writers have pointed out (myself included), is a blank slate upon which nearly any fear or social commentary can be projected.

  And of course, there’s the fact that you never get just one zombie. You get wave upon relentless wave of them. Yes, they are plodding and stupid, but they are endowed with a single-mindedness that is as frightening as it is total. The individual zombie is nothing special. Detestable, yes. Frightening, certainly. One might safely say that a walking corpse is profound without being accused of waxing hyperbolic. But a single zombie is not an insurmountable obstacle. Even those who have never seen a zombie movie, or read a Max Brook book, know how to dispatch it. Destroy the brain with a gunshot or blunt object and the deed is done. Simple as that. Repeat as many times as necessary, or until you and your small band of survivors are all dead.

  This leads, naturally enough, to the most common criticism of zombie fiction. Detractors accuse the genre, perhaps rightly, of being somewhat static. There is little content, they say, beyond the tidal motion of zombie violence, where the dead advance, are repelled, advance again, get repelled again, and so on until the reader grows numb and the continuing survival of the characters pointless. Why is this popular, they ask.

  I would argue that this tidal motion, its endless repetition, is exactly what gives the genre its vitality.

  Let me explain.

  Modern life has a tediousness to it that is almost tragic. We go to work on Monday and begin the soul-sucking process of wading through an endless stream of bullshit emails. We move an endless amount of paperwork from pile A to pile B, then back again. We fill out forms that lead to more forms. Work takes on a painful sort of circularity, like dogs at the racetrack sprinting after fake rabbits. Those of you working retail know this pain at the molecular level.

  Given the seeming pointlessness of it all, is it any wonder that the human spirit seeks to rebel? Is it any wonder that our creative minds seek to put a face on so much circularity, and annihilate it?

  That’s where books like the one you hold in your hands come in. With Remains of the Dead, Iain McKinnon has harnessed the caged rage of the modern worker, and given him back his defiant roar. The war he describes is of course one of attrition. Zombies attack and people die. And this happens again and again.

  But this is hardly sloppy storytelling. Quite the reverse, actually. This is your life, your job, he’s describing—only with zombies.

  So turn the page and get mad for a while. Fight back, if only against the meat puppets of the mind.
<
br />   And be glad you had this chance to vent.

  Joe McKinney

  San Antonio, Texas

  August 31, 2011

  Chapter One

  All the Towns’ Folk

  Dejected by the dead world beneath him, Cahz closed his eyes and listened to the throb of the helicopter’s engine. The constant heavy beating of the blades and the drone of the turbine encased him in noise. He cradled the solid metal body of his carbine, its hard surface reassuring to his touch. The weapon sat in an unorthodox position, butt hooked over his forearm with the muzzle pointing at his feet. With every rock or turn the chopper made, the stock jostled against the helmet sitting in his lap, making a low clunking noise.

  It was a sound almost lost to the din of the cabin, but Cahz felt it and loathed it, like the incessant dripping of a leaky tap, coercing his silent rage to a crescendo. With his eyes closed he focused on his physical state. His backside was numb, his legs were aching for a stretch, and there was a sharp pain in his shoulder from a strap on his body armour that was biting into his flesh. But it was the most comfortable arrangement he could muster.

  The view from the chopper proved to be no distraction. Out of the window the corpse of one more unimportant city lay before him, ragged and dirtied by violence, neglect and nature flaking away the remnants of civilization. They were cities populated by the walking dead—the men, women and children who had found no rest in their demise. The wretched creatures were tortured by a malodorous and corrupt immortality that robbed them of their vital spark and imposed a ravenous hunger. They were forever-shambling husks in a perpetual hunt for living flesh.

  Cahz opened his eyes, desperate to lose the nagging dread of coming in country. He purposefully kept his gaze inside the cabin and focused his attention on the minutia.

  To his right was an invisible demarcation line—a few extra inches of space he would not cross. That area belonged to Idris, the pilot. Cahz didn’t like to engage him in conversation or intrude on his side of the cabin. It wasn’t a festering hostility that made Cahz standoffish. It was fear. Not fear of the man; Idris was a nice enough guy, a bit reserved and quiet, but there was nothing menacing about him. Cahz was fearful of something going wrong.

  It was the fear that he might initiate some distraction that would cause them to crash, were he to nudge Idris’ elbow at the vital point in a manoeuvre or break his concentration at a crucial moment. It wasn’t that Cahz feared dying. After all, these days there were worse things than death.

  He looked around the cabin trying to distract himself from the discomfort and noise.

  The chopper they flew in hadn’t been designed to ferry troops but it served well enough in its current roll. She was small, not so much compact as cramped, but she had good fuel economy and an excellent range. All things considered not a bad run about. Cahz very much doubted any new helicopters had come off any production lines for some years now. This was the third chopper sequestered to them in as many years. The first broke down and was dismantled for parts; he assumed because the vital part that was broken no longer had a replacement. The second chopper no one knew what happened to it or its crew. It flew out one bright morning on a specimen run and never returned. No distress call, no wreckage, nothing. She just vanished.

  Maybe it’s still down there in that grey landscape, Cahz thought. The land, for all its greenery, looked washed out and dreary. It was a depressing sight.

  Thirty minutes ago he’d been briefly occupied by the sunrise—a palette of vivid golds, azure blues and iridescent pinks as the lingering period of murky twilight was forced back. It was beautiful; a rare splash of colour to this dead world.

  However, the brilliant orange glow had quickly been obscured by a flock of dark rain laden clouds. With that the world had taken on the depressing insipid hues that shrouded the dead below. And as it did the claustrophobic oppression had returned.

  Cahz had been a soldier all his adult life. He’d lost count of the number of flights over hostile territory—flights far more dangerous than this. The enemy below didn’t fire ground-to-air missiles, they didn’t drive a car packed full of explosives into your base, and they didn’t leave indiscriminate booby traps. He’d served much of his time in uniform fighting insurgents, being shot at and bombed. But this world was a long way from those tours. In the old world people had tried to kill him, people had tried to help him and some people couldn’t have cared less about him. But there were always people. The villages or towns or cities may have been battle damaged, but without fail life would return. The traders would reopen the market, the housewife would brush out the dirt and shattered glass and the kids would play in the street.

  Not now. The city below was scarred from the damage inflicted during the chaos of collapse. But the wounds to the cityscape hadn’t been healed by man. Instead nature had started the long task of breaking the concrete down and reclaiming the land, soothing the harsh grey back to a verdant green.

  Unable to escape the dismay overwhelming his consciousness, Cahz purposefully switched back to his military mindset, preoccupying himself with the practical aspects of his mission.

  He toggled his radio. “Angel, what’s your situation?”

  “Secure and in position,” Angel answered in her thick Russian accent. “I have eyes on Bate and field of fire is good.”

  “Bates, how’s your position?” Cahz asked.

  Bates’ voice crackled over the short range radio, “A-okay. Area is clear. Capture net is set. Activity is high but I’m ready when you are.”

  Cahz re-examined the terrain below. Raggedy figures shambled their way towards his man on the ground.

  There were more than he’d expected. Normally their quarry was thinly spread out from their aimless wanderings, but here they looked more concentrated.

  Still, it might make things go quicker, Cahz thought as he cast his gaze out at the dead city.

  He craned round, trying to take in as much of the terrain as possible when he caught the eye of the last member of his team. Cannon was a giant of a man and had to cock his head slightly to fit in the cabin. His broad muscular chest wouldn’t have looked out of place on a power lifter. And now he was wedged into the back of the tiny chopper.

  At least I get to ride shotgun, Cahz reminded himself.

  Even though the other two team members were on the ground, Cannon filled the back seats. His only relief was the half hour or so when they set up and executed the collection. As soon as Bates and Angel were back in the cabin Cannon spent his time crushed up against the door.

  The whole nine hours or so the round trip took, Cannon and Idris wouldn’t leave their seats.

  “Your biggest risk,” Bates had once joked, “is getting deep vein thrombosis from sitting on your ass.”

  Cannon had quipped back, “And your biggest risk is me.”

  “I don’t know why you insist on coming along,” Cahz had commented long ago. “Let French or one of the Marines come in country.”

  Cannon had pouted ever so slightly in disdain, “And who’d look after your ass?”

  That was all the dissuasion there would be. Cannon just sat there quietly waiting for his commander to take the lead.

  It always amazed Cahz that even in this shattered world the logistics corps had produced body armour large enough to fit his frame. It had proven impossible to supply one small part for a helicopter and yet extra-extra large tactical vests were common fare.

  “How’s it look to you?” Cahz asked.

  “Looks risky boss,” Cannon said, “but that’s what they pay us for.”

  Cahz gave a chortle. “When did you last get paid? You got a Cayman Island account I don’t know about?”

  Cannon gave a wry smile.

  “Quicker we get this done the quicker we go home,” Cahz said, turning back round. He shifted the carbine and fidgeted to get back into a semi-comfortable position before pulling his mission map from a pouch on his body armour.

  He stared at the map. The pape
r was crisp and new but it might as well be a century’s old piece of parchment. It may have been printed only six or seven years ago but the land below bore little resemblance. The sweeping roads were broken and incomplete, the sprawling cities crumbling to rubble and the place names lost to human awareness.

  The city below looked anything but familiar underneath the grime and feral vegetation—a terrain more hostile and more deadly than any map could indicate.

  After the loss of a chopper and its crew the ship’s captain had argued for reducing the complement on specimen runs. The captain had wanted to reduce risk exposure. In theory a collection crew could consist of just two men. The pilot was a given but the capture net only needed one man to set it. Maybe the team size would have been cut if it hadn’t been for Cahz’s arguments. The extra manpower was an insurance policy in case of the unexpected. If anything did go wrong out here Cahz knew the only chance for survival was to work as a team.

  Like the map the mission plan was not the reality. On paper things weren’t as messy.

  Cahz toggled his radio again. “Okay people, let’s make this clean and quick. Bates, call them in.”

  He let his thumb slip off the send button and looked out over the crumbling city.

  Things were certainly a mess out here.

  * * *

  “Get up, Ali!”

  Ali was wrenched out of his sleep. He swallowed deep in his parched throat, trying to move the sticky mucus from his mouth.

  People were shouting and rushing around. Doors slamming and lights blazing.

  The warehouse was alive with the sounds of panic.

  Ali opened his eyes but the bright lights made him blink and turn away.

  More tentatively Ali peaked out from behind his eyelids, hand against his brow fending off the worst of the light. The hollering in the warehouse pressed in and he felt the panic gash a hole through his grogginess.