Till You Drop Read online

  The centre of town was full of greymen, stumbling, shambling, moaning, wandering up and down the hilly streets with their arms - those who still had arms - held horizontal in front of them.

  Full, too, of worthy citizens, going about their business. And muttering.

  “Homeless drunken bastards,” hissed a man in a suit. “Cut their benefits off, they’ll soon find jobs.”

  Another man thought they were scum from the big council estate on the outskirts, and reckoned it was time to put up a fence, keep them where they belong, but one middle-aged woman, laden with shopping bags full of shoes, reckoned she’d read about them in the Daily Mail: “They're from eastern Europe, it’s happening all over, apparently.”

  “Why aren’t the Fearful … fearful?” Orlandus asked. “I mean, can they not see that dozens of zombies have walked out of the woods, right into the middle of their main shopping centre?” Lanto just shook his head. He had no idea.

  The police had been called, but they weren’t having much joy. Greymen, it transpired, were not easy to arrest, or even to move on; if they planted their feet, it would take a bulldozer to shift them. The officers of Fearful order were reduced to following the monsters around town, trying to look as if they were shepherding them.

  “Coppers are worse than useless, as usual,” a young woman told Lanto. “Typical public sector - if it’s not sitting in a van playing cards, they’re not really up for it.”

  The cousins walked on. “I can’t see Ngggg, can you?”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to spot,” said Orlandus. “Presumably he’ll be wearing an armband: ‘Shop Steward’.”

  He wasn’t, but they found him anyway, standing next to a pillar box outside a burger place. They goodnighted him, and he goodnighted them back, and then he told them: “We have walked out.”

  Could greymen sound proud, Orlandus wondered; and if so, could they sound simultaneously proud and uncertain? If they could, it wasn’t bad going when your lips had been sown shut. “May we ask, Cousin,” he asked, “what has prompted this action?”

  The bloodtakers hadn’t heard of Restart. In fairness, even very few humans had heard of it at that stage. It wasn’t the sort of dull old thing the news media cared to dwell on, and in any case it was still a trial scheme, not due for national rollout for some months yet. There were rumours on the social networks, of course, but monsters, in general, had always been more interested in starting rumours than in following them.

  The shock that the two cousins felt on hearing Ngggg’s account of the undead Fearful was, therefore, fresh. Lanto, in particular, seemed at first almost unable to process it.

  While his cousin stared at the humans passing them by - a kind of horror in his eyes that seemed entirely new, as if he were looking at a species he’d never seen before - Orlandus asked the greyman: “You’re talking about … forgive my language, Cousin …. human zombies?”

  “Not zombies,” said Ngggg. “That is just the thing: not zombies. This threatens who we are. This cheapens what we do. This is … ” He searched for a long time for the right word, perhaps one that he’d overheard on a single occasion, decades earlier, and never thought or spoken until now. It took some finding. An old woman with a puppy on a lead stopped and watched, and seemed happy to carry on her walk only once the greyman had finally declared: “This is shoddy.”

  ***

  Before she died, she would never have done a job like this. Even after her mum died, and the booze took hold, and everything else: she wouldn’t have been caught dead doing a job like this. But on Restart Two, you went where you were sent.

  At least the people she spoke to phoned her. At least she wasn’t phoning people up for an energy company, trying to rip them off. On Restart, in a life after death, you had to live on at-leasts. There wasn’t much else.

  The bloke on the line at the moment, six exhausting hours into the first ten-hour shift of her new life, was telling her it had been love at first sight with his wife. Love at first sight, and they’d got married twelve years ago next July.

  “Aw, that’s lovely,” she told him, “and do you still feel the same about her?”

  “Oh God, yes,” said the bloke. “God yes. If I knew her current address I’d be round there like a shot. Anyroad, enough about me – let’s talk about you, love. What are you wearing?”

  She’d weighed six stone at her death, so that was what she weighed now. Restart was just that – it wasn’t rebirth. You came back as you’d gone out. In her case, very few teeth and not much hair, the skin tone of a ninety-year-old.

  “Suspenders,” she told the bloke. At least she didn’t have to fake the husky voice. “Suspenders and stockings, no knickers, and red high heels.”

  ***

  The most depressing thing at work, Josie found, was when she asked one of her colleagues whether they fancied popping out back for a quick smoke break, and they replied that they didn't smoke. If they couldn't see the absolute irrelevance of that, then what hope was there that they’d see anything else? Sometimes she’d say to them, “But I think it’s important to stop work for a few minutes every now and then, get a breath of night air, look at the stars, stretch the neck muscles. Oh, I couldn't do without my smoke breaks, me!” And some of them would still look puzzled and say, “But I don’t smoke.”

  Cheryl was always up for a smoke break. She couldn't remember whether she’d been a smoker or not, before she killed herself. Gaps in memory amongst the restarted were apparently “to be expected,” which Cheryl reckoned was Latin for “shut up, nobody cares.”

  She wasn’t a smoker now, at any rate – she hadn’t really got that much of a throat, what with damage she’d done and then the damage the process had done by way of repairs – but she understood the importance of the principle. Every hour or so, you briefly stopped work. Josie said it was important to practice going on strike, several times a day, like fire drills, because you never knew when you might need to do it for real.

  This was something new, though. A group of several dozen large, grey figures, naked – or almost naked – standing quite still, quite silent, a few yards away.

  “What are they?” said Cheryl. “Who the hell are they, what are they doing?”

  They were across the entrance to the little goods yard, where lorries backed in to unload stock. Not stretched across, given their size and number; more like bunched across. Josie thought, really, it was obvious what they were doing.

  Cheryl was backing away, back into the building, and glancing at her, Josie saw that the poor woman really needed an answer to her question. Josie could see on her face what she was thinking: that these misshapen, grey things were the next phase. That people like Cheryl would one day be considered the lucky ones – “First phase restarts,” people would say, “Jesus, you lot got off lightly!”

  Josie gripped her arm. “I don’t think it’s that. Cheryl, love? I don’t think they’re – I don't think they're our new colleagues. I don’t think it’s what you think it is.”

  She didn't know what they were, but she recognised the shape they were making.

  She called over to them. “Excuse me? Are you picketing our supermarket?”

  There was a short pause, and then a voice: “Yes.” She couldn't tell at that distance which if any of them had spoken.

  “Good for you,” she said.

  Less of a pause, and then: “We have walked out.”

  Cheryl, still trembling, her arm linked with Josie's, shouted over the tarmac: “I don’t blame you, love. Good for you.”

  “Would you and your friends like a cup of tea?” Josie asked. She didn't know what they were, these grey pickets, but she sort of knew what sort of thing they were. She was aware that she ought to be frightened, of course; things that didn’t exist, things which only existed for the purpose of being frightening, and which even then were only bearable because you knew they didn’t really exist – and here they were existing. But the sheer relief of knowing that whatever this was
, it wasn’t what it might have been ...

  "We do not eat,” came the voice, without delay this time, “we do not drink, we do not seek company, we do not sit, and we lie down only when we are no longer able to stand.”

  “Right,” said Josie. “OK, just asking, because – you know, it’s not a warm night.”

  A long pause this time, though. “We have gratitude for your kindness.”

  “Well, that’s – yeah, OK. Can I ask? Why are you picketing here?” Her voice was cracking a little with unaccustomed yelling. The grey picket’s voice seemed to carry with much less effort.

  “We are agreed. It is not enough to walk out. We thought it would be. It is not. There must be focus.”

  Standing away from the grey people, Josie saw, were two rather handsome men, one young, the other distinguished. Plain clothes cops, perhaps? She used a few seconds to create an elaborate fantasy – feasible in plot terms, sexually surreal - about the two dark-eyed loners, then returned her attention to the grey picket.

  “Focus? How do you mean?”

  She jumped, and Cheryl jumped with her, as another voice – much more frightening, a voice of authority – barked behind her. “Get back in here, please, you two!” A determined arm yanked her inside, where she found all her colleagues gathered around, no work being done. That gave her a moment of pleasure. The door was closed behind her and Cheryl.

  “Detective Inspector Pipe,” she said. “Nice to see you again. You’re here because of them out there, I suppose?”

  He passed her a mug of tea. She did drink, and sit down, and all the rest, so she took it.

  “I think I mentioned before that I’m a police liaison with Fairness in Work, so anything which appears to have a potential impact on restarted people I get told about.”

  “You were summoned here,” she said. “On your night off, I’ll bet?”

  He nodded. “I am missing my evening class. We were going to be doing the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. Now I’ll never know.”

  “You could look it up.”

  “You never do though, do you?” He gave her a sad smile. “In theory you could look up anything, everything.”

  Josie sipped her tea. It wasn’t hot, so then she gulped it. “Do you have any idea what’s happening outside?”

  “I very much fear,” said DI Pipe, “that the rate of profit is falling. It has a tendency to do that, so I’ve heard.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m going to look it up as soon as I get home. And when I’ve figured it out, I’ll call you.” In all honesty, she couldn’t conjure up a sexual fantasy involving the avuncular DI, but instead she fantasised having a cup of tea with him, in a well-lit cafe attached to an uncrowded second-hand bookshop in a small seaside town in the deep South West, on an exceptionally rainy day.

  “Now, then,” said Pipe, standing up. “I’ve been watching that lot out there, and whoever they are, whatever they are, they’re very slow moving.”

  “Right. So ...?”

  “So I’m going to ask you, Josie, to evacuate all your staff through the front door.”

  He was right: very slow moving. By the time the pickets had smelled the human zombies leaving through the front door, and shambled their way round to it, the restarts and their colleagues had long gone, into the night.

  ***

  The fairness agenda demanded total mobility of labour, in practice not merely in theory, because it would clearly be unfair if an employer in one place should have to pay higher wages for the same work than an employer in another place which just happened to have a larger labour pool. It was also unfair to the jobless, who were being prevented from taking jobs outside their own immediate locality by a brake on market freedom.The Fairness in Work people had a slogan to cover this: "Equal pay for work of equal value." This is what your grandmothers fought for, they explained.

  What this meant, in practice, was that unemployed workers were subject, under the Assisted Fairness Scheme, to assisted relocation; from, say, Dorset to Latvia. It would be unfair if some people took advantage of this assistance and others did not, so the offer was, naturally, compulsory.

  ***

  Lanto and Orlandus had been keeping to the shadows outside the supermarket; not literally, because there weren't any, due to the security lights, but they were aware that this was not, strictly, their business, they had no standing in the matter. They were not pickets. They were ... what? Pickets’ friends?

  “Secondary pickets,” ruled Orlandus, from the authority of his recent readings. “Which is illegal, incidentally. Proper naughty rebels, us.”

  And then, as the depth of the greymen’s outwitting became apparent, Lanto felt it was time to melt away: their Cousins would not wish their humiliation to be witnessed by two bloodtakers, secondary friends or otherwise.

  To Lanto’s surprise, Orlandus disagreed. “In a minute, Lo, just a minute – this is important.” To Lanto’s horror, Orly had his phone in his hand.

  “Blood and thunder, boy! You're not filming it?”

  “Not for my own gratification,” Orlandus objected. “This is what you’d call a training video.”

  He carried on filming as the greymen shambled away, clearly dispirited, and seemingly rather aimless. Though, to be fair, it was never easy to tell with greymen.

  Bloodtakers have many abilities, or gifts, which humans would envy - being universally sexually attractive, having extreme longevity, never getting indigestion, and so on - but surely the most impressive of all is the ability to hold a proper conversation while riding in pillion on a speeding motorbike.

  “Our first moment of militancy,” said Lanto, the passenger, “a pathetic failure. We need to understand why.”

  “This whole ... thing,” Orlandus replied, “it needs to be more than sectional.”

  “Sectional?”

  “Something Ngggg said the first time we met him, it's made me think: this needs to be about class not craft.”

  Lanto shook his head, as Orlandus overtook two lorries in one manoeuvre. “We are not humans, Orly. We don’t have classes. Or crafts, come to that.”

  “I’m not so sure. If we don’t have a class, how can we have class unity? And if we don’t have that ... ”

  The conversation came round – as always in recent days – to fear. Funny, Orlandus thought; fear had been eternally central to their existence, but it had never been something they talked about or thought about, until these last few weeks. He wondered if humans were like that about their labour; never thought about it, just lived in its belly.

  As the growing lights of London drew them home, he voiced the thought that had been growing in him. “They are not our prey. Not merely. The relationship between Nighthood and Fearful is more symbiotic than that.”

  “True,” said Lanto. “Their fear gives us meaning.”

  “And what we do allows them to compartmentalise fear. If fear were generalised, it would paralyse them. There is so much to fear - bereavement, illness, abandonment, malice - in every minute of every day that they would be unable to function.”

  Lanto said nothing; encouraged by this, Orlandus continued.

  “The purpose of night fears is to put all human fears in one box, and then hide the box in the darkness of the night, and get on with the day.”

  As the borrowed bike turned into Eversholt Street, Lanto said: “I’ve often thought: the lives of the Fearful are so short and fragile and bedevilled that it’s a wonder any one of them can ever concentrate long enough to plough a field or land a plane or lance a boil without gibbering with fear.”

  Orlandus turned and nodded. “It’s thanks to us that they can.”

  ***

  The point about moonhowlers – about all monsters, perhaps – is that you don't see them. They allow themselves to be glimpsed, or smelt, or suspected; even, now and then, to be spotted, by terrified, lone individuals. But they are not seen. The Nighthood is unseen; that’s the point.

  Hampstead Heath that n
ight was literally crawling with werewolves; that’s what the General told the Prime Minister, when he woke him. It was an inaccurate statement; werewolves don’t crawl. Hampstead Heath was literally loping with werewolves; that would have been a better way of putting it.

  Orlandus’s film clip of the greymen being outwitted by a lone police officer had leapt from band to band, and moonhowlers from across the country had answered Shrak’s summons. They knew little of stumblers, cared little more, were unaware, most of them, of the existence, let alone the nature of the cause of the grey picket line. But they knew what they were seeing in that video: humans making fools of monsters. They knew that couldn't be passed by.

  When Lanto and Orlandus arrived, towards dawn, Shrak told them proudly that the Heath was now occupied, in solidarity with the greymen, in support of their demand for the abandonment of the Restart scheme.

  ‘Occupied,’ Lanto thought, was just the right word: there weren’t a few square yards on the whole of that great commons which wasn’t, indeed, occupied by a moonhowler. Openly, brazenly – loudly and dynamically.

  They allowed themselves to be seen. In fact, they pretty much insisted on it. They danced, and howled, and yelped, and lit fires, and stank. They chased each other, and they chased any human that came within range. They hunted rabbits and foxes and owls, they filled their mouths and faces and fur with blood, and they fed on fear. They were the brazen unseen.

  “How about that, Cousins?” Shrak asked the bloodtakers. “You can’t move for shitters!”

  And it worked. Who could imagine it not working? The Fearful fled from the Heath, and even from the surrounding streets. One of the privatized armies was brought in to seal off the area. A state of emergency existed, throughout the night. And then came the morning.

  In the morning, the Fearful had vanished, and been replaced with humans.

  The picket of soldiers proved permeable, as humans approached the Heath with their camera phones, as news crews arrived with their cameras, as the terrifying occupation became ...

  “A tourist attraction,” said Orlandus. “People are flooding in to see us – to see the unseen.”