Chapter 9
The zombie shortage had been going on for well over a year now. Most people generally regarded this as a good thing, but there were two groups that were adversely affected. The first was the undead management and control industry, who relied on former humans as a source of revenue.
The other was the print media; they needed constant tales of death and destruction in order to boost their dwindling circulations. Good news was no news, as the saying went, and so every day their pages were filled with confected outrage and fabricated semi-fictional beat-ups that only occasionally bared any resemblance to the truth.
Occupying pages four through seven of today’s edition of The Daily Ink was the sad tale of Lucas, the young man Dead Rite had encountered the previous Friday night. The headline screamed “Another Young Life Cut Short”, and was accompanied by a photograph of Lucas as a cherubic, churchgoing sixteen-year-old. It was a deliberately manipulative image, one that was designed to elicit sympathy from the reader who was more likely to mourn the death of a naïve teenager than the scruffy, shaggy-haired booze hound he would later become.
Following on from the grief, anger and soul-searching of this latest zombie attack was coverage of Bernard Marlowe’s relentless electioneering. Marlowe, a one-time editor of this “news” paper, was deep into his campaign for Prime Minister, and he was given a helping hand from his former colleagues at every available opportunity. Articles endorsing his anti-zombie jihad were conveniently located adjacent to tragic stories of zombie attacks, so that even the most simple-minded of readers (and this publication certainly had many of those) could draw a link between the two without too much prodding or coercion.
For those that still needed to have it spelled out for them, a separate editorial lambasted the current administration for allowing the undead situation to spiral out of control, while anointing Marlowe as the one best equipped to protect our children from this evil pandemic sweeping the globe. And whenever they were unable to come up with any genuine news, The Daily Ink would fill its the pages with countless media slags and professional opinion formers who had turned scapegoating the undead into an art form. Paying too much tax? Blame it on the undead. House repossessed? Blame it on the undead. Traffic chaos made you late for work? Somehow, via a six-degrees-of-separation kind of logic, these hateful hyperventilators found a way to convince their readers that every one of your problems could all be traced back to those wretched zombies.
The sad, boring truth was that zombie attacks were becoming less and less frequent, and cases like Lucas’s were few and far between. But the trash media weren’t about to let a small thing like facts get in the way of a good story and prevent them from hyping the threat to absurd proportions.
The Daily Ink even had its own colour-coded alert system on its front page, although how they measured the level of threat on any given day was never divulged. That day’s edition, the one that Miles flicked through as he killed time waiting around at Dead Rite, warned of an orange threat level. This corresponded to a medium threat; green was safest, and red signified that sales had slumped and a swift pick-me-up was required.
Some in the media actually seemed to pine for the days of the outbreak three years earlier, when the initial hysteria saw newspaper circulations and consumer spending soar to astronomical levels. They were now hellbent on returning to that level of fear; it was almost as if they were trying to wish the apocalypse into existence.
People don’t spend money when they’re happy and content. It’s no coincidence that the words “panic” and “buying” often appeared side-by-side.
Miles knew not to take any of what was within these pages seriously. He put The Daily Ink in the same category as professional wrestling; occasionally entertaining, and only the most dimwitted of people believed it was real. It was definitely a publication that made you feel stupider for having read it.
“Hey, Miles?” He looked up to see a coworker, Erin, settling into a chair opposite. “I need a guy’s opinion on something?”
It was mid afternoon, and all the staff were sitting around and wasting time as they waited for something to happen. A year ago Dead Rite were responding to dozens of zombie sightings every day, but due to the work drying up, as well as Z-Pro’s market dominance, two or three days would sometimes sail by without a single job being called in. On days like this, the staff on duty whittled the hours away by reading the newspaper, watching TV or, in Erin’s case, texting on her phone.
“Sure,” Miles said, tossing the paper aside. “What’s up?”
Erin held up her phone for Miles to view. “Would you call that big?”
Miles quickly shielded his eyes from the screen. “Erin, you really should warn someone before you show them a photo of an erect penis.”
He also thought about explaining what was and what wasn’t an appropriate topic of conversation for the workplace, but he then remembered overhearing Steve and Adam discussing amyl nitrate and glory holes a few days earlier, so he figured there wasn’t too much in this place that was off-limits.
“This guy sent it to me?” Erin said. Like so many young women of her generation, Erin had the irksome habit of ending many of her sentences in an upward inflection, making her statements sound like questions. “He seems pretty pleased with it? I just want to know if I should be impressed?”
Miles squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “I’d really rather not–”
“Come on, help me out here? Is that considered big?” Erin held the phone a few inches from Miles’ face, forcing him to look.
“Well it’s hard to tell just by looking at that,” he finally said. “How tall is he?”
“He says he’s six one, but we literally haven’t met in person yet?”
The surprise registered on Miles’ face upon hearing this. Some random guy was sending intimate pictures to a girl he’d never met? Miles lamented the sheltered life he must have led. Here was a whole world of courtship and dating that he was missing out on.
“I can’t say one way or the other,” he said. “It looks kinda big, but maybe he just zoomed in close. There needs to be some sort of reference point.”
Erin looked at Miles like he was trying to communicate with her in Klingon. “What do you mean?”
“You know, like in nature photography when they take a picture of a tiny tree frog. They place it next to a five cent piece to give you some idea of the scale.”
“Hey, that’s a good idea,” Erin said, tapping at her keypad to churn out a quick reply. “I’ll ask him for another one, but this time with five cent coins lined up next to it?”
Miles was about to explain that that wasn’t quite what he had in mind, but Erin seemed satisfied so he let it go.
He went to the kitchen to make himself a coffee.
Miles and Erin went back a few years. They had attended the same high school, and had many classes together. Erin was one of the pretty popular girls, and Miles was one of the boys that the pretty popular girls routinely made fun of.
He couldn’t stand her back then. He hated the way she and her friends would torment him, the way they mercilessly teased anyone with the slightest physical imperfection, and their over-inflated opinions of themselves. So when Erin came to work for Dead Rite last year, Miles expected there to be a certain degree of hostility between them. This quickly proved not to be the case when it became apparent that Erin had no memory of Miles whatsoever. As far as she was concerned, he was a complete stranger. Miles had occasionally thought about reminding her of their past association but ultimately, like the misspelled tattoo on Erin’s wrist, he decided it would be best not to draw any attention to it.
Since they’d been working together, Miles’ opinion of Erin had softened a little. All those years of trauma she inflicted on him was nothing personal. Someone in a position of power victimising a weaker person was simply human nature.
There was also the fact that Erin had grown a lot since he last saw her and become a completely different person – specifically, her body mass had increased by about fifty percent.
While some may consider Erin’s significant weight gain to be poetic justice for all the fat kids she ridiculed as a teen, Miles couldn’t help but feel just a tiny bit sorry for her. Erin was the opposite of an ugly duckling; instead of being a plain child who had blossomed into an attractive adult whilst remaining a kind and decent person, she was an extroverted, overconfident narcissist who hadn’t yet caught on to the fact that she could no longer use her looks to manipulate people the way she used to.
Miles was filling his coffee cup when he became distracted by the TV in the adjoining room. The volume increased suddenly, and all office chatter immediately ceased.
He stuck his head in the door to see everyone crowded around the TV.
“What’s going–”
He was immediately shushed by Marcus, normally one of Dead Rite’s more rambunctious coworkers. Like the rest of the staff, Marcus had his eyes fixated on the screen.
It was a breaking news report. The headline read “Toronto Rave Massacre”.
Miles had come in halfway through, but the facts and figures flashing up on screen soon brought him up to speed.
The single worst undead-related incident since the initial outbreak three years earlier.
Of the twelve thousand ravers in attendance, approximately eight thousand were believed to be undead.
The Canadian army deployed to bring the situation under control.
Authorities at a loss to explain how so many casualties could have occurred in such a short space of time.
The accompanying footage resembled something out of an apocalyptic sci-fi film. Thousands upon thousands of day-glo attired zombies were crammed into a fenced off area, while hundreds of armed guards clad head-to-toe in black protective gear patrolled nearby. Helicopters winched survivors to safety, and distraught family members waited desperately to learn the fate of loved ones.
“Man,” Elliott said, shaking his head with disbelief. “So many zombies.”
The first thought that drifted into Miles’ mind was how much money a job like that would net them. He felt a little guilty for thinking this during such a tragic event, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t alone. Sooner or later, every UMC worker came to view zombies as bipedal beings with invisible dollar signs floating above their heads.
“What is this, like, the third zombie-rave tragedy in the past year?” Erin said.
“This is the fourth, actually,” Marcus replied. There had already been similar incidents at raves in Paris, Johannesburg and Dusseldorf, although they were all relatively minor compared to this latest one.
“I wonder what causes it,” Elliott said. “Why does this happen at raves and not at, I don’t know, sporting events?”
“It’s caused by the drugs,” Felix said. “They deplete the subject’s survival instincts. Instead of running away from a zombie, the ravers feel a compulsion to hug it. The infection spreads incredibly rapidly. By the time anyone notices there’s something wrong, it’s too late.”
The latest update then flashed up on the screen.
Superstar Belgian DJ and SlamCore pioneer KoreKayeShyn believed to be among the victims.
It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room, as they learned that one of the world’s biggest pop stars was no more. Other than the sound of a few shocked gasps, the room lapsed into a deathly silence.
Marcus took the news the hardest. He was visibly distraught, burying his head in his hands.
“Oh man, that’s so messed up,” he said, his voice cracking. “I had tickets to see him next month.”
Miles gently patted Marcus on the shoulder. “His music will live on,” he said.
He wasn’t sure if this was what Marcus wanted to hear right now, but it was better than the trite, “At least he died doing what he loved” cliché. That was the emptiest and most meaningless of all platitudes. Stuntmen frequently died doing what they loved. So did heroin addicts.
Marcus was another relative newcomer to Dead Rite. He was also something of a minor celebrity, having appeared in a popular soap opera during his early teens. Acting work had dried up in recent years, due largely to Marcus favouring nightclubs and illicit substances over learning his lines and turning up to auditions on time. His party-hearty lifestyle had superseded his interest in performing, and left him with a defective memory and a miniscule attention span. The Dead Rite job was the latest in a long line of menial, dead-end occupations he’d held over the past few years.
Adam then strode into the room with purpose and flicked the TV off, just as Bernard Marlowe appeared via satellite link-up to capitalise on the tragedy and inform the public there was nothing to prevent this kind of massacre from happening here.
“We’ve just had a call come in,” Adam said. “And it looks like it’s a big one. We’re going to need every single one of you.”
The staff quickly snapped out of their languor and sprung into action, collecting their equipment and piling into the minibus.
Adam jumped behind the wheel. He revved the engine and, after stalling a couple of times, screeched out of the parking lot.
Shortly before they were due to arrive at their destination, Erin’s phone chimed with a text message. She flipped it open to read it.
“Hey Miles?” she said. “It’s seven?”
Miles looked across to where Erin was seated. “Seven what?”
“You know, seven coins?” Erin looped a strand of stringy peroxide-blonde hair around her index finger as she spoke. “Um, thirty-five cents?”
It took Miles a few seconds to realise what Erin was getting at, and that her Prince Charming had come through with his reply. “That’s a bit bigger than average, isn’t it?” she said.
Miles lied and assured her that it was, although sooner or later Erin would discover she’d been short-changed.