Chapter 21
Team spirit hadn’t improved the next morning during the bus ride back out to Graves End. The previous day’s disappointments still lingered in everyone’s mind and put them in a sour mood. Worst of all was Steve and Adam – they’d had a blazing row before they left home, and now their toxic vibes were infecting the rest of the staff.
It all began when Adam made what he thought was a fairly innocuous comment regarding a house available for rent. It was a small hundred-year-old stone cottage that they saw every time they travelled to and from Graves End. Whenever they drove past it, Adam couldn’t help but fantasise about what it would be like to live there. It looked like something out of a story book, standing alone at the top of a luscious green hill with majestic views of the sweeping valleys below. It was completely isolated, with no neighbours for miles.
The previous night, Adam’s curiosity got the better of him and he looked up the real estate listing online. He was surprised to discover how affordable the rent actually was. The house had been on the market for two years now, and the rent had more than halved in that time. The reason for this was pretty obvious – the previous tenants probably met with a zombie-related demise – but Adam wasn’t at all superstitious, so that didn’t bother him in the slightest.
But things took an ugly turn when he casually mentioned this to Steve over breakfast the next morning. Steve started off by mocking Adam’s interest in the property, telling him that Adam had lived in the city his entire life and wouldn’t last a week in a place like that without going stir-crazy, before angrily reminding him of the state of their finances and that moving house was out of the question. Adam tried to explain that he was just thinking out loud, and that he knew the house wasn’t really a viable option for them, but this only ended up making things worse. It quickly devolved into a full-blown shouting match that woke up most of the neighbourhood.
Adam now sulked in the back of the minibus and stared out the window. Steve had been in some rotten moods as of late, but he had never been this bad. Adam was beginning to think that all this pressure might finally be getting too much for him. Steve was flying off the handle over the smallest of things. Most of the staff now went out of their way to avoid him, preferring to go to Adam with any problems they had, since they were afraid of how Steve might react.
Adam hoped Dead Rite didn’t go under, but at least there was a silver lining if it did. It would be something of a mercy killing, and maybe it would be for the best. Steve wasn’t happy there anymore, and when Steve wasn’t happy he made everyone else miserable.
A career change might be good for all involved.
If the first day at Graves End hadn’t exactly gone to plan, early indications were that the second wouldn’t be any different. For their first job for the morning, Felix and Marcus spent nearly forty minutes attempting to restrain a crotchety old geezer and bundle him into the minibus. They would have completed the job in half that time if Marcus hadn’t driven off without closing the door. The zombie immediately tumbled out – Marcus had also failed to strap him in properly – and it took a further fifteen minutes to get him back in.
Marcus’s forgetfulness and absentmindedness was getting so bad that Felix thought he might be showing signs of dementia at the age of twenty-seven. His brain was so drug-fried that he was constantly forgetting where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He would zone out and stare into space for minutes at a time.
He still appeared to be buzzing from the rave he attended the previous weekend, and whatever substances he’d ingested there must have been potent because he hadn’t stopped yapping about it. Marcus’s verbal tinnitus, along with that God-awful radio station he was playing incessantly, was driving Felix up the wall.
The minibus pulled into the driveway of the second house. Marcus jumped out, but Felix hung back.
“You go ahead,” Felix said. “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
During the previous job Felix had noticed a large tear in his protective fibre-mesh bodysuit. Luckily, he always carried a couple of emergency spares on him.
“I don’t know why you even bother wearing those things,” Marcus told him. “It’s not like you’re ever going to need it.”
He reached through the front window and turned the radio up full volume, then headed off towards the house.
It wasn’t long before Marcus encountered the home’s owner. He was a middle-aged bald guy in sweatpants and a stained t-shirt. He was lumbering around on his front yard, unsteady on his feet and with a long string of drool hanging from his mouth.
The industry term for this type of zombie is “drunk uncle”.
The zombie spotted Marcus and came hobbling towards him.
Marcus was pleasantly surprised. After spending all of yesterday trying to coax a bunch of geriatric zombies out of their homes, here was one coming straight for him.
It wasn’t until the zombie had come to within about ten metres that Marcus noticed something wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t a typical undead being, staggering around the place like a sloth on barbiturates. This guy seemed more like a baboon on crack. He grunted and growled, and he moved at more than double the speed of what he was used to. The thing was almost running.
Marcus held onto his snare pole, psyching himself up in preparation to restrain the zombie.
Then his speed increased, yet again. It was something close to a sprint. He moved in a series of awkward and jerking motions, like a marionette controlled by a junkie suffering through acute withdrawals.
Marcus had no idea what to do. He hadn’t been trained to handle anything like this.
At the last moment, he lost his nerve and bolted out onto the street.
The bald zombie gave chase. Marcus tried to remain calm and thought about how ridiculous this must seem to an onlooker, like a Benny Hill skit. But something was seriously wrong here. He had never seen a zombie move in this way before. There was no industry term for this kind of behaviour.
He made it out to the street, where he was confronted with an even more startling sight.
Zombies were now everywhere. Pouring from the nearby houses, out onto the street, their dead eyes filled with murderous rage.
Marcus prayed that none of this was really happening, and that it was all just the side-effects of a particularly unpleasant comedown. But the fear he felt was far too intense to be anything other that real.
His lungs filled with air, then he screamed out at the top of his voice.
“FELIX!!”
Felix was still midway through wriggling into his back-up bodysuit and remained oblivious to the drama unfolding around him. He looked up and saw Marcus in the middle of the road with zombies closing in from all directions.
Felix quickly slid behind the wheel of the minibus, then started the engine and threw it into reverse.
But before he did any of that, he switched the radio off. That infernal music was doing his head in.
Felix tore out into the street as fast as the rickety old minibus could manage. He sped over to Marcus, who was moments away from becoming someone’s lunch. The street was now filled with at least thirty zombies.
Marcus dived head-first into the moving vehicle and yanked the door closed behind him. “Drive!” he shouted.
But Felix didn’t drive. He continued on at the slow pace he was travelling, studying the amassed zombie horde with a peculiar curiosity.
“Felix!” Marcus screamed. “Go! Now!!”
“Marcus,” Felix said calmly. “Look.”
“Felix!!” Marcus was close to losing it.
“Marcus, we’re not in any danger.” Felix slowed the minibus down until it came to a complete stop. “Take a look around you.”
Marcus worked up the nerve to take a peek out the window. The zombies were still there, but something about them had changed. All their anger and aggression had disappeared in an instant. They were no longer the ravenous beasts that almost devoured him a minute ago. They had returned to the docile and confused creatures he was used to.
“That was bizarre,” Felix said.
“What the hell just happened?” Marcus said, still struggling to catch his breath and make sense of what he had just seen.
“Don’t you see what’s going on here?”
Marcus shook his head. “Nothing about what I just saw is making a whole lot of sense.”
Felix realised he would have to spell it out for Marcus. “I think the zombies were attracted to the music.”
Shortly after 9:00 a.m. Steve called the staff in for a quick team meeting. Felix had informed him of his latest discovery, and Steve agreed to let him share it with the rest. By this stage, he was willing to give just about anything a shot.
Felix explained to the group how the zombies seemed to be drawn to certain types of music. The most effective type, the one that turned them from slothful to psychotic in the blink of an eye, was the popular genre of music known as SlamCore.
After the close call with Marcus, Felix conducted a bit of trial and error to determine exactly what types of music the zombies were most attracted to. They were mildly aroused by electroclash, aggressive hip hop and industrial rock, but it was nothing compared to what SlamCore did to them. Something about that particular combination of sounds, rhythms and frequencies tapped into their primal urges and drew them in like moths to a flame.
Country music seemed to repel them.
“So that explains what happened in Toronto,” Elliott said, referring to the shocking rave tragedy a month earlier. “It was the music that caused it?”
“That and every other rave massacre from the past few years, it seems,” Marcus added.
“So why has nobody figured this out until now?” Adam asked.
“Who knows?” Felix replied. “I assume it’s because they’ve allocated most of their time and resources towards searching for a cure rather than finding out what kind of music they prefer.”
Felix then outlined his strategy for how they could best exploit this knowledge. They would switch on every radio they could find within the town – all the car stereos, portable transistors and bedside alarm clocks – and tune them in to a specific frequency with the volume turned up full. Felix would then use his laptop, which came with an inbuilt radio transmitter, to broadcast a brief sixty second burst of SlamCore over that particular signal. The hope was that this would lure any nearby zombies from out of their homes and into their clutches with minimal effort.
Everyone then returned to their designated areas and set about looking for radios. Since the residents of Graves End were a fairly trusting lot, this wasn’t all that hard. The doors to their homes were usually unlocked, and most left their car keys in the ignition.
Ten minutes later, they had switched on and tuned in about eighty radios. The volumes were turned up as far as they would go, and the doors to all the houses were opened up to allow the zombies to wander straight out.
Right when the clock ticked over to 9:20 a.m. – the staff had all synchronised their watches – Graves End went from being a peaceful and pleasant semi-rural community to one giant open-air rave. The brutal sounds of SlamCore blanketed the entire township. It was like what being caught in a battle zone whilst high on ecstasy might sound like.
The track Felix had selected was “Hang Tha Horse” by Mr. Needlemouse, which was quite possibly the dumbest and most obnoxious song ever recorded. He’d observed that the stupider the song, the more effective it was at drawing the zombies in.
His plan worked almost immediately. Within seconds of the music starting, the zombies began emerging from their homes. One by one they all shuffled out, some breaking into what could be termed an awkward, disjointed run.
The effect this music had on them was a little troubling to some. They had gone from sleepy and docile to agitated predators. Some of the staff took a backward step and gripped onto their snare poles. They had never seen zombies behave like this before.
“Why are they reacting this way?” Erin asked, the concern showing on her face.
No one had an answer for her, but the impact it was having on them was undeniable. The music was like some sort of zombie mating call – although nobody really wanted to stick around for the subsequent orgy.
Even Miles, who was initially quite skeptical of Felix’s claims, was surprised. If he hadn’t been here to witness it he probably wouldn’t have believed it. He also thought it was somewhat appropriate that they were so drawn to this genre of music, given that SlamCore appealed mostly to people with limited brain function who just blindly followed the herd.
He remembered back to the one and only time he had voluntarily exposed himself to this type of music for a prolonged period of time. It was about six months ago, when Elliott and Amy had dragged him out to a club to watch some Dutch teenager with half his head shaved get paid to push buttons on a raised platform wave his hands in the air. The drugged-up crowd went ape for it, but to Miles the music was a form of torture. It sounded like the soundtrack to a snuff film remixed by a hearing-impaired sociopath. In some strife-torn countries, it literally was a form of torture: sadistic warlords were known to lock captured enemy soldiers in confined spaces and pummel them with deafening SlamCore for days on end.
Felix paused the music when his watch ticked over to 9:21 a.m. The zombies stopped a couple of seconds after that. With the flick of a switch, they went back to being like dumb, drunken pandas. They stood in the one spot, caught in a state of suspended animation, clueless as to where they were or what had just happened.
The Dead Rite staff quickly moved in to apprehended each of the zombies, snapping on the cable ties and guiding them towards the bus. After all the difficulty they had experienced yesterday, this almost felt like it was too easy.
The day before it had taken them over six hours to capture enough zombies to fill the first bus. Today they had done it in less than twenty minutes. Marcus jumped behind the wheel, and he and Adam took the cargo back into town to deposit them at the processing centre.
From that point, there was nothing more for the team to do except break early for lunch and talk about how they would be spending all the money they were about to make.
Fabian was becoming more and more apprehensive the longer the day wore on. He had been trapped inside this stuffy auditorium for three hours now, sitting in these uncomfortable plastic seats and having to endure speeches from four indistinguishable politicians, two captains of industry, and a set of patriotic songs from a dreary country singer generously billed as the opening “entertainment”.
Finally, the moment they’d all been waiting for had arrived.
Bernard Marlowe took to the stage, flanked by his trophy wife Celine and fame-chasing daughters Stephanie and Madison. He now stood less than ten metres from where Fabian sat.
“This country will not be held to ransom by extremists and those on the lunatic fringe!” he declared, parroting the words verbatim from the teleprompter in front of him. Despite reading from the same script every day since his campaign began, Marlowe still relied on his teleprompter like he relied on his daily application of hair-in-a-can. He was a bumbling inarticulate buffoon without it.
The audience applauded, and the rally travelled along on its predictable course: Marlowe’s empty sloganeering, followed by the crowd’s sycophantic fawning.
“On March 1, we will say No! to fear! We will say No! to incompetence! We will say No! to the worst government this country has ever seen!”
More cheering from the crowd. Marlowe regurgitated all the lines he’d spouted at every other public event from the last twelve months, rehashing them like an aging rock band trotting out its greatest hits for easy applause.
“The undead don’t run this country – the people run this country!”
“Together, we will emerge victorious in the war on horror!”
“I believe in democracy!”
The easy-to-please crowd were on their feet now, eating up every word.
Marlowe stood back, drinking it all in. More than anything, this was what he craved – power, respect, adulation. This was the reason he entered politics.
The applause died down, and the audience took their seats.
But Fabian remained standing. He was dressed in a Hugo Boss suit and a woollen hat that couldn’t quite contain his ginger dreadlocks. His face was now hidden behind a red bandana. His suit jacket was turned inside out, revealing a large red Tribe of Zeroes “Z” logo painted across the back.
He climbed up on his seat and raised his fist in the air.
“Fascism is capitalism in decay!” he shouted.
The bandana muffled his voice somewhat, so only those close to him could actually understand what he was saying.
There were a few groans and boos from the crowd. Someone shouted, “Get a job, dead-head!” Security quickly moved in to subdue this lone agitator.
But Fabian was not alone in his act of rebellion. He was joined by seven other well-dressed attendees, fellow Zeroes, who also had their faces obscured by bandanas. They climbed up on their seats and shouted in unison: “Fascism is capitalism in decay!”
Before Marlowe and his goons could respond to this interruption, the Zeroes launched their attack.
In a matter of seconds there were a dozen projectiles flying towards the stage. Marlowe’s security team swarmed in to protect their leader, rushing in from all directions to form a human barricade.
One unlucky guard at the front took a hit for his boss when a balloon struck him directly on the chest. It burst open, and his shirt and jacket were drenched with the ghastly contents. He was immediately incapacitated and fell to the ground in agony.
Panic and confusion quickly took over, as the smell of rotting corpses wafted throughout the auditorium. It was the most revolting stench imaginable. A smell so strong it made it difficult to breathe.
The majority of the attendees made a frantic dash for the exit. Others couldn’t control themselves and emptied their stomachs on the spot.
Once their stockpile of missiles had been depleted, the Zeroes used the growing chaos to their advantage and disappeared into the crowd.
Security swiftly ushered Marlowe and his family off the stage and outside the venue towards their waiting limousine. They maintained a tight wall around them, although several more guards had been hit with the stink bombs and succumbed to violent bouts of nausea and vomiting.
The limo’s door opened. Marlowe disregarded the “women and children first” convention and dived in head first. His wife and daughters followed, but Madison Marlowe wasn’t able to move quite fast enough. Her bodyguard fought a valiant battle to keep his lunch down, but in the end his efforts were all in vain.
He puked all over her brand new Givenchy dress, in full view of the waiting paparazzi.