Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (22 page)

The girls reached the other side of the road, and a big Mercedes cruised up to the curb, the driver leaning out of the side window to whisper sour nothings from behind a cupped hand. The girls smiled dead smiles and climbed into the back seat, too-short skirts riding up over pallid thighs bereft of muscle tone. All that remained on the footpath when the car pulled away was the discarded kebab wrapper and some pale, dry scraps of meat.

There was a huge advertising hoarding stapled to the wall at the corner of Mylton Road and O’Reilly Street, selling rampant consumers some new brand of alcopop. Graffiti had been daubed across it in thick red dripping lines; I glanced at the slogan as I drove past it.

Arseylum seekers out! Kill em all!

The viciously droll message was unequivocal, fuelled by impotent rage and directionless tabloid-driven jingoism. The hatred behind the words was terrifying, bland and unfocused, ready to turn on anyone different from what was considered the norm. The people who had written the words operated under the assumption that all immigrants were money grabbing scam artists, even the honest ones. It was at once sickening and heartbreaking.

I thought of Jude once more, fearing for her future. I prayed that I was strong enough to educate her to the dangers of such narrow, uninformed thinking. Hoped that I was man enough for the daunting task that lay ahead. It dawned on me yet again that raising a child was the most difficult and risky undertaking of all: if you screwed it up, you were just adding to the dumb herd, producing another mindless follower. The enormity of it all made me want to stop the car and run into the night, screaming until my throat burned. But I drove on, heading towards my last pick-up of this harrowing shift. My final few quid before going home to flop lifelessly into bed alongside my sleeping wife.

The man was waiting by the curb outside the Pound Shop when I drew up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He seemed nervous, but I assumed that he was just riled at me for being late. He lifted a small brown hand and twitched a little half smile as I stopped the car, then jumped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him as if in an attempt to keep out the night.

‘Sorry I’m late, pal. Bit of confusion back at base camp.’

‘S’okay, my friend. No problem.’ His accent was certainly foreign, but I couldn’t place where in the world he could be from. Asia? The Far East? My ignorance of such things truly knows no bounds.

‘Where to, boss?’

‘Wishwell, please. Palm Tree Way.

Shit. I could’ve done without a trip to that part of town at this hour. Wishwell was the worst estate in the borough, and the vermin who were housed there would still be up and about, fighting with each other, playing loud music on stolen stereos, smoking weed and drinking illegally imported French booze.

‘Good night out?’ I asked, making small talk.

‘No, no. I’ve been working. Cleaning offices. I go home now, tend to family. Sleep.’

So he worked the graveyard shift cleaning town centre offices: doing the jobs nobody else would do, just like so many other immigrants in this country. Oiling the hidden wheels of commerce. Paid shitty wages under the counter––tax-free, but with no additional benefits––just to enable him to feed and clothe his family. This hardworking man was exactly the type of person the graffiti on the hoarding had been aimed at: a man just trying to get by, to do right by his family. I had more in common with him than I did the scum who had painted the vitriol. I pitied him for living in Wishwell, but it was probably the only housing the council had offered.

‘Tough shift, eh?’ I glanced at him in the rearview mirror: small face, ever-blinking eyes, creased brown skin.

‘Yes, mister. Just like you, I work hard to make something of myself and my family.’

I took the quick route in an effort to save him a quid on the fare-down by the river, past the dark and abandoned shipyard and the flat-roofed clothing warehouses. The man had lapsed into silence. He sat staring out of the side window with those nervous blinking eyes, his thoughtful features bathed in a wash of sodium light from the lamps that lined the curb along the riverbank. I wondered again where he had come from, what he had given up to come here and feel safe. But was he really safe? I didn’t think so. Persecution comes in many forms.

I dropped him at the outskirts of Wishwell, refusing his offer of a tip and bidding him goodnight. He smiled at me, shook my hand and wished my family well. I watched him as he darted across the road, ducking into a narrow alley lined with battered green wheelybins behind a low block of flats. Tom Waits croaked near-tunelessly from the radio, and I reached down to let off the handbrake.

Long shadows detached themselves from some ragged bushes that overhung the mouth of the alley, slow moving but purposeful: three stooped figures, nothing more than dense silhouettes, drifted into the alley, following the man who’d just left my car.

There was something not quite right about the figures, and my internal alarm bell started ringing. They moved clumsily, without natural rhythm, and their limbs looked too slack, as if lacking any proper working joints. I opened the car door, set my foot on the curb. Listened. But there was only silence, underlain by the dry rustling of dead leaves and empty crisp packets in the gutters, and the usual distant estate sounds of bass heavy dance music, crying kids, shouting spouses.

I waited for roughly thirty seconds, and when nothing happened I closed the door and drove off into the night towards a promise of warmth and safety that could only be realized when at last I curled into my sleeping wife’s soft and welcoming back.

* * *

It was only when I saw the television news two days later that I realized I’d been expecting the report. A local asylum seeker, Jalal al-hakim, from Iraq, had gone missing. He had last been seen leaving the city centre offices he cleaned as part of a five-man crew at one-thirty a.m. on Saturday morning. Police were treating his disappearance as suspicious; Mister al-hakim had only been in England for eight months, after fleeing persecution and torture in his own country. He was an outgoing, friendly, family man, liked by both his workmates and his employers, and had no known enemies.

Al-hakim’s face flashed up at me from the screen. It was a recent photograph, probably taken by his wife, in which he played with his two young daughters. He was laughing; he looked happy. But still a shadow seemed to loom over his small frame, shading his features.

My insides churned as if I had an ulcer, and my skin prickled as if stung by nettles. I had been the last person to see this man before he’d vanished; I was a potential witness. So I rang the police without finishing my morning coffee and told them what little I knew, agreeing to go down to the station to make a statement later that morning. But still my conscience wasn’t clear: I had driven away after watching those shambling figures follow him down the alley. I felt ashamed, cowardly in an almost abstract kind of way, and desperate to make amends.

I left the house without telling Tanya about what had happened. She couldn’t help but notice my reticence, along with the fact that I was more withdrawn than usual, and stared a silent question at me as I kissed Jude goodbye. I shook my head, smiled sadly. She brushed her dry lips against my forehead, blew hot stale morning-breathe against my hairline, winked at me as I drew away and opened the front door.

I went to the police station in my lunch hour, not expecting much and receiving even less than that. It was fruitless. I informed a disinterested uniformed officer of what had happened that night, and about the shadowy figures I’d seen slinking into the alley; then I left, feeling utterly disillusioned. Nobody cared about these people, not the public, the police, or the politicians. All they were was an election tool, a way of faking interest in the community. Local councilors would bleat on about asylum seekers and their attendant problems all day long, but when it came to caring––actually
doing something
––they suddenly clammed up and found some more pressing business. It seemed that nobody wanted to get their hands dirty.

There was more graffiti visible on the flyover abutment behind the High Street on my way back to the depot:

Get shot of immigrint shit!

Charming. And these people thought they were so much better than everyone else? They couldn’t even spell in their own language, while the people they despised so much could speak it if not better then certainly more politely than these restless natives.

By the time I got back to the depot Claire was on a break. She was pouring herself a coffee as I walked in, and made me one with an air of faked irritation so I didn’t feel like I was getting special treatment. We sat at the chipped Formica table in the cramped office at the rear of the tiny building, and I told her about my visit to the police station.

‘Are you really that surprised?’ she asked me in a tone of mock incredulity, that broken glass growl of hers coming from somewhere down near her boots. ‘C’mon, Karl, nobody gives a shit about anybody these days. It’s dog eat dog out there, and if you aren’t a consumer you just get consumed.’ She sipped at the awful coffee, her large bland face forming a grimace around the rim of the mug.

‘I s’ppose you’re right,’ I relented, then blew on my own drink, watching with a faint nausea as the skin that the milk had formed on its surface rippled like an oil slick on a park pond. ‘I was just hoping for more, y’know?’

‘And that’s what I like about you: you’re different. You give a shit. But don’t let it go to your head, because I’ll deny ever saying it if it comes out.’ She smiled one of her rare sunny-day smiles, then went back to the coffee. I felt numb, empty. Ghost-like.

‘Anyway,’ said Claire, disrupting my bleak thoughts and attempting to change the subject. ‘You heard the latest?’

I hadn’t, but knew that I was about to; Claire was the woman to see if you wanted to know what was going on in Scarbridge. She was better than the local news––more up-to-date, and her sources never failed her.

‘Which is what?’ I asked, wondering if I’d soon regret it.

‘Well, it seems that about four months ago half a dozen corpses went missing from the town morgue. Those kids who died from smoke inhalation in that warehouse fire down by the old Dock Road… the silly sods who set it alight while they were trying to rob it? Them. Their bodies. Stolen.’

I glanced up at her, looking for any sign that this was one of her morbid little jokes. Her face was rigid, blank; she was telling the truth.

‘Fuck,’ I said quietly, placing my mug on the scarred tabletop. ‘Some people will steal anything.’

She smiled; a sad, tired expression. ‘It was all hushed up by the authorities, of course. Too embarrassing to let into the public domain. People are finding out though; they always do. Nothing stays buried for very long round here. Someone spoke to someone else after a few too many pints, and the news is breaking out like little fires all round the estates. Just like always.’

Four months ago. Just about the same time that the attacks on immigrants had begun: foreign families being burned out of their low rent council housing, kids spat on at school, a pregnant woman pelted with fruit in the local supermarket, one or two people even going missing, just like al-hakim… there had even been a picket line outside one of the town’s three primary schools, the parents in the area refusing to allow a couple of Turkish children into the building. One of their fathers had been hospitalized when someone had thrown an engineering brick at his head. It was all so wrong… such a fucking mess.

I wondered if the incidents were linked: whether some right wing group was about to implicate the immigrant community in the theft of those boy’s bodies, laying claims to all kinds of voodoo and necrophilia. Breeding even more fear. More violence.

I didn’t want to think about where it all might end.

* * *

The chill early hours again; midweek in Scarbridge, when all the smart folk are tucked up in their beds, wrapped in sleeping yoga poses around their loved ones. I was returning to the depot from a drop-off in Newcastle––a nice little earner––and decided on impulse to take a detour.

The urge to return to Wishwell came upon me unannounced. Now, with the aid of hindsight, I can put it down to shame, guilt, the need to do something––to do
anything
. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there, but I did know that I had to go back to the mouth of that alley. To inspect the place where I’d dropped off al-hakim for his final truncated journey home.

Winter was closing in like a gloved hand around a warm neck, choking the life out of the world: trees had shed their blossoms long ago, the sky looked brittle as a sheet of glass, and a sharp chill had crept into the air. Yet still I saw young women dressed in nothing more than artfully placed scraps of wispy material and tottering about on four-inch heels, displaying their goose pimples to whoever cared to look. I shook my head in amazement at these people. Once more, I vowed that my child would be raised differently, brought up with intelligence and thought for the future.

Wishwell dominated the skyline to the east, three and a half miles out of town, it’s run down tower blocks blocking out the stars. The four central ragged concrete towers were surrounded by a maze of estate blocks––cramped terraced houses, cheap purpose-built flats: the estate was a riot of contrasting architectural styles, and had been continually added to since the early 1960s. I drove to the perimeter of the estate and parked up by the alley; I turned off the radio and sat in silence behind the wheel, remembering those lumbering loose-limbed figures and their odd disjointed movements. How they’d seemed to detach themselves from the darkness like smoke.

Was there really some extremist neo-fascist group operating out of Wishwell? Some militant offshoot of one of the local right wing political parties, whose aim was to clear the immigrant population out of the district, starting with this grubby, downtrodden estate? The thought terrified me, but made complete sense. There had been an intense paranoia and distrust of the asylum seekers who had been shipped into the area for quite some time now, and such reactionary groups feed off negative emotions like hyenas at a rotting cadaver.