A Series of Inevitable Events.
Chapter One.
“Tamahome?”
“Miaka?”
“Tamahome!
“Miaka!
“Tamahome…”
“Miaka…”
As another
exhilarating episode of Fushigi Yugi
drew to a close, Emily, Sami and Yasha
wiped away their tears of laughter and turned to more serious matters.
“When are we going
to that new comedy club, guys?” said Emily.
“Tonight?” Yasha suggested.
“Yasha, you promised you’d go out with your boyfriend
tonight.”
“I know, but-”
“What about
Saturday?”
Sami shook her head. “Not Saturday. We’ll get crushed by
all the Christmas shoppers.”
“What, at night?”
“Especially at
night.”
Emily gave a
shudder of the intensity she usually reserved for KFC meals or liver and
onions.
“Ugh, all those
shoppers. What’s wrong with the world? Why are we so consumerist?”
“No idea,” said Yasha. “Hey, let’s go and buy more animé!”
“OK!”
Chapter Two.
Several hours and
too much money later, the girls staggered back up to Em’s room, laden with huge
bags of DVDs, books and unfortunately dairy-based food.
“What shall we
watch first?” asked Sami.
While Sami and Yasha tried to decide
which animé they couldn’t bear waiting a few hours
longer to watch – never an easy task for any fan – Emily was turning on the TV
and flicking through the channels.
There is a kind of
heroine who would see the words ‘BREAKING NEWS’ flashing across the bottom of
the screen on every channel, and think nothing of it, and continue to think
nothing of it till the undead are close enough to
nibble her on the ear. Fortunately, Emily was not one of these heroines.
She therefore knew
that reports on a mysterious virus sweeping the city should never be ignored.
“Guys, listen to
this!”
“Doctors recommend
that people avoid crowded areas such as
“Oh, crap,” said Sami. “Em, you’d better go just in case. You already have a
cold.”
“Shh!”
“So far the virus
doesn’t seem to be fatal,” continued the news anchor. “Although several victims
have slipped into death-like comas, complete with rigor mortis, they invariably
revive and carry on as normal…”
“No! No, you stupid
man!” Emily kicked off her shoe and threw it at the TV.
“What?” asked Yasha.
“It’s begun!”
“What’s begun?”
Sami raised her eyebrows. “Is this the zombie thing, Em?”
“Of course it’s the
zombie thing!”
“OK, sure. Sit down
and have some ice-cream.”
“I can’t have ice-cream! And even if I
could, we have to barricade the door first!”
“Well, how about we
leave that till we see how things work out?”
Emily jabbed a finger
at the TV. On the screen, behind the news anchor, a young man was stumbling
around in the road.
“You don’t believe
me? That’s one of them!”
Sami sighed. “Em, I think he’s just dru-”
A big red bus sped
around the corner and hit the man, crushing him under its wheels. Yasha screamed, the news anchor said something that
guaranteed the end of his career, and Emily gave a hollow laugh.
“You just watch…”
Slowly, the young
man got up and began to stagger onwards, although his arms were now hanging off
and one of his legs was the wrong shape.
Emily looked at the
others.
“Let’s barricade
the door,” said Sami.
“Yes, let’s – hang
on!” Em exclaimed. “We can’t!”
“Yes we bloody can!”
“No! Those things
are right in the centre of
“The Royal Family?”
“No! Tim!”
Chapter Three.
Tim sat in his
room, eating a slice of toast and contemplating his latest War Studies essay:
‘If women ruled the world, there would be no more
wars: discuss this theory.’
He stared out of
the window. Something appeared to be on fire, and lots of people were screaming
in an irritating manner. God, the pre-Christmas rush was murder…
There was a slow,
hollow knock on his door.
Sighing, Tim got up
and went to answer it. The door creaked back like a coffin opening.
Standing in the
hallway was a very angry and out-of-breath Emily. She was wearing her big
kicking boots and brandishing a baseball bat with a look of menace in her eye.
Tim stared.
“What did I do?” he
said finally.
“What?” Emily
looked from him, to the bat, and rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be daft, I’m not going to hit you.”
“Is Stu in town?”
“The dead are rising, doofus.
I’ve come to get you somewhere safe.”
“I’m perfectly safe
here,” Tim pointed out, adding to himself ‘Or at least
I was…’
“Oh no you’re not!” Emily stuck the baseball bat through her belt and
pulled a small green book out of her bag. “According to my Zombie Survival
Handbook, staying in an infected area is…” She flipped through the pages. “ ‘Bloody stupid’.”
“Really.”
“So let’s get some
weapons and go back to mine. It’s out of the crisis area and Yasha and Sami are making
sundaes.”
Tim still looked
witheringly unconvinced.
“We’ll make you
some toast,” Emily added.
“Fine.”
“Or you can stay
here and be it.”
“Shut up.”
“Well, stop wasting
time!” Emily marched towards the door. “Let’s kick some dead ass!”
With another sigh,
Tim ate the last of his now cold toast. His eye fell on his essay title.
He picked up a pen.
Load of bollocks,
he wrote, and followed Emily.
Chapter Four.
The roads were
deserted. One of the buildings was smouldering quietly to itself, and all the
windows were broken, but there was no-one, dead or alive, to be seen.
This didn’t include
our respectively intrepid and sceptical heroes, who were walking quickly and
quietly along the empty streets. Emily, still clutching her baseball bat, was
glancing suspiciously from side to side. Tim had found an axe somewhere, and
was glancing suspiciously at Emily.
“Surprisingly
enough,” he said “I don’t see any zombies.”
“That’s a good
thing.”
“Just out of
curiosity, did you see any on your way here?”
“Yes, but they
didn’t see me.”
“So they could, in
theory, have just been ordinary people?”
Emily waved her
arms around. “Do ordinary people break windows? Do ordinary people burn down
buildings?”
“Yes.”
“Shut up!” Emily snapped. “Don’t you see how eerily quiet it is? Doesn’t that
suggest anything to you?”
“Several things. Terrorist action, a sale at Hamleys…”
“OK, when we get
back to mine, you’re watching Shaun of the
Dead, and then you’ll understa…”
Emily’s voice
trailed off as they turned the corner.
“What now?” asked Tim.
“
“And?”
“I was sort of
trying to avoid
Tim looked. As far
as the eye could see, there was a huge crush of people. They lurched in and out
of the shops and seethed across the pavements. Annoying, yes. Zombies? He
doubted it.
That was, until he
began to look more closely at some of the people. Not being a prejudiced
person, Tim wouldn’t usually have minded seeing grey people shuffling by, and
felt sorry for people with missing limbs insofar as he felt sorry for anyone at
all. But when you combined the two, along with a low, hollow moaning and the
smell of rotting flesh, he had to concede that maybe Emily could just possibly
be right.
“Well, this sucks,”
he said.
“Damn straight,”
Emily twirled her baseball bat as she tried to think. “Where’s another Tube
station? One we can get to through the back roads?”
“Um…”
Tim’s thoughts were
interrupted by a sudden loud beeping noise.
“Shit!” Emily
dropped the bat and scrabbled for her phone. “I bet it’s
Sami, I bet they think I’m dead…”
But it wasn’t Sami. Emily read the text, and her
heart sank. She groaned.
“What?” asked Tim,
nervously eyeing three zombies who had stopped and seemed to be wondering, in
their own special, Neanderthal-like way, what the noise had been.
Emily showed him the
message.
Hey Em! Got a day off work so I thought I’d come to
“Ally’s coming to
“Oh, wonderful.
Tell her to go home.”
Go home, fool,
Emily texted.
The three zombies seemed
to decide that there was something strange going on. They began to shuffle
forwards.
Emily’s phone
beeped again, attracting the attention of two more zombies.
“For the love of
God, put it on silent!” Tim snapped.
“ ‘Can’t, I’m already here. Why is
“Just an idea, but
shall we run?”
“We can’t run!
Ally’s out there somewhere!”
“She’ll be fine as
long as she can move above a jog.”
Emily considered
the words ‘Ally’ and ‘jog’ together.
“She’s doomed!”
“So are we,” Tim
muttered, as the zombies closed in.
Chapter Five.
The first zombie, a
young woman dressed in rags that would once have been the height of chavvish fashion, groped forwards. Emily took a step back,
swung the baseball bat, and hit her hard across the face.
“DIE, BITCH!”
“That’s an
incredibly stupid comment to make,” said Tim, who was backing away from two
zombie men.
“Stop talking and
start hacking!” Emily shouted as she beat the woman several times over the head
for good measure.
“Mneh…” Tim swung the axe and hit the first zombie in the
arm. This, obviously, did absolutely nothing.
“You have to
destroy the brain, stupid!”
“Getting to it…”
Emily stepped over
the zombie’s remains and attacked a small child-zombie who was toddling towards
her and hissing. One blow of the baseball bat left it whimpering on the ground;
two, and it twitched and stopped moving.
“Haha! And there you lie!” Emily chuckled.
“Mm, how brave of
you to deal with the little
zombies…”
“Less talk, more
chopping!”
Tim looked up from
the headless corpses of his two zombies, and raised his eyebrows. “Likewise.”
“Waah!” Emily shrieked, as something grabbed at her hair.
She spun around to see another zombie girl, who was holding her scrunchie and pushing a wad of money towards her.
As her hair tumbled
down, Emily narrowed her eyes and raised the bat high about her head.
“DON’T – MESS – WITH
– MY – DAMN – HAIR!” she shouted, punctuating each word with a thwack. In the
background, Tim looked understandably afraid.
Emily turned and stared
across
“Oh, easily done,
just another few thousand zombies to fight our way through…”
“Don’t be such a
pessimist.”
“It’s my natural
state of being.”
But before our
heroes could stride into the almost certain doom that awaited them on the
crowded street (something Terry Pratchett would have
had serious words with them about), Emily’s phone beeped again.
‘Actually, I don’t think I’m in
“GAAAH!”
Chapter Six.
Ally sipped her
tall skinny decaf mochalattechino with gingerbread
sprinkles and decided that there was definitely something very strange going
on. There had to be, for a Starbucks to be completely deserted.
Her phone rumbled
against the tabletop, and she picked up the text. It was from Emily, and full
of expletives. She deleted it and helped herself to a flapjack from behind the
counter, while the TV in the corner jabbered on.
“So what is the
government’s reaction to the zombie situation?” the host asked the two
‘experts’ someone had hurriedly scraped together. “Will we be seeing some
positive action against the building crisis?”
“Well, Ken, it
depends on your point of view,” said the first expert. “First of all, can we
really call the situation a crisis?”
Ken stared at him.
“The undead are roaming the streets, looting shops
and eating people. How is this not a
crisis?”
“See, that just
proves the prejudice of the media today,” said the second expert angrily.
“Zombies are people too! How do we know that eating the living isn’t an
important cultural tradition for the z – um…respiratorially
impaired?”
“What?”
“ALLY!”
The shout of rage,
and the sound as the glass shattered, stopped Ally hearing the experts’ final
verdict on the rights and wrongs of eating people alive. She turned around, and
waved vaguely at Em, who was standing in the broken doorway of the shop,
wearing a thunderous expression.
“Hi Em! How’s
everything?”
“ZOMBIES are taking
over
“Oh, there’s
something about that on the news…” Ally turned back to the TV.
“Well,” said Tim,
stepping over the broken glass “she’s obviously fine. Let’s go.”
“Now we’re here, we
might as well rescue her.”
“From what?
Overpriced coffee?”
“It’s free when you
steal it,” Ally pointed out. “And shh, I’m watching
this…”
Emily studied the
screen. One of the experts was beating the host over the head with his chair
for being so ignorant and bigoted, while his co-expert was cheering him on.
“What is it, Jerry Springer?”
“The news. They’re
talking about zombies.”
“Are they calling
in the army?”
“No.”
“The SAS?”
“Nah.”
“The Brownies?”
“Sadly, no.”
“What are they doing?”
Ally explained the
debate so far on zombie rights. Emily and Tim listened in amazement.
“Here,” said Tim,
handing Ally the axe.
“Don’t you need
this?”
“Not any more. I
don’t want to live in a world where the term ‘expert’ is applied to people that
stupid.”
“We’re stupid staying here,” Emily
pointed out. “Let’s get back to mine, put heavy things against the doors and
windows, and watch Excel Saga till the government sees sense.”
Tim and Ally stared
at her.
“OK, fine, till
someone with sense forms an
underground resistance, or the general public takes the law into their own
hands.”
“No chance,” Tim
muttered. “They’re all too worried that they won’t finish their Christmas
shopping before the world ends.”
Chapter Seven.
“It’s quiet,” Ally
said. “Too-”
“Make my day,” said
Tim, waving the axe, which he had taken back after Ally
managed to cut herself with it. “Finish that sentence.”
Emily, meanwhile,
was wondering whether a thought that had been nagging at the back of her mind
for the past half-hour was ever going to stop faffing
about and make itself known. There was something about
the zombies, something that didn’t seem quite right. Something that she definitely
hadn’t seen in any of the films she’d studied.
“Living impaired at
three o’ clock!” Ally shouted, jerking Emily out of her musings. They were
passing a small supermarket, out of which a family of zombies were struggling,
weighed down with plastic bags. Some of them seemed to contain turkeys,
stuffing and mince pies – others were bleeding quite nastily.
“They’re ZOMBIES,
Ally, ZOMBIES. You don’t have to be PC about zombies.”
“Really?”
The father zombie
lurched up. Emily side-stepped and cracked him over the head with the bat,
knocking him to the ground. As she began to stamp on his face, the mother
zombie moaned furiously and waddled towards her, but Tim stopped her in her
tracks with a mildly impressive throw of the axe – mild because, from his
expression, he obviously hadn’t meant to let go of the handle.
“Next time you
throw that thing near me,” Emily said, after a long pause “aim.”
“Feh.”
They turned to the
zombie children, but fortunately they saw the absence of their parents as a golden
opportunity to start Christmas early. Sitting down in the middle of the road,
they opened the bags and began to fight over raw turkey and entrails.
“God, it’s like
being back at playgroup…” said Emily.
Ally was pouting.
“Why don’t I get a weapon?”
“You get a weapon
when you find one.”
“I found plenty.
You took them away.”
“When you find one
that you won’t kill yourself with.”
“How am I meant to
defend myself without a weapon? What if I get eaten?”
“We hold a minute’s
silence, then carry on,” said Tim. Ally stuck out her
tongue at him.
“Again with the
playgroup comment,” said Emily. “Let’s go! What are we waiting for, Christmas?”
A change came over
her face. Her voice trailed off. The nagging thought had just come out of the
back of her mind, taken a bow and introduced itself as an epiphany.
“Em doesn’t look
very well,” Ally whispered to Tim.
“I’m fine! I’ve just realised what’s going
on!”
“I would clap,”
said Tim “had the rest of us not realised it a few hours ago.”
“Shut up, Tim!”
Emily flapped her arms at him. “The TV said the zombies are looting, right? Why
do zombies need to loot? They’re dead, they don’t need anything!”
“So…?”
“And one of them
took my scrunchie and tried to give me money!” She
pointed at the shop. “I bet if we went in there, we’d find a big pile of money
on the counter!”
“Ooh, really?” Ally began to eye the shop with interest.
“Don’t even think
about it. Can’t you see?” Emily continued. “The zombies are SHOPPING!”
“You mean,” said
Tim “the virus is some kind of marketing ploy concocted by big corporations who
didn’t know what they were unleashing?”
“Hadn’t thought
that far, but yeah!”
“We have to tell
someone!” said Ally.
“Like who? Those
idiots on the news? The police?” Tim
said, indicating the street. The police were very conspicuous by their absence.
“How about the big
corporations?”
Emily looked around
at the looted shops.
“They won’t do
anything,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s working. They’re getting the money, and
the people who can actually choose what they want – the living – are being
eaten.”
Tim and Ally took
this in.
“We’re screwed,
aren’t we?” said Tim.
“Let’s get home,”
said Emily. “We’ll see who’s screwed or not.”
Chapter Eight.
“So, who’s screwed,
Em?” asked Ally, as they stood, or rather crouched, outside Emily’s building.
“We are.”
They were hiding
behind an abandoned car on the other side of the road. Between them and the
door was about twenty zombie. These weren’t the usual
lumbering, moaning zombies, however. These zombies were dressed in tracksuits,
and were busy doing stretches and limbering up. They looked almost alive, apart
from the disturbing way they kept picking splinters of bone out of their teeth.
“Twenty?” said Tim.
“Twenty’s not as bad as
“How?” Ally asked.
“Send you out as
bait, then kill them while they’re feasting on your
corpse.”
“Over my dead…oh.”
“It’s not as simple
as that, Tim,” said Emily.
“So letting them
eat me is simple?!”
“Shh,” Emily stared at the zombies, and her heart, which was already somewhere
in the region of her knees, sunk even lower. “They’re the athletics team. We’re
going to have to be very, very fast.”
Ally thought about
this.
“Tim’s right. I’ll
be more use as bait.”
“Don’t be such a
martyr. All we need is a plan…”
“I am not doing this,” Tim was still saying a
couple of minutes later.
“Yes, you are.”
“Serves you right
for wanting to use me as bait,” said Ally.
“My opinion was
valid, and my plan was sound, unlike this one.”
“This is a sound
plan,” Emily said cheerfully, and finished scrawling the last ‘e’ on the front
of his T-shirt. She stood up, grabbed Tim’s shoulders, spun him around and
shoved him out into the road. “You’re on!”
Tim lost his
balance, fell over, and got to his feet to see all twenty zombies staring at
him.
“I’ll bloody kill
her,” he muttered.
“I think it’s
working,” Emily said to Ally, from the relative near-safety of behind the car.
A couple of the
zombies had started towards Tim out of instinct, but paused as what Emily had
written caught their attention. As she’d expected, the magic word ‘
“Bleh?” said one zombie to another, enthusiastically.
“Bleh!”
“What d’you think
they’re saying?” Ally whispered.
“Uh... ‘I wonder if
they have that T-shirt in lurid green’?”
“Really?”
“How the hell
should I know?”
Nervously, Tim
started walking along the road. The zombies followed him.
“If my calculations
are correct,” said Emily “they’ll think he’s leading them to a shop, so they
won’t eat him.”
“And if they’re
wrong?” Ally asked, then answered her own question
with a malicious grin. “We hold a minute’s silence and move on.”
“You’re cruel.”
“I know.”
“Come on,” said
Emily, standing up as the last overmuscled zombie
jogged slowly after Tim. “Phase two.”
Walking calmly
forwards with twenty of the slavering undead at his
heels was quite possibly the most nerve-wracking thing Tim had ever done. He
gritted his teeth, and wished someone else was with him. Stu, Mindy…anyone he could use as a handy decoy.
Then another sound
faded in over the assorted ‘Blehs?’ – the sound of a car engine, going at full speed and coming
closer. Tim began to walk faster.
He broke into a run
as the car careered around the corner and screeched to a halt. Ally opened the
door, while Emily revved the engine and drummed her fingers on the steering
wheel. The zombies – momentarily taken by surprise – had gathered themselves.
They started to run.
“Hurry, Tim!” she
shouted. Despite Tim’s headstart, the zombies were
gaining.
“They’re going to
eat you, you know!” Ally added reassuringly.
The nearest zombie
stretched forwards and grabbed the collar of Tim’s coat. Tim struggled out of
the garment, collapsed into the car and slammed the
door behind him.
“You took your time
out there,” said Emily.
Tim glared at her.
“I – am – NOT – a –
runner,” he growled.
“Well, the main
thing is we’re all alive.”
Tim looked as if
he’d like to do something about that state of affairs, but, fortunately for
him, the arrival of the zombies stopped him vocalising these thoughts.
“Haha, they can’t get us, we’re in a car!” said Ally.
“Actually,
according to the handbook, us sitting here in a car
will only slow them down.”
“Then why-”
“Because we’re not
just going to sit here in the car,”
said Emily, and released the handbrake.
The car shot
forwards with a roar, crushing two zombies beneath its wheels. Then it stalled.
“EM!”
“This isn’t MY car,
OK? It’s not easy driving a strange car!”
“TRY!”
Muttering, Emily put the car in neutral, re-
started it, and then accelerated gently forwards. The zombies
began to jog alongside them.
“Just an observation?” said Tim. “They’re keeping up.”
“Do you know how difficult it is to
be heroic with you two around?”
Judging that the
car wasn’t likely to stall, Emily floored the accelerator, and they began to
pull away from the crowd of zombies.
For about three
seconds. Then a pale, undead face slowly began to
appear in the side window.
“Um,” said Ally
“did it occur to anyone that they can run as fast as they want because they
don’t feel pain?”
“What do you think
I watched Dawn of the Dead for? My health?” Emily snapped, and slammed on the brakes.
There was a
screech. The zombies ran on ahead, slowing down as they realised the car was
somewhere behind them, but it was already too late. Emily had hit the
accelerator again, and ploughed through the group like a bowling ball through a
set of pins. Zombies went flying, many of them in pieces.
“YOU LIKE THAT, YOU
DEAD BASTARDS?!” Emily shouted, went into reverse, and backed over the
remaining zombies.
“Crude,” said Tim
“but horribly effective.”
They sat in
reflective silence for a few moments. “What now?” Ally asked finally.
“Go inside, eat, watch animé.”
“No liberating
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Hang on,” Tim
said. “Much as I hate to be responsible for such a predictable comment – do you
hear that?”
The girls listened.
There was the sound of a police siren. It was getting gradually closer.
“Yay!” Ally shrieked
as the police car rounded the corner.
“Ally, wait-” Emily
began, but Ally had already unlocked the door and leapt out into the street.
She began to jump up and down, waving her arms.
“We’re over here!”
“Ally, for Christ’s
sake-”
There was a shout –
“There’s one of them!” – and then the sound of
gunfire.
Epilogue.
Christmas Day had
dawned, crisp, clear and annoyingly snowless. Across
“I wish they’d
aimed a little further to your right,” Tim said to Ally, whose left arm was in
a sling for the second time in her life.
“Well, how was I to
know?”
“When they said
‘We’re looking for three murderers’,
that’s how you were to know!”
Emily sighed
quietly to herself. The police had been
looking for them. The government had agreed with the arguments put forwards by
the ‘experts’ – rumour had it they’d also accepted a large hand-out from an
unnamed corporation – and granted the zombies ‘post-human’ status, with all the
rights they’d had while they were living. As long as they refrained from
biting, they were entitled to full police protection.
Their lawyer had
tried to get the charge brought down to manslaughter, but admitted that it was
unlikely. Technically, the zombies had been going about their own business –
killing them was as legally dodgy as hitting a burglar who was just going about
his own business whilst robbing
someone’s home. Emily had fired her.
She’d never wanted
to be a hero. She’d just wanted to survive. Although she had, she was seething
quietly with rage. Suddenly, she realised that she didn’t just want to be a
survivor either.
Emily stared out of
the barred window, ignoring Tim and Ally’s bickering.
“One day, I’ll get
out of here,” she murmured. “And they’ll rue the day they were resurrected…”
And she kicked off
her shoe, and began to slap it idly against the palm of her hand.