Dead Stop Read online

  DEAD

  STOP

  Mark Clapham

  Abaddon Books

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2014 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Pye Parr

  Design: Pye Parr & Sam Gretton

  Marketing and PR: Mike Molcher

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-534-6

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-535-3

  Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Thanks to Brie Parkin for the filthy Old English, the inhabitants of Scoblotopia (Lance Parkin, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith) for general writery support, and David Moore at Abaddon for picking my submission from the pile in the first place.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN THE DEAD woman sat opposite me and started talking about how I was going to die within the hour I was annoyed, but didn’t take her too seriously. Ghosts say stuff like that all the time and I’ve learned to ignore most of it.

  I don’t know whether it’s a desire to freak out the few unlucky members of the living who can see and hear them, or some traumatic response to their own deaths, but the recently deceased all seem to act the banshee if you give them a hearing, wailing incoherently about impending doom. It’s one of the reasons I generally try and avoid them.

  It was when the dead woman started to make me an offer—to find me a safe route out of my terrible fate and access to a secret offshore account containing enough money to buy a small island—that I started to pay attention.

  For a start, ghosts don’t usually try and talk you into a deal, beyond issuing unreasonable demands that you help them back to the land of the living.

  Also, I’ve always really wanted an island.

  If you could see the things I can see, you would want an island too. A really desolate little shithole of a rock, where nothing has ever died except gulls and shellfish, neither of which leave ghosts behind.

  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

  ‘YOU CAN SEE me?’ she had said, sitting down opposite me in the diner. Her tone was breathy, nervous but not hysterical.

  ‘Yes,’ I said quietly, chewing on a fry. The owner/chef/whatever was already in the kitchen, but still I talked as if someone might be listening. Old habits.

  Not that I made it a habit to engage with ghosts. I had over the years developed quite a knack for not looking like I was looking at them, a highly attuned version of the genetic British capacity to not make eye contact on public transport.

  In the case of Melissa, I must have been staring, at least long enough to notice. Smooth. On this evidence, I would have made a great spy, right up until the first honey trap I encountered.

  I was in the conversation now. I guessed I had to see where it went. At least until I finished eating.

  ‘Even though I’m dead?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, after a pause. There had been no denial or confusion when she mentioned being dead, just a statement of fact. I’d never seen this before in a ghost.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m Melissa, and if you don’t want to end up dead within the hour, you need to listen to what I have to say.’

  ‘Okay, Melissa,’ I said. I was getting dubious again now, expecting another spook sob story. ‘I’m David, and I’m listening. How am I going to die?’

  I listened and ate the rest of my burger, my chewing slowing and the last morsel abandoned as she laid it all out: about the zombies on their way even now, and about the lab, and the company that owned it. About how she wanted me to kill her undead body properly, so that her ghost could move on. She explained it all with such precision and efficiency I think she would have preferred to include PowerPoint slides to hammer home the key bullet points.

  ‘Even if what you say is true,’ I said after she’d finished. ‘Why should I head towards the danger? Why not run down the road, or lock myself away and wait for my tow?’

  ‘You got an answering machine when you called for that tow, right?’ she said, nodding before I confirmed it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how...’

  ‘This entire area is owned by the company, and all local calls are diverted for filtering,’ she said. ‘Usually your details would have been diverted to a mechanic in the next town, and you would have been picked up without being any the wiser, but in an emergency situation that won’t happen. You won’t get to the next town, it’s too far. And if you hide from the zombies, you’ll still be here when the company get their act together and enact their sterilisation plans.’

  It was, all told, a pretty awful offer, a dangerous job I was entirely unqualified to do, offering pipe dream rewards.

  Unfortunately, it was the only offer anyone was going to make me today and, presuming Melissa wasn’t just crazy—and if she was, she was convincing crazy—I didn’t have much choice but to accept it if I wanted to live beyond the next three minutes.

  If it hadn’t been attached to her body, which was apparently wandering around independently a few miles from where we were sitting, I would have shaken Melissa’s hand there and then.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I SUPPOSE SOME people might find it strange that I accepted Melissa’s zombie story in good faith, taking the whole scenario for granted. After all, I didn’t believe in zombies.

  Well, a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in them either. Belief isn’t required when you know for a fact that something is real, when you can’t escape the evidence of your own senses.

  Once you’ve accepted ghosts, why not zombies too?

  Also, and this may seem strange considering the dire circumstances Melissa was predicting, I wanted to believe her. After years of dealing with ghosts and their self pitying bullshit, there was something about her unsentimental directness I admired.

  That should have been a warning sign in itself. Who dies a horrible death, then marches their transparent arse to the nearest living person to make a deal to kill their own corpse, if you’ll pardon the tautology?

  That arse was part of the problem, too, along with the rest of the non-corporeal body sitting opposite me. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, dead or alive, but she had full curves beneath the dark suit she’d died in, and there was something about the way she looked at me over her severely framed glasses that I really liked.

  Yes, she was dead, literally untouchable, but since when did the impossibility of any kind of relationship stop a man being led astray?

  I may be psychic, but I never claimed to be smart.

  Making a deal with a pretty female ghost. Zombies or no zombies, I was in deep, deep trouble.

  I SUPPOSE I should explain who I am and how I got to be here, or at least sketch in the interesting highlights. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the zombi
es soon enough.

  My name is David Ian Larkin, although I don’t use the Ian on anything other than legal paperwork. I was born in the North of England thirty-four years ago, and I can’t remember much about my early life, which is a bit of a shame as it can hardly have been less fun than my later life. I know those first years didn’t involve dealing with ghosts, as I can very clearly remember the first time I saw one of those.

  It was horrible at the time. With hindsight, it was much worse.

  I was twelve years old, being taken to my first funeral, which was exciting because it was a day off school, but not exciting because, you know, it was a funeral.

  The man in the coffin was one of many uncles—I’m an only child, but my parents come from big families, which probably explains why I’m an only child—and although we weren’t close he had been a funny, friendly guy who always brought me chewy, brightly coloured sweets of the kind they probably make from petroleum by-products.

  I was sad to see him go. That didn’t mean I was pleased to see him come back, appearing beside his own coffin.

  It was a hot summer day, completely lacking the mist-laden atmosphere required for an authentically funereal feel. The churchyard was bright, the grass vivid green, and the laughter of children younger than myself echoed across from a nearby primary school.

  It felt inappropriately cheery, and it would have been easy to forget the bleak nature of the occasion if we weren’t all sweating our guts out in black suits, or in my case an ill-fitting hand-me-down jacket over my grey school trousers. Even inside the relative cool of the church, the vicar left a sweaty handprint on the top of the coffin after giving poor Uncle Gary a blessing.

  I hadn’t known where to look for most of the service, my eyes avoiding staring at relatives with deeper grief than my own as they quietly sobbed, so found myself staring at the handprint, the liquid trace of skin contact, as it slowly evaporated on the varnished surface of the coffin, until I was just blankly staring at the wood itself.

  The surface was slightly reflective, and I caught the image of a pale, distorted face.

  I looked up to see the shade of Uncle Gary leaning over his own coffin, a man made from some insubstantial material like nothing I had ever seen before—a creamy, translucent mist with currents of blue-grey moving within it.

  A ghost. I was looking at a ghost.

  There was a brief pause as I took in what I saw, then I reacted in the only way appropriate for an adolescent male making his first contact with the world of spirits.

  Reader, I lost my fucking shit.

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, I found myself facing the prospect of encountering my first zombie with the knowledge that if I lost my fucking shit now, I would lose my fucking head and my fucking life immediately after.

  So I kept my shit together as best I could, which was not very well at all.

  Seconds after Melissa and I made our deal, there was a brief half-shout and a crash from the diner’s kitchen. We both jumped at the noise.

  ‘Shit,’ said Melissa, eyes locked on the serving hatch behind the counter. ‘I hoped we had more time.’ Her voice was what I suppose you’d call mid-Atlantic—a bit American, a bit clipped English, no recognisable local accent. She could have been from either country, or from somewhere else altogether and learned English as a second language.

  Now didn’t seem to be the time to get her life story.

  ‘He could have just dropped something,’ I said doubtfully. The proprietor of the diner had disappeared into the kitchen after serving me. I had been informed before he went that I should ‘holler’ if I needed anything. There had been the sound of cleaning and clearing ever since, the occasional clank of a back door opening and closing—it was pretty late, so I guess he was taking out the trash and finishing up for the night.

  Following the crash, there was silence. I contemplated hollering, but didn’t.

  ‘I’ll go check,’ said Melissa, clipping through the corner of the table as she stood up. A chunk of her hip dissipated and reformed as the table edge cut through it, but if she felt anything, she didn’t react.

  Melissa didn’t even get halfway to the kitchen door. The door crashed open, and it came through.

  NOW, THE THING about ghosts is that they’re both absolutely a presence and not there at all. Sometimes I wonder whether other, luckier, people really can’t see ghosts, or whether their brains filter them out as random, insignificant patterns, like heat haze or dust in the air, never making the connection that distinguishes the spirit as something real and distinct.

  Whatever. All I know is that, like a graffiti tag you’ve never really looked at properly but which is all over your town, once you’ve seen one ghost you can’t stop yourself from noticing the buggers everywhere.

  The day I saw Uncle Gary, I’d had to be dragged screaming and flailing from the church, and I could see that there were ghosts everywhere. There always had been, I knew that straight away; it was just that I’d never registered that they were there before.

  Medieval ghosts standing on the worn tombstones that made up the church floor. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ghosts standing by the elaborate tribute plaques on the walls. Then, out in the churchyard, ghosts milling between the tombstones.

  The restless dead, everywhere. There, real, but somehow not there at all.

  Present but absent.

  THE FIRST THING I noticed about zombies, as opposed to the vaporous undead I was used to, the thing that shocked me even though it shouldn’t have: there was nothing absent about a zombie at all.

  The creature before me was very much there, a physical presence, flesh and stench and twisted limbs more aggressively real and organic than the subdued presence of a living human being.

  The zombie who crashed through the door was a man in a blue-grey boiler suit, and he entered with a shockingly inhuman lurch, limbs smacking forward in great, twitching, imprecise motions, feral lunges untamed by the sensitivities of an active brain.

  Its skin held no deathly pallor, but instead the purplish darkness of a bruise, tinged with black around the extremities.

  Its lolling mouth was an unhealthy blue-red, eyes yellowish white with wide, slack-looking pupils.

  And it stank, a smell of illness, bile and decay that hit me like a physical extension of the zombie itself, a stench so powerful it felt invasive, a preliminary attack reaching across to crawl into my nose and pores.

  It was probably that stench that saved me. My brain was still in shock and I initially stood there gawping like a twat instead of turning and running, but the horror of the thing’s stench overcame my paralysis and caused me to physically recoil.

  As I jerked back to try and escape the smell, a clawed hand passed through the air where my throat had been seconds before. The creature’s entire body weight seemed to have been thrown behind the lunge, and it followed through on the blow, the momentum causing it to stumble past me.

  Reprieved for a moment, I looked for an escape route.

  KIDS ARE RESILIENT. They say that, don’t they, when some poor little sod loses their parents or suffers some terrible illness or injury? Kids are resilient. They bounce back.

  Maybe I was resilient, or maybe I was too bloody stupid to ask for the help I needed, but after my first contact with the dead I somehow edged back to normal without ever explaining my erratic behaviour or falling into the mental health system.

  I was seeing things that everyone else would consider impossible, but that first outburst was written off as the results of grief for Uncle Gary, and after that my family were too busy dealing with wills and estates to question that first judgement. As far as my doctor, school and any other authorities were concerned, providing I was back at school by next term, and there were no further public displays of raging shit-loss, it was case closed.

  Poor boy, they were very close, give him some time and he’ll be fine.

  I wasn’t bloody fine at all but, for better or worse, I dealt with it myself. The funeral had
been at the end of my first year at secondary school, so there were no important exams to miss, and I had the whole of the summer to work out what was happening to me.

  I hadn’t made many friends that first year, which had pissed me off at the time, but now I was glad of it, because while adults were delicate enough to not ask any questions, kids my own age wouldn’t be so tactful. For now, I was glad to be alone.

  It took three weeks for me to work up the nerve to leave the house. There were no restless spirits in our crappy new-build home on a crappy identikit estate, so I got to go out and see my next ghost on my own terms.

  The first was a couple of streets away, just an old lady standing on the pavement, staring at a post box.

  She didn’t see me, mainly because as soon as I saw her I turned and ran straight back home.

  I stayed in my room and didn’t so much as open the curtains for a whole week.

  ‘BATHROOM IS CLEAR,’ shouted Melissa, and I turned to see her emerging from a closed door in the corner of the diner, thankfully in the opposite direction from where the zombie was slowly turning around. ‘There’s a window.’

  I ran for it, the battered trainers I wore for travelling slipping on the scuffed linoleum floor. Melissa disappeared back through the door before I slammed into it, my head nearly bumping into the stylised male and female figures stencilled there.

  I slammed the door shut behind me, and closed the chunky red plastic lock. I had no illusions that the locked door would hold out against even a couple of serious blows, but at least I had given myself a second to breathe and think.

  I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, taking in the blandly unpleasant smell of a well-maintained public toilet, the scent of cheap cleaning products overpowering anything nastier. Compared to the rank stench I’d just experienced, the low-level chemical stink was reassuringly normal.