King of Zombie Heath

Day 39 - Shovelling snow, delusional doctors and what to do with Mordsley?

Went to sleep, slept like a corpse and woke up this morning in a Siberian prison camp. At least that's what it feels like. Stiff as a plank and every muscle in my body screaming out for the sofa and a DVD. No such luck. After a maple sausage MRE (once in a while's fine, but I don't think I want to eat them three times a day) it was back to digging snow.

No sign of Soldier X, Action Mike or Freckles. I wonder if they're out there somewhere dancing naked in the snow? Will we ever see them again? I think I could get to like X.

Biswas, My Bad and Big Bro went to inspect the bodies. Biswas worked at Novartis, where he studied the virus before everything went bottom up. Something to do with optimizing growth to increase yields. It's funny, saying it like that kind of makes it sound as if he's responsible for exterminating the human race. "Increasing yields". To do what? Kill more people? He did go into a little more detail when My Bad introduced him to us the other day, but I confess it was his wife that captured my undivided attention. Sounds a bit pervy when I read it back, but if you saw her you'd understand. Anyway, as soon as Biswas found out about the dead Angel Dusters, he wanted bits of them. Tissue samples. Heads probably, to pickle and store in jam jars in a secret closet somewhere. I know we're a pretty well-equipped hospital, but what does he think one man and his Ph.D can do in a makeshift lab? Generate seed strains? Conduct genomic sequencing? Study the cell culture in lab animals? I wouldn't put it past him and My Bad to try that. We've already proved to be excellent guinea pigs. We even keep journals that tell the researchers how we're feeling.

The man's obsessed with finding a cure. The way I see it, and the way Doc's pilfered copy of Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders IV describes it, he's suffering from "nonbizarre and erroneous beliefs based on false inferences about external reality, beliefs that persist in the face of evidence to the contrary and which are not generally accepted by other members of his subculture." Or, to put it in layman's terms, he's delusional and should be sleeping in Six receiving a little paper cup of coloured pills each morning with his morning MRE. But he's a scientist. So does anybody bat an eyelid? Nooo. People expect him to be mad as a hatter.

So, Biswas got his samples and we (the loose cogs, only good for heavy lifting) were tasked with dumping the bodies in the containers on the back car-park. There are ten of them. The moment the doors of the first swung open the scale of what's been going on hit me smack in the face, and we had to open six more before we found anywhere to squeeze the dusted Dusters in without having step on heads or exert ourselves by flinging them up onto a pile.

I tell you one, I've never seen so many dead bodies stacked side by side and on top of one another, lumped together like forgotten old fish fingers gone past their sell-by dates. And the faces. Twisted masks of terror, agony and rage, captured and frozen in place by the cold. It was a wet dream come true. It was art. I wish I'd had a camera.

I tell you two, that car-park is going to stink come spring.

Dick and Chimp spent the day checking the perimeter cameras and installing no-breaks so they still work when the generator's off. Arthur managed to stay nice and warm inside by watching the monitors and dishing out left-a-bit, right-a-bit instructions over the radio, like he had a clue what he was doing. Chimp wants to be sure every inch is covered. He's thorough. I've decided X was harsh calling him a jug-eared little cunt. He's keen and focused, once he's doing something useful, and Dick likes him. True, I did hear them discussing aliens, and I'm positive I heard the name David Icke mentioned at least once, but a friend of Dick's is a friend of mine. As a sign of respect I've decided not to call him Chimp or Jug-eared little cunt to his face. There were no reports or marauding Angel Dusters queueing up at the gates.

It's funny how a hundred years of female liberation goes out of the window as soon as civilisation breaks down and there's digging and lifting to do. The ladies, led by Juanita, and helped by Mini Meera, have taken charge of the food and are setting up an out-door freezer in which to store all the frozen food now that the walk-in freezer is no longer freezing. Chimp said it would use so much electricity it wasn't worth it, especially as it's still well below zero outside. He suggested we use all the frozen stuff up first and set the freezer up as a kind of panic room. No one without industrial cutting tools or explosives is getting in there once the door's shut. Makes perfect sense, until you ask yourself how the hell you'll get out once it's besieged by starving Angel Dusters. Still, it's a plan, and "impossible isn't in our dictionary" (quote courtesy of Arthur, our inspirational CEO) and kitting it out will keep some of our minds off what's going on beyond our walls.

Us, the men-of-little-use, continued with the back-breaking task of shovelling snow into water tanks. There was no lifting today. We took Soldier X's advice and started clearing the roof. With seven of us working, one tank was quarter-full by lunch-time.

Juanita's gang rustled up a decent lunch. Steaming hot. Burgers and mixed veg. Then it was back to the salt mines. Sorry, the roof.

I was taking a break and staring at the south wall, wondering what X's platoon of two (a platwoon!) were up to when I heard an engine and saw plumes of black smoke approaching. The generator is off when we're not inside or cooking, so all there is to hear is the noise we ourselves make and, when we're not making any, it's really, really quiet. Gone the background hum of distant traffic. Gone the honking of car horns. Gone the planes roaring overhead. Not even dogs barking or birds tweeting. Just the sound of blood rushing through your ears. If you listen, really, really listen, you can hear a silence so deafening, so oppressive, so utterly complete you could go mad listening to it.

Hearing an engine, when you're supposed to be the only people alive, can be quite disconcerting. I had visions of a troop of Mad Max road-warriors arriving to smash the walls with a convoy of cannibalised lorries, school buses and Humvees, all stripped down and souped up with metal spikes and grills and ballistae, the broken bodies of Soldier X, Freckles and Action Mike strapped naked to the bonnets.

No such luck. The walkie-talkie crackled and Soldier X told us to open the gates. He was back, with a bulldozer and a Land Rover towing a trailer with a small generator and a load of supplies. And, according to Dick who spoke with Chimp later, a surprise we were going to love. Freckles brought the Landrover and trailer in then returned outside to help X and Mike clear the snow from outside the walls. They're still at it as I write this. Juanita's taken them a double dose of food and drink. They deserve it.

The evening meal of burgers and veg came with invisible déjà-vu sauce and we all ate together in the Ward Five dining room, like a big happy family. Arthur, exercising his leadership muscles and trying to establish his position as Alpha Male, raised the question of what to do with Mordsley. He's a non-contributor and a drain on our resources, and he gives the ladies nightmares. Everyone agrees that we can't just keep him locked up like an animal (why not? That's exactly what society was doing with him before society imploded) but no one really wants a liver-eating, paedofilic, necromancing (or is it necrophilic?) serial killer walking around. So, what to do? Do we give him a chance, hoping he's turned over a new leaf and learned his lesson, and let him out? Foolish, according to Arthur, since he's locked in that cage for a reason. Force him to work? How do we do that? Beat him with a stick? We all know Mordsley only does what he wants to do, so instead of one person in a cage not working we'll probably get one person out of a cage not working and a second person not working either trying to make the first work. Hardly logical. So, do we leave him where he is, feeding him our food and water while we all work our fingers to the bone? Or do we drop him over the wall and leave him to fend for himself? Or do we kill the bastard?

I voted for kill the bastard. It's the simplest, most humane solution. And I'm not the only one who thinks so, either. Art the Fart, Tracey and G'n'D agreed with me. Chimp, Big Bro and Bling wanted to drop him over the wall with some sandwiches and a can of Tizer. Nimby, Tubbs and LT think we should let him out and give him a chance to earn his keep. My Bad says he should stay where he is. When she said that, Dick said he'd had an idea. "I know," he says, "why don't you inject him with an incurable disease and see if he survives?" My Bad wasn't amused. If looks could kill, Dick would be outside sharing a container with the three Angel Dusters and a hundred ex-members of staff. He's always been obsessive, and the fact that she used him is eating him up. He needs to mellow, to learn how to let go, how to forgive. Chill. No matter how bad it is, the sun always comes up in the morning.

Some said this, some said that, the others hummed and haad and, in the end, after several hours' blablabla, we decided to decide what to do with him at a later date.