A modern fairy tale

This one's inspired as another of Chuck Wendig’s  Flash Fiction challenges  for a non-medieval, modern or future fairy tale.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/07/06/flash-fiction-challenge-fairy-tale-upgrade/

   It’s a jungle out there.

   Or at least a temperate forest-cum-icy-wasteland this far north. And it's far from a fairy tale.

   A crossbow bolt sang past my ear as I turned the corner of New Road and South Lane: a shrieking counterpart to the flash of cameras as the police Communications Station registered my bicycle’s chip and registered Neighbourhood Pizza and Pharma for Carbon Tax (my ancient Trax 18-incher has tyres made of petroleum-derived rubber substitute) and made a Road Use Profile of  my lanky height (but skinny width) using up so many cubic centimeters of road space.  

   New Street Academy’s a tough school and since the courts ruled that searching children for weapons violated their human rights that corner’s been a shooting gallery. At least they rarely fire guns because the law assures that only the police, our tiny army and the gangs have access to firearms. Davenport Estate Killaz Crew owns the neighbourhood and they kneecap or clitoridectomize individuals in schools who arm themselves with anything more powerful than a bow. Big Jamal is something of a softie and he won’t behead a child for a first offence - except for apostasy.

   I settled the Kevlar vest a little more snugly on my chest and pulled the helmet Dad had worn in Gulf Three down over my brow.

   In the panniers behind me ancient Tupperware food boxes rattled against cardboard bottles of Approved Medicines. The government licences 28 prescription treatments as environmentally safe and cost-effective and provided by ethical businesses. Ethical businesses go to great lengths annually to show Members of Parliament and the movers and shakers in the Pharmacology Board just how ethical they are during their week-long Safety and Social Responsibility Audits at remote locations set amid tranquil surroundings far away from the everyday pressures of life in our war-zone cities and villages.

   At Moor Hill House I stopped and chained my bike in the security cage to keep it from drifting while I was inside. 

   The lobby of Moor Hill House was dark. Though it was technically illuminated by sustainable bulbs, I gave silent praise that today was breezy; some of the windmills studding the countryside were rotating lazily and so those bulbs gave off a grey, 20-Watt glow. I switched on the ‘scope and raised my mirror on its long wire handle to scan the landing one flight of stairs up. Since doctors stopped making house calls even in emergencies a generation ago and insurance rates and Road Tax for the pharmacists’ armoured cars hit the roof when I was a boy, it’s left to the voluntary sector and sub-contractors to deliver food and medicine to the sick and old who’re too scared or infirm to visit the county’s hospital. The scarlet fleece hoodies of Neighbourhood Pizza and Pharma are as much a part of English life as the blue armour of the police who arrive whenever a Beast addict has gone berserk and bitten everybody he saw, but NP&P arrive before things go chemically wrong whereas the police usually get to the scene only after a gangbanger or an unlicenced bystander has cut the Beastie down. It has to be a head shot or decapitation with a Beastie. If the axe-wielder isn’t from an approved community that’s expected to employ violence as an expression of its cultural richness (and is therefore a vigilante taking the law into his own hands), he’ll like as not be charged with murder.

   The coast seemed clear. I scuttled up squelchy-carpeted steps and knocked quietly on the second door on the left. Turning to face the hallway with a good solid width of wall behind me, I fingered a rolled-up Road Safety Manual which is a mandatory piece of equipment for all bicycle couriers who can’t afford the police bribes. A Bible makes a better shield against switchblades and is a superior gag for some attack dogs but judges pass heavy sentences on those who carry (openly or under plain covers), such divisive literature. Long minutes passed while bolts and chains were withdrawn from the flap in the door beside me. The judas opened and I passed through a box of sandwiches from the Mother’s Union kitchen in the Northallerton security compound.

 “God bless you, Deacon Willoughby,” came the man’s quavering voice.

   “And you, Mister Payne. Same time tomorrow. And I’ll have your prescription if the convoy gets through from York.”

  The last call is always my happiest, being family. We often reuse a teabag or two while she wolfs down the thin bread, cabbage and watery cheese that are the chief products of an agricultural system long ago rendered ecologically sustainable by law. North Riding Neighbourhood Pizza and Pharma prides itself in adding variety to its food deliveries; some spring onions or green beans in season.

    Today her front door was ajar and I pushed cautiously into the shabby little room I’ve known since childhood. When I saw the powdery packet on the table I reached for the iron poker used when her annual coal ration arrives for Winterval. I pulled down my hood for a better field of vision. She was nowhere to be seen but there’s a stage in a Beast high when they hide; silently enjoying the hallucinations before the Rage comes upon them. There was a noise behind me and I turned around very, very slowly. I said “My, Grandma, what big eyes you have.”

Heart beat

  “Vampires, for crissake, Sarge! Now I’ve seen it all. I can’t believe it. Bloody vampires. And joinin’ the Met, too. Now I’ve seen it all.”

   I braked to miss a large dog that ran out in front of our unmarked patrol car.

   “Dave, your grandfather couldn’t stick walking the beat with people with German surnames for years after the War and we’ve got a couple of Irish plods I’d trust my life with who won’t be blowing up anything any time soon in revenge for Cromwell’s merry pranks. And you can’t even say you don’t trust Big Mo in a fight as he’s never pushed anything onto us - least of all you - and he always volunteers to be the designated driver on quiz nights when I’m on leave. We’ll get used to just about anything in the Met and get on with The Job. You know we will.”

   “But how will we manage policing people – things – that are five times as strong as us and three times as fast and twenty times as resistant to damage? Tell me that, Detective Sergeant Einstein.”

   “We’ll do it the time-honoured way as always, and to Hell with what the touchy-feely Brass say. We’ll use the Peelian principles of citizen policing: commonsense, patience, our senses of humour and proportion and, if that fails, we’ll serve up the occasional good old-fashioned kicking to bring a happy conclusion to the evening’s work.”  

   Dave looked away from me and remarked “You’re right Ned.” We’re first-name pals whenever Dave isn’t too stressed. “We’ll get used to anything. We’ll even police them, somehow. Despite not even being allowed to take the piss out of anyone any more, as long as you do the job right you’re accepted. Kind of. I mean, we get on alright don’t we?”

   “What d’you mean by that?” I asked.

   “Ned, I’m a detective too aren’t I? We’ve worked Serious Crime and vice together for the whole seven years since I made detective and I’ve never even suspected you of taking a freebie off the girls; not even after you was shot at an’ it got all tense on the street. And you go to most of the stag nights but none of the weddings. Plus you’re always very smartly turned out. My Ma thinks you’re just lovely. That’s got to mean something, yeah? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind.” He paused. “It’s just not my cup of tea, is all I’m saying. Just so you know.” 

   We were both very quiet all the way to the station after that little gem.

  Some muppet with a degree and probably all of two years’ street policing experience stood at the front of the training room; his uniform cap (that had never got dirty and would never be knocked off by a scrote in full baseball hat, trainers and hoodie) was all a-glitter with brass and those cute little checks that just shouted Accelerated Promotion at you. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen… and others?... Thank you all for coming here tonight.”

   As if we had a choice. Some of those attending were clearly civilian volunteers for the new combined organisation but from the expressions on their faces a lot of them were experienced coppers and they were in agreement with my own pessimistic expectations. I’d almost rather be dead than attend a briefing that looked set to be a weapons-grade embarrassment in its earnest wish not to upset anyone according to their, let’s see now : gender; class (a tricky one if you’re a real toff amongst the mostly proletarian and petit bourgeois Metropolitan Police Service: there’s an actual hereditary peer in Tower Hamlets but he’s been there for ages); race or ethnicity (or?); faith or absence thereof; disability; orientation (both sorts of orientation, Inshallah)… or Heart Beat Status. Or whatever the Common Purpose numpties at command level were going to call it. Since when had policing stopped being a job where you occasionally needed to upset some people in the course of your duties? Ah, yes: 1981.

   He waffled on. “These are exciting days and nights and it’s a great challenge and I believe a privilege to be here at the founding of an entirely new branch of the Metropolitan Police Service; the Combined Support Unit.

   You’ll see that we’ve arranged the seating into three files from the front to the back of the room with gaps in between. In a short while we’ll split you up into mixed groups for self-introduction and team building but at first (forgive me for this), we’re going to, ah, segregate you by types.” He looked as embarrassed about this as if he’d been caught in possession of a Sjambok and The Collected Speeches of Enoch Powell. Rivers of blood, my arse. “Um, ever since the unpulsed community-” So that’s what they were calling it! “- came out of the, er…came out, it’s been widely known that though some vampires are in fact slayers and while some police officers are vampires, most slayers were in fact human - if I can use that word in its old-fashioned sense. Now, while the Metropolitan Police Service takes a very firm position” –“Oh God, please make him stop! “- against slaying or any other kind of illegal violence against the unpulsed we also have a solemn duty to the broader community. This includes managing offenders” – whatever happened to just plain old nicking villains? “- or potential offenders who are (not to put too fine a point on it… Um.) more physically able than the normally able-bodied amongst us. I mean the naturally able-bodied. Er.”

    Just swallow me up, I prayed. Just let the ground swallow me up and take me far, far away from this horrible place.

   “And since some of the former slayers are entirely quote human unquote and they aren’t yet equipped with strategies for dealing lawfully with the unpulsed, and while on the other hand some of the unpulsed are not yet reconciled to centuries of persecution by slayers of all sorts -” Dear Lord, will this never end?  “- we’re asking all the vampires: slayers or not; police officers or not, to sit in the right hand file for now. Similarly we want all the purely human slayers (whether they’re officers or not) to sit in the left-hand section. The ordinary, non-slayer coppers should be in the middle.”

   Typical. As usual, honest coppers were going to be stuck between two hostile camps and tasked to keep order, the poor bastards. So we danced the dance of the politically correct like an Aesop’s Fable made flesh until we settled into the three unequally populated oblongs and perched our backsides on cheap-looking (but actually very expensive and quite uncomfortable) Metropolitan Police Service issue tacky plastic chairs. The police-only slayers glared over the heads of their sandwich-filling ordinary Plod colleagues at a very much smaller groups of vampires; uniformed and otherwise. This was going to be such fun. Hollow laughter.

    “Ned, Ned! What are you doing?” Dave asked: white-faced and jumping up from his chair across the aisle from me. He really was an old-fashioned copper and right now he looked like an outraged Robert Peel - or he would have if Robert Peel had been the great-grandson of a Jewish grocer from Hackney. Also, Dave was a lot taller and didn’t have the bad breath and peppermint smell old Bobby had.

   I tried my famous charming smile. “Seven years together on Serious Crime and Vice, mate, and we got into all kinds of scraps and even a shooting and I never got a scratch on me. At least; not one that lasted for more than a few seconds. And stag nights are just that: nights. They hold weddings in the daylight Dave. Join the dots. Just give me a chance, yeah?”

   He sulked through the whole of the inaugural briefing and we weren’t in the same group for the team building. I’d give him as much time as he needed to come around but I doubted he’d need as much as his grandfather had with the Germans. Dave was basically a proper old-fashioned copper serving in this new, crap, politically correct police ‘service,’ so his sense of duty and fair play would win through eventually. And his legendary heavy-handed sense of humour, of course.

   I couldn’t wait till he remembered what Ned is short for.

   Oh, joy.

Three sentence story

Today we offed two common crims and a political who’d pissed off the local wog brass, yeah? The pol took a long time to croak and in the end we had to speed him on his way so we could get back to camp before taps, and that was the first time in my life I’ve ever felt bad about hurting someone. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it scared the hell out of me when the whole day went dark; capisce?

Over the hedge

   I suppose it had to happen eventually (as Clive always said it would; may he Rest In Peace) and now it’s finally happened and an entire family of them has moved into Number Twenty Three – which was Mrs. Brenner’s old house and though we never got on; what with her not being quite our sort of person and the War and all, though she kept it very nicely appointed and had a gardener who went in every spring and summer after Mr. Brenner passed away but you can afford to do that, can’t you? when you’ve picked up so much money over the years in a variety of shall-we-say ‘businesses’; despite the efforts of hard-working folk (who’d lived here on The Estate from when it was first built I might add) to make a decent living in hard times and all without all the help that only layabouts and immigrants get from the Government these days I might add and I’ll never know why Mrs. B decided to move out of The Crescent at all because we were all perfectly nice and tolerant towards her despite everything, but there you are, so anyway these ones had only been here for a couple of weeks and already they’ve been knocking on the doors and asking the real residents for help without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’, though the wife seems to be nice enough and at least you can see all of her face unlike that sulky little miss at the supermarket (where I only shop for my nephews’ birthdays and Christmases because I prefer to patronise local independent shops rather than those big ‘out of town’ monstrosities because you can still get the service there and they always know your name or recognise your face anyway and they’re run by genuine locals who really know their business though you really can’t beat Tesco’s for cereals and proper scented soap without paying a premium at the hippy ‘boutique’ and cat food’s shocking now even if you buy it in bulk at specialists now that money doesn’t stretch as far as it used to before the Common Market) and anyway she seems to be quite nice, considering, and her eldest son’s still ‘cricket-mad’ which is fine as far as I’m concerned and “Long may it last” say I because as soon as he starts to grow a beard I’m going to get double glazing installed and extra locks on the back door if Nigel will pop round to fit them if he’s not too busy with his girlfriend (that hair!) and she looked really upset about her daughter; the little one by the way – (whom we only saw the once when they and their other relatives turned up in all those flashy Mercedeses to move them and all their movables in) - not the older daughter with the spectacles and the very plain dress but who’s very pretty with a really nice, glossy pigtail (if it’s not ‘politically incorrect’ to use that word!) and who reads a lot and I hope it’s recipes or romantic fiction or something because if she goes all religious I might just take Nigel’s advice and sell this place and invest the profits through his brokerage and move into one of those cosy little park homes up at Lea Green to be nearer to Vera who’s getting nearer to God every day - and who only looked to be about eleven or twelve or so and you’ve really got to wonder if that surly father of hers; doctor or not, hadn’t married her off to some goatherd or something in the old country where she belongs, the poor mite, and though I’m not what you’d call inquisitive she looked as if she’d been crying a lot and I said that of course I’ll keep a look out for the little scrap, we’re all neighbours now and anyway this is called The Crescent, isn’t it dear, and she gratefully went off straight away to tell her family and though we keep ourselves very much to ourselves I got on the phone to the Council at once and they were useless as always since Labour got in and they passed me off to The Police who seemed to be unaware that the girl was missing and who were pretty useless after that as well despite coming to the house and staying with the family for hours and of course they declined to keep the residents properly informed apart from showing us all pictures of her – Maryam she’s called which is so sweet and almost English-sounding – and asking if we’d seen anything unusual on Thursday evening last which of course I hadn’t because: A) I never mind other people’s business, and B) because nothing unusual ever happens in The Crescent which is all part of its ambience and what helps to keep the property prices up, and indeed nothing unusual happens in The Estate as a whole, (except for in The Avenue of course. Baptists; I’ll say no more) and even her at Number Fifteen who’s married to a music teacher who’s years too old for her isn’t what you’d call ‘unusual’ despite those trouser suits though I’ve always thought she can’t be much good at arithmetic (Comprehensive ‘education’, what else can I say?) because it always takes so long for her to argue about the price and the quality of the work done by all the tradesmen who endlessly ‘improve’ her house and garden though why aren’t her sons interested in music at all is what I’d like to know, so of course I couldn’t help the scruffy teenager they sent to my house to impersonate a Police Officer and slurp my Earl Grey as if it was going out of fashion which it never does because though I’m no snob I know that true quality never goes completely out of fashion, but fortunately I always know where to go for advice since Sally moved to Australia and whenever Nigel’s too busy with important people to help out; and of course Mr. Neale’s always ready to listen because he’s never quite fit into our little community here in The Crescent despite our live-and-let-live, always-help-the-neighbours ethnos though he keeps a close interest in his immediate surroundings and we have had some lovely chats in his sitting room despite the smell, so yesterday afternoon I paid him a little visit with a slice of the walnut cake that Clive loved so much in the red dress with the rose pattern and my hair down and tied with a simple ribbon and a dab or two of Indian Coral and the door was on the latch (because it’s still very much that sort of neighbourhood despite - well - you know, them) which was unusual for him because despite his charm he always keeps his doors firmly locked due to his experiences in Kenya (or was it Rhodesia? I forget which) and so I just walked in with a friendly “Coo-ee, Mr. Neale!” but he was nowhere to be seen and the back door was open so I could see all the way through into that high garden of his with its overgrown hedge that blocks the light to Mrs. Middleton’s dahlia beds and he wasn’t in his shed which was bolted firmly enough, though the padlock was off and it looked as if he’d been painting one of his silly boats or model rockets because there was sky blue metallic paint on the bolt and in little drips all along the path that really needed some attention with a good proprietary brand of moss remover, so I went back into the house to call him downstairs but to no avail, which led me to worry that he’d had some kind of a seizure (and given how his complexion has been getting worse these past few weeks I’d been afraid that some such might be on the cards) so I went upstairs hesitantly and against my firm beliefs about privacy to find Mr. Neale collapsed and lying on his side in the front bedroom with the curtains and the blinds drawn and sprawled amid all his ‘ham radio’ equipment and the asthma mask and lots of his orchids all strewn about and torn up (ugly, smelly purple and black things that I’ve never liked and I always told him he’d be better off getting a Pekingese) with splashes of that glittery paint everywhere, and you could have knocked me down with a feather when I tell you that the poor man had not only his shirt off but he also had a big rent in the skin of his back from the nape of his neck down to his, well, shall we just say his waist-line? and his head and entire torso were collapsed and hollow though the rest of him was solid enough; like a banana that’s been peeled and the end half of the fruit taken out but the rest put back inside the peel, though looking into the large gap it seemed as if his insides were a lot less complicated-looking than all the wiggly stuff that one sees on hospital programmes and he was covered in ever so many little round holes about the width of my little finger; and some of which were dripping with the blue paint and there was a sparkly pink pencil with one of those nasty little rubber Japanese cartoon characters fitted onto the blunt end stuck right into his chest area, but I was disturbed right then by hissing from the far corner by the bedside table where I saw what I thought was a ventriloquist’s dummy but when I looked closer was a tiny little naked man like a dwarf but the colour of porridge or a faded wooden fence that needed a good thick coat of creosote and he had one very large eye with a black contact lens that was looking at me though the other eye wasn’t looking at anything because it had been punctured and was dribbling sky blue as well and now I knew exactly where the hairless little brute had recently come from and just then it started, oh-so slowly, to crawl towards me with its pale little pipe-cleaner arms and funny, twiggy hands and toeless feet and I thought to myself: “Doris my girl, you know exactly whom this creature has locked up in his shed and it’s intolerable that anything like this should happen in our lovely town in the nicest county in our dear country with a good British Home Stores and a proper, old-fashioned Marks and Spencer, and that’s so convenient for the station for shopping trips to London and Clive never liked him for some reason but he never told me why not and he came here to be welcomed by us all so nicely and now he’s taken to kidnapping our little girls from under their families’ noses (though he seems to have only a single nostril) and you know your duty,” so I went down to the shed again and pulled the bolts across the door jamb and let the poor little girl out into the sunshine.

 

   After I had taken Maryam back to her parents who, needless to say, were delighted to see her and not a little flattering in their gratitude though I say so as shouldn’t, I went back to ‘Mr. Neale’s’ house because I knew from The Daily Mail what to expect if the ‘authorities’ decided to treat Mr. Neale as some poor refugee and took into their heads the notion that the Americans had poisoned his home on the Moon or something and that he really deserved our help despite his criminal behaviour and just where could they deport him to? - and like as not they’d let him go free and squander taxpayers’ money on ‘settling’ him and treating him like Royalty and put him above the respectable people who’d have to pay for him to lord it over us and he’d be up to his old tricks again in no time because that sorts never learns, do they? - and what if he brought his family down and God only knows what drugs and noise and diseases they’d bring with them and anyway I had discovered why Clive had come to dislike him so much in recent years and it was a jolly good thing, too, that it had a very long extension lead because if there’s one thing you can rely on in the suburbs it’s that we keep our gardens nice and tidy now that electric hedge trimmers are so cheap and reliable and easy to wield.

The Daily Mail’s very sensible editorial policies about such matters as immigration and law and order and a great deal of up-to-date celebrity news can be read online here.

The Sheep Look Down

Another Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds writer's blog.
I've used the crooked tree to sketch out another scene from a world I imagined in another Flash Fiction challenge.

   There’s no-one with less job security than an astronomer - with the obvious exception of an aeroplane designer - so I often sit under the crooked tree.

   The twigs resemble blood vessels tunnelling out through some invisible body from the arteries and veins that are the branches…

   it is more like a nervous system, which is how I can communicate with you

   I did not hear the words which were as loud to me as shouting though they didn’t disturb the peace of the glade. The words simply formed in my mind: as real as memories and just as silent to the outside world.

   “Who are you?” I asked the open air or whatever the inner world of my diseased imagination had conjured up after a lifetime’s disappointment.

   i am an exile, the last of my kind; a skulking fugitive below the outer crust of my home planet a century more light’s travelling from your world

  Not one in a thousand people on Earth really believes in other planets any more, or that this world is only one of maybe hundreds in the cosmos. When I tell people I’m an astronomer they often ask me if I draw up horoscopes and then grow blank and bland and apathetic (or else they become piously furious) when I explain that it has long been known that the universe contains many suns like ours (which are what we call the stars) with planets circling them as whale calves circle their mothers.

   Surely this voice was my unconscious dredging up an invisible friend from a place that Mankind is no longer interested in seeking out; comforting me after dreaming back home in Iowa of Outer Space were dashed by academic disappointment as astronomy grew ever less respected by the world’s physicists and after long years at the drafting table, unsatisfied and resentful, in the enormous Boeing shipyards on the Jersey shore.

   you doubt that i exist, sky-watcher, and yet you still do not flee this distressed, receptive organism for your home and the depressive drug you hope will comfort you. you believe in your heart and despite your grief that I am real. i am real and so i speak to you through (alas for you no longer have the physics to understand it fully!) let us call it a wireless radio constructed from this tree’s threatened life. learn well what I have to teach you, former dreamer; for I have a message of dread news and great sadness for you and for all Mankind 

   “I guess the numbers of next Saturday’s Atlantic City Daily Snorkel lottery would be too much trouble?” I asked, thinking about cigars and some very elderly barley water I kept in the closet below the shelf for all my bathing trunks.

   you must learn to be alert to your surroundings once more and to see the changes inflicted on your species during recent decades, lest your nests become tombs and your reefs necropolises just as my people’s have

   If this thing started to tell me how to respect Mom and Pop and how to treat other folks’ property I was going home and have a talk with my good friends Jim and Jack and Mac and Glen and then wash myself thoroughly in the Waters of Chlorine and meet someone not too fussy in the cheap bar of a cheap lido. At least the Exile wasn’t telling me to build a boat. I hate building boats.

   you must learn again – you and all your kind – to construct aircraft and great rockets and so to regain the skies because what is coming to your world and that extinguished my people is more terrible than the dooms of which your religions warn you. the Void grows nearer, little vertebrate; cruel beyond everything that all the generations of Mankind have suffered    

  “Now wait a minute,” I interrupted (myself, I guess) “what changes are these that’ve been inflicted on us? What should I be alert for?”

   remember the fantastic tales that you read as a child? The stories of gallant explorers visiting strange worlds? what of them, now?

   “But I do remember them; The Time Machine and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has been filmed sixteen times in English. And The Lost World and the comic books about Superman washed ashore in Maine as his parents in doomed Atlantis hoped. I still read them. What’s wrong with that?”

   but what of outer space? what of The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon? and remember from your youth - did Superman hail from Atlantis in your grandfather’s comics? you; the would-be scrutineer of the stars have forgotten that the hero was born on another planet; not in the oceans of Earth. your species has had its imagination turned inward to the waters instead of outward to the galaxy. the Void, my enemy and yours, has long clouded your imaginations and it has done so by altering the chemical balance of your brains and made you all obsessed with swimming and inland waterways and the oceans. unless you teach them anew and urge them to incline their eyes upwards, when the Void’s agents arrive to infest your world your warriors will be obliged to struggle onto dry land from their fleets and learn – perhaps too late – to fight in large formations on the planetary crust  

   I listened to a real radio that night, hiding from the Exile and what it instructed me do. The program was about the Cuban Torpedo Crisis. Depressing stuff. In the morning I’ll get out my chainsaw. But tonight, I’ll dust off my old telescope and take one more look out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Perhaps I’ll see something new.

Skin deep

 “So you’re the mighty slayer who’s going to kill me? I don’t think so,” sneered the vampire.

   “You can’t believe that or I’d already be dead,” I replied, pointing to the coffin with its chains and drifts of silver shavings and wild rose thorns. “You’d be luckier if I was merely a slayer,” I added while turning the cylinder’s nozzle and breathing through my mask. “What I am,” I added; opening my little case of instruments “is a vampire flayer.”

180 degrees Malthus

   It will be dark soon and they will come out to hunt us.

   I slide out of my daytime hideaway under five layers of crushed cars and scrabble up to the usual vantage point in a concertinaed Ford saloon on top of the stack. This gives me almost 360 degrees of vision to scan of the wasteland of the Epidemic. Hunger strikes me only seconds after I awake and I spend five painful minutes resetting the web of fishing-lines hung with the DVDs and strips of cooking foil that are my early warning system.  Waves of nausea and cold sweats assault my body like a fever. To survive for any length of time in this world I long ago adopted the only rules that count: stay hidden; stay covered; stay awake and alert all night long. Oh, and search for the dwindling supply of food that won’t kill you, and do it by using stealth and camouflage. This last consists of a green boiler suit and a hood, boots, respirator mask and gauntlets; all taken from a hazmat technician who no longer needed them. I’ve stitched fishermen’s netting all over it in patches and bunches and festooned the mesh with strips of rag and plastic bags and fake foliage from a florist’s shop so that at any distance I resemble just another patch of rubbish-strewn, weed-covered Epidemic devastation. In short, I look like nothing at all. I wonder if Cal and Jaz will be about tonight (dusk is falling quickly now) so we can forage as a team again for greater ground coverage and hopefully a modicum of protection against stray Hunters.

  I pick at the wing mirror of the Volkswagen one layer down with my multitool: a device so complex, versatile and varied that it makes a Swiss Army knife seem like a flint axe by comparison, hoping to set up another line of sight in my perch so I can monitor the path going westward through the scrap yard to the high wall whilst I concentrate on staring east towards the blocked gates that would one day be unchained and thrown aside. It’s my favourite gadget as it had been even before the Epidemic: before the actual Swiss Army became a blood-sucking horde - as have the Boy Scouts, the Neighbourhood Watch, Greenpeace and the Women’s Institute. The Jehovah’s Witnesses no longer knock politely at your door.

   Before the Epidemic, vampire attacks were rare and were undertaken in remote, undeveloped parts of the world whose natives and law enforcement officials were laughed to scorn by the sophisticated journalists and TV audiences of the modern world: vampires were merely the fantasies of superstitious tribesmen or invented as alibis for corrupt, drug-dealing policemen. When the infection spread and the reality of the Undead became inescapable the authorities rushed to investigate the historical evidence of those old cases and it soon emerged that the world’s thousand or so old-style vamps had mostly dwelt in the West or in Russia and travelled to the Third World for what the New York Times dubbed ‘blood tourism’. A kid turns up, drained and cold in a Manila rubbish dump, and it’s all So what? Plenty more where she came from.  Mexico City suffers a string of abductions and exsanguinations but when the parish priest shouts ¡Vampiro! it’s Adios, muchacho, and lay off the coke for a while, eh, Father? Nobody knew or cared enough to find out anything much about that older generation, especially as their kills usually happened in hot countries where forensic science and the procedures of post-mortem examination were sketchy at best – and where drained and broken-necked bodies were buried as hastily as all the others. It was only when Stockholm’s early morning streets became littered with corpses over the Christmas holidays two years ago that the world’s governments started to take notice - but by then it was far too late. Humanity never did discover why the old-timers allowed their numbers to rise so quickly or how their growth overwhelmed any customary methods of population control. Perhaps they believed their time had come and humanity was ready to accept them as rather glamourous overlords. By the time the Hindu Kush and Haiti were overrun such questions had become academic.

   I pick dirt from my nails and double check the kit in my rucksack: lighter and lighter fuel; machete; yards of climbing rope and three spools of fishing line. Change of pants and a spare bra. Comb and hairbrush. Rouge and brushes. Roll-on deodorant – I was always a fragrant girl even during adolescence but it’s literally a life saver to be odourless in the Fourth World. A pack of silver plastic survival bags and a Thermos complete my portable wealth – ‘wealth’ now meaning simply whatever’s needed to keep death at bay. Perhaps that’s what it always meant. All those luxuries like television and medicine and law had been camouflage to hide the eternal truth that the world is just one great big food chain and the only true value is whatever is required to keep you at the top.

   In the Third World the old methods seemed to work pretty well at first; the Indian and Chinese governments had sent their huge armies to remote and overrun provinces; the tribal lands and wildernesses where people had always been one step from starvation. The wooden stake and the decapitating stroke of a sword or machete had been enough to dispatch the infected; especially when accompanied by cleansing fire and so the city folk could relax again and turn off their TVs when footage of the charnel pits became too graphic. But it was in the oldest industrialised countries that the contagion transmuted into the Epidemic. Western governments tried whatever they could to keep their territories safe but even a series of twenty megaton extensions to the Panama Canal and flooding the Channel Tunnel were weeks too late. Homeland Security clods must have been patting down returning tourists and missing the signs for at least forty days and forty nights before they closed the airports, and here in Britain it turned out that possessing the right European Union paperwork at Dover really was a passport to previously undreamed of opportunity. Towards the end the TV had begun to blame long exposure to its own broadcasting frequencies or microwaves or mobile phone towers or processed food for whatever had mutated the original vector of old-time vampirism: be it God’s curse (or the Devil’s); a virus; bad attitude; bad breath; sinful thought, whatever. So it became a global pandemic that transformed the pampered citizens of the First and Second Worlds into blood-hungry monsters who can survive in full sunlight unlike their terrified parents (though they still prefer to hunt by night) and who are also strong enough to feed on human survivors and their own horrified progenitors alike.

   The wing mirror comes off the Volks at last and I jam the glass into the Ford’s empty rear-view frame; unlike the Old Ones this new breed of vampire casts reflections. My stomach churns again and I begin to think more urgently about looking for my friends... Jaz said she’d noticed traces of humanity over by the gasworks the night before last; a small remnant of homo sapiens holding out against both races of vampire until their food runs out and both they and the unmutated vampires go extinct. The new ones’ll disappear soon thereafter too, if cannibalism turns out to be a busted flush. I scan the rear view from the driver’s seat. I can see straight through to the back window and then towards the western wall of the yard. Nothing at all obscures my view in the mirror, but then nothing has been able to since the English broke our advance at Waterloo.

      It will be dark soon and they will come out to hunt us.