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Starting writing this months ago, lost the drive. Worked out the plot details so started again.
Just throwing this up to get my ball rolling.
----
PROLOGUE
I hope your not expecting a happy ending. There’s no “and they lived happily ever after” or “but at the last minute, they were saved”.
It’d be nice, I won’t deny that.
But if you want fantasy and princesses and sunsets watched arm in arm by happy, now-wiser young lovers then go to a library and take a Barbara Cartland novel or some other tome dedicated towards pretending it all works out fine and hey, you’re a stronger person having gone through the experience.
Nope. What follows is what happened. I don’t know how or why, that can be left to those with enough time and a safe place to ponder and argue about the details. All I can do is sit here and write out my story, to explain how I went from being another surly little nobody to saviour of the entire goddam human race.
Actually that’s a lie, I’m not the saviour of anything except my own hide and a few others. But given the circumstances, that’s one hell of an achievement considering.
So I’m holed up here. I’ve got this laptop, enough bottles of vodka to see me through and christ knows how many cartons of smokes. If nothing else, irony survives eh? How many times have you heard the warnings about smoking? They even reached a point where they printed stuff on the packs designed to…I don’t know, put you off?
Let’s face it, if you can get past the first choking, puke-inducing inhale then a few words stamped on the pack ain’t going to change your mind. All the finger wagging in the world, all the research, all the warnings and it wasn’t the cigarettes that got us after all. But I don’t feel smug, I just feel tired.
Hang on, there’s banging at the door, I need to take care of it before I can continue. At least I’ll never have to worry about running out of bullets.
Right, that’s that.
Booze? Check.
Smokes? Check.
Memory and strength to record this like the industrious little historian I never was? Check.
I warn you, you’re not going to like what follows. You’ll find it hard to believe, reading this back in however many years. No doubt they’ll rewrite history to give this a positive spin, or introduce some pathetic reason to not teach or speak about what happened ever again, so if you’re reading this then either I’ve been celebrated as a chronicler of events, or it’s being passed around underground and whispered about in meeting halls or classrooms.
Don’t listen to the history books, they lie. Nobody knew why it happened, where it started or even who was the first. Oh I don’t doubt there are men in concrete bunkers somewhere that know. Men that talked in powerfully quiet voices, smoke cigars and thump the table to demonstrate just how-goddam-serious-this-all-is etc etc.
I’m talking about me and you, the people that actually got caught in this thing and had to learn to fight, kill, survive and evolve.
We never knew what happened until it was in our faces, and that’s always the last moment.
So settle back, dear reader, and flick the page over to embark on what you’ll dismiss as fiction. Except you and I both it’s not. I reckon I can make it to the end before it’s all over for me. I never used to be much of a typist but, as with everything else that happened, you learn fast or you fall and are finished.
Grammar, spelling, split infinitives, double-negatives? Those are all my mistakes, go complain to Mr Childs, my old English teacher at college.
If you can find him out there. If he even remember what a college is, and if he doesn’t bite your face off before you can say hi.
Are we ready? Everyone comfy? Good, then take a nice deep breath and begin.
Go.
Just throwing this up to get my ball rolling.
----
PROLOGUE
I hope your not expecting a happy ending. There’s no “and they lived happily ever after” or “but at the last minute, they were saved”.
It’d be nice, I won’t deny that.
But if you want fantasy and princesses and sunsets watched arm in arm by happy, now-wiser young lovers then go to a library and take a Barbara Cartland novel or some other tome dedicated towards pretending it all works out fine and hey, you’re a stronger person having gone through the experience.
Nope. What follows is what happened. I don’t know how or why, that can be left to those with enough time and a safe place to ponder and argue about the details. All I can do is sit here and write out my story, to explain how I went from being another surly little nobody to saviour of the entire goddam human race.
Actually that’s a lie, I’m not the saviour of anything except my own hide and a few others. But given the circumstances, that’s one hell of an achievement considering.
So I’m holed up here. I’ve got this laptop, enough bottles of vodka to see me through and christ knows how many cartons of smokes. If nothing else, irony survives eh? How many times have you heard the warnings about smoking? They even reached a point where they printed stuff on the packs designed to…I don’t know, put you off?
Let’s face it, if you can get past the first choking, puke-inducing inhale then a few words stamped on the pack ain’t going to change your mind. All the finger wagging in the world, all the research, all the warnings and it wasn’t the cigarettes that got us after all. But I don’t feel smug, I just feel tired.
Hang on, there’s banging at the door, I need to take care of it before I can continue. At least I’ll never have to worry about running out of bullets.
Right, that’s that.
Booze? Check.
Smokes? Check.
Memory and strength to record this like the industrious little historian I never was? Check.
I warn you, you’re not going to like what follows. You’ll find it hard to believe, reading this back in however many years. No doubt they’ll rewrite history to give this a positive spin, or introduce some pathetic reason to not teach or speak about what happened ever again, so if you’re reading this then either I’ve been celebrated as a chronicler of events, or it’s being passed around underground and whispered about in meeting halls or classrooms.
Don’t listen to the history books, they lie. Nobody knew why it happened, where it started or even who was the first. Oh I don’t doubt there are men in concrete bunkers somewhere that know. Men that talked in powerfully quiet voices, smoke cigars and thump the table to demonstrate just how-goddam-serious-this-all-is etc etc.
I’m talking about me and you, the people that actually got caught in this thing and had to learn to fight, kill, survive and evolve.
We never knew what happened until it was in our faces, and that’s always the last moment.
So settle back, dear reader, and flick the page over to embark on what you’ll dismiss as fiction. Except you and I both it’s not. I reckon I can make it to the end before it’s all over for me. I never used to be much of a typist but, as with everything else that happened, you learn fast or you fall and are finished.
Grammar, spelling, split infinitives, double-negatives? Those are all my mistakes, go complain to Mr Childs, my old English teacher at college.
If you can find him out there. If he even remember what a college is, and if he doesn’t bite your face off before you can say hi.
Are we ready? Everyone comfy? Good, then take a nice deep breath and begin.
Go.
Page:
(A) Mick Hucknall.
ONE
Start at the start. That’s how it goes right?
I’ll tell you about me.
Give you some backstory so, as they say in scriptwriting classes, you can sympathise with the character. Why?
Because unless you know me, some of things I did are going to make you hate me, you’ll want me to die. And nobody likes to follow someone they hate.
When it began, I was just your average 20 something male. Had a nondescript job in a cubicle filled open-plan office. You know the place, you’ve worked there as well.
You come in on a Monday morning and everyone pretends they care, they run through the script with about as much enthusiasm as someone writing a thank you letter to Nan for the crappy cardigan you got for Xmas.
“Good weekend?” “Get up to much?” “Go out anywhere?”.
Nobody wants an answer, not a truthful one. They say their line, wait for the response noise and then remove their coat and sit down.
Imagine being honest for a moment when that middle-aged woman across from you asks. Just smiling and telling her that you got drunk, tried to impress a random female enough that she wants to have sex with you, but you failed and ended up playing videogames until 4am with your equally frustrated, drunk mates.
But you don’t do that, you smile and nod and make the required noise so she leaves you alone.
You sit at your desk and push papers around for the first 30 minutes, check your email, send a couple of txts to mates about whatever you managed to do (or didn’t) over the weekend.
You glance over sometimes at the elderly guy over on his desk and you tell yourself “Man, I’ll never end up like that”.
Except you’re no longer a teenager, you’re already doing the adult thing and guess what? You’re doing the same as him. Oh but you’re not though, this is just a stop-gap for you, you’ll never work here for another 20 years because you’re just spinning your wheels waiting for that moment to do what it is you do want to.
Your band is sure to get signed, your acting career will take off if you just do another no-budget movie that shoots all night and you get a couple of angry sandwiches and warm mineral water, you’re about ready to write that script/novel that you’ve been thinking about for the past few months.
You’re not going to end up in a faceless, grey life waiting for retirement. Nah, not you. You’re different. Special.
Uh-huh, whatever gets you through the night - as someone once sang.
So that was my weekday. Wake up, sloth into that bare-walled, magnolia painted, brown tiled floor office and wait for the weekend.
I was exactly the same as everyone else pretending they mattered. I didn’t go out of my way to cause unhappiness to anyone, minded my own business, paid my bills and everything else that you do whilst you wait for that distant rescue from mundane.
If you saw me in the street, you’d forget about me twenty seconds later if you didn’t know me. Just another person going somewhere, or coming back from somewhere else.
Hey, in my mind I was important and that’s what counts right? Because nobody knows the real you, they just see the respectable front you put up to protect that deep, poetic soul deep within eh?
Of course.
I was twenty-something.
During my time I’d had nineteen lovers, two cars, seven jobs, two dads (ok so only one was biological but that was the caring, sharing nineties and he asked nicely enough so what-the-hell, he was living in the house with mum anyway), three cats and six dogs.
Not much of an inventory for twenty-odd years wandering about is it? But before you write me off, take stock of your own life. Look around you and ask if you’re exactly where you wanted to be as a kid. And if you can say yes, then you’re lying.
Don’t bother lying to yourself, trust me on this.
A pointless job that ate my daylight hours, enough friends to keep my from thinking too much about anything too deeply and enough self-belief to get myself through another day of not much at all.
I lived in your typical “New Town”, which is funny as hell because as anyone who’s ever been unfortunate enough to live anywhere similar will tell you, it’s not new at all. It may only be thirty or forty years old, but the decay is there. It’s as if someone had the best of intentions and drew all these nice, tree-lined estates with parks for children, local shops and community centres but got bored of it after a day and just photocopied a house over and over, dropped them on the town plan map and connected them all with cycle paths, roundabouts and sporadic bus routes.
Whatever remains of the town centre with it’s desperately hopeful mall has long since given up and is resigned to being used as a skateboard park by bored teens with designer nonchalance and the studied toughness that only comes with comfortable, middle-class upbringing. Small tribes of pretend-aggressive kids hover near shop fronts after dark, drawn to the lights like a band of insolent moths. Huge out-of-town shopping areas with the obligatory electronics superstore, shoe stores, DIY edifices, a computer store, maybe a faux-Italian restaurant that thinks by serving four different types of soggy, tasteless pasta they can achieve some chic, helped with wicker chairs, candles in bottles and piped music.
You know the places I’m talking about, you live there too or have driven through thinking “Jesus, what kind of place is this?”.
Well that was my stomping ground. Not much but it kept me happy because, just like you, I had plans. Doesn’t even matter now what those plans were, the only thing that did matter was that I had them. It allowed me to sneer at those that were just going through the motions. Not like me, I knew better, this wasn’t going to be my life.
Christ, if I only knew then what was coming. I’d have revelled in the boredom, celebrated the lack of decent live music venues and rejoiced at the fact that the biggest danger I faced was avoiding gaggles of beered-up alpha males on a Friday night, preening and fighting in front of squawking females, who clucked like angry hens and sucked at ultra-low cigarettes in between shrieking and laughing when one fell over in the street.
Granted, it doesn’t sound like much to anyone else but that was the life of your typical bored, frustrated intellectual who recognised the inherent idiocy of his environment yet did nothing, despite his loud protestations at what was wrong in the world.
Well, that all changed one Saturday morning. Nothing special to suggest that another overcast, dreary weekend beginning would herald the end of the world.
But then we tend to only notice the little, unimportant things and let the truly momentous events pass un-noticed.
If nothing else, let my story teach you to pay attention. To not pass your days in a fugue of television, beer and long winded discussions about the most trivial of trivia.
It makes no difference though, you’ll forget all about it eventually. Once these days have become nothing more than a boring afternoon in history for some morose little kid one hundred years from now.
You think when Nero fiddled as Rome burned he really thought that only a few people would even remember when time had misted over and left nothing but dust?
What appears to be the most important thing in the history of the world will, one day, become nothing more than an exam question.
So answer this, and show your workings for full marks:
(Q) In the early part of the twenty-first century, what caused 95% of the world’s population to turn murderously insane and try to obliterate every trace of themselves from the planet’s surface?
Start at the start. That’s how it goes right?
I’ll tell you about me.
Give you some backstory so, as they say in scriptwriting classes, you can sympathise with the character. Why?
Because unless you know me, some of things I did are going to make you hate me, you’ll want me to die. And nobody likes to follow someone they hate.
When it began, I was just your average 20 something male. Had a nondescript job in a cubicle filled open-plan office. You know the place, you’ve worked there as well.
You come in on a Monday morning and everyone pretends they care, they run through the script with about as much enthusiasm as someone writing a thank you letter to Nan for the crappy cardigan you got for Xmas.
“Good weekend?” “Get up to much?” “Go out anywhere?”.
Nobody wants an answer, not a truthful one. They say their line, wait for the response noise and then remove their coat and sit down.
Imagine being honest for a moment when that middle-aged woman across from you asks. Just smiling and telling her that you got drunk, tried to impress a random female enough that she wants to have sex with you, but you failed and ended up playing videogames until 4am with your equally frustrated, drunk mates.
But you don’t do that, you smile and nod and make the required noise so she leaves you alone.
You sit at your desk and push papers around for the first 30 minutes, check your email, send a couple of txts to mates about whatever you managed to do (or didn’t) over the weekend.
You glance over sometimes at the elderly guy over on his desk and you tell yourself “Man, I’ll never end up like that”.
Except you’re no longer a teenager, you’re already doing the adult thing and guess what? You’re doing the same as him. Oh but you’re not though, this is just a stop-gap for you, you’ll never work here for another 20 years because you’re just spinning your wheels waiting for that moment to do what it is you do want to.
Your band is sure to get signed, your acting career will take off if you just do another no-budget movie that shoots all night and you get a couple of angry sandwiches and warm mineral water, you’re about ready to write that script/novel that you’ve been thinking about for the past few months.
You’re not going to end up in a faceless, grey life waiting for retirement. Nah, not you. You’re different. Special.
Uh-huh, whatever gets you through the night - as someone once sang.
So that was my weekday. Wake up, sloth into that bare-walled, magnolia painted, brown tiled floor office and wait for the weekend.
I was exactly the same as everyone else pretending they mattered. I didn’t go out of my way to cause unhappiness to anyone, minded my own business, paid my bills and everything else that you do whilst you wait for that distant rescue from mundane.
If you saw me in the street, you’d forget about me twenty seconds later if you didn’t know me. Just another person going somewhere, or coming back from somewhere else.
Hey, in my mind I was important and that’s what counts right? Because nobody knows the real you, they just see the respectable front you put up to protect that deep, poetic soul deep within eh?
Of course.
I was twenty-something.
During my time I’d had nineteen lovers, two cars, seven jobs, two dads (ok so only one was biological but that was the caring, sharing nineties and he asked nicely enough so what-the-hell, he was living in the house with mum anyway), three cats and six dogs.
Not much of an inventory for twenty-odd years wandering about is it? But before you write me off, take stock of your own life. Look around you and ask if you’re exactly where you wanted to be as a kid. And if you can say yes, then you’re lying.
Don’t bother lying to yourself, trust me on this.
A pointless job that ate my daylight hours, enough friends to keep my from thinking too much about anything too deeply and enough self-belief to get myself through another day of not much at all.
I lived in your typical “New Town”, which is funny as hell because as anyone who’s ever been unfortunate enough to live anywhere similar will tell you, it’s not new at all. It may only be thirty or forty years old, but the decay is there. It’s as if someone had the best of intentions and drew all these nice, tree-lined estates with parks for children, local shops and community centres but got bored of it after a day and just photocopied a house over and over, dropped them on the town plan map and connected them all with cycle paths, roundabouts and sporadic bus routes.
Whatever remains of the town centre with it’s desperately hopeful mall has long since given up and is resigned to being used as a skateboard park by bored teens with designer nonchalance and the studied toughness that only comes with comfortable, middle-class upbringing. Small tribes of pretend-aggressive kids hover near shop fronts after dark, drawn to the lights like a band of insolent moths. Huge out-of-town shopping areas with the obligatory electronics superstore, shoe stores, DIY edifices, a computer store, maybe a faux-Italian restaurant that thinks by serving four different types of soggy, tasteless pasta they can achieve some chic, helped with wicker chairs, candles in bottles and piped music.
You know the places I’m talking about, you live there too or have driven through thinking “Jesus, what kind of place is this?”.
Well that was my stomping ground. Not much but it kept me happy because, just like you, I had plans. Doesn’t even matter now what those plans were, the only thing that did matter was that I had them. It allowed me to sneer at those that were just going through the motions. Not like me, I knew better, this wasn’t going to be my life.
Christ, if I only knew then what was coming. I’d have revelled in the boredom, celebrated the lack of decent live music venues and rejoiced at the fact that the biggest danger I faced was avoiding gaggles of beered-up alpha males on a Friday night, preening and fighting in front of squawking females, who clucked like angry hens and sucked at ultra-low cigarettes in between shrieking and laughing when one fell over in the street.
Granted, it doesn’t sound like much to anyone else but that was the life of your typical bored, frustrated intellectual who recognised the inherent idiocy of his environment yet did nothing, despite his loud protestations at what was wrong in the world.
Well, that all changed one Saturday morning. Nothing special to suggest that another overcast, dreary weekend beginning would herald the end of the world.
But then we tend to only notice the little, unimportant things and let the truly momentous events pass un-noticed.
If nothing else, let my story teach you to pay attention. To not pass your days in a fugue of television, beer and long winded discussions about the most trivial of trivia.
It makes no difference though, you’ll forget all about it eventually. Once these days have become nothing more than a boring afternoon in history for some morose little kid one hundred years from now.
You think when Nero fiddled as Rome burned he really thought that only a few people would even remember when time had misted over and left nothing but dust?
What appears to be the most important thing in the history of the world will, one day, become nothing more than an exam question.
So answer this, and show your workings for full marks:
(Q) In the early part of the twenty-first century, what caused 95% of the world’s population to turn murderously insane and try to obliterate every trace of themselves from the planet’s surface?
Zombie stories!
I wub zombie stories!
I wub zombie stories!
A nice intro that has got me interested
I liked it. A few things seemed a bit unnecessary (the banging at the door for instance), but I'm not writing it, so i don't what significance they have.
It does sound a lot like you, which of course it would being you writing it and all. What I mean is, if I read it without your name at the side I'd think "this sounds like Goatboy". Which isn't a bad thing.
It does sound a lot like you, which of course it would being you writing it and all. What I mean is, if I read it without your name at the side I'd think "this sounds like Goatboy". Which isn't a bad thing.
Starting writing this months ago, lost the drive. Worked out the plot details so started again.
Just throwing this up to get my ball rolling.
----
PROLOGUE
I hope your not expecting a happy ending. There’s no “and they lived happily ever after” or “but at the last minute, they were saved”.
It’d be nice, I won’t deny that.
But if you want fantasy and princesses and sunsets watched arm in arm by happy, now-wiser young lovers then go to a library and take a Barbara Cartland novel or some other tome dedicated towards pretending it all works out fine and hey, you’re a stronger person having gone through the experience.
Nope. What follows is what happened. I don’t know how or why, that can be left to those with enough time and a safe place to ponder and argue about the details. All I can do is sit here and write out my story, to explain how I went from being another surly little nobody to saviour of the entire goddam human race.
Actually that’s a lie, I’m not the saviour of anything except my own hide and a few others. But given the circumstances, that’s one hell of an achievement considering.
So I’m holed up here. I’ve got this laptop, enough bottles of vodka to see me through and christ knows how many cartons of smokes. If nothing else, irony survives eh? How many times have you heard the warnings about smoking? They even reached a point where they printed stuff on the packs designed to…I don’t know, put you off?
Let’s face it, if you can get past the first choking, puke-inducing inhale then a few words stamped on the pack ain’t going to change your mind. All the finger wagging in the world, all the research, all the warnings and it wasn’t the cigarettes that got us after all. But I don’t feel smug, I just feel tired.
Hang on, there’s banging at the door, I need to take care of it before I can continue. At least I’ll never have to worry about running out of bullets.
Right, that’s that.
Booze? Check.
Smokes? Check.
Memory and strength to record this like the industrious little historian I never was? Check.
I warn you, you’re not going to like what follows. You’ll find it hard to believe, reading this back in however many years. No doubt they’ll rewrite history to give this a positive spin, or introduce some pathetic reason to not teach or speak about what happened ever again, so if you’re reading this then either I’ve been celebrated as a chronicler of events, or it’s being passed around underground and whispered about in meeting halls or classrooms.
Don’t listen to the history books, they lie. Nobody knew why it happened, where it started or even who was the first. Oh I don’t doubt there are men in concrete bunkers somewhere that know. Men that talked in powerfully quiet voices, smoke cigars and thump the table to demonstrate just how-goddam-serious-this-all-is etc etc.
I’m talking about me and you, the people that actually got caught in this thing and had to learn to fight, kill, survive and evolve.
We never knew what happened until it was in our faces, and that’s always the last moment.
So settle back, dear reader, and flick the page over to embark on what you’ll dismiss as fiction. Except you and I both it’s not. I reckon I can make it to the end before it’s all over for me. I never used to be much of a typist but, as with everything else that happened, you learn fast or you fall and are finished.
Grammar, spelling, split infinitives, double-negatives? Those are all my mistakes, go complain to Mr Childs, my old English teacher at college.
If you can find him out there. If he even remember what a college is, and if he doesn’t bite your face off before you can say hi.
Are we ready? Everyone comfy? Good, then take a nice deep breath and begin.
Go.
Just throwing this up to get my ball rolling.
----
PROLOGUE
I hope your not expecting a happy ending. There’s no “and they lived happily ever after” or “but at the last minute, they were saved”.
It’d be nice, I won’t deny that.
But if you want fantasy and princesses and sunsets watched arm in arm by happy, now-wiser young lovers then go to a library and take a Barbara Cartland novel or some other tome dedicated towards pretending it all works out fine and hey, you’re a stronger person having gone through the experience.
Nope. What follows is what happened. I don’t know how or why, that can be left to those with enough time and a safe place to ponder and argue about the details. All I can do is sit here and write out my story, to explain how I went from being another surly little nobody to saviour of the entire goddam human race.
Actually that’s a lie, I’m not the saviour of anything except my own hide and a few others. But given the circumstances, that’s one hell of an achievement considering.
So I’m holed up here. I’ve got this laptop, enough bottles of vodka to see me through and christ knows how many cartons of smokes. If nothing else, irony survives eh? How many times have you heard the warnings about smoking? They even reached a point where they printed stuff on the packs designed to…I don’t know, put you off?
Let’s face it, if you can get past the first choking, puke-inducing inhale then a few words stamped on the pack ain’t going to change your mind. All the finger wagging in the world, all the research, all the warnings and it wasn’t the cigarettes that got us after all. But I don’t feel smug, I just feel tired.
Hang on, there’s banging at the door, I need to take care of it before I can continue. At least I’ll never have to worry about running out of bullets.
Right, that’s that.
Booze? Check.
Smokes? Check.
Memory and strength to record this like the industrious little historian I never was? Check.
I warn you, you’re not going to like what follows. You’ll find it hard to believe, reading this back in however many years. No doubt they’ll rewrite history to give this a positive spin, or introduce some pathetic reason to not teach or speak about what happened ever again, so if you’re reading this then either I’ve been celebrated as a chronicler of events, or it’s being passed around underground and whispered about in meeting halls or classrooms.
Don’t listen to the history books, they lie. Nobody knew why it happened, where it started or even who was the first. Oh I don’t doubt there are men in concrete bunkers somewhere that know. Men that talked in powerfully quiet voices, smoke cigars and thump the table to demonstrate just how-goddam-serious-this-all-is etc etc.
I’m talking about me and you, the people that actually got caught in this thing and had to learn to fight, kill, survive and evolve.
We never knew what happened until it was in our faces, and that’s always the last moment.
So settle back, dear reader, and flick the page over to embark on what you’ll dismiss as fiction. Except you and I both it’s not. I reckon I can make it to the end before it’s all over for me. I never used to be much of a typist but, as with everything else that happened, you learn fast or you fall and are finished.
Grammar, spelling, split infinitives, double-negatives? Those are all my mistakes, go complain to Mr Childs, my old English teacher at college.
If you can find him out there. If he even remember what a college is, and if he doesn’t bite your face off before you can say hi.
Are we ready? Everyone comfy? Good, then take a nice deep breath and begin.
Go.
Page: