Ghost Virus

It took them less time to find the SAS squadron than they could have hoped. As they walked up the High Street towards Tooting Broadway station, they saw at least eight khaki Land Rovers parked in a line, as well as three camouflaged personnel carriers. About forty blades were gathered around the station entrance, all wearing black helmets and black combat uniforms and body armour.

Jamila took out her warrant card as they approached, and held it up so that the blades could see it.

‘Police,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me who’s in charge here, please?’

A sergeant took her card and examined it carefully. Then he said to Jerry, ‘What are you carrying that for? That chainsaw?’

‘We can explain that,’ said Jamila. ‘Please just let us speak to whoever’s in charge.’

An officer in a black beret came forward. Jerry thought he was far too young to be an SAS officer. He had blue eyes and a fresh face and he looked more like the captain of a public school rugby team.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

‘Detective Sergeant Patel and Detective Constable Pardoe, both attached to Tooting CID. We only just managed to escape from the police station after the clothes broke in. You’ve seen the clothes? The coats and the jackets and the sweaters?’

The officer nodded. ‘We’ve lost three men already. That’s why we’re here, to regroup. We’re all pretty stunned, to tell you the truth. We were told we were going to have to deal with rioters. We had no idea they were going to be – well, whatever the hell they are.’ He held out his hand and said, ‘Major John Wallace, by the way. SAS CRW.’

‘What happened?’ asked Jerry.

Major Wallace turned around and looked back along Mitcham Road. It was still jammed solid with abandoned cars and buses, and the pavements were still strewn with bodies, and it was still raining, hard.

‘We tried to call your control room to let them know that we’d arrived,’ he said. ‘There was no response. And then our own radios cut out. We haven’t been able to get into contact with anybody, not even with mobile phones.’

‘Same problem,’ said Jerry, lifting up his iPhone. ‘Dead as a dodo. No landlines working, either.’

‘I’m guessing that our rioters have set off some kind of electromagnetic pulse device,’ said Major Wallace. ‘They’re designed to knock out anything electric – phones, radios, as well as computers. We know that the Russians and the North Koreans have got them, but these aren’t Russians or North Koreans. For God’s sake, they’re not even people.’

‘How did you lose your men?’ asked Jamila. She spoke so sympathetically that Jerry thought Major Wallace was going to start crying.

‘We couldn’t get the Jackals anywhere near the police station because of all these abandoned vehicles, so we went on foot. We came across the – rioters, whatever they are. They were swarming in front of the police station and it looked like they were mutilating a number of dead police officers. We fired some warning shots but they came straight for us.’

Major Wallace paused to take a deep breath. Then he said, ‘We shouted another warning and then we opened fire. There must have been about two dozen rioters, and it was only when they came closer that we realised what they actually were. I couldn’t tell you how many rounds we pumped into them but it didn’t make any impression on them at all. They kept on coming and they brought down three of my best men while they were still firing. Literally buried them. That’s when I called for an immediate retreat.’

He paused again. ‘What we’re going to do now, I have no idea.’

‘Well, let me tell you this,’ said Jerry. ‘Because they’re just clothes, they can’t be stopped by shooting at them. They can’t be Tasered, either, and I don’t think that tear-gas would have any effect, either. They haven’t got eyes and they haven’t got lungs.’

‘So how in the name of God can they be walking around, attacking people?’

‘It has been explained to us,’ said Jamila. ‘But it is a long and complicated story, and even then what we were told may not be true, or not completely true, anyway. It is some kind of virus which infects clothes and gives them the personality of people who used to own them, but are now dead.’

Major Wallace frowned at her. Jerry could tell that if he hadn’t seen the clothes for himself, he would have thought that she was raving.

‘DS Patel and me, we managed to escape from the nick,’ he said. ‘We were trying to get here to meet you when we got spotted by five coats. They chased us into a building site and that was where I found this chainsaw. When they came for us, I cut them up into literally hundreds of pieces. DS Patel told me her grandfather used to do that to jinns when they tried to get into his house. A jinn – that’s a ghost, or a demon thingy.’

‘That was only a story,’ Jamila insisted.

‘Yes, but it killed them, didn’t it, cutting them up?’ said Jerry. ‘And just to make sure, we made a bonfire out of them afterwards.’

Major Wallace said, ‘All right. And you think that we’ll be able to deal with the rest of them the same way? We’ve a chainsaw aboard one of the Jackals, but we’re going to need a lot more, aren’t we? These clothes – there must be hundreds of them.’

‘There’s a Screwfix shop just down the road there, and there’s a Wickes hardware store in Plough Lane, just the other side of St George’s Hospital,’ Jerry told him. ‘Between the two of them they should have enough chainsaws in stock, and if not there’s a Toolstation in Wimbledon.’

Major Wallace said, ‘Did you catch that, sergeant?’

The sergeant had been standing close behind his right shoulder, so Jerry thought that it would have been amazing if he hadn’t. ‘Yes, sir,’ he snapped. ‘Chainsaws, sir.’

‘That’s right, sergeant. As many as possible and as quickly as possible. You’ll probably have to ram your way into the shops but we’ll worry about that later.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The sergeant picked out half a dozen men. They all climbed into one of the Jackal armoured vehicles, started up the engine with a loud bellow, and U-turned across the road, colliding with three abandoned cars and forcing them, deeply dented, out of their way.

Major Wallace said, ‘All we can do now is wait for them to come back. Let’s go and sit down and you can brief me some more about this virus.’

Next to the station there was a Starbucks coffee shop. Its front window was smashed and its front door was hanging by its hinges. They went inside, their feet crunching on broken glass, and sat down at one of the tables.

‘Shame there’s no power,’ said Jerry. ‘We could have made ourselves a double espresso.’

Another helicopter passed overhead, so low that that the whole coffee shop shook.

‘That sounded like one of ours,’ said Major Wallace. ‘Central command will have seen what’s going on so we’re sure to have reinforcements pretty soon. It’s so damned frustrating having no way of getting in touch with them. As I said, I can only guess that these clothes have an EMP device, although I always thought you needed a high-altitude nuclear explosion to fry a country’s electronics.’

‘Yes,’ said Jamila. ‘But instead there is some extraordinary psychic power at work here. If the virus is able to give clothes the power to come alive, who knows what else it can do? My grandmother told me about a bhoot which could set fire to somebody’s house even if it was miles away. It could also kill people who had antagonised it during its lifetime just by dreaming about them.’

‘Don’t tell me any more,’ said Jerry. ‘Too much of what your grandmother told you is coming true.’

*

More than an hour and a half passed before they heard the bellowing engine of the Jackal coming back, and a loud crunch as it drove over an abandoned motorcycle.

Jerry and Jamila followed Major Wallace out of the coffee shop. The sergeant climbed down from the Jackal brandishing an orange Husqvarna chainsaw, and his blades came out carrying two chainsaws each. Three of them went back to the Jackal and brought out more.

‘Well done, sergeant,’ said Major Wallace, inspecting the chainsaws all laid down in a row on the pavement. ‘How many altogether?’

‘Twenty-three, sir. I reckoned that would be enough. They’re all petrol, and we’ve topped them all up. They had your cordless electric chainsaws, too, but none of them were charged and of course there’s no power to charge them up with.’

‘Right – plan of action,’ said Major Wallace. ‘We divide into three squads of chainsaw operators and we attack the police station simultaneously from the north, the centre and the south. The main doors in the centre have already been breached, so we won’t have any trouble gaining access there. The doors on the north and south sides you’ll almost certainly have to blow.

‘Any clothes we encounter on the way there we rip to bits, and when we attack there can’t be any hesitation, and I mean none. I want you going after those coats and jackets as if you’re berserk. The Tooting Chainsaw Massacre. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the blades, in unison.

‘Once we’ve chopped up these clothes, I’ve been discussing with Detective Sergeant Patel here what we should do next, because she’s something of an expert on bizarre happenings like this – well, more of an expert than any of us. She says we need to burn them, so that we make absolutely sure that the fibres they’re made of can’t come back to life. Yes, I know. None of it makes any sense. But they’ve already accounted for three of us, and if that’s what it takes to kill them off for good and all, that’s what we’ll do.

‘So – while the chainsaw squads are doing their worst, another squad will be scouting around the area to requisition any trucks that aren’t stuck in a traffic jam. They’ll bring those trucks to the police station and load them with the chopped-up clothes, so that we can take them away to build a bonfire out of them. DC Pardoe has suggested that a place called Figges Marsh is the best place to burn them… he says it’s a recreation ground just south of the police station. Apparently it’s not too far away and we should be able to get there easily by the back streets even if the main road’s blocked.’

Major Wallace looked around at his squadron in their black kit and goggles, and said, ‘Any questions? No? Right then, chainsaw squad, fire up your chainsaws!’

Jamila came up to Jerry and said, ‘What are you going to do?’

Jerry already had his foot on his chainsaw, ready to start it. ‘What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to go with them. I’ll be making up the numbers, and besides that I know that nick like the back of my hand and these geezers don’t, do they? There’s loads of places where those coats could hide. They could hang themselves up from the back of a door and pretend they were ordinary coats and who would know?’

‘If you’re going, then I’m going with you.’

‘Sarge – you haven’t got a chainsaw.’

‘I don’t care. I wouldn’t know how to use it, even if I did. But I’ve been involved in this investigation right from the beginning, and I want to see it through to the end.’

‘Jamila – no.’

‘Jerry – yes. And that’s an order. I’ll stay close behind you.’

‘If you get yourself killed, I’ll never speak to you again.’

‘If I get myself killed, I won’t be able to hear you, anyway.’

Jerry said something else, but all around them twenty-three chainsaws were starting up in chorus, so that she couldn’t hear him. He bent down and tugged at the pull cord of his own chainsaw, and that stuttered into life, too.

The twenty-three SAS blades of the chainsaw squad divided themselves into three columns – two of them walking along the pavements and the third down the middle of the road, in between the lines of damaged cars, their chainsaws idling like twenty-three softly growling pit bull terriers. Jerry and Jamila walked down the middle of the road, too, at the rear of the column. Jamila hadn’t wanted to walk along the pavements because there were too many bodies to step over, and some of them were grotesquely mutilated. In spite of the rain, there were still deltas of blood running into the gutters.

When they reached Byton Road, the eight blades who were going to attack the police station from the south turned right. They would go down the side-streets and then double back. The other fifteen kept on going. As they came around Amen Corner they could see that a few dark coats and jackets were still crouched like hunchbacks over the bodies of the Wandsworth anti-terrorist team, tearing them open and dragging their glistening insides all across the road. The three SAS men who had been overwhelmed by the clothes were lying there too, somewhere, and one of the blades in front of Jerry revved his chainsaw as if he couldn’t wait to get his revenge.

‘Hold your horses, Branning,’ said the sergeant, without even turning round to see who it was. None of the squad wore name-tags on their uniforms, so Jerry was doubly impressed.

They held back, waiting for a signal from the squad who were coming from the south. Jamila, close behind Jerry, tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘If this goes wrong…’

‘What?’ said Jerry. ‘I can’t hear you!’

She held onto his shoulder and said loudly in his ear, ‘If this goes wrong, I want you to know how I feel about you!’

He turned and looked at her. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to.

Jerry smiled and said, just as loudly, ‘Me too!’

At that moment they saw a flashlight further down the road. The south squad were in position and ready to advance.

‘Right!’ screamed the sergeant. ‘Let’s get in there and chop the bastards to bits!’

The SAS blades all started to run towards the police station with their boots pattering on the tarmac and their chainsaws roaring. The coats and jackets that had been dismembering the anti-terrorist squad stood up straight, but they made no attempt to flee. If they were capable of thought, they obviously believed that nobody could hurt them. The blades tore into them, swinging their chainsaws up and down and side to side, and sleeves and collars and lapels and long strips of lining flew all around them.

Eight of them ran through the car park gate at the side of the station, while the other eight bounded up the steps towards the front entrance. Jerry and Jamila followed them. The long brown dress that Jerry had tied by its sleeves to the railings was still lying there, flapping, and he saw one of the SAS blades ripping it in a few roaring seconds into chaotic shreds of wool.

It was pitch dark inside the station, but one of the blades tossed two white chem lights across the reception area and abruptly the whole grisly scenario was brightly lit up. On the far side of the reception area there was a struggling mass of clothes, like a heap of giant maggots. They were heavily bloodstained and some of them were draped in long strings of membrane and intestines. There was hardly anything recognisable left of the police officers who had tried to fight them off, only the tatters of uniforms and boots with torn-off ankle-bones sticking out of them.

Now that they had almost finished dismembering the officers in the reception area, more clothes were ascending the stairs, and over the roaring of chainsaws and the shouting of the SAS blades, Jerry could hear screaming from the upper floors.

With no hesitation the SAS squad ran across the blood-streaked floor and started to tear the clothes to bits. The clothes struggled and flailed, but there was nothing they could do to save themselves from the jagged teeth of eight chainsaws.

Jerry heard a loud bang from the back of the station and a few seconds later the north squad came running in.

‘Get upstairs after that lot!’ bellowed the sergeant, and they crossed the reception area and started to attack the heaving crowd of shirts and jackets that were mounting the staircase.

The air was thick with a storm of ripped-up fabric – wool and nylon and cotton and silk – as well as zips and buttons that were scattered across the floor. Jerry could hear that the south squad had broken into the cells, and from the screeching sound of chainsaws against metal bars, he could only imagine that there must have been be coats in there, too, probably trying to get at their prisoners.

He saw a trench-coat flying towards the back of an SAS blade, clearly intending to jump on him. He ran over, snagged its belt in the teeth of his chainsaw, and then sawed it upward in a tangle of khaki gabardine and black wool lining.

As the south squad climbed up the stairs, strewing them with fabric, Jerry and Jamila climbed up behind them. Only three or four chainsaws were still roaring at full throttle now, although the rest of them were keeping up a menacing burble as the SAS blades scoured the station for any clothes they might have missed, or which were hiding.

Jerry and Jamila followed the south squad along the corridor to the control room. The door had been broken off its hinges and was lying flat on the floor. By the light of the soldiers’ torches, they could see Inspector Callow and DI Saunders and Sergeant Bristow and three other officers, or what was left of them. One was still sitting in front of the dead CCTV screens, his white shirt soaked with blood, headless. His head was lying on the floor, his eyes wide open, staring at his shoes as if he were wondering how he had managed to get down there.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jerry. ‘Smiley. What a bloody awful way to go.’

At last, one after another, the chainsaws fell silent. Along with the sergeant and four of his blades, Jerry and Jamila searched the station from the top floor back down to the reception area, but they found no more living clothes.

Major Wallace was waiting for them outside, by the front steps.

‘This is a great start, DS Patel,’ he said to Jamila. ‘I’m receiving reports that there are still random groups of clothes roaming around the neighbourhood, attacking anybody who’s out on the streets. Now that we’ve dealt with this lot I’m going to send out five patrols armed with chainsaws to hunt them down.’

He looked back inside the police station. ‘I hope we’ve done for most of them. But we’ll get any strays and chop them up, too, don’t worry. I can’t thank you enough for the help you’ve given us. And you, DC Pardoe. Bloody good show, the both of you.’

He had hardly finished speaking when the streetlights started to flicker on, and lights in the police station came on again, too. Shop fronts all the way along Mitcham Road were suddenly illuminated again. It was only then that they could see the full horror of the bloody carnage on the pavements, and the dismembered bodies lying across the road.

In his pocket, Jerry’s iPhone began to ping with messages and texts, but he felt too numb to take it out and answer them. He set his chainsaw down on the steps.

Jamila linked her arm through his. ‘What next?’ she asked.

‘It’s time for the big clear-up,’ said Major Wallace. ‘Then we’ll be lighting our bonfire. I very much hope that you two can join us.’