Eye Spy

In life, London had been the financial and cultural capital of the world. In death, it was still a capital - just not of either of those things. What it could claim to be a capital of exactly, Yancy Dawes wasn't sure, but if he had to guess, death, despair, and destruction were in the running for the gold, silver, and bronze. Terms from an event that was last held in Sydney, was going to be held in Athens in 2004, and sure as hell wasn't going to occur in this city next year. Not unless the creatures swarming the streets decided to drop dead or participate in events other than consuming the flesh of the living.

Watching the security feed of the Umbrella UK facility, he smiled at his own joke, however unspoken. Maybe if the hordes of zombies were thinned enough, their remnants might be able to be used in new events. Certainly target shooting at least. Maybe even the sprint - first was the winner, everyone else was dinner. Problem was, given the current situation, he and everyone else in this facility were still on the menu.

"Watch Four, report."

He pressed the transmit button on the console he was assigned to. "Watch Four, reporting in." He paused. "Nothing to report."

"Affirmative. Out."

He sighed, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes - not really from exhaustion, but from the effects of being assigned to stare at screens for eight hours a day, every day, for the last five years. When the world had been collapsing, Umbrella, knowing why and how the dominos were falling, had decided to relocate its staff into its various facilities, in the hopes of weathering the flood. Which meant that by the time he saw the doors of the above facility close behind him, the higher ups of Umbrella UK had his life planned out for him. 7 to 3, he was on watch duty. Rest of the day was his, whether it be to sleep, play, or pray. Only he couldn't sleep, he'd exhausted the facility's libraries, and he'd given up praying five years ago. Whatever God thought of the greatest fuckup in the history of mankind, He hadn't come to the rescue.

He sipped the water from his mug and began idly scrolling through the security cameras. Whatever their number, they all showed the same thing. Zombies. The walking dead. The infected. The undead. Creatures that were once human, creatures that now numbered in the billions, creatures that, in London at least, numbered in the millions. And outside this facility, hundreds of thousands in a swarming tide, pushing against each other. Crawling away at the concrete barrier that surrounded the facility. At the iron gate, which everyone here feared would someday come down. Because he'd seen that thing close. He'd seen desperate people trying to get in, only to discover that Umbrella no longer did tours. Some of the people who'd tried to get in were among those to die outside. Those who, five years later, were still crawling at the gates. Still trying to get in. Still trying to-

"What you looking at?"

"Jesus!" He spun round in his chair, putting a hand on his holster, as he looked up at the woman standing above him. "Don't scare me like that."

She nodded at the screens. "Figure you'd be used to being scared by now."

He released his hand from the holster and gestured at the screens. "Them, I can deal with. You? You're already on the inside."

Lucy Simms laughed and handed him one of the two cups of tea she held. "Here."

He took the cup instantly, but decided to at least give the facts of life lip service. "Isn't tea being rationed?"

Lucy shrugged and took a seat beside him. "Everything's being rationed."

"Yeah, but...how?"

She sipped her tea. "There are ways."

Dawes decided not to ask how. Because among the other facts of life in the Umbrella UK facility were that there were twice as many men as women. And, well, suffice to say, Umbrella had stocked up on contraceptives among everything else. If Lucy had...

She looked up at him from the tea. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing." He put the tea down, swung around in his chair, and went back to looking at the screens. "Absolutely nothing."

Rationing tea. The thought of Britannia running out of the stuff would have seemed insane once, but here they were. Rationing tea. Just like they were rationing everything else. Because as well stocked as Umbrella's facilities were (incredibly well stocked, come to think of it), it had been five years since the T-virus had escaped the Hive, and while the dead didn't need to eat, the living did. And drink. And piss. And poop. And all those other bodily functions that the average human needed to carry out in order to survive. The only reason the UK facility had lasted thing long was that the people of this island had the decency to die quickly - high population density, not enough guns, and a gutted military had ensured that the UK had fallen quickly. Which meant that there was plenty of food lying around that the facility's strike teams could raid. But even so, being now confined to one meal (a fancy term for an MRE) a day, with their numbers being whittled down through everything from zombies to suicide...He looked at Lucy. She was sipping her tea. As if nothing had happened. As if the world hadn't changed. As if this were another day in the office.

Sometimes, he thought about asking her. But five years, and she was still wearing that golden band of hers, with the oh so romantic words "property of the Umbrella Corporation" carved into it. When the shit hit the fan, she'd been in London, while her husband and children had been in Liverpool. She'd told them to come to London. They hadn't made it. And the only consolation anyone could give her was that there was a good chance that they'd been incinerated when the RAF had dropped napalm on the city rather than being devoured.

"So," Lucy asked, putting her tea aside. "Anything new?"

In spite of everything, Dawes smirked, and gestured to the feed from Cam 13. "Jane Doe's lost an eyeball."

"Excuse me?"

He zoomed the camera in and pointed to one of the zombies on screen. "There. Yesterday that bitch had her right eye."

Lucy squinted at the screen. "Huh. You're right."

"Yep. Way I see it, if it took her five years to lose her right eye, we only need to wait two years till she loses her left eye, and stops being a threat."

"Why two years?"

"Math."

"What kind of math?"

Dawes shrugged. "Just math. I mean, I'm a guy, and we all know guys are better at math than girls."

"Oh, great." Lucy leant back in her chair. "I mean, the world's ended, but the patriarchy's still alive and well."

"Well, yeah. You seen the board of directors?"

Lucy frowned. "You know I haven't."

Dawes, frowning as well, took a sip of tea. "If it makes you feel better, I haven't either."

"Yeah, it doesn't actually."

An uneasy silence lingered between the two of them. Dawes looked at her, though not so much Lucy Simms, but rather the patch on her right shoulder. The red and blue of the Umbrella Corporation, worn like a soldier might a flag. Once, long ago, seeing the black armoured guards patrol the grounds of this facility, it had seemed quaint. But this was a world where nations didn't exist, and soldiers, if they were still alive, didn't really care about the flags their uniforms bore. Granted, he hadn't actually met any soldiers, but...

He idly tapped the keyboard, shifting from the security cam feed to a satellite feed.

"What are you doing?" Lucy asked.

"Looking for soldiers," he grunted.

"Through a satellite?"

"Um, yes?" He glanced at her. "You didn't know Umbrella had satellites?"

"Course I knew, I just didn't think they'd be active."

Dawes shrugged. "Umbrella built them to last. Don't need much maintenance up there after all." He established the link, tapping into Satellite 21. "Anyway, soldiers," he said.

"What's your fixation with soldiers?"

Dawes didn't answer. He didn't know soldiers. He'd briefly seen them five years ago, as the Army had tried to contain the chaos in London, but they'd fallen like flies. Uncle Sam however, had had much better luck. Because some madman had erected a concrete barrier around the White House, and used the grounds as a staging point for everything from helicopters to tanks. Right now, it was early morning on the US east coast, but while the walls were undermanned, the horde pushing against them hadn't diminished.

Lucy leant forward, staring at the top-down view of the siege. "Poor bastards," she whispered.

"More like lucky bastards."

"Lucky?"

Dawes snorted. "More guns than people in that country, and that was before the outbreak. Also a lot more space as well."

"Yeah, but, didn't you hear about the California facility?" Lucy asked.

Dawes frowned. "No," he murmured.

It was a lie. He'd heard about it, because everyone in the Umbrella Corporation had heard about it. The California facility wasn't the first Umbrella base to fall, but of all those who'd succumbed to the undead, starvation, or both, it was the most important. Doctor Isaacs had been there - a man who, from what he understood, was the smartest person on the planet, and would have certainly been in the top one-hundred smartest people before zombies started devouring their brains. Isaacs had been working on a cure for the T-virus. Something to pacify the undead hordes, as well as reversing the viral contamination of Earth's biosphere. For five years, he'd tried, and as far as Dawes was aware, produced nothing. But if the facility was gone, if Isaacs was gone, then...

Then we could be down here for the short remainder of our lives.

Lucy was looking at her now empty tea cup, and he almost reached out to comfort her, before keeping himself in check. The T-virus had killed everything. Even if every zombie dropped dead today, the remnants of humanity would have to learn how to grow food in depleted soil, using crops that had to withstand the constant viral bombardment of the pathogen. Not impossible - he'd seen it through similar satellites - but difficult. Extremely difficult. The grass outside the facility proper had been converted into a garden, but the staff could only grow a fraction of a fraction of what they needed to survive. And get outside London, into the fields of wider England, and what did one find but dust and ashes?

And we did this, Dawes reflected, glancing at the screensaver of one of the consoles - the spinning white and blue umbrella of the corporation who even before the outbreak, had dominated the planet. We fucking did this. Someone played God in the Hive, and now God Almighty told us to fuck off when we couldn't control it.

He was barely aware that he was typing. Barely heard Lucy ask what he was doing. He just brought up a selection of images - one for each of the cam feeds. Each of them showing a different continent, each of them showing a date.

"Dawes?" Lucy asked.

He gestured at the screens. "Backed these images up," he murmured. "Just a little reminder of how things were." He frowned. "And how they are now."

Lucy looked at the first image - it showed North America, and was dated September 24, 2002. The images differed by location, but there was steady progress over the years to 2007. And combined, they told the story. How from space, with each year, Earth had become more visibly sick. Green turning to brown. Brown turning to yellow. Entire continents reduced to wastelands. The T-virus brought fauna back to life, while outright killing flora. End result was that the last five years had done more damage to Earth's biosphere than in the 200,000 years that modern humans had walked the planet. And even with the satellite images on screen, Dawes couldn't help but think of the creatures outside. Of the thought of them walking around for 200,000 years as well.

"Well," Lucy murmured. "That's...something."

He grunted.

"Are you even authorized to access satellite feeds?"

He looked at her. "Someone has to back these up," he said. "Something for the people that come after us. Something to show them how the world once was before..." He turned away, putting his chin on his fist. "Before it all went wrong."

Lucy didn't say anything. Nor did he. The only sound was "Watch Four, report," at which point he went back to the security camera feed and confirmed that there was, indeed, nothing to report. Which was more than he could say for the techies, as they reported on the falling supplies of diesel for the generator, and the inability of the facility's solar panels to provide a fraction of what the base needed to operate. People like him might be in proverbial arks, but their necks were still barely above water.

Lucy got to her feet. "Got to go," she said.

Dawes decided not to ask why, though did start to say, "y'know, if you ever want to have tea again, you..."

He trailed off. He could tell that she was listening, but that she had no intention of answering the question. Fitting, really - there were so many questions in this world that could be answered. Problem was, when it came to questions involving survival, culpability, and everything else, Dawes tended not to like the answers.

So he went back to watching the cameras. Of watching the legions of undead that Umbrella had spawned, turned against their creators.

Watching. Waiting.

Weeping.