The Shambling Life

As the crisis deepened, we barricaded ourselves in the new magazine offices by disabling the lifts and blocking the fire stairs with boxes of old pornography.

“You know it’s times like this,” I said, hunkered down behind an upturned desk, “when I’m stuck in the offices of this fine magazine trying to avoid what can best be described as a zombie horde, that I…”

“That you what?” asked my crazy ex-third flatmate Victor Ninox, who was of course hunkered down right beside me.

“That I really wish I could think of something profound to say.”

The other so-called “real life” staffers of the magazine were squatting or sitting or lying around the room. The place looked every bit the refugee encampment. Gas lamps cast a ghostly light in the gathering dusk. Bedrolls were laid out under desks. Someone had gathered all the competing magazines, piled them in the middle of the floor, and made a cheerful little bonfire out of them.

One of the interns lay on his face in a corner, bleeding gently, but this was in itself nothing unusual. The tech editor had already stolen his shoes.

The editor stood up carefully and peered out the fourth-floor window at the street below. Then he dropped hurriedly back under his desk.

“They’re still out there,” he said.

Victor sighed.

“How many now?” I asked.

The editor just shook his head. “Must be thousands of them. And they’re fast too. When Blind Karl from the truck mag went out to get some fags, did you see how quick he had to run to avoid getting torn to pieces?”

I had to see for myself. Vic tried to hold me down, but I prised off his clammy fingers and crept toward the window. I stood up, slowly, carefully, and peered out. There they were. Jammed into the street, stretching the full length of the block. As the editor had said, thousands of them. A shuffling, moaning, clutching horde. In torn, filthy clothes. Slack jawed, their eyes were dead, their fingers clutching and twitching spastically.

“Console gamers,” said Vic, appearing beside me.

“What are they saying?” I asked. I could see them, swaying back and forth, moaning. Vic reached forward and carefully, so carefully, cracked open the window.

“Braaaiiins!” moaned the crowd. “Take our braaaiiins!”

Vic’s eyes widened and with surprisingly quick reflexes for such a chronically overweight man, he slammed the window shut. Seconds later, something vaguely pink and vaguely grey splattered against the glass. Then something else. A rain of this pulpy material followed, splashing against the window and then running down the glass face of our exciting new mini-skyscraper.

“We brought this on ourselves you know,” said the senior freelance games journalist with the shotgun, who had only popped in to complain about an error on his latest invoice and was now trapped in what could best be described as a siege situation.

“How’s that?” asked the editor.

“The constant jibes. The constant anti-console rants,” the journalist said. “The bias. The way you always make them feel like second-class citizens. Like they’re stupid or something. As if playing on PC somehow makes you better, just because you have to spend more money and more hours trying to get the damn thing to work. And for what? Somewhat sharper graphics. A bloated sense of self importance. Honestly, if I didn’t have a totally hot date this evening, I’d turn this shotgun on myself.”

A grim fatalism fell over the office as everyone there realised the embittered and cynical senior freelance games journalist was more or less right. We just sat there, staring. Even when the mob outside got bored of swaying in the street and throwing their brains at us, and instead rushed the glass doors at street level.

We heard the doors shatter. We heard the cries of the middle-aged disinterested security guard as he was overpowered. We heard them tear through the pornography blocking the fire stairs, even as others chocked open the lift doors and started climbing freehand up the cables.

But still we sat there, grim, caught in a spiral of sudden but perhaps inevitable self-loathing.

“Makes you think doesn’t it?” said the tech editor. “I mean, who are the real monsters? Them… or us?”

On perfect cue and with a terrible splintering noise, the door to the office gave way. Dozens of crazed console gamers poured through the gap, trampling videocards and scattering new Logitech peripherals in their haste to seize the tech editor and bear him to the ground.

There were at least thirty of them, jumping up and down on his groin. Kicking, punching, gouging, the full bit. One of them brained him with an original Xbox he’d found in a nearby storeroom: a formidable weapon indeed.

“Oh God!” screamed the tech editor in the moments before he mercifully slipped into a coma. “It’s them! The monster is them!”

The monster is them. Wise words indeed, I thought, as the senior freelance games journalist’s shotgun roared like an archangel, and the rest of us beat the console gamers back into the hall, down the fire stairs and into the street. There, the cops had finally turned up to resolve the situation in the time-honoured tradition: with riot batons and tear gas.

And as the dust settled and the tech editor was borne gently away in an ambulance, I thought about what he said. In the endless battle of PC versus console, the monster is them, people. The monster is them.