CHAPTER ONE
When the end of the world came, Paul Dawson was desperately holding on to a fart. Sat uncomfortably at the back of the Palais des Festivals, the deputy CEO of the Lenny Bennett Group had soon realised that the white linen Vilebrequin trousers he’d panic-bought at Gatwick Airport had been a ghastly mistake. True, they made an erotic virtue of his womanish hips and thighs, especially when silhouetted against the late-afternoon sunshine spilling across La Croisette, but both material and hue were viciously unforgiving when it came to bodily fluids. And, by God, there were going to be fluids. He had spent the better part of the previous evening engaged in a flirtatious oyster-swallowing competition with Tanya Lifelong, the heavily-pregnant MD of The Skill Factory, and his bowels were in uproar. Dawson shifted in his seat and pinched hard, vaguely remembering an off-colour joke he’d made to Tanya about "wetting the baby’s head". His roiling stomach groaned aloud at the memory, for a brief blessed moment drowning out Verne Warner’s interminable Titanium speech.
The chair of the Titanium jury had first taken to the stage about seven hours ago, according to Dawson’s lower intestine, and appeared to finally be building to a climax.
"This award," Warner cried, holding aloft the coveted Lion so that it shone impressively beneath the stage lights. "This award here, it’s more important than Gandhi’s glasses, or the tiny baby Jesus, or hope, or faith, or charity, even…
"BECAUSE THIS AWARD HERE IS FOR THE GREATEST FUCKING ADVERT OF ALL FUCKING TIME."
He paused for dramatic effect. Someone in the audience coughed awkwardly to break the embarrassed silence as Warner’s wrist began to tremble from the effort of holding up the heavy award. Dawson held his breath. Not because he gave a shit, mind, but more from not wanting to give a literal shit by accident if he breathed out. Those fucking oysters.
Warner dropped his voice to a hoarse and dramatic whisper: "And this here really fucking important award goes to…"
The gathered crowd began to irritably murmur.
"…to…" Warner was grinning, enjoying the moment. The irritable murmur begat an impatient grumble.
"This award goes to… me.
"That’s right: ME."
A brief aghast silence from the ad crowd, immediately swelling to a roar of disapproval. Warner didn’t notice, prancing around the stage with his self-appointed Titanium in one hand and the microphone in the other, his erection clearly visible beneath the stage lights.
Gary Mace reared out of the shadows. There was blood on his teeth. He was naked
"FUCK YEAH!" he screamed. "FUCK YEAH!"
The audience began to stamp their feet in anger; slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster yet, keeping pace with the escalating rage. It was a rhythmic sound, primal, a thunder that filled the auditorium. Furiously thrown objects rained down upon the stage: festival programmes and espadrilles, novelty cigarette lighters and condoms (one appallingly overused and full, which landed with an unappetising splat that could be clearly heard even above the thunderous stamping), a wig. Warner dodged the missiles, screaming all the while.
"FUCK YEAH! FUCK YEAH!"
Suddenly, the roaring, stamping crowd fell silent. Warner was momentarily too caught up in glory to notice.
"I’M KING OF THE FUCKING WORLD!" he bellowed into the silence. On the stage behind, something scuttled rapidly towards him on all fours, spider-like. The crowd watched the scuttling shape, unspeaking.
It was Peter Trouser, the creative chairman of TBAG/London. He moved with a horrid alacrity, rearing up behind Warner in a long-limbed, fluid motion that was almost inhuman. In Trouser’s hand was a Tin Lion his agency had been awarded for Innovation for a digital carrier bag it had designed for the supermarket Netto, and he raised it above the back of Warner’s head with both hands.
And then brought it down, hard.
Again and again, the Tin Lion rose and fell. The crowd moaned in quiet appreciation of the spectacle, eyes round and excited.
Again and again, the Tin Lion rose and fell, rose and fell.
Again and again and again, until it was done.
Trouser stood on the stage, panting hoarsely. His eyes shone wide and red in the gloom of the auditorium. Beside him, the slumped body of Verne Warner twitched and shuddered. Dying nerves, the fading of faint electrical impulses, nothing else. No more award-winning short-run, made-in-house DM packs for Verne, never again. Trouser bared his teeth and shrieked in triumph at the silent crowd in front of him.
Then the crowd shrieked back.
CHAPTER TWO
The rage spread like a virus, leaping from person to person, adwanker to adwanker. While Paul Dawson wrestled with his increasingly terrified sphincter at the back of the auditorium, the rest of the international advertising crowd went full-fat, balls-out, homicidal doolally.
Sarah Goldrich, the tiny, puffball-skirted CEO of Bellow, Fornby, Minge & Partners, took off her horn-rimmed Prada spectacles and calmly drove them over and over again into the watery left eye of Robert Junior. The strawberry-blond global CEO of Singer and Silverman promptly responded by grabbing Goldrich’s ears and head-butting her to the ground. The two grappled viciously on the sticky floor among the discarded coke wraps and exotic French prophylactic packets, roaring incoherently. To a casual onlooker, it would appear that the diminutive Sarah was winning by a nose; at least she still had one, unlike Robert.
In the row behind, Junior’s ECD Kate Stamina was sat astride her creative partner Paul Heartburn. She had pinned him to his seat and was suffocating him with her hair, methodically stuffing it into his mouth as his hands fluttered and writhed at his sides. Heartburn strained and struggled as he choked on the taste of John Frieda Frizz-Ease Forever Smooth Anti-Frizz Primer, his brain slowly starved of oxygen, his chest hitching for air. His final thought was of a really nice idea for a press ad for the high-street salon brand that would surely do well in the print category next year and that if he rushed it out in time maybe he could get it into Champagne Big or even the Creative Squares if worst came to worst and it missed the deadlines which would at a push he supposed be slightly better than fuck-all after all and… and… and…
And then he was gone.
"NOT THE FACE! NOT THE FUCKING FACE!" Leonard Nil (chairman, chief creative officer, Queen of the Andals, Mother of Dragons and Prime Minister of Magnolia LDN) had climbed on to a seat and was wildly swinging his Burberry man-bag (A/W 15, ahead of the curve) to keep the roaring hordes at bay. In the general melee, Nil had lost a brogue flip-flop and his hairdo had come undone. "NOT THE FACE! NOT THE FUCKING FACE!" he shrieked. "NOT THE FUCKING FACE!" The horde surprisingly complied, at least for the short term, and obligingly ate him from the toes up.
Dawson hid behind the half-chewed body of a large and abundantly freckled female German CEO he had never heard of, eyes screwed shut as he desperately tried not to look at her missing bits. The sound of the chaos around him was even worse than the sight, he found. Terrified screams, roars of pain and anger, gibbering laughter, running footsteps. Someone was singing the Moonpig.com jingle over and over again in a high, cracked voice. Dawson opened his eyes and immediately cringed in terror as production grande dame Lizie Glower ran past in the aisle next to him, bare-chested, gnawing on a severed arm as if it were a chicken drumstick. Attending to her meal, she didn’t notice him. Oh, thank Christ. He might just make it, after all. If he could keep quiet for a while and wait it out behind this great big feasted-upon Fräulein, he might just make it after…
In the general melee, Leonard Nil had lost a brogue flip-flop and his hairdo had come undone. ‘NOT THE FUCKING FACE!’ he shrieked
"GAAAAAAAAAH!"
Gary Mace reared out of the shadows next to Dawson. There was blood on his teeth and he was naked. His face was moon-like in the gloom, white and round and totally devoid of any humanity. Mace reached hungrily for Dawson, eyes rolling.
"GAAAAAAAAAH!"
This was it, then. This was how the end came; with neither a bang nor a whimper but a gaaaaaaaaah. Dawson felt mildly surprised by this. He had always imagined the final curtain would fall upon him in a suitably foetid back room in Thailand somehow. Funny how things turn out.
Mace grabbed Dawson by the shoulders, drawing him near, bloodied teeth snapping at the air. Mace’s hands were horrifyingly hot, baking almost. Dawson felt a scream bubbling up in his chest and began, too late, to struggle. He thrashed wildly in Mace’s embrace.
And in that last panicky moment of extremis, as death came rearing for him in the tombstone shape of his former boss’ teeth, Dawson finally gave in and let go of his lower bowel and sharted himself.
Epilogue
Jim Belton stood naked on the Plage du Martinez and sighed.
"Party," he said, to no-one in particular.
La Croisette burned before him, a pall of oily black smoke obscuring the previously bright summer blue of the late afternoon sky. Crowds of ad folk ranged up and down the seafront, screaming and fighting and tearing at one another. In the general panic, it was increasingly difficult to distinguish the biters from the bitten.
By Belton’s feet lay the tattered body of his friend, Jonathan Surly. The ECD’s face was a ruin, distinguishable only by his blood-matted beard and the extinguished Silk Cut 100 he held in one clawed hand. Someone had ripped Surly’s inordinately expensive dental work from his head, leaving a ghastly, gaping hole. "Party," Belton said, sadly. Surly had fucking loved those teeth.
Above the cacophony of screams and sirens rose the startling sound of galloping hoofs as Johnny Fornby came suddenly charging from the foyer of the Martinez, shirtless and raging, riding a horse. He held an empty bottle of Domaines Ott in each hand and was using them as makeshift clubs, their bases matted with blood and scalp and hair. As he passed Belton, he leaned down from the saddle and grinned wolfishly at him. His teeth were far too big for his head – they would be, seeing as they were patently Surly’s, forced uncomfortably into his mouth. Belton reared back in disgust as Fornby galloped away, stolen teeth flashing in the smoky twilight.
The crowds were beginning to thin out now, only small clusters of people left alive to kill one another. The maître d’ of the Martinez stood in the middle of the road, his clothes aflame, still somehow managing to look down his nose at the chaos around him. Maurice Levine, the global Ominiscis chief, ran past the burning man. He was screaming. Sir Martin Chervil clung to his back, riding him like a pony, chewing the back of his head.
Belton sighed again and turned away and walked across the sand to the sea’s edge. There was an inflatable turtle bobbing in the water, its blank painted eyes looking sad, somehow. Belton stroked the turtle’s head. "Party," he told it reassuringly, and climbed on top of it, testicles squeaking noisily on the rubber. He launched himself into the surf and began to paddle, the screams of the dying slowly fading behind him. He was heading home.
Jonathan Burley is the executive creative director at CHI & Partners. Audiobook version read by Robert Bathurst, mixed by Parv Thind at Wave and produced by Adam Henderson at CHI & Partners.