“It’s ever since they sacked all their regular staff and replaced them with these so called ‘agency staff’ – all night long we hear those bloody drums going and see strange lights coming from the loading bays around the back,” Enid Froup recently told the Dagenham Examiner and Used Car Exchange, describing the strange goings on surrounding the local branch of a well-known supermarket chain. “Fran Gretins who lives across the road from the store reckons that, come dawn, she’s seen some pretty weird characters sneaking out of the back gates – semi-naked and wearing funny feathered hats, or so she says.” The Dagenham supermarket hit the headlines when, apparently following the lead of the shipping firm P and O, decided to terminate the contracts of its staff, recruiting what it described as ‘agency staff’ to replace them at lower pay rates. It is widely rumoured that the supermarket chain are using the store as a pilot project for these new employment policies, with the aim of rolling them out nationwide, if successful in Dagenham. The nature of these new ‘agency staff’, however, have excited some comment in the local community, with regular customers at the store commenting unfavourably upon them. “We assumed they’d be foreign and speak bad English,” says Froup. “But they turned out to be just, well, weird – all dead eyed and shuffling around. As for language problems, they barely seem able to speak at all, just grunting in response to any questions.”
Even stranger, there have been claims that nobody has ever seen any of the new staff either enter or leave the store. “We all assumed that they’d bring them in by bus and take them away each night,” Froup says. “But that Fran Gretins is adamant that she’s never seen anyone bussed in or out – and she’s always lurking behind those curtains of hers with her field glasses by day and night-vision goggles after dark.” There have also been reports that, during the week, when the store opens twenty four hours a day, the same staff have been observed on duty, all day and all night. Speculation about the new supermarket staff came to a head when a customer visiting from Edmonton claimed to have recognised one of the workers. “I had the shock of my life when I went to pay at the till,” forty three year old roofer Tim Wollock told the Dagenham Examiner and Used Car Exchange. “There, scanning in my purchases, was Frankie Hools – I was surprised because he was killed in a fatal road accident some three months ago! I tell you, I thought I was going to have a heart attack I was so shocked!” Wollock tried to communicate with the till operator, with no success. “He just seemed confused – didn’t recognise me at all,” he recalls. “The harder I tried, the more agitated he got, until this ‘supervisor’ came over and started whipping him – then he calmed down and asked in this slurred voice whether I wanted to pay card or cash!” The roofer remains convinced that the shop worker he was his deceased acquaintance. “I know he looked a bit different – all sallow faced and with sunken eyes,” he muses. “But I’d know Frankie anywhere!”
This incident, along with the constant nocturnal drums, have led the local newspaper to a startling conclusion: that the so called agency staff are, in fact, the undead, raised by Voodoo priests in the pay of the supermarket chain. “It’s obvious really – they, like every employer in the UK, is seeking to drive down labour costs. What cheaper labour could there be than zombies?” opines the Dagenham Examiner and Used Car Exchange’s Chief Crime Reporter Simon Klax. “Just feed them some past its sell by date meat every so often and keep them in the cold room when they aren’t required. Obviously, they need the Voodoo priests on hand to keep them under control with their nightly rituals.” Klax is convinced that supermarket chiefs have been ‘recruiting’ corpses of the recently dead from nearby boroughs and towns to act as their new work force after having been resurrected by the Voodoo priests. “There’s probably a regular turnover of these ‘staff’ as they eventually decompose and bits fall off, so they are always on the look out for new recruits,” he muses. “They undoubtedly bring the fresh corpses in by night, in the refrigerator trucks and have them revived at an altar set up in the loading bays.”
Klax’s attempts to expose the company’s body snatching by exhuming the graves of their victims, though, has been foiled by their cunning. “We’ve established that the bastards are targetting people who are being cremated – they obviously do a deal with the crematoriums to spirit the bodies away before they are burned. The ‘ashes’ the bereaved relatives are given is probably supermarket economy own brand tea,” he speculates. “They know that an empty grave would be damning evidence!” Klax has further theorised that the goings on at the Dagenham store might not just be a pilot scheme for the supermarket chain, but for British commerce generally, perhaps even with the connivance of the government. “This could all be part of some master plan to replace retail workers and other unskilled labour with the living dead,” he says. “It wouldn’t just cut wage bills, but also benefits bills for the government, as they wouldn’t have all those low paid ‘working claimants’ to pay. Maybe that’s why the government are so keen to drive the poor into further poverty with tax and cost of living rises – they hope to kill them off to provide more unpaid living dead labour for their pals in business!”
The journalist’s revelations have also resulted in the supermarket chain receiving criticism from an unexpected source: the United Association of Voodoo Practitioners. “It has come to our attention that the so-called Voodoo priests they are using are not genuine,” the Association’s President., Lancelot Bengle, told the Dagenham Examiner and Used Car Exchange. “Indeed, they weren’t from any country practicing our religion, let alone black. Under the circumstances, we can only conclude that their actions constitute nothing less than cultural appropriation.” The Association is consequently demanding that the supermarket cease and desist its current operations until it hires fully qualified Voodoo priests that have been approved by the Association. “The use of unqualified Voodoo priests without the correct cultural context to fully understand the rites that are carrying out is not only culturally insensitive, but also highly dangerous,” he explains. “If the dead are raised improperly then you could easily end up with a zombie revolt or even a localised zombie apocalypse on your hands.”
