Fever (Flu) (21 page)

There was movement in the hall. He turned quickly, but it was Vicky, an oversized t-shirt draped around her wiry body.

“What is it?” she said but he shushed her, stepping closer to the bedroom door.

All kinds of things started going through his head. Was one of the couple still alive? Had someone broken into the house through the bedroom window? He would have heard a crash, surely.

Colin reached for the door, opening it slowly. It seemed to jam halfway.

He tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry and his tongue felt like an old facecloth.

A low moaning sound came from the room.

Colin pushed the door through.

It opened, light from the bathroom illuminating what appeared to be a pantomime ghost standing next to the bed.

“Who’s there?” Colin cried. “Go on, show yourself!” But there was no response, the figure simply stumbling forward.

Colin could see behind it now, noticing that where Ben had been lying in bed, there was no body. Chris remained on the other side of the bed.

Sweat was streaming into Colin’s eyes, blurring the sight before him.

A heavy scent of decay attacked his nostrils.

He pinched his nose with one hand.

Reached for the sheet with the other.

It came easily, revealing Ben.

“Jesus, B-Ben?!” Colin said.

But there was still no response, the face before him showing no more signs of life than it had when it was on the bed. Vacant eyes stared somewhere
around
Colin but not
at
him. A mouth hung open, blood dried on its lips. And then that low moan came again, as if Ben was trying to tell him something.

Colin knew that Ben wasn’t alive. He knew it because of what he’d watched on the YouTube videos, how the infected looked less and less human by the day. But those were videos and a small part of him could deny them as true or relevant, hide the truth until it was right in front of his eyes, no less real than the flu itself.

Colin did the only thing that he could think of, pushing Ben back with a hard shove, then closing the door again.

He heard the body tumbling to the floor.

He listened as Ben clambered to his feet again, made his way back to the door and began the pointless drill of thumping his head against the wood.

He looked to Vicky. He was still in shock and couldn’t think of anything to say to her.

Vicky retreated down the corridor, knocking over a vase as she went.

Colin followed her.

She came out from the living room, wearing a coat over her t-shirt, jingling the car keys in her hand.

“What are you doing?” Colin asked, although he knew exactly what she was doing: she was leaving.

She didn’t look at him. She seemed angry. Colin knew her too well. She’d found some way to blame
him
for this, just like she blamed him for
everything
he had absolutely no control over. The shop closing. The video on YouTube. Ben walking around when they both knew he was dead. All of it was Colin’s fault.

“Vicky, stop!” he said, reaching for her.

He knew she wouldn’t fare well outside, regardless of what was going on. In the real world, Vicky suffered. Colin knew now why her flat looked so run down: she went home every night late and crawled into bed alone and broken.

And that, of course, was
also
his fault.

“Vicky,” he said, grabbing her, “Think about this! Where are you going to go?”

As she pulled against him, her coat came away, and Colin could see fresh scarring on her arms. It looked like she’d been cutting herself.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she screamed. She shook his hand away and stood, poised, fists rolled up tight. The anger was vibrating through her, breath coming hard and fast as if she were about to explode. “DON’T EVEN LOOK AT ME!”

“Vicky–”

“YOU!” she cried, pointing a finger. And then, more quietly, “You...” Water filled her eyes, her mouth turned up as if something were trying to crawl out and couldn’t stretch her lips wide enough. A soft low wail left her, not unlike the noise Dead Ben made. “You stood there in your suit. Me beside you...”

“Vicky, please...”

But she persisted, talking over him, “And you said those words in front of all those people. And I loved that day, I
really
loved that day. And I loved
you
.”

“This isn’t the right time—”

“When
is
the right time? You come into the shop every day and everyone is laughing with you, having fun, sharing jokes, and then I come over and everyone’s quiet...” She wiped her face. “When did you tell them all that our marriage... our life together was A FUCKING JOKE?!”

“Vicky, it wasn’t like that.”

“It was EXACTLY like that!” she barked. “And YOU... Everyone told you how brave you were, how difficult it must have been.” She beat her fist against her chest, and he could actually hear the vibrations. “WHAT ABOUT ME?!”

He grabbed her and pulled her close, and while at first she resisted, pounding with her balled fists, she soon crumbled against him, releasing more tears and noise than her frail body seemed capable of. And Colin took it all from her. He took it because he knew that when it boiled down to it, a part of her was right; he
did
lead her up that garden path. He married her, spent the best days of her life on a whim, on an experiment to see if he could make a go of the mainstream life, the life his parents, his friends wanted.

As her sobs subsided, Colin could hear the gentle thuds against the door of the master bedroom.

***

Later, Colin was lying on the sofa bed in the living room, Vicky asleep beside him. Colin nursed her until she went over, exhaustion claiming her. He waited until he could be sure she was out, and then he carefully unfurled the duvet and stood up quietly.

He lifted his pillow, carrying it with him as he opened the door and left the living room.

In the hallway, he could hear the soft thumps against the master bedroom door as Ben continued his tireless campaign.

Colin ignored the noise, entering the spare bedroom, finding the two twin beds. The sun was strong now, attacking the blinds. He could see Sinead’s face clearly. Still breathing heavily, her mouth and nose smeared once again with more of that thick, bloody mucus.

Colin stood over her bed. He was shaking.

“Sorry,” he said, and with hands that felt like jelly, he pressed the pillow in his hands against Sinead’s face.

He held it firm, feeling only the slightest bit of resistance as her hollowed-out body tried to keep going, her lungs fighting to get air that was no longer available. Within moments, she relaxed, but still Colin held the pillow, pressing harder, feeling something break under the force of his hands.

He heard some noise leave his mouth, perhaps the beginning of a keen, but he held it in, closing his eyes and pressing harder.

He stood over the three bodies in the garden, stacked like old mannequins one on top of the other. In his hand he held a petrol can. He doused the bodies with the pungent liquid then dropped the can to the ground. He struck a match, dropped it onto the bodies then stepped back as they were swallowed up by flame.

Colin was numb.

His mind travelled back to earlier.

After dealing with Sinead, Colin had found a baseball bat in the spare room.

He’d gone to the master bedroom, finding Ben on his feet; the dead man’s head sloped to one side, tongue protruding, eyes looking up and to the left. It was like his whole body was hanging from some invisible rope.

Colin brought the bat down heavy against his old friend’s head. The noise was duller than he expected it to be, and so he hammered again, digging into the soft part of the dead man’s brain, his body shaking, a short gasp leaving his lips before he was still.

He recalled bringing the bat down on Chris too, and then his memory blurred into random images of lifting each body in his arms, of carrying them outside to the grass.

The fire roared painfully.

Colin watched Sinead’s sweet face through the flames until he couldn’t bear it any more.

He left the garden, heading back into the house.

He found Vicky curled up on the sofa, staring into space. He sat down beside her, rubbed her feet aimlessly. She allowed him but didn’t seem to gain any comfort from his massage.

They heard a scream.

Vicky looked to Colin, her eyes like two bright lights. Colin grabbed the baseball bat, followed the noise. He entered the spare room.

He found the soldier on the remaining twin bed.

The lad’s eyes were open. He stared at Colin. A low rasping sound escaped his lips.

Colin raised the baseball bat, but the soldier cried out again, and this time Colin could make him out. “Please,” he was saying.

24
^th
June

Ciaran was full of pain. It flowed like waves through his mangled body. His breathing was strained, each gasp fighting against broken ribs. Both arms were throbbing, crudely wrapped in a makeshift sling.

He’d been conscious for days now. He wished he hadn’t been. He wished he could sleep, but he couldn’t. He wished there were drugs he could take, gear he could smoke, but there was neither.

There was a television set at the other side of the room. As Ciaran writhed on the bed, the damn thing played a constant loop of violence and panic.

Colin entered the room. He carried a bottle with him. He reached into his pocket, dropped a mobile phone onto Ciaran’s bed.

“That’s yours,” he said. “Found it on you when I pulled you from the car. I’d be surprised if it works, mind. My network’s packed in. You see, this,” and here he pointed at the TV screen, “seems to have spread across the whole of the UK. What you’re watching is quite new. Seems Scottish, from the accents, but we rarely hear a commentary anymore.”

Ciaran stared at the phone. A little antenna icon appeared in the top left corner.

“The internet’s better,” the other survivor continued. “A few servers are still connecting. We’ve AOL here. Some of the other search engines have powered down. Unpaid bills, you think?” Colin laughed, took a glug from his bottle.

“Pick it up for us,” Ciaran said to the other man, gesturing to the phone, his one good eye pleading. “Pick it up and search for my mam on the contacts list.”

“Your...
man
?” Colin seemed to look at him funny. “MAM! M.A.M.”

“Ah.” Colin laughed quietly, reached for the phone. His hands were moving slowly with all the booze he’d consumed. His brow furrowed as he struggled to work out how to use the thing. “Jesus,” he said, noticing the antenna icon. “Looks like you’ve got a signal.”

“Middle icon,” Ciaran urged. “Address list.”

The other man waited for a moment, his eyes meeting Ciaran’s. “Look, are you sure you want me to do this?”

Ciaran couldn’t understand what he meant, what he possibly
could
mean. Of course he was sure! He needed to talk to his mam, see if she was okay, tell her he was going to come for her, that he was still out there, that he still loved her. His face must have said it all, because the other man nodded, smiled faintly then pressed the CALL button. He looked again at Ciaran.

“Ready?”

“Yes!”

The phone was held to Ciaran’s ear.

On the television, he watched a young woman trying to pull away from an older man wearing a suit and tie. The older man’s mouth was wrapped around her arm. A stream of blood seeped from the man’s mouth.

The number was ringing.

The phone lay on the bed.

Ciaran’s face was turned away from it, looking out the window at the empty fields that seemed to go on forever, stretching out like a fluorescent desert, many miles from the concrete West Belfast he called home.

He imagined his mam’s phone lying in some puddle or ditch up in Newcastle, or anywhere else that lost things seemed to accumulate. Behind the sofa. In a taxi. Anywhere at all apart from in her hand, or at the bottom of the brown leather handbag that never left her side, the bag that contained her life, her medication, her fags, her address book.

Her phone.

If he allowed himself to believe that she still carried the damn thing, then Ciaran would know that his mother was dead.

Tears broke from Ciaran’s one good eye. It cried all the harder. His nose streamed with clear snot that he constantly fought to sniff away.

Colin sat beside him. The other man reached over, gently tipping Ciaran’s head and wiping his nose and eye every few moments, before leaning back and without as much as a word, allowing Ciaran to continue weeping, exorcising his grief the way it had to be done.

After some time, the tears just seemed to dry up. There was a salty taste in his mouth. It still hurt to breathe, perhaps even more so now.

Ciaran looked over to find the other man. He was still drinking.

Ciaran looked out the window again. Then to the television, still playing the same footage on repeat. “It hasn’t reached us then, has it?”

“Not as such...” Colin set the bottle down and Ciaran noticed that his hand was shaking. He tried to steady it. Cleared his throat then continued: “We’re fairly isolated out here. Very few neighbours about.”

Ciaran nodded, looked back at the phone.

“Still can’t believe it’s working,” Colin said. “You should maybe turn it off, save the battery.”

“Yeah.” But Ciaran didn’t care about the phone anymore. If he had the use of his arms he would probably have opened the window and thrown it as far as he could. “Maybe best to stick it in some drawer. Just in case.” He didn’t mean any of what he was saying. These words were just something to fill the air, the phone just a focus point, irrelevant amongst the scenes of riots and barbarity on the television screen.

“What’s wrong with them?” Ciaran asked.

He watched another scene unfold: an older man sinking his teeth into a nurse at the hospital. The man’s face was empty as he attacked, his eyes heavy and tired looking, as if he was bored.

“They’re dead,” Colin said. He lifted the bottle again, drank from it.