Flu (27 page)

    She slammed the door, once safely inside.

    A figure to her right scared her, and she raised the gun almost instinctually.

    Lark was sitting in the driving seat, staring into space.

    "Jesus!" she said, lowering the gun. "You gave me a fright. I thought you had left already."

    "Did you see him?" he asked, tears streaming down his face. It had made his eyeliner run. It looked like he was crying tears of ink. As if his tattoos were leaking, somehow, through his eyes.

    "Yes," she said quietly. "I saw him."

    He looked at her, smiling sadly.

    "I didn't call you," he said. "I kinda forgot. Sorry about that."

    "It's okay," she said.

    "He's a dick," Lark said, suddenly.

    "I know," Geri said, agreeing. "So are you."

    "I know," he said, choking a short guffaw of laughter back like an overexcited child. Then he buried his head in his hands and cried. He cried hard, the tears shaking through him as if boiling over. Geri placed on hand on his shoulder, gently, as if to steady him. As if to stop him from literally falling apart like a broken doll.

    For a few moments, they just sat there in the Land Rover. Him crying, her holding him. The dead peering in through the windscreen, like shoppers looking at a shop window. The sun was dipping in the sky, as if about to retire for the night, but wanting to offer a few words of condolence before doing so. Finally, he was still, raising his head from his hands as if he had nothing more to give. She took her hand from his shoulder without saying anything.

    "I feel bad about the cops," she said. "I dreamt about them when I was sleeping."

    "Yeah?" Lark replied, wiping a tear from his eye.

    "Yeah," she said. "I don't want us to lose what makes us human. We'll be one step closer to those things outside if we do."

    "Maybe," he said. He didn't seem to care. "Do you want to go back to the store, then?"

    "Do you?" she asked him.

    "I just want to be away from here," he said. "I don't care where we go."

    She looked at him in a different way. The fading light cast a flattering shadow across his tired, solemn face. She realised that he was handsome in a rough kind of way. And his tattoos… she hadn't really looked at them properly, until now. One of them stood out to her. It was an antiquated looking samurai, Japanese style, on his forearm. It had one eye looking up as it held its sword aloft. It looked sad, somehow, while still embroiled in the fight. It was like its eyes told one story while its sword told another.

    "Do they hurt?" she asked, reaching forward and running her finger over the samurai. He jumped, as if her fingers were tattooing him, then, relaxed, again. She noticed the hairs on his arm standing on edge.

    "That one did," he said.

Chapter Twenty Three

    George sat on the cold, hard, concrete floor of the storeroom, leaning his back against a couple of boxes of bleach. In one hand was a half-empty bottle of warm vodka. The other hand held his handgun. Opposite him lay the body of his colleague and - perhaps - friend, Norman Coulter.

    George could hear the movements of the dead outside. They were gathering at the storeroom entrance like vultures around a carcass. He reckoned they would be hard pressed to get in. However, the noise of their attempts was enough to disturb him, preventing him from sleeping through the night. Of course, he was unlikely to sleep soundly beside…

    He would never in a million years have thought that he would have to keep this type of vigil over Norman. The kind where a gun was required. If anything, he'd have expected things to be the other way around - the big man loyally standing over
his
body, waiting for it to stir before, solemnly, putting a bullet through
his
head. But here they were, and that just wasn't the way things had rolled.

    He wondered how long it would be until he, too, contracted the virus. Falling ill, no one but himself to put bullet through his brain. It was so hopeless that he reckoned he'd probably have done it right after putting

    Norman down, but he'd made a promise to a dying man… and that meant something more than ever, now. It seemed that in a world like this, patrolled by Death itself, even more respect was demanded for those who had passed.

    He recalled a time, when he'd just joined the force, being the first to arrive upon a random shooting. Rarely, for Belfast, it wasn't a sectarian attack. Just a pub brawl gone nasty, ending in one party going home for his shotgun before returning to the scene. The perpetrator even had a licence for the gun, which at the time had struck George as odd.

    George had been working the graveyard shift, receiving the call just after 1:00am. He got there pretty quickly, even before the ambulance. One man was lying on the road, the other simply standing mutely with the shotgun in his hands. Punters surrounded them as if it were some kind of street theatre being acted out. The wounded man was almost blue by the time George got to him, but he tried to keep him talking, applying pressure to his wound as he chatted aimlessly about nothing. The man knew he was dead, though. It was almost as if he could feel the life drain from his body, knowing exactly how much he had left and how long it would take to fully empty. He said only one thing to George.

    Tell my wife she was right.

    George remembered feeling burdened with the words. He didn't know what they meant, but he knew that he had to pass the message on. Exactly as it had been told to him. After all, he thought, if it had been my wife, I'd want her to know the exact words.

    He waited until the funeral, a sombre affair made all the more grim by the typical Northern Irish weather. He spotted a young woman at the front of the small crowd. He remembered thinking how pretty she looked in her black dress and feeling guilty for even thinking it. This was a woman mourning, he reminded himself, not some skank at a night club.

    George approached the woman, asking if she were the widow. She cried, reciting the word 'widow' as if it was a sudden realisation of what the day had been about. As if George talking to her made it all the more real, an event that meant something beyond the graveside. George introduced himself and passed on the message.
Tell my wife she was right,
he said slowly and clearly. He even remembered smiling, once it had been said. He had practised the smile in the mirror before coming out. But she never thanked George for the message, nor did she express ingratitude. She simply nodded before being led away under an umbrella.

    Later that week, George heard from Norman of another tragedy.
Remember that bloke you were called to who had been shot?
He said.
The one from the bar brawl?
George would never forget it.
Well,
said Norman,
the wife's only gone and done herself in and all. Seems she couldn't live without him.
Later George discovered the truth. She'd accused him of cheating on her with her best friend. He'd vehemently denied it, storming out for a night on the booze. It was the last she'd seen of him.

    A sudden sound snapped George out of his daze. He looked to the bed in front of him. The big man's eyes had opened, and his body was shaking, as if recharging. He coughed up some phlegm from his lungs. It slid out of his mouth like drops of red paint. He stared at George for a while, as if surprised to see him. George waited for a moment, taking another heavy swig of vodka.

    The big man was on his feet, stumbling around as if he, too, were drunk. He looked at George as if about to say something, but then forgot what it was.

    George rose to his feet, grip tightening on his handgun. For some reason he felt suddenly angry with Dead Norman. It was as if he were disappointed that he was no different to the rest of the dead fucks outside. No smarter, no more able to articulate himself. A part of him thought Norman should have had more class than them, more dignity. But he stumbled about just as aimlessly, grunting and sniffling exactly the same way a hundred or thousand others got on.

    Finally, George couldn't take anymore. He walked over to Norman, aiming the gun squarely at his head. His aim needed to be steadied, what with the vodka's influence. He fired once, twice, cutting two clean holes through the big man's head, staining the tall, cardboard tower behind him. Norman fell faster than he'd gotten up, his arms flailing as he collided with the boxes. And there he lay, sprawled over the dusty storeroom floor and blood stained cardboard, like some kind of giant, bloated spider. But he was finally at peace, finally able to rest.

    George stood silent for a second, drinking the moment in. His eyes lingered on the big cop's body, as if the shock of his death were finally sinking in. A heavy clot of grief stiffened his chest. He felt tears well up in his eyes, his throat suddenly swelling. Without even realising what was happening, he suddenly found the gun in his hand rising, travelling through his lips, into his own mouth. The barrel was still hot, and it scorched his lips. But he seemed to be numb to that, numb to everything. The gun rested in his mouth for a moment, George's finger trembling on the trigger. He knew he'd made a promise, but it seemed to mean nothing to him anymore. What was the point, anyway?

    (tell my wife she was right)

    Who would know, who would care? Norman certainly didn't look like he cared about anything much anymore.

    He could taste the warm, acrid metal of the gun on his tongue. Almost sweet against the harsh, dry taste of vodka. He mostly longed for it all to be over, but another part of him, minute though it was, fought to stay alive. Finally, the gun hand fell to his side, again, before leaving his grasp, entirely, clambering against the hard concrete. And George fell down beside it, knees cracking, heart breaking. He lifted his head, looking to the beams across the storeroom ceiling. But his eyes were dry, now. And he had no release.

Chapter Twenty Four

    "She must be starving, the poor wee pet," Karen said, mopping the little girl's face with yet another baby wipe. Several spent wipes littered the carpet beside her; Pat noted the amount of dried blood on each with his trademark furrowed brow. He was suspicious of this child. Sure, he didn't mean her harm, but it was pretty clear to him that she had either suffered the flu or was still suffering from it right now. How she'd managed to survive, he didn't know, but he questioned just how safe it was to be around her.

    Pat called Karen out of the room. She came at once, as if scared not to. Pat felt a moment of guilt before reminding himself of
the greater good.
The necessity in keeping a tight rein on a girl like Karen, a girl given to spontaneous excitement that could very well kill her. He suddenly realised that he would hit her again, if he needed to. Only to protect her, of course.
(spare the rod spoil the child)
He closed the door, looking in on the little girl and smiling. She smiled back, her eyes radiating innocence like some kind of heat.

    "Has she said anything yet?" he asked Karen, once they were alone.

    "No," Karen replied, breathless and obviously very excited by the new development. "I don't think she can speak, though. Or if she can, she probably doesn't know any English."

    "You have to be careful, you know," Pat warned.

    "What do you mean?" she asked, baffled.

    "She's had the flu," he said, keeping his voice low, as if worried the little girl might hear him through the door. "We don't know how safe it is to be around her."

    "She's just a child!" Karen said, agitated in a guarded way.

    "Yes, but a child who was so close to death that they decided to quarantine her!" Pat stressed, again. He began to wonder if there was any common sense in Karen's pretty little head. Of course, Pat knew the little girl's arrival into their lives gave Karen the purpose she so badly longed for. So her spectacles were going to be very much rose-tinted about this whole thing. And that worried Pat, because, regardless of how good her intentions were, it would do no one any good if either she or he contracted the flu. Even the little girl would lose out.

    But Karen continued to pout, despite this. It was as if she knew just how much sense he was making but refused to acknowledge it. This wasn't a world for her, Pat suddenly thought. There wasn't a selfish bone in her body. A girl like Karen was born to nurture, to look after the needs of others. If she'd been born into a different side of the community, Pat reckoned she'd have ended up as a nun.

    "So what do we do?" Karen asked, her manner short and to the point. Any kind of rapport they once had was now lost.

    "We keep in her in that room and that room alone," Pat said, adopting a similar manner. "And when you go in, you wear one of these," he showed her a packet of surgical masks in one hand, "and when you go out, you wash your hands with some of this," Pat said, pointing to a plastic container of anti-bacterial wash in his other hand.

    Karen nodded, retrieving a mask without protest. She slipped it on before walking back into the room. Pat did similarly, following her. The child was waiting for them, smiling at him as he entered the room. It was hard not to allow your heart to be melted by this child. She was utterly adorable. Once cleaned up, Pat could hardly take her eyes off her, such was her beauty and innocence. Her mahogany brown hair and dark, chocolate eyes lit the fuse of her porcelain skin. If he still believed in God, he would have seen her as something of a miracle, a sign that not all was lost.

    And that was the thing, of course. Karen hadn't thought this far ahead, obviously, and Pat was keen to discourage her from doing so. But this little girl was more than just a miraculous survivor of a killer virus. She held hope for the future in other ways, too. Within her blood could very well be the answer to the whole sorry mess. The reason she had survived. The reason her body had rejected the viral attack on its defences. Something different within her make-up that offered hope for all that remained of humanity. This little foreign girl could hold the cure, the very key to humanity's survival. In her blood, there could very well be the foundation for an anti-virus.