The Zul Enigma (58 page)

Beccy, he began, I don’t
know how to say it, but then he couldn’t go on because his face contorted in a
way I would never have believed possible and more tears flooded down his cheeks
and streamed onto the lapels of his jacket. I had never before seen such an
expression on a human face. It screamed out pain, desperation, fear and horror.
He shook his head and swallowed. He hunted for a handkerchief, wiped his eyes
and blew his nose. He ran his hand through his hair and puffed out a sigh. It
was hot on my face and I knew he’d gone through the previous day and night on
coffee alone, because his breath was rank and sour and the reek of it made me
want to recoil.

Tell me, Carlos, tell
me, I said in the gentlest voice I could find. Our baby kicked and made the
fabric of my dress flutter.

Beccy, he began. He
reached for my hands and squeezed them as he stared into my eyes, then pulled
me closer and whispered, the only people left alive on this God forsaken planet
are the privileged. Like us.

I don’t understand, I
said. Carlos’s eyes filled with tears. Beccy, it’s the poor… all the
impoverished… who have died. We don’t know for certain yet, but it doesn’t look
as if anyone else has been affected. Just them. Billions of them. And he
doubled over, covering his face as spasms shot through his body like little
explosions and he tried to stifle the sound of his wailing.

There was a metallic tang in my mouth. I’d bitten through the inside of my lip
and all I could feel, hear and taste was a rush of blood.

Carlos fell asleep with his head on my lap, exhausted, but my mind was running
out of control like an articulated truck with no brakes careering down a hill.
All the poor. How could that be. I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe
it. They surely couldn’t all be dead. Please God, please God, Carlos
must
be mistaken.

When he woke up he had a
better colour. I refused his request to make coffee and instead brewed lemon
ginger tea, cooked scrambled eggs, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes and put four
slices of wholegrain bread in the toaster. We talked in the kitchen.

I… I don’t understand, I
said. I can’t take it in. You’re saying there was no evolutionary leap, no
transfer to a parallel brane universe. He nodded, that’s what we think now. But
what about the physicists who said it was possible. He shrugged. So you mean
Zul lied to us. Or was his theory of evolution some cover story for this… this…
I couldn’t find the words to describe what Carlos had told me.

But how did they die, I
asked, and he told me that after conducting analysis on hundreds of bodies from
all over the world, scientists found the cause of death was heart seizure
caused by a new virus. But… I said… but… my brain was too slow to process such
a monstrous concept… but where did it come from. And why did it only attack the
poor. How could it attack just the poor. That, Carlos said, is the question
everyone’s asking.

And why did it happen on
E-Day – and not just that – how come everyone died at the exact
moment it was the
21st
December
everywhere on the planet. That’s bizarre… no… not bizarre… it’s unbelievable.
It had to be planned… it can’t be a coincidence. Carlos shook his head. We
don’t know, he said. It’s a mystery how the payload action was triggered so all
the deaths occurred simultaneously.

I shook my head in my
hands. I couldn’t grasp it. All those people all over the world dead. It was
abominable. Who would ever even think of doing such a thing.

I thought it was weird,
I said, starting to cry, how the TV footage, the photos, the videos on the
Internet, only showed poor neighbourhoods. But, I don’t know, no one mentioned
it and it was all so overwhelming, so shocking, I sobbed, I just didn’t put it
together and… I had to stop looking… because… well… I just couldn’t watch any
more of it. Now I knew, I felt terrible, and I covered my face, but the tears
ran through my fingers and trickled down my arms.

It wasn’t just you,
Carlos whispered putting his arm round me, it was hours before anyone realised.

But… who did it. Who
could have done this terrible, unconscionable thing. And he told me he’d talked
to a professor in the Department of Chemistry at MIT in the States, one of the
most highly regarded people in synthetic organic chemistry research in the
world, who confirmed it would be possible to biologically engineer a lethal
virus to be triggered at a pre-determined time. But to target all the poor.
Nobody knows how that was done.

I’d never seen Carlos
look so grave. They haven’t
proved
that the virus was genetically
engineered, he said, but it’s a possibility. And to answer your question about
who did it. Well… it looks like it was Zul. Then his face crumpled and he shook
his head. But who or what Zul is we still have no idea.

Tuesday 25th December 2012

We lay in bed holding each other. Neither of us wanted to wake up, let alone
get up. We couldn’t even talk. I mean, what was there to say. Happy Christmas.
Peace and Goodwill Towards Man. All we could do was cling to each other as we
tried to blot out the memory of the past four days and focus, just for a
moment, on ourselves. Focus on the pleasure that comes from flesh touching
flesh, from the sensation of a hand’s caress, from the feeling fired by a kiss
and with great effort we blanked our minds of everything else and started to
make love.

I rolled onto my side
and Carlos snuggled into my back, stroked my hip and ran his hand over my
bulging belly and up to squeeze my breast. But before we could get properly
started, feelings of guilt began to sneak in through the cracks in my
concentration, exposing my hidden agenda that the act of sex would make me
tired enough to let me drift back into a blissful state of unconsciousness… the
sleep of the unknowing… the sleep of the un-remembering.

Carlos thrust harder. I
trembled, making him groan. But I wasn’t trembling due to excitement: I was
trembling because I couldn’t put out of my mind the faces of all those dead
people, the ones who had suffered in poverty, the vast majority from Africa,
Asia, South America and the Middle East. I was trembling because I could feel
them peering through the veil that separates where they are on their side from
where I am on my side. I was trembling because I could see billions of dead
faces watching us making love. I was trembling because I couldn’t answer their
question… why us… and I thought how yesterday we talked about taking our lives.
But… well… how could we kill our baby. Of course the answer is, we can’t.

 
And then I felt Carlos roll away. I knew
he hadn’t climaxed and neither had I. What we’d tried to do was a useless
attempt at creating something loving and tender in this new hideous world,
where love and tenderness have been banished by the most monstrous act of
discrimination from which none of us left behind will ever escape and for which
we will always feel responsible. For all I know, Carlos had been thinking the
same thing. But I couldn’t turn to him. I couldn’t talk to him. I just lay
there, on my side, as stiff as the corpses crowding my mind.

My
brain hadn’t yet grasped that this hideous event might be affecting Carlos in a
more profound way than it was affecting me. I
know
he is a good man and
he’s appalled… shocked senseless… but that is not what people who don’t know
him are saying. I’ve seen the accusations in the papers and I’ve heard them on
the news. But I refuse to read them and turn off the TV when they start talking
about it. I’m not ready to deal with that. Not yet. Not ever. And unless Carlos
brings up the subject, I don’t even want to think about it.

But earlier I couldn’t
help myself thinking about it.

After a minute or so he slipped out of bed and I buried my head under the
covers and pretended to sleep as I heard him go into the kitchen to brew
coffee.

Hours later, when I still hadn’t managed to stir myself, Carlos came back into
the room. I heard him open the wardrobe door and then a crackling sound as he took
the presents we’d bought for Ash and Josh down from where I’d stashed them on
the top shelf. I’d wrapped them weeks ago in jolly red and green Christmas
paper and tied them up with pretty ribbon bows, even though they’re for boys.

Beccy, he said shaking
my shoulder, get up. You can’t lie in bed all day. We need to drop the presents
over. It’s time to go for Christmas lunch, remember. As if I could forget. But
I didn’t feel like getting up and trying to act normal. I didn’t think I could
act normal. Not even for those two dear lads. I was too busy dealing with the
billions of deaths I have on my conscience. Sorry. So instead I started to cry.

And it’s like I pushed
the red button on a nuclear missile. Carlos ripped the quilt off the bed and
screamed at the top of his voice – not the reaction I’d expected at all.
For Christ’s sake, will you pull yourself together.
You’re
not the
child…
they
are.

His yelling shocked me
motionless. I felt exposed with nothing covering me and I cowered, curled up in
a ball with my hands over my eyes, and next I tasted blood flooding my mouth…
again. With one hand I groped for the quilt, trembling, wanting to pull it back
over my nakedness, over my head, and a minute later when the silence became
deafening, I opened my fingers and glimpsed Carlos firing me a look that would
have roasted the very devil himself, before he turned and stormed out of the
bedroom slamming the door behind him.

It’s a hollow feeling when you break something special you’ve only had for a
short while – when you know you’ll never be able to put it back together
exactly as it was before – that it will never be quite the same again
– never quite as good as it once was. That’s the feeling I had then.
Carlos had never shouted at me before. Ever. He had never raised his voice in
anger to me. And he had never, ever looked at me with such blatant disgust.

But I wasn’t surprised,
because he’s told me over and over that the qualities he most admires and loves
about me are my strength and fearlessness. But the way I’m behaving now… with
what’s happened in the world… I can’t be the strong, fearless woman he loves.
And I know I’ve let him down. He’s seen through my façade. And he feels
cheated, because I’m not the woman I pretended to be.

All I wanted to do was
cry and have him comfort me and tell me everything would be okay. Of course, I
knew that would be a lie because nothing will ever be okay again and I don’t
even know if Carlos and I will be okay. Not now we’ve crossed the line that
marks the beginning of the loss of integrity in a relationship.

Only a few days ago we
were so happy, euphoric even. We had so much love for each other and so much
hope for a bright new future, whichever way things panned out. But that was
destroyed in the instant it took for all those poor people to die. And as a
result, not only has he discovered I’m not as strong as he thought, but
something else too. Something worse. And I don’t know why I felt it and I
didn’t want to feel it but for a moment, for some mad reason, I blamed him for
what had happened.

And he knew it.

He knew that’s why I
couldn’t make love to him. Why I couldn’t talk to him.

Of course, logic
dictates
he
wasn’t behind it. I
know
he wasn’t responsible for
this horrendous event. I know he’d rather kill
himself
, and
me
,
and the
baby
than do such a terrible thing.

But regardless of
whether Zul is human or not, I can’t help wondering if there is a deeper,
darker reason why he contacted Carlos.

I had to pee. He must have heard me get up, because he opened the bedroom door
just as I walked out of the bathroom. I’d washed the blood from my mouth and
brushed my teeth and hair, but my eyes were swollen and I looked like shit. The
moment I saw him I froze like a rabbit in a spotlight. He stared at me and I
knew he was taking in my shape, my tummy, and it’s the baby that did it. His
face softened. He walked up to me but after the shouting I wasn’t sure where I
stood. I wasn’t sure where he stood. He put his arms around me and whispered
I’m sorry and he nuzzled my neck and kissed my shoulder. I’m so sorry, he said.
We are two of the few left. We have to stick together. We mustn’t fight. I’m
sorry. And I did feel comforted. Somewhat.

We just got back from Christmas lunch at Erika’s. I didn’t think they could
pull it off. But they did. Roast turkey, stuffing, mince pies, Christmas
pudding and brandy butter – the whole works. Oh… and Christmas crackers.
They drew the line at the carol singing, thank God. What am I talking about
“thank God”. There is no God. I know that well enough now.

After
the boys went upstairs clutching their favourite presents to their chests and
groaning with the discomfort of over-stuffed tummies, we adults talked. Carlos
couldn’t hold back his tears and I was mortified for freezing him out earlier.
He needs just as much comfort as anyone else. Probably more. Of course, I don’t
really blame him for what happened. I don’t know what came over me before. In
all honesty, everyone’s in a terrible state of shock. Our reactions are
exaggerated. Our emotions are all over the place. People are behaving out of
character. The number of suicides is unprecedented.

It’s a terrible thing to
say, but it does help to know everyone feels as bad as each other and it helps
me to know Erika and Drew are as disgusted with the “Christmas” charade as I
am. But what could they do – after all – if it weren’t for the
boys, they’d be slashing their wrists right now too.