by Polly Ho-Yen
I pull out the survival kit and wrench open the lid.
Its contents fall to the ground with a patter.
I step around Julie, Steve and Angharad so I’m the one that’s closest to the Grey and direct the shiny lid of the tin – the heliograph – right into its eyes.
Its irises look like old mottled coins, but as the beam of sunlight hits them they suddenly flash amber. It’s like an explosion; the burst of colour, the flecks of gold.
The Grey rears up. It looks huge, it looks giant as though it has grown taller and wider somehow. The amber in its eye does not die away.
It looks like it is about to crash down on us when all of a sudden, it turns sharply to its side and dashes away.
Away into the trees the Grey runs, as fast as it can move; it’s a swirl of legs, a blur of speed.
I direct the heliograph to the next Grey approaching, pointing the light into its eyes as before but just as I am taking aim, another pounces forward, colliding into them. They fall towards me, knocking the heliograph right out of my hands. All I can do is watch as it tumbles onto the ground, out of my reach.
In the next moment, I sense, from the corner of my eye, a flashing light.
It’s coming straight from the tower, a beam of light, and I know, with a certainty, that it’s the light from another heliograph. It’s Sylvia. She is here. She knows what to do.
She directs another ray of light right into one of the eyes of a Grey. It shrieks and runs off into the trees.
I dash forward, snatching up the heliograph and then leap backwards, flashing the beam of light again and again into the eyes of the Greys, and watch them wince and scatter. They cannot bear it when the light hits their eyes.
Steve is still shouting: ‘Run! Billy! Angharad! Run!’
There are still Greys rising; they are just steps away from us, their backs turned towards the tower and so the light cannot be directed into their eyes. There are too many. I flash the heliograph, but I know I won’t be able to reach them all.
I hear Angharad cry out as a Grey reaches towards me, its arm swiping and slicing the air.
Its arms reach out for me.
It is about to touch me.
* * *
I look into the face of the Grey and the many twisted and searching faces behind it, as they make their almost voiceless, whining howl. Shadows hang in their dull, dead eyes, a gloom that surrounds and engulfs me. I feel myself start to let go. It’s too late. There were, in the end, too many.
But then Steve’s there. His strong arms pull me up and away, just as the Grey’s arms swipe the space where I was standing.
I hear a scramble of footsteps, coming from the tower. There’s someone beside me.
Anwar. He’s sticking his lip out, the way he does when he’s concentrating hard, directing light from the heliograph I made him, right into the eyes of the Greys that are surrounding us. It’s only been a few days since I saw him last, but he looks older somehow.
I have to save my friends. I have to find Sylvie. I feel a rush of energy and start once again to shoot the sunlight in one direction and then the other, towards the advancing Greys.
The irises of the Greys burst into colour as the flashing light reaches them and they run off, one by one, until finally, we are alone.
Finally, we are safe.
HOW TO UNDERSTAND
‘You made it!’ Anwar exclaims, turning towards me. ‘We were wondering when you were going to turn up.’
Before I can reply, Steve wraps his arms around Anwar in a huge bear hug. ‘Anwar!’ he roars.
‘Easy, Mr G, easy!’ Anwar says, which makes us all laugh.
It feels like such a relief to be able to laugh again. Like bubbles rising, floating upwards, inside me.
‘The heliograph,’ I say. ‘Good thing I taught you how to use one.’ Anwar grins back at me.
I think back to Sylvia showing me how to use one all those months ago, on Christmas Day. The way she wanted to tell me something about them when we visited her in hospital. All this time she had known; all this time she had been right.
‘When did you get here?’ Angharad asks Anwar.
‘A couple of days ago. Sylvia was pretty surprised to see us, I think.’
Suddenly I sense her as a flash of silver that one moment is behind me and in the next is silently beside me, and we are standing together as though we have never been apart.
I can barely turn to look at her but when I do, my breath catches in my throat and I cry out, for she is there. Sylvia is really there. She is solid beside me. I reach for her and her dry, warm hand catches mine in hers in a fierce clasp. It’s a tight ball of fingers. Her hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail, which glows silver in the sunlight, and she’s smiling at me, a small half-smile, one that seems to know something that I do not.
‘Billy,’ she says slowly, lingering over every sound.
It’s the sound of a bell ringing; it’s laughter, it’s light.
‘Billy, Billy, Billy!’
‘Mum!’ I don’t mean to call her that but it’s the word that comes out and it feels good, suddenly like the only name I could possibly use for her.
She wraps her arms around me, buries her head into my hair as though she is trying to breathe in every bit of me.
‘You made it,’ she mumbles into my head.
‘Of course I did,’ I say.
‘And you’ve not come alone,’ she says, looking towards Steve, Julie and Angharad. Behind her, I can see Anwar’s family slowly emerge from the tower.
‘No,’ I say back. I worry for a moment how she is going to react. Will she be cross that I’ve broken the rules? But her gaze remains steady and warm. ‘I’ve worked out it’s better to stick together with the people close to you.’
She nods her head furiously and smiles but at the same time she looks like she is about to cry.
‘That sounds like a good rule,’ she says. ‘Come on, let’s all get inside before any more Lumens come along.’
‘Lumens?’ I ask.
‘That’s what I call them,’ Sylvia says as we all trail into the tower. ‘Anwar says that you call them Greys. He’s filled me in on what you’ve been through.’
She looks over at Steve and Julie. I realize I’m holding my breath.
‘Hi, Steve,’ she says simply.
‘Sylvia, I—’ Steve begins to say.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘It’s okay.’
Steve continues to bluster over what to say, but then he says just two words: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay, it really is,’ Sylvia says. ‘I know we all could have handled things a bit differently.’ Then she fixes him with a hard, blazing look. ‘Thank you – thank you for looking after our boy when I couldn’t. You were right to do what you did.’
‘I never didn’t want to see him,’ Steve says in a rush.
‘I know that,’ Sylvia says. ‘That was my fault.’
I realize that something’s lifted from my chest. Hearing them speak to each other, properly, has been something I didn’t know I had been missing so much until this moment.
‘And you must be Julie,’ Sylvia says. ‘Anwar told me about you and Angharad.’
‘Hello,’ Julie says a little anxiously.
‘It’s good to meet you,’ Sylvia says with a small smile and I see Julie’s face brighten in relief. ‘Right, let’s get you all inside, where it’s safe.’
* * *
Sylvia and I had walked behind everyone and as the others went ahead, it seemed so weird and so normal at the same time that it was just the two of us, again: Sylvia and I.
After she’d closed the thick metal door with a clang and bolted it securely behind us, I’d asked her about the Greys or the Lumens, as she called them. I wanted to know if I was right in thinking that she knew about them before.
She told me that she was one of the first to see the virus in her old job. The diagrams I had seen of them in the tower on the night that she first brought me h
ere were from that time. They had discovered a cell mutation in a patient – it was not someone that Sylvia had ever seen; she’d been working in the laboratory processing the samples. She’d submitted her report to her bosses and told them how dangerous she thought it was, seeing how the potential for infection would be massive if it spread, but no one had listened. No one wanted to hear. Sylvia thought that they were looking to see how they could make money from it and how they could control it. They wanted to keep it hidden until then.
She didn’t know where the virus came from – there was some speculation that it might have developed in relation to severe changes in climate caused by pollution. What was concrete was what it would do if it attached to a host. It could be fatal or cause a physical transformation, turning people’s skin grey, changing the vocal chords, altering how they move.
She’d tried to find out more about that first patient when she thought she’d discovered something else about the mutation. That, although the virus caused the extreme physical changes that rendered the patient seemingly inhuman, it seemed to react differently over time with exposure to UV light. But it was when she started to ask more and more questions that they sacked her.
I have so many questions and I want to talk to Anwar and Angharad about it all too. But then someone, I think maybe Anwar’s mum, calls for Sylvia and she leaves me in the little room, the same one where she’d laid out the two sleeping bags all that time ago, that had smelled musty and damp.
As I look around now, I can see that it’s not as bad as I remembered it to be. Part of me thinks about rejoining everyone else, but I also want to sit quietly to think. We’ve been through so much and so many things have turned out to be different than I thought. I can almost feel it all settling in my head like snowflakes swirling towards the ground. After a few moments, I start to feel as though I can, for the first time in a long time, begin to understand things around me a little more clearly: Sylvia, Steve, our family, the Greys.
Then Sylvia comes back through the door.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks. ‘Food’s almost ready.’
‘I was just wondering,’ I say. ‘What does the light do? What was the research that you were doing before you stopped working?’
‘It’s just a theory I had based on some of the science I was working on around the virus, but I think the light makes them able to consciously resist infecting new hosts. I believe the virus retains more humanity than people think, but until the UV comes into play, it takes over and makes the infected drawn to new hosts so the virus can spread and spread.’
‘Angharad said they had seen something on the news about them being able to understand what people are saying?’
‘Yes – exactly. Those are probably the Lumens that have been exposed to more light. Directing the UV into their eyes seems to speed up the effect.’
‘Did you know that before? When you gave me the heliograph?’
‘I think so, although, Billy, you have to understand that even though our adventures all started because of my research, that the doctors and your dad weren’t wrong. I wasn’t well, and I’m still not completely well. It all took over too much and that wasn’t fair on you.’
‘Do other people know?’ I ask. ‘About the way they react to light?’
‘A few days ago I spoke to some army officials who are taking back my research to their headquarters. We radioed them to come and see us out here. Now the cat’s out of the bag, there’s nothing my old bosses can do about me going public about what I know. They can’t discredit me now. It should have been done a long time ago, but it’s a start.’
As I turn over in my mind everything that she’s telling me, my thoughts are distracted by a rich smell of cooking coming from inside that makes my stomach turn and grumble.
Sylvia hears my tummy rumble and says, ‘That’s all Fatima. She’s a great cook.’
I realize she must be talking about Anwar’s mum; I’d only known her as Anwar’s mum before.
Sylvia reaches towards my face and she studies it intensely, just like on the day that I saw her waiting outside school early, the day she lost her job.
‘You’ve been very brave, Billy,’ she says. ‘I’ve missed you very, very much.’ She looks almost embarrassed as she asks me: ‘How have you been… really?’
‘Oh, you know,’ I say. It feels like too big a question to answer when I think of the fire and moving in with Steve and the twisted knot of feelings that I carried around. Then I remember meeting Anwar, the day he just came up to talk to me while I was standing all alone in the playground, and all the times that Angharad stuck up for me over and over again. And then I think of the fallen man, walking down the street in that odd, disjointed way that first seized my attention, and all that has happened since then. And I realize that I do have an answer: ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘I’m all right.’
Sylvia beams down at me. ‘You’re more than all right,’ she says.
‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘How are you feeling?’
Sylvia is silent for a moment. She takes a breath, exhaling slowly, and then she starts to speak: ‘Better than I was. Fear and worry can make you act in strange ways if you don’t talk about things. My fears, though they were based on real things at first, just took over. And I’m so sorry that I sometimes put you in danger because I was concentrating too hard on keeping you safe. That I nearly lost you.’
‘And now?’
‘Now?’ Sylvia asks. ‘I know what I need to do if I feel like I’m losing myself like that. My time in hospital was hard, but it’s what I needed to do to prove that I can look after you. I know I need to get better for myself and for you.
‘And I think what you said was right – we do have to stick together with the people that are important to us.’
We walk up the stairs to the main room of the tower. Anwar’s mum is handing out steaming bowls of food and his dad and Steve look like they are deep in conversation. Both have their sleeves rolled up and look like they are matching. Anwar’s two little sisters are simultaneously singing and trying to climb on to Angharad’s back, making the beads of her hair click together, while Anwar shouts at them to get off. He tries to lift up Taifa, who simply wraps her legs around his waist, hangs off his neck and prods him in the nose in a way that makes him laugh. I see Julie walk towards Sylvia, a warm smile spread across her face.
‘Whatever happens next,’ I say to myself, ‘I just know we’ll be prepared.’
- EPILOGUE - HOW I SAVED THE WORLD IN A WEEK
‘It’s on!’ Anwar calls out. ‘Everyone get in here, squeeze in!’
We crowd around the small tablet.
It’s a squash for us all to be able to see the screen.
I can barely hear the prime minister’s voice over the scramble of Anwar’s sisters complaining that they can’t see and Steve trying to calm them down and make room and Anwar telling them to shut up because they’re about to watch history in the making and Anwar’s mum telling Anwar off for saying shut up.
For a moment there’s quiet and then I hear part of the broadcast: Here’s the footage that has marked a significant turning point in the management of the infection…
It cuts to a film and suddenly the room is filled with an explosion of whoops and shouts.
‘There you are, Billy!’ Anwar’s dad says delightedly, squeezing my shoulders.
It’s not just me. There’s Steve, Julie and Angharad and the group of Greys, of course, all around us, edging ever closer. Then I’m pointing my heliograph towards them and they’re running away. It’s a film of what happened yesterday, caught on the CCTV which Sylvia had rigged up back when she was prepping the tower all that time ago when we were still living together. It’s a little bit grainy and you can’t see our faces really, but it clearly shows the Greys darting away as I direct the light into their eyes.
It was what Sylvia called ‘the final piece of the puzzle’ – conclusive evidence to prove what she’d been researching and theorizing, that the effect of
UV on the Greys brought about a change in the virus, affecting how the Greys behaved and that it could, in fact, spark their recovery. That they weren’t actually Greys, they were still the people they had been before. Everyone yesterday that had been exposed to the UV rays by the heliographs were now recovering; they’d been found by the army and taken to a secure medical facility. The film cut to a medical advisor talking about the patients. They were still in quarantine, but they believed they were no longer infectious. Their skin had lost its grey colour and some of them were talking, slowly, but talking nonetheless about what it had been like to be infected.
We are at present rolling out the UV exposure therapy to those infected and continue to see startling results, remarkable recoveries. World leaders are united in their gratitude to the young hero shown in the CCTV film whose actions have conclusively shown that this works. He and his family have asked not to be named but his bravery and quick thinking have essentially brought about an unexpectedly swift resolution to this crisis.
‘It doesn’t feel that swift,’ I say.
‘We only left Bristol a week ago,’ Angharad points out.
‘One week?’ I reply. It feels like far, far longer.
Anwar grins. ‘That’s all it takes for you, Billy Weywood –one week to save the world.’
I smile back and I can feel Sylvia kiss the top of my head and Steve squeeze my hand in his.
Like most things, it doesn’t feel like how it sounds – saving the world in a week – but what feels real is everyone around me.
My world, for the first time in a long time, feels secure.
TOP RULES FOR SURVIVAL LIVING
1. Always be prepared
–
have KEEP everything EVERYONE IMPORTANT TO YOU ready and CLOSE TO with you at all times
2. Pay attention