by Katie Hale
I shut my eyes and clench my hands. I pinch a few between my thumb and forefinger and deposit them back on the sore part of my leg.
Forcing myself not to look at them, at their miniature mouths burrowing into the dead flesh of my calf, I cut a strip from the bed sheet and bandage them in. I pull up my trousers and throw the remaining maggots on the fire, where they hiss briefly with escaping air. I try to push the unbearable itching to a separate corner of my brain. I tell myself I am a survivor.
I am a survivor.
Once the water has started to boil, I cook some of the rice and one lot of kidney beans in their can. I eat. I drink the boiled rice water. The farmhouse curls around me, still and protective, like a reward for choosing safety over the city. Already I can feel my body returning to itself, restored by food and heat and four solid walls. I am going to live.
For the first time in months, I lie on a mattress. It is softer than I could ever have imagined. I tuck myself into my flowery duvet, and sleep swirls at my edges like a persistent current. All my days and weeks of walking are stored inside my body. They drag it down, and I am swept away.
*
I wake the next morning in near silence, the only sound the broken kitchen clock. Soon the light will lift the lid on the sky and all the noises of morning will begin. Birds will chitter and call. When they flit from branch to branch their wings will flutter and disturb the leaves. Twigs will break and fall to the soft earth, where insects and small mammals commute under the leaf mould. All these things have a sound. With the death of human noises, I have become good at hearing these other quieter things. The day is a noisy place, so long as I listen.
For now, though, it is dark and still. I slide myself out of my makeshift bed, taking care to keep the warmth of the night folded under the duvet, in case I need to get back in.
The laminate is cold under my feet. I stuff on my socks and boots, and stoke and blow on last night’s fire until it has reignited itself. Once there is a solid orange blaze, I take the pan and head outside to collect water.
For a few minutes I do nothing but stand on the back step, metal pan in hand, looking out at the paling yard. I think of old family photos, the kind found buried in the drawers of dead grandparents or distant aunts: a man, a woman, sometimes with a child balanced on the hip, standing at the door to a house, a look of pride. A name nobody can read scrawled on the back, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes their only identity is that look, that pride in ownership, in containment: this is me, this is where I live, where I make my life.
I stand on the back step and watch the dark horizon distinguishing itself from the sky.
I used to wake up early in the past, too. It made me feel as though the day belonged to me, because I had been there at its beginning. In its early vulnerability, before the business of society took hold, the day had shown itself to me. Back then, of course, the business of a day began with dustbin men and the first heavy-eyed office workers. Now, it begins with light.
I do not know how long I stand there, watching the day come into being. How many days have I seen begin? Each one nudging me imperceptibly here. Standing in the doorway of an old farm on the outskirts of a city. Alone.
I do not mind the isolation. As a child, my favourite moments were always spent alone. Only alone could I shut out all the noise, make my mind go still enough to explore, to experiment with circuits and motors and cogs, to create. It was what I craved, I told myself, to be always on my own. I would become an inventor, left alone in a lab or workshop to develop my brilliant ideas, to bring my new creations into being. The logical complexities of objects, set apart from human inconsistency.
Of course it would take time. Unlike most of my classmates, I always knew that I could not just leave school, put on a white coat, stick some coloured pens in my breast pocket and call myself an inventor. I knew that was not how creation worked.
So I practised. At weekends and in the holidays, in the early mornings before school and in the evenings once my homework was complete, I learned. I taught myself mechanics, electronics, computing. I learned to fix and repurpose. After school and self-learning had taught me all they could, I went to college. I worked outside of class.
When the War broke out, I was doing odd jobs part-time on the university campus. The ‘odd-job man-woman’, they called me. I called them other things. I kept to myself, expanding my expertise, always striving for the experience and the isolation that would allow me to invent.
Now there is nothing to create, and nobody to create it for. There is only survival, a continuous plateau of existence, and an endless rising and falling of days. Thinking now about that childhood dream – the inventor locked away with her own creative genius – I wonder whether I ever believed it.
As the sunlight edges across the sky, the secrecy of this day starts to slip away from me. The morning opens itself up like a flower. The quiet dark becomes a cobblestoned yard with empty dog sheds, a crumbling barn. They come into view like an assertion of all the day’s possessions. An old wooden washtub planted with weedy flowers. An early fly, buzzing, landing on the corner of the doorbell. The dark band of trees that fringes the stream. Fields. Walls. Fences. A rusty metal gate. At the day’s edges, a dull spread of hills.
This is me. This is where I am going to make my life.
I climb the fence at the corner of the field and pick my way down the bank towards the stream. The water runs cold across my hand as I dip the pan in and out of the current.
Tomorrow I will explore a few miles upstream to see if the water can be drunk without boiling. The next day I will make the hike to the city to see what I can scavenge. After that I will construct a wood store and haul and chop logs for the kitchen fire. Then, if I am still alive, I will dig the fields and find something to plant them with.
An image of the Seed Vault flashes across my mind, but I push it quickly away. Erik would laugh if he could see this new desire. Or he would despair that it has come too late. Or he would do nothing.
As I cross the yard back towards the farmhouse, slowly, so as not to spill any of this precious water, there’s a muted scratching from the intact end of the barn. At first I think it must be rats, but then I hear it again: scrabbling claws, followed by a weak, high keening.
I stop myself. Hope is a killer. It puffs you up like a balloon, then turns away as reality jabs like a needle. Hope is no help to a survivor.
I put down the pan and ease open the upper half of the barn door. Inside is dark and fetid. Shafts of grey dissect the lower end where the beams and roof have caved. A pale spot on the ground where a gap leads out into the yard. I let my eyes adjust to the murky light, holding my breath against the smell. Still it makes my eyes water. I shift and my foot clangs against a rusted tin of turpentine. I hold myself there, waiting.
One by one, they swim up out of the gloom: four chickens, thin and ragged, bits of skin raw where their feathers have been pecked or scratched or worn away. Perched on a ledge, making that desperate keening I heard from the yard, is the cockerel.
I shut the door. I walk back across the yard to where I left the pan. I kneel down beside it and press my face into the dank cobblestones.
*
I fetch an extra pan of water from the stream. In the clear space in front of the fire, I peel off my trousers. Already the wound is cleaner. I start to rinse the maggots from my leg.
The first touch of the water stings, but along with the maggots, it washes away all the days of thirst and pain, the possibility of not surviving, the nothingness that threatened to pull me in. I pour cup after cup of water over my calf, until all the maggots are bobbing and squirming in the bowl underneath it. Then I take the turpentine from the yard and bash at the rusted screwcap with a stone, till the metal gives and I can get at the sharp-smelling liquid inside. I tip some onto a fresh wad of bed sheet and dab it on the clean wound. It stings like fire and I grind my teeth to keep from crying out.
I bandage it with another torn-off bit of
sheet, and silently thank my mother for her makeshift remedies. Then, since there is nobody around to hear, I thank her out loud, too.
*
A city is a vast unmanageable thing. Once, they were mutable, changing and transforming with every person passing through. Their architecture was born out of layers of history and decisions made long ago.
Now, the city is still and dead. It sits placid in the landscape like a washed-up jellyfish. It takes me more than two hours, or what I think must be more than two hours, to walk from the first gated, big-gardened houses to what feels like the centre: a wide paved area with broken shops and sporadic trees. I keep expecting to see people. There are no people, but I keep expecting them. The back of my neck prickles and I spend the morning looking over my shoulder, as if the streets have eyes and are watching me, and I think again about the animals that must be prowling here somewhere. Even empty, the city is a place for keeping my head down.
I come to the wide river I saw from the hill. It is a dull grey, reflecting the sky. A sharp breeze ruffles the water, biting at my uncovered head as I cross a curving white metal bridge towards an enormous building, lumpy and silver, like a gigantic mirrored grub. Outside it, shreds of concert posters lift and flap.
My mother brought me here to see an orchestra once. I was very young, and she was desperate to channel my meticulousness into something she understood – like music. I remember the lights. There were hundreds of them, embedded in the ceilings and hanging from rigs, all changing together or in sequence, rising and dimming, flowing from colour to colour so it was as if the lights themselves were the orchestra, and the music was only incidental. And I remember us getting lost on the long drive home, and my mother blaming my father even though he wasn’t with us – or perhaps because he wasn’t with us.
I had forgotten that occasion. It is as though I had left the memory here, beside the river, reflected in the building’s mirrored surface, waiting patiently for me to come back and collect it. It is strange how a particular place can unlock a particular memory.
Something rustles in an overgrown hedge and I square myself, but there is only me and the rats, the muddy river, and miles of unmined buildings.
There are tags and slogans scrawled on the walls, built up on top of each other like layers of clothing. The bottom ones, partly hidden, are spray-can pictures, the kind that used to draw tourists and bloggers the world over. The kind of riotous colour that probably meant something to somebody once upon a time.
On top of that are the asinine declarations, the washed-up statements of everyday life. Phone numbers, initials, hearts. Some half scrubbed off, most of them just ignored.
The newest marks are the most urgent, the most deeply felt, the roughest, the ones painstakingly stencilled. These are the words that came from the depths of people, forged in the desperation of the War and the Sickness. These are the final futile pleas before the Last Fall.
In black sprayed-on letters running the length of a restaurant wall, someone has stencilled SAY NO TO NUKES, followed by a phallic bomb in a circle with a line through it. Underneath it in green paint, someone else has daubed the call: Go Vegan. I like this – a last attempt to better a dying world.
At the bottom of the wall, someone with a black marker pen has simply scribbled: heroine.
Here and there, a street ends in a crater, or in a wide expanse of rubble – legacies of the bombing that marked the escalating War. Mostly, though, the city is intact. Sickness, then. I have already climbed a dozen roadblocks, sectioning off infected areas for quarantine. Some of these roadblocks were clearly official – heavy concrete barricades pasted with reflective strips, barbed wire coiling across their tops. The rest are makeshift, thrown together by panicked civilians using cars and furniture and broken window glass.
I keep thinking about one section, near the edge of the city. The streets are broader, the houses bigger without being ostentatious. There are overgrown gardens and driveways with rusting cars. And pasted on lampposts and in the windows of empty shops, faded evacuation posters, offering a way out.
I keep imagining those people, surrounded by a city of Sickness, quarantined in their suburban houses, not for other people’s good but for their own. I can picture their disbelieving joy when the posters went up, their determination as they packed suitcases and prepared for evacuation to the Safe Centres, where there would be clean air and plenty of food. I can picture their hope on arriving, their loved ones in tow – before it all collapsed. Before the resources thinned and the Safe Centres went to war with one another, with themselves. Before the remnants of humanity were burning, and all the while, me: huddled in the Seed Vault, beneath rock and snow and ice, surviving.
*
Even from the outside, the clinic is a marvel of engineering – not one of the old constructions, clanking and groaning and striving to fulfil its purpose, but a huge cylinder of concrete and toughened glass. It is the ideological cousin of the Seed Vault, a life-support machine made to outlast human stupidity, to look beyond catastrophe to the survival of the human race. On the evening I first saw it from the top of the hill, it rooted in me and shone like a distant pinprick of hope. While I rested at the farm, the idea of it kindled in my mind: that when all the other buildings are dark tombs and megaliths, when the scavenging dogs growl and snap on the edge of their territories, there is still this, a hub of power and perseverance, shining as a monument to the human urge to endure. I cannot stop myself from hoping.
In the daylight, the clinic looks haughty and unnatural.
At each compass point, a turbine stands sentry. Racks of solar panels surround the building like planetary rings, the strange outlines of clouds reflected in their depths. I remember hearing about these so-called clinics in the early days of the Sickness. I remember how they would act as an ark to carry what was left of humanity into the future, and how hardly any ever made it to completion before the world gave up on the future, retreating to the newer Safe Centres to huddle together and attempt to just survive the present.
Inside, the corridor is dark, leading deep into the building as if descending into a bunker. For a moment I am in the Seed Vault and I have to put out a hand to steady myself. My fingers brush against something: a black and silver switch. I press it and the corridor gutters into light. I switch it off, then on again. I do this four more times, and each time I picture the switch snapping the circuit shut, sending electrons humming through the wires. I had forgotten the sheer marvel of pressing a button in one place and seeing light come into existence in another.
Somewhere during this miracle, I become aware of a sound, something deep and constant, impossible to shake. It’s a while before I recognise the hum of electricity, the mechanical pulse I must have lived with for most of my life, which now seems as alien as the building itself.
I am quick with my search. I find stores of redundant medical supplies, fridges filled with insulin and vaccinations, rooms kept cold for things people once believed were worthy of preservation. I find a half-used tube of antiseptic that feels like a vow, like a voice saying Never again, and I stop to treat and rebandage my leg, although already the bite seems to be healing.
Other than that, there is nothing to take time over. There are no stores of protein, processed and packaged for optimum endurance, no cartons of food waiting for a lonely survivor to need them. Instead there are empty boxes, a few discarded wrappers, a smashed table and overturned stack of chairs: all the detritus of the looting, of the people who came and emptied the place before heading back out into the city. The death throes of humanity, drawn here like blundering moths to a flame, leaving nothing for me.
*
That evening, sitting by the kitchen fire in a house that already feels like a home, I cannot shake the feeling of the clinic, its smell of newness, its determined existence even when all its stores are either useless or empty. I picture the lights guttering on, the only unnatural glow in this vast dark world, like an unseen adversary, mocking me with its s
enseless persistence. Look, it catcalls, you’re not the only one who can endure. You’re not the only one to survive. Which of us will last the longest, Monster?
And I want to run at it, through the burst streets and split tower blocks, through the packs of dogs, straight at that arrogant construction. To break down the turbines and smash the solar panels, to revel in the clatter of busted metal as the lights black out and everything preserved there grows warm and sour. To stand sweating and cold in the darkness and say, See? I’m the one who will last the longest.
But then I remember the building itself, the structural beauty of it. I remember how minimal it is. Like the Seed Vault, it revels in its clinical functionality. Nothing decorative. Nothing wasted, until the looters interfered. Like me, the designer of the clinic understood that survival is a matter of necessity, not of joy.
I try to imagine him – I make him male because of the dogged self-assurance necessary to engineer a structure such as this, something so completely autonomous and certain of its own success. And because of Erik. Because of his absolute faith in perseverance, and because of how little it took for that perseverance to fail. I picture them blending, these two undoubting men, until they are one person, until everything the clinic stands for is in some way broken.
I suppose that, too, is the price of survival: a hope so false it burns and dies like a firework.
*
I do not know where to start. I make a mental list of what I need. Food. Matches. Clothes. Fresh batteries for my torch if I can find them. Tools.
For a second I think about all the paraphernalia I used to throw away, all the tools and commodities I have so casually expunged from my life, now buried somewhere on a rubbish heap, their usefulness prematurely discarded. I think about all the so-called rubbish this city must have once created. If I could find it . . .
I stop myself. A horde like that would not be unclaimed. It would be occupied by scavenging dogs, by savage gulls, by rats carrying all kinds of diseases. And besides, I would not know where to begin to look for it.