“I reckon you’ll have to do it,” Geoff said.
“Do what?”
“Get the bullet out. Strap up my arm.”
“I don’t know anything about…”
“Unless you’re too squeamish, that is.” – he was smiling as he said it. In the circumstances, Geoff seemed to be coping a lot better than I was.
“Well,” I said, “I’d rather get someone who knows what they are doing, but…”
“But there ain’t nobody. There’s just you.”
He was right. But I was scared. Because I had no idea what I should do.
“Let’s ease you out of that denim jacket,” I said.
The blood had seeped right through the material and had congealed. I was afraid I might open up the wound and make matters worse if I wasn’t careful. I tried pulling the jacket collar back over his shoulder, aiming to draw out his arm as slowly and carefully as I could through the sleeve. But whenever I tugged at the denim sleeve, Geoff winced and gave a gasp of pain.
“I reckon you better cut it off,” he said, “The jacket, I mean.”
“I was hoping that’s what you meant.”
“Cut the sleeve off anyway.”
“Are you sure?” I said, “This is a new jacket, isn’t it?”
He laughed so loudly it was like a donkey braying. In fact, he laughed so much that tears started rolling down his cheeks. The laughter was infectious because soon I was laughing just as much as he was. When we’d finally calmed down a bit, I said, “I have no idea why we are laughing.”
“You!” he said, laughing still, “I’ve been shot, you’re probably going to have to cut my arm off with a kitchen knife, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s also the end of the soddin’ world. And all you are worried about is spoiling my denim jacket!”
I was laughing again now. “Yes,” I said between guffaws, “I suppose that is a bit funny.”
But when the laughter eventually subsided, I knew that it wasn’t funny at all.
“There is no way I am cutting off your arm,” I said solemnly, “With or without a kitchen knife.”
I got a large pair of scissors from the kitchen and I cut all the way through the arm of the jacket from the cuff to the shoulder. Then I had to take off his watch. He was very proud of that watch. It had Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and calendar. It even told the time. Then I cut through the arm of his shirt underneath. I had to use a wet kitchen towel to dab at the dried blood from time to time so that I could peel away the material without hurting him too much.
His upper left arm, just beneath the shoulder, was a mess. To my untutored eye it looked like a piece of tenderised steak. I couldn’t see a massive hole though, so it wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. It wasn’t good either. All I could do was dab at it gently with some cotton wool dipped into TCP and then put a bandage over it. TCP and a bandage was about as far as my home First Aid supplies stretched to. I wasn’t sure that my treatment was likely to make any improvement. I only hoped it hadn’t made matters worse. Once he’d been patched up, I found an old pullover for him to wear. It had the benefit of being sufficiently baggy to slip over his injured arm without causing too much pain, sufficiently thick to keep him warm and sufficiently old for a few bloodstains here and there not to be a problem.
“Why didn’t you go home after you were shot?” I said.
“I ran away.”
“Ran away from what?”
“I ran away from home. That’s how come I was out in the fields in the first place.”
I couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying. I knew Geoff’s family slightly. His father was a good-natured, hard-working dairy farmer. His mother ran a small grocer’s shop in the village. He had a young sister, Greta, who was about twelve or thirteen, I think, and always seemed very serious and studious. As far as I knew they were an entirely happy family.
“Running away sounds a bit desperate. What happened? Did you have an argument with your mum and dad?”
“My sister. Me and her had an argument.”
“You ran away from home because you had an argument with your sister?”
“Yeah, well, it was a bit more than an argument. She went for me. Attacked me.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Greta was so small, so fragile.
“My dad took her part, of course. My mum was still feeling pretty sick so she never really stood up for me. So I had to clear out. There was nothing else I could do.”
“Geoff,” I said, “You have to go back home.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. I mean, what will your parents say when you find you’ve been here and I haven’t even let them know?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” – the sudden anger in his voice shocked me – “You keep going on as if everything is like it used to be. As if nothing’s changed. The world has ended, man!”
I kept my cool. I told myself again that this mood swing was a symptom of the shock. I sat there and I let him rave at me for a while. I thought it would do him good to get it out of his system. When he’d finished telling me what a stupid fool I was in words of one syllable, I said, very calmly, “OK, Geoff, so you think the world has ended…”
“Listen to me, man! I don’t think…!”
“OK, OK,” I said, “So tell me about it.”
And he did.
5
“It started with the snow. That was over a week ago. Ten days maybe. The heavy snow, I mean. I thought it was great. I looked out of my bedroom window that morning and everything was white. It reminded me of when I was a kid. There was always snow in winter in them days. My little sister, Greta, she wanted to go out and build a snowman, so we had breakfast and then we… well anyway, that was before she... before she got sick.”
“Greta got sick?”
“I told you.”
“You said your mum was sick. You never said…”
“I told you she got violent. I told you she attacked me. It’s all the same.”
I didn’t see the connection but Geoff had already snapped at me once and I didn’t want to set him off again, so I said nothing.
“Yeah, well anyway, never mind about Greta. You know where my dad’s farm is, don’t you? Up on Windicott Hill, so we get a good view for miles around. Everywhere was covered in snow. It was as if Windicott Woods and the village and the fields and farms for miles around had all vanished. Apart from the old church steeple and one or two of the big old barns in up in Biddeman’s farm, off in the distance, there wasn’t much you could see. Only the snow.”
“I know,” I said, “It was the same here. Worse because my house is in the bottom of the valley so I couldn’t even see the church steeple, never mind Biddeman’s barns.”
Even though it had been snowing on and off ever since Christmas, the heavy snowfall came as a shock. In late December and early January, the snow had mostly been the sort of snow that doesn’t settle: fine, powdery, wet snow that sifts down like icing sugar and melts away beneath the watery sun. That changed on January 13th. That was when we had the first of the blizzards. We’d had plenty of advance warning. The Met Office had been tracking a ‘cold front’ moving in through Sweden, Denmark, Germany and France. The newspapers were calling it the Siberian Snowstorm. It arrived in the South-east of England first. Then it moved west. With so much advance warning, you’d think we’d have been well prepared. But, of course, we weren’t.
“I always loved the snow,” Geoff said, “Not any more though.”
“It’s been a damn’ nuisance,” I said, “But hardly the end of the world.”
“Maybe not. Not yet. But things are only going to get worse, ain’t they?”
“I didn’t think you were such a pessimist. OK, so the weather is bloody awful, the power’s off and the phones are out of action. That’s only temporary. Everything will be back to normal pretty soon.”
“You reckon?”
“I do.”
“The way things are going, I reckon there’ll be nothi
ng much left. Nothing that works, anyway.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The riots and stuff.”
“Riots?”
“You’re not going to tell me you never heard about the riots, are you?”
“That’s exactly what I am going to tell you. I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“How come you don’t know?”
“I don’t watch much telly. I prefer to read. And play guitar.”
“The Internet though. You must have seen it on the Internet.”
I shook my head – “I had a touch of flu. I was completely out of it for a few days. Well, more like a week, I think.”
“You got better though.”
I nodded, “I got better.”
“Some people do.” It struck me as an odd thing to say. A lot of what Geoff was saying struck me as odd. He told me about the looting then. It had started in London. Random gangs of youths smashing shop windows and taking things for no reason at all. Mass looting is not a commonplace occurrence in London but it happens from time to time. In London, almost anything could trigger a riot. Hot weather, flooding, a confrontation with the police, someone having a private argument that suddenly escalates into a fight that eventually turns into mob rule.
“This wasn’t the usual sort of riot,” Geoff said, “There were rumours going about that it was something that got started on the web. You know, like flash mobs an’ that. The news on telly was full of stuff about looting and smashing up shops in big cities – not just London. Birmingham too, Cardiff, Plymouth, all over the place. Round here, we thought we were safe. Out in the sticks. What goes on in the cities don’t have anything to do with us. But then the riots started spreading. Breaking out all over the place. Not only in Britain. There were riots in France and Germany. I seen it all on the telly.”
I remembered seeing some reports about trouble in France and Germany, just before I got sick. Civil unrest is what they were calling it. People burning cars, fighting on the Champs Élysées. A couple of mass shootings in Berlin. I hadn’t paid too much attention at the time.
Those were the sorts of things that happened all too often abroad. If you’d asked anyone around here they’d all have told you that ‘abroad’ is a dangerous place. The only ever news that got reported from France and Germany was bad news: clashes between political rivals, unrest in the banlieues, terrorism, crooks, nutcases…
“Some mobs went into the Vatican, smashing stuff, nicking stuff. The police couldn’t stop them, or so they said. If you want my opinion, I think half the police was probably in there nicking stuff themselves.”
I laughed. I assumed Geoff was making a joke.
“Then it got worse.”
“Worse?” I said, “How much worse can it get?”
“A lot worse. You sure you don’t know anything about this?”
“I must have missed it all. When I was in bed with flu. By the time I got over that, there was no power.”
“It’s been going around,” said Geoff, “Russian Flu. One of the bad sort, so they say. It laid my mother pretty low. My dad got over it. I think. I never got it at all. But my sister, she got it bad. My dad locked her in her bedroom. You could hear her in there. Screaming. Smashing things.”
“Not exactly the usual symptoms of flu,” I said.
“It takes people different ways.”
“But Greta wouldn’t harm a fly!”
“She changed.”
6
I tried Geoff’s phone a few times more. For a while the “No service” message went away, which gave me hope. But when I tried phoning 999 again, there was no answer. I tried phoning some other numbers – a friend, a couple of local businesses, even the Inland Revenue in London on the basis that the tax man is a creature that never sleeps. Nobody answered. Then the phone reverted to “No service” again. I still refused to be as cynical as Geoff. He had tried to convince me that the world as I knew it had pretty much pulled down the shutters and gone into administration. That prospect seemed so absurd that I didn’t bother worrying about it. The only thing I was concerned about was Geoff’s injured arm. Somehow I had to get him to a doctor.
“I think we’ll have to see if we can get you into the village,” I said.
“Why?”
“To see the doctor.”
“There’s no doctors in the village.”
“Of course there are. There are two doctors.”
“There’s a doctor’s surgery,” Geoff corrected, “But the doctors don’t live there. They live miles away.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that even the doctors would be cut off from the village.
“Looks like we’re screwed, don’t it,” Geoff said.
I slumped back into an armchair. “Yes, it certainly does.”
The blood was starting to seep through the arm of the pullover that I’d given Geoff. I was worried about him but tried not to show it. He wasn’t losing huge amounts of blood but I had no idea how badly injured he might be where it didn’t show. I had horrible visions of him suddenly keeling over and dying on my kitchen floor. But I couldn’t think of anything else I could do.
Geoff seemed to be more worried about the dog than about himself. “Poor old Bobby. He wants some food. Don’t suppose you got any dog good?”
“Not something I keep in stock,” I said, “As I haven’t got a dog and have never acquired a taste for dog food myself.”
“Better make him some scrambled eggs then. Or a tin of tuna might do.”
I didn’t have eggs or tuna. I soon discovered, however, that a few pilchards in a saucer made an acceptable alternative.”
“How come old Bobby is here?” Geoff asked, as he patted the dog.
I told him about my strange encounter with the old man in the farm house.
“Old Douggie Lampton wouldn’t let Bobby out of sight. He loves his dog almost as much as he loves his sheep.”
I told him that as far as I could figure out, he didn’t seemed to love his sheep very much at all. He’d said that sheep were diseased animals that couldn’t be trusted.
“Don’t sound like old Douggie Lampton, that don’t. I reckon he must have got a touch of it too.”
“A touch of what?”
I knew what Geoff was going to say before I’d even asked the question. And say it he did – “The Russian Flu.”
If Geoff was to be believed, this mysterious Russian Flu had the strangest set of symptoms. It could do everything from making little girls throw temper tantrums to causing a sheep farmer to take against his own sheep. The symptoms I’d suffered weren’t anything like so exotic. I’d had alternating bouts of sweating and freezing-fits with added hallucinations. In fact, I’d had a set of symptoms that you wouldn’t want to have one at a time, and you definitely don’t want to have all together: sneezing, coughing, headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea – well, you get the picture. While everyone else was watching the country collapse under the devastation of the snowstorm of the century, I was wrapped up in my own private fever dreams, oblivious to it all.
“There must be someone in the village who has some medical knowledge,” I said, “A nurse maybe?”
“There is Dr Prentiss, I suppose,” Geoff said after a moment’s thought.
“Who’s Dr Prentiss?”
“He used to the be the doctor here but he retired years ago. He’s ancient. Must be about a hundred, if not more.”
“And he lives in the village?”
“Yeah.”
“Right then. I’ll take you to Dr Prentiss.” An ancient and geriatric doctor was, after all, better than no doctor. “Where does he live?”
“Oh, he won’t be at home.”
“No?”
“But I bet I know where he will be…”
7
So that’s how we came to be trudging through the snow just as twilight was falling. We’d been walking for almost an hour when we saw the dead sheep. It was Bobby the dog who noticed it first. He
must have caught its scent and went scampering off in great excitement, leaping and diving through the snow and barking at us until we followed. The sheep’s throat had been cut and it had bled out into the snow.
Then we saw another. And another. And another. Scattered at irregular intervals, the blood-drenched bodies of the sheep were already being covered by the falling snow. Then we saw a human body. It was the old man I’d talked to in the farmhouse. Douggie Lampton. His throat was cut too and he lay in a mush of red-tinted snow. He still held the knife in his hand, its blade red with blood.
I had never seen a dead body before. I mean, yes, I’d seen them on films and on TV. I saw my Uncle Ray’s body too, when I was about seven or eight; he was made up to look as lifelike as a waxworks figure that someone had put, as a joke, inside a satin-lined coffin. But seeing dead bodies in films and on TV, or seeing the carefully arranged body of my Uncle Ray, that’s different, totally different, from seeing a human being, a man I’d been talking to just a couple of hours earlier, lying cold and dead in a snow-covered field. I’ve got used to seeing dead bodies since then. We all have. But that was my first and I didn’t take it well.
My legs almost gave way. I’m not normally squeamish but this was something I couldn’t control. For a second, everything became brightly-lit as though someone had turned on high-powered floodlighting, the kind of lights they use in stadiums and football pitches after dark. I felt light-headed, dizzy. For some reason, I felt like laughing. It was as if I was looking down on the scene from a distance. I was detached, uninvolved – and then bam! I slammed back down to earth with a jolt.
There, lying a few feet away from me, was the dead body of Douggie Lampton. He was lying in a mess of his own blood. His throat gaped, as cleanly sliced as a joint of meat. This was real. This had happened. It was too big a thing for me to take in. I kept saying to myself, “This is not real. This can’t be real.” But, by God, it was!
The dog lay in the snow, licking his dead master’s hand and whining. I said we should do something. Geoff said there’s nothing we can do. I said, he might not be dead, which was obviously absurd. Geoff said we had to keep walking. I said the least we could do was notify the authorities. Geoff said there were no authorities. Not any longer.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 3