“Well, you see, Colonel, the thing is, there’s someone else. With me, I mean.”
“Someone else?” He looked around the Hall theatrically to indicate that he was unable to see any companion of mine.
“He’s outside,” I said.
“In this weather? Seems rather eccentric. Who is he? Anyone I know?”
“Geoff Parkham,” I said.
“Ah, yes. I know him. Nice lad. Better get him inside, then.”
I told him about the gunshot wound. The Colonel seemed genuinely concerned. He immediately took charge of the situation, barked out an order to someone sitting on the floor to get a camp bed sorted out. Snapped his fingers at an elderly white-haired, tweed-coated gentleman who had been sitting at a table, reading – “Walter! You’re needed!” – then strode to the door, opened it and bellowed into the darkness, “Geoffrey Parkham, you stupid damn’ fool. Get yourself in here before I come out there and drag you in!”
That was when a shape leapt out of the darkness towards us. The Colonel jumped back, bumping into me and nearly knocking me over. It was Bobby the dog. Fortunately, Bobby and The Colonel knew one another and clearly liked one another’s company. My heart sank as I realised I was going to have to explain how Bobby had adopted me and what had happened to his master.
9
Walter Prentiss may have been old but he carried himself with the authority of youth. He took Geoff over to the far end of the hall, sat him in a chair next to a table and called for someone to bring the gas lamp over to assist in his examination. He took off Geoff’s watch and handed it to the Colonel. He carefully removed the pullover Geoff was wearing and cut off the bandages I’d put on. He chuckled to himself when he saw those. I gathered my bandaging did not entirely suggest a high level of medical competence. He asked me to shine my torch on Geoff’s arm. The arm looked, to me, worse than ever. It was not only swollen but it was also now crusted with congealed blood. Doctor Prentiss tutted to himself.
“Is it bad?” Geoff asked.
“It depends on the angle from which you look at it,” said the doctor, “From your perspective it is no doubt worse than it is from my perspective. From my perspective it is merely an interesting problem. From your perspective I should imagine it is moderately painful.”
Geoff went for the stiff upper-lip approach. “Oh, it’s not too bad, really.”
“How about now?” The doctor pressed his thumbs into Geoff’s arm and Geoff yowled like a dog. He yowled so convincingly that, for a while, Bobby joined in.
“Sorry about that. I was just testing the accuracy of my diagnosis.”
“What is it?” Geoff said, his upper lip showing definite signs of weakness this time, “Did he get an artery?”
“I think,” said the doctor, “that we may safely discount that possibility.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mainly because you are still alive. Had you suffered a severed artery you would certainly have expired long ago.”
“Ah…”
“Fortunately, I have all the equipment I need to operate upon you. The facilities here are somewhat primitive, but all the same, I think I should be able to do a moderately satisfactory job.”
The doctor then set about giving instructions to various people who had been standing around watching and ten minutes later a table had been laid out in readiness for the operation. There was a bowl of tepid water, some methylated spirits and cotton wool balls, some towels and plasters. And some kind of forceps. While all this was being assembled, Doctor Prentiss had said nothing about what he was preparing to do and Geoff’s face, I noticed, had become quite pale.
Eventually, the doctor took a flannel and dipped it into the water. “The first thing we have to do is clean up the wound,” he said, “And then I shall ask someone to go and get the meat cleaver and bread knife from the kitchen so that…”
Geoff fainted clean away.
“Oh, dear,” the doctor said, “That was just my little joke. It’s surprising how often my patients don’t see the funny side of things.”
It turned out that Geoff’s injury wasn’t quite so bad as it looked. Once the arm has been cleaned up, you could see that it was dotted with a whole bunch of little holes. They looked red and swollen. Geoff had regained consciousness just in time to be able to watch the proceedings with a detached interest. He had been peppered with shot – little lead pellets. Doctor Prentiss spent a happy half hour or so removing a dozen or so of them. There were a few more that had penetrated more deeply and would probably work their way out in their own sweet time.
The doctor used a pair of tweezers to squeeze out the pellets that were close to the surface of the skin. A few of them popped out quite easily. Each time one did, Geoff gritted his teeth and made a little moaning sound. I got the impression that having gunshot tweaked out of your body was not the most pleasant experience you can have. Some of the pellets took quite a bit of probing and squeezing. One in particular took about five minutes before it finally popped out.
“I haven’t any painkillers or antibiotics,” the doctor warned, “so don’t bother asking for any. Naturally, if you have the chance to go to a better equipped facility than this, I should do so. But, at any rate, I’ll patch you up as best I can.”
Doctor Prentiss clearly enjoyed his work. He gave a broad smile of triumph with each pellet that he extracted and dropped into a small metal dish. Everyone in the Hall had gathered around to watch. Someone actually clapped after a particularly painful pellet was removed and fell into the bowl with a tinkle.
“I wonder why anyone would shoot you?” Doctor Prentiss said, “I hardly think you could be mistaken for a pheasant!”
Geoff shrugged.
“Who was it?”
Geoff shrugged again. “A farmer, I suppose.”
“You can’t have failed to recognise him at that distance,” said the doctor.
Geoff didn’t shrug that time. Doctor Prentiss was a wily old bird and he knew more than he was letting onto.
“It was snowing,” Geoff said.
“Let me see, from the depth of the wounds and the fairly narrow range of scatter, I’d say he must have shot you from a distance of about fifteen yards. Possibly twenty. If you didn’t recognise him at that distance, it must have been snowing very heavily indeed.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t recognise him. What I’m saying is, with the snow an’ all, maybe he didn’t recognise me.”
“And that’s why he shot you? Because he didn’t recognise you? Ah well, as motives go that’s a new one to me. So who was it, this farmer who shoots people he doesn’t recognise?”
The assembled crowd waited for an answer. Geoff looked around at them and then mumbled something.
“I beg your pardon?” said the doctor.
Geoff mumbled again. More loudly this time – “Douggie Lampton. It was Douggie Lampton who shot me.”
“Indeed?” said Doctor Prentiss, “I shall have to be careful, then, if I happen to be wandering near Lampton’s Farm. To make sure he recognises me from afar. I don’t want to get peppered with birdshot.”
“You don’t have to worry about Douggie Lampton,” Geoff said, “He’s dead.”
There was a silence.
Someone in the crowd said, “Douggie Lampton dead? I don’t believe it. I saw him a couple of days ago and he was right as rain.”
Then I told them how we’d found his body in the snow, with his throat cut.
10
Nobody batted an eyelid when I told them about finding Douggie Lampton. They seemed more shocked when I told them about finding his sheep with their throats cut. “He loved those sheep more than he ever loved any people,” someone said. Someone else said, “At least, he went quickly.” “Yes,” another voice added, “And at a time of his own choosing.”
I heard someone say, “How do we know it wasn’t them who killed him?”
By “them” he meant me and Geoff.
Someone else said, “If it was them who
killed him, why’d they be telling us about it?”
“To cover their tracks,” said the first voice.
“You’ve said some stupid things in your time, Fred Weaver,” said another voice, “But that just about takes the biscuit.” I took that to mean that we had been judged and found innocent.
Then they started telling funny stories about the dead man. “Do you remember the time one of his sheep fell into his septic tank and, oh, but the stink it made when he fished it out again!” “And then there was the time when he was cutting Margie Melthorpe’s hedge and he mowed down all of Albert Melthorpe’s prize marrows by accident…” And so on and on. It sounded as though they were sharing reminiscences of someone who had died happily in his sleep rather than an old man who’d slit his own throat, alone on a hill in a snowstorm.
But if they weren’t shocked by what I had to tell them, the same can’t be said for me when I heard what they had to say. By all accounts, Geoff’s description of the country falling into anarchy under the combined pressures of riots, looting, sickness and the never-ending freeze, was not an exaggeration.
The Colonel, however, was sanguine about it all – “Oh, the chaps in Whitehall will have everything under control soon, mark my words. There are contingency plans for all sorts of disaster, you can be quite sure of that. The Army will get everything sorted out.”
“What makes you think the Army haven’t been infected?” mumbled the doctor.
“What? Oh, no, there are vaccines and whatnot, all kinds of measures in place. Have no doubt about that.”
Doctor Prentiss grunted. “We can only hope that the Army has been recruiting old age pensioners then. Still, the Generals will be all right, I suppose. Geriatrics to a man.”
“I fail to see the point you are making,” said the Colonel, rather grumpily.
“The point I am making is one that should be obvious to any dispassionate observer. Namely that the malaise disproportionally affects the young. All the rioters are, as far as one can tell, in their teens or early twenties.”
“The ‘malaise’!” snapped the Colonel, “What the Hell d’you mean by that, exactly? You medical chaps over-dramatise everything. A bit of winter flu and you’d have us believe the Black Death had come upon us!”
Someone at the far end of the Hall sneezed violently.
“There!” said the Colonel, triumphantly, “Flu. Coughs, sneezes, headaches.”
“Yes, yes, you are probably right, Colonel,” said the doctor, “Just a touch of winter flu. A symptom of which is that young people lose all inhibition. Engage in excesses of Dionysian proportions. Go on rampages of orgiastic violence. Quite, quite. Winter flu, as you say.”
It was obvious that the Colonel and Doctor Prentiss were enjoying themselves. They were clearly two old friends who liked nothing better than a good argument.
“Drink is probably a more likely cause,” said the Colonel, “And drugs. Isn’t that what they were saying on the wireless before the power went out?”
“Were they?” said the doctor, “If so, that would be a most extraordinary conclusion. The country is experiencing a devastating outbreak of an as yet unidentified disease, flu-like in its initial stages, and somebody on the wireless thinks that booze is behind it.”
“Excess of alcohol is often the precursor to violence,” said the Colonel.
“Why, then, is the violence confined to young people? Do not older people also drink alcohol?”
“Oh, really, Walter! You are being deliberately obtuse. Remember the Mods and The Rockers fighting in Brighton? Skinheads. Punks. Young people, the lot of ’em. Football hooligans, for God’s sake. What about the Poll Tax Riots? The London riots of 2011. Battles on the streets. Buildings burning. That’s what young people are like. Always have been, always will be. It’s not a new phenomenon.”
“Perhaps, perhaps…” said the doctor.
“But you don’t think so?” I asked.
“Oh, I can only speculate. I note the facts, I form a hypothesis. But the facts are few and, I suspect, much of what we have been told is inaccurate. I am an old man and my knowledge of these sorts of things is probably quite out of date.”
“‘These sorts of things’,” the Colonel said, “And what sorts of things might those be?”
The doctor gave a chuckle. “My friend, the Colonel,” he explained, “likes to think of himself as a down-to-earth, rational sort of fellow. By which he means that if he can’t see something with his own two eyes, then in all probability it doesn’t exist. In his view, I am more of a fantasist. I believe that the entire progress of human history has been largely dictated by things that we cannot see.”
The Colonel made a noise that sounded a bit like a car tyre deflating.
“The Black Death, for example…”
“There! What did I tell you? I knew he’d bring the Black Death into it before long!”
“Or, for another example,” continued the doctor, “the tularemia outbreak at the Battle Of Stalingrad. Then again there is AIDS. SARS. Ebola. COVID-19. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which killed over fifty million people and, incidentally, disproportionately affected the young. In all those cases, there is nothing to be seen. Not with the naked eye, at any rate. And yet the effects of those ‘nothings’ could hardly have been more profound. Or more catastrophic.”
“You don’t seem to have the flu,” I commented.
“Immunity,” said the Doctor, “In my professional career I must have come into contact with countless varieties of flu bugs. Built up immunity over the years, no doubt.”
“And you?” I said, looking at the Colonel who also gave the impression of robust good health.
“Same thing,” he said, “In my career I’ve been in all kinds of desperate situations.”
“In the antique business?” I said.
The Colonel raised a disapproving eyebrow. “’Scuse me, old chap. I see someone is trying to contact me,” and off he wandered to the far end of the Hall, leaving my question unanswered.
By that time, Doctor Prentiss had finished removing pellets from Geoff’s arm. There remained two or three pellets that had penetrated too deeply for him to get at. He said they might work their way out of their own accord in a few weeks. Or they might stay there for ever and Geoff would just have to learn to live with them. The show, as far as everyone else in the Hall was concerned, was over and they had drifted back to their tables and camp beds to natter or play cards or read books.
That just left there three of us: Geoff, me and Doctor Prentiss. The doctor was dabbing some kind of disinfectant on Geoff’s wounds and patching him up with clean bandages.
That evening passed slowly. The fact of the matter is that there was nothing much to do in the Church Hall. They had some paperback books there but none that I felt inclined to read. I didn’t feel like playing draughts or Happy Families either.
Someone had a transistor radio. The only station they could get was Radio 4. That was promising at least. It meant that the good old BBC was still operational. Up to a point anyway. They were broadcasting repeats of old programmes: Just A Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Gardener’s Question Time. Every so often an announcer’s voice would say: “You are listening to Radio 4. Due to the current emergency situation, we are unable to broadcast our scheduled programs. Normal service will resume as soon as possible.”
So mostly I sat around talking. Even though the Hall was pretty packed, most of the people in the village had decided to stay at home. The people who’d gathered in the Hall either lived alone and had come for the company or else they had some other reason for leaving their house. Frozen pipes. No food or water. Or, quite simply, they were frightened.
I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only one who’d been ill. More than half the people in the Hall had suffered from the flu, though whether of the Russian variety or some more commonplace sort nobody seemed entirely clear. Not even Doctor Prentiss. Some of the people had experienced little more than a cough and a run
ny nose. Others had been confined to bed. Some said they’d recovered but clearly a good many of them were still pretty sick. I asked if anyone had died. Three, they said. There had been three deaths in the village, not counting Douggie Lampton. The doctor told us that the ones who’d died had been frail. They’d had “pre-existing conditions,” he said. The Colonel pointed out that this was entirely consistent with a flu epidemic.
At least, I felt I’d done something useful by coming to the Hall and getting some proper medical attention for Geoff. Now that my duty was done, I had every intention of getting back home as quickly as possible. Looking through the window, however, it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to make it back that night. Not only was it pitch black, with not so much as the hint of moonlight, but the snowfall was heavier than ever. I had to reconcile myself to spending the night in the Hall.
“Once the thaw sets in,” said the Colonel, “everything will get back to normal in no time at all.”
“On the contrary,” said the doctor, “The snow is our only protection. It’s like a defensive wall around the village. As soon as that wall is gone…” – he shrugged but said no more.
11
About two o’clock in the morning there was a tremendous crashing sound. The Hall was entirely in darkness. Most people were asleep but everyone woke immediately. People flicked on torches. There was broken glass all over the floor.
The Colonel took charge at once. He went to the window and shone his torch through it. Someone outside shouted at him. I couldn’t make out what he said but it didn’t sound complimentary. Then a couple more voices yelled at him. The Colonel, however, was not so easily intimidated. “Come up here and say that again to my face!” he yelled. Then I saw him duck away from the window and a rock about the size of a grapefruit whizzed past his head.
That was the final straw as far as the Colonel was concerned. He drew the cord of his pyjama trousers a notch tighter, requisitioned the nearest torch and strode out through the front door of the Hall. We could hear some more shouting. I looked through the window to see what was going on. There were three young men down on the road. They were screaming and cursing for no reason that I could make any sense of. One of them kept laughing. Then one of them threw another rock at the Colonel. There was a plentiful supply of rocks around there due to the old dry-stone wall that separated the Hall from the road. This one hit its target. The rock caught the Colonel on the side of the head and he staggered back. Just then there was an enormously loud bang. I looked across to the next window on my right. An old man in a tweed jacket had opened that window and fired a gun at the youths. It was the sort of gun I’ve seen people hunting deer with. A rifle of some sort. A serious gun. Not the sort you’d use to shoot pheasants. Whether or not he had been aiming at the youths I don’t know. Since they were all still standing, all I could be certain of was that he hadn’t scored a direct hit.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 5