by David Moody
“Do something, you useless little prick!” she yells at someone unseen, her bellowing voice muffled but still clearly audible even through the closed door. “For god’s sake, come on!”
The hostility in her voice is unnerving, and I actually start to edge back toward the stairs before telling myself to get a grip. She reappears again and mooches through the clutter on the table. She picks something up—looks like an open glass jar—then moves back into the shadows.
“You know you want it,” I hear her shout. “Come on, react! Don’t just sit there, you pathetic piece of shit.”
She walks back this way, the jar held out in front of her; then she looks around. Damn, she’s seen me. I try to get out of the way but it’s too late. No backing out now. She angrily yanks the door open.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Sorry,” I stammer, immediately on the wrong foot. “I didn’t mean to disturb you—”
“Yes you did,” she bawls at me. “No one ever comes here unless they don’t have any choice. You didn’t come here by accident, so you did mean to disturb me.”
“Hinchcliffe said I should—”
“You McCoyne?”
“Yes, I—”
“He said you’d probably turn up at some point. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be with you.”
When she stops talking I become aware of a faint whimpering noise coming from elsewhere in the room. Scott moves away from the door, and I follow her inside. At the far end, strapped to a chair by ropes tied across her tiny torso and around her ankles and wrists, is an Unchanged child. It’s one of the kids from the council depot nest we cleared out earlier this week, I’m sure it is. When she sees that someone else is in the room, she starts moaning in fear, tugging at her restraints to try to get free. The effort’s too much, though, and she gives up and slumps forward sobbing, letting her bonds take her weight, her long, greasy hair hanging down and covering her dirty face. Poor little shit. What the hell has Scott been doing to her?
“Interesting,” Scott says, watching both the girl and me, her eyes flicking between us.
“What is?”
“The way she reacted when you appeared,” she says.
“She recognizes me, that’s all. I helped catch her.”
“I just need one of these little cunts to show a bit of backbone and start fighting. Get Hinchcliffe off my back for a while. It wasn’t so bad when Thacker was in charge. Hinchcliffe’s got no patience. He wants results or he wants them dead.”
The little girl, shaking with cold, cries out again. In a sudden fit of rage that takes both me and the child by surprise, the doctor spins around and hurls the glass jar at her. It hits the wall just above her head and explodes, showering her with sharp shards of glass and sticky globules of food.
“Jesus, what the fuck are you doing?” I shout, forgetting myself.
Rona Scott leans back and looks at me disapprovingly. “Looks like someone’s been spending too much time around these things.”
“It’s not that. I just—”
Scott’s not interested. She runs toward the girl again, grabs her shoulders, and yells into her face. The child screams back at the top of her voice, tied tight but still straining to get away. “That’s better,” Scott says, taunting the kid, slapping her cheek. “Now that’s more like it.” She turns her back on the still-screaming child and looks at me. “Right this way.”
She shoves me out of the room and locks the door, muffling the little girl’s cries but not blocking them out completely. She stops in the middle of the corridor, preventing me from going any farther, waiting expectantly. I realize what she’s waiting for and reach into my inside pocket and pull out a half-full packet of cigarettes I’ve been holding on to for a while. She studies the packet for a moment, checks how many smokes are inside, then grunts her approval and heads for the staircase.
We climb another flight of steps up to the third floor, which looks identical in layout to the second. She takes me into the room at the far end of the corridor, double the size of the others. There’s a wide window on one wall that gives Scott a virtually uninterrupted view out across Hinchcliffe’s compound. On the opposite wall, a smaller window overlooks the sea. Driving rain clatters constantly against the glass. There’s more light in here than in any other part of the building I’ve been in so far, but that’s not a good thing. This is Rona Scott’s clinic–cum–living-quarters, and I’d have preferred not to be able to see anything.
“Over there,” she grunts at me, pointing across the room. I walk across the cluttered space, picking my way through the rubbish that covers the floor. There are unpleasant stains and used swabs and dressings everywhere, crusted hard and brown. Discarded strips of bandage lie around the place like gruesome, blood-soaked paper-chain decorations. This place makes me realize just how much the role of a doctor (if Rona Scott ever really was a doctor) has changed. No longer concerned with the ongoing well-being and general health of their patients, they’re now here just to patch people up and keep them fighting as hard as possible for as long as they can. As with any war, countless numbers of people have suffered horrific injuries over the last year. Fortunately for them, most died quickly on the battlefield or later as a result of radiation sickness, infection, or malnutrition. Doctors like Rona Scott are rarely bothered by people like me, and it shows. This room, although still having the faintest smell of antiseptic, now has all the dignity and class of a back-street vehicle repair shop.
Scott walks over to where I’m standing, drops her cigarette, and stubs it out on the carpet. I’ve never been this close to her before, and I pray I never am again. She looks even worse than I do, as if she’s been personally collecting samples of all the diseases and conditions she might still have to treat. Her breath is foul. The bottom of one of her earlobes is missing and has been patched up with adhesive tape that’s covered with blood. I hope that little girl downstairs did it.
“Okay, make it quick. What’s wrong with you?”
“Where do I start?”
“What hurts most?”
“Everything hurts,” I answer honestly. “No appetite, lost a load of weight, fucking awful cough, sometimes there’s blood when I piss…”
“You look bad.”
“Thanks.”
She picks up a flashlight and shines it into my eyes, sighing with effort every time she moves. I don’t know whether she’s as unfit as I feel or whether she just resents every second of time she’s wasting on me. Is she like this with everyone? Is it because I’m not a battle-scarred soldier or one of Hinchcliffe’s precious fighters?
“Strip to the waist,” she orders, and I immediately do as I’m told, starting to shiver even before I’m done. I catch a brief glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror in the corner, and I have to look twice to be sure it’s really me. I stare at my skeletal reflection. Christ, I can see every individual rib. I’m hollow chested. My chest goes in instead of out like it used to …
“Stand still,” she says but I can’t stop shaking. She peels off her grubby fingerless woolen gloves and starts touching me. I recoil from her unforgiving, icelike fingers. She roughly pushes and prods at my skin, working her way around my kidneys and belly with the bedside manner of a butcher working in an abattoir. I wince when she jabs her fingers into me, just below my rib cage, then wince again when she pinches my gut. Is she actually doing anything or just using me for stress relief? Finally she unearths a stethoscope from under a pile of papers and used dressings on a window ledge and presses it against various different parts of my back and front. Examination over, she tells me to get dressed.
“Well?” I ask as I quickly pull my clothes back on again.
“Not a lot to say, really.”
“So what’s wrong with me?”
She groans and plumps her heavy frame down into a chair, which creaks with surprise under her sudden weight. She rummages around on top of a desk and fishes out a half-smoked cigarette, then spends a few seconds
picking dirt off the filter and flicking ash off the end before lighting up. Bitch is doing this on purpose, I’m sure of it. She’s tormenting me, dragging this out unnecessarily. She’s probably enjoying the feeling of power. She’s probably heard what I can do with the Hate, and now she’s showing me who’s in charge.
“Were you close to any of the bombs?” she eventually asks.
“Which bombs?” I answer stupidly.
“The bombs. Remember? Great big friggin’ explosions? Bright light? Mushroom clouds?”
“I was about ten miles from one of them. Might have been farther. Why?”
“Don’t suppose it matters really, but it probably didn’t help. We’ve probably all had enough of a dose by now. How long were you exposed for?”
“Exposed?”
“How long were you out there?”
“I don’t know. I passed out for a while. I was picked up on the highway, but I don’t know how long.”
“Wouldn’t have made much difference anyway,” she says, drawing on her cigarette and looking past me at the rain running down the window. “No doubt we’ll all end up going the same way in the end. Christ, they threw enough of that shit up into the atmosphere to do us all in.”
“So what’s wrong with me?” I ask again, although I think I already know the answer. I think I knew it before I came here. I’ve suspected for a while, but I didn’t want to accept it.
“Cancer,” she finally says, before adding a disclaimer, “probably.”
For a second all I can think about is the way she said “probably,” as if we’re still in the old world and she’s covering her back in case she’s made a misdiagnosis and I sue. The fact she’s just confirmed my worst fear goes almost unnoticed at first, but then it slowly starts to sink in. Cancer.
“Where?”
“What?”
“The cancer, where is it?”
“I’d do an MRI scan, but the power’s down,” she says sarcastically. “Hard to say for certain,” she finally answers. “You’ve got something big in your gut, probably in your stomach, too, but there are bound to be more. Those are secondaries, I think, but I’m no expert. Truth is you’re probably riddled with it by now.”
I stare at her, my mouth hanging open, knowing what I want to ask next but not knowing if I can. She looks up at me, makes fleeting eye contact, then looks away again, anticipating the question that’s inevitably coming.
“How long?”
There, I finally managed to spit the words out. Scott smokes again and pauses before answering.
“Don’t know. No accurate way of telling anymore. Could be weeks, could be months. Maybe a year at the absolute outside if you’re lucky.”
“If I’m lucky?”
“Figure of speech.”
“But isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Like what? The National Health Service is falling apart at the seams, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are no spare beds anywhere. Come to think of it, there are no beds.”
“There must be something.”
“You know the score, McCoyne. You’ve been around here long enough to know what it’s like. There probably used to be a cure, or some surgical procedure that might have given you a little more time, but things have changed. If there was a drug, your chances of finding a good enough supply now are pretty much zero, and even if you did, it’d probably be contaminated and you wouldn’t know how to administer it. No point wasting the little time you’ve got left worrying about it, if you ask me. And you did ask me, so I think you should listen.”
“But there must be something,” I say again.
She shakes her head. “Only thing you can do,” she starts, giving me hope for that briefest of moments, “is take control and finish it sooner rather than later. Save yourself the pain.”
“You’re joking,” I hear myself instinctively say, my brain completely failing to process everything I’m being told. “Tell me you’re joking.”
She just looks at me with disdain, then gets up and walks toward the door. She holds it open and waits for me to leave.
“Do I look like I’m joking? When was the last time you heard me laughing? When was the last time you heard anyone laughing? Tell you what, here’s a good one for you: Find yourself a gun and shove it in your mouth. Take one bullet tonight before bedtime. Caution, may cause headaches and drowsiness.”
Her insensitive comment goes unanswered. Suddenly the room is painfully quiet and empty, the only noise is the rain as it continues to hammer against the windows.
“Just go,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do for you. There’s nothing anyone can do. Live with it till you die from it.”
27
I’M ON THE EDGE of the empty development, almost back at the house. The thought of being shut away in the dark there again makes my heart sink, but it’s the only place I’ve got left to go. Don’t remember how I got here. Don’t even remember leaving the factory.
Take a couple of days off, Hinchcliffe told me. Relax and straighten yourself out, he said. That was a fucking joke. Relax? Since when has anyone been able to relax in this vile, fucked-up world? Straighten myself out? Jesus, that’s equally impossible. In the space of a day everything has become infinitely more complicated and yet immeasurably simpler at the same time: more to think about, but less time to do it. My mind flits constantly as I walk through the torrential rain, never settling on any one thing long enough to give me time to work anything out. If I’m not thinking about the fact I’m dying, I’m thinking about Peter Sutton, Joseph Mallon, and the crowd of Unchanged buried underground. And if I’m not thinking about them, I’m thinking about the little girl strapped to the chair in Rona Scott’s fucking torture chamber. I can’t get her out of my head, poor little cow. And if I’m not thinking about her, I’m thinking about my own kids, and that’s never a good sign. Under it all there’s just one main thought I keep coming back to: I have a terminal disease.
If this had happened to me in my old life, I’d be panicking now, and so would everyone else. I’d be thinking about the kids and Lizzie, checking whether I had any insurance coverage, avoiding all the difficult but necessary practical conversations that Liz would be having with me about the future I wasn’t going to have … but today there’s no panic and no noise, just a strange, uneasy calm—an empty black hole where my life used to be. I knew I wasn’t well, and nothing the doctor said came as a great surprise, but at least until I’d spoken to her there was still an element of uncertainty and doubt, and I could still think I might wake up tomorrow and feel better. Now that’s gone, and the only thing I know for sure is that I’m well and truly fucked. There was a guy at work who got cancer. We all had half a day off for his funeral, and the crematorium was packed. There were hundreds of people there—hundreds of lives affected by one death. Christ, no one will even notice when I go. If I die alone at the house, my body will just be left there to rot. No one gives a shit about me. They all just take what they need from me, then dump me.
I trudge slowly through the housing development, soaked through, laughing to myself at the bloody irony of it all. I’ve survived the war—countless attacks, battles, and fights, a gas chamber, bombings, a nuclear blast even—and yet it’s my own flesh and bone that’s finally going to finish me off as my body eats itself from the inside out.
I remember Adam, the crippled fighter I spent a few days with last summer, when the war was close to reaching its peak and the killing still felt brave and righteous. I often think about him. In constant pain and barely able to move without help, all he wanted to do was fight. In spite of his obvious physical limitations, the only thing that mattered to him was killing—wiping out the last of the Unchanged before they could get to him. It’s not his determination or his aggression I remember most, though. It’s his attitude to death. I sat with him as his body shut itself down, and I listened to him still talking about the next fight and the next kill as if he was going to go on forever. He was like an animal, blissfully
unaware of his own mortality, living for each moment, not wallowing in self-pity and waiting for his life to reach its inevitably anticlimactic ending.
What I’ve learned today has forced me into a position that is almost the exact opposite of Adam’s. He felt free and uninhibited; I’m restricted and trapped. His death meant nothing to him; mine is all I can think about. I’m already consumed by it; damned to spend my last days, weeks, and months (if I’m lucky) wondering how many more times I’ll wake up and see the sun rise, how many more times I’ll fall asleep, how many more fights I’ll have or avoid, how many books I’ll read or how many more times I’ll go to certain places or see certain people …
I’m between a rock and a hard place—Hinchcliffe on one side, Peter Sutton on the other—and I know I have to either do something about it or take Rona Scott’s advice and finish things right now. Last night I was on the verge of packing up and getting out of here for good, and Christ, I wish I had. Apart from suicide, leaving here is my only remaining option.
There’s a light up ahead. Someone with a flashlight is coming toward me, a coat over his head. Even from this distance I can tell by his height and the way he’s moving that it’s Rufus. What the fuck does he want now? Why can’t everyone just fuck off and leave me alone? There’s always someone looking for me, and they all want something. None of them ever wants to do anything for me. Well, they can all go to hell. I’ve got nothing left to give.
“Danny,” he yells as he flags me down, his voice sounding even more tense and unsure than usual. “Thank God I found you. Hinchcliffe wants to see you.”
“Hinchcliffe can fuck off,” I tell him, pushing past and continuing on toward the house. Rufus scurries after me, again overtaking and getting in my way, desperately trying to stop me.
“Where have you been?”
“Leave me alone, Rufus.”
“I’ve been looking for you all day.”
“Now you’ve found me.”
“You have to come—”
“I don’t have to do anything,” I tell him. “You can tell Hinchcliffe to go fuck himself. I’m through running around after him. I quit.”