The Days After

by Alistair Ballantine

  I fingered through the packet of cigarettes on the floor to my right and pulled one to my mouth. I lit the end and watched the smoke rise up out of tip. I turned the cigarette around and focused my eyes on its glowing end, I blew on it and the amber wrapped itself fully around the tip, I squeezed the filter and inhaled. Another amber light caught my eye, it wasn’t coming from the cigarette. I could see a flame floating in the distance. I stood up immediately and scrambled over the rooftops. I watched the flame as it danced, and then suddenly it fell and exploded into a fire ten times the size. I kept my eyes focused, but the fire made everything surrounding it darker. I climbed down the ladder and jumped off the second last step onto the landing. The moonlight glared through the windows, an eerie silver creeping across the walls. I made my way quickly down the stairs and snatched my car keys off the radiator by the wall. I swung the door open and peered around, there was nothing waiting outside.

  The mini started with a loud grunt and the headlights flickered. “Come on Rory.” My ex-girlfriend used to call the mini, rust-bucket Rory because of his numberplate. She thought she was being terribly witty and every time I used to have to choke out a laugh and unfortunately the nickname stuck with me, luckily, she did not. I pushed into first gear and twisted the wheel. I pulled out and drove around the corner past the church, I couldn’t see the fire from the road but I had a pretty good idea where the house was. I had to stay off Holland park avenue which meant stealing around the back streets. I reached the road I’d guessed where the fire was coming from. I could smell it in the air. I climbed onto the car but it made no difference, the houses were tall. I ran to the door of the first house on the road and rang the bell, then remembered the power was out and so pounded my palm against the door and counted to ten. No one came. I proceeded to do this with the next five houses until I gave up on waiting and started to just knock on the doors and move straight on to the next house. After what must have been fifteen or twenty houses I crossed the street and began on the houses opposite. I knocked on three more doors on the opposite side when I came to a house that had two of the things waiting at the top of the steps, pressed against the door. I hesitated, then decided that it had to be the house if they wanted to get in there so badly. I was standing on the pavement, but they already knew I was there and started to move away from the door, towards me. I took a few more steps back and then climbed onto the bonnet of a boxy family car parked outside. The things crawled down the steps and across the pavement until one was under the car, and the other pressed itself up against the front wheel. I leapt onto the street and ran around the back of the car and started pounding on on the door. I watched behind me as could the things changed their positions and starting to move back towards me. Barks came from behind the door. I kept pounding with my palm and the barks got closer. I bent down and looked through the letterbox, it was dark but I could make out a wagging tale.

  I shouted through the letter box and the dog jumped up and licked my fingers.

  I shouted again.

  I looked around and the things had made their way across the pavement and had started to crawl up the first step. I slapped my hand against the door a few more times and then turned and jumped over them at the bottom of the steps and climbed back onto the car.

  “Come here, come on. Back to the car.” I baited, stomping, denting the olive bonnet.

  “Shhhhh.” I heard from behind me. “Shhhh.” Came the voice again. I looked around and there was someone standing in the doorway of one of the houses I had already knocked on. I jumped off of the car and tiptoed to the house.

  “Do you realise how loud you were being, they're all going to bloody come here! You have to be quiet. Those things out there can hear.” Said the man.

  I looked him over and gave him the apology that he was so clearly after. He stood there, staring at me with his hands on his hips looking disappointed and pissed off. He was taller than me, his jaw looked heavy and his eyes were narrow slits of scrutiny. If my brother was here, he would have called him a Roman and told me to stay clear, Charles always had a thing about young men who stood up too straight and held their chin's too high.

  “Not a good idea to start shouting at every house in the area.” He continued.

  A girl behind him, “He didn’t know, besides, he’s here now. Lets just go back to the roof and keep an eye on the fire.” She was perched on a staircase in the dark.

  The man still standing authoritatively in the hallway gave out a sigh and then proceeded to introduce himself and girl in the dark, “I’m Edwin and this is my sister Rosie.”

  The hallway was wide and a narrow staircase curled up the wall on the left into the distance, a chandelier hung above me and there was a second towards the top of the stairs. It was very dark and ghostly pictures of men and women in oil stood and sat in heavy gold frames. Edwin led me up the stairs holding a long evening candle in his hand that had a large clump of foil wrapped around the bottom to catch the running wax. A ladder on the top floor opened up onto the rooftop where there stood two large metal bins, both with flames leaping out. They had stuffed the bottom of the bins with bricks to raise the flames of the burning cardboard and old pieces of furniture out, into sight.

  “We’re toasting marshmallows, would you like one?” Asked Rosie.

  Her face was orange from the fire and there was a smudged finger of soot down her cheek. Her hair was tied up and I couldn't tell what colour it was, her lips were full and rested comfortably on her soft amber skin, she was a renaissance painting and I immediately felt guilty for admiring her.

  I accepted and she passed me a chopstick with a pink marshmallow squashed onto the end.

  The atmosphere on the roof was tense, neither Rosie nor her brother were talking to each other. I wondered if it was me, if I had said something or done something to create the mood, I recounted what I had said, which was barely anything, an introduction, accepting a marshmallow, was I not what they were hoping for, maybe they could smell the whisky on me? Edwin already thought I was a nuisance, I started to think maybe I should leave. I could just stand up and tell them that I better get going, and if they wanted to find me I could give them my address, but maybe they wouldn't come for me, and then I would be alone again. Thankfully Rosie broke the silence before I spiralled any further into self doubt.

  “I know what you think, you don’t have to spell it out again.” She looked up from the fire at her brother, “I am just not ready yet. She is still there and whether or not there’s any of her left inside, neither you or I can say, but I am not prepared to just declare the end of it and move on. Do you think she would be if it was you or I in there?”

  Edwin let out a sigh and looked as though he wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, but didn't, “What happens if we stay here and nothing changes, what shall we do then? We might stay here and keep ourselves fed for a while, but then what? All this death around us is not healthy, you can catch all kinds of diseases from the dead and if that doesn’t get us then maybe it will be our spirits. I don’t much want to be reminded of death every time I venture outside. It is not a life.”

  “Well at least you are alive!” Rosie replied, the futility was obvious.

  The roof returned to silence and I stayed quiet, holding the marshmallow over a flame that was dwindling at the side of one of the barrels.

  When eventually the two of them tacitly agreed to move on and begin communicating once more, we discussed lighter issues and spent the rest of the night talking about our pasts, namely schools and jobs; the shallow topics seemed tentatively appropriate for the mood around the fire.

  Rosie’s life up to this point was similarly inappropriate or more accurately, as redundant as mine. She had spent her first eighteen years in one private school or another. She then, briefly had a job as a secretary in order to earn money for a gap year in South America that never materialised due to the sickness of a friend, which meant she spent the next six or so months using her saved money to party in London. She rec
ounted a number of her nights out which lightened the mood, yet she would finish off each story commenting on how pointless it had all been. She then studied History at Edinburgh for four years and had only been back a week when she was in a car crash with their mother. She had been knocked into a coma for two weeks and had an operation on her throat. She showed me the furry white plaster on her neck where apparently there were still stitches underneath.

  From what I could gather, which was difficult because Rosie was crying when she explained, was that their mother had been injured but returned from hospital only a few days after the accident, and she was, in some sense, still in the house.

  Edwin’s life on the other hand compounded the redundancy of Rosie’s and my own in light of our current predicament. He had spent most of his childhood at school in the country and later joined the military. He had survived almost entirely unscathed from a number of military tours in places that I only recognised in terms of black newspaper print. He'd been on a three man military exercise for the most of the last month in South America and returned to England on news of the car crash. He spoke without “ums” and “ers”, each sentence had their own factual merits, and their simple presence and pertinence made my own and Rosie's chatter seem childishly fervent.

  Still in the throws of jubilation from finding Rosie and Edwin, and lubricated by the descending whisky, I repeatedly complemented the pair of them and announced to the roof about how lucky I was to find them, to which Rosie would always answer about how lucky we both were to have Edwin with us, and how he was the best brother ever! I was glad when Edwin went to bed first as I was starting to feel obsequious and Edwin was clearly embarrassed by the comments. I feigned the desire to get him to stay up chatting, and thankfully he complained he was tired and courteously made it abundantly clear that there was no point in trying to sway him.

  “He's something special, don't you think?” Rosie said when Edwin had finally left the roof down the dark hatch.

  “Yes.” I agreed, “I still can't get over how fortunate I am to have found you two.” I hated myself.

  “I'm sure that it is us who are lucky to have met you.” She replied politely.

  Then she asked me what I had been doing for the last few days and I looked longingly into the fire, attempting to come across as forlorn, “I spent the last two days with my girlfriend.”

  “I'm sorry.” She replied, ”that must have been hard.”

  “Maybe I’ll be with her soon.” I put in a deep and morbidly hopeful tone, and then uttered into the fire, “I'm sorry about your mother.” I said with a considered pathos.

  Rosie didn't respond but joined me in watching the wooden chair legs burn and I covered my face as if I was crying.

  “And what of your friends and the rest of your family?” I eventually asked and she replied with surprising frankness.

  “Dad left us years and years ago, he has a new family and a new life in Scotland. I suppose whatever it is that has happened here, has happened up there too.” She paused and threw a chopstick into the fire. “My friends, well, I suppose they're all gone. It's all disappeared, our whole lives, none of it matters any more, our past I mean, all of that time spent, all of that effort invested and it's just vanished, and then, what's become of them, they're dead for no reason, they've probably all become those things, those organs.” She said, the frankness disappearing. “It's not right.”

  I responded with reflective silence whilst thinking about the elegant lines of her jar that so easily juxtaposed with her neck and yet fell away into the back of her cheeks.

  Satisfied with my maturity Rosie asked about my friends and I told her the truth, which took me by surprise; I told her about how I had left my friends behind over a year ago, the collapse of a relationship with a girl I’d known since childhood, our shared friends, our shared lives, our shared spaces and how I had absconded from it all and lost myself in work and associated only with disposable colleagues, “It was just easier that way.”

  “Maybe that was a good thing, in some way at least you have protected yourself from a lot of the pain of loss that can only be expected to come.” She said and I agreed with her and looked to the darkness between the stars in the distance, so as to appear lost in thought, and I knew she would discontinue the conversation because she would feel guilty for forcing me to relive the past.

  She passed me another marshmallow, and smiled to me, a smile filled with true sympathy, she actually cared through all of her own pain and her own loss, in that brief second she understood all that I should have been feeling and I felt guilty for taking her away from her own grief, impressing upon her my own, which wasn't even real.

  “This could be our last night.” She said warmly.

  “Yes.” I dully replied, squeezing the bridge of my nose.

  “Fancy a drink?”

  “Yes, why not?” I replied, probably too quickly. “Do you have any scotch?”

  “I will go and look.” She said and disappeared down the hatch, refusing any help.

  I told myself that Jessica would have done the same in my position, and I pictured her standing on the beach, grinning, waiting for me to chase her into the water, a blue and white striped bikini, salt thickened sun blushed blonde hair, no shoes.

  The clanking of glass sounded through the hatch, interrupting my dream, and I helped Rosie up the ladder.

  “The one with the bird on it, does that sound okay?” She said as she passed two glasses and a bottle of wine to me.

  I told her it was my favourite and poured the wine into one of the glasses, and she poured a lethal amount of scotch into the other, “Cheers,” we toasted.

  “Forgive me if you don't care to talk about it, but I feel I need to ask.” I hesitated, gauging her reaction, “What do you think has happened, what is this?” I said, gesturing with open arms to the surrounding city.

  She sipped her wine and winced, it was obviously terrible, “I don't know, a sickness, an evil sickness.” She took a much larger sip and winced again. “Did you see the news just before the power went out?”

  “No, I’m afraid I didn't.”

  “They said it was seventy five percent and growing.” She expected me to understand.

  Trying not to sound too ignorant I pressed her.

  “I'm bad at explaining, sorry.” She needlessly apologised. “They said in numerous different sample populations, before the power went out that at least seventy five percent of them had succumb to whatever this is, and that they were expecting this number to grow.”

  I didn't understand.

  “No, what I mean to say, is that seventy five percent of people had already died by the time the power went out, and who knows how many more have died since then.” She paused, I think for dramatic effect. “It could be everyone!”

  I tried to respond, but had nothing reassuring or intelligent to say.

  “I know what Edwin thinks, he won't tell me, but he thinks this is it, the end of it all! And that we're just lucky to have lived this long.”

  “But earlier he mentioned wanting to leave London, as if there was an alternative?”

  “Yes, well, he said that because he thinks he is protecting me, giving me hope, but I know what he thinks. He thinks we're going to die!”

  “But.” I muttered, lost for words.

  “That's what all of this is, it's all for my benefit.” She said gesturing towards the sign behind me and the fire. “I know what he truly thinks.”

  “Does he know, that you know?” I asked.

  “No, and he mustn’t, he needs a sense of purpose. We all need to play our parts.”

  “You two are such noble creatures.” I said laughing. “You're an English aspiration.”

  “No, but some things are more important.” She said seriously but with a smile, in visible reverie.

  We continued chatting on the roof until the fire turned to embers and then to ashes and the morning light began to illuminate the horizon to the east.

  Rosie
pointed me to a bedroom on the third floor and said good night and then kissed me on the cheek, which I wanted to read into.

  The room had a bunk bed against the wall on the right, and to the left was a large collection of teddy bears in and around a fireplace, all judging me. I drew the curtains and peered down, there were a number of the things on the steps of the house across the street, hiding in the shade from the rising sun and I couldn't make out how many. I blew out the candle, sat on the bottom bunk and watched them, absent-mindedly mesmerised by their writhing, sticky orgy, and thinking about the ethereal night that had just embraced me, still feeling the warmth on my cheek.

  13th July

  In the morning I opened the door to the dog in the neighbouring house once the two organs had left. I wasn't allowed to adopt him because Edwin was apparently severely allergic to dogs, which I didn't believe but Rosie confirmed. I tore open all of the dog food and left it in a pile on the floor of his kitchen so at least he had a chance, unlike the countless other pets that were invariable going to starve next to their deceased owners.

  I spent the next two days in limbo with Rosie and Edwin, flitting about the house trying to find things to do and every now and again venturing outside for daily supplies or in search of luxuries; with the help of a brick I replaced my entire summer wardrobe. One afternoon during a torturous game of scrabble we thought we heard a sign of life, a car horn had started to sound in the distance, Rosie and I shot each other looks of trepidation whilst Edwin's narrow eyes widened with anticipation. When we eventually tracked down the car, the denim jacketed driver was hunched over the wheel with her forehead pressed firmly on the rubber. We didn’t search the car any further as we knew what would be found lurking. Edwin decided it was best to leave her there to distract what used to be the neighbourhood.