“Yeah, it’s what dey call ironic, innit?” another of the gang, a tall fat kid, chipped in.
Chuck laughed. “Big word for a little turd.”
“Please don’t wind them up,” Amy begged, painfully aware of how close this was to turning violent. Yes, Chuck had the gun but she knew he would only manage to fire it once or twice before they stabbed him, then who knew how it would turn out.
“Why you hanging wiv a Fed, cuz?” the skinny black kid asked Jay.
“He’s alright for a Fed, cuz,” Jay tried to defend Muz.
“What’s wrong wiv you? Ain’t no Fed alright, fam,” the gang leader replied.
“Dat’s the bare truth. We should merc him, innit,” another of the gang added.
“Listen to me,” Margaret said. “We’re staying in this block until all this is over and we don’t want any trouble.”
“You got trouble,” the gang leader told her. “This is our block now.”
“Aw, come on, fam. Allow it,” Jay asked him.
“Allow it? Allow it? You tellin’ me allow it?” The youth’s level of aggression was beginning to build again now.
“Nah, boss. I’m just askin’, innit.”
“Askin’? You don’t ask me nothin’, you get me?” The anger in the skinny black kid’s voice acted as a cue for his mates and they readied their weapons in their hands.
“Yeah, boss. Sorry, man,” Jay said, trying his best to placate the gang leader.
“I’ve had enough of this shit,” Carl suddenly declared, producing the empty assault rifle, which had until that point been slung over his back, hidden from the eyes of the gang. “May I suggest you all do yourselves a big favour and fuck off?”
The gang leader’s demeanour instantly changed, as Carl actually pressed the muzzle of the rifle against the tip of his nose and he staggered back in shock.
“Whoah, easy, mate,” he said, recovering his composure a little and trying to save face in front of his friends. “Me and my crew, we was just messin’ wiv you. Chill, bruv. We ain’t staying. We heading up to that army line over the fields. We gonna get outa dis shit hole.”
“Believe me, fam, they won’t let you through,” Jay tried to tell them. “We just come from the cordon.”
“We’ll make them let us through, innit,” the black youth said, straightening his bandana with unconscious nervousness while thrusting out his chest.
“Yeah, we ain’t afraid of no army guys,” his big fat friend added. “Bunch of pussies finking dat they bad just ’cos they got guns.”
“An army guy tried to test me one night before all this shit,” another of the arrogant kids said. “When I was out with my girl, he called the bitch a sket. Dropped him with one punch. Bang. Bouncers had to call for an ambulance, innit. Swear down.”
His gang mates looked at him as though they knew he was lying.
“I swear down,” he protested.
“Come on, let’s get outa here,” the leader said. He lurched aggressively at Muz, as though he might be about to throw a punch but then turned and walked away.
“But…” Jay began to say.
“Let them go,” Chuck told him, as the gang put up their hoods and began to scurry off, laughing among themselves.
The big fat youth turned back as he continued to walk away. Making one hand into the shape of a gun, he mimed firing off a couple of rounds at Carl.
“But…” Jay started again.
“Just let them go,” Muz agreed with Chuck.
The group stood and watched the young idiots strut off along Lacey Drive, making sure they were actually leaving the area.
“Let’s get inside,” Margaret then said, hoping the previous animosity among the group had been set aside.
Inside the entrance to the tower, they barricaded the main doors as best as they could with the furniture they had piled up, and then headed up the stairs.
Chapter 12
Amoeba
Back in the squalid little flat up on the thirteenth floor of the tower, Muz couldn’t help feeling that Chuck was watching him constantly. It wasn’t just him the big man was keeping an eye on. Whenever anyone got up from where they were sitting, he watched them intently, particularly when they headed for the hallway. Trying and failing to be subtle, he would crane his neck, leaning out of his armchair, to check they weren’t making a move for the front door.
The mood of the place was as sour as the stale smell in the air. None of them spoke, but several meaningful glances were exchanged. No one made eye contact with Chuck though, no one except Tom, who sat glaring at him.
Unable to tolerate the tension, Margaret got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. She prepared for the group a simple meal of tuna, sweet corn and mayonnaise mixed into penne pasta. She even went to the effort of squeezing in the juice from a wedge of lemon to give it a little more flavour. Dishing it out onto four plates and three bowls, she took them through to the living room. The group ate heartily but in virtual silence.
“What were you thinking, attempting to break through the road block with the truck?” Chuck eventually blurted out at Muz, unable to take any more. He was correct in thinking that the tension in the room was due to people’s anger at him for having spoiled their chance to escape. “You do know it would have never worked, don’t you?”
Muz didn’t reply, instead focusing on the bowl in his lap.
“Even if we had, by some miracle, managed to escape,” Chuck felt the need to argue further, “you, as a police officer, have a responsibility to the safety of the public. That includes making sure this shit doesn’t spread any farther than it already has.”
Unable to hold his tongue any longer, Muz bit back.
“Hey, I know there are dangers in the job I do,” he said, “but I’m not some army drone who signed his life away on a dotted line. I just want to get home to my family.”
“If this gets out past that cordon, you won’t have a family,” Chuck told him.
Muz looked at him with hard acidic eyes for having even suggested that his wife and daughter might be in danger.
“We all have a responsibility to keep this contained,” Chuck insisted, looking around the room and trying to catch the eyes of the others.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Amy murmured almost inaudibly, while hand feeding Digby a piece of pasta.
“What’s that meant to mean?” Chuck barked back.
“Deciding to stay in here is an easy decision for you to make,” Amy came back at him, louder and more confident now. “But the rest of us aren’t in the same boat as you.”
Chuck’s eyes widened and now it was his turn to avoid eye contact with anyone.
“What do you mean?” Muz asked Amy, clearly seeing from Chuck’s reaction that the woman had struck a nerve.
“What’s she talking about?” Carl challenged Chuck.
When the fat man failed to respond, Amy took it upon herself to press him.
“I’ve seen that hanky you’re always coughing into,” she said.
“What about his hanky?” Carl asked, looking more and more worried by the second.
“It’s stained with blood,” the little paramedic stated.
“Shit. You mean he’s infected?” Carl asked, jumping up from where he had been sat on the floor and edging away from the big black man.
“No. Calm down,” Amy replied.
“Then what?” Carl asked again, feeling confused and still fearful. “I don’t understand.”
“Are you going to tell them or shall I?” Amy asked.
Chuck locked angry eyes on her but she didn’t give any sign of backing down.
“What?” Carl demanded.
“I’ve got lung cancer,” Chuck announced solemnly, hanging his head.
“Oh,” was all Carl could say in return.
“Shit,” Jay added.
“Yeah, it is,” Chuck said flatly.
Feeling extremely stressed at being forced to reveal so much about himself, he put down h
is plate and reached into his jeans pockets. Pulling out a packet of fags and a lighter, he lit one up with a shaky hand, not even bothering to go out onto the balcony with it.
“Should you really be doing that?” Margaret asked him, her voice full of concern.
Chuck tried to laugh back at her but it turned into a violent cough. “I’m already a dead man,” he finally managed to reply.
“If you’re coughing up blood, it must be pretty advanced,” Muz said. “How can you be on operational duty?”
“Nobody knows about it,” Chuck told him, thick grey smoke pouring from his mouth. “I had the good sense, when I first started suffering, to get checked out outside the military. All the observations I’ve had have been by civilian doctors. I knew that if the army medics found out, I’d never see another tour again… and I’m no desk jockey.”
Muz could kind of relate to that. He himself had kept past injuries to himself to prevent Occupational Health taking him off the streets, but that was no way near on the same level as this.
“Have you received any treatment for it?” Amy asked.
“By the time I was concerned enough to get myself to a doctor, it was already too widespread to treat effectively,” Chuck told her. “Besides, chemotherapy? No thanks. I’d rather not become a ghost until after I’m dead. I decided I wanted to keep working as long as I could. Even most of my family don’t know.”
The room went silent again then, as people fought with their conflicting feelings for the big man. They were annoyed that he had kept so much about himself from them. They felt pity for him, but were also angry that he had stood in their way of a chance to escape. Amy was right; they all still had their whole lives ahead of them, even if he didn’t.
“If you’re meant to be controlling this outbreak,” Carl said after about ten minutes of contemplation, “How did you end up stuck in here with the rest of us?”
Chuck had finished his smoke and was digging into his plate of pasta again but paused to answer the man.
“The Joint Task Force are usually the military’s initial responders to any global incident that the Crown has an interest in,” he explained. “We’re not normally deployed on home soil, but then there’s not normally a reason for us to be.
“When we were first ground assigned, I elected to lead an attached troop on a recce of ground zero. Biggest mistake of my life. Our mission was to investigate the site of the initial outbreak of public disorder, in an effort to try to ascertain the reason. That was before it had even been considered that the civil unrest might be caused by some kind of disease.
“We were attacked,” Chuck’s eyes began to glaze over as he was drawn in by the terrible memory of what had happened. “In a matter of hours since the initial police report, the numbers of the afflicted had grown way beyond what we’d expected and their tolerance of pain and injury was not something we had been briefed on. My men didn’t stand a chance. It was a slaughter.
“The few that managed to make it back inside the APCs alive made an immediate tactical retreat. I got pinned down and couldn’t get to the RVP in time. They left me. I don’t blame though; I guess they just thought I’d been eaten, like all the others.”
Really, Muz thought to himself as Chuck ended his monologue. Or did you leave them, he wondered, thinking back over what he had seen of Chuck’s self-preservation instincts.
“So, why were you wearing a suit when we first bumped into you?” Carl asked, remembering the moment Chuck had stepped out of the black TT, having almost run him down.
“I broke into a tailor’s and stole it,” Chuck replied with a shrug. “I didn’t want the media helicopters focusing on me. It would have been… an embarrassment for the military. I also didn’t want civilian survivors looking to me for help, when I was just as screwed as they were.”
“Now I get it,” Muz said bitterly.
“Get what?” Chuck asked.
“Now I understand why you chose a flat all the way over here on the Stonegrove to hold up in, when there were perfectly good options back in Colindale. You wanted to get somewhere where you could keep a close eye on the activity on both the north and west cordons.”
Chuck nodded with a shrug.
“When we were back at the nick and I said that I wanted to keep heading west, you knew the military cordon had been put in place less than half a mile off in that direction, didn’t you?” Muz accused him.
The big man nodded again.
“Like I said,” he added defensively. “I was just trying to stop you from getting yourself killed by snipers.”
Muz glowered down at his food. He was so angry now that he couldn’t even think about eating another bite, despite his hunger.
“Are you, like, meant to be Special Forces or somefin’?” Jay asked with open scepticism, looking him up and down.
“No,” Chuck told him. “The JTF aren’t Special Forces, though we often have some attached to us, as needs require. We’re a deployable microcosm of the tip of the military’s command structure, working under the direction of COBRA…”
“COBRA?” Amy stopped him. “Sounds very Hollywood.”
“Yeah, they’s G.I. Joe’s enemies, innit,” Jay announced proudly.
“Seriously? How old are you again?” Chuck asked him, his voice heavy with exasperation. “It stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’, the government’s initial disaster control office. It’s our job to assess a problem up close as it unfolds and report our findings back to PJHQ, the non-mobile headquarters.”
Margaret, who had been sat in the armchair by the window, eating her food with an expression of distaste and quietly taking in all this new information, now spoke.
“If you are, as you say, a non-commissioned officer, how is it that you’re able to be so… well, portly?” she asked.
Chuck shot her a stern look. “You mean fat,” he said.
“I would never be quite so rude,” Margaret replied.
“No, no. Say what you mean,” Chuck insisted. “The military’s not like all the Hollywood films. Not all soldiers look like Dolph Lundgren, you know.”
“Dolph who?” Jay asked.
“It’s a privilege of rank,” Chuck went on, answering Margaret, while ignoring the boy’s ignorance. “Fitness tests are formally not an option for any rank, but informally, if I’m too ‘busy’ to attend them, the PTIs don’t tend to chase me up.”
“That’s good,” Carl jumped in with a grin. “’cos it doesn’t look like they’d have to chase you very far.”
Chuck gave him a smile the grim reaper might have been proud of but he didn’t say anything back. He had long since learned to take on the chin the ribbings about his weight from his men. When he had first started gain a few pounds, he hadn’t worried too much about it, telling everyone it was ‘combat reserves’. He had joked, telling his troops that, if they were all in the field and the ration drops stopped coming in, he would be the last man standing. When the time came that he ran out of holes on his belts however, he finally had to admit that he was just plain fat.
After Chuck’s story, the day stretched on with only pockets of stilted conversation among the group. Most of their time they spent watching BBC News but still they learned nothing more than they knew already. Chuck spent long hours stood alone out on the balcony of this flat and occasionally, disappeared off to the other that overlooked the west cordon line.
As the evening at long last began to close in, Margaret made an attempt at breaking the tension they were all clearly feeling by bullying the rest of the group into playing a game of charades. It didn’t go down well. It felt so absurd and out of place to engage in such frivolous activity in the wake of all the horror they had seen. Chuck flatly refused to get involved and Margaret didn’t push him. Tom was completely out of his league and just sat there with a stupid perplexed expression written across his broad face.
As far as the others were concerned, playing the game only served to illustrate how different they all were from each o
ther. Margaret spent almost twenty minutes attempting to mime La Triviata, which she had seen at the Bolshoi theatre only last year. Even when she conceded defeat and told the others the title, all she got in response were blank stares. Jay received the same response when he mimed Lose Yourself by Eminem.
“I thought M and Ms were sweets,” Muz said without even a hint of sarcasm.
Jay kissed his teeth and folded his arms in a sulk.
That night, having locked the front door and the barred cage, Chuck kept the keys on him. None of the others would be leaving the flat without waking him.
On the morning of the fifth day, Carl was the first to wake. When Muz came around, he discovered the man out on the balcony in the wet chilly air. As the copper stepped through the door from the relative warmth of the flat, he saw that Carl had his wallet held open in his hands and he was staring of a photo held behind a clear plastic window in one of its compartments. From the glimpse that Muz managed to get before Carl swiftly closed the wallet, it was a picture of a chunky looking tortoiseshell cat. It was hard to tell because the other man’s silver fringe was hanging in front of his face but Muz could have sworn Carl had a tear in his eye.
“Seen anything interesting?” Muz asked casually.
Carl shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, slicking it back out of his eyes.
“How you feeling today?” Muz then asked, allowing a little compassion to break through a crack in his now hardened shell.
“I really need to get back to work,” Carl told him. “This has gone on for too long now. The CEO is going to kill me if I’m not back in soon.”
“What?” Muz asked in response. “You’re telling me that your main concern is that it’s going to be your boss that’s going to kill you?”
“Figure of speech.”
They heard the door open behind them and looked back to see Chuck stepping out.
“Hey,” the overweight soldier said, a steaming hot mug of coffee in one hand and a packet of fags in the other.
The other two men nodded curtly at him, and after no more than a couple of minutes of standing there in uncomfortable silence, they went back inside, leaving Chuck alone.
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