The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  The problem was that Stella didn’t do Facebook, and he didn’t have Stella’s phone number, and the only person he knew who did was in a secure quarantine ward making increasingly infrequent contact with reality.

  He probably didn’t really need to talk to Doug Lewis.

  Ben pulled the duvet over his head, and went to sleep slowly shredding fragments of skin from the side of his thumb.

  He spent most of the next day under the duvet as well.

  Around eight that evening he got out an old notebook and laboriously hand-printed a summary of the law as it pertained to recordings made without the subject’s knowledge or consent. He typed it up without checking his inbox, and emailed it to Kyle without looking at any of the emails he’d received from a long list of people.

  “MP Doug Lewis, who announced he was quitting politics yesterday,” said the TV, when Ben turned the volume up.

  He changed the channel.

  “Conversion of the old paediatric ward into a quarantine ward. Now you’ve claimed this will save the NHS hundreds of thousands over building a new ward, but does the cost-effectiveness really balance against a possible decrease in safety? What is the contagion risk with a repurposed building?”

  Ben changed the channel again.

  “—dreds of you have written in about this new product, Vitalux, which claims to offer protection by strengthening the brain/blood barrier with the use of peptides. Now, we’ve spoken to a good ten experts on this, and the response has been unanimous: this does not work. We have one in the studio now, Dr Jean Rushton. Dr Rushton, can you explain a little more about what this product is claiming to do and what it can actually do?”

  Ben turned the sound back off.

  At eleven, while he was drifting in and out of sleep and contemplating drugging himself unconscious, Ben’s phone rang and frightened the piss out of him with a shrill beep in the middle of an entirely silent flat.

  His sudden jerk alarmed the cat, who dug her claws into his chest and made him yelp, making her dig her claws in even more.

  Once they’d broken the man/feline cycle of noise and pain, Ben managed to locate his phone and answer it before voicemail took over.

  “Are you coming this evening?” Molly asked, half-peevish and half-concerned.

  “Can’t walk,” said Ben, promptly. “So probably not.”

  “Okay,” Molly said, uncertainly. “You know you should see a doctor, right?”

  “Seen one,” said Ben, with absolute sincerity. “Seen several at once.”

  “…Take care, Ben,” Molly said, and hung up.

  Ben wrote Doug Lewis on the back of his hand, hobbled to the bathroom, and put a sleeping pill into his face. He wobbled back again, and dislodged Minnie from her position slap bang where he wanted to lie down.

  He sank into a dreamless black abyss of sleep from which he didn’t wake for a full twelve hours.

  Ben woke groggy and disoriented but with the distinct impression there was something he needed to do. Once he’d been to the loo and ascertained that it wasn’t that, he shuffled aimlessly around the kitchen, making more toast than any one person should reasonably eat, and at last caught sight of his hand.

  “Oh,” Ben said, losing heart. “Right.”

  He rifled through various letters in their storage place of a box that he’d been meaning to organise, until he found several headed with the NHS logo, and worked through them by date until he’d got the most recent one.

  “This probably isn’t necessary,” he told Minnie, who was chewing the toe of his sock intently. She paused, looked up at him, and made a sound like a fart underwater, before returning to the apparent treat of pulling apart cheap cotton fibre.

  Ben found the handset for the land line and laid it beside him.

  He worked his way through the entire plate of toast.

  When the last crumb of dry bread had been consumed, and Minnie had torn a hole the size of a one pence piece in the toe of his sock, rendering it unusuable, Ben girded his loins a little further, picked up the handset, and called the ward number.

  “Hello?” He waited for the introductory spiel to die down, and added, “My name’s Ben Martin, I’m the registered next of kin for Leah Martin, number eight…er, number eight-seven-seven?”

  Ben picked at the hole in his sock while the person on the other end of the line looked this up on their system.

  “Yes, I was just wondering if you still had my sister’s telephone in her effects?”

  There was another pause, and then confirmation.

  “Is there any chance I can either collect it or — I just need one of the contacts from it.”

  There was a certain amount of confusion on the end of the line.

  “No, it’s okay, I don’t need to disturb her, I just need one of the contacts from her phone—” Ben began, again, pulling a thread out of his sock. “No, no, I just need—it’s not necessary to—”

  But they’d already connected him.

  “Ben?”

  For a moment she sounded as close to her old self as he could remember. Ben’s heart sank quietly towards his feet. When he’d first found out, when she’d first cheerfully told him she was going into quarantine and there was nothing to worry about because there’s always plenty of time, when no one had known that she’d had it for years already, he’d hoped, pathetically, that it was a mistake. There were false-positives for every test, after all: that was how the KBV test had been developed. It was in all the papers. There could easily have been a mistake, some sort of sample mix-up, some kind of instrument failure.

  After seeing the degree of back-up and cleanliness and science theatre at HPA he’d let that hope drain out of him, replaced by the understanding that there wasn’t a mistake and that furthermore, Leah wasn’t going to get better. She wasn’t going to be the miraculous person who survived. She wasn’t going to be the first person to get a cure manufactured in the nick of time and struggle back to life and sanity with a weak smile and a squeeze of someone’s hand.

  She was going to die, spitting blood and swearing, incoherent and in pain, isolated from everyone she knew, just like everyone else who had KBV. Just like Natalya would.

  “Hi Leah,” Ben began. “How’s…things?”

  “They’re starving me,” Leah said, in a half-snarl. “They’re starving me and they’re stealing my fucking blood right out of my veins.”

  “Oh,” said Ben. “That’s…nasty.”

  “You put me in here,” said Leah, who apparently no longer remembered that she’d gone along with the government mandate for quarantine with cheerful compliance and the blithe certainty that it was all a mistake that would soon be rectified. “You and your cunt father just shoved me in here to get rid of me.”

  “I’m…I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened,” Ben said weakly.

  “You’re all after my blood,” Leah insisted, so loud that it was as if she had shoved the handset into her throat. “You’re all trying to take my blood and starve me to death in here.”

  “That is literally the opposite of what I want,” Ben assured her.

  “How’s college?” Leah added, taking an abrupt left turn into normality again.

  “It’s, it’s not bad, yeah,” said Ben, going gamely along with this. “It’s, I need to get hold of Stella, actually, for that.”

  “Stella!” Leah said, with delight. “How’s Stella?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said patiently, “I don’t have her number. If you tell me I can find out—”

  “She probably wants me to rot in here just like you do,” Leah said darkly. “You and the fucking nurses.”

  “I expect she misses you,” Ben said, plucking another thread out of his sock.

  “Have you heard from Mum?”

  “Of course not. But if you give me Stella’s number—” Ben tried, unravelling a little more of his sock.

  There was a sound on the end of the phone which he initially thought was machinery, and was then puzzled b
y because it sounded more like a furious dog, until he realised it was Leah, growling into the phone. There was a scuffling noise somewhere in the background. He wondered if they were actually allowed phone handsets in quarantine, or if this was just some sort of speakerphone he was blaring out of into a ward with its own airstream.

  “Leah?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Ben took a couple of slow breaths. “I know.”

  “They’re not feeding me.”

  Ben strongly doubted this. He ran through the list of symptoms in his head, practically engraved into his memory, and settled on: pica, indiscriminate hunger, obsession with blood, desire to bite.

  “Do you want me to tell Stella they’re not feeding you?” Ben suggested.

  “Yes,” Leah said, petulant and hoarse. “Tell Stella. Tell everyone. I need meat, I’m anaemic, they don’t even care. They want me to die.”

  “If you give me Stella’s number,” Ben said, “I can tell her and we can try and get them to give you more meat.”

  There was a long silence. In the background, Ben could hear people shouting. There was a motor running, a fan of some kind, and more hoarse voices.

  “Leah?”

  Still nothing. Ben wandered if she’d walked away and left the phone completely.

  “Leah?”

  “I want to go home,” Leah said quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m not ill. Everyone here is fucking crazy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The man in the bed next to mine swallowed his watch,” Leah went on, “and now no one is allowed any jewellery or anything like that. And it’s too cold.” She sniffed. “They moved some people onto Death Row because they started spitting up blood, and the man in the bed next to mine tried to lick it off the floor.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben repeated.

  “Stella’s on 07XXX XXX XXX,” Leah went on, so matter-of-factly that Ben had to struggle to write it down, “and they won’t let me call her. This phone doesn’t do outbound calls at all. And I’m not fucking sick, Ben, they’ve put me in here with people who lick the blood off floors and I’m not even fucking sick—”

  There was a bang. Ben jumped, but it was followed by another, and another, until he realised that she must be hitting the wall next to the phone.

  “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH ME,” Leah screamed. “NOTHING. THEY PUT ME IN HERE TO STARVE WITH CRAZY PEOPLE AND I’M NOT EVEN SICK.”

  There was a deafening buzz of the kind that was used in intercoms. The background noise of Leah’s call cut out abruptly, along with the thumping and screaming, and a calm voice said, “I’m afraid we’ve had to terminate your call, Mr Martin.”

  “That’s,” Ben said, shakily. “That’s okay.”

  “We’re going to give your sister a sedative,” said the voice. “She’s a little wound up right now.”

  “I, I can tell,” said Ben, breathing through his mouth. “Th-thank you.”

  “We’re doing everything we can to make her comfortable,” the voice went on, soothingly. “Which I’m afraid includes trying to stop her from damaging herself.”

  “Okay,” said Ben, swallowing. “Okay.”

  “Was there anything you wish to discuss with the care team?”

  Ben shook his head, remembered that he was on the phone, and said, “N-no, that’s fine. I. We discussed what I needed to discuss. She, uh. She’s pretty adamant she’s not, she’s not getting enough meat. Is that—?”

  “A symptom?” the voice finished. “Yes, unfortunately. We think the part of the brain that registers ‘full’ signals from the stomach is degraded by this point, but no one knows yet why the fixation on meat, or blood. Certainly there’s no measurable decrease in dietary iron. We take regular samples, and she’s not anaemic.” There was a pause. “Is that everything?”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Sorry. Thank you. Sorry.”

  He hung up.

  After a few minutes he got up. He rested his full weight experimentally on his sprained ankle, and a bolt of livid red pain lanced up his leg and through his field of vision.

  Ben stamped to the bathroom, impeded by the occasional inability to see and the accompanying loss of balance as he thumped his injured foot down.

  He pushed the toilet seat back.

  He took his toothbrush from the sink, rotated it until the bristles stuck into the palm of his hand, and opened his mouth.

  He barely touched his tongue: a loaf of nearly undigested white toast hit the backs of his teeth and bounced off the sides of the toilet bowl.

  When the heaves had died off, he flushed the toilet, brushed his teeth, and stared at himself in the mirror.

  There were bile burns around the edges of his lips: his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair needed cutting. The base of his nose was red and raw.

  Ben closed his eyes, and limped back to the living room.

  He drank two glasses of water, sat down as close to cross-legged as he could, and picked up his iPhone.

  Stella answered on the fifth ring.

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  Ben forgot his original script for a moment, feeling around his teeth for any leftover toast, but remembered to say something before the pause got too weird.

  “It’s Ben,” he said, “Ben Martin, I—”

  “Ben!” she sounded relieved. There was a bump, a slam, and some outdoors-sounding noises — he guessed she’d stepped out of work for a minute. “How are you? Did you talk to—?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “I just got off the phone to her. She’s, uh.”

  “I heard they moved her,” Stella went on, lowering her voice. “How’s she, how is she taking it? Did…what’s going on?”

  Ben stared at his own hands for a moment. “She’s.” He diverted his attention to the ceiling. “She thinks they’re stealing her blood,” he said at last. “And that they’re not feeding her enough. They’re, um. She’s on the ward before the last one.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Fuck,” said Stella, eventually. “Oh…Ben, I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Ben said, from a long way outside of his own head.

  “That’s right,” Stella rallied, and Ben imagined her standing up straighter. “It isn’t over yet, there’s a lot of work being done, it’s not a fait accompli at all. Don’t lose hope, Ben, and tell her not to—”

  “I will,” said Ben. He didn’t add, but she’ll forget five minutes later. He only scanned the ceiling for spider webs with the kind of detachment he used to take to individual therapy sessions. “She, uh, she asked after you.”

  “Even now?” Stella sighed. “They won’t let me talk to her.”

  “I know.” Ben twisted a thread from his sock around his fingers. “Did you try pretending to be her girlfriend, or—?”

  “No luck,” said Stella. “They won’t even let…unless you’re down on the form as next of kin. And I don’t think she was taking it very seriously when she filled that in.”

  In hindsight, Ben thought, by the time Leah filled in the form she was probably already having psych symptoms. The flippancy, the impulsivity, the recklessness…the reported promiscuity…

  “Listen,” Ben said, “I asked her for your number so I could let you know what was going on without waiting for it to filter through Dad and Melinda, but also there’s—” he ruminated, trying to get to the best approach and only finding that his stomach felt hard-done-by. “Are you still friends with Doug Lewis?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “I…yeah?” Stella sounded bewildered. “I mean, not friends exactly, but I still have his number, I see him about once a year…why?”

  Ben pulled out another thread. “I…I think I need to talk to him?”

  “He’s quitting, though,” said Stella, promptly. “I mean, if you want him to intercede for Leah — I don’t even know what — I’ve tried, I asked him a few times and he’s done his best but there’s so many…”

  “It’s…complicated,
” Ben said, slowly. “And I don’t think I even…entirely know why I need to speak to him, I just…think I probably do.” He took a deep breath. “It’s to do with — did you read those articles before they got taken down?”

  “Huh?” Stella seemed distracted. “I meant to, I don’t — Melinda emailed me one but by the time I got around to it there wasn’t anything there.” She turned away from the phone and added, “Yeah, in a minute.”

  Ben relinquished his sock, and caught Minnie giving him a disapproving look.

  “I’m just going to email you his number, what’s your address?” Stella said, suddenly. “I’ve got to get back to work, I can’t — give Leah my love. If she remembers me.”

  Ben gave Stella his email address, and hung up.

  Brrp, said Minnie, trying to steal the sock.

  “Easy for you to say,” Ben retorted.

  Stella didn’t get around to emailing him the number until nearly four, but Ben judged this to still be a reasonable time to call an MP, even if he had heard they knocked off work around half-past two due to the terrible strain of doing absolutely nothing all the time.

  Dialling Doug Lewis’s number was somehow easier. There wasn’t any expectation attached, Ben thought, as he settled back against the windowsill and pushed Minnie away gently with his injured foot. The worst case scenario would be Doug Lewis telling him to sod off in no uncertain terms. It wasn’t like he was about to make Ben feel guilty as well.

  The former MP’s phone rang for quite some time.

  Ben was about to give up, on the understanding that the man had sensibly disabled voicemail, when there was a breathless, “Hello, Doug Lewis,” in his ear.

  “Um, hi,” said Ben, realising he wasn’t actually sure where he was going. “My name’s Ben Martin, I’m a friend of Stella Omo?”

  “Oh alright,” said Doug Lewis, with genial indifference, “what can I do for you, Ben?”

  “Right,” said Ben, falling back on honesty. “Um, the thing is, I’m a journalism student, and I was…I’m trying to put together a thing about KBV, and I was wondering, since you’re…since you’re quitting politics, if…”