The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  Ben closed his laptop. “There don’t seem to be any ‘bad people’ in this. Just…greedy ones or…”

  “Misinformed ones, stupid ones, lazy ones, dismissive ones, ones who give up easily, ones who were careless with labelling things,” Dr Bill ticked them off on his fingers. “No one drop makes an ocean.”

  “If they have a way to…to stop KBV—” Ben began, but Dr Bill cut him off.

  “Not if. They do.”

  The Ides came and went. The news lost its collective mind, and as if to make up for lost time began vomiting out continual coverage of every unreported source and disappearance in relation to KBV that could possibly be found. The news cycle grew so saturated that people on Twitter began pointedly posting links to everything else that was happening in the world: there were still natural disasters, murders, robberies, rapes, political machinations — more when everyone was paying attention to something else — art gallery openings, lost cats, celebrity weddings, suicides, miscarriages of justice, and even a shuttle launch.

  Life, people said indignantly on social media, didn’t stop.

  Ben returned from college at lunchtime, laden with library books and a list of subheadings for Kyle Project Just Write The Damn Thing Ben.doc, with little determination and a very real desire to just eat lunch and then watch the news for a few hours.

  Minnie was asleep on the back of the futon, but mrrp’d at him when he put the books down next to her, and stretched her foot into his face, nearly knocking off his glasses.

  “Fuck you too,” Ben said, tickling her behind the ears.

  On the TV, the silent screen purported that the Prime Minister, Minister for Health, and heads of the Medical Council and NHS had called an emergency meeting. It informed him that security at Stevenage had been ‘ramped up’ because of the angry protests outside, and that someone from the security company had quit in a spectacular fashion which involved distributing pepper spray to the protesters. It mentioned, in passing, that Boots had run out of sputum tests at fifty branches and that HPA had warned they might not be able get them from the manufacturers quickly enough to meet needs.

  Ben’s books slithered off the back of the futon.

  “Arse,” said Ben, still watching the TV and the closed captions he couldn’t remember turning on.

  The TV informed him that an employee of XXXXX/XXXXXX was in hospital after being assaulted on his way home. It cut to footage of a badly bruised man in bed repeatedly saying, in green text across the bottom of the screen, I work in payroll I don’t know anything about this.

  Ben looked away and picked up his books. He recalled one of his interviewees saying, How easy it is to feel responsible for where your efforts end up. It had been a question at the time, but the answer presented itself without fanfare. How easy.

  He looked, up, caught the words, multiple fractures, and changed the channel.

  As if to break the tension, the landline rang.

  “Hooray,” said Ben, looking for the handset. “I’ve been missold PPI again, have I?”

  He found the handset under the futon and gave Minnie a stern look.

  “Calling chatlines again?”

  He picked up.

  “Hello, can I speak to Ben Martin, please?”

  The voice was so practiced that Ben almost believed it was another PPI scammer, but they didn’t sound quite bored or eager enough, only strangely sympathetic.

  “Speaking.” He made himself comfortable on the futon: the TV was showing an advert for something you could plug into a socket to fill your entire house with CGI forests.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr Martin,” said the voice, as if she’d said it a hundred times already that day, “you will be receiving a letter in a few days to confirm this but we feel the news has to be got out as quickly as possible.”

  Ben froze on the futon, and said slowly, “Right?”

  “I’m afraid Miss Leah Martin is no longer with us,” said the voice.

  “Right,” said Ben, again.

  “We understand this is a very difficult time for relatives of secure ward patients,” went on the voice. “And we would like to remind you that there is a hotline already set up for counselling, 08XX XXX XXXX — that’s twenty-four hours, now, if you need any kind of support or have questions or you’re concerned about the possibility of infection yourself, please don’t hesitate to call the hotline.”

  “Right,” said Ben.

  “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

  “Right,” Ben said, staring through what was now a footballer being showered in chocolate bars.

  “Mr Martin?”

  “Right,” Ben repeated.

  “I’m afraid I have to contact quite a lot of people,” said the voice. “Do you understand what’s happened?”

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  It got dark.

  Around seven, Kingsley came in with his bike. Ben wasn’t sure quite what was on the TV screen any more. He wasn’t sure, either, what was in his head. It felt like static, but as the TV was fine, it was probably just a reflection of something involving bright lights and a nervous contestant trying to pick an answer.

  “Didn’t think you were into Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? reruns,” said Kingsley, leaning over the back of the futon.

  Ben said nothing.

  “Papers are full of it still,” Kingsley added, picking up the remote. “Are you actually watching this?”

  Ben said nothing.

  “Where’s the cat?”

  Ben registered that he was being asked a question, but couldn’t comprehend what the contents were, and so he didn’t answer.

  “Ben?”

  Kingsley poked him in the shoulder with a long, bony, and rain-wet finger. “Ben-ja-min?”

  “Yes,” Ben’s mouth said, from a distant galaxy. “That’s me.”

  “I…know…that’s you.” Kingsley stared at him for a moment. “Are you okay?”

  Ben watched the contestant fail to get a maths question right.

  “I don’t think so,” his mouth said, far, far away.

  “I don’t think so either,” Kingsley said, still staring at him. “What…is happening. Right now. What’s going on?”

  Ben shrugged.

  “Are you on something?” Kingsley gave him another prod. “This isn’t good shit, whatever it is. Tell me what…”

  Ben said, “She should have said forty-six.”

  Kingsley turned the TV off.

  A black hole sucked out of the wall in front of Ben, pulled at the edges of his consciousness, ate into his brain. He reached for the remote, but Kingsley moved it away, and waved his hand in front of Ben’s face.

  “Ben.”

  He turned to Kingsley but couldn’t quite focus on his face — his field of vision seemed to have been displaced to some point beyond the flat, beyond the city, beyond anywhere he could think of.

  “If you don’t fucking answer me I’m calling an ambulance. Ben, are you okay?”

  The word bubbled slowly out of somewhere in Ben’s midriff, but it dragged him back into himself: painfully, without mercy, but back into himself.

  “No,” said Ben, making eye contact and wishing he hadn’t. He could feel his face trying to crumple into an expression, and fought it off. “I don’t…I don’t think I am.”

  Kingsley gave him a worried, suspicious look, and patted him slowly on the shoulder. “I’m making tea.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Leah’s dead.”

  Kingsley stopped in mid-pat and let his hand rest on Ben’s shoulder. It was warm, and long, and felt like a smaller version of Minnie sitting there. “Okay,” said Kingsley, after a moment. “I am making a lot of tea.”

  At midnight, Kingsley said, “You should try to sleep.”

  Ben unrolled the futon mechanically, and lay down on it.

  He stared at the ceiling until the dark receded, and then he stared at the ceiling until it returned.

  “I’ve got to go to The Princess tonight,” said
Ben, lying supine and immobile, forty-eight hours after a phone call full of polite, sympathetic destruction.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” said Kingsley, from the wooden chair he’d taken to using now that Ben wouldn’t get up off the floor. “Look at you.”

  “Need money,” Ben said, making no move to go anywhere.

  Kingsley picked up Ben’s phone. It had been buzzing, beeping, blonking, and generally trying to attract his attention at the usual rate for the last two days, plugged into the wall socket, but Ben hadn’t responded. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point.

  “She’s called Molly, right?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl you DJ with.”

  “Mm.” Ben stared at the ceiling. There was something terribly urgent he probably needed to do, he thought. Besides going to work and pretending to be a normal human being, he needed to move and speak to people and lie to them more convincingly.

  But it was if not comfortable then at least not agonising here in the blank nothingness he’d created for himself, and the ceiling was refreshingly devoid of stress, and sometimes Minnie walked on his bladder and sometimes he was forced to get up and do something about that but mostly nothing happened. Nothing, Ben thought, was good. Nothing was safe.

  “Hi,” said Kingsley. “Yeah, no, it’s not Ben. His flatmate.”

  Ben watched car headlights sweep across the wall. He could hear a motor running outside.

  “That’s right, yeah,” said Kingsley. “Well, if you come round some time I’ll make you some. Listen, I’m calling because — aww, that’s sweet of you — I’m calling because Ben’s…I — yeah, no, he’s not coming. I don’t know when. I don’t — no, he’s not ill…”

  There was a pause. Someone opened and closed a car door loudly, twice.

  “Oh, Molly, love, if he’d run off with a fucking girl I would be over the moon. He’s just really fucked up right now.”

  Ben gave a weak laugh.

  “No. No, no. His, uh. His sister died a couple of days ago and he’s taking it … well, he’s taking it the way you’d expect.”

  The car drove off, accelerating with determination.

  “I don’t know why he never mentioned that. Look, it’s not my fault if he wanted to keep it private. Yeah, I know. Is it? Is it. Well, I — yeah, if you’d tell him as well I think he’d appreciate that — Gareth who? Oh, right.”

  “Jesus,” said Ben, sitting up. “Not Gareth.”

  “Fucking hell,” Kingsley said, hanging up. “He moves.”

  “Did she say she was telling Gareth?” Ben demanded, wild-eyed.

  “Uh…yeah. Doesn’t he normally pay you?”

  “God,” Ben said, standing up. “Not Gareth.”

  “Ben—”

  Ben went into the bathroom. He took a shower that went on for a time span that had no point of reference: his mind chanting not Gareth solemnly to cover the void beneath.

  When he came out, Kingsley was in the process of folding up the futon.

  “You’re not going out, are you?” he asked.

  Ben shrugged. “Work.”

  Kingsley shook his head. “I swear to God I will sit on you if I have to.”

  Ben flopped onto the folded up futon as soon as Kingsley had finished, and pawed at his own face. “Nrgh.”

  “Yeah, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not going anywhere either.”

  “But.” Ben stopped, and realised blearily that the reason everything was blurry was not because he was having some kind of neurological degradation but because he hadn’t put on his glasses.

  “But nothing. Look at you.”

  Ben groped around in vain. “Glasses.”

  They were placed into his hands. “You,” said Kingsley, “need serious, actual, proper, psychological help.”

  Ben put on his glasses. “I’m fine.”

  “You ain’t fucking moved or eaten for two days.”

  Ben shrugged. “Wasn’t hungry.”

  Kingsley made an exasperated noise and got up. There was a series of banging noises from the kitchen, which sounded to Ben like the start of some angry cooking: he picked up the remote and flicked through the channels, increasing the volume one notch for each ten he passed.

  “TONIGHT: EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE OF FINAL-STAGE KBV.”

  “Don’t do that,” Kingsley shouted from the kitchen.

  “SEE WHAT XXXXX/XXXXXX HAS UNLEASHED ON THE POPULATION.”

  “Ben, don’t fucking watch that.”

  Ben turned the volume down slightly, sank down into a slouch on the futon, and pulled Minnie from her resting-place behind him.

  “This program contains scenes of a disturbing nature.”

  Maarrrow, Minnie complained.

  Ben wrestled the cat onto his lap and stroked her until she’d stopped trying to take the skin off his thighs. She began to dribble instead.

  “Bethesda Hospital, 2AM: late-stage KBV patient Chris Clovelli is secured to his bed.”

  “Ben, seriously,” Kingsley leaned back out of the kitchen. “Don’t fucking do this, this isn’t going to help.”

  “What is?” Ben said under his breath.

  “At this point,” said a doctor in what looked like a space suit, “he’s likely to start damaging the hospital and hurting himself. We try to keep patients under sedation but that’s difficult: the last thing anyone wants is a puncture wound.”

  The screen cut to a thin black man strapped to a bed. His legs were rigid, his back arched, his fingers curled. A moment later he spasmed so violently that Ben thought the bed would give up the ghost, but instead a tear opened in the man’s arm.

  A space-suited figure rushed forward and placed an oxygen mask over the man’s face.

  “Sedation,” said the voice-over, “is vital. Late-stage patients convulse so violently that they may break their own bones.”

  “It is clear,” said the first space suit, “that they’re in a lot of pain. Perhaps unfortunately, they continue to have lucid periods right up until the point of death, so we’ve had one or two heart-breaking conversations with patients about it.”

  Ben scratched Minnie behind the ears. He could feel the bile in his stomach as if it was a separate entity to him, something which had moved in and was now trying to move out.

  There was a shuddering spasm from the man on the bed, and the mask filled abruptly with blood.

  Space suits rushed in again to remove the mask, to allow the man to breathe, stepping warily around the blood.

  He folded in the middle. Ben watched the camera cut away slightly too late to keep the audience from seeing his leg bend the wrong way.

  “Chris Clovelli,” said the voiceover, “was a paramedic. He contracted KBV trying to rescue a drunk-driver from the wreck of his car.”

  Ben concentrated on breathing slowly and peacefully, as if he was already asleep.

  The space suits returned, and tried to run a line into Chris Clovelli’s foot. This was, explained the voice over, as three people held the man’s foot down, an IV ‘full of morphine’.

  “It’s unbearable,” said the first space suit. “My job, as a doctor, is to do everything in my power to save this man’s life, and I know I can’t do it. My second job is to prevent unnecessary suffering, and right now—” he glanced over his shoulder, “—that’s nearly impossible too.”

  The soundtrack, which had covered the noises of the hospital — or perhaps they’d been unable to record them through the glass — cut out. There was an unearthly scream, and the voiceover said: “Chris Clovelli has been screaming for hours.”

  “I used to be against euthanasia,” said one of the space suits. It sounded like the kind of comment which was not intended to be overhead, let alone broadcast.

  One of the space suits held Chris Clovelli’s head and stroked it as his body thrashed. There was blood on his mouth: his eyes were red from side-to-side: Ben remembered once blowing a vessel in one eye afte
r vomiting too hard, but this looked as if every last one had gone at once.

  “I don’t want to die,” said a very thin voice.

  One of the space suits seized Chris Clovelli’s grasping, clawed hand, and clasped it in their own glove. They stroked the back of it with their other hand.

  “I don’t want to die,” repeated the thin voice, more loudly. “Please — where is my mama — I don’t want to die here—”

  “It’s okay,” said one of the space-suits. “It’s okay.”

  “It hurts—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m going to die — where is she—”

  The soundtrack returned, and so Ben saw rather than heard Chris Clovelli scream, and scream, as his body buckled again. Space suits dodged as he vomited a fresh gout of blood down his body and began to choke.

  “Chris Clovelli’s lungs are disintegrating,” said the voice over. “If he is lucky, he’ll drown in his own blood.”

  “It is abnormal,” said a doctor, not in a space-suit, “for a patient to have this level of care. We’re over-stretched — not enough staff — so many of them die alone.”

  She put her hand over her mouth and blinked for a moment.

  Ben looked down at his hands. They looked odd, and far away.

  “I feel weird,” he said, and passed out.

  After another two days, Ben put his shoes on, and left the flat.

  He wasn’t sure why, at first. He’d had a vague idea of going down to get some bread, but he didn’t stop at the shop. He didn’t stop at the bus stop, either.

  When he passed the Overground station Ben realised he had no idea what he was doing at all.

  The sun was shining. There were a few hesitant shoots on the trees. Late daffodils — the ones not socked by the February snow — nodded from patches of grass. It was cold, but the world was slowly waking up.

  The information on the website said: we cannot release the bodies of KBV patients for funeral arrangements. We are legally required to incinerate them on site. A memorial service may be requested at the time of incineration but due to the busy nature of the hospital it is not always possible for this wish to be granted.