How We Survive

by Jess Ballard

  HOW WE SURVIVE

  PREFACE

  Whispers carried by winds and radio waves had already reached the ears of the village’s inhabitants, but there were few who were truly heeding the warnings. It was a small rural village, nestled between fields and watched over by trees that were hundreds of years old, the kind that suffocated the young with its limited possibilities and remoteness, then drew them back in their later years for the beauty and tranquillity. Their disconnectedness meant that a large scale epidemic was even less plausible to them than many of the politicians deep in denial.

  However, in the village hall, with its leaky roof and perpetual smell of dust, a small group had gathered. They were prompted by a news report that had aired the previous week, before the TV schedule had become disrupted, sporadic news programmes the only thing being aired. Some people kept their TV and radios on all day, and would until the power supply stopped, just so they wouldn’t miss these precious updates. Some, more than would admit, kept them on for the static, white noise that would drown out thoughts they refused to acknowledge.

  News of this meeting had been spread by word of mouth, whisperings to neighbours over fences and in empty corners of the local shop or pub. About twenty people had turned up, out of a population of over one hundred, which was better than expected.

  These were the people who believed the rumours, who trusted the report many were dismissing as a joke, or those who would rather be safe than sorry. An old farmer chaired the meeting, and proposed a plan. Murmurs of agreement, and of apprehension, followed, and the people were urged to go home and discuss it with their families before making a decision. They were also warned that they only had until the next morning, as it was then when the plan was to be executed.

  One couple knew what they were going to do. For a few days they had been trying to devise a plan, something that would be in everyone’s best interests, and the farmer’s proposal had decided it for them. In fact, it had made what they planned to do far simpler that it would have been otherwise. Walking home down the dark streets, the moon and stars hidden by a curtain of clouds, the couple held hands for the first time in almost ten years, and the woman leant her head on the man’s shoulder. Both were convinced that the other had been having an affair, and now both were feeling very guilty for having wasted so much time on such absurd assumptions (although they may not have been entirely wrong).

  This particular family was not very close, but nevertheless, their daughter was waiting for them to return that night, peeking out from a crack in the living room curtains, eager to hear what the meeting had been about. She was only too aware of the friction in her parents’ marriage and the distance it had put between her and them, yet felt that the recent events had pulled them closer, and would continue to do so. And that was her little bit of hope in a world that was about to fall into ruin.

  After the woman had poured a drink for herself and her husband, they all sat down round the dinner table.

  “So, what’s the plan?” the daughter asked, trying to mask her excitement, all things considered.

  “Harry Douglas has offered anyone who wants to leave a lift to a town where they’re setting up a sort of refugee camp,” the man replied. The word refugee felt awkward, like it didn’t belong in his dining room, but in some far away, impoverished country. The daughter nodded.

  “We think it’s a good idea. Sensible,” the woman added.

  “It’s supposed to be safest place for, what’s it they’re calling them? The immune,” the man added.

  “But mum can’t come.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They won’t accept me, so there’s not much point in wishful thinking.” Under the table, the man squeezed her hand.

  “I’m sorry, mum.”

  “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing you can do,” she said with a hint of guilt in her voice, and of resignation.

  “You should pack and get to bed. Harry’ll be here early.” The man kept his eyes focused on the grain of the wooden table. The daughter simply nodded, realising this was not the time to question, and left the room quietly. She knew not to make a scene; outward expressions of emotion were rare in their household.

  She packed sparingly, filling only one rucksack with what she thought were essential items for survival, though this included a few photographs and her favourite book. Then, she undressed and crawled under the covers of her own bed for the last time, leaving the curtains open so she could fall asleep looking at the inky blackness of the patch of sky she knew she would never view from this angle again.

  The next morning a knock on the door woke her. She dressed quickly and ate a rushed breakfast with her parents, both of whom were dressed, even if only one was to accompany her. They both appeared to be watching her intently.

  Afterwards, she brought her rucksack downstairs, and was met with the sight of her parents waiting at the bottom of the staircase. Their expressionless faces betrayed to her that there was something they were keeping from her.

  “Where shall I put this?” She gestured with her bag, eyes searching for her father’s luggage.

  “Just leave it there.” The man spoke quietly but with no kindness.

  “Are you ready to go? Haven’t you packed yet?”

  “Jenna, there’s something we need to tell you.” The woman was not looking at her.

  “Was that Harry?” The daughter tried to ignore the feeling of dread blossoming in her chest. “We’d better say goodbye then.”

  Neither parent answered.

  “Mum? Dad?”

  Still no answer.

  “Dad, Harry might go without us...”

  “Jenna, we’re staying here.” The man’s voice did not invite an argument.

  “But... what about the disease? Isn’t this camp the safest place for us?”

  “It is. For you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re going, we’re staying.”

  “But didn’t we decide to stick together...”

  “I can’t.” His flimsy excuse.

  “I need him, Jenna.” Her equally weak justification.

  The daughter thought for a moment.

  “I’ll stay here then.”

  “Jenna, there’s no way we can allow that.”

  “We’re supposed to stick together, we’re a family...”

  “Jenna, you need to go.”

  “No, listen to me...” A knock at the door interrupted her. It was Harry.

  The woman picked up the bag and went to open the door. The daughter didn’t move. She didn’t move when she saw Harry beckoning from the doorway, she didn’t move when she saw her rucksack being loaded into a van, she didn’t move when she felt a hand grasp her wrist.

  “Come on, Jenna, Harry’s leaving.”

  “Dad...”

  “Jenna, you need to go with Harry.” When she still refused to move, the man nodded at Harry, who in turn gestured to some other vaguely familiar villagers. They entered her house and advanced towards her. The man let go of her wrist and stood back, putting an arm round his wife.

  A pair of hands grabbed each arm and propelled her towards the door. She fought back, throwing herself in the opposite direction, the rug bunching up beneath her feet, skin being rubbed red by the men dragging her from her home. She shouted, “Dad, Mum,” but there was no answer. She screamed, she bit, she kicked. She twisted her head back to try and make eye contact with her parents, but the door was shut as soon as she was out of it.

  “DAD!” She yelled as they passed through the gate.

  “MUM!” She yelled as the opened the doors of the van and threw her in.

  “PLEASE!” She yelled as she pummelled the inside of the van with her fists until they were bruised and bloodied.

&
nbsp; She felt the van lurch as they pulled away, and cried as it took her to a distant, unknown town. Then she tried, with all the strength she could find, to forget her parents.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  Heat hung in the air, trapped in by vague clouds that blurred into one, dirty white sheet, suffocating the Earth. Shadows were hazy, and the frame of the boarded up window in which I was sitting did not provide me with any shelter from the sticky heat. The paint, limp with the moisture in the air, was peeling from the frame. I picked at it absentmindedly as I watched the world outside though a crack in the boards, a limited perspective. The paint didn’t flake, but came off in strange, slightly clingy strips that I then peeled from my fingers.

  A barely perceptible breath of wind came through the door frame, stirred the air around me and quickly faded, making me uncomfortably aware of the sweat pooling at the nape of my neck and the dampness under my arms. I remembered the summers before, walking through long, dry grass, sitting on lazy swing sets, passing the day as slowly as shadows lengthen in the afternoon. I thought of the glare of the sun illuminating every bit of dust that hung in the air, the painful brightness of flowering plants and the pavement that glowed silver between cracks. I thought about how, that summer, those cracks had been muddied with blood.

  Nobody knows when it started. They claim they do, but really, everybody was in shock when the first few cases were reported, and so nobody did anything for a really long time. It was seemingly random. A girl on a train would fall ill, attack a couple of passengers, then get off at the next station, leaving the remaining passengers onboard, unharmed. A man returning from work early because he felt ill would kill his wife and one of two children, then walk away, leaving the remaining child petrified, confused and alone. There was no pattern. Every night we were shown a couple of these peculiar stories on the news, but they were just that: stories. Nevertheless, I think it was a worry for everybody, or everybody who had their brain switched on, that it wasn’t just “a couple” of cases, that something was being kept from us.

  There wasn’t one day when a switch was flicked and everybody fell ill. They came in great tidal waves, then drips, then steady flows, scattered, random clumps. Scientists hypothesised: was it air borne? It couldn’t be, it would be spreading faster and affecting more people if that was the case. Water borne? Again, unlikely, seeing as people with access to clean water were being infected even as those without weren’t, and there wasn’t a clear area, a water board or a reservoir or something similar, being affected. Age, race, gender, location, nothing was uniform. It defied logic. Science couldn’t explain it.

  Only later, after they declared war on the infected, did a timid student from Venezuela step forward with a theory. There was a link, she had said through a translator, to some of the leading scientific professors in the USA. I remember watching it with my parents, so far away in our cottage in a village in the middle of the countryside, as she revealed why some of us were doomed to become infected, and why the others would be the ones they hunted. It was why my parents told me to leave.

  “The appendix, deemed useless by evolution, is revealing its true purpose. In all the cases I have studied, the... infected, shall we say, have all had their appendixes, while there is evidence to suggest, be it a scar or medical records, that the people they have killed have received an appendectomy. That is to say, they do not have an appendix.”

  The silence that fell over the world in that instance was broken soon after by laughter. They cut the broadcast. The girl disappeared. But her idea sparked action. The US medical researchers of course continued investigating her theory, and later released a more concise, academic explanation in their name, with no mention of its founder. But it was the girl, I don’t remember her name, that caused the burst of activity, that spread like a fire in a dry forest.

  And so the war began, between the organised armies of most of the world and the infected, people whose humanity was unconscious, but were people nonetheless. The ‘As’, as they began to be known, the ‘A’ being short for ‘Appendix’, were rounded up, and some countries began systematically killing them, or began trying, as it proved to be quite difficult to capture what were effectively wild animals. As for the immune, you started seeing families loading up with supplies, scared to leave the house. You saw people limping, clutching at blood drenched sides, and a new age of amateur surgery was born. Everyone was so desperate to live.

  My mum was a potential, and not willing to go down that dark path of hasty operations in some harshly lit neighbour’s basement. My dad was immune. They decided to stay in our house, locking themselves in, and waited for their death together. My neat, faded scar and I were sent to a refugee camp.

  I was still there, the exact number of months I don’t know. Conventional measurements of time cease to carry much meaning in a world such as ours. It was the height of the summer, and we were well protected from the outside world by the cracked windows of an old office building.

  I had no family, and friendship was out of the question. Trust between mankind had long been shattered. Nobody looked you in the eyes anymore. Consequently, it was mostly silent in our cramped prison of safety. Only the cries of names that no longer belonged to anyone occasionally filled the spaces in between us. Dirt and sadness clung to every fold in your clothing and every crease in your skin.

  The sun had almost set before I had noticed the dwindling light and the shadows hiding the dirt and the bodies outside. It hung about on the horizon, as if it was reluctant to leave us. It was a deep shade of vermilion, reflecting off those windows still intact, of which there were few, lighting up the small town like it was on fire. And when the sun eventually left, the stars appeared, brighter and more alive than they used to be. The sky flickered with colours that I can’t remember or describe, and the longer you looked, the more appeared, distant stars and galaxies. It was as if they had moved closer to comfort the dying Earth. To pity us.

  The night was silent. Everybody in the camp was silent. There was no sign of any As. The wind had long since moved on. In that moment, it truly felt as if we had given up. There was this immense sky hanging above me, pressing down, and all around me, everything I could reach was dead or dying and it felt infuriating. I hadn’t moved all afternoon, so I got down from the window ledge and stretched. Electricity crept into my legs and arms, and the quiet anger in the back of mind fizzled. It needed to be satisfied.

  That’s when I decided I would go. I would run away, even though I probably wouldn’t find anywhere much better. The point was, I didn’t know what was going on outside. And if I had stayed in that cocoon, I would have died there. That’s what it felt like that night, like escaping would save me.

  There was nothing to miss, not even the safety, because what is safety if you’re not living? No one was doing anything here. The war had ended in turmoil and chaos, as had the government plans for rebuilding society. If there was any kind of movement, or revolution, it was never going to reach this town, a town far from my own home, a place unknown to me outside of the camp. The middle and the end of nowhere.

  I needed to find a place for myself in the outside world, or else make one.

  I walked calmly to the dorm, suppressing the urge to sprint out into the darkness. The wardens that were supposedly running this place were nowhere to be seen. I picked up my rucksack, shoving a jumper in, the only thing that hadn’t been stolen from me in that shithole, and of course, the possession to which I had the least sentimental value attached.

  The entrance to the building was not guarded by wardens, and fear was our locked door, so once I managed to slip into the stairwell I didn’t have to sneak past anyone. I’m not sure they would have tried to stop me anyway.

  The first thing that hit me as I stepped outside was the lingering smell of decay and smoke. Right by the entrance to the refugee camp was a pile of corpses, dead As crowding the streets, waiting to be burned in the night by the camp wardens.

  The t
hing about As is that they’re mostly harmless - until they catch the scent of appendix-less bodies. Then they’re like rabid dogs, and won’t stop unless they lose the scent, or kill whatever it’s coming from. Which means the camp, for As, is a concentrated pocket of delicious smelling people, and attracts quite a large number of As. For this reason, it only occupied the top floors of the building to try and distance the refugees from the As, and armed guards are stationed in the first floor windows to gun down any attackers, which was why I had to step over several grisly bodies.

  I expected to feel exhilarated as the slightly fresher air of the outside sluggishly caressed my bare arms, but in reality the thrill lay in the idea more than the execution. As I began to walk down the middle of the road, my mind flooded with the practical problems of my spur of the moment decision, as well as the fact that I didn’t actually have a plan.

  I wanted to help. I wanted to spend my days doing something other than staring out at a deserted town, waiting for it to be over. I suppose for the first time in my life I wanted to make my own decisions, to do something worthwhile. I had been sent to the camp against my will, but it had been my choice to leave, and that was a start.

  We were reasonably well cut off from everything in the refugee camp, the government’s not so subtle way of keeping everyone calm by heavily censoring our information. In the early days, there was some sort of army, a crisis militia being raised in various locations across the country; I knew that much. It was evident by the lack of able bodied residents at the camp, which consisted of underage children, and the elderly, that the healthy middle portion of society had been called up.

  That could mean that now there wasn’t any one left to fight. Maybe they had all succumbed in the early battles. There had to be something else. I couldn’t be the only one still alive and wanting to fight.

  Till I found my cause, there was the issue of food. And of shelter. How was I going to rest? The possibility of an attack was ever present. I wasn’t so worried about weapons; I’d learnt early on that if you could run and had stamina, the As wouldn’t be a problem. They were determined but slow, so if killing them wasn’t an option, you could outrun them. But if they found me while I was sleeping, I could be dead before I woke up.