by Alex Scarrow
‘This. Is. Completely. Nuts . . .’
CHAPTER 48
Three Days Later
Rex Williams woke up for the second morning in a row with no one there beyond the thick glass to observe him. The light still fizzed softly from the ceiling of his room, the monitor still flickered in the observation room beyond. There was no one on duty.
Again.
The last bit of information he’d received had come from the pleasant young navy ensign just before she’d handed over her watch to someone else. There’d been reports of floaters over North Island. Not revelatory news; the spotter planes had been shooting those bloody things down for the last two years. But coupled with two days of no-shows through the observation window and, more importantly, no meals slid through the hatch, Rex felt it was fair to say he might end up dying in here.
There was water still available from the tap. The toilet still flushed. And, of course, the power was still on. But for how much longer? And when it did stop, the flow of filtered air would cease. He’d die of suffocation within a few hours. He was getting a little concerned.
If only he could see what was on the monitor. The internet still worked in a limited way for those on North Island; there was still enough of a digital infrastructure for the AN News station to post sketchy bulletins.
Rex had been thoroughly debriefed on his return. Treated with a wary scepticism as he laid out everything he’d seen, felt and heard. He’d known going in that this would happen. That on returning they would have to consider the prospect that he might be some form of manifestation of the virus, not to be trusted. During his short absence the shape of the crisis committee had changed. Now it was being jointly led by the Deputy PM and Captain Xien.
They’d allowed him to record the announcement he wanted broadcast publicly. Filmed him through the thick glass as he explained to the camera that the virus was intelligent. That it was not a malignant force, and that it was interested in discussing terms by which both ‘civilizations’ could live alongside each other.
Whether they’d actually broadcast it he had no idea, but he doubted it.
Perhaps Grace had fooled him, then. Convinced him to allow her to be freed and taken to the approaching island so she could rejoin Them. And now here he was, locked in a clinically clean ‘dungeon’, waiting for the power to fail, the lights to go out, and to die alone in the dark.
So . . . it’s come, then. The virus must be here.
He could only imagine the horror of what was going on in the world outside. That enormous floating scab picking its way down Cook Strait, drifting into Wellington Harbour and unleashing on the inhabitants whatever hordes of nightmare creatures it had stored in its bulk below water.
Rex closed his eyes against the glare of the ceiling strip light. If his luck was in, the power would trip out and he’d suffocate in his sleep.
Something woke him.
He wasn’t sure what exactly. The light was still on. There was still power. He turned his head on the pillow to look left at the window, hoping to see someone in the observation room. But there was no one.
He heard a crackle of something over the intercom. The speaker was still on, of course, quietly filling the silence of his room with the soft hiss of nothing happening.
Then again. Something clacking.
‘Hello?’ called out Rex hopefully. He stared at the small wall-mounted speaker as if looking at its grille would tell him more. ‘Hello? Anyone out there?’
Another clacking sound. Then something that sounded moist, like a wet towel slapping and dragging gently against a wall.
He sat up on his cot, half terrified and half relieved. ‘I’m in here!’ he shouted.
He thought he saw a shadow in the observation room, something tall lurching just beneath the ceiling light, casting a momentarily splayed outline down across the wall and on to the desk. Something big, misshapen, inhuman.
The noise ceased. The double-door entry was a pressurized airlock that needed someone able to read the instructions to turn the . . .
Clack.
He could see the blurry shadow again. Tall. Limbs flexing and curling from a mound near the top, a Medusa-like crown of writhing snakes mounted on top of a twisted totem.
Clunk. Hissss.
Rex’s heart jumped. He pulled his bare legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms round his knees. That was the outer door. That was air pressure equalizing.
Clack.
Much clearer now. Not just coming out from the speaker – he could hear it transmitted through the inner hatch too. Something fumbling just behind the door. Right outside.
‘Oh, God, help me . . . ’ he whispered. He knew this was the virus – coming for him. As such, he should be thinking of it as a rescue, but his heart was pounding in his chest as he listened to the form shuffling around outside.
Click. Clunk.
The heavy door swung slowly inwards, revealing something that filled the doorway.
Amid the contortions of bloody skin, purple muscle and pale shellac, amid the confusion of human and animal and crustacean, he saw something emerging from soft tissue. It formed like sculptor’s putty manipulated by an invisible artisan’s hand.
A face he recognized. The face managed a wet rictus smile of barely firmed-up flesh and unready sinew and spoke with a voice that sounded like a witches’ quartet. ‘There you are.’
‘Grace? Is . . . is that y-you?’
‘Yes. Come on . . . join us.’
PART III
CHAPTER 49
Three Months Later
29 September
Freya,
Even though winter’s pretty much starting to kick in again, the virus seems to have stepped things up instead of going dormant. We’ve been fighting bugs constantly all the way down the coast.
Big bastard ones.
It’s like the virus has decided we’re a nuisance that needs to be cleared out of town once and for all!
We’ve been upping our meds, twice what we were normally taking. We’ve all been scratched, cut, spiked, God knows how many times now. So far, thank God, I think we’re keeping the infection out. I wonder whether the virus actually wants to infect us anyway.
Maybe we’re just food now.
Or sport.
7 October
Freya,
It’s getting freezing cold again. October, and it’s started snowing heavily already. We’re keeping warm, though. We’ve got a Kobe space heater – one of those big cylinders on wheels that looks like a jet engine. A couple of minutes of that every hour and we’re good for a while.
Oh, and we found a lighthouse!
It’s perched on a large cement ‘plug’, on top of a rocky outcrop in the middle of the English Channel. We found a battered old tugboat and a couple of motorboats pulled up and stored in the lighthouse’s basement floor. Cora’s worried that in a storm the tugboat might get smashed to pieces, which is a fair point. But we haven’t had any stormy weather in years, have we? Not since before the outbreak. Which makes me wonder if Finley’s right that the world’s climate has been ‘equalized’ by the virus somehow.
If so, then I guess you’re not sunning yourself on a beach right now.
It’s not bad here really. We live mostly on a floor about two-thirds of the way up the lighthouse. For some reason it feels warmer than the other floors, but, also, the higher up you go the less damp it is.
15 October
The virus can get across the sea. We know that. I guess you must know about that too by now. I often wonder whether it’s carrying on developing. Getting smarter all the time while we sit here and shiver in our ivory tower.
Don’t laugh, but I wonder if one day a helicopter will come over and land on the roof and virals will emerge with guns and stuff. Why not? The virus seems to have access to the minds and memories of everyone it’s turned to mulch. I’m guessing there are a fair few helicopter pilots who got rendered down into slime.
Seriously.
&nbs
p; Crabs, growth roots, spore clouds. None of them seem to have anything like human intelligence. What does that mean? Are they all linked? Or is it like a whole new ecosystem or something? How do you reason with an ecosystem? Who’s in charge?
It’s questions like that that we discuss each night over the cooking stove.
November
Cora died today. You met Cora, by the way. She was that nice lady who brought over something for us to eat in the compound at Southampton. Remember her? She slipped on an icy rock outside the lighthouse. She just slipped and fell into the sea. Kim saw her go in from a window halfway up. By the time we all made it down to the bottom she was gone.
No sign of her. She was gone beneath the slurry and ice.
The sea is freezing cold here now. I mean, properly freezing. She would have lasted a minute or two at best, gone into hypothermic shock and drowned. The sea just took her away quickly and quietly. No fuss, no muss.
Sounds really wrong to say this but – I think Cora was the worst person for us to lose. I mean, it wouldn’t be good if it happened to any of us, but it’s particularly bad it was her. She was the heart of our little group I think, the Survival Mom.
December
We’re going through our diesel supplies faster than we thought we would. The space heater does a great job, but, Christ, it’s a thirsty bastard. We’re about a third of the way through our stock! We’ve switched to keeping it on most of the time, but turned down to its lowest setting so at least there’s a constant trickle of heat on our floor. We plugged up the ladder entrances top and bottom to kill the draught and conserve our heat. But then nearly killed ourselves because of the build-up of carbon monoxide fumes! So, there’s a life lesson learned! We unblocked the entrance to the floor above so there’s somewhere for the toxic fumes to go and some way in for fresh air.
Duh.
OK. So we’re playing Risk way-y-y-y too much. You know, the board game? The one where you’ve got the map of the world and you have to conquer it? Finley made a copy by drawing the world map on the floor with a piece of chalk and we’re using screws and bolts we found in the lighthouse’s workshop for the pieces. I carved some wooden dice which work reasonably well, although some have a habit of rolling higher than others.
Which of course causes total meltdowns as I’m sure you can imagine.
December/January (not sure)
Howard cut his hand on one of the iron railings last week. It’s been getting steadily worse ever since – all pink and puffed up. He’s been on antibiotics but I don’t think they’re working. I don’t know whether it’s the wrong kind of antibiotic, or whether they’re just out of date. No one knows what to do to help him fight the infection.
Kim’s really upset and worried. She’s grown really close to him. She sees him as like a father figure or something.
Freya, I don’t know if we can survive losing someone else. Cora hit us hard. And it’s so hard being the leader, constantly having to try and boost morale. Constantly assuring the others it’s going to be OK, that we’re going to be fine.
Only I’m beginning to wonder if we are. The arithmetic of our situation is only going to go one way, right?
I’m exhausted trying to be positive in front of the others all the time.
Feburary-ish
Howard passed away last night. Finley said it must have been sepsis. We wrapped him up in a tarpaulin. Adewale carried him down to the concrete foundation and said a prayer. Then we tipped him over the handrail and gave him a burial at sea.
For a moment, I thought his body was just going to stay there, resting on the icy slush, but eventually it slipped through and disappeared.
So we’re down to four now. Not so good. But, I suppose, trying to look on the positive side, that’s still enough people for a decent game of Risk.
March
We’ve got enough food and drinking water for a few more months, when it should, in theory, warm up again. Hopefully, for the ice/slush to break up enough so we can do another run ashore for supplies. But – and this is a huge goddamn ‘but’ – we’re getting low on diesel for the heater. At the rate we’re burning through it, we’ll run out in a couple of months.
So, pretty soon we’re going to HAVE to try another supply run, whether the sea’s cleared or not.
It’s something we keep discussing that we need to do, but we keep putting it off. I’m thinking we can wait until we’re down to two months’ supply, then we should really go and get some more.
April
We need better balanced dice. It led to a fist fight. I actually hit Adewale. I punched him in the face. I can’t actually believe I did that. I feel so bad about it. We were fighting over Europe. I was invading it, he was defending it and there’s this one particular dice that delivers sixes pretty much every time.
Jesus.
May
Just want to wish you a happy birthday. (I think it would be about now, right?) I miss you so much, Freya. I think if it was just you and me here I’d be fine with that. I’d be happy here until we died of old age, to be honest. (That, or froze into an ice sculpture.) Our little safety bubble. I could go with that.
In other news. I have a fractured ankle. I missed a step coming back down from a piss trip. Typical. I’ve spent, what, over four years surviving the apocalypse and the end of the world without a single broken bone, then I go bust my ankle going for a leak!
I can’t even blame ice and say I slipped on an icy step, I simply missed a step and . . . crack! We have plenty of painkillers of course, which I am merrily munching my way through (well maybe not so merrily), but it’s keeping the pain down to a dull throb that I can cope with. I’ll be honest, though, I’m petrified I’ll end up like Howard and die of sepsis and an overenthusiastic immune system!
For the moment I’ve got my leg up in the air and Kim insisted I move my sleeping bag right next to the Kobe heater since I can’t move around to keep myself warm.
Which is kind of her.
May
They’re going for a foraging trip ashore without me. I feel, like, useless sitting here with my dumb-ass broken ankle.
May
Shit. Where the hell are they?
May
It’s been three days now. It’s not a weather thing. There’s no such thing as ‘weather’ these days. No storms. No blizzards. One day’s the same as the next – grey sky and a flat white sea.
Something must have happened to them.
The virus.
Probably.
Summer
I’m alone. I was hanging on to hope for a few weeks that maybe the boat had got damaged and they needed to go find another one. But I guess the truth is, they’re gone. The virus got them, or the boat sank or something.
‘Alone’ is going to be hard. I have food and heating and water, and, really, I can last ages here. But I wonder if there’ll come a time when I choose – you know – NOT to hang on.
Shit.
Winter
I think I’ve been here a year now. Winter’s come again, Big Time. It’s much harder than the last three. Really, really cold now. The snow on the helipad is at least a metre deep! I’m worrying about how much weight the helipad and this old tower can take. I wonder if I should be shovelling it off?
Winter
I’m really going to have to start rethinking my heating plans. There’s fuel for just a few months if I keep burning through it like I am. I’m going to have to ration it. Maybe there’s some stuff I can find that I can burn. There are old stores. There must be something down there I can use. I’m going to freeze to death otherwise.
Winter
I just managed to hobble down stairs and came across a stash of coal bags. I’m not sure how long it will last or if I’m going to end up choking myself on fumes in here, but I’m gonna use it anyway. I might even heat up some of my meals on it. In other news, I found a bunch of old books on the floor downstairs. I’m guessing that’s from when this place wasn’t automated and had
a crew. The choices are interesting. There’s a bunch of books by someone called Jilly Cooper and a guy called Archer. But there’s also a whole load by Stephen King. A writer I’ve actually heard of!
I think I’m going to start with him.
Spring
OK. Listing in descending order of favourite Stephen King books: The Dead Zone, Firestarter, The Stand, It, The Shining, The Tommyknockers, Cujo, Needful Things, Christine. Talking of The Dead Zone, I can’t believe Stephen King predicted a total ass-hat like Trent!
Sheesh. Now for the Archer guy.
Spring
Seriously? OK I’m gonna do it. I’m going to have a go at those Cooper books.
Winter
Winter’s here again. Does that make it two years now? Or three? I’m losing track.
Winter
So, Freya, I think today is the day. I’ve been listening to Dad’s advice. And he’s right – at some point you’ve just got to admit when the game’s over. So . . . this is me signing off. Which is nice timing really, since there’s only a few more pages left in the notebook.
I love you, Freya. Always have.
CHAPTER 50
Leon set the pen down and closed the cover. Writing down a long, protracted goodbye felt stupid. It would’ve felt like he was stalling, delaying the inevitable.
‘Today is the day.’ His words spilled out amid a cloud of evaporation and echoed off the hard concrete walls. Pale daylight leaked down from the ladder well of the floor above. Leon had no idea what the time was, other than it was day.
It was day and night, that was all. The days were best used for sleeping, the nights were for keeping moving and eating and using a few minutes’ worth of fuel to boost his small dark world above freezing point for a few hours.
But the last litre and a quarter of red-tinted diesel fuel was sitting in a milk carton. There was enough there for two or three more blasts of the Kobe heater. Then that was it.
Really it.
He could hear Dad’s voice. ‘Your core body temperature’s not going to last very long once that Kobo goes out for the last time.’