56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  She can already smell it: the cloying, pungent aroma of rotting human flesh.

  Like a cheap perfume years past its use-by date mixed with meat that’s been left to turn in the sun, spores multiplying and warming and spreading until they’ve replaced every last molecule of unscented air. It’s not that bad in the lobby, but it’s bad enough in the lobby to know that that’s how bad it’s going to get.

  She thinks about poor Declan, standing outside the apartment’s door all this time. This will definitely be a story he trots out over pints with the lads in the years to come. She just hopes he won’t be ending it with and that’s the day I decided to quit.

  Lee has a rummage in the pockets of her blazer, triumphant to find the very end of a packet of forgotten Silvermints just about still wrapped in their foil. There are benefits to forever failing to be organized and making clothing choices based purely on what looks the cleanest.

  Two clean mints, one fuzzy with lint. She puts them back in her pocket, then takes a face mask from another one and snaps the bands around her ears.

  The lobby is small but bright, benefiting from a second pair of glass doors directly opposite the ones she’s just come through. They lead to a central courtyard. Lee doesn’t go out there but scans it through the glass: a pleasant area landscaped to within an inch of its life, with vibrant green trees, wooden benches, and a trickling water feature that she knows will make her want to pee as soon as she hears it. The building bends around the space in a gently curved U shape, with a pair of large, wrought-iron gates filling in the open end. Emergency vehicle access, she guesses.

  She counts three floors of apartments, about thirty in all if each one has one balcony. The ground-floor units have little tracts of private space outside patio doors, maybe about a narrow parking spot’s worth, demarcated by a metal railing. But the railings are low and open between their horizontal lengths, so easily climbed over, just as Michael said. There’s no one in the courtyard that she can see and from this angle, it’s hard to tell if there’s anyone watching from a balcony.

  She turns back around.

  Next to the main doors is a small and clearly brand-new hand-sanitizer dispenser. She looks for a lever before realizing it has an electronic sensor and sniffs the air as she rubs the clear liquid into her hands.

  Lemongrass. Fancy.

  The steel holder where the fire extinguisher should be is attached to the wall below a row of framed notices. The first is headlined “House Rules” above a bulleted list of—Lee squints—twenty-three separate instructions the residents of the Crossings apparently have to abide by.

  Sounds like school, she thinks. Or prison.

  The second is one of the government-issued, bright-yellow COVID-19 information sheets. One of the early ones, going by the fact that it only contains three recommendations: wash your hands, practice good coughing etiquette, and maintain a distance of two meters away from other people.

  The third framed notice is what to do in case of an emergency. Lee takes out her phone and dials the number for the management company printed in red across the top. It’s immediately picked up by an answering machine that instructs her to call a different number outside of office hours.

  She checks the time on-screen: eight forty-five.

  She dials the second number from memory. It rings twice before bringing her to the very same voicemail.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” she says out loud. She leaves a message with her name, rank, and number and a demand that someone call her back immediately.

  Then she turns to the letterboxes. Four neat rows of slim boxes with stainless steel doors fixed low to the rear wall. She pulls a pair of blue latex gloves from her trouser pocket and puts them on, snapping them over the cuffs of her blazer to form a seal. She uses an index finger to open the narrow flap of the box marked “1,” bending down to see if she can see what’s inside.

  There’s a slim, white envelope, but she can’t see any text on it from this angle.

  She starts down the corridor, passing a set of lifts. It’s lit by strips of overhead fluorescents, motion activated; they flick on as she goes. The corridor curves to the left, revealing three more doors and Garda Declan—Casey? Is that his last name?—standing with his arms folded outside the door marked “1.”

  He has two masks on: an inch of the blue, papery material of a disposable one is just visible behind the black cloth that covers his face from the bridge of his nose to his jawline. Not a bad idea, Lee thinks. A thin sheen of sweat glistens by his hairline and what she can see of his face seems to have a bit of a grayish tinge to it.

  “You can go wait outside,” she says. “Get some fresh air.”

  The young officer doesn’t need to be told twice; he’s moving away before she’s even finished talking.

  The apartment door is about an inch from being completely shut—closed, but without the locking mechanism lined up. No visible marks or stains on the door, the frame, or the handle. Looks like there’s a light on on the other side.

  Lee takes out the two clean Silvermints, lifts her mask with a finger, and pops them into her mouth. She lets them sit on her tongue, waiting until she can detect the sting of their menthol. Then she exhales hard, filling the mask with the smell of peppermint. It won’t last long—the mints are already softening, chalky edges crumbling—but it’s better than nothing.

  She pushes open the apartment door—lock looks intact, nothing stuffed in the mechanism—revealing a narrow hallway. Hardwood floor, white wall, a silver-framed mirror hanging on the wall to the left just above a console table. The light is coming from a fixture on the ceiling but it looks like there’re other lights on elsewhere in the apartment too.

  On the right is a door that opens outward, open about halfway, blocking most of her line of sight into the rest of the apartment.

  Hitting her is what feels like a solid wall of smell.

  Smell isn’t even the word for what’s in the air. A smell is something you have to breathe in to detect. What’s emitted by a decomposing body does all the work for you, leaving you no choice in the matter. It floods your nostrils and rushes into your mouth and claws at the back of your throat. It clings to every skin cell and clothing fiber and strand of hair. It makes your eyes water. It’s less of a smell and more of an invasion. An all-out assault.

  So much for her bright idea with the mints—every last molecule of menthol is immediately vaporized.

  Lee steels herself and steps inside.

  50 Days Ago

  Leo is about to make a statement, live from Washington, DC. The apartment doesn’t have a TV so Ciara finds a live stream online and watches it horizontal on the couch with her laptop balanced on her stomach.

  It’s not even light over there yet. He walks to an artificially lit podium set up outside a grand-looking building shrouded in predawn darkness, his face solemn and serious.

  She wonders what he’s thinking. He’s a medical doctor as well as the leader of the country. He must understand more than most.

  He begins to speak, slowly and deliberately, reading easily from some unseen teleprompter, but looking as if he’s talking directly to the lens.

  The virus is all over the world.

  We have not witnessed a pandemic of this nature in living memory.

  We will prevail.

  As soon as the program cuts back to the talking heads in the news studio, Ciara shuts the laptop and then surprises herself by bursting into hard, hot tears.

  She’s not scared, at least not physically; the virus may be in the country but it still feels very far away from her. It’s mostly a benign flu, from what they say. She trusts that the people who are supposed to know how to protect her from this will, that they already are. But all this is still . . .

  Well, scary.

  Some of the things the Taoiseach said she’d heard before, many times, but in sci-fi vir
us thrillers and postapocalyptic zombie movies, not from the mouth of the leader of her country in a press conference so pressing he had to do it in the predawn dark on the other side of an ocean.

  And this is real-world.

  Hers.

  Her mother once told her that the scariest thing she saw on TV on 9/11 was a live shot of the southern tip of Manhattan when thick, dusty smoke was billowing into the sky from between the injured buildings. It was a familiar shot of a city her mother felt she knew even though she’d never been, because she’d seen it destroyed and invaded and exploded countless times across decades’ worth of TV shows and Hollywood movies. But this scene was rendered utterly alien by the fact that it was happening for real. The mundane and the incomprehensible, smashed violently together—it caused cognitive dissonance, her mother had said. She’d read about it somewhere, probably in one of her self-help books.

  What if she gets this thing?

  Ciara can’t deal with that particular worry right now, so she replaces it with another one: Why hasn’t Oliver called her?

  They’re supposed to meet again in a few hours, but she hasn’t heard from him since he put her in that cab outside the Westbury three days ago. It’s exhausting to be worried and actively trying to keep yourself from not being that. The very fact that plans are already in place might well be why he hasn’t called or messaged her. Everything is set except for the exact time and actual location of their meeting, and maybe he’s presuming they’ll meet outside his office after work just like they did last time, because this is the thing they were supposed to do last time but didn’t, so maybe in his mind this promised text is just a formality, firmly in the just checking we’re still on category of communication, and that’s why he’s leaving it until the last minute.

  Or maybe he’s changed his mind.

  The radio silence since Monday night can be bent to support both hypotheses, that’s the problem.

  And can they even still go to the cinema, after Leo’s speech?

  Ciara opens up her laptop again and surfs national news sites until she finds a bulleted list of what’s happening, published ten minutes ago and updated in the last two. She scrolls down. Schools, colleges, and childcare facilities will close. Museums, theaters, and other cultural institutions will close, too. No mass gatherings of more than one hundred people indoors or five hundred out, which still sounds like an awful lot to her. Shops, restaurants, and bars to remain open but with the immediate implementation of social-distancing measures. Everyone must aim to limit their social interaction.

  It sounds straightforward but nothing is, not now. Cinemas aren’t mentioned by name—do they qualify as a cultural institution? Or are they like shops or bars, somewhere that can remain open so long as they limit the number of people allowed inside? Oliver said this one is small, so it may not even have that many seats, and, really, how many people are going to go see a space documentary on a Thursday night? Especially now, after that. And what exactly does “limit social interaction” mean? If he is her only interaction, does that qualify as limiting?

  What happens if he decides not to include her in his?

  She closes her eyes and rubs at them in frustration.

  Of course this would happen now. Of course it would. After all this time, she’s somehow managed to cultivate a seed . . .

  And here comes a bloody once-in-a-lifetime, global pandemic to kill it off.

  You couldn’t make it up.

  Her phone rings, startling her. It’s wedged down the side of one of the couch cushions; in reaching for it, she accidentally answers the call. There’s no time to prepare for talking to the name she sees as she puts the device to her ear: OLIVER.

  “Hello?” She’s immediately convinced that her attempt at sounding casual has failed spectacularly.

  “Ciara?”

  “Oliver.” She feels the urge to stand up. “How are you?”

  “Good—apart from the whole, you know, end-times-plague thing. You?”

  “Same.”

  “Did you watch Leo’s speech just now?”

  “Yeah.”

  She starts pacing back and forth in front of the window.

  “It’s all a bit surreal, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Very.”

  “Are you limiting yourself to one-word responses on purpose, or . . . ?”

  “No.”

  He laughs at that.

  “So,” he says. “Tonight. I don’t know if the cinema is even still open . . . And I’m not sure if I really want to go there. Have you ever seen Outbreak?”

  “Is that the one where a monkey bites the doctor from Grey’s Anatomy?”

  “Odd angle, but factually correct.”

  “Then yes. But years ago.”

  “Well, there’s a scene in a cinema where you can actually see the germs coming out of people’s mouths. I thought it was funny at the time but now . . .” He sighs. “I don’t know. I could just be overreacting.”

  She says, “Hmm,” because she doesn’t know where he’s going with this and doesn’t want to show her cards before he does.

  This is so bloody exhausting. She wishes she could just press a button and skip ahead, past this part.

  “We could do something else?” he suggests. “We could—”

  “Yeah.”

  “—go get a drink or something. Are you still in the office?”

  Her mortification at reacting too eagerly is quickly replaced by terror that he might be about to suggest coming here.

  “It’s just that I was going to say we could meet in the same spot,” he says. “Outside my office? But if—”

  “No, no. That’d be great. Actually, I am working from home now, but I live, like, five minutes away from there, so . . .”

  “We could meet somewhere else if it’s better?”

  “No, no. That’s good. Let’s do that.”

  “Five thirty?”

  “See you then.”

  He ends the call, and she falls back, spent, onto the couch, where she allows herself half a minute of sweet relief.

  So she hasn’t fucked this up.

  Yet.

  Apart from how busy Tesco is and the disproportionate number of people rushing from its doors clutching jumbo-sized packs of paper products, nothing about Baggot Street seems to suggest that anything is wrong. All the shops are open, including the florist. So too are the cafés, pubs, and restaurants. Ciara thinks a few too many people are wearing winter gloves for this kind of weather, but that could just be because she’s looking for signs that the world has changed, evidence that these people are the kind who watch the news too. When she pulls the cuff of her coat down to avoid touching the button at the pedestrian crossing with her bare skin, it feels like overkill. A part of her hopes that no one has seen her do it, that he hasn’t.

  But he couldn’t have, because he’s late today.

  While she waits she tries to distract herself from overreacting to this by focusing on the two men standing outside Tesco in the plain black uniform of store security guards. One of them is sucking on a cigarette he’s keeping hidden in his palm, listening while the other one talks animatedly and points into the shop. A third person, a woman in a skirt suit, comes out and joins the conversation. She keeps glancing nervously behind her, back inside. Ciara thinks maybe they’re flustered about how many people are in-store.

  This distraction works a little too well and Oliver is suddenly there, beside her, apologizing as he bends to kiss her on the cheek—an upgrade from their last greeting, sending a little electric shock through her skin. She feels the same flutter of nerves in the pit of her stomach that she did when she saw him the last time, and she wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about butterflies.

  He blames his minor delay on a meeting that ran over. The partners had been hoping for the best and bee
n uninterested in planning for the worst, so now the office is abruptly closing from tomorrow and no one quite knows how that’s going to work.

  There’s a lot to figure out, he says.

  “How about you? How are you getting on?”

  “Grand,” she answers. “Honestly, it’s not even that different. My job is like ninety-nine percent silently staring at my computer anyway. Okay, I have to pay for my own VitaminWater now but, apart from that . . . My couch is a lot comfier than those horrible ergonomic chairs they make us sit on.”

  “So are you, like, coding all day or . . . ?”

  She smiles. “ ‘Coding’?”

  “Oh yes, I know all the lingo.”

  “Do you now?”

  “What can I say? I read a lot of Wikipedia.”

  She laughs. “I don’t code. I’m in web services. It’s like technical customer service. I’m basically the IT guy who asks if you’ve tried turning it off and on, but with cloud-computing clients so it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

  “I thought you lot made apps or something.”

  “That’s just what we want you to think. The actual money is in server farms, cloud computing, slowly but surely moving toward a place where the entire internet will run on our equipment so our maleficent leader will effectively control the world . . . That kind of thing.”

  “Should I be scared?”

  “It won’t change anything.”

  “Let’s go get a drink, then.”

  He suggests a pub on Haddington Road, around the corner. They walk toward it side by side, without touching.

  “You’re not thinking of going to Cork?” he asks. “To your parents?”

  She’s confused and not just by the parents, plural. “For what?”

  “It’s just that, one of the guys in the office, that’s his plan. Legging it to Galway tomorrow. His dad is a GP and he’s telling them that we’ll all be confined to our localities soon. There’ll be no going anywhere. Although personally I think he’s just looking for an excuse to make his mother do his washing. He’s a bit younger than us, so . . .”