Last Stand For Man

by Ryan, Nicholas

  There was another long silence, charged with electric tension and antagonism. Camille’s face was stony, her eyes like flint. She glared at Tremaine, searching his face for some sign of deceit but could find none. The tension went from her shoulders slowly, and her eyes widened just a little. She inclined her head in a gesture of grudging capitulation.

  “You truly believe this, don’t you?”

  “I know it,” Tremaine said earnestly. “I am certain.”

  Camille’s eyes shifted and settled on the empty space beyond Tremaine’s shoulder for a long moment as if she were suddenly daydreaming. “Very well,” she sighed without meeting his gaze. “I will not go to work tonight,” she told the lie to appease him and saw instantly the relief in his face. “I will phone and tell them I am too ill.”

  “Good,” Tremaine let out a breath of air he had been holding and visibly relaxed. The fire went from his gaze like cooling lava, and the touch of a relieved smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Thank you,” he said.

  The pizza arrived, carried high overhead by the chef on a serving platter. He set it down in the middle of the table and stood back satisfied. Tremaine inhaled the aromas and felt his mouth water. He knew he was hungry, but he hadn’t realized just how famished he was until this instant.

  “Enjoy!” the chef smiled like the pizza was a personal triumph. Camille flashed the young man a dazzling smile of appreciation. The chef gave a curt little bow and scuttled back behind the serving counter. Camille picked up her knife and fork. “We share,” she said. “It is the house specialty. I hope you will enjoy. And after we have finished eating, I will take you to your hotel.”

  Tremaine attacked the food with single-minded determination.

  Outside it began to rain.

  * * *

  Henri Pelletier shrugged off his rain coat and trudged up the narrow stairs to his home, located above a shop that sold hand-made chocolates. He could hear his wife in the kitchen and smell the aroma of cooking, but Henri was not hungry. He hung his coat on the back of the bathroom door and slumped down in the sofa that faced the television. His wife heard him. She came bustling into the room, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She was a large woman with huge shapeless breasts beneath her blouse. Her dark hair, woven through with grey strands, had been pulled back in a bun, and her face flushed red and perspiring. The loving maternal smile on her lips faltered and froze when she saw Henri’s expression.

  “What is wrong, Henri?” the mayor’s wife asked in a whisper. Her hand clutched at her throat instinctively.

  He shook his head and forced his face into a dismissive grin. “Nothing, chéri,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

  She came cautiously towards him. They had been married for thirty years. She knew when her husband was lying. His face seemed to have collapsed, the flesh hanging in unexpected pouches and folds. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you hungry?”

  He looked up into his wife’s eyes and tried to keep the smile going just a little longer. “Not at the moment,” he said softly. “I wish to watch the news first.”

  He switched the television set on and his wife left him alone in the darkened living room. On the wall, a clock chimed 9 pm. Henri switched to a news channel, and the bright flickering lights from the screen lit his face into a death-like mask of hollows and deep haunting shadows.

  The spread of the Raptor virus was a continuous news feed; linking outdoor live footage back to a pair of female news anchors back in a studio. Henri watched with the cold slithering fear of dread coiling tighter in the pit of his guts. The contagion had breached France’s borders. The broadcast showed footage of armed troops at crossing points and then cutting to a live feed from the streets of Paris. Henri leaned forward in his chair, pressing his horrified face closer to the screen.

  He could see police cars in the foreground parked at crazy angles across a shadow struck street. The blue flashing lights were like a strobe. Darkened by their uniforms and riot gear, French troops were filing through the gap between the cars and jogging in two lines down the middle of the road. They were carrying shields on their arms and wore dark paramilitary helmets. At the far end of the street was an intersection. The camera zoomed in, but for a moment nothing happened. The troops reached a traffic sign and spread out across the road in a line, linking their shields like a wall. Henri Pelletier held his breath and felt a trickle of ice-cold sweat run down the back of his shirt. Over the images a reporter was broadcasting, but Henri narrowed his gaze and blocked out the sound. He concentrated on the intersection, the road lit up by the neon lights of nearby shops. The armed soldiers started to move forward in a straight line, stretching from one side of the road to the other. The camera tried to follow their progress by zooming further, but the image became shaky. Henri swallowed hard.

  Then, suddenly, there came a blood-curdling scream from somewhere off camera and the line of soldiers froze. Someone barked an order, and the men braced themselves.

  A wall of snarling, blood-drenched figures came around the corner and spilled out across the intersection like a wave of bodies; a heaving seething mass of snarling growling faces. They were clawing and biting at the air, surging forward towards the thin line of soldiers. Henri felt his breath jam in the back of his throat. A spotlight cut through the darkened gloom like a knife, falling on the faces of the crowd. They were inhuman, their features distorted, their faces ravaged and greyed. They hissed at the soldiers and then charged.

  Henri Pelletier sat back in his chair and watched numb with horror and fear as the tide of infected undead crashed into the line of soldiers, and then overwhelmed it. The center buckled first. One of the soldiers fell screaming to the ground with three of the infected thrashing at his body. In an instant the entire line collapsed into a terrified rabble as men tried to escape back towards the police cars. The camera picture shook madly and then suddenly tilted side on and froze.

  Quickly the image switched back to the studio. One of the women behind the news desk wept softly.

  “We repeat,” the other broadcaster announced. “The Raptor virus has reached Paris. Three thousand people are already believed to be infected, with that number rising dramatically by the minute. Police and Army are unable to contain the spread of the contagion at this time. The government has declared a state of martial law in Paris, Nantes, Strasbourg and Lille. All other major towns in the northern region of the country are on high alert…”

  Henri Pelletier’s skin crawled and prickled with a thousand insects of terror. He had delayed fortifying the city, and now he felt filled with cringing fear. He sat very still for a long time, staring blankly at the television screen. His only movement was the fluttering tick of a nerve at the corner of his eye. His face was white as marble, shiny with a sheen of perspiration.

  Quietly, as if in slow motion, he leaned over the side of the sofa chair and vomited across the living room carpet.

  * * *

  Jacques Lejeune pulled up the collar of his overcoat and turned the corner, walking slowly with his head bowed, deep in thought. The night was a pearlescent mist; an Impressionist painting of soft hazy edges and blurred halos around the streetlights. The mist drifted like smoke, turning the figures that passed him on the street into vague ethereal shapes.

  “If the American is right, then it is the end of the world,” Jacques heard the echo of his footsteps on the ancient cobblestones, walking without purpose or direction. “And if that is the case, then what have I done with my life?”

  He was a sixty-year-old man and still a virgin. As the Deputy Mayor he had some prestige in the community, but as a man?

  He had lived in his mother’s home with her until she had passed away just the year before, and had never dated, never married. Now he was staring into the precipice of his own mortality and the view from where he stood was not a pleasant one.

  Without realizing it his feet carried him towards the old city’s imposing walls, and as he stepped beneath the vast arch of the
Porte Saint Roch gate, a young woman with lewdly painted lips appeared from out of the darkened gloom.

  She wore a short skirt, a handbag dangling by her side. She sauntered towards Jacques with a polite invitation in her eyes and in the way she smiled. Jacques hesitated. His feet shuffled on the wet ground. The young woman was very beautiful.

  “Twenty-five euros –” the prostitute came closer to him, confident in the way she moved her body. She began slowly unfastening the top buttons of her blouse. At every sway of her hips the fabric of her shirt gaped open, and Jacques had to tear his eyes back to her face.

  “I’m… I’m not interested,” he said stiffly, without conviction. Her lips were soft, painted red.

  “Twenty then,” the prostitute lowered her price. “And for that I promise you the time of your life.”

  Jacques shook his head but his resolve began crumbling. The woman’s top gaped wide open and her breasts were soft in the moonlight. A car drove past, slowing as it passed through the gatehouse but Jacques did not notice. He took a step backwards into deeper shadow. The woman came close enough that he could smell the scent of her cheap perfume. “Come on,” her voice purred. Possessively she ran a delicate hand across his chest, smiling up into his face with sparkling eyes. “You know you want to…”

  A wave of unaccountable despair washed over Jacques, hopeless longing and the emptiness of his fear. He hung his head for a moment and felt the oily taste of his shame in the back of his throat. The woman heard him sob.

  When he lifted his eyes again, the movement shook loose a tear; it spilled down his sallow cheek.

  “My mother died…” he made a helpless gesture with his hands like a plea for understanding. “And I’m very lonely. I’ve never been with…”

  The young woman reached for Jacques hand. “Come with me,” her voice firmed and became husky. “My name is Paulette. I will look after you.”

  “Come with you? To where?”

  “My apartment,” she said softly. “It is just around the next corner.”

  Jacques cuffed at the tears in his eyes and nodded passively. Paulette led him down a shadowed laneway.

  * * *

  “I was starting to worry about you,” the woman behind the reception counter at the Grande Hotel smiled her relief at Camille Pelletier. “Half the night shift staff have already called in sick this evening.”

  Camille groaned. She flung her handbag behind the counter and pulled off her sweater. “Why? Is there something going round? A flu?”

  “Fear,” the woman behind the counter said with scornful condescension, pouting her lips. “They’re all worried about the Raptor contagion that has been on the news.”

  “They said that?” Camille sounded shocked. She thought for a moment about Steven Tremaine and the lie she had told him at dinner.

  “No,” the woman shook her head. “They all made the usual excuses, of course. But you can tell. It’s in their voices.”

  Camille said nothing more. She swept through a doorway to an inner office and dropped into a chair behind a computer monitor. She glanced at her watch while she waited for the latest data on hotel occupancy and reservations to spill down the screen. It was a few minutes before 10 pm.

  “Glad you could make it,” a matronly woman’s voice called out from over her shoulder. Camille spun round on her chair. It was the day manager – a bitter woman in her forties with a dry withered face and a surly expression. She eyed Camille with open resentment. “I was expecting to have to cover your shift as well. Most of your staff have already called in absent. I thought you would be one of them.”

  Camille widened her eyes into an artless challenge and stared defiantly at the woman with her jaw set and determined. “Then you were wrong, Marguerite. Again.”

  The day manager sucked air through her clenched teeth so the sound was like the soft hiss of a snake. Her eyes flashed venomously. In her hand she held a thick folder stuffed with dog-eared sheaths of paper. She threw it onto the desk beside Camille.

  “These reports need to be completed and sent to head office before midday tomorrow,” the woman declared. “I’ve done most of it. You will have to do the rest. It’s a full inventory of all… and I mean all… of the hotel’s current cleaning and maintenance supplies. Everything needs to be counted and signed off. That’s your responsibility.”

  “Mine?” Camille was about to protest. Her tasks were not administrative. She oversaw the reception counter and customer check-ins. “Why me?”

  “Because I put your name on the bottom of the forms,” the older woman smiled vindictively, flashing crooked, discolored teeth. She turned and left without another word, her footsteps echoing hollowly on the parquetry floor.

  Camille flipped open the cover of the folder and sighed. Ahead of her waited twelve hours of work in dark cramped storerooms in the bowels of the building. She closed her eyes, sighed as her shoulders slumped. “I should have called in ill,” Camille muttered darkly.

  * * *

  They came for Tremaine at 6 am – a frantic pounding on his hotel room door drove him from the bed and he stumbled to his feet, bleary-eyed, his head still stuffed with the cotton wool of fatigue. The television was still on. He saw the face of a man dripping blood flash upon the screen, the stranger’s mouth wide open in a silent shriek of agony. He drew the door open suspiciously and saw Henri Pelletier and Captain Devaux of the Police Nationale standing in the hotel corridor. The mayor wrung his hands with anxiety, shuffling impatiently from foot to foot while the Captain of Police stood stoic and stiff to one side.

  “Monsieur, you must come immediately,” Henri Pelletier insisted. There was naked unholy fear in his eyes. “The meeting at the Town Hall has been brought forward.”

  Tremaine swayed on his feet. He scraped his hand across the unshaven stubble of his jaw and blinked myopically. He had not slept long enough. “What’s happened?” his voice croaked.

  “The contagion,” Pelletier lowered his voice to a coarse whisper. “It reached Paris last night. France is infected and the virus is spreading down from the north. The capital is under martial law, and we have had no contact from those government authorities in Paris, or any of the other major cities since the early hours of this morning.”

  Tremaine listened in silence, the fury and outrage growing like a fire in his eyes as the French mayor explained. He glowered at Henri Pelletier and his voice snapped with scorn.

  “I told you this would happen,” Tremaine came fully awake in an instant, grappling with the ominous implications of the mayor’s update. “Now you’re in a panic because everything I warned you about is coming crashing down around you.”

  Pelletier lowered his eyes with regret and shame, and his face reddened. He nodded his head and when he looked up again his expression was twisting on his lips as though he were in great pain. Tremaine saw weakness in the man’s eyes. Henri Pelletier lacked the instinct for ruthlessness. Most men were reasonable; they sought to avoid confrontation. But there would be no room for the luxury of compromise in the dark days ahead.

  “Yes,” he conceded. “You were right, Professor Tremaine. The contagion has reached France, and it is spreading south towards us. I have cost us twelve hours of preparation. I can only hope that there still remains enough time for us to save as many people as we can. But right now we need your help – not recrimination. There will be time for that later, I assure you, and I will go to my God to be judged. But now – right now – we need you to come to the Town Hall. The others have been summoned and are assembling there, waiting for us.”

  * * *

  There was just four of them in the conference room: Tremaine, the mayor, Captain Devaux and Colonel LeCat from the Gendarmerie.

  “Deputy Mayor Lejeune is not answering his phone,” Henri Pelletier apologized.

  “And your daughter, Camille?”

  Pelletier shook his head dismissively. “She was not notified,” he said. “This matter is beyond the involvement of the local business com
munity.”

  Tremaine grunted. The building was eerily quiet. He glanced out through the curtained window. The new day was dawning.

  “Very well,” Tremaine turned back to face the room, his voice filled with determination and authority. “What do we know for a fact that we didn’t know when I left here last evening?”

  Pelletier shrugged his shoulders. “I have told you,” he said, frowning. “Paris is being overrun by the infected. It was on the news last night – the first cases in the capital began appearing late in the evening.”

  “And you cannot reach anyone in Paris?”

  Henri Pelletier shook his head. Tremaine glanced at LeCat. “Colonel?”

  The burly French commander unfolded his arms and straightened his shoulders. “Communication with headquarter elements has been disjointed,” he chose the word carefully.

  “Meaning?” Tremaine fixed the man with a stare.

  “Meaning that we have no direct link to an active command,” LeCat was forced to admit. “The contact we have had has been with broken elements of the Army in various regions surrounding Paris.”

  “What about other headquarter elements here in the south?”

  “There are none,” LeCat sighed expressively. “We cannot make contact.”

  “Meaning the majority of the French Army has deserted?”

  “Or been infected,” LeCat said.

  Tremaine and LeCat stared at each other through the tense crackling silence. Tremaine nodded his head slowly. “How many men do you have based here in Avignon?”

  “Two hundred and thirty six,” LeCat answered automatically.