Apart from her, there was just a fat, middle-aged man playing a game that looked like an outtake from a bad science fiction film. The aim was to blast computer-graphic spaceships with computer-graphic laser guns. It seemed pointless to Sebastian. Then again, every game in the arcade seemed pointless to him. So he leaned against the fake Grecian column and watched Freddie. Sebastian never tired of watching Freddie. He never tired of looking at his handsome, angular face and his dark, curly hair. He never tired of watching the way his jeans tightened around his backside when he leaned over the pinball machine to flip the flippers. For a long while, Sebastian had told himself he was just jealous of Freddie – jealous of his good looks, jealous of his self-confidence, jealous of the way he just had to smile at a girl to get her to fall head over heels in love with him.
But then, quite suddenly, a couple of nights earlier while was sitting in his miserable little bedsit watching something on television that was boring him to tears, the truth had flashed across his mind with the blazing intensity of an illuminated billboard, the sort you see in Piccadilly Circus or Las Vegas: I Love Him.
That was it. Sebastian Taylor Loves Freddie O’Leary. The words had flashed on and off in his mind with the noise of fireworks exploding. Sebastian Taylor Loves Freddie O’Leary. Sebastian considered the idea and found it sound. But, of course, it was quite impossible.
He switched off the television and went to have a bath. He sat in the bath and tried saying the words aloud just to see how they sounded. “I love him.” Yes, those words sounded OK. Then he tried, “I love you.” Those were the words he’d have to say to Freddie, just in case Freddie hadn’t realised.
When Sebastian got out of the bath, he was laughing. His dismal little flat didn’t seem anything like as dismal as it had before. Because in the interval between getting into the bath and getting out again, his entire life had changed. He was now a man in love.
“So what do I do about it?” he asked himself.
He answered his own question: “I suppose I’d better tell Freddie.”
That was going to be the tricky bit. He couldn’t tell how Freddie would respond. Would he fling his arms around Sebastian and shower him with kisses? Or would he belt him in the face and tell him he never wanted to see him again?
Sebastian didn’t know. All he knew was that he would never know until he told Freddie. And that is why Sebastian had come down to the Salty Sailor Amusement Arcade on this cold, wet, windy night in January.
The Letter
Dearest Freddie,
I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t want to argue. But I had to tell you. This is the only thing for it now. The only way out. For me. I can’t live without you. I know that now. It’s not your fault. I don’t want you to blame yourself. Not for anything. It’s just me. I want you to remember me, us I mean, as we were before. Friends. Good friends. Till I went and spoiled it all by falling in love with you. Please forgive me. Remember how it used to be.
Yours always,
Sebastian.
Snowbound
Sebastian told himself he would never let a drop of cider pass his lips ever again in his entire life. He felt so sick, he didn’t even want to move. When he stood he wanted to sit down. When he sat down, he felt he needed to vomit. If he opened his eyes, the light was too bright. If he shut them he felt dizzy. It had taken him a while to get up the courage to have a shower but once he’d done it, he was glad he had. At least, he no longer smelled as bad as he had done before.
“Why did we argue?”
The memories were vague. He recalled going down to the Salty Sailor Amusement Arcade. He remembered watching Freddie playing the pinball machine for a while. And then they’d gone on to the pub. They’d had a few drinks and then…
Sebastian groaned. “Oh no. Oh, my God! I didn’t, did I?”
The memories were all jumbled up, swilling around in a mix of sour cider and a pounding hangover. Had he really told his best friend that he’d fallen in love with him?
“Oh, no…”
He’d have to tell Freddie it had all been a joke. He could say he’d had a drop too much to drink. He could say he’d done it for a bet. For a lark. He’d never really meant it.
Then he remembered the argument. It was all coming back to him now. In the pub. Freddie had shouted at him. Called him names.
“Oh, no…”
No, there was no going back. That had been a once-in-a-lifetime argument. It was all over between him and Freddie. Sebastian was sure, absolutely certain, that Freddie would never want to see him again.
It was while he was thinking this that Sebastian first noticed the snow. That was why the light seemed so bright. Beyond the window of his room, everything in the outside world was white: dazzlingly white. The streets were ankle-deep in snow. The sky was silvery white and big, fat snowflakes were drifting down from it.
He turned on the radio. BBC Radio 2. They were playing some songs from the ’70s or ’80s. Sebastian only really liked rock’n’roll, ’50s and ’60s stuff. But it wasn’t the music he was interested in. It was the weather report. How long had this snow been failing? And how long would it continue?
Another old pop song came on. No DJ. That wax odd. Radio 2 generally had more talk than music at this time of day. He put the kettle onto the gas stove. He needed some coffee. He checked what he had in stock. Only some cheap ‘own brand’ instant stuff. It would have to do.
There was a voice. On the radio. He turned up the volume.
“…due to the current situation, our regular schedules have been interrupted today. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to resume our regular broadcasts as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are the news headlines for today, Monday the thirteenth of January.”
He switched off the radio.
The kettle was boiling. He spooned some of the filthy instant coffee into a cracked mug and poured on the hot water. He wasn’t sure if he could face milk yet so he decided to drink the coffee black.
“Shit!” He sat on the edge of his unmade bed and nursed the hot mug in his hands. “Monday. It can’t be Monday.”
Yesterday had been Saturday. That’s why he’d gone down the amusement arcade and onto the pub. He would never have gone there on a Sunday. He wasn’t even sure if the arcade bothered opening on Sundays.
“Oh God, I must have slept for two days.”
How much cider had he drunk anyway? He’d bought a few two--litre bottles from the supermarket the week before. He wasn’t generally a heavy drinker but sometimes he liked to have a half of dry cider while watching the telly.
He saw an empty cider bottle lying on the floor. He looked under his bed. Two more empty bottles there. He went to the swing-lid trash bin. Another two bottles in there.
“Oh God, no wonder I feel half dead.”
He’d never been on a binge before. Not like this. This had been the binge of his lifetime. He couldn’t even remember drinking all the cider. He must have blacked out.
There was still a smell of vomit around the place. He pulled back the sheets of his bed. Oh Hell! They were disgusting. He pulled all the sheets off, found a big black plastic bin bag in the kitchen and bundled the sheets into it. He’d have to clean up. Disinfect the place. It stank like a public toilet. But first he needed to grab a bit of shuteye. God, he was tired. So very, very, incredibly tired.
*
It was the knocking that woke him. Someone was banging on the door of his flat.
The Sickness
He looked more dead than alive. His skin was pale, almost greyish in colour, his hands were as cold as ice. And, worst of all, his eyes. His eyes looked as though they’d had salt and sand rubbed into them. Red. Where his eyes should have been white, they were a horrible, fiery crimson. A fine, branching network of inflamed blood vessels made the eyes look as though they were on the point of bursting.
“What the hell…?”
“I’m sick.”
“I’m not feeling too gr
eat myself,” Sebastian said, “But you… For God’s sake, you should be in hospital.”
Sebastian realised he was gaping; his mouth was open in shock and horror. The dreadful apparition standing before him was Freddie. Slim, good-looking Freddie with his perfect skin, curly, dark hair and electric-blue eyes. Except now his skin looked cracked and leathery, his hair was wet and lank. And his eyes. My God, what had happened to his eyes?
“Can I come in?”
“Of course you can. I’ll phone for a doctor.”
“You won’t get one.”
“Just you wait and see if I don’t.”
Freddie was right. He couldn’t get through to a doctor. His landline made a crackly, buzzing sound. The mobile played a recorded message about a network fault.
So Sebastian did the best he could all on his own. He found some dry clothes and got Freddie to put them on. Freddie’s clothes were soaking and cold. He’d been walking through the snow but he wasn’t dressed for it. The way he was dressed, in jeans, denim shirt and trainers, he could have died of exposure. No wonder he looked so pale.
Freddie was a couple of inches taller than Sebastian. When he put on the clothes that Sebastian gave him, the jeans didn’t come all the way down to his shoes.
Freddie lay on the settee. Sebastian got a duvet off his bed and covered Freddie with it. All this while, Sebastian kept conversation to small-talk of the most trivial kind – how awful the weather was, how cold his flat was, how strange that the phones weren’t working, and would Freddie prefer tea or coffee, how about a biscuit or a piece of toast, and finally, what the hell was Freddie doing walking through a snowstorm in jeans and a denim shirt?
Freddie just mumbled answers: yes, no, don’t know, don’t mind, can’t remember, not important. Until Sebastian finally came out with the big one: “What the bloody hell happened to you?”
That was when Freddie told him about the sickness. It came with the snow, he said. The snow had started falling on Saturday evening but it only really started to fall heavily in the early hours of Sunday morning. Sebastian remembered seeing a few light flakes of snow as he walked back from the pub. But he hadn’t seen any heavy snow. He had probably already been well into his second or third bottle of cider by that time. The memory of the cider made him feel sick again. Why had he drunk so damn’ much? Oh yes, because he was going to kill himself. And why was he going to kill himself? Because of the argument with Freddie. The biggest, loudest, most God-awful argument he’d ever had in his entire life. All because he wanted Freddie and Freddie didn’t want him.
And now here was Freddie lying on Sebastian’s settee, pale and sweating, trembling and cold and looking close to death. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Sebastian said, “What sickness?”
Freddie told him that on the day after the Great Snow, people started getting sick. They had fevers, they sneezed and coughed, they got delirious, some hardly knew what they were doing – they were almost drunk with the sickness. And it wasn’t just one or two people. Lots of people. Most people. And it took them in different ways. The older people got ill: stomach aches and puking. The younger ones were tougher, they didn’t get the physical ailments so much, but the sickness got to their brains. They started acting nuts, ranting, raving, they got violent, smashing things, attacking people.
“And you got this sickness?”
Freddie nodded.
“But you’re not ranting and raving. You’re not violent.”
“I think I’m fighting it off. I think it’s like with flu. It makes some people really sick. Others just shake it off.”
“Oh,” Sebastian said, “That’s good then.”
That was when Sebastian saw a small, bright red drop of flood trickle from Freddie’s right nostril.
*
Sebastian stayed awake all night, mopping Freddie’s brow with a flannel soaked in cold water, cleaning away the blood which was running more freely now from his nostrils and was oozing from the corners of his eyes, cleaning up the bile and the vomit, and holding his hand and talking to him, listening to him raving about his childhood, a dog he’d once had, being beaten by his father, finding his mother in the arms of another man, a holiday in Bournemouth, eating a huge ice-cream called a Knickerbocker Glory – it was all disjointed rambling and sometimes Freddie would laugh and sometimes he would cry and Sebastian couldn’t be sure how much of what Freddie was saying was true and how much was pure fantasy. But he sat on the floor next to the settee and he listened and he said “Oh really,” and “That must have been sad,” and “That’s nice,” and similar meaningless platitudes and he stroked Sebastian’s hand and he mopped his brow. And by mid-day the next day, which was Tuesday, Freddie was over the worst of it.
Spring Awakening
It was a bleak spring. Everything was falling apart. First the phones went, then the electricity. People lay dead in their houses, bodies lay rotting in the streets, gangs of red-eyed youths roamed through the town, doing whatever they wanted. Atrocities of violence, rape and murder were commonplace. The only safe thing to do, for those few who had survived the ravages of the sickness was to hide – barricade the doors, pilfer what food you could, and just try to survive until things got better. If they ever did.
In March, the Army arrived. Sebastian was ecstatically happy when he saw the first lorries and armoured vehicles rolling into town. It felt as though they, the survivors, had been living under some malignant occupying power and now the Army had come to liberate them. People stood in the streets waving at the soldiers. Some waved flags: the small flags that were sold in the summer months for children to stick into sand castles. There were Union Jacks, American flags, flags bearing the logo of the Star Ship Enterprise and even one or two swastikas. Sebastian had been surprised to see how many people were lining the streets waving their little flags. Until then, he hadn’t realised so many people had survived. Ever since the Great Snow, the town of Stony Cove had given the impression that it was deserted, a ghost town through which only hoodlum bands of loutish, half-human creatures wandered. Now Sebastian realised that all those other people – those other survivors – had been doing exactly what Sebastian and Freddie were doing: they had hidden, barricaded themselves away, hoping that one day somebody would come to rescue them. And when the Army arrived it seemed as though that day had come.
But as time went on, it no longer seemed so certain. True, the Army did start to impose order where previously there had been chaos. Corpses were cleared from the streets; a curfew was imposed and transgressors were summarily shot. Food was brought in and distributed in return for cooperation from the residents. That cooperation took many forms. In some cases, people with specific skills such as painters, decorators, plumbers and electricians, were recruited to help repair and renovate essential buildings. Power generators were brought in, a communal kitchen was established in the old Methodist Hall and a small clinic was set up in what had formerly been the local doctor’s surgery.
But cooperation could also mean information. The Army was determined to document and register all the survivors. At first, that seemed sensible. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to be done after any catastrophe: a flood, an explosion or, in more geologically active parts of the world, an earthquake or a tsunami. Document the dead, document the living. Nothing wrong with that, surely?
Then they started taking people away. Only certain people, though. People who had been sick and then recovered. People like Freddie.
Luckily, nobody knew that Freddie was staying with Sebastian. Sebastian’s flat was in a small, two storey detached house. The landlord occupied the ground floor. Sebastian had the floor above. The landlord wasn’t there any more. Sebastian didn’t know what had happened to him. He didn’t care. All he cared about was hiding Freddie. He couldn’t be sure if anyone had seen Freddie arrive. He could only hope they hadn’t. For the first few weeks after he came, Freddie was too fragile, too infirm, to go outside. When the Army came, Sebastian decided that it
would be better if Freddie never went outside. It would be better if nobody knew that Freddie was even there.
One day, the soldiers came. Sebastian saw them arrive. They knocked on the outer door, the door to the street. Sebastian considered pretending that there was nobody at home. But he’d already seen how the soldiers dealt with unoccupied houses. They battered down the doors or they shot the locks. Sometimes it turned out that the unoccupied houses weren’t unoccupied after all. So Sebastian went down the stairs and he opened the door and he said, very calmly, very politely, “Hello, can I help you?”
There were two soldiers there. They were carrying guns and wearing what Sebastian assumed was combat dress including hard helmets. He had been expecting one of the soldiers to reply with something like “Good day, sir, I wonder if you might be able to help us?” In fact, there were no polite preliminaries. The soldier nearest to him pushed Sebastian out of the way and started running up the stairs towards his room. Sebastian shouted, “Just a minute! You can’t…” But by then the second soldier had grabbed hold of Sebastian. Moments later the first soldier emerged from Sebastian’s room, pushing Freddie in front of him.
They took Freddie away. They didn’t say where they were taking him. Sebastian thought it was the last time he’d ever see him. But he was wrong.
Loss
Stony Cove: January
Gloria
“I’ve had it right up to here. If that old bat keeps going on about her teeth, I swear I’ll throw her teeth out the bleedin’ window and then see what she’s got to say about that.”
Gloria sat down on the uncomfortable, hard-backed, tubular-metal chair and kicked off her shoes. Her feet were aching, her back was aching and she was starting to feel a headache coming on.
The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned Page 2