The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned

by Collingbourne, Huw

  “What are you doing on the floor, for God’s sake?”

  “I feel weak. I just sort of, slid down the wall. Can’t get up again now. You’ll have to help me.”

  “Have you been drinking? For God’s sake, Donnie, it’s only half past nine. In the morning.”

  “I’m sick. I feel sick.”

  Helen started to panic then. “Sick? What’s the matter? Here, let me help you.”

  With some difficulty she pulled him to his feet and, with his arm around her shoulder, guided him into her little living room. She sat him on the chair where she had been sitting moments earlier. She picked her book up off the floor and put it onto the coffee table, closing it as she did so, not even bothering to put a bookmark to save her page.

  “Oh, Donnie, you look rough, my love. What happened?”

  “The sickness. I must have got the sickness.”

  “What, the flu, you mean?”

  “Not the flu. The sickness that came with the snow.”

  Helen still wasn’t quite sure if he was pulling her leg or not. Either he was playing a joke on her or else he was delirious. Whatever he was saying just didn’t make any sense.

  “Look, I’ll put the kettle on. Get a cup of coffee inside you, that’ll do you some good. Your hands are freezing. How long you been out in the snow? You could at least have worn gloves.”

  “Gloves?” – he gave her a look of total incomprehension.

  “Gloves. I bought you some lovely gloves. Sheepskin. You should have worn them.”

  “Gloves?” he said.

  It was no use talking to him. He wasn’t making a blind bit of sense. Helen got a duvet off her bed and wrapped it around him. She moved his chair closer to the radiator. She managed to get him to eat a few spoons of soup. But no matter what she did, he wouldn’t warm up. His hands were icy cold. He kept shivering.

  Towards the afternoon, Donald’s eyes started to bleed. That’s when she became really scared. She phoned the doctor’s surgery but there was no answer. Then she phoned 999. But she was just kept waiting, listening to a recorded message. So she did the best she could for him. She piled more blankets over him and she mopped the blood away from his eyelids with a moist flannel. She was at her wit’s end, not knowing what she should do next when there was another knock at the door.

  Her pulse raced when she heard it. She didn’t know why but she had a feeling that there was something wrong. Not just with Donald. She had a feeling that something bad had been let loose in the town. Maybe there really was some sort of sickness. One of those diseases that came from Africa or China? This time she didn’t open the door. When the knocking came again, she called out, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” came back a voice, “Keith. I need to talk to you.”

  He needs to talk to me! Helen thought. He has no idea how much I need to talk to him. Keith had always been one of Helen’s closet friends. If anyone knew what to do in an emergency, Keith would be the one.

  When she let him in, Keith practically ran into her arms and they stood there, in the open doorway, hugging one another and saying nothing for a good minute. When they pulled away from one another they saw tears in one another’s eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Keith said.

  “Donald, my fiancé, he’s not well.”

  Keith gave her a baffled look. “I’m not talking about Donald. I mean everyone. What’s happened to everyone?”

  They sat down then and had a long talk. At first, Helen didn’t believe what Keith told her about the weird things he’d seen in the town. Keith, on the other hand, found it all too easy to believe that Donald had become suddenly and inexplicably sick. “There’s loads of people worse than he is.”

  “Sick, you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Mad, I think. It’s like half the town’s just gone mad.”

  “What are we going to do about Donnie?” Helen asked.

  Keith had a good long look at Donnie, shivering and pale in the armchair under a mound of bedclothes.

  “He don’t look too good, do he?”

  Helen shook her head, “No, he doesn’t.”

  “I tell you who’d know what to do.”

  “Who?”

  “Gloria.”

  “Which Gloria?”

  “You know, fat Gloria from school. She’s a nurse these days.”

  “Gloria’s a nurse? Really? Where does she live?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “I can’t leave Donnie.”

  “OK, then,” I’ll go round her place. If she’s there – and she might not be, if she’s working – I’ll bring her round. She’ll know what to do to make Donnie better.”

  But Gloria didn’t know what to do either. When Keith went to her house, Gloria was practically hysterical. Her mother was dead, she said. And her brother Ben was crawling around on the floor and growling like a dog. Earlier on, Ben had tried to attack her so she’d locked him in his room.

  “Oh, Keith,” she cried, “What the hell are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know, Gloria. I was hoping you were going to tell me.”

  Dave

  “So that’s one duck stuffed with asparagus and one bream à la maison. Will there be any wine, sir?”

  “That’s a bit of a poser, isn’t it. I mean, duck suggests red. Bream suggests white. What would you recommend?”

  “Have you considered a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, sir? It would complement the bream while adding a certain zest to counteract the fat of the duck.”

  “Oh, I hope the duck isn’t fatty!”

  “Not at all, sir. I was referring to the natural quality of the duck flesh.”

  “I’m not sure. What do you think, Archie?”

  The chap doing the ordering was one of those formal, old-fashioned types. Dave put him down as ex-army. Or ex-air force. He had that gruffly polite way of talking that officers tend to have. They are too polite to shout but they damn’ well expect you to do exactly what you tell them to do anyway.

  His dining companion was a bit of a chinless wonder. One of those public school types. A bit younger and thinner than the military-looking chap. What would he be, Dave wondered? In daddy’s business somewhere? Banking maybe?

  “Actually, I’m quite fond of Sauvignon blanc, sir.”

  Sir. Oh well, that put a new complexion on matters. Maybe they worked in the same bank and the older one was a senior partner or whatever they have in banks. No, that didn’t quite fit.

  “Fine. We’ll have a bottle of whatever it was you suggested,” the older one said, handing back the menus, “Make it well chilled, would you? Fancy an aperitif, Smedley, um, I mean, Archie?”

  “Oh, rath-er, sir! Pink gin, perhaps?”

  “Good idea. Two gin pahits, boy.”

  Strange. The older one called the younger one Smedley. Presumably his surname. Then he switched to Archie. Presumably his first name. Obviously he wasn’t in the habit of socialising with his inferiors. Must be in the military, then, Dave thought. Two army officers out for a meal on expenses at the Grand Plaza which was by far the best hotel in town due to the fact that the other hotels were all pretty squalid. But why would two army officers be having dinner in a godforsaken, out-of-season dump like Stony Cove in the middle of January? Oh well, that was no concern of Dave’s. He just had to take the orders, bring the wine and generally be as cringingly obsequious as possible. It was such a boring job and many of the diners were such rude people that he had started making a game of guessing who they were and why they were there just to relieve the tedium.

  Dave was sick to death of serving people. It wasn’t the life he’d had in mind for himself. He had wanted to be an artist. But everybody told him it was a waste of time. Who’d employ an artist, they said? It was an empty dream. Dave had tried to convince himself that he could make a career in art. You didn’t have to exhibit paintings in art galleries, he’d reasoned. Artists were needed all over the place. Drawing and designing things: computer games, advertisin
g posters, Cornflakes boxes. His dad had laughed at that. “Oh well,” he’d said, “if you really want to make a name for yourself drawing pictures on boxes of Cornflakes!”

  In the end, Dave had given in. He’d let himself be convinced that being an artist was not a career. Not a career for someone like him anyhow. Someone ordinary. Someone who probably didn’t have any real talent anyway – just dreams. So he’d left school with no qualifications worth mentioning and he’d got whatever jobs were going. The first job he’d actually enjoyed was serving in a pub. Not that the work was interesting. It wasn’t. But he got on with the people there. He talked to the customers, joked with them and on the whole they liked him. That was his real talent, Dave decided. Getting on with people.

  Last summer he’d got a job in the Jollity Camp. Serving in the Dining Hall. Boring as hell and the pay was lousy. But he’d made some good friends. Freddie and Sebastian were his best mates there. They all had a similar sense of humour. When they weren’t working it seemed they were always larking about. On the whole, that summer job had been fun. More fun than his current job. There wasn’t much fun to be had serving people in the Grand Plaza Hotel. It wasn’t so much the genuinely rich or posh customers who were the problem. It was the ones who wanted to pretend they were richer and posher than they really were. With some of that sort, the cutlery was never clean enough, the steak was always underdone when they’d specifically asked for ‘medium’ and the service was never fast enough.

  Dave finished work at 10 o’clock that night. It was cold and breezy outside. A thin, wet sleet was starting to fall. He’d had enough of Stony Cove. He’d had enough of the Plaza Hotel and the stuck-up customers and the even more stuck-up hotel manager. He didn’t think he would be able to stick it for much longer. Come summer, he’d probably get a job back at the Camp. Maybe he’d sign up to some night classes in art too. He could draw OK already but he knew he hadn’t mastered perspective. And he needed to brush up on anatomy too. If he could just get perspective and anatomy sorted out, maybe he’d be able to get a job as an illustrator. A cartoonist even. That was Dave’s dream job – to be a cartoonist for one of the comic-book publishers. People looked down on them in Britain. But abroad, in Italy and France, comic-book artists were stars. Some of them were as famous as novelists.

  When he got home to his flat, he took off his coat, kicked off his shoes and went looking for his little box of tricks. That’s what he called it: his box of tricks. It was an old metal Quality Street sweet tin. He’d eaten the sweets years ago but kept the tin because he liked the colours. Besides which, it looked so innocent. Too innocent to contain anything naughty. In fact, it contained some very naughty things indeed. Dave didn’t have many vices. He wasn’t overweight, he wasn’t a heavy drinker and he didn’t smoke – well, not regular cigarettes, anyway. He did enjoy a nice spliff from time to time, however. It helped him relax. He had all his makings in the tin. He kept a bit of roll-your-own tobacco and a little brown lump of crumbly Moroccan Gold hashish resin. He had a little cigarette-rolling device which he used to assemble the cigarette paper and tobacco before crumbling a good pinch of the resin into it and finally licking the paper to seal it. Then he put on some music – mid-period Pink Floyd, before they got too pretentious – and settled back to enjoy a smoke.

  Maybe it was the hash or maybe it was the music or maybe it was just that he was in a weird mood and needed some way of breaking through the incipient depression, but somewhere between ‘Astromine Domine’ and ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ he suddenly took a fancy to a tab of Fritz The Cat. He had been keeping it for a special occasion. He didn’t trip very often but when he did he preferred to do it on quiet, sunny days when he could feel a warm breeze on his skin and hear the grass rustling in the fields. He’d never tripped at night before. In fact, he’d never tripped alone before. He generally liked to be with a friend. He liked to be able to share the experience, to talk about the things he was seeing, the thoughts he was having.

  He opened the Quality Street tin and stared at the little bit of paper with the wide-eyed cartoon cat printed on it. Would he? Should he? The answer to the second question was easy: no, he definitely shouldn’t. As for the first question: would he? He picked the bit of paper up on the tip of his index finger and stared at it. No, the music was wrong. Too harsh, too jangling. He went over to his MP3-player and picked another Pink Floyd album. A later one. ‘Wish You Were Here’. Slower, more melodic. He sat back in his chair and let Dave Gilmore’s string-bending waft him into the music. He put his joint into an ash tray and watched the smoke curling slowly to the rhythm of the music. He looked into the sweet tin again. Fritz The Cat stared back at him. He licked his index finger, picked up the tab of paper and popped it into his mouth. By the time it kicked in, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ was playing. Dave had never before realised what a depressing song it was. It was incredibly dark. Oppressive. It seemed to suck him into a place from which he couldn’t escape.

  *

  The next day went past in a blur. The night seemed to have gone on forever. He couldn’t remember much about it. He had vague memories of staring at the ceiling which had shimmered and pulsed like a soap bubble and of staring at a book called ‘Anatomy For The Artist’ which had lots of photographs of naked people and thinking to himself, “They are all dead. All the people in this book are dead,” and that gave him a profound understanding of something but he couldn’t remember what. And the next thing he remembered was putting a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug, boiling some water and then forgetting what to do next. He tried pouring the water onto the coffee and stirring it but it didn’t look right. So he got some milk out of the fridge and put a drop into the coffee but it still didn’t look right. So he poured it down the sink. It was morning by that time and he was well on the downward slope of the trip but everything still looked unnaturally bright. When he looked out the window, all he could see was white. He knew that was because the pupils of his eyes must be dilated. That was one of the side-effects of the acid. So he sat in his chair and stared at the wallpaper. Even though the LSD had pretty much worn off by that time, the wallpaper wouldn’t stay quite still. It undulated slightly and the rose pattern on it seemed to be in constant motion, trickling down the wallpaper like pink turtles. It made him feel dizzy. So he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was nearly dark. He was hungry. He decided to go out to the Chinese takeaway down the street. When he saw the dismembered body lying in the snow and two young girls feeding from it, he thought he must still be tripping. When he saw two teenagers beating a screaming old woman with iron bars, he thought he might be mad. But as he walked through the town and saw atrocity upon atrocity, he knew that it wasn’t he who’d gone mad. The world had gone mad.

  Five Against The World

  There were six of them at first.

  Dave, Helen, Keith and Gloria had been at school together. When the madness started, Keith went to find Helen. She was nursing her fiancé, Donald, who had fallen sick. They went to find medical help from Gloria, because she was a nurse and would surely know what to do. But Gloria had problems of her own. Her brother Ben was out of his mind, foaming at the mouth, crawling on his hands and knees; her mother was dead. Then Keith had seen Dave walking in the streets, looking shell-shocked. So that made six: Dave, Helen, Keith, Gloria, Donald and Ben.

  Keith decided to go looking for other friends who might be able to join them. That’s what they say, isn’t it – there’s safety in numbers. It had been a frightening search. He’d gone the houses of two old school friends but they hadn’t answered when he rang the doorbells. Then he’d gone to another friend’s flat, a bloke called Paul who was a mate from work, and he’d rung and he’d rung and he’d rung. He had just been about to leave when the door was opened very slightly. “Paul?” Keith had said, “Is that you?”

  The door had opened more widely and Paul was standing there, pale and sick-looking. His tee-shirt was drenched in blood and there were masses of parallel, b
loody scars running down his face like the claw-marks of a great cat.

  “Oh, hello, Keith,” Paul had said, smiling as though there was nothing in the least unusual, “Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Keith glanced through the open door into the room. Nobody else was there. But there were blood stains all over the place. On the furniture, the floor, the walls.

  Keith decided not to stay for tea. He went back to the others and told them what he’d seen. As far as they knew, only the four of them – Gloria, Keith, Helen and Dave – had been untouched by the madness and by the sickness.

  A few days later, Keith went to look for Sebastian. He was incredibly relieved to find that Sebastian too was untouched by the sickness. But Sebastian had other problems. He was nursing Freddie, and Freddie was sick. So now there were five of them who were healthy – Gloria, Keith, Helen, Dave and Sebastian – and three of them who were sick: Donald, Ben and Freddie.

  *

  The next few weeks were bleak. Stony Cove had become a place of death and madness. The place stank of death. Every house, every flat, every street, every pub and every shop carried the whiff of putrefaction. Dead bodies were everywhere. There were the bodies of people whom they had known – old Mrs Tigue the greengrocer, Alfie Bates the landlord of The Royal Oak, Wendy Allen, Danny Jones, Bernie Tatlock; so many people lying dead and rotting in the streets and in their homes. And then there were the bands of louts. That’s what they’d called them at first. Louts. Or vandals. That was before the name ‘red-eyes’ started to catch on. Nobody seemed to know who’d come up with the name but soon that’s what everyone was calling them. They were always young people, usually in their teens or early twenties, they went around in gangs and they had sore-looking eyes with red, crusty lids and, sometimes, blood oozing around the edges. It was a symptom of the disease, people said. But what the disease was or how they’d caught it nobody seemed to know. Whatever it was had killed many of the old, the weak and the ill. Younger and stronger people mostly survived. But their minds didn’t. It was as if all sense of morality, decency and self-restraint had been purged from them. They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. They would knock down a person who happened to get in their way, they would rape girls or boys because it pleased them to do so, they would engage in acts of astonishing brutality because they were bored. It was their sheer uninhibited mindlessness that was the most terrifying thing about them.