I kept them all in chemically induced comas for two weeks, eventually rousing them one at a time when the medicine ran out. When she regained consciousness, Sue just wasn’t there any more. She could breathe and open her eyes, but she was gone, brain dead apart from the most basic autonomic functions.
I euthanised her as soon as I realised. Another death on my conscience.
John sat beside Lee all day, every day, holding his hand, reading him stories, playing his favourite songs on an old battery-powered CD player. I wanted to sit with Lee too, but I felt I would be intruding. So I busied myself with the day to day running of the school and only allowed myself to sit with my poor damaged boy when his father had fallen asleep. I sat there, stroking Lee’s hair, fighting back tears, willing him to pull through.
Then one wet, grey day, John came running to find me. I was teaching a first aid class to a group of juniors when he burst into the room.
“He’s awake,” he said, and I didn’t need telling twice. I ran as fast as I could down to the room we’d put aside for recovery and there was Lee, lying in bed with his eyes open. He mumbled something unintelligible and I felt a rush of fear — what if he was brain damaged? But then I remembered the metal in his jaw.
“Don’t try to speak, Lee,” I said softly. “Your jaw is wired up to help it repair.” I saw the understanding dawn in his eyes and I realised he was still in there.
John hugged me hard, crying into my shoulder saying “thank you, thank you,” over and over. I hugged him back, looking down at Lee, knowing that he would live but unsure how he would cope with the long, slow process of recovery and adjustment. Half deaf, crippled, held together with wire and plaster casts; his biggest fight was only just beginning. For Tariq and Jack, too.
But there were no soldiers coming after us, no armies left to do battle with. The land was free of military rule.
We were free.
Free.
THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BE KING
ARTHUR ST JOHN Smith sat at a desk in a bland air-conditioned office, pressed the return key on his keyboard and wondered where it had all gone wrong.
When the viral apocalypse wiped the world clean, he had been kind of excited. The terror, the wet beds and the months of self-imposed quarantine in his pokey flat living off cat food and, eventually, the cat, were a bummer, but he eventually came to see his survival as a grand opportunity to turn things around.
All his life he’d been in search of a calling. He was pretty sure that Data Entry Clerk (Croydon (South) Council) wasn’t it, but he didn’t know what was.
Maybe his new job as Survivor (End of the World) would lead him to his destiny.
His first foray into the devastated world beyond his front door was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to him. He pulled on his gloves, stuffed his belt with kitchen knives, and bound his face and head with torn sheets, leaving just a slit for his eyes. Once he worked out that his glasses wouldn’t balance on a cloth-swathed nose, he sellotaped them to his bindings and strode from the house, ready to do battle. In his head it was a grand narrative — meek suburban wage-slave reborn as survivalist hunter-gatherer, stalking the ravaged landscape, calm and ruthless, ready to fight looters and feral dogs.
Maybe there was a damsel in distress somewhere, in need of rescuing. He reasoned that such a maiden may have been even more reluctant to emerge than he, so he checked every house on his street, hoping to find a lissom beauty cowering in terror, just waiting for him to hold out his marigold-gloved hand and tell her everything would be all right.
He especially held out hope for number 34, where that mousey woman from the library lived. She had smiled at him once, a year ago, on the tram. It had been a Monday. But in her house, it was the cats that had done the eating. So he struck out into the wider world.
His big mistake, he now knew, had been stealing the car.
Before The Cull, he had walked past the showroom on his way to work and every day, without deviation, he would glance at the car as he walked past. He’d never stop and stare at it, that would be ridiculous, but he snatched glimpses of it out of the corner of his eye and nurtured a hard covetous knot in his stomach at the thought of it.
Once he was sure his road was empty of life, his first thought had been for the car. He strolled down the familiar streets, retracing his old route to work, marvelling at the changes in the landscape.
There was Mr Singh’s corner shop where he used to buy his wine gums — two packs every Monday morning, enough to last him a week. The shop had been looted and set on fire; a charred corpse dangled out of the upstairs window.
There was the bus stop where the hoodies congregated. They’d jeered at him once as he walked past. Arthur pictured them dying horribly. He wasn’t imaginative enough to conjure anything really gruesome, but the thought of them dying of the plague was satisfying. He chuckled. Served the vicious little bastards right.
There was the primary school. He ignored it; he’d never liked kids.
Finally, there was the showroom. His spirits sank when he saw that the windows were smashed and the cars were all gone. His brogued feet crunched over the glass-strewn tarmac as he explored the wreckage. Nothing there. Out the back, however, he saw a garage locked up with a heavy chain. He paused. Should he?
His colleagues would have described him as bland. Not timid, but not dangerous. But with no-one to tell him off, no social disapprobation to keep him meek and mild, he felt a sudden rush of reckless freedom. Licking his lips in anticipation, he scoured the garages for a crowbar, then returned and jemmied the lock away, opening the garage doors to reveal his heart’s desire.
A Lamborghini Murciélago, abandoned with the keys still in the ignition. The dealer must have thought to hide it when he realised things were going to hell.
Half full of petrol, untouched, jet black bonnet gleaming in the sunshine, the car invited him to take it for a spin. It was like some magic gift, so improbable it had to be intended. He looked left and right before he got inside, instinctively wary of discovery. But nobody yelled at him, or took a shot at him. The seat moulded itself to his saggy rear, allowing him to recline in the low slung vehicle. It felt right; it felt like a throne. This car was his now and why not? Didn’t he deserve it?
He closed the door and gently, almost reverently, turned the key. The car purred into life. He placed his hands on the steering wheel, considered taking off his rubber gloves so he could feel the real leather, but decided to play it safe, pressed his foot on the clutch and then gently depressed the accelerator, revving the engine. The car growled, roared, came alive around him.
In that plush seat, enveloped in that purring, eager metal beast, he felt a rush of something new and strange.
Power.
He was free and alive and it felt good. He released the handbrake and let her rip, tearing down the Queensway towards Croydon town centre, weaving in between ruined and burnt out wrecks. This must be what it felt like to be a rock star, he thought. Like Chris de Burgh going smooth at ninety, feeling good to be alive; or Chris Rea, on the road to hell.
His drive lasted for thirty seconds, and now, two months later, as he scrolled down the spreadsheet preparing for another dreary morning of data entry, he looked back on that glorious half-minute and thought that probably it would be the most dramatic thing that had ever happened to him.
Because the men in the yellow hazmat suits had been searching the town for survivors, and he’d ploughed straight into a group of them outside Morrisons.