For a few blissful moments nothing else mattered. With huge, saucer eyes filled with tears of joy and relief, Sonya watched as the doctor wrapped her little baby in a soft blanket and carried her across the room. Ignoring the pain and discomfort she felt, she sat up and took the little bundle from him. Shutting out the rest of the world, she stared down into a beautiful, wrinkled, blotchy blue-pink face. She stroked the baby’s cheek with a single gentle finger and revelled in the warmth, movement and noise that the little girl had innocently brought to her otherwise lifeless world.
‘What are you going to call her?’ asked Paulette, peering over the mother’s shoulder.
‘Don’t know,’ Sonya replied quietly. ‘We had a few ideas for names but we hadn’t settled on anything for definite.’
‘Take your time and get it right. I always said it was easier to give them a name once you knew what they looked like. Until then you…
Paulette suddenly stopped talking. The baby had stopped crying. The room was quiet.
The three adults in the room exchanged nervous glances.
Both women looked to Croft for an explanation. When he remained silent Sonya looked down and gave her little girl’s hand a gentle squeeze. Nothing. And then the baby opened its mouth wide and let out a sudden, rasping cry. The cry turned into a helpless splutter. Then another cough. Then another and another until the high-pitched coughing had become a constant scream of innocent, helpless agony. Sonya held her daughter close to her breast, desperate to help but knowing that there was nothing she could do. Croft tried to help and take the baby from her but she wouldn’t let go. They knew what was happening.
The deadly contagion still hung heavy in the air.
Just minutes after being born the baby was dead.
15
Croft broke the news to the handful of survivors gathered in the assembly hall before heading back upstairs to look after the heavily sedated Sonya. The range of drugs available to him had been desperately limited. He’d pumped the devastated girl full of whatever he could find until she’d finally stopped screaming and slipped into unconsciousness.
Jack Baxter sat with Bernard Heath in a corner of the hall.
Clare lay on a foam mattress next to them. They had talked intermittently for a few hours with neither man able to even contemplate sleep. In that time Baxter had been given the opportunity to ask some of the questions which had weighed heavy on his mind since last Tuesday morning. Heath, of course, had been unable to answer any of them, but the conversation seemed to have helped nevertheless.
On hearing the news that the baby had died, Heath began to cry. He seemed ashamed by his show of emotion and tried unsuccessfully to hide his tears from Baxter.
‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ he said after a few minutes of silence, his voice unsteady.
‘What?’ Baxter replied.
‘It means that this is definitely the end.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s got to be over now, hasn’t it? There are only a handful of us left now and it looks like we can’t reproduce. So as far as I can see that’s the end of the human race, Jack.’
Baxter stared into the darkness.
‘You can’t be sure,’ he said quietly.
‘We can’t be sure about anything, but you’ve got to admit, it doesn’t look good, does it? I’d started to think that there might have been some hope for us. I’d been thinking that whatever makes people like you and I immune might make our children immune or our brothers or…
Tears began rolling freely down his tired face.
‘You might still be right,’ Baxter whispered.
Heath shook his head.
‘I’ve got a son,’ he continued, wiping his eyes again. ‘He lives in Australia. My wife’s been over there with them. She flew over three weeks ago to see the grandchildren. I know she’s…’
‘She’s probably with them now,’ he interrupted, anticipating what he was about to say and instinctively saying the opposite.
‘For all you know they could be safe. It might only be this country that’s affected. We might………’
‘I know they’re dead,’ Heath interrupted sadly. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say, I know they’re dead.’
Baxter rubbed his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. He knew what he was hearing was right.
‘Until we know for certain though…’ he began, about to try pointlessly to persuade Heath that there was still some hope.
‘Don’t waste your time, Jack,’ Heath interrupted, sitting upright and staring into the other man’s face. ‘There’s no point holding on to dreams or half-baked ideas or…’
‘But you can’t just dismiss everything that……’
‘Listen, can you really say you’ve stopped to try and appreciate the scale of what’s happened here?’
‘Well
I…’
‘I hadn’t. But something struck me a couple of days ago that puts all of this into perspective. Did you own a car?’
‘Never learnt to drive,’ Baxter answered, surprised by the question he’d been asked. ‘Why?’
‘I remember when I brought my first car home. My mother thought it was a death trap and my old dad spent the day outside with me trying to get the engine tuned. I’ll never forget that day…
‘What point are you making?’
‘How many crashed cars have you seen? How many abandoned cars have you seen round here?’
‘Hundreds, probably thousands, why?’
‘Because somebody owned every single one of them. Every single one of those cars was someone’s pride and joy.’
‘I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying…’
‘What about your home? Did you own your house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Remember the feeling when you picked up the key and walked inside? Remember your first night there when it was your house and you could shut the front door and forget about everyone else?’
A faint smile crossed Jack’s face as he remembered setting up home with his dear departed Denise.
‘God, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘We had such a laugh. We hardly had anything. We sat on boxes and ate chips from a…’
‘Just think about the fact that someone had memories like that about every single house you’ve passed, and chances are they’re all dead now. Hundreds of them. Millions of them.’
‘It doesn’t bare thinking about.’
‘But we should think about it. And what about children? Did you have children, Jack?’
He shook his head sadly.
‘No, we wanted to but…’
‘Every single corpse lying and rotting on the streets and every one of those bloody things outside this building, they were all somebody. They were all someone’s son or daughter or brother or sister or……’
Heath stopped talking again. More tears trickled from his tired eyes.
‘You okay?’ Jack asked, hesitantly. He shook his head.
‘This is the end,’ he replied. ‘I tell you there’s no doubt about it, this is the end.’
16
Sheer physical and emotional exhaustion had drained Sonya to the point of collapse. The cocktail of drugs hurriedly prescribed by Dr Croft had knocked her out for the best part of four hours, giving her body time to regain a little strength. When she woke it was shortly after five in the morning and it was dark, save for the first few rays of morning light which were beginning to edge cautiously into the room. She was still lying on the bed where she’d delivered. The body of her baby daughter lay in the crib at her side, wrapped in pure white blankets. As soon as she’d regained consciousness she reached out and picked the little girl up and held her tightly, keeping her safe. Instinctively but pointlessly she still wanted to protect her lifeless child.