by Mark Morris
"I really have no idea," he responded wearily. "Does it matter?"
"'Course it matters," Marco said with a scowl. "It might have something to do with this wave thing."
Greg took a small sip of malt, relishing it, knowing that soon it would be gone and that if he wanted more he would have to go out scavenging.
"Even if it is," he said reasonably, "there's very little we can do about it."
Marco grunted. "Don't like it, that's all," he said sulkily. "Fucking unnatural, it is."
Greg chuckled inwardly. Unnatural. That was certainly one way of putting it. His word for it, though-well, not the blue lightning; he had no idea what that was-would have been cleansing. He knew that countless lives had been lost, and that a tragedy of Biblical proportions had been visited upon the earth (or at least upon their cosy corner of it), and yet, for him personally, the flood had come almost as a blessing. His life had been in such chaos, his mind in such terrible turmoil, that the wave, the tsunami, whatever one wished to call it, had come almost like a proclamation from on high. In one fell swoop his problems had been-quite literally-swept away, rendered insignificant by the natural catastrophe that had overtaken them. And ironically, rather than making preparations to die in a land of abundance, he was now doing his utmost to survive in a world that, he had no doubt, would soon be ravaged by hunger, disease and lawlessness. Oh, yes, Greg was under no illusion that these were the halcyon days, the days of languor and indulgence, to be enjoyed-as thoroughly as one was able-before the real battle began. Not that such a thing could be explained to one-note dunderheads like Marco. Creatures such as he could no more grasp the intricacies of the human psyche than they could grasp the colors of a rainbow. No, at some point Greg knew he was going to have to jettison the boy. Prolonged exposure to Marco's unceasing banalities would, in the boy's own parlance, "do Greg's head in."
For now, though, he was useful. He was young, strong; he had already made an adequate (if complaining) laborer, and Greg had no doubt he would make an equally adequate bodyguard if and when the situation arose.
Together the two of them had spent most of the time since the water had abated removing corpses from the flooddamaged lower floors of the hotel. A grin task, but-as Greg had constantly had to remind his companion-necessary to their well-being if they were going to continue to use the hotel as their base. They had kicked down door after spongy door and carried the bodies down the hotel's many stairsonce sumptuously carpeted in a deep maroon plush, but now a squelching mudbath littered with stinking weed and dead sea creatures. At first the two of them had treated the dead respectfully even (in Greg's case) tenderly, but by yesterday morning, during which time the corpses had been out of the water for eighteen hours or so and had begun to bloat and discolor almost in front of their eyes, they had been forced to quicken the process, to roll or even toss the bodies down the stairs in their haste to add them to the growing pile outside. And by dusk yesterday any compassion or respect that Marco, in particular, might have initially felt for the dead had long gone. In fact, he had become so densensitized that he seemed, at tines, even less human than the heaps of spoiling meat that had once been fellow guests and hotel staff members. In one objectionable instance he had dangled the body of a child by its foot above the central section of the stairwell before letting it drop eight or nine floors to the ground below. As the body had impacted with the floor and split apart, he had even let out a whoop and punched the air, his face shining with glee.
Greg had remained silent on that occasion, but the second time Marco had overstepped the mark he had expressed himself more forcefully. Over the course of the past few days, Greg had discovered that, despite being the senior member of their unlikely partnership by some thirty-five years, he was by far the more motivated and energetic of the two. Marco was lazy, slothful, and although his body was reasonably muscular for now, there was also a fleshiness to it that seemed to indicate that in the not too distant future what was now a bearlike physique would rapidly dissolve into sagging layers of fat. He slept long hours, and took as many breaks as possible, which actually suited Greg fine. The older man relished whatever time he spent alone. Time merely to bask in his newfound serenity.
Early mornings were the best. For the first three after the flood, he had woken to the whisper of moving water, to the gurgle and splash of it impacting with the side of the hotel. On the fourth day, once the water had drained away, he had woken to the dawn chorus, and had particularly loved not the song of the birds themselves-though that had been fine enough-but the way it had eventually dwindled to a silence more profound than he had ever known.
And as well as the silence, Greg loved too the pearly, roseate quality of the dawn light, which seemed particularly beautiful after the curious pyrotechnics of each of the previous postflood evenings. Yesterday, Thursday, he had got up andbasking in his solitude-descended through the sodden dankness of the hotel, pushed through the double entrance doors on the ground floor, and turned left, away from the growing heap of corpses in the street, to take the morning air.
So liberating had his walk been yesterday, in fact, despite the devastation all around him, that Greg had been looking forward to repeating it again this morning. However, after performing his ablutions-washing himself with soap and bottled water, applying deodorant, brushing his teeth, combing his thinning hair, carefully trimming his neat gray beardhe had exited his room only to discover that Marco was actually up and about before him.
The door to the younger man's room (or rather, suite-and indeed the suite that Marco had appropriated had once been the bridal suite, prompting Greg to wonder how many of the couples who had begun their nuptials here were still together, still happy, still alive) was standing open. This was unusual, for although Marco had smashed the lock from the door in order to gain access to it a few days earlier, he was in the habit of jamming it shut when he was inside.
"Marco?" Greg had called, first hovering in the doorway and then venturing over the threshold. The room had been dinm, the curtains drawn, the air fusty (Marco was not as particular about his personal hygiene as Greg was), but it was immediately apparent, even before Greg entered the bedroom beyond the sitting room and noted the empty bed with its rumpled, grubby-looking sheets, that the young man was not at home.
Perhaps, thought Greg, his companion had turned over a new leaf. Perhaps he had woken uncharacteristically early and had decided to make a prompt start on the day's grisly task. Perhaps he had even taken Greg's advanced years into consideration and had been determined to spare him some of the arduous labor of hauling what amounted to slabs of putrefying meat down corridors and stairs to the growing human mountain outside.
Perhaps... but Greg doubted it. It was more likely that the boy had woken up hungry and had gone foraging for food. He decided to head down to the fifth floor, which was where he and Marco had ceased work yesterday, to see whether there was any sign of the young man.
It was here, entering a room whose door had been kicked from its hinges and was now lying half in and half out of the corridor, that Greg encountered Marco, trousers round his ankles, pimply backside exposed, yanking down the pants of a dead girl perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. The girl's flesh was a marbled purple-green color, her stomach distended with gas, her face bloated and blackened almost beyond recognition.
As Marco tossed the girl's filthy pants aside and stepped forward, Greg blurted, "What the hell are you doing?"
It was evident that Marco had no inkling he was being observed. He leaped away from the bed onto which he had hauled the girl as though doused with scalding water.
"Fucking hell!" he yelled, pulling up his trousers and spinning round. "What you sneaking up on me for?"
Greg could barely believe the gall of the man. "I was hardly `sneaking up,'" he snapped. "Besides which, I think that's somewhat irrelevant, don't you?"
Marco zipped his fly. The thick black brows on his wide, olive-skinned face crunched into a scowl. He glowered at Greg,
but said nothing.
"All right," Greg said after a moment, "I'll ask again. What the hell were you doing?"
Marco snorted. "Who are you? My fucking dad?"
"No. Thank the lord."
"Then keep yer fucking beak out!"
Greg sighed. Outwardly he was calm, but inwardly his stomach was crawling with revulsion. "Aware as I anz of our present radically altered circumstances," he murmured, "I'm afraid that necrophilia is one thing I simply can't ignore."
"Necra-what?" said Marco dangerously.
"Just answer me one question, Marco. Were you or were you not about to have intercourse with a four-day-old corpse?"
"Intercourse." Marco sniggered like a six-year-old.
Voice still icily calm, Greg said, "All right, you moron, I'll bring it down to your level. Were you about to fuck the stiff?"
The grin fell from Marco's face. "What I do is my own fucking business. It's got fuck-all to do with you."
Greg licked his dry lips. "You disgust me," he said quietly.
"Yeah? Well, tough shit. You might not have noticed, granddad, but the world's gone down the fucking plughole. We've got to take whatever we can fucking get now."
Greg regarded Marco's hulking form almost contemplatively. Then, at last, he waved a dismissive hand.
"You're quite right, of course," he said. "Conventional morality is a redundant concept in this brave new world of ours." He stole another glance at the bloated corpse. "Well, I'm off for some breakfast. I'll leave you to assuage your particular appetites in your own way."
He was gone for over an hour. He walked the nmud-caked, debris-strewn streets of Mayfair and Soho almost blindly, bypassing the dead as if they were nothing but sacks of rubbish, once even stepping over a severed arm as if it were a branch blown from a tree. Already the streets were beginning to smell bad. Greg wondered whether the rats had drowned with the people. He hoped so, though they were hardy buggers, with fierce survival instincts. If even a few had survived, the city would be overrun in weeks. It was a terrifying prospect. The birds were bad enough. Wherever you looked you could see pigeons, gulls, even garden birds like sparrows feasting on human flesh, and also on the ubiquitous red crabs that themselves were making a meal of the city's population. All at once, by dint of the fact that their numbers had remained relatively unaffected by the disaster, birds were the top of the food chain; nature had been turned on its head. Greg wondered how long the remains of the human race could survive in such a world.
He walked up to Buckingham Palace-a muddy ruin, its ground-floor windows hidden behind banks of black silt, the railings that surrounded it dripping with raglike weeds. There was a crumpled red bus lying in the driveway, and half of what appeared to be a caravan nestled beneath the famous viewing balcony like a giant smashed egg.
He tramped over to the National Gallery, which was hard work because, Hyde Park being so close, the streets in this area were choked with more than their fair share of uprooted trees and vegetation. The Gallery looked as though it had been hit by a bomb. The whole left side of the building had caved in. Greg thought of what the place had once contained. All that history, he thought, all that human creativity and endeavor simply wiped out. Part of him felt he should have been devastated by the loss, but the strange thing was, it didn't seem to matter. With as good as everything and everyone gone, who would be left to acknowledge it, or care? What was the legacy of the human race but a trivial indulgence?
Back at the hotel he breakfasted on tinned rice pudding, courtesy of the well-stocked, though extensively flooddamaged kitchens, then crossed what had once been the opulent marbled lobby, complete with Corinthian columns, to the staircase. Halfway up the stairs he encountered Marco, red and sweating, dragging the body of a woman in his wake. So lathered in mud that she appeared to be made of tar, the woman's dirt-encrusted hair trailed behind her like a mass of roots and her head bounced off each squelching step.
"How are you getting on?" Greg asked bluntly.
"Finished floor five," Marco muttered.
"Good work," Greg said. "I'll give you a hand."
For the rest of the day the two men worked mostly in silence, doggedly clearing corpses from the hotel and adding them to the growing mountain of rotting flesh farther down the road. It was late afternoon, the daylight beginning to lose its luster, when they swung the last corpse onto the pile.
Greg stepped back, plucking away the soap-smeared handkerchief that he had been wearing over his nose and mouth to combat the smell.
"Task complete," he said. "Well done, Marco."
"Yeah. You too," Marco said dutifully. "I'll get the fuel."
Greg nodded, standing upwind of the sickening miasma of what would soon become probably the largest funeral pyre that London had seen since the days of the Black Death. The smell of the dead was on his clothes and he wondered whether he ought to burn those too. He watched the birds circling above the heap of flesh until Marco returned with the two plastic canisters of fuel they had salvaged from a petrol station the previous morning.
Together the two men walked around the pile, splashing petrol onto limbs and torsos and heads. Greg tried not to look at the people he was dousing, tried not to think of them as anything other than disease-ridden waste that needed to be neutralized.
When they had finished, Marco lit a match and unceremoniously tossed it onto the pile. The gulls wheeled away with shrieks of protest as the fire took hold. The flames spread quickly, obliterating limbs and features, melting skin as though it were plastic. Within a minute the air was filled with the angry sizzling of hot fat, with boiling clouds of thick black smoke and the stench of rancid barbecue. Marco stood and watched, eyes gleaming. Greg turned away, wanting to bathe and rest, desperate for something to take the taste of decay from his mouth.
As the day darkened, the fire became a beacon, bestowing the surrounding wreckage with an odd, jerky life. Marco seemed fascinated by it. Even later, when they were enclosed in the sanctuary of their top-floor suites-each a pantheon of classical 1930s style, all chrome fittings and etched glass-he kept shuffling into Greg's sitting room and over to the window, his gaze drawn by the flickering light as a baby's might be by glittering shapes or bright colors.
Irked by the younger man's presence, Greg eventually asked, "Can't you watch the fire from your own window?"
"Can see it better from this one," Marco muttered.
"But what's to see? If you've seen one fire you've seen them all."
Marco gave him a strange, slow-eyed look. "This is our fire," he said, "and it's got people on it."
It was only when the blue lightning returned, dancing and snapping at the horizon, that his attention became distracted. As if the lightning had been designed to annoy him, he muttered, "Don't like it. It's fucking unnatural."
Greg wished he had something to listen to. Something with earplugs. What he wouldn't give for a bit of Stravinsky. Eyes closed, he tried to imagine the music in his head.
Then Marco said, "There's someone down there."
Greg's eyes snapped open. "What?"
Marco pointed through the glass. "There's someone on the street. By the fire."
"Are you sure?" But Greg was already pushing himself from his seat, despite his stiff joints and aching muscles. "Where?"
Marco pointed again. "There, look."
And there he was. With the fire behind him the figure looked strangely thin, oddly insubstantial.
Despite his desire for solitude, Greg felt suddenly excited. "Come on, we'd better go down and meet our guest."
"What if he ain't friendly?" Marco said.
"Why shouldn't he be?" Greg retorted.
Marco shrugged. But he picked up the quarter-full Scotch bottle before following Greg from the room. By candlelight, the two of them made their way down to the ground floor. By the time they reached the lobby Greg felt breathless and dizzy. He couldn't remember when he had last done so much physical labor in so concentrated a period.
Thoug
h the fire was dying it was still burning brightly. The smell of charred meat was sickening. The heat from the fire, even from halfway down the street, made Greg's eyes sting, his cheeks redden.
"Hello?" he called. "Is someone here? We saw you from the upstairs window."
"Be careful, Doc," Marco said. "If he's hiding, it's probably 'cos he ain't friendly."
"Or it could be because he can see you waving that bottle about," said Greg irritably. "For God's sake try not to look as if you're itching to club someone, can't you?"
Marco sighed, but did as Greg asked.
Turning back towards the fire, Greg called, "Please show yourself if you're there."
A dark shape extracted itself from the far side of the fire and stepped forward. Marco raised the bottle again, but Greg pushed his arum down. "Come forward," he coaxed, "to where we can see you."
The figure hesitated, then took several cautious steps forward. As he stepped from the dazzle of the blaze into the gentler illumination, Greg saw that he was a boy, perhaps seventeen years old. He was slim, black, good-looking, but his clothes were filthy and he had a wary look in his eyes.
"Hello, young man," Greg said softly. "My name's Greg and this is Marco. What's your name?"
The boy scrutinized them for what seemed a long time, and then he cleared his throat and said, "Max."
"Pleased to meet you, Max," Greg said. "Can we offer you anything? Food? Something to drink?"
"Help," Max muttered. "I need help. I've got a sick friend. If we don't help her, I think she'll die."
Friday, 291h September
I didn't tell you what we did after we met the man in the supermarket, did I? It was getting dark when we came out, so we looked around for somewhere dry to stay, but we couldn't find anywhere. In the end we broke into somebody's house and slept in their front room. There weren't any bodies around, thankfully, but loads of stuff had been swirled about by the water and was lying around all broken and jumbled up. Me and Dad cleared it all out, then pulled up the soak-ing wet, muddy carpet (which was not easy, let me tell you) until we'd created a big enough space on the floor for us all to sleep. The floor-boards were a bit wet and stinky, but not too bad. Dad put plastic sheets on the list of things we needed, cos he said finding dry places to sleep would be virtually impossible for the next few weeks. Anyway, like I said, we all slept on the damp floor in our sleeping bags, and the next morning we woke up stiff and achy. My shoulders and legs were killing me from carrying the rucksack and tromping through all that mud. Mr. and Mrs. B looked even worse than I felt, but they didn't complain. Mr. B's breathing was really bad, like his throat was full of gravel or sand, and he kept putting a hand on his chest. I could tell Mrs. B was worried about him, but she didn't say anything.
