by Brady, Eoin
Fin could not bring himself to look at the body. Thankfully, she had fallen forward, her face obscured by blood-matted hair. “She wasn’t wearing gloves.”
“I’ve good and bad news for you. That man there is the first advanced case that I’ve personally had to deal with this far west. Every person he came into contact with is likely infected. You are a risk until we know exactly what it is that we’re dealing with. He came here by plane, train, bus, taxi? Walked through a crowd, coughed in a bar. How many people do you pass in a day?”
“This cannot be contained?” Rebecca looked to be on the point of collapse.
“Does not look that way. I can’t let you out, not at the moment. The potential for further contamination is too great. Though, if we could trade places, I would in a heartbeat. You’re in better shape in there than the rest of us. I’ll leave a few ration packs behind, if they can be spared.”
“I tried to get out to Achill Island,” Rebecca blurted out.
“And you came back?”
Rebecca was crestfallen, obviously hoping for better news.
“We’re moving survivors into the grounds of Westport House and the surrounding buildings. From there we are busing as many as we can to Achill Island. It’s safer there. If you have people on the island, then they’ve just won the lottery.” She took a small packet from a pocket and threw it through the gate. “Those aren’t vitamins. Should either of you get sick, that’ll make it quick and painless – relatively.”
“This is being put out to the public?” Fin asked.
“I wish. Probably best to leave that body there. If others see it, well, there’s no better deterrent.”
“Is there anywhere else we can go?” Fin felt emboldened by the suicide pills, assuming it meant she was not going to shoot him.
“Achill is designated a safety zone, but we have no presence there yet. Camps are opening along the rail tracks to Dublin.”
Home. I could walk the coast from Dublin.
“The news said to avoid public transport,” Rebecca said.
“Those that can walk have been given directions to evacuation points.”
A soldier ran up behind her and whispered something.
“If you decide to use those, would you do me a favour? Lock yourselves in a room and mark it. There have been reports saying weepers rise even after being poisoned. I can’t validate that, but no harm ever came from caution. Good luck.” She turned to the soldiers around her. “Quarantine this place.” She left, listening to a report from the breathless soldier.
Fin picked up the poison and walked out of the tunnel with Rebecca. He ran aside, doubled over and vomited. Collapsing on the tarmac, he rolled onto his back, gulping air. It got Ciara. There’s no way that I’m not infected. His teeth felt gritty. He wondered how many more times he could vomit without doing proper damage to his teeth.
Rebecca sat down beside him. Neither of them took much notice of the rain.
“There’s no instructions on the packet,” Rebecca said, turning it over carefully in her hand.
Fin closed his eyes, enjoying the cool rain falling on his face. “Well they don’t really need ‘warning choking hazard’ written on the side, do they?” It felt like all the blood drained from his extremities and strength leaked away with it.
“They look fairly large, are they suicide suppositories? Imagine. What an undignified way to go,” Rebecca said.
Fin managed a smile. “What a shitty end. I don’t think I’ve ever fainted before.”
Rebecca’s reply sounded distant.
He passed out.
12
SOS
Fin barely remembered Rebecca helping him back inside. If not for a painfully full bladder, Fin would have stayed beneath the blankets in an embryo of warmth until sleep took him again. His dreams were muddled and melted away from memory, leaving only a residual feeling of terror. It took everything he had to get up.
Light seeped through gaps in the storm shield covering the lobby windows. By the colour of it, he guessed it was early morning. Only birds and joggers used to be out at this time. Infected don’t sleep. The hotel never felt so empty. There had always been the promise of more guests. Regulars that came every year without fail. Where are they now? The Christmas decorations were still out, mocking what they should be celebrating. Dust motes fell slowly around the tree, the sweet smell of pine perfumed the air. If I don’t take it down, how long will it be up?
The motion sensor in the bathroom turned the light on for him. The stranger reflected in the mirror gave him pause. Greasy hair and stubble shadowed his face and the bags beneath his eyes were black.
Bladder empty, he shuffled back through the lobby. Noise coming from the bar drew him to the door. Rebecca would not make that much of a racket. He stopped before entering. What if she’s infected? He went in, fumbling with the packet of tablets the captain had given them in his pocket. So easy. One swallow and then no more worries. Solene, his family, all of those concerns were a dull ache. Shame, regret and self-loathing, those would go too. He took the tablets out of his pocket and left them on a table. I have to get back to them. The soldiers never saw our faces. If I can get a train to Dublin, I’m as good as home.
Rebecca stopped what she was doing and held her breath when he entered. I must look like a zombie. Silence stretched on and she relaxed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Fin asked.
The whole bar had been rearranged. Tables were upturned in front of doors; stools and chairs were stacked against the windows. Before answering his question she pulled off a blue knitted hat that had been sitting in the lost and found box for months. Her hair was butchered. It was hardly longer than his now and the sides were uneven.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Does she mean the hair or the bar? He thought the best answer in both cases was “Why?”
“The advice online is to not have anything they can grab easily. No hoods or long hair.”
“It looks well on you. How long did I sleep?”
“You’ve been out for a while.” She put a hand on his shoulder and guided him towards the coffee machine.
“What have you been up to here?”
“I can’t sit still. There’s only a lock and bolt securing the doors. If they put any effort into getting in, there’s little stopping them.” She put two coffee mugs under the tap. There were no chairs left standing to sit on.
“Is there any bleach left in the hotel?” he said, trying to breathe through his mouth.
Through the serving window into the kitchen, he saw all of their dry food organised into piles. “The stuff that’ll go out of date first is closest to the door,” Rebecca said, when she noticed he was appraising her work.
“Did you get the food from upstairs?”
“And the basement. Kept me busy. I’m going to spread it out around the hotel, in case of – just in case.”
“You should have woken me.”
“I tried to, but you wouldn’t budge.”
“How long was I out?”
“Two days. First, I thought you were sick, but you had no symptoms. Well, not of turning into one of those things. You held those poison pills so tightly that I thought you’d taken one. It could have been shock,” Rebecca said.
“How are you okay?”
She spread her arms out wide, her fingers pointing to her head. “I’m clearly not.”
“All I want to do is sleep. My thoughts feel like they’re bubbling through tar,” he said.
“You need to keep busy, keep moving.” She handed him his coffee and loaded it with sugar.
He perked up suddenly. “Two days. Are things any better now?”
She hesitated and took a sip from her steaming mug. “It’s not good.”
The coffee tasted delicious; he savoured the warmth, a nice contrast to the feeling he got from Rebecca’s statement. His stomach rumbled for something more substantial. “Much worse?” He wanted to search for his phone on the top floor, but he da
red not touch it after using it as a lure for Ciara and David. The thought of Solene’s voice on that phone was maddening.
Rebecca walked through to the kitchen. On the countertop was a categorised list of everything in the fridges and freezers. They made sandwiches. The bread was stale and hard. He picked off small circles of blue mould.
“We have enough food to last us weeks. So long as the power stays on, we’ll have a decent variety of meals. As for tinned goods, we have fish, beans, pickled peppers, jalapeños, olives. Crisps and sweets. Water is not a problem. They ordered enough cases of it to see us through the New Year’s party rush.” She listed off the things she had taken from the drinks store and vending machines, and all the medicines and bandages from the offices and first aid kits. They were not in a bad situation, which made him feel guilty not knowing how his family were faring. “We’ve plenty of toothpaste and brushes too. More than enough body wash.” She said that last part pointedly.
“Will the power go out?”
She ran her hand across her scalp. “This plague devastated the country. I assume it’s only a matter of time.”
They brought their food and coffee to the bar. Fin only now noticed how quiet it was outside. Rebecca held his arm before he could leave to look out the window. “The roads are not safe. People fell along the roadside to the camps, a trail of weak and sick to feed the weepers. Now they’re all I see. Please don’t draw their attention. We are trapped. On the plus side, it’s mostly the slow ones like David.”
Fin couldn’t believe it. He stood out of view of the window, pulled back the blind and peered through the storm barrier. People walked the road in a slow melancholic shuffle, like a procession behind a hearse. No, not people, not any more. He stepped away from the glass.
“I’ve done what I can down here,” Rebecca said. “I think we need to go through the hotel room by room and collect the complimentary bottled water and potted milk. There’s a lot of food still upstairs too. I would like to move off the ground floor soon.”
“How long are you’re planning on staying here?”
“As long as we have to.”
Fin pushed his sandwich away from him. “What are we going to do with the bodies?”
“Nothing, they’re perfect where they are.” Rebecca took his sandwich and put it in the refrigerator. “There’s something you ought to see upstairs.”
The stairwell was not a place to talk. Each door on every floor was tied shut with heavy rope that could only have come from the basement. She took him to the fine dining restaurant at the top of the hotel and pointed to the mountain, draped in diaphanous wisps of cloud. An SOS signal had been painted onto the side of the mountain. It had to be massive to be seen from such a distance.
“I’ve watched a light move down the mountain at dawn and climb it again just before nightfall. Somebody is living in the church at the top,” Rebecca said.
“That’s a cruel place when the wind picks up.”
“Too many sick down here, too much panic. How many guns are there in Ireland? Now imagine soldiers that couldn’t pull the trigger on ordinary people. Sure, look at you. I thought your head was gone when you stayed in bed for so long.”
His cheeks burned. “I’m sorry. I –”
“Nothing to be ashamed of, how do you process this?”
Fin held a hand to his head as if he could physically hold himself together. “Is this what it’s like to have a breakdown? Not knowing what’s real?”
“Seeing this and not believing it is standard, I’d have thought,” Rebecca said.
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“See this through. Survive, I suppose.”
“Any word on a cure?”
“I don’t think there’s any coming back from that.” She nodded towards the creatures on the street. “Some are calling this our extinction event, and they’re not even the craziest ones with opinions and an internet connection.”
Fin watched the movement of zombies until he was satisfied that it was aimless; visual and auditory stimuli attracted them, but they had no focus, constantly turning to the next thing.
“You wouldn’t mistake one for human, would you?” Rebecca said. “They move as creepily as they look.”
One bumped into a car and set the alarm off, drawing the others to it. A fast one weaved through the crowd and lunged at the infected, taking it to the ground. Fin was grateful the attack was blocked by the cars. Riled up, they mobbed the car, biting and clawing at one another, but after a while they parted without offence.
Something else was setting them off. Fin opened the window a little to let cold air and a fresh sea breeze invade the hotel. Mobile phone ringtones kept sounding, irritating the infected. One of the creatures, an old moustached man, fell over from the weight of his backpack. Those around swarmed him. He found it harder to rise with flesh torn from his legs. Another weeper in the crowd was quicker than the others. Unsteady and jittery on her feet, but so fast she had to crash into the side of a car to stop her momentum. Her weeping was raw and sharp, her voice broke and croaked, but the sound kept emanating from her slack-jawed mouth.
Is it she or it?
Rebecca yanked him back from the window. “I don’t think those ones are fully dead yet.”
The small hairs across his body rose on goosebumps. Adrenaline coursed through his system but he was developing a tolerance. “Not fully dead?”
“There are specialists across the world trying to figure this out before it has a chance to spread. Those fast ones are newly infected, some are still averse to pain, but that might have been a false report, there’s so much fake news spread around this, that it’s hard to know what’s true. Weepers can be killed like a normal human, but unless you cripple them or destroy the brain, they will come back as those zombies – for want of a better word. That’s what happened to Ciara, the infection killed her and she came back as that.”
“This is only a few days old and already there are specialists. That strikes me as odd.” Fin said.
“Really? I thought it necessary.” She closed the window slowly, without making a sound. “It’s fascinating stuff, really. The first stage of the disease is a fever. Think back to before the outbreak. It was national news that we were heading for the worst flu season in years. People have reported delirium and hallucinations. Maybe that’s the point they stop being who they once were. The weeping at first drew sympathy from others, got them close enough to infect. Clever enough to begin with, but now it causes terror. Nobody has explained why they weep. The final stage happens when they die. Those slow, shambling things down there are by all scientific classifications, dead. Zombies.”
Fin pinched his leg through his pocket. “We need to get out of Ireland then.”
“I’m not going anywhere until those fast ones die. We’re right on the coast. When rescue comes, this is where we need to be,” Rebecca said.
A distant clatter made them go quiet. Fin rushed to the stairwell door on the balls of his feet and braced it closed. Rebecca had a hammer in her hand.
“You went down to the basement?”
She shushed him and passed him a knife.
He spent countless nights wandering the hotel alone. There were always unexplained sounds, but the knocking would have given him pause even before zombies had left the realm of science fiction. Glass broke. It sounded close. They were no longer alone.
13
Forgive Me
“I should have done more,” Rebecca cursed.
The noise grew louder. “Whoever, or whatever it is, is not trying to be quiet,” Fin said.
“That does not bode well. Come on.” She bounded down the stairs two at a time, keeping close to the wall to avoid detection. The carpet muffled their steps.
Rebecca undid the knot of ropes sealing off the third floor corridor. Fin had turned the motion sensor lights off, so they would not accidentally alert the world to their presence. The fire door closed softly on well-oiled hinges, leaving them in a
darkness that was total, two feet beyond the stairwell.
“What are we doing?” Fin asked, angry at himself for following her so readily.
“The hotel is empty, the halls are safe. I have the master key to get into any of the rooms. I just want to get a look at what we’re dealing with.”
“If they’re not infected, won’t they notice that this door is the only one that’s not tied shut?”
Rebecca opened the door and pulled the rope in with her. The noise was much closer. Fin felt hands primed to grab him in the shadows. A line of light cut through the darkness beneath the door, broken by the shadow of legs. Standing tight to the wall, they watched a man press his masked face against the small window and peer down the hall. His anxiety was clear from his heavy breathing. Living. He carried on, banging the railing with something heavy.
“I think there’s only one,” Rebecca said. “Go down the hall and when I start wailing, you run towards me as fast as you can. Make as much noise as possible. He’s banging to scare out any infected. I want him outside and running from us.”
Fin jogged down the corridor, breathing shallowly through his facemask in case the infection lingered in the hallway. Rebecca started wailing like a banshee. It was not far off the weepers. Fin sprinted towards her. The banging stopped instantly and a shadow darted past the door.
The man thundered down the stairs. From the sound of it he fell over on the second floor and yelled. “No, no, no!”
Rebecca pressed the chase, bolting from the corridor, weeping hysterically. She pulled a hammer from inside her jacket. She ran ahead of Fin, taking the stairs at a reckless pace, a convincing mimic of the infected. They slowed down on the second floor and stopped entirely before the entrance to the lobby. Whoever had come into the hotel would be under no doubt that the infected were inside, they would be terrified and dangerous, knowing they had to at least try and fight for their lives. Nobody would be stupid enough to go about unarmed these days.
“What now?” Rebecca asked.
