by Danny King
“That would be great.”
Nurse Parker re-entered after a quick fingering of the doctor’s buzzer and invited me to retake my wheelchair for the ride back to my room.
“Remember Mr Jones,” Doctor Jacob said, just before I reached the door. “Look after your new eyes and they’ll look after you.”
I nodded my appreciation and was swept from the room by Nurse Parker, already wondering if I shouldn’t just throw it all in and upgrade my arms and legs while I was here.
15.
A BLINDING NIGHT’S SKY
I looked out across a crystal blue sea and watched the gulls circle and squawk above the crashing waves. I’d been recuperating here just short of six weeks and my strength and confidence had come back to me a little more each day. The surroundings had helped, naturally. It wasn’t an accident that The Agency had one of its primary trauma hospitals in such an idyllic location. Your heart couldn’t help but soar at the sun, the sea and the scenery. A little oasis of tropical paradise – that’s what this was. Paradise. The guys in here had been to hell and back, seen and done things no man should be burdened with, and suffered injuries they had no right to survive. Yet here we all were, in heaven.
And hell’s a little easier to forget when heaven’s so beautiful.
I returned my healthy eye to the John Wyndham on my lap and soaked up a few more words. The Day of the Triffids. I’m not normally into science fiction – space ships, aliens, foreign worlds and “what is this thing you call kissing, Captain?” I find it all a bit of a yawn. Perhaps it’s because I have trouble relating to it. Spaceships. Other worlds. Runaway robots. The situations and settings feel too artificial to me. But then again, I haven’t read that much sci-fi in my time, especially “quality sci-fi”, so maybe I wasn’t giving the genre a fair shout. Perhaps I should take the plunge and get an Isaac Asimov or a Robert A. Heinlein as my next book? But then again why should I if I didn’t enjoy sci-fi? There were thousands of books out there. Maybe millions even. I could read a book a day for the rest of my life and never have to worry about sci-fi.
If I’d still been with Linda, and if she’d been here with me today, she would’ve made me read an Isaac Asimov next. She wasn’t into sci-fi either, she just liked making me do whatever I didn’t want to do. It was the same with everything; food, clothing, movies or haircuts: if I hated it, didn’t suit it or was allergic to it, she’d make me wear it, watch it or eat it. Naturally she claimed she did these things to help me broaden my horizons, but really she just liked making me do the things I didn’t want to do. And each time she got her own way she’d see it as a vindication of her own righteousness. And every time she didn’t, she’d see it as a confirmation of my stubbornness and turn it into a fight about my drinking.
I looked out at the sea again and let a warm breeze carry these thoughts away before returning to my book.
As it happened I was quite enjoying The Day of the Triffids. It was the sort of sci-fi I could live with: fantastical and a bit of a stretch, but still within the realms of my imagination. Most of it was set in London or on the South Downs, where I lived, which was a big help. And the odd walking vegetable asides, there was nothing too implausible about the story. The circumstances were incredible I’ll grant you, but the ways in which the characters analysed and reacted to their situations were always fair and believable.
Basically, this is what happens. Somewhere in the future (and bearing in mind this book was published in 1951, so the future in question here is the early 1960s) scientists develop an extraordinary plant whose oils are radically superior to anything on the market. This has global implications as far as world hunger, engineering, trade and peace are concerned, so you’d think everyone would be happy about it, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, there’s a downside. The Triffids are deadly meat-eating plants that can walk around on their roots and kill people with a single flick of their stingers. But that’s okay, because they are only plants, after all, not poisonous elephants, so they’re kept in check, behind electric fences and farmed by experts for their oils. Then one evening, a spectacular meteor shower lights up the night’s sky across the entire globe. Everyone rushes to watch it, only to wake up the next morning blind. Only a handful of people escape, our hero Bill Masen being one of them, because he’d been in hospital with his eyes bandaged up (like all good heroes have from time to time) so he missed the cosmic light show, which is lucky for him.
Things are naturally chaotic at first, with whole populations crying out for help in the darkness, and the sighted do what they can for the blind, but soon realise the situation’s utterly hopeless. There are simply too many blind to look after, feed and care for, and too few sighted. They can’t save everyone and disease and death are soon filling the cities, so the few sighted survivors take to the countryside and start afresh.
The Triffids don’t actually come into it very much at first. Bill and his chums have a hundred and one other things to worry about in the early chapters, but as the book goes on, and the Triffids escape their captivity and start feeding like crazy on the bumbling blind.
Anyway, like I said, the situation’s a bit contrived, but the characters are very plausible. Wyndham himself called his books “logical sci-fi” and usually made his central characters sensible men or women who used logic and reason to negotiate their way through extraordinary circumstances.
I liked this. And because Wyndham didn’t feel the need to keep sending his characters out in the middle of the night in open-topped cars with empty fuel tanks simply because no one had been stung in a while, it made the whole story more palatable. I just wished half the blokes who hired us made some of the same decisions.
As a lifelong proponent of “common sense”, I figured Bill might like this book too, so I made a mental note to recommend it to him when I got back to Sussex and dipped my eye into the next paragraph.
“Ah Mr Jones, here you are,” a sweet American voice declared from across the lawn. Nurse Parker strode towards me with a little tray of drugs and handed me a cup of tablets.
“Margarita time already,” I said, knocking them back and chasing them down with a paper cup of water. “Any chance of a beer?”
“Any chance of one-forty over eighty?” she replied, to the amusement of the assorted disabled villains lounging nearby.
“You’re leaving us soon I hear.”
“End of the week they say,” I confirmed.
“Well take care out there, Mr Jones. We do good work, but we don’t do miracles.”
“I will,” I promised, which wasn’t so much a lie, more an accepted response to such an undeliverable request.
Nurse Parker looked at the book in my lap. “You too, huh? Why is everyone reading that same book?”
“Everyone?” I said.
“Well, everyone here. Mr Collins and Mr Mihailov were reading it yesterday, or the day before,” Nurse Parker reckoned. “And I saw Mr Hu with it last week.”
“Well, you know how it is, one guy sees another reading a book and before you know it we’re all reading it. We’re a bunch of sheep really don’t you know?”
“Clearly,” Nurse Parker agreed, unsure what to make of the explanation and even less so the phenomenon. She shrugged the concern from her shoulders and made do with telling me that I shouldn’t read for too long as I was putting a strain on my eye, so I switched my eye patch between eyes and asked her if that made her happier.
“Much,” she replied with a giggle, then went about her drug peddling.
I returned the patch to its rightful eye and watched Nurse Parker go, before glancing over at Mr Collins relaxing in the shade of the palms. He seemed unfazed to have had his name mentioned by Nurse Parker and simply reached for his lemonade. The tall glass instantly shattered between his Tungsten fingers, once again making everyone laugh.
“Bollocks!” Mr Collins growled, his third such accident in as many days. “Fucking hand.”
Well, we were all having trouble adjusting to our new acce
ssories.
After another hour I came to the end of the book and slowed up my reading pace to soak in the last few words until the story finally gave way to blank paper. The last page of a book is like that for me. It’s a curiously affecting experience, particularly if I’ve enjoyed the book, as I had with this one. I always made sure I read every single word to prolong the experience; the biography, the acknowledgements, the “also published by…” and even the legal guffins, probably because I didn’t want it to be over. I didn’t want to let go. For me, the end of a book is like the end of a journey, or like saying good-bye to an old friend whose company you’d particularly enjoyed. And when that final page was turned and you closed that book for the last time, all you were left with were the memories. And possibly a shit movie if they made one. Occasionally I’d turn back to the beginning and reread the first couple of pages, just to remind myself of where it had all begun, but it’s ultimately a futile exercise because you can never retrace footsteps of discovery. You can only ever trample over them.
I closed the book, ran a grateful eye over the cover one last time, then slipped my feet into my slippers below the deck chair.
The sun was now dipping into the west, casting shadows across the lawn and freshening the breeze. Most of the guys had gone inside for dinner, or treatment, or for rest. Only Mr Gerber remained, his feet in his slippers, despite his slippers being nowhere near the rest of his body.
“Are you finished now, Mr Jones?” Mr Gerber asked, between breaths, as he back stroked lengths of the pool with his remaining limbs.
“Almost,” I replied with a nod, setting the book down on the table at the end of the row from his, then heading off to the comm link office. In the reflection of the glass door, I saw Mr Gerber look about then haul himself out of the water and walk on the flattened palms of his hands towards where I’d left The Day of the Triffids. Nurse Parker had been right when she’d said that she’d seen Mr Collins and Mr Mihailov reading it on previous days, and Mr Hu reading it last week. We’d only had one copy between us, so we’d been taking it in turns to read. It worked out cheaper that way.
It also made it easier to disguise the fact that we were part of a book club.
Surprisingly, no one who’d joined us so far had questioned the need to do things this way. I suppose we were all from covert backgrounds, so why shouldn’t we? Secrecy was kind of habit forming.
I watched Mr Gerber haul himself up into the deck chair next to where I’d made the drop and wipe his hair and body with his towel, before reaching for the book. I envied Mr Gerber for the journey he was about to take and the characters he was about to meet. Bill Masen, Josella Playton, Will Coker and of course, those terrible implacable Triffids, forever wandering the Sussex Downs and laying siege to the last few pockets of humanity. He was in for a real treat.
Still, I wasn’t quite done with them yet and entered the ice-cold comm link office through the tinted glass doors.
Mr Martin was on duty and turned to greet me when I entered.
“Email?” he asked.
“Internet,” I replied.
He tapped a few keys on his keyboard while I filled out the access form and topped it off with an inky thumb print.
“Let me see,” he instructed once I’d cleaned my thumb. He studied it for a moment, pricking my thumb to draw blood to ensure I wasn’t wearing a latex fingerprint, then asked me what machine I wanted. “Do you require privacy?”
“Will I get it?” I almost laughed.
“What I mean is, do you want a booth or are you okay with one of the table monitors?”
I looked around the empty comm link office, then back at Mr Martin.
“Give me a booth.”
Mr Martin managed to hide most of his smirk while he tapped a few more keys then told me to take the first booth on the left. I closed the door behind me and settled in front of the machine as it clicked and whirled to life.
I opened up the internet and searched a few sites: big boobs, girl-on-girl, anal sluts, that sort of thing, before selecting something suitably eye-popping for Mr Martin to get distracted by while he monitored my surfing from his own computer. It was rumoured that he had a penchant for interracial sex, particularly two or more big black gang-bangers ambushing a slender young white girl, which many of us thought was something of a cipher into Mr Martin’s own desires seeing as he was neither big nor black.
I flipped my eye patch up, dug my fingers into my socket and popped my eye out into my hand. I gave it a quick wipe, then extended the jack and slotted it into the USB portal of the machine.
A little window opened up in the corner of my screen and piggybacked buttfuckers.org to our own website. This window didn’t appear on Mr Martin’s computer and what’s more no trace of it would remain once I’d pulled the scrambler. You could argue that these precautions were a tad OTT for a bunch of swotty book worms and you’d probably be right, but the fact remained that ours was an affiliation outside of the normal bounds of Affiliating and as such, it would be regarded with suspicion if The Agency or any of our employers were to find out about it.
Eight books had already been posted, with usernames and scores beside each. The Day of the Triffids had been read by sixteen guys so far, only seven of which were residents of this hospital. The others were Mr Smith over in Tajikistan (username: Fail Safe), who’d given it a four, stating the fact that he thought it had drifted a little towards the end. Someone called Cyber Guy, also on the Tajikistan job, who’d given it a three; Mr Mumbo in Sri Lanka, who’d given it a four; Captain Electric in Belize, who’d given it a four; Sergeant Ardent also in Belize, who’d given it a five; Snowman, Ice Man and Snow Flake, all of whom were somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, who’d given it a four, a four and a five respectively, and The Rt Honourable Baron Bean Boner in Swindon, who’d given it a two. Who’d invited that guy to join?
This, together with my fellow patients’ scores, gave The Day of the Triffids an overall score of 3.69 (rounded up to two decimal places). I thought this was a bit low so I logged on using my username (Book Mark) and gave it a five, bringing its average up to 3.76. If I’d been the first reader to score this book, I might well have given it a four myself, as a five is a big ask for any book, but the lads’ harsher scoring of a book I’d really enjoyed had influenced my final decision causing me to weigh in with a maximum to correct the perceived wrong. I wondered if the others had been doing this too. And if so, what the book would have scored had we all voted with our conscience.
I made up my mind to have a word with Mr Alekseev after dinner. Mr Alekseev (username: Tech Boy) had designed and encrypted the site to my specifications from this very seat while recuperating from reconstructive facial surgery, so I figured I’d ask him if he knew of some way of fixing it so that each user couldn’t see a book’s overall score until they’d submitted their own. Then again, that would be a bit annoying, slogging your way through a pile of utter donkey shite just because it had been on our site, only to discover that everyone else had thought so too. It kind of undermined our powers of recommendation.
I wracked my brains a little longer as to the problem before I was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Mr Jones, the doctor would like to see you if you have a minute. We have the rest of your eyes for you to try.”
It was Nurse Parker.
I pulled my eye from the back of the computer, erasing the book club window, then folded the USB jack into the orb and pushed it back into my eye socket.
“Does he want to see me right now?” I asked, opening the door and sheepishly fixing Nurse Parker with my good eye.
She glanced at the ongoing porn on my screen and framed her disapproval with a stare.
“If you’re not too busy,” she frowned.
I clicked the computer off then stood, remembering to theatrically retie my pyjama cord.
“Lead on,” I invited.
“Like I say Mr Jones, you only got one good eye left,” Nurse Parker advised. “
Go easy on it.”
16.
BETTER OFF DEAD
“Fire!”
The first three opened up with their sub-machine guns, obliterating the targets to their cores. I let off a volley of automatic fire over their heads, warning them onto their bellies as Mr Herbert threw stun grenades into the mix.
“Move it!” I yelled. “Pick up the pace!”
They shuffled forward, splattered with dirt and peppered with that stinging dust that hits you when a flash-bang explodes nearby, but all of them made it to the wall.
“Get your arses moving, maggots!” I offered by way of an encouragement.
I fired another burst of AK fire over their heads as they took to the ropes, then timed their splits on my stopwatch, stopping only when they fell out of my line of sight, and a whoosh from Mr Sato’s flamethrower signalled he had them now.
“Next three!” I ordered, and three more cherries took to the target range and obliterated three fresh paper targets with their SMGs.
I’d been home only two weeks when I’d got the call. Was I available to help vet and train a new batch of recruits for The Agency? Well blimey, I was so potless I would have gone on Celebrity Big Brother had I been asked to, so I jumped at the chance and a week later found myself in an enormous underground cavern on a private island just off the West Coast of Scotland, firing live rounds at The Agency’s latest crop of temps.
“Get your arses moving!”
God this took me back. It only seemed like last week that I’d been here myself, face down in the mud, bullets whizzing past my head, methane filling my pants, wondering what the fuck I’d let myself in for. And those instructors! Just where the hell had they got them from? As a typical cocky twenty-something brain donor, I’d always thought of myself as Rambo’s harder brother, but they’d scared the hell out of me. Particularly when they let that kid in my intake fall into the grinder instead of hitting the emergency stop button when it had become clear ropes weren’t his strong suit.
