by Jack Lewis
“I didn’t want to complain, given how crappy you must be feeling, but I’ve had a bad head myself. Think me and the madam are going to get some sleep,” said Bethelyn.
She took her daughter upstairs and left Ed alone in the dark room, his muscles aching and his head throbbing. He shut his eyes and listened to the sounds of the natural disaster outside and the wind as it blew through the cavities of his old house. Despite the pain his body was tired, and slowly his brain began to relax.
Something banged so hard upstairs that his ceiling shook. Not my roof too, he thought. Two houses in one day? Surely nobody is that unlucky. Then a voice shouted to him.
“Ed!”
It was Bethelyn’s voice, and there was a twist of panic in it that he never expected from her. He stood up from the chair but felt his stomach lurched with something akin to sea sickness. No sooner was he on his feet that his legs felt so light that he didn’t have control of them. They buckled underneath him, and he fell forward and almost cracked his head on the coffee table as his body met the floor.
He was led on the carpet now. His arms and legs felt completely numb, as though they were phantom limbs that didn’t belong to him anymore.
“Get the hell up here Ed,” shouted a voice upstairs, but the sound of it faded.
He tried to move but his vision was fading and his body shutting down. He pushed against the feeling but knew it wouldn’t budge. Whatever it was, whatever was happening upstairs, he couldn’t get there.
As his vision became fuzzier and his head lighter, he knew it was useless to fight. He was fading into nothing, and the world around him was fading too. He surrendered to the numbness and felt the fingers of darkness close his eyelids.
5
Ed
A spray of water woke him up. His eyes flickered as daylight hit them, and he felt a breeze blowing on his skin. For a second it mixed with his semi-conscious mind and took him back twenty years, to his older brother sneaking through in the window of their shared bedroom at midnight, of getting a waft of weed as James climbed clumsily into his bed opposite Ed’s. Pretending to be asleep while his brother whispered his name, no doubt excited to tell him what he’d been up to when mum and dad thought he was in bed.
Just as quick as he’d come back, James was dead again, and Ed saw a spray of glass on the living room floor from where the window had smashed. Bethelyn’s tape job had kept the shards bigger than they would have been.
Pain twisted in his temple as though wound in there by a sadist with a screwdriver. He closed his eyes and tried his old hangover trick, which never worked, of simply wishing the pain and nausea away. He pushed himself off the carpet and sat up. He ran a hand through his hair and felt the grease that slicked his locks. Something in the house stunk in the same way as a pub toilet an hour before closing. He looked down at his pants and quickly realised it was him.
What the hell? He hadn’t done that in years. Not since James and dad had taken him to the Dirty Feathers for his sixteenth birthday and convinced the landlord, Des, to serve him a few lagers. The night ended with James supporting Ed all the way home, tolerating the drunk Ed’s swaying with a patience that every big brother probably learned to develop.
Ed blinked, and again James was gone.
Nobody knew if James was dead, of course. Not officially. His boat had hit a storm too big for the vessel to break through, and none of the crew had ever come ashore. No sane person could look at the freezing sea, imagine the group of men sinking beneath it, and hope that fate had taken pity on them. Ed had never seen the body, but he’d let himself grieve because that was the only way he could cope. Everyone talked about hope as though it was shining light that anyone could follow, but sometimes that light led you into dark tunnels.
He walked out of the living room and stretched a foot onto the stairs, but even the slight movement made him dizzy. How long had he been out for? He’d hurt himself in Bethelyn’s house when the roof crashed, but surely not this badly?
“Beth?”
Silence met him at the top of the stairs. He gripped the edge of his bedroom door and let it support him as he staggered into the room. What he saw locked his legs in place.
They could have been asleep if it weren’t for the fact their eyes were wide open. April lay on the bed with her arms above her head and stretched along the bed. Her chest rose and fell, but there was a stillness to her that you usually only found in photographs. Her skin was grey like concrete dried in the sun.
Bethelyn was on the floor next to the bed. She lay on her stomach with her face buried in the carpet. Ed crossed the room and stood over her, but he couldn’t speak and didn’t dare touch her. He hoped he was wrong, but he had an idea what had happened. His stomach twisted.
They could have been asleep. They weren’t asleep. The same thing happened to him, after all. He hadn’t just fallen asleep naturally, yet some stretched out, indeterminate time had passed and he had woken from it. It could have been something to do with his injury. It could have been something, anything else, but that was wishful thinking. The woman on his bedroom floor made it clear that, no matter how empty it made him feel, this was exactly what he thought.
He left the bedroom, climbed downstairs, passed through his living room and stopped in his kitchen. Three knives hung from a metal rack and swung slowly in the breeze. He tapped his finger along them and settled on the longest one. The blade was wide, jagged, and there was enough handle to keep his hand away from anything he chose to use it on. His dad used to cut pork shoulders with it. He gripped the knife in one hand and leaned on the plastic-coated kitchen counter with his other.
When he thought of using it his throat dried up. What should he do about them? Should he just kill them? He’d seen the early stages of the outbreak on television. Shaky-cam films of infected as they walked through cities in disorganised waves, their minds distracted by the still-alive hunks of flesh that ran in all directions around them, screaming and shoving each other into harm’s way.
The public information newscasts had told him what to expect from infection. It had told him that you caught it through a bite or scratch. That once you got it you fell into a coma and then you awoke as one of them. How then, was Ed still human enough to consider the question? What’s more, how the hell had he caught the infection? He hadn’t been bitted and neither had Bethelyn or April.
He thought again of having to go up there. There was a dim image in his mind of what he needed to do, but he didn’t dare cast light on it. Instead there was another answer, and he decided it lay outside of his house.
A walk across the living room and out of the hallway later, he stood outside his house and felt the tickle of a cool wind. The sky was light grey with cracks where the blue shone through, and it seemed as though the bulk of the storm had gone and left the rear-guard in its place.
He walked up a cobble street which twisted through Golgoth and connected each house. Further up, beyond a stone wall which had collapsed seven years ago and was never fixed, he came to Gordon Rigby’s house. Rigby was an old-timer, an ex-headmaster who had retired to Golgoth and let his mind grow as old as the island’s eroding cliffs. He was a man who loved order but was slowly losing the ability to achieve it. His fingers tugged on lots of webs, and Gordon had involved himself in almost every social hobby and past time on the island. His brown hair, which despite his age refused to grey, and jacket and waistcoat combination were often seen at domino games and pub quizzes, at knitting circles and scouting trips. He was also heavily involved in the town council, and ran it in the manner of a school classroom.
Ed stood outside Gordon’s house, and he saw signs of the order that Gordon struggled to keep. Through his living room window he saw a wooden table set against a wall with a chess set on it, but even from outside the house he could see that the pieces were arranged so incorrectly that even Ed, who was asked to leave after-school chess club, could have done better.
“What am I doing?” said Ed to himself, hoping tha
t someone else would answer.
He’d never gotten on with Gordon. They didn’t hate each other, but there was no fondness. Still, the old man was useful. He knew ‘man things’, those little bits of knowledge that men over fifty somehow acquired but didn’t give any clues as to how. Gordon was one of only two people on Golgoth who had keys to the town hall and the survival stash Bethelyn had mentioned earlier, and he might have had a slight clue of what the hell they were supposed to do.
The handle of Gordon’s front door turned and his black door opened with Ed’s push. Nobody bothered locking their doors on Golgoth. Even before the outbreak there were those on the island who never bothered with security. Ed was something of an outcast in that regard.
“Gordon?”
Ed footsteps thudded on wooden flooring. Gordon’s house had been stripped back to the bare essentials over the years. Dust lined the edges of the wooden panels on the floor, and his walls were free from any plaster or paper so that the original stonework of the cottage was bare. It gave the place a cold feel that seemed designed to repel visitors.
This was backed up by a smell that, as soon as he breathed it in, clung onto the hairs in Ed’s nostrils. It was the smell of darkness, of something wrong. That was the only way he could describe it. An aroma of wet earth and the things buried in it, of dark bogs and rotten food and every other pungent smell that his mind could conjure up. When Ed took a step forward it was almost like stepping through a mist, and he felt the aroma latch onto his clothes.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and coughed into his sleeve.
He stepped into the living room and saw a gathering of flies by the window, but it was only when he was in the centre of the room that he saw the dead cat. It lay pathetically on the floor, body ripped at the belly and pipe-like intensities strewn on the ground. Its eyelids were open and its eyes stared at the ceiling. Ed took a step back and heard a crunch, and when he looked to the floor he saw a pile of dead flies squashed underneath his feet.
He felt something bubble in his stomach and begin an ascent up into his throat, burning a trail through his body as it went. He ran out of the house and into the street. He bent over and waited for the vomit to come, but it wouldn’t.
You’re pathetic, said a voice.
It was a voice he heard a lot. It belonged to his father, though it hadn’t been used in years. Despite how much he missed the old man, Ed knew that he’d fed him enough insults and put downs to give him a complex that’d last years. Ed had never measured up, never been the son that he should have been.
It had always been so. As his childhood years passed and Ed’s body grew, he felt himself shrink. It was weird seeing his father drawing lines on the living room wall to mark Ed’s height, but knowing at the same time that he was never going to measure up.
You bastard. This time the voice was Ed’s.
You screwed me up, but when James and I needed you, you left us. And even now I can’t bring myself to hate you.
Ed straightened up and was grateful for the tickle of cold on his face as the temperature outdoors met his skin. He put his hand to his face and covered his eyes. He had to think. Where was Gordon? What had he even wanted him for? It wasn’t as if the old man could have done much to help. It was just shock that carried him down here. That, and trying to avoid what he knew he was going to have to do at home.
As if summoned by his thoughts, a scream shattered the silence. Ed looked up, his eyes scanning the street before him and stopping at his house. Another scream, this time leaving no doubt as to where it came from.
The path blurred by, and Ed’s thoughts ran as fast as his legs did. In seconds he found himself running up the narrow stairs of his house. Every inch closer to his bedroom, his pulse pounded and his breathing grew heavier. He stood at the top of the stairs with his knife in his hand, sounds rushing by too quickly to process. There was a rumbling sound, as if someone was fighting.
He walked into the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. He almost dropped the knife in shock. Bethelyn was awake, but she was on the floor. Her daughter was on top of her, eyes ablaze with a hunger Ed had never seen before. April strained at her mum and tried to overpower the arms of the older woman. She gnashed her white teeth and tried to bite her mother’s fingers.
Adrenaline shot into Ed’s system and brought him out of paralytic shock. He covered the distance in three paces, took hold of April by the back of her dress and pulled her away from her mum. The girl’s head twisted faster than it should and her stare snapped on him. He saw now that the blood had left her face and her eyes were the colour of puddle water. She climbed to her feet and walked toward him. She gripped the knife tighter in his hand, felt the metal cold against his skin. His temples throbbed.
“Give me the knife,” said Bethelyn, getting to her feet.
April moved closer.
Ed took a step back, closer to Bethelyn. He put his free arm on her and tried to push her away, hoping to get her out of the room.
“Look away,” he told her.
April’s teeth made a clacking sound as she gnashed them and she screwed her nose up, baring her canines. She walked closer.
Bethelyn knocked his arm away.
“Give me the knife.”
Ed took a step toward April and raised his arm. He had to do it.
“She’s my fucking girl,” said Bethelyn, desperation making her voice crack. She grabbed hold of the knife handle and tugged it away from him.
Ed looked sideways at her. “Maybe there’s a cure. We’re not infected, so there might be a way to stop it.”
A sound left April’s throat. It was something bestial that had no right escaping the mouth of a little girl.
“Shut up Ed,” said Bethelyn.
She straightened up fully and held the knife at chest height. April let out another growl and walked toward her mother. In another time, on another day, she might have been going in for a hug. This time as the girl was inches away from her mother, the older woman raised her knife and plunged it into her daughter’s temple. There was a crunching sound, and a solitary dribble of red blood twisted its way down the side of the knife. April’s body sagged, and she fell to the floor like a discarded jacket.
Beth stood over the body with her mouth open. She opened her fingers and let the knife drop to the ground. She turned and looked at Ed, but her eyes stared beyond him at the same time. It was a look that found its way into his core, shaking him to the point that he felt his stomach lurch.
Bethelyn walked up to the wall, raised her fist and pounded it against the plaster. She winced at the first contact, yet she brought it back and punched it again. After another two strikes she finally screamed out in pain, and Ed saw that her knuckles were red and the skin was torn.
Did he have bandages? Antiseptic wash? What the hell should he do now? He didn’t know what to say or how to act. It was lost on him. Ed had failed to learn whatever instincts you were supposed to have to help you deal with another human being in crisis. Bethelyn was about to break down and all he was going to be able to do was to stand there awkwardly.
Bethelyn rested one bloody hand limply in the other.
“We need to go find Gordon,” she said, voice shaky. “He’s got the key to the shelter. More will have turned, and we need to be somewhere safe. We can find anyone else still living on the way.”
“I was just there. At Gordon’s. Don’t think he’s going to be much help.”
“He’s one of them?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“Then we need to find him.”
Ed tried as hard as he could not to look at the body on the floor. Instead he focused on Bethelyn’s face, but he couldn’t read an expression in it. Though he didn’t move his head, April’s body burned on the outskirts of his vision all the same, and eventually he had to give it a glance. He regretted it immediately.
“Listen Bethelyn. Don’t you think we should…do something? Don’t you want to stay here a while? For her?”
Bethelyn gave him a stare that threatened to tear through him. Tears strained at the corners of her eyes but she held them back with a will that most would have found impossible. Her cheeks quivered and blood ran from her busted knuckles.
“Ed,” she said, eyes almost pleading. “Don’t say anything. Just fucking don’t.”
6
Heather
Sometimes she felt something unsettling inside her, less a voice in her head than a weight in her soul. It was a sheet stitched with anxiety, hopelessness, pointlessness, and it could slip over her unannounced. It was nothing physical, but it exhausted her all the same. Some days she woke up and within seconds she wondered what the point was, why she’d even opened her eyes, how unsurmountable everyday life seemed.
Once, back when there were cars, she’d been driving along a country road on a dim afternoon. The road was narrow and twisted without warning, so with a hurrying heart and wide eyes she paid attention to the asphalt in front of her. A cat jumped out from a bush. Heather stuck her foot on the brake and managed to bring the car to a stop, but it was a while before her pulse followed.
