Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead

by Jacob Prytherch

  I snapped, reaching up quickly and grabbing the little man, holding him up in front of my face. My mouth trembled and my eyes quivered with unconcealed disgust at this maggot, this worm who looked at the world with such a sickeningly detached view. His features sickened me - his beady eyes, his withered countenance, his hands that grasped and clung like a demented child. He seemed to be bleeding from the shoulder, but I had no sympathy for any wound he may have suffered. I pushed him between my two palms, feeling his little bones twist and snap, crushing him with every ounce of strength I had. Soon I couldn't even feel him squirm any more. I opened my hands to find nothing, but still I felt the need to wipe them on my trousers, to rid myself of his unnerving nature.

  Eliza crouched down next to me. I hoped she hadn't seen my frenzied movements. If she had, she didn't give any indication, focussing solely on the girl in front of us. She reached out tentatively and placed her hand on one of her thin shoulders, simply holding it there for a few moments. It seemed like an age had gone by when finally her patience was repaid and the girl raised her head slightly, looking at us over her forearms with eyes that had seen far too much. I reached out a hand, following Eliza's patient lead. After a couple of minutes, she carefully unfolded her filthy arms. This simple action seemed to be some sort of tipping point, as she suddenly leapt, throwing her arms around my neck and releasing a howl that was laced with days of torture, horror and sorrow.

  This moment of salvation and relief was a lone light in the darkness, for when we searched for other survivors there was little to be found except the dead, the dying, and in one or two cases those who begged for death, for a release from the amount of pain they were suffering. Amputations, experimentation, torture, it was as if everything that humanity had accomplished in the past, bringing civilisation to the heights it had been at before the plague, had also twisted and skewed the value of life, reducing it to a commodity, another thing to consume and be consumed. It was not animalistic, it was worse than that, it was human.

  We had no way to save them, no surgery tools, and no way to halt their slow death, so I had to administer the rest of the methadone, helping them on their way as gently as I could. The house of murder, after weeks of screaming, fell into silence.

  "Where are we going to go?" asked Eliza, sitting against the wall by the fire exit. I was just finishing cleaning the wounds on her cheek and eye, being as gentle as I could. I carefully taped a couple of sterile pads over the worst affected areas and gave myself a nod of satisfaction at my work. There was precious little to celebrate, so I had to make the most of any victory, no matter how small.

  "Lets just drive," I said, closing up the bag of medicine, ready for the onward journey. "Anywhere is better than here."

  The girl was sat silently, still sobbing slightly but otherwise healthy, as good as she could be under the circumstances. The wounds on her back were painful but didn't seem to be infected and would heal with only minimal scarring as far as I could tell. It was Arthur I worried about the most, as he seemed to have given up, simply staring at the opposite wall whilst flexing the fingers on his broken arm. I could see him wince from time to time at the pain of his actions, but perhaps he simply wanted to feel something else, even pain, anything apart from the sense of loss.

  I could feel the map pressing against my leg in the hip pocket of my trousers, but I tried to ignore it as best I could. There was no way I was following the path that Perdita had laid out for me in her childish scrawl. That way lay doom, I was sure of it. We needed to simply get into the car and get out of town, find somewhere safe, somewhere supplied, so we could wait this out. How long could a body last before the elements decomposed it entirely? Even with winter coming – which would slow the process – surely in less than a year the last of the dead would be gone, assuming there were no more fresh infections. With so few people around the infection rate must have dropped dramatically. It was a glimmer of hope.

  Eliza and I had carefully carried both bodies – Dorothy's and the girl’s mother's – to the exit, before finding some clean sheets amongst the horrific bedclothes. We wrapped them tightly, being as respectful as we could with Dorothy in case Arthur looked over at us, but he never did. He was lost. The girl was admirably strong of spirit, even helping us to wrap her mother, though she still hadn't said a word.

  Eliza had a look in her eye, as if she desperately wanted to discuss something but present company prevented her. I made a note to ask her when we were alone. I had had enough of trying to avoid issues, they only bred new issues, multiplying in the shadows before emerging worse than ever. We needed to clear the air.

  She stood up, flexing her arms a little in readiness for the impending escape. She looked at my shoulder, her eyes showing a little concern.

  "Don't you want to do something about that cut? It might get infected..."

  I looked over, seeing the patch of blood that had spread into the necrosis covered jumper from just below the shoulder joint. It started hurting immediately, as if reacting to my eyes. I winced and nodded, as Eliza helped me painfully remove my clothes.

  It was a deep knife wound, very fresh, needing a lot of stitches. (You know.)

  I had no idea when I had suffered it, but I suppose that didn't matter. (It matters. You know why.)

  There was no thread in the small first aid kid and I had no desire to scour the station again, but I had seen some super glue under the reception desk, so I decided to go and get it to seal the wound. (You...)

  I felt an itching inside my head, as if a spider were crawling around inside my temples. I rubbed my face quickly in some manic urge to pull myself back into concentration, back into the moment. I couldn't think about it. (About what?)

  I couldn't.

  I left Eliza, walking back into the reception. The grisly scene had lost none of its monstrosity in the time we had been away and I had no wish to dwell there, quickly grabbing the super glue and making to leave, when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

  Vince was still there, still writhing, just barely alive. His sharp features were pale from blood loss, but his eyes were watching me, displaying nothing but stone cold hatred. I fixed my eyes on his gaze, unwilling to turn away, unwilling to let him win even this. It was all so... unnecessary.

  “Why?” I asked, walking forwards until I was stood over him, looking down on a man that had once been so tall. His hands were contorted, all the blood draining from his limbs, restricting him, pulling him into himself, down into his own slow death. “Why did you choose all this? It's all gone out there, dead. At the very least, this was a chance for something new, but you chose this. You chose it. This...”

  I gave up. He could say nothing in reply, his lips drawing inwards painfully with each fitful breath. The knife wound gaped in his side, made by the knife from Eliza’s shop - the catalyst for our escape. So small. So terrible.

  I turned to go and my boot tapped gently against something, an object that had fallen out of the bag as I had scrambled for the methadone, so full of terror in the face of this man that now was so small, so pitiful. I bent down and picked the lollipop, before placing it into the man's twisted fingers.

  “I hope it was worth it.”

  Eliza helped me clean the wound, following my instructions carefully, before sealing it with the glue. It was a temporary measure, painful and messy but necessary. When my arm was ready, we prepared ourselves to move. I had only put the check shirt back on, deciding to leave the stinking sweater to rot with the rest of the bodies in the police station. The girl, who when I had been gone had revealed her name to be Juliet, was helping Arthur to his feet. He was clearly in no hurry to leave but he had no aggression towards the girl and was content enough to follow her lead.

  I was quite loaded down, carrying the sports bag full of pharmaceuticals and now the shotgun, with the few remaining shells taken from Arthur’s pockets during our incarceration, which I had found in one of the torture chambers. I was also trying to carry Dorothy's feet... th
ere was no way we were leaving her behind, not here, not after what had happened. (What had happened?) We also needed to take a second trip to the car with Juliet's mother's body into account, which would surely be a stretch even with a small number of dead outside. We needed to do some reconnaissance before we went any further.

  Eliza took a deep breath and pushed the fire door handle down, the scent of death wafting in as she carefully opened it, just a notch. She put her eye to the gap and scanned the slice of alleyway that was visible to her, before closing it again. Her face had drained of all colour.

  “There's so many of them, eating. They're eating... I don't know... I don't know who...”

  I knew, I remembered the sight as Marcus had hurled the cannibalistic man outside, helpless into the hands of the waiting corpses. There had been so many stumbling throughout the alleyway. I had hoped they would have dispersed by now but it seemed they had stayed for the feast. Even after simply cracking the door open a little, one or two must have seen Eliza and were already slamming their fists against the fire exit. It was a strong, thick fire door but it wouldn't last forever against the weight and force of the amount of dead in the alleyway. We needed a new escape route.

  The station was all on the one sprawling floor, so we had no choice of escaping out of a second floor window. The front entrance was still barricaded, an obstacle we could conceivably remove but it didn't come out very far from the gathering in the alleyway and I wasn't confident we could be in the car and away in time.

  There had been a driveway on the right hand side of the station, near to where I had parked the Morris Minor. We found the entrance that led out to it near to the cells. It had also been barricaded, hidden behind a stack of chairs, which is why we hadn't spotted it before. There was a locker room and storage area just off the corridor next to it, the windows of which were also boarded up but still had one or two gaps wide enough to look out of. Squinting through I could just make out that the back door led out into a small private car park serving the station. There was only one police car left, both of its front doors lying open, its white, blue and fluorescent yellow stained red with blood from some moment of carnage. There were one or two of the dead still roaming this area, one even wearing a black police uniform, with his police earpiece hanging from a wire and dragging behind him like a limp and lifeless tail. They were moving around at the far end of the car park so would hopefully be no problem to circumnavigate. Confident that we would soon be away and in the clear, I turned away from the window and happened to glance at a noticeboard on one of the walls next to a row of lockers. It was a station hierarchy. As I moved closer, I recognised two of the faces and breathed in sharply with alarm.

  The superintendent had been a woman named Hannah Read, probably mid to late thirties judging by the photograph. The expression on her face was one of calm austerity, very different to when I had last seen her, battered to death, swelling with the gases of necrosis as we had sewn up the sheet over her face. There was simply no mistaking the dark long hair and high cheekbones. It was strange to see this picture of her, so full of life, almost regal, when now she was decomposing by the second, breaking down to her component parts. Which part contained such poise, such authority? Did it evaporate? Was this woman's soul located somewhere there, within the bones and tendons?

  The other picture left me with such a raw feeling of disgust that I wanted to spit it out, to charge back to the reception area, grab the garden fork and destroy this man's body as he had been a party to Hannah's destruction. Sergeant Vincent Thomas. Even in the past – when he was bound by rules and regulations that he must have simply followed but never cared for – his face carried the air of one who felt the world owed him a favour. Had he revelled in the use of force he could legally bring down upon those breaking the law? Had he used his knowledge of laws and detection to commit foul deeds even before this apocalyptic situation had developed? Or had it simply been chance that had brought this violent, inhumane side out of him? There was no way of knowing. Maybe he had resented Hannah's authority or maybe he had desired her from afar, succumbing to his urges when the world had changed forever and he had no longer bound by anything except a self imposed moral code which he found all too easy to disregard. Maybe he had simply given up hope of a better future for mankind, becoming as hellish as the creatures that surrounded the station.

  Such thoughts were pointless and futile questions that would never be answered. I pulled the photograph of Hannah from the wall, before carefully placing it in a side pocket of the sports bag. Eliza joined me, having pulled the two bodies to the back door with the help of Juliet.

  “Will you give us a hand with these chairs?” she asked, looking towards the barricade.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, zipping up the pocket and standing up. I looked around at the lockers and noticed that about half of them had been levered open with a crowbar at some point, probably by Jason.

  “Actually, if you could start and I'll join you in a couple of minutes, I want to change into some of this gear,” I said. “I’m sick of the smell of these clothes. When I’m dressed I can go and get the car and back it up to the door, so we can load it here. It'll be quicker than making two trips carrying the bodies and I might be able to do it without any of them getting a whiff of me.”

  She nodded and went back into the corridor, asking Juliet to help instead. I watched them for a few seconds, seeing Juliet's brow crease with determination and effort as she lifted the chairs aside and carried them out of the way. Eliza was involving her as much as she could, which could only be a good thing. The young girl had been dwelling on events long enough in that cell. I wondered when she had last eaten as she looked painfully thin, her small ribs visible under her muscles as she moved. The sooner we got to the supplies in the car, the better. We hadn't found any food in the offices, although we hadn't had the stomach to search everywhere.

  I changed into a black uniform made up of trousers, a short sleeved shirt and a clean pair of socks. I felt surprisingly better simply for the feeling of the ironed cloth on my body. I pulled the photograph of Isaac out of my old trouser pocket and slipped it into the new one, before starting to pull out the map. Caught by a sudden impulse I decided instead to push it back down, deeper into the clothes I was leaving behind. It was time to make my own way.

  I looked in another locker and found a small shirt, maybe a women's size, which I handed to Juliet. She took it tentatively, before slipping it on and buttoning it up in that focussed methodical manner that children possess. It was too big for her, hanging low off her shoulders, yet she seemed more comfortable now she was wearing it, moving the chairs with a little more fervour.

  There was a large bag in the bottom of one of the lockers, black with white writing. I pulled it out and unzipped it. The contents brought a tiny smile to the corner of my mouth. Perhaps our luck was changing.

  Inside there was a full set of what looked like armour – a bulky vest, shoulder guards, knee guards, a helmet with a neck guard and visor – along with a transparent round shield, truncheon and even a small extendible baton, though how much use that was against the dead remained to be seen. The truncheon would be relatively helpful in a tight spot but it was the shield that was a godsend, allowing me charge at any obstructing corpses without fear of being bitten by their hungry jaws, as long as I pushed them away hard enough. As I started to put on all the various pieces of armour, carefully trying to work out how to assemble it over the blue jumpsuit that I had also found in the kitbag, my mind started to drift back to a time I had previously never remembered... a time of huddling small under the covers of a bed, safe and warm as if in a cocoon, whilst a voice filtered through, recounting tales of heroes on horseback, swords and monsters, the good against the unjust, chivalry and honour... ideals that seemed all the more childish in my current circumstances. Was Marcus any better than those he had killed with such wicked glee? There was no purity left in this world, as if a blanket of ash had fallen, turning all col
ours to variations of grey, which changed and shifted in the shadows until you lost track of which grey was even the lightest. The only thing to do was to continue.

  “I'm ready,” I said eventually, testing the range of movement my arms had in the armour, which was surprisingly light and made of a flexible but tough material. Eliza inspected me closely, tugging and adjusting bits here and there. I felt as if this were the first day of school...

  I blinked a few times as another memory grasped my mind, forcing itself to be recounted. My blue satchel, grey and red lunch box, the wet gravel path, the wall thick with moss and ivy. The salute to the camera, proud in the face of the unknown. Clearly something was drawing my memories out. They weren't gone... they were all there, treasures in a catacomb ready to be discovered.

  (Bring them all to the surface, like bodies pulled from a lake.)

  Focus. I had to focus. Eliza's voice cut through the memory, pulling it away like curtains before the show, the grand finale. The escape had begun.

  “Very good. We may just make it out of here alive. Come on, I'll let you out.”

  Eliza turned the lock, before pausing with her hand on the door handle. She looked at me with a mix of concern and warning, making sure that I was in no doubt just how much importance was resting on my efforts. I pulled the visor down and held the shield in my left hand, the shoulder of which was throbbing painfully, though the pain was easy to push through with the amount of adrenalin that had started to course through me.

  “I'll be waiting here for your knock. Be careful,” she said softly, before pushing the door open.

  The light outside was starting to dim as the world crept towards night, giving a halo of shadows to the corpses that were staggering aimlessly around the far end of the car park. It also gave them an extra dimension, potentially an advantage as it was now clear most of them used sense other than sight to find their prey. I had to be alert. Even though I was wearing clean clothes, I was aware of the odour of my own sweat as it beaded and slid down my face. Was this what drew them? Stop musing and start moving, I told myself in the same chiding tones that Marcus used so frequently. I ignored the dead at the end of the car park and pushed my legs into action in a tentative half jogging motion, trying to make every step as quiet as possible whilst still moving with some sort of speed.