by Paul Wilcock
Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below plays on the iPod and I feel lonely and small and start to wonder why I even bother trying to stay alive when everything's so shit and nothing I do will have any meaning and even if I did do something amazing there's never anyone around to see it and write it in the history books and all of the history books have probably already been burned to keep people warm and if they haven't eventually the sun will burn out and everyone on the planet will be dead and nobody will be around to read the history books or care that I ever existed so what's the point?
I flick the track on, hoping for something more upbeat, my iPod does that amazing thing it sometimes does when it reads my mind and the next random track is exactly what I want it to be and The Pina Colada Song comes on.
It’s too late to try and find somewhere safe to sleep, I'm not creeping around in the dark checking out deserted houses so I sleep in the car, Lotus Esprits were not made for sleeping in so I keep waking up with cramps in various muscles and aches in others, I decide not to watch any more sunsets, it just leads to misery and pain.
While I'm trying to sleep, I think about Emma, I liked Emma, liked her a lot but I never managed to love her, I tried to but it just didn't happen, we did have a lot of good times though, we met at University, I was studying Computing, well not studying so much as listening to the occasional lecture about Computing, Emma was studying Media, she wanted to get into TV or Radio, never did though as far as I know, I think she ended up being the manager of a car showroom bizarrely, she lived in the flat on the right side of the courtyard in the student compound we lived in, she used to walk by and I'd watch her through the kitchen window and sometimes she'd wave and I'd feel like a peeping tom. I started coming up with lame excuses to knock on the door of her flat and ask her questions, the door would usually be answered by one of her male flatmates, they always had a knowing smirk on their face like they saw an endless procession of desperate boys trying to get a date with Emma, she was really hot so I could understand it. Eventually we saw each other in the students union bar on a night out, spent the rest of the night talking and ended up dating. The big problem was, Emma had a best friend that she met on her course, Sarah, who actually did go on to become an actress, and even though I didn't find Sarah as physically attractive as Emma, the more time I spent with her, the more attractive she got until it got to the point that I was inviting Sarah out to what was supposed to be romantic dates with Emma.
Emma never found out about me seeing Sarah behind her back, or else she never let on that she knew, ironically the reason we broke up was actually because I kissed another girl that I had no interest in at all, you could call it Karma, but really it was my own stupidity and weakness when it came to women wanting to kiss me.
I'm 20, it's December 1999, New Year’s Eve, I'm at a party with Emma, Sarah is around here somewhere too but she keeps coming and going, I manage to sneak a few secret kisses when the opportunity arises but mainly I'm stuck with Emma, which isn’t as bad a thing as that makes it sound, but when I'm kissing Emma I'm thinking about how much nicer Sarah's lips feel and when Emma puts her hand on my leg I'm thinking how much more exciting it is when Sarah touches me.
We are out on the University Millennium Ball at some swanky hotel a thirty minute coach ride away from campus, decorated in a very opulent style, all red and gold, exotic potted plants in most of the corners, huge Christmas tree in the main foyer. Everybody is dressed up in gowns and Tuxedos but not everyone is acting in a manner appropriate to their clothing, still drinking too much, acting like idiots, the way students do. I'm in character as a James Bond type; cool, suave, sophisticated, I like wearing a Tuxedo. A man takes a picture of me and Emma without asking or telling us to pose, he wants me to pay him £10 for it, I tell him no and he walks away taking pictures of other couples, a magician is also going from table to table showing off card tricks and illusions. I'm drinking a pint of lager, Emma is having a vodka and coke, I'm quite tipsy, but still keeping up with the suave and sophisticated act. Emma's telling me about the history of some boring TV show but I'm not interested and the music is quite loud so I find myself just watching her lips moving and listening to the music until her mouth becomes an abstract object on its own, everything around it fades into insignificance and her lips, red with lipstick, full, moist (could be lipgloss), a hint of tongue occasionally flashes into view and I'm wondering why Sarah's lips feel nicer when we kiss, Emma's lips look really inviting and I find myself imagining kissing them and start to get turned on. I come crashing out of the fantasy as Sarah sits down heavily next to me, hand on my leg under the table where Emma can't see it. Emma smiles and greets Sarah, I say “Hi”, I'm focussing on Sarah's lips now, trying to see what advantage they have, what their secret is but there isn't any real difference, both sets look just as kissable; Sarah throws me a quick air kiss as Emma picks up her drink and then her hand moves from my leg to my hand, I'm in heaven, but it feels wrong to be doing this so close to Emma, I'm scared that she'll see or notice some stupid look in my eyes while I'm talking to Sarah. I try to extract my hand from Sarah's grip but she won't let me and my frantic arm movements probably look odd and suspicious to Emma so I have to stop and accept the hand which I love to hold but not here and not now; then 1999 by Prince comes on and it’s the song everyone's been waiting to hear tonight and we don't know it yet but it will get played three more times before the party ends but this is the first time and so we all get up to go and dance. Mercifully Sarah disappears into the crowd and I'm left to dance with Emma alone, she's a good dancer, sexy, much better than I am, shuffling around like some shambolic dancing bear, completely ruining my James Bond image. The flashing lights and loud music start to crash in on me and I realise I'm actually a lot more drunk than I thought. Time and reality start to fold in on me and the seconds seem to overlap, my movements become erratic; it feels like the ferry crossing to France that my parents took me on as a child, off balance, staggering from side to side, feeling sick, I give in and stagger from the dance floor to vomit, I don’t make it as far as the toilets though and puke on the stairs, a couple of girls shriek and shrink away from me drawing the attention of a nearby bouncer who shoots me a disgusted look. I careen away in the opposite direction, bouncing off walls and other revellers as I go, a hand reaches out and grabs hold of my arm, yanks me through a doorway into what appears to be the women’s toilets, it’s Sarah and she pushes me backwards into a cubicle before I have chance to register what's going on, by the time my brain catches up she’s kissing me hard on the mouth, she doesn’t seem to mind or notice the taste of vomit that fills my mouth; I, on the other hand, am enjoying the peach flavour of whatever she’s just been drinking. I fumble behind me, close the lid on the toilet with a bang and sit down, Sarah on my lap, grinding against me hard, tongue never leaving my mouth, hands groping and stroking, my chest, stomach, cock, my hands do likewise, enjoying the feel of her ass, sliding up under her top, her skin so warm and soft to touch, I try to make contact with as much of it as I possibly can. My excitement builds and I’m so turned on it hurts and I can’t believe I’m actually about to have sex in the women's toilets and then Sisqo – Thong Song comes on and I can’t believe I’m about to have sex while listening to the thong song but the song stirs something else in Sarah and she rushes from the cubicle to go and dance again and I’m left sitting dishevelled and horny on the toilet alone, curious faces peering around the door at me. I decide I should leave before anyone else screams and brings the bouncer back my way. I button up my shirt and head back out to look for Emma, at least puking earlier helped to sober me up a bit. I grab a water from the bar to help my sobriety along and also wash away the taste of vomit and any traces of Sarah still clinging to my lips.
Emma is back at the table looking bored, I apologise for leaving her alone and explain my having to be sick and evading the bouncer, she asks if I want to dance again, I say no, I just want to sit for a while, people-watch. She goes to dance without me and I drink
my water, check out the girls that pass my table. I lean back and close my eyes, time passes, a hand on my leg snaps my eyes open; I’m surprised to find that it’s not Sarah, even more surprised that it's not Emma either, it’s a girl I’ve never seen before, when did I get this attractive to women? She’s talking to me so I try to pay attention, she seems to want me to dance, I tell her I’m not interested, I have a girlfriend, I don’t tell her I kinda have two girlfriends, one should be enough to dissuade her; it isn’t and she keeps sitting next to me, asking me if I love my girlfriend, a question I’m in no condition to answer correctly or even truthfully and apparently my answer of “I don’t know” spurs on her advances and she asks me to dance again. I still don’t want to. Who is this girl? She isn’t even that attractive, I'm not lying when I tell her I don't want to go and dance with her, I pretend to fall asleep again but she just starts groping me and blowing in my ear, I stand up, knocking the remainder of my water across the table, as I start to leave the table to get away from her the DJ announces that midnight is only a couple of minutes away, the girl shrieks and gets up, starts pulling me towards the dance floor as Prince starts to sing 1999 again. I still don’t want to dance with this girl but I guess it is midnight on New Year’s Eve so I should get up and join the countdown. As I’m being led to the dance floor, behind me where I can't see it happening, Emma returns to the table to find me, in time for the countdown, I won’t find out how close I was to being saved from screwing everything up until later though and for now Emma stands at the edge of the dance floor searching for me in the crowd while I get dry humped by another girl, for the moment hidden from Emma’s view by a curtain of drunken dancers. The girl I'm dancing with (did she even tell me her name?) is very insistent and the amount of groping, playful little kisses on my neck when she dances close to me, and the way she presses herself against me, all starts to work its magic and as the DJ counts down to midnight, I find myself looking into this stranger’s eyes and they’re hungry and knowing how much she wants me turns me on and the countdown to midnight turns into the countdown to the end of my relationship with Emma as her eyes finally land on me in the crowd of hundreds at the stroke of midnight and she sees me kissing another girl, a girl I have no actual interest in, and as soon as I kiss her I know something is wrong, I can sense it, or it might just be guilt suddenly turning my stomach, but I turn around and somehow happen to meet Emma’s gaze and we stare for a few seconds and I can tell that I’ve blown it and try to send her a telepathic message that conveys how awful I feel right now and that it's all a terrible mistake brought about by too much booze and a horny bitch that's still grinding against me. I push her away and start to head towards Emma but there are people blocking my path and they grab me and want to celebrate the new year and I’m really not in the mood anymore and you'd think that they'd see that in my hateful glares but they don't and so I start shoving them away until one of them shoves back and then I’m fighting, I don’t know who I’m fighting but people are punching me and I’m punching people back, it may not be the right people for all I know as the fight seems to get bigger and it seems like a bad idea to continue fighting as I will most definitely get hurt and anyway I'm kinda in a hurry, but as I turn around to see if I can see Emma (I do, she’s just heading out through the doors at the back of the hall) I’m hit from behind and knocked to the floor.
I’m 27, it’s November 2006, I walk along the deserted promenade, the sea and sky similar shades of grey; it's cold, I need to find a warmer coat, currently I'm wearing 5 layers, a mixture of sweaters and jackets but it isn't keeping me warm enough and my movements feel restricted. My iPod plays Madonna – Holiday, the promenade takes me past the arcades that I used to enjoy as a child, playing Q-Bert, Outrun, Operation Wolf, Galaxians, many more, the only machines in here now are crane grabbers, penny pushers and slot machines, the crane grabbers have been smashed and looted, stuffed toys and plastic tat obviously worth something to someone. I kill two infected by the harbour, easy kills, both had already been worked on by seagulls, eyes and chunks of flesh missing from their faces, I wasn't sure if the seagulls were infected too or if animals could even catch the infection, either way I didn't want to be around if they came back now that they had a taste for human flesh.
Emma's parents lived just past the fun fair at the end of the promenade in a little B&B, the fun fair catches my attention as I pass by though, I went here once with Gemma, bizarrely it was the day after we'd just split up for the second time but the trip had been pre-arranged and paid for so we went anyway and pretended to still be together, the day ended in hate as was usually the case with Gemma but most of the day was actually fun. I enter and wander amongst the rides, the ghost train (no way was I going in there now), the pirate ship, the big wheel, I look up and see that some of the higher carriages still contain people, infected, trapped in place in their seats with the bodies of what were once their loved ones sat decaying next to them, I wonder what their last thoughts were as the fun day out at the fair turned into a nightmare, fighting off their infected children or boyfriends/girlfriends, trapped 50ft up in the air, held in place by metal bars, nowhere to run, kill your kid or die; looks like they all died. I walk on, see the game where I shot through the centre of three hearts on a piece of card with a pellet gun, I won a fluffy rabbit for Gemma, she accepted it, she probably named it Dan and stabbed it when she got home, crazy bitch. When I spot the electronic “Test your strength” attraction I laugh to myself, I paid to have a go on this, showing off, but as I lined up the hammer with the post I had to hit I accidentally nudged it, setting off the strength reading, a whopping 1 out of 100 score and £1 down the drain, I pick up the hammer now and smash it down on the post, if it was working I would have sent the counter smashing through the bell at the top like in that old cartoon I vaguely remember but it's turned off and the counter doesn't move, but something else does behind me and I see an infected man working in the hook a duck stall, trapped behind the circular counter. I decide to test my strength on his face and smash the large hammer into the side of his head, sending him spinning in a cartwheel into the side of the stall. I manage to hook five ducks fairly easily but find that all of the stuffed toys have also been looted from here so I can't claim a prize.
I leave the fair behind, it's definitely not as fun as usual when there's no power, no prizes and the rides are full of the infected and corpses. Emma's parent’s B&B is just around the corner, one of a row of sixteen B&Bs on this street, Emma would often moan about having to share her home and her parents with a revolving door of strangers; the sound of seagulls nearby makes me smile momentarily as it takes me back to trips to the seaside as a child but my smile quickly fades as I remember the eyeless corpses by the harbour and I quicken my pace.
The door is broken and splintered, blood coats the walls and a swarm of flies fills the entrance hall as I disturb them, I have to retreat back out to the street until the air clears sufficiently for me to dart through to the lounge, but the lounge is no better and my right foot slides away from under me in the entrails of a man, or half a man; his legs are nowhere to be seen. The body is fairly fresh, I'd guess it happened within the last couple of weeks based on my unfortunately growing knowledge of corpse decomposition. The man's eyes snap open and his jaw starts working as he reaches for my foot which is still uncomfortably far inside his body. I pull back as I swing down with my hammer crushing his skull and squishing his brain. A blood trail leads from the man into the kitchen, presumably where his legs were dragged, I follow the trail cautiously, hammer held high ready to swing, and enter the kitchen; more carnage greets me as I find multiple body parts strewn around the room, more blood coating the walls and ceiling, I decide that the man’s legs were not dragged in here as I first thought but his torso dragged itself into the lounge after the bloodbath. There doesn't appear to be anything that still has a head in here though so I continue on into the dining room which is surprisingly clean and tidy, whatever happened here didn't get as far as
the dining room, the tables and chairs are still upright, table set out for a meal, eight plates.
I backtrack to the entrance hall and check out the ground floor bedroom where one of the guests would have been staying, the bed has been stripped, just a bare mattress remains, a dark bloodstain in the centre, the chest of drawers has been emptied in a hurry, drawers strewn across the floor, the wardrobe doors stand open, wardrobe empty, only two coat hangers remain inside. I close the door and head upstairs, the first floor landing has three bedrooms and a bathroom, the stairs continue up to the second floor. The bedrooms here are in much the same state as the ground floor, cupboards and drawers emptied, beds stripped, devoid of all traces of occupation, just empty rooms. The second floor is the top floor, two more bedrooms, what was once a third bedroom, now a second lounge just for Emma's family, and a larger bathroom, this is where Emma and her parents lived when not changing guest’s beds and cooking breakfast. I check Emma's room first, she isn't there, not that I expected her to just be taking a nap on her bed or anything but at least there were no blood stains on the mattress in here, the bed clothes had been stripped and clothes taken though; this room still contained some remnants of a living occupant however, photos stuck to the mirror, nobody I recognise other than Emma, more photos pinned to a notice board, older ones this time, some from University; I'm on one of them, of just the two of us together, I'm surprised, I expected her to hate me, the last six months of that year at University were full of hateful stares, hurt, tearful eyes, screaming and shouting, lots of apologising and grovelling from me, but we never managed to stay friends, by the time University ended and I left to go home she was civil towards me but that was all and we rarely actually saw each other. We didn't speak to each other again once we moved back to our respective homes; yet here I was, pinned to her wall six years later. The most annoying thing about the whole situation was that breaking up with Emma ruined my relationship with Sarah, once we didn't need to do everything in secret, once I was single and available our little affair just wasn't as exciting any more, it's funny, before that New Year’s Eve party I often thought about breaking up with Emma and having a real relationship with Sarah but I didn't want it to end the way that it did, with me dripping with blood, vomit and betrayal, I always hoped that she'd break up with me so that I could be the victim and enjoy other peoples pity for a while. I leave Emma's room and try her parent’s door, it doesn't budge, something behind it stopping it from opening. I slam against it with my shoulder a couple of times but it doesn't move so I shout through the door “Hello! Is anybody in there?” The loud sound of my own voice startles me and makes me realise just how silent my life is now, probably why I drown it out with my iPod so often. There's no response from the room so I move on to the next door, the second lounge, two corpses lie on the rug, decapitated, most likely infected, maybe Emma and her family managed to fight off their attackers, packed up their clothes and left; a lot of people did. The last door is the bathroom, it won't open either, barricaded from the inside like the bedroom next to it, I try a couple of shoulder barges and it gives slightly; only slightly, but definitely some movement. I charge the door two more times, kick it five times, something crashes to the floor behind the door and I'm able to push it open a little, a small gap, large enough to get a look at one corner of the room, which is disappointingly empty and normal. I continue my assault on the door until the gap widens enough for me to squeeze through, sliding over a chest of drawers, knocking a chair to the ground, scrambling over the pile of assorted bits of furniture and wood that had been wedged up against the door. The bathroom is empty; no bodies, no signs of a struggle, I spin around looking for clues as to how and why the inside of the door was barricaded, the window is closed and latched. Pulling back the shower curtain (that familiar feeling of dread as I do so), reveals the answer, a hole had been roughly chopped through the wall into the bedroom next door, I look through and see blood and bodies and death and my heart sinks, this was becoming all too familiar, groups of survivors making a secure base only to find that one of their members was already infected and they were now trapped and taken by surprise. I pull myself through the hole in the wall and lower myself down to the floor, the carpet is sticky, one of the bodies twitches as I draw near and I automatically swing my hammer for a killer blow ending its existence. I examine the bodies, five in all, but the third one makes my heart sink even further, it's Emma, she's been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and her head has a hole through it, punctured with a hammer and chisel I see on the floor nearby. She was infected, now she's dead; she's wearing the necklace I bought her for Christmas before we broke up, the silver chain with the heart shaped pendant. I sit down and look at her for a while; then I search the rest of the room, take the tins of food that look like they should still be edible, gather up some more clothes including a Burberry trench coat, the kind you see detectives wearing in old films, just the thing to keep me warm this winter, a good find. I also take some sheets and a pillow and make up a bed for the night in the bathtub; rebuild the barricade against the door, and after a couple of hours of lying awake keeping one paranoid eye on the hole in the wall, I fall asleep.
