Elysium Part Two. In A Landscape

by Kelvin James Roper

Selina lay on the sofa thinking about the nightmares of the previous evening. They were getting worse.

  She had been in the water, the dead sinking around her, and no matter how frantically she tried to swim to the surface she was being pulled down with them.

  She had woken gasping, and wondered if she had stopped breathing in her sleep.

  She took several deep breaths and sat up, looking across Mortehoe from the large window of the living room.

  Both Selina and Priya had been given time to become familiar with the mechanics of the village, and advised to do so at their own pace. At first Selina felt compelled to rise at dawn to help the elderly women with their chores. They thanked her and sent her away advising that work would find her in due time, and that she should make use of her days becoming familiar with the village.

  When people asked whether she had ever heard of communities such as theirs before, Selina reassured them that she hadn’t, or rather she had only heard of such places at the end of sentences like, ‘You’ll never guess what I heard…’ and were more often than not flagrant myths.

  Often she would be asked where the nearest habitable city was, though she reminded them always that she didn’t know. She was from half a world away, and could only tell them that the capital of Britain was Birmingham. She could barely tell them much about the country at all, other than she had heard it was soon to become part of a European nation.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Betty asked. ‘How can you join Britain to Europe? It’s a bloody island.’

  ‘Not physically join... Are you serious? There have been talks for years of creating a single European nation, with a single government...’

  ‘And a single man running the show?’ Tinder mused, ‘That’s a lot of responsibility.’

  ‘I guess.’ Selina shrugged.

  Priya was more colourful when questioned. Like an actor, Selina thought. When she spoke, she told of southern Britain being little more than open air gravelands. She spoke of the bloody civil wars in the middle-east and the fall of the Americas.

  When Selina spoke there was an air of dissatisfaction, though when Priya told her tales the Smuggler’s Rest fell quiet, and everyone hung on her every theatrical word.

  They had questions of their own also, and neither missed an opportunity to pick information whenever they could.

  Selina was regarded suspiciously when she did this, though on the day of her first vaccine course, which she had been regarding with some apprehension for days, Betty told her a little of the area.

  ‘The land still has various nasties here and there,’ Betty told her dismissively when Selina asked why she and Priya had to be injected.

  ‘What kind of “nasties”?’ She asked.

  ‘The kind that’d turn your guts to rot.’ Reighn Corbin said jovially. Selina turned, and looked into the bright blue eyes of a broad-chested man in his late thirties. He had a bow across his chest, and she learnt that he hunted game in Lee wood.

  She asked him more questions, and discovered he was unable to answer for long without mentioning the birth of his new-born son, William, with pride. He told her, after his second drink, that he regarded Selina and Priya as good omens for bringing about the birth of his boy on the day of their arrival, and as such was happy to answer any questions or, if she or Priya needed it, help with repair work on their homes.

  As he grew increasingly merry, Selina sorted her questions in order of importance, knowing that she had a limited time until he became incomprehensible. As he spilt his fourth drink across the table and drew a lingering scowl from Betty, Selina asked how they had remained undetected for over a century. He was eager to explain.

  ‘There was woman by the name of Dekeyrel… Sharon, or Susan, or some such. She worked in the pharmaceutical industry at the time of the outbreak. She had relatives living in the Ilfracombe area, just up the way, and she came with her husband and daughter in the hope of outrunning the spread of the virus. The facts are vague... Y’know, so long after the event, but there were conferences with the Tuppers, I mean Semilion’s... All our great-grandparents... and a scheme was designed to quarantine Mortehoe and Woolacombe from the rest of the country – a safe haven from the epidemic and a blind-spot from the government of the day. By a miracle the Dekeyrel’s managed to extract and contain the virus without killing themselves; they cultivated it and began manipulating its composition. It’s amazing what they achieved with what little equipment they had. They trained the Camberwell’s and they, in turn, taught their children everything they knew. The founders had even insisted thousands be spent on their education. It meant setting them up in Northern Ireland but he considered it the only way to keep on top of modern practice.

  He took a large draught of ale and expelled a wheezing burp, his hand on his chest. He chuckled and excused himself before continuing. ‘Where was I? What did I just say?’

  ‘That the Camberwells...’

  ‘The Camberwells, yes. They set them up in Belfast. After the first bout of virus had brought the population to its knees the immunology of humans began to counter the effects of the flu. Vaccines were provided by iCDO, what was then the International Infectious Control Agency, and the Dekeyrel’s and the Camberwell’s would always be one step ahead of the antibiotics, infecting animals and releasing them close to the perimeter gates in an attempt to convince the authorities the virus was mutating at an exponential rate.’

  He looked down at the table, then fixed Selina with an intense, somewhat introspective stare. Flecks of green shone in his hazel eyes. ‘Dawn and me, we sometimes talk... You know, about how things might have been if the Dekeyrel’s hadn’t done what they did.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, they had to make the government think this area was unsafe, and they had to kill people to do it. After they’d done it the once they weren’t so frightened about being uncovered for hiding away in their own community, or for retaining land that might be used to counter famine, but because they’d slaughtered twenty or so civil servants. Dawn and me, we think that after the first few years the motives got confused, but, well, that’s all in the past.’

  ‘And you still do it? Mutate the virus, I mean.’

  Reighn nodded, tapping his pipe on the sole of his boot, ‘Not anyone you’re likely to see drinking in here. There’s a basement beneath an old hotel over near Woolacombe where they work on it. Very hush hush. Every couple of months, depending if anything’s been caught in the traps in Lee. They take foxes and badgers, any carnivore they can find, up to the border before dosing them and setting them free.’

  ‘Aren’t you risking other animals contracting it and the virus returning here?’ She asked, shocked.

  ‘Not a chance; there’s a furlong of land between the main border and an unmanned perimeter. It’s a deep channel of brick and concrete, and anything else they could find when they built it. They release the animals into that area of no-man’s land and they’re trapped for the duration of... What’s it called?’

  ‘The incubation period?’

  ‘That’s it, they’re trapped for the duration of the incubation period until they’re captured by the Britons.’

  ‘The Brit...’ She said with a laugh in her voice. She hadn't considered that the villagers had become so detached over generations they no longer thought of themselves as being British. ‘What do you call yourselves then?’

  ‘We’re Mortehi’ George Porter interrupted with a smile as he sat next to Selina. ‘Or Mortehoians?’ He asked of Reign, who was shrugging to stand and head to the bar. George placed his tankard on the table. ‘It never comes up. I mean, we don't really talk about ourselves in that way.’

  George retrieved a plate from the bar containing a loaf of bread and some dry cheese. He began cutting thick slices of both and presented Selina with a sandwich. ‘We were lucky, in a way,’ he said, continuing Reighn’s dialogue. ‘The Dekeyrels and Tuppers wrote guidelines to conceal us from satellites.’ He pointed skyw
ard. ‘Sky was brimming with them in those days. Still is. There’s the mirror... A telescope of sorts, up in one of the barns on the hill. They built it specifically to track them. Great circular lens it is, I’ll take you up there one day. It would have made life a hundred times more complicated, having to remain hidden just in case there were any still overhead,’ he smiled briefly as he handed her a sandwich, ‘but the collapse of society did more than open up the job market…’

  ‘There was no-one left to maintain their operation…’ Selina concluded, thinking of the thousands of satellites circling the globe, waiting on standby for contact – or slowly descending in the atmosphere before falling to earth. She had often wondered how easily the world must have functioned in the old days, what with the legendary internets, and the mass of telecommunication, weather, mapping and entertainment networks. Historians painted the old-world as a golden age of capitalist ease. It was so vastly different to the modern age.

  She recalled a teacher taking her class to the Archive Museum and showing them an exhibit that was laden with scuffed and well-thumbed photos of satellite imagery. She remembered the curator explaining how the world had depended daily on those hundreds of thousands of pieces of machinery orbiting the earth. One photo had stuck in her mind, a high altitude shot of Hawaii, a green dot in a shimmering, turquoise blue. In the corner of the photo was a copyright symbol beside the date 2038. It had struck her that at the time the photo had been taken the world knew nothing of what was to follow. They had no idea the difference a year could possibly make. Twenty years later, when the epidemic had claimed near four billion lives, only a score of satellites remained in operation - their tasks many and their application hindered by bureaucracy.

  ‘Are there other communes in these parts?’ Selina asked, finding herself unsure whether she approved with the efforts taken to remain secluded when so many others had collaborated to fight the epidemic. ‘The world considers land contained within quarantines to be wasteland. Billions have been spent keeping the epidemic contained whilst trying to re-gain land… they need it to curb starvation across the world. Jesus, if this place is discovered and they find out what you’ve done they’ll probably bring back the noose by popular demand!’

  At this George laughed, ‘That’s as maybe. I don’t know about communes other than Mortehoe, Woolacombe and Lundy. There are some men who fish away at Putsborough and Croyde but they keep themselves to themselves, I suppose they have families… Unless they breed amongst each other.

  Selina snorted a polite laugh as Reighn sat down with another drink and sighed, having been listening to their exchange. ‘You might think we’re callous for looking after ourselves and not giving a second thought for the old-world, but the powers-that-be of our ancestors day destroyed near everything. Society, finance, the landscape. You don't need me to tell you that…’ He looked up as Semilion entered the bar. George saw and turned back to Reighn. ‘Keep it down, I don’t know if Semi wants us telling her stuff.’

  ‘It’s ok,’ Selina intervened, ‘he’s told me quite a bit already, I'm sure he wouldn't mind.’

  ‘Ah, well, there's a difference between what Semi would tell you and what we might.’

  Reighn nodded in agreement. ‘Well, all I’ll say is I’m not surprised our ancestors wanted nothing more to do with the world at large. Now,’ He reached for his tankard and missed, before picking it up, draining it and excusing himself. ‘Need to speak to Semilion about an increase in Dawn’s food rations.’ He stood, knocking his chair over.