Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  ‘We can split up as soon as we get out of here,’ Magnus whispered, ‘but we stand a better chance of making it out if we stick together.’

  Jeb glanced at him. ‘You’re a liability, mate.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have got out of the cell in the first place if it wasn’t for me.’

  ‘You think so?’ Jeb’s smile mocked him. ‘It was me that smashed that screw in the face.’

  ‘And it was me that persuaded him to unlock the door.’

  ‘Then you turned into Jesus fucking Christ and started releasing random villains.’ The smile was gone. ‘Didn’t you think there might be a reason I stick to my own fucking cell?’ Every word was a bullet. ‘Get yourself fucking killed if you like, but leave me out of it.’

  ‘I apologised, okay?’ There was no point in being polite, Magnus realised. Jeb was like a belligerent venue manager who needed convincing before he would agree to book a new act. Appeasement would get him nowhere. ‘I told you, I won’t get in the way and I might be some help.’

  Jeb cast him a sceptical glance, but something in Magnus’s words must have persuaded him because he whispered, ‘Don’t talk and don’t try any Good Samaritan acts. First sign of trouble you’re on your own. Understand?’ Magnus nodded. Jeb cast a quick look around the courtyard. ‘We need to get through the admissions hall’ – he gestured up ahead with the hand that was holding the Taser – ‘and then out through the front gate. I reckon these keys will let us into admissions, but I don’t know about the gate. If you see anyone, keep your head down. Don’t speak until spoken to and take your lead from me.’

  Jeb did not bother to wait for Magnus to agree. He loped towards the door of the admissions block, keeping his body low. Magnus thought he heard voices shouting behind them, but all his strength was focused on keeping up with Jeb and he did not look back.

  The key turned first time and they entered a small vestibule at the bottom of a steep metal staircase. Jeb clattered upward, the Taser clutched in his right hand. Magnus followed in silence, matching his pace to the other man’s. The effects of his beatings were still upon him and his legs protested, but he forced them on, to an upper landing and another locked door.

  ‘I feel like I’m in a fucking computer game.’ Jeb shifted the Taser to his left hand and took the keys from his pocket. He slid them awkwardly into the lock. Magnus wanted to say that he would relieve him of one or the other, but knew the offer would be rejected. Jeb looked cautiously round the door. Something about the practised stealth of the move made Magnus wonder if the other man had been in the armed forces. ‘Okay.’ Jeb nodded to him. ‘Keep up, and remember what I told you, take your lead from me.’

  They entered a long corridor. Magnus supposed he must have passed through it on the night he was admitted, bloodied and bruised, still not quite sober, but he could remember little of that journey except a prison officer’s hand steadying him when he stumbled. It had been a small kindness in a night lacking in compassion and Magnus found himself wondering if the man had caught the virus.

  The thought made him think of his mother again. He had called her a week after her birthday, alerted by a caustic text from his sister Rhona, but had he spoken to her since? He didn’t think so. She and Rhona would be fine, he reassured himself. London was an overcrowded airport terminal, jammed with travellers and the people who serviced them. The infection was bound to cut a swathe through the capital, but the Orkney Islands were at the butt end of the world and surrounded by sea. However hard the city was hit, the Orkneys would survive.

  But what about tourists? an unwelcome voice in his head whispered. What about the cruise ships and twice-daily ferries? The flights direct from Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow that connect with flights from London and beyond?

  ‘Where will you go when you get out?’ he asked Jeb, to shut the voice up.

  He expected the other man to tell him to mind his own business but Jeb said, ‘Fucked if I know. Guess I’ll cross that bridge when the time comes.’ He bared his teeth; half snarl, half grin. ‘If I haven’t burned it already. You?’

  ‘Up north, home.’

  Jeb looked at him, his expression curious. ‘Will they take you in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  Jeb stopped and raised a hand in the air, silently telling Magnus to freeze. He cocked his head to one side. The pose reminded Magnus of the games of cowboys and Indians he and his cousins had played. Hugh had always been the tracker shaman, able to spot the enemy (for some reason the cowboys had always been the enemy) from miles away. Usually the memory would have raised a smile, but Magnus had heard the footsteps that had stopped Jeb in his tracks.

  ‘In here.’ Jeb pointed to a half-glass door marked Education. He unlocked the door and Magnus slipped in after him, closing it quietly. The room had been designed to allow tutors to be on their own with inmates, while also allowing screws to keep an eye on what was happening inside. Prisoners’ paintings covered one wall. Perhaps the art teacher encouraged self-portraits, or maybe the inmates used each other as models. Bullet heads and staring eyes sent out blank challenges from the wall, fronts that must not be breached for fear of what might lie behind them. The prison featured too, its high walls and vertical bars looming aggressively towards the viewer. It was how the place made you feel, like it was alive and biding its time before it crushed you.

  Jeb crouched beneath the pictures, his back against the wall, the Taser cradled in his hands. Magnus hunkered down beside him, under a large Dolly Mixture coloured painting of the Disney castle, complete with Mickey, Minnie and their weird chums. Some prisoner had painted it as a present for his small child, Magnus supposed. The thought depressed him and he wondered again what waited beyond the gates of the prison. Had the sickness taken hold on the outside, or had Pentonville been abandoned in some crude attempt at quarantine?

  Jeb’s breaths were keeping time with the approaching footsteps in the corridor beyond.

  Magnus whispered, ‘There might be safety in numbers.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  Fear had drained the blood from Jeb’s face and tightened his features. He looked like a medieval church effigy carved by a mason with one eye on the old gods.

  ‘What did you do?’ The words slipped out before Magnus could stop them.

  Jeb shook his head. ‘Not what you’re thinking.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  He was right. A series of tabloid headlines were riffling through Magnus’s mind, the kind of stuff that made you lay the newspaper face down. He started to get to his feet but Jeb sank a hand into his shoulder, keeping him there.

  ‘They’ll know you’re a VP from the colour of your tracksuit. We’re branded in here, remember? If they find us, our only chance is to attack first. Don’t wait to see if they’re going to play nice.’ Jeb’s voice was so low Magnus had to strain to hear it. ‘They won’t. If they smile, smile back, then hit them as hard as you can and run.’

  The footsteps were close now. Jeb flattened himself against the wall and shut his eyes. Magnus focused on the window into the corridor. He saw the men’s shadows approach followed swiftly by the men themselves, four prisoners, each dressed in green sweats, rather than the blue that he and Jeb were wearing. The men’s complexions had the exhausted, stone-greyness of people denied the sun and they each had the loose-skin look of men who had recently lost weight, but none of them appeared to have the virus. A prisoner at the back of the line raised a hand in sly benediction and winked at them. Magnus recognised him as the man he had set free, now dressed in the colours of a different hall. The man nodded to let him know he wouldn’t give them away and passed by.

  They crouched beneath the paintings in the education room until the men’s footsteps faded into silence. Magnus got to his feet first. Something in the intensity of Jeb’s fear made him as keen to escape the other man as he had been to ally with him
.

  ‘Good luck.’ Magnus was at the door before he realised that it was locked. Outside, in some distant corridor, the sound of screaming echoed. He turned and saw Jeb getting to his feet. The keys and weapon in his hands made him look more jailer than prisoner, despite his prison-issue clothes.

  ‘Like you said, we can split up once we get out of here.’ Jeb’s voice was low and intense, as if he had found his courage and was making a conscious effort to hold on to it. ‘But right now I reckon we stand more chance if we stick together.’

  The screaming died abruptly.

  Magnus asked, ‘What did you do that makes you so frightened?’

  Jeb stepped closer. ‘Until you get these colours off you better be scared too.’

  Magnus felt the heat of the other man’s body and smelled the sweet funky smell of stale and fresh sweat mingling on his skin.

  ‘All you need to know is that I never hurt anyone who didn’t have it coming to them. I never touched up little kiddies and I never put my hands on a woman that didn’t want me to put my hands on her.’

  ‘Is that what the women would say?’

  Jeb flinched. ‘Women say a lot of things.’ He unlocked the door and scanned the corridor left to right, like a sniper. ‘I never met a woman who didn’t say more than her prayers.’ There was a catch in his voice, as if something in his throat’s mechanism was broken.

  Ten

  The prison officers’ locker room had already been ransacked, but whoever had been there had concentrated on money and valuables. The small space was littered with clothes, rifled wallets and gaping sports bags. Jeb undressed quickly and stowed his tracksuit out of sight on top of one of the lockers. Magnus stripped off his tracksuit. It was like trying to find an outfit in a jumble sale, sifting through a muddle of styles and sizes, looking for something that would fit and would not mark him out as a fraud.

  ‘Hurry up. It’s not a fashion show.’ Jeb pulled on a Hope for Heroes T-shirt.

  Magnus saw the Union Jack tattoo on Jeb’s chest and wondered again if he had been in the forces. He found a bright blue mod T-shirt with a target on the chest and topped it with a brown hoodie. The hoodie was too warm for the weather, but he liked the idea of being able to hide his face.

  ‘Here, these should fit you.’ Jeb tossed a pair of jeans at him. They were long in the leg. Magnus folded the hems into turn-ups. Jeb was tying the laces on a pair of top-of-the-range Nikes. ‘Try and find something you can run in.’

  It was strange, wearing the clothes of someone you had never met. Magnus rooted through the tangle of clothes and shoes until he found a pair of size eights. He wondered if the screws had left in such a rush there was no time to change out of their uniforms, or if they were still somewhere in Pentonville, coughing up their guts in the sickbay or dealing with a riot in the far reaches of the jail. He thrust his hands into the pockets of the jacket and found an Oyster card and a discount voucher for two classic margaritas and a bottle of wine at Pizza Express. He crumpled the voucher into a ball and let it drop to the ground.

  Out in the prison corridors beyond someone bayed like a wolf.

  ‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ Jeb muttered. He was rooting through the abandoned gear, pocketing car keys, checking ID cards. He found a Snickers bar, tore its wrapper free and shoved it into his mouth.

  Magnus felt he might kill Jeb for a share of the chocolate but he asked, ‘How will we do it?’

  ‘Same way we came in, through the front door.’

  The locker room was windowless and lined with steel cabinets. It was larger than the cell they had shared, but it gave Magnus the same trapped feeling and his skin itched with the urge to escape. A Daily Express lay folded beneath a wooden bench. Its headline screamed, CONTAGION! Magnus picked up the tabloid. It had been published two days ago. The first three pages were devoted to the virus. People were calling it the sweats and it was overloading hospitals in London, Paris, New York and Berlin. There was an editorial alleging that the poor state of the NHS had precipitated the crisis, but the criticisms were well-rehearsed and perfunctory, as if the journalist’s heart had not really been in the story.

  China and Russia had issued statements denying rumours of outbreaks in their major cities, but social media contradicted official accounts and the Express carried surreptitiously-taken photographs of a Shanghai hospital ward lined with beds full of failing patients.

  A small galaxy of celebrities had been felled by the virus. Magnus searched for Johnny Dongo’s name, but either the comedian was okay or he had been eclipsed by A-listers. There was something distasteful about the celebrity photographs, the rows of hot women in bikinis, all of them dead.

  ‘Look at this.’ Magnus passed the paper to Jeb.

  ‘You can’t trust tabloid rags.’ Jeb tossed the paper on to the floor. ‘They don’t care about facts, or whose life they ruin, just as long as they can twist out a good story.’

  Magnus lifted the paper from the floor and held it wide, showing Jeb the photograph of the hospital ward, flanked by sidebars of smiling female celebrities.

  ‘People are dying.’

  Jeb was riffling through jackets and trouser pockets. He glanced up. ‘We already knew that.’ He clicked a penknife open, checking its blade. ‘How many of these actresses are holed up in some spa, ready to come back from the dead with a big tada when the time’s right? And who says the people in that hospital have the chills? All that photo shows is exactly what I’d expect to see in a hospital, patients lying in bed.’

  ‘They’re calling it the sweats.’

  Jeb clicked the penknife shut. ‘Sweats, chills, I don’t give a fuck.’ He slid the closed knife into his jeans pocket. ‘Just concentrate on getting out of here. We can worry about killer flu after that.’

  Magnus joined Jeb on the floor and rummaged in a sports bag. There was nothing useful in it, just a bottle of shower gel that claimed to double as shampoo and a towel, but touching another man’s possessions felt intimate and wrong. Magnus shoved it out of the way and started on another bag. He wanted to find something to eat. He wanted a knife like the one Jeb had found, or, better still, a Taser. He said, ‘What if the front door’s locked?’

  ‘I’m hoping someone will have already solved that problem for us, but if it’s locked then we find a way of opening it.’ Getting rid of his incriminating tracksuit had made Jeb more confident. ‘Here.’ He passed Magnus a prison officer’s identity card.

  The man in the ID photograph was older than Magnus. His hair was a similar dark brown, but it was cut short in a barber-shop no-style. His face was thin and intelligent-looking; perfect casting for a university professor, or a curator of rare manuscripts.

  ‘I don’t look anything like him,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Just flash it and only if you need to.’ Jeb pulled on a beige jacket, shoved the Taser into one of its pockets and ran a comb he had found through his hair. ‘Tidy yourself up.’ He tossed the comb to Magnus.

  Magnus glanced in a small mirror hung on the inside of one of the lockers. His hair was greasy, his chin covered in stubble too long to be designer, but too short to be called a beard. The bruises on his face were shifting to yellow, but the graze on his cheek had scabbed and it was obvious that his eye had recently been blacked.

  ‘Ready?’

  Jeb shoved an NYPD baseball cap on his head. His beard was slightly ragged, but the civilian clothes he had chosen fitted well and he might easily be mistaken for an off-duty prison officer.

  ‘You look like a screw.’

  ‘Good, that’s what I was aiming for.’ Jeb grinned. ‘I’m not sure what you look like, but it’ll have to do.’

  The corridors up ahead echoed with the rumble of male voices. They passed a splash of blood blooming head-height on a wall, red and vital against the whitewash. Their eyes met, but neither of them said anything. Magnus wished he had the weight of a Taser in his pocket.

  ‘Anyone who’s got out will come this way,’ Jeb whispered. ‘So s
ooner or later we’re going to meet someone. If anything kicks off, go in hard.’ Magnus wanted to protest that he did not know how to ‘go in hard’, but he nodded. Jeb must have seen the fear on his face because he added, ‘Fight dirty and don’t hold back.’

  Magnus’s father had tried to teach him how to fight, shouting instructions while Magnus threw punches into a grain sack, left, right, left, right, right, right, right, but Magnus did not have the dexterity required of a good featherweight and he lacked the power to be a heavyweight.

  ‘It’s your mouth that gets you into trouble,’ his dad had finally said. ‘Let’s hope it learns how to get you out of it too.’

  They met their first prisoners in the next stretch of corridor. There were two of them, both still dressed in green prison-issue tracksuits and trainers. Magnus detected a glimmer of sweat on the younger of the pair which spoke of the virus. That was who he would go for if it came to a fight, he decided, the underfed youth whose hands were trembling. The decision prompted a familiar jolt of shame.

  ‘All right, lads?’ Jeb’s voice was bold and confident.

  The men froze and the boy Magnus had marked as his target muttered, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re not screws.’ Jeb took off his baseball cap and rubbed a hand through his suede head. ‘Just treated ourselves to a couple of going-away outfits. Talking about going away, you’re going the wrong way, aren’t you?’

  ‘Depends whether you want to get your head kicked in or not,’ the elder of the duo said. He was a man somewhere beyond his mid-forties who looked like he knew what it was to take a kicking. The man’s face was pitted with old scars that suggested a flight through a car windscreen or unexpected congress with a plate-glass window.

  ‘Trouble up ahead?’

  ‘You could say that.’ The man’s voice was heavy with resentment. ‘A reception committee checking who’s fit for the outside.’

  ‘Too scared to go outside themselves, if you ask me.’ The boy hugged his ribs, as if he were cold and trying to stop himself from shivering. ‘They said I was sick. No one sick gets to leave.’ His voice wavered, but he added bravely, ‘I heard on the news that they’re sending the army in anyway. That’ll fix those cunts. The army have the best doctors too. They’ll sort us out.’