Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  ‘Ever gone too far?’

  Jeb’s laugh was deep and humourless. ‘Far too far.’

  He started to walk on, his feet crunching against the gravel and after a moment Magnus followed him. It was like a near-death experience, walking the long dark tunnel towards a pinprick of light.

  ‘I keep expecting a voice to tell me to turn back, it’s not my time yet,’ Magnus whispered.

  ‘Be nice to wake up and find out it was all a dream.’ Something about the light in the darkness seemed to have made Jeb more confiding.

  Magnus said, ‘That’d be grand, right enough.’

  He imagined himself in his old room on the farm, eleven or twelve years old. Woken by the sound of the kitchen door shutting as his father came in from early-morning milking, the rattle of metal on metal in the kitchen below, as his mother set the pans on the range, ready to make breakfast. His loathed school uniform hanging from the peg on the back of his bedroom door. Hugh still alive; knowing they would meet later at the turn in the bend where the school bus stopped. Nothing special, just an ordinary school day. Tears were running down his cheeks. Magnus let them take their course until the light threatened to touch his face and then he rubbed them away with the back of his hand.

  It was a subway train, sitting tight against the walls of the tunnel, its windows illuminated from within. Jeb slid along the side of the train.

  ‘Check this out.’

  Magnus followed. It was what he had wanted to avoid, being constricted between a subway train and a tunnel wall, another rock and a hard place.

  ‘We can go through it.’ Jeb pointed to a smashed window. He took off his jacket. ‘Give us a leg-up.’

  Magnus helped to boost Jeb up. Jeb slung his jacket over the jagged edge of the broken window and slid inside, head first. It was a tight fit and he kicked his legs as he wriggled through. He stuck his head out.

  ‘You coming?’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘More of the same.’

  Magnus muttered, ‘More of the same.’

  He took a deep breath and climbed on to the side of the carriage. Jeb reached out and dragged Magnus through. The jacket was still draped across the broken glass, but Magnus felt it scrape against his belly as he slid inside the compartment. They would have to be careful. Scrapes and cuts could turn septic and there was no longer the guarantee of a friendly doctor armed with antibiotics, ready to patch them up.

  The brightness of the carriage hurt Magnus’s eyes, but it was mercifully empty. Had he ever been in a completely empty London Underground carriage before? Maybe in the dim light of half-dawn after a heavy post-show session, but then his senses would be dulled by drink and tiredness, the taste of sulphate coating the back of his throat.

  ‘You said it was more of the same.’

  Jeb had put his jacket back on and was already starting down the carriage to the connecting doors and the next compartment. He glanced back at Magnus.

  ‘What would you call it?’

  ‘I thought you meant more bodies.’

  Jeb opened the door and stepped through.

  A thin man was slumped in the corner of the compartment, his face hidden by long dreadlocks that had fallen forward, obscuring his features.

  Jeb said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

  The carriage smelled like long-ignored refuse from some downscale grill house. Meaty leavings that had been locked in a tin shed for days in the middle of a heatwave.

  Magnus pulled the neck of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose.

  ‘It took some people suddenly,’ Jeb said. A phone rested on the seat beside the dead man. He picked it up and tossed it to Magnus. ‘ET phone home.’

  ‘Don’t you want it?’

  The mobile was turned off. Magnus switched it on, wincing at the sound of its wake-up tune: loud and stupidly melodic. The battery was almost full, but as he had expected there was no signal. He glanced at the log. The last call had been two days ago, to Mum. It had gone unanswered. Magnus turned the mobile off again and stowed it in his jeans pocket.

  Jeb was at the door to the next carriage. ‘Guess you feel sorry for me. The end of the world and there’s no one I’d like to call.’

  Magnus caught the door as it was about to slam shut and followed Jeb through.

  ‘Who said it was the end of the world?’

  ‘Looks like it, from where I’m standing.’ Jeb’s voice was belligerent. As if he had just begun to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening and was working his way up to expressing it. The next carriage was empty too. A tatty copy of Metro lay crumpled on the floor. Jeb picked it up and shoved it at Magnus. ‘Here you go. You like reading the news.’

  The newspaper felt thin and insubstantial, a half edition. Its headline was to the point: SWEATS KILLS BILLIONS.

  ‘We’re not the only ones who’ve survived.’ Magnus folded the Metro into a baton and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘A bunch of lads left the prison with us, and there were plenty of soldiers about the jail. London’s an overcrowded shithole.’ He had loved the city, loved the anonymity it conferred, loved that he could walk for miles without anyone hailing him to ask his business and tell him theirs. ‘It was bound to get hit hard. Things will be different in the countryside. I bet the sweats have hardly touched the islands. People are always behind the times up there.’

  No they’re not, the voice Magnus feared whispered in his head. Once maybe, but not any more. Orkney had Internet and drugs, a giant Tesco. There was no more relying on catalogues for clothing. Girls had the latest fashions delivered to their door and when they were dressed for a night out you would be hard pushed to tell them from Londoners.

  Surely someone on the council would have got wise and set up a quarantine zone, he consoled himself. As soon as it became clear what was happening they were bound to have halted trains, flights and ferries, switched off the constant stream of tourists.

  Money, the cruel voice whispered. All those hotels, B&Bs and restaurants; the cafés, craft shops, excursions and galleries.

  The carriages were mostly empty, but occasionally they passed bodies lying where they had died. ‘It’s like going to sleep,’ Magnus’s mother had said to him of death. ‘You close your eyes and don’t wake up.’

  His father had been caught in the combine, his flesh hacked, his bones and organs crushed. The doctor said death had been instantaneous, but Magnus had dreamed about the moment his father finished clearing the blockage in the combine’s blades. There must have been a shit-sinking second when he knew, as the machine growled back to life, that he had neglected to take the keys from the ignition.

  Windows and doors were shattered or forced open in some of the carriages, where survivors had smashed their way free. The driver must have died, Magnus guessed. They would find him slumped across the wheel, or huddled on the floor of the cab. He remembered the driver of the prison van, the squirming white of his belly.

  ‘Why do you think we haven’t caught it yet?’ he asked Jeb as they slammed into yet another carriage, another stink of shit and rotting meat. ‘Do you think we’re immune?’

  Jeb had pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled.

  ‘Maybe, or maybe it’s in the post.’

  Jeb sounded as if living and dying were all the same to him, but Magnus had seen how hard he would fight to survive.

  ‘Did you get ill?’

  ‘Sicker than a dead dog.’ Jeb looked at him. ‘I caught it early. They were about to take me to hospital when I got better. I tried to string it out, in the hope of meeting a nice nurse. I thought maybe some wild woman would fancy getting it on with a bad man, they say it happens sometimes. But the screws guessed I was faking. How about you?’

  ‘The guy in the cell I was in got it. It took a long time for him to die. I had three days of close exposure.’

  Jeb nodded, as if it made sense. ‘Some people die slow, others die fast. The poor bastards on this train obviou
sly didn’t expect to catch it.’

  Magnus made a mental inventory of his own aches and pains. So far there was nothing that tiredness and hunger could not account for. Perhaps the sweats would strike him down suddenly, the way it had hit the people on the train. He thought of the unanswered phone call on the dead man’s mobile: Mum.

  ‘Maybe they knew they had it and were trying to get to somewhere, someone.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  They made their way to the control cabin in silence. This time it was Jeb who moved the corpse, sliding the train driver out of the cab and into the corridor.

  ‘Poor sod.’ It was the first time he had expressed pity for any of the dead and Magnus glanced at him. Jeb caught his look. ‘My old man worked on the railways. He wasn’t a driver, you need connections to be a driver, but I know what he’d have thought about dying on the job; a fucking insult and not even any overtime to make it worth your while.’ He was fiddling with the controls. ‘Ever driven one of these things?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither, but how difficult can it be?’

  The tunnel stretched ahead, dark and seemingly as endless as outer space, but they had walked a long way. Surely it wouldn’t be far until the next station, the next assembly of bodies. Magnus could see his own reflection in the train’s curved windscreen. He looked thinner, older, like the fishermen he had sometimes seen coming ashore in the early morning, battered by the elements, half-dead to the world.

  ‘These trains need electricity to work.’

  ‘I’m not completely fucking ignorant.’ Jeb threw a few switches and pressed some buttons, experimenting with the dashboard. ‘Just cos the station was out doesn’t mean the points will be. If everything rode off one circuit the whole system would overload.’

  As if to confirm what he was saying the engine shuddered alive. Magnus imagined the corpses slumped in their seats quivering in response. He saw them staggering down the carriages, heads bowed, hair hanging over their faces like the dreadlocked man in the first compartment, coming to see who had woken them.

  Jeb let out a shout of triumph and the engine died. He slammed his hand against the dashboard, hard enough to hurt. ‘Shit! Fucking thing!’ He pressed a combination of levers and switches, but whatever charge the train had stored was gone.

  They rested for a while in the shelter of the carriage, but Magnus sensed danger in sleep and though Jeb sank deep and snoring, he did not get beyond a half-doze. Then it was up and out, into the dark again, a long stumble through nothingness until they reached the next station and a weary climb up precipitous, stalled escalators. There was a moment of swearing and panic when they realised that the grilles to the Underground entrance were shut and bolted, but then Jeb found a key hanging from a hook in the ticket office and they were suddenly, miraculously, out into the brightness.

  If the tunnel had been outer space, then this was a new planet of whose atmosphere they were uncertain. Magnus was getting better at unfocusing his eyes as he passed dead bodies, but it was hard to block out everything and so he knew that the corpse he was skirting had once been a woman in a summer dress. He glimpsed a tangle of long, russet hair and felt the pity of it all.

  Jeb stepped through a smashed window of a Pret A Manger and grabbed a bottle of water. He threw its cap on the floor and chugged down its contents. Magnus followed suit. The water was warm, but the sensation of it going over his throat and down into his belly was delicious. He drank half of his bottle and then forced himself to stop, worried he would be sick.

  The shop was a mess, but unless the contents of the till had been taken it was hard to see what whoever had broken in had been after. Tables and chairs had tumbled as if the seating area had been the scene of a fight, but there were no bodies, no spatters of blood. The glass counter was shattered and a display cabinet lay tipped on its side beside it. The wrapped food it had held was scattered across the floor.

  He and Jeb squatted on their haunches and pawed through mouldering sandwiches, melted puddings and glistening sushi. They burst open packets of crisps and stale muffins that seemed impervious to decay. It was the kind of food Magnus hated, the sort of crap he resorted to eating on badly planned tours, where he arrived in towns too late for dinner and left too early for lunch. It was the best meal he had ever eaten.

  When they were finished they packed a couple of paper bags they found behind the counter with more snacks and bottled water and crossed the road to a hotel. The doors were open and they walked silently through the carpeted lobby, their senses under assault from a surfeit of textures and colours after the grey of the prison and the black of the subway tunnel.

  It was a five-star place, old-fashioned and gaudy with wealth. They passed the reception desk, unchallenged. Everything was neatly arranged, as if the staff and guests had simply left, taking their luggage with them. The carpet was decorated with floral medallions, the chairs figured with gold paisley patterns, the satin curtains embossed with thick, crisscrossing lines. Patterns vied with patterns, colours with colours; everything caught, reflected and refracted, over and over again in bronzed mirrors. Magnus said, ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’

  ‘I can think of worse fates,’ Jeb said and Magnus wondered how it would be to lie on a soft mattress and feel clean sheets against your skin.

  The hotel corridors were a challenge to match the Underground tunnel. The lights were still on, the rows of closed doors a series of possibilities. Neither of them knew how to activate the hotel’s electronic key cards and so they took turns at kicking and shouldering locks until they gave way. There were a couple of false attempts, rooms wrapped in darkness with bodies humped beneath their covers, but then they found two adjoining bedrooms. They made no plans for later, but their eyes met briefly for a moment before they each went into their room and closed the door behind them.

  Eighteen

  Magnus woke suddenly, aware that there was someone else in the room. Jeb was a shadow at the window. He had opened the curtains a few inches and was staring out at a view of the building’s flat-roofed kitchens. He turned and looked at Magnus.

  ‘I walked up to the sixteenth floor. You can see a good way across the city from up there.’ His voice was calm, as if he were just back from buying a round at the bar and picking up a conversation they had already started. ‘A lot of it’s on fire.’

  Magnus swung his feet out of the bed. He had intended to wash before going to sleep, but the lure of the hotel bed had proved too much for him and he had slipped between its sheets filthy and fully dressed, only pausing to take his trainers off.

  ‘How close are the fires?’ Magnus stretched. His head hurt. His back hurt. His shoulders, legs and arms hurt.

  ‘Hard to say.’ Jeb paused and Magnus got the impression that he was seeing the view from the top floor again and assessing the distance between them and the fires. ‘Not so close you can’t take some time to sort yourself out, but close enough for us to need to think about moving on.’

  Magnus was unsure of how he felt about the ‘us’. He got to his feet, rubbing his eyes. Jeb, he noticed, was freshly shaved, showered and changed. Magnus said, ‘So there’s still water.’

  ‘Hot water.’ Jeb nodded towards a chair where a neatly folded bundle of clothes waited. ‘I got you these.’

  It felt like a rival on the comedy circuit had just offered to swap the top slot for inferior billing. Some instinct within Magnus twitched, reminding him that kindness was a thing to be mistrusted, but he said, ‘Thanks.’

  He had been too weary, too fearful, to look at the television earlier. Now he lifted the remote and pointed it at the blank screen.

  Flashing images appeared from a hospital ward somewhere in India. They were quickly replaced by similar scenes from somewhere in Europe and then Africa. The TV’s volume was down and subtitles stabbed across the bottom of its screen.

  V596 IS NO RESPECTER OF AGE OR SOCIAL CLASS

  The picture shifted to stock film of
an anonymous scientist delicately inserting a pipette into a test tube.

  SCIENTISTS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE TAKING PART IN AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION

  ‘It’s showing the same stuff, over and over,’ Jeb said in a low voice. ‘I let it run on for an hour this morning. I reckon someone put it on repeat before they left the studio.’ Before they died, the soft voice in Magnus’s head whispered. He kept his eyes on the screen, where anxious men and women ushered their children towards hastily commandeered primary schools and community centres. It had been a sunny afternoon, but the children were dressed in coats and jackets, as if wrapping them up tight would help protect them from infection.

  QUARANTINE CENTRES HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN TOWNS AND CITIES ACROSS EUROPE

  The camera focused on unhappy-looking soldiers manning a barricade. Magnus thought some of them looked sick, but perhaps worry and lack of sleep had sapped the colour from their skin.

  CURFEWS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED. NO-GO ZONES PUT IN PLACE TO AVOID LOOTING AND DAMAGE TO PROPERTY

  Magnus said, ‘We should check out the Internet.’

  ‘It’s down.’ Jeb shrugged his shoulders. ‘In the hotel anyway. I tried the computers behind the reception desk and a few laptops. Could be the server.’

  ‘Could be.’ Magnus nodded, though he knew that neither of them was convinced.

  The scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen announced:

  Military law established … Looters and rumour-mongers to face the highest penalties … Schools cancelled … Curfews in place during hours of darkness … Dog owners urged to keep pets indoors … Cabinet reconvened … Prime Minister set to make an announcement later today …

  And on the main screen the various images of hospital wards around the world were repeating.

  V596 IS NO RESPECTER OF AGE OR SOCIAL CLASS. SCIENTISTS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE TAKING PART IN AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION