by Rob Ewing
‘She never ate it,’ Alex says.
‘No wonder,’ Duncan laughs, trying a joke, then seeing that the not-eating is a subject Alex is sad about.
‘If only I’d made a better job,’ he says. ‘She might’ve had it and got her strength. She might’ve got better.’
Duncan forgets his joke. He puts an arm over Alex’s back instead. Alex says, ‘Auntie Jane was crying about us being in here, but she was too strict, wasn’t she?’
‘Strict? For what?’
‘For going away. When the men came they wouldn’t let me go with Mum. I told them I wouldn’t get sick, that I didn’t have a cold all summer. I said “Cross my heart, hope to die; stick a needle in my eye.” I even kicked the edge of the rug, but it was no use.’
‘They took your mum …’
‘So I stayed with Auntie Jane. Only she was too scared to inject me. After that I don’t remember.’
We cover the sandwich up. Alex pats the duvet like it’s a favourite friend, then frowns, calls himself eejit.
His sister Clare’s room is the first one upstairs. She has a sign Sellotaped to her door: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and if I am not here GO AND LO.O.K FOR ME. The OOs of LO.O.K have dots to turn them into accusing eyes.
There’s a bookcase, striped carpet, bed, wardrobe. She has a silver CD player. The CD inside is by Lady Gaga. Her bedsheets are pink. So’s the carpet.
We wait for Alex to decide what to do. For once he’s the boss; even Calum Ian waits.
After thinking about it, Alex goes to Clare’s bookcase to look through her books. He spends a long time there, then picks up something from the floor.
It’s a girl’s shoe: shiny black. Alex puts it back on the floor next to his own foot for measurement.
‘Her feet went less of a size,’ he says. ‘I never realised my big sister would go that way.’
Next along is his mum and dad’s bedroom. The duvet’s missing – it’s downstairs. The wardrobes emptied, with a lot of plastic bags of clothes on the floor. The bedside lamp, broken. Perfumes on a dressing table.
We follow him to his old room. There’s a sign on the door made of red card and gold tinsel which says Santa Stop Here. He has a small bed, and the wardrobe’s small too. There’s a teddy bear temperature-reader on a chest of drawers, which right now says COLD.
He opens his toybox. There are a lot of things inside for a boy. I want him to have a party of it, but he just stares at the contents. Then closes the box.
‘So this is my house,’ he says, circling his hands. ‘I hope you like it. It’s quite dark. Also, it feels lonelier than it did. But it’s a good house, and I’m proud of it.’
He sits on the toybox. All of a sudden the fun seems to melt away from his face, and he says, ‘What if they won’t understand? What if we’ve changed how we speak so much that when adults come to find us we’ll be talking a different language?’
Everybody goes quiet – maybe because there isn’t any way of proving that it couldn’t happen, other than it not being long enough for time.
‘We’d know,’ Calum Ian says. ‘I’d tell you straight if you started talking rubbish. We’d give you a clap on the head to get you normal again.’
Alex doesn’t answer back. He gets up from the toybox and goes out to the hall.
We follow, and he stops on the stairs.
Still being in charge he points at Duncan like he’s the smaller kid then says: ‘You can be the one to put on my DVD.’
Duncan says, ‘You want a film?’
‘Not a film. Something else. It’s part of the worst. I’m not scared if you’re here. It’s downstairs.’
‘What worst—’
‘Downstairs.’
We follow him to the living room. After a time of chewing his sleeve Alex points to the DVD player then says, ‘Inside that.’
Duncan takes a metal ruler out of his rucksack. He uses it to break the lid of the DVD player.
There’s a disc inside: just silver, no film name. He hands it to Alex. Alex doesn’t want to touch it.
Duncan looks at us, puzzled, then goes back into his rucksack and takes out his portable DVD player. He connects the battery-pack, puts in the disc.
We try to bunch together by sitting on the floor and on the chair behind.
When the screen gets broken into choices we press PLAY.
The first is an advert! Everyone cheers, it’s amazing! There’s a bathroom being cleaned with blue stuff. A lady with shining blonde hair smiling at her clean toilet. Adverts only happen when the world is going OK!
Then it’s the news. Alex hides his eyes.
It’s an early news. They didn’t know yet. There’s a foggy picture of a night-time street. Then a lady reporter, wearing a mask and lifting it up to talk to the man in a blue suit beside her.
We press return for MAIN MENU. Elizabeth reads the dates of the clips with her finger. Her shoulders drop and she makes a sad groan in her throat.
November, December.
‘Who did these? All these recordings?’
‘Dad.’
Next: a newsman beside a fence. Behind him is a plane. This one and lots of other planes have been told not to leave. But the people can’t get off either.
They’re waiting for days. The steps to get people down are forbidden. Some of them jumped.
Food gets passed up, after dead people start to land on the runways. Flat trucks come and take them away.
Elizabeth goes to MAIN MENU. More adverts. More news. She doesn’t want to press the button to start – but then Calum Ian presses it for her.
It’s cold in the news, because the people talking have smoke on their breaths, plus they’re wearing scarves.
‘He’s the one that frightens me,’ Alex says.
‘Him?’
‘No, the next one. He’s the one that made me scared of seeing zombies.’
It’s a film we’ve seen before. Someone being chased by police. The picture freezing into dots, like when storms used to shake the satellite dish. Then, when the picture comes back, the running man has fallen asleep beside some stairs. Black paint is coming out of his shoulder.
‘Shot,’ Duncan says.
Elizabeth holds her head like it’s sore. Calum Ian covers his ears from the film’s shouting, though it’s crackly and it isn’t even that loud.
‘He was only ill,’ Elizabeth says.
Calum Ian chooses another one. It’s a film of someone talking: a man with a sweaty face. He looks at the camera and smiles and talks patiently, so you’d think he’d be a good teacher. There are two people sitting beside him. They both look strict, or bored. Or fed up. These two don’t look like nice teachers, and they don’t look at the camera.
The man talks about growth. He uses words we don’t understand. He mumbles, then talks too fast, calls growth a cancer that has to be stopped. There’s a light that’s too bright for his face. He might be patient, but still, he looks like he’s in a hurry. We all agree that even though he’s smiling it’s probably not a true smile.
‘Can’t understand him,’ Alex says. ‘It’s like he’s talking in sore tooth language.’ On other days this might make us laugh, but right now, here, it doesn’t.
The man goes on and on. I get bored with him, which is fine because then the clip changes. And then I want to be bored again, because it’s a man Elizabeth recognises as the Prime Minister.
‘I am appealing for calm,’ he says. ‘I want you all to know we are doing the best we can. Please put your trust in the efforts of our emergency services—’
The clip cuts off – then there’s a film of people camping or working inside a sports stadium.
Elizabeth rubs her eyes with her sleeve. She’s shaking like she’s been outside for too long and got cold.
We watch the rest. I don’t even remember the one about the man running from the shopping place. I feel sorry for him, because he’s left behind his box of stuff. It’s all tipped onto the shiny floor beside a Christmas tree.<
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The DVD stops. It goes to blue screen, and we know we’ve come to where the electricity stopped.
The big kids should be in the lead, but they’re not.
Alex: ‘What was that man doing?’
Elizabeth puts on a smile. ‘In the very last clip? I know, actually. Mum and Dad used the same thing to help people.’
‘What?’
‘He had a mask. Called a nebuliser. Doctors and nurses use them to help people: maybe if they have asthma or lung problems, for their breathing.’
‘But the mask didn’t help the people who died.’
‘No. The bad man used it to hurt them.’
‘How?’
‘He used it to send bits of sickness in the air.’
‘Is the sickness still in the air?’
‘I don’t know.’
Alex goes quiet for a bit. After this he frowns and says, ‘If the people didn’t have asthma, or lung things, why did they want to put the masks on?’
‘Because he told them a shitty lie. He said it was oxygen. To give them energy, for shopping. He told them it was extra healthy, that it would give them extra strength for their Christmas shopping.’
As we leave the house the last person still sitting is Calum Ian: staring and staring at the blue screen of the player until Duncan has to wake him up, ask for the player back, tell him to get going.
Calum Ian clicks out the DVD – then he takes it outside and sprays it with petrol.
He throws a match, and we all watch as the silver top of the DVD bubbles and melts and goes black.
Alex keeps turning to have one last look at his house: watching to see if there will be any change, maybe hoping for some sign of life at the windows or door.
Then we’re back, walking the road.
Up in the north, where the wind blows hardest, some of the telephone wires got knocked down. Rubbish, plastic bags and fishing nets all snagged in a line along the fences. Tin cans, plastic tubs buried down in the sand drifts that the wind has built at the corners of the road.
It’s when we come to an abandoned car that Calum Ian, still walking behind, whistles for us to stop.
The car has been spray-painted.
There are red and blue swirls on the doors. Also on the front window.
No names, no letters or messages, no drawings: just swirls of spray.
We look inside. Calum Ian stays by the grass verge. There’s empty crisp packets and juice cartons and tins bashed but not opened on the front not-driver’s seat.
We look around, but there’s nothing: just some blank houses, the rubbish-snagged fences, the empty hill.
Duncan whistles on his brother, who doesn’t come but instead hunkers deeper in the grass.
We open the car door. It creaks bad, plus the inside smells old: old like the sun dried the air in it for weeks.
‘Nobody recent,’ Duncan says.
Still though: he looks at the hill and the nearest house in case there’s a trap we didn’t see.
When nothing bad happens Calum Ian comes over to us. I notice he’s got one of the knives out: tucked in the side of his belt so the end of it points backwards.
He takes out his tarpaulin and rolls it out on the road: offering us weapons, if we want. Then says, ‘Duncan saw smoke. Three month back. It was coming from the other side of the big hill. From the side we’re on now.’
Nobody speaks.
He must see something in how we’re all looking because he adds in a hurry, ‘Listen: it was hard to know if it was really smoke or just more clouds.’
Elizabeth gets him to slowly repeat what he said, and to give more details: about the exact date, about how long since, about whether the smoke was black or white.
‘Why didn’t you tell?’
Even though the question is aimed direct at Calum Ian it’s Duncan who finally answers: ‘He ordered me not to.’
Calum Ian looks caught. But then he gets his confidence back and says, ‘Tell me then: why didn’t they come and help? If it was truly friendly adults, they would’ve come. If it was my dad, he would’ve come. But nobody did. So you work out if a person doesn’t come – maybe that means they’re watching and not wanting to be found.’ Pointing to the rubbish inside of the car he says: ‘An enemy.’
Elizabeth looks at him like she can’t believe.
She stares at the weapons, back at him.
Then she nods, only not for agreement, but more for realising the worst in somebody.
She goes to fold the tarpaulin roll, then seems too disgusted to let her hands even touch it.
‘You and your stupid weapons.’ Then: ‘What if there was a search party? What if that was our only chance and we missed it? What if we missed our last ever chance of being saved? Did you think about that?’
‘What if they were bad bastards. Did you think about that?’
She hitches her bag up, then starts on the path, going quick like we’re in an even bigger hurry.
‘You don’t know what you’re walking into,’ shouts Calum Ian after her. ‘I was just trying to defend us. To keep the team safe. You’re the one that’s always going on about teamwork. That’s what it was.’
‘Protect us: from who? It’s you who wants to poison people. Maybe it’s you we’ve to worry about.’
Now he’s made Elizabeth nervous. I see her move from the middle of the road to the side – trailing the fence, then kneeling, like his words had some effect after all.
It gets us all nervous – so when we see the wind turbine moving – just before the houses of Bagh a Tuath – there might as well be a hundred folk on it, waving.
Calum Ian orders us to wait in the grass, where we hide and watch for a bit: listening for strangeness in the sound it makes as it chops air.
Alex thinks it’s a sign that adults are still alive. Elizabeth doesn’t agree. She says it turns all by itself until the day it gets rusted and stops.
Our third house has a ramp going around and up to its front door. There are two gates, both with stiff bolts. We take it in turns to climb over. There’s a door-knocker with a nameplate which says: E. R. KERR.
As soon as we open the door there’s a smell. Not the worst smell, but a definite one.
The hallway’s narrow, middle-bright. There’s a tipped-over walking frame on the floor. It’s got an empty string bag tied to the front of it, plus a long stick with pincers for picking stuff up. Old person things.
Because of the smell Alex won’t come in.
He waits on the step outside, and begins to count aloud to tell us how long we’ve taken—
‘Stopping at two hundred. One, two, three—’
We tie on our perfume-hankies, which is the best thing to have done, because when we go into the kitchen we discover that there’s an old woman dead in a chair.
She’s not alive. It’s easy to see. She’s fallen to her side, all twisted up like the trees by the north shore.
Her skin went black.
We search the rest of the kitchen, trying not to look at her. In the end Calum Ian puts a towel over her head.
I worry that it’s disrespectful, but truthfully, it’s better not to see.
We open the kitchen drawers. The fridge stinks, plus it’s empty. We look in the bathroom cabinets, the bedroom, then every cupboard in the kitchen again.
At the end of this Elizabeth just sits on the hall floor.
‘Nothing.’
Calum Ian bangs his hand on the doorframe.
‘Who tells Alex?’
It’s just then, when we’re trying to pluck up the courage to go out and tell him, that Alex begins to shout.
Something scared him proper: because now he comes into the house to get us.
He’s shaking, won’t stop.
Calum Ian gets to him first. He puts Alex’s hands at his sides for attention then asks him what he’s playing at.
‘Was no—not—’
I remember now how his words got broken up, after it happened. So does Elizabeth: she k
neels down and speaks to Alex quietly, trying to unmess his thoughts.
‘Remember, one at a time. Slowly.’
‘N—n—’
‘Think of all your words. Separately, like you did before. Go on. A big breath, it’s easy.’
‘Th—there. Was.’
‘OK … there was what?’
‘A thing.’
Calum Ian straightens up right away: and looks at all of us, making a told-you-so noise. He asks: ‘What kind? A man, right? He must’ve been hiding, I bloody knew it! Did he look bad? Was he like the bad man in the DVD?’
Alex presses his hands to his cheeks.
‘I can’t believe it was real! It wasn’t a dream!’
Elizabeth gets his attention by clicking her fingers in front of his face. She speaks sharper now.
‘Describe for us.’
‘Ran away … it had eyes and a face.’
‘So it was a dog, or a cat.’
‘No. It was running up on its two legs like a person.’
‘Alex. You can’t be making stuff up.’
‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’
Now when Calum Ian takes his roll of knives out of his rucksack we don’t say a thing.
He chooses the all-silver one: checking the sharpness of it by jabbing it into the wood of the floor.
For now we let him be in charge. He tries to look angry, like a man could be, but still, I can see he’s scared.
I wait for Elizabeth to tell him to put down the knife; this time she doesn’t. Nor does she tell him to stop when he hands out darts and knives to the rest of us.
I don’t know how to hold a knife for proper defence. Neither does Duncan, who drops his.
‘You grab – always – with two hands,’ Calum Ian whispers fiercely. ‘So go for the guts. Or the throat, and you attack first. Always first. We come in from three or four sides, that puts up our strength, right?’
He forces us down in the grass.
‘Listen.’
For ages there’s only birdsong, and the whurry-whurry of the wind turbine.
Then there’s barking – we see three dogs.
They see us as well, and they come close, tails wagging and their ears backwards for friendship.
One tries to get close to Duncan who holds up the shaking end of his knife.
