Before Safe Haven_Lucy

by Christopher Artinian

  “You came,” said Samantha, smiling widely as she opened the door and pulled Lucy in by her hand, sensing her hesitation.

  “I just finished my rounds. I thought I’d drop in for one drink,” said Lucy.

  “You’ve only just got here,” said Samantha. “Don’t make excuses to leave already.”

  Lucy smiled politely, and Zofia walked up to her with an empty glass in one hand and a bottle of purple fluid in the other. “One drink,” she said in her quiet, polish voice. She proceeded to fill the tumbler to the top with the blackberry vodka. “There,” she said, nodding, “one drink.” All the women, including Lucy, laughed.

  “We are all friends here. We have all suffered. We have all lost. For one night we can forget troubles outside this room and laugh. Surely we all deserve one night without tears?” said Amelia and raised her glass. “Na zdrowie. This is cheers,” she added smiling.

  The other women raised their glasses too. “Cheers” they all said at the same time.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, Lucy thought. Maybe it would help her forget just a little of the pain that she wore every day like a thick black cloak. She took a sip of the blackberry vodka. “Oh my God! This stuff’s good,” she said.

  “Told you,” replied Samantha.

  “Our grandfather’s recipe,” said Zofia. “It’s good, yes?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Lucy taking another drink.

  “Of course, you won’t be able to feel your legs tomorrow, but who cares about that tonight?” said Amelia, and they all laughed again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lucy opened one eye. The other was pressed too tightly against a pillow to open for the time being. Where was she? This wasn’t her bed. This wasn’t any bed. She was on a couch, and the pillow was a cushion. Her tongue had the texture of carpet, and her head was fuzzy. She felt like she should have a headache, but for the time being, one evaded her. She looked around the room with her one eye and saw Samantha on the floor with a blanket over her. She was awake and smiling.

  “Morning,” said Samantha quietly, trying not to wake up Zofia and Amelia who were still sleeping well.

  “What happened?” asked Lucy.

  “It’s good stuff that vodka, isn’t it?” said Samantha and let out a little laugh.

  “Erm, I guess so,” replied Lucy.

  “You and me were pretty well gone by one. The girls said, ‘Why not sleep here?’ It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Samantha.

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty,” said Samantha.

  Just then, there was a loud knock on the door. The two women looked at each other, a little confused and still more than a little woozy. Zofia rushed to the door and opened it. It was the ambulance driver from the previous day.

  He looked past Zofia and straight at Lucy. “Somebody said you were here.” There were no secrets in a base this small. “Cessation call!” he said.

  “We’re not on call,” she replied.

  “We are. The on-call team hasn’t been heard from in over ninety minutes. They’re sending a squad out to their last reported location. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes,” he said, and turned to go.

  “Shit!” said Lucy. “That was “Ramon and Olivia wasn’t it?” Samantha nodded. The levity from the evening before gone in an instant.

  Zofia closed the door and leant back against the wall. She knew Olivia well. Amelia went across, and they both hugged. All four of them knew what losing contact was code for. Since the quarantine had been in place, there had only been one such instance. It sent shockwaves through the whole base for days, but then no one had spoken about it again.

  “C’mon,” said Samantha, getting up. “We’d better get ready.” Both of them had sobered instantly. They said their goodbyes and headed back to their own rooms.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Lucy still wanted a really hot shower, but the tepid water felt good on her face anyway. She thought about Ramon and Olivia, what had probably happened to them, and how she and Samantha ran that same risk every time they went out on a call. She knew scratch victims were the best way to find a vaccine for this virus. She knew there had been documented cases abroad of scratch victims actually surviving, but the infrastructure in those countries had collapsed before a vaccine could be developed. She also knew that it was because of the danger they presented that the government was bringing in the policy that all fresh scratch victims were going to be euthanized; and it would probably be extended to existing scratch victims when they had the manpower to deal with it. On the one hand, if it had happened, Ramon and Olivia would still be alive, on the other hand, in the long term, the best chance of ever finding a vaccine would be gone.

  She climbed out of the shower, wrapped a towel around herself and laid down on the bed. She opened her bedside cabinet drawer and pulled out the picture of the little girl on the swing. “I love you, Charlie,” she said, kissing the photo. In that moment, she forgot about Ramon, Olivia and the day ahead.

  After the episode with losing time when she had taken two oxycodone tablets in quick succession, Lucy didn’t feel a need or urge to take any more that day, but now, now she craved the numbness again. She reached for the cloudy brown plastic bottle and flicked off the safety cap. She swallowed one of the tablets and placed the bottle at the back of the drawer, covering it with a handful of socks. She looked at the photo again and placed that back in the drawer too, before getting ready to fight through another day.

  Lucy was tying her boots when the knock came on the door. It was Samantha, holding out a large coffee for her friend.

  “You really are the best. Have I told you that lately?” said Lucy taking the coffee.

  “Have you heard the latest rumour?” asked Samantha.

  “No, what?

  “London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham,” said Samantha.

  “What about them?” replied Lucy sipping her coffee.

  “They’ve all had outbreaks in the last few days.”

  Lucy brought the cup away from her mouth and gulped. “Jesus, let’s hope they’re nothing more than rumours,” she said.

  “Let’s hope,” repeated Samantha.

  Most of the rumours that were circulated at the medical base ended up being true, and both women had butterflies in their stomach as they walked out to the ambulance. The driver and his mate were standing outside the vehicle smoking roll ups.

  “‘Ello again,” said the driver.

  “Hi,” replied Samantha.

  “Just talking about the latest news,” said the driver.

  “What news?” asked Samantha.

  “Y’know, the outbreaks,” he said taking a final puff on his cigarette before throwing it to the floor and extinguishing it with his boot.

  “Those are just rumours,” said Samantha, fishing.

  “Yeah! Rumours,” replied the driver, and he and the other soldier let out a small laugh.

  “You think they’re true?”

  “I think they’re the tip of the iceberg, sweetheart,” he said. “C’mon then, we’ve got important work to do,” he said letting out another laugh.

  The two women looked towards one another, the butterflies intensifying, before climbing in to the back of the ambulance.

  Two hazmat men, different to the ones from the day before, greeted them with a nod before resuming their gaze to the opposite wall of the ambulance. The engine started and the wheels began to turn.

  Lucy and Samantha sat next to each other and remained silent, digesting the information. There had been dozens of rumours flying around the base over the past few weeks. They got told no more than was on the television or radio. Even the soldiers didn’t know what was going on. There were probably only a few people in the whole of the country who did. It was a time for misinformation. All the measures, all the structures that had been put in place had given Britain the best chance of surviving, but it had been a house of cards, and now, it sounded like the bottom row had just started burning.


  They’d been travelling for fifteen minutes when Samantha broke the silence. “I’m starving.”

  Lucy looked at her watch. “We can get some chow at the distribution centre.”

  “Can’t they speed this thing up?” asked Samantha.

  Suddenly, the ambulance came to a screeching halt.

  “Fuck!” said the driver and passenger simultaneously.

  Lucy and Samantha, both got up from their seats and walked to the front where they could see the road ahead.

  Samantha let out a childlike cry of disbelief and put her hand up to cover her mouth.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” said Lucy, as the two hazmat men joined them.

  While the Policewoman was still struggling on the floor, the RAM, the acronym the army used for the reanimated corpses, was not interested in the ambulance. It just knelt there, pinning the dying woman to the ground, taking a mouthful of bloody flesh from its victim’s neck.

  All the occupants of the ambulance were in shock. They had seen a lot over the past weeks, but they had not seen anything like this. The driver and his mate began to fumble for their sidearms. They were conscripts, they had not seen active service and their nerves and amateurism showed. They had been given rudimentary training and then a host of various babysitting assignments, this being the latest one.

  “What do we do?” asked the passenger.

  “Headshots, remember? We’ve got to get them in the head,” he replied.

  “Can’t we just drive over it and smash it to hell?” asked the passenger.

  “Erm. Yeah, actually, yeah, I suppose we can,” the driver replied, immediately feeling relief that he would not need to climb out of the vehicle.

  The passenger picked up the radio handset. “Control this is Mobile Three, over,” he said sounding more nervous than Samantha or Lucy felt.

  “Mobile Three, this is Control, pass message, over,” said the female voice.

  Just then, two shots rang out, then a third, and the head of the bloody chinned attacker exploded, collapsing onto his now still victim. The occupants of the ambulance just stared, open mouthed.

  “Mobile Three, are you reading me? This is Control, pass message. Over.”

  The passenger of the ambulance looked down at the handset, for a moment, everything was a strange dream. Then he snapped back to reality. “Erm, Control, erm, no message, it’s all over now, over and out,” he said, placing the handset, which crackled a response, back in the holder.

  He brought his eyes back up to the scene in front of him, just as the downed policewoman began to struggle to get up from under the weight of her fallen attacker. The dead weight shifted, and he saw that the police woman was no longer a policewoman, but one of these devilish atrocities. “This isn’t fucking happening,” he said under his breath.

  The RAM sat upright and looked straight ahead towards the ambulance. The blood was still gushing from the wound in its neck, and its skin had already turned a more pallid hue. Its lips peeled back from its teeth in a snarl that sent shivers down the spines of the six occupants of the ambulance.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” said the driver.

  All six of them felt it, like a communion. Even though they were in the relative safety of the ambulance, it was like they were out there, with the creature, face to face, no protection. Then another shot boomed, and the side of the RAM’s head erupted in a fountain of blood. As if frozen in time, the beast remained upright, the snarl now engrained on its face until the day it decomposed, then it fell back, its head bouncing on the tarmac.

  Three soldiers emerged from a side street, each still training their rifles on the downed corpses. They stood over the bodies for a few seconds, the lead soldier nudged one of the creatures with his foot before he looked towards the ambulance and just waved them round as if he was directing them around roadworks.

  The driver of the ambulance had been in the same morbid trance as the others, but now, realising there was an opportunity to put distance between himself and this gruesome scene, he engaged first gear and the vehicle began to move away. It veered around the soldiers and the bodies, the driver’s mate looked with frightened eyes as they passed the scene. He wasn’t thirty-one anymore, he was just a little boy, now and despite what his mother had told him to help him get back to sleep when he’d had a nightmare, monsters were most definitely real.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lucy watched as the syringe gradually filled with blood. And that’s the last name on the list, she thought to herself as she handed Samantha the phial. Lucy smiled and nodded politely towards the female soldier. She’d forgotten her name almost as soon as she had been told it. It was the stress and the weariness. Those things made you forgetful, she told herself.

  “Thank you doctor,” said the young woman as she slipped out through the small gap of daylight in the curtains. A partition had been hastily erected in one corner of the distribution depot to give soldiers some small modicum of privacy while they had a quick exam and blood taken.

  The ambulance driver popped his head through the curtain. “Apparently, there’s another coach load of soldiers coming in for check-ups, they’re emailing the list to you now. So much for us getting away early,” he said, before disappearing again.

  Lucy and Samantha looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “No rest for the wicked, I suppose,” said Samantha. “How about we get a bit of brekky before they arrive?”

  “That sounds like a plan,” said Lucy, closing the laptop.

  The two of them headed out of the makeshift examination room and towards a fast food trailer that had been commandeered by the army. Next to it was a double decker bus, which was adapted so pairs of double seats faced each other, leaving enough room to house a plastic table in between. The choice wasn’t wide, but the pair of them walked away with a plate of scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of coffee each. They climbed the steps of the double decker and walked past a few seats taken by soldiers before finding a space near the back of the bus.

  “I am absolutely famished,” said Samantha, sawing through a piece of the dry toast with her knife before piling it and a small mountain of eggs into her mouth.

  “Clearly,” replied Lucy, smiling, as a chunk of egg fell from the corner of Samantha’s mouth.

  Samantha smiled and wiped her mouth with her hand. “Sorry,” she said, I’m just so hungry.

  “No need to apologise, sweetie,” said Lucy taking a sip of coffee and beginning to eat her breakfast in a more sedate manner.

  The two women ate in relative quiet, occasionally looking around the bus to study the other occupants. Cafes and canteens were often bustling and noisy when filled with this many people, but the mood was bordering on mournful. It was like a grey cloud hung over the bus. Had the rumours about the other cities been circulating here too? Had they found out something more? Were they even just rumours anymore? wondered Lucy.

  Samantha placed her knife and fork neatly in the centre of her empty plate. “That was so good,” she said, taking a drink of coffee.

  “Hey, isn’t that erm…your friend’s sister? The one from yesterday?” asked Lucy, pointing out of the window.

  “Yeah, it’s Emma. I should go say hello,” she said getting up before pausing, realising Lucy hadn’t finished her breakfast.

  “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll finish, then I’ll take our plates back, you go say hi.”

  Samantha disappeared and Lucy sat back in the seat. She watched as her friend tried to attract Emma’s attention, then began looking around the bus again. There was a muted conversation going on between two female soldiers on a table diagonally across from her. Lucy pricked up her ears to see if she could listen. Lucy had been in the country long enough to identify certain accents, and the girl who was talking was definitely from Birmingham or thereabouts.

  “...Been trying all morning but the lines are dead,” said the first soldier.

  “Look,” said the second putting her hand across the table and taking the first woman’s ha
nd. “Y’know what rumours are like. It could be something simple. It could be another cyberattack. The phone network might have gone down. It could be anything. Don’t think the worst.”

  The first soldier looked across the table to her companion. “I can feel it. I can feel it in my bones. They’re gone.” Suddenly, as if sensing she was being watched, the young woman looked across at Lucy, who immediately put her mug down and began to clear away the plates.

  Part of Lucy felt guilty for intruding on a private conversation, part of her felt scared. Birmingham was one of the cities Samantha had mentioned. Was this it? Was everything starting to crumble?

  She returned the plates and mugs to the fast food trailer, and headed back inside to wait for the next coach load of soldiers to arrive. Samantha caught up with her before she reached the curtained off corner of the warehouse where they were destined to spend the next few hours.

  Once inside, they sat down. Samantha smiled as she recounted her conversation with Emma back to Lucy, but the smile disappeared when Lucy told her the snippet of the conversation she had heard between the two soldiers.

  “Surely if that was the case, something would have been made public,” said Samantha.

  “You mean like they have with everything else? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming them. If they broadcast that the outbreaks are out of control, that’s it. Game over. The state taking over all media was the smartest thing to do, but it means that we have no idea what’s really going on. I guess the only ones who really do are in a bunker somewhere in London.”

  “I feel sick all of a sudden,” said Samantha, putting her hand over her stomach.

  “You want something for it?” asked Lucy.

  “Yes. How about a one-way ticket to a small pacific island with no RAMs?”

  “I’ll look in my bag, sweetie, but the best I can manage is probably some Metoclopramide,” Lucy replied.

  “I’ll be okay,” said Samantha, “It’ll pass.”

  Both women let out gasps as the curtains were flung open by the ambulance driver. “Quick!” he said, “There’s been an attack. They need a doctor.”