Remade

by Alex Scarrow

  Freya hadn’t really kept her eye on the news very much before the plague came. The occasional headline managed to penetrate her inward-looking cloud of doom. For the last year she’d become preoccupied with considering her future, which was going to be a walking cane, crutches, then a wheelchair, then one day choking to death on a crisp because her throat had decided to spasm. Her future was going to be ever-increasing doses of painkillers and muscle relaxants. So her mind hadn’t really been that much on the news.

  But even she knew enough to know how little Iain knew. ‘The Taliban and Al Qaeda are two very different organizations, Iain. They’re not one thing called Al-Talibarn.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’

  ‘And the war in Syria and Iraq was being fought by guys called IS.’

  ‘Yeah . . . that’s them. That’s who I meant.’

  She shook her head and looked at him in the mirror. ‘Moron.’

  All of that was old news now: the daily body count reported every evening from the war as coalition boots on the ground in places like Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco struggled to keep hold of the bombshelled ruins they called towns.

  ‘Makes sense, though . . . They were losing it, so they decided to make something that was going to take out everyone on the planet.’ Iain shrugged again. ‘It’s not like they had any worries about dying alongside us, right?’

  ‘’S right,’ added Big Phil.

  ‘Well, screw ’em,’ said Iain. ‘They’re all plague slime and we’re alive. Survival of the fittest.’

  ‘You guys really get off on all this survival shite, don’t you?’ said Freya.

  Iain shook his head. ‘No . . . I’m just as cut up as everyone else, but it is what it is. This is about survival of the fittest.’

  ‘We could be the last humans left alive in the world,’ added Claire.

  A woodland health spa populated by thick-headed personal-fitness instructors, beauty therapists, a shuffling MS sufferer and a mixed bag of waifs and strays. Freya mentally shook her head. If they really were the last humans left on Earth, she didn’t hold out much hope for the future of mankind.

  ‘Although there could be others who survived,’ said Claire hopefully.

  For once, Freya agreed with her. ‘There must be. We can’t be the only ones who’ve figured out how to stay immune.’ She wanted to add that back at Emerald Parks it wasn’t exactly wall-to-wall geniuses and rocket scientists. If they’d managed to suss out how to beat the virus, somebody else must have done so.

  She slowed down for the junction leading on to the A11, but didn’t bother stopping and checking. One of the benefits of post-apocalyptic driving was there were no other cars to worry about.

  ‘I wish I’d learned to drive,’ said Claire. ‘I was just too busy doing my Level Three NVQs and the beauty-therapy course up in Manchester.’

  ‘My parents made me cram the theoretical and binge-learn the practical,’ said Freya. ‘It worked, though. Passed first time.’

  Maybe that was one of the other reasons she’d enjoyed her brief honeymoon period of popularity, being the first student in her year to have a car and a valid licence?

  What was it that jealous cow, Tanisha, had quipped?

  Oh, yeah.

  Soon you’ll be the first one driving a mobility scooter, eh, Freya?

  What a lovely world she used to live in. Maybe those two mutton-heads Iain and Phil were right to be treating this culled world like their own version of The Walking Dead. One big survival game now to them.

  ‘Freya! Up ahead . . . see?’

  She nodded. On the side of the road was a swarm of the smaller snarks, ones the size of hermit crabs. They were beginning to shuffle across the road, like migrating baby turtles scrambling across a beach towards the safety of a tropical sea. Freya stepped down on the accelerator and squished over them, Iain whooping with delight and craning his neck to look out of the rear window.

  ‘Nice one!’

  ‘Yeah!’

  Freya rolled her eyes as she watched them in the mirror, both lads twisted round and grinning at the glistening smeared tracks behind them.

  ‘Shit, check out the snail trail!’

  ‘Snark juice!’

  ‘The pair of you are totally gross!’ chuckled Claire. ‘How many d’you reckon we just splattered?’

  Freya inwardly sighed as the three of them made their own guesses.

  She caught sight of someone sitting in the middle of the road right at the last moment. She’d thought it was just another victim. Not every pile of bones they’d come across had been lying flat out. Others had been slumped in seated positions. She’d even once come across one slumped across the counter in a pub, kept on his feet because he’d been wedged between two beer pumps.

  She slammed her foot down on the brake and the Land Rover swerved to a sluggish halt, lubricated by the last of the snark gunk still on its tyres.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ shouted Iain in the back seat as he rubbed at his forehead. ‘Just banged my ’ead!’

  ‘Umm, look?’ She pointed through the windscreen.

  ‘OhmyGod!’ Claire pulled herself forward to see better. ‘There IS someone else!’

  Freya unclipped her seat belt and reached for the door handle. She felt Claire’s hand on her shoulder. ‘What if he’s infected? What if he’s not immune, like we are?’

  ‘Claire, if he’s still alive after all this time . . . then he’s figured it out too.’

  Freya opened the door and pulled herself clumsily out of the car. She looked back the way they’d come. There was no sign of any snarks. She walked to the front of the Land Rover and saw the person she had very nearly run over.

  ‘Hello? Are you OK?’

  He nodded. She couldn’t work out how old he was. A boy? A teen? Adult? He looked gaunt, shockingly pale. His dark hair was matted and unruly, his cheeks mottled with scratches. But not sick. Not with the virus. There was no doubt over that. No one ever got sick from it and recovered.

  You were either immune or you weren’t. Just like Mum used to say . . . There’s no such thing as a little bit pregnant . . .

  He was sitting on a backpack. Like a country rambler taking a break for sandwiches and tea from a Thermos. Only he didn’t have either of those things – in fact he looked as if he hadn’t eaten in quite a while. He looked like some poor wretch who had sat down and just given up.

  ‘I’m so sorry . . . I . . . I didn’t see you until the last—’

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said quietly, struggling wearily to get to his feet.

  He sounded as if he had an accent of some kind. Irish? Australian?

  Freya stepped forward and offered him her hand. He took it and pulled himself up.

  ‘Are you alone? Are you with others?’

  He shook his head. She wasn’t sure which question he was saying no to. Just then she heard a shrill, panicky voice echoing from the trees beside the road.

  ‘LEON?’

  A young girl staggered out from the gloom beneath the branches, buttoning her jeans. Ten . . . maybe eleven. Like the young man, she looked pale and painfully thin. Even more unwell than the boy, if that were even possible. Long dark hair hung in greasy clumps. She stared wide-eyed at Freya, and rubbed a hand absently up and down an arm swathed in old, stained and yellowing bandages.

  ‘Just us,’ he croaked in answer to Freya’s question. ‘It’s just me and Grace.’

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘The reason you two weren’t infected by the virus is because of these . . .’

  Leon and Grace stared at the small, blue plastic capsule the man was holding between his thumb and index finger.

  ‘Painkillers. Paracetamol, aspirin, codeine, ibuprofen . . . basically any kind of analgesic.’

  He was wearing the same-coloured short-sleeved sports shirt as most of the others here, and a plastic name tag: Terry Morris. They were in a small room with a single strip light glaring down from the low ceiling on to a treatment bed and a pair of plasti
c chairs. On the walls were posters on how to administer first aid and how to spot the early signs of a stroke or seizure.

  Grace was sitting on the bed, Leon on one of the chairs and Terry Morris was standing beside her, in the process of unwrapping her bandaged arm.

  ‘You must have both been taking painkillers of one sort or another when it all kicked off. Am I right?’

  Leon nodded.

  ‘But Mom wasn’t,’ said Grace.

  Terry looked at her. ‘You saying your mum didn’t get infected?’

  She shook her head. ‘But the crabs . . . got her.’

  ‘She lasted until then?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Those things came nearly two months after the initial outbreak. She must have been taking something during then otherwise . . .’

  Grace shook her head.

  ‘Maybe she was, Grace,’ said Leon. ‘And we didn’t know. Mo too.’

  Terry shrugged. ‘I don’t know how this works, or why, but we spotted it early. Everyone who turned up here had been on painkillers of one kind or another. There’s a Chinese family that turned up . . .’

  ‘They were all taking tablets?’ said Leon.

  ‘They all routinely drank traditional herbal tea for medicinal reasons. Which of course has a strong natural analgesic in it. They lost their youngest child to the virus, though. A baby. She was on formula milk. That pretty much confirmed it for me. It seems this plague – this virus – is unable to digest people with traces of those chemicals floating around in their bloodstream.

  He puffed his cheeks and tutted at himself. ‘I really don’t know if it’s limited to painkillers and anti-inflammatories. It might include other drugs like mood stabilizers, or certain antibiotics. But I suspect not, otherwise many more people would have found themselves immune. It’s guesswork; I’m just a qualified nurse. Here we all pop an aspirin, a paracetamol or an ibuprofen daily and so far that seems to have done the trick.’

  ‘Grace has been taking antibiotics . . . for her arm. It doesn’t seem to be healing.’

  Terry nodded as he finished unravelling the bandage. ‘Oh . . . that’s a nasty inflammation,’ he said as he exposed her forearm. ‘We probably need to try her on a different kind.’ He peered closely at her red skin, blotched and weeping in places. ‘The usual nasty germs are still around and doing their thing, it seems. MRSA is still here, and still quite deadly. I presume you’ve also been taking some painkillers or anti-inflammatories?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘And you too?’ he said to Leon.

  ‘I get bad headaches all the time. So I’ve been taking aspirin.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Not for a few days. We ran out.’

  ‘How long?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘I . . . I don’t know. A few days. Just over a week ago maybe.’

  Terry frowned. ‘Did any of those snarks touch you in the last week?’

  Leon and Grace looked at each other, confused.

  ‘It’s what we call ’em.’ Terry tutted again. ‘Unless you’ve got a better name for them.’

  ‘Crabs,’ said Grace. ‘Bugs.’

  ‘Walkers . . . crawlers,’ added Leon. ‘They seem to be changing.’

  ‘And getting bigger,’ said Grace.

  ‘Yeah, we’ve noticed that too. Any of them touch you in the last week?’

  Leon nodded. ‘Sure.’ He pointed to the scratches and cuts on his cheeks. ‘I don’t know if they have eyes . . . I’ve never seen any eyes, but they kept finding us.’

  ‘It could be smell, sound, motion . . . pheromones perhaps.’

  ‘They . . . Are they really made from the stuff that used to be people?’ asked Grace solemnly. ‘That’s what Leon and me think.’

  Terry nodded. ‘It’s the likeliest answer. The virus infected clouds from the raw material. You saw those, I presume?’

  Both nodded.

  ‘So I suppose it’s evolving. All the stuff that used to be people, cats, dogs, birds, insects – every living thing – it’s using that and trying different things.’

  ‘You make it sound smart,’ said Leon.

  ‘Nature can be pretty smart.’ Terry dabbed at Grace’s arm with a cotton pad dipped in antiseptic. She winced.

  ‘Tender?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  He peered closely at a raised welt on the back of her hand. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Barbed wire,’ answered Leon quickly. ‘Rusty barbed wire. I think that’s how she got this infection on her arm.’

  He finished dabbing at her arm with antiseptic. ‘Well, at least that’s cleaned up now.’ He pulled fresh bandages from a plastic packet and bound her arm up once again. He reached out and touched her forehead. ‘You’re quite warm.’

  ‘I think she’s got a fever or something,’ said Leon.

  Terry nodded. ‘I think so too. Look, I’ll give you some different antibiotics and some stronger anti-inflammatories to take. It’ll keep those snarks at bay, but more importantly it’ll clear this nasty infection up. We may be immune to the plague, but I’m afraid even a septic paper cut can still kill you just like the good ol’ days.’

  He turned to Leon. ‘And let’s get you both on aspirin again.’

  ‘I’m Freya by the way.’

  Leon looked up from the canteen table. He was getting used to this: people coming over and telling him their name and then asking him what he’d seen ‘out there’. He and Grace had been left alone for the first two days at Terry’s insistence. He said they both needed some rest and feeding up. They’d been assigned a guest chalet to share inside the vast glass house and Grace was still very poorly and feverish, although it seemed like the infection in her arm was beginning to get better.

  He recognized Freya as the girl who had nearly run him over. ‘Leon,’ he said, offering her his hand.

  ‘Well, duh, I know,’ she replied. She grasped his hand and shook it. ‘Seems like I’m back of the queue to pester you with an avalanche of questions.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s OK. There’s not much I can answer, though. It sounds like me and Grace haven’t seen anything you guys haven’t already seen.’

  Freya set her tray down on the table. ‘Just like school dinners here.’

  It was heated food . . . sure it came from tins – nothing came freshly picked any more – but it was food heated in a saucepan; a luxury as far as Leon was concerned.

  She settled awkwardly into the chair. ‘You’re looking a lot less like roadkill now.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m feeling better, thank you.’

  ‘How’s your sister doing?’

  ‘She’s a lot better than she was. I think we were both in a pretty crappy place when you nearly ran me over.’

  Freya picked up a fork and speared one of the ravioli in her bowl. ‘So what’s your meds story?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your medication story?’ She blew on her food. ‘Quite a few here are alive and well because . . . uh, because we weren’t well. We’re all pill chompers. We survived the initial outbreak because a lot of us were on one med or another at the time.’ She nodded at those people not wearing the park’s uniform. ‘The staff, on the other hand, survived because they were isolated and stayed inside the tropicarium. But the rest of us . . . We were just “lucky” to be sick at the time.’

  The tropicarium, Leon had learned, was the name for this large glass-house structure that contained the pool, the hot tubs, the sauna, the chalet cabins, the plastic palm trees and plastic orchids, the artificial grass. The place looked like a tropical paradise, except none, or at least very little of it, was actually real.

  ‘Grace had a broken arm and I get headaches. So we were both on painkillers at the time.’

  ‘Terry said your mum survived for a while too?’

  Leon nodded. But that was all he gave her on the subject. What had happened had happened five months ago. It felt like much longer.

  Three months they’d spent back down there in that dark nuclear bunker, w
orking their way slowly through forty-year-old rations. Just him and Grace, surviving, simply existing like cave dwellers. They’d been in shock, Leon realized, what the US army called PTSD. Losing Mum felt like years ago. On the other hand, it took a question, a smell, a word . . . to bring her right back and make it feel like yesterday.

  ‘Hey, it’s OK,’ said Freya. She touched his hand lightly. ‘We all lost someone. I don’t talk about my parents either. Subject best left with the wrapper on.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Both he and Grace had done a lot of crying. Sometimes together, but mostly he’d done his crying when he was sure she was in some fitful sleep.

  Leon glanced up at Freya, looked at her properly this time. She was pretty in an imperfect way: her ears stuck out just a little; her jaw tapered like an almond, giving her a slightly weak chin. Her mouth worked sluggishly, making her words slur, and she moved around cautiously, like a person driving someone else’s car for the first time.

  ‘So, in case you’re wondering about my slurred speech . . . I’m not drunk. I was diagnosed with MS about nine months ago. It’s why I sound a bit like this. Why I feel so frikkin exhausted all the time.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. That sucks.’

  ‘Or it doesn’t, depending on how you look at things. If I’d been a well girl, I suppose I’d now be part of some disgusting pale, slimy, crabby thing.’ She smiled nonchalantly. ‘Girl with early signs of MS versus gross bug thing . . . no brainer, really.’

  Leon noticed the older man who was in charge here, Carnegie if memory served him, coming over to join them.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning, Leon?’

  ‘Better, thank you, sir.’

  He smiled at the formality. ‘Terry tells me your sister has a nasty infection, but he’s put her on some pretty robust antibiotics?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s feeling better already.’

  ‘You were both in a pretty sorry state when they brought you in. Terry said you guys were borderline malnourished, dehydrated; he thought your sister might have scabies.’