“What difference doessss it make?” Kara’s voice had taken on a serpentine hiss as her throat rotted away. “Unlessssss it’sssss a cure, it’sssss no good to anyone.”
Jeremy sucked in a breath and listened to it whistle between his teeth. His stomach felt empty and nauseous. While Kara was correct in her pessimism, it was still welcome news to hear that someone had possibly discovered something about the nature of The Peeling. Knowledge made the virus seem more natural and less like the flesh-consuming monster that it currently was. If people knew how it was passed on then the fight to contain it could finally begin. Not that Jeremy would have anything left in his life to fight for, even if mankind succeeded in destroying the beast.
“How do you feel?” he asked Kara.
She tried to laugh, but her tattered vocal chords seemed to lack the ability now. “I feel like my head’s going to fall off into my lap any minute. My neck feels numb, like it’s not even there anymore.”
Jeremy was about to tell her he was sorry, but then decided it would be a pointless gesture. Apologies would provide her no solace. Besides, she seemed to be getting more angry than brooding.
“This is probably what I deserve, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve been fucking my sister’s husband – among my many other sins – and this is probably my punishment.”
Jeremy shook his head. “She forgives us.”
“What? She knows?”
“Yes. She told me earlier. She loves us both and forgives us.”
Kara hitched forward and tears were instant in their arrival. As they fell down her face, they gathered flakes of skin and a film of blood from her cheeks; so fragile was her flesh. “I’ll go to hell for what I’ve done. Carol can forgive – she’s a better person than us – but I doubt God will be so compassionate.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Kara. We all do things we regret. Carol isn’t holding it against you, so you shouldn’t hold it against yourself, either.”
“Fuck you!” The outburst was sudden and vicious. “You’re the one that should be melting away, not my sister. You’re the one that’s spent your whole marriage fucking around. What did you ever do for her? Nothing! Yet she’s the one dying while you’re perfectly fine.”
Jeremy sighed and tried to keep his focus on the television. He had a feeling that she would strike at him if he made eye contact. “If I could take her place, I would.”
“You’re a liar. They have a cure at that news station. Look at them. They’re fine, just like you.”
Jeremy looked at Sarah’s tired face on the screen and shook his head. “Actually, one of the reporters has the disease. She showed me earlier.”
“Bullshit!” Kara sprung up from the couch. You have a cure, but you won’t share it. With me and Carol out of the way, you can carry on screwing around. Probably already got a new fancy-woman.”
Jeremy stood up and backed away. He could sense violence coming off of Kara and he wasn’t interested in stoking that particular fire. Nonetheless, she came at him, withered fingers outstretched like talons.
He stepped aside and shoved out, sending her sprawling back onto the couch. As she fell, her legs shot forward and upended the coffee table. Immediately her ankle began to bleed. She clutched at it and sobbed.
“I’m fucking melting!” she screamed. “What did I do to deserve this? I’m not a bad woman, not really. I don’t deserve this. I don’t. I don’t.”
Jeremy left while she was distracted. A madness seemed to have overtaken her and his presence seemed to make it worse. He felt endangered; an enemy inside his own home. He wanted to see Carol. He wanted to be with his wife.
At the top of the stairs, the noise of the television faded away and Jeremy was again met with the eerie silence of the landing. There was every chance that Carol was already dead; part of him wanted that peace for her. If she had passed on then he would just sit with her awhile and hope that, somewhere, someplace, she was still with him. But when he opened the door, he saw that the mercy of death had not yet visited his wife.
Carol lay on the bed, looking more like a puddle than a human being. Her skin clung to her now only in patches and in many places her bones were showing clearly. But her eyes…her eyes were still flawless. Beautiful.
He sat down on the bed and went to touch her, but then realised there was nowhere he could do so without causing her pain. “I love you, Carol. I wanted to tell you that one more time.”
It was an obvious effort for Carol to form words, but she seemed eager to do so all the same. “I…love…you…too.”
“I wish I had more time with you. I wish there was time to make it all okay. I’m going to miss you every minute till the time I join you. I just hope that when I get there, you’ll be waiting for me. If not, though…I’d understand.”
Carol’s eyes flickered as if fighting away sleep – or death. Jeremy wasn’t sure if she’d heard the words he’d just spoken, but he hoped so. Eventually she came back to him and managed to speak again. “Please, Jerry…please…”
“What, sweetheart? What do you want?” But she didn’t need to answer. He knew what she was asking for. Release. He nodded, felt tears well up behind his eyes. “Okay,” he finally said.
Jeremy leant forward and kissed his wife’s forehead. His lips came away moist and sticky, but he did not care. Trying to be as gentle as possible, he pulled loose one of the pillows beneath his wife’s head. Her eyes stared at him intently and he knew that if she could, she would have been smiling. By doing what he was about to do, Jeremy could show his wife the kindness in death that he could not give her in life.
Jeremy put the pillow to his wife’s face and pressed down. It took only a minute for her to die.
***
Jeremy sat with Carol for almost a full hour before he left her. He knew that once he exited the bedroom, she would truly be gone forever. Part of him had also been curious to see whether her body would continue to rot away after death. It had not. If he’d obeyed her requests earlier then her body would have been more intact as it was lying here now. It was just one more regret to add to his list.
Downstairs, Kara had gone missing. The television was still switched on and, if he wasn’t mistaken, the volume had been increased. Sarah and Tom were still reporting and there was an urgency about them now that he’d never seen before. He looked around the living room, but found only shadows.
“It has now been categorically proven,” Sarah said on the television, “that the virus is passed on through carriers. While only fifty-percent of those exposed to the infection become symptomatic, it has been discovered that the other fifty-percent are not immune as originally thought. The seemingly unaffected are in fact passing on the virus by becoming highly-infectious carriers. While half of the population is dying, it is the other half that is infecting them. It is for this reason that a nationwide quarantine is now in effect. Healthy or infected – all will be restrained if found outside their homes at any times. Lethal force will be used if necessary. Through isolation, it is hoped that the infection will reach a saturation point and that none-symptomatic sufferers will remain healthy. There is still hope for us, Great Britain, but we must stay calm, and we must stay indoors. Never Stop News is now the official channel for the British Government alongside the BBC, so please leave your television on at all times for further updates. We will be interspersing our regular newsfeed with episodes of Friends, The Simpsons, and Only Fools and Horses, so sit back and enjoy as that’s coming up next.”
“You did this.”
Jeremy turned his head away from the television and saw Kara moving out from one of the room’s shadowy corners. Her face had peeled away from her skull and her snarling mouth made her look like a vengeful demon.
“I did what?” Jeremy asked her.
“You infected Carol and you infected me. You are the one that should be dead.”
“You don’t know that I have it. You don’t know anything.”
“Yes, I do. I haven’t been around anyone since the whole thing started – no one, except for you.”
Jeremy thought about earlier in the week when he’d popped round to see Kara at her home – popped round for his weekly shag. “I’m sorry,” he said, worrying that she could be right; that he could be responsible for his wife’s death, and others.
“Quiet!” Kara stepped further out of the shadows. She was holding a large chef’s knife from the kitchen. “I don’t want to hear you anymore.”
Jeremy nodded. “Okay.” He made no move to get away, unsure whether Kara even had it in her to do him harm. In normal circumstances, he thought not, but these were not normal circumstances and she was most certainly not her usual self.
“You’ve been fucking us both for a long time, but now it seems like you really got the job done. You’re a murderer, Jerry. If Carol and I had never let you near us then we would be okay, we would be healthy.”
“Half the world has the disease, Kara. You would have gotten it anyway, one way or another. Carol is my wife; you really think I would infect her purposefully?”
Kara came closer with the knife. Still he did not move. She growled at him, blood falling from her lips and covering the exposed bone of her lower jaw. “Men like you have been a sickness on women since time began. Women have always suffered because of misogynistic perverts like you.”
“You’re talking nonsense. The Peeling is killing as many men as women. It’s just luck of the draw who gets infected.”
Kara came at him with the knife. “Lies! You did this. You killed us!”
Jeremy was about to dodge the knife attack, but at the last second he decided to remain in place. What was the point?
He thought about seeing Carol again as the knife entered his chest and forced him backwards as though he’d been punched. He fell backwards onto the sofa, blade jutting out from between his ribs, and ended up facing the television. Delboy and Rodney were flogging Sikh crash-helmets in a world that knew not of such horrors as The Peeling. Jeremy thought it was a nice way to go and, by the time he bled out, he almost managed to kid himself that the world still had a chance.
Almost.
THE PEELING OF SAMUEL LLOYD COLLINS
Thursday
My big toenail fell off today. That leaves three on my right foot and two on my left. It stung at first, but now my toe just feels…hot. I’m keeping the nail in an ashtray in the kitchen.
My name is Samuel Lloyd Collins and I suppose, in a way, this is my last will and testament, except I don’t have anybody to leave anything to, so I guess this is really just my last testament. Or maybe writing this is merely the closest thing I have to company.
I don’t have to be alone. I could go next door and take part in one of their endless political debates that echo through the walls and keep me awake at night. Sometimes I think about yelling at them to ‘keep it down’, but what would be the use? Politics are high on everybody’s agenda right now. One would expect them to be.
Everyone has their own theory on how ‘The Peeling’ started, but I personally think it was the Arabs. It’s always the Arabs, isn’t it? Saddam is dead and the Yanks finally got Osama. So what choice did they have left but to go for broke? Everyone assumed their master plan would culminate with a nuclear attack on a major city, but in many ways this virus is worse. We may have snuffed out the leaders, but their passion for killing, it seems, will never die. You cut the head off a chicken and it runs around like a maniac, spraying anyone nearby with blood. That’s what ‘The Peeling’ is: arterial chicken blood spraying us all with its infectious filth. I guess the Arabs won in the end…
I came down with the sickness on Tuesday. Two days ago. I’ve already lost a bit of hair and some skin off my testicles, and you already know about the toenails. Funnily enough, my fingernails are currently unaffected, probably the only reason I’m able to write this. I thought about typing this on the computer, but somehow it felt like a man’s final words should be in ink, don’t you think? Maybe when it comes right down to it, paper is more permanent than a collection of cheap circuits.
My future is laid out for me now. I’ll be dead within a week, give or take a day. The beauty of the Peeling is that it leaves no room for hypothesising. No room for hope. It kills every time, no exceptions. In a way that certainty has allowed me to come to terms and accept my fate. This time next week I will be a bubbling oil-slick of rancid, dissolving flesh. Somehow I’m fine with that.
But I need to know who is responsible for the pain I’m in. I already told you I think it’s the Arabs, but unless I know for sure…Well let’s just say that knowing for definite would bring a certain degree of closure to the situation. Of course, the honourable men and women of the Government’s various agencies are urgently investigating the origin of this disease and those responsible, but as each second passes, Great Britain withers and dies beneath its second great plague. I just hope to be alive when they determine the guilty party.
Already know it was the Arabs, just need to know for sure…
Friday
I woke up this morning stuck to my pillow. Not because I had been drooling in my sleep, but because the skin below my left eye had rotted and fused with the cotton. I had to rip the pillow away and half of my face with it. The resulting meld of infected flesh and sickly white cotton reminded me of a surrealist painting, beautiful in a way. Maybe I’ll have it framed before I die.
What an odd thing to muse upon! It would not surprise me if I have gone quite mad. I’m already starting to feel delightfully delirious (or maybe that’s just the throbbing and burning where my face used to be).
Such good bone structure I was blessed with, but did not know of, until I was today faced with it in the mirror. The bone of my cheek now shows right through, covered only by several, thin slivers of sinewy gristle. I look like the Phantom of the Opera (albeit a grizzlier version). I wonder what part of me will dissolve tomorrow. That’s the fun part of this sickness, I suppose, not knowing which chunk of skin will decompose next. It isn’t like typical flesh-eating diseases; they have a point of infection and usually spread systematically. But The Peeling strikes the body at random, necrotising a man’s feet before popping up a day later and doing the same to his ears. I’ve seen hundreds of case photographs and no two victims follow the same path of infection. The only non-variable: it’s always fatal. No one understands this disease at all…
…and no one can stop it.
I think it’s starting on my chest…
Saturday
I can see my ribs. Two of them, glistening at me like curved piano keys. It’s amusing, in some morbidly fascinating way, to see one’s inner workings. The pain is starting to subside, and thankfully only throbbed for a few hours in the morning, but the cloying odour inside the house is repugnant. Ideally, I would open the curtains and windows, but I don’t wish to be disturbed by the outside world. I would only become resentful of those who still have all of their skin. Besides, it was being around other people that infected me in the first place, sealing my fate, and I hate them for that! But retaining my humanity is all I have left to focus on for now and resentment will only make that task harder. I have decisions ahead of me that should not be made in temper…
I have been corresponding all day with a trusted associate that is supplying me with up-to-date information on the current pandemic, along with the progress of the on-going Government investigations into the crisis. So far it seems clear that this was a premeditated and focused attack on the western world. The Peeling has, so far, hit 90% of Europe and is seeping its way into the East. USA and South America are also stricken, worse than we are in fact, but it is unsurprising to me that, as yet, the Arab world is unaffected. I am eager to see just how far into the East the disease spreads before ceasing its journey of human pestilence. I’m guessing that it will be shortly after it runs out of Christian nations to infect.
Sunday
I lost a hand today. Thank God it was my l
eft and that I can still continue writing this. I now have a withered stump that drips periodically with a viscous yellow discharge. It looks similar to the contents of a Cadbury Cream Egg but smells worse than anything I could ever hope to describe to you now. I suppose it’s the aroma of lingering death.
Next door are still at it. Talking incessantly at all hours. I need peace and quiet right now. Time to think. I already informed my colleagues that I would be working from home for the next week and am not to be disturbed under any circumstances. They were not happy, but I’m the Boss, so they’ll have to cope. They don’t know that I have the sickness, of course, probably too wrapped up in their own fear of it to even consider the possibility. People only worry about themselves nowadays.
My associate emailed today and told me that the infection was definitely engineered – Wow. What a revelation! – and that it was unleashed upon the world at strategic locations: Major cities, along coastal areas so that the disease would work inwards from all directions, eating around the edges of England as though it were a Jaffa Cake with a chewy orange centre…
God what I would do for a box of Jaffa Cakes right now! The stump of my wrist is itching just thinking about it. Perhaps it’s excitement?
Anyway, I have sent a reply email asking what is currently known about WHO engineered the disease. That is what I have to know.
Then maybe I can do something about it.
Monday
I have lost an eye today. It is indeed unfortunate, but in a way I am blessed to have persevered this long anyway. Many do not, and at least I have the other eye. My left one just dribbled out of its socket today like an under-boiled egg with its top sliced off: all foamy white and custardy-yellow. I almost laughed when I looked in the mirror. I look like a zombie-pirate.
At least it doesn’t hurt. Not physically.
I suspect I have little time left now and I am anxiously awaiting news from my associate. I can feel the illness seizing my internal organs in its corrosive grip and it’s only a matter of time before they start to decay completely. I have already taken to soiling myself involuntarily, so I assume that my intestines are already rotten. I would take a shower to get clean, but the pressure would only shred what remaining skin I have left. For now I will sit and wait for my associate to provide me the information I so desire…
The Peeling: Book 1 (Jeremy's Choice) Page 4
