by Rhys Thomas
‘What?’ Miriam’s heartbeat doubled.
Henry’s father rose slowly from his seat. Joseph had to help him out of the car.
All of a sudden there was a new noise in the sky. The slapping of helicopter rotors.
‘They’re out of control,’ said Joseph. ‘Come on.’
Finally the gears of Miriam’s brain clicked into place. She shuffled across the seat.
‘What do you mean out of control? Are they ill? What?’
She clambered out of the door, keeping her head down. She looked down the road. There were people running towards her. Hundreds of people. They streamed between the lines of cars, coming up the carriageway like a wave.
The helicopter appeared from behind the buildings. The doors of the hold were open and Miriam could see two soldiers, one sitting at a gun station. Its massive frame drew round at right angles to the road and hovered lower. The downthrust caught some dust from the street and threw it into swirling vortices.
‘Get away from this area. It is not safe. I repeat, it is not safe,’ came an echoing voice. ‘We are about to begin firing. We have to contain the area.’
Miriam’s body felt light, her heart beating too hard, as if a piece of her being had come loose, unable to cope. She felt Joseph’s hand around her arm. The helicopter was so low now that Miriam could see the bewilderment on the faces of the two soldiers. They were looking at each other: are we really going to do this?
‘We will begin firing in five seconds,’ said the voice.
People were climbing out of their cars in panic and falling beneath the stampeding limbs of the crowds.
‘Five.’
More machine-gun fire hammered out from the direction of the approaching crowds. And then the sound of massed screaming.
Joseph pulled her away. ‘We need to get off the street,’ he called loudly, above the roar of the helicopter.
Miriam looked at the tall buildings.
‘We can hide in there,’ he shouted.
They ran.
‘Four.’
Henry’s father led the way. He kept looking back to make sure his son and daughter-in-law were in tow.
‘Three.’
‘This is a fucking joke,’ she heard Joseph say.
A boom shook the street and knocked them over. Rubble flew into the air. Something had exploded. Glass in the car windows cracked.
‘Two,’ came the voice through the debris.
‘One.’
An enormous cacophony of sound tore the air to shreds. There was a high metallic end on top of the deep, throaty chugging of the gunfire. The sound attained its own substance in the particles of air that boomed through her skeleton. She could see hardly anything. Sound and dust was all there was. Screaming, firing, running.
Joseph and his father were two dark shapes in the smoke. She coughed and retched. Air was not air, it was sand. The first of the crowds collided with her and knocked her back to the concrete. She got to her feet and passed between the bodies, sideways, towards the buildings.
Another boom. Her ears rang and the ground was no longer beneath her. She reached for it but it was gone. She struck the concrete hard and rolled. Back to her feet. Running across unpopulated space, empty road. A whistle through the air, behind her, in front of her. Another explosion. This time further away. The ground shook. Her ears rang with a high-pitched shriek, like a banshee. There was blood in her mouth.
Concrete. Under her fingertips. Uneven. Pebbled. She felt her way along the building, searching for a corner, a way out. She blinked soot from her eyes, wiped them clean with her wrist.
‘This can’t be happening,’ she whispered urgently.
‘Miriam, go!’
It sounded like it came from underwater. The figures were pointing behind her. She looked. It was an alleyway. She could escape. The figures crouched behind a car.
She turned away and ran. There was gunfire everywhere, pinging into walls, into cars. It had no source. There was no explanation for it. Her eyesight refocused. She had reached the alley. She turned to look for Joseph and his father. They dashed from the cars towards the alleyway.
‘James!’
Time slowed and the sky blazed white. She saw his eyes and went to reach for him but he was lifted into the sky by a tide of bullets that ran up his centre. She saw them as clouds of exploding cloth on his chest. He flew diagonally up and backwards and out of sight, behind the corner of the building. Joseph stopped.
‘Oh God, Dad, no!’ he cried. He turned, chased after him. ‘Miriam, go!’
The words meant nothing. Her mind jarred. She stopped. She fell to the ground and lay still. She was in a courtyard. An apple tree grew in its centre. Its trunk and branches were gnarled and old and leafless. Its roots had pushed up and cracked the paving stones around its base. Her mind could not process. Her body was limp. She lay, eyes open, unblinking.
She was there for maybe two minutes, that was all. Two minutes before she saw the courtyard glow electric blue, whiten, electric blue again. Two men approached her. They were wearing helmets. The lenses were hexagon-shaped. Their uniforms were yellow and made of a rubber material. Their boots and gloves were green and joined seamlessly to the uniforms at the wrist and knees. They looked like spacemen.
‘Are you all right, my love?’ said the first man. His voice was human despite his appearance. It came through a filter at the mouth that looked like a square showerhead.
Miriam did not answer.
The two men turned to each other.
‘She looks gone.’
The second man nodded.
‘Do you want to come with us?’
‘We can help cure you,’ added the other one, as if he was speaking to a deaf child.
Miriam still did not answer. Beyond the alleyway, on the main road, the noises persisted but they were not as they had been. The courtyard kept them out.
‘Let’s get her in the ambulance.’
They laid a stretcher at her side and lifted her on.
‘Do you mind us taking you away like this? Are you happy with it?’
Both men, crouched on their hams, loomed over her. Miriam saw her reflection in their masks. Her lips were dark with blood. Her face looked pale but perhaps that was dust. Her hair was white and chalky. She watched herself impassively until her reflection moved away into the distance, smaller and smaller, until it was gone and she felt her body being lifted, her weight sagging gently into the cloth of the stretcher. She felt moving air on her face. It travelled up her neck, over her chin, over her lips. As it passed her mouth she drew some into her.
The two men loaded her into the ambulance. There were three other people in there. They all stared blankly ahead and said nothing. The rumble of the engine shook the frame of the vehicle and they pulled away.
The doors opened again and a bright, white light spilled into the ambulance. Five men in white spacesuits appeared. A rectangle of black perspex, the visor on their mask, was the only darkness. The light was diffuse. It was as if it had not one source but was simply present in the air; a presence in its own right.
The first of the spacemen ascended the metal steps of the ambulance and stood in front of the woman opposite Miriam.
‘Do you want to come with me?’ he said.
The spaceman was tall and large. The woman said nothing. The spaceman was holding a light green strip of plastic.
‘I’m going to put this on you.’
With gloved hands he strapped the plastic round her wrist and connected the two ends. His hand movements were deft despite the heavy gloves. He then put one arm beneath her legs and another round her back and lifted her up. Carefully he stepped down from the ambulance and carried the woman away into the light.
The second spaceman entered and stopped in front of Miriam.
‘Are you ready to come with me?’ said the detached voice of the faceless mask.
The man crouched before her and slid a light green wristband round her wrist. She looked at it.
It was a thin plastic band that you would see in any hospital, but with a bulging around one section. Here, a metal sensor shone in the light. It was weightless. Next to the sensor was a number handwritten in red: 373.
Outside the ambulance she was in a plastic tube. It had been clipped to the back of the ambulance so the outside world could not get in. The walls were made of an opaque white material that let in the light. As they walked along, the walls shimmered in ripples before them. At the far end of the plastic tunnel was a room, large and square. Vinyl floor and whitewashed walls. She was carried through some double doors that opened automatically with a hermetic hiss. They were in an antechamber. To their left and right, along the walls, were lines of wooden chairs. The cushions were upholstered in a pink rubbery material cold to the touch. Several of the chairs were occupied. Miriam was carried to her own and placed into it.
An air-conditioning unit was set into the wall. A length of white cloth had been tied to the grille and flapped lazily in the current. Fastened to the ceiling was a black bowl of glass. A security camera.
Miriam looked at her green wristband again, at the red handwriting. Things came to her by degrees: the street, the lines of cars, the sounds of explosions. She was there again, watching Joseph disappear from view as he tried to help his father. A static current lifted the hairs on her body; an unpleasant, unnatural sensation. Her father-in-law had been killed. There were too many bullets in him. They had lifted him and thrown him down the street. He could not be alive.
The doors through which the spacemen had disappeared hissed open. A doctor entered.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, his voice high and quick. ‘We need people like you. You can rest assured that if you want to stop at any time you just have to say so.’
Miriam looked about her at the other people sitting in the identical pink chairs. They were all infected. It was clear. And they were all wearing light green wristbands.
‘This is a government facility, it is not a hospital. You’re safe here. Nobody can get in. In this building we have the best medical technology available on the planet, and the best doctors and scientists to give us the best chance possible. This is where the fight back begins.’
Miriam caught his eye. She spoke. Her voice sounded odd, distant, as if she was listening to a recording of her voice on a stereo.
‘Where are we?’
‘You are in Colindale. In London.’
She could hear him but not clearly. She placed the tip of her little finger in her right ear. There was sand in it. Dust.
‘We’re grateful to you. The whole country is. We need more volunteers like you,’ he said. ‘The sooner we can find out what this thing is, the sooner we can kill it. And with people such as yourselves willing to help, we can do it.’
Miriam spooned as much dust from her ears as she could. It was crusty, already congealing with wax.
‘We want to run some tests. It’s nothing to worry about. Last night something terrible happened across much of London. We need to work quickly, and that is why you’ve been brought here in such a manner. I hope you can forgive us for that. But our facility was unaffected, and all of our staff were unharmed. It’s a miracle.’
‘Miracle,’ Miriam whispered under her breath. She looked at the doctor. ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘there’s been a mistake.’
He paused and looked at her in surprise. ‘I’m sorry?’ he said.
‘I’m not ill.’
The doctor came closer. He had taken three steps towards her when a man sitting in one of the chairs opposite said, ‘No, I’m not ill either.’
The doctor stopped. Turned. The man was leaning forward and staring at the ground. He was holding the end of his wristband between his thumb and forefinger.
‘I’m not going to be able to help you,’ he said in a steady, slow drone.
‘I am not ill,’ said a third person, a woman, sitting in the chair furthermost along.
‘I am not ill,’ said a fourth.
Crystalline shards of panic grew up on Miriam’s skeleton. Suddenly the room had become real to her. The colours were faded up. She did not know where she was. She had been taken away. Her mind started to race – it cranked around, its gears and pistons coming to life. Her head hurt. There was pain in her knees, at her hip, along the back of her forearms. She was trapped.
‘I want to leave,’ she said. ‘Now.’
She wanted to stand but her legs felt weak. If she tried to stand she would fall.
‘Fascinating,’ said the doctor, quietly to himself. He looked about the room, at the dozen faces staring back at him. ‘Just wait here for a moment,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’m not ill,’ called yet another person.
But the doctor had left.
Miriam could feel sweat forming under her skin.
‘What are we doing here?’
None of them answered her at first. It was a man sitting three chairs down from her who finally spoke.
‘They think they’re going to cure us,’ he said. His breath became heavy. ‘They don’t understand.’
The automatic doors opened and two large men entered. They did not look like doctors. They wore navy blue boiler suits and heavy leather boots. They walked steadily towards the centre of the room. They said nothing but were looking in the direction of the man who had spoken. Their marching was purposeful. And then they broke into a run.
The man who had been talking jumped to his feet and burst across the floor in a flash of unnatural speed. He threw himself towards an elderly woman sitting opposite. It all happened in relative silence. There was no shouting, screaming, no human noise. The guards tackled him before he could reach the old woman. They tumbled into the far wall. The guards overpowered his writhing body. There were grunts and sighs, the slip of leather shoes on the vinyl floor. They carried him out by his arms and legs. He struggled but without making a noise.
As they passed her, they glanced at Miriam. She made eye contact. Panic swelled. They thought she was going to turn. They were going to come back for her next. They disappeared out of the antechamber. Miriam waited for the doors to seal shut before rising shakily to her feet. There was no energy in her legs.
‘What are they going to do to us?’ she said to unlistening ears.
They didn’t care. They were not human any more. She went to the doors through which they had been brought in, one foot in front of the other. They were locked. She pressed her shoulder into them using her weight as a lever but there was no escape. The fear inside her was of a new kind, of the new world. This fear was unknowable.
She was in a government building. She was safe. The government did not harm its own people. And yet she was terrified. The new government was sinister. It glared at her through the inverted dome of black glass in the ceiling, through the tinted red light of an eye just visible through the murk.
She tried to get her fingers between the thin slit that cut the doors in two. There was no purchase. Her fingers fumbled. The men were coming for her. She could hear their dull footfalls on the soft floor but she could not bear to turn round and see them coming.
Their hands on her were heavy and intrusive. One of them pressed against her breast. A ball of anger welled in her throat.
‘Get off me!’ she screamed.
They locked their arms over and under her limbs. She kicked out but she was nothing more than a loose marionette of flailing bones. They hauled her out across the chamber and the doors shut tight.
Down dark corridors they passed, the only illumination dull yellow emergency lights set along the ceiling too far apart to gain a sense of orientation.
‘I’m not ill,’ she protested. ‘This is wrong.’
The guards did not answer. They turned left and right at gloomy internal crossroads. Soon she saw unidentifiable people walking around in white all-in-one lab suits, wearing their fried-egg masks.
The orderlies took Miriam into a smallish room, like a one-bed hospital ward. They
laid her down and strapped her wrists and ankles to steel loops welded into the bed frame.
‘You can’t do this,’ she said, arching her back uselessly. The orderly trussed the second ankle strap with a finality he clearly enjoyed. He looked at her, smiled emotionlessly and left with his colleague.
She pulled at her shackles. Her legs were open and she felt vulnerable and foolish.
The doctor came in, the same man who had been in the antechamber, the one with thinning hair and high voice.
‘Please, I’m not ill. I’m really not. I have a family.’ There was pleading in her voice. ‘I have to get back home.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said calmly. His eyes were red at the edges. ‘You’ll be well looked after here.’
‘Why don’t you believe me?’
He wasn’t even looking at her. He was checking some papers on a clipboard.
‘Believe you?’ he said, dismissively.
‘My name is Miriam Asher. I live in Waterloo. My husband worked for Hutchins and Leclerc. I have two children, Mary and Edward. I am staying with my mother in Enfield because my husband was killed by the illness. We’re going to Cornwall to escape. Does it sound like I’m ill to you?’ She spoke quickly. ‘Would I be able to talk to you like this if I was ill?’
The doctor peered at her over the top of his clipboard.
‘Please untie me.’
He cleared his throat. His expression had changed. ‘When did you first feel it in you?’
‘Feel what?’
‘The illness. The Sadness you have in you.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t feel it. I’m not ill.’ She struggled with her ties. They dug into her skin. Small rivers of pain flowed laterally across her wrists.
The doctor looked worried. ‘Something’s gone wrong,’ he said urgently. He glanced nervously through the square glass window in the door. His movements were jerky, with a new energy in them. ‘I don’t understand. How could—’
