by James Smythe
I had a spot next to a store, one of those clothes places where the front porch is made like a beach hut, with a surfboard and dark wooden walls, and there was a lady standing with me, drunk, I think; slurring her words, certainly. I really want to go to bed, she said, and I said, Well, why don’t you, then? And then she pointed her finger at me and said, I know your type. I ignored that and told her to swap places with me, so that she could rest against the window. She swore at me, and then pushed me aside, and screwed herself up into a ball on the floor. She was a snorer as well, started right up. Shouldn’t you wake her up? asked a man, and I said, No, she’s drunk, let her sleep it off. Sure, he said, okay, and then they finally opened the doors to the church – we didn’t even know that they were shut, we were just there, so far back that we couldn’t see them if we tried – and the whole crowd moved forward in this big chunk, and all of a sudden I was a few shops down, in front of a bakery, and I couldn’t see the woman any more. I tried to shout back, to tell people to wake her up, but of course nobody was listening to me, they just marched forward. All I could think was, I hope that nobody tramples on her, I really do.
I had been staring at stale cupcakes in the window of that damned bakery for a few hours when we finally moved again, and I ended up in front of the next shop, and there, bright as day, was Leonard’s first wife, Estelle. I never liked Estelle, not least because of the stories that Leonard told me about her (about her cheating, how she used to just bitch about people behind their backs, the things that she’d say, the debts that she ran up (that we were still paying after they divorced!), her general attitude), and she hadn’t phoned me after he died, even though I called her, left a message, told Jacob, their son, what had happened. I’m surprised to see you here, she said, I would have thought that you’d be sitting shiva. Well, I’m not, I said, I’m here. At a Christian church, no less, she said, and that smile just spread itself across her face like butter, just like Leonard used to say it did. I don’t see you sitting shiva either, I said, and she said, Well, no, he lost that privilege when he left me for you. And this isn’t Christian, I said; the Church of the One True God is non-denominational, so they say. That made her snort. What about Jacob? I asked, and she said, Well, I didn’t expect him to turn up. She leant in closer, which put us nose-to-nose, and I could smell her lipstick, and she said, He never liked you, so I would think he’s mourning in his own way. Oh, do try to not be such a bitch, I said, and she made a shocked noise, a little burst of yelp. What did you call me? People tried to turn in the crowd to look, and so I said, louder than I usually speak, Don’t play that card, Estelle, and then she said, totally out of the blue, Did they ever discover why Leonard died? Because, the way I reckon it, it was just before all those other people started dying. Will there be an enquiry, do you think? I turned my back on her and tried as hard as I could to not cry, but all I could hear for the next five minutes was her telling the people around her in the crowd that I stole her husband from her, and now I was here calling her a bitch, and I wasn’t even honouring his memory in the proper Jewish way, and I felt like just shouting out, Well, what does it matter if I don’t follow Jewish rules, there is no Jewish any more! But I didn’t, because I know that would have made the tears come out harder still, and then she would have won.
I didn’t wait to see what the people in the church would have to say for themselves; nothing would have made up for what I lost, I suspect.
Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh
The airport was chocka, unsurprisingly, people desperately waiting for them to put planes back on. That’s always the way with airports, I reckon: they have to let you in in case you’ve got a flight, even when everything’s locked down. Besides, where else were the people going to go? We spent hours there with all those other people, as they coughed and choked their way into the air conditioning. If we weren’t ill before we’re going to catch it now, Katy said, and I said, Maybe we’re immune. Hadn’t thought of it till that point, really, but I texted Mark about it, see what he thought. He texted back with a No clue, and told me that the Jessops were at a church, and he was sulking by the van.
Katy called home again a few times, but there wasn’t anything, and that set her off crying, really, really bad crying. I hugged her and lied to her, all that stuff you’re meant to do, but I was actually jealous; because I’d have loved to have just cried, but I had to be the strong one.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
On the news they started reading a list of hospitals that were shutting across London. There weren’t many, but enough. Karen’s was on the list, and they didn’t give a reason for the closures. They sold it like they were too busy to take other people, but I assumed that it was something else, probably. I assumed but hoped that it wasn’t. I sat by the phone and wished that it wasn’t ringing because it was so busy, but I knew – when I kept picking it up, listening to the dead dial-tone – that it wasn’t the case.
Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City
Seemed like the church was running three or four different sermons, because we ended up listening to a man who wasn’t a priest, just a convert since The Broadcast, dressed like a stereotypical preacher in this bright white suit. The illness we’re all feeling, it’s because God is punishing us, he said, because we didn’t listen to Him enough. That can all change, and should all change! We have a platform to tell Him all about our love, and we should use it. He looked so tired, the man did, and I was tired myself, from the drive, from having to have Joe up on my shoulders so that he could see. His throat was creaking as he spoke. We know that He’s listening, because we heard Him speak; tell Him of your love! The preacher stood down, and a woman ran onto the stage, one of those fat, wealthy types. She held her hands up. Praise the Lord! she shouted, I used to only be concerned with myself, and now I know that there is somebody else there, I intend to change my ways. Now I know that I can be saved, I want to ask you, Lord, to not abandon us. We have so much to learn from you.
The crowd went through getting up, saying something nice or pleading or begging, even, that God come back. There wasn’t very much praying got done, just lots of talk about saving ill ones, or knowing that dead relatives passed on because it was God’s will. Everybody seemed so sickly, like Jennifer was, like I knew I was. Then the preacher pointed to Joe, called him up. Young man, you must have a story, he said, tell us why you’re here. I didn’t want to go, but everybody turned, looked at us. What’s your story, little fella? No, he doesn’t want to speak, I said, and then somebody shouted out, It’s the kid from the television, the one who didn’t hear The Broadcast. The crowd weren’t nasty – I had worried that they would turn on us, chase us out, pitchforks and hollering – but they kept asking us questions. Is he scared? asked the preacher, and I said, No, what should he be scared of? Well, of hell, said the fat woman, because he’s got to be heading that way if the Lord didn’t even see fit to speak to the boy. It’s because you came from that commune, she said, like it was a nudist colony, like we committed grand sins there. It says, in the Bible, about sins. Oh, for God’s sake, I said, and they gasped, as if taking His name in vain suddenly rendered me the Devil itself. Why aren’t you begging forgiveness? they asked Joe, directing the questions at him, but he was such a little kid, how could he answer? He started crying, gasping for air the way that kids do, so Jennifer picked him up. Shame on you, she yelled, and that got Mark’s attention. Come on, he shouted, let’s get out of here.
He drove the next leg and we tried to calm Joe down. He didn’t really understand too much of what happened, but he got enough to think that they hated him. Kids are perceptive, Mark said, and I guess he was probably right. We stopped a few hours later, at an Ihop, hoping to find something to eat, but the place was shut, abandoned, it looked like, even though the lights were all on and the door was open. Mark went in to check the place out, came back and told us that the burners were all on. Somebody was here, he said, and they must have left; we should eat.
M
ark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
I didn’t tell them about the dead guy in the back room; the manager, it looked like. He wasn’t killed or anything. He had just died. His right eye was bloodshot, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. I don’t know anything about disease, sickness, whatever, but my few years on the force – coupled with even more years of sitting on my sofa and watching bad medical dramas – told me that it wasn’t murder. I shut the door to the back office so that Joe didn’t accidentally see the body and went back down, told them to head on in. I can fry a mean egg, I said.
(There was a second, when we were just sitting down to eat, that I thought I heard a noise from the back. It was just the grill cooling down, the way that they do, clicking like a car radiator, but I thought that it was the manager for a second, that it was the beginning of the zombie uprising. When I worked out what it was I started laughing, trying to hide it with mouthfuls of egg. What’s wrong? Joseph asked, and I had to tell him that it was just the situation, that it was everything. You have to laugh, right? I asked, but I don’t think that persuaded him.)
Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago
Still hours – days – after it happened, nobody came. I lay on my cot and watched the ceiling. I didn’t think about The Broadcast; it seemed so long ago already. I slept and dreamt, of my childhood; everything in my life I purged myself of, pushed aside – Janelle, Clarice, our home, my job; and of Allah, calling to me. When I awoke I was alone, still, in the darkness. I opened the cage, as that is what it was, and I made my way to the chamber. Inside the medicine box – marked with the red cross, the sign of health, of safety, of we-will-make-you-well-again – I found a syringe in a black box, sealed. I assumed that this was how they would kill me; how they would send me to my maker, make me pay for what I did. I sat myself in the chair that they would have used, pulled my shirt off, took the leather and strapped it to my arm, tightening it until the veins lurched to the surface of my arm. I took the syringe and looked around at the room that I would die in, knowing that it was to be the end, and I jammed the needle – thick, meant to break bone, it looks like, so that nothing can get in its way as it slides into you, ends you – into my vein, and I pushed the plunger. I had seen videos of people before, films, where they shake and shiver immediately; and they froth at the mouth, and beat at their heads, and scream for mercy. It is the end, and they barely have time to register it. I prepared myself, held the arms of the chair. I saw them: the people that I killed. I had been paid to kill, because I was a bad man, and they were worse. I saw myself, years before, abandoning my classrooms, my profession; leaving Janelle, because she did not understand; pulling on the uniform of the Fruit of Islam, because I had a mission; I saw myself abandoning everything that I ever loved, because the mission was never enough, can never be enough; I saw myself degraded, shallowed, unwhole, begging for work; and then I saw him, with his envelope of bills, and my family begging me to come home, and Allah ashamed of me; and I saw myself here, being logged, being oppressed, shoved, beaten, judged, condemned. I shook, and felt myself slip.
I fell to the floor, gasping; it hit every part of me, and for a second, yes, I felt like I was dying, but I did not. When I caught my breath, I saw that the syringe was adrenalin, always ready in case needed, a casual part of every prison medicine case; and I realized how stupid I had been, thinking that the stuff they would use to end my life – a cocktail, some of the people who went to the chamber before I did used to call it – thinking that they would leave that stuff there, that it wouldn’t be kept under lock and key in a doctor’s office somewhere out of reach. I thought about what else I could do – I was there to end my life, to cease from being what I had become – but even as I looked at the leather straps, the chair, the glass pane of the observation window, I realized that I was meant to die a certain way, in a manner passed upon me by a judgement greater than my own. I could not escape that.
I returned to my cell, pulling myself along the corridor until I reached my cot. I lay there and shut my eyes, but all I could feel was my heart, all I could hear was the beat of my blood around my body, rubbing vein against vein as they struggled to deal with what I had done to myself.
SWEATING IT OUT
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
We didn’t have the faintest clue how bad it actually all was. In retrospect, the government did a better job than I gave them credit for at the time in terms of managing panic, managing expectations of what was happening, or going to happen. I assumed that they wouldn’t even know where to start, when I left – not because I would hold that place together, but because I often displayed glimpses of morality that were painfully absent from many of my peers. So, damage limitation; they weren’t giving out numbers of dead (or dying), they were giving constant reassurances that they were working on the problem, they were even suggesting that things were getting better. The hospitals that had closed were forgotten about in updates suddenly, and the presenters were caked in make-up so that, to the casual observer, you wouldn’t notice that they were red-eyed and just as sickly as you were.
And, somehow, I still wasn’t ill. I wasn’t even sniffling. I walked to the centre of London – which was all I really remember happening those few days, if I’m honest, that walk to and fro, following the river, noticing how there were no boats moving on it, and when they weren’t there it had an almost unsettlingly calm flow to it – and everything felt like it was coming towards an end. There was something in the air that felt like winding down; a taste, I can’t explain it any more than that. If there had been another Broadcast that day I wouldn’t have been surprised. I ended up walking up to Leicester Square from the river, up the Charing Cross road, along Oxford Street, down Regent’s Street. It was the sort of walk I never did; I never went into that part of the city, not before The Broadcast, certainly; that was reserved for tourists, weekends with visiting relatives. It felt like six in the morning on a Sunday, it was so empty, and the shops were all shut. You could actually see the streets themselves, the architecture, the frontages of the buildings. The pavements, even; you never usually noticed pavements, and yet, there they were. I got to actually look up at the buildings, at their lines where they met the sky, see the cornices, the parapets. I stood outside Liberty’s for an hour, maybe, just marvelling at it, at how anybody got away with building a doll’s house in the middle of one of the busiest commercial districts in the world. How did it slip through the cracks? A real man wouldn’t have cried at that, I suppose.
After that I was at a loss, so I headed down to the far end of Oxford Street, to see if this bar that I used to visit was open, or even still there, but it wasn’t, and I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t been there since my twenties, and I have no idea why I thought it might have survived. I saw the boundaries of Hyde Park, went in, and Speaker’s Corner was there, just completely empty, so I took a spot, a nice open spot, and I stood there. There wasn’t anybody else around – I must admit, I expected the crazies to keep their spaces, because this was finally a chance for their theories on aliens and gods and conspiracies by the KGB to be heard – but I was all alone. I started talking anyway, rambling along, because it helped for me to vent, to get everything out. I started talking about why I had quit and that spiralled into other subjects, rambling on and on. It felt good to be talking, at least.
Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East
We’d been inside the room for far too long, fifteen men sweating it out, worrying that they might have something because nobody came back, hungry and thirsty and stinking, because the showers were behind a closed, locked door. We had a buzzer, like a servant’s bell, and it made people come to the window, see what we wanted. Then it just stopped working, stopped calling anybody to us. Some of the boys worried that it meant we were sick, but I told them that was bollocks. We were all fine, none of us were ill. (Course, we didn’t know it then, but it was probably because of the decontamination and the shots and the quarantine t
hat we were actually okay, that we didn’t all kick it.) But they were antsy, and after too much time spent sitting on crappy beds with nothing to do, they were starting to talk about how to escape. Turns out it didn’t take much: the door gave way after just a few kicks from Stevens’ size 13s, and we were out into the labs. The guy who came when we pressed the buzzer was lying on the floor, not quite dead, but shivering, shaking, his sweat like an outline on the black marble floor underneath him. We called for an ambulance for him from the phone on his desk but nobody answered, so one of the boys – trained medic, good lad – said that he’d stay behind until he managed to get the poor guy more help. Don’t know if he ever did or not.
London was deserted, or as close to deserted as a city that big can be. People were there, just not acting like they usually did, and doing everything slower. Seemed like every other house had police tape up, or a poster warning people to stay away. Cars, as well; there were far fewer cars. I went off from the rest of the boys, on my own, because I wanted some time to myself, to see what sort of a mess the place was in. I picked up a copy of The Sun (one of the few newspapers that made it to print, by the looks of it, all ten pages or whatever it was, like a bloody pamphlet), headed into the park, sat and read it cover to cover. There was no sport section, no TV listings, no letters or ‘Dear Deirdre’, no horoscope, no tits on Page 3; it was just telling us all what we already knew. The editor was having a giraffe, asking the UK to start ignoring all quarantines, returning to our daily lives: He will come back for us, was the quote, and when He does we will be ready for Him, with a country that has picked itself up and dusted itself off. I heard this guy shouting then, over at Speaker’s Corner. He was the only one there, so I went over, sat opposite him, listened as he spoke about how we were losing our sense of ourselves just because we thought that God might be real. Aren’t we? he asked me, and I said, I don’t know, mate. You work in a hospital? I’d forgotten about the whites, so I told him no, told him that I was a soldier. You were in Iran? Yeah, I said, and he came down from the rock he’d been standing on, sat next to me. Aren’t you angry, if there is a God, that He let you go out there? He didn’t let us do anything, I told him, the PM ordered us to go, we went. Did you lose any friends? Yeah, I said, another unit was closer to the blasts. And you aren’t angry, that He let that happen? If He is real? I didn’t know what to say, so I did what I learnt from years of being a soldier: I kept schtum.
