Infected
The Beginning
Perry Stevenson
Copyright © 2017 by Perry Stevenson.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901170
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5245-9741-2
Softcover 978-1-5245-9740-5
eBook 978-1-5245-9739-9
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
Rev. date: 04/17/2017
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Contents
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Day Eight
Day Nine
Day Ten
Day Eleven
Day Twelve
Day Thirteen
Day Fourteen
Day Fifteen
Day Sixteen
Day One
Monday 12 May 2014
I awoke at 11.00 am. What a beautiful day – last day of work! Pity I was due to start at 3.00 pm, but then I had three days off – hooray! This taxi driving work was starting to get to me, working 12-hour shifts for not a lot of money, but that’s what happened when you approached retirement age. I used to be an accountant and implementing computer systems, but at 64 technology had now overtaken me. It was definitely a younger man’s game. I was just lying in bed reflecting on what to do that day before I had to leave for work at 2.00 pm, when a distant voice shook me from my dreamy state.
“James, are you getting up? I’ve made you a cup of tea.”
“OK, Mary, I’m working on it,” I replied. Well, that must be a first – the wife had not made tea in months. Mary must have wanted me to do something.
Five minutes later, “Hurry up or your tea will be getting cold”. Why was it that wives never liked you to relax?
“And you can cut the grass before you go to work,” Mary continued.
I knew there would be a catch. I dressed myself and staggered down the stairs, still not fully awake. After sitting down in the kitchen, I started to drink my tea.
Sheba, our black Labrador, gave me a nudge for a stroke, which I dutifully did.
“You have a letter from the police – what have you done?” Mary asked.
“Have I? Let me look,” I replied.
It was from the firearms division. I had applied for a licence ten weeks earlier, for a .22LR. Yes! – they had granted me a licence; what a mission that had been. It took three months before I could join a small-bore rifle club in Chelmsford. You had to be a member of a club for six month, attending on a regular basis, before you could even apply for a licence and you had to have proper storage, such as a gun cabinet. Because it was for target shooting, you could only use solid pointed ammo and you had to declare the maximum number of rounds you would be storing on your property at any one time. I went for the .22LR because that was the only calibre semi-automatic rifle you could get legally in the UK. You could not get a pistol full stop, unless it was over 20 inches long.
“I’ve finally got the firearms certificate,” I said.
The wife responded with a question: “Is this going to cost us money?”
“Yes,” I replied, thinking, I have three days off – this is going to be so good, and what type of .22LR semi-auto to buy. I had owned a shotgun certificate for nearly 50 years but never a firearms certificate.
Anyway, I cut the grass and managed to watch the news before the wife turned over to watch the tennis. Mary did love her tennis – her favourite was Federer.
I got myself ready for work, and collected the mobile phone and satnav. No sandwiches today, I thought – I’ll treat myself to a Big Mac. The Nissan Micra started up OK; it didn’t like the damp weather but now we were well into spring it started fine.
It was about a 35-minute drive to Stansted Airport from Boreham, which involved going along a few country lanes – you just had to avoid the occasional pheasant and rabbit. Arriving in our car park in Stansted Business Park just before 3.00 pm, I had just got out of the car and saw Roger, another driver, walking across the car park towards the main entrance of our building. He waited for me by the double doors.
“Last night tonight,” I said, making small talk.
“Yes, thank God for that,” Roger replied.
“Do you know if there are any good jobs for tonight?” I asked. Roger always seemed to be in the know, although the controllers were told by the main man not to tell drivers about upcoming jobs, especially the longer runs.
“Yes, there’s one to Gatwick and another into London.”
“Well, I hope I get the Gatwick one,” I replied. Driving to a hotel in London could be a real pain, plus I would have to use the satnav. I had been driving taxis for 18 months and had never been to the same hotel in London twice.
We arrived in the controller’s office to be greeted by Max, another driver, who was just finishing his shift.
“Did you have a good day?” I asked.
“No,” he said in a rather disgruntled voice. Starting at 3.00 am on a Monday was not a good time for business.
Laura appeared at the small opening in the partition that separated the controller’s office from the drivers’ room. Laura was 20-something, with all the bits in the right places. Very nice.
“Hello Laura, are we going to have a good night or a bad one?” I asked, fishing for information.
“Something may turn up,” she replied. Sounds like something is booked in then, I thought.
Roger and I collected the car keys. He got the eight-seater Mercedes Vito and I was put in the Ford Mondeo. We used the Mercedes for airline crew, so it looked as though he had the Gatwick job – damn! We walked along the corridor and out through the front doors together.
“I’ll see you at the watering hole,” I said, meaning the car park at the back of the Hilton at Stansted.
We had to check our vehicles over first to make sure there were no dents or scratches, and that the indicators and lights were functioning correctly. We then logged into the PDA system to show we were available for work, which would be displayed on the controller’s computer in the office.
Roger left first and I followed. It was less than a mile from Stansted Business Park to the hotel, which we covered in under five minutes. We pulled up in the car park next to each other at the back of the Hilton to wait for a job to come in. The car park backed on to a small wooded area, where two rabbits were feeding at the edge; three magpies were walking around the car park looking for scraps and two others were sitting on the roof of the three-storey hotel.
“How are your children?” I asked Roger.
“They’re fine, but my oldest still hasn’t found a job.”
“That’s not surprising. Work is very difficult to come by, especially for the young these days.”
Roger’s PDA sounded off – he had a job. That was quick; sometimes you had to wait hours before a job came in, especially at 3.30 in the afternoon.
“Anything good?” I asked.
“Pick up at the Travelodge in Great Dunmow and back to the airport terminal.”
“OK, I’ll see you later,” I said. With that, he pulled away.
I turned my radio on and started to listen to some music, looking across the car park towards the end of the runway about a quarter of a mile away. The usual planes were taking off – EasyJet, Ryanair and the occasional Fedex cargo plane.
Roger came back about 4.00 pm, and just as he pulled up next to me my PDA went off. From the Hilton to the terminal. I indicated to Roger that I was off, and drove round the car park to the front of the hotel. There were two people waiting at the entrance, looking a bit agitated and with a whole pile of luggage. I pulled up opposite.
“Mr and Mrs Jones to go to the airport terminal?”
“Yes.”
I got out of the car, opened the boot and proceeded to try to fit all their luggage in – with great difficulty. The Joneses sat on the back seat, and with luggage finally loaded we were on our way.
“We just missed the hotel bus and our flight leaves in just over an hour,” said Mr Jones in a very strong Welsh accent.
“If there are no holdups we should be there in five minutes,” I said.
I went the back way to the terminal, by way of Long Border Road, which ran parallel to the A120. It also passed very close to the end of the runway, and just as we were passing a Fedex Boeing 747 flew overhead. It seemed to be going so slowly that you wanted to try to give it push, but the noise was deafening, and I turned to Mr and Mrs Jones and said, “I bet that rattled your teeth”.
“Is that thing actually going to get into the air?” said Mr Jones.
“They usually do, but it seems to take them a long time before they gain any height,” I said.
We continued on our way past Endeavour House, a large office block near the airport, coming out at the main terminal roundabout. Fortunately, there were no holdups as we approached the drop-off point.
“I don’t believe it!” exclaimed Mr Jones. “They’re charging two pounds for dropping off passengers now, it used to be free.” He had noticed the sign as we turned into the drop-off area.
“Yes, they started charging this year, but I have a special discount card so it only costs us taxi drivers fifty pence,” I replied.
We managed to find a slot to pull into. I turned to Mr Jones and said, “That would be eight pounds, please.”
“OK, keep the change,” he said, handing me a £10 note.
“Thank you very much,” I replied, jumping out of the car and starting to extract their luggage from the boot. We said our goodbyes and I proceeded out of the drop-off area. I fed the discount card into the payment machine so I only had to pay 50p, and then headed back to the hotel, where I found Roger still waiting for his next job.
The day continued with small jobs for each of us around the hotels and the airport terminal until around 7.00 pm, with long waits in between. Then Roger got his Gatwick job from Enterprise House, where the airline crews were picked up, to take them to Concorde House, which did not even have a postcode and was approached the long way round from the North and South terminals – well by road, anyway – due to the many security barriers.
I received a few more jobs from the Hilton and the Holiday Inn Express into Bishop’s Stortford, people just wanting to go out for the evening rather than being stuck in a hotel.
By 9.30 pm things were getting very quiet, as they often did at that time of day; everybody had got to wherever they wanted to be. We very rarely picked up passengers from Bishop’s Stortford as there were plenty of other taxi firms in the town, plus our controllers tried to avoid drunks. So I turned on the radio to listen to the BBC news. The usual stories came up – in Iraq the fighting against IS was still going on, but the Iraqi government forces seemed to be losing; the Syrian war was still in progress and seemed to be getting worse; and the British government was still talking about immigration but never seeming to do much about it because its hands were tied, due to the prevailing EU regulations. There were some reports of disturbances in London around Marble Arch and the Oxford Street area – probably a load of drunks, and the theatres finished at about 10.00 to 11.00 pm, which would add to the chaos.
Finally, my PDA went off, just when I was thinking of getting something to eat and drink. These things did happen to me. It was from the Inflite Jet Centre, for executive jets, to a hotel in London. The passenger would supply the details. The Inflite Jet Centre was at the opposite side of the airport to the main terminal, in Stansted Business Park. Within minutes I was at the security gates outside Inflite. The guard opened the hatch in the small security cabin as I approached.
“Hi Jack,” I said.
Jack was a very tall, well-built man who always gave me the impression of being a nightclub bouncer.
“Hi James, are you busy today?”
We knew each other quite well as I had taken passengers from Inflite to various locations before.
“We’re not exactly overworked at the moment, but I’ve got a passenger to take to a hotel in London,” I said.
“I’ll just check that,” said Jack, picking up his phone. He spoke to someone for a few seconds, although I couldn’t hear what was said. Then he continued, “OK, James, that’s fine. Pull up at our new main entrance.”
The security gates opened. A new executive lounge had just been added, with TVs and rather posh lounge suites, furniture and Wi-Fi connections; it must have cost a fortune. They did get a few celebrities passing through. I had seen Victoria Beckham (Posh) with two of her children, and I once picked up Muhammad Ali from there to take him and his family to a hotel in London just before the Olympics in 2012. Most times we picked up aircrew and took them to a local hotel. This time, the passenger had not given an exact location to our office, so it could be a celebrity of some sort. I pulled up at the entrance, walked into the lounge and approached the reception desk.
A very nice young lady sat behind a counter with a computer and telephone in front of her and a large screen hung on the wall behind her which seemed to be displaying the weather, with the sound turned off.
“Can I help you?” she asked in a posh English accent. She was very conservatively dressed, which seemed to match the accent.
“Yes, you can. I’ve come to take a passenger to a hotel in London,” I replied.
“They are just clearing customs, and should be out in five or ten minutes,” she said. If this had been the normal terminal for normal people, this process would probably take at least an hour.
“Can you point me in the direction of the toilet?” I asked
“It’s just around the corner to the left,” she replied.
“Thank you,” I said, noticing at that moment a very large sign stating Toilets this way.
I had at least an hour’s drive ahead of me, longer if the traffic was bad. There was nothing worse than being stuck in a traffic jam, dying for a pee. So I did what I had to do and then walked back to the car. This was a good time to have a smoke, so I rolled a cigarette, walked round the car park until I had finished it, and then got back into the car. I knew it was against the law to smoke in the taxi.
After about five minutes, through the windows I saw my passenger walking through the executive lounge, followed by a porter pulling two suitcases. I extracted myself from the car, which was becoming very comfortable, and opened the boot ready for the luggage.
The porter came up to me and said, “Taxi to go to London?”
“Yes,” I said, and he put both suitcases in the boot. I shut the lid and walked round the side of the car ready to open the door.
“Hello, would you like to sit in the front or the back?” I asked the passeng
er.
“Hello, I will sit in the back, please,” he replied in slightly broken English. He was from somewhere in Asia, although I could never tell if people were Chinese or Japanese, or from any other country in that part of the world.
He looked vaguely familiar. I opened the back door and he got in. Shutting the door, I walked round and climbed into the driver’s seat, then turned to the passenger and asked “Which hotel are we going to?”
He consulted a mobile phone and said, “This is where we are going,” leaning forward and pushing the phone towards me. I could see it was the Hilton London Metropole on Edgware Road. I fed the information into the satnav and had a quick look at the route it planned to take us. I saved the information and turned the satnav off.
“Do you know where it is?” he asked.
“I know roughly where it is, but I’ll use the satnav when we start getting close,” I replied.
As soon as he had leaned forward and started to speak, I knew who it was – a world-renowned actor and director from Hong Kong famous for his action movies. Well, that didn’t happen to me every day! I would tell the girls back in the office later; that would make them feel a bit envious.
Finally, we were on our way. As we approached the security gate, I waved at Jack and he signalled back, the gates opened, and I turned left onto the one-way system past our offices and round to the M11. I quickly built up speed to 75 mph – according the speedometer, anyway. Within 15 minutes we were approaching the M25, where I turned right, heading for the A1. By now it was nearly 11.00 pm and the traffic was very light. I had found with this particular brand of satnav that it was best to plan the main route and only use the device when getting close to the destination. If not, it could take you on some really strange routes, such as through the middle of London rather than around it.
“How long will it be before we arrive?” he asked.
“We should be there or very close in about fifteen minutes,” I replied.
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