There were some genuine survivors too. People who, like Gloria, Keith, Helen, Dave and Sebastian, had been completely unaffected. They didn’t know why. Some guessed that they had a natural resistance to the plague. Sebastian thought it was because they had all been indoors on the night of the Great Snow. But why that had saved them, he couldn’t say.
And then there were the very few who had neither escaped the disease nor fully succumbed to it. Gloria’s brother Ben, Helen’s fiancé Donald and Sebastian’s friend Freddie were among these. They had fallen sick but they had, to some extent, recovered. They had not lost all rationality like the bands of ravaging red-eyes. Once they had fought off the most debilitating effects of the contagion, both Ben and Freddie emerged as rather childlike in personality. They were good humoured and communicative but they could remember their former lives only imperfectly and they were incapable of complex thought.
Gloria’s fiancé Donald had fared rather better. He had been weak for quite a while but his mind remained relatively unchanged. They didn’t know it at the time, but that placed Donald in a very tiny minority, a minority in which powerful forces had a great interest. But even though his mind was intact, Donald, in common with Ben and Freddie, exhibited the characteristic red-looking eyes. And that was to be his downfall.
*
Just over three weeks after the Great Snow, the Army arrived in town. Those few sane survivors among the local population, welcomed their arrival. We’re saved at last, they thought. When the Army started clearing the streets of the dead, it seemed as though the small seaside town might be on the brink of emerging from the great calamity that had struck it. When the Army imposed a curfew, most people thought it was for the best. When the Army began shooting the red-eyes, many people thought it was about time too. Though some people, whose children, husbands, wives or lovers were among those roving bands of the infected and insane, were not so joyful. Because they had held onto a vague, vain hope that one day, by some miracle, be it from God or from Science, their loved ones would be returned to them whole, intact in mind and body, cured and restored. But those who had no loved ones among the red-eyes had no sympathy for those who did. The red-eyes were, after all, no better than animals. They were thieves, brutes, rapists, killers. Death is all they deserved.
A week or so after the Army came, Helen’s fiancé Donald went down to the beach. He needed light and air after so many weeks of being copped up in a tiny, stuffy room. The town was safe now, so they said. The red-eyes were no longer a threat. The decaying bodies no longer littered the streets. The beach looked as it always had. The surge of the surf sounded the same, Donald’s shoes sank into the wet sand just as they always had done. The sun was shining, the salty wind was cool and brisk. Donald felt that the worst was behind him. The best was yet to come.
On his way back from the beach, he met a soldier. The lad only looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. It was Donald’s bad luck that the soldier was young, inexperienced and nervous. Donald waved at him, said, “Nice day,” and the soldier shot him. He shot him in the head and he shot him in the heart. Donald was dead before his body hit the sand.
If it had been an older, more experienced, calmer soldier, things might have turned out differently. The soldiers had been specifically instructed to report sightings of anyone who had recovered from the sickness. There was some project that the high-ups were doing that specifically needed those people. Far from being treated as enemy combatants, they would be treated very specially indeed. But the young soldier had forgotten all about that. All he saw was a red-eye just yards away from him. As far as the young soldier was concerned, red-eyes were the enemy. So he shot him. He shot him very efficiently. He had spent long hours at target practice and prided himself on time well-spent.
A week later, some soldiers came for Gloria’s brother Ben. Ben wasn’t really quite as special as Donald because although he had recovered, his was an imperfect recovery. His mind was not what it had been. Even so, the soldiers took him. And then one day, they came to Freddie’s flat and they took Sebastian.
And then there were five.
Freedom
Cambridge: April
Outsiders
King’s College Chapel loomed, in all its Gothic splendour, ahead of three ill-assorted visitors and a dog. Two of the three might have gone largely unnoticed among the other people strolling in the late morning sunshine along the King’s Parade. The third, however, was not the sort of person to merge into the crowd. Clad in an ankle-length buffalo-skin coat, with long black hair hanging beneath a broad-brimmed black hat, Leila would have attracted attention even if the irises of her red-rimmed eyes had not been of such an incandescent silvery colour. “I don’t trust them,” she said.
“Who?” said Jonathan.
“Them.”
“Who’s them?” asked Geoff.
“How can I make myself any clearer, my petals?” said Leila haughtily, “Them!”
“Ah…”
Jonathan and Geoff had known Leila for a couple of months but they still hadn’t truly begun to understand her. Jonathan had fled his village in the Cornwall when the Great Thaw followed the Great Snow. Geoff, who had been shot in the arm in mysterious circumstances, had tagged along. They had ended up taking refuge inside a Land Rover in the depths of a remote forest when Leila had suddenly turned up and, having turned up, showed no inclination to go away again.
“The thing I fail to understand is how Cambridge continues to function when everywhere else has long ago given up the ghost. And bollocks to you too!”
Leila’s concluding exclamation was aimed at a passing cyclist who had been forced to swerve when Leila, having suddenly decided to cross the road without bothering to check for oncoming traffic, very nearly bumped into him.
“Nice church,” said Geoff.
“It’s a chapel, darling,” corrected Leila, “King’s College Chapel, a world-renowned architectural monstrosity best known for its tedious Christmas carol services and its hideous turrets.”
An elderly, white-haired man whisked past them in a silken flurry of crimson-edged academic gown. He nearly bumped into two soldiers, both of whom were holding semi-automatic shotguns in a way that looked as though they would be prepared to fire them at a moment’s notice just for the fun of it.
“Where d’you think you’re going, granddad?” said one of the soldiers, gruffly.
“If you’d attended my lectures on existentialism, you wouldn’t need to ask that question,” snapped the old gentleman.
“I wonder if it really does?” said Jonathan?
“What?” said Leila.
“Continue to function.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“You said that you couldn’t understand how Cambridge continues to function while everywhere else has given up the ghost?”
“I said that?”
“You did. But how can we be sure that it really is functioning?”
“The light comes on in my room when I flick the switch. Hot water runs into the bath when I turn on the tap. There are students. Going to lectures. People on bicycles. That’s more than we’ve seen anywhere else in absolutely ages.”
“I’d agree that it all gives the appearance of normality. But that might be an illusion.”
“Might it?”
“Well, I mean, take the soldiers on the streets, for one thing. That can’t be normal, can it?”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, my dear.”
“But worse than that, why are there no red-eyes?”
“But, darling,” said Leila, “Look around you – there are thousands of us.”
It was true. The majority of the undergraduates and even a few of the younger dons displayed that characteristic redness of the eyelids and sclera. But that’s all. In all other respects they seemed to be free of the more violent and debilitating effects of the sickness. They didn’t stagger as though drunk; indeed they had such complete control over the coordi
nation of their limbs that they could not only walk normally, they could even ride bicycles. And as for the other typical symptoms – the lack of inhibition, incoherence, dementia, the sudden bouts of uncontrollable rage and violence – of these there was no sign.
“Yes,” agreed Jonathan, “There are thousands. But they are all like you. They have the superficial symptoms, but nothing more.”
Leila laughed. “I think you are jealous. For once, I fit in and you are the outsider.”
“What about me?” said Geoff, “I never had any symptoms at all.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, chaps, stop being so maudlin. The sun’s shining, the birds are twittering and I am determined to do the full tourist thing. Come on, let’s go into this ghastly edifice and coo at the stained glass windows and dead saints. I suppose they have a few dead saints, haven’t they?”
Botch, Scab and Emerods
“Listen, oh, you fools. For the Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew. And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.”
“All right now, sir, you’ve ’ad your say. If you can just be moving along now…”
Pipply the Porter was doing his best to be reasonable with the Pardoner. But his best wasn’t good enough. The old man stood before the gates of St Dunstan’s College, dressed in a long and ragged Inverness Cape draped over a shabby pinstripe suit, his frizzy, yellowish hair so disordered that it looked as though he might be attached to a portable Van Der Graaf Generator discreetly concealed about his person, his right arm clutching a long wooden staff which he shook in the air to emphasise the spiritual terror of his words – “The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust. From heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies. Thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.”
“Yes, yes, sir. I’m sure I shall. But you ’ave to understand that we ’ave to keep the college gates clear. So if you’ll just be…”
The Pardoner’s staff swung through the air with a dramatic whoosh, striking Mr Pipply soundly upon the head. This would have done Mr Pipply’s head a good deal of damage were it not for the bowler hat which Mr Pipply, in common with the two generations of Pipply porters who had preceded him, wore at all times when on duty. The staff knocked the hat from Mr Pipply’s head and sent it crashing against the wall of the porter’s lodge. With casual aplomb, Mr Pipply strode across to the lodge, retrieved the hat from where it lay in the dust and grime at the foot of the wall, brushed it carefully with the sleeve of his jacket and placed it back upon his head. The bowler had been severely dented by the blow of the wooden staff. It was, indeed, a bowler no longer fit for a Pipply porter to wear. This riled Mr Pipply to his very core.
Turning to the three undergraduates standing behind him, he whispered in as calm as voice as he could muster, “Right, lads, he’s all yours. Nobody can say I didn’t give him fair warning.”
Terrence Farquhar, Angus Whitley-Stanton and Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle advanced towards Perkins The Pardoner, determined that the nutty old man should be apprised of the fact that bonking the bowler off the head of Pipply the Porter was a crime for which he would have to pay. Moreover, in accordance with the Master’s wishes, they would also see to it that Perkins The Pardoner was sent scurrying away from the environs of St. Dunstan’s to seek out other, lesser colleges, such as St. John’s, perhaps, or Magdalen, upon which to cast his baleful shadow.
Terrence, being the biggest and strongest of the three (he was a college rugby full-back and rowed for the university) strode towards the Pardoner menacingly and was about to say, “Clear off before I rip your bloody head off,” when he was stopped in his tracks by the Pardoner cursing him.
“Oh, thou foul abomination,” whined the Pardoner, “Know thou that thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away. The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.”
Terrence Farquhar, all 6 foot 2 inches and 15 stones of solid muscle, gaped silently. A medical student, his skills in Biblical exegesis were somewhere between rudimentary and non-existent. He neither knew which part of the Bible the Pardoner was quoting, nor for sure if he was quoting the Bible at all. For all Terrence Farquhar knew, he might have been quoting from the works of the venerable Stephen King or the great Biblical scholar, J K Rowling. Terrence Farquhar didn’t read much, apart from medical texts and occasional pornography, so he was somewhat at a loss to know how to respond to the Pardoner.
After a long pause, he eventually said, “Did you just curse me?”
“I did,” said the Pardoner.
“Oh, shit,” said Terrence Farquhar.
“Despair not, my son,” said the Pardoner, “A curse may be removed, a sin may be pardoned.” He opened his Inverness Cape to reveal numerous little pockets sewn into the lining. Each pocket contained a different item. There were potions, there were scrolls, there was a crucifix and there was a dried mouse.
“I recommend,” said the Pardoner, taking hold of a small empty bottle, “this plenary indulgence. It is the dying breath of Saint Walter of Pontoise.”
“And who, may I ask, was Saint Walter of Pontoise?” said Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle, who had, all this while, been leaning up against the wall of the Porter’s Lodge juggling three snooker balls.
The Pardoner gave her a stare of the gimlet variety. It was a stare that had caused grown men to quake. It had no effect of any description upon Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle who had been given the old gimlet workover by far better starers than Perkins The Pardoner.
“Let me be clear,” went on Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle, “If you do not depart hence within the next ten seconds, I fully intend to put to the test Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion with the help of one or more of these snooker balls and your loathsome head. By which I mean, let there be no doubt in the matter that I shall bounce these extremely hard projectiles off the top of your scruffy noddle. Do I make myself clear?”
“The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head,” said the Pardoner.
“Yes, yes, I know, and the emerods, and scab. Now just a minute while I take aim with this snooker ball…”
But the Pardoner was already off, proceeding with surprising speed for a man of his age in the general direction of Peterhouse.
As they dawdled back towards the college bar, Terrence Farquhar asked, “What are emerods anyway?”
“Oh, come on!” said Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle, “You are a medical student after all. Should I ever suffer from them, I trust you’d know which end of me to examine.”
“Oh! You mean… Oh! Good grief! Does the Lord really smite people with piles? I had no idea.”
Tea and Geometry
After gawking at the interior of King’s College Chapel for a while, Leila, Jonathan and Geoff went to a little tea shop just off the King’s Parade and had a pot of broken orange pekoe accompanied by a plate of freshly-made scones with strawberry jam and cream.
“Why are we even here?” said Leila, “I mean, it’s all very nice and all that, to be able to do the tourist thing when the rest of the country is filled with nothing but corpses and roaming bands of brain-dead psychopaths. But even so, why are we here?”
“Eat your scone and stop complaining,” said Geoff, “This is about as good as it gets. We got our own rooms,
hot and cold running water, food, booze…”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Leila persisted, “We come here because someone in some village somewhere who may or may not be a colonel tells us to come here. Then we meet a tramp called Darius Smith in a deserted motorway service station and he specifically tells us not to come here but when we come here anyway, he hitches a lift and it turns out he is a professor of the history of art. And what’s more he is a great chum of this chap who may or may not be a colonel. And, anyway, why is everyone so goddamn’ cheerful here? Look around you. People drinking tea and eating scones…”
“As are we,” Jonathan interjected.
“As, indeed, are we. Doesn’t that strike you, in the circumstances, as absolutely bloody nuts? Because, my dear chaps, that is exactly how it strikes me.”
“Didn’t he say the Prime Minister was here?” Geoff said, dolloping a blob of jam onto the cream on his scone.
“Philistine!” exclaimed Leila, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the jam goes on before the cream? However, be that as it may, you are indeed correct that the Colonel did claim that not only the Prime Minister but also what is left of the Government have relocated to Cambridge. But one has to say that if they really are here they are keeping a very low profile.”
Just then a waitress came up holding a piece of paper.
“Ah, the bill,” said Leila, “What does it come to, exactly?”
The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned Page 5
