“It’s all gone. It’s an empty world. We’re what’s left.” Dave adopted a cornball lisping accent. “In the wake of a global apocklelixsh, they were mankind’sh laaaaasht and bessssht hope.”
She was expected to chuckle at that. She didn’t.
“Maybe you should start thinking about that,” he continued. “That we’ve got to make this work. Or we’re, you know, totally screwed.”
“It works already. We have food and power and water.”
“Work, as in, for the rest of our lives. We may have to be the ones that rebuild civilization. That’s a huge responsibility for us.”
He said “us” but she knew he meant “me.” And he wasn’t doing that cornball voice now. He was quite serious.
“For Ron,” she corrected.
He nodded. “The old boy’s got a ton to cope with. And I’m there to help him until—”
“You take over.”
A smile flickered on his lips, which he quickly molded into a wince.
Nice save.
“I’m going to be his deputy manager for as long as he’s around. Then, you know, I guess at some point I’ll have to step in and—”
“Finally get your promotion to spa manager, huh?”
His expression hardened. “There are nearly forty people here now. In the future, we’re gonna grow, and somebody’s got to keep things orderly.”
“We’re gonna grow? Make babies, you mean?”
He spread his hands innocently. “That’s how populations grow, last time I heard.”
She got it. Got his angle.
“This isn’t actually an apology, is it?”
“Yeah,” he replied defensively. “I just said sorry, didn’t I?”
“I may sound slightly stoned sometimes. My stupid lips get in the way, but that doesn’t mean I’m a fool. If this is your clumsy attempt to hit on me, Dave, nice try, but I’m not interested.”
He shook his head.
“So what’s the matter? Did Claire turn you down again?”
He got up, the wicker seat creaking. “You think you’re really”—he struggled to find a good word—“sharp and funny, don’t you!”
She shrugged. “Well…at least I’m not a total idiot. I’m hoping.”
“Just so you know,” he snorted, “I wouldn’t touch you with a bloody barge pole. I don’t do charity work.” He paced away into the faux-jungle inside the glass building, past the zero-maintenance plastic palm trees and ferns.
“Nice. Thank you so much for that,” she said quietly.
• • •
Ron Carnegie was waiting at nine o’ clock sharp, by the spa reception desk. The others, drafted into the foraging party, were already assembled there: Big Phil and Iain nervously swapping wisecracks, covering their edginess with bravado, and Claire, makeup slapped on thickly like a protective second skin. They’d already made a start at outfitting themselves for the trip, pulling on several layers of sweatpants, then strapping plastic knee braces and shin guards over the top.
“You’re going to stay in the car, Freya, all right?”
She looked at Ron. “Of course.” She shrugged. “I volunteered to drive, not to bug squash.”
The two young men grinned at that. “We’re the SAS,” said Big Phil. “Snark Annihilation Squad.”
“Don’t mess about, lads,” said Ron. “You’re not heading out to find the snarks—you’re on an errand. We need to fill up on things. Here’s the shopping list.”
“I need…some things.” Claire shot a glance at Freya. Freya nodded.
Me too.
Ron handed Claire the community shopping list. “We need everything that’s on here and anything else you can think of.” He turned to the two young men. “And please, lads, no risks. All right? This is not some PlayStation zombie game. If there’re too many of them out there, we’ll try again later.”
“Relax, Mr. Carnegie,” said Big Phil, picking up a cricket bat. “We’ll be careful.” He looked at Freya. “And you’re sure you’re OK to drive today?”
“As we can all see, I’m no super athlete.” She narrowed her eyes. “But I’m not an invalid either.”
Not yet.
Phil grinned at that. Away from his “pack leader,” Dave Lester, he was slightly less obnoxious.
“Now just be careful. Like I say, if there are too many out and about today, then just come back. We can try this again tomorrow.”
“We’ll be OK, Mr. Carnegie.”
“Good. Well, then…I suppose we should get the show on the road.”
He walked them to the revolving glass door at the front that led outside to the parking lot: a clearing cut out of the woods, with individual parking spots marked out with log dividers. There were only a dozen cars in it. Three of them belonged to staff members who’d been here when it all began. The others belonged to the park and had the park’s swervy, green logo—halfway between a Nike swoosh and a feather—stenciled down the side. It was supposed to be a leaf, symbolizing all things natural and the exclusive hidden forest location.
He handed Freya the keys to the hybrid Land Rover. “Drive carefully, Freya. I’ll see all of you back here in an hour.”
Chapter 34
“I’m telling you, the plague was brewed up by the…uh…Al-Talibarnies,” said Iain.
Freya mentally rolled her eyes, then looked in the rearview mirror at him and scoffed at that. “Yeah, right, those Taliban and their big-ass, top-secret bioweapon research facility in Kandahar.”
“Well, come on, it was made by someone,” he argued with a shrug. “A weapon designed to leave buildings and objects and machinery intact? Seriously…it’s the perfect antipersonnel weapon. And, you know, they were losing their jee-had thing, right?”
Freya hadn’t really kept her eye on the news very much before the plague came. The occasional headline managed to penetrate her inward-looking cloud of doom. For the last year she’d become preoccupied with considering her future, which was going to be a walking stick, crutches, then a wheelchair, then one day, choking to death on a cracker because her throat had decided to spasm. Her future was going to be ever-increasing doses of painkillers and muscle relaxants. So her mind hadn’t really been that much on the news.
But even she knew enough to know how little Iain knew. “The Taliban and Al Qaeda are two very different organizations, Iain. They’re not one thing called Al-Talibarn.”
“Yeah, well…”
“And the war in Syria and Iraq was being fought by guys called ISIS.”
“Yeah…that’s them. That’s who I meant.”
She shook her head and looked at him in the mirror. “Moron.”
“Makes sense though… They were losing it, so they decided to invent something that was going to take out everyone on the planet.” Iain shrugged again. “It’s not like they had any worries about dying alongside us, right?”
“’S right,” added Big Phil.
“Well, screw ’em,” said Iain. “They’re all plague slime and we’re alive. Survival of the fittest.”
“You guys really get off on all this survival shit, don’t you?” said Freya.
Iain shook his head. “No…I’m just as torn up as everyone else, but it is what it is. This is about survival of the fittest.”
“We could be the last humans left alive in the world,” added Claire.
A woodland health spa populated by thick-headed personal-fitness instructors, beauticians, a shuffling MS sufferer, and a mixed bag of waifs and strays. Freya mentally shook her head. If they really were the last humans left on Earth, she didn’t hold out much hope for the future of mankind.
“Although there could be others who survived,” said Claire hopefully.
For once, Freya agreed with her. “There must be. We can’t be the only ones who’ve figured out how to stay immune.
” She wanted to add that back at Emerald Parks it wasn’t exactly wall-to-wall geniuses and rocket scientists. If they’d managed to figure out how to beat the virus, somebody else must have done so.
She slowed down for the junction leading to the A11 but didn’t bother stopping and checking for cars. One of the benefits of postapocalyptic driving was there were no other cars to worry about.
“I wish I’d learned to drive,” said Claire. “I was just too busy doing my vocational tests and the beauty-therapy course up in Manchester.”
“My parents made me cram for the tests,” said Freya. “It worked though. Passed first time.”
Maybe that was one of the other reasons she’d enjoyed her brief honeymoon period of popularity, being the first student in her class to have a car and a valid license.
What was it that jealous cow, Tanisha, had quipped? Oh, yeah.
Soon you’ll be the first one driving a wheelchair, eh, Freya?
What a lovely world she used to live in. Maybe those two idiots Iain and Phil were right to be treating this culled world like their own version of The Walking Dead. One big survival game now to them. “Freya! Up ahead. See?”
She nodded. On the side of the road was a swarm of the smaller snarks, ones the size of hermit crabs. They were beginning to shuffle across the road, like migrating baby turtles scrambling across a beach toward the safety of a tropical sea. Freya stepped on the accelerator and squished over them, Iain whooping with delight and craning his neck to look out of the rear window.
“Nice one!”
“Yeah!”
Freya rolled her eyes as she watched them in the mirror, both lads twisted around and grinning at the glistening, smeared tracks behind them.
“Shit, check out the snail trail!”
“Snark juice!”
“The pair of you are totally gross!” Claire chuckled. “How many d’you think we just splattered?”
Freya inwardly sighed as the three of them made their own guesses.
She caught sight of someone sitting in the middle of the road right at the last moment. She’d thought it was just another victim. Not every pile of bones they’d come across had been lying flat. Others had been drooped in seated positions. She’d even once come across one slumped across the counter in a pub, kept on his feet because he’d been wedged between two beer pumps.
She slammed her foot down on the brake, and the Land Rover swerved to a sluggish halt, lubricated by the last of the snark gunk still on its tires.
“What did you do that for?” shouted Iain in the backseat as he rubbed at his forehead. “Just banged my ’ead!”
“Umm, look?” She pointed through the windshield.
“OhmyGod!” Claire pulled herself forward to see better.
“There is someone else!”
Freya unclipped her seat belt and reached for the door handle. She felt Claire’s hand on her shoulder. “What if he’s infected? What if he’s not immune, like we are?”
“Claire, if he’s still alive after all this time…then he’s figured it out too.”
Freya opened the door and pulled herself clumsily out of the car. She looked back the way they’d come. There was no sign of any snarks. She walked to the front of the Land Rover and saw the person she had almost run over.
“Hello? Are you OK?”
He nodded. She couldn’t figure out how old he was. A boy? A teen? Adult? He looked gaunt, shockingly pale. His dark hair was matted and unruly, his cheeks mottled with scratches. But not sick. Not with the virus. There was no doubt about that. No one ever got sick from it and recovered.
You were either immune or you weren’t. Just like his mom used to say: There’s no such thing as a little bit pregnant.
He was sitting on a backpack. Like a country hiker taking a break for sandwiches and tea from a thermos. Only he didn’t have either of those things—in fact he looked as if he hadn’t eaten in quite a while. He looked like some poor wretch who had sat down and just given up.
“I’m so sorry… I…I didn’t see you until the last—”
“I’m OK,” he said quietly, struggling wearily to get to his feet.
He sounded as if he had an accent of some kind. Irish? Australian?
Freya stepped forward and offered him her hand. He took it and pulled himself up.
“Are you alone? Are you with others?”
He shook his head. She wasn’t sure which question he was saying no to. Just then she heard a shrill, panicky voice echoing from the trees beside the road.
“Leon?”
A young girl staggered out from the gloom beneath the branches, buttoning her jeans. Ten…maybe eleven. Like the young man, she looked pale and painfully thin. Even more unwell than the boy, if that were even possible. Long dark hair hung in greasy clumps. She stared, wide-eyed, at Freya, and rubbed a hand absently up and down an arm wrapped in old, stained, and yellowing bandages.
“Just us,” he croaked in answer to Freya’s question. “It’s just me and Grace.”
Chapter 35
“The reason you two weren’t infected by the virus is because of these…”
Leon and Grace stared at the small, blue plastic capsule the man was holding between his thumb and index finger. “Painkillers—Tylenol, aspirin, codeine, ibuprofen…basically any kind of analgesic.”
He was wearing the same-colored short-sleeved sports shirt as most of the others here and a plastic name tag: Terry Morris. They were in a small room with a single striplight glaring down from the low ceiling onto an exam table and a pair of plastic chairs. On the walls were posters on how to administer first aid and how to spot the early signs of a stroke or seizure.
Grace was sitting on the table, Leon on one of the chairs, and Terry Morris was standing beside her, in the process of unwrapping her bandaged arm.
“You must have both been taking painkillers of one sort or another when it all started. Am I right?”
Leon nodded.
“But Mom wasn’t,” said Grace.
Terry looked at her. “You saying your mum didn’t get infected?”
She shook her head. “But the crabs…got her.”
“She lasted until then?” He looked puzzled. “Those things came nearly two months after the initial outbreak. She must have been taking something during that time, otherwise…”
Grace shook her head.
“Maybe she was, Grace,” said Leon. “And we didn’t know. Mo too.”
Terry shrugged. “I don’t know how this works or why, but we spotted it early. Everyone who turned up here had been on painkillers of one kind or another. There’s a Chinese family that turned up.”
“They were all taking tablets?” asked Leon.
“They all routinely drank traditional herbal tea for medicinal reasons. Which of course has a strong natural analgesic in it. They lost their youngest child to the virus though. A baby. She was on formula milk. That pretty much confirmed it for me. It seems this plague—this virus—is unable to digest people with traces of those chemicals floating around in their bloodstream.”
He puffed his cheeks. “I really don’t know if it’s limited to painkillers and anti-inflammatories. It might include other drugs like mood stabilizers or certain antibiotics. But I suspect not. Otherwise many more people would have found themselves immune. It’s guesswork—I’m just a qualified nurse. Here we all pop an aspirin, a Tylenol, or an ibuprofen daily and so far that seems to have done the trick.”
“Grace has been taking antibiotics…for her arm. It doesn’t seem to be healing.”
Terry nodded as he finished unravelling the bandage. “Oh…that’s a nasty inflammation,” he said as he exposed her forearm. “We probably need to try her on a different kind.” He peered closely at her red skin, blotched and weeping in places. “The usual bad germs are still around and doing their thing, it seems.
Infectious bacteria are still here—and still quite deadly. I presume you’ve also been taking some painkillers or anti-inflammatories?”
Grace nodded.
“And you too?” he said to Leon.
“I get bad headaches all the time. So I’ve been taking aspirin.”
“Today?”
“Not for a few days. We ran out.”
“How long?”
Leon shook his head. “I…I don’t know. A few days. Just over a week ago maybe.”
Terry frowned. “Did any of those snarks touch you in the last week?”
Leon and Grace looked at each other, confused.
“It’s what we call ’em,” Terry explained. “Unless you’ve got a better name for them.”
“Crabs,” said Grace. “Bugs.”
“Walkers…crawlers,” added Leon. “They seem to be changing.”
“And getting bigger,” said Grace.
“Yeah, we’ve noticed that too. Any of them touch you in the last week?”
Leon nodded. “Sure.” He pointed to the scratches and cuts on his cheeks. “I don’t know if they have eyes… I’ve never seen any eyes, but they kept finding us.”
“It could be smell, sound, motion…pheromones maybe.”
“They… Are they really made from the stuff that used to be people?” asked Grace solemnly. “That’s what Leon and me think.”
Terry nodded. “It’s the likeliest answer. The virus infected clouds from the raw material. You saw those, I presume?”
Both nodded.
“So I suppose it’s evolving. All the stuff that used to be people, cats, dogs, birds, insects—every living thing—it’s using that and trying different things.”
“You make it sound smart,” said Leon.
“Nature can be pretty smart.” Terry dabbed at Grace’s arm with a cotton pad dipped in antiseptic. She winced.