Fever (Flu) (18 page)

Chris was in sales; he worked for some pharmaceutical firm and found that the more travelling his job involved, the less it mattered where he was based. He just needed to be near the motorway, and, regardless of how remote it seemed out here among the cows and turf, he was only half an hour from the nearest slip road.

Colin knocked the door lightly. There was no answer, so he gently pressed the doorbell, listening as a familiar gong sounded from inside the house.

He looked over to the garage window, noticing both cars inside. They were obviously scared of looters, even out here. A house like theirs was already going to draw attention, so no need to give the wrong sort any other excuse to stop by.

Colin wondered what kind of reception
he
was going to get. Perhaps the couple had spotted Vince coming down the drive, just as Vicky said, and decided to lock down until the sorry looking car moved on. You could hardly blame them.

Colin stepped back from the doorway.

He looked at the side window, finding the blinds open. He stepped closer, cupping his hands around his eyes then pressing against the window, but he couldn’t see anyone..

He wandered round the house. Reached the back door, looked through its glass into the small utility room. Nothing.

He was just about to give up, return to the car and the inevitable earache from Vicky when something startled him. It came from inside the house.

Colin reached for the door handle, slowly twisted it. It wasn’t locked. He looked around then pushed the door open.

He stepped onto the ivory-coloured tiles of the utility room floor. A washing machine and tumble drier stood side-by-side. A radio was plugged into a nearby wall, an almost inaudible hiss escaping from its silver speakers.

Colin approached the door straight ahead, knocking gently.

“Hello?” he called out. “It’s Colin. Ben? Chris? You guys home?”

There was no reply, so he pushed the door open. It led into the kitchen cum dining area.

His eyes traced the room.

Everything looked so clean. There was not as much as a used cup in the sink.

A red plastic clock with no numbers kept time. A single plastic coffee table sat in the corner. A naked Barbie doll sat on top, its head turned slightly to one side, its arms raised and pointing forwards. It was staring at Colin as he moved through.

“Guys?”

Still no one.

Colin began to wonder if they were gone.

Maybe Chris had scored a ticket on some private plane, and the couple had left this godforsaken island altogether, heading for sunnier climes. That was the kind of people Chris dealt with, after all. People with money. People with class. People with the kind of capital that could afford fancy cars and villas on the continent.

Colin could imagine Chris and Ben relaxing in Spain, cocktails in hand.

But why leave the door open? The cars in the garage? The radio on?

Colin moved through to the hall, finding a rich red carpet.

A strange smell greeted his nostrils. It was like treacle mixed with bleach. It was unpleasant, even though he couldn’t put his finger on why.

He wondered if the smell was coming from his own body, all that excitement from earlier making his sweat all the more pungent. He checked under his arms, finding a slight hum, effectively masked by a familiar brand of deodorant—expensive shit he’d picked up from
House of Fraser
.

The living room was the next door along, and Colin peeked his head though, still calling as he went.

He made his way along to the next door, finding the study. It was empty. Just a desk with a computer. Bookcase in the corner.

The next room was the bathroom. A huge corner bath sat next to a separate walk-in shower. Toothpaste and two brushes rested in a stainless steel cup by the sink.

But still no sign of life.

The smell from before was in the bathroom, and Colin wondered if it was a burst pipe or some blockage in the system. The more pungent it got, the less pleasant it became. Colin unrolled some toilet roll and blew his nose, dropping the spent tissue in the toilet and flushing it.

The next room was a bedroom—one of three, it seemed. Colin pushed this door like all the others, calling as he went.

He stepped inside.

The air was thick in here, the acrid smell catching in his throat like out-of-date milk. He immediately felt himself gag and bent over to wretch onto the floor. When he backed up, he saw the source of the smell, the bodies of his friends side by side in bed together.

A cold, icy sweat broke across Colin’s back.

Ben was hardly recognizable. He’d always been slim, but he’d lost even more weight, his bones now stretching through parched skin, scarlet-stained teeth protruding through pale, narrow lips.

His eyes were barely human, no longer fixed on any particular view but instead blending into his skull like dusty old glass. They reminded Colin of the eyes of dead fish when they were washed up and left to fester on the beach.

The poor bastard had clearly reached the latter stages of flu, his nose and ears clogged with hardened blood.

Chris, however, looked healthy. As healthy as a dead man
could
look. There were no signs of infection, his body unmarred by the symptoms that Ben displayed. Instead, his face portrayed sadness, emptiness. And while Colin suspected that he had taken his own life, it seemed easier and more romantic to assume he had died of a broken heart.

“Where is he?”

Vicky was never the patient type, and on a day like today, her nerves were shot.

She stood, arms folded, a safe distance from the car. She was staring over her glasses at the sight of the soldier buried in the windscreen. In the back was Sinead. Poor little infected Sinead. Riddled with the very pandemic that was killing half of Ireland.

Vicky held a handkerchief against her mouth. She didn’t trust the freshness of the country air to dispel an airborne virus, a virus Colin thought it wise for them to carry around in the back seat of the car.

God, he was a prick sometimes.

She approached the back window and peered inside.

Sinead was half awake. Blood gathered around her teeth like messy lipstick. She started coughing. A pink gob slapped against the window. It held, sticky like jam, before sliding down and discolouring the clear, sun-sparkled glass.

Vicky inched away, finding her back against the fountain in the garden.

She looked towards the bonnet of the car, the body still buried in the glass, both arms hanging from its side as if the silly twat had taken a running fucking dive for the windscreen.

She remembered, as a child, being alone in the car with her dad. She couldn’t remember where they were going, just that it was only the two of them in the vehicle and it was dark. A bird slammed into the windscreen. Vicky could hear the crack of its breaking bones, even now. She remembered her dad turning to her, swearing loudly, and then laughing. It was her first memory of death.

She had buried that memory. But a regressive therapy session unearthed the bird, cleaned its tiny corpse, rotting in the back of her mind for nearly thirty years, and presented it to her like a proud cat.

“Why do you think your dad had laughed?” the counsellor asked her.

Vicky didn’t know. She thought it might have something to do with him being a drunken prick who beat her and her mother on a daily basis, but she couldn’t be sure.

What’s keeping Colin?

She stared towards house. No sign of him.

She lay down on the grass lawn, looked up into the sky. The sun was still blinding. There were very few clouds.

Vicky was just beginning to relax a little and enjoy the sunshine when the body on top of the car began to move.

***

As Colin looked at the two bodies on the bed, he recalled the young woman he’d found at the car crash earlier. How he’d watched her fade from life like steam from a teacup. But this was different. These were people he’d known in life, spent time with.

He thought about Aunt Bell, and a heavy weight seemed to fill the empty pit of his stomach. He wondered how she would spend her last moments. He wondered if she were still waiting for her soup, if they’d given her anything to drink or some fresh blankets. Had they explained what was happening, why they were in the house, barricading her inside? Did she try to resist or just quietly roll over and let the virus take her?

Colin moved closer to the bed. It smelled of sick and sweat.

He moved one shaking hand over Ben’s eyes and closed them. The poor bastard had obviously struggled towards the end, trying desperately to cough up some lump in his throat or fight for his last breath.

Colin wondered who had gone first. Had Chris decided he wouldn’t be able to watch his lover die and selfishly ended his own life before the flu took Ben?

Colin knew he’d have to drag their bodies out into the garden, along with their bedding, and burn them. He knew that the whole house was likely to be contagious. But what did it matter? The flu was everywhere now, rampant throughout Ireland, thick in the very air he breathed into his lungs.

There was no escaping it. It was all around him.
He
could be next.

Colin opened the wardrobe, finding a blanket. He spread it across the two friends on the bed.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Then he heard Vicky scream.

When he reached the car, he found Vicky on the lawn, scrambling backwards, eyes wide, and her glasses on the ground.

On the car bonnet, he found the soldier’s body shaking, arms flapping. He was struggling like a frightened fish, head still wedged in the windscreen, blood spreading through the shattered glass.

“J-Jesus.” Colin said. He didn’t want to look but couldn’t tear his eyes away.

He ran to Vicky, scooping her up in his arms.

She released an ear-splitting shriek that he would hear ringing in his ears for hours afterwards. Her glasses flew from her head, her eyes narrowed, wrinkling at the corners as tears rinsed out. Colin tried to pull her close, but she struggled against him, her fingernails digging into his back, fists flying. She was inconsolable, so he released her, left her on the grass, writhing and keening like a woman possessed.

Colin moved towards the car. He got right up close to the trapped soldier.

“Hello?” he called.

There was no reply. Colin hadn’t expected one. Maybe he just needed to hear a voice,
any
voice, even his own.

He opened the car door, finding the soldier’s face, bruised and sliced. One eye staring back at him. With his head raised and his face visible, Colin could see how young he was.

Just a child.

“Stop struggling,” Colin said. “You’re making things worse!” Blood was pooling on the dashboard. “Stop moving, for Christ’s sake,” Colin said again.

Colin rolled his hands into the cuffs of his cardigan sleeves. He tapped at the windscreen until it split into pieces, falling back onto the bonnet.

The lad pulled his head free, his body slipping down the bonnet and falling to the side of the car.

Colin exited the car, finding the soldier on the ground, choking.

“Think! Think! Think!” Colin muttered to himself, wracking his brain, trying to remember his first aid training.

He threw himself to the ground by the lad’s side.

With one hand, he forced the soldier’s mouth open, reached into his throat to find he’d swallowed his own swollen tongue. Colin searched inside, feeling the lad gag, warm, bloody juices belching through the gaps between Colin’s hand and the soldier’s throat. He found the tongue then pulled it free, relaxing it back into the soldier’s mouth.

Carefully, lest he break any more bones, Colin bent the wounded lad over his knee, patting his back like a sick child as he expelled the rest of the shit in his throat onto the stoned driveway.

“It’s okay,” Colin said as he continued to pat the lad’s back. “You’re going to be okay.”

18
^th
June

They’d put both Sinead and the soldier in the spare bedroom. They lay in two twin beds, side by side.

Sinead was barely conscious. Her airways were clogging up with blood-filled mucus and needed to be cleared on the hour, every hour.

The soldier was seemingly not infected but still swaying in and out of consciousness. He was badly injured. It wasn’t just the cuts on his face and neck. His legs, neck and some of his upper body had suffered in the collision, meaning bones were most likely broken, perhaps beyond repair. Without proper medical help, he might die or, at the very least, his bones would heal wrong. It was hard to imagine the pain the young soldier was going through, but there was nothing could be done for him.

There was little could be done for either of them. Some water when they were able. Some soup through a straw. Yet either one of them could pass away in their sleep at any time. And with the way things were looking, that mightn’t be such a bad way to go.

As Vicky stood at the doorway, looking in on her former colleague, she remembered the girl Sinead used to be and would never be again. Bright, carefree. A people-person, born to do the job she did. Good with customers, laughing at their jokes, building rapport.

Everyone loved Sinead.

They
hated
Vicky.

In the old world, Vicky had been retreating into herself. Hiding in the office, going over sales figures, retail reports, dealing with invoices and purchase orders. She would only come out onto the shop floor to meet difficult customers, the arsey ones who didn’t respond well to Sinead’s soft approach. That was something Vicky
did
excel at: she could put the fear of God into anyone with little more than a look.

Vicky closed the spare room door, made for the bathroom.

She clicked the light on and locked the bathroom door behind her.

She washed her hands, scrubbing them feverishly with soap. Threw some water on her face, looked in the mirror. Her eyes were like tea bags. She felt old and withered. It was obvious she hadn’t been sleeping well.