The Fading

By Linda Taimre

Shortlisted for Viva la Novella 2018

"Insightful and intriguing... a great read." - Alice Grundy, Seizure

A dark, fast-paced novella set in dystopian Australia that questions your humanity…

Something is awake.

Harriet's wife, Katherine, is dying from an insidious virus that threatens humanity – and this is not just any disease.  This virus makes people literally disappear, swallowed by a rapidly evolving enemy.  Desperate to find a way to save her love, Harriet must move fast to discover a cure.  She'll strive to find a way to defeat the virus before it takes Katherine, no matter the cost.

A cost that Lady Trinh, head of the Australian government, cannot bear.  From her seat in Brisbane's protectorate, a pollution-free haven for the lucky few, Lady Trinh will go to any lengths to protect her people – and not only from the virus. For her, failure is not an option, and loose threads must be quickly cut.

Something is awake. And it wants to feed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kaustik Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648415015

Linda Taimre

I'm an Australian author who writes speculative fiction - anything supernatural, fantastical and futuristic.​ In the past, I've been an actor, corporate improvement analyst, teacher, producer, and operations manager.  Nowadays, I'm also interested in neuropsychology, though I still love an occasional theatrical stint. 

Book preview

Something awoke while feeding. It had no mouth, no bones, it had no skull, it had no blood, nor plasma. It had only a shadow of instinct. It was free of form, yet still understood time. Place, though, was not clear. It was surely alone. That was instinctively known. Being so surely alone, this was instinctively feared.

But it could grow. It had found food, and had fed for months. Now, it was awake.

Harriet and Katherine stared at the offending bottle of wine. Katherine furrowed her brow while Harriet breathed through her nose, almost snuffling. She suddenly snuffled her way to the bottle and grabbed the seal with vigour, pulling hard. It did not open. She retreated to her kitchen stool.

I thought if I surprised it, it might work.

Katherine nodded. Yeah. It was worth a try.

Harriet smiled, nuzzling her head into Katherine’s collarbone, pushing aside the deep brown hair with her nose. You’re bony these days.

I know, right? I can’t help it, said Katherine. Harriet nuzzled a little further, her cheeks tingling with a hotness that inevitably pre-empted tears. No, no crying right now, she thought. You’re not the one who should cry.

You know you shouldn’t be so close to me, Katherine said.

Harriet faked a yawn to cover the tears that had wriggled their way out and rubbed her face vigorously. You know what helps you gain weight? Alcohol! With that, she grabbed the wine and yanked the top. It popped off and red splashed on her hands, which she licked off, saying, I surprised it!

Katherine laughed and poured them each a glass. What a beautiful dork, she thought as she watched Harriet chasing drips of wine down her forearm. Cheers, she said, and drank. Katherine walked slowly through their small apartment, past the window edges encrusted with smoggy dirt. Brisbane’s sky showed only a vague tint of the blue it used to have through the dark orange that now dominated the Australian atmosphere.

As Katherine passed the bathroom, she could smell a faint tinge of vomit – though whether this was real or imagined, she wasn’t sure. She vomited so regularly that the smell lived in the skin of her nostrils. Her insides were sloughing off and slipping out her throat, an attempt by her body to rid itself of illness, an illness that had bound itself around the very cells of her body. It had started spreading through Australia about six months ago – at first just villages, graduating to towns, cities, then up to the supercities and conglomerates. The protectorates, sealed concrete structures within cities, so far remained untouched.

I heard that Mr. Currant’s dog got sick. He thinks it’s all part of it, he’s started chaining him down to the earth to stop him disappearing, Katherine said.

I doubt it. There haven’t been any reports of it affecting dogs.

He knows that.

Maybe we should chain you down, Harriet mused. Or wrap you up in cling film. Surely that would make you stick. She shook her head so that her blonde curls fell in front of her face, skimming her big nose. Harriet was a goofy-looking girl, but she wasn’t stupid. From the moment Katherine fell ill, Harriet had imagined at least twice a day that she had been taken, preparing herself against what she now knew was an inevitability. Sometimes the thought of it would make her retch out of misery. But when she started smelling the rot on Katherine’s breath, Harriet wasn’t shocked, or even scared. It felt like an easy fitting of the final piece. A strangely satisfactory chance to test out the limits of her tragic capacity. Of course, of course, that wasn’t true. But everything helped to confuse Harriet’s brain enough that she could manage, and maybe, one day, recover. So Harriet surmised.

She attacked the dirty bowls and cutlery strewn across the bench, scrubbing vigorously to remove the last scraps of their spaghetti. Katherine’s illness lingered in the room, in Harriet’s mind, in the air between them. The Fading, thought Harriet. It sounds so gentle. How stupidly euphemistic.

Katherine, too, always disliked this name, well before it became personal. The capital letters gave The Fading a biblical scale which she stubbornly refused to accept, in spite of the biblically horrific consequences and wild indiscrimination. She tried to conceal it when it struck her. Dying isn’t typically what you want to face, especially when it comes to this sort of dying. The first time she threw up, she didn’t think there was anything wrong. It was when it happened the second time that she was hit by a cinder block of fear, and she knew she had an average of six weeks left. She had lived five of those weeks. Standing at the kitchen counter, drying a spatula and flicking Harriet with the tea towel, Katherine was living out the last of her days.

The two women moved to relax on the couch. Harriet shoved a pile of infoslides to one side – a collection of in-depth analyses of The Fading’s effect on the human immune system, cell structure, cell death – anything she could use to understand Katherine’s plight. Katherine picked up one infoslide focused on the timeline of the disease. She flicked through the screens to come to the section on the Wrenching.

Darling, no, don’t read that again, you don’t have to do that, Harriet said.

Katherine pulled away from Harriet’s attempt to grab the slide. I need to prepare myself. Really, I want to know. With that, she settled back into the corner of their couch and read, again, about the Wrenching. Unfortunately, this was not a coy name. Patients’ guts, not satisfied with their attempts at self-cleansing, finally succumbed to the horror of the invasion of its cells. A last-ditch effort at purging occurred whereby the muscles would violently contract, the cells thrashing against the grip of the viral membrane. Katherine flicked through stories of how patients had dealt with the Wrenching. It came without warning, and it was agonising. Some had screamed until their throats bled. Others had torn out hair, scratched deep rivets down their faces trying to gouge out the source of their pain. One woman in Argentina even took to sawing off her own limbs, partly to diminish the number of body parts that felt pain, partly in an attempt to kill herself.

It didn’t fade, not the pain itself, that wasn’t how The Fading got its name. There was no payoff of that sweet sigh of disbelief when pain is finally relieved. Instead, the agony increased until just before the point most people would faint. And at that point, it stopped. The pain stopped because the body was no longer available to experience it. The pain stopped because the body of the patient lifted off the surface of the air, and disappeared.

No one knew for sure how The Fading was transmitted – it seemed to be proximity-related, though not always. Quarantine was meant to be in effect for all patients. Katherine shrunk away from the thought of overcrowded school halls, vacant office blocks, and swimming pools – all emptied of their proper contents and hastily converted using swathes of plastic sheeting and latex gloves. She knew that living in a dying office building would only bring back her depression.

A twinge ran through her mind, and she looked up at Harriet. You know I will leave if you want me to. If you’re worried, I will leave, Katherine said.

That, thought Harriet, is not an option. Harriet crawled over the couch and caught Katherine in a wriggling embrace. She took her face in her hands and licked her cheek. Katherine laughed and groaned.

If you’re sick, I’m sick, said Harriet. A tiny thrill of panic ran through Harriet at the thought of her own death – but it was pointless to dwell, considering the randomness of contagion. It was this randomness that Harriet used to justify still going to work in the protectorate, a theoretically disease-free space. Yes, I could be sick. But I’m not yet, and I may never be, and we just don’t know how it works. I can’t risk losing her to quarantine. Something rose up in Harriet’s mind, a quiet, guilty question as to whether it was right to put Katherine above an entire protectorate. But as soon as she considered the alternative, Harriet’s bile rose. No, no, she’s not going anywhere. Harriet’s violent, protective instincts roared at the thought of Katherine not being in her life. She was driven to stand up and shove whatever was threatening Katherine, she wanted to shiv it, to eviscerate it with wit and savage intelligence. But to protect against the intangible, Harriet knew only one way: an unfaltering search for something she could put in a syringe and shove into Katherine’s veins to purge the blank-faced evil.

So she gathered piles of infoslides, borne out of her contacts in the vaccinations department of GrowForth, where she and Katherine worked. She couldn’t directly ask questions relating to The Fading, for fear that someone would realise why and Katherine would be forced into quarantine. But she could probe, delicately, gathering information and trying to piece together some answers.

Harriet let go of Katherine’s hand, suddenly afraid she would break it with the force of her love. She wanted to consume Katherine and fuse herself to her. She wanted to absorb Katherine’s disease and fight it for her. She loved her so much that her chest tightened and her heartbeat was so fast and heavy it made her hands tingle.

Katherine’s love was rarely as violent; rather, it was a constant, thrilling warmth. A warmth she knew she could count on, until the end came and she no longer had a body that could feel warmth.

Why does this keep happening? shouted Leena Kitt to no one. Where is it all going? The small scientist looked around for the nearest non-breakable thing she could find – a difficult task in a laboratory housing deadly viruses – and saw a storage cupboard in the corner. Which she then kicked. Repeatedly.

Right, well that’s me, demonstrating my maturity levels, thought Leena. Sighing out her spent irritation, she turned back to the work that had prompted such frustration. A human bone sample lay within a small dish, sitting in a sealed testing space. The drip-test had shown a negative result for the presence of BX59. Which should be fricking impossible, considering the patient in question had died of precisely that. The doctor ran her hands through her black frizzy hair and pulled it slightly to release the tension. This was the 19th such dish that had tested negative for BX59, or Paralytic Joe. Leena stared at the yellowy shade of the drip-test which indicated that the mystery persisted. Abruptly she turned to the other side of her dingy lab and unlocked the freezer containment unit, crammed full of dishes all containing tissue samples from dead BX59 patients. She swapped out dish 19 for the last one left to test, the only brain sample to have come across her desk.

Carefully, Leena moved the dish to an automated clamp and pushed a series of buttons that allowed the mechanism to shift the dish inside the bright, sealed testing space. Her movements were precise given the potential danger of the contagion housed there, though she didn’t honestly believe she would find traces of it anyway. Let’s just get this out of the way. What a waste of three weeks’ work.

Doctor Leena Kitt was employed by the Gates of Science, a private organisation that worked within the pharmaceuticals industry. It was, in truth, a somewhat hack institution without much money, but it allowed Leena to work in relative peace, even if the facilities were questionable. At least I get to work inside the protectorate, Leena thought, sub-par standards and all. She glanced back at the freezer containment units she packed to the maximum allowable limit of 20 dishes. Most definitely sub-par.

Leena looked back at the testing space with the new dish now safely sealed inside. She prompted the mechanical clamp to pry open the dish, exposing the brain sample, and initiated the testing process somewhat unenthusiastically, not looking forward to the final confirmation of the disappearing disease. It just makes no sense. The patients, the Joes, died of BX59. Where did the infection go?

Bah, she uttered, padding about in her pink trainers waiting for the pale, yellow result to reveal, yet again, nothing. She scuffed the floor to make the rubber of her shoes squeak. Good thing I have no labmates. Spinning on the spot a few times, Leena eventually swirled back to face the testing space and check the colour. Her eyes were swimming as they tried to focus on a sheen of vibrant blue. What? Leena jammed her fists into her eyes and rubbed hard, then held her forehead to steady her off-balance brain. The colour was still there – vibrant, peacock blue. Holy mackerel. That’s different.

Few people had witnessed a Fading in person.