Fear of Misery

By F. Fidelio

Eight people still breathing in a Dead Zone – how many can cheat Fate twice?

Trapped in the same city isolation area, curiously immune to a terrifyingly swift pandemic that has left corpses and suspicion in its wake, they face the same harrowing ultimatum: believe the media and report to a 'quarantine centre', or believe their own eyes and attempt escape...

Their lives, and possibly all humanity, depend on them getting it right.

Fear of Misery is a vivid urban dystopian thriller, set in a London of the near future where resource shortages, overpopulation and climate change have seriously impacted the fabric of society.

For Egg, staffing his children's ward; Daze, dossing in her Gothic crypt; and 80-year-old Annie, housebound on the 20th floor of her tower block, death is truly the great leveller. Join this achingly portrayed band of everyday survivors on their dark, nail-biting journeys through vacant streets, disturbing questions, desperate losses and redeeming loves.

Would you make the same choices to save yourself or others?

If you can handle the fast-pace and compelling suspense then Fidelio's thought-provoking future-tech tale is right up your street.

Just beware that Wednesday, 4:00 am feeling…

• Language: English
• Publisher: RabbitWorks
• Release date: Mar 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789493101005

F. Fidelio

Thanks for choosing to read Fear of Misery, I hope you enjoyed it. This is my debut novel, finally seeing the light of day after five years lurking in the eerie mess between my ears (squashed amongst a multitude of other stories jostling to escape). I wanted it to be thought-provoking, disturbing, and uplifting – tough to do; I wonder if I achieved that to any degree? I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you enjoyed the story or have something interesting to say about it would you be kind enough to consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book or on your favourite social media platform? I believe passionately in the freedom of expression that indie-authorship gives me as a writer, and the choice it offers readers, but I don’t have the promotional or financial reach of a large traditional publisher, so every review you write helps the book become visible, your thoughts enable others to discover it, and provide the vital statistics of my storytelling ability. If you are curious to know more about the The Fear of Misery or want to join me on my writing journey, then come along over and visit me at my website: FOLLOWFIDELIO.ONLINE Here you’ll find more information on what I’m currently writing, you can join my email list to keep up to date on new releases, and jump down The Rabbit Hole if you dare (that’s where I’m stashing free-to-access written work of odd shapes and sizes and experimental in nature). I am bucking the trend of present conventional wisdom by writing both the dark and the light of life because I’m a traditional storyteller at heart: if the story is funny, I’ll tell it, if it is harrowing, I’ll tell that too, I’ll even mix it all together and cross genres… scandalous! Film directors don’t have to care, so why should writers? After all, my stories start off as films in my head... If you want more of the dark side then look out for Angels In The Labyrinth, which is a contemporary classic horror. Alternatively, if you’re in the mood for something funny and quirky, check out my Earth-bound Sci-Fi satire, Invasion of the Vox Lagomorpha. Thanks again, and Happy Reading!

Book preview

Dedication

For Tom,

Two words:

Thank you

Prologue

"T hrough the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. The former, misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it...There is a principle in human society, by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence...This principle...will be found to be the grinding law of necessity, misery, and the fear of misery.

THOMAS MALTHUS, 1798  - An Essay on the Principle of Population

1. On Another Planet

Marta Oliver

Weightless and warm , with blackness resting like thistledown on closed eyelids, breathing to the beat of the universe and making gently centring waves; here was the genesis of pure hope, the source of the divine knowledge that everything was going to be alright . It was all so simple, so basic. Every time she crawled into the pod, her nakedness like a shame, she knew it was there – that Truth – and went seeking it with a sigh, wishing that she could grasp it for good, like any normal human.

She knows that she had sighed just now, and moaned with it; she felt the vibration in her chest and throat spread through the rest of her floating torso. How long had she slept for? She hopes long enough, and yet not too long. Harry was beyond caring about her absences from the bed, but she had some pride as far as the children were concerned.

...There. She feels it fighting to reappear; weak and smothered now, but within a matter of hours it would have the upper hand again. Damn it.

A breath; a happy thought; and then The Exercise before docking with the outer reality.

It was something she had worked on with her therapist. Somewhere between a mantra and a safe-word. As the waves of constricting life began to overpower her, she would remember this womb, and she would remember this body – these relaxed muscles and evenly drawn breaths, simply being and not responding. She would say to herself the words she feels herself speaking now:

Marta – you are safe

Marta – you can choose

Marta – you only need to take one step at a time

Marta – breathe like you are on a mountain top and free as a bird

Marta – hold yourself as if a lover just asked you to dance

Marta – talk softly to yourself, and always listen for the answers

Taking hold of the side handle and depressing the lid-release, she watches the pod hatch lift and the beloved black dissipate into the vague light of the bathroom. Hauling herself back into her fight with gravity, she steps out and into the physical assault of the shower. Great, she thinks, it isn’t morning; she has time to dry her hair and slip into bed.

A slight discomfort fills her chest as the dark beast turns restlessly in its sleep. But Marta is smiling. She pulls out her ear-plugs and pulls on a robe, then finds her way around the isolation tank to turn off the oxygen. She plugs in the hair-dryer and tries not to notice that her shoulder muscles are beginning to tense, fibre by fibre.

Marta – you are safe.

Rather than putting on slippers, she pads out into the dressing room that leads to the bedroom, curling her toes into the deep carpet, celebrating sensation. She can see the shape of a sleeping Harry on the bed beyond. Once upon a time, as a beautiful, too young bride, she had longed to lay by his side between sweet-scented sheets.

Marta – you can choose.

Creeping out of the dressing room door she gets one bare foot on the landing and peers down its length to the carriage clock on the half-moon table. It sits timorously under the glowering nineteenth-century portrait of one of Harry’s male relatives, and tells her that it is exactly four in the morning.

Something haunting stirs in her at that moment; a memory surfaces, of Sarah and Will scrambling up the stairs towards her, bathed and smelling so good, bursting with news about their new present... She smiles. That idiot puppy had destroyed more household items than all her domestic help over her entire lifetime. But they had been happy back then. Carelessly happy.

Marta wanders down the landing and listens at a closed door with a light shining underneath. Her hand goes to the handle, then hesitates, finally dropping to her side, confidence defeated. She walks on as if in a dream, to another door – this one stands ajar. The room within is gently lit since the curtains are undrawn and a large-eyed moon shines in curiously. Marta sneaks a look, like an opportunistic thief, and she sees what interests the moon so greatly. Somebody. A body. Slumped in the middle of the floor.

She stares with uncomprehending fascination, ‘Will?’

Marta – you only need to take one step at a time.

She staggers forward, and stumbles a little as she lowers herself to the floor. Will is kneeling, keeled forward as if mid-yoga pose.

He’s fully dressed, thinks Marta through a fog of incongruity, but...it’s bed-time. She reaches out and pushes the long, dark hair away from his face, ‘Will?’

The pressure of her touch causes the young man’s body to fall sideways in grotesque slow motion and the open, dulled eyes of Marta’s son stare, unseeing, past her left shoulder.

A silent scream contorts Marta’s face as she endeavours to breathe, and then, a panting wail gains momentum as she scrabbles backwards, gets to her feet and flies down the corridor, throwing herself into the brightly lit bedroom of her daughter.

Blinking and fighting the light with one hand she flails her way to the double bed.

‘Sarah! Wake up! Something...oh, something dreadful has...’

But the teenage daughter, in silken night attire, sleeps soundly the sleep of the departed, her mobile still clutched in her hand.

Marta reaches out for a second time, touches the flawless skin of the girl’s shoulder and feels an alien coolness. Her own ragged breaths contrast with the becalmed chest under glossy navy-blue fabric.

Marta – breathe like you are on a mountain top and free as a bird.

Slowly, slowly, like the first suited divers, she lifts her leaden feet, passes through the haze of the landing, gasping and feeling her way back to her bedroom. The door opens to her touch, even creaking a little in sick-humoured, ominous portent. She half creeps forward, toward the figure on the bed.

‘Harry—’ the whisper catches in her throat.

Her legs now make their presence felt, trembling violently and buckling before she reaches the divan; before she could reach the husband who lay so incredibly still.

Marta – hold yourself as if a lover just asked you to dance.

She crawls the last metres, numb and wide-eyed. Knelt like a child in prayer by the side of the bed, she looks up into the pale, lifeless face of the man she had once loved. She draws herself up to touch it and feels the waxy quality of coolness that is personifying this waking nightmare. Like a child, too, she raises his left eyelid to see if she can find him behind it, but there is nothing.

There is nothing.

Marta – talk softly to yourself, and always listen for the answers.

No words would come.

But she listened.

Then she stood up, unsteadily, made her way back to the bathroom, got back into the flotation tank, robe and all, and pulled down the hatch.

Pete Nahal

As dawn began to assert herself, the second-floor Georgian apartment met the new day less confidently, despite its architectural pedigree. Without the night it seemed empty and soulless. In the large living room a few pieces of classic walnut furniture were augmented with kit-form laminate, and the bay-window was fitted with unflattering grey Venetian blinds.

Everything appeared colourless and forlorn as the light slid through the thin metal slats. This was due in part to the layer of dust, and the piles of discarded clothes, books, and kicked off shoes. The wall of bin-bags stacked along the hallway didn’t help either. The stucco grandeur of the ceiling was defaced by grimy cobwebs, and scuffed, panelled double-doors stood open, linking to a bedroom. This use was signified by a mattress lying askew on the floor, with twisted bedding and a higgledy-piggledy wall of books and magazines around it. The retro digital alarm-clock no longer worked, or rather, was no longer supplied by electricity since that service had been cut off months before.

As the morning progresses the place feels as though it were waiting to begin breathing; as if opening a window would release a kind of vacuum. So when there is a click and a swish, and a bookcase swings forward revealing a narrow doorway, it comes as an expected relief to the barely moving dust motes suspended in the middle of the room.

Life.

A thin young man edges into the grey; a bare, golden torso, and filthy jogging trousers, barefoot, and stealthy. His black hair is long, clearly showing an outgrown cut. He turns to the blinds and pulls off a gas-mask with one hand, raising another with a handgun, and spins slowly into a silent crouch.

He listens.

And waits.

Then, agile like a cat, he rises, flattens himself against the wall and slides to the window. From its edge, he levels his left eye to a gap in the blinds and holds his breath. His eyes dart keenly from side to side and his face is taut.

He looks down to the leafy avenue below. The quiet street.

He notices everything. Everything is important. He sees too many cars. Not new ones. The usual ones. But two, no, three, are here when they should have gone by now. He stops to think.

What day is this, Peter? Have you lost track again? No, it’s Wednesday, it’s definitely Wednesday. Is it a holiday? Got to check. Don’t think so. They are messing with you, mate. Or does it mean something?

He breathes a controlled, quiet breath, his mind racing. Still watching without moving a muscle, he waits. It’s as still outside as inside, there is no breeze, the trees watch with him.

And then he sees one, just a glimpse: in black, automatic rifle, body armour – moving behind the gateway of the opposite house, another Georgian creation converted into flats. His heart-rate accelerates. Damn, the bastards are getting close! He flattens back against the wall and pants a little to catch up with his breathing then sidles back to the hidden door.

It’s then that he hears the helicopter; faintly, but there all the same. Blood crashes in his ears.

No!

He steps behind the door and pulls it closed behind him. It seals with a whooshing, sucking sound.

He turns to face the secret room.

This is another world compared to the flat beyond. There is LED lighting, and insulating panels lining the walls, floor, and ceiling. A bunk-bed is pushed against the far wall, the bottom bunk of which is used as a sofa. By it, mounted on the wall with mathematical precision is a bizarre array of weapons; knives, a naginata stick for martial arts practice, a baseball bat, nunchucks, a lead-black crossbow, and the breathtakingly beautiful centrepiece is a ceremonial kirpan dagger in an ornate casing of brass over dark polished wood. On the other side of the bunk-bed, a makeshift kitchen on a trestle table provides the luxuries, while a bucket with a lid provides the necessities. The other two walls, right and left, have shelving units stacked with packaged food and other provisions. Here the living is done, and here, worryingly, is the soul of the apartment.

The young man paces up and down like a caged lion, still grasping the handgun and the gas-mask. Suddenly, he ceases pacing and strides to one of the shelving units. He lays down the weapon and the mask, and pulls out a heavy jacket and Teflon vest.

He will wait.

But if they come, he will be ready.

And they will be sorry on the day they finally catch-up with Peter Nahal.

Annie Baker

So, another beautiful ...nearly sunny morning, thinks Annie as she lies with the duvet up to her chin, looking at the net-curtained, condensation-fogged window in her twentieth-floor flat.

‘And I’m still here, Johnnie,’ she mumbles out loud. There is nobody to hear, and yet, someone listens. She lies propped up on pillows, a froth of white curls around a pale, puffy round face, gathering her strength and conviction.

She needs to pee.

‘I know, Johnnie, I know, Come on old girl, you’ll be all right when you get going.‘ She pulls herself upright and puts her swollen feet to the floor, over the edge of the single bed. The double is no longer practical. She reaches for the nearby walker for support and steps forward into her slippers. Then, leaving the metal frame behind, takes stiff, slow steps to the door of the tiny living room where the bed is set up, and across the narrow hallway to the equally bijou toilet. She hangs on to the disability handle on the wall as she lowers herself onto the seat, wheezing and puffing. After tinkling away for a few moments a particularly triumphant bout of wind heralds the new day, which sets her giggling and doesn’t help the breathlessness.

‘And it’s Wednesday, Johnnie, so I get a visit from Kathy at two, and,’ she continues throughout her move to the bathroom, just a few steps away, ‘I get my dinners delivered at four. Woo! It’s a busy day, Wednesday. Got to put my war paint on. Now then,’ says Annie, holding on to the bathroom sink and wheezing at her face in the mirror above it, ‘what d’you say, love? Blue or green eye-shadow? I know it. Green. You always liked green.’

The next few steps of the morning ritual are painfully slow, and regular pauses are necessary to hold a wall or perch on a seat. But finally, Annie is in a floral dress, wearing green eye-shadow, rouge, and peach lipstick, sitting in her armchair. Now she needs to rest for a while and recover her strength before breakfast.

She uses the remote to activate the screen opposite, and lifts an oxygen mask to her face, pulling the strap over her curls and flicking the switch on the cylinder. She sits back and inhales deeply, gradually losing the grey haze around her peripheral vision, and watches the recorded quiz-show from the previous evening that she enjoys so much. But she can already feel her eyes growing heavy.

Well, not surprising, she thinks; after all, she had a funny spell in the early hours and restless nights are the very devil. It got so bad that she had to use the oxygen for several hours. But that was alright, Kathy would organise more. So, if a funny spell had to happen, it couldn’t have happened on a better day than a Wednesday...well, Tuesday night...no, early morning Wednesday, whatever... Annie drifted off and her body did its best to repair and recover a little sleep.

She awoke to the sound of a distant helicopter.

Without really processing what had woken her, she pulled off the mask and reached for her reading glasses to see her watch. It was ten in the morning.

‘Oh! Johnnie, how could you have let me doze for so long, you silly bugger, I haven’t even had my breakfast yet!’ With this, Annie pushed herself up out of her chair and made her way to the kitchenette as the TV burbled in the background.

‘Eggs, I fancy some eggs, today...yeah, that’s just what the doctor ordered...’

While the wheezing kept her busy, she negotiated a frying pan and two eggs into position, set the kettle to boil, then sat down on a chair at a tiny, square, kitchen table while the eggs bubbled and spat. There was a chair on the other side and Annie looked at it pensively.

‘Bugger!’ she swore, irritably, and made her way slowly back to the living room, returning wheeling a stand holding the oxygen and mask. She took a moment while leaning against the work-top with the mask at her face, after which she made a pot of tea and plated-up her two eggs.

It was as she sat thus, contemplating her belated breakfast with relish, holding the mask to her face, that she heard an almighty crash.

The front door was broken open and an armed man wearing black gear from head to foot, including some kind of a mask, strode into her living room, caught sight of her through the gap in the kitchen units, and froze.

Annie’s eyes were like saucers as she stared back and her arthritic joints tightened painfully on the mask.

Was this, then, the day she’d be seeing Johnnie again?

The man was very young, she could see that now. Only a boy, really. He took another couple of uncertain steps forward, which brought him to the threshold of the kitchen, and faltered to a standstill. His face was sweaty and tear-stained; he looked at Annie with such an anguish of pleading and hell that she suddenly knew, with certainty, that she never ever wanted to witness again.

Her heart, her poor sick heart, was struggling to meet this challenge and she put her free hand to it, instinctively.

The man moved his mouth as if to speak, but failed.

There was something so terrible in his expression that it pushed Annie strangely beyond her fear.

She removed her mask carefully.

‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you to knock first?’ she said, then smiled; it was a smile that said: I see your pain, I can be your friend if you need me to be.

The young man gasped and sank to his knees, struggling to breathe against the sobbing that was beginning. Genuinely fearing for his health, Annie made as if to stand, but that triggered a violent response.

He found his tongue roughly and angrily, ‘No! No, stay where you are! Do you hear me?! Stay here, and don’t leave, stay quiet and...and...Oh, Jesus, I never...I...I can’t...this is...’ He gritted his teeth and roared like an animal in pain, raising veins and suffusing his face with a puce under-skin veil while he continued to stare at her as if she terrified him.

Then, abruptly, he turned and fled.

Annie stared after him for a moment. Slowly she put the mask back up to her face, steadied herself on the table-top and looked over to the empty seat, ‘I thought I was for it there, Johnnie,’ she wheezed into the moulded plastic. ‘Next time, I’d appreciate a bit of heroic whatsname, chivalry, if you please.’

The wheezing got worse and whined into a laugh between frayed breaths as she imagined her husband waggling his eyebrow at her and informing her laconically that chivalry is dead. Annie laughed to her full rattling capacity, knowing only too well that this was hysteria, but, well, what can you do when you nearly snuffed it, again, and your dead husband was a smart-Alec comedian even when he was supposed to be busy pushing up the daisies in Greenway Cemetery?

The laughter turned to tears for a while.

It took another few minutes after that to clear the grey spheres from her peripheral vision and to stand up. She grabbed a tea-towel and wiped her eyes, said, ‘Bugger’ when she saw her eye makeup all over it, and then dragged her oxygen flask into the living room and sat down in her chair in front of the TV. She had listened to the tone of the young man when he had said to stay there, and stay quiet.

‘He wasn’t messing, Johnnie’, she said under her breath as she turned off the volume and watched the subtitles roll.

They were telling her that a killer virus had erupted across Europe, beginning in Finland, of all places. That it was travelling the globe. That there had now been confirmed outbreaks all across the UK, and many large urban and suburban areas had been quarantined – no-one allowed in or out. Anyone trying to break this blockade would be shot on sight, the risk of contamination was too high with such a virulent airborne disease. No-one was to leave their place of abode. The affected areas would be cleared. Bodies would be burnt. Vaccines were being developed. Treatment centres would be set up within the Quarantine Zones for survivors. Help-apps and telephone numbers were given out. Annie’s hand twitched as it responded to the thought that she should take a number down, but a second thought paralysed it.

She watched on.

Crying and terrified interviewees. Worried about relatives. Worried because they had visited an affected place just the night before. Doctors describing the symptoms, as far as they knew them, and advising anyone with concerns to report to their local hospital. Local hospitals overrun with panicking people, crying women, screaming kids, angry men. Politicians saying the military was deployed, all hands were on deck. Police and army officials begging for public co-operation in the face of extreme emotions. Barely controlled panic. Curfews enacted. Ban on movement of civilians. More warnings of the shoot to kill policy around quarantined areas.

They showed maps of the affected places. Firstly, the Quarantine Zones, where people were ordered to keep to their houses.

And then they showed the Isolation Zones, the hot-spots where it was reported that everyone had died or was dying... no-one to enter or leave, on pain of death...

‘Oh, bugger,’ said Annie slowly and profoundly under her breath as she stared at the map on the screen. ‘Bugger it. What is it about Wednesdays? Now then, Johnnie, this is going to take some thinking about.’

She got up and returned to the kitchen table. She drank her cold tea and ate her cold eggs, impervious to the buzzing of the helicopter. She frowned into space, and Johnnie sensitively refrained from interrupting.

2. Intensive Care

Lenny Fabergé

He felt his foot tapping on the floor of the vehicle, more biofeedback than he needed; he stopped it with immense willpower. He put the key in the ignition, and his heart filled his mouth. This had to work. If it didn’t, they were all dead.

Was there another way? Shit, he couldn’t think now. It was time to reciprocate the unexpected with the unexpected. And they surely wouldn’t expect this...

So much had happened in the last hours that sitting on Toby’s bed and playing snap seemed a century away. A world away. The poor kid. He had been on the ward for weeks in that oxygen tent, and last night was his last night. Today he was to be free to breathe the open air again. So, the game of snap at one in the morning was meant to head off a six-year-old’s mutiny against doctor’s orders; Toby got some rare one-to-one distraction on the night-shift, until he fell asleep with half a handful of cards still to play. And he, Lenny Fabergé, AKA Egg, sitting beside the bed on a small metal chair, had rested his head for a moment and woken-up three hours later, alive.

That had never been a remarkable event before today. He was forty-eight, but never worried about heart attacks, and had his hopes and dreams, like any man, despite the tough times everyone found themselves in. No, he expected to awake. He didn’t expect all the kids to do so all the time, that being the nature of hospitals and the nature of his ward. But never in his wildest nightmare could he have imagined being woken by one of them screaming like that. He winced at the remembrance and strained his knuckles white on the ambulance steering wheel.

So, there he was, woken by piercing sound and adrenalin to the heart, starting up, throwing the heavy plastic walls of Toby’s oxygen tent over him, and running around to the next bed, to Jo, calling her name softly. The girl was a living skeleton of twelve years, with long, dark hair; she made a ghoulish sight sitting in the dimness, bolt upright and staring.

Staring and screaming.

He engulfed her in his big arms, but her tension did not melt. He took her pale face between his hands and said quietly, ‘Jo, it’s OK, it was just a dream.’

Jo began to cough, the remnants of the pneumonia that her anorexia had invited in. She managed to focus on him and shook her head in a stilted, twitching manner, ‘No, Egg, look...’ she breathed.

He pulled out the drip from her arm that she had badly wrenched by sitting up violently, and whilst he closed off the flow and hung up the drip-line he had slowly looked around the windowless hospital bay at the four other beds, at the four other little occupants. Low light spread in from the open corridor, muting the colourful decorations and bedding. He got up and went across to Ben in the bed opposite. He put his hand to the five-year-old’s cool head and slipped his fingers down to the carotid artery.

He breathed out softly. This was going to cause trouble; no way was this kid up for the Great Promotion in the sky. He plaited his brains trying to think what could have happened...Had he missed something? Was there something mentioned at the handover meeting that—

‘Egg?’ Toby was at his elbow.

‘Hey, mate, let’s have you back in bed for a moment, come on,’ he said quietly, trying to guide the boy back to the tent.

‘But I think Douglas is really poorly.’

The kid in the bed opposite to Toby had a severe ENT infection; but a face like a balloon, sinus drain and antibiotics did not make him a high-risk case. Still, Egg hurried over with a deepening sense of unease.

This kid was dead too.

Not a mark on him, not a sign of disturbance, not a hint of why. He flew to the other two beds and felt cool necks for pulses that were not going to be there.

He had never known panic in his life before today. That was the moment. There’s a first time for everything, his old Gran used to say in her musical Jamaican tones.

He had surveyed the two children staring wide-eyed at him and told them calmly, ‘Toby, hop back in bed and Do-Not-Move, either of you – that’s an order! Understand, Privates?’

They had both nodded in dumb show, and he had raced around the corner into the broad corridor which was the spine to which all the bed-bays and private rooms connected. He had headed for the section desk, hoping to find backup, but instead found Dot crumpled on the shining floor. He was dreading being right, so when, as he rolled her corpulent frame over, her unblinking eyes refused to focus, he did not check her pulse. He stood and picked up the phone, dialling the internal emergency number, hearing himself breathing heavily. The internal line was following the motif of this horrifying ride: dead.

Returning to the section desk he turned the key of the locker beneath the inside of the counter. He pulled out Dot’s bag and found her smartphone. It lit-up but there was no connection. Since the polar-shifting had increased solar-flare disruption, local-nets were the means of service and no-one really relied on them one hundred per cent. It could mean something, or it could be the usual Sod’s Law.

Egg ran on a little way and, after trembling in indecision and bewilderment for a few seconds, pressed an emergency response button on the wall, and waited.

Nothing happened.

So he ran on into another bay. This one had curtains that he wrenched back as if real light, not phantom night lights, would mercifully illuminate normality.

Instead, it revealed that each bed was a coffin...

He pulled at his dreadlocks, standing in the middle of a morbid stillness.

A sudden burst of life propelled him into the next bay, and the next, past prone figures of more colleagues, more lifeless phones, still no response to the alarm back down the corridor; and at the last section he shouted for somebody, anybody, at the top of his lungs.

He then ran on into the next department, and the scene was the same. Sporadic staff, lifeless; and beds full of death.

Here, he hung out of windows and shouted, but saw no sign of life, no traffic, not even as he leant out of a window three floors above the A&E entrance.

Egg had run through nearly the whole East Wing before he remembered the kids.

He had been speeding along a large wide corridor with glossy floors and huge windows to either side of him. The thought had made him swear loudly, his pumps made a strangled squeaking sound as he braked, and span around.

He had returned to the bay of the children’s ward to find the two living souls where he had left them, more or less. Toby had not gone back to bed but was sitting, white and quiet in the bed beside Jo, who was trembling convulsively.

‘What’s going on?’ she cried out when she saw him, and then burst into tears.

He had struggled to get his breath as he joined them on the bed, forcing himself into calmer body language than fitted his skin and the perplexed horror that gripped his mind.

‘Well,’ he had said, flailing for something sane to say, ‘I don’t know yet. That’s the honest answer. But, you’re alright. Listen to me, Jo, you are fine.’ He had adjusted the nasal tubes hanging at her neck which were attached to her oxygen line, and looked thoughtfully at Toby, ruffled his hair and said, ‘We’re all fine’.

He rested his elbows on his thighs and leaned forward, rubbing his hands over his face for a moment, letting his brain race.

And then that genius little kid had said, ‘Why don’t we watch the news?’

Ignoring the fact that they were surrounded by corpses, he had said, ‘Yes. Good thinking, Toby. Jo, we’re moving you to a sofa in the family room, OK? Toby, find an extra jumper. I’m going to turn the TV on, wait for me here.’ Implicit in this was the fact that he was on a corpse-clearing mission.

He had cleared all death from sight; yanking curtains across beds at the ends of bays and sliding poor Dot, Dot whose voluptuousness had made night-shifts a little more tolerable, out of sight behind the desk.

But the family room had held a poignant moment. Sitting on the sofa, head lolled back as if in desperately needed sleep, was a thin, mousy woman in her twenties, the mother of a little girl on the ward. Her daughter was one of the increasingly rare car-crash victims, who had lain in a coma for eight long months. Until this morning.

A box of tissues lay by the young woman and she held a teddy bear in one hand. Oh, he had thought, you are finally released from your agony. Then he lifted her gently and moved her to the next bay, on a bed behind a curtain.

He had dressed both kids – to keep them warm he thought and said, but some watchful wariness from his army days also spoke silently to him. With Toby on his hip and the fragile Jo loaded into a wheelchair holding her hands over her eyes, he cruised them along the corridor and into the family room. The toys and colours surrounding them contrasted so starkly with the horrors witnessed that all three turned their attention to the TV with a sense of total surrealism. The kids had sunk back into the squashy sofa, exhausted, and Egg had pulled up a stool.

He started out intending to choose the news channel but, apparently, normal programming had been suspended and almost every channel had activated their own news service.

So, they were in the middle of a plague.

That was the gist of it.

This was not good news. Egg had a wife and children two hours away.

After five minutes of few facts and a lot of emotional filler, he’d gone and sat between the kids on the sofa, tension so high that it made his ears whine. It was the same for the kids, they pulled themselves up out of their physical slump and listened hard.

The hospital was in an Isolation Zone. Ringed about by a Quarantine Zone. Because everyone in the Isolation Zone was known to be, or assumed to be, dead.

‘So why aren’t we, Egg?’ Jo had asked him warily.

‘Because we aren’t,’ he answered, straining to keep processing the newsreader’s words. ‘They say there are likely to be survivors, and they know more than us...’

Suddenly he went weak with relief. National maps of the areas of the outbreak showed that his home, his wife, his kids, were all mercifully centrally placed in an unaffected area.

Sit tight, baby, he had thought.

After that, what made his ears prick up was the information about their Zone. Specifically, that the very hospital they sat in was a centre for survivors to report to.

Egg pulled a, ‘well, whaddayouknow’ face at the kids who looked hopeful.

‘My dad can come for me!’, Toby had said eagerly, displaying his infallible trust in good and love and implicit safety.

Jo stayed silent.

Egg knew that she was thinking hard. Life had been slightly more complicated for her. She was anorexic, conflicted, and an anxiety lightning-rod. There was not one relationship she trusted and had faith only in her own self-control, which was slowly killing her.

So, continued the newsreader, the phones were down as part of an isolation protocol, and control of this killer-virus was the aim of every government action...

As he listened, Egg couldn’t get it out of his head that if all three of them hadn’t been on oxygen, they would not now be goggling at the outside world via a screen but floating around as newly disconnected souls.

His fingers had twitched restlessly.

But what respiratory virus kills in a matter of hours? he asked himself repeatedly. As a soldier and a nurse, he wanted to know where the sweating, blood, vomit, sputum and diarrhoea were. When had the symptoms of pain and discomfort shown themselves, and, the gut-wrenching question – had his few hours of sleep been at the expense of lonely agony in four children who were his responsibility?

And then, the big one: were they still at risk? It had only been half an hour since they had potentially exposed themselves...

He looked at his hands. He had touched both kids after dealing with the dead bodies. The shock had driven basic precautions out of his head.

Too late to do anything about that.

Should he put them all on oxygen masks, though?

Yes. Yes, it couldn’t hurt.

Plans started forming in his mind. He put several on hold while he covered both his charges with blankets and announced that he would make breakfast. The kids were drained now; he switched over to a digi-film, put the remote in his pocket and went in search of portable oxygen kits. He made high-dose vitamin drinks, sandwiches, and instant soup in the unit kitchen. While the water was boiling he tipped out Dot’s huge tote-bag and packed it with food and drinks from the cupboards.

There was a campsite feel as he dumped the bag, handed out the food and drink, and explained about the oxygen. To the children he said only that they needed to stay ‘topped-up’. Jo looked at him with a steady expression and he assumed that she had sussed him. But she was badly shaken, even receiving the glass of high energy drink and taking an instinctive sip without thinking. She nursed it protectively, thoughtfully. It was momentous. Nobody on the planet could have got her to touch anything to her lips yesterday.

Then he had explained the Next Step.

He was going to see if there was anyone else in the hospital who had survived. That was tough because it reminded them all of the limp little bodies they had left behind in their bay, and it scared the kids, he saw that. Jo’s face said, please don’t leave us, and Toby was curious but uncertain.

‘What about the ghosts?’ he had asked.

‘What ghosts?’

‘You know. When people die they get ghostified. There’s stuff left, coz sometimes they don’t know that they have died...and they haunt