Demise of the Living (32 page)

“
I don’t think the dog
will be an issue,” Sharon said to Thomas to placate him. “It can
eat the scraps we leave behind.”

“There’s not going to be any
scraps,” Thomas said.

“
A dog that size won’t
eat much,” Colin noted.

“
You’d be surprised. And
anyway, it’s not going to be chowing down on the pineapple rings is
it? It’s going to want to be fed meat,” Thomas pointed
out.

“
I’ll feed it from
my
ration,
all right?” Billy volunteered. “I could stand to lose a few pounds,
at any rate.” He smiled and gently slapped his stomach.

John threw his hand up to his
face and gave a loud, gaseous burp.

He said apologetically, “Excuse
me. I think I’ve got a bit of an upset stomach after those
leftovers.”

“That’s ‘cause you ate so
fucking much of it,” Thomas snipped.

“It was going to go to waste,”
Billy interjected. “You had your fill; what the hell do you care,
anyway?”

“
Gentlemen
,” Sharon said, her
voice clipped. “Okay, so tomorrow we need to take stock of what we
have, what we can make from it, and just how many days’ worth of
food there is.”

“There was a week’s worth of
camping meals in the trailer for twenty of us,” Colin said. “Just
to get ourselves organized faster, can I suggest we dish out some
of those for tomorrow while we get the menu and rotas drawn
up?”

“Make sure whoever’s on
latrines isn't cooking my supper that day,” Thomas joked.

“
John, you have the
inventory of the food supplies,” Sharon said. “Can you work out the
calorific total we have from our stocks and then calculate how long
that will last us?”

“
That’s a hell of a lot
of work,” John complained. There were beads of sweat forming on his
waxy forehead. He wiped his brow and swallowed hard. “I’ll need to
go over every item again, note down its details, and them multiply
it up. And then there’s the fact that we’re not going to eat
through things at an even rate. If we open a tin of tomatoes, we’ll
need to eat it before it goes off.”

“I’m sure you’ll do your best,”
Sharon said.

“That’s going to take all day,”
John complained.

Thomas jibed, “Not like you’ve
got anywhere to go.”

“
I appreciate it’s a lot
of work. Maybe the girls could help you,” Sharon said, glancing
over at Karen and Melissa.

“So what do we do with the
expiration date?” Billy asked.

“
I’m sure if the foods
past its sell-by date, it will still be edible. It just might not
taste as nice.” Liz replied.

“I didn’t mean that. I meant
once John’s worked out the totals and come up with a date when the
food runs out, what then? Do we just sit here and starve to
death?”

“Well, of course not,” Sharon
answered, a little too quickly.

“What then?” Billy asked.

“Do we start eating each other
like those things outside?” Thomas added.

“We’ll need to work out a plan,
of course,” Sharon said.

Colin cleared his throat
and leaned in. He said, “Look, I’m not a good judge of these
things. I don’t know if the food will last two months or two years,
but if we work out an expiration date—as Billy put it—we’ve got a
finite amount of time to come up with a plan. But we’re in no rush
to do anything just yet.”

“So we just sit on our butts?”
Thomas asked.

“For now.” Colin shrugged.
“Things could change.”

“Like what?” Liz asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, those
things outside… they might wander off or freeze come winter.”

“
Doesn’t seem likely,”
Thomas said. “Besides, winter’s a long way away. I don’t fancy
being cooped up in here until then.”

Colin’s cheeks flushed.
He gritted, “Well, I don’t know.
Something
, all right?! There’s no
point worrying about it until John gets back to us with the
expiration date.”

“It’s okay, Colin,” Sharon said
in a soothing voice. “We don’t have to plan for that eventuality
just yet. I think that’s a subject for another meeting.”

Colin nodded and sat back, a
little less angry.

“
Now we have the issue of
the guns,” Sharon said, reading from her list. She raised her gaze
from the paper and smiled at Liz. “First of all, I’d like to thank
Liz for this afternoon’s—”

“I want a gun,” Thomas
said.

Sharon scowled at the abrasive
interruption.

“
There aren’t enough to
go round, Thomas. We’ve covered this,” Billy said.

“Billy has suggested we keep
two loaded guns at each of the stairwells and one in the camp,”
Sharon said.

“
Yeah, Billy
would
say
that. He’s got the shotgun,” Thomas complained.

“With two shots,” Billy
reminded him.

“Is it safe leaving the guns
lying around?” Liz asked.

“In what way?” Sharon
replied.

“Well, there are two little
girls around.”

Melissa exclaimed, “Ma!”

“I’m not a little girl!” Karen
said over Melissa’s protest.

“Under normal circumstances I
would agree with you, Liz,” Sharon said. “But these aren’t normal
circumstances, are they?”

Liz dipped her head, giving
tacit agreement.

“And what if they did break in?
You’d want your li—” Sharon stopped herself and smiled at Melissa.
“You’d want your daughter to be able to defend herself, now
wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose,” Liz said
sheepishly.

“Are we all in favour of
Billy’s idea?” Sharon asked.

“No,” Thomas said loudly.

“I think we all know your
opinion, Thomas,” Sharon said, cutting him off. “What about
everyone else?”

There was a wave of nods around
the table.

“Carried then,” Sharon said
like a judge, tapping her pen against the table.

She studied the faces in
the meeting room. Everyone else looked contented and relaxed. Other
than Thomas.

It was a good place to end the
meeting.

Sharon smiled. “If there
isn’t any other business, we’ll meet back here tomorrow at nine
a.m.”

Chapter
17

Melissa sat a few feet
away from her brother. The dog had refused to come into the room
with her, so she left it outside to root around the empty office
space. She kept the meeting room door open and could hear Blow
scurrying around, entertaining herself with some imaginary
chase.

Grant snarled at her from
behind the duct tape gag. He didn’t look much like Grant any
longer. Although his appearance had degenerated in the last few
days, it wasn’t the matted hair or the blotchy pale skin or even
the ghostly white eyes that struck Melissa the most. It was the way
he moved. Constantly fighting against his bindings more animalistic
than human. This creature before her was a long way from the
brother who annoyed her with his every action.

She had tried talking to him,
watching to see if there was any spark of recognition in his blank
eyes, but finally she gave up and just sat watching.

It was growing dark outside.
Soon the light would go altogether and it frightened her to think
of being with him in the dark.

Melissa stood up.

“Bye Grant,” she forced herself
to say.

She exited the meeting
room and closed the door. She could still hear Grant inside
struggling to break loose, and she wondered how he felt being left
alone in the dark.

“Blow!” Melissa called.

There was the patter of paws on
the carpet and the little dog came bounding to heel.

The stairwell was gloomy with
the encroaching night. The noise of a door closing from somewhere
lower down echoed off the forlorn walls. Melissa placed a hand on
the cold metal rail and cautiously made her way down through the
gathering murk.

As she reached the third floor
she could see a light darting around the abandoned office. She
pushed the door open and walked in, curious as to who was
there.

Blow sped past her.

“Blow, come back!” Melissa
half-whispered.

The dog ignored her.

She walked into the darkening
office space to hear a door slam shut.

“Blow?” she asked
cautiously.

“
Can you take your dog
out of here, please?” she heard a voice say.

Melissa looked round to see Mo
standing with his back to the closed door of a meeting room, a
torch in hand.

Blow was turning circles by his
feet.

“I’ve just washed and I don’t
want to get dirty again,” Mo said.

“
Blow. Here, girl,”
Melissa called and made a chirping sound with her lips.

The dog, sensing it would get
no attention from Mo, ran back to Melissa.

“Thank you,” Mo said. “Now it’s
getting dark. I think you should head back down to the camp.”

“Okay,” Melissa agreed.

She scooped up the dog and
left.

***

“Avant garde piece of artwork
you’ve done there, Sharon,” Liz commented.

Sharon had taken a large
sheet of flip-chart paper and drawn a grid across it. The grid had
numbers and luminous multi-coloured boxes in columns stretching
from one end of the paper to the other.

“I give up,” Thomas said, arms
folded like an art critic. “What is it?”

Sharon stood back to give the
viewers a better look at her creation.

“It’s a death clock,” she
said.

“A what?” Liz asked.

The jovial atmosphere
evaporated

“
Well, more of a
death
calendar
,” Sharon corrected
herself. “The expiration date Billy was talking about.”

“And what’s it do?” Colin
asked.

“I took the information John
had from the stock take. Worked out the calories per day and the
amount we have stockpiled,” Sharon explained, pleased with her
work.

“I thought that was on your
agenda for tomorrow,” Thomas said sarcastically.

“It was, but there’s precious
little to do to pass the time. It was just a matter of crunching
John’s stock take through the laptop.”

Liz pointed to a red
blocked-out square on the chart. “I can’t make that out in this
light; is this when we’ll die then?”

“
No,” Sharon said. “This
is when we run out of food. This point here, about three weeks
later, is when we’ll die of starvation. That’s if we have water.”
She flipped the chart over to reveal a second, very similar but
less expansive chart. She pointed out a red block of colour on the
new chart. “If we can’t replenish our water, this is when we’ll die
of thirst.”

“Cheery,” Billy said, joining
the conversation.

“
I can’t say we can put a
positive spin on this, but we need to plan,” Sharon said. She
tapped a thick black felt-tip pen on both charts, drawing attention
to the green squares. “This is the point of action.”

“Point of action?” Liz
said.

“Yes. This is the time where we
still have some supplies, be it water or food, and we are still in
a position to do something. When we reach this point we need to
take action or we will die.”

“Again: cheery,” Billy
commented.

“No, it’s a good piece of work,
Sharon,” Colin said, “Now we have a date to work to. Now we know
when we need to have plan B ready for.”

“We can start plotting out
contingency plans tomorrow,” Sharon said.

“
Isn’t that a little
premature?” Liz asked. “I mean, it looks like we have plenty of
time just now.”

“True, but we need something to
work to. If we just sit about all day we’ll lose momentum,” Sharon
explained.

“Like doing your homework when
you get it handed to you rather than the night before,” Colin
said.

“You could put it like that,”
Sharon agreed.

“So is this it?” Liz asked. She
was staring out of the window at the apartment block opposite
them.

Sharon followed her empty gaze,
but saw nothing that would attract her attention.

“
Is this
what
?” she
said, confused by the question.

“Is this the end of the world?”
Liz said, looking off into nothing.

“
What—like end-of-days,
Armageddon-type deal?” Billy asked.

“Whatever you want to call it,”
Liz replied.

“I don’t think it’s the wrath
of God, if that’s what you mean,” Colin said.

“Nah, can’t be the rapture. I
don’t see any piles of clothes—and let’s face it: I’m still here,”
Thomas joked.

“They bombed the hospital,” Liz
said, still in her trance-like state.

“Trying to stop the spread, I
guess,” Colin surmised.

Thomas waved a thumb at the
window. “Did a fat load of good, that. Look at them all out
there.”

“Look, if they bombed the
hospital, that’s a fairly major action. That would have to have
been authorised by someone pretty high up and that implies there’s
a plan a big plan,” Sharon said.

“How’s that help us?” Billy
asked.

“Well, it means the government
is trying to fight this thing,” Sharon reasoned.

“
Why haven’t we seen
anyone since Monday?” Colin asked. “Not even a police
car.”

“
I don’t know. There
aren’t any major army bases, or navy or air force nearby and this
isn’t a big city. If everywhere is like this, then I imagine it
could take a while for them to get round to us. They’d secure key
locations first, like power stations and food depots or oil
refineries.”