Flu
Wayne Simmons
Proudly Published by Snowbooks in 2010
Copyright Š 2010 Wayne Simmons
Wayne Simmons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
Snowbooks Ltd. 120 Pentonville Road London N1 9JN Tel: 0207 837 6482 Fax: 0207 837 6348 email:
[email protected]
www.snowbooks.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-906727-19-2
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Finaghy, Northern Ireland
17th June
There was a woman screaming in his face.
She was one of many crowding around him. But he couldn't hear her. With the headgear he was wearing, Sergeant George Kelly couldn't hear what any of them were saying. Just muffled words. Muted. Censored. Like sounds you would hear under water.
But he could
see
her talking,
see
her screaming.
And he knew she was swearing.
It was something about the way her lips were moving. Shaping the words as if they were heavy. Teeth showing. Almost growling rather than speaking. Or maybe laughing. Because, with every fuck-shaped word she mouthed, there was at least the
hint
of a smile.
It didn't matter, of course. None of their words mattered to George when all he could hear was the rhythmic sound of his own breathing. A mechanical mish-mash of pumps and compression as sanitised air flowed, noisily, through rubber tubing into his facemask and lungs. Steady and dependable.
Pure and uninfected.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking to the corner of his visor, he saw his constable, Norman Coulter, also in breathing apparatus, also fighting through the confused and excited crowd. Norman smiled, as if enjoying himself, rolling with the mob as if on some fairground ride. George knew it was just bravado, though. Maybe the big man was drinking on the job again. Or maybe he had something even more taboo flooding through his system. George didn't care, though. Not now. He couldn't blame the poor bastard for taking the edge off, regardless of how he did it. In fact, he wished he'd had the wit to take a drink himself.
Together, the two men waded their way through the sea of silently angry people, their cries and protests as muffled as the swearing woman's rants. The crowd was constantly shifting, like marbles in a tin. It was like being on a ship. Waves of people rabid with emotion, slapping against each other. George almost felt sick with the constant impact of body upon body.
They moved through the car park into the nearby tower block of flats. It was the fifth time they'd been to this particular block, in Finaghy, but the thirteenth time they'd been to a call
like this.
George had been counting. He wished he hadn't been counting, because the number 'thirteen' had always bugged him. It wasn't that he was particularly superstitious, but there was something about numbers and codes that unnerved him. He hated maths, unable to understand them. But you feared what you didn't understand. That's what they said, anyway.
The crowd was becoming increasingly lively, increasingly aggressive. But George remained focused, shoving his way through the confused and frenzied people with resolve. The angry woman remained, somehow, in his face, despite the heavy numbers. She was still screaming, still shaping f-words. How she managed to keep up with him, he wasn't sure. He knew that if she had been giving Norman that kind of abuse, he'd not be quite as passive. But George wasn't going to risk the use of force where he didn't have to. He'd seen this all before. They were on the cusp of something nasty. A riot, a breakdown. A loss of order, or control. They needed to tread very carefully. The crowd was scared and confused. One wrong move could set them off like a bucket of fireworks.
Still the woman screamed at him, as he fought his way up the stairwell. He wondered if she was a relative of the 'patient'. Or maybe just a family friend. Looking at her, he reckoned she was more likely just another nasty bitch sent to try his patience. Some troublemaker using the whole drama to offload her general beef with the police. He'd seen her type before. He wondered what would make a person so bitter, so one-dimensional in their thinking. He couldn't understand that mentality at all. Didn't she understand the pressures he, and other officers, suffered on a daily basis? How they were first on the scene of everything nasty? Breaching the frontline of every flare-up? Protecting, negotiating, tolerating?
(enforcing?)
But George was adamant he was going to hold his cool a little longer, regardless of his anger. Especially on his thirteenth -
(thirteenth what?)
No one back at the station had given
these types
of calls a name yet. He'd been on twelve (now thirteen), yet remained unaware of a codeword, number, colour or any other way to distinguish such calls from more 'routine' police work. It suddenly dawned on George how odd that was.
When it first hit, George had felt the same as everyone else. Confused, scared, unsettled. He'd seen the signs on television. The news reporting a rise in workplace absence. The shutting down of small businesses. House prices falling to ridiculously low prices, people trying to flee to Europe, America, anywhere that would take them. But then the airports closed, all exits in and out of Ireland blocked. Eventually, hospitals and medical centres became overrun with patients. Private healthcare intervened, but the demand was overwhelming. The posters, first advising of helplines to ring if sick, then advising of martial law.
Anyone found outdoors after curfew would be detained,
they said. And it was then that George's role changed, his perspective shifted. He became one of those
administering
detention. Today, he was
administering
much worse.
They took the next flight of stairs by storm. He noticed Norman, in front, pushing through the dwindling crowds, quite aggressively, as they neared the second floor. Bodies were less thick, now, but still in his face like lights at a show. George filed behind Norman's ram-like hide, allowing the bigger man to do all the donkey work. He wondered if it would have been better to take the lift, avoiding the heavy throng of people for the relative calm of spinning cogs and levers. But the numbers continued to thin as they got closer to flat 23. Word must have got out, he thought. Another person infected. 'Get out, get the police out and stay out' as the well worn advert on television instructed.
Yet, it certainly hadn't got through to one person - the swearing woman still persisted. George could actually hear what she was screaming at him, now, even through the oxygen mask. It was mostly obscenities, as he suspected. She didn't trust the police, warning George that she was watching every 'fucking' thing he was 'fucking' doing and would record it on her 'fucking' phone if he did anything out of 'fucking' line. He gritted his teeth and continued to ignore her. He hated her type, and he
really
hated her.
When they reached flat 23, the crowds had diluted. There were only a few people milling about outside. Most of them stood back as George and Norman approached. A couple of paramedics, wearing even more elaborate breathing apparatus than George and Norman, came out to meet them. They didn't introduce themselves, nor did they exchange any pleasantries. They simply nodded to George to confirm, subtly, their diagnosis.
It was flu.
The people huddled around the doorway, mostly relatives of flat 23's tenants. They seemed reluctant to step back. The paramedics did their best to gently persuade them, but in the end it was Norman's handgun, brandished assertively in the air, that ultimately convinced them what a good idea it would be to make room. There were a few shrieks from a rather inconsolable older woman; George left her to the paramedics to comfort and, most likely, sedate. This was the way of such things. Desperate measures for desperate times.
George followed Norman into the flat, closing the door in the face of the swearing woman who had been tailing him like some mad banshee with Tourettes. He got a little satisfaction out of that, but it seemed wildly inappropriate to admit it. Even to himself.
George steadied himself, leaning against the wall for a short, precious moment. His breathing was slowing. He could hear the air more clearly as it pumped through the tank into his mask. Norman was beside him, patting him on the shoulder to ask if he were okay. He
wasn't
okay. He
couldn't
be okay. Because this was where it got messy. This was the bit he had hated most about all twelve previous calls. They called it 'risk management.' He didn't know if that was the correct title or not. But what did it matter in a situation like this, anyway? These words, these terms dreamed up by bureaucrats in 'think tanks.' 'Protocol' and 'viable' and 'procedural.' None of them bore any relevance to the real world. None of them meant anything, here in this flat, to these people. They offered no comfort to anyone within this awful crescendo to a brutal, anonymous and necessary evil.
They moved through the hallway of the small flat, finding a tearful young woman. The television was turned up loud in another room. George could hear a lively debate about symptoms and signs of the flu. It was pretty much all people were talking about, on the radio, the TV, the street. The television sounded old, tired, jaded. Its speakers were muffled, buzzing as if a fuse had blown somewhere. An overtired doctor was reciting government rhetoric, hardly sounding like he believed it himself. The studio audience were almost as vicious as the crowd outside.
The woman didn't introduce herself, simply retreating through into another room on seeing the two cops. She didn't look scared of them or surprised to see them. But she wasn't going to shake their hands, either. George didn't expect pleasantries. Cops were like angels of death, now. Expected, even summoned, but never welcomed.
George shook his head, looking to his colleague. The bigger cop shrugged, dismissively. He followed the young woman, George filing in behind him. He wondered if it was she who was infected, or a partner or husband. Nothing seemed
obviously
wrong with her. But appearances were deceiving. A simple sneeze seemed all that was needed to determine someone's health. A tickly cough, runny nose. All previously harmless symptoms of a minor cold or flu. Barely noticeable, before. Now, they were like the first nails in the coffin. Enough to send shivers down a man's spine. Like the bells ringing out during the Great Plague.
George's heart sank as they were led into another room, that of a little girl. Pink Barbie wallpaper lined the walls. A faded Disney Princess duvet covered the bed in the centre of the room. A couple of posters, cut out of magazines and comics, were cellotaped, roughly, above her headboard. A little girl with a fever lay under the covers, a bucket in the corner holding her vomit, a bedpan seeming to contain fresh excrement. A thick line of blood was seeping out of her nose, constantly being attended to by her young mother with a heavily soiled handkerchief. She couldn't have been more than six years old.
The young woman turned to them, petitioning them in what seemed to be some kind of Eastern European dialect. While George couldn't understand what she was saying, he was pretty sure he got her meaning.