[My generation has had to put up with some of the most cock-teasing viruses in history. SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu... They've all threatened to bring about the end of the world as we know it and then, well, they've just kinda burned out. A lot of articles I've read claim this means we're due an extra-super-special-nightmare-scenario-biblical-proportions plague. Oh joy. I wrote this piece after realising what an utterly ruthless bastard a supervirus outbreak would probably cause me to become. It's the end of the world as we known it. I don't feel fine.]
I hadn’t hit anyone since primary school. Tommy Sheldon had been picking on me for weeks: teasing, insulting, pushing, the whole nine yards. It had been a slow, gradual build-up of anger and then a sudden lurch into violence, like bad weather gathering overhead before the heavens open in an instant. He had cut in ahead of me in the lunch queue and was rehashing the usual jibes of ‘fatty’, ‘lardy’ and ‘piggy-pig-pig’ when I dropped the tray I was holding and landed a solid blow to his jaw, sending him clattering to the ground hard. My brain hadn’t had any input: my body knew what it was doing and was sick of my better judgment holding it back.
Twenty years later, I hit someone again. This time I thought about it. She was old, which translated into two things in my mind. Firstly, I could take her. Secondly, she’d already lived a full life: she didn’t deserve the twenty-pack of bottled water we were arguing over. It wasn’t that I’d pondered long and hard, in fact the thoughts came and went unsettlingly quickly, but this time I knew what I was doing. My brain was definitely in control, and my better half was already slipping.
I dropped the bottles of water into the trolley and no one around us thought to question me. I wasn’t a tough man, I didn’t have practice in the don’t-mess-with-me stare, but they knew just as well as I did that none of that mattered. My eyes were hard, shoulders tense and back ramrod-straight as I pushed my way through the crowd tearing tins and cartons from the shelves.
I was going to survive this, even if it meant someone else didn’t.
David held me tight when I finally returned home, and I permitted myself a few moments of intimacy before telling him to go unpack the shopping while I boarded up the windows. He swallowed, took a breath and then nodded. I was halfway through nailing the final board over the living room window when he came in holding a pack of kitchen knives, asking me why I’d bought them when everything else was tinned or bottled. He didn’t like the answer I gave him.
That night we sat on the sofa and watched the news reports come in. Confirmation in five new cities and twenty-seven more deaths. David’s arms closed tight around my shoulders. Over the pleas of the presenter to remain calm and his repetitions of the government’s emergency procedures, I could hear his breathing: shallow, erratic, desperately trying to stifle sobs. I placed one hand between his shoulders, rubbing up and down his spine in time with my own, regular breaths. The fingertips of my other hand brushed against the handle of the largest of the knives I’d bought. I let out a sigh that very slowly transformed into a yawn. When I slept, I barely even felt the knife beneath my pillow.
Three days later, the television refused to work. I checked the stereo and then all the lamps. No power. The utilities had failed quicker that the newspapers, and I, had expected. We ate what remained of our untinned food in the dark of the kitchen that night, silent as the first helicopters beat their propellers overhead.
After that time became something of an irrelevance, measured only in baked bean tins and bottles of water per day. David didn’t think I noticed he was piling more onto my plate than his, but I’d always manage to get him to look away for long enough to switch them around. The office job had left me doughy around the edges, so I could afford to eat a little less. I almost tried to smile at the prospect of using all this mess as a slim-down programme.
We were down to our last five tins when the first person pounded on our door. David had been squinting through the darkness at a book, face pressed almost flush to the page, while I’d been recounting the bottles of water. Three rapid taps, a pause, another three faster, another pause, then a constant beating at the doorframe. I could hear the muffled voice of Mrs. Jones coming from behind the plywood and, approaching step-by-step, managed to make out a few choice words. ‘Help’ was among them. I explained to her, voice raised to penetrate the barricade, that we didn’t have enough food to keep ourselves going much longer, let along her family. Her voice was just as loud as mine, but my tone had been flat, steady, uncompromising; hers rose and felt like the tides, at one moment a manic dash of desperate, hopeful entreaties, the next a near-wailing jumble of pleads. She was halfway through explaining that it was only her and Danielle, her youngest, now that-
From behind the door came a sneeze. The sort of high-pitched sneeze than not too long ago might have brought a light smile to my face and prompted me to share a look with the parent, in an ‘isn’t that adorable’ sort of way. Now I just turned away from the door and returned to counting bottles, telling David to ignore the racket. For five hours, all we heard was the rapping on our door, punctuated by the occasional sob and increasingly frequent sneezes.
Time didn’t pass, but the supplies did. We scraped the insides of the tins for a rogue bean, or carrot, or sliver of pasta and that managed to keep us going for what felt like a few more days. But before long a new sort of emptiness settled over me, and from the silence David had fallen into I guessed he wasn’t far behind.
So I decided I had to go scavenging. David protested, at first against the whole idea, then against the fact that I should do it. Too risky, he said. The military, looters, exposure. I placed a hand on his cheek and one side of my lip twitched as I felt the thick pelt that was developing. That must have been driving him mad. I told him that I didn’t want him risking himself, but I think he understood one of the meanings behind my placation. He didn’t have what it took. I wasn’t sure if he got my second implication.
I didn’t want him to have what it took.