Flu

  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: info@snowbooks.com

  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

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Epilogue

  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 mor
e 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.

  He looked, again, at the little girl. His sister had a child the very same age. They clearly shared the same interests, his little niece having similarly themed decor in her room, albeit with a little more cash spent on it. Where was this little girl from, though? Romania? Probably one of the many Eastern Europeans George would have seen on an almost daily basis. Selling papers at traffic lights. Begging in the street. Busking, maybe. Sometimes the perpetrators of petty crimes. They were far from welcome in Belfast. Even less so in rural areas. George always wondered how they put up with the constant abuse they received, the slander and the slogans on the wall. Probably couldn't understand much of it, he thought. The darker side of Belfast lost in translation.

  He bent down by her bedside. The girl was barely conscious, but he talked to her, nonetheless.

  "Hi, sweetie," he said, not sure what else to say. It was what he called his niece. He suddenly felt guilty about using his special name for her with someone else.

  Not that it mattered, of course. His words were probably meaningless, anyway. Muffled by the equipment he was wearing. Dulcet tones murmured to a drained body, delirious with fever. It really wasn't likely that she even heard him. But George thought he should say something. Even just for the mother's sake.

  He placed his gloved hand over the little girl's brow. It was radiating heat to such an extent that he could even feel it through the fabric, as if it were a hot plate. He brushed the sweaty hair away from her eyes, took a fresh tissue from a nearby box and removed some of the ever- increasing blood and bile seeping from her nose. She suddenly began to cough, spitting a dark smear across his visor. He quietly removed it, before dipping another tissue in water and patting her burning forehead with it. Then he continued to clean her, using more dampened tissues.

  "Shhhh " he said, each time she sputtered. "It's going to be okay."

  But it wasn't going to be okay. It was clear that her condition was pretty far advanced. Yet, underneath the mess, when he wiped her face clean, he found a beautiful little girl. Strikingly beautiful. George looked to the mother, hoping this would be the face she would record in her memory. The one to remember her daughter by.

  George then looked to his partner, standing, awkwardly, by the bed. Big Norman looked even bigger when compared to such a small, weak child. Like a bear watching over her. A giant from some fairy tale. The big man looked more than just uncomfortable as he stared at the scene before him. He seemed moved. It was as if even his heavy and jaded heart was melting at the bedside of this child, this innocent little creature who did not deserve what was happening to her.

  George, shook his head, sighing heavily under all the tubes and glass. He pulled himself to his feet, feeling the weight of his oxygen tank.

  "Christ," muttered Norman. George pulled the big man aside so they could discuss the situation more privately. His visor was steaming up, and it was difficult to make out any expression on Norman's face. "This is a hard one, mate. What do we do?" asked Norman. But he knew well enough what they were meant to do. He'd accompanied George all twelve times before this.

  "We have to stick to protocol," said George, hating the word as he used it. Yet, somehow it seemed appropriate to use a 'think tank' word to describe something indescribable. Something clearly wrong, yet masked as right under nonsensical language and jargon.

  Protocol. Procedural.

  Norman just stared back at him, as if George, too, were infected. Infected by nonsense, by bureaucracy. Infected by the very words he was using. It troubled George to see Norman look at him like that. It shamed him. He was suddenly aware of the sweat building under his mask. His breathing, fast and heavy. His hands, sticky and itchy under his plastic-lined gloves. Whether it was the screaming woman having riled him, or the little girl on the bed, or the fucking words leaving his mouth, he really didn't feel well.

  (maybe it was flu?)

  "Fuck protocol," Norman said, suddenly. He was never a fan of the 'think tank' mentality. "I'm not going to quarantine a six-year-old girl. Not like this. No way."

  "We could lock the mother in, too." Georg
e offered. It was a terrible thing to say. He knew that. But he also knew it was as close as he was going to get to being the right thing to say. The most honest, the most human thing.

  "Are you serious?" Norman said, almost laughing. But his superior was serious. Very serious.

  "It's the only thing we can do," George said, pressing one hand against the wall beside him. "For the little girl, anyway. Let's face it, the mother's probably infected, anyway." It was true. This flu was airborne. Those within the vicinity of the infected usually contracted the virus quickly afterwards. George felt sick even thinking about it. He was still heating up under all the protective clothing, feeling close to ripping it all off. He suddenly felt trapped in his head gear, trapped in the tower block, this breeding ground for germs and disease and fear and venom. "It's either that or leave the little girl in here alone."

  Norman sighed, heavily. He began to pace the hallway like some kind of animal. A big animal. Even bigger looking than normal, with the riot gear and breathing apparatus. He was not a man who was known for benevolence. Huge, cumbersome, with an attitude to policing that suited his burly appearance. Maybe that was why he never progressed from constable, regardless of the time he had spent in the force.

  "Do we tell them?" he asked, finally, pointing in the general direction of the little girl's bedroom. He couldn't even turn to look at them.

  "Best not to," George replied. "We're best just leaving right -"

  "Jesus Christ!" Norman exclaimed, dumbfounded. "This is really fucked up."

  George knew that Norman found a lot of things to be 'fucked up.' Things like the recent reform of the force. Or the positive discrimination during recruitment, since the reform. But Norman reserved 'really fucked up' for especially messed up things. Things that made your mind bend, such was the insanity. Things that were too funny, too ridiculous, too appalling.

  Too unfair.

  "It is really fucked up," George replied, his voice raised a little. "But that's the world we live in, now "