A BRIEF MOMENT OF RAGE
I keep the gun hidden. The gun keeps me alive. It’s a fair exchange. Apart from having a loaded Glock in my jacket, the only plan I’d had since killing the old man was to avoid survivors and keep moving south. South was as good as any, but you run out of it, after a while.
I was on the outskirts of a seaside town, moving quietly between houses, when somebody behind me said, “Hey.”
I turned, slowly. A very young man, maybe only eighteen, something like that. I could have imagined that Jake might have grown up to look very like this tall, skinny boy. I was thinking of him now as a boy, shivering in his jeans and hoodie, messy dark hair flopped across his brow.
“Hey yourself.”
He jerked, nervous. Not used to speaking to people, I guessed. He bobbed his head and said, “You’re alive, then.”
NINE MONTHS EARLIER
It started just like any morning, with the Pure DAB showing 6:45 and playing Classic FM down low; “The Lark Ascending.”’ Jeff, without really waking, rolled over and tapped the handle to give us five minutes, coming back to pull me in, my big warm bear.
He snored like he was enjoying the racket, then muttered, “We need another alarm.”
“What, one that goes off in the afternoon?”
“One with bigger numerals.”
That surprised me. “You can’t read the display? Really?”
“Hit forty and everything goes to shit.”
I pushed my face into his chest and breathed him in. Then pulled my head up, hearing Abbie starting, not crying yet, but it would get there in a hurry.
I pushed myself against him, “Your turn.”
“I was up in the night.”
I tried to remember that, and maybe could. It was all blending into one, hard not to wish your baby’s life away, wanting her to sleep through. Get out of bed herself. She was coming to the end of this stage anyway, a toddler rather than a baby now. I still called her my baby.
Just a normal morning. Normal, normal, normal.
Half an hour later we were in the kitchen. I had been trying to get Abbie to eat a boiled egg, but she had other uses for it. Breakfast News was on in the background, Steph and Charlie sitting on the red couch, but I wasn’t taking any of it in. Normal.
I stood to look out of the window, down at the street four floors below, already busy with cars and bicycles. Pedestrians walking, others standing at the bus stop, looking tired. And, as usual, it made me feel itchy, lives being lived out there while I would be killing the hours, tied to Abbie. Get myself out for coffee at Angela’s house, so the babies could hit each other with spoons and we could bitch about Marcus and Jeff, the brothers we married. Maybe waste some time at the Borough gardens if it didn’t rain. I’d forgotten to notice the weather forecast, as usual.
Jake had put his school uniform on but still couldn’t manage his tie, no matter how hard he tried. Jeff knelt in front of him, telling how he couldn’t do it when he was six either, talking him through the steps as he tied, using his patient voice that wasn’t patient at all. Jake caught my eye over his Father’s back and waggled his eyebrows.
I said, “Wait a damned minute here. I got up in the night. Me. You did it Saturday.”
“What, are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Christ, Jeff, I’m going to be here all day while you . . .”
I caught myself, about to accuse him of going out gallivanting. I honestly couldn’t understand how he stuck with that job, that horrible woman who was his boss.
I remember the next moments like they are branded on my consciousness, seared in, so they can come at me again and again, any time, bring me to my knees. Abbie, see her, big blue eyes looking round to make sure she had our attention before her hand comes out and opens, quite deliberately. The egg hitting the floor. Jeff pressing his lips together in a failed effort to stop himself from laughing. Me coming over and being unable to resist pressing my face into her lovely curly head for a second to catch that unbelievable brand-new scent, the skin of her brow so soft under my lips it was almost like powder. She waved her Pooh Bear fork, smiling her triumphant, two-toothed smile.
As I picked the spilled egg from the floor, I was suddenly angry. Not just angry, furious, enraged in a scalding way I had never been before and had no idea I could be. That little shit and her fucking egg. Did she think I was her slave?
Instead of putting the mess on the table, I squeezed it in a tight fist before hurling it across the floor. Then I stood, with my teeth bared, wanting this anger. Loving the liberating heat of it, sizzling its ferocious way from my head to the burning tips of my fingers.
Abbie was still in her high chair, but had half clambered out, her face a red mask of fury. She swiped with her Winnie the Pooh fork, raking my forearm. I was going to hit her, was pulling back to do it, but suddenly Jeff was there, huge and crazy in his anger. I screamed at him and he roared back and, as he closed in, I threw a chair with everything I had, knocking him back and giving myself time to go for the knife. He hadn’t gotten up in the night, that was me, the selfish bastard.
Jeff was coming on again, his face contorted with fury but Jake was on his Father’s back, biting his neck, and I saw my chance and stabbed my husband, the carving knife going most of the way into his belly. I pulled the knife out, ready to plunge it in again, when he caught me with a roundhouse punch that smacked my head against the wall. Only my incredible burning fury kept me upright to stab him again, but his next punch caught me square in the face and my legs buckled. I was on my knees and he was beating me, pummeling me with his club like fists as blood from his belly and chest sprayed me.
I came to, my head on the kitchen floor. I was looking at Abbie, lying broken only inches from my face. There was no doubt that my baby was dead. I could hear a noise coming from my mouth as I pulled myself shakily to my knees, a keening note that I hadn’t known I had. I stopped as I caught sight of Jeff. He wasn’t dead, but was sitting glazed eyed at the base of the fridge freezer, in a pool of blood that widened even as I watched.
I whispered his name and he had to make an effort to get his eyes to focus on me. The ones that needed spectacles now, just to see the time on our clock radio. Pink froth bubbled onto his lips as he spoke. “Thought I’d killed you.”
Then he said, “I killed Abbie. Jake too.”
But Jake was getting to his feet, looking sick and bloody, but not dead. The television screen was just behind his head and my eyes swept past it and then snapped back. A guy in a bloody shirt was sprawled across the BBC Breakfast couch. The screen went blank.
I put out my arms and Jake stumbled towards me, crying out as he saw his sister, but falling into me, sobbing. Jeff said, “I don’t know what came over me. I . . . I . . .”
He closed his eyes against the horror and agony and, as I watched, his face relaxed and went slack. His hands fell from his belly.
Jake was crying into my neck and I hushed him, stroking his hair. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move beyond rocking my little boy. Couldn’t believe any of this was real. Two minutes ago, I had been trying to feed Abbie egg that she wanted to push into her ears. Jake whispered, “I wanted to hurt you, Mummy.”
I tried to talk but all that came out was “M-m-m-m. T-t-t-t-t.” Like my mouth had lost the ability to form words.
But Jake was crying out and pulling himself into me and I needed to do something for him, my boy. I got myself onto my shaky legs and picked him bodily up, thinking to dial 999. Instead, I glanced out of the window.
The street was in chaos. There had been accidents, cars on the pavement, bodies strewn about the road. People, some injured, were stumbling about, confused, distraught. Like survivors of a bomb or an earthquake.
I slumped back down onto the slippery floor, pulled my live child to my chest and my dead baby into my lap and howled.
After a while I had to get us out of there. TV was still dead, but someone was sobbing quietly on Radio 2. No luck raising anybody on my phone and the few Facebook posts were of people saying they had killed their partners or children or parents.
Jeff was lying dead and so was my beautiful baby. But I had to leave them, get out of that blood smelling house. The electricity had died so the lifts were out, and there were people on the landings, looking stunned, some of them as bloody as me. One or two tried to talk to me as I hurried past, asking what had happened or for help, but most didn’t.
I had it in mind to drive to Marcus and Angela’s house, thinking Marcus, the policeman, would know what to do. But driving wasn’t an option. I pulled Jake close and we walked fast, avoiding looking at the faces around us.
That walk was a horror in itself, but we finally reached the detached house in the suburbs. Nobody answered my knock, so I opened the door onto the neat little hall. Nobody answered my call either, so I walked tentatively inside, keeping Jake close.
Angela was in the bedroom, strangled, I was sure, with Little Mark beside her. I hurried Jake away, even though he had seen much worse carnage on the way, these deaths were more intimate. Then Marcus was coming through the front door, a big man with a crazy look in his eye, holding a pistol.
He asked, “Have you been in the bedroom?”
Not sure what to say to be safe, I just nodded. He held the gun out, butt first.
“This happens again, don’t hesitate. Not for a second. Shoot me.”
Then he asked, “Is Jeff here?”
I took the gun before answering. Didn’t answer while I looked at it, making sure of where the safety was.
I said, “Sorry.”
The shudder that went through him came close to taking his legs away. Then he rallied. “Just the two of you? You and Jake?”
“Yea.”
“Looks like Jeff caught you a couple of good ones before . . . whatever.”
He pushed past me then, going into the kitchen, saying we should drink whiskey. A lot of it. Coming behind him, I asked about the Police, but he waved it away. “I walked into the station, right to the gun room, got the Glock and walked away.”
I can’t remember if we did drink whiskey, but I recall him going into the garden and Jake saying, “Uncle Marcus is digging.”
We buried his wife and child. My husband and baby were still lying in the flat and I couldn’t imagine doing anything about that.
The next day Marcus took the pistol from me, taking it into the garden, to where his family were. He said, “Come and get it, after. Keep it hidden, OK?”
I ran after him and grabbed his arm, suddenly angry. I was briefly terrified of my rage, but, no, this was just normal anger. “We need you! We need you to be the policeman.”
He looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and threw my arm off.
The following day, we walked out, Jake and I. We met people in the street, none of whom knew I had the gun and some of whom asked what was going on, like I might know. We made our way to the Council offices, hoping someone would be there, someone who knew something and could be in charge. Smoke was billowing from the big, blocky, ugly building. Someone standing nearby said, “Well, at least something good has come out of this.”
We walked to a church, seeing people milling around. I didn’t really believe in a God, but we went in. The person standing in front of the altar was a nun, with a badly battered face. She was saying none of us knew God’s mind, sobbing as she spoke, but managing to speak loudly enough that I could hear right at the back. Then she said, “But we know he must have a reason. Why we survived when so many others didn’t.”
That didn’t go down well, people were shouting. Somebody calling out that all us survivors were murderers. We had murdered our own families, for fuck’s sake. Only the killers had been spared.
That kicked something off and suddenly fighting erupted. We got out of there.
Two days later, the electricity came back on. The day after that, the television, constantly tuned to BBC 1, displayed the banner, PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT TO FOLLOW SHORTLY.
It didn’t follow shortly, but at least it followed. A government spokesman behind a desk, somebody I had never seen before. He spent several minutes noisily sorting the hand-written papers in front of him, frowning, as though he didn’t know he was being broadcast. Then he cleared his throat and told us . . .
What did he tell us? That they knew next to fuck all apart from, on 3rd August at 08:14 hours GMT everybody in the whole world seemed to have an episode of uncontrollable rage. It was not known how many had died, but it was a lot. Military personnel were particularly badly hit, what with them having weapons. No truth to the rumor that it was a plot originating in Russia; they were hit as badly as anyone else.
Government was beginning to re-form, but it was patchy and not known when basic services would be returned. He urged people in certain jobs like police and medical services to return to work, saying he knew how hard that would be but we had to get back on our feet, as communities, as a nation.
Then he said, it is not known if this episode is a one-off anomaly, or if it will be repeated. His composure, which had been fairly good up to that point, cracked. But he got it back together and said, the episode took us all by surprise. It may be different if we are prepared for it.
He didn’t look like he believed that and I wondered who he had killed.
Over the following weeks, a new normal came close to taking hold. The electricity was sporadic and the city reeked but trucks appeared with food and water. I was torn between keeping Jake by me at all times and wanting to lock him away. I thought, if I feel it coming again I’ll blow my own brains out.
Twenty-two days after the first episode, I shot my Jake to death.
I can’t remember much about the weeks and months that followed and it’s a wonder that I survived. I wandered, my head scoured clear of coherent thought. I walked under clouded moons and clear stars and bright suns and through rain and snow. I slept in wet ditches and stately homes and supermarkets. I was shot at and chased by dogs and half-starved and once someone burned down the house I was sleeping in and I spent a day chasing her down to shoot her like a dog.
I drank wine and vodka till I was unconscious then woke up and started again. I woke one day in a bed in a chintzy bedroom and being warm, an alien feeling by that time. I was hooked up to a clear drip.
I sat up and found I was wearing old style pajamas, blue striped cotton, men’s. No gun in sight. The room had floral wallpaper and smelled vaguely musty. I tore the line from my arm and wobbled to the door, but found it locked. I was about to kick and hit it, but knocked instead.
As soon as the person on the other side of the door spoke, I knew it was an elderly man.
“You’re awake.”
“The door is locked.”
“Ah, yes, I’m sorry. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty rough, to be honest. But not murderous in any way, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
I could almost hear him thinking, this old man who had dressed me in his own pajamas and hooked me to a saline drip. Taken my gun away. Finally, the door opened.
He was hairless, small, smaller than me, and looked about eighty. I could have knocked him over easily, even in my current state. I said, “Why aren’t you pointing the pistol at me?” He shrugged, “Do I need to, do you think?”
“No.”
“You were badly dehydrated. Malnourished. I thought you were dead, when I found you.”
When I shrugged again he said, “What we’ve all been through . . .” It seemed he couldn’t find the right words to end the sentence, so asked, “Are you hungry?”
It turned out I was. Afterwards I said, “I better go. Before the next . . .”
“Episode?”
“That seems a weedy kind of word for it.”
He sat back and laced his fingers together. “I think we’re safe enough, for a few days yet.”
He said it with such confidence that I had to ask why.
“I’ve been tracking the episodes and, although there’s a wide range, there is definitely a pattern. It always happens between seven and nine a.m., for a start.”
“What time is it now?”
“Nearly eleven.”
“Ok. I’m still not sure I trust it.”
“The time between episodes has been between 21 and 27 days. Always within that range, do you see?”
“But hang on, how many times has it happened?”
He laughed at that, and clapped his hands. Like this was fun.
“Very good, very good! You are quite correct, we are working from a very limited sample. It has occurred twelve times.”
“What were you, a statistician?”
“Lucky for you, a retired GP.”
Then he said, “You are the first live person I’ve seen since January.”
“What happened to the last one?”
I expected him to say, I killed them, but he threw his hands in the air. “I waved, but he wouldn’t come near, not even within shouting distance. There can’t be many of us left.”
Tim and I lived together then, and it worked in its way. It was easy to find food and I put some weight back on. During the danger periods, I decamped to another house, too far away for us to reach each other. He had managed to record himself in a rage, or episode as he called it. It lasted 32 seconds.
Tim had been an environmental activist, before, and had theories about why this had happened; the Earth taking steps to put itself in balance. He rigged up a radio set and would broadcast regularly, but never managed to contact anyone. One evening, when we were drinking wine after a meal, he said, “Something you should know. I can still manage an erection and I ejaculate.”
I was staring at him, my wine glass in my hand. “Congratulations.”
“I’m serious.”
“What are you saying?”
“That it’s not beyond us to find a way to rear children. To manage our condition.”
The thought of becoming pregnant, having a baby, bringing it into a world where I would be its mother. I didn’t make it to the sink in time.
Still gasping and choking, I rounded on him. “Is that why you saved me?”
Not long after, during one of Tim’s safe periods, we attacked each other and I killed him with my bare hands.
It was two months later when I met my next living person, a boy who stepped out behind me to say, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“You’re alive then.”
He took a couple of paces closer so he was only about ten feet away. It hurt to look at him, just a young boy, ducking his head, shy. If Jake had lived . . . I shook that away.
I asked, “Do you always do this? Make contact?”
“You think that’s crazy?”
“Depends on if you want to stay alive.”
“I have a question that I like to ask.”
OK, something about this seemed wrong, the sideways way this kid was looking at me, sly, like he expected something. I said, “Let me guess. Why, oh why did this terrible thing happen?”
He was shaking his head, irritated. “No! No, not why. Who. Who has done this to us.”
I let my hand wander to my chest, almost touching the pistol. “You think this is being done to us?”
“And you think I’m the crazy one? Jesus Christ!”
“Well, who then, Mr. Answers?”
“It’s obvious. Aliens.”
“Really. You think?”
He threw his hand at me, annoyed. “Yes, I think. They’ve been doing their research on us for years.”
“None of that was ever . . .”
It was as if he couldn’t stay still. I wondered if maybe he had been taking drugs, you could just walk into any pharmacy. “You expected they were going to be our chums? Or maybe come down here and shoot it out with us?”
“OK. I see your point. Calm down, though, eh?”
He caught himself. Then he looked at me slit eyed, nodding, like I had just confirmed something for him. “See how it works? We’re finished. Easy as pie.”
I took a step back, away from him “I knew a wise old man. He thought it was the Earth, having had enough of us. Getting rid of us before we destroyed it.”
“Is he still alive?”
“He wasn’t that wise.” I took another step away. “And I met a holy woman who thought that this was God’s judgement. And a guy who said we were a failed experiment, that we had an inbuilt self-destruct button.”
“That’s all shit.”
“Probably. My point is, the only thing we know for sure, is that it happened.”
The way the boy was looking at me now. I took another step away. He took a step forward.
“Tell yourself that, if it helps.”
“OK, how’s this? If aliens do land, I’ll come find you. Give you a high five.”
Another step forward, two more, and we were only a few feet apart, so he could whisper and still be heard. “How long till we lose it next, d’you think?”
I’d had enough of this creepy boy. “I’ve no idea why you’re still alive.”
I slid my hand inside my jacket, but he was already pointing his gun at me, grinning.
“That’s easy. I was fucking furious from the start.”