This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Anyone depicted or inferred as having sex is eighteen or older.
A romance in two parts. Part 1 of 2. The hardest part was keeping pace with reality!
The English summer of 2020 became the warmest since records began. Sun scorched through day after day of cloudless skies in May, June and July, beating even the idyllic heat of '76. Back then, as in 2003, people bitched about the melting tarmac, traffic jams, sleepless night and browned lawns. Pub gardens filled with thirsty, sunburned office workers and rusting barbecues competed to smoke out suburban neighborhoods. They might pretend hardship, but everyone found an excuse to coast and have a glorious time. Except this year turned out far from normal.
2020 began with news of atypical pneumonia in a city far away. A place that meant little to anyone. Bat soup, they explained. The reason people got sick. No need to worry, said the mayor of Wuhanâjust a dirty wet market. Move along, nothing to see here. But there was. Eleven-million people watched a city close around them, before the world's largest pilgrimage at Lunar New Year. By the end of January, fifty-seven-million people fretted inside HubeiâThe Chinese People's Armed Police Force welded their doors closed as a reminder.
All too late. Every fucking time, always too late. Seventeen years along, a world order that learned nothing from SARS played politics and lost time that would cost humanity dear. The Chinese Communist Party, who lied their way to power, murdering forty-five million of their own people in the great leap forward, who shot, or squashed with tanks, their own protesting students only thirty-one years ago. The same old men with their dyed hair and sad suits that bought influence from Washington to Wagga Wagga told the United Nations they had its back and bought a muppet to front the WHO. A desperate CCP, bribing the planet to believe its bullshit. And the tragedy is, it did.
By the third week of March, a global pandemic blew through a hundred fifty thousand. Five and a half thousand dead. Covid-19 wanted to prove something.
The President of the United States of America, campaigning for re-election, declared the virus a hoax. Like a CCP echo, he assured 328 million people everything was under control and '
we're on top of it'.
He promised a vaccine 'within months', denied any responsibility and advocated prayer. Two subjects dominated the US media in Marchâthe numbers falling over, and the democratic primaries. By the end, no-one cared who'd face off against the GOP in November because congressmen of both stripes fell sick and died.
A month later, the orange man was in a boxâone more old-person corpse, a boomer removed. His wife didn't stick around for him to drop in the hole. She boarded a private plane to Chile the next day. His vice-president, sworn in on TV, sweated, coughed, and expired inside a week. Two Democratic geriatrics went the same way within days of each other. The worlds' largest power fell to its knees. And the people trembled.
As thirty cities in the US with over a half-million locked down, the Corp of Engineers dug trenches across freeways from California to Connecticut. With airports shuttered and food running out, masks, the focus of so much attention a month before, became irrelevant. For Americans shut inside the horror of a broken medical system, it turned into a question of when, not if.
The British Prime Minister, emboldened after his election landslide, who still walked around without a mask and shook hands with asymptomatic carriers in March, buried his fiancĂŠe and unborn child the first week of May, and together with his surviving cabinet retired to the underground bunker from which the country expected government during a national crisis. No-one ever learned they died before June because of
The Media
. The Media, reporting important events and commenting upon public opinion for centuries, since the black death, instead reduced to commenting on food riots and marauding gangs murdering people in their homes for baked beans, toilet paper and pasta. They blinked out, one by one, as a cloud passes over a star. None of them reported on the ninety-year-old queen that disappeared from public view in April. How do you even have media when people are starving, dropping in the street and the ad revenues stop? Want to tweet or eat? The Zuckerberg empire, out of cash and without functioning banks, evaporated.
The flu kills more; they said in January. When summer comes, it will blow away like so many dandelion seedsâ
he loves me, he loves me not
. The symptoms are mildâmore dangerous to cross the street. Except now, in September, the empty roads couldn't kill anyone. If you had the virus and recoveredâit struck again. If you didn't, but still needed care, they took your bed anyway. Without food to deliver or people to buy, trucks sat parked up everywhere, post-modern monsters willing human life to evaporate. Fifty million died in June alone, a billion in July, and by August no-one gave a shit.
In Shoreditch, London, a man of medium height, with blue eyes and in rather more need of a shave than his patchy beard, clattered up the shutter of a small cafe. These days more desperate community center than coffee shop, the place grew to include a wall of notices, a corner table with tools and a small rack of free warm clothes, which ebbed and flowed with the park sleepers still avoiding human contact. Tom never explained why this place still existed when all logic suggested it closeâand no-one asked. Ten years ago, he opened, and this was what he did.
The cafe did not have customers so much as clients. Every day, fewer people showed up as the tail of CE took them. As the last public services closed in July, that's what they blamedâthe Coronavirus Extinction. The only functioning serviceâthe tumbrel-men who drove around collecting bodies for the massive lime pits on Hampstead Heath in return for almost anythingâsex mainly. Money and jewelry, watches and electronics have no value after an extinction, being the artificial constructs of an extinct society. Everyone will die, so why not fuck yourself to death?
Tom's cafe, once a thriving hipster haunt, no longer chalked a menu on its blackboard. People brought food, stolen from others or supermarkets, and Tom cooked it. Noodles, rice, vegetable soup and anything that might fit in a gas fryer. He closed at sundown because no-one came after dark and gas-lighting made the place look desperate, like a drug den. Prices became comically irrelevant, so he cooked what turned up and charged what he thought, or gave it away. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except to keep going. Life without electricity became a matter of adapting, but when the water stopped, a city with continuous occupation since AD 43 would die. Already, the streets teemed with rats, fighting with each other and becoming more fearless each day their old foe died out.
Earlier, he'd baked flat bread with flour from a sack they gave him yesterday as a trade for sweetcorn soup and fried chicken, only just expired. A young city guy in an expensive suit tore off chunks at the tool table, chewing as he wound packing wire round the ends of a bracelet, trying it for size around his neck.
"My wife's," he explained, "the only thing I have left. When I go, I want to be wearing it. Hope it's ugly enough that the tumbs don't nick it."
"They're only interested in one thing, now," Tom said. The guy dropped the pliers back in the tray and gazed at the wall.
"So this is what it's come toâJesus Christ, I hope I'm gone soon. Doesn't it worry you?"
"I'll go when my time comes," said Tom. In his mind, his wife of ten years, her still-beautiful icy body buried in her beloved Richmond Park, near the spot where they met.
Outside, they hear a frantic squeal of tires and the roar of a performance car being driven at ludicrous speed through deserted streetsâa low yellow object flashes past the cafe and without slowing, spins, shrieking, under full power into something hard along the street. Seconds later there's a woof as the gas tank ruptures.
"That's how I want to go," the guy says, "not rotting away in bed, but like that." He walks away as Tom surveys the carnage. The car is ablaze with several others, but someone is down and screaming for help. For a moment he turns on his heelsâthe guy was right with his
'what's the point'
. But when his humanity kicks in, Tom runs.
The girl is in shock and bleeding from a leg wound. Tom rolls her over and recognizes the face. She came in a week back, borrowed a screwdriver and returned it the next morning, staying for congee and paying with a gold ring which he refused. Why, if a god exists, does he allow this? An innocent maimed.
In the cafe, she shakes as he cuts up the leg of the jeans and winces as alcohol hits the raw flesh. It's a jagged, shallow cut, but her ankle is swelling.
"It almost hit me," she said, reliving the horror, "then the car exploded, and I felt the sting."
"Okay, you're clean now but you need to rest," he said, standing.
"I can'tâmy dad's dying."
"Where do you live?"
"Swanfield."
"I'm in Camlet street. Round the corner. Can you wait? Need to clean up here."
"Don't worry about me, it's only a matter of time for each of us," she said, "I only want to have him go without pain. It's not CVâhe's a diabetic with cancer, as if that makes any difference."
Hands on hips, Tom took in the girl, her leg on a chair, preparing to die yet comforting another. Was it this that kept him going? Running this ridiculous place for what purpose? Patching up stuff on the way out; sweeping and dusting life's room before turning off the lights.
