Survivors

He walks through soft, gently rising meadow, anticipating the view of his valley home that the low summit ahead will provide. He has been away for too long. But where has he been? What could have taken him away from the land he loves? His mind lingers on that mystery for a moment before the scent of summer grass once more envelopes him in a warm embrace and beckons him on. As he walks, buttercups and poppies appear in the grass. He’d not noticed them before, but now he is surrounded by bright blooms that tremble in the warm, summer breeze, their heads nodding to the bees that buzz erratically among them.

And look! A large grey bird, a heron, taking off and flying low over the field, casting a small shadow beneath its wings until they carry it steadily higher into the deep blue sky, and away. How long has it been since he’s seen one of those?

Not far now. A small knot forms in his stomach; an anxiety that seems out of place, that feels wrong and yet, perhaps, is just the nerves of a traveller returning home. Where has he been? He pushes the thought aside. Nearly there – just a few more steps and the valley he knows so well will be revealed before him like a rug unrolled to reveal its rich splendour.

He reaches his viewpoint, but the valley seems reluctant to reveal its splendour today. It hides beneath a cloak of low-lying cloud. There is a moment only to reflect on the strangeness of this before the wind rises suddenly. The shroud is torn away in an instant and the valley below is suddenly, brutally, exposed. Not in the summer shades of green, reds and blues. Yellow, no grey, it seems to stretch forever, dirty rubble lying below a choking, putrid haze.

He staggers back, turns, only to see that the field he has just climbed is already being swallowed by the same decay; the green grass shrivelling to dark, parched dust. He turns again, to face the brutally exposed crater, terror gripping his heart, the knot in his stomach nearly choking his breathing, dust tearing water from his eyes. A wind races across the dead valley floor below, whipping up the dust and debris. Suddenly it is a horse – a dead, dusty silhouette without eyes, racing up the hillside towards him. It is joined by others, charging, chasing him down. He is too slow to turn and outrun them. As they open their mouths to bellow their anger, he is engulfed in their dusty forms. He runs, stumbles, but the horses continue to suffocate him, their shrill calls filling his ears, his lungs, his mind….

He awakes to the sound of the bell and the scrape of a dish being shoved under the metal grill towards him. It is followed by the prod of a stick; he is never sure if its intent is to prompt him to eat, or check he is still alive. The food is the usual gruellish grey; unpleasant to smell, unpleasant to eat, but all that is available. And it sustains him. No, more than that, he is thriving on this grey, lumpy stew. Thriving in a way that defeats all sense for, he is not just putting on fat, but perhaps muscle too. How long has he been here? Weeks? A month perhaps? Time is difficult to measure in the cell, but certainly, almost certainly, not longer than a month. And yet he has grown a body he no longer recognises as his own. His arms and legs, previously lean, are chunky, and his chest is huge. He can no longer feel his ribs; his fingers cannot penetrate the deep flesh to feel the bone beneath. 

And yet, for all his size, he is weak. He feels his weakness as he clambers unsteadily to his feet and relieves himself in the corner of the cell. The solid metal walls become bars at chest height and so, standing, he can see the cells beyond his own. Dozens, all similarly occupied by a solitary, heavy beast of a man. In the early days, they spoke. Hushed questions they have no answers to; shared pities that drifted away with the ventilation to whatever lies beyond; memories shared in a sewer of despondency. Now, they rarely talk – they just wait.

Time, slowly, painfully dissolves in slumberous sickening emptiness, until, with a distant click, darkness, returns. Sleeping on the hard floor at night is little different to the monotonous drowsing of day, but the tormented moans from other cells’ occupants and shadows that flit behind the eyes, weaken his defences to the memories that siege his mind.

Reality bleeds into nightmare; nightmare into reality, as his mind chases for reason in a maze of anger, and hopeless, weary torment. A moment of coherent thought reminds him that he was an accountant, a job he’d not necessarily enjoyed, but one that he’d been good at. Nobody needs accountants now. The Stroke has seen to that. 

Stroke; what a strange name for an event that killed billions. It sounds so harmless; so gentle. He’d enjoyed stroking his dog, his fiancées cheek. Not fair to taint the word and the memories it held and disguise the end as a fleeting brush of history. Who decides these things now? Who in the new interim government is able to infect a word and apply it to a self-made cataclysm? It is cruelty upon cruelty.

In the darkness of night, his mind tries to make sense of what followed. The Stroke had changed so much. Like so many others with skills that were no longer valued, he had become spare, an unnecessary and unsustainable drain on society. He’d been listed on the register but opportunities to work were limited and he was two years short of the official age for priority work allocation. Time runs out; time always runs out, though we act as though it is limitless…

He’s drifting into half-sleep again. There’s a mouse running round the clock screaming hickory dickory dock…

There had been a clock, a big clock behind the lady at the registry...

She explains his options – none of them are good. But a period in select detention, bulking up so that he is better able to contribute to the new society seems the least bad. He signs the papers.

They come for him early. It seems unnecessary. Escape is impossible. Could he have run? Would he have? Rumours persist of havens on the far side of the desert. He doesn’t believe them. They are no more than wished for dreams. Yet, still he resents that they have come early.

They appear at his door with forms, and weapons they claim they don’t want to use, but the eyes of the younger one speak differently. He is stripped of his belongings, his identity, and loaded on to a lorry with, perhaps a dozen other sad-eyed men he barely sees in the shade of dark memory dreams. Most, he supposes, are younger than him. He doesn’t look at them. He is alone in the darkness, screaming in silence. 

Somewhere, the lorry enters the tunnels. There is a shudder, and then emptiness….

The dream evaporates into memories that burst violently through the walls of consciousness. He is lying on the floor of his cell, his huge chest heaving as he gasps for breath. 

He had wanted to believe that the lorry was the worst – that transport was necessarily brutal. But, in the damp gloom of the tunnels, out of sight and out of mind, new hells had emerged. New guards, armed with electric prods they used with impunity, drove them from the trucks. Here, confusion was replaced by terror as they were first stripped of the last remnants of humanness – their clothes - and bundled as living cargoes onto a train…

No air! There is no air; no space. He fights against the writhing forms of others that oppress him from every direction; fights for each breath as heat boils his lungs and suffocates his stamina. A body falls beside him; not to the floor for there is no space; but enough to give him a window to his next breath. He feels no remorse; only gratitude… As the train continues through the underworld, he lets go of his mind and escapes.

He is awake again with the memories. Some are lost to him, but he remembers being dragged from the carriage, over the bodies of the fallen. He remembers gun shots as those too injured by the journey are disposed of. He remembers, vaguely, being sorted and he remembers the door closing on his cell; this cell. 

He is here; it is real.

Morning brings the usual click and lightness. But there is a change. There is no scrape of a dish, no grey gruel, not even a prod. Time bleeds away with a new unease…

Suddenly, there is a lot of noise, from all around. He stands so that he can see through the bars. There are guards everywhere and commotion as electric prods are used to rouse giants and drive them out to the corridors – they are being moved. His own cell door opens with crashing violence, and a guard enters. He is young, perhaps still a teenager and he is nervous. The eyes betray fear, as they always do. It is a chance. He throws himself at the guard and past him into the corridor. But another is there – a more experienced guard and the blow from the older guard’s prod turns his legs to sand. The old guard shouts obscenities at the youngster who, shamed, adds further blows to the older man’s. Together they drive him, stumbling, crawling, crying through a gap where before there had been wall, and into a corridor beyond. The guards fade away, swallowed by noise and darkness, replaced by other inmates, and he imagines he is once more aboard the train, with bodies pushing him forward into other bodies, air squeezed from his body in the confinement. 

Slowly, painfully, the bodies ahead of him shuffle away and he is forced by the crushing pressures behind to move with them. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, new sounds emerge, a conveyor perhaps; a rattle of chains. Someone screams. The scream echoes around a sudden fearful silence. And then there is panic – the pressure behind intensifies – the weight increases – the air thickens. It is worse than the train, where exhaustion and confusion had fused with the last remnants of hope to allow the mind to dull – here there is an awareness that cannot be escaped.

The corridor appears to end at a wall, terror and salvation in one sheet of steel. Whatever is there, he wants to reach it, whilst at the same time he knows he must not. The corridor narrows – it is a funnel that feeds the wall. He, and his fellow monsters, are forced onwards by the weight behind, but in single file now. Now he can see a doorway that represents, perhaps, the end of his journey. There is no door, just strips of black rubber-like material that they must pass through to escape the torment of the corridor.

Another scream – this one more gut-wrenching, more desolate, more final than the one before. It triggers renewed panic, but this time it is panic without hope. Hopelessly, they scramble at steel walls, trying to find hold where there is none, or scramble and trample over others to try and reach escape. There is no escape – the metal walls reach above their heads to bars that stretch further into the gloom - the only route available terminates at the black rubber threads.

He is next. Before the strips close behind the man ahead, the other monster’s shape has crumpled to the floor. He is next. He will not scream. He was once a man, and he will die a man. He is pushed on. The blackness opens before him. In that briefest moment, he sees his end. Bodies hanging, moving through the gloom.

There is a bang that is external and at the same time internal and a grey that closes around him, even as he feels his feet dragged into the air, enveloping him into darkness.

***

In the city, a lady pauses on her way home from a long day at work to buy groceries from the supermarket. Her daughter is with her; she has collected her from school. They are survivors; protected by wealth and position from the worst impacts of the Stroke. Life has not been easy, but gradually a new normality is taking shape – one that affords her, and her family, some of the basic commodities that they once considered essential. There have been so many shortages, so many hardships. But there is hope, and hope breeds enthusiasm and commitment to the cause. 

In the supermarket, the lady pauses at the meat counter, with her daughter, who points excitedly at the burgers. Meat, unavailable two months ago is slowly returning to the shelves, though it is expensive. Its label testifies that it is safe to eat. 

If she had considered the matter, she might have wondered that she has never seen a cow, a pig or a sheep since the Stroke. But people have long since stopped questioning where their food comes from; the Stroke has made little difference to that. So, she buys meat with little regard for it, or its label. The label that tells her it is Human Grade Meat.