Last of the Living

2

2STUART

SUNDAY 10 MAY – 1:14am

So the others are in bed but there ’ s no point me going up yet. I know I won ’ t sleep. Gabby went up early but I stayed down to watch a film. I sat through the whole thing, but didn ’ t take any of it in. Too much on my mind.

What we saw in the supermarket was shocking. Sickening. There ’ s been reports of similar things on the news over the last few days, but seeing it in the flesh like that was so much worse.

What we get on BBC and SKY is the safe, sanitised, watered-down version of events, the bits they want us to see. We ’ re spared the gory details, and because it ’ s what we ’ re used to, we don ’ t question it. They show endless footage of wars, but you hardly ever see any blood. You see all those cities in ruins, buildings crumbling, desperate people searching through the rubble... but you ’ re always watching it from a safe distance. You can ’ t smell it. You can ’ t taste it. You can ’ t feel it. All that changed today.

We didn ’ t think anything of it when we saw the first reports. Just one or two cases... nothing much in isolation. There ’ s a new disease doing the rounds every couple of months, and for all the panicked predictions, they never seem to amount to much. There was Swine Flu a few years back, Bird Flu before that, and then there was that virus they found buried in the Siberian permafrost that had been dead for thirty-thousand years but which some d**k in a lab managed to bring back to life. But this season ’ s killer syndrome of choice is different. It came after the annual flu surge and caught everyone unawares. Seems it was something in this year ’ s mutation of the flu that opened the door to this new germ. The first epidemic paved the way for the next.

But back to the news...

I was sitting here with Gab and I remember the bulletin clear as day. They were talking about how this particular infection strikes its victims all of a sudden. It literally knocks them off their feet. One minute they seem fine, half an hour later and they ’ re flat on their backs in the middle of a supermarket aisle, apparently out for the count.

And this is where the TV version of events differs from what we saw today.

On the news they talked about infected people ’ s salivary glands working overtime, constantly dribbling and drooling, some kind of involuntary reaction after they ’ ve lost consciousness. But I don ’ t know... that ’ s not what I saw today. I mean sure, she lost consciousness, that much was obvious, but it ’ s what happened next that doesn ’ t tie up. She attacked that poor shop girl and she was doing everything she could to get spit all over her. She was definitely conscious, and she was definitely hurling or drooling or whatever, over the girl. It was controlled, it was violent, and it was frightening as hell.

It doesn ’ t add up.

And now I ’ m left sitting here on my own in the middle of the night, sleep the very furthest thing from my mind, thinking why are they lying about this? Don ’ t people need to know? If these sick people are out on the streets, shouldn ’ t somebody be telling us or doing something about it?

It ’ s probably just me, blowing the whole thing out of proportion.

I ’ d like to know what happened to the supermarket worker who got caught today, though. Maybe she ’ s all right tonight, maybe she ’ s out drinking with her friends, trying to forget about the day from hell she ’ s just survived.

But what if she isn ’ t?

And what about the woman? Did they restrain her? How many more people could she have drooled over on the way from the supermarket to the hospital?