Last of the Living

3

3STUART

TUESDAY 19 MAY – 10:54am

I have the radio on as I work. It used to be a distraction that got me through the tedium of the day, now the work ’ s the distraction. Concentrating on the stuff the boss tells me makes it easier to block out everything else. See, I think something big ’ s going on here. Part of me thinks I ’ m wrong because no one else seems to be reacting, but then I look at the facts and I know I ’ m right about this. See, I think this should be the main headline, but they ’ re treating it like an afterthought, squeezing in a mention between the local news and the weather reports.

I know I ’ m coming across like a conspiracy theorist here, but the mainstream media changed the way they talked about the infection a few days ago. I can ’ t help thinking they ’ re trying to make it look like less of a big deal than I know it is. They ’ re still talking about isolated cases and extreme reactions, but if you dig a bit deeper and start looking at the unofficial news – people ’ s f*******: timelines and tweets, all that kind of stuff – it paints a very different picture.

I can ’ t do it here on the office computer, but I can see stuff on my phone. You look at some of the crank sites (at least I used to think they were cranks), all the sites for Preppers and the like, and they ’ re all full of it. They ’ re all saying the exact same thing. They ’ re reporting huge numbers of cases. Well huge by comparison to the ten o ’ clock news, anyway. I found this report from a kid in Aberdeen. Something like what happened to the woman in the supermarket happened to a friend of his, apparently. How much of this was bullshit I don ’ t know, but it made for pretty disturbing reading. He was talking about his friend having gotten sick after one of his sick relatives (who subsequently died or disappeared, I ’ m not sure which) had coughed up gunk all over him. He dropped in the middle of the street without any warning. A few minutes later and he was up again, literally spewing bile over anyone he could get close to. He puked up over more than ten people before anyone could stop him. Just one sick kid.

Thing is, if this is as bad as I ’ m thinking and this is how this infection spreads, then what ’ s happening is scattershot, isn ’ t it? One infected person could contaminate a whole street if they ’ re not stopped and sedated in time.

I ’ m finding gaps in explanations, holes in stories, unexpected spaces where there should be information. And no one else is questioning it.

Right now, all this is little more than gossip. No one ’ s sounding particularly worried, and that ’ s strange in itself because people are usually happy to panic. Christ, I remember what happened after nine-eleven. I was on work experience in a law firm in the middle of the city centre, halfway up a twenty storey building. The days and weeks after the attack people were talking crap about how friends of friends of friends had been approached by an Arabic-looking gentleman at the train station, warning them to stay out of city centre high-rises. I remember the mild panic when someone spotted a plane circling, but it was just a light aircraft. If you looked close enough, you could see a TV logo painted on its tail. It was a bloody weather forecaster doing circuits for local radio, nothing more sinister.

People don ’ t ever stop and analyse. They either ignore what ’ s in front of their noses or jump to conclusions and make assumptions without realising what they ’ re doing. Why would terrorists launch an attack on our office, for Christ ’ s sake? Hardly a key tactical target, was it? And would anyone really have been so inspired by what they ’ d seen across the Atlantic as to want to fly a small plane into the side of a building in Digbeth? I doubt it. People can be so bloody stupid at times.

Now it ’ s the reverse, though. Now I think something is happening, but people have got their heads buried in the sand because that ’ s easier than facing up to what might be coming.

This started overseas. South Sudan had a head start on the rest of the world for once. On the radio now there ’ s a report from the UN where some specially convened meeting is discussing sudden huge rises in the rates of infection in other parts of Africa. And my colleagues are still casually talking about the football and who got voted off the latest shite reality TV programme last night, because what ’ s happening over there , isn ’ t happening over here . Not yet. Not in the same kind of numbers, anyway.

But if you look back at reports from those other countries, I think you can see a pattern emerging. It all started the same way. I think it ’ s only a matter of time.