Artwork: The Four Vomiters by Will Jacques

Season of the Dead
J.S. Watts

 

I still can’t work out if it was ironic or simply plain malicious that so many of us died just as spring was blossoming, sending up new shoots of fresh, green hope. To die with so much beautiful, flourishing life around you is a cruel joke. I’d ask you what you thought about it, but I don’t want to disturb you. You look peaceful.

At the end, I guess it doesn’t matter. Dead is dead, whichever way you look at it.

Initially, I looked at it without fear and as little more than a minor inconvenience.

It started out as just another virus scare and we’d had so many of them in recent years. Like all the times before, we were told to wear face masks – then not to bother to wear face masks, because they don’t stop you getting it, just limit the spread of it if you already have it (which was hunky dory for everyone else, but not so much for the wearer) – to wear face masks because everything was spreading too quickly; to behave normally, but wash our hands thoroughly in hot soapy water for at least twenty seconds – not to wash our hands so much as dry, cracked skin harbours the virus; to come back to work from retirement because the country needs us to keep working – not to go to work and to isolate ourselves at home. The list of contradictions seemed never ending. In the end, it seemed simpler to do nothing.

If I was blasé to begin with, you, I admit, were concerned. You constantly checked the never-ending public service announcements and did what you were told, but it didn’t make you feel any better. You overstocked our food cupboard with cold pills, water, dried pasta, baked beans and custard powder, but you didn’t feel any safer or more in control. You ended up sleeping badly and were forever washing your hands. It was a shame you didn’t think to bulk-buy hand soap and hand cream. I hated your anxiety. It was irritating and seemed so pointless.

I took everything with the maximum pinch of salt. I mean, they kept telling us that most of us would experience little more than a mild cold. Okay, some unfortunates would develop lower respiratory tract infections and, of those, some would prove to be acutely ill and the really unlucky would die, but, hey, it was only a few poor souls and they were going to be the ones who already had multiple, serious health problems or were very old and already at the end of their lives.

Except...
Except the people who were allegedly keeping us informed lied. Whether they knew they were lying, is another matter. Once you caught the virus, and you were going to catch the virus, at best it seemed like flu, a really bad dose of flu, but mostly it was worse: immediate lower respiratory tract infection, intensive care, death. A whole overflowing graveyard of death.

Perhaps I should have realised earlier. There was a hell of a lot of reassuring guidance and instructions for something that was only going to be akin to a mild cold. You said as much, didn’t you?

“If it’s that insignificant for the vast majority, Jill, why the constant stream of dos and don’ts? The daily, detailed, public health announcements? It doesn’t make sense. We should be taking this really seriously.”

But I put you and your theories down, like I always did, and by the time the truth was out and in our faces, you didn’t feel like saying, “I told you so”. You should have done. I deserved it.

Because it wasn’t just the multiple deaths. There was also what they called “multiple, repeat infection”, as if getting the virus once wasn’t enough.

Except...
Except the description of multiple repeat infection was another lie. What was actually happening to people was that they were contracting the virus once and dying, but not staying dead. They didn’t get over the virus. The virus never left them. It just kept them going beyond their sell-by date.

Observers saw illness, then improvement, then a reoccurrence of illness. When they tested in response to the second illness, they found the virus and assumed it had reoccurred. They didn’t test to see if it had ever gone away or if the patient was still alive. That seemed obvious.

At least that was how I saw it. Others, including you, said different: that medics, retired or not, could not not know that a patient was dead; that all that was happening was that the virus was reoccurring and cumulatively weakening further those who were already weakened. The more they weakened, the more they succumbed to the virus. With each pass it got worse until they died, even if you started out robustly healthy and with a strong immune system.

But I have heard the dead talking. I know what I know.

It’s not as if they were rampaging, flesh-hungry zombies, like in the horror movies we used to watch together. The poor sods didn’t even know they were dead. They weren’t interested in a flesh-protein brunch of bleeding brains. Their next hit was inevitably a drug-based cold and flu remedy. Little good it did them, though. Dead is dead, whether you die first and exist on for a virus-infested while longer, giving the virus an extended opportunity to infect still living organisms, or whether you just dwindle, peak and pine and then die the old fashioned way – once.

We did discuss it. You said, and I quote, “You’re not in you’re right mind, Jill. The enforced quarantine is getting to you. Not everyone is dying. People are, eventually, getting better. Yes, others are dying, but only once. People don’t die twice and, anyway, if it was happening like you say, they’d tell us.” You always were trusting.

Regardless, of how many times someone contracted the virus, or died, in the end the bodies lay down and then started piling up. The large number of medics amongst them meant there were fewer to care for the next wave of us succumbing to the condition and so even more of us died. If truth be told, and of course it wasn’t, I don’t know if any of us really survived or whether some have just managed to sustain their ambulant dead status for a longer period than others.

No one knows how many officially died in the spring. Was it the famously quoted 1% of the World population? That’s still about 787,000,000, by my calculation, give or take a few million. But there was more to come. Who was counting, anyway? As matters grew worse, we had all locked ourselves in our homes preparing to die, or in the forlorn hope of protecting ourselves from the virus, or the looters who had taken to ransacking private houses when the shops ran out of food.

The ban on mass gatherings and social events further encouraged our retreat behind locked gates. I’m surprised those with the virus weren’t officially required to lock themselves inside their homes and daub the plague sign on their front doors, but I honestly think that most of us chose to retreat. We just wanted to crawl away and get it over with. Even you. Well, you had contracted the virus by then.

I suspect our natural urge to run away and hide played into the government’s hands, assuming it was them who were manipulating things. The free press should also be applauded for contributing to the mass hysteria. I especially liked the screaming headlines from our local news provider: VIRUS HAS SPREAD TO NEIGHBOURING COUNTIES – HERTFORDSHIRE, KENT AND DEVON. Have you checked a map of this island recently? There isn’t a single location that can claim to be neighbours to all three of those diverse counties. Nevertheless, hysterical headlines like that succeeded in raising anxiety levels and generating panic amongst the geographically challenged.

There were rumours that the virus had escaped from a lab, rather than being the food-inspired, we’ll eat anything we can kill, evolution from animal to human that was officially stated to be the cause. Of course, if it had escaped from a lab, it didn’t have to be one of ours. The whole damn thing went international in a few short weeks, so it could have come from any lab, any government, any organisation, come to that. If I were a non-terrestrial, wanting to invade Earth, I’d send down a virus to wipe out a swathe of the population, weaken others and totally distract everyone from anything coming from the skies. Or, and this is the cause I favour, it could just have been Mother Nature cleaning herself up a bit, wiping out the spreading infection of humanity with a virus of her own. I guess we’re never going to know, though.

Whatever the cause, it was a spring of death rather than traditional re-birth.

Birth? Spring? Death? So, where was I? I’m finding that my thinking is getting a little blurry. It could be the fever, or the amount of pills I’ve been popping. Not that they do any good.

I find I am losing the plot more often these days, and you’re not going to prompt me, are you? I’m tempted to try to wake you up, but at last you look peaceful and I’m hoping that this time there will be no waking up, that you are finally really dead, not the dead-limbo of the virus. I wasn’t certain the carving knife would work. You can’t be too sure about the un-dead, but I chose a big one and it seems to have done the trick. Despite your repeated assertions that you were getting better, you were so far gone, I don’t think you even noticed.

It was a mercy killing, honest, except of course that you were already dead, one way or another. You had the virus, so even if you weren’t already dead, you soon would be. No one is getting out of this alive. Do you forgive me? I was really only carrying out the wishes of our government, who have encouraged people to lock themselves away ostensibly to avoid the virus, but in practice so they can die sight unseen and without scaring whoever is left. Not that there will be many of those, soon.

Which brings me to me. Am I dying, or already dead, which is actually one and the same depending on how you look at it, but in either event, how much longer can I expect this horror to go on for? Stabbing you was easy, but I’m surprisingly hesitant about doing it to myself. I could just sit here with you, my endless boxes of tissues and those in-effective cold and flu remedies and wait for nature, or whatever, to take its course. We all die eventually. It’s just that I hadn’t expected to go at this age or before I got to see summer, but I guess Mother Nature is determined to do a thorough spring-clean.

 

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