Authors: Nathan Kuzack
He had no idea how the boy had come to possess immunity to the virus, and it was the possibility of its impermanence that bothered him most. Unable to sleep, he listened to the sounds of the zombies’ nocturnal activities and imagined the boy becoming infected and transforming into one of them. It hurt to think about such a thing, but it was impossible not to; the fear of it came creeping over him like hives. He’d invested so much emotion and hope in Shawn already – possibly foolishly much – that just thinking about losing him broke his heart. But the possibility of the boy’s infection also scared him on a knee-jerk, self-preservation level. If it happened Shawn wouldn’t be Shawn any more, and a zombie would be on the loose here, in his home, where it could catch him when he was totally defenceless.
He finally managed to fall asleep, only to wake not long after covered with sweat, a cry of terror half strangled in his throat. He looked around wildly before it clicked that he’d been dreaming. He couldn’t recall every detail of the nightmare, but he did know that it had involved a zombified Shawn, evil-eyed and sharp-toothed, plunging a knife into his chest. In the dim light the ghostly after-image of Shawn’s face, transformed from angelic to demonic by the virus, hovered before him. At that moment, in the dead of night of a dead world, it was more than he could bear. He got up, took a chair and wedged it under the door handle.
For a long while he lay in bed staring at the braced chair, consumed by a mixture of fear and guilt. In the end, guilt won out. He got up again and removed the chair. The impact of the dream had faded enough to reveal it for the unreality it was, and his pathetic attempt at blocking the door felt like a betrayal of the boy’s trust.
Returning to bed, he pulled the covers over himself and turned away from the door. He would face whatever was to come with the boy head-on. There would be no shutting him out.
* * *
Winter set in as the weeks passed. It was the calamity’s first winter, a season tailor-made for the post-virus age, the city turning as cold and grey as its zombified inhabitants. David covered the air vents and set about building up their stocks of food as best he could. The short days and the cold were effective deterrents to going outside, and he worried constantly about running out of food while they were in the grip of a bleak midwinter. The boy was unconcerned, declaring he’d put on weight and could live off his body fat for
x
amount of days, exhibiting coping mechanisms that continued to astound. He took delight in the slightest of pleasures, rarely complaining about their situation and always brimming with hope that it would improve. He referred to David as his “best friend”, in a hierarchy of friendship that consisted of precisely two souls: him and the cat. His primary needs were simple and practical, giving David something to focus his energies on, enough to prevent him from slipping back into his old zombie-like state of depression even without the boy’s company and conversation. It got to the point where he could barely even remember the silent emptiness of the lonely months before they had met.
Like any child, Shawn had his methods of manipulation, which tended to amuse rather than irritate, and bouts of pouting when he couldn’t have his way, but they were few and far between, and for the most part he was obedient and good-natured. It gladdened David’s heart to see the boy’s open, artless smile. Sometimes he caught himself stealing glances at him just for the warm feeling it gave him, like the ageing writer in
Death in Venice
obsessively eyeing Tadzio, the embodiment of beauty and innocence and transient youth. The boy had lifted the veil separating him from the rest of the world, changing his outlook on life beyond all recognition, and in the wake of this metamorphosis anything seemed possible. Whole rafts of survivors. The rekindling of civilisation. Happiness. He began daydreaming about living out their lives in peace, he and the boy and other survivors, in a place where there’d been no people when the virus had struck, and so was free of death and zombies – an island or a city with natural defences like a modern-day Machu Picchu. It didn’t matter how ephemeral or unrealistic his dreams were; that they entered his mind at all marked a huge sea change in attitude.
He had few qualms about the fact that the boy had become the centre of his existence. Even more so because his initial discomfort with the boy’s cybernetic status had given way to a dawning realisation: that the boy was like some impossible miracle made flesh, some priceless treasure, with he its only guard. For all he knew the boy possessed the only uninfected, properly functioning cybernetic brain in the world. Stored away inside it was a record of every scientific discovery, every great work of literature, every Oscar-winning film, every magnum opus of the classical composers. He was like a golden child, the Chosen One, the blond-haired, blue-eyed fount of all human knowledge.
But it went even deeper than this. The boy’s brainware continued to record the aftermath of the disaster. Everything he saw and heard – all the horror and insanity and injustice – was recorded and preserved. He was the proverbial witness to history; it was possible he was the only witness of his kind. And what if there were far more survivors than he’d thought possible? What if there were enough to continue civilisation and eventually repopulate the Earth? Not everything could be recorded in the pages of a book. They would need the boy’s archives and his raw computing power. For all he knew, the boy might be essential to the survival of what remained of the human race.
Yes, Shawn was special. Inconceivably special. The adjective his mother had used all those years ago, an adjective that had never been true of himself, was certainly true of the boy.
When informed of this the boy stared, open-mouthed and confused, before asking “why me?” It was another echo of his mother, this time the words she’d chanted the first day of the virus – the same question from polar opposites, the boy asking why he’d been spared and she demanding to know why she had not.
It didn’t take him long to realise that Shawn was less a Miles from
The Turn of the Screw
and more a
Harry Potter
for the post-apocalypse age. He was the real “boy who lived”: orphaned but unique, powerful but uncertain of that power, under threat in a strange new world but not facing it without a friend.
Shawn’s brainware compensated for the atomic clock signals it was missing and extrapolated the date, and when he announced that Christmas Day was only two weeks away David was lost for words. He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. Christmas seemed like a quaint, long-forgotten custom of a bygone age. He would have been happy to let it pass by unmarked, but one look at the boy’s face made it clear that wasn’t an option. Holocaust or no holocaust he was still a child, and children loved Christmas; to cancel it after all he’d been through would have been tantamount to child abuse.
The next morning he persuaded the boy to stay in the flat while he ventured outside. It was a bitter, blustery day underneath a sky that festered like a stormy sea, and for the first time he wore his padded ski jacket, an item of clothing so warm that conditions other than extreme cold rendered it unwearable. He wound his way through the city, collecting items here and there and ending up at the little shop named
Hens’ Teeth
. The stuff he’d previously found useless was now highly prized. He went through the shelves, thinking humourlessly: what did you get the boy who had nothing? Toy cars, dinosaurs, action figures and the odd alien all went into the holdall. He wondered whether the boy still believed in Father Christmas. He suspected not, and hoped not. Surely he’d seen enough to have worked out that such a benevolent figure didn’t exist, and he honestly didn’t know if he could bear the pretence of acting as if one did. Remember: only good little zombies get presents, don’t they? Or Santa won’t come.
Upstairs, in a room that had clearly been a stockroom cum staff room, he found more items he wanted: an artificial Christmas tree with fibre optic lights and a box full of decorations. The tree was larger than he would have liked, but it was boxed up with a carry handle on top so he took it.
As he walked back to the flat, laden down with presents and the accoutrements of Christmas, he marvelled at how irrational his actions were. He could just imagine Varley catching him now, frenziedly beating him to death with his own Christmas tree. What a tragic scene that would make for the boy to find.
I must be insane, he thought. Completely insane.
When he got back to the flat the boy was standing in his bedroom window, watching for his return. David held the box up towards him, so that the picture of the tree on the front was visible, and the boy clapped his hands and started jumping up and down with excitement.
Suddenly he didn’t feel so insane any more.
* * *
He treated the organisation of the first post-virus Christmas like a military operation, some things shrouded in secrecy no matter how much the boy bugged him for information. He searched the city for more presents he thought the boy would like, writing cards and wrapping gifts while he slept. Christmas dinner without a morpher was going to be a challenge but, undaunted, he dug up potatoes from a back garden on Canning Road, and was ecstatic to find a real turkey in the bottom of the Lighthouse’s freezer.
They decorated the living room together. The tree he’d found turned out to be really rather beautiful, the tips of its artificial needles glowing in a mesmerising variety of patterns and colours.
One night, while sitting in tree’s glow, they talked about Father Christmas, Shawn clearing up any uncertainty over the subject by saying, “I know people give presents, not Santa – only babies think that.”
“And you’re certainly no baby.”
“I never liked him much anyway. He used to creep me out – kinda like the zombies do now.”
David laughed so hard at this it drew tears.
The morning of the big day itself the boy bounded into his room at precisely the prearranged time (thanks only to brainware) and excitedly ordered him to look outside. David got up and drew back the curtains. A thick layer of snow covered everything, and it was still coming down, descending in twisting flurries in a quintessentially festive scene. He could scarcely believe it. A white Christmas. Now of all times, when there was only them to appreciate it. The boy insisted they go out in it before they did anything else. David didn’t like the idea, but he relented when the boy said he’d never played in snow before. And it was Christmas Day after all. They couldn’t go far since running in snow was difficult and made them vulnerable, so they threw snowballs and built a snowman on the street outside, the boy giggling with glee and David searching all the time for any sign of a zombie, haunted by the notion of a Christmas morning massacre.
Back inside the boy opened his presents, exclaiming how he loved each one and thanking David so profusely it nearly moved him to tears. One of the gifts was the toy astronaut he’d retrieved from the church, a task that had required the wrestling of several demons into submission.
He’d instructed the boy not to give him a present, telling him that the sight of his happiness would be gift enough, but the boy defied him and proudly handed over a small box. He realised what was inside a moment before he lifted the lid: it was his father’s ring. The symbolic nature of the gesture was unmistakable: the ring was the mantel of fatherhood, and the boy was passing it from his dead biological father to him. He started to say he couldn’t accept it, but it was a stock response and he stopped himself. He wanted the ring, he realised. More than anything.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
The boy nodded, his blue eyes sparkling. “Does it fit?”
He tried the ring on different fingers. It fit perfectly on the ring finger of his left hand – the permanently vacant spot for a wedding band – so he left it there.
“Thank you,” he said.
David did all he could to make it as normal a Christmas as possible for the boy, distracting him from the distinctly un-Christmassy goings-on outside, and ignoring the heart-rending impression that they were like two Jews throwing a party in the Warsaw Ghetto. They played games while Christmas songs played in the background and ate till they were fit to burst.
In the evening they watched a film – a version of
A Christmas Carol
– huddled together on the sofa, the boy’s head resting on his chest. The only light in the room came from the tree and the television screen, softly illuminating the flurries of snow that pressed against the window pane. It had snowed intermittently all day.
When the film ended the boy said of the Scrooge character, “He wasn’t really bad after all, was he?”
“No, not really.”
“Do you think that’s what they’re like? Deep down, I mean. Deep down they’re really good?”
David had to think for a moment. How the hell did you word it so a kid would understand?
“Well, they don’t know what they’re doing, do they? So I guess they’re not bad when you think about it like that.”
“But they do such bad things.”
“They’re not themselves.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Of what?”
“Being the way I was: alone … I hated it.”
“Hey, look at me,” David said, pushing the boy away so their eyes could meet. “I’m not gonna leave you, little man – ever.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
He pulled the boy to him again and held him.
He knew he had no right to make such a promise, but nevertheless it had slipped from his lips as easily as a heavy drop of dew slipped from the tip of a tall blade of grass.
* * *
The snow lasted for almost a week before it turned slushy and iced over, becoming treacherous to walk on.
On New Year’s Day the boy cemented the ring-giving by asking shyly, “Would you mind if I called you ‘Dad’?”
“Of course I wouldn’t mind,” David replied, keeping his voice neutral even though his mind was racing.