I looked down and saw I was wearing disposable blue paper pyjamas that crinkled as I moved. I saw also that my right hand had been handcuffed to a metal rail running along one side of the bed.
My left hand, at least, remained free. I yanked experimentally at the chain a couple of times, but it was soon clear that brute force was never going to set me free.
I stared through the pane of glass at the outer chamber. I wondered if I might be inside some kind of isolation unit. If they thought I might be carrying the EVE virus with which Red Harvest had
wiped out the rest of humanity, that would make sense. They had shot me with a tranquillizer dart, I felt sure, then brought me to this place . . . wherever it might be.
I leaned over the side of the bed and saw a bedpan. The sight alone filled me with an overwhelming urge to urinate. Despite my shackles, I was at least able to get both feet on the ground and
make use of the pan. Then I lay back, still groggy from the effects of the tranquillizer, and fell asleep until Alice came to me.
I came awake only slowly, from a dream in which I had been swimming through an ocean of oil, desperate to reach air. She gazed down at me in alarm, her face framed by the strip lights. She
mouthed something at me, and when I tried to reply, no words would emerge, despite a powerful sense of overwhelming danger. She shook her head in frustration, then darted out of sight. I tried to
sit up and see where she had gone, but there was no sign of her. I hoped she could get away, escape whatever place we had been brought to, and soon enough I slid once more into unconsciousness.
I found myself ravenous with hunger the next time I opened my eyes. I rattled at the chain in frustration, wondering if their intention was to starve me to death. But only a
short while passed before the door in the outer room opened, allowing two men to enter.
One was slight and bespectacled and wore the white coat of a doctor, while the second was tall and muscular and wore a grey T-shirt and cargo trousers. He pushed a metal trolley. His crew cut
made me think he might have been one of the three men who captured me. I watched with fascination as they each opened a locker in the other room, withdrawing white suits from within and pulling
them on, finally completing the ensemble with visored hoods.
More hazmat suits, I realized. I had been right in thinking I was in some kind of isolation chamber. But if they had the antidote to the EVE virus, as I knew Red Harvest had, was it really
necessary to take such extreme precautions?
Then, I remembered: the men who captured me had also worn hazmat suits. Perhaps they didn’t have the antidote after all.
They checked each other’s suits before opening the inner door. As it swung open, I felt a sudden breeze, indicating a difference in pressure between the outer and inner chambers, and
further confirming my virus theory. I smelled coffee and baked bread and felt my hunger grow exponentially, as the larger of the two men lifted a plastic tray of food from his trolley before
depositing it on top of the white cabinet.
‘Mr Beche,’ said the other man, smiling at me, ‘Jerry. How are you feeling?’
‘Like I’ve been hunted, kidnapped, drugged and chained,’ I answered. ‘Where am I, and who the fuck are you?’
‘We’ll get to that,’ he replied. ‘First of all, we want to make sure you’re well, and then we’ll talk.’
‘Or you can just tell me who you are, and where I am,
right now
,’ I insisted. ‘Otherwise, why the hell are you keeping me here?’
The little man’s shoulders rose and fell. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have the authority to tell you anything.’
‘Are you Red Harvest?’ I demanded, my heart hammering.
‘No.’ He brought both hands up in a gesture of placation. ‘Rest assured, we’re not.’
‘Then why the
fuck
am I chained to the fucking bed?’
The smaller man opened and closed his mouth, then looked to his larger companion, who placed the plastic tray on the trolley standing near my bed and pushed it closer. ‘You attacked some
of our people when they brought you in,’ he said, his voice calm but certain, ‘despite them saving your life.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said, trembling with fear and anger. ‘You’re Red Harvest. Where is she?’ I demanded, my voice rising in pitch. ‘Where is Alice?’
‘Who?’ asked the smaller man, baffled.
‘Alice!’ I nearly screamed. ‘My wife, Alice Beche. I
know
you’ve got her here somewhere.’
‘Mr Beche—’
I lunged towards the trolley, grabbing hold of the plastic tray and flinging the food and coffee at them. The larger man ducked neatly to one side, and the tray went sailing past his head before
clattering to the floor. ‘
Where is she?
’ I screamed. ‘In some other cell?
Where?
’
The two men exchanged a long glance with each other. The smaller one turned to me and opened his mouth to say something, but then I saw his companion shake his head, and he fell silent.
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Mr Beche,’ said the larger man. ‘You need to eat. You’re malnourished as it is.’
‘Why?’ I bellowed. ‘So I can be good and healthy when you torture me again? Is that it?’
I kept screaming as they rapidly retreated back the way they had come without another word. When they were gone I curled up on the bed in terrible anguish, my face damp with tears as I screamed
Alice’s name, hoping against hope that wherever they were keeping her, she could hear me. The smell of food while my stomach roiled with hunger was almost more than I could bear.
After enough hours had passed, I fell asleep once more, from exhaustion as much as fatigue. The next time I woke, I found another trolley beside me, laden with hot food. I gorged myself on it
until I was nearly sick, then waited to see what happened next.
I learned to tell the time by the nature of my meals: first came thick porridge and coffee, then later scrambled eggs, and later still fish or chicken with salad –
breakfast, lunch and dinner. The food was good, far from prison slop, and brought to me by a sallow-faced man of about middle age, based on what I could see behind his visor.
I didn’t react, shout or scream, throw the tray around or anything like that. I asked him to at least open the blind, but he wouldn’t do it. Why, I couldn’t guess. What harm
could it do, to at least see the outside world?
My initial panic had subsided, replaced by desperate cunning. I knew my best chance to escape required me to cooperate, at least for the moment. I forced myself to watch passively as the man who
brought me my food and changed my bedpan went through the rigmarole of changing into a hazmat suit before wheeling a trolley into the inner chamber, then repeating the whole process in reverse. The
most he ever said was,
Good morning, Mr Beche
, or
Good evening, Mr Beche
, no matter what I said or asked.
By my estimation, three days passed like this before they sent the shrink in to talk to me.
On the morning of the fourth day, someone new arrived with my breakfast. He wore a dark suit that looked curiously old fashioned, with a narrow tie and a pair of thick-rimmed
glasses and a button-down white shirt; he didn’t bother with the hazmat suit. Neither did the burly individual accompanying him – the same man whom I’d attempted to decapitate by
throwing a plastic tray at him. This time, when the inner chamber door opened, I detected no sigh of air indicating a pressure differential between the two chambers. My quarantine, then, was
over.
He wheeled a trolley inside and wordlessly handed me my tray of porridge and coffee, a look of warning in his eyes. The other man entered carrying a plastic chair in one hand and a briefcase in
the other. He placed the chair near the bottom of my bed before taking a seat and opening the briefcase on his lap.
‘Guess I’m safe to be around after all, huh?’ I asked.
‘There is no EVE virus any more, Mr Beche,’ he said. ‘We had to take precautions, of course, until we were absolutely sure. But there’s no trace of the virus in your
bloodstream. In fact, all the evidence points to the EVE virus being extinct.’
‘But it was airborne . . .’
‘Not any more,’ the man explained. ‘Not even in a dormant form. We checked.’
I stared at him, thunderstruck, still far from sure whether he was lying to me or not. ‘Who are you, exactly?’
‘My name is Doctor Sykes,’ the man replied. ‘I can imagine how frustrating it must be for you, being kept in the dark like this. I know it doesn’t make any sense right
now, but, rest assured, there are good reasons for it.’
‘There’s no good damn reason to keep me chained up like this.’
‘You’ve been violent,’ he said. ‘It’s for our protection.’
‘Why can’t I see out of the window?’
‘All in good time.’ He held up a card. ‘Now, tell me. What’s the first thing this makes you think of?’
I stared at the Rorschach card held in his hands and laughed out loud. ‘You absolutely
have
to be shitting me.’
‘Mr Beche, please. This won’t take long.’
‘I thought those things were a joke,’ I said. ‘What do you think I am, crazy?’
Sykes sighed, put the card down and picked up another. ‘Let’s try it again, Mr Beche. Let’s just concentrate on the task at hand.’
I glanced at the ink blotches. ‘Murdered corpse,’ I said, with confidence.
Sykes exchanged a look with the other man, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. Sykes lifted another card.
‘My parents fucking,’ I said immediately.
‘You’re not taking this seriously, Mr Beche.’ He held up another card.
‘My pet cat Mitzy after I cut out her entrails because they wouldn’t let me have any cake on my birthday,’ I snarled.
Sykes gave me a baleful look, then dropped the cards back in his briefcase with a sigh.
‘I don’t
need
a psychological test, dammit!’ I said. ‘We were alone for ten years.
Ten years
, thinking everyone else was dead. I had to go foraging
through streets filled with corpses.’
‘You said “we”.’
‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘Me and my wife, Alice. You’ve got her here somewhere, right?’
Sykes licked his lips and glanced at my chained wrist. ‘Mr Beche . . . you must know she died along with everyone else, from the EVE virus.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said thickly. ‘You caught her and brought her here.’ I leaned towards him as far as the chain would let me, and felt a small rush of pleasure when he ducked
his head back slightly. ‘I want you to know something. She had nothing to do with . . . with what I did to Nussbaum, and Keene. That was all me, do you understand?’
‘That doesn’t quite fit with what you wrote in your diaries,’ said Sykes.
I looked at him, baffled. He opened his briefcase again and lifted out something I recognized immediately. I stiffened, outraged to see something so precious in his vile, criminal hands.
‘Where did you get that?’ I demanded.
‘From the place you made your home the past several years,’ he said. ‘It’s your diary, isn’t it? One of them, at any rate.’
I stared back at him, mute. He licked his lips and turned back to some of the earliest pages.
‘Alice is the reason I’m here to talk to you,’ he explained, passing the diary over to me. He tapped at the top of one page, where an entry began. I stared down at the words,
then back up at him.
‘Read it, please, Jerry.’
‘I . . .’
The words I had been about to say caught in my throat, and my vision blurred with tears. I didn’t need to read it; I knew the entry off by heart.
This morning I dug the grave, out back in the garden where Alice liked to sit on sunny days. I talked to her for a while before I put her in the hole, about the things I was going to do, and
about how I’d come and visit . . .
I pushed the diary away.
‘You tried to save her, but you were too late,’ said Sykes.
‘She was right here,’ I said numbly.
And yet I had written those words. I remembered, then, for the first time in a long time, the journey I had worked so hard to suppress: travelling across a blighted landscape filled with the
bodies of the dead, the air thick and rancid with their stink, hunted by dogs already turned feral. I remembered . . .
I don’t remember exactly what I said next, or what I did. All I really remember is Crew Cut wrestling me back down onto the bed, and holding me there while Sykes hurriedly stuck something
in my arm. They said much later that I hit Sykes, but I don’t remember that bit. Mostly, I remembered all the things I had worked so hard never to have to remember again.
Alice was sitting on the end of my bed, still wearing that same ratty green scarf she’d picked up in Toulouse during our honeymoon.
‘I miss you,’ I said, my throat so thick with emotion I could barely get the words out.
‘I know you do, sweetheart,’ she said, and glanced towards the door. ‘You stay here while I get myself a coffee, okay?’
‘Wait,’ I said, as she got up and pulled the door open. ‘Don’t go.’
She turned and smiled, hair swinging around her shoulders. ‘Look at you,’ she said, nodding at my wrist, still cuffed to the bed. ‘You never miss a chance to do your party
trick, do you?’
I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Take care, honey,’ she said, pulling the door open and slipping out of sight.
That was the last time I ever saw her. I suppose that’s the moment I started to regain my sanity. But at that moment all I could really think was,
Party trick? What party
trick
?
Then I woke up for real, and realized what she meant. It had been such a very long time ago, it was hardly surprising I had forgotten.
Floyd had taught me the party trick back when we had been students together, and long before he recruited me to help him try and save the world. His love for cheap magic stunts knew no bounds,
especially if any pretty girls were in the vicinity. One time at a party he got a girl to cuff his hands behind his back, before we all participated in locking him in the bathroom. We stood
outside, beers in hand and counting down from sixty en masse, barely reaching twenty before he came bursting out of the door, unshackled arms raised in triumph. The last I saw of him that night,
was as he disappeared into his room with the girl who’d cuffed him, and a stolen bottle of wine.