The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) (11 page)

For the sake of sanitation for the residents of the home, Adag opened up the new stand-alone conference centre on the far side of the home which was to be used for NHS Special Needs Conferences. Now it was a temporary billet for the soldiers. It had been built as a money spinner for the home, smart conference facilities which included four toilets, a couple of urinals and two shower rooms.

The owners of Thorncroft had found a niche market that would popular because it was in such a scenic and remote place, it had its own large kitchen for catering and a lot of NHS Trusts had started to put in bookings to use it. Now it was just a glorified dormitory for unwanted guests.

              In those very early days of our quarantine, I had no interest in most of the soldiers we were forced to live along side. They were not by any stretch of the imagination our friends at that moment in time. In three weeks-time they would abandon us, that is if the Twice Dead didn’t decide to come our way and finish us all off once and for all.

              Adag called Seb, me and Mitch to her quarters that evening after Jasmine, Eden, Paul Stevie and Cassidy were in bed. Phoenix was in no fit state to leave his room.

              Neither Seb or I had ever been in Adag’s grace and favour flat before as we were residents, not staff, but with the onset of the Twice Dead disaster, the line between resident and staff had blurred overnight.

Adag made us all tea and coffee and then she got down to business. She told Seb the news that we weren’t being taken to a place of safety by the military when they left.

              “They are leaving us here?” he said and he couldn’t hide the incredulity in his voice, “They are leaving us here?”

              “What else do you expect them to do?” I said dryly as I reached for my mug of tea on the tray, “Rescue us?”

              “Well yes,” he was stunned, “Surely they must be wondering how we survived when everyone else didn’t!”

              “Obviously that isn’t important,” I shrugged my shoulders, “They leave in three weeks after the quarantine ends and we will be on our own, no one is going to look after us other than us.”

              “Bastards!” Seb clenched his fists in anger, pressing them hard onto the arms of his chair, he was angry.

              “It might have been different I think,” I said reflectively, and I took a mouthful of tea, “If were weren’t disabled.”

              My words shocked Seb. His mouth dropped open.

              “Well, DOH!” I said surprised by his reaction, “Isn’t it obvious?”

              “What about Adag and Mitch?” Seb looked at the Thorncroft staff when he got his composure back.

              Before I could answer Adag spoke, “The Colonel spoke to me again, he said he was authorised to take me and Mitch with him when they left.”

              Now it was my turn to be taken aback. I had assumed that Adag and Mitch would suffer the same fate of abandonment as us. Obviously not.

              “I told him to stick his offer up his arse,” Mitch fumbled with the top pocket of his shirt and took out a packet of cigarettes, he didn’t take one out, just tapped the packet.

              “I was of course politer with my answer,” Adag said primly, “But not by much.”

              “Able bodied cunts,” Seb said savagely.

              I laughed. Wolf was right, I did have a seriously warped sense of humour. I hadn’t noticed it until now.

              “You should go with them,” I said to Mitch and Adag, “You have a chance…”

              “No,” Adag cut me off, before I could more, “We stay together, for better or worse.”

              “We don’t stand a chance on our own,” Seb said.

              “We’re not on our own,” I said.

              “Oh yeah, look at us,” Seb said derisively, “Two cripples, a bunch of retards, a couple of Aspies, with only an OAP and a middle aged woman to keep the Twice Dead Hordes from our door!”

              “I am not an OAP,” Mitch gave Seb a dirty look.

              “Seb, if you can’t say anything constructive, can you please shut the fuck up?” Adag’s words were calmly said, but all our mouths dropped open in shock for Adag never swore in front of the residents. She smiled “If you don’t mind,” she added proving she was still a professional.

              Seb pressed his lips into a thin line and crossed his arms over his chest.

              “Cripples, retards, Aspies or not,” Mitch interjected, “We all have to pull together now, we know the military isn’t going to help us, so we help ourselves, they will be gone in three weeks, so we need to prepare to look after ourselves, for the moment we are ok for food, electricity and water, however, the food won’t last, we can’t be sure how long the electricity will stay on and the same goes for water.”

              “We have the stream,” I pointed out, “The water is from an underground source, and there is the old well, at the bottom of the garden, it’s boarded up, but I’ve heard water moving about in it when I sit by it.”

              “It’s fed from Lake Monocot,” Adag nodded her head, “We have the extreme weather food storage in the cellar, it’s mainly canned food, but it’s food at least.”

              “There’s wild garlic growing all around this place,” Mitch said suddenly, “And the trees are heavy with fruit, we don’t do anything with it, how about we start to gather it and try and preserve it?”

              “Apples, pears, wild garlic, blackberries,” I mused, “Going back to basics.”

              “It’s a start,” Adag said but she didn’t sound enthusiastic, “But we have to think about the others, we know what has happened but they don’t.”

              “We don’t know everything,” I pointed out.

              “I think we know enough for now,” Adag replied “But for Eden, Jasmine, Stevie and Cassidy, they are going to have to be told that…” she swallowed hard, “They won’t be seeing their families ever again.”

              I hadn’t fully thought about that. I had been worrying about how to tell them that they would never see the Gorilla and Shannon again.

Seb had told me his family was in London like Adag’s daughter, Mitch had no one like me, but the others, they had families outside of the home.

              I thought of Paul and his family, but like Phoenix, he was quite disconnected to his emotions when it came to things like love and affection. He understood obsession in that he could focus his attention on a particular concept, idea or thing.

              “Cassidy rarely sees his family,” I said at last, “He doesn’t talk much about them.”

              “He has you,” Adag said and I looked surprised and she smiled at me.

              “He connects to you because you look similar.”

              I looked at her blankly, “He once said you and he had the same colour arms.”

              Of course. My skin was light brown, cream with a bit of mocha I often thought, an inheritance from an Indian father I barely remembered, Cassidy was mixed race too, white mother and Jamaican father. I hadn’t thought about that.

              “Stevie will take it the hardest I think,” Mitch said.

              “We don’t know how any of them will react,” I had a good idea actually but I didn't really want to think about it just then, “We will just have to deal with everything on a day by day basis.”

              “Who’s going to tell them about Shannon and Gregory?” Mitch said suddenly.

              “I was wondering about that, “I said.

              “Might be best to say nothing,” Seb responded.

              “They have a right to know,” Mitch said heavily, and he took a cigarette out of the packet and put it behind his ear, “We can’t protect them forever.”

              “We’ll find the right time,” Adag said, “And yes, Mitch, you are right, we can’t protect them forever.”

              “What about the Twice Dead?” Seb spoke up.

              “Well, they haven’t arrived here yet,” I stated the obvious.

              “The Yanks won’t help us,” Mitch said with the knowledge of his former life, “They will just wait out their time here and move on, we’re just collateral damage and an inconvenience.”

              “I’d say they are an inconvenience to us,” I said dryly and then I added, “Let’s do some foraging tomorrow for food, we have to start at some point so I guess it might as well be now.”

              To my astonishment everyone in the room agreed with me and it was decided to go out early in the morning and return home mid-afternoon.

We talked about other things that evening, I can’t remember what, but by the time we all went to bed a tentative consensus between us had been agreed.

              In the time of the Twice Dead, the people of Thorncroft Residential Home for the Disabled would do all they could to survive. To see as many days as they could in a world more dangerous than it had ever been before.

That night as I lay in my bed, in the darkness, my room door locked, my duvet curled around my body I stared into the darkness and thought many things.

              Yet again, I wondered how we at Thorncroft had managed to survive the contagion. What made us so different from everyone else on the planet? Was it us? Was it an accident within an accident? Could it be because of where we were? Moreover, if it was, what was it about where we were?

True we were set in many acres of ancient woodland, part of the building (the garage) was once part of a Great Earl’s estate that had been put into trust by one of the Earl’s philanthropic descendants a million years ago (being sarcastic here by the way) with the end result being Thorncroft Residential Home for the Disabled. Nothing else had been built on the land since the conference centre, something to do with the trust, deeds and legalities about protected green spaces.

If where we were, was the reason the contagion had not affected us did that mean that the Twice Dead would not come here? No, that couldn’t be the case, Gregory had turned into a Twice Dead whilst he was here and then there was the man he had bitten, but perhaps that was part of the reason, what if they knew to keep away from this area if they were already turned. Gregory turned into a Twice Dead here; he wasn’t one when he had come back from time.

I wondered what was going to happen to the man who was now locked in the secure TOR space, tied down and drugged. How long before he changed? I exhaled, plumped up my pillow and my mind moved onto other things.

              I thought about my life, who I had been before, how I had lived and dealt with my disabilities. I touched my leg, free of my leg brace, aching from overuse. I remembered each operation, each a painful reminder of their failure to stop the muscles and bone from getting weaker because of a rare congenital illness. Eventually they put special metal pins into my left leg and hip and this helped in that the degeneration was pretty much stopped but it didn't reverse the previous damage.

              I was lucky in a way though, the genetic deformity that affected by leg and hip could have affected other parts of my body like my arms, and neck, but it hadn’t.

              My parents, my real parents had taken me from hospital to hospital trying to get help for me. Until their deaths when I was three years old, I had been the much-loved child of Olivia and Sanjay Lal. A mixed race couple who defied their respective families to marry and have a child.

              The accident that claimed them when I was three and in hospital for an operation left me not only an orphan, but also without family because neither of my parent’s family wanted the mongrel child born of a much hated relationship.

              My mother’s family I found out had been upper middle class, wealthy, well connected and from what I could work out, as racist as they came. No way did they want their daughter married to a man of colour not even one like Sanjay who came from an equally wealthy, middle class background, but he was Indian and his parents like Olivia’s parents were dead against the match, ironically pretty much for the same reason, racial and in their case religious.

              I remember when the Social Worker told me why I was in foster care, and I can still remember how bewildered I was, how hurt and how I had gone deep into myself, becoming what was seen as an emotionally defective child with serious physical health issues.

              I had nothing of my parents, just fragmented baby memories of a woman with long blonde hair and a man with dark eyes and a lovely smile, but if I had any memories of their respective families, those I shoved away into some dark recess in my mind for to me they were an anathema, something to be struck down and buried deep.

              There had been moments of happiness in my life, there had been Jack and Theresa and those wonderful three years in which I was part of a family. I clutched at my pillow. I had not thought about Jack and Theresa for a very long time.

              When I had moved into Thorncroft and had been told that it was to be a permanent placement, dependent on my behaviour of course, I was happy, or as close to happy as someone like me can ever become.