Corona

For my daughter Ivy

Copyright © 2020 David Christopher Frank Arrowsmith

The right of David Arrowsmith to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023.

Apart from any under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or author, or in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

CONTENTS:

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PART ONE: CONVERGENCE

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PART TWO: CHAOS

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PART THREE: DIVERGENCE

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MAP

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CODA

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BONUS CONTENT

PART ONE

CONVERGENCE

THE MAN

He eases up the garage door as quietly as he can, spraying tiny squirts of lubricant on the hinges as he gently tilts, painstakingly inching it up and open. His eyes take a second to adjust to the gloom of the single room lock-up within. It’s another sunny day, like almost every day it seems, but in the small garage that he uses as a storage unit it’s cold, dark and musty. He scans the piles, mentally taking inventory of his depleting stock. Pallets of tins are piled precariously on top of one another, the exposed cardboard and torn cellophane now outweighing the remaining tins themselves. He tours the garage, selecting a can here, a jar there. He pauses in front of a locked trunk, pushed into the corner and half-covered with a mouldy old tarp. Pulling out his keys he opens the small padlock and surveys the contents, almost untouched since all this began, since she left and the world turned to shit. 

A four pack of toilet paper - quilted. Tinned tomatoes, dried pasta, UHT milk, hand sanitiser, plain flour. All the stuff that got scarce and then disappeared altogether. And then what passed for survival staples - matches, candles, water purification tablets, a small green pouch containing a mini first aid kit. He’s resisted using any of it, part of his constant efforts at self-discipline. Or perhaps something else. Nothing taken out, and just one item added, since her departure – his fingertips grazing the nap of the small velvet pouch, now tucked snugly into the far corner of the lock box.

Something makes him freeze, crouched with his hand halfway to closing the trunk. A noise perhaps? He doesn’t move, breath held, muscles trembling as he strains to make out what triggered his barely-checked automatic flight response. Hearing nothing further he carefully closes and locks the trunk, and slowly stands and turns to face the open door once more. Looking out of the darkness is like being inside a pinhole camera. The outside is so bright and crisp and clear it’s almost hyper real. He can feel what he hopes is not a migraine coming. Time to go. 

He scans the area and, seeing nothing amiss, closes the garage door - but not without banging the bottom edge on the concrete floor with a clank that echoes across the car park. Everything seems louder these days - without the constant background noises they took for granted before all this: the trains at Denmark Hill station, the regular procession of passing buses, the sirens of the ambulances racing to and from King’s College Hospital, the drone of passenger planes transporting the masses to their holiday destinations of choice.

He sets off for the mansion block that towers above him at a brisk walk, the tins and jars clinking in the pockets of the oversize raincoat. An uncomfortable sweat spreads across his back. He can feel the moisture sticking his threadbare clothing to the skin under his arms, across his neck and in the hollow of his lower back.

This time he’s sure. That’s a noise. A stick snapping underfoot. Maybe twenty metres away, to his left and behind him. He doesn’t stop, or turn to look. He just runs. He’s tall and slim and his long legs stretch out to eat up the ground between here and the door to the block. But, as he rounds the corner, skirting the flower bed where the rose bushes stand prickly guard, he skids wide - the leather on the soles of his shoes worn thin and frictionless - and one foot slides off the pavement and into the gutter, his ankle rolling painfully. He’s able to right his foot and regain his stride instantly, and without falling, but the burst of pain bodes ill.

*** 

13th December 2020

I’m not sure why I’m still writing this diary.  I guess I’ve always been a completist: ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ as that old television quiz master – what was his name again? - loved to say. I guess it gives me something to do. Sometimes it feels like therapy (bit late for that, right?), but I also want it to be some kind of record, to stand as a monument to what happened, for better or worse. Who knows maybe one day someone (you, Lucy?) will read this...

I shudder to think what the world is like for you, dear reader. I wonder if you were even alive ‘before’, if you even know what it was like for those of us who experienced it. Sometimes I imagine that you’re reading this in a world where the slate has been wiped clean – and that those memories, for so long preserved in printed word and cached ones and zeroes, in hearts and minds and living recall, have gone, lost forever like everything else. Perhaps this diary is the last surviving testament. If it is, then know you will find precious little of worth within these pages. But today, if I do one thing, I would like to do my best to set down the story – for it is only a story, we are past the point of an objective truth, if ever such a thing existed – of the fall of man.

It came from China. Wuhan. Something to do with the wet markets there, where they just wash the animals’ blood and guts into gutters and drains at the end of each day. Bats and pangolins coming into contact with each other and creating a new virus that can attack humans. Or that’s the prevailing belief anyway, what the news said, back when there was news. I could never quite bring myself to discount the rumours about a Russian bio research lab that had an accident a few months prior though. It just seemed like there was a plausible New Cold War motivation for almost everything that started to go wrong across the Western democracies. At least to me anyway. Then again, I’ve always loved a conspiracy theory. It’s not like I was one of the Luddites who had started attacking mobile phone masts when the serious whack jobs claimed it was all caused by the new 5G cell phone networks though. They needn’t have bothered. 4G, 5G, wifi, it all went down in the end.

Whatever the source of the outbreak, it made the jump to humans and started causing illness and death in Wuhan. A particularly nasty kind of flu that attacked the lungs and respiratory system, it seemed deadliest for the old, the weak and the sick. From Wuhan it spread across China, aided by a lack of transparency that ran pretty close to being a cover up. As a result, no one here was really aware of it until too late.

Eventually it swept the globe and, nation by nation, the death toll rose and the lockdowns began.

To begin with it was just low-level stuff. Lots of deaths, yes, but a pandemic on the normal, albeit horrific, scale. Some panic buying and shortages, outbreaks of minor criminality, lockdowns in most countries turning the planet’s major cities into ghost towns. Manchester, Liverpool, London – each and every major town and city in the UK eventually fell into the most serious ‘tier 3’ category, before they had to invent a tier 4, then a tier 5...

The global death toll was well into the millions. For those of us that had survived, life went to shit. And, just when I thought it couldn’t get much worse, Lucy left.

But it was when the second spike came that the trouble really started...

The assumed immunity never materialised. Those that had had it before got reinfected. And somehow it was worse the second time around. Perhaps the lungs had already been damaged and weakened, in readiness for the virus’s second onslaught. All attempts to flatten this second curve and control the timing of this second wave failed. It was like a viral tsunami, making landfall bang in the middle of flu season, with our hospitals already full of the sick and elderly. Doctors and nurses dropped like flies. Ventilators, PPE, everything ran out within days despite the previous months of production and stockpiling. The deaths skyrocketed and the morgues and cemeteries couldn’t keep up. The proliferation of corpses caused all kinds of secondary illnesses and fatalities as the plague gained the ascendancy.

As more and more people succumbed, from all walks of life and professions, the infrastructure and amenities of major Western powers ground to a halt and collapsed. Britain was no exception. In London refuse stopped being collected, and piled in the streets with the bodies of the dead. Gas, electricity and water supplies across the country were turned off, or failed catastrophically, or became so intermittent that they could no longer be relied upon. Food supplies dwindled, as imports and exports ceased and domestic production faltered and stalled. There were shortages of everything. The skeleton emergency services could no longer maintain order as the riots, lootings and criminality spiralled out of control. 

London became a post-apocalyptic war zone. Criminal gangs took over the cities, patrolling their territories while the rest stayed locked up inside.

***

THE MAN

One such gang has seemingly decided to camp out in front of his block of flats, a handful of them now sitting around a pile of wood that they have got burning with the help of petrol siphoned from parked cars. The global market had collapsed early on - oil values had turned negative and, with vehicles rusting and airport runways abandoned, never recovered. The once ‘black gold’ was now less than worthless, except as a pyro accelerant. 

He can see them from the balcony of the top floor flat they once shared, where he now stands alone amongst the potted plants, taking in the impressive London skyline from this unique geographical vantage point high up on Dog Kennel Hill as the sun sets once again.

He’s lived there for five years now, four years BC (before Corona). Most of that time with Lucy and then, latterly, alone. When they’d bought the flat, they’d had to jump through all kinds of hoops to pass the residents committee tests and win over the neighbours. Most of those friends, and foes, were now dead.

Lucy had left in the summer, before the second outbreak. Before the descent into total anarchy and lawlessness that had now become the new normal.

Now it’s just him and Mr. Tibbles. 

Closing the balcony door behind him, he pulls out the tins and jars and packets from his pockets - more than any one coat should have, some original, most repaired, several carefully sewn in for additional carrying capacity over the last nine months.  Eventually, from a flap right underneath a damp armpit, he plucks the gaudy packet of dried cat food. As he rips the spout open and pours a measure into a plastic bowl the cat appears and, with a cursory lazy blink, sidles past and tucks in. Before he stows the pack in the cupboard he tosses a couple of pieces into his mouth, clears his throat, and swallows them down, encapsulated in a tiny glob of mucus.

Dinner is served.

***

THE MAN

Up on the flat roof, he limps heavily between the pots and pans arrayed over the surface, checking to see if any overnight rain has replenished them. The sun is barely peeking beyond the distant skyline of St Paul’s cathedral, the London Eye, The City - and the wispy cloud cover has yet to burn off. He shivers, and pulls the overcoat tighter around his gaunt frame. It’s hard adjusting to being so skinny when you were always more on the cuddly side, but he’s been fastidious in rationing himself almost since day one - certainly since Lucy left anyway. That and the regular calisthenics exercise regimen he’s adopted - cobbled together from vague memories of a mother with a Rosemary Conley workout DVD, and the basic stretches and exercises Lucy used to force him to do to stop his back giving out - means he’s fit but whippet-thin. At least that means less weight on his painfully swollen ankle.

Should probably look at that properly now that it’s daylight again.

As ever, there are no planes in the sky, no vapour trails anywhere to be seen. Not even any helicopters ferrying urgent medevac patients to the rooftop helipad of King’s hospital. The sky has belonged to the birds, and the birds alone, for months.

Then the walkie talkie, habitually clipped to his frayed rope belt but perpetually forgotten, crackles into life. He always keeps it charged, semi-regularly changing the frequency and broadcasting a welcome message just in case he can make contact with anyone monitoring locally. Or in the faint hope that Lucy tries to reach him with the sister handset he gave her as she left. He’s never been contacted, by Lucy, by anyone. Never had any response at all.

As soon as he hears her voice his head starts to spin. He sees the distant metal spire of the Crystal Palace transmitter shear across his eye-line as if toppling to earth. As his vision narrows down to two tiny pinpricks of light, the peripheral images blurring and turning black, he crumples to the ground in an undignified slump. He avoids further injuring his ankle but can’t help but bang his tailbone. She’s saying something about a baby. Before he can force his parched vocal cords into a response, she’s telling the airwaves that he shouldn’t try to find her, that she’ll broadcast again when the child is safely delivered. 

Is that a siren? From the handset, or the road down the hill? Or both? I must be projecting again. It’s getting louder and louder, as if it’s right here on the roof with me...

The migraine breaks out in its full, brutal and all-encompassing glory – just as the handset crackles and dies, and the sun finally bursts free of the horizon, and the low-lying clouds, and beams directly into his skull. All he can hear is static and the pulsing of the blood in his temples. 

When he finally risks opening his eyes again the sun is high in the sky, but mercifully shielded from direct view by a picture-perfect fluffy white cloud. He tentatively massages his temples with his fingertips, unfurls from the foetal position, rolls awkwardly onto his knees and eventually, gingerly, stands up, favouring his injured ankle. 

Any water there might have been in the pots and pans is long gone. The walkie talkie handset is dead, its battery depleted. The world is silent, save for the spontaneous outbursts of cheerfully naive birdsong, as it has been for almost all of almost every day for nearly a year.

As the migraine fades it is replaced by the realisation he’s not just thirsty but dangerously dehydrated, and his stomach is cramping and spasming.

***

THE MAN

He eases the door closed, pushes up the nub on the latch, turns the key in the lock and slides the well-oiled bolts at the top and bottom across. Peering through the