The Peeling Trilogy Read online

  At fifty-two, Jeremy’s limbs were stiffer than they used to be, and his arthritic bones ached more often than not. He was certainly willing to take a stand against anyone looking for trouble, but he couldn’t claim truthfully that he was the best man for the job. Most days he just hung around in the doorway, half asleep, from nine in the morning till six at night, and then he went home to his wife (unless he had somewhere else to be). That was why all of these people in the studio right now were such a thorn in his side; they forced him to concentrate and stay focused despite his weary mind’s desire to shut off. Most of the people didn’t even need to be there – they were just clerks and office assistants from other floors or departments – but no one wanted to leave while news was still coming in; everyone wanted to know more about the peeling – in case it got them. Their fear and panic was almost palpable, and Jeremy could sense it hanging over the dimly-lit room like a soiled blanket of poisonous air.

  “As we have little fresh news to report from official sources,” Tom told the audience at home. “We will be turning the air over to you – the public. For the next two hours we want to hear from you, Great Britain. We want you to tell us what you’ve seen, and what are your thoughts about the peeling? Do you have it? Does someone you love have it? Is there any advice you can give to help others out there? We want to hear from you now.”

  Jeremy didn’t know what they expected to get from the public that they didn’t know already. It was well-documented that the peeling started with a tingling sensation in the hands and feet – sometimes the nose and ears – before moving on to a streaming cold, and flu-like symptoms. After a day-or-so of runny nostrils and messy sneezing, the virus really started its magic. Jeremy shuddered to think about what the peeling did to the human body then.

  “Okay, we have our first caller,” Sarah reported. “We have Keith on line-1. Hello, Keith.”

  “Hiya, Sarah. Hiya, Tom. I just want to say that you’ve been a constant comfort during these last few days. I don’t have any family, and not being able to leave the house has been really hard on me.”

  “It’s been hard on a lot of people,” Tom said. “But, right now, the only way to stay safe is to lock yourself away.”

  “Do you have the peeling, Keith?” Sarah asked in her typical, caring manner. Although Jeremy couldn’t help but notice that the young girl didn’t seem as calm as she usually did.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by a muffled sound that could only have been sobbing. Eventually, Keith came back on. “Yes…I have it. I’ve had it three days…since Wednesday.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that, mate,” Tom said. “It’s truly terrible what this virus is doing to people. Absolutely horrifying.” The reporter took a deep breath and suddenly seemed very tired, as though he’d dropped a mask that had been hiding his true face all along. Jeremy sympathised from over by the studio’s door. Tom wasn’t much more than a lad, really, and he had suddenly found himself responsible for consoling an entire nation.

  Sarah sat forward on her chair and clasped her hands together on top of the desk. “Keith? If it’s not too hard for you, could you tell our viewers what it’s been like since you got ill? Could you tell us about your symptoms?”

  After another short pause, Keith replied that he would. “I got home from work at about six on the night – I’m a mig-welder. Anyway, Man U were playing Chelsea and I wanted to see them get their arses hammered, so I got some beers in and plonked myself down in front of the telly. I was happy, you know?”

  “We know,” Sarah confirmed.

  “Well, I’d been feeling a bit under the weather all day and my nose had been running like a tap, but I thought it was just a cold. I mean, no one really knew what was going on then – it was all just rumours.” Keith seemed to lose his voice then to a croaking onslaught of tears.

  “Just go on when you’re ready, Keith,” Sarah told the man. “We’re here for you.”

  “Right, anyway,” Keith gathered himself. “I was sat watching the game, and I couldn’t help but scratch at my feet the whole time. Was a bit like pins and needles, but no matter how much I itched or walked around the living room, it just wouldn’t go away. Thankfully it got a little better after a couple beers and I managed to ignore it.”

  “What happened next?” asked Tom, filling a brief moment of dead air.

  “Then I fell asleep on the sofa. Do most evenings if I have a drink. I woke up later, in the middle of the night. I knew it was late because the shopping channel had come on, selling their usual junk. So, I sit there for a few minutes, trying to wake up a bit so I can get up and go to bed, but as soon as I lean forward to stand up, I feel this sharp stab of pain.”

  Jeremy rubbed at his eyes in the doorway. He’d heard enough reports to know what was coming next. He’d even seen what was coming next first hand.

  “I look down at my feet,” said Keith, fighting back sobs, “and I can hardly…I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.”

  “Tell us, Keith.”

  “My feet they were…oh God…they were like raw steak. They had no skin. I could see all the gristle and bone and blood. They looked like those anatomical dummy things they have in school, you know? Anyway, like a fool I grab down at them, like I needed to make sure my eyes weren’t still half-asleep and seeing nonsense. When I touched my feet it was bloody agony. I almost passed out it was so bad. Worst pain I’d ever felt…but I would give anything to feel that way now – it was heaven compared to the pain I felt after. The skin from my ankles started peeling away next, blistering up and peppering the floor like dandruff. Then it moved further up my legs. Then it….then it…” Keith finally allowed himself to sob openly after minutes of fighting it back. “My dick is gone! It fell onto the carpet like a goddamn sausage.”

  Keith began to wail inhumanely and the phone line went dead. Jeremy didn’t know if it was the caller or the studio that had cut the conversation short. Probably the studio; they had a duty not to cause the public any more distress then they were already in.

  Sarah smiled awkwardly into the main camera. “We seem to have lost Keith, there, but I’m sure we’re all united in our prayers that his condition gets better.”

  “Absolutely,” Tom added. “I think we should just move on and take the next call.”

  “That would be Angela Thomas on line-4.”

  “We’re all going to die. God is punishing us for letting the queers and the-”

  The line went dead. This time Jeremy was certain it had been the studio’s doing. There was nothing like a crisis to bring out the hate-filled vipers from their pits. England liked to act like all the whackos lived abroad in less civilised countries, but working in a news studio made it quite clear that there were as many nutjobs here as there were anywhere else.

  Jeremy checked his watch. There were only forty minutes till he could leave, but it seemed like an eternity. At home, his wife was sick – like so many other people – and it felt like a betrayal not to be with her now, looking after her. He’d betrayed her for most of their twenty-year marriage, with various other women and his hidden gambling habit, but failing her now was enough to make his guilt muscle finally take notice. He was a hypocrite, that much was true, but he knew there were times when a man needed to step up and be selfless for the woman he loved; this was one of them. The entire nation lived in hope that the peeling would soon be dominated by a cure – that man would triumph over nature once again as it had always done. But Jeremy knew better. He knew that the virus wasn’t just bird-flu on steroids. This was the end. Even if the virus was destroyed, the amount of death it was due to cause would be monumental. Millions. The world would never be the same again. Perhaps that meant Jeremy would get the chance to be a decent man again, to be a good husband – even if it was only for the handful of days his wife had left. She could get better, but something in his gut told him not to hold onto that hope. He had to get home.

  The next call came from line-2. A cantankerous o
ld man, named Bob. “It’s them bloody Koreans, I’m tellin’ ya. I’d blame the Arabs if I could, but they don’t have the smarts for this. North Korea has been closed off to the rest of the word for decades. We don’t know what they’ve been up to, do we? But I tell you one thing for nought; they’ve obviously been plotting the downfall of the world this whole time. Kim Jong Il arranged for it to happen before he died and, surprise surprise, a virus the likes of which the world has never seen, has come out of a country no one knows anything about. Prime Minister Lloyd-Collins knew about it; tried to do something about it, too, before he died.”

  Sarah butted in while she had chance. “Now, Bob, it’s already been confirmed that North Korea has been affected like everyone else. Early reports that they were the instigators of this pandemic turned out to be false. Prime Minister Lloyd-Collins’s directive to bomb their country was just the paranoid actions of a dying man. General Harvey Whitehead was right to do what he did by holding emergency cabinet hustings.”

  “All so he could get in power,” Bob asserted.

  “Come on,” said Sarah. “Do you really believe that? General Whitehead was only made Deputy-Prime Minister temporarily because his military background is exactly the skillset needed to help manage the nation through this crisis. His decision to ignore Lloyd Collins – God rest his soul – probably averted nuclear war.”

  “And also let the bloody Koreans get away scott-free, to boot. You bloody watch what happens now. This time next year we’ll all be slaves to a bunch of slitty-eyed-“

  The line went dead. Jeremy had heard enough of this. Holding a public phone-in was just morbid and macabre. There would be no hope gained from talking with them, for they were the most hopeless and lost of all. The men and woman of the United Kingdom were floundering helplessly in the dark, rotting away slowly in both body and mind. Their sad stories would do nothing but spread more suffering, infecting people’s thoughts in the same way the peeling infected their flesh.

  Jeremy was just about to abandon his post when a ruckus erupted in the corner of the studio. A handful of people had begun to scuffle with one another while others backed away fearfully. Angry voices filled the air and bounced off the narrow walls, interrupting the on-going news report.

  “We seem to be having a few problems here in the studio,” Sarah told the audience. “I think we should cut to a commercial break briefly, but don’t go anywhere, guys. We’ll be right back.”

  Sarah and Tom stood up from their desk and headed away from the violence, whilst Jeremy shot past them and headed for the centre of the squabbling crowd. As he got nearer, he realised that it was not a fight that had broken out, but an attack on a single individual. A pair of men and one woman were kicking hatefully at a downed body.

  “Everybody, back away, now!” Jeremy hollered at the group with great force in his voice. While he may not have been a physically imposing man, he had a voice that commanded attention. The group of people immediately stopped what they were doing and stared at him. Their victim remained, huddled and whimpering, on the floor and Jeremy saw that it was a young, blonde girl – perhaps as young as twenty.

  “She has it!” said a woman who was wearing a power suit, her face dripping with anger. “The bitch has it and tried to hide it.”

  Jeremy looked down at the girl shaking on the floor and saw no signs of the peeling on her. He looked up at the power-suit woman who had spoken. “What?”

  “It’s true,” said a tall, Black man stood next to her. “She’s been sneezing none-stop for the last hour.”

  Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “Sneezing? A young girl sneezes and you all think you have the right to attack her? A big strong man like you?”

  “She deserves it. We could all be infected because of her. I have a family.”

  “Then you should be with them, instead of here acting like a thug. Now help her up off the floor.”

  The man shook his head. “Fuck no. You pick her up. I’m not touching her.”

  Jeremy took a step forwards and stared the man hard in the face. “You just did touch her, with your fists, as I recall. Help her up. I won’t ask you again.”

  The taller, larger man just laughed at Jeremy, then shoved out with both arms. Jeremy acted quickly, grabbing one of the man’s thick, black wrists and pulling him forward, off balance. Then he kicked out and took the man’s legs from under him, sending him to the floor with a thump. Jeremy was just about to follow him down to deliver a knockout punch when Sarah called out to him.

  “Jeremy, don’t! I’ll help the girl up and we’ll take her somewhere to lie down.”

  Jeremy looked up at the young news anchor and was confused. “Sarah, you have the news to be getting on with.”

  “We’re on a break, and Tom can handle it for ten minutes.” She glared at the nearby crowd and shook her. “You people should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  Sarah went over to the fallen girl and knelt one side of her. Jeremy knelt the other. Together they gathered the woozy young woman to her feet and walked her away from the baying crowd. There were a whole host of angry mutterings that followed after them, but no one had the guts to act out after what had happened to their ring leader.

  Jeremy and Sarah took the girl out into the corridor. “We can take her to my dressing room,” Sarah said.

  Jeremy nodded. It was a kind offer, and that was why he had always liked Sarah. She was as friendly as anybody else, despite being a national sex symbol. Her ego had every right to be much larger than it was.

  They half-carried, half-dragged, the girl into the dressing room and set her down on a plush sofa filling one side of the space. She was weak and upset, but seemed to be coherent.

  “Are you okay?” Jeremy asked her.

  Her eyes had filled with tears, but she nodded. “I don’t think they would have stopped.”

  “Goddamn animals,” Sarah said. “They should be arrested.”

  The girl waved her hand. “It’s okay. I’m just going to go home and forget about it. Can I just rest here for a while first?”

  “Of course you can, sweetheart. Take as long as you need.”

  “Is it true what they said,” Jeremy asked the girl. “Do you have the peeling?”

  “I…don’t know. I have the sniffles, but I’ve been sneezing for a few days now and nothing else has happened.”

  “You just have a cold,” said Sarah. “If you’ve been sneezing that long and haven’t come down with other symptoms then you’re probably fine.”

  Jeremy nodded and let out sigh. Despite millions of people being sick, it was still a relief to know that this one young girl was going to be okay – for now.

  The girl laughed pitifully. “I think people forget that the peeling didn’t make all of the other, regular illnesses go away. Not every sneeze means you have the plague.”

  “Exactly,” Sarah said. “Now you just relax here until you feel better. There’s water in the fridge and some cookies. Help yourself.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lane. You’re really kind – kinder than I would have expected you to be.”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy agreed. “A big celebrity like you, mixing with the common people like us.”

  Sarah bopped him on the arm playfully. “Don’t be silly. I’m C-List at best. Anyway, I have a feeling that the world will have little need for celebrities soon.”

  “You shouldn’t think the worst. The world will get through this, one way or another. Not everyone is getting sick.”

  Sarah took Jeremy by the arm and led him back out into the corridor. It seemed like she wanted to tell him something; something that couldn’t be anything good.

  “Is everything alright?” Jeremy asked her, noticing the tears that were brimming at her eyelids.

  “No, it’s not alright. Things are definitely not alright, Jeremy. You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sarah leant back against the wall of the corridor and for a moment it looked like she might collapse complet
ely. “I have the producers in my ear, nonstop, telling me facts, figures, things to say – and what not to say. We’re not telling the public anything close to the truth.”

  “They know the truth. It’s right in front of their faces.”

  Sarah shook her head. “They’re all locked up inside while police and military patrol the roads. All they see is what’s out their windows.”

  Jeremy wasn’t following. “So what is the truth?”

  “That there’s thirty-million dead, not four. The worldwide estimates are over half a billion. The USA and most of Europe are decimated.”

  Jeremy’s stomach swelled up against his ribcage. Vomit rose in his throat. “You’re telling me that half of the UK is infected already, in less than a week?”

  “The NHS has estimated that the virus affects one-in-two people. Everyone has a fifty-fifty chance. They’ve also put the chance of death at 100%. Anyone who catches the peeling will die. No exceptions.”

  “But you haven’t been telling people that. You’ve been reporting the numbers of infections, but you haven’t said people are dying. You’ve even implied that there’s a chance of recovery.”

  “I don’t make the decisions about what to report, Jeremy. The peeling doesn’t just kill people instantly. They suffer for days first. The death toll has only just begun, as the first people to catch it have had it for almost a week now. We didn’t know the virus would kill in all cases, at first, but with the data coming through today, it’s clear that no one is surviving. The Government are trying to make the decision on whether to go public with the information or not.”

  “The Government? What right do they have to dictate to the news outlets?”

  “They can control information in a national crisis. They always have.”

  Jeremy stood wearily in the corridor, shocked and sickened. He had known the peeling was a plague beyond anything ever seen, but he hadn’t thought it powerful enough to wipe out half of the world – 50/50. There would be no containing it, no cure – just unimaginable death and suffering that would linger in the consciousness of man for centuries. He looked at Sarah and could not imagine the burden she was forced to carry – to have such information, but unable to share it.