The other chimps ostracised him for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. He wasn’t hungry, and he passed the day picking at insects on the forest floor and crushing them. He was beginning to feel distinctly strange.
At a certain point he climbed a tree and sat sprawled over a branch, aimlessly staring at the ground.
The hunters didn’t catch his attention until they were almost underneath him. They were nearly naked and they carried spears. When he saw them, he flew into a blind rage. He dropped onto them, without caring too much which one he actually landed on, and began to tear at the man’s face.
Four hunters went looking for food; only one returned to the village. He returned with a wild story about a deranged chimp that had killed his three companions. He was carrying its corpse on his back. His face was splashed with its blood.
When rumours of an outbreak reached Europe, Dr. Erika Sönderlund was sent to investigate it, from the University of Uppsala.
She arrived to find half the entire village in a curiously morose and reflective mood, which she assumed to be due to the deaths they had endured, the number of which increased every day.
Sönderlund followed every protocol with the utmost scrupulousness. In the investigation that followed later, she was completely exonerated. The protocols, designed by some of the finest minds in Europe and the USA, were simply inadequate to deal with the new disease.
The best thing, it was often said afterwards, would have been to carpet bomb the entire area and make sure nothing survived. When faced with what was to emerge, people dropped ordinary ethical considerations like hot potatoes.
All of that was in the near future when my friend James announced that he was going to take part in a new drug trial.
“They’re saying it blows Prozac out of the water.” he told me.
“They always say that every time they bring out a new drug.” I said. “It’s just marketing. Ten or twenty years later they discover all the problems with it and they do the same thing again with yet another drug.”
But I felt immediately bad after saying all that stuff, because I could see he was finally almost excited about something, after three years of suffering absolutely crippling depression. I’ve just never seen antidepressants really help anyone.
He shook his head.
“This is really something new.” he said.
Then he began to cry.
“It’s either this or I’m just going to end it all, Dave.” he said.
It was hard to see him like that. He’d been in that state since his long-term girlfriend, Kirsty, had dumped him, even though he’d since met someone else, a girl named Julia, and they’d got engaged. James had always had a knack with the ladies. They were strongly drawn to him for reasons I could never quite understand.
Julia was not unfamiliar with depression herself, so she understood him better than Kirsty ever had, and yet his depression hadn’t lifted after he’d got together with her. It was as though, once some precipitating event had brought on his condition, it just refused to lift.
James’s depressive behaviour had been one of the factors Kirsty had cited at the time in no longer wanting to be with him. Truth be told, I’d never really liked Kirsty. I felt her behaviour all along had really laid the groundwork for James’s misery. Julia was a big improvement.
But then, if he’d been truly happy to start with, would he even have tolerated Kirsty?
Whenever I thought about it, I just ended up going round in circles. I don’t buy the idea that depression is usually just a biochemical thing; why would such a vast number of people all have become biochemically disordered at the same time? All the same, I couldn’t explain precisely why James had started on a downward spiral when other people in much the same situation just don’t.
The drug only had the code name AX52 and its development had reached Phase 3. It was being given to several hundred people with minimal supervision. In theory, it had already been shown to be relatively safe. I just didn’t like what I read about it. Where James saw hope and promise, I saw evidence of a wholesale reordering of brain chemistry that I found disturbing.
I met up with him the day after he’d taken the first dose. He wanted to go and get a beer.
I saw immediately that he was profoundly changed. This drug clearly wasn’t the type of thing where you have to wait two months and then you might be able to convince yourself that it’s working. He had transformed into absolutely the most cheerful person imaginable. He exuded resilience and a quiet confidence.
“So I take it it works then?” I said.
“Dave,” he said, “I feel amazing. I feel normal. I see everything differently. I’m cured.”
We were in a bar and he was absolutely as relaxed as if he was at home in his own living room and all the people in the bar were close personal friends. He met everyone’s gaze calmly and openly, with a faint smile that spoke of a deep content.
“Is it like speed or something?” I asked. “Are you going to crash at some point? Will it stop you sleeping?”
He laughed amiably.
“No, none of that. It has no known side-effects at all, and you don’t develop tolerance.”
“You never develop tolerance?”
“It’s not a stimulant. It reconfigures the brain naturally. My brain will probably go back to how it was unless I take one pill a day, but it doesn’t have to be in my bloodstream to work.”
“Not sure I understand.” I said.
“Think of a car. You have to get it serviced regularly or it’ll probably stop working, but you don’t need to take a mechanic around with you.”
“I see.” I said.
What he was telling me, was hard to believe. If true, they had discovered the perfect drug. I almost couldn’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to take it. After all, who doesn’t feel stressed or low or anxious at times?
I know lots of people who are stressed or low or anxious most of the time.
We spent three hours in the bar, getting through only a couple of beers each, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It was as if the drug had eliminated everything bad in James’ personality, leaving only a brilliant sense of humour and a superbly optimistic outlook. It hadn’t made him smarter or funnier or anything that he wasn’t before; it had only removed all obstacles to him being his best possible self.
When I went home, my mind was whirling with possibilities. If this drug was for real, soon everyone would be taking it, and we’d be living in an entirely different kind of world to the one we’ve been used to.
It was only when I tried to sleep that night that darker possibilities began to plague me.
What would happen, I wondered, if James got himself involved in something that positively required darker emotions? What would happen if, for example, his fiancé Julia, who he lived with, developed some sort of serious disease? Was he still in possession of the ability to express the full range of human emotions, or had half of his emotional range been cut off?
I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The signs were there, all around us, in retrospect. People were becoming oddly quiet and contemplative. Not everyone, but lots of people; nearly a third of the population, they said later. Julia was one of those people. Instead of being happy for James or, alternatively, worrying about the implications of this strange new drug, she began to spend hour after hour staring at the wall, or the floor, or sometimes out of the window.
This went on for two weeks with no sign of change.
James wasn’t worried. He said she was just like that sometimes. She may have been like that sometimes, but she stopped going into work and spent all of her time staring blankly at things.
“She says she just feels like she needs a break.” he told me, with hardly a trace of concern.
“What kind of break is this, where she just stares at things? Spa trips or two weeks in Paris I could understand, but this isn’t normal.”
He shrugged.
“Everyone’s different.” he said. “She needs some quiet contemplation time. Some ‘me’ time.”
“Me time.” I echoed, struggling to comprehend his attitude.
Julia worked full-time at an optician’s and spending two weeks of her precious vacation time doing literally nothing didn’t make any sense to me, but there was no getting through to James.
This conversation took place in their living room, with Julia actually present. She would respond apathetically if directly asked a question, but otherwise she said nothing.
In the mornings I was in the habit of turning on the TV so I could get the news while I ate breakfast. One morning, by which time Julia had been enjoying her staring holiday for yet another week, I turned the TV on to find there was only one topic in the news: a strange new plague that caused people to abruptly flip into a long-lasting state of extreme aggression. At that point no-one had connected this sudden flip to the epidemic of blank contemplation. It would be months before anyone was even able to understand that there was such an epidemic, much less connect it to the horrors that followed.
In some respects the disease, as we now believe it to be, followed a similar pattern to the sleeping sickness that some connect to the Spanish flu, except in reverse. The flu epidemic was obvious, then later on some fell prey to a strange disorder in which they became unable to concentrate, or even, in the more extreme cases, to stay awake. Whether the two really were connected or not remains a matter of conjecture.
In the case of IAD, Infectious Aggression Disorder (the acronym being later pronounced as if it was a word, “eeyad”), the prodromal phase typically lasted several weeks; the victim would fall into a contemplative state, often becoming fixated on unimportant things in their immediate surroundings, such as the texture of carpets or the movement of people outside a window on the street.
The infectious agent was unknown, and remains unknown, but once infected, the victim eventually snaps into a sustained violent rage unpredictably, at least in most cases. Only in a small percentage of cases does recovery follow; typically, death occurs through violence, and if not, eventually the heart gives out.
Another parallel some have drawn is between the prodromal phase of schizophrenia, in which apathy and an inability to self-motivate may become evident, eventually giving way to auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and disordered thinking.
Truth be told, there are no exact parallels in medical history or science.
Rabies may spend even a decade travelling patiently up the nerves before finally infecting the brain, but during this period, symptoms are typically absent.
I stood and stared at the TV. The whole situation sounded serious, but you can never really tell with TV. Then I heard a shout from outside. I looked out of the window to see two people, a man and a woman, attacking an elderly man in the most hideously brutal fashion imaginable. In fact, I don’t think you can imagine it. I had never seen anything like it, except in horror films.
Of course I had to do something. I had to help him. I took my cricket bat from the wardrobe and checked the window again to see if he was still alive, thinking I could rush out and perhaps still save him. I didn’t want to be one of those people who watch someone getting attacked and do nothing to help. I quickly regretted looking at all.
There was nothing left of the elderly man other than a horrible mess. Meanwhile, the people who’d attacked him were fighting another three people, all of them gouging and kicking at each other in a manner that didn’t even seem quite human.
The television too was showing horrific scenes, blurred out, but shocking.
I tried to phone my parents to check if they were OK, and found the signal was down.
The next idea I had was to go and find James. I needed to talk to someone about the situation. Maybe he knew more than me about it. Someone must surely understand what’s going on, I thought. James lived only about a hundred yards up the street, on the other side.
I hastily put on a coat and went down the stairs to the front door of my apartment building. From inside the door it wasn’t really possible to see much, but there didn’t seem to be anyone near the door, so I slowly unlocked it and opened it.
Aside from the people a little further down the street, who were still fighting with each other and sporadically attacking the corpse of the old man, there was another gaggle of nutcases further up the street, in the other direction, also fighting with each other. Several residential apartments and shops had broken windows.
I thought if I quickly crossed the road and then walked briskly up towards the people who were fighting, the second lot, I could get to James’s place without attracting their attention. They seemed pretty absorbed in the fight and they were a little further up than where James lived.
I ran across the road swiftly and pressed my back against a wall on the other side. No-one had noticed me. Then I began to edge slowly up the street, staying close to the shop windows, ducking into doorways whenever possible, to reassess the situation.
The nutcases remained absorbed in their fight, which was worsening in intensity. At a certain point I stopped in the doorway of a shop that sold general household stuff, like soap and shampoo and cleaning products. I peeked around the corner of the doorway at the small crowd. I was sickened to observe that one of them, a woman, seemed to have had her eye gouged out, but she was continuing to fight with incredible ferocity. Any one of them could have just turned and ran, but none of them were running. Instead they were clawing and punching and kicking, emitting inhuman screams and growls.
I fell back into the doorway, nauseated, breathing heavily. I still had perhaps another twenty yards to go; I was almost there.
When the glass smashed behind me, I almost jumped out of my skin. An arm thrust itself through the shattered door and fastened itself around my neck. I jabbed backwards with the cricket bat. Whoever it was, was trying to pull my neck onto the sharp edge of the broken glass. On my third attempt I managed to get them with the bat, and they roared in pain. From the roar I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman; the noise sounded animalistic.
I pulled myself free and turned around to look.
My assailant was hardly more than a teenager, male, of slight build, with long blond hair and about a week of beard. He was covered in dripping blood. The expression on his face was one of incandescent rage.
Apparently he couldn’t get through the door; most of the entire door was glass but only the upper part of it was smashed. He began kicking furiously at the lower half.
I ran into the street, and then the fighters noticed me. One of them broke off and ran towards me; a man wearing a bloodstained white shirt and black trousers, as though on his way to a job at the bank.
I ran back towards my apartment, but the rage-fuelled maniac was too fast and he was almost upon me when I turned and let him have it with the bat. Mercifully, he crumpled immediately and lay in the road shouting threats at me.
Whatever was wrong with those people, it appeared they at least didn’t have superhuman strength. They were ordinary people in the grip of a blind rage.
None of the others had peeled off the group, so I ran directly to James’s door and hit the bell.
His apartment had an intercom system with a camera, so I knew he’d be able to see me, assuming he was actually at home.
I waited, watching the fighters nervously.
Then the teenager appeared. He had somehow got through the glass door and was lumbering towards me with a look on his blood-streaked face of pure hatred and anger. Fortunately his leg seemed to have got injured somehow, and he was limping. When he saw me looking at him he howled, and that caught the attention of the fighters.
They began walking slowly towards me.
“Look at how clean he is!” one of them shouted, as though not being covered in blood was an offence to all natural decency.
The woman with the missing eye shouted, “I’m going to eat your face!”
There were a couple of swear words in there that I’ve left out.
I readied the bat. Had it not been for the bat I’m sure they would have run at me.
“I’m not your enemy!” I shouted at them, my voice quavering with fear.
This was met only with a crude insult from a large man in a tattered leather jacket.
I pressed the bell again frantically.
They all began mocking me, echoing my words: “I’m not your enemy” and laughing.
I was about to make a run for it while I still might hope to break through the semicircle they were forming around me, when the door opened and I bolted inside, slamming it shut afterwards. They began throwing themselves against it. Fortunately it was made of sturdy wood, reinforced with steel.
Never before have I felt grateful for the criminal element of our town forcing such security measures upon us.
I ran immediately up the stairs to James’s apartment on the third floor. Avoiding the lift seemed prudent.
James opened the door with a smile on his face.
“Hey, I’ve been wondering if you’re all right!” he said.
At that moment I felt a huge sense of relief. He seemed calm, composed, and even relaxed.
I ran in, shut the door, locked it and put the security chain on.
“I nearly died out there.” I said.
“Yeah, I saw.” he said. “You’re shaking. Would you like a coffee or a beer or something?”
“Beer.” I said, but then it occurred to me that alcohol would slow my reflexes and make me easy prey. “No, coffee would be great, actually. God, it’s so good to see you. Have you been watching the news?”
“Yeah, it’s terrible.” he said, and he went into the little kitchen to make coffee.
We chatted for a few minutes about the morning’s events. I told him about the elderly man, and the demented teenager, and the crowd of fighters who’d nearly got me.
He said he’d seen a lot of horrific things from the window.
“Milk and sugar?” he asked. “Just milk, right?”
“Yeah, just milk.” I said.
He brought in two steaming mugs and we sat at the table where he and Julia ate their meals.
I looked around the apartment. It was familiar, comforting. Julia had really brightened the place up, hanging a couple of pictures depicting Italian landscapes, placing a smattering of scented candles around the flat, and putting some brightly-coloured cushions on the sofa. The TV was on quietly in the background, showing endless scenes of horror and devastation.
I was in such a state that I had completely forgotten to ask about Julia. She owned her own place that her parents had helped her buy, so she wasn’t there one-hundred percent of the time, although they did more or less live together.
“How’s Julia?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s OK, I think.” he said. “In a bit of a bad mood, to tell you the truth. You know what she’s like.”
“Is she feeling down again?”
He pondered the question.
“No, not down, exactly. I think she’s angry with me because I keep forgetting to take my shoes off when I come in from outside. She hates it when I walk around the flat in outdoor shoes.”
At that moment there was a tremendous bang and a howl. I practically jumped out of my skin.
“That’ll be her.” said James. “I had to lock her in the bedroom. She’ll calm down in a bit.”
“That’s Julia?”
“‘Fraid so. Maybe it’s the time of the month. I’ve lost track.”
I got up and walked towards the bedroom.
Julia’s voice, so distorted with rage that it was barely recognisable, emitted a string of curses from the other side of the bedroom door.
“H-hello.” I said. “Julia, is that you? It’s me, Dave.”
“Dave, you piece of filth!” she screamed unhingedly. “I’ll tear your throat out! Open this door! You’re finished, you worthless turd!”
I’ve toned down her language considerably. No point writing out the torrent of abuse that emerged from her crazed lips.
“You see what I mean?” said James amiably, coming up behind me.
“James, she’s infected!”
“Infected? Do you think so?”
“Obviously she’s infected.” I said.
“Oh, well.” he said. “Better get a doctor, I suppose.”
“The doctor’s can’t do anything! Haven’t you been following the news? You’ve seen what’s going on outside! How would we even get to a doctor?”
“You’re quite right. What do you think we should do then?”
“I don’t know! How should I know?!”
I walked back into the living room. The gears of my mind were whirling frantically. Julia clearly wasn’t in her right mind, but neither was James.
“It’s the drug you’re taking.” I said to him. “You can’t grasp the severity of the situation. You’ve lost your human compassion. Can’t you see?”
He looked slightly hurt, but I wasn’t sure if his facial expression was even really sincere, or just put on for effect.
“Do you think I should let her out?” he said. “She’ll definitely attack us, I can promise you that. We only just cleaned the flat yesterday.”
“Don’t let her out! I’m just suggesting, you should probably be more upset.”
“What good would that do?”
He had a point, I supposed.
“She’s going to need food and water.” I said.
“No, there’s a massive bag of snacks in the bedroom, and a couple of bottles of cola.”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand.
“My God.” I said.
“She’ll be OK, honestly. You don’t need to worry.”
I grabbed him by the shoulders.
“We’re in the middle of some kind of epidemic. Everyone’s going crazy. We’ll be lucky if any of us survives. We have no idea if she’s ever going to recover. They might easily break in at any moment and beat us to death and eat our faces!”
He pushed my hands off himself.
“Hey, hey, there’s no need to panic.” he said. “What’s the point?”
I strode about, literally wringing my hands, trying to think what to do.
I felt as though I had stepped into a nightmare. We were surrounded by deranged maniacs and the only sane person I could talk to about it was completely unable to grasp what was going on.
Oh, he knew the situation in purely logical terms. He knew about the epidemic and now that I’d explained it to him, he could see that Julia must be infected. The problem was, none of this carried any real emotional weight for him.
What would happen if we were attacked? His fight-or-flight response wouldn’t kick in. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be paralysed by fear either. I had to hope his abnormal mental state could form some sort of advantage.
Then something caught my attention on the TV. The national news channel had been replaced by some improvised local thing, telling us to bring infected people to the train station where possible.
“It’s important to avoid all contact with infected people.” the announcer said. “However, if you have an infected person securely restrained at home, and if you have a car, bring the infected person to the treatment centre in the train station. I repeat again, a cure has been found. A simple injection can restore your loved ones to sanity.”
“We have to take her to the train station.” I said.
“I can ask her if you want, but I don’t think she’ll agree to it.” he said doubtfully.
“James, she’s insane. I’m not suggesting we ask her. I’m suggesting we tie her up and drag her there. Have you got a car?”
“You know I haven’t.” he said.
I swore under my breath.
“We can walk. If we can restrain her, we can manage it.”
“You know, you’re sounding a bit heavy-handed here.” he said. “That’s my fiancé you’re talking about. I can’t just force her to go places she doesn’t want to go. Haven’t you heard of feminism? Women have rights, you know.”
“She’s not in her right mind! She could die without treatment!”
“I suppose.” he said. “Well, all right then, let’s do it.”
“OK!” I said, relieved that he’d grasped it.
“OK, how are we going to manage it?”
That was the million-dollar question.
There was another inhuman howl from behind the bedroom door, and the sound of Julia throwing herself against the door with incredible force.
“What’s that, my love?” said James.
In response she only howled again, and shouted something incomprehensible in a voice that sounded positively demonic.
“How about, you stand a little way from the door. I open the door. She rushes at you and I slip a pillowcase over her head from behind, then we both fall on her and tie her up with some rope?”
“Sure, but I haven’t got a pillowcase or rope. The pillowcases are in the bedroom.”
“This is going to require some thought.” I said.
After a while we figured out that one of the cushions on the sofa had a case big enough to do the job. A second cushion cover we cut up into strips to tie her up with.
Then I stood behind the door and prepared to open it.
“Do it.” said James.
When I opened the door, Julia bolted out like a rocket. Unfortunately she had found a spanner that James kept in a toolbox under the bed, and she raised it in the air, intending to brain him with it. It was lucky he didn’t have a hammer in there.
I managed to get the cushion cover over her head just in time. James snatched the spanner and we tied her up.
She swore at us atrociously. The people infected with IAD weren’t zombies; they were fully conscious and aware, just unable to control their blind aggressive impulses. Perhaps rabies does the same thing in extreme cases.
“Should we take the cover off her head?” James asked, a slight smile on his face.
“No, I think leave it on.” I said. “She can breathe perfectly well. How does it look out the window?”
James went to look.
“Bad.” he said.
“You’ll need a weapon. I’ve got the cricket bat.”
“We’ve got some good kitchen knives.” he said.
This posed a moral quandary. As I’ve mentioned, we weren’t dealing with zombies here. We were dealing with people who’d lost their minds temporarily and may even be curable, if the reports were to be believed.
“We need something non-lethal.”
“How’s a cricket bat non-lethal?”
“I can just break their arms or something.”
“I could just stab them a little bit.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! If you stab anyone at all, they could bleed to death.”
“Yeah.” said James.
He thought for a bit, then said, “How about a can of Super-Eeze?”
“What’s that?”
“Spray for sore muscles. It makes your skin feel hot, so I reckon it’d sting the eyes.”
“Perfect.” I said.
Soon we were making our way down the street, dragging along an incandescent Julia, who screamed every threat under the sun at us.
James seemed amazingly sanguine.
“Doesn’t this upset you?” I asked him.
“She’s always like this when she’s hungry.” he said.
“She’s not always like this!” I said. “She’s never like this! What’s wrong with you?”
“You don’t see her as much as I do. She can get really irritable at times, especially before lunch.”
There was no point reasoning with him. The drug really had removed half his emotional capacity.
Periodically one of the deranged victims of the disease ran at us, and I either got them in the legs with the cricket bat or James sprayed them in the face. Often it took both of us to deter them, and we had to temporarily let go of Julia. We had taken the precaution of tying her ankles together with a short length of fabric, so she couldn’t get far.
For me, every attack was a fresh horror, but I could see James was quite enjoying himself. The whole thing was like some sort of weird computer game to him.
Eventually, after what seemed to me like half the day, we turned onto the street that ended in the train station. A ton of people in hazmat suits, mostly carrying rifles, were milling around the front of the station, but they didn’t scare me nearly as much as what I saw once we got a full view of the station.
A chimney had been hastily erected over the station and it was pouring forth black smoke. What could they possibly be burning in the station?
As I watched, four IADs ran at the figures outside the station. They were promptly dispatched with the rifles, and carried into the station.
They could have tasered them, or thrown nets over them or something, but instead the suited figures simply shot them.
“This doesn’t look good.” I said to James.
“I know what you mean.” he replied. “All stations look the same. Not exactly brutalist, but definitely not built with pride. Bit depressing, I used to think.”
“Not the architecture! I mean, the chimney and the shooting. James, I don’t think they’re helping people in there. I think they’re murdering them and incinerating them.”
“Oh, yes. Could be.”
He was still smiling.
“We have to get Julia back to the flat, James. They’ll kill her.”
“I wouldn’t like that at all.” he said, and at least he was frowning slightly.
“Let’s go.”
But at that moment one of the figures noticed us and began shouting.
We ran, or as much as we could run with Julia tied up and completely out of her mind with anger.
Several of them caught up with us near the end of the street. One of them took aim with a rifle. I really thought it was all over and we were done for.
By pure luck, a bald middle-aged infected man suddenly ran at the man with the rifle out of nowhere—or, more precisely, from behind a tree. Suddenly there was chaos.
Another of them tried to shoot us but James snatched my cricket bat, ran up to him—miraculously dodging bullets all the way—and knocked the gun out of his hand with a huge smirk.
I don’t know how Julia got free, but somehow she managed it. I backed away in horror, but fortunately she wasn’t interested in me. She ran at the suited men.
In the resulting melee, several shots were fired, yet none of them hit their targets. The men in the hazmat suits must have been shaking with fear. I certainly was.
For several minutes the street was full of screaming people, Julia scratching at the suited figures, climbing on their backs and clawing at their eyes, the infected man punching and kicking at them, and James judiciously hitting their legs and arms with the cricket bat.
I’m quite sure we committed many imprisonable offences. In Britain it’s illegal to arm yourself at all. Or had that law been suspended in view of the outbreak?
Eventually we were left with a pile of groaning bodies. The infected man ran off shouting in pure rage and Julia sat down, finally exhausted.
James had enjoyed himself tremendously.
“This is great!” he said.
“Great? We almost got killed!”
“Oh.” he replied. “Yeah, I suppose. That would be quite bad. My mother would never forgive me.”
“Let’s put the suits on before more of them turn up!”
We quickly divested three of the police or military people or whatever they were of their suits. Only one of them put up any resistance, and I soon shut him up with a quick blast of Super-Eeze to the eyes.
Getting Julia into a suit wasn’t easy. She complained like crazy and kept trying to hit us, but we managed it. She was completely out of energy, and that seemed to have dampened her fury for a while.
We made our way swiftly back to James’ flat, James dealing deftly and happily with anyone who attacked us.
Julia kept trying to argue with James, saying the most hurtful things she could possibly come up with, but nothing seemed to bother him at all. She directed a few remarks at me too, but I can’t say any of her criticisms hit home. They were so wild and deranged that they didn’t even hurt my feelings.
Eventually, and not without considerable difficulty, we managed to get Julia back in the bedroom again, the bedroom door firmly locked.
“What now?” said James.
“There’s nothing we can do.” I told him. “We just have to hope she gets better.”
“I don’t mind her moods.” he said. “I’m used to it.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“You’re really not.” I said. “That’s the drugs talking.”
“Anyway, you might as well stay over.” he said. “It’s fun out there, but a bit dangerous.”
We were there for five days, eking out the food in James’ cupboards. Then James ran out of medication. On the morning of the sixth day, he was inconsolable. He cried and raged and threatened to top himself. I did my best to keep him calm, telling him Julia would get better soon. It was really as though I was dealing with a completely different person.
There was no sign at that point of anyone getting better.
Nonetheless, three days after that, a miracle occurred. We awoke one morning to find Julia shouting from the other side of the door in a voice that sounded afraid, but otherwise calm.
When we opened the door she stumbled out, and James wrapped her in a tight embrace.
“I thought you were gone forever.” he cried.
Julia said nothing; she was sobbing hysterically.
I went to the window and looked out. In the street I saw only a couple of people picking their way slowly between pieces of wreckage and a smattering of corpses.
The epidemic was over just as quickly as it had begun. The week of rage, as it came to be known, had only really lasted nine or ten days.
I honestly thought we’d end up being prosecuted for our behaviour, but any crimes that had been committed during the week of rage were more or less written off as impossible to prosecute. It was unclear who had even been sane at the time.
Work continues to attempt to isolate the infective agent. Some say it’s a virus; other claim it’s a protein that somehow deranges the system; still others argue that mass poisoning was responsible. So far it hasn’t even been possible to prove that transmission from person to person occurred.
The infection, if that’s what it was, may even have somehow entered the water supply.
Almost certainly the week of rage was due to an infection, and almost certainly it originated in primate communities in the Congo.
Most of Britain was affected, and large parts of France and Germany.
Since then, things have been different. Everyone knows who their truest friends really are, and most of the things people used to worry about, now seem trivial and unimportant.
James seems quite happy. His depression lifted naturally, without recourse to the new drug, or any other.
Many people, it goes without saying, have lost people they loved. And yet, in spite of that, life now seems more valuable than it ever did before.
I don’t expect the situation will last. People always revert to type. Don’t they?
And sometimes I wonder what will happen if the new drug, AX52, gets approved.
