A Cry in the Crowd

by Steven Hemming

conclusion

A kernel of realisation began to bloom in Mark’s mind. A huge wave of denial washed over him at what he knew was coming. But at the same time he felt he needed to hear it. As if confirmation could somehow explain a lifetime of conflicting emotions along with a strange sense of dread which had followed him for as long as he could remember.

Gordon was about to speak when Peter held up a hand. “I’ll tell him,” he said simply, and Gordon nodded with a slight bob of his head. “The virus in your breath had become so mutated, and so virulent, that it sort of — I don’t know — burst into the atmosphere like a huge swarm of microscopic bees. Everyone it touched fell almost instantly ill and died within a couple of days, and it spread like wildfire. Your first cry in a crowded place was all it took.”

“It was incredible,” Gordon said very quietly, and Mark, Peter and Marie all looked at him because they had heard the almost reverential tone the professor had used, and they knew that it was the scientist in him which could but marvel at the simplistic perfection of it.

Mark could only stand and stare. He felt strangely calm, detached even. He wondered for a second or two whether he ought to feel guilty but the guilt wouldn’t come, only numbness.

“So all this,” he moved into the centre of the room with arms outstretched as he slowly turned in a circle, “all this death and disease is due to me?” He raised his voice and lifted tear-streaked cheeks to the flaking paint of a sagging ceiling, and Peter’s heart lurched at the sight of it. “Well thank you, Dad!” he yelled, and with that he slumped onto one of the hard-back plastic chairs, head lolled forward. He dragged his flask from an inside pocket and gulped till the burn of the poteen was too much. “So what about Pete?”

“He was injected with what was sent to Geneva,” said Marie. “ We simply hoped it would work. Peter knew the risks.”

Mark’s head lifted as Peter crouched in front of him. “I’ve loved you as a brother all these years, Mark, but I couldn’t tell you the truth, not at first. You were too young and wild back then, you might have run with the shock of it, disappeared, got yourself killed, who knows? I felt I owed it to your Dad...” He faltered. “Our Dad... And you as well, to keep you alive no matter what. Even if it meant keeping the truth from you.”

“But why when you never even met him? You should’ve been calling him all the bastards under the sun for what he’d done.” Mark sniffed and cuffed tears away with the back of his hand.

“Far from it. The money he sent us literally saved my mother’s life. She was dying.” His voice caught in his throat, eyes moist. “Cancer. The money gave her an extra five years of life, and they were happy years, Mark. When Gordon and Marie came to me, I couldn’t refuse.”

“Sending Peter to try to find you was a final forlorn hope,” Marie said. “But he did find you, almost dead from your wounds, and by using the portable DNA kit we supplied him he was able to confirm who you were.”

“We know all about you, Mark,” Gordon went on, speaking quickly now as if time was of the essence. “Up until two years ago we were in constant communication with Peter while we tried to mount an expedition, but the world is super-cautious. The satellites block all communication, including the Internet and radio. It’s as if you’ve been erased from the history books. And when the last of Peter’s carrier pigeons either died or was killed for food, we lost all contact.”

Mark suddenly realized the importance of Peter’s rooftop sanctuary. “Those bloody pigeons,” he said with a wry grin, shaking his head. “And I called them flying bleedin’ rats.”

“Them flying bleedin’ rats saved your life, mate,” Peter smiled back.

Then Mark turned back to Marie, his expression serious. He seemed to think for a moment before asking: “So what happened to my Dad?” And then, almost as an afterthought: “And what if I’d been killed in the last two years?”

“When it all began, we knew how important your father would be if we ever had any hope of finding cures for the plagues, so we helped him escape. Unfortunately you were separated from him in the chaos. He couldn’t find you in time and so you were... left behind. He...” She faltered with downcast eyes, flicking a quick glance at Gordon as she did so. “He disappeared shortly afterwards. If you had died, we hoped that Peter could somehow save your body from the fires so we could take samples.”

Marie flipped a velcro fastener on the thigh of her suit and Mark saw the plungers of six syringes. “You are just as valuable dead as you are alive.” She flashed an enigmatic smile shyly complimented by an attractive shrug of her shoulders. She whispered: “No offence, Mark.”

Mark managed a rueful grin, swallowed past the dryness in his throat. “None taken,” he croaked. His voice was suddenly neutral, leeched of emotion.

“We have to go!” Gordon screeched, grabbing Mark’s arm. “We have to go now!”

They dashed from the station into the pouring rain.

“Hurry,” Gordon yelled, “there’s hundreds of them!”

Just before they reached the gate they crossed a small courtyard with cracked concrete and weeds sprouting from the rotten masonry of half-collapsed walls. Mark spotted down a filthy alleyway a circle of children. He skidded to a halt as he caught a snatch of song, an ancient nursery rhyme about a ‘ring of roses and a pocketful of posies’, and as the kids held hands and spun in a dizzying circle Mark felt his own senses whirling.

He threw off the grasping hands of his three companions and when Peter threw an arm around his neck and tried to drag him away he shoved him aside. He felt a shudder as the children all fell down as one, laughing and giggling, a parody of their own eventual demise.

One of the group, a young girl perhaps six or seven years old, suddenly jumped to her feet and ran over to him. She stopped so close that her chest touched his knees and she arched her back to look up at him. She smiled broadly with stained and crooked teeth in a face begrimed with dirt and soot, and Mark’s heart went out to her.

He reached behind his neck and unclasped a thin chain with a small heart-shaped golden pendant hanging from it, which he had worn for as long as he could remember. It had been his mother’s and was all he had left of her, but he felt compelled. As he fixed it around the girl’s neck he saw tears run tiny rivulets through grime. In that instant he felt almost absolved.

Mark looked back just once as the gate closed behind them and he caught the eye of the girl. She had gone back to her friends and she was looking up at him from where she lay dressed in rags on rain-soaked cobbles, and his heart lurched as he saw her cough. She waved to him and he was sure he could see through the scything rain a spattering of blood on her dirty palm and on the soft Cupid’s bow of her lips.

They clambered into the chopper and through the smoke of a nearby pyre a horde of people were swarming over the heaps of rubble which marked the border between urban decay and no-mans-land. They were screaming and firing weapons like an attacking army from a forgotten age.

As the chopper wheeled away and lifted high into the air one of the soldiers positioned in the open doorway angled down his big matte-black chain-gun and made ready to fire. Mark gripped the soldier’s white-suited shoulder, squeezed, shook his head. The soldier blanched behind his visor.

He’d seen that look before. Seen it in the eyes of a dying martyr on a battlefield long ago. It was a look he’d hoped never to see again. So he let go of the big gun and it swung to point upwards on its axis and the soldier slid himself away from the door and sat with his back against the bulkhead.

Gordon reached into a compartment behind him and handed over two suits identical to his own. “Put these on,” he said to Peter and Mark, and as they complied Mark looked out of the open hatch and watched his blighted land, shrouded in rain and robbed of colour, fall away below him.

* * *

It was the heat which woke him. Jumbled images raced through his mind: the flight over the ocean, a flash of white, a searing explosion, his world turned upside-down in an instant and a crazy, tumbling descent. Then nothing.

He tried to move but searing pain ripped through him.

He struggled to breathe, wanted to rip the helmet from his head, then realized he no longer wore it.

He tried to turn his head but the message to do so was lost and blocked by obstacles of broken bones and severed nerves. Out of the corner of his eye he found himself looking out over a cobalt-blue sea, shot through with the maroons and yellows of the rising sun. It was the first time he’d seen the ocean. But it was the lung-full of air he sucked in through his nose that provided the revelation. It was grass and earth and the scent of autumn blossom. He didn’t know them as such, knew only that they created a wonderful feeling of peace within him. He was subtly aware that the sensations of them dulled the pain of his shattered body.

But most of all, and the most startling revelation of all, was that the strong, steady breeze which blew in from the ocean didn’t carry with it the stench of roasting flesh.

When he swivelled his eyes he had to squint against the heat from a large piece of burning wreckage. He could see the outline of the downed chopper partially obscured by billowing smoke. He could make out silver-white humps against scorched earth.

All were still until one suddenly raised its head and he saw Marie Laval looking at him through a blood-smeared visor. A gash on her forehead leaked blood down the side of her face. Mark thought that he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his entire life.

She looked at him with big eyes wide with shock and horror. She tried to smile encouragement. Her body hurt in a million places all at once. All she could think was how pointless it had all been; all the planning, the research, the duplicity. And finally she despaired at the hopelessness of her endeavours, and those of the Professor, and all the others who thought there may have been hope. All of it crushed by a single surface-to-air missile. Why hadn’t they listened? The hope for the world was lying just a few feet away, his body torn and twisted. She lowered her head to the soft grass of France and wondered if she would ever walk it in peace again.

Mark watched in bemused fascination as a blurred image loomed close, and as he started to slip away he wondered why a complete stranger in normal clothes would be kissing him, why she was blowing breath into his blasted body, why someone else was pummelling his chest all the while gabbling away in a language he couldn’t understand. He heard shouting and saw the two figures tending to him being roughly shoved aside. Then Marie’s face, smudged by blood and tears, encased in smeared plastic, filled his vision with a loveliness he could quite happily carry to his grave.

He mumbled something and she leaned in closer to hear.

Thought she heard something about his Dad, what happened to his Dad?

She lay her head sideways on his chest. She looked across at the white-suited figures lying mangled amongst burning wreckage. She willed movement, demanded it.

It happened in a twitch of scorched material, an outstretched arm with fingers groping for the touch of a son he’d never known, a shattered face-plate with a shard of Perspex separating cheek from the bone beneath. An old man. So very old.

As their eyes met Mark felt the connection. Saw in his mind’s eye a stumbling figure with bloodied hands, raising aloft a swaddled bundle, staggering into the sunlight casting shadows in a crowded place.

And it was enough.

Peter had crawled over, his right arm hanging limp at his side and bent unnaturally at the elbow. He joined Marie on their knees alongside him, their faces aghast at the horror of it. But he saw compassion too. And he no longer felt fear.

He stared at Marie, past the thin smear of blood on the inside of her helmet, and what he saw drew a few extra laboured beats from his dying heart. He saw the passion of someone so utterly caring that it leaked from her very pores. He saw hope, and salvation. And release.

“Take my blood,” he hissed through waves of agony. “My back is broken... or my neck... I don’t know... but I’m well... and truly... buggered.”

Peter placed his hand at the back of Mark’s neck and gently tilted back his head so he could breathe more easily.

“Pete.” His voice was a hoarse whisper now. “Oh God, Pete.”

Over Peter’s shoulder he saw flickering light leave the eyes of a man whose sorrow was insurmountable.

“Thanks for everything, mate,” Mark gasped. “I couldn’t... have had... a... better brother. Now stop... arsing about... and take my blood.”

Peter smiled down at him, choked back a sob. Tears welled in his eyes.

The last thing Mark saw was the face of a young girl lying in a filthy street. He saw her innocent wave and blood-smeared smile and he smiled as well. He saw a faint ray of hope in angelic features and it helped carry him to another place.

Mark was dead before the first two syringes had been filled but Peter carried on with grim determination until all six were full. Then he gently placed his hands beneath Mark’s body.

He cried a torrent of tears as he rolled him into the flames.

“Sleep tight, bro,” he said quietly.

* * *

For years afterwards, as Peter slipped into troubled sleep, he would dream of the virus burning within Mark as Mark himself had burned. And he would reach across the soft rise and fall of Marie’s breast and once a month he would take the syringe and while gazing into each others eyes they would press the tips of needles into giving flesh.

And as a part of Mark coursed through their veins he would look out into the festering city, smell familiar odours, see pinpoints of wavering light at the very top of the Eiffel Tower and a more distant flicker of flames far away beyond the city walls.

But the saddest irony of all was that undefended by thirty years of viral contamination the poor farmer’s daughter who had given Mark the kiss of life had unwittingly unleashed the plagues in Europe. There had been no cure, just brief respite.

All there could ever be was a fleeting pause in the world’s dying scream.