“Well?” I ask as I quickly pull my clothes back on again.
“Not a lot to say, really.”
“So what’s wrong with me?”
She groans and plumps her heavy frame down into a chair, which creaks with surprise under her sudden weight. She rummages around on top of a desk and fishes out a half-smoked cigarette, then spends a few seconds picking dirt off the filter and flicking ash off the end before lighting up. Bitch is doing this on purpose, I’m sure of it. She’s tormenting me, dragging this out unnecessarily. She’s probably enjoying the feeling of power. She’s probably heard what I can do with the Hate, and now she’s showing me who’s in charge.
“Were you close to any of the bombs?” she eventually asks.
“Which bombs?” I answer stupidly.
“The bombs. Remember? Great big friggin’ explosions? Bright light? Mushroom clouds?”
“I was about ten miles from one of them. Might have been farther. Why?”
“Don’t suppose it matters really, but it probably didn’t help. We’ve probably all had enough of a dose by now. How long were you exposed for?”
“Exposed?”
“How long were you out there?”
“I don’t know. I passed out for a while. I was picked up on the highway, but I don’t know how long.”
“Wouldn’t have made much difference anyway,” she says, drawing on her cigarette and looking past me at the rain running down the window. “No doubt we’ll all end up going the same way in the end. Christ, they threw enough of that shit up into the atmosphere to do us all in.”
“So what’s wrong with me?” I ask again, although I think I already know the answer. I think I knew it before I came here. I’ve suspected for a while, but I didn’t want to accept it.
“Cancer,” she finally says, before adding a disclaimer, “probably.”
For a second all I can think about is the way she said “probably,” as if we’re still in the old world and she’s covering her back in case she’s made a misdiagnosis and I sue. The fact she’s just confirmed my worst fear goes almost unnoticed at first, but then it slowly starts to sink in. Cancer.
“Where?”
“What?”
“The cancer, where is it?”
“I’d do an MRI scan, but the power’s down,” she says sarcastically. “Hard to say for certain,” she finally answers. “You’ve got something big in your gut, probably in your stomach, too, but there are bound to be more. Those are secondaries, I think, but I’m no expert. Truth is you’re probably riddled with it by now.”
I stare at her, my mouth hanging open, knowing what I want to ask next but not knowing if I can. She looks up at me, makes fleeting eye contact, then looks away again, anticipating the question that’s inevitably coming.
“How long?”
There, I finally managed to spit the words out. Scott smokes again and pauses before answering.
“Don’t know. No accurate way of telling anymore. Could be weeks, could be months. Maybe a year at the absolute outside if you’re lucky.”
“If I’m lucky?”
“Figure of speech.”
“But isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Like what? The National Health Service is falling apart at the seams, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are no spare beds anywhere. Come to think of it, there are no beds.”
“There must be something.”
“You know the score, McCoyne. You’ve been around here long enough to know what it’s like. There probably used to be a cure, or some surgical procedure that might have given you a little more time, but things have changed. If there was a drug, your chances of finding a good enough supply now are pretty much zero, and even if you did, it’d probably be contaminated and you wouldn’t know how to administer it. No point wasting the little time you’ve got left worrying about it, if you ask me. And you did ask me, so I think you should listen.”
“But there must be something,” I say again.
She shakes her head. “Only thing you can do,” she starts, giving me hope for that briefest of moments, “is take control and finish it sooner rather than later. Save yourself the pain.”
“You’re joking,” I hear myself instinctively say, my brain completely failing to process everything I’m being told. “Tell me you’re joking.”
She just looks at me with disdain, then gets up and walks toward the door. She holds it open and waits for me to leave.
“Do I look like I’m joking? When was the last time you heard me laughing? When was the last time you heard anyone laughing? Tell you what, here’s a good one for you: Find yourself a gun and shove it in your mouth. Take one bullet tonight before bedtime. Caution, may cause headaches and drowsiness.”
Her insensitive comment goes unanswered. Suddenly the room is painfully quiet and empty, the only noise is the rain as it continues to hammer against the windows.
“Just go,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do for you. There’s nothing anyone can do. Live with it till you die from it.”
27
I’M ON THE EDGE of the empty development, almost back at the house. The thought of being shut away in the dark there again makes my heart sink, but it’s the only place I’ve got left to go. Don’t remember how I got here. Don’t even remember leaving the factory.
Take a couple of days off, Hinchcliffe told me. Relax and straighten yourself out, he said. That was a fucking joke. Relax? Since when has anyone been able to relax in this vile, fucked-up world? Straighten myself out? Jesus, that’s equally impossible. In the space of a day everything has become infinitely more complicated and yet immeasurably simpler at the same time: more to think about, but less time to do it. My mind flits constantly as I walk through the torrential rain, never settling on any one thing long enough to give me time to work anything out. If I’m not thinking about the fact I’m dying, I’m thinking about Peter Sutton, Joseph Mallon, and the crowd of Unchanged buried underground. And if I’m not thinking about them, I’m thinking about the little girl strapped to the chair in Rona Scott’s fucking torture chamber. I can’t get her out of my head, poor little cow. And if I’m not thinking about her, I’m thinking about my own kids, and that’s never a good sign. Under it all there’s just one main thought I keep coming back to: I have a terminal disease.
If this had happened to me in my old life, I’d be panicking now, and so would everyone else. I’d be thinking about the kids and Lizzie, checking whether I had any insurance coverage, avoiding all the difficult but necessary practical conversations that Liz would be having with me about the future I wasn’t going to have … but today there’s no panic and no noise, just a strange, uneasy calm—an empty black hole where my life used to be. I knew I wasn’t well, and nothing the doctor said came as a great surprise, but at least until I’d spoken to her there was still an element of uncertainty and doubt, and I could still think I might wake up tomorrow and feel better. Now that’s gone, and the only thing I know for sure is that I’m well and truly fucked. There was a guy at work who got cancer. We all had half a day off for his funeral, and the crematorium was packed. There were hundreds of people there— hundreds of lives affected by one death. Christ, no one will even notice when I go. If I die alone at the house, my body will just be left there to rot. No one gives a shit about me. They all just take what they need from me, then dump me.
I trudge slowly through the housing development, soaked through, laughing to myself at the bloody irony of it all. I’ve survived the war—countless attacks, battles, and fights, a gas chamber, bombings, a nuclear blast even— and yet it’s my own flesh and bone that’s finally going to finish me off as my body eats itself from the inside out.
I remember Adam, the crippled fighter I spent a few days with last summer, when the war was close to reaching its peak and the killing still felt brave and righteous. I often think about him. In constant pain and barely
