“This does not read like a debut novel. MV Clark creates a unique zombie apocalypse with scale, scope, and depth. This is a universe which demands our attention and exploration.” — Jay Wilburn
Teaser from
The Splits:
Personal Histories of Scott-Lapidot Disease
from the Splits Archive
by MV Clark
London 1969 – the first UK outbreak. Soldiers have arrived and are beginning to clear the area of infected. Two sisters live close to each other in the area where the disease is at its worst. Claire, a young mum, has a fully stocked kitchen. But Anna is alone with no food, and she decides to go out foraging. This decision will cast a shadow over the rest of her life.
After the soldiers left me they went to Dara and Sombo’s flat. That visit was mercifully quiet but later on, as they got further down the row of houses, I heard doors being kicked in, shouting and screaming, and gunshots.
On day ten I heard the same sounds, but fainter.
On day eleven there was a hush. I lay on my bed with the radio repeating its advice to stay indoors. High from the lack of food I drifted in and out of sleep and lost track of time.
On day twelve I woke up once again with a clear head. But I knew it would not last – by the afternoon I’d be motionless on the bed, my strength draining from me. I was possessed by the thought of bread and butter. This did not strike me as unduly ambitious so I decided to go out again, but this time I took the meat cleaver.
There was nobody on the street, just blinding early morning sun in one direction and dusty luminescence in the other. I held the cleaver out in front of me with both hands as I walked towards the main road.
Before I got there I noticed a familiar house with its door ajar, the home of a Cypriot family who ran an upmarket delicatessen near Claire. It had red paintwork and sash windows with stained glass panels. A fig tree grew in the front garden.
I often walked past it and on a cold night, if the curtains were open, I would glance past the fat leaves and in through the window. I’d see heavy dark wooden furniture and religious paintings. Occasionally I’d catch the family gathered round the table eating a meal, but often the curtains were closed and I didn’t see anything.
In warm weather I saw more because the family would gather on the front step. Sometimes they were joined by a tiny old lady in a black dress whom they addressed as “yaya”. One day she noticed me looking and stared back with stony, heavy-lidded eyes. After that, I’d tried not to look.
Now, cautiously, I approached the house. I pushed the half-open door to reveal the staircase, beyond which the hall disappeared into shadow.
“Hello?” I called. I tensed my fingers around the meat cleaver and, as quietly as I could, walked into the darkness at the far end.
I fumbled for a light switch. When it clicked on I saw a kitchen with a chequered linoleum floor, lace curtains and pale blue cabinets. There was no sound apart from the cantankerous hum of an ailing fridge freezer. One of the cabinets was covered in droplets of blood, and in the middle of the droplets was a black dot, which I realised must be a bullet hole. There were several more pits in the walls but I was too hungry to be curious. I put the cleaver in my pocket and began exploring the contents of the cupboards. I found walnuts, almonds, honey, lentils, beans, tinned tomatoes, potatoes, onions, olive oil, wine and vinegar, all of which I put into a bag.
Then I went to the fridge, a clunking old thing. Its handles were falling off and had been reattached with chicken wire. When I opened it a rich gassy smell rolled out. Of course – it had been on and off for days because of the power cuts. I peered inside. The milk, yoghurt and vegetables were bad but the halloumi and stuffed vine leaves looked okay. In the freezer I found a chicken that was still cool. I reached in for it and as I did so something scratched my wrist – a small length of wire sticking down from the loose handle. I snatched my hand back and looked at the wire. It had an odd undulating shape. Drops of coagulated blood.
I was pondering the significance of this when I heard shuffling. I whirled round and saw a small figure with white hair in the doorway. It wore black and its back was bowed. The yaya.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was hungry.”
She didn’t move. I wondered how I was going to get out of the house. I walked reluctantly towards her. “I’ve only taken a few things. I’m desperate. I’ll put them back if you ask me to.”
She lifted her head and her face came into the light. Her skin was hard, translucent, like a mermaid’s purse that has dried up in the sun. Deep cracks ran across her forehead and from the corners of her eyes, exploiting the furrows of old age.
She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me towards her, puckering as if she wanted to kiss me. I pulled away but I couldn’t shake her off – her hands were like clamps. I tugged desperately at the meat cleaver, tearing my pocket as I freed the blade. I lifted it back behind my head then whacked it down into her skull. It went in about two centimetres. I looked at her and she looked back. She didn’t die but she let go and stumbled back, at the same time pitching forward from the waist, which allowed me to yank the blade out of her head and push past.
It was only when I was outside that I pieced together the meaning of what I’d seen. The whole family had been executed except the grandmother, who the soldiers must have missed. The house was as infected as any house could be. I threw the food into a dustbin.
It wasn’t until I was back in my flat that I remembered the scratch. I went to the window to examine it. The cut was small but unmistakeable – minuscule slivers of severed skin on either side, a thin valley of red in the middle. Traversing it was a smear of blood the size of a penny.
A desperately sad feeling came over me. There wasn’t much left of my life. It was narrowing like an unfinished tunnel. I could no more affect that narrowing, defer that end point, than I could stop the sun going down.
I shook my head. I couldn’t let something so disgusting – so disabling – rampage around up there. Get on with it, Anna, I told myself. I went to the sink and ran a tap over the cut.
What had actually happened, after all? Even if some of the people I’d looted had been infected, the blood that touched me might not have been. Even if it was, had it got inside my body? Supposing it had got inside my body, the illness might not be transmitted that way. And I felt fine. If I was going to turn surely I would have had symptoms by now. Minutes or hours, they’d said. Days at most I’d heard recently.
On day thirteen I noticed new words coming from the radio. I turned up the volume.
“This is the UK National Security Council. The outbreak is over. Repeat: the outbreak is over. All infected have been identified and apprehended. Repeat: all infected have been identified and apprehended. The army is working with civil authorities to restore services and a military presence will remain in the borough until this is complete. In the meantime residents may leave their homes and businesses are encouraged to re-open. The outbreak is over. Repeat: the outbreak is over.”
I listened to the broadcast four or five times before it sank in. I did not trust it but my desire to get out again was overpowering.
When I got to the high street the first thing I did was check on the man who had given me the meat cleaver. The lights were on, the door was open and a shrivelled, half-chopped lettuce lay on the counter. But he was gone. That scared me and I huddled against a wall whilst taking a long look at my surroundings.
After a while I walked to the kerb. Where I stood on Green Lanes there was a dip giving lengthy upward perspectives in either direction. Normally the entire road was choked with traffic and when you looked along these vistas they ended mistily, blanched by a haze of car exhaust. Now I had a sweeping view of empty pavements, bare tarmac and limpid air. But it was slowly returning to its usual state. A woman briskly rolled up the shutters of her bakery and a lone Renault made its way down from Manor House. I was gladdened. I looked up at the empty grey sky and wondered what to do next.
The answer was obvious – go to Claire’s. But as I got deeper into the residential streets they remained silent and empty. Despite the activity I’d seen on Green Lanes I began to panic, wondering if I had imagined the government’s announcement. I was halfway between Claire’s house and my flat – whichever way I ran it was a long way to safety. I pressed on.
Claire lived in a wealthy part of Haringey lined with four-storey Victorian piles. In summer the trees became swaying green giants and the gardens overflowed with roses and ferns, exuberant barricades against the city concealing cool shady hollows at their centre. But at this time of year the trees were bald and grey, the gardens a mess of scratchy twigs and bare soil. When Claire opened the door I was shocked by her appearance. Her hair was stuck to her head with sweat, her cheeks were scratched and she had dark shadows under her eyes. For a moment I wondered if she was ill.
But she said: “Come in, come in, welcome to the sleep torture house,” and I saw she was herself.
Her kitchen always made me blink. Inherited from the previous owners, it had a yellow lino floor and bright pink cabinets.
On the white Formica table lay her latest craft project, a patchwork quilt made up of familiar scraps of fabric – cotton polka dots from our childhood party dresses, old blue ticking from Grandpa’s pillows, the delicate cream and pink flecks of Love is Enough from the smart cushions in the sitting room. I didn’t know why she wanted to work with these odds and ends – they reminded me of Mother.
Michael, my demanding nephew, was playing with spoons on the floor. “An-ah!” he said brightly, although he did not smile.
“You look so thin!” said Claire.
“I didn’t have any food.”
“What’ve I been telling you about stocking your kitchen? You’ve really got to start listening. Let me cook you something.” She began preparing sausages and potato. “Were you scared?”
“Uh, no.” I scrabbled in my handbag and pulled out the meat cleaver. “I had this.” I remembered the old lady and felt a macabre satisfaction. She’d looked as if she’d always been a bitch.
I arranged myself at the table so I could sit in one chair and put my feet up on another. Then we began to talk. The familiarity of my sister’s mind, our perfectly matched capacity for conversation based on repetition and interruption, beat back all remaining fear.
“I think we’re okay,” said Claire. “I think that’s it. They said it’s over, it’s got to be over, right?”
“I think it is over,” I replied. “We can’t both be hallucinating the announcement.” At that moment a car roared past Claire’s house, underscoring the point.
“What if they’ve missed one person?” she asked. “Even one person with the disease. It could all start again.”
I recalled the scratch and felt a dark pulse of anxiety. My hands seemed to have lost their strength – they lay in my lap like dead things, sickness spreading from them up my arms and towards my head and heart. But I couldn’t fall silent, not just then. I might as well write ‘I’m infected’ on my forehead. “We’d be back to square one,” I managed miserably.
“We can’t ever know, can we. You can’t prove a negative.”
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