Mute

Chapter 1. Apocalypse soup kitchen

The apocalypse came and went and I missed it. It's a shame. I mean it's a shame about the apocalypse, not that I missed it.

Could I be the last human alive? I don't have enough information to answer that. It's definitely possible that I'm the last man on earth, the last man standing, but it's just as possible that other people survived whatever it was that ended the world. There could be what they call in those post-apocalyptic movies, pockets of humanity, ramshackle bands fighting to keep the species alive, to rebuild, all that malarkey.

Or maybe it only happened on my patch. Maybe it was a purely local catastrophe. If that's true then I'm going to look a right muppet when I'm found, what with me living like I Am Legend.

I'd better explain how I got here. I'm not sure who I'm explaining this to though, there might not be anyone to hear it. I know I shouldn't think like that but I can't pretend I'm feeling at all positive right now.

Here's what happened.

It was a big night. A big session. There were three of us, Rachel and Pete and me. We all called in sick from work on the Friday and went out for a late breakfast. Then we started on the beer and the shots. We really hammered it all afternoon. Then afternoon became evening and evening became night and we carried on hammering it. The drugs came out at some point, they had to or we wouldn't have lasted. It was properly messy. We ended up back at Pete's. I don't remember much apart from feeling really up for it with Rachel and realising pretty quickly that she was feeling really up for it with Pete. I think I might have toyed with the idea of trying to get all of us involved in something but that would have been too weird, and more to the point, why would Pete have wanted me involved if he was on course to get Rachel all to himself anyway? And besides, I don't think Rachel wanted me involved at all.

So I left them to it. I remember that part. I remember the walk home. It was stupid o'clock, maybe eight am, full-on daylight and people from the real world starting to go about their business. I just kept my head down. I was in a right old state and just needed to get home. My pride was hurt because of the Rachel and Pete thing and I was coming down like a sledgehammer on a rock.

When I got home I made a decision, a necessary decision. There was no way I was going to spend one of those horrible sleepless comedowns lying in my bed, sweating and twitching, tossing and turning - starting to doze off then coming back round again because of all the chemicals still racing around in my mind, making it buzz and whirr and spin and not stop not stop not stop. I've been through enough of those awful times. So I hit my stash: Temazipam, Diazepam, mazzies, dizzies, jellies, downers, whatever you want to call them. I hammered a load, I was taking no chances, I dosed up good and proper.

Then I had a big gin and a fat joint and that was that.

I woke up a long time later. At least a day later. I knew I'd been properly knocked out. It took me a while to shake the fug of sleep from my head, it seemed to take hours, then I realised I was in a different kind of fug. A fever. I was proper hot and proper ill. I started shivering like crazy so I wrapped myself in the duvet and tried to sweat it out. I was burning up but I was freezing too. I was a human Baked Alaska. I held the duvet really tight around me but I was still cold. I jumped out of bed to get a jumper from a drawer and in the few seconds I was out of bed the chill hit me double hard and I started shivering like I've never known before. It was like I was drilling a road. I thought my teeth were going to fall out from all the rattling. I grabbed not just the jumper but all the clothes I could hold at once and bundled myself back into bed. I put the clothes under the duvet and just lay there, burning and shaking. I was hallucinating, the delirium from the fever spiced up by whatever leftovers from Friday's session were still loose in my system.