Marc Chadbourn - The Queen of sinister

'I need to… think about what just happened, Caitlin,' Mary said gravely. 'But I'll come looking for you when I've worked out what it all meant.'

Caitlin forced a smile. 'It'll wait till morning, I'm sure. I'm not going to stay at the hall for long. I want to get back home.'

Mary saw her to the door, but just as she was stepping out into the gale, Mary gave her a fierce hug in an unprecedented show of physical affection. 'Look after yourself,' she said. Then, 'Be careful.'

It sounded like a warning. As Caitlin entered the foul atmosphere of the village hall, Gideon greeted her with a sad expression and nodded to one of the side rooms. Through the gap in the door, Caitlin could see Eileen sitting hunched beside her sister, holding her hand loosely. Daphne was lying on a table, already comatose and sleek with sweat. The black mottling was visible in contours on her face and forearms like some Maori tattoo. Caitlin couldn't believe the speed with which the plague attacked the body.

Was this the end of the world? she wondered. Humanity wiped out in a matter of weeks, nature clearing the decks ready for the next phase? It seemed so unfair after all they'd endured during the last few months: they had escaped the bang, only to be done for by the whimper.

There was nothing she could say to Eileen, so she left her to her grief. No more new patients were being brought in, so she retired to the office, grateful for a moment of privacy to try to make some sense of the illness. Frantically scrawled notes on sickeningly stained paper were scattered all over the desks, while charts and graphs were pinned to the cork board next to a yellowing announcement of some pre-Fall Best-Kept Village contest.

Caitlin still nurtured a desperate hope that if she kept turning over all the details, sooner or later she'd hit upon some startling insight that would reveal the plague's true nature. But the mechanics of transmission escaped her; the whole epidemiological nature of the disease was a complete mystery. Were some people genetically predisposed to contracting it? Perhaps even for those like herself who appeared immune, it was just a matter of time.

She tried to focus on the positive, but everything pointed towards the unthinkable: at best, humanity stripped back to a handful of survivors. At worst: the end. She stared at the mass of notations and scribblings and felt the waves of despair break against her. It was all chaos. All too much, with no time to make sense of it. Liam was still in his bed. Grant was fast asleep, too. Relieved, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of beer. She hated the taste of it, but at least it anaesthetised her. Finally, she had calmed enough to go to bed. She would wake Grant, she thought, and they would make love, and the world and all its hideous threats would be forgotten.

Her desperation for something life-affirming made Caitlin as drunk as the alcohol. She slipped into the dark bedroom and pulled off her clothes, her awkwardness dissipating in the heat of her rapid arousal. Grant was dead to the world, but she knew how to wake him. She found his chest and moved her hand towards his groin. It took a second or two before the sensations told her something was wrong. Grant's skin felt waxy and feverish, and there was a puddle of sweat near his belly button. For the first time, she listened to his breathing: it was shallow and laboured.

'Grant?'

Her mind became a mad jumble of thoughts: flashes of worst-case scenarios, quickly suppressed, prayers, memories, oddly settling on the time when he had proposed to her, when everything had been perfect. Deep in her heart, she knew the truth, and she thought the rush of brutal emotion would drive her mad.

She jumped from the bed, cursing the lack of electricity, and raced to fetch the candle from the hall. Shielding it with her hand, she closed her eyes briefly before she dared take that first look. The pain was as sharp as if she'd been physically struck. In the candlelight, Grant's skin looked hoarfrost-white, only emphasising the black mottling running in lines all over him. Pretending she was doing something worthwhile, she checked his pulse and then opened his eyelids.

He wouldn't regain consciousness. She'd already felt his final kiss, shared her last words with him — and what had they been? The bitterness and anger of their parting brought another stab of pain. Amidst the cold depths of her despair, she felt a burst of self-loathing, but it only had a second of life before another thought struck her, just as terrible. And then she had the candle and was into the hall, hovering outside Liam's door, whispering, 'Please, God, please, God, please, God,' not daring to go in, thinking she might actually go mad there and then from the sight she was projecting.

But the reality was much, much worse. Liam lay in his bed, the sheets tucked up, just as she had left him, just before the goodnight kiss. His skin was white. And black.

The storm outside had broken, but the one within would rage for ever.

The night never ended.

All thoughts and fears, grief and desperation were purged from Caitlin as she lost herself in the constant round of mundane tasks necessary during the last few days: the sheet-changing, the bed-washing, the administration of what sparse painkillers she had to hand, but most of all the talking. She would sit at their bedsides for hours at a time, letting the words come from the depths of her mind and heart, a trance state in which she had no idea what she was saying. Part of it was a simple attempt to impose order on a situation that had none, a discussion of the mundane chores as if Grant and Liam were both up and about, just out of sight, ready to respond once they had finished whatever they were doing.

And she talked and talked so they wouldn't have the opportunity to respond; if they couldn't get a word in, there was still the possibility that they might. And at other times, she spoke of her love for them both, that deep, deep well of emotion that she hadn't visited for a long time, and which surprised her with the volume it contained.

And there was the tragedy, for it shouldn't have surprised her at all. She didn't know if they could hear her, didn't really know if it was for their benefit or her own, but she hoped and prayed, and talked.

And on the fourth day, they died. The first hour was one of utmost peace, a chrysalis state of numbness and nothing. Caitlin was gone; her life was over. Afterwards, she sat by Grant and thought of what had been lost, never to be regained; and then she sat by Liam and considered what might have been and now never would.

Then she retired to the kitchen and brewed herself a pot of the infusion they laughingly used to call tea as the thin light of a cold, grey dawn gradually leaked through the windows. Hunched over her mug, she saw Grant and Liam's shoes next to the back door, muddy from their last walk together as a family. The image hit her with an inexplicable power, and then she was sucked away in an uncontrollable torrent of grief that dashed her on the rocks of her own bitter sorrow. Shortly after noon, in a light rain with the clouds shimmering like silver, Caitlin took a spade into the garden they had all tended in the days before the Fall. At the end, underneath the gnarled oak where Liam had climbed and Grant had built a tree-house, she dug. The topsoil went down for two feet and then she hit the thick, yellow-grey clay, water-sodden and dense. Her muscles burned and her joints cracked and complained, yet she forced herself on, relishing the pain. The rain plastered her hair against her head, soaked through her clothes so completely that she felt as if she were wearing water.