Колин Бейтман: Titanic 2020: Cannibal City

'I'm really hungry.' — New York survivor of the Red Death

Cannibal — a person who eats human flesh. Oxford English dictionary

To save a lot of time, right here at the start, let's be sure of our facts:

1. The world as we, you and I know it is over — wiped out by a plague. Those darned scientists!

2. But there are survivors. There are ALWAYS survivors. But you gotta watch 'em.

3. Jimmy and Claire were lucky enough to find themselves on the Titanic when the plague struck. Not often you get 'lucky' and ' Titanic' in the same sentence.

4. You'd think they'd be miserable — but they're having the time of their lives.

5. Why does there have to be a five? Four is plenty.

6. But six is an even number. The new Titanic is fabulous — of COURSE everyone wants to steal it.

She was running for her life. Twelve years old, and top of the menu.

Ronni came to New York from London for a vacation. She didn't particularly want to go, but her mother insisted — it would be educational, she said, think of the museums, think of the art galleries, think of that big statue thingy you see in the harbour. Her mother didn't have the slightest interest in education — what she meant was, I'll park you in a museum, then I'll go off shopping.

On the day it happened — it being the day everyone suddenly dropped down dead — Ronni was in the Museum of Natural History, a great, fantastic place, but after four hours she'd had enough, and after six hours, her mother being two hours late in coming to pick her up, she'd really had enough. So she decided, against strict orders, to make her own way back to the hotel. She'd already spent the meagre few dollars her mother had left her to buy lunch, so she had to walk — but almost as soon as she left the museum, people began to drop dead all around her. Well — perhaps it wasn't quiet as instantaneous as that, but it felt like it. What they actually did was start throwing up — here, there, everywhere. It was disgusting. Then they collapsed, too weak to move. Ronni just held her nose and kept walking. But even when she got to her hotel there was no let up. There were people throwing up in the lobby, in the elevator and along the corridor outside her room. She was incredibly relieved just to slam the door shut, lie down on her bed and flick the telly on — only to find that half the channels weren't working, and those that were were showing pictures of people throwing up.

Ronni wasn't stupid — over her few days in the Big Apple she had been vaguely aware of all the talk about this supposed 'Red Death' — some kind of a bug sweeping across America that lots of people were dying from — but New York didn't seem to be greatly affected, so she had supposed it was all being hugely exaggerated. There were a lot of things she wanted to see around the city, and some little outbreak of flu wasn't going to stop her enjoying herself, so she deliberately avoided watching the news after that and remained blissfully unaware that the situation was deteriorating across the whole world.

But now, as she lay back on her bed, she realised how much the day at the museum and the long walk home had taken out of her. Her legs ached and her head was sore. She'd drunk nearly a litre of water, but still felt really hot. Actually, now she felt a little . . .

Ronni dashed to the bathroom and threw up.

And then again.

She staggered back to bed and crawled under the covers. Damn — had she picked up the bug? Or maybe just a little bit of it? No wonder, with everyone being sick all around her. But she was young and strong and she'd soon shake it off. A bit of a sleep and she'd be fine.

In every corner of that magnificent city people were doing exactly the same as Ronni — climbing under blankets, lying down at work, stretching out on park benches and saying to themselves, 'A little rest, and I'll feel better soon.'

Think of it — by 2020 there were eighteen million people living in New York. And one day, they all just lay down for a little rest.

The Four Seasons Hotel was, without doubt, one of the finest hotels in New York, if not the world. Was is the important word here. It was a five-star hotel, luxurious beyond most people's wildest dreams. Now, if you had to decide how many stars it deserved, you would probably venture — oh, minus thirty?

That's minus *****************************

Six weeks after the Red Death struck it was dank, dirty and stinking. The toilets were blocked and overflowing, the stench from the kitchens was overwhelming and rats scampered along the corridors, gorged on decaying human flesh. Rotting corpses lay in the lobby or sat slumped over tables in the dining room. They were tucked in bed or curled up in the corridors. Some were even standing upright in the elevators, eternally waiting for a floor they would never arrive at.

And yet —

Ronni was sick for three days, too ill even to call room service, too fevered to wonder where her mother was or why no one had bothered to come and clean the room. But on the fourth morning she woke — and felt fine. She got up and had a shower and the most disturbing thing about it was that the water was cold. She tried calling her mother's room, even though it was only next door, but there was no response. She decided to let her mother sleep on — at least she could then slip down to breakfast without her mum's usual complaint about her choice of clothes. Ronni had slept for so long, and was now so hungry, that all memories of the Red Death and the collapsing population had been pushed to the very back of her mind. To her it was just another day of her vacation — until she stepped into the corridor and saw the first of the rotting corpses. She screamed and ran to her mother's room and banged on the door, but there was no answer. Perhaps she'd gone out already, and was unaware of what was surely a murder outside her room. Ronni edged past the corpse and rushed to the elevator — and screamed again; the door was wedged open by a woman's blue and bloated body. A double murder! But then as she took the stairs down to the lobby and saw the bodies there, and there and there, memories of reports of the Red Death came flooding back. But what if nobody knew that the hotel had been so badly affected by the plague? She had to summon help! Stop a policeman! She raced across the corpse-strewn lobby and emerged on to Fifth Avenue — and what had been a very noisy city, with bumper to bumper traffic and the sidewalks crammed with workers and tourists, was absolutely and completely quiet. Cars were crashed or abandoned; bodies lay everywhere.

It was horrible.

You might say Ronni was lucky to be alive — but it was 'luck' in the broadest possible sense, because if you woke up with millions of corpses for company, you probably wouldn't feel lucky at all. You'd feel terrified, and distressed, and confused, just like Ronni. But the fact is, she did wake up, she was alive, and now she had to figure out a way to survive.

There was no power in the city, which meant that the fresh food was already off, but there were still plenty of tins and bottles of water, both downstairs in the hotel kitchens, and in grocery stores in the immediate neighbourhood. Ronni learned to ignore the bodies lying everywhere, although she could never truly get used to the appalling stench. By day she explored the streets surrounding her hotel, spending hours in huge department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's, trying on clothes, painting her face with make-up, pretending she was a pop star, acting, playing, singing, doing everything she could to take her mind off the fact that the world had ended and she was utterly alone. At night she retreated to her room in the hotel. She cooked her tinned food on a small gas stove she had rescued from a camping store. She spent the hours of darkness staring out of her bedroom window. She slept only fitfully. For the first three or four weeks she actually supposed that she would be rescued, that a helicopter would land and take her away to safety. Yet she knew deep down that the catastrophe that had befallen her, the city, the country and the world was so indescribably huge that there was no possibility of it.