The Peeling: Book 1 (Jeremy's Choice) (6 page)

“Quiet!” 
Kara stepped further out of the shadows.  She was holding a large chef’s
knife from the kitchen.  “I don’t want to hear you anymore.”

Jeremy
nodded.  “Okay.”  He made no move to get away, unsure whether Kara
even had it in her to do him harm.  In normal circumstances, he thought
not, but these were not normal circumstances and she was most certainly not her
usual self.

“You’ve
been fucking us both for a long time, but now it seems like you really got the
job done.  You’re a murderer, Jerry.  If Carol and I had never let
you near us then we would be okay, we would be healthy.”

“Half
the world has the disease, Kara.  You would have gotten it anyway, one way
or another.  Carol is my wife; you really think I would infect her
purposefully?”

 
Kara came closer with the knife.  Still he did not move.  She growled
at him, blood falling from her lips and covering the exposed bone of her lower
jaw.  “Men like you have been a sickness on women since time began. 
Women have always suffered because of misogynistic perverts like you.”

“You’re
talking nonsense.  The Peeling is killing as many men as women.  It’s
just luck of the draw who gets infected.”

Kara
came at him with the knife.  “Lies!  You did this.  You killed
us!”

Jeremy
was about to dodge the knife attack, but at the last second he decided to
remain in place.  What was the point?

He
thought about seeing Carol again as the knife entered his chest and forced him
backwards as though he’d been punched.  He fell backwards onto the sofa,
blade jutting out from between his ribs, and ended up facing the
television.  Delboy and Rodney were flogging Sikh crash-helmets in a world
that knew not of such horrors as The Peeling.  Jeremy thought it was a
nice way to go and, by the time he bled out, he almost managed to kid himself
that the world still had a chance.

Almost.

Thursday

My big toenail fell off today.  That leaves three on
my right foot and two on my left.  It stung at first, but now my toe just
feels…hot.  I’m keeping the nail in an ashtray in the kitchen.

My name is Samuel Lloyd Collins and I suppose, in a way,
this is my last will and testament, except I don’t have anybody to leave
anything to, so I guess this is really just my last testament.  Or maybe
writing this is merely the closest thing I have to company.

I don’t have to be alone.  I could go next door and
take part in one of their endless political debates that echo through the walls
and keep me awake at night.  Sometimes I think about yelling at them to
‘keep it down’, but what would be the use?  Politics are high on
everybody’s agenda right now.  One would expect them to be.

Everyone has their own theory on how ‘The Peeling’ started,
but I personally think it was the Arabs.  It’s always the Arabs, isn’t
it?  Saddam is dead and the Yanks finally got Osama.  So what choice
did they have left but to go for broke?  Everyone assumed their master
plan would culminate with a nuclear attack on a major city, but in many ways
this virus is worse.  We may have snuffed out the leaders, but their
passion for killing, it seems, will never die.   You cut the head off
a chicken and it runs around like a maniac, spraying anyone nearby with
blood.  That’s what ‘The Peeling’ is: arterial chicken blood spraying us
all with its infectious filth.  I guess the Arabs won in the end…

I came down with the sickness on Tuesday.  Two days
ago.  I’ve already lost a bit of hair and some skin off my testicles, and
you already know about the toenails.  Funnily enough, my fingernails are
currently unaffected, probably the only reason I’m able to write this.  I
thought about typing this on the computer, but somehow it felt like a man’s
final words should be in ink, don’t you think?  Maybe when it comes right
down to it, paper is more permanent than a collection of cheap circuits.

My future is laid out for me now.  I’ll be dead within
a week, give or take a day.  The beauty of the Peeling is that it leaves
no room for hypothesising.  No room for hope.  It kills every time,
no exceptions.  In a way that certainty has allowed me to come to terms
and accept my fate.  This time next week I will be a bubbling oil-slick of
rancid, dissolving flesh.  Somehow I’m fine with that.

But I need to know who is responsible for the pain I’m
in.  I already told you I think it’s the Arabs, but unless I know for
sure…Well let’s just say that knowing for definite would bring a certain degree
of closure to the situation.  Of course, the honourable men and women of
the Government’s various agencies are urgently investigating the origin of this
disease and those responsible, but as each second passes, Great Britain withers
and dies beneath its second great plague.  I just hope to be alive when
they determine the guilty party.

Already know it was the Arabs, just need to know for sure…

Friday

I woke up this morning stuck to my pillow.  Not
because I had been drooling in my sleep, but because the skin below my left eye
had rotted and fused with the cotton.  I had to rip the pillow away and
half of my face with it.  The resulting meld of infected flesh and sickly
white cotton reminded me of a surrealist painting, beautiful in a way. 
Maybe I’ll have it framed before I die.

What an odd thing to muse upon!  It would not surprise
me if I have gone quite mad.  I’m already starting to feel delightfully
delirious (or maybe that’s just the throbbing and burning where my face used to
be).

Such good bone structure I was blessed with, but did not
know of, until I was today faced with it in the mirror.  The bone of my
cheek now shows right through, covered only by several, thin slivers of sinewy
gristle.  I look like the Phantom of the Opera (albeit a grizzlier
version).  I wonder what part of me will dissolve tomorrow.  That’s
the fun part of this sickness, I suppose, not knowing which chunk of skin will
decompose next.  It isn’t like typical flesh-eating diseases; they have a
point of infection and usually spread systematically.  But The Peeling
strikes the body at random, necrotising a man’s feet before popping up a day
later and doing the same to his ears.  I’ve seen hundreds of case
photographs and no two victims follow the same path of infection.  The
only non-variable: it’s always fatal.  No one understands this disease at
all…

…and no one can stop it.

I think it’s starting on my chest…

Saturday

I can see my ribs.  Two of them, glistening at me like
curved piano keys.  It’s amusing, in some morbidly fascinating way, to see
one’s inner workings.  The pain is starting to subside, and thankfully
only throbbed for a few hours in the morning, but the cloying odour inside the
house is repugnant.  Ideally, I would open the curtains and windows, but I
don’t wish to be disturbed by the outside world.  I would only become
resentful of those who still have all of their skin.  Besides, it was
being around other people that infected me in the first place, sealing my fate,
and I hate them for that!  But retaining my humanity is all I have left to
focus on for now and resentment will only make that task harder.  I have
decisions ahead of me that should not be made in temper…

I have been corresponding all day with a trusted associate
that is supplying me with up-to-date information on the current pandemic, along
with the progress of the on-going Government investigations into the
crisis.  So far it seems clear that this was a premeditated and focused
attack on the western world.  The Peeling has, so far, hit 90% of Europe
and is seeping its way into the East.  USA and South America are also
stricken, worse than we are in fact, but it is unsurprising to me that, as yet,
the Arab world is unaffected.  I am eager to see just how far into the East
the disease spreads before ceasing its journey of human pestilence.  I’m
guessing that it will be shortly after it runs out of Christian nations to
infect.

Sunday

I lost a hand today.  Thank God it was my left and
that I can still continue writing this.  I now have a withered stump that
drips periodically with a viscous yellow discharge.  It looks similar to
the contents of a Cadbury Cream Egg but smells worse than anything I could ever
hope to describe to you now.    I suppose it’s the aroma of
lingering death.

Next door are still at it.  Talking incessantly at all
hours.  I need peace and quiet right now.  Time to think.  I
already informed my colleagues that I would be working from home for the next
week and am not to be disturbed under any circumstances.  They were not
happy, but I’m the Boss, so they’ll have to cope.  They don’t know that I
have the sickness, of course, probably too wrapped up in their own fear of it
to even consider the possibility.  People only worry about themselves
nowadays.

My associate emailed today and told me that the infection
was definitely engineered –
Wow.  What a revelation! –
and that it
was unleashed upon the world at strategic locations:  Major cities, along
coastal areas so that the disease would work inwards from all directions,
eating around the edges of England as though it were a Jaffa Cake with a chewy
orange centre…

God what I would do for a box of Jaffa Cakes right
now!  The stump of my wrist is itching just thinking about it. 
Perhaps it’s excitement?

Anyway, I have sent a reply email asking what is currently
known about WHO engineered the disease.  That is what I have to know.

Then maybe I can do something about it.

Monday

I have lost an eye today.  It is indeed unfortunate,
but in a way I am blessed to have persevered this long anyway.  Many do
not, and at least I have the other eye.  My left one just dribbled out of
its socket today like an under-boiled egg with its top sliced off:  all
foamy white and custardy-yellow.  I almost laughed when I looked in the
mirror.  I look like a zombie-pirate.

At least it doesn’t hurt.  Not physically. 
  

I suspect I have little time left now and I am anxiously
awaiting news from my associate.  I can feel the illness seizing my
internal organs in its corrosive grip and it’s only a matter of time before
they start to decay completely.  I have already taken to soiling myself
involuntarily, so I assume that my intestines are already rotten.  I would
take a shower to get clean, but the pressure would only shred what remaining
skin I have left.  For now I will sit and wait for my associate to provide
me the information I so desire…

Who is responsible?  Who turned me, and most of the
free world, into a quivering mass of mutilated flesh?

I wonder if there’s any Jaffa Cakes in the pantry.

Tuesday

It has now been one week since I first noticed the skin
under my armpit was peeling away in pus-filled chunks.  One week since I
realised I was a dead man walking.

Dead man peeling! Ha!

But I am still alive, devoid of nearly all my skin,
granted, but alive nonetheless.  Moist splatters of pungent flesh litter
my home now, whilst foul scabs fall from my body constantly.  The only
merciful thing about this disease is that I feel nothing.

Nothing except for the soft scraping of insanity inside my
fleshless skull.

Wednesday

Today will be my last.  I can feel it.  My lower
legs snapped today when I got out of bed, too rotten and malformed to bear what
little weight my frail body has left.  It is of no importance however, as
I awakened to something wonderful: 
You have mail.

 
I am about to drag my withered
limbs over to the computer right now, to see what my trusted associate has for
me.  I will record the email, and my response, for you right here, as I
feel it will be important.

Dear Prime Minister.

I sincerely hope that you are keeping well in
this time of dire need.  Great Britain is within the talons of great
turmoil and despair, but I trust that your inspired leadership will see us
through as ever.  This shall not be the end of our endless empire and the
good people of this nation will go on stronger than before.  That is our
way and always will be.  May Angels sit on our shoulders as God guides our
souls through the times ahead.  Long live Great Britain.

But without further ado, Prime Minister, I will
provide you with the Intel you require.  It was discovered at
0300
GMT today that the disease is not contained to western nations as first
assumed.  In fact we now have reliable information that the infection,
commonly referred to as ‘The Peeling’, was contracted in Turkey and has quickly
spread as far east as Japan.  I’m sure you can appreciate, that with the
USA also affected, it effectively means the disease has travelled the entire
circumference of the world…  Yet there is one country that has shown no
effects of the illness, despite being surrounded by it on all borders.  We
have tried to contact that nation’s Government but they have declined all
opportunities to reply.  It now seems a reasonable assumption that the
country in question is responsible for this worldwide plague.