AROUND THE CORNER : THE BEGINNING OF THE END

From the earliest civilisations, governments have been put in place to protect the people. No one would have thought that in this day and age, it would have been the government who signed the death warrant for nearly sixty million of its own people.



It was being billed as one of the coldest winters in British history, and as of the first of January 2008, the weather reports had been right for once. Bitter winds swept in off the Atlantic and chilled the population almost to a standstill. The winter flu’s and colds had been the same that year just as every year before but a particularly nasty stomach bug had started to sweep the whole nation. The BBC had started to report on it when cases reached a few thousand. By the end of the first week in January, a hundred thousand people a day were being infected.
Hospitals had started to close their doors as wards were full, despite lines of the young and old trying desperately to see a doctor, a nurse, anyone. Village halls, schools and even town council offices were being used as temporary waiting rooms.
The Government made its first mistake by putting value on the economy over the people. Shops had reported massive high street losses that Christmas as millions of people used the internet to stock up on presents, food and all the rest of the trimmings that accompany the festive season. It was only natural, said the chancellor, that the country would pick its feet back up in the starting months of the year. So on the first of January 2008, the government asked the country to show its combined traditional stiff upper lip and go to work, despite any minor illness which they might have. Only taking time off sick if it was an emergency or if a family tragedy had occurred was the order of the day. How ironic that statement, which was flashing across the television screens around the country, would look in a few weeks time.
When the sickness and diarrhoea of the stomach bug started the hit the nation, within days the whole country had ground to a halt. People who would otherwise have been safely tucked away in bed at home were at work, spreading the virus faster than its makers could ever have imagined in their wildest dreams. That was when the health system collapsed.
For some reason the people infected with the sickness virus never got better. Hospitals started to resemble cattle yards as patients could not drink enough water to replenish the liquids they had expelled onto the floors, beds and all over themselves and the nursing staff. It quickly became apparent that this was no normal winter bug that was doing the rounds. A patient would turn up complaining of stomach cramps and within a time period ranging from a few hours to a few days, they would be dead. The report given by the medical council was that massive dehydration simply caused the deaths; the body could just not get enough liquids back into it’s system in time.
The Government made its second and ultimate mistake at the end of that hell of a week. Anyone who was starting to show ever the slightest sign of a stomach bug, was to quarantine themselves away at home and to drink as much water as they possibly could and to wait for the virus to work its was out of the body. Staying hydrated was the key to beating the virus. The message was put out on all television and radio shows and emails were sent out in the millions from the Department of Health to the population as a whole. They could not have been more wrong, it was the tap water which carried the virus.
Months earlier, a farm in the south western corner of the country reported a case of foot and mouth; the animal kingdom’s version of the black death. Within days surrounding farms had been infected and all meat in the country was destroyed. Cattle within a fifty mile radius of the outbreak was slaughtered as a safeguard. After weeks of more slaughter and culling, the outbreak was traced back to a medical vaccine laboratory that was situated nearby to the original farm of the outbreak. Investigations were called and scapegoats were fired. All this did not stop another outbreak of foot and mouth disease only weeks later from the exact same place. Again huge cattle slaughter was ordered and again the outbreak was finally contained. The mandatory scapegoats were found and fired again. No one had even thought to ask about the heavily fenced off building that was connected to the vaccine laboratory. It would not have made any difference if anyone had, no government in the world would own up to having a biological weapons laboratory, never mind having one in their own country.
As people drank more and more, they received a larger and larger dose of the virus, vomiting and soiling themselves to death, they died within hours covered in pools of their own blood and excrement. When the government discovered what was passing the virus on it was too late, far too late, for the unthinkable was starting to happen.

Liverpool Royal Hospital, Liverpool.

Dr Gina Harrison was on the verge of collapse. She had been on her feet for nearly four days straight, only stopping for a brief 10 minutes every few hours to grab a cup of strong tea and to stuff a mouthful of sandwich down her throat. At the start of the week, people had stumbled into the Accident and Emergency Department with stomach cramps which quickly turned into violent fits of sickness and diarrhoea. At first it was simply a case of hooking them up to a drip to get fluids back into their system but after the first day the stocks of hydration fluids were desperately low and no new deliveries were arriving, they had been forced to start mixing their own batches up from bottled water, salt and sugar.
The situation had changed on the second and third day when they had been forced to lock the doors of the hospital and have the police guard the barred doorways. It went against all her medical training, not to mention her own strong sense of ethics to shut the door in the face of the ill but if it hadn’t been done they would not be able to save the patients they already had filling the corridors not to mention the wards.
Now she stood trying to comprehend what her eyes were showing her. As she scanned the ward with glazed over eyes, her sight fell on blood and excrement being shovelled into medical disposal bins with the street shovels normally stacked away until the snow started to fall in the next few months. Patients hung limply over bed rails, dry retching into buckets which had not been emptied for hours. There was simply not enough people in the hospital to deal with the sheer amount of sick people. She had been working nearly none stop for four days and she hadn’t manage to save one life. Not one fucking life! She felt a tear roll down her dirt stained cheek and she brought up her blood stained jacket sleeve to cuff it away when she heard a scream. She ran back out of the ward into the corridor towards where the scream was coming from. Screaming was strangely uncommon at the moment as the patients were either unconscious, vomiting or dead. She turned a corner at the run and glanced at the light green sign on the ward door. Or what had used to be the sign. This ward was being used as a temporary morgue until the funeral directors could come to collect the bodies which had already filled the hospital’s basement. Now a skull and cross bones had been scrawled over the previous light green sign with a thick black marker pen.
Coming to a stop she saw Ann, one of the new nurses they had taken on over the holidays, white faced, shaking and eyes bulging. Turning towards Gina she pointed at a nearby bed
“That man, he just moved!” she managed to half whisper, half croak.
Almost giving an audible tut, Gina put a reassuring had on Ann’s shoulder and began to turn her away to get a hot drink, it had been a hell of a week for her never mind a new nurse fresh out of medical school. And then the man let out a gasp, then a groan and slowly rolled over and curled up into a ball on his side. Ann turned around and ran out of the ward. Gina had seen many things as a doctor in an Accident and Emergency Department but what she had just seen and heard was something that she would have never though she would have to deal with. On the bed was an old man, his skin stretched and already decaying due to the massive dehydration which caused his death. Maybe death wasn’t the right word as he was curled up into a ball and moaning to himself. She had heard of cases like this before, people who had been in horrific car accidents who had slipped into a coma and all life signs had stopped, only for them to suddenly gasp and sit up wide awake hours after death had been pronounced. They normally died within minutes but nonetheless they had done the impossible and come back to life. Walking over to the man she carefully took his wrist and checked for a pulse. Not finding one she went to his neck to try. The man’s head suddenly turned towards her. Gina was staring right into his dried up eyeballs when he leaned over and opened his mouth to speak to her. She put her face close to his to listen to what he was going to say. Only he didn’t say anything, he leaned forward and sunk his teeth deep into her face. Taking away a bloody hunk of Gina’s face in between his teeth, the old man let out a blood curdling moan and grabbed for her hair. Screaming Gina clapped her hands to her face and broke free of the old man’s grip
“Help me!” She managed to shout out, her mouth instantly filling with her own blood and tears and she span around and made for the ward exit. “My face! He bit my face!” She ran straight into a TV camera crew running in to help, her face smashing into the camera lens. The pain faded away as she slipped instantly into unconsciousness.

Ann walked over to the bed in the private room on the highest ward in the hospital. With a tear rolling slowly down her left cheek she gathered up the two edges at the top of the bed sheet and pulled them up over the head of Doctor Harrison. The on call doctor hadn’t been able to figure out what had caused her death, the wound to her face was not life threatening, it would have certainly required extensive facial reconstructive surgery but it was not a fatal injury. Certainly not one which would cause someone to die within twenty minutes of it happening. Maybe it had been the shock,. No one would know until a post mortem took place and with the state of the hospital as it was at the moment, that could be weeks.
Tucking in the sheet behind Doctor Harrison’s head, blood instantly soaking through the white sheet over where the wound had been stitched shut, Ann went behind the bed to push it through the door, a space had been made in the deep freeze morgue in the basement. It was the least they could do for her. Wiping away the lone tear with her wrist, she winced and rubbed her elbow. The bite that old man had given her while trying to restrain him would need to be looked at downstairs when one of the on call doctors had a free moment. Her beeper went off

*EMERGENCY-WARD12/TEMPORARYMORGUE-SECURITY-REQUIRED*

She dashed off leaving the room door wedged open with the bed and headed straight for the stairs. The white bed sheet that she had covered Doctor Harrison with twitched and a low moan came from under the sheet.