Home in the Hill

Few things are more cosy than playing a board game with the family on Christmas Eve. The large table slap-bang in the middle of the wood-floored dining room. The monopoly board barely perceptible if not for the burning candles scattered across the bare floor and hanging from the chandelier above. My Father and mother sitting across from me and my little sister as she gently rocks her favourite dolly from side to side. This was home.

Except it wasn’t.

We all knew the stakes of the game were higher this year. You could see it in the purposeful intent in each of our eyes. You could feel it in the taut atmosphere of the room. A wooden room, too big and too cold for a cosy family board game.

I look across at my sister, Pippa. It’s her turn. She should be deliberating her next move but is preoccupied with rocking her little dolly, Hermione, to sleep. I feel a shiver down my neck watching the candlelight dance as it catches Hermione’s glassy dead eyes.

‘For God sake! Make your damn move already, Pippa!’

My father isn’t the nicest man at the best of times, but especially when he’s losing.

A year ago mother would have chided my father for speaking to my nine-year-old sister in such a manner. Saying something like, “Malcolm, how dare you speak to our little princess like that?” Now, she just laughs. Her neck arching back, her eyes rolling beneath her unkempt hair like a bedraggled witch as she guffaws into the heavens.

A smirk of satisfaction crawls its way beneath my fathers moustached upper-lip as Pippa idly rolls a double-four and lands on the go-to-jail space. Distractedly placing her silver old-boot piece in the jail square, her eyes never leaving the rocking dolly.

‘That’s what you get for not paying attention!’ Father announces, scooping up the dice in his hairy paws. The witch next to him, Tracey, otherwise known as my mother, arches her neck to the shining chandelier again and lets out her newly-acquired trademark cackle.

She is the most far-gone out of all of us. I don’t think she even knows where she is most of the time. Sometimes I just wish she would win this damn game so she could have it over with already.

I watch my dad take his turn as though in a dream. He in the foreground a nebulous mirage whilst behind him I stare transfixed at the dead girl in the corner. Her dark hair jiggling as she giggles to herself. Her bloodshot eyes meet my own as she sticks a bony finger to her withered lips, gurgling the word, ‘Shhh,’ as though through a mouthful of dirt.

‘I’m sorry, Lucy,’ I whisper, feeling tears well in my eyes.

My father’s cheer startles me from my reverie as he lands on the community chest and rakes in the accumulated funds in the boards centre. His hand absently reaches for the empty bowl next to him.

‘Get me some more pork scratchings from the store room will you, Kaylee? Looks like Daddy’s gonna win this time!’

I rise from my seat and make my way to the store room knowing full well there will be no pork scratchings there. We ran out of them just like we did everything else. But I wouldn’t want to make Dad mad. He’s nearly as far gone as Mom.

I make my way to the end of the bunker and latch open the thick oak door. The long room used to be full of supplies. Everything from food and drink, condensed milk and tins of soup to medical supplies and even some alcohol. But now, dipping beneath the wooden beams and into the store room, the rows of empty shelves look a sad sight indeed. The rations down to a couple of tins of sausage and beans and a lonely packet of beef jerky. That will have to do.

Before returning to the game, I make my way up the long ladder out of the bunker, all the way to top. I can hear the scratching and clawing outside before I even open the hatch.

The air pressure hisses as I twist the seal and push the heavy hatch up, walking into the grizzly site of the Observatory above our shelter.

The light blinds me as I make my way out above ground.

No matter how many times I come up here the suns presence never fails to shock me. Living underground will do that to you. 90% of our house is based underground inside a hill. My pasty-white skin is testament to that. The other 10% is this glass dome on top of the hill. We call it the Observatory. The Observatory boasts of a 360degree panorama of the town below and the mountain peaks in the distance. Although most of this is obscured by monsters pressing up against the glass around me. They used to be human once, but COVID-19 took care of that. The thickened glass will ensure they cannot breach our sanctuary. But the site of that mass of blood-shot eyes and drooling jaws never fails to haunt me.

I make my way over to my little brother, Xavier, and my boyfriend - well, ex boyfriend - Justin, laying lifeless in the centre of the dome.

This is where we lay our dead.

Seven-year-old Xavier won the game yesterday, so his body is still fresh. He was far gone, so it was maybe for the best. But, my ex-boyfriend’s body, Justin, has been sitting here for nearly two months and the sight of his rotting flesh doesn’t come close to the stench.

He didn’t win the game, but my father took care of him anyway.

Malcolm and Justin never got along. My father’s ex-army so he was always a strict type, especially when it came to boyfriends. He flipped his lid when I became pregnant four-years-ago. I was fifteen at the time. And he went even crazier when I told him I lost the baby three-months later. I shouldn’t have said it was Justin’s fault. Yes, he was abusive sometimes but despite the bruises I wore, it was me that went down to the clinic and had an abortion. Justin’s beatings had nothing to do with it.

Of course, when the virus broke out a year later, my father wasn’t totally happy with allowing my abusive boyfriend into the shelter with us. But what choice did he have? We was in a global crises.

And then father killed him. On Halloween, my birthday no less. He said Justin was showing signs of the second phase but I knew he was just using that to justify killing the boy who supposedly killed his grandchild.

But that was me. We was going to call her Lucy.

And now we’re all showing signs of the second phase.

I look over at my little brother’s lifeless body.

Poor Xavier.

He smiles and winks at me.

Hallucinations where just the start of the second phase.

That damned second phase.

The whole world went into uproar about a little cough when they had no idea that was just the dawn of something we truly needed to fear. It was the attacks in the street over food and milk that should have worried us. Those first glimpses into the dark hearts of man showed us what was truly to come.

COVID-19 started as a mild respiratory disease. 98% of those infected survived and those that didn’t where the old and the medically vulnerable. But what people didn’t foresee was the awful impact of the recurrent infection. It soon became clear that the virus worked in similar ways to the chicken pox. If you get chicken pox once, your fine. If you get it again, you get the measles, which is much worse. The secondary infection phase on this disease was far more horrifying. You got it once, you were fine. You got it twice. Welcome to Hell.

The first phase affected the lungs. The second phase affected the entire organism. Debilitated lung function meant chronic hypoxia became the norm. People began to operate at an oxygen level far below the former average. This oxygen-deprivation resulted in first hallucinations and then mania.

From our vantage point on the hill we watched in horror as the town below went through phases of attacking each other to committing violent acts of coitus on the street together. Sometimes in twos and threes, often in the tens and sometimes hundreds.

It’s almost funny now, to think we feared a cough. We feared a virus. When we should have feared what lay beneath. I heard a quote once, that the line between good and evil does not run between race, class or country, but through every human heart. The virus was simply the rust on the blade. Scratch beneath the surface and you find the weapon hidden beneath. A weapon that beats like you and me.

I shiver at to think that I could have been one of them in those mass attacks and writhing orgies if not for my father. He left the army with PTSD. To make things worse upon coming home he found out mom had been having an affair whilst he was away. From then on he spent his days in a stupor. A combination of drinking himself to death and constructing an underground shelter in this hill got him through the days. I suppose he wanted to protect his family from all the horrors he saw whilst on duty.

He never really talked about mom’s affair back then, unlike now when that’s all he ever seems to talk about. The second phase has affected us all in different ways.

The town laughed at first. Calling him ‘the man with the house in the hill.’

‘You’re not laughing now,’ I say to the heaving mass of angry faces and snarling teeth beyond the three-inch-glass.

A few weeks before all the networks went down, the broadcasters where calling the final phase of this virus the NDE. Where the oxygen deprivation went beyond hallucinations and mania into Near Death Experiences. I don’t know what it was the infected saw or heard in these NDE’s, but it was at this point when they stopped fighting and copulating with each other and began focusing on taking down the small remaining healthy population.

People like us.

Three-years in and with food scarce it was only a matter of time before we joined them.

I bid my dead brother farewell as I leave the Observatory. He waves at me and gives me another cheeky wink as I make my way back down the ladder, closing the hatch door and leaving the infected to continue there futile clawing at the glass above me.

I return to the dining room. To the game. All wood, and cold and flickering shadows. The large room’s walls painted with dark birds swirling among fluffy clouds on a backdrop of light blue sky. My dad’s idea to make us feel like we’re in the great outdoors. To me however, the effect creating a striking paradox of the sky pressing down upon us, threatening to crush us. I have never felt so indoors under this false charade.

‘Well, about time,’ Father says, snatching the beef jerky from my hand. ‘You’ve forfeited your go and miraculously your mother is in the lead. That’s the first time she’s been on top since she was screwing Gareth whilst I was away on duty!’

Father erupts into a howl of laughter, quickly followed by mother who falls into her usual fit of cackles.

That’s oxygen deprivation talking again, I think, looking from my little sister, Pippa, still trying to coo her doll to sleep, and to my mother, her scruffy hair covering her wide-eyes as though in disbelief that she’s in the lead, eyes still streaming with laughter.

It hits me how far gone we all are.

I don’t know how the infection got in, but it did. Each of us well into the second phase. My mother in her delirious state, my little sister insistent that her doll, Hermione, is a real baby. My father who has begun to run this house like a military operation as though he where still behind enemy lines. And then there’s me. I’m just thankful that I know Xavier’s corpse cannot really wink at me and that my aborted baby in the corner is not real, shushing me to keep my secret. But they are becoming more real by the second. When do dreams become reality? Is that when we enter the final near death stage? The NDE?

‘Your go Kaylee,’ Father says, taking a gulp on the oxygen tank beside the table. We’re all allowed a puff on it once an hour so it doesn’t run low. Though I’m not sure Father is sticking to that rule.

I grab the dice.

‘Woahhh! It’s Papa’s go next!’ Mother yells, her gnarled claw grabbing my hand. I’m just thankful for the contact. It’s a rare sight mother speaking up.

‘Your pap died two days ago! He won the game before Xavier remember!’ Father says, pointing to Grandfather’s corpse sitting next to mother at the end of the table, a bullet hole square in the middle of his forehead.

I always liked Grandpa Norman. He played lovely tunes on his harmonica and always gave out the best sweets when we were little but the second phase hit him hard. He won the first game of Mercy Monopoly two days ago. He was supposed to make his way up to the Observatory to do the deed but upon winning he just grabbed the gun and shot himself there and then.

No one’s really thought of moving the body since. Plus, it would be a grievous task getting him all the way up that ladder.

‘Oh yes, there you are!’ Mother says, wiping some of the dried blood from Grandpa’s cardigan before returning to her catatonic state.

‘There, there, go to sleep, Hermione. Ignore this noisy bunch,’ Pippa says, her nose almost touching the smiley-faced dolls.

I roll the silver thimble piece in my palm watching it dance in the candlelight and thinking about the virus that has destroyed our once humble lives. The life of the whole world. But no, not the virus. COVID-19 simply exposed the evil in our hearts and punished us for them. Take us for example. A normal family. My mother. The adulterer. My father. The drunkard. Myself. The liar. And Pippa, my little sister . . . Well, maybe she was just the girl who never grew up. Maybe the only innocent one among us.

I roll the dice.

It takes me a moment to realise that I have landed on my mother’s accumulation of properties as she takes all my money from me like a hungry beggar. Its takes me a further moment to realise that mother is the only person around the table with money left in front of her.

Father grunts, removing the pistol from his camo-jacket. ‘Fine. You win,’ He says handing the gun to my mother.

I watch absently. Pippa is not watching at all. Still caught up in the living-dead-doll.

Father continues, ‘Tracey Whitman, I announce you the third winner of Mercy Monopoly. Granting you leave to shuffle off this mortal coil in peace-’

‘Yeeha!’ Mother shouts, putting the gun in her mouth.

‘No, not here! In the Observa-’

-and pulling the trigger.

My mother’s blood, flesh and bone showers us all as her skull explodes, taking her life in the seat right next to her fathers.

My father picks bits of mom’s brain from his overgrown moustache as my little sister coos her blood-speckled dolly to sleep.

Three of us left now and only two bullets remaining. I hope I win the game tomorrow.

I see my aborted child, Lucy, shushing me from the corner. She’s covered in blood too.

The room spins as I realise my oxygen levels drop even further.

I reach for the oxygen tank but it seems a thousand miles away.

I know in this moment I am entering the third stage of COVID-19.

NDE.

My body warps into this Near Death Experience, and the room warps with me.

I will finally know what those outside know.

I will become one of them.

My head explodes in light.

Then all fades to black as I peer into the darkness of my own soul.

I’m standing over what remains of my blood-spattered family, holding the gun.

My father looks up at me. ‘Kaylee? What . . . are you doing?’

Pippa still plays with her dolly.

‘I know now,’ I hear myself say. All bloodshot eyes and snarling teeth. ‘This is wrong. We are wrong.’

I let the gun rip.