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ericfruits · 6 years

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A day crossing Paris by train

ON SUNNY weekends Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse bustles with visitors. They admire its goats and cows, buy fresh farm eggs, picnic in riverside meadows and explore the 11th-century hilltop castle. Furtive mushroom-pickers slip to secret spots in the woods nearby.

Parisians have been enjoying this fantasy of rural life since the railway first arrived in St-Rémy 150 years ago. The line was dubbed the “lilac train” in honour of the mauve bouquets taken back to the Smoke as remembrances of day-trip idylls.

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The lilac line is now, rather less charmingly, line B of the regional express network (RER, in French). On maps it appears as a blue thread with frayed ends stretching diagonally across Paris from bottom left (St-Rémy) to top right. It links country, leafy suburbs, the opulent city, tourist delights (and traps) and grotty northern banlieues. At its far end is Charles de Gaulle airport, a sprawling avant-garde mess that touched down on the fields of sugar beet and tulips next to the village of Roissy in 1974.

Despite its name, the B is no express. Tracing its 80km (50 miles) takes an hour-and-a-half—not that anyone normally does so. Day-trippers go out; commuters come in; people travel a few stops for shopping, or to see friends, or to go to school; at airports (the line indirectly serves one at Orly, as well as Charles de Gaulle) and railway interchanges travellers from further afield pile on. For all of them, the line is a means, not an end—and not a particularly appealing one. Many of the carriages that between them provide almost a million journeys a day wobble disturbingly along, with yellow-painted walls, dim lights, metal coat-hooks over threadbare purple seats, a crackling tannoy, doors that hiss, brakes that squawk like gangs of novice clarinettists. Strikes or breakdowns, both frequent, bring enormous disruption.

Approach the line as an end-to-end experience, though, rather than a sometimes irritating bit of infrastructure separating the A you are at from the B you desire, and things become more fascinating. François Maspero, a leftist writer, and Anaïk Frantz, a photographer, celebrated this when they spent a month on the RER B in 1989. Their aim was to show warm, welcoming human life in the poorest suburbs and defy those who imagined a “circular purgatory, with Paris as paradise in the middle”. Their journey told them something about Paris—but also something universal.

The railway lines that rush, or chug, into the world’s cities all give you that universal: the constant intermingling, and disentangling, of rich and poor, local and visitor, native and migrant, young and old; the enriching diversity and grating inequality. But each line also gives you something specific to each particular string of places, be it the A train in New York, running from JFK airport up to Harlem, the Yellow Line that runs through Delhi’s wealthy centre and crowded slums on to its enormous, sprawling suburbs, or London’s District Line, which runs from bankerly Richmond to working-class, immigrant-heavy East Ham. For the particulars of Paris, take the B train.

RERing to go

Well before dawn on a weekday morning a fingernail moon hangs over St-Rémy. Birds have their voices, but little else stirs. The windows of Le Chalet Caffe, a bistro and tobacconist, are dark. At neighbouring La Giostra, where last night women in tweed jackets ate smoked-salmon pizza, the doors are blocked by overflowing bins. Only the station is bright, its four faux-Victorian lamps ablaze, white floodlights criss-crossing the platform with shadows.

“Yes, yes, don’t worry yourself,” the driver says amiably as he walks to the cab. “The only direction is Paris”. A mother waves off her shaven-headed son, a military-camouflage pack on his back. A middle-aged woman scowls at a pair of guide books for Dubai.

Once off, the bright line of wagons creeps between stations barely a minute apart. The first passengers—ruddy-faced, well-to-do, lugging suitcases—appear to be poised for travel, not commuting. They are almost silent. Those who get on respect a universal rule of public transport in the West, sitting as far as possible from their fellows (they avoid eye contact, too). The line loops past a ruined farmhouse. There were vineyards down here, before phylloxera struck.

At Bures-sur-Yvette, as darkness begins to lift, potted geraniums cram windowsills and the 19th-century villas boast turrets. Haydn and Mozart will be performed next Saturday in Saint Matthieu’s church, which predates them both by centuries. A white-haired man in a linen jacket, baguette in his wicker basket, heads into the “artisanal” butchers. Take coffee and a croissant at the bistro—the owner proposes traditional “tartiflette” for lunch—and nothing seems to have changed for decades. A few Portuguese-speakers in hard hats stand at the aluminium bar; the rest of the clientele is pale-skinned. The village memorial counts 67 villagers lost in two world wars.

As dawn gives way to daylight the train slips under a 19th-century aqueduct on millstone pillars, built in the place of a Roman predecessor, and enters the suburbs proper. Station walls are draped in purple ivy. Orange-red tiles top many homes. Posters promote exhibitions in Paris. Near Sceaux the tree-lined avenues remain, as they have been for more than a century, a home for writers, academics, musicians (as well as disturbingly well-coiffured dogs). When Erik Satie died in Arcueil, his bedroom was said to contain 100 umbrellas and an untouched piano.

This is a well-heeled world for the cultured and comfortably liberal. Its voters flocked to the young centrist Emmanuel Macron in last spring’s elections. Not all is genteel. You can walk by large housing estates in the southern banlieues, just as in the north. But they are for the most part well tended, fenced off, freshly painted. Once in a rare while the graffiti, ubiquitous along the line, is actually uplifting. At a station beside a stately school, a wall enjoins travellers to “hope, hope”; the words are English, the lower-case letters in the looping, cursive hand that French children must still perfect. It is a different story north on the line. Fresh graffiti in the station at La Courneuve says “A bas Le Macronisme” (Down with Macronism). Up there, the voters turned to hard-left politicians, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Up there, food outlets offer fried chicken, not tartiflette.

As suburb becomes city in the south, most passengers are clearly on their way to work. The train breathes in tieless young men in dark suits watching Les Simpson on their phones; middle-aged ones playing Candy Crush. A man in a black T-shirt studies a slender book on quantum gravity; perhaps he is from the nuclear-research centre at Saclay.

For some, the train itself is a workplace. A silent woman in a leopard-print headscarf hands out yellow cards describing four jobless brothers. The pale blue card of a pot-bellied man reports he has no employment and wishes you safe travels. The beggar in the dark blue cap is readiest to smile.

Brass bands play and feet start to pound

The line only reached the heart of Paris in 1895, when a tunnel was built from Denfert to Luxembourg station. It took a further eight decades for it to be coaxed under the River Seine (down an especially steep incline) and connected with the north.

At the trio of underground stations—Port-Royal, Luxembourg, Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame—which constitutes the heart of tourist-Paris, couples with small backpacks flood the train. They are insistently warned by loudspeaker, in several languages, of the dangers of pickpockets. With the carriages too packed to pass through, begging moves to the platforms and corridors. In the monstrous maze of Châtelet Les Halles—120 trains an hour, and allegedly the largest metro station in the world—women in black and children in bright coats pass entire days sitting underground on tiled floors. One woman explains her home was in Aleppo.

There are buskers, too. The regional rail operator, RATP, says there are 300 or so officially accredited ones. Antoine Naso, a stocky former line manager, calls the city’s 5.5m Metro passengers “one of the biggest music scenes in the world”; he recently put on a concert of some of the best acts of the past two decades. Every few months Mr Naso auditions new talent in a tiny basement mock-up of a metro tunnel. Two choral singers in sensible dresses perform Henry Purcell’s “Let us wander”. Endless young men with beards cover rock and pop anthems. The stand-out is Podkopaev Evguenio Korela, once a Finnish hard-rocker, who has by some technical magic transformed the lime-green handle of a broom into a funky percussive synthesiser. He has played in the city for 30 years; he talks movingly of his love for the “liberalism [and] democracy of Paris”.

Mr Korela won’t perform on the B train. It is too noisy. He and bigger bands like Eurofolk, an eight-piece Ukrainian gypsy-jazz group with quite a following, prefer the acoustics and space of stations like Châtelet Les Halles; the echoes of Eurofolk’s set can be heard from the RER platform. But Wayne Standley, a midwestern folk guitarist, says he has played the length of the B line. The southern part “got lonesome towards the end,” he recalls, “but you needed a rest. And it was quieter, so you could sound a little better”. He remembers a Malaysian guitarist friend who thrived on the B train with a set consisting mostly of advertising jingles.

North of Gare du Nord, the line threads between massive residential blocks and post-industrial districts, some buzzing, some distinctly not. As the steelworks, glyceride refineries, car plants and warehouses up here have closed, they have been replaced by studios for film editors and artists, glass office towers, shopping malls and recycling plants. The beggars return to the carriages—but up here they are mostly white, and addicts. A grinning woman in a black baseball cap moves quickly along on her crutches, a carriage per stop; she offers no story, just asks for money.

Life here is far tougher than in the centre or south. In 2010 Emmanuel Vigneron, a geographer,compared death rates, medical care and incomes of people near every station on the RER B, adapting a technique first used to study health-care differences along the belt road of Tahiti. “We showed that by moving 15 minutes out of Paris mortality rates would double”, he says. In a sample of women from Port-Royal, in central Paris, and La Plaine-Stade de France, where the average income is dramatically lower, he found that those few stops further north represented an 82% higher risk of dying in a given year. Similar studies for commuter lines elsewhere have since become a headline-friendly way for various cities to worry about their inequality.

The presiding spirit of the banlieues is Paul Delouvrier, an administrator ordered by Charles de Gaulle to sort the “shambles” of the outer city and its slums. His legacy is one of huge, dispiriting tower blocks—the main focus of the book Maspero and Ms Frantz produced in 1989. For all their work’s sympathetic, humane charm, though, the decades since have mostly strengthened a popular view of northern banlieues as alien and threatening, a home to Islamist and immigrant extremists, sites of police brutality, riots, drug-dealing and rape. In February 2017 riots raged for several nights in estates near the RER station at Aulnay-sous-Bois after police reportedly sodomised a young man with a baton.

Take an afternoon walk around estates such as La Courneuve 4000 or Aulnay 3000, where thousands of people are packed tightly together, and it is no wonder that many told Maspero that their dream was to move to a pavillon, one of the modest, privately owned villas that predated the projects. A massive wall of apartments has a broken plastic symbol of a galleon on its side. It is said to be due for demolition soon. By a doorway a woman tends a fire in a shopping trolley, roasting maize cobs to sell. Men stand on the roadside with tiny coolboxes, offering single cans of fizzy drink. Above them is an enormous poster of Moussa Sissoko, a footballer in the national team who was a resident here from 1989 to 2001. It is a reminder that some, at least, succeed and leave.

Get off at Drancy station and things look more welcoming. But among the grey, four-storey blocks of La Muette estate, built in the 1930s, there is a wooden cattle wagon, stencilled with a Star of David on one door as well as lettering of SNCF, France’s national railway company. Parties of schoolchildren circle the site with a guide. In the second world war La Muette, surrounded by barbed wire and watch-towers, was Paris’s concentration camp for those of Jewish descent. A memorial centre at the site, inaugurated by France’s president only in 2012, explains how mostly French guards oversaw the camp and the transport of inmates to the border, en route to Auschwitz. Today, bicycles are scattered on communal grass in early-evening sunshine.

All passed out of our lives

On the last leg north, the city breathes out. Having sent its commuters home it has a few hours to relax. Four teenage boys, sweaty in football kits, noisily debate their performances on the pitch. Young women run laughing and cheering into the carriage: one wears an ankle-length, dazzling white fur coat and sports a beehive of red hair; the head of her friend is shaved in an intricate criss-cross pattern.

The line splits at Aulnay. One branch slips under a motorway and out into fields of maize. The other takes a jumble of commuters and travellers towards the airport. In a few years, though, the travellers will be gone. Before the Olympics come to Paris in 2024 a non-stop service will start whisking passengers from Charles de Gaulle to Gare de l’Est, in the centre, in just 20 minutes. The locals will be left alone.

Monks in saffron robes and orange bobble hats stare out at arenas, hotels, exhibition centres and construction sites, approaching a terminal that is floodlit in red, white and blue, a top-heavy mass of concrete and shadow. Its signs are algebra in blue—2A-G divided by T3 in this direction, but carry T1 into the shuttle-bus column. Silvery escalators rise from the platform, their passengers’ heads tilted upwards—a group of Chinese tourists, each with a rectangular cardboard train ticket in hand; those monks, unencumbered by any luggage at all. It is near midnight as they glide up, and up, into the artificial light. Below, the windows of the B train, etched with graffiti, are radiant in the gloom.

This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "Take the B train"

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ecotone99 · 4 years

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Apple on the road [TH] [UR]

CH1

Daylight. Freedom, or a chance at it. He pushed through the double doors leading out onto the street, fingerless gloves leaving handprints on the grimy glass. He tripped, his combat boots not properly laced up in his haste to escape. He turned his head and flicked his matted hair out of his eyeline, looking frantically behind him for any signs of pursuit. There appeared to be none, but he knew better than to relax. He could hear them screaming, harsh guttural cries from the upper floor windows. Desperate and hungry, they knew that had just lost a feast, that they’ll have to trap some other poor unfortunate sou. He’d been blessed that they didn’t have the strength to tie proper knots in their malnourished state. The experience he’d gained before the fall meant that he was better fed than most of the ones who were left. And so he was healthier, he had no shakes that rattled the emaciated bones of the other survivors.

Which is why the creatures had taken him. Ever since the unprotected shops had been cleared out, and the spoils used up, people had become more desperate. There had been a lull, almost a return to some semblance of normal society about six weeks after.

That had vanished as the supplies ran out. Jay’s years in the Army reserve had served him well. His time working in the bars and restaurants around Dublin before humanity fell meant he knew where to find supplies, even now. He was able to stay strong and sharp. While this was a good thing for obvious reasons, it also made him a target for gangs like those he had just escaped, seeing as the cannibals nearly cut him on the spot, and only kept him alive so that he would be fresh for longer.

He ducked into the alley he had tried to hide in the night before. His rucksack was where he had stashed it behind the overflowing recycling bin. The bins were one of the first warning signs for Jay, the big flashing neon that read get ready.

The end is nigh.

When the people start getting sick on as big a scale as it was, they stop turning up for work. Jay never worked in an office, but did realise that no-one would notice if no one turned up to their office jobs. Not for a while anyway. The first things to go was the general upkeep, the stuff that's never noticed by the 9-5ers who drove everywhere and spent little time in alleyways. In fact the only time they spent in the lower locations of society was to empty their bladders or stomachs, depending on what stage of the night it was. Every day Jay had seen the early morning cleaners descending on the streets around temple bar and harcourt street, sweeping the broken bottles from the night before. Then, one day they weren't there and the broken glass got crunched underfoot by the dress shoes and high heels of the office workers, who joked that it must have been a crazy night. Then, the bins started to fill…

When people stopped showing up to work en masse, the government naturally became concerned. No workforce meant no work, which meant no commerce, no revenue to fill their fat coffers. October the 15th 2025 was the day with the highest recorded number of sick days in the history of the Republic, almost all reporting moderate flu-like symptoms that confined them to bed. October the 25th was the lowest… not a single person called in sick, because there was not a single person in work that day to answer a phone. The ten days in between were filled with confusion, growing steadily to fear and outright panic as the looting began. The people who braved the hostile atmosphere and tried to go to work found the petrol pumps empty, the bus drivers absent, the train stations silent and unmanned.

The country ground to a halt as martial law was declared due to the national emergency, people being advised to stay indoors and avoid excessive contact with any family members who showed signs of infection. The government issued a national broadcast to the effect that this debilitating virus would be short lived, that 80% of the population would recover fully within a week and those still affected would be administered an anti-virus that was currently being developed.

That was Day Ten...

By Day Fifteen, they issued another broadcast, advising the use of protective masks that were being sent to each home when burning the bodies of whichever family member who had succumbed and to quarantine those who lingered.

By Day Thirty, there were few left to heed these announcements.

Jay was one of the remaining. The ending of civilisation had happened so long ago he could remember only vague snippets of who he was before the fall.

So much that was commonplace in a functioning society had been cast aside, he struggled to remember his actual name any more. He just knew it had started with a “J”

All the survivors clung to parts of their life before, but discarded others.

Most people went by nicknames now, names derived from physical features or skills they had.

Jay’s friend Fixer had earned his moniker from being able to fix people’s bones, but his skills didn’t extend to fevers and Jay had paid him a visit once to find Fixer staring up at him through sightless eyes, a sickness had taken him during the night.

Jay had mourned for his friend, closing fixers eyes and mopping the coughed up blood from his lips as best he could and then left, taking his friends most valuable possessions before he did, leaving his body for the scavengers.

Ch2

During his two years living in the city centre, Jason Young had become pretty good at avoiding the dregs of inner-city society, the drunks, the hobos, the crazies, the junkies. Everyone who lives in a major city for any length of time will learn the same skill. The young man had certainly encountered a lot of them.It was probably said something about him, he mused sardonically. Certainly his habit of attracting the crazy ones was mirrored in his love life. On this particular morning, he was heading home from a rather awkward rendezvous with an ex. His foul mood was not improved by the weather, nor by the alcohol induced headache. At this stage, he was oblivious to the many prone forms littering the pavements of Dublin, some fortunate enough to be

wrapped in old sodden sleeping bags, others making do with newspapers or simply huddling together;some four or five in one cold doorway.

It was just part of the 2019 landscape.

He was mostly immune to the pangs of pity that he had once felt when seeing someone so down on their luck. In a twisted way, he was grateful to the homeless.

They were a reminder. A reminder to work, to pay taxes, to keep a lid on the drinking.

To not become like them.

Jason made regular promises to himself that he would quit his job and pursue his dream of becoming a songwriter. But every time he left the tourist bar he worked in, exhausted, drenched in sweat and stinking of beer and gravy, his route home would take him past some of the worst parts of the city. The ha’penny bridge, one of the most recognisable landmarks of Dublin would never be free of those pitiful forms, clutching battered paper coffee cups. (any spare change, bud?) He passed these every day, and every day he went to work.

He stopped off in a Londis to pick up breakfast. A chicken fillet roll would have to do. No mayo, extra bacon please. On an impulse, he picked up a Lucosade sport on his way to the till. Maybe the glucose would help with the hangover. The total came to €7.25 and Jason fished the coins out of his wallet. It took a while for him to sort through all the change and count out the correct amount, but he didn’t want to risk using his card. Last night had been a costly affair. Especially considering where he eventually spent the night.

He headed south.

He was facing a long walk home in last night's clothes. Although it was february, and so still dark, he decided to take a shortcut home.

He turned right off the main thoroughfare onto brewers lane. Not the most inviting of lanes at the best of times, brewers lane had a hard-earned reputation for separating unsuspecting people from their hard earn money, with a little help from local thugs. It was dark, it was I littered with empty beer cans, it stank. Nonetheless, it was either that or an extra twenty five minutes walk home. Jason decided to risk it. As habit formed by big-city living dictated, he had a cautious look down the alley before venturing in. All seemed good and safe. He was only a few steps down when a hobo emerged ragged from a shadowy doorway and started flailing about himself with what looked like an empty wine bottle. Prudently, Jason swiftly retraced his steps and was soon passing one of Dublins landmarks, the spire on his (slightly longer) way home. O’connell street was busy for a monday morning and he was forced to sidestep more than one oblivious texter, head buried in the latest iphone, thumbs a blur. He came to a halt in the throng.

The traffic on the road made the traffic on the pavement wait, cars speeding by with no room to dodge between them. It was probably for the best that Jason didn’t have a chance to duck between cars. In his hungover state, he’d probably end up being scraped off the tarmac. As he walked past the Molly malone statue, burnished brass breasts shining in the weak spring sun, a sense of something going on entered his alcohol-fogged brain. Sluggishly, he took the turn down onto south William street and headed towards Rathmines. Or at least he tried to… A garda officer in a high-vis jacket, similarly shining in the morning sun, stopped him with an outstretched hand like the bouncer at the club the night before.

“Ye can’t go this way, son. The roads closed off. Nutjob on the roof”

Light grey eyes rolled skyward under a rainproof blue cap.

Jason raised his head, with a squint he could just about make out a figure standing atop the georgian building that housed the clothing shop of choice of young upper-middle class dubliners. Filled with a morbid curiosity, Jason pushed his way through the crowd to the edge of the cordon established by the Gardai with yellow tape. He craned his neck, wincing as the newly emerged sun set off the slumbering headache with a vengeance. The encroaching sirens added fuel to the eager snapchatters, overlarge phones in the air like lighters at an old school concert.

The crowd felt tense with a sort of anticipation. It felt like a movie theatre watching the AWKWARD/SCARY SCENE IN A MOVIE WHERE THEY WANT TO LOOK AWAY BUT CAN'T]

Jason looked up under furrowed brows, the thick brown hair barely obscuring the pitiful view, soon to be trending on the various social media platforms. The lone figure stood unsteadily on the edge of the georgian building, the tattered rug thrown over his shoulders flapping in the spring breeze. His worn, windbitten face turned away from the men in high vis jackets reaching out to help him. His streaming eyes seeing something else. He swayed and the crowd let out a collective “ooohhhh” drawing back slightly but not turning away. Jason’s protesting stomach, already embattled let out a groan and he started to make his way out of the crowd, back towards the molly malone statue. His pace gradually got quicker and quicker, til he was almost jogging away from the scene. Hungover or no, he knew he didn’t want to see the potential fatal outcome of the situation. He wondered how the people pressed up against the Garda cordon could think the risk was worth it. They seemed more concerned with getting some online notoriety than having the image of a falling man seared into their memory, like grim, grainy images from that day in early september all those years ago.

Another groan rose from the crowd, due to what Jason neither knew nor wanted to find out. He reached the bus-stop and leaned gratefully against the thin red lump of hard plastic that passed for a seat below the exposed bus shelter. He had always wondered about the pitiful lack of comfort a bus-stop actually provided, as a child questioning his father during one of their many cold waits. He was gruffly told the lack of shelter was to stop homeless people sleeping there. This was one of Jason’s first memories of his father, the grizzled grey man who always seemed ready to reveal the harsher side of life to his only son. Such was his way. The reason they were waiting in the cold air for an hourly, hour-long bus journey to see Jason’s granmother was partly why his father was the way he was, Jason had come to realise as he got older. Forced out of his job, inventor’s ideas stolen by companies too big to touch, Thomas could no longer afford a car. The old but proud DiHatsu had an ignoble end, Jason remembered, as the car essentially broke in half when the tow truck tried to winch it onto the truck’s flatbed . The repo man had scratched his balding head with a grubby paw and called for a second truck to collect the pieces left behind. After that, the family had moved to a dingy, rented terraced house where they learned to rely on public transport. As Jason had grown up, moved out and entered the workforce himself he began to understand how something like that could make a man grow bitter and cold towards the world. At that younger age, he was just happy he didn’t have to sleep in a bus shelter, on a seat designed to deter the kind of people who were most in need of it. Older now, a functional adult in his own right. he had grown so used to public transport that he eschewed the car in its favour. One thing he had certainly noticed was how the actual cover offered by bus shelters seemed to shrink with each new design introduced.

He was certainly noticing it now, wearing last night's shirt and a light jacket that was intended for taxi journeys and cloak room stowage, not keeping him warm on a chill february morning.

He shifted on the hard plastic seat and rubbed a hand across his face, pushing against his shut eyes making fireworks dance gleefully across his vision. His hands still stank of last night’s energy drinks, causing him to grit his teeth against the post-session vomiting that his stomach had been threatening since he woke in his Ex’s bedroom.

Jason shook his head wearily when Danielle’s face rose to the forefront of his consciousness.

The real-time bus planner told him a 15B was due in four minutes, the red digital display similar to the one on his bedroom alarm clock, the one he should really be looking at right now.

He recoiled in distaste as the middle-aged woman who had just sat beside him succumbed to a fit of coughing, hacking rasps that cut into his sore head.

The bus peeked cautiously around the corner of Dame street, as though gauging the traffic to see if it would be worth continuing on.

Slowly, it inched its way towards Jason and his sick companion; finally groaning to a halt and allowing him an unobstructed view of a sour faced busdriver as the doors opened.

As he gratefully sank into a seat on the bus, he was nearly pitched headfirst into the old woman in the seat in front as the bus jerked to a halt suddenly.

The reason was clear fairly soon, a wailing siren heralding the speeding ambulance that made the passengers on the bus wince as the screeching alarm pierced their eardrums for a long second before fading as the white van sped off ahead.

Jason sighed and sat down, keeping one hand on the rail in front of him for support. He settled in for the journey...

Ch 3

Lungs heaving, Jay cautiously peered around the corner of the industrial-sized rubbish bin. The wheels on the bin creaked in protest as his considerable bulk added its weight to overflowing black plastic. He winced, but he seemed to have no pursuers that would hear. The alley seemed clear but Jay knew better than to relax. The rubbish underfoot could easily conceal a trap laid by the ravenous. Too many of his friends had succumbed to the poisonous shards they laid out, waiting for the thin soles of a survivor's shoe to pierce. All they had to do then was wait for their victim to slow and sicken. They knew all too well that the remaining survivors dared not go near the few remaining medic centres, rumoured to be nothing short of death camps where the now totalitarian regime experimented on the patient's, trying any desperate means to develop a cure.

Jay had spent many a cold night’s vigil over a dying friend, the extra layers he gave them doing little to stave off the chill that had set in their bones. Once the poison set in, the only thing that kept the cold at bay, at least for a little while was more poison. This came in many forms to the desperate survivors, but was mainly harsh spirits, bottles of vodka or wine looted from the abandoned shops and dark, empty nightclubs.

In the morning, the sun warmed the pavements but his friends remained cold, not to move again. Every time this happened, he swore he’d stay on his own from then on. Leaving the stiff thing that was once his companion in this cruel new world for the dogs and crows took a toll on him, knowing the best course of action would be to wrap the body and deposit it in the river Liffey. The first time he did that, the hazmat suits nearly caught him before he fled into the alleys he knew best.

Now, he knew to leave the body, that it would be gone by the time he could bring himself to return to the place again.

Every time he told himself, and yet every time without fail he found himself seeking out any survivors as yet untouched by the Sickness or the insanity that came with that horrible plague.

It was harder every time, with the Hazmats of the new regime sweeping the city day and night for suitable candidates for their drug trials, and the cannibals for their next meal.

But seek he did, because there was comfort in life, hope that one day someone would actually cure the world of its current evils.

He didn’t feel much comfort that day, having just escaped the clutches of one such group of cannibals, this particular gathering holing themselves up in an old psychiatric hospital. They even covered their scarred, emaciated bodies in the old hospital gowns they found in the wardrobes.

For the few remaining, life became a constant cycle of pursuit by the fluorescent bio suits of the failed government or harrassment, threat and sometimes real danger from the fallen survivors, the ones whose brains were affected by the plague to the point where it was only a matter of time before they were taken by the bio suits in one of their sweeps for test subjects, or by the increasingly more common cannibal gang, for a feast.

The government had roamed the now empty streets, sweeping for those healthy enough to press into service or the weak ones they would do trials on.

Lost in thought, he nearly didnt notice the govenrment goons clad in reflective suits until it wass too late, their harsh voices muffled by their masks as they chased him.

He pushed his way into an abandoned building, the dummies sporting dated fashion looming at him out of the shadows. He stumbled over piles of unworn clothes and found himself at the base of a set of stairs. Voices behind him told him he hadn’t lost his pursuers and he started climbing.

CH4

The pillow below Jason’s head defied his need for sleep, rebelliously swaying from side to side as the hangover claimed him, body and spirit.

He groaned, cursing his workmates for suggesting post-work drinks. He promised himself he would avoid nights like those for some time, but knowing deep down it was an empty pledge.

All it would take would be one more stressful overworked day full of drunken idiots and hungry children baying for drink or food.

He anticipated, even in his current state that he’d be tempted back to the late night bar next week. He only hoped he wouldn’t see Danielle there.

As he thought of her, his phone buzzed.

Somehow, he knew it would be her and he wearily pushed himself up onto one elbow, grasping for the offending piece of technology.

He squinted, the bright screen making it hard to make out the message.

He gave up and sunk back beneath the covers.

Whatever drama she wanted to stir up could wait until he felt vaguely human again.

He sighed, closing his eyes and willing sleep take him.

What felt like a moment later they snapped open, indignant.

Jason’s least favourite roommate and dubstep afficanado; Chris had obviously returned from his holiday festival in Spain.

He was heralding his triumphant return with wall-pounding bass that drilled through Jason’s fragile skull.

“Fuck sake.”

Jason heaved himself upright, a momentous effort.

The text message was still waiting for him, the little notification light flashing insistently.

It wasn’t from his ex-girlfriend, but was troubling enough anyway.

It was from his manager Damian, who had put a message into the group chat.

Apparently, Damian had received a call from the alarm company who monitored the security at the bar. Someone had broken in and stole some bottles of spirits and thrashed the cold room where food was stored.

After the daily chaos that took place in his bar, Jason was no longer surprised by anything that happenned there.

Thankfully, he had switched off his internet to conserve battery before he viewed the message, as Damian was asking everyone to come in and help clean up.

He carefully exited the group chat, ensuring the message would stay “unread” and swung his legs onto the bedroom floor.

Today was his only day off, and he was determined to enjoy it hungover though he was.

The sounds that could barely be described as music increased in intensity, threatening to knock the mold off the thin walls typical of cheap dublin accommodation.

After a brief shower and an even briefer breakfast, Jason left.

He was careful to shoot a venomous look at his roommate before he did, and slammed the front door as hard as he could.

Years of customer service had thought him to take joy in small victories.

The harsh light of the outside world made him don knockoff designer sunglasses, bought after more haggling than they were worth from a shady man in a Lisbon subway station.

He revelled in the feel of his own clothes, the crispy black work shirts always dehumanising were often jokingly referred to as prison overalls when out of earshot of the managers.

He found his second wind, weaving through the throng with the confidence of someone who held the general public in quite low regard.

He was well used to pushing his way through crowds, usually protectively clutching valuable bottles of spirits to restock the bar.

A man leaned out of the melee of people, facing him expectantly with the intention of stopping him.

Jason’s eyes narrowed, the hostile unapproachable look well-practised by any city dweller firmly upon his face as he prepared to walk past this man, who no doubt wanted to stop him to ask for money.

Dublin was rank with beggars and scam-artists, although there was little art involved in harassing innocent tourists for whatever change they had.

The man’s innocent smile dropped somewhat as Jason brushed past him with a shake of the head.

It occurred to him too late that the man maybe just wanted directions.

He looked back but the tourist was already being pointed in the right direction by a less suspicious Dubliner.

With a mental shrug, Jason continued on.

He turned onto a quieter street, escaping the madness of the overpacked thoroughfare of central Dublin.

He stopped outside his friend’s apartment block on Gardiner street, letting Siobhan know he was outside. He shuffled his feet as he waited, taking care not to tread in the rubbish piled beside the bin. A seagull pecked at one of the bags, suggesting it was the culprit responsible for the mess.

A head poked out a second floor window, evidently wet hair telling him before she even spoke that he’d have to wait a while before she’d be ready.

“Come up! I’m nearly ready.”

He snorted at that, knowing how long she could take and pushed the door as it buzzed.

The sound startled the big sea bird and it took flight.

Half an hour later, they came back down the stairs and out onto the street.

Jason noticed almost immediately a shiny red apple sitting pretty on the road, about a foot from the curb.

It stood out from the rubbish around it, perfectly unspoilt and somehow untouched by the seagull. In his job, he saw perfectly good food being thrown out every day. Something about this apple bothered him, the knowledge that it had been thrown away by some careless person with too much. There was nothing wrong with it, but it would go to waste because it had touched the floor. It was food for the seagulls now.

“What are you looking at?” teased Siobhan “I’m surprised you can see anything with those shitty sunglasses”

His attention taken from the fruit, he indignantly replied. “Excuse me darling, these are designer”

Their banter continued down the street as they made their way towards the local coffee shop, the apple remaining where it was.

CH5

Jay’s viewpoint

He held his breath as best he could, the numbing drugs they were trying to pump into him through the mask making his eyelids heavy.

The van thundered on, swerving between the abandoned cars on the road.

His captor swayed with the van, but those terrifying red eyes never leaving Jay as he fought sleep. If he slept there would be a chance he’d never wake up, but if he remained conscious he could look for an opportunity to escape. The terrifying figure leaned sideways and muttered something to the driver, the reflective suit crackling with static and playing tricks with Jay’s eyes.

The drugs must have been potent indeed, as the captor’s face faded from terrible and alien to almost normal and human, and back again.

Jay blinked, shaking his head and moaning.

The thing reached out to him, clamping him to the bench with an impossibly strong hand.

They screeched to a halt, and a babble of conversation told Jay they had reached their terrible destination. The dreaded Morgue, where the dictators practised their torture.

The survivors had spoken of this place in hushed tones, and each of them had known someone who was dragged into the Morgue, never to be seen again.

Jay had met one man who said there was a furnace at the back that burned night and day, crisping the bones of those who met their terrible ends at the hands of the Morgue’s twisted scientists.

He lay still, heart pounding in spite of the sedative they were feeding him.

He knew if he allowed himself to be wheeled through those doors, there’d be no hope for him.

He played dead, rolling his eyes back into his skull and letting his body go limp.

He sensed rather than felt rough hands unbuckling his restraints.

They thought he was drugged enough to walk willingly to his death.

Not so!

As soon as he was free, his eyes shot open and he struck hard, feeling bone crack as his captor stumbled backward.

He sprang upright and bolted from the van. His stuff was still with thr driver, but he could find more.

His life was worth more than any item and so he ran, bare feet pounding the cold pavement.

He heard shouts behind him but didn’t dare look back.

After a while he slowed, legs shivering from the effort.

He was sure he hadn’t been pursued and leant gratefully up against a wall.

His flight had served to remind him how hungry he was.

His stomach rumbled in protest and it struck him that he hadn’t eaten since before his earlier escape from the cannibal hotel.

His legs suddenly giving out, the adrenaline that had fueled him up to this point was gone and he slid to the damp, cracked concrete.

The drugs they had given him were taking hold and he sat there for what seemed like an age, shadows passing him by like the ghosts of his departed friends.

He was paralysed, only able to let out a whimper of fear as one ghost stopped in front of him.

It leered down at him, screeching.

If it had a question of him, Jay didn’t know.

The shadow retreated and seemed to reach behind itself.

In what could have been it’s hand glistened a coin, bright as the sun.

The coin glowed, blinding Jay.

He heard it bounce off the ground beside him, each time it hit the ground was like an earthquake. It was impossibly heavy and shifted gravity as he shut his eyes tight and willed the shadow to go away.

After another deafening screech it did, and it seemed the token had given him the strength to stand.

He opened an eye, his vision returning to normal. The shadows were gone but the coin remained.

With the loss of his backpack, he felt compelled to keep it.

The weight of it in his pocket was reassuring, he found.

Even though the concept of money had died out with humanity, he decided it had some value to him. He would use it as a good luck charm.

It seemed to be working its magic already, as he spied what could be food in front of him.

CH6

Full of caffeine and cake, Jason and Siobhan headed back to her apartment.

They stopped outside the graffitied door to her apartment block.

He noticed the apple had been harried by something, looking less than perfect now but still somehow maintaining its dignity, if fruit could be dignified.

There was a pregnant pause, broken by Shiobhan.

“Well…” she was somewhat shy “do you want to come up?”

“For more coffee?” he cheekily replied, grinning his wolfish grin.

She laughed, a delightful sound.

“Shut up, you messer” and grabbed his hand, leading him up the stairs.

Later, he pushed his way out onto the dark street.

Something moved in the shadows by the bin, making him suddenly cautious.

CH 7

The hunger making him clumsy, Jay staggered towards his salvation. His eyes were locked on the food, and he was too hungry to care if this was a trap.

An apple waited for him, even with its battered appearance it was perfect to him.

He reached out, stumbling.

He tripped and fell outstretched hand inches from the food he was too weak to grasp.

Jay heard something to his left.

He was too tired and hungry to be scared.

If this was to be his time, then so be it.

He was tired of running.

He looked up and saw clearly a human, a survivor with concern in his dark eyes.

CH8

Jason looked down at the homeless man, shivering on the pavement at his feet.

Self preservation be dammed, he reached out a hand.

“Are you alright mate?”

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