Run

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Getting up was not going to be an option. Sitting up was more than he could manage right now.

He tried to open his eyes but the light from the window cut into him like a knife. Even with his eyes closed he felt the narrow shaft of winter sun that spilled across his face from the crack in the curtains. He winced as each new pain found a home in his gradually waking body. He groaned quietly. Carrie did not respond.

He looked at the clock through a tentative chink in his eyelids and saw it was past seven. He didn’t know what day it was, or what the hell had happened to him since he had gone to bed quite normally the previous night.

The bedroom door opened and Carrie crept in. He watched her shape round the foot of the bed through almost closed eyes.

‘Are you awake?’ she said quietly.

Danny groaned. The sound tore at his throat like barbed wire.

‘Flu?’ Carrie said.

‘Guess so,’ Danny whispered. ‘Someone on the train yesterday. Sneezing everywhere.’

‘I made you a lemon and honey.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on his forehead. He shrank away from her icy touch. ‘It was like sleeping next to an inferno last night. You’ve got some temperature now.’ She took her hand away and fire spread back into his face,  but at least she was blocking the sun.

‘Can you call Brian?’ he said.

‘Yes. And the office. You’re not going anywhere today. But I have to. We’ve got inspectors in, so I don’t have any choice.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘The phone’s by the bed. Call me. Or call Dr Stoddart.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said again.

‘I’m sure you will.’

‘It’s just flu. Man flu.’

Carrie laughed and kissed his forehead with frozen lips.

‘I’m sorry, but I really have to go. I’ll see if the chemist’s got anything on the way home.’

‘Just need to sleep it off. Could you close the curtains as you pass?’

‘Will do.’

He was only dully aware of her leaving, or of the front door opening and closing a few minutes later. He rolled onto his side and pulled the duvet over his head. Everything hurt, especially his left leg. Vague memories of trying to run through a bad dose of cramp the previous evening pushed up through his delirium. Had he done himself a permanent injury? Or had the cramp merely been a symptom, a sign… of what? Of flu? Or of some other seed growing inside him, a seed carried like a suicide vest onto last night’s train…? Who knew what the hell was out there these days…

A sudden, vast wave of heat rolled up through his body. He shuddered and felt sweat begin to pour off his skin. His eyes ached, his flesh tingled as if under the feet of a million crawling insects, and his left leg burned. He slipped deeper into the fever, his mind now spinning uselessly and his breathing shallow and erratic.

He dreamed of darkness; he dreamed of heat and swirling movement, of an ocean of sticky, cloying fluid sucking at his limbs. He floated down red-black corridors, past row upon row upon row of empty windows… windows like eyes, holes in the eyes. A door, too small, he squeezed his arms and legs tight against his rigid body, slipped through. Open space, black and hot, Carrie sitting in a tree beside a slowly ticking Grandfather clock. The hands moved backwards. On the face a stream bubbled darkly, tinkling over the hands and running like blood out across the floor. Behind her, clinging to the branches of the tree was a koala, and when it turned its head towards him he saw holes, deep black voids, where its eyes should have been.