Game Changers of the Apocalypse Read online

  Game Changers of the Apocalypse

  by

  Mark Kirkbride

  Omnium Gatherum

  Los Angeles

  Game Changers of the Apocalypse

  Copyright © 2019 Mark Kirkbride

  ISBN-13: 9781949054767

  ISBN-10: 1949054764

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher omniumgatherumedia.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  First Electronic Edition

  By the same author

  Satan’s Fan Club

  In memory of

  Dorothy Porteous

  5th June 1914 to 2nd February 2016

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Acts of God

  Someone else’s dreams. Greg couldn’t remember them now but that was what they’d been like—someone else’s dreams.

  A laser-thin shaft of sunlight poked through the curtains. Aerial dust that would never have been visible otherwise churned within it.

  “What do you mean, you can’t get excited about our wedding?” said Polly.

  She’d put him on the spot before he’d even had a chance to engage whatever apparatus normally enabled him to circumvent his own feelings on the subject. Now something like the immobilization of muscles that occurs in sleep pinned him to the bed. “It’s just… It’s like it’s not happening to me.”

  However much he’d tried to keep on top of preparations, she’d been five steps ahead, making him feel as if he wasn’t doing his share. Until finally he wasn’t. He hadn’t organized transport, got the rings or booked the honeymoon.

  He stared at the sunbeam slanting across the bed.

  “Greg?” She rolled onto her side to face him.

  He turned his head. “Yes?”

  “You’re saying you don’t want to get married?”

  On any other day, they’d have been doing a groggy pas de deux about the flat by now. Yet he couldn’t keep the genie bottled up any longer. “I do, and I don’t.”

  “Greg, it’s a simple enough question.”

  “No…?”

  The mattress rocked and sea-rolled. Creaky springs squeaked.

  Off the bed, she spun round. Her arm shot in his direction, swung sideways. “Then you’re free to go.”

  He jerked upright.

  For a second, he had a million motes in his eye. Sunlight scoured his senses. What?

  He shuffled to the edge of the bed. “Come again?”

  She stood a few feet away, shaking violently. He’d never seen her like this. “If this is how it’s going to be, it’s better to get it over with. I wouldn’t want to use up any more of your time. You can leave, now.”

  Eh? “Er, can we talk about this?”

  “What’s there left to talk about?” She flung an arm out. “Everything’s obliterated.”

  But I don’t—He raised his hands. “Polly, listen, I’m really sorry. You caught me off…”

  “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  She grabbed some underwear from a drawer, a lemon dress from a hanger and streaked from the room. The swooshing-shut door collided with its frame, causing different-sized perfume bottles and make-up jars to rattle on the dressing table. The pictures they’d chosen together shook on the wall.

  She didn’t mean it. Did she? Technically it was her flat.

  What’s wrong with me? His heart twanged like a plucked double bass string. Why do I have to say what I think?

  Head buzzing, he stepped into his pants and tugged on some socks. Pulling his arms through the sleeves of his cotton shirt, he buttoned it up. She’s upset. He stepped into his thin suit trousers and threw on his unlined suit jacket. She’ll have calmed down in a minute.

  He gathered up his keys and wallet, stuffed his tie in his jacket pocket and veered out of the bedroom.

  Lemon dress on, Polly put a foot on the edge of the sofa, showing off first one long, sleek, tapering leg then the other as she did up the tiny clasps to the sides of her wedge sandals amid the lounge’s creams and browns and oranges.

  Her lips remained pursed and her thirty-year-old profile as sharply delineated as minted coinage.

  She looked up. “Keys.”

  “What?”

  “Your keys.”

  He handed them over. “Polly, it doesn’t have to be like this.” This is silly. Why can’t we just talk normally?

  “You’ve humiliated me!”

  He held a hand up. “Baby, don’t take it so personally.”

  “Don’t take it personally? Don’t take it personally! How can I not take it fucking personally?”

  “Polly...” He moved his hand towards her.

  “Don’t…” His fingers paused, mid-air. “You’d better get going. She’ll be waiting.”

  His hand dropped like a wounded bird. “What? Who?”

  A flash of hazel eyes. “Nicola.”

  “Oh, Polly, for the billionth time, that was five years ago, before I even knew you existed. I can’t help it if we still work at the same place.”

  “I always wondered why you stayed there. Now I know.” She pushed him towards the door.

  He hadn’t even had a shower. Picking up his shoes from the shoe rack, he tried to put one on. Her chivvying hand at his back had him hopping along and he had to abandon the attempt.

  She opened the front door, gave him an extra shove. “You can collect the rest of your stuff at the weekend.”

  “Polly, this…” The light hurt the back of his eyes. The doormat prickled his soles. He whirled around. “I…”

  She thrust a large plastic bag into his chest. “Here.”

  “I’m…” He managed to hold the bag but dropped his shoes.

  “Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last man alive.”

  The door slammed. He recoiled as if he’d taken the full force of the impact.

  He put the bag down and stepped into his shoes. Stooping to tie them, he peered at the bag. Pink with red lettering that read “H&M”, it had flat sides, sharp corners and didn’t close. Inside, he could make out their photograph album containing every snap printed by or for them and the bulging scrapbook in which he’d lovingly archived everything they’d ever done together.

  He reached for the handles and stood up.

  My life in a bag.

  ~

  A plane shrieked overhead. Still adjusting to the sun’s glare, Greg stumbled along the pavement. He had to concentrate on each and every step and stop to swallow down sobs. An elderly woman walking three lamb-like poodles stepped off the pavement and took the long route, round a post box. He’d only made it a few more yards when a choke engulfed him. What am I going to do? He had to lean against a lamppost. Two women chatting outside a mini-supermarket in colourful saris, like butterflies, looked round. Locked in position, he disguised his predicament with a cough.

  Hacking manfully, he pushed off. His hand shook as he got his mobile out and called the number he wanted.

  “Hi, Simon. Can you… Can you tell Milo I won’t be in? Just say I’m ill or something and I’ll be back on Monday. There’s no way I can make it today. Polly’s…” He swallowed. Where am I going to go? “Polly’s chucked me out.”

  A man clutching a whisky bottle lurched towards him like an alchemist with the elixir. This is how p
eople end up on the street. All the struts kicked away. Cars and buses thundered past, going the other way. The bag bump-bump-bumped his leg. Yet he couldn’t stop. He’d got caught in the press of bodies heading for the tube station.

  Breathing in heady diesel fumes, he passed a bus stop. A mum knee-deep in kids called out to one in danger of being swept away: “Jack, come out of the tall people.”

  Greg’s phone went in his pocket. Struggling to get elbow room, he reached for it, got it out and up to his ear. “Hi, Simon.”

  “Greg, I’m really sorry.” Choppy breathing, the flap of footsteps. “What happened?”

  “She asked me to leave.” A Polish man and woman overtook him, one either side. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  “Okay. What are you going to do?”

  A bald man knocked Greg’s elbow. The phone nearly jumped out of his hand. He caught it and, hand shaking, put it back up to his ear. “I don’t know. Stay at a Premier Inn or Holiday Inn, I expect, till I find somewhere.”

  “No, Greg, stay at mine. If you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa.”

  Gripping the phone tighter, “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, course. I’ll be around this weekend but stay as long as you need.”

  “Thanks, Simon.”

  “Welcome. And don’t wander the streets. The key’s here if you want it…”

  Come to work and face Milo? “I’m sure I can survive a day, but thanks.”

  “No problem. Take it easy.”

  “Will do. See you later.”

  He’d passed the turning for the tube station. The hordes now poured towards him. He had to dodge left and right to avoid getting bustled. Too—many—people.

  His clammy shirt stuck to him inside his jacket. Tired of lugging the bag, he took refuge in an empty doorway and sat down. Free fall. I’m in free fall. He lifted the bag up onto his lap. A bag man, that’s what I am.

  He tipped the contents out next to him. A phone charger and his toothbrush landed on the step. A spare pair of socks tumbled out along with some boxer shorts. Something like a fish hook caught deep in his throat. So caring. The photograph album and scrap book slid out one after the other. He opened up the album and flicked through pictures of them striding like giants through a model village, with a couple of the model village’s model village, followed by some of them on the Epping Ongar Railway, a former tube line with fields, to stop, dead, at Polly in red in Antigua. He instantly recalled the silent lightning out at sea, that night, as they kissed at the outdoor bar. So clever. Opening up the scrapbook at random, he saw pairs of tickets, or stubs of tickets, for films, plays, exhibitions, a couple of restaurant receipts, a card he’d given to Polly with a teddy bear holding a flower on the front, a Post-it note from her to him, a drawing he’d done of her on her birthday. The hook tore at his gullet. So calculating.

  He stared out through the milling legs.

  The sound of a flying saucer landing issued, briefly, from his mobile.

  Extricating it from his pocket, he saw the name of the sender and his heart pounded like a bass drum. What had he done now? He opened up the SMS: “The menus just arrived. Feel like crying. Hope you’re happy.”

  He froze. If he could escape notice, perhaps he could pretend this wasn’t happening.

  He fell backwards.

  The door he’d been resting against had swung open. A face with a beard for a toupee, a shaved head for a chin, leered over him. “Yes?”

  Greg clambered to his feet. “Sorry.”

  Having no further to fall left only one way to go—sideways.

  ~

  Greg emerged from the greasy tube station and stepped out into wall-to-wall sunshine. A woman with a large mole on her left cheek, as black as a fly, glared at his girlie bag.

  At a crossroads, red buses, black cabs, crossed and turned from east and west, north and south, alternately.

  He turned too.

  A roofed moped revved like a chainsaw, buzzed past.

  Through darkened glass, he glimpsed faces at tables.

  A cluster of bellboys stood in the doorway, becapped and all different heights, like a clump of mushrooms.

  Five minutes later, he arrived at work and made it inside without getting noticed.

  Creeping along a corridor, he heard footsteps coming the other way. Please, not Milo... His breathing quickened. He looked for a door to dive through. Surely the day couldn’t get any worse. Could it?

  He recognized the bobbing shaved head and wiry figure, always leaning forwards when in motion as if in a hurry to get to where he was going. Phew. Greg’s breathing slowed to its normal rate. “Hi, Rob.”

  “Hi, mate. There was a message for you just now.”

  “There was?”

  “Yeah, in the fax machine.”

  Polly? Greg turned around and, lengthening his stride, managed to keep up with Rob. “Do people still use those things?”

  “Yeah, sometimes.” Rob nipped ahead, and they bounded up the stairs in tandem. In the corridor at the top, he held the first door open. “It’s still in there.”

  “Thanks.” Greg walked over to the printer-cum-fax machine. Bending over it, the niff of hot electrics, plastic and toner filled his nostrils. The blood beat in his brain. The pressure behind his eyeballs intensified as if they themselves had expanded.

  “Sweet nightmares,” read the message, with no indication as to who or where it was from.

  He stood up. Ow! He’d cracked his head. What idiot put the fax machine under a shelf?

  Frantically rubbing his blazing crown, he retrieved the sheet of A4 and held it up. It was addressed to him but what did it mean? Who’d sent it? Why?

  The pad of footsteps behind him.

  He spun round.

  Rob crossed the open-plan office to pick up a stapler and returned with it to his desk.

  Sleek black monitors perched on beech desks under the strip-lit cork white sectional ceiling. Pippa stared at her screen with a finger to the corner of her mouth as if trying to locate a crumb. Rob crunched the teeth of the stapler down on a document. Katissia tapped at her keyboard with her head leaned to one side, murmuring.

  Backing out into the corridor through the door opposite to the one he’d come through, between white plasterboard walls, over a light blue linoleum floor, under more fissured and dotted polystyrene ceiling tiles, Greg bumped into something solid yet yielding.

  He staggered and turned. “Sorry, Simon, I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s alright.” Simon’s face had a pale, exposed look, like someone who normally wore glasses but who wasn’t wearing them today. It went with his stoop, which, given his youth, was plainly more the product of a desire to deflect attention away from his height than to avoid lintels and light fittings.

  “I was just going to come and look for you.”

  Simon’s hand dipped towards his trouser pocket. “For the keys?”

  “And a quick chat if that’s alright?”

  Simon nodded, adjusted his tie. “Of course.”

  “Thanks, Simon.” Greg started to turn, paused, turned back. “Hey, you didn’t fax me, did you?”

  Simon blinked. “Fax you?”

  Greg patted his arm. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s find somewhere to talk.” They headed downstairs and passed doors, doors. The corridor veered left. Greg halted. But—This isn’t… “Er, Simon.”

  “Yes?”

  “Didn’t we used to come through that way? I could have sworn there was a doorway there last week.”

  Simon stopped and turned, this way and that way. “Did we?” The combination of a youthful complexion and scorings under the eyes gave him the troubled countenance of an old child. “I got lost on the way to the Gents’ the other day.”

  Greg nodded. The building, an industrial shell refitted for modern office space, underwent alteration nearly every day. Prefab rooms split and halved or merged and doubled. Corridors opened up and closed.

  They took the long route
round to the tea room. Two sofas, one with purple upholstery, the other with red, each with corresponding cushions, faced banks of drink dispensers and snack machines.

  Greg placed the bag on one of the sofas and walked over to the hot drinks machine. He pressed the button for tea, white with sugar, stared at, sniffed and finally tasted what he got—coffee, black, without.

  “Stupid damn thing.” He left the hot full plastic cup on the window sill.

  Simon stood in the centre of the room. “What happened?”

  Greg paced up and down. “I told her I wasn’t bothered, about the wedding.”

  “Oh.” Simon, who would have been the best man, followed Greg with tiny turns of the head and tracking eyes. “You mean you don’t… You don’t love her anymore?”

  Greg stopped pacing and shifted from foot to foot. “Of course I do.”

  “Er… uh?”

  “I was just being honest with her.” He shook his head, sighed. “But apparently honesty’s not a very good policy.”

  Simon breathed in deeply, out slowly. His eyes searched the health and safety posters, the certificates and notices on the wall.

  Greg’s head tipped back. He righted it. “Listen, I didn’t mean I didn’t want to be with her, just that if it was down to me, I wouldn’t bother. With the wedding, I mean.” He raised his arms above his head. Fingers interlocking, he clasped the back of his head. “It’s all just plans, plans, plans. It’s become this careering juggernaut.” His hands came apart and one of his arms shot off to the side. “It’s like she’s forgotten what it’s for.” His arm came to rest as if stuck. “I mean, a marriage is more than just a wedding.” He lowered his arm. “I didn’t want things to change. I was already happy.”

  Simon’s eyebrows tilted. One twitched. “But you proposed.”

  “To try and make her happy.” Greg pressed the fingertips of one hand to his forehead. “And believe me, I know, I know, if I hadn’t, we’d still be together.”

  Simon bowed his head. Is he praying?

  For spiritual guidance? Deliverance?

  Simon looked up. “Well, maybe for her symbols are more important than they are for you. And perhaps you’re overthinking it.”