Contamination
By Jason Wright and Dave Jeffery
()
About this ebook
After another booze binge, journalist Dean Sharp wakes to find the world has changed. He is trapped in his home, while outside the city is burning and in the streets people are killing each other in wanton acts of violence. Isolated and alone, Dean must face his own demons as he tries to make sense of events that have an odd familiarity about them. Soon he will question if the terrible dreams plaguing his sleep are the result of alcohol addiction or memories of a past he is not meant to remember. The present is an endless nightmare of slaughter and madness. And the future of all mankind hangs in the balance.
Jason Wright
Jason Wright, a distinguished technology expert with over 15 years of experience in the industry, has recently ventured into the enchanting world of children's literature. Known for his background in computer engineering and passion for artificial intelligence, Jason has consistently been at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. Throughout his career, Jason has made significant contributions to various tech companies, from ambitious startups to established multinational corporations. His expertise in AI and machine learning has earned him recognition in the field, with several articles published in leading tech journals. Despite his focus on technology, Jason has always cherished a love for storytelling and the power of imagination. This passion led him to explore the world of children's books, where he discovered the unique joy of combining his technological prowess with the art of storytelling.In his debut children's book, "Chatty's Big Adventure: A Journey with ChatGPT for Kids," Jason brings to life the captivating story of Chatty, a friendly robot with a gift for conversation. Aimed at 3-year-olds, this beautifully illustrated tale takes young readers on an adventure with Chatty, who explores the world outside and forms lasting friendships with various animal characters. By harnessing the potential of AI language models like ChatGPT, Jason creates an engaging narrative that introduces young readers to the wonders of friendship, the beauty of nature, and the magic of conversation. The charming story not only entertains but also fosters curiosity and a love for storytelling in children. The success of Jason's book has resonated with parents and educators alike, earning him a newfound appreciation in the world of children's literature. With his unique blend of technological innovation and creative storytelling, Jason has emerged as a trailblazer, bridging the gap between technology and the arts, and inspiring young readers across the globe.
Read more from Jason Wright
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Contamination - Jason Wright
CONTAMINATION
Written by
Dave Jeffery
Based on a Story by
Jason Wright
Dead Silent Publishing
––––––––
C:\Users\ICEMAN2012UK\Desktop\deadsilentpublishing4b.jpgdeadsilentpublishing.co.uk
CONTAMINATION
Story Copyright © Jason Wright
Text Copyright © Dave Jeffery
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 retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book contains a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s creation or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
The moral right of the authors has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988: Book design by Donnie Light - eBook76.com
TODAY
The screams come from far away. The glass screen helps to muffle them but on days when the lab isn’t busy they come as a thin, woeful drone, relentless and pitiful.
People move behind the glass; they all wear white coats and surgical masks. They mill around tables made from stainless steel, tables which are currently empty. They aren’t always. Most times the things that make the distant screams lie upon them. They are scary to look at but there is knowledge that the creatures are part of helping to save lives.
Someone steps up to the glass. The world is filled with the image of a man. He has a stern face softened by the lines beneath eyes of watery grey. He smiles and all of the omnipotent fear melts away.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Better,’ Dean says. ‘The pain is gone. When can I come out?’
‘In time,’ the man says. ‘We need to make sure you’re no longer sick. Make sure you don’t hurt other people.’
‘How long? It’s scary in here.’
‘I know.’ The man nods to reinforce the statement. ‘But you want to be well, don’t you? You want to help other people get well?’
‘Yes. But I’m lonely,’ Dean says. Inside a terrible longing for the
company of others threatens to swamp him. He can feel tears running down his cheeks.
‘There, there,’ the man says. The grey eyes appear to be moist in sympathy. ‘Shall I sing to you?’
‘Yes,’ Dean says. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Go to your bed and I shall sing your favourite song until you go to sleep.’
Dean moves away from the glass, but he is reluctant. Every emotion is telling him to stay near to the man behind the glass. He goes to the small bed and lies down, taking the heavy duvet and dragging it over him.
Through the intercom the man in the lab coat sings. The words are soothing and sleep rises up to claim him. As he is sucked into oblivion, the song goes with him, keeping him company like a good friend through a great ordeal.
‘Ah, shit!’
* * *
‘Ah, shit!’
Dean Sharp’s alarm clock was set to eleven thirty am. While this was usual, no matter what day of the week or what time of year, the buzz-saw din of an alarm going off was not the reason he sat bolt upright in his bed.
Confused and disorientated, he tried to focus on the room about him. Despite the dim bulb overhead the light still played with his eyes and sent needles into his brain.
Somewhere in these moments he heard the dull thud of a bottle of Jim Beam hitting the carpet. He made no move to investigate. The bottle would be empty.
It always was.
He glanced over at the clock, and it told him bad news.
Eight forty am.
‘Fuck me,’ he muttered as he rubbed his hands through his dark, unruly hair. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done an eight- forty. Maybe twenty years ago at Sheffield University when he’d studied for his BA in journalism. Back then it was all about early doors at The Victoria Inn and another day of assignment rewrites with a pie and a pint as Ultravox played on the jukebox.
The memories were good and he was reluctant to let them go. He could almost hear the clink of beer glasses. No, not the clink of beer glasses but glass, yes.
Breaking glass.
As the sheets slid from his bed it wasn’t only the cool breeze that came to him through the window of his Islington flat. Both elements sent a shiver through his body, goosing his skin in the process.
Buffered by the curtains, thin distant screams rose from the streets below. He scuttled out of bed, his boxer shorts askew and exposing him to a picture of a semi-clad Anna Torv on the wall before he absently adjusted them.
Not now, baby, he thought. Later you’ll get my undivided.
He walked at pace towards the window and inched the curtain aside. He peered out onto the scene three storeys below. No matter how many times he blinked his hazel eyes, the images outside remained the same.
Crowds of people below were fighting. No, not fighting, brawling; on the pavements and in the gutters. Men, women scrabbling around on the floor, on each other, some being beaten with bare hands and feet; vicious nails - be they finely manicured or unkempt talons- tearing at faces, trying to find soft flesh in unprotected sockets. There were children too, without rhyme or reason, brandishing everyday objects, a cricket bat, a hammer, a chisel, but their conventional use was obsolete in this New World Disorder. Now, hammers were brought down on skulls, cricket bats were used to pummel backs of legs and flailing hands, and chisels were rammed into soft bellies until the grey streets ran red.
From his vantage point, Dean was an omnipotent, impotent god looking down upon a world that had gone insane. He stumbled away from the window and vomited onto the floor, his legs giving out and his hands planted in sick to prevent him from collapsing onto the carpet. He threw up again, more this time, onto his hands and upper arms. The vomit was hot and shocking against his skin. His sides
ached with the force of it. Another retch, but it fetched only bile that he spat out regardless.
‘What the fuck’s going on? Did I miss the memo?’
Rhetoric: all of it, spilling out through the snot and tears. He came up onto his knees, crossing his arms, oblivious to the vomit now slopping against his chest and dripping into his lap.
Check the news, idiot!
The thought punched through his head like a falling...
Hammer
...meteor and had him moving to the door that separated his bedroom from the rest of the apartment.
He made for the lounge, where his forty-two inch plasma waited, and its screen was dark as though a portent for the images to come. He stopped briefly at the kitchen, a place of pale wood and sombre, storm cloud grey granite, and grabbed a tea towel which he used to mop up the mess congealing on his arms as he staggered up the short hallway to the lounge.
There, black leather sofas and bright yellow walls waited for him. Opposite, an expanse of glass showed the city skyline, framed by a PVC fascia. He slowly walked towards the panes and stared, his mouth forming an ‘O’ without him even being aware of it.
Beyond the glass, beyond belief, the city was burning.
* * *
Smoke belched into the sky, cavorting, swirling; black bellowing bellies painted yellow by the multiple infernos that created them.
Dean planted his hands on the panes in order to steady himself. His
mind echoed the sky, a swirling maelstrom of dark, brooding clouds; not fuelled by destruction but the confusion that came with processing the images beyond the window. His breath jittered as it emerged from his mouth.
‘This can’t be happening,’ he said. In his head it sounded lame, out in the ether it became an embarrassing conclusion born from self-
delusion. This shit was happening. He just needed to know how bad it was and how widespread it had become.
I will be with you. Be patient, my love.
Another abstract thought. He was prone to them, especially in times of stress. And he was out-of-his-skull-stressed at that moment. He wished it didn’t happen; it only topped up the pressure. He had Jenna to thank for it.
Not now, Deano. Not when you really need to keep your shit wired tight. Another time, another place, just not fucking now.
He forced himself to move away from the window; the ghostly images of his hands waved him on his way before fading as though abandoning him to his fate. He picked up the TV remote, the black plastic squeaking under his taut grip as he hit the buttons. Dean jumped as a huge blast of static filled the lounge. His legs caught the edge of a rosewood coffee table and he fell heavily onto one of the sofas where the leather squealed like an old man’s wet fart.
Dean aimed the remote at the TV and punched the keys as he fervently rubbed at his shin. A horizontal red weal rose to the surface of his pale skin as, on the screen, words made the pain fade to nothing for the time he read them and realised their connotations.
Do not panic. Wait for instructions.
Six words, two basic sentences, on every channel, white letters on a ditch-dark background. They screamed an epiphany in his beleaguered brain as his throat yearned for a shot of Jim Beam. Six words telling him how things were from this point on.
Dean got conservative; he summed things up in four.
‘We are so fucked,’ he croaked.
* * *
He had an eighty-year-old father in Birmingham and a spinster sister in Sussex. He’d seen neither in more than fifteen years. The argument had been heated and laced with venom, festering emotions stockpiled from a misplaced childhood, but time had rendered the altercation meaningless; the relationships no longer just dysfunctional,
estrangement had set up stall too. The passing years blunted the edges enough for occasional stilted telephone conversations and the ritualistic posting of Christmas and birthday cards.
Logistics provided enough cover from which to hide the apathy of a family that had become cemented in place by duty. The mortar was aged and crumbling but, at that moment, as Dean climbed from the shower and towelled himself off, his need to see his kin was overwhelming. Shit, it takes the end of the world to make me want to see Jenna.
End of the World?
He paused. Had he fallen asleep and missed a few stops? He tried to drag the events of the previous night through a mind made fudge by booze and fear. He thought he’d gone to his usual haunt, a bar deep in the suburbs, where whisky was served by the bottle and people left you alone.
Shadows of a past came to him. He recalled stumbling through streets jaundiced by lamplight; witnessing a couple kissing in a bus shelter, and the bark of a vixen in a distant alleyway.
Grey and slurry slow, but these memories were returning and all of them made plain something he already knew. Last night, after he’d got home and downed his second bottle of Old Jim, he’d passed out. But the world he’d winked out of for a while was normal. No burning buildings, no orgy of violence where children cracked skulls with claw hammers, no streets made wet with the blood of the slaughtered.
Oh, come on, Deano! Face it. You wouldn’t know last night from last week when you’re on a bender.
Yeah. But shit-faced or not I’d know if people were killing each other. When I went to bed, the world wasn’t like this.
You’re a pisshead. Don’t talk in absolutes.
They were his thoughts but in his head he saw Jenna, heard her voice. His sister was thirty-six and successful. She had business acumen, which translated to Dean as being a total, Cavalli-clad bitch. And then some.
With a cherry on it.
The arguments had been bad when they were growing up, Jenna always the centre of the family universe. This tenet became even more prevalent after their mother had died. Hit and run, the police had said. It mattered not, his mum was dead and his life was a huge shit burger he choked on for most of his youth. And Jenna was the short order cook who was always happy to keep that particular meal on the menu, with her constant digs, constant bleating. Always wanting, needing, things her way. His father was a good, yet hardened, soul. But Sharp Senior had been made soft by the death of his wife, and he saw too much of his dearly departed in Jenna. The emotional transference was, perhaps, inevitable but when it happened it wasn’t so much applied as slapped on good and thick. The upshot was that Dean’s sister could do, say and have what she wanted as long as she pandered to her father’s emotional needs, and left her brother to count down the days when he could get the hell out of the house for good.
The mini wars of childhood had given way to bitter battles, tempered by a parting of ways when Dean left home to attend university, effectively cutting himself off from the life he once knew and loathed. He would’ve loved to have said that he’d never looked back but such a claim would have a suffix of ‘pants on fire’ had he ever made it. He did look back, especially when too much whisky craned his neck. In the past he saw answers as to why his life sucked.
But that was before he’d seen the city in flames. Life sucks but this new reality didn’t just bite, it stayed around to chow down for a while, and citizens were mere meat, tenderised by its powerful jaws.
How many people are dead? How can I find out just how bad things really are?
TV was as good as useless. Dean’s mind went through a check list as he dragged on a white shirt and jeans. He hunted through the apartment for his mobile phone and found it in the white-tiled bathroom, abandoned by the sink unit.
He yanked the cell from the basin, knocking over the ceramic mug that housed his toothbrush, paste and razor. The items clattered onto
the floor, the mug toppled like a drunk on the edge of a kerb then it fell onto the tiles where it exploded like a small, noisy bomb.
But this was a distant event. Dean was too focused on the mobile rammed to his ear. He checked the display countless times and it made clear he had a full battery and the signal was good.
But the earpiece gave out only static.
Dean shook the device, his frustration surfacing as a fierce beast. He managed to wrestle with it, dragging its carcass beneath the waves. It had no place here, not yet at least. But he knew it wasn’t far away, instead it lurked on the ocean floor waiting for the riptide to drag him down where it could rise up and consume him.
Now what? Sit tight and wait it out?
He turned to the basics, scanned the kitchen and checked out whether he had the provisions to see him through a few days. The food was rudimentary, the cuisine of a bachelor pad. In a wall-mounted cupboard he found tins of processed food he’d never knew existed, let alone touched.
For a moment the thought of food turned his stomach. This was nothing new when he’d spent a couple of days in the company of Ol’ Jim. But this felt deeper than that, this felt fundamental; innate like some kind of primordial warning. Then, like a passing thought, it was gone, and he continued to scan his provisions.
Maybe the tins weren’t even his. More likely they were the leftovers of another relationship that had gone south. At least this time he had something to show for it, even though it was almost as unpalatable as the loneliness.
He continued his search. A check of the cupboards, fridge and freezer established he’d enough assorted foodstuff to last a week.
Thank God for microwaves.
As long as the power stays on, Deano.
He ignored Jenna’s troublesome voice in his head.
‘Sniff my shit, bitch!’ he whispered.
But Jenna’s voice was insistent, like an angry wasp trapped in an upended glass.
You got enough Jim Beam on tap, Deano? You got enough to keep those shakes at bay? You can do without food, but what about a few days without Ol’ Jim?