The Second Coming of Auntie Lynn by Indigo Azidahaka

It’s been some year. The zombie apocalypse hit in the way no one really doubted it would if it was going to. A virus that came from animals in captivity that had been fed their own kind. Sure enough, it rots the brain and the nervous system, and it’s airborne like a virus. Like a traditional parasite, it survives off the host's body for as long as it can. This mutant death sentence forces the host to cannibalise when it tries to reproduce. This type of dystopia isn’t even science fiction anymore. I had thought that most of us knew this when I locked the house up and put myself and Auntie Lynn into hiding to try to survive this. Apparently they didn’t. There is a type of person that can’t stop pretending everything’s normal. Some people do it because they were traumatised young and they’ve got a weak mind, and some people just do it because their brains are fucking broken, so they tell themselves everyone else lives wrong. Someone a long time ago thought to tell these people they were the majority and set up a whole system based around keeping them too busy to exercise certain parts of their brains. It’s caused a lot of problems, mainly viruses like this, but also people who think they’re better than these people. Because their brains are a bit different, they weren’t as receptive to all the rigidity that’s assigned to human minds when the skull is still soft via something a group of them down the pub call ‘O levels’. They are Auntie Lynn's age but she is much much older than them. 

Auntie Lynn is a slender woman from Ghana in her late 50s. She’s got dark skin, high cheekbones and greying thick curls she protects under delicately wound bright cloths that always match her dresses. She turned up one day in the village just buying fruit outside the market. The church going people were giving her all sorts of looks as though she was an odd sight, as though they hadn’t seen her before in their stained glass depictions and written about her in leaflets about the second coming. You could tell who she was by the way she went into the shop and ordered everything without saying a word. You could tell who she was by the way she appeared taller than rooftops standing at 5’8”. She’s my Auntie Lynn. We went home together that day. She led me back to a house that when we got inside, I’d always owned, and the house became many places. She’ll teach me everything I know one day, until then I’m just going to ride out this virus and keep us safe. 

Two years in, I wonder if she’s restless because she’s getting about in a way that’s not quite typical of her usual omnipotent demeanour. She’s between the kitchen and the utility room like a pendulum. Then she found a rat in the gram flour in the garage. In some ways I don’t think she’d hurt a living creature, but in other ways I know she does what she says needs to be done. She was fuming, poor cunt. Then it started raining; she works in mysterious ways. I decided I should go out and get some more supplies, try and take some of the stress off her a bit. 

There’s been some developments in the virus. Over two years of people calling it a government conspiracy, saying it doesn’t exist, and that wearing protective clothing is a sign of membership of a human trafficking ring allowed it to hit pretty much every corner of the world pretty quickly and mutate a few times over.  That's pretty much all the public information there is because there isn’t really a public anymore. I couldn’t tell you with certainty about survival numbers or resource scarcity. A few weeks in, there was a big explosion in a gas factory in a large city in Eastern Europe where the virus had hit hard and it killed loads of people instantly. Entire family lines, stories, recipes, life lessons, sets of wedding china, wiped out just like that. It was one of the first big things to be reported on TV that signified the actual end of civilisation. It was followed by loads of stuff like that, and since TV stopped a long time ago, I really honestly couldn’t tell you what’s out there. 

I think from the way things happened some people would hate other people, lose faith completely in human beings or just pity them in a very lonely type of condescension - but I’ve started to really like them. 

There’s these radio shows that come through sometimes made by people like us, hiding out, surviving somehow, just talking into microphones. Who knows where they are in the world. They've got all different accents, different languages and they swap genuinely incredible survival tips like how to safely syphon fuel out of abandoned vehicles, detailed instructions for safe foraging and proofing your house against the infected. A few times I’ve heard scientists. There’s these amazing scientists who are actually studying the virus, who speak to each other in Marathi via the radio channel and then switch to English for things they’ve confirmed like “the virus doesn’t affect children under 12 years of age” and “stay far far away from pigs”. Apparently pigs’ nervous systems are a breeding ground for the virus to mutate. They can pass on variations from animals to humans because their flesh is so similar to ours, which also means that when a pig is infected they crave human flesh. I heard in both the North and South of Ireland millions of people were eaten by pigs and Gardaí became like a pig target force just going round shooting pigs that had broken loose from farms and were attacking towns and cities. Apparently, some people are actually going into comas and their bodies are fighting the virus somehow. They’re waking up in fields months later like injured soldiers used to do on battlefields after the maggots had eaten their dead flesh; their wounds healed enough for them to come home when their whole families thought they were dead. So, now there’s this new generation of humans who have survived actually getting the virus. They’re just waking up in totally random places with no recollection of whether or not they tried to eat their own families. They are probably immune now and could rebuild a virus resistant society or their DNA could be used to help develop a cure. 

I only know all of this because I can understand Marathi when Auntie Lynn sits and listens to the radio with me. She can speak all the languages in the world, at the same time if she wanted to. It’s because of her that the house exists, as I said before, I owned it before I met her, but only since I took her hand and she led me there. It was equipped with everything we would need to survive this. Almost like it was purpose built and no one ever tries to steal our solar panels or the potatoes I’ve grown or anything, so I know she’s keeping us safe. That’s why I want to take some of the stress off her. I know that she’s got other things to deal with and I think finding that rats had got into the supplies was a too crude a depiction of the world’s events to be mirrored in her own kitchen. Right now she probably needs some space. 

I leave the house for the first time in two whole years and it’s a lot more scary than I thought it’d be. It’s really really quiet. Maybe it’s because I’m walking down abandoned village roads and there’s not a large concentration of trees but I swear there’s less birds than I remember - a lot less than we get in the garden. I wonder if the wild animals have collectively agreed that human beings are nothing but chaos and stay far away from our settlements. 

I’m moving slowly so as not to draw any attention. It’s spring but there’s not so many jewel-like berries in the hedgerows so I keep an eye out for Swine Cress, Plantain, Fireweed and especially infected humans and animals alike. It’s not that I regret my decision to leave the house I’d been safe in for two years, it’s just that I've only now realised I don’t know what to do if I see an infected person or pig. I don’t know if they’ll see me or smell me, or if they’re fast, the scientists made it seem like the pigs in Ireland were proper fast. There’s less pigs farmed here but there’s farmers fields all around so if they were going to be anywhere they’d probably be here. Apparently infected people and pigs were drawn towards cities and larger towns because there were less places to hide and more people to eat. I can’t imagine how that would work, if they would just follow A47, because that seems far too organised for bodies that are hosting a parasitic virus. Now I’m properly considering it, would they not just sniff out all the people who were hiding here first - and are they still sniffing? I gaze out into the empty fields, stock still, eyes darting. It’s spring and there’s no lambs. Where the fuck are the lambs? 

A bird chatters from nowhere behind me and I nigh on shit myself. If anything parasitic is left in this village then that sly little cunt’s just given my position away. I’ve got to move now, there’s no point in returning home yet because I’ve been less than an hour. When I left her, Auntie Lynn was standing in the garden gripping a sweeping brush and staring at the sun as if wondering what to do with it. I duck down behind the hedgerow and start crawling, so if anything is looking for me now it’ll think I’m a badger. After twenty-five minutes, I reckon I can probably lift my head up and stand again, as I’m doing so I hear children’s laughter. I hit the ground again faster than if I’d been hit by a speeding car and slid myself deeper into the greenery, moving forwards on my stomach towards the noise. Where the stones and dirt road intersect with cement stands two children, a girl and a boy looking to be about 8 and 12 in school uniforms they’ve long since grown out of, they’re talking, walking and laughing. I stand up straight and lift my hand and they stare at me from wide eyes sunken in their dirty faces. The little boy steps forward and his sister pulls him back silently. We just stare at each other for a minute until I realise I’m the adult and I should speak first. 

“It’s alright,” I say, “it’s okay, I’m not infected, and I’m not going to hurt you.”

They stare still. I know they can talk in English because I heard them and they’re wearing the uniform of the nearest school in the village over, so they must be still frightened, or plotting. I know I’ve got to say more so I just say, “My name is Indigo Azidahaka and I live not far away with my Auntie Lynn and I promise I’m not going to hurt youse. What are your names?”

The girl speaks, “I’m Lucy and this is Thomas.” 

“Hi Lucy and Thomas, what are you doing?” I ask.

“We’re walking,” she says.

“Where to?” I say.

“To school,” she says.

School can’t be still going surely. I would have thought that would be pretty low on the priority list to open a school up amidst a worldwide virus killing people. 

“Is it ok if I come over?” I say. 

“Do you have a gun?” 

“No, I’ve got a big knife but it’s just for foraging, do you?” 

“No, alright.” 

“Why are you going to school?” 

“We always used to walk to school. We walk to school and back every day.” 

I look down at her small hard bare feet and back up at her. 

“Why?” I said. 

Thomas answered me loudly, striding ahead, “In case we might see Daddy” he said, so earnestly I don’t cotton onto what might be obvious immediately. 

But I still catch myself whispering, “Where’s your parents?” to Lucy as we walked after him. 

She answers with an adult sense of responsibility and certainty that haunts the demeanour of a child that’s grown up too quickly, “We don’t know.” 

“Where have you been living?” 

“In the Wendy house Daddy built us. We just woke up there one day, we couldn’t get in the house but there were instructions.” 

“Instructions?” I ask. 

“How to boil water, they left us pots and a generator and blankets and things you could cook and a book about what’s poisonous and on every plant in England and they wrote to never go in the house again.” 

“Do you know why?” I asked. 

“We don’t know why,” she said firmly. 

“Did you ever look inside the house, Lucy?” 

“They painted the windows black,” she whispered. 

“Do you want to come and live with me and Auntie Lynn?” 

“Will she mind?”

“I don’t think so. She already loves you unconditionally.” 

“Why?” 

“I don’t know, She just does.” 

“Thomas, do you want to go and live with Indigo and their Auntie Lynn?” 

“Yes, but can we finish walking to school?” 

Lucy looked at me worriedly. 

”Of course we can, but have you ever seen anything horrible on the way there?” 

“No, just fields and birds and school.” 

“Is school empty?” 

“I don’t know, we just get near the gates and turn ‘round.”

“Alright.” 

So we just walk, me in various shades of brown, grey and green, with binoculars, a rucksack and a big knife followed by two bare footed kids in too small school uniforms with dirty faces, talking about various types of mushrooms and edible plants. Knowing me I’ll bring home every orphaned child and pet we come across. I wonder how many there actually are. 

We’re getting further towards the larger village now having passed an intersection that would eventually lead to pavements. We hear stuttered clopping and wood being dragged in a raw way that goes through you. We turn around and see the creature. I feel like my eyes are bleeding. Limping towards us is what would have grown up to be a horse. It was being trained young to pull a cart on the roads. That's why it was shod young. Why it was tied to a wood and metal cart that it’s back had grown into - the way young trees grow around nails. The gashes and deformities made their way up it’s back and neck to the reins it had worn off, then up to the bit painfully cutting into its face. 

“We have to help it,” Thomas said. There were tears running down both the children’s faces. I touched my cheeks. They were wet too. Lucy just nodded. I couldn’t not look. I was reminded again that I was the grown up, so I pointed at a wooden road sign pointing to a blacksmith's half a mile away and made a mental note to pick Auntie Lynn flowers on the way home. 

“We have to get the stuff off him, so we’ll go to the blacksmith’s because there will be tools there,” I said.

“Should we not try first?” said Lucy.

“No I don’t think so, we could hurt him without getting the things off quickly.” 

So we keep walking. We’re holding hands now. I look behind us every few steps to check the beast is following us steadily and each time I look I notice more deformations. The swelling. The pain. I feel sick. 

Do you ever feel so dissociated that the heat from your body feels like liquid? One small sweaty hand in mine and six steps every time I move my feet forward, followed by heart shattering dragging. We duck down behind the bushes growing into the gates just before the blacksmith’s - an old stone building that sits stubborn on the land around it. As we cautiously turn onto that land, we are met with a sight that we neither expected nor would consent to see again given the choice. The field to the side of the blacksmith’s is stacked with beasts in pain and distress. The grotesque imagery of these horses.

Disease, injury, humiliation, rot.

Flies covet trampled bodies, and dead eyed crows look on at the live decomposition. We notice a hoof going through a skull. Thomas shrieks and falls to the floor as he tries to tear the stench from his nostrils. Lucy picks him up and I half carry, half drag them both to the stone building. From this angle it looks a lot less permanent. It's separated from the field by a fallen stone wall. The house itself appears to have been charged into enough for the tree that stood beside it, for at least 30 years, to have been uprooted, and to have cracked a window and loosed some stones. All for the absent attention of the long deceased smithy. I scramble around by the door - upturning stones, checking crevices for keys. At the corner of the building, Lucy helps Thomas be sick, his hands gripping the stones for support. I’m feeling fraught at this point. I’ve brought them here and I just want to get them away from the horrors and keep them safe. Planning to smash a window, I walk towards them. 

Thomas is sobbing now and he lifts a stone from the corner wall he’d been gripping and looks at me with his fearful child eyes,“I broke it”, and I spy a gleam in its little grout cavern. 

“You’ve fixed it, you clever boy,” I find myself close to a smile. I grab the key from its space in the wall and usher the children inside the house where we’re met with another intense smell similar to a sourdough starter. There’s no evidence of anyone having been here and the stout building has only the workshop and a small kitchen with a bed inside. I pile the furnace up with coal and light it. Not just to work but to warm us all up as we’re all shivering from shock. I suggest Thomas has a lie on the bed. I sniff empty jam-jars in the kitchen until I find one I’m satisfied with to pour him a drink of water from my flask. Lucy is picking up tools with admirable strength for such a slight child. I tell her to find any clothing that could protect me and go to find a tool belt in which I put a blade, a mallet, pincers to remove shoes, a hack saw, sheers, both standard and cutting pliers for removing metal, leather, and wood. By the time I’m done, Lucy returns with two hard hats and a selection of leather and aluminised clothing. 

“I’m helping you, you can’t do it alone,” she tells me.

 She is very right. I resent putting her in any danger, but I really do need someone to stand in front of the horse and keep it still, so I nod. We pull comically large clothing over our own and secure it by rolling excess fabric around twine and rope until we look like tightly trussed rag dolls and we pull a blanket over sleeping Thomas before creeping outside. 

Our beast had followed us as far as he could - to the minefield of rocks that had once been a wall before the tree - and was standing awkwardly as though his weight on any one of his legs was just too much to bear. He was calm as we approached him, desperate for us to come near. The way he is is so undignified that I felt the pain of his broken spirit perhaps more severely than the state of him. As we exchanged looks, his ailments and his weight were mine. As Lucy held his jaw gently and I moved to his body with the pliers, the wave of second hand embarrassment almost had me turn my face while I helped him. Cutting away first at the metal least embedded into his body, he stayed far too still for a creature such as himself. It was not natural. Black and red flakes over my gloved and tied hands, the difference between blood and rust is a fanciful thought but the smell of infection is putrid and splits me from all the rest of the air in the world. I am in a glass chamber of anguish which might now be my own. I work the metal out of my body, we flinch and spasm in pain, as new sharp edges pierce further consistent wounds. Drag new pathways for torture where my hair should grow. I passed through him to his other side or perhaps I floated over his body, high on affliction. Now the work was timeless and in no way rewarding. We were hurt. I am cutting tiny pieces of metal out of our belly and I am taking a hack saw to rotten wood and pulling nails out of our skin. We are lifting my weight off our back and uncovering black dead tissue and pus. Crooked legs become my own limbs while I loosen shoes and pinch the nails. We are relieved. We are waiving away crows that have never witnessed recovery and do not believe in it. We need to bathe our wounds in salt but maybe it’s better that maggots eat the dead flesh as we could never make it to the beach and we wouldn’t know what would await us there. You cannot lead a horse in this condition to the sea. We can clear a path to fresh grazing though. 

Myself and Lucy never quite return to our bodies. I see her feeling some of what I felt while her small delicate fingers worked the reins and bit away from the swollen face of the creature. We work to relieve the suffering from one horse at a time and lead them through cleared rubble and over a hastily dismantled remnant of stockade into an empty enclosed field with more grass. Thomas joins us to clear stones and we help until we would be less useful if we stayed but we vow to come back. We lock up the house and put the key back. Thomas asks if we should leave a note. We don’t. We go home. As we walk away, myself and Lucy return to ourselves and we walk this morning's path unafraid and gather flowers. 

“Are we going to our new house now?”

“Yes.”

“Whose house is it?” 

“Well it was mine, but not until Auntie Lynn took my hand and led me to it. It’s ours now.” 

“Will we have our own bedrooms?” 

“Yes, if you want to. There can be two right next to each other.” 

“Can we decorate them?” 

“Yes of course.” 

“Will-will there be dinner?” 

“There always has been so far.” 

We went back to our home and there was lentil stew and dumplings waiting at the wooden table which had grown pleasantly and appeared thicker and older to accommodate for the extra sturdiness needed. I am washing dishes. Thomas and Lucy have finished eating and are running around giggling and banging doors excitedly. I realise I didn’t bring any supplies home. I realise that’s not what I went for. Auntie Lynn isn’t staring at the sun anymore with a broom; she’s sitting in the conservatory with her eyes shut feeling the last of the sun on her face. I don’t need to ask her if she sent me. She’s taught me everything I know.