And Then I Woke Up

by Malcolm Devlin

She once told me when you say you’re going to tell people a horror story, they sit up in their chairs defensively, waiting to see you fail. When you tell them it’s a love story, they relax, they open themselves wide. Macey used to write horror stories she sold as love stories. She took a certain pleasure in seeing her audience find themselves out of their depth.

When I say this is a love story, I mean this is a story about someone who believed in something impossible and beautiful and dangerous with such strength of character and devotion that they followed the thread of it all the way to the very end, no matter what the world threw at them.

Night means darkness, darkness means introspection, introspection dredges up all kinds of monsters and my god, do those bastards keep us busy until dawn.

Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams.

Macey once told me the problem with the truth was that it was so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That’s why religion is so potent, she said. Why history and science are still considered up for debate. Myth is more appealing than verified truth because the grey areas between the facts can still be used against us.

These days, what’s broadcast is carefully controlled. The news is tempered, shorn of opinion; dramas are kept calm and easygoing, the stakes have been lowered, and whatever they do show is calibrated to be much less intense. It’s not censorship, we’re assured, it’s simply a form of moderation, for our own good. Nothing divisive, nothing to make people angry, nothing to make people scared. At Ironside, we get even less. A shadow of a shadow of the media we once knew. We get fashion tips and decorating tutorials; we get kids’ TV shows; we get the shopping channel with its endless Tupperware and paste jewellery.

Although we’re constantly being reassured relapses are rare, it would be nonsense to say they don’t happen. The infection is never really gone. It isn’t communicable, but at best it’s dormant. It’s worked around, understood.

“Are you alright?” I said, too late, perhaps to make a difference if she wasn’t. When she nodded, her smile was brave. “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s nothing. Really. Nothing at all.” If my time in the facility has taught me anything, it’s when people insist nothing is wrong, it’s a lie to buy them time to process their situation.

They liked the weapons she had forged herself; they couldn’t stand the way she chose to wield them.

She’d shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a cry for help?” And her grin would be wicked and dazzling. She didn’t believe any of that. She wasn’t writing stories like she did because she was damaged or dark—from what I could tell, she was better adjusted than most people I knew. She found it fun. Interesting, she said. “People’s reactions to them are the most interesting of all.”

The crazy stuff was already sneaking in by then. Little cracks in the societal structure everyone stepped over with a little skip rather than stopping to figure out how to resolve.

The world was tipping, its weight shifting, and no one had noticed how precarious the ground beneath our feet had become. Every image, every video feed, everything we heard and read seemed to have two sides. Each piece of evidence divided us, and with each line drawn, a wider slice of reality was thrown into question. The truth became slippery, as though the information itself had become a carrier. With each broadcast, the gleam in one person’s eye found a home in a multitude of others. And with enough confusion, enough doubt, well . . . that’s when the believers started to take charge.

It was a Saturday when the world finally broke.

“They’re monsters. Everywhere,” she said. “Macey, it’s Family Day. They’re only kids, high on sugar—” “No, Spence, they’re monsters. Literally. They’re eating the customers.” I looked at her. “They’re not eating the customers,” I said. “They are! Jesus Spence, what do you think that noise is? People are screaming.” And she was right, they were. Or at least they were at that moment. As soon as she told me what I was supposed to be hearing, I heard it. The clatter and conversation of the restaurant lunch rush was immediately replaced with the worst kind of animal noises; the smell of baked pizza crust and melted cheese was substituted completely with the unmistakable smell of rotting meat. Macey spoke and the world clarified as though her description of it served as a corrective lens.

The funny thing was, I remember it suddenly making sense. All the tension, the uncertainty, the knot in the pit of my stomach that had been there since I don’t know how long. It was gone in that one moment. There was us and there were monsters. It was so simple it was almost a relief.

I’ve always thought I knew how to handle myself. Someone comes at you in a bar, you take away their advantage and give them something that’ll make them think twice about trying that sort of shit again. You make all these plans. You try and account for the unexpected, but events have a way of taking you by surprise and you find yourself doing what I did: standing and staring, mouth gaping like an idiot.

All you need to know, Awad tells us, is after the minor symptoms passed, the infection hung in there, disseminating itself to the brain and the spinal column—hard to find, harder to remove—it lay dormant, waiting. When the dominant narrative started to snowball, the infection short-circuited our reason. It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it.

I always come back to the commentary about that Times Square video. If you’re the sort of person who sees blood and monsters rather than somebody real? What does that say about us, I wonder? What does that say about me? Does it take a certain sort of mindset to succumb to that sort of narrative? A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.

It was all bullshit in the end. The dead didn’t come back to life. I shouldn’t have to say this, but that sort of thing simply doesn’t happen. Thank god, maybe? It should come as a relief, I suppose.

The world has always been bigger than us as a species, and it’s only our own limited viewpoint that makes us think we’ll ever be in a position to destroy it so decisively.

The jumble of white and grey rooftops crawling up the hillsides had discoloured to a subdued palette of yellows and greens. It wasn’t the end of the world we had imagined; it wasn’t some magical utopia either, it was simply a place where life endured. A place where the balance had shifted. People still lived here, but their status had changed. They were no longer the dominant concern.

Maybe we’ll all have to get used to the uncertainty. Maybe that’s what frightens me. The way you can get used to anything if you’ve got nothing better to gravitate toward.

“They were real people.” “I know that now!” I wasn’t sure if the anger in her voice was aimed at me or herself. “But we used to see them watching telly or looking at phones or computers. And all I could see were blank screens, snow, static, you know. Broken people poring over broken machines.” Her hands were on her head, clawed, restless, as though she could snatch something away. “And I remember thinking to myself, look at these poor fools. They’re still going about what they think of as normal life. They’re still acting out impulses to consume, consume, consume. Staring at blank televisions, pawing away at phones and laptops like they actually mean something.

“Spencer. Spence. You’re going to kill me because although you look like a fucking hobo, you’re a gentleman who is absolutely not going to let me become one of those assholes.”

There are two types of victim infected by the narrative. The believers and the followers. The believers are the ones invested in furthering the story. They’re the Maceys and Vals of the world who go all-in. They’re charismatic, confident. They’re the carriers of the lie, and the gleam burns so bright in them it draws the rest of us, reigniting the light in our own eyes until we see nothing other than the perspective they shape for us. The believers are the ones who can explain what’s happening. They justify it and we simply shovel down all the shit we were fed as though it’s good for us.

The way I see it? The trick to curing us of the narrative was to break our faith. To weaken the hold the believers had on us; to give us room to doubt and see the truth as a better story.

It wasn’t so much a personal silence. It was an external stillness that served to balance an internal cacophony. It was a hyperawareness, a heightened alertness.

Macey once told me the worst way a story can end is by someone waking up and realising everything that happened was only a dream. “It’s a cop-out,” she said. “All that carefully constructed world building, all those people who you believe in and then . . . nah, it’s a lie and none of it really matters. No one wants that. We read stories, watch shows on TV, and we appreciate they’re fiction. But when they come out and outright admit it, it pisses us off.”

I had known her since before the infection, but I wondered if it was something she’d always had about her. She had only needed the right time to be taken seriously, the right kind of chaos to allow her to rise gloriously to the top.

“It’s only that I don’t trust dreams. I don’t think it’s fair they don’t really mean anything.”

“Gaspin,” she said. Gaspin was dressed in army fatigues and a hunting jacket. He had a machine gun cradled in his arms as though it was a child. “Ma’am,” Gaspin said. “See anything out there?” Macey said. “All quiet, ma’am.” Macey nodded. “Well,” she said. “As you were.”

“Maybe it really was worth tooling up with weapons, stockpiling canned goods and fuel. Do you ever think it’s odd that so many who didn’t get infected had guns stashed in their homes somewhere? I mean, I don’t for a minute believe they ever thought this is how things were going to end, but . . .”

“Who’d have thought you horror writers would be so right?” I said. “Fuck right off.” “Right-o.”

“Do you think we are cured? I don’t feel cured, Spence. They say the infection doesn’t go anywhere. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Just because we’re not seeing dead people anymore, doesn’t mean we’re alright.”

“What do you do when you stop running, Spence? What do you do when whatever it is you’re running from isn’t there anymore?” She smiled. “You start to rebuild. That’s what they’re doing. That’s what they were reporting on the television that day.” She jabbed her finger at the gateway on the opposite side of the motorway. “They’ve outlasted the end of the world, and so they’re preparing themselves to build a new one.”

I sometimes wonder what it takes for people to consider how civilisation should be defined.

Perhaps civilisation is only whatever we think of as normal, or perhaps it’s the baseline normality we’re born into. It’s a series of expectations that shifts forward with each generation. A series of technological landmarks to tick off the list: electricity, refrigeration, the internet. The higher we climb, the further we fall. So, if your world had been through the sort of upheaval that knocks your definition of civilisation back several generations, what level do you aspire to rebuild to? What is the civilisation you construct from the ruins you find yourself in?

One thing I should tell you about Val, is that he was never a destination. I found myself with him, but he wasn’t the flag on the horizon I steered toward. He wasn’t what I was looking for, he was someone I found on the way. And sometimes that’s enough. You find someone going the same direction as you are and it’s all the connection you need when the world had turned as much as it had.

And if I resent anything about the narrative, it’s the way it fell back on such outmoded tropes as to make him into someone I might look at twice. But that’s how it worked isn’t it? That’s what the doctors said. It feeds off familiar beats. Comfortable rhythms. Things we’ve seen a million times on TV are somehow easier to believe. I’ve always surprised myself.

Relationships aren’t scientific, they’re not mathematical. They’re chaotic, abstract, irrational.

History is one long string of stories honed to sharpen one side over another.

The world ended late in the morning of a lazy Saturday, and by three that afternoon I had murdered my son and my husband and fled the house we called our home.

You know what I really hate about being cured? Everyone’s so . . . fucking smug, you know? First thing I get when I got to the facility: It’s all okay! The world isn’t ending! It’s make-believe, and you? Well, you fell for it because you’re . . . weak, or stupid, or angry. You’re susceptible, that’s what you are.”

“Good news, it’s not your fault. Bad news, you didn’t narrowly escape from your husband and son who had turned into ravenous zombies, you murdered them both in cold blood because . . . fairy tales. But as I said, good news!”

“I miss being infected. I miss the narrative.” Her smile was small, her eyes raw. “Not because of Val, never because of him. No, I miss the certainty of it. It made the world so . . . simple. It was us and them and that was that. The whole world was black and white. Everything was easy. And most important of all, I loved my son with such a ferocity it lit a fire within me and that fire fuelled me in the way nothing else could. “I miss missing him in that way. I miss loving him so unconditionally. I miss him and I miss the disease that made me see monsters.”

Even if there was consent on her part, let’s be very clear: I was a man, gaslighting a woman. I was lying to her to send her back to a violent life because . . . well. I wish there was a way of finishing that sentence easily. I wish I could justify myself with complete confidence. I can’t, acknowledging only how we live in strange and unpredictable times. I’m not proud. And all it took was for me to tell her a story.

Stories are addictive. I keep imagining futures for the world. I keep imagining I had a part in them, no matter how small. And then, I suppose, you could say I wake up and I see my place in relation to everything else is tiny, insignificant, mostly known for having followed the straightest path without thought and done harm to others.