The Roar by Clayton Emma

I can see are their faces flickering on the screens. They stop talking and just stare at me, licking their dry lips with wrinkly tongues.’
    ‘Do you recognize any of them?’ Helen asked. ‘Are they teachers from school or the policemen who came when Ellie disappeared?’
    ‘No,’ Mika replied, shuddering. ‘They look as if they should be dead.’
    ‘They sound like the type who take Everlife pills,’ Helen said, in a disapproving manner. ‘I wish those pills had never been invented. They do something strange to the people who take them. It’s as if their bodies are clinging to life but their souls and all the goodness in them have given up and gone. Humans will try anything to escape death. Thousands of years ago, they tried magic and when that didn’t work, they turned to God, that’s why people still say, ‘thank odd,’ when something good happens in their lives. But when God didn’t save them, they gave up on him and turned to science. But I can’t be doing with this staying alive for ever business; paying a fortune for pills so you can walk around looking like a skeleton with eyes. All the worst people got the most important jobs in the Northern Government after the plague and now they never get replaced because they stay alive for so long. It’s not natural and it’s not worth it. I think people should die with dignity when their time comes. I wouldn’t say that in public, mind you, it’s not a popular point of view, so keep it to yourself.’ She looked at him mischievously over the rim of her teacup.
    ‘OK,’ Mika said, smiling.
    ‘What else can you tell me about the Telly Heads?’ she asked.
    ‘They’re mostly men, though I remember two women. At the end of the dream the Knife Sharpener raises his knife and it glints in the light of their faces.’
    ‘So how do you end up?’ Helen asked. ‘Roast beef or enchiladas?’
    ‘I don’t know. I wake up making this horrible groaning noise. It scares my mum.’
    ‘I’m not surprised,’ Helen said.

5
    A NEW GAME
    I t wasn’t easy living in a fold-down apartment in the new town, Barford North. The only green the refugees of the Animal Plague saw from their windows was the mould on their neigh-bours’ curtains. Most had travelled thousands of miles, leaving the sun and their homes behind them, and it was as if all the people of the world had been mixed up in a big bowl and poured out again into concrete boxes. In Mika’s tower lived people from every country; there was even a man from Mongolia who had grown up in a tent and a woman from Peru who was born on a llama farm. Now everyone lived in identical fold-down apartments four metres square, and living this way had taught them to be patient. There was no point having a tantrum in a fold-down apartment because they had to fold one thing away before they could use another, and if they did it in a hurry, it all went wrong and they’d end up with the washing line wrapped round their headinstead of a sandwich in their hand. They had to fold the bed away to use the kitchen, then fold a bit of the kitchen away to use the shower. The shower creaked and sank when they got in it, the vacuumbot often ground to a halt with depressed wisps of smoke leaking out of its eyes, the handles fell off the kitchen cupboards if anyone sneezed and the walls were so thin they could hear their neighbours belch and fart. The only item of furniture they owned was the sofa in front of the television.
    But there was no point complaining about how horrible their lives were, because nothing could be done. No one was going to wave a magic wand and make the world beautiful again. Nobody could bring back the forests and the fields that had been destroyed because of the Animal Plague, and as time went on, they got used to living behind The Wall in a concrete hell. And in some ways life was better; if they had an argument there was nowhere to go (unless you fancied standing in a gloomy hallway), so people made more of an