The way that things ended could never have been foreseen. It wasn’t obvious at first; the beginnings were strange and slow until they picked up a pace.

In a large warehouse distribution centre, on a day like any other day, a handful of employees didn’t show up for work. Stuart, the manager, phoned them all, but there were no replies, so he left angry messages threatening the security of their jobs if they didn’t show or at least call in. Still, none of them came.

Later that day, Stuart had an online meeting with managers from other warehouses of the same company. Amongst the pomp and waffle of the management-speak meeting, Stuart expressed his irritation that twelve of his workers that day were no-shows with no explanation. Strangely, oh so strangely, some of the other managers said that the same thing had occurred that day in their own warehouses. What the bloody hell was going on? Fucking unions must be up to something, they all agreed.

The next day, in Stuart’s warehouse, triple the number of workers didn’t show. This was now a serious dent in the workforce, and Stuart could see the storm of shit that was about to howl down upon him if the higher tier of management caught wind of the fact that customers weren’t getting their appliances delivered on time. So he called his subordinates together and said that due to unforeseen circumstances, no-one’s shift could end until the work had all been done, and no, the overtime would not be paid at time-and-a-half, but there would be an extra bonus Christmas gift in the hamper at the end of the year. The workers got to work, shaking their heads and silently swearing. Their shifts were long enough already.

The trend continued. By ten days later, half the workers were gone and were unreachable. Stuart doubled the workload of each worker left. By this time, he was in a sweating panic about what upper management would do if they found out he’d completely lost control of his workforce. Whatever the reason for the magic disappearing act of his staff, he just knew he’d be the one to get the blame, even if the same thing was occurring elsewhere. He couldn’t be shown to be missing targets. His job would be on the line.

Stuart finally got home late in the evening. His flat felt bare and unwelcoming. Exhaustion and hunger plunged him into his sofa. As he lay there, it dawned on him that that there was practically no food left in the house. He dragged himself to take a look and discovered a box of Oxo cubes, a couple of crackers, half a loaf of stale bread and some mouldering carrots. He ordered a pizza delivery and lay on the sofa waiting for it to arrive. It hadn’t come after more than an hour of painful waiting, so he called the pizza place in pent-up fury to give them what for. No one answered the phone. Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell was going on? A surge of anger took over from his exhaustion and provoked him to storm out of the block of flats into his car. He screeched off towards the supermarket.

He reached the supermarket car park and through the haze of dark and drizzle, lit only by the dull orange glow of a morbid street lamp, realised there was – what was it? A hundred or more people amassed – all what, singing? Stuart was popping with fury by that time and only just about held it together to edge past the mass of people without running them down – which, to be honest, they probably deserved. Finally, he managed to park.

He felt a shred of unease at that moment, and paused before he got out of his vehicle. These people had strange, maniacal grins. But he was almost beyond caring by this point; he was so weary, famished, and fed up. As he got out, he realised they were bellowing, ‘Singing in the rain,’ and some were twirling each other around and careering about with umbrellas. This is some woke bullshit, he muttered to himself. He didn’t know if the term accurately described what was going on, but he had no other way of categorising this madness.

Stuart marched into the supermarket to escape the throng as soon as he could, but as he entered, he stopped dead. Now what? There were but two workers on the entire shop floor, both trying to get a huge queue of angst-ridden customers through a couple of malfunctioning automated self-service tills. On seeing this, his anger collapsed, and he was overcome with the desire to cry. Just need some food, for Christ’s sake.

He shuffled over to the pizza section, then thought, Sod it, went off, grabbed a trolley, piled it high, and coolly walked past the tills without paying. The two staff were in a frenzied whirl of bleeps and products and pissed off people. He felt confident they wouldn’t notice. God knows what had happened to the security staff, but there was no one in sight. CCTV? – whatever; all he knew was that he wasn’t going to stand in that oversized queue.

He finally got home. Pizza, beer (for free!), warmth and comfort; escape from the madness out there. What a bloody awful day.

The next day, however, was far worse. The shitstorm finally came. By the time he sloped into work, still knackered, there was already a bunch of jumped-up higher management hovering around, peering over clipboards and assessing things.

A woman with an air of importance stopped Stuart in his tracks as he attempted to sidle by. She wore a fitted suit and donned a high vis and hard hat, though not for any apparent reason. “Ah, good morning, you must be Stuart,” she said, with a strange expression between pursed and pouty. “We’re running a spot check this morning on the entire workplace. We’re auditing all our warehouses as it seems there are issues with workforce management. Our business consortium has created new methods to ensure managers are given the tools to curtail workplace absences effectively. Any initial questions or issues you’d like to raise?”

Stuart was too tired to say anything to ingratiate himself, so just murmured, “No, you just carry on.” The lot of them crawled off around the warehouse, scratching away at their clipboards, observing Stuart’s every move as he put on his best boss impression and ordered around the handful of beleaguered workers left. It felt as if they would never leave the premises. He’d spent his days until now fending off the vampiric upper management, and as the day wore on, he felt himself become a husk of his former self as his life force was sucked from him, though there hadn’t been that much to begin with. By the end of that almost endless day, he was experiencing a desperate all-over body pain, a throbbing head, and barely a clear thought.

He almost couldn’t care less when Ms. Pursed and Pouty gave him the final results of the audit. “Well, Stuart, we feel we’ve dealt with the situation with suitable generosity, but we’ve had to reschedule your targets, and we’ve put measures in place to make this workplace Swift and Agile to meet quality standards. We’ll need evidence of proven improvements by our next audit and regular weekly reporting. You need to be properly incentivising your workforce to put a stop to the high level of absences and meet the new set of targets. If staff are disappearing on you, you must take the personal responsibility necessary when occupying a managerial position and properly scrutinise your management style.” Given that Stuart was practically delirious by this point, he couldn’t quite fathom what on earth she was getting at. Swift? Agile? And what did they think he’d done with his workforce? Didn’t even matter; he just had to get home and deal with the pain.

He was barely conscious of driving home, but he made it. Thank god that was over. He didn’t even have the energy to get a pizza in the oven; he just crumpled onto the sofa and pressed the TV remote – he needed something to distract him from the devastating pain. The news was blathering on, and it took a while for the words to seep past the pain in his skull. Was this for real? The words were going round and round…

“A national emergency has been called this evening. It has become apparent that the workforce is now operating at a fraction of its capacity across all sectors, as swathes of workers fail to show up for their shifts. It is as yet inconclusive as to the reason. MI5 is looking into a union conspiracy. Meanwhile, reports of lunacy have skyrocketed…”

He had no idea if he was in some crazed hallucination – he must be the one who’s a lunatic, he thought. The TV wasn’t helping, and he pressed the remote to switch it off before ebbing off into pain-world and finally falling asleep.

He slept long and deep, and when he eventually woke up, he felt clear and refreshed. Wow, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept like that! The pain had gone, and he was starving hungry – no wonder, he’d hardly eaten with all that crap going on at the warehouse. Why not start the day with a proper cooked breakfast for a change? Eggs, sausages, a good load of tea and toast – the works. Not the usual crappy cereal. He stretched and started to hum a tune. He couldn’t believe how good he felt! Today was a time to enjoy. What time was it, anyway?

He fumbled for his phone and pressed the main button. The battery was dead. Strange, it shouldn’t have gone flat so fast; it usually lasted for more time. He plugged it in and switched it on. As it loaded up, confusion overcame him. The phone said it was Friday. But the vampire day from hell was Monday…surely he couldn’t have been asleep for over three days straight? That must have been some fever. The phone then lit up with numerous bings and bleeps. Text messages. Voicemail messages. Threatening termination of employment if he didn’t comply with company policy on sick leave. Stuart suddenly felt the all-encompassing pain return to his entire body, and he fell to the sofa again. There seemed no way to make the pain go away other than to drift off to sleep.

When he woke again, the light had become a little dusky. His dreams had been vivid, probably due to the hunger, and some slight disturbance from further bleeps on his phone. As he came back into consciousness, he knew there was no way he was going to engage with his phone again – seeing those messages would just make him feel rotten. He was struck by an irrepressible urge to throw his phone as far away as possible. He stumbled to the balcony of his flat and was about to hurl the phone onto the concrete below when he caught sight of a neighbour in his garden down below, spinning a child around. They were both laughing and giggling.

Then he realised he could hear more laughter and looked over to see two women of about 50 years old jumping on a trampoline. This joy seemed strangely infectious, and he let out an uproarious laugh himself. The trampoline women looked up when they heard him. Then they all started laughing together, and he hadn’t a clue why they were all laughing, but it felt really good. He laughed until he felt weak and wheezy and clutched at his chest.

“You okay up there, love?” shouted one of the women.

“I think so!” he said breathlessly. “Actually I think I’m great! But I’m just so hungry!”

“So come down!” the woman shouted back. “We’re just about to have dinner!”

He’d never so much as said a friendly hello to these neighbours in the past – in fact, he wouldn’t have even recognised them as his neighbours before today. But how incredible he felt. Why would he want to do anything right now but go and eat dinner with the neighbours? He sensed himself fly down the stairs of his block of flats, partly from happiness and partly from the wooziness of hunger.

When he got to the neighbours’ place, they served him up a big bowl of steaming stew with freshly baked rolls. It smelt delicious. He told them how grateful he was, and he started laughing again because, well, he never told anyone he was grateful, and it seemed like a strange thing to say. And before he knew it, they were all laughing again, and he had no idea why, but it really just felt so good.

When he’d finally eaten his fill, washed down with copious water, as by this time he was also mightily dehydrated, he was hit with a pang of embarrassment at his own strange behaviour and thought to ask, “So does anyone know what’s actually going on?”

“We’ve no idea!” one of the women replied. “All we know is that we’re not going to work and we’re having the time of our lives!” and they started laughing again. For Stuart, however, the word ‘work’ plunged him back into pain for a moment, before it seemed that the best and only way out of it was to start laughing again, and he made a note to self that the best course of action was to not think about work at all.

“Let’s go to town!” cried one of the women, and before he knew it, the three of them were strolling off down the street, laughing and joking as if they’d known each other their whole lives. Stuart’s neighbourhood was one of crumbling urban decay, of dog shit and detritus; hard and unloved. But now there were people everywhere, chatting and singing, laughing and dancing.

They came to the local park, where hundreds were gathered, dancing to the captivating beats of a band. Stuart had never come across such a band, and he must have looked confused, for one of the women explained to him that it was a Samba; Brazilian music made by West Africans who’d been in slavery. The beats were elating and Stuart started to feel his body move slightly. Eventually the movements took over his body and become a dance, and the more he danced, the happier he felt. How could this all be so incredible? And how can you keep feeling even happier than the happiness you felt before?

He danced and danced, eyes closed, and when he finally opened them again, he’d lost the two women in the crowd. He was still enjoying the music but was hit with an urge to walk up a hill and look down on the beauty of it all, just him and the moon. It was another strange feeling; he couldn’t remember staring at the moon since he was a boy at scout camp. He moved on.

As he walked, he enjoyed the feeling of his footsteps, going at his own pace; a far cry from the arduous hours on foot in the warehouse, goading others into doing this thing and that thing. He shuddered with pain again at the thought of work, and again, he laughed it off.

Finally, he got to the foot of the hill he was about to climb. He took a deep breath and started to laugh deliriously. How much he was looking forward to getting to the top. But it was not to be, as from out of nowhere he was swooped upon, hooded and handcuffed, and bundled into a vehicle, which then drove off. It all happened so fast that he didn’t even try to protest. He felt himself collapsed and speechless as they drove into the night.

Time passed, and eventually, they arrived somewhere. He was dragged out of the car, but he could barely stand.

“Get him a wheelchair!” a voice barked. Hooded, handcuffed, in a wheelchair…he couldn’t handle anything any more, and he slipped off into unconsciousness.

The next thing he knew, he was coming back to awareness in what looked to be a hospital room. He was strapped to a bed, and he had some kind of a monitor next to him, which he was connected to by a mess of wiring. Many other people were strapped to beds around him, but he seemed to be the only one awake.

Through his bleariness, he perceived a man in a white coat walking around the room and writing down information from the monitors of each of the prisoner patients. At that moment, a stern-looking man in military uniform marched in. He looked like some kind of general from the bygone age of empire. Things were getting more and more bizarre.

“Doctor!” the general barked. “Things are now completely out of hand, and I’m not seeing any progress from you. You need to be working faster to get to the bottom of this. We’ve now got down to operating on only twenty per cent of the workforce, and it’s dropping by the day. You need to come up with something conclusive before we don’t have enough staff to stop the fucking nuclear power stations from melting down!”

Hmm, mused Stuart. So maybe my management style isn’t to blame after all.

“Sir, my team has been working round the clock to understand what’s going on, and at last I may have some good news,” the doctor said, in a slightly placatory tone. “If you just bear with me, I can explain the conclusions that are starting to be drawn from this latest set of neurological results,”

“Well get on with it then man! I thought it preposterous in the first place that whatever the hell is going on was being identified as a public health issue, and my patience is now wearing thin!”

“Of course, Sir. It may take some time to relay all the details, so as I say, please bear with me.” The doctor took a quick breath, seemingly trying to buy himself a bit of space without interruption. “The evidence is mounting that the effects seen in swathes of the workforce is due to some sort of pathogen.”

“Some sort of pathogen!” spat the general, “What, causing ‘can’t-be-arsed-itis’ in all the lower rungs of society? This is laughable!”

“We do indeed believe it to be a pathogen,” continued the doctor. “It seems that the pathogen, when active, interacts with the nervous system, which in turn triggers an immune response. The statistics recently generated are forming a pattern that displays that workforce dropout in any workplace begins with those on the lowest incomes working in the most stressful conditions. However, as you can see from this graph, over time, workforce dropout has greatly spread to lower management, and at its worst, upper management.” He paused in anticipation of an unhelpful interruption from the general. The general said nothing, though his eyes were now bulging. The doctor continued.

“Studies over the last decades consistently conclude that employees on the lowest rungs of a hierarchy within a workplace are more prone to a variety of diseases caused by the build-up over time of the stress response in the body, causing partial organ shut down due to duress, and leading to stress-related diseases like heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes…”

“Ridiculous. These people just have no self-discipline. Not enough old-fashioned exercise, meat and two veg. That kind of thing.”

The doctor cleared his throat. “As I was saying, this phenomenon is now well documented in numerous studies. The latest round of tests we’ve administered concerning the current crisis seems to suggest that a previously unknown pathogen becomes active when the body is under duress in a high-stress environment, namely on a low rung of the hierarchy within the workplace. The pathogen seems to affect the neural pathways, triggering an extreme stress response and leading to some kind of all-over bodily shutdown…”

“Some kind of shutdown?” the general roared. Stuart was starting to find him irritatingly predictable. “Why, then, are the streets filled with hysterical lunatics?”

“Well, Sir, we are still in the early stages of this part of the theory, as medical science has never come across what I am about to tell you – until now. It seems that after the bodily shutdown, there is then a regenerative period within the body and brain, usually accomplished by a deep sleep. When the patient emerges, they feel enormously different. However, if they enter the same stressful environment again, the body’s organs start to falter as the pathogen again takes hold. Not only that, but interviews we’ve conducted show that once the pathogen has taken hold, even the thought of being back in that stressful environment triggers a partial shutdown. Early theory suggests that somehow the nervous system has created an adaptation for itself, and deviates from the partial shutdown by creating a state of elation within the body. The patient starts to laugh, sing and dance. They have to, or the body will start to shut down with pain, or at worst go into a full shut down, where unconsciousness follows.”

“This is the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard,” said the general, although his tone was now more vanquished than rambunctious.

“Ludicrous, maybe,” replied the doctor. “I mean, forget Covid; this situation is about as unprecedented as unprecedented situations get. And you know as well as I that when the government made announcements stating that as a matter of national duty, people needed to return to work, it made no difference, and when they ordered that workers were to be rounded up and forced back to work, those workers just went into shutdown mode and passed out. Not only that, but the situation seems to operate as a positive feedback loop. When a section of the workforce has disappeared, this puts more pressure on the workforce that remains, accelerating the advance of the pathogen, as it takes hold of nervous systems that have become highly stressed due to increased workload. So the increase in workforce diminishment only speeds up over time.”

“Well, for fuck sake, what is to be done?” the general said with more vigour. “How long before we can get a vaccine to end this madness?”

“I’m afraid we’re yet to understand the nature of this pathogen, which may be a very recent mutation. There is also speculation that the first outbreak occurred in Siberia, quite possibly due to a virus being released as the permafrost melts due to anthropogenic climate change. We have yet to be able to isolate and examine the pathogen properly. We are confident that it is highly infectious, that most of the population is currently infected by now, and that it can remain dormant until the carrier enters into prolonged periods of daily stress. Those who already experience such daily stress will quickly experience activation of the pathogen. We are starting to see that in the world’s most unequal societies – in the USA, the UK, and South Africa for example, the outbreaks are beginning to spiral out of control. The main problem at hand is that there is no method to bring the situation back under control if people cannot even be coerced into working.”

The general and the doctor hadn’t been aware that Stuart was fully conscious until now, but there was something so ridiculous about this scenario that he couldn’t help but draw attention to himself by bursting into hysterics. Can’t even be coerced into working! What was the world they would be moving into? It was fine that he didn’t have to be a manager in a warehouse any more, but if every infected soul would not and could not run the hospitals, maintain the water supply, or keep food supply chains going, what then? The end was coming.

Curious thoughts crept into Stuart’s mind…was it the end of the world, or was it really just the end of forcing people to do stuff? Could people start to work again if work was about working together rather than control? And would people with power and authority figure this out in time, before the world actually ended? For some reason, he didn’t even care what happened…he just wanted one good day, this day, not a lifetime of dreariness. He could see now that he didn’t know himself; he’d spent his whole life taking orders and ended up with a lonely, monotonous existence. That should have been a sad thought for Stuart, but the more he laughed, the happier he felt.

“Shut up, you lunatic!” barked the general, “For crying out loud, be quiet man!”

The doctor tried to interject. He was obviously concerned that the general’s shouting would worsen the situation. “Sir, evidence shows that it is unlikely we’ll be able to redeem the situation by putting infected individuals under further duress. I’m very uncertain about the way we’ve been treating…”

“And you can shut up too, you damned fool!’ the general bellowed. “I’ve had enough of all this! It’s nothing but a mass of lazy plebs throwing this country to the dogs. And fools like you with your woke commie theories are just going to make things worse! You need to start respecting authority and following orders to work on solutions, not coming up with deranged theories about why people will no longer do an honest day’s work!”

Until now, the doctor had maintained an air of composure in the presence of the unpleasant general. But as Stuart continued to howl with laughter, he realised the doctor suddenly looked like he was on the verge of collapse. The doctor leaned into the room’s wall, his breathing tight, his face pained. Stuart stopped laughing, and the general halted his spewing of venomous words, clearly unsure what to do. The next moment, however, a smile spread to the face of the doctor before he started to laugh to the point of hysteria. The pathogen must have taken hold, and the body’s response had kicked in. Stuart started to laugh again, too.

The general kept shouting, but it was to no avail. There was no going back now. He stormed from the room. Stuart and the doctor laughed on and on, and the patients in the other beds started coming to consciousness and began laughing hysterically, too. Today was the day for living, even if living it would bring them to

the end.

But who knew what the end would really mean?