by Alex Scarrow
His mind drifted back to that underpass on the outskirts of Oxford. He and Freya had wandered through it way too casually, too distracted by the logjam of abandoned vehicles to notice the huge dangling root above them. Maybe too distracted to have avoided stepping on some hair-thin, threadlike feeler. They had alerted the virus to their presence on the way through and faced the consequences on their way back.
He couldn’t see any viral creatures moving around at the moment, but suspected that thousands of them were tucked away in hiding—some beneath the delivery trucks parked in the loading docks, others in the dark, cavernous interiors, ready to swarm out at the first tingling of their warning thread.
There was little to see during the day, but at night, he knew, they all came out—he could hear them. On several occasions over the last couple of days, they’d heard haunting animalistic sounds like the bellowing of a wounded cow or the mournful lowing of whale song. Leon wondered if the virus was experimenting, producing larger creatures.
The fact that they only came out in numbers at night supported someone’s suggestion that they were uncomfortable in daylight, that UV rays might be harmful to them.
So far, the virus had tested the broken window only once. Leon, and a guy roughly his age called Jake, had used duct tape to seal the gap.
That morning, Cora had come upstairs to look and let out a bloodcurdling scream. The entire window had been covered by a membranous purple skin that fluttered like a sail. A thick nodule of fibrous tissue had grown around the broken pane, probing the tape for a way in. It could “smell” there was an opportunity here but hadn’t found a way to exploit it yet. Realizing there was no way through, it had soon gone.
Stuck in here with no way out, their small group had had plenty of time to talk, to get to know a little about each other, and to speculate about their predicament and how long they were going to last without any food.
Cora was the woman who’d spoken to him and Freya briefly in the containment pen. Broad-framed and ruddy-faced, she was the kind of person Mom would have called a “no-nonsense northerner.”
Finley was fifteen. He had frizzy, black hair parted on the side and thick glasses that reminded Leon of Milhouse from The Simpsons.
Artur was a middle-aged Hungarian man with limited English. Piecing together his sentence fragments, they’d figured out that he’d once had a job driving a truck. He’d been the one who’d reinforced the doors, barricading them with animal cages and heavy water drums and then, later, improvising a locking bar through the door’s handles.
The other four in their small group were less forward in revealing anything about themselves. There was a young girl called Kim, a large, round-shouldered man called Adewale, a slight and pale man called Howard, and a middle-aged woman who used to be a police officer called Dawn.
Just random people. Not strong survival types. Ordinary people who were still alive because…well, they were just lucky.
Through the window, Leon watched the low and heavy clouds swiftly moving by and raindrops racing each other down the unbroken glass panels.
He wondered if they should have stayed put.
If you’d stayed put, what…in Norwich? At Everett’s castle? You’d be dead already, asshole. Listen. Grace and Freya are probably in a better situation right now than you are. It’s time to figure your shit out, Leo.
Dad’s voice. It was always Dad, sitting in the back of his head, ready to kick him in the butt if he started trying to feel sorry for himself.
Damn right I will. You saved your sister and your girlfriend. That’s great going, Son. Now it’s your turn. If those other losers can’t come up with something, then you’d better do it.
“Like what?” he muttered, steaming the glass up with his breath.
You’re not a baby anymore. Figure it out, Son.
“Great. Thanks a bunch, Dad.”
Chapter 5
“We’ll use one of these,” said Leon. He banged his hand against the kennel cage’s mesh. “We take it outside, we get inside it, then we can shuffle around. It’s a protective bubble.”
He looked at the others, hoping for at least one of them to back him up or take the ball and run forward with it.
“It looks way too heavy, mate. How do we move around?” Jake had short-cropped hair, and Leon could see the edges of a tattoo poking up around the neck line of his T-shirt. The tattoo was reassuring. He was pretty certain the virus couldn’t mimic those too.
Jake nodded at the cage. “We’d have to take the floor out.” He glanced at Leon. “That’s what you’re getting at, right? Using the cage as, like, a turtle shell or something?”
“Right. Exactly that. It’s like a wire-mesh turtle shell.”
Leon looked again at the cage. Most of the cages were the same size, four feet high and eight feet wide. Room for two, maybe three, people, stooped over, carrying the weight of the cage on their backs and shoulders.
“The crawlers will get through the mesh,” said Finley.
“That’s a tight mesh,” said Jake. “They won’t get through that.”
“The slime will still get through though,” countered Finley.
“The slime’s not really a problem,” said Leon. “We’ve all been chugging the pills, right?”
Animal sedatives and pain pills were the one thing, apart from water, this building had in abundance. Bizarrely, the virus seemed to have a problem coping with this type of medication in a host’s bloodstream.
They all nodded.
“So, right, it can touch us, slime all over us as much as it wants to, but it can’t infect us.”
“Even if it can’t infect us, it still wants to kill us,” said Howard. He looked around at everyone, then back at Leon. He held his hands up defensively. “I’m just saying what we’re all thinking.”
“The virus makes the scuttlers and anything else from the slime, but that takes a while to do. So each drop of goo on its own isn’t a big deal,” Leon explained.
“If we keep moving, we’ll be fine,” added Jake.
Leon nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. If we keep moving, we’ll be leaving behind us a trail of goo that’s busy transforming itself into, I dunno, tiny crabs.”
“What if all those crabs catch up with us?” asked Kim.
“That’s why it’s important we keep moving,” Leon replied.
“What if it makes something huge?” The question came from Artur.
They hadn’t seen any virals bigger than a dog in the last few days. They’d all witnessed the human totem poles after the mass eruption in the quarantine pen, and some of them had seen creatures as big as cows and horses over the last couple of years. So it was entirely possible that they might encounter something big enough to knock a cage over. Or crush it.
“I think it takes the virus a lot of effort to make things from the slime. But combining things it’s already made might be quicker,” said Finley. “Like Lego—making the bricks is hard work, but once it’s got the bricks, it can make bigger things? I dunno.”
“We’ve all heard the noises outside. Something much larger must have made those,” said Cora.
“Maybe the larger a viral is, the harder it is for it to stay assembled.”
“It knows we’re trapped in here, so it’s taking a rest,” added Jake. “Maybe it’s just making the scuttlers for now.”
Howard looked unhappy about the plan. “But what if it suspects we’re up to something?”
Jake shrugged.
“Either way, it’s not stupid,” said Leon. “It seems to figure things out pretty fast. If we go out there with a dog cage over our heads and get away with it once, it won’t let us get away with it again. So that means we get one shot at this.” Leon looked around. “It’s an escape plan. I’m not talking about foraging trips. This is all of us making a run for it together. It’s a huge risk, but
we don’t have much choice.”
“Hardly run,” said Finley. “Crawl maybe.”
Leon looked at Jake, then at Cora, hoping for a little more support from them. Now that he’d thrown this brain wave of his out there, he was not so eager to take sole responsibility for seeing it through.
“So, look, all I’m saying is this is a way we can get out of this warehouse.”
“Then what?” asked Howard.
“Where do we go?” added Cora.
“I don’t know! I’m just putting an idea out there!” He shrugged. “We try and find a truck or something? Find a boat maybe?”
“Food first,” said Artur.
“We need food, fast.” Leon had seen enough starved-to-death-on-a-desert-island reality shows to know they were up against a ticking calorie clock. They were now reeling from the effects of four days without food; fatigue and apathy had set in. “It’s not exactly a complete plan or anything. I’m just suggesting stuff. And look, if we don’t move, we’ll die here.”
They stood in the warehouse, eyeing the various-sized cages, then, when they’d run out of other things to look at, eyeing each other in an increasingly expectant silence.
Finally Jake snorted an edgy laugh, which he tried to cover up as a cough.
“What?” asked Leon.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
He shrugged. “It’s just like The Apprentice. Who’s going to project manage the first task? Since it’s your idea…?” He pursed his lips and bounced his brows up into air quotes.
“Me?” Leon made a face. “No, come on…please, somebody else. Somebody older.” He looked at Cora.
“You seem to be doing pretty well at the moment, young man.” She smiled weakly. “It’s a good idea.”
“It’s the only idea,” added Jake.
She shrugged. “Well yes, there’s that. All the same, it’s your idea, Leon, love. And I’m voting we do it.” She looked around at the others.
No one else voted. But after a moment, their heads nodded mutely.
“There we go, then,” she said. “Leon? You’re in charge.”
Chapter 6
“Could you just tape it to my arm, please?”
The medic looked up at Freya irritably. Even through the fluorescent light reflecting on the faceplate, Freya could see the man was about to tell her to shut the hell up and move along.
Her blood ran around the tilted petri dish as blood should. The moment of tension had passed.
The marine in the corner of the small room, carrying the saltwater hose, took his hand off the flow valve and stepped back.
“I’m not being difficult. I can’t hold the swab on. It helps if I have both hands free?” she added in explanation, gesturing at the walking stick resting across her thighs.
Begrudgingly the medic fumbled for a length of adhesive tape and stuck the cotton swab down on her arm where the blood had been taken. “There.”
“Thanks.”
She looked again at the small puddle of her blood in the dish as the medic screwed the sample lid on. It was a healthy red, a reassuring liquid—it hadn’t instantly thickened into a dark-colored blob. The medic tossed the sealed container into the trash and pulled out one of the new, green ID cards.
“So your name’s…Emma Russell?” The medic looked at Freya’s old red card and was about to copy the name down on to the new one.
“Uh, no.”
“What?”
“I… That’s not my actual name.”
“But it says—”
“Well, obviously, it’s not my card. I…uh…well, I found it. That’s kind of how I got on board.”
The medic’s eyes rounded, and she pushed her stool back. “You weren’t properly tested ashore?”
“Not exactly, but hey—” she spread her hands guiltily—“I passed the test, right? So…no harm done?”
The woman looked like she wanted to refer to a senior officer. But there was no one higher in rank in the room for her to pass the buck to.
“Look.” Freya pointed at her own blood. “Apparently, I’m human, so we’re all good here. I was wrong to steal a card. But I knew I wasn’t infected so…it didn’t seem like a big deal.”
The medic shook her head, then conceded her point by rolling Freya’s stool forward again. “OK. What’s your name?”
“Freya Harper.”
She scribbled the name on to the card, then handed it over. “You’re lucky I asked your name after I tested you, sweetheart.”
Freya smiled. “Thanks for, you know, not killing me.”
“Don’t lose it,” she said, then waved her to get up and get out. “Next!”
Freya made her way to the infirmary door, out into the passage, where the rest of her fellow refugees were lining up.
She waggled the card above her head and did a victory jiggle. “Yay me. I’m human!”
She got a muted laugh from some of those standing in the line, but the rest glared at her.
“Move along!” grunted a soldier.
“Can I go up on the main deck now?”
“Yes. Go.”
“Thank God.” She sighed with relief. Since starting off, they’d been kept below, confined to just one deck, which, as far as she could see, didn’t have so much as a single porthole. The last five days had been pretty queasy ones. She’d made it through without barfing, but the whole deck stank of stale vomit and disinfectant.
She took the stairs up to deck B and followed the hastily handwritten signs taped to the bulkheads that pointed the way to “OUTSIDE.”
Finally, as she emerged from the ship’s interior and the constant glare of fluorescent lights into natural daylight, she felt the gust of cool wind on her cheeks and began to feel better. The aft deck, about the size of a tennis court, was a seamless continuum of dull, military-gray metal, decorated with a large white ring, a yellow H in its center. Pretty much everyone who’d been tested before her was up here now, relishing the fresh air and sunlight, escaping the rank odor from belowdecks. Freya spotted a gap at the handrail that ran all the way around the edge of the deck and made her way toward it.
She’d found, these last few days, that despite the ship’s gentle rolling, the aching in her left hip had eased slightly. She’d been expecting it to be worse with the constant effort of steadying herself. She still needed her walking stick of course, but she wondered whether the unconscious act of constantly leaning into the ship’s movement might have been flexing her joints in a helpful, almost therapeutic way. She grasped the rail, looked out at the sedately rolling sea, and took in a deep breath of salty air. “At. Bloody. Last!” A hundred yards away was another similar U.S. Navy ship, leaving a churning wake of foam behind it. She could see civilians lining the deck and impulsively offered a wave to them.
Someone waved back.
She couldn’t make out any details. Just a stick man, or woman, from this distance. Probably a random stranger returning the gesture, but a tiny part of her hoped it might be Leon or Grace.
Crap. We should’ve planned some sort of signal.
If they’d thought ahead. If they’d been smarter.
But no. She, Leon, and Grace had arrived at Southampton and stupidly hoped that their troubles might be over. That the “authorities” were there with men in white-and-yellow suits and clipboards, and everything would be all right.
A small fleet trailed back toward the horizon behind her, another six ships of varying sizes. One of them tall and white, a luxury cruise ship that old people used to love spending their autumn years on. Freya remembered Mom pleading with Dad to take her on a cruise, and Dad complaining that he didn’t want to spend two weeks on a floating nursing home. The unasked-for memory of her parents stung.
She pushed her mind away from them and onto Leon.
Where t
he hell did you disappear to, Leon, you ass?
She presumed he and Grace were together. Of course they were—he wouldn’t have abandoned her. She knew he would’ve fought tooth and nail to get her on one of those boats.
She waved again, hoping that the same person would wave back. They didn’t.
They could be on there. They might be on one of the other ships. Maybe even on the other fleet, heading to New Zealand.
New Zealand. That really would mean goodbye.
During their journey together, from Everett’s castle down to Southampton, there’d been plenty of moments she could have said something to him. Just asked him if he felt something for her. Instead, both of them had assumed they were about to board a ship together and, once they were safe, would have plenty of time to figure out that little ritual dance. So neither of them had said anything.
They’d shared one kiss beneath his anorak in the pattering rain. One kiss…
Over the murmuring voices of the others gazing out to sea and the gusting wind, she heard footsteps approaching and the squawk, crackle, and beep of a walkie-talkie. She turned to see three men coming quickly toward her, the first Americans she’d seen not wearing biohazard suits. One of them was civilian, the other two navy—three men who looked like they didn’t have time for any cheeky back talk from her.
Crap. What’s up?
She was about to ask them when they came to a halt at the railing, right beside her, the two navy officers swiftly raising their binoculars to their eyes, the civilian raising his walkie-talkie to one ear.
“Sea Queen. Sea Queen. This is fleet leader USS Oakley. Please respond. Over.”
Chapter 7
Tom Friedmann listened to the warbling hiss coming from his handset.
He tried again. “Sea Queen. Sea Queen. This is fleet leader USS Oakley. Please respond. Over.”
Nothing. Just the hiss.
He scanned the distant cruise ship. To him, the Sea Queen looked like a goddamn floating shopping mall crowned with a pair of pointless, fake, red funnels.
