by Alex Scarrow
None of the rescued people glanced up. Her heart sank. She’d been grasping at straws, holding on to a very slender hope.
To her left, farther along the deck, a winch cable was being lowered down from a crane to the first rescue boat. It descended until the boat’s steersman managed to grab hold of it and clip the boat’s four lifting lines on.
She felt a rough hand on her shoulder. “Get back, please, ma’am!” barked a marine. He pushed her firmly aside and waved at the other Brits beside her to make way as well. “C’mon, folks, clear this area!”
Freya shuffled back with the others until the marine had them far enough away that he was satisfied, then held them there. She peered over his shoulder to see what was going on. She could see half a dozen crew in biohazard suits emerging from a deck door. As the motor launch finally came to a rest just above deck height, swinging gently from the arm of the crane like a baby in a cradle, she watched each of the boat’s crewmen and the rescued passengers as they were hosed down with seawater.
After a couple of minutes, they were helped aboard, one after the other, the passengers assisted across the deck, over the door’s lip and presumably taken down for an immediate blood test.
There was the sound of a distant thud, followed very quickly by another. Everyone froze and turned to see where the sounds had come from.
Several tall pillars of sea-spray blossomed alongside the distant cruise ship. They rose gracefully, fell back into the sea, then turned into black columns of smoke.
The understanding hit everyone at the same time, and Freya let slip a wretched gasp.
Tom monitored the Sea Queen’s sinking through a pair of binoculars. All six torpedoes launched by the USS Oakley had hit their target, and already the top-heavy cruise ship was listing gently to starboard.
The bridge crackled with the sound of radio traffic coming from the stricken vessel. It sounded like a young man was in possession of the radio.
“Why? Why? WHY?”
He could hear screaming and wailing in the background. “We… You…you could’ve gotten us off, you bastards! You bastards! You could’ve come. You—”
Tom heard the signal crackle and rustle, then a different voice. Older. An English accent this time.
“First Officer Reynolds here. Who’s receiving this? Over.”
Captain Donner looked at Tom, the mic in his hand. His hard eyes on him: You called the order, Mr. Friedmann, so you can take this call.
Tom nodded and took the mic from him. He vaguely recalled Reynolds. The first officer had shown him to the Sea Queen’s conference room the last time they’d had a fleet meeting before splitting up for Calais and Southampton; he recalled an older officer with a well-trimmed and graying beard.
“Tom Friedmann speaking. I’m the president’s representative in charge of—”
“I know who you are,” he replied quickly. The line hissed, the channel open. Tom was dimly aware the whole fleet would be hearing this exchange.
“I’m really sorry, Reynolds.” Tom was about to say over, and lift his finger, but he wanted, needed, to say more than that. “We had to do this. We really had no choice. Over.”
Tom mentally cursed himself for not being able to recall the man’s first name.
The open line whistled and hissed for a few seconds.
“I…I understand,” Reynolds replied slowly. It sounded like there was more he wanted to say too. “A bloody mess, right?”
“A bloody mess,” Tom agreed.
“I…uh, lost my wife and sons during the outbreak, Friedmann. So I suppose I’m ready to go now.”
“I lost my kids too.”
“I…” Reynolds’s voice was faltering. Tom heard something clattering to the floor in the background. The ship’s listing was more pronounced now.
“Reynolds? What were your boys’ names? I’ll say a prayer for them.”
“Stewart. Iain. Good boys, both of them.” The line went dead for a moment. Then: “What about you?”
“Mine?” Tom wasn’t inclined to air his personal grief in public like this. But for a man prepared to go down with dignity, displaying that British stiff upper lip that Tom had always assumed was nothing more than a movie cliché, he was happy to indulge him.
“They were called Leon. And Grace.”
“Then you pray for your kids as well.”
“I do. Every day.”
The line hummed and crackled for a while. “I’m going to go now. Things to attend to here.”
“Understood.” He wondered how the hell to sign off from this conversation. Nothing he could think of to tack on the end felt worthwhile or seemed right. He pressed the talk button.
“You go and join your boys, Reynolds.” There was no answer this time.
Five minutes later, the Sea Queen rolled over; a few minutes after that, all that was left to mark she’d ever been there was a loose archipelago of floating debris.
Chapter 11
Leon stopped pushing the rattling cage, and for a couple of minutes, he and Cora allowed themselves to collapse on the ground inside and catch their breath. There were still about a dozen or so crabs clinging on to the mesh, scrabbling and fidgeting to find a way in. He flicked at the spindly leg of one that was poking through. The leg snapped easily and leaked out a thread of goo that dangled and swung like a pendulum of snot.
“Do you think these are the stubborn ones?” he asked between gulps of air. “Or the stupid ones?”
Cora wheezed out a laugh.
The rest of the swarm had fallen away from their cage as it moved forward. A few of them had made a second attempt at nosing their way in at the bottom before giving up and dropping off.
With the scuttlers gone, they’d been able to see where they were going.
“Where are the others?” gasped Cora. “Where did the crabs go?”
“I dunno,” huffed Leon. He looked around frantically. No sign of them. He felt a sickening tug at his gut. “Maybe something else attracted them?”
Cora met his gaze. “Oh, God help them.”
He looked around. They’d come to an exhausted rest in the middle of an acre of open concrete. The labyrinth of warehouses and industrial units was behind them. Ahead, he could see the flat, blue-gray water of the Solent and the waterfront that days ago had been lined with naval ships and the remains of the refugee camp.
The tall wire mesh reinforced by iron stanchions that had ringed the vast containment pen had been stampeded flat in several places, though most of it remained intact. The less-well-reinforced perimeter barrier around the camp was in tatters: loose coils of barb wire had been shoved aside or flattened by the weight of flesh-stripped corpses.
The camp itself looked as if a tsunami had hit it. The ground was strewn with cloth-tangled bundles of bone, crates of miscellaneous supplies dropped and spilled. The row of medics’ tents on the U.S. side of the camp had burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than soot-covered support poles and hard, blackened puddles of melted vinyl. On the far side of the camp, the Pacific Nations side, the tents were still standing in two neat rows. The ground across the camp seemed to be free of the crisscrossing patterns of veins and tributaries. The virus appeared to have picked the bodies here clean and moved on to pastures new.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Leon scanned the site for any signs of movement, wondering how the hell such a horrific scene had come to feel so normal so quickly. Except for a twisting spiral of smoke coming from a small stack of smoldering tires and the occasional flap of a loose corner of tarp caught by the offshore breeze, it was inert and eerily silent.
“I can’t see the others anywhere,” whispered Cora.
Leo’s slow pan of the area halted on a couple of the cages upended beside the camp’s perimeter. For a moment, his heart skipped as he imagined them toppling over and the
virals flooding in to get them. But there were no bodies.
“Hold on! There!” puffed Cora. He followed her finger and saw four figures huddled together, right at the edge of the dock. She cupped her hands and was about to call to them, but Leon grabbed her arm.
“Don’t!” he cautioned. “Don’t shout!”
Cora nodded quickly.
Cautiously Leon began to lift up the cage.
“What are you doing!” she hissed.
Leon nodded at the debris-strewn ground ahead. “We’re not going to get any farther in this.”
“I’m scared!”
“Me too, but…we can’t just sit here. We’ve got to find a truck or something. While we can!”
“Shit, Leon…I’m so…”
“I know. I know, but we’ve got to keep moving.”
Cautiously, Leon resumed lifting up the back of their cage, and they both climbed out from beneath it. He offered Cora his hand as she struggled to get to her feet.
“My God,” she gasped, squeezing the backs of her legs. “My legs feel like rubber.”
Leon could feel the same dull ache. Doubled over and wheeling that heavy cage all the way down to the waterfront, they’d been effectively doing one long squat thrust for the last hour.
Now that the surge of adrenaline that had kept him going was beginning to ebb away, he suddenly realized how completely exhausted he was. His arms and legs were wobbling with fatigue and lack of food; he felt light-headed and nauseous—ready to collapse.
He leaned against the cage as he tried to figure out who he was seeing in the distance. He recognized Finley’s small frame. Two of the other three had to be Kim and Howard. The other one, large and heavy, was unmistakably Adewale.
“Where’s Jake?” asked Cora.
“And the other two?” added Leon. He couldn’t see another abandoned cage anywhere. He turned to look back where they’d come from, hoping to see Dawn and Artur bringing up the rear, but there was no sign of them.
“But…they were ahead of us!” hissed Cora. At the beginning, they were.
Shit.
“There’s someone!” said Cora.
He turned back and looked in the direction she was pointing and saw a lone figure pacing back and forth between several trucks, a gun slung over one shoulder. It looked like Jake. He pulled himself up into the driver’s side of one of the trucks, then a moment later, Leon heard the growl and snarl of an engine starting up. The vehicle began to turn sluggishly and made its way across the abandoned camp toward the others.
“Come on,” said Leon. He offered Cora his arm, and they slowly picked their way across the ruins and debris of the camp, Leon scanning the clumps of clothing, desperately hoping not to catch a glimpse of Freya’s orange anorak.
Kim waved them over. A moment later, they joined the group standing beside the idling truck. The engine growled, then died.
“I heard a cage flip over back there,” said Adewale. “And I heard screams. I thought it was you two. It was behind us. It must have been the others.”
“Shit,” muttered Kim.
“We nearly went over” was all Leon managed to say. He thought he should have felt something. Two people he’d been beginning to know may well have just died. He felt nothing—just relief that it hadn’t been him and Cora.
“Poor Dawn and Artur,” whispered Kim.
“We need to get going,” said Leon. “Before those things sniff us out again.”
Jake emerged from the driver’s side and hopped down. “This truck’s loaded with stuff—food, water, guns, and a couple of saltwater sprayers.”
“Good job, Jake. Let’s move on and get the crap out of here.”
“What about Dawn and Artur?” Kim was scanning the warehouses. “What if they’re trapped in one of those? We can’t just…”
Leon felt everyone eyes resting on him.
Jake said what no one else wanted to say. “We can. We have to. Right, Leon?”
Leon shook his head. It felt like a betrayal abandoning them, not even hanging on awhile longer to see if they were going to emerge. His heart said wait.
But something else came out. “We’d better go. While we can.”
“No!” cut in Cora. “She’s right! We can’t just leave them!”
“They’re dead!” said Adewale. “I heard the screams. They tipped over. They’re dead!”
Leon looked at Jake, hoping he was ready to assume the role of leader. Instead, Jake shook his head back at him subtly.
Your call, mate.
“We’re going,” Leon said softly. Cleared his throat, then again: “We’re going. Now.”
Chapter 12
Grace stared at the small, round window; its diameter was just twenty inches with glass so thick it was like looking down the neck of a bottle. On the other side, she could see his familiar face.
Jing—that was the only name he’d given her.
“How are you this morning, Grace?” His voice came over the intercom speaker.
“I’m OK,” she replied.
Over the last few days, she’d glimpsed a number of faces through this small spyhole window, heard a number of different voices, but Jing was the one presence that was always there. She’d spoken briefly with the carrier’s Chinese commander, an Australian Navy officer, and a physician from New Zealand, and with all of them, the conversation had ended up following roughly the same pattern:
“You’re infected by the virus?”
“No, I’m not infected by the virus. I am the virus. I represent the virus.”
“Can you explain what you mean by that, Grace?”
“I am a human construct.”
“A copy of a human?”
“If you like.”
“So if Grace is not your proper name, how do you want us to address you?”
“Grace is my name. You can call me Grace. I’d prefer it.”
“You’re a virus…called Grace?”
“No. I am a collective, a community made up of what we call ‘partials.’ Many of these partials were parts of other humans, but the most-present human in this construct is me. So you probably should call me Grace.”
The first time she’d had this conversation she’d been asked to clarify the difference between being a “collective” and someone who was simply infected. She’d responded by allowing the softest tissue on her face—the white of her left eye—to extrude a slender and pale tendril that swayed like a sea anemone until it finally landed on the small, round window and began to splay filaments of growth across the glass.
“Please stop that,” the physician had said. No one had asked her to clarify the distinction again.
“Why are you here, Grace?”
“Why did I risk being burned by your men?”
“Yes.”
“Because I want to talk with you.”
“About what?”
“They want to know more about you. I thought I could help.”
“They… When you say ‘they,’ who are you referring to?”
“The virus, of course.”
“You’re actually saying the virus communicates with you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“By talking, I suppose. Just like we are now.”
“Would it be possible for us to talk to it?”
“You kind of already…are.”
“Are you ready for your breakfast, Grace?”
She nodded. “Yes. Please.”
Faintly, through the thick, lead-lined door, she heard a hatch on the far side slam shut, then heard something humming within the door itself, then the light on her side of the door turned green. She slid the hatch open and reached for the small tray in the cubbyhole beyond.
They gave her exactly what she’d asked for: a glucose solution. I
t was a bowl of sugar dissolved in warm water, a cloudy, viscous, and sickeningly sweet soup.
Jing smiled at her through the lenslike window. “It would be easier for us if we just gave you a can of Coca-Cola.”
She took the bowl of sugar solution and set it down on the floor, careful not to spill a single drop. She smiled at Jing through the window.
“I’ll be back in a little while.”
Maintaining her complete human form was now an unnecessary expenditure of effort and energy. She’d managed it for a number of weeks back in England, but now, exhausted by the effort, she could reduce to a more energy-efficient form.
She glanced at the corner of the small isolation chamber and looked at the camera mounted there on a bracket. She knew it was seeing everything and recording everything.
There were no secrets now. All the same, a degree of discretion would be better at this stage. Part of what she was hoping to achieve was to demonstrate that she wasn’t a monster. She was still a girl called Grace; it was just that her physical form was malleable.
She placed the bowl on the floor in the corner farthest from the camera and lay down beside it, curling herself around it in a fetal position.
They could probably guess at what she was doing, but it wasn’t something they necessarily needed to see with their own eyes.
Her intention was not to frighten them.
She lifted her pink T-shirt and shuffled until the bowl’s lip was touching her bare belly, then lay still for a moment, closing her eyes and communicating with her community of colleagues that breakfast was ready.
The pale skin around her navel instantly began to soften to a milky gel, from which emerged half a dozen nodules of flesh. They each extended cautiously toward the bowl, little finger-thick tentacles, arcing and curling blindly, each one like the tender trunk of a tiny, flesh-colored elephant, “sniffing” the air. They finally sensed the meal and dipped down toward the sugar solution, submerging into the thick liquid.
Grace could feel the replenishment of energy in her inner world almost immediately—a sugar rush a thousand times faster and more efficient than that experienced by any child chewing candy. The millions of little workers in Grace’s feed tubes were already wholly replenished by the sugar and, having had their fill, were passing the goodness on up the tubes and into her torso where delivery cells were already gathering, feeding, and inflating like gluttonous mosquitos ready to travel the arterial network and distribute the sugar banquet to those cells that couldn’t get away from their work.
