by Alex Scarrow
He waved her silent, then clenched his eyes and mouth shut. His hands went to his face, and he rubbed at his closed eyes with the balls of his hands, fighting the overwhelming sensation of queasy shock for a moment.
Grace didn’t have a birthmark. This girl was telling him the truth.
“You OK, Mr. Friedmann?”
He felt dampness on his hands and was vaguely aware he was leaking tears. “Just gimme a sec, will you?”
“Sure.”
He swiped a forearm across his eyes, then let out a long, deep sigh before he finally opened his eyes again.
“You know Leon and Grace?”
Freya nodded. “We’ve been surviving. Together. For some time.”
“Tell me they’re OK,” he said softly. “Please tell me that.”
“They’re OK. They were OK. They were both with me at Southampton.”
“Southampton?”
Freya nodded.
“In the compound?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” He clamped his eyes shut again. “I was that close to them?”
“Were you the one walking up and down with the clipboard?” There’d been one figure in particular that she and Leon had noticed wearing a biohazard suit and pacing the fence perimeter with a clipboard tucked under one arm.
“Yes, that was probably me.” He sighed. “Where are they? Tell me what happened to my kids. The breakout? Where did they end up?”
Freya shook her head. “We were together when it happened. Holding hands when the viral people erupted. People just panicked. There was a big surge toward the exit, and we got pulled apart. I got knocked down, and by the time I managed to get up, they were both gone.”
Tom wanted to scream. He needed five minutes alone in some soundproof, padded cell to scream and smack the walls with his fists.
I was that close! His eyes might even have rested on their faces for a fraction of a second, but he’d been so distracted with running this damned fool’s errand that he’d missed the very thing that had triggered the whole operation in the first place.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I got out of the pen. I think I was one of the last to get out. Everyone was running in different directions. I ended up going through those testing tents.” Freya didn’t want to mention that she’d picked up someone else’s red “passport.” “Some of us got rounded up by your soldiers and herded aboard. I was expecting to find Leon and Grace on the ship already.”
Tom nodded slowly. The whole thing had turned into a disaster. They’d had something like six or seven thousand people at the waterfront crammed into a space no bigger than a couple of football fields, and the only thing holding them in place was some flimsy wire mesh with far too few armed men watching it.
He looked up from his hands. “They were OK though? When you last saw them?”
“You’re asking if I thought they were infected?” The girl shook her head. “No. They weren’t infected.”
“You know that?”
“I know that. I know Leon pretty well!”
“And Grace?”
She hesitated a moment. Just a nanosecond. Just enough to tell him there was something she was holding back. “She was fine too. The three of us and another guy, we came down to Southampton together because of the radio message.”
“Tell me about Grace.”
“What? She and Leon were—”
“Stop fooling with me. What’s up with her?”
The girl would have been crap playing a hand of poker. It was written all over her face.
“You’re holding back on me. What’s up with my daughter? Come on, please…Freya.” She shook her head. He could see tears welling, fighting to spill out.
“She’s had…a hard time over the last few years.”
“Everyone has. What specifically?” Jesus. Go easy on the girl. You’re gonna frighten her! “Please, Freya. I’ve been trying to find them since it happened. I…” Now his voice was damned well catching. He coughed to clear his throat. “I knew they had to be alive. They got out of London before things collapsed. They were heading to their grandparents in the countryside. They had to have survived.”
“Well, they did.”
“What about their mother?”
Freya shook her head. The movement dislodged the first of her tears. “Leon told me she died quite early on.”
“How?”
“The snarks got her.”
“The crablike things?”
“That’s what they said. She died saving Leon and Grace from them. We stumbled upon them not long after they lost her. We were foraging. I was driving. They were on the road, and they looked in a pretty bad way. That’s how we met.”
He hadn’t spared Jennifer much thought during this hell, but she was the mother of the only two reasons he had left to live. That her well-being impacted on their well-being, hearing that she died…saving his kids…he realized that was so much more than he’d done for them.
“You OK, Mr. Friedmann?”
“Yeah, fine.” He swiped at his face again. He dipped his head. “I should have been with them. I should have come over to the UK.”
“It all happened so fast, Mr. Friedmann. No one had time to go anywhere.”
“We knew. We had a few hours head start on everyone else,” he muttered. He wiped his eyes dry again and sat up straight. “We knew there was no controlling this thing before that became obvious to everyone. I could’ve gotten across in time. There were still flights taking off.”
But you didn’t. You stayed put, you selfish asshole.
Tom coughed again. He managed a flickering smile for the girl. She seemed to be telling him the truth. He wanted to know more about how his kids had been getting by.
“So you took them in?”
“Yes.”
“And you kept them safe? Looked after them?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I owe you everything, Freya.”
Her cheeks blotched pink. “You don’t need to thank me. We became really close.”
He studied her. She appeared to be roughly the same age as Leon; were she and him together? She didn’t look like the kind of girl he thought his son would go for. The piercings. Too punky. Too…
What the hell do you know about your son’s preferences, huh? He was just a kid when you last saw him. More interested in computer games than girls.
He nodded. “I’m glad they had you looking after them.”
“Leon looked after us, really,” she replied. “I think he surprised himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m guessing he was never the alpha-male type?”
“A quiet boy mostly.” Tom shook his head and laughed. “His younger sister’s the bossy one.”
Freya nodded. “Oh, that’s for sure. I know you didn’t see him for a while before the outbreak. I’m guessing he’ll be a different person to you, Mr. Friedmann. He’s strong; he’s smart. He’s resilient.”
“If I meet him again.”
She looked at the papers on his desk. “He could be somewhere on one of our ships, right?”
“I’ve been through the manifest. I didn’t see their names. I radioed the other fleet—no sign yet. That’s what I’ve got to hope for now, haven’t I?” He took in a deep breath. “Now I know they’re still alive.” He sighed. “There’s also a chance they didn’t get on any of the ships in either fleet.”
“Leon’s resourceful.”
“I need to manage my expectations, Freya. You just told me they’ve been alive since the outbreak.” He pressed his lips together for a moment. “When I was beginning to accept they might be dead.”
“Well, they’re not!”
“And you know that for certain?”
She was hesitant to reply, th
en finally: “I guess I can’t be certain. But Leon’s—”
“But nothing, then.” He cleared his throat and rubbed at his face again. “Much as I’d give anything to, I can’t order the fleet back on just your…hope.”
“You’ve got to do something!”
“We’re six days in. Over halfway back. This fleet needs to return to Cuba. We don’t have the supplies or fuel to turn around. We need to drop everyone off, and then… Shit!”
“But if they’re not on the other ships, they’re stuck back in England!”
“I know.”
“We have to do something!”
“If they didn’t get on…” He sat back in the chair and straightened his aching back. “If they’re not with the fleet?” He shook his head. “Then…”
“We just give up on them?”
“Then I’ll do something. I’ll figure something out.”
Chapter 15
Lieutenant Choi Jing pointed at the CCTV monitor. The girl was huddled on the bed, lying on her side, knees drawn up. “She is currently resting, sir.”
“I can see that, Lieutenant,” replied Captain Xien. He stepped toward the small round window and peered through the thick glass, so he could see her directly.
“She says maintaining this form, the human form, is tiring. It requires more energy. She has given me a list of ingredients we should add to the glucose solution to help her stay…in human shape, sir.” Jing pointed to some notes he’d made during their last conversation.
Captain Xien watched her for a while, reminding him of a trip to Beijing Zoo when he was seven. His grandparents had taken him to the reptile house to see snakes—lots of them, doing absolutely nothing. He’d wished he’d been allowed to poke them with a stick to see if they were at least alive and not just plastic replicas.
“I hear that the girl has a developed a level of trust with you, Lieutenant Choi.”
“I speak good English, and I am the only one she sees through that window all the time, sir.”
Xien nodded. “She must be a very frightened child.”
“Sir…”
Xien turned to look at the young officer. He seemed eager to say something more than a yes/no answer, but was at the same time intimidated by Xien’s rank.
“You can speak freely to me, Lieutenant.”
“I believe it is a mistake to think of her as just a child.”
He peered at the girl’s bare back. “She is a child though, yes?”
“She was, sir. But, in the way she has described herself, it is clear that she is more than what she was.”
“Please explain what you mean by that, Lieutenant Choi.”
“She says she is not just one person. She is many.” Jing gazed at the flickering TV monitor. “She says her current form is that of a girl called Grace. But she contains the minds, the thoughts, of many, many others.”
“Others? Other people?”
“Yes, sir. Others that have been infected. And also…”
“What?”
“The virus itself.”
Xien looked at him. “I don’t understand, Lieutenant.”
“She refers to the virus as something separate. Like a teacher, an adviser. She is the most fully ‘present’ person in this collective, but there are parts of other humans. They all listen, with, I sense, a great respect, to the ‘teacher’—the virus itself.”
The young man made it sound a little like a yoga class in there. “They listen? You are telling me the virus speaks?”
“Yes, sir. It can speak. It can think. It can reason. It is intelligent, sir.”
Xien turned to look through the glass at the huddled form on the bed. A little girl draped in a surgical gown in a bare, clinically lit cell. Any moment now, he expected her to lurch to her feet and shuffle her way toward him, croaking and groaning like a horror movie.
Intelligent? He felt something prickling the skin down his back and realized it was fear. A plague that had wiped out the animal life on the planet in just a few months was a terrifying enough thought. But a plague that was able to think? Maybe even strategize?
“If it can speak, what does it say?” Xien leaned closer to the small window. “What does it want?”
“She says it wishes to communicate directly with our…” The young officer peered down at the notes he’d made. He leafed through several pages of his pad and found the characters he’d scrawled earlier. “…with our highest ‘hierarchy cluster.’”
“Hierarchy cluster? You mean it wants to communicate with our government?”
Jing nodded, smiled. “It is saying, ‘Take me to your leader.’”
Xien snorted. “Will the virus accept me as leader and talk to me?”
“The girl, Grace, has explained to the virus that you are in command of this fleet but that there is a committee above you, sir. A civilian authority.”
Explained to the virus. Xien narrowed his eyes as he continued to stare at the back of her head through the thick plate glass.
The virus sounded like a visitor from afar coming to grips with the basics of a complicated indigenous culture. One of the many theories that had been going back and forth in New Zealand before he’d set off on this rescue mission was that the outbreak hadn’t been something “homegrown,” or genetically engineered, but that it was an extraterrestrial life-form, some dormant microbe that had piggybacked its way across the galaxy on a piece of rock. If that really was what had caused the outbreak, then that speck of life clinging to the side of a ragged chunk of ancient geology represented a first-encounter scenario, the response to the question to which mankind had been seeking an answer forever: Are we alone? Well, now, it seemed, they had their answer. He had already broadcast to Cuba that they had a safely contained “specimen” in their fleet but had yet to receive any kind of response back from the Cubans or their American guests.
Maybe adding that the virus was, in fact, an invading alien entity might stir them into replying.
“Has she said why the virus wishes to talk with us?”
“No, sir.”
Xien wondered whether it understood the concepts of truce or surrender or even mercy—whether it was looking to negotiate a pact or, like some kind of psychopathic killer, it wanted its victim to hear some form of self-justification before finally slitting its throat.
“Is there a way we can communicate directly with this virus? And not via the girl?”
Lieutenant Choi shook his head. “She has not so far told me a way.”
“Ask her when she wakes up.” He took one last look at the huddled form on the cot. “It is best we have as direct a line of communication with our ‘alien invader’ as possible.”
Chapter 16
Jake brought the truck to a halt, and both he and Leon stared through the windshield at what lay ahead.
To the left of the road was a sloping bank of coarse grass that became weed-crested dunes of silt before descending into the cold, gray sea. He could see half a dozen small fishing boats, some covered in weathered tarps, bobbing on the choppy water nearby.
Just ahead, the road became a short bridge. To the right of them, he could see a long beach of gravel and mud on which dozens of old, paint-flaking dinghies lay upturned, like a row of beached sea lions sunbathing. The water was calmer on that side of the bridge, protected by a long and straight spit of sand in the distance that swung off to their right as far as Leon could see. A sheltered bay.
Jake had a road map on his lap, his finger jammed down on where they were right now. The small bridge in front of them appeared to be the only connection to a place called the Isle of Portland. From what he could see on the map, it was a small slither of beach that ran parallel to mainland UK and terminated on the right with a blob. They were there—this little bridge the only link.
“Some island,” said Jake.
Leon nodded. Not exactly a remote island, but with a strip of seawater thirty yards across isolating it, it was as good as one. Everett’s castle had been protected by a moat only ten or so yards wide in some places.
This was better.
There was a line running across the small bridge. Jake let the truck roll slowly forward until finally they could see what it was—a ragged gap. The bridge appeared to have been deliberately destroyed, either smashed or blown up; either way, they were looking at a gap about twenty feet wide, framed by layers of asphalt, brick, flint, and blocks of limestone.
On the far side of the gap was a portable toilet, tucked up against the right-hand-side guardrail. There was an awning outside it, a white, plastic patio table, and a deck chair whose yellow canvas seat fluttered in the fresh breeze.
Leon nodded. “So how do we get across?”
Just then, they saw an old man emerge from the cabin doorway. He shuffled out into the daylight and waved at them.
Leon slapped the partition at the back of the cabin to alert the others, then he opened the door and glanced back down the road the way they’d come to look for any sign of virals. The nearby fishing village was still and silent.
“I think we’re clear.” He stepped down onto the road. Jake got out too, grabbed a gun, and then together, they cautiously advanced toward the crumbling edge of the bridge.
The old man waited patiently for them on the other side of the gap. He wouldn’t have looked out of place sitting in one of those upturned and beached boats to their right, repairing an old net. Except he was carrying a shotgun.
“All right, mate?” called out Jake.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he replied.
“We saw your sign.” Leon gestured behind him. “Back on the main road.”
“Aye.”
Leon heard footsteps as the others joined them, spreading out on either side. “Kim, Howard, grab a salt-sprayer and go keep an eye out behind us for snarks.” They turned and went back to the truck.
“This is the island?” said Finley, sounding less than impressed. “It’s not exactly Alcatraz.”
