Death Tide

by Devon C. Ford

  Creeping as slowly and lightly as possible, Peter slipped out from under the covers and opened his door as softly as he could. The slight creaks and groans from the hinges made him freeze, ready to jump back into bed and pretend to be asleep if he heard even the slightest indication that he had been detected. Getting the door open enough to slip through, he made his way cautiously to the stairs, keeping his feet carefully to the edges of the floorboards, where they were the least likely to make the sounds which could get him caught. For a moment, he stopped at his sister’s bedroom door, and his bottom lip began to tremble as he saw her prized poster of Madonna. He’d laughed at her singing Into the Groove, using her hairbrush as a microphone. He made himself look away and carry on, knowing deep down that he would never sit with her on a Sunday evening and record the songs they loved from the charts on their ancient tape deck.

  Making painstakingly slow progress in the interests of silence and self-preservation, he crept down the stairs until the partly-open door to the lounge showed him half of the television screen. His father’s slumped shoulders were visible in the armchair; the balding head lolled to one side, making Peter imagine the soft snoring that came from him in that position, especially when the mostly empty bottle rested against the side of the chair. He couldn’t see his mother, but his mind filled in the blanks and put her sitting out of sight, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other as she stared at the screen with dry, vacant eyes. At least it was the news and not his mother’s favourite rubbish, Dallas. She spent hours with her glazed eyes glued to that, or worse, her videos of it over and over again.

  Satisfied that his father was asleep and his mother couldn’t see him – if she was even conscious at all – Peter settled himself down carefully to watch and listen as the television told him the things that they would not.

  “…declared a state of emergency. Once again, an infectious disease has spread from a London research laboratory and infected the population. Police and military personnel are containing the outbreak, and residents are urged to stay in their homes until instructed. Anyone suspected of being in the early stages of infection, usually denoted by bites or scratches from those already afflicted, should be isolated and avoided. Do not attempt to treat people suspected of being infected. We repeat, do not attempt to help people who are infected. Other signs indicating infection are fever, confusion and dementia, and uncharacteristic aggression.”

  Peter sat still on the stairs, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. It was normal for his parents to drink themselves into oblivion each night, but he imagined that even normal people would be doing that now. He knew London was a long way away, but he was still worried that this illness would sweep across the country and find their little patch of nowhere.

  Peter went back to bed as stealthily as he could, and lay staring at the dark ceiling until he drifted into a fitful sleep.

  Professor Grewal tried to calm himself with mathematics. Calculations and estimates passed the time, and he forced himself to work through the mental arithmetic slowly, step by step, to while away the hours. For the first time in weeks, he felt trapped underground in the laboratory that had never made him feel claustrophobic before. But before, he had been able to simply walk out.

  Well, maybe not simply walk out, he admitted, thinking of the security doors and main entrance that was monitored by three guards, day and night. Those guards would not open the airlock doors with their spinning metal wheels until identification was verified via the closed-circuit television feed, but even before all this went wrong, he could still, with relative ease, get outside.

  Not that he had in weeks, because he had been close to a breakthrough. He had been on the verge of it ever since the two American scientists had come in with their most recent research. But the way the two men with their matching glasses and similar government-issued wardrobes always glanced at one another before answering got on his nerves no end. Their research, conducted under the guise of medical testing and treatment, had been brought across the Atlantic for refining.

  Refining. That was what they called it. Professor Grewal called it weaponising.

  Morally, he was against the idea, but practically he knew that if he didn’t conduct the final process, then someone else would. It was a matter of professional pride, not arrogance, but he knew the other people in his field, and he knew that anyone else they brought in to do the work would be less effective than he was. He knew that the Russians had just as vast a research budget as the USA and the UK combined, and given that the likelihood of all-out nuclear war was very low, he knew that the two hugely powerful nations would find other ways to wage war in silence.

  One way involved people like him. Professors in advanced bio-chemistry with real-world experience comprised a very small portion of the world’s population, and when they reached the tip of that particular iceberg, they tended to know each other. Of all the others he knew, he was certain that he was the best person to complete the research through to testing in the shortest time.

  He had been right, at least about his ability to bring that research off the paper and into the bloodstreams of test subjects. What he had been wrong about, however, was the expected effects of the test.

  These test subjects were another moral issue, and a solution had been provided by their American counterparts. Prisoners, unlikely to ever earn their freedom within a reasonable time, exchanged their lives for cash so that their families could see at least some benefit from their existence. Under strict conditions to prevent the spread of the disease, the subjects were restrained on the wheeled stretchers and the disease was administered in carefully measured doses of varying amounts.

  The disease itself was naturally occurring, and it had taken the Americans years to breed it into the most severe potency. Still, as potent as it was, the speed at which it progressed was still slow enough that the symptoms could be recognised, and the infected subject effectively quarantined in time to stop a cataclysmic spread.

  That was where Grewal came in.

  His theories on crossing over disease barriers and combining them had been inspired by his research work on vaccinations. By combining the overly aggressive strain of the rabies virus with the fast-acting meningococcal disease, he had been successful in turning up the dial on the new hybrid disease all the way to eleven.

  When the six simultaneous human trials began, the small facility was on full lockdown. Those trials began just as expected, and the first ninety minutes went seemingly without incident. At around the two-hour mark, four subjects began to display symptoms in varying degrees. Grewal made a note on his clipboard, mentally disregarding the other two as having received too small a dose to be effective, and he paid close attention to the one subject who he now knew had received the highest amount. Within three hours, that subject advanced far beyond the effects visible on the others, was writhing in pain and crying out. His skin showed angry, red welts and he complained of cramps and a headache.

  By four hours, his temperature had risen to such a level that those standing by to monitor him could feel the heat radiating away from his skin. By the time that temperature was noticeable, the groaning, crying subjects had quietened and were sweating through their rapid, shallow breathing.

  One of his laboratory assistants scribbled a rapid note as their doctor called out the time of death for the first subject, followed at regular intervals for the next two, before something very unexpected happened.

  Subject one, his frothing mouth hanging open and his rapidly cooling skin no longer glowing pink, but having turned a deathly pale shade, opened his eyes slowly.

  It wasn’t the simple mechanical response of a body in recent death to relax each muscle, because the eyelids fluttered open and blinked. The eyeballs, clouded and milky as though cataracts had blinded him, turned slowly left and right as though looking for something.

  The chest began to rise and fall gently; each movement of the ribcage expanding and contracting prompted a rasping hissing noise,
like wind whistling through a creaking door. The lab assistant who had recorded the time of death for that subject froze and turned slowly towards him, checking that the correct information had been annotated against the right subject. Stepping closer, he bent down to watch the rise and fall of the man’s restrained chest, placing his own face next to the subject’s, and believing himself safe from the contagion behind his mask and goggles, his eyes grew wide just as the face turned towards him and locked its own milky orbs on the man’s. Then it opened its mouth wide and bit the man on the face.

  Six days later, after the full stupidity of the safety protocols in place became apparent and the sealed doors had been opened to investigate why the facility had stopped picking up the telephone, Grewal was still trapped in the store cupboard.

  The lock was holding and there was no sign that the dynamic of those ‘things’ outside and him inside would change, but the supply situation was the more pressing concern. He had no idea what was happening in the wider world above ground, or in fact anywhere other than the three feet of corridor he could see either side of the door he was hiding behind. But his world was a small, dark place.

  Not needing to count off on his fingers, Grewal cursed his luck that he had sought refuge in a room without running water and calculated that he had two days before he would be out of fluids and forced to try and escape that room before he was too weak to be effective. The only problem was the two lurching figures outside the door, who responded with blood-curdling screeching noises every time he made any sound. No matter how still he stayed, they would not leave.

  He was entombed, effectively, by his own monstrous creation and would soon be forced to fight them or else face a certain, agonising death by dehydration.

  FOUR

  “Well, I’m not waiting here for news,” Peter’s father snarled angrily at his mother, whose only response was to take a further gulp of drink without taking her malevolent stare away from his eyes. He had spent the morning trying to raise people on the telephone, painstakingly dialling each digit of the numbers written in a book and waiting for the dial to slowly spin back to the zero. Each call had either resulted in him slamming the handset back down in frustration at nobody answering, or having a terse conversation with the person on the other end. Each time he made a call, regardless of the outcome, it seemed to anger him more.

  “I’m going out,” he raged, throwing open a door to a cupboard in the hallway and retrieving a shotgun with a belt of cartridges, which he slung over one shoulder, before seeing Peter through the railings of the stairs and glancing back to his wife. He seemed to be weighing something up, like he was searching for the lesser of two evils, before abruptly saying to the boy, “Get your boots on and come with me.”

  “What are you taking him for?” his mother shrieked, waving her half-smoked cigarette at her son as she stalked forwards full of accusations. “Planning on leaving me behind, are you?”

  “Don’t bloody test me, woman,” Peter’s father raged back at her, puffing himself up to his full height like a gorilla. She wasn’t intimidated by his animalistic display, and her face told him exactly that.

  “Stay here,” he instructed her and turned on his heel just in time to ignore the childish face she pulled at him and hear the accompanying huff of derision. A glance at Peter conveyed the information that he should have already got his shoes on and been waiting, so the boy scrambled down the rest of the stairs to comply quickly.

  “Stay,” his father added in a growl, this time to their collie dog, who had automatically risen to follow at his heel.

  Walking at double speed away from the house and towards the farm to keep pace with his much taller father, Peter resisted the urge to ask him any questions. He had learned long ago that asking would only gain the reward of a clip around the ear or a snarled response of an aggressive platitude like, “Listen instead of talking and you might learn something,” or, “Two ears, one mouth, boy. Work it out.”

  So Peter kept silent, and kept pace, as his father strode towards his battered farm pickup with a soggy cigarette hanging from his lips. The once-white pickup was very basic, and he waited patiently until his father sat behind the driver’s door and sighed before reluctantly leaning over to lift the pin and unlock the passenger side. Peter slipped in and sat down, trying to keep himself as small and unnoticeable as possible as his father started the rattling, noisy engine.

  Pulling out of the drive to the farm, he turned right, heading up the lane in the direction of the main road, but stopping at the houses midst the tall pine trees.

  “Stay here,” he told the boy, not expecting and not receiving any answer, before climbing out and retrieving his shotgun from the flat bed of the pickup. Peter watched him as he walked slowly towards the houses, and he saw the gap that one missing vehicle had left. One of the farm workers came out of his house, and everything about his demeanour said he was apologising. He wrung his hands as he spoke, keeping himself hunched and smaller than the boy’s father, which is how people usually acted around him. Peter knew he was a bully. He was worse than Edward ever could be, because he was strong and not just picking on someone smaller than him to feel better. He bullied everyone, intimidated everyone, and if anyone didn’t bow down to him, then he forced them away.

  Peter turned his attention back to the conversation and concentrated, trying to decipher what was happening without hearing the words. He saw the worker, a small man called Keith, who did most of the tractor driving. He was pointing to the gap where Peter expected there to be a car, and saw Keith waving his arms in some wild explanation of something. Peter’s father seethed. He knew that face, even if Keith didn’t, and he knew his father had stopped listening and was on the verge of violence. Keith’s eyes kept flickering towards the gun held low in one hand, as though the world was just crazy enough right then that his boss would use it on him. Without raising the weapon, and without another word, his father turned and stomped back towards the pickup.

  Cramming his big frame behind the wheel after thrusting the gun over to the opposite footwell, he started the rattling engine again and pealed out in a drone of high revs. He gripped the wheel tight, his knuckles glowing white with the pressure, and seemed to hold his breath. Peter kept himself still and quiet, being invisible like he knew how when this close to his father, until he eased off the throttle and let out his breath in a long hiss of escaping air.

  “Tony’s gone,” he said, surprising his son, “pissed off last night apparently. His sister rang him from Aldershot. You know where that is?”

  Peter opened his mouth to speak, hesitating because he didn’t usually ask him questions that he expected an answer to. He took his eyes away from the empty lane to look at his son, making him blurt out an answer.

  “No, where is it?”

  “It’s that way,” he said, pointing a finger past the young boy’s face and making him stiffen in anticipation, “west, towards London.”

  London, Peter thought, where the news said the trouble was.

  “His sister is married to a soldier, and she rang him, telling him to get out. She would know if the army has been sent in. He tried to get Keith and the others to leave too, but they wouldn’t.”

  Something in Peter’s mind lit up then, as though a circuit had been connected, and he spoke the words aloud before good sense could stop him.

  “Yesterday, when we were told that school was closed, none of the children from the base were there and we heard the biggest convoy ever move past…” he said in a rush, trailing off as he waited for the response to come.

  His father just eased off the throttle, slowing the pickup and swinging into the farm yard to creak to a halt. He didn’t move, so neither did Peter.

  “You asked last night what was happening,” he said finally. “Well, there’s…” he stopped, rubbing hands hard across his face, “there’s some sort of shit spreading across the country. People are going mad and biting each other, then they catch whatever it is and do the same. The
bloody army is on the streets. That shouldn’t happen!” he said savagely.

  Peter kept his mouth shut, marvelling that this was the longest he had spoken to his father without him yelling in as long as he could remember. He looked up at him, risking eye contact in the strangeness of the moment. The father looked back down at his son, something resembling kindness or even fear in his eyes.

  At least it wasn’t the loathing Peter normally saw, which made what he said next even more of a shock.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you or your sister, which is why we need to go and get her.”

  The argument between his parents raged longer than usual, and he sat at the top of the stairs even after the inevitable smash of glass. He had changed into his pyjamas as the sun sank, and by the time his hunger had become painful, the raised voices from downstairs had grown so loud and slurred that he daren’t venture down there.

  From what Peter could gather, fairly easily because they were shouting at each other without a care of where he was and what he could hear, his mother was against the idea of getting his sister back. His father was adamant, and the smashing glass was her answer to his insistence.

  Going to bed for the second night in a row with an empty stomach, Peter miraculously found sleep.