By 8am, there was a line halfway down the block but we hadn’t done more than a couple of hundred people. The nurses who lived in the de-reg zone came in with confused looks on their faces, and we told them what was going on and set up more tables for them. Doctors should have been arriving from the regulated zone by then but with the gates shut there would be no way for them to get through.
There were six of us injecting people but the line outside was still growing. We were running out of time. If they’d started giving out shots containing Rebola at the other clinics, it would only be a matter of hours before people started getting sick.
We worked all that day and into the night, taking shifts and sleeping in short spurts on the beds in the consulting rooms. By the next morning, the line at the door had only gotten longer, and we were down to our last fifteen hundred doses.
I was injecting a young family, three children and their parents, when I heard a screaming at the door.
“Get away. Get the fuck away from us.”
A man had come in, blood running from his nose and mouth. He was having trouble breathing and with each breath more blood came up. People around the man were moving away from him, but instead of getting out of there, like they should have, they just stood there, watching.
The man started coughing, with his hand over his mouth. Blood ran between his fingers and down his arm.
“Help me,” was all he could say before he crouched down on the floor, desperately trying to get enough air into his lungs. He was around thirty-five, with worn but clean clothes, and I imagined him as someone’s husband or father. Annie rushed over to him and lay him on his side to clear his airways but I knew there was nothing we could do for him.
“This way, quick,” I said to the family who I’d been working with. I’d done two of the children but hadn’t yet done the third child, the oldest, or the parents.
There was a back door to the clinic and I showed them out it.
“Here, take these,” I said to the mother, pressing a syringe and three doses into her hands. “Do yourselves. Immediately.” Both her and her husband, who had their youngest in one arm and their daughter by her hand, looked up at me like animals stunned by a car headlight.
“What the hell just happened in there?” the father said.
“You’ll be fine. Just go,” I said.
I went back inside and the infected man was now lying face down on the floor in his own blood, smears of bloody handprints around him. Annie was trying to herd people out, but those who had been near the door had rushed inside and there was a struggle over the remaining vaccines. Three people were trying to inject themselves, while others had taken doses and were heading for the back door. One woman had the remainder of my box.
“You can’t take all of those,” I said. “There are people who have been waiting here all night.”
“I have a family.” the woman looked at me out of dark eyes from between matted hair, and clutched them to her breast.
Just then there was a commotion at the door. Word had obviously spread back through the line about what had happened to the man inside, who Boon was now dragging towards the back door by his arms. Shouting started as a whole crowd of people tried to push into the clinic, unaware it was probably the worst thing they could do. They would have been better off waiting outside for us to inject them there.
Then I heard screaming.
“Everybody get outside,” I called, but nobody was listening to me. I let the woman go and grabbed the box of vaccines from Annie’s table. People were still stuffing them into their pockets along with syringes and needles. With a stampede at the door, the ones inside couldn’t get out, and now Boon was trying to direct everybody towards the back. I wondered where he’d left the body, and wanted to tell him that people shouldn’t go anywhere near it or the trail of blood he’d left behind. We needed to clean up. But then a man and a woman were trying to grab the remaining vaccines from me. I pulled two out and handed them to them.
“Where are the needles?” the man said.
“Over there,” I said, pointing to a table.
They rushed off but then another man came at me and I felt a hand being stuffed in my face and the box being ripped away.
Outside it was complete mayhem. People were fighting one another, tearing at each other’s clothes and pushing their way past one another to be first in the door of the clinic. People were bleeding and I wasn’t sure if it was from fighting or if they were already sick. A couple of young men had pieces of wood and were beating their way through the crowds with them.
Just then a shot went off. I looked around and saw Boon standing there with his pistol in the air. For a moment everyone froze.
“Okay,” he said. “Everybody just stop. You need to get out of here. This place is now contam—”
But that was all he could say. Another shot had rung out, from a man by the door who was pointing a gun at him.
Suddenly Annie was by my side together with the three nurses.
“This way,” she said. “Quick.”
Annie ducked down and pulled me along a corridor and we heard more shots going off and people started screaming and glass started breaking and then Annie opened up a door with a key and pushed us all inside and slammed the door shut behind us. Inside the room, which was lit with a single fluorescent globe, were racks of medicines.
“The drug room,” Annie said. “The door’s solid steel. We’ll be safe in here.”
I only nodded. I was in complete shock. Apart from the fact that my heart was racing I felt strangely detached from everything that had just happened, almost as if I hadn’t actually been there.
We heard people bashing on the door and screaming out for us to let them in.
“Do you think the same thing is happening at Gilda’s?” Annie said.
“Probably.” I slumped down on the floor against the wall.
“We had enough, too,” one of the nurses said. “If only they’d waited, we probably could have gotten to everyone. At least the ones who were waiting.”
For another two hours the screams and yelling continued and then, as quickly as it had started, it quietened. There was no way that everyone had died so quickly, so I could only presume that there were no more vaccines left and that people had abandoned the place.
“What should we do?” one of the nurses said to Annie.
“I think we’d better stay here for a while.”
The next morning, we tried the door. Something was blocking it and it took both one of the nurses and I pushing hard against it to remove whatever it was and create enough space for us all to get through. There were two bodies behind it, dried blood around their mouths. Down the corridor were another three, and in the main room of the clinic there were many more. Some of them looked like they’d died from the virus, but most of them looked like they’d either been shot or beaten to death. I saw fractured skulls and broken fingers. Crude weapons were still in hands but anything valuable, including shoes and even a pair of pants, had been taken. What sickened me most was a young girl, around four, with her eyes still open and blood dripping slowly from her mouth. I felt nauseous but looked around for Boon, but he wasn’t there.
Outside, at least another thirty people lay dead, scattered along the dirt road. All the windows of our vehicle had been smashed in, but when I activated it with a voice command it still started. We had to drag four bodies away from the road to get out and it was then that I vomited. I hadn’t eaten in nearly a day so there wasn’t much to come up, but I dry retched and spat against the side of the car until the dizziness and nausea left me and I could see again.
“Where are you three going?” Annie asked the nurses.
One of them looked at her as if the question meant nothing.
“Home, I suppose,” another one said.
We dropped the three nurses off at their houses and then drove as close as we could to Gilda’s house. Bodies were all over the place and I had to put the car in manual and swer
ve from one side of the road to the other to avoid them, bumping over arms or legs. Crows, rats, dogs and cats were already feeding on them and ran or flew off as our car approached.
We parked and walked as quickly as we could towards Gilda and Sam’s, afraid of what we might find there. As we got closer, the number of bodies on the street increased. We turned a corner into their street and found people carrying bodies away. Those doing the carrying didn’t look much more alive than those being carried. We went inside the house and found Gilda and about five other people out the back sitting around on the rotting lounges and old camp chairs.
“Thank God you’re okay.” Gilda stood up when she saw us and hugged us.
“Where’s Sam?” Annie said.
“Inside, sleeping,” Gilda said, and I felt my insides slump and a tiredness the likes of no other come over me.
“Where’s Boon?” Gilda said.
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “We got separated. I was hoping he had come back here.”
“No,” Gilda said. “Not yet.”
Annie and I decided to try to get back through the gates and go home. We were both exhausted, Annie especially, and she was starting to cough in a way which frightened me. She wanted to stay and help clean up, but I insisted we leave.
As we neared the gates, we were stopped by an army squad about a kilometer out.
“You can’t go any further,” one of them said to us through our broken window, holding a rifle at the ready.
“We live in the regulated zone,” I said. “We got caught here.”
“I’m sorry sir, but nobody’s going in or out for a week at least.”
“I work for the military,” I said. “Contact General Savage and ask him if you should let me through.”
“I’m sorry sir, I have my orders.”
“Listen, you can either let me through, or you can explain to the General how you were responsible for the death of one of his top scientists, Michael Khan.”
He looked at me. “Just a moment, sir.” He walked across to his group commander.
The commander came across to me with a retina scanner.
“Michael Khan?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Just look in here please.” He held the scanner up to my eye and waited a moment for the results, then said, “We’re very sorry sir, please go on through. I’ll let the guys up ahead know you’re on your way.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re lucky,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“They’re about to napalm the whole place.”
“What?”
“Yes. The Indonesians made a real mess of things. They’re going to napalm it before the rats start spreading.”
Annie gripped onto my arm. “We have to go back for Gilda and Sam,” she whispered.
“When is it going to start?” I said.
“In about an hour,” the officer replied. “You’d better get moving.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ON THE DRIVE back into the city my whole body was raw and shaking. I felt as if I personally was responsible for the deaths of all those people. Annie was in the seat next to me, coughing, breathing with difficulty. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have wanted to kill myself. I no longer deserved to live. I imagined myself dying from Rebola, blood pouring out of my nose and mouth, choking me. That is what I deserved. That is what I wanted to happen. How could I be alive when all those people were dead or about to die?
When we got into the city, Annie was coughing so much we went straight to the hospital.
“You’ve got pneumonia,” the doctor told us when she came in with the results. “Due to your HIV-4, you’ll have to be admitted.”
Visiting hours were over so they didn’t let me stay. I climbed back into the car and asked it to take me home.
It felt strange to open the door and walk into our empty house alone, and I felt a shiver run down my back as I closed the door onto the dark hallway. I curled up on our sofa. The sky outside was dark with smoke and the horizon glowed orange like sunset. Ashes started raining down upon the windows. I imagined the inferno that was choking, suffocating, scorching everything and everybody in its path. I thought about Gilda and Sam, how despite all they’d been through they had still been still strong, hopeful… I could only hope that they died quickly, but I knew that probably wasn’t going to be the case. They were going to die in agony, like everyone else we had tried to save.
For a long time I just sat there, my body turned to a lump of flesh, every nerve exposed as if I’d been flayed. My mind fell into a dark abyss of depression, thoughts barely registering. I imagined fire coming in through the windows, the intensity of the heat, the pain as my skin and hair seared. I tried to cover myself, put my arms over my head to protect myself, but I couldn’t breathe. For a few minutes I held my breath, hoping that I could end it, that it would stop, that I would faint and never wake up, but my body fought against me.
The next morning when I walked into the hospital, I felt as if I was a passenger inside my own body, watching it go about its routine but having no control over or connection to it. I said hello to the nurses on Annie’s ward but it was as if someone else were saying hello to them. And the way they greeted me back, their eyes and smiles huge and distorted, frightened me. They seemed totally unaware of what had just happened. I felt like I’d walked into a different reality — one in which a third of the population hadn’t just been annihilated. For a moment I wondered if I was going crazy, if maybe it hadn’t actually happened.
Then I walked in to Annie’s room. She opened her eyes briefly and looked at me, but neither of us said anything. There was nothing we could say. I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand, but she closed her eyes and within seconds she was back asleep; her mind unable to bear it. I stared at a poster on the wall of Annie’s room that said “A smile a day keeps the doctor away” with a yellow smiley face on it, but it meant absolutely nothing. Anything human that had once existed inside me, anything nice or beautiful or happy, had been erased. The only thing I could feel was a total contempt for all things human, and a strong desire to revenge myself against those who had been responsible for what had happened. I hated myself, I hated the military, the government, and I hated every other person in the regulated zone — either for their stupidity, like mine, at not knowing what their government was capable of, or for their complicity if they did know.
There were only two things that kept me going: my wife, who I still cared about, and the overriding thought that I was going to change humanity. We had destroyed our environment and now we had turned our destructive nature upon ourselves. What would be left when we had finished? The same thing that was left on Easter Island after they’d chopped down every last tree and eaten every last bird and mammal — the mauled bones of each other?
The next few days were a blur of going in and out of the hospital. Then finally, Annie was able to come home, and I picked her up.
I was sitting in my office that night when Annie came in.
“Gilda and Sam are alive!” she said to me.
“What? How?”
“I just got a call from Gilda. Apparently Boon went for them. He was given warning, and the rebels had bunkers in case the army attacked. A couple of hundred people survived.”
Tears of happiness welled up inside of me. I couldn’t believe it, and when my shock passed I stood up and hugged Annie tightly.
That night I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, Annie by my side. It was 3am but I was unable to sleep. The thought of Gilda, Sam, Boon and the others all being alive cut through to my cold, empty heart like a scalpel. Not everything was hopeless. Not everything was lost.
I thought back to a time before my parents had died, when we’d gone to the beach for the first time in my life. Iraq was almost entirely land-locked, so we’d gone over to Turkey for a holiday. We’d arrived at night, and my parents had gotten me up early the next morning to walk down to th
e water with them.
The sun still hadn’t risen as we crunched across the sand and watched the gentle waves breaking. We took off our shoes and played the game of trying to chase the ocean, running after it when it retreated and then running for our lives when it came after us again.
Then the sun came over the horizon, turning the entire ocean into a glittering, golden sheet, and my father lifted me up onto his shoulders. My mother was next to him and she took his hand and together the three of us stared at the transcendent beauty, and I was filled in that moment with such a feeling of love and togetherness that I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect world.
“I have to go back to the base,” I said to Annie the next morning. “I have to try to convince the Prime Minister to fund Geneus so we can continue on with our germline trials.”
“Okay,” she said.
I put a call through to Bruno.
“If I can convince the government and Geneus to support a continuation of our original project, do you think Gendigm would consider investing even if they don’t get a controlling share?” I said to him.
“What are you planning?” Bruno said.
“We now have everything we need to complete the germline modifications. I might be able to convince the Prime Minister to allow us to continue with the project and maybe even get funding from the government.”
“How?”
“They trust me now. They think I’m one of them. I’ll tell them that germline modifications are the only way we can guarantee survival of our population. The somatic modifications are just a bandaid — they’re never going to be able to protect people from the broad spectrum of modified viruses we’re going to be facing. We need to get to the core of the immune system and that can only be done from birth. If they want their precious population to survive long term, which I presume they do, that’s what they’re going to have to focus on.”
“Do you think they’ll go for it?” Bruno said.
Conception: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Perfectible Animals Book 1) Page 15
