The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion)

by Suchitra Chatterjee

  “In town,” I said as I flopped onto my usual chair, “We found two survivors, in the Tea and Herb Café.’

  Phoenix digested this information with little interest but when I mentioned there were two dogs, he immediately asked what sort. I told him, along with their names.

  “My mum had a Jack Russell,” he said and there was an almost touch of wistfulness in his voice, “He used to sleep on my bed.”

  “I’ll ask if they can come and see you, if you want?”

  “OK,” he said.

  “Stevie said you wanted to tell me something,” Phoenix nodded his head.

  Apparently, the Twice Dead were converging on various places around the UK where the majority of the Epsilon Command survivors were located and there had been a couple of pitched battles between them and some external security forces linked to COBRA.

  There were several fires now in and around London. The Security Forces who for some reason were out and about had used flame throwers to some effect on the walking corpses. Phoenix showed me some footage. It wasn’t pleasant to watch but once again I forced myself to view it.

  This was the same London that had once been silent but now it was a surging, heaving mass of shuffling grey faced people with eyes emptier than Jasmine’s oxygen deprived brain. They moved as one I thought as I watched.

  I let myself see more than just a moving, heaving, mass of animated flesh. I had to look beyond the flesh that walked. What could I see that might give me clues to help me understand more about them, about what had happened and why? I ran everything I knew and supposed I knew over in my head.

  The contagion was supposedly a worldwide test; well this was what the military had been told. It had been done to see if it was possible to utilise satellites in space for use against global Contagions like Ebola, Bird Flu and other spreadable plagues, but why do it from space? The question popped into my mind almost as fast as Dr. Sandra Lee of the Pimple Popper Channel could pop out a big blackhead.

  Moreover, a worldwide test, how had that come about? How had it been orchestrated? There were wars all over the world between different countries, different religious groups, different ethnicities. How did you get them to speak to each other and then unilaterally agree to something so big? Not only big, but for some countries that were poverty stricken or riddled by conflict why bother at all?

  And why be secret about it in the first place? It wasn’t as if the test had any military value. It was about science, medicine and helping humanity, or so that was what we were being told. The pieces simply didn’t fit in the way they should. In fact, the more that I thought about it, the pieces had never really fitted in the first place, it was all so hasty, and all over the place, pretty much as if everything had been concocted together at the last minute.

  I ran my thoughts over the countries that Phoenix had told us had Drones flying over them. I hadn’t really taken all that he had told me in properly.

  “Phoenix,” I said thoughtfully, as my muddled thoughts began to separate and become large fragments that I could understand better, “Can you tell me which European countries have Drones flying over them?” Since the tightening of border controls with the refugee crisis, and the UK opting out of the EU, crossing from a none part of the EU into the EU was not as easy as it had once been.

  Humans rights had gone tits up from about 2014 and three years on it had only got worse; hate crime had been steadily climbing to heady heights on all sides. White on Black, Black on White, Muslim against Christian, Christian against anyone who wasn’t Christian. There was fundamentalism on all sides. The hatred was spreading and it didn’t look like there was a cure for it.

  Phoenix set about getting me the list. It didn’t take him long. I watched his fingers fly over the keys. At some point he was going to need another computer. More powerful. We would have to somehow get to a bigger town to secure that.

  I looked at the list and then said, “Do the same for the rest of the world please.”

  He did. I stared at both sets of information for the longest time. Yes, a cliché, I know but I did that. I tried to make sense of it but right at that moment I couldn’t. It was too horrifying to comprehend. Perhaps I was wrong? Perhaps I was reading it in the wrong way? I mean it was rocket science, literally! I needed more time to digest it and then pick it apart and understand what Phoenix had just given me.

  I left him at his computer, heading for the kitchen, intending to make myself a strong cup of coffee. The door to Paul’s room was open. He was lying in bed, propped up with half a dozen pillows. He was on a drip; intravenous military morphine was slowing pushing its way into his thread like veins. He heard me clacking my way down the hall.

  Adag had obviously finished talking to Mitch who I suspected was now hiding in the garage. She was trying to get Paul to drink some high protein chocolate milk. He was telling her he didn’t want it. He was so pale, pale and hairless, like a white starved ape I thought and then I felt guilty. Paul wasn’t an ape, but I had never seen someone with skin so translucent and thin. Until now that was.

  “Want a game of chess Lucy?” Paul called out to me.

  I almost said no, but then said, “Sure, why not?” I entered his room and sat on a chair by his bed and Adag went and got his chess set from his desk. It was a large board, heavy by the look of it as she quickly put it on his over the bed table.

  I had never seen a board like it before, it was made from some kind of silky wood. There was a smell of maple, and something else I couldn’t place. I sniffed and reached out to touch the surface. It was like touching silk.

  “Adag plays with me,” Paul said, his pale tongue licked at the beads of chocolate on his upper lip, “But she’s rubbish.”

  Adag snorted as she bought over a wooden box from the same desk and began to take out the pieces, one by one, “That doesn’t say much for your teaching skills then, does it?” She wasn’t angry by his words because he said with a twitch of his lips, “Fair comment.”

  My eyes were drawn to the chess set that Adag was now carefully laying out. It was beautiful and by the look of it, quite old. I reached out and took one the pieces, like the board it had a hard but silky feel to it.

  “His father bought it for him,” Adag said, “When he went to India on business a couple of months ago.”

  I turned the chess piece over in my hand. It was made from a very solid piece of intricately carved wood, stained bright red, like blood I thought. I asked Paul what the wood was, if he knew, of course he did.

  “Sheesham,” he said, “It’s a Lotus design apparently.”

  The queen piece I had in my hand had a rounded sloped base which had tiny triangular nicks in it. It then rose upwards, in a round stem, that spread out to a basin shape, and in the centre was the wooden core of the lotus. It was handmade I realised, each piece of the set was slightly different from the other. Black was now red, and a honey colour for the white pieces.

  “Beautiful,” I murmured rolling the queen in my hand.

  “It does what it is supposed to do,” Paul did not see the beauty in the pieces, or the board. It was a chess set, nothing more, nothing less.

  “Philistine,” Adag said but she was smiling. She understood Paul and I had a feeling in his own high functioning Asperger’s way, he understood her. I was surprised when I felt a surge of jealously run through me. But then I remembered Jack and how we had shared Theresa and loved her equally.

  Adag’s heart was big enough for both Paul and me. I relaxed and took the red chess pieces. Neither of us talked, well not much, mainly it was me and even then it was just the odd word or two to break the silence. Paul was not into small talk though he could make reasonably good small talk, but only when he wanted.

  Even though I had not played for a long time, the memory of my games with my foster brother Jack came flooding back. He had loved chess, it was a game he could play unrestricted, even when he was struggling to breathe. Theresa would sometimes wake me up when his chest was bad and I would
go into his bedroom and sit with him, playing chess as the oxygen hissed into his nose. He had been as sick as Paul was. Sicker in fact. Why had we done it? What made us…the long buried thoughts chilled me and I pushed a memory away that I thought I had forgotten.

  Paul was a good player, chess to him was a game of logic, each move calculated to ensure that he won the game. Was he competitive, I mused as I used a knight to take one of his bishops, or was he just using chess to hone his mental abilities for the subjects that he obsessed over. Like space, the universe, the final frontier. I looked around his room as he contemplated his next move on the board.

  On one of his walls, neatly pinned two intricate posters of solar systems. High above his head was a scale model of a satellite which swayed gently on almost invisible fish wire. Behind his bed, pinned on the wall was a poster of the same satellite with the word “Aura” on it.

  From what I could read on the poster, this particular satellite belonged to NASA, and was a scientific research one that studied Earth’s ozone layer, air quality and climate. Other posters, neatly pinned to the walls were of other satellites from all over the world.

  I read some of the facts on a poster next to the Aura one. I learned that Azerbaijan had one satellite in orbit, that the new Russia had more satellites than America, that must have pissed that Trump off, and that India had 70 satellites to call their own, floating around the heavens.

  “Your move,” Paul’s voice made me turn to look at the chessboard. I smiled. He was trying to corner my King with his bishop, knight and castle. Clever.

  “You know a lot about space, don’t you?” I said as I made my move, sliding my castle across the board so it was it was in a diagonal line with his remaining bishop.

  Paul turned his head to look at the posters of satellites pinned to all of his walls, the books on the planets, and also information on satellites that orbited the earth and then back at me.

  “OK, so it’s obvious,” I replied wryly.

  Paul took my castle with his bishop. I smiled. I took his bishop with my knight, “Checkmate I think,” I said.

  Paul stared at the board for the longest time, and I wondered if he was angry? Should I have let him win? My queen was protecting my knight and I had deftly blocked his king in, making what seemed to be erratic moves but I had actually known what I was doing.

  Jack had said I should enter chess competitions but I never did. I played the game because it made him happy, he should have been a champion, so much brilliance packed in a frail, dying body, never having a chance to achieve his dreams because life fucked him over, gave him a drug addict of a birth mother who valued her next high over the health of her unborn child.

  “I want a drink,” Paul said abruptly to Adag who had been watching us play.

  “Your manners are almost as good as Phoenix’s,” I said and to my surprise Paul turned to Adag and added the word, “Please,” Adag wasn’t at all perturbed by his bad manners, she looked briefly surprised, then pleased he wanted a drink.

  “Chocolate or Banana?” I made a face as Adag handed Paul a carton of chocolate protein milk but then she handed me the banana one, “Don’t argue,” she said when I opened my mouth to say I didn’t want it, “It’s got iron in it, and you need iron, remember?”

  There was a snort from Paul, and I swiveled my eyes to him but he looked back at me placidly. “Another game?” he said politely. My lips twitched. I nodded my head. I sipped at the drink Adag had forced on me. Grudgingly I had to admit it tasted quite nice.

  “I’ll make you both some lunch in while.”

  “No thank you,” we both said simultaneously. Adag gave us both an evil smile.

  “It’s none negotiable,” she replied and then added before I could protest, “Best not to argue Lucy,” and she left the room.

  Paul and I looked at each other.

  “Drink your milk,” I said and I set the board up for the next game.

  Paul intended to win this game. His moves were bold, aggressive, and he contemplated each of his moves for a long time, leaving me time to let my eyes wander once more to the many posters and other images on his wall.

  “I wonder which satellites they put the Twice Dead Pathogen in?” I wasn’t asking a question, I was musing to myself out loud, “And how did they get it up there?”

  “What do you mean?” Paul’s voice startled me. I hadn’t been talking to him but to myself.

  “Oh, sorry,” I apologised to Paul, “Just thinking out loud, about the Twice Dead Pathogen, how it got disseminated the way it did.”

  We hadn’t had the time to fill Paul in with the finer details about how the Pathogen had ended up spread all over the world, due to his ill health, only that it was a test that scientists were doing in conjunction with several world governments that had gone wrong. Really wrong.

  Paul looked at me oddly, “I thought it was an air born pathogen,” he said, “That is what Adag said to me.”

  “Yes, its air born,” I said, “It was distributed by satellites apparently.”

  Paul had been about to move one of his chess pieces. He took his hand away and said slowly, “Satellites don’t do that, they do a lot of things but not that.”

  “Apparently they do,” I said, and I told him what Phoenix had told me from what he had gleaned from the files he was able to access. I also added my own concerns and confusion.

  “Pass me that folder,” Paul said and he pointed to his dressing table where there was a line of folders.

  “Which one?” I swung my body to look where he was pointing.

  “The purple one,” he said, “In the middle,” I got up and retrieved it and he flicked it open. He skimmed passed several pages and ran his finger down a column of neat black writing. I can’t say I understood anything that was in the folder, only that it was full of diagrams, writing and even more diagrams.

  “Can you ask Phoenix which satellites were supposed to distribute this test pathogen?” he said suddenly. I blinked and didn’t move at first.

  “You were right to be confused,” Paul raised his head to look at me, “Because half of what you have told me isn’t possible and what is possible, couldn’t happen.”

  Why hadn’t I thought of coming to Paul in the first place? He was Phoenix’s equivalent with regard to space and all things space related which included satellites, high powered telescopes, and anything to do with the world behind the stratosphere.

  I got up and went to speak to Phoenix, to ask him Paul’s question. He gave me the answers, printing them off. I looked at them as I headed back to Paul’s room. I waited patiently for him to respond.

  He looked up, finally and said softly, “Those particular satellites, they are all inactive, and have been for years…many years.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say and my heart sank. Because the wild and unsubstantiated theory that I had been pushing around in my head now had merit. It made more sense than what we had been lead to believe.

  “But even if they weren’t inactive,” Paul added, “They weren’t made to be used that way, it’s simply not possible.”

  “Are we all that stupid?” I was surprised at how angry I suddenly was.

  Paul looked at me questioningly, “Are we so stupid we accept such a shit explanation without really questioning it?” I clarified my point.

  “What do you know about astrophysics, satellite technology, the Star Wars program, air borne pathogens and how many ways they can be released?” Paul countered my question with a question.

  It was my turn to frown, “Not a lot.”

  “Exactly,” Paul said quietly.

  “This is all doing my bloody head in,” I said in a frustrated voice, “One minute it is one thing, the next it is another, everything is changing, I can’t keep up with it all! I don’t even know what the truth is anymore, shit I don’t even know who I am right now!”

  Paul was silent for a moment and then he said softly, “All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you, the o
nly lasting truth is change…” I wasn’t expecting Paul to quote from Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower, an author I had liked and read often. I was even more surprised that Paul had even heard of Octavia Butler. An African American science fiction writer, and a woman as well.

  “Your move,” Paul said distracting me from my thoughts.

  “I’m hungry,” I said suddenly, and I was.

  “Me too,” Paul sounded surprised, “I’d love a cheese and pickle sandwich.”

  “Sounds good,” I stood up, “I’ll ask Adag, finish the game over lunch?”

  He nodded his head. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were bright, “I wonder how they did do it?” I heard him murmur as I left the room.

  After we had both eaten our lunch, which surprisingly we both really enjoyed, Paul had asked Phoenix to come to his room with his lap-top. Strangely enough these two residents of Thorncroft rarely interacted, despite both of them having similar traits when it came to being obsessive and reclusive.

  Combining their brilliance hadn’t been my idea, it just happened and things became a lot clearer after that. Too clear in fact.

  Gabe and Percy ate supper with us that first night. They came and helped in the kitchen and afterwards when the others had gone to bed, went into Adag’s flat which was pretty crowded, with Seb in his wheelchair, Mitch on a hard backed seat, me on the only armchair, Adag on a stool and Percy and Gabe on the sofa with the two dogs curled at their feet.

  We had not talked about what Gabe and Percy wanted to do. They had needed time to digest that they were not going to be saved by anyone other than themselves. Adag had made coffee for everyone and we sat in the privacy of her flat in silence for the first few minutes.

  It was Gabe who spoke first, he rubbed the hot ceramic of his cup with his fingers, and said “Will you stay here?” he asked us.

  “Where would we go?” Adag responded.

  “To one of the cities, like London…” Gabe replied and he saw the expressions on our faces.

  “Oh…” he said.

  “So they are actually Zombies?” Percy was trying to get his head around what little he knew.