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

by Suchitra Chatterjee

  I removed two bags of rubbish from Phoenix’s room, along with a bag of dirty laundry. I didn’t open his curtains, as I knew he wasn’t very keen on any strong light shining in his room.

  I then made his bed, and then told him he had to have a shower. He stared at me again and I said, “If you don’t shower, I will give Stevie your desk top computer to use for weight lifting.”

  “The soldiers took it,” Phoenix said.

  “They gave it back,” I replied. He got up and went to have a shower. I found clean clothes in his wardrobe, and handed them to him, and as he was showering, I cleaned up the rest of his room.

  When he had showered, his room was clean, smelt of lemon as I had used a lemon wipe to clean all the surfaces and I was sitting on his arm chair.

  He sat down at his desk and the laptop, “Where’s my computer?”

  “I’ll get Stevie to bring it in for you later,” I said.

  He saw the can of coke I had bought for him from the kitchen and reached for it, snapping the tab open and taking a long drink.

  “You have no manners,” I said in a matter of fact voice, he didn’t reply, “No manners at all, but an incredible brain, everyone in the home must really irritate the shit out of you.”

  His fingers tapped on the keyboard as he stared at the screen in front of him, “Not everyone,” he said.

  I exhaled, “Did you find anything about Zimmerman? Or the soldiers in Colonel Wolf’s unit?”

  He nodded his head. I waited. I didn’t hurry him, or get impatient, that would make him slower and less inclined to talk.

  “Are you afraid?” his question was unexpected. He was still staring at his computer screen, hitting the keyboard now and again.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked him.

  “What has happened?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I am too,” I went still in my chair. Phoenix had never expressed fear before. His voice was the same level as if he was asking for a drink of cola or a piece of toast.

  “I think we all are.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he said softly, “You don’t irritate me,” That was the closest he was able to come to saying he liked me and was glad I was with him.

  “Glad to know what,” I said.

  He reached down into a cupboard that was built into his desk, when he opened it; I heard a soft swishing noise. He had a printer in it. He handed me a sheaf of double-sided printed-paper.

  “Professor Zimmerman,” he said.

  I read the A4 sheets of paper carefully, trying to absorb any information on the Professor that might give us a clue as to what part he had played in the releasing of the contagion.

  Professor Zimmerman was 64-years-old, childless and 20 years widowed Biochemist, originally based in Oxford, he had been doing research into plant-based contagions that could be given orally to animals in order to try and stem outbreaks of Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Ebola and even Mad Cow Disease.

  He had originally been based in an Oxford University medical research centre, but about six years ago, he had moved to America and taken up a specialist post in the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. Where the Colonel’s wife had been, I thought as I flicked through the papers on my lap.

  He had come back to England about six months ago, suddenly leaving the centre for an extended sabbatical. He had gone to stay with his younger sister, Rachel Bach, recently widowed who had taken up residence in a cottage in the grounds of her wealthy son-in-law’s house in Birenchester. Apparently, she had been a scientist too, but she had worked in the area of quantum physics.

  Birenchester. That was about 70 or so miles from Thorncroft. I knew this because it held an international arts festival there every year. It was jokingly known as the posh person’s Brighton Fringe Festival.

  “Why would Duke be talking about Zimmerman? He’s not even in the USA anymore,” I said and then I added, “He’s probably a Twice Dead by now anyway,” I wasn’t directing my words at Phoenix, I was just speaking aloud.

  “He did research into the pathogen,” Phoenix spoke, he handed me another sheaf of papers, “He told them it was dangerous, he warned them there could be side effects if they used it in its present form.”

  Now, that was interesting.

  “Warned who?” I asked.

  “New World Succession,” Phoenix replied.

  “So he was part of it all?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Bastard,” I frowned, “But why did he come back to England? If he was part of it then he would be safe in the USA, why on earth come back?” I read the extra sheets Phoenix had given me. Zimmerman had gone back because of family reasons. He had tried to get his sister and her family to relocate to the US, but they had refused.

  “He was trying to save them,” I said suddenly comprehending Zimmerman’s reasons for returning to the UK, “He was trying to save them, wow, even a mass murderer can love their family.”

  I then read about Zimmerman’s family, it was all in the report that Phoenix had printed off for me and with every word I read, I realised that Aaron Zimmerman’s sister Rachel was very different from him. She was a pacifist, wanted to help people and did voluntary work at a local charity shop in her home town.

  She was the mother of one child, a daughter, Ruth, married to a London based stockbroker Michael Rosen. They had three children, two boys and a girl a baby of four months old.

  I had a sudden and quite horrific thought that made my stomach jump. What about Twice Dead Babies? We had seen Twice Dead children shuffling along with Twice Dead Adults, but what about the babies? I thought about the children I had seen shuffling along with the dreadful grey mass of lost humanity. What sort of ages were they?

  I pushed the dreadful thoughts from my head. My imagination was now well and truly activated since the contagion and I am afraid it was making up for lost time.

  “I think he is alive,” Phoenix spoke, making me jump.

  “Who?” I was confused by Phoenix’s words.

  “Zimmerman.”

  “What makes you say that?” I said.

  “Your Colonel’s unit has been deployed to Birenchester.”

  “What?” I sat up then, “Private Jasper said they were going to Oxford!”

  “Change of orders, they are now in Birenchester,” Phoenix said, he clicked a few keys, and slid his hand to a joy stick to the left of him, I had presumed it was for the games he still played, when things were quiet but obviously it wasn’t, “I have been tracking them.”

  “Tracking them?” I got up from my seat and limped over to Phoenix’s side, “What do you mean?”

  “I helped Paul and Mitch configure the satellite dish on the roof,” the electronics genius said, and he moved the joystick gently, eyes on the computer screen, “It’s bouncing off military satellites that are still working in space.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said with a sigh, “You are mirroring them.”

  I saw Phoenix’s lip twitch, almost a smile. Not quite, but almost, “Paul helped too, he knows all of the Satellites in Space and how they work,” To my surprise, the tracking that Phoenix spoke of included video footage. Colour video footage.

  “I took out the Drone camera with some other hardware that wasn’t broken,” Phoenix said in answer to my unspoken questions about the video, “Before the soldiers came, I spliced its components into a nano-bot I’ve been working on for a couple of years, I’ve bounced the signal from a military satellite in Space to a commercial one that is still functional, we have our own Hubble telescope on earth.”

  “Nano-Bot?” I was a bit dazed by all the technical information that Paul was throwing at me.

  “A miniature drone powered by an internal solar battery that is on a constant recharge loop,” he said and then he added, “It’s the size of a large bumble bee, it looks like one too, Paul said I should disguise it.”

  “You followed the soldiers with this Drone?” I said in amazement.

  He shook hi
s head, “It has a mini magnet, it sticks to metal, I got Seb to stick it to the side of your Colonel’s jeep.”

  My Colonel? Hardly. I frowned, “Won’t they see or hear it.”

  “Highly unlikely,” Phoenix said, “If they hear anything, it will sound like a bee as well as look like one, it’s the size of your thumb and there are some big bees about.”

  I had a sudden thought, “How come you don’t talk this much to other people?”

  “No need,” he said calmly, and to my surprise, I understood what he meant. His whole world from when he was a little boy had revolved around computer technology and how it worked and what he could use it for. He had very little interest in anything else. He liked to make technology work for him; he wanted to be able to control it. What we were asking him to do was helping him do more things with technology, he was testing theories I suspected that he had not been able to test before. Taking his knowledge and pushing it further and further down a pathway that would probably put The Matrix to shame at some point.

  Hacking into COBRA was just the tip of the iceberg of what Phoenix possibly could do. His obsession had given him a brilliant and analytical mind into the complex world of computers, technology and all things mathematical. The downside was that it had socially stunted him, made him appear abnormal to the rest of the world and therefore nothing more than a mad kid who liked computers.

  I had valued Phoenix’s computer skills simply because they had helped us all understand what was happening outside of Thorncroft, but stepping back from that, I had actually not given him much thought as a person beyond these skills.

  And thank God neither had Epsilon Command. They knew COBRA had been hacked, but I suspected that Wolf had told them it had been done by a severely autistic boy who was now comatose and was probably just another Gary McKinnon. Perhaps if Phoenix had not been in a residential home for disabled people, Wolf’s superiors might have taken a different view on the matter.

  Epsilon Command might not have wanted a messy battle with a valuable military unit against more than five Twice Dead and therefore it had ordered us to be put down in the home in which we had been abandoned in, but this time it looked like good old fashion prejudice had actually worked out in our favour.

  And then then there was Paul. Not only did he have Asperger’s but he was dying as well. Two brilliant untapped minds, two amazing young men whose potential could never be realised outside of an apocalypse. It wasn’t a nice thought but it did make me grateful.

  I had never been to Birenchester before, I only knew about the festival, which I had seen on TV and other documentaries about, rich and large sized villages in the South.

  It was a pretty town, bigger than Thorncroft, with wider roads, larger houses and many neatly trimmed trees on equally well-kept grass verges.

  “Any wild garlic nearby?” I asked Phoenix.

  “No.”

  “Then why would they think he is alive?”

  Phoenix didn’t answer. He moved the cursor so I could follow the line of trucks, which were parked along a once elegant grass verge.

  “Have you got Zimmerman’s sister’s address?” I said to Phoenix. Stupid question, of course he had. Seconds later, we were outside the address and I saw familiar faced soldiers, no longer in biohazard suits, but in their combats, milling about a large house in a well-kept garden of at least five to six acres.

  I got a glimpse of Private Salter, he was sitting on the step of one of the army trucks, his arm still in a sling. He looked bored.

  “Can you get into the house?” I asked.

  Phoenix expertly hovered the miniature drone near some neatly trimmed ivy over an oak front door. It eventually opened and I saw Nat, he was carrying a pink bundle in his arms that was moving.

  “I wish this had sound,” I muttered.

  Phoenix moved his hand to a button on a black box behind his computer screen. There was a crackling sound and then there were voices.

  “Audio was difficult,” he said, “But not impossible.” I heard shouting. The drone moved through the house, keeping high up so it wouldn’t be detected.

  We flew into a large room, filled with fine furnishings and several people. Phoenix gently put the drone onto a light fitting that had an overview of the whole of the room. The moving images from the video were panoramic and clear.

  Phoenix had provided me a photo of Zimmerman and he was sitting on a chair at a large shiny oak dinging table, his head in both of his hands.

  An older woman was standing by a fireplace. Beside her were two young boys. One was about six or seven years old, the other no more than four or five. The old woman had her arms around the boys. Her face was wet with tears and the boys had a look of bewilderment on their faces.

  I saw Wolf and Elise. Duke wasn’t in the vicinity, but I suspected he wasn’t far away.

  “…will be leaving in the morning,” Wolf was speaking, his voice sounded tinny, but he was audible.

  The Professor’s head shot up, “And go where?” he said.

  “Epsilon Command Base 2 in London,” Wolf replied tersely.

  “You don’t want to be going there,” Zimmerman said.

  “Those are the orders,” Wolf said flatly.

  “Tell him why he doesn’t want to be going there, Aaron,” the old woman’s voice was filled with pain and anger, “Tell him you bastard!”

  “Rachel…” Zimmerman began, but his sister interrupted him with a hiss as she clutched at the shoulders of the two boys.

  “Don’t you Rachel me you son-of-a-bitch, it’s because of you my Grandchildren don’t have parents anymore!”

  “I told them not to go to London!” Zimmerman wailed, “I begged them not to!”

  The Drone camera footage was good and I said as much to Phoenix.

  “Only the best technology and hardware,” Phoenix said.

  “Yeah,” I said dryly, “For mass murderers.”

  “You didn’t tell them why!” Rachel was screaming at her brother, “You didn’t tell them that the world was going to end did you?”

  “It was an accident,” Elise’s voice cut over Rachel’s and the older woman turned her wrath on the female officer.

  “It was no accident Captain, it was done on purpose, by the people my brother worked for, he warned them that the pathogen was not ready to be deployed, oh yes he was part of it, only he knew what it might possibly do…”

  “Shut up Rachel!” Zimmerman shouted, and he slammed both his fists onto the table “Shut up! I tried to get you to listen, to come back with me to America, but you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t leave, that’s why I came here to you!”

  Elise looked at Wolf who was staring at Zimmerman silently.

  Wolf turned and shouted out a soldier’s name, “Take the children to Lieutenant Barnes,” he ordered the female soldier who was called Topaz.

  The two boys didn’t want to leave their Grandmother, but she soothed them gently, stroking their hair, kissing their bewildered faces and telling them to go and sit with their sister and she would be with them soon enough. The boys went with Ellis, both looking back at their Grandmother, fear in their eyes I suspected. I wanted to feel sorry for them, but I found I couldn’t. I felt nothing for them at that moment.

  “How did you survive?” Wolf spoke once the two boys were out of hearing, “All the other survivors were found in remote areas, you are in a town that is now empty of people.”

  I had been thinking about that too. I leaned over Phoenix, my eyes glued to the screen.

  “He inoculated us,” Rachel said bitterly, “We didn’t know, he put it in our food, only it made Poppy sick.”

  “It wasn’t meant for babies,” Zimmerman mumbled and he rubbed his tired face,” I couldn’t make much, and I hadn’t tested it, I wasn’t sure even it would work…”

  “Did you give it to your niece and nephew-in-law?” Wolf asked flatly.

  Zimmerman nodded his head.

  Wolf laughed softly, “Then they will have survived the
contagion, that is until the Twice Dead got to them, then they would have been ripped apart and eaten alive,” his words had the impact he intended them to have.

  Rachel’s hand shot to her mouth, she swayed, but she was one tough woman, she didn’t fall to the ground and scream hysterically as so many would have done.

  “They were going to do it with or without me,” Zimmerman said pitifully to his sister, “They said they would allow my family to be part of the chosen, but you refused to come to America, so I came home, hoped I could persuade you to change your mind, but it wasn’t supposed to happen so soon, it wasn’t supposed to happen for another six months.”

  He sounded bewildered by this.

  “Sir,” Elise began; I could hear the shock in her voice, but Wolf held up his hand to silence her.

  “And now we know the truth about the contagion,” Wolf said, “So Epsilon Command, once they have you under their control will get rid of us, because we know the truth.”

  “You’re a soldier,” Zimmerman said in a spirited voice, “You follow orders.”

  “Only up to a point,” Wolf said coldly, “You aren’t worth saving Zimmerman, but if I leave you here Epsilon Command will only send another unit to get you, probably sacrificing more ignorant soldiers in the process because most of the cities are overrun with the Twice Dead that appear to have a plan, any idea what that plan is?”

  “Twice Dead?” Zimmerman said in a dazed voice.

  “It’s what a group of disabled people who survived the contagion called them,” Wolf said, “I was made to abandon them, they weren’t worth saving apparently.”

  “Dear God,” Rachel had to sit down then, I was surprised that our fate had affected her more than the fate of the world itself, “Aaron, what have you done?”

  “I wanted to save you and the children,” he said pathetically.

  “You should have left us to die,” the old woman shook her head, “At least we would have all been together.”

  “You’d have been turned into one of those things!” he cried out, “I told Ivan…”