AFTER IT HAPPENED
BOOK FOUR: HOPE
COPYRIGHT
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Any names, characters, incidents and locations portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Copyright © Devon C Ford 2016
Devon C Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive and non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen.
No part of the text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, known or otherwise yet invented, without the express permission of Devon C Ford.
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PROLOGUE
Steve’s return trip was a lonely one. The two hours spent airborne to deliver the advance party was enjoyable as he guided the huge machine over the landscape.
Their target wasn’t difficult to find; the protected bay was unique in its geography and rich in lavish houses. Row upon row of individually sculpted residences, each with their own private jetty leading to the calm waters, jutted out over the high ground.
‘Million Row’ they called it, which was ironic because you’d have been very lucky to buy a house there with a measly one million.
Just before midday he had swooped low to a patch of clear, open ground to allow his two passengers to jump from the side door and run for cover after closing the fuselage door behind them.
Steve had been on the ground for no more than a few seconds before his feet and hands guided the green Merlin helicopter upwards in a surge of power.
He turned the nose north, dipped it low and screamed away over the rooftops.
Without someone with him to focus his mind, his thoughts wandered as they often did. He found himself again having covered miles in the air travelling in excess of one hundred and sixty miles an hour without any conscious thought.
He had to stop doing that.
His focus returned to the immediate when he was about forty miles out, and a blinking red light above his head became the centre of his world.
Oil pressure warning.
He tapped the readout in the vain hope experienced by every human being in such a situation that it might just be a mistake. It wasn’t. He began to feel a subtle change in the way his bird was holding the air; a slight tug here and there, more effort needed to keep her straight.
His fears of the diminished lifespan of a modern aircraft without proper maintenance was becoming fact all too quickly. He faced a difficult decision; make distance towards home as fast as possible or slow down and be prepared to ditch the aircraft at a slower speed which wouldn’t necessarily result in a violent death.
He steadied his nerves, opted for a period of speed and prayed he would make it back.
THE COMMON DENOMINATOR
Marie’s revelation prompted mixed feelings in Dan. He was utterly overjoyed at the knowledge that she was pregnant, and in the same second terrified that she would die. He felt utterly distraught that their baby would never live.
Being the well-adjusted and emotionally open man that he was, his fear and concern presented itself as an impotent anger.
This did not impress Marie.
He tried to comfort her, to wrap her up in his arms and recite false platitudes like ‘it’s going to be ok’, but he couldn’t force himself to lie convincingly. Even for her.
He found himself avoiding her, furthering the distance they felt growing between them. He had to do something. Every problem had at least one solution, and if something couldn’t be immediately fixed with action then he had no idea what to do or where to even start.
He stalked from room to room, looking for some useful activity or distraction to present itself. He found Kate sat with Sera in the lounge and stopped. He wanted to confide in Kate, but Sera always mocked him and provoked arguments; he knew it was just their personalities clashing, but he couldn’t deal with that right now.
He mumbled to Kate, asking for a word. A scathing look was fired at him from Sera and the two disentangled themselves as Kate rose. She walked with him outside, waiting patiently as he directed Ash off to search the bushes and lit himself a cigarette.
“Marie’s pregnant,” he said finally.
No look of joy washed over her face as such revelations usually prompted. The memory of delivering stillborn babies and fighting frantically to save the lives of their mothers was still a raw nerve for her. She knew what the news meant better than most.
“Before you say it was irresponsible, it happened before we knew about the problems. She reckons she’s about five weeks gone,” he said, looking at the floor and feeling utterly to blame for putting her life in danger.
“We’ll do everything we can for her,” Kate replied placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder and feeling his pain for the impending loss.
“Everything,” Dan said with a mirthless smile, “what more can be done than to just try and keep her alive? An abortion?”
He felt instantly wretched for saying it out loud, but he couldn’t help thinking that it was early enough for her to take something and stay alive at the cost of their baby. He stopped, and screwed his face up to try and keep the fear and grief locked inside. Kate surprised him then, wrapping him up in a big hug while telling him it was going to be ok. He wanted to believe her. He almost did. How was it so easy for some people to comfort others, but his attempts just made them angry?
“We’ll look at this again from scratch. Go over all the medical histories and find something,” she said as she let him go.
He mumbled his thanks as she turned and walked back to the house. He stayed outside, letting the late summer morning warm his body.
Ash snapped his head up and stared as two figures approached, jogging down the long driveway. No growl came from him, betraying that he already knew their identities when Dan couldn’t tell from that distance other than to guess. He glanced up at his master, who nodded his head towards the two runners. As Ash bounded away to greet them, the shapes became two slim young women.
Leah had taken to running with Emma, the two pushing each other further and faster each time. Emma wanted to run, and a simple compromise to keep her safe was for his lethal protégé to accompany her.
They raced each other the last hundred yards, Ash excitedly bounding along with them and keeping pace with little effort. Leah pulled up in front of Dan a clear ten paces ahead of Emma and stood smiling while she caught her breath.
Leah saw his face and stopped smiling.
“What?” she asked, her chest heaving to repay the oxygen used on the sprint finish.
Dan just shook his head, unable and unwilling to open the floodgates to his feelings right now. He went to turn away and was stopped by Leah.
Less than two years ago she was a scared young girl, but now she was a frightening young woman. She was fit and strong, skilled with guns and knives as well as fearsome when unarmed. He trusted her, and she had repaid all his efforts with unwavering loyalty and flattered him with imitation.
“Hey!” she snapped at his back, demonstrating that she also bore no small resemblance to Marie’s strength of character. “What’s going on?” she tried again.
Dan weighed up his responses, knowing that she would not let it lie until she found out what was troubling him.
“Marie’s pregnant, and I’m terrified I’ll lose her,” he said simply, only just managing to keep his voice from cracking.
&nbs
p; Leah threw her arms around him and held on tight, unable to voice her feelings. Marie and Dan were her mentors, her role models; effectively her parents.
Emma stood awkwardly aside, her analytical brain seeking any solution that could ease the all too evident pain in Dan to whom she owed so much, including her life..
“We can start again from the beginning,” she said quietly, unknowingly echoing Kate’s words, “find anything, anything at all, that we have in common. There has to be a reason we are immune. There has to be a common denominator.”
With that, her eyes glazed slightly as she delved deep into her thoughts. She walked back to the house, her pace gathering as she went.
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
“Well that’s probably not that accurate,” explained Emma unhelpfully, “it’s more like looking for a needle in a haystack but when we don’t know what a needle is, what it looks like or what it’s made of.”
The assembled blank faces made her instantly regret speaking out loud after Kate had voiced her opinion on the gravity of their task. She still felt awkward around people in general, but was learning to find common ground with some. Since leaving university, she had spent almost no time at all with others who weren’t also scientists.
Dan rubbed his eyes, no longer bothering to try and hide the strain he felt. Marie snaked a hand over his shoulders to reassure him in a gesture that was typical of her manner. She seemed less worried about it than he was, or at least that’s what she portrayed. She was oddly fatalistic about it; what will happen will happen, she said. It was inexorable.
Dan outright refused to sit back and accept that fate held any sway over him; he believed that your own future is decided by your actions and not some divine intervention. If he didn’t like the way something was turning out, then he changed it.
He leaned back to her, accepting some small comfort in her touch as Kate and Emma spoke back and forth about possibilities and getting them nowhere.
“The way I see it,” he said, silencing them all out of pure interest, “is that there has to be one thing which we all have in common. I’m no scientist but I’ve investigated enough things in my life to know that wild theories aren’t going to make a difference to anyone. Emma? What did you say the factors were?”
She seemed a little confused at having to explain base-level virology and immunology to the group, but dutifully responded.
“Genetic, synthetic, environmental,” she said.
“So,” Dan said, allowing the exhaustion he felt to show as annoyance “every single one of us has one of those things in common somewhere. Re-interview everyone; get a deeper history. Did they have any illnesses as a child for example?”
“Well I’ve barely had more than a cold since I ended up in hospital on holiday,” offered Marie to get the ball rolling.
“Same here,” said Kate, “the only time I’ve been properly ill was from anti-malaria tablets.”
“Urgh,” said Dan, shuddering, “Lariam. That stuff made us all rotten on deployment, typical army cheap medicine. Most of the guys threw theirs out and took their chances with malaria instead.”
“The Doxycycline they gave us wasn’t much nicer,” said Emma quietly.
Silence hung in the room as the coincidences began to connect, like a domino run had just been toppled.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Kate, marvelling at just how offensively simple a solution had just presented itself.
“Ok,” said Emma, scrabbling through the mess on the table for a pad and pen, “where did you go, when, what vaccinations or medications did you take?”
“Mid 90’s. Kilimanjaro expedition via Nairobi. Lariam and some injections, but I never thought to ask what,” said Dan, suddenly more awake at the possibility of a new line of enquiry.
Emma turned to Kate.
“Ethiopia. Ten years ago, medical outreach charity work. Doxycycline,” she said.
“Viral research centre in Uganda,” she said to herself, following up with, “ironic.”
All eyes turned to Marie.
“Safari. Kenya, six or seven years ago now? No idea what I had but it was injections before I went and a tablet every day which made me feel like shit so I stopped taking them,” she said simply.
Kate stood and threw open a filing cabinet, snatching a list of all the names of their residents and throwing pages at her team and including Emma in the distribution.
“Travel history. Dates, places, medication. Go!” she said, scattering them from the room. She sat heavily and looked at the only two people still in the room.
She saw a scarred warrior, a man who she had seen take so much physical abuse over the last year and a half that she was amazed he still functioned. A ruthless killer when pressed, but doggedly loyal to his cause and a more chivalrous man than she had ever met. Even if he was emotionally retarded. Next to him was a fierce and domineering woman with a natural ability to lead and control others. They were the Alphas of this small clan.
Only now they looked like a pair of tired children trying to put on brave faces so as to avoid being sent to bed. Marie’s mask slipped back into place first. She sat herself up, smiled at Kate and spoke with renewed confidence.
“Seven months to figure this out then! Come on, nobhead, let’s get me a cup of tea; you never told me you climbed Kilimanjaro!” she said kindly to Dan, prompting him to wake up as intended by the comedy insult.
“You never asked,” he replied.
He stopped at the door and turned back to look at Kate. She gave him a nod of reassurance, and watched him follow his woman.
THE NEEDLE
“Without a doubt, it’s our only lead. Everyone has some link to Africa, the various inoculations for travelling there, or anti-malarials,” said Emma after going over all of the information again.
As per one of her various idiosyncrasies, she had collated this information into charts on her laptop. After consulting a world atlas courtesy of Pip in the library she presented that the majority had visited – or planned to visit – Africa or a very nearby island within the last fifteen years.
Dan recalled Penny telling him once that she had taught children English in Gambia on a trip as part of a school exchange. Neil had responded with his own exploits as a young soldier on his first trip abroad. Quite how then they didn’t realise it was such a coincidence to have all visited an uncommon destination escaped him, but then they had other things on their minds at the time.
Like surviving the next twenty-four hours.
Slightly annoyed at the unnecessary PowerPoint display, Dan cut her off as politely as possible.
“So basically that’s all we know. But the Ugandan viral research centre sounds like a pretty good bet to me,” he said.
“Six and a half thousand miles to the equator, with two oceans to cross and no guarantee of transport other than walking for most of the journey,” said Steve after clearing his throat.
“Technically, it’s a channel and sea,” said Emma, not grasping that it was the rhetorical instead of the literal being discussed. Her voice trailed off as she realised her mistake in speaking again.
“I understand why, but it’s a ridiculous risk to try and make that journey,” Steve said, fixing Dan with a look of challenge.
“Do you?” he snapped back, more harshly than he intended. “You really understand why I’m suggesting making a probably ten-thousand-mile journey with countless variables with a pregnant woman?”
Steve sighed. He’d seen that fire in Dan’s eyes before. Seen it after he had burned a group of attackers alive in a barn, gunning down anyone who ran and strung up their leader in bloody revenge. There were many things he saw eye to eye with the younger man about, but this was not going to be one of them.
“Needs of the many, my friend,” he said as he stood.
Dan nearly flipped. The needs of the many were irrelevant to him now; the human race would die out in the existing generation if the answers he desperately sought weren’t found.
He said nothing. Instead he turned and walked from the room save he say something to a loyal friend he would later regret. He snapped his fingers aggressively, prompting his huge dog to rise from the floor with a grumble and lope outside to follow him.
He lit a cigarette and paced restlessly. He wanted to break something. He needed to act; he saw no other way of fixing a problem. For the last year, everything that stood in the way of success could be fought and killed. Now he felt powerless. Useless.
Steve followed him outside and bent to stroke Ash between the ears.
“I do get why you want to go,” he said quietly, “but you can’t drag everyone literally halfway across the world on a hunch. People are settled here. They’re happy and they’re safe. They will want to stay. I’ll help however I can, but I can’t abandon what we’ve built here.”
With that, Steve turned away and went back inside. Dan was left brooding. Who would follow his wild goose chase? Did he really think he held enough sway over the group? Did he command enough loyalty and respect to potentially condemn others by following him into uncertainty?
There was only one democratic way to find out. He would spread the facts among the group, and see if he had enough support to make it viable.
A TEST OF LOYALTY
He decided that the best way to announce the plan was to put up notices and encourage people to make their own decisions.
He and Leah copied it out onto large pieces of paper and hung them in the dining hall for all to see. A brief announcement over breakfast the next morning got the group clamouring to read this latest development.
The note was simple enough. Studies of the group’s immunity showed a link to Africa in some form. Dan proposed an expedition there to find out if they can solve the problems of having stillborn babies. It was a long shot, but it was a chance to perpetuate the human race.
Hope: After It Happened Book 4 Page 1
