by Alex Scarrow
Leon spotted a couple of small piles of clothing, one on the green, another across the flowerbeds just outside the post office. He pointed them out to his mum and she nodded sadly. ‘I guess nowhere escaped this, then.’
‘The pharmacy is just a bit further along this high street,’ said Mohammed. He climbed out of the back of the van.
Mum opened the passenger-side door. ‘You kids stay right here. We don’t all need to go looking.’
Leon ignored that and reached for the door handle.
‘No.’ She grabbed at his arm. ‘I said stay!’
‘Mum, for God’s sake, I’m just—’
‘Leon,’ she snapped at him. ‘For once can you please just do as I say?’
He stared at her; a challenge. He wanted to make the point that maybe it was time for him to stand up and be an adult. OK, he wasn’t keen . . . but it was probably time. She needed to know, the conversation needed to happen, but maybe not just now. She had her stress-face on and was doing the voice-rising thing. Clearly, this morning she wasn’t going to take any shit from him.
‘You stay right here and you watch your sister. All right?’ Her voice was sharp. The next notch up would be the Mum-screech. The one that went right through him like nails across a blackboard.
He nodded resentfully. ‘Make sure you get me some aspirin or paracetamol.’
‘Don’t worry . . . we’ll get a bit of everything.’ She squeezed his arm gently before letting go. ‘Back in five, OK?’
She stepped down out of the van, closed the door and followed Mohammed round the barricade and down the pretty little high street.
Grace stirred in the back. ‘Why do you always do that?’
He watched them until they disappeared round a bend in the road. ‘Do what?’
‘Wind her up like that.’
He turned in his seat and looked back at his sister. She was slumped against the side of the van, cradling her throbbing arm. Eyes closed and skin pale.
‘I’m nearly seventeen. She still treats me like a little kid.’
‘Yeah, well . . . you behave like one, still.’
He mentally counted to five. His sister irritated the hell out of him sometimes. That whole little girl all grown up voice she did. Like she was the older sibling here – sometimes really grated.
‘So you really think we might actually be immune to this thing?’
Mohammed nodded. ‘It is a distinct possibility. You told me you were on that train? Well, I was in the village hall here . . . The same thing happened to me. We were woken up by local police. All taken to the hall. The policeman was telling us what he’d been told, about all the emergency measures, then somebody came into the hall, sick. We all ran, panicked, outside, and that floating white “pollen” was coming down on us like snow.’
He shook his head. ‘There was so much of it. Some of it must have touched me – I am sure of it.’
‘And you didn’t get ill?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing. If . . . if . . . we have immunity, it is not like normal where you take on the virus, you survive and now your body knows how to fight the infection, I think. If it is that we are immune, then the virus must have no effect at all. It cannot get established.’
‘Or we’ve been very, very lucky so far.’
Mohammed nodded. ‘That is also possible.’
They passed the village’s one and only pub and its quaint little beer garden. Just ahead of them on the other side of the narrow road was a church and, next to it, a single-storey community centre. Along its short gravel path, flanked by beautifully maintained flowerbeds, lay small bundles of clothes from which bones protruded, tufts of tangled and matted hair still attached to the tops of skulls. Jennifer spotted a mottled brown skull emerging from the neckline of a blue dressing gown right beside her and, on the path, a pair of bright pink dentures.
Her eyes flicked away from them quickly. It was just too much. She looked at the only safe place: the sky.
‘Oh God, I feel like I need to throw up.’
‘Do not look so closely then,’ he replied.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘That was where they rounded you up . . . ?’
Mohammed nodded. ‘I ran from there, then out of the village.’
‘What about family? Was there anybody else . . . ?’
‘I am lucky, I think. I have no family.’ He touched her arm lightly. ‘This is the village surgery. The pharmacy is inside.’
Leon opened the driver’s side door.
‘And just where do you think you’re going?’ Grace clucked imperiously.
‘Just going to take a look.’
‘Mom said you had to stay right here with me!’
‘You stay here. I’m not going far.’
He climbed out.
‘Leon!’
‘Hey! Relax! I’m just going to go take a look at the pond.’
‘Why?’ Her voice lost its scolding tone. ‘Leon, please don’t!’
‘I’m not going to touch anything! Just stay there. You’ll be fine.’
He left the door open, like a bank robber anticipating the need for a quick getaway, and made his way across the overgrown lawn towards the pond. He detoured slightly to get a closer look at a pile of clothing nearby.
It appeared to be the remains of someone young: sneakers, jeans . . . a football top that was once a canary yellow, now mostly mottled with dark patches, and a mop of wavy, brown, shoulder-length hair. It could have been a boy with Harry Styles hair, or a tomboy girl who liked her football. All he had to go on was clothes, bones and hair.
Where’s all the rest of him . . . her?
He’d witnessed Mr Mareham’s body reduced to a pool. He’d watched Eva and that guy, Greg, beginning to break down into that same liquid. Where did all that thick liquid go? He wondered if it had somehow dried out and become those white flakes, like dandelions turning from flowers to white puffs of seed? But not all of that liquid, surely? He wondered if it had just soaked into the ground, but there seemed to be no residue or anything else on the grass. It seemed that everything from this body that could be digested had been done so perfectly efficiently, and then apparently vanished . . . leaving behind nothing but bones.
It can’t have just evaporated, MonkeyNuts. It’s there . . . somewhere.
Leon nodded. He’d seen it up close. It wasn’t just a ‘dumb’ liquid. He was certain he’d witnessed it trickle with some kind of purpose, not simply following the grooves of wood, or the pull of gravity, but small rivulets of it moving deliberately towards other ones, reaching out for each other. Making connections.
It’s not evaporated or soaked away. It’s gone somewhere. He stood up and looked around, suddenly feeling vulnerable and exposed.
It’s hiding.
CHAPTER 28
There were bodies in the surgery’s waiting room. Not that Jennifer felt she could call them bodies; they were just clumps of clothes, no worse than the small piles of laundry Leon left lying around for her in his bedroom like cowpats in a field. In the corner she glimpsed a baby buggy and a pink snuggle-suit; she was too slow looking away to not register the little skull and its two dark orbital sockets staring back at her. Much of the floor of the waiting room was dotted with clothes and scarecrow bones. She stepped warily clear of each pile, examining the floor for the web-like tendrils of fluid.
‘Mohammed . . . where’s all that stuff gone?’
He nodded. Clearly he’d noticed that too. There was little to suggest these bodies had ever been anything more than bones and rags, save for a network of faint stains on the surgery’s corded carpet, snaking pencil-thin lines that radiated out from each body like old disused country roads, marking where the liquid had once been.
They made their way round the receptionist’s counter to a back room lined from floor to ceiling with partitioned shelves and pigeonhole compartments stuffed with small white packets and cartons of pills, many labelled with patient names.
‘We should get se
veral kinds of antibiotics for your daughter,’ he said as he pulled the cartons out one by one, reading the contents of each. ‘And also we should gather a selection of general-purpose antibiotics. Also analgesics of whichever kind you prefer. The brand is not important; it is the same whichever you choose.’
Jennifer started sorting through the boxes in the pigeonholes. ‘You seem to know a lot about medicines.’
‘I used to be a practising pharmacist,’ he replied.
‘Here?’
‘No, back in Syria.’
She looked at him. ‘I thought you said you came from Bangladesh?’
He shrugged. ‘Originally.’
‘Then you travelled there . . . ?’ She let the question be open and non-specific, but he nodded. He knew exactly what she was asking.
‘I went to help my brothers and sisters.’ He nodded solemnly. ‘Yes. I was there.’
‘Did you fight over there?’
He ignored her. Pulled out a cardboard box and emptied the contents on the floor. ‘Put what you find in here.’
‘Did you fight?’ The question came out sounding like a courtroom accusation.
‘No. I was just a medic.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Healing wounded terrorists?’
‘Healing wounded people.’ He turned to look at her. ‘It is all ancient history now, Mrs Button. Irrelevant. Now it is just the few of us who have survived that matter.’
‘Yes . . .’ She offered him a conciliatory smile. ‘You’re right.’
Leon squatted down at the edge of the duck pond and examined the water. Lily pads and a carpet of what looked like green algae rested on the still surface. He’d sat beside ponds before, the one in Central Park, for instance. The water’s surface there had rippled with activity: the wakes from radio-controlled boats, the ripples caused by ducks and geese paddling around and squabbling for hunks of bread tossed in.
The water here was as flat and still as a mirror. Even the breeze stirring the willow was doing little to cat’s-paw the surface. There were not even the faint expanding circles caused by dipping daddy-long-legses or paddling water-boatmen.
Silent. Still. Utterly lifeless.
He heard the van’s rear door slam shut and turned to see Grace making her way across the lawn towards him – steering widely round that one body.
‘Leon!’ she called out. ‘What are you doing?’
She pulled up a few metres short of the pond, wary of it, wary of the floating algae.
‘I thought there might be something left alive in the water,’ he sighed. ‘Fish or, you know, something.’
She was angry with him, but she was also curious. ‘Is there anything?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. I guess that means the seas have all been infected too.’ Made sense. Didn’t something like ninety per cent of the world’s living things hang out in water? The virus would have probably had a great time wreaking havoc in there.
‘You know what that means, don’t you, Grace?’
She nodded. ‘It’s got everywhere.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He’d been holding on to a fading hope that some day soon a UN relief force was going to appear out of the sky like a host of angels, squadrons of Chinooks kicking up dead leaves and dust, and spilling army boots on to the ground. But, if this virus was as effective at sea as it was on land, then not even a remote, far-flung island nation was going to have a chance of surviving. Not Tonga, not Hawaii, not Easter Island, maybe not even those dotted around research stations in the Antarctic.
‘We’re alone. Not even ocean-bound places like New Zealand will be left.’
‘Except for other people like us,’ she said.
‘Like us?’
‘Maybe, I don’t know, maybe . . . we really are immune to it?’
‘You, me, Mum and Mohammed?’ He settled down on his bottom and looked across at the willow tree.
‘There could be others too.’ She scratched at an itch at the end of her cast. ‘If we’re immune to the plague, then there have got to be others too, right? It can’t just be us left.’
They heard the pond stir. The gentlest ripple of water lapping a few centimetres up the dry mud beside his feet. He looked out across the pond and saw a second concentric ripple following the first; gentler, but distinctly there. He turned round to look at her.
‘Did you just throw something in?’
‘No.’
He looked up at the tree again. Perhaps the breeze had shaken a leaf or a seed pod loose. Then another ripple expanded in a circle from somewhere further along near the pond’s edge.
‘Shit,’ he uttered. He got off his butt and on to his feet, but stayed squatting at the pond’s edge. ‘Maybe something’s still alive in there?’
Grace took a couple of steps closer until she was standing just behind him. ‘I can’t see anything.’
He stood up to get a higher point of view. The water that he could see between the pads and algae was green and cloudy. He stared at it for a minute, willing another expanding circle of movement to help him pinpoint where he should be looking.
Then he saw it. The faintest flash of something pale near the surface. Just a glimpse then it was gone again.
‘It’s a fish!’ said Grace, excited. She’d spotted it too. The pale underbelly of some pond fish or similar. The sight of it pleased them both, and they shared a grin.
‘Maybe the sea is safe!’ said Leon.
‘Maybe we’re not alone, then?’ said Grace hopefully.
They heard Mum’s voice and turned. She was approaching the van with Mohammed, each of them holding a large cardboard box in their arms. ‘I told you two to stay in the van!!’ she bellowed at them across the green.
‘Mum!’ Leon waved his hand. ‘Come over here! You gotta see this!’
The two adults set their boxes down, hurried over and joined them standing by the edge of the village pond.
‘What is it?’ panted Mohammed, his face creased with concern.
‘It’s OK . . . nothing bad!’ Leon pointed down at the still surface of the pond. ‘Look!’
‘Leon . . . for God’s sake! And you as well, Grace!’ She shook her head angrily at her children. ‘I told you both to stay in the—’
‘Mom! The fish are still alive in there!’ said Grace.
That shut her up.
‘Alive?’ said Mohammed. ‘Are you sure?’
Just then another series of concentric circles rippled across the surface, and they all saw it, just for a fleeting second: the pale underbelly of a fish, the flutter of a dorsal fin and then it was gone again down into the murky depths.
‘Oh my God,’ gasped Mum. ‘Was that a carp?’
‘This . . . is very encouraging,’ said Mohammed slowly. ‘It means there is other life left. Certain species that could be unaffected.’
‘Exactly!’ said Leon.
They waited and watched for several minutes, but it seemed the carp had developed a sudden bout of stage fright and wasn’t going to make another appearance today.
‘That’s really great,’ said Mum. She rested a hand on both her children’s shoulders. ‘Sorry I shouted.’
‘That’s OK, Mom,’ said Grace. ‘We got some good news.’ She managed a wry smile. ‘Finally.’
‘We should head back,’ said Mohammed.
They turned away and went over to the van, Grace elaborating on Leon’s theory, as if it were all her own, that maybe the virus didn’t like water and that maybe that meant the virus was being kept at bay by the various seas and oceans around the world. That maybe other island nations, like New Zealand and Hawaii, were just fine.
They climbed back in the van, and with a grinding of gears and a lurching motion the van did a painfully slow five-point turn, bumping up over a kerb before heading back down the way it had come, engine whining in low-gear distress, and Little Buntingham was left once more to its tranquil peace.
The breeze gently stirred the willow tree and it swished in response. Scudding clouds al
lowed a break in their relentless grey lid. Blue sky showed and sunlight fleetingly dappled this peaceful rural idyll. Picture perfect, if unnaturally quiet. No birdsong, no buzzing of dozy bees, no distant church bells or the humming of a groundsman’s lawnmower. There was just the rustle of a breeze and the stirring of the willow.
Several beams of cloudy sunlight, filtered green by the algae, lanced down into the depths of the murky pond and rested momentarily on the back of the stage-shy carp.
Only it wasn’t a carp. At best, it was a clumsy, malformed approximation of one: a fish scrawled by some talentless child with a crayon.
A best guess at a fish.
It was an attempt by a coalition of several billion cells to assemble the DNA fragments they’d gathered from the myriad creatures that had been absorbed in this cloudy little universe into a working model. An ambitious project by their microcosmic standards. Lesser ‘projects’ had been attempted with various degrees of success, floating single-cell life forms, various invertebrates . . . DNA templates that were modest by comparison.
Seven hours ago – ‘decades’ by the timescale of entities as microscopic as these – an almost believable facsimile of a pond snail had been remade. Simple in structure, simple in locomotion, simple in thought. The successful assembly of an almost complete species genome from the fragments ‘stolen’ as the virus had rampaged and looted its way across the pond microcosmic centuries ago.
Baby steps, microcosm milestones.
Scaling up to the level of humankind, the almost convincing pond snail was like mankind’s first successful flying machine, a fragile construct of balsa wood and bicycle parts . . . the misshapen carp, the first successful satellite in orbit.
If microscopic intelligence could have cheered, popped champagne corks and lit cigars as it regarded the fish, it would have. Instead it just stored at a chemical level the data as sequences of DNA, a record of the successful expression of the genome, another one to add to this colony’s small but growing library of viable species templates.
And started again.
CHAPTER 29
28.05.17
Dad, where are you now? Have you found a survival bunker like us? Are you sitting pretty at the top of some New England lighthouse with crates of food and bottles of water and a shortwave radio? I know you’re alive. You’re probably doing the whole I Am Legend thing, right? You think you’re Will Smith. Ha ha.
