by Louise Voss
Paul leaned forward. ‘What was the message you tried to get through, Mr Diaz?’
‘Doctor Diaz. This virus, it’s not a flu but a new variation of a virulent African virus called Watoto. As soon as I heard the first news reports and learned about the symptoms, I suspected Watoto. And then the guards and the other prisoners here started to get sick and I carried out some tests.’
‘Tests?’
‘I have certain privileges here. A colour TV. A supply of books and journals. And a good microscope and some basic lab equipment in my room. One of the sick COs let me take a blood sample from him. There’s no question: it’s Watoto. We called it Watoto MR. Today they’re calling it Watoto-X2.’
‘And this is the virus you were testing on employees at Medi-Lab?’ Paul asked.
‘Yes … well, it’s more complicated than that. But essentially, yes. It was one of the viruses we tested. I tried to alert the authorities days ago. And now here you are, finally!’ His bitter laugh echoed round the room. ‘Over two decades I’ve been in this goddamn place, with the most pathetic equipment, when I could have achieved so much. All I can do now is play with common cold samples, if I am lucky enough to catch one, and read research papers. It’s funny, for years I tried not to think about Medi-Lab – it made me too angry, after the way Mangold betrayed me. It seemed our research was doomed to remain in the dark, forgotten. Then a few months ago I read a fascinating paper by an Englishwoman about Watoto. I thought, at last, somebody else is going to discover the cure. She’s going to find the satellite.’
Paul sat up straight. ‘You mean Kate Maddox?’
‘Yes. Do you know of her?’
‘She’s my girlfriend.’
Diaz clapped his hands together. ‘My, my. The plot thickens, no? And where is your brilliant ladyfriend now?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Harley quietly.
Paul felt fear and nausea fill his body again. ‘Hold on, did you say somebody else is about to discover the cure? You mean, somebody as well as you?’
Diaz stared at them impassively, as if challenging them to disbelieve him.
Paul and Harley both leaned across the table. Paul said, ‘And does anyone else know it? Does Mangold know?’
Diaz pulled a disgusted face. ‘Yes. He does. But it was me who discovered the cure. I was the first one to test it – on myself. Years ago.’
‘And do you remember how to create it?’
‘Of course I do! I am not senile.’
‘This is incredible,’ Paul said. ‘You need to tell us. We need to get something into production straight away.’
Diaz sat back and laced his fingers. ‘I can do that, certainly. But I have two conditions. First, I must be released from this place. I want my freedom.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Johnston said.
Diaz shot him a look of contempt. ‘Maybe I should wait until you’re all dead, then I can take the keys from your body and let myself out. I’m immune. Watoto could wipe out half the world, but I will survive. I don’t have many years left and I want to spend them as a free man.’
‘OK,’ said Paul. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Hang on,’ Harley protested. ‘We can’t—’
‘What choice have we got?’
Johnston, sitting quietly beside Diaz, nodded in agreement.
‘What’s the second condition?’ Harley asked.
‘I want you to take me to Charles Mangold. Now.’
43
Rosie and Lucy trudged in silence along the side of the Ventura Highway. They had been walking all day, and the sun was setting. Nobody had stopped for them, and no police cars had passed by. Rosie’s mind raced constantly; should they stay out of sight or keep going? They were targets for muggers and looters, their hands already conveniently bound behind their backs – or would it be better to try and attract attention, to get help? They had nothing worth stealing, no money, jewellery, phones; nothing. She kept glancing at Lucy, her heart bursting at the shock and trauma etched on her daughter’s features.
‘At least we’re together, baby,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you were going through this without me.’
At that moment, Rosie sneezed, and it was as if the sneeze short-circuited her brain, scrambling all the signals as though her thoughts were a mass of tangled wires. For a second the ground tilted beneath her and a flood of nausea washed over her. Unable to steady herself, she stumbled and fell to her knees.
‘Mom? Are you OK?’
Confused, Rosie nodded and staggered back up, waiting for her head to clear. She swallowed bile; cold sweat drenching her. ‘I’m fine. But we have to get this damn tape off our wrists.’
‘I bet people would stop if we could wave at them. But we can’t,’ said Lucy in a small voice as they made their way right to the edge of the freeway for the twentieth time that day. There was very little traffic, just the occasional laden-down car heading out of town to join the queues of people trying to get out of the city.
‘There’s a ramp over there,’ Rosie said, dipping her chin in the direction of the interchange ahead. ‘Let’s head for that and pray that someone will stop for us when they come off the freeway.’
‘Nobody has yet,’ said Lucy miserably. As they staggered along, shoulder to shoulder as it was the only way they could touch, she kept looking across at her mother.
‘Mom … are you sick?’
Lucy’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. Rosie opened her mouth to reply, and found she couldn’t speak for a few moments.
‘I don’t feel too good,’ she confessed, and Lucy stopped in horror, tears jumping to her eyes.
‘You have the virus!’
‘No, baby, I’m sure it’s just stress,’ Rosie mumbled. ‘Or hay fever … You know I always get hay fever around now.’ But her legs were so weak and unsteady it was as if her kneecaps had been removed. ‘I’m so tired. I need to lie down for a while,’ she admitted.
Lucy looked around for somewhere to rest, her shoulders shaking with sobs. ‘Don’t you dare die on me,’ she howled suddenly. ‘I don’t have anyone else!’
Men’s voices rang out from the nearby slip road. ‘Oh, thank God,’ Rosie said, ‘Come on, we can get help.’
They forged forward, one last push, thought Rosie – but then stopped short. There was indeed a group of men, seven or eight of them, all white, in their thirties, incongruously dressed in smart business suits. Or at least the suits would have been smart when they’d first donned them – well over a day ago, by the looks of them. Now they were ripped and dirty, and Rosie saw a patina of vomit all down one man’s tailored jacket. They weaved up the ramp, in the middle of the street, singing angrily, several of them swigging openly from bottles of what looked like bourbon. They were all very drunk – but they were the first people Rosie had seen all day.
‘Excuse me,’ called Lucy, a moment before Rosie, who was beginning to have a bad feeling about this group of men, could stop her. ‘Please could you help us?’
They all stopped as one at the sound of her voice, and turned to look. There was a mixture of expressions on their faces: rage, bewilderment, hopelessness, inebriation. Rosie’s knees were trembling so badly she could barely stand, and it wasn’t just the onset of her fever.
‘Help you?’ The first man squinted at her. ‘Why should we help you? Maybe you can help us, though …’ He turned and made a lewd gesture to the others, and they all laughed – the sort of futile laughter that was closest to tears.
‘See, the thing is,’ he said, coming closer, ‘we got nobody we have to be good for, not anymore. Wives, girlfriends – they’re gone. Our kids too. Most of the other guys in the neighbourhood. Even my fucking boss is dead.’
Lucy backed away. ‘Have you got the flu?’
‘Not yet we don’t. But we will. We all will. So we thought we’d have ourselves one final party, didn’t we, boys?’
The ‘boys’ cheered weakly.
‘And what do we need at a party,
besides booze – which we already got?’ He appealed once more to his friends.
‘GIRLS!’ they roared, pressing in closer to Rosie and Lucy, close enough that they could smell the alcohol on their breath and the bitterness in their hearts.
‘Hey, boys,’ said Rosie, putting on her brightest smile although her head was pounding and her throat felt as though she had gargled razorblades. ‘We’ll party with you, won’t we, honey?’ She raised her eyebrows at Lucy, widening her eyes to implore her daughter to go along with it. ‘But first we need you to cut this tape off our wrists. And if any of you has any Advil, I’d sure appreciate it. We can’t party with our hands tied, and we got mugged back there. I got a headache. So, do us a favour, eh, and maybe we’ll see our way to getting into the party spirit for you?’
The men, swaying, looked at one another. Rosie swallowed hard. She had just invited a group of eight drunk, desperate men to produce a knife and approach them with it. Men with a death wish, who wanted sex. But what choice did she have? They were unlikely to run into anyone better. Besides, thought Rosie grimly, if she really did have the flu, then meeting her end at the sharp point of a drunken banker’s knife was probably a less painful way to die.
‘Cool,’ said the man with vomit on his jacket. He walked up to Lucy and stroked her face, then the breast that Heather had threatened to cut off. ‘You’re pretty,’ he said. He was bald on top, and the jacket seemed too big for him.
‘She’s sixteen years old.’ Rosie had to grit her teeth to stop herself spitting at him. She wished with all her heart that she had never set eyes on Paul. If she hadn’t, then she and Lucy would be holed up in their house, doors and windows locked, eating canned tuna and waiting for it all to go away. Not out here by the side of a freeway, about to be raped. Lucy’s eyes were like saucers and she was shaking all over. Rosie almost wished they were still with Heather. At least there was only one of her.
Rosie sneezed, once, twice, three times and then, to her horror, vomited a stream of pale bile at the man’s feet. He recoiled in disgust, despite the fact that he’d already thrown up over himself.
‘Oh my God,’ said one of the others. ‘Look at her. She got the flu!’
‘Fuck! She got the flu!’ they chorused, backing away immediately.
‘Wait,’ called Rosie, a dribble of vomit running down her chin. She wiped it on her shoulder. ‘Please, wait!’
But they had all run away, their silence more chilling than their shouting had been.
‘We’re going to die,’ said Lucy. ‘We’re actually going to die.’
Rosie mustered up her last reserves of strength to reply firmly: ‘No, we are not. We are going to find somewhere we can rest. We’ve been walking for hours and I need to sleep a while. I don’t have the flu, I’m just tired and my head hurts from when that insane woman hit me.’
They turned and walked at a right angle to the freeway until they came to a residential street, low shabby houses with junk-strewn front yards and beaten-up cars on blocks outside. ‘Over there,’ Rosie said, gesturing to a For Sale sign. ‘God, who would buy that dump? But it looks empty. Come on.’
There was not a soul in sight as Rosie and Lucy went round to the rear of the boarded-up house. ‘Can you kick this door in, Luce? I don’t have the energy.’
Lucy narrowed her eyes at the flimsy back door. Her first kick bounced off it, and she growled in frustration.
‘Imagine it’s Sister Heather,’ Rosie said, managing a faint smile. Lucy tried again, three times harder, and the door splintered and swung open.
‘Good girl.’ Rosie kissed her daughter’s cheek, and they stepped into a dingy, damp-smelling kitchen. Rosie closed the back door by reaching behind her with her tied hands. She opened the kitchen drawers the same way, but they were all empty, as was the whole house. ‘Damn. I thought there might be a knife or some scissors. Looks like we’re stuck with this tape. Let’s go lie down a while, OK, honey? We’ll have a sleep and then decide what to do.’
‘I have to pee,’ said Lucy miserably. ‘Will you help me?’
With difficulty, they both used the bathroom, and then curled up on the dusty carpet of one of the empty bedrooms, falling into a restless sleep almost immediately.
44
Riley had been really, really angry, and Jack and Bradley had both cried till snot ran out of their noses. When Riley had finally stopped yelling at them, Bradley had explained about Jack’s mom being a doctor working in a lab in California, and that she had a cure for the flu so, even if their dad had caught it, she could give him a shot and make him better. But it didn’t make Riley any less mad.
‘For fuck’s sake, you little twats,’ Riley said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke in their faces. ‘Don’t you have any idea how big California is? Plus, no one has found a cure for Indian flu, so if Dad has got it, he’s basically screwed. You two have totally messed up this trip, you realise? If I take you home, I’ve wasted two days gas money and travel time. But getting you to this lab could add two days on the other side! Jeez. Whereabouts is it, anyways? I guess I’ll have to take you there, and then your mom can look after you – if she doesn’t have me arrested for child abduction or some shit like that.’
Jack and Bradley, heads hung low, were still snivelling. ‘California,’ said Bradley.
‘Duh – I got that. Whereabouts?’
‘I don’t know, ’zactly,’ Jack confessed. ‘On top of a mountain, she said.’
Riley laughed mirthlessly. ‘Why does that not surprise me?’
‘California didn’t look that big on the map,’ Bradley protested, hiccupping.
‘Well, it is, shit-for-brains. It’s huge. What’s the name of the lab? I could Google it.’
The boys looked at one another.
‘Um,’ Jack said. ‘My dad said it’s a secret lab.’
Riley rolled his eyes and took a savage drag of his cigarette. ‘Right. Great. Fan-fucking-tastic. So how did you think you’d find it?’
‘I was going to ring Mummy to tell her we’re coming. I know her number.’ Jack had rallied slightly, and adopted an I’m not completely stupid, you know expression. But Riley seemed to think otherwise.
‘And speaking of your dad, what in hell have you told him about where you are?’
Jack puffed out his chest. ‘I left him a note telling him that I’d gone to visit Mummy, with you and Bradley.’
‘Ri-ight. Sheesh. This gets better and better. Your dad will tear my balls off and feed them to the dogs if he ever sees me again.’
‘He doesn’t have any dogs,’ Bradley pointed out helpfully, as Riley took out his cellphone and rang his mother. He told her that he was coming back with the boys, and they both started to cry again.
‘Don’t take us back, Riley,’ Bradley begged, once Riley had terminated the call.
Riley narrowed his eyes at his little brother. ‘I haven’t decided what to do with you yet,’ he said darkly. ‘Just gettin’ the old girl off our backs for now. Chill the fuck out.’
‘I need to go next door and get Jack,’ Vernon said, once he had put the weak and traumatised Shirley straight to bed. They had spent an uncomfortable two days in the hospital, Shirley hooked up to an IV drip. Sedated and miserable, she gave no reply but simply turned her head to the wall and fell asleep.
Vernon stopped in the driveway and picked up his mail, with Jack’s note on top of the pile. He read it incredulously, the blood draining from his face as he saw the words ‘going to California’. He gave a great bellow of anxiety and charged up to Gina’s front door, pounding hard on it.
‘Gina! GINA! Why didn’t you tell me! Where are they? Have you called the police? Gina!’
Gina answered the door and Vernon pushed past her into the hall. She looked tiny and shrunken, like a raisin, even more red-eyed and vague than usual. He wanted to slap her. While she’d sat here getting stoned, her kids – and his – had hared off across the country into the heart of a killer epidemic. He grabbed her by the shoulders
and shouted into her face.
‘HAVE YOU CALLED THE POLICE?’
‘Hey, Vernon, it’s OK,’ she said, startled out of her torpor. ‘Relax, they’re fine. Really. I just talked to Riley, he’s on his way back.’
Vernon sank down on to the bottom stair, his head in his hands.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Gina sat down next to him, her wide hips touching his, which immediately made him leap up again like a scalded cat. He remembered, too late, how she had always had a problem with over-familiarity.
‘Honey,’ she said, standing too and rubbing the side of his arm in a way that made him twitch with discomfort, ‘You were in the hospital with Shirley. You had enough on your plate. The kids will be fine with Riley, I swear.’
‘How old is he again? Twenty?’
‘Seventeen. But, like, a totally mature seventeen.’
‘I want to speak to him,’ he said belligerently.
‘Sure.’ Gina floated across to the telephone. ‘Go easy, though, Vernon – he didn’t know that the boys had come with him. He found them hiding in the Airstream when he took a comfort break.’ She dialled a number and handed the receiver to Vernon.
Vernon clamped the phone against his ear, fuming as the ringtone turned into a voice message. The fact that the receiver smelled of patchouli enraged him further. ‘Hey, losers, it’s Riley. Leave me a motherfuckin’ message and I might get back to you. Or maybe I got better things to do …’
‘Riley? This is Jack’s father, Vernon. I do not appreciate you taking my eight-year-old son on an insane road trip into the heart of an epidemic that is probably killing thousands of people a day.’ He tried to rein in his anger and frustration, but failed miserably. ‘Now you listen to me, and listen to me good: Jack had better be back here by tonight, or you will be in serious trouble, do you understand? So you turn that heap of metal crap right around and get back here NOW.’
He slammed down the phone and clenched his fists.
Gina shook her head slowly. ‘Not cool, Vernon. I told you: Riley didn’t know Jack had stowed away.’
