by Rob Aspinall
23
Frenzy
We moved. Not with the herd, but across the road. Down a side street and out onto another main road. It was more of the same. Mass panic. Hard to tell who was fleeing and who was chasing. But some of them were infected for sure. They were running, shrieking and jumping on commuters, tourists and locals alike. Pulling them down to the floor and tearing into them like predators taking down prey.
It was a bloodbath. And there was nothing we could do but run. To get the hell out of Dodge.
But how? The streets were jammed. The underground would be a lottery at best—even if it was still running.
“How about the train station?” I said.
“Too far,” Inge said. “Keep moving until we find a quiet street.”
As we ran, an infected leapt off a car bonnet and took me down. Ling stopped and karate kicked it in the face. Its neck snapped. She pulled me to my feet.
“I owe you one,” I said.
“You owe me two,” she said.
We ran after Inge. I heard chopper rotors in the sky. A dark-blue jet helicopter landing on the roof of a high-rising glass office block.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Up there!”
Inge and Ling glanced up to where I was pointing, high to our left, a couple of blocks down. No debate needed. That was our target.
We cut through the streets, running against the tide. People were turning and attacking the uninfected left, right and centre. Tactical police were already out on the street in full body armour. They jumped out of vans and prepped their automatic rifles.
Inge swotted a rabid guy in a suit away.
Ling scooped up a discarded crash helmet and swiped an infected woman in the face. The helmet smashed her jaw to pieces.
I body-swerved two as they tried to jump on me.
I looked over my shoulder to check my six and saw we had other problems.
The Big Bad Wolf was back on his feet and on our tail.
As we passed through the police, one of the officers held a rifle out for a team mate to take. I snatched it off him and hooked it over a shoulder. I looked behind me and saw Philippe do the same. I prepped the rifle as we ran and blasted a trio of infecteds out of the way of Inge and Ling.
We weaved through abandoned traffic and hit the pavement to our left. The road cleared, but a red double-decker bus came barrelling towards us from the right.
It ploughed through infecteds and normals alike.
The three of us skidded to a stop. The bus slammed straight into a building a few feet in front of us. We ducked low, arms over heads as concrete debris flew everywhere.
The bus blocked our path and gave Philippe the chance to catch up. I let off an automatic round in his general direction. He darted away behind an overturned silver Bentley.
We moved to the right. Glass rained down overhead as infecteds hurled themselves through the top deck windows.
I shot an infected pensioner as she dropped, the power of the round blowing her sideways.
Another two missed us by a whisker, hitting the road with a smack and snapping at our heels.
Philippe came out of hiding, chasing us up the street with gunfire.
We were almost there—the entrance to the office tower.
Inge stopped dead in her tracks. She put an arm out and held me and Ling back.
A rush of bodies broke out of the building. Screaming, crying, turning, biting, an absolute mess. We let them pass before heading inside, across a blood-stained lobby.
There were more infecteds inside. A few crawling their way into their diseased new life. A couple ramming their heads into the walls.
Suddenly, Helicopter Plan didn’t seem like such a good idea. We headed to the lifts anyway. Inge pushed the button. One of them was working. It opened. Two office workers inside on the floor. Streaks of blood up and down the mirrors.
We jumped in the lift.
I heard a small yapping sound echoing across the lobby. Oh no, a scruffy little white dog, tied to the leg of a steel bench fixed against the far wall.
The owner was an old woman in a beige raincoat, down and spasming. Infecteds heard the dog. They turned towards it.
Me and Ling looked at each other.
“What?” Inge said, sensing the unspoken.
“We can’t leave it,” I said.
Ling stepped out into the lobby. “Cover me,” she said.
I nodded and stepped out with her.
“What are you doing?” Inge said. “We haven’t got time.”
“Hold the lift,” I said, following Ling out.
Ling ran across the lobby, fly-kicked an infected security guard and spin-kicked a blonde woman in a blood-soaked white blouse. She bent down to free the dog. Two more infecteds sprang out of nowhere. I mowed them down, the sound of gunfire echoing all over the lobby.
“Come on,” a usually-cool Inge said.
Ling freed the dog. It sprinted away.
“No, come back!” Ling yelled in Chinese.
The dog obviously didn't speak the lingo. It flew through the entrance and away across the street.
Coming the other way was Philippe. He entered the lobby at speed. We traded fire.
Ling made it past me into the lift. Inge pulled me back by the scruff of the neck and hit the button to close the doors.
As the doors slid shut, bullets made metal bumps on the inside.
Inge shook her head at the pair of us.
“What?” we both said.
In the meantime, the numbers rolled upward. I jigged on the spot. There were two people slumped against the back wall of the lift. I thought they were dead. They began to wake up. To moan. To lurch up off their backs, all crooked and broken.
“Oh shut up,” Inge said, putting a silencer round in both of them—instant kill shots between the eyes. The infecteds slid back down. The lift doors opened on the top floor. The brown carpet was thick. The windowed offices sparkling and the furniture designer leather.
We hurried along the corridor and found a door at the far end.
I heard the distant beep of a second lift. I turned to see Philippe whirling out into the corridor with his rifle. We slipped through the door in the nick of time—high-powered ammo cutting the door to splinters.
But we were already halfway up the stairs. Into the sun and the sky and the wind of the roof of the building. The jet helicopter idled, ready. A man and woman in suits led by a bodyguard to the rear of the chopper. Pilot waving them on from the cockpit window.
We made up ground, but we may have left it too late.
There was a building rubbing shoulders with the tower. Three storeys taller. And it was spilling over with people. In the near distance, they hit the deck of our roof. A couple breaking their legs.
Infecteds threw themselves off after them. They landed in the same heap, but they didn’t feel pain, or care about broken bones.
So we moved faster still across the rooftop. I glanced over my shoulder. Saw the rooftop door opening.
I stopped and turned, rattled the door with rifle fire, pinning Philippe down. I back-pedalled towards the chopper. Inge had the pilot at gunpoint. Ling took on the bodyguard with one hand. Subdued him in less than a second. She pushed him in and held the door open. Inge and Ling climbed in as Philippe broke out of the rooftop door. I hesitated to shoot. He ran towards me, ready to fire. But he was jumped by an infected office worker.
Philippe knocked the man off him with his rifle butt.
Yet another three of them piled in, like pigeons on a dropped kebab.
Inge screamed at me to get on the chopper. I backed up to the door.
Philippe shot two of the infected off him, but two more jumped into the fight. I saw him click empty.
Inge stared beyond me, to Philippe. She shook off whatever it was she was feeling. “We have to go, now!”
I ignored her, sprinting away from the chopper and across the roof. I went for precision. Single rounds. Double-taps to the head.
One, two, three, I blew the infecteds off Philippe.
I switched to automatic and took out another pair of them scrambling his way.
Philippe was on his knees, waiting for a bullet that wouldn’t come.
I turned and ran to the chopper. Climbed onboard. The door still open as the pilot lifted off the helipad. Philippe stared up at me. I stared at Philippe.
He jumped to his feet and took off across the roof. The helicopter peeled away to the right. On the streets below, I saw ants doing battle. Sirens flashing and wailing. Fires burning. Mass screaming. A train coming off its rails and smashing into a platform. Three more helicopters taking off across the city.
I closed the door and set the rifle down on my lap. I stared at the other three passengers, facing backwards at the three of us. The burly Arab bodyguard. A grey-haired man in an expensive suit. A blonde woman with hair tied up in a charcoal trouser number.
Not one of us said a word.
The world had just ended.
Not a whole lot else to say.
24
A Trip To The Movies
I sit in a grey, windowless box of a room. I’m strapped into a chair. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The chair is leather and tilted back, my feet off the floor. My head against a headrest. It’s gloomy in here. A bald man in glasses in a lab coat appears by my side. He jabs me in the neck with some kind of shot. A clear serum in an injector pen.
I start to feel woozy.
He fixes some kind of weird, wiry shower cap to my head. Attaches electrodes. Squeezes in some tingling blue gel. I realise it’s a crude version of the things that mad Dutch doctor strapped on us in Alaska.
“This will allow us to read and manipulate his brainwave patterns,” Lab Coat says to someone.
I turn to the left to see the man from Barcelona—the professor-type—standing over me, like he’s observing. “Is he ready?” he says.
Lab Coat shines a light in my eyes. Checks my pulse. “He’s ready.”
The two men leave the room by a side door. I hear it lock shut with bolts on the other side. The lights in the room drop to darkness. I sit there for a few minutes, then bam. The whole room lights up with sounds and images. The sound is like a pneumatic drill and white noise that gets inside your bones. The images are almost blinding at first. They pulse and flash. All three walls that I can see lighting up like giant movie screens. Even the ceiling. Some are abstract—laser lines making shapes and moving to the sound. Others, of random crap like blood and cows and sky and TV static and hooded figures moving through trees. Then wolves and sharks and nuclear bombs and before I know it, I’m in some kind of trance.
Then I snap straight out of it. Into another featureless room. At a steel, screwed-down table. The professor guy showing me ink drawings, playing word association. Another session taking a written exam. Multiple-choice questions circled with a red pencil.
Then all kinds of weird questions with a video camera pointed square at me. A woman in a lab coat sat off to one side, watching a computer monitor.
Oh, and did I mention the lie detector they've got me hooked up to?
The professor-type shows me a polaroid picture of a teenage Inge. Looks like I took a picture of her on the Rio beach. She’s smiling with the sun in her hair. Blue eyes twinkling like the sea. Skin tanned and smooth. A cute, white smile.
To look at her, you’d say catalogue model rather than psycho-killer.
The man in the lab coat tells me she’s dead. That she died during her reconditioning.
As I look at the photo I feel nothing. I mean, I feel something. But teenage Philippe is a blank slate. Like, you could have shown him a photo of a brick. He’d have had the same reaction.
They study my eye movement.
The woman looks at the screen. Nods to Lab Coat. They pack up and go, but leave behind a contract and pen attached to a clipboard. The professor-type leaves with them. Then I hear him speak over a hidden PA system in the room. “Congratulations Ricardo, you're now ready for deployment . . . Full Type A credentials.”
“I’m free to go?” I ask the room.
“Yes,” the man says. “But first, we’d like you to sign your terms of employment.”
I scan through the wording on the page.
“You’ll notice clause seventeen is a new amendment to the contract,” he says.
I turn to clause seventeen. It reads:
All forms of romantic relationships, marriages, children or other associated activities are strictly forbidden. Any contravention of these laws will be viewed with extreme prejudice by the committee.
“Do you understand what that means?” the man asks.
“Yes,” I say, moving to the bottom of the contract. I pick up the pen and sign. “Now what?” I ask.
“Return to your room and await further instructions.”
I get up. Push the chair under the table.
“Oh and one more thing, Ricardo,” the man says. “You’re not Ricardo anymore.”
I open the door and step out into a corridor. I look to my left. A few doors down, Inge steps out of a room, too. We look at each other, empty of emotion. We turn and walk in opposite directions.
Whatever we had, it’s over.
25
While The World Burns
The Italian Riviera had to be the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. And I’d seen plenty since joining the fight against JPAC. The seas were a sparkling cyan-blue. The beaches a sandy white. The coastline high and rocky. The mansions multicoloured. And the designer label streets lined with Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
So then, what better place to watch society tear itself apart than one of Alex’s dad’s old holiday homes?
The truth is, it was the nearest safe place to London. And as yet untouched by the madness.
Needless to say, the pad was eye-poppingly awesome.
Surrounded by snooker-table lawns, it was a mustard-yellow villa built on the cliff-face. It looked out over a private stretch of beach. It had a shimmering outdoor pool and a giant sun terrace.
Inside, it was a palace. A dozen bedrooms, limestone floors and big antique sofas that swallowed you whole. A giant flatscreen TV played out the devastation on the wall opposite. We gathered around to watch it.
Me, Alex, Inge, Ling, Roni. And oh yeah, our two new data hackers, Giles and Zak.
The TV coverage was blanket. Every news channel you could think of streaming live and recorded footage.
And the virus wasn't contained to London, the UK or Europe. It was sweeping the world faster than Pokémon Go.
“What the hell happened?” I said. “The virus should have died with Dahl.”
“We broke the rest of the data on our way over,” Giles said. “Jasper Dahl was a ploy to get you all in the same place.”
“So Philippe could kill us,” I said.
“Either him or the first wave of the virus," Inge said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Siberia was a set-up, too.”
“A long-term play?” I asked.
“Think about it,” Giles said, conspiracy engines winding up. “First they take old committee members out of the loop, seal the chain of true information. Next, they throw them a few fake worms.”
“Like, hey, there’s a butt-load of data to be had in Uzbekistan,” Roni said.
“Exactly,” Giles said, sharing a smile with Roni. “They know you’re assassinating the likes of Teddy Tucker anyway, so they let it happen. After all, it plugs a leak in their organisation.” Giles continued. “Then comes Mexico City. Philippe’s taken out of the game and reconditioned.”
“Peter and his MI6 friends are taken out, too,” I said.
“And so would you have been,” Giles said, “had Ling not intervened.”
“And what are the chances they have drone surveillance in Wilmington?" Roni said.
“I thought bank security was loose,” Inge said, nodding to herself. “They let us take the money so we could finance the Siberia hack.”
“Making it
look legit,” Roni said. She slapped Giles hard on the arm. "You're a smart guy.”
Giles smiled, waited until Roni wasn't looking and rubbed his arm.
“So that’s why they had Philippe deployed as emergency response?” I said. “They set the whole thing up?”
“At every stage, they’ve had a plan in place,” Inge said. “To pick us off. Kill our operation.”
“And we’ve been playing right into their hands,” I said, pushing up off the sofa. I paced in frustration. “All the angles covered. Always ahead.”
“Nadia's smarter than I thought,” Inge said.
“No shit,” Zak said, slouched and yawning on the sofa.
“Much smarter than Nathan Moore,” Inge continued.
“Don’t even speak his name,” I said. “He’s still top of my kill list.”
Giles looked at Zak. Zak at Giles.
“What?” I said.
“We found something in the files,” Giles said.
“Didn’t you know?” Inge said.
“Know what?” I asked.
“The guy got popped a while ago,” Roni said, perching herself on a sofa arm close to Giles.
“He what?” I said.
As if London hadn’t been enough of a rug-puller. Now this. I thought it would have felt different. Felt good to know that piece of crap was in the ground. But I felt—empty.
“How?” I asked.
“Your friend, Philippe,” Zak said, pulling an imaginary trigger at his own head.
I blew out my cheeks and flopped back onto the sofa. The large yellow cushions sucked me in, my feet not even touching the floor.
Meanwhile, the scenes on the news were unbelievable. Helicopter shots of a feeding frenzy. Phone camera videos of people raging against the windows of sealed-up buildings. A world map of the known spread, with ‘hot zones’ in London, Beijing. New York, Mumbai . . . I mean, you could go on and on. X21 was eating through the global population. Millions already infected. Some said up to a billion or more.
Giles hopped through the channels. Some were conservative—calling it a pandemic. Others labelled it a zombie apocalypse. It was neither. But everyone was giving it the same name: The FM Virus. It stood for Four Minutes, the time it took a person to catch and turn. Though from past experience, I could have told them it depended on size, fitness and number of bites.
