Extinction Game

by Gary Gibson

  ‘From who?’ I asked. ‘Red Harvest?’

  ‘Who else?’ Floyd gave me a look. ‘Which brings me to why I’m here.’

  ‘Ah.’ I looked down at my steak tartare. ‘No such thing as a free lunch, right?’

  He smiled at that. ‘Just before GreenTech’s directors went before the board of inquiry, some gene cultures went missing.’

  ‘You think Marlon and Herschel took them?’

  The way he looked at me made me wonder if he’d had special training in how to make people feel there was nothing they could possibly hide. ‘That’s my belief, yes.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘That’s where you come in. Your calendar is free for the next five weeks. You’re not due to take part in another consultation until at least March, and you won’t even have to travel that far from home.’

  How do you know all that? I almost asked him, then let it go. I had the same, unsettling feeling I’d had when Floyd had first remade my acquaintance.

  I promised to make careful enquiries. I tracked down another former colleague from GreenTech, with Floyd’s help. From him, I learned that the missing cultures had been ordered to be destroyed. Perhaps Marlon and Herschel had indeed done this, but Floyd clearly thought otherwise.

  The third and last time I met with Floyd was in a pub we had often frequented, and which was still popular with other American students studying at Oxford. I had taken the train up, hoping this might be the last time Floyd required my services.

  ‘Marlon and Herschel have set up a regular little home from home not far from here,’ he told me. We were in a garden area at the rear of the pub, a wooden table and a half-finished shepherd’s pie separating us. ‘A farmhouse, set back from the road in the middle of a couple of acres.’ He sipped at his latte. ‘Nice place, too.’

  ‘Last time I spoke to you, they’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.’

  ‘We think they had prepared identities,’ he replied. ‘Ones they could just walk into when things got too hot.’

  I laughed uneasily. ‘This is all getting a bit James Bond for me.’

  He regarded me stonily. ‘This is all quite serious, Jerry.’

  ‘And you really still think they’re working on these . . . these cultures they stole?’

  ‘They’ve been ordering lots of specialist equipment,’ he explained, ‘through shell companies. It took a great deal of work to trace them. That kind of thing takes an enormous amount of planning.’

  ‘You’re talking about Red Harvest again, aren’t you?’

  He raised his shoulders, then let them fall again. ‘Red Harvest is wealthy,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a lot of rich members. Marlon and Herschel couldn’t manage all this on their own. The question is, how far along are they with what they’re planning?’

  ‘What are they planning, Floyd?’ I shook my head. ‘You never made it clear.’

  ‘We don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s what we don’t know that worries us.’

  ‘That makes absolutely no sense.’

  ‘Let me describe the equipment they’ve been ordering through those shell companies: incubation units; HEPA filters; lab equipment and sterilizing equipment; hazmat gear. What does that suggest to you, other than that they’re growing bugs on behalf of their nut-job religion?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘GreenTech vetted everyone. There were psychological tests, batteries of them. If Marlon and Herschel really were that crazy, it would have shown up.’

  ‘You can learn how to pass those tests,’ he said, with such an air of authority I hesitated at pursuing it further.

  ‘If you’re so sure about all this,’ I insisted, desperation edging into my voice, ‘why don’t you just go in there and arrest them?’

  It was Floyd’s turn to hesitate. ‘There’ve been some fuck-ups. Technically, we don’t yet have the necessary clearance or authority to be operating in the UK.’ He glanced around in the most furtive manner possible. ‘The thing is, time is running out, and I don’t know if we can wait much longer.’

  Then it dawned on me. ‘You’re not supposed to be here at all, are you?’

  ‘I need to get in there,’ he said, ‘and see just what they’re up to. But you’re the expert in this kind of thing. I want you to come with me and take a look at whatever set-up they have running in there.’

  ‘You mean . . . break in?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

  The ‘farmhouse’ turned out to be a former hotel on a hillside on the outskirts of town, set back among concealing trees at the end of a long, private road. Officially, the farmhouse belonged to a local startup looking to harvest graduates from the university. I listened to all this, and tried to ignore the small voice in the back of my head that kept wondering if this wasn’t all some wild delusional fantasy Floyd had dreamed up. But then, if it hadn’t been for his warning about the audit . . .

  I listened to Floyd as we drove out to the farmhouse in his rented Land Rover. He spoke of a threat of biological Armageddon I could scarcely credit. He was right, of course, but by the time I knew that, it was too late, and Herschel and Marlon had already beaten and tortured him to death.

  I didn’t ask Floyd how he’d known the two men would be out, or how he’d got keys to get inside. I just assumed it was all spook stuff of some kind, but I still felt thoroughly scandalized when I saw just how easy it was for us to get inside the farmhouse.

  My mind kept trying to find excuses for what we found in room after room. There were weapons, stockpiles of canned food and water filtration units. One room looked as if it had been converted into an engineering shop. Another had been turned into a miniature ward, filled with an impressive supply of medical equipment. It was like a paranoid’s dream of what they’d need to survive the fall of civilization.

  Even all that wasn’t anything compared to what we found in the basement.

  The basement was split into two long rooms, accessible only by a specially installed airlock system. HEPA filters hummed quietly, scraping the air clean. Most of the space was taken up by a number of temperature-controlled incubation units, and hazmat suits hung on racks next to crates and boxes of yet more supplies. A couple of computers had been set up in a corner on a desk, and there was sufficient lab equipment to grow bugs on a frankly industrial scale, even with just the two of them working in isolation.

  I could no longer deny the obvious: whatever Herschel and Marlon were planning, it was big. Would whatever bugs they had developed be spread by blood, by skin or transmitted through the air? It was too early to tell, but my stomach roiled at finding that Floyd had been right in everything he had told me.

  I don’t know how Marlon or Herschel figured out we were there. Maybe they’d just forgotten something and come back to get it, but I remember clearly the sound of a gun’s safety being taken off, and the ashen look on Floyd’s face when Marlon appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his face twisted in an angry scowl.

  Beside me, Floyd jerked forward, and then I was deafened by gunfire.

  Floyd collapsed halfway to the stairwell, one knee a ruined mess.

  I started to babble something, but then Marlon stepped forwards, knocking me to the floor before raising his gun above my head butt-first and bringing it crashing down, sending me spinning into darkness.

  Things got hazy after that.

  There are a variety of ways to get information out of people – drugs, torture, threats, even bribery. Marlon and Herschel opted for the first two. They kept me in one part of the basement, Floyd in the other. I was bound and gagged and handcuffed to a chair and shot full of something that sent me drifting off into a borderland between wakefulness and dreaming. Every now and then they took the gag off, and I mumbled answers to Herschel’s questions, hardly aware of what I was saying. They did the same to Floyd, then started dunking me face-first into a bucket of water until I nearly passed out, before dragging me upright once more and demandi
ng answers to questions that meant nothing to me.

  Days passed in this way. I wondered what was happening back home, and what Alice might have told the police once she realized I was missing.

  I started to get sick – more sick than I had ever felt in my whole life. I had trouble breathing, and sweat drenched my skin. I shivered as if I had been cast naked onto an ice floe and set adrift. My tongue swelled in my mouth and I began to hallucinate. At one point I watched as Herschel and Marlon argued about whether it was worth keeping me alive, then I slipped back into unconsciousness, wondering if I would die anyway before they finished bickering.

  Then, the next morning, Marlon appeared beside me with a plastic ampoule filled with some kind of clear liquid and injected me with it. I rapidly got better; the fever subsided, and I began to breathe more easily and be able to keep food down.

  The next day my interrogation resumed. What did I know about the Haven? Was there anyone inside Red Harvest who was working for us?

  The questions went on, and on, the two men’s anger only growing with each question I failed to answer adequately. Later that evening, I heard Floyd screaming from the next room as they tortured him, only for the sound to be abruptly cut off. I listened as his torturers bickered yet again, and I felt sure Floyd had died of his injuries.

  Then it hit me. Sometime in the next few days, or maybe even sooner, I would be next. They had, after all, been unable to extract any information from me whatsoever.

  Later that night I somehow got one arm free of the thick tape securing me to my chair. They had been feeding me sporadically at best, and by now I had lost so much weight I was able to wriggle free of my improvised restraints, although I nearly dislocated a shoulder in the process. I made my way through the doorway, noting that Floyd’s body was gone. The airlock had been dismantled. I climbed the steps only to find the basement door locked.

  I retreated into the shadows beneath the steps and waited a few hours, until I heard the jangle of keys. I had found a hammer lying on a workbench, and when Marlon came down the steps, I stepped out of the shadows, swinging it at his head.

  He collapsed to the ground without a sound, his legs folding beneath him. I kept swinging the hammer, lost to blind fury and half-crazed from torture and the terror of my impending death. I recall little of what happened next, except that I found myself staring down at the pulped ruin of Marlon’s head, unable at first to connect that terrible sight with the bloody hammer still gripped in one hand. Before that moment, I would never have believed I was capable of such awful violence.

  I searched his body, finding a pistol tucked into his belt. I ran upstairs with the gun in my hand just as Herschel stepped in through the front door. He barely had time to look up and open his mouth before I shot him in the head, the contents of his skull spattering against the door behind him.

  I found Herschel’s mobile phone and tried to call Alice, but there was no signal. It was the same with the landline in the kitchen; when I picked it up, all I heard was a hiss of static, and not even a dialling tone.

  Then I glanced up and saw a calendar with days crossed out hanging on the wall, and realized I had been held captive for very nearly a whole fortnight. I stared at the date, hardly able to believe it could have been so long, then searched around until I found some stale bread in a cupboard, stuffing it into my mouth until I retched and nearly passed out.

  A little while later I made my way along the road on foot, through drizzling rain, until I reached the outskirts of Oxford. Everywhere I went I saw nothing but corpses, shrouded by great buzzing clouds of flies. I remembered the ampoule with which Marlon had injected me, and how I had recovered from a desperate and inexplicable illness in a matter of hours.

  I wandered through the deserted streets, barely able to stand the smell of death and rot, before I made my way back to the farmhouse, high on its hill.

  I searched the whole place, from top to bottom, until I found a plastic tray containing four ampoules identical to the one Marlon had used on me. If there was any chance whatsoever Alice was still alive, I knew I had to find her and inject her with it.

  From a bedroom I grabbed a clean change of clothes that more or less fitted, and took the car keys from Herschel’s still-cooling fingers. I had wondered if perhaps there had been others working here apart from Marlon and Herschel, but as I searched the house, I became convinced that they had been working here alone – although that did not preclude the possibility of other Red Harvest groups, in other parts of the world, working in similar secrecy.

  I drove the car as far as I could before the sheer number of empty vehicles scattered across the roads forced me to abandon it for a motorbike with a full tank.

  It took me another two days to reach London, during which I found no one alive. I had acquired a hunting-rifle from a sporting goods shop, having become concerned over the packs of increasingly feral dogs I was encountering. On my way through Ealing, I nearly came off my bike when someone, somewhere, started shooting at me, and I was forced to take a lengthy diversion before I could reach home. I don’t know what happened to that person, but I strongly suspect they didn’t survive much longer.

  And then, at last, I arrived home, and looked down at Alice, her face strangely peaceful in death. I sat there by the side of our bed and wept until the sun rose above city streets that were silent for the first time in over a thousand years.

  I buried Alice in our garden, the air full of the stink of putrefaction from the neighbouring houses. Then I left forever, making my way back to Oxford, and back to the basement where my new life had been born. There were computers there, and my hope was that they would contain information that might help me understand how Marlon and Herschel had carried out their act of genocide. If anyone else was alive out there in the rest of the world, they were going to need the antidote that had saved my own life.

  But first, I wanted to see whether it might be possible to synthesize more than the pitiful four ampoules that remained in my possession.

  It seemed strange to me that no one else came looking for Marlon or Herschel, although it soon became apparent to me, upon my return, that the two men had been preparing for a lengthy journey. Perhaps it had been their intention to leave the farmhouse forever. I slept in an empty property closer to town for a good while, maintaining a watchful eye to see if Red Harvest sent anyone to find out what had happened to the two cultists, but no one ever came. Why this should be remained a mystery, at least for the moment.

  Eventually my fear subsided, and for a while, as I carried out my investigation into the antidote, the farmhouse became my home. I buried Floyd much as I had buried Alice, and simply discarded the bodies of the other two; as far as I was concerned, the feral dogs now wandering the countryside could have them.

  There was a stockpile of fuel and a couple of portable diesel generators within the farmhouse sufficient to supply me with electricity for the foreseeable future. From the computers, I learned that the farmhouse was only one of a number of distribution points scattered around the globe, and that the Haven – Red Harvest’s central base of operations – was located in Maine, on the east coast of the United States, near a town called Biddeford.

  I watched the skies for contrails and scanned the radio waves for any sign of human life, but there was none. Even so, I could still not bring myself to believe what I would soon know to be true, that the human race was as good as extinct. I distracted myself with feverish work, and as I explored the information stored on the computers I slowly came to understand that the antidote I had been injected with was only of limited efficacy. Each dose was good for half a year at best. To stay alive beyond that would require further doses. Synthesizing it was out of the question – I lacked the necessary equipment, and all the indications seemed to be there were enormous, pre-prepared batches stored at the Biddeford Haven.

  If I wanted to live any longer than the next several months, I would have no choice but to visit this Haven.

  I began to p
repare for a solo journey that would take me all the way across the Atlantic. I had sailed around Europe’s coasts in my youth, so I searched moorings and harbours until I found a forty-foot yacht that needed minimal work to make it seaworthy.

  I find it hard to remember my state of mind during all this. I know that I certainly contemplated suicide. The loneliness was dreadful beyond imagining. But such thoughts never came close to becoming actions. Something within me drove me to live at all costs. I simply would not, could not, allow myself to die.

  Even so, time was passing all too quickly, and so I set sail barely three months after I had first stumbled out into the dawn of a new world, my shirt soaked in another man’s blood.

  I won’t belabour the trials and terrors of that first ocean voyage. Suffice to say that, when I finally reached American soil, it was a thousand kilometres farther south than I had intended. Powerful storms had taken their toll on my yacht, and I sailed her as far north as I could before she finally ran aground in heavy squalls, still a hundred kilometres south of Biddeford. After I struggled to shore, I worked my way through a variety of vehicles in order to drive the rest of the way.

  The Haven, when I finally reached it, proved to be a sprawling ranch with numerous outbuildings, all contained within a tall security fence with cameras posted around the perimeter. I walked the last six kilometres there, moving only at night, grasping a rifle in both hands. I holed up in the cabin of an abandoned truck until the morning, watching the compound through binoculars, but it was clear there were absolutely no signs of life or movement. In fact, the Haven appeared to be just as empty and deserted as anywhere else.

  I waited until the next evening before cutting my way through the fence and sneaking up towards one of the buildings. When I looked inside and saw long-dead corpses, I knew death had not spared the cultists after all. I had my answer for why no one had ever come looking for Marlon or Herschel.