Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The father blinked the sweat and fog out of his eyes. If this man was telling the truth then he didn’t know Oleg was alive, and he and Karen were in the dark over how he’d learned that his daughter was here. ‘Go and fuck yourself.’

  The little man’s face stiffened while the grin remained fixed. ‘Well, you can tell me, or you can tell them later.’ He nodded over his shoulder at the door. ‘I know which I’d prefer, and if you are candid with me it may help your case. It’s your call. But we can only assume, until we are better informed, that the two kidnappers told Abergil about Karen, prior to their final exit from the stage.’

  The father imagined a beheading was not going to be sufficient today. Torture had a part to play. He swallowed the lump that had swelled inside his throat. They would want to know about others who may have offered his crusade assistance, any other guardian angels beyond those already slaughtered. A fresh onset of a comprehensive weakening, in limb and neck, at the thought of his coming travails at the hands of the Kings, tempered the rage that smouldered at the sight of this portly peacock, mocking him inside the garage belonging to the woman who had ruined his life. But if neither his interrogator, this prissy fiancé, nor the Kings knew about Oleg’s involvement, that would mean Rina, Yonah Abergil’s girlfriend, hadn’t overheard the confession he’d extracted from Yonah at his villa, when Oleg’s name was mentioned. And if Yonah had never known Karen’s identity, then what Semyon Sabinovic and Oleg had discovered after bugging his daughter’s clothes was never shared with Yonah Abergil either. This also meant that Oleg’s faked death by overdose beneath the chapel had been convincing to whomever went to kill him. And it must have been good too, because no man could return from the dead, no matter what that man believed about ritual magic and his ‘patron’.

  The father remoistened his mouth with saliva. ‘You shacked up with that psychopath . . . You condone what she did. You’re now an accessory to kidnap, to murder. But it doesn’t trouble you. What kind of animal are you?’

  Widening his eyes with excitement, the man raised his hands and spread them wide to encompass a vastness beyond the bricks and mortar of the room. ‘The animal that will survive this little challenge, as well as the almighty setback that is on its way. That’s the kind of animal that stands before you this morning, one who intends to continue into the new year with health and portfolio intact.’

  The man read confusion in the father’s eyes, and he seemed pleased with the opportunity to elaborate on his cryptic suggestions. ‘You should be grateful that the girl you fathered, a long, long time ago, our daughter for argument’s sake, will have parents, a family, in the immediate future. A future that is, quite honestly, unbearable to even think about at this point in time. Plenty of children are already without parents in this world, and many more will also lose their own, and soon. That is, if the young even survive at all. It’s really not looking good for . . . well, anyone really. Besides those of us who are prepared.’

  The man saw something come into the father’s eyes and he stepped further away from the chair. He pointed at his own face. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mask. It has nothing to do with my identity. That’s hardly relevant now, I’d say. But you have been running wild out there, and this morning you compromised our little quarantine here, which we’ve observed since the first infections in Oxfordshire.’

  The father almost laughed. ‘You’re hiding inside here because of a bug.’

  ‘I’m afraid this is a bit more than just any bug. It’s actually the tediously inevitable NBO. The next big one. An idea that’s been knocked back and forth between microbiologists for the last fifty years. Sure you’ve heard of it. It’s what we’ve all been, ultimately, waiting for. God knows there are enough distractions competing with the pandemics to occupy our minds these days. No sooner does an outbreak reach a dead end and most people forget about them. I honestly doubt we have the mental capacity to do much else. There’s just too much going on these days, don’t you think?

  ‘But there have been a great number of people with expertise, privately funded, who have continued to fastidiously measure, test and assess risks, on behalf of those with their eyes on a much longer strategy. People like us. And there are a great many people that have a chance of . . . how shall I say it, continuing.’ The man chuckled. ‘Ask me and I’d say that when I knew that this virus was probably the one, the news brought some relief. You believe that? Hallelujah, the future is finally here!

  ‘Thank God some of us had the foresight to prepare for it. And here’s another thing, Karen really did do you a favour.’ The man raised a proprietorial finger. ‘Hold on! Bear with me. Before you go off, you really should thank Karen for taking Yasmin. I mean it. For taking on that responsibility. Because any alternative for the girl doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Not now. Not out there?’ The man mock-shuddered. ‘When you think of what is coming . . . well, what is already here and extremely infectious.’ He paused and squinted, appearing to peer into the distance of his thoughts. ‘It’s happening right now.’

  The father spat to clear his mouth of what now tasted like someone else’s faeces. ‘You shitting little cowards. Another pandemic begins and into the keep you go scurrying. Over and over again. Like you do every time. Out here in your little castles. Extending your longevity with gene culture, but the one thing you can’t entirely own is your health. But fuck the rest of us, yeah? You fucked us all a long time ago. You weakened and divided and destroyed everything around your walls. But when everything finally breaks down, I will be gone, and I will take a secret delight in the likelihood of you all being torn apart. You have no idea of the rage that awaits you, out there.’

  The man pretended to yawn. He checked his heavy wristwatch. ‘The significant minority that you so despise will have expanded proportionally, when this bug has run its course. Because the much-thinned-out dissatisfied majority, and it’s a simple matter of mathematics now, will consist of but a shadow of their previous numbers. I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive my rather dry summary of something impossible for any of us to really grasp, and I’m talking about the consequences of what will probably now be the biggest sudden depopulation since the Black Death. Yes, that’s right, so hold that thought. And here’s another for you to consider: how else do those of us with influence and primacy even address such a monumental and inevitable change? So it has come down to hard choices about survival, continuing the species and a version of civilization. And that can only occur if there are far fewer than nine billion of us still around.’

  The discomfort in his leg was now bringing the father to the breathless condition just prior to passing out. He found it difficult to focus on much besides the idea that his foot had finally separated from his leg. Stupefied with pain, confusion and the choppy sea of rage, he just stared at the man. He even began to wonder if the figure before him was mad, or just privileged, isolated, and paranoid.

  ‘We’re all at fault, or maybe we never were and this is an old and indifferent planet’s doing. But we don’t all need to go. Nor do we need to allow an arbitrary cull. There’s far more at stake now than who has what, who is rich and who is poor, and whose fault anything was. Some of us have moved on from that debate. Those of you who cannot accept that, well . . .’ The man offered the palms of his hands to indicate the precariousness of the father’s circumstances should that need any confirmation. ‘The short of it, the burgeoning Asian pandemic must be seen as a necessary evil. An opportunity.’

  The father kept his eyes and teeth clamped shut until a wave of pain and nausea relented. ‘So you came in here to make me feel better about what your bitch did . . . to ease your conscience about what you are complicit in, by telling yourself that you are securing my daughter’s future. Is that it, the new script? During the latest viral dead end that’s got you all shitting bricks in your woodland retreats, these are the new positions of the goalposts . . . You want me to ratify this, or sign something, before you have me murdered?’

  �
��Murder? We’re not murderers. Oh no. Your fate lies with others who are eager to get started on what they came here for. Please see my fiancée and I as merely providing a facility for an unpleasant necessity that your own actions created. But Karen believes that you should, at least, be offered an explanation of how things are going to pan out for the girl. For Penny.’

  ‘At least?’

  ‘Yes. She’s actually furious with you, for bringing another necessary evil at one time, I am now told, out of the woodwork. But you,’ the man pointed a stubby finger at the father’s face, ‘you brought them back within her orbit, where they are not welcome. One’s exposure to such things, I think you will agree, should be limited. So this is a very nervous time for her, and for all of us here. I don’t even have to be here with you. I’d rather not be. But she thought you were owed something before . . .’

  The man was doing him no favours. Even in such pain the father could differentiate between gloating and an attempt at relief for the condemned. ‘Soon enough our considerations of the past will be altered beyond recognition, because the past won’t really matter. Who has done what to whom. None of that will matter. A terrifying thought. But also an incredible opportunity if you’re smart. It’s what we do in the next couple of years that will count for everything.’

  The more he spoke, the more the man reminded the father of those distant, wine-fuelled executives from food distribution who held forth at parties, their baritones rising to the ceilings of the rooms they quickly came to dominate; people who had drifted into the executive level of agriculture, construction, nuclear power, the emergency government, water management and resettlement planning, after their opportunities in finance diminished as the world’s markets began to collapse; men who considered anyone unlike themselves as without worth. The father felt his face contort into a sneer that he had no control over. This was a man the father would feel pleasure in destroying. He now wished that he had started destroying people much earlier in his life. He blinked his blurred eyes clear. ‘Have you any idea what that woman has done? To me. My wife. Her parents. To so many . . . because she stole our child?’

  The man resumed his seat beyond the range of a sneeze. He seemed intent on more justification. ‘The bigger picture, if you please. Let’s put your natural outrage to one side, for one moment. You look at the same world as we do, and you’ve seen where this is all going. The country is a powder keg. The resentment, divisions, sectarian violence. My God, who can keep up with it? Between the Islamists, between the nationalists and the Islamists, between the nationalists and the refugees, the bloody socialists, the underclass and anyone near them who has more than they do, which isn’t hard. The nationalists have even recruited from the camps, as have the Islamists. The rival criminal clans are directing most of it. Our friends out there.’ The man nodded at the door. ‘They’re even in government now.’ Dismissively, he wafted a small, feminine hand in the air. ‘Drone strikes, curfews, riot control, it doesn’t work. And with so many without work, don’t you think it’s all really come home? I mean, the children still living with their parents beyond their forties? Do you know how many deaths have resulted from sibling rivalry this year alone? How is any of this going to improve? Anarchy is unavoidable, inevitable. We’ve seen it getting closer for years. We’re only about two years behind the States and you saw what happened out there when the south ran out of water. Jesus Christ. We’ve all that coming, right here. This isn’t bloody Norway. So we’ll continue to destroy ourselves from the inside, with the ethnic divisions, the class war, the sheer territorial rage of cornered, hopeless animals, while the climate reduces us, storm by storm and drought by drought.’

  The man took a deep breath and slapped his hands against his thighs. ‘There is far too little for far too many, even here on the lifeboat called Great Britain. We’re considered the lucky ones, with the Kiwis, of course. You believe that? But look at the influenza alone that we’ve seen in Europe. Not to mention the diseases that have killed millions across thirty years globally. Mere warnings. Labs have always managed to produce vaccines, eventually, but this is quite different. This is the one. And the world it has entered is very different to the world that cured AIDS and cancer. This world is no longer even remotely cohesive.

  ‘And . . .’ He paused as if from the gravity of what he was about to announce. ‘Nature, King Death no less, is inhabiting SARS CoV11 and about to take its course, here as elsewhere. And it will have to run and run, or soon everything will be lost to chaos. This isn’t about you, me, Karen, it’s about . . . well, it’s about your daughter. She is the future. She and others in her privileged position can make it, and make it comfortably. We’ll make sure of that. She wouldn’t have a chance otherwise. Not a hope in hell. Because when that “bug” came in through Oxford, the gates of hell truly began to creak open in Britain. You see, your daughter has already been inoculated. All of Karen’s family members and staff have been too.’

  The father raised his face.

  The man tapped the side of his nose. ‘The Gabon River Fever is relatively harmless compared to the Asian bug. Ha! And mostly used as justification for the Italians, French and Portuguese to sink the refugee boats, and for the northern hemisphere to close its borders. Still, you wouldn’t want to catch that and it is around, but Gabon River Fever never spreads far enough. We’ve had outbreaks in Europe twenty-one times, but it’s always a dead end. We took our eyes off that one years ago. But the new SARS? Oh, boy. The Chinese have lied, like they always do. And so have their neighbours in case we shut them out for good.

  ‘This is an archetypal zoonosis, from the animal to the human animal. Fucking rats again. Isn’t that the rub? A country struggling to breathe and grow food began to eat the entirety of the animal kingdom at its disposal. They were breeding rats in China for food. They farmed bamboo rats and guinea pigs very successfully, but the problem was storage and distribution. They sold them in wet markets in appalling, overcrowded conditions, and we subsequently became the amplifier host. But the bug is changing again as it passes through us, and has become even more lethal. Bats were the reservoir host, rats the cultivating host, and we’re the dead end, literally.

  ‘Time has finally been called. Because this strain is spread by exhalation. Exhalation! By breathing. This strain has been observed living in seawater for six months. It isn’t going away. We’ve got years of it ahead, wave after wave.’

  The father swallowed. ‘She . . . there is a vaccine?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m afraid this strain of SARS has proven itself ninety per cent fatal so far. A respiratory cluster-fuck, like an extreme form of pneumonia. But some very clever people got the antibodies from the right bats. And the first vaccine has been ninety-seven per cent successful against SARS 9 and 10, in some rather hastily conducted trials, and ninety-three per cent successful against 11, so we’re still taking some precautions against exposure.’

  The father’s captor moved his head from side to side, casually pondering his advantages. ‘But the drug will never come close to wide availability. Production couldn’t even begin to match demand this time around. It is scarce and very, very expensive right now, like everything else that people need that is a matter of life and death. Nothing unusual there. Family members of those with access to it, I’m afraid. Then key workers. All a bit vague now, but we can assume that those with the expertise to keep the power stations running are in. Same with the farmers, and the experts that will be needed across all the primary fields. You must have known how it would go down if we ever reached this point. A vaccine couldn’t be distributed fairly. So what’s the alternative, a lottery?’ He laughed. ‘This is not something that will be thrown off the back of a truck any time soon. The isolation wards, the barrier nursing, and quarantine in a population of this size? Impossible. The dieback is just going to be off the scale. Some people are talking seven billion or more worldwide, though others claim that forty per cent is a more reasonable figure. Only a third of Europe died from bubonic p
lague, and medieval Europe was more primitive than our world, just about.’ He lowered his voice and whispered. ‘Close to four billion. Can you fucking imagine that? The wretched living conditions of most of our fellow creatures, and their close proximity to each other, is going to be key, and it’ll take four or five years, but . . . Wow! The dieback in historical terms is going to be . . . epochal.’

  The man recomposed himself, wiped his fringe back from his forehead. ‘So, a collective in business at the highest level, well above that sham we call government, had to make the difficult decisions. I’d say people in certain positions are much better at doing that now, because all the rules changed, quite literally, some time ago. I’m sure you of all people noticed. And now the clock is ticking far faster than anyone thought. Most Centres for Disease Control in the first world don’t even know about the vaccine. They suspect some of us have something, but they don’t know what. Most of the current emergency government doesn’t know either, though they will soon enough. But private industry looks after its own first. We discovered it, so it’s only fair. And do you think the emergency government will distribute it fairly when they receive their limited supply? It’s not like you can expect government to sort anything out, anyway. This all goes way above government, way above the media, you know that. These levels of corporate organization stopped even trying to avoid being seen as a conspiracy about four decades ago.

  ‘But the antibodies have been cultivated from a tiny bat that was pissing onto the rats in a wet market. Discovered by one of many private enterprises with field operations in Asia, in which Karen has a sizeable interest. So the vaccine has been passing between a select few, for months now. In the nick of time, I’d say.’

  ‘You bastards.’

  ‘Pragmatic bastards. Those feedbacks this year, with the plant stress? Jesus Christ. They’re producing carbon dioxide. Collapse has been on the cards for a long, long time. We’d face starvation eventually in the UK, later than most, but it’s on our dance card. Soil fertility is already becoming an issue, as are crop losses from the droughts; even with the water management in Europe, yields are worryingly down again, and far worse than they are claiming in the news. Our recent fecundity is a blip and actually very fragile. But with your background, you probably assumed as much. There are seasonal variations from one year to the next, but it’s all getting worse over the long haul.