Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  ‘What you are about to hear is a conversation, recorded yesterday evening, between Professor Jonathan Martin, a renowned virologist, his colleague Professor Constance Jones, and the head of security at the facility where the leaked bio-weapon that caused the carnage was produced, one Alastair Brown,’ the voice explained before cutting off.

  Almost immediately, a human voice crackled down the line.

  ‘What’s the latest, Alastair?’ the man Lesley assumed to be Professor Martin asked in a plummy, slightly lisping voice.

  ‘The good news is the fire destroyed most of the evidence,’ Brown responded. ‘The bad news is the paramedics spotted us taking off, and the fire services are already talking about arson. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, as we can just pressure them to shut up. But one of them has already blabbed to Drummond at the Tribune about fishy goings-on. He’s sniffing around. My preference would be to kill him, although that might be a little obvious.’

  No it wouldn’t, Lesley thought.

  ‘You’re saying the stampede story won’t hold?’

  ‘No, particularly when they see the bite marks on the bodies. But we’ve prepared a backup. We’re going to claim terrorists released a virus into the food chain. After the Glasgow Airport attack, it shouldn’t be a difficult sell. I’m sure I can scare up a suspected al-Qaeda member or two: there are plenty of Muslims to choose from. We’ll leak it to Drummond through a friendly politician later today.’

  ‘For God’s sake, if the virus is out there, we shouldn’t be worrying about a cover story, particularly one that accuses innocent civilians on the basis of their faith,’ an elderly female voice, presumably Professor Jones, chimed in. ‘We need to hope we’ve contained it, then work out how it got out so it doesn’t happen again.’

  ‘Alastair assures me we’ve nipped it in the bud,’ Martin said.

  ‘Yes, about that,’ Brown interjected. ‘I suspect one of the cows may have toddled off before we arrived.’

  There was silence from the scientists.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Brown continued. ‘I’ve got teams scouring the countryside looking for it.’

  Jones was the first to recover from the bombshell. ‘And you haven’t found it yet? What is it, some kind of ninja cow?’

  ‘There are a lot of woodlands out there,’ Brown replied, sounding uncertain for the first time.

  ‘Sorry, my mistake. It’s Rambo cow. I suppose it has smeared itself in camouflage paint and is fashioning traps out of spiky logs for its pursuers as we speak.’

  ‘Sarcasm won’t get us anywhere, Constance,’ Martin chastised.

  ‘Pardon me for being upset. This is a disaster.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Brown broke in. ‘I deserve the criticism. It was unprofessional of me to let one escape. But believe me, I take a great deal of pride in my job, and I will do whatever it takes to make up for this mistake.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Jones said. ‘You know how virulent the virus is, what the infected animals can do. If that cow starts infecting other animals, I’m getting myself and my family on a plane.’

  ‘You can’t jump ship,’ Martin replied. ‘We need you to work on the vaccine.’

  ‘What use would that be? It isn’t even half-ready. By the time we got it together, it would be too late.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ Martin said. There was a brief silence. ‘What do we do with this abattoir worker – what’s his name?’

  ‘Terry Borders. We’re keeping him sedated for the moment. I’ll wake him for a chat when I get the chance,’ Brown explained. ‘If he remembers everything, his story would fit in with the terrorist angle. But it would be neater if he were to die from his injuries, so to speak.’

  ‘Let’s just hold off on that until we see what happens,’ Martin said.

  ‘My God!’ Jones exclaimed. ‘Neater? Hold off? This is a human life you’re talking about. We’re scientists, not murderers.’

  Lesley could hear the coldness in Brown’s voice. ‘I’m sure many animal activists would call you a murderer, Constance. My job is to ensure the secrecy of this project, and I can only reiterate that I will do whatever it takes to meet that objective. Whatever it takes. Do you understand?’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m merely reminding you of what I am tasked to do, and the importance of keeping cool heads at this critical juncture.’ There was the scrape of a chair being pushed back. ‘And now I’d better get back to that task. Enjoy your evening.’

  A door closed. For a short while there was only the heavy breathing of the two scientists.

  ‘I knew I should have retired when I had the chance,’ Jones said in a small voice.

  The hiss cut out, to be replaced by the computerized voice, which said, ‘The facility where this was recorded lies three miles west of the abattoir, masquerading as a vet school research centre into cow herpes. I suggest you visit it. Carefully.’

  The line went dead immediately. Lesley sat there slack-jawed. While the caller hadn’t explicitly revealed that the government was involved, it must be. This was the kind of story that brought down leaders and made careers: a bio-engineered virus accidentally released into the food chain. She immediately googled the three people in the recording. Martin and Jones were real people, with plaudits as long as her arm in their respective fields. Brown’s name scored no hits. She hurried to the toilet and locked herself in a cubicle, where she listened to the conversation again, foot tapping against the tiles the whole way through. There was no way she was going to hand this over to the twat. She had started recording after his name was mentioned, and could claim the information came from her own contacts. Not that she had any.

  As she left the cubicle, a voice in the back of her mind – way back, in a cobwebbed room with boards nailed over the door – whispered that what she was about to do was unscrupulous. She mentally hammered up a few more boards until the voice fell silent, and then rushed to Alexandra’s office.

  In her excitement, she burst straight in. Alexandra jumped as the door thudded off the wall. ‘Bloody hell, Lesley, haven’t you heard of knocking?’

  ‘Sorry, but you’re going to love me when you find out what I’ve got for you.’

  Lesley sat down with a flourish and waited expectantly. Alexandra shuffled some papers, glanced at her screen, scratched her chin, and then looked out of the window.

  ‘Lesley. Yes. I’ve been meaning to talk to you,’ she said, staring intently at the blank grey wall of the building on the other side of the alleyway.

  Clearly she hadn’t listened to Lesley, which was a fairly normal state of affairs. This time she would have to pay attention.

  Lesley was leaning across the desk, ready to relate the gist of the tip-off, when Alexandra turned to face her and blurted out, ‘We’re letting you go.’

  ‘What?’ Lesley asked, wondering how on earth the editor knew what she was about to ask. ‘You’re letting me go to the facility?’

  Alexandra ignored the question and launched into what seemed like a well-rehearsed spiel. ‘You know the paper’s been having problems. Online news, bloggers, the global recession: they’ve all cut into our market. Circulation’s down and we’re haemorrhaging money. We need to cut costs. Unfortunately, you’ve been selected for redundancy.’

  ‘Oh. You’re letting me go.’

  Lesley shook her head. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. This was her big moment, the scene where the plucky hack talks her boss into letting her do something foolhardy, not the scene where the superfluous loser gets the boot. Sure, she had known they were reviewing the paper’s operations, but the newsroom had been assured only support staff would be cut.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  Alexandra shook her head.

  Lesley’s lips, which only seconds before had been tingling with the anticipation of revealing her big break, flapped numbly as she croaked, ‘Who else are you letting go?’

  Alexan
dra coughed. ‘Well, three in accounts, five from distribution—’

  Lesley cut her off. ‘How many journalists?’

  The editor once more studied the side of the building, which had not become any less featureless in the past few minutes and seemed undeserving of such close attention. ‘Just you.’

  To call the resulting silence uncomfortable would be like saying having your eyeballs prised out with a spork stung a little. The numbness that had started in Lesley’s lips spread down her neck.

  ‘Just me? Shouldn’t it be last in, first out? You could fire Stephen.’ She waved at a skinny youth who just happened to be hurrying past the window. ‘He’s only been here a year.’

  ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘Why me?’ Lesley asked, unable to keep the plaintive tone out of her voice and hating herself for it.

  Alexandra blew out her cheeks and cast a last longing glance at the wall before meeting Lesley’s gaze. ‘To be honest – and I’m telling you this because I think it will be good for you long-term – you’re not very good. You only got this job because your old man called in a favour with the managing editor.’ She shrugged. ‘I wanted to hire someone else.’

  There it was. The truth – as naked as a fat German naturist and just as welcome in the small room. Lesley kept her face expressionless.

  Alexandra must have thought she was holding back an emotional outburst, for she babbled on in an attempt to mitigate the blow. ‘Not that I’m saying you’re a bad journalist, just not a very good one. At least, not good enough for the Tribune, which has exceptionally high standards. I’m sure you would fit in well on a free paper. Or maybe a lifestyle magazine.’

  What Alexandra didn’t realize was that when Lesley showed no emotion, she was usually holding back a desire to inflict bodily harm, rather than tears. Being made redundant was one thing, and it had certainly throttled the life out of her excitement. Being told she was a bad journalist was something else entirely. Lesley closed her fist around the voice recorder and wondered if she would have the speed and strength to whip down Alexandra’s trousers and jam it up her bum before her colleagues intervened. Lifestyle magazine. Cheeky cow.

  Then she remembered the revelation on the voice recorder and smiled. It was perfect. Alexandra had never given her a fair crack of the whip. Now she was letting the biggest story in the rag’s history slip through her fingers.

  You’re going to regret this, Lesley thought. You’ll be like the record executive who rejected The Beatles or the editor who decided not to buy the Harry Potter books. She relaxed her fist, allowing blood to flow back into her fingers, and slipped the voice recorder into her trouser pocket. ‘You’re right, Alexandra. I don’t belong here.’

  Alexandra smiled back uncertainly. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. You’re doing absolutely the right thing.’ Lesley’s smile broadened.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you agree,’ Alexandra said, clearly discomfited by the unexpected turn in the conversation. ‘Let’s keep this between us for the moment, until the details are finalized, OK?’

  ‘No problem,’ Lesley said, climbing to her feet.

  She hurried back to her desk, feeling Alexandra’s bemused gaze on her back. Over the following half-hour she planned her next steps. The first move would be to organize a stakeout – the very word generated a thrilling shiver – and ask residents near the facility if they had seen or heard anything odd. She would also have to establish a link between the abattoir and the facility and find out how the virus got out. Then she would make a few calls to other newspapers – The Times or the Guardian probably – with her exclusive.

  She was looking at the facility’s website, noting down its exact location, when Colin returned, his cheeks flushed and pupils dilated.

  ‘How was the lunch meet?’ she asked as he strolled over to her cubicle.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Colin replied vaguely. Lesley caught a strong whiff of mints with an undercurrent of lager. ‘Any calls while I was out?’

  The question seemed casual enough, but something about the way he asked it gave Lesley pause. Suddenly it occurred to her the tip might be a sick joke Colin was playing on her. After all, the call did come in suspiciously soon after he’d left the office. He probably already knew she was for the chop. The swine knew everything. It would be just like him to put the boot in when she was down. She searched his face for any hint he was up to something. His lip was curled up at one side, although it could have been just everyday smugness.

  ‘No calls,’ she said, picking up a pen and twirling it. ‘None whatsoever. Not a single one. Zip. Nada. Zilch.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, frowning.

  That was it. While he often transferred his calls to Lesley, he had never questioned her if there weren’t any. He was probing, which meant he was trying to figure out if she had got the call. She should have known better. A virus that turned cows into killers, what an idiotic idea. And she had almost swallowed it. All of her dreams fell away, and she was left with a vision of morosely shuffling along with other undesirables to sign on at the dole office.

  ‘I suppose you think it’s funny,’ she hissed. ‘One last joke at my expense.’

  Colin’s frown deepened. ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, I’m not falling for it, Knob-end.’ Lesley jabbed her pen towards Colin’s groin. He skipped back into the narrow corridor between the cubicle walls. ‘You’ve got five seconds to piss off back to your own desk, otherwise this pen and your left ball will enjoy the same relationship as a pickled onion and a cocktail stick.’

  Colin threw up his hands. ‘Fine, I’m going. You’re losing it, Lesley, you know that?’

  He sauntered back to his desk, casting glances over his shoulder as he went. Lesley stuck two fingers up at him. Once he was out of sight, she dropped her head to the desk and banged it a few times experimentally, just to see how much it would hurt if she really went for it.

  Too much, she thought, and slid open the drawer to retrieve a packet of cigarettes.

  She was greeted by her father’s image.

  ‘Just what I need,’ she said. ‘Your ugly mug.’

  To the casual observer, the picture would look like a typical family shot: a proud father with an arm slung around his daughter, a slim young woman with poker-straight brown hair dressed up in a brand-new business suit for her first day at work. A closer study revealed the cracks in the image of family unity: the daylight between their bodies; the way his hand was hovering above her shoulder rather than resting on it; the fixed grin on her face, so wide and false it pushed her large green eyes into slits and revealed every tooth, including the slightly brown incisor she had never got fixed after being hit in the face with a hockey stick at university.

  They had been forced to pose by Lesley’s mother, who was delighted her daughter was following in Charles’s illustrious footsteps. When her mother dropped the picture off at the office a week later, Lesley had dumped it straight into the drawer. She didn’t want anyone to think she was trading on her father’s reputation. She had known he’d put in a word for her, but had been determined to show she deserved the chance. Now she had blown it, he would try to bail her out. As soon as the news of her redundancy reached the old sod in his retirement villa on the Kenyan coast, he would be on the phone to his cronies. Not because he cared about her; the famous McBrien name, renowned through generations of journalism, must not be besmirched in such a way. She didn’t want him to save her. If she was going to make it, she wanted to do it herself. And if she was going to fail, which at the moment appeared the more likely scenario, she wanted to do so with dignity.

  Lesley closed the drawer and headed out for a smoke. Colin’s ridiculously phallic quiff protruded over the top of his cubicle as she walked past. She briefly considered setting fire to it – with the amount of hairspray he employed it would go up like a torch – but decided a few months in jail was not a price worth paying for the brief burst of savage p
leasure she would derive from watching him run to stick his flaming head under the water cooler. All the same, she could not resist aiming a slap at the mound of hair, prompting an ‘Oi!’ in protest.

  ‘Urgent newsflash: You’re a wanker!’ she told Colin, who had stood up to glower at her.

  ‘Seriously, Lesley, what the hell’s up with you today?’ he asked, readjusting his hair.

  ‘Like you don’t know.’

  ‘Look, whatever paranoid fantasy you’ve cooked up, leave me out of it,’ Colin responded.

  The apparently genuine confusion on Colin’s face gave her pause. What if the story was real and she didn’t look into it because she thought she was being mocked? That would be far worse than taking a ribbing. She turned away from her nemesis and thumped downstairs. What she did know was her head was buzzing and she was in no condition to make a decision. She needed time to think, and to listen to the recording a few more times. Then she would decide whether to chase the story or make good on her threat to skewer Colin’s nuts.

  4

  In the belly of the beast

  Terry fought his way out from the deep morass of unconsciousness that kept trying to suck him back down into its murky depths. When he hauled open his eyelids, a sterile white ceiling greeted him. He vaguely wondered if he had overindulged, which would explain the stinking headache, and ended up getting lucky. He groped around for a warm body, and found he was alone in a single bed. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, his first feeling was one of relief. While he desperately needed to end his eighteen-month spell marooned in the love desert, he didn’t want it to be through a one-night stand – particularly given his disastrous last two flings before the barren patch began.

  After the first of those one-nighters, he’d woken to the morning sunlight glinting off the facial fuzz of a snoring heavyset woman with a tattoo of Pocahontas on her shoulder. He had a horrible memory of cuddling up to her in a corner booth at Clatty Pats nightclub, where such characters were ten a penny, while she explained she had changed her name to reflect her love of the Disney character, and an even worse memory of being pissed enough to find it endearing. He’d tiptoed out of the bedroom, trying to ignore the accusing button eyes of the crude home-made Pocahontas dolls littered across the room.