Plague Nation

by Alex Scarrow

  They were each holding on to the handle of a tall riot shield with POLICE stencilled boldly across them. And at their sides, tucked into belts and pouches, he could see the handles of a curious variety of sharp-edged weapons: fire axes, machetes, hunting knives. One man even looked as if he was carrying a samurai katana.

  One of the soldiers further along noticed Leon’s curious look. He pulled himself on to his feet, carefully made his way down between the two rows of grounded shields and hunkered down in front of him.

  ‘You all right there, son?’ he barked over the growl of the truck’s engine.

  Leon nodded.

  ‘Aye, close bloody call that, wasn’t it?’

  Leon recognized the voice from back in the tunnel. The one who’d been shouting the commands.

  ‘Flame! . . . Again! . . .’

  Deep and gravelly, like a knife drawn flatly across dry toast. Clearly someone used to a lifetime of shouting over noise and with a hard Glaswegian accent.

  ‘Yeah. I’m OK.’

  ‘You were checking out our kit? Not exactly standard issue, huh?’

  Leon nodded. ‘Like . . . I dunno . . .’

  ‘Medieval?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The man snorted a laugh, then wiped at the thick moustache beneath his nose.

  ‘For good reason, lad . . . Different kind of warfare now. Guns’re useless on those scuttlers. Too many of ’em, too small and too bloody fast.’ He looked Leon over quickly. ‘You medicated?’

  ‘Aspirin.’

  ‘Good. Your girlfriend too?’

  He didn’t bother correcting him. ‘Yeah. She’s on the same.’

  ‘Good. You’ll get a full medical examination when we get back.’ He stood and began to make his way carefully towards his seat. ‘Lucky we decided to come out foraging today!’

  The truck rocked and bounced across another kerb.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The man didn’t hear Leon’s voice. That, or he ignored him.

  Half an hour later the vehicle turned off on to a side road, flanked by mature oak trees that hung over the road from either side, creating a flickering tunnel through which the pale sun dappled light. He spotted a sign by the side of the road.

  WELCOME TO BANTON CASTLE:

  CORPORATE EVENTS, WEDDINGS, BANQUETS.

  Scrawled over it in red paint:

  CAMP CAMELOT

  Perhaps another emergency operation?

  They emerged from the trees into a clearing. Leon craned his neck to look over the heads and helmets of the soldiers in front of him, expecting to see some vast military base, perhaps an airstrip lined with Chinooks ready to whisk them away. He was anticipating a stirred-up ants’ nest of activity: army doctors and nurses processing queues of bedraggled and malnourished survivors, soldiers organizing queues, rows of buff-coloured tents . . .

  Instead he saw a tall and narrow castle encircled by a moat. Surrounding the moat was a large tree-lined clearing, he guessed a half a kilometre in diameter: the castle grounds.

  Except, unlike any castle grounds he’d seen, it wasn’t all carefully cross-hatched mown lawn and tended rose gardens – it was a wasteland of weeds and grass and nettles and brambles. Here and there, dark, ragged craters pitted the ground like a no-man’s land pockmarked by artillery.

  The truck came to a halt beside the moat as a drawbridge was slowly lowered for them.

  ‘OK,’ said Freya. ‘I get the Camelot reference now.’

  Beyond the lowering bridge stood the castle, a traditional Norman keep sitting proudly on its own man-made island, an acre of mud-churned ground littered with pallets of supplies, boxes, crates, oil drums, another army truck and a third one up on blocks that looked as if it had been cannibalized for parts.

  The bridge finally clunked into position and the truck rolled across on to the muddy ground beyond and parked beside the others.

  ‘All right, lads!’ barked the Scottish soldier. The others stood up, grabbed their shields and shuffled to the back of the truck, jumping down into the mud.

  The man gestured at Leon and Freya to follow the others. ‘End of the ride, boys and girls.’

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Freya.

  ‘You saw the sign, didn’t you?’

  ‘Banton Castle?’

  ‘Aye. Although you may have spotted we call it Camelot now.’ He held a hand out to her. ‘Come on.’

  She pulled herself up off the bench with a groan.

  ‘You all right? You pulled a muscle, love?’

  ‘No . . . I’ve got MS.’

  Leon got up, squeezed past her, jumped down off the back and then turned, holding up his arms to help her down.

  ‘This is being used as an army base, then?’ asked Freya

  ‘Aye. You need a hand with her, lad?’

  ‘I’m good.’ Leon grasped her hands as she sat down and bum-shuffled off the back.

  Leon looked around. Above him loomed the Norman keep. He could see faces looking out of narrow arched windows and heads peering down from the flat roof at the very top. From one of the corner towers a Union Jack fluttered.

  ‘First things first, you two. Medical examination and then Major Everett will want to have a chat with you.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Two Years Ago

  Chaos. Absolute chaos.

  Tom Friedmann was being led across the deck of the aircraft carrier by a young man who looked as if he’d stepped straight out of high school into a standard-issue secret-services dark suit. Between his shoulders Tom could see the discreet bulge of a radio battery, and curled over the top of his ear the skin-coloured wire descending from an earpiece fed into the crisp white collar of his shirt.

  ‘This way, Mr Friedmann.’

  It was getting dark now, the Atlantic sky a cold, deep grey-blue that almost mirrored the freezing ocean below it. The carrier’s football-pitch-sized deck was almost completely filled with civilians sitting in rows like POWs, each issued with an orange waterproof spray jacket and a plastic bottle of water. Thousands of them – men, women, children – trembling in the cold. He recalled images of Syrian refugees in life jackets spilling from rickety boats on to Greek pebbled beaches.

  And now it’s our turn.

  At the far end of the deck, a large floodlit space was being kept clear for the constant traffic of helicopters coming in to land, disgorging yet more people on to the carrier’s deck, refuelling and taking off again.

  The young secret-services agent led Tom towards an open door at the base of the carrier’s tall, office-block-sized island. Tom craned his neck up to look at the bridge and air-traffic control at the top. Through the windows up there he could see the busy comings and goings of navy personnel and the faint glow of screens and displays inside.

  ‘Mind the step and mind your head, sir.’

  The passageway beyond was crammed with a seething mixture of navy personnel and government civilians. Everyone seemed to be clasping a clipboard to their chest as they squeezed past each other, or the flapping sheets of freshly printed and hurriedly stapled printer paper.

  He could guess what they were: hastily authored and printed-off procedure documents. Tom knew the CDC and FEMA had a thick dossier of emergency procedures to follow in the event of a wide spectrum of emergency situations. Today’s crisis, however, wasn’t in either of their playbooks. He was pretty certain of that. He looked around at the harried faces; everyone appeared to be doing their best to pretend there was some semblance of order here. That someone, somewhere, knew what the plan of action was.

  The young man kept looking back over his shoulder to make sure Tom was keeping up with him.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I’m trying to find Trent’s PA, sir. Let her know we managed to pick you up from Battery Park.’

  ‘Make way there!’ Just ahead of them, navy personnel backed up against the bulkheads. The civilians, less used to the cramped confines of navy life, were slower in followi
ng their lead.

  Tom’s chaperone put an arm across Tom’s chest and pressed him into a rack of internal-post pigeonholes. The papers poking out rustled and crumpled against his back.

  Down the passageway he saw some faces he recognized approaching, one behind the other, playing follow the leader; a Supreme Court justice, a couple of Republican congressmen. Then he saw uniforms: army, navy, air force, all silver buzzcuts, razor-burned jowls and stern expressions. They swept past Tom, and a young navy officer gestured for them to turn left into the open doorway of a meeting room.

  ‘This way, please, gentlemen.’

  Still more followed in their wake. He noticed several uniforms from the Royal Navy, the Canadian Navy. The familiar face of one of the White House’s regular press liaison officers and the news anchorwoman from CNN. He couldn’t recall her name right now, but all it would take would be someone saying out loud, ‘Tonight’s six o’clock news brought to you by . . .’ and he’d have it.

  Then, right at the back, one more familiar face.

  Tom waited until he was right beside him. ‘Dougie!’ He reached out and tapped the Secretary for Commerce on the arm.

  Douglas Trent turned angrily, a man with far too much on his mind and in no mood to be door-stopped by some civil-servant underling. His scowl instantly vanished when he recognized his old friend.

  ‘Tom! Thank Christ you made it!’

  Tom nodded. ‘Thanks for getting me out. It was a real close-run thing.’

  ‘A promise is a promise, amigo. No man left behind. Right?’

  ‘Mr Secretary?’ It was an underling door-stopping him this time. ‘The others are waiting in the briefing room to start the—’

  ‘Just gimme a second!’ Trent snapped.

  ‘Doug, what the hell’s going on?’

  Trent shook his head. ‘We don’t have anything like a chain of command. It’s a goddamn mess. That’s what we’ve got going on. We need to get our shit together and we need to do it quickly.’

  ‘Right.’ Tom nodded. ‘Right . . . then better let you get on. I’ll—’

  ‘Sure.’ Douglas Trent turned to go, then stopped. ‘No, wait. You can come in with me.’

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s going to be a free-for-all in there. I need someone in my corner. I need a quick-thinker. Fresh eyes.’

  ‘Jesus, Dougie . . . I’m not a bureaucrat or a—’

  ‘We got far too many of those in there already. Right now what I need is a wingman.’

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Shaken,’ Freya replied. ‘And, yeah, just a little freaked out.’

  ‘Hold still, please,’ said the doctor. She wrapped a tourniquet round Freya’s arm, cinched it tight and began to study the pale skin of the girl’s forearm for a suitable vein.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking your bloods.’

  ‘We’re not infected.’ Freya pulled her arm away. ‘We’ve both been taking the pills since the outbreak happened.’

  ‘This is just a precautionary measure. Now, please—’

  ‘I don’t want her sticking a needle in me!’ She turned to Leon for support. ‘I don’t want a stranger sticking a bloody—’

  ‘Hey, Freya.’ Leon stepped forward. ‘It’s OK. She’s just taking a little blood, right?’

  The doctor nodded. She looked as if she didn’t smile very often.

  ‘A small blood sample. That is all.’

  ‘I . . .’ Freya stared at the empty syringe in the woman’s hand. ‘I . . . really hate needles. And, look! I’m still shaking from earlier! You’re going to miss the vein and . . . Can’t we do this tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Every newcomer must be screened straight away,’ the doctor replied. She had an accent. Clipped. Precise. European.

  ‘Screened?’

  She looked at Leon. ‘Yes. Tested for dormant infection. This is not optional, I’m afraid.’ She turned to Freya. ‘And my name is Claudia Hahn.’ She smiled. ‘So . . . no longer a stranger now, all right?’

  ‘What do you mean by a dormant infection?’ pressed Leon.

  Dr Hahn sat back on her stool. ‘We suspect some people are resistant. Not fully resistant, but in so much as the virus takes a great deal longer to affect them and present symptoms.’ She looked at them both. ‘You encountered them earlier today, yes?’

  Leon nodded. She was referring to the snarks. ‘But we didn’t make contact with them.’ He turned to Freya. ‘Right?’

  Freya nodded quickly. ‘They never even touched us.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I still must have a sample. Please. To be absolutely certain.’

  Leon nodded at Freya. ‘I don’t think we get a choice here. Best just get it over with.’

  Reluctantly Freya offered her arm and looked away as Hahn inspected it and started tapping it in search of a decent vein.

  ‘We have also heard from some others that joined us last summer,’ the doctor continued. ‘You two may find this quite unbelievable . . .’ She looked up from Freya’s arm. ‘This virus . . . this thing, I don’t even know if we can call it a “virus”, but, whatever it is, it has tried to make imitations of people.’

  ‘People?’ Leon recalled the horse. The very convincing starving horse that Grace had pleaded with the others to be allowed into their shelter. If it could do horses, then why not people?

  ‘Yes. But very bad imitations, though. It is possible to easily tell. Apparently it cannot replicate hair or nails.’ She finally found a decent vein and eased the needle in.

  Freya jerked and looked away quickly.

  ‘Then if you can tell just by looking . . . why the blood test?’ said Leon. ‘Why not just take a look at our hair and nails?’

  ‘I have. I can see you have real hair and nails. But this is a more thorough test.’ She finished drawing the blood sample then pressed a cotton pad to Freya’s arm.

  ‘What’s the test?’

  Dr Hahn took the syringe of blood and squirted several droplets of it into a petri dish. ‘Sodium chloride.’ She looked at them both. ‘Table salt.’ She opened a bottle of clear liquid. ‘This is a strong saline solution. Ready?’

  Freya frowned. ‘Uh, why’re you asking me that? I’m not exactly planning to jump up and eat your face or—’

  Hahn poured a small amount of it on to Freya’s blood.

  ‘The virus reacts instantly to the salt. For some reason it cannot tolerate it.’ She gently swirled the petri dish around, ensuring the saline solution and blood had a fair chance to mix.

  ‘I have actually seen a positive result . . . just once. Blood taken from an animal. The blood instantly congeals. It is quite unmistakable.’ She stared closely at the mixed liquid as she tilted the dish from side to side and watched Freya’s blood run freely across the glass. Eventually she looked up at her over the plastic rims of her glasses. She smiled.

  ‘Congratulations, young lady. You are one hundred per cent human.’ She turned to Leon. ‘Now it is your turn . . .’

  ‘Knights, you may be seated!’

  Freya met Leon’s eyes and cocked a brow at him.

  Knights? Seriously?

  They were standing in a great banquet hall. On all four sides stone walls rose up to meet roughly hewn oak support beams that stretched across the ceiling and supported the planking of the gallery floor above. At one end a vast fireplace crackled with burning logs. Above the flames a large cooking pot hung from a frame and a hook, bubbling and steaming.

  Crowded around the fireplace Leon counted seven dogs, a mixture of greyhounds and cocker spaniels, watching the pot intently and licking their lips hopefully.

  The hall was filled with probably a hundred people, standing either side of two long, wooden tables, waiting for their turn to take a seat on the benches beside them. At the far end of the hall was a third table set horizontally.

  Leon found himself thinking of Hogwarts. Instead of the teaching staff sitting at the top table, there we
re ‘knights’. Leon recognized the face of the man who’d squatted beside him in the back of the truck. They were all still wearing their army fatigues, but the strapped-on armour had been removed and now they looked like an unkempt row of army cadets.

  In the middle of them all, where Leon would have placed Dumbledore, stood the community’s leader, Major Everett. The only person on the top table with a military title and yet not in uniform.

  ‘And now the rest of you may be seated,’ he said, spreading his hands.

  The hall filled with the noise of bench legs scraping against the wooden floor and the rustle of movement. Leon and Freya followed the others and squeezed on to the bench side by side.

  ‘Jesus, did we just step through a time portal into the Middle Ages?’ whispered Freya.

  Major Everett remained standing as he waited for them all to settle.

  ‘Well, I’m sure the rumour mill has been turning this afternoon.’ Absently he pulled at the hem of his dark burgundy shirt and fussed with its flapping sleeves. ‘I was hoping, as I’m sure we all have been, that this second shitty winter might have finished the bloody thing off, but that appears not to be the case. The kraken is still out there and very much alive and well.’

  The hall filled with a chorus of sighs and muttered exchanges.

  ‘Sergeant Corkie, would you mind briefing everyone on what you encountered today?’

  The gravelly voiced old soldier who’d spoken to Leon nodded and stood up. ‘Aye, sir. As you lot all know, since the snow started clearing up, me an’ the lads have been scouting out the nearby towns around Oxford. Those of you who’ve been here with us since last year will remember that we saw just a few of those little scuttlers around last spring. And they looked pretty sluggish and all done-in. And since then absolutely nothing. Not a sign of the buggers.’

  He shook his head. ‘Then today . . . well . . . it turns out that the winter hasn’t killed them off. They’re not dead. In fact, they’re doing very well and send their regards.’