Plague Nation

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you,’ said Grace. ‘I promise. But we do want to ask you something. And you have to be very honest.’

  He glanced from her to Hahn, meeting her gaze, hoping the doctor was somehow waiting for the right moment to step in and put a stop to this.

  ‘My brother said there was a radio message about a big rescue mission,’ Grace started with a matter-of-fact manner, the tone of a little busybody settling a petty playground dispute between school friends. ‘And he said that you’d told him that was all a load of silly nonsense because you’ve not heard anything on your radio.’

  She lifted her chin slightly, looking down her nose at him like a disapproving schoolteacher. ‘Now, you have to be honest with me, Mr Everett. Is that true?’

  His eyes flickered back on to the sharp glistening spike hovering just in front of him, so close to him now he couldn’t actually focus on the tip of it. It was a threatening blur.

  ‘Don’t shout the answer,’ she said. ‘Whisper it quietly. Were you telling the truth?’ Grace lifted the pressure of her smothering hand ever so slightly.

  ‘Yes! Yes! I was telling the truth—’

  She pressed her hand down again to hush him. ‘Hmm. I’m not sure I trust you.’

  Everett glanced again at Hahn, his eyes pleading with her to help him. But she shook her head. ‘I am with Grace, Major. Just be honest with us and we will leave you alone.’

  Oh my God . . . She’s one of them. They’re both . . .

  Hahn smiled. Guessing what he was thinking. ‘Yes. We have both been infected. But I am still very much Dr Hahn.’

  ‘Be honest. That’s all you have to do.’ Grace lifted her hand again slightly.

  ‘Please don’t hurt me!’ he gasped quickly.

  She pressed down again to silence him.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to try your radio anyway.’ Grace cocked her head. ‘Can we?’

  Let them. Jesus Christ. Let them turn it on. Let them play with it. They won’t get anything.

  He nodded quickly.

  Hahn wandered from the bedside, across the study, to the table beneath his window. The army-green radio set sat in a metal carry-rack: a panel full of cryptically labelled buttons and a small LED screen.

  She’s no idea how to use the thing.

  Hahn squatted down, inspected the panel for a moment, then found the power switch. She pressed it and the radio came alive, small green diodes blinking.

  ‘Now what do I do?’

  The hand was lifted from his mouth again. ‘You h-have to hit the digital analogue mode button. Then the one n-next to it. That takes you through the f-frequencies.’

  Hahn nodded and followed his instructions. ‘There’s no sound.’

  Everett carefully raised a hand and pointed. ‘H-headphones. There.’

  Hahn picked up a heavy set of army headphones and pulled them over her ears. She began to turn the dial through the frequencies. In the quiet of the room, Everett could hear the steady hiss of white noise leaking out as she clicked through. He prayed he’d remembered to do that precautionary thing the last time he’d listened in.

  ‘Is there anything?’ asked Grace.

  Hahn shook her head and kept turning.

  ‘There’s nothing out th-there . . .’ Everett whispered. ‘It’s a w-waste of time.’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Grace. She pressed her hand down on his lips again to hush him.

  A minute passed in silence, just the repeating click of the dial and an endless hiss, and Everett was beginning to hope there might be some way out of this for him. These two creatures might have just come here to learn the truth, and then having done so would disappear into the night never to return. Perhaps even leave the castle alone once and for all.

  If only . . . God . . . He’d remembered to do it.

  The girl was looking at him as they waited. ‘I bet you’re surprised at how good we’ve got at looking human, aren’t you?’

  Everett looked at Grace and nodded.

  ‘Are you thinking there are others of us here?’ She smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s OK, Mr Everett. It’s just me and Claudia, I promise.’

  Hahn finally pulled the headphones off. ‘There is nothing, Grace. It is just white noise. Everett’s right . . . there’s no one out there.’

  Everett did his best not to gasp with relief. The girl looked disappointed. He wondered if she’d been hoping to catch him out, to have enough justification to thrust that hovering spine deep into his right eye.

  ‘Hang on, let me try something . . .’ Hahn stood up, leaned over the rack and peered at the nest of cables emerging from the screw-in sockets at the back

  No . . . Shit. No. No. No.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Grace.

  ‘I’m checking to see if the cables are all plugged in properly.’ She checked through them, one after the other. ‘This one . . .’ She leaned further over, squinting to try to read the socket labels in the poor light.

  Everett felt his guts turn in a queasy loop.

  ‘Not sure what this one is . . . but it is very loose. Almost completely unscrewed.’

  Oh God . . . Oh please. No.

  She twisted it tight, pushed the rack back, then squatted back down. The dial clicked once again as she began to turn it. Again, click, and the hiss of white noise leaking from the headphones.

  Click . . . hiss . . .

  Click . . . hiss . . .

  Click . . .

  CHAPTER 33

  Leon stirred. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was actually wide awake, that his sleep had been disturbed by something real, not a dream. Then he understood what had awoken him. Noises were coming from outside, beyond the dorm’s door and out on the gallery.

  Voices. Several of them.

  Feet clumped carelessly on the echoing wooden floor. He sat up. The dormitory was still mostly dark, just a faint glow of lethargic pre-dawn grey light spilling in through the narrow windows. He could see others sitting up on their cots.

  ‘What the hell’s going on out there?’ grunted Corkie sleepily.

  Leon could hear several female voices talking across each other. It sounded like a heated exchange. He assumed it was Danielle kicking off again, probably over a borrowed pillow or something, then he recognized Grace’s voice, sharp and urgent, cutting across the exchange.

  He swung his legs over the side of his bed, pulled on some tracksuit bottoms and a loose sweater. ‘Something’s going on out there!’ he called as he hurried barefoot across the floor and pulled the door open to take a look.

  The flickering beam of a torch cast distended shadows across the floor and stone walls. He could see several figures gathered in the middle of the gallery, several more in the doorway of the women’s dormitory, emerging like him to see what the hell was going on.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Leon called out.

  ‘Leon!’ Grace cried. She hurried over to him and threw her arms round his waist.

  ‘Hey! What’s up? . . . Hey, Grace?’ She was clinging to him tightly. He could feel her whole body trembling.

  ‘Leon . . .’ Naga’s voice. She was the one holding the torch. ‘She’s really upset. She’s manic! I can’t get any sense out of her!’

  He tugged Grace loose from him and hunched down so they were face to face. ‘Grace! What’s up? What’s happened?’ Her eyes were round and wide, her mouth the same.

  Naga came over. ‘I found her out here.’ Naga shook her head. ‘I think she’s in shock.’

  ‘Grace?’ He grasped her shoulders and shook her firmly. ‘Talk to me!’

  ‘Sh-she-she’s in there with him!’ she managed to utter, her words almost incoherent.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘C-Claudia. Killed!’

  ‘What? Killed? Who’s been killed?’

  Corkie emerged from the men’s dorm carrying his torch and cursing angrily. ‘Jesus Christ! We’re trying to get some bloody sleep in here!’

  Leon tapped his sister’s che
ek lightly to get her to focus back on him. ‘C’mon, Grace . . . You said someone got killed? Who?’

  ‘Everett!’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s what I thought she was trying to say,’ said Naga.

  ‘Dr Hahn, Major Everett . . . Where are they, Grace?’ asked Leon.

  She pointed across the gallery floor at the door to Everett’s study.

  It seemed now that everyone had emerged on to the gallery, more torches adding to the confusing dance of shadows.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Freya’s voice. Leon turned to see her limping over. She’d obviously got up too quickly to bother rooting around for her walking stick. She joined Leon and rested her hand on his shoulder to recover her balance. ‘Grace? You OK, hon? You look like you’ve—’

  ‘Everett’s . . . infected . . . Hahn!’ she cried out, finally managing to clarify things.

  Infected. Everyone heard that word.

  In the stunned silence Freya shook her head. ‘Grace, sweetie, just slow down and tell us what’s you’ve seen.’

  ‘The virus!’ She looked up at Freya, then Leon. ‘It’s in the castle!’

  The gallery erupted with gasps of disbelief. Everyone staring at Grace.

  ‘Grace, if it was in the castle—’ started Leon.

  ‘Everett . . .’ She pointed again at his study door. ‘He’s one of them!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ snapped Corkie dismissively. ‘Your sister’s a bloody pain in the arse.’ He strode past them towards Everett’s room and knocked heavily on the door.

  ‘Major?’

  The voices hushed down and they all waited in silent anticipation for the door to open and Everett to appear, bleary-eyed and grumpy at being rudely roused at such an unearthly hour. But there was no answer.

  Corkie knocked again, harder. ‘Major Everett?’ He waited another couple of seconds, then tried the door handle. It was locked.

  Then they heard it, muffled by the door but unmistakeable in the complete silence: a low keening moan coming from inside the room. It sounded like several blended voices, male and female, young and old – a small tuneless choir humming a discordant, rising note.

  ‘Shit . . . shit!’ hissed Corkie. ‘Something’s going on in there! Everett? Major? You OK?’

  The wailing sound grew louder. More insistent.

  ‘Do something!’ snapped Naga.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Grace said Dr Hahn’s in there too!’

  ‘He’s infected!’ shouted Grace. ‘He’s infecting her!’

  ‘Infected?’ Corkie scowled. ‘Oh, come on.’ His voice sounded as if he were holding on to a hope that Grace was crying wolf. Then they heard something fall over and crash inside the room and the last of his doubt vanished. He turned round and picked out a few of his men. ‘Gosling, Briggs, Royce, get a salt-sprayer and riot shields!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hurry!’ He took several wary steps back from the door as the wail grew louder and rose in pitch. ‘And get some diesel!’ he shouted after them.

  The men’s feet slapped quickly down the stone stairs and echoed across the main hall below.

  The contortion of voices beyond the door could no longer be mistaken as human, as if whoever . . . whatever . . . knew what was coming.

  Fire.

  Something thudded against the inside of Everett’s door, and Leon pulled Grace and Freya with him as he backed up several steps. He looked around at the frightened faces, stark torchlight picking out rounded eyes, mouths held wide open and silent. He found himself experiencing a fleeting recall of that nightmare moment back at Emerald Parks: everyone uselessly frozen, the only ones in motion those who were hell-bent on burning his sister like a Salem witch.

  The door thudded again. Corkie jumped away. ‘Everyone get back!’ he barked.

  ‘OhmyGod, ohmyGod,’ whimpered Denise softly.

  Leon felt Freya’s hand grasping his arm tightly. ‘Please not this again!’ she hissed.

  He nodded. Her memory of Emerald Parks was clearer than his. He’d been dazed, stunned by a punch to the head, and, mercifully, his recall of the last few moments had been a blur that he’d never since tried to revisit, pick through or make sense of.

  The inhuman wail beyond the door rose and fell and rose again like wind gusting across some desolate, bleak moor. They heard the clanking of the fire hydrant, below, the chilling sound of diesel sloshing in a jerry can, and the barefooted slap of Gosling, Briggs and Royce coming back up the steps, all three puffing heavily from the exertion.

  Corkie took one of the shields from Briggs and a machete that the man had thought to grab too. He turned round and whipped the beam of his torch over the faces on the gallery, looking for Grace. He finally found her.

  ‘You’re sure both of them are in there, love?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘Right.’ He approached the door and knocked again one more time. ‘Everett! Can you hear me? This is your last warning! Open the door or me an’ the lads are going to kick it in!’

  The wailing sound continued, rising and ululating, then dropping away to a mournful whimper. Leon wondered if that was Dr Hahn’s voice. If Everett had infected her, then perhaps, just like that woman who’d been on the train with them, she’d gone into some sort of shock-induced trance . . . that god-awful moaning sound like some sort of lullaby or hymn.

  The gallery waited in expectant silence for Corkie to make his move.

  He decided he’d waited long enough. ‘All right, stuff this for a game of soldiers.’ He raised his bare foot up to waist height and kicked hard with his heel at a spot right beside the door handle.

  The fake oak door rattled flimsily under his kick. The veneer cracked and splintered. He raised his foot and kicked again and this time the door juddered inwards. The keening moan suddenly ceased.

  Leon instinctively took another step backwards, drawing Grace and Freya with him.

  Corkie picked up one of the riot shields standing on the floor beside him. ‘C’mon, mate, let’s stop playing silly buggers!’ he shouted into the dimly lit room. He was about to step forward when something emerged from the grey gloom.

  ‘Oh, shit-shit-shit . . .’

  CHAPTER 34

  The torch in Corkie’s hand briefly illuminated the figure as it fell through the door, and Leon’s impression of its size and shape was fleeting. It seemed to be two figures, or more accurately one and a half.

  As the figure staggered upright, Corkie and his men backed up. Several torch beams converged as it hesitated there for a moment. Leon recognized bare male human legs: one still covered with pale skin and a fuzz of leg hair; the other a mess of jelly-like muscles and ligaments as its skin slewed off. Its groin was still covered by a pair of light blue-and-white-striped Y-fronts, though they were darkly mottled with smears and spots of blood. Its torso, however, was far less comprehensible; it was a contorted mass of bones and cartilage as two bodies seemed to be melded together.

  From the right side of the torso, barely recognizable, Everett’s arm had grown into a long serrated blade of tough resinous material, with short gnarled spikes and unfinished nodules bubbling off at irregular angles. On the left hand side of the torso, where Everett’s armpit should have been, Leon could see a head welded into the flesh as if it had been forcefully rammed there, a nightmarish Siamese twin.

  Hahn’s face was still discernible, twisted upwards, facing the ceiling. Leon could see the whites of her eyes as they rolled sideways, wide, confused, frightened. Her head was in effect morphing to become Everett’s shoulder, but not yet completed. From the bottom of her head, the neck and the remains of Hahn’s upper body flailed like a useless puppet, arms swinging. Her upper torso gave way at her waist to the flapping remains of her spinal column, her vertebrae still stoically held in place by frayed, knotted strings of nerves and arteries. One of her arms still seemed functional, and Leon watched as she raised her hand towards her face, flexed her fingers and stared longingly at them, as if saying good
bye to the last fragment of control she would ever have.

  Everett’s own head was perched on the end of a half-metre-long neck that was now bowed forward under its own weight. As they watched in a frozen silence, his head began to droop from the extended neck, like a plastic action figure held over a lighter flame. It sagged on sticky strands down towards the floor until finally they snapped like twine. The head separated and thudded on to the floor and the long neck recoiled and swung upwards.

  Somebody screamed at Corkie to do something, and for Leon the illusion of time being slowed down to a glacial crawl suddenly evaporated.

  Everything went into rapid motion.

  ‘Spray the bastard!’ bellowed Corkie. ‘Spray it!’

  Gosling pumped the extinguisher’s trigger and a jet of salt water spurted out across the gallery on to the conjoined figures. The response was instantaneous. Both mouths opened wide and screamed in synchronicity. Male and female vocal chords weakened by their rapid decay now sounded like recordings slowed right down: fluttering, loose and multi-timbral.

  Everett’s long, jagged claw-arm swung around in a vicious sweep that knocked the fire extinguisher clean out of Gosling’s hands. Then swung back, barbed spikes lodging deep into his skull with a hard thud.

  Gosling staggered backwards, clawing at his face, the spikes snapping deliberately, easily, like the delicate spines of a sea urchin. The claw-arm now swung towards Corkie and he quickly ducked down behind the riot shield. The shield thrummed like a plastic water butt under the hammer-blow impact.

  ‘Briggs! Royce!’ he shouted. ‘For God’s sake burn it!’

  Briggs had the fuel in one hand, a shield in the other. He passed Royce his shield and started fumbling with the jerry can. The idiot was wearing cricket gloves for protection and was getting nowhere fast.

  Leon pulled Grace’s grasping hands off him and lurched forward.

  ‘Leon! No!’ both she and Freya screamed.

  He snatched the jerry can from Briggs’s gloved hands and grasped hold of the tightly screwed cap.