Plague Nation

by Alex Scarrow

  Grace and Fish joined them, looking around at their surroundings.

  ‘So many people,’ Grace said, looking at the civilians.

  ‘Hey! You!’

  They turned at the voice to see a yellow suit approaching them, assault rifle slung over one arm, clipboard tucked under the other. At least this one had a full Perspex visor. Leon could see a face behind the reflective plate.

  ‘You folks need to come with me.’

  Freya looked at him. ‘You don’t seem to be Chinese.’

  ‘United States Navy, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘Now, will you folks please follow me?’

  CHAPTER 51

  Tom Friedmann signed the form as best he could, wearing his thick, black neoprene gloves. He handed the clipboard back to the lieutenant. Any fool could have forged that nondescript scrawl and authorized the resource allocations on the sheet.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Tom nodded and watched him jog back down the mile-long quayside towards the far end of this vast fenced encampment where the Pacific Nations Alliance ships were all birthed. The largest of them, the Chinese aircraft carrier Jiangsu, loomed over Southampton like a giant grey, white and blue multistorey car park.

  Down their end of the quayside, the US presence was far less impressive. Despite two false starts and very nearly a complete cancellation, Trent had allowed Tom to take only a couple of destroyers and seven cargo ships. One of the destroyers and five of the cargo ships were moored up in Calais right now, running a similar rescue operation for mainland Europeans. That gave him just under two hundred navy personnel, about fifty medically trained civilian volunteers and one platoon of marines.

  The rest of the navy and military boots were back in Cuba, busy enforcing Trent’s presidency.

  Tom stepped out of the tent, his onshore ‘office’, and into the tepid, pallid daylight. He looked up at the scudding clouds and recalled one of the many times he and his ex-wife had flippantly played the my country’s better than yours game. She frequently used to win with the well, at least we’re not all packing firearms like the A-Team argument. However, he felt he was close to a draw with the weather’s always so goddamn insipid and grey.

  Once again he scanned this end of the camp for his children’s faces. He wondered if he’d even recognize them now. It had been three years since he’d last seen them. Grace had been eleven. She’d be fourteen now and Leon nearly nineteen.

  If they were still alive.

  He shut that down quickly. We don’t go there. They’re alive. We frikkin well know it, don’t we, Staff Sergeant Friedmann?

  The ‘processing camp’ was divided in two: a coil of barbed wire ran down the middle, cutting it neatly in half. On one side, US marines patrolled; on the other, Chinese, New Zealand and Australian troops took turns.

  Tom was irritated by the lack of trust between them. They should have been pooling resources, working together to feed and process the Brits who’d turned up here. But the Pacific Nations Alliance now viewed what remained of the US with extreme caution. The detonation of a tactical nuclear warhead fifty kilometres out to sea off the coast of Havana hadn’t been missed over there. They viewed the hostile takeover of Cuba as an illegal act, an act of terrorism, and the use of a nuke as a warning sign that the only other surviving nation on Planet Earth was dangerously ready to throw its weight around.

  The PNA, frankly, wanted to put a safe distance between themselves and Trent’s ‘America Version 2.0’. And Tom really couldn’t blame them for that. But here, far away from that idiot, they should be coordinating more.

  This should be one processing camp. Instead, here was this long barrier of spiralling razor wire, a symbol of distrust because that hothead had wanted to make his point with a fifty kiloton warhead.

  They needed to be sharing their limited resources. They should have been working together to decide which tested and properly evaluated evacuees were going in which ship to which nation.

  Mistrust was hampering their efforts.

  Both groups had arrived here two weeks ago. The PNA ships had arrived several days ahead of them, and the quayside had already been crowded with nearly a thousand people waiting for rescue. All of them fast running out of food and water. The first order of business had been constructing the perimeter, setting up the mesh fences, the watchtowers. He’d argued for one compound, but the PNA fleet led by the Jiangsu’s captain, Xien, had insisted on setting up the border.

  Tom had spent the last week in negotiations with his PNA opposite numbers – Captain Xien from the Chinese navy and Admiral Kemp from the Australian navy – discussing how the Brits were going to be tested and sorted. The PNA, more specifically, the Chinese, had been doing some useful groundwork on testing, while the US had been playing gunboat politics. It seemed they knew far more about this pathogen than anyone else. They had a test process they were prepared to share with the Americans: a blood test that checked for elevated levels of oestrogen and histamine, but which also mixed a small amount of salt with the blood. There was an active ingredient that responded to coagulation and turned the sample blue-ish. It wasn’t perfect. The blue was dark; you needed to hold it up to a strong light to spot the colour change. But it was a damn sight more helpful than anything Tom’s side had come up with.

  Trent’s parting piece of wisdom had been, ‘If one of those Brits so much as sneezes, shoot ’em dead.’

  Sharing the testing technique had been the easy part of the negotiations. The more difficult part had been discussing how they were going to divide up those that had been passed as clean. There was a temptation on both sides to cherry-pick the most useful: engineers, mechanics, doctors, dentists, and so on.

  They’d managed to agree on a ‘passport’ design, however. It was a simple red credit-card-sized document, handed to those whose blood didn’t turn blue. A digital photo and name. The Chinese carrier had a reprographics room, and their printing machines were running the passports off right now. The most important part of these hastily designed documents would be the space set aside for two further photos to be trimmed and stuck in: pictures of two distinguishing marks.

  Tom knew the virus could make bugs. They’d seen images. This pathogen could make creatures. There was a microbiologist among the US personnel who didn’t know how to categorize this thing. He didn’t know which branch of microbiology expertise they could file it under: bacteriology, mycology, protozoology, phycology, parasitology, virology . . .

  Out of exasperation he’d even resorted to using a line from Star Trek: ‘This isn’t life as we know it.’

  It can make things.

  Tom had seen with his own eyes the virus grow tendrils, like mould-growth, reaching out across the ground, spreading from the mush that had been a human body. He knew – they all knew – that it could do that, but from conversations with the Brits in the holding pen, waiting for the testing to start, they’d learned about the bigger creatures. Worse than that, the copies. Some of them had mentioned the virus attempting to produce a range of lookalike animals: dogs, cats, rabbits, deer. He’d asked if it were possible that what they’d actually witnessed were just infected animals that had somehow been partially liquefied, absorbed – whatever the damned correct term was – but had managed to survive. The interviewees had all seemed quite certain they were viral creations, mostly bad copies, yet lately almost convincing.

  They’d learned about a root network. Just like those hairline tendrils but on a much bigger scale. Like tree roots, but thicker. Apparently this damned thing was linked up like a telephone network.

  And then, the most unsettling of all these conversations, were the people who’d claimed that this thing had begun to mimic humans. At first Tom suspected he was hearing from the crazy few, the sort of idiots who saw a face in a banana and claimed it as a miracle from God. Survival paranoia. Fear and ignorance combined to create mythology. The very same recipe that produced barbaric ‘treatments’ and ‘exorcisms’ in West Africa, that once produced ridiculous he
adlines about the AIDS epidemic during the eighties.

  But he’d heard the same crazy thing enough times. And if he could accept the virus was having a go at dogs and cats . . . then why not humans?

  Photographs of distinguishing marks on the passports were agreed on both sides of the table to be the most important inclusion. Birthmarks, scars or tattoos. At least two. The Chinese had pushed for three, Tom had pushed for one, arguing that if some poor child was too young to have fallen off a bike or a skateboard, or get marked up with body art, did they really deserve to be left behind?

  Two was the compromise.

  The hardest of the negotiations had been to determine how they were going to process the passport-holders. Trent had given Tom a checklist for potential candidates: a scoring system taking into account health, skills, age, race and political leaning for Chrissakes. Tom had ditched Trent’s memo as soon as they’d set sail. But healthy and young – or at least not too old – those were the criteria upon which he and Captain Xien had agreed.

  Tom surveyed the camp. The holding pen was now crammed with several thousand people yet to be tested. They had been held in there for over a week, and their relief and gratitude was turning into something else.

  We need to get moving before we lose control of this.

  In front of the pen, the testing tents had been set up, several dozen of them on their side of the camp divide, and many more on the other. Tom was pushing to start testing; Xien wanted to hold out for a while longer. Evacuees were arriving every day. The PNA had space for far more people than Tom’s small flotilla did.

  When they’d arrived, there’d already been just under a thousand waiting for them. The supplies they’d brought with them (if any) had run out and they’d been foraging from supermarkets and warehouses in the area. Over the last week that number had swollen to about six thousand. It seemed as though it was tailing off now.

  On the US side of the razor wire, they had space for about nine hundred evacuees on the three ships. Xien and his translator had so far been coy about revealing how many they had space for, but talking to a more relaxed Australian navy officer, he’d discovered that they were looking to take on no more than two and a half thousand.

  Between both fleets, they were going to be able to rescue only half the people gathered here. Which was news best kept to themselves.

  He looked at the long holding pen and the people crammed inside, noses and fingers pushed through the wire, calling out to the marines standing guard in their yellow biohazard suits.

  The cavalry’s arrived, folks! But only for some of you.

  Tom decided to take another tour around the camp, to check on the set-up of the last few testing tents and the wire fence ‘corridors’: one leading those who’d be given passports to another sorting area, and another leading the rest out of the perimeter of the camp to fend for themselves.

  Half of you will be saved . . . The rest? God help you.

  When their nine hundred were aboard, it was going to be time to set sail, leaving the rest of these poor bastards behind. That, he knew, was going to be most dangerous part of the operation. The moment the ‘left behinds’ figured out the ships were getting ready to depart, there was going to be bloody chaos.

  It was going to turn ugly.

  Which is why he wished there was a little more openness and cooperation going on. If Xien’s fleet started packing up before they were done, Tom’s marines were going to have to hold the line until they were ready to cast off.

  He shook his head. This would have been a lot easier if Trent hadn’t been such an asshole.

  Tom muttered under his breath as he scanned the pen yet again for Jennifer and the kids, convinced they were in there somewhere. He’d given them the edge; they’d escaped London before the lockdown. Jenny’s parents’ home was the perfect rural hideaway . . . and he recalled her father had a shotgun too.

  They made it. They survived.

  He scanned the faces beyond the wire systematically, his eyes darting from face to desperate, hopeful face, hoping to see Leon and Grace.

  They’re here. They HAVE to be here.

  Tomorrow the testing process would begin. They had seven tents. Three examination booths per tent, so batches of about twenty evacuees at a time. The PNA would probably process twice that number. Altogether sixty people at a time. Allowing for half an hour per batch for blood testing, photographing distinguishing marks and filling in the passports, they’d be through the people in this pen in about two days.

  Come on, Leon. Come on, Grace.

  Tom was going to spend all day tomorrow on the pen gate as they let each group through. Watching the candidates like a hawk, theirs and the PNA’s.

  And, if need be, he was going to be standing there all through the night.

  And the next day.

  Because he knew . . . he just knew

  CHAPTER 52

  What the hell have we gone and done?

  They were stuck in a wire cage the size of a couple of football pitches. Along each of the four sides soldiers in yellow and white hazard suits were standing guard. At all four corners, towers had been improvised, using freight-loaders, their crane arms fully raised. On top of each one a wooden pallet served as a platform and two soldiers manned a sweeping floodlight.

  Leon watched a solitary figure in yellow slowly stalking the far end, clipboard under one arm and just a metre or so back from the mesh.

  He wasn’t sure what was concerning him more: the menacing, faceless guards, or the cram of humanity sharing their cage. He had no idea how to judge numbers. There were easily thousands in here, though. The concrete ground was occupied from one side to the other with people standing or sitting, with bivouacs made from coats and jackets. The pen reeked of human faeces. The guards had provided basic latrines in one corner of the pen, but there was no getting away from the smell.

  The sky was beginning to darken now and the glare coming from the floodlights was more noticeable.

  ‘Any sign of the others yet?’ called Freya.

  He turned to her. Leon had managed to find a vacant space along the mesh that gave him a view of that cattle grid and the entrance to the camp. Freya was sitting on the ground a metre back. ‘No.’

  Leon had been fully expecting them to turn up here at some point today. It’s not like they were far away, and he was sure Naga would have sent someone else in to see what had happened to them. The afternoon had drifted by and was now waning.

  ‘Maybe they’ve decided not to come,’ he added.

  A woman to Leon’s left looked at him. ‘You just arrived this morning, love?’ She had a mop of wild and wiry grey hair held in check by a baseball cap.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We been here a week. It’s a bloody disgrace, treating us like this. Like effin’ animals.’ She nodded out through the mesh at the figures patrolling the fence. ‘Bastards.’

  A siren sounded from one of the four watchtowers. Leon flinched at the noise. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Feeding time at the zoo,’ the woman replied. She nodded her head. ‘There . . .’

  Leon followed her gaze and saw about two dozen soldiers in white hazard suits escorting a convoy of seven forklift loaders towards the pen. The forklifts were stacked high with crates. As they approached, the soldiers guarding the entrance began to wave their arms at the people inside to back up from the gate to allow the forklifts in. They were getting little cooperation, and Leon noticed the woman beside him shaking her head.

  There was a heavy rattle of gunfire over their heads from the guard tower beside the entrance, and the angry crowd ducked, cowered and withdrew.

  ‘People are going to start getting shot if this keeps up,’ she muttered.

  The gate clattered to one side and the soldiers were first in, waving the crowd back with their guns. Behind them, in the space created, the forklifts rolled forward, deposited their loads on the ground then slowly reversed out, the spinning yellow lights accompanied by warning beeps. />
  ‘There’s no bloody organization here,’ she said. ‘It’s absolutely disgusting. There’s people been stuck here for days and got nothing to eat yet.’

  The soldiers withdrew and the entrance gate rattled closed again. The crowd surged forward as one, and Leon’s last glimpse of the crates was of a man clambering on top of the nearest stack and tearing at the cardboard and packing tape with his bare hands.

  ‘Like I said . . . feeding time at the zoo.’

  It was cold, made even more miserable by the rain drizzling down from the dark overcast sky. The floodlights sweeping the pen picked out the rain in thick, glistening beams.

  ‘OK, so I’m going to write a letter of complaint to someone once this is all done,’ said Freya. ‘Mind you, to be fair, I’ve been to rock festivals that were almost as shit as this.’

  Leon put his arm round her shoulders and tugged at her to shuffle up. They were sitting under his anorak in the rain in a pen that reeked of human crap, and yet he realized he was OK with that; if he could feel the body warmth of Freya right next to him, that would do him.

  Do you love her, MonkeyNuts?

  Of course, Dad. She’s great.

  Then tell her, for Chrissakes!

  She bum-shuffled closer then rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Grace is working her magic again, I notice.’

  A few metres away, Grace was squatting down with some other folk, Fish beside her. They seemed to be deep in conversation.

  ‘Getting the camp gossip, I guess,’ said Leon. ‘Where’s everyone come from? Who’s just braved Crap Corner to go have a dump?’

  He felt Freya’s shoulders jiggle beside him.

  ‘I guess they weren’t expecting this many people,’ he said after a while. ‘I’m sure we’ll get sorted soon.’ He felt rain pool on his brow, then run down the bridge of his nose. ‘Real soon, I hope.’

  Freya nodded at the Chinese aircraft carrier. It had loomed over the quay like a joyless multistorey car park during the day. Now that it was dark, the lights glaring brightly on every deck made it glow like some sort of dystopian shopping centre. ‘I’d say there’s room for everyone here on that big old bugger alone.’