by Teri Terry
I open my eyes. It’s night still. The stars are even brighter now, unnaturally so—they shine like our sun, and light up the sky. I try to sit up, but I can’t. Mum eases me up.
“Where…” I whisper, then swallow. The words won’t come.
“Where are we? We’re going to the bird hide on that proposed development site. A good place to hide away. No one has found it yet, and believe me, they’ve tried.”
A good place to hide away? Her words float around inside my head, but the meaning is lost.
She helps me walk. She takes most of my weight; I can’t move otherwise. I try to say I’m sorry, but speaking jars my head and it hurts so much I start to cry again.
“Shhhh. Shhhh, Shay. We’ll be there soon.” She starts humming a lullaby, and I focus on that, and on stuffing the pain away in a drawer. A drawer isn’t big enough now; it’s a cupboard, then a wardrobe. Then a whole room in a house.
We’re there. It’s a sort of tent shelter, made of mottled canvas that blends into the trees and bushes that surround it. She leans me up against a tree. She’s got one of those air mattresses where you push a button and it somehow inflates itself. She puts it inside the shelter, puts a blanket on it. Helps me lie down.
“Shhhh, baby girl. Go to sleep. Shhhh…”
I’m not sure if I sleep, but later I open my eyes, and she’s gone. The pain is in a soccer stadium now. I haven’t got a ticket, so I can’t get in; it’s safe.
She comes back, lugging stuff from our boat, kisses me, and goes back for more.
I close my eyes, and everything goes black.
CHAPTER 20
CALLIE
I GO BACK TO WATCH Mum and Kai sleeping. It’s late at night and dark behind the glass in their enclosure, but outside is a watcher. He has a screen where he can see them through an infrared camera, and the temperature of the air where they sleep is monitored for change.
It stays safely in the green.
I’m counting down the minutes until they can let them out tomorrow. An hour passes; another, and another. There is the slow tick of a clock on the wall. The breathing of the watcher.
The phone buzzes next to him, and he picks it up.
“Sir! But how— Yes, sir!”
He puts the phone down and runs—for a large cupboard in the corner of the room. He opens it and takes out a biohazard suit, and puts it on faster than I’d have thought possible. Somewhere nearby an alarm starts to ring.
Curious about what is going on, I drift outside.
Everywhere I look, lights are on or switching on, bathing the tent city in a strange orangeade glow under a weak new moon. People emerge wearing biohazard suits, and they seem agitated and afraid. Inside what was the dining tent, there are now people lying on camp beds. Some are sweating and silent; some are screaming out in pain.
Mum’s friend Dr. Lawson is in there, but he’s not in a suit. He’s on a camp bed.
There is fight in his face and pain in his eyes. He has a notebook and scribbles something on the page.
The newly suited watcher from Mum and Kai’s quarantine tent arrives and is waved over by Dr. Lawson. He helps him get up.
Slowly they walk outside, Dr. Lawson refusing the offer of an arm. They head toward the quarantine tent.
Inside of it the lights are on now, and Mum and Kai are awake, up and dressed. When Dr. Lawson walks in, the relief on Mum’s face soon turns to horror as she gets a better look at him. His gray face, the way his body shakes and shudders.
He gestures to the watcher to unlock their door.
“But that’s against—”
“There doesn’t seem to be much point in that now, with half the camp laid out sick in the dining tent, does there? Just do it, and then leave us. Go back to help.”
Controls are manipulated, and the door swings open. Mum rushes out to Dr. Lawson, Kai following more slowly behind. The watcher salutes and leaves.
Dr. Lawson clutches her arm. In his other hand there is the notebook, and he holds it up. “From the beginning…” He breathes heavily, eyes clenched tight, then opens them again with a grimace. “I’ve written down my symptoms. Everything, with the time. I can’t hold a pen anymore; I need you to do it for me now. And I need you to take over the task force meeting tomorrow. We’re one of five centers linking to discuss…” He stops again, his body shuddering. “To discuss what we’ve found out so far. To find a way forward.”
“What, me?” Mum says. “But I don’t know—”
“You are the only doctor left here who is not infected, and not likely to be: this doesn’t skip victims. You are still alive so you must be immune.” His shoulders are rigid with effort. “Take it.”
She takes the notebook. “Kai, help me,” she says. Together they help Dr. Lawson up and onto a bed in the surgery that adjoins the quarantine tent.
“Kai, note the time. Write down everything he says.” She’s rushing about, checking equipment, and soon has Dr. Lawson hooked up to some weird medical thing with little electrodes here and there on him. A thing on his fingertip measures something else.
“The lights are strange,” Dr. Lawson says. “Broken into components, as if my eyes are a prism. When we were outside, the stars even more so.” His whole body shudders and twists, and he groans. His face is slick with sweat.
“Isn’t there anything you can do for him?” Kai asks.
“There is no known treatment, no cure. Craig, are there any supplies of morphine, or other painkillers?” she asks him.
He shakes his head. “Yes, but not for me. Record. The stars were wondrous! I could see the plasma, magnetic fields; the elements are a rainbow, each its own color.” He gasps. “Each moment, the pain in my head, in my chest, intensifies. Waves against the shore, drowning.” He grimaces.
He continues to describe what he can see, what he feels, and it is so like what happened to me when I was infected that I can almost feel it again. I wrap my arms around myself, wanting to leave but afraid to lose sight of Mum and Kai. In case they get it too.
I focus on Mum. She’s taking readings off equipment and tells Kai to write numbers and stuff down. Her face is still but pained; a different sort of pain than Dr. Lawson’s—one that comes from seeing her friend like this.
She holds his hand.
“But even as it intensifies, until there could be no worse pain, then, it eases.” You see it instantly on his face. A calm. Wonder in his eyes.
“Who’s your friend?” Dr. Lawson says.
“What friend?” Mum and Kai exchange glances; Dr. Lawson is looking straight at me.
He can see me? “Tell them I’m here!” I say, frantic to give him a message for them before he dies.
“But who are you?”
“She’s my mother. I’m Callie! Callie’s ghost.”
“Ah, I see. I’m not sure she’d want to know this.”
“Craig? Craig?” Mum says. “What is happening?” She strokes his hand. “Who are you talking to?”
“There is peace inside me. I see things I shouldn’t see; the dead. I’ll be one of them soon.”
Tears glisten on Mum’s face.
“Tell her! Tell her I’m here!” I’m screaming at him now. He looks at me and shakes his head sadly. His eyes close, and his head slumps back. Blood leaks out from his ears, his mouth. The eyes that just seconds ago could see me.
And then bzzzzzzzzz. Flat line on a machine. Even I’ve watched enough TV to know that means he’s dead.
Kai’s hand is on Mum’s shoulder. She has tears in her eyes and she stands there, still holding Dr. Lawson’s hand. But I’m angry. Why wouldn’t he tell her I’m here?
If the illness has spread, there will be more people who are dying. Maybe more of them who will be able to see me and pass on messages.
She shakes herself a little, lets his hand fall away. “Kai, I must go help. Others are ill.”
“But what can you do? There is no cure, no treatment. You said so.”
“Then we can just hold the
ir hands. Sometimes that is all that can be done. Stay here. You don’t have to come with me.”
Kai’s scared. I can see it in his eyes, in the way he stands, leaning forward, like he’s about to fight. But he shakes his head. “No. I’ll go with you. We stay together.”
They go to the dining tent, and I follow, but at a distance, staying away.
She wants to hold their hands, to ease their suffering. She doesn’t want them to see me, to hear that her dead daughter stands at her shoulder. I can’t do it, I just can’t.
I watch from above.
Some of those who were in suits are becoming ill, taking their suits off. Like the watcher. He’s lying on a camp bed with the rest. Some people have already died. Kai helps carry bodies away to another tent, now a morgue—a blank, set look on his face, his body so rigid it must be hard to move.
There is a nurse in a suit who seems clear of the illness, at least so far. She’s found morphine, but it soon runs out. And Mum soothes those in pain as best she can. She tells them it will ease, and when it does, she holds their hands. She watches them die.
It’s dawn; pink streaks cross the sky. One of the nurses who is ill and past the pain now murmurs about the coronas around the sun. The colors.
And then, like all the others, she dies.
CHAPTER 21
SHAY
MUM KISSES ME. She puts a cool cloth on my head and lies down beside me.
Through the slit windows in the green canvas walls of the hideout, I can see that the sun is coming up. The light—a rainbow of colors—hurts my eyes, but I can’t stop looking. It isn’t right; that isn’t how the sun looks.
Then I’m drifting, not sure if I’m awake or in a dream.
There’s an echo inside my head, a ringing sound.
It’s a dream. I think it is.
Mum is there. She’s holding me, saying she’s sorry. That she failed.
Am I dying? I ask her.
No. I am. She smiles. She’s talking to me, but our words aren’t out loud. They’re inside me.
She’s in pain too, and I try to show her how to put it inside a soccer stadium, but she can’t.
She’s braver than me. She doesn’t cry.
CHAPTER 22
CALLIE
THE MOST SENIOR SURVIVING OFFICER isn’t very senior, and he’s scared; he wants to wait until a more senior officer arrives.
But Mum bosses him around. From all the reading she did in the night, and what Dr. Lawson told her before and after becoming ill, she says she knows what to do. She tells him that Dr. Lawson said to do this and that, and he believes her.
Except for Mum and Kai, the only ones on the base who escaped infection were those who were suited when it broke out. They begin to carry the bodies from the morgue tent to a field behind the base. Soon smoke rises into the sky.
And then Mum has lots and lots of coffee, and she finds the only tech still alive who knows how to use all the computers and stuff to set up our end of the virtual task force meeting. He explains as he does so. The monitors are linked between Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, here in Newcastle, and something called the WHO. Which, the tech explains to Kai, isn’t a rock band—it’s the World Health Organization.
Just in time they’re ready: one by one the monitors become live, and each screen shows a group of people from all the different places.
“Hello, I see we’re all here now.” A voice from the London monitor. “I represent Public Health England in London and will be chairing today. Let’s start with some introductions.”
He introduces himself and then names those in his group in turn, and with each name someone nods. There are doctors and some politicians that even I recognize.
“Newcastle next.” He frowns when he sees Mum, and the most-senior-not-very-senior surviving officer. “Where are Dr. Lawson and the rest of your group?”
Mum answers. “Hello; I’m Dr. Sonja Tanzer, an epidemiologist from the University of Newcastle. Dr. Lawson called me in to help. I’m afraid we had an outbreak last night at this so-called secure facility. Apart from me and two nurses, there is no medical contingent left here of the Newcastle team. In fact, the only survivors were the suited guards on the perimeter, and those not present when the outbreak began who were suited on their return.”
There are shocked sounds from all the monitors.
“Are there any thoughts on how the breach occurred?” asks the chair.
“None. My son and I were brought here in contained quarantine after our tenant died. Dr. Lawson let us out when it became clear what was happening, and that we weren’t infected. He bravely recorded his symptoms—and I carried on when he couldn’t—until he died. This illness is like nothing I’ve seen before.”
“With all due respect—I know Dr. Lawson wanted to include you, Dr. Tanzer, but you are a researcher, not a clinician.” This from one of the white coats on the London screen.
I bristle at his tone. He might as well have said, “Sit down and be quiet, little girl,” something I’ve heard often enough.
Mum raises an eyebrow. “Doctor—sorry, I don’t remember your name?”
The chair points out that the white coat spoke out of turn, and he scowls and is introduced again.
“The standard medical approach doesn’t appear to be working, from everything I’ve heard and seen,” Mum says. “Perhaps the eye of an epidemiological researcher will yield useful information.”
“Edinburgh here. We concur with Dr. Tanzer, who is an expert in her field. And frankly, we need all the help we can get.”
The chair continues introducing everyone from the monitors, then asks a doctor in Aberdeen to begin with a summary for those less versed in the facts.
He clears his throat and begins. “The so-called Aberdeen flu does not behave like any previous flu epidemic, or indeed, like any previous epidemic or pandemic, period. Original thoughts were of an environmental contaminant—some sort of poisoning. Suggestions of terrorists poisoning the water and all sorts of things have been investigated and ruled out. No toxins have been found. While the quick course of the illness seemed to back up some kind of mass poisoning, it soon became apparent that it is communicable. It is infectious.”
London: “Which doesn’t rule out bioterrorism.”
Aberdeen: “No. There appear to be two forms of the illness. One type spreads from contact with infected individuals, and initial symptoms appear about twenty-four hours after contact. But in some places, particularly Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Newcastle, the spread has been much faster than this model would predict: huge numbers of people have been infected simultaneously, and often points of contact with infected individuals can’t be traced.
“Both appear to run the same course and time frame, once symptoms present. Patients come down with light fever and headache. This progresses within a few hours to severe fever, headache, and internal pain, and death follows within hours. Autopsies show cause of death as widespread organ failure. Many patients are hallucinatory with pain, though just before they die they often become lucid and calm for a short time.”
London: “What is the fatality rate of those infected?”
Aberdeen: “It appears to be virtually one hundred percent.”
There are gasps of shock from WHO, from London, but not the other places. They all know.
London, a politician this time: “So everyone who catches it dies?”
Aberdeen: “There have been a very few unconfirmed reports of survivors. A few in Aberdeen, one in Newcastle. We need to look into the claims. It is possible the individuals in question were actually sick with something else and didn’t survive this illness. Also, some people who are exposed don’t catch the disease—like Dr. Tanzer and her son. Perhaps about five percent are resistant to infection, but we’re still gathering figures. This resistance appears to be genetic, as it tends to be particular families and related individuals that don’t come down with the illness, even if everyone around them does. We also need to look into that to see if i
t is something we can exploit more widely.”
WHO: “What is the infectious agent?”
Edinburgh: “We haven’t isolated it as yet. It’s not bacterial, we’re sure of that. No traces of influenza virus or any other type of known virus or agent have been found so far. It may be something completely new.”
WHO: “How can we fight something when we don’t know what it is?”
London: “Exactly. Containment has been the implemented approach so far, but it’s not working, at least not well. Schools are closed throughout the UK as of today. Travel, both domestic and international, is banned without a permit or immune pass. Airports and ports are closed. The coast guard and navy, both ours and international, are watching our coast in case anyone makes a run for it. The army is being deployed along with police to place roadblocks around all affected towns and cities as we speak.”
Edinburgh: “Because of your immunity, Dr. Tanzer, you can travel. And that may be very helpful indeed.”
Mum inclines her head. “If I am indeed immune and not just lucky so far.”
The not-so-senior officer next to Mum stirs. “Excuse me for interjecting. Dr. Tanzer, I was out with my containment team when the outbreak here began. Central Newcastle, the university area where you worked, and Jesmond, where you lived, are all quarantined. There are reports that over ninety percent of residents in those areas have died so far. You must be immune.”
Kai, offscreen, gasps. Mum sits up straighter, but her face doesn’t register the shock.
Mum: “If we don’t know the causative agent, how do we stop the spread, or treat it?”
London: “Exactly. These studies must receive priority.”
WHO: “So, basically we’re looking at an epidemic that we don’t know how to treat or prevent that has the potential to kill ninety-five percent of the population of the world.”
London: “Yes.”
Mum: “In the meantime, we need to examine the patterns. Map all the cases. See what connections we can find. This may help contain it and identify the cause.”
