The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned

by Collingbourne, Huw

  “Ten pounds and eighty-five pence,” said the waitress.

  “Ah. Oh, Well… Sadly I seem find myself in a state of pecuniary embarrassment.”

  “You what?”

  “It would appear that I have no ready cash about my person. I don’t suppose either of you two gentlemen…?”

  “I ain’t got no money,” said Geoff.

  “Nor me,” added Jonathan.

  The waitress didn’t look at all put out. “Just take this to the till and they’ll get everything sorted out.”

  With embarrassment, Jonathan clutched the bill in his hand and walked over to the plump woman sitting at a till behind the counter. He wondered how they would sort this out when none of them had so much as a penny between them.

  Having been living out in the desolate wilds of Britain where conventional currency was worthless and only the food and equipment that could be scavenged had any intrinsic value, none of them had even bothered to steal money when it was readily available. Jonathan wondered if they would have to pay the bill with their labour, doing washing up in the kitchen of the tea shop.

  Timidly and blushing, he handed the bill to the smiling lady. “I’m afraid we haven’t got any money.”

  The woman read the bill then rang up £10.85 on the till. It was an old-fashioned till with keys like a typewriter and a display at the top which showed amounts of money on little pop-up cards. When she rang up the amount, a tray beneath the keys popped out. This contained notes to the left and coins to the right. She took out two five pound notes, a fifty-pence piece, three ten-pence pieces and a five-pence, all of which she handed to Jonathan.

  Jonathan stared at the money lying in the palm of his hand.

  “Did you enjoy the tea and scones?” the lady at the till asked.

  “Oh yes, very much,” said Jonathan.

  “You’re visitors to Cambridge?” she said.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Be sure to see the Mathematical Bridge, won’t you.”

  Jonathan wasn’t sure what to say so he smiled and said nothing.

  High Table

  “I suppose the Russians are behind it all. I say, would you pass the mustard, old fellow? They always are, aren’t they? The Russians, I mean.”

  Colonel McPherson who was dining at High Table in St Dunstan’s that evening, had been lost in thought; he had been glancing along the lines of undergraduates wearing their academic gowns and sitting on wooden benches at either side of the three long tables that stretched away into the candle-glimmering darkness. Something was clearly preying on his mind.

  He turned towards the elderly don sitting on his right. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you…”

  “I was saying, it’s the Russians who are to blame. For the situation in which the country finds itself.”

  “Ah.”

  “And if you could just see your way to passing the mustard.”

  The Colonel picked up the silver mustard pot to which the elderly don had pointed and passed it to him. “Well now,” he said, “I don’t think there is any reason to point the finger of blame at the Russians”

  “No? That seems to be the general consensus. The Siberian blizzard we had last winter. Some sort of bacillus. Carried in the snow. Or do I mean bacterium?”

  “To the best of my knowledge,” replied the Colonel, “the causative agent has yet to be established.”

  “Really? It seems to me that this university is positively heaving with microbiologists and biochemists and whatnot, many of whom have a Nobel prize or two on their mantelpieces. One would think they’d have the antidote by now. Mind you, I always thought those science chaps were overrated. Not a proper discipline, in my view, biology.”

  “And your subject is…?”

  “You are not familiar with my work? I am Timkins.”

  “Ah?”

  “Of Pistleworth and Timkins? No? You haven’t read our book. ‘Anglo-Saxon Poetry, its Contemporary Relevance’. Standard text, old man. Absolutely standard text.”

  “You teach Anglo-Saxon poetry, then?”

  “We are supposed to call it Old English these days. I’ll have none of it. Tell most people that you teach Old English poetry and they think you mean bloody Wordsworth. Would you like to hear some Anglo-Saxon poetry?”

  But the Colonel was no longer listening. He was already deep in conversation with that awful history-of-art chap, Darius Smith, sitting on his other side.

  “They’re not dining with the students, I see,” said the Colonel.

  “No,” said Smith, “I believe they prefer to eat alone. In their rooms. They seem disinclined to socialise.”

  “Jonathan always was something of a loner. The boy, though, Geoff, I’d have thought he’d have been more outgoing.”

  “The girl is a bad influence, I think.”

  “Leila. She’s rather interesting, don’t you think?”

  “In what way?”

  “From a scientific perspective.”

  Smith chuckled. “Art is my subject, Colonel. It’s no good expecting me to have a view on scientific matters. Though, speaking as a non-scientist, I would have to say that she is intriguing. The red eyes. Symptomatic of the infection. And yet she does not show the other symptoms. You believe this to be a natural immunity?”

  “Like you,” said the Colonel, “I am not a scientist.”

  “At any rate, she is, I think, most curious.”

  “All three of them are curious. Jonathan, who suffered from some sort of infection. What are we to suppose it might have been? Winter flu?”

  “Ha! Perhaps,” said Smith.

  “And yet he made a complete recovery. Geoff, also rather interesting. He was certainly exposed to the infective agent. His younger sister suffered all the classic symptoms.”

  “She died in the end?”

  “She did. Rather horribly, as a matter of fact. And yet Geoff, even though he is of precisely the age at which one would anticipate the infection to be at its most virulent…”

  “Was totally unaffected.”

  “Quite. Zutenheim is most interested in them.”

  “Zutenheim?”

  “Hadn’t you heard? They’ve appointed him as the head of the Project.”

  “Exodus?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s something of a maniac though, isn’t he?”

  “A maniac may be precisely what we need now. These are not ordinary times, after all.”

  “I suppose not. This lamb cutlet is a bit tough, don’t you think? Standards are declining, there’s no getting around that unpalatable fact. Standards are definitely declining.”

  Project Exodus

  It was already over a week since Jonathan had first heard of Project Exodus. It had been the day immediately following their arrival in Cambridge. The topic had cropped up during conversation over a late breakfast served in Hall. There had been no college silver in evidence on that occasion, no candles and no undergraduates. Even though breakfast was served at High Table, it was a strictly informal affair; but at least there were some moderately comfortable chairs in which to sit instead of the hard benches reserved for undergraduates.

  Ten o’clock on a grey April morning and flurries of rain were spattering down the big plate-glass windows set at regular intervals into the wall facing onto the Fellows’ Garden which.

  It had not been a relaxing breakfast. This was principally due to the presence of Colonel Reginald McPherson and Captain Tristan Timms-Martin. They had already wolfed down a full English breakfast (bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, black puddings and fried bread) and were giving their full attention to toast and marmalade when Jonathan, Geoff and Leila arrived.

  Captain Timms-Martin stood at once and gallantly pulled back a chair for Leila. She simpered at him in a way that, Jonathan thought, ill became her usually steel-hard features. The truth of the matter was that Lelia had a soft spot for Captain Tristan Timms-Martin. She had set eyes on him just the previous day, when he had arrive
d at a motorway service station, clad all in black leather and riding a classic Harley-Davidson Electra Glide motorbike. It had been Timms-Martin who had warned them about a mob of red-eyes heading their way and had advised them to make for Cambridge with the greatest of speed. From that moment onwards, it was obvious that Leila was besotted. Jonathan wasn’t sure if that was due to the black leather, his David Niven-style moustache or his soft, rumbling baritone voice.

  “Awfully kind of you,” Leila cooed as she sat in the chair.

  “Not at all, my dear, not at all,” rumbled Timms-Martin.

  Geoff made a vomiting noised in his throat and Leila kicked him under the table.

  “Now then, my dear chaps,” said the Colonel, as he poured coffee from a silver coffee pot into tiny white, bone-china cups, “You may recall back in the Church Hall…”

  “The Church Hall, sir?” Captain Timms-Martin raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Yes, I happen to know Jonathan and Geoff. Socially one might almost say. As I believe you know, Captain, I had retired to civilian life, or so I had thought – running a little antique business, very relaxing if somewhat uneventful – until events conspired against me, so to speak. I’d settled in a little village in the west country. When the Great Snow came we set up an emergency shelter in the local church hall. I recall a conversation Jonathan and I had. I think Jonathan was inclined to pessimism. I merely pointed out that the Government has contingency plans for precisely this sort of eventuality.”

  Jonathan laughed at that, spitting out bits of toast and marmalade in the process – “Precisely this sort of eventuality? The end of the bloody world as we know it? Pull the other one.”

  “Oh, I realise it may sound odd but I can assure you that detailed plans were long ago drawn up for all sorts of national emergencies. Nuclear attack, armed invasion, biological warfare, pandemics, earthquakes…”

  “Earthquakes!” said Leila, “In England. Oh, puhhh-leeeease….”

  “What I am trying to get across to you is that the Government is prepared to deal with the current situation.”

  “You’d never guess it,” said Geoff, “Half the population’s dead. The other half are like crazed lunatics.”

  “Except in Cambridge,” Leila added, “In Cambridge everything goes on as normal.”

  “Precisely,” agreed the Colonel, “That is all part of contingency planning. As I told you, the Emergency Government has relocated to Cambridge. So we now have the heart of the political, military and civilian infrastructure specialists working with some of the best scientific minds in the world in an effort to restore order.”

  “Scientists?” said Jonathan, “What have they got to do with anything?”

  “Quite a lot, as it turns out. As you’ll understand when I tell you a bit about Project Exodus.”

  “More toast?” said Captain Timms-Martin, offering a rack of toast to Leila.

  Leila fluttered her eyelashes. “Oh, I really shouldn’t, but…”

  Geoff made the vomiting noise again. Leila kicked him again.

  “So what exactly is Project Exodus?” asked Jonathan, “And why should we care?”

  “Difficult to explain,” said the Colonel.

  “Try,” said Jonathan.

  “Much easier, I think, if I show you.”

  So after breakfast, the Colonel had driven Jonathan, Leila and Geoff (with Bobby the dog in the back seat) in an army staff car, up to the Cavendish Laboratory and then to the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. Here they met physicists, biologists, chemists geneticists and epidemiologists all of whom were only too pleased to explain the advanced research being undertaken in an effort to identify and treat the causative agent of the sickness which had brought about the near collapse of civilisation. It was all very impressive. They were shown images of mutated flu and rabies viruses, they watched tularemia and anthrax bacteria on a display screen connected to a powerful microscope. A serious, grey-haired woman wearing a stained white lab coat gave them a long and largely incomprehensible description of the behavioural changes that occur due to frontotemporal dementia caused by Pick’s Disease. Another equally serious, grey-haired man wearing a tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows told them all about the revolutionary insights that had been gained into the devastating effects of Angiostrongylus cantonensis, otherwise known, as the rat lungworm, which may infect the brains of human beings. An astrobiologist told them about the dangers of non-carbon-based lifeforms entering the earth’s atmosphere on meteoric fragments. An earnest young chemist, who wore round glasses that made him look like Clark Kent, gave them a long and rambling account of the history of quasi-military research into hallucinogenic drugs which might be effectively dispersed in air or water or might be synthesised in the host’s bloodstream by a genetically modified infective organism. A physicist, who appeared to be completely insane, told them casually that he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about since reality is an illusion in eleven dimensions.

  They were walking down a long, nondescript corridor in a big, nondescript building when they suddenly heard a howling. It sounded like an animal, a dog perhaps, in pain. But when they turned a corner they saw it was a man. The man was in what looked like a prison cell: a small, smooth-walled room painted in pale antiseptic green with a bunk bed, a sink, a toilet and no other furnishings. The only way into the room was through a metal-barred door. The man was gripping the bars of the door and shrieking through them with all his might.

  The Colonel put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder and pulled him away, gently but firmly, guiding him down a passage that led in another direction. “A sad case,” he said, “We are doing our best for him. I am told that there has been some improvement in his condition. We can only hope for the best.”

  *

  “So, there you have it,” said the Colonel on the drive back to St Dunstan’s College, “As you can see, we have the finest scientific minds in the world and I don’t think it’ll be too long before they get things sorted out.”

  “But they are all saying different things,” Jonathan said, “They don’t even agree on what caused the sickness so how the heck are they going to come up with a cure?”

  “Yes, well that’s the interesting part, you see,” said the Colonel, “In order to find a cure they have to run tests. To isolate the factors that allowed certain individuals to avoid becoming sick. Or, having become sick, to recover from it.”

  “Certain individuals?” said Jonathan.

  “I’m not sure I’m liking the sound of this,” said Leila, “Because that sounds like us. Me, Geoff and Jonathan.”

  “Quite, quite,” agreed the Colonel, “I knew you’d understand.”

  “Oh, shit!” Geoff said.

  Jonathan and Leila said nothing. The sunshine had quite suddenly drained out of the day.

  The Mathematical Bridge

  While the university appeared to be, in all essentials, fully functioning, the one thing in which it was notably lacking was any connection with the world outside. There was no television, no radio, the mobile phone network was as dead in Cambridge as it was in the rest of the country. Cambridge was a hermetically sealed outpost of a civilisation which, in Jonathan’s experience, had all but vanished elsewhere. Still, it was a comfortable existence and, just so long as the food and wine supplies lasted, it seemed as good a place to stay as any.

  That evening, Jonathan, Geoff and Leila decided to take a walk through town. Bobby the dog had been left in Jonathan’s room in St Dunstan’s college, snoozing contentedly. After months spent hiding themselves away, moving around furtively, always on the lookout for roving gangs of red-eyes or vigilantes, it felt weird to be strolling around openly. It felt even weirder to see so many other people strolling around openly too. Undergraduates were out on the streets, going to pubs, going to restaurants. They were laughing, singing, walking or cycling. They appeared not to have a care in the world.

  Jonathan, Geoff and Leila walked through the old market square an
d then down Trinity Street, past the rough stone walls of Gonville & Caius College, then they turned into the large open courtyards of St. John’s and finally they crossed an elaborately Gothic bridge called ‘The Bridge Of Sighs’ in imitation of the one in Venice, or so they said.

  “Did you believe any of that?” Leila asked.

  Jonathan shrugged. “Of what?”

  “That baloney the Colonel was giving us earlier on. About all the best minds, being on the verge of a breakthrough, all that guff?”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s something doesn’t ring true about it. I mean, how come Cambridge is still functioning when the rest of the country, the rest of the world for all we know, has gone back to the Dark Ages?”

  “Like he said, the Government has a base here. It stands to reason, I suppose, that they’d have plans to keep everything running. In the event of a national emergency.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “And another thing, why did they have that poor man locked in a prison cell?”

  “He was a red-eye. Infected. I guess they must be treating him. Trying to find a cure?”

  “Or experimenting on him? How do we know it wasn’t them who infected the poor guy in the first place?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “He looked like me, Jonathan,” said Leila, “I was sick and I got better. But not completely better. My eyes. I still have red eyes. So who knows, maybe I still have the infection in my blood? Maybe I have the antibodies? Maybe the man in that cage has too?”

  Leila was getting maudlin; she was making Jonathan feel uncomfortable. Because she was putting into words ideas that he had barely even dared to think.

  It was dark by now but the evening was warm and the moon was bright so they walked along the bank of the Cam, glancing across at the backs of the colleges on the other side of the river.

  “Which one is the Mathematical Bridge?” Leila asked.

  “The what?” said Geoff.

  “She said, be sure to see the Mathematical Bridge. The woman in the tea shop. I can see lots of bridges but I can’t say that any of them looks more obviously mathematical than any others.”