Since it was too early for traffic, he reckoned he’d be home inside twenty minutes.
‘Can you spare a few dollars, bud?’ a young male zombie said, as he stepped out of an alcove into Harry’s path.
There were two girls as well. Neither were much older than Harry, but their top halves were filthy and their legs caked in dried excrement. One hadn’t taken well to her mod, with a tumour the size of a tennis ball closing her right eye.
Permanent diarrhoea was a sure sign of a one-zero-six zombie mod. While their bodies went to hell, their brains had been tuned to a state of bliss that the few people who’d had a one-zero-six reversed described as like having the greatest moment of your life stretched out forever.
One-zero-sixes weren’t capable of work, or any other task that required concentration, but they retained enough of a survival instinct to stick together, either stealing or begging for food.
‘Heavy night,’ Harry said, holding his breath as he stepped off the sidewalk to dodge the zombie. ‘I’ve got no coins.’
If he hadn’t been so hungover, Harry would have seen the leg that tripped him up. And, even if he hadn’t, he would have stumbled instead of sprawling and almost cracking his skull on the kerb.
‘I’ll kick all your asses,’ Harry shouted, holding his face as he rolled out of the gutter.
But the healthier of the two girls had a little .22 revolver waving in Harry’s face. This was scarier than a regular mugger, because most zombies had no fear of committing crime. Four walls, free healthcare and food pushed through a cell door was practically their idea of paradise.
‘Give,’ the male said, pointing to the obvious bulge of the phone and money clip in the inner pocket of Harry’s Vilebrequin beach shorts.
Harry didn’t want to lose his phone or house key, so he pulled out his money clip. His hands trembled as he freed seventy dollars in small bills and threw them in the air. The girl with the gun looked up at the money as the male zombie snatched two twenties and a ten before breaking into a clumsy run.
‘Hey!’ the girl with the gun shouted, shifting aim towards her disloyal partner.
Harry saw his moment to escape, leaping to his feet and sprinting towards Fremont. There was no gunshot and he wondered if the gun wasn’t loaded. Or fake. Or jammed up, given how filthy its owner was. The casinos on Fremont Street paid for private security patrols, and Harry passed one of them riding a Segway down the pedestrianised street.
But seventy dollars was no fortune, and Harry was exhausted. The last thing he needed was to explain everything to some dumbass private security, then sit in an office waiting for real cops to show and having to write out a bunch of statements.
There were four cabs ranked in the street running between the Lucky Star and O’Malley’s Gambling Hall. Harry jumped in the first one and fought an urge to spew as he told the driver to take him home.
45 BACK TAXIS
Ellie wouldn’t get super wealthy until Elliegold floated on the NASDAQ stock exchange, but the company was now profitable, and his chief-executive salary covered the rent on a sizeable house in San Francisco’s trendy Marina District, and paid for a Mercedes SUV big enough for his wife and five kids.
The stretch along Marina Boulevard was usually busy on a spring Sunday morning, but today there were no moms with jogging strollers, or father-son sailing partnerships.
Ellie took the Mercedes right, away from the ocean, and was surprised by the handwritten We’re Open sign on a family-owned gas station. There was an old Nissan plugged into a rapid charger, its driver leaning against the hood, vaping.
Ellie glanced at his watch as he parked up, grabbing his anti-virus mask off the passenger seat and snapping the elastic straps behind his head. Then he fitted white sanitary gloves and stepped out. The shop was open, but it was in night-time mode, with the automatic doors bolted and the server picking items from behind a bullet-proof screen.
‘What are my chances of size-two diapers?’ Ellie asked.
He’d figured this was a long shot, but the assistant backed into the store’s mostly empty racks and returned holding a bulky pack in each hand. They were some weird brand Ellie had never seen, but it was still a miracle.
‘Size two, ninety-two per pack,’ the assistant said, holding them up to the glass. ‘You want?’
‘Yes I want,’ Ellie said triumphantly. ‘I ordered a super-jumbo pack online, but they’re not gonna show until the quarantine ends. Do you just have the two boxes?’
‘The only others I have are size four,’ the guy said. ‘Anything else you need?’
‘All good,’ Ellie said.
‘The total with tax comes to one hundred and forty-eight, sixty-two. The credit-card system is down, so it’s cash only.’
Ellie felt stung, knowing ninety Huggies cost twenty-eight bucks in Walmart. But he counted seven twenties and two fives and dropped them into a counter tray saturated in sterilising UV light. His change rattled down a plastic chute. He grabbed the diapers through a hatch and threw them on to the back seat, before settling back behind the wheel.
In the two years since SNor the US government had spent billions on planning for another synthetic virus outbreak, and three blocks down Ellie turned right into a checkpoint manned by National Guard officers in bright yellow biohazard suits.
A rubber-gloved hand made a halt signal and tapped Ellie’s registration into a computer strapped to the opposite wrist. After a few seconds, the suited creature stepped forward and signalled for him to put down the window.
‘Do you have an emergency travel authorisation?’ she asked, a speaker on her mask giving a Darth Vader quality to her voice.
Ellie shook his head. ‘I tried to submit an application, but the online system is swamped.’
‘What’s the purpose of your journey?’
‘I’m picking up my mother-in-law from her apartment. She’s sixty-nine and diabetic. Her carer can’t get to her so she’s going to stay with us till this blows over.’
Or we’re all dead …
The hooded guardswoman nodded. Her colleague waved a police car and a couple of other vehicles through as Ellie handed over his licence and gave his mother-in-law’s name and address. When this was done, the woman disappeared inside a truck and returned with a quarantine authorisation sticker, which she stuck to the windshield.
‘Mr Gold, I’m giving you ninety minutes to collect your mother-in-law and return to your home address. I’m going to waive the six-hundred-dollar ticket for breaching quarantine, because we appreciate there have been problems with the trip-authorisation website. However, if you are stopped a second time, there’ll be a twelve-hundred-dollar fixed penalty, and people who persistently breach quarantine regulations may be detained for an indefinite period.’
‘Thank you kindly, ma’am,’ Ellie said, shuffling to peel his sweaty back off his seat before rolling through the barricade and on down the deserted street.
46 DEAD BIRTHDAY
After a crazy Thursday house party and his Friday overnighter at Steak and Eggs, Harry’s Saturday evening was more sedate, celebrating Kirsten’s forty-seventh birthday at a creepily deserted tapas restaurant, with a bunch of her friends, co-workers and James, the latest in her line of much younger boyfriends.
There was talk of LHV, though Harry noted how fast the catchier Killer-T moniker had taken hold. Bleak conversation and the empty tables all around stifled any hint of celebration.
The quarantine around San Francisco had been extended to the whole of Northern California. One of Kirsten’s guests had spotted Nevada State Guards preparing to block the I-15 freeway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and everyone agreed that Nevada and the rest of California would get locked down soon.
Harry was the only guest under twenty, and the gloomy conversation made him feel like he was dining on the Titanic as he got tipsy on red wine, flirted unproductively with one of Kirsten’s junior chefs and made it home by ten thirty after saying that he had a ton of school stuff to
catch up on in the morning.
Harry got woken by Matt and Lana fighting in his kitchen, just after nine on Sunday morning. He usually went to the fridge for juice when he woke, but he didn’t want to go near Lana in case she tried interrogating him about what Matt had been up to on Friday night.
Instead, he filled a glass from his bathroom tap, sat up in bed and logged into the Vegas Local content management system. The site had 11,000 active users, double the average for a Sunday morning. Visitors would usually focus on local sports and downloading 2-for-1 coupons for Sunday lunch, but the stats screen showed eighty per cent of visitors were logged into the gossip boards, talking about Killer-T and the prospect of quarantine.
The news kept getting darker. Since Harry had left Kirsten’s birthday meal the night before, the governors of California and Oregon had confirmed state-wide quarantines. Seventeen clinics had been constructed in the Vegas area, designed to prevent virus outbreaks ravaging regular hospitals. There were rumours that a family of visitors from San Francisco had been admitted with Killer-T style haemorrhaging. Four cases had been confirmed in Canada, at least five hundred in San Francisco and more than a hundred thousand in Europe.
Harry felt sick. Even the optimists were predicting thousands of deaths and he reckoned his readers might appreciate some light relief on the Vegas Local home page. Ellie had linked all his local news sites into a central database, and Harry trawled it, hoping to find a nice car chase out of Omaha, or a skateboarding pig in Philadelphia.
When his quest drew a blank, Harry decided to check the responses to Vegas Local’s Send Us Your Story inbox. According to the blurb on the Your Story page, Vegas Local wanted to hear from you. In reality, Harry, Matt and Roberta the intern didn’t have time to investigate daily reports of rat droppings in restaurant kitchens, or some old couple’s complaint that the neighbouring motel had turned into a drug den.
But every so often there was a ready-made story, and out of sixteen unopened story tips, the one titled ‘Help me bust Helen Back’ stood out.
Back was a Harley-riding Goth magician, her stage name a play on Hell and Back. Her solo magic act had played in theatres up and down the strip for more than a decade, most recently in the custom-built Hell Arena at the Fontainebleau.
Harry clicked the header, opening a message full of dodgy spellings and swears.
Dear editor,
Helen Back real name Helen Margolis was my step ma until recenteley
She is a nastey manipulating **** who treated my mom like **** and my mom wound up in psychoatric hospital and Helen ran me down evree chance she got for two whole years until I got into fighting and staying out all hours of the night and got kicked outta school last term.
Helen got busted by IRS for not paying over $10 million in back taxis. But she has now got off prison with a deal. By snitching on the lab that did her gene mods to the FBI.
Just so you know I am not making things up, the dumb ***** gave me her old laptop and left her email on it so I can still see EVREYTHING
LOLS!! So dumb
So here is a letter with attachements out of all the most information that my step ma gave the feds.
I hope you can use this and do the nastey ***** Helen Back a lot of damage and take her down a peg to her suck-up fans.
Max Briston (Age 13)
‘Good old vengeful stepkids,’ Harry told himself, smirking as he opened up the first of two attachments.
It was an accountant’s report, more than sixty pages long, with details of Helen Back’s past earnings and a schedule for paying a seven-figure fine and more than twelve million in back taxes.
A major Vegas entertainer getting busted for tax avoidance was a solid story, but the second document was the zinger. It was a copy of a two-week-old statement that Helen Back had made for the FBI.
It began with Back’s real name and home address. Then the document stated that Helen knew of a large-scale Las Vegas-based human-genetic-modification operation run by her friends Veryan and Mango Kowalski-Clark.
After details of several modifications that Helen Back had paid for, there was a list of names. The first were two nurses who Back claimed worked in Los Angeles dealing with patients.
Mango never sees patients directly, but made an exception for me as we have known each other for many years. Mango was keen to impress me and often boasted that she has modded famous film and TV personalities …
Harry was disappointed that there were no celebrity names, because that would be enough to make this a national story. The next couple of pages were dry, with long-winded details about how long Mango, Veryan and Helen had known one another, and a long list of details on dates when they’d met, both socially and for Helen’s treatment.
But Harry gawped when he read the last section, right before the box where Helen Back was supposed to sign her name.
In response to Agent Sander’s final question regarding my knowledge of any other persons connected to, or working for, the organisation: last February I attended a children’s birthday party at Mango and Veryan’s home.
Their son Josh seemed fond of a girl in her late teens, who I assumed was a local babysitter. I did not speak to the girl, but later that evening Mango had drunk a lot and told me in confidence that the girl was her ‘brilliant little lab rat’, and was responsible for the lab work on all of my genetic modifications.
I did not catch the girl’s last name, but her first name was Charlie. As always, Mango seemed keen to impress and boasted that Charlie was ‘a bad girl, who had done time in White Boulder’.
47 TEAM MANGO
Charlie was sprawled on a wrecked couch, watching her two foster brothers playing a basketball game on their Xbox when her foster father Navid called from the kitchen.
‘The British prime minister is about to make a statement.’
Charlie moved a bowl of M&Ms from her lap to a side table and hopped to the kitchen. Her step-parents sat at the dining table, looking worried as the screen on the refrigerator door showed Prime Minister Lawrence stepping up to a lectern outside 10 Downing Street.
It was past midnight in London, the weather was drizzly and dozens of cameras flashed as Lawrence spoke from behind an acrylic quarantine screen, while an aide sheltered him with a large umbrella.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, the past week has unarguably been the most difficult of my career. I am now able to announce that shortly before 5 a.m. on Thursday a team of SAS soldiers and Special Branch officers raided an address in West London, following a tip-off from a member of the public.
‘Three suspects were arrested, and a female suspect was shot and fatally wounded. The premises contained a laboratory, where we now believe the initial samples of the Killer-T virus were developed before release. Following on from this initial raid, a second home was raided nearby, and two more suspects arrested.
‘Paperwork and computer files relating to the development of Killer-T were seized, along with samples of a vaccine. Preliminary tests at the Porton Down biocontainment facility indicate that the vaccine is at least ninety-five per cent effective and has no immediately obvious side-effects. A few moments ago, the DNA patterns and other details for manufacturing this vaccine were deployed to hundreds of vaccine laboratories around the world.
‘I would like to personally thank the police officers, military personnel and scientists who have taken part in this operation. And to offer special thanks to the member of the public, who wishes to remain anonymous, but whose vigilance may save millions of lives.’
Shouts came from the gaggle of media the instant the prime minister stopped talking.
‘Prime Minister, if the raid took place early on Thursday, why are you only announcing it now?’
‘Couldn’t the anti-virus samples have been released sooner?’
‘How long will it take to manufacture enough of the vaccine for everyone?’
The prime minister cleared his throat. ‘My scientific advisors are in a better position than me to answer detailed
questions and will be available shortly. Given the sophisticated nature of the plot, we felt it was essential to conduct preliminary safety tests on the vaccine before releasing it for manufacture.
‘Over the past two years, my government has put unprecedented resources into preparedness for another outbreak of a synthetic virus, and twenty-fold advances have been made in the speed with which vaccines can be manufactured, tested and deployed. The first batches of vaccine will be released to healthcare professionals and other essential workers within twenty-four hours.
‘As with all vaccines, there will be a period of between twelve and twenty-four hours before a patient has a high level of protection from Killer-T. Given the rapid spread of the disease, and the time it will take for widespread vaccine distribution, we can still expect the number of cases and fatalities to increase sharply over the coming days. I must urge everyone in the United Kingdom to continue to follow quarantine rules and await announcements on the vaccination programme in their area.’
As the prime minister stepped back into number 10, Charlie turned and smiled at her foster parents.
‘Looks like we got lucky this time,’ Navid said.
Charlie nodded.
‘But even with …’ She paused as the phone in her pocket vibrated. ‘Cases of Killer-T are at least doubling every twenty-four hours. So if it takes a week to vaccinate most people and another day or two for their bodies to develop immunity … That’s two to the ninth power … Making five hundred and twelve infections for every one we have now.’
‘But quarantines should significantly slow the infection rate,’ Navid pointed out.
‘True,’ Charlie said, pulling out her phone, which now had Mango’s name on the screen. ‘Sorry, I’d better take this.’
Charlie’s regular phone wasn’t encrypted so Mango spoke cautiously.
‘Have you seen the news?
KILLER T Page 23
