No Escape

by Alex Scarrow

  “Hope?” Leon raised his brows. “For what? Another rescue fleet?”

  “Who knows? The Americans and the Chinese managed to do it once. They might try again.”

  He shook his head. “They’ll have enough of their own problems trying to survive to worry about rescuing pockets of people from around the world.” He looked out of the window. “That rescue went badly. I don’t see them trying it again.”

  “Oh, buggeration.” She let her spoon drop back into the chowder.

  “What?”

  “I came over and sat down here to cheer you up. Now, all that’s happened is you’ve got me feeling down!” She was joking, he suspected, but only half joking.

  “I’m sorry. Before the world ended, I wasn’t much better. My dad used to think I was a total emo.”

  “Emu?”

  “Emo. It’s what you call a self-indulgent, whiny-ass teenager who spends his life in his bedroom. Looking back, I think I probably was.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t recognize that teenager. I do see a young man who stepped up when we needed someone to. I think your dad would be proud if he could see you now.”

  Outside, a fishing boat was slowly approaching the jetty. The boats went out half a dozen times every day, coming back laden with fish. The English Channel was brimming with cod, haddock, and mackerel now. Two years left alone, and fish stocks the world over were topped out. He watched as one of the fishermen hopped onto the jetty from the foredeck and began securing stern and aft lines.

  They were never going to run out of food and drinking water here. If there was one outpost of humanity that stood a chance of outlasting all others, it was probably going to be this place.

  Wait. That’s all they were going to be able to do now: keep the virus from bridging the gap and wait for winter.

  “It’s good to plan, to always be thinking ahead,” Cora added. “To be one of those ready to get on another boat if need be.”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Seriously, if you’re not thinking like that, then what’s the point?”

  Chapter 27

  Grace was right; it was unpleasant. It was a lot like climbing out of a soothing, warm bath back into a cold, drafty, and unwelcoming bathroom.

  Jing felt his consciousness wading toward a distant surface of rippling shards of light. If he’d been the kind to believe in the idea of an afterlife, he might have interpreted those shafts of light as heavenly beacons. But he knew what they were—the reconnection of his supercluster cells with a tangle of optic nerves. He was in the process of disconnecting from the world within and reconnecting with the world outside. Grace had told him this process got easier to cope with and quicker with practice, but this being his first visit to what she’d referred to as her “bioverse”…it was hard.

  He didn’t want to return. She’d warned him about that too.

  His foggy vision began to clear, giving him the blurred image of his own closed eyelids. He could now hear the soft fizz of the fluorescent lights and the hiss of the wall speaker. He could feel the cold, hard floor tiles beneath him and the shuddering cold blast of air on his skin from the air-filtration unit.

  Jing opened his eyes and clenched them quickly shut again. The ceiling light was dazzling. It was overwhelming.

  “Lieutenant Choi?” the wall speaker crackled deafeningly. Jing winced in response.

  “Lieutenant Choi…can you hear me?” The speaker sounded painfully shrill.

  Now his sense of smell was returning, his nose reporting in for duty. He could smell a festering, meaty, cheesy odor that was almost overpowering.

  He fought an instinct to gag at the stench. “Lieutenant Choi?”

  He nodded, if only to shut up the sharp crackle of the isolation room’s speaker. “Yes,” he replied hoarsely. “Yes…I hear you.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Quiet, please,” he rasped. “Give me…time.”

  The speaker remained mercifully quiet as the last vestiges of his self gradually re-inhabited the body lying on the floor. He turned his head to one side, away from the light above, and cracked his eyes open to see the bloody mess of his right shoulder and arm. In places, it had been dissolved right down to the bone, but it didn’t shock him. Close up to it, he was witnessing repair work already going on: the rapid growth of fine strands of muscle tissue closing together to form thicker braids, the gradual creep of arterial tubes inching to join with each other. His cells all knew what to do, where to be, what to become.

  I am becoming human again.

  But calling this fragile, inefficient frame “human” felt as if he was cheapening the word. If it was possible, he’d felt even more human on the inside, more in touch with who he was, with those around him…with Grace. A sense of connection, communion—part of a whole that meant so much more than the mobile skin sack of liquid that was Lieutenant Choi in this outside world.

  “Human” felt too generous a word for such an outmoded form of biological transport.

  The speaker crackled again. “Lieutenant Choi? How are you feeling?”

  He turned his head toward the observation window and saw their faces: Captain Xien, the prime minister, Dr. Calloway, and a dozen others, all staring at him as if he were some monster dredged up from a dark lagoon.

  At this moment in time, he wanted nothing more than to go to back down into the rabbit hole, into the darkness, to the inner world, to Grace’s bioverse. He wanted to climb back into that warm, welcoming bathwater and…connect with an endless community of minds. To talk, to listen, to learn. To understand more. To be more. To be part of more.

  “How do I feel?” he rasped.

  Their heads nodded, comically, in unison.

  “Cold. Tired…” He wanted to add the word lonely, but his observers couldn’t possibly understand what he’d mean by that.

  He could choose to go back. And he definitely was going to go back there at the earliest opportunity, but first, far more importantly, there was work to do. A full debriefing. He needed to tell these men everything he’d experienced and what They had asked him to convey to these wide-eyed men waiting beyond the thick glass.

  “Give me a little…more time.” His throat and mouth felt bone dry. “May…I have some water?”

  “Of course,” a voice responded. A moment later, he heard the delivery hatch clunking. No one was going to fetch his drink for him, so he gathered his strength and sat up. His still-knitting arm peeled wetly from the floor, several small “feeding” tendrils snapping and falling away.

  He clambered on all fours across the floor to the hatch and opened it, reached for the beaker inside and then poured some of the water down his throat, savoring the sensation of rehydration.

  He felt a little more strength return to his cumbersome frame. He pulled himself up by grasping the edge of the table, and then he let himself down heavily onto the chair. In front of him, on the tabletop, he could see the spread-out construct of Grace’s ocular organ. Before he’d gone under and joined her, he’d been repulsed by the sight of it: pink, purple, quivering, and glistening. It looked so fragile, exposed, and raw.

  But now, he admired the economy of its structure: the simplest organic circuit to deliver Grace visual feedback of what was going on in this room, sending that data down to her consciousness.

  Why make a whole eyeball, an ocular cavity, a skull, a brain, when just a small lens, a cluster of photo-sensitive cells, optic nerves, and a brainstem would do?

  He smiled at the ingenuity of it.

  “What’s amusing, Choi?”

  He shook his head. They won’t understand. Yet.

  “Nothing,” he replied. He drained the glass of water. “Another water please…with sugar. Lots of it.”

  He waited patiently for someone beyond the window to organize that. A few minutes later, the hatch clunked again. He re
ached inside, pulled out the cup, and, this time, drained the sweet sugar solution in one long chain of noisy gulps.

  “That is better,” he announced.

  “Lieutenant Choi, are you ready to talk to us about this…uh, this experiment?” That was the prime minister’s voice he heard.

  Jing nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good. While you were…gone, we compiled a long list of questions that—”

  “How long was I…immersed?”

  “You were away for seven hours.”

  He arched his dark brows. “Seven hours?” It had felt like days.

  “Yes. Now, Lieutenant Choi, as I was saying, a number of experts have assisted us in compiling a list of questions that—”

  “I will answer your questions. But first…I must pass on a message.”

  * * *

  Rex Williams regarded the men sitting around the long oak table—a mixture of the survivors of his cabinet from two years ago and an assortment of military uniforms. They were staring at him as if he had brought a sacrificial goat to the table, then slaughtered and gutted it right before their eyes.

  He repeated what he’d just said. “I’ll do it.”

  “That’s absolutely senseless, Prime Minister!”

  “Choi was returned unharmed, just as Grace promised he would be.”

  “We don’t know for certain that he hasn’t been changed in some way we won’t be able to detect. He could now be weaponized—some sort of viral Trojan horse,” said Dr. Calloway.

  “I understand that. And we will continue to keep him in isolation for the foreseeable future.”

  “You understand, Prime Minister, that if you do this, you’ll have to be quarantined too?” said Calloway.

  “Of course.”

  “Possibly indefinitely.” Calloway looked around the table for support. “You’ll be rendered ineffective as leader of the committee?”

  “I know. But we have to treat this as what it is. Unbelievable as this must sound—and God knows it sounds unbelievable to me—this is an invitation from one civilization to another to sit down and have a conversation. Now that we know the virus can cross the oceans at will, we are at its mercy.”

  “We have access to weapons, Prime Minister.” Bullerton turned to look at Xien. “Subject to the Chinese agreeing.”

  “You’re talking about using nukes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many nuclear warheads in your arsenal, Captain Xien?”

  The officer glared at Rex, poker-faced for a moment, then finally, he spoke. “Before the outbreak, I would have been court-martialed for telling you this. Most likely shot. But”—he offered a wan smile—“much has changed. We carry twenty-four warheads.”

  “Twenty-four?”

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty-four warheads are not going to protect us for long.”

  Rex pointed at the fuzzy print of the long-range radar scan; they were looking at a tear-shaped blob off the northeast coastline of North Island. It was two hundred miles away and traveling their way very, very slowly—a little more than a mile an hour.

  “In six more days, it’ll land on North Island,” said Rex. “It has asked to speak to us before it does so.” He looked around. “It can wipe us out,” he went on. “It doesn’t need to talk to us…but it wants to.” He spread his hands. “We’re fools if we don’t acknowledge that. It wiped out the rest of our world in just a few weeks. The only reason we’re still alive here is that none of the first waves of infecting spores came to ground in New Zealand.”

  “We could evacuate.”

  “And go where?”

  The room was silent. There was no answer. There was no place left to run. Rex would have been relieved if someone had raised a hand and suggested a viable alternative to submitting himself to the same process as Choi. Really. He would have been.

  “It has invited me to go and talk with it. So that’s what I’m going to have to do.”

  “What about the Americans?”

  “What they decide to do is up to them.” Rex shrugged. “If they’re smart, they’ll do the same thing.”

  Bullerton stood up. “Prime Minister, if you expose yourself to this virus, we will have to select a new acting leader. There’s no way we can accept you back.”

  “I’ve already worked that part out,” said Rex. “If I do this, maybe I can negotiate with the virus to leave New Zealand alone. Maybe I can assure it we’re no threat. But if we respond to this request with a nuke, I suspect we won’t last very long.”

  He laughed nervously. “Worst-case scenario, if it, you know…”

  Kills me? Eats me? Turns me into slime? Jesus Christ. Am I really doing this?

  “…just kills me, then you gentlemen will need to go and pick a new leader anyway.”

  Chapter 28

  Clearance: 43kk Timestamp: 23.09.00.12 Source: radio, external. Encryption: Seleass34

  Transcript for: President, Eyes Only

  Message:

  This is Rex Williams, spokesman and acting civilian head of the PNA speaking. And this is a message for acting President Douglas Trent. This communiqué is encrypted, Douglas. I know you’re not anxious to talk with us, I’m guessing because we have the Chinese on board with the PNA. Fine. This isn’t a conversation. It’s a heads-up. One of our long-range recon planes has picked up a large viral structure that appears to have crossed most of the Pacific just to get to us. We can now safely conclude the virus no longer seems to be held back by the sea. And that changes everything. I’m guessing another one may well be on a course toward you. If you have long-range planes and fuel for them, I’d get them up in the air to start looking for it.

  There’s something else you should be made aware of. One of the ships in the fleet that cooperated with yours, collecting survivors from Britain and Europe, picked up an infected virus carrier. A young girl. I’m sure by now you’ve been briefed on what happened over there? That this virus can make completely convincing facsimiles of people? The girl has presented herself to us as some sort of diplomatic ambassador with an invitation to myself to come and “negotiate a truce” with the virus in person.

  What this means in practice is that I willingly submit myself to infection, to be partially broken down, “ingested” if you will, into its ecosystem.

  I’ve been assured that I’ll be returned to my former self once the talks are concluded, free of any harmful effects or any hidden infection. We have already had a volunteer undertake this process—ingested and returned—and while he is still in quarantine, it does appear that he’s unharmed.

  This is going to be a huge act of trust on my part.

  Strange as all of this may sound to you, we’re taking it seriously over here. If the viral structure approaching us reaches these shores, then it’s going to be over for us. If we try to nuke the bloody thing, then we’re presuming that it’ll simply make another one. Plus, that may put an end to any further offers of negotiation.

  If this plague can negotiate, if it wants to talk, I believe I owe it to the people here to go and listen to what it has to say.

  If you’ve already been presented with a similar scenario, I strongly urge you to do the same and to think of it as a first meeting of civilizations. If you haven’t yet been approached this way, then you may also have an “emissary” among your quota of rescued people, waiting to make contact with you.

  Mr. President, I don’t know whether this virus thinks the same way we do. It could be taking this meeting as an opportunity to determine whether we’re a threat or an irrelevance.

  That’s [—unclear/indecipherable—] to begin with. Oh, there’s one other thing. Our viral “ambassador” explained to us that she’s some sort of hybrid of the virus itself and the person she was before she became infected. She’s given us a name and claims that you actually know her? Whether conf
irming that fact gives you some comfort that the virus is leveling with us or not, I give you the name she gave us:

  Grace Friedmann.

  End of message.

  Tom stared at the name printed at the bottom of the page, afraid to takes his eyes off it even for a second in case it became someone else’s name when he looked at it again. He felt waves of heat and cold wafting over him, his skin and scalp prickling. He reached out for the back of the chair to steady himself, then finally he looked up at Trent.

  “That’s why I called you in here, Tom.”

  “My…my daughter?”

  “Yes, your daughter. It seems she’s very much alive.”

  “They’re…saying she’s infected?” That came out sounding more like a question. Like he needed Doug to clarify the point for him.

  “Yup. Seems she is.” Douglas Trent’s hard, pinched face softened ever so slightly. “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  She’s…infected? But alive. Alive!

  “I’ve already given orders to lock things down, Tom. We’ve got spotter planes in the air. We need to know if one of these goddamned viral things is heading our way! I’m going to…”

  Trent’s voice was background noise right now as Tom looked down at the note again and reread the last paragraph. Single words stepped out of the blur of smeared print: hybrid, viral.

  Hybrid. That one word gave him a shred of hope. Hybrid. Half of. Part of his daughter still existed, then a part of Grace was still alive. Jesus. He had no idea what that even meant.

  He’d begun to think of himself as a grieving father, to concede the loss of both his children, accept that he was adrift, a loner for whatever time he had left to live.

  Then this.

  “…and if those sons of bitches can cross the sea, then that means those damned saline tests must be a load of bullshit,” continued Trent. “We’ve gotta look at all those people you rescued again! We need to develop another kind of test. Shit! I need to get our people thinking about another kind of test we can use to…”