Anna studied the earth from the junctions where moats intersected. She saw couples, even groups of three or four, standing or lying in each other’s arms, packed together beyond their combined trenches. It surprised her how few people she saw camping like this. These combined moats were no wider than the singletons’, but they were deeper. There must be a maximum, an optimum number. Try to fit too many, and the overlapping symptoms would eat into the keep, diminishing it, ultimately to nothing.
“One of them ain’t even infected,” said a young soldier to her when they passed two sleeping men cuddled together behind their trench. “One of them blokes is immune, but he just loves his boyf, and he’d rather stick with him. If they’re close enough you can’t tell if it’s one moat or two. You hear people say that,” he said. “It’s a new kind of love story.”
Later, Anna would sit across from Nick beyond his moat and listen without speaking, her hands clasped, as he wept at the memory of the ostentatious and charismatic young Swedish woman full of what sounded, to Anna, like mannered flimflam about secrets of the earth, that had transported him. He blurted out stories from the crooked pilgrimage on which he’d joined her, when she let him, to pat the sides of old monuments and stroke castles’ flanks as if they were sleeping beasts; to find ways to fill his traveling days when she would not.
“She wouldn’t let me stay with her in the end,” he said.
Poor sniveling boy, Anna thought, equal parts contempt and compassion.
Once as Anna took a sample from an abandoned trench overlooking the Thames, she felt the ground quiver and turned to see the skyline on the south side abruptly break as a tower collapsed with an appalling noise and a billow of glass and brick. That same week the BT Tower snapped at its base and came down into the quarantine zone. Some of the affected had started to gather together and take last stands or sits or sleeps spaced out around some edifice, overlapping their trenches to open the earth and bring down the city on themselves.
“Got reports of a deader in Maida Vale. Suicide by second floor.” A ruined woman in a crater of bricks. She had stood to let the floor dissolve around her, until she had plummeted like a victim in an old cartoon on an untethered raft of wood. Anna and the corpse were watched by a stander in a pocket park surrounded by a circle of fallen trees, his trench deep enough to contain inches of water.
Anna listened at countless trenches, trying to hear noises.
The colonel told her she could not live in the town any more.
“We barely know what’s going on,” he said.
Her room in the barracks was small and plain and overlooked an enclosed yard where two huge tires leaned against a wall. There was a landline, which connected only to the rest of the base.
Sporadically, the television in the officers’ lounge would not come on. “What’s going on?” she said to Gomez. “I haven’t seen the news for two days.”
She stopped at the sight of him. He looked at her with something so like agony that she closed the door and went to him and stood close enough that if he moved at all, if he looked at her with any glimpse of invitation or acceptance, she could hold him up.
He stood. He nodded thanks but carefully he stepped back from her.
“There are people,” he said slowly, “out there, in that fucking chaos. I can’t talk to them any more. It didn’t need to be like this. Did it? It didn’t. I don’t care that you can’t cure it but if you can’t, then show us how to live with it.”
He did something and that night the TV worked again.
Emergency broadcasts. Perry put his head around the door to be lit by aerial footage of fires in Chile, the ruins of Antwerp and Edinburgh.
“Colonel,” Perry said, “I’m doing another late session tonight, OK?”
“Did you see that Australian guy? “Gomez said to Anna.
Perry left, and Gomez eyed the closing door. “He thinks he’s found something,” he said. “Online.”
“How?” Anna said. There was no internet any more, only an unstable Sargasso of abandoned sites adrift in static, drifts and clumps of wrecked data, blogs, social media, the digital debris of industries and agencies.
Gomez shrugged. “Supergeek.”
Anna watched footage of the tops of a forest, warplanes howling above it. The canopy was broken by overlapping circles of treelessness, the stigmata of new humans. In Dubai, people lay down in the basement of the Burj Khalifa, but they were discovered by armed police before the tower came down.
“You might raise kids,” Gomez said. “Let them sleep next to you.”
“You’d be sleeping behind theirs,” Anna said. “Children’s trenches are smaller. It would be a squeeze.”
The colonel looked at her mournfully. She remembered he was divorced, that he had a son. That night she looked out into the yard, at the tires, dark black against the gray-black of the wall, and started to cry, almost experimentally. Soon she was crying without performance, because even though it needn’t, perhaps, the world was ending.
Two in the morning, nowhere near sleep, she got out of bed and descended to the research sub-level. How is it appropriate to feel? she thought. Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It’s the surplus of animal fear, it’s never indicated, it’s nothing but itself.
A soldier outside Nick’s room nodded to her. The lights were on within. The guard outside the storeroom hesitated—she was supposed to be accompanied by a senior officer—but these protocols were breaking down. “I get my best ideas at night,” she said, and he looked at her with a hope that oppressed her.
She passed her own samples. She searched the shelves for equipment that might be Perry’s. She called up footage of experimental animals. Dogs howled at the bottom of trenches. She examined the waveform of the audio, flattened out those distress calls, but she could not find any whisper.
Anna started to head back to her room then turned in the light from Nick’s chamber and told the soldier to let her into the observation annex. He did not hesitate for long.
Perry was scrolling through images on a pull-down screen, while Nick sat on his bed and watched. Perry wore his hazmat suit, but had taken the helmet off. Nick’s eyes were teary.
She recognized the faces on the screen.
“Lai,” Nick said. “Birgit. Terrell. Where did you get these? These aren’t my pictures.”
“I told you. I found your friend’s account.”
“They already looked …”
“Then they’re not as good at it as me. You know what I noticed in your file? We didn’t have any feeds from Birgit. She was using a secure anonymous account and she was better at online security than we thought.”
“She knows things,” said Nick.
“A lot of it’s gone now. But I want to show you something.”
“This is her private stuff—”
“I want you to tell me what we’re looking at.”
Images of Nick and his friends in bars, climbing mountains, making faces at animals in zoos.
“This is Scotland,” Nick said. “That’s where I met her.”
A damp and fogged-over valley. Pictures of stone, sand in the crabgrass. A self-portrait of Birgit under a cliff in a furious storm.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. She went off into the country. I told you, man, she was full of all these mad stories, she was always wanting to see stone circles and stuff. She said she knew secrets. She went off on her own for like a week. We met her again in Edinburgh after.”
A slope of gray rock studded with gorse. Birgit’s face looking down a steep slope of flint. What Anna thought for a moment was a lake with an island in its center but was, she saw, a wide moat surrounding an edifice in stone. Another image of the same broken castle. Another. Birgit had circled the ruins.
Anna called Colonel Gomez. He did not sound as if he’d been sleeping.
“I’ll come to your office,” he said.
When he arrived he looked out of her window in his fatigues
for a long time. “I had to get rid of Collier today,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who that is.”
“You knew him,” he said without judgment. “He knew you. You met him on the gates a lot. He woke up this morning and there was a moat around his bunk.”
“Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me? I can take specimens—”
“Will it help?” He met her eyes. “You have a lot of specimens, and we don’t get any closer to fixing things.” He looked away. “They came and took him. We still have enough of an infrastructure that I could get word to them. They came. And I just don’t even know if it was necessary. At all. I don’t know how much longer they think that’ll work. There’ll come a
point …” he said, and held up his hands.
“In books about war,” Anna said, “they always tell you that people were made to dig their own graves like that’s especially bad. Like it’s worse.”
“Yes,” said Gomez. “It’s worse.”
She told him what she’d seen, what Perry was saying to Nick, what Nick was telling him. She held up her phone, which was no longer a phone but was still a camera.
“I took it through the glass,” she said. “Look, I know we’ve gone over everywhere he went. But look, do you see where she is?”
“Is that a castle?”
“He’s not Subject Zero, she is. If we can examine the actual source, maybe we can learn things. Maybe we can find a cure. Perry’s going to want to go there, you know. He has his job to do, but I want to do mine. Can you get me to Scotland? What do you see, Colonel?”
“I see a castle. I see a moat.”
“You know about bird flu,” she said. “Diseases have jumped species barriers before.” She flicked through the images of the old building behind its water. “You see a keep. What do you not see?
“There’s not supposed to be any way across. You don’t see a drawbridge.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” the colonel said. “I’m going to talk to him.” Anna waited and worked the whole of the next day until he knocked on her door again and beckoned her to where a vehicle waited, with Perry in the back seat.
They walked the main street of the town like sightseers. The cars that fronted the low old buildings were scoured with the desert dust. They saw no trenches. They saw no one. Anna believed there must be some few staying out of view, who had chosen this as their last place.
“There’s a geotag on the pictures,” Gomez said. “We have a pretty good sense where it is. We might even be able to get there.”
“Colonel,” Perry said uneasily. “Dr. Samson doesn’t have clearance—”
“Are you fucking serious?” she said.
“Alright,” Gomez said. “We’re in the dreg days here, you understand that?”
“I want to see the source,” she said. “I want to see where it started.”
“To do what?” Gomez spoke gently. “What are you actually working on? You making much headway on a cure, Doc?”
After a moment, Anna said, “You can’t cure something you don’t understand.”
“Sure you can,” Gomez said. “I mean, I know you want to understand it. I know that. But sure you can cure.”
“This is my job, Colonel,” Perry said. “You’re right, though, things are urgent.”
“You think the earth is sick?” Gomez said to Anna.
“I think it’s something.”
They broke into the diner and drank warm soda from the broken fridge.
“There’s no orders to follow any more,” Anna said. “Don’t you want to see the end of this?”
“I’m not discussing this with you,” Perry said. “Why are we talking about this with her?”
“What do we know about the place in the pictures?” she said.
“Nothing,” Gomez said. “It’s not listed on any map we have.”
“Colonel, please—” Perry said.
“What do the Brits say?” she said.
“There are no Brits any more,” Gomez said. “There’s no England, and Scotland we can’t get through to. Or I can’t. You got some direct line, Perry?”
“I am not discussing this in front of her,” Perry said. “What exactly are we even debating?”
“Who said this was a debate? Nick told Perry Birgit had plans—”
“Colonel! You and I need to talk about this,” Perry said. He stood. “And we need to talk about it with my bosses.” He went to piss and Gomez breathed out heavily and looked at Anna and hesitated and gave her the car keys. She looked at them stupidly.
“Go,” he said. She looked at him.
“What?” she said.
“He’s right. We need to talk about this. Him and me.”
“Colonel, I have the right …”
“Jesus, will you go? He’s probably making his report right now. I agree with you, don’t you get it?”
She went quickly into the street where the last light was waning and no lamps were coming on. The town was quiet and she listened hard as she ran but heard only her own footsteps on the way back to the car. She drove, thinking about the gray Scottish hills and the unmarked castle, the secret, tucked behind its moat.
The sentries panicked to see that she was not with the colonel, held her at gunpoint against a wall as they failed to get through to him, until, after two, three hours, the shafts of headlights swayed into view and Gomez parked the gray Lexus he had hot-wired in front of the guard post, and stepped out of the unlikely vehicle big and stiff in his uniform, and alone.
“What happened?” she said. “Where is he?” He glanced at her and she hated herself for asking.
“There are some trenches in that town, still,” he said.
“What about his bosses?” she said at last. “Are they going to come? Do they know?”
“They might,” Gomez said. “Which is why we’re moving.” He was. Moving fast, and speaking with energy. “I’m talking to some of the guys here directly. I’m pulling in some old favors. Chain of command is kind of negotiable right now.”
“What are we going to do?”
He gave her a dossier and a laptop. “Perry’s. You’re a researcher. So research. You have a starring role in there, Doc. Maybe it is you who can stop this.”
“What?” she said as panic rose in her. “I don’t know what you mean …”
He slumped and even smiled. “Jesus,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You know that, right, Doc? We’re just keeping each other company now. I’d rather have your company than his.”
Oh come on, she thought. You’ve still got a bit of hope in you, she thought. She was certain that was true, but she did not know, she realized, what it was he was hoping for.
Nick was reading on his bed when the colonel and Anna came in. Was the trench wider? Anna thought it was wider.
“Have you eaten?” Gomez said. Nick shook his head. “Eat. Get a lot of calories in you. You’re coming with us. We’re going to give something one try. And I’m not going to lie to you: it’s going to be hard.”
Anna looked through Perry’s notes, his research, his scribbled ideas and hypotheses. Much she did not understand, of course, but he was astounded at how often, as Gomez had said, she featured in his work.
She sorted through information about her blood type, her history, his opinions of her motivations and her research. He made notes of every time he saw when she was lax with her hazmat suit in Nick’s proximity.
To weaponize something he needed to understand what stopped it.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” she said to Gomez.
“Whatever you want,” he said.
I know you think it’s in me, she said. That I’m the answer. She hated it.
Rumors must have spread in the base but the colonel moved with enough command and speed that there was confusion but no dissent. That, Anna thought, would come later, when they were gone, as contradictory orders stutteringly reached them from Washington, or wherever was the seat of government now.
>
At the airfield, a modified army Gulfstream met Gomez, Anna, Nick and the colonel’s volunteers, one, Adams, waving to them from the cockpit. They had seen that Anna did not wear her suit, how she made no effort to avoid Nick. It had been a cue: Burrows and Castillo had shrugged their hazmat gear on, but they were the only ones, and even they let it sit loosely, had not done it up.
Nick kept saying, “Yes!” He was more buoyed up than Anna had ever known him to be. He kept forgetting to hate his captors. They asked him what he thought when they discussed plans.
When they flew, she looked down through blackness at only a few dustings of tiny lights, new centers of habitation. Some alone, surrounded by deep wide trenches of dark.
“We’re pushing the edge of our fuel range,” the colonel said. “You know what the stakes are. Keep him going.”
“He knows what the stakes are too,” she said.
The soldiers sat strapped into seats on either side of the big dimly lit cargo hold festooned in cords, steel clips, and tethers. They stared all wide-eyed into the space between them, where Nick stood, his own eyes gaping.
“Yes,” Gomez said. “He does. Does he care, though?”
“He does,” Anna said. “Look at him. He does now.”
Nick paced up and back and up and back the length of the cargo hold. He started with an enthusiasm she had never seen in him before. He strode like an energetic man. “It’s because of whose footsteps we’re following,” she said.
Eight hours while the sun tracked shafts into the suspended chamber and the airplane shook across the world. He faded. Young love, Anna thought with cool humor. “Come on, Nick,” she said. She fed him chocolate and coffee and drugs to keep him awake and cajoled and begged and barked at him to keep moving on his atrophied muscles. They let him use the bathroom but they wouldn’t let him lock it.
He tried again and faded again. “Jesus!” he shouted. He panicked. Sometimes he jogged around the Land Rover RSOV and she shouted at him not to be an asshole, not to tire himself. The soldiers watched. He walked, he crawled. Into the fifth hour he started to cry with exhaustion, but he did not stop his motion, did not rest in case cracks appeared around him, in case the metal honeycombed with matterlessness and a moat came down around him in the plane itself.
Three Moments of an Explosion Page 28