Going onto the farm, especially in his school uniform, which was on its first day out of the five that it had to last, was a bad idea. His father would rage at him if he found him playing there when the daily movements were going on. The beating he had taken when he tried to follow him to work one day last summer was still fresh in his mind. He had come face to face that day with a young bull which was being herded in his direction. Peter shuddered at the memory and the feeling of fear; not from the animal who had just demonstrated an alarming aggression, but from his father, who had promised worse injuries than the bull could inflict if he ever disobeyed him again.
He didn’t know how long he waited, but it was long enough for the slight chill of the morning to creep into his body. Getting up and going into the large shed that was called the workshop, he turned on the electrical breaker to make the power flow to the simple building covered by its wriggly-asbestos panelled roof. Hearing the radio burst into low static as soon as it woke with the fresh feed of power, he stepped towards it and began to turn the dial gently to try and find some music. The fine-tuning of a radio was a skill he had learned but not yet perfected, so when he first heard the voices speaking intently with an edge of stress, Peter struggled to find it again after reversing the direction of the dial too far. Eventually, painstakingly turning it a fraction each time, he found the voices once more.
“…unconfirmed reports coming from the capital throughout the night, but it is certain that the military has been deployed on the streets of London. Looting and riots have erupted, but eye-witness accounts have stated that the infected are at the heart of the troubles. A spokesperson from the London Metropolitan Police Force has urged all residents of the city and surrounding areas to stay in their homes and not to infringe on the activities of the emergency services.”
A pause sounded, punctuated only by Peter’s eyebrows meeting in the middle, until the newsreader started again.
“In other news, after their two-nil victory over Albania last month, the England football team has announced that they are confident of another win ahead of the return leg when Albania travel to Britain next month in the world cup qualification rounds…”
His attention faded away from the sports news, finding it perverse that people could be so casual as to talk about a football match when, to him at least, it sounded like London was burning to the ground. The sound of a loud engine outside brought him back to reality, making him quickly run from the shed to flick off the electricity breaker on his way out. He stopped running as he rounded the edge of the house to see his parents sitting in the front seats of the car, both smoking and arguing intently, with hands waving to make their points. They hadn’t seen their son yet, and he preferred it that way, so he kept still with just a part of his face showing around the edge of the brick.
Peter’s mother evidently said something his father didn’t like, because he started hitting the steering wheel with enough force to rock the car on its springs and crush the cigarette between his fingers and burn him; something which his mother seemed to find amusing. That made him rage more at her, evoking an equally savage verbal response that Peter couldn’t hear. The simple fact that they had gone anywhere together, especially in the middle of the day when his father was usually hard at work seven days a week, indicated that something was definitely wrong. As his mind wandered, some sense of danger penetrated its way into his head, and he looked up to see both of them looking directly at him.
An escaping gasp made him jump, realising too late that it was his own, and Peter froze as his body decided whether to run or not. His head took over just in time, telling him that he had nowhere to run to. His body reluctantly followed those instructions and he stepped sheepishly out from behind the house to the sound of cars doors opening and slamming.
“What the hell are you doing here?” his mother screeched at him.
“Don’t you lie to your mother, boy,” his father warned; his voice heavy with the unspoken threat of physical punishment.
“School closed,” he blurted out as he retreated, eager to instinctively stay out of striking distance, “they sent us all home.”
Pater’s parents looked at one another in silence, as though the information made sense to them when it didn’t make any sense to him at all.
“Get inside,” his father eventually snapped at him, seeming to consider whether to clip him around the head just because. Peter went inside. Following the automated responses for getting in from school, he ran up the stairs to remove his uniform and fold it neatly ready for the next day, failing to understand that there wasn’t ever going to be another day at school. He dressed in some rough clothes and, as much as he hated to be anywhere near them, went downstairs to ask what was going on.
That evening, sitting in darkness in his room after the reward of an early bedtime yet again, for no reason other than asking questions which remained unanswered, Peter tried to make sense of what he had been told and what he had seen on the news. There was something going on in London, and as of that lunchtime, nobody was reporting from the city at all.
He had been there once, for a funeral he later realised, but at the time he’d blocked out the arguing from the front seat and stared in awe out of the window at the complete opposite of a world he knew. Everywhere was drab and concrete, with buildings taller than the biggest trees he had ever seen, and the air seemed to have a thicker quality that was totally at odds with the fresh farm breeze he knew. Now, imagining those same streets from the depths of his memories, he struggled to envisage those buildings burning like the ones on the clips of camera footage, and those streets full of people running and screaming. He couldn’t get the images he had seen out of his brain. He knew that sleep just wasn’t going to happen, so he decided to risk the wrath and try to listen to the television, which was still blaring loudly on the ground floor below.
Creeping as slowly and lightly as possible, Peter slipped out from under the covers and opened his door as softly as he could. The slight creaks and groans from the hinges made him freeze, ready to jump back into bed and pretend to be asleep if he heard even the slightest indication that he had been detected. Getting the door open enough to slip through, he made his way cautiously to the stairs, keeping his feet carefully to the edges of the floorboards, where they were the least likely to make the sounds which could get him caught. For a moment, he stopped at his sister’s bedroom door, and his bottom lip began to tremble as he saw her prized poster of Madonna. He’d laughed at her singing Into the Groove, using her hairbrush as a microphone. He made himself look away and carry on, knowing deep down that he would never sit with her on a Sunday evening and record the songs they loved from the charts on their ancient tape deck.
Making painstakingly slow progress in the interests of silence and self-preservation, he crept down the stairs until the partly-open door to the lounge showed him half of the television screen. His father’s slumped shoulders were visible in the armchair; the balding head lolled to one side, making Peter imagine the soft snoring that came from him in that position, especially when the mostly empty bottle rested against the side of the chair. He couldn’t see his mother, but his mind filled in the blanks and put her sitting out of sight, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other as she stared at the screen with dry, vacant eyes. At least it was the news and not his mother’s favourite rubbish, Dallas. She spent hours with her glazed eyes glued to that, or worse, her videos of it over and over again.
Satisfied that his father was asleep and his mother couldn’t see him – if she was even conscious at all – Peter settled himself down carefully to watch and listen as the television told him the things that they would not.
“…declared a state of emergency. Once again, an infectious disease has spread from a London research laboratory and infected the population. Police and military personnel are containing the outbreak, and residents are urged to stay in their homes until instructed. Anyone suspected of being in the early stages of infection, usually
denoted by bites or scratches from those already afflicted, should be isolated and avoided. Do not attempt to treat people suspected of being infected. We repeat, do not attempt to help people who are infected. Other signs indicating infection are fever, confusion and dementia, and uncharacteristic aggression.”
Peter sat still on the stairs, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. It was normal for his parents to drink themselves into oblivion each night, but he imagined that even normal people would be doing that now. He knew London was a long way away, but he was still worried that this illness would sweep across the country and find their little patch of nowhere.
Peter went back to bed as stealthily as he could, and lay staring at the dark ceiling until he drifted into a fitful sleep.
Professor Grewal tried to calm himself with mathematics. Calculations and estimates passed the time, and he forced himself to work through the mental arithmetic slowly, step by step, to while away the hours. For the first time in weeks, he felt trapped underground in the laboratory that had never made him feel claustrophobic before. But before, he had been able to simply walk out.
Well, maybe not simply walk out, he admitted, thinking of the security doors and main entrance that was monitored by three guards, day and night. Those guards would not open the airlock doors with their spinning metal wheels until identification was verified via the closed-circuit television feed, but even before all this went wrong, he could still, with relative ease, get outside.
Not that he had in weeks, because he had been close to a breakthrough. He had been on the verge of it ever since the two American scientists had come in with their most recent research. But the way the two men with their matching glasses and similar government-issued wardrobes always glanced at one another before answering got on his nerves no end. Their research, conducted under the guise of medical testing and treatment, had been brought across the Atlantic for refining.
Refining. That was what they called it. Professor Grewal called it weaponising.
Morally, he was against the idea, but practically he knew that if he didn’t conduct the final process, then someone else would. It was a matter of professional pride, not arrogance, but he knew the other people in his field, and he knew that anyone else they brought in to do the work would be less effective than he was. He knew that the Russians had just as vast a research budget as the USA and the UK combined, and given that the likelihood of all-out nuclear war was very low, he knew that the two hugely powerful nations would find other ways to wage war in silence.
One way involved people like him. Professors in advanced bio-chemistry with real-world experience comprised a very small portion of the world’s population, and when they reached the tip of that particular iceberg, they tended to know each other. Of all the others he knew, he was certain that he was the best person to complete the research through to testing in the shortest time.
He had been right, at least about his ability to bring that research off the paper and into the bloodstreams of test subjects. What he had been wrong about, however, was the expected effects of the test.
These test subjects were another moral issue, and a solution had been provided by their American counterparts. Prisoners, unlikely to ever earn their freedom within a reasonable time, exchanged their lives for cash so that their families could see at least some benefit from their existence. Under strict conditions to prevent the spread of the disease, the subjects were restrained on the wheeled stretchers and the disease was administered in carefully measured doses of varying amounts.
The disease itself was naturally occurring, and it had taken the Americans years to breed it into the most severe potency. Still, as potent as it was, the speed at which it progressed was still slow enough that the symptoms could be recognised, and the infected subject effectively quarantined in time to stop a cataclysmic spread.
That was where Grewal came in.
His theories on crossing over disease barriers and combining them had been inspired by his research work on vaccinations. By combining the overly aggressive strain of the rabies virus with the fast-acting meningococcal disease, he had been successful in turning up the dial on the new hybrid disease all the way to eleven.
When the six simultaneous human trials began, the small facility was on full lockdown. Those trials began just as expected, and the first ninety minutes went seemingly without incident. At around the two-hour mark, four subjects began to display symptoms in varying degrees. Grewal made a note on his clipboard, mentally disregarding the other two as having received too small a dose to be effective, and he paid close attention to the one subject who he now knew had received the highest amount. Within three hours, that subject advanced far beyond the effects visible on the others, was writhing in pain and crying out. His skin showed angry, red welts and he complained of cramps and a headache.
By four hours, his temperature had risen to such a level that those standing by to monitor him could feel the heat radiating away from his skin. By the time that temperature was noticeable, the groaning, crying subjects had quietened and were sweating through their rapid, shallow breathing.
One of his laboratory assistants scribbled a rapid note as their doctor called out the time of death for the first subject, followed at regular intervals for the next two, before something very unexpected happened.
Subject one, his frothing mouth hanging open and his rapidly cooling skin no longer glowing pink, but having turned a deathly pale shade, opened his eyes slowly.
It wasn’t the simple mechanical response of a body in recent death to relax each muscle, because the eyelids fluttered open and blinked. The eyeballs, clouded and milky as though cataracts had blinded him, turned slowly left and right as though looking for something.
The chest began to rise and fall gently; each movement of the ribcage expanding and contracting prompted a rasping hissing noise, like wind whistling through a creaking door. The lab assistant who had recorded the time of death for that subject froze and turned slowly towards him, checking that the correct information had been annotated against the right subject. Stepping closer, he bent down to watch the rise and fall of the man’s restrained chest, placing his own face next to the subject’s, and believing himself safe from the contagion behind his mask and goggles, his eyes grew wide just as the face turned towards him and locked its own milky orbs on the man’s. Then it opened its mouth wide and bit the man on the face.
Six days later, after the full stupidity of the safety protocols in place became apparent and the sealed doors had been opened to investigate why the facility had stopped picking up the telephone, Grewal was still trapped in the store cupboard.
The lock was holding and there was no sign that the dynamic of those ‘things’ outside and him inside would change, but the supply situation was the more pressing concern. He had no idea what was happening in the wider world above ground, or in fact anywhere other than the three feet of corridor he could see either side of the door he was hiding behind. But his world was a small, dark place.
Not needing to count off on his fingers, Grewal cursed his luck that he had sought refuge in a room without running water and calculated that he had two days before he would be out of fluids and forced to try and escape that room before he was too weak to be effective. The only problem was the two lurching figures outside the door, who responded with blood-curdling screeching noises every time he made any sound. No matter how still he stayed, they would not leave.
He was entombed, effectively, by his own monstrous creation and would soon be forced to fight them or else face a certain, agonising death by dehydration.
FOUR
“Well, I’m not waiting here for news,” Peter’s father snarled angrily at his mother, whose only response was to take a further gulp of drink without taking her malevolent stare away from his eyes. He had spent the morning trying to raise people on the telephone, painstakingly dialling each digit of the numbers written in a book and waiting for the dial to slowly spin back to the zero. Each call had either
resulted in him slamming the handset back down in frustration at nobody answering, or having a terse conversation with the person on the other end. Each time he made a call, regardless of the outcome, it seemed to anger him more.
“I’m going out,” he raged, throwing open a door to a cupboard in the hallway and retrieving a shotgun with a belt of cartridges, which he slung over one shoulder, before seeing Peter through the railings of the stairs and glancing back to his wife. He seemed to be weighing something up, like he was searching for the lesser of two evils, before abruptly saying to the boy, “Get your boots on and come with me.”
“What are you taking him for?” his mother shrieked, waving her half-smoked cigarette at her son as she stalked forwards full of accusations. “Planning on leaving me behind, are you?”
“Don’t bloody test me, woman,” Peter’s father raged back at her, puffing himself up to his full height like a gorilla. She wasn’t intimidated by his animalistic display, and her face told him exactly that.
“Stay here,” he instructed her and turned on his heel just in time to ignore the childish face she pulled at him and hear the accompanying huff of derision. A glance at Peter conveyed the information that he should have already got his shoes on and been waiting, so the boy scrambled down the rest of the stairs to comply quickly.
“Stay,” his father added in a growl, this time to their collie dog, who had automatically risen to follow at his heel.
Walking at double speed away from the house and towards the farm to keep pace with his much taller father, Peter resisted the urge to ask him any questions. He had learned long ago that asking would only gain the reward of a clip around the ear or a snarled response of an aggressive platitude like, “Listen instead of talking and you might learn something,” or, “Two ears, one mouth, boy. Work it out.”
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 3