“They killed that old man,” I said, “There were people living in those houses all around him. Watching through their net curtains. And nobody, not a single person, went to help him.”
“Yeah, well,” said Geoff, “We didn’t neither.”
I didn’t reply. He was right. We were as bad as the rest of them.
10
We slept in the Land Rover that night. It was a one of those big, old models with solid metal sides and enough room in the back to kip down and stretch out. I slept soundly. I would have kept on sleeping if it hadn’t been for the scratching noises.
They sounded like fingernails scraping down the outside of the metal. It was a penetrating noise. The sort of noise guaranteed to wake you from the soundest sleep. I sat up, looked out through the front window and also through the back window. There was nothing to see. Then the Land Rover started rocking from side to side. As if someone, or something, were pushing it. As the sides of the vehicle had no windows, it was impossible for me to see what was going on out there. Bobby had moved up close to me. I could feel him shivering. Geoff was awake too. He lay completely still, in his sleeping bag, his eyes wide with fear.
Then there came an almighty banging. Bang! bang! bang! Someone was thumping heavily and repeatedly against the side of the vehicle.
There was no point trying to lie low, no point holding our breath and hoping that whatever was out there might not notice that we were inside. It obviously knew we were there. And it didn’t seem to have any intention of going away.
I slipped out of my sleeping bag and took a knife from my knapsack. I crept up to the window in the back door of the Land Rover and, slowly and carefully, I peeped out. There was nothing to be seen other than the long, dark tunnel formed by the trunks of the fir trees stretching away into the distance.
Then, quite suddenly, there was a pair of eyes.
I jumped back in horror. The eyes were huge, bestial, red-rimmed and staring.
I wished we had a gun. If we’d had a gun I would have fired a shot. Which, from inside a Land Rover might not have been a very sensible thing to do. Then again, I knew nothing about guns anyway, so even if I’d had one I wouldn’t have known how to use it.
Geoff was sitting up in his sleeping bag now. He was panting harder than the dog. All three of us – Geoff, Bobby and me – were staring through the back window. But the eyes had gone. Whatever it was that had looked in at us, had moved away. Then I heard the front door on the passenger side being opened. I hadn’t bothered locking it the night before. I hadn’t been expecting visitors. And anyway, if you know anything about old Land Rovers, you’ll know that a locked door isn’t much more of a barrier than an unlocked one.
I leapt up with the intention of holding the door shut. It was a pointless effort. The door was already open and something dark, unkempt and shaggy had leapt inside and was now kneeling on the passenger seat. It grasped the back of the seat, which is all that separates the front from the back of the Land Rover. It crouched there, staring at us through a fringe of long, greasy black hair.
If I’d been quicker witted and more experienced in the arts of self-defence I would have set about it with my knife. Luckily, I wasn’t, so I didn’t. If I had done, we would never have met Leila.
“What does a girl have to do to get service in this place?” the crouching form said.
My heart was still beating faster than it had any right to be beating and, for a few moments, I could make no sense of the smooth female voice coming from the shaggy anthropoid shape in front of us.
Geoff was the first to speak. What he said was indecipherable but sounded a bit like “Gah-gurkle-gah…” This was probably due to the fact that, in the excitement, his mouth had become entangled with the hood and drawstring of his sleeping bag.
I took up the conversation. My precise words were, I confess, somewhat lacking in diplomacy but they expressed my feelings accurately and concisely in words of one syllable.
“Good morning, gentlemen and dog,” said the creature which I was only now starting to think of as an actual woman, “The name’s Leila. And who might you be?”
Ten minutes later, the four of us were sitting outside eating cornflakes and long-life milk from plastic bowls while we boiled a kettle of water for tea over a small fire.
Leila was definitely a woman. The ape-like appearance was due to a combination of her enormous black, shaggy coat, a broad-brimmed black hat and her long black hair which had a tendency to drape itself around her face, leaving little to be seen except for her eyes peering through the undergrowth.
She had terrifying eyes. On their own, the silver irises would have been striking and attractive. But combined with the raw-looking red rims, her eyes looked inhuman and brutish.
“I don’t look entirely at my best at the moment,” she said, as she poured the hot water into the teapot, “I’ve been a bit under the weather, you see. Sugar and milk?”
“Just milk for me,” I said.
“Milk and two sugars,” said Geoff.
“Have you any sugar?” Leila asked.
I shook my head.
“That will have to be milk and two sugars without the sugar, then.”
“I can’t drink tea with no sugar,” Geoff mumbled.
“Then we shall drink it for you.”
Geoff drank his tea without sugar and complained after every sip.
“What were you doing to our Land Rover?” I asked.
“What did it sound like?”
“It sounded like you were pushing it and thumping it.”
“That’s precisely what I was doing.”
“And scraping your fingernails down it.”
“My fingernails? Really? Oh, that must have been this.” She reached inside her fur overcoat and produced a long, vicious-looking dagger. It was twice the size of my knife and I had the feeling that, unlike me, Leila knew how to use it. It was probably just as well I hadn’t tried to intimidate her with my pathetic little knife earlier.
“Love the coat,” said Geoff, “What fur is it? Bear? Or wolf?”
“Bear? Wolf?” she said in a tone that suggested that was one of the stupidest things she’d ever heard, “Oh no, this is buffalo hide.”
“Buffalo?” I said, unsure if she was pulling our legs, “Where would you get buffalo hide?”
“Typically,” she said, “off a buffalo. You don’t have any toast and marmalade, I suppose?”
We didn’t. We did have some crispbreads and a pot of strawberry jam, however, so we scoffed that down for our second course.
Leila seemed a nice enough person, once you got past her unusual appearance and eccentric manners. But there was one thing that continued to bother me. Her eyes. They were bloodshot with painful-looking red eyelids. They reminded me of the eyes of the man who’d bled out in the alleyway. They reminded me of Jake’s bloodshot eyes when he’d killed Mr Cadwallader. Leila said she’d been ill. I wanted to ask her about that but it didn’t seem the sort of subject you could just drop into conversation. She might have taken it the wrong way and I wasn’t sure if she was completely sane. She saved me the trouble.
“You keep staring at my eyes,” she said, “Quite impolite. But, in the circumstances, understandable. They are symptomatic of an infection. Quite painful, actually. Look.” She took the lower eyelid of her right eye between a thumb and forefinger and squeezed gently. A single drop of blood like a red tear oozed from the eyelid and trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of a hand.
I wondered what infection might cause your eyes to bleed like that. I’d heard of haemorrhagic fever but wasn’t sure what it was. I had a feeling that some tropical diseases like Ebola caused people to bleed from the eyes and, well, just about every other bodily orifice. I also knew that Ebola was not at all a good thing to catch. Sitting there on the ground, I shuffled a couple of feet further away from her, almost without intending to do it. The sight of the blood oozing from her eye filled me with dread.
She smiled. “The reaction is a common one. At least you haven’t tried to shoot me yet.”
“We haven’t got a gun,” Geoff said. I could have strangled him.
“But you do have a radio which, in the present circumstances, might be of rather greater use.”
The radio was nowhere to be seen. It was tucked away inside the Land Rover.
“I was watching you last night,” she explained, “Your attempts to tune into shortwave stations were valiant but doomed to failure.”
“You were watching us?”
“Oh yes. I am not in the habit of approaching people whom I do not believe to be harmless. Or, at any rate, more harmless than I am.”
“Why do you say our attempts to tune into shortwave stations…?”
“…were doomed to failure? I say it because it’s true. You need an aerial.”
“The radio has an aerial.”
“A very inadequate one, however. You need a very long, extensible aerial if you are to have the remotest possibility of hearing anything more than indecipherable crackling.”
“Is that a fact? And how do you know that?”
She smiled, “I know a great deal of very useful things, darling. Now are you going to take my advice and get yourself a proper aerial or are you simply going to sit in a forest and feel sorry for yourselves?”
So we set out to find an aerial.
11
Leila led us to a farmhouse a couple of miles distant. We took our walking sticks with us – the ones that Geoff and I had taken from Mr Cadwallader’s store. Leila had a stick too, and it outranked ours. It must have been almost six feet long and I had the feeling that she might occasionally use it for activities other than walking. The farmhouse was an old building with rough-plastered walls and a thatched roof. There was a wooden shed out the back and she walked right into it.
“Nothing to worry about here,” she said, “There’s no one at home. Well, no one that will bother us.”
I didn’t ask for details. And I didn’t look inside the house. I’d seen enough horror over the past few days. It suited me better to think of this as just a deserted house – end of story.
Leila found a roll of wire – thin, electrical wire covered in plastic. She also found some alligator grips and a pair of pliers. She took the lot and then we strolled back to where the Land Rover was parked. The paths we took led mostly through the forest and we didn’t see a single soul en route, which suited me.
Once we got back, she unwound about twenty feet of wire, cut the plastic covering off one end and twisted it into the alligator grip which she then clamped onto the aerial of our radio.
“Now all we have to do is get the rest of the wire strung up into the trees,” she said.
I looked at the trees. The bottoms of the trunks were bare. Further up, they were dense with the prickly-looking branches of the spruces.
“How are we going to do that?” I said.
Leila gave me a look of withering contempt. Then she took off her huge buffalo-skin coat and hat, clenched the free end of the wire between her teeth and shinned up the nearest tree with the agility of a gibbon. When she got far enough up the tree, she looped the wire around a branch and shinned back down again.
“There you go,” she said, as she put her coat and hat on again, “One long-wire antenna. Now, let’s see what’s on the radio.”
Leila tuned the radio with the practised air of an expert. There were a few foreign language stations at first. Although the reception waxed and waned a bit, it was very much better than it had been without the aerial. Finally she hit on an American channel. It came in loud and clear. It sounded strangely normal. A man’s voice spent some time talking about domestic news – there’d been a hurricane somewhere and a mass shooting somewhere else. Then he said something about an emergency meeting that the President was having with an Army general and members of the CDC.
“Well, that’s good news, at least,” I said, “I mean, America seems to be functioning pretty much normally so it’s not as if there’s a global catastrophe or anything.”
Leila shushed me. She was more interested in what the radio announcer was saying than what I was saying.
“…the President said that the situation in Europe was at crisis point but that the American people could rest assured that all necessary measures would be taken to contain and eradicate the problem.”
Then there was discussion with an economist about the impact of the European situation on imports and exports. That was followed by someone offering advice to people who had been unable to contact friends and relatives in Europe.
“What’s the CDC?” I said.
She gave me one of those “You really are an idiot, aren’t you?” looks of hers. “The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a federal agency. But that’s not the important bit.”
She turned the radio off.
“Leave it to the Yanks,” Geoff said, “They’ll get something sorted out. They’ll probably be sending food parcels over or something.”
“Yes,” I said, “And they’ll probably negotiate a trade deal while they are at it. You know what the Americans are like!”
Geoff and I were treating it all as a big joke. I guess we were in a good mood. It was a relief to find that life in America was carrying on as usual. I’d been starting to think that maybe everywhere in the world was in as bad a state as Britain. Leila didn’t see the funny side, however.
“You do realise what they are talking about, I suppose?”
“Who?” said Geoff.
“The Americans. You do understand what we just heard. What it all means?”
“That America is doing fine,” I said, “And help is on its way.”
Leila laughed. It was a bitter laugh, completely devoid of humour. “Something is on its way,” she said, “But it isn’t help. When the President has high level meetings with the top military brass to discuss all necessary measures to contain and eradicate the problem, it’s a safe bet it’s not food parcels they are talking about.”
“What then?” said Geoff.
“A bomb, maybe. Probably more than one. That’s just what we need to make everything OK again. Some great, stinking big atomic bombs dropped on us!”
Geoff laughed. I didn’t. I was trying to convince myself that Leila was being over pessimistic but I wasn’t succeeding. “The Americans think it’s a disease, then?” I said.
“Hmmm?”
“The broadcast said the President was consulting with the CDC, some sort of health agency, which kind of implies that…”
“For God’s sake, darling! Of course it’s a disease. It was the Russians that did it.”
“What?”
“It came in the snow. I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
“Of course, I we can’t be one hundred percent certain. I mean, maybe it was the Americans. Or the Armenians…”
“Armenians?”
“What I’m trying to say, darling, is that it could have come from anywhere. But since the snow came from Siberia and the Russians have a bit of a history with this sort of thing, one has to draw the most plausible conclusions.”
“What history have the Russians got?” said Geoff.
“Are you two really as ignorant as you appear or are you working on a comedy double act?”
“We’re planning an act for the Blackpool summer season,” I said.
“Then may I suggest you work on better material. You have no doubt heard of Biopreparat?”
Geoff looked blank. I looked blanker.
“The Fifteenth Directorate?”
We continued to look blank.
“The Kirov anthrax accident? The Aralsk-7 smallpox outbreak? Well, crikey, even you chaps must have heard of Chernobyl!”
“Of course, I’ve heard of Chernobyl!” I said.
“I saw it on the telly,” Geoff added.
“Well, then, that’s what I’m, saying. This is the same thing that
happened with Chernobyl, except this time it’s biological rather than nuclear. Isn’t it all transparently obvious, darlings?”
Our continued blankness persuaded Leila that, as far as Geoff and I were concerned, it was far from transparently obvious, so she set about explaining. She began with a potted history of the Soviet biological weapons programme. According to her, they’d tried weaponising everything from the plague to dengue fever along with a number of diseases I’d never even heard of. She gave graphic accounts of experiments with monkeys on a place called Rebirth Island. Most of the experiments were unpleasant. Few of them, fortunately, were entirely successful.
“And over the years there have been quite a few accidents. Diseases getting out of the laboratories and into the population. Nobody quite knows how many such incidents there have been because, of course, the Russians don’t go around advertising them. They didn’t go to great lengths to fess up to Chernobyl either.”
“I don’t see what Chernobyl has to do with anything,” I said.
“Radioactive fallout spread over Scandinavia, Italy, Greece… it even got as far as Scotland and the mountains of Wales. Well then, what do you think would happen if an accident sent a plume of pathogens – viruses, fungal spores, bacteria, something like that – up into the atmosphere and the weather systems carried them across Europe and down into Britain?”
“Can bacteria and viruses live inside clouds?” Geoff said.
“Can viruses live at all is a more pertinent question?” Leila replied, “Most biologists regard viruses as non-living. Little packages of nucleic acids that can’t do anything on their own. They just spend their time drifting around looking for cells to infect. My God, you chaps! What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?”
“We’ve still got some whisky,” I said.
“Sod that! I mean a proper drink. I have a craving for gin. A good dry Martini would go down a treat. Let’s go and get one!”
12
We were sitting in a cocktail bar called Miami Nights. It was situated in a dilapidated area on the far outskirts of a small town about twenty minutes’ drive from the forest where we’d been staying. Illumination was provided by candles that we’d placed on a few table tops. We’d nicked the candles on our way, from a small, semi-derelict hardware store. Leila was drinking pink gin. Geoff was sipping a glass of cider. I’d decided to stick to wine: a fairly decent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 10