by A. T. Avon
‘Figures.’
Missy stood and paced for a moment, before coming to a stop in front of the air con. She lowered her head and let the cool air roll down the back of her neck. ‘You betrayed me, Kilgariff.’
‘How do you figure that?’
‘In the Japanese lab.’
‘Oh. That.’
‘What happened down there? Who shot who? We heard gunshots.’
Kilgariff said nothing for a moment. She scanned the room, as if fearful it was bugged. Finally, she relented. ‘West got angry. This was after you left. He didn’t want me collecting samples. I told him to get off me, but he was violent. He started manhandling me.’
‘And?’
‘One of the two Chinese guards told him to cool it and sort of raised his rifle. Before I even saw what was happening, West had snatched the rifle. He seemed to do it out of instinct, training. Maybe he knew he’d be out of options if the muzzle was ever actually pointed at him, I don’t know.’
‘So you’re saying he acted preemptively, defensively?’
‘I guess. The solider fought back, fought to keep his gun. But West had it by then. He just…’ She mimed someone spraying machinegun fire. ‘Both of them, just like that. Like a reflex. I thought he’d kill me, too, but he didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. He marched me back upstairs, then he shot you. I was as confused as you were.’
‘But less shot.’ Missy bathed in the cool air, all the while studying Kilgariff’s face, looking for any sign of deceit. ‘You still sleeping with Houellebecq?’ she asked finally.
Kilgariff didn’t protest the question, nor did she duck it. ‘Yes.’
‘Did he deceive you, or were you in on this all along?’
‘Think about it,’ Kilgariff said. ‘This isn’t about who I’m sleeping with, or whether I work for the Chinese.’
Missy sat down again, listening.
‘We’re in a facility, Missy, which has apparently been purpose-built for this pandemic. We have a chance to survive. If we work hard, if we work fast, we can be ready for this when it reaches us. They monitor world news here. Or they did.’
‘I know.’ Missy’s mind instantly went to James. ‘Do you know anything? I haven’t got access.’
‘It’s bad. It’s everywhere now. And it’s impossible to figure out. There are domes, surfaces like maps, but the infected attack them.’
‘Attack the domes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Kilgariff held out her hands. ‘That’s the million dollar question? Why does this thing attack itself?’
‘And? What’s the answer?’
‘You have to help your father figure that out, Missy.’
Back to the hard sell, Missy thought.
She ran back over Kilgariff’s explanation of what had happened in the Japanese facility, before noticing the large huntsman spider had returned. Missy watched it emerge from behind a small chest of drawers, then retreat back in. She had noticed others around the facility, too. The place was seemingly full of them.
It creeped her out.
‘And more to the point,’ Kilgariff said, still thinking out loud, ‘why do people hide after infection, only to turn on the uninfected? Nesting, they’re calling it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They don’t infect the uninfected, they murder them. It’s like there’s…’ Kilgariff’s voice trailed off. She shook her head.
‘Finish your sentence,’ Missy said, thinking of Houellebecq that first night in the Chinese hotel. What had that place been called? The Gin Bar? The Jing Bar? He had said the exact same thing to Kilgariff.
Finish your sentence.
All that time ago, when everything had been somehow less confusing than it was now.
It was demoralizing. Had they made any progress at all? Sure, they had found the Japanese lab, and Missy had stolen the contents of a filing cabinet, but where was that intel now? Tang had full control. She could feel him pulling the strings, manipulating everyone. She looked up at the CCTV in the top corner of the room, wondering who was watching her right now, listening?
Presumably Tang himself.
She considered addressing him directly, but resisted the urge.
‘It’s like the world never had a chance,’ Kilgariff was saying. ‘There’s no resilience against something like this. Without shipping, without fresh food on shelves, everything’s collapsing. People are defending what they have. Hospitals are all overrun. No one’s going to work. Everyone’s either sick or hiding, so…’ She held up both palms. ‘The world’s basically just stopped.’
‘Hiding from the virus?’
‘No. Hiding from the zombies.’
‘People have to stop using that word.’
‘Why? My entire family is dead, Missy, and it was zombies that did it.’
The words shocked Missy. It was a full minute before she managed to ask: ‘How? How do you know?’
‘Tang told me.’
‘He could be lying.’
‘Why? I’ve already agreed to help him.’
A good point.
‘And now you need to help, too, Missy. This is a last stand. Do you get that? Do you understand? We all have to be in it together.’
Missy studied Kilgariff’s face. Had she rehearsed this pitch? Was she acting? It felt like it.
‘And if I don’t?’
‘If you don’t, your father won’t. And if your father refuses, they’ll kill you.’
So there it was. Missy understood clearly now. Her father was willing to die not to help the Chinese, but letting her die… that, apparently, was something he couldn’t have on his conscience.
She thought back to the car, to the pipe coming in through the driver’s window, to the gas curling in. To the exact expression on her dead mother’s face.
Late in the game to get squeamish about killing family, she thought bitterly.
But she didn’t have a choice. She knew it. She wasn’t going to get answers sitting in this tiny box of a room, playing hide and seek with giant spiders. ‘Fine.’
‘Fine?’
‘Tell Tang I’m in – but on one condition.’
‘Which is?’
‘No camera in this room. I’m tired of being watched.’
She knew she had no way to enforce this demand. She didn’t even know why she made it. It was childish: a grab at power when she had none. But it was satisfying, too. At least she had informed Tang she wasn’t stupid. She knew he was listening somewhere, and now he knew she didn’t like it. It was that simple.
She got up and opened the door for Kilgariff. ‘Thanks for the visit.’
Chapter 6
Somewhere in the Gobi
Five hours later, just on dark, Missy was called back to the “container”. She dressed in a Hazmat suit again and made her way back through the airlock.
Houellebecq and her father were waiting inside, both standing beside the pen.
Houellebecq pointed into it. ‘Look,’ he said.
Missy looked, and sure enough, there was a dome in one of the overcrowded hexagonal segments at the base of the pen. It hadn’t been there earlier but was already the size of a basketball. It had perhaps fifteen rats clustered in it.
All the others were giving the dome a wide berth, and some were already dead or dying. ‘You used fleas with plague this time?’ she asked.
Her father just nodded.
She was looking at the Weifang outbreak then – only in miniature.
‘The rats were all healthy when placed inside,’ Houellebecq said.
Missy looked in the pen again. Nozzles had activated, spraying a short burst of water.
‘It’s a two-part process,’ her father said, as if guessing her next question. ‘Seemingly by design. Self-regulating.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s the substance,’ said her father, ‘but then there’s something else, some kind of protein. Fo
r a long time now, I’ve been calling it Protein Z.’
‘Z?’
‘For zombie, yes.’
This was too much for Missy. ‘What is it with all the zombie crap?’ The word had no place in good science. There was alive and there was dead. End of story.
‘Waterborne,’ said Houellebecq, with a nod towards the now water-misted pen.
Her father pointed down into it, through the mist. ‘I’d say it’s matching the real world. Ten percent for the infection rate, fifty for fatalities.’
Missy said nothing.
‘And that’s the nest,’ Houellebecq said, also pointing. ‘They’ll mount an attack on the dome from over there.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t know. That’s why we’re experimenting.’
Missy took a few steps back, sucking in air. She suddenly felt claustrophobic. She wanted to rip off her suit and charge back through the airlock.
She once again took in all the CCTV cameras, all the biotech on the airlock. ‘What is this place exactly? If we’re so unsure about the substance, about the viruses it might use, how come we have this place? Kilgariff said it was custom-built.’
Her father exchanged a look with Houellebecq. ‘It’s an arc,’ he said finally, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘I designed it. Not for the Chinese, but I was kidnapped, so…’ He rubbed at the suit behind his neck, shaking his head. He switched off the water in the pen and finally added: ‘We planned to build an arc like this in America. There was an incident with a submarine. That was the project I left academia for. You would’ve been… oh, I don’t know, ten or so. But it fell through.’
A year before the gassing, Missy thought.
In other words, her father’s crack-up phase.
‘Fell through why?’
‘Politics. I came to China seeking funding for a build in the middle of Australia. An international effort, like the space station or…’ He flapped a hand. ‘You get the idea. Something cooperative, inspiring, uniting. I came here with the plans, trusting… well, everyone. But I was kidnapped. I was betrayed by a man called Frank Moore.’
‘My predecessor,’ said Houellebecq grimly.
Missy remembered the name from the plane, back when Houellebecq first kidnapped her, dragging her into this mess.
Moore had been searching for her father.
‘And my plans then served to build this facility. It took a few decades, and there were a lot of upgrades, but they had the basic concept. They copied it, just ripped it off, easy as that.’
Missy glanced up at the CCTV cameras in the ceiling again. ‘So Kilgariff wasn’t lying. If I work for you on this, I’m working for the Chinese?’
Her father nodded miserably.
‘And if I refuse?’
He tapped the Perspex roof of the pen. ‘Then we all die.’
Chapter 7
Somewhere in the Gobi
The next day, the pen was down to two living rats.
But that wasn’t the most shocking part. It was what the substance had done to the rest of the pen that was horrifying. The virus had spread throughout the entire rat population. Not ten percent. One-hundred. And the fatality rate had been close on the same. There were rat corpses piled up in all the pen’s cavities. Hundreds of them, all covered in blood and intestines.
Thousands, in fact.
‘It wasn’t meant to go like this,’ said her father, dragging a finger down the Perspex and shaking his head. ‘The first infection triggered the dome. That part worked. And the infected rats left, as if possessed, as if in pain. That part worked, too.’
‘But?’
‘It spread too fast. Healthy rats came into the dome, like you and Houellebecq saw at Tumenzhen. There was that curious zone of immunity – but then they were attacked. The nest just didn’t stop killing. It even turned on itself.’
‘What’s the purpose of it all?’ Missy asked. ‘Let’s try and come at it from that angle. You said it was survival, saving humanity. But we’re down to two rats. How does that signal salvation? Are they even male and female?’
‘No,’ said Houellebecq, coming in through the airlock even as he made final adjustments to his Hazmat suit. ‘Two alpha males.’
‘It wasn’t meant to go like this,’ said Missy’s father again.
‘It’s progress,’ said Houellebecq. ‘We can rule out a divine substance, bent on saving us from ourselves.’
‘Which means what?’ asked Missy. ‘It’s hostile?’
‘Hell yes, it’s hostile.’ Houellebecq arrived at the pen. Missy noticed he was back to chewing gum – presumably having sourced the nicotine variety. ‘Not all the dead rats down there are dead because of the virus. In fact, most of them were murdered. Literally rat on rat, survival of the fittest.’
Missy checked the food and water supply and saw that it wasn’t the cause of the abnormal result. It had performed as programmed. In fact, it was still inserting food and water. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s start back at the beginning. Let’s confirm what we do know. A rat gets infected. A dome springs up. Rats in the dome that are infected leave. Rats that aren’t infected enter. We’ve got that on video, right? We are filming this?’
Her father nodded.
‘Then what, gangs form? Nests?’
Her father nodded again.
‘And these gangs – these nests – once they incubate or whatever, they attack the uninfected?’
‘The ones in the dome, yes.’
‘Agreed,’ said her father.
‘Ending the dome?’
Missy’s father glanced at her, as if he hadn’t considered this. ‘Yes. Maybe.’
‘Maybe,’ conceded Houellebecq.
But then her father frowned and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I remember now. The dome collapsed and vanished before they finished killing the uninfected inside it. I’ll check back on the footage later, but now that I think about it, I’m certain.’
‘So we still don’t know what ends a dome exactly, but we do know what starts it. An infection. The substance finding its way into a host.’ As she said this, though, Missy realized she couldn’t even be sure of this much. Was it the substance or an infection that started a new dome?
She remembered that, without plague, there had been no dome. So she decided to assume she was right about it being the infection, not the substance, that triggered the dome. Or rather, the two combined.
She pressed ahead with her thinking: ‘And we know the nests incubate for a bit, then go on to spread the virus in the wider population.’
‘No, they attack the dome first,’ said Houellebecq.
‘But after that?’ Missy asked.
‘We don’t know,’ said her father. ‘We didn’t get that far – before the carnage.’
Missy bit at her lip, trying to make sense of it.
Talking through it hadn’t helped much.
She thought about Tumenzhen, then about the neighboring town of Houjiawan, with its failed CDC chicken cull. ‘The infected leave the dome, enter nests, hatch, then attack and shut down the dome. Let’s assume, after that, they do go ahead and spread the virus. Why? To create more domes or…’ She was circling the same idea, unable to prove anything. ‘I still don’t see the purpose of domes, nests.’
Houellebecq nodded. ‘It always comes back to the same question. Why? Why does the substance spare two mice?’
Her father bared his lips and performed an exaggerated chomping. ‘Biting.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Like zombies,’ he said. ‘They weren’t “spared”. They’re alive because they were the best at biting. They literally tore the rest apart.’
‘With their teeth?’
He held up his phone and Missy found she was able to view the carnage as if in the pen herself. Clearly, the pen had cameras which fed into her father’s phone. She watched as one rat tore out the throat of another.
‘That’s not natural. Rats don’t normally do that, right?’
‘N
or do humans,’ said Houellebecq. ‘But you remember the attack on our RV - on the way here. I think that was a nest. We came in on the tail end of an attack.’
This reminded Missy of the sample she had taken that day. ‘What happened to the sample I took? West gave it to you, right? In the RV.’
‘Tang has it.’
‘Of course he does.’ Missy rolled her eyes.
‘This experiment is a failure,’ said Missy’s father. ‘I’m calling it. It tells us nothing. Outside, there’s immunity, survivors. It’s more complex outside, and simultaneously more subtle. There’s more at play. We’re still getting SOS messages from all around the world in a variety of formats…’ His voice trailed off. Finally, he added, ‘There are still people out there.’
‘All reporting zombies,’ said Houellebecq.
Missy felt a stab of frustration. ‘SOS messages? I can’t help you both if you don’t tell me everything. I can’t keep learning extra details like this. What else aren’t you telling me?’
‘DNA,’ said her father, sharing a look with Houellebecq.
‘What about it?’
‘It changed,’ said Houellebecq.
‘Changed? Changed how?’
‘Nothing that makes any sense. But we extracted three corpses.’ Her father showed her a photo on his phone. ‘Three rat corpses.’
‘What, from down there? From in the pen?’
‘Yes. We found clear DNA alterations in two of them, both infected with plague.’
‘And the third?’
‘The third,’ said her father, ‘wasn’t infected. The third was killed more conventionally.’ He did the strange biting thing with his teeth again. ‘Murdered.’
Missy thought for a moment. At first this revelation about DNA didn’t seem like anything much, but then the full enormity of what she was hearing hit her. ‘It’s the same as the girl who attacked us,’ she said to Houellebecq. ‘It confirms what we thought about her. This substance, via various viruses, is editing DNA?’
Her father nodded. ‘It can actively chop out DNA and replace it – like CRISPR.’
‘Which is what?’ asked Missy.
‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,’ said Houellebecq.
‘And that helps me how, Houellebecq? Speak English.’