After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Then the heroic work of government scientists in New York would uncover the secret of the antidote, the cure for The Falling. The government would be worshipped by the populace as they distributed the cure for free, thanked by the wider world. American economic and military dominance would be secured first, before the cure could be safely distributed around the globe. America would lead once again.

  Marcus’s body seethed with impotent rage at the injustice as he crept slowly up to the edge of the forest and peered between the thick branches and leaves at the compound barely a hundred yards away.

  Kerry was gone and the compound airlock was yet again wide open.

  ***

  23

  Marcus squatted in the undergrowth and watched for several minutes, trying to ignore the insects buzzing in clouds around him. In the distance they looked so dense it seemed as though the bayou was aflame with lazy coils of smoke spiralling up on the hot thermals.

  The airlock remained open.

  The compound would by now be completely compromised, he had no doubt. The solar power generators would not be able to sustain positive air–pressure for this long against the open airlock. Insects would have flown in, probably the infected people would have wandered inside too.

  Why had Reed opened it? Bait?

  Marcus tried to second–guess the holosap’s thinking, but with what he needed almost certainly inside he could think of no good reason as to why the doctor would have opened the door. He had achieved his aim. Marcus and Kerry could not survive long in the wilderness with so little to eat and the danger of infection and with their only likely saviour the potential cure locked beyond their reach in the compound.

  Then he remembered: an act of evidence, that the compound had been breached due to negligence, perhaps on Kerry’s or Marcus’s part. A reason to explain their deaths away as infection. There was nothing that Dr Reed, a holosap, could do.

  Marcus took a breath and moved forward.

  A body slammed into him from one side and a pair of arms wrapped tightly around his neck as he crashed down into the dense undergrowth. Marcus grabbed at the arms and tried to yank them off of him but they gripped him like bars of iron bent by force of will about his neck, strangling him.

  Marcus reached behind him, searching for a face, but his attacker buried their face into him to avoid his groping fingers and Marcus cried out desperately as he felt hot breath against the soft skin at the side of his neck, felt teeth sink in with terrible strength and pain as they punctured and burrowed deep into his flesh. Marcus screamed, and then suddenly he was free. He lurched to his feet in panic, leaping away from his attacker as he whirled to face them and kill them with anything he had to hand.

  And then he froze.

  Kerry looked up at him, her eyes wide with horror and disgust as she wiped her hands across her face, smearing Marcus’s own blood across her lips. He stared down at her as a crushing sense of dismay plunged through his guts.

  ‘Kerry?’ he whispered as he felt tears pinch at the corners of his eyes.

  Kerry spat a mouthful of blood and skin onto the soil as she got to her feet. ‘We’ve got to leave,’ she said.

  Marcus stared at her, his jaw hanging open as though the tendons and muscles were already decaying, rotting inside of him. He held his hand to his bloodied, throbbing neck and felt his torn flesh hot beneath his fingers.

  ‘You bit me,’ he managed to utter.

  ‘Only way to protect you.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Come on, I’ll explain on the way!’

  The sound of helicopter blades thumping distant, hot air reverberated through as Kerry grabbed his shirt and yanked him into the forest. Marcus stumbled after her in a daze and together they ran through the mangrove swamps, their clothes drenched in sweat, clouds of insects boiling around them.

  Marcus heard the helicopter land at the compound somewhere behind them, the sound of its rotors fading away. He realised that whoever was left aboard was now disembarking. He staggered after Kerry, who was running with the stamina of the insane. She smashed foliage aside with her arms as she forged a path away from the compound.

  Marcus guessed that they’d covered a mile when she suddenly changed direction and picked a spot behind a large tree that sagged beneath the weight of its many branches. She squatted down, breathing heavily as Marcus slumped down alongside her, his chest heaving.

  They sat for several moments until their breathing was back under control.

  ‘You want to tell me what the hell you’re doing?’ Marcus uttered.

  He touched his hand to the back of his neck and it came away smudged with blood and soil.

  Kerry’s reply seemed to reach him from another world. ‘I’m immune.’

  Marcus looked at her for what felt like an age before he could formulate a reply.

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I’m immune,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t catch The Falling, and now neither can you.’

  Marcus briefly entertained the idea that The Falling had already infected her cortex, had maybe reached up into her brain and was addling her thinking.

  ‘Kerry, there is no cure and no immunity. We were at the earliest stages of developing a vaccine and hadn’t even begun to…’

  ‘I added another test to the series,’ Kerry added.

  Marcus felt certain doom weigh in upon him. Kerry had lost it, joined the crazies of the world.

  ‘There is no cure,’ he repeated, slower this time as he tried to contain the anger now returning to run like poison in his veins. ‘You’re not thinking straight, Kerry, and now we’re both infected and we’re both going to die.’

  Kerry rolled her eyes.

  Marcus snapped. He reached out and grabbed her, yanked her to the floor. He saw the sudden panic in her eyes as he straddled her, both fists clenching her shirt up against her chin as he shouted into her face, spittle flying from his lips.

  ‘You got infected and you bit me, you stupid, selfish, insane little bitch! You’re out of your damned mind and now I’m going to die too, all because of Kerry and her stupid little dream world! Where the hell do you get off you idiotic little…–’

  A sharp pain in Marcus’s side cut him off and he looked down to see Kerry holding a sheath knife against his flank.

  ‘Get off me,’ she hissed, ‘or I’ll gut you like a fish right here.’

  Marcus didn’t let go of her, unafraid. ‘I’m dead anyway. What’s the difference?’

  Kerry shook her head.

  ‘You really think I’d be doing all of this if I wasn’t sure that I could not get infected, you dumbass?’

  Marcus stared down at her.

  ‘We only captured the nutria yesterday,’ he replied. ‘You cannot have tested a cure in such a short time.’

  ‘I didn’t create a damned cure!’ Kerry snapped and jabbed the knife into Marcus’s side hard enough that he yelped as he leaped off her. ‘I just isolated the gene and spliced it into human blood.’

  Marcus watched as she stood up and brushed herself off, slipping the knife back into a sheath on the belt of her shorts.

  ‘Human blood?’ Marcus echoed, horrified.

  ‘Mine,’ she replied, and wiped more of Marcus’s blood off her face with her forearm. ‘The gene responsible for immunity in nutria was a protein similar to the CCR5 and human leukocyte antigen. I tried to get you and Dr Reed to put the gene out into the wider world so that we could test it under different circumstances in different people, but neither of you would agree to it. In Dr Reed’s case, I guess we now know why.’

  Marcus shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know why he’s done this but it must have been planned. You can’t just call up a helicopter and a bunch of infected people out of nowhere.’

  ‘They must have a test process of their own going on,’ Kerry explained. ‘A pool of people they can use to test viruses and infections on. I got a good look at them all before I escaped from the compound roof and they all looked li
ke bad dudes to me, ex–cons or something.’

  Marcus nodded. Back in New York there was no room to house serious offenders, the prisons themselves now homes to thousands of families. Instead, people convicted of serious crimes were simply taken out into the wilderness and left to fend for themselves, which was as good as a death sentence as infection occurred typically within a few days.

  ‘How do you know that this gene in your blood will work?’ Marcus asked. ‘It could affect different populations in so many different ways.’

  ‘The gene that causes The Falling was mutated in exactly the same way as many other genes that cause infectious disease, like HIV. CCR5 is found on the surface of human cells and is a bit like a lock that The Falling and other diseases can open in order to enter the cell and infect it. If you take stem cells and mutate them to be unable to open that lock, then inject them into a host, you develop that immunity within them because stem cells reproduce indefinitely. The new stem cells provide a permanent supply of resistant immune cells.’

  Marcus blinked.

  ‘That’s a huge risk,’ he said. ‘You’d need a bone marrow transplant or similar to create immunity.’

  ‘Not if you’re uninfected when the stem cells are introduced,’ Kerry insisted. ‘They multiply within you, ready to fight off any infection that may occur. It’s a vaccine, Marcus, a crude one but the best we’ve got right now.’

  ‘But it might not work for everybody,’ Marcus replied. ‘We can’t just assume we’re in the clear! I don’t like it.’

  ‘Well what would you like?! If I had not done this we’d both be out here and entirely without any chance of survival!’

  Marcus ran a dirty, bloodied hand through his hair as he tried to think straight.

  ‘Why did Dr Reed open the compound door after I’d left?’

  ‘He tried to convince me to come back inside,’ Kerry said. ‘He must have looked at my notes last night and figured out what I’d done. Reed must have opened the airlock when we heard the helicopter arrive. As soon as I stepped out to see what was happening that damned zombified freak attacked me. If you hadn‘t heard me scream we‘d have both been trapped inside and probably been killed. If Reed’s trying to take the glory for all of this he can’t afford to have me running about out here alive and well with a dirty great bite mark in my neck.’

  Marcus felt the weight of their predicament push down on him even harder as he looked about at the bayou forest around them.

  ‘It hardly matters,’ he said finally. ‘Even if The Falling doesn’t get us, we’ve got no food and water and there’s nothing to hunt out here. We won’t last more than a couple of days.’

  Kerry inclined her head at him as though trying to understand.

  ‘You really have led a sheltered life, haven’t you Marcus?’

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘We’re surrounded by what we need to survive, if you just look around you.’

  Marcus laughed bitterly. ‘Yeah, at the trees and the stagnant water and the damned bugs! And even if you’re suddenly able to survive out here, what then?’

  Kerry gestured with a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of New Orleans.

  ‘The nearest relay station,’ she explained, ‘to shut it down and get Dr Reed off our backs. He won‘t be able to transmit his holosap without it. And then we’ve got to get this knowledge out into the world before anybody gets to us.’

  Marcus though for a moment. The relay stations were merely small hubs with communications dishes set at regular intervals along routes used by scientists travelling out into the dangerous wilderness, essential for local communications and also for passing holosap projections to join their human counterparts in the wilderness. The regional communication satellite at the city airport, however, was responsible for beaming information to other regional hubs in other states and countries. They had all been built at great risk to the constructors after the majority of satellites had fallen either silent or literally from orbit, and holosaps were dependent upon both to venture beyond their colonies in the remaining populated cities. Likewise, humanity relied upon the large, powerful regional communication dishes to stay in touch with each other.

  ‘Send an electronic mail?’ Marcus guessed.

  ‘And quickly,’ Kerry confirmed, ‘because if this happened to us, how long do you think it will be before every other research station around the world is taken down by whoever is behind all of this.’

  A brief mental image of the hundred or so research posts manned by courageous scientists searching for a cure flickered through Marcus’s mind.

  ‘I guess we’ll know by the time we get there whether or not we’re immune,’ Marcus replied.

  Kerry turned away from him and headed off into the forest. Marcus hurried after her.

  ‘If we’re not immune, we’ll need to do something about it before…’

  ‘Before what?’ Kerry asked.

  ‘Before we start falling to pieces,’ he answered. ‘You got bit first, so I’ll have to take care of you and then finish myself off afterward.’

  ‘Who said romance was dead?’

  ‘I’m just trying to think ahead in case things don’t work out.’

  Kerry stopped, turned and grabbed his shirt.

  ‘You know, you’re not so bad,’ she said, and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘For risking your neck to boost me onto the compound roof,’ she replied with a smile. ‘You didn’t know I was immune. It was very brave of you, even if you are a dumbass.’

  Kerry released him and strode off.

  Marcus stood for a moment, feeling both elated and meek, before he set off after her.

  ***

  24

  London

  ‘This way!’

  Arianna’s ears were still ringing from the blast and she could hear chunks of brickwork falling down around her as the two armed men hustled her away down the alley past the chimney.

  Arianna knew that somebody must have set charges to blow the apartment to pieces, because even the helicopter’s powerful gun could not have produced such a devastating blast. She was supposed to have died in that explosion, all evidence of her being there removed. Kieran Beck and his men had planned their attack well. Now, the hooded men shoved and prodded her through the city. They wore no masks or other protective equipment, despite the increased danger of infection. Worse, they were forcing her south, away from the city.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ Arianna asked, trying not to sound afraid.

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ answered the bigger of her two abductors.

  The other man laughed a short, nasal chuckle. Although she could see neither of their faces, they sounded like criminals through and through, the kind of people who had been ejected from the city for their crimes. Being tossed out into a wilderness where every breath of wind carried the fear of death was considered a far greater punishment both by the judiciary and the people.

  She glanced over her shoulder, and in the breeze that ruffled the men’s deep hoods she glimpsed jawlines that seemed warped and disfigured, as though the two big men were as old as the hills, their skin haggard and wasted.

  ‘This is abduction,’ Arianna uttered.

  Neither of the two men replied as they guided her down what had once been Tanner Street, according to the dirt encrusted signs, and down a long tunnel beneath what had once been a railway line. At the far end was parked a small jeep, painted dark green with stencilled black numbers painted on the side.

  The fuel shortages meant that seeing a vehicle was a rarity these days.

  ‘You’ve got a car even out here?’ she uttered.

  ‘Plenty of fuel about if you know where to look,’ replied one of her abductors. ‘Plenty of vehicles too, people left in such a rush. It’s finding decent batteries that’s hard.’

  The two men prodded Arianna into the jeep and then climbed in the front, the leader’s gun never
straying far from Arianna’s chest. To her dismay, they started the vehicle’s engine and pulled away through the city to the south.

  ‘You’re heading the wrong way,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing out here.’

  Neither of the men replied. Arianna felt anxiety creeping like little insects through her veins.

  ‘The further south we go the more dangerous it gets,’ she insisted.

  ‘The more you chatter back there the more dangerous it gets for you,’ said the shorter man, jabbing the gun at her chest again as he leaned over his seat. ‘You’re lucky to be alive so just shut up, sit still and wait.’

  The man turned back to the front, shaking his head and muttering as he did so. ‘Damned women, never happy.’

  Arianna suppressed an overwhelming desire to express the important gains made by the feminist movement over the past two hundred or so years. She figured it unlikely that the guy would have heard of suffragettes, and she didn’t want to die just right now.

  She looked back over her shoulder through the rippling canvass cover at the rear of the jeep, through a transparent plastic panel as the distant shape of the apartments and the chimney vanished slowly behind her, a column of smoke thinning and joining the buffeting clouds far above the river.

  Han Reeves was still back there, with Myles Bourne at his side. She was suddenly struck forcibly by the realisation that the two detectives had actually crossed the river to pursue her.

  ‘The police,’ she said softly to herself.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the driver.

  ‘They followed me, over the river. They wanted to kill me?’

  Neither of the two men replied, and Arianna fell silent again and watched as the crumbling city drifted by.

  Many of the lower lying streets were flooded with expansive pools of green water upon which floated a detritus of trash, the plastic legacy of mankind’s creativity. Buildings towered hollow and grey against the tumbling clouds, and she fancied she could hear the lonely wind whistling through countless empty rooms.