There are my fellow survivors Tim and Zemyna; there’s Zemyna’s sister Ruta, and finally Tim’s brother James, who by a not-that-amazing coincidence happens to be a medical researcher with specialist knowledge of the virus, as well as a survivor who spent three days in the hotel before devising a sufficiently intelligent (and hence decided uninfected-like) plan to break out; those enforcing the quarantine took a chance on not shooting, and had their faith rewarded.
Of course, now he’s out, and he’s spent a year not under the dominion of the Sombra virus, he is, today, naturally relieved at the thought of never having to experience what he’s experienced ever again, but also naturally a little peeved that science and willpower, the most grudging partnership in all of international politics, is quite possibly going to make a second virus dead, and of all the ones it chose, it chose his.
“So Tim,” Ruta says, “how did this all start, anyway?”
We’ve got an hour, so when the small talk lulls, we turn to Tim for, well, not big talk, exactly, but medium talk. Talk with a 32” waist, so to speak.
“You mean my story or the virus generally?” he replies.
“Well, the virus, I guess. It’s like it appeared from nowhere.”
And with Laura’s verbal encouragement, Tim is given the legitimacy to take us on a lecture of how it all happened.
II
“It’s like you say, Ruta; these things do sometimes appear to come from nowhere. Even now, scientists are safely putting their best bets on HIV being from zoonosis–”
He gets hit with a five-panel wall of blank faces.
“From animals,” he translates, “but it’s still uncertain, even seventy years or so on. And it’ll be the same with Sombra. Much of what we have about the history of it, especially the origins, is rumour, is speculation, is idle talk amongst the masses. I remember when the first mention of it turned up in the lab; it was the first day back after Christmas; I’d claimed as much as holiday as possible, so it was after New Year. Anyway, rumour – not really much more than that – had passed from South Korean intelligence to the WHO of disruption on the DMZ, and of course, the weird thing was that it had gone to the WHO, not the Security Council.”
He has all of our attention now; to the point where I am only dimly aware of the helicopters being ordered to move a safe distance away, out of the flight route.
“As you can imagine, the rumour gets out, and the Internet’s all a-twitter, in a total fucking frenzy, because of course a deadly new virus may or may not have emerged and it’s–”
“December 2012 when it happens,” I interrupt, because stupidity on the Internet happens to be my expertise, and whilst there’s an endless amount of it, it all falls into very finite patterns.
“Exactly. And of course, it’s not the end of the world, just like SARS, just like H5N1 or H1N1, just like they all weren’t. But the rumours keep building. The virus, of course, moves into South Korea, and therefore the open, where we get a good look at it. And of course–”
He’s moving into the bit we all know, but of course, he’s simply got to tell it again.
“We eventually get the video, once the problem hits Shanghai. This grainy phone footage shows the victims walking around, apparently normally, but something isn’t right with them, there’s that blank-eyed stare, and where they should be speaking normally, they do so in a flat monotone.
“We were clearly dealing with something that attacks the brain, and whilst the victims attacked in the late stages, by biting and tackling, it transpired that this was simply a death throe.”
“How do you mean?” Ruta asked.
“It’s like the way Ebola victims go into fits in their final stages, which can often conveniently throw a lot of infected blood around. They get the urge to bite people, sometimes even bite animals, which has the convenient effect of passing the disease around more directly. But it’s airborne anyway, which is how the trouble really kicked off.”
The media choppers are still pushing their luck with that flight path, and the BBC and Al-Jazeera – why we have two televisions on I have no idea, but we do – are still pushing for some news out of none, all the while ignoring the infinitely more informative tickers in the lower tenth of their screens.
“And even as Shanghai gets a quarantine slapped on it, cases are exploding all over the world, in America, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, and it starts creeping into the Middle East and Europe too. The UK government goes into overdrive – they might be imbeciles but they’re not complete and utter idiots, and so we’re allowed to bring in as many experts as we can get. So we bring them in. Virologists, neurologists, philosophers …”
“Philosophers?”
I think it’s me who says it, but it could be anyone of us in the audience of five.
“We were working on the theory that … well, I dunno. But it wasn’t entirely pointless, anyway. But that was what happened, you know the rest, it went worldwide, it killed about three million, we got it locked down and then for four years it was in recession and the global economy finally wasn’t.”
“Yeah, those were good times,” I quip. It gets a bit of a laugh.
Outside, the skyline remains the same, for now. From our vantage point, we can see to the north-east, when we’re not dizzy from the heat, the hotel that most of us had to escape from; beyond that, the hypodermic spire of the Burj Khalifa and the surrounding skyscrapers are unmissable.
Or at least, you’d bloody well hope so.
III
So we pass stories around the room, and for that matter pass around the vol-au-vents and beverages with them. Alcohol’s kept to a minimum, in part because of local law but also because we’ll need to be fully alert if it all goes wrong.
The hour is ticking round swiftly and the stories are almost all told, helped in part by Laura and Ruta being a rapt audience without a story of their own.
“You know,” Laura begins, before attention swivels round to me properly, “Jack never properly told me this story he’s about to tell until just before we got on the flight.”
“Well, it wasn’t one I wanted to recollect too often,” I reply.
“Yes, but …” she gives me a funny smile, pitched halfway between about-to-laugh and about-to-hug-me. “It’s like when we went camping, and you were really keen not to stay in a hotel, or go abroad. Had to wrestle this out of you.”
“Well, OK. I guess after it’s shared once it’s easier, right?”
I get a few nods to this notion. Behind me, the BBC has turned to a profusion of CGI in order to cycle through the 2014 pandemic and the vaccine that was developed at its peak. No doubt the Dubai incident – which Al-Jazeera is naturally more focused on anyway, will come up shortly. In fact, it does, and so with that neat parallel in place, I begin my story.
IIII
Even by last autumn, the Burj Al-Arab was still probably the most extravagant hotel in the world. And why wouldn’t it be? The 2010s as a decade had been a zigzag of recession, the brief recovery from it, the pandemic, and the recovery from both of them. Beaten senseless by these twin blows, the world had perhaps become a slightly more cautious place, one where all these overblown gestures suddenly paled into insignificance. Dubai now stood as the last outpost of excess, the final place where architects and designers could deliver nonlinear and post-modern civic indulgences in wholesale batches. London, Shanghai, Mumbai and New York had given up this nonsense; there was no place left for it in their economies.
And so, as a wealthy man, I had to go, and I had to experience this last outpost, before it also joined what similarly conservative-minded punters liked to call the Dourist zeitgeist. And I had to book into what I thought was its finest specimen.
So I did, and for three days it was the standard holiday experience, albeit blown up to ridiculous levels. What wasn’t marble in there was glass, and what wasn’t detailed down to a sub-molecular level was probably a dumpster round the back. I could’ve spent half a day fiddling with the room settings o
r losing tennis balls over the side of the court, and in fact, I probably did. Those were three fantastic days, even if on some deep level they were probably a little empty. But I could stump up £5,000 a night, so I was well within my rights and it’s what I chose to do.
It was the fourth night when things deteriorated.
It was also in the early hours of the morning. I had gone to bed but not slept; not necessarily because of insomnia – well, maybe – but more because as soon as I stopped walking around, my head buzzed with thoughts. Not really relevant thoughts, to be honest, just my mind, skipping over all manner of things, making all kinds of tenuous connections, wondering about this, about that, about life, about work, for some sad reason. You can take the City out of the man, and all that.
Naturally, I got tired of being tired and I wasn’t going to listen to my inner monologue’s bullshit all night, so I got up and left the room, in my pyjamas. Because why the hell not? That’s why. I moved around the floor I was on, came across the reception desk and stopped.
Something was wrong with the receptionist; the phrase uncanny valley threw itself in front of my train of thought, a half-remembered phrase from my investments in computer games studios earlier that year. I spent a bleary couple of seconds wondering how they were doing before coming to my senses. That woman behind the desk? She wasn’t right.
“Can I …” she said, paused, and then repeated it, over and over, like there was a glitch in her system. I should be fine, I told myself – I was vaccinated. But then, why was I worried? And why hadn’t the Burj Al-Arab vaccinated their staff? Of course they had. They must have done. Most of the whole damn world had got one.
“Can I …”
I kept at least five metres back, and looked behind me for extra walking space. She was probably in the mid-phase of the disease, if it was still the same disease. It quite possibly wasn’t.
“Can I …”
You fucking can’t, I thought to myself, and took a couple of steps back. She didn’t chase, she merely gave that weird, faded stare. She didn’t have to chase. If she coughed, sneezed or even breathed heavily, at least some of those viral spores would be out in the space of the room. They could’ve been already, I realised.
“Can I …”
“Shit,” I whispered, and made a run for it, all the way back to my room, slamming the door and locking it. Outside I heard a shout, and then another.
I bolted to the bathroom, locked that, just to be sure, and pissed over the toilet seat. Better there than where it was going. I then found myself in the bath, simply lying down, having forgotten how exhausted I was. But I couldn’t sleep now, and I knew it, and my mind was still digging for thoughts, and it was working like a diamond mine, moving tonnes of shit and earth to find grams of rock that had to be chipped away in order to find something of value, or even, for that matter, the startlingly obvious.
Like the way that I was now behind two locked doors.
In every zombie film – not that I claim comprehensive knowledge of Russo and Romero; I have, at best, moderate knowledge of Boyle, and that’ll do – but in these films, there’s a theme, and that is that confined spaces are counter intuitively bad for the uninfected. And this knowledge had applicability, I decided, because the symptoms of mind-rotting debilitation minus accompanying loss of physical strength had worrying similarities. In the end, I concluded that like Lyndon Johnson, victims of the Sombra virus, or whatever the hell this mutation was, should be inside the tent pissing out, causing an expansion of welfare programs and direct intervention in proxy wars in south-east Asia.
Well, that was a bad analogy, but it’d have to do.
I unlocked the bathroom door and looked around. I was safe, and I heard no banging on the door, just a noise from upstairs I couldn’t figure out. I decided I wouldn’t bother to, either. It was hard enough to figure out what was in front of me.
I got dressed. That much was sensible. I walked over to the window and glanced out at the view below me. It could’ve been a water landing, maybe, if I flung myself out far enough. The thing was, it was also a huge drop down, at least – was I halfway up? At least a hundred metres. Dropping that far onto a bouncy castle would break a leg. The window exit was a no-no.
So I opened the door instead.
“Can I …”
I kicked her in the crotch and shut and locked the door again, then slowly, slowly let go of my breath.
I needed a gun, I thought. Or even a longbow. Just some sort of range weapon. But I wasn’t getting one. It was down to me and the equally unarmed infected, the brain-addled versus the brain-rotted in the ultimate showdown, the rumble in the … hotel.
I slapped that thought away too, and tried the door again. The corridor was empty; the receptionist had apparently wandered off.
From the room, I found my way to the balcony overlooking the lobby. Along the way I checked the ventilation systems. No luck there; most of the time it was hard to tell what they even looked like. When I found a shaft, it was too small even for a baby to crawl through.
Looking over the lobby revealed it to be a mess; debris was scattered across the floor. I heard gunshots, saw shadows sweeping across the floor. Someone had a gun. Someone was also on the ground floor, making me wonder why they hadn’t simply left.
This changed things. Blinking hard and jabbing my fingers at the grit in my eyes, I realised that the man with the gun in the lobby’s motives were ultimately impossible to predict, so I’d have to have a plan for him. People who were asleep were probably wondering about the noise people like him were making, and hence were waking up, exposing themselves to infection earlier, so I had to have a plan for that. And obviously I had to get out, and have a plan for that.
I got out, obviously. In fact, ninety per cent of the escape was easy; finding a lift, exhaling weary relief as the doors opened to nothing and then riding it down to the ground floor was simple enough. The ground floor, though, had turned into a warzone, and this was the hard part, where my journey had to become so indirect. This is the bit that both stays with me and becomes so incredibly hard to describe.
It wasn’t that shit I saw that was the problem, although there was enough of that to keep any sane person at night with their eyes jammed open and their cheeks flooded. Chunks were shot out of the walls and doors. Bodies were strewn about the place. What I hoped was blood was smeared on the walls that weren’t pockmarked. In front of my own eyes, I watched in real-time as the man with the shotgun was hoist with his own petard and then processed, for want of a better phrase.
No, what really troubled me was what I had to do. Or what I justified as necessary, at any rate; the late-stagers are obvious enough, and there’s no cure – I had no qualms about that. The early-stagers, though, that’s a different matter. I found the weapon I was looking for, and I used it, but I could never be sure that I had been one hundred per cent accurate, or that I’d judged every case correctly.
And when the massed authorities outside announced the quarantine, I found myself dashing past a definitely uninfected woman in the corner of the lobby. The man with the shotgun had been somewhat indiscriminate and hit her across both thighs. There were seconds to go on the deadline, it was a borderline case; certainly, I didn’t have to time calculate how much I’d be slowed down. I just had a gut decision to make, and I hesitated, but the injured, crawling mid-to-late stager heading my way sealed the deal.
So I left the building and reached the massed ambulances, soldiers, police and press with less than a minute to spare, holding up my hands and shouting anything that sprang to mind as eloquently as I could. They lowered their guns on me as the barriers went up. A set of temporary metal panels, they were going to be replaced in due course, and work on the more permanent barbed-wire wall started within the hour.
I was still shaking, though. The Sombra victims hadn’t laid a finger on me, and the choices I made I could probably justify, but that didn’t matter. What was trying to kill me was child’s play; what I had t
o live with was a different matter.
V
I tell the group all of that. What I don’t tell them is what happens next; how, having escaped from the hotel and jumped on the emergency flight back to London, I quit my job, moved down to a smaller house and spent quite some time in there, going out perhaps twice a week at most. After about three months, I gave this up, and that’s when I met Laura.
There was something I just found intriguing about Laura, from the off. And it took me about a date or two to figure it out, but it came to me in a half-remembered flashback in the midst of a dream. She was the spitting image of the young woman in the lobby. I wondered briefly whether it was my memories and my thoughts mixing, but no, that didn’t seem right. The similarity was definitely real; it resonated with me too much.
I have never told Laura this, and I’m especially not going to tell her now, ten minutes before the big event, as we whittle down those minutes with the world’s most impossible blame game.
“Accident.”
“No, Iran. Definitely Iran. Or some sponsored Islamist movement.”
“Mossad. They have previous.”
“CIA, if we’re going there.”
“Lockheed Martin. Weapons testing. Apparently there’s some experimental shit going down today, what better test than this, right?”
“The Qatari government,” Tim suggests.
“What?”
“You name me a bigger rival in this part of the world in the whole ‘building expensive hotels and stadiums’ business. Aren’t they hosting the World Cup in four years?”
“Eight, I thought. They postponed one of them,” I point out.
“Oh, right, the pandemic.”
“How could you forget that?”
“Yeah, true enough.”
“Anyway,” I say, raising a flat diet coke, “never assume malice when an event can be explained by incompetence. Hanlon’s Razor.”
Holiday of the Dead Page 36