There had to be another way.
And she let her thoughts wander through the inside of every car boot she’d ever seen, tried to remember the details, the constructions and angles, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t think of a single way out.
Until she realised out wasn’t where they should be getting.
Franquin had no way of knowing whether the helicopter pilot could hear him.
But it felt as if he could, and he convinced himself that what he was about to say would make a difference. He stared out across the water, his headset clamped to his ears and the thin microphone a shadow on the edge of his vision. And he started to talk.
It wouldn’t help to be bombastic. He needed to be honest. And steer clear of talk about duty or loyalty or saving the world.
Instead he spoke of understanding.
His own understanding for the young pilot.
Understanding for his fears, his reluctance, and the impossibility of comprehending the incomprehensible.
He stood there, speaking into the ether, voicing what they all felt.
How nobody had dreamt it would go this far.
How he too knew what it was to lie awake at night, and how that was something he didn’t let people know but that didn’t make it any less true.
And he said that he’d known for more than thirty years that this was what it would come to, for thirty years he’d known and yet even he had hesitated when the time came.
And he talked about how there had been nobody to turn to.
No one to confide in when he had doubts, because he was the one who roared and stood firm and gave orders and couldn’t flinch simply because things had become difficult.
And his nights had been sleepless.
He’d killed people in the hunt to create a virus. Innocent people who had served as guinea pigs and who he’d seen die and who stayed as images that refused to go away no matter how hard he closed his eyes.
He’d killed civilians. He had personally authorised a strike to destroy a hospital in Amsterdam, and even though that had been laid down in the plans that had been stored in files and binders for thirty years, that hadn’t made it any easier to live with.
And now. Now there was an Audi on a field and he understood what he was asking and how hard it was.
But he asked anyway.
No, he didn’t ask, he pleaded.
He pleaded with a helicopter pilot who maybe heard what he said, maybe not, begged him to do what he had to do, not because it was the right thing – because who knows what’s right or wrong – but because this was the best plan they had and even if the easiest thing to do would be to bail out, their survival depended on nobody doing that.
All of that he said, all the time with his gaze locked on the horizon.
And he felt his colleagues’ eyes behind him but didn’t turn around. He’d exposed his innermost self. But they didn’t know if he had, or if it had merely been a speech to persuade the pilot to comply. And he had no intention of telling them.
When eventually he removed his headset, he could only hope his words would make the same impression on the pilot as the people in the room.
Janine was smaller than he was. Smaller, thinner, more supple. And that meant the task had to be hers. It would probably hurt like hell but she didn’t have much choice.
Janine had taken command. She’d ordered William to lie as flat on the floor as he could, and then she’d pressed against him, told him that they needed to switch places and that he had to help her over.
He couldn’t quite grasp what she was trying to do, but he clumsily turned on to his other shoulder, Janine’s body heavy on top of his, making it hard to breathe, and their bodies scraping against steel and bolts and hurting more with every moment. But their hands were tied and they had to find something to brace themselves against in order to get the leverage they needed.
And finally she landed on his other side.
He heard her wriggle around, felt her breath against the side of his head as she positioned herself with her back towards the cabin of the car.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘The back seat.’
He understood immediately.
They would never be able to open the boot. But with a little luck, perhaps they could go the other way. Perhaps there was a crack between the boot and the back seat, a crack into the car itself, and perhaps it was impossible but what else was there to do but try?
She pushed her arms behind her again. Forced them to crawl up the back of the seats, pushing the pain away as she let her fingers explore the surface, up towards the handles that would hopefully be located on top of the seat. The ones that would release the seat-back and allow it to fold forward. The ones that maybe, maybe she could reach, if there was a crack to push her hands through.
She searched with her eyes without seeing, let them flicker from side to side as if that would help her hands to see, tried to picture every car she’d ever seen in order to work out where her fingers needed to be going.
And there it was. The tiny hole where the seat was attached to the chassis. And she pushed, bent, forced her hands to wander inside, her nails clawing their way up the upholstery to drag her fingers forward, millimetre by millimetre, closer to the lever she hoped would be there.
And she screamed.
Screamed in pain and with all the air in her lungs, screamed to increase the flow of adrenalin, screamed to make herself bend just a little bit more, and then she screamed for joy: ‘There!’ she screamed, the feeling of hard plastic between her fingertips. She’d found it.
A tiny lever.
‘Can you move it?’ William asked.
She didn’t answer.
Braced herself, closed her eyes, let her fingers keep searching. This was definitely it, a curved plastic surface in a cavity, the lever she needed to pull, yet she realised it was impossible, how could she transmit any strength to her hands when her entire body was twisted into unnatural angles? But it was the only chance they had, and she fought to reach around the handle, fought because she had to.
Almost. Almost. One centimetre more.
She had the clasp in a weak, feeble grip, just the friction of her skin against the plastic. And she tried to pull it, maybe it moved a fraction of a centimetre, maybe she only wished it did, and the next moment her fingers slipped off of the surface and the grip was lost.
It was no use. Her arms were on fire. She couldn’t take it much longer. And her mind flooded with desperate thoughts.
Thoughts of Albert, of the world outside, of everyone who would die and what if they still could stop it. What if they actually still could?
‘Push me!’ she screamed.
He hesitated.
‘Push me against the seat, push as hard as you can!’
He got what she was trying to do. And it would no doubt cause her a lot of pain, but she was obviously aware of that. So instead of debating, he did as she asked.
He braced himself against the other side of the boot. And Janine held her breath, made herself as big as possible, tensed every muscle as William pushed his legs against the chassis, full force, squeezed her harder and harder against the seat-back. The seat kept refusing to budge, she couldn’t breathe and the pain was unbearable and even so she screamed at him to keep pushing.
And William pushed. Harder and harder and harder. Her arm twisted more and more behind her back. And she tried not to think about which would break first, the seat or her bones, instead she struggled to make the handle move, straining to make contact between the plastic and her skin in the hope that the friction would dislodge the catch. Perhaps William’s pressure could help, perhaps it would make the clasp slide up or the seat give way and maybe, just maybe they’d finally make it.
If they didn’t she’d die in the boot of a car. And then what would it matter if her arms were broken.
‘Come on!’ she screamed.
Her tone was higher the harder he pushed, and she wi
lled him to keep pushing because she could feel the seat bow under the pressure and —
— and then, it happened.
The clasp slid off its hook.
The seat folded into the back seat, and they both gasped for air, as if they’d just surfaced from a long, dangerous dive. And at that moment —
The moment the car opened up before them.
The moment daylight poured into their wide-open eyes.
In that moment, they saw the helicopter through the windows. A shadow against the blinding sky. But that was enough.
In that moment, they knew.
Then came the explosion.
It was the fuel that made it happen so quickly.
It was the fuel that made the flames spread in a fraction of a second, evaporating in the sudden heat and blending with the oxygen in the air, igniting in a single blast of red and yellow and black and starting a whirl of dancing fire that never seemed to end.
The heat warped the metal out of shape, glass was shattered and turned to dust, melting into soft clumps that fell to the ground and would lie there forever, sparkling in the sunlight for no one to see.
All that had lived was suddenly gone and wouldn’t return.
Where grass had grown a new crater gaped, glowing red-hot and covered in flames, and a new steel skeleton had been added to the field’s collection of worn-out tanks, once targets for shooting exercises but now nothing more than forgotten wrecks; of debris from armour-piercing shells and grenades, and of an ambulance that wasn’t an ambulance and that had been blown to pieces in the hope of stopping a future that was already coming.
And with time the crater would cool. New plants would take root, cover the ground, and everything would start anew in the perpetual ring dance that is life.
For the plants on the abandoned firing range at the foot of the Alps it didn’t make much difference.
For William Sandberg and Janine Charlotta Haynes it was the difference between life and death.
PART 4
Fire
I don’t know who you are.
The truth is I don’t even know if you exist.
The only thing I know is that I hope. And that is what keeps me going.
Maybe that’s the reason I’m writing.
Because as long as there’s someone shouting, there has to be someone who hears. Because maybe you can create a future by mooring to it, by throwing out an anchor and holding on, by planting a flag on a mountain and saying, this is mine, this place exists and no one can take it away.
Like planning an event in a calendar to make sure that day will arrive, so even if the world is going to end then at least it can’t happen until then.
Midnight. Thursday 27 November.
Tonight we’re going to escape.
One last attempt to stop what’s happening.
And whoever you are, I want to believe you exist.
I want to believe you’re reading this.
I want to believe that means it went well.
50
They awoke with a feeling of emptiness.
And their thoughts ran in circles the way thoughts do.
First the anxiety that something had happened. Then the realisation that it was only a lingering dream, because it had to be, because it always is. Then the struggle to recall what kind of dream it had been, where it took place and who was in it, and why the feeling stayed and wouldn’t let go.
But there was no dream.
And the search went full circle.
They’d fallen asleep to footage of chaos and rioting, theories and experts and here’s what you should do to protect yourself. And maps showing where the virus had reached and how it was spreading.
And their TV showed the same images over and over, the same ones it had shown before they fell asleep, only more desperate, more terrified, more panicked.
Albert and Leo sat on their beds in silence, watching the images without turning up the volume.
The empty feeling was gone.
Replaced by the feeling that everything was coming to an end.
The world had closed.
Schools and libraries and supermarkets were locked and boarded up, as were the railway stations and airports and every other place where people might meet and breathe the same air and spread the virus.
Armoured vehicles ordered people to stay inside, hospitals would only admit the infected, and men and women in rustling hazard suits desperately tried to treat them but didn’t know how. The course of the illness was terrifyingly quick, and in labs all over the world researchers and experts were running between tests and machines, and nobody had any idea what it was they were seeing.
In city after city, the authorities commandeered ice rinks. The same rinks where ten-year-old children had chased pucks or practised pirouettes only days before, and where parents had stood cheering and freezing and drinking hot chocolate while they waited to drive their children home. Now the rinks had been turned into cold-storage facilities and the ice was covered with black plastic bags laid in rows, and in some of the body-bags lay the very people who days earlier had been performing pirouettes and drinking hot chocolate.
And where the ice wasn’t enough, fires were lit.
Body after body was fed into the flames, incinerated to destroy the virus, and when the black smoke rose towards the sky one source of infection was neutralised, but everywhere across the planet new ones kept appearing.
Everything was moving in one direction.
And the only thing anyone could do was to try to slow it down.
In the hope that if they slowed it down long enough, maybe someone would find a cure.
Someone didn’t have much time.
There was no reason to suppose the police had discovered Leo’s identity, much less blocked his credit card. Even so, his hands fidgeted from the tension as he checked out of the motel.
The car they’d left behind had been rented in Christina’s name. And even if anyone was searching for it, there wouldn’t be any way to link it to him. They would be looking for Albert, of course, but everything that could reveal Leo’s identity had been carefully disposed of.
Leo was simply a young man checking out of a motel. An extremely nervous young man, it had to be said, but since when was that illegal?
‘Trying to escape?’ the man at the reception asked him.
Leo looked up, panic in his eyes.
How did he know? Had the card triggered some warning?
‘We’ve been talking about it,too,’ the man continued. ‘My wife and I. But what is there to escape to?’
It was a rhetorical question. And Leo got it. There was only one thought on everyone’s mind: the disease.
And a deadly virus was obviously of far greater concern than the fear of being caught by the police for running a red light in Berlin. Even so, Leo couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when he realised the man was only talking about the disease.
Only.
And he smiled at the receptionist, mumbled something that didn’t make sense even to himself and that the man was too polite to ask him to repeat, and they both bade each other farewell with a feeling of sympathy.
The sincere feeling of sympathy that only exists in the shadow of a disaster.
Chiefs of staffs and political aides worldwide picked up their phones to receive the same message.
Scenario Zero was underway.
And everywhere the message was passed onward and upward to the highest authorities, cars were readied and families woken and driven through deserted cities to planes standing by for take-off.
There hadn’t been much time.
Less than forty-eight hours had elapsed since the first envelope was delivered. It contained a short code, and that had been used to retrieve the orders, those that had lain in wait for decades, and after that the wheels had started to turn.
Presidents and prime ministers had been allowed to assemble a group of family and staff, and those who were included were winners and
those who weren’t were losers and would never know. In silence the important documents were assembled, those that would be needed to run the country from afar, and were packed together with toys and family photos and whatever seemed necessary, stowed in trunks and cargo compartments before setting off at high speed in vehicles where nobody spoke a word.
On the horizon, smoke rose from fires.
All over the world, leaders abandoned their homes and their friends and their countrymen and a disease that refused to die.
Heading for a future on a ship.
Alone and isolated from the rest of the world.
And everyone was scared and frightened and full of grief.
It was a small price to pay for surviving the end of the world.
Albert was already outside waiting in the car when Leo got the call from the newspaper.
He’d been trying to reach them since he woke up, but nobody had answered. He’d left messages but no one had called him back and at least two hours had passed. And he couldn’t blame them.
He could picture the scene in the newsroom, the whirl of activity, frenetic phone conversations and improvised meetings and newsfeeds and information streaming in, all of it needing to be converted into headlines on the web before the competition got there first. They were doing the most important job in the world, at least in their own mind, and that notion kept fear at a distance and made them invulnerable, as if they weren’t part of the world but reported from the sidelines and couldn’t die – the same way Christina had believed she couldn’t die until she did.
And he knew he wasn’t their priority. A stranded intern paled into insignificance compared with a global epidemic and the collapse of civilisation.
So when they finally called him back, he was concise.
Chain of Events Page 38