He jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, one hand on the card machine to pay for their new car, and the other gripping a bag of breakfast that would probably only make them high on sugar but sometimes you have no options.
He started talking as soon as the editor on the other end of the line said his name.
‘The franking machine,’ he asked. ‘Have you traced it?’
He heard a no.
And more words followed it, but Leo interrupted him without listening; there was no time for excuses or explanations and the person he was speaking to would surely agree.
‘I sent you a picture,’ he said. ‘Someone there must have it, check with Christina’s people, we found an envelope, another one, or never mind. But I think the things that are happening are connected to William. We’re being chased. And I think because of the envelope, someone is after us —’
The voice at the other end, irritated, cutting him off.
‘Leo? Please?’
He stopped talking. Replayed what he’d just said, and realised that he’d been babbling incoherently. Not a good quality for a journalist.
‘Let me speak,’ said the voice.
‘Sorry, I’m – go ahead.’
And at the other end the voice began to speak.
From that moment, Leo lost all interest in the franking machine.
Seconds later, Leo yanked open the passenger door, jumped in beside Albert, dumped the paper bag on the back seat and clipped his seat belt in one single movement.
‘Drive,’ he said.
Albert, sitting behind the wheel, reacted immediately.
Exhausted after only a few hours’ sleep, he’d allowed himself to relax, and now he realised what a fool he’d been to think he could. Someone had tracked them down, or Leo’s card had triggered an alarm – whatever it was, he wasn’t about to hang around. He started the engine and reversed out of their spot with screaming wheels, bracing himself for bad news.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing,’ said Leo. ‘Or, rather, it has. We’re going to head south.’
Albert looked at him. Now what?
Leo buzzed with an energy that had surfaced out of nowhere and that he didn’t know how to channel, tried to organise his thoughts into something that resembled a logical flow before letting them out of his mouth.
‘The call,’ he said. ‘William’s call. When Christina and I were on the roof, when he called and interrupted the transmission?’
‘Yes?’ said Albert.
‘They traced it. I know where to find them.’
The young crew-cut pilot had been sitting in his helicopter with the black Audi below.
He’d circled around it, pass after pass. He’d fought against his feelings, on the one hand the duty to follow orders and do his job, and on the other that tormenting restlessness that refused to stop vibrating within him, as if trying to remind him what was right and what was wrong.
And he couldn’t stop thinking about the pilot in Amsterdam.
The one who’d disobeyed orders and flown past his target, only to reconsider and return to and finish the job.
Then he’d heard Franquin’s voice in his headset.
It was as if the man could read his thoughts, as if Franquin knew exactly what was going on in his mind; this was just like Amsterdam, he thought, smaller in scale but exactly the same situation, and if a fighter pilot could listen to his conscience, shouldn’t he too?
In his ears, Franquin kept talking.
Talking about how hard it was for them all.
And the pilot hesitated, he wanted to object and tell Franquin that there had to be a better way, but he knew he could never do that, knew that the moment he allowed it to become a conversation he would lose. Franquin would tell him it was too late to duck out. He’d remind him that he’d squeezed the trigger before and it was his duty to do it again.
And he knew it was a lie.
Blowing up the ambulance was not the same thing, the man inside was already dead, but in the Audi there were two living people, and they weren’t even infected but simply in their way, and that tore him up inside, literally tore him up all the way from the marrow and out, it was a feeling he’d never experienced before but that couldn’t be misinterpreted, and how could he ignore that?
And he fought to keep Franquin’s words away, he circled the Audi one last time, and then he straightened on his course, steered away from the firing range, away from the valley and the mountains and the castle, didn’t know where, but away.
He was many miles away from his target when Franquin finally breached his defence.
His orders might be wrong but what he was doing was worse. He heard Franquin over the radio and he still didn’t answer but deep within him, he knew.
He had no choice.
He couldn’t hold out.
And eventually, he did the only thing there was to do.
He turned the helicopter around.
He saw the test range come back into view, and the black Audi, and he pinched his skin to drown out the painful feeling, the sweat that soaked the back of his shirt, the stinging sensation of anxiety that wouldn’t stop growing but that made him rub his forehead to think, rub his back against his seat, rub his skin and inside his shirt and everywhere, literally everywhere, a restlessness that ached, that stung, no, that itched and that wouldn’t stop and that drove him to insanity —
It wasn’t until he saw the blood soaking his uniform that he knew.
The discomfort he’d been feeling all morning.
What he’d thought was anxiety.
It wasn’t.
And once he’d started to scratch he couldn’t stop, his body screamed and burned and fell apart and he needed both his hands to stop it. Outside the air howled around his compartment and reality spun faster, circling as a ring-dance of hazy streaks past the windows and eventually there was nothing left to do.
He had long since let go of the trigger when the helicopter hit the ground, exploding into a fireball of burning fuel and melting glass.
A few hundred metres away stood the black Audi.
Waiting for the inevitable fate that never came.
For William and Janine it was the difference between life and death.
51
William and Janine clambered out of the black Audi and left it behind, left it with the explosives inside and the black smoke billowing from the wrecked helicopter next to it.
They helped each other to cut through the cable ties that bound their wrists, and they walked through the landscape without uttering a word. They needed food. Food, warmth, sleep.
It took them an hour to reach the village. It looked like a page out of a travel brochure, if people made travel brochures about places where there wasn’t anyone left.
Everyone had fled, the same way people all over the world had packed up and climbed into their cars and thought that we can’t be safe here, not here, but somewhere else.
The name of the village was the German word for hills, and that was very much what it looked like. A handful of houses with weathered wooden cladding were scattered on either side of a winding street, the asphalt a mass of cracks and potholes where it had lost a life-long war against the annual thaw.
In the background, the Alps stood in stark relief against the sky. And beyond one of those distant ridges, somewhere on the other side of all the clefts and gullies, somewhere over there was the castle and the lake and everything else they’d fought so hard to escape from.
There wasn’t a car in sight. Every gate and door was closed. Windows had been boarded up. All that remained was a village full of memories but devoid of people.
They made their way between the houses, weathered signs telling them what sort of business had been going on inside. They passed the convenience store and the hairdressers and the shop that used to sell clothes and shoes and outdoor equipment. And they knocked on doors and rang bells, but everything was locked and no one answered.
It was beginning to get dark.
The evening was clear and crisply cold, and the ground that had thawed in the sun began to turn hard and icy, crunching under their naked feet as they walked.
The temperature was dropping. They needed somewhere to spend the night.
And eventually they chose a house with old, rickety doors where they wouldn’t have to do too much damage to get in.
They washed in someone’s bathroom. Scraped gravel out of their wounds with towels smelling of someone else’s detergent, towels that had been folded and stacked neatly in a cupboard, waiting not for them but for someone who might never return.
In the kitchen they found coffee and canned food. And they ate in silence, William on the living-room couch and Janine in the armchair next to him, their plates as protection against whatever they might drop, as if they were polite guests careful not to leave stains, as if they wanted to be able to look their hosts in the eye and apologise for breaking in but assure them that they’d done their best not to leave a mess.
Food that presumably had flavour even if neither of them could taste anything.
On a shelf in front of them the TV showed the same looped footage.
Cities. Villages. Countryside.
People in hazard suits, bodies being dumped in fields and burned on pyres, desperate attempts to stop the disease.
‘Fire,’ she said.
And he said nothing.
‘That will end it all.’
The last part didn’t reach him, that’s how thin her voice was, little more than an exhalation.
But he didn’t need to hear her. He already knew what she meant.
This was it.
A huge and violent fire.
This was the final verse.
The first helicopter arrived later that same evening, and more would come throughout the night. Franquin would shake hands with presidents and prime ministers and their partners and their families. And even if he knew that from time to time he’d wonder, he knew he’d never ask.
Why these people, he wouldn’t ask.
Because this was simply the way it was decided. It was impossible to save everyone. And someone had to choose who got to live, and he was relieved that choice had fallen to someone else.
There was no point debating whether it was right or wrong. Nobody deserved what was happening, and no one could determine who was worth saving and who was not. It was a desperate attempt to save a species. The individuals didn’t matter.
The huge carrier ship could stay at sea as long as it had to. Eventually the disease would subside, and then, only then, would the ship return to land.
Perhaps they’d succeed. The odds were no better than that. Perhaps.
But something had to be done, and this was the plan they’d devised. Franquin had already heard the crew referring to the ship as The Ark. Behind his back, he knew they were calling him Noah and he didn’t like it.
Not because the comparison was unwarranted.
But because it was terrifyingly accurate.
And the hours passed. On board, the mood was heavy and all the new faces that kept arriving were red from crying and stiff and scared, and nobody questioned anything but they weren’t grateful either.
When night fell and the first twenty-four hours were done, everything had been checked off against the plan.
With two exceptions.
Their own helicopter was missing from the radar.
And Connors still wasn’t answering his calls.
Every place on earth has its own unique silence.
And when night fell and the news became unbearable a new type of stillness came to replace the old.
William lit a fire in the grate, not that he was cold, but he needed to hear the crackle of the flames. There was comfort in seeing that some things kept working as they should, that if nothing else, at least fire and air and gravity would keep cooperating, and that even if humanity died out there would be other things that stayed.
There they sat. Listened to the fire.
Life about to end. And the only thing they could do was wait.
‘We were going to celebrate our first anniversary,’ she said, apropos of nothing.
She wasn’t trying to start a conversation, that simply happened to be where her thoughts had ended up, and she rested her gaze in the fire, hoping that the loneliness would be easier to endure if they shared it with each other.
William didn’t reply.
She told him all about it, about Albert, about the life they’d had together, about that evening in the restaurant, how angry she’d been that he was late and how pointless that anger felt now. About the plans they’d made for the future. The places they’d wanted to live, the jobs they’d wanted to have, the vacations they’d intended to take.
The future. It was all they’d ever talked about. So sure had they been that there would be a future for them.
‘And then we’d be parents.’
She said it plainly, no emotion. No hint of self-pity. One more of the thousand things she needed to get out, as if saying them aloud would give them a chance to survive, rather than just dying as silent thoughts buried inside her.
And William looked at her across the polished wooden table. The table and the cloth that was draped on top of it, knitted or crocheted or whatever method kept the mustard-brown threads together, a project that had been important to someone once but that had lost its meaning and been left behind when reality fell apart.
‘We’d name him after one of the great scientists,’ she said. ‘It was always a he when we talked about it.’
She shrugged apologetically as if that were something that needed to be excused.
‘Alexander, after Bell. Or Isaac, like Newton. Christopher after Columbus, you know, those kinds of names. We wanted to name him after someone who’d changed the world.’
William sat silent. The air full of the words he ought to say.
Words that were created for moments like this, words that perhaps were clichés but so what, provided they did their job? Words that had become clichés because they were comforting, because who didn’t want to be comforted when everything around them was fear and uncertainty and chaos?
But he didn’t say them.
If that’s what you want, then one day you’ll get it.
That’s what he ought to have said.
You still have all the chances in the world.
But he knew it would be a lie.
And he was certain she wouldn’t want to hear lies.
Instead, he let his eyes linger on the fire, staring off into eternity until everything became a unity of colour, contourless fields that floated into each other and flickered in time with the flames.
‘What did they want to make of it?’ he said finally.
She looked at him, bemused. ‘Who?’
‘The Organisation. Of the future. The new predictions you translated into Sumerian, what were they?’
She thought about it for a moment.
‘What you’d think. Prosperous harvests. Finding oil.’ She gave him a sad smile. ‘Who cares, really. It’s not our future, and it never was.’
He nodded. And they sat like that.
The silence warmed them as much as the fire, wrapped itself around them, brought stillness to the whole room.
And it filled him.
With peace.
And he realised it was the same feeling he’d experienced that night: peace, stillness, calm. He just hadn’t understood that’s what he felt.
That night, it had came from the warmth of the water, the water that slowly filled the bathtub around him, that spilled over the top and made him weightless right there in his own bathroom. The water that freed him from all the thoughts that had kept refusing to be silenced.
This time it wasn’t the water. It was the warmth of the room. And this time he wouldn’t die.
Or then again, maybe he would.
But not by choice.
And he sat in silen
ce.
And felt that if ever there had been a moment to talk, this was it.
‘We adopted her,’ he began.
They hadn’t spoken for so long his voice came almost like a shockwave, even though it was barely more than a whisper. Janine looked at him. Saw the outline of his face, a thin edge of light where the glow from the flames hit him in the darkness.
She knew instantly what he meant. The sorrow he didn’t want to talk about. The one that everyone had told him wasn’t his fault either, the one that he couldn’t do anything about and shouldn’t blame himself for. That he hated everyone’s opinions about, and that he’d refused to tell her about.
But now he did.
Low voice, slowly, and with his eyes staring into distance.
‘To us, she was always our daughter,’ he said. ‘But to her…’
He paused for a moment, and the moment grew into seconds, and the silence lasted for god knows how long and Janine let it.
‘She thought we let her down. As if one day we were her parents, and the next we’d suddenly decided to renounce it. And we couldn’t understand her. For us, nothing had changed. For us, she was a part of us and there was no before and no after. But for her…’
He gave a small shrug.
‘I think that was the beginning of the end.’
Janine said nothing.
‘And then she died.’
Just like that. And that was all.
And the fire kept crackling and it’s never quite as silent as when there is a sound to show how silent it is.
‘How?’ she said.
‘I didn’t see the signs,’ he said.
All the things he’d never told anyone before, that were too painful to confront, all those things were waiting. Waiting, only an exhalation away.
And he held his breath. Until, eventually, he let it out.
‘She stopped talking to us. She moved out, she’d barely turned sixteen, but she emptied her room and told us she wouldn’t be coming back. And then she stopped seeing us. Not just us, gradually she stopped seeing her friends too, and they’d call and be worried and what can I say? We were, too, naturally. But were we worried enough?’
Chain of Events Page 39