by CT Grey
“Yeah,” she said. “I wondered when you would bring her up.”
“Well…” I put the pen down to stop the records. “How did you end up with her?”
“As…”
“As a friend and also, I believe, as a roommate.”
Jane glanced at Sergeant Red and then leaned forward to whisper: “It’s a long story. I don’t know if you want to hear about it, really.”
“Well,” I said. “I like long stories. And this one, it’s off the books.”
“Seriously?” She frowned at me.
I nodded and then waved my hand at Red. “Why don’t you take a break?”
“Sir.” Sergeant Red stood to attention and then turned around, just as Jane put a hand over mine and said, “I don’t mind if he stays, but you have to promise that this is completely off the records. Will you?”
I reached down at the end of the table and tabbed in a code sequence to turn off all the recording devices other than the one that connected me to the holo-drone. And then I relaxed to listen how she had met one who had strolled down the halls of power, while I could still see the remains of Harry’s objections fading before my eyes, as I said: “Tell me Alison’s story.”
*** Alison ***
“Are you sure about this?” Jaq asked. She kept shifting her gaze from the road to Alison and back again. “I mean really, really sure?”
“Of course I am, my love,” Alison replied. There was no doubt in her mind about whether she should go back to work or not. And it wasn’t even a question about ‘should she’, because as far as she was concerned, her work was the one thing that kept feeding them with information they couldn’t otherwise get from other sources. Some could have even claimed she felt more responsible and honoured to serve her Queen and the Country than devoting time to her lover and her weird little family. And taking the morning off from her duty had hit her hard because every tiny pang of guilt made her guts squirm so much, she had no other choice but to snap: “Drop me off at the next stop.”
“Like now?” Jaq hit the brakes, halting the van.
“Like now my love,” Alison smiled even though she knew Jaq had hit the brake as a mark of sarcasm. And without giving her chance to really understand the consequences, Alison unbuckled the seatbelt and smacked a kiss on her lover’s surprised-looking face. Then she grabbed her bag and stepped out into the traffic-lane just as the long line of cars started honking their horns.
She waved two fingers at them and then hurried her steps to the sidewalk, where she turned around and saw Jaq, mouth gaping wide open for her, completely eating her word on going back with Jane, as the traffic started moving past her company van. It seemed strange to see so many people out there. But then again, even though the Metropolitan Police had placed roadblocks all over London’s main road junctions, Alison guessed it hadn’t dented the amount of traffic that passed through the inner streets. And there was nothing that could have changed it. Not as long as oil kept flowing into the refineries and out from there to the petrol stations.
In fact, Alison knew better than most the real reason for all the recent wars was to keep the population consuming rather than allowing them to realise that one day everything was going to stop. That one day down the line, generations of people would understand there was no way their lifestyle was going to survive with the way they were spending all the available resources to maintain their habits, which had been so different a little over a century ago. She grabbed a Daily Telegraph, and read its headlines, while she glimpsed on her way down the tube. One thing was sure, cracks had started to appear in the façade of society. It was almost - as one of the articles was saying - that they’d passed Judgement Day without ever really understanding that the end of the days had already arrived. Some could claim it was just media manipulation to maintain their circulation. But if they’d gone to church, as so many were doing in this crisis, they’d hear the clergy telling their congregations what was happening wasn’t a biblical Armageddon. Then again, if it was, someone had done a really bad translation of the Book of Revelations.
Alison just couldn’t wave away the fact that things had happened in an eerily similar way to Saint John’s predictions. She knew God was real: she’d witnessed it so many times when vampires had been consumed by a holy cross. But then again, modern people would have burst out laughing at the thought, since they pinned their belief in science and ‘factual’ evidence. And not for one second would they have accepted that a religious symbol could have held any real power. In fact she’d seen too many people abandoning the cross in front of the biters rather than finding out if Lord had anything to say on the matter.
It was just so much easier for them to trust the scientific facts. They worked: simply one bullet in a walker’s head made them stop moving. But Alison couldn’t push aside a theory that had been troubling her ever since she’d learned Jane had become zombified. It would be laughable to ask for volunteers if she announced she had a theory on how to repel zombies. And she couldn’t blame them. The media had done its job very well. They had shown the public exactly what they should do, even though a Telegraph journalist was saying that, ‘the unnamed governmental source said they were working on a cure…’
The train speakers crackled alive: “Next station Westminster…”
“Finally,” Alison muttered. She folded the newspaper quickly and dropped it on the next seat as the train came to a halt. As she stepped onto the platform the whole station reeked of desolation even though London should have been in the middle of the busiest tourist season, with tens of thousands crowding the area, vying to see the historical buildings and monuments.
Alison rode the escalators up the surface and stepped through the ticket barriers to find the heart of Whitehall similarly empty.
“Excuse me, officer.” Alison stopped by an armed police officer, who was casually observing Big Ben. “Where is everyone?”
“Huh.” The constable blinked his eyes. “How can I help you?”
“Well.” Alison said slowly. “I wondered if you might know what’s happening—”
“What do you mean?” The officer scratched behind his ear. “What’s happening?”
“Never mind,” Alison sighed as she realised it was going to be waste of her precious time asking questions, when she could find the answers just down the road. “Go back to sleep.”
“Look ma’am,” the officer started just as Alison swung her handbag onto her shoulder and left him looking her swaying hips as she walked towards the traffic lights. Although there were only few cars going towards the Westminster Bridge, she obeyed the law and crossed the street when the lights turned green. It was a strange thing to do, considering the situation, but then again, she was a creature of her habit, and she wasn’t going to let anything disturb her usual practice. There was nothing to divert her from walking past the concrete blast barriers in front of the Parliament buildings, nor stop her from admiring the silent beauty of Tower Gardens, before she stepped through the mighty double doors into Thames House.
However, what lay beyond those reinforced gates was the absolute opposite of the peacefulness on the outside. It looked like organised chaos as the internal intelligence apparatus was running at full steam. The whole place from the first floor entrance to her cubicle on the third floor was stacked full with the personnel that were seemingly flying from one place to another. To any casual observer it looked as if they were panicking. But Alison knew better. This was business as usual, and all of them were operating in a controlled frenzy in order to get the best intelligence, as quickly as possible, to the decision-makers down the street.
The moment she sat down in her chair and turned her computer on, she heard a voice behind her.
“So Ali, did you solve the ‘family issue’?”
Alison spun her chair around and saw Bran leaning against the flimsy cubicle wall, while holding a stack of papers in his pinstripe suit armpit and she said: “Yeah. It’s all good.”
“All good?” B
ran looked at her questionably. “Internal Security sent me a text saying that the gate had detected gunpowder residue upon your person.”
Alison, fearing the worst, grimaced, shrugging. “As I said, all’s good.”
“Excellent,” Bran said, “because I was worried for a moment.”
“You… worried?” Alison laughed. She couldn’t believe her ears. Her manager had never been worried about his underlings. The man in the pinstripe suit was made from steel and, when it came to her life, he’d never invested so much as an iota of interest about her comings and goings. Not talking about her family issues. And now he was saying the report from the front gate had got him worried. If anything it sounded as strange as the heart of London reeking in almost absolute desolation. “Why would you be?”
“Well,” Bran said. “You know me. I really care about well-being of all my people.”
“You do?” Alison raised her eyebrows. “Right, if you say so.” Then she pointed the stack underneath Bran’s arm and asked: “What’s that?”
“Oh, this.” Bran pulled it out. “This is something I need you to look at ASAP. It’s part of the report we are putting together on the current situation. So if you don’t mind, I need you to look at it now, and tell me what you think about where we are heading. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Alison answered. It wasn’t as if she actually had anything better to do but to get on with the job she loved so much. “When you say ASAP, what do you actually mean?”
Bran glanced at his watch. “Is five o’clock okay for you?”
Alison’s shoulders slumped when she heard the time-window. There was barely enough time to read the report, let alone conduct a comprehensive analysis of the findings. “Oh well.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Life’s a bitch, and then you get used to it.”
“Excuse me,” Bran said. “What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing,” Alison waved her hand. He handed her the report and she swivelled her chair around and tapped her index finger on the keyboard to wake up the screen. When it flickered alive Alison quickly checked her emails before leaning back in the chair, and turned first page on the case folder marked: UK EYES ONLY. The first thing that jumped out was a picture of a badly mangled corpse lying on a morgue table.
The text associated to it went fairly quickly into the details, explaining how this person had died a few months earlier in a car accident on the M6 near Lancaster. But what was so interesting about the John Doe was that, soon after the paramedics and police had arrived at the scene, this same person had risen from the ground and assaulted the nearest person, in this case, a passenger from the car that had hit him. The police initially believed he was under the influence of drugs, and when he assaulted them, they’d tried to beat him down with their batons. When that had not worked, and the Armed Response Unit had informed them they were unable to attend the scene quickly, one of the officer’s had taken matters into his own hands, and driven over Patient Zero. Multiple times.
The Coroner detailed all the bone fractures and lacerations inflicted as post-mortem, except one, which had marked the victim as the very first walker in the UK. The wound he’d found being ante-mortem, was a small cut on his right arm; made, in his estimation, by a small-calibre bullet. And it showed a clear case of a secondary bacterial infection. The Coroner suggested that the bullet must have passed through another victim first, and transmitted the infection.
From there, the foreign pathogen had relatively quickly colonised all parts of the host body, including the brain; effectively turning a living person into a cannibalistic nightmare through a parasitic connection that simply refused to believe it was dead already.
Although Alison acknowledged the mangled corpse was the first official victim in the United Kingdom, reading the report just strengthened her suspicions that the roots of the outbreak lay somewhere outside their borders. This couldn’t be purely a problem that had originated in their country, or there’d have been more evidence. No way, and the next case folder just built on that foundation.
It was the same suspicions that had made their sister organisation, MI-6, backtrack Patient Zero’s movements from his house in the outskirts of Nottingham to Amsterdam, and from there all the way to the South Eastern Europe, where the trace had ended in a small burned village at the Balkan mountains.
What he’d been doing there was pure speculation and the report’s conclusion referred to another case that wasn’t part of the file Bran had given her. However, it didn’t stop her from connecting the dots, as Alison knew that several Interpol cases she’d been assisting with, in the past, had all dealt with organised crime. And those activities had varied from the black market profiteering to human trafficking.
Human trafficking…
The next ten files marked an increasing number of cases, all of which pointed at the same source. And all those victims had come from foreign countries. But what was particularly noticeable was that all of them had come from northern parts of Africa.
However, as she fired up the map marking the direct situation in the UK, the details started to become more than sketchy. And even though some of the cases made connections to other countries, she couldn’t ignore that fact that zombification victims were becoming increasingly numerous in towns and cities that weren’t located inland, but mostly on coastal areas.
“If I didn’t know better,” Alison muttered quietly as she pushed aside the keyboard and stretched her neck from side to side. “I’d swear that they are walking out of the sea.”
If that’s the case, Alison thought as she walked to the coffee machine, then we’re in deep shit, and there’s nothing we can do before the walking dead start outnumbering the living.
No, that cannot be real. Alison shook her head as she pushed the button. They are not supermen and nobody can cross the sea by walking on the bottom. It would be impossible for them to wade through all that silt, pressure and God knows what’s really down there.
However, as the machine filled her extra-large pink mug with a steaming coffee, an idea came popped in her mind. All of the singled-out cases had pointed one way or another to organised crime and therefore, if they were trafficking plague victims into the British coves, then maybe the Coastal Guard had reports in their system and if that was the case…
Alison hurried back to her computer. She typed in her authorisation and then quickly surfed through the system to the Coast Guard database.
However, as the data started filling her screen, there were more reports than she could handle in one sitting. And none of them exactly marked with a screaming headline of: ‘if you’re looking for zombies then please click this one.’
“Bollocks.” Alison pushed the keyboard away and checked the clock. It was steadily advancing towards the deadline and involving herself in the deep data-mine would only delay her.
Right. She glanced at the pile that was now only half as high as it had started. Let’s forget about that then, and just write it in as an observation that needs to be looked at later on. Her attention shifted to the one of the screens, showing The News. In it, the Prime Minister was taking his place in the House.
He leaned his hands against the podium, looked down and then started speaking hastily, ‘...in addition,’ he said, ‘to those few members of public who have contracted this horrible plague in the mountainous area - and who I understand are getting better. And I think the House wants to know what the government is doing to prevent this terrible disease spreading among the public… We are proud to announce that through the help of the W.H.O. we have developed a vaccine that I understand will prevent—”
“You know,” Alison heard Bran’s voice coming from behind her. “That’s bollocks.”
Alison glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. “You think so?”
“Walk with me,” Bran said. He quickly moved off from her cubicle and headed towards the doors, which lead to the corridor that connected Thames House's two wings together. Alison grabbed her handbag, and ran after him,
only to catch him waiting by the window, looking outside.
“Bran, are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. Bran pushed hands into his trouser pockets and started slowly walking down the corridor. “I’m a bit shaken, but yeah, I’m all right.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Did you read those files I gave you?” Bran asked quietly as one of the senior intelligence analysts walked past them. “Tell me that you did, and didn’t waste time on some mumbo-jumbo bullshit the PM’s wasting on the populace.”
“Bran,” Alison huffed. “You should know me better than that. And before you say anything… yes, I read most of your file.”
“So what do you think?” Bran asked as they turned on a corner and took the stairs leading downwards. “Did you draw any conclusions?”
“I did, Bran,” Alison answered. “And I think that the problem the PM is addressing has deeper roots than he’s telling the public.” She started explaining her findings to him as they reached the bottom of the stairs and then crossed the hall to head towards the basement. She ended by saying, “what I think is that we should try to track down the subjects to the source and find out where it all began,” just as Bran stopped by a heavy steel door.
“Why?” Bran asked as he tapped in a code and grabbed a chromed wheel.
“Well, I think you were saying upstairs that the vaccination the PM is introducing to the public isn’t going to work. And I suspect they have known about this for months, if not longer. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not.” Bran shook his head before he turned the wheel and pulled the door open to one of the chambers that up until now had been way above Alison’s security clearance. In fact the whole basement level had been off-limits for as long as she’d been part of the security community. Immediately she set foot in a small observation room that overlooked a much larger area below, she understood why. It was because the thick glass walls were preventing her from hearing the moans and groans coming from two Type Ones strapped on tables.