No antidote or even treatment was known. Meeting in emergency session, the United Nations declared IVN epidemic throughout Central and West Africa and proscribed cross-border travel as from noon on 15 November.
In the early hours of 14 November, a recently arrived Nigerian businessman was admitted to a Paris hospital. Although he said he had felt unwell on the aircraft itself, he had not told the flight-crew. They, many of the passengers, and numbers of cleaning, customs, and other terminal staff at Orly were diagnosed in the following days. The businessman passed into coma and the presence of IVN in Europe was confirmed.
As the story broke, the UN tried to forbid, for an initial period of one month, all air-travel throughout the world.
They were too late. Despite the fact that, by 25 November, almost every country in the world had closed its borders, the virus continued to spread, probably by means of the atmosphere. It reached Australia early in December and was finally acknowledged as global on the nineteenth of that month.
By then, cases in Europe and North America were being numbered in thousands. The disease was so contagious that medical workers everywhere were refusing to report for duty. By the first week of January untended bodies were appearing in the streets of London.
The exodus from the cities precipitated the collapse of the internet and the world banking system. Wherever the refugees went, whatever indescribable scenes ensued, IVN followed. It had stumbled upon a vast, untapped and uniform biomass: the warm, evenly regulated bodies of six billion people. As if intoxicated by the possibilities of its own discovery, the virus sidestepped each obstacle to proliferation, each attempt to find a cure. It had become the most successful organism ever, generating new, viable, and even more dangerous mutants almost by the day.
The BBC World Service kept broadcasting till the end. With Helen, his surviving daughter, Davies had listened long into the night, the voices fading, coming back. They spoke of nothing but the plague, la peste, die Pest. It was further advanced in Africa and Europe than in Asia. North and South America, like Australia, seemed to be a little behind.
Madmen were given air-time. They said the disease was caused by a fog from outer space, sprayed by aliens who would herald a new order of peace and understanding. Hitler had been reincarnated and was enacting global revenge. Those who had died believed not in the Lord. They were impure in spirit, fornicators, corrupters of children, and would burn for eternity. The only scientific antidote consisted of 7,777 daily recitations of the name of Krishna. Nostradamus had predicted the pestilence in detail: when Neptune aligned with Mercury it would pass as quickly as it had arisen. Wear a yellow silk handkerchief at all times over the mouth and nose. It had to be yellow, since this was the colour of hope.
Yellow, like the mycelium of Serpula lacrymans, the fungus called by laymen dry rot, prince and inheritor of the world’s estate.
Helen had been born in that house, in 2000.
Her elder sister had died on 25 February, 2017.
One Thursday in early March, Davies drove Helen a few miles west and north, deeper into the country. He had wanted to find somewhere familiar yet relatively undeveloped, by a clean river for water and power, with fields and woods around, and it needed to be within striking distance of abandoned shops and warehouses, for supplies.
They arrived in Shanley at midday, finding, to their surprise, an elderly man left alive in the village, a Mr Templeton. He died the following Saturday.
When they buried Mr Templeton, Davies told his daughter that he thought they were alone, not just in the village, but in the whole of Buckinghamshire, in the whole of England, even in the whole world. London was deserted. He and Helen had been there by road, several times, driving slowly through the car-strewn streets and sounding the horn. To no avail. There had been nothing on the radio for weeks. Davies’s own broadcasts, which he had set up to run automatically, had received no response. He knew neither why God had spared them nor whether they would continue to be spared.
They knelt down in the church to pray for Mr Templeton and for everyone else who had died. Helen looked up at the stained glass window behind the altar, at the beautiful, winged figure of St Michael in his radiant armour, with his lance and shield, quelling the dragon.
‘I asked St Michael to help us,’ she whispered to her father, as they got up to go.
‘Which one?’ he said. ‘There are two St Michaels in the window.’
She pointed.
Her father indicated another young man, to the right of the first, holding a pair of scales. Behind him was a host of people, men and women, in white robes. ‘That also is St Michael,’ he said, ‘weighing the souls of the risen dead on Judgment Day.’
While Helen watched, Davies went to the eagle lectern, turned to the Book of Revelation, and read some words to the empty pews. ‘And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.’
With that, he shut the book and walked with her out into the evening sunshine.
When they got back to the house, it was Helen who noticed that in their absence the display on the computer had changed. The software was set to actuate if the radio drew a response.
A man’s faint, crackling voice said, ‘I hear your message, Philip Davies. Repeat, I hear your message on 15,150 kilohertz. I am on Scolt Head, in Norfolk. I have been alone since February. I will call you on the hour, every hour, until I hear from you again.’
That was Jack Sturges, a fifty-year-old fruiterer, the first of the villagers. His 4×4 arrived late the next day. It came at speed up past the mill and stopped where Davies had tied a huge bunch of balloons to the wrought iron gates. And although Sturges had been a stranger, he and Davies and Helen embraced on the garden path, weeping for joy.
Perhaps it was those balloons that had inspired Jack’s scheme to locate as many survivors as he could, for without a community there could be no future. With Davies he took a lorry to Watford, a town five miles to the east. Armed with a copy of the Yellow Pages and a street plan, they found laser supplies, cases of balloons and cylinders of hydrogen and helium. The balloons were released in batches from the church tower, in winds of varying speed and direction. Each balloon carried a piece of fluorescent card imprinted with the current date:
3 April, 2017
SURVIVORS! JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!
We are at Shanley, Buckinghamshire,
England, 51°43'23" N, 0°18'41" W, TQ 166038.
To hear our message, tune to
15,150 kHz short-wave!
In all, over a period of three years, a hundred and twenty thousand cards were printed, each of them borne away by balloon. The first two responses came at the end of May, within a few days of each other, from Muriel Taylor in Northwood and Leigh Fernihough in Pimlico. More responses came in June, either from the balloons or directly from the ‘commercial’, as it came to be known, endlessly broadcast via a short-wave transmitter driven by a petrol generator.
Martin had appeared a month later. He had been only sixteen then, a year younger than Helen. They had married in 2021. No children had been granted to them.
Martin’s love and courage had been repaid with blasphemous sadism. With a single tremendous machete-blow, the one called Danzo had almost severed his head. Then Bex had told Danzo to gouge out the eyes.
Martin had died a week after their arrival. On the first afternoon they had shot Jack Sturges and Vernon Howarth. More had probably died since.
Davies had often suspected that other communities might exist elsewhere, but the airwaves had remained silent, and, as the roads had become less and less easy to traverse, as petrol supplies had dwindled, the village’s car-borne searches had become fewer and fewer and eventually had been abandoned. After that, Davies had become fearful of making contact with others: perhaps rightly so.
He knew that Bex would soon weary of the village and move on. He and his followers would not leave anyone behind. They must h
ave done this at least twice before. With the new recruits from the village, the gang now numbered fourteen.
Bex, or Bexley, or whatever his real name might be, was probably the first of them to have been ejected from whichever group had nurtured and failed to contain him. One or two of his closest henchmen may have been expelled at the same time, or may have chosen to join the outcast.
Bex had then located and gained access to a new settlement, doubtless knowing he would find there other disaffected youths like himself. Anyone might understand their impatience with chopping firewood and milking cows, with a necessarily conservative hierarchy, with life in a small and inward community. Davies was pretty well sick of it himself, even though he was – had been – head man of Shanley village these twelve years past, even though he had occupied this manor house and freely enjoyed every privilege of his office.
Since the first days of the community, Davies had placed importance on keeping a route open to the town of Watford, an almost inexhaustible repository of food, tools, clothing, medicine and fuel. That was how Bex had found the village. He had encountered the open lane, deduced its purpose, and simply followed it west.
Davies saw now, only too clearly, that he should have listened to those who had advised him to relinquish this route, to let those lanes, too, fill with fallen trees. It was his fault that Bex had come.
Unlike poor Martin, Davies had never subscribed to pacifism. He should not have left the village undefended. He should have been expecting someone like Bex, someone with automatic weapons.
Davies was trying not to think of his daughter. Her fate was unbearable. It was eating him alive, and it was all his fault.
‘Dear Christ,’ he breathed, the words coming of themselves, ‘if you love anyone at all, don’t let them harm her.’
The cellar door opened. Shielding his eyes from the light, Davies tried to make out which of them was coming down the steps.
‘Grub time.’
The voice belonged to a boy named Matt. He was not quite as bad as the others.
‘Did you speak to Bex for me?’
Davies had again asked for an interview; was not even sure what he would say, how he would plead.
‘Might have.’
‘What did he say?’
Matt, in his plaid shirt, placed the tray on the floor. ‘Rabbit stew. Like you had before.’
‘What did he say?’
Matt directed his flashbeam into Davies’s latrine bucket. ‘I’ll get you a fresh bucket this afternoon.’ He shone the light around the walls and ceiling as if searching for signs of attempted escape, returned to the steps and started to climb.
‘What did he say?’
‘Said you were holding out on him. So you could stew a bit longer. Like that rabbit.’
‘We don’t know of any other villages! Tell him it’s the truth!’
A moment later the door slammed and Davies heard the key turning in the lock.
4
In the end, digging a grave proved too hard, so Suter trundled the body into the thistle-grown pasture at the edge of his orchard, drenched it in creosote, and set it on fire.
The time was now early afternoon. He had wasted the best of the day and still had not even made a start on his household chores.
This disturbance in his routine had awoken in him a feeling he had not known for years. He felt resentment, even anger, towards his uninvited guest. He told himself that the use of creosote had been forced upon him: his stocks of petrol, paraffin and the like had become dangerously low.
But, as he watched the black smoke billowing towards the lake, Suter regretted his choice.
‘You ought to say something.’
‘Such as?’
He remembered the figurine and took it from his pocket. Had the man been a Buddhist? Did Buddhists follow a funerary tradition? Cremation, surely. So this might have been the right thing, after all.
Still Suter could think of nothing to say. As if seeking inspiration, he turned back to the figurine. Its eyes, creased in mirth, seemed to have remarked his meanness over the creosote. What was the little man holding? If not a coconut, could it be the planet?
Surprising himself, Suter blurted out, ‘Hard luck, whoever you were. And sorry about the creosote.’
‘Now that’s what I call a real valediction.’
‘Get lost, you.’
Collecting his spade and pickaxe, he took the wheelbarrow and trudged back to his house.
He had known the place, from the outside, since his early boyhood. Its elevations were now partly hidden by dark masses of ivy and pyracantha and akebia. The stone terrace overlooking the river, the sweep of what had been the gardens, were overgrown with elder, buddleia, goat willow. The kitchen, where he spent much of his time indoors, was at the south-eastern corner. He kept his most valuable possessions in the cellar; the garage block, with chauffeur’s flat above, had become storage for a prodigious number and variety of tools, most of which Suter had gathered by Land Rover in the first months of his occupancy.
He cleaned and hung up the spade and pickaxe and stood the barrow in its place by the wall.
Other men, other human beings, were still alive. He knew he had yet to grasp the full implications. Until this morning he had been living in ignorance. ‘Fool’s paradise, more like.’
As he shut the garage door, he said, ‘You know you’re going to have to leave all this unattended, don’t you?’
‘I wish, sometimes, that somebody else would answer.’
‘Do you think he spoke English?’
‘What else?’
‘He might have been foreign.’
‘They’re all foreign. Whoever they are. They always were.’
By now he had reached the kitchen porch. He pulled off his boots and went inside.
‘Foreign to me, anyhow.’
The events of the morning had brought back to Suter the insoluble equation he had almost forgotten. Other people, even dead ones, equalled inconvenience, unpleasantness, expense. They were impossible to understand. As a child he had been open-hearted and willing, but had always found himself excluded, pushed to the edge and left there, unable to fathom the enigma: what did they want of him?
He found out in his adulthood. They wanted two things. His money and his absence, in that order.
Suter peeled off his thick outer socks, rolled them into a ball, and pushed his feet into his house-shoes. As he did so, with rare vehemence, and for the first time in many years, he uttered the single word of the foullest oath he knew.
Despite his overwhelming reluctance even to consider the matter, he knew there was no choice. He would have to find out where the body had come from.
Not to make contact, but just to know. Without such knowledge, he could never have peace of mind again. They – the murderers – were almost certainly to be found upstream. A long way, Suter hoped. A very long way. If they had a settlement, and if it were permanent, so much the better.
Why had they survived? Why had he found no trace of them before now? How many others were there, in this country or abroad? Should he resume his search of the radio frequencies?
‘One thing at a time.’
Suppose there were settlements. They would surely be small, isolated and few in number. Any normal social structure would have collapsed, making way for who knew what.
Suter wanted none of it.
He took off his binoculars and zipped them into their leather pouch, which without thinking he placed, as usual, on the windowsill.
Everything he did was neat and methodical. He had long ago seen that avoidable spontaneity in his life entailed unnecessary work, bother, even mortal danger. He drew comfort from order, from making and keeping schedules and lists. And indeed, without this he would long ago have been lost. He would have become forgetful. Vital maintenance would have been left undone. He would have run out of something important, or a shotgun would have jammed at a critical moment, turning him into dogmeat. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday: cl
ean the guns. Saturday morning: rifle practice, three rounds only, into the rusty plate of mild steel hanging from the horse chestnut on the lakeshore. Now more holes than plate. When he got back, he would find another one.
‘If you get back.’
‘Oh, I’ll get back all right, don’t you worry.’
He had two 7.62 millimetre sniping rifles, an Accuracy International Model AW and a Mauser SP66. There was a night sight, a Maxi-Kite, for the AW. Where was it? Upstairs. Better check the alignment. Dry-zero the zoom scope as well.
His plans for lunch having been spoiled, Suter opened some mackerel and ate it straight from the can. He spent most of the afternoon and early evening indoors, packing food, choosing clothing, preparing equipment. Towards dusk the sky clouded over. Drizzle began to fall.
By the time he was able to sit down and relax after supper, the drizzle had intensified to rain.
‘What do you think of it all, then, Rees?’
His cat – the cat – usually became more attentive when the weather got worse. He jumped up into Suter’s lap and allowed himself to be fondled, eyes closed, neck sunk, head raised.
‘Hmm?’
As ever, Rees had little contribution to make. His mother, also a tabby, had been a feral cat who, little by little, Suter had managed to bring into semi-tameness. Before, he had never much liked cats, but had become fonder of Rees than he wanted to admit. He disapproved of keeping animals prisoner: Rees was free to come and go just as he pleased.
On cue, he jumped down and curled up on the hearth-rug.
Suter leaned over to place another log on the range and drew the lamp closer to the arm of his chair.
He opened his diary. It was over a week since he had made an entry. He leafed through the pages. Birds seen. Resolutions, mostly unkept. Plans for growing more and better French beans. A thundery afternoon in August when, swimming in the lake, he had been trapped in the water for two hours by dogs.
He pressed, thrice, the button on the end of his pencil.
Thursday, 11 October, 2029. Calm, golden. Rain at nightfall.
Then: Saw a body in the river. Got behind the copper beech. Thought I was mad again.
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