by Alex Scarrow
He smirked. ‘Sure . . . OK.’
‘And, Freya . . .’
She huffed and walked past Ron not bothering to stay and listen to any more. She paused for a moment in front of Dave. ‘You touch a hair on Grace’s head, you even look at her funny, and I swear, I will ram a skewer into your ear next time.’
CHAPTER 40
The Congolese jungle
Beneath tall red cedar trees with their broad, waxy leaves – a canopy that filtered out the light so much that the jungle floor below existed in an eternal emerald-green twilight, it was unnaturally quiet. Six months ago, this Congolese jungle would have echoed with twittering and tweeting, the haunting cries of howler monkeys, the incessant chee-chee-chee of insects. Now, like everywhere else, the only sound was the stirring of leaves, the creaking of ancient branches. Without the movement of wind, the world would have been wholly silent.
But not lifeless.
The jungle floor was very far from barren. Here in this place that once upon a time, a million years ago, had been the cradle of humanity – the place where one species of primate had learned that coming down from the trees freed up their dextrous hands and their minds – here, it was a cradle for a brand-new ecosystem.
The jungle floor as we would recognize it, was long gone, buried beneath a dark brown leathery blanket. The blanket ran smoothly, lifting in humps here and there, faintly marking the topography below: fallen trees, dips and rises in the ground.
In several locations, the leathery material had hardened into a firm resin-like material, and tall stalagmites, like termite mounds, emerged from the soft blanket. Copying the behaviour of the trees, they speared straight upwards, reaching for the sunlight. But, unlike the trees, there was intelligence at work, deploying a more effective method of reaching the sunlight. These stalagmites reached only halfway up, tapered to a point, then formed thin sinuous ‘ropes’ of material that swayed gently as they ascended towards the canopy of leaves overhead.
In the brilliant sunlight above the canopy, the ropes thickened and became bloated pink and sepia balloons that looked like the intestines of a pig comically inflated to ridiculous proportion. The balloons swayed gently in the breeze, their taut, thin membranes glistening in the sunlight, thousands of them up there, like tethered party balloons, collecting the solar energy, converting it inside themselves to a sugar solution that was then transferred back down the ‘ropes’ to feed the hungry mega-colony below.
Every now and then, a balloon gently broke free and floated away, its useful life as a solar collector coming to an end and now assigned the role of a spore container, to be carried aloft to a higher altitude where it would eventually rupture and release its cargo.
On the jungle floor, this mega-colony was one of the very first. Consequently, it was one of the most mature. Billions of years of evolution by our standards had accelerated here to mere months. Beneath the brown blanket churned a glutinous ocean: cells arranging into clusters large enough to store libraries of DNA packets, many of these packets assembled by trial and error into almost complete genomes. Groups of clusters cooperating and merging to become super-clusters capable of not only storing data, but – like the simplest of digital AI – processing that data. Making decisions.
Strategizing.
The ‘plan’, for want of a better term, was embedded and encoded in the chromosomes of every single cell in this vast ocean, every one of them entrusted with knowledge of the ‘goal’, but each too simple on their own to understand it.
The plan was stratified; it came in levels of complexity. The simplest to understand and the most important level of the plan was the simple expedient of survival. Procreation. An easy enough concept for simple cells to understand.
But with the creation of billions of clusters came the emergent ability to read just a little further down the encoded to-do list. The instructions were to store and collate the newly acquired genetic data. To try to reassemble the life forms it had consumed and destroyed.
This mega-colony had made great strides on that front. It had reproduced some very impressive life forms, large ones that required the complicated assembly of resinous skeletal structures, articulating limbs, muscle tissues, nerve endings, support systems of organs. But, ironically, it was the simpler things it struggled to replicate. For example, it seemed so many life forms appeared to want to cover themselves with linear arrangements of dead cell tissue, compressed to form a protein it didn’t quite understand. A useless protein that seemed to serve no purpose. A protein we would call keratin.
For a while, all was still in the quiet jungle, then the leather blanket humped with movement from below – something stirring. Eventually, the leathery skin ruptured and out of the soup emerged a modest-sized creature. Its brown eyes blinked at the green-filtered sunlight. Its small mouth opened and closed, a chattering noise emerging from its lips. Slender arms ended with delicate, five-digit hands. The creature pulled itself out of the mush, and took several testing, loping steps across the leathery skin, bouncing gently like a toddler on a trampoline.
The prototype ‘monkey’ moved as one would expect it to, walking on its tiny knuckles and dainty feet, its long tail curling, twitching and waving behind it. Behind those all-brown eyes, optic nerves fed information to a walnut-sized brain. Instinct, copied instinct, helped the creature move. It headed for the nearest tree, leaped from the trampoline surface of the skin on to the rough bark of the trunk, its small hands reaching for knots and grooves to hold on to. It scampered up the side of the tree at first, slightly ungainly and awkward, like a wild animal shaking off the tail end of a tranquillizer, but by the time it had reached the spreading branches it was moving like a monkey should.
From a few metres away, it was an utterly convincing facsimile. It might even have fooled a zookeeper if it had been thrown into an enclosure filled with the same species. It certainly would have fooled young visitors pulling faces at it through a cage’s mesh. But looking closer, much closer, it would have become apparent that this monkey had no fur. Instead, its skin was coloured dark to mimic the millions of strands of keratin it had trouble duplicating.
Washington, DC
The building from the outside was instantly recognizable, having once been the iconic backdrop to so many movies, perhaps looking a little scruffy, though; the front lawns needed mowing, the rear rose gardens were competing with unpoliced weeds. But the building was still very much an icon. Inside, however, a much younger colony than the jungle one was finding its way. Down the dark blue carpets of the hallways of power, thick veins of the virus meandered, occasionally dipping into side rooms and offices, probing, investigating, hunting for organic morsels. A central, much thicker vein, protected by a hardened leathery membrane, snaked down the hallway to the office at the far end, thickening as tributaries joined in from side offices.
The double doors stood wide open and led into an oval-shaped room with tall windows beyond a dark maple wood desk that looked out across those scruffy, untended lawns.
The room would normally have been bright with sunlight. But the windows were now almost entirely coated inside by a thin sepia-coloured membrane, like stomach lining stretched out in a tannery to dry. The membrane filtered the light coming into the room, rendering the space a deep blood-red, bathing it in a womblike glow.
The floor was concealed by a thick mattress of organic soup twenty centimetres thick, again topped with a thin, protective membrane. The walls displayed networks of impressionistic arterial artwork – veins, branches, tributaries – like a projected map of the road network of a truly industrialized country.
The polished maple desk, the blotting pad, the two phones, one linked to an exchange on the mezzanine floor, the other linked directly to the Pentagon – the very same old-fashioned phones once used by a man named Kennedy to talk to a man called Khrushchev – were covered by thin, dark hyphae-like strands of the material that had dried and died. Nothing useful here . . . just a smooth plastic surface that ignore
d the virus’s probing.
This colony was at a less mature life-cycle stage. Its cells had formed smaller clusters that were now beginning to exchange the genetic data they had gathered. Simple scuttling-creature experiments had been attempted successfully, and their ghostly, pale, almost translucent forms shifted and twitched in their hundreds as they dangled from the tall dark blue drapes by the window, like bats clinging to a cave roof.
New York City
In a large open-plan office with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked down on the streets and lesser skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, there was very little of the virus to be seen. Scuttling explorers from a super colony sixty floors below had found their way up to the top floor and managed to infect and disassemble the few humans who’d been taking refuge there. Apart from them, this floor had been lean pickings with little more than its modern, clean, expensive office furniture and corporate grey-blue cord carpeting, and the virus had long since departed, leaving behind a dozen or so piles of clothing, bones and tufts of indigestible hair.
There were cans of uneaten food stacked against a wall, several dozen gallon bottles of water-cooler water, left unused. Unrolled sleeping bags lay on the floor, and in a cardboard box was a stack of cans that had been opened and scraped clean, their contents eaten.
The people who’d been holding out here had been prepared. They’d taken steps, and if the world had been a fairer place they would have deserved to have survived for their efforts. But none of them was unhealthy, none of them was struggling at the time with any aches or pains, sprains or even minor headaches. Health-conscious and fit over-achievers who ate their greens, skipped dessert and did Pilates at least twice a week, they had no need for painkillers, anti-inflammatories or anti-depressants.
These lucky, or unlucky few, had been up here and holding out for weeks, maybe even months, observing the empty streets below, the empty blue skies above, watching summer become autumn, become winter. Hoping desperately for a sign that they weren’t alone. That there’d be hope of a rescue.
Outside one of the broad windows, a sheet flapped and snapped in the breeze, words painted boldly in red on it.
13 SURVIVORS HERE! SEND HELP!
There’d been no one left to read it and no one left to care. New York was dead, America was dead . . . the world was dead.
One body, a skeleton held almost completely intact by a two-hundred-dollar designer shirt and dark trousers, was slumped in an office chair, turned away from its desk to look out over the city. The body was slouched like a lethargic teenager in front of a games console, skull tilted at an uncomfortable-looking angle, resting against the left collarbone and topped with a buzzcut of dark hair.
Empty orbital sockets stared forlornly out at the panoramic view of the necropolis.
In one skeletal hand, palm upwards, nestled a dead mobile phone, stained and encrusted with a dried residue of blood. In the other, a handgun.
A single, very tidy hole marked the left temple.
On the desk lay a scrawled note, a couple of lines scribbled on a legal pad. A goodbye written by a shaking hand.
I’m so sorry for everything.
I tried to survive. I love you both.
CHAPTER 41
13.01.18
Dad, the weirdest thing happened this morning. I woke up without a headache!
Leon had been getting morning headaches from even before the day Mum and Dad had their big Right-There-In-The-Kitchen Meltdown. The doctor at the Lincoln Medical Center had said it was probably stress-induced. That’s what the GP in London had said too: his parents splitting up, the pressure of moving to a new place, the anxiety of school exams, hormones and that kind of teen-angst stuff thrown on top. The doctor told him she saw so many more stressed-out teenagers these days than she used to, and having regular morning headaches was a pretty mild problem compared to some of them. She’d told him that one day the headaches would probably stop without any warning. Just like a verruca that, one day, despite all the expensive ointments and creams . . . y’know . . . just goes.
He’d woken up this morning, eyes still closed, listening to Grace murmuring and whimpering in her sleep (he never knew how much sleep-muttering she did!), opened his eyes and realized his head – for the first time in God knows how long – was completely clear. He lay there on his bed and listened to someone on kitchen duty banging pots and pans on the far side of the tropicarium, the sound of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons being played over the PA system and finally Mr Carnegie announcing breakfast time.
And he realized he felt . . . OK.
Totally weird thing, Dad,
he scribbled in his journal,
I feel fine. Is that wrong?
Leon looked at those words written down on the page and then scribbled them out. It felt bad writing that down. It was as if he were saying, ‘Yeah, eight billion people died six months ago, but, hey, at least I’m feeling better.’
Me and Grace are doing OK. This place is safe and pretty well organized and I think we’re going to make it. Plus, I’m not a hundred per cent sure about this, I may be reading the signals all wrong, but I think Freya likes me. She’s different, Dad. You’d like her. I think Mum would have liked her too . . . She’s kinda sparky.
He looked at ‘sparky’ and wondered what that actually meant. It seemed to sum her up, though: she was funny, ballsy, smart . . . and mature. Not mature in the sense of being all po-faced and being awfully sensible about things, but emotionally mature. Knowing what people were really saying when they talked. She came up with some pretty clever stuff.
Leon realized he might possibly be falling for her. He’d wanted to take a swing at that git Dave. He trusted Freya and Grace’s version of what had happened. Mainly because he’d seen with his own eyes, Dave’s wandering gaze like a fumbling freshman’s fingers. He’d watched him, listened to the little sarcastic asides to his ‘wingmen’ Phil and Iain. He acted like a king in waiting. Waiting for Ron to make some big mistake, to trip and fall, or more likely be pushed. He wondered if all that kept Dave from staging a coup was his knowledge of that one gun locked away in Ron’s desk.
It had been three weeks since Dave had tried groping Freya, and Mr Carnegie’s fudged solution that they should just stay out of each other’s way had surprisingly worked so far. Apart from the occasional glare across the tables at meal times, the peace had been kept, but Leon couldn’t help wondering how long their current little world was going to last. He wondered if a rescue from someone somewhere was already underway, or whether they were all alone and at some point would find Ron’s regime being replaced with Dave’s.
‘The guy’s a complete bell-end,’ said Spanners. He lit his crinkly roll-up again. For the third time, Leon noted. ‘I served with a first lieutenant on a ship who was like him. Treated the Taiwanese crew like dirt. Dave’s bad news.’
He blew smoke out and the breeze carried it quickly away across the roof of the tropicarium. It was one of the reasons why Spanners volunteered to do watch duty pretty much all the time as Ron didn’t permit smoking anywhere inside the complex.
‘You were in the British Navy?’
Spanners snorted. ‘Nah, merchant navy. Container ships. Second engineer mostly. Good laugh some of the time.’
‘Those big ships?’
‘Oh yeah, they’re big.’ He snorted again. Leon wasn’t quite sure when he did that whether he was laughing, or just clearing his nose. ‘There was this one time, when we cleared our berth in Hong Kong, when we lifted our anchor . . .’ He looked at Leon. ‘Big anchor, right? I mean, the size of a car. And each of the chain’s links the size of a washing machine or something . . . anyway, we were drawing the anchor in and we found bits of the rigging of a junk tangled in amongst it.’
‘Junk?’
‘Fishing boat. We must have dropped it on them. Sank the poor buggers. I don’t know if we killed anyone. I hope not.’
‘Jeez.’
‘Yeah, big ships. Ten mile turning circle. That’
s why they never stopped if someone went over the side. No point. Plus it cost too much in diesel and time.’
Leon scanned the horizon with the binoculars. There hadn’t been any signs of the virus in more than a week now. The last sighting had been one of Spanners’s: a bloom of spores floating like a twist of campfire smoke in the distance.
‘Do you think the plague is over?’
Spanners sucked on his roll-up. ‘The infectious disease bit? Dunno . . . I’m gonna keep taking the tablets for a while yet. But I guess the virus stage has got to die out at some point. Stands to reason . . . there’s nothing left for it to infect.’
‘I guess so.’
‘It’s the same as zombies.’
Leon lowered the binoculars and looked at him. ‘Huh?’
‘Well, you’ve seen zombie movies, right? It’s the same bollocks every time. The world gets infected and those things eat human brains for breakfast, lunch and dinner, right? So, how come, after everyone’s been infected apart from the heroes . . . these zombies don’t, you know, all just starve to death?’ He snorted. ‘All you’d need to do is sit tight until they dropped from hunger, right? And what about the fact they’re made of decaying flesh? How do the muscles work? The tendons? How do they even digest brains and turn that into fuel if they don’t have any working organs?’ He shrugged. ‘That’s why I think zombie films are a load of old bollocks. There’s no logical framework or –’
Leon spotted something moving among the trees. A flash of something tan-coloured among the rich dark evergreen.
– ‘thought behind them. Might as well all be ‘magic’. Might as well be Harry Potter, or—’
He saw it again. Something moving around among the trees. ‘Spanners! I just saw something.’
He stopped talking and looked at him. ‘Snarks?’
‘No . . . I don’t think so. It was brownish.’
‘Well, there’s a lot of brownish stuff out there. You sure?’