by Frank Tayell
Pushing his way through the sheeting, was...
“You’re the Doctor then?” I asked, extending my hand.
“I am,” he said. “But you’ll excuse me if I don’t shake your hand. Not until we’ve given you a thorough check up.”
He wore an all-in one suit, with a mask that obscured most of the face that wasn’t covered by the hood, but I knew, the moment he spoke, that this wasn’t the man I’d seen in that video. This man’s accent was one hundred percent Birmingham, not the cultured English with the trace of India of the real Doctor. As for his hand, he still had all of his fingers. The old man had been wrong. The Doctor wasn’t at Caulfield Hall.
“Well, I’ll risk it,” A familiar voice said from behind me. I turned. Sir Michael Quigley, dressed in a double-breasted suit, stood in the doorway, his hand outstretched.
“Sir Michael. You made it,” I said, shaking his hand.
“And you too, Bill. Thank God.”
“It’s a small world,” I think I said. It was that or something equally trite.
“And getting smaller and bigger each day. What do you think of our set-up then?”
“Impressive. Better than anything I’ve seen so far.”
“You’ve seen many places where there are survivors, then?” he asked. I’d forgotten how sharp this man was.
“Not really. A few here, a few there. Five was the most in anyone place,” I said, lying furiously.
“We must get you to a map. See where they are, send out a patrol, perhaps to bring them here. It’ll be safer for them. Our strength lies in numbers now, more than it ever did before.”
“Oh, I agree with that,” I said. “It’s why I came here. Look, Sir Michael, I didn’t ask Jen, but did Lord Masterton... Is he...?”
“He didn’t make it. When we got here the house was empty. Abandoned, along with the village. I assume he went on the evacuation. It’s a shame that. Your plan had promise. It would have worked. Should have. If it wasn’t for that terrorist cell.”
“Yes, some of your soldiers said something about terrorists.”
“And I’ll tell you more about it at dinner. A proper meal. You must be famished.”
“Well, yes, now you mention it.” I wasn’t hungry at all.
“Well first Dr Tooley needs some of your blood. Isn’t that right?”
“Er, yes,” the fake doctor said. “Just a small sample. Not much. Just to check whether I’m on the right track.”
“He’s recreating the vaccine, you see,” Quigley said, “If you’ve got natural immunity, that will speed up the research, won’t it doctor?”
“Oh, yes. Speed it up. Yes.”
“We should have something in a matter of weeks, didn’t you say.”
“Weeks? Er, yes, two or three weeks. Yes.”
“Maybe less. And with only a few hundred doses needed, we’ll all be able to venture out with impunity before winter hits. We’ll find these other survivors you mentioned and create a real sanctuary. A new England, eh Bill? All we’ve ever dreamed of, eh? Well, get to it, doctor.”
“Yes, yes, er, yes,” the doctor stammered, “If you’ll come in here. Into the lab. I’ll get the samples and then... then get back to work.”
“Good. Good. And it really is good to see you, Bill.”
And then Quigley left. The two soldiers stayed behind.
I followed the doctor through the plastic sheeting and sat on the edge of the couch.
“You’re the man who created the vaccine?” I asked.
“Er, yes,” he answered nervously.
“You must be pretty good.”
“I was. Am. University at Oxford, Masters at Imperial, Doctorate at Cambridge, then two years at...” his voice relaxed as he listed his well rehearsed CV. I just kept a track of the number of years he’d been working. If he’d been telling the truth, then he’d got his degree when he was seven. It was insulting really.
At least the act of recitation relaxed the man, which was good since he was holding a needle. I’ve never liked needles. I don’t have a problem with blood, just with needles. I turned away, my eyes idly scanning the prop-equipment. They fell on the glass-doored fridge. At the back, on every shelf, were bottles of wine. At the front, shielding the bottles from anyone more than a few feet away, were miscellaneous boxes and racks of test tubes and vials. I almost smiled, until my eyes caught the writing on one of the racks. ‘Lenham Hill’.
Sholto had said he’d destroyed them all. Or was it that he only thought he had? I tried to remember as I stared and puzzled and wondered if those vials were just a prop, or whether they did actually contain the virus.
Dinner
It was around six pm when I was escorted up to The Gallery. As the name suggests the walls were covered in paintings, all portraits of now deceased ancestors.
“Bill, all sorted then? Good,” Quigley murmured as he ushered me to a chair. The General and Jen were already seated at a table that could fit ten but was set for four. “Come in. Sit down. Drink?” Quigley waved a hand dismissively at the pair of guards. They left the room.
“I expect this brings back some childhood memories. Dinner with the family, eh?” Quigley asked, jovially.
“Yes. Yes it does,” I said, sharing a look with Jen as I sat down. Growing up we’d always eaten in the kitchen and we’d never eaten with her parents. That Jen hadn’t told him this gave me some hope.
“There’s some things you need to know, Bill,” Jen began.
“They can wait, they can wait,” Quigley said dismissively as he rang an absurd little bell.
It was a meal that made a mockery of the aristocratic splendour Quigley was trying to imitate. The food came from tins or packets, served on silver and antique china. I don’t suppose it would have been too bad had it been cooked properly, but it was barely warmed through. I forced myself to eat. The wine was cold enough for condensation to bead around the glass, and that was a pleasingly unfamiliar sensation amidst the close air of the room. But knowing what had been stored with it in the fridge, I only took the most tentative of sips. I think some of the disappointment at the meagre repast showed on my face.
“Something wrong?” Quigley asked.
“Sorry, it’s just in these surroundings, having seen all those fields, I thought... I suppose I was hoping for fresh bread.”
“I know, I know. But there’s the danger of cross-contamination. Until we can be certain it’s safe, we can’t risk eating any of the food growing in the ground.”
I didn’t comment.
“What happened to the rest of the Cabinet?” I asked, when I decided I’d toyed with the food for a decently polite length of time.
“We split the government,” Jen said. “Out of the eight in the emergency cabinet. Four went to the Isle of Wight, Sir Michael, myself, Nicole Upton and Paul Haylett stayed in London.” I sipped at the glass to hide my expression. “We’d built barricades either side of the river. We controlled a long strip of land, and we had the river itself. We thought we could hold onto that, keep that as our centre of government and supply it by river. But we were overrun. The undead, They got into the Tube.”
“But you were still there, whilst I was still in the flat?” I pressed.
“I thought you were dead. Sir Michael, said...”
“I sent people to collect you.” Quigley interrupted “A couple of teams. One didn’t come back, the others said you were dead. Mistaken identity I suppose.”
I didn’t want to catch him in a lie, not then.
“Then you left London and came here?” I asked, instead.
“More or less,” Jen said. “You know the Isle of Wight was destroyed?”
“By a nuclear attack of some kind? One of your soldiers mentioned it.” The General frowned at that.
“After that we knew we had to move the government again,” Quigley said. “I don’t know why London wasn’t destroyed, but we thought it could happen at any moment, and then what would have happened to our country? I checked a
number of locations but this one seemed the best. The house was empty when we arrived. Deserted, but otherwise intact. I left some men to prepare the defences and came back to London. We needed someone up here and I thought Jen seemed best for that role. If any of the locals did return then seeing her friendly face would be far more reassuring than a group of soldiers.”
“No one did, though. Return, I mean,” Jen said, sadly. “I do wonder what happened to them all.”
“Yes,” Quigley said. “So do I. It took a long time to get the rest of the survivors ready to leave. Before we did, the undead came up through the Tube. We ended up fighting our way out of the city. That was my fault. I take full responsibility. We lost Paul, Nicole and hundreds of others on the way up here. Bandits. Near Oxford, if you can believe that.”
I didn’t. I was certain now that I had killed the undead Nicole Upton down by the River Thames. I decided to poke the hornet’s nest a little.
“There’s something I don’t understand. The vaccine. Was it real?”
“Ah.”
“I mean, how do you make a vaccine for a virus you don’t know exists?” It was a dangerous question.
“Was it real?” Jen answered “Yes and no. Yes there was a vaccine, but we never had enough to distribute to the entire population. They were to be given a placebo at the muster points. But that would give us an opportunity to examine everyone who arrived. We would have been able to weed out the infected. Then they would have a long train or bus journey to the coast. The worst that would happen was a train carriage or a bus would have to be sanitised. A few hundred uninfected people would die, but the majority would survive. In effect it was a mobile quarantine. And it would have worked.”
“But the doctor, downstairs, he’s working on recreating the vaccine. So does that mean there was one?”
“There was,” Quigley said, “And it was going to be demonstrated to the leaders of the world. It wasn’t a vaccine for this virus, but a vaccine for everything. All of the world’s major diseases cured with one simple injection. There was enough for the demonstration and not much more than that. The same terrorists who switched our placebo for the poison we distributed at the Muster Points, the ones who released this abominable virus onto the world, they destroyed the lab. Fortunately our doctor survived, and now thanks to your blood, we should have something that will work against this virus within a few months. It won’t work against anything else, unfortunately, but it will give us a fighting chance.”
It wasn’t really an answer, but then, there wasn’t much point asking him to elaborate since there would be no way of knowing if he was actually telling the truth.
“Who were these terrorists?” I asked instead. “I mean, this is so far beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”
“Well, we did have some warning something was going to happen,” Jen said. “We just didn’t know where or what. It’s why we had the quarantine and martial law in place, but...”
“But we were betrayed.” Quigley interrupted, “The nuclear bombs, the outbreak, switching that placebo for poison, that was their work. It was a cell that had its roots in our government, its branches in the corridors of power throughout the world. It’s more than just a movement, it’s an insidious international conspiracy that stretches back to the dark days of the cold war. This organisation was behind it all, and it was all done with just one aim, to destroy Western democracy and usher in a new world order. I tried to stop it. I failed. But I managed to mitigate its effects. Our species is still alive and now we can focus on rebuilding.”
There was silence then. I had no idea what to say. The man’s gall was breathtaking, his lies so impassioned I wonder if he’d begun to believe them himself.
“They didn’t succeed,” the General said, breaking the increasingly uncomfortable silence. “We have a military, a Prime Minister and a Monarch. England will rise again.”
“A mon...” I stopped. I looked at Jen. “You’re kidding?”
“It’s only in name, Bill.”
“You’re the Queen?”
“Technically, just technically,” she said, hurriedly.
“She is eligible,” the General added. I looked over at him and wondered what rank he’d held six months ago, or whether he’d held any rank at all.
“There were at least a few hundred people between her and Buckingham Palace.” I said.
“And now they’re all dead,” Quigley said.
“It’s all about continuity and legitimacy,” Jen said. “Without a monarch, how could we have a Prime Minister?”
“Consensus?” I suggested.
“Then there would be no continuity,” Quigley said, patiently. “We need to maintain the legitimate British government. Who has the right to order the military into action? What makes us different from some band of thieves? A Queen is what people are familiar with. Familiarity breeds loyalty. It brings comfort. And then there’s the future, of course. Someone needs to consider the direction the nation will take over the next thousand years, and if not us, then who?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” I tried to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“It’s not really important, Bill, not now, not yet,” Jen said. “But in five years or ten, when we’ve got a proper country working again, we’ll have something to fall back on. It will be democratic, of course. There’s a constitutional conference planned just as soon as it’s safe to hold one. There’ll be a referendum. We’ll give people the opportunity to vote for a Republic, but honestly, do you think they will?”
There wasn’t even any point answering that.
“Then you’re in contact with other groups, other communities?” I asked instead.
“We know where they are,” the General said, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
“It’s not about power, Bill,” Jen said, “It’s not about ruling the world, but we’ve got to preserve democracy. After... what happened, after what was done to us. Someone has to, and it’s only us left.”
“We’re looking at a period of consolidation,” the General said. “We have a large military, but few civilians for it to protect. Our goal now is to bring together all the survivors scattered across the country.”
I thought back to how I’d been greeted at the gate, how, if I’d not been who I was, I’d have been lucky to be turned away and more likely to have been shot. I thought about the people who must have been here when Quigley arrived. And I thought about all these soldiers, all these men, and what that meant.
“And you’ll bring all these survivors here, will you?”
“Oh no,” Quigley said, smiling. “We’ll move to the coast. We need to be nearer to the fleet. Yes, we still have a fleet. The Admiral has located a number of possible sites for the new Capital. We’ll relocate just as soon as the doctor is finished working. Britannia still rules the waves and one day our Empire will stretch out its benevolent hand upon them.”
I think he genuinely believed what he said.
After that the rest of the meal was spent grilling me on what I’d seen and where I’d been. They masked the interrogation behind polite curiosity, but there was no question that Quigley and the General were only interested in where other survivors could be found. I named a half dozen places I’d been to that had been abandoned when I arrived. The lies came easily, and I gave no thought to being found out. It didn’t matter. I had already decided to escape from the madhouse as soon as possible.
The Prison
There’s an old saying, if you’re going to find yourself imprisoned, then make sure it’s in a cell you built yourself. My jail was the second best thing, my old childhood bedroom.
The room hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen it, but that had been during the Easter Bank Holiday, two years ago. I’d never really stamped my identity on the room. The few childhood memento’s I’d kept here, or more accurately forgotten to take with me back to school, had long since been packed up.
As a child, having a room to myself seemed a luxury compared
with the shared dorm at boarding school. I took the simple, functional furnishings as a further sign of my acceptance as one of the family. Looking around the room then, I saw it for what it was, the attic room of the unwanted child who couldn’t be simply forgotten. I heard the key turn in the lock. That was an unfamiliar sound. All the bedrooms had keys, of course. That’s a common feature of a house that historically hosted guests that didn’t just dislike one another but were representatives of countries literally at war. It had come as quite a surprise, when I got to university, to discover that it wasn’t the norm.
I listened by the door just long enough to be sure that the two guards who’d escorted me upstairs had gone away.
I walked over to the window, a long narrow one, painted shut decades before, and peered out. The sun was still a few hours from setting. Now I knew to look for it, I could make out the signs that Quigley and his private army were about to leave. I paced the room, trying to work out what to do. Then I realised that was the wrong question. I had to work out exactly what I would be able to do.
I’d have to leave that night. There were too many soldiers to leave during the daytime, and I’d foolishly told too many lies to survive any more questioning.
It was lunacy. A Queen, A PM, A General, a fake scientist and a fake plot by a fake terrorist group, Quigley’s story was the ultimate house of cards. His power, and I assume the Generals, came from the soldiers. They followed because of this elaborate tale of terrorism and vaccines and lost glory that they might, one day, regain.
But I knew it was a lie. The barricades that ringed the house, the ones made of concrete and steel. They must have been airlifted in. That had to have been done before the evacuation. In which case why would everyone have left Caulfield? Why would anyone? They wouldn’t. Quigley had to have killed them and he must have been certain he had killed them all or he wouldn’t have allowed Jen to come up here. And he killed them because old Lord Masterton, his former mentor, would have been a far likelier candidate to lead in this changed world. He had killed everyone else, because they would be more likely to follow Jen than him.