by Frank Tayell
On that same trip he’d gone to Lenham Hill. He had killed everyone in the facility. Then he’d gone back to London and engineered the deaths of Nicole Upton and everyone else he couldn’t trust.
Quite why he’d not just killed Jen was a bit of a puzzle. I assumed that perhaps he did genuinely believe in this business of a monarch and continuity.
As for the doctor, Quigley knew he was fake, and there was no way that the doctor could live long enough for that to be proven. Two weeks. That’s all the man had left. As to what would happen to him then, that was obvious enough.
I paced the room, trying to work out, from the little contact I’d had with him, whether I could persuade the doctor to help me. I doubted it. There wasn’t time. The old man had been wrong about the Doctor, but he had said something about Quigley knowing where their community was. Taking that with what the General had said at dinner, it was clear that was the community that they were planning to invade. And that was where I’d just sent Kim and the girls.
None of which helped me very much. What could I do? There were two options, get out, get over to Ireland, warn the old man and let Mister Mills and Leon and those with military experience deal with the forthcoming mess, whilst Kim, the girls, Sholto and I went somewhere far, far away from the whole lot of them. Or I could try and stop Quigley.
The first option was clearly the easiest and the most likely to work. But there was Daisy. That was the difficulty. If she did need medical attention, where else was she going to find it?
I turned back to the window. There was one other choice, built upon a slim chance. The old man’s plan. Jen didn’t know everything. If I could persuade her of the truth, perhaps she in turn could persuade enough of these soldiers to rebel or mutiny or whatever you’d like to call it. Then we’d contact the submarine.
It didn’t seem likely, but it was worth a try. If she didn’t think it would work, then we could at least burn the place down as we left. Perhaps the old man had been wrong about that as well. If there wasn’t a radio signal, perhaps the submarine would just disappear. At the very least we’d destroy some supplies.
Decision made all I needed to do was escape from a locked room.
Confrontation
The great thing about being locked in a room you spent much of your childhood in, is that you’ve explored every inch of it. In a room like that one, it hadn’t taken long. Other than the window and its meagre view, the only other thing with which a bored child might entertain himself with was the lock. It hadn’t taken long before I realised that all of the bedroom locks had the same key.
As a child it took weeks to realise that the nails in the back of the wardrobe were long and thin enough for the task. It took months to work them free, and months more before I’d learnt how to pick the lock.
As an adult, years later, it had taken about fifteen minutes to realise that modern locks were built to withstand such clumsy manipulations.
I listened at the door until I was absolutely certain the guards had really gone. Then I listened for another ten minutes, just to be certain. Then I called out. There was no response. Twenty seconds after that, I had the door open.
My first task was to find Jen. Of course I didn’t know what room she’d be in, but there was no reason for her not to be in the same room she’d used since she finished school. That was two floors below.
I crept along the corridor towards the main staircase. I stopped at the top of the stairs. I could hear voices below. For a moment I strained to make out the words. It was something about a guard rota for the next day. I turned and went back, towards the servant’s staircase at the corridor’s other end.
There were no windows, no natural light at all and without electricity to power the infrequently placed light bulbs, the staircase was pitch black. Cautiously feeling for each step, my hands and elbows braced against the narrow sides of the steep stairwell, I went downstairs.
The corridor on which Jen’s room was located was deserted. I tried her door. It was locked, but I had it open in a few seconds. I went inside. She was there, she was asleep and she was alone.
I put my hand over her mouth. She woke, struggling.
“Jen, it’s me. It’s ok. You need to be quiet. OK?”
She subsided, slightly.
“Quigley is lying,” I said quickly. “This super-vaccine he talks about, that was what caused the outbreak. He was there when it happened in New York. Him and a dozen other politicians from every corner of the world. That’s how it spread, senior politicians got infected, flew home, and then turned. At the muster points, that was a poison, but it wasn’t terrorists. It was Quigley.”
“What?”
“Shh! Come on, you must have realised that doctor downstairs is a fake.”
“I... fake?” She mumbled, confused and still half asleep.
“Exactly. Quigley was running the lab at Lenham Hill. You remember the place? When he left London, when he told you he was looking for somewhere to retreat to, he went there. He killed all the scientists. The doctor, the lab, recreating the vaccine, it’s just smoke and mirrors.”
“Smoke?”
“You must have noticed,” I snapped, growing impatient. “Haven’t you ever looked at it?”
“At what?”
“The lab! Quigley killed everyone, but not the Doctor who created the virus in the first place. Look,” I said, trying a different tack, “there are other people, hundreds of other people. We can go there now, you and me and however many of these soldiers you can trust.”
“Trust?”
“Quigley’s mad. You must have seen that. He’s threatening to nuke anyone who won’t submit to him.” Words weren’t working. Jen had never been much of a morning person. “Come downstairs. I’ll show you. In the lab. I’ll prove it to you. Please.”
She hesitated briefly, pulled on some clothes, and we went downstairs. There was a second way into the cellar, a narrow set of stairs from behind the kitchens. We had to wait an interminable five minutes for two soldiers to finish rifling through the cupboards.
I’d not thought to find a light. The cellar was dark, but the dim glow from the glass-doored fridge, and the display and standby lights was enough to see by.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “This isn’t a lab. There’s no extractor fan. It’s not even a sealed environment. This stuff is just plastic sheeting. Look up there. It’s nailed into the beams.”
“That’s just...” I didn’t let her finish. I didn’t want her to think. I just wanted her to understand.
“You see this,” I pointed at the fridge. “That’s your virus. The stuff that causes the dead to walk.” I pointed at the label. “See that. ‘Lenham Hill’ Quigley took this to New York and had his Doctor, the real Doctor, inject it into a bunch of people. Remember that night I spent at the MOD, the interrogation? That’s what they were doing. That’s where that money was disappearing to. Then there was the bombing. We started that too. Prometheus, that’s what...” I trailed off. There wasn’t much light, just enough to read the label, just enough to read her expression. “You knew about Lenham Hill. Of course you did.”
“My father told me. When they took you in for questioning. It’s why you were released. I had to promise you would stop digging.”
“You knew. You didn’t tell me.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Did you know what it really did? This virus, this super-vaccine?”
“I’d seen the test data. We all had.”
“Test data? Who’s ‘all’?”
“A cross-party committee. It was too important to be subject to petty politics. The test data showed it worked. It did work.”
“And you believed it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course I did. My father started the work on it. Or his department did, decades ago.”
“And Prometheus, did you know about that?” I asked.
“Grandfather told me about that. It was his idea originally. We knew that the government wasn’t goin
g to survive World War Three. Some people might, and all we could do was ensure that they had a chance, that our way of life might continue. And because he came up with that, my father became involved in the vaccine project. And then so did I.”
“And you supported it.” Again, it wasn’t a question.
“I wasn’t the Prime Minister. What did it matter if I approved or not?”
“You could have said something. You could have announced it to the world.”
“And? You think anyone would be surprised? Do you think anyone would care?”
“Mutually Assured Destruction. I thought we’d moved on from that,” I muttered.
“The world turns, but it stays the same.”
“The Muster Points. The evacuees. Did...”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence. The lights came on.
It was arrogance. It was complacency. It was spending a day under a familiar roof. I’d let my guard down. I’d stopped thinking about the threats hidden in every shadow.
The bottles of wine in the fridge should have given it away. If not that, then the doctor’s absence at dinner should have suggested it. Where else was he going to be, but sleeping down in the cellar, with the electricity for comfort and the wine for company?
I didn’t know how much he’d heard. He had a rifle in his hands, and from the way the barrel was wavering back and forth, he didn’t know how to use it. That wasn’t reassuring. He didn’t even give me a chance to try and reason with him.
“Guards. Guards!” he bellowed.
I took a step back, keeping my eyes on his rifle, my hand searching for the tray with the medical equipment, looking for something sharp.
“Don’t Move. Don’t!” he yelled, taking a couple of steps towards me. He’d found some courage from somewhere and the barrel was now pointing steadily at my face.
I stopped and raised my hands. It seemed like the only thing to do.
A few minutes later two more guards appeared at the stairs, then the General, then Quigley.
“What’s going...” Quigley began. I didn’t let him finish.
“That’s the virus in there. In those vials,” I said addressing everyone but him. “It was Quigley who created it. In a facility in Oxfordshire called Lenham Hill. He started it, but it’s all over now. There’s just a handful of survivors out there, with sixty million zombies at their backs. You can have a future, you can help us rebuild.”
It wasn’t the greatest of speeches, and I should know, I’ve written a few in my time. Certainly I’ve written enough and watched other people deliver them, my eyes glued to the audience whilst psychologists and body language experts spewed forth their opinions through an earpiece. No, this wasn’t a great speech, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it was. These soldiers didn’t flinch. They didn’t care. They knew.
Quigley hadn’t killed all those people himself. He hadn’t gone to Caulfield on his own. He’d had men with him, men he could trust, his praetorian guard. These men. They’d killed the scientists at Lenham. They’d killed the rest of the cabinet. They’d killed old Lord Masterton and everyone else who’d lived in or near the Hall.
“And he killed your father and everyone else in this house,” I said to Jen. “All the farmers, all the locals who might prefer you ruling them than him. He had them killed, then burnt the corpses out in the fields beyond the first barricade.”
“Is that true?” Jen asked.
“What is truth?” Quigley replied, sarcastically. “This was all an act. I told you that. Your Majesty. I told you in London, it was only a way of guaranteeing support for our rule. A way of making all the people we found certain we had the right to rule over them. Well, maybe I was a little disingenuous. I should have said my rule, but since the monarch has no power, it was your own fault for not realising.”
“If this was just about power then you haven’t done very well,” I said. “Just you and a few hundred soldiers and how many of them can you really trust?”
“Power?” He shook his head derisively. “You’ve changed, at least. You’re not the snivelling overweight pole-climber that I remember. You’re still not very bright, though. I suppose that’s not something that can be acquired out in the wilds. I suppose you’re friends with that old man. I thought we’d shot him,” I realised, that though he was looking at me, that last was addressed to the General.
“They outnumber you,” I said.
“Really? They? Not we? So you know him, but you’re not with him. Interesting. It doesn’t matter. I have soldiers. They were the best-trained professionals in the world before, and now there is no one who can stop them. Set against old men and cripples, I think we’ll manage.”
“I won’t allow it,” Jen said.
“Oh, please, just stop!” Quigley replied, “You really don’t understand. He does. You’ve been coddled and protected your whole life. Picked for government because of your father, picked for the cabinet because I knew how to play you. Even your one petty rebellion, standing for the opposition had little effect. The few principles you espoused early on, you abandoned the moment there was a chance at power.”
“And so did you,” I said.
“No!” And there was real anger in his voice now “This was never about power, mine or anyone else’s. This was about a future for our entire species.”
“Oh, so you’re a true believer?” I asked.
“Hardly. I don’t believe, I know. I know that at its worst our country is better than the best anywhere else. Our island story spans thousands of years, and in a thousand more, this will be seen as our finest hour. I know England will prevail.”
“It’s The UK, or it was, but it was never just England. Not that...” I was about to start swearing at him, letting my tongue loose whilst I gauged which of the soldiers I might reach before being shot, but Jen interrupted me again.
“It’s over. It’s all over,” she said. “I want this to stop. I’m ordering you to stop. No, I’m commanding you.”
“Oh, for the love of... Commanding? You’ve served your purpose and served it poorly. You were meant to stop people from deserting, from running off into the wilderness. That was your one job. A figurehead, to make people think that though things were tough they had a future if they stayed with us. And you failed. You couldn’t even get the women to stay. I should have picked someone else to be Queen. Maybe I will. So, let’s see. Well yes, why not. Bill Wright is actually Bartholomew Sholto, brother of Thaddeus and joint architect of the whole plot. Yes, that does work rather well. Did you know that American contact of yours was actually your brother? He had some lunatic idea that he could stop me. It doesn’t matter now.”
He took a step forward.
“So, the brothers Sholto ran this terrorist group. We’re still unclear what their motives were,” Quigley went on. “With ideological terrorism that is often difficult, isn’t it. On discovering that there was one last refuge of peace and democracy in the world, he came here. Seeking to destroy the place. And then... And then...” he nodded at the General. The soldier began to walk slowly around the room.
“Let’s see,” Quigley went on, “I think you destroyed the lab. Ruining forever any chance at recreating the vaccine. Of course, we’d have had to have done that at some point, and the lab has served its purpose. It gave everyone something to cling to. A distant hope. Well, your sabotage will give them something different. A thirst for revenge. So you destroyed the lab. That just leaves the doctor.” He turned and nodded to the general who was standing just a few paces away from the doctor.
“I’ll take that,” the General said in a kind, soothing tone as he took hold of the doctor’s rifle with his left hand. “We don’t want to wake up the people outside. Not with any accidental gunfire.” And in his right hand was a knife. He plunged it deep into the doctor’s throat, stepping smartly backwards away from the spray of blood.
“Now, where was I?” Quigley continued as the body collapsed to the floor. “Ah yes, after you killed the doctor, you des
troyed the research. Or was there a struggle first? Yes, I think that would be best.” He took another step forward and pulled down the plastic sheeting. He was two paces away.
“And then, there was an interrogation.” He took another step and then hit me in the face. “I found out where you came from, where your base was. I’ll have to come up with a story about how you brainwashed a lot of the civilians. The women, at least, not that I think any of my men will care.” He hit me again. I could taste blood. “We’ll have a trial of course. Then hang you. First thing in the morning, I suppose. That’s when it’s meant to be done. A war crimes trial, for the worst criminal in history. Yes, yes. I think that will work for the history books. The final thwarting of the terrorist. Justice and revenge, the seeds of the nation’s rebirth. That leaves just one loose end. How you killed the Queen.”
I was going to fight. I just needed Quigley to hit me one last time. I’d seen a pair of scissors on the floor. One more punch and I’d fall over, grab the scissors and stab him, whilst he was still gloating. Honestly, after what I’ve been through, what I’ve had to do to survive these last six months, I think I stood a fair chance.
Jen did not.
Her leg shot out as she grabbed at his wrist. I think she was trying one of those judo moves they teach in self-defence classes. I don’t know if she’d fought anyone over the past few months. I doubt it. And she’d certainly forgotten that before he’d become a politician, Quigley had worked in covert operations. He flinched, slightly, as her foot kicked his calf, and batted her hand away. Her other hand clawed at his eyes. He ducked, twisted, grabbed and threw her across the room.