by E. C. Tubb
“That was good of him.”
“Probably charity for old time’s sake,” Thom said, screwing up his eyes at the hit of extra strong coffee. “But I don’t mind long as he don’t rub it in. He said something about getting a bonus for finishing early, but I think that’s crap.”
“What about your Aunt?” Marian said.
“Looked in on the way to the pub,” he lied fluently, though she had asked the question a little too casually. Does she suspect? He wondered. “That’s why I met him after work. I didn’t think I could leave her all day.” He put a little emphasis on the ‘all’ and was gratified to see her flush.
“What plans today?” He said. “Want to meet for lunch?” He didn’t really want to meet, but Amir had suggested it, when they had talked about it the night before, after—Thom realized now- one beer too many. “Try something unexpected,” Amir had said. “Watch her reaction.”
Marian looked nonplussed. “I—no, I can’t. Sorry, I have to work through lunch. Sorry.” She said, “What will you do instead?”
“I’ll check the website for jobs,” he said. “Fetch Auntie’s prescription—I didn’t get a chance yesterday- and get her shopping. The usual.”
He sighed, and she reached across and squeezed his hand. “If we could get her in a home…” She said, but they both knew that there were too few places that would take a semi-continent woman who on good days could just remember who she was.
“It’s okay,” he said, knowing that she didn’t cope well with illness -she could barely bear to be around any invalid, let alone someone as ill as Auntie. Marian’s limit was to share Saturday afternoon visits with him, and they were the shortest of the week.
She squeezed his hand. “Thanks.”
“What for?”
“Understanding.”
He smiled; obscurely disappointed that she had turned down the lunch offer, even though he’d expected her to.
Later he surfed the net, while the TV showed a programme on the slow death of the cattle industry, from increasing costs and dwindling profit, multiple disease outbreaks, and finally rural Snarks. The narrator said, “An upside of the mass move from dairy to cereal is that as crops don’t attract Snarks, the farmers are safe if they take sensible precautions.” Thom thought of the down-side—increasingly starving Snarks moving into the cities.
When he checked the jobsite, predictably most vacancies called for PhDs. He toyed with the idea of returning to Uni, but with Marian earning, they’d have to fund it themselves, and that would tip them over the edge of solvency. With a sigh, he exited the JobSite and checked SnarkWatch, noting recent kill sites.
Marian had urged him to spend longer with Auntie, prompted—he guessed- by her own guilt, so he left earlier than usual. He took the street parallel to the route he’d taken before, so that the Snark wouldn’t sense a pattern. Several times he found himself walking a straight line and started to hop from crack to crack for a minute or two, humming Bob Marley, ensuring his rhythm was irregular enough to not attract a Snark.
A corpse hung from a lamp-post, and he shivered, wondering what urban justice had prompted the hanging; the St Vitus Dance-like thrashings of Blacktongue seemed to draw Snarks, and flash-mob lynchings grew common as the disease mutated -it seemed- at will. Or it could simply have been that someone accused the man of petty theft. The body seemed to still twitch but it must have been the breeze or his imagination. He walked on, his mood soured.
Auntie seemed worse today, barely responding at all when he tried to ease her out of bed, so he left her where she lay. When he tried to feed her, she turned her head away, groaning. He had to get her to the toilet, however much pain it caused her. It was then that he noticed the bruising on her legs, and felt her forehead. “You’re burning up, Auntie.”
He called Marian on his mobile for advice, but went straight through to her voicemail, so hung up without leaving a message.
Then he took a bowl of warm soapy water to Auntie while she sat on the throne. He washed her, while trying to screen out her cries. After helping Auntie into a dressing gown, Thom shepherded her into her box-sized lounge where he sat her in a chair, while he rushed over to the pharmacy. He hoped that he might be able to log onto a public terminal there, and check Auntie’s symptoms.
But the terminal returned a dozen answers and the pharmacist seemed unsure, asking him a barrage of whispered questions to which he didn’t have the answers, while she looked around as if a flash-mob might coalesce at any moment.
Heading back, he wondered whether to call Liv, but decided instead to send her a text; “Can’t make it today. Sorry.” She might feel as let down as he did, but if Auntie had something serious, he couldn’t risk exposing her to it.
Back at Monmouth Street, Auntie felt even hotter. Worried about dehydration, he mixed boiling water from the kettle with honey and lemon, then with some cold water to make it drinkable. But she seemed even more desperate not to eat or drink and as she wriggled and squirmed to avoid the cup, he saw her tongue and went cold.
He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t noticed it before.
Auntie Beth retracted the black lump as if suddenly lucid; it may have been his imagination, but he thought he saw momentary fear in her eyes and wondered if she knew deep down how deadly her symptoms were.
* * * *
He skulked around the library, looking for internal surveillance cameras, waiting for a careless user to leave their desk with the machine still logged onto the net. Eventually he found one, and Googled vague terms like ‘swollen tongue.’ Apart from the obvious one he found no mention of other infections. He managed reach a free Australian site via a couple of detours and typed in ‘Blacktongue,’ but the machine immediately locked down. He shook his head in frustration and walked away as Library Security sauntered in, their casual behaviour not fooling him for a second.
On the way back he felt a distant rumbling several times, and changed his rhythm and direction to create an illusion of randomness. He heard a scream, quickly cut off, from a couple of streets away. He could feel them, something he’d never noticed before. And when he reached home and poured himself a glass of water, the surface of it shook as if there were a distant earthquake. He poked his tongue out in the mirror. Was it his imagination, or was it slightly swollen?
He was racking his brains wondering where he could get answers when his mobi rang. “Amir,” he said, as Icon switched to Bareface. “I was just about to call you.”
“That building you followed your missus to last night,” Amir said without preamble. “The one you sent us the Pic of.”
“Uh-huh.” Thom wondered if he might yet regret his drunken confession. “It said Colston Enterprises on the front plate.”
“That’s bollocks, mate. It’s DWP Fraud Surveillance. Told you they was all bloody Stasi. You’re married to a Snoop.” Amir paused. “Course, if I was mixed up in the wrong kind of things, like, I might have a mate who was involved in selling alternative-sourced pharmaceuticals. You know?”
“And might this mate—”
“If I was, which of course I’m not.”
“But if you were, would this mate be unemployed?”
“By the law of averages, people like that are.”
“So he might recognize someone from the Stasi?”
“Again, by the law of averages…”
“I understand.” Thom paused. “Well,” he said, “Could your mate do me a favour? I need a temporary Net-User ID.”
Amir’s eyes narrowed and Thom wondered how much he should tell his old friend. He had no proof it was Blacktongue (yeah, right said a cynical inner voice), nor that he was infectious. Amir said, “What you need it for?”
“A friend of mine is in some trouble—I don’t want Marian involved,” Thom said.
“I’ll text you the details,” Amir said. “You’ll have thirty minutes, so use it quick.”
“Sure.” Thom hung up. Seconds later, his mobi bleeped. Crash-and-burns were self-eradicating
and in theory left no traces. If he were quick he could search the net, then report his phone missing straight after, denying any knowledge of the search. He headed for the front door. “Might as well do it on the move.”
For once, he had to consciously remember to change rhythm, and several times he thought that he heard a rumble coming nearer. When he finally managed to find what he was looking for, he stopped, and stared at the screen. Blacktongue’s symptoms matched Auntie Beth’s exactly. The shaking, swollen tongue, joints bruised from internal bleeding.
The virus was usually caused by insect bites, as it was in the original bovine disease that gave the geneticists their template. But then the bastards had made it still more lethal, making it temporarily communicable by touch. Thom was surprised that the Chinese or Iranians -or whoever was really behind it- had limited the infectious period to only twenty-four hours, but guessed that uncertainty would add to the panic its mere presence would cause.
Worse, symptoms included headaches and nausea. Maybe it wasn’t a simple hangover he had had. In which case, Lisa and the boys were as good as dead.
He tossed the mobi into a bin as if it burned his hand. Googling even only a semi-official site with ‘Blacktongue’ would set off alarms in government surveillance sites and they could use the mobi to track him. He danced his way past the rumblings of the subterranean predators to Auntie Beth’s house, humming ‘Spy in the House of Love.’ He was oddly calm: Perhaps the grief and then the anger would come later. If he was infected, it would have been by now.
Auntie Beth had fallen out of bed and was lying face down on the carpet. Her breathing was ragged, her eyes sightless when he lifted and turned her, but her feet were beating a manic percussion on the floor, and her hands and arms twitched and flexed to an internal metronome. Her tongue was now so swollen that the black slab of flesh poked out of her mouth, even when he tried to close it.
Thom put her down and walked across to the mantelpiece above a fire that hadn’t been lit in decades. He gazed at the pictures; Marian and Thom on their wedding day; Thom aged eleven in his school uniform, grinning toothily at the camera; Auntie Beth in her early forties, holding a young boy by the hand -he stared shyly at the camera, and Thom barely recognized himself; Auntie as a young woman with another woman, whom Thom guessed to be her lost love; and a fairly recent one, taken just before the old woman began the slow spiral into premature senility, of Thom flanked by Auntie and Marian; he couldn’t remember who had taken any of them.
He walked back to the spasming body, and put his hands on her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d end it for you now, but a mercy killing needs to be done right, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t stuff it up.”
He picked up the antique land-phone and dialled Marian’s number. Before she could answer, he put down the phone. What was the point of telling her that Auntie had Blacktongue?
“I can’t hack this, Auntie,” he said from the doorway. “I hope it ends quick, and you don’t suffer, love.” He pulled the door shut behind him.
He stopped at a little kiosk that sold items whose provenance the buyer didn’t ask, and bought a voice-only disposable mobi for which he paid cash. When the elderly Turk asked for ID, Thom said casually, “I’ve left it at home. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.” The shopkeeper smiled and added ten pounds to the price, which Thom paid without arguing.
Outside, he dialled Liv and wasn’t surprised at her cautious “hello,” to an unknown voice-only number. “I can’t talk for long,” he said. “I just called to tell you that I love you, and the boys. I’ll call you later. No, nothing’s wrong.”
He set off for the city centre, singing neo-reggae songs that had a slower beat than normal, weaving across the pavement, at times into the road, wiping his nose occasionally, trying to sort out the confusion of feelings inside him.
When he reached his destination, he called Liv again and said, “I’m going to call you once, then hang up. When I call you again, straight after, don’t answer, don’t speak at all. Just keep quiet.” He cut the line, and murmured, “I can’t give you hope, darling, I can’t give you justice. But I can give you revenge.” He settled down to wait.
* * * *
Marian’s eyes widened as she saw Thom waiting across the square. He crossed quickly before Marian could descend the steps and joined her at the top, where they would be safe from even the biggest Snark, should one surface.
The square was empty but for a few late commuters, hurrying home before it got dark. Daytime felt safer, whether or not it was. For all their technology, people were still cavemen under the skin, scared of the predators beyond the campfire.
“You knew, didn’t you?” He said loudly, phone in hand, his foot tapping in time to the pulsing of the virus through his blood. Somewhere, a Snark was circling, digging its way through the soil.
Marion smiled, and the knowledge in her eyes chilled his blood. “Knew what?”
Thom leaned forward. “Can’t hear you,” he said, hoping that deafness was a symptom of Blacktongue. Marian repeated the question. “That Auntie Beth had Blacktongue,” he replied. “That I’d get it…and…”
“Infect your whore?” Marian shouted, then shrugged. “That’s what you get for screwing around.”
“She isn’t—”
“She might as well be!” Between words, Marian’s lips were a line so thin as to be invisible. “Why? Wasn’t I enough?”
He swallowed, his tongue already feeling too big for his mouth. “Because. There’s only so much TV you can watch in a day. Because she doesn’t make me feel so bloody useless?”
“It’s my fault?” Her eyes widened, and he saw shock turn to anger.
“Not your fault. But you have a job. She doesn’t, so it makes us equals.”
“And I’m supposed to pay for you and your whore?”
Thom could see now how it might have looked. It was easier for Marian to believe that he paid for sex, than to believe that he was trying to care for a second family. He shook his head. “We’ll—we would have taken our chances, if it had come to it. Why are you so bloody angry, anyway? Christ, it’s not as if we had anything—”
“I thought we did!” Marian shouted. “I loved you, even when you turned into a whining, walking lump of self-pity.”
“You never showed it.”
“I never show anything, dummy!” She said, wiping her eye angrily. “Why do you think that I stayed with you? I could live in reasonable comfort on my own, not in a dump like we have.”
They stared at one another in silence, and both sighed. Something that should have been so obvious but had got wrapped in the cotton wool in Thom’s brain seeped through. “Why haven’t you got Blacktongue?”
Marian shrugged. “Luck, I guess.” Her smirk told him she lied.
“There’s a cure—”
“No, it’s a vaccine,” Marian said. “It’s nearly impossible to synthesize, so it’s rarer than rocking-horse shit. You see why it’s kept quiet?”
“So the story’s true, then?” Thom nodded, understanding. “Don’t want the plebs being cured, do we, draining the state? Sometimes I wonder if the bastards let these things out on purpose to keep our numbers down.”
“That’s just paranoia,” Marian said. “Don’t be silly.”
“Is it? The state’s always worked on fear to keep people in line.” He added, “You need it for your work.” Marian’s eyes widened as he continued, “If you’re buying bootleg meds as part of a sting, you might catch something.”
She said, “They’re often how it’s spread. But how—”
“Your suspects know,” he said.
She mouthed an ‘oh,’ and said, “Catch Blacktongue early and you can stop it, though it leaves you needing medication for the rest of your life. I take the pills in work.”
His laugh was a bitter snort. “I suppose I’ve got no chance of getting my hands on any?” He felt the oppressive presence of a Snark rumbling by on the next street.
She looked down,
scraped her foot on the step. “I got the vaccine for you,” she said. “But only enough for one person. It’s up to you if you want it.”
“So Liv dies, like Auntie’s dying now.”
“Auntie’s old!” Marian said, her eyes glinting. “She has no quality of life.”
“Did you give it to her on purpose?”
“No! Of course not! What sort of monster—”
“Would infect other people, innocent people? How’d you do it?”
“I didn’t,” Marian said. “But there are people who will break in for a few hundred quid, while the target’s out. Just leave an infected fly buzzing around to spread the virus. Or someone immunized who’ll brush up against the target during the infectious window.”
“The target? A nice, sterile name for an innocent woman.”
“Your whore isn’t innocent!”
“Her name,” he snarled, gripping her arm, “is Liv. She has a name. She has kids. Is it their fault, too?”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t know—I, I just followed you one day, waited for you to come out, saw her. I didn’t know.”
“Will you let Liv and her children die?” He said. He grabbed her arm and dragged her down the steps.
“Stop it!” She tried to reach into her bag, but her right arm was clamped in his hands, and the bag was hanging over her left shoulder so that she couldn’t unzip it left-handed. He guessed she was carrying a taser or pepper spray “Let go of me!”
Instead he dragged her down the steps into the danger zone. “Commuters have to cross this.” He chin-cocked the cracked paving slabs onto which he dragged her, the weak spot in the route to the other side of the square, and the steps up to the monorail stop, and safety. “You’re not the only one who can work things out.” He stamped his feet, letting the delicious, delirious twitching have its way at last, drumming his heels on the ground right next to a couple of upraised slabs, imitating the symptoms of Blacktongue. “You might be safe from the virus, but you won’t survive a Snark attack.”
“Thom, please.” She tried to wriggle free, but he gripped her left arm in his right hand, to pull her around in a parody of a dance. “Please, Thom, let me go. I’ll give you the vaccine. Here,” she said, trying to pull free, “let me give it you now.”