The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  There was a conversation of some kind between the shorter woman and Natalya, partially in sign language, and they opened the cooler. They removed a rack of vials — Ben guessed there were six, maybe the full nine, but couldn’t see — and laid them on a counter.

  “It must be weird checking your own blood to see if you’re infected,” he said.

  “Depends what with,” said Daniel, disinterested. “If you need a control group in a hurry yours and your labmates is usually the stand-in. Everyone’s got plenty of blood.”

  “Thanks,” said Ben, “that’s not helpful.”

  “Oh right,” said Daniel, glancing away from the glass for a second. “I forgot. Are you going to photograph this?”

  Ben shook his head, and looked away from the glass. “I mean, I don’t even know what degree of illegal that is.”

  “More or less illegal than snuffling coke like a pig in swill?” Daniel asked, with a pointed smile.

  “I don’t really do that…much…any more,” Ben explained, turning back to the glass. “Also the only people who give a shit about that are the police. If I do something here the company’ll be pissed off as well.” He thought about this for a bit. “I wonder if this is covered under whistleblowing, or…”

  Ben pulled out his phone and began leafing through for the PDF of McNae’s.

  He couldn’t find the whistleblowing section and couldn’t remember if he’d actually imagined it or not.

  Daniel said, “The serology for the separate sets of those is going to take a while,” and turned his back on the window.

  After a moment, Ben put his phone away again.

  Daniel stared at the opposite wall for a minute and said, “This may amaze you but this isn’t what I’d planned to do with my day.”

  “No,” said Ben, “me either.”

  Daniel drummed his fingers along the bottom of the window, behind him, and said, “If I found a different club with slightly less grating music—”

  “You’re thinking about that now?” Ben asked, startled out of a wordless, thoughtless reverie which he would have quite enjoyed if it hadn’t also been shaded with a looming sense of danger.

  “Trying not to think about what the fuck’s going to happen to my career or my mum’s deep sense of shame if I’m caught trespassing,” said Daniel, lightly, “so yeah, let’s talk gay nightclubs, please.”

  “You could come to the Princess,” Ben said, acquiescing. “Guaranteed non-shit music.”

  “Is that because you work there?” Daniel suggested, giving Ben a judgemental look.

  “Yeah.”

  “That kind of guarantees the opposite, doesn’t it? How’re you supposed to dance until three to the sound of breathy white girls with guitars sighing about how much they wish they were Amelie?”

  “The clientele usually manage it,” said Ben primly, “and fuck you, sometimes I play white boys with guitars complaining that their girlfriends don’t understand them.”

  “Diverse,” Daniel agreed.

  Ben looked over his shoulder. There was only one person in the lab now — the shorter woman. “Natalya’s gone,” he said, sudden alarm seizing his throat.

  “Calm the fuck down,” said Daniel, without looking. “Literally no one hangs around in the lab waiting for serology, or for the thermocycler to complete the PCR run for that matter, if there’s someone they can delegate to — and the thermocycler keeps the samples until you’re ready for them so strictly speaking you don’t need to delegate at all, Lordes is just a bitch about it.”

  Ben looked over his shoulder again, caught the virologist’s eye, and received a surprise thumbs-up for his trouble. He looked away.

  “Have you considered,” he said, resuming their earlier conversation, “going to not-clubs.”

  “Museums and art galleries tend to frown a little more fully on toilet sex,” said Daniel, pursing his lips. “Also, there are children there.”

  “Possibly,” Ben added, with a certain amount of sarcasm, “dial back the toilet sex part as well.”

  “I happen to like toilet sex.”

  “Sounds unhygienic,” said Ben, examining the floor.

  “Sex in general is unhygienic and dangerous,” said Daniel with satisfaction. “Might as well remove the illusions from it.”

  “What illusions?”

  “That it’s necessarily congruent to love.”

  Ben thought about this for a minute, and was in the process of trying to formulate the words, I really don’t like the sound of that when the door to wherever decontamination happened opened, and Natalya came out in the clothes she’d been wearing before she went in.

  “It will be some hours,” she said, joining them at the window.

  “I should have brought a drink,” Daniel muttered. “Is there a cafeteria in here?”

  “If you go out you will not be able to get back in,” said Natalya. “When David comes back, perhaps. I don’t like to leave the observation window.”

  Ben blinked. “You don’t trust, um…her?”

  “Rhiannon I would trust to the end of the world, but she is not the only person in this building with access to Group Four lab,” Natalya explained, leaning on the window sill. “I prefer to know if anyone else is trying to involve themselves.”

  “This is a little paranoid,” Daniel protested, fiddling with his hair until it stood straighter, sharper, and more stiffly above his forehead.

  “Better safe than sorry is the motto of any good laboratory,” Natalya reminded him. “But all the same I wish I had brought a book.”

  With almost one mind, the three of them sank into sitting: or rather, Ben sat awkwardly in a position he wouldn’t be able to maintain for long, Daniel sat cross-legged without any apparent effort, and Natalya squatted.

  “Wait,” said Ben, recalling. “I have a game on my phone that lets you sync one game of Strip Jack Naked or Blackjack or anything across several devices.”

  “I’m on Android,” Daniel said.

  “Should still work.”

  “What’s Strip Jack Naked?” Natalya asked, retrieving her phone with a glance through the window at her colleague. She gave a thumbs-up through the glass, which looked completely out of place on her — Ben wondered what she was like when she wasn’t tense with the horrible possibility of impending death and traumatised by kidnapping. More cheerful, maybe?

  “It’s a card game,” Ben said, opening the game. “Me and Rachel played it for money at the hosp—fuck.”

  “Ah, good,” said Natalya, “this is you, yes? I accept the invitation to join the game and it will open?”

  “Hospital?” Daniel asked under his breath.

  “Yes,” said Ben, a little too loudly, “it should just open up.”

  They had played several rounds of Strip Jack Naked, Blackjack, Rummy, and one of Texas Hold ‘Em (which only Natalya liked); the hours passed slowly, but aside from Daniel’s occasional unanswered enquiries about “which hospital? Why?” they stayed away from most personal conversation.

  “Am I imagining it,” said Daniel, “or is Yagoda a particularly Russian and not very Kazakh name?”

  “I changed my name,” said Natalya, “for reasons I am sure are obvious.”

  “But your surname?”

  “Russian names come with an expectation of scientific prowess,” said Natalya, “it was prudent. It saved my family further embarrassment. It is also, I think, memorable.”

  They sank into a silence for some time after that.

  David arrived, left, and returned with a few cans of full-sugar Coke which had apparently been made for sale in Turkey, then left again.

  “I need to pee,” Ben said, leaning against the window pitifully.

  “Not long,” said Natalya, once again watching the window like a hawk.

  Twice, two people had come in and stared down at the small group on the floor, to which Natalya had very pointedly said “They’re with me, and Group Four is in use,” and Ben had contained minor heart seizures.
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br />   “At least if your bladder bursts you’ll have something to think about which isn’t being arrested for trespassing,” said Daniel with a certain amount of malice.

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” Ben complained.

  “Well now you can think about something that isn’t needing to piss.”

  “Daniel you are the literal opposite of helpful.”

  “Is that David?” Daniel added, peering into the lab.

  “Yes,” Natalya said. “He has the results and thinks Rhiannon should see them first.” She seemed even more tense. “This isn’t good.”

  David presented a plastic-laminated print-out to Rhiannon. They conferred in silence. Ben saw Rhiannon’s mouth, even though the obscuring plastic bubble and three layers of glass, shape the word “shit”.

  Natalya beckoned impatiently from the window. Rhiannon seemed to take an eerily long time to reach them – David left for the exit door again.

  Looking like a messenger from another world, the woman in the blue Racal suit plastered the laminate up against the glass.

  Ben read a series of numbers he could in no way put a context to, and skimmed through the sheet of paper until he reached some which made slightly more sense to him:

  HIV (ab/ag/incl. p24): DETECTED

  Lyssavirus IgM/IgG: DETECTED

  Ebola RNA: POSITIVE (>5x10^8)

  He glanced at Natalya, who had pressed her lips together and wasn’t saying anything.

  KBV: [assumed]. [P (cross-reaction) 0.000000342]

  He looked at Daniel, who appeared to have slid slightly further down the glass towards the door they’d come in by.

  “That’s a high load,” said Daniel.

  “We’ve yet to have any samples with a low one,” said Natalya. “Even in this short space of time it multiples a great deal, without becoming symptomatic. Interesting.”

  Ben did not find this interesting. Ben found this highly unpleasant. He looked through the glass at Rhiannon, who looked incredibly troubled and was trying to get Natalya’s attention in a distressed, non-urgent way.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Aside from a currently incurable viral infection,” said Natalya, “yes. I will remain asymptomatic for several years and this confirms what I suspected about that injection.” She did not look particularly alright to Ben’s eyes, but her voice was steady.

  She tapped on the window, tapped at the results, and pantomimed bringing them through. She also pantomimed a camera, and murmured to Ben. “Take one shot through the glass, also.”

  Ben, still mindful of her earlier comments on the legality of photographing anything there, swallowed uncomfortably, and took out his phone. He was quite sure she could just print out the results somewhere else; then he made the mistake of wondering what could happen to them in the time it took for her to decontaminate.

  He took three or four pictures of the results pressed against the glass and, feeling like an idiot, gave Rhiannon a solemn thumbs-up when he’d finished. He sent them immediately to Natalya.

  “Right,” said Natalya, leading them out through the door they’d entered through.

  “Where are we going?” Daniel asked, as she led them left instead of back towards the reception.

  “A few more things,” said Natalya briskly.

  They came into a cramped room with a number of laptops and attendant desktop computers next to them, several old grey filing cabinets, a shelf full of blue box files, and a kettle with four cups in the corner. There was a whiteboard with the words “ANIL: Thursday/Friday” in the corner and a drawing of a cat in another.

  Natalya went to one of the laptops and, after some rooting around on the desk, produced a memory stick. Ben stared around the room, surprised to find that no matter the level of importance of the work, the type of person it housed, or the aims they pursued, an office of a small team was an office of a small team and identical in every respect to the one he’d occupied as a researcher.

  “I’ve emailed some of it to Bill,” Natalya said, still doing something with the laptop. “And some of it is in the filing cabinet and can’t be copied easily.” She ejected the memory stick and handed it to Daniel. “This is for you,” she said.

  Ben said, “This is a new level of illegal, I take it?”

  “It’s breaking my contract,” Natalya agreed. “But it is merely insurance.”

  Ben took a deep breath as his throat began to close again. “Because you’re going into quarantine?”

  Nataly looked up and stared at him as if he’d asked about the colour of her underwear. “What good will I do there, doing nothing?” she said, quite archly and with a much stronger accent than she usually spoke with.

  “Well,” said Daniel, with an effort to look reasonable that wasn’t wholly successful, and Ben held his breath against what he was sure was going to be something awful, “you won’t infect anyone else in there.”

  The angry look Ben had been trying to avoid giving him lashed out anyway, but the response remained silent.

  Natalya, however, did not appear to be insulted. “I have no official test record as my samples have very kindly been mislaid,” she pointed out, “there are still retests to wait upon. And BSL-4 conditions ensure I do not infect anyone here while in the lab. If they do not let me in the lab, I can at least,” she reached down and pressed a key on the laptop, “run simulations at home. I can do none of this in an isolation ward.”

  David poked his head around the door. “Have you backed everything up?”

  “Yes,” said Natalya. “If you wish to remove my test from Q10 go ahead.”

  David nodded, and withdrew with a wave at Daniel. “Nice to meet you in person.”

  Ben was far from overwhelmingly happy to find himself back outside: the clouds had cleared up to a dismally bright day but the wind was still trying to remove his ears, and standing in the dazzling, setting sun just made the whole experience of sitting in a windowless corridor for several hours while KBV samples were processed on the other side of the glass all the more surreal.

  “I s’pose we’d better find the tube station,” Daniel reflected gloomily, shivering. He hadn’t brought a coat, again, and looked as if he regretted that decision. “Lordes will murder me and I’ll never be heard from again.”

  “You didn’t have to come,” Ben said, taking out his phone.

  Daniel rolled his eyes. “You can’t just dangle an opportunity for intrigue in front of my face and expect me not to escape from Lordes for the afternoon,” he said, rubbing his arms briskly.

  Ben unlocked his phone. The photos of Natalya’s diagnosis were still on screen, and as he whisked them away it occurred to him that Leah’s must have looked the same: DETECTED; DETECTED; POSITIVE. KBV: [assumed].

  He opened up the maps.

  “This way,” he said, after a minute. “Wait, no, hold on. Opposite direction.”

  “Yeah,” said Daniel, following him, “maybe I should check my own phone.”

  “Go on, then,” Ben muttered.

  Daniel made no move to.

  They walked along the verge for about a hundred metres, Daniel with his hands buried deep in his jeans pockets and Ben with one hand in his armpit and his phone in front of him. After the verge ran out and they were obliged to cross the road, Ben said, “D’you…want to borrow my coat or something?”

  “No,” Daniel said immediately. He peered at the setting sun. “I mean, if we don’t get to the station before it gets dark and werewolves come out—”

  “It’s not that far.”

  “Right.”

  They walked in silence for a little longer. Ben checked his phone again, and a horrible suspicion crept over him. “Wait, no…other direction,” he said, slowly.

  “Fucking hell,” Daniel complained, “I’m going to die out here in the wilderness of Zone 4. Give me that.”

  He took the phone out of Ben’s unresisting hand, rotated it a few times, and said, “See what you’ve done here is been a moron. It’s ba
ck in the opposite direction.”

  “That’s what I just said,” Ben said patiently.

  They turned, and began walking back towards HPA again.

  “They’re going to think we’re staking them out,” Daniel observed.

  “Can I have my phone back?”

  “Not until you’ve learned how to read a map,” Daniel muttered, giving it back to him.

  They ran out of verge in the opposite direction, but were rewarded with a pavement eventually.

  “Ah,” said Daniel, inhaling as if he was smelling a flower. “Civilisation.”

  “D’you think she’s going to be okay?” Ben asked, checking the map on his phone again.

  Daniel stopped in the middle of the pavement and stared at him as if he had suddenly started speaking a foreign language. “No?” he said, as Ben waited for him to start walking again. “No, she has a four year window and I think, Ben, what is actually going to happen is she’s going to fucking die, and maybe you shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  Ben sighed and put his phone back in his jacket pocket. “I meant in the short term,” he said, as Daniel continued to stare at him as if he had an extra head. “It just…with what happened with the kidnapping…I don’t think there’s anyone at home to…to look after her.”

  “Yeah? That’s probably a good thing,” Daniel said, walking again at last.

  “Jesus,” said Ben, staring at him.

  Daniel made an expansive gesture which took in the darkening sky and the apparent lunacy of the entire known world, and said, “She’s planning on breaking quarantine like some mad Soviet bitch—”

  “Shh,” Ben muttered.

  “—it’s probably best if there isn’t anyone at home to get in her way,” Daniel went on, slightly more quietly but not much. “Or for her to infect by accident.”

  “That’s—” Ben frowned, and put his hands back in his pockets. “Look, I’m just saying, it’s…it must be a stressful time. You know. With the kidnapping and the conspiracy and the infection with the incurable disease and the total lack of anyone to rely on?”

  Daniel inclined his head with what Ben hoped was going to be sympathy. “Okay, listen,” he said, “this may contravene your deeply-entrenched journalistic instincts—”