The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Okay,” said the perfectly-casual reporter, who was wearing perfectly-clean white trainers and had perfectly-clean white teeth, “so you said it’s eighty-six percent accurate…should we be worried that this is potentially leading people who do have KBV away from getting a proper test?”

  “Bloody irresponsible,” muttered Ben’s dad.

  “Well,” said the science explainer, smiling at her with significantly less brilliantly white teeth, “the sputum test is calibrated towards sensitivity. So that margin of fourteen percent is false positives — of every hundred people who’ve had the test and had it come up with three reds, you have fourteen who get their triple-test back negative.” He turned to the camera. “That’s why it’s important not to panic if you get three reds, but go to a doctor and have blood taken.”

  “Because it might be wrong,” said the reporter.

  “Because it might be a false positive,” agreed the science explainer. “Do be cautious, behave as if you are potentially infectious — no kissing, no toothbrush sharing, no unprotected sex, be very careful about what happens to your blood if you’re injured — but don’t despair.”

  “That’s right,” said the reporter, “remember, it’s important to keep your hopes up, whatever the outcome of your sputum test. Laboratories around the world are hard at work looking for a cure, and the long latency period means there’s a good chance one will be found before you even start feeling sick.”

  “And it’s worth remembering,” added the science explainer, talking directly into the camera, “that KBV has killed comparatively few people so far. There are lots of other illnesses, like measles, the flu, HIV/AIDS, diabetes even, which have killed hundreds of times more people. It’s not a death sentence.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Ben’s dad, changing the channel, “but people get better from those, don’t they.”

  “Geoff,” said Melinda, annoyed. “I was watching that.”

  It had just begun to get dark on the twenty-fourth, and Melinda had laid out some biscuits and cups of tea on the coffee table. The fairy lights had come on by themselves.

  “They’ve got a light sensor,” said Melinda, proudly.

  They were refracted in migraineish directions from the surrounding tinsel. Ben, despite repeated urging, skirted the biscuits and sipped at over-sugared tea with the feeling that somewhere in the room a landmine was waiting to be detonated.

  “How’s college?” Melinda asked, at last. “I know you started telling us and then that man from the Salvation Army called and we got a bit distracted.”

  “Er,” Ben swallowed hot tea and tried to think up something non-committally positive. “It’s, yeah, it’s. It’s alright.”

  “Not fallen behind on anything this time?” his dad muttered into his own tea.

  Ben thought about the list of legal summaries, which had reached double figures, and Victoria’s polite enquiry as to whether he remembered that he had to do more than one project this year. “No,” he said, holding his tea against his mouth. “No, it’s fine.”

  Melinda looked over at his father. She glanced at Ben, and then back at Ben’s dad, who shrugged. Melinda said, with a tight smile, “Have you spoken to Leah recently, at all, love?”

  Ben thought about his wrestling match with Leah’s sanity. He thought about trying to wring Stella’s number out of her while she ranted at him about her blood and the food and how hungry she was. He thought about the sound her fists or her head had made, hitting the wall. Maybe her foot. Probably her head.

  He looked at Melinda, smiling insincerely at him with pale pink lipstick and a determined desire to care about someone she’d never actually met, because Ben cared and Geoff pretended to, and she was sure it mattered if she did.

  He looked at her hands, which still had a little bit of icing sugar on one side, and her horrible duck-patterned blouse, because it was Christmas and Ben constituted company now and you had to look nice at Christmas. He looked at her hair, where she’d covered up grey with honey blonde dye and put on an entire can of hairspray to hold that stupid spiky, bouffant hair do in place for no one’s eyes but his and his Dad’s.

  “No,” said Ben. He felt obscurely sorry for her, but not as sorry as he felt for himself.

  “Well don’t give up on her, Ben,” Melinda said, sipping tea. “Don’t give up hope, you know that’s important.”

  Ben felt something rippled through his face which he wanted not to be an expression of disgust but which obviously was.

  He stared into his tea.

  “No,” he said. “I have to give up hope and so do you.”

  “Pardon?” Melinda said, putting her tea down. “Ben—”

  “The more I learn about this,” Ben said to his tea, his voice rising, “the more I know they’re not going to pull some miracle cure out of thin air in time to stop her dying, alright? They’re nowhere near. And she is dying, right now, there in that shitty hospital, she’s going to die, and she’s going to die in horrible, horrible fucking pain, and no one can stop it, and if we actually just accept that now instead of sitting around hoping it’s not going to happen maybe it’s not going to — not going to — you’re just making it worse.”

  Melinda took a deep breath. “Ben, darling, sometimes people do just spontaneously get better and no one knows why.”

  Ben half-slammed the teacup down on the table. He saw Melinda wince but didn’t register it properly. “No one’s done that with this, have they?”

  “Ben,” snapped his father, half-rising. “Stop shouting at Melinda. You’re being very self-centred.” He cleared his throat. “She’s my daughter, it’s not easy. And it’s not as if—” he pointed at Ben, finally on his feet. “It’s not as if you’re the first person in the world to lose someone to a protracted illness. Not by a long shot.”

  Ben flopped back into the sofa. “At least with cancer you can go and see someone and hold their fucking hand.”

  “Enough swearing,” his father growled.

  “She’s not even Leah any more,” Ben said, staring up at him.

  “How the hell would you know?” his father asked, still on his feet. “You don’t talk to her. You’re the only bloody person they’ll let her see because of that stupid form, and you don’t even make the effort to talk to her. How would you know?”

  “Geoff,” Melinda said, reaching out a hand without getting up. “Volume.”

  “How would I know what Leah was like in the first place?” Ben asked, something like stomach bile in his throat.

  “Don’t you take that tone—” his father barked.

  “Oh God,” Ben sighed, “how about I just take a taxi back to the station instead and stop spoiling your nice Christmas with my bad news.”

  “Look, there’s no need for that,” Melinda began, but both of them ignored her.

  In the background the TV, as ignored as Melinda, flashed up some images of a woman mopping a floor in huge yellow rubber gloves, wearing a huge plastic smile.

  “Your mother,” his father snapped, coming over to Ben and looming over him as well as he could — Ben knew if he stood up now he’d have an inch on the old man but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it, “your mother was the one who took Leah off with her, you don’t sit here in my house and imply it’s my fault your sister’s in that hospital.”

  The whole atmosphere of the room began to darken, as if it was filling up with smoke.

  “She took Leah because you didn’t want her,” Ben said, with his head tipped back so he could go on staring up at his father.

  “Now that’s not true,” Melinda attempted, from her corner.

  “Your mother,” Ben’s father repeated, “practically kidnapped that girl—”

  “Dad, I was there for the proceedings, you didn’t even ask for custody of Leah, you barely even bothered for me and that was only because Grandma told you to—”

  “Ben,” Melinda said.

  “I will not stand here and be blamed for—” Geoff shouted

&n
bsp; “If you hadn’t dumped her on Mum she’d have put you on the form in the first place and I wouldn’t be the one who has to listen to her losing her fucking mind,” Ben shouted back, climbing off the end of the sofa. “You want to talk to her, talk to her! You’re still her Dad, they’ll let you do it! You don’t even want to, you just want it not to be your problem!”

  “How bloody dare you—”

  “Will you both please just calm down!”

  “Your problem,” roared Geoff, putting his index finger almost into Ben’s nose, “is you think too bloody much of your own opinion and your own damned self. Can’t possibly be grateful that I chose you and didn’t let your mother take you off to bloody Guatemala and God knows where, oh no. I didn’t have room for two of you—”

  “That’s a fucking lie,” Ben muttered, backing away. “And you know it.”

  “—don’t you dare talk to me like that in my own house—”

  “Darling, please, the neighbours—”

  “—thought I was going to raise my son to be a decent young man and instead got a bloody high-strung little girl who can’t stick to anything, can’t even make up his mind whether or not he’s a bloody homosexual—”

  “Geoff, shh—”

  “Funny how that comes up every single time,” Ben shouted, half-way up the stairs. “Almost like you didn’t fucking ‘accept’ it at all, never mind all your big talk about how you’d ‘had a proper think about it’—”

  “Ben—”

  The front door thumped. Down the stairs and through the frosted glass Ben could see a man with an indistinct woman behind him. He continued to back up the stairs as Melinda hurriedly flung open the door.

  A red-faced man with a butcher’s neck and his small pale wife, neither of whom Ben recognised, stood on the doorstep.

  “Would you mind keeping your domestic strife down,” snapped the red-faced man. “We’re trying to watch flipping Toy Story 3 and all my kids can hear is your rotten bloody husband swearing and shouting—”

  Ben took advantage of the interruption to flee into the bathroom.

  He turned the lock, and heard the front door slam with a force that rattled the shampoo bottles on the edge of the bath.

  He sank down onto the floor next to the sink and put his face against the cold porcelain. Everything smelled of Toilet Duck and synthetic air freshener.

  “You’d better not be throwing up in there,” Geoff growled, from the far side of the door.

  Ben thumped his forehead off the sink support.

  “Waste of good food,” Geoff continued.

  “Geoff, please,” Melinda said, hopelessly. “Just let him alone for a minute.”

  “We paid enough money,” Geoff went on, ignoring her, “for you to stop bloody doing that.”

  Ben rubbed his forehead.

  “The only boy in the whole fucking hospital—”

  “Geoff—”

  “And you said you’d stopped,” Geoff said, thumping the bathroom door. “And then you come back with red bloody fingers and disgusting breath, so help me, I am not paying for you to spend more time in those useless clinics—”

  “Geoff, come on, now there’s tea downstairs going cold.”

  “Well he doesn’t care about that, does he?”

  Ben thumped his head off the sink support.

  “What are you doing in there?” his father barked.

  Ben took out his phone from his pocket. He opened up a memo file, and typed, I’m 29 not 14 in it. He saved the memo file, and closed it.

  “BEN.”

  Ben rubbed his forehead. “For fuck’s sake.”

  On the twenty-fifth, Ben watched Dr Who in silence. His father watched Dr Who in silence. Melinda made a valiant attempt to follow the plot but couldn’t work out what was happening and eventually gave up to keep an eye on the turkey.

  Ben said ‘thank you’ for the cafeteire.

  Melinda thanked him for the glass ornament from the V&A Museum, and added it to the tree.

  In an attempt to save the evening from any further fights, Ben took his Macbook upstairs, where next door had failed to lock their wireless, and contemplated something that had been bothering him for some time.

  Why, he wrote in a new file, did we persist so long with the Badai-Tugai/Koneboget origin story after latency was confirmed?

  It was obvious that Dr Anathan had a professional stake in the natural origin hypothesis, and after being consulted before the index cases her conscience probably wanted it to be something out of the wilderness of Central Asia as well. But that didn’t explain why the ‘Wandering Government Inspector’ story had kept circulating.

  Or, Ben thought, typing again, where it had been picked up in the first place. The possibility that the class had been infected on their reunion trip might have made sense to begin with, given the usual incubation time of illnesses and the need for what Dr Bill called a cohort contaminant — something they’d potentially all been exposed to — but the idea that it must have been caught from an attack in Badai-Tugai when no one had reported one seemed…weird.

  He began wandering through online news archives. There were bunches of the same kind of story released together, and most of the time it was a day, two days at most, after someone else had broken it, with very little changed. That was, however, just how the news worked: the natural flow of stories was sometimes used to bury things, usually brought up a little later when the editors noticed, but so far he couldn’t find the right thing being buried.

  Nothing in the AP or Reuters preceded the Wandering Inspector Attack theory hitting the newspapers. There didn’t initially seem to be any mention of it in the English-language newspapers for Tashkent.

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: If you’re not doing anything and you’re not too drunk yet

  Would you mind helping me look for something? I’m trying to find what I guess is the media equivalent of the index case for that really persistent theory that someone with KBV attacked the Tashkent students while they were in Badai-Tugai – you know, the one that’s kind of kept going even after the whole latency thing suggests they were still at Uni in Tashkent at the time?

  He went back to the search. Several papers had picked up the idea and run with it at once, despite there being no confirmation from any police in the area or record of an attack being reported.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: ISN’T IT SUPPOSED TO BE CHRISTMAS

  I can’t believe you’re trying to rope me into doing your homework for you. What happened to the spirit of goodwill and brotherhood to all men and taking a break for the holiday season?

  You owe me at least one actual fun activity.

  And I mean real fun, not horrible hipster fun accompanied by your pseudorapist friends.

  “Ben,” Melinda said, from outside the guest room door. “Do you want some mince pies?”

  “I’m fine,” Ben said, noting the same name on three separate stories. The first one had the earliest date he had so far for the mention of an attack.

  “You haven’t eaten very much,” Melinda persisted.

  “They’re very nice,” Ben said, dutifully. “I’m just full.”

  “They’re not mine, they’re from Sainsbury’s,” Melinda said, “I just meant…you didn’t really eat much dinner. I hope you’re not still upset—”

  “I’m fine,” said Ben. “I’ll have some later.”

  He tried looking up the author’s name instead.

  She was prolific: there were a lot of articles ascribed to her before the KBV outbreak as well, but she’d made a large dent in some of the earliest KBV subject matter, and…Ben scanned through a couple of headlines…she didn’t seem to think much of a lot of the measures for containment or of the efforts of Colindale…or people from outside the UK, for that matter.

  KBV proves that this country needs to stop being so complacent about reported epidemics in non-EU countries.

&nbs
p; Then again, Ben thought, bookmarking her profile page, she was writing predominantly for the Mail. She was probably used to stirring up discontent for no reason.

  Most of the trains were delayed on Boxing Day. Engineering works had run over, and when Ben finally got back into London he found coachloads of irate travellers were being loaded up for shipping out to various stations where the lines weren’t open yet.

  The station looked like a kicked ants nest.

  “Jesus,” Ben said, trying to wrestle his way to the tube entrance.

  It was sealed off with a grille.

  “Tube strike,” said one of the Transport Police, standing next to it.

  “Oh for—” Ben sighed, recalling that by this point the Boxing Day Strike was practically tradition.

  “Buses are a nightmare,” the officer added, by way of advice, “Victoria line’s running most of the way but if I were you I’d walk or get a taxi if you can.”

  “Thanks,” said Ben, who wasn’t entirely sure how many miles it was from Marylebone to his house but was guessing it was more than he really wanted to cover.

  He gave up around Kings Cross, found a Starbucks that was open and not immensely busy, and took up residence on an armchair for an hour.

  Ben checked his emails.

  To: Ben M

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: Happy Christmas etc

  I’ve got some news which should come both as a relief and more of a problem, when’s a good time to call you?

  Ben got out of the armchair, sent a reply that now was fine, and expelled himself back onto the street with his phone in his hand, ready.