The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “I’m diabetic,” said Warren, by way of explanation.

  “Food,” agreed Helen Pomeroy. “I’ll just…empty the vending machine, then.”

  After a thoughtfully-provided carrier bag had been filled with wrappers and Warren Meldrew had declined a curt invitation to join in a fresh game of Strip-Jack-Naked — once he’d had it explained to him that it wasn’t anything to do with weird sex — a small commotion broke out beyond the glass.

  All four men lurched to see what the problem was: Dr Bill struggled back to his feet and pressed himself against the pane.

  Natalya came up to the glass and shook her head. Even behind the plastic bubble that engulfed her head she looked pessimistic. Rhiannon was heading for the decontamination doorway: Natalya returned to a bench, and Ben saw her raise her foot as if to kick something, before setting it down again carefully.

  The period of decontamination felt like the longest time had even been made to stretch. Daniel began to hop from foot to foot with impatience: Dr Bill remained with his face pressed to the window, watching Natalya and Anil checking and rechecking something Ben couldn’t guess at.

  “What’s happened?” Warren asked, uneasy.

  “Shut up,” Daniel suggested.

  “No, but what’s happened?” Ben asked, glancing between the observation window and the decontamination door.

  “Nothing good,” said Daniel, which Ben felt he could figure out himself. He also felt this wasn’t far removed from “shut up”.

  Rhiannon finally emerged, her hair wet and her face an angry pink, clad in a tracksuit. “It’s no good,” she said, immediately. “Wait — who’s this?”

  “Warren Meldrew,” said Warren. “From XXXXX/XXXXXXX.”

  Rhiannon didn’t spare him another word. “We’ll have to wait a couple of days to be one hundred on it,” she said, addressing herself mainly to Daniel — Dr Bill was still looking through the window and Ben accepted without insult that he was hardly the person to be processing this information himself. “But it’s not reacting at all. There’s no recognition — well, there’s not a proportion of recognition that gives me much hope.”

  “What does that—” Ben began, but Warren Meldrew was speaking.

  “I’m told,” he said, nervously, “that it worked on the original samples. There was a retest before release — part of the reason for delay — making sure the freeze hadn’t led to any degradation—”

  “Oh bullshit,” said Dr Bill, peering through the window, “that wasn’t the reason for the delay at all and you know we know that. Save us the company spiel.”

  Rhiannon gave Warren Meldrew a long, penetrating look. “Oh, it worked on the original samples, did it?” she asked, with a kind of hostility Ben hadn’t witnessed in a while, from anyone.

  “Yes,” said Warren Meldrew, backing up. “At a ratio of about one thousandth to one it was still inhibiting viral reproduction, I have the whole—” he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his jacket’s inside pocket and tried to give it to her.

  “Wow,” said Rhiannon. Ben was impressed to see that even Daniel leaned away from her. “A serum designed for use on a virus with an HIV-level mutation rate and a noteworthy history of hybridising from reassortment works on the stage it was designed to work on and not the virus that’s developed after god knows how many years of free development in the global population, just—” she made a grabbing motion with her hand, as if harvesting mushrooms, “—picking up other RNA from billions of other viruses. Amazing. Who could possibly have guessed.”

  Warren Meldrew bumped into Ben in his eagerness to put a little space between Rhiannon and himself. “I’m not a—”

  Rhiannon rubbed her face. “We have,” she said, with emphasis, “every bit of surrendered data. We have no understanding of this fucking virus that Natalya and the rest of us hadn’t already managed to reach on our own, and there are some sizeable gaps because — to put this in idiot pharma rep speak—”

  Warren backed away a little further.

  “—When you take a mutation which comes to your irresponsible shitheaded attention because it is unusually good at forming hybrids — and you repeatedly grow that mutation and encourage it to hybridise — what you get is a very difficult to pin down virus and what you definitely do not get is something which will still respond to some bullshit serum you cooked up NEARLY A DECADE AGO.”

  Ben moved out of Warren’s way, and Warren bumped into the wall instead. He held up both of his hands. “I didn’t have anything to do with this,” he said, “I sell eczema creams.”

  “It’s not like your pigheaded company hasn’t heard of the fucking flu,” Rhiannon snapped. “They make enough money flogging placebo-strength flu shots in the bloody Philippines. It changes every season and that’s only picking from a short list of potential proteins — you must be keeping something back, no one is this dumb—”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” repeated Warren, as if someone had pulled a string in his back. “I, most of the management didn’t know, things change a lot, better handover procedures probably needed but—”

  “How can you even know if it’s the right damn serum—” Rhiannon snapped. “The whole defining characteristic of this virus is the hybridisation and a major constituent is infamous for its mutation speeds—”

  Daniel, who seemed to be enjoying this, leaned against the opposite wall. “And if they’re assuming it’ll mutate its way down to something less virulent,” he said, “it’s got a three-year latency window to spread as widely as it needs to. There’s no need for it to find a balance with its host.”

  Rhiannon took two more steps forward and jabbed a finger up at Warren’s face.

  “I just sell eczema creams,” Warren repeated. “I don’t — I didn’t want to come here, I want to be at home.”

  “You’re a stooge of a in irresponsible, greedy, untrustworthy—” Rhiannon said.

  “People keep telling me they’re going to do something to my kids—”

  Dr Bill got down from the window and back into his wheelchair. “Are you suggesting it’s undefeatable?” he asked, ignoring Warren entirely.

  “It’s not like they inoculated us,” Warren went on, to an audience of no one. “We’re as much at risk as everyone else. I didn’t know.”

  “No,” said Rhiannon, her face hardening. “No I am not. But his bloody minders — the scale of what they’ve just wandered into — out of blind greed and bloody managers—”

  “So,” said Ben, nervously, “what we’ve mostly established is that blaming people isn’t going to help?”

  Rhiannon stopped for a moment and threw up her hands. “What is going to help?” She glanced at Daniel and added hastily, “I mean, there are a couple of things that definitely will but—”

  “Shh,” said Daniel.

  Natalya passed through the decontamination door.

  “Rhiannon,” she said.

  Rhiannon passed back through the door, with a finally angry glance at Warren Meldrew. The colour seemed to have leeched from his face until it nearly matched his suit.

  “No joy,” Dr Bill sighed.

  Natalya shrugged. She had an expression which Ben thought bordered on angry, but wasn’t anything like the thunderous fury which had ripped through Rhiannon. “We can work with this.”

  “Yeah,” said Daniel, unconvinced.

  “It will take a lot, lot longer than they led us to hope,” said Natalya, drying her hands on the front of her sweater, “but we can work with this.”

  Ben exhaled slowly.

  “I appreciate,” Natalya added, looking at him, “this is too late for some.” She glanced beside him at Warren Meldrew. “Who is this?”

  “He’s a rep from X/X,” said Dr Bill, simply.

  Natalya’s composure somewhat dented, and she advanced on Warren Meldrew with a speed that made Ben flinch.

  “Well,” said Natalya, without raising her voice. “It is convenient to have you here. You can be the one to talk to t
he press.”

  Warren Meldrew gave her a nervous look. “I’m not cleared to do that,” he said, swallowing. “We’re under very strict instructions at the moment to clear any statements with the press office and they’re going overtime.”

  “Tough shit,” said Natalya. She pointed at Ben. “The press is right here. Tell him everything.”

  Ben returned home after dark. His Kapture probably contained more information about the internal practices of X/X than their own documentation did, a list of managerial changes longer than a phone book, and more shouting than a football match. His head had filled up with nervous conversations about enforced tests, and how to prevent further spread.

  He was half-way through a slice of dry toast when his phone rang again.

  He looked around the flat: Kingsley had evidently come in and gone out again, for there was food in the cat’s bowl and the bike by the wall. Ben took out his phone.

  Dad (mobile)

  Said the screen.

  “No,” said Ben, and hung up.

  There was a note on the kitchen worktop reading, I O U 4 TV LICENSE.

  The TV was switched off.

  Ben went to turn it back on again, and stopped. He thought about Warren Meldrew: he thought about I work in payroll, and I sell eczema creams and they keep telling me they’ll do something to my kids and beaten until stomach ruptures.

  He took his Macbook out of his bag, and opened up a new document.

  “Shit,” said Ben, aloud, closing the Macbook again. “I didn’t tell Stella.”

  “Mandatory,” Tasneen said, laying such heavy stress on the syllable that she looked as if she was having a seized. Ben pushed his coffee backward and forward between two hands. The college cafeteria’s milk frother was out of service, leaving what Tasneen called ‘actual, genuine, Ben-unfriendly coffee’ as the only caffeinated option.

  It tasted like punishment.

  “It’s not actually my fault,” Ben pointed out, keeping his voice low. “I’m just…watching this unfold.”

  “From right next to the action,” said Tasneen, all but dreamily. “It’s like some kind of mid-nineties apocalypse TV, Ben, they’ll be barricading people in their homes next and send round a guy with a bell and some red paint to write ‘unclean’ on people’s houses and—”

  “You didn’t see the news yet, then?” Ben asked, uncomfortable and caressing a cooling coffee cup. He’d woken to Kingsley switching the volume up on the TV very pointedly, and found the first voice he consciously understood for the day to be Dr Bill’s. It was disorienting. He’d thought, half-awake, that he was on the phone. “Call yourself a journalism student. How’re…how’s home?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject,” said Tasneen, with a grimace that answered the question more effectively than half an hour of conversation could have, “D’you mean the stock footage of the tanks?”

  “Oh, it’s not stock,” said Ben, who was unfortunately familiar with most the BBC’s military archive footage from one of his most boring weeks of his entire employment there. “They sent someone out there at considerable expense to film a bunch of tanks doing nothing on Salisbury Plain.”

  “Porton Down,” Tasneen corrected. “Are you drinking that?”

  “No,” said Ben, “they’re reopening Porton Down. The tanks were on Salisbury Plain — that’s mine—”

  “You said you weren’t drinking it,” Tasneen said, “and it’s gone cold anyway.”

  “Slightly less than molten isn’t the same as cold—”

  “Don’t be such a pedant,” she said, taking a sip. “You’d better not have a cold. Military quarantine.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, deflating over the space where his coffee had been. “Military quarantine.”

  It was just an idea they were putting forward, he wanted to say. The same sort that got vociferously shouted down in Commons and which no one would ever let pass in a million years. Dr Bill had called it an overreaction and sarcastically asked if the quarantine was going to be staffed by robots, leading to the baldly amusing spectacle of Andrew Marr telling him to behave himself, live on the news.

  “You know in films,” said Tasneen, setting down her purloined coffee and giving him a more sympathetic look from between smudged eyes, “this is normally when they discover a cure.”

  When it’s too late, Ben thought, for at least one person.

  “Yeah well,” Ben muttered, instead, “in films they don’t care when people are getting the shit kicked out of them for working for the wrong company.”

  “People read the papers and do the dumb thing.” Tasneen said. She didn’t make a face, and for a moment Ben was confused, too caught up in military quarantine and mandatory testing and Porton Down and the uncomfortable violence that accompanied every theoretical debate.

  After a moment of silence it occurred to him, like a slap in the mouth, what someone like Tasneen knew first-hand about people reading the papers, and doing the stupid thing, and felt his cheeks grow hot.

  A PLEA FOR SANITY: “MY SISTER IS DEAD, BUT X/X EMPLOYEES AREN’T TO BLAME”.

  “I can’t believe you put something in the Sun,” Tasneen said, offering him a crisp.

  “The kind of people kicking people to death don’t read the bloody Guardian,” Ben pointed out, rejecting it.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Tasneen, with conviction Ben was sure was born of experience. “People act weird when they’re scared. Or even just righteously pissed off — I used to know this girl who’d send threatening letters to people who worked at Huntingdon.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “I think my sister used to do that as well.”

  “Big into animal rights?” Tasneen asked, with the same note of caution everyone seemed to be using whenever they mentioned Leah. He wanted to tell her that it was okay, that the weeks had come and smoothed off the roughest of edges, but somehow, he thought, if he assured her he was fine, he wouldn’t be any more. It was easier to just keep working.

  “Big into fairness,” Ben said, checking his phone. Making sure articles were still up, he thought ruefully, probably needn’t have become a ritual after all. He still checked. “I mean she did also use to nick massive, massive quantities of prawn cocktail crisps from the corner shop, but in theory she was big into fairness.”

  “Don’t blame her,” said Tasneen, tipping the bag back to get the last of the lurid dust of flavourings. “Shit’s like crack.”

  “Uh,” Ben said, noting one of the other headlines flagged for his attention. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be reading mine after all.”

  “And after you put all that effort into writing something accessible to nine-year-old reading levels and cretins on building sites,” said Tasneen, shaking her head. “Outrageous.”

  “No, look,” Ben said, and instead of showing her the article, began reading it out.

  “I can’t look if you don’t show me—”

  “Yeah but there’s a long list of other people in my phone I don’t want you to call—”

  “It worked out in the end,” Tasneen pointed out archly, but she sat back and opened a carton of apple juice with an expression of patient concentration. “Continue, reading slave.”

  “WHO release recommendation for world governments: military-enforced quarantines may be only way to contain spread of KBV.”

  “Get the fuck out,” Tasneen said, solemnly. It clearly didn’t come as a surprise; neither of them had really believed their own assertions that it wasn’t going to happen.

  “No, listen. As an artificial virus, KBV has no known reservoir host—”

  “What’s that?”

  Ben wracked the deeper recesses of his reading. “Uh, it’s like another species where the virus just sort of sits in the population and doesn’t kill them off so much, and then it can jump back into people once natural immunity’s gone down, which I don’t think counts with KBV because no one ends up immune.”

  Tasneen went to say something but closed her mout
h.

  “‘Just dead’, yeah, I know.” Ben frowned. “—isolation of confirmed cases and mandatory testing—”

  “No one’s going to agree to that,” said Tasneen, slurping apple juice through a straw, and in contravention to the obvious. “That’s fucked.”

  Ben was so engrossed in reading about what the WHO had recommended on his way home that he nearly walked into a few people, and one or two inanimate objects. No one seemed especially wound up, but, Ben thought, it usually took a couple of days for these things to work their way up to shouting.

  He flopped over the futon as soon as he got in, and flicked through until he found a loop of Dr Bill discussing with four other people exactly what implications martial quarantine had, whether the government would take it seriously, whether the population would comply, whether the army would comply…

  He checked his emails.

  To: Khoo, Daniel; Ben M

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: quarantine

  Not a word to anyone about you know what.

  Ben wondered if they’d genuinely throw away one of their most valuable scientists over something like this, and then wondered why he was wondering. Of course they would.

  At half-six Kingsley returned with a clatter and a bang and slammed his bike down against the wall hard enough to dent the plaster.

  “Is—”

  “Fuck off.”

  Ben sank down into the futon and pretended to focus on Dr Bill’s beard, close-captioned slowly with the words, “It’s still important to preserve a sense of normality — if we treat people as if we can’t trust them, they will behave that way.”

  Kingsley stalked off to his bedroom, slammed a few more things, and returned in slightly less cycling gear and no better a mood.

  “Do we have to watch this?”

  Ben shrugged, and offered him the remote.

  Kingsley didn’t take it.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Kingsley stormed on into the kitchen, and Ben winced his way through a succession of bangs, thumps, and clatters, as Minnie dug her claws into his leg and began to thrash her tail.