The Next Big One
Page 49
“No,” said his father, slowly. “No, no, that’s not…it’s not for me, is it? You could go—”
“If Stella hasn’t invited me,” said Ben, “I don’t think she wants me there either.”
His father made an odd croaking noise, and said, “You didn’t do anything.”
“I think that’s the problem,” said Ben. He tapped his teeth again. “Have you told…have you told Mum?”
“Don’t know where she is.” His father cleared his throat. “No idea where she is. Last I heard she was in Venezula.”
“Suriname,” said Ben, to his fingernails.
“Was that before or after Venezula?” his father asked, confused. “I thought Caracas…”
“I don’t know,” Ben said, surrendering. “She usually only tells Leah…told Leah.”
“Maybe Stella knows.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, sinking into the futon. “Sorry about college.”
There was a rumble on the far end of the line. His father cleared his throat a few more times, until Ben wondered if he was ill, or if there was a fault on the line.
“Hrmmm. Well.” His father stopped, and said, “Hrm. You got one Distinction this time.”
“Yes,” said Ben.
“Better than last time,” said his father. “Isn’t it?”
Spring hadn’t quite advanced enough for the benefits of the sun to extend much beyond it going down, and Ben began to regret only wearing a shirt as soon as he got off the tube. There wasn’t a lot to be done about it, and he stuck his hands in his pocket all the way from the station to the car park.
He hadn’t banked on having to wait half an hour, but in retrospect he probably should have expected it.
The security guard in the car park booth watched him suspiciously, and eventually leaned out of her door with some reluctance — Ben could see a small screen, a tablet of some kind — showing a TV program she was probably loath to break away from.
“Not planning on doing anything stupid, are you?” she asked, adjusting her hat.
“For a given definition of stupid,” Ben said. “I mean, I’m not trying to get in or anything.”
“I know you from somewhere?”
“I’ve been here before,” said Ben, digging his hands further into his pockets. “Just waiting for someone.”
“What’s in your pockets?”
“Phone, wallet, Oyster card, house keys…” Ben gave her a worried look. “Is…that a problem?”
She shrugged. “Well, you’re waiting outside here, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to do something to whoever you’re waiting for,” said the security guard. “I mean, we’ve had a lot of trouble. Not normally this late. But you know—”
“Like Stevenage?”
“Not that bad.” She drew herself up — even standing on the lip of the booth she was shorter than him. “And we’re the solution, not the problem.”
Ben nodded, and after a moment added, “What’re you watching?”
The conversation about Breaking Bad’s finer merits carried him through until the main door opened, and emitted a few people. There was one bike still in the bike racks that Ben could see, and if he squinted he could tell — or guess — that it was a red mountain bike which had seen happier times.
He spotted David’s pale hair, and a moment later the tall, dignified figure of Natalya heading for her death trap of a car. He hoped this meant they’d finished for the night.
Daniel came out of the main door wearing a hoodie, which Ben had honestly never suspected he might even own, and stopped, spotting him in the light from the security booth.
“Fuck are you doing here?” he asked, hurrying over. “Go home, it’s late—”
“I’m a creature of the night,” Ben said, “or at least, I’m being paid to be one. There’s a party you have to come to.”
“Ugh,” Daniel threw back his hood. “I’m incorrectly attired. Also.” He threw one arm around Ben’s waist. “I don’t want to sit in a dirty room listening to your shitty hipster music.”
Ben kissed him.
“I’ve been slaving all day over a hot agent—” Daniel protested, making a very pathetic attempt at fighting him off, “—you smell nice.” He collected himself. “I’ve been slaving over a hot agent all day and you’re trying to coerce me into listening to Apricot Sadness or whatever your fucking horrible friends and their disgusting bands are called, I won’t do—”
Ben laid his head on Daniel’s shoulder. “I can’t vouch for anyone else — and if anyone knows a band called Apricot Sadness it’ll be Molly — but I can assure my set is going to be wall-to-wall shit late 90s techno.”
“You’ll get fired.”
“It’s the theme.”
“That is genuinely the theme? Getting fired?” Daniel poked him.
“No, shit 90s dance music.” Ben jerked his head back towards the building, where a few windows remained lit. “Is your mum speaking to you yet?”
From the expression on Daniel’s face, Ben decided that he didn’t want to hear the answer. He made a valiant attempt to rescue the conversation in the face of a mouth that could have been sucking on a lemon’s sourer cousin.
“How’s it going in there?”
“It’s…going,” Daniel said, taking Ben’s hand. “We’re doing…something. Not sure what yet. But there’s a kind of progress being made.” He squeezed Ben’s hand. “Don’t hold your breath or anything but if this stays reasonably contained…”
“That sounded like optimism.”
“Tell no one.”
DEATH HOSPITAL ADMITS: WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WENT WRONG
In London, St Thomas’s Hospital remains under full quarantine due to what has been confirmed is not a mass testing failure but a close to 100% KBV infection rate. With staff and patients alike barred from leaving, in the last 24 hours a police blockade has been set up to help deal with enquiries from relatives, and pass supplies inside. Doctors, nurses, and cleaning staff within the hospital say that with adequate supply lines they will be able to continue treating patients, but the mood within is bleak.
It has been six days since every single routine sputum test at St Thomas’s, in South London, came up triple positive. A selection of blood samples, rushed to Newcastle, have confirmed that there is apparently no fault in the sputum tests: several hundred people in one building have been infected. Epidemiologist, Dr Bill Greenhill, says that without any way of telling which patients were infected first, it will be hard to isolate the “transmission vector”.
“Did you see the news” became the question Ben dreaded hearing most; by now it was on everyone’s lips.
ST THOMAS MYSTERY DEEPENS AS POLICE BLOCKADE TESTS POSITIVE FOR KBV
Eighty percent of officers serving at the blockade around St Thomas hospital London, forty percent of delivery porters, and at least 16 relatives who attempted to gain access and were turned away without meeting anyone have all been found to the KBV positive, we can reveal today. A source from within the Met says: “We are reviewing how we handle this situation as there is clearly something the police have not been told about how this disease spreads.”
The Government has appealed for calm, and the NHS has issued a statement requesting that all those who have been in contact with the hospital or anyone who has been in contact with the hospital immediately report for blood tests. Relatives and charity members are being warned to remain away from St Thomas’s until further notice.
TOP DOC HYBRID CLUE: THE ST THOMAS MYSTERY EXPLAINED?
Could killer virus KBV have become airborne?
Leading virologist and inventor of the triple-test, Dr Natalya Yagoda, today claimed that ‘a virus which was [made] to hybridise easily and outside of the usual bounds of viral species could well become endowed with other characteristics, including the ability to spread via water droplets, like measles’.
In an interview with a staff nurse at St Thomas, who has asked to remain anonymous, it was revealed that a patient who cam
e in ‘presenting with symptoms with viral bronchitis’ tested positive for KBV and was referred immediately to the isolation wards.
‘We knew it was only passed through fluid contact’, the nurse told us, ‘and we gave him anN95 [type of sterile mask] when he started coughing’.
RIOTS AT STEVENAGE: EIGHT KILLED, SEVENTY-TWO INJURED.
Eight are dead after a protest outside X/X headquarters in Stevenage ‘got out of control’, police have confirmed. A little after midnight last night, an unknown number of protesters, wearing the popular “N95” flu mask and in some cases armed with crow-bars, succeeded in breaching security at the ill-fated pharmaceutical company’s headquarters. What began as an aggressive demand for ‘the real stocks’ of KB-AO was apparently inflamed by the inability of the company to provide an adequate response to questions, and violence broke out.
So far police have not released the identities of the casualties, but it is thought that both protestors and X/X staff number among the dead. Thirteen of the injured are police officers; the police force has declined to comment on the possibility that infected persons were among the attackers “until bloodwork has been returned from Newcastle”.
It was a Tuesday lunchtime when a coughing woman was shot dead by security forces at Schipol Airport. All further flights were grounded; news footage was uncertain. Phone calls from within the Airport appealed first for sputum tests for staff members and passengers; passengers complained of unlawful detention.
Three Amsterdam flights landing in the US were put in immediate quarantine.
ST THOMAS BARRICADE NOW CONSIDERED INFECTIOUS.
COBRA, the Metropoltian Police, and the NHS KBV Reponse Control Team this morning released a joint statement warning members of the public to observe the perimeter initially set up around St Thomas Hospital, London, despite the absence of security to enforce it.
“St Thomas Hospital perimeter barricade must be treated as infectious,” the statement has warned, “and the public are strongly urged to remain away from it for the sake of their own safety. We are still in contact with staff and patients and infected volunteers at the hospital and they have confirmed that they would prefer to receive further supplies by airdrop to reduce the risk of outside contamination. The public is urgently requested to keep away at all costs.”
In Windhoek a man was arrested for claiming that his vitamin concoction was ‘a sound and plausible remedy’ to KBV. Sputum tests, confirmed by bloodwork, revealed him to be in the middle stages of the psychological symptoms of the illness. A nurse he had spat on committed suicide.
By the beginning of September the cross-parliamentary vote on militarised quarantine was close to unanimous; for the first time, MPs were permitted to cast their votes remotely.
KBV: WHERE DOES IT END?
You have just finished reading The Next Big One by Derek Des Anges, published by House of D Publications, in electronic format. To enjoy additional material and a reading list relating to this book, please purchase the work in print format from Lulu.com
Table of Contents
The Next Big One
Acknowledgements
Preface
The Next Big One