Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  The editor didn’t even bother replying to Colin. He slapped his pen down onto his notebook, both of which had remained unused throughout Colin’s pitch, and curled his lip.

  ‘Give me one good reason for not kicking the pair of you out right now,’ he said.

  ‘Throwing me out would be a big mistake,’ Lesley replied, smiling.

  She held the editor’s gaze until he picked up his pen again with a sigh and poised it over the notebook. ‘Fine, let’s hear it then. But you’ve got precisely two minutes.’

  Lesley smiled broadly at Colin and tipped him a big wink. His fake grin, which he was still holding with some difficulty, wilted like boiled cabbage.

  ‘Let me see,’ Lesley began. ‘I was investigating this same lab, which is definitely government. The virus was being developed as part of a weapons programme, and was in the experimental stages. I was captured by the lab security while investigating. Watched my original source being killed by an infected bull released by an odious security man called Alastair Brown. Escaped with the help of one of the scientists. Picked up the only survivor from the original abattoir killings and got his story. Hid out for a while. Was held captive by a cannibal. Escaped, was attacked by Brown, who killed three people.’

  Colin’s eyes were growing ever wider as Lesley casually recounted her tale.

  ‘Drove along the railway lines, sneaked through Glasgow city centre. Saw piles of bodies, animal and human, being burned. Was stopped by soldiers and taken to a refugee camp, where the army was essentially holding people captive to stop the virus mutating. Heard that soldiers were shooting people who sneezed, just in case. Saw refugee camp attacked by hundreds of cows. All on fire. Took Brown captive. Flew to Channel Tunnel in hijacked helicopter, which then crashed. Walked through tunnel for a while. Got in gun battle with Brown, who had picked up a mutated version of the virus, as far as I know the first human to get it. Killed him. Drove to France in little service vehicle, where we talked our way in.’ She crossed her legs and held out her hands. ‘I think that’s it …

  ‘Oh no, wait a minute,’ she added, looking Colin full in the face. ‘I had fantastic sex with a really hot guy.’ She turned back to the editor. ‘And that’s definitely all.’

  ‘That’s a pretty wild story,’ the editor said. ‘But it’s just a story unless you have evidence.’

  ‘I have this,’ Lesley said, holding up the flash drive.

  ‘And what’s on that?’

  ‘All of the data from the programme, videos from tests, authorizations from government departments, emails regarding progress. Everything we need to tie the virus to the government. I got it from one of the scientists on the programme.’

  Colin made a strangled sound as the editor almost launched himself across the desk in his eagerness to grab the little pink stick. Lesley held it out of reach.

  ‘Not so fast. We need to talk turkey. Firstly, I want to write the story myself. No joint by-line with anybody.’ She looked significantly at Colin. ‘Then I want a serialization of my escape. Let’s say two thousand words per week, over five weeks. And you need to introduce me to some book publishers.’

  The editor’s greedy eyes never left the drive. ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘Hey, what about me?’ Colin asked plaintively.

  ‘Maybe we can use your pictures with Lesley’s story, if they’re good enough,’ the editor said, still not taking his eyes off the device.

  Colin leapt to his feet.

  ‘There is no way I’m playing second fiddle to her,’ he said. ‘I’m taking my pictures elsewhere.’

  The editor shrugged. ‘Fine, you do that.’

  ‘Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out!’ Lesley gleefully called over her shoulder to Colin, who was by this point scurrying down the corridor.

  ‘Right,’ the editor said. ‘We’d better get going on this. I want to get a story online in the next few hours, then a big spread for tomorrow. You’ll have to work with some of the team to get it all done, but the by-line will be yours. Are you up to it?’

  Lesley smiled. ‘Just show me to a computer.’

  Ten long hours later, Lesley burst through the hotel-room door, clutching a laptop borrowed from the paper. Terry was reclining on the bed watching TV, dressed only in a pair of silky boxer shorts. All around him were littered the remnants of a room-service splurge: dirty plates, empty mini wine bottles and crumpled serviettes.

  ‘Finally!’ he exclaimed, and grabbed at her as she flopped onto the bed.

  She slapped his questing hands. ‘In a minute, pervert. First you’ve got to see this.’

  Lesley booted up the laptop, plugged in the 3G modem and brought up the International Herald Tribune website. There, dominating the screen, was her story. ‘British Government Responsible for Deadly Virus’ ran the main headline, and underneath, in smaller letters: ‘Fears of human infection’.

  ‘It’s on the New York Times website too,’ she said, clicking through onto the story itself. ‘Tomorrow it’ll be splashed all over the front page.’

  Lesley stared at the screen, drinking in her by-line for the fiftieth time. She thought of James, Constance and Gregory Strong, without whom the story would never have got out. The memory of their respective nasty deaths briefly dampened her feeling of triumph, but she told herself they would have been happy the story was out, and vowed to give them prominence in the book she would write.

  ‘Wow,’ Terry said. ‘You are going to be famous.’ He sent his hands creeping back around her waist. ‘Fancy a celebratory shag?’

  She looked down at his tiny boxer shorts, which were doing a decidedly poor job of hiding his enthusiasm.

  ‘Patience. There’s one more thing I have to do.’

  Terry blew out his cheeks in frustration as Lesley reached for the telephone and dialled. It rang a good fifteen times before a sleepy female voice answered.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ Lesley said.

  ‘Lesley?’ her mother shrieked. ‘Oh God, you’re alive. We were so worried, we couldn’t get through, we didn’t know if you were OK or not.’

  ‘I’m fine, Mum. In fact, I’m better than fine. I’m staying at the Intercontinental in Paris, I’ve met a lovely man and I’ve just broken a story bigger than Watergate.’

  Her mother was so busy alternating between crying and screaming for her husband that Lesley had to move the phone away from her ear. Even Terry backed away from the tinny screech emanating from the receiver. After many hysterical pronouncements of motherly love, Lesley’s father came on the phone.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ Lesley said breezily.

  ‘Hello, love. I told your mum you’d be fine. You’re a resourceful girl.’

  ‘Glad to hear you were concerned.’

  ‘Come now, it’s not that. You’re your father’s daughter, remember?’

  God, here he goes, Lesley thought. Sure enough, he tried to launch into one of his war stories. ‘It’s like that time I was caught behind rebel lines in the Congo, your mother was—’

  Lesley cut him off. ‘Look, I don’t have much time. I have some urgent business to attend to.’ She ran her index finger up Terry’s penis and rubbed the tip. He clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle the moan. ‘I just want to say one thing: look at the International Herald Tribune website. Right now.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lesley laughed. ‘I don’t want to ruin the surprise, which I can assure you will be very, very big. Just promise me you’ll do it.’

  There was a puzzled silence before her father spoke. ‘OK, I promise. Straight away.’

  ‘Good. Look, I have to go. I’ll call you both tomorrow, when it’s not the middle of the night for you. Tell Mum I love her.’

  She hung up the phone and let out a hoot of triumph.

  ‘Oh, I can just imagine his face,’ she said as Terry fumbled at her blouse. ‘He’ll be so jealous.’

  ‘Try not to imagine it while we’re having sex,’ Terry said, giving up on the fiddly buttons and instead tu
gging clumsily at the zip on her skirt. ‘That would be very disturbing.’

  Lesley pulled the skirt down. ‘Don’t worry, that will be the last thing on my mind.’

  Because now the McBrien name is going to be famous because of me, she thought, and leapt on top of Terry with abandon.

  Epilogue

  Cruel Britannia

  Geldof slouched on the leather sofa, trying to snag the television remote from the glass coffee table with his big toe. From the kitchen came the sizzle of hot fat, the chunky aroma of steak and the tang of frying onions as Mary set about making dinner.

  His toe fell short, nudging the air-conditioning remote off the table. It landed face down and the fans kicked into life, sending a blast of icy air down his neck. There was no need for air conditioning that evening: the sun was low in the sky and a cool breeze was blowing in through the patio doors, which looked out onto the Adriatic Sea. He sighed, resigning himself to the fact he was going to have to sit up – a task considerably harder than it used to be, given the roll of fat thickening his waist.

  It had been three months since Geldof and Mary had pitched up in France, bewildered, lost and grief-stricken. Already it felt like a lifetime. He would have been lying if he said he didn’t feel his parents’ absence. He missed them in the way he missed his old dog Bobby, an ill-tempered mongrel that stank of piss and chewed all his socks. They had been an integral part of his life, and he had many fond memories – the kind of cringing memories that make you laugh out loud and feel fuzzy. Sure, he felt guilty about how much he enjoyed his highly unethical jeans-wearing, meat-eating, power-guzzling lifestyle. And he had decided to keep his name after all, even though it still prompted sniggers when he introduced himself. But all in all, he was much better off.

  He could tell that Mary – whom he had almost called Mum the previous evening – had not left her old life behind so easily. Sometimes he chanced upon her sniffling over a Sudoku puzzle, and every time she saw the twin boys who lived in the villa at the far end of their rocky beach, she stiffened and marched in the opposite direction. There were signs she was looking to the future, though: she was talking about getting some tutoring work.

  With such a comfortable life dulling his senses, Geldof’s recollection of their first week in France had grown hazy: a jumble of images of quarantine, hotel rooms and TV studios, where they were interviewed by a series of correspondents with insincere smiles. It was these interviews that had brought Granddad Carstairs running. The old man had been in South America when the virus broke out. Wisely, he’d stayed there. The moment he saw Geldof, however, he boarded his private jet and came straight to France.

  Geldof had no memories of the cheerful old gentleman who turned up at the hotel with a suitcase full of brand-name clothes for him and an offer for him to move into his villa on the Croatian coast until they could figure out a long-term solution. Geldof had accepted, and his grandfather had no problem with him bringing Mary along.

  Since then, he’d had little to do other than lounge around and come to terms with the fact he was now very rich. His grandfather, who popped in every few weeks for a brief visit, had taken a hit with the virus, but Carstairs Coffee was one of the biggest brands in the world and he still had a disgusting amount of money. Enough, in fact, to somehow secure the return of James’s body, have him cremated and pay for his ashes to be scattered from a helicopter hovering high over their house in Bearsden. Geldof would have preferred to sit the ashes in the back garden as the centrepiece of a commemorative squirrel assault course. But setting foot on British soil would be pretty much suicide.

  Brown, as it turned out, was the canary in the cage. Details of what happened in the weeks after they fled were sketchy: Britain had supplanted Somalia as the place no journalist wanted to go to; and the embattled authorities had ensured that even when the power came back on, mobile communications and the internet were not restored. All they knew was the disease had spread through the population like wildfire.

  The camps turned into slaughterhouses as the infection spread and people turned on each other. There were reports of soldiers pouring bullets into hordes of murderous refugees until they were ripped to shreds. Those who emerged alive were infected and set off to rape, maim and kill their way around the country. Soon enough, the British authorities jumped ship. The mainland was ring-fenced by warships and aircraft instructed to blow anyone who tried to leave to smithereens.

  And try to leave they did. First they came in small boats, which were picked off by helicopters. Next came a ferry, stowed to the gunwales with infected passengers. A NATO warship put three shells through its bows. After that came planes, four in a week. The first craft, a small private jet, struck out across the English Channel and was shot down before it reached France. Next was a Boeing 747, obliterated over the Atlantic. The last two, both commercial airliners, were destroyed before they even left the runway at Heathrow. No more planes left after that: NATO carpet-bombed every airfield in Britain.

  Even then, the onslaught continued: the infected tried their luck in paragliders and canoes, they swam and tried to walk through the Chunnel (which had now been concreted over and fitted with remote-controlled flame-throwers and automatic weapons). It seemed it would only be a matter of time before one of the infected got out. There were growing calls to fire-bomb, or even nuke, Britain. While the British government-in-exile used its veto in the United Nations Security Council to stop this option, people agreed drastic action was inevitable, particularly since teams of scientists working around the clock had come no closer to producing either cure or vaccine.

  And then, out of the blue, a group calling itself BRIT (Britons for the Rights of the InfecTed) contacted CNN. The group had one very simple demand: don’t kill us. The infected were organizing themselves, restoring order, getting infrastructure up and running, the group said, and only wanted to be left to live in peace.

  That had been two days ago. Now, Geldof was forcing himself to undergo the strenuous activity of sitting up because a live debate was about to take place between former Labour politician Tony Campbell, now the leader of BRIT and self-proclaimed Prime Minister of the infected nation, and Lesley, who had become the world’s leading authority on the virus, despite the fact she knew absolutely zero about virology.

  ‘Are you coming to watch this?’ he called through to the kitchen.

  Mary didn’t respond and he didn’t push the point; she tried whenever possible to avoid anything that would remind her of what had happened to her boys.

  Geldof perked up when Tony Campbell came on screen. There had been a lot of debate about how he would look: would he be a twitching bag of rage with drool-slicked lips or a sorry, half-decayed excuse for a human being? At first glance, he appeared to be neither. Tony was an average-looking man of West Indian descent, with a high forehead, close-cropped hair and a moustache he plucked at as he was introduced. Upon closer inspection, the signs of the virus were visible. His face was covered in dark blotches, like pools of deep water in the coastal shallows. There were sores, covered with make-up but visible to those who knew what they were looking for. The whites of his eyes were no longer white – they were a strange mustard colour – and he was holding a handkerchief, which he used to catch a huge sneeze.

  The camera cut to Lesley. The last time Geldof had seen her and Terry had been six weeks ago, just before he moved to Croatia. They had shacked up in a little apartment in the centre of Paris. Terry had stuck to his vow to become vegetarian and had given up his Old Spice habit. From the smug aura Lesley had developed, it was clear the new life was agreeing with her. She was introduced as the heroic journalist who had led a band of unfortunates out of Britain – a growing myth that didn’t bother Geldof – and author of the non-fiction book Apocalypse Cow: Escape from the Cursed Isle, available in the shops soon, priced at €19.99.

  ‘I’m going to come to you first, Tony,’ the presenter, a middle-aged British woman with dyed black hair, said as the shot cut to a split-scree
n view. ‘Let’s be absolutely clear. You are infected?’

  ‘Yes, Naomi, I am. And as you can see, I am perfectly rational.’ He spread his hands. ‘I want to get straight to the point. We are all aware of the debate about what should be done with the infected, as we have been dubbed. I think it is scandalous that governments are countenancing doomsday solutions. We are still people. People with a horrendous illness, but people nonetheless, who need your help, not your hatred.’

  ‘Surely you must accept it’s very difficult for us to empathize with you?’ Naomi asked. ‘You do appear to want to rape and eat the rest of humanity.’

  ‘I’m going to have to correct you. The virus wants to do that, not us. You can’t blame the sufferer for his illness. We are victims and want this out of our systems. You don’t know how it feels to look at someone and have this irresistible urge to tear into their flesh, bury your teeth in their neck, drink their blood, to …’

  Tony tailed off and lowered his hands, which had twisted into claws while he spoke. He took several deep breaths. ‘I repeat, we are people. I go home to my wife and three-year-old daughter each evening, both of whom are infected. I tuck my girl into bed, read her a story and then pray I won’t wake up in the middle of the night with bombs falling.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘The right to live peacefully, here in Britain, until a cure is found. And I want to stress Britain is now peaceful. Everyone is infected, so there is no more unpleasantness. We accept there must be quarantine for the moment. All we ask is that you don’t write us off.’

  ‘Let me bring you in here, Lesley,’ the presenter said. ‘Do you buy this argument?’

  Lesley looked directly into the lens with the practised ease of someone who spends a lot of time on camera. ‘It’s clear Tony was a politician in his earlier life. He presents a compelling argument. But he’s glossing over the full horror of this virus. He said there is peace because everyone is infected. What he should have said is: “infected or dead”. I wonder how many people Tony himself killed? He certainly alluded to it earlier. Let’s look at the reality: CNN hasn’t been able to send its own camera crew over there, because we all know what would happen as soon as they set foot in Britain. Are we to believe this problem can be contained by ignoring it, as Tony suggests?’