Plague World

by Alex Scarrow

  He could see bodies wriggling into the space, fighting each other for an opportunity to squirm under; if the gap had been a fraction wider, they would already be inside.

  As it was, the very smallest of them were beginning to wriggle free from the press of bodies at the bottom and squeeze in. Leon stamped on the first one that got under.

  ‘Cora. Cora! We have to move this forward. NOW!’

  She nodded quickly.

  ‘Be careful. Don’t let the cage ride up or they’ll flood in!’

  She yelped in reply.

  Leon looked for a space on the wire to grab hold of, but every inch was covered. He balled his hands into fists and braced his knuckles against the mesh, feeling sharp pricks as the nearest of the little snarks began to probe his flesh.

  ‘Let’s go!’ he yelled, quickly moving his fists away and placing them elsewhere.

  Cora copied him, effectively punching at the cage to move it forward. The wheels began to turn and they took their first few steps treading on and crushing the bodies of the smallest creatures that had made their way under.

  Leon had no idea how the others were doing and no way of seeing which way to go. As they slowly rolled their way forward, it was only with the vague hope that they were still facing the right way.

  CHAPTER 9

  US Navy Ensign Carl Dornick steered the rigid-hulled inflatable closer to the looming cruise ship. Even from two hundred metres away it towered above them: large, flat, white and dashed with countless rows of broad square windows.

  ‘I’m slowing down. Eyes on the water, guys,’ he barked into his walkie-talkie above the roar of the outboard motors. He eased back on the throttle and the launch slowed, settling down into the water and casting a gentle bow wave. The other five launches followed suit, fanning out either side of him to form a ‘V’.

  They were close enough now to pick out more details, like people. Dornick hadn’t been sure what to expect and presumed he’d be witnessing rows of orange life-jacket-wearing passengers waving frantically from the promenade deck. The only clear instructions he’d been given were . . . Absolutely NO ONE is to be rescued FROM THE SHIP. Only people lifted out of the sea. Is that perfectly clear? ONLY OUT OF THE SEA.

  The briefing officer hadn’t wasted time explaining why, since they all knew about the salt/virus thing. As his launch had bounced its way across the gently swelling waves he’d reassured himself with a comical mental image of flailing slug-like creatures thrashing and steaming amid foaming water crying ‘I’m meltiiiiiinnng!’ in some cartoon voice.

  He’d even – stupidly – grinned at that. But as their boats were drawing in close to the ship, Dornick felt ashamed of his flippant imagination. The rolling humps and valleys of deep blue-grey water were peppered with flashes of high-viz orange. Dozens of them.

  ‘We’ve got jumpers in the water already, watch your speed!’

  He eased back on the throttle until the engine was one tick above idling and they were now barely nudging forward, the boat’s inflatable stern no longer lifted proud and high, but bobbing sulkily at the same level as the rest of the hull.

  He could see the shoulder-flashes of orange life jackets and rolling, lifeless heads. Dornick winced. The passengers had been given instructions to wait until rescue boats had arrived before abandoning ship. The water was a degree or two above zero. Ten to fifteen minutes was about as long as a person could hope to stay alive. It had taken them twenty minutes to launch the boats and ten to make their way across. Many of these people were already dead, or too far gone to revive.

  ‘Look out for moving ones!’ he shouted to the two crewmen up front. One of them raised a hand to acknowledge the order.

  Holy crap! It’s like Titanic! He turned to look around at the other launches. They were spreading out into an evenly dispersed line that chugged gently forward, picking careful paths through the bobbing dead.

  He glanced up again at the Sea Queen. Now with his engine only chugging softly, and the Atlantic slapping at their fibreglass hull, he could try listening for voices calling out for help.

  It took a few seconds for his ears to adjust. He could hear something. Faint. So faint it was almost drowned out by the softly sputtering engine behind him. He switched it off.

  ‘Engines off, everyone!’

  The other launches followed suit.

  Now, finally, it was quiet, save for the slosh of water beneath them as they bobbed like a row of buoys fifty metres back from the ship’s vast vertical hull.

  Dornick listened.

  ‘You hear that?’

  They nodded. ‘Sounds like . . .’ Seaman Chapman cocked his head. ‘Sounds like whale song?’

  Dornick nodded. It did. Not the clicks or deep grumbles they made, but that melancholic lowing that could carry for dozens of kilometres. The sound seemed to be coming from above. From aboard the ship somewhere.

  He reached for the loudhailer hanging from its cradle beside the helm and cupped it to his mouth.

  ‘Attention! Attention! Passengers of Sea Queen . . . Rescue boats are waiting for you at the aft on the port side. Please make your way to the aft, PORT SIDE!’ His words, distorted and electronic, bounced back off the ship’s sheer hull.

  He waited and listened. That faint wailing was there still, rising and falling in pitch, at times sounding like a chorus of voices.

  ‘Jeez. Is that singing?’ asked Chapman.

  Dornick ignored him. He clicked the loudhailer’s trigger and tried the same announcement again.

  This time there appeared to be a response. He heard a solitary voice. He craned his neck to look up and right. He could see a pale face, a hand waving frantically from the ship’s aft deck. He counted about a dozen figures suddenly appearing beside it.

  Dornick raised the loudhailer to his mouth again. ‘We cannot board your vessel! You will have to jump!’

  He turned on the boat’s engine and spun the wheel to the right. Although the rear of the cruise ship was less than sixty metres away from them, anyone jumping into the water was going to be stunned by the impact and go into an immediate cold-shock response. They needed to be right there, ready to pull them out within seconds of impact.

  Dornick waved at the other launches to follow his lead, then did his best to steer quickly through the near-frozen floating bodies.

  He eased back again on the throttle, dropping the engine into neutral, and the launch coasted to a halt at the ship’s rear. He looked up at the passengers still frantically waving for help from the curved aft railing.

  ‘You must jump!’ he bellowed through the loudhailer again. ‘WE CANNOT COME ABOARD!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What?’

  Chapman pointed up at them. ‘None of them have got life jackets on.’

  ‘I know. We’ll have to get to them quickly.’ He edged his boat forward, just a fraction closer. Not too close, though: if a body hit the launch from that height, it would sink them.

  ‘You have to jump! We. Will. Retrieve. You!’

  Dornick looked around at the other boats. They all needed to be a touch closer. He grabbed the walkie-talkie. ‘Get in tighter! They’re jumping without jackets.’ He watched the other pilots as they jockeyed for position, forming a semi-circle around the rear of the cruise ship. Close. But not beneath.

  Dornick looked back up. One of the passengers seemed to understand what was being asked of them: a woman, swinging one leg over the safety railing, then the other. She clung to the railing, though, not quite ready to let herself go.

  ‘LET GO! WE. WILL. RETRIEVE. YOU!’ his loudhailer squawked again.

  Chapman shook his head as he watched. ‘Fall’s gonna kill her, sir!’

  ‘It’ll shock her. Just get yourselves ready to pull her in!’

  The woman seemed about to let go, then stopped. Ready to try again. Then she jumped.

  She fell like a mannequin dropping like dead weight, turning slowly forward and smacking the water face first.

  ‘DAMN!�
�� shouted Chapman. ‘That’s gotta ’ave killed her!’

  Dornick eased the throttle up and their launch lurched forward.

  Ten metres.

  Five metres.

  He eased back into neutral, the boat coasting the last metre or so as Chapman and another man leaned out over the prow, ready to pull the woman aboard and administer first aid. Chapman got a grasp on her first.

  ‘Sewell, gimme a hand!’

  ‘I got her, I got her!’

  Together they managed to get a firm grasp of her, and on a quick count of three, they pulled her up over the inflatable side of the boat by her armpits.

  The three of them tumbled backwards into the boat and it took Dornick a good ten seconds to untangle what he was looking at and to understand it wasn’t quite right.

  Her skin was blistering. No . . . bubbling. He could see pustules welling up rapidly, emerging all over her pale skin. It reminded him of milk in a pan, at the point of boiling and threatening to turn into a rising froth.

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ Sewell was looking at the same thing.

  The woman suddenly opened her eyes wide and began to thrash violently. ‘OH-GOD-OH-GOD-I’M BURNING!!! HELP MEEEEE!!!’

  ‘Shit! Shit!’ Third-degree burns all over. ‘Hurry!’ cried Chapman. He grabbed her arms to stop her thrashing around while Sewell tore open the first-aid kit to look for the burn dressings and face shield.

  Dornick hooked up the walkie-talkie, left the helm, squeezed round the side of the console to give his men a hand – an instinctive muscle-memory response borne from endless first-aid drilling.

  Then his brain engaged.

  Burns.

  Salt.

  The virus.

  SHIT!

  Too little, too late.

  ‘LOOK!’ Chapman was gazing upwards. He pointed up at the rear of the cruise ship. Dornick followed his finger and tried to make sense of what was coming down towards them.

  Over the safety rail – no, over and under – it looked like a mudslide in slow motion, a waterfall of molasses, long dark drools of oily liquid stretching elastically down towards them.

  ‘What the fu—?’

  ‘Shit,’ Dornick muttered.

  The treacle-like threads spilled down over their launch like the myriad silk threads of a collapsed spider’s web. He saw dark nodules on the threads; hundreds, oozing, sliding down . . . Closer, he could see the nodules were little rounded bodies sprouting a Swiss Army knife of fragile little limbs.

  Hundreds. Thousands.

  As the three seamen were overwhelmed, Dornick’s walkie-talkie hissed and crackled from its hook by the console.

  ‘Everyone pull back now! Pull back. Pull—’

  CHAPTER 10

  Tom leaned on the railing as he watched the launches make their way back. There were three of them coming back fast, kicking up angel wings of spray as they bounced heavily on the swelling sea.

  ‘Christ,’ he hissed under his breath. The radio traffic between the launches had been confused and panicked. From what he could see as they drew up beside the USS Oakley, they’d lost two boats and crews. Six men in total.

  He counted eight figures wearing bright orange life jackets.

  We saved just eight?

  The fleet channel was still being bombarded with garbled requests for rescue from the Sea Queen. There were still hundreds of people aboard, alive. But by the sound of it, the viral outbreak was out of control.

  They’re already dead, Tom. Nothing you can do for them.

  He turned to Captain Donner. ‘How quickly can you sink that ship?’

  ‘What?’

  He nodded at the distant pale bulk of the cruise ship. ‘How quickly?’

  Donner recoiled at the suggestion, his mouth dropping open. ‘You’re serious?’

  Tom glared at him.

  ‘We . . . uh, we have six Mark Fifty-four torpedoes on board for ship-to-ship contact. I’d guess just a couple on target would be enough.’

  ‘Launch all six. Let’s make this as quick as we can.’

  Captain Donner turned to pass the order on, hesitated, then turned back to face Tom. ‘USS Baron is much closer to her than—’

  ‘I don’t care which ship sinks her,’ Tom snapped. ‘Just get it done!’

  Donner nodded and headed back inside the bridge.

  Tom looked back down. On the main deck below he could see their Southampton passengers lining the railing, watching the three motorboats as they made their hasty approach. They watched in silence as the launches drew near. No cheering or waving for the returning heroes. The mood was sombre. He spotted the dark-haired girl with the walking stick he’d spoken to half an hour ago. She was watching the launches keenly.

  Jesus. What a mess.

  The rescue bid had cost them boats and men. This whole endeavour so far had taken about seventy personnel from what remained of the US Navy. The president was going to have a fit when he heard about that. For now, Tom could only hope those six poor bastards in the two missing launches were already dead, and not . . .

  What a goddamn mess.

  Until this morning, the cost had seemed worth it. They’d rescued nearly two thousand civilians from Calais and Southampton in total, and the Pacific Nations ships had picked up about twice that number. He gazed at the distant bulk of the Sea Queen and realized that the majority of that number, just over a thousand of their rescued people, were aboard her.

  The three launches began to slow down their approach, peeling to the left to close in alongside the destroyer. Tom could see the precious few they’d just rescued from the freezing cold water now wrapped up in foil thermal sheets. Some of the civilians lining the rail began calling out: a chorus of voices that could have been support for the crewmen, or words of comfort for the rescued. In the chorus of voices he thought he heard someone calling out his kids’ names.

  Freya squinted at the foil-wrapped figures in the bobbing motorboats below. There seemed to be no more than two or three of them per boat.

  So few.

  She cupped her mouth again and waited for a momentary pause in the voices calling down, then tried again. ‘Leon? Grace?’

  None of the rescued people glanced up. Her heart sank. She’d been grasping at straws, holding on to a very slender hope.

  To her left, further along the deck, a winch cable was being lowered down from a crane to the first launch. It descended until the launch’s coxswain managed to grab hold of it and clip the boat’s four lifting lines on.

  She felt a rough hand on her shoulder. ‘Get back, please, ma’am!’ barked a marine. He pushed her firmly aside and waved at the other Brits beside her to make way as well. ‘C’mon, folks, clear this area!’

  Freya shuffled back with the others until the marine had them far enough away that he was satisfied, then held them there. She peered over his shoulder to see what was going on. She could see half a dozen crew in biohazard suits emerging from a deck door. As the motor launch finally came to a rest just above deck height, swinging gently from the arm of the crane like a baby in a cradle, she watched each of the launch’s crewmen and the rescued passengers as they were hosed down with seawater.

  After a couple of minutes, they were helped aboard, one after the other, the passengers assisted across the deck, over the door’s lip and presumably taken down for an immediate blood test.

  There was the sound of a distant thud, followed very quickly by another. Everyone froze, and turned to see where the sounds had come from.

  Several tall pillars of sea-spray blossomed alongside the distant cruise ship. They rose gracefully, fell back into the sea, then turned into black columns of smoke.

  The understanding hit everyone at the same time, and Freya let slip a wretched gasp.

  Tom monitored the Sea Queen’s sinking through a pair of binoculars. All six torpedoes launched by USS Oakley had hit their target, and already the top-heavy cruise ship was listing gently to starboard.

  The bridge crackled with th
e sound of radio traffic coming from the stricken vessel. It sounded like a young man was in possession of the radio.

  ‘Why? Why? WHY?’

  He could hear screaming and wailing in the background.

  ‘We . . . You . . . you could’ve got us off, you bastards! You bastards! You could’ve come. You—’

  Tom heard the signal crackle and rustle, then a different voice. Older. An English accent this time.

  ‘First Officer Reynolds here . . . Who’s receiving this? Over.’

  Captain Donner looked at Tom, the mic in his hand. His hard eyes on him: You called the order, Mr Friedmann, so you can take this call.

  Tom nodded and took the mic from him. He vaguely recalled Reynolds. The first officer had shown him to the Sea Queen’s conference room the last time they’d had a fleet meeting before splitting up for Calais and Southampton; he recalled an older officer with a well-clipped and greying beard.

  ‘Tom Friedmann, speaking. I’m the president’s representative in charge of—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ he replied quickly. The line hissed, the channel open. Tom was dimly aware the whole fleet would be hearing this exchange.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Reynolds.’ Tom was about to say, ‘Over,’ and lift his finger, but he wanted, needed, to say more than that. ‘We had to do this. We really had no choice. Over.’ Tom mentally cursed himself for not being able to recall the man’s first name.

  The open line whistled and hissed for a few seconds.

  ‘I . . . I understand,’ Reynolds replied slowly. It sounded like there was more he wanted to say too. ‘A bloody mess, right?’

  ‘A bloody mess,’ Tom agreed.

  ‘I . . . uh, lost my wife and sons during the outbreak, Friedmann. So I suppose I’m ready to go now.’

  ‘I lost my kids too.’

  ‘I . . .’ Reynolds’s voice was faltering. Tom heard something clattering to the floor in the background. The ship’s listing was more pronounced now.

  ‘Reynolds? What were your boys’ names? I’ll say a prayer for them.’