Plague World

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Next!’ barked the old man.

  ‘Come on,’ urged Leon. ‘Kim! Howard!’ He called out. They turned to look his way. Leon beckoned for them to fall back to the bridge.

  ‘What about our truck?’ asked Jake.

  He looked at it. ‘Well, it’s a very nice truck, young man.’

  ‘No, I mean how do we get that over?’

  ‘You don’t. It stays where it is. For now.’ He winked. ‘No one’s going to steal it, are they?’

  Finally they were all across and Leon suddenly felt an invisible weight lift from his shoulders. They were safe for the moment, protected by a barrier the virus had no possible chance of crossing.

  He remembered feeling this way at the castle when Freya and he had been welcomed by Mr Everett, and again in Southampton when they’d run into those soldiers in biohazard suits – an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and relief. For the last few days they’d all been measuring the rest of their lives in hours. And, since Leon had stepped hesitantly into the role of group leader, he’d had no option but to act confidently, certain of their survival.

  It was an exhausting act, and at last . . . he could drop it. Someone else was going to be in charge and making the decisions for them from now on.

  The old man gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Now then, there’s a taxi waiting for you lot.’

  Leon looked around him. ‘Where?’

  The old man rolled his eyes. ‘I’m joking. It’s only a short walk, you lazy Herbert!’

  From the right, the long shingle spit closed in on the road, and, to the left, the grass narrowed until it was a mere green ribbon beside the tarmac, creating a narrow bottleneck of land. Beyond that, Leon could see the low hump of the Isle of Portland, but in front, running across the narrow road, he could see a barricade.

  ‘That’s our second and final line of defence,’ explained the old man.

  It was a thrown-together palisade made, by the look of it, from wooden planks salvaged from countless boats and dinghies. The palisade wall was about two metres high and looked unlikely to stop anything determined to scramble over it, certainly not the virus.

  A head appeared over the wall, with white tufted hair and wide, just awoken, blinking eyes.

  Another oldie. Leon was beginning to wonder whether they’d strayed on to some island-sized retirement home.

  ‘Dereck!’ the bearded old man called up.

  ‘Ah, Peter . . . I see you have some guests! Are they clean?’

  ‘Aye.’

  The palisade gate wobbled inelegantly as it swung open. ‘Sleeping on the job again?’ muttered Peter as they passed through and the gate began to close behind them. ‘That dozy old bugger was immigration control –’ he raised his voice for everyone to hear – ‘and this . . . is the Kingdom of Portland!’

  PART II

  CHAPTER 17

  On the western side of Russia, near the borders of the Ukraine and Belarus, lies a city called Voronezh, named after the sedate-moving Voronezh River, which runs north–south through it, the city spreading either side. In the southern district of Levoberezhny is located a vast plant that runs alongside Dimitrova Street, taking you either west into the beating industrial heart of the city, or east, out into the endless, horizon-less, breadbasket fields of central Russia.

  The production plant was half-French, half-Russian owned and, until two years ago, had been the largest producer of yeast in Russia, the second largest in the world, churning out twenty thousand tons of dried yeast powder every year.

  In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, this enormous complex of fermentation chambers, separation tanks, and cane and beet storage silos lay abandoned and silent, the cavernous and cadaverous remains of an industrial digestive system.

  It took the virus eighteen months to find it.

  The first winter, the virus was consolidating across every city, town and village in the world. It migrated its mass down into subterranean hideaways, underground rail networks and sewage systems, away from the light and the cold. Each hideaway was linked by threads to the greater viral metropolis. Consolidation took the form of the thickening of these linking tendrils, tightening the internal infrastructure and reaching out to make contact with other masses of the virus.

  It was one of these roots, growing eastwards out of the city of Voronezh, seeking new friends and allies, that came across the yeast production plant. One root that on a cool February morning had stopped tunnelling below ground and had surfaced briefly. Emerging into the daylight it began to grow a swollen knuckle of resinous material. The knuckle quickly grew into a distended glistening blister, which eventually burst after a couple of hours, spilling out a dozen scuttling creatures on to the melting snow. That was routine behaviour for an exploratory growth: to tunnel for a while, then surface and explore. If nothing of interest was found, it would tunnel back down and carry on.

  One of the tiny mobile scouts – no bigger than a pebble, released from the root that morning – randomly scuttled through the open door of a storage silo and made a significant discovery.

  Yeast. Sugar beet.

  The Voronezh biomass concentration swiftly set about relocating to the industrial side of the river, growing rapidly across the four traffic lanes of the Vogresovskiy Bridge, pumping itself eagerly through thickening arteries towards the abandoned production plant and the super-reservoir of sugar riches located in the silos there.

  As an already tepid second summer cooled with approaching autumn, news spread of the find. Viral concentrations located further east in urban ruins with place names like Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai extended and thickened their links, and dispatched emissaries and queries. A trans-Asian ‘trunk’, with a diameter as thick as a car and protected by a thick, leathery epidermis, snaked its way thousands of kilometres, through mountains and deserts, through dense forests and marshland – a construction every bit as ambitious as the Great Wall of China.

  The contiguous land mass of Eurasia now had its viral equivalent of a capital city. As once all roads led to Rome, so all threads now led to Voronezh.

  Next to one of the silos was a tall cylindrical fermenting tank surrounded by a framework of metal support struts. The vast tank was now buried beneath protective layers of resin-like material that gave it the appearance of a termite mound on an impossible sixty-metre-high scale. A termite mound linked by thousands of viral ‘transit cables’, the thickest of them snaking across the ground towards it like tree roots, others slimmer, branching across from nearby buildings, equally coated in resin, like the tentative early support threads of a spider’s web.

  The ugly, unordered, lumpy coating of resin made it look like the artless work of dull-witted termites and belied the complexity of what lay within . . .

  A raging cauldron of broth, a liquid universe.

  Camille had been the very first.

  Her encounter with the virus on an arid no-man’s land in West Africa, a tundra of dust and dry grass peppered with rusting landmines, had occurred a few days before the virus had become news. In the human family tree of infection, she was Eve. In the words of virologists – Patient Zero.

  Camille had became one of the first representatives, one of the first human advocates.

  What They had told her, what They wanted to be very clear about, was this: They were only here to help. To facilitate – that was all.

  The big decisions about what happened next had to be ours. Humanity’s.

  Facilitators. Not murderers. Nor malignant conquerors. Helpers, that was all They were.

  They were here, bearing a wonderful gift.

  Of all the human arrivals to this micro-universe, Camille had the most time to try to understand Them. At the most basic level, existence was an endless ocean of single-cell life. Everybody, every living thing, was made up of Them and what had once been Us. But, whenever cells paused from their endless mingling and began to casually link into daisy chains, then very quickly into complex web-like gatherings, so the cells’ �
��ancestry’ began to emerge, an evolutionary life story told in fast forward. The greater the gathering, the more the story revealed itself.

  Camille was vaguely aware of this gathering process as millions of cells, recognizing each other like delegates at a conference, exchanged chemical handshakes and then bonded together. It was like waking from a sleep, the gradual assembly of her consciousness, of her sense of I.

  In her simplest form she had travelled many of the main arterial routes of this brand-new viral empire. She had awoken to see the gleaming spires of Shanghai draped in vast fluttering skin sheets, gathering and converting sunlight into sugar. To see forests of methane-filled sacks tethered to and floating above the minarets of Medina. She’d woken to see the fresh water of Lake Geneva covered in a purple lid thick enough to walk on, to see the London Eye turned into a pastel-pink parasol, glowing a rosy hue as sunlight shone through the skin membrane that had grown between its spokes. The virus’s ingenuity never ceased to astound her. Ingenuity borne from an infinite crowd intelligence, in the way a school of mackerel can perform the most graceful, constantly evolving, living sculptures from a simple base set of flocking rules.

  Camille had seen this new world from outside and from within, and couldn’t help but admire what it had achieved: the total conquest and subjugation of a complete world within months. And all of that done with a benign intent, a genuine wish to be kind.

  Now . . . her foggy version of self-awareness was sharpening and becoming clearer as her recent memories sorted themselves into order. She didn’t know the name of the city; the lettering on the signs was unusual, indecipherable, even for a girl who knew French, Hasau and English. It looked like some kind of production plant in an industrial smoke-belt city, but, in viral terms, it was ground zero, their gathering of command clusters. Their Vatican City.

  Their epicentre.

  CHAPTER 18

  They had informed Camille that it was time for a gathering. The process of consolidation demanded it now. A unifying of purpose, a synchronization of efforts, as the virus prepared to embark on the third and final stage of its ambitious programme. But, before that happened, some matters needed to be resolved.

  Camille let her mind assemble the illusion. She had seen pictures in her battered old school textbooks of American government buildings and chose a visualization that seemed to suit the vast liquid gathering of biomass. She imagined a courtroom on a grand scale, converting the roiling cauldron of cellular life into rising tiers of pale marble benches arranged in a semicircle around a stage and populated with an audience.

  Humanity.

  The tiers receded into the distance until they vanished into a haze. The faces nearest to her were defined by what she sensed of them – amino acid signals that suggested a gender, ethnicity, an age.

  She visualized the representative for ‘Them’ as a judge in a long powdered wig and flowing robes, a majestic figure with deep-set eyes and a Roman nose, sitting on top of a podium on a marble throne, and she presented herself as the little girl from an African village that she’d once been. Even down to her faded flower-print dress and her pink gel flip-flops.

  Camille was here as an ‘advocate witness’, one of 169 chosen witnesses. They were all here to share their knowledge and the judge was here just to listen and arbitrate.

  Deep within the thick broth inside silo three, a chemical spread out like ink dropped into a washbasin of clear water, diluting as it went, eventually staining the water a faint and uniform pale blue. Camille’s mind translated that into a ‘shhh’ being passed back through the gathered crowd, tier by tier and up into the distance.

  Now that the low murmuring of voices had been silenced, the judge leaned forward on his throne and spoke with a soft but commanding voice. ‘You understand why you and the other advocate witnesses have been called together? To decide the fate of those who remain.’

  They nodded.

  ‘Let us begin . . .’ He turned to look towards Camille and the other witnesses around him. She could taste their nervousness and imagined they could taste hers. ‘The first may introduce itself.’

  She felt attention turn her way, sensed faint chemical feelers daisy-chaining around her.

  ‘My name was Camille Ramiu. I was one of the first . . . I think?’ She looked up at the judge for confirmation.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, you were.’

  She turned to face the endless audience. ‘I was an orphan in a warring country. My mother died of sickness; my father was killed by militia. I became my sister and my brother’s guardian. I saw a dog was dying – it licked me. And now I know that that was when I was saved.’

  She turned to look over her shoulder, up at the judge. ‘I want to thank you.’

  She saw him nod and the slightest smile touch his solemn face. How much of that was chemically signalled and how much was the embellishment of her imagination was unclear.

  ‘My mother died a few months before you came to our world,’ she continued. ‘So she is gone. Lost forever. I know I will never see her again.’

  ‘That is regrettable,’ acknowledged the judge.

  ‘If you had come sooner, if she had been infected like me . . . she would be with me now.’ She turned to the others nearby. ‘I cry for those poor people who remain outside.’

  ‘Outside . . . if they die, then they are lost. Forever . . . That is the tragedy.’

  She had lived the last year of her human life in a shelter made from dried mud bricks and a plastic awning stolen from a rubbish site. Just her and her younger brother and sister. Now all of humanity was her family, her brothers, her sisters. This microcosmic universe was her home.

  ‘The fact that there are enough people out there who remain outside,’ she continued, ‘enough of them to be able to get ships to rescue more. This worries me.’ She looked at the judge on high, the other witnesses and the endless audience.

  ‘I know not all of you are fully here, some of you exist as a part of your full self, and for you, when you return and reassemble, you must ask this question. Are they a danger to us? Do they have weapons that could hurt us?’

  Camille had experienced enough of men in tatty khaki uniforms carrying guns, and handheld rockets, and grenades and machetes.

  ‘I am worried. I think we all should be worried. I think we cannot decide what comes next until the first part of the job is done. Until we know we are safe.’

  The judge stirred. ‘Complete assimilation of your kind?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. They are out there. Still. And, while they are, they remain a danger.’

  ‘Your contribution is a valid consideration. Thank you.’

  It was an advocate witness who stepped forward many hours later to present a very different case. Her appearance to Camille was vague, unresolved. Almost ghostlike. Camille’s sensory outer cells had barely brushed against the next ‘witness’ in the swirling cauldron. But, as the ‘witness’ drew nearer, Camille was able to start getting a sense of who she’d once been.

  A young girl like her.

  ‘My name is Grace Friedmann. This is only a small part of me, brought here by a good friend of mine, a doctor called Rachel Hahn – so I could be here to speak. The rest of me –’ she looked up at the judge – ‘is with them. The outsiders. I’m trying to reach out to them.’

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘Are you ready for the briefing, Prime Minister?’

  Rex Williams felt the eyes of his cabinet: the assembled senior officers of New Zealand’s armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army and Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, all resting on him.

  Am I ready?

  He’d answer no, if he was allowed. Three years ago Rex had been a freshly appointed junior health minister with virtually no experience of leadership or dealing with civil servants, and no knowledge at all of healthcare. He’d found himself, at the age of twenty-five, the youngest member in the National Party’s history to be on the election team. The party was after the young vote and h
e’d been selected because he was young and good-looking, and that always helped.

  Now, three years later, not only was he New Zealand’s caretaker prime minister, but also the civilian figurehead of the recently patched-together Pacific Nations Alliance. He knew he was far too young to be staring at this room full of elder statesmen and silver-haired chiefs of staff in their crisply laundered uniforms. All of them, no doubt, wondering why a boy, barely able to grow a beard, was suddenly running the show.

  He nodded. ‘You can proceed with the briefing. Thank you.’

  This was his government’s first full briefing since the fleet had returned last week. There had been voices among the senior officers in the Chinese Navy that the scientific data they’d gathered should be for Chinese use only. No doubt their suspicion in sharing information had been provoked by the Americans’ continuing stony silence over in Cuba; they acknowledged the regular transmissions from New Zealand with little more than a ‘Yeah, we hear you.’

  Luckily Captain Xien had silenced his officers’ concerns and brought everything they’d learned about the virus to the table.

  The lights in the briefing room dimmed as a small projector winked on and displayed a title slide on the projection screen.

  Viral Subject – observations

  The presentation had been put together by a team from Xien’s Chinese contingent, with contributory notes from a renowned child psychologist based here in Wellington, an academic linguist down from Auckland and an American physicist. Presenting the slides was a junior Chinese Navy officer.

  ‘Good morning, Prime Minister Williams and cabinet members,’ he started nervously. He cleared his throat. ‘Please forgive my English. It is not perfect. First I will introduce myself. My name is Lieutenant Choi Jing. Captain Xien, Commander of the People’s Navy, requested that I should present this briefing to you because I have had the most contact with the subject. She, uh . . . she has, I believe, come to trust me. So . . .’ He left that last word hanging in the air as he fumbled with the clicker, looking for the next slide.