Plague World

by Alex Scarrow

  Ten minutes after that first incision, Rex could see spots of blood soaking through Lieutenant Choi’s trousers. He could see the smart cotton uniform deflating as once firm flesh became jelly, leaving just the ridges of untouched bone to mark the frame of his body.

  Choi’s face was gone. The purpling of his skin had begun at his temples and bloomed outward across his forehead, around his closed eyes and on to his cheeks. Rex, watching closely, had noticed how the advancing edge of discolouration was led by much fainter leading lines beneath the skin. As both doctors and various experts had speculated, the living host’s arterial system provided a convenient and rapid transport network for the pathogen. Thus the heart and lungs would be left unaffected until the very end – the cardiovascular system becoming an unwitting conspirator to its own demise.

  Half an hour after first contact, Rex noted Jing was no longer breathing.

  Jing had begun to feel frightened. One by one, he’d felt his senses shut down: first his sight, then smell, taste, then hearing. Even the coldness of the observation room’s floor had receded. One by one his connections to the world were severed until he felt he was a non-corporeal entity, disembodied and floating in darkness.

  He had experienced a sensory deprivation tank once before, an enclosed coffin-like container filled with body-temperature water. It had been one part of his training as a junior officer, assessing his ability to remain calm, checking him for claustrophobic tendencies. He and his fellow officer trainees had been left to float in complete silence and darkness for an hour. For some of his colleagues it had been a disconcerting experience. For Jing, at first, it had been almost pleasant with nothing to sense, nothing to feel, hear or see . . . A chance to descend deep into his mind. To meditate.

  But, towards the end of the exercise, like the others, he’d begun to experience a growing sense of panic at the dilation of time. An hour, they’d all been assured – just one hour, yet each of them afterwards had confessed they’d begun to believe a whole morning had passed in there, a day even, that they might have been the one trainee forgotten about as the rest of the group moved on to the next exercise!

  Jing was beginning to fear that this floating, silent, blackness would be his eternity. He wondered how long it would take, existing like this, for the experience of complete sensory denial to send someone completely insane.

  Then . . . he became aware of something.

  A brand-new sense.

  A sixth sense that could only be described as halfway between taste and smell. Or perhaps an amalgamation of both that added up to more than the sum of its parts. He had a new sensation that seemed to stimulate ‘understandings’.

  First a ‘flavour’ that vaguely reminded him of the first sip of morning tea. He recalled a soothing memory of his mother waking him up on home leave. A tender smile and her cool palm against his cheek and the tap of the cup being placed gently on his bedside table.

  He instinctively understood that the triggered memory was deliberate. It was a method of communication that preceded a shared language.

  Something was greeting him.

  Another ‘flavour’ – this time, starch. The smell of his uniform’s stiff collar. The same smell that greeted him every morning as he dressed, buttoned up and prepared for duty.

  He had an instinctive understanding that this was something like, ‘Are you ready?’

  Then a ‘flavour’ that reminded him of linseed oil, chalk dust, disinfectant, stimulating memories of his first day at school.

  He understood that someone was telling him to focus. To pay attention.

  The final ‘flavour’ stimulated a different part of his consciousness.

  [h50o-8fch5thj2ha9-e—Jhs9@-hl*se.-I&s89pjje]

  It was halfway between hearing an unrecognizable noise and reading a phrase in a foreign language.

  It came again, modified slightly . . .

  [he5007cHn-you$hr-me-Jing£9@t’some It’shr8ce . . . ] like someone was tuning a radio in for better reception. The peculiar sensation occurred again. Only this time it made sense.

  [hello, can you hear me, Jing? It’s Grace.]

  CHAPTER 24

  Freya and about forty others were being escorted out of the tobacco warehouse. They were all allowed half an hour a day outside in a fenced-off compound that had once been a basketball court. The wheeled doors of the warehouse clattered open and Freya savoured the sunlight on her face as she stepped outside on to the tarmac, warm beneath her feet.

  This routine had only been in place for the past week. Somebody, somewhere, presumably Mr Friedmann, had pulled strings to get them this brief amount of time outdoors. The conditions inside had been getting progressively worse. The toilet blocks were being emptied less frequently. The mealtimes were becoming ever more chaotic as less and less food was being brought in by the forklifts. Freya was worried that pretty soon things were going to break down into a brutal version of jungle law: the fittest and strongest shoving their way to the front and taking what they wanted. It wasn’t like that yet inside the vast warehouse, but she could see that if conditions continued to deteriorate it wouldn’t take long.

  She wandered over to the chain-link fence, grabbed the rusting wire for balance and stretched out her left leg, then her right. This morning, she noticed that her left hip was completely painless, not even the slightest nagging ache.

  She’d also noticed her speech getting better, less slurred. She’d been told the symptoms of MS could sometimes appear to plateau for a while, but it was, ultimately, regretfully, a one-way journey.

  We can’t reverse this, Freya. The best we can hope to do is manage the rate of degeneration.

  She straightened up and looked around, hoping to catch sight of Leon’s dad. He’d come down here most mornings, bringing with him a little discreet contraband food for her, and assurances that this appalling state of affairs was going to be over soon. But she couldn’t see any sign of him today.

  She looked around at the four sides of the old basketball court. Normally there were about a dozen guards.

  This morning, though, there were more of them. A lot more.

  She saw three army trucks, led by a Humvee, approaching the quayside, kicking up dust from the road as they turned off the highway and rattled across gravel towards them.

  What’s this, then?

  Her heart jiggered hopefully. Maybe Mr Friedmann had finally managed to talk the president into letting them out? Those trucks would take them into Havana, presumably there would be some sort of accommodation waiting for them and hopefully something useful for them to do.

  The trucks came to a halt. Then one by one turned and reversed towards the side of the court. She saw Tom Friedmann climb out of the Humvee and walk slowly to stand beside the three backed-up trucks.

  Freya crossed the court, heading towards the vehicles towards him. She waved. ‘Hey! Mr Friedmann!’

  He spotted her and offered her a muted nod. Freya reached the mesh, wound her fingers through and called out again. ‘Mr Friedmann! Hey! Are we getting out today?’

  He looked distracted. An army officer was waiting for instructions from him. Heads nodded briskly, there was an exchange of words, then the officer strode away to pass on whatever orders had been given.

  She tried to get his attention again. ‘Hey! It’s Freya! Are we getting out of here today?’

  He bowed his head and looked down at his feet.

  Dammit. He heard me. He’s ignoring me!

  That didn’t seem like him. She figured he was the kind who’d just come out with it if he had something awkward or difficult to say.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she called out again, louder this time.

  He remained as he was, still looking down at his own feet.

  A voice barked out and a moment later the canvas drapes at the back of all three trucks were flung roughly aside. In their shadowed interiors, she could see movement going on – something glinting as it was moved forward and into the sunlight.

&nb
sp; She saw a bare, tanned forearm. A rolled-up sleeve. A gloved hand holding a fire hose. The glint of a watch strap. The movement of arms and hands following orders.

  ‘NOW!’

  Jets of liquid emerged from all three trucks, arcing out across the court. For a fleeting second she wondered if they were going to be treated to a cooling shower to wash away several weeks’ worth of sweat and grime. Hardly the most dignified way of getting clean again, but – screw it – about time and more than welcome.

  Then she caught the overpowering odour. Thick in the shimmering air and unmistakeable.

  Petrol.

  She screamed. ‘OH GOD, NO!’

  The petrol soaked her, stung her skin, her face. She backed away from the mesh fence as the arcs of liquid swept across the court, soaking everyone and drenching the tarmac. The air was suddenly filled with screaming, everyone realizing, like Freya, what was about to happen.

  Freya backed, shaking, into a corner of the court, staring at her soaked hands and arms, feeling her clothes clinging to her skin, her long dark hair matted, hanging and reeking of petrol.

  Oh God. No! Not like this. Not like this!

  The hoses stopped. But the screaming didn’t. Her voice and everyone else’s pleading, crying, screaming, wailing as one of the marines stepped towards the mesh, produced a twist of paper and set it alight.

  Freya saw Mr Friedmann turn away, head towards the Humvee, sobbing, not even man enough to witness what he was supervising.

  The marine held the twist of paper in his hand until it had caught properly, then pushed it through the mesh and backed quickly away.

  Freya’s scream became one long ragged sound as, almost in slow motion, a wave of blue flame swept across the court like a vengeful ghost, engulfing her and everyone else.

  ‘NO!’

  She sat bolt upright in her cot, her scream strangled to a thick, throaty gurgle.

  It was dark and very still. The stifling air in the warehouse was thick with the sounds of slumber, deep and even breathing, snores and rumbles. And there, perched on the end of her cot, like some fairytale troll, sat Grace.

  ‘Freya,’ she said softly. ‘It’s me.’

  Freya was still huffing air in and out of her lungs, like the bellows of blacksmith’s furnace. She was still in shock, still half immersed in the absolute certainty that she was on fire from head to toe, her skin blistering, bubbling and slewing from her bones.

  ‘I saw your nightmare,’ said Grace. ‘It was horrible.’

  She needed another few seconds to shake off the terror, to pull herself out of the confines of that dream and make sense of the context of this one. Was it another nightmare? Obviously she was still sleeping.

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace smiled. ‘It is me. I’m here. This is real.’

  ‘Grace,’ Freya said again. She looked around. She was still in the warehouse, the air still stank of tobacco, sweat and faeces. ‘How come you’re here?’ How? . . . Where did—’

  ‘I’m inside you, Freya.’

  ‘Inside me?’

  ‘I infected you.’ Three words delivered as plainly and as simply as that. It must be a dream, then.

  ‘I want to see Leon,’ Freya said. ‘Can I see Leon, please?’

  ‘Freya, this isn’t a dream. This is real.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Course it is.’

  ‘I infected you.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  Grace nodded. ‘I did.’

  ‘OK then. How? When?’

  ‘On the way down to Southampton.’ She leaned forward, reached out for one Freya’s hands. Freya instinctively recoiled and pulled her hand back. ‘Freya, this is not a dream. This is a construction. Like a mind trick. An illusion. It’s an illusion I’m controlling.’

  ‘You’re . . . controlling this?’

  ‘Yes. Because I’m inside you. I’m with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s just crazy. This isn’t real!’

  It certainly felt real, though. Smelled real. Freya tried to remember if she’d ever had a dream where she could actually smell things.

  ‘Freya, please . . . listen to me. I’ve got something very important to tell you.’

  ‘You . . . you’re not here! You can’t be here!’

  ‘Not all of me is here, just a little. Enough to tell you what I have to tell you.’

  ‘This isn’t making . . . I . . .’

  ‘Freya, please!’

  ‘Grace, I . . . Shit . . . this is—’

  ‘You’re saved. I saved you. You’re one of us now.’

  ‘One of . . . ?’

  ‘And you have a job. A very important job to do.’

  ‘A job?’

  ‘Let me explain it to you. Let me show you . . .’

  CHAPTER 25

  Flight Lieutenant Jamie Cameron glanced at the fuel display. ‘Ten more minutes of this, Steve, then we’ll turn this old bird around.’

  ‘Good.’ His co-pilot nodded. ‘I’m getting squint-eyes.’

  Jamie tapped his throat mic. ‘Ten more minutes, lads.’

  The rest of the crew acknowledged him.

  Flying low at a thousand metres, beneath the top-heavy cumulus clouds, was tiring on the eyes, but the ‘floaters’ had so far tended to hang at this altitude, pushed along more quickly by the lower and thicker air currents.

  Ever since the outbreak they’d been tasked with the same thankless job, flying endless languid loops around New Zealand airspace looking for floaters.

  The Surviving World had learned about the resistant effects of analgesics. The Surviving World had learned about salt – how to use it as a barrier, how to use it as a testing agent.

  The virus, however, was also learning to take better advantage of the world’s high and low pressure fronts and prevailing winds. It had begun to produce more ambitious airborne structures: membranous sacks given lighter-than-air buoyancy by the methane and helium contained within. These sacks, some of them larger than weather balloons – swiftly becoming known as ‘poppers’ or ‘floaters’ – contained thousands of infectious spores. It wasn’t enough to shoot these things down; they had to be shot down out at sea so that the fluffy snowflake-like spores that erupted and descended from them hit seawater and died.

  During the first year after the outbreak, there’d only been a couple of dozen floater sightings, and those had been heading south-westward, having drifted a long way across the Pacific, presumably from the North and South American continents.

  In the second year, the number increased radically, most of them drifting eastward from mainland Australia. There had been nearly two thousand logged sightings. Every single one of them easily ‘popped’ with a burst of incendiary rounds, the flammable methane/hydrogen mix inside the sacks erupting with a satisfying bluish flash and the thousands of tiny spores sparkling like stars as they burned. In the last six months the floaters had reduced to a steady flow averaging about a hundred per month. They were easy to see and quickly spotted on the radar. They drifted slowly enough to be less-than-challenging targets for the boys in the back of the plane.

  ‘Sir, I’m picking up a signal, zero-four-seven.’

  That wasn’t for Jamie, that was a message for the electronics officer, Lieutenant Talbot. The channels were all kept wide open – unless Carling and Jessop way at the back of the plane started bitching about one thing or another.

  ‘Got it on my screen now. Surface level signa— . . . That’s . . . Whoa! OK. That’s big. Really big!’

  Jamie tapped his mic on. ‘Talbot, what’ve you got back there, mate?’

  ‘We’re picking up a signal on the radar. Something big on the surface.’

  Jamie hoped to God it wasn’t another rogue oil tanker. There’d been one discovered over a year ago drifting listlessly on the ocean’s meandering currents. A team in biohazard suits had gone aboard and found the ship’s holds filled, not with oil but with tens of thousands of bodies, a last desperate bid to escape the outbreak. There’d been n
o sign of infection among them. But in a way that seemed worse. They’d died of thirst. They would have all been dead within a week of setting sail.

  ‘Freighter?’

  ‘Bigger.’

  ‘Tanker?’

  ‘No, mate. This is way, way bigger.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Talbot, stop pissing around and give me something more precise than “bigger”!’

  ‘What’s on my screen is about five kilometres across, sir. How’s that for precise?’

  ‘Five kilometres?’ He exchanged a glance with the co-pilot sitting beside him. ‘How far away is it?’

  ‘Two-forty klicks, at heading zero-four-seven.’

  About twenty minutes away from them . . . and judging by the heading, it was something that must have come in from the Pacific.

  ‘You sure it’s not weather noise?’

  ‘It’s not weather.’ Talbot sounded irritated, like he’d been asked if he knew port from starboard. ‘It’s solid and it’s sea level.’

  For a cold-sweat second, Jamie wondered if he’d screwed up spectacularly on navigation. Sat-nav systems had ceased to function a long time ago. It was ‘old school’ navigation now, mark one, eyeballs and time and speed calculations made on a paper chart.

  His co-pilot anticipated his question. ‘Relax. We’re right where we should be, sir, although . . . Talbot’s picked up something that shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Right.’ Jamie checked the fuel display again. The detour was well within their range. ‘We’d better go and take a closer look at this bloody thing.’

  A quarter of an hour later his co-pilot made a sighting. ‘Jamie, you see it?’

  He nodded. With a flat, uniform, deep blue sea it was easy to spot – a block of faint grey on the horizon, ‘land’, which shouldn’t be there.

  ‘Looks like a volcanic island.’

  Jamie adjusted the course slightly and reduced their altitude so that their first approach and fly-by would be a relatively close one. The sea rushed beneath them, a glistening blur as they closed the last twenty klicks’ distance.

  After a couple of minutes Jamie could pick out a lot more detail. The structure was shaped very much like a volcanic island – a central steep column-like volcanic spout surrounded by an apron of ejected detritus that would comprise the ‘lowlands’.