by Alex Scarrow
‘I know, I know.’
Leon looked up at the ladder. He and Dad had discussed the options last night. The drop from the helipad would be certain. No mistaking that. But Leon wasn’t sure he could do it, to will his body to take that last step and lean forward.
There was the gun, lying on the ground; all that was required was the twitch of one finger.
Dad shook his head. ‘I heard stories of idiots who screwed that up. Took an ear off, lost an eye . . . ended up paralysed or in a coma. You make sure you aim straight, son.’
Leon nodded. ‘I will, Dad.’
He pulled himself slowly to his feet and let the mound of sleeping bags and blankets fall away from him on to the floor.
‘Today’s the day, Leo. Don’t leave it too late. Don’t leave it until dark. Don’t leave it until you’re too cold to hold the gun straight.’
‘I won’t,’ he croaked.
He picked the gun up and tucked it into the inside pocket of his anorak, safety on. The last thing he needed to do was shoot himself in the gut or the groin and bleed out painfully.
He cleared the debris away from the well leading down. He didn’t want to do the deed in the space he’d been living in these last two years. It had served him well. It felt vaguely disrespectful doing it here, leaving a mess that wasn’t ever going to get cleaned up.
He wanted to go down to the bottom. Open the door of the storage room and step out on to the concrete base, lean against the handrail and do the thing there. He hoped he’d go over and leave no mess behind. No fuss, no muss.
Like Dad said, if somehow he flinched at the last moment and ended up unconscious, at least the freezing cold sea would finish the job quickly.
‘Anyway, it’s not like I’m giving up,’ he mumbled as he took hold of the ladder and began to climb down.
‘No way, son. I’m so frikkin proud of you. You held out, Leo. You’re the very definition of a born survivor. Marine material for sure.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ Leon replied. ‘You remember that time you told me I was a waste-of-space slacker?’
‘I do. I was so, so wrong, son.’
‘Yes, you were.’
He began to make his way down the creaking old spiral stairway. He realized he hadn’t actually descended this far since last summer. It had been six months since he’d last tried limping down these creaking old rusty steps.
‘Echo!’ His voice echoed around the cavernous darkness and rang the word back at him as he clanked his way slowly down the last few steps.
He could see the faint outline of the doors at the base, light seeping round their edges.
‘Let’s not be total dicks about this,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to unbolt and open. We’re gonna step over to the rail and do this. OK?’
His voice echoed in the dark all around him.
‘That’s the plan. Are you with me, Dad?’
‘I’m with you, MonkeyNuts. I always have been.’
He stepped across the basement floor in total darkness, guided only by the door’s outline. He stepped on granules of broken glass that crackled, on something tacky that squelched in the dark, then Leon found himself beside the door.
He knew, the moment his hand grasped the bolt, there could be no stopping. No last-moment jitters or change of heart. No deals with God.
He could hear the soft moaning of the gentle wind outside squeezing its way through the cracks. This world was slowing down, cooling down, going into a hibernation from which it might never wake up.
‘It’s time to leave the party, Leon.’
‘I know, Dad.’
‘And don’t go beating yourself up, son. It’s not like you’re checking out early. You fought for as long as you could.’ He could the feel the weight of the gun in his anorak, bumping against his ribs.
‘Let’s go, son.’
He reached out for the bolt and found it with the tips of his fingers.
CHAPTER 51
‘Hey . . . Leon?’ The voice echoed around in the darkness.
He remained where he stood, stock-still, his fingers on the bolt, his other hand wrapped round the gun’s grip.
‘Leon?’
The voice was female. If it had been male he would have let it go and stepped out. He wasn’t mad; he knew he’d been talking to himself for the last two years. He knew Dad was dead and gone, not keeping him company up there in that room.
But this voice was female.
‘Leon . . . don’t go outside.’
It was vaguely familiar. Not Kim, though. Kim had had a London accent. Not Cora, she’d had a northern accent. Perhaps he really had gone mad. He heard the soft scrape of something moving closer to him.
He slid the bolt and pushed the door open. Light flooded in, pushing back the gloom and revealing a figure standing in the middle of the damp and cluttered floor.
‘It’s me,’ she said.
The figure was still forming. In the half-light he could see the glistening nodules of knitting flesh, dangling loops of pink and red tubes pumping raw material into and on to her unfinished frame. Her neck and head, however, had enough skin that he recognized her features.
‘Freya?’
‘Yes. It’s me.’
It was her voice. He wasn’t yet sure about the waxwork dummy moulding itself before his very eyes.
‘You . . . you’re the virus?’
‘I’m a part of it.’ She nodded. ‘Yes.’
He was vaguely aware of the cool weight of the gun still in his hand. One swift arm movement, one twitch of his index finger. Not to shoot her, but himself. He knew well enough how ineffective guns were on the virus.
‘I can guess what you’ve come down to do . . . Please don’t.’
I’m looking at Freya. She’s right there. She’s right in front of me. That’s her!
Another voice inside his head, equally compelling was screaming, That’s not Freya! That’s not her. That’s a viral!
He jerked the gun out of his jacket and . . .
‘No!’ she cried.
. . . put the barrel to the side of his head.
‘DON’T!’
She didn’t move forward, didn’t try to reach out for the gun. Instead she held her still-forming hands out – an invitation, not a threatening gesture.
‘Forget our pact!’ she cried. The words bounced around the enclosed space while outside the freezing cold sea slapped lazily against the rocks.
‘Forget it. We were so wrong!’ Her voice was firm. ‘Death is death, Leon. It’s stupid. It’s really stupid!’ She smiled. ‘You know, it’s for morons with no imagination?’
That sounded so like her. He realized he wanted her to sound convincing. Wanted it so badly. His finger fidgeted on the trigger, gentle compressing and releasing it, compressing and releasing, anxious, it seemed, to get on with the plan as previously agreed.
‘You go and do that, and there’ll be nothing left of you, Leon.’ She said. ‘No re-spawn. No second goes. You’re gone for good.’
‘That’s the point,’ he replied.
‘Then it’s a dumb point.’
He lowered the gun ever so slightly. ‘You are Freya . . . aren’t you?’
‘Uh-huh. I know I don’t look so good.’ She smiled. ‘Bad hair day.’
‘What . . . what happened to you?’
‘The very same thing that happened to Grace. To everyone else.’
‘She’s infected too?’
‘She was saved. And she saved me.’
Second by second, he could see Freya’s form developing, her skin knitting, thickening, losing its shiny translucency and acquiring opacity and colour. Like a ghostly form emerging from a mist. The incorporeal becoming real. He could hear liquids moving in the darkness behind her, drips of goo running down and puddling, the soft crackling of hard-edged resin fragments locking into place.
‘I don’t want to die,’ he whispered. ‘You . . . you get that, right? You understand?’
‘I know.’
&n
bsp; ‘But I will. Tonight. When it gets dark. I’m finally gonna run out of . . .’
‘We know.’
‘Fuel. I’ll freeze. I’ll go to sleep, then I won’t ever wake up again.’ Saying that out loud to her, his voice hitched and he struggled to hold back a sob. ‘But I . . . I don’t want to g-go that way either. I don’t want to die.’
‘Then take my hand, Leon.’
He shook his head. He glanced at the glistening criss-crossing growth tendrils on the floor, throbbing gently as they propelled forward the gobbets of soft tissue inside them. ‘I . . . I . . . really can’t . . .’
‘Don’t be frightened, son.’
The faint sound of his father’s voice didn’t shock Leon. He was certain it was Dad inside his head. Dad, the ever-present adviser, the inner provider of pep talks. He glanced out of the open door at the concrete walkway outside – three steps down, then the rusty old handrail. In just a second of time he could run and throw himself over that. If he wasn’t killed by the drop on to the rocks three metres below, he’d be unconscious within a minute in the freezing water.
Dead within two.
‘The gun or jump? Or you can join us. That’s what you’re thinking about, right, MonkeyNuts?’
A figure emerged from the gloom behind Freya. Like her, it was in the rapidly accelerated process of completing itself. From both arms, from the stomach, the neck, throbbing umbilical tubes of gristly flesh dangled like gas station fuel pipes. The figure was a nightmarish form, but there was enough of its face for Leon to see it was Dad.
‘You’ve done so well, son. You managed to outlast everyone.’
Freya nodded. ‘He’s right. We’ve looked far and wide. Every corner of the planet. We really can’t find anyone else left. It really looks like it’s just you.’
‘You’re the last man left on Earth,’ his father said. ‘It’s one hell of an achievement, but it’s time to come home, son.’
Leon backed away from the sight of both figures, out through the open door into the half-hearted daylight.
‘Leon, please? Don’t do it,’ pleaded Freya. Both figures took a hesitant step forward.
He was outside now. Out in the unprotected cold. He took one more backwards step and felt the small of his back bump up against the handrail. He felt the soft breeze chasing around the base of the lighthouse, chilling his hands and face.
In the daylight now, they stood framed in the doorway, dragging the pumping cords of fluid after them. In the full daylight he could see through their membranous skin, see a faint webbing of bluish arteries, the pulsating of organic machinery simulating the tasks of human organs. He could see the pull and bulge of cord-like sinews, the gristle and gnarled ends of resinous bones.
It was horror made real.
‘Leon, I nearly took my own life. Don’t make that mistake.’
His father and Freya, flayed of most of their skin and shambling like zombies.
‘Leon,’ implored Freya. ‘Please . . . I’ve missed you so much!’
He shook his head. ‘You . . . you’re not Freya. You’re not Dad!’
‘Leon,’ said Dad. ‘This isn’t how we are. How we look. This is not who we are anyway. On the inside we’re complete. We’re just as you remember us. And everyone you ever knew is in there.’
‘Not Mum, though.’
‘No.’ He shook his head slowly, sadly. ‘Not Mom, I’m afraid.’
‘What about Grace?’
‘I’m here.’
The voice came from his left. He turned and saw her. Grace. Standing right there on the walkway, wrapped in a threadbare parka she must have scavenged from the basement. She was just as he remembered her before the fire, completely unscarred. Precocious and pretty. Small. Intense. The hood was pulled up around her face, her skinny, bare and pale legs and feet poking comically out at the bottom.
‘Oh my God,’ he whimpered.
‘It’s me, you big dork.’ She smiled at him. ‘Please . . .’ She held out a fully formed hand, her skin as pale and as unblemished as it had always been. ‘Please,’ she said again, ‘believe it’s me.’
Leon could feel warmth trickling down both of his cheeks. Tears, he realized, as they quickly cooled and soaked into the scant few bristles of an unconvincing beard.
‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she said. ‘Asking everyone, sending the word all around. Finally . . . we found you alone out here. Just in time.’
Alone.
Yes.
He’d counted every day, every minute of his solitude.
‘What . . . what’s going to h-happen to . . . to me?’
‘We want to take you home, Leo. We want to take you home where you belong.’
The gun. Or join. Decision time.
‘You know, They told me something,’ said Grace.
‘They?’
‘The virus. Deep down in their DNA is their history. It’s incredibly ancient, Leon. They’ve been around almost forever. And guess what?’ She edged a fraction closer to him.
‘W-what?’
‘They think they might’ve been here before.’
He was getting very cold now. He wondered how Grace could bear to be standing there with the skin of her legs exposed to the freezing wind.
‘B-been here?’
‘Uh-huh. Something like this may have happened here before.’
He looked at Freya and Dad. With every passing second they were becoming more and more human-like. Freya’s extended hand looked complete, looked like the hand he’d held a long time ago. Held and squeezed. She had lips on her face, lips that he’d kissed once.
And only the once.
‘We were like this –’ Freya gestured back into the gloom behind her – ‘once before. Joining us now, coming down to live in the inner universe, it’s not an end to things, Leon. Trust me! It’s not death. It’s a transition – that’s all it is!’
Dad nodded. ‘It’s like heaven, son.’
‘It’s a return,’ said Grace. Her hand closed the gap between them, one finger resting gently on the back of his. ‘Come on. Let’s go home, bro.’
Leon closed his eyes, letting the ice-cold world fade away.
The voices were still, waiting for him to make the call . . .
And in the calm silence inside his head . . .
He took in a deep breath and chose . . .
AFTERWORD
‘It’s known as the “Fermi paradox” – the assembling of a bunch of reasonable assumptions about the almost infinite number of stars and exoplanets out there in the universe and coming to the conclusion that we should be being bombarded with extraterrestrial “Howdy” messages.
There are only three conceivable explanations for why we aren’t. Firstly, life on Earth was a unique one-off, a one-in-a-trillion chance encounter of variables. Secondly, that the assumptions we made are off by a significant factor. Or, thirdly, there’s something else at work, some “filtering” event that’s hoovering up life wherever it finds it.
I’m inclined to believe life here was not unique. I’m also inclined to believe that we’ve got our science about right when it comes to considering the permissible boundaries within which life can develop. Therefore, I have to consider the third possibility.
It’s not beyond the bounds of probability that in the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history, some distant civilization, vastly more advanced than ours, came to the same conclusion that we’re encountering now – that space is simply far too big a thing to travel across, that the laws of physics and quantum physics uniformly say a clear and resounding no to interstellar travel.
What would an advanced civilization do when faced with such a damning conclusion? Give up? Accept their fate to remain alone forever? I could imagine they might create some kind of device designed to travel, endlessly reproduce and spread the memory that they once existed. A viral device perhaps. Something that might eventually evolve in its own right, rewrite its core programming. Become something more than how it h
ad been when it started out. Perhaps, if RNA truly is a universal constant for life, it might even, one day, bring us the genes of creatures far and wide, and, in turn, gift our DNA to civilizations who would never otherwise have had a chance to meet us.’
Dr Edward Chan – Astrobiology Science Conference, San Diego
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this series required more than just a sick mind and a laptop. Behind my name on the cover exists a team whom I shall name and thank now.
Thank you Debbie Scarrow for countless re-reads and feedback (sometimes necessarily blunt!). Thank you Venetia Gosling and Lucy Pearse at Macmillan Children’s Books for being my editors, your work has taken this series upwards several notches in quality. Thanks to Rachel Vale and James Annal for fantastic covers and design. And thank you Veronica Lyons, Samantha Stewart and Nick de Somogyi for being the final line of defence and sparing my blushes!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist. After ten years in various unsuccessful bands he ended up working in the computer games industry as a lead games designer. He now has his own games development company, Grrr Games. He is the author of the bestselling and award-winning TimeRiders series, which has been sold into over thirty foreign territories. Plague World is the third and final book in the explosive REMADE trilogy with Macmillan Children’s Books.
Visit his website at www.AlexScarrow.com
IT HAS A PLAN
‘A high impact thriller that will keep readers . . . begging for the next instalment’
School Library Journal
The electrifying first novel in the REMADE trilogy
SURVIVAL WAS JUST
THE START OF IT
‘It’s tense, taught and tantalisingly twisty throughout’
Joanne Owen, Lovereading4kids.co.uk
The second nail-biting novel in the REMADE trilogy
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