Plague Nation

by Alex Scarrow

  She was home again.

  ‘Home’ in many ways. Home in the comforting illusion she’d constructed of her bedroom back in New Jersey. Home amongst this ecosystem of entities that had come along for the ride with Grace to observe these curious humans holed-up in their fortress.

  Grace liked coming to her interior world. She missed the intimacy of this micro community, with its communication that had no choice but to be honest. Communication that was more than just words; it was memories, smells, sounds, feelings, desires all conveyed at once in a rich cocktail. By contrast, in the outside world, talking felt like such a primitive and limited way to exchange ideas. Like using Morse code in an age of wifi.

  It was tiring.

  Here she felt relaxed, soothed.

  She was home tonight for another reason, though: to comfort someone who needed her. Someone who was still very frightened and confused by her surroundings. She felt her presence nearby . . . a voice crying out in darkness. A wafting of sharp amino acids that clearly cried a frightened, ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

  ‘I’m back,’ said Grace softly.

  ‘Grace? Grace! Is that you?’ came the reply, clearly relieved.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  She created the familiar space of the infirmary in her head. Created herself as Dr Claudia Hahn would recognize her – disfigured by burn scars. One day, maybe soon, she’d present herself as she’d once looked, so much prettier with her long hair dark and wavy, and her skin smooth and pale.

  But not yet. Familiarity was important.

  She placed herself on the infirmary’s gurney. Sitting upright on it, legs swinging over the side. And then she placed Claudia Hahn opposite, sitting on her examination stool.

  Dr Hahn shook her head, her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, her forehead rumpled. She looked confused as she took in her surroundings. ‘My infirmary . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Grace? What is this? Am I . . . dead?’

  ‘No, Claudia. You’re alive. Like me.’

  ‘But . . .’ She looked around the room. ‘But this is not real?’

  ‘It’s my memory of your infirmary. I think I got it mostly right.’

  Hahn looked around and shook her head. ‘Not quite.’ She pointed at her desk, clear and organized. ‘I am usually less tidy than that.’

  Grace smiled. Encouraged that Claudia could joke with her.

  ‘Can you help me to understand, Grace? I . . . am confused. I . . . The last thing I remember clearly is . . .’

  ‘Dr Hahn . . . Claudia, you’ve been absorbed.’

  She looked at Grace. ‘You infected me?’ It was a comment that floated halfway between a question and an accusation. Grace had had this conversation with Claudia Hahn the previous night, but then she’d been less ‘there’, her consciousness not fully assembled yet . . . less ‘present’.

  ‘I invited you to join us.’

  ‘Us? Who is—’

  ‘I know. It’s all very difficult to deal with at first. But it gets easier, I promise.’

  Hahn’s frown deepened. ‘But . . . you did infect me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how is that possible? I am immune. I was taking the medication like everyone else.’

  ‘Those chemicals make it much harder for us, but it’s not impossible.’ Grace held out a hand to her. ‘And the truth is you and the others aren’t taking enough to properly stop us, just enough to slow us down.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Us.’ She repeated the word, her hand still held out. ‘You call us “the virus”. But we’re all family now.’

  Hahn stared suspiciously at her offered hand.

  ‘Those pills you take do hurt us. Those chemicals in your blood killed millions of our cells, but we managed to bring you over.’

  ‘But . . . I am still . . . alive?’ She shook her head as if she were trying to shake off a drunken stupor. ‘Today – I think it was today, this evening, actually – was I not talking to you, to your friend Freya? I even spoke to Major Everett! Or was that all a dream?’

  ‘No, you spoke to him and to Freya.’

  Dr Hahn was frowning again. ‘But how? If I’m infected?’ She looked utterly perplexed.

  ‘They are inside you now. They’re a part of you. They’re learning all about you so they can save you.’

  Hahn’s eye narrowed. ‘They . . . the virus?’

  ‘The virus.’

  Realization settled on to her face. ‘God, no. Please . . .’

  ‘It was exactly the same for me, Claudia. One of those small creatures “stung” me, some cells managed to survive in my bloodstream and they hung in there. Slowly they reproduced. It took weeks and weeks, but they managed to help me across to join them in the end. And all that time I was kind of confused, not sure what was real and what was not. It was like a long, weird dream.’

  Grace stretched out and grasped one of the doctor’s trembling hands. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise. You’re still you. You’ll always be you.’

  ‘I don’t want to die like this!’

  ‘You’re not dying!’

  ‘I don’t want to be –’ she shook her head, trying to find the right word, then finally settled for Grace’s – ‘absorbed!’

  ‘They’re just inside you, that’s all. Today you really have been walking around, talking, being a doctor. No different from normal.’

  ‘But am I still . . . a human? Not a—’

  ‘A copy?’ Grace shook her head. ‘No. You’re still you.’ She nodded towards the door to the infirmary. ‘Outside, in the Big World, you’re asleep in that cot right next to mine. Right now, out there as well, I’m holding your hand.’

  Hahn pulled back from her, then stared down at both her hands, touching them lightly together, fingertips tracing across her palm. ‘This feels so real. Here, I feel real. But this is a hallucination?’

  ‘It is what they call an abstract, but in some ways its more real than outside.’

  ‘I do not understand this. Where are we right now? Where is this?’ She looked around the not-quite-right infirmary. ‘Am I in your . . . your mind? Or are you inside mine?’

  ‘We’re joined. So I guess you could say we’re somewhere in between,’ Grace replied. ‘We’re in the stream.’

  ‘Stream?’

  ‘That’s what I call it.’

  ‘In . . . you mean bloodstream? We’re in your blood?’

  ‘Our blood. We’re joined. Our hands are joined, melded. I’ve entered your stream.’

  Hahn shook her head again. ‘This is hard. Am I just . . . cells? Just cells floating in what? In plasma?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I suppose.’ Grace smiled. ‘It’s weird at first.’

  ‘But how can I think? How can I talk? This is not possible. My mind is billions, trillions of cells linked together in a very specific way. Surely who I am is that! The structure of those cells!’

  Grace shrugged. ‘They understand which part of our mind is who we are, and which part of our brain is just, like, storage. Like how part of a computer is a processor, but another part is the hard drive.’

  Hahn shook her head. ‘I don’t like this! I don’t want this!’

  ‘Give it time. It’s weird, I know, but it does get easier. Then, soon, you realize it’s the only way to be.’ Grace smiled. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  Hahn began to sob. ‘Why? Why did you do this to me? Why did you infect me?’

  ‘Because you were so kind to me. You cared for me. I like you, Claudia. It’s my gift.’

  ‘This?’ She spread her hands at the illusion. ‘This is a kindness?’

  ‘You’ll see that it is. Soon. You really will.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘And I had to do it, Claudia. I had no choice.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The blood test. Do you remember what happened?’

  Hahn shook her head. ‘No . . . I . . .’ She narrowed her eyes.

  ‘That�
�s OK, not all of your memory is assembled here. You did that salt test on my blood.’ Grace shrugged. ‘Obviously, I was never going to pass that test.’

  Hahn screwed up her face, narrowed her eyes. ‘No. Hold on. I remember . . . remember . . .’

  Grace cut her short. Hahn’s memory was going to be horrible. Grace sensed Hahn’s cluster sending out chemical feelers for it, rummaging around for it like an absent-minded old lady in kitchen drawers full of junk mail and red-headed bills.

  Grace enveloped the feeler and blocked it.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK,’ Grace cooed softly. ‘It’s been nearly a week now. You didn’t tell anyone I failed. It’s our secret.’

  ‘My God, this is crazy. This is—’

  ‘And we really can’t tell the others, Claudia. We can’t tell them about us.’ She leaned forward and rested a hand on one of her shoulders. ‘They’ll burn us. They’ll set fire to both of us if we do.’

  ‘What about all the others?’ Hahn stared at her. ‘What is going to happen to the others?’

  Grace hunched her shoulders. ‘We’re trying to decide what’s for the best. That’s what this is all about . . . what’s best for them.’

  Hahn shook her head vigorously. ‘I will tell them. I am going to tell them!’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘You . . . you . . . They . . . can’t do this to us! I can’t let you infect them all!’

  ‘Please!’ Grace leaned her face closer to the doctor’s until their noses were almost touching. ‘Please?’

  ‘This is not right. I have to tell them . . . I will tell them!’

  ‘You know they are listening to us, don’t you?’

  Hahn looked around the illusion of the room. Her eyes darted manically.

  ‘We’re not alone – no one’s ever truly alone in the stream,’ said Grace.

  ‘Grace, listen to me,’ Hahn hissed, her voice lowered. ‘Those people do not deserve to die.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill them. I want to save them. Don’t you see?’ A tear leaked from Grace’s left eye and streaked down the scarred tissue of her cheek. Not for show. Genuine. ‘Especially Leon . . . Freya. I love them. I miss them so much.’

  ‘If you loved them, Grace, you wouldn’t infect them!’

  ‘Please?’ Grace whispered. ‘Say you won’t tell anyone. Say it out loud. Say it and you have to mean it. You really have to mean it.’

  ‘I cannot do that.’

  Grace loosened her grip on the woman’s shoulder. She sat back on the gurney and sighed deeply. ‘OK . . . then we’ll have to do the other thing.’

  ‘Other thing? Grace . . . what is that?’

  She shook her head. ‘We’ll talk again soon.’

  CHAPTER 25

  The ‘proper’ toilets in the castle were located downstairs off the main hall. Very posh, very modern ones with slate tiles and recessed ceiling lights. But they were no longer functional and were being used as storerooms.

  The communal toilets were now located off the gallery floor. More convenient for those who had a weak bladder and needed a midnight piss, no need to tramp down the stone stairway and across the cold stone floor of the main hall, disturbing the dogs on the way. Just a tiptoe across the creaking wooden floor, past the women’s dorm, past the closed door of Everett’s ‘campaign’ room, past the laundry room and towards a large room that was now, as Fish liked to call it, the ‘communal pisser’.

  The latrine apparently used to be a function room where civil weddings were conducted and corporate strategies were explained before a PowerPoint presentation.

  The conference table, lectern and chairs had been cleared out, and now there were half a dozen curtained cubicles set up inside the room.

  Leon coughed once into his fist as he entered, as toilet etiquette dictated. No one responded. He had the latrines to himself. He swept aside the nearest curtain, lifted the yellow plastic lid of the ‘Kampa Khazee’, sighing wearily as he remembered Naga’s latest whinge about men in this place not lifting the seats.

  He did the decent thing.

  The function room had tall glass doors that opened on to a paved balcony that protruded over the moat and provided what must have once been a beautiful view of the grounds beyond. Which made it the perfect place to locate the communal toilets; latrine duty involved dragging them outside, hefting them up on to the railing and emptying them directly into the moat below.

  He finished his business, stepped out of the cubicle and went across to the glass doors, opened one and stepped on to the balcony.

  It wasn’t quite dawn yet, but the sky had already lightened to a metallic grey. If those floodlights hadn’t been on down below, casting cones of sterile light across the lumpy ground, there would still have been just about enough light to see all the way to the distant tree line.

  At this time – just before ‘proper’ dawn, with fingers of silvery mist withdrawing like phantoms – he imagined, before the virus, the trees would have echoed with chirrups and tweets from a dawn chorus of early birds.

  Instead it was graveyard silent, save for the distant and soft rhythmic chugging of the generator powering the floodlights. He thought he could hear someone whistling a tune somewhere down below on the apron of ground that surrounded the keep. Probably the Kurdish guy, Omar. Omar seemed to know every Michael Jackson song ever written. Leon cocked his head, trying to catch the wafting notes, trying to recognize the tune. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  He heard something else. Water sloshing softly. It was coming from further along the balcony, emerging from another open glass door. Curious, he took a dozen steps towards it and found himself looking into the laundry room. Just like the latrine, it had once been a function room. He could hear water sloshing around in a bucket. And the regular fwip, fwip, fwip of someone vigorously scrubbing something.

  He coned his hands around his eyes, peered in through the glass and saw someone squatting on the floor of the laundry. The scrubbing sound and sloshing immediately stopped.

  ‘Leon?’ A small whispered voice. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He pulled the door open and stepped inside. ‘You OK? What the hell are you doing at this time?’

  She didn’t answer. He could see her poised over the bucket, perfectly still, like a small burrowing meerkat frozen by the sound of an approaching predator.

  It looked like she was scrubbing at a bed sheet.

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘I had . . . an accident . . .’

  ‘An accident?’ He stepped towards her.

  ‘Leo . . . please . . .’ She held a palm out to him. ‘Just stay there.’

  ‘Hey, sis . . .’ He ignored her and squatted down beside her. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Leon!’ she hissed. ‘Just go!’

  He could see the glint of a torch on the floor beside her. Everyone had their own; every room had one. He picked it up and flicked it on.

  ‘Jesus!’

  The water was as red as a vat of cranberry juice. And there were dark, almost sepia-coloured stains on the sheet that were never ever going to come out. ‘What the hell—’

  ‘Leon!’ She glared at him angrily. The eye on the ruined side of her face glinted harshly in the light of the torch. ‘I said go!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I . . .’ He looked at the dark, murky water. Unsure. ‘Are you hurt? Did you cut—’

  ‘Oh, brainiac, come on. What do you think . . . ?’

  Then he got it. Belatedly. Stupidly. ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘Right.’ She nodded.

  ‘Ah . . . that’s gross.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She resumed scrubbing the sheet. ‘Little privacy then, bro, huh?’

  He flicked the torch off again, stood up and backed up a step, trying to contain the queasiness in his voice. ‘Uh, OK . . . I’m going.’

  He wanted to find something funny to say. Something big-brother
ly, witty, yet tender and supportive, but all he could come up with was, ‘Crap. I guess it sucks being female, right?’

  Oh, brilliant. Genius, Leon.

  ‘It caught me by surprise. It’s my first . . .’ She stopped scrubbing. ‘Actually, do you mind? Can you leave, please?’

  ‘Sure . . . I’ll . . . let you . . . uh . . .’ He retreated towards the veranda door he’d come through. ‘See you at breakfast, then?’

  Grace resumed her vigorous scrubbing as he stepped out into the cool dawn air and made his way along the paving stones to the open door leading back into the latrine room.

  The end of the world might have been and gone, yet so many of the mundane, inconvenient, things in life still happened on a regular basis.

  There was something oddly reassuring about that. About the awkward moment he and Grace had just shared. He found himself smiling as he made his way along the gallery towards the men’s dormitory. Relieved. Proud. Reassured.

  Looks like I’ve got my bossy little sis back.

  CHAPTER 26

  ‘First time?’ Freya made a face. ‘Poor thing. The first time it happens it’s always totally traumatic. Fourteen is pretty late in the day for your first period, though.’

  ‘She’s small . . . Does that have something to do with it?’ replied Leon.

  Freya sighed as they both shuffled forward a step in the breakfast queue. ‘What makes you an expert in female matters all of a sudden?’

  ‘Just a guess.’

  ‘Stress, trauma, poor diet, all those things have a bearing. And, bless her, she’s been through all that and God knows what else over the last couple of years. Point is it’s a really good sign, Leon. It means she’s mending. It means her body has decided it’s well enough to get on with the important things.’

  ‘Porridge or bean stew?’

  Freya looked at both bubbling pots dangling over the roaring fire. ‘Is the porridge sweetened this time? Not salted?’

  ‘Oh my days!’ Danielle squawked indignantly. ‘It was just a simple bloomin’ mistake!’ Danielle was, or used to be, the youngest member of the castle’s community. Sixteen now, but fourteen when the world had ended. Yet sometimes she managed to sound like a cantankerous old housemaid from another century. ‘The sugar pot wasn’t labelled properly. It wasn’t my ruddy fault!’