Plague Nation

by Alex Scarrow

  Given more time, they might have been able to completely isolate her from the agonizing sensation of millions of cells dying as the salt water flowed over and through them.

  That brackish, rancid, toxic water had burned as it entered her mouth, burned its way down her throat, and burned as it passed through her small intestines. It was burning its way through the small protective pouch of cells in her stomach – a gut within a gut – before she’d had the chance to stagger away and evacuate the dying mess of throat and stomach lining into a corner of the main hall.

  As the fire consumed the hall and panic reigned, she’d had the chance to cough up a thick gelatinous string of blood and mucus: millions of microscopic lives selflessly given to ensure the survival of the whole colony – spat out in a heap on the stone floor.

  She’d been hoping, assuming even, that the silly man, Corkie, would test himself first. And, if he had done, the ensuing chaos might have ended the testing right there. But it had happened as it had, giving her body just enough time to save itself. The best thing was that if Leon and Freya had had any doubts at all about her before, they certainly didn’t now.

  And there was Claudia’s sacrifice to acknowledge. Her body was gone, her bones, her hair and nails, the last forensic fragments of who she used to be. Now, though, Claudia’s essence, her consciousness, lived on within the biochemical universe of Grace. It had been a willing sacrifice. Claudia had understood what they needed to do. Everett needed to look guilty. Needed to be the guilty one. The distraction.

  There were other fallen comrades too. The small community that had been slowly growing inside Corkie, for example. Given a little more time, Corkie, like Claudia, would have begun to understand and accept . . . and embrace this new form of life. But, and this is where the tragedy lay, he was never going to know that. All that was him had gone, burned away.

  Grace looked up again at the illusion of her father. ‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’

  He nodded. ‘If the survivors can send fleets of ships . . . if they can do that . . . what else can they do?’

  ‘We have to know, don’t we?’

  ‘Of course we do, Grace. You have to go and see.’

  She glanced at the other girls in her dance troupe, now climbing into the warmth of their parents’ cars.

  ‘We have to send word to all the others . . . tell them what I’m doing, right? Let them know I’m going to try to board the ship?’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘You’re quite right, we do. But first things first, little monkey. Fancy a McDonald’s on the way home?’

  Leon looked out of the back of the truck as the countryside rolled by. Every now and then he found his gaze resting on the driver of the truck behind them – Royce.

  Royce was ‘in charge’ of the soldiers now. The conceit that they were ‘actual’ soldiers had slipped away like an embarrassing idea for a fancy-dress theme that no one was bothering with any more. He hadn’t promoted himself to ‘corporal’ or ‘sergeant’, wasn’t insisting that anyone call him sir, but by default, being the oldest and hardest-looking of the knights, he’d assumed the role of their leader.

  Their eyes met through the mud-spattered windshield. Leon acknowledged Royce with a quirk of his eyebrows. Royce constantly had a face like a balled-up fist, even when he smiled.

  He scowled back.

  They were heading south, heading for Southampton. Towards something that had become much more than a glimmer of hope – something real, reinforced every day by that looping broadcast. The wording of the message had stayed exactly the same each time they listened, but the date was revised by an automated voice.

  And, Jesus . . . Trent. President Trent. Was that Dad’s friend, Trent?

  He knew the two of them went way back. They’d been in the army together. Served alongside each other in Iraq. Leon had met the man only a couple of times: once at the opening of some college building that he’d paid for, and once at a garden party. His big-ass garden. His expensive party. Leon had hated seeing Dad being all deferential to the man, bowing and scraping before him, laughing too loudly at his crap, crass jokes. Leon had even once witnessed him swat his mum’s behind, like he wanted to make the point he ‘owned’ her as well as Dad.

  President Trent, ladies and gents. When the hell did that happen?

  Although Leon had only met the man twice, he’d seen his face pretty much every day. There’d been a framed photo at home on the wall beside the stairs. A picture of Dad and Trent and several other guys in their unit. Young men pumped up with the sense of their own invulnerability, sitting on the blackened carcass of an Iraqi tank. Second Lieutenant Douglas T. Trent, Staff Sergeant Tom Friedmann and three other young bucks.

  Freya nudged Leon and leaned towards his ear. ‘You OK?’

  He nodded. ‘You know the guy making that radio announcement?’

  ‘It’s the president, isn’t it?’

  Leon nodded. ‘Did I tell you he’s a close friend of our dad’s?’

  Freya’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘No, I’m not messing. Dad and him were in the army together.’

  Her eyes rounded. ‘Seriously?’ She looked to Grace for confirmation, but she obviously hadn’t heard him over the rattling growl of the truck’s engine, and, anyway, her gaze was far away, taking in the overgrown fields receding on either side behind them and the procession of abandoned cars on the hard shoulder.

  Grace had been like that for the last couple of days: withdrawn, saying hardly anything. Leon was worried about her.

  ‘How does your dad know the president?’

  ‘Old army buddies from the nineties or something.’

  ‘Wow. And now he’s the prez?’

  Leon shrugged. ‘He was already something in the government. A secretary of something. And he’s, like, billionaire-rich . . . or he was, anyway.’

  Freya thought about that for a moment. ‘Then maybe your dad is alive still? You know, if he has connections to the president? And the US is together and sorted enough to launch a rescue fleet?’

  ‘New United States,’ he corrected her. ‘And new president. That sounds to me like they didn’t completely escape the plague. Some sort of crap went down over there for sure.’

  ‘At least they’ve got a government. Our useless lot just disappeared. But it’s pretty hopeful, right? About your dad?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He looked out at a field of broccoli stalks, rows of stubby green heads that had gone to seed and been overrun by tall nettles and cow parsley towering over them, seeming to bully them into submission. It never ceased to surprise him how quick nature was to step in, how soon hard road surfaces buckled and cracked and sprouted weeds, how quickly untended window boxes became drooping jungles that turned the sides of buildings into vertical wild gardens.

  Just two years and nature had grabbed it all back from mankind.

  Their journey down to Southampton so far had been slow. They had a fortnight ahead of them, if the dates in the radio message were still accurate. It was the third week of August now, and they had until September. Even though the roads were regularly plugged by snarls of abandoned cars demanding detours, this was Britain, not the sprawling US. Nowhere was weeks away over here.

  They were going to get there with plenty of time to spare.

  The mood of everyone aboard the trucks had lifted a little from the despair and panic they’d felt in the aftermath of the fire. They’d had to lower the bridge and withdraw to the far side, and from there they’d spent a day and a night watching their fortress slowly burn to the ground, leaving them out in the open, vulnerable, exposed, with no one, it seemed, in a fit state of mind to step forward and take charge of the situation.

  Over the last few days, Naga seemed to have finally emerged as the unofficial ‘civilian’ leader, with Royce in reluctant command of the remaining knights. He seemed increasingly happy to defer to her with each new decision that needed to be made.

  N
aga had made the call that the only thing they could do now was head for Southampton and hope for the best.

  As they’d driven slowly away, they’d all been expecting the worst: to be overrun at any moment by swarms of giant crabs, drawn by the belching noise of two overladen trucks; to witness the English countryside turned into something alien and ghastly, a landscape of pulsating viral roots linking and branching and giving birth to endless hordes of nightmare creatures.

  Instead there had been only a handful of distant sightings.

  This morning, for example, as they’d set off at first light, they’d spotted a solitary crab watching them. Leon guessed it was about the same size as the ones Corkie’s men had fought when they’d rescued Grace, the size of a large breed of dog, or a small pony. It had bobbed there, just a hundred metres away at the edge of the weed-tufted forecourt, swaying on spindly limbs. None of them had any doubts that it knew they were there.

  It was clearly watching them.

  Then it had turned and scuttled nimbly away into the nearby trees.

  Leon wondered how the virus organized itself. How it was structured. Were the crabs their version of knights or soldiers? Or were they like attack dogs, ‘trained’ to kill? And what about the human manifestations – Everett and Corkie . . . Had they somehow been a part of the virus’s ecosystem, avatars, created by the virus to spy on them?

  Or had they simply been unaware hosts?

  He wondered if the virus had any kind of hierarchy at all, or whether it was just some sprawling cooperative of organisms united by one simple principle – anything other than its own kind was the enemy and theirs to destroy.

  Leon was certain Corkie had had no idea that the virus was sitting dormant inside him. But Everett? Had the man been infected all along? One of them from the very beginning?

  If so, if they’d known, they might have been able to overpower him somehow, restrain him in some way . . . and then question him.

  Question him? Leon shook his head at how ridiculous that sounded.

  How do you talk to a virus?

  CHAPTER 38

  They came across it without warning, driving through a village that could once have been the setting for some cosy Sunday-night drama. The village green, big enough on which to play cricket, had become an acre of untamed prairie grass, and the decorative flower baskets outside the post office drooped long roots like unkempt hair, having long ago given up any hope of finding water.

  The narrow road they’d been driving along took a sharp left turn round a bandstand, and there it was. No warning signs. No hint of what was coming, that something so catastrophic and so large had struck at the heart of such an innocent-looking rural idyll.

  The front truck lurched to a halt and everyone in the back lurched with it.

  Leon banged his head against a tarp strut. ‘Ow!’

  With the truck’s rear cover on, no one could see what was ahead. But they heard Fish, on driving duty, through the partition. ‘– the effin’ hell is THAT . . . ?’

  Leon, sitting at the rear of the truck, was the first to stand up and clamber over the tailgate. He dropped down on to the narrow road and stepped to one side to see what was blocking their way.

  He spotted the tail fin first: tall, white, unscratched, with the British Airways logo still patriotically displaying its swipes of red and blue.

  ‘What is it?’ Freya called down.

  ‘Plane,’ Leon replied. ‘A crashed one.’ He took a few more steps to the side of the road to see round the truck. The tail fin curved down to merge with the rear half of the fuselage, which looked unblemished and undamaged, until, catastrophically, it was. There it went from gleaming and smooth to a twisted, buckled and frayed mess of cables and exposed rows of passenger seats. ‘A big crashed one,’ added Leon.

  The driver-side door opened and Fish stepped down. Leon joined him and for a moment the pair of them stared in awe at the wreckage. The wings were gone, sheered off. The plane must have come in from their right, aiming optimistically for the fields beyond the village on their left.

  ‘You think it was trying to land?’ asked Leon.

  Fish nodded. ‘Tried . . . and nearly did it too.’

  Others were dropping down from the back of the two trucks and soon they all stood together in silence, listening to the tick of the trucks’ engines cooling down, and trying to comprehend the scene of violent impact before them. Presumably it had happened a couple of years ago.

  Naga broke the silence. ‘We passed a left turn a couple of kilometres back. We can get round this mess.’

  ‘We should look it over,’ said Fish. ‘There might be some things worth scavenging. Bottled water, sealed food.’

  She frowned. ‘Why? We’re just a day, if that, from Southampton.’

  ‘What if there’s no one there . . .’ Fish looked around at the others sheepishly. ‘Yet?’

  Leon nodded. ‘He’s right.’ They had pallets of food and bottles of Evian in the trucks with them, but they were getting through them quickly. Any opportunity to scavenge, particularly from an easy target sitting right in their path, was worth a few minutes of their time.

  Naga relented. ‘Ten minutes only.’ She looked around. ‘And just a few of us. Leon and Fish, take Royce with you.’ She made sure they took a fire extinguisher and a gun.

  Leon, Fish and Royce left the rest beside the trucks, taking a moment to stretch their legs. They made their way towards the wreckage of the plane, stepping over twisted fragments of metal, partially scorched and melted shards of plastic. Up close, he could see rows of seats still locked in place and canted at an angle as the plane appeared to have twisted along its length. They were all still occupied. Carbonized bodies were strapped in like crash-test dummies, one or two leaning forward in what looked like the brace position.

  ‘Flash-fried,’ grunted Royce. He looked at them. ‘They were burned so quick they kept their pose.’

  ‘Just like the Romans in Pompeii,’ added Fish.

  Leon turned to his right, towards the rear of the plane. The roof of the fuselage was still intact from here all the way back to the tail, but he could see into some of the gloomy interior, where shards of light angled down from the regularly spaced oval windows. The rows of seats were filled with blackened corpses all the way to the toilets at the back.

  Every seat taken. The last train out of Dodge City.

  Fish bent down and scooped something up from the ground. He held a scorched fragment of paper in his hands and squinted to read what was on it. Leon looked around and saw that the ground was littered with papers, most partially burned at corners and edges, the print faded and blurred by exposure to two seasons of rain and snow. He saw the cover of a British passport nearby and wandered over to pick it up.

  ‘Theresa Redmond, MP.’

  Fish picked up another. ‘Jeremy Bolland, MP.’ He looked at Leon and raised an eyebrow.

  Leon looked around and found another one nearby. ‘Simon Hurst, MP.’

  ‘The government,’ grunted Royce.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Fish. He found another passport. ‘Yup, another MP.’ He had a hard smile on his face. ‘So this is where our government ended up.’

  ‘Figures,’ said Royce.

  Fish shook his head. ‘They locked down the airports for the rest of us peasants, then tried to do a runner themselves.’ He laughed coldly. ‘Well, this is a fantastic example of poetic justice for you.’

  Leon looked up at the rows of carbon-black bodies welded to their seats, to their seat belts. ‘You think they burned after crashing?’

  Fish shrugged. ‘The wings are sheered off. That’s where the fuel is kept . . . I think. Maybe on impact those tore off and –’ he gestured at the scorched interior of the plane – ‘that was the result.’

  Leon had a thought. ‘I wonder if it was brought down? You know, shot down?’

  ‘By one of our jets?’ Royce looked at Leon. ‘Or was it one of yours?’

  Leon looked at the wreckage,
avoiding the man’s glare. Royce had the bulgy-eyed look of the kind of lifer you’d definitely not want to share a cell with.

  He slapped Leon on the back. ‘Relax, mate.’ And wheezed out a laugh. ‘If it was a Yank jet, then sod it. Good luck to ’em.’ He chucked the passport he was holding back into the seats above them. It clattered down through several rows and finally lodged against one of the seat’s arms.

  They returned to the trucks twenty minutes later. At the back of the plane in the rear galley they’d found some bottled water and a catering pack of honey-roasted peanuts: 80 x 250g – Always check for nut allergies before opening.

  About a handful of nuts each. Not a great haul.

  As Leon clambered up, Grace hovered at the back of the truck and gazed at the distant wreckage. ‘Were there people . . . in that plane?’

  ‘Yeah. Lots.’

  ‘Oh. The poor, poor, things.’

  ‘Freya?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘You were saying earlier about the British government disappearing?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Leon, you’re kidding me!’

  Royce clambered into the truck. ‘Looks like it was the whole bloody lot. The entire bleedin’ House of Commons.’

  He turned and offered Grace his hand to pull her up. ‘There you go, sweet’eart. That’s how real life works. When the ship goes down, it’s the bloody captain and his mates who get the lifeboats. The rest of us buggers have to swim.’

  Leon helped him lift Grace. ‘You look pretty pleased about that.’

  Royce sniffed. ‘Just confirmed what I always suspected, mate. One rule for ’em, one for us.’

  Grace stood outside the toilet door. It was a door very similar to the one she’d once been dragged towards by her mom.

  She recalled their panic-stricken retreat across a forecourt of coffee tables and cheap leather chairs, much like this one – another service station on another motorway.

  She stared at the sign above the ladies’ toilet. Last time she’d stared at a service station toilet door, she’d been running from them.