“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Everything. It feels like a prison.”
“I don’t think so. We can go anywhere, do whatever we want. That doesn’t feel like prison to me.”
“Can we, though?”
“Can we what?”
“Go anywhere, do anything we want? I’m not sure we can.”
Leila put her nail-file down, stood, picked up her overcoat which had been lying on the floor and settled her black, broad-brimmed hat on her head. “Right, I’m in!”
Jonathan looked blank. “In on what?”
“You just issued a challenge. I’m in on the adventure. Come on, Geoff,” Leila gave a well-aimed kick at Geoff’s left buttock which made him curse profusely. It also made him get up off the floor. “What was that for?” he yelled, “What’s going on?”
“We are going to break out,” explained Leila.
“What? Break out of where?”
“Cambridge, my darling. We’re going to escape from Cambridge.”
Out Of Bounds
“Sorry, Miss, you can’t go that way.”
“Why not?”
“Girton Road is out of bounds, Miss.”
It was a perfect day. The sun was shining, with only a few hazy clouds visible in the sky so they had decided to set off towards the west. Leila walked at a brisk pace which Geoff and Jonathan struggled to keep up with. The dog Bobby trotted alongside. They had strolled through King’s Parade, then over the bridge past Magdalen College and then on the long trek up Huntington Street which led past some of the outlying colleges. Finally they arrived at Girton. This part of Cambridge looked more like a leafy suburb than a university town. The roads here were lined by hedges behind which grew trees of considerable size and antiquity. Behind the trees, largely hidden from sight, stood Girton College.
“We are visiting friends,” Leila insisted.
The look on the soldier’s face made it clear that he didn’t believe this. “If you’ll just go back the way you came, Miss, there won’t be any trouble.”
There were two soldiers, both wearing mottled beige uniforms which might have acted as camouflage in a desert location but made them stand out like beacons in the verdant streets of suburban Cambridge. On their heads they wore berets. In their hands they carried guns: assault weapons of some sort with chunky metal grips, long, thin muzzles and sighting devices fitted on the tops. The guns looked capable of delivering death quickly and efficiently over a significant distance.
Leila was insistent: “I wish to visit a friend at Girton.”
The second soldier, taller and altogether nastier looking than the first, stepped forward: “Not open to discussion. The bleedin’ lot of you, get back. Now!”
Geoff and Jonathan stepped back without a moment’s hesitation. Leila stood her ground, undeterred. “Well then, maybe we’ll skip the college. But surely there can be no harm in taking a little stroll out into the countryside. What’s in that direction?” She pointed to her left.
“Madingley,” said the first soldier.
“Madingley’s out of bounds,” the second soldier added.
“Over there then?”
“Westwick and Cottenham,” said the first soldier.”
“Out of bounds,” said the second soldier.
“Hmm,” Leila glanced in all directions, “So if we can’t go to Girton and we can’t go to Madingley and we can’t go to Westwick and Cottenham, where can we go?”
“You can go back where you bleedin’ came from,” said the second solider.
“Then again…” said Leila.
Jonathan, who had noticed the second soldier’s trigger finger twitching worryingly close to the trigger of his gun, stepped forward and took Leila by the sleeve. “I think we’ve had enough walking for one day,” he said.
“Oh,” said Leila, “but I can assure you that I haven’t.”
“The dog has. Poor old thing’s walked off his paws.”
Leila glanced down at Bobby. The dog was holding his front paw limply in the air and whining pathetically. Leila was genuinely concerned. “Oh, poor Bobby, baby. Come to aunty Leila and I’ll carry you.”
And so they turned around and headed along the road that took them back into town. As soon as they were out of sight of the soldiers, Bobby leapt from Leila’s arms and with a chirpy woof and a wag of the tail went scurrying on ahead at a brisk trot.
“Damn’ dog!” said Leila, “He’s a better actor than I am!”
After that they continued south towards Grantchester. They walked through the Grantchester Meadows alongside the river. Various small water fowl which splashed across the river surface were studiously ignored by the flotillas of swans, elegant and aloof, that glided past them.
It was late afternoon by the time they arrived in Grantchester. In spite of its proximity to Cambridge, the village gives the impression of being rural and remote, cut off from the larger town by numerous agricultural fields. The fields themselves were untended and already infested with weeds. But even so, Grantchester looked the very epitome of the perfect English village.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” sighed Leila when she caught sight of a picturesque little tea room, “I would kill for a cup of tea and a plate of scones.”
The tea room stood at the corner of a street. As they walked towards it, someone lurched around the corner nearly bumping into Jonathan who jumped back in surprise. When he took a closer look at the person, he stepped back yet further. So did Leila. So did Geoff. Bobby the dog arched his back, the hair standing in hedgehog spikes over his shoulders, his teeth clenched; he made a strange noise midway between a whine and a growl.
The person who had lurched around the corner was a young woman, or at any rate she had been. Now she was a thin, sad scarecrow, a mere ragged remnant of a woman, her dirty clothes hanging in tatters from a skeletal body, her eyes oozing blood that dripped over the crusty red-rimmed eyelids.
The woman held out a hand towards them. The face was a mask of pain. “Help me,” she wheezed, “For the love of God Almighty, please help me…”
Leila took a hesitant step towards the woman. Suddenly the woman’s head blew apart in a fountain-spray of blood. The sound of gunfire: putt-ta-putt-ta! Then the sound a footsteps – of how many people it was impossible to tells since they were running down the street on the other side of the corner beyond the tearoom.
Johnathan shouted – “Quick! Run for it.”
But there was nowhere to run to.
Three soldiers came around the corner. They were holding assault rifles. One soldier pointed his rifle at Jonathan, another at Geoff, the third at Leila. The one aiming his gun at Leila shouted, “Get away! You!”; he looked at Jonathan, “And you!”; he looked at Geoff, “Move away from the hostile. Now!”
“The what?” said Jonathan.
“The hostile. The Infected. The red-eye. Just back away from it.”
Anyone sensible would have realised that when a soldier armed with an assault rifle tells you to do something, it is very much in your interests to do it. Geoff wasn’t at all sensible when, completely ignoring the order, he stepped in front of Leila, putting himself directly in front of the gun barrel.
An Old Friend
“That won’t be necessary, Nichols.”
“Sir?” The soldier with the gun had been startled to hear the voice behind him, but not so startled that he had moved his gun by so much as a centimetre. It was aimed at Geoff. And Geoff was standing in front of Leila. If the soldier named Nichols pulled the trigger, the two of them would be dead in an instant.
“The gun, Nichols, it really isn’t necessary.”
“The girl, sir, she’s a hostile.”
“Ah, there you are mistaken, Nichols. The girl has some superficial similarities to a hostile. But those are deceiving. Look at her, Nichols. Other than the eyes, what other symptoms are there?”
“Well, sir, she looks pretty weird and…”
“I beg your damn’ pardon!” snapped Lei
la.
“Put the gun down, Nichols.” A tall, elegant army officer approached Nichols and, with his left hand, casually brushed down the muzzle of the soldier’s gun so that it was pointing towards the ground. “You see, it so happens that I know these people.”
“Well, am I glad to see you!” said Leila. She impulsively flung her arms around the officer and kissed him full on the lips which, as it happens, is a gross violation of correct protocol in the circumstances.
It had taken a few seconds to recognise the officer in uniform but the rumbling Richard Burton voice and the thin moustache clinging to his upper lip rapidly banished any doubts as to his identity. This was the same man who just a few weeks earlier had discovered Leila and her companions hiding away in a motorway service station. On that occasion he had been wearing a black leather biker’s jacket and riding an Electra Glide motorbike.
“Captain Timms-Martin,” Jonathan said, “What the heck are you doing here?”
“I might well ask you the same question. What I am doing here is trying to ensure your safety. Cambridge is, for the time being, a designated safe zone. We intend to keep it that way.” He turned to the three soldiers standing close by, “Everything’s under control here, chaps. Carry on patrolling, would you?”
“You don’t sound like an army officer,” Geoff said, suspiciously.
“Really? Why ever not?”
“Army officers shout a lot. And salute a lot. I seen the films.”
“Ah, yes, you are probably right. We have dropped a certain degree of formality, I suppose. The thing is, this is not a safe area. You would be well advised to leave.”
“We were planning to go that way,” Jonathan pointed down a leafy lane that led vaguely towards the south.
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that, sir. Trumpington Meadows are out of bounds. You must return to Cambridge.”
“And if we refuse?”
“That is not an option, sir. I really must insist.”
Safety In Numbers
“We have to get out of this place.” Leila was pacing the room. She’d been pacing the room all evening. It was starting to get on Jonathan’s nerves. Geoff ignored her. He was too engrossed in another James Bond novel which the junior porter had loaned him.
“I was the one who suggested getting away from here,” Jonathan reminded her, “You said you weren’t bothered.”
“Well, I am bothered now. That damn’ soldier nearly shot me. One day one of them will. I have all the tell-tale symptoms, after all. Of someone who’s been infected.”
“If you mean your pale complexion and your cherry-coloured eyes, well, half the population of Cambridge looks pretty much the same.”
“And that’s another thing. Before you met me, had you ever met anyone who had recovered from the infection?”
“I recovered,” Jonathan said, “I think I did, anyway. I had the worst flu ever when the Great Snow came last winter. I was so sick I missed out on the end of the world until it was all done and dusted.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“It’s true. I felt at death’s door. But then I got better.”
“You can’t have been infected, then. You don’t just get better. It either kills you or else it destroys your mind, cell by cell.”
“Not you, though?”
“It’s true, I fought it off. I think that’s the same with most diseases, isn’t it? Some people are more susceptible than others. Even victims of smallpox sometimes recover. But it leaves scars. That’s what happened to me. Look at me. It doesn’t take more than a quick glance to tell that I was infected.”
“Then again, Geoff didn’t get sick at all.”
“The point is, it was me that soldier was planning to shoot. He’d shot a red-eye girl right in front of us. Blasted her skull apart. He was ready to do the same to me.”
“As long as you stay in Cambridge you’ll be safe,” Jonathan insisted, “I think you will be, anyway. Like I said, half the students look pretty much the same as you.”
“You think they all have some kind of natural resistance, do you? Really? You really and truly believe that?”
“It’s possible.”
“No, it isn’t. Over the last few months we’ve travelled all over the damn’ country, hundreds of miles, and we’ve never seen a single person with the same symptoms as me. Not even in London. There are the infected and there are the uninfected. Two breeds apart. You and Geoff are uninfected. You had a bad bout of flu, so what? If you’d had the disease you would have ended up looking like me. I don’t mean you’d have been a tall, dusky, ravishing beauty. But you would at least have had red-eyes.”
“But…”
“Don’t interrupt! The irrefutable point I am making is that of all the red-eyes we’ve seen in our travels – and we have seen a great many – none were like me. Not one. They retained not a shred of humanity, they were irrational, non-communicative, violent, bestial. Essentially, they were subhuman. Non-people. And then we come to Cambridge, and lo and behold, the town is full of people just like me. Red of eye yet entirely rational.”
“‘Entirely’ might be stretching a point. The Pardoner, Horace Pethelwaite, Dame Bara Clutt…”
“None of those had red eyes. They are just ordinary Cambridge eccentrics. The town specialises in them.”
“What about the students at St Dunstan’s? They have red eyes and they are as nutty as fruitcakes.”
“No, they aren’t. I’ve talked to some of them. Angus Whitley-Stanton, for example, is quite charming.”
Geoff groaned from behind the cover of his book – “Oh God, she’s got the hots for him!”
“The point that I am making,” said Leila, ignoring Geoff, “is that the red-eyes in Cambridge are not like red-eyes anywhere else. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”
“It is a little odd, I suppose.”
“A little odd! Are you kidding me, Jonathan Richards! Are you pulling my very shapely leg? Odd! It’s bloody unbelievably, impossibly damn’ well odd. Either the entire student population of Cambridge was immunised against the infection. Which would be curious since nobody had advance warning of it. Or else they were cured of it. Which is equally curious because nobody admits to knowing what the damned infection even is, so how the hell are they going to have a cure? Then again, there is one other possibility.”
“Which is?”
Leila looked grave and she spoke in uncharacteristically sombre tones. “The other possibility and, in my view, the most probable one, is that everywhere there is a small percentage of people who, like me, managed to recover from the disease. And that those people have been rounded up, from the length and breadth of the country and brought to Cambridge to be…” Here, Leila paused.
“To be what?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. But whatever it is, it can’t be good. Maybe they are testing them. At the Cavendish Lab and those other places we saw. Maybe Cambridge is just some huge bloody scientific experiment and we are the bloody guinea pigs.”
“They can’t have been brought here,” Jonathan said, “Not if they are students. If they are students, they would already have been here at the time of the Great Snow.”
“Then maybe they aren’t students. Maybe the Pardoner was right. Maybe they are all fakes. Maybe everything we see, everything they tell us, is untrue. Just like the Mathematical bloody Bridge!”
Two Men and a Woman In A Boat
The Silver Street bridge crossed the river just by Queens’ College. It was a dark night and there were no street lights in operation. The light from the college windows was just sufficient to show the shadowy outline of the Mathematical Bridge further up the river. Jonathan, Geoff and Leila walked passed the Anchor pub which, from the sound of it, was having a busy night. The Anchor was the sort of riverside pub where, on warm nights, you would see people standing around outside, drinking and chatting. Luckily this wasn’t a warm night. In fact, it was perishing cold. There was the faint glitter of frost
on the grass of the river banks.
“Down here,” said Leila, “I saw them the other day when we were walking along the college backs.”
There were rows of punts bobbing alongside one another on the water near the bridge. Some steps led down to the punts. All the punts looked pretty much the same so they got into the nearest one and Bobby the dog leapt in after them.
“A shame I couldn’t bring my guitar,” said Jonathan, “I’ll miss that.”
“The world is full of guitars, my dear,” said Leila, “but singularly lacking in guitarists. We’ll find you another one. Half a dozen if need be. Now, undo that rope there, Geoff, and cast off or whatever the nautical term may be.”
Once untied, the punt quickly drifted out towards the centre of the river. “What do we do now?” said Geoff, “There must be some oars or something, mustn’t there?”
“In a punt?” said Leila, “I doubt it. The essence of a punt is that it has to be punted. With a punt pole. Which, I should imagine, is that long thing lying down the middle of the punt. Has anyone here ever punted before?”
Geoff and Jonathan shook their heads. Bobby whimpered.
“I was afraid not. I don’t suppose it can be all that hard, can it? I mean, students and tourists do it in their thousands. Can’t be anything to it. Here, hand me that pole, Geoffrey. Now, which end of the bloody boat am I supposed to stand on?”
As Leila stood, the punt wobbled wildly from side to side and Bobby howled pathetically. Leila made her way to one end of the boat and, finding a sort of flat platform there, stood upon it. The boat continued to wobble and Bobby’s howling took on a plangent quality that would have brought a tear to the eye of all but the most hardened dog-hater.
“This thing doesn’t seem to be all that sea-worthy if you ask me,” said Leila, “In fact, it’s a positive hazard to life and limb.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re so tall,” suggested Jonathan.
“Tall?” said Leila, “I’m barely 1.82 metres in height. Or if you prefer the old-fashioned measurements, six feet.”
The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned Page 8