Plague Nation Read online

  To Debbie,

  my partner in slime.

  (And who helps me turn my bad wurdz good.)

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PLAGUE LAND

  PLAGUE WORLD

  CHAPTER 1

  Two Years Ago

  Tom Friedmann stared out through the smoked glass of the foyer at a scene of which he couldn’t make sense. The sky was spilling flakes like Thanksgiving-parade ticker tape. It vaguely reminded him of the billowing clouds of office stationery that had fluttered down over Manhattan after the first American Airlines impact all those years ago. These were smaller, though, like those big fluffy snowflakes you know are going to settle and know damn well are going to cause merry havoc with your travel plans.

  Channelled down by the tall glass-and-chrome office blocks all along Wall Street, the flakes fluttered in clouds that at a distance looked like a descending bank of fog.

  And people were dropping. Dying.

  Not immediately . . . not gas-attack immediately. He’d seen that at work in the Middle East. The ghastly sight of civilians dropping in waves. No mess, no fuss, just death by chemical agent. But, Jesus, this was happening almost as quickly.

  Too fast for nature, surely?

  Tom watched a cop on the other side of the road. A minute ago he’d been waving pedestrians inside into various corporate foyers. Now he was on his knees, swaying like a drunkard and staring at the glistening skin of his hands.

  ‘Tom, there’s no answer!’

  He turned. Elaine Garcia – she was holding his phone up at him. She’d been trying to reach her mother.

  ‘Give it to me!’ he demanded.

  He took it off her.

  ‘Tom, what’s happening?’

  He ignored her as he swiped through his contacts: half a dozen numbers in a quick-retrieve list. The first number started with the White House prefix. It was engaged.

  The second number was his son’s mobile. It rang twice before Leon picked up.

  ‘You OK, Dad?’

  ‘That you, Leon?’ He sounded different. Not Leon’s usual lazy for-parents-only drawl, the voice version of an eye-roll.

  ‘Dad, what’s goin—’

  ‘It’s here, Leo. It’s right here in the city!’

  ‘What? In . . . in New York?’

  ‘Yes! There are people dying in the goddamn street!’

  The line rustled and crackled with telecoms overload. He wondered how many people were saturating the network with panic calls right now.

  ‘Dad, where are you? Are you safe?’

  ‘Leo, listen to me! Son! Listen! This thing is airborne! You’ve got to stay inside! Stay at home! Tape up your windows and doors, and STAY INSIDE!’

  ‘But we’re on a train, Dad! You said get out of London. You told us to—’

  Tom winced. He had said that. That had been his advice exactly. Get away from London. Outside in the street a police car with a wailing siren had pulled up. The fallen cop’s colleagues were getting out to help him. Tom banged his fist on the glass to warn them to stay in their squad car, but with the noise outside, the siren, people’s screams . . . his banging fist was lost in all of that.

  ‘I know. Shit . . . shit. Are you close to Mom’s family?’ He tried to remember where Jennifer’s parents lived. A small chocolate-box village just outside a city called . . . he remembered.

  ‘Are you near to Norwich?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Train’s about—’ The rest of what Leon was saying was gone amid crackling.

  ‘OK, soon as you get there, you tell Mom, you tell Mom’s parents they’ve gotta stay inside. Do you understand me? Stay inside! Close the windows. Don’t go out again!’

  The cops outside were now looking up at the artificial snow, batting the flakes away from their faces. The infected officer had flopped over on to his side, the good hand clawing at the other glistening, reddening one.

  ‘Oh God, Tom!’ cried Elaine as they watched.

  The man pulled some flesh away from his hand. It came off far too easily, like casserole beef from a T-bone. Blood streamed down his forearm; a tendon hung from the bones of his hand in a tired, swinging loop.

  Jesus Christ!

  A few metres further down the street, where a woman had collapsed earlier, the process seemed far more advanced. Under the woman’s now stained clothes, her previously bulky frame had reduced and dark trickles of liquid seemed to be fanning out around her.

  The cop on the ground was flailing his dissolving hand around, screaming for help from his colleagues. There were other people outside converging on the squad car. Other people infected like him, shambling towards the cops in a state of shock, like toddlers bow-mouthed and mewling for their mothers. They stared bewildered and frightened at their hands, their arms, swiping at glistening, erupting blisters, pleading for help.

  The cops seemed to be ignoring the light fluttering ‘snowfall’ as if that was much further down the list of things to note. They backed away from the screaming mass of infected people approaching, barking commands at them all to stay well back.

  Jesus . . . it’s like a frikkin zombie movie.

  A gun came out. A single shot went up into the air. Tom could see by the wide-eyed look from the young cop standing over his stricken colleague that the next shot was going to be aimed. He was aware Leon was still on the end of a crackling line. Waiting for advice. For help.

  ‘Listen to me . . . Listen . . . This thing’s in the air. You can SEE it. Like flakes. It’s fast! It’s killing people everywhere . . . touching their skin, then they’re dying . . . melting . . .’

  The signal was breaking up badly.

  ‘Don’t let it TOUCH you . . . the flakes! Don’t let them near you!’

  He heard his son reply. Something chewed up and spat out by the failing signal.

  ‘I love you, son!’ he shouted into the phone, as if that might make a difference. ‘I love you, both you and Grace! God, I wish I was with you—’

  Someone barged into him. Nearly knocking the phone out of his hand. A guy in a grey suit and a white office shirt damp with sweat. He tried to snatch the phone from Tom’s hand.

  ‘Hey! Get out of my goddamn way!’

  Tom shoved the man ba
ckwards into the smoked-glass window. It rattled and boomed, but didn’t crack.

  ‘You got a signal there?! I gotta make a call!’

  ‘Get your own phone!’ Tom snapped. The man backed off and went in search of someone else on a phone. Tom put the cell back to his ear. ‘Leon! You still there?’

  Just a crackle and hissing.

  ‘Leon! LEON!’

  He was gone.

  Elaine was staring at him as he disconnected the call and slid the phone back into his jacket pocket. ‘Tom . . . ?’

  Outside, the cops were now reacting to the flakes that had landed on them. One was staring intently at his own hand like some hokey carnival palm reader; the other was rubbing the bridge of his nose with the back of a hairy forearm.

  ‘Tom?’ she bleated again, more insistently this time.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  He shook his head. Furious with himself. He’d had advance warning. Twenty-four hours ago the president had been advised to mobilize FEMA resources. He’d been ahead of the herd . . . just. And yet he’d failed to capitalize on it, failed to take steps, and here he was stuck in the reception of some Wall Street reprographics company, watching people die all around him.

  He stared out of the window. The downfall of flakes seemed to be lessening, or perhaps the ever-present ‘Manhattan Mistral’, funnelled between the tall buildings, was pushing the cloud of particles further down the street. The two policemen who’d turned up in the squad car were beginning to falter. One had dropped down to sit heavily on the kerb, like a late-night reveller trying to figure out how he was going to get home. Most of the other people around were in the same state, slumped to their haunches, dizzily trying to comprehend what was happening to them.

  Tom reached for the swing door that led on to the pavement.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ cried Elaine. Her perfectly threaded brows were arched in horror.

  He nodded at the police car parked on the far side. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘We can’t go out there!’

  ‘I’m going. You can come with or you can stay. Up to you.’

  She shook her head frantically.

  Act quickly or don’t act at all, MonkeyNuts.

  ‘I’m going, then,’ he said firmly.

  ‘You can’t leave me!’ she cried, reaching out to grab his arm. ‘Please! You can’t—’

  He shook her off roughly. ‘You’re a grown-up, Elaine. You’ll have to figure something else out.’ He pushed the door open, pulled his jacket over his head and hurried across the pavement and into the late afternoon sunlight now striping the ground with shades of salmon pink and shadowy lavender, like vast Rothko-esque hard-edged brushstrokes. Behind him he could hear Elaine banging on the glass and howling after him.

  He approached the younger cop sitting on the kerb.

  ‘Officer?’

  The cop looked up at him and blinked back the sun in his eyes.

  ‘Keys?’ said Tom. ‘Your car keys? Are they in the ignition?’

  The cop grinned, vacant and childlike, at him. ‘Hey, Steve? That you, man?’

  He’s gone. He’s out of it.

  Tom looked past him. The driver’s side door was wide open. The emergency lights were still rotating. Which presumably meant the keys were there. ‘Never mind.’

  He quickly hopped in and pulled the door closed, found the keys dangling from the side of the steering column and turned them. He shot one more glance back at Elaine, standing beyond the smoky-coloured glass, banging her fists on the window for him to come back to rescue her.

  She’s not your responsibility, Tom. Leon and Grace. OK? Just Leon and Grace. That’s it.

  CHAPTER 2

  I get it, Dad. I get it. I’m not a complete moron.

  You’re dead.

  I realize now that you’re just a figment of my imagination. A therapy tool. A way for me to confront my issues and set them out on the pages of a journal instead of leaving them to stew inside my head. You’re a cure for my migraines, a placebo.

  So why the hell am I keeping this journal going? I suppose part of me still hopes you’ll end up reading it and see that I did OK. That I’m not some useless waste-of-space slacker. That I actually managed to last this long.

  Longer than you, probably.

  I suppose a part of me kind of hopes you’re watching me somewhere, a ghost looking over my shoulder as I write this.

  So, yeah, Dad . . . Surprise! I survived! And if you’re a ghost reading this, I guess you want to know how I’m doing, huh?

  Well . . . life’s been better. We’re still in Norwich, but we moved from the apartment block near the football ground to a flat above a supermarket.

  Life is all about economy of energy use: calories spent getting calories in. Until we moved we had to make tough calorie choices every day. Now there’s a ton of tinned food just two floors below us. We’re sitting on top of our own larder. Plus it means me and Freya don’t even have to step outside. Which is a frikkin relief considering how cold it is out there.

  Last winter we got completely snowed in. For months. Then there was ‘summer’, which was cold, grey, wet and not very long. Then another winter again – same damn thing. Real New York-style; snow piled up in dunes.

  And the virus? We’ve not seen a single sign of it. Anywhere. Not for over a year now. I don’t know if this cold weather is linked to that somehow. Maybe it is. Maybe without seven billion humans churning crap into the atmosphere, global warming did a sudden massive U-turn. But, linked or not, it is what it is. I think the freezing cold has killed that thing off, and this is the aftermath.

  This is our challenge now . . . surviving an Ice Age.

  ‘Leon? Look!’ Freya was pointing.

  He lowered his scarf and puffed out a thick plume of steamy air. ‘Yeah, I see it.’

  They were standing on the rooftop of a shopping mall on the west side of the city. A mall called Chappelfields. Just like any other, with the same usual-suspect chain stores, the same useful and useless things to be found inside.

  Freya was pointing to the left of a snow-covered outdoor market, where a faint red light was blinking at the top of a cluster of masts and satellite dishes. On a clear day with the sun shining and everything glinting, they probably would have missed it, but today the thick grey clouds overhead cast the city in a pall of twilight shadow.

  ‘Someone’s still got power,’ said Leon.

  ‘Let’s not get too hopeful about it yet.’

  One night last winter, they’d spotted a light on the other side of the city. The next day they’d trudged across to find out what it was. A hummock of snow had slid off the slanted surface of a bank of rooftop solar panels, and after a few days of getting some light a neon sign had eventually blinked back to life and lit up, promising one and all that they could have hours of family fun at Lazer Warz.

  This blinking red light was closer. Close enough to bother taking a quick look.

  ‘Worth our while?’

  Freya shrugged. ‘Something on telly you need to hurry back for?’

  Leon smiled. ‘You OK to take a detour for it?’

  She shifted her weight and leaned on her stick, one of those walkers with a rubber grip-handle at the top, and four stumpy legs at the bottom.

  She nodded. ‘My hips are aching like hell. But I can do it. Let’s have a look.’

  They stood outside the glass-fronted building and stared up at the cluster of aerials and satellite dishes at the top. Leon looked at the sign perched on the side of the building.

  BBC. The three letters were each wearing a tall bonnet of snow.

  ‘BBC Norfolk,’ said Freya. ‘TV and Radio Centre.’

  He turned to her. ‘This is where the BBC lives . . . lived?’

  ‘Not all of it. Obviously. It’s just a regional building. BBC Norfolk.’

  ‘Ah, right.’

  Leon reached into his rucksack and pulled out a mallet and chisel, their sta
ndard breaking-and-entering kit. He looked up. The glass frontage was three storeys high, divided into a grid of two-metre panels, supported by metal spars. Smashing the one directly in front of him wasn’t going to result in a glass cascade. He’d made that mistake before and nearly been decapitated by an avalanche of large, jagged shards.

  ‘Ready?’

  Freya took a few shuffled steps backwards. ‘Ready.’

  He pulled his scarf up to cover his face right up to the bridge of his nose, placed the chisel firmly against the glass, narrowed his eyes and then swung the hammer hard. The glass, brittle from the cold, shattered easily and clattered noisily inwards, leaving an empty frame in the front of the tall building, like a gap-toothed smile.

  They waited until the last loose shard had wobbled and dropped to the ground, then stepped inside into another dimly lit cavernous interior.

  Leon led the way into the large atrium. There was an indoor-outdoor cafe to their right, all glass-top tables, cushy chairs and large potted plants that might once have been lush temperate-weather ferns but which were now twig skeletons. At the back of the atrium was a large municipal library. A stairway led up to a balcony that overlooked the large interior and, to the left, they saw an entrance to the main BBC floor space.

  They took the stairs up in silence, their boots scraping and tapping noisily, listening hopefully for the sound of someone challenging them. They arrived in front of the main entrance. A turnstile blocked their way, an access-card slot beside it, waiting patiently for an employee pass to be inserted. Leon swung his leg and hopped over it easily, then turned and offered his hands to Freya to help her.

  ‘I thought the BBC was all about ease of bloody access for all,’ she grunted as she parked her bum on top of the turnstile, passed Leon her walking stick then swung her stronger leg over. She had to lift her other leg across, and gritted her teeth as a dull pain stabbed at her hip.

  The inside was just as Leon had expected: an open-plan office full of desks, chairs, shoulder-high cubicle partitions and pot plants that had died long ago. One side was the internal glass wall that looked out upon the atrium and the cafe below. The other side was punctuated with framed posters featuring the grinning faces of the station’s local newsreaders and celebrities.

  ‘There’s no sign of any power here,’ said Freya. The computer monitors and ceiling lights were all off. They were standing in the gloomy pall of waning third-hand daylight. ‘Another stupid wild-goose chase, by the look of it.’ She sighed.