Plague World Read online

  Dad’s voice. It was always Dad, sitting in the back of his head, ready to kick him in the butt if he started trying to feel sorry for himself.

  Damn right I will. You saved your sister and your girlfriend. That’s great going, son. Now it’s your turn. If those other losers can’t come up with something, then you better had.

  ‘Like what?’ he muttered, steaming the glass up with his breath.

  You’re not a baby any more. Figure it out, son.

  ‘Great. Thanks a bunch, Dad.’

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘We’ll use one of these,’ said Leon. He banged his hand against the kennel cage’s mesh. ‘We take it outside, we get inside it, then we can shuffle around. It’s a protective bubble.’

  He looked at the others, hoping for at least one of them to back him up, or take the ball and run forward with it.

  ‘It looks way too heavy, mate. How do we move around?’

  Jake had short-cropped hair and Leon could see the edges of a tattoo poking up around the neck line of his T-shirt. The tattoo was reassuring. He was pretty certain the virus couldn’t mimic those too.

  Jake nodded at the cage. ‘We’d have to take the floor out.’ He glanced at Leon. ‘That’s what you’re getting at, right? Using the cage as, like, a turtleshell or something?’

  ‘Right. Exactly that. It’s like a wire-mesh turtleshell.’

  Leon looked again at the cage. Most of them were the same size, a metre high and two wide. Room for two, maybe three people, stooped over, carrying the weight of the cage on their backs and shoulders.

  ‘The crawlers will get through the mesh,’ said Finley.

  ‘That’s a tight mesh,’ said Jake. ‘They won’t get through that.’

  ‘The slime will still get through, though,’ countered Finley.

  ‘The slime’s not really a problem,’ said Leon. ‘We’ve all been chugging the pills, right?’

  Animal sedatives and analgesics were the one thing, apart from water, this building had in abundance. Bizarrely, the virus seemed to have a problem coping with this type of medication in a host’s bloodstream.

  They all nodded.

  ‘So, right, it can touch us, slime all over us as much as it wants to, but it can’t infect us.’

  ‘Even if it can’t infect us, it still wants to kill us,’ said Howard. He looked around at everyone, then back at Leon. He held his hands up defensively. ‘I’m just saying what we’re all thinking.’

  ‘The virus makes the scuttlers and anything else from the slime, but that takes a bit of time to do. So each drop of goo on its own isn’t really a problem,’ Leon explained.

  ‘If we keep moving, we’ll be fine,’ added Jake.

  Leon nodded. ‘That’s what I was thinking. If we keep moving, we’ll be leaving behind us a wake of goo that’s busy transforming itself into, I dunno, tiny crabs.’

  ‘What if all those crabs catch up with us?’ asked Kim.

  ‘That’s why it’s important we keep moving,’ Leon replied.

  ‘What if it make something huge?’ The question came from Artur.

  They hadn’t seen any virals bigger than a dog in the last few days. They’d all witnessed the human totem poles after the mass eruption in the quarantine pen, and some of them had seen creatures as big as cows and horses over the last couple of years. So it was entirely possible that they might encounter something big enough to knock a cage over. Or crush it.

  ‘I think it takes the virus a lot of effort to make things from the slime. But combining things it’s already made might be quicker,’ said Finley. ‘Like Lego. Making the bricks is hard work, but once it’s got the bricks it can make bigger things? I dunno.’

  ‘We’ve all heard the noises outside. Something much larger must have made those,’ said Cora.

  ‘Maybe the larger a viral is, the harder it is for it to stay assembled.’

  ‘It knows we’re trapped in here, so it’s taking a rest,’ added Jake. ‘Maybe it’s just making the scuttlers for now.’

  Howard looked unhappy about the plan. ‘But what if it works out we’re up to something?’

  Jake shrugged.

  ‘Either way, it’s not stupid,’ said Leon. ‘It seems to figure things out pretty fast. If we go out there with a dog cage over our heads and get away with it once, it won’t let us get away with that again.’

  ‘So that means we get one shot at this.’ Leon looked around. ‘It’s an escape plan. I’m not talking about foraging trips. This is all of us making a run for it together. It’s a huge risk, but we don’t have much choice.’

  ‘Hardly run,’ said Finley. ‘Crawl maybe.’

  Leon looked at Jake, then at Cora, hoping for a bit more support from them. Now he’d thrown this brainwave of his out there, he was not so keen to take sole responsibility for seeing it through.

  ‘So, look, all I’m saying is this is a way we can get out of this warehouse.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Howard.

  ‘Where do we go?’ added Cora.

  ‘I don’t know! I’m just putting a thought out there!’ He shrugged. ‘We try and find a truck or something? Find a boat maybe?’

  ‘Food first,’ said Artur.

  ‘We need food, fast.’ Leon had seen enough starved-to-death-on-a-desert-island reality shows to know they were up against a ticking calorie clock. They were now reeling from the effects of four days without food; fatigue and apathy had set in.

  ‘It’s not exactly a complete plan, or anything. I’m just suggesting stuff. And look, if we don’t move, we’ll die here.’

  They stood in the warehouse, eyeing the various-sized cages, then, when they’d run out of other things to look at, eyeing each other in an increasingly expectant silence.

  Finally Jake snorted an edgy laugh, which he tried to cover up as a cough.

  ‘What?’ asked Leon.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No, what?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s just like The Apprentice . . . Who’s going to project-manage the first task? Since it’s your idea . . . ?’ He pursed his lips and bounced his brows up into air-quotes.

  ‘Me?’ Leon made a face. ‘No, come on . . . please, somebody else. Somebody older.’ He looked at Cora.

  ‘You seem to be doing pretty well at the moment, young man.’ She smiled weakly. ‘It’s a good idea.’

  ‘It’s the only idea,’ added Jake.

  She shrugged. ‘Well yes, there’s that. All the same, it’s your idea, Leon, love. And I’m voting we do it.’ She looked around at the others. No one else voted. But after a moment, their heads nodded mutely.

  ‘There we go, then,’ she said. ‘Leon? You’re in charge.’

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘Could you just tape it on to my arm, please?’

  The medic looked up at Freya irritably. Even through the strip light reflecting on the faceplate, Freya could see the man was about to tell her to shut the hell up and move along.

  Her blood ran around the tilted Petri dish as blood should. The moment of tension had passed.

  The marine in the corner of the small room, carrying the saltwater hose, took his hand off the flow valve and stepped back.

  ‘I’m not being difficult. I can’t hold the swab on. It helps if I have both hands free?’ she added in explanation, gesturing at the walking stick resting across her thighs.

  Begrudgingly the medic fumbled for a length of adhesive tape and stuck the cotton swab down on her arm where the blood had been taken. ‘There.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She looked again at the small puddle of her blood in the dish as the medic screwed the sample lid on. It was a healthy red, a reassuring liquid – it hadn’t instantly thickened into a dark-coloured blob. The medic tossed the sealed container into a bin and pulled out one of the new – green – ID cards.

  ‘So your name’s . . . Emma Russell?’ The medic looked at Freya’s old red card and was about to copy the name down on to the new one.

  ‘Uh, no.’
r />   ‘What?’

  ‘I . . . That’s not my actual name.’

  ‘But it says—’

  ‘Well, obviously, it’s not my card. I . . . uh . . . well, I found it. That’s kind of how I got on board.’

  The medic’s eyes rounded and she pushed her stool back. ‘You weren’t properly tested ashore?’

  ‘Not exactly, but . . . hey –’ she spread her hands guiltily – ‘I passed the test, right? So . . . no harm done?’

  The woman looked like she wanted to refer to a senior officer. But there was no one higher in rank in the room for her to pass the buck to.

  ‘Look.’ Freya pointed at her own blood. ‘Apparently I’m human, so we’re all good here. I was wrong to steal a card. But I knew I wasn’t infected so . . . it didn’t seem like a big deal.’

  The medic shook her head, then conceded her point by rolling her stool forward again. ‘OK. What’s your name?’

  ‘Freya Harper.’

  She scribbled the name on to the card, then handed it over. ‘You’re lucky I asked your name after I tested you, sweetheart.’

  Freya smiled. ‘Thanks for, you know, not killing me.’

  ‘Don’t lose it,’ she said, then waved her to get up and get out. ‘Next!’

  Freya made her way to the infirmary door, out into the passage where the rest of her fellow refugees were queueing.

  She waggled the card above her head and did a victory jiggle. ‘Yay me. I’m human!’

  She got a muted laugh from some of those standing in the line, but the rest glared at her.

  ‘Move along!’ grunted a soldier.

  ‘Can I go up on the main deck now?’

  ‘Yes. Go.’

  ‘Thank God.’ She sighed with relief. Since setting off they’d been kept below, confined to just one deck, which as far as she could see didn’t have so much as a single porthole. The last five days had been pretty queasy ones. She’d made it through without barfing, but the whole deck stank of stale vomit and disinfectant.

  She took the stairs up to deck B and followed the hastily handwritten signs taped to the bulkheads that pointed the way to ‘OUTSIDE’.

  Finally, as she emerged from the ship’s interior and the constant glare of strip lights into natural daylight, she felt the gust of cool wind on her cheeks and began to feel better.

  The aft deck, about the size of a tennis court, was a seamless continuum of dull military-grey metal, decorated with a large white ring, a yellow ‘H’ in its centre. Pretty much everyone who’d been tested before her was up here now, relishing the fresh air and sunlight, escaping the rank odour from below decks. Freya spotted a gap at the handrail that ran all the way around the edge of the deck and made her way towards it.

  She’d found these last few days that, despite the ship’s gentle rolling, the aching in her left hip had eased slightly. She’d been expecting it to be worse with the constant effort of steadying herself. She still needed her walking stick of course, but she wondered whether the unconscious act of constantly leaning into the ship’s movement might have been flexing her joints in a helpful, almost therapeutic way.

  She grasped the rail, looked out at the sedately rolling sea and took in a deep breath of salty air. ‘At. Bloody. Last!’

  A hundred metres away was another similar US Navy ship, leaving a churning wake of foam behind it. She could see civilians lining the deck and impulsively offered a wave to them.

  Someone waved back.

  She couldn’t make out any detail. Just a stick man, or woman, from this distance. Probably a random stranger returning the gesture, but a tiny part of her hoped it might be Leon or Grace.

  Crap. We should’ve planned some sort of signal.

  If they’d thought ahead. If they’d been smarter.

  But, no. She, Leon and Grace had arrived at Southampton and dumbly hoped that their troubles might be over. That the ‘authorities’ were here with men in white and yellow suits and clipboards, and everything would be all right.

  A small fleet trailed back towards the horizon behind her, another six ships of varying sizes. One of them tall and white, a luxury cruise ship that old people love spending their autumn years on. Freya remembered Mum pleading with Dad to take her on a cruise, and Dad complaining that he didn’t want to spend a fortnight on a floating geriatric home. The un-asked-for memory of them stung.

  She kicked her mind off them and on to Leon.

  Where the hell did you disappear to, Leon, you arse?

  She presumed he and Grace were together. Of course they were – he wouldn’t have abandoned her. She knew he would’ve fought tooth and nail to get her on one of those boats.

  She waved again, hoping that the same person would wave back. They didn’t.

  They could be on there. They might be on one of the other ships. Maybe even on the other fleet heading to New Zealand.

  New Zealand. That really would mean goodbye.

  The last bit of their journey together, from Everett’s castle down to Southampton, there’d been plenty of moments she could have said something to him. Just asked him if he felt something for her. Instead, both of them had assumed they were about to board a ship together and, once they were safe, would have plenty of time to figure out that little ritual dance. So neither of them had said anything.

  They’d shared one kiss beneath his anorak in the pattering rain. One kiss . . .

  Over the murmuring voices of the others gazing out to sea and the gusting wind, she heard footsteps approaching and the squawk, crackle and beep of a walkie-talkie. She turned to see three men coming quickly towards her, the first Americans she’d seen not wearing biohazard suits. One of them was civilian, the other two navy – three men who looked like they didn’t have time for any cheeky backchat from her.

  Crap. What’s up?

  She was about to ask them when they came to a halt at the railing, right beside her, the two navy officers swiftly raising their binoculars to their eyes, the civilian raising his walkie-talkie to one ear.

  ‘Sea Queen. Sea Queen. This is fleet-leader, USS Oakley. Please respond. Over.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Tom Friedmann listened to the warbling hiss coming from his handset.

  He tried again. ‘Sea Queen. Sea Queen. This is fleet-leader, USS Oakley. Please respond. Over.’

  Nothing. Just the hiss.

  He scanned the distant cruise ship. To him the Sea Queen looked like a goddamn floating shopping mall crowned with a pair of pointless fake red funnels.

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  The officer shook his head. ‘Nothing that looks problematic, Mr Friedmann.’

  He tried again. ‘Sea Queen. Sea Queen. This is fleet-leader, USS Oakley. Please respond. Over.’

  The radio crackled in reply. ‘USS Oakley, this is Sea Queen responding. This is Sea Queen, over!’

  ‘What the hell’s going on over there?’ asked Tom. ‘We got something about you guys testing and getting a positive result? Over.’

  He released the Press-to-Talk button. The speaker hissed again.

  ‘Uh . . . yeah. That’s . . . .’ The voice on the other end of the call sounded shaken, the poor bastard holding on to some semblance of self-control by his fingernails. ‘We . . . Shit! Affirmative. We got several positives! They just went off on us like firecrackers . . . What?’ The transmission stayed open; whoever he was talking to was panting, gasping for breath. In the background Tom thought he could hear other voices.

  Panicked voices.

  Tom cut over him. ‘Have you contained the . . .’ He hesitated and looked around. There were civilians either side of him, well within earshot. The girl on his right was staring at him with a mouth wide enough to catch fish. He twisted, and turned his back on her.

  ‘Have you successfully contained the “positives”? Over.’

  The reply came back quickly. ‘Uh . . . no. That’s a negative! We’ve got . . . we’re having some difficulties here. Over.’

  Tom waited for more. T
hen gave up waiting. ‘I need more details. Over.’

  ‘My God!’ It sounded like a different voice. ‘My God, they did the same thing as Southampton! About a dozen of them, all at the same time! The . . . the . . . main theatre . . . the testing area, it’s overrun! Jesus Christ . . . the people who were waiting in there, all of them . . .’ The transmission remained open. Tom thought he could hear the man sobbing. ‘. . . Oh God. They’re everywhere. We’re screwed!’

  He cut across him again. ‘Listen to me. I’m the senior coordinator. Is the entire ship compromised or do you have a portion of the ship that’s secure? Over.’

  ‘They . . . they turned into the crab things and they’re everywhere! They’re in everything! Jesus Christ! They’re no—’

  ‘Stay calm and listen to me!’ he snapped. ‘Where are you calling from? Over.’

  ‘The bridge! The bridge! There’s about fifty or so of us up here. Civilians and crew. We’ve closed the . . . the doors and all the windows! And I . . . I can see more people outside on the foredeck. They’re not infected yet, but . . . ’ The radio spat out hissing. Tom waited thirty seconds.

  ‘Come back, Sea Queen. We’re listening. Over.’ No reply. He tried again and got nothing.

  He turned to Captain Donner for his thoughts.

  ‘Good God,’ Donner muttered. ‘We have to do something for those poor bastards.’

  ‘I’m open to any suggestions.’

  Donner shook his head. ‘I . . . there’s nothing . . . no protocol, no—’

  ‘We should send over a launch and—’

  ‘Then what? For Chrissakes, I’m not going to order any of my crewmen to go aboard!’

  ‘Those people . . . on the bridge, they could jump overboard. We could try picking them up.’

  ‘The water’s freezing, sir. They won’t last more than a couple of minutes.’

  ‘A couple of minutes is enough if we’ve got boats out there waiting for them. We have to try.’

  ‘And what if they’re infected? We’ll be bringing infection into the fleet!’

  ‘They won’t be!’ came a voice from behind them.