Plague Nation Read online

  A root of sorts.

  But not a tree root.

  Its lumpy and gnarled surface was as hard as that of a mature tree’s root, its shape as random as a product of nature with whorls of half growth and stunted, abandoned stubs of dead-end branching.

  If Freya had kicked away just a little more of the snow and gravel and dug just a little deeper, she would have noticed that the root had made a long journey thus far. A journey that most certainly had not begun ten metres away beneath the nearest oak tree.

  If Freya had knelt down and pulled the hunting knife from her backpack and cut a groove into the muddy root’s ‘bark’, she would have exposed a soft protective membrane, like leather. And if she’d been curious enough to cut through that membrane, she would have discovered a pink fleshy mulch, very much alive, a super-highway of microbiotic life, busily delivering amino-acid messages to and fro.

  It had a purpose.

  CHAPTER 7

  Grace stroked the hindquarters of the Arabian horse. She savoured the suede-smooth texture of its coat as she stroked downwards, then the coarse brush-bristle texture as she stroked upwards, feeling the spasmodic twitch of long muscles beneath its coat as it responded to her touch. She could feel the damp warmth of the animal radiating from its flanks.

  ‘He’s really beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, that he is. He won the Virginia Derby six times, he’s travelled the world and now he’s spending his retirement in the lap of luxury. And, of course, entertaining lady horses of a very high standing.’

  She suppressed a chuckle and blushed at that. She knew exactly what the trainer was talking about.

  ‘He’s one in a million. Although, he’s worth a helluva lot more than that.’

  The stables echoed with the snorts and impatient stamping of dozens of other horses, and the rich smell of their dung was almost overwhelming. But Grace didn’t dislike it. On the contrary, it was a comforting smell, one that seemed to come encoded with positive associations, like burning leaves on an autumn bonfire, or the extra cinnamon topping of a Thanksgiving latte.

  Dad had promised her this for months. And, today, he’d finally delivered on his promise to take her to his rich friend’s stables. Mom was there too, stroking the horse.

  ‘It’s really very kind of you to show us around,’ she said.

  The trainer shrugged. ‘No problem, Mrs Friedmann.’

  ‘Tom, we should probably go soon. I’m sure this gentleman has plenty of things he needs to get on with.’

  ‘Relax, there’s really no rush, hon. Mr Trent’s got plenty of guys taking care of his horses.’

  ‘I know, but . . . I don’t think we should impose—’

  ‘Mom, not yet. Please?’

  She looked down at Grace. ‘Douglas Trent’s been very kind letting us have a tour around here. We’re very lucky. Let’s not be too cheeky.’

  Grace frowned up at her. ‘I’m not being cheeky. I just want to stay here a little while longer.’

  ‘We’ve got somewhere to be—’

  ‘Like where?’

  Mom’s face creased with sympathy. ‘I’m really sorry, honey . . . This will have to wait for another time. There’s some important news.’

  The image of her mother quivered like a reflection in a bowl of water. Grace felt the memory beginning to unpick itself, fading to darkness and leaving her with a neutral blank canvas of abstract thought. The horse, the trainer, her dad, that smell . . . The stables were all gone now.

  [. . . information. High importance . . .]

  I was enjoying that.

  [. . . (enjoy, enjoying, enjoyment) less importance. Information high importance . . .]

  Her memories were all right there, like a jukebox, ready to play so very vividly for her. Sometimes she allowed herself to get lost in them, to fool herself that she was still Grace Friedmann living in the outside world. But in truth she was now nothing more than a complex amalgamation of blood chemistry, a superstructure of billions of loosely allied cells, capable of detaching and reattaching.

  She was just information in liquid form.

  Her memory faded, the hallucination of Mom replaced by the presence of a data package-carrier. Grace sensed its proximity, the amino acids that crossed the nano space between them infusing the outer cells of her super cluster with a sharp taste of urgency.

  What’s so important?

  [. . . contact. New identifier. Handshake . . .]

  Even now, after such a long time, she found the chemical-exchange conversations hard work sometimes.

  Can we talk in an abstract?

  [. . . this is acceptable. Choose an abstract . . .]

  She was used to conversing with a different package-carrier cluster. It had learned how she preferred to communicate and prefaced its delivery by constructing the abstract . . . the memory first. This package-carrier was completely new to her. A stranger.

  It had obviously come a long way with its message. A very long way.

  She gathered her wits and pulled a clear memory from her mind. She selected one she was comfortable using. A memory that for no obvious reason was much more firmly defined than any other. Possibly it was the routine familiarity of it, the reinforced, repeated scenario. The same journey, the same small environment . . . the back seat of Mom and Dad’s car.

  In this memory she was seven again. Swinging her short legs and kicking at the back of the passenger front seat with her pink pumps. Outside, tall buildings edged slowly by as they sat in stop-start traffic from one intersection to the next. Davison Elementary School was just half a dozen blocks away from home, but every morning the journey seemed to take an eternity.

  The package-carrier ‘became’ Mom in the driver’s front seat, tapping the steering wheel impatiently with her hand. Just the two of them. Leon’s high school was close enough for him to walk.

  Mom looked in the rear-view mirror at her. ‘I have high-priority information for you.’

  The package-carrier had absolutely no idea how Mom talked. It was an imposter within her illusion, a stranger inhabiting Mom’s body and doing her voice all wrong.

  ‘Have established connection, exchanged data packets,’ continued Mom in a flat, emotionless, robotic voice. Grace hated her mom sounding wrong.

  Outside the boundaries of her illusion, her super-cluster cells parted, allowing the messenger in, and then closed again to completely absorb it. The package-carrier dissolved and the information it had carried was now available to her.

  Mom spoke again. This time her voice was better. ‘We’ve got some brand-new family.’

  Grace was in the back seat, swinging her pink pumps. ‘New family? I thought I knew about everyone. I thought we were the family.’

  ‘Well, honey, there’s no real limit to who your family is. But these are family from a long way away.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘It’s another super-cluster. A very, very big one.’

  ‘Bigger. You mean . . . bigger than us?’

  Mom settled to a stop at a red light, turned in her seat and looked at her. ‘Much, much bigger.’

  ‘Oh.’ Grace played with the zipper of her Hello Kitty school bag, back and forth – zzzup, zzzup, zzzup – as she gazed out of the window at another bored kid strapped into a back seat, being driven to school. Their eyes met for a moment.

  ‘So . . . does that mean I’m not the most important person any more?’

  ‘You’re always our most important person, sweetie. We all love you. But it’s not just us any more. We all need to get on together.’

  ‘Are they coming over to visit?’

  ‘No. We’re going to have to pay them a visit.’

  ‘But we’re the family, Mom. Why don’t they come to us? Why do we have to go to see them?’

  ‘Because they are the family, Grace. We’re really just an offshoot. We’re the country cousins, if you want to think about it that way. And they really, really want to meet us. Learn all about us and share family stories.’

  ‘Are we going to have to talk about . . . the big plan?’

  ‘Yes, honey, we are. You know there’s so much we all have to do, and we’ve only just begun. The plan needs to be discussed.’

  She sighed wearily and the sigh turned into a stretch and a yawn.

  ‘Oka-y-y.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Not once?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, never?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Like, literally . . . never?’

  ‘Argghh.’ Leon turned to look at Freya, exasperated. ‘Like I said . . . no.’

  She giggled at his mock anger and absently tapped the steering wheel with her knuckles. They were sharing the driving. It tended to be a more comfortable and less jerky ride with Leon in the passenger seat.

  ‘OK, so what about you, then?’ asked Leon.

  ‘Boys have never featured heavily in my personal life. At primary school I used to hang out with them more, because I . . . I suppose I preferred playing the boy games, rather than pretending to push a pram around. Then, in secondary school . . . Well . . . the secondary-school years weren’t a great success for me romance-wise.’

  He glanced at her walking stick, leaning against the seat behind him. ‘The MS?’

  ‘No, that started in my last year. No, I was always just a bit of an outsider. Not one of the cool kids. You know how it is – you are or you’re definitely not. It was very binary, wasn’t it? Playground politics.’

  Leon nodded. He knew what she meant. High school in New York had been the same. A caste system of jocks and WAGS, the rest of the student body . . . and then at the bottom, the outcasts. He’d constantly hovered on the borderline between ‘the rest’ and ‘the outcasts’.

  After Mum and Dad had split an
d she’d taken them ‘back home’ to England, he’d definitely been one of the outcasts in his sixth-form college. Mum had assured him that his acquired American accent would make him an exotic curiosity. Instead it had made him a target. He shook his head at the hypocrisy and flawed logic of teenage doctrine. They all parroted the same mantra – I’m an individual . . . I’m unique . . . There’s only one of ME. I’m special – and then did anything they could to look and sound identical to all their friends. Worse than that, they punished those who didn’t tow the line and follow suit.

  Who do you think YOU are? You think you’re so special, huh?

  He’d once tried to clarify that very point with one of the popular girls at college. She and her gang had been picking on him because he sounded different, and yet all they banged on about all day, every day, was how wonderfully different they were to everyone else. The fact that some days it was almost impossible to tell them apart from each other was completely lost on her.

  ‘I used to think that—’

  They heard a loud bang.

  ‘Shit! What was that?’

  The van suddenly started to judder violently, then it swerved sharply towards the central reservation. Freya grasped the steering wheel with both hands and began to push on the brake. There hadn’t been many potholes or cracks from the cold weather, nor any weed tufts to steer around. The road must have been freshly surfaced just before the virus hit.

  Reassured by the smooth surface and clear for the last hour of any car graveyards, Freya had slowly allowed her speed to climb to nearly one hundred kilometres an hour.

  She wrestled the wheel left, then right, then left – short controlled jerks that prevented the van spinning on the wet surface – finally coming to a rest a hundred metres down the road.

  Freya sat back in her seat and puffed out a breath. ‘That was a blow-out, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Never had one.’ Leon looked at her. ‘Jeez, you were pretty cool, though. You had one of those before?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh well, after six hours of your riveting company . . . I could do with some excitement.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Leon opened his door, got out and went round to the front. ‘Front-right tyre’s gone,’ he called out. He was looking at shreds of rubber and wire coiling. The wheel rim was resting on the ground. Behind the van was a snaking, still-smoking black trail of smeared tyre rubber.

  Freya got out and looked at it. ‘Ever changed a tyre?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘It’s pretty simple I’m guessing.’ He headed to the back of the van and opened the rear doors. ‘There must be a spare, and one of those lifting things.’

  ‘A jack?’

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  He pulled several boxes of their tinned supplies out on to the road, lifted the plastic matting and found an empty space where a spare had once been. ‘Great.’

  Freya sucked air through her teeth. ‘So we borrowed a van from a careless idiot. Bloody marvellous.’

  They both looked around. There were no other vehicles in sight. Just empty road as far as they could see. Ahead of them, though, rose the outskirts of a town, a low carpet of rooftops, and in the distance the faint grey outlines of several high-rise buildings.

  Leon could see an overpass and a slip road about half a kilometre ahead. He noted a sign informing them to take the next slip for the city centre.

  ‘So that must be Oxford over there, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Looks pretty close by. We could go see if we can find a spare . . . or borrow another van.’

  Freya sighed and rubbed her hip absently. ‘Wonderful. More walking.’

  Leon reached into the back of the van, pulled out their backpacks, the two army rifles they had and Freya’s walking stick. ‘I can go alone, if you want to stay—’

  ‘No,’ she replied quickly. ‘You’re not leaving me here all alone!’

  ‘Well, at least let me carry your back—’

  ‘And don’t patronize me!’

  He looked up at her. She was grinning at him. ‘Joking.’

  They made their way down the slip road, as empty as the A road, and turned right at a small overgrown roundabout. Ten minutes of walking later, they found themselves staring at the tail end of a logjam of vehicles.

  As they drew closer, they could see it was actually the very front of a traffic jam, a solid convoy of cars and vans prevented from proceeding any further by a barricade of dumped concrete blocks and barbed wire.

  ‘My God,’ whispered Leon.

  It was also solid in the sense that a number of the vehicles, all a uniform charcoal black, had been welded together by some kind of intense heat. Leon stepped carefully between the concrete blocks, round some coils of rusting razor wire, and inspected the nearest vehicles. Their tightly packed metal carcasses seemed to be merged together in places. The road was black with soot, and crusty cowpats of melted rubber and plastic around their wheel rims.

  Freya joined him. ‘God . . .’

  ‘It looks like it was napalmed or something.’

  Freya nodded. ‘Firebombed.’ She winced at something and looked quickly away.

  Leon saw what she’d spotted. In the car to their right, a four-door hatchback that might once have been a Volvo, were the carbonized silhouettes of bodies. He counted five. Two in the front, three smaller ones in the back. The fingerless blackened nub of two small hands and thin arms protruded through the empty frame of the rear left window.

  One of the kids . . . trying to climb out of the back.

  He caught a glimpse of the corpse’s face: a dark speckled mannequin’s head, featureless, without a nose and only fused dents where eyes had been. A tidy row of small white upper teeth framed a dark hole where the mouth had frozen open in a perpetual fossilized scream.

  He snapped his eyes shut and turned his head away, not wanting to pick out any more details, not wanting to give this image a chance to take permanent root in his head.

  ‘No one got to leave Oxford, then,’ said Freya matter-of-factly. Leon could tell she was trying to sound dismissive and business-like, but he could hear the slightest tremble in her voice.

  ‘Come on.’ He reached for her hand and tugged her gently. ‘We need to go find another ride.’

  They walked along the hard shoulder, staring resolutely ahead as they passed beside the blackened convoy, not wanting or needing to look closely at any of the other frozen shapes, some still belted in their seats, others half in, half out of their cars, nearly but not quite escaping the fireball.

  The road began to slope down into an underpass. They came to a halt just outside its gaping gloomy mouth and looked at each other.

  ‘We could backtrack and go up and round,’ said Leon.

  Freya looked behind them up the blackened road, flanked on either side by concrete banks, then back into the tunnel ahead of them. It wasn’t long. Fifty metres of gloom – she could see the glint of unburnt vehicles edging out into daylight at the far end.

  ‘Unless there’s such a thing as underpass trolls, I think we’ll be OK.’

  They made their way along a service walkway at the side with a safety rail. After taking several steps, they found themselves a metre or so above the road, looking down on the roofs and bonnets of the jammed vehicles. Their boots echoed in the cavernous interior, and somewhere nearby they could hear the steady drip, drip, drip of water.

  Round about the middle where the road began to flatten out, ready for the rise up and out, Freya chose to lighten the mood by whistling a tuneless version of an Olly Murs song.

  A few minutes later they emerged, relieved, into daylight at the far end.

  ‘You can’t carry a tune, Freya,’ said Leon.

  ‘Could have been worse. I could’ve been singing.’

  At the top of the sloping road, the jam of vehicles began to thin out, and they started looking for a suitable candidate that could be reversed clear of the tangle.

  ‘There’s a similar van.’

  Leon looked. A dark blue one, about the same size as theirs. Leon crossed the road and peered through the driver-side window – no rags, no bones to be seen. He suspected the vehicles at this end of the jam must have been hastily abandoned by their owners, not wanting to face the same fate as those poor souls ahead.

  He tried the driver-side door. It opened easily and he pulled himself up inside. The key was still in the ignition and he gave it a hopeful twist.