Plague Land Series Book 1 Read online

  At her feet, she noticed the smaller skeletal remains of what had clearly once been a dog. A red collar with a name tag on it lay among the organic mulch and fur and bones.

  “It’s liquidizing every living thing it comes into contact with.”

  Guillot nodded. “And it’s fast.”

  Danielle looked down at the dirt floor. At the pools of dark, viscous liquid and the curious linking patterns as one pool trickled toward another. She had some of that gunk on her yellow boots. She couldn’t help the urge to scrape it off on the dirt-like dog muck.

  “Remy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s no way something like this can be contained.” She realized her voice was trembling. She looked at him. “Do you think this is it?”

  Guillot knew what she meant by that. Over glasses of after-work wine, they had once discussed epidemiology, getting quite philosophical at times, considering that in the grand narrative of Life on Earth, it was the “little fellows” that told the big story. The subject of a viral extinction level event had cropped up, and they’d both casually agreed, maybe fueled by the bottle of Château Haut-Brion they’d nearly finished between them, that it was likely one day—by natural means or man-made—that mankind wasn’t going to vanish with a bang, but with a dry cough and a sniffle.

  He was about to say something, maybe agree with her, maybe tell her she was jumping to an overly pessimistic conclusion, when someone outside called her name. She stepped out of the barn into the daylight. Guillot followed her.

  “Dr. Menard, Dr. Guillot?”

  They both turned to look at the young man who had just come up from the far side of the field.

  “What is it?”

  He raised an arm and pointed with a gloved hand back at the field. “Look!”

  They both turned around to look in the direction he was pointing. “At what?”

  “Over there!”

  Dr. Menard did as he said, not really sure what it was he had noticed. And then she saw it too—and in that moment she felt a dizzying realization that made her unsteady on her feet.

  “Oh God,” she gasped.

  “What?” Guillot hadn’t noticed it yet. “Look, over there…on the grass.”

  He turned to look where she was pointing. Then he saw it too. Their eyes met again.

  “Shit!” he said. “In answer to your question…”

  On the field, a cluster of crows lay stranded, flapping their wings spasmodically. Their dark feathers broke free and fluttered away on the breeze.

  “…I think this time, we’re screwed.”

  Chapter 12

  Leon took Grace to school, dropping her off at the front gate. Almost as soon as she stepped inside the school grounds, several of her friends peeled away from various chattering groups and hurried over to offer to carry her shoulder bag.

  Queen bee of the playground.

  Leon sighed. She always fits in so easily. She always had. He envied that about her.

  He watched her go, flanked by her two best friends, both babbling into one ear, each eager to outdo the other with whatever inane gossip they’d managed to scoop overnight.

  She glanced back over her shoulder and offered him a tight, motherly smile that quite clearly said, Try to make an effort today, OK?

  He waggled a hand at her and watched through the gate until she’d disappeared inside.

  He had half a mind to skip school today. He was exhausted after last night’s restlessness. His dad’s few words over messenger had been playing on his mind. And, also, his head was thumping like crazy this morning. His mom was usually lenient when it came to his headaches. She knew they were nasty, made him feel nauseous sometimes. They’d been to the doctor; he’d had an eye test and even a scan. Apparently his eyes were fine, and there was nothing on the scan to worry about. Their doctor said more than likely it was simply stress. Probably caused by recent events: the split up, the move, the new school. He said he saw plenty of students with identical symptoms every year as the months rolled up to exam time. His mom had even taken him to a therapist, and she’d said pretty much the same thing, although she’d prescribed a diary, not pills.

  “In your diary, I want you to write to your father. Talk to him. Tell him how you feel, what’s bugging you. Write to him like you’re talking to him, as if he’s right there. Just a few sentences every day.”

  He’d bought one. Hadn’t used it yet though.

  Leon decided today was probably a day best spent at home under the duvet. Because this wasn’t just another headache. This felt like the start of a cold; his throat felt rough and his neck ached. He wanted to go home and sleep, maybe down another couple of aspirin. He could crash on the couch and watch the news all day.

  Hey, MonkeyNuts, is that it? Is that what this is all about? Skipping school so you can watch the news?

  He wasn’t entirely sure. Maybe he was trying to convince himself he was coming down with man flu, instead of admitting that he was doing exactly what Grace had said he was doing on the bus ride in.

  You obsess about things, Leon. You do. Seriously, you’re like a dog with a bone. I swear you’re on the spectrum somewhere! Another phrase she’d picked up without really understanding it, but it sounded convincing when she said it.

  “Jeez…get a grip,” Leon muttered to himself. Every year, it seemed, there was an apocalyptic plague story. He could imagine news editors around the world holding a news story like this in reserve ready to whip it out on a slow news day. If it wasn’t SARS, it was bird flu. If it wasn’t bird flu, it was swine flu…or a resurgence of meningitis or HIV. The news thrived on scare stories, whether it was plagues or terrorist threats or “video games that’ll turn your teenaged son into a gun-toting psychopath.”

  He shook his head as he walked back through the Kings Arcade. In contrast to the news he used to watch back in New Jersey, stations like FOX or CNN, the BBC news seemed to be a lot less foaming at the mouth and excitable. Almost laid-back, by comparison.

  Maybe his dad’s perception was colored by the way the news was reported over there, because, frankly, looking around, he wasn’t seeing any signs of panic here; he was seeing business as usual.

  He walked past the glass front of the mall’s electronics store. In the window, a large tablet screen was streaming Sky News 24. There was bulletin tickertape scrolling beneath, the image of a reporter in the field.

  WEST AFRICAN VIRUS: Several infection sites confirmed in Europe.

  He stopped where he was.

  Infection sites also confirmed in India, South Africa, Egypt…

  The list continued. “Shit,” he said.

  “It’s getting a bit unsettling isn’t it?” He turned to see a woman standing beside him, just like him, caught midstride by what was on the tickertape.

  He nodded. “First I heard about this thing was, like, yesterday over breakfast.”

  “Me too. I heard someone on the tube saying it might be an ISIS thing…like a terrorist biological weapon or something.”

  He looked at her. “Really?”

  She hunched her shoulders. “It’s what I heard.” She looked down at the two plastic shopping bags in her hands. “I know it’s probably silly, an overreaction…but I thought I might get some extra bits and pieces in. Some extra milk and bread…just in case.” The woman almost looked embarrassed as she admitted it. She shrugged. “Anyway…” Then she turned and continued walking up the mall.

  Leon watched the screen for another minute. The tickertape was repeating the same things and the reporter had now been replaced by a return to the studio and some other news story. He set off, his pace just that little bit more urgent, keen to get back home, turn on his laptop and the TV.

  Twenty minutes later, he was back home and on the couch, wrapped in a quilt with the laptop resting on his legs and the TV remote in his hand. He s
ipped at his steaming mug of Lemsip cold medicine, still trying to convince himself he was simply coming down with a cold rather than stressing himself into a storming headache.

  He put CNN on—the international station. Unlike the let’s-all-be-calm-and-not-get-excited-here BBC, they were all over the virus story. They were calling it Super-Ebola, because it seemed they didn’t know what else to call it. He saw a map of the world being superimposed in the background with red dots marked up on it—there were thirty or forty of them, evenly spaced, not clustered around a particular country or city, just dotted evenly. And as he watched the graphic on-screen, several more dots appeared on the map like cartoon measles. If this wasn’t so serious a story, he could imagine the sound-effect guys would have played a boing-boing sound as each new dot appeared.

  He logged on to the DarkEye website.

  The site’s forum was buzzing about Super-Ebola. All the other usual topic threads had been bumped right off the landing page. The site’s home page was one long list of headlines and links that wandered down off the screen, each one being commented on by hundreds…no, thousands of people.

  There were reports of infection now coming in, it seemed, from pretty much every country in the world. And cell phone photos…lots of them.

  He clicked on the images, many of them poor in quality, blurred, shaken, and pixelated—pictures taken quickly by frightened people. The images seemed to be largely the same: streets littered with piles of clothes. In the background, the car license plates changed, the languages on roadside signs changed, but in virtually every picture, the scene was essentially the same—humps of clothes, presumably bodies, lying in roads, half-in or half-out of cars, in the doorways of buildings.

  In some of the less hastily taken, clearer images, he could just about make out other curious details. The bodies looked…old. Like they’d been dead for some time. They reminded him of some of the grisly images of exhumed bodies from mass graves in places like Syria or Bosnia: all bones and rotten, degraded material. In one picture, he could see the bodies of an entire family on a pale tile floor… They seemed to be linked together by dark, snaking lines of string, as if someone had drawn a spider web over the image in Photoshop.

  “What is that?” he muttered.

  He turned his attention to the comments, scrolling down to the most recent entries on the last added headline.

  Posted 11:37 a.m.—xaanMan

  It’s global culling. This has government skunkworks written all over it. Those pics look like the Kurdistan gassing pictures from back in Saddam’s time. This Ebola+ stuff is a stupid decoy name. No way it’s biological. It’s chemical frickin warfare.

  Posted 11:38 a.m.—Lenny1234

  You’re a paranoid idiot. What? U think it’s the big old evil military/industrial complex again? NeoCons out to destroy the world? Moron. It’s hitting us here in the States just like everywhere else.

  Posted 11:38 a.m.—DarkHorse3

  I’m getting scared. They not telling us anything on RTU news. All they saying is that situation is under control and not panic.

  Posted 11:38 a.m.—Garpy-n-nan

  I’m not seeing “new” bodies in those pictures. They all look old. Are they even real bodies? Whatsup? I think this is a big hoax.

  Posted 11:39 a.m.—kilbofraggins

  Those ARE REAL bodies, asshole. This virus is like Ebola but a thousand times worse! People are being turned into liquid within a few hours.

  Posted 11:39 a.m.—XllnnGng

  I’m a microbiology grad and I’m telling everyone here there’s no way this is a natural pathogen. Nature just doesn’t operate this fast. A successful virus doesn’t kill its host in minutes, that’s crazy, because it needs a host to act as both a transport unit and as a factory producing more of it. Any virus that can kill this quick wouldn’t even end up getting going in the first place. It would become extinct with patient zero.

  Posted 11:40 a.m.—GunProm

  How come this shit is happening everywhere? Surely there should be some sort of spread pattern? You know, spreading via airplanes, airports, and so on. Unless it’s airborne, but even then you’d get a pattern.

  Posted 11:40 a.m.—JerryMcD

  Anyone here stunned at how quickly this is happening? I mean this time yesterday we were all discussing the latest IOS Trojan, and now it feels like arma-frickin-geddon. You want my dollar’s worth? It feels like this was a synchronized job. Terrorists, maybe those ISIS scumbags, placed around the world with vials of this nightmare, and then they all dropped their vials at the same frickin time.

  Leon rubbed his eyes. He felt completely wasted—weary, tired. His joints ached, and even with his duvet wrapped around him like a poncho, he couldn’t get warm enough. And, for a moment, a shudder of fear passed through him.

  Oh, crap… Maybe I’ve got it?

  He spent five panic-stricken minutes scanning through the forum, doing a search on “symptoms,” “early symptoms,” “Ebola+,” and “flu-like symptoms.”

  And got nothing back.

  Jeez, relax, MonkeyNuts… It’s just a cold.

  He was already feeling a little better than he had first thing this morning, with the Lemsip now inside him.

  Seriously…if Lemsip’s happily dealing with what you’ve got, then you’re probably OK. No need to freak out, all right?

  He still felt tired though, and his head was thumping. He finished the last of his hot drink, settled back on the cushion, and rested his heavy eyes.

  He closed them for a moment, fully intending to just doze for five minutes and then read some more. But his dizzy mind reliably assured him that there wasn’t a lot he could do right now. Reading a website and watching the news wasn’t actually going to change anything. All it was doing was stressing him out and making his head worse. It might be a good idea to crash out for a while.

  Get some perspective, moron.

  He was pretty sure by the time this cold—if it was a cold—had come and gone and he was back at school, the world’s news stations and conspiracy nerds would have moved on to some brand-new, shiny news story to get all worked up about.

  Ain’t that always the way, Leo? The world goes on…and on…and nothing ever really changes.

  Chapter 13

  Soho, Central London

  It fluttered down to earth, an anonymous dot of life—not even life yet. Something dormant, inert. A light breeze, the upward warming gust of the city below, kept it dancing and airborne, a small flake just visible to the naked eye.

  This particular dot had been in a slow descent over the last few days, a protracted and leisurely free fall entirely at the whim of the warm air currents that had carried it aloft from hotter, more humid climates. A long and leisurely journey northward to cooler places.

  But since dawn of this particular day, the speck had been gradually descending toward the busy urban carpet below, drawing close to the source of that noise—a hum of activity, traffic, the occasional faint peal of a police siren.

  Finally, as the morning sun peered over the city and flashed rays of light through the spokes of the London Eye, the speck’s graceful descent came to an end, as a chance downward gust of wind pushed it horizontally, to settle on the plastic rim of a grimy window box, sitting high up on a soot-encrusted windowsill overlooking a relatively quiet backstreet in Soho.

  The sound of life was all around now: the distant rumble of traffic on Tottenham Court Road reaching the far end of this quiet cul-de-sac, the cooing and flutter of pigeons on another ledge nearby, the tinny rattle of music drifting from the open window of a building opposite, and the echoing clang of scaffolding poles being tossed from the back of a flatbed truck farther up the street.

  Amid all this, the small flake, the particle, remained lifeless. It had yet to be revived from its deep sleep.

  But this was about to happen.

  Another
gentle gust nudged the particle along the plastic rim of the flower box—just a couple of inches, but that was far enough.

  The particle met a solitary drop of rainwater.

  It was finally time to wake up, to stir, to change from a dormant grain of genetic material, to something else—a living agent. Life.

  The moisture permeated its husk, rehydrating the package inside. Biochemical machinery began to stir, to reboot, and the fragment of life began to listen to simple, ancient genetic commands to begin its work.

  Others like it were out there, caught by the air currents in the upper troposphere and deposited in other countries and continents… Many would fail to awaken, because they hadn’t encountered liquid water, or had been incinerated as the tiny micrometeorite on which they’d been hitching a lift had exploded in the upper atmosphere. But this one particle, like a few others, found a fertile foothold.

  Home, for the moment, was on this lofty fifth-floor windowsill.

  The awakening was gradual. The first single-cell life form it encountered within the microworld of the water droplet was an uneven battle of lightweights. The cell succumbed to the much larger dot of life and was absorbed and stripped of its resources—a veritable feast for this hungry organism. But simple genetic commands compelled it to do more than merely feed. Its primary objective at this stage was replication. A toehold was all it had in this droplet-of-water world. A larger microorganism with an appetite for upstart newcomers could easily have overwhelmed it. It needed help; it needed more copies of itself. Replication was the highest priority.

  Very soon it had “fathered” a copy of itself, and now both of them were working hard on replicating again.

  Twenty minutes passed. At this point, if someone had examined the droplet under a magnifying glass, they might have just detected the faintest dark smudge in the middle. Under a microscope, they would have seen the faint, feathered line of this growing community, now numbering tens of thousands, beginning to reach out and explore.