“Shit,” he uttered. He got off his butt and onto his feet, but stayed squatting at the pond’s edge. “Maybe something’s still alive in there?”
Grace took a couple of steps closer, until she was standing just behind him. “I can’t see anything.”
He stood up to get a higher point of view. The water that he could see between the pads and algae was green and cloudy. He stared at it for a minute, willing another expanding circle of movement to help him pinpoint where he should be looking.
Then he saw it. The faintest flash of something pale near the surface. Just a glimpse, then it was gone again.
“It’s a fish!” said Grace, excited. She’d spotted it too—the pale underbelly of some pond fish or similar. The sight of it pleased them both, and they shared a grin.
“Maybe the sea is safe!” said Leon.
“Maybe we’re not alone, then?” said Grace hopefully.
They heard their mom’s voice and turned. She was approaching the van with Mohammed, each of them holding a large cardboard box in their arms. “I told you two to stay in the van!” she bellowed at them from across the green.
“Mom!” Leon waved his hand. “Come over here! You gotta see this!”
The two adults set their boxes down, hurried over, and joined them standing by the edge of the village pond.
“What is it?” panted Mohammed, his face creased with concern.
“It’s OK. Nothing bad!” Leon pointed down at the still surface of the pond. “Look!”
“Leon…for God’s sake! And you as well, Grace!” She shook her head angrily at her children. “I told you both to stay in the—”
“Mom! The fish are still alive in there!” said Grace. That shut her up.
“Alive?” said Mohammed. “Are you sure?”
Just then, another series of concentric circles rippled across the surface, and they all saw it, just for a fleeting second: the flutter of a dorsal fin, and then it was gone again down into the murky depths.
“Oh my God,” gasped Leon’s mom. “Was that a carp?”
“This…is very encouraging,” said Mohammed slowly. “It means there is other life left. Certain species that could be unaffected.”
“Exactly!” said Leon.
They waited and watched for several minutes, but it seemed the carp had developed a sudden bout of stage fright and wasn’t going to make another appearance today.
“That’s really great,” said Leon’s mom. She rested a hand on both her children’s shoulders. “Sorry I shouted.”
“That’s OK, Mom,” said Grace. “We got some good news.” She managed a wry smile. “Finally.”
“We should head back,” said Mohammed.
They turned away and went over to the van, Grace elaborating on Leon’s theory as if it were all her own, that maybe the virus didn’t like water and maybe that meant the virus was being kept at bay by the various seas and oceans around the world. That maybe other island nations, like New Zealand and Hawaii, were just fine.
They climbed back in the van, and with a grinding of gears and a lurching motion, the van did a painfully slow five-point turn, bumping up over a curb before heading back down the way it had come, engine whining in low-gear distress, and Little Buntingham was left once more to its tranquil peace.
• • •
The breeze gently stirred the willow tree, and it swished in response. Scudding clouds allowed a break in their relentless gray lid. Blue sky appeared, and sunlight fleetingly dappled this peaceful rural setting. Picture perfect, if unnaturally quiet. No birds singing, no buzzing of dozy bees, no distant church bells or the humming of a groundskeeper’s lawnmower. There was just the rustle of a breeze and the stirring of the willow.
Several beams of cloudy sunlight, filtered green by the algae, sliced down into the depths of the murky pond and rested momentarily on the back of the stage-shy carp.
Only it wasn’t a carp. At best, it was a clumsy, malformed approximation of one: a fish scrawled by some untalented child with a crayon.
A best guess at a fish.
It was an attempt by a coalition of several billion cells to assemble the DNA fragments they’d gathered from the various creatures that had been absorbed from this cloudy, little universe into a working model. An ambitious project by their microcosmic standards. Lesser projects had been attempted with various degrees of success—floating single-cell life forms, various invertebrates…DNA templates that were modest by comparison.
Seven hours ago—decades by the timescale of entities as microscopic as these—an almost believable facsimile of a pond snail had been remade. Simple in structure, simple in locomotion, simple in thought. The successful assembly of an almost-complete species genome from the fragments stolen as the virus had rampaged and looted its way across the pond microcosmic centuries ago.
Baby steps, microcosm milestones.
Scaling up to the level of humankind, the almost-convincing pond snail was like mankind’s first successful flying machine, a fragile construction of balsa wood and bicycle parts; the misshapen carp, the first successful satellite in orbit.
If microscopic intelligence could have cheered, popped champagne corks, and lit cigars as it regarded the fish, it would have. Instead it just stored at a chemical level the data as sequences of DNA, a record of the successful expression of the genome—another one to add to this colony’s small but growing library of viable species templates.
And started again.
Chapter 29
5/28
Dad, where are you now? Have you found a survival shelter like us? Are you sitting safely at the top of some New England lighthouse with crates of food and bottles of water and a shortwave radio? I know you’re alive. You’re probably doing the whole I Am Legend thing, right? You think you’re Will Smith. Ha ha.
6/1
So this is what we think. We *think* the virus is dead already. We think that it’s a victim of its own efficiency. It was so frickin good at spreading that it hit everything it could affect within a couple of weeks and then had nothing left to infect after that. Maybe it was consuming what it infected as a food source, and now that’s all gone, it has withered, dried up, blown away…or something. I don’t know. But all I do know is that we haven’t seen any sign of it for weeks now. The last sign of it I saw was one of those pollen clouds, I guess over a month ago.
Mo thinks it must have been an engineered virus, totally man-made. Because it makes no sense, in, like, an evolutionary way, to be so damn quick and efficient and not make some attempt to preserve its hosts. He said it’s like the way a farmer preserves a proportion of his crops for the winter. It might have been a bioweapon? Or a research project, a cure for cancer, ,maybe, that just got to be a little too effective and saw everything as a cancer cell? Whatever…the greedy, stupid bastard of a plague has left itself nothing to chew on. And now it’s dead and gone too.
So, whether we were/are immune or not, we’ve decided that it’s probably safe enough to go look around, see if there are any other survivors. Because the alternative is to stay in this dark dungeon until the food eventually runs out. We’re going to Norwich. That’s where we were heading anyway. Maybe Grandma and Grandad made it through? I guess we’ll find out if one of them has got that immunity gene too.
There was a logjam of vehicles on the side road leading to the A14 just outside of Ipswich. They had to spend several hours picking their way through the cars and trucks. Several times, Leon and Mohammed had to brush aside the dried bones and rags (some still strapped in place by their seat belts) to sit in the driver’s seats, turn over the engines, and steer vehicles to the side to make way for their van. In most cases the engines all started perfectly. Leon assumed that wouldn’t be the case six months from now. Batteries would finally be completely drained, the elements would have started to corrode the more vulnerable engine parts, the tires w
ould be flat. He imagined ten, twenty years from now, this logjam would be a rusting, decaying mass, gradually merging into a soup of flaking oxidized metal, leaving behind only the plastic components just as the virus only left behind bones.
Beyond the jam, the A14 was empty and Leon soon got the hang of riding the gears smoothly all the way to the top, despite his mother’s frequent, insistent nagging to keep the speed down.
“It’s not a race, Leo.”
Twenty-five miles southwest of Norwich, near a place called Stowmarket, they spotted a road sign for a service station. The van’s tank was showing less than a third full and needed gas.
Leon steered them onto the exit and up toward an empty roundabout.
“Why don’t we have these back in America?” said Grace.
Their mom shrugged. “They had intersections instead of roundabouts. I think they were starting to install them in California before—”
“They’re cool,” pronounced Grace as Leon swerved around the overgrown grassy island in the middle, then took the exit into the service station’s parking lot. They’d expected to find an empty acre of asphalt. Instead, it was almost completely full of cars, in some places vehicles parked in orderly rows between the white lines; in others, cars were parked erratically, as if the final spaces had been fought for.
Leon looked for a sign that would lead them to the gas pumps. “Where’s the gas station?”
“Stop over there first,” said his mom, pointing. “We might as well take a look inside and see if we can pick up some more supplies.”
Leon parked the van near the entrance to the glass-fronted service station store, and they climbed out.
There were the usual humps of clothing dotted here and there. It was a sight that had become so common they barely noticed it anymore; certainly, they no longer bothered to give the piles a wide berth for fear of infection. They were just harmless relics to be ignored…except where they converged in groups and told a story. Here their story was quite clear. Bodies were piled up along the glass front, packed more deeply around the wide double doors.
They wanted to get in. But someone inside wasn’t letting them.
Leon could see the grease of palm prints, scuff marks and scrapes, and in several places, hairline cracks in the thick plate glass. In his mind’s eye, he could see the crowd clamoring to be let in, begging for compassion from those lucky enough to already be on the inside. Parents holding their little children up above their heads like green cards. Curses and threats hurled through the glass as, behind them, a billowing cloud of white flakes slowly drifted across the parking lot like an advancing bank of fog.
Leon shaded his eyes and pressed his nose close to the plate glass. It was gloomy-dark inside. The August sunlight was playing peekaboo from behind scudding clouds. Its light made short, momentary advances across the floor inside, and as it did, he caught glimpses farther in of more deflated humps of material and bone.
The virus still managed to find a way in.
Despite the locking of doors, despite the efforts of those within—maybe the service station’s staff—it had all been futile. He imagined the horror not just for those standing out here, but maybe more so for those cowering inside. They would have had a perfect ringside seat. The perfect panoramic observation window to watch at leisure as the virus did its work on those outside. To see each grisly stage of breakdown and liquefaction, to see people dropping to their knees, flopping to the ground, cries of panic turning to keening whimpers of grief. To witness through scuffed glass a mother watching her baby cough blobs of blood onto its bib, to see another holding her dying children in her arms, to watch those forms glisten wetly and merge like wax figures held too close to a roaring fire—merging, a return to the mother’s womb in a horribly different way. To see husband and wife, mother and father, embracing and dying…to watch a Greek chorus of figures slump to the ground, slowly withering and merging into one wet mass.
Those inside would have seen all that play out against the smeared glass. They would have witnessed in close-up detail the process, and they’d have known that was inevitably going to happen to them too.
Leon felt his scalp prickle and the skin along his arms began to goose bump.
Jeez. “Leon!”
He turned at his own mother’s voice. “Whuh! What’s—?” She’d been saying something to him.
She was standing a dozen yards back from the front of the service station, holding Grace’s hand. “I said…you need to stand back. Mohammed’s going to try to get us in.” She nodded toward the sound of an engine being revved nearby.
Leon backed up a few feet, then watched as a white Ford Fiesta lurched forward from one of the parking bays, bounced over a curb, knocked a trash can and a wooden picnic table to one side, and then finally smashed heavily into the plate glass. It shattered, and a blizzard of glass granules cascaded and rattled on the hood and roof of the car.
Mohammed waited until the last fragments of glass had finished dropping, then emerged from the car rubbing at a smear of blood on the bridge of his nose.
“You OK?” asked Leon’s mom.
“Ach. Banged my nose on the steering wheel.” He said “nose” like “dose.” He tasted blood on his lips. “My nose is bleeding.” He pinched his nostrils to stem the flow.
“We’ll find you some tissues,” she said, stepping over the crackles of glass. “Come on.”
Chapter 30
Inside it was dark, but at least lighter than the total dark of the bunker they’d been hiding away in for the last three months.
Leon did his best to forget about the clothes and bones piled up outside and the few dotted around inside…and the scene that must have taken place here months ago. All ancient history now, he told himself. No more relevant or shocking than the ancient fossilized fetal-position remains of Pompeiians.
They split into two groups. Leon’s mom and Mo headed one way, he and Grace the other.
Leon carried a shopping basket in each hand, while Grace led the way with the flashlight, shining it along aisles of snacks. Their van outside was filled with survival essentials: water and canned food, boxes of rice and dried pasta. Sensible, nutritious food portions designed to keep UK missile crews functional for months and months.
Nutritious…and utterly tasteless.
What had been sadly lacking over the last few months had been the sweet stuff: packs of Haribo candy and bottles of Coca-Cola. Leon grabbed a few fistfuls of candy from the shelves and tossed them into his basket.
Grace grumbled. “Your teeth will all fall out.”
“Maybe,” sighed Leon. “But who’s gonna see, huh?” There was that small consolation: if they were the last people of planet Earth, there was no need any more for vanity.
“All the same…you don’t need to binge-grab this stuff.” She shook her head. “It’s, like, gonna be literally everywhere. For free…as much as you want. Forever.”
“It’ll go bad.”
She raised her thick, dark eyebrows. “Seriously? This sugary stuff is all chemicals—it’ll last forever. It’s the healthier stuff that won’t last long.” She pulled a bag of nuts and dried fruit slices off the shelf and held it up for closer inspection. Spots of blue mold dotted the inside. “See?” She put it back. “All the healthy stuff is already going moldy.”
Leon’s mom and Mohammed, meanwhile, were in the food mart, across from the station’s coffee area, on the far side. They were each carrying a shopping basket and filling it up with their own treats. Mohammed was piling up cans of dates in syrup in his. Leon’s mom decided to pick up some instant coffee and as an afterthought some boxes of crackers. She walked a little farther down the aisle and found a temptation she couldn’t pass up. She placed several bottles of red wine into her basket. Mohammed heard the bottles clinking in her basket as she returned to join him.
“Why?” he asked, shining h
is flashlight on the wine. “You do not need it.”
“Oh, yes I do.”
“No, you do not. It does not help.”
“Well, I beg to differ.”
He scowled disapprovingly at her. “I have never understood why people choose to ingest a drink that is designed to provoke a toxic response in the bloodstream.”
She cocked her head. “Are you doing the religious abstinence thing on me?”
“It is a common sense thing, Mrs. Button. We should keep our wits about us at all times.”
She closed her eyes and rolled them, then eventually nodded. “I suppose that’s true. Very sensible of you.” She pulled them out of her basket and placed them on the rack of chips beside her.
“There are actually practical reasons behind the tenets of my faith.”
“Really? How about polygamy? Forced marriage?”
He cocked his head. “That dates back to the time of the Crusades. There were many more widows than there were men back then. It is… It was meant to be a practical measure. A charitable thing.”
“A form of enslavement, more like.”
He shrugged. “That is all gone now, old customs, prejudices—”
“And religions?”
“If there are other survivors out there, it will be a new world. Maybe a better culture will be born from this.”
“For better or worse.”
“Maybe more tolerant.”
She looked longingly at the bottles of wine beside her. “Maybe one that allows the occasional glass?”
“Moderation in all things is a good thing.”
She laughed sadly. “Including moderation…as my dad used to say.”
“And he may yet still, Mrs. Button. If you and your children are immune, then it is likely that at least one of your parents is also.” He smiled. “I would very much hope to meet them.” He picked up his basket and wandered a little farther down the aisle.