“Tender?”
“Yes. Very.”
He peered closely at a raised welt on the back of her hand. “How did you do that?”
“Barbed wire,” answered Leon quickly. “Rusty barbed wire. I think that’s how she got this infection on her arm.”
He finished dabbing at her arm with antiseptic. “Well, at least that’s cleaned up now.” He pulled fresh bandages from a plastic pack and wrapped her arm up once again. He reached out and touched her forehead. “You’re quite warm.”
“I think she has a fever or something,” said Leon.
Terry nodded. “I think so too. Look, I’ll give you some different antibiotics and some stronger anti-inflammatories to take. It’ll keep those snarks at bay, but more importantly, it’ll clear up this nasty infection. We may be immune to the plague, but I’m afraid even a septic paper cut can still kill you just like the good ol’ days.”
He turned to Leon. “And let’s get you both on aspirin again.”
• • •
“I’m Freya by the way.”
Leon looked up from the cafeteria table. He was getting used to this: people coming over and telling him their name and then asking him what he’d seen “out there.” He and Grace had been left alone for the first two days at Terry’s insistence. He said they both needed some rest and feeding. They’d been assigned a guest chalet to share inside the vast glass house, and Grace was still feeling very poorly and feverish, although it seemed like the infection in her arm was beginning to get better.
He recognized Freya as the girl who had nearly run him over. “Leon,” he said, offering her his hand.
“Well, duh, I know,” she replied. She grasped his hand and shook it. “Seems like I’m in the back of the group to pester you with an avalanche of questions.”
He shrugged. “That’s OK. There’s not much I can answer though. It sounds like me and Grace haven’t seen anything you guys haven’t already seen.”
Freya set her tray down on the table. “Just like meals in the school cafeteria.”
It was heated food. Sure it came from cans—nothing came freshly picked anymore—but it was food heated in a saucepan, a luxury as far as Leon was concerned.
She settled awkwardly into the chair. “You’re looking a lot less like roadkill now.”
He laughed. “I’m feeling better, thank you.”
“How’s your sister doing?”
“She’s a lot better than she was. I think we were both in a pretty crappy place when you nearly ran me over.”
Freya picked up a fork and speared one of the ravioli in her bowl. “So what’s your meds story?”
“What?”
“Your medication story?” She blew on her food. “Quite a few here are alive and well because…uh, because we weren’t well. We’re all pill chompers. We survived the initial outbreak because a lot of us were on one med or another at the time.” She nodded at those people not wearing the park’s uniform. “The staff, on the other hand, survived because they were isolated and stayed inside the tropicarium. But the rest of us…we were just lucky to be sick at the time.”
The tropicarium, Leon had learned, was the name for this large glass-house structure that contained the pool, the hot tubs, the sauna, the chalet cabins, the plastic palm trees and plastic orchids, the artificial grass. The place looked like a tropical paradise, except none, or at least very little of it, was actually real.
“Grace had a broken arm and I get headaches. So we were both on painkillers at the time.”
“Terry said your mum survived for a while too?”
Leon nodded. But that was all he gave her on the subject. What had happened had happened five months ago. It felt like much longer.
Three months they’d spent back down there in that dark nuclear bunker, working their way slowly through thirty-year-old rations. Just him and Grace, surviving, simply existing like cave dwellers. They’d been in shock, Leon realized, what the U.S. Army called PTSD. Losing his mom felt like years ago. On the other hand, it took only a question, a smell, a word…to bring her right back and make it feel like yesterday.
“Hey, it’s OK,” said Freya. She touched his hand lightly. “We all lost someone. I don’t talk about my parents either. Subject best left with the wrapper on.”
“Yeah.” Both he and Grace had done a lot of crying. Sometimes together, but mostly he’d done his crying when he was sure she was in some fitful sleep.
Leon glanced up at Freya, looked at her closely this time. She was pretty in an imperfect way: her ears stuck out just a little; her jaw tapered like an almond, giving her a slightly weak chin. Her mouth worked sluggishly, making her words garbled, and she moved around cautiously, like a person driving someone else’s car for the first time.
“So, in case you’re wondering about my slurred speech…I’m not drunk. I was diagnosed with MS about nine months ago. It’s why I sound like this. Why I feel so friggin’ exhausted all the time.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. That sucks.”
“Or it doesn’t, depending on how you look at things. If I’d been a well girl, I suppose I’d now be part of some disgusting, pale, slimy, crabby thing.” She smiled nonchalantly. “Girl with early signs of MS versus gross bug thing…no brainer, really.”
Leon noticed the older man who was in charge here, Carnegie if memory served him, coming over to join them.
“How are you feeling this morning, Leon?”
“Better, thank you, sir.”
He smiled at the formality. “Terry tells me your sister has a nasty infection, but he’s put her on some pretty robust antibiotics?”
“Yeah. She’s feeling better already.”
“You were both in a pretty sorry state when they brought you in. Terry said you guys were borderline malnourished, dehydrated. He thought your sister might have scabies.”
Leon nodded. “We…uh…we didn’t cope very well.”
“Well, look, Leon, you’re going to be perfectly safe here. We have a contained, sealed, safe environment. Power and food and water for as long as we’re going to need it.”
“How long do you think that will be?”
Ron smooshed his lips like a car mechanic totaling up an estimate. “Who knows?”
“The authorities, or, you know, whoever’s left out there and still functioning,” cut in Freya, “are gonna need some time to get their act together before they start reaching out.”
Ron nodded. “We might have to dig in and cope on our own for quite some time.”
“So you keep saying,” said Freya. “That is if anyone does come.”
“The authorities have contingency plans for all kinds of disasters, Freya. There’ll be an emergency authority hub somewhere outside London. If we’ve managed to get by OK, I’m sure the prime minister and the cabinet have too.” He turned to Leon. “And your president and his people I imagine are just fine too, but I can expect it’s going to be quite some time before a major relief effort gets going.”
“Dave thinks the whole world is dead and gone…that it’s just us left.” Freya turned to Leon. “He’s Ron’s assistant.”
“Deputy manager, Freya,” Ron chided her gently. “I think Dave is overly pessimistic. There’ll be relief efforts happening eventually.”
Leon nodded. “I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Carnegie.”
“Anyway…we’re just going to sit tight here for now. Freya?”
“Ron?”
Leon noticed him stiffen at her cheeky familiarity. “Why don’t you show Leon around the tropicarium?”
“I might just do that, Ron.”
Chapter 36
Grace lay alone in the chalet bedroom. The curtains of the small window were closed, and only a trickle of diffused daylight leaked into the small room. She felt weak and hot, her mind slipping in and out of consciousness, not sleeping
but not truly awake either.
She had a fleeting dream about much happier times. Back in their New York home. Christmas, that’s what it felt like. There were decorations and a tree in the corner of their living room. Of course it was Christmas. Leon looked so much younger. Maybe ten or eleven. He was tearing the wrapping paper off a large Star Wars Lego set, squawking with delight. Weirdly, in the dream, she was the same age she was now. Twelve. That kind of made her the big sister.
A part of her fevered mind appreciated the irony of that. Leon had stepped up after his mom had died. He’d been doing his best to be an adult. Doing OK, under the circumstances. She knew she’d be long gone if it hadn’t been for him. So, now, in this pleasant dream, it was nice, if weird, to see him as a little kid once more.
She was unwrapping a new iPhone. Her mom and dad were there, smiling at each other. Her foggy mind couldn’t figure out whether this was a dream or a memory or somewhere in between. She was older than Leon…a dream, then.
Gramps and Grandma were there too. They’d come down from Connecticut for Christmas and were cooing and enjoying watching the little ’uns.
A perfect, perfect dream.
• • •
Inside Grace, a colony of cells, alien to her body’s immune system, was doing its best to survive. A desperate struggle now that their world, the inside of Grace, had become a biochemical war zone.
The immune system was fully mobilized and ready for a fight. These invaders had entered their world, and they were on the prowl through the bloodstream, hunting down the unwelcome bacterial imposters who’d set up camp there. Busting down their cell walls when they found them, tearing apart their reproductive machinery.
These unwelcome invaders had a name in the universe outside: Staphylococcus aureus.
But there was another invader, much, much smaller, and it too had taken up residence. To these tiny life forms, the war between Staphylococcus and the immune system was a war between giant beasts, elephants locking tusks, while meantime, they crept like mice around their vast, stomping feet.
This second invader was infinitely smaller but dangerously similar in structure, not like other viruses—just strands of DNA floating in a perilously thin casing—but these virus-hijacked cells were complete. They were life forms capable of their own life cycle. The biological war of giants was of no concern to this virus, except that it was stirring up this world’s, this microcosm’s “little police”—the lymphocytes and macrophages. They smelled blood and were out and about in great numbers doing their part to help the giants take down the bacterial invader, looking for kicked-in cell walls into which to race, to raise havoc inside.
The virus was lying low for now, going dormant. Time to find a safe place to go to sleep until things calmed down.
• • •
Elsewhere, on a human scale, a hundred miles away stood a building on the outskirts of a medium-size countryside town. A three-story building that was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, with large delivery archways at the rear for horse-drawn carts to deliver payloads of barley and hops. Once upon a time, the building had hummed with activity, producing hundreds of barrels of real ale, called Butcher’s Best. In recent years, it had been doing the same job but on a much smaller scale. An old building now, it had been ripe for tearing down and redeveloping before the virus hit, but like a stubborn old man, it had persisted and remained standing.
The building’s basement was enormous: a storage cellar that had once been designed to store thousands of barrels was a labyrinth of low archways, tunnels, vacant wooden barrel racks, and, until a few months ago, a thriving colony of rats.
A very different colony inhabited this space now.
In the darkness of this old brick cellar, safe from the uncomfortable penetrative UV rays, it was warm. Almost tropical.
There was life down here.
A sea of life.
An ocean of life.
To a casual observer, the basement floor appeared to be a seething cauldron of brown broth. It could have been mistaken for a sewage treatment tank, except that it didn’t smell of feces. The odor could be described as meaty, cabbage-y…the smell of a school or hospital cafeteria or a soup kitchen.
The virus had converged here, in a good place. In microcosmic terms, this was a city. A megacity. A place where many hundreds of thousands of minicolonies had merged to share their experiences, their data.
Their knowledge.
And now sections of jigsaw-puzzle DNA were being played with, assembled to see what they could form. In the darkness of the brewery basement, yet another genetic template was emerging from the crusty surface of the broth. An ambitious project this time, something much, much bigger than before. Over several hours, a small dimple in the surface of the broth became a molehill, then a hump the size of a pitcher’s mound. Its form became more complex, more refined, took on definition and complexity. Beneath the surface, billions of cells passed along chemical messages. Between them, they agreed on roles and formed a brittle skeleton-like frame. Some formed sinew-like material; others, a facsimile of muscle tissue.
Finally, after many hours, the hump had become an organized subcolony that could begin to articulate and move. The crusty surface tore open and a creature that bore just the vaguest resemblance to a cow staggered to its seven feet. Some legs worked as they should; others were withered and uncertainly formed. The creature’s head had the wedge-like shape of a cow’s. A noise emerged from its mouth. Not the deep mooing of a cow, but a warbling, mournful shriek that sounded as chilling and unpleasant as the cry of an urban fox.
It staggered clumsily, wading drunkenly through the broth.
On the wedge-shaped head, an experimental organ attempted to function, a glistening, dark orb that emerged from beneath a protective flap of membrane. One eye, blinking and rolling in the darkness. It detected a hazy pinprick of light coming through the floorboards above—detected the light…reported its presence down an optic nerve to a subcolony of cells that had combined to form another very simple organ about the size of pinhead.
The beast staggered another step, then finally collapsed back into the broth. Not a cow, not even close…but getting there. It was an incredible result that would be logged and stored in the collective memory of this basement city. The very complicated optic organ and the other organ, a simple brain, had worked successfully together.
The short-lived creature began to break back down once again into the soup from which it had been made. This process was a lot quicker than the assembly. Cells rejoined the larger community, exchanging protein messages.
An hour later, the DNA packet responsible for creating a viable eye, optic nerve, and brain tissue had proliferated across the entire basement of the brewery, and several hundred small, articulated crablike creatures emerged from the soup, following a guiding tendril up the stairs to the ground floor, out of the delivery archway, and into daylight. Some of them began to scramble across the ground on their thin pincer legs, sniffing for the outlier tendrils of a sibling colony; others dissolved in the sunlight and became small balls of fluff, like dandelions gone to seed, waiting for a stiff breeze to carry their spores away, each one containing news of this wonderful development.
Chapter 37
12/3
Dad, you out there still? You still alive? It’s been almost seven months. The general feeling is that the world is actually totally screwed. No country survived intact. There’s no one left to pick up the pieces. But maybe there are lots of other survival centers like this one, still going.
We found one of them. Or, more accurately, they found us. They’re holding out at this luxury, forest health-spa place. It’s basically a big plastic greenhouse with gyms and Swedish saunas and hot tubs and a small swimming pool inside. The place is sealed up like a drum. Virtually airtight, like some kind of Mars colony outpost. That’s how they survived: none of the virus
could get inside. In fact, it’s a perfect survival stronghold. They’ve got solar-power panels, a wind turbine, and even a diesel generator, so they’re all set for power. Food and water isn’t a problem. When we need more, we send out a van to the closest supermarket and fill it up.
Catching the virus isn’t a problem either, Dad. We’re all immune here. Now I know why. It’s not hereditary—it’s chemical. It’s painkillers… That’s the cure! Which I guess means there’s more of a chance that you’re still alive. See, I thought it was hereditary, which meant if we got our immunity from Mom then the chances of you being immune too would be hugely unlikely. So, if it’s drugs…you’ve probably figured that out too. And as long as we keep popping pills we’re safe from catching it. That’s one thing taken care of. Check. The other’s not so easy…
There’s the things this virus is making. They call them snarks here. I don’t know if other survivors are getting the same weird creatures we are—we’ve got these small crablike things. Every one of them seems slightly different. Now and then you get bigger snarks. The biggest thing we’ve seen so far was the size of a cat or a small dog. I get the feeling the virus is trying to make new species, but it can’t do the big stuff…yet. Shit. Can a virus really do that? You know, think, plan, strategize? The idea of that really scares me.
12/8
Grace’s arm is all healed up now. She was sick for so long. I really thought she was going to die when we went back to the bunker. I thought the snark virus was inside her, but just taking its time breaking her down. Turns out she must have gotten an infection from something else.
Terry fixed her up by the way, Dad. He is a staff member here at this place. An ex-British Army medic turned male nurse. There’s another guy who’s an ex-army engineer, called “Spanners.” Then there’s the manager, Ron Carnegie. I think he’s what you’d call one of those stick-up-the-ass types. He’s a nice old guy, but everything’s by the book, health ’n’ safety and stuff. And his sidekick is this survival blowhard called Dave. I guess you know the type… Yup, they have ’em over here too.