Beneath the bones and clothes, a murky puddle of viscous liquid had pooled.
“My God. Complete liquefaction of all the soft tissue…” Gupta shook his head. “In just a few hours?”
“That’s impossible,” whispered Jones.
There were other lumps of cloth and bone on the road. “It kills quickly.”
Jones nodded. He knew what Gupta was getting at. It had killed too quickly for these victims to make their way to some triage center. They’d literally dropped where they’d been standing.
“That’s…an encouraging sign,” said Gupta. The phrase felt poorly chosen. “At least it appears that there is no incubation period.”
“Flash-fire infection,” said Jones. Maybe this pathogen, whatever it was, was going to be too efficient for its own good—no hosts living long enough to quietly carry the infection to fresh pastures. Hopefully it would burn itself out before it could spread too far.
Gupta pulled out a small plastic container and a sample pipette. He set the container down and unscrewed the cap. He then picked up the pipette in his thick-gloved fingers. “I will get a sample of the fluid.”
Carefully, he touched the tip of the pipette to the dark liquid. Jones thought he saw the surface quiver or ripple slightly. Gupta squeezed the rubber bulb and released. Air bubbled out, and the liquid, thick as syrup, began to climb up the inside of the narrow glass cylinder. Finally, he placed the pipette in the container and screwed the cap back on.
“We should look around… Try to see if there are any survivors.”
Gupta shined his flashlight across the front of the garage. Through the half-raised shutter, the glow from a solitary, fizzing striplight spilled out.
They made their way across the uneven road, potholed with cracks and craters—decades-old asphalt that needed resurfacing. Gupta ducked under the raised shutter. Jones followed him inside.
The oil-stained concrete floor was littered with tattered blankets, discarded cans of food, clips of ammunition, and AK-47s.
“Oh shit,” whispered Jones.
Gupta heard him and nodded.
The town was back in Boko Haram’s possession. “They must have been holing up here,” said Jones.
“I see no bodies though.”
“Then they must have fled.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Gupta. Boko Haram propaganda videos portrayed them as benevolent protectors and saviors of the people. In reality, they took what they needed, abducted whom they wanted, and moved on.
The sergeant ducked under the shutter and stood up beside them. “Everything is OK?”
They both nodded. “We’re fine,” said Jones. “Fine.”
He nodded. “D’accord.” He looked around. “The militants were here.”
“And left in a hurry.”
The sergeant shook his head. “No. Not even in a hurry. They would not leave their guns behind.” He quickly barked an order in French, and several seconds later, two of his men ducked under the shutter and joined them. “You two stay here,” he said to the doctors. “We will check this place.”
Gupta and Jones nodded.
Jones watched as the three soldiers worked together silently, two covering, one moving, probing every dark corner of the garage. Finally they disappeared as they went through a doorway at the back.
Gupta looked at him. “Terrified?”
“Very.”
“Me too.”
“This is not Ebola.” Gupta’s comment sounded halfway between a question and a statement.
Jones nodded. “No pathogen works this fast. It’s not Marburg. It’s not L21-N. I have no idea what it is.”
“Maybe a chemical weapon?”
Jones shrugged.
Suddenly the sergeant’s voice crackled over their earpieces. “Dr. Jones? Dr. Gupta! Come, please!”
They looked quickly at each other, then hurried over toward the doorway at the back of the garage. Jones stepped through first. He could see flashlight beams whipping back and forth across what looked like a small storeroom. It was difficult to understand what he was seeing by the stark, flickering beams. He turned to his right, saw a switch, and flicked it hopefully.
A striplight in the ceiling blinked reluctantly several times, then finally winked on.
“God!” Jones gasped. He looked down at the bundle of clothes and bones and the pool of dark brown mulch beneath it…then at the bizarre sight spread across the floor.
Chapter 7
Leon’s mom arrived home late from work, as she always did these days. Grace had made a start at preparing dinner. That was one of the new routines they’d gotten into the habit of over the last six months. Back in New Jersey, his mom had always been waiting for them at home at the end of the school day, all milk and cookies and “How was your day?”
She worked for an estate agent in Shepherd’s Bush now. Her days were spent taking buses and subways around West London, meeting potential clients to show them around ridiculously overpriced and dingy town houses. Nowadays it was Leon and Grace waiting with the milk and cookies and asking her how her day had been.
“Rubbish,” she responded when they asked her. She dropped her keys in the kitchen bowl. “Lots of standing around like an idiot and waiting.” She kicked her work shoes off into the shoe basket and gave Grace a hug. “How are my two babies?”
Leon rolled his eyes.
“How’s your arm?”
Grace was stirring the pan with her good arm. “Sore.”
“Leo! Why are you making her do the cooking?”
“I’m not making her. Jeez. You know what she’s like—she took over. She said I was doing it all wrong.”
“You want some aspirin, honey?”
“I’m OK. Maybe at bedtime. Hey…by the way, I got a commendation for my short story,” Grace crowed. “My English teacher is putting it up on the school website.”
“Oh wowzers…clever girl!” She kissed the top of Grace’s head and looked over at Leon. “And what about you? How was your football?”
“Soccer,” he corrected her.
“No…” She wagged a finger and smiled. “Over here we call it football.”
Leon sighed. “It was OK.”
“Did you score any goals, love?”
“Sure. One or two I guess.”
“Did you put your dirties in the laundry basket?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good boy.” She let Grace go, came around the breakfast bar, and put an arm around him. Leon let her squeeze him and made a halfhearted effort to squeeze her back. He knew it was her guilt reflex—another day spent focusing on rebuilding her life, her career, and all that she had left to offer her kids at the end of the day was a squeeze and a few token questions.
“I’m exhausted,” she sighed. “Been on my feet all day.” She slumped on one of the breakfast stools. “So…what do you guys fancy doing this weekend? I heard there’s a music festival in Hyde Park. We could go and—”
“I have Pony Club on Saturday,” said Grace.
“You can’t ride with your arm.”
“They’re showing us mucking out and grooming. I gotta go.”
Leon’s mom turned to him and raised her brows.
“Sorry, Mom… I got a Clash of Clans team meeting.” Leon kept in touch with a few friends back home. Once a week they hooked up on Skype and mostly played dumbass first-person shooters that bored Leon, but at least it was some form of contact with his old life.
“We could go in the evening if you guys want?”
The prospect of pointlessly milling around a rock festival with his mom and kid sister was pretty grim. He could see her cajoling them to go see this and that, herding them like a sheepdog, all phony excitement and forced smiles, and then it would eventually end up with her moaning at them for being miserable when
all she was trying to do was get them to spend some quality time together. The subway journey back home would be in silence…and Sunday would be one long sulk.
“Fine,” she sighed. “It was just an idea.”
“Maybe next time, Mom,” offered Leon.
She nodded at that and almost looked relieved. “OK.” They sat in silence for a minute. “Mmm! What’s cooking?”
“Out-of-the-jar own-brand sauce,” replied Grace. The microwave pinged in the corner. “And nuked pasta.”
They ate off their laps in the small living room, Leon on the sofa with his mom, Grace sitting on the beanbag, a fork in one hand and the TV remote control right beside her. Another rerun episode of The Big Bang Theory was about to start.
“Grace, can we have something else on?” By that their mom meant EastEnders or some cooking show.
“How about the news?” Leon asked.
She looked at him. Surprised, possibly even impressed. “Yeah…the news. Why not?”
Grace rolled her eyes and huffed, then zapped the channel over to BBC1.
“Something caught your interest, Leo?”
“There’s the African thing.”
Leon’s mom shrugged and looked at him. “What African thing?”
He pointed with his fork at the screen. “Over there? On the TV?”
She turned and watched. Currently the news was running through the tail end of the headlines recap: how the prime minister’s son was coping with his first term at an inner-city academy; Betsy Boomalackah on the red carpet, promoting her new movie; then it cycled back to the headline story.
A senior cabinet member caught up in a sex scandal…
“What African thing?” asked Leon’s mom after a couple of minutes.
Leon shrugged. “Maybe it’s over… It was, like, on the TV news this afternoon.”
The very next item was the African thing. A reporter was on the ground in Abuja, Nigeria, wearing khakis, a flak jacket, and a blue helmet.
“…scenes of violence today as Boko Haram fighters pushed south into the city’s northern suburbs…”
“That African thing?”
Leon shook his head. “Not those Boko guys… The virus thing. It was, like—”
The image on the screen changed to a press conference, flash photography, a panel of worried-looking faces behind a forest of microphones.
“…continuing mystery surrounding the news this morning of the outbreak of an as-yet-unidentified virus in Northern Nigeria, which now appears to have spread to the neighboring states of Ghana, Benin, and Cameroon.
“Dr. Ahmand Saliente, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, has already ruled out the possibility that this is an outbreak of Ebola, the frightening hemorrhagic disease that was brought to public attention several years ago. ‘We know this is not Ebola or Marburg, and we wanted that message to get out quickly. We are dealing with something that has a very different and rapid spread pattern…’”
“Oh”—Leon’s mom wound pasta on to her fork—“those poor people. It’s one thing after another over there, isn’t it?”
“…the as-yet-unidentified virus has spread remarkably quickly in just twenty-four hours, and the foreign office has issued an advisory travel warning to those considering trips to any of the West African nations…”
“That doesn’t look good,” said Leon.
“Are you worried about it?” his mom asked.
He hunched his shoulders. “Just saying…”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Leo…don’t get all worked up about it. I know what you’re like. You’ll obsess about it, just like your—”
He closed his eyes and stifled an urge to snap at her. She was going to say Just like your dad… She’d managed to stop herself though.
The news had moved on to a story about Amazon trying to buy out Walmart.
“Is that it?” said Grace. She picked up the remote. “Can I change it back now, please?”
Their mom nodded. “It depresses me—the news. One thing after another.” She tried tacking on something humorous about the prime minister’s son and whether his best mate in year seven was a midget bodyguard in disguise, but Leon’s attention was elsewhere.
He pulled out his phone and logged on to DarkEye.com. It was his go-to website for conspiracy news. There were dozens of links to do with the story. He hit one that took him to a place called UnderTheWire.com. The banner proudly claimed they served up the world’s unfiltered news, news that the likes of Fox, CNN, and even the BBC “Don’t Want You to See!” The latest submitted story, right at the top of the page, was of “smoking-gun evidence” that NASA never landed on the moon. The next headline down was about Taylor Swift being a secret CIA operative.
The third article was what he was after.
There are unconfirmed reports that the mystery illness in Amoso and several other towns in Nigeria has turned up in a number of other locations outside of West Africa. The source of this UnderTheWire story is unknown, although it could well be tapped intelligence traffic or somebody within the WHO, or perhaps the U.S. military biological weapons division, USAMRIID. There is speculation that this may be a bioweapon being tested out by the U.S. on a number of radical Islamic strongholds, a small-scale field-testing of some sort. There are even rumors of a CIA mission currently investigating the outbreak sites to evaluate the weapon’s effect…
“Leon?”
He looked up at his mother. “Huh?”
She tapped the side of his phone with her fork handle. “I don’t want you sitting up all night fixating over this and giving yourself a headache for tomorrow.”
“Just showing an interest in something…OK?”
“Come on. Phone away, please. Let’s at least have dinner together before you disappear on to the internet.”
Dinner together? Hardly. It was the three of them eating a microwaved meal off their laps while they gazed in silence at an old rerun.
“Fine.” He tapped his phone off and tucked it back into his jeans.
Chapter 8
Amoso, West Africa
A small tributary of dark, viscous liquid flowed across the concrete floor of the storage room toward an open door that led to a side alley. At several places, the liquid flow had branched.
“Jesus…” Dr. Jones whispered.
The branching looked like a photo of a river delta taken by satellite—fanning out, branches off branches, like a root system seeking nutrition.
He squatted down and dabbed at the liquid with a sample stick; then he dropped the stick into a plastic container and labeled it.
His eyes tracked a small tributary of liquid that had emerged from the bundle of clothes and bones on the floor.
That’s not right.
He looked around for something and saw what he wanted: a can of Coke stacked in a pile of other canned goods, no doubt commandeered from the townspeople. He popped the can’s tab and poured its contents on to the floor. The liquid hissed and bubbled in a puddle, but what it wasn’t doing was flowing in any particular direction. There was no slant to the floor.
The viscous fluid from the body, on the other hand, was somehow making its own decision about which way to flow.
Dr. Gupta looked up at him as he understood why Jones had poured the soda on the floor. “Impossible.”
Jones got down on his hands and knees and peered closely at fine, threadlike tendrils feathering out from the main stream of liquid—the sort of quadratic branching you’d expect to see from a sample grown in a Petri dish.
“Merde!” a voice crackled loudly through Jones’s earpiece. He looked up to see that the sergeant had stepped out through the open door into the back alley. “Regardez! You need to see this!”
Jones rose to his feet and crossed the floor, stepping through the open door into the alleyway. It was dark, no lighting dow
n here where boxes and trash cans of spilled garbage were piled up against the walls on either side.
Gupta joined him in the middle of the narrow alley. A two-story building overlooked the garage. He was shining his flashlight on the cracked and flaking whitewashed plastered wall in front of him. In the stark brightness of the flashlight beam, Jones could see an almost ink-black fine line, rising up the wall, like a vine. It formed a familiar fanning-out pattern.
Gupta shined his flashlight across the alley floor and into the open doorway through which they’d both just stepped. “The liquid managed to find its way outside,” he said. He looked at Jones and said it again. “The liquid found its way outside.”
Jones followed the snaking, black line of viscous fluid across the littered floor.
“My God. It’s not flowing…”
“It’s growing.”
“Like fungus mycelia.”
Jones turned to him. “I really don’t know how to begin to analyze this. I’ve never… This is something else—”
“We’ll get more of an understanding of it if we can locate a body in early-stage infection.”
“Yes…yes, of course.”
Dr. Gupta aimed his flashlight up the plastered wall. The dark line had snaked all the way up toward a second-floor window, where a feeler had branched off and appeared to have found the opening. The main stream had doubled back down in a scribbled arc toward the window, where the feeler rejoined it. The vine flowed over the window frame, through the gap, and inside.
“We’re going in,” he said.
“Shouldn’t we…uh…send the soldiers in first?”
“Oh…yes, absolutely.”
• • •
On the second-floor landing, the sergeant and one of the other legionnaires, took up covering positions, weapons raised and ready, while Jones and Gupta went in. At the far end of the hallway was the open window they’d seen from the alleyway below, the faintest ambient glow of blue light from the garage’s rear door spilling in from it.
The hallway was dark; several light sockets dangled from the ceiling minus bulbs. The walls, painted an unpleasant lime green, flaked paint onto a tired linoleum floor. Numbered doors lined both sides—apartments, cheap ones. In a poor town like Amoso, Jones suspected there’d be entire families living cheek by jowl in each. They were going to find bodies undoubtedly—lots of them.