‘You two stay here. 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 out of sight 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.’
‘Perhaps a chemical weapon?’
He shrugged.
Suddenly the sergent’s voice crackled over their earpieces. ‘Dr Jones? Dr Gupta! Come, please!’
They looked quickly at each other then hurried over towards the doorway at the back of the garage. Jones stepped through first. He could see torch beams whipping back and forth across what looked like a small store room. 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 strip light 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
Mum arrived home late from work, as she always did these days. Grace had made a start on preparing dinner by the time she got home. That was one of the new routines they’d got into the habit of over the last six months. Back in New York, Mum 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 tubes around West London, meeting potential clients to show them around ridiculously overpriced and dingy terraced houses. Nowadays it was Leon and Grace waiting with the milk and cookies and asking her how her day had been.
‘Rubbish.’ 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 round the breakfast bar and put an arm round him. Leon let her squeeze him and made a token 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 at the weekend? I heard there’s a music festival in Hyde Park. We could go and—’
‘I got Pony Club on Saturday,’ said Grace.
‘You can’t ride with your arm.’
‘They’re showing us mucking out and grooming. I gotta go.’
Mum turned to Leon and raised her brows.
‘Sorry, Mum . . . I got a clan meeting.’ Leon kept in touch with a few friends back home. Once a week they hooked up on Skype and mostly played dumbass 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 mum 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 tube 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, Mum,’ offered Leon.
She nodded at that and almost looked relieved. ‘OK.’
They sat in silence for a minute. ‘Mmmm! 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 Mum, Grace sitting on the beanbag, a fork in one hand and the TV remote right beside her. Another rerun episode of Big Bang Theory was about to start.
‘Grace, can we have something else on now?’
By that Mum meant EastEnders or some cookery 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.’
Mum shrugged and looked at him. ‘What African thing?’
He pointed with his fork at the screen. ‘Over there? On the telly?’
She turned and watched. Currently the news was running through the tail end of the headlines recap; how the PM’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 Mum 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 flack 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 neighbouring 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 haemorrhagic 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 –’ Mum 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?’ Mum 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?’
Mum 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 from somebody within the WHO, or perhaps the US military biological weapons division, USAMRIID. There is speculation that this may be a bio-weapon being tested out by the US on a number of radical Islamic strongholds, a small-scale field-testing of some sort. There are even rumours 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 towards 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 labelled 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 town’s people. 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, hyphae-like 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 sergent had stepped out through the open door into the back alley. ‘Regardez! You need to see this!’
Jones got to his feet and crossed the floor, stepping out through the open door into the alleyway. It was dark, no lighting down here where boxes and bins of spilled rubbish were piled up against the walls on either side.
Gupta joined him in the middle of the narrow alley. A two-storey building overlooked the garage. He was shining his torch on the cracked and flaking whitewashed plaster wall in front of him. In the stark brightness of the torch 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 panned his torch 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 analyse 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 trained his torch up the plaster wall. The dark line had snaked all the way up towards a first-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 towards 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 first-floor landing, the sergent 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.
The hallway was dark, several light sockets dangled from the ceiling, minus bulbs. The walls, painted an unpleasant lime green, flaked paint on to 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.
Gupta flashed his torch on the window at the end, picking out the distinct dark line of liquid zigzagging down the wall beneath the ledge and across the linoleum floor, up the hallway towards them.
‘There it is,’ he said.
The thin line snaked along the floor, several tributaries branching off on their own paths, almost as if consciously dispatched, like scouts. The line drifted towards the left-hand wall, running along its base, eventually disappearing under a door.
They advanced slowly, squatting down and examining the vine-like trail as they went.
‘You took a sample down from the store room?’
Jones nodded, his breathing getting heavy now, steaming up the Plexiglas plate in front of his face.
‘It seems to be the same stuff. I’ll take another sample anyway.’
He turned to face the two soldiers holding position further down the hallway. ‘Check in this apartment, please,’ he said, nodding at the door beside him. They moved smartly forward. He
sitating for only a few seconds, they kicked the door in and ducked inside.
Jones could hear their muffled voices coming from within, verifying each room as clear before moving on to the next. Heavy boots, the sound of doors being wrenched open, then nothing as they made their way further in.
Gupta and Jones looked at each other. They waited a while and then finally Gupta called out. ‘Are you OK in there?’
Nothing.
‘Is it safe for us to come in?’
Nothing. Then, finally, the sound of boots approaching, hurrying back. The sergent emerged from the dark interior breathing heavily, his face damp with sweat.
‘Sergent? What is it?’
‘There is a live one in there.’
Both men quickly followed him back inside towards a back room, negotiating the cramped confines of the family home in their bulky containment suits. Light from a guttering candle sputtered a faint dancing glow across the sparse room. Jones noticed one of the other legionnaires, doubled over, apparently fighting an urge to vomit against his faceplate.
On the bedroom floor, across a threadbare rug, the black line weaved its way towards a large dark puddle from which hundreds of other short feathered tributaries had branched out. As Jones took a step closer, he could see – amid the viscous dark brown pool – what appeared to be a hand.
‘It hasn’t liquefied all of this person yet!’ He hunkered down beside the hand and, closer now, could see why. ‘Ah . . . it’s just a prosthetic.’
The sergent pointed towards a door leading off the room. ‘The live one . . . he is in there.’
Gupta stepped towards the open doorway, hesitating momentarily before leaning in.
And then Jones heard his breath catch and a gurgling that sounded very much like gagging.
‘Dr Gupta?’ asked Jones. ‘Someone in there? Alive still?’
Gupta took a moment to respond. ‘What’s left of him . . .’ He stepped back out of the doorway, turned his back to Jones and retched noisily.
Jesus. Jones stepped forward, grasped the door frame, wary of what he was about to see . . . If a veteran like Gupta can’t handle it . . . ?
He poked his head round the door frame.