‘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, perhaps down another couple of aspirin. He could crash out on the couch and maybe watch the news all day.
Hey, MonkeyNuts, is that it? Is that what this is all about? Bunking off college 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 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 held 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 Dad’s perception was coloured 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 gadget 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 mid-stride 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 IS 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 carrier 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 turned and carried on 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 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 sipped at his steaming mug of Lemsip, 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 onscreen, 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 down 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 mobile-phone photos . . . lots of them.
He clicked on the images, many of them poor in quality, blurred, shaken and pixellated – 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 number 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 to 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 frikkin 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
An
yone 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-frikkin-geddon. You want my dollar’s worth? It feels like this was a synchronized job. Terrorists, maybe those IS scumbags, placed around the world with vials of this nightmare, and then they all dropped their vials at the same frikkin time.
Leon rubbed his eyes. He felt completely wasted – weary, tired. His joints ached and even with his duvet wrapped round 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 a 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 bit.
Get some perspective, moron.
He was pretty sure by the time this cold – if it was a cold – had been and gone and he was back at college, 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 northwards to cooler places.
But since dawn of this particular day, the speck had been gradually descending towards 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 splayed 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 garden 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 lorry further up the street.
Amidst 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 centimetres, 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 micro-meteorite 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 micro-world 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 toe-hold 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.
An hour later, the raindrop was a viscous little bubble as black as ink. Several hairline hyphae-like strands had emerged from it and stretched along the plastic rim of the garden box. Another precious raindrop had been encountered by one of these and a chemical signal had been fed back along the thread to the ‘homeworld’ that a nearby satellite, rich in resources, had just been encountered.
The thread thickened ever so slightly as thousands of cells reinforced it, eager to feast on the new droplet of water and the hapless cells of amoeba floating inside it.
By the time another full hour had passed, the plastic rim of the window garden box had been colonized, and a thicker, more adventurous hyphae thread had found its way down the plastic rim on to the rich, fertile soil in which several stunted geraniums had done their best to flower.
The dark soil was a veritable buffet of cellular life. Like Victorian-era naturalists on safari, slaughtering the new species they came across, then carefully preserving, stuffing and sketching the corpses, this colony of the curious encountered, absorbed, deconstructed and stored the genetic information it was gathering in its growing chemical pool.
While the soil was becoming a soup, the geraniums remained unaffected. Their cellulose membrane was as impenetrable as the plastic of the window box.
The conquest of this tiny ecosystem, perched up on the grubby, soot-covered, fifth-floor windowsill was coming along nicely . . . then a much grander prize landed nearby.
A pigeon.
The bird studied the windowsill, looking for crumbs. It had learned from experience that ledges populated with clutter like this sometimes yielded interesting morsels. A keen, beady eye surveyed the stone of the sill, but found nothing of interest.
It hopped up on to the green plastic of the window box, and looked curiously at the flowering geraniums, slowing drooping as their roots’ hold on the soil softened. It stepped sideways along the box rim. One stunted foot stepped on to that first colonized drop of rainwater, home of the very first ‘founding fathers’ of this thriving community.
As the pigeon shuffled along another step, several thousand spores were carried away on the bottom of its claw.
The pigeon lost interest in this lonely window ledge, and instinctively suspected there were richer pickings down in the bu
sy, bustling world below. With a flutter of wings it was gone, swooping down along the quiet backstreet, over the flatbed truck where half a dozen workmen were dismantling scaffolding poles, towards the hubbub of activity at the far end.
And, all the while, the several thousand passengers it carried on its foot had already, eagerly, started their work.
CHAPTER 14
Grace woke him up when she got in. ‘And where were you?’
Leon jerked fully awake on the couch. One hand went up to his still throbbing forehead. ‘Oh no . . .’
‘You were meant to meet me at the school gate!’ Grace stared down at him sternly, her good arm crossed with the one in the sling as she tapped a foot impatiently.
‘Sorry, Grace . . . I just . . .’
She tutted, then flapped a hand his way. ‘Don’t worry about it. I got some useful networking in. I got to walk home with Peter Durst. He’s, like, the popular guy in the year. . . so, you’re good.’ She disappeared into the kitchen to get something out of the fridge.
‘Don’t tell Mum, OK?’
Her head poked out of the doorway. ‘That all depends on how nice you are to me.’
Leon nodded. She had leverage. Mum was paranoid about letting Grace walk home alone through Hammersmith. Surely it was no worse here in London than New York? This place was all leafy alleys and busy streets and sweet old dears with wheelie bags. Not exactly The Projects.
‘I need a favour!’ Grace called from the kitchen.