Long before the sun had even begun to think about making another half-arsed attempt to illuminate the savage streets of Aberdeen, Lesley and Tom were heading out of the city. The blank windows of the silent homes stared at her like dead eyes, and their doors seemed like maws ready to vomit out a stream of infected. She did her best to hold her nerve and stuck close to Tom’s back wheel. Only when they’d cleared the worst of the urban sprawl did she begin to relax a little, at least in terms of her fear of being disassembled atom by bloody atom. There was nothing at all relaxing about the bike ride. Her legs felt like planks of wood after the previous day’s exertions, and the good night’s sleep Tom recommended she enjoy hadn’t materialized. She’d locked her bedroom door but still woke at every creak and rustle. At one point she’d plunged back into her dream of standing in the wasteland. This time, when she stepped on the last other living being, she looked down to see it was a tiny Jack.
“How many more people are going to die because of you?” he said with his last breath.
She jerked awake in breathless terror to find it had started raining. The patter on her windowpane sounded like hundreds of pounding feet. She scrambled under the bed, where she spent another hour hiding behind a dusty suitcase until Tom knocked on her door and told her it was time to get ready. Prior to leaving, he suggested she go into the bathroom and douse herself with aftershave to try hide her scent. She stripped to her knickers and poured almost an entire bottle of Old Spice over her body, prompting a wave of aching desire to see Terry again. Now that they were apart, she could remember the good things about him and their relationship: his honesty, his kindness, his luscious body. She needed something to take her mind off recent events, just for a few minutes, so even though she felt little desire she slid her hand into her knickers and tried to awaken her body. Her middle finger stroked and teased as she imagined herself in bed with Terry, all of their relationship problems forgotten in the urgency of carnal acts. She began to warm to the fantasy, but memories of all the harm she’d done kept forcing their way to the fore. In an attempt to add impetus to her imaginings, she lifted her arm to take a whiff of Old Spice. She breathed too deeply and the searing in her nostrils and lungs kick-started a fit of coughing that killed any chance of escape. She’d pulled on her clothes and trudged downstairs.
“I don’t want to sound like a little kid, but are we nearly there yet?” she called out to Tom.
He slowed down to ride beside her and said, “Only another one hundred and forty miles.”
“I’m going to take issue with your use of the word ‘only’ here,” Lesley said. “How long will that take us? A lunar cycle?”
“Normally, I’d say nine hours. At this pace, double it.”
“You can’t expect me to ride that long.”
“If time’s as tight as you say it is, you have to. Look, it’s four in the morning now. We’ll be there by around eleven in the evening, provided we have no incidents.”
“Whoa there, cowboy. Incidents? You said all the bandits had cleared out.”
“That’s true, but there are still wild animals about.”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Well, consider me extremely fucking worried now.”
Tom hiked a thumb toward the loaded crossbow slung across his back. “Nothing will mess with us while I’ve got this.”
“Oh, so this virus has made cows smart enough to recognize a crossbow and keep their distance. That’s reassuring.”
“Look, you’ll be fine. You’re not going to set anything off smelling like you took a bath in Old Spice. Which, by the way, was a Christmas present from five years ago. You should have used the Paco Raban.”
It was reassuring to hear that Tom, who was after all infected, couldn’t detect her unsullied condition. Terry would be proud of her. Yet as she rode she divided her time between dropping her head to grimace at the effort of the steady climb they were now on and shooting anxious glances at the fields opening up around them. It was going to be a long day.
* * *
Amazingly, Tom’s prediction of an uneventful journey proved correct, although the stillness was eerie, particularly under the lowering stacks of clouds that threatened to dump rain on them at any minute. At first, the ride wasn’t too bad. They stuck to the main road, and Lesley’s legs ached less as the repetitive motion lulled her into a trance-like state. They left the road twice to avoid checkpoints, which she couldn’t see the need for since there was almost no traffic. The only vehicle they passed was an army truck that roared up the other side of the road and ignored them. Once they’d skirted around Perth, though, the road began to wind and the hills took their toll. She began to feel light-headed, and at one point even had an out-of-body experience that made her fall off her bike and skin her hands. Tom gave her fifteen minutes to rest, before pushing on. Past lochs, villages, and glens they slogged, only the thought of the story keeping her going. Lesley had no idea at what time they arrived at the camp; all she knew was that it had been dark for what felt like an eternity. Yet once they’d ridden down the hidden track, she saw that a fire still burned.
“Wait here a minute,” Tom said at the end of the road.
He got off his bike and skipped off toward the light source.
Lesley let the bike fall sideways and toppled to the ground herself. Her thighs, bum, back, shoulders, and forearms were having a raucous argument about which hurt the most. She let them get on with it, too exhausted to display even the slightest curiosity about her surroundings. Her eyes drooped and sleep was beginning to take her when Tom returned.
“Follow me,” he said.
“You’ll have to drag me,” Lesley said. “Or give me a ko-carry. I don’t care which. Seriously.”
And so it was that Lesley, mounted on Tom’s back, approached the campfire. As they drew closer she saw two people: a woman with short hair and deep scars illuminated by the shifting light and a boy who had his back to her. The woman rose, tilting her head at a quizzical angle. “Lesley?” she said, her voice rising at the end in a disbelieving tone.
“Do I know you?” Lesley said.
The boy turned. Even though his face had filled out and he wasn’t wearing glasses, Lesley recognized him as Geldof. At the same moment, she realized who the scarred woman was. The feeling of déjà vu came on again, so strongly that she let go of Tom’s neck and slipped backward. She landed on her shoulders with her legs still held around his waist. The faces of Geldof and Fanny appeared above her, and, in chorus, they said, “What are you doing here?”
The moon had come out from a break in the clouds. It haloed Fanny’s head, making her look like an angel. Lesley, her mind and body already pushed to breaking point, dug her fingers into the grass to reassure herself she was neither dreaming nor dead and being welcomed to Heaven by Fanny. “I believe I’m going mental.”
* * *
An hour later they sat around the fire, up to speed on each other’s stories. Lesley clutched a cup of herbal tea, still scarcely able to credit that she’d been thrown back together with the remnants of the Peters family. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, the saying went. She hadn’t forgotten the past, far from it, yet here she was anyway. One plus point was that Fanny was alive, although badly scarred, which meant Lesley could remove one death from the tally stacking up against her. Fanny looked remarkably calm regarding the bombshell Lesley had dropped about the real bombshells soon to be dropped. Geldof wasn’t maintaining his composure as well.
“I can’t believe they’d kill so many people just like that,” he said.
“Really?” Fanny said. “Let me give you a few examples. The Holocaust. Hiroshima. Cambodia. Nigeria. Rwanda. Bosnia. Iraq. Syria. If the human mind is capable of such atrocities, why do you think it can’t be done now? You could argue this would be easier. Most of the people in all those countries were truly innocent. In Britain, many have killed. Many will kill again, given half the chance. They can justify it to themselves and others on those grounds. I told you before, people have to choose to be something better. The virus is giving us that pressure. What do they have?”
“Conscience? It’s wrong.”
“Right and wrong is defined by those with the power to make decisions. We have to assume this is going to happen.” Fanny paused to rub her face. “I know you want to stay, and I know I said I would respect your wishes, but this changes everything. When your mercenaries figure out an escape route, and they’ll be a lot more motivated when they hear what Lesley has to say, you need to go with them.”
“Only if you come with me,” he said, hugging himself.
“You know that’s not going to happen,” Fanny said.
“Then I’m staying. There’s no way out anyway, you know that. We can die together.”
“While that’s a lovely sentiment, let’s not get all fatalistic,” said a large man in tie-dye, who’d been roused from his bed along with all the other camp residents to hear what Lesley had to say. “If she writes the story about the attack and what we’re doing, there’s a chance public opinion could stop them.”
As Lesley looked at all of the infected calmly gathered around her, for the first time she began to believe it was possible. She’d been one of the most vociferous proponents of sinking the whole damned island into the sea, yet here she sat amongst a group who were most assuredly still people. If they could resist the virus, it stood to reason that everybody else could. If the world knew that and saw humanity still existed on the island, surely they would rise up against the barbarity of genocide. All of those lives saved would compensate for the deaths she’d caused and, with luck, end her jinx.
“You’d better get to work, then,” Fanny told her.
Even though she could barely keep her eyes open, Lesley nodded. “Maybe you can come with me, and we can talk while I write. I’ll need some good quotes.”
Once they were in the hangar and the Internet was ready to go, Lesley opened up Gmail and started typing in her account details.
“What are you doing?” Fanny said.
“I want to get a message to Terry to tell him I’m okay.”
“Bad idea. They might be monitoring your and his accounts for activity.”
“But they think I’m dead.”
“Do you really want to take the chance? We can’t give them any warning about this story. You can send him an e-mail after.”
Reluctantly, Lesley shut the window. “Can I use your e-mail to send it to my editor?”
“Same thing goes for your editor’s account. The only way this story is going out is for it to go viral. We need to send it to every activist, blogger, campaigning group, and newspaper at once, and we need to do it from an e-mail account they won’t be expecting. So we use mine.”
And so Lesley sat with Fanny until 4:00 a.m., bashing away on the keyboard until she was gritty-eyed and almost seeing double. The story itself was inelegant and awkwardly written thanks to her exhaustion, but it was also a raw and powerful cry for humanity. Fanny had also encouraged her to edit out any details that may give a hint to her location, pointing out that it would be very easy for the U.S. to take them out with a drone. Lesley did, however, make mention of the fact that there was at least one person who was immune. As far as she knew, the young girl Ruan was the only recorded case of somebody who was able to resist the virus. If they started frying everybody, then that person, whose blood may hold the key to a cure, would be lost. They only had one argument about the story, and that came when Lesley tried to withhold her own name. She focused the article on Jack: how he’d come forward with the story, been abducted, and then died. Her role was as an anonymous journalist.
When Fanny read the draft, she poked Lesley in the arm. “Why are you leaving yourself out?”
Lesley didn’t have the energy to explain the thoughts that had been swirling around her brain for the last few months. “I just don’t think it should be about me.”
“That’s nonsense. You’re a name. You have credibility. You used to be all for incinerating us. Your name has to be on it and your story central to it. That way people will be more likely to listen.”
Lesley knew she was right and went back to write herself in, feeling sick as she knew her fame would now only grow. When it was done, they pasted it into the e-mail Fanny had prepared addressing thousands of people and urging them to pass it on, and hit send. Then they sat back to wait, which Lesley did face down on the table until a blank sleep of exhaustion claimed her.