If this is the best Britain has to offer, thought Tony Campbell as he looked at the predominantly slack faces of the cabinet members gathered in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A at 70 Whitehall, then we are well and truly screwed.
His advisors sat around an orange table so large they couldn’t lean back in their plush leather chairs without butting against the wall, which was painted a grotty shade of shit brown. Only the bank of monitors displaying a drawing of a human brain proved they hadn’t returned to the seventies, when the whole of Britain had been tarred with the same two-tone brush. The young Tony had even owned a brown corduroy suit, matched with a lurid orange kipper tie and a shirt with collars so wide that a gust of wind could have sent him soaring off like a hang glider—a sharp contrast to the sober blue outfit he wore today. His cabinet members were dressed just as conservatively, which would have given a casual observer the mistaken impression they actually knew what they were doing.
In the days before the virus brought the country not so much to its knees as left it lying face down in the gutter soaked in its own piss, crisis meetings such as this one were known as COBRA after the location in which they were held. Tony considered the acronym too thrusting for the gatherings held by Brits for the Rights of the InfecTed, the self-appointed rulers of a formerly proud nation. His unspoken term SLUG—short for Sluggish Laggards in Useless Government—was far more appropriate.
He leaned forward, the overhead strip light glaring off the smooth brown skin of the vertiginously high hairline he’d suffered since he was a boy. His young self had often buffed up the front half of his scalp in an attempt to redirect light and create a Dalek-style death ray. Had he that death ray now there would be piles of ash on the chairs where his advisors sat. Only a few members of the cabinet were remotely useful. To his right sat Glen Forbes, Secretary of State for Defense and Commander in Chief of Land Forces. A stocky man with tiny ears out of proportion to his bulbous, bald head and skin several shades darker than Tony’s, Glen had been a lieutenant general before the outbreak. After, as the highest-ranking military official left alive or in-country, he took up the task of marshaling the remnants of the armed forces and attempting to restore order through the standard military fallbacks of curfews and brute force. It was Glen, an old acquaintance from Oxford, who’d sought out Tony to head up a largely civilian government in order to make the new rulers seem less of a jingoistic military regime to the world.
By virtue of his experience, Glen had a working knowledge of the process unfolding across the Atlantic, where the UN was drawing closer to passing a resolution authorizing military action. Sure, they were keeping the food drops going and sending reassuring messages about researching a cure, but every article Tony read portrayed the infected as bloodthirsty beasts who loved nothing more than snacking on a dollop of brains washed down with a nice chug of blood. He entertained no doubt the media was being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize the infected so there would be no public outcry when the hawks swooped in to eradicate the threat of a global apocalypse. Only the nuclear missiles BRIT still controlled were delaying that moment. That deterrent wouldn’t hold forever.
While Glen possessed certain skills, he was himself a ferocious hawk with claws far sharper than his brain. He’d been a firm backer of the Iraq invasion and unrepentant when the WMDs proved to be as hard to find as a four-quid pint in London in the days before the virus. He adhered to the school of thought that there was little point in possessing weapons if you weren’t going to use them. Or as he’d once put it, “Why buy a Ferrari if you aren’t going to take it out for a spin?” Glen’s attitude helped convince Tony that the clock was ticking down to the moment when the warships and warplanes maintaining a protective cordon around Britain would dump their deadly payloads on the mainland: if Glen was representative of most generals, they would be champing at the bit to play with their toys.
To Tony’s left sat Amira Farouk, his spin doctor. A rotund woman with protruding teeth and thick, sweeping hair, she’d been Tony’s trusted media advisor for years. She came up with the BRIT acronym, using the word “infected” to emphasize that they were sick and thus could be cured; the Keep Calm and Carry On campaign; and the tactic of whipping out a picture of Tony’s daughter during his first televised interview—recorded in the fledgling weeks of his job as leader of the new infected Britain—to remind the world that the lives of millions of children were on the line.
It hadn’t been Amira’s fault that the CNN interview had gone as tits up as Pamela Anderson in zero gravity. The stress of his new job, the lingering sores and sniffles from the early stages of the virus, and the high stakes of the attempt to present a softer face to the world had put him on edge. So, when that sodding journalist Lesley McBrien goaded him, the virus had awoken and he came across as a slavering maniac with his threats—futile, of course, since she was in a studio in Paris—about unravelling entrails and gouging out eyeballs. After the interview, the world’s media had focused on his pointy teeth, speculating that he sharpened them with a file to make it easier to tear human flesh. That was completely unfair. He’d always had sharp teeth and had worn a moustache for over twenty years to partially shield his dentally challenged mouth. That now was gone, thanks to Amira.
“You need to lose the moustache,” she’d said in her post-interview debrief. “It makes you look like a mad dictator. You do know you pet it when you’re nervous, don’t you? You looked like a Bond villain stroking his cat.”
“Oh, come on. It’s just a bit of hair.”
“No, it’s a symbol of all that is dark, cruel, and twisted in mankind. Think about all the evil leaders with moustaches. Hitler being the obvious one.”
“Mine isn’t a toothbrush moustache though, is it?”
“You’re right. It’s more like a dental floss moustache. Still has to go.”
“I’m not going to cave in just because you brought up Hitler. Who else you got?”
“Genghis Khan.”
“That was more of a beard-moustache combo.”
“How about Ming the Merciless then? You can’t deny that was one evil mouthbrow.”
“He was a bloody movie villain.”
“Exactly. The all-consuming evil of moustaches is so well accepted that it’s become a trope in Hollywood. Bad guys are either effeminate English toffs or they have facial hair. Sometimes both.”
“Don’t we have bigger things to focus on than the contents of my top lip?”
“I know it seems trivial, but after that psycho performance we can’t afford to have any more negative associations. You don’t want to give cracked.com the chance to put you in a Top Ten Evil Moustaches list. Just humour me and shave it off, okay?”
Tony, a regular on the satirical Web site, had complied.
Beyond Amira and Glen, the cabinet swiftly ran out of talent. Tony’s gaze tracked along the other dozen individuals who, through blunders or lack of ambition, had butted up against low glass ceilings in their careers before everything went to shit. It didn’t help that many of them were doped up on the diazepam and nitrazepam the UN included in its aid drops. While the drugs were useful for dampening tempers, they turned the users into the sluggish laggards of Tony’s acronym. Tony avoided the drugs, preferring to deal with the bursts of anger in his own way. The advisors were the best he could scrape up given that the greatest minds in the U.K. had buggered off before the quarantine. It had all been a question of money: those who could afford to go abroad did so, leaving behind those who couldn’t afford the rocketing ticket prices as the virus bit. Of course, not every Brit with the skills he needed was able to make it out in the panic, but of those who remained, many had either been killed or were lying low.
When Tony’s gaze fell on the sorry excuse for a chief scientist, one of the chief pill poppers, he ground his teeth. Before the outbreak, Tim Roast had been a biology lecturer at a provincial university—one of those pokey affairs that somehow attained university status and ran around trumpeting its credentials like a lottery winner flaunting his newfound wealth. This position was a step down from a government research post, from which he was sacked when he contaminated crucial samples with his own saliva. He looked exactly the way Tony felt a lecturer should: V-neck pullover, badly knotted tie, and a pair of glasses so enormous they made his eyes look like snooker balls. This, unfortunately, was the man who was leading their hunt for a cure. The problem, apart from Tim’s utter crapness, was that the government facility where the virus was developed had been blown up in an overzealous cover-up. That journalist had smuggled out the data, but the world wouldn’t share it; presumably they were concerned BRIT would use it to synthesize more of the virus.
Enough moping, Tony thought, and slapped his hand on the table. “Right, let’s get on with it. Tim, please tell me you’ve made some progress.”
Tim stood up and tugged on his tie. “Actually, we think we’ve tracked down the part of the brain the virus targets.”
Tim nodded at his assistant, who handed out briefing papers. This was the first time Tim had done anything other than look vacant when asked about the virus, so Tony eagerly snatched his up. His face reddened as he looked at the top page. In the death ray scenario this would have been the point when he incinerated the muppet. He pulled out his wallet and opened it: Mr. Spock’s impassive face regarded him from alongside pictures of his wife, Margot, and daughter, Vanessa.
This is your reflection, he thought. You are calm. You are in control. You are Vulcan.
Tony had been relying on Spock to calm him for over forty years. When he was a boy, his parents had done nothing but argue; his mother had been fond of telling Tony he was the product of a burst condom and the reason they were so miserable. He was always on edge, waiting for the shouting to start. He was seven years old when the first episodes of Star Trek aired on the BBC. He became entranced by Spock, whose calm angular face radiated magical tranquillity amid the bright, fuzzy colors and exotic aliens. No matter how chaotic the situation, Spock remained untouched by fear and despair. He would never cower in the corner as crockery flew. Tony’s curly hair frustrated his plans to give himself a bowl cut, so he started plucking on his ears and eyebrows in the hope they would develop into Spock-like points. When the physical transformation didn’t occur, he practiced steepling his fingers and raising his eyebrows until, after months of repetition and fierce concentration, these gestures started to calm him in moments of stress. After his father left for good, his mother still blamed Tony for ruining the marriage, so he had plenty of reason to carry his emulation of Spock through his teens and on into his adult life.
Now it felt like he was catching up on a lifetime of unspent ire. The virus slumbered inside him, fingers curled loosely around his brain and ready to squeeze. Already he could feel the pressure, although it was nothing compared with the iron grip exerted in the presence of the uninfected. It was worse when the hold of his conscious mind loosened and the virus was given free rein in his dreams. They couldn’t be called nightmares, for he was the monster that bit and tore—although the savage joy he felt in the dream turned to gut-wrenching sickness when he awoke and wrestled for control of his mutinous mind. His need for Spock had never been greater.
Tim adopted a lecturing drone as Tony summoned up Spock to fight off his rising temper. “We suspect the virus targets the amygdala, which is part of the primal limbic system. Animal studies have shown that stimulating the amygdala, or more properly amygdalae, since we have one on each side of the brain, increases sexual and aggressive behavior. It also seems to control fear.”
Tim paused, waiting for acknowledgment. Tony, fingers now steepled and right eyebrow straining upwards, didn’t respond. The delay seemed to send Tim into a trance, and his assistant had to nudge him.
“Where was I?” The assistant pointed to a line on the sheet of paper Tim was clutching. “Super. So, the olfactory bulb, in fact all our sensory apparatus, is directly wired to the limbic system. We believe that when the scent of the uninfected is fed into the amygdalae, the virus activates, prompting increased aggression, heightened sex drive, and lack of fear.”
Tony, whose invocation of Spock had calmed him down enough to speak, said, “And how does this explain that people are still angrier when the uninfected aren’t around?”
“The virus rearranged the furniture when it moved in, so there are bound to be residual effects.”
“Do you have any evidence of this?”
“It’s still a theory. But it all fits. Birds don’t have amygdalae, which could explain why the virus didn’t affect them. Mammals do. Plus women have smaller amygdalae and larger prefrontal cortexes.”
“This is getting too brainy for me,” said Glen. “Can someone explain it in layman’s terms?”
“Think of your amygdala as a dog and your prefrontal cortex as its owner,” Amira said. “Women have a French poodle…”
“Hang on,” Glen said. “Don’t be fooled by the fluff. Poodles are vicious little bastards. Nippy. Treacherous. Yelpy. Just like a woman in fact.”
Amira kept her cool. “Fine. Then women have a well-trained golden retriever on a strong leash. In men, it’s a slavering pit bull on a tattered piece of string held by a pissed-up skinhead.”
“Good analogy,” Tim said. “Like Amira said, in most cases the members of the fairer sex do seem better able to keep a lid on their tempers.”
“I thought that was because they didn’t have any balls,” Glen said.
“Why don’t we just snip off your shriveled scrotum in the name of science, then?” Amira said sweetly. “You could definitely use a bit less testosterone.”
Glen’s ears wiggled, driven by his grinding jaw—a sure sign he was heading toward an explosion. Fortunately, Tim got back on topic before it could escalate into Glen lobbing furniture around.
“Testosterone may be a factor,” Tim said. “But I want to point you to teenagers as another example. Puberty brings about rapid development of the limbic system, but the prefrontal cortex takes years to catch up. This is what causes all that erratic emotional behavior: the anger, the mood swings, the desire in boys to hump anything that moves.”
“So the virus has turned people into teenagers,” Tony said. “What’s your solution? Ground everybody until they learn not to be snotty brats?”
“We’re thinking we could remove the amygdalae in a few test subjects to see if it makes a difference.”
“Do we have any neurosurgeons capable of doing this?”
Tim scratched his nose with the electronic pointer he’d forgotten to use and recoiled as the laser shone into his eye. “Not exactly,” he said, blinking. “But we could figure it out.”
“So what does this amygdala look like?”
Tim squinted at the screen. “Kind of like a peanut?”
“Better not do it on yourself, then. You’d remove your whole brain.” Tony tossed the report down. “If you’re going to cut and paste from Wikipedia, make sure you delete the bloody logo. You just googled a few key phrases and came up with this, didn’t you?”
Tim fidgeted with his glasses. “Well, yes, but it does make sense. And Wikipedia is a valid source.”
“For lazy cretins. Anyway, if by some miracle you were right, could you treat it with drugs, or are you proposing we crack open the head of every man, woman, and beast in this country?”
With a longing look toward his chair, Tim said nothing. Tony massaged his temples. While Tim was clearly a grade-A buffoon, there did seem to be some logic to the theory. Plus the clock was ticking louder and faster every day. They needed to find a solution or face obliteration. Better to pursue a possible dead end than stand looking down the alley, not sure if it led somewhere.
“Fine, give it a try,” Tony said, now feeling more fatigued than angry. “What else do we have?”
“There is this,” said Frank Maybury, a former chief inspector now serving as secretary of state for the Home Department and the only other member of the cabinet who’d shown he could do his job.
He slid a piece of paper up the table. It was a pamphlet calling on people to resist the virus and giving some techniques to maintain calm. Some of the strategies appeared to be based on the tenets of Buddhism, although Tony didn’t recall Buddha encouraging people to get thoroughly stoned and have frequent sex to release calming endorphins—or in the case where no partner was available, masturbate regularly to achieve the same effect. If Buddhism had advocated that, it probably would have supplanted all other religions centuries ago.
Amira grabbed the leaflet. “Resist: You Are More Than Your Urges,” she read out loud. “Don’t think much of their tagline. I’d have gone with, ‘Meditate. Vegetate. Copulate.’”
“Why are they telling everyone to have sex?” Frank said, with a significant look at Amira. “Most of us don’t need any encouragement.”
Amira blushed and hid behind the leaflet. Tony’s mood lightened. There was indeed no need to promote hanky-panky. The frequency and intensity of sex with Margot had exploded since the virus came along, and when he walked through his offices at Number Ten Downing Street he would often hear broom cupboards and meeting rooms vibrating with the moans and thumps of quick knee tremblers. From the way the men’s loos never seemed to have any toilet paper, it was pretty clear there was a significant amount of solitary activity to boot. He never flagged it up. People needed a release, and as long as it was consensual or the soloist managed not to splash on the toilet seat, he didn’t have an issue with it.
“Where’d you get it?” Tony said.
“A patrol caught a bloke with a bag of them.”
“I don’t recall handing out flyers being illegal.”
“They saw him in a garden in the middle of the night and thought he was a burglar. We only found out what’d he been up to after we nicked him.”
Tony turned the leaflet over. He knew from his own experience it was possible to slow, if not entirely stem, the tide of anger. Yet could an entire nation be trained to resist? The majority, once lucidity returned, were filled with shame at the acts they’d carried out but were still unable to resist when another uninfected person came within range. Now the uninfected were all gone, some—like this insane Blood of Christ group that was causing so much trouble—still allowed their tempers to turn to violence or simply used the virus as an excuse for preexisting psychotic tendencies. The average punter was struggling to keep calm. Others seemed barely affected. Amira was a perfect example of this last group: always cool and collected. Tony had never seen her take a pill.
Glen, who also didn’t take any sedatives because “the anger gave him an edge,” showed exactly what he thought of the leaflet. “Great idea. Let’s all sit cross-legged and wish the whole thing away. In fact, let’s start distributing candles and incense. Maybe chuck in a few Best of Enya CDs and free passes to a spa. I’m sure that’ll do the trick.” He looked around the table. “You know how strong this virus is. You know the things we’ve done. If one of the uninfected came in that door right now, you know what would happen.”
Tony knew, all right. No matter how hard he tried, he would never forget what the virus had turned him into. He’d never asked the other members of his cabinet what they’d done in those awful early days, as he was sure they wanted to forget just as much as he did. From the stricken looks on their faces—Amira aside—he knew it wasn’t good.
“In the unlikely event everyone learns to control it, we’d still be an infection risk,” Glen said. “Do you really think they’ll let us live out our days in splendid isolation when we’re all carriers?”
Even Amira, who often sparred with Glen just for the sake of it, didn’t argue that point. Each and every person in Britain was a threat and would remain so until a cure was found, if it ever was. Glen stood up, holding his briefcase, and walked to the head of the table. The brightness of the monitors haloed his head, cloaking his face in shadow.
“I have a plan,” he said. “One that will actually work.”
Tony had a feeling that the plan would involve large explosions of some sort, but he couldn’t shut Glen down after having given others a shot at presenting a solution. “Let’s hear it.”
“First, can we agree that sooner or later—most likely sooner—the UN is going to give the go-ahead for every living thing in Britain to be obliterated?”
Everybody nodded.
“And do we agree we’d much rather this didn’t happen?”
The nods were more emphatic this time.
“Great. Next, what’s their motivation for doing this?”
“They don’t want the virus to get out,” said Frank, stating the obvious.
“Bingo. So, we take away their motivation.”
“We’ve been through that,” Tony said. “The only way to take away their motivation is to cure it or assure them it’s contained long term. That’s what we’re trying to do. Rather ineptly so far, I might add.”
“There’s another way to take away their motivation.” Glen reached into his briefcase and threw his own set of briefing papers onto the table with a heavy thud. “We spread it.”
The silence that filled the room could only have been more stunned had Glen announced he wanted to live out the rest of his life as a woman and whipped off his uniform to reveal a basque, miniskirt, and stockings. Nobody reached for the papers, so Glen pressed on. “Tony, I’d like to quote what you said during your CNN interview, ‘Would everyone having the virus be such a bad thing? If we all had it, there would be no need for violence.’”
Tony, still struggling to get his brain to come up with some response to relay to his slack mouth, remembered the comment. It had been an off-the-cuff remark, not a policy recommendation, and he’d realized it was ill judged as soon as he said it. Now it was being tossed back in his face.
“In that spirit,” Glen continued, “I propose we refit our Trident missiles with refrigerated warheads filled with blood collected from soldiers and fire them at Europe. We can have infected blood raining down on Paris, Berlin, and Rome within a few minutes, too quick for them to respond. They’ll assume the lack of a mushroom cloud means the missiles were duds or simply a warning of our capabilities. It’ll take them a while to figure out what really happened, and when they do there’ll be no point in launching a response. The virus will be out, and they’ll be too busy trying to contain it. Plus, they’ll have more motivation to find a cure, or everyone will be infected.” Glen paused, his teeth shining white in the dark shadow of his face as he grinned. “Now, any comments?”
Amira, who was shaking her head so vehemently that her dangly earrings almost slapped Tony in the face, spoke up. “I have one,” she said. “You’re off your bloody rocker.”
Her voice broke the paralysis, and suddenly everybody was talking at once, hands waving and fingers stabbing the air. Amira was up on her feet, her composure gone for the first time since Tony had known her. Glen ignored the storm of voices and slid one of the briefing papers along the table to butt up against Tony’s fingertips. Tony hesitated. Their gazes met, and Tony realized that the military man, normally so volatile, seemed utterly calm.
“It’s the only way,” Glen said, his strong voice cutting through the hubbub.
Tony picked up the document and began to read.