‘Grace, I just want you to know how proud of you I am.’
She looked up at Dad. He’d been waiting for her outside Davison Middle School’s gym hall along with the other parents, all huddled together for warmth against the cold, gusting November wind.
The other kids who’d performed this evening were flooding out to be greeted by their own very proud parents, who’d seemed intent on catching every possible moment with their smartphones.
‘You were fantastic.’ Dad squeezed her shoulders. ‘I can tell you put a lot of thought into that.’
She had. A lot. She’d been working on that dance routine with her friends for months. The backing track had changed several times, and Grace had had to take charge of their small troupe after Natasha Baumstein had stormed off due to ‘artistic differences’.
Mom hadn’t been able to make the Thanksgiving concert. She’d had to fly back to England to help Grandad deal with Grandma’s cancer scare. And Leon, as always, had other plans. So it had been just the two of them this evening, Dad filming her on his iPhone and grinning at her proudly from the front row as she and the girls did their energetic dance routine to Jessie J’s latest track.
That was the last time she could genuinely say she loved him. The big revelation, the BIG ROW and the bust up between Mom and Dad was just a few weeks away.
So this particular memory of him was tender and precious.
‘You’re such a clever girl.’
It was the last time she remembered desperately wanting him to be proud of her.
‘Thank you, Dad.’
‘You showed them. You managed to show them all.’
Grace was aware that her memory was being used by them.
‘It was so hard.’ She shook her head. ‘It actually hurt. Hurt so much, it felt like I was burning up on the inside.’
‘But you were strong . . . and very brave not to show it.’
‘I knew it was coming. So I had time to prepare.’
The salt test. Leon’s suggestion. When he’d blurted the idea out, she’d known there wasn’t going to be any escaping it. And she had to pass the test, or . . .
She just had to pass it.
She didn’t know how to do it . . . just that she needed some kind of protection, and quickly. Equally, she didn’t know how to instruct her heart to beat or her lungs to work, or blood to flow . . . These things just happened. She had to trust that the community of colleagues inside her would know what to do to save them all.
As she’d queued, standing between Leon and Freya, she’d felt things happening inside her. She could sense the builder cells urgently converging in her throat, her trachea. She’d fought an urge to hyperventilate as the lining of her throat thickened, the airwaves contracting and beginning to affect her breathing. She’d fought the urge to gag as she’d felt something alien rapidly swelling inside her gut.
Given more time, they might have been able to completely isolate her from the agonizing sensation of millions of cells dying as the salt water flowed over and through them.
That brackish, rancid, toxic water had burned as it entered her mouth, burned its way down her throat, and burned as it passed through her small intestines. It was burning its way through the small protective pouch of cells in her stomach – a gut within a gut – before she’d had the chance to stagger away and evacuate the dying mess of throat and stomach lining into a corner of the main hall.
As the fire consumed the hall and panic reigned, she’d had the chance to cough up a thick gelatinous string of blood and mucus: millions of microscopic lives selflessly given to ensure the survival of the whole colony – spat out in a heap on the stone floor.
She’d been hoping, assuming even, that the silly man, Corkie, would test himself first. And, if he had done, the ensuing chaos might have ended the testing right there. But it had happened as it had, giving her body just enough time to save itself. The best thing was that if Leon and Freya had had any doubts at all about her before, they certainly didn’t now.
And there was Claudia’s sacrifice to acknowledge. Her body was gone, her bones, her hair and nails, the last forensic fragments of who she used to be. Now, though, Claudia’s essence, her consciousness, lived on within the biochemical universe of Grace. It had been a willing sacrifice. Claudia had understood what they needed to do. Everett needed to look guilty. Needed to be the guilty one. The distraction.
There were other fallen comrades too. The small community that had been slowly growing inside Corkie, for example. Given a little more time, Corkie, like Claudia, would have begun to understand and accept . . . and embrace this new form of life. But, and this is where the tragedy lay, he was never going to know that. All that was him had gone, burned away.
Grace looked up again at the illusion of her father. ‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’
He nodded. ‘If the survivors can send fleets of ships . . . if they can do that . . . what else can they do?’
‘We have to know, don’t we?’
‘Of course we do, Grace. You have to go and see.’
She glanced at the other girls in her dance troupe, now climbing into the warmth of their parents’ cars.
‘We have to send word to all the others . . . tell them what I’m doing, right? Let them know I’m going to try to board the ship?’
He squeezed her hand. ‘You’re quite right, we do. But first things first, little monkey. Fancy a McDonald’s on the way home?’
Leon looked out of the back of the truck as the countryside rolled by. Every now and then he found his gaze resting on the driver of the truck behind them – Royce.
Royce was ‘in charge’ of the soldiers now. The conceit that they were ‘actual’ soldiers had slipped away like an embarrassing idea for a fancy-dress theme that no one was bothering with any more. He hadn’t promoted himself to ‘corporal’ or ‘sergeant’, wasn’t insisting that anyone call him sir, but by default, being the oldest and hardest-looking of the knights, he’d assumed the role of their leader.
Their eyes met through the mud-spattered windshield. Leon acknowledged Royce with a quirk of his eyebrows. Royce constantly had a face like a balled-up fist, even when he smiled.
He scowled back.
They were heading south, heading for Southampton. Towards something that had become much more than a glimmer of hope – something real, reinforced every day by that looping broadcast. The wording of the message had stayed exactly the same each time they listened, but the date was revised by an automated voice.
And, Jesus . . . Trent. President Trent. Was that Dad’s friend, Trent?
He knew the two of them went way back. They’d been in the army together. Served alongside each other in Iraq. Leon had met the man only a couple of times: once at the opening of some college building that he’d paid for, and once at a garden party. His big-ass garden. His expensive party. Leon had hated seeing Dad being all deferential to the man, bowing and scraping before him, laughing too loudly at his crap, crass jokes. Leon had even once witnessed him swat his mum’s behind, like he wanted to make the point he ‘owned’ her as well as Dad.
President Trent, ladies and gents. When the hell did that happen?
Although Leon had only met the man twice, he’d seen his face pretty much every day. There’d been a framed photo at home on the wall beside the stairs. A picture of Dad and Trent and several other guys in their unit. Young men pumped up with the sense of their own invulnerability, sitting on the blackened carcass of an Iraqi tank. Second Lieutenant Douglas T. Trent, Staff Sergeant Tom Friedmann and three other young bucks.
Freya nudged Leon and leaned towards his ear. ‘You OK?’
He nodded. ‘You know the guy making that radio announcement?’
‘It’s the president, isn’t it?’
Leon nodded. ‘Did I tell you he’s a close friend of our dad’s?’
Freya’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘No, I’m not messing. Dad and him were in the army together.’
Her eyes rounded. ‘Seriously?’ She looked to Grace for confirmation, but she obviously hadn’t heard him over the rattling growl of the truck’s engine, and, anyway, her gaze was far away, taking in the overgrown fields receding on either side behind them and the procession of abandoned cars on the hard shoulder.
Grace had been like that for the last couple of days: withdrawn, saying hardly anything. Leon was worried about her.
‘How does your dad know the president?’
‘Old army buddies from the nineties or something.’
‘Wow. And now he’s the prez?’
Leon shrugged. ‘He was already something in the government. A secretary of something. And he’s, like, billionaire-rich . . . or he was, anyway.’
Freya thought about that for a moment. ‘Then maybe your dad is alive still? You know, if he has connections to the president? And the US is together and sorted enough to launch a rescue fleet?’
‘New United States,’ he corrected her. ‘And new president. That sounds to me like they didn’t completely escape the plague. Some sort of crap went down over there for sure.’
‘At least they’ve got a government. Our useless lot just disappeared. But it’s pretty hopeful, right? About your dad?’
‘Maybe.’
He looked out at a field of broccoli stalks, rows of stubby green heads that had gone to seed and been overrun by tall nettles and cow parsley towering over them, seeming to bully them into submission. It never ceased to surprise him how quick nature was to step in, how soon hard road surfaces buckled and cracked and sprouted weeds, how quickly untended window boxes became drooping jungles that turned the sides of buildings into vertical wild gardens.
Just two years and nature had grabbed it all back from mankind.
Their journey down to Southampton so far had been slow. They had a fortnight ahead of them, if the dates in the radio message were still accurate. It was the third week of August now, and they had until September. Even though the roads were regularly plugged by snarls of abandoned cars demanding detours, this was Britain, not the sprawling US. Nowhere was weeks away over here.
They were going to get there with plenty of time to spare.
The mood of everyone aboard the trucks had lifted a little from the despair and panic they’d felt in the aftermath of the fire. They’d had to lower the bridge and withdraw to the far side, and from there they’d spent a day and a night watching their fortress slowly burn to the ground, leaving them out in the open, vulnerable, exposed, with no one, it seemed, in a fit state of mind to step forward and take charge of the situation.
Over the last few days, Naga seemed to have finally emerged as the unofficial ‘civilian’ leader, with Royce in reluctant command of the remaining knights. He seemed increasingly happy to defer to her with each new decision that needed to be made.
Naga had made the call that the only thing they could do now was head for Southampton and hope for the best.
As they’d driven slowly away, they’d all been expecting the worst: to be overrun at any moment by swarms of giant crabs, drawn by the belching noise of two overladen trucks; to witness the English countryside turned into something alien and ghastly, a landscape of pulsating viral roots linking and branching and giving birth to endless hordes of nightmare creatures.
Instead there had been only a handful of distant sightings.
This morning, for example, as they’d set off at first light, they’d spotted a solitary crab watching them. Leon guessed it was about the same size as the ones Corkie’s men had fought when they’d rescued Grace, the size of a large breed of dog, or a small pony. It had bobbed there, just a hundred metres away at the edge of the weed-tufted forecourt, swaying on spindly limbs. None of them had any doubts that it knew they were there.
It was clearly watching them.
Then it had turned and scuttled nimbly away into the nearby trees.
Leon wondered how the virus organized itself. How it was structured. Were the crabs their version of knights or soldiers? Or were they like attack dogs, ‘trained’ to kill? And what about the human manifestations – Everett and Corkie . . . Had they somehow been a part of the virus’s ecosystem, avatars, created by the virus to spy on them?
Or had they simply been unaware hosts?
He wondered if the virus had any kind of hierarchy at all, or whether it was just some sprawling cooperative of organisms united by one simple principle – anything other than its own kind was the enemy and theirs to destroy.
Leon was certain Corkie had had no idea that the virus was sitting dormant inside him. But Everett? Had the man been infected all along? One of them from the very beginning?
If so, if they’d known, they might have been able to overpower him somehow, restrain him in some way . . . and then question him.
Question him? Leon shook his head at how ridiculous that sounded.
How do you talk to a virus?