Leon and the others were standing in a queue. He’d been fully expecting to be jostled and pushed around the entrance to the pen. But instead he’d been surprised to find everyone had calmly formed one long snaking line. A number of people had even appointed themselves as stewards, indicating where the queue should double back on itself and keeping an eye out for ‘corner jumpers’. The woman from last night was one of them: Cora, barking out instructions like a collie herding sheep. She smiled and nodded at Leon and Freya as she walked down the line.
‘I reckon it’s going to be quite a few hours,’ Leon said.
Freya braced a hand on his shoulder and craned her neck. ‘Yeah.’
Leon looked around again, hoping to catch sight of Naga and the others. ‘Hey, Fish, have you seen any sign of our lot this morning?’
Fish looked as though he were about a million miles away, eyes wide and glazed over.
‘Fish?’
He was holding Grace’s hand. She looked equally blank-eyed and distracted, but she stirred, aware that Leon had spoken. ‘No,’ she answered for him. ‘I don’t think they’re going to be coming, Leon.’
‘Well, they’re going to miss this if they don’t get a move on,’ said Leon. He continued looking around at the faces in the queue. In the last few months he’d come to know some of them – Naga, Denise, even Royce – well enough to care what happened to them. ‘We should have agreed on what to do if we didn’t report back.’
‘Naga’s not an idiot. She’s probably sent Royce and some of the knights already. Or maybe all of them are walking in.’ She started looking around. ‘They’ll be OK, Leo.’
He looked through the mesh at the soldiers standing and watching. Some white-suited, some yellow, all of their faces hidden behind tinted visors or round goggles. He wondered which one had made the announcement. It had been hard to hear exactly what was being said. The speakers blasting out from each corner tower had echoed over each other, making the instructions almost unintelligible.
He’d got the gist of it, though. Blood tests and body marks. As they shuffled forward a step, he catalogued what he had to show. No tattoos. No birthmarks. But there was an appendix scar, a faint circular patch on his arm from an MMR jab he’d got at school and one wart on his knuckle. Leon wondered whether Grace’s scars would qualify as one identifier or more. Maybe they’d need something else. ‘Grace, haven’t you got three moles clustered together like Mickey Mouse?’
Again, she looked lost, somewhere far away. He waved a hand at her. ‘Grace?’
She blinked and stirred. A flash of irritation flickered across the unscarred half of her face.
‘Jesus, Grace – Fish – what is it with the pair of you?’
‘Aw, leave ’em alone, Leon,’ said Freya. ‘They’re tired. So am I, for that matter. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.’
Leon was tired as well. But not totally zoned out like them. They needed their wits about them this morning. Not daydreaming. Not shuffling along like zombies. ‘Grace, Fish – you heard the guy? You’ll need two identifying marks. Grace, what have you got?’
She cocked her head and glared at him with feigned indignity. ‘I’ll be telling the doctor, not you!’
‘So there!’ Freya chuckled. ‘You tell him to mind his own business.’
‘Name, please, sir . . .’
‘Joseph Anthony Garret.’
Tom checked the watch strapped round the outside of his suit. It was eleven thirty. They’d been at it for just over two hours now. They were actually making good progress, working through the waiting evacuees quicker than he’d expected. They were on the fourth batch now, which meant that once this lot were done they’d have one hundred vetted British people billeted aboard their ships.
One hundred done. Eight hundred to go. Sixteen more hours of this, provided there were no hitches or speed bumps. So far there hadn’t been a single positive result, which was pretty much what he’d been anticipating. If this virus really . . . really . . . could mimic humans as some of these Brits had been claiming, surely they’d be far too obvious. And, even if they looked convincing, surely they wouldn’t understand verbal instructions, or be able to partake in a conversation, give a name or a date of birth or a previous profession?
Mimic humans?
The idea sounded ridiculous. Far more likely that it was the manifestation of panicked minds. These people had been hanging on for nearly two years. Most of them in remote, isolated enclaves, no contact with the outside world, perhaps even convinced they were the last humans left alive. No wonder these poor bastards had been jumping at shadows. One person hollers ‘wolf’, and all of a sudden that wolf becomes a very real thing in the minds of those within earshot. Two years of survival. Two years of holding out on their own, and fighting off viral creatures that certainly were for real . . . Tom wondered if he’d have fared any better.
‘And your date of birth, please, sir? That’s month, day, year.’
Leon weaved his way through the long snaking queue on his way back from the toilet corner. He’d hung on as long as he could, then checked with an old biker who was unofficially stewarding their section of the queue that he was OK to go for a leak and keep his place rather than going to the very back of the queue.
He scanned the faces he passed, still hoping to catch sight of Naga and the others. He hoped to God they’d finally figured out what had happened, that they’d been picked up and rescued.
He rounded another bend in the winding line and spotted Fish. But not in the queue. He was standing to one side of it, close to the pen’s fencing. He appeared to be with a group of about fifty or sixty people.
Leon stopped. ‘Fish?’
No response.
‘Fish!’ he called again. ‘What’re you doing over there?’
The group seemed to be huddled together and holding hands like some sort of impromptu prayer meeting. He walked towards them. Close up, he could see some had their eyes open and were staring dull-eyed at seemingly nothing. Others had them shut, as if deep in prayer or meditation. No one was talking and they were standing unnervingly still, men, women, children alike.
They didn’t appear to be members of one particular survival group. Leon had noticed over the last two years that hard survival had begun to make people who’d endured it together look vaguely similar. The learned habits, the layers and methods of protection defined to some degree how they dressed. This gathering of ‘parishioners’ looked as though they’d come from all corners of the United Kingdom.
‘Fish! Hey!’ He slapped his friend’s back gently to make him jump, partly because he was annoyed that Fish had just wandered off and left the girls unguarded.
Fish remained inert. His eyes cracked open gradually and he turned slowly to look at Leon.
‘Fish . . . what the hell are you doing?’
He frowned and for a moment it seemed he didn’t even recognize Leon. Then the stupor cleared from his face and he smiled. ‘Hey.’
Leon looked around at all the others, stock-still and utterly silent, hands clasped. He cocked a brow. ‘Who’re your new . . . umm . . . friends?’
He noticed Fish was holding hands with a middle-aged Asian man on one side and a large round-shouldered guy on the other.
‘Leon . . .’Fish hadn’t seemed to have heard the question, or was choosing to ignore it. ‘This has to be goodbye, mate.’
‘What?’
‘I like you. Both of you.’ Leon guessed he was talking about Freya. ‘But I’m gonna say goodbye. I’m with these people now.’
‘What’s wrong with you? You can’t just—’
‘Leon!’ Fish hissed under his breath. ‘You have to go! This is not a good time!’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Just go!’
Leon reached down to grab one of Fish’s hands.
‘DON’T!’ Fish snapped angrily. ‘GO!’ There was something in his wide eyes and the hardness of his expression that suggested the next time he said ‘go’ it was going to come with a shove.
‘OK . . . OK . . .’ Leon raised his arms and hands in surrender and backed up a step. ‘You know where we are.’ He nodded over his shoulder. ‘In the queue over there, but we’re getting quite near to the gate so . . .’
Fish nodded, the hardness melted away. He tipped him a nod and offered a faint smile. ‘See you around, mate . . . soon.’
Tom watched the three evacuees leave, clutching their red cardboard documents as if they were winning lottery tickets. A marine waved at them to follow him along the marked channel towards their ships.
One hundred and seventeen passed, he calculated. They’d rejected only about half a dozen people so far. Not because they’d found a viral imposter – which, frankly, he was beginning to suspect was a load of paranoid hokum – but because they hadn’t got enough acceptable identifying marks to log. Tom had been tempted to step in and overrule his medics at one point. It had been a nine-year-old girl for God’s sake – of course she didn’t have any bloody tattoos or scars. But then if he started bending the rules, making allowances and exceptions, berating his personnel for following orders to the letter, this process was going to descend into chaos.
Watching the little girl being escorted into the ‘rejected’ channel without the card had been hard.
With some of the others, though, the ones who grumbled angrily, ungratefully, at their week-long incarceration, the lack of creature comforts, he’d been tempted – God, he’d been seriously tempted – to fail them. Every person issued with a red card meant one less space aboard for Leon and Grace.
The next three candidates were led in. Tom glanced at their faces then excused himself to check in on the neighbouring tent. He stepped in to find the process was already underway with the first candidate.
‘Name please, ma’am?’ asked one of the medics, passport flattened out on her clipboard and pen in hand.
Another one was busy uncapping a new syringe.
‘Name? Please?’
‘Uh . . .’ The woman looked confused, as if she’d been turfed out of a comfy bed two minutes ago and was still trying to figure out if she were awake or not.
‘I need your name, ma’am. First, middle and last.’
The medic with the syringe slipped a pressure band over the woman’s bare forearm and cinched it tight.
‘Martell. J. T.,’ the woman replied sluggishly.
‘Uh . . . ma’am, that’s my colleague’s name.’ She looked at the name badge taped to the front of the hazard suit beside her. ‘I actually need your name.’
The other medic was shaking her head irritably as she stared at the pale arm. The pressure band had been tightened, but she was struggling to find a vein. She cinched it tighter and looked again, but found nothing into which she could tap.
‘Miss . . . are you or have you ever been a heroin addict?’
The woman was staring at the glistening needle poised above her skin, which hovered like some bird of prey looking for a hapless scurrying field mouse below.
‘Miss?’
Tom noticed the other two candidates she’d come in with were shuffling uncomfortably: two men, one black, one white, both in their thirties, he guessed. They took a step towards each other. He saw them reach out and clasp hands tightly.
Well, OK . . .
‘Miss, I need you to look at me and listen!’ The medic, Martell J. T., was getting frustrated. ‘I can’t find a vein we can use in your arm, ma’am. So we’ll need to try the other . . .’
She loosened the clip on the pressure band and tried to slide it down her forearm. But it was stuck.
‘Uh, hold on.’
The woman’s skin seemed to be stuck to it. ‘I guess that was on pretty tightly. Just bear with me . . .’
Martell tugged at the pressure band a little more firmly. This time it slid easily down her arm, but the woman’s skin peeled away with it, tearing all the way down her forearm like wet tissue paper.
‘What the . . .’ The medic stared at the exposed muscles and tendons, a perfectly flayed arm dribbling dark strings of viscous liquid on to the woman’s jogging bottoms.