“So, that’s what it looks like.”
The image on the microscope screen remained largely meaningless to Huxley, but, aesthetically at least, he found it far uglier than the contents on the hypodermics. The molecule was dark with a jagged yellow outline, its mass dotted with red flecks that writhed in constant motion.
“Yeah.” Rhys’s expression was all heavy-browed grimness, leading him to conclude that she had no good news to impart. She began her analysis an hour before first light, hoping to complete it in advance of the engines starting up again. She had exhibited a spasm of revulsion at the contents of Pynchon’s pack; a little girl’s head perched atop the severed neck of an adult male was certainly off-putting. Any squeamishness quickly disappeared when she set about her work. She opened the skull with one of the combat knives and used a syringe to extract the required amount of fluid. Placing a small bead of the stuff on a slide, she slotted it into the microscope’s base.
“The sample’s loaded with it,” she went on. “Looks like it’s a fast-breeding little bastard.”
“Any idea what it’s called?” Huxley asked.
She grunted an utterly humourless laugh. “I’d be amazed if any medical professional had ever seen this before the outbreak. I can tell it’s not a virus, its morphology and chemical make-up being more akin to a bacterium. The good news is, given its signature appearance and rapid growth, identifying its presence in another sample shouldn’t be difficult.” She reached for a fresh syringe. “Who wants to go first?”
Huxley’s anxiety was stoked to such a high degree that he barely felt it when she pressed the tip of the needle into his arm. He had managed perhaps an hour of fitful sleep upon their return to the boat, the dream plaguing him once more, terrible in its beautiful clarity. He could feel the sand-laced wind on his skin this time, ears thrumming with the hard gusts sweeping in from the blue ocean beneath the even more blue sky. But it wasn’t all beauty. The woman in the wide-brimmed hat hid her face from him as he reached for her. The movement he had thought a joyful whirl now appeared more an attempt at avoiding his touch. The shadow cast by the hat receded when she consented to turn her head towards him, revealing eyes that were both hard and tearful. She began to speak but the dream evaporated when Pynchon shook him awake.
“Well, there it is,” Rhys reported after performing her mysterious communion with the microscope. At first, Huxley saw nothing but globules of red on the screen, until she adjusted the magnification, whereupon the same ugly dark cells resolved into focus. “Smaller though.” Rhys punched buttons and altered some more settings. “Less frequency too, but that may be due to location. We know this thing affects the brain first so it may breed more in cranial vessels. And—” she took a closer look at the readout “—less motile. Not quite dormant, but not as fully active either.”
She took samples from each of them, running her own blood last. Each one returned the same result. Curiously, Huxley’s tension diminished as he absorbed the news. He felt there to be an inevitability to it, a confirmation that any hope of surviving this journey had been a fantasy. Five, he thought, recalling the visceral graffiti on the artists’ boat. Failure. They didn’t make it, why would we?
“So we’ve all got it,” Pynchon said. “But it’s not doing much.”
Rhys inclined her head. “More or less. The question is why?”
“The injections,” Plath said. “Whatever we took is slowing the spread.”
“Possibly.” Rhys frowned as she continued to stare at the screen. “Would explain the absence of symptoms.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” Huxley said. “You think they lied to us about the boosters?”
“Maybe. But I think it’s more connected to memory.” She pointed to the scars on her head. “Dickinson recovered some memories then…”
“Went nuts and Pynchon shot her,” Plath finished. “So?”
“So it seems likely this pathogen is connected to brain function somehow. Memory is part of our cognitive apparatus. Every Diseased we’ve encountered has displayed delusional behaviour. The disfigurement suffered by the girl on the laptop began to worsen when she started to obsess over that phone call with her shitty mother.”
“You think they took our memories to protect us,” Huxley said. “Memory is its trigger, like the open wound it needs to infect us.”
“We’re already infected. But it’s possible the act of remembering acts as a stimulus.”
Plath squinted at her. “A psychic disease? Come on.”
“Memory is a physiological process of the brain. An electrochemical signal exchanged via a network of synapses. There’s nothing supernatural about it. What if this pathogen needs that very process to activate?”
“Meaning,” Pynchon said, “as long as we stay amnesiacs we’ll be fine?”
Huxley’s anxiety rose again when Rhys folded her arms. “Maybe, but the fact is we won’t.”
“Why not?” Plath asked. “I mean, they operated on us to get at our memories, cut them fully out for all we know.”
“True, but they didn’t take away our ability to form new ones. Our collective memories may only add up to a couple of days but it’s still experience stored in our brains. We are still remembering, we just have less to remember.”
“The longer we survive the more memories we build up,” Huxley said. “The greater the chance of activating this thing.”
“Not only that…” Rhys paused to offer a tight grimace. “Clearly the surgery we were subjected to has prevented us from remembering personal details, life history and so on, but I don’t think we’d be able to form new memories if they’d taken them completely. The organic machinery that enables us to remember is part and parcel of everything else that allows us to function as human beings. You can’t just rip it all out. And, like I said at the start of all this, the brain repairs itself.” She paused again, arms bracing tighter across her chest. “Which brings us to the dreams. And don’t tell me I’m the only one.”
Her eyes tracked over each of them, brows raised expectantly. Secrets shared, Huxley concluded, seeing how Plath and Pynchon shifted in discomfort. It’s not just me.
“I’m on a beach,” he said. “There’s a woman there. I don’t know who she is, but I’m pretty sure I used to.”
Pynchon let out a slow breath before speaking, face tensed and guarded. “Some dusty village somewhere. Air smells like shit and smoke. Lot of bodies on the ground. I think I killed them.”
“A boy I think I knew,” Plath said. Her closed expression made it clear no more information would be forthcoming.
Rhys’s eyes clouded and she hugged herself before unfolding her arms. “An emergency room. Frantic, chaotic. I try to help, but it’s not enough. People keep dying. I think I’m the only doctor there.”
No one spoke for at least a minute, digesting the implications until Pynchon gave them voice: “Dreams are memories, aren’t they? We’re remembering when we sleep.”
“Fact is,” Rhys replied, “neurological science is pretty vague when it comes to dreams. No one’s ever been able to come up with a convincing evolutionary rationale for why we do it. Most credible theories centre on the notion that they’re simply a by-product of random electronic impulses produced by the brain during sleep. Memories are a major part of the dream state, that’s true, but dreams alter them. When processing random input the brain defaults to its hard-wired need to craft a narrative. What we’re seeing may be memories or just something cooked up by the millions of synapses in our heads.”
“Like infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters producing Shakespeare,” Huxley said.
“Exactly. However, although we can’t trust anything we see in a dream, they seem a little too specific to not have a memory component.” She looked again at the microscope screen. “I’d need to run more tests to confirm it, but I’d be very surprised if our count of these little fuckers didn’t increase when we sleep.”
“‘It starts with the dreams.’” Plath’s mouth gave a sardonic quirk as she spoke Abigail’s words from the laptop. “She tried to warn us.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Pynchon said. “Turning back was never an option.”
“For you, maybe.”
“For any of us. We’re all infected, remember? As whoever sent us here knew we would be. Even if, by some miracle, we made it out of this city on foot, the only reception we’d get would be a bullet.” He turned back to Rhys. “How long do we have?”
“There’s no way to know for sure. Clearly, the treatments we’ve received have bought us some time, but, for all I know, this thing could accelerate at any second.”
“Why send us here just to get sick and die?” Huxley asked.
“Could be we’re supposed to find a cure,” Plath suggested.
“If that was true—” Rhys patted the microscope “—we wouldn’t have had to scavenge this. They gave us no means of analysing our environment. And none of us really has the expertise for it anyway.”
“Except you,” Huxley said.
“And I’m pretty much groping in the dark here. I suspect my role is to just keep us alive. And think about it, isn’t that the only thing we’re doing as we proceed along this river? Our collective skills are geared towards survival.” She gestured to Pynchon. “Combat skills.” Her finger moved to Huxley. “Investigative skills. Useful if one of your group might turn into a monster at any moment. Dickinson was a mountaineer, an explorer, accustomed to survival scenarios.”
“Golding didn’t strike me as a born survivor,” Pynchon commented.
“He had a considerable reservoir of knowledge, some of it actually useful. And, for all his fear and whinging, he never panicked once. It’s clear to me we were all selected for this, and selection must’ve been pretty rigorous. Resistance to panic is a key survival trait.”
“And me?” Plath enquired, eyebrow raised.
Rhys met her gaze squarely, speaking in flat and unambiguous tones. “Your scientific acumen is useful, but your pathological focus on your own needs gives you an increased chance of survival.”
Plath’s mouth quirked and she shrugged. “And I thought we were getting close.”
“Whatever we’re here for,” Rhys went on, “it’s not research or data collection or reconnaissance. We’re here for something else. Something that requires us to stay alive, at least for now.”
The engines started up then, the boat accelerating briefly before settling into its typical, unimpressive speed. Huxley looked at the sat-phone in expectation but it failed to chirp.
“Small mercies,” Pynchon muttered, taking a seat at the chain gun controls. “Don’t really feel like following orders just now.”
They passed under more bridges and through the ruined remnants of others. The fog obscured much of the banks save for glimpses of vegetation that grew thicker and taller with each passing mile. The bridges also became increasingly festooned with root-like growths spiralling around supports and railings. “Too much,” Huxley heard Rhys murmur as she tracked her carbine sight over one particularly overgrown bridge.
“What?”
“Too much growth. Looks like a jungle reclaiming abandoned infrastructure. The city’s fallen, sure, but nature doesn’t move this fast.”
He raised his own carbine and peered through the sight at the north bank, making out what appeared to be the base of a huge tree. He initially marked it as an oak or a yew, its mass of roots half hidden by the water. But as he looked closer he recognised a chaotic but still discernible pattern in the overlap of the roots, one he had seen the night before.
“Not nature,” he said. “Some of the bodies we found last night had sprouted. Like plant pots, Plath said. This—” he tracked his sight along the misted bank, finding a jumble of twisting vegetation “—this was all people. This is what happens when it’s done turning you into a monster.”
“Not just a disease,” Plath mused. “A multi-stage organism. A new form of life.”
“From outer space?” Huxley lowered his carbine and grinned at her scowl. “C’mon, the thought must’ve occurred before now.”
“Abigail didn’t say anything about… spaceships or meteorite impacts or strange lights in the sky. If it is an invasion they must’ve been pretty quiet about it.”
“Makes a certain kind of sense though. When you think about it?”
“Sense?”
“Let’s say you’re an alien civilisation and you find a nice shiny, blue-green planet to colonise. Problem is, it’s got several billion sentient apes living on it. Or infesting it, depending on your point of view. Not only are they likely to take exception to your arrival, they’re also busy poisoning the place with all manner of polluting chemicals. Maybe for them this was no more significant than us spraying a houseplant with bug killer.”
Rhys gave a faint laugh, shaking her head. “Not buying it. Any race capable of interstellar travel wouldn’t need to resort to something so elaborate. Their technology would be so far in advance of ours they’d be like gods. Besides, if you can zip around the entire galaxy at light speed, why bother coming here?”
“I’m fully open to alternative theories, Doctor.”
“Diseases, pandemics, they happen. All through history there has been at least one major outbreak of serious infectious illness every century. This one is just the most… unusual to date.”
“That’s your theory? Shit happens?”
“I’ll admit it’s not exactly Darwin or Einstein. But I’m sticking with it until more data makes itself available.”
A sound came drifting through the fog then, a voice, but very different from the discordant screaming of a Diseased pack. It was more rhythmic, a series of sharp grunts echoing for several seconds before fading. A little later they heard a near identical sound, but this time dimmed by distance.
“What is that?” Huxley said, straining to hear more.
“Language.” Plath moved to his side, resting her arms on the rail. “They’re communicating.”
“Like birds,” Rhys said with a note of agreement. “Or apes. Chimps warn other troops away from their territory by taking to the trees and grunting.”
“Why not just talk?” Huxley asked.
“Could be they don’t know how any more,” Plath said. “As the doc says, this thing is multi-stage. The further along the infection tree you get the less human you become, if you don’t die and turn into a tree first.”
The calls fell silent for the space of about a minute then started up again, louder this time. It sounded to Huxley as if the unseen Diseased that produced them were parallel with the boat.
“Are they following us?” Rhys wondered.
Plath’s eyes narrowed, features tightening. “I think so. Territorial behaviour implies an intolerance of intruders.” Huxley took an involuntary backward step when she drew a breath and screamed into the fog: “FUCK OFF YOU MUTANT BASTARDS!”
A short interval of silence then the grunts resumed. Huxley felt they had grown in volume, something Plath also noticed, to her considerable annoyance. Retrieving her carbine, she began to prowl the aft deck, raising and lowering it repeatedly, peering through the sight with predatory keenness before hissing in disappointed frustration.
The calls continued for the rest of the day, providing a constant and increasingly irritating soundtrack to their journey. Lacking anything else to do, Rhys set about analysing the sample of growth matter they had retrieved during their foray. Pynchon retired to the crew cabin and embarked on a mission to disassemble, clean and reassemble their weapons. Huxley settled himself into the seat in front of the map display, eyes flicking between the slow track of the dot along a wide blue line and the inert plastic block of the sat-phone. It occurred to him that its silence might be a ploy, a means of feeding their fears, although the purpose of it eluded him. Alternatively, he speculated that the powers controlling the device simply had nothing to say at this juncture. Or, he reflected, they want to avoid any more questions.
As the day wore on Plath maintained her predatory vigil on the aft deck, her agitation increasing in concert with the rising cacophony from the riverbanks. The sound had taken on a decidedly aggrieved pitch, overlapping voices indicating multiple Diseased were now tracking their progress.
“Just one,” Huxley heard Plath mutter. “I just want one. This fucking fog…”
Having momentarily abandoned his scrutiny of the map display, Huxley loitered in the wheelhouse entrance, reaching up to rest his hands on the lintel. He saw how Plath’s nostrils flared as she spoke, as if trying to catch a scent. “Can you smell them?” he asked her.
Her face twitched, head moving in a marginal shake. “Smells of rot, something else it has in common with the Everglades.”
A sudden upsurge of calls from the north bank caused her to spin about, moving to the starboard rail to aim her carbine into the shrouded depths. “Both sides now. There’s more of them too. I can tell.” Apparently glimpsing movement in the swirling red haze, her finger moved to the carbine’s trigger. Huxley watched it tremble before relaxing as she fought down the urge to fire.
“Take it easy,” he said, which earned him only a dismissive glare before she resumed her fruitless hunt.
“Just one,” he heard her whisper as he turned back to the wheelhouse.
“Anything?” he asked Rhys. The way she crouched at the microscope reminded him of Plath in its singular focus.
“If I was a real biologist,” she said, not looking up from the eyepieces, “I think I’d be using the word ‘fascinating’ a lot just now.”
“Unusual, huh?”
“If you call protein matter assuming a cellulose structure ‘unusual’, then yeah.”
“And in English, please?”
She sighed and moved back from the microscope, punching a button to activate the screen. The image resembled an irregular series of narrow ovals on a reddish brown background. “It looks like a plant,” Rhys explained, “but it’s made of meat, and a number of additional compounds not usually found in human tissue. Cell division is remarkably rapid, too. It’s literally growing before our eyes.”
“So, the plant pot thing wasn’t too wide of the mark.”
Rhys inclined her head, brows arching in agreement. “A grow bag would be a more accurate analogy. My guess is death is a signal for the infection to shift into another mode. It uses the organic matter of the body to fuel… this.” She tapped the screen. “Self-replicating cells that form branching structures.”
“To what purpose?”
“Unknown, but it must somehow relate to the disease’s life cycle. Else, what’s the point?”
“Does there have to be one?”
The glance she gave him was only marginally less scathing than Plath’s dismissal. “Life always has a point.”
“And what’s that?”
“Something it has in common with us: survival. Continuance of its species.”
Huxley gave a rueful grin and began to rise, intending to return to the map display, stopping when he noticed the mark on Rhys’s neck. It was small, the size and shape of an average mole, but he was certain it hadn’t been there in the morning. “What?” she asked, but the sudden chirp of the sat-phone forestalled his answer.
Moving forward, Huxley paused to shout down the ladder at Pynchon – “Mom and Dad are calling!” – before moving to the front of the wheelhouse. He watched the phone vibrate until the others crowded round then hit the green button.
“Do you have casualties?”
“No.”
“Do any…”
“Enough of that shit! Of course we’re displaying aggression and irrational behaviour. Why the fuck wouldn’t we? Just get on with it.”
Clicks and silence then the boat’s engines died. “Rest period,” the phone voice said. “Communications will be resumed in seven hours. Maintain a rotating guard in pairs until dawn. The Diseased in this region are extremely hostile.”
“You ever going to tell us what we’re doing here?”
“Final phase instructions will be provided shortly. Continue to monitor each other for signs of sudden mental or physical change.”
Clicks. Silence.
“If that is a real person,” Pynchon said in a flat monotone, “I intend to survive this just so I can hunt them down and kill them. Slowly.”
Huxley and Rhys took the first watch. He kept to the foredeck, debating over whether to tell her about the mark on her neck. Could be nothing. He knew it wasn’t. Just because her infection might be getting worse doesn’t mean the rest of us are too. He knew this to be pathetic optimism. She would want to know. Probably true. She’ll resent you for telling her. Also true.
This continual babble of question and answer was underscored with a competing background hum of other thoughts. Plath’s new-found animation. Pynchon’s new-found morose fatalism. The fact that they were alone in the middle of a city of monsters and all infected and he was going to die soon and he couldn’t even remember his life more than three fucking days ago…
You’re missing something. The statement cut through his rising panic with hard, insistent clarity. If cop instinct had a voice he knew this was it. Something important. Something that’ll get everyone killed if it’s not addressed. But what is it?
He turned his gaze outward, hoping the dark swirl of the fog would provide distraction, but the ongoing chorus from the Diseased denied him any peace. It occurred to him that, in any way that mattered, he was only a few days old, an infant sent forth into a world of terrors. Without memory, what are we? Golding had asked. No one. Nothing. He was a child pretending to adulthood only because of the skills they left him. The cop instinct that made him useful. So why wasn’t it working now?
Too much to think about, he decided. Too many clues. Clear the decks. Make room.
He found Rhys at the microscope once again, but she wasn’t engaged in any analysis. The device’s in-built computer featured a clock that, as far as they could tell, provided an accurate readout on the display screen.
“Ten minutes left on our shift,” she said when he entered the wheelhouse.
He tried not to let his gaze linger on her neck, but found it impossible. The mark had grown to the size of a penny now, dark red in colour. “I noticed something earlier…”
“This, you mean?” She pointed at the mark. “Yeah, me too.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Don’t be.” She hesitated, wincing. “You’ve got one as well. Behind the left ear.”
His hand immediately went to the spot, probing, exploring. If she hadn’t pointed it out he wouldn’t have noticed it, a small patch of raised skin that failed to produce any pain when he poked a trembling finger to it. “So…” He swallowed, forcing moisture down a dry throat. “It’s started.”
“I’m not so sure. Are you remembering anything? More than before, I mean.”
He shook his head. “Just the dream, and I still have no idea who she is.”
“Same with me. Memory is the trigger, we know that.”
“Then what is it…?” He trailed off when the answer came, shaming in its obviousness. “The vaccine. It wasn’t a vaccine.”
“Not sure about that either. These marks could be a side effect. A by-product of the inoculant fighting it out with the infection.”
He poked his mark again, perversely annoyed by the fact that it didn’t hurt. “Can you test these?”
“They’re a bit too small for a viable biopsy using the instruments I have. Given the current rate of growth, though…” She raised her eyebrows, grimacing as she patted a hand to the microscope. “I’ll draw some fluid in the morning, see what she can tell us.”
She’ll tell us we’re dying. The realisation, uncoloured by even the smallest crumb of doubt, failed to produce the upsurge of terror he expected. It appeared he had, without articulating it in word or thought, already accepted the inevitability of his own demise. This was always a suicide mission. Why would you ever think otherwise?
“OK,” he said, letting his hand fall to his side. “Pynchon and Plath?”
“Haven’t noticed any marks, but it stands to reason they’ll have them too.”
“Do we tell them?”
“They may have already noticed. Besides, it’s not like we can do anything about it.” She flicked the microscope’s power button to off and turned to the ladder. “Best to wait for morning.”