Unsurprisingly, sleep eluded him. Plath and Pynchon roused themselves from their half-slumber and assumed watch duties without a word. As a dull-eyed Pynchon climbed the ladder, Huxley made out the small red mark on the underside of his wrist. No way he missed it. The utter absurdity of their security now depending on the alertness of two amnesiacs, one a melancholic soldier, the other a high-functioning psychopath, brought a chuckle bubbling to Huxley’s lips. He quelled the urge with memory pain, knowing surrendering to humour right now would invite hysteria.
Where did you go to high school? he asked himself, the question sending a sharp bolt of discomfort through the front of his skull.
How old were you when you had your first wet dream? More pain, sharper now. An ugly memory perhaps? A complicated sexual awakening? Or had he been abused like Dickinson?
He summoned the woman from the dream, watched her twirl in the sun. What was her name? Where did you meet her? What did her laugh sound like? How did she smell…?
He shuddered now, agony raging in his head, but it stopped at this particular question. Not because he had an answer. It was the question itself. Smell. Cop instinct welled, setting his heart beating faster and making him sit up. What does anything smell like?
Hot dogs? Nothing. He could see a hot dog in his head, dripping with onions, red ketchup contrasting with yellow mustard, steam rising from the concoction of reconstituted meat and white bread lacking any nutritional value. He had a vague notion of how it all tasted, much as he knew how the bourbon they found on Abigail’s barge would taste. But no inkling at all of how it smelled.
“Onions,” he said aloud and the memory of that sweet but savoury tang came to mind. “Ketchup.” Same thing. “Now hot dogs.” Once again, nothing.
The woman on the beach. He closed his eyes, watching her move across the sand, long hair trailing. He knew there should have been salt on the wind, perhaps carrying a trace of her perfume. But once again he found himself reaching into the same empty box.
Rhys had apparently managed to sleep, something that stirred as much annoyance as it did admiration. “In the morning, I said,” she groaned, pushing his hand away as he nudged her shoulder.
“Your dream,” he said, voice low but urgent. “What did it smell like?”
She blinked, frowning at him, her tongue working around her mouth. “I dunno, it’s a dream…”
“What does it smell like?”
A crease appeared in her forehead, the blinking of her eyes slowing to a stare.
“A busy ER has to stink, right?” he said. “Blood, shit, vomit. But you can’t remember that stink, can you?”
She continued to stare, shaking her head.
“But you can remember what blood smells like?”
Her frown deepened and she nodded.
“Context,” he said, dipping his head closer to hers. “Individual smells we remember. Combine them with a context and it goes away.”
“Smell is a very strong memory trigger,” she said, matching his whispered tone. “In some ways more powerful than vision. An interesting effect of what was done to us, but…”
“Plath can remember the smell of the Everglades. Like rot, she said. And she’s mentioned them twice now.”
She blinked at him again then reached for her carbine. “No hesitating. We just kill the bitch.”
He nodded and retrieved his pistol before moving to the ladder. He had almost reached the top when they heard it, a loud splash of something heavy meeting the water followed by a short series of grunts and a shout of pain, one that came from a male throat. Pynchon.
Huxley heaved himself into the wheelhouse, crouching instantly, pistol extended in a two-handed grip, scanning for targets. The wheelhouse was empty and, he noted as he scanned the rear of the compartment, the microscope was gone. A grunt and scrape from the left snapped his gaze to the aft deck. Pynchon stood there, staring at him with wide eyes, his teeth gritted in pain. Not standing, Huxley realised, looking at the soldier’s feet: only the toes of his boots touched the deck, the rubberised surface spattered with an ongoing trickle of blood. Huxley’s eyes tracked the falling blood to a wound in Pynchon’s shoulder, pierced from back to front by something long, dark and sharp.
“Sorry,” a voice said, the sound coming from behind Pynchon. “Did I wake you?”
It was simultaneously Plath’s voice and yet not: her usual even cadence overlaid with a more sibilant note. Her words were partially mangled, as if coming from distorted lips.
“Or did you finally make an intelligent deduction, Detective?” Plath enquired.
Something moved behind Pynchon, his body swaying, puppet-like with the motion. Huxley inched forward, making room for Rhys as she ascended the ladder. He could discern a shape in the gloom to Pynchon’s rear, something larger than it should be but he couldn’t see enough of it to shoot at.
“How long?” he called back, shuffling forward another few inches. “Since you started to remember. How long?”
“Hard to say really.” Plath’s tone was jarring in its marriage of convivial normality with rasping malice. “Some things haven’t come back. My name for instance, but I never had much attachment to it anyway. Other things… well, they’ve become very clear indeed.”
Pynchon’s suspended form jerked in response to Rhys moving across the middle of the wheelhouse, carbine at her shoulder. As she shifted her shield, Huxley caught a slightly better look at Plath’s deformed person, glimpsing her face and seeing something that mirrored her voice. It was still recognisably her, but narrower, the chin elongated to a point, cheekbones expanded, long teeth extending over her lower lip. He tried to centre his pistol sight on her forehead but she shifted again, placing Pynchon in the path of the bullet.
“Careful now,” Plath warned. “Don’t you want to hear my story? I promise you’ll find it interesting.”
Rhys edged forward, Huxley glancing across to see her features harden when she noted the absence of the microscope. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“You didn’t need your little toy, dear,” Plath replied, taunting delight in her voice. “They were right about not providing any diagnostic equipment. It would only have distracted you.”
“From what?” Huxley asked. He stood straighter, seeking a different angle but still a clear shot eluded him.
“From what they sent us to do, of course.” Plath laughed, the ugliest sound she had yet produced. “I should know. It was my fucking idea, I just don’t remember volunteering for it…”
The boat’s engines came to life with a roar, the craft swaying from port to starboard with enough energy to send Plath staggering. Pynchon screamed as he swung, somehow finding the strength to jerk his body. Kicking his legs, he jack-knifed, the motion succeeding in freeing him from the object skewering his shoulder.
Huxley fired the instant Pynchon collapsed to the deck, two shots aimed at the dark shifting mass now disappearing over the stern. “Fuck fuck fu—!” Rhys yelled, the sound swallowed by the bark of her carbine as she strode forward, firing round after round into the foggy darkness. Huxley hurried to Pynchon, clamping his hands over the gushing hole in his back.
“Help him!” Huxley called to Rhys. She continued to cast bullets into the void, each shot accompanied by an enraged yell. “Doctor!” His shout succeeded in drawing her attention. Glancing down at Pynchon with both anger and annoyance, she shouldered her carbine and crouched to inspect the wound.
“Get the med-kit,” Rhys instructed, shoving his hands aside and replacing them with her own. As he rose, Huxley heard a gasp from Pynchon, accompanied by a plume of blood as he forced the words out. “Lies… she said it’s all just… lies…”
Come dawn, the boat continued to chug its ponderous course along a waterway that might as well have been a sea. They could discern so little of the world beyond the fog now that the map display provided the only guide to their location.
“Somewhere between Richmond and Kingston… is my guess,” Pynchon said. He spoke with slow deliberation, each word emerging in a tightly controlled cluster of syllables formed by features that twitched constantly in pain. Rhys had judged his wounds too severe to be stitched. She packed them with bandages and swiftly rejected the soldier’s suggestion that they cauterise it.
“The igniter from the other flame-thrower…”
“Forget it. The shock’ll kill you. And drop the tough-guy posturing. It’s getting tedious.”
They strapped him to the seat in front of the map display, Huxley berating himself for failing to make a more thorough search for painkillers in their foray ashore. Pynchon experienced bouts of suffering, his body taking on a violent spasm before subsiding into a torpor, although the tension in his face never faded. Despite this, he insisted on providing an account of Plath’s transformation.
“Happened so fast. I was on the foredeck, checking over the chain gun, not that there’s much to check. Just something to do. Wiping down the targeting optics, stuff like that.” He paused to endure a shudder, swallowed water from the canteen Rhys held to his lips then continued. “She was aft, where I wanted her to be. Haven’t felt too comfortable around her for a while now. Guess none of us have, eh? I heard something… like a ripping sound, then a yell. Like she was in pain. When I got there…” He trailed off, features forming a baffled frown. “She was heaving the microscope overboard. But her face, her arms. They were changed. I didn’t get that good a look. Soon as I brought my weapon to bear she chucked the microscope in the river and came at me, way too fast for anything human. It all got blurry after that. Felt like fighting a giant scorpion.” A small, bitter laugh escaped his lips. “Didn’t win, did I?”
“She say anything?” Huxley asked.
“Not much. Just the stuff about lies, but it was pretty garbled until you two turned up. Thanks for that, by the way.”
Huxley turned to Rhys. “D’you think it was true? What she said about this being her idea?”
“Who knows? Psychopaths often delight in dishonesty. It’s all part of their manipulation schtick. Obviously the disease has changed her physically. Personality-wise, not so much.”
“You sure you hit her?” Pynchon asked Huxley.
“Pretty sure. But it was quick, and we’ve seen other Diseased soak up a lot of punishment.”
“She’s still out there.” Rhys spoke with conviction as she peered through the wheelhouse windows. “Tracking us. I mean, it’s pretty obvious we’re here to put an end to the Diseased – and she is one. Why wouldn’t she try to stop us? She’d probably just do it for shits and giggles.”
“From now on,” Huxley said, eyeing the denser-than-ever fog beyond the windscreen, “we keep the night-vision goggles handy at all times. They’re the only means we have of seeing through this shit.”
“Battery life…” Pynchon began, raising a limp hand in warning.
“I remember.” Huxley took his hand, easing it down. Before releasing his grip, Huxley felt the roughness of the mark he noticed earlier. It had grown, forming a long crimson stripe from Pynchon’s wrist to his elbow.
“I hate it,” Pynchon said, Huxley looking up to find a weak grin on the soldier’s lips. “Spoils the look of my tats.” His eyes shifted to Huxley’s neck, narrowing in sympathy. “Not just me, then.”
The mark felt identical in texture and size to Pynchon’s, a frond-like shape tracing over the skin from Huxley’s ear to his collarbone. Once again, he found it strange that it didn’t hurt. “Wouldn’t want you to feel left out,” he said, a poor joke spoken in a thin, reedy voice that shamed him.
“I think it’s the inoculant reacting with the disease,” Rhys told Pynchon. “It’s safe to assume the compound we were given was experimental, something rushed through without the required trials and tests. Severe side effects are to be expected.”
He gazed at her in dull-eyed silence before grunting, “Guess you must’ve skipped the bedside manner bit of med school, huh, doc?”
“Whatever we took didn’t work on Plath,” Huxley said to Rhys. “How do we know it’s working on us?”
“For a start, we haven’t turned into monsters yet. Secondly, I didn’t notice any marks on her. It’s possible she had innate resistance to the inoculant.”
“She said… she started remembering a while ago,” Pynchon pointed out, gritting his teeth as another bout of suffering coursed through him. “Maybe it doesn’t work if you’ve already recovered your memories, or some of them, anyway.”
“Memory is a wound,” Huxley said, echoing his conclusion when Rhys had analysed the sample of Diseased tissue. “Once infected, you’re done.”
They should have been accustomed to the sat-phone’s signature chirp by now but still managed to flinch when it started up.
“At the risk of facing a court martial for mutiny,” Pynchon said, “I raise no objection to chucking that fucking thing over the side.”
Reaching for the device, Huxley felt a strong compulsion to do just that. But they had come so far and still knew so little. The phone-voice, for all its infuriatingly bland obliqueness, at least offered the prospect of enlightenment.
“How honest are we going to be?” he asked, finger hovering over the green button.
Rhys crossed and uncrossed her arms. “At this stage, we might as well just tell them everything.”
Huxley looked at Pynchon who grimaced as he replied with a shrug.
“Honesty it is,” Huxley said, hitting the button.
As usual there was no delay before the phone-voice asked its inevitable question: “Do you have casualties?”
“Plath transformed into… something unpleasant. She attacked Pynchon. We injured her but she escaped.”
“Is Pynchon dead?”
“No. But his condition is…” Huxley watched Pynchon raise an eyebrow, pain-filled eyes blinking slowly “… serious.”
Short pause, one click. “You will find another container has opened in the hold. Take the phone and examine the contents.”
Rhys followed Huxley down the ladder to the crew cabin where the lid of the previously sealed storage locker was now raised at a slight angle. Inside, they found a computer tablet sitting atop a suitcase-sized box of heavy duty plastic. The box had an LED panel and eleven-digit keypad on its upper side, the screen a blank pale blue. The tablet activated the instant Rhys picked it up and a map appeared on the screen: a simple representation of northern Europe. A red dot pulsed in the south-east of the British Isles and the phone-voice began speaking:
“What has been named the M-Strain Bacillus was first identified in London approximately eighteen months ago. You have seen the results of mass infection at first hand.” More dots appeared, forming a sprawling track from west to east. “Dieppe. The Hague. Oslo. Copenhagen. All cities where infection has taken hold. Infected subjects have also been identified in various locations throughout Poland, Belorussia and the Russian Federation. All borders have been closed for over a year, all civilian flights grounded and maritime trade suspended.”
“It’s carried on the wind,” Rhys said, taking advantage of a slight pause in the voice’s monologue. “The prevailing winds in the northern hemisphere blow east.”
“Correct.” The screen changed again, showing what appeared to Huxley’s eyes as a mass of white fibres sprouting from a central core. “The primary infection vector. An airborne spore produced after the expiry of an infected host. This vector rendered standard pandemic response plans ineffectual. Quarantine produces only a temporary delay in contagion as it does not require human contact to proliferate. Infection occurs both through inhalation or dermal absorption. Bio-hazard clothing offers a measure of protection but only in areas where the spores have already been detected. Once a sufficient number of victims has been amassed the spread is unstoppable.”
“Except in amnesiacs,” Huxley said.
“In the early stages of the outbreak numerous hospitals reported limited rates of infection among patients with Alzheimer’s, neurological injury or other illnesses involving symptomatic memory loss. Trials confirmed that, while such patients were not immune from the bacillus, they were highly resistant to it.”
“Meaning,” Rhys cut in, “you rounded up a load of people with Alzheimer’s, exposed them to the spore and timed how long it took them to die. Right?”
No pause. “Correct. For obvious reasons, subjects suffering from dementia could not undertake effective field research. Volunteers were sought for trials. Your mission is the outcome of those trials.”
“But this mission isn’t field research,” Huxley said. “Is it?”
The screen switched back to the map and zoomed in on London. The picture acquired more resolution as the city filled the screen, the simple graphic changing to a satellite image. At first it showed only a smear of fog covering the city from end to end, pink at the fringes and deep crimson at the western edge of the city. It reminded Huxley of one of the cells from the microscope display, that crimson blot the nucleus to something vast and malignant.
“Fog that isn’t fog,” Rhys said. “It’s the disease, isn’t it? The fog is made of those spores and we’ve been moving through it, breathing it, absorbing it for days.”
“Yes,” the phone-voice confirmed, as uninflected as ever. “The inoculant you administered has proven the most effective formulation yet.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble just to get us to this point.” Rhys tapped the crimson nucleus. “Why?”
The picture changed once more, still showing the same region of London but with the fog vanished to reveal a monochrome image of the city below. At first Huxley thought it had been blurred or corrupted. Streets were formed of fuzzy-edged lines, often disappearing completely into a discordant, irregular mess that bore a vague resemblance to a forest viewed from above.
“This is the most recent imaging radar scan of what is termed the Prime Infection Zone. In the early days of the outbreak a large number of infected gathered in this region to die. The reason for this was unknown for some time although it was assumed that its proximity to a sustainable water source was a primary factor. An estimated ten thousand people expired here within twenty-four hours, with the number increasing exponentially over the next seventy-two hours. The growths that emerged from the dead quickly combined to form the structure you see here. It has created a canopy of sorts that blocks sunlight and prevents surveillance of what may be occurring beneath. However—” the image altered, shifting from black and grey to pink and red “—thermal imaging indicates considerable biochemical activity. Also the spore count in this area is far higher than elsewhere.”
“It’s a nursery,” Rhys concluded. “Where the spores are born.”
“We believe this to be correct.”
“Then bomb it,” Huxley said. “Few thousand tonnes worth of incendiaries would do it.”
“Four months ago a thermobaric explosive device was dropped onto the central mass of the PIZ. It created a scorched area half a kilometre square. Within forty-eight hours the damage had disappeared from our scans. This mass is capable of repairing itself.”
“Drop a nuke. Nothing’s going to repair that.”
A pause and a click from the phone, then: “Please turn your attention to the case in the locker.”
He looked at the hard, rough plastic of the box with its as yet unchanged display screen. Then he looked at Rhys, knowing his face undoubtedly showed the same absurd mix of shock and understanding he saw on hers.
“You have to be kidding me,” he said.
“Any airdropped munition capable of damaging the PIZ creates more problems than it solves,” the phone-voice told them. “The blast would scatter spores over the northern hemisphere. It would also create a radiation cloud damaging to agriculture and long-term health. The device in the case is a low yield thorium bomb. Satellite X-ray scans of the PIZ indicate there are numerous deep hollows beneath the canopy. The blast from this device will incinerate the inner workings of the mass and create a localised but contained radiation plume that will destroy organic matter over the following months, including the spores.”
Rhys let out a laugh, shrill and short. She rose from a crouch, wandering the crew cabin, hand rubbing continually at her stubbled scalp. “Strictly a one-way trip, I guess,” she said in a breathless sigh she managed to keep from turning into a sob.
“You all volunteered for this mission,” the phone-voice said. “As did the members of the previous research missions. All mathematical modelling predictions came up with the same result and no margin of error: if the M-Strain Bacillus is not stopped, all human life on this planet will become extinct in nine to twelve months.”
As Huxley’s eyes lingered on the case, the memory pain surged to previously unknown levels, as did the cop instinct. Lies, Plath had said. Is this what she meant? “What happened to the other missions?” he asked the phone.
“The memory suppression surgery used in the prior attempts proved insufficient to ensure success. The pathogen is capable of repairing memory synapses as well as altering them. For this attempt, surgical interventions were augmented by gene therapy and use of an adjuvant to boost immune response and combat the pathogen’s ability to restore memory loss.”
“So,” Rhys said after a few calming breaths, “the red marks are a side effect of the inoculant?”
“Yes. You will have noticed they’re growing in size and lividity as the amount of bacillus in your system increases.”
“How long until it stops working?”
“Outcomes vary considerably depending on the subject, as you’ve seen.”
Huxley exchanged a long look with Rhys. Might as well tell them everything. “Plath said something,” he told the phone. “When she… changed. She said this was all her idea. What did she mean?”
“That is irrelevant…”
“No. No! NO!” He thumped a hand to the floor alongside the phone. “No more of that. You want us to carry your big firework into the heart of that thing you answer my question, or we’re not fucking going anywhere. Understand?”
Twenty seconds of silence, three slow clicks. “The volunteer you knew as Plath was a research physicist with an additional expertise in the biomedical applications of radiography. She was seconded to the team that oversaw initial subject trials as part of a joint international effort to combat the M-Strain Bacillus. She later contributed to the development of the thorium device. While this mission did not originate with her, she did form part of the planning staff and oversaw selection.”
“She’s a fucking psychopath,” Rhys grated, pausing her pacing to stare at the phone. “You must’ve known that.”
“Her personality profile raised concerns that were accommodated due to her expertise. The more troubling aspects of her character became apparent during the human trials stage.”
“The Alzheimer’s patients,” Huxley said. “She got a real kick watching them die, I bet. Playing God, she’d have loved that.”
“Her methods generated considerable discussion, however her results were inarguable.”
Rhys rested her back against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor. She looked at Huxley as she spoke, the clear and obvious question shining in moist, unblinking eyes. “So, the idea is we just stroll on in there, flip the switch and get atomised. I don’t know who I used to be, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a hero.”
“You have a ten-year-old son,” the phone-voice replied. The screen displayed a photograph of a boy, frozen in mid-run, casting a smile over his shoulder at the camera. Huxley thought he might have glimpsed some echo of Rhys’s face in the boy’s features but couldn’t be sure. He held the tablet up for her to see. She stared at it with welling tears but no glimmer of recognition.
“Pynchon has a husband, parents and two brothers,” the phone-voice went on, the tablet display running through a series of photographs. This time the familial resemblance was unmistakable and Huxley felt a pang of gratitude that Pynchon had been spared the sight of the family he didn’t remember. It was a favour the voice couldn’t reach him.
“Huxley, you have a wife.” He felt no surprise at recognising the woman on the screen from his dream, she even wore the same hat. Her smile was a bright, wonderful thing he couldn’t look at for long. He shuddered as the memory pain jolted through his head, unable to restrain himself from seeking knowledge, asking himself her name.
“Any reason you didn’t tell us this before?” he asked, closing his eyes when the pain became unbearable.
“Prior studies indicate the memory-blocking procedures can be eroded by repeated exposure to personal details. Efforts were made to ensure the mission featured no reminders of who you were. All of you were kept isolated from each other during training so there would be no risk of familiarity.”
“That’s why you’re a machine voice. No chance you might stir any memories.”
“Correct.”
“And now it doesn’t matter?”
“Now the risk is considered tolerable due to your evident resistance to the bacillus and the need for motivated reasoning.”
“Motivated reasoning?” He managed to smile. “You’re asking us to die for people who might as well not exist to us.”
“The entire human race is facing an extinction-level event. Norms of ethics and morality are no longer relevant.” A pause then a single click. “However, the studies did indicate the human capacity for hope in survival situations to be an important factor. Turn your attention to the display on the device.”
Leaning forward, Huxley saw that the LED screen now featured a number in black characters: 120.
“The readout is a timer,” the voice went on. “Time to detonation can be manually adjusted using the keypad. Once the device is activated you will have a maximum of one hundred and twenty minutes to return to the boat and attempt escape. The blast radius will be contained by the mass of the PIZ.”
“But we’re still infected.”
“You have demonstrated that the inoculant is an effective treatment. Further treatment will be required but our analysis indicates your chances of long-term survival can be estimated at ten per cent.”
“Ten per cent?” Rhys lunged for the phone, putting it to her mouth and shouting into the receiver. “Fuck you!” She tossed it to Huxley and made for the ladder. “Turn it off.”
“It doesn’t have an off switch.”
“Then just leave it here.” She started climbing. “We need to talk about this. All three of us.”