Deciding they needed to move faster, they divested themselves of any excess weight. Rhys surrendered her carbine for the combination of pistol and flame-thrower. Huxley kept his carbine and pistol but dumped everything else save the bomb. They both retained their night-vision goggles, electing to spare the batteries until needed. Before setting off, they gulped down protein bars and drank the remaining water in their canteens. With only a mile to go there seemed little point in saving it. Huxley hadn’t realised the scale of his hunger until his first bite, wolfing down the whole bar and quickly unwrapping another. He wondered if his hunger arose from the imminence of his own demise, some innate, desperate desire to accrue sensation before the chance to do so disappeared for ever. Or he was just tired and really hungry.
Beyond the street sign arching over the junction the growth columns became denser and more numerous, forming a forest of sorts which soon narrowed into something resembling catacombs. Street lights continued to flicker among it all, meaning they didn’t need to resort to the goggles. Still, it was an unnervingly quiet place of plentiful shadows and yet more floodwater, so the stink was as bad as ever.
“Raised some interesting questions, didn’t he?” Rhys asked, leading the way once more while Huxley followed with the bomb. The density of the growths obscured much of the urban landscape but the edges of roadways and pavements were easily discerned, enabling them to follow a reasonably straight line.
“Who?” Huxley asked.
“The jigsaw man. What he said about the disease. Doesn’t just feed off memories, it changes them. Like it needs us to hate, needs our rage. My guess is hormones act as a stimulus, adrenaline, cortisone, all the chemical soup that churns when you’re stressed. That’s its fuel.”
“Makes sense.” Huxley spoke in a cautious mutter, concerned by the rapid animation of Rhys’s speech. Aggressive. Irrational, maybe? Words the phone-voice would have said. Words he thought now.
“And to do that it has to play with our thoughts, change our memories,” Rhys went on. “Makes me wonder. About Dickinson, I mean. Had she really been abused or was it just something the M-Strain cooked up to make her crazy?”
“Also raises the possibility that Plath might not be the psycho we think she is.”
“Oh, she’s every bit the psycho we think she is. I doubt the M-Strain needed any help with her. She had a whole headful of bad shit to draw on already. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the people who survived longest in this place without showing signs of mutation were the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the selfish, deluded fucks who do so well in this shitty world…”
“Rhys…”
“… and why not? Why wouldn’t they? We already made a fucked-up world for them to flourish in, a world where all the greedy, thieving liars get to rule the rest of us. Why wouldn’t they flourish in this one too?” She had come to halt now, shoulders slumping in fatigue although her invective flowed thick and fast. “The first soldiers. Who were they? Not a coincidence. Can’t be…”
“Rhys.”
She started at the hardness of his voice, falling silent with a gasp. She didn’t turn and he saw her tremble.
“Have you remembered anything?” he asked her.
She didn’t speak for long enough to make him acutely aware that he had both hands full with a nuclear explosive device. Should she choose to immolate him he would have great difficulty drawing his pistol in time. However, when she did finally turn, his fear dissipated at the sight of her face. Instead of a picture of delusion he saw only grief. No deformity and no unreasoning hate. Just a profound sorrow that was, in its own way, just as hard to look upon.
“That’s just the point,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I looked at my son and I felt nothing. There should have been something, shouldn’t there? If he was real. If I was really a mother. There should be something. But I didn’t know him. I don’t even dream about him. I just dream about that fucking ER shift. Whatever they did to us, it’s permanent. Even if we make it out of here, the people we were died before this whole journey ever began.”
“He’s real.” Huxley removed a hand from the bomb case to grip her shoulder, drawing her closer. “As real as me and you and the woman I’m married to. We have to hold on to that. It’s all we have.”
She rested her forehead against his chest, allowing herself a few gasping sobs before drawing back. “I just wish they’d told me his name.”
They found the first flower a short while later. The catacombs narrowed for a time then opened out to create cavernous tunnels. For the first time since leaving the river Huxley saw fog again. It lay in a thick bank towards the end of the largest tunnel, perhaps indicating a larger space, one that might even be open to the air.
“Pretty,” Rhys commented, pausing next to a mound of growths. Moving closer Huxley perceived a vague resemblance to an embracing couple. Had they been lovers? Friends? Strangers even, seeking some comfort from another human body in the face of oblivion. The object of Rhys’s interest sprouted from what he thought might have been the head of the larger figure: a short stem crowned by a closed cup of dark-red petals.
“Haven’t noticed much plant life,” Rhys added. “Every tree or bush we’ve seen has been dead or close to it.”
“I don’t think it’s a plant,” Huxley said. He nodded to the fog-shrouded tunnel ahead. More dark-red flowers covered its floor and curving walls. Moving closer, he saw these were open, the petals drawn back to reveal a mouth-like opening. Glancing ahead, he found the flowers became thicker in number as he began to emerge from the tunnel, petals spread even wider to form a carpet of red blossoms stretching away into the most impenetrable crimson haze he had seen yet. Cars, trucks, and buses rose from the field, blanketed into vague outlines by the flowers.
“They’re responsive to light,” Rhys said, coming to his side. She activated the flame-thrower’s igniter and stooped, bringing it close to one of the half-opened blossoms. The petals twitched and spread, a small but visible pink cloud of particulate matter emerging from the mouth in a gentle puff. Rhys straightened, surveying the swathe of flowers before them. “The nursery of the M-Strain Bacillus,” she said, turning to Huxley, brows arched in an obvious question.
“We’re not quite at the heart yet.” He took a firmer hold on the bomb case and resumed wading his way through the flowers. The ground felt uneven beneath his boots, rough growth mounds interspersed with infrequent patches of bare tarmac and pavement. “We haven’t reached the stadium.”
“Twickenham Stadium.” She fell in alongside. “Sounds very quaint, don’t you think? Almost Hobbit-esque. Wonder what they played there.”
“Soccer,” he said. “It’s always soccer here, even though they call it football.”
“Rugby.”
They froze. The voice had come from the fog, echoing in a way that sounded far from natural. Front, behind, right, left. Huxley couldn’t tell. They had drawn close to one of the overgrown buses, Rhys training the flame-thrower on it as the most obvious hiding place. Huxley crouched, setting down the bomb case to unsling his carbine.
“They played rugby,” the voice said. Despite the echo Huxley had no trouble recognising it. His carbine sight tracked over a field of red blossoms that merged with the haze about twenty feet away. He saw no movement and when Plath spoke again, he still couldn’t discern a location.
“I have to confess, I never thought you two would make it this far,” she told them, her tone lightly conversational. “Always thought it would be just Pynchon and me at the end. All the models predicted it.”
“That’s really fascinating,” Rhys replied, face set in a mask of eager animus. “Why not come on over and we’ll talk about it some more?”
A faint, hollow laugh. Hearing a soft, rhythmic ticking to his right, Huxley jerked the carbine up, the sight revealing beads of moisture detaching themselves from an overgrown car’s shattered wing mirror.
“So keen to kill me, Doctor?” Plath asked. “I guess the Hippocratic oath doesn’t survive amnesia.”
“First do no harm.” Rhys pivoted slowly, eyes bright and finger tense on the flame-thrower’s trigger. “You are nothing but harm. I’d guess you were a pestilence long before all this shit came along.”
Another sound, a soft rustling, Huxley seeing only a swirl of displaced mist.
“Pestilence is a silly word.” Plath’s words were accompanied by a weary sigh. “It suggests that sickness is somehow an aberration in the environment we evolved to live in. In fact the opposite is true. This world is designed to kill us and we are designed to live only long enough to reproduce. That is the true balance of nature. I can see it now. Disease is not an aberration, even this one, despite its unique origin. We are the aberration. A species so successful it eventually devours its environment and secures its own doom. What is happening now is merely a necessary corrective.”
Rhys took her hand from the flame-thrower’s trigger to pat Huxley’s arm, nodding urgently at the bus. When he replied with a doubtful grimace, she added a hard squeeze of her hand for emphasis. He nodded, reaching down to take hold of one of the bomb case handles. Rhys started towards the flower-shrouded vehicle, moving low and slow while he followed, dragging the case.
“Don’t you want to know?” Plath asked them as they skirted the bus. Huxley strained to discern some sound from within the vehicle, hearing nothing. Rhys, however, remained fixed on it, ploughing an arcing line through the flowers as she led them closer.
“Know what?” Huxley called back, hoping the answer would reveal a target.
“Why, the origin of course. The genesis of the M-Strain Bacillus.”
“Sure.” His eyes roved the misted flowers, carbine aimed one handed. “Tell us all about it.”
A pause during which he entertained the absurd image of Diseased and deformed Plath stepping up to a podium, notes in hand, a professor about to deliver her keynote lecture. “It’s both surprising and mundane,” she said finally. “Predictable and incredible.”
This time Huxley had a definite sense that she was closer. He reached out, patting Rhys’s shoulder to bring her to a stop. She halted with a visible effort, Huxley sensing a desperate keenness to unleash her flames on the bus.
“It’s all about hubris in the end, you see,” Plath went on. “The arrogant conceit that has possessed humanity since an ape first struck sparks from flint. The delusion that we can transcend the natural laws that bind us. Always we are driven to understand the world, not for the pleasure of enlightenment, but for control. For power. We are a species engaged in an endless quest to bend nature to our will. Specifically, in this case, the power of mutation.”
Rhys let out an annoyed grunt. Huxley divined she was torn between curiosity and her keen desire to watch Plath burn. “Tell us something we don’t know,” she called out. “Of course mutation is a component of the M-Strain. That’s obvious.”
“Mutation is the engine of evolution,” Plath responded. “But it is fundamentally random, unpredictable. All major advances in natural selection take generations to appear, thousands of years of labour by what Dawkins called the Blind Watchmaker. But what if mutation could be guided, directed, controlled?”
Although her voice still possessed the frustrating echo, cop instinct drew Huxley’s focus away from the bus. Way too obvious a hiding place. He turned, crouching back to back with Rhys, setting down the bomb case once again to take a firm hold of the carbine.
“The work of millennia could be done in decades, or less,” Plath went on. “Diseases cured, intelligence enhanced – higher, faster, stronger. Human potential unlocked to the fullest. There was a man – you won’t be surprised to hear that he was a man with a huge amount of money. A man as terrified of his own mortality as he was of losing his wealth and power. The kind of terror that drove him to invest his fortune in gene research, viral research, synaptic research, a grand project to connect human will with evolution. He wanted to be all he could be, all he wanted to be. Instead, he gave us the ability to become our worst nightmares, and in so doing spelled the doom of the world.”
“The M-Strain is artificial,” Rhys said.
“Of course it is. Only humanity could have produced something so perfectly cruel. So insidious. Nature’s cruelty is inherent, but also unsentimental. Sadism is a feature but also a teacher. A cat that doesn’t enjoy killing will go hungry, but only humans torture for sheer pleasure. In that sense, the M-Strain is humanity distilled into its purest form. We have always been a nightmare.”
“So some rich guy created this thing,” Huxley said, scanning the fog for some betraying twitch or vortex. “And dumped it in a warehouse in west London.”
“Not quite. Creating a pathogen of such complexity and danger in complete secrecy required a great deal of effort. Covert labs were established in various locations. The work of years at the cost of billions. The London site was merely a testing station. Despite being one of the richest cities in the world, it also boasts some of the worst poverty and homelessness statistics. Finding subjects no one would miss was not particularly difficult.”
Huxley detected a cadence to her voice that spoke of both nostalgia and regret. “You were part of it,” he said. “That’s what made you so useful to this mission. You helped create the M-Strain.”
“I’m not sure the word ‘create’ works in this context. I was merely one of many who facilitated its birth, a birth that was inevitable. It might surprise you to learn that we didn’t know what we were making, the nature of our child was too complex, too powerful. It was never intended to be contagious, never intended to be something that could reproduce itself. Our billionaire paymaster envisioned a minion bringing him a single pill on a silver plate once a year to maintain his godhood. But you can’t tap into the very essence of evolution itself and expect to control it.”
“Tell me something,” Rhys said, Huxley feeling her tense in readiness. “Did it get out or did you set it loose?”
The subsequent pause was long, Huxley detecting the first sign of movement in the fog: a sudden spiral in the mist accompanied by a flurry of displaced flower petals. He resisted the impulse to fire, knowing whatever Plath was now, she was moving too fast to hit, at least at this range.
“She’s not in the bus,” he whispered to Rhys just before Plath started speaking again. She was closer now, but still maddeningly unable to place.
“You think so poorly of me, Doctor. And yes, I’ll confess to certain… predilections that place me outside of societal norms. But, much as I’ve come to embrace its necessity, all this isn’t on me. This is where we arrive at the mundane aspect of the story. You see, it all came down to a combination of bureaucracy and laziness. Somewhere in the logistics train a mid-level project manager decided to save a few cents on a security protocol with only a ninety-nine per cent assurance rating. In a complex system, one per cent is a huge margin of error. A bored security guard took a little too long on his piss break and one of the test subjects escaped. It wasn’t long before the authorities picked him up and he was still rational enough to tell them all about his ordeal. They tried to be circumspect about it, keep it under wraps. No scandal. No criminal charges. After all, what government wouldn’t want to get its paws on something so powerful. But, of course, it was far, far too late. I’ll spare you the tedious genies and bottles metaphors.”
“They arrested you,” Huxley said, carbine shifting left and right of where he had seen the flurry of petals, widening the arc each time. “Recruited you to work on the cure.”
“Recruited is far too pleasant a word for what they did to me. The more desperate a power structure becomes the more vicious their methods. I was fully cooperative from the start, but that didn’t stop them claiming I might be holding something back. I believe there was a good deal of basic vindictiveness in all their torments. Eventually, as the outbreak got worse, they set their pain-inducing nerve agents aside and made me a conscript to the International Outbreak Response Team. I think you can guess the rest.”
Another flurry of petals ten yards to the right. “She’s circling,” Huxley whispered to Rhys. They turned together, maintaining their back-to-back crouch.
“You said it was your idea,” Rhys called out. “Get a bunch of volunteers together, wipe their memories, dose them with an inoculant and give them a thorium bomb to deliver. Guess you didn’t realise they were going to send you along for the ride.”
“It was a bit of a shock when I started to recover my memories, that’s true. Then, when I realised the truth about the inoculant, I started to get angry. A rare emotion for me.”
Huxley’s mind flashed to the marks he and Rhys bore, the marks that had blossomed into raw wetness on Pynchon’s body. Marks he couldn’t remember seeing on Plath. “Your injector was empty,” he said. “They vaccinated us but not you.”
“Vaccinated?” Plath let out an ugly sound that he assumed to be a laugh but resembled more a grating screech. “You still think that’s what it was? You fucking idiot. And my applicator wasn’t empty, it just didn’t work on me. So it goes with experiments at the edge of known science. All the brightest medical minds in the entire world tried for months to come up with a working vaccine and the best they could do was invasive brain surgery. The absence of memory is your only protection, and it won’t last. And as for your bomb…”
Her charge was so fast Huxley barely had time to bring the carbine to bear, pivoting to train it on the explosion of petals, raised like a wake by something dark and very fast. A stunning, iron-hard impact to his side, casting him into the air with so much force he turned a full somersault. A yell escaped him as he collided with the ground, sharp, deep pain and grinding of bone leaving him in no doubt Plath had cracked most if not all of the ribs on his right side. His carbine was gone, even though his hand kept reflexively pulling an invisible trigger.
Carbine! He rolled amid the flowers, still shouting, shock robbing him of any action but ineffectual flailing. A roaring whoosh sounded from Rhys’s flame-thrower, but it was short-lived, followed by a scream and a series of crunching thuds. Get your fucking weapon!
Spittle spouted from clenched teeth as he forced action into a stunned form, rolling onto his front and blinking tears as he cast about for the carbine. It lay at least three yards away, a distance that had suddenly acquired marathon proportions. He began to crawl towards it, grunting with each heave of his damaged body, blood colouring the spit that flew from his lips. His vision swam in concert with the waves of agony that swept him, but he didn’t allow himself to stop. By the time he clamped a hand to the carbine’s stock, there was a good deal more blood than saliva flowing from his mouth.
He tried to stand but collapsed instantly, instead forcing himself into a sitting position, bringing the carbine to his shoulder. As he aimed it, his vision blurred again, clearing by sheer effort of will to reveal a figure so impossibly deformed he required several precious seconds to accept it as real.
Plath’s elongated face remained much the same as that parting, leering glimpse he caught before she fled the boat, apart from the blackened and scorched flesh that covered its left upper portions, the result of Rhys’s final blast with the flame-thrower. Everything else that had made Plath a human being was different. Her body was stretched to a length of at least three metres, torso far narrower than her hips. Her arms featured two additional joints and had grown by several feet. Her legs were even longer, jagged arcs of muscle and sinew sprouting from her rear. The most severe change was the fact that she had acquired two more legs, both positioned at her waist. They were smaller than the others, the flesh that formed them raw and wet in places. These and the rear legs ended in a sprawled, clawed parody of human feet, while her arms narrowed to irregular spikes.
She dangled these over a stunned, possibly lifeless Rhys, arms and legs splayed, blood leaking from nose and mouth. Huxley saw no animation in her at all. For some reason, Plath was reluctant to impale her helpless prey with her spikes, though her still smoking, part-ruined face displayed naked hate as she leaned close to Rhys, hissing a single word: “Bitch!”
Huxley squeezed the carbine’s trigger, too driven by pain and panic to remember to flip the safety off. His hands shuddered as he got a thumb to the lever, flicking it to full-auto by which time Plath had closed the distance between them in a few bounds of her impossible limbs. A blurring swipe of her spiked arms sent the carbine tumbling from his grasp before she brought the enlarged foot of one of her new-grown legs down on his chest.
Pain exploded in a blinding flash. He would have screamed if there had been any air left in his lungs.
“Just wait a while longer,” Plath said, her blurred bulk retreating from sight. “We haven’t finished our little chat.”
He lay gasping, surprised by the fact that he was capable of such a thing. Although, the bloody spray that accompanied each gasp made him doubt it would last much longer.
“A thorium bomb.” He heard Plath laugh again, looking up to see her crouched over the bomb case. “I’m insulted they thought I would actually fall for that. Wouldn’t’ve worked anyway, the roots of this nursery go far too deep. A hundred megatons wouldn’t be enough.”
Huxley sagged as another wave of pain swept through him, his gaze slipping from Plath, becoming filled by the sight of the red-petalled flowers. It was then that he saw it.
“That wasn’t my idea, by the way,” Plath went on, her voice dimmed as the flowers captured his full attention. Black. He flailed a hand at the closest flower. Its petals were still mostly red, but were also speckled in black.
“I wanted to call it a biological dispersal unit, but they were worried Rhys would see through it. Some sort of nuke was considered more convincing. I guess they bargained on the fact that fissionable devices were way outside my specialty.”
Huxley coughed, a thick wad of blood emerging from his mouth to land on the nearest flower. Instantly, its petals darkened, stem wilting until it was a pitiful blackened remnant. The other flowers nearby also withered; wherever his blood had touched them, they turned black, and it was spreading. Looking around, he saw that he lay in the centre of a widening pool of darkness, flowers dying all around.
Antibody. The word came back to him in a flash, accompanied by the image of it scribbled in blood. Antibodies… That’s what we are…
Plath loomed above him, spiked limbs descending to pierce the ground on either side of his head. Huxley’s eyes slipped towards the one next to his right ear, the one she had used to impale Pynchon. It was thinner than the other, scarred, reduced.
“That’s the thing about ignorance,” Plath said, lowering herself so that her face was only inches away. “It’s so very dangerous. But not for me. I learned at an early age that to successfully navigate this world, I would need to learn just about everything I could, such as the fact that there’s no such thing as a thorium bomb.”
Her left eye was sunken beneath a mass of blackened flesh, the other gleaming clear and bright as she leaned closer. “I read your file, Special Agent,” she said, voice a solicitous whisper now. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I had ways of securing access. Such a brilliant career you pissed away. Did they tell you you’re still married? That beautiful wife of yours.” Her ruined features formed a taunting parody of a sympathetic frown. “Think she’s waiting for you…?”
The woman on the beach, the way she looked at him. A goodbye? A final rejection of the drunken failure she’d married? He didn’t know why, but he didn’t think so.
Huxley took a long, shuddering breath, fixing his gaze on Plath’s one eye, shining with the cruelty that defined her, and spat a thick wad of blood directly into it.
Her reaction was spectacular in its immediacy and violence; massive, deformed body rearing, twisted limbs thrashing as a scream of agonised rage erupted from her throat. Huxley fought through his pain to roll to the left, avoiding Plath’s withered spike as it stabbed into the ground an inch from his back. He kept rolling, shouting with the pain of his broken ribs, until the drumbeat of her multiple limbs receded, craning his neck to see her engaged in a crazed dance across the field. A constant stream of hate-filled, garbled obscenities leaked from her gaping mouth, along with a torrent of thick, dark blood. She danced a while longer then slumped, shuddering in pain, and Huxley felt a flare of hope that she would simply subside into death.
Unwilling to trust to luck, he looked for his carbine, finding nothing but more blackened flowers. Pistol, he remembered, hand moving to his holster, finding it empty. Probably lost when she first hit him. Shit…
“YOU FUCKER!” The screeching challenge was dispiriting in its loudness, as was the determination Plath displayed in heaving herself upright on her deformed limbs. “Pathetic, worthless, fucking loser…” she raged, each word accompanied by a thick gobbet of both flesh and blood as she clawed her way back to him, drawn, he assumed, by nothing more than predatory instinct. Both sides of her face were black now, one burned, the other shrivelled and sunken like the flowers that had felt the touch of his blood.
Huxley scrabbled back, heels scraping over dead, blackened growths and tarmac. From the way Plath continually stumbled in pursuit, coughing out chunks of her insides all the while, he attempted to find some comfort in knowing she would be dead shortly after she killed him. It didn’t work.
The stream of flame licked over Plath’s spiked arms first, bringing her to a sudden halt. A screech even more painfully loud than before pealed out as she pivoted towards the origin of the flames. The fire stream grew more intense as its source closed on its target. The blazing yellow-orange tongue stripped away much of Plath’s upper mass, wreathing her in roiling black smoke and swirling embers. Rhys appeared at the edge of the heat haze, limping through the smoke, flame-thrower still casting its blazing cascade onto Plath’s diminishing husk. Rhys halted and fell to her knees, keeping her finger clamped to the weapon’s trigger until it expended all its remaining fuel. A few final dregs of burning chemicals arced out to join the flames consuming Plath before it guttered to silence.
Huxley watched Rhys slump, expecting to hear the slowly diminishing beat of his own heart accompanied by a dimming of vision. Instead, he convulsed in an energetic bout of pain and coughed more blood onto already dead flowers.
“You don’t sound so good,” Rhys croaked, turning towards him, her face a mess of mingled soot and blood. “No offence.”
“It’s just… a flesh wound.” He laughed then wished he hadn’t, although the resulting agony served to dispel his remaining fatigue, at least for now. What felt like at least five minutes of painful gasping enabled him to lever himself onto his knees. Another minute and, incredibly, he was on his feet. He clutched at his ruined ribs, fearing that some of what was inside would spill out if he didn’t, staggering towards Rhys.
“Thought she’d killed you,” he said by way of redundant commentary.
“Yeah?” She managed to raise an arm, pointing a wavering finger at Plath’s smoking remains. “Well, I fucking killed her, didn’t I?”
She winced and lowered her arm, Huxley seeing that the mark on her neck had grown in size, joined by several more. Like Pynchon’s just before the end, the texture was different, glistening wet and blistered instead of rough. Putting a hand to his collarbone he shuddered at the touch, the pain, sharper and deeper than all the others, communicating itself to his back and thighs where he knew more marks would be appearing.
“Injury,” he said. “That’s what triggers the final stage.”
Rhys squinted up at him. “What?”
He didn’t reply, instead looking around until he found the bomb case. Stumbling towards it, he fell to his knees and dragged it closer, peering at the timer.
“Don’t!” Rhys said, not quite managing to shout as he punched in the sequence and activated the countdown. “We’re not there yet.”
Huxley set the bomb case down and turned the timer display towards her, the readout already counting down: 00:28, 00:27, 00:26…
“Stop!” Rhys groaned and forced herself upright. “Stop it!” She managed only a few feet before falling, staring at him with desperate eyes. “We can’t… not now… not here…”
“A thorium bomb,” Huxley said, watching the timer tick down: 00:15, 00:14, 00:13… “There’s no such thing, according to Plath.”
“You…” Rhys clutched at the black remnants of flowers, dragging herself closer. “You can’t… believe her…”
“No.” Huxley inclined his head in agreement. “Not about everything. But this—” he tapped the timer display “—this I do.”
00:06, 00:05, 00:04…
“Huxley!” She flailed an outstretched hand at him, fingers splayed. “Please!”
“That’s not my name.”
00:00.
The timer blinked the zeroes twice and went dark. Huxley stared at the case for the space of two seconds before weakly shoving it away. “And this is not a bomb.”
He hissed through clenched teeth as he regained his feet, moving to slump down beside Rhys, helping her sit up. “See?” he said, tugging the collar of his fatigues to reveal the raw, expanded mark. He could feel it pulsing now, like something ready to burst. “It was never a bomb. It’s us.” He took her head in his hands and pressed their foreheads together. “We’re the bomb. We always were. Survival, remember? This mission was all about survival. We had to survive long enough to get here.”
She pressed herself against him, the violence of her shudders telling of pain that matched or exceeded his. “I guess…” she grunted eventually, putting both hands to his shoulders to raise herself up. “We should do… what we came to do.”
He looked up to see her offering a hand, a deep, bitter weariness bringing a firm refusal to his lips. The woman on the beach… My wife. Rhys’s son. Pynchon’s husband. Whoever the hell Golding and Dickinson did this for.
Huxley took her hand, almost pulling her over as he hauled himself to his feet. They had to hold on to each other to prevent falling as they made their way onwards, although they stumbled many times. Their destination was obvious now, a bank of fog so thick it resembled a vast, formless bruise. They both bled as they walked, leaving a trail of blackened, dying flowers in their wake. Huxley could feel the inoculant working within him, a feverish, busy nausea that wracked him with pulses of the purest agony, making each step an exercise in masochism. Rhys sobbed with the effort, but every time he thought she might fall, she gripped him tighter and kept moving.
When the bruise filled his vision Huxley began to make out a form within it, broad and monolithic in scale. “The stadium,” he said, the effort of speaking causing him to convulse and vomit up a chunk of something wet but solid. He would have fallen if Rhys hadn’t jerked him back to a measure of sensibility. He straightened from an agonised crouch to take in the sight of the stadium. The fog remained thick but he could make out the dense mass of flowers that covered it.
“This is where… they came,” Rhys gasped. “Thousands… came to die here.”
Huxley hugged her closer and they walked into the fog. A few minutes of stumbling brought them in sight of a huge wall of flowers. Huxley looked up to see the stadium was completely shrouded in blooms, each one with petals spread wide to cast out what Plath had called a necessary corrective.
“Maybe she was right,” he said in a low, slurred mumble.
Rhys shifted against him, unable to raise her head. “What?”
“Plath… Saving the world… For what? So they just…” He raised his arm, flailing at the wall of flowers. “Just do this… all over again.”
Rhys’s answer came in a soft sob accompanied by a movement he took as a shrug. “Maybe… they won’t.”
Pynchon’s husband. Rhys’s son. My wife. “Yeah.” He started forward again, pulling her along. “Maybe.”
They stopped a foot from the flower wall, Rhys’s eyes leaking red tears as she blinked at the barrier. “No way in.”
“I don’t think… it matters.” Huxley looked back the way they had come, their passage marked by a trail of withering blackness slowly expanding across the field. The ground beneath had a wet sheen to it, a sludge like softness that caused it to subside in places, fissures appearing as the corruption spread from flowers to roots. The roots of this nursery go far too deep…
He tottered back from Rhys, taking her hand. “Ready?”
Incredibly, she managed to smile at him and reply with a weak squeeze of her fingers. Words, however, were beyond her now. Looking into her veined, reddened eyes he knew she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing a smiling boy whose name she couldn’t remember.
He smiled back and together they turned, walking into the wall. At first the flowers shrank from their mere touch, subliming into colourless threads. The barrier thickened a few feet in, the flowers still dying but their number so great they created a dense, soft mass. Huxley kept walking for as long as he could, forcing steps from his shuddering legs. When, inevitably, they gave way, Rhys fell with him, their hands still clasped. As the withering growths embraced him, the marks defacing his body opened to spill forth their final torrent of poison. There was pain, then cold, then a perverse feeling of connection. It may have been the product of a fading mind, but he felt he could feel the entirety of this monstrous nursery dying, the poison leaking from his sundered body spreading to every stem and petal. He took joy from its death.
The last few pulses of his heart stirred the shielded corners of his brain as it mistook death for sleep, and in those seconds he dreamed. A woman on a beach, hair trailing in the salted wind. She turned to him, face drawn in a terrible sadness.
“Don’t go,” she told him, pleaded with him. “We only just found each other again.”
“I have to,” he said, and she crushed herself to him. He held her as she wept, savouring the feel of her against him, the smell of her hair as the wind played it across his face. Shifting to place her lips close to his ear she whispered something.
“My name,” he stuttered with the last fluttering spasm of his body, still holding Rhys’s hand, but it was lifeless now. “She said… my name…”