Extinction Game (26 page)

Things got hazy after that.

There are a variety of ways to get information out of people – drugs, torture, threats, even bribery. Marlon and Herschel opted for the first two. They kept me in one part of the basement,
Floyd in the other. I was bound and gagged and handcuffed to a chair and shot full of something that sent me drifting off into a borderland between wakefulness and dreaming. Every now and then they
took the gag off, and I mumbled answers to Herschel’s questions, hardly aware of what I was saying. They did the same to Floyd, then started dunking me face-first into a bucket of water until
I nearly passed out, before dragging me upright once more and demanding answers to questions that meant nothing to me.

Days passed in this way. I wondered what was happening back home, and what Alice might have told the police once she realized I was missing.

I started to get sick – more sick than I had ever felt in my whole life. I had trouble breathing, and sweat drenched my skin. I shivered as if I had been cast naked onto an ice floe and
set adrift. My tongue swelled in my mouth and I began to hallucinate. At one point I watched as Herschel and Marlon argued about whether it was worth keeping me alive, then I slipped back into
unconsciousness, wondering if I would die anyway before they finished bickering.

Then, the next morning, Marlon appeared beside me with a plastic ampoule filled with some kind of clear liquid and injected me with it. I rapidly got better; the fever subsided, and I began to
breathe more easily and be able to keep food down.

The next day my interrogation resumed. What did I know about the Haven? Was there anyone inside Red Harvest who was working for us?

The questions went on, and on, the two men’s anger only growing with each question I failed to answer adequately. Later that evening, I heard Floyd screaming from the next room as they
tortured him, only for the sound to be abruptly cut off. I listened as his torturers bickered yet again, and I felt sure Floyd had died of his injuries.

Then it hit me. Sometime in the next few days, or maybe even sooner, I would be next. They had, after all, been unable to extract any information from me whatsoever.

Later that night I somehow got one arm free of the thick tape securing me to my chair. They had been feeding me sporadically at best, and by now I had lost so much weight I was able to wriggle
free of my improvised restraints, although I nearly dislocated a shoulder in the process. I made my way through the doorway, noting that Floyd’s body was gone. The airlock had been
dismantled. I climbed the steps only to find the basement door locked.

I retreated into the shadows beneath the steps and waited a few hours, until I heard the jangle of keys. I had found a hammer lying on a workbench, and when Marlon came down the steps, I stepped
out of the shadows, swinging it at his head.

He collapsed to the ground without a sound, his legs folding beneath him. I kept swinging the hammer, lost to blind fury and half-crazed from torture and the terror of my impending death. I
recall little of what happened next, except that I found myself staring down at the pulped ruin of Marlon’s head, unable at first to connect that terrible sight with the bloody hammer still
gripped in one hand. Before that moment, I would never have believed I was capable of such awful violence.

I searched his body, finding a pistol tucked into his belt. I ran upstairs with the gun in my hand just as Herschel stepped in through the front door. He barely had time to look up and open his
mouth before I shot him in the head, the contents of his skull spattering against the door behind him.

I found Herschel’s mobile phone and tried to call Alice, but there was no signal. It was the same with the landline in the kitchen; when I picked it up, all I heard was a hiss of static,
and not even a dialling tone.

Then I glanced up and saw a calendar with days crossed out hanging on the wall, and realized I had been held captive for very nearly a whole fortnight. I stared at the date, hardly able to
believe it could have been so long, then searched around until I found some stale bread in a cupboard, stuffing it into my mouth until I retched and nearly passed out.

A little while later I made my way along the road on foot, through drizzling rain, until I reached the outskirts of Oxford. Everywhere I went I saw nothing but corpses, shrouded by great buzzing
clouds of flies. I remembered the ampoule with which Marlon had injected me, and how I had recovered from a desperate and inexplicable illness in a matter of hours.

I wandered through the deserted streets, barely able to stand the smell of death and rot, before I made my way back to the farmhouse, high on its hill.

I searched the whole place, from top to bottom, until I found a plastic tray containing four ampoules identical to the one Marlon had used on me. If there was any chance whatsoever Alice was
still alive, I knew I had to find her and inject her with it.

From a bedroom I grabbed a clean change of clothes that more or less fitted, and took the car keys from Herschel’s still-cooling fingers. I had wondered if perhaps there had been others
working here apart from Marlon and Herschel, but as I searched the house, I became convinced that they had been working here alone – although that did not preclude the possibility of other
Red Harvest groups, in other parts of the world, working in similar secrecy.

I drove the car as far as I could before the sheer number of empty vehicles scattered across the roads forced me to abandon it for a motorbike with a full tank.

It took me another two days to reach London, during which I found no one alive. I had acquired a hunting-rifle from a sporting goods shop, having become concerned over the packs of increasingly
feral dogs I was encountering. On my way through Ealing, I nearly came off my bike when someone, somewhere, started shooting at me, and I was forced to take a lengthy diversion before I could reach
home. I don’t know what happened to that person, but I strongly suspect they didn’t survive much longer.

And then, at last, I arrived home, and looked down at Alice, her face strangely peaceful in death. I sat there by the side of our bed and wept until the sun rose above city streets that were
silent for the first time in over a thousand years.

I buried Alice in our garden, the air full of the stink of putrefaction from the neighbouring houses. Then I left forever, making my way back to Oxford, and back to the
basement where my new life had been born. There were computers there, and my hope was that they would contain information that might help me understand how Marlon and Herschel had carried out their
act of genocide. If anyone else was alive out there in the rest of the world, they were going to need the antidote that had saved my own life.

But first, I wanted to see whether it might be possible to synthesize more than the pitiful four ampoules that remained in my possession.

It seemed strange to me that no one else came looking for Marlon or Herschel, although it soon became apparent to me, upon my return, that the two men had been preparing for a
lengthy journey. Perhaps it had been their intention to leave the farmhouse forever. I slept in an empty property closer to town for a good while, maintaining a watchful eye to see if Red Harvest
sent anyone to find out what had happened to the two cultists, but no one ever came. Why this should be remained a mystery, at least for the moment.

Eventually my fear subsided, and for a while, as I carried out my investigation into the antidote, the farmhouse became my home. I buried Floyd much as I had buried Alice, and simply discarded
the bodies of the other two; as far as I was concerned, the feral dogs now wandering the countryside could have them.

There was a stockpile of fuel and a couple of portable diesel generators within the farmhouse sufficient to supply me with electricity for the foreseeable future. From the computers, I learned
that the farmhouse was only one of a number of distribution points scattered around the globe, and that the Haven – Red Harvest’s central base of operations – was located in
Maine, on the east coast of the United States, near a town called Biddeford.

I watched the skies for contrails and scanned the radio waves for any sign of human life, but there was none. Even so, I could still not bring myself to believe what I would soon know to be
true, that the human race was as good as extinct. I distracted myself with feverish work, and as I explored the information stored on the computers I slowly came to understand that the antidote I
had been injected with was only of limited efficacy. Each dose was good for half a year at best. To stay alive beyond that would require further doses. Synthesizing it was out of the question
– I lacked the necessary equipment, and all the indications seemed to be there were enormous, pre-prepared batches stored at the Biddeford Haven.

If I wanted to live any longer than the next several months, I would have no choice but to visit this Haven.

I began to prepare for a solo journey that would take me all the way across the Atlantic. I had sailed around Europe’s coasts in my youth, so I searched moorings and
harbours until I found a forty-foot yacht that needed minimal work to make it seaworthy.

I find it hard to remember my state of mind during all this. I know that I certainly contemplated suicide. The loneliness was dreadful beyond imagining. But such thoughts never came close to
becoming actions. Something within me drove me to live at all costs. I simply would not,
could not
, allow myself to die.

Even so, time was passing all too quickly, and so I set sail barely three months after I had first stumbled out into the dawn of a new world, my shirt soaked in another man’s blood.

I won’t belabour the trials and terrors of that first ocean voyage. Suffice to say that, when I finally reached American soil, it was a thousand kilometres farther south than I had
intended. Powerful storms had taken their toll on my yacht, and I sailed her as far north as I could before she finally ran aground in heavy squalls, still a hundred kilometres south of Biddeford.
After I struggled to shore, I worked my way through a variety of vehicles in order to drive the rest of the way.

The Haven, when I finally reached it, proved to be a sprawling ranch with numerous outbuildings, all contained within a tall security fence with cameras posted around the perimeter. I walked the
last six kilometres there, moving only at night, grasping a rifle in both hands. I holed up in the cabin of an abandoned truck until the morning, watching the compound through binoculars, but it
was clear there were absolutely no signs of life or movement. In fact, the Haven appeared to be just as empty and deserted as anywhere else.

I waited until the next evening before cutting my way through the fence and sneaking up towards one of the buildings. When I looked inside and saw long-dead corpses, I knew death had not spared
the cultists after all. I had my answer for why no one had ever come looking for Marlon or Herschel.

The carnage extended throughout the rest of the compound. The main building, a two-storey structure that looked as if it had started out as some rich man’s summerhouse, had a makeshift
barricade built across its front steps, while inside I found a cache of ampoules that seemed to have been deliberately smashed.

I explored further within, finding a dozen more corpses, their bony wrists secured with plastic ties. Judging by the tilt of their heads and the dark stains all around them, it was clear their
throats had been cut.

After a while I figured out what had happened from bits and pieces of information: there had been a rebellion of some kind. The cult’s leaders had used the supplies of antidote to control
their followers, dispensing it only to those who were in their favour. Anyone who didn’t toe the line, it seemed, simply died once the antidote stopped working. I found the evidence in the
minutes of mob trials at which the former cult leaders had been found guilty of betraying their own stated principles, before undergoing immediate execution.

Beyond that, I can’t say for certain just what had happened. But in the years that followed, I certainly speculated. I wondered if perhaps only an inner circle of the cult had known about
the grand plan to wipe out humanity. And, once the deed had been irrevocably done, perhaps all they needed to do, to keep the rest of the cultists in line, was to threaten to withhold the
antidote.

But their leaders were few, and their followers many. Once the promised paradise on Earth failed to materialize, that controlling minority – I felt increasingly certain – must have
been faced with overwhelming opposition to their rule. And if those smashed ampoules were anything to judge by, those in charge must have been just as petty and venal as the billions they had
sentenced to death. It looked as if they had destroyed the remaining supplies of the antidote rather than allow the rebels to seize it.

With the existing supplies of the antidote destroyed, how was I, then, to survive?

I found a place to sleep in a deserted dormitory within the compound, then spent the next several days looking for anything that might possibly help me survive longer than the next few months.
Eventually I found a well-equipped laboratory, but most of the equipment had either been smashed to pieces or burned. This at least explained why the rebels had been unable to synthesize any more
antidote themselves.

It took another week of searching, but finally I discovered an unharmed cache of the antidote. It was hidden in a crate at the back of a barn on the very edge of the property, along with lab
workbooks detailing the requisite formulae to synthesize more.

I soon formulated a plan that would give me purpose in the coming years. First, I would search for other survivors, if they were out there. Somewhere in the world, there had to be secure
facilities with people surviving on canned air, or in underground military complexes built to withstand nuclear or biological attack.

I was telling myself a lie, of course: one that gave me a reason to hold my grief and anger at bay, not to mention the dreadful guilt I felt at the thought that I could have found some way to
escape sooner, to warn people of what was happening. Sometimes, the grief gave way to anger, and in my mind I called myself a coward.