Fever (Flu) (22 page)

“What do you mean,
dead
?” Ciaran asked.

“I mean, like, not living. Horror movie stuff where people climb out of their own graves.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Have you ever watched a zombie film?”

“Of course. I used to love them,” Ciaran said. “Well, that’s what seems to be going on here.” Ciaran laughed, but Colin looked at him sternly. He stopped laughing.

“The guys who own this house,” Colin said, “we found them dead when we got here, lying side-by-side. But one of them didn’t stay dead. He got up and started moving around. He attacked me, and I had to—” Colin sighed, shook his head bitterly. “Outside is clear, though. Not a sinner for miles. So maybe we can wait it out here. Maybe the army or the government will get their shit together, beat it, and we’ll be able to go back to the city.”

Ciaran looked back to the screen. It was different footage now. A mob of people were closing around some cops in someone’s living room. One of them took his gun out and was threatening to fire.

“Maybe,” Ciaran said, but he didn’t believe it.

Waringstown, County Down, 28
^th
June

“Shit!” Tom barked.

His chat icon appeared. Agent 13 was incoming.

The alert sound had woken Tom suddenly, and he’d knocked over the mug of tea resting on his desk. Forgetting the spilt tea, Tom moved his shaking hand back to the mouse and opened the dialogue box, finding what looked to be a web address link.

“What’s this?”

But Agent13 was still typing. A new message appeared.

FOLLOW THE LINK. NO TIME TO EXPLAIN.

A cold sweat ran down Tom’s back. He stepped away from his computer.

He’d been watching more videos online. The lab in Belfast, where a dead man climbed out of his gurney and started walking around the room. The infected were all over the net, looking more and more demonic by the day. And they weren’t the
only
demons. The demons in Tom’s head ran rampant. He’d no pills. Felt more paranoid than ever.

Do I know this man
? he mused.
I mean, REALLY know him?

“Who are you?” he barked at the screen.

He typed the words back to Agent13.

Mere seconds passed before another line appeared: TOM, IT’S AGENT 13. NOT COMPROMISED. TRUST ME.

Tom ran a hand through his greasy hair.

He’d been cyber-chatting to 13 for years. They would talk for hours about everything. Not just truther stuff, but films they enjoyed, life and all the shit it threw at them.

Another message appeared:

NET GOING DOWN SOON. FOLLOW THE LINK OR WE’LL LOSE TOUCH.

Tom smacked a hand against his head.

He looked briefly at the link he was meant to follow. He couldn’t focus on it. It was just squiggles and numbers and dots, dancing before his eyes.

“What to do? What to do?” he muttered.

The parrot imitated him, repeating the words back to him, “What to do? What to do?”

Tom sneered at the bird.

He moved back towards the keyboard, banging his reply out angrily on the keyboard. “Are you from the government?” he said as he typed, but he knew it was nonsense even as he said the words.

Seconds passed. The message on screen advised that Agent13 was typing.

TRUST ME

The same bloody message!

Tom growled, grabbing his hair with both hands. He was beyond frustration.

“What to do?” he said again and again to himself, the bird in the cage repeating his mantra.

HURRY, came another message.

Tom swore as he moved back to the computer.

He placed his hand on the mouse and hovered the cursor over the link. Its numbers and dots and squiggles were still dancing, making him dizzy.

He closed his eyes and clicked.

***

Ballynarry, County Armagh

The internet was fucked. Every last search engine, including AOL, failed to connect. YouTube was no longer accessible.

Colin leaned back in his chair. Rubbed his beard.

His eyes once again fell upon the characters written on the notebook page he’d found taped to the study wall. He’d tacked it to the corner of the monitor:

12/08

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Chris some time ago. Chris always struck Colin as a paranoid type, always going on about the government and the New World Order, all that American stuff that didn’t make much sense to a guy like Colin, a guy who lived his life one day at a time. Chris would recite some date when the world was supposed to end. It was to do with some conspiracy or other.

Was this the date?

Colin looked back at the screen, and an idea struck him.

When he’d moved into Aunt Bell’s house, he’d needed to get an internet connection put in. Aunt Bell didn’t care for it. ‘What’s wrong with the television and radio?” she’d said to him. But Colin had experienced some problems getting connected and needed to ring a help desk. They gave him a long number with a few dots to type into the URL bar. Colin remembered it bringing him to his service provider’s help page, where the technician could sort out his connection problems for him. All website addresses were coded like this, he’d learned.

He looked back at the numbers he’d found scribbled onto the page.

He clicked on explorer. It didn’t connect, just as Colin expected.

He typed the numbers from the page into the URL bar, a full stop between the two dates:

http[colon slash slash]12[dot]08[dot]

He pressed the RETURN key.

It didn’t connect.

Colin leaned back in his chair, thinking.

Maybe he should put the year in. This year.

He was interrupted by Ciaran’s voice from the other room.

Colin stood up, left the study and moved through the hallway.

He opened the kitchen door, finding Ciaran sitting on his makeshift wheelchair.

Vicky stood at the sink, staring out the window in front of her.

Colin followed her gaze.

Several figures stood in their garden, their bodies twisted like old scarecrows, their movements slow and laboured.

“They’re here,” Ciaran said.

The Chamber, County Armagh, 30
^th
July

Dr Miles Gallagher sat in front of his laptop, playing footage from the security cameras.

A crowd of dead people were pushing at the perimeter fence, surrounding The Chamber’s Mahon Road base of operations. Their eyes held no emotion. Yet their hands grabbed the wire with aggression, their lips shaping cries of hunger and frustration.

The enemy was at the gate
, Gallagher mused. And what a peculiar foe they were.

Gallagher turned away from the screen as several men entered the room.

An older man, the Colonel, stood po-faced at the front, watching as the others filed in. Some of the men sat in the chairs by each workstation, others moving to the back wall, preferring to stand. Once everyone was inside, the Colonel closed the door.

“Gentlemen, at The Chamber we’ve always worked on the premise that knowledge is power. It’s been key to everything we do at this project: our surveillance work, investigative work, as well as our,” he cleared his throat, looked to Gallagher, “interrogation work.

“Now I don’t know a hell of a lot more than you about what’s happening with this virus outbreak, but what I do know I want to share with you right now. Along with our options.

“Things aren’t good as you know. Stormont’s fallen. They tried everything to contain this thing. First with softer methods, then with more force. They tried quarantine,” the Colonel continued. “Locked people in their homes. Sealed up hospitals and community centres. Opened death camps.” He waved his hand. “None of it worked, gentlemen. This island is fucked beyond repair. And that leaves you and me with two options: we either stay or we go.”

The Colonel looked around the room, expecting a challenge.

Gallagher, the trace of a smile across his long, pale face, followed the Colonel’s gaze, finding only nervous eyes looking back.

“We’ve got seven golden tickets, gentlemen, and a people carrier cleared to go to RAF Aldergrove. There’s talk of a chopper lined up to take you to London. We can’t confirm or deny that, but God knows it’s better than hanging around here, waiting for the fence to give way.”

Still no one spoke.

“This hat,” said the Colonel, reaching for the military cap on the table beside him, “holds a piece of folded paper for every man in this room, including myself and the good doctor.” He looked over at Gallagher, who nodded in agreement. “The rules are simple, gentlemen. We draw from the hat. If you get an ‘X’, you stay. If the paper has a tick, you go.” The Colonel looked again to Gallagher. “So let’s begin.”

The next few minutes were tense, each man passing along a regimented line to dip their hands in the hat and lift a piece of paper. The Colonel nodded as they passed.

As each man opened their paper, revealing mostly ‘X’ shapes in red pen, Gallagher could see hopelessness spread across their faces. It seemed like they knew they were in attendance of each other’s funerals, standing over these old, knackered computer monitors like gravestones, hands hanging by their sides.

One man pulled a lucky strike, raising his fist in the air and blurting out, “Oh, thank Christ!” But he soon quietened down when the others glared at him with resentment and envy.

The next winner knew not to be so jubilant.

“Final draw,” the Colonel announced quietly as the last hand dipped into his cap. He watched the young soldier as he opened the paper, his face saying it all. The Colonel smiled weakly. “Those with the appropriate papers should gather one small bag and assemble by the mess hall in the main campus at 21.30 tomorrow evening,” he said. “In the rather unlikely event that someone wishes to give up a golden ticket, you can find me in my quarters. I will be only too happy to arrange a swap. As you were, gentlemen.”

The soldiers filed out of the room, conversation muted and uncomfortable as they left. Gallagher stared down at his own piece of paper and the little red cross in its centre. He carefully folded it then dropped it into a nearby paper bin, before he too made for the door.

The Colonel stopped him.

“Doctor Gallagher,” he said in a low voice. “A word, if you please.”

Gallagher followed the Colonel to a quiet corner of the room.

The Colonel looked to make sure none of the others were in earshot.

“Take this,” he said and then slid something into the doctor’s lab coat. “We’re both getting out of here.” Gallagher said nothing.

The Colonel walked towards the door before turning, then nodding.

Gallagher nodded back.

He reached in his pocket finding a piece of paper with a green tick marked on one side.

Gallagher smiled.

He was just about to leave when he spotted a man sitting at the back of the room. It was Charlie Saville. He was one of the engineers. Not someone used to the horrors of the frontline by any stretch of the imagination.

Charlie was a big man, fond of his food, always one for having a laugh in the mess hall with some of the other lads. He was popular with just about everyone, always a smile on his face or a joke to tell. Yet now, Charlie looked broken. He sat in his small chair like an overgrown schoolchild, face in his hands.

Gallagher approached.

“Come now, Charles,” he said. “You’re in the army. No room for tears among soldiers.” He placed a hand on the big man’s shoulder.

Charlie looked up at him. His eyes were like plugholes, deep set in his generously-sized face. “Sorry,” he said.

“Quite alright,” Gallagher said.

He lifted his hand from the other man’s shoulder, pulling up a chair beside him.

“You see, the human condition doesn’t prepare us for this sort of thing,” Gallagher continued, smiling. “Sudden death we’re much better with. Something we can’t plan or prepare for. When a man first joins the army, that’s what he fears the most. The bullet or the mine. An attack from insurgents.

“Those are fears that we learn to control, to submerge within ourselves, only to arise mere moments from the end. If we’re unlucky. But
this
,” and here Gallagher lifted the ticket that sat beside Charlie, holding it in the air between them, “this is something alien to men like us. And altogether more brutal.”

Charlie sat in his chair, sniffing back tears.

He reached into his shirt pocket, produced his wallet. He unclipped the button, sliding a photograph out, offered it to Gallagher.

Gallagher looked down at it, expecting to hear about the man’s wife, his family. But the picture looked more like something Charlie had cut out of a magazine. It was a young girl. She was pretty, maybe someone famous.

“I carry this around with me,” Charlie began. “Sometimes, when the other lads are telling me about a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, and they’re all miserable and drunk and showing me pictures of their wives and babies, I show them this. And they laugh.” Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know why they laugh?”

Gallagher didn’t.

“They laugh because they know I could never get a girl like that. Because I’m a born loser. Big Charlie, the guy you go to when you want a drink or a game of cards or to hack into some new porn site on the computer. That’s all I mean to them. That’s all I’ve meant to
anyone
.” He threw the picture down, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair.

Gallagher sat for a moment, staring at Charlie intently.

He didn’t feel pity for the man. Gallagher didn’t
do
pity. He was a man for whom feelings and emotions and needs were useless, mere distractions from work.

He lived by routine—a routine that involved eating at a certain time, drinking at another. Using the toilet, having sex—these were necessary evils. They had a time and place to meet the basic needs of his body, to serve the human shell he found himself inhabiting. But deep down, Gallagher resented all of these things.

He didn’t like his own humanity, but he liked to study that of others. He liked to explore what made people tick and what made them
not
tick. And he enjoyed studying Charlie.