Fever (Flu) (27 page)

“Where you been, buddy?” Tom said as he typed. He waited for 13’s reply:

BUSY. DID YOU READ THE NOTES I SENT? Tom scratched his head.

“What notes?” he typed.

MILES GALLAGHER, came the reply.

Tom swore loudly.

“Why are we still talking about this?” he complained. He typed it.

ALL RELEVANT, 13 replied.

“Why?” Tom typed back.

STILL OPERATIONAL. GALLAGHER IN CHARGE NOW.

Tom sighed, looked around the room, sifting through the many books and files that littered the floor, the desk, the bed. There were papers with words circled in red, underlined and punctuated with dramatic exclamation marks.

Tom sifted through the mess, retrieving the printout he was looking for, simply marked ‘Gallagher’.

His eyes were tired.

“Dr Miles Gallagher,” he read. “Decorated field medic. Worked the Gulf War. Particularly skilled in the art of interrogation. Ruthless, brutal, blah blah blah...”

Tom looked back to the screen, typed, “What do you need to know?”

CAN WE TRUST HIM?

Tom laughed.

“
Trust
him?! He’s a fucking goon! Of course we can’t
trust
him!” He was literally banging the keys as he typed.

Agent 13’s next reply bowled him over.

WITH GALLAGHER NOW.

“What?!” Tom bellowed at the screen.

He looked around, suddenly spooked.

“You fucking—” Tom rubbed his mouth. “No, don’t speak!” he whispered to himself. “Don’t speak, this fucker’s infiltrated you. Played you like a fiddle.”

He’d been right that 13 had been acting suspiciously last time. It hadn’t just been the demons dancing in his head or the pills running out. It was his fucking gut trying to tell him something!

Tom went to the phone, picked it up. Rubbed his hand across the receiver, searching for bugs. “No,” he said to himself. “They couldn’t have got in here. You would have seen them. Get a grip, for fuck’s sake! It’s all online. All online.”

He went to the computer lead, ready to pull it from the wall, but stopped himself.

13 had written more:

BEEN WORKING UNDERCOVER SINCE I HAD MY EYES OPENED. YOU CAN TRUST ME.

“Fuck!” Tom shouted, his fists clenched and raised, his eyes ready to pop. “What to do, what to do?” he ranted.

“What to do?” chirped the bird hoarsely.

“Fuck up, bird!” Tom yelled.

Another message on screen. It read:

TOM? YOU STILL THERE?

“Yes,” Tom said. “Still here.”

He cried out in frustration. The noise filled the room. He desperately needed to trust 13. He’d no other choice. There was nobody else out there.

NEED TO KNOW YOUR GUT INSTINCT ON GALLAGHER, came 13.

“Okay,” Tom said, resigned to helping. He reached for the paper again. “Gut instinct. What’s my gut instinct?” He scanned the text. It was all in there. “Interrogation, surveillance, covert operations. For God’s sake, man, he’s up to his eyes in shit!” He went to the keyboard. “Can’t trust him,” he said, typing.

OKAY, came 13’s reply.

“Is it? What’s okay about it?” Tom barked. “The whole fucking world’s gone to hell, and you’re sleeping with the goons! There’s nothing okay about
that
!”

ONE MORE THING, 13 typed.

A media player file attachment appeared on screen. Tom clicked in.

The video started to play. It was footage taken with a phone or digital camera. Tom saw a few goons sitting around what looked like some sort of control room. They were watching a large screen at the front of the room.

On the soldiers’ screen, Tom could make out the image of a small girl running around her bedroom. The windows of the bedroom were covered by metal sheets, as if the room had been sealed from the inside.

SURVIVOR, 13 typed. QUARANTINED BUT RECOVERED FROM THE FLU.

Tom’s mouth dropped. “Oh, lordy,” he said.

But there was more:

I’VE GOT A PLAN, AND I NEED YOU TO HELP ME.

“My help?” Tom muttered. “What the hell can I do?”

He heard a thud from across the room and turned to follow the noise. His eyes fell upon the birdcage, but he couldn’t see the parrot anymore.

Tom stood up from the computer, crossed the room. He leaned in closer to the cage.

Inside, he found the parrot had fallen from its perch. It lay perfectly still on the cage’s floor.

Tom rubbed his mouth. “Oh shit,” he said.

Ballynarry, County Armagh

The steam from the bath filled the room. It was like mist, and Vicky wondered if she could get lost in it, taken to another world, away from this house and fucked-up countryside, where only death thrived.

She didn’t think she could feel any worse than she did. There was already plenty to feel shit about, after all: the ever-increasing number of bodies outside, the ever-decreasing supply of food and water
inside
(not that
she
cared much about that: Vicky couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten). But the mind was a funny old thing. And today, Vicky had woken with a brand new feeling of woe that was totally unexpected.

Guilt.

At first, she’d mistaken it for grief. The two feelings were pretty similar, she realised: both seeming to rise up from the gut, filling her chest like acid. But then her head got in on the action, and Vicky had words and pictures to go with her feelings.

The radiant face of Sinead filled her mind.

When she thought about it, Vicky reckoned that this image was merely a front. That Sinead’s sweet, innocent face represented a lot of people that Vicky had pissed on from great heights throughout the years.

People like her mother, whom Vicky hadn’t talked to in years, still blaming the old woman for the things that bastard husband of hers had inflicted on them both.

People like Colin. God knew, Vicky had been a bitch to Colin even before their whole shambles of a marriage fell apart. She
thought
that she loved him, and she probably had, as much as a damaged shell like her could. But how
real
was that love? Was it more a case of her just needing the complete opposite of her father: a man she felt stronger than, a man that
she
could manipulate?

Vicky closed her eyes, tried to will the guilt away. But it dug its claws in. A heavy, soul-shattering presence that wasn’t for budging.

It possessed her.

The feeling was unbearable. And the more it consumed her, the more Vicky hated herself.

She already hated everything and everyone around her.

What was there left to live for?

As if to remind her, scratching noises suddenly came from the other side of the bathroom’s single window. The sound was infuriating. Dead fingernails against glass. It dug right through her skin, reached into her stomach and twisted. Vicky started to retch, but there was nothing inside her to come up.

She sobbed in frustration and pain.

As the water continued to rise up around her, its heat surprisingly numb against her flesh, Vicky’s eyes were drawn once more to the razor. It sat innocently on the side of the bath, by the taps. She’d used it already. Each time she’d entered the bathroom, actually. But only to take the edge off, only to draw blood and let some of the pain spill out across her skin.

Once, she’d pressed it against the bigger vein on her wrist, intent on slicing long ways, on making the bleed count—
really count
—but she’d lost her nerve at the last second, dropping the blade to the floor like it was scalding hot.

This time would be different...

Craigavon, County Armagh

Willis clocked the mass of dead, gathering like doped-out wolves below.

He was flying over Lisburn. The new city seemed completely overrun. There was little chance of any survivors down there at all, the dead filling the streets densely, as if parading.

Willis flew further south, passing Lurgan.

He headed for the No Man’s Land known as Craigavon. Even before the flu, there had been little of interest in Craigavon. Locals called it Roundabout City; the place offered miles and miles of empty road, punctuated by a shopping centre, some leisure facilities and random pockets of run down housing.

The helicopter reached an area within Craigavon known as The Lakes. Here water sports were the order of the day.

A well-trodden path circled the water. The path looked damp, miserable. Still drying from the rain showers that had broken the blue skies earlier. This was a popular spot back in the day. Sunday walkers would come from neighbouring Portadown and Lurgan, often with their dogs in tow.

The water split, disturbed by frantic air from the helicopter’s propellers.

Willis spotted more of the dead.

A large, fenced-off compound had been erected, home to one of the so-called Rescue Camps the authorities had built to contain the infected. But the infection had consumed the place and everyone in it. Willis had followed the story on his Blackberry, watching the footage on YouTube. It was hard to believe that society could do this kind of thing to its own people. But here it was, in front of his very eyes: a concentration camp for the infected, where now only bodies roamed.

The pilot carried on.

He flew away from Craigavon’s centre, out into the sticks, where the roads and roundabouts gave way to fields and foliage and confused cattle.

He found a deserted patch of land close to an old farmhouse and some trees. Willis circled the house, searching for signs of life (or death). It seemed clear, so the pilot pushed down on the stick, taking the helicopter in for landing.

***

Willis killed the engine, waiting in the cockpit as the blades calmed.

He could feel the confused stares of the three passengers behind him. Brina Fico, with her two civilian guardians, just as Gallagher had described. They looked tired, scared. Their clothes were still soaked by the rain from earlier.

Willis had picked them up from the roof of an apartment block in Finaghy, just as Gallagher asked.

Brina Fico was six years old, and she was important to The Chamber. Daughter of an illegal immigrant, Brina’s flat was under observation by The Chamber for the Home Office. In the new world, however, Brina was important for very different reasons. She’d been quarantined, locked in her own home like many others who’d developed the virus.

Yet, Brina survived.

Willis looked at her now.

She sat in the back of the helicopter, cradled in the arms of one of her guardians, a young woman with red hair and pale, freckled skin. Willis didn’t know the woman’s name. She was of no real importance to The Chamber, apart from the fact that she seemed able to comfort the child.

Beside the girl was the other guardian. An angry looking fucker with tattoos and narrow eyes set deep within a shorn head.

It was Tattoo who addressed the pilot first: “Why are we stopping?”

Willis ignored him, climbed out of the helicopter.

He took a moment to reflect on what he was doing: Willis had every confidence that Gallagher could create some sort of antibody from the girl, maybe even a cure.
So why not bring her to him?

He thought back to what Uncle Tom had said:
He’s a goon. Of course you can’t trust him.
Yet a part of Willis respected Miles Gallagher. In a way, the doctor wasn’t so different from himself: a truth-seeker of sorts, working in the lab, unravelling the mysteries of the reanimated dead. Gallagher probably knew more about what made those things tick than anyone else alive.

Was it jealousy, then?

Knowledge was a drug. Willis knew that better than anyone. But this was bigger than that. They were fighting a war. Willis and others like him. Uncle Tom. Chrysler. Truthers throughout the world. And that little girl was part of the fight.

She was the prize.

So innocent...

In a way, little Brina was the epitome of the whole sorry mess Willis had been mixed up in over the years. The government, the army and now The Chamber. The young kids he’d carried to war, their lives destroyed because of the whims of others; powerful and evil forces; groups like Bilderberg, pulling the strings, playing one nation against another for personal gain, their own hands as clean as the three-piece designer suits they wore.

The
real
knowledge, the
real
power was with those fuckers. Willis knew that. They were probably watching him right now via satellite, holed up in some bunker, waiting for him to do their bidding.

Waiting for Gallagher to extract the makings of an antivirus from the girl.

And then they’d come out again, seize power and rebuild an empire.

On their terms.

But Willis could end it all now.

He held the prize. The power.

He drew his handgun and moved around to the side door of the helicopter.

“Get out,” the pilot ordered.

“What?” snapped the young woman. Her name was Geri McConnell, and she’d had enough drama over the last number of weeks to do her a lifetime. “This is the rescue? Humanity’s last stand is...
some old farmhouse?
”

“Come on! Hurry!” the pilot said, looking around nervously.

Geri noticed the gun in his hand.

“Look, what’s going on?” she said. “You told us you were taking us to safety.” She poked her head outside, looked around, “Nothing here but wide open space. Doesn’t look too safe to me.”

“Just get out!” the pilot insisted, “Or God help me...”

His gun hand was shaking. His eyes were wide, a crazy look that was particularly unwelcome. After everything that had gone down, Geri was hoping for a bit of sanity. For comfort, security. Wasn’t too much for a girl to ask, was it?

The pilot waved the gun at her again.

“Please...” he begged. Still that crazed look in his eye.

But Geri had some crazy in her too. God knew, you couldn’t survive this long
without
going mad. Geri was nearing breaking point, and this asshole was going to know about it.

“No,” she said assertively. “No to whatever madness you’re peddling. I’m staying right here.”