Infinity Cage (20 page)

The result was instantaneous: a Mexican wave of panic rippling from the very front of the roadblocked crowd, back towards the logjam of parked vehicles. The crowd began to turn their backs on the military blockade in ones, twos, threes, then en masse, pushing past each other to return to their abandoned vehicles and possessions.

‘Maddy!’ Rashim was shouting at her. He jerked her arm. ‘The virus is in the clouds! In the rain! We have to get out of the rain!’

The press of people between them and the roadblock was beginning to thin out as those before them continued to stream past. She caught a glimpse of an old man who had collapsed to his knees on the road and was swaying groggily, like a closing-time drunkard. He was looking directly at her with red-rimmed eyes that began to leak dark bloody tears down on to his cheeks. For some reason his face creased with the slightest hint of an amused smile, as if something quaint, charming and odd had just occurred to him, then he flopped forward face down on to the tarmac.

That’s how quickly the virus takes effect?

If Rashim was right and the virus had made contact with that man from the first few drops of rain, then … how long ago had it started to spit? Five minutes? Ten minutes?

God help us … that’s fast.

‘The trees!’ said Rashim. ‘Over there!’ He was pointing towards the edge of the sloping wood.

Becks took the lead; she scooped Charley up in her arms and began barging her way there, crossing the paths of people rushing away from the roadblock towards their parked vehicles and handcarts. Rashim and Heywood followed behind her. Maddy began to run but paused and turned to look again at the old man; his legs and arms were thrashing uncontrollably, drumming against the tarmac … in some kind of seizure.

‘Maddy!’

She turned and saw the others had hopped over the low rusting barrier beside the highway and started making their way across a parched field towards the distant trees. She nodded to Rashim that she was coming. She hurried across the highway, weaving past others running away. As she lifted her leg over the barrier, she cast one last glance back over her shoulder. The space directly before the blockade razor wire had cleared, but she could see there were three or four more people who had collapsed right there. Some of them were thrashing and twitching. The old man was entirely still now … and she could see a dark liquid beginning to pool on the tarmac round his head, leaking out of his ears, his eyes, his nose and his mouth.

She climbed over the barrier and followed after the others. They were nearing the treeline. She hurried across the fifty-yard-wide apron of dry ground, mottled yellow with tufts of sickly-looking, acid-tainted grass, towards the edge of the wood … and found herself nearly stepping on the body of a crow. She was about to step round it when she noticed the bird was twitching like the humans on the road had been. A wing beat erratically against the ground, and dark feathers fluttered loose as if they’d been attached by cheap glue that had perished. She saw a bald
patch of pale skin, pulled taut against a toothpick of bone. The skin was glistening wetly. Aware she had to run for her life but for this fleeting moment morbidly fascinated, she quickly hunched down to get a closer look. She watched as the glistening pale skin began to break down into a thick paste that slowly ran off the bone like porridge off the back of a spoon, exposing cartilage and raw tendons beneath.

She looked around and saw dozens of other birds littering the ground. Some were still flapping and twitching. Others were already dead, clouds of black feathers blowing away from them like dark dandelion seeds, leaving behind tiny clusters of fragile bone, liquidating grey skin and viscous pink pools of soft tissue.

‘Maddy!’ Rashim was calling out to her. ‘Hurry! Watch the rain!!’

She looked up and saw the others had reached the treeline now. She stood up and heard the patter of drops on her hood increase from the occasional tap to persistent drumming. She stepped round the dying bird then hurried across the field towards them, keeping her head down and her hands tucked inside the plastic sleeves as the rain began to come down more heavily. She joined them sheltering beneath the low boughs of a short fir tree that had retained some of its pine needles.

‘Did you see all those dead birds?!’

Rashim nodded. ‘Perhaps birds as well as humans are affected.’

‘Oh my God …’ she gasped, her mind suddenly jumping elsewhere. ‘Oh my God! I got rain on my hands! I got a drop of rain on my
face
!’

‘It seems to act immediately on contact.’ Rashim turned his hands over and looked at them. ‘Check your skin for any discoloration!’

They all did as he said. Inspecting the fronts and the backs of their hands.

‘And look at each other’s faces!’ he added. ‘Look for anything, blemishes, redness, sores … 
anything
!’

The rain was coming down more heavily now as they peered closely at each other. Drips pattered down every now and then between the branches above them against the hoods of their macs.

‘If that rain is carryin’ your virus, then we’re already dead,’ said Heywood. ‘I got some on me too.’

‘Perhaps not every raindrop carries a cell of the pathogen,’ said Rashim. ‘It could be that a number of airborne particles of infected matter got caught in an updraught further south, were carried on the wind and came down with the rain.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? One drop in ten, a hundred, a thousand could carry a live cell. The drier we stay, the better our chances.’

‘Or maybe those people over on the road were already sick?’ said Charley.

He considered that for a moment. ‘That is also possible.’

On the road, people who moments ago had been angrily clamouring to get past the roadblock were fleeing up the highway the way they’d come, away from the infected bodies; streaming through the mire of parked vehicles and abandoned handcarts, past other fresh arrivals still intending to head south and looking bemused at the people surging either side of them as they slowed down at the rear of the logjam. Panic was spreading to them now, and panic communicated faster than any virus could possibly spread.

Maddy heard the drone of a jet in the air and was about to look up to see where it was coming from when a hundred-yard length of the highway suddenly erupted into flame. A sequence of brilliant-white fireballs rolled down the road, engulfing parked vehicles, handcarts, running people and freshly arrived alike. A half-second later, she felt the searing heat on her face
and heard a deep
whoomp
. The fireballs rose lazily into the sky, becoming mushroom clouds of rich orange that darkened into clouds of soot-black smoke.

‘They’re firebombin’ the highway!’ shouted Heywood.

A delta-winged drone swooped low along the road, piercing through the columns of smoke, leaving swirling disturbance holes in its wake. They saw a payload being released from its belly, a cylinder that broke open in mid-air and spilled a cluster of dots. A moment later, another section of the road, further down, instantly erupted into flame. As the brilliant balls of flame began to darken into billowing clouds of smoke, again they felt the pressure wall of hot air on their faces and heard another sickening
whoomp
.

In the sky, swooping and circling like predatory birds, were a dozen more drones preparing to descend and deliver their incendiary payloads.

‘They’ll flame this whole guddamn area!’ shouted Heywood. ‘Not just the road but either side!’

Maddy squinted and blinked. ‘OK … OK. Right …’ She looked at the sloping wood above them. It was covered in a thick carpet of brown pine needles and cones shed from the dying trees. ‘That way! We need to go up!’

They began to clamber uphill, ducking beneath low bare branches, feet sinking into small drifts of needles and catching on buried roots and rocks, hands concealed by the scrunched-up sleeves of their macs, reaching out for rain-slick thorny brambles to pull themselves up the steep incline.

Another deep
whoomp
came from behind them, accompanied by a momentarily flickering phosphorous glow, casting stick-man shadows of skeletal trees up the sloping ground before them. Maddy scrambled, climbed and pulled herself up, using anything she could find purchase on.

She tripped and stumbled knee deep into a bed of pine needles. ‘Dammit!’ she gasped as she staggered out of it, reaching for a bare branch, and pulled herself up again.

She felt Heywood shove her roughly from behind. ‘Keep movin’!’ he hissed. ‘They’ll bomb this hill!’

She scrambled forward, clawing for anything she could pull on, feet sliding on the exposed knuckles of tree roots, sinking into small dunes of needles. Five minutes later, she emerged from the woods into a clearing that flattened out. She dropped to her knees, exhausted, fighting for her breath. She turned round to see the others right behind her, spilling out through scratching bare branches into the open.

All of them were catching their breath as they turned to look at the highway. Another row of lurid white florets of flame blossomed below, as Heywood had said, and were now searing the ground at either side. The field – where she’d been gazing at the dissolving bird carcasses just minutes ago – was now a carbonized wasteland. Even from here, a hundred yards up the forest slope, as she watched the balls of flame roll into the sky, she could feel the heat on her face.

‘God knows how wide they’ll go with that. Maybe into the trees if they saw us make a run for it!’ gasped Heywood. ‘An’ maybe right up this hill.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘We can’t stop here! We gotta keep pushin’ up! Gotta keep goin’ up!’

Breath already ragged from the steep climb, she nodded, staggered to get up and move onwards and upwards, but fell to her knees again.

She felt a firm hand wrap round her upper arm and turned to see it belonged to Rashim. ‘Must keep going, Maddy.’

They continued their desperate ascent for another half an hour, as the wan light drained from the dying end of the afternoon. The heavy rain clouds had thinned out and the threat
of sudden-death-from-a-raindrop had passed for now. The sickly sun had made its bed and was now settling beneath a sepia sky.

Every few minutes they stopped to catch their breath and check on the creeping advance of the systemic firebombing going on behind them. The dusk was brilliantly illuminated every now and then by livid strips of flame. The firebombing was stepping uphill in ordered, systemic slices, leaving in its wake a Dante-esque landscape of flaming tree trunks and a ground carpeted with smouldering pine needles that flickered like the embers of an endless campfire.

They reached the brow of the hill as the last light of day stole away from the sky. Maddy slumped down on to a large flat-topped boulder. As she struggled for breath, she gazed at the scene below her. The firebombing appeared to have finally been called off, ceasing three-quarters of the way up the hillside. In the distance, she could see the highway they’d been on earlier – dozens of fires still flickered brightly among the tangle of burnt-out vehicles. The military blockade was still there. Powerful floodlights on the sentry guns had been switched on and above them the two large information screens glowed like shop windows with public announcements that no one but the burnt husks of the dead were likely to read. The drones patrolled the dark sky in tireless loops, beams beneath them, and probed the ground either side of the road, seeking any remaining signs of life.

They came across an old deserted petrol station and roadside motel of six chalets arranged in a horseshoe round a gravel car park. From the signs of breaking and entering, abandoned mattresses and rotten bedrolls, the chalets had been used before, probably many times over, by migrants on foot, stopping on their way north to the glittering lights of Denver.

As the rain began to spit down on them again, they decided to take shelter inside one of them. Becks quickly picked one, climbed the half a dozen steps to the covered porch and trampled down weeds that had grown up through the gaps between the boards. She pulled the front door open and pushed aside a mosquito-net door. The others hurried inside as the rain began to come down more heavily, not even pausing to check that the dark interior wasn’t already occupied.

Ten minutes later, they were sitting in a circle on the floor, a single flickering candle between them. They listened solemnly to the rain drumming on the shingle roof and a
drip
,
drip
,
drip
in the bathroom where the roof shingles had slipped and the rain was getting in.

‘If any of us got infected, we’d know by now,’ said Maddy. ‘Right? We’d know?’

Rashim nodded. ‘From what I saw, it appears to work
incredibly
quickly. Within seconds of contact.’

‘Maybe it
ain’t
carried by the rain,’ said Heywood. ‘Reckon we all got wet enough earlier that, if it was, we’d be long dead by now.’

‘The rain …’ Rashim shrugged. ‘It was just a thought. But for it to travel so quickly it
must be
an airborne pathogen. Remember those soldiers were all wearing masks? There could have been viral particles in the raindrops. Or … it’s possible the rain may be suppressing the airborne particles. Washing them out of the air and down into the ground. In which case, the rain might have been a lucky break for us.’

‘Either way, we got lucky,’ Maddy replied. ‘Dead crows on the ground by the road. This thing infects birds as well as people.’

‘I saw a dead deer,’ said Charley. ‘On the way up the hill.’

Becks nodded. ‘I also saw other dead creatures. They were liquidizing.’

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘Then I guess that’s what we’re up against: a virus that kills every living thing it touches.’

‘Every livin’ thing?’ Heywood looked around. ‘Just animals? Or does that include things like trees? Grass? Moss? What about the tiny bug things that live in the air?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it’s just animals.’ She tried to visualize that crow’s body. The flesh had been disintegrating into a pale viscous liquid. But what about the grass it had been lying on? She couldn’t remember if the process had extended to breaking down the blades of grass into goo as well.

‘So, if that’s the case … that means we’re stuck in this place.’ She looked out of one of the grimy windows of the chalet. ‘I mean, if we touch literally
anything
outside …?’

‘Suggestion,’ said Becks. ‘We have supplies. We should wait here until the virus has infected all possible infection candidates.’

‘Infection candidates?’ Maddy laughed desperately. ‘Like … every living thing?’

‘Potentially.’

‘Becks is right,’ said Rashim. ‘We will know what this virus can and can’t infect if we give it twenty-four hours or so. It seems to act incredibly quickly. Which means we’ll know soon. Tomorrow morning we may be able to see what the virus can affect. Until then, we’re safe here. We have food and water and we’re sheltered from the rain.’

‘And how long can we stay here?’ Maddy looked at their bags lying in a pile together in the far corner of the chalet’s bare-board floor along with their macs. ‘We’ve got a day or maybe two of uncontaminated bottled water on us. What do we do after that runs out?’

‘We can boil water, can’t we?’ said Heywood. ‘That kills germs? Right?’

Maddy looked at Rashim. ‘Can we do that? Can we drink boiled water?’

‘I am not a microbiologist. I presume if you apply enough heat it must kill any living viral particles in the water. So … this is possible, perhaps.’

‘We’ve got maybe enough dry food for a week,’ said Maddy. ‘How far is Waldstein’s campus from here?’

Rashim looked at his wrist-pad. ‘Just over forty-one miles south-west of where we are now.’

‘That’s forty-one miles of mountainous terrain.’ She bit her lip. ‘That’s what? Three? Four days of hiking?’

Heywood nodded. ‘Four days. If we’re lucky.’

‘So … we could wait it out here for, say, three days. Then,’ she said, shrugging, ‘then maybe we’re going to have to take our chances out there?’

‘The virus will have a finite lifespan,’ said Rashim. ‘If it
spreads quickly, kills its “host” quickly, then it must also die quickly.’

Maddy turned and looked at him. ‘Is that something you know? Or are you just guessing?’

‘Reasonable conjecture, Maddy. Viruses are parasitic. They are not self-sustaining forms of life. Once a virus runs out of things to infect, it has nowhere to go. And, if this is an engineered bioweapon, then I would have thought its creators would surely have developed a pathogen that quickly becomes harmless after it has done the job of depopulating the enemy.’

‘Perfect guddamn doomsday weapon, then.’ Heywood snorted. ‘Sweeps through an’ kills everythin’ in its path, then kills itself off. That’s what this thing is?’

‘Yes. That’s how it would be designed,’ agreed Rashim.

Heywood snorted phlegm. ‘I bet them North Koreans ain’t the only idiots with dumb-ass weapons like this hidden away in a vault somewhere.’

Maddy nodded. ‘We’ve been making dumb-ass weapons like that since the atom bomb.’ She sighed. ‘I’m surprised we didn’t wipe ourselves out far sooner.’

A sombre silence settled on them once more. They listened to the drumming of the rain and the patter of drips from the roof in the gutted remains of the bathroom.

She got up, crossed the small room and pulled the bathroom door closed. ‘No one should go in there,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust this rain.’

‘Agreed,’ said Rashim.

She came back and sat down on the floor with them. ‘And we should all probably get some rest. We’ll see what the situation looks like outside in the morning.’

‘What if one of us is already sick?’ said Charley. ‘What if none of us wake up in the morning?’

What if she’s right?
Maddy realized they had no idea for sure whether this thing killed within minutes of contact or whether the people they’d seen collapsing had already been infected hosts for hours, perhaps days, and been carriers of K-N without knowing it. It was quite possible one or all of them was already infected and, as they sat here now, a single killer cell in each of them was getting busy subdividing and subdividing again. And as they slept they’d all quietly be rendered to pools of viscous liquid. In the morning all that might be left of them would be hair, bones, clothes and a dark stain on the floorboards.

‘We will be fine, Charley,’ said Rashim. ‘We just have to sit tight here and let this thing run its course.’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Right?’

Charley jerked her head from him, frowned, then patted the hair down again.

Maddy felt her shoulder being shaken. As she stirred from a very deep sleep, she put together the scrambled fragments of the dream she’d been having. She’d been a girl, riding a bike up and down a lazy suburban street. How old? Twelve? Thirteen? There’d been the smell of raked-up and burning autumn leaves, the feel of a warm September sun on her face and the sound of old eighties classics playing on someone’s car radio. There were several other kids on bicycles and skateboards, just idling in circles on the pavement. It felt like a Sunday afternoon. Lazy. Cosy. Nice. One of the kids had been Liam. Another, Sal. All three of them somehow siblings, brother and sisters, just goofing around with their friends without a care in the world. A voice was calling out to them from an open front door across a freshly mown lawn. A voice calling them in for lunch; pot roast was on the table and they’d better come in now and wash their hands.

Someone else’s memory
, her half woozy mind rationalized as
she stirred. It must have been one of her many borrowed memories that she’d unconsciously populated with the closest she’d ever had to a family.

‘Wake up, Maddy.’

She opened her eyes to see Becks crouching over her. Daylight was spilling into the motel room through the grimy window.

‘Wake up, Maddy,’ she said again softly. ‘You should see this.’

‘What’s up?’ she replied groggily, wiping sleep from her eyes and putting her glasses on.

Becks shrugged. ‘It is better if you come and look for yourself.’

Maddy pulled herself up on to her elbows and tried to get to her feet. She immediately felt a painful dead-leg ache in her thighs and remembered last night they’d been desperately scrambling up an increasingly steep hillside, trying to stay ahead of the firebombing. An adrenaline-sustained race to escape incineration. No wonder she’d slept so deeply that she’d had a proper dream; she’d been utterly exhausted.

Becks grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet, then Maddy stepped over the others, still fast asleep. Heywood was snoring. Rashim was muttering something.

She and Becks stood by the window and looked out. ‘My God …’ she whispered.

Just beyond the covered porch entrance to their chalet was a wholly alien landscape. Over on the far side of the gravel car park was the mothballed petrol station, and opposite the other derelict chalets and the rusting remains of an abandoned pick-up truck … those were the only things that looked vaguely real-world. The bare fir trees that loomed over this remote roadside pit stop were now entirely bereft of the last of their leaves, just grey bark, dead or dying wood. From the tips of their branches to the melted stumps of twigs, strings of pale pink-grey slime
hung down like drool from the corner of a hungry dog’s mouth. The ground glistened with a lattice of what looked like slug trails, which linked here and there with small cowpats of mucous-like slime. On the weathered floorboards of the porch, just beyond their window, where last night weeds and nettles had been poking up through the gaps in the planking, now gluey strings dangled down into the dark crawl space beneath the chalet. A thick mist of white smoke fogged her ability to see any further away; that had to be the drifting aftermath of last night’s extensive incendiary carpet-bombing. Just this small pocket view of a glistening yet lifeless grey-and-white alien world. It reminded her so very much of chaos space.

‘My God …’ she whispered again.