The Doomsday Box (7 page)

“If you're still symptom-free in forty-eight hours, it's unlikely you've been infected, but we need to be sure. A week to be on the safe side.”

The woman was wearing an isolation suit, Opal realized abruptly. The very air she was breathing was filtered to remove bacteria. Opal had seen something similar in a movie about germ warfare. “And if I do start to show symptoms . . . ?”

Dr. Amory hesitated. “Hopefully we'll have found a cure by then.”

After a moment, Opal said, “Do you know what you're dealing with yet? Some sort of superbug?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Helen Amory said drily. “We're fairly certain Colonel Saltzman died of the Black Death.”

Q
uarantine wasn't as bad as Danny had expected. It was certainly a lot better than the nights he'd spent in the slammer during his bad-boy days. He had a private room, for one thing: comfy bed, little desk thing with a phone on it, chairs, flat-screen TV screwed into the wall. Nobody locked the door, for another. Thing was, the whole team was in quarantine, but isolation units were limited and they weren't in quarantine from each other. No point really. They'd already been in close contact. If one had it, they all had it. So you could wander down the corridor and visit your friends if you liked, just so you didn't try to leave the isolation unit. Leaving the isolation unit was something else. Wasn't just a lockdown either: there were
armed guards
on every exit. Yanks weren't shy when it came to lethal force. You had to admire them.

He was lying on the comfy bed using the remote to channel surf when Michael slipped furtively through the door.

“Knock?” Danny said.

“Sorry,” Michael said, but gave no sign of going out again. He looked around for the nearest chair and sat in it. That's what irritated Danny about Michael: too self-confident by half. “Can I talk to you?” Michael asked. When there was no immediate reaction, he added, “About . . . something?”

Danny stared at him for a moment, then switched off the television and swung his feet off the bed onto the floor. About
something
? “Okay,” he said cautiously.

“I'd like your advice,” Michael said in his polite Eton accent.

“What about?” In the great scheme of things,
something
didn't convey a lot of information. Danny felt wary and vaguely suspicious. People didn't usually ask his advice. Especially African princes.

Michael looked uncomfortable. “You know when you join the Project, they give you a physical?” He hesitated, then added, as if Danny mightn't know what a physical was, “A medical examination?”

Danny nodded. “Yeah.” The doctor who'd done his was cross-eyed with a hacking cough, a poor advertisement for his profession.

“Is it to make sure you're fit for the job, or do you think it's just, you know, an insurance thing?”

This was getting weird, Danny thought. “Bit of both, I expect. How should I know?” This had to be something to do with the plague, but when Michael decided to pussyfoot around a subject, he was a real expert. All the same, Michael was looking genuinely worried.

“Did you tell them the truth?” Michael asked. “About your health?”

Not just weird but downright bewildering. “No reason not to—I'm healthy as a horse. Tonsils as a kid, but that's about it.”

“Did you tell the doctor about your tonsils?”

“Can't remember,” Danny said honestly. “But if I did, it didn't seem to worry him.”

“Suppose it had been something more serious. Like . . . diabetes or”—he licked his lips nervously—“something else. Do you think they'd still have taken you on?”

“You don't have diabetes, do you?” Danny asked.

“No, no,” said Michael quickly. “That was just an example. What I meant was, if you
had
a serious condition, would they still keep you on?”

“Do
you
have a serious condition?” Danny pushed him. If he did, Danny couldn't think what. Never so much as heard him sneeze. He'd seen Michael in the shower, and he was one of the fittest-looking blokes he knew.

Michael flushed, then shook his head. “No, of course not. I was just wondering. You know . . . about Project policy.”

“You've been with the Project a year longer than I have,” Danny told him. “You have to know more about policy than I do.” What was
wrong
with Michael? There had to be something, or he'd never have started this conversation. Maybe he was worried about getting sick and it had affected his brain. Danny opened his mouth to say something else, then shut it again as Fuchsia came in, waving a book.

“Boys,” Fuchsia said. “I've found what they're all so worried about.”

“I'd better go,” Michael muttered. He started to rise from his seat.

“No, you stay,” Fuchsia told him. “I wanted to tell Danny, but we all need to know this.”

Michael sat down again, warily. He gave a warning glance toward Danny, as if asking him not to mention what they'd been discussing, not that Danny knew what they had been discussing in the first place.

Fuchsia said, “It's the Black Death.”

“What's the Black Death?”

“What they're all worrying we might have. Opal told me. But the thing is, I've looked it up now.” She waved the book she was holding. “It was the most awful disease that broke out in the Middle Ages. Listen to this.” She flicked the book open and read, “‘The plague that raged all over the land consumed nine parts in ten of the men through England, scarcely leaving a tenth man alive.' That was from the records of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society in 1883.”

“It broke out in 1883?” Danny asked.

“No, silly,” Fuchsia said. “They're an
archaeological
society. They were reporting on old findings. But imagine nine people in ten wiped out! That's worse than those awful African diseases like Ebola that everybody's frightened of.” She waved the book at them again. “It broke out in China in thirteen-something and spread to Europe a couple of years later. They called it the
blue sickness
then. People used to catch it in the morning, and by the afternoon they were
dead.
It was totally the fastest disease
ever
.”

“Yes, but that was before antibiotics,” Danny said. “They can cure it now, can't they?”

“That's the thing,” Fuchsia told him. “They used to think it was bubonic plague, which is pretty nasty and fast and deadly, but this book says scientists aren't so sure anymore. It broke out a few more times, the last of them in sixteen-something, then just sort of disappeared. So if it
wasn't
bubonic plague, it's a whole new disease we've never tried antibiotics on, so they might work or they might not. And even if they did work, you'd have to move really, really fast and watch people, because if they caught it at night or something, they'd be dead before you'd think of giving them the pill. The early symptoms don't look serious, you see. The first thing that happens is you sneeze. Who'd think twice about that?” Her eyes were gleaming. “They made up a rhyme about it. You'll never guess what it was. . . .”

Michael said politely, “What was it?”

“‘Ring a ring of roses, a pocketful of posies, a-tissue, a-tissue, we all fall down!'” She looked from one face to the other. “The old nursery rhyme is actually a plague song.”

Opal came in then. All the color had drained from her face, and there was a frightened, haunted look in her eyes. “They're dead,” she said. “Everybody's dead.”

T
hey ran together up the corridor, all four of them, to the entrance of their quarantine wing. Through the glass doors at the end they could see the bodies of their guards. One man was slumped with his back against a wall, head forward as if sleeping. The other was prostrate on the floor, his body bloated, sightless eyes staring upward at the ceiling. The skin of both men had taken on a bluish tinge, and there were swellings on their necks. It took only the briefest glance to confirm they were dead.

“Is it just the guards?” Michael asked, staring through the glass.

“No,” Opal said. “There are other bodies just around the corner. I think everybody's dead.”

“How do you know?” Danny asked.

“I went to look.”

Michael said, “How did you get out?”

“The doors aren't locked anymore,” Opal told him.

“How come?” Danny asked, frowning.

Without warning, Opal burst into tears. “I don't know. Does it matter? Look at them—they're dead! They were infected by whatever killed the colonel, and now they're dead.”

Michael put his arms around her. “It's all right,” he murmured.

“It's not all right!” Opal sobbed. “There are more bodies in the corridors. Doctors and nurses and . . . people, just people; and they look much worse than those two. And they all have this awful, terrified look on their faces.”

“You went out and saw them?” Danny asked.

Opal pulled away from Michael and Fuchsia to round on him. “I didn't touch any of them, if that's what you're thinking. I don't have the disease.”

“I was just thinking how brave you were,” Danny told her.

Fuchsia said, “Of course you don't have the disease. None of us has it.”

Opal stopped glaring at Danny to turn to Fuchsia. “Why do you think that?”

“It's what I was reading,” Fuchsia explained. “The Black Death is terribly dangerous and you can catch it off somebody if they so much as breathe on you, but some people are naturally immune.”

“You think we might be?” Michael asked.

“I think we must be,” Fuchsia told him. “If we weren't immune, we'd be dead by now.” She gave a weak version of her powerful smile. “It says in the book that anybody who came in contact with a plague victim would show symptoms within a few hours. Nearly everybody dies. In the Middle Ages there were putrefying corpses everywhere.” She glanced through the glass doors. “Like those two.”

“Are you sure we haven't been infected?” Danny asked.

“Hope not,” Fuchsia said.

“You haven't,” said a cool voice behind them.

I
t was almost funny, as if they were having a routine meeting like they did back in the old days. Except then the participants were mostly middle-aged. Here, Opal and Michael sat at one side of the table, Danny and Fuchsia at the other, while Carradine was at the head, middle-aged himself now. He felt ten years older than he had when he'd last seen them. In the mirror this morning, his skin was gray, his face taut with strain.

“You aren't going to die,” Carradine said. He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a weak smile. “At least not from the disease.” Michael opened his mouth, probably to ask for an explanation, but Carradine went on tiredly, “I'm sorry you had to . . . had to . . .” He let the sentence trail. What had happened was ghastly. What was worse was that his Project team was involved and about to get a lot more so, but he could see no way out of it. Which didn't mean he had to like it—they were only kids, for God's sake. Astral missions were one thing, but this . . . He collected his strength. “I'm sorry you had to see the bodies, find out this way what has happened. I should have been here to look out for you, but . . .”

But the whole thing had run out of control within hours, in spite of everything he'd tried to do to stop it. The trouble was, it had all sounded so far-fetched, like some second-rate disaster movie. Nobody took his demands for quarantine seriously until people started dying, and by then it was too late to save the base. And by the time the quarantine was imposed, he knew for certain there were one or two people who'd left Montauk. Nobody knew whether they'd contracted the disease or not, but if they had, the epidemic could go global within days, given the speed of modern air travel. He shrugged, paused, then said aloud, “This might easily turn into a worldwide crisis.”

“Why aren't we going to die, Mr. Carradine?” Michael asked quietly.

He liked Michael. The boy never panicked, never made a fuss. “You've been vaccinated,” Carradine told him. “So have I.”

“Against bubonic plague?” Opal frowned. “I didn't think there was a vaccine.”

“There is, as a matter of fact, but what we have here isn't bubonic plague.”

They looked at him expectantly, and Fuchsia said, “So the Black Death
wasn't
bubonic plague?” She was the sharpest one of all, however she came across. If they could just find a way to switch on her talent fully, she'd be the best asset the Project had ever had.