Three Moments of an Explosion (35 page)

“I keep hearing about new strains,” Perry said. “And terrorist stuff.” He followed Anna into the staff lounge and stood close to where she took her coffee, watching her with uncharacteristic hesitation while loudspeakers summoned someone somewhere.

“It’s all rumors,” he said. “Everyone’s keeping their cards close to their chests. You hear something about Jaipur, Angola, Scotland. You know in this scene it’s all about the rumors.”

Anna heard very few rumors.

“Colonel Gomez said you’ve been going over what Nick told us,” she said.

“Subject Zero,” he said. “Yeah. I’m going over his files.”

“And mine?”

He blinked at her and she watched his caution go away. “I’m interested in the source,” he said. “That’s my job. And I’m interested in anyone who can’t seem to get infected.”

When they had brought her here and showed her video footage of Nick in his room, Anna had said, “How do we know it’s him?” The colonel and Olson had pulled up graphs of incidents and the spread.

No one was saying that everyone he touched would get it, Olson said, nor that those who did become infected would pass it on to all they touched. But Olson had put a lot of time and computational power into this, cross-referencing key words in global emails and messages, newspaper reports, hospital records, unexplained disasters, flight information, changes of address. The statisticians traced the spread backward. Nick was the initial vector.

They had gone over his tedious blogs, his gushes about his new travel friends, their combined gigabytes of pictures. Eager young men and women who traveled together and went off alone and rejoined their friends again repeatedly, writing emails about drugs and history and folklore and raised consciousness and imaginary secrets. Retraced his route through Hungary, Slovakia, Scotland, Germany. Looking for every castle, every artifact, every old wall. “They’re just monuments,” Gomez said. “Ruins.”

When he returned to the U.S., Nick’s passage through New Jersey and Illinois, Wisconsin, New Mexico had left hot spots blooming.

“Where does the stuff go?” Olson had said. “Does it just compress? And most of all, what’s the source? We figure that out, we might have a chance. Maybe track down people responsible.”

The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing. Sharon was lost, presumed dead, in the chaos of Belfast. Lai and Birgit had been booked on the same flight from Edinburgh to Copenhagen. Both had been in recent contact with Nick: it could have been around either of them—or both—that a trench had scored, in the matter of the plane, breaking it apart and bringing its fragments down into the sea.

“I’ve found a few things,” Perry said to Anna. “I don’t know if they’ve all been properly looked at before. How’s your stuff going?” Perry said. “Any luck tracking down the dirt?”

Two can play at your game, Perry,
Anna thought. She did not even convince herself.

Nonetheless she looked him up and after false starts as servers stuttered, could find no publications. His degrees were in military history. She had half-expected him to be some parapsychologist, a kook anomaly-hunter promoted into power by these impossible times.

In Perry’s mind—she was certain—would be a future battlefield thronging with uniformed men advancing under packs and the weight of their weapons, rifles up, sending each other signals with quick silent clenched hands, moving in new adaptive formations toward the ruins of a village, each soldier surrounded by a stretching rip in the earth, that traveled with him, his own dugout trap, perhaps the solid nucleus on which he stood traveling with him to refill the hollows over which he leapt, so he advanced through thick jungle or a rising falling desert leaving a landscape of ripped-up interwoven trenches behind him.

Give it years. Give it months. Troops would drop into some recalcitrant statelet and use trenches to fight and advance again, in some new way, thought up by some brilliant secret theorist who would win some prize of the existence of which civilians could not know. A celebration of unorthodox strategy. A black-ops gong.

Twice Anna succumbed to the online chivvyings of her last friends and participated in their self-consciously elegiac video-dinners. The internet was increasingly patchy and temperamental, censored and monitored, but the connection in her temporary house was still surprisingly decent. She sat at one end of her kitchen and connected with Sarah and Bo in Pasadena, Tia in New York, Daniel unwrapping some post-midnight snack in his Berlin small hours.

“So?”

“Chicken, couscous, almonds, harissa.”

“Mmmm. I have hake and capers.”

Red sunlight went down across Anna’s face. She described her own soup and salad.

“I have gummi bears,” Daniel said. “How’s Subject Zero?”

“Shhhh,” Anna said. Everyone made their usual
the spooks are listening
faces.

Daniel chewed on a candy. “Officially here is not too bad,” he said. “Infection rates are pretty low. Unofficially, worse, but it’s no London. Yet. Partly because a lot of people are just fucking off into the mountains or whatever. It’s going to start accelerating.”

It could only be the childless among her acquaintances who could bear this conversation.

“Did you see that Australian film?” said Bo.

A young architect from Perth had gone viral with a plea for a new urban design. New cities for a new age, he said. He had crowd-sourced collaboration and, with dollars thrown frantically at him, built a mock-up of several streets, according to his notions.

“We have to stop thinking apocalyptically,” he said. “Stop using words like ‘pandemic.’ ” The camera tracked him through his fake town. “You’ve all heard the rumors of new communities in hidden places. I think they’re true. What if I told you I know they’re true? They could be true for a lot more of us, and I’m going to show you how.”

Wide spaces, large plazas made from cheap and easily replaceable materials. No buildings above a single tall floor. Houses with a kitchenette, toilet, shower arranged as satellite-rooms around a big central space.

“It’s a new kind of room,” the architect said. “We call it the keep.”

Under a glass roof, between high walls, a big central bedroom-cum-den floored in compact earth, bed and chairs and freestanding shelves and TV and desk snugly tessellated in clever configuration, to fit within a perfectly regular, pre-dug trench, with a foldout walkway to cross it for when you wanted to move.

“We can make this deep enough and wide enough to contain all cuts arising from the condition.”

“What do you think?” Daniel said. He shut down the pop-up. “It could work.”

“No,” Anna said. “It couldn’t.” The speed with which the moats came was increasing. Some reports suggested that their depth was increasing. And there were those stories of mutations, and her friend’s daughter’s memory of sounds. She looked away from the screen, her anguish taking her by surprise. “Even if
we
could live with the trenches,” Anna said, “the world, us, this, it can’t. We didn’t set it up right. No. It won’t work.”

“Even our allies don’t tell us shit anymore,” Gomez told Anna. “Hell, we get reports of bombing raids and shit from Poland to Ecuador to the Scottish fucking islands and we don’t know who the fuck’s blowing up what.”

They had originally tracked Nick down in a suburb of a dying town in Colorado. Anna went back and re-watched the footage of his first interrogations again.

He had no family. “The people on the road,” he said. “They’re my family.” He had been moving for months, ever since he realized something was happening to him. He kept moving all day and slept in open ground. He camped in woods. “But I missed being inside, you know?” he said. “I thought maybe it would be OK.”

He had broken into an abandoned building and unrolled his sleeping bag in the ground-floor lounge. The next day he had woken to find a large section of the wall fallen into a new cavity, a ragged moat containing him. He had been so exhausted its collapse had not roused him. Beyond the hole stood three nervous police officers who had kept him at gunpoint until the colonel’s team arrived.

“I started noticing a few inches here and there when I got back from Europe, you know,” he said. “Birgit and Lai said there were things happening.”

Anna had been volunteering in Madison, patrolling the remains, feeding and interviewing the moated, taxonomising them according to the latest schema. She had felt calm even in that catastrophe, that lowering landscape of rubble and trench rings, some containing bodies, some empty.

From there she had gone to London where the edges of the infected zone had been sealed off with barricades and gun towers, to keep the infected back, as if anyone was sure of how it spread or how contagious the condition was. In those boroughs the trenched kept walking. Helicopters flew over Tooting and Thannet, where houses and churches and community halls collapsed into the gouged chasms where people had stood too long. The streets looked plowed.

It was a melancholy kind of martial law. News crews in protective overalls made forays into the infected zones where the Londoners left behind kept trudging, even driving, if their moats manifested beyond their cars’ edges, watching the camera crews sourly.

There was a vogue in surrender. At first it was sleep that trapped the affected. Awake, they tended to move. But a change came: more and more women and men were just standing still to let the moats come.

Newscasters interviewed them across the dugouts that had dug out to contain them. One channel won a BAFTA for three interviews conducted in a single shot on Albemarle Street where a man and two women stood swaying on their nuclei in the remains of the pavement.

“Why are you here?” shouted the journalist.

“Fuck off,” one woman said.

The man said nothing.

“You could keep going,” the journalist said. “There’s food, you could find a big space—”

“Oh, excuse the fuck me,” the second woman interrupted coldly. “Am I doing this wrong?”

Anna studied the earth from the junctions where moats intersected. She saw couples, even groups of three or four, standing or lying in each other’s arms, packed together beyond their combined trenches. It surprised her how few people she saw camping like this. These combined moats were no wider than the singletons’, but they were deeper. There must be a maximum, an optimum number. Try to fit too many, and the overlapping symptoms would eat into the keep, diminishing it, ultimately to nothing.

“One of them ain’t even infected,” said a young soldier to her when they passed two sleeping men cuddled together behind their trench. “One of them blokes is immune, but he just loves his boyf, and he’d rather stick with him. If they’re close enough you can’t tell if it’s one moat or two. You hear people say that,” he said. “It’s a new kind of love story.”

Later, Anna would sit across from Nick beyond his moat and listen without speaking, her hands clasped, as he wept at the memory of the ostentatious and charismatic young Swedish woman full of what sounded, to Anna, like mannered flimflam about secrets of the earth, that had transported him. He blurted out stories from the crooked pilgrimage on which he’d joined her, when she let him, to pat the sides of old monuments and stroke castles’ flanks as if they were sleeping beasts; to find ways to fill his traveling days when she would not.

“She wouldn’t let me stay with her in the end,” he said.

Poor sniveling boy, Anna thought, equal parts contempt and compassion.

Once as Anna took a sample from an abandoned trench overlooking the Thames, she felt the ground quiver and turned to see the skyline on the south side abruptly break as a tower collapsed with an appalling noise and a billow of glass and brick. That same week the BT Tower snapped at its base and came down into the quarantine zone. Some of the affected had started to gather together and take last stands or sits or sleeps spaced out around some edifice, overlapping their trenches to open the earth and bring down the city on themselves.

“Got reports of a deader in Maida Vale. Suicide by second floor.” A ruined woman in a crater of bricks. She had stood to let the floor dissolve around her, until she had plummeted like a victim in an old cartoon on an untethered raft of wood. Anna and the corpse were watched by a stander in a pocket park surrounded by a circle of fallen trees, his trench deep enough to contain inches of water.

Anna listened at countless trenches, trying to hear noises.

The colonel told her she could not live in the town any more.

“We barely know what’s going on,” he said.

Her room in the barracks was small and plain and overlooked an enclosed yard where two huge tires leaned against a wall. There was a landline, which connected only to the rest of the base.

Sporadically, the television in the officers’ lounge would not come on. “What’s going on?” she said to Gomez. “I haven’t seen the news for two days.”

She stopped at the sight of him. He looked at her with something so like agony that she closed the door and went to him and stood close enough that if he moved at all, if he looked at her with any glimpse of invitation or acceptance, she could hold him up.

He stood. He nodded thanks but carefully he stepped back from her.

“There are people,” he said slowly, “out there, in that fucking chaos. I can’t talk to them any more. It didn’t need to be like this. Did it? It didn’t. I don’t care that you can’t cure it but if you can’t, then show us how to live with it.”

He did something and that night the TV worked again.

Emergency broadcasts. Perry put his head around the door to be lit by aerial footage of fires in Chile, the ruins of Antwerp and Edinburgh.

“Colonel,” Perry said, “I’m doing another late session tonight, OK?”

“Did you see that Australian guy? “Gomez said to Anna.

Perry left, and Gomez eyed the closing door. “He thinks he’s found something,” he said. “Online.”

“How?” Anna said. There was no internet any more, only an unstable Sargasso of abandoned sites adrift in static, drifts and clumps of wrecked data, blogs, social media, the digital debris of industries and agencies.