“Are either of you in any pain? Discomfort?” asked Leon’s mom.
Neither of them seemed to hear her. The rain drumming on the roof was getting louder and more insistent, and heavy drips were beginning to splash down through the holes, onto the ground.
“Greg?” said Leon. “Eva?”
Eva had started singing something softly. It sounded like a gospel hymn of some kind.
“Hey, that’s really nice, Eva,” said Greg dreamily. “Don’t stop.”
Leon watched as a trail of blood thickened with mucus, rolled out of Greg’s left nostril, down his cheek, and soaked into the hair around his ear. He lifted his infected hand up to his face and stared up at it. A long ribbon of pink gel dangled down from it in a loop, swinging inches above him.
“Wow. I’ve never seen the inside of my hand,” he said drunkenly. “I can see the bones…the tendons…the muscles… Fascinating.”
Leon turned to look at his sister. Her face was white, her eyes round with horror.
“Mom,” said Leon quietly. He nodded at his sister.
Don’t let her watch this.
She nodded, got up, and tugged Grace after her. “Let’s take a look around, honey, see if we can find supplies, anything useful.”
They disappeared between the tractors, and Leon turned and resumed watching over Eva and Greg. Eva’s arm was stretched out above her head now, like she didn’t have a care in the world, was just some dreamer lying among the hay bales. Leon could see the process was accelerating. The infection seemed to be spreading quickly; her skin was mottled all the way up to the elbow now and faint lines showed the infection snaking ahead like scouts before an advancing army. The flesh along her forearm and around her wrist was drooping like melted wax, exposing glimpses of bone and tendon.
“Can either of you hear me?” asked Leon.
“Yeah…” whispered Greg after a while. “I hear you, mate.”
“I have to go now… Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Thirsty,” Greg replied, smacking his dry lips. “Thirsty work…this…melting business…”
Leon looked at the plastic bottle of grape-flavored water. He wanted to help them any way he could—hold the bottle to their lips—but he couldn’t touch it now.
“The water’s right there… It’s right beside you, Greg.”
The man’s bloodshot eyes swiveled to the right. “My sight… Shit… It’s going… I can’t see… All blurry… Just light…glowing light.”
“It’s the Lord!” whispered Eva. “Coming down for us.” Blood bubbled out of the side of her mouth. She started to gag and cough and turned her face to the side. Pink froth spilled out of her mouth onto the ground, accompanied by several loose teeth.
Leon wanted to leave, and yet felt he had to stay. To bear witness. On the one hand, he was storing up images in his head that were going to torment him with nightmares, but on the other, he needed to know what it was going to be like when they inevitably got this infection. He was certain it was going to happen to them sooner rather than later. They were going to die—he was going to witness his mom, Grace, himself…dying just like this.
He needed to know what it was going to be like. How it was going to feel.
Greg’s left leg began to twitch and kick, almost in defiance, like it was the last part of his body putting up a fight. He started to moan and a deep gurgling came from the back of his throat, like he was now experiencing some sort of discomfort.
“Greg? Can you hear me? Is it…hurting?”
The moan became a whimpering cry, no longer the voice of a young man but the tearless mewling of a small boy.
“I…don’t wan’…to go clothes shops, Mom… I don’t want to…” Greg muttered. The rest of his words became an incoherent, childlike jumble. He was silent for a few moments, then suddenly began to shriek. The shrill sound lasted just a couple of seconds before it turned into a guttural click as something within his throat collapsed or snapped or gave way.
Enough! God, enough! You’ve seen enough.
Eva’s upper arm was now beginning to slide off the bone like slow-cooked meat. The pooling liquid beneath seemed to be organizing itself, several small threads emerging from the pool like feelers, snaking inch by inch across the ground—explorers charting a new continent.
“Leon! Come on!” His mom’s voice. “Now!”
He stood up and backed several steps away from the two bodies.
“I…I’ve got to go,” he said softly. Neither of them seemed to hear him.
Eva resumed humming her hymn, while Greg just gurgled and whimpered.
Chapter 23
Leon figured it was just about midday when his mom finally did what Mr. Mareham predicted she would do.
She cracked.
They’d left the barn, Leon’s mom not wanting to risk staying near the infection a moment longer than they had to. There was no way of knowing if there would be more of those lethal floating particles. They’d made their way across field after field, hoping to find a farmhouse, a gas station, an out-of-town strip mall, a main road…even hoping to find a police roadblock, despite the fact they might be shot on sight if they did.
“I thought Britain was supposed to be, like, overcrowded,” said Grace.
Leon smiled encouragingly. Good to hear her have a go at trying to be funny.
She had a point. It seemed as if they’d made their escape from the train into the one unspoiled wilderness left in the country. After an hour of cutting across plowed ruts of mud, they finally headed toward a nearby woods in the hope that it was concealing some sort of safe haven.
Leon spotted the corpses of dozens of animals—cows or bulls, by the look of them—in the far corner of the field they were crossing, sagging, black-and-white hides that had torn open to reveal rows of curved bones like the gnarled clawlike fingers of upturned hands. They were a safe enough distance away to pause for a moment, but then a gust of wind swooped across the field and scooped a cloud of particles from each carcass up into the air.
They scrambled toward the cover of the nearby tree line and skirted the edge for a while, looking for something else more promising to head for than the deep, dark woods.
Finally, exhausted and thirsty, they came to a halt beneath the low boughs of an elm tree. Leon’s mom excused herself to go for a pee, ducking beneath a loop of barbed wire and disappearing into the woods.
Grace shucked the straps of her backpack off her shoulders, let it drop to the ground, then slumped down to sit on it. She inspected her mud-caked tennis shoes. “I wonder if school’s closed today,” she wondered absently. A stupid question, but it was something to break the silence.
“Of course it is,” Leon replied. “Everything’s closed, Grace.”
“Like, forever and ever…the end?”
He shrugged.
She snorted humorlessly. “That’s your dream, isn’t it? Schools closed forever. The end of the world. Just like those stupid Xbox zombie games?” The way she said that, it sounded as if she was blaming him for wishing this on the world.
She was right about one thing though. How many times had he imagined how cool it would be to be the lone survivor in a postapocalyptic landscape as he hacked his way through legions of undead, risen demons and Slendermen? Brutal onscreen survival…from the comfort and convenience of his bedroom, with a mug of coffee and a warm Pop-Tart beside him.
“Just shut up” was all he managed to come up with.
“Great idea leaving town, Leo.” Her voice had lost that croaky, sarcastic drawl she used for playground put-downs. “We should have stayed at home.”
Home? Did she mean London? Or was she talking about the U.S.?
“Dad’s a complete, total idiot…telling us to get out of—”
“Dad was totally right,” he replied. “If we’d stayed, we would have been tra
pped.”
“I hope he and his girlfriend are dead.”
He spun around. “Why don’t you just shut up?”
“No, you shut up! You always take his side.”
“What? No I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do. You’ve done nothing but sulk like a baby since we moved. Making things even harder on Mom. And she’s had enough to—”
“Jeez, Grace! Just stop trying to big-sister me! You don’t know shit. You don’t know anything.”
“I made an effort to fit in here. Which is more than you’ve—”
“Mom didn’t have to drag us to England! She could’ve worked it out with Dad. She could’ve kept going… She just didn’t like it there. This was just an excuse to leave—”
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Leon’s mom emerged from the woods. “Just knock it off, both of you!” She stumbled out of the undergrowth toward them.
“Grace said she wished Dad were dead!”
“Yeah, so what? And all you do is blame Mom just because you can’t make any new friends over here.”
“You’re so full of it, Grace. You—”
Leon’s mom ducked down quickly through the barbed wire—“The two of you just stop it! Please!”—catching her scalp on a rusty barb. As she stood up, it scraped deeply, tugging roughly at her hair and making her yelp with pain.
Grace and Leon shut up. They watched her straighten up, clutching the top of her head and grimacing. She lifted her hand away from her messed-up hair and stared at the smear of blood across her palm. Then, without warning, her legs buckled beneath her and she slumped down heavily, ending up kneeling in the mud, her face buried in her hands, sobbing and rocking backward and forward.
Just like Ben had said.
One thing too many…buckaroo.
Grace dropped down beside her. “Mom? Mom? Hey! Please! Don’t cry!”
But Leon’s mom continued wailing into her hands and then Grace started crying too.
Leon watched them both huddled together on the wet mud, with a sky threatening more rain and a silent woods beside them that should have been alive with birds singing but instead sighed mournfully in the breeze.
The three of them were stuck in the middle of nowhere… The other passengers? He had no idea if they were still alive. Still people. They were marooned here, with no food, no water, nowhere to go, and no one left alive to help them, so it seemed.
Time to step up to the plate, MonkeyNuts.
He closed his eyes and massaged his temple. Another bastard of a headache was announcing its timely arrival.
Chapter 24
Suffolk
As the rain pattered relentlessly on the corrugated-iron barn roof, beneath it, on a low stack of abandoned wooden pallets, several trillion cells that had once formed the architecture of a being called Eva now began to work as a giant collective.
Nearby was another cooperative that used to be known as Greg. Both these colonies now served new masters—masters, or, more accurately, liberators: like a crusading army, advancing from city to city, freeing slaves from their shackles and recruiting them to the cause.
The virally infected cells—simple automatons with no real understanding of kingdoms or cities or slaves—now worked on a new basic chemical incentive: to find cells unlike themselves, non-brethren identified by their DNA, and store those sequences of nucleotides for later, while converting them just enough to enlist them in the process of hunting down the other non-brethren that remained.
Within five hours of very first contact, as the light faded from the gray sky and the afternoon became twilight, the last soft-tissue components of the former kingdoms of Eva and Greg had been absorbed and recruited as single-cell citizens of a far greater combined nation. What remained of those old kingdoms were the crumbling ruins, the defeated battlements and strongholds: bones, hair, teeth, and nails.
The indigestible and the unnecessary.
Between those brittle, forgotten remnants, the cells merged into a single big pool rich in stores of nutrition, a gathering place where cells swirled around each other and exchanged the tiny packets of DNA data they each carried like market square gossip, like mercenaries comparing their stolen goods.
They exchanged, compared, and every now and then, when pieces of DNA accidentally fit together, like jigsaw puzzle pieces stirred around in a box, they…reconstructed.
Somewhere, in the middle of the dark, glutinous puddle, a tiny part of Eva was remade; just a few hundred fragments of data that under the old regime would together have formed a single, solitary, not particularly important gene—a gene that decided the configuration of taste buds, a gene that used to have the tiniest say in the type of food Eva once favored.
She used to have a thing for banana smoothies. That insignificant gene was the reason for that. A tiny part of Eva, in that moment, had been recovered. The short DNA sequence was reproduced in the genome of several cells that were now promoted to a more important role: specialized cells with a particular purpose, guardians of a microscopic fragment of genetic knowledge.
Tiny little librarians, tasked with keeping that part of Eva alive for posterity.
Forever.
Chapter 25
They came across it the next morning, after a night huddled together beneath the plastic roof of a rural bus stop. Leon, Grace, and their mom…quite possibly the last three people left alive in Britain, perhaps the world.
Leon had spent the entire night looking wistfully down the long, straight country road, overhung by leafy branches that creaked and groaned, hoping to spot the distant pinprick of someone’s approaching headlights.
As soon as the sky started to lighten to a dispiriting gray and they could see where they were going, they got to their feet and continued down the road, hoping to find a small town, maybe a gas station with a vending machine selling something they could safely drink. Leon’s head thumped with every step, his headache compounded further by the ache of dehydration and exhaustion.
They passed a stream and considered for a moment dipping their cupped hands into it. But Leon and his mom looked at each other and shook their heads. Not worth it. Not yet at any rate.
The gray sky gradually became a featureless white—it was midmorning, Leon guessed, when they finally came across the entrance to something: an old road of cracked, unmaintained asphalt leading up to a wire-mesh fence. There was an old Ministry of Defense sign above which a newer sign had been attached.
Grace read the sign. “Redevelopment of site: Hewitt and Hughes Contractors. This site is supervised twenty-four hours.”
“Maybe there’s someone here,” said Leon. He could imagine finding a bowlegged, old security guard with a German shepherd called Saxon, stoically doing his job despite the coming of the end of the world. A cranky man who might at first try to gruffly shoo them away, but who would take pity and let them in. He would provide shelter and food, and in return, they’d show him how to open his stone-cold heart and learn to love again.
Just like some crummy TV movie.
The cracked road led up a gentle slope, past a cluster of saplings that looked as if they hadn’t been deliberately planted but were the random scatterings of Mother Nature staking her claim.
At the top of the slope, they came to a halt.
“What are those?” asked Grace.
They were looking across a couple of fenced acres of weed-covered ground, punctuated at regular intervals by artificial-looking mounds of grass: uniformly round, with flat tops. Leon counted them—twenty-seven…three orderly rows of nine. There were several boarded-up concrete structures and a single prefabricated shed.
“Maybe there’s someone in the cabin?”
They made their way toward it, up an overgrown pathway, between two of the rows of mounds. Leon noticed each one had a short flight of concrete steps that led down into the ground and a heavy iron door. T
hey reminded him of the ruins of the Nazi fortifications along the Normandy beaches. Each mound’s iron door appeared to be firmly sealed with heavy-duty padlocks.
The shed was also locked. They knocked on the door and waited a minute. Then, finally, Leon decided no one was home and aimed a kick at its flimsy door. It caved inward. Inside, they found several plastic chairs set around a table cluttered with copies of The Sun, the Mirror, and the Daily Express from three days ago. The headlines were all about some soccer player who’d been arrested for assaulting a referee, a former Britain’s Got Talent star who’d been discovered living homeless on the streets, and an article on the recent spike in the number of African migrants “swarming toward Britain.” There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, several mugs that held the congealed dregs of coffee, and a long-handled night watchman’s flashlight.
There was an empty kettle and a small fridge. Leon’s mom hurried over to it and pulled it open. Inside there was a bottle of milk that was so old it had separated into three clearly distinct layers of gunk. There was, however, a plastic liter bottle of water. She pulled it out and opened it.
“Here,” she said, holding it out to them.
Leon took it from her and sipped it. “It’s pretty stale, but it’s OK.”
He handed it to his sister. She tested it and made a face, but then thirst overcame her and she eagerly tossed back several hasty slugs. Leon followed her, then handed his mom the bottle. She upended it and gulped a few mouthfuls. It was stale water that had been sitting there for a while with God knows whose backwash floating around in it, but they quickly finished it off between them.
There was nothing else to drink and little of use except the flashlight. Leon picked it up and tried it. It was working.
They stepped out of the cabin and made their way back down the path. It was then that Leon noticed that one of the many grassy mounds’ doors wasn’t padlocked.
“Mom, look!”
He took the half a dozen steps down and pushed against it gently. It creaked inward.