Leon’s mom stared at her rebellious kids, united on this particular issue, and found herself unable to put together a convincing counterargument. “Well, if we find one…you take it very slow, Leo. I mean it. Slow!”
Chapter 27
They found a white van that had skidded to a halt at the side of the very same road they’d been walking along two weeks ago. The driver’s side door was open, and a dozen yards away, Leon saw a pair of Doc Martens boots and the frayed cuffs of a pair of jeans protruding from the bushes beneath a tree.
Mohammed wandered over and ducked under the tree to get a closer look.
“Don’t get too near it,” said Leon’s mom.
He nodded, pulled a branch to one side, and made a face at what he could see. “Just bones and clothes left.”
The driver presumably. It looked as if he’d been infected, come to a halt before he crashed into something, and then… What did he hope to find by getting out? Help? Leon wondered why the driver had even bothered to unbuckle himself. Maybe he hadn’t seen up close what Leon had seen—the inevitability of death.
This must have happened after they’d walked this way. He wondered how long after. Carefully, he pulled open the passenger’s side door and peered inside, expecting to see the ghastly, stringy remains of some other poor soul. But the interior appeared to be clean, and the key was still in the ignition.
“It looks OK.”
Grace remained several feet away on the other side of the narrow country lane. She stared uncertainly at the van. “What if there’s still…bits of him inside?”
Leon cautiously climbed up on to the passenger’s side.
“Please…be careful, Leo,” his mom called out.
He looked around. “I can’t see any…gooey stuff. It looks totally clean.”
“I’m not sure it’s worth the risk,” she added. “It just takes one touch from one of those flakes or tendrils, and we’ll get it.”
“Unless we are immune,” Mohammed reminded her.
Leon backed out and stepped down on to the asphalt. “Mom, we’re going into a village and looking around for stuff. We’re gonna end up touching lots of things. And on the way, if we come across one of those spore clouds, we’re going to want something to shield us from it.”
Grace bit her lip, remembering their escape from the cloud on the railway track. She nodded eagerly. “Leon’s right.”
“Then let’s be sure…a hundred percent sure.” Leon’s mom went to the back of the van and gingerly pulled the rear doors open. Something dislodged inside as she slowly opened it. A can of paint rolled out and thunked on to the road. The back of the van was cluttered with cans, brushes, and paint-spattered dust sheets.
Ten minutes later, the rear of the van was completely empty, its contents tossed out onto the road. Leon’s mom nodded, satisfied there weren’t any hidden sticky strands of the plague lurking inside.
Leon settled into the driver’s seat, his mom the passenger’s seat, and Mohammed and Grace crouched in the back.
“OK,” said Leon, turning the ignition key. The van started, grunted, lurched forward a couple feet, and then stalled.
“Neutral,” said his mom. “Is it in neutral?”
Leon mentally smacked his forehead. He knew about gears and clutches. The basic theory of it all anyway. He pulled the gear column into neutral and turned the ignition again. The van’s engine purred with begrudging approval this time. He glanced down at his feet and tried to identify the three pedals from memory.
Brake, clutch, accelerator.
He pressed down on the left-most pedal and then pushed the gear stick into first. A grinding, rattling whine came from the engine.
Oh yeah. Clutch…brake…accelerator.
He tried the correct pedal and waggled the stick into first, this time without the van complaining. He eased his foot off the clutch and the van lurched forward once again, kangaroo-hopping nearly into the tree and the bones beneath it. He spun the steering wheel and the van swung sharply back onto the narrow road and ended up thumping gently against a tree on the far side and stalling.
“For God’s sake, Leon,” cried Grace from the back, “you’re going to kill us all.”
Half an hour later, the van finally crawled into Little Buntingham, the engine grinding and whining at Leon for his heavy-handed and heavy-footed treatment.
An improvised barricade had been set up across the road, nothing they couldn’t knock aside: just some wooden packing crates, an old sofa, and a hastily painted warning on the back of a real estate agent’s sign:
WE HAVE THE PLAGUE HERE
“This will have to do,” said Mohammed.
Leon brought the van to a staggered halt and turned the engine off. He imagined this rural village was exactly the type of country setting for which American tourists came to the UK: a village green, a duck pond with a weeping willow dipping leaves into the water. No ducks now, of course. There was a pub, and next to it a post office and a convenience store. A church spire loomed over the top of thatched roofs. Real wish you were here picture-postcard stuff. But it was deserted and silent except for the gentle, soothing whisper of the willow stirring in the breeze.
“Maybe it’s been evacuated?” said Leon’s mom hopefully.
“No,” replied Mohammed. “You saw the sign. It reached this place too.”
Leon spotted a couple of small piles of clothing, one on the green, another across the flower beds just outside the post office. He pointed them out to his mom and she nodded sadly. “I guess nowhere escaped it, then.”
“The pharmacy is just a bit farther along this street,” said Mohammed. He climbed out of the back of the van.
Leon’s mom opened the passenger’s side door. “You kids stay right here. We don’t all need to go looking.”
Leon ignored that and reached for the door handle.
“No.” She grabbed at his arm. “I said stay!”
“Mom, for God’s sake, I’m just—”
“Leon,” she snapped at him. “For once can you please just do as I say?”
He stared at her—a challenge. He wanted to make the point that maybe it was time for him to stand up and be an adult. OK, he wasn’t eager…but it was probably time. She needed to know, the conversation needed to happen, but maybe not just now. She had her stress face on and was doing the voice-rising thing. Clearly, she wasn’t going to take any shit from him this morning.
“You stay right here and you watch your sister. All right?” Her voice was sharp. The next notch up would be the mom screech, the one that went right through him like nails across a blackboard.
He nodded resentfully. “Make sure you get me some aspirin or Tylenol.”
“Don’t worry… We’ll get a little of everything.” She squeezed his arm gently before letting go. “Back in five, OK?”
She stepped down out of the van, closed the door, and followed Mohammed around the barricade and down the pretty little main street.
Grace stirred in the back. “Why do you always do that?”
He watched them until they disappeared around a bend in the road. “Do what?”
“Get her worked up like that.”
He turned in his seat and looked back at his sister. She was slumped against the side of the van, cradling her throbbing arm. Eyes closed and skin pale.
“I’m nearly seventeen. She still treats me like a little kid.”
“Yeah, well…you behave like one still.”
He mentally counted to five. His sister irritated the hell out of him sometimes. That whole little girl all grown up voice she did. Like she was the older sibling here—sometimes it really grated.
• • •
“So you really think we might actually be immune to this thing?”
Mohammed nodded. “It is a distinct possibility. You told me you were on that tra
in. Well, I was in the village hall here. The same thing happened to me. We were woken up by local police. All taken to the hall. The policeman was telling us what he’d been told, about all the emergency measures. Then somebody came into the hall, sick. We all ran, panicked, outside, and that floating white pollen was coming down on us like snow.”
He shook his head. “There was so much of it. Some of it must have touched me—I am sure of it.”
“And you didn’t get ill?”
He shook his head. “No. Nothing. If…if…we have immunity, it is not like normal where you take on the virus, you survive, and now your body knows how to fight the infection, I think. If it is that we are immune, then the virus must have no effect at all. It cannot get established.”
“Or we’ve been very, very lucky so far.”
Mohammed nodded. “That is also possible.”
They passed the village’s one and only pub and its quaint, little beer garden. Just ahead of them on the other side of the narrow road was a church and, next to it, a single-story community center. Along its short gravel path, flanked by beautifully maintained flower beds, lay small bundles of clothes from which bones protruded, tufts of tangled and matted hair still attached to the tops of skulls. Leon’s mom spotted a mottled brown skull emerging from the neckline of a blue bathrobe right beside her and, on the path, a pair of bright-pink dentures.
Her eyes flicked away from them quickly. It was just too much. She looked at the only safe place: the sky.
“Oh God, I feel like I need to throw up.”
“Do not look so closely then,” he replied.
She sucked in a deep breath. “That was where they rounded you up?”
Mohammed nodded. “I ran from there, then out of the village.”
“What about family? Was there anybody else…?”
“I am lucky, I think. I have no family.” He touched her arm lightly. “This is the village medical center. The pharmacy is inside.”
• • •
Leon opened the driver’s side door.
“And just where do you think you’re going?” Grace clucked imperiously.
“Just going to take a look.”
“Mom said you had to stay right here with me!”
“You stay here. I’m not going far.” He climbed out.
“Leon!”
“Hey! Relax! I’m just going to go take a look at the pond.”
“Why?” Her voice lost its scolding tone. “Leon, please don’t!”
“I’m not going to touch anything! Just stay there. You’ll be fine.”
He left the door open, like a bank robber anticipating the need for a quick getaway, and made his way across the overgrown lawn toward the pond. He detoured slightly to get a closer look at a pile of clothing nearby.
It appeared to be the remains of someone young: sneakers, jeans…a soccer shirt that was once canary yellow, now mostly mottled with dark patches, and a mop of wavy, brown, shoulder-length hair. It could have been either a girl or a boy with Harry Styles hair. All he had to go on was clothes, bones, and hair.
Where’s all the rest of him…her?
He’d witnessed Mr. Mareham’s body reduced to a pool. He’d watched Eva and that guy, Greg, beginning to break down into that same liquid. Where did all that thick liquid go? He wondered if it had somehow dried out and become those white flakes, like dandelions turning from flowers to white puffs of seed? But not all that liquid, right? He wondered if it had just soaked into the ground, but there seemed to be no residue or anything else on the grass. It seemed that everything from this body that could be digested had been—perfectly efficiently—and then apparently vanished…leaving behind nothing but bones.
It can’t have just evaporated, MonkeyNuts. It’s there…somewhere.
Leon nodded. He’d seen it up close. It wasn’t just a “dumb” liquid. He was certain he’d witnessed it trickle with some kind of purpose, not simply following the grooves of wood or the pull of gravity, but small rivulets of it moving deliberately toward other ones, reaching out for each other. Making connections.
It’s not evaporated or soaked away. It’s gone somewhere. He stood up and looked around, suddenly feeling vulnerable and exposed.
It’s hiding.
Chapter 28
There were bodies in the office’s waiting room. Not that Leon’s mom felt she could call them bodies; they were just clumps of clothes, almost like the small piles of laundry Leon left lying around for her in his bedroom like cow pie in a field. In the corner, she glimpsed a stroller and a pink snuggle suit; she was too slow when she looked away to not see the little skull and its two dark orbital sockets staring back at her. Much of the floor of the waiting room was dotted with clothes and scarecrow bones. She stepped warily clear of each pile, examining the floor for the weblike tendrils of fluid.
“Mohammed…where’s all that stuff gone?”
He nodded. Clearly he’d noticed that too. There was little to suggest these bodies had ever been anything more than bones and rags, except for a network of faint stains on the office’s knitted carpet, snaking pencil-thin lines that radiated out from each body like old, disused country roads, marking where the liquid had once been.
They made their way around the receptionist’s desk to a back room lined from floor to ceiling with partitioned shelves and pigeonhole compartments stuffed with small, white packs and cartons of pills, many labeled with patient names.
“We should get several kinds of antibiotics for your daughter,” he said as he pulled the cartons out one by one, reading the contents of each. “And also we should gather a selection of general-purpose antibiotics. Also analgesics of whichever kind you prefer. The brand is not important; it is the same whichever you choose.”
Leon’s mom started sorting through the boxes in the pigeonholes. “You seem to know a lot about medicines.”
“I used to be a practicing pharmacist,” he replied.
“Here?”
“No, back in Syria.”
She looked at him. “I thought you said you came from Bangladesh?”
He shrugged. “Originally.”
“Then you traveled there?” She let the question be open and nonspecific, but he nodded.
He knew exactly what she was asking. “I went to help my brothers and sisters.” He nodded solemnly. “Yes. I was there.”
“Did you fight over there?”
He ignored her. Pulled out a cardboard box and emptied the contents on the floor. “Put what you find in here.”
“Did you fight?” The question came out sounding like a courtroom accusation.
“No. I was just a medic.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Healing wounded terrorists?”
“Healing wounded people.” He turned to look at her. “It is all ancient history now, Mrs. Button. Irrelevant. Now it is just the few of us who have survived that matter.”
“Yes.” She offered him a conciliatory smile. “You’re right.”
• • •
Leon squatted down at the edge of the duck pond and examined the water. Lily pads and a carpet of what looked like green algae rested on the still surface. He’d sat beside ponds before, the ones in Central Park, for instance. The water’s surface there had rippled with activity, the wakes from radio-controlled boats, the ripples caused by ducks and geese paddling around and squabbling for hunks of tossed-in bread.
The water here was as flat and still as a mirror. Even the breeze stirring the willow was not a cat’s-paw to the surface. There were not even the faint expanding circles caused by dipping daddy-long-legs or paddling water boatmen.
Silent. Still. Utterly lifeless.
He heard the van’s rear door slam shut and turned to see Grace making her way across the lawn toward him, steering widely around that one body.
“Leon!” she called out. ??
?What are you doing?”
She pulled up a few feet short of the pond, wary of it, wary of the floating algae.
“I thought there might be something left alive in the water,” he sighed. “Fish or, you know, something.”
She was angry with him, but she was also curious. “Is there anything?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. I guess that means the seas have all been infected too.” Made sense. Didn’t something like ninety percent of the world’s living things hang out in water? The virus would have probably had a great time wreaking havoc in there.
“You know what that means, don’t you, Grace?”
She nodded.
“It’s gotten everywhere.”
“Uh-huh.” He’d been holding on to a fading hope that someday soon a UN relief force was going to appear out of the sky like a host of angels, squadrons of helicopters kicking up dead leaves and dust, and spilling army boots onto the ground. But, if this virus was as effective at sea as it was on land, then not even a remote, far-flung island nation was going to have a chance of surviving. Not Tonga, not Hawaii, not Easter Island, maybe not even those dotted-around research stations in the Antarctic.
“We’re alone. Not even ocean-bound places like New Zealand will be left.”
“Except for other people like us,” she said.
“Like us?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, maybe…we really are immune to it?”
“You, me, Mom, and Mohammed?” He settled down on his bottom and looked across at the willow tree.
“There could be others too.” She scratched at an itch at the end of her cast. “If we’re immune to the plague, then there have to be others too, right? It can’t just be us left.” They heard the pond stir. The gentlest ripple of water lapping a few inches up the dry mud beside his feet. He looked out across the pond and saw a second concentric ripple following the first—gentler but distinctly there. He turned around to look at her.
“Did you just throw something in?”
“No.”
He looked up at the tree again. Maybe the breeze had shaken a leaf or a seedpod loose. Then another ripple expanded in a circle from somewhere farther along, near the pond’s edge.