“What are you doing to Freya?”
He quickly pulled her top back down. “Just messing.” He got off her, stood up, and offered Freya a hand. “Just play wrestling.”
Freya kicked at his hand. “Get away from me, you pig!”
Dave shrugged. He muttered quietly to her, “Ron won’t be running things forever.”
The words chilled her. Not just an observation—it was a barely concealed threat.
He strode across the terrace to the door, looked at Grace, and winked. “You too… You’re not too young, princess,” he muttered under his breath.
“I’m going to tell Mr. Carnegie what I just saw,” said Grace.
He pushed past her and headed down the stairwell. She watched him go, then hurried over to Freya. “You OK?”
Freya nodded, mutely, then began to sob. Grace sat down beside her, put her arms around her shoulders, and held her tightly. “There, there,” she cooed, rubbing her back.
She may only have been twelve, but she knew when another girl needed help.
• • •
“Well? Dave? What have you got to say about this?”
Dave looked at everyone assembled in the cafeteria. All eyes were on him, waiting expectantly for his explanation.
“I knew something like this would happen.” Dave shook his head angrily. “No,” he sighed, “I didn’t bloody well attack her.”
“I said,” Freya cut in, “you assaulted me.”
“Ron”—he turned to his boss—“seriously? Are we doing this?”
“I want to hear what you’ve got to say.”
Dave rolled his eyes and sighed again. “She was up on the terrace hanging her laundry. She backed up against one of the deck loungers and tripped over the footrest end.” He looked at Freya. “You all know what she’s like—she’s clumsy. I went over to give her a hand…and she got really shitty with me.” He looked at his audience. “You know what she can be like…really arsey. She told me to ‘eff off.’ Said I was looking for any excuse to grope her. And that’s when little Miss Princess turned up out of the blue and decided to get the wrong end of the stick.”
“Grace said you lifted Freya’s shirt up.”
“I was pulling it down, because yes…it was up. She was struggling on that deck chair like a flipped-over turtle. I was just trying to—”
Iain and Phil laughed.
“All right, you two,” snapped Ron. “Keep it down.”
“I was a complete sucker, trying to be helpful to her.” He snarled. “That won’t happen again, I’m telling you.”
“You really are a lying weasel shit bag,” said Freya. “Everyone knows what you’re like! Ever since I turned up here, I’ve seen what you’re like—hitting on anything with a pulse.”
“Quiet now, Freya,” said Ron. “You’ve had your say. It’s Dave’s turn.”
“You want to know what else he said?” She didn’t wait for Ron to reply. “He said Grace wasn’t too young for the same treatment either.” Freya shook her head and stared at him. “Yeah, I heard that. You really make me want to vomit.”
“Is that true?” asked Ron.
Dave’s face creased up with incredulity. “Jesus! She’s a kid! Of course I didn’t bloody say that!”
“Oh my God, you lying shit! You lying piece of—”
“All right, all right!” Ron raised his hands to hush them both.
Dave shook his head. “You really are a piece of work, aren’t you? Throwing an accusation like that at me—”
“Quiet! The two of you!” Ron snapped.
They both clapped their mouths shut. No one had heard Ron’s voice sound like that before.
It was quiet. Grace broke the silence though. “He’s the one who’s lying, Mr. Carnegie.”
Leon grabbed her hand to shush her.
“Look.” Ron absently scratched at the back of his neck and grimaced. “Look, Dave…I really can’t have someone around, on my team, who I can’t trust with our guests. There’s a disciplinary process that I have to—”
“You can’t kick him out, sir!” shouted Iain. “Not based on what she said! You know what she can be like!” He looked at Big Phil to back him up, but he merely offered a noncommittal shrug.
“Uh-huh.” Freya shrugged. “Like, you know, because that’s what I do for a hobby…make false accusations of assault.”
Dave was emboldened by the support. “Ron, look, this is crazy. We’ve all got to work together, you know? Stick together. I…” He puffed out a breath. “Look, we’re probably it. All that’s left. Just us. Alone. Here.”
“All the same, Dave, there are rules of conduct and—”
“Ron! This isn’t a holiday spa anymore! We aren’t Emerald Parks employees anymore!” He pointed at Freya, nodded at those few in the audience not wearing green tops. “And they’re not our bloody guests!” He turned back to Ron. “We can’t piss around anymore and pretend it’s all going to get back to normal! The game is survival, mate… Do you understand?” He laughed. “Jesus, look at us. We’re having a crappy disciplinary hearing!”
Leon watched Ron still vigorously scratching the back of his neck. Still wincing and sucking air in between his teeth.
He’s going to back down. He could feel Grace trembling with rage.
“Now…just…Dave…just calm down. Please. No one’s getting kicked out. No one’s getting fired—”
“Fired?” Dave laughed. “From what? From our jobs?”
Leon noticed some heads nodding in the cafeteria and realized that the only reason Mr. Carnegie was still in charge here was that no one had figured out yet that someone else could be. That, or maybe it was the rumor that Mr. Carnegie kept a gun locked up in the top drawer of his desk. Spanners told Leon that somebody had found one, on one of their shopping trips, and Mr. Carnegie had put it out of the way for safekeeping.
“Look, I think for the sake of peace and order here, the best thing is for you two to give each other a wide berth.” He gave Dave, then Freya a firm, headmaster’s stare. “Is that perfectly clear?”
Dave shrugged. “Suits me, Ron.”
“Freya?”
She laughed dryly. “Sure. Why not? I mean…how many females’ testimonies equal a male testimony? More than two, apparently.”
“Now, Freya…I’ve had enough of this bickering! Dave, you’re on warning from me! Do you understand?”
He smirked. “Sure…OK.”
“And, Freya…”
She huffed and walked past Ron, not bothering to stay and listen to any more. She paused for a moment in front of Dave. “You touch a hair on Grace’s head, you even look at her funny, and I swear, I will ram a skewer into your ear next time.”
Chapter 40
The Congolese Jungle
Beneath tall red cedar trees with their broad, waxy leaves—a canopy that filtered out the light so much that the jungle floor below existed in an eternal emerald-green twilight—it was unnaturally quiet. Six months ago, this Congolese jungle would have echoed with twittering and tweeting, the haunting cries of howler monkeys, the incessant chee-chee-chee of insects. Now, like everywhere else, the only sound was the stirring of leaves, the creaking of ancient branches. Without the movement of wind, the world would have been wholly silent.
But not lifeless.
The jungle floor was very far from barren. Here in this place that once upon a time, a million years ago, had been the cradle of humanity—the place where one species of primate had learned that coming down from the trees freed up their dexterous hands and their minds—here, it was a cradle for a brand-new ecosystem.
The jungle floor as we would recognize it was long gone, buried beneath a dark-brown, leathery blanket. The blanket ran smoothly, lifting in humps here and there, faintly marking the topography below: fallen trees, dips and rises in the ground.
br /> In several locations, the leathery material had hardened into a firm, resinlike material, and tall stalagmites, like termite mounds, emerged from the soft blanket. Copying the behavior of the trees, they speared straight upward, reaching for the sunlight. But, unlike the trees, there was intelligence at work, deploying a more effective method of reaching the sunlight. These stalagmites reached only halfway up, tapered to a point, then formed thin, sinuous “ropes” of material that swayed gently as they ascended toward the canopy of leaves overhead.
In the brilliant sunlight above the canopy, the ropes thickened and became bloated pink and sepia balloons that looked like the intestines of a pig comically inflated to ridiculous proportions. The balloons swayed gently in the breeze, their taut, thin membranes glistening in the sunlight, thousands of them up there, like tethered party balloons, collecting the solar energy, converting it inside themselves to a sugar solution that was then transferred back down the ropes to feed the hungry megacolony below.
Every now and then, a balloon gently broke free and floated away, its useful life as a solar collector coming to an end and now assigned the role of a spore container, to be carried aloft to a higher altitude, where it would eventually rupture and release its cargo.
On the jungle floor, this megacolony was one of the very first. Consequently, it was one of the most mature. Billions of years of evolution by our standards had accelerated here to mere months. Beneath the brown blanket churned a glutinous ocean: cells arranging into clusters large enough to store libraries of DNA packets—many of these packets assembled by trial and error into almost complete genomes. Groups of clusters cooperating and merging to become super-clusters capable of not only storing data, but—like the simplest of digital AI—processing that data. Making decisions.
Strategizing.
The “plan,” for want of a better term, was embedded and encoded in the chromosomes of every single cell in this vast ocean, every one of them entrusted with knowledge of the goal, but each too simple on their own to understand it.
The plan was stratified; it came in levels of complexity. The simplest to understand and the most important level of the plan was the basic expedient of survival—procreation. An easy enough concept for simple cells to grasp.
But with the creation of billions of clusters came the emergent ability to read just a little farther down the encoded to-do list. The instructions were to store and collate the newly acquired genetic data, to try to reassemble the life forms it had consumed and destroyed.
This megacolony had made great strides on that front. It had reproduced some very impressive life forms, large ones that required the complicated assembly of resinous skeletal structures, articulating limbs, muscle tissues, nerve endings, support systems of organs. But, ironically, it was the simpler things it struggled to replicate. For example, it seemed so many life forms appeared to want to cover themselves with linear arrangements of dead cell tissue, compressed to form a protein it didn’t quite understand—a useless protein that seemed to serve no purpose. A protein we would call keratin.
For a while, all was still in the quiet jungle; then the leather blanket bunched up with movement from below—something stirring. Eventually, the leathery skin ruptured, and out of the soup emerged a modest-size creature. Its brown eyes blinked at the green-filtered sunlight. Its small mouth opened and closed, a chattering noise emerging from its lips. Slender arms ended with delicate, five-digit hands. The creature pulled itself out of the mush and took several testing, loping steps across the leathery skin, bouncing gently like a toddler on a trampoline.
The prototype monkey moved as one would expect it to, walking on its tiny knuckles and dainty feet, its long tail curling, twitching, and waving. Behind those all-brown eyes, optic nerves fed information to a walnut-size brain. Instinct, copied instinct, helped the creature move. It headed for the nearest tree, leaped from the trampoline surface of the skin to the rough bark of the trunk, its small hands reaching for knots and grooves to hold on to. It scampered up the side of the tree at first, slightly ungainly and awkward, like a wild animal shaking off the tail end of a tranquillizer, but by the time it had reached the spreading branches, it was moving like a monkey should.
From a few feet away, it was an utterly convincing facsimile. It might even have fooled a zookeeper if it had been thrown into an enclosure filled with the same species. It certainly would have fooled young visitors making faces at it through a cage’s mesh. But looking closer, much closer, it would have become apparent that this monkey had no fur. Instead, its skin was colored to mimic the millions of strands of keratin it had trouble duplicating.
Washington, DC
The building from the outside was instantly recognizable, having once been the iconic backdrop for so many movies, perhaps looking a little scruffy though; the front lawns needed mowing, the rear rose gardens were competing with unpoliced weeds. But the building was still very much an icon. Inside, however, a much younger colony than the jungle one was finding its way. Down the dark-blue carpets of the hallways of power, thick veins of the virus meandered, occasionally dipping into side rooms and offices, probing, investigating, hunting for organic morsels. A central, much thicker vein, protected by a hardened leathery membrane, snaked down the hallway to the office at the far end, thickening as tributaries joined in from side offices.
The double doors stood wide open and led into an oval-shaped room with tall windows beyond a dark maple wood desk that looked out across those scruffy, untended lawns.
The room would normally have been bright with sunlight. But the windows were now almost entirely coated inside by a thin, sepia-colored membrane, like stomach lining stretched out in a tannery to dry. The membrane filtered the light coming into the room, rendering the space a deep bloodred, bathing it in a womblike glow.
The floor was concealed by a thick mattress of organic soup eight inches thick, again topped with a thin, protective membrane. The walls displayed networks of impressionistic arterial artwork—veins, branches, tributaries—like a projected map of the road network of a truly industrialized country.
The polished maple desk, the blotting pad, the two phones, one linked to an exchange on the mezzanine floor, the other linked directly to the Pentagon—the very same old-fashioned phones once used by a man named Kennedy to talk to a man called Khrushchev—were covered by thin, dark, threadlike strands of the material that had dried and died. Nothing useful here…just a smooth plastic surface that ignored the virus’s probing.
This colony was at a less mature life-cycle stage. Its cells had formed smaller clusters that were now beginning to exchange the genetic data they had gathered. Simple scuttling-creature experiments had been attempted successfully, and their ghostly, pale, almost-translucent forms shifted and twitched in the hundreds as they dangled from the tall, dark-blue drapes by the window, like bats clinging to a cave roof.
New York City
In a large open-plan office with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked down on the streets and lesser skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, there was very little of the virus to be seen. Scuttling explorers from a supercolony sixty floors below had found their way up to the top floor and managed to infect and disassemble the few humans who’d been taking refuge there. Apart from them, this floor had been slim pickings with little more than its modern, clean, expensive office furniture and corporate, gray-blue carpeting, and the virus had long since departed, leaving behind a dozen or so piles of clothing, bones, and tufts of indigestible hair.
There were cans of uneaten food stacked against a wall, several dozen gallon bottles of watercooler water, left unused. Unrolled sleeping bags lay on the floor, and in a cardboard box was a stack of cans that had been opened and scraped clean, their contents eaten.
The people who’d been holding out here had been prepared. They’d taken steps, and if the world had been a fairer place, they would have deserved to have survived for their e
fforts. But none of them was unhealthy; none of them was struggling at the time with any aches or pains, sprains or even minor headaches. Health conscious and fitness overachievers who ate their vegetables, skipped dessert, and did Pilates at least twice a week, they had no need for painkillers, anti-inflammatories, or antidepressants.
These lucky, or unlucky few, had been up here and holding out for weeks, maybe even months, observing the empty streets below, the empty blue skies above, watching summer become autumn, become winter. Hoping desperately for a sign that they weren’t alone. That there’d be hope of a rescue.
Outside one of the broad windows, a sheet flapped and snapped in the breeze, words painted boldly in red on it.
13 SURVIVORS HERE! SEND HELP!
There’d been no one left to read it and no one left to care. New York was dead, America was dead…the world was dead.
One body, a skeleton held almost completely intact by a two-hundred-dollar designer shirt and dark trousers, was slumped in an office chair, turned away from its desk to look out over the city. The body was slouched like a lethargic teenager in front of a video game console, skull tilted at an uncomfortable-looking angle, resting against the left collarbone and topped with a buzz-cut of dark hair.
Empty orbital sockets stared forlornly out at the panoramic view of the necropolis.
In one skeletal hand, palm upward, nestled a dead cell phone, stained and encrusted with a dried residue of blood. In the other, a handgun.
A single, very tidy hole marked the left temple.
On the desk lay a scrawled note, a couple of lines scribbled on a legal pad. A goodbye written by a shaking hand.
I’m so sorry for everything.
I tried to survive. I love you both.
Chapter 41
1/13
Dad, the weirdest thing happened this morning. I woke up without a headache!
Leon had been getting morning headaches from even before the day his mom and dad had their big right-there-in-the-kitchen meltdown. The doctor at the Lincoln Medical Center had said it was probably stress-induced. That’s what the physician in London had said too: Leon’s parents splitting up, the pressure of moving to a new place, the anxiety of school exams, hormones, and that kind of teen-angst stuff thrown on top. The doctor told him she saw so many more stressed-out teenagers these days than she used to, and having regular morning headaches was a pretty mild problem compared to some of them. She’d told him that one day the headaches would probably stop without any warning. Just like a plantar wart that, one day, despite all the expensive ointments and creams…y’know…just goes.