The Hunted

  Amelia made a hmm noise and came over to where Ed was hovering in the doorway. She touched him lightly on the chest with her fingertips.

  ‘There’s nothing more we can do here,’ she said gently. ‘We’re just getting in the way. Come along downstairs. There’s a lot we need to talk about.’

  When Ed followed Amelia into the front room, Trinity and the others looked at her as if she was an alien. They were still getting used to the fact that there was an adult who didn’t carry the disease. And Amelia stared back at Trinity in a similar way. This was strange for all of them. Amelia’s little companion shrank away from the children, evidently scared.

  Amelia plumped up some cushions and settled on to a sofa with a weary sigh, and her shadow sat down beside her, holding on tightly to her hand.

  ‘I expect there’s a great deal you all want to know,’ said Amelia ‘And there’s much I want to know as well.’ She looked at Trinity. ‘Particularly about you two, my dears. But we shall come to that in good time. Shall I go first?’

  ‘Please.’ Ed nodded.

  ‘My name is Amelia Dropmore and this is my sister, Dorothy. She is eighty-seven years old, and I am ninety-two. Don’t mind her, she’s living a second childhood. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s. She has been what they describe as “demented”, charming word, for twelve years. It’s a mercy for her, in a way, because she has no idea what’s going on. Her mind is stuck in the past. She thinks it’s the nineteen thirties and she’s a little girl and there is no sickness …

  ‘I am not demented. Before the sickness came Dorothy had been living here for eight years. I was still independent, but I knew the place well. I visited her whenever I was able. Like everyone else I’d thought that was it. The world would carry on as normal, Dorothy and I would grow older, and pretty soon one of us would pass on, and then the other. Nothing to write home about. Just a slow dying of the light.

  ‘And then it happened. Our world did not carry on as normal. It was thrown off its axis. Altered beyond recognition. At first the staff here were really very good. They did what they could for the old folks. But one by one they either took sick, or simply stopped coming in in the mornings. Who can blame them? They all had loved ones. Families to be with. So in the end it was left to me to look after the ladies and gentlemen who live here.’

  ‘Why aren’t any of you sick?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘She don’t know, do she?’ said Kyle. ‘How could she know? She ain’t no scientist.’

  ‘I’m afraid you are quite wrong,’ said Amelia patiently. ‘I am a scientist.’

  ‘You’re joking me.’

  ‘What? You don’t think a woman can be a scientist? Or you don’t think an old person can be a scientist?’

  ‘For real? You’re a scientist?’

  ‘Yes. I trained at Cambridge before the war, in the Department of Experimental Medicine. And when war broke out I went to work for the government at the Medical Research Council in Mount Vernon in Hampstead. Churchill was terrified that the Germans might use chemical or biological weapons –’

  ‘I knew it.’ Kyle slapped the arm of his chair, sending up a tiny cloud of dust that hung in the air.

  ‘You knew what?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘That’s where the disease came from, innit? It was a weapon that got out, that went wrong.’

  ‘No,’ said Amelia and she slowly shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that. It would have been easier to deal with if it had been. We’d have known what it was. And we had no idea. It was a peculiar disease, like nothing any of us had ever encountered before. It came from nowhere, appeared overnight in a fully virulent form. And it seemed choosy – the young were spared, anyone under the age of fifteen, and the very old.’

  ‘That’s news to me,’ said Kyle, shifting uneasily in his seat.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Amelia. ‘When the world went to pieces, the old were vulnerable. No one to look after them, easy prey for looters and house invaders. Most were simply killed. In the fog of war it was hard to see what was going on.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Kyle. ‘I had some grand-parents living in Wood Green. Lost touch with them when it all kicked off.’

  ‘You’re saying older people aren’t affected by the disease?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Yes. People in their late eighties and over do not seem to have been affected. Several of us here are over ninety, and three are over a hundred. It passed us by. Why?’

  ‘Do you know why?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘We had theories. Perhaps old people had some degree of natural immunity to it, from some past infection. But that didn’t explain why no young people got it. Perhaps it only bothered with people who were strong enough to carry it. But that would assume that the disease had a degree of intelligence. Which is impossible. Or so we thought. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.’ She gave a stern look to Kyle which softened into a smile.

  ‘You interrupted me,’ she said. ‘Got me off the subject. An old schoolboy trick.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘As I was saying,’ Amelia went on, ‘I worked for the government during the war, doing my patriotic bit, and after that I moved around. I worked in Germany for a period, and America. For a few years I was at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry at Middlesex Hospital. I was even on the Board of Health for a spell … Oh, you don’t need to know all this. Just listen to me! I’m a typical rambling old person, showing off how much I can still remember. Suffice to say, I spent my entire adult life researching diseases and the beautiful mysteries of the human body.

  ‘And thirty years ago I retired, although I remained on various boards and charities and health advisory committees. And I got old. And I thought my usefulness was over. Apart from looking after Dorothy here.’ She touched her sister’s hand and she smiled back at her.

  ‘So when the disease came into the world I looked on helplessly, wishing there was something I could do, some way I could help. Be careful what you wish for, that’s what they say, and they’re right, because the disease worked its evil magic. Doctors were dying, scientists, researchers, nurses … everyone except the very old and the young. Hospitals and laboratories were having to close down because there was nobody well enough to work in them. That’s when I got the call. Me and hundreds like me. Retired scientists, and doctors, and nurses.

  ‘It wasn’t publicized. Imagine the panic if it got out that the future of the world was in the hands of a bunch of rickety old-age pensioners. But it was the only way they could keep the labs going, keep the hospitals going; they had to bring us out of retirement. They asked for volunteers at first, but when it got completely desperate they made it clear that we had no choice. I was here when they came for me, looking after Dot. I hated to leave her, but there was no way round it.

  ‘When I went into the laboratory, I was shocked by what I found. It was desperate, simply desperate: sick and dying people trying to carry on working. And it was all no use: several of them went mad and did terrible damage to people and to equipment. It got so that if anyone showed even the slightest signs of illness they were barred from the labs. I tried to keep up – so much had changed since my day, there had been so many advances in technology and knowledge – but even so nobody had the faintest idea where the disease had come from, how it worked and how we might stop it.

  ‘The basic techniques were unchanged. We took blood samples and tissue samples. We worked with rats and guinea pigs and monkeys, and one by one we died. It was a race against time and we lost. The younger ones among us were the first to go. It was like a sort of ripple effect, working upwards through the ages. Until there were only us old crocks left. There were five of us in the end, all over eighty-five, all women, trying to run the laboratory. We didn’t stand a chance. We knew that even if we somehow did find a cure there were no doctors left, no nurses, no infrastructure. What could we do? We five old crones?’

  ‘And did you find a cure?’ asked Kyle, leaning forward now, looking hopeful.

  ‘N
o, dear. We did not.’

  Kyle slumped back in his seat.

  ‘Did you find out how it worked even?’ he asked.

  ‘I probably know more about the disease than anyone else in England,’ said Amelia. ‘And here am I, ninety-two, weak and feeble and helpless. I haven’t got much longer on this earth. How I’ve got to ninety-two quite frankly I have no idea … and all I know will die with me.’

  ‘Unless you tell us,’ said Trey, and he and Trio crossed the room to sit next to her on the sofa. ‘We could write it all down, or something.’

  Amelia smiled at him and placed her hand on top of his. She stared into his face, trying to make sense of him, and was just about to ask him something when Lewis butted in.

  ‘Is it like this all around the world?’ he said. ‘Is it this bad everywhere?’

  ‘As far as we know. Everything looked hopeless. We gave up in the end. We closed the labs and I came here to be with Dot. By then all the staff had gone. Dead or run off. It was just the old people. Left to die. But we didn’t die. Because, before I left the labs, I was able to do one last thing. I had ultimate authority: the government had given orders that anything I needed I should have. The work I was doing was that important. So I made one last order.’

  ‘What was it?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Come along,’ said Amelia, struggling up off the sofa. ‘I’ll show you.’

  40

  Ed was reminded of the secret drinks stash in Shadowman’s basement at the club in London. Only the shelves in the cellar here weren’t piled high with alcohol. It was food. Rows and rows of boxes and cans and bottles and jars and packets and plastic containers, all with identical packaging; plain white with black lettering – Emergency food supplies – with the date and contents and various government stamps and labels and warnings. There was fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta in sauce, meatballs, spam, noodles, condensed milk, long-life milk, fruit juice, biscuits. Anything you could think of, it was here. All kept neat and in order.

  ‘Three lorries turned up one morning,’ said Amelia. ‘And men in gas masks brought the food down here and put it on the shelves under my supervision, and I signed for it and they went away, and that was that. No questions asked. Just following orders. We’ve been living off it ever since. We have fresh food as well. There’s a large vegetable garden and an orchard. We keep a few chickens and ducks and pigeons.’

  Ed looked along the shelves. He was reminded that those who had the food had the power. He remembered Mad Matt’s warehouse near St Paul’s. But what happened when it ran out? Could any of them grow enough food to live on?

  ‘You have to tell us what you learnt, Amelia,’ he said. ‘Is there any hope?’

  Amelia clutched Ed’s arm with her thin, bony hand. ‘You are our hope, Ed,’ she said. ‘You children. You are not infected. I learnt that much. The young, like us, are not infected.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lewis. ‘Why aren’t we infected?’

  ‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ said Amelia, her voice fragile and fluttery. ‘I’m getting tired. I need to sit down.’

  They made their way back to the front room. It took a while for Amelia to get her breath back. She was strong, though. Ed could see that she had to tell them what she knew.

  ‘You were born after the infection spread across the planet,’ she explained once she was settled. ‘You must think of it like spores. Did you ever see a mushroom pop and spray a little cloud into the air? Spores. Like tiny, tiny little specks of dust. Poof!’

  She looked at Kyle, who was not really following any of this, sitting there bored, spinning his axe in his hands and picking dried blood off the blade.

  ‘You reminded me of it earlier,’ she said.

  ‘Huh?’ Kyle gave her a vacant, dumb look.

  ‘When you clapped the arm of your chair.’

  ‘What have I done now?’

  ‘Nothing wrong. But do it again.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Bang your chair.’ Amelia mimed the action.

  Kyle did what he was told – thumped his hand down on to the arm of his chair, sending up a cloud of dust that was picked out by the sunlight coming in through the windows.

  ‘There,’ said Amelia. ‘You see it? If it didn’t catch the light it would be invisible to you. That’s what happens when a mushroom puffs out its spores. Up they go, into the atmosphere, spread by the wind, and by animals and people. Up into the clouds, down into the lakes and rivers. We think that the disease was spread in a similar way. It must have happened very quickly. And it certainly happened without anyone noticing.

  ‘The disease would have originated somewhere isolated and there must have been an incident, something that exposed it, and introduced it into the wider world. It broke out of wherever it had been hiding, and it was carried to busier places and incubated unknowingly. And then – pop! – like spores on the wind, it spread itself, and anyone infected became a carrier until – pop! – they passed it on. More spores.’

  ‘All this happened before we were born?’ Ed asked.

  ‘It’s the only explanation.’ Amelia looked out of the window, lost in her thoughts for a moment.

  ‘The modern world,’ she said quietly after a while. ‘What a place it was. We were all linked via roads and shipping lanes and aeroplanes. We did the work of the disease for it … Pop, pop, pop. It spread across the planet until nearly everyone alive must have been a carrier. And then, some fifteen years ago, it stopped spreading and started to grow. So, you see, anyone born after that first infestation was untouched. That’s you children. You are free of the disease. My fear is, though, that when it has reached a certain stage it will emerge again. Pop! The spores will be on the wind once more.’

  ‘They’re massing,’ said Trio.

  ‘What’s that, my dear?’

  ‘The sickos, the diseased adults, they’re massing. All grouping together.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re getting ready for the final stage,’ said Amelia. ‘But I don’t know. There’s still so much I can never know.’

  Amelia was growing tired, her body slumping. She gave in to small yawns that she tried unsuccessfully to hide behind her hand, and her head kept tipping forward.

  ‘South America,’ said Trey. ‘That’s where it came from. The Amazon rainforest, the big green.’

  Amelia seemed to come awake suddenly, to come alive.

  ‘Are you sure of this?’

  ‘Yes. Because our parents were the carriers. The people who first brought it out of the jungle and into the wider world.’

  ‘I knew you were special when I saw you,’ said Amelia, her eyes glinting. ‘You and I are going to need to have a long talk.’

  41

  Framed by the bedroom window, the moon was riding high in the sky, thin clouds drifting in front of it, lit up a ghostly grey. A few stars showed through the silver veil, but there was a mistiness to the night that blurred and hid things. Brooke wondered how many other children might be looking up at the moon right now.

  She was focusing her attention out there, in space, because she was finding it hard to think about what was going on down here. Right here, in this room where Macca was slowly dying. Little old Norman had done what he could, but Macca had lost a lot of blood and an infection had got into his body and the doctor didn’t have the drugs to fight it. Macca was burning up, his skin turning blotchy. He was feverish, slept most of the time, a restless, fidgety, troubled sleep, and would wake up babbling.

  The only thing that seemed to calm him down, to make him happy and peaceful, was Brooke. She hadn’t left the room since they’d arrived.

  Ha! Big joke. She’d been winding Macca up in the car, playing him for a fool, lining him up for a great big smack in the mouth. And it had never come, because the stupid bloody fool had got himself bitten. Five days they’d been here now and Brooke had hardly left his side.

  Before they’d known just how bad the wound was Ed had promised Macca that they wouldn’t leave him behind. Ed was going crazy
now, desperate to be moving on, but a promise was a promise.

  And, whatever happened, Brooke knew she couldn’t leave Macca. If she wasn’t there when he woke up he’d scream and rave and thrash about, accuse other people of trying to poison him. Brooke wasn’t even sure if he really knew who she was any more, whether she was his girlfriend or his sister or his mum, or some angel with fluffy wings come fluttering down from heaven. There was just some part of him that seemed to need her.

  She’d only come along on this stupid journey so that she could spend time with Ed, get closer to him, and she’d hardly done that at all. He was downstairs helping the crumblies, keeping his mind off the delay, the endless bloody waiting. Amelia had given him work to do in the garden. And they’d all been talking to the crocks about the disease, learning stuff, all except Brooke who was stuck here with Sickboy.

  She’d lost count of the times she’d thought about leaving him to it. She hardly knew him after all. He’d been nothing to her. Just some smelly, mouthy kid who’d come shuffling through the door behind Ed when they tipped up at the museum. She didn’t owe him nothing.

  Brooke put her hand to his forehead. It was damp and burning up. Like touching a hot oven. She got a wet flannel from the bowl of water on the chair next to the wall, dabbed at his face like Norman had shown her. Macca didn’t react, didn’t move at all, not even to flinch or try to push her away, like he used to do in the first couple of days. His breathing was heavy and raspy and broken, with no proper rhythm to it. Occasionally he’d have these fits of sucking in air in great gulps, his whole body shuddering.

  She felt like weeping. What was she doing here? What were any of them doing here? She should be back at the museum with her friends. Not stuck here with these old people and this sick boy. Nobody cared. They’d dumped her here. Oh, Brooke, she can look after our friend. She stood up and walked quietly to the door. Maybe if she could just get out of here for a few minutes, go and walk in the garden in the moonlight, anything. It was driving her crazy.