For Debbie . . . my partner in slime ;)
A big thank you to James Richards for reading through from a microbiologist’s viewpoint. Any errors are mine, not his!
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
PART II
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
PART III
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I
CHAPTER 1
West Africa
The girl was only ten. Her name was Camille. She was on her way to collect water from the drinking well, a large battered and dented tin jug dangling from each hand, when she spotted it just a few metres off the hard dirt track.
A dead dog.
Not an uncommon sight. Except for the fact that it was only half a dead dog. Camille stepped from the track on to the rough ground, mindful of the clumps of dry earth. There were still plenty of old rusting landmines to be wary of, half buried in the sun-baked dirt . . . a regular reminder of the days of the civil war.
As she approached the dog, she could see that it was actually still alive. The tan-coloured animal was whimpering, its front paws clawing at the earth as if it was trying to pull itself along the ground. Its head, chest, front paws, the whole front half of its body was intact, then sloped away into a messy shredded end of bones, tendons and spilled organs. Its eyes rolled up at her as she stood over it. Its pink tongue lolled as it panted.
Camille squatted down beside the dying animal. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ she said softly. The dog must have triggered one of the old mines, blown its hindquarters clean away.
She squatted down and stroked its muzzle. The animal licked her hand, pitifully grateful for the company.
‘You sleep, little lady.’ For some reason she was certain the dog was a bitch. ‘You sleep now.’
Female. In this troubled country, it was always the women and girls who did the suffering. The men did what they did, and everyone else endured. She caressed the animal’s muzzle. It licked her fingers, leaving a slick of saliva stained pink with blood.
The dog quivered and blew froth from its nostrils, then, with a final whimper, it died.
Camille stood up and looked around.
There was no gouge of dark, freshly exposed earth nearby that would indicate a recent explosion. Perhaps the animal had managed to crawl some way after being blown up?
It seemed unlikely. And it had happened recently. She would have heard the bang . . . surely?
Not that it mattered now. The dog was dead. Her suffering was over. At least Camille had been there to comfort her in the last moments of life. She wiped her damp fingers down her yellow shirt, leaving faint pink smudges on the material.
She winced. The fine cotton felt oddly coarse against her sensitive fingertips.
Which was silly, because she had skin that was thick from hard work, callouses on her fingers from carrying those water jugs every day. She looked down at her hand . . .
. . . and saw that the dark pigment had vanished from the tips of her fingers, exposing raw pink flesh that glistened wetly . . . like the tender, not-quite-ready skin beneath a freshly burst blister.
Camille was dead an hour later.
CHAPTER 2
Leon suspected this was something quite different. It was the speed with which it all happened, the speed with which it had gone from being some curious little comment he’d heard tagged on to the end of the morning news on the radio, to being the main item on the TV news, to being the end of the world. Three quickly taken steps all occurring within the span of a week.
His ears had pricked up over breakfast, catching those few words on BBC Radio 4, the very last item as he raced to finish his breakfast.
‘. . . in Nigeria. There’s very little information as yet coming from the region, but we do know some sort of containment procedure is already being put in place . . .’
He tuned his mum out, and his younger sister, both of whom were talking, neither one listening to the other. Leon struggled to hear the radio beneath the shrill babble of their voices; he was sure he’d heard the word plague in there somewhere.
‘. . . no confirmation that this is another outbreak of Ebola. In fact, we’ve heard that’s already been ruled out . . .’
And then the newsreader was off talking about the tedious world of sport: which new athlete was being outed for taking performance-enhancing drugs, which football team was in danger of being dropped from the Premier Division . . .
Just blah-blah-blah. The usual stuff that filled the 8.30-to-8.40 morning slot. Which was his handy daily cue to finish his bowl of Weetos and get going.
He pushed the bowl of chocolate milk away and stood up. Done.
Bus to catch for college. Another day to endure. Just like the last, just like the next.
‘Leon?’
He looked up at his mum. ‘Huh?’
‘I said don’t forget to bring your sports bag home. Your kit’s probably growing mildew all over it by now.’
‘Uh yeah, right,’ he mumbled. He grabbed his rucksack from the back of the chair and headed for the hallway.
‘Bowl?’ Grace looked up from her phone. She was busy feeding her virtual pony on the screen. Swipe-drop-munch-neigh . . . points! Like it actually really mattered.
He sighed at his bossy younger sister. Twelve, and she nagged him like she was his mother, a mini version, but every bit as nag-some. He sighed again and doubled back, picking it up.
‘And, Leo . . . you really shouldn’t waste the milk.’
He drooped his eyelids at her, his version of shove it, poured the milk down the plughole and dropped the bowl into the sink. Half an act of rebellion against his younger sister.
‘Good boy,’ said Mum distractedly as she fiddled with the buttons of her blouse with one hand and held her phone to her ear with the other. He squeezed past her, round the kitchen table, heading for the hall.
‘Leon?’ she called after him.
He stopped and turned.
She smiled guiltily at him, the phone still pressed to her ear. ‘It’ll be all right, you know? We’ll all settle in soon enough.’
He suspected she was on hold, listening to crackly elevator music. Dead time. Son time.
‘I know it’s been hard, Leo, but . . .’
He knew she felt bad about the way things had been, guilty about everything that had happened recently. Sorry that she hardly had time for either of them.
‘Yeah, well . . .’ was all Leon could offer in reply. He shrugged. He couldn’t even manage to find some sor
t of lame smile to give back to her.
‘You’ve got friends now, haven’t you?’ she continued, half stating, half asking.
He nodded. ‘Sure.’ It was far easier to lie than tell the truth. The last thing he needed right now was Mum telling him how he needed to engage . . . to get out there and mix with the other kids.
‘How’s your head?’
Leon shrugged. He tapped his temples. ‘Fine.’
‘You got some aspirin? Just in case?’
‘Yup.’
‘You going for the bus?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Don’t forget to pick your sister up on the way back.’
‘I won’t.’
Grace had fractured her forearm playing netball. She now had it in a cast and a sling, and Mum wanted him to help her home. Her arm ached, his head throbbed, he suspected Mum was on Prozac . . . between the three of them they were getting through drugs like junkies in a crack house.
Mum looked at him pitifully, and for a moment he glimpsed her old self. Mum . . . before she changed her name back to Jennifer Button, almost forensically removing all trace of his dad. Mum from way back when she’d had time for him.
‘Leon . . . honey, it’s going to work out –’ Her call suddenly connected. ‘Oh, yes, appointments please.’
He turned and headed into the hallway, grabbing his jacket off the peg by the front door, and let himself out. If he’d known how this particular week was going to go, how the next few months were going to be . . . he would have told her he loved her, that all the crap they’d been through over the last year was OK . . .
I forgive you, Mum.
But he wasn’t to know any of that. Today was only Monday. Just like any other Monday. Another stuff-just-rolls-along day, marked by nothing different, except one word he’d just about managed to hear on the radio in the background.
Plague.
CHAPTER 3
Leon hated this place already. Seven weeks at Randall Sixth Form College, and he’d spoken to no more than a dozen of the other students. Coming in mid-year . . . he might as well have arrived smeared with human excrement; every little clique, every little gang was already well and truly established and they all held him at arm’s length.
No one seemed willing to admit the lanky new kid with the funny New Jersey accent into their little circle.
Mostly they left him alone. There were a few assholes who picked on him. Nothing particularly inventive – ‘Hank the Yank’ and a few other no-brainers like that. There was a little dose of it every day, just five minutes of it usually, then they got bored and moved on.
When Mum had first dropped the bomb on him and Grace – that she and Dad were splitting up and she was taking them both back home to live near her parents in England – he’d been shocked. Tears. Panic. The foundation of his world just whipped out from beneath his feet.
But also there’d been a hint of relief. Relief from the rows, those barked exchanges in the hallway of their New York apartment. The lowered voices behind the closed bedroom door. Murmurs from both of them that ended with a Screw you and the click of a light going off.
Mum had put a desperately positive spin on things. That England, London, was a ‘totally sick’ place to live. (Oh jeez . . . Mum, puh-lease, don’t even try that talk.) She’d told him and Grace that the other kids were going to love their ‘exotic movie accents’, that all the other London kids would be fascinated by their interesting, new, stand-out-of-the-crowd American buddies, even though Leon and Grace were both British by birth.
She completely missed the point. No kid wants to stand out.
Just like no soldier wants to stick his head up out of the foxhole. Not if he doesn’t want it smeared over the guy standing next to him. And that ‘kewl’ American accent had drawn fire for Leon all right. By the end of Day One he was Hank the Yank. By the end of Week One it had mutated into Hanker the Wanker. Hey, because, y’know, it rhymed.
Genius.
He wasn’t a Yank, he’d explained far too many times. He was British. British born, British mother. It’s just that he’d happened to have spent the first sixteen years of his life in the States. Not exactly a crime.
There was another outcast in the class; someone else with whom Leon took it in turns to be target of the day. Samir. He’d shortened his name to Sam because he thought it sounded cooler. He wandered over to Leon in the hallway at the mid-morning break as Leon was sorting through the rancid tangle of damp clothes in his sports bag. Mum was right – it smelled like something was thriving in there.
‘’Sup, Leon.’
‘Hey,’ he replied, looking up at Sam. Sam’s family had come from Pakistan, but in many ways the way he talked, dressed, carried himself was more ‘British’ than the rest of the students in their year.
‘My dad just texted me.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He said . . .’ Sam pulled out his phone and swiped it. ‘He said did I see the news.’
‘See the news? Why? What’s up?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Sam. ‘Something must’ve happened, I suppose. A bomb maybe?’
A bomb? If there’d been anything like that tube bomb scare at Shepherd’s Bush a few months back, he suspected the college’s PA system would have announced it.
‘I’m going to the library. Want to come?’ asked Sam.
The college library was more like an internet cafe than a book repository. One side had a row of computers, and the other racks of well-thumbed magazines and untouched newspapers. Oh, and a small rotating spindle of paperbacks in the middle that the librarian optimistically refreshed daily with ‘The Latest Teen Must-reads!’.
Sam led the way inside. Some heads turned their way from the various clusters of students in the room, tucked closely together and conspiring God knows what between them. He hated entering rooms. Heads always swivelled. He much preferred leaving them.
Leon hid behind Sam Chutani, who seemed to be one hundred per cent bulletproof to the hallway sniggers, sideways glances and curled lips. He dressed like an adult, like an IT consultant: Primark suits, loafers, tie and shirt and a fountain pen permanently nestled in his breast pocket. He simply did not give a crap about the others and the peer pressure to conform.
Leon envied that. Envied Sam his rhino-thick skin.
Sam sat down at one of the computers and logged on to his student account. ‘My dad watches the Reuters news feed all day long at work. He’s always the first to know if anything has happened, anywhere.’
As the Reuters website opened, Leon expected some large apocalyptic headline to grab their attention. No bombs today, apparently. No crashed planes. No tourist shootings, or shopping-mall massacres. Today, for once, there seemed to be an outbreak of sanity.
Sam pointed out a headline in the tech-business column. ‘That’s what it is.’
ForTel buys out silicon rival in Indonesia.
‘Oh . . . right,’ said Leon. Earth-shattering.
Sam’s dad ran a small high street PC business, building to order – the price of silicon chips was everything to him. He knew Sam was building his own PC, a ‘Monster-Ninja-Kick-Ass Rig’ ready for the ‘final’ Call of Duty due to be released just before Thanksgiving.
Final? Ha. Leon suspected he’d die an old man before that gravy train stopped running.
Then he spotted another news item at the bottom of the page.
Quarantine . . . and some place name of which he’d never heard.
Sam hit a link and in a flash the page changed to the ForTel homepage.
‘Wait!’ said Leon. ‘Can you go back?’
‘Sure.’ Sam sighed and went back to the Reuters page. Leon looked for the small headline, but it wasn’t there any more; the page layout was different, a new page of news stories.
‘Crap, it’s gone.’
‘What are you looking for?’
Leon shook his head. ‘Never mind. It was something to do with a . . . I don’t know, just . . .’
Sam p
atted him on the back. ‘You OK, Leon?’
CHAPTER 4
Ionian Sea, off the West Coast of Italy
Commander Benito Arnoni stood at the prow of the Levriero with a line ready to throw. The pilot cut the engines of the Guardia di Finanza motorboat as it closed the last twenty metres of choppy water.
The boat before them was one of the usual repurposed fishing vessels used by migrant traffickers, stripped of fishing lines and apparatus to make maximum use of the deck space. The vessel had first been spotted an hour ago, and Arnoni’s patrol boat had been hastily dispatched to intercept it.
Even as a dot on the horizon, it hadn’t looked quite right. Closer to it now, it looked decidedly wrong. No waving arms, no rows of malnourished faces, no painfully thin and terrified stick figures braced against each other to keep their balance as the boat bobbed and rocked on the water.
It looked utterly deserted. Arnoni had no one to whom to toss a line.
Their motorboat slowly approached the deserted vessel and Arnoni, standing at the prow, stretched and craned his neck to get a better look across its empty deck. No bodies to be seen, but the boat looked oddly decorated. Ribbons of bright pink, like streamers from Christmas party poppers, were draped across the rusty paint-flecked deck. Some of those streamers were wound up the side of the wheelhouse, up the support stanchions to a radio aerial where a large pink streamer flared out and fluttered like a pennant. For a moment, Arnoni wondered if this boat was someone’s idea of a joke. A publicity stunt. Perhaps some conceptual artist’s idea of meaningful ‘art’. Crimson and sepia paint seemed to have been spattered everywhere, as if the artist wasn’t quite satisfied that his ribbons were enough of a creative statement.
As the prow of their launch bumped against the front of the boat, Arnoni threw a leg over the safety rail and hopped across on to its foredeck.
The first thing that hit him was the stench. A sickeningly sweet yet cheesy smell that reminded him of hanging joints of salted ham.
And no . . . they certainly weren’t party streamers or decorative ribbons. He hunkered down and inspected the pink webbing more closely. It glistened wetly.
‘Merda.’
The boat looked like an abattoir. As if the contents of some slaughterhouse had been dumped on to the boat from high above. Now he knew what he was smelling: the putrid, sickly-sweet odour of rotting flesh. He covered his nose and mouth as he made his way down the side of the boat, shuffling along the narrow foot space, past the wheelhouse towards the open cockpit and the aft deck. A low green canvas awning spread over the bow of the vessel rustled and snapped in the breeze. He took a deep breath through his mouth . . . steadying his nerves, his stomach. Knowing, sensing, that there was more to see beneath it.