He ducked down under the awning.
‘Gesu Cristo!’ He crossed himself. His very first thought was that he was staring at the handiwork of the devil himself. Some barbaric, playful, diorama ingeniously constructed from the parts of humankind.
Commander Benito Arnoni threw up . . . and just over an hour later, he was dead too.
CHAPTER 5
College finished for Leon at two o’clock. There was a Key Skills class he was meant to attend, taking him to 3 p.m., but he decided to skip it. He went to his locker and retrieved the sports bag. The clothes inside were all convincingly damp and muddy. He’d take them home tonight and give them to Mum to throw into the washing machine. And she’d dutifully ask him how the football game after college went. He’d tell her it went well, that, sure, he was making friends. That the guys were, like, all totally cool. She’d smile as she stuffed his kit in the washing machine and then get back to thinking about work, about herself, thinking about how their father had messed up all their lives so completely.
Leon’s conceit had worked twice so far. He took his tracksuit and trainers to college, dragged them through a muddy puddle, let them sit damp for a few days then brought them home and told Mum he’d had fun kicking a ball around with the other lads.
Now he made his way through Hammersmith towards Grace’s school; a secondary that looked like a high-security prison from the outside, its small playground fenced high and topped off with wire. Mum insisted he met Grace right at the school gates, so she didn’t have to walk home on her own. There had been a girl at another school nearby who’d been assaulted by a gang. That had happened a few weeks after they’d arrived from the States and settled into their flat.
Maybe when she was a little bit older Grace could make her own way home, but not yet and not with her broken arm.
Her school finished at half past three. Leon had some time to dawdle through King’s Mall. He hung out here on Wednesdays and Fridays (when he was supposedly playing football). It was warm and dry and he could usually make his hot chocolate in Starbucks last for ages as he stared at the passers-by.
He walked past a shop window flickering with the same image across a dozen widescreen plasma TVs: a newsreader, and behind him, over his shoulder, what looked like someone’s mobile-phone video, pixellated and blurred. Leon could make out what looked like discarded piles of clothes left in the middle of some dusty street. He quickly realized they were bodies, dozens of them, scattered about almost randomly. The video lasted only a few seconds, ended, and then looped around again. Across the bottom of the various TV screens a headline scrolled.
Unidentified viral outbreak in Nigeria.
He wondered if this had something to do with the soundbite that had caught his attention this morning over breakfast. He looked around, expecting to see others beginning to gather to stare at the screens, but the mall was busy with people who had far less time on their hands than him, certainly not enough to hang around watching TV through a shop window.
He watched for another couple of minutes, until a commercial break came on. And then he realized he’d better get a move on to pick up Grace.
‘I’m worried about you, Leo.’
‘I’m fine, Grace,’ he replied.
‘No. You’re not. You don’t have any friends. You spend too much time on your own.’
‘Jeez. What are you, my mother?’
Grace shrugged as she walked beside him, small and slight and half her brother’s height. He took her pink school bag and slung it over his shoulder while she adjusted her sling.
‘You can be real immature sometimes, Leo. Somebody’s got to look after you.’
Grace was coping far better than him with the sudden move to London. She’d already been invited to several birthday parties, and from the snatches of chitter chatter he’d listened to while she was on her phone she sounded as if she were already well on the way up her school’s social food chain.
It seemed the whole exotic-accent thing was working in her favour, and of course she played on it, hamming it up so much so that she sounded like some precocious Beverly Hills princess. Even before the move, back in New Jersey, she had been popular. Queen of the playground, a member of every after-school club going.
She placed a hand on his arm and looked up at him. ‘You’re missing Dad, aren’t you?’
‘Dunno, a bit . . . maybe.’
‘Don’t! He was a complete jerk, cheating on Mom like that!’
Leon wasn’t so sure it was that one-sided. Yeah, he’d had a thing with someone at work. But Mum wasn’t entirely blameless. She pecked at him all the time, always seemed to have something to moan about, to blame him for, whether it was slippers in the hall, bristles in the sink, over-salting the evening meal she’d slaved over or staying late at work far too often. He’d overheard him call her a ‘bitter little shrew’ once and wondered why on earth they bothered putting up with each other.
‘It takes two to screw up like they did.’
‘Men!’Grace tutted.
Leon smiled. Grace tried to sound like a grown-up, yet most of the time she sounded like one of those precocious child actors who talked about inner dialogue and character motivation.
Leon shook his head. ‘Jesus, Grace, why can’t you just be like every other girl your age and just play with, I dunno . . . dolls or something?’
She sighed wearily. ‘Play is for children.’
They walked on in silence for a while, weaving their way along the increasingly busy pavement, filling up with early commuters and the tail end of kids coming home from school.
‘Anyway, it’s you we’re talking about.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
She tossed her curly dark hair and jutted her chin out. ‘You’ve got to make much more of an effort, Leon. Mom’s stressed out enough as it is.’ Mom. Grace was hanging on to her accent as if it were a gift, whereas Leon had been doing his best to bury it.
‘She doesn’t need to be worrying about you being some weirdo loner as well.’
‘I’ve got friends, OK?’
‘So, how come they never call, or come round?’
Jeez. Gimme a break.
‘Because I value my personal space. That’s not a frikkin’ crime, is it?’
Grace looked up at him, smiling with pity. ‘Just try a bit harder, OK?’
Pity? From a twelve-year-old!?
‘I’m fine, Grace. Can we just leave my social life out of it?’
They walked past a convenience store, and she stopped suddenly. ‘OhmyGod!’
‘What?’
‘I need to buy a paper! They’re doing coupons for free Maybelline samplers all this week.’ She headed for the open door. ‘I miss a coupon – I lose out. Wait here.’
Leon nodded obediently, watching his sister stride inside – so small for her age with drainpipe arms and legs and knobbly knees, her long dark curls held tidily back from her face by an Alice band . . . and so annoyingly precocious. Even as a baby she’d been protective of Leon, patting him affectionately on the nose as she sucked on a bottle of milk.
Among the halal meat hanging in the shop window, he saw handwritten ads taped to the glass. Beneath the awning, the afternoon edition of the Evening Standard sat on a rain-damp rack, a tall headline spread across the entire front page.
MYSTERY VIRUS IN WEST AFRICA.
He took a couple of steps closer to the window to read the story beneath.
. . . an as yet unidentified virus has turned up today in several other isolated villages in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. The World Health Organization has already despatched a scramble team to the three locations where symptoms have been reported. There are reports that personnel from the United States military’s medical research division, USAMRIID, have also been sent. So far neither organization has commented on the nature of the virus, although some eyewitness accounts from within the affected villages have talked of extensive haemorrhaging and ‘external bleeding’, symptoms similar to those of Ebola.
>
Grace came out of the shop, leafing through the paper in search of her coupon page.
‘You seen this?’ asked Leon, pointing to the newspaper rack.
She momentarily cocked an eyebrow at the headline before returning to her own paper. ‘Oh, you worry far too much. It’ll be another false alarm.’
She led the way up the busy street. Leon cast one last glance back at the window before following her.
CHAPTER 6
Amoso, West Africa
Dr Kenneth Jones leaned over in his seat to look out of the window. Below, the small town of Amoso was barely visible in the night. There were no street lamps on, although one or two buildings were showing lights, presumably portable generators. He could see several oil-drum fires scattered across the area, but apart from that it looked like a ghost town; there was nothing going on down there, no cars on the roads, no pedestrians.
‘I can’t see anything moving,’ he said into his throat mie.
The helicopter’s beam played steadily across the narrow streets, picking out the flat corrugated iron rooftops encrusted with aerials and satellite dishes.
Jones spotted something pale flicker into the intense beam of light and out of it again. And then in . . .
It was just . . . a plastic bag stirred up by the down-draught of the helicopter.
Dr Gupta leaned forward to take a look. The face-plate of his containment suit clunked awkwardly against the window.
Above the deafening drone of the helicopter, Jones heard Gupta’s voice over his headphones. ‘Dammit. I can’t see anything useful in here . . . these UN-issue suits are too bulky.’
Jones nodded. He hated them. They were incredibly cumbersome and stifling. He was just about managing to hold in check a suffocating sense of claustrophobia. The sooner they were done getting a sample back to their hastily assembled UN ops centre, hosed down three separate times and out of these damn suits, the better.
‘Are we safe to go down?’
‘We clear the ’elicopter first, Doctor.’
Jones looked at the five men sitting across the cabin from him: French Foreign Legion. Elite troops – Jones knew them by their reputation. ‘We establish a safe perimeter,’ the squad’s sergent continued. His accent was thick. ‘Then you come out. You understand me?’
Jones nodded quickly.
‘Relax,’ added the sergent. ‘We take good care of you two.’
This wasn’t Jones’s first time. He had gone into Sierra Leone in 2014 at the first outbreak of Ebola, and last year there’d been the suspected outbreak of Marburg in Liberia. But this time there was the added danger of bullets, hence the legionnaires accompanying them. He and Dr Gupta had been briefed that there might be a Boko Haram presence in the town; the government forces had cleared Amoso half a dozen times of those terrorists, and they kept creeping back in like a persistent cold.
Dr Gupta turned to the other men in the helicopter’s cabin. ‘We don’t know if there are any survivors down there. If there are, we must keep them well back. If this is an Ebola outbreak—’
Jones looked at Dr Gupta. ‘It’s not Ebola. This is too fast a spread pattern.’ He pulled a face. ‘We don’t know anything yet. Haemorrhaging, that’s what eyewitnesses have reported. Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, it might be a pathogen related to one of those. But . . .’
There’d been just nine seconds of footage from a mobile phone. That’s all. Nine grainy, hand-shaken seconds. The only visual information from which they’d had to work. Dr Jones had seen bodies . . . dozens of them lying in the streets of this small town earlier this afternoon. Heard a woman’s voice, shrieking, terrified, the camera view whipping frantically from side to side.
Then it had ended abruptly.
Gupta was listening to a message coming in on another frequency. Jones saw him nod and reply, his words drowned out by the deafening roar of the helicopter’s engine. And then his voice came clear and crisp over the headphones.
‘The pilot is taking us down now.’
The helicopter lurched forward, gliding across the town as its floodlight swung from side to side, trawling for a suitable place to land. It picked out a crossroads clear of any obstructing vehicles then quickly began its descent.
Below, the town seemed to stir to life, dust and rubbish whipped up into a frenzy by the intensifying downdraught. Finally, gently, with a thud that Jones felt rather than heard, they were down on the ground.
The sergent pulled the sliding cabin door open and let his four men exit first. They scrambled out of the cabin, clumsy and heavy-footed in their biohazard suits, on to the pot-holed tarmac of the road, all of them dropping to a kneeling position and scanning the perimeter with quick, precise movements.
Jones watched the sergent and his men, one by one, getting to their feet and securing covered positions around the helicopter. Whispered orders in French crackled over their earpieces, and finally the sergent gave the doctors the all-clear to get out.
Gupta tapped Jones’s leg. ‘You ready?’
Jones nodded. ‘Bit scared to tell the truth.’
‘We’d be idiots not to be.’
Gupta stepped out and Jones followed, awkwardly struggling to keep his balance. The air pack on his back was heavy, forcing him to lean forward like an old crone carrying firewood. He looked about him. To their left was one of the few buildings in the town that had lights on. A sign in Hausa and English – REPAIRS, FIXES, SALE OF CAR AND TRUCK – indicated that not so long ago it had been a garage. The sign was pitted with ragged bullet holes, the cinderblock walls either side of the raised shutter door too.
Open for business.
By the flickering beam of his torch, he could see mounds of cloth dotted around the junction, fluttering in the downdraught as the helicopter’s blades still spun and the pitch of the engine slowly wound down.
Gupta walked cautiously towards one of the small mounds of cloth and knelt down beside it.
Jones heard his voice over the intercom. ‘What the hell is this?’
Dr Gupta beckoned him to come over.
‘Jones . . . come and have a look here.’
He hurried over and knelt down beside him.
There was no corpse, certainly nothing that could be described as a body. Instead, they were looking at a mess of darkly stained clothes wrapped around a bundle of bones, patchy and mottled. A skull lay on the road beside the pile . . . mostly vanilla-coloured bone, with just a patch of dark scalp and a tuft of hair left where the victim’s crown would have been.
Beneath the bones and clothes, a dark puddle of viscous liquid had pooled.
‘My God. Complete liquefaction of all the soft tissue . . .’ Gupta shook his head. ‘In just a few hours?’
‘That’s impossible,’ whispered Jones.
There were other humps of cloth and bone on the road. ‘It kills quickly.’
Jones nodded. He knew what Gupta was getting at. It had killed too quickly for these victims to make their way to some triage centre. They’d literally dropped where they’d been standing.
‘That’s . . . an encouraging sign,’ said Gupta. The phrase felt poorly chosen. ‘At least it appears there is no incubation period.’
‘Flash-fire infection,’ said Jones. Perhaps this pathogen, whatever it was, was going to be too efficient for its own good; no hosts living long enough to quietly carry the infection to fresh pastures. Hopefully it might burn itself out before it could spread too far.
Gupta pulled out a small plastic container and a sample pipette. He set the container down and unscrewed the cap. He then picked up the pipette in his thick gloved fingers. ‘I will get a sample of the fluid.’
Carefully he touched the tip of the pipette to the dark liquid. Jones thought he saw the surface quiver or ripple slightly. Gupta squeezed the rubber bulb and released. Air bubbled out, and the liquid, thick as syrup, began to climb up the inside of the narrow glass cylinder. Finally, he placed the pipette in the container and screwed the cap back on.
?
??We should look around . . . try to see if there are any survivors.’
Gupta panned his torch across the front of the garage. Through the half-raised shutter, the glow from a solitary fizzing strip light spilled out.
They made their way across the uneven road, potholed with cracks and craters – decades-old tarmac that needed resurfacing. Gupta ducked down under the raised shutter. Jones followed him inside.
The oil-stained concrete floor was littered with tattered blankets, discarded tins of food, clips of ammunition and Kalashnikovs.
‘Oh shit,’ whispered Jones. Gupta heard him and nodded.
The town was back in Boko Haram’s possession.
‘They must have been billeted here,’ said Jones.
‘I see no bodies, though.’
‘Then they must have fled.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said Gupta. Boko Haram propaganda videos portrayed them as benevolent protectors and saviours of the people. In reality, they took what they needed, abducted whom they wanted and moved on.
The sergent ducked under the shutter and stood up beside them. ‘Everything is OK?’
They both nodded. ‘We’re fine,’ said Jones. ‘Fine.’
He nodded. ‘D’accord.’ He looked around. ‘The militants were here.’
‘And left in a hurry.’
The sergent shook his head. ‘No. Not even in a hurry. They would not leave their guns behind.’ He quickly barked an order in French, and several seconds later two of his men ducked under the shutter and joined them.