Anna still communicated with only a very few of her friends. She abided by the injunction not to disclose what she had been seconded to work on, in the details, but given her expertise, her time in London, the fact that she didn’t care, it was not surprising that word spread.
She received an email from an ex from whom she had not heard for years, since he had moved to an out-of-the-way town in Portugal. He wrote to her in a voice that she found curiously flat, as if he was compensating for the millennial mood, wishing her good luck with her research, for all their sakes, telling her he still thought of her often, hoping his coastal home would be isolated for some time to come.
“We were too much,” she wrote back. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, you know it. What I mean is that our sets overlapped too much.
“They came to me after I’d been in London and in Madison. I probably shouldn’t tell you but I want to try to explain.” She typed quickly. “You remember my friend Jana? She’s in San Diego now. I was there last year. That’s what started this whole thing for me. I took her daughter to a reading at a library, some writer she likes, adventure stories. She’s ten. Anyway, on the way back she saw something at the end of an alley and we went to check it out because I knew Jana wouldn’t have done and I always figure that’s my “aunt” job, right?
“Every time I see an adult who’s infected I feel surprised. I don’t know why but it feels to me like this is a condition for children. It should be children who have this. If you’d told someone a few years ago that this would start spreading I bet we would have thought it would be children who’d get it, instead of anyone for reasons we can’t make sense of.
“This was before we knew much about it (as if we do now!) but I’d heard a few things and I suddenly had a terrible feeling because I saw a trench right across the alley, right through the pavement like they’d been laying a pipe, and beyond it was a body.
“It was an old man who had died. A homeless man. He smelled. Later it turned out he’d been there two days.
“I told the kid to come back but I was surprised because she wouldn’t stop. She starts to climb down into the trench to get across and I’m shouting at her and then she slips, just tips out of view.
“The cut was deep. On the other side the poor dead guy looked like he was eyeing me. The kid was freaking out.
“I see her at last, curled up under a little overhang in the wall. I reach down. She looks up at me—there’s dirt all over her face—with this haunted look. I feel like there must be worms all over her.
“She says, ‘I couldn’t climb out.’ I reach down and tell her to take my hand.
“A week later, we’re talking about it. We’d called the cops and everything of course, told them. She wants to know if the man’s OK and in Heaven. So I’m saying all the usual stuff, I don’t know, different people believe different things, etcetera. She says to me, ‘I heard something in the moat. Something moving.’
“She was OK. She didn’t catch it and we don’t know why. Neither did I.” She considered, and discounted, adding something to that.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out. Drawing diagrams, sets, the details of anyone who gets infected. Trying to work out a common factor.
“In the end I’m a soil scientist. I’ve been thinking about it as if it’s the ground that’s the vector, not the people. Like if it’s not a sickness at all.”
She didn’t send what she’d written. She saved that message to a private folder. Instead she sent her ex a brief reply full of anodyne melancholia, and received nothing in reply.
As soon as she entered his room Nick began to complain, though in an almost dutiful manner as if he was decreasingly invested in his own anger.
“Can you hush?” she said. “I’m here to take you somewhere. Over you come.”
He bit his lip and jumped over the trench.
Anna walked behind him and Gomez and the soldiers who escorted him. Perry came back for her.
“Did you even put your helmet on?” he said.
“I don’t get that close.”
“Well, I guess after London you’re not that worried.” She said nothing. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No, but I’m sick of him moaning.”
“I hear that. I’ve been reading over his story. You’ve seen the way he talks about his traveling crew, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re the ones who got him into castles.”
“You know what a star fortress is?”
“Yes,” she said. She walked away from him.
The soldiers took Nick past notice boards and the entrances of lifts, up several flights of stairs, through double doors. He gasped and threw his hands wide and turned slowly on the spot.
They were in an irregular triangular yard about fifty yards on its longest face. It was enclosed by high wire-topped concrete walls, each punctuated with irregularly spaced windows, from several of which leaned young soldiers. They were relaxed but their weapons were visible. The floor was overlaid with the remains of paint markings, guides and touchlines for various sports, each in a different color. A rusting netless basket was bolted to one wall.
“Couldn’t arrange the sun,” Anna called. The cloud cover was flat and unvarying gray. The yard was too enclosed to feel the wind.
A soldier watching from above shouted, “Keep moving, homeboy.” Nick looked up at his audience and could not stop smiling. “Keep moving.”
Nick waved in what might have been dismissal or a greeting. He started to pace the perimeter.
“Heads up!” someone shouted. A basketball dropped from one of the windows. It landed with a thwack and began to wander the pitch in a series of decreasing bounces.
Nick kept walking in the shadow of the walls. Anna went to meet the ball and caught it one-handed. She stopped a distance from the basket and threw the ball casually. She scored.
The soldiers whooped and cheered. She waited for the ball to come back to her and did it again, to more applause.
“Holy fucking shit, Doc!” someone shouted.
“Nick,” the colonel said.
Nick was watching her.
“Nick, please keep moving?”
He did. He walked slowly to the center of the yard, keeping his eyes on Anna, and stopped there again. “No?” Nick called. “This wouldn’t be OK? You don’t want to fuck up your basketball court?”
“Nick,” the colonel said, “come on.”
“Was this you?” Nick said to Anna. “Arranging this? You want me to say thanks? Is that it?”
“I don’t want you to say anything,” she said. She walked past him to the far side of the court. She could feel nothing unusual about the surface close to him when she passed.
“Nick, I know you’re enjoying yourself with this shit,” the colonel said, “but please don’t put me in this position, you know I need you to move now.”
The caution was extreme. Based on everything they knew it would take at least an hour of immobility for Nick’s presence to start to have a measurable effect on the ground.
Alone in Nick’s room she knelt by the trench. It felt shocking, indecent, to see the moat empty of him. She gripped the cracking edge of the tiles. She looked down through layers of broken floor into dense, almost black earth.
Computers kept a micrometrically precise record of all fluctuations of the trench. The ground had started to crumble, to sink into a gouge, seventy-three minutes after they had brought Nick here and ordered him into his bed, and had seemingly completed its change two hundred and twenty-five minutes after that. The ground had eaten into a widening hole.
It was one of Anna’s jobs to find out where the matter had gone.
The sensors insisted there was no change but for the random pattering of loose earth in gravity, now, but Anna always felt as if she could see the moat growing, spreading inward unevenly so that the nucleus, the solid ground at its center was eaten away by emptiness.
“I keep hearing about new s
trains,” Perry said. “And terrorist stuff.” He followed Anna into the staff lounge and stood close to where she took her coffee, watching her with uncharacteristic hesitation while loudspeakers summoned someone somewhere.
“It’s all rumors,” he said. “Everyone’s keeping their cards close to their chests. You hear something about Jaipur, Angola, Scotland. You know in this scene it’s all about the rumors.”
Anna heard very few rumors.
“Colonel Gomez said you’ve been going over what Nick told us,” she said.
“Subject Zero,” he said. “Yeah. I’m going over his files.”
“And mine?”
He blinked at her and she watched his caution go away. “I’m interested in the source,” he said. “That’s my job. And I’m interested in anyone who can’t seem to get infected.”
When they had brought her here and showed her video footage of Nick in his room, Anna had said, “How do we know it’s him?” The colonel and Olson had pulled up graphs of incidents and the spread.
No one was saying that everyone he touched would get it, Olson said, nor that those who did become infected would pass it on to all they touched. But Olson had put a lot of time and computational power into this, cross-referencing key words in global emails and messages, newspaper reports, hospital records, unexplained disasters, flight information, changes of address. The statisticians traced the spread backward. Nick was the initial vector.
They had gone over his tedious blogs, his gushes about his new travel friends, their combined gigabytes of pictures. Eager young men and women who traveled together and went off alone and rejoined their friends again repeatedly, writing emails about drugs and history and folklore and raised consciousness and imaginary secrets. Retraced his route through Hungary, Slovakia, Scotland, Germany. Looking for every castle, every artifact, every old wall. “They’re just monuments,” Gomez said. “Ruins.”
When he returned to the U.S., Nick’s passage through New Jersey and Illinois, Wisconsin, New Mexico had left hot spots blooming.
“Where does the stuff go?” Olson had said. “Does it just compress? And most of all, what’s the source? We figure that out, we might have a chance. Maybe track down people responsible.”
The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing. Sharon was lost, presumed dead, in the chaos of Belfast. Lai and Birgit had been booked on the same flight from Edinburgh to Copenhagen. Both had been in recent contact with Nick: it could have been around either of them—or both—that a trench had scored, in the matter of the plane, breaking it apart and bringing its fragments down into the sea.
“I’ve found a few things,” Perry said to Anna. “I don’t know if they’ve all been properly looked at before. How’s your stuff going?” Perry said. “Any luck tracking down the dirt?”
Two can play at your game, Perry, Anna thought. She did not even convince herself.
Nonetheless she looked him up and after false starts as servers stuttered, could find no publications. His degrees were in military history. She had half-expected him to be some parapsychologist, a kook anomaly-hunter promoted into power by these impossible times.
In Perry’s mind—she was certain—would be a future battlefield thronging with uniformed men advancing under packs and the weight of their weapons, rifles up, sending each other signals with quick silent clenched hands, moving in new adaptive formations toward the ruins of a village, each soldier surrounded by a stretching rip in the earth, that traveled with him, his own dugout trap, perhaps the solid nucleus on which he stood traveling with him to refill the hollows over which he leapt, so he advanced through thick jungle or a rising falling desert leaving a landscape of ripped-up interwoven trenches behind him.
Give it years. Give it months. Troops would drop into some recalcitrant statelet and use trenches to fight and advance again, in some new way, thought up by some brilliant secret theorist who would win some prize of the existence of which civilians could not know. A celebration of unorthodox strategy. A black-ops gong.
Twice Anna succumbed to the online chivvyings of her last friends and participated in their self-consciously elegiac video-dinners. The internet was increasingly patchy and temperamental, censored and monitored, but the connection in her temporary house was still surprisingly decent. She sat at one end of her kitchen and connected with Sarah and Bo in Pasadena, Tia in New York, Daniel unwrapping some post-midnight snack in his Berlin small hours.
“So?”
“Chicken, couscous, almonds, harissa.”
“Mmmm. I have hake and capers.”
Red sunlight went down across Anna’s face. She described her own soup and salad.
“I have gummi bears,” Daniel said. “How’s Subject Zero?”
“Shhhh,” Anna said. Everyone made their usual the spooks are listening faces.
Daniel chewed on a candy. “Officially here is not too bad,” he said. “Infection rates are pretty low. Unofficially, worse, but it’s no London. Yet. Partly because a lot of people are just fucking off into the mountains or whatever. It’s going to start accelerating.”
It could only be the childless among her acquaintances who could bear this conversation.
“Did you see that Australian film?” said Bo.
A young architect from Perth had gone viral with a plea for a new urban design. New cities for a new age, he said. He had crowd-sourced collaboration and, with dollars thrown frantically at him, built a mock-up of several streets, according to his notions.
“We have to stop thinking apocalyptically,” he said. “Stop using words like ‘pandemic.’ ” The camera tracked him through his fake town. “You’ve all heard the rumors of new communities in hidden places. I think they’re true. What if I told you I know they’re true? They could be true for a lot more of us, and I’m going to show you how.”
Wide spaces, large plazas made from cheap and easily replaceable materials. No buildings above a single tall floor. Houses with a kitchenette, toilet, shower arranged as satellite-rooms around a big central space.
“It’s a new kind of room,” the architect said. “We call it the keep.”
Under a glass roof, between high walls, a big central bedroom-cum-den floored in compact earth, bed and chairs and freestanding shelves and TV and desk snugly tessellated in clever configuration, to fit within a perfectly regular, pre-dug trench, with a foldout walkway to cross it for when you wanted to move.
“We can make this deep enough and wide enough to contain all cuts arising from the condition.”
“What do you think?” Daniel said. He shut down the pop-up. “It could work.”
“No,” Anna said. “It couldn’t.” The speed with which the moats came was increasing. Some reports suggested that their depth was increasing. And there were those stories of mutations, and her friend’s daughter’s memory of sounds. She looked away from the screen, her anguish taking her by surprise. “Even if we could live with the trenches,” Anna said, “the world, us, this, it can’t. We didn’t set it up right. No. It won’t work.”
“Even our allies don’t tell us shit anymore,” Gomez told Anna. “Hell, we get reports of bombing raids and shit from Poland to Ecuador to the Scottish fucking islands and we don’t know who the fuck’s blowing up what.”
They had originally tracked Nick down in a suburb of a dying town in Colorado. Anna went back and re-watched the footage of his first interrogations again.
He had no family. “The people on the road,” he said. “They’re my family.” He had been moving for months, ever since he realized something was happening to him. He kept moving all day and slept in open ground. He camped in woods. “But I missed being inside, you know?” he said. “I thought maybe it would be OK.”
He had broken into an abandoned building and unrolled his sleeping bag in the ground-floor lounge. The next day he had woken to find a large section of the wall fallen into a new cavity, a ragged moat containing him. He had been so exhausted its collapse had not roused hi
m. Beyond the hole stood three nervous police officers who had kept him at gunpoint until the colonel’s team arrived.
“I started noticing a few inches here and there when I got back from Europe, you know,” he said. “Birgit and Lai said there were things happening.”
Anna had been volunteering in Madison, patrolling the remains, feeding and interviewing the moated, taxonomising them according to the latest schema. She had felt calm even in that catastrophe, that lowering landscape of rubble and trench rings, some containing bodies, some empty.
From there she had gone to London where the edges of the infected zone had been sealed off with barricades and gun towers, to keep the infected back, as if anyone was sure of how it spread or how contagious the condition was. In those boroughs the trenched kept walking. Helicopters flew over Tooting and Thannet, where houses and churches and community halls collapsed into the gouged chasms where people had stood too long. The streets looked plowed.
It was a melancholy kind of martial law. News crews in protective overalls made forays into the infected zones where the Londoners left behind kept trudging, even driving, if their moats manifested beyond their cars’ edges, watching the camera crews sourly.
There was a vogue in surrender. At first it was sleep that trapped the affected. Awake, they tended to move. But a change came: more and more women and men were just standing still to let the moats come.
Newscasters interviewed them across the dugouts that had dug out to contain them. One channel won a BAFTA for three interviews conducted in a single shot on Albemarle Street where a man and two women stood swaying on their nuclei in the remains of the pavement.
“Why are you here?” shouted the journalist.
“Fuck off,” one woman said.
The man said nothing.
“You could keep going,” the journalist said. “There’s food, you could find a big space—”
“Oh, excuse the fuck me,” the second woman interrupted coldly. “Am I doing this wrong?”