‘Look, them soldiers are wearin’ masks,’ said Heywood. He cursed. ‘Means it could be hangin’ in the air right now!’
Maddy nodded. ‘News said it’s probably airborne.’
Heywood looked at the masks. ‘Looks like they’re pretty guddamn certain it’s airborne.’
Charley looked up at Becks. ‘Airborne?’
‘That means the virus will spread with the wind.’
Heywood looked up at the overcast sky. Rain-heavy clouds were rolling slowly northwards, promising more than a few drops of rain. ‘And that wind, guddamn it, that wind’s comin’ this way. This ain’t good!’
Maddy clenched her teeth, wondering what the hell they should do next. There was no way forward; even if the roadblock wasn’t stopping them, they’d be heading directly towards the virus outbreaks further south. Backwards, then, to Denver? Run away from it? Or …?
The spots of rain grew heavier. She tugged the protective hood of her plastic mac up over her head and looked to her right. A brown forest of dying fir trees carpeted a steep hillside – the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Beyond the wooded brow of the hill, the sharp ridges of distant peaks looked forbidding. But that was the direction they needed to go, just south of Colorado Springs. Up there, into those unforgiving mountains.
‘How far away is Waldstein’s campus?’ she asked Rashim.
He turned his wrist to look at the small screen. ‘By road, fifty-one miles. Directly, as the crow flies from here, it’s forty-three miles.’
She gazed at the snow-covered peaks. It looked like a steep climb, and over the brow it was only going to get steeper. And probably colder.
‘We’re stuck on this road! We can’t go south. We can’t go back up. We should head off-road from here!’ She nodded at the sloping forest.
Just then they heard a scream coming from the crowd somewhere up in front of them.
Something had just happened. Back in among the pressing crowd Maddy noticed a ripple of heads turning and necks craning one way then the other to see what was going on. They heard another scream. She could see a soldier standing on the roof of one of the APCs, pointing at someone in the crowd.
Uh … this isn’t good.
‘Becks? What can you see?!!’
‘There is a disturbance ahead, Maddy.’
‘I know that! But what’s causing it?’
‘It appears people are backing away from something in the –’
She heard a woman’s voice, just ahead, much closer, screaming. ‘Someone has got it!’
‘Rashim!’ Maddy tugged desperately on his sleeve. ‘What do you think? Go for the trees?’
But Rashim’s eyes were on the clouds tumbling heavily in the sky.
‘Rashim? What do you –’
‘The rain …’ he uttered. Then suddenly he pulled the hood of his mac up over his head, zipped up the front and pulled his hands up inside the sleeves. ‘The rain! If it’s airborne, it’s going to be in the rain!’
She stared up and felt a splash on her cheek. ‘Whuh?’
‘Cover yourselves!’ shouted Rashim. ‘Cover your skin!’
They were jostled by someone pushing roughly past them. ‘It’s here! K-N, it’s HERE!!!!’
CHAPTER 34
2070, Rocky Mountains
The result was instantaneous: a Mexican wave of panic rippling from the very front of the roadblocked crowd, back towards the logjam of parked vehicles. The crowd began to turn their backs on the military blockade in ones, twos, threes, then en masse, pushing past each other to return to their abandoned vehicles and possessions.
‘Maddy!’ Rashim was shouting at her. He jerked her arm. ‘The virus is in the clouds! In the rain! We have to get out of the rain!’
The press of people between them and the roadblock was beginning to thin out as those before them continued to stream past. She caught a glimpse of an old man who had collapsed to his knees on the road and was swaying groggily, like a closing-time drunkard. He was looking directly at her with red-rimmed eyes that began to leak dark bloody tears down on to his cheeks. For some reason his face creased with the slightest hint of an amused smile, as if something quaint, charming and odd had just occurred to him, then he flopped forward face down on to the tarmac.
That’s how quickly the virus takes effect?
If Rashim was right and the virus had made contact with that man from the first few drops of rain, then … how long ago had it started to spit? Five minutes? Ten minutes?
God help us … that’s fast.
‘The trees!’ said Rashim. ‘Over there!’ He was pointing towards the edge of the sloping wood.
Becks took the lead; she scooped Charley up in her arms and began barging her way there, crossing the paths of people rushing away from the roadblock towards their parked vehicles and handcarts. Rashim and Heywood followed behind her. Maddy began to run but paused and turned to look again at the old man; his legs and arms were thrashing uncontrollably, drumming against the tarmac … in some kind of seizure.
‘Maddy!’
She turned and saw the others had hopped over the low rusting barrier beside the highway and started making their way across a parched field towards the distant trees. She nodded to Rashim that she was coming. She hurried across the highway, weaving past others running away. As she lifted her leg over the barrier, she cast one last glance back over her shoulder. The space directly before the blockade razor wire had cleared, but she could see there were three or four more people who had collapsed right there. Some of them were thrashing and twitching. The old man was entirely still now … and she could see a dark liquid beginning to pool on the tarmac round his head, leaking out of his ears, his eyes, his nose and his mouth.
She climbed over the barrier and followed after the others. They were nearing the treeline. She hurried across the fifty-yard-wide apron of dry ground, mottled yellow with tufts of sickly-looking, acid-tainted grass, towards the edge of the wood … and found herself nearly stepping on the body of a crow. She was about to step round it when she noticed the bird was twitching like the humans on the road had been. A wing beat erratically against the ground, and dark feathers fluttered loose as if they’d been attached by cheap glue that had perished. She saw a bald patch of pale skin, pulled taut against a toothpick of bone. The skin was glistening wetly. Aware she had to run for her life but for this fleeting moment morbidly fascinated, she quickly hunched down to get a closer look. She watched as the glistening pale skin began to break down into a thick paste that slowly ran off the bone like porridge off the back of a spoon, exposing cartilage and raw tendons beneath.
She looked around and saw dozens of other birds littering the ground. Some were still flapping and twitching. Others were already dead, clouds of black feathers blowing away from them like dark dandelion seeds, leaving behind tiny clusters of fragile bone, liquidating grey skin and viscous pink pools of soft tissue.
‘Maddy!’ Rashim was calling out to her. ‘Hurry! Watch the rain!!’
She looked up and saw the others had reached the treeline now. She stood up and heard the patter of drops on her hood increase from the occasional tap to persistent drumming. She stepped round the dying bird then hurried across the field towards them, keeping her head down and her hands tucked inside the plastic sleeves as the rain began to come down more heavily. She joined them sheltering beneath the low boughs of a short fir tree that had retained some of its pine needles.
‘Did you see all those dead birds?!’
Rashim nodded. ‘Perhaps birds as well as humans are affected.’
‘Oh my God …’ she gasped, her mind suddenly jumping elsewhere. ‘Oh my God! I got rain on my hands! I got a drop of rain on my face!’
‘It seems to act immediately on contact.’ Rashim turned his hands over and looked at them. ‘Check your skin for any discoloration!’
They all did as he said. Inspecting the fronts and the backs of their hands.
‘And look at each other’s faces!’ he added.
‘Look for anything, blemishes, redness, sores … anything!’
The rain was coming down more heavily now as they peered closely at each other. Drips pattered down every now and then between the branches above them against the hoods of their macs.
‘If that rain is carryin’ your virus, then we’re already dead,’ said Heywood. ‘I got some on me too.’
‘Perhaps not every raindrop carries a cell of the pathogen,’ said Rashim. ‘It could be that a number of airborne particles of infected matter got caught in an updraught further south, were carried on the wind and came down with the rain.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? One drop in ten, a hundred, a thousand could carry a live cell. The drier we stay, the better our chances.’
‘Or maybe those people over on the road were already sick?’ said Charley.
He considered that for a moment. ‘That is also possible.’
On the road, people who moments ago had been angrily clamouring to get past the roadblock were fleeing up the highway the way they’d come, away from the infected bodies; streaming through the mire of parked vehicles and abandoned handcarts, past other fresh arrivals still intending to head south and looking bemused at the people surging either side of them as they slowed down at the rear of the logjam. Panic was spreading to them now, and panic communicated faster than any virus could possibly spread.
Maddy heard the drone of a jet in the air and was about to look up to see where it was coming from when a hundred-yard length of the highway suddenly erupted into flame. A sequence of brilliant-white fireballs rolled down the road, engulfing parked vehicles, handcarts, running people and freshly arrived alike. A half-second later, she felt the searing heat on her face and heard a deep whoomp. The fireballs rose lazily into the sky, becoming mushroom clouds of rich orange that darkened into clouds of soot-black smoke.
‘They’re firebombin’ the highway!’ shouted Heywood.
A delta-winged drone swooped low along the road, piercing through the columns of smoke, leaving swirling disturbance holes in its wake. They saw a payload being released from its belly, a cylinder that broke open in mid-air and spilled a cluster of dots. A moment later, another section of the road, further down, instantly erupted into flame. As the brilliant balls of flame began to darken into billowing clouds of smoke, again they felt the pressure wall of hot air on their faces and heard another sickening whoomp.
In the sky, swooping and circling like predatory birds, were a dozen more drones preparing to descend and deliver their incendiary payloads.
‘They’ll flame this whole guddamn area!’ shouted Heywood. ‘Not just the road but either side!’
Maddy squinted and blinked. ‘OK … OK. Right …’ She looked at the sloping wood above them. It was covered in a thick carpet of brown pine needles and cones shed from the dying trees. ‘That way! We need to go up!’
They began to clamber uphill, ducking beneath low bare branches, feet sinking into small drifts of needles and catching on buried roots and rocks, hands concealed by the scrunched-up sleeves of their macs, reaching out for rain-slick thorny brambles to pull themselves up the steep incline.
Another deep whoomp came from behind them, accompanied by a momentarily flickering phosphorous glow, casting stick-man shadows of skeletal trees up the sloping ground before them. Maddy scrambled, climbed and pulled herself up, using anything she could find purchase on.
She tripped and stumbled knee deep into a bed of pine needles. ‘Dammit!’ she gasped as she staggered out of it, reaching for a bare branch, and pulled herself up again.
She felt Heywood shove her roughly from behind. ‘Keep movin’!’ he hissed. ‘They’ll bomb this hill!’
She scrambled forward, clawing for anything she could pull on, feet sliding on the exposed knuckles of tree roots, sinking into small dunes of needles. Five minutes later, she emerged from the woods into a clearing that flattened out. She dropped to her knees, exhausted, fighting for her breath. She turned round to see the others right behind her, spilling out through scratching bare branches into the open.
All of them were catching their breath as they turned to look at the highway. Another row of lurid white florets of flame blossomed below, as Heywood had said, and were now searing the ground at either side. The field – where she’d been gazing at the dissolving bird carcasses just minutes ago – was now a carbonized wasteland. Even from here, a hundred yards up the forest slope, as she watched the balls of flame roll into the sky, she could feel the heat on her face.
‘God knows how wide they’ll go with that. Maybe into the trees if they saw us make a run for it!’ gasped Heywood. ‘An’ maybe right up this hill.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘We can’t stop here! We gotta keep pushin’ up! Gotta keep goin’ up!’
Breath already ragged from the steep climb, she nodded, staggered to get up and move onwards and upwards, but fell to her knees again.
She felt a firm hand wrap round her upper arm and turned to see it belonged to Rashim. ‘Must keep going, Maddy.’
They continued their desperate ascent for another half an hour, as the wan light drained from the dying end of the afternoon. The heavy rain clouds had thinned out and the threat of sudden-death-from-a-raindrop had passed for now. The sickly sun had made its bed and was now settling beneath a sepia sky.
Every few minutes they stopped to catch their breath and check on the creeping advance of the systemic firebombing going on behind them. The dusk was brilliantly illuminated every now and then by livid strips of flame. The firebombing was stepping uphill in ordered, systemic slices, leaving in its wake a Dante-esque landscape of flaming tree trunks and a ground carpeted with smouldering pine needles that flickered like the embers of an endless campfire.
They reached the brow of the hill as the last light of day stole away from the sky. Maddy slumped down on to a large flat-topped boulder. As she struggled for breath, she gazed at the scene below her. The firebombing appeared to have finally been called off, ceasing three-quarters of the way up the hillside. In the distance, she could see the highway they’d been on earlier – dozens of fires still flickered brightly among the tangle of burnt-out vehicles. The military blockade was still there. Powerful floodlights on the sentry guns had been switched on and above them the two large information screens glowed like shop windows with public announcements that no one but the burnt husks of the dead were likely to read. The drones patrolled the dark sky in tireless loops, beams beneath them, and probed the ground either side of the road, seeking any remaining signs of life.
CHAPTER 35
2070, Rocky Mountains
They came across an old deserted petrol station and roadside motel of six chalets arranged in a horseshoe round a gravel car park. From the signs of breaking and entering, abandoned mattresses and rotten bedrolls, the chalets had been used before, probably many times over, by migrants on foot, stopping on their way north to the glittering lights of Denver.
As the rain began to spit down on them again, they decided to take shelter inside one of them. Becks quickly picked one, climbed the half a dozen steps to the covered porch and trampled down weeds that had grown up through the gaps between the boards. She pulled the front door open and pushed aside a mosquito-net door. The others hurried inside as the rain began to come down more heavily, not even pausing to check that the dark interior wasn’t already occupied.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting in a circle on the floor, a single flickering candle between them. They listened solemnly to the rain drumming on the shingle roof and a drip, drip, drip in the bathroom where the roof shingles had slipped and the rain was getting in.
‘If any of us got infected, we’d know by now,’ said Maddy. ‘Right? We’d know?’
Rashim nodded. ‘From what I saw, it appears to work incredibly quickly. Within seconds of contact.’
‘Maybe it ain’t carried by the rain,’ said Heywood. ‘Reckon we all got wet enough earlier that, if it was, we’d be long dead by now.’
‘The rain …’ Rashim shrugged. ‘
It was just a thought. But for it to travel so quickly it must be an airborne pathogen. Remember those soldiers were all wearing masks? There could have been viral particles in the raindrops. Or … it’s possible the rain may be suppressing the airborne particles. Washing them out of the air and down into the ground. In which case, the rain might have been a lucky break for us.’
‘Either way, we got lucky,’ Maddy replied. ‘Dead crows on the ground by the road. This thing infects birds as well as people.’
‘I saw a dead deer,’ said Charley. ‘On the way up the hill.’
Becks nodded. ‘I also saw other dead creatures. They were liquidizing.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘Then I guess that’s what we’re up against: a virus that kills every living thing it touches.’
‘Every livin’ thing?’ Heywood looked around. ‘Just animals? Or does that include things like trees? Grass? Moss? What about the tiny bug things that live in the air?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it’s just animals.’ She tried to visualize that crow’s body. The flesh had been disintegrating into a pale viscous liquid. But what about the grass it had been lying on? She couldn’t remember if the process had extended to breaking down the blades of grass into goo as well.
‘So, if that’s the case … that means we’re stuck in this place.’ She looked out of one of the grimy windows of the chalet. ‘I mean, if we touch literally anything outside …?’
‘Suggestion,’ said Becks. ‘We have supplies. We should wait here until the virus has infected all possible infection candidates.’
‘Infection candidates?’ Maddy laughed desperately. ‘Like … every living thing?’
‘Potentially.’
‘Becks is right,’ said Rashim. ‘We will know what this virus can and can’t infect if we give it twenty-four hours or so. It seems to act incredibly quickly. Which means we’ll know soon. Tomorrow morning we may be able to see what the virus can affect. Until then, we’re safe here. We have food and water and we’re sheltered from the rain.’