Becks flexed her arms and her wrapping of waterproof macs rustled noisily in the silence. Her mouth and nose were covered by a cloth mask, her hands contained within two layers of plastic bags. Hardly a proper bio-hazard suit, but it was the best that could be done with what they had.
Maddy’s voice was muffled through the shower curtain. ‘Just grab the nearest samples you can lay your hands on and come back!’
The support unit held in her hands a couple of empty water bottles. She took several cautious tiptoe paces across the creaking floorboards of the porch towards the half a dozen steps that led down to the gravel-covered ground beyond. She turned to her right and saw their faces crammed together, peering out through the grimy window.
‘How are you feeling out there?!’ Maddy called out. ‘You all right, Becks?’
‘I am not yet experiencing any unusual symptoms.’
Becks squatted down near the edge of the porch and set the water bottles down. On the top step was a small white hump of the dried residue. She touched it gently through the plastic bags with the tip of her index finger.
‘The residue appears to have developed a hardened crust.’ She probed it a little more insistently and the residue cracked like eggshell. ‘There is a dry outer crust.’ She poked her finger into the small mound and pulled it out. A string of goo dangled from it.
‘Beneath the crust … there is still some moisture. It is like a thick paste.’
‘Get a sample of the crust,’ said Rashim. ‘And a sample of the paste.’
She nodded and unscrewed the cap of the bottle. Then, carefully, she peeled a fragment of the crust off; fragile like pastry, it began to crumble in her fingers. She gently dropped the dry crumbs of residue into the bottle, screwed the cap back on and set the bottle down. She picked up the other one, then dipped her finger into the soft interior of the small hump of residue and scooped some of the paste out. It dangled from her finger over the open bottle; a long pendulous drip clung for a couple of moments to the tip of her finger, then eventually dropped with a soft splat into the bottom of the bottle. She screwed the cap on.
‘I have obtained a sample of each.’
‘OK, job done,’ said Maddy. ‘Come back in.’
She made her way back towards the open door, stood just inside the doorway and pulled the door closed behind her.
‘OK, carefully take the plastic bags off your hands so you are pulling them inside out,’ said Rashim through the shower curtain, ‘then tie a knot in the top of each bag.’
Becks set the plastic bottles down on the floor and did as he’d instructed.
‘Now remove those macs and leave them there. Then we’ll let you past the curtain.’
Becks shrugged off the macs, let them drop to the floor and kicked them back against the bottom of the porch door.
‘Those sample bottles … there’s nothing on the outside of them, is there?’
‘No, Rashim. I was very careful.’
He nodded. ‘Good.’ He was about to pull the curtain aside, when Heywood stopped him.
‘Shouldn’t we wait just a bit? You know? Just to be safe? Make sure she’s not infected?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Yes, maybe you’re right. Becks, would you mind staying where you are for a little while?’
She nodded. ‘Of course. I understand.’
They kept her waiting for a couple of hours, standing with her back pressed to the door, a bottle in each hand and the shower curtain up against her, rustling in and out as she breathed.
Two hours of that and Maddy had finally had enough. ‘I guess she’s fine.’
‘Becks, do you feel any odd symptoms?’ Rashim peered at her through the shower curtain. ‘Check yourself again. Is any of your skin discoloured?’
Becks looked at her arms and hands. ‘I see no discoloration.’
He let out a breath. ‘All right … I think she is good to come in.’ He carefully pulled the curtain aside and Becks stepped forward. She held the plastic bottles out in front of her. ‘Here are your samples.’
Maddy and Rashim looked at each other for a moment. Maddy grabbed them both lightly at the bottom, grimacing as if they both contained warm urine samples. ‘Right … I guess we better get on and do this. Heywood, go and get our test subjects.’
He nodded. He stepped into the bathroom and came back a moment later with something cupped in his hand.
Maddy set the bottles down on the floor, then carefully unscrewed the cap of the one containing the dry powder from the crust. ‘OK … ready?’
Heywood knelt down beside her. ‘Lucky contestant number one.’ He uncupped his hands and tipped the cockroach he’d been holding into the bottle. Maddy quickly screwed the cap back on. They watched the creature scuttle around in the bottom of the bottle for a moment, its legs picking up the chalk-white dust.
‘Seems OK so far,’ said Heywood.
‘We don’t know that yet,’ replied Maddy. ‘Let’s test the gunk.’
Heywood went back into the bathroom and returned a moment later with another cockroach scooped up from the bathtub. She unscrewed the cap of the second bottle. ‘Ready?’
He nodded. She pulled the lid off. ‘Unlucky contestant number two.’
He tipped the creature in. It dropped to the bottom into the goo with a soft spluck. Like the first one, the cockroach skittered around the bottom of the bottle in circles, dragging a string of the viscous gunk after it.
‘Please be OK, Mr Bug,’ uttered Charley.
They gathered closely round both plastic bottles and watched the invertebrates exploring their new surroundings in mindless scratching circles.
‘Anyone know what a distressed cockroach looks like?’ said Maddy after a while.
‘Seen enough of ’em to know they’re hardy little buggers,’ replied Heywood. ‘If any species gonna outlive all the rest, it’ll be them for sure.’
They continued to watch in silence for half an hour. Neither roach seemed affected in any way.
‘What if these bugs are immune?’ said Heywood.
‘Nothing else that we have witnessed so far has been,’ said Rashim. ‘I cannot imagine why one particular species of invertebrate would be.’
Another half an hour passed silently. They stared in anxious silence, mouths dry, desperately thirsty. They weren’t going to last much longer trapped in this room. They needed to get out. They needed to find water.
The first cockroach, its dark brown carapace covered in a coating of pale dust, finally stopped moving.
‘Oh … please … no,’ whispered Maddy. ‘Come on, move, little bug, don’t die on us …’
Its antennae flickered and twitched and curled. Then it rolled on to its back, legs flexing and shuddering.
‘That doesn’t look very good,’ said Heywood.
Its tiny legs twitched one more time, then it was still. In the other bottle, the second cockroach was also beginning to slow down.
‘Oh no.’ Maddy sat back on her bottom. ‘They’re infected.’
Rashim was still peering closely at the dead one. ‘I do not see any tissue breakdown yet. But then … I do not know, that might be because the exoskeleton is a harder material for the virus to deconstruct?’
‘Air,’ said Charley. ‘Maybe they’re both running out of air?’
Rashim closed his eyes with relief. ‘Of course …’
Maddy sat up. ‘Oh God! Yes!’ She quickly leaned forward and carefully unscrewed the cap on the bottle containing the crust sample. The ‘dead’ cockroach immediately began to kick its legs. It wriggled on its back for a moment, then flipped itself over and resumed scuttling in circles round the base of the plastic bottle.
She unscrewed the cap of the other one and the roach covered in gloop began to struggle with renewed vigour in the sticky mess.
She let out a long sigh of relief. ‘Well done, you lovely little beauties!’
Heywood snorted. ‘Never thought I’d wish one of these things a long and happy life.’
‘We should not get too excited yet,’ said Rashim. ‘We really have no clear idea how quickly this virus works.’
Maddy picked up the plastic bottle. ‘We don’t have time to be this cautious.’
Rashim frowned. ‘What are you doing, Maddy?’
She upended it and held her other hand, palm up, beneath the open neck. The cockroach tumbled out on to her hand and skittered around her palm, leaving a glistening track of threads of slime on her skin. Then it hopped off on to the floor and zig-zagged energetically away to disappear beneath an old wardrobe.
Charley gasped at the sight of the droplets of goo. The others instinctively pulled back a little from Maddy as she stared at the palm of her hand.
‘We haven’t got time to screw around,’ she said. ‘We’re out of drinking water and we’ve still got miles of mountain terrain to cross.’ She looked up at them. ‘We’re going to die here if we stay any longer.’
She glanced at Rashim. ‘You’re thinking moisture might still wake this gunk up, aren’t you?’
He nodded.
‘Then I guess we’d better find out.’ She lifted her hand to her mouth.
‘Maddy! That is unwise!’ cautioned Becks.
Before anyone could stop her, she dabbed her tongue at a spot of glistening goo on the palm of her hand. Then instinctively made a yuk face. ‘Tastes yeasty … like Vegex spread.’
Rashim shook his head. ‘That was completely stupid.’
‘Well … some of it’s inside me now. We’re going to know what the deal is soon enough.’
CHAPTER 38
2070, Rocky Mountains
The Kosong-ni virus was ‘dead’. Rashim speculated that a ‘rapid redundancy’ – a quick life cycle – must have been a critical part of its genetic design. As a bioweapon, and that’s what it most certainly was, it would have been engineered to spread and act rapidly, to completely annihilate any living organism it came into contact with, then after a short period of time some inbuilt chemical trigger must make the virus infect itself. The perfect doomsday weapon engineered by people who were prepared to lie low for a few weeks with food and water and be ready to emerge in the aftermath and reclaim a wholly ‘cleansed’ world.
‘Reckon only them crazy-ass North Koreans’d be insane enough to build a weapon as indiscriminate and stupid as that,’ said Heywood.
They exited the chalet, stepping out into a summer’s day that looked like the bleak middle of winter. They made straight for the abandoned garage opposite in the hope of finding something to drink in the garage’s convenience store. For once luck was on their side. A vending machine at the back had been hiding a dozen cans of soda out of view in its workings like an over-cautious museum curator. Seven pristine, undented, un-rusted cans of diet cola, three cans of an energy drink, six cans of grapeade and to Maddy’s delight a single can of Dr Pepper.
She belched after taking a long thirsty slug. ‘Sorry.’
‘Three cans each and two spare,’ said Heywood. ‘We better make these last.’
They set off into a world dusted white by the virus residue and resumed walking south-west along the broken gravel road that had led them here nearly a week ago. It climbed relentlessly uphill, a slow and steady gradient ascent from the foothills up into the Rockies. They passed a faded, paint-flecked roadside sign:
You are NOW entering Pike National Forest
Elevation – 4302m
Named after Explorer and Frontiersman, Zebulon Pike!
The term ‘forest’ seemed a particularly pitiful joke now. Douglas firs that should have been lush and thick with a coat of dark green needles and brown cones were now no more than grey skeletons: telephone poles surrounded by a haze of thin twigs.
The gravel crackled and crunched beneath their feet as they made their way silently up into the mountains, the white residue brittle and fine like the ice of an early-winter frost.
Mid-afternoon they took a break as the climbing road hairpinned back on itself. They stood on a lay-by that dropped steeply away beyond a rusting safety barrier. Once upon a time this had been a roadside picnic spot; a weathered picnic table and bench, the remains of a barbecue pit and a faded sign suggested this would be a great place to take that all-important we-were-here holiday snap of the Front Range of the Rockies.
Maddy lowered her backpack to the ground, wandered across the gravel to the edge of the picnic area, leaned against the safety rail and gazed out across the river valley below them. The landscape was like a black-and-white movie, a lifeless and barren greyscale. The sloping valley side opposite them looked like it was feathered with first-of-the-season snow, as this side would to someone peering across from over there. It looked wintery. She shuddered; it was a few degrees cooler to be fair. The altitude, of course. They must be a few hundred feet higher than they’d been when they’d set out. Perhaps some of the white dusting she could see at the very tops of the receding peaks was year-round snow?
Rashim joined her, leaning against the creaking safety rail. ‘A contrast to the Amazon jungle, hmm?’
‘Now that was truly breathtaking.’ She smiled. There, she’d witnessed so much life crammed into one place. Millions of species of flora and fauna, all jostling with each other for elbow room. It had felt like they were swimming through a green soup alive with buzzing, chittering noises.
‘I wonder what that jungle looks like now.’
He sipped grape soda carefully from a can. ‘Like this probably. Grey, not green any more.’
‘Do you think K-N got everywhere?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe there are some islands or remote places that managed to escape it. I hope so.’ He sighed. ‘It would be nice to think there might be a lush green island somewhere out there in the middle of an ocean, an island stuffed full of animals carrying on their lives oblivious to all of this.’
‘Uh-huh. Wouldn’t it.’ She finished her second can, tipping the last few drops into her mouth. One more soda left in her backpack. When it ran out, God knows what she was going to drink. Same for the others. They were all sipping carefully.
He licked his lips. ‘If we had been just a few days earlier, we could have prevented this from happening.’
She nodded. ‘I wonder if this is a bit like the sort of rebirth you get after a forest fire.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m sure I read somewhere that natural forest fires are, like, a part of the life cycle of a forest. You get a mature forest and it kind of starts dying from within because only the oldest trees are the ones getting any sunlight. And they’re all so old they’re dying bit by bit anyway. Then along comes a lightning storm. There’s a fire; everything burns down to soot and charcoal, and it looks completely dead. But then all that ash is great for the soil. So, the first time it rains, the green sprouts back out of that pitch-black soil and the forest begins a brand-new life cycle, because now the old trees have gone the saplings have a chance … they can see the sun.’
He shrugged. ‘If there’s anything alive out there … possibly.’
‘Maybe Kosong-ni, Pandora … Waldstein’s Revenge … whatever we want to call this, maybe it’s something that just had to happen. A new start for the saplings, so to speak.’
He looked at her. ‘A rebirth?’
She nodded. ‘Don’t you ever wonder whether this is a cycle that has happened to humanity before? Like, I dunno, like maybe Noah’s ark, or Atlantis, was some Extinction Level Event that happened ages ago … and maybe a trace of that story somehow ended up becoming the DNA for some kooky Bible story?’
He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Not really.’
She laughed drily. ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. I like that you don’t ever seem to overthink things.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’ve always liked that about you.’
‘I suppose I am not the philosophical type.’ He shrugged. ‘I think of philosophy as a soft “science” for those who cannot handle the definite answers of real science.’
‘Ouch.’ She
smiled at him. ‘I didn’t think you were such a hard-core pencil-neck.’
‘Science is a thought process that can be proven or disproven. Whereas philosophy, religion, art …?’ He shrugged again, dismissively. ‘With those areas of thought, everyone’s opinion is considered valid. No one, therefore, is “wrong”. Which logically means no one is right. It’s circular thinking that gets no one anywhere.’
She looked out across the river valley. Looked south to where they needed to be. Waldstein was out there somewhere. Hopefully still alive and waiting for them.
‘How long are we going to last after we’ve finished our cans?’
‘There’s water down there,’ he said, nodding at the glinting thread of a river below them.
‘But is it safe to drink? What if there are active K-N microbes, or cells, or whatever, in the water?’
‘We’ve touched enough of the residue powder with our bare skin. If it was still … “alive”, we’d know by now.’
‘I guess at some point soon we’re going to have to refill our water bottles. And then we’ll know.’
They both stared out at the valley for a while, listening to nothing more than the whisper of a gentle breeze. Standing up here, they should have been hearing so much more: the twittering of birdsong, the sporadic, throaty cry of elk, the buzzing of insects.
‘You do know … we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble, Maddy?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We should have set the time-stamp for after K-N had happened, then opened a portal right beside Waldstein’s campus.’
She was about to shake her head and remind him that the burst of tachyon particles would have exposed Waldstein to whoever was out there monitoring the world for illicit experiments in time travel, when she realized what he was getting at.
There’s no one left watching right now.
Probably. And if someone was still watching and waiting for rogue tachyon particles to appear … what would they do now if they spotted one? Would they even care? They’d almost certainly have far more important matters on their mind than watching for naughty tachyon particles.