Authors: Louise Voss
‘Paul, Paul …’
She gently shook him awake. His eyes were glazed, his breathing shallow and wet.
‘I need your permission to try something,’ she said.
Paul opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He nodded towards a glass of water on the side, and she lifted it to his lips.
‘We think we’ve found an antivirus. We’ve tested it on rats and it seems to work, but it’s risky. Normally, we would—’
‘Give it to me,’ he whispered.
She looked up at him.
‘But, Paul, I think I should—’
He cut her off. His voice was so weak she had to lean closer to hear him. ‘I trust you, Kate. If you think it’s
going to work, I’ll risk it.’ He coughed. ‘What have I got to lose?’
‘It could kill you. I don’t want to use you as a guinea pig.’
‘If you don’t, Watoto will kill me.’
‘It’s only a seventy per cent chance …’
‘Only.’
She nodded. ‘I’m frightened to try it, Paul. If I inject you and it doesn’t work, it will be as if I killed you.’
He looked into her eyes. ‘I’d rather die trying.’ He started to cough again, his eyes screwed shut, wincing with pain. He gripped her hand and attempted a smile. ‘And if it doesn’t work, I guess I’ll get to see Stephen again.’
Kate squeezed his hand back.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Do it.’
She left the room and returned a minute later. She took his bare arm, surprised again at how hot his skin was. The strength in his muscles, in those arms that she loved to feel wrapped round her, was absent; his strong hands were curled like dead spiders. She was amazed her own hand wasn’t shaking. But as she prepared the injection, she wasn’t a lover, or a nurse. She was a scientist. Beneath the fear, she had faith in what she was doing. It took a moment to find a vein, then slipped the needle in.
Now all she could do was wait.
Harley was shouting at one of the junior officers when she emerged from the room.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Kate, I’m sor—’
‘What is it?’ She had a feeling of sick dread that he was going to tell something had happened to Jack.
But it wasn’t as bad as that. Terrible, but not as bad.
‘It’s Angelica. She’s escaped.’
Nothing could have prepared the three boys for what they saw when they finally entered the city of Los Angeles early on Tuesday morning. They were silent as Riley drove at ten miles an hour through deserted streets. Almost every shop window was shattered, and their tyres crunched over a million pellets of broken glass. Rubbish piled up on the sidewalks, but you didn’t have to look too closely to see that some of it wasn’t trash at all, but dead bodies. Smoke rose and mingled with the smog from a hundred unattended fires, from braziers on street corners to whole apartment blocks, shooting flames high into the air.
The smell was terrible – death and rotten food, blood, smoke and dirt. Riley closed all the windows and air vents, and popped down the locks. It immediately became unbearably hot in the car, but neither Jack nor Bradley complained. They sat holding one another’s hands, without even noticing, staring open-mouthed with horror out of the windows. There was a bewildering and discordant backdrop of noise that filled every last cranny of their heads: a cacophony of never-ending alarms – car alarms, security alarms, smoke alarms – swirling and shrieking, seeming to press in on them.
A man lay dead in the middle of the street, blood from several bullet holes in his chest congealing in a dark puddle around him.
‘Don’t look, kids,’ said Riley in a strangled voice, but of course they did. Jack retched, but managed not to vomit. He pulled his knees up to his chest and put his hands over his ears, burying his face.
‘Shit,’ Riley said. ‘I don’t have room to drive around him.’
‘Can we turn around?’ whispered Bradley, who had also turned green. ‘I don’t feel good. My head hurts.’
Riley shook his head. ‘No space. Can’t back up with the Airstream neither.’
The man was spread-eagled right across the centre of the narrow one-way street, although his blood had oozed from one sidewalk to the other.
‘I don’t want to walk from here,’ Bradley added. ‘My legs are aching.’
‘We ain’t walking nowhere,’ Riley said. ‘Close your eyes, both of you.’
Jack and Bradley did as they were told. Riley turned the steering wheel to the right, mounted the kerb, and drove as close to the looted storefronts as he dared – but they still felt the bump and crunch as he drove over the dead man’s feet and ankles.
Bradley was crying. ‘I want Mommy,’ he said. ‘It’s awful here.’
Jack had his hands over his ears, and his eyes tightly shut.
‘Come on, squirt, we got this far – look, we’re almost in West Hollywood, and that’s where Dad lives! We’re real close now. Look out for signs for Wilshire Country Club, OK, ’cos his house is right by there. South Mansfield Avenue. First to spot it gets … shit, I don’t know. I ain’t got nothing left to give you. Gets a popsicle at Dad’s, I guess. We’ll be OK when we get there.’
He seemed to be trying to reassure himself as much as them.
They drove on, past a field hospital that had been erected in a park, dark green army tents and lines of sobbing masked people outside being herded in, or pushed in wheelchairs, by soldiers in full protective suits, armed with machine guns. Even from the moving car, Riley could see the terror in the eyes of the sick people, like they knew that if they went into one of those tents, they wouldn’t be coming out alive. Riley shuddered and drove faster. It was only when they had got a few blocks past it that Jack spoke. ‘Those ladies wanted to go to a hospital.’
Riley had forgotten all about the hot girl and her mom in the Airstream. He hesitated. He couldn’t turn the vehicle round.
‘It’s not far,’ he said. ‘They can walk from Dad’s. I don’t reckon it’s safe for us to stop near so many people with the flu.’
‘There’s the turning to Dad’s street!’ Bradley said a few minutes later, pointing with a shaky hand. ‘It looks different,’ he added.
The formerly quiet, tree-lined road with its Spanish-style bungalows and neat front yards had turned into something resembling a war zone. Trash cans and cars had been overturned. A school bus blazed, watched by a small gang of young men with bandannas tied across their noses and mouths. Two of them were sitting on the sidewalk, cleaning their guns. They were big, muscle-bound guys with tattoos and shaved heads, but they looked sick and scared.
‘That’s Daddy’s house,’ Bradley informed Jack, as Riley pulled up a little way along from the gang near the school bus. ‘We’re here.’
Riley put the car into ‘park’ and they all gazed at the detached, modern sandstone house. It looked untouched b
y riots a
nd fire, and its large pillars, flanking the front
door, were reassuring. Riley turned to face the boys. His eyes
were red-rimmed with stress and fatigue, and acne stood out angrily on his cheeks. ‘OK. This is what we’ll do. I’m gonna go ring the bell. You two stay right here in the car with the doors locked. I’m gonna bring you out something from Dad’s house that you can tie around your faces as a mask – a shirt or a tea-towel or whatever I can find. But you don’t get out till I give you the signal. Got it?’
The boys nodded fearfully. Riley pulled on his denim jacket and buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his elbow. He leapt out of the car and dashed up the marble steps to the front door.
Jack and Bradley watched from the back seat as Riley kept his finger on the buzzer. Over the background noise of all the alarms, they could hear the high-pitched frantic barking of a small dog.
‘Martha,’ said Bradley. ‘That’s good. It means Daddy’s home. Look, Riley’s getting the spare key.’
They watched as Riley, with his arm still over his face, delved into one of two large terracotta pots of pampas grasses on either side of the porch. He pulled out what looked to Jack like a large pebble, and turned it over. ‘It’s in that fake stone. Cool, isn’t it?’ Bradley said, with a ghost of a smile.
Riley extracted a key from a small compartment at the back of the stone, opened the front door and vanished inside, holding up his palm in a ‘wait’ gesture at them. Seconds later he appeared again at the top of the steps, and vomited copiously over the balustrade into one of the pampas grasses.
‘Oh no,’ Jack said. ‘I hope he hasn’t caught the flu. We’d better go help him.’
‘We don’t have masks on,’ Bradley said. ‘So hold your breath, OK?’
The boys ran up the steps to where Riley was still leaning over the edge of the porch. Jack tentatively rubbed his denim-clad back, but Riley straightened up and grabbed
his arm, tears and snot and puke all over his face. ‘I told you not to get out! Don’t go in there!’ he shouted, but it was too late to stop Bradley, who had rushed in calling ‘Dad! Da-ad? We’re here!’
Then he screamed.
Riley, when he had recovered enough from the sight of his father’s bloated corpse to be able to move without throwing up, marched the boys upstairs to the room that his dad called ‘the world’s smallest cinema’, Martha the dog yapping hysterically at his heels all the way. He grabbed the nearest Disney DVD that he could find, shoved it into the home entertainment system and turned up the volume. It was
Fantasia
, to which both Jack and Bradley would, under normal circumstances, have objected strongly. But they sat down on the leather sofa in front of the huge screen and stared with blank, horrified eyes as pink elephants cavorted and whirled. The smell of dogshit permeated the entire house, but at least it masked the other, worse, smell.
‘Stay there,’ Riley ordered, in a voice muffled slightly by the cloth he had tied over his mouth and nose. ‘Keep the door closed. Don’t move until I come back for you. If you have to use the bathroom, use that one –’ He pointed at the small en-suite off the room. ‘Do NOT leave this room. I’ll be right back, I’ll go get you a drink.’
Riley bounded down the stairs on legs that felt like rubber. His heart was pounding so hard that it felt like it had been replaced with an enormous beach ball that had no room to move in his chest. He saw his dad’s feet sticking out from behind the kitchen island, and it reminded him of the other dead man, the one whose feet he’d run over. Without looking again at his father’s face – one glance had been enough to confirm that he had clearly been dead for some time – he grabbed his ankles and dragged him with great effort across the room, negotiating around two runny piles of dog shit,
into the utility room off the kitchen, where he left him next
to the washer-drier. He closed the door behind him, retched, and threw up again in the kitchen sink. After he’d cleaned
up the dog mess, rinsed his mouth and the sink, and scrubbed
his hands more thoroughly than he’d done for
years, an
investigation of the refrigerator revealed a
carton
of service
able-looking OJ, and a half-full bottle of
Chardonnay.
Riley unstoppered the wine and downed its contents in four huge gulps, Martha sticking so close to his ankles that he risked tripping over her at every step. He filled two glasses of OJ for the boys, a bowl of dry food for Martha, which she fell on ravenously, and returned upstairs.
‘OK, kids?’ he said, holding out the juice.
Jack took the glass, but didn’t drink any. Bradley was unable even to reach out for his. His small body was trembling uncontrollably, almost convulsing. Riley looked at him more closely and saw that his eyes were red and his nose streaming – he had attributed it to tears, but now, laying a hand on his forehead, realised that his brother’s temperature was sky-high, and he was almost catatonic.
‘Fuck!’ Riley said, in a panicked whimper, putting the OJ down on a shelf. ‘Oh Jesus, no, no, no. Oh fuck, Brad, man, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault …’
He turned and thumped the wall hard with his fist, leaning into it, his shoulders shaking. Jack just stared at him, and then at his friend, and then at the garish swirling colours of the cartoon.
Riley took a deep, sobbing breath and turned back. He picked Bradley’s limp body up in his arms. ‘Jack, pal, I’m sorry but I think Bradley’s got the flu. I’m gonna have to put him in another bedroom so you don’t catch it too.’ If you haven’t already, he thought but didn’t say. If we haven’t all caught it.
Jack didn’t speak.
‘OK, buddy? He’ll be down the hallway – but listen, you have to stay here. You can’t hang out with him any more, not till he’s … better. I can’t look after two sick kids.’
Jack nodded briefly.
‘Will he die?’ he said, so quietly that Riley barely heard him.
‘Nah, man, of course not,’ he said, negotiating Bradley through the doorway. ‘It’s only a spot of flu, don’t you worry.’
Jack stared down at the glass in his hand as though he’d never seen orange juice before.
Riley laid his brother on the bed in the spare room, wet a washcloth and placed it on his burning forehead. Bradley barely stirred. He looked so tiny on the huge king-sized bed, and Riley remembered when he was first born, the shock of his helplessness, and Riley’s own resentment that there was a rival for his parents’ affections.
‘You’re a royal pain in the ass, you know,’ he whispered, dabbing beads of sweat away from Bradley’s cheeks and neck. ‘Please don’t die. Please, Brad. Mom will kill me if you die. And, well, I guess I’d miss you …’
But Bradley couldn’t hear him. He had slipped quietly under a thick comforter of unconsciousness.
Kate sat next to the isolator, watching Paul’s chest rise and fall. He was deathly pale, but seemed to be sleeping peacefully. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass and felt her own eyes begin to drift closed. She felt so tired it was as though each individual blood cell inside her was aching. How long would it be before she knew whether it had worked? Whether she had saved Paul’s life … or killed him?