I tried ringing every number I could remember, every number in my phone book and every number I could find written down. I found a few old magazines and called the numbers they gave for subscriptions, but no one answered. I've turned the phone off now, who knows how long the battery will last, but Jen knows where I am, and she knows I’m waiting.
09:40, 13
th
March.
What do I know about the infection? Not much. The outbreak started somewhere in New York and quickly spread. They can be killed. Technically They are already dead, certainly They are no longer human. They feel no pain and, as far as anyone has been able to tell, They can't communicate. They are not immortal, but They can withstand far greater trauma than any human. They only stop when their brains are destroyed.
Someone who has been infected can live anywhere from a few minutes up to a few hours before dying. After death They come back. How long it takes for someone to succumb to the infection doesn't seem to be linked in any way to the severity of their wound. I've seen footage of people missing limbs who've languished in pain for hours and those who've received the merest scratch turning almost instantly.
Jen sent me copies of the dossiers the Intelligence Services put together but they contained scant few facts and a lot of speculation. Most of what I know came from a fixer I only knew as Sholto via the online drop-box system we'd developed over the years and the phone Jen left with me.
Sholto and I had first crossed paths about seven years ago. I never knew his real name but after about the fourth or fifth message I got from him, when he was shaking me down over what was really nothing more than a misunderstanding, I asked what I should call him, he said Sholto. It was about a month after that when I finally got around to picking up the Sherlock Holmes anthology from the coffee table where it had lain since Jen had given it to me at Christmas. Inside was a book mark I didn't remember being there before, an Orwellian “Big Brother is Watching You.” When I glanced at the text of the page I tore the flat apart looking for bugs. I never found any, but that's not to say they weren't there.
The exact details of what I did or didn't do, whether or not it was in anyway unethical, because it wasn't illegal, not really... well the specifics aren't important now. Let's just say I owed him. He'd get in touch every once in a while, sometimes offering something, sometimes asking for something. Since what he usually asked for was worth a lot less to me than what he offered I stayed in touch. It was thanks to his information that Jen climbed the greasy pole, and though I told Jen that I had a source I never told her everything I learnt from him, for instance, the existence of the vaccine. I always suspected he was working for an acronym, either the CIA, NSA, MI6 or GCHQ or possibly all of them, but I never found out which.
He was male, he was from the US and he liked playing chess online at ungodly hours, that's all I really know about him. We were never friends. The only time he called on the phone he used a voice synthesiser and I’m old fashioned enough to think that true friends know what each other sound like. But there were times when I'd get these odd messages late at night which made me genuinely think that this guy, whoever and wherever he was, really didn’t have anyone else.
On the journey from the hospital back to the flat Jen had summarised what had happened whilst I'd been unconscious but the presence of the two uniformed men was clearly restricting what she could say. She left me with a box of food, the phone and a promise to return as soon as she could. I tried to sleep but found whenever I closed my eyes all I could see was that footage from the mall. After a couple of hours of that I gave up, struggled out of bed and turned on my laptop.
There were twenty messages from Sholto when I finally logged in. None of them were particularly friendly though I like to think he was relieved when I finally did reply. The first message read “I see you're in hospital. When you get out download these files. Keep them safe. It could be important.”
I’m not sure why I followed his instructions, but I did. Day after day I copied the files to my laptop, deleting all the documents, films and music I had previously stored there. When the broadband stopped working I used the government phone. By the time that stopped working, just after the evacuation started, I'd filled the laptop and the external hard drive on which I'd been storing our plans for the election campaign.
I tried to scan the files he sent through. There was the audio feed from air traffic control when Air Force Two went down, the calls between the fire crews when the South Korean oil refineries in Yeosu and Ulsan blew up, right down to the satellite pictures of the explosion when the oil tanker crashed into the docks in Baltimore. Some of it was in English, but a lot wasn't. Some was in Chinese, some in Russian others in languages I couldn't begin to even guess at. It's all there, out of the way, under the bed, and it makes for interesting reading, at least the parts I could understand.
Sholto's real genius lay in tracking the outbreak's spread. After I fed his data to Jen (alright, I claimed credit for it myself, but then so did Jen, that's how it goes in our line of work), I found that he had a more accurate handle on it than any of our analysts.
You've heard the expression, the shot that was heard around the world? That came at 18:15 GMT on the second day. The shot was fired by a Gendarme straight into the head of an infected tour guide on the Champs-Elysees. Paris, ever prone to rioting, was in flames by nightfall.
By the time I woke up in hospital, Britain was under quarantine.
No unauthorised flights were being allowed to land, no ferries or ships that hadn't already been secured at sea were allowed to dock and the Channel Tunnel was blown up.
Any planes without clearance, and there were lots of those, were shot down whilst they were still over water. Publicly the line was that most flights were being diverted and the shooting down of aircraft was a last resort. However no secret was being made of the destruction of air traffic, quite the opposite in fact. By the evening of the 22
nd
, on all the news stations and news sites that were still operating, footage was being broadcast of a Jumbo Jet being blown up over the Channel. Over the video the Beeb anchor read “A Boeing 747 out of Nairobi was targeted and destroyed by the RAF after an outbreak spread to the flight-deck. The pilot's last transmission was to request the plane be destroyed as he too had been infected. This is the second such incident today.” whilst the ticker at the bottom read “Breaking News: Another Threat Averted!”
It was such obvious propaganda, so archaic, so reminiscent of the news-reel footage from the Second World War, that I
wonder why people believed it. I suppose because they wanted to believe that the government was still in control and, after all, who cares about Johnny Foreigner, just as long as Tommy's all right.
The Tube was sealed, trains were cancelled, churches, synagogues and mosques were ordered not to open their doors. Pubs, restaurants, schools, universities, cinemas, theatres, airports and ferry terminals, anywhere that gave people a reason to congregate was firmly closed. The Army was deployed to guard the supermarkets and empty the petrol stations and people were asked, very politely at first, to go home and listen for announcements as to when they would reopen.
The smaller places, corner shops and mini-marts, they were allowed to open and sell what they liked at whatever price they'd accept, but they wouldn't be getting anything more to restock their shelves. The once great nation of shopkeepers found that there was nothing more to sell.
I was impressed by how quick our response was. No, that's not quite right, surprised is closer to the mark. I was surprised by how quickly the army was deployed, the Tunnel mined and the decision taken to destroy those billions of pounds worth of foreign aircraft and shipping. These things, I know, don't happen overnight. Jen said there'd been rumours of a terrorist bio-attack for months, aimed at cutting the UK off from the rest of the world. Plans had been put in place to mitigate its impact. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew.
Perhaps it was the presence of her armed guard, but I couldn’t get the truth out of her. I don't suppose it matters now.
The curfew ran from 6pm to 6am and
martial law
was imposed. Looting or breach of any of the emergency laws was punishable by an automatic twenty years of hard labour. Breaching the curfew was punishable by death. The few fledgling riots, protests and demonstrations that sprang up were brutally stamped down. People were shot on sight. That's a bloodless sentence to describe it, but I wasn't there. I didn’t see it. I didn’t experience the fear, loss, confusion and panic of those first few days.
It was repeated over and over that since those carrying the infection were not capable of understanding an instruction to stay inside, anyone outside must be infected. There is a cold, hard logic to that, one that tapped into the fears of the populace in a way that made it the only justification anyone needed.
The supermarkets, re-opened as Food Distribution Centres on the 22
nd
February, first to sell perishable goods, then other items as they became available.
Most people didn't keep much food in their houses. Just in time shopping, I guess they called it, and the Distribution Centres just couldn’t meet the demand. Some food got through, and some people got lucky, but most went hungry, whilst others fled. To try and counter that, they broadcast segments from a Temporary Processing Centre. A grand title for a warehouse with row upon row of camp beds, where those without one of the coveted travel permits were sent.
You were only allowed to leave if you had a permit, and the news made it clear that if you tried to leave you would have to show it. The footage was bizarre, a mix of public service announcement and reality TV schadenfreude as cars were pulled over and drivers questioned. These segments were never live, I think they'd been carefully selected to
find the most expensive cars and most obnoxious passengers. Perhaps it was staged.
The police would make a performance out of asking for the permit. Of course, the driver never had one. Then they would bundle the car's occupants into the back of a lorry, whilst the anchor would explain to the viewers that these curfew breakers were being driven off to a Temporary Processing Centre. In the back of the shot, whilst the anchor was talking, you could see the car being unceremoniously shoved into a ditch.
It was very theatrical. I doubt that in reality they pushed cars off the road, I mean, why would they, when they could be driven off to somewhere they'd cause less of an obstruction?
Maybe those people who left early had the right idea. They'd have been the first wave to be resettled in Ireland or Wales, working harder than they'd ever imagined they'd have to, but fed and more importantly, safe.
“There are currently no reported cases in United Kingdom, Ireland or the Channel Islands.” They broadcast that quite clearly at the beginning of each news bulletin. Then they'd list the number of boats sunk and planes shot down and which new government in exile we were playing host to along with what fraction of its military. I suppose this gave some legitimacy to our salvage operations, the polite euphemism for the piratical theft of ship borne cargo and the land based stores designated as food aid for the year's projected global famines. I think all that did was to remind people that the world on the other side of the water had fallen over the brink.
Then again I don’t know that many people were getting their news from the TV or radio, not in those first few days. Internet traffic spiked as the nation stayed glued to footage from web cams and shaky camera phones, uploaded often without any comment or description beyond a location and that was all you needed to plot the outbreak's spread.
Governments everywhere claimed to be still in control. The pictures told a different story as towns and communities blocked roads and walled themselves in, as armies deserted battalions at a time, as millions fled and were killed out of fear that they may carry the infection. Military crackdowns, summary executions and food riots followed. It was the same everywhere.
The news from China was odd. Not much was coming out and the little that was seemed like it had been written in advance. It was as if someone had decided that this was to be the week they'd announce that a Yangtze clean-up plan was under way and they were going to release that to the world regardless of whether there was any global press left who cared. All the western social media sites were blocked. On their own sites they'd blocked anything connected with the words zombies, undead, virus, infection and every other synonym you could imagine.
People were recording and uploading footage, but it never got published. I don't read Mandarin or Cantonese. I don't speak it either, but the footage Sholto pulled from there, was as bad as anywhere else. Adults and children, peasants and farmers, professionals and the elite, relative, friend, neighbour or stranger, infected or not, there's footage of people killing each other as the country was consumed by panic.
The outbreak didn’t start in China though the conspiracy theorists would like you to think so. They just fed off the silence, wanting to look anywhere but their own back garden. Or back yard. It started in New York. That outbreak in the Mall, along with the other outbreaks across the city and the state, all reported in that first hour, that was the second wave; all caused by people directly infected by Patient Zero.