World War Moo (3 page)

“Come with me if you want to live,” she said.

Ruan took the hand. She hadn't touched another human being for what felt like an eternity—not counting violent encounters—and the contact sent delicious signals scampering along her nerve endings. The woman must have felt something similar, for she gasped and squeezed so tightly that Ruan's bones clacked together.

“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” the scarred stranger said, emphasizing each word.

The report of splintering wood echoed through the forest, and the chorus of animal and human voices grew louder still. Ruan snapped back to herself. “That's very sweet, and I'm happy, too, but can we get the hell out of here?”

The woman opened her eyes and yanked Ruan to her feet. They ran through the woods together, leaving behind the sounds of pursuit.

 

3

Lesley McBrien waited at a tiny table in Nancy Whiskey Pub, where laughter and the click of pucks from the shuffleboard table added random and incongruously cheerful percussion to the somber music of Arcade Fire drifting out from the stereo—rather like an uninvited and enthusiastic busker playing the bongos at a funeral. The dissonance did nothing to ease her frazzled nerves. In front of her sat a Jameson's and lemonade, her second in the twenty minutes she'd been here. She fought to stop her regular sips from turning into gulps as she kept glancing toward the front door.

She'd arrived early to the bar on the corner of Lispenard, Sixth Avenue, and West Broadway to give it a quick once-over. Her contact had chosen well. A close-packed affair with a long wooden counter behind which twinkling fairy lights wove through row upon row of liquor bottles, the bar wasn't the kind of high-end place frequented by New York's contingent of highly paid UN twats. It was instead full of a mainly young, casually dressed crowd swigging on beer, chatting, and casting occasional glances at the muted television screens overhead.

It was refreshing to be away from the UN staff, diplomats, and hangers-on, most of whom were as useful as a fart in a spacesuit, a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest, or any of the other overused similes the pathologically cynical journalist crowd working the UN beat bandied around. They did nothing but form working groups, a misnomer if ever she'd heard one; craft resolutions full of loopholes so large a grinning dictator could, and often did, merrily lead a convoy of tanks through them on his way to massacre his own people; and hold meetings, meetings about meetings, and meetings about meetings about meetings. It could take two years to decide whether to deploy lemon- or orange-scented urinal blocks in the delegates' lavatory, never mind whether to deploy an intervention force.

Lesley was too recognizable to take the chance of one of these numpties seeing her chatting with the man she awaited. She was the leading pundit on the infection: her face was plastered over the news, and her book about her flight from Britain as the virus turned animals into killing machines had sold a hundred thousand copies in the first week. The advance had swollen her bank account to bursting with money she couldn't bring herself to touch. Her dream of eclipsing her famous war correspondent father had come true, much to his chagrin: on the rare occasion they spoke he dropped snide comments about how her efforts didn't compare to his former exploits. He had no idea how right he was. As if to demonstrate her ubiquity, one of the screens flipped to a promo for the interview with Jay Leno she'd recorded the previous evening. Her fingers tightened round the glass, which she wanted to hurl at the screen. Instead, she put her head down and let her hair hide her face.

The book portrayed her as a sparky journalist who—with grit, determination, and a firmly starched upper lip—had uncovered a moronic secret government weapons program aimed at decimating enemy nations' food chains. In reality, she'd chanced on the story and made a big hairy dog's cock of the ensuing investigation. Only blind luck allowed her to escape with the world's biggest scoop. The sole thing she'd done right was to shoot dead the pursuing Alastair Brown, the government security operative who'd been the first recorded case of the virus crossing to humans and a glistening purple bell end to boot. In the first draft of her book, she'd stuck closer to the truth, only glossing over her more idiotic moments—such as allowing herself to be lured to an out-of-the-way location, on a flimsy pretext any decent journalist would have seen through, and kidnapped. Her editor, unimpressed by the fecklessness of the “lead character,” had given the facts the kind of brutal massaging normally only dealt out by a heavyset, moustachioed woman in an East European bathhouse. Once the fiction of Woodward in high heels had been created, Lesley couldn't back out of it.

Worst of all, her success had been bought with death. For the hundredth time she ticked off the victims: Gregory Strong and Constance Jones, the scientists who gave her the information about the viral program—dead because she hadn't got the story out in time; Fanny Peters—dead because she had to go on a food run when Lesley turned up at her house with extra mouths to feed; James Peters, David Alexander, and his twin sons—killed by Brown because they were in her company; Bernard the helicopter pilot—dead in a crash because they'd hijacked his aircraft. She tried to pay homage to these people by talking about them in interviews, but the host always turned the subject back to her. They wanted to celebrate the heroic tale of a survivor, not dwell on the grim topic of the dead.

The kiss of death had even followed her to New York. She'd witnessed—probably caused—two fatal car crashes, a pedestrian squashed by falling scaffolding, and a woman struck dead by lightning. Animals were not immune either. She and fellow escapee Terry Borders had bought three rounds of goldfish as they tried to build a cozy domestic life. Each of them had quickly floated belly-up in the murky water for no discernible reason other than Lesley's malicious proximity. She was a jinx to every living thing in her vicinity, the rose that grew strong and bright as its roots burrowed into the fertile depths of a mass grave.

It had gotten so bad that she suffered a recurring nightmare in which she stood alone in the middle of a desolate landscape. Off in the distance, the crumbling buildings of a ruined city clawed at a sky blackened by storm clouds. As she stepped across the desiccated soil, her foot crunched on something. This was the only variable in the dream: sometimes the animal she'd stepped on was a cockroach, sometimes a mouse, once an unbearably cute chinchilla. Always, though, as the creature expired she was seized with the certainty she'd killed the last living being on Earth apart from her. She would wake with a scream dying in her throat. Terry assumed she was having nightmares about being back in Britain; she didn't disabuse him of this notion. He would try and convince her it was a delusion, like the smell of death he'd thought clung to his skin when he worked in the abattoir. Unlike Terry, she had proof of her curse: the corpses that trailed in her wake.

Her phone rang, interrupting her self-flagellation, and she looked at the caller ID. Her finger hovered for several seconds before she accepted the call.

“Hi, Terry,” she said.

“Hello. Just wondering when you're coming home. I've made vegetable risotto.”

“Sorry. I meant to tell you I was going to be out late.”

There was a long silence. “Right. Working again. I can tell that from the music.”

“I'm meeting someone about a tip,” Lesley said, her voice tight.

“There's always something, right?”

“You know why I have to work so hard.”

“I suppose I do. It would just have been nice to have some company.”

Terry never said anything direct about how their escape had been presented. She wished he would, wished somebody would confront her about the damage she'd done so she could take her punishment now rather than store it up for the day of reckoning that must be coming. Instead he only referred to it obliquely, in snide little comments like, “I suppose I do.” She knew he thought her selfish, pouring everything into her career to become a star. He didn't believe her when she told him she didn't want to be so lucky, that she only wanted to deserve whatever success came her way without having to clamber up a pile of bodies.

“It's not my fault you don't have enough to do,” she said.

A heavy sigh flooded the speakers. “I just meant it would be good to see you, specifically.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

She thumped the phone down, her mouth dry, and tried to focus on the night's business. Ever since she'd been posted to New York, the Security Council had been meeting regularly behind closed doors to discuss the British crisis. She knew from sources that they'd talked about using nukes—a proposal vetoed by the Brits, who wouldn't have a country to go back to, and the French, who would have to deal with the fallout. Recently, though, there'd been a sense of growing momentum: whispers in the corridors of power and tougher language in off-the-record briefings that pointed toward the decisive military action many—including North Korea and Iran, who were delighted that a new pariah state had displaced them from the top of the international hate list—had been calling for. Tonight, she hoped to find out exactly what was afoot.

Jack Alford was a member of the delegation from the British government in exile, which had kept its role as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council despite being responsible for the virus in the first place and not having a country to govern—two pretty fucking compelling reasons for their being kicked off, in Lesley's view. She knew he was uncomfortable with the use of force, so when he'd slipped her a note asking to meet, she suspected he was going to tell her a lot of things he shouldn't.

The door swung open and in walked Jack—a tall and rangy man in his early forties, with short black hair verging on curly, a cute face, and an easy way that meant he was often buttonholed by female journalists looking to pump him for information, as well as just pump him. After a quick detour to the bar, he picked his way through the crowd and air-kissed Lesley. The soft rub of his cheek sent a shiver down her spine. She pulled away abruptly, picturing Terry sitting alone at home and staring resentfully at her untouched plate.

Every meeting began with a game in which they created farcical scenarios that the pallid UN chief would condemn, strongly condemn, or ignore. Lesley plowed right in. “I've got a good one for you tonight. Germany invades Poland again.”

“The Germans are the only ones keeping the European economy afloat, so they can invade whomever they bloody well like,” Jack said. “Ignore or encourage.”

Lesley smiled, but Jack kept his face straight. Around his eyes were circles so dark it made him look like he was wearing mascara.

“My turn,” he said. “Armed forces wipe out millions of people deemed subhuman and a threat to humanity.”

That's a bit grim
, Lesley thought, but still tried to answer in a jokey tone. “Are you talking about gingers? Ignore. Ginger hair is bogging. There was a story last year about a sperm bank refusing to take donations from gingers. If I ever want a kid, that's where I'll go.”

Jack's lips stayed tight. “Actually, I'm talking about something closer to home.”

Lesley raised a quizzical eyebrow, realizing he meant business.

“You can't use my name,” he said.

“A senior official close to the negotiations okay?”

He nodded.

“Let's start with the cure,” he said. “There isn't going to be one any time soon. They might be close to a treatment to control the symptoms, but it would be a series of shots. And how would they administer them? You can't get near the infected, and you can't trust them to take it themselves. Even if they did, the costs would be astronomical and the virus could still be passed on.”

The shit journalist Lesley had been would have interrupted to say she knew all that. Her months in New York striving to deserve her ill-gotten reputation had taught her you never stopped somebody talking even if they were covering old ground; it gave the speaker the ego boost of feeling they were imparting crucial information, thus loosening the tongue, and some nugget you didn't know could crop up. Applying this rule, she'd already gleaned off-the-record information on the virus from the team working on a cure. They were calling it The Bloody Mary, as it had proven to be a cocktail of viruses rammed together willy-nilly. Some of the viral components—the sneezing and the sores—served the same purpose as a booster rocket putting a space shuttle into orbit, allowing the virus to spread more quickly in the early stages. After a while they sloughed off, dealt with by the immune system, to leave the core virus responsible for the urge to attack. That was the real bugger. Like most viruses, it hid itself inside cells. The sneaky part came when it stopped hijacked cells from sending out specialized molecules telling the immune system they'd been compromised. You couldn't fight what you couldn't see.

“This is why we are where we are,” Jack said. “They can't keep Britain ring-fenced forever. The cost of the operation is crippling.”

Lesley nodded in agreement. Estimates put the outlay close to one trillion dollars and rising, straining a global economy still battling the hangover of recession. It wasn't just the military: humanitarian aid was draining the coffers at an alarming rate. Never mind aid deliveries to Britain, there were over fifteen million expats dependent on handouts—middle-class Britons who were either on holiday abroad during the peak August season when the virus broke out or had fled the country in the expectation of spending a few weeks drinking wine and visiting art galleries while the army sorted out the animals. When humans got infected and the U.K. banks collapsed along with the rest of the country, they became a dishevelled and hungry horde with no money and nowhere to go. The largest camp, known as Little Britain, had been set up outside Calais, sprawling across miles of formerly beautiful countryside. At least five million people lived there in makeshift shelters, littering the fields and polluting the rivers. There had already been several outbreaks of cholera. France, fearful that the foreign masses might also spread the more pernicious disease of the English language and culture, was desperate to send them back home—which meant the current occupants of Britain needed to be cleared out in a tidy fashion.