Authors: Nathan Kuzack
It was more than David could bear. “Okay, little man. You can come, but only on one… two – no, three conditions, okay? First, you stay close to me and never leave my sight; second, you do exactly what I tell you, no matter what; and third… I’ll let you know what the third one is, okay? Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Shawn said, the timbre of triumph in his voice as he dried his eyes. David knew he’d just lost their first real battle of wills, but in the circumstances he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
* * *
Outside it was cold and blustery, conditions made to seem like a tranquil summer’s day by yesterday’s bedlam. As they walked to the main road, past the square of the erstwhile playground, Shawn studied it with a strange sort of longing, as if by intuition he knew it had once been a place for those of his kind, full of effortless joy and youthful laughter.
On Ruckholt Road, David cautioned the boy to stay close and remember what he’d agreed to, but he needn’t have bothered. Shawn stayed right by his side, instinctively acting as a second pair of eyes for his elder chaperone, whose hand he slipped his own into 100 yards along the road. This, too, he did without thinking, though the motional memory driving it was a half-forgotten one from another world.
David looked down at the boy and gave his hand a little squeeze. Don’t worry, he thought. You’ve got me to protect you now. And I would sooner die than let anything happen to you. My God! Such a thing was true. Absolutely true. He would relinquish his tenuous grip on immortality if it meant the boy could go on. And it was no begrudgingly noble attitude he felt obliged to adopt; it was entirely uncontrived, as natural a tendency as the inclination towards self-preservation – a deep-seated altruism he hadn’t known he possessed. The realisation of it swept over him like the warmth of sunlight emerging from behind drifting clouds, gifting him with the breathless feeling you got when making an important discovery. He, who had no claim upon the boy, who was unrelated to him under any normal definition of the word, but who, thanks to the parallactic shift in perspective effected by mass death, was as good as being his closest relative, would die defending him. His son. His acybernetic son, at that. The outcasts of the old world were the rulers of the new. Only this wasn’t a land fit for kings any more, and they didn’t fit in here any more than they had done before.
At the junction where it was – the atrocity – he crossed over the road and transferred his charge to his other hand, shielding him from it. Not that the boy probably hadn’t seen just as bad, or worse – could there be much worse? – and there was certainly no shielding him from the smell.
“Where did it come from?” Shawn asked as they walked. “The sickness, I mean.”
It was a good question. It was perhaps
the
question. Yet every time he thought about it he always arrived at the same conclusion: what did it matter? The damage had been done.
“I don’t know,” said David laconically.
It was the only answer he could give the boy. He wanted to say it was a dreadful but unavoidable part of life, a natural process such as the way mindless microbes gave rise to biological disease, but the words would have rung hollow, even to a child’s ears.
“Has it ever happened before?” the boy asked.
“Well, there’ve been plenty of sicknesses before, but never anything like this, no.”
It was true and it was incredible. The devastating gamut of a terrible plague had been concertinaed down beyond all imagining, unfolding as if time had slipped into fast forward, the whole thing over and done with in less than a day. There had been no race to identify the bug responsible as with previous epidemics. No struggle to locate its point of origin. No burning of the bodies to try and limit its spread (the bodies were too busy fighting each other over mouthfuls of cold flesh). No hope of a vaccine or a cure. The rapidity of the disaster reaffirmed his belief that the virus was man-made.
Cy-vis tended to sort themselves into two categories: the “for gain” and the “for glory”. The latter were usually brainchildren of the disillusioned and the bored: those nameless, faceless exiles from reality who’d been hidden away all over the globe, dotted here and there from the deepest subterranean basement to the tallest high-rise. These people had frittered away their overabundance of time on brainware-enabled erotica, alter egos whose virtual lives were as thrilling as their real ones were mundane, and, occasionally, fantasies of virus-borne subversion; from the criminal elements excluded from mainstream society and the “messers with people’s heads”, who did it purely for personal amusement, to the offspring of the over-privileged bourgeoisie, striving for fame and kudos in a world where such things were ever more difficult to attain. Typically they were individuals who, for one reason or another, had gross misconceptions about the ease with which they’d be caught, or the severity with which they’d be punished – or sometimes both. It was easy to pin down the who – roughly – but the how and the why were different matters altogether.
Nobody had foreseen a cy-vi designed for such utterly merciless destruction, and, if they had, they certainly hadn’t prepared for one with the means to carry it out. It had been a virus with a purpose: primarily, death. And death itself wasn’t what it used to be. For the greater part of human history it had been the great leveller, ubiquitous and inevitable, the unconquerable ender of all life stories. But in the pre-virus world of computer-controlled biological systems backed up by modern medicine, a world of the perpetually young and healthy, dying was passé. It wasn’t an accepted part of life any more, even if the acceptance had only come via symbolic defence mechanisms such as those described in
The Denial of Death
. Instead, death was an evanescent phantom haunting only the most unfortunate of lives: the misadventurers and the war dead, the murder victims and the irrevocably suicidal. For most people it was abnormal, unnecessary, irrelevant, and, if it did happen, truly tragic.
For the virus’s creators to have caused so many tragedies in one go… He found it difficult to believe that anyone could have intended it to happen the way it had. He’d held a fairly jaded view of society before the calamity, but he’d never come close to wishing such wanton violence on the world. What possible reason, however prompted by madness or wrath or disconnection from reality, could ever have been motivation enough? Motivation for genius at that, since anything capable of defeating all the protections in place – all the firewalls and the antiviral measures and the heuristic algorithms – had to have been touched by the hand of genius. How the hell had they done it? Had genius and madness, the uncomfortable bedfellows they so often were, combined to bring about the ultimate act of genocide – or the ultimate act of genocide and suicide combined? For it not to have been suicide, the creators of the virus must have somehow made themselves immune to their own invention, but had they really been intent upon living in a world such as this, effectively as alone and endangered as he and the boy were?
Then there was the whole question of zombification. Why turn half of the world’s population into zombies? There was no reason he could think of that didn’t involve the praxis of sheer evil.
Of course, it was possible that human beings hadn’t created the virus directly, that instead it had been invented by some artificial intelligence, but he thought the chances of it remote. There were strict controls over such things – laws dictated by
TITANN, The International Treaty on Artificial Neural Networks
– to say nothing of inherent limitations. Human intelligence had evolved over millions of years, developing the ability to theorise beyond the knowable, to believe in things for which there was no tangible proof. God. Love. The soul. Truly self-aware AIs were too perfect, too bound by logic, too tormented by the pointlessness of their own existence. They were prone to madness and suicide, and were notoriously difficult to sustain and control, making viable AIs a long way off. Besides, who would have been crazy enough to unleash an intelligence so intent upon wiping out its creator’s entire race?
There were many unanswered questions; the only thing David was certain of was the fact that these questions would remain unanswered.
“Where are we going?” the boy asked.
“Just a little place I know.”
On Church Road they turned right into a small arcade.
“That’s it,” said David, pointing. “Zena’s.”
Inside the shop they rooted through the racks of clothes. David stuffed anything that looked like it might fit into his holdall, against the protestations of the boy, who denounced some of the items for being “too girly”.
“I won’t wear them,” he said matter-of-factly.
David gave a wry smile, feeling strangely reassured by the boy’s objections. Some things really didn’t change, he thought.
“No arguments,” he said. “That’s the third condition, okay?”
“Okay,” the boy conceded, his tone begrudging, reminding David of himself 90 years ago. “When are we going to my old place?”
“When it rains next.”
“Okay.”
On the way back to the flat, the boy grabbed hold of his hand again and David looked down at him and winked.
When he saw where the boy had been holed up for the past seven months his heart sank. A gloomy staircase surrounded by rusty railings led down to the front door of the place: a basement flat, the look of which gave David the ludicrous impression it was furious with the house above for being there, for squashing it down and keeping it interred. Even upon cursory inspection he could tell it was hopelessly indefensible, despite its bunker-like appearance. “Hole” would probably turn out to be a fitting title for it – either that or tomb-in-waiting. That the boy was still alive became more of a wonder as the days went by.
There was something undeniably childish about the way the boy had gone to ground, like a rabbit burrowing beneath the terror of the hawks’ talons, while he had watched it all unfold from three storeys up. But, then again, he’d simply remained where he’d always been, whereas the boy had made it clear that staying at his parents’ house hadn’t been an option. He suspected the boy had suffered the same horror as himself: being attacked by his own zombified mother, but every time the boy was questioned about it he clammed up, and David was unwilling to press him.
The street the flat was on – Tennyson Road, well outside of his previous search parameters – was strewn with litter being picked over by a couple of ragged-looking Patterdale terriers. The dogs watched them from a distance through sheets of rain, their movements jerky with apprehension; such animals had learned to give human beings, their former keepers, as wide a berth as possible. There were no trees here, nor greenery of any kind. There was an imposingly bad feel about the place. Unlike most parts of London, this area had never been what you could call sought-after; unless you counted the time the Olympics had visited long ago, in a time when the Games had been a challenge to a person’s physical capabilities rather than the prowess of their brainware programmers, the Olympic Park a short walk away only a distant reminder of its origins. Shawn said he’d lived with his parents nearby, making him think they hadn’t been a wealthy family, but the most he could get out of him when it came to their professions was that his father had been a “manager” and his mother a “leader”.
The boy bounded down the steps. Whatever misgivings David had about the place, the basement flat had been the boy’s home, had sheltered him through his darkest hours, making him as comfortable here as he was in his third-floor flat. There was an unmistakable note of enthusiasm in the boy’s demeanour, as if he couldn’t wait to share some secret with him, as he turned and said, “Come on – it’s down here.”
Inside it was, more or less, the way he’d imagined it would be from the outside. The place was cramped and musty-smelling, its uneven mixture of natural and artificial light far from easy on the senses. Litter from the poor diet of foraged food the boy had been subsisting on almost filled one room, while another contained the items they’d come here for, which were precisely the kind of things he’d anticipated too: toys, toys and more toys, and a couple of items he suspected were improvised weapons. Toy guns and home-made cudgels lay side by side, forming a disquieting juxtaposition of the make-believe and the real: the new paradigm of must-have accessories for an uninfected child of Earth. There were no photographs, no books, no disks; the kid had clearly gotten no chance to take anything from his real home. David couldn’t help feeling a numb kind of resentment towards the objects; ever since he’d stepped inside the flat he’d felt cornered, making him edgy and eager to leave. We’re risking our lives for this crap, he thought. Not that he blamed the boy. Why shouldn’t he have these things? God knew he’d lost everything else.
This thought was reaffirmed when the boy proudly held up a green plastic dinosaur and said, “Look: this is Jerry. I talked to him when I had no one else. He told me things, told me everything would be all right.”
“That’s great,” said David. “Hurry up now; we can’t stay long.”
“He said you’d come along one day … and he was right.”
“Yes, he was.”
David looked around the place as Shawn cherry-picked items for the holdall. He pictured the boy all alone down here for months on end, so close to death at all times, the only thing to talk to a plastic representation of a species that was almost on a par with mankind when it came to sudden extinctions. It was strange to envision the different perspectives from which they had regarded the period of post-apocalypse, from below ground and above, the boy in his warren and he on his battlement.
When Shawn had finished with the holdall, David said, “Okay, now show me where your clothes are.”
The tiny master bedroom had an en suite bathroom and smelt worse than the rest of the flat. Being so young, Shawn had yet to learn the basics of housekeeping such as washing clothes and cleaning a toilet. They quickly piled his motley collection of dirty clothes into bags. There wasn’t that much to take, all of it scavenged from one place or another, and the majority of it appearing to be, by David’s estimation, either too big or too small.