Infinity Cage (23 page)

‘Oh my God, Rashim … is that someone else up ahead of us? Look! Over there!’

Rashim narrowed his eyes as he looked up the winding road. Sure enough, standing at the top of it there
was
someone there. ‘It looks like he is carrying a gun.’

They continued heading uphill towards the figure. Walking slowly, cautiously. Closer, Rashim could see more detail. The figure was clad in a chunky bright orange anorak, a bright pink woolly hat and a matching scarf wrapped round the face. The lone figure had spotted them too, unslung the rifle and with some effort had attempted to shoulder the heavy weapon and aim it at them.

They stopped fifty yards short. Maddy spread her hands out in front of her, palms out and making clear she was not holding anything. ‘Hey! It’s OK! We’re not armed!’

The figure dropped its aim slightly. The gun looked a size too big for it.

‘
DAD!
’ They heard a high-pitched voice squeal. ‘
There’s strangeeeerrrrrs!
’

‘It’s a kid,’ uttered Maddy.

‘It is a girl,’ added Rashim.

They saw a bright flash of orange, movement among the
forest of uniform, lifeless grey tree trunks. Someone was sprinting this way, weaving through the trunks towards the road.

‘Dad!! Strangeeeeerrrrs!!’ the girl cried again.

The man finally staggered out on to the gravel road, a hunting rifle held ready to use in both his hands. His face was hidden by a scarf and the hood of his anorak was pulled up. Clouds of condensed breath puffed through the material.

‘It’s OK, Troy! I’m here now, hon. I’m here!’ He aimed his rifle at them. ‘None of you lot move!’

‘We’re not armed!’ said Maddy. ‘We don’t have any weapons on us.’

The man’s aim wandered from her to Rashim and Heywood. ‘Any of you people showing signs of infection?’

‘No.’

‘Skin lesions or discoloration? Vomiting? Nausea?’

‘No. Nothing.’

The man lowered his aim slightly. ‘Where’ve you come from?’

‘We came down from Denver,’ replied Maddy.

‘They got this thing up there too, haven’t they? All the broadcast digi-streams coming from there went down four days ago.’

‘I think it’s everywhere now.’

‘You’re the first survivors we’ve come across in a week,’ added Heywood.

The man’s rifle dipped a little more. ‘Same here.’ He turned to look at his girl. ‘What do you think, Troy?’

She craned her neck slightly; looking round Maddy and Rashim, she spotted Charley cowering half hidden behind one of Becks’s legs. ‘They got a kid with them, Dad.’

He kept his weapon raised, his eyes darting from one person
to another. Eventually the tip of his barrel dropped slightly. ‘I guess that swings things, huh?’

She shrugged in reply. Then, as an afterthought, she nodded. ‘They look friendly.’

The man lowered his gun all the way down, tugged away his scarf and pulled back his orange hood to reveal scruffy, fine sandy-coloured hair and a thick dark beard. ‘I’m Duncan. This is my daughter, Troy. It’s just the two of us up here … now.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Can I trust you people?’

‘I hope so.’ Maddy sighed. ‘It’d be a pretty sad thing for mankind if the last of us can’t even get along.’

Duncan Wassermann explained that he and his daughter were hunkered down in an old camping park just a mile up the road.

As they picked their way wearily up the winding gravel road, he was keen to tell them his story. He worked for the FSA’s intelligence agency located at a military base near Colorado Springs. He was employed as a threat analyst. Or, more to the point, he
had been
. Past tense. Everything was said with the past tense now.

He told them he’d known something like this was imminent. He told them how there’d been several months of encrypted radio and digi-net traffic going to and from several sources in North Korea. Even before the naval showdown over the oil reserves in the Pacific. The traffic went right across his desk and Duncan Wassermann had been quite certain the North Koreans were planning some bioweapon outrage. The Ruling Committee of generals had been carelessly using a transparent and blatant codename for their bioweapon: White Death.

‘Those ass-hat generals were debating how, where and when to deploy their wonderful doomsday bioweapon right up until
the last moment.’ He shook his head. ‘The idiots were flinging emails to each other from their survival bunkers.’

He’d told his superiors in the last few weeks that he’d been growing increasingly worried the escalating war with the Pacific Union was going to result in those maniacs releasing something horrific. ‘God knows how many times I flagged that traffic to the department head. But as far as I know they didn’t do a goddamn thing about it.’ He sighed. ‘Last communication I sent up to them was another coded phrase. It was some kind of countdown message. I reckon they had this damned virus already smuggled into dozens of places around the world and they just all smashed their glass vials at the same time. That’s how it spread so damned quickly.

‘Anyway, three weeks ago … I decided I wasn’t going to wait around to see if I was right. I grabbed the kids, the wife, and we came up here.’

They turned a corner in the road and up ahead was an entrance sign stretching across the road.
WELCOME TO BLUE VALLEY CAMP
. They passed beneath it. The campsite was set alongside a small man-made lake. Dozens of derelict family cabanas were arranged in circles round barbecue pits. Alongside the lake, the dirty fibreglass hulls of sailing dinghies rested on rusting trailers with flat perished tyres, and nylon halyards clattered noisily against aluminium masts with a rhythmic tap.

‘This place was still open when I was a kid back in the forties. We used to come up here for the summer break, back when the skies were mostly clear and still kind of an off-blue.

‘I brought with us a tow trailer loaded up with drinking water and dried food. And there was a store cabin up here with some decades-old but still perfectly safe canned food.’ He puffed his cheeks. ‘What with the hunting rifles, I figured we stood a pretty good chance of riding this whole thing out.’

Maddy looked at him. ‘And it looks like you did.’

‘No.’ He looked away. Clamped his lips shut. ‘No, not all of us.’

The Wassermann family had made the camp’s general store their survival bolthole. Bedrolls were laid out across the floor; a wood burner sat in the middle with a cooking frame erected over the top. Duncan poured a packet of dried soy-flake stew into a pot of boiling water suspended over the wood burner. He stirred it in vigorously.

‘We brought enough supplies here for six months, easy,’ he said. ‘You know, I was half expecting this camp to be overrun with people who also knew it was up here. But it was just us.’ He smiled. ‘Couldn’t believe our luck.’ He glanced at his daughter. She was sitting with Charley on the far side of the room; both girls were chatting quietly about something, flicking through glowing images on an old digi-tablet.

‘So … uh …’ Maddy wanted to ask him about the others. He’d said ‘kids’, plural. He’d mentioned his wife.

‘You want to know about the others? What happened?’ He stroked his chin, sat down. ‘It was just so damned quick. It came so suddenly.’ His voice warbled with emotion.

He scrunched his mouth up before continuing. ‘My wife, Caley, and our oldest daughter, Jade, were fishing over by the lake. It started to rain. I called out to them they best come in because the clouds looked that yellow light-acid colour? Not burn-rain but …’

Heywood nodded. ‘Rash rain.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, they had their coveralls on, and Jade and Caley wanted to just carry on fishing … so I left ’em to it.’ He sighed. He glanced again at his girl, then lowered his voice a notch. ‘I looked out on them a while later and they were both
face down on the ground. Soon as I saw them, I knew it was K-N. I’d heard on the Denver digi-stream there’d been outbreaks further south reported earlier in the morning.’ He shook his head. ‘Didn’t realize until then; didn’t even think the weather was helping to carry the virus. Didn’t realize until it was too late.’

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ said Maddy. ‘We were caught up on the road heading south. It started to rain … and people began to drop suddenly. It was horrible. Terrifying.’

‘I’m lucky me and Troy were inside at the time.’ He stirred the bubbling pot for a while, silent, his lips pressed together, his eyes dewy with moisture.

Then he looked at Maddy, ready to say more. ‘So … we didn’t have much of them left to bury,’ he said. ‘By the time the rain stopped, the sky was clear and we could go outside again … they were just some of that white powder.’ He shook his head. ‘White powder … and bones and clothes.’

He stared into the flickering flames of the wood burner. ‘Still hasn’t set in yet. Doesn’t quite seem real. I keep thinking I’m going to hear their hiking boots outside and the store bell’s going to ring and the door open … Caley and Jade will come wandering in.’

Maddy patted his shoulder. ‘If you hadn’t acted when you did … none of you would have survived. You saved your daughter.’

He stirred the bubbling pot absently. Nodded. ‘Yes. I did.’

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Enough about us. How about you people? What’s your story?’

Maddy explained how they’d been caught up on the highway heading south – the military roadblock, the infection breaking out as it began to rain and their fleeing for their lives into the trees, pursued by drones firebombing the foothills behind them.

‘Scorched-earth containment.’ He nodded. ‘Last I heard on
the news, other governments were trying the same thing … flame-bombing whole cities. But I guess it was too late by then.’ Duncan looked down at the bubbling pot and nodded. ‘Good enough to eat now, I think.’ He called the girls over and, with Maddy and Becks helping him, they served up the soy-flake stew into bright green plastic breakfast bowls and passed them round.

‘The virus died out very quickly, though,’ said Maddy. ‘Like somebody, somewhere, just flicked off a switch.’

‘A very cleverly designed virus,’ said Rashim. ‘Fast life cycle. Designed to wipe the slate clean, then wipe itself out.’

Duncan nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘That seems a very
precise
control,’ said Maddy. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you could control something like a virus that tightly?’

‘It is not particularly difficult, Maddy,’ replied Rashim. ‘RNA strands can be programmed as precisely as any form of computer code. I imagine some very simple biochemical switch turned it off. Perhaps the absence of a particular protein? I am sure there are any number of ways to build basic on–off functionality into a pathogen.’

Duncan looked at him. ‘You’re a bioweapons specialist?’

‘Genetics.’ Rashim shrugged. ‘It is one of my many fields of interest.’

‘OK … so you’re saying, if this thing just ran out of flora and fauna to absorb, then maybe, as you say, there was some chemical trigger telling it the job was done?’

Rashim nodded. ‘Which would then stimulate it to mutate into a counter-virus to infect itself.’ He dipped a spoon into the broth. ‘We just have to hope K-N has been completely wiped out by itself and it does not have any hardy “survivors” like us hiding away in some dark and nutritious corner.’

‘The virus was active round the lake for longer,’ said Duncan. ‘I noticed that. I presume there was more life in the water to slowly digest than there was on the dry ground. Or maybe water kept it alive for a while longer. The micro-organisms in the water? I don’t know.’

‘But it’s rained since,’ said Heywood. ‘That powder ain’t come back to life.’

Duncan nodded. ‘Where it’s turned to that white powder, it’s completely dead.’

‘Have you tried testing the lake water?’ asked Maddy.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘We haven’t gone anywhere near it. Nor are we going to for as long as we possibly can. We have enough sealed drinking water in here to keep us going for months.’

They ate in silence for a while before Troy finally spoke. ‘I wonder if the baddies who made this virus survived it too?’

‘Most likely,’ Heywood grunted. ‘It’s the ones that least deserve to live that live longest.’ He curled his lip. ‘They’ll emerge from their bunkers with their sparkly chests full of undeserved medals, their trophy wives and well-fed, pig-faced kids … and inherit the earth.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘Now how the hell can that be the right choice for the future of mankind? Huh?’

She challenged him with a pointed look and was about to try to shush him. But he nodded … and shut up before he said any more.

‘By the way, I’ll just put this out there … you’re more than welcome to stay here with me and Troy,’ Duncan said after a while. ‘There’s a storeroom full of old canned food; it’s all perfectly edible and that’s going to keep us going for months here. More than long enough to outlast any remaining pockets of the virus.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Wassermann … but we’re heading south-west.’

‘Where to?’

To meet with our maker
, she was tempted to say. Instead she just smiled. What a bizarre answer the truth would make. ‘I’ve got, uh … I got some family down south. I just need to find out if they made it through this. You know?’

‘No, I get that. You want to know. You
have
to know, right?’ He nodded slowly. ‘What about the rest of you?’

‘I am going with her,’ said Rashim.

‘You two a couple?’

He was about to say no, but Maddy answered for him. ‘Yes.’ Simpler that way.

Duncan turned to Heywood and Becks. ‘How about you guys?’

‘I go with Maddy,’ replied Becks. ‘Always.’

‘An’ I’m jus’ taggin’ along for the ride,’ said Heywood.

Duncan looked at Charley. ‘Are you sure you want to take your daughter along with you? It could be pretty –’

‘Uh … she’s not my daughter,’ said Maddy. ‘We found her on the road …’

‘She’s not my mom,’ said Charley. ‘They aren’t my family. They’re looking after me.’

Duncan nodded. ‘Ah, OK … I thought …’