Lost Girl (17 page)

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘That’s who we need right around now. His face wouldn’t be unwelcome.’

‘How far has it spread?’

‘Springing up in Central Europe. The Continent. Maybe the south-east now too. First cases. Mostly just rumours, but something’s building. I think we all know that, and if this bug is
a dead end, there’ll be another soon after, something big, far bigger than what’s already been doing the rounds the last twenty years, like the bug that took my boy. So I often have to
wonder will anything matter for much longer, these bits and pieces that some of us still hang on to, like the law, rights. Maybe it’s all simpler than we think. Maybe it’s already
happened, that final change inside us. The gloves are off. They are in Africa, South America, Asia, southern Europe, if we’re going to be honest. We’ve seen it on the news. And it
doesn’t look so unusual now, does it, no matter how bad it gets? People in those places are not thinking like we are any more, because in those places people have it far, far worse than us. I
do wonder how long we can give each other assurances.’

‘Me too.’

They sat in silence for a long time and finished the rum.

The police officer eventually stood up. ‘Let’s get your hand sorted. I don’t need to tell you that our conversation is totally off the record.’

‘Of course. What about your car? They saw it.’

‘Stolen.’

‘Your face?’

‘I was in Exmouth all day. I’m still there right now.’

‘But back there, what will be said?’

The officer pursed his lips. ‘Initially, another head case with a shooter, business as usual. You picked the right place to do it in, unless you’ve started a riot we don’t know
about while we’re sitting here chewing the fat. A dead teenager can still kick it off. Depends on the parents, if there are any. Then there’ll be harder questions asked, autopsy,
ballistics, descriptions. Something worse is bound to crop up meantime and cause delays to our lot. Fingers crossed, eh? But Rory was a King, so they’ll pursue their own inquiries.
They’ll be after you now.’

They walked back to the car. The officer paused before he climbed in. ‘You know she won’t look the same. Not like you remembered. If you ever become one of the luckiest men on this
planet, just remember, she’ll be six.’

‘I’d know her.’

After the hospital, his sedation and exhaustion were embraced by the unrelieved heat of the hotel room. Morphine pills for his stitched and bloated hand, antibiotics, rum,
fatigue, sleep deprivation, and a fever quickly provided a surreal medium for his notions to swim through.

Slippery with sweat, and falling in and out of sleep for two days and nights that became indistinguishable, the father talked to the figures of the air. Maybe his mind finally found the
maelstrom it had been crawling towards for years: a blur of nonsensical visions, infuriating repetitions of memory, and the cruel torments that his dreams inevitably turned into, bedfellows of a
madness he’d foreseen the very day his daughter vanished.

The subjects of his second and third moves, Bindy Burridge and Tony Crab, appeared in opposing corners of his hotel room and whispered to each other. And in this delirium, Bindy was all bone
from the waist down.
Look at what they’ve done to me
. Tony Crab had no eyes.

Neither of the men fought back when the father had appeared in their tiny rooms, in what had once been a library and a clothes shop, respectively. Bindy, the mole creature, with the small,
white, plump hands, had wept and pleaded for mercy when the father took away his glasses to spray his face. Tony had just started to shake, pale with terror, and wept. They had told him nothing of
use and swore they knew nothing about his daughter. The devices they owned they handed over without resistance, along with their codes. Both men had suffered terribly in prison. Bindy had only
partial use of one arm and wore a scarf to hide the scars around his throat. Once they were released their records were leaked by the local police forces and entire streets had turned upon each of
them. They’d been relocated hundreds of miles from home when the father had caught up with them. Sex offenders in the slums were often doused with petrol and burned alive, and for doing far
less than interfering with children.

His own bitterness, his fear and rage, populated the room, appearing in different forms in the distance, before reappearing close to his eyes when he was no longer sure if they were open or
shut. At one point, in one of the many wet hours of gibbering and writhing, or sitting up to speak to those faces beside his bed, the father came awake only to find himself as a doll in a tiny,
cold bed. The walls of the room had reared up like cliffs. He’d closed his eyes and gulped water from a bottle. The liquid was warm and tasted of plastic.

When he fell asleep again, fragments of his conversation with Malcolm Andrews, the first offender he’d ever visited, played on a loop accompanied by the distant cacophony of children in a
playground. And then he dreamed of bones. Mountains of bones in rags, withered shanks, parchment-skin faces yawning silently, dusty and still, one piled upon the other, tier after tier, rising into
the dying light.

His wife was in the bathroom too, crying, always crying.

Rory’s throat was shot out again and again, his ruptured cheek flapping like rubber. Nige Bannerman’s punctured skull littered the darkness wetly. Bowles was a whale harpooned on a
patio, leaking black.

A vast crowd of thin, naked people, their flesh dark, were then running through his room in fright. They kept coming and coming, kicking up vast clouds of salty dust. Something the size of a
hill rose in the near distance and stared down. A fire in the surrounding trees changed direction again, and the father climbed out of his bed and ran amongst the thin people.

His daughter had been knocked to the ground up ahead. She wailed, but he couldn’t reach her, was shoved to the side, pushed about before he could regain his balance and turn towards the
sound of her cries. When she fell silent, he woke up.

Eventually, the father lay face down on the bed to stem the sight of the people that came and went, came and went, through the room. The past, the present, and nonsense, all coming together in
the same space. But sleep would only return him to their old home in Shiphay, where he was running through the front garden, leaping from one tiered level to another, before finding himself back
near the patio doors. He couldn’t see his daughter but could hear her saying, ‘What’s that?’

The black car pulled away, over and over again, and the father ran up the road through air as thick as treacle. The sunlight was blinding, the street made from white stone, its glare forcing him
to squint. In the distance the car turned out of the street, and the father’s feet slid down the hill, back to the front gate of their house. Down there the world was grey and damp. His wife
was on the lawn, sobbing, screened from him by the trees. The father saw that the street had become a cemetery filled with small headstones, tiny angels and sprays of brightly coloured flowers. His
daughter spoke to him from out of the ground and said she was with friends and couldn’t come back, and he sat up with an anguished cry that must have been heard in the neighbouring rooms of
the hotel.

Finally, when sleep’s insistent torments released him, he could taste the sea’s brine in his throat. His eyes were swollen and the bed was sodden.

Once the fever had broken, and he was able to stand easily, the father took a shower and spent a day propped up in bed watching the news, or just staring at the curtains.

His ribs and hip bones were visible through the skin of his body. It had been a long time since he’d taken a hard look at himself in the mirror, but his weight loss still came as a
surprise. All of his clothes in the room were soiled.

He continued with the antibiotics, but stopped taking the morphine pills to avoid dreaming, and ate small meals from the hotel vending machine. The two days he’d waited in A&E to see a
nurse, and picked up an infection, felt like a lifetime ago. The police officer had driven him to a hospital in Dartmouth where the queues were smaller, but the heat was everywhere and so were its
pallid victims. But while he was recuperating, at least the temperature outside dropped to thirty-three degrees.

In Spain, France and Portugal the fires were being contained in smaller areas too, but the new pandemics in Asia and North Africa were both being linked to the European ports and some UK
hospitals. Like the ongoing famines in Africa and China, it was unusual for pandemics to supplant the relentless coverage of the fires, or the hurricanes and floods, wherever they were occurring,
unless the bugs were getting out of control. The father’s thoughts turned to what the police officer had told him beside the wheat field.

There had been at least a dozen pandemics the father could vaguely remember now, and all in the last three decades. Plague, legionnaires’ disease, E. coli of the blood, hantaviruses and
various strains of influenza had killed millions, but labs somewhere had always investigated recognizable DNA and RNA and eventually detected the antibodies and antigens necessary for vaccines.

Viruses flourished repeatedly, but briefly; many inexplicably died away, evolutionary dead ends, or they hit a volley of the latest antibiotics in the northern hemisphere. They always became
footnotes to the bigger deals when continents were on fire, water filled city streets, mudslides took townships down slopes, or cities were blurred by hurricanes. But the news stations were
claiming the new pathogen from Asia was SARS CoV, and that alone was enough to make Centre for Disease Control sweat buckets, and the story was persisting. Never good signs.

The new Asian SARS bug had been listed as a worldwide health threat a few weeks before. He hadn’t known that. He did remember a report about a plane in China, sometime in the spring,
before the onset of the hottest summer that Europe had ever endured. But that plane was now being cited as key in the latest pandemic. And China Airlines Flight 211 had carried three hundred
people, from Zhejiang to Beijing, fifteen of whom were already running high temperatures and barking chestily at take-off. By the time the plane touched down, hours later, two hundred and ten other
passengers had been infected. Within weeks, three thousand healthcare workers, their patients, and the patients’ visitors had been infected and died from the same virus across eighty of
Beijing’s hospitals. By that time, the WHO in Geneva became aware that the severe, acute respiratory syndrome had already spread to Hong Kong and nine other Chinese provinces. Familiar
statements of alarm had been issued, but he’d lost sight of it in other news because of the fires and what India and Pakistan were lumbering towards over water, again. But here were the
latest reports of thousands of new cases of SARS in Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, the east of India, and South Korea. Decades of pollution, freshwater shortages, chronic
overpopulation and a food crisis in half of its territories, civil strife, the gradual but certain economic collapse, the continuing desertification of one half of its land, with one tenth of its
entire population estimated as still being homeless after the floods of 2038: there was always tragedy in China. But amidst the usual flux and chaos, there were claims that the new bug’s
infectiousness, in combination with its lethality, had rarely been seen before. It was like an extreme form of pneumonia, with flu-like symptoms: blinding headaches, high temperatures and chills,
crippling muscular aches, a persistent coughing of bloody phlegm leading to the degradation of the lungs.

The Canadians were now reporting its appearance too, as were the Americans, the Japanese, and the Russians after weeks of denial, and nearly every refugee camp in and around China and India had
it too. In Europe, however, it had not seemed to pass beyond a few thousand people, and mostly in the central countries.

The Guangzhou Institute was now calling it the eleventh SARS coronavirus, but the first that boasted pre-symptomatic infection: by the time the affected felt unwell they had been highly
infectious for days – they had gone to school and work, had shopped in crowded markets, helped fill public transport to capacity, breathed on international flights, queued for clean water,
and slept in crowded refugee camps. Just scanning the reports made the father feel even weaker than the heat, the infection in his hand, and the drugs already had.

The crisis is ongoing
.

He stayed in Devon for another week, but neither Scarlett nor the police detective called him.

His hand became an ugly blue and purple colour but was healing and no longer so swollen. His shoulder ached and remained stiff, but the worst of that injury had passed. More than anything, he
was lucky to be alive.

When he tried to contact all of the recent accounts that Scarlett Johansson had used, he found them disconnected, and the father suspected he would never hear from her again. Against her advice,
even her orders, he had gone to The Commodore and he had killed four men. Nothing about that morning’s carnage had appeared on the local news service.

If Rory was a King they’ll prefer to pursue their own inquiries . .
.

They blind snitches with toothbrush handles . .
.

Out here, they seal the leaks with machetes . .
.

They’ll smash your vertebrae with a hammer. You’ll wish they’d cut your head off . .
.

The hotel was costing him too much money and he knew he’d be incapable of making a move for a few weeks. When he did move again, he would probably need to take food or valuables from his
victim. The downward spiral: you could always fall further, and there were no limits now.

He would go back to Birmingham to see his wife, and he could not help feeling that he was going back to say goodbye.

‘You’re hurt,’ his wife said.

‘Nearly better now.’ The father tried to conceal the stiffness in his movements caused by the shoulder, its pain revived by sitting for so long during the drive up to the
Midlands.