Lost Girl (41 page)

The man was doing him no favours. Even in such pain the father could differentiate between gloating and an attempt at relief for the condemned. ‘Soon enough our considerations of the past
will be altered beyond recognition, because the past won’t really matter. Who has done what to whom. None of that will matter. A terrifying thought. But also an incredible opportunity if
you’re smart. It’s what we do in the next couple of years that will count for everything.’

The more he spoke, the more the man reminded the father of those distant, wine-fuelled executives from food distribution who held forth at parties, their baritones rising to the ceilings of the
rooms they quickly came to dominate; people who had drifted into the executive level of agriculture, construction, nuclear power, the emergency government, water management and resettlement
planning, after their opportunities in finance diminished as the world’s markets began to collapse; men who considered anyone unlike themselves as without worth. The father felt his face
contort into a sneer that he had no control over. This was a man the father would feel pleasure in destroying. He now wished that he had started destroying people much earlier in his life. He
blinked his blurred eyes clear. ‘Have you any idea what that woman has done? To me. My wife. Her parents. To so many . . . because she stole our child?’

The man resumed his seat beyond the range of a sneeze. He seemed intent on more justification. ‘The bigger picture, if you please. Let’s put your natural outrage to one side, for one
moment. You look at the same world as we do, and you’ve seen where this is all going. The country is a powder keg. The resentment, divisions, sectarian violence. My God, who can keep up with
it? Between the Islamists, between the nationalists and the Islamists, between the nationalists and the refugees, the bloody socialists, the underclass and anyone near them who has more than they
do, which isn’t hard. The nationalists have even recruited from the camps, as have the Islamists. The rival criminal clans are directing most of it. Our friends out there.’ The man
nodded at the door. ‘They’re even in government now.’ Dismissively, he wafted a small, feminine hand in the air. ‘Drone strikes, curfews, riot control, it doesn’t
work. And with so many without work, don’t you think it’s all really come home? I mean, the children still living with their parents beyond their forties? Do you know how many deaths
have resulted from sibling rivalry this year alone? How is any of this going to improve? Anarchy is unavoidable, inevitable. We’ve seen it getting closer for years. We’re only about two
years behind the States and you saw what happened out there when the south ran out of water. Jesus Christ. We’ve all that coming, right here. This isn’t bloody Norway. So we’ll
continue to destroy ourselves from the inside, with the ethnic divisions, the class war, the sheer territorial rage of cornered, hopeless animals, while the climate reduces us, storm by storm and
drought by drought.’

The man took a deep breath and slapped his hands against his thighs. ‘There is far too little for far too many, even here on the lifeboat called Great Britain. We’re considered the
lucky ones, with the Kiwis, of course. You believe that? But look at the influenza alone that we’ve seen in Europe. Not to mention the diseases that have killed millions across thirty years
globally. Mere warnings. Labs have always managed to produce vaccines, eventually, but this is quite different. This is the
one
. And the world it has entered is very different to the world
that cured AIDS and cancer. This world is no longer even remotely cohesive.

‘And . . .’ He paused as if from the gravity of what he was about to announce. ‘Nature, King Death no less, is inhabiting SARS CoV11 and about to take its course, here as
elsewhere. And it will have to run and run, or soon everything will be lost to chaos. This isn’t about you, me, Karen, it’s about . . . well, it’s about your daughter. She is the
future. She and others in her privileged position can make it, and make it comfortably. We’ll make sure of that. She wouldn’t have a chance otherwise. Not a hope in hell. Because when
that “bug” came in through Oxford, the gates of hell truly began to creak open in Britain. You see, your daughter has already been inoculated. All of Karen’s family members and
staff have been too.’

The father raised his face.

The man tapped the side of his nose. ‘The Gabon River Fever is relatively harmless compared to the Asian bug. Ha! And mostly used as justification for the Italians, French and Portuguese
to sink the refugee boats, and for the northern hemisphere to close its borders. Still, you wouldn’t want to catch that and it is around, but Gabon River Fever never spreads far enough.
We’ve had outbreaks in Europe twenty-one times, but it’s always a dead end. We took our eyes off that one years ago. But the new SARS? Oh, boy. The Chinese have lied, like they always
do. And so have their neighbours in case we shut them out for good.

‘This is an archetypal zoonosis, from the animal to the human animal. Fucking rats again. Isn’t that the rub? A country struggling to breathe and grow food began to eat the entirety
of the animal kingdom at its disposal. They were breeding rats in China for food. They farmed bamboo rats and guinea pigs very successfully, but the problem was storage and distribution. They sold
them in wet markets in appalling, overcrowded conditions, and we subsequently became the amplifier host. But the bug is changing again as it passes through us, and has become even more lethal. Bats
were the reservoir host, rats the cultivating host, and we’re the dead end, literally.

‘Time has finally been called. Because this strain is spread by exhalation. Exhalation! By breathing. This strain has been observed living in seawater for six months. It isn’t going
away. We’ve got years of it ahead, wave after wave.’

The father swallowed. ‘She . . . there is a vaccine?’

‘Yes, and I’m afraid this strain of SARS has proven itself ninety per cent fatal so far. A respiratory cluster-fuck, like an extreme form of pneumonia. But some very clever people
got the antibodies from the right bats. And the first vaccine has been ninety-seven per cent successful against SARS 9 and 10, in some rather hastily conducted trials, and ninety-three per cent
successful against 11, so we’re still taking some precautions against exposure.’

The father’s captor moved his head from side to side, casually pondering his advantages. ‘But the drug will never come close to wide availability. Production couldn’t even
begin to match demand this time around. It is scarce and very, very expensive right now, like everything else that people need that is a matter of life and death. Nothing unusual there. Family
members of those with access to it, I’m afraid. Then key workers. All a bit vague now, but we can assume that those with the expertise to keep the power stations running are in. Same with the
farmers, and the experts that will be needed across all the primary fields. You must have known how it would go down if we ever reached this point. A vaccine couldn’t be distributed fairly.
So what’s the alternative, a lottery?’ He laughed. ‘This is not something that will be thrown off the back of a truck any time soon. The isolation wards, the barrier nursing, and
quarantine in a population of this size? Impossible. The dieback is just going to be off the scale. Some people are talking seven billion or more worldwide, though others claim that forty per cent
is a more reasonable figure. Only a third of Europe died from bubonic plague, and medieval Europe was more primitive than our world, just about.’ He lowered his voice and whispered.
‘Close to
four billion.
Can you fucking imagine that? The wretched living conditions of most of our fellow creatures, and their close proximity to each other, is going to be key, and
it’ll take four or five years, but . . . Wow! The dieback in historical terms is going to be . . . epochal.’

The man recomposed himself, wiped his fringe back from his forehead. ‘So, a collective in business at the highest level, well above that sham we call government, had to make the difficult
decisions. I’d say people in certain positions are much better at doing that now, because all the rules changed, quite literally, some time ago. I’m sure you of all people noticed. And
now the clock is ticking far faster than anyone thought. Most Centres for Disease Control in the first world don’t even know about the vaccine. They suspect some of us have something, but
they don’t know what. Most of the current emergency government doesn’t know either, though they will soon enough. But private industry looks after its own first. We discovered it, so
it’s only fair. And do you think the emergency government will distribute it fairly when they receive their limited supply? It’s not like you can expect government to sort anything out,
anyway. This all goes way above government, way above the media, you know that. These levels of corporate organization stopped even trying to avoid being seen as a conspiracy about four decades
ago.

‘But the antibodies have been cultivated from a tiny bat that was pissing onto the rats in a wet market. Discovered by one of many private enterprises with field operations in Asia, in
which Karen has a sizeable interest. So the vaccine has been passing between a select few, for months now. In the nick of time, I’d say.’

‘You bastards.’

‘Pragmatic bastards. Those feedbacks this year, with the plant stress? Jesus Christ. They’re producing carbon dioxide. Collapse has been on the cards for a long, long time.
We’d face starvation eventually in the UK, later than most, but it’s on our dance card. Soil fertility is already becoming an issue, as are crop losses from the droughts; even with the
water management in Europe, yields are worryingly down again, and far worse than they are claiming in the news. Our recent fecundity is a blip and actually very fragile. But with your background,
you probably assumed as much. There are seasonal variations from one year to the next, but it’s all getting worse over the long haul.

‘So the bigger picture, who can feed themselves now? The British and French, Canadians, Scandinavians, Polish, Russians, Japanese and Koreans. But what still remains in Mexico, Central
America, the Caribbean, every single country but France that borders the Med, India, Pakistan and the Middle East, are all on their way to final collapse because of water, or a distinct lack of
it.

‘We can only surmise that our own summers and winters are now standard too. But we’ll fall apart from within, even before we have a major food or water crisis here. The population is
at least one hundred and twenty million now. We don’t even know exactly how many people are here, with more and more coming in every day, but it stopped being ninety million a long time ago.
And the people won’t stop coming. Most of Central Africa and North Africa, southern Europe, is still on the move. Asia too . . . where are they going to go? Look at India and Pakistan.
We’re already going the way of America, as well as much of Europe unlucky enough to not be Scandinavia or an island. You’re an intelligent man. You must have seen this coming from way
back when.

‘So try and imagine the numbers . . . every man, woman and child on the move across the next four or five decades in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Can any more be taken in, and
absorbed in the bits and pieces that will still be functioning? Nine billion. Nine billion of us at the last count, and nearly all in the areas that will fail to support human life beyond a bit of
hunter-gathering and cannibalism. You do know what happened on Easter Island, to the Mayans, and to the Vikings in Greenland? Well multiply that, Daddio, into the billions until only tens of
millions would be left standing. Inconceivable.

‘And it would all be in full swing by the end of this century. Your daughter might still be around then. Her children will be for sure. You ever figured out what’s coming to our
children and grandchildren? We have. And it cannot happen.
Our
child cannot go out like that. Yasmin cannot see
that
: total collapse.

‘A few more years like this, maybe a decade. Then a decade of it being worse. Then another decade of it being even worse than that. Cumulative collapse. Can technology keep pace with such
disruption? Afraid not. Never has done. Not really. You must have known all of that
vision of the future
stuff they piped out was bullshit. We’re maxed out. We can’t even cope
with our own public health requirements in a heatwave. The statistics are false. At least one million people died this summer across Europe. We’ll never generate enough juice to air-condition
every home, only some, and we know how much resentment that causes. The speed of climate change has taken us all by surprise. It just has this momentum, you know?’

He grinned. ‘And you really can’t believe anything you hear any more, out there. We all educate ourselves with online rumours from the indie journos. But here’s another rumour:
everything is actually far worse than you think and have been told. Much worse. There are going to be very few winners. The needs of the many cannot be met, blah, blah, blah. That is what it has
come down to, but the needs of the few can be met. Something drastic is required that doesn’t involve the nuclear option, before the nuclear option is standard practice. How many years away
is that? Or is it weeks these days? India and Pakistan? Jesus Christ, they’ll kill us all. The Chinese are already taking what they want from what’s left around them in Asia. Can you
see the US standing in the way when Japan and Taiwan finally get rolled? Who knows?

‘But a pandemic is a solution, an accidental lifeline for the species. If you like, the final solution. Think about it. Fucking brutal. Cold, but . . . Refugee problem: numbers reduced and
better managed. Food shortages: solved. Land and housing shortages: solved. Water crisis: managed. And globally. It is going to be horrible, and you’re best off out of it, but our girl will
be all right. You have
our
word on that.

‘Now, I think I’d like my breakfast. Karen has requested a few minutes with you, before . . . well, we all live in a time of inevitability. And for what it is worth, I did try and
put in a good word for you, considering your grievances, and on behalf of this charming old-fashioned model of justice and fairness that you still hold dear, and have carried like one almighty
cross for years. But, my pleas for clemency fell upon deaf ears. Sorry. But look at it this way, soon the pain stops.’ The man rose from his garden chair and walked to the door.