Noah's Ark: Contagion (30 page)

At first she thought there was nobody inside, or nobody who was in any fit state to come to answer. Then she heard a voice. It sounded like someone grumbling to themselves. The cabin door swung open and she found herself face to face with an elderly gentleman; tall, and with thinning white hair.

“Yes?” he grunted.

“Hi. My name is Doctor Janice Hanson. I think you might possibly be the most important person on board this ship.”

Janice had rarely used her title since she had retired, but she knew from experience that it often helped command respect, or at the very least a level of attention that was more difficult to attain without it.

“Well of course I am,” the man replied. “What of it?”

“Sir, this may sound like a bit of a strange question, but have you recently undergone surgery?”

“Of course I have!”

“Was it transplant surgery?”

The man rolled his eyes and sighed, wheezing slightly as he did so. “Kidney. Didn’t he tell you this already?”

Janice could feel the excitement rising inside of her. She had found her man.

“And you’re taking medication? To stop your body rejecting the new kidney?”

“Hmph,” he grunted. “If you ask me, it’s nothing of the sort. I feel perfectly fine. The kidney was donated by my own son, why would I reject it? You doctors, fill me up with drugs to keep me under control. I know your game.”

“Could I look at them? The drugs, Mr—”

“Sanderson. Tom Sanderson. You can call me Mr Sanderson.” He shuffled off into his cabin. “Well come on then, if you’re coming. And close the door behind you; you’re letting the warm air out.”

Janice didn’t need to be asked twice. She scuttled in after him, following him over to a bedside cabinet. Tom pulled open a drawer to reveal half a dozen little white-and-blue boxes. Janice grabbed one, hardly daring to believe what she was seeing.

“Orthoclone OKT 3. You’re injecting?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! That’s what the doctors are for. Doctor Lister has been administering my injections. Once a day, every day. He’s a good chap. If it wasn’t for him signing me off, they wouldn’t have let me come on the cruise. Promised he’d look after me, he did. Company man, see. Haven’t seen him today. That’s why you’re here though, isn’t it? He sent you, to give me my injection?”

“Mr Sanderson, it will be a pleasure to give you your injection. And then, if you don’t mind, I will take some of your Orthoclone down to the medical centre. You’re about to save a lot of lives!”

• • •

Surgeon Lieutenant Russell Vardy was not prone to panic. His training and experience in the armed forces had prepared him for stressful situations. All of that capacity for remaining calm under pressure was being tested to the limit as he watched Captain Jake Noah writhe and flail on the bed. He hadn’t personally witnessed the last moments of Kiera’s life, but it didn’t take years of medical practice to know that Jake was on the brink of death.

He had done all he reasonably could. From somewhere, one of the remaining nurses had produced a tranquilliser, although it had had little effect. Russell had tried to make his patient comfortable, and now he looked on, utterly helplessly, as Jake’s body destroyed itself, cell by cell.

“Vardy!”

He looked up to see Janice galloping down the corridor. She arrived in the room, breathless and sweating. Unable to speak, she thrust a box into the surprised doctor’s hands.

“Orthoclone? This is powerful stuff, Janice. We wouldn’t use this without a course of glucocorticoids first. The risk of cardiac arrest is too high. A shot of this could kill him.”

Janice, still trying to catch her breath, looked at Jake, then at Vardy. She didn’t need words, and he understood at once that she was right. Without the drug, Jake was as good as dead. There was nothing left to lose.

Vardy sprang into action. The box contained single-use hypodermic needles in sterile packaging, as well as five tiny vials filled with the drug. With steady hands, he prepared a dose.
 

Jake’s twisting body presented the same problem Kiera’s had, just hours before, but Vardy wasn’t messing around. He grabbed the captain’s neck and with a deft action, pierced the skin and pressed down on the syringe. The clear liquid disappeared into Jake. Vardy extracted the needle, and let out the breath he hadn’t until then realised he was holding.

“Do you know how long before we’ll know?” Janice said, wheezing.

“No idea. I suggest you stay with him. I’m going to get a dose of this into Miss Levin. And then I need to get the machine configured to make more of this stuff. Where did you find it?”

“Long story. But there’s more. Enough to treat another twenty of the most urgent cases while we wait for your machine to do its thing.”

Twenty-Nine

J
AKE
’
S
HEAD
FELT
like it had been removed from his shoulders, spun at high speed in a liquidiser, then poured down his own neck. He liked the feeling; it meant he was probably alive.

He was vaguely aware of sound. The sound had structure. His brain made an attempt to decode it, make sense of it. It was hard work. As much effort went into focussing and directing his attention as went into the actual processing of the noise.

Eventually something clicked into place. It was voices. The sound he could hear was voices. He knew how to understand voices, he just had to remember. The knowledge was scattered among neurones that seemed to have become disconnected. The effort required to forge new pathways between them was too great. His thoughts spun, and everything faded away.

The next time he became self-aware, the pain was no longer restricted to his head. His whole body felt as if it was on fire. He liked this feeling even more, because it meant he probably still had a body. He had the impression that time had passed. During that period, his neurones must have got together to form some kind of order because now he could think a little more clearly. When someone next to him spoke, he could discriminate individual words, although deriving any kind of meaning from them was still beyond his capacity. It wasn’t long before the strain of trying once again overloaded his exhausted mind, and the world he was briefly aware of faded away a second time.

The third time Jake came round, the pain was agonising. He didn’t like it any more, and it made him grunt and moan.

“He’s awake! Did you hear that? He made a noise!”

The words ricocheted around inside his head. He didn’t hear them clearly; they were accompanied by the kind of white noise he associated with a badly tuned radio station, or a poorly maintained ship-to-shore radio.

Ship-to-shore. The thought sparked something inside him. He was on a ship. His ship.

That single observation was a key. It unlocked a flood of memories from childhood through to the moment he had found Russell, Janice, and Mandy working in their deck two laboratory. A tsunami of memories so potent that it threatened to overwhelm him yet again. But the world didn’t fade away. The agony was too intense. The waves of pain pulsing through every molecule of his wretched body meant there was to be no further respite in unconsciousness.

“Jake, can you hear me? It’s Janice. You’re in the medical centre.”

He wanted to respond, to make her understand that yes, he could hear her. He wanted her to know he was in terrible pain. If only he could make some part of his body bend to his will, she would understand and would help him.

He fixed his attention on his eyes, pouring every ounce of effort he could muster into opening them. Surely, he thought, the physical effort of opening an eyelid was far less than any other bodily movement he could attempt? It might have worked, had he been able to gather a minimum level of concentration, but his body had other ideas. The constant stabbing, burning, piercing pain battered its way into his thoughts, leaving no room to mount a positive action.

The frustration he felt caused another grunt, an involuntary reflex that forced air through his windpipe.

“You were right! I heard that! He definitely made a noise. I think we should up the dosage of the tranquilliser.”

“Agreed.”

There were more words, technical words, but he didn’t hear them because mercifully, the pain had started to abate. And with it, his grip on reality.

• • •

He forced open his eyes.

“Jake?”

He blinked.

“Hey, how are you feeling?”

It was a fair question, and he hadn’t yet assessed himself adequately to give any kind of answer. He remembered waking up before, and the pain that went with that. Time must had passed since then; how much he had no idea. Now, his whole body ached as if he’d just swum the English Channel with a life raft tied to his waist. It was a strange thought, because he seemed to remember that he
had
been swimming with a life raft.

“Lu…” He tried to speak and found that it was more difficult than he recalled.

“Lucya is going to be okay. She’s on the same medication as you. She hit her head, but it wasn’t serious.”

His eyes were slowly adjusting to the light. He could see a figure standing over him. Two figures. Vardy, and Janice. They were both here. Why were they here? Shouldn’t they be helping the people with the virus?

“Vi…rus,” he managed.

“There’s a cure, Jake,” Janice said. “Sort of. It’s not perfect, far from it in fact. But it will get the job done. We’ve been testing your blood for the last two days. The virus is inactive, and the mutated antiviral too. Your body is flushing them out. Another week and they’ll be entirely gone.”

“Others?”

“Yes, we’re treating the others too. Thanks to the machines you found on the base, Russell has been able to synthesise more drugs in much greater quantities. It’s going to take a long time, but we are going to beat this virus.”

Jake grunted. He had a thousand questions, but now wasn’t the time. All he really wanted to do was sleep.

Thirty

J
AKE
HADN
’
T
MOVED
for hours. He knew he should try and walk; the doctors had insisted it would help. Getting his blood moving would help flush the virus out of his system, and it would also help rebuild the muscle tissue he had lost when the infection had swarmed through his body, boosted by the well-intentioned but ultimately deadly antiviral. But he didn’t want to move. He wanted to remain exactly where he was, sitting right next to Lucya.

He had been sitting there most of the day every day since he could get out of bed. It had been eight days since Janice had found the miracle drug, the drug that had been under their noses the whole time. His recovery had been remarkably rapid, but he knew it would be a long road back to full health.
 

Besides, he was lucky: he had survived. Maryse, Scott, Kiera, and David had all lost their lives to the dreadful virus, as had seven others whose names he hadn’t known. At least five more patients, including Grau Lister, were still in a critical condition. The effects of the virus were so far advanced, so much damage had been done to their internal organs, that it was far from certain that they would ever recover.

Lucya had also been lucky, at least as far as her injection of antiviral was concerned. The dose she had self-administered had been very small, and therefore had done little to reinforce the virus already present in her bloodstream. Ironically, her collapse and subsequent lack of consciousness had helped her. Without any physical exertion causing her heart rate to increase, and in turn pump the antiviral around her body more quickly, it had remained confined. The immunosuppressives had done their job, shutting down the T cells so vital to the survival of the invader, leaving it to flounder and die. They had done nothing to bring her back to consciousness though. In fact it seemed they had plunged her into a coma, which was one of the side effects that Vardy had warned of.

Jake had maintained his vigil by her bedside, keeping an eye on the monitoring equipment that Ewan and his colleagues had salvaged from the second lab in the base.

The submariners had been busy during the last week. Ewan had paid him regular visits and kept him up to date on events. Coote had taken charge—temporarily, Ewan assured him—and had organised rolling missions to the base to bring back supplies. The storm had abated and they had been able to bring the ship and the submarine closer in to the shoreline. By releasing more of the
Spirit of Arcadia
’s inflatable emergency life rafts, they had brought over not only a number of medical supplies, including the machines that were monitoring Lucya, but also food supplies to replenish the empty kitchens. Head Chef Claude Dupont had avoided the virus and was now revelling in his role as one of the most important people on the ship, preparing protein-rich rations for everyone. He saw it as his professional duty to get the population back to peak fitness via their stomachs. Jake was reflecting on all of this when a familiar voice jerked him out of his reverie.
 

“Captain Noah! How are we doing, old chap?”

“Not bad, Coote, not bad. I wish I could say the same for Lucya.”

“She’ll pull through, you mark my words. She’s made of strong stuff that one. You’ll see, the two of you will be supping vodka on the sun deck before you know it. I might join you, although mine’s a single malt.” Coote touched the side of his nose conspiratorially.

“How’s the plan to get into the dry dock? Ewan said you were sending a task force to get the undersea door open and take the
Ambush
into the base.”

“That is indeed the idea. You found us enough food in there to keep this ship supplied for months, but it’s going to take us months to bring it across if we rely on the rafts. It makes more sense to load up the
Ambush
in dry dock and then transfer it over in bulk. As you know, the door can only be opened from the inside. As you also managed to find a way to get the power on in the base, the task should have been a simple one. Ralf led a team over there to flood the dock and get the door open…” Coote’s voice trailed off.

“What is it? Something went wrong, didn’t it?”