Текст книги "Noah's Ark: Contagion"

Автор книги: Harry Dayle

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Using his hands to help him shuffle around once more, he faced the door and pushed it all the way open. He collected up the torch from the floor, clicked it on, and aimed the beam inside.

Twenty-One

FROM HER POSITION on the tender platform, it was evident to Lucya that the raft contained only three people long before it reached the Spirit of Arcadia. What was less obvious was who was missing. The three men clad in black neoprene all looked much alike from a distance. Two of them were rowing, propelling the little craft along at quite a speed. The third sat in the middle, nursing some kind of trunk as if it was the most precious cargo ever carried.

By the time they were fifty metres away, her worst fears were confirmed. Jake was not with them. She realised with horror that this was the news Chuck had been trying to tell her on the bridge, before Erica had interrupted.

“What’s happened? Where’s Jake?” she screamed across the water, desperate to know.

Someone shouted back, but the wind carried their voice away from the ship and towards land, making it impossible to hear what they were saying.

“Where is he? What have you done with him? Where’s Jake?” She was tearing at her hair, frustration choking at her.

The little raft seemed to take forever to close the distance to the ship. When finally it touched the platform, Ewan jumped off and grabbed her, shaking her to try and calm her down.

“He’s okay, Lucya, Jake is okay. He’s at the base.”

“What? Why? Why did you leave him there?”

By then, Vardy and Eric were hauling the machine onto the platform. Vardy looked on, concerned.

“Ewan, that’s not entirely the truth now, is it?”

“Where is he, Vardy?” Lucya demanded. “Tell me now!”

“Ewan is right, he’s on the base. But he isn’t alright, not really.”

“He hasn’t…he’s…the virus?” She looked at the three men. Ewan nodded, looking at his feet. “Then why the hell did you leave him there? He should be here! He needs medical attention! We have to go and get him!” She made for the raft, as if to go and retrieve him herself.

Vardy blocked her path. “Lucya, he asked us to leave him there.”

She stared at him, unblinking, processing this information. “I don’t believe it, you’re lying! You must be lying! Why would he do that?”

“It’s true,” Ewan said gently. “He insisted. I wanted to bring him back, but he said he’d only slow us down. He said the machine was more important.”

Lucya fell to her knees. The tears that she had shed for Erica, tears that had only just dried on her face, were joined by fresh tears as she sobbed on the little platform. She knew that it was exactly what Jake would have said. She knew he would sacrifice himself to help the rest of the ship.

Ewan knelt down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, we’re going back for him. I promised I would go back for him.”

“Then let’s go, now!”

“No,” Vardy said. “There’s nothing to be gained by risking another trip over there unless we have a cure. If we can’t make the vaccine work, Jake is dead anyway. I’m sorry to sound harsh, but that’s the reality. If we have a vaccine, then by all means take it to him and bring him back.”

“I’m not waiting, I’m going to find him, on my own if I have to!” Lucya pushed past Ewan and put one foot in the raft. She got no further, as Ewan turned and grabbed her, and Eric helped him pull her back.

“Lucya, you can’t go. You need protection; the ash will kill you as soon as you set foot on the land. Russell is right. Let him make his cure, and then I promise you and I will go and find Jake.”

• • •

Jake looked around the room, bewildered. For a minute, he was convinced that the tunnel must have led him round in a long loop, because he found himself back in Vardy’s lab. Except, he realised, it wasn’t Vardy’s lab at all. It was a perfect duplicate, a mirror image. There were the same long benches loaded with equipment. The same dormitory, office space, and kitchen area. Everything was identical, just back to front. And as Jake noted with some satisfaction, the equipment was the same as in Vardy’s lab, with one important difference. In this room, there were four Heimat Brinkdolph Gemini 5001 machines.

He considered how he could draw the attention of the submariners to these machines. If he was dead by the time they came back, he wouldn’t be able to tell them they were there. He was, however, confident that they would look for him when they returned and found he wasn’t where they had left him. That meant there was a way of ensuring they got the message.

He shuffled over to a huge dry-erase board that took up most of one wall. A plastic beaker attached to it by means of magnets was filled with markers. He gave the beaker a whack with his torch and several of the pens fell to the floor. He selected a bright green colour, and proceeded to write across his own chest: “2nd Lab, More 5001 Machines.”

Happy that the others would locate the additional means of production for their remedy whether he was alive or not, he was ready to continue his search of level four.

Shifting around on his bottom was somewhat impractical, and required that he travelled backwards, but he found it preferable to dragging himself along on his chest. So it was by that same means that he returned to the tunnel, grabbing his gas mask in passing, and continued his journey.

Progress was slow, and it took him more than fifteen minutes to reach the next door, by which time he was completely exhausted. Only the constant urge to explore, to discover what lay just a little further along, kept him going. Lucya had once remarked that it was that urge, that never-ending desire to see what was around the next corner, that had made the British turn such a large proportion of the map pink. She believed every Brit was a sailor and an explorer at heart, although Jake vehemently disagreed. He smiled to himself as he thought that maybe she’d been right all along. “Just a few more metres,” he told himself. And then he’d seen the second door ahead, picked out in the glow of his torchlight, and he knew he had to get at least that far.

Opening this one was much easier now that he had an established method. Once again, with his back to the door, he flipped the rubber straps of his mask over the handle and pulled.

The room beyond felt different to the labs when he shuffled in. The noise of his body dragging across the floor echoed a little. Something, somewhere, was dripping. It was the first sound not of his own making that he had heard since the other men had left, and it sent a shiver down his spine. Something else was different too. Off to his left was a small, glowing red light, like a bloodshot eye watching him in the darkness.

His torch battery was almost completely drained, so it was impossible to see what, if anything, the light was attached to. The more he tried to focus on it, the more it seemed to float away from him, teasing him. He shook his head, trying to see more clearly. The virus was making it harder to think straight, and the paralysis in his legs was starting to turn to pain.

Jake shuffled towards the tiny red glow, feeling in front of him as he went. His torch beam, now barely brighter than the red eye itself, illuminated the area just enough to see that the light was built into a metal panel. It looked a lot like the panels in the control room on board HMS Ambush: beige, dull, utilitarian. Next to the light was a handle covered with red plastic. Underneath was an engraved label that read: “Emergency Use Only.”

Jake brushed his hand gently over the panel. The rubber gloves made it hard to feel anything, but he was sure there were other switches or controls. There was no way of seeing exactly what they were because with a flicker, his torch finally gave out completely.

Sitting there in the dark, in pain, he rested his hand on the red handle. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he repeated to himself, and pulled down the handle with a clunk.

• • •

“I think gas masks would be prudent at this stage, Janice,” Vardy said.

“Good plan.”

Both doctors picked up masks that had been brought to the makeshift lab by the submariners who had kitted it out while the landing party had been away.

They were in another store room down on deck one, near to Janice’s temporary morgue. Three tables borrowed from a restaurant had been assembled in a U shape. Vardy’s equipment from the Ambush occupied one table. On another was a rack of test tubes filled with blood. Each was neatly labelled with a name. Next to the tubes was a writing pad. Names corresponding to those on the tubes were listed on the topmost page, and alongside each were details including the age of the patient, how long they had been suffering or paralysed when the sample was taken, and where they were now.

On the third table was the Heimat Brinkdolph Gemini 5001 machine, and a plastic container filled with ash. It was this container that Vardy and Janice had turned their attention to.

With mask securely in place, Vardy cautiously opened it. He took a plastic beaker in one hand, turned to the tubes of blood, selected one, and poured a small sample into the bottom. Then with a plastic spoon he scooped up a tiny amount of ash and sprinkled it over the blood.

The reaction was almost instantaneous. The ash soaked up the blood and began to fizz and boil. Vardy and Janice both pulled away instinctively, but it lasted only a few seconds.

“Jesus! Have you ever seen anything like that?” Vardy said. He leaned over the beaker, staring inside.

“Never. What even happened? I mean, there was no visible gas given off. Where did the blood go? It seemed to boil, but there was no visible gas?”

Vardy picked up the beaker and swilled it around. The blood had indeed disappeared, leaving just the spoonful of ash which looked as dry as before.

He took another beaker, placed it on a digital scale, then put in some more ash.

“Four point three grams,” he said. “Stand back.” He poured a few drops of blood onto the ash, and they both watched as the exact same reaction took place. When he was sure it was over, he re-read the scale.

“Six point two grams. So the blood’s still there, but it’s changed form.”

“Russell, I’m sure this is fascinating, and another time it would be worthy of study, but we need to get this antiviral underway.”

“Of course, of course. But this is an important step. Now we know that we’re going to have to use a microscopic amount of ash to mutate the vaccine, otherwise we could end up turning the vaccine to ash.”

Janice nodded. “How microscopic does the amount have to be?”

“That’s what we need to figure out.”

They spent most of the next half an hour performing tests with the ash, combining it with blood, water, alcohol, and most other liquids they could get their hands on. The reaction was largely the same in every case, with the ash turning the liquid into more ash. But they did find a limit.

“So we’re agreed,” Vardy said finally. “Anything less than a tenth of a gram of ash dissolved in anything more than ten millilitres of liquid appears to be stable.”

“Uh huh. How much vaccine do you have?”

“There are three kits. Each one contains ten mills of flu vaccine. The 5001 machine can make more, but it will take too long. Do you want to prep the vaccine or the ash?”

“I’ll take the ash,” Janice said.

“Here, it goes in this.” Vardy handed her what looked like a tiny jam jar with a plastic lid. She placed it on the scale and set the readout to zero. Then, using the tip of a plastic spatula, she very carefully dropped just a few grains of the ash into it. The readout on the scale counted upwards, then back down, settling on a figure of 0.09 grams. She retrieved the jar and affixed the lid. Letting out the breath she had been holding, she handed the beaker to Vardy. “Over to you,” she said, relieved.

Vardy placed Janice’s jar in a small tray that protruded from the body of the Gemini 5001 and pressed a button. An electric motor whirred, and with a click the tray slid inside the machine.

“Just like loading a CD,” Janice observed.

Vardy took a second tiny jar and placed it on the scale. On the table with the test tubes was a bright orange box that looked like a tiny briefcase. He undid two plastic catches and lifted the lid. Inside were a dozen glass vials of different sizes, each labelled with the name of the vaccine it contained, and a date after which is should no longer be used. He selected the influenza vaccine. Taking a hypodermic needle and syringe, he pierced the seal on the vial and drew out the entire contents. The clear liquid was then injected into the small glass jar. With the lid securely in place, he put the jar into a second tray that sat waiting on the front of the blue machine, and pressed the button. With another whir and a click, the jar was pulled inside.

“What happens now?” Janice asked.

“Now? We wait. The machine will work its magic. It will constantly analyse the vaccine, and once it detects any kind of mutation, it will sound an alarm. We’ll need to manually verify with the microscope of course.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. Could happen quickly, could take a few hours.”

“And if it works? How are we going to treat three thousand people when there are only two more vaccine kits?”

“The machine can make more. It functions as a miniature bioreactor. If this antiviral works, we hold some back and put it back into the machine along with a base liquid. It can’t create huge volumes. I won’t lie to you, it’s unlikely we can make enough to treat everyone in time, but I’m not going to worry about that until we know if this even works.”

• • •

For a few seconds it seemed as though nothing was going to happen. Then the rumbling started. A low, repetitive sound. Jake thought it sounded like a pump. Whatever it was, it was just the precursor to a much louder noise, a noise he knew very well: the noise of a huge diesel engine coming to life. The tiny red light had turned green, but it was still the only illumination in the room for another two and a half minutes. Precisely one hundred and fifty seconds after he pulled the handle came the unmistakable sound of a generator spinning up and then, quite suddenly, Jake was blinded by what seemed like a thousand floodlights all coming on at once. His arms flew up to cover his eyes, protecting them from the dazzling, brilliant light.

The noise around him abated slightly, as the diesel motor warmed up and settled down, and the initial load of so many lights coming on at once had been met. At the same time Jake’s eyes had begun to adjust, and through slotted fingers he could observe his surroundings properly for the first time.

The room he was in was huge. He’d only seen the hall containing the biohazard tanks with the aid of torchlight, but he had the impression this room was easily as big. He estimated that it must be at least half the size of level three, meaning that combined with the labs and the toxic store, level four was considerably larger than the others.

The panel with the lever that had started the generator stretched away for some distance. It was covered in meters and readouts, which as far as he could tell were all to do with the state of the electrical systems in the facility.

Much of the rest of the space was filled with giant tanks. Although they looked a lot like the toxic tanks they had seen before, these were clearly marked as being filled with diesel, no doubt for powering the generator, which from the sound of it was located somewhere further back, out of sight.

The door through which he had entered was still wide open, and through it Jake could see that the concrete tunnel outside was also now illuminated. Spurred on by the possibility to explore further without the need of a torch, he shuffled back towards the door. Halfway there, something caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it on the way in; his pocket light was too weak to have picked it out in the darkness. A little deeper into the room, near the first of the giant diesel tanks, was a small blue flat-bed trolley. He shuffled over to it backwards, dragging his useless and increasingly painful legs. The trolley was loaded up with a gas bottle. Jake was able to haul it off quite easily as the bottle appeared to be empty. By repositioning the trolley so it butted up against the diesel tank and thus did not roll anywhere, he pushed himself up off the floor and slid onto it. He wriggled around as best he could. His back was leaning against the handle, his legs stuck out in front of him, and only his ankles and feet were unsupported, and dangled off the end. The trolley was very low to the floor, which made it easy to load and unload. For Jake, it meant he could reach the ground with his hands by leaning forwards just a little. The grated floor once again offered a perfect surface to grip with his fingertips, and with a little effort, he pulled himself—and the trolley—forwards. It rolled easily, and he was at the door in seconds.

Getting out of the door and turning ninety degrees into the tunnel proved a little more difficult, but again the grated floor helped, and by pulling harder on one side than the other, he soon got the hang of steering on the move. Once outside and rolling straight, he couldn’t help but let out a whoop of joy at his newfound mobility.

Twenty-Two

“VARDY? VARDY! WAKE up!”

“Wha…what? What is it?” Russell rubbed his eyes and looked around him, confused.

“You fell asleep,” Janice scolded gently.

“Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to. Rough couple of days.”

“Don’t sweat it. Listen, your machine is beeping, I thought you ought to know.”

“Right, yes, thank you.” He pulled himself out of the armchair on the far side of the room, stretched his arms high above his head, and yawned. “God, I could use some coffee.”

“From what I’ve heard, you’ll be lucky to get any kind of refreshment on this ship. And if God is handing out favours, I’d ask for a working antiviral before caffeinated hot drinks.”

Vardy walked over to the machine and pressed a button, muting the feeble bleeping noise. Numbers and codes scrolled across a little LCD display built into the front of the unit; he read them off aloud. “Okay, so the machine thinks the mutation is complete. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

A couple more buttons and a drawer popped out of the machine. It held one of the two small jars. Inside, where the clear vaccine had been, was now a very slightly milky yellow liquid. Vardy ripped open a sterile packet and took out a new syringe. He pierced the lid of the jar and extracted a few drops of the substance, then pushed the plunger of the syringe back down, forcing out the drops onto an open microscope slide.

“Alright, what have we got here?” he said, arranging the slide under one of the two microscopes. He adjusted the focus, and spent some time examining their new creation.

“Well?” Janice asked. She couldn’t stand the wait, she was desperate to know whether the mutation had worked.

“Well, I think this has gone better than expected. Here, take a look yourself. Look at this one first,” he said, pointing to the second microscope. “That’s the mutated virus.”

Janice sat down at the table and lined her eyes up with the eyepiece. She could see the cells infected with the virus. They looked like some kind of miniature alien: bizarre, spiky, ugly, but also familiar. “I remember studying this kind of thing in med school,” she said. “Nothing quite like that though.”

“That’s the mutation. Most unusual, right?”

Janice lifted her head and nodded. “And the antiviral?”

“Help yourself.” He held out a hand towards the microscope he had just been studying.

She moved her chair sideways, lining herself up to get comfortable. “Wow, okay, yeah. I see the similarity. That’s amazing, that the ash could mutate the vaccine like that so quickly.” She sat back and looked at Vardy. “But will it work?”

“Let’s try it on some infected blood.” He located a small Petri dish and consulted the notepad with the list of names. “Roger Marston, sixty-eight years old. Infected since at least twelve hours ago. Okay Roger, let’s see what we can do with your kindly donated blood sample.”

Vardy ran his finger along the row of test tubes until he found the one with Roger’s name on it. Taking care not to spill any, he removed the tube, poured some of the blood into the Petri dish, replaced it, then used the syringe to squeeze a couple of drops of the mutated vaccine onto the blood.

“I’ll get this under the microscope, quickly,” he said.

For a while, he watched in silence. Janice waited patiently. She knew there would be no instant results. Suddenly Vardy’s hand shot up in the air and he clicked his fingers repeatedly. “Janice! Note down the time. I think it’s started!”

Janice checked her watch and scribbled on a page of notes they had been keeping as they went along.

“Three minutes to the first reaction,” she said.

“Yes! There it was again. And another one! This is incredible, it looks like it could actually be working!”

“Can I see?”

“Yeah, of course.” He pulled away and looked at Janice with an expression of triumph mixed with disbelief. “I have to admit, I wasn’t hopeful. Take a look and see what you think.”

Janice positioned herself over the microscope again, and altered the focus slightly for her own eyes. She saw the mutated virus and the antiviral made from the mutated vaccine. She didn’t have to wait long to see what Vardy had been talking about. Right in front of her, the antiviral attacked a virus-infected cell. It was like watching a rabid dog on the offensive as the mutated vaccine went for the virus, overpowering it, and eventually killing it. The more she watched, the more attacks she saw.

“It’s so…violent!”

“So’s the virus. The remedy needs to be just as powerful if it’s to beat such a potent opponent.”

“What happens to the antiviral when it’s killed every trace of the virus? Isn’t there a danger it could attack healthy host cells?”

“No, that can’t happen,” Vardy said confidently. “The influenza vaccine we used is made with a deactivated virus. It poses no risk to normal healthy cells.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“One hundred percent. I think we should move directly to testing this on a patient.”

“Whoa, hang on there. This stuff just came out of the machine. One test on old blood is hardly conclusive. We need more proof it’s not dangerous before we start injecting people.”

“Doctor Chalmers, we don’t have time. If we were back in a regular lab, under normal circumstances, then of course I would agree with you. But we’re not. People are already dying, and those are the edge cases: the old, frail, and those who were already sick. Another few hours and the others are going to start dying too. We’re going to be dealing with hundreds of deaths at a time. We have to try this now. We cannot afford to wait a moment longer.”

Before Janice could protest, there was a knock at the door. She opened it just a crack; they didn’t want visitors in the lab unnecessarily. She recognised the woman outside as one of the most recent draft of nurses.

“So sorry to disturb you, Janice, but we thought you should know. Kiera, the nurse? One of the first infected? She’s in a very bad way. Her ears are bleeding, her hair has almost all fallen out. I don’t think she’s got long left. If your miracle cure is ready, she needs it right now.”

Janice took a deep breath and looked at the nurse. She looked dead on her feet. “Okay, we’ll be up there soon,” she said, and closed the door gently.

“Well I guess you’re going to get your way, Surgeon Lieutenant Vardy. It looks as if circumstances are pushing us into live clinical trials here, whether we’re ready or not.”

“It’s the right thing, Janice. Trust me, it will be fine. Look, let’s get another batch into the machine before we go. We need this thing running twenty-four seven making antiviral.”

• • •

There was a final door for Jake to try. He had reached the end of the tunnel. Of course, he hadn’t explored fully in the other direction, but his rapidly deteriorating condition suggested he never would. Not without some kind of miracle or medication, anyway.

The last door was different to the others. For one thing, it wasn’t set into the side of the tunnel wall. It was head-on, facing him as he reached the end. For another thing, this door was much wider; the full width of the tunnel. This was an entry or exit that was designed for passing heavy equipment, or a lot of people in one go.

There was no simple handle to open it. Indeed there was not, at first glance, any visible means of opening it at all. Jake studied it for a while. He felt very dizzy. His new set of wheels had got him further and faster than he’d managed before, but his energy level was at an all-time low nonetheless. He could feel his body using all of its resources to try and fight off the virus. The battle going on inside was also creating heat, a lot of heat, and the wetsuit provided no ventilation, which just made matters worse. The team had brought bottles of water with them, but those had been left in the crate on level three. Nobody had thought, in the heat of the moment, to leave anything for Jake. He could almost have killed for a swig of ice-cold water. His mind wandered, thinking about how sweet it would taste, how cooling it would be as it trickled down his throat. The trickle of water turned into a cascade, and he found himself standing under a waterfall. The cold water pounding against his skin felt incredible, refreshing, revitalising. He looked up and saw a bright blue sky, dotted with tiny white clouds. Someone was near him, splashing around in the water with him. Was it Lucya? He tried to move, to get closer and take a look.

With a bump and a clang, he landed on the grated floor. He had lost his balance during the daydream. His head hurt, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from landing on it, or the virus attacking him.

For the first time, he considered giving up, right there. He told himself that the virus would kill them all soon anyway, that he was lucky. He would get to die peacefully in this place rather than in the chaos of a ship full of sick people all demanding attention.

And yet somewhere, deep inside him, a flame of hope still burned. Hope, and faith. Not a religious faith: that was something he’d never had. Rather, a faith in Doctor Russell Vardy. A faith in Doctor Janice Hanson, a faith in Lucya, Martin, Coote, and the rest of the crews of the Spirit of Arcadia and of HMS Ambush. There was still time. They had the machine. They could still make it. Giving up now would be to give up on them, and he knew they deserved better. He owed it to them to stay alive. They were working with every ounce of effort they could muster to save him, and all the others who had been infected. The least he could do was stay around to be saved.

With renewed motivation, he forced his eyes open and tried to push himself back up into a sitting position.

It was then that he first noticed the panel in the wall. He hadn’t seen it before, because he had been focussed on the door itself. The panel was on the right-hand wall, set a metre or so back from the door. Its purpose was in no doubt, because stencilled large in bright yellow paint, was a notice. It said simply: “Push to Open.”

The panel was, of course, out of his reach. But not by much.

Jake had left his torch back in the generator room, but he still had his gas mask. Sitting as upright as he could, he held it by one of its two filters and tapped the panel with the other.

Nothing happened at all.

He tried again, tapping harder. The panel moved, although barely, recessing itself further into the wall. But still, nothing. It was as if it wanted to be pressed by a hand rather than an inanimate object.

Jake remembered the trolley. It was right behind him. He pushed it around so it was pressed against the opposite wall, and heaved himself back on board. Getting it turned round again was more of an effort, but he was a determined man and after a couple of false starts he found himself sitting next to the panel, just high enough to be able to reach it. He raised his hand, placed it in the centre of the rectangle, and pushed.

It looked like nothing was going to happen again, but then, from somewhere inside the wall, a deep rumbling sound emerged. In front of him, the huge door started moving, sliding upwards, right into the ceiling.

• • •

Had Kiera Stevens been in a better state, she might have objected to the audience gathered around her bed. Surgeon Lieutenant Russell Vardy, Doctor Janice Hanson, three nurses, including Mandy, who had been awoken from her delicious slumber by the commotion, and Lucya. They were all packed into the small stateroom in which Kiera and Barry had been laid up. As it was, Kiera was entirely oblivious to those watching on; she had long since lost consciousness. That was a blessed relief for her, because she was decaying fast. The nurse had not been wrong with her diagnosis. Kiera did not have much longer to live.

Vardy was trying to administer the antiviral, but it was not proving to be easy. Although Kiera was unconscious, her limbs were twitching, almost convulsing. It was as if the virus knew it was about to be attacked and had taken possession of her, making it nigh on impossible for the surgeon lieutenant to inject the drug. Even when he was able to grab an arm or a leg briefly, before it was snatched away by another involuntary muscular movement, he was having great trouble finding a vein. Her skin was covered in red blotches, some so deep they had become black. In places, the flesh was falling away completely.

“Doctor Hanson, I’m going to need some help here,” he said, frustration raising the pitch of his voice. “You need to hold down her arm long enough that I can get this in.”

Janice stepped forward. During her career as a forensic pathologist she had seen bodies that were in a terrible state. Burnt bodies, crushed bodies, decapitated bodies, even brutally beaten and half-eaten bodies. But every one of those bodies had had one thing in common: they had all been dead.