Noah's Ark: Contagion (21 page)

“But?” Lucya looked at him quizzically. Something in the way he spoke made her think that all was not right.

He opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by Erica pushing her way in front of him.

“Lucya! You’re back!”

“Hey, sweetie, are you okay?” She bent down and picked the girl up, hugging her tight. She surprised herself with just how happy she was to see the child.

“Dave showed me the maps. I’ve learnt the names of five countries!”

“That’s amazing, well done! Perhaps you’ll be a navigator one day? Telling the captain where to take the ship?”

“Is that what you do?”

“Yes,” Lucya said, smiling. “The captain does everything I tell him.” She caught Dave’s eye and gave him a wink. “Do you mind staying with Dave and Chuck a bit longer? I have to go and meet Jake. He’s bringing us something very important.”

“Will it make Daddy better?”

Lucya felt a pang of guilt, but she knew this wasn’t the right time to explain. “I don’t know about that,” she said softly. She told herself it wasn’t a lie, not really. She wasn’t getting the girl’s hopes up.

Erica looked into her eyes. “Is my daddy dead?” she asked simply.

Lucya was shocked. She hadn’t anticipated the question at all. Suddenly she felt all eyes were on her, not just Erica’s, but Dave’s and Chuck’s too. The atmosphere had changed in a second; only Erica seemed to be breathing.

“Yes,” Lucya whispered finally, her voice hoarse. The girl in her arms became a blur as her eyes ran with tears. “Yes, I’m so sorry, my love.”

“Don’t cry, Lucya.” Erica hugged her tightly. “Daddy wouldn’t want us to be sad. When Mummy died, he said she’d gone to heaven to watch over us, and that she’d be sad if we were sad all the time. Now Daddy’s in heaven with Mummy, isn’t he?”

Lucya sobbed and trembled uncontrollably, unable to speak. She didn’t believe in God or heaven, and events following the asteroid hadn’t done anything to change that. At the same time, she knew that this was a harmless lie, one that Erica could hang on to and draw strength from. “Yes,” she managed to croak. “I’m sure they’re in heaven together, looking down on you.”

Erica didn’t speak. Lucya could feel the girl’s tears run down her face and fall onto her own neck. The two of them stayed like that, bound together for a long time as each of them tried to come to terms with the truth.

It was Erica who pulled herself together first. Sniffing, she extracted herself from Lucya’s embrace, and with her tiny hand she dried first her own tears, then those of Lucya.

“Will you look after me now, Lucya? You and Jake?”

“Of course we will, my darling, of course!”

• • •

Opening the door, Jake realised, wasn’t going to be easy. Propping himself up on one hand, the handle was still out of reach.

He considered the problem. If he could get his shoulders higher, then his hand would reach further. He rolled himself over onto his back, then pushed himself into a sitting position. By continuing to push his hands against the floor he was able to raise his bottom a few centimetres from the ground and shuffle backwards. After a lot of shuffling, he was sitting with his back to the door. Reaching a hand over his head, the handle was almost within reach. The tips of his fingers brushed against it, although through the thick rubber that covered him, he couldn’t feel it.

Shaking his head to try and restore some clarity, he turned his attention to the objects he had with him. There was the torch of course, but it quickly became obvious that was not going to work. One try was enough to see that the rounded bulge of the lamp was incapable of getting any purchase against the handle; it just slipped right off.

His next idea was the sections of wetsuit sleeve that were pulled over his feet to offer additional protection from the ash. As he considered he wasn’t likely to make it outside, much less be walking anywhere, the sleeves were redundant. Leaning forwards he tried in vain to reach them, to pull them off. Jake kept himself reasonably fit; he was certainly no slouch. If he’d tried a day earlier, he would easily have been able to accomplish the manoeuvre. But with the bulk of the wetsuit around his body, and the paralysis in his legs spreading gradually towards his belly, he might as well have been reaching for the moon. His feet were even further out of range that the handle itself.

That left only one possibility: the gas mask. Vardy had suggested putting the masks back on when they had entered the hidden level, when it became clear what sort of work had been carried out down there. There was no specific threat, nothing they had seen suggested the air was anything but perfectly breathable. And yet, removing the mask felt like a giant step to Jake. Sending Ewan and the others on without him had been quite simple. Although doing so meant he would probably die in the tunnels, there was a disconnection between his action and the ultimate reaction. It was easy to be brave when the consequences were delayed. But removing the mask? That was an action that could directly and immediately lead to being poisoned, or gassed, or infected with a biological agent even more deadly than the virus that was already attacking his body. Removing the protection of the air filters could lead to a quicker death.

There was one other option, he told himself. He didn’t have to open the door. What was to be gained? It wasn’t as if he would find a miracle cure inside. And even if there were other survivors, what could they do for him? He risked infecting them if he went in.

“Hello?” he shouted as loud as he could. His voice was muffled by the mask, but the sound still carried well in the confines of the concrete tunnel. “Is there anyone there?” His lungs once again felt fit to burst. The damage caused by the gas and the effect of the virus had greatly reduced their capacity, and every word hurt as he shouted it. He hammered on the door with both fists. He banged his hands against the metal grate floor. The noise reverberated around him. Even when he stopped, it seemed to echo through his head. There was no answer. Nobody opened the door, and nobody came running to see who had entered their base. He was completely alone.

With nothing to lose, he made a snap decision. The mask was whipped off in one movement. Jake took a deep breath through his nose, opened his mouth, and let it out slowly. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said to himself quietly. The air was cool and had a strange smell to it, a metallic tang that stuck in the back of his throat. He took more breaths. He could feel his heart banging inside his chest, but the more he breathed, the calmer he became. If there was anything dangerous in the atmosphere, it wasn’t going to kill him immediately.

Grasping the gas mask by one of its two filters, he held it high above his head and looped the straps around the door handle. The rubber gripped the smooth metal, and with the tiniest of clicks the door unlatched. Jake had to throw out a hand to stop himself falling backwards as his weight was no longer supported by it.

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

F
ROM
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.”