‘Rick? Rick!’ But Rick had gone. Jonah closed his eyes but he couldn’t think straight. Got to contain it, keep them in, maintain the perimeter. Already he could hear the static-filled thumping and smashing of glass, as somewhere directly above him the disease spread itself.
He disconnected, but kept hold of the satphone. After so many congratulatory phone calls over the past three days, he would now be the one to spread the devastating news. ‘Contagion,’ he said, practising the word again, and then he dialled.
After breaking the news to three key people on three continents, Jonah switched off the satphone and watched another friend die. Though he tried to he could not close his eyes. He saw Andy tripped and then pushed against a wall in the electrical plant room, arms thrashing at the mutilated guard holding him there, Mot?rhead T-shirt slashed and torn and darkened with his blood, eyes wide with panic and terror and disbelief as the guard pressed forward and closed his mouth on Andy’s nose and ripped his head to the side . . . and Jonah could not close his eyes. Here was his legacy, in blood. Here was the result of everything he had thrown himself into for years. The guard bit again and again, and then moved away to let Andy slump to the floor, dead.
It was only as Andy shoved himself upright again, half a minute later, that Jonah looked away.
The temptation to turn off the viewing screens was great. In his seventy-six years he had seen two dead bodies: his dear wife Wendy, prepared and laid to rest, her hair brushed the wrong way and her visage so painfully, terribly still; and Bill Coldbrook, his old friend and boss, whom Jonah had discovered hours after his suicide. Death was no stranger to him, yet it had always been distant.
But he berated himself for his cowardice. He was responsible for Coldbrook, and he had a responsibility for almost forty staff members down here, from the most talented scientist to the canteen cook. He had to keep watching the screens to see who would survive and where they would find shelter. After that . . . he did not know.
Jonah kept two of the four screens focused on Control, one zoomed in on the breach, the other encompassing the whole room. It was a dead place. Since he’d locked himself in Secondary fifteen minutes ago he had seen no movement there, though his attention flickered back to those screens every few seconds, drawn by the breach. It looked so harmless. So benign.
What had come through now lay dead on the floor of Control, one of the few motionless bodies he could find. Others, like Andy, moved on, perpetuating the violence and hunting down those as yet untouched. Shocked and confused though he was, Jonah was a scientist, someone who had always retained his sense of wonder. And already he was analysing what he was seeing.
The bites stopped them, they fell, and then they rose again, usually within a minute. The infection – because that was what it had to be – changed them. Kills them, he kept thinking, but he was not certain of that yet. Not definite. Melinda, Satpal . . . He shook his head. Perhaps the infection dulled pain receptors, did something to their sense of self, and drove them on through pain to . . .
‘Jesus,’ Jonah muttered, because it seemed the horror would never end. There were no microphones on the facility cameras and silence made the carnage more shocking somehow. The picture flickered and settled on the canteen, apparently still and peaceful until a naked man pulled himself up on one of the dining tables, his throat a ragged mess, his chest scored by scratch marks, and ran quickly from the room.
The image flicked to the kitchen. There was no one there and no movement, and then there was a thrashing at one edge of the screen, someone moving just out of shot, their shadow thrown across the room by harsh fluorescents, and a spray of blood splashed across the previously pristine food-preparation surface.