‘Of course,’ Jonah said.
‘I mean it! I’ll put myself at risk, but not them.’ He looked at Lucy, crying softly in the seat beside him. ‘Never them.’
‘Never them,’ Jonah said. ‘And that’s why, despite all this, you’re not a bad lad.’
Vic coughed, a cross between a laugh and a sob. And the cars and trucks and buses passed them by, most of their drivers probably not even realising that they were going the right way. At the moment the threat was still cloaked in confusion, and perhaps people were always unwilling to accept the worst. But soon, very soon, there would be proper panic.
‘The man I’m sending you to is called Marc Dubois,’ Jonah said. ‘He’s a phorologist: studies disease carriers and the spread of epidemics. He’s one of the best in the world. He’s a good friend, and he’s at Cincinnati University. They’ve got a secure place there. He’s preparing it.’
‘What sort of place?’
‘Somewhere for times like this.’
Jonah gave him Marc’s contact details, they finished their conversation, and as Vic disconnected he felt a moment of overwhelming shame. While he’d been running, Jonah had been working, doing his best to devise ways in which this horror could be controlled now that it could no longer be contained.
‘So are you going to tell me where we’re going?’ Lucy asked softly.
‘Cincinnati. But first I’ve got to tell you why this is all my fault.’ Vic stared through the windscreen. It had started to rain, and the stream of tail lights looked distorted. His wife held his hand, and he thought of Holly, realising that he had been a student of guilt for quite some time.
‘. . . all but abandoned, though rumour has it there were at least thirty mutilated bodies found around the small town. So what happened to the rest of the population of over a thousand inhabitants? Where are they? No one knows. And no one knows why the authorities have labelled reports of “the dead rising” media scaremongering, when it’s quite clear from diverse eyewitness accounts that many of these attackers have been shot down, burned, electrocuted, fallen from a great height, or been crushed, only to recover to attack again. And no one knows why at least fifteen churches in Tennessee have reportedly closed their doors to non-believers. Battening down the hatches for the Rapture? You better believe it. Listen out for the sound of Heaven’s horns, people. And no one knows quite why that man in Chattanooga decapitated his baby son and three daughters while his wife was at work, or why police used machine guns against rioting civilians in Highland Park. People from Chattanooga, get on that choo-choo first chance you get. And folks are starting to ask why the President has yet to make a statement, why National Guard convoys are driving left and right, unable to find their own assholes, and why towns in Georgia and South Carolina are seeing vigilante gangs shooting people in the streets and burning their bodies. No one knows anything, people. And that’s why I’m remaining on air 24/7 from now on, because as soon as Richie Brock knows something, you will too. Remember, my number is—’
Jayne flicked the radio off and checked everything she’d laid out on her bed. Money, passport, purse, overnight bag, clothes. That was it. That was all she wanted to take, because everything else would remind her . . .
She had called her cousin, forgetting that it was late in Britain. I’m coming to stay with you, she’d said, and she’d hung up as Jill had mumbled something through her sleepy confusion. At least she knew she was still there.
The bite throbbed. She hated looking at it, because it reminded her again of what she should have become. She should be out there with them now, racing through the streets and looking for someone else to bite. But all she felt was sickness with the pressure of restrained grief, and queasy with pain from the familiar hated fires in her joints.
They probably wouldn’t let her on a plane with her medicine.