The network of platforms, ladders and bridges hangs from several tall trees. It’s an impressive engineering feat, but he does not have the inclination to admire it. Across the platforms there are people shouting, and then he sees why.
The zombies are climbing the uprights, slow and clumsy. Most of them fall or are shot down by marksmen with steam-powered weaponry. But not every zombie falls. For every hundred that do not make it, one manages to crawl onto one of the platforms. The fighting then becomes hand-to-hand, and everyone is involved. Even the children.
Jonah sees a woman hunkered beneath a flexible canopy, a baby at her breast and a long curved knife in her other hand. She is ready to free her child, and herself.
No, he pleads, please don’t, don’t make me see.
The air of this place is filled with their stench, and the aroma speaks of hopelessness.
They all fall in the end.
Jonah closes his eyes—
—the man stepped back and let him go. He had fallen to his knees in the corridor, and for a moment he glanced around expecting to see the burning sea, or the falling dead, or those people floating their way from terror to terror.
Does it really all come to this? he wondered. But, of course, it had – and it would again. Satpal had shown that. A brilliant man, he had seen how things were and had made his choice.
‘But not me,’ Jonah said. He picked up the gun and fired at his abuser. The man could have killed him at any moment. But he didn’t want Jonah dead. He wanted him to see.
‘Bastard,’ Jonah said. He looked for a gunshot wound in the man’s chest, but was not surprised to see none. The man had retreated to the end of the corridor, and stood staring at him, unmoving.
He comes from through there, showing me what happened to his world.
But why?
Jonah was rational and in full control of his faculties, though events were running away with him, and the idea of madness had seeped away. Yet while he had an answer for the raging things – which required irrational leaps of science – he had no answer for this.
He raised the gun and fired again. The man snorted – his mask emitting skeins of mist or steam – and then he walked calmly out of sight.
‘Tell me what you want,’ Jonah said after the noise of the gunshot had echoed away. But there was only silence.
5
In some ways, Marc reminded Vic of a younger Jonah, though he looked nothing like him – Jonah was thin and wiry, Marc was heavily built and strong. But there was a grace about him, an inner strength. Perhaps knowing more about the world than most people gave him a peace of mind that many others lacked.
Vic stood in Marc’s office doorway and looked inside, and he was amazed. The room was piled high with loose-leaf files, sample jars, DVDs, books, and magazines and newspapers yellowing around their edges. A desk was pressed against the rear wall, and there was a small sofa with a coffee table in front of it, both of which were also homes to boxes of files and papers. Marc was at his desk, working on a laptop. Vic saw the satphone beside him and wondered whether the phone networks were still down.
‘You lied about the rabbits,’ Vic said.
‘Your daughter hates me now?’
‘No. She just wanted rabbits.’
‘Right.’ Marc continued what he was doing, and it was half a minute before he spoke again. ‘Come on in.’ He still did not look up.
Vic entered and stood awkwardly in front of the loaded sofa, looking around the room and smelling the mustiness of time. ‘You work in here?’
‘Only when someone releases a plague that threatens the world.’
‘Doesn’t happen much, then.’
‘Threw it together myself – well, paid to have it done. This used to be an old water-pumping station and its offices. A grey concrete block, so no one’s interested in it. And, because it’s remote from the university, Jonah always called it my bunker.’
‘So what’s it for?’
‘Times when I need somewhere private to work. Lots of personal stuff stored here that I wouldn’t want the university to see. And it’s a retreat. I wanted to be prepared, just in case something like this ever happened.’