‘But it doesn’t help us,’ Marc said. ‘Here.’ He tapped a few keys and a map of the USA filled the screen. It was blank, a simple outline with fainter lines indicating state boundaries. There was a colour-coded key down the left-hand side, and a line of editing icons across the top. ‘This is a program I’ve been working on for a while. It can plot disease vectors, reported outbreaks, confirmed outbreaks, and lots of other stuff.’
‘Such as?’
‘Pretty much anything you want. Code input differently and it’ll bring up a different map. Convert it into graphs, or hard-data listings. So we can plot incidences of immunity, designated safe areas. . anything there’s data on. I’ve set it to follow all the online news channels. Uses word-recognition software to plot reported outbreaks. And it follows more reliable sites to plot confirmed outbreaks.’
‘What other sites?’
‘A variety,’ Marc said. ‘Military, Homeland Security. Stuff I shouldn’t have access to. I set up an automatic renewal on a search engine, repeating searches every ten seconds, and then word recognition again on the blogs it brings up.’
‘What words did you use?’
‘Zombie. Do you think we need any other?’
‘Zombie,’ Vic said, staring at the screen. ‘So how does this help us?’
‘It doesn’t,’ Marc said. ‘Not in the slightest.’ He sat back and pointed at the keyboard. ‘Hit enter.’
‘What am I seeing?’
‘Rate and extent of spread.’
Vic hit enter and sat back. A clock at the screen’s top right started at 00:00, and progressed half an hour every ten seconds. And in a little over eight minutes, he saw what he had done.
The outbreak centred on Coldbrook, in the southern arm of the Appalachians. To begin with the spread was slow, and the red dot barely changed for the first two hours. At hours three to five it snaked from that area a little, several distinct lines of red bleeding outward along roads. And once the roads were lit red, the spread happened faster. At hour six it flooded Greenville in the south, at hour eight Knoxville to the north. And then the spread increased, the red smudge bleeding outwards as if it was a schematic of the land’s greatest wound. Highways fed the spread, and the landscapes around them were soon flooded as well. At hour fifteen, Atlanta, Charlotte, Louisville and Nashville were within its grasp.
‘Got a cousin in Nashville,’ Gary said. ‘Top bloke. Barman.’
‘This just marks distinct outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Once they reach a certain concentration, the program fills in the surroundings.’
Vic waited a further couple of minutes until the program ended, frozen in time over twenty hours from when he had got out of Coldbrook. Then he sat back and held his hands to his face.
‘The military?’
‘As you’d expect,’ Marc said. ‘National Emergency, the Guard called up, doing everything in their power, blah-di-fucking blah. Offered my services, they just said they had their own people. But they don’t have what we have — Jonah, and Coldbrook.’
‘Had,’ Vic said.
‘He’ll get back online. He has to.’
‘Haven’t they sent anyone to Coldbrook?’ Vic asked, realising that he should have asked Jonah.
‘I asked,’ Marc said. ‘They told me that information was classified. So I made a call, spoke to a guy I know. The term he used was clusterfuck.’
‘And you’ve missed all the political shouting,’ Gary said. ‘National, international. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world’s watching this in real-time. All flights from the States turned back, north and south borders closed.’ He laughed out loud, a shocking sound. ‘Lot of good that will do! Like closing the borders to flies.’
‘What are these?’ Vic asked. Initially he’d believed that the scattered red dots elsewhere across the country might have been a fault on the laptop screen, or perhaps reports of false sightings. But the more he looked at them, the more they seemed to blink like red eyes.
‘Isolated outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Something like this doesn’t just spread evenly.’
‘But Jacksonville? Dallas?’
‘People run,’ Gary said. ‘Christ knows I would.’
‘I did,’ Vic said softly.
‘And that’s why the spread can never be stopped physically,’ Marc said. ‘Gary’s fly comment is pretty good, but still not accurate. There’s film all over the Internet of these things being shot, but short of building a five- thousand-mile-long wall to contain the whole area. .’ He raised his hands despairingly. ‘There are planes, trains, cars, helicopters, boats. Those infected don’t show intelligence — certainly no more than a rudimentary memory, and perhaps a basic ability to learn through repetition. But they could be trapped in a hold or a car’s trunk. Or maybe the infection can survive for a time in spilled blood.’
‘Holy fuck,’ Vic said.
‘That’s just what Marc’s been saying,’ Gary said.
‘I’ve been busy while you were resting.’ Marc dropped a leather notebook in Vic’s lap, folded open at a page filled with names. ‘Jonah and I. . we’ve been friends since you were shitting your diapers. Don’t agree on everything, that’s for sure. He’s a stubborn old fuck.’
‘You know him well,’ Vic muttered.
‘But one thing we’ve always agreed on is that there’s no politics or religion in science. No boundaries. Secrecy benefits states, but shared knowledge is the way forward for mankind. He’s already spoken to some of these people, but not all. He didn’t get through the list before. .’ He shrugged.
‘Spoken why?’ Vic asked.
‘For help. There are scientists around the world working on this, and I’ve already established a direct line with some of them.’
Vic started reading the names on the list. Some had a tick beside them, a few were crossed out. He recognised a few from conversations with Jonah over the years — and he knew a couple more by reputation. Others he had never heard of, and there were a few names he could not even pronounce.
‘Robert Nichols, professor of cellular immunology,’ Vic read. ‘Lucy-Anne Francis, physical cosmologist. Kazuki Yoshida, thanatologist. Caspian Morhaim, microbiologist.’
‘You know so many interesting people,’ Gary said.
‘And a musician can say that?’ Vic asked. He felt a brief, vivid flood of optimism, fed partly by Marc’s actions and the knowledge of the people they already had on their side, ready to work as hard as they could until this was over. But perhaps it was also inspired by knowing that Marc was now in control.
‘So what’s the bad news?’ Vic asked.
‘That was it,’ Gary said. ‘For the fucking terrible news, you’ll have to follow me.’
‘Where to?’ Vic went cold, because the two men had suddenly grown grimmer than ever. The smoky air in the room felt heavy, loaded.
‘The roof,’ Gary said. ‘I saw the first fire to the south half an hour ago.’
They climbed to the wide roof together and stood at the parapet. It was dawn. To the east the horizon was smeared deep pink and orange, reminding Vic of Marc’s disease-spread program. And to the south, Cincinnati was already awake.
There were three spires of smoke, each arcing gently to the west and spreading into a high haze. Two of them were several miles away, their sources hidden by folds in the land and buildings in the city, but Vic could see the glimmer of fire at the base of the third column. It was perhaps two miles away.
‘That’s a new one,’ Gary said. ‘Closer.’
‘Bengals’ stadium ablaze,’ Marc said. ‘You know. . everyone runs.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vic asked, but then he realised what Marc was getting at.
‘They run to survive, or they run to spread the disease. Those fuckers’ main aim isn’t to eat fucking brains, or whatever it is they do in the movies. They spread the disease, as quickly and widely as possible. This is no passive contagion.’
‘Hush,’ Gary said. They listened, and to begin with all Vic could hear was a gentle breeze blowing dust across the rooftop. Behind them the helicopter’s tied rotors groaned a little, as if the machine was keen to fly. And then, in the distance, a sound like bubblewrap being popped.
