It was a perfect day, the afternoon sky cloudless and azure. Beneath the burning summer sun, Ben Shepherd walked slowly between the houses, an airtight suit protecting him from any chance of contagion. From time to time he would stop and go inside, looking about him, seeing where the dead had been taken; this one sat at table over a plate of untouched, rotting breakfast; that one on its knees beside the bath, a stain of vomit telling its own dark story.
He looked, his eyes taking it all in, processing it, his mind already weaving the cloth of a new tale from these sickening threads. It was like the whole world had died. The disease had passed like a cloud over the sun of their collective being and blotted them out. Only one in twelve had survived, according to the latest figures. And no one knew why. Sheer will, Ben told himself, stepping out into the dusty street once more. There was no other answer, after all. For this silent army had come upon a people without defences.
"Kick-start", GenSyn had called it when they'd made it. And then Lehmann had taken the drug and mutated it, given it a new name and sold it on the open market "Golden Dreams", he'd called it And finally it had changed itself; become a predator, feeding on human blood and tissue. The ultimate killer. The Hollower, as it was known.
Ben frowned, then sniffed the air, but he could smell nothing through his helmet's filters. Briefly he thought of taking it off, but why take the risk? He need only take a sample of the air - a machine could do the rest; analysing the various pheromones. From that he could produce a safe analog. Something that would remind without killing.
Yes, he thought, but where's the story?
When the tragedy was so sudden, so general, was it really quite so tragic? He walked toward the river now, musing on the question. Whatever poignancy each individual death might have possessed had been robbed by the sheer scale of the disaster. When death was on such a scale it became anonymous, anodyne. To make his story work he needed a single focus. One single soul to animate the tragic whole.
"A child," he said softly, thinking of Chuang Kuan Ts'ai. "It has to be a child."
A child cut off from its parents when the epidemic hit. A child . . .
Ben laughed, then rubbed his gloved hands together, seeing it whole. It was exactly what he had been waiting for: the perfect vehicle for his experiments in death. Stepping Over, he would call it.
Stepping over . . .
As the wind rose, a corpse blew past him, tumbling end over end like a loose, dry bush. And in his mind he saw it burning, its smoke sweetly-scented, like incense. A God-sign, given to him alone; for him alone to interpret.
Ben walked on, smiling broadly, the river just ahead of him now. And as he walked the opening words of Dante's epic "poem came to his lips:
"Day was departing and the dusk drew on, loosing from labour every living thing save me, in all the world; I -1 alone - "
Michael Lever stood before the screen in the downstairs study, channel-surfing, trying to find a station that was still transmitting. The House Computer could have located one in an instant, but he had dispensed with its services these last few days, wanting to keep busy.
"Well?" Emily asked, coming into the room. "Still searching," he said over his shoulder. "How are the boys?"
"Fine," she answered, coming across and standing beside him. "They're restless, but that can't be helped. Better restless than dead, neh?"
The slightest irony in her voice made him turn and look at her. "I thought we'd settled this."
She shrugged, her face closed against him.
He sighed and rolled his eyes to Heaven. "They're alive, aren't they?Aiyal What in the gods' names did you want, Em?"
"I wanted to help ..."
"You wanted to die, that's what. You and your boys. Because that's what would have happened if you'd gone out there like you wanted."
"Maybe..."
He shook his head, angry with her suddenly - at her ingratitude as much as anything. "No, no maybes about it. You'd be dead. And the boys would be dead. And how would that have helped?"
"Shooting those men didn't help, did it?" she answered, a fire in her eyes now.
He swallowed. "So what was I supposed to do? Let them break down the gates and come in?" He laughed, incredulous. "You know what would have happened if they had, don't you? I mean . . . apart from us all getting the disease. They would have killed us, thaf s what. You saw how desperate they were."
"You can't say that. You didn't even talk to them."
"They didn't respect our sign."
"But they were desperate."
"And so was I." Michael turned from her. "Anyway, you've not got to worry about that, have you? I mean, thaf s on my conscience, not yours. Yours is white as white, after all!"
"That's unfair!"
"Is it?" He turned back, glaring at her now. "Consider the facts. This thing ... the Hollower. Look what if s done to our world in a mere five days. Asia, Africa, America, there's not a single City where it hasn't spread. Decimation isn't the word for it. Over ninety per cent fatalities. Ninety per cent! Shit! Don't you understand what that means. Emily? It means we're back in the Stone Age! It means . . ." He shuddered, then fell silent, shaking his head.
"I'm sorry," she said, after a moment. "It's just. . . it's just that I feel so helpless. I want..."
".. .to go out there. I know" He looked at her again, admiring her spirit even as he was irritated by her illogic and angered by her ingratitude. "You want to do something, neh?"
"Well, it's better than sitting on your arse and doing nothing!"
He stared at her, saying nothing, hurt by her accusation.
"So?" she said. "Do you think it's safe?"
He laughed, amazed by her persistence. "You really want to try it out there?"
"Why not?"
"Because we don't know. Because . . ." He swallowed, then said it. "Because I don't want to lose you, Em."
"So if s not the boys you're worried about. . ."
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Em! Do you have to twist everything? Of course I'm worried about the boys. It'd hurt me if any of them were hurt. But it's you I love. Is that such a fucking crime?"
She stared at him a moment, then, unexpectedly, she smiled.
"I thought you'd lost it, you know."
"Lost it?"
"Your temper. I thought. . ." She reached out and touched his cheek. It was the first intimate gesture she had made .toward him in the two years she had lived inside his walls. He closed his eyes, savouring it.
"Anyway," he said, feeling her fingers move away, opening his eyes again to look at her. "I am doing something."
"Like what?"
"Like producing an antidote."
She stared at him, mouth open. "You've got one?"
"It's being delivered later today. The simulations suggest it's effective in close to ninety-five per cent of cases. If we can mass-produce it."
Emily looked down, sighing. "If only we'd had it five days back . . . three days, even."
"But we didn't." He took a long breath, then. "Look, Em. There must be many more like us. People who've locked themselves in. Small, isolated pockets of healthy life. If we can get to them... if we can get the antidote to them, thaf d be something, surely?"
She looked up at him, then nodded, a profound sadness in her face. "Yes," she said, smiling through the pain. "That would be something."
As Ben turned the comer he knew that something was wrong. There was a pile of burned and broken furniture not twenty feet away - between him and the waiting cruiser - that had not been there earlier. Aside from that, other, smaller things had changed. Someone had been here. A number of someones.