Spermophobia, thought Edward, Mysophobia. A lot of people had developed such phobias since the rats came.
“Now there are these other things, she’s become terrified of disease.”
Nephophobia, Pathophobia. Once arcane medical terms, now almost everyday parlance. They were closely connected, not so surprising when you remembered what she’d been through.
“It’s been making life very difficult for us.”
“I can imagine.” Everything had to be cleaned over and over again. Floors scrubbed, handles and counters sprayed with disinfectant, the air kept refrigerated. All her foodstuffs had to be washed and vacuum-sealed in plastic before she would consider eating them. Edward had watched the roots of fear digging deeper within her day by day, until she could barely function and he could no longer cope.
“She’s lost so much weight. She’s become frightened of the bacteria in her own body. She was living on the top floor of the house, refused to take any visitors except us, and now she’s gone missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. We thought you should know.”
“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“She couldn’t have gone anywhere, that’s the incredible part of it. We very badly need your help. Can you come over tonight?” This is a turnaround, Edward thought. Her family spent a year trying to get me to clear off, and now they need me.
“I suppose I can come. Both of you are still okay?”
“We’re fine. We take a lot of precautions.”
“Has the family been vaccinated?”
“No, Matthew and our father feel that The Lord protects us. Do you remember the address?”
“Of course. I can be there in around an hour.”
He was surprised they had found the nerve to call at all. The brothers had him pegged as a man of science, a member of the tribe that had helped to bring about the present crisis. People like him had warmed the planet and genetically modified its harvests, bringing abundance and pestilence. Their religion sought to exclude, and their faith was vindictive. Men who sought to accuse were men to be avoided. But he owed it to Gill to go to them.
He used the short steel bar to block the gap in the door, and covered the shortfall by welding a biscuit-tin lid over it. Not an ideal solution, but one that would have to do for now. The sun would soon be setting. The red neon sign above the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opposite had flickered on. It was the only part of the store that was still intact. Rioters had smashed up most of the junk-food joints in the area, looking for someone to blame.
Pest-controllers had put the massive rise in the number of rats down to three causes: the wetter, warmer winters caused flooding that lengthened the rats’ breeding periods and drove them above ground. Councils had reduced their spending on street cleaning. Most disastrously of all, takeaway litter left the street-bins overflowing with chicken bones and burger buns. The rat population rose by thirty per cent in a single year. They thrived in London ’s Victorian drainage system, in the sewers and canal outlets, in the Tube lines and railway cuttings. Beneath the city was a maze of interconnected pipework with openings into almost every street. They moved into the gardens and then the houses, colonizing and spreading as each property became vacant.
One much-cited statistic suggested that a single pair of rats could spawn a maximum number of nearly a hundred billion rats in just five years. It was a sign of the burgeoning rodent population that they began to be spotted during the day; starvation drove them out into the light, and into densely populated areas. They no longer knew fear. Worse, they sensed that others were afraid of them.
Edward had always known about the dangers of disease. As a young biology student he had been required to study pathogenic microbes. London had not seen a case of plague in almost a century. The Black Death of the Middle Ages had wiped out a third of the European population. The bacterium Yersinia pestis had finally been eradicated by fire in London in 1666. Plague had returned to consume 10 million Indians early in the twentieth century, and had killed 200 as recently as 1994. Now it was back in a virulent new strain, and rampant. It had arrived via infected rat fleas, in a ship’s container from the East, or perhaps from a poorly fumigated cargo plane, no one was sure, and everyone was anxious to assign blame. Rats brought leptospirosis, hantavirus and rat-bite fever, and they were only the fatal diseases.
Edward drove through the empty streets of King’s Cross with the windows of the Peugeot tightly closed and the air-conditioning set to an icy temperature. Lying in the road outside McDonald’s, a bloated, blackened corpse had been partially covered by a cardboard standee for Caramel McFlurrys. The gesture, presumably intended to provide some privacy in death, had only created further indignity. It was the first time he’d seen a body on the street, and the sight shocked him. It was a sign that the services could no longer cope, or that people were starting not to care. Most of the infected crept away into private corners to die, even though there were no red crosses to keep them in their houses this time.
The plague bacillus had evolved in terms of lethality. It no longer swelled the lymph glands of the neck, armpits and groin. It went straight to the lungs and caused catastrophic internal haemorrhaging. Death came fast as the lungs filled with septicaemic pus and fluid. There was a preventative vaccine, but it proved useless once the outbreak began. Tetracycline and streptomycin, once seen as effective antibiotics against plague, also failed against the emerging drug-resistant strains. All you could do was burn and disinfect; the city air stank of both, but it was preferable to the smell of death. It had been a hot summer, and the still afternoons were filled with the stench of rotting flesh.
Edward had been vaccinated at the college. Gill had blamed him for failing to vaccinate their son in time. Sam had been four months old when he died. His cradle had been left near an open window. They could only assume that a rat had entered the room foraging for food, and had come close enough for its fleas to jump to fresh breeding grounds. The child’s pale skin had blackened with necrosis before the overworked doctors of University College Hospital could get around to seeing him. Gill quickly developed a phobic reaction to germs, and was collected by her brothers a few weeks after.
Edward dropped out of college. In theory it would have been a good time to stay, because biology students were being drafted in the race to find more powerful weapons against the disease, but he couldn’t bear to immerse himself in the subject, having so recently watched his child die in the very same building.
He wondered why he hadn’t fled to the countryside like so many others. It was safer there, but no one was entirely immune. He found it hard to consider leaving the city where he had been born, and was fascinated by this slow decanting of the population. An eerie calm had descended on even the most populous districts. There were no tourists; nobody wanted to fly into Britain. People had become terrified of human contact, and kept their outside journeys to a minimum. Mad-cow disease was a comparative picnic, he thought, with a grim chuckle.
The little car bounced across the end of Upper Street, heading toward Shoreditch. The shadows were long on the gold-sheened tarmac. A blizzard of newspapers rolled across the City Road, adding to the sense of desolation. Edward spun the wheel, watching for pedestrians. He had started to think of them as survivors. There were hardly any cars on the road, although he was surprised to pass a bus in service. At the junction of Old Street and Pitfield Street, a shifting amoeba-shape fluctuated around the doorway of a closed supermarket. The glossy black rats scattered in every direction as he drove past. You could never drive over them, however fast you went.