21st Century Dead Read online

  Warming to his subject, he continued. “A further reason why the program itself has been implemented is to give young people a chance to temporarily assume what is in effect a considerable amount of personal responsibility. This may seem daunting, even frightening, at first, but we in the program hope that ultimately you will come to look upon this next week as both a challenge and an opportunity to show just how mature and resourceful you can be. Before I talk about the specifics of your assignments, let me dispel some of the rumors about R1.”

  He raised a finger, as if about to accuse them of starting the rumors themselves. And then, as forcefully as if resuming an argument, he said, “Yes, R1 is a virus, but it could only be contracted by living beings such as yourselves if your blood and/or other bodily fluids were to become mingled with that of an R1 sufferer. R1 is not—I repeat not—an airborne virus. Neither can it be contracted simply by touching the flesh of a sufferer—however, we will issue you a plentiful supply of disposable gloves as an extra precaution against physical contact.

  “In the unlikely event that you should get scratched or bitten by your assigned R1 infant during the course of the program, the important thing to remember is, firstly, not to panic, and secondly, to seek immediate medical attention. Although we are still some way from finding a cure for the virus, we have discovered a vaccine that can eradicate R1 cells in the early stages of infection. Evidence has shown that patients treated with this vaccine within the first ninety minutes of infectious contact have a 98.7 percent recovery rate. However, there is no need whatsoever for you to become involved in any situation where there is even the remotest risk of infection. The R1 infant assigned to you should remain muzzled at all times, and as long as you adhere to the necessary precautions you will be fine.”

  Alistair Knott raised a hand. Mr. Letts frowned. “Yes?”

  “What about feeding time?” Alistair asked. “Won’t we have to take the muzzles off then?”

  “Not at all,” Mr. Letts replied curtly. “We will issue you more than enough disposable feeding tubes, which you attach to the front of the muzzle. I will demonstrate how in a few minutes.”

  As if Alistair’s question had emboldened the rest of the class, Millie now raised her hand. “What about the smell?” she said. “My mum says she doesn’t want an R1 in the house because they stink.”

  Mr. Letts looked momentarily outraged, but a huff of exasperation downgraded the expression into a scowl. Acidly he said, “The facility’s inmates do not smell. Like all R1 sufferers, it’s true that their bodies have succumbed to a limited amount of physical corruption—a process which is subsequently arrested by what we call the ‘R1 barrier,’ which incidentally we still do not fully understand—but all of our test subjects have been treated with a combination of chemicals which negates the more unpleasant effects of bodily decomposition.” He glanced at Mrs. Keppler. “Well, if there are no more questions, I think it’s time for you to become acquainted with your charges.”

  For the first time Fleur felt jittery with nerves as the class lined up, each to be presented with a metal tag bearing a four-digit number. When that was done, Mr. Letts crossed unhurriedly to a narrow door tucked between the edge of the glass screen and the adjoining wall and tapped out a code on a keypad. The effect of his action, as he stepped back, was twofold. The lights flickered on in the Crèche, transforming the black screen into a viewing window, and the door unlocked with a series of clicks.

  As she shuffled forward behind a dozen of her classmates, Fleur glanced almost unwillingly at the room beyond the glass. She was just in time to see rows of evenly spaced incubators made of opaque plastic the color of sour milk before she was through the door and among them.

  The first thing that struck her about the Crèche was its stillness. The incubators were so silent that they might have been occupied by dead meat, or nothing at all. The stillness seemed to reach out and stifle the combined sound of almost thirty thirteen-year-olds—the rustle of clothing, the squeak of rubber soles on vinyl flooring, the soft rasp of respiration that was trying not to escalate beyond nervousness. When Mr. Letts, who had slipped into the room at the back of the group, spoke, it made them all jump.

  “Some of you may be experiencing a sense of disquiet, perhaps even anxiety or distress, about now. Am I right?”

  As if on cue, one of the girls—Fleur thought it might have been Lottie Travis—failed to curtail a sob. Around her, she became aware of heads nodding slowly, and then of her own joining in.

  “That’s a perfectly natural reaction,” Mr. Letts said in an almost kindly voice. “Living babies are a bundle of instincts. As human beings we’re used to them moving almost constantly, even in repose—but the R1 infants, as you will see, are a different case entirely. Their only instinct is to feed, but they seem to know—or at least their bodies do—that there is little point transferring energy and resources into limbs that do not respond in an efficient manner. Therefore, they remain motionless as they wait to be fed. Having lived almost all their short lives in the facility, they have become creatures of habit. They feed three times a day and they expel waste products once a day. The advantage of this for you is that as long as you administer to these routine requirements, you will find the R1 infants simple to maintain. If, however, you deny them their sustenance for any length of time then they will do what normal infants do. Can you guess what that is?”

  Fleur put up her hand. “Cry?”

  “Exactly,” replied Mr. Letts. “Though it is a cry you will never have heard before, and almost certainly will never want to hear again.”

  Behind her, Fleur heard another sob tear itself loose from Lottie. There was a prolonged shuffle and bump as Mrs. Keppler led the girl through the crowd and out of the room, and then Mr. Letts said, “Time to match you up, I think.”

  Gesturing toward the incubators, he told them to search for the ones that matched the numbers on their tags. Fleur looked at hers as her classmates shifted around her like restless cattle. After a few seconds, several of her peers—Ray Downey, Alistair Knott, Tina Payne—broke away from the huddled group and began to move tentatively among the rows of tiny plastic boxes.

  “What’s your number?” Millie asked almost fearfully, as if one of the tags might prove the equivalent of a short straw.

  “It’s 4206,” Fleur replied.

  “Mine’s 9733. Let’s look together, shall we?”

  The numbers on the incubators seemed random, as if this were a treasure hunt or a puzzle, but Fleur supposed they must adhere to some system somewhere. Like Millie, she tried to focus on the numbers stamped on the ends of the plastic boxes rather than on their contents, which remained nothing but darkish blurs on the periphery of her vision. It took her several minutes, but at last she spotted the number that matched the one on her tag.

  “It’s here,” she said, suddenly breathless.

  “What have you got?” asked Millie. “A girl or a boy?”

  “I daren’t look,” Fleur replied.

  “I’ll look for you then, shall I?” Millie moved up beside her. After a few seconds, she quietly said, “It’s a boy.”

  Fleur felt as though she were having to override a physical restraint in order to raise her head. She managed it at last, blinking to focus her gaze. The baby in the incubator was lying on its back with its arms upraised in a crucifix position. It looked not dead but as if it was pretending to be, which was somehow worse. Its eyes were dark glints in its mottled, bluish face, and its chest, which should have been rising and falling, was as still as a lump of clay and not dissimilar in texture.

  “He’s cute,” Millie said, not at all convincingly. “What are you going to call him?”

  Fleur’s thoughts felt as heavy as wet cement. She blurted out the first and only thing that came to mind.

  “Andrew,” she said. “After my dad.”

  * * *

  “So this is it, is it?”

  Elliott peered into the portable crib, which Fleur had put on the k
itchen table. As always, he looked tired and grubby after a long shift spent patrolling the perimeter, his hair peppered with the dust that kicked up from the scrubland. He was twenty, lean and muscular, often difficult to predict emotionally. Sometimes he was broody, uncommunicative; at other times he was easygoing, quick to smile. Fleur loved her brother, but she couldn’t say that she fully understood his quicksilver personality. Needless to say, most of her friends found him mysterious, and so had a massive crush on him.

  “He’s a he, not an it,” she said.

  Elliott snorted. “Has Mum seen it?”

  “Not yet. She’s at Aunty Valerie’s.”

  “Course,” said Elliott, raising his eyebrows. “It’s Friday. I lose track in my job.” He opened the fridge, took out a bottle of soda, and opened it with a crack and a hiss. Dropping his weight into a wooden chair with a groan, he took a swig, then gave her a shrewd, sidelong look. “She won’t like having it in the house, you know. She hates those things.”

  Fleur felt irritably defensive. “He can’t help how he is.”

  Elliott shrugged. “Even so.”

  As Fleur prepared the baby’s feed, the silence stretched between them. It was a silence redolent of bad memories and unspoken grief. The reason why Elliott was a perimeter guard was that their father had been one before him. Seven years ago, when Fleur was six and Elliott thirteen, Andy McMillan had been on patrol when a section of faulty fencing in his quadrant had collapsed, allowing a group of at least two dozen R1s to swarm into the compound. In the ensuing melee, Andy had suffered multiple bites—so many that the virus had taken hold quickly. Jacqui was the only one who had seen her husband in the hospital, raging and inhuman. And it was she, alone and traumatized, who had had to make the terrible decision that faced all R1 sufferers’ next of kin—to allow their loved ones to live on in a contained, controlled environment or to give the order to bring their suffering to a swift and humane end.

  Fleur had been too young to fully appreciate Jacqui’s anguish over the decision, but Elliott’s reaction and the subsequent screeching arguments between Fleur’s mother and brother were scarred into her memory. Elliott had accused Jacqui of murdering their father. Jacqui had retaliated by saying that she had only been carrying out Andy’s wishes, that he had made it abundantly clear that if the worst ever happened, the last thing he would want would be for his family to see him reduced to the state of a slavering, mindless animal.

  Eventually, of course, the raw wounds had closed up and the arguments had subsided. But they had never properly healed. There had been so much venom released during the endless round of accusations and counteraccusations, so much anger and hatred and hurt expelled and absorbed by both sides, that there would always be a tenderness there, a weak spot. Jacqui and Elliott loved each other, relied on each other, looked out for each other—but there still existed an underlying tension between them, a sense that if, for whatever reason, circumstances should ever force the wound to reopen, then all the old venom and more besides would come gushing out anew.

  It was Elliott who eventually broke the silence. “That stuff smells disgusting.”

  Fleur couldn’t disagree. She had emptied one of the sachets of powdered meal, which they had each been given before leaving the facility, into a bowl and was now adding hot water, as instructed. The stench that rose from the reddish paste was like the most rancid dog food imaginable. Holding her breath and screwing up her eyes, she nodded at a silvery rucksack emblazoned with the Moorlands logo, which was leaning against a table leg. “Get a feeding tube out of the pack, will you?”

  Elliott stretched out a leg, hooked the pack with his foot, and pulled it to him. He rummaged through its contents and extracted a short length of corrugated tubing with a metal screw attachment at one end and a funnel at the other.

  “I’m guessing you mean one of these,” he said, handing it to her.

  She took it from him. “Thanks.”

  He watched as she screwed the tube into a circular aperture at the front of the visorlike muzzle that was fastened securely around the lower half of the baby’s face.

  “Fucking grotesque,” Elliott said with a bleak laugh. “Now it looks like an elephant fetus.”

  Ignoring her brother, Fleur mixed cold water into the thick, foul-smelling gruel and then began to spoon it into the funnellike end of the feeding tube. After a moment the baby’s black eyes widened, its limbs began to twitch and squirm, and it began to eat with a muffled, wet, gnashing sound.

  “Oh, that is totally gross,” Elliott said almost delightedly, rocking back in his chair.

  Fleur shot him a disapproving look. “He needs to eat, Elliott.”

  Elliott sat forward again abruptly, his eyes narrowing. “Why does he? I mean, why does it?”

  “Because it’s a school project,” Fleur said. “I have to look after him. Do you want me to fail for being a bad mother?”

  Elliott shrugged. “Who’s going to know?”

  Fleur pointed at a thin metal bracelet around the baby’s right wrist. “That monitors his physical state—his metabolism and stuff. They’d know if I didn’t look after him properly.”

  Elliott peered at the bracelet. “I could probably fix that.”

  “Don’t you dare!” said Fleur. “I want to do this properly.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do, that’s all.”

  Elliott pulled a face. “Well, I think it’s sick. Looking after those things, keeping them alive…”

  “They’re test subjects,” said Fleur. “Without live subjects we’d never find a cure for the R1 virus.”

  “That’s what you’re doing now, is it?” taunted Elliott. “Vital medical research?”

  Before Fleur could reply, there was the rattle of a key in the lock and the front door opened, admitting a brief roar of traffic noise.

  Fleur tensed as her mother’s footsteps approached the kitchen. She’d wanted to get the first feed over and done with before Jacqui arrived home. As it was, her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway with her face screwed into an expression of repugnance.

  “What’s that awful smell?” she said.

  “It’s the baby’s feed,” said Fleur nervously. “Sorry, Mum. It does pong a bit.”

  Jacqui put down her bags and sloughed off her threadbare coat as she walked across the room. She’d become thinner over the last few years, though not in a healthy way. She looked haggard and pale, her green eyes too large for her once elfin face, her almost-black hair tied back in a lifeless ponytail. Fleur felt her guts squirm as her mother examined the feeding infant, the repugnance on her face hardening into something more deep-rooted.

  “How was Aunt Valerie?” Fleur asked, to break the silence.

  “Same as always.” With barely a pause, Jacqui asked, “Where are you going to keep it?”

  “In my room,” Fleur said.

  “It’ll stink the place out.”

  “It doesn’t smell. Only its food does. It’ll be finished in a minute.” She avoided Elliott’s eye as she spoke, aware that she, too, was now referring to the baby not as “he” but “it”—compromising her principles to avoid conflict.

  To her surprise, her mum said, “Poor creature.”

  Elliott made a noncommittal sound that could have been an acknowledgment of her comment or a rebuttal of it.

  “I thought you hated the R1s,” Fleur said tentatively.

  “I hate the virus,” Jacqui said. “And when people get infected, the virus is all they become.” She nodded at the baby. “It doesn’t mean I don’t grieve for the people the virus wipes out, the ones who once occupied the flesh—or in this case the one who never even got a chance to become a person.”

  “You don’t think the real person is still in there somewhere then?” said Fleur. “And that if they find a cure those people will come back?”

  All sorts of emotions chased themselves across Jacqui’s face. “I want to believe,” she said eventually. “But I don’t know if I can.”<
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  * * *

  “Ricky Jackson’s dad took his back. Said he and Ricky’s mum couldn’t stand having it in the house. So did Lottie Travis’s mum—she said it was giving Lottie nightmares. But did you hear about Tina Payne?” Millie’s brown eyes were wide.

  Fleur shook her head.

  “Get this,” Millie said, and lowered her voice to a dramatic murmur. “Her dad came home drunk, and the baby was crying ’cause Tina wasn’t feeding it properly. So he took it outside and dumped it headfirst in the bin and buried it under some rubbish and didn’t tell anyone. It was there two days before Tina went out and heard it crying.”

  “That’s awful,” said Fleur. “Was it all right?”

  Millie’s shrug sent her dreadlocks swaying and clinking. “S’pose. They don’t die, do they, even if you don’t feed them? You have to cut off their heads or burn them to kill them.”

  Fleur tried to imagine being upside down in a bin full of stinking rubbish for two days. The thought of it made her feel sick. “Do they feel pain or distress, do you think?”

  Millie pulled a face. “Don’t think so. Don’t think they feel anything really.”

  “Must be awful,” said Fleur.

  Millie nodded. “Yeah, I’d rather be dead than…” Then she realized what she was saying and clenched her teeth in apology. “Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  Fleur waved a hand as though wafting a fly. “It’s okay. So how did you find out all this stuff anyway?”

  Millie dipped her hand into the pocket of her shorts and extracted a wafer-thin rectangle with a burnished steel finish. “Smartfone 4.5,” she said. “Gossip Central. You should get one. Then we could talk all the time.”

  “I wish,” said Fleur, trying not to look envious. “But we can’t afford it. We’ve only got Elliott’s wage coming in. Mum’s got a 2.5, but she doesn’t let me use it.”