The Migration, page 9
An old woman with pearl-white hair glances at me. “I don’t see what you’re sitting down here for,” she says. “Someone will be needing that seat.” I feign deafness. The bus is sparsely populated but she doesn’t want me here. I rub self-consciously at my medical ID bracelet and pull my sleeve down to cover it.
“Are you listening, child?” the woman insists, her voice low and querulous. She pokes my foot hard with her cane. “Go on then.”
I don’t answer and she doesn’t try again but I can feel her gaze on me. Doesn’t she know that I’m scared too? That I have no idea why any of this is happening? That I didn’t want it? Maybe death frightens her, but her body is understandable, its decline is slow and predictable. But me? I may as well be another species.
* * *
—
The bus takes me as far as Shipton-on-Cherwell, a tiny village north of Oxford, and I have to do the rest of the journey on foot. An hour later, I find myself hobbling beside the drainage ditch that borders the road a couple of miles from the cement works. The runoff is foamy, the colour of snail shells, creating a treacherous layer of muck.
But the long walk has loosened up some of the stiffness in my muscles. There’s still a nip to the air but the clouds have dispersed enough for the sun to chase the chill from my skin. Green-checkered fields and gently rolling hills surround me, hard limestone beneath. I pass signs for the Oxford Airport but the sky is empty of planes.
Soon I’m climbing steadily up Bunkers Hill. The air is heavy with woodsmoke and the loamy smell of rotting leaves. When I find the place where I went off the road, I can make out streaks of black rubber on the pavement. Shattered windshield sparkles like crystal. There: a trace of the Renault’s paint is lodged in a furrow in the bark of a yew tree. I trace it with a finger and the silver flecks crumble off easily.
Below me, past the tree line, I can see a broken vista of the cement works: trashed offices, gutted clinker silos, a pump house and a rusted water tower perched on the edges of a lake. And that massive two-hundred-foot chimney where I left Kira.
Is she still there? Do I still want her to be there?
When I close my eyes I want to pretend the whole thing has been a bad dream. That I’ll open them to find time has gone backwards. It’s the three of us walking out here, Aunt Irene promising to take us to see castles in Warwickshire when the weather warms up.
But it’s not a dream. Soon they’ll burn up another girl in Kira’s place. Someone’s sister, someone’s daughter. And what will they tell her family?
This is my responsibility. Mine alone.
I abandon the road entirely, push through the line of trees toward the tower while I still have my nerve. I lose my footing almost immediately on the steep decline, slide through the muck until my fingers snag around a gnarled root of an oak tree. A dozen yards from me is the fence. I find a gap and dig my elbows into puddles of water as I make myself small enough to crawl under. Sheared metal whispers and snags my coat, then I push free.
Soon I’m pressing my palms against the rusted metal door of the chimney. The hinges resist but I keep pushing. The door creaks open and light spills through, the colour of honey.
When I step inside there are three things I notice.
The first, a sound like rustling.
The second, a figure, tiny and pale—Kira—a barely recognizable muddle of limbs and shadow.
But it’s the third thing that stops me dead in my tracks: she’s not alone.
* * *
—
Who is he? How did he find her?
Fear burns a bright tang on my tongue. There’s an electric shimmer to the air, the same tingling on my skin. My body explodes into the gap between him and Kira and I swing my satchel, still full with two glass bottles of Coke, into his back. I slam into him.
Warm breath bursts from his lungs as the two of us crash into the concrete wall of the tower. He’s bigger than me, stronger too. I grab him, or try to, but he twists, easily, pinning my shoulders against his chest. His heart hammers like it could leap out of his body and into mine.
“Hey,” he says, “hey now. You don’t need to—” His lips are close to my ear. I smash my head backwards into his chin. A hot crescent of pain surfaces where his teeth make contact with my skull. He grunts and loosens his grip enough for me to slip away.
One step, two steps. I spin around to look at him.
“You…”
I know his face, even in the shadows. That wide forehead, almost hidden in curls, those dark eyes.
“I won’t let you take her.”
He takes a step back, afraid of me. Good. I’ll take him apart if he moves again.
His voice is low. “I just wanted to help.”
“Help? Help how?”
He touches his face and his hand comes away bloody. I’ve split his lip. “I followed you from the hospital. You don’t remember?”
“You were there,” I say slowly. There are gaps in my memory after the accident. I try to fit him into one of them. “Out on Bunkers Hill.”
“You nearly hit me. When you—after your car went into the trees you were in and out of consciousness. Talking about her. How you left her here.” His eyes are wide. He takes a step toward me.
“Don’t move.”
He stops, hands in the air. “However you want it.”
Fuck. What to do now?
Keeping an eye on him I kneel down next to Kira and gather her up in my arms. I recognize the sharp joint of her elbow, the way she curls her feet against me. But her lightness reminds me of china teacups, how delicate their arms are, how easily they break. She’s breathing still, and I feel her heart thudding, the blood travelling through her thawed veins and there’s a sweet leaping feeling inside my chest. Hope. I was right then. Somewhere inside, my sister might still be alive.
“When you left her here—”
“Shut up, would you?” I tell him. “I just need to figure this out.”
“You better let go of her. Please.” He wipes his lip on the sleeve of his coat, leaving a smear of blood. “You’ll snap her bones if you don’t leave off.”
I touch the back of her hand, damp, slightly tacky, and her knuckles flex and release. The air goes out of my lungs. How long have I been holding my breath? I lay her carefully back down onto the ground but she’s left a trace of something thick, glutinous and stinking on my palms.
“She listens at last,” he mutters.
“If you come near me I’ll scream.”
“For all the good it will do you. Do you think anybody would hear?”
“I—” A movement from Kira distracts me from finishing. Her hand knocks against my knee gently: sleepy, somnambulant, at once recognizable and utterly foreign.
“Her muscles are breaking down,” he says. “I don’t think you should touch her. She also looks as if she’s lost bone mass. A fair bit.”
I stare at her, trying to decide on my next move.
Where are you, Kira?
She cranes her head toward me, and her neck stretches and elongates. Thin silver lines radiate across her temple where the skin has already been stretched. Her eyes are larger than I remember. A corona of white circles the pupil. The amber rim of her iris is dappled with specks of grey-blue, glossy as oil, as if the pigmentation is beginning to break down. A small fold of tissue has grown into the outer corners of her eye. As she stares back at me, it shutters horizontally across her pupil with the speed of a switchblade and I jerk back.
It won’t be you anymore, Dr. Varghese had told me. It will be something else. A horrible thought: maybe I shouldn’t have taken her. Maybe it would have hurt her less to burn.
He’s close enough to help me up and I let him. “You’re bleeding,” he says. “We need to take care of that.” He’s right. The bandage over my stitches is gluey with blood. I try not to think about infection and septicemia, hemophilia, strokes. All the ways Dr. Varghese said my body might betray me.
Every decision is a doorway and I always seem to be stuck on the wrong side. Should I trust him? The weight of his arms around me, the smell of sweat, smoky and sweet at the same time. Human, at least, and alive. So. Which side of the door do I want to be on?
13
Outside the tower I can see him properly: dark hair, brown, melancholy eyes. He’s wearing an old donkey jacket, the kind used by labourers, bunched at the sleeves and unbuttoned down the front. Blood on the collar now, thanks to me.
“Tell me your name.”
He rubs a knuckle against his eyebrow. “Names,” he says. “Right. Bryan Taite.”
“I’m Sophie,” I offer warily.
“And her?” That classic English awkwardness has taken over.
“Kira.”
“I don’t know if it matters.” He sits down slowly on a large concrete block. I stay where I am, close to the door to the chimney. “Her name, that is. But it’s good to know.”
“It does matter. She was my sister. She isn’t just some…thing.”
“Sorry,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes. “That was an idiot thing to say.” He takes off his jacket even though a chilly breeze has begun to lace its way through the wreckage of the cement works. Grimacing, he stretches his arms, rubs at the spot between his shoulders where I hit him. “What was in that bag?”
“A couple of Cokes.”
“Any of them still going?”
Inside my satchel, the bottles are still intact. I hand him one, then back away a pace to open my own. Coke fizzes over my hands. I catch him grinning at me. “Let me look at your arm,” he says. A peace offering?
“Are you a doctor then?” I snipe.
“I saw the accident. I saw the blood. I…” He pauses. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to make it, to be honest.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m pleased you did. Make it. Anyway, my mum’s a nurse. So let’s have a look.” Reluctantly, I peel back my sleeve and he lifts the gauze. The stitches are still holding, but the skin looks raw and ragged. He doesn’t say anything about my medical ID bracelet. “Hold on a mo.” He pulls a sealed package the size of a teabag out of his back pocket and presses it into my hand. An alcohol prep pad. “Clean your hands first.” I tear it open with my teeth.
“Do you think they are…”I don’t know how to say this. “Infectious? Is that how it spreads?”
That half-shrug again. “Whatever is happening to your sister, you can bet you oughtn’t to be mucking about with it.”
“What do you know about them?” I ask him. “The ones like Kira?”
“I don’t. Know very much, that is. I’ve only seen pictures before and even then it’s not the same. It’s just…” He shakes his head. “That smell, yeah? Acetone. Anorexics have the same smell. It’s called starvation ketosis. The body breaks down fats and turns them into acids that can be used for energy. That’s what’s happening to her—or at least I think it is. You can feel how light she is.”
“You touched her?”
“No, I just…” He puts up his hands defensively. “I wanted to make sure she was all right. But her bones? Soon they’ll be like the bones in tinned salmon. Soft like that. I didn’t know if she would…” He runs his hand through his hair.
“If she would what?”
“Survive the night,” he spits out. “So I came back. To see how she was and maybe help.” He leads me to his truck, which he has parked out of sight behind one of the gutted buildings. There’s a blue plastic tarpaulin hanging over the back. “I thought maybe I’d try to rig up some sort of shelter, keep the elements off her. Who knows what might affect the nymphs?”
“Nymphs?”
“That’s what they call them at the Centre.”
“Like from the Greek myths? The ones who were always being chased by fauns?” I try to make sense of this.
“Not exactly. It’s more technical than that. A nymph is a stage in the process of metamorphosis, I guess. Something that changes into something else.”
I shake my head. “The doctors at the Centre know this? And they still insist on cremating them?”
“Think about it. It’s nightmare stuff, yeah? They don’t know what’s happening, only that people with JI2 are dying—but when they do, biologically, the bodies keep going, they keep—”
“Changing.”
He grimaces unhappily. “What does that remind you of?”
All those horror films I watched with Jaina, giggling while the undead lurched their way out of their coffins and onto the streets. It doesn’t seem so funny now.
“Cremation’s the best way of stopping it while they figure things out. Clean, efficient—and people don’t ask too many questions.” He takes a swig of his Coke and when he’s finished his expression has settled again. “I thought you must’ve known this. If you didn’t know then why’d you bring her here in the first place?”
I’m still trying to work through the implications of what he’s said, what it means for Kira. “I didn’t know all this. Some of it, maybe, I guess.” I tell him how Kira died and what Dr. Varghese said to us in the hospital. “I saw the look in Kira’s eyes. Something was driving her toward the river. But if what you’re saying is true, maybe there’s more to it. Maybe some part of me knew already that I was infected and wanted to understand how it happened.” He keeps quiet throughout, studying me with a steady gaze. “I didn’t think about what would happen next.”
I turn away. The stark shape of the chimney draws my eye: dense concrete, pitted by time, the pale blue of the door frame, spotted by rust. The remnants of a metal ladder climb the left-hand side, broken and twisted in places. The light refracts from the sheared metal. The sky above is reddening, the clouds textured like herringbone in peach and gold as the sun begins its descent behind the treeline.
“What you did was really brave,” he says after a while. “I never would have had the guts.”
“How do you know all this stuff about them? The—nymphs.”
“I’ve been volunteering at the hospital. My mum, right? She thought it would be a good idea. For me to feel useful.” He glances away from me, doesn’t meet my eyes. “It’s mostly been cleaning duty, easy stuff I can’t mess up. When I saw you pushing that stretcher, I knew that you shouldn’t be there. I wondered what you were doing. Maybe that’s why I followed you out here. I was—”
“What?”
“Jealous.”
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“You aren’t the only one who wants to know what’s happening,” he says roughly. “I lost someone. Her name was Astrid. We were going to get married.” Then he shakes his head, clamps it down. “And so when I saw you…”
“What?”
“I suppose there was a part of me that wished I’d known enough back then to get her out. They cremated her body.”
“Did she have JI2?”
“Yeah, she did. I know that now.” He startles me with how close he is, close enough he could touch me if he wanted to. The expression in his eyes is too complicated for me to parse. “I won’t tell anyone,” he says.
Warmth rises in my cheeks. “Thank you,” I tell him. “For last night. For your help. You might have saved my life.”
He shrugs.
“And thank you for coming back. For Kira.” After a moment: “What’s going to happen to her?”
“I only know a little,” he says, “not enough. At the beginning, the hospitals were still performing autopsies. My mum is an autopsy nurse. She was involved in some of the early ones, when the doctors thought JI2 was caused by a parasite. When the Centre was officially set up specialists were brought in so she hasn’t had much contact since. But I’ve been looking into what she learned. In tropical forests, there’s this type of fungus. A zombie fungus, called cordyceps. It infects ants. I found an old nature documentary about it. You can see the fungus taking control until eventually it bursts from the ant’s head like a radio antenna. So these doctors thought it might be like that: a foreign body had invaded the host and was hijacking its nervous system.”
“Which caused the tremors,” I say.
“That was their theory. But they haven’t been able to find any foreign elements in the bodies. No parasites, no bacteria. Not at the earliest stages. Or later, even, after they realized the hosts weren’t entirely dead. The host suffers brain death but something happens after. First the tremors, then they sink into a sort of stasis.”
“Then what?”
“Most places cremate the bodies. But there are other options. You can donate your body to science. They say it’ll help people.” His body has begun to shake, deep shivers at the level of muscle. But he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t know if he recognizes that it’s even happening.
“What if you’re still alive? What if some part of you can sense what’s happening?”
“It’s what I’ve done,” he shoots back. “That way if I die at least I can still do some good. Mum and I talked it over. She said I wouldn’t feel anything, they’d make sure of that. If it even is me inside, which no one seems to know for sure.”
“You’re sick too?”
He holds up his right hand and pulls the cuff of his shirt back. I can see the metal tag with his patient ID number on it. “It’s why I’m on cleaning duty. They don’t want me working with patients. You?”
“I was just diagnosed.”
His eyes widen a fraction of inch. “Welcome to the monster club.”
14
In the amber light of the sunset, Bryan helps me to rig up a tarpaulin to keep the rain off Kira. I still feel terrible about leaving her here but it’s late and I have to get home.
“Good night, Kiki,” I whisper. She has curled herself up, knees tucked awkwardly beneath her body. A slow susurration of tremors steals across her muscles. “Stay safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
After I come outside, Bryan fastens a chain around the door of the chimney, and snaps a sturdy-looking lock on it.
“It’s the best we can do for now.” Rather than pocketing the key, he buries it in the damp soil beneath a loose brick. “That way you can find it if you need to get in.” The anxious energy I sensed in him earlier has dissipated, replaced by a friendly reserve. We’re on the same side, yes, but the same side of what exactly?
