Things get torn apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts for ever, but nothing ever entirely disappears either. It just becomes something else.’
The sound of the tyres rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The Interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or sign would loom out of the fog giving variation to the otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel – always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through the fog for ever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.
A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. ‘Just taking a little shortcut,’ he said. ‘We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.’
Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St Matthews. ‘We could have got gas and food on the Interstate. This is going out of our way.’
Franklin reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and popped it between his lips. He stared ahead, his fingers tapping on the wheel, the cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Shepherd thought back through all the wrong notes he’d picked up over the last few hours: the way Franklin had ushered the cop who had clearly known him out of the room back at the station; the way he had insisted on driving rather than flying up to Cherokee; even his suggestion to come to Charleston in the first place to interview Cooper rather than hand it over to other agents. ‘Sorry for what?’
Franklin wound down his window a little then lit the cigarette, blowing smoke out into the cold. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.
The soldiers immediately made themselves at home.
As well as the food and fresh fuel supplies – which they offloaded from the lorry with impressive and well-drilled speed – they volunteered to take over the grave-digging detail their arrival had disrupted. They also brought something far more valuable than any of these – they brought a laptop.
All the communications and technology in the compound had either been destroyed or looted, effectively cutting it off from the wider world. So while everyone else was out beyond the perimeter fence Liv traced cables from the dish on the roof of the main building and hot-wired the laptop into the compound’s satellite link.
Like any journalist Liv was a total information junkie and she’d been cold-turkey for days now so the first thing she did when she fired up the laptop and got online was call up some news sites. She scanned the headlines feeling the buzz of an addict getting a fresh hit. Since her brother had fallen to his death from the summit of the Citadel, Ruin and the story that had unfolded in the wake of his sacrifice had never been far from the news. It was her story too – and also Gabriel’s. She did a News search on Google with GABRIEL in the subject line. Pages of results came back, all several days old and just retelling stories she already knew: his arrest at the hospital for suspected terrorist acts and homicide; his subsequent escape from custody; the manhunt that ensued with her picture and name next to his. After that there was nothing. The only more recent stories relating to Ruin were medical ones concerning an outbreak of what some of the more tabloidy sites were calling ‘a plague’.
Liv clicked on the top result, her heart racing at the implications of this. She remembered the symbol she had seen on the Starmap, the circle with the cross through it that made her think of disease and suffering. Was this what it predicted – the event that would result in the end of days?
The article opened and she speed-read it, her mind pulling out the facts as her eyes skimmed the words: outbreak centred around the Citadel – eighteen dead, eighty-six in isolation – the whole city of Ruin in quarantine and under police control.
She opened another window and searched for RUIN POLICE. Skype was already installed on the desktop and she opened this too, logging in through her own account that thankfully still had some credit on it. She copied the number of the switchboard into the keypad, adding the international dialling codes for Turkey then hit the key to boost the speakers as the number dialled and started to ring.
It rang for a long time, long enough for her to read another article about how the infected had been transferred from the Public Church into the Citadel itself. There was a link to a news clip but someone answered before she could play it.
‘Ruin Police,’ a voice said, with chaos sounding in the background.
‘Hi,’ Liv said in fluent Turkish, ‘could you connect me to Inspector Arkadian?’
‘Name please?’
‘Liv Adamsen.’
‘One moment.’
The line switched to musak and Liv flipped back to the news site, scrolling through another article about the outbreak. It featured apocalyptic photos of empty streets and people standing by the public gate to the Old Town wearing full contamination suits. The Citadel soared up in the background, so terrible and familiar. Seeing it in this context made something click in Liv’s head and she pulled the folded piece of paper from her pocket and smoothed it flat on the desk while the tinny hold tune continued to play. She scanned the symbols again, her eyes settling on the beginning of the second line.
The symbol for disease followed by …
She looked back at the photo on the screen, the man in the contagion suit with the sharp outline of the mountain behind him.
… of course …
The second symbol represented the Citadel and the disease had started there and was now spreading. The next part of the prophecy was coming to pass.
The musak cut out.
‘Liv?’
‘Arkadian.’ More noise in the background, like he was on a street full of children. ‘Are you OK? I just saw the news about the outbreak.’
‘It’s chaos here. People are scared. I’m scared. We’re evacuating the children from the city. Where are you?’
She looked out of the window at the distant movement of people working on the hill as they dug the new grave. ‘Still in the desert,’ she said. ‘We found it.’
‘I know. Gabriel told me.’
Liv felt the world shift. ‘Gabriel! You spoke to him?’
‘Yes.’ Another pause filled with the babble of children. ‘Just before he was taken into the Citadel.’
Liv felt like all the air had been sucked from the room.
‘He was sick, Liv, he had the virus – but he was not as sick as the others.’ She gripped the sides of her chair and reminded herself to breathe. ‘Most of them go mad when the disease takes them, but not Gabriel. He rode all the way back here because he knew he had it. He didn’t want it to spread. It was Gabriel who insisted the disease be contained inside the Citadel. He wanted to take it