Aleksey drew some smoke so deep into his lungs he felt it really ought to kill him on the spot before the cancer got him. But he needed the hit.
Despite what he’d let on to the undeniably interesting Rachel, he actually knew quite a lot about bio-warfare, or, he supposed, bioterrorism. Like a lot of things in life, the definition depended on which side of invisible lines you stood. He’d called it war at the time, legitimate and necessary. Now he saw these things a little differently.
It was ironic really: horses of the apocalypse and dogs of war. His two favourite creatures in all other respects.
He’d asked Rachel a final question, one that seemed important to him. How easy would it be for their chimera to be replicated in another lab, now it had already existed in the world once? Her reply had not been all that reassuring. Apparently nothing ever really dies in the world of pathogens.
He had thought back to her story of the chessboard and the rice. Occasionally, he feigned a lack of knowledge on things he actually knew very well. As with his skill at listening, it was a trick that had served him nicely in the past. She had neglected to mention, or perhaps had not known, the actual origin of that story. A man had once tried to trick a king who had offered him a reward by asking for rice measured out just as Rachel had described. The king thought he had a bargain—a pound of rice to pay up maybe. When he discovered the truth, he’d had the man killed.
This somehow seemed a very applicable moral to understand for those who might want to put into practice the power of the seductive exponential curve. The wordpowercould be redefined. He smirked and wondered what Wulf Schultz would have thought about that.
He felt arms slide around him and laid his spare hand over them, rubbing Ben’s warm skin. ‘People are starting to leave.’
‘I’m deeply saddened.’
‘You didn’t eat very much.’
‘Hah, so you did remember I was actually there.’
‘Poor baby, did you think I was ignoring you? You seemed utterly entranced byRachel.’
‘I could say the same about you andMaxwell.’
Ben pulled Aleksey’s shirt loose from his belt and slid his hands up onto his belly, stroking it thoughtlessly. ‘I’m not sure I entirely understood what he was talking about most of the time.’
‘Join the club.’
‘But oddly we found some stuff in common after a while. When he was a student doing his doctorate, he worked at Porton Down—that’s the army’s nuclear, biological and chemical research unit. Or it used to be.’
‘That does not surprise me.’
‘I went there quite a few times. Did my NBC instructor training there. I was telling Max about this one time. They’ve got this cool running track around the whole perimeter of the out-of-bounds area, and I was told it was okay to use, but to watch out for the two-headed rabbits. Funny, yeah? I actually believed them for a minute, but Max reckoned it might well have been true. They did experiments on humans there, too. One guy died of bubonic plague in the 1960s according to him. As if. He was just winding me up—like my mates did about the rabbits.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. What else did you talk about—with Maxwell?’
Ben plucked his cigarette from him and tossed it out onto the darkened slopes of the tor. ‘This is self-inflicted chemical poisoning. Come be nice for a bit more.’
Aleksey nodded absentmindedly, his thoughts racing.
He could smell the Dartmoor night air, pure and almost intoxicating. The stars were a river of silver grains washing across the midnight-blue sky. A sheep bleated briefly until her errant lamb gave reply. It was so peaceful. So utterly unspoilt. And yet he felt contaminated, itchy in his own skin. He could not stop an image invading his mind—however much he wanted to think about Ben’s hands stroking his belly, the feel and smell of him so close, so utterly perfect. All he could see was that third black horse of the apocalypse which Schultz had been so ardent for. It had become clearer in his mind now. It was still riven with pain, desperate, maddened, but now it was infected too; its breath brought death, and it left starvation and misery in its wake. Food insecurity. He almost laughed.Insecurity. They had no idea. There’d be no sheep on Dartmoor running wild with their lambs, no ponies with their leggy June foals. No dogs left alive for long either. And he knew what came next. He'd lived it once—the strong turned upon the weak of their own kind.
Famine.
He sighed and went in with Ben to be nice.
He couldn’t think of anything better to do.
His mood cheered up considerably when Austin’s electric car batteries were flat. He’d expected a charging station? On Dartmoor? Apparently, it would take eight hours to top up from the cottage, so Tim volunteered Squeezy to drop it back to Exeter for him another day.
This was all very amusing, and Aleksey tried to look helpful and concerned, but he didn’t find it so funny when husband and wife just got in with Max, who said he’d drop them off.
His head buzzing with plague, chimera and bio-weapons; he really didn’t need to see voluntary human extinction along for the ride too.
* * *
Chapter Five
By the time everyone had gone it was extremely late, but all four of them appeared more wired than exhausted, so Tim suggested they polish off Ben’s bottle of wine out on the patio to wind down. He lit the fire pit and for a few minutes no one said anything, all lost to their own thoughts.
