World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Read online

Lesley smiled, but Jack kept his face straight. Around his eyes were circles so dark it made him look like he was wearing mascara.

  “My turn,” he said. “Armed forces wipe out millions of people deemed subhuman and a threat to humanity.”

  That’s a bit grim, Lesley thought, but still tried to answer in a jokey tone. “Are you talking about gingers? Ignore. Ginger hair is bogging. There was a story last year about a sperm bank refusing to take donations from gingers. If I ever want a kid, that’s where I’ll go.”

  Jack’s lips stayed tight. “Actually, I’m talking about something closer to home.”

  Lesley raised a quizzical eyebrow, realizing he meant business.

  “You can’t use my name,” he said.

  “A senior official close to the negotiations okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s start with the cure,” he said. “There isn’t going to be one any time soon. They might be close to a treatment to control the symptoms, but it would be a series of shots. And how would they administer them? You can’t get near the infected, and you can’t trust them to take it themselves. Even if they did, the costs would be astronomical and the virus could still be passed on.”

  The shit journalist Lesley had been would have interrupted to say she knew all that. Her months in New York striving to deserve her ill-gotten reputation had taught her you never stopped somebody talking even if they were covering old ground; it gave the speaker the ego boost of feeling they were imparting crucial information, thus loosening the tongue, and some nugget you didn’t know could crop up. Applying this rule, she’d already gleaned off-the-record information on the virus from the team working on a cure. They were calling it The Bloody Mary, as it had proven to be a cocktail of viruses rammed together willy-nilly. Some of the viral components—the sneezing and the sores—served the same purpose as a booster rocket putting a space shuttle into orbit, allowing the virus to spread more quickly in the early stages. After a while they sloughed off, dealt with by the immune system, to leave the core virus responsible for the urge to attack. That was the real bugger. Like most viruses, it hid itself inside cells. The sneaky part came when it stopped hijacked cells from sending out specialized molecules telling the immune system they’d been compromised. You couldn’t fight what you couldn’t see.

  “This is why we are where we are,” Jack said. “They can’t keep Britain ring-fenced forever. The cost of the operation is crippling.”

  Lesley nodded in agreement. Estimates put the outlay close to one trillion dollars and rising, straining a global economy still battling the hangover of recession. It wasn’t just the military: humanitarian aid was draining the coffers at an alarming rate. Never mind aid deliveries to Britain, there were over fifteen million expats dependent on handouts—middle-class Britons who were either on holiday abroad during the peak August season when the virus broke out or had fled the country in the expectation of spending a few weeks drinking wine and visiting art galleries while the army sorted out the animals. When humans got infected and the U.K. banks collapsed along with the rest of the country, they became a dishevelled and hungry horde with no money and nowhere to go. The largest camp, known as Little Britain, had been set up outside Calais, sprawling across miles of formerly beautiful countryside. At least five million people lived there in makeshift shelters, littering the fields and polluting the rivers. There had already been several outbreaks of cholera. France, fearful that the foreign masses might also spread the more pernicious disease of the English language and culture, was desperate to send them back home—which meant the current occupants of Britain needed to be cleared out in a tidy fashion.

  “Putting the money aside, at some point the virus is going to get out. Unless it no longer exists,” Jack said. He took a long pull on the beer he’d ordered. “At the next Security Council meeting, military action is going to be vetoed again. But that’s just for public consumption. They need the infected to be off guard for the plan to work.”

  Lesley leaned forward, her knees gripping the table leg. “And the plan is?”

  “The U.S., China, and Russia are going to take action on the grounds that this is a clear and present threat to humanity’s existence. At the next set of food drops after the meeting, they aren’t going to deliver aid. They’re going to drop nerve gas, which should take out a sizable chunk of the armed forces working on distribution.”

  “Is that why they’ve been doing food drops? To create a Trojan horse?”

  “No. The food drops were to encourage the infected to stay put. If they’d all been starving, even more would have tried to pile over to France. Anyway, the gas is only part of phase one. You’ve heard of neutron bombs?”

  “It’s another type of nuke, right?”

  “Yes, but they have lower blast power than a standard nuke, meaning less damage to infrastructure and so less reconstruction. Neutrons have a short half-life, so the radiation dissipates quickly. But anybody exposed to the blast radius that doesn’t die from the explosion will die within weeks. This takes care of the British and French objections as far as possible, so they’re happy to let it go ahead as long as they don’t have to publicly back it.” He slugged from the beer again and banged it down on the table. “They’ll be dropped on every major population center, with an added focus on the command and military structure. In phase two, they’ll start a more conventional bombing campaign: jets and helicopters, missiles and napalm. Once that’s over, they’ll send in ground troops to mop up.” He shot her a grim smile. “It’ll be over by Christmas.”

  Lesley pulled on her fingertips in lieu of the cigarette that New York’s antismoking rules prevented her from having. She would never forget the sight of an infected bull trampling that poor scientist to death, the bodies that littered the streets, the cows rampaging through the refugee camp as army helicopters rained down fire. She didn’t want to have to live through that again, and so had been all for a swift cleansing. However, now that she was hearing the stark details of what this would entail, she felt queasy.

  “What about the British nukes? Won’t they get a chance to fire them off?”

  “They’re hoping they’ll be able to shoot the missiles down and take out the subs before they can pop off any more.”

  “Sounds like a slim hope.”

  “It’s considered an acceptable risk. It’s the chance of a few cities being flattened versus the world being infected. There’s never been a threat like this to humanity. All bets are off.”

  “So you’re for the attack?”

  Jack frowned. “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I was. If they were mindless, brain-eating beasts, it would be an easy decision. But they’re not.”

  “So why now? They’ve had months to do something.”

  He picked at the label on his bottle. “Something happened a few days ago that made them very nervous. I’m not sure what.”

  Jack uncharacteristically refused to meet her gaze. He clearly knew what had happened but didn’t want to tell. Lesley let it lie: he didn’t seem in the mood to be pushed, and in a way it was irrelevant. All that mattered was that they’d decided to act.

  “When’s the vote?” she said.

  “Seventeen days from now. Everything will be in place to get going the next day.”

  Lesley drained her drink, bringing back some of the color that had leached from her cheeks. “Why are you coming to me? You know where I stand on this.”

  “I’m coming to you precisely because of where you stand. If you come out with this story, if you oppose the attack, it might make a difference.”

  “Why would I oppose it? I’ve seen the infected up close. I know how dangerous they are.”

  “You’ve seen a few of them,” Jack said. “Let me show you something.”

  He whipped out his smartphone and slid it across the table to Lesley. The screen showed a Facebook page. She scrolled through page after page of young children, from infants to gap-toothed older kids, smiling out from dozens of pictures.
r />   “What’s this?” Lesley said.

  “Pictures people have posted of their family members still alive in Britain. All infected. Are you really telling me you want to see them killed? Don’t you think they deserve an opportunity to be cured?”

  Lesley focused on one chubby boy, no more than six months old. He was smiling behind fingers jammed into his mouth, giant blue eyes glittering with mirth. She remembered Tony Campbell—the leader of BRIT, or Brits for the Rights of the InfecTed—holding up the picture of his daughter when she’d interviewed him on CNN, something she’d dismissed as a tactic to throw her off. She slid the phone back across the table, her guts gnarling further.

  “If I write this up, they’ll know what’s coming.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they might do something desperate.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And if the story does stop the attack, the virus might get out.”

  “Sure. But let’s call this what it is: genocide. If you don’t write the story, you’ll be a party to it. If you write it, maybe you can create a public outcry and stop the bombing from taking place at all.”

  Lesley stared at Jack. Here she was again, at the center of a massive story—this time with the responsibility for millions of lives in her hands. Perhaps she was actually Death and nobody had bothered to tell her. Not for the first time, she asked herself what her father would do. Insufferable as he was, he’d earned his reputation. He would tell her that as a journalist her first responsibility was to the truth. On those grounds alone she should write the story. There were plenty of other reasons. The attack was a typical half-arsed strategy from the international community. Never mind the possible nuclear response: the staggered nature of the assault meant plenty of people would be left alive to flee after the initial bombing. The blockade had coped so far, but if everybody tried to cross the English Channel at once, some of them would get through and precipitate the very thing the attack was aimed at avoiding. And finally, if she refused, Jack would take the story to another newspaper and she would miss out on a scoop she really had worked for. There was only decision she could make.

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  Jack touched her hand and headed to the toilet, leaving her sitting with her reeling head in her hands. She glanced at the bar. A stocky youth with tattoos running the length of both arms was staring at her. For a moment she thought about bolting, sure he was a spy. The youth tipped her a wink and held up a glass. He was trying to pick her up. She exhaled and shook her head. Seconds later, the young man was winking at somebody else.

  Even though it had just been a burst of paranoia, she was glad of the pick-up attempt. This was an explosive story the powers that be would want to keep under wraps. She needed to be careful. She was going to stay right there in the very public bar and write her story on the laptop. Instead of e-mailing it and giving any cyber spies a chance to intercept the communication, she would take her computer physically to the New York Times office to upload the story. That way, there was no chance they would find out what she was up to.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight by the time she finished. Jack had left after one more drink, and she’d moved to a table in the corner to hide her screen. When she typed the final word, a sense of pride swept over her and she temporarily forgot her doubts and fears. While this piece was not as groundbreaking as the initial story about the virus, it wasn’t far off. More pertinently, it came from the sweat of her brow. For the first time in her life, she felt like a real journalist.

  She read it over again for typos. Jack had wanted her to come out strongly against the attack, and suggested opening with an analogy painting an alternative history in which sufferers of HIV/AIDS were rounded up into gas chambers. Even if she’d been going to editorialize, she wouldn’t have taken that route. The gas chamber mention risked linking the Jewish people to flesh-eating zombies. Given she lived in New York, making a link that could be construed as anti-Semitic would have put her in more danger than if she’d been plopped down in middle of London wearing an “Eat Me” T-shirt. Instead, she wrote it as a straight news piece. She really should have called the appropriate officials for comment, but that would alert them to the story and possibly prompt them to kill it—or even her. The paper could add the denials once the story was published and they were safe.

  She pulled on her jacket and headed out into the chilly night to flag a cab to the New York Times building. After being immersed in the story, it felt strange to watch so many New Yorkers going about their normal business: looking for late-night food, rushing to catch the subway home, and generally looking pale and interesting. She supposed the vast stretch of Atlantic between the U.S. and Britain gave them some comfort and got it that many Americans only vaguely understood the rest of the world existed; all the same, she found this capacity for getting on with life in the face of a potentially planet-altering event astonishing. This resilience was what so many people loved about New York. To her it seemed like willful ignorance. Why couldn’t they fret, worry, and generally be miserable about the future like the Scottish? New Yorkers were probably as close to Brits as you could find in the States, and they certainly had a spikiness she liked, but she still found everybody more upbeat than she was used to.

  Thinking about dour Scots, she realized she should let Terry know she wouldn’t be home until the wee small hours. After all, it wasn’t his fault their relationship was floundering. It wasn’t anybody’s. They’d been thrown together when escaping Britain and were still caught up in that whirlwind when she invited him to New York. Now that the initial shag-frenzy had waned and life settled down into a routine, they were two near-strangers rammed up against each other in a cramped apartment in the East Village. Terry was trying to keep busy. He’d joined a vegan cooking class and was volunteering at a food bank, but he still couldn’t find any work. She could tell he struggled with being reliant on her. She struggled with it, too. The little things that had once been endearing were now irritating, such as the smell of Old Spice that permeated the apartment; Terry may have finally accepted he didn’t smell of meat, but his habit of wearing too much aftershave remained. But he had nowhere else to go, so she couldn’t kick him out. Then again, they couldn’t keep going this way. Something had to change.

  She resolved to be at least a little kinder to him, but the call didn’t go through. She looked at the screen. There was no service. She gave the phone a shake, just in case the SIM card had dislodged, and stared at it suspiciously. It seemed a little too coincidental that her phone had stopped working not long after she got her hands on an incendiary story. It was possible she was just being paranoid again, but Lesley’s breathing quickened as she hurried to the curb. A yellow cab turned the corner and she waggled her arms at it in a decidedly uncool, non-New York manner. The locals usually just held up a nonchalant arm and let it hang there at half-mast. Lesley, who thought she was missing some subtle signal only natives got, usually had to leap in front of a cab to make it stop.

  Somebody else was trying to flag the vehicle, but on this occasion her semaphore won the day, and the cab drove past the closer fare. As she stepped forward, she accidentally kicked a cat that had been lurking unseen by a lamppost. It yowled and ran onto the road, where it disintegrated with a pop under the wheels of a passing truck. The jinx had struck again. Hanging her head, she ducked into the cab without sparing the driver a glance. “New York Times building, please.”

  When the cabbie didn’t drive off straight away, she looked up. “Can we get going? I’m in a hurry.”

  “Everybody’s in a hurry, lady.”

  Lesley started as the door flew open. A man with his jerkin zipped up to his chin and a woolly hat pulled down to his eyebrows stuck his head in. “Mind if we share?”

  “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

  He climbed in, forcing Lesley to scoot across, and pulled the door closed behind him. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to the same place.”


  The doors locked and the driver pulled out into traffic. Even before she felt the gun poke into her ribs, Lesley knew what was happening.

  “It’s amazing what you can overhear when playing a little shuffleboard,” the man wielding the gun said.

  Lesley, her heart sinking down to bounce off the top of her bladder and bring on the urge to pee, raised her face to the scarred ceiling of the cab. “Not again,” she shouted.

  4

  Cold water trickled through the first hesitant sprouts of ginger hair on Geldof Peters’s chest, which still heaved from the exertion of his long swim, as he sloshed through the shallows of the Adriatic Sea. A gaggle of girls lolled on a blanket halfway up the pebbly beach, gazes trained on the water polo match taking place in a nearby inlet. Croatia was going through an unseasonably warm spell, and the girls wore tiny bikinis intended to draw more attention to the areas they were barely concealing. It was working. Geldof smoothed his hair out of his eyes, blinking away the saltwater that stung his contact lenses, and picked his way through the slippery rocks on the seabed; he didn’t want the girls to notice him only when he tripped and went face first into the shallows.

  He trudged up the beach to the spot he’d staked out beneath some trees and sat down, alone. A cheer went up and the polo players, each one six-foot plus and displaying an anatomical marvel of musculature, emerged from the water to join the girls. Perhaps if he’d been able to play the game Geldof would have found a niche in the village. He knew better than to try. While he could cover long distances when swimming solo, anything that involved serious hand-eye coordination left him looking like a string puppet controlled by a hyperactive toddler on a sugar rush. Still, after an initial chubbiness brought on by a binge on the meat and fish his mum had once denied him, the daily swimming had added a wiry layer of muscle to his once-scrawny frame. He would have made a reasonable physical specimen back in Scotland, where wrestling open a particularly tightly wrapped fish supper had been considered strenuous activity. In Croatia, however, every man under the age of twenty-five could claim direct descent from Adonis.