The door through which he had entered was still wide open, and through it Jake could see that the concrete tunnel outside was also now illuminated. Spurred on by the possibility to explore further without the need of a torch, he shuffled back towards the door. Halfway there, something caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it on the way in; his pocket light was too weak to have picked it out in the darkness. A little deeper into the room, near the first of the giant diesel tanks, was a small blue flat-bed trolley. He shuffled over to it backwards, dragging his useless and increasingly painful legs. The trolley was loaded up with a gas bottle. Jake was able to haul it off quite easily as the bottle appeared to be empty. By repositioning the trolley so it butted up against the diesel tank and thus did not roll anywhere, he pushed himself up off the floor and slid onto it. He wriggled around as best he could. His back was leaning against the handle, his legs stuck out in front of him, and only his ankles and feet were unsupported, and dangled off the end. The trolley was very low to the floor, which made it easy to load and unload. For Jake, it meant he could reach the ground with his hands by leaning forwards just a little. The grated floor once again offered a perfect surface to grip with his fingertips, and with a little effort, he pulled himself—and the trolley—forwards. It rolled easily, and he was at the door in seconds.

Getting out of the door and turning ninety degrees into the tunnel proved a little more difficult, but again the grated floor helped, and by pulling harder on one side than the other, he soon got the hang of steering on the move. Once outside and rolling straight, he couldn’t help but let out a whoop of joy at his newfound mobility.

Twenty-Two

“VARDY? VARDY! WAKE up!”

“Wha…what? What is it?” Russell rubbed his eyes and looked around him, confused.

“You fell asleep,” Janice scolded gently.

“Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to. Rough couple of days.”

“Don’t sweat it. Listen, your machine is beeping, I thought you ought to know.”

“Right, yes, thank you.” He pulled himself out of the armchair on the far side of the room, stretched his arms high above his head, and yawned. “God, I could use some coffee.”

“From what I’ve heard, you’ll be lucky to get any kind of refreshment on this ship. And if God is handing out favours, I’d ask for a working antiviral before caffeinated hot drinks.”

Vardy walked over to the machine and pressed a button, muting the feeble bleeping noise. Numbers and codes scrolled across a little LCD display built into the front of the unit; he read them off aloud. “Okay, so the machine thinks the mutation is complete. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

A couple more buttons and a drawer popped out of the machine. It held one of the two small jars. Inside, where the clear vaccine had been, was now a very slightly milky yellow liquid. Vardy ripped open a sterile packet and took out a new syringe. He pierced the lid of the jar and extracted a few drops of the substance, then pushed the plunger of the syringe back down, forcing out the drops onto an open microscope slide.

“Alright, what have we got here?” he said, arranging the slide under one of the two microscopes. He adjusted the focus, and spent some time examining their new creation.

“Well?” Janice asked. She couldn’t stand the wait, she was desperate to know whether the mutation had worked.

“Well, I think this has gone better than expected. Here, take a look yourself. Look at this one first,” he said, pointing to the second microscope. “That’s the mutated virus.”

Janice sat down at the table and lined her eyes up with the eyepiece. She could see the cells infected with the virus. They looked like some kind of miniature alien: bizarre, spiky, ugly, but also familiar. “I remember studying this kind of thing in med school,” she said. “Nothing quite like that though.”

“That’s the mutation. Most unusual, right?”

Janice lifted her head and nodded. “And the antiviral?”

“Help yourself.” He held out a hand towards the microscope he had just been studying.

She moved her chair sideways, lining herself up to get comfortable. “Wow, okay, yeah. I see the similarity. That’s amazing, that the ash could mutate the vaccine like that so quickly.” She sat back and looked at Vardy. “But will it work?”

“Let’s try it on some infected blood.” He located a small Petri dish and consulted the notepad with the list of names. “Roger Marston, sixty-eight years old. Infected since at least twelve hours ago. Okay Roger, let’s see what we can do with your kindly donated blood sample.”

Vardy ran his finger along the row of test tubes until he found the one with Roger’s name on it. Taking care not to spill any, he removed the tube, poured some of the blood into the Petri dish, replaced it, then used the syringe to squeeze a couple of drops of the mutated vaccine onto the blood.

“I’ll get this under the microscope, quickly,” he said.

For a while, he watched in silence. Janice waited patiently. She knew there would be no instant results. Suddenly Vardy’s hand shot up in the air and he clicked his fingers repeatedly. “Janice! Note down the time. I think it’s started!”

Janice checked her watch and scribbled on a page of notes they had been keeping as they went along.

“Three minutes to the first reaction,” she said.

“Yes! There it was again. And another one! This is incredible, it looks like it could actually be working!”

“Can I see?”

“Yeah, of course.” He pulled away and looked at Janice with an expression of triumph mixed with disbelief. “I have to admit, I wasn’t hopeful. Take a look and see what you think.”

Janice positioned herself over the microscope again, and altered the focus slightly for her own eyes. She saw the mutated virus and the antiviral made from the mutated vaccine. She didn’t have to wait long to see what Vardy had been talking about. Right in front of her, the antiviral attacked a virus-infected cell. It was like watching a rabid dog on the offensive as the mutated vaccine went for the virus, overpowering it, and eventually killing it. The more she watched, the more attacks she saw.

“It’s so…violent!”

“So’s the virus. The remedy needs to be just as powerful if it’s to beat such a potent opponent.”

“What happens to the antiviral when it’s killed every trace of the virus? Isn’t there a danger it could attack healthy host cells?”

“No, that can’t happen,” Vardy said confidently. “The influenza vaccine we used is made with a deactivated virus. It poses no risk to normal healthy cells.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“One hundred percent. I think we should move directly to testing this on a patient.”

“Whoa, hang on there. This stuff just came out of the machine. One test on old blood is hardly conclusive. We need more proof it’s not dangerous before we start injecting people.”

“Doctor Chalmers, we don’t have time. If we were back in a regular lab, under normal circumstances, then of course I would agree with you. But we’re not. People are already dying, and those are the edge cases: the old, frail, and those who were already sick. Another few hours and the others are going to start dying too. We’re going to be dealing with hundreds of deaths at a time. We have to try this now. We cannot afford to wait a moment longer.”

Before Janice could protest, there was a knock at the door. She opened it just a crack; they didn’t want visitors in the lab unnecessarily. She recognised the woman outside as one of the most recent draft of nurses.

“So sorry to disturb you, Janice, but we thought you should know. Kiera, the nurse? One of the first infected? She’s in a very bad way. Her ears are bleeding, her hair has almost all fallen out. I don’t think she’s got long left. If your miracle cure is ready, she needs it right now.”