‘You said it was more of the same.’
Jeb had put his jacket back on and was already starting down the carriage to the connecting doors and the next compartment. He glanced back at Magnus.
‘What would you call it?’
‘I thought you meant more bodies.’
Jeb opened the door and stepped through.
A thin man was slumped in the corner of the compartment, his face hidden by long dreadlocks that had fallen forward, obscuring his features.
Jeb said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
The carriage smelled like long-ignored refuse from some downscale grill house. Meaty leavings that had been locked in a tin shed for days in the middle of a heatwave.
Magnus pulled the neck of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose.
‘It took some people suddenly,’ Jeb said. A phone rested on the seat beside the dead man. He picked it up and tossed it to Magnus. ‘ET phone home.’
‘Don’t you want it?’
The mobile was turned off. Magnus switched it on, wincing at the sound of its wake-up tune: loud and stupidly melodic. The battery was almost full, but as he had expected there was no signal. He glanced at the log. The last call had been two days ago, to Mum. It had gone unanswered. Magnus turned the mobile off again and stowed it in his jeans pocket.
Jeb was at the door to the next carriage. ‘Guess you feel sorry for me. The end of the world and there’s no one I’d like to call.’
Magnus caught the door as it was about to slam shut and followed Jeb through.
‘Who said it was the end of the world?’
‘Looks like it, from where I’m standing.’ Jeb’s voice was belligerent. As if he had just begun to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening and was working his way up to expressing it. The next carriage was empty too. A tatty copy of Metro lay crumpled on the floor. Jeb picked it up and shoved it at Magnus. ‘Here you go. You like reading the news.’
The newspaper felt thin and insubstantial, a half edition. Its headline was to the point: SWEATS KILLS BILLIONS.
‘We’re not the only ones who’ve survived.’ Magnus folded the Metro into a baton and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘A bunch of lads left the prison with us, and there were plenty of soldiers about the jail. London’s an overcrowded shithole.’ He had loved the city, loved the anonymity it conferred, loved that he could walk for miles without anyone hailing him to ask his business and tell him theirs. ‘It was bound to get hit hard. Things will be different in the countryside. I bet the sweats have hardly touched the islands. People are always behind the times up there.’
No they’re not, the voice Magnus feared whispered in his head. Once maybe, but not any more. Orkney had Internet and drugs, a giant Tesco. There was no more relying on catalogues for clothing. Girls had the latest fashions delivered to their door and when they were dressed for a night out you would be hard pushed to tell them from Londoners.
Surely someone on the council would have got wise and set up a quarantine zone, he consoled himself. As soon as it became clear what was happening they were bound to have halted trains, flights and ferries, switched off the constant stream of tourists.
Money, the cruel voice whispered. All those hotels, B&Bs and restaurants; the cafés, craft shops, excursions and galleries.
The carriages were mostly empty, but occasionally they passed bodies lying where they had died. ‘It’s like going to sleep,’ Magnus’s mother had said to him of death. ‘You close your eyes and don’t wake up.’
His father had been caught in the combine, his flesh hacked, his bones and organs crushed. The doctor said death had been instantaneous, but Magnus had dreamed about the moment his father finished clearing the blockage in the combine’s blades. There must have been a shit-sinking second when he knew, as the machine growled back to life, that he had neglected to take the keys from the ignition.
Windows and doors were shattered or forced open in some of the carriages, where survivors had smashed their way free. The driver must have died, Magnus guessed. They would find him slumped across the wheel, or huddled on the floor of the cab. He remembered the driver of the prison van, the squirming white of his belly.
‘Why do you think we haven’t caught it yet?’ he asked Jeb as they slammed into yet another carriage, another stink of shit and rotting meat. ‘Do you think we’re immune?’
Jeb had pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled.
‘Maybe, or maybe it’s in the post.’
Jeb sounded as if living and dying were all the same to him, but Magnus had seen how hard he would fight to survive.
‘Did you get ill?’
‘Sicker than a dead dog.’ Jeb looked at him. ‘I caught it early. They were about to take me to hospital when I got better. I tried to string it out, in the hope of meeting a nice nurse. I thought maybe some wild woman would fancy getting it on with a bad man, they say it happens sometimes. But the screws guessed I was faking. How about you?’
‘The guy in the cell I was in got it. It took a long time for him to die. I had three days of close exposure.’
Jeb nodded, as if it made sense. ‘Some people die slow, others die fast. The poor bastards on this train obviously didn’t expect to catch it.’
Magnus made a mental inventory of his own aches and pains. So far there was nothing that tiredness and hunger could not account for. Perhaps the sweats would strike him down suddenly, the way it had hit the people on the train. He thought of the unanswered phone call on the dead man’s mobile: Mum.
‘Maybe they knew they had it and were trying to get to somewhere, someone.’
‘Maybe.’
They made their way to the control cabin in silence. This time it was Jeb who moved the corpse, sliding the train driver out of the cab and into the corridor.
‘Poor sod.’ It was the first time he had expressed pity for any of the dead and Magnus glanced at him. Jeb caught his look. ‘My old man worked on the railways. He wasn’t a driver, you need connections to be a driver, but I know what he’d have thought about dying on the job; a fucking insult and not even any overtime to make it worth your while.’ He was fiddling with the controls. ‘Ever driven one of these things?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither, but how difficult can it be?’
The tunnel stretched ahead, dark and seemingly as endless as outer space, but they had walked a long way. Surely it wouldn’t be far until the next station, the next assembly of bodies. Magnus could see his own reflection in the train’s curved windscreen. He looked thinner, older, like the fishermen he had sometimes seen coming ashore in the early morning, battered by the elements, half-dead to the world.
‘These trains need electricity to work.’
‘I’m not completely fucking ignorant.’ Jeb threw a few switches and pressed some buttons, experimenting with the dashboard. ‘Just cos the station was out doesn’t mean the points will be. If everything rode off one circuit the whole system would overload.’
As if to confirm what he was saying the engine shuddered alive. Magnus imagined the corpses slumped in their seats quivering in response. He saw them staggering down the carriages, heads bowed, hair hanging over their faces like the dreadlocked man in the first compartment, coming to see who had woken them.
Jeb let out a shout of triumph and the engine died. He slammed his hand against the dashboard, hard enough to hurt. ‘Shit! Fucking thing!’ He pressed a combination of levers and switches, but whatever charge the train had stored was gone.