"We know you are capable — you must be, to have evaded us for as long as you did."
She nodded.
"Your sole objective will be to track down and disable — by any means necessary — the rebel."
The air hung heavy as she stared into his terribly disfigured face. "You mean Will Burrows?"
"Yes, Seth Jerome," he said succinctly. He mopped his weeping eye with the back of his hand, and then snapped his fingers awkwardly, using what remained of his thumb and index finger.
"What…?" She heard a clicking on the stone floor behind her and whipped her head around. A shadow flitted through the doorway.
It was the Hunter, the giant cat that had come to her aid on the surface. Pausing to look around, it briefly sampled the air, and in the blink of an eye it had capered over to Sarah's side and was rubbing itself affectionately against her leg, with such vigor that her chair was pushed sideways.
"You! she exclaimed. She was both astonished and delighted to see the creature again. She'd assumed that the Styx had had it killed back up in the excavation. Indeed, quite the opposite was apparent: It was a very different animal beside her now, compared to the sorry specimen she'd seen Topsoil.
She could tell from the way it carried itself as it scampered off to sniff at something in the corner of the room that they'd been making sure it was well fed. Its appearance was considerably improved, and the festering would on its shoulder had been tended to. A lint pad was bound to its shoulder by a copious amount of gray bandaging trussed around its chest. As it was also sporting a brand new leather collar — not something generally found on these animals — Sarah instantly assumed it had been in the care of the Styx rather than Colonists.
"His name is Bartleby. We thought he might be put to good use," the Styx said.
"Bartleby," Sarah repeated, then glanced across the table at the battle-scarred soldier for an explanation.
"Naturally the animal will be eager to find his old master — your son — employing his keen sense of smell," the man told her.
"Ah yes." She nodded. "How very true." It would be invaluable to have a Hunter when she was tracking in the Deeps, and the fact that it was Cal's scent trail would be incentive indeed.
She smiled back at the man, and then called out, "Bartleby, here!" He obediently returned to her side and sat down, watching her as he waited for another command. She kneaded the scabrous expanse of the cat's wide, flat head. "So that's your name, is it… Bartleby? " He blinked his saucer-sized eyes at her, a loud purr rumbling from his throat as he shifted from forepaw to forepaw. "You and me together, we'll get Cal back, won't we, Bartleby?"
The smile vanished from her face. "And we'll flush out a big rat in the bargain."
Outside in the rose garden of Humphrey House, several pigeons alighted by the bird table, where the cook regularly left slices of stale bread and other scraps from the kitchen. Distracted from the magazine spread before her, Mrs. Burrows looked up and tried her best to focus on the birds with her red, swollen eyes.
"Blast it! I can't see a bloomin' thing, let alone read!" she grumbled, squinting first through one eye and then the other. "This filthy, filthy virus!"
Television news bulletins had begun to pop up a week ago, reporting a mysterious viral outbreak that seemed, as far as anyone could tell, to have originated in London and was now sweeping like wildfire through the rest of the British Isles. It had even reached as far afield as the United States and the Far East. Experts said that although the disease, a sort of mega-conjunctivitis, was short-lived, lasting four or five days at most in the average person, the rate at which it had spread was a serious cause for alarm. The media constantly referred to it as an "Ultra Bug," because it had the unique attribute that its transmission appeared to be both air— and water-borne. A world-beating combination, apparently, for the virus that wants to go places.
According to some experts, even if the government made up its mind to manufacture a vaccine, the process from full identification of a new virus to production of sufficient vaccine for the entire population of England could take many months, if not years.
But the scientific intricacies were of no concern to Mrs. Burrows — it was the sheer inconvenience that made her fume. Dropping her spoon in her cereal bowl, she started rubbing her eyes once again.
She had been perfectly all right the evening before, but, roused by the morning bell outside her room, she'd woken into a living horror show. She was instantly aware of the painful drying of her sinuses and her ulcerated tongue and throat. But all this paled into insignificance as she'd tried to open her eyes and found they were so heavily gummed together that it was impossible to do so. It was only after bathing them with copious amounts of warm water from the hand basin in her room, accompanied by language that would have made a sailor blush, that she'd managed to pry apart her eyelids even a fraction. Despite all the washing, they still felt as though they had a crust over them that could only be removed by scraping it off.
Now, as she sat at the table, she let out a mournful groan. The persistent rubbing only seemed to be making matters worse. With tears streaming down her face, she scooped up a generous helping of cornflakes and, with one bloodshot eye, tried once again to read the copy of TV Guide on the table beside her. It was the latest issue, just delivered that morning, which she'd purloined from the dayroom before anyone else had had an opportunity to get their hands on it. But it was no good; she was hard-pressed to make out the titles at the tops of the pages, let alone the smaller print of the program listings below.
"What a stinking, filthy bug!" she complained again loudly. The dining room was uncannily quiet for this time of the morning; on any normal day, even the first sitting for breakfast would have had a healthy turnout.
Grinding her teeth with frustration, she folded her napkin and used an edge to carefully mop each weeping eye. After a series of deep mooing noises as she tried unsuccessfully to ease her sinuses, she blew her nose noisily into the napkin. Then, blinking rapidly, she attempted once more to focus on the magazine pages.
"It's no good, I can't see a sodding thing. Feels like I've got grit in them!" she said, pushing her cereal bowl away from her.
With her eyes closed, she leaned back in her chair and reached for her cup of tea. She put it to her lips and took a sip, then spluttered loudly, blowing it out in a fine mist over the tabletop. It was stone-cold.
"Urgh! Disgusting!" she shrieked. "The service in this place is deplorable." She slammed the cup down on its saucer. "Whole place has come to a standstill," she complained to nobody in particular, knowing full well that most of the staff hadn't shown up for work. "Anyone would think there was a war on."
"There is," came a distinguished voice.
Mrs. Burrows hiked up one puffy eyelid to see who had spoken. At his table, a man in a tweed jacket, perhaps in his mid-fifties, was dunking a finger of buttered toast into his boiled egg with small, deliberate movements. Like her, he seemed to prefer his own company, as he had chosen to sit at the small table in the adjacent window bay. The room was completely deserted except for her and this other diner. It had certainly been a strange couple of days, a skeleton staff with inflamed and seeping eyes doing their best to tend to the patients, who mostly confined themselves to their rooms.
"Hmm," the man said, and nodded as if agreeing with himself.
"Sorry?"
"I said there is a war on," he declared, munching on his piece of egg-dipped toast. From what Mrs. Burrows could see, he had only been mildly affected by the virus.