"I can't believe it. My goodness, poor Mrs. L," Mrs. Burrows gasped, genuinely meaning it. It was a rare moment: She was feeling compassion for someone who really existed, not just for some actor playing a part on one of her soaps.
"At least it was quick," the matron said.
"Quick?" mumbled Mrs. Burrows, frowning with bewilderment.
"Yes, very. She complained she was feeling sick just before lunch, then became quite disoriented and went into a coma. There was nothing we could do to resuscitate her." The matron pressed her lips together and lowered her gaze to the floor. Taking out a handkerchief, she dabbed first one eye, then the other. Mrs. Burrows couldn't tell if this was from the continuing effects of the eye infection or because she was upset. "This epidemic is serious, you know. And if the virus mutates…" the matron started to confide in a low voice.
Just then the porters pushed the paradise cart back out into the corridor, and the matron hurried off to join them.
"So quick," Mrs. Burrows said again, trying to come to terms with the death.
Later that afternoon in the dayroom, Mrs. Burrows was so preoccupied by Old Mrs. L's untimely demise that she wasn't paying much attention to the television. She'd been restless in her bedroom, so decided to seek solace in her favorite chair — the one place that usually brought her a measure of contentment. But when she arrived, she found that there were already quite a few patients lounging in front of the television. Their daily schedule of activities was still disrupted from the lack of staff, so they were mostly left to their own devices.
Mrs. Burrows had been unusually subdued, allowing the other patients to dictate the choice of program, but when an item came on the news, she suddenly spoke out.
"Hey!" she exclaimed, pointing at the screen. "It's him! I know him!"
"Who is he, then?" a woman inquired, looking up from a jigsaw puzzle.
"Don't you recognize him? He was in here!" Mrs. Burrows said, her excited eyes riveted to the report.
"What's his name?" the jigsaw lady asked, holding a piece of the puzzle in her hand.
Mrs. Burrows hadn't a clue what his name was, so she pretended she was so intent on the television that she hadn't heard.
"And Professor Eastwood had been assigned to work on the virus?" came the question from the interviewer offscreen.
The man on screen nodded — the same man with the distinguished voice who had spoken to Mrs. Burrows in a rather disparaging way at breakfast only days ago. He even had on the same tweed jacket he'd been wearing then.
"He's an important doctor, you know," Mrs. Burrows told the handful of people in the row behind her in a self-important way, as if she was confiding in them about a close friend. "He likes boiled eggs for breakfast."
Someone in the room repeated "boiled eggs," as though she was thoroughly impressed by the information.
"That's right," Mrs. Burrows confirmed.
"Shhh! Listen!" a woman in a lemon-yellow bathrobe hissed from the back row.
Mrs. Burrows tipped her head back to glare at the woman, but was too intrigued by the news report to take it any further.
"Yes," boiled-egg-man answered the interviewer. "Professor Eastwood and his research team at St. Edmund's were working round the clock to identify the strain. By all accounts, they were making good progress, although the records were lost."
"Can you tell us exactly when the fire broke out?" said the interviewer.
"The alarm was raised at nine-fifteen this morning," boiled-egg-man replied.
"And can you confirm that four members of the professor's research team also died in the blaze with him?"
Boiled-egg-man's eyebrows knitted together as he nodded somberly. "Yes, I'm afraid that is the case. They were exceptional and highly valued scientists. My heart goes out to their families."
"Do you have any theories what started the fire?" the interviewer posed.
"The laboratory carried a range of solvents in its stockroom, so I suppose the forensic investigation will begin there."
"There has been speculation in the past week that the pandemic may be man-made. Could the death of Professor Eastwood—?"
"I will not be drawn into such conjecture," boiled-egg-man barked disapprovingly. "It is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. Professor Eastwood was a close personal friend for over twenty years and I will not have—"
"Professor Eastwood must have been getting too close — that's what happened! Someone snuffed him out!" Mrs. Burrows boomed, drowning out the television. "Of course it's a bloomin' conspiracy. It's those no-good Russkies again, or maybe the lefties, who've got nothing to moan about anymore 'cept what we're all doing to the environment. You see how they're already trying to blame this plague on greenhouse gases and cows' farts."
"I think it escaped from one of our own labs," the jigsaw lady piped up, nodding vigorously as if she'd single-handedly solved the mystery.
Silence returned to the room, with the news report featuring yet another "science correspondent" who was giving the doom-laden prophecy that, at the drop of a hat, the virus could mutate into a far more lethal form, with dire consequences for the human race.
"Ah!" said the jigsaw lady a her card table, pressing a piece of her puzzle home.
Then the television screen was filled with a piece of highly accomplished street art. Graffitied on a section of wall between two shops in north London, it was a life-sized figure wearing a respirator and clothed in a bulky biohazard suit. Apart from the fact that it had a pair of what were unmistakably large cartoon-mouse ears sticking out of the top of its military helmet, the figure was very realistic. At first glance, it looked as though someone was actually standing there. The figure was brandishing a placard that read:
"Too bloody right it is!" Mrs. Burrows bellowed, her thoughts returning to Old Mrs. L's horribly premature death. The woman in the lemon-yellow bathrobe shushed her again.
"Oh, can't you shut up?" the woman complained with haughty disapproval. "Do you have to be so loud?"
"Yes, I do — this is serious!" Mrs. Burrows growled. "Anyway, at least I'm not as loud as your ghastly bathrobe, you old trout," Mrs. Burrows threw back at her, wetting her lips as she prepared to do battle. Even if the end of the world was looming, she wasn't going to be spoken to like that.
33
Drake didn't have the faintest idea where Will was. He kicked himself for not noticing when the boy wandered off in the first place. It was Chester who had spotted him trying to signal them as they'd all sought refuge in a lava tube. At that moment, pelted by a volley of loosely aimed sniper fire, Drake only had time to return the signal to the stranded boy. His primary concern had been to get the others away from the Limiters, and to safety.
Will didn't know his way around yet, and Drake didn't know him well enough to guess where he might have gone. No, Drake was at a total loss as to where to start looking for the gone boy.
And now, as they crept along the winding tunnel, with Cal lagging behind and Elliott prowling up ahead, Drake attempted once again to blank out all his years of knowledge and experience and adopt the mindset of a complete novice. Think from ignorance.
Caught by surprise and completely terrified, the boy's first impulse must have been to try to catch up with them. Realizing that this was impossible, he might have gone for the next most obvious option and left the plain by the closest lava tube. But not necessarily.