N. White: The End - Visions of Apocalypse

It’s warm, the beginning of summer, and I’m sitting on a bench in a children’s playground. Swings move in a gentle breeze, their chains creaking. I take a handful of petri dishes from my bag, and line them up beside me.

The labels are in my handwriting: Bacillus anthracis (true to form, the Anthrax spores are a brilliant white), Yersinia pestis (Bubonic Plague, not black but orange), and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (a suitably phlegmy green).

I note the time, wish them luck and open them to the air.

My stomach clenches. Infection, already! I rub my belly, feeling an almost maternal rush. But no, it’s a reminder of my skipped breakfast. Couldn’t face another bowl of extruded nutrient mush this morning. I crave something with taste.

I look behind me, more out of habit than need. The paranoia of the early days is ingrained. Police and other Government forces are long dead or disbanded, and the Skin-Gangs that replaced them have vanished away to nothing in recent weeks. It seems there is a limit to the persistence of organized barbarism.

Satisfied in my privacy, I dip a finger in the Anthrax dish and scoop out a taste. The layer of spores breaks with a delicate crunch, like a pie crust.

I lick my finger. It’s surprisingly sweet, but with a dusty, sour aftertaste. I try them all, ending with a creamy dollop of plague. I clean out the dish, smacking my lips.

The chains jangle louder for a second. I twist my head to see the swings. Were they rocking that high before?

I examine the remaining dishes. My heart sinks to see they’re already greying over, a billion little victims of bactericide. As grey as the trees and the grass, as grey as my life.

I check my watch. One minute, fifty-eight seconds. A new record.

Back to the car, which I kept in sight the whole time. Even so, I circle round and check underneath before getting in. It drives itself back to the lab while I keep an eye out, M16 on my lap. Only when we enter the underground car-park do I put the safety back on. Old habits.

I punch in the code and let the machine read my iris. The outer door opens and I step inside. Another code, another scan and then I’m into the bunker, home sweet home.

The first level is an open-plan office, a big spread of desks and chairs like you’d find in any modern city circa one lifetime ago. Angela stands waiting.

Unlike me, she still looks the part. White coat, black hair in a bun. She even wears her name tag, lest we forget she is Doctor Cortez.

“What happened to the test cultures?” she asks.

“I ate them.”

Her bottom lip wobbles. “You what?”

“I ate them.”

“You ate them?” She sits at her desk, takes off her glasses and rubs her temples. “She ate them. Ate them. Why would she even think to do that?”

She talks to herself a lot. I think she’s going crazy.

“Doctor Mackenzie — Julia,” she says, not looking at me, “we’ve got to stick to professional standards if we’re going to beat this.”

I stifle a laugh. Beat this? We got beat the day we engineered the first bacteriophage. She was part of the company that sold the first wave of designer viruses.

“You could go,” I say.

Her hand twitches, covers her missing right eye. No, Doctor Cortez will not be going outside.

“You bitch,” she says. “I didn’t ask them to rescue me.”

I close my eyes, suppress. “I’m going to the Garden.”

“What for, dessert?”

She remonstrates with herself, hands waving in the air. Definitely crazy.

I walk on. A couple of familiar faces look up from their workstations, say hello, then put their heads down. When your electricity comes from solar panels, computer time is precious. The stairs are unlit, another energy-saving measure.

I open the door at sub-level three. Ahead are benches stacked with equipment, all dead and useless. The one bit of high-tech that turned out useful, the printer on the next level down, is busy churning out food from hoppers of chemical ingredients.

At the far end is an airtight door. I go inside, shower and put on a bio suit. Then I shower again, dousing the outside of the suit with antivirals.

It’s a mirror of normal procedure. The entire world is a clean-room now, a sterile wasteland except for the phages.

Through another door, where I get an air bath and a second antiviral shower. Then a high-powered UV light switches on and I turn around, arms raised. Only then does the last door open, and I can enter the Garden.

It’s like visiting an aquarium. You’re in the dark, peering at a giant glass box. Instead of fake rocks and tiny fish, you see racks and racks of test tubes and vials. A robot arm rests in the centre, ready to grab.

There’s a console on one side where I log in. Temperature, air pressure, light levels — mundane, but essential maintenance that keeps the last pocket of microbes on Earth alive.

Everything’s fine. The Garden grows. The hardest part is preparing feedstock, which has to be sterilised to an exacting degree. Not one virion can get through.

All it takes is one. Bacteria are a varied bunch, but they all share the same template: Organic balloon. Our virus latches on, injects its own DNA and performs a hostile takeover. Balloon fills with baby viruses, bursts. Repeat.

Repeat until all the balloons are popped. The party’s over, but like bad guests they stick around. Not being technically alive, they don’t even have the decency to die of old age.

All this happened in nature already, of course. For millions of years bacteriophages were locked in an arms race with their prey, until one of our bright sparks tipped the scales. Maybe even one of the boys and girls upstairs, not that they’d admit it.

It wouldn’t be a problem, we said. Increase the virulence and it burns itself out sooner, we said.

I set the robot to work. It quickly finds an old classic: Streptococcus . Group A strain, everything from strep throat to eating your face.

I add a dash of Escherichia coli and Clostridium tatani , better known as tetanus. Are you sure, asks the computer, are you sure? Yes, yes. The robot places the mixture in the Garden’s only exit, a drawer that passes through two airlocks on its way to me.

I leave, not bothering to follow decontamination protocol. No point. I’m the most sterile thing in there. I throw the suit in an overflowing trash-can.

I place the sample on a counter-top, lean over and take a deep breath. The smell is repulsive, a toxic blend of mould, yeast and rancid meat, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except it has a taste, it is alive and doing what it was born to do.

I shovel each mouthful at speed. In an enclosed environment like the bunker, the phage is more concentrated, so the bacteria won’t last as long as they do outside.

It’s possible I’m a little crazy, too.

Lunchtime meeting. Everyone sits in a conference room, nineteen of us last time I counted. Doctor John Geere, the closest thing we have to a leader, presides.

I stare at his sideburns, which have grown to giant proportions. They sprout out the side of his head like an Orangutan’s cheek flanges.

“We’ll start with Doctor Chung’s atmospheric data,” he says. “I’m afraid it’s not good. Go ahead, Vanessa.”

When we first met, I was struck by Vanessa’s friendly smile and envious of her good looks. Today I notice she has shaved her head completely. Even her eyebrows.

She does not waste time. “The samples from the last twelve-week period show atmospheric oxygen content is currently averaging eighteen point seven percent, down from the norm of twenty point eight. From the current trend, all oxygen will be depleted in six hundred and thirty days, plus or minus fifty.”