The Farm Read online

  Hannah was getting on with the tests that she had been told to complete, focused entirely on what she was doing, then suddenly found herself on the floor with her head pounding, ears ringing, and pain registering from every part of her body. She looked up and saw the lab in disarray, and a couple of her colleagues lying prostrate. On her third attempt she managed to get to her feet, leant against a wall. Looking around, her first thought was about the state of their research rather than the welfare of her colleagues. Containment had been breached, and she could see into several neighbouring labs which she should have been completely isolated from. Months, or even years of painstaking work would have to be restarted, or could be lost entirely. It was too scary to think about what could have been unleashed.

  Turning her attention to the welfare of her fellow scientists, she tried to ignore what she could now be exposed to, hoping that the obsessive focus on safety would have paid off. Beyond the most basic first aid, she was clueless. She approached the man lying closest to her. He was regaining consciousness, but his legs looked in a bad way. She wobbled badly as she walked, but made it the six steps to him without falling. She could see several shards of glass protruding from his thighs and shins, and he was bleeding badly. As he woke he assessed the situation impressively quickly.

  “Help me sit up,” he instructed her, wincing in pain as she complied. She helped him shift so that he was leant against a workbench.

  “Now give me your lab coat. I need to do something to stop this bleeding.” He did not ask for any further help, indicating that she should move on to the next person as he tied a tourniquet around the top of each of his legs. She did as she was told.

  The next person she came to was lying face down, bleeding from a cut to the head, which did not look too serious. She was breathing shallowly, but steadily. Hannah reported this back to the man who was still working on his legs.

  “Leave her,” he advised. “It sounds like it’s going to be nothing worse than a concussion. She can wait. Get to the next person and tell me how they look.”

  The next person was the head of their team, and she looked dead. Hannah checked for a pulse, but could not find one. Before she could do any more there was the sound of decompression as the door into the lab opened, and three figures in hazard suits entered. They quickly took control of the situation. She watched as they checked on the condition of the three people still lying unconscious. The one she had deemed dead was declared alive, and two of the suited men took immediate action to keep her that way. The person who Hannah had yet to reach was not so lucky. Two more figures in hazard suits arrived, and one by one the survivors were taken to the quarantine facilities.

  She spent three days isolated in quarantine, visited by no one who wasn’t encased in a hazard suit. She was subjected to countless tests, gave dozens of blood and urine samples and was monitored constantly. She knew that around about her several people had been diagnosed with rabies, and a couple had a mutated strain of Smallpox that they were unlikely to survive. Hannah considered herself blessed when she was given the all clear. There would be months of follow up tests and she was prohibited from all forms of sexual activity, which she knew would be all too easy to comply with. For the next three weeks she was to stay on site, as there was a total shut-down until they were certain it was safe, but otherwise she was free to move around Birstall.

  All told, thirteen people had died as a direct result of the explosions, two had already died of infections picked up in the aftermath, and two more were almost certain to follow. As yet no assessment had been made about the state of the research, and how much had been compromised, but it looked bad. No trace had been found of the terrorists who had caused all of this. Suicide did not appear to be part of their plan and they seemed to have escaped cleanly. Security insisted that they must still have been close by the time the bombs went off, but they were given little credit following their failure. The terrorists were the only ones who were no longer present at the facility that had been at the scene of the explosions.

  Hannah spent a few hours walking around the facility observing the damage that had been wrought from outside the cordons that had been erected. It was a relief to be free of the cramped quarantine room, and to have some confidence that she was still healthy. The feeling of freedom soon wore off. She still couldn’t leave the facility, and could not get on with her work. She was a prisoner there, with a sentence that would last as long as it had to too be sure that she was no danger to the general public. There was no way of arguing with the necessity of the sentence, but that made it no less unpleasant.

  As she stood staring at the scene of destruction a man walked very slowly towards her. His legs did not seem to bend properly, and by the time he reached her he was sweating and out of breath. He stopped next to her and they exchanged smiles. He was called Phil. The most she had spoken to him in her time at Birstall had been a few days earlier, when he had been on the ground with shards of glass sticking out of his legs.

  “Should you be up and walking?” she asked him.

  “I was told not to overexert myself, but that it would be good to keep moving a bit. After three days in that tiny cell I needed to get a bit of fresh air. These bandages don’t make the walking to easy though.”

  They stood in silence for a few moments watching the containment work proceed. Hannah broke the silence, “You were really impressive in there. Able to keep calm and give first aid instructions while bandaging your own wounds. I would have panicked if you hadn’t woken up and taken control.”

  He looked embarrassed by the compliment. “It was nothing. I’ve been trained in first aid. I just sat on my arse and let you do the hard work.” She raised an eyebrow in his direction but did not know what to say in response.

  “What’s going to happen now?” she asked instead.

  “It’s going to take a few weeks to clear this mess up. Then I guess that the Government will send a team in to investigate our security and safety procedures. Then we’ll be allowed to get back to work, and we’ll find out how much has been lost. Some teams will be worse hit than others. A lot of people have died who can’t easily be replaced. Long term, I don’t know.”

  “How many people are still in quarantine? Are we going to lose anyone else?”

  “One of the guys with smallpox seems to have turned the corner and is recovering. I think everyone will be surprised if the other one survives the night. The guys with rabies don’t seem to be doing too well either. They aren’t responding to treatment, and are growing more and more violent. They’ve all been strapped down to prevent them biting the doctors. No one is giving much away, but I think they have been showing some pretty strange symptoms. I don’t think that it’s a normal strain of rabies that they’ve been infected with.”

  “We really work with some nasty stuff here don’t we.”

  “God yeah. I wonder if the guys who did this had any idea what they could be unleashing.”

  Newcastle University

  Ruth checked her phone as she walked out of her lecture and found she had missed four calls from her mum. The persistence suggested it had to be pretty urgent, so she said to her friends that she needed to make a call and would catch up with them in a bit. She walked over to a quiet spot and phoned home. After a couple of rings she heard her mother’s voice saying hello.

  “Hi mum. I just got out of a lecture. What’s up?”

  “It’s your brother. He got arrested this morning.”

  “Christ! What’s he done?”

  “He was ploughing the field then some guy walked straight out in front of him. John went straight over the top of him.”

  “Is the guy OK?”

  “No. His head was crushed by the plough. He died immediately. We don’t know who he was, or what he was doing in our field as yet, but John’s been taken away for questioning. That was about six hours ago. We’ve not heard anything since, but there is a policeman waiting by the tractor guarding the crime scene.”

  “Do
you want me to come home? I can get the train down to Norwich, then if you can’t pick me up I can get the late bus back.” There was a pause, and Ruth could hear her mum talking away from the phone.

  “Your dad says you’d be best to stay put for now. He’s been talking to the police and there seems to be a lot of trouble around at the moment. People round here seem to have gone a bit nuts, and the police haven’t got the resources to keep it under control. He doesn’t want you travelling alone.”

  “What’s going on down there? The biggest crime in living memory is when Mrs Smith had her garden gnome stolen.”

  “I’m sure this is just a lot of noise about nothing, but its better safe than sorry. Your Dad’s off locking up all of the guns at the moment to make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. He sees two policemen, now he seems convinced that civilization is on the brink of collapse.”

  “Well you should be pretty safe where you are then. There’s no civilization for miles around… Are you sure you don’t want me coming home tonight?”

  “No. We’ll see how things are in the morning. I’ll give you a call if we hear anything from John in the meantime.”

  They said their goodbyes and hung up. Ruth was shocked. Her brother being arrested was about the least likely thing she could imagine. Growing up she couldn’t ever remember him getting grounded at home, or having a detention is school. She would have loved to tease him about this when it all blew over if it wasn’t so serious. After considering it for a few minutes she decided against going home and followed her mum’s instructions. Giving her parents something else to worry about was not a good idea, and there probably wasn’t anything she could do to help in Norfolk anyway.

  Not feeling like socializing after that piece of news, Ruth texted one of the friends she’d just parted from and let her know that she wouldn’t be joining them, and was heading back to their house instead. She was not keen to share this news until it was clear how it would all pan out, and probably not even then. Talking about home was always a bit awkward, as it always reminded people to tease her about her country bumpkin upbringing. Everyone else seemed to find it amusing that the nearest city was thirty miles away from the farm she called home. Finding a suitable defence for the rural lifestyle always seemed elusive. Much as she loved her family, she knew that farming was not for her. Unlike her brother, a permanent return to the home she grew up in would never be on the cards.

  The bus arrived at the stop before Ruth did, so she had a short sprint to make sure it didn’t leave without her, then flashed the driver her pass and found an empty seat where she could sit and stare out of the window for the twenty minutes that the journey would take. Normally this time would be spent on her phone, sending texts, scanning Facebook or her e-mails, or talking to people and annoying the passengers around her with a one sided conversation. That day the phone stayed in her bag as there were other matters occupying her mind.

  The streets that the bus passed were all familiar enough to be ignored, but about halfway home there was a burst of activity. Through the window there was what appeared to be a bit of a domestic on display. A woman of slight build standing at about five foot two was throwing herself violently at a man who couldn’t weigh less than twenty stone. He kept pushing her back, but appeared unsure of what to do. When he tried to walk away she launched herself at him again. He swore at her and pushed her back again, but was doing all he could not to hurt her, and was at a loss as to how to convince her to stop attacking him. Ruth wondered what he had done to make her so enraged to behave like that. The bus did not stop to see the conclusion of the altercation. As they left there were a couple of guys in matching Newcastle football shirts about to step in to try and calm the situation, and Ruth noticed that the man at the centre of events was bleeding from his right arm where he appeared to have been bitten. The injury looked consistent with the way the little woman was going at him teeth and nails bared.

  Ruth watched until the participants in the fight were all out of sight. Everyone else on the bus had been watching, but no one said anything about it. The event called to Ruth’s mind the second part of the conversation that she had had with her mother. Apparently there was a wave of violence spreading across her home county that had left the police overstretched enough for it to be unsafe for her to travel back. She had thought it a ridiculous overreaction when she had heard it, but found herself having second thoughts. Obviously there was no link to be drawn between the scene she’d just witnessed and any events four hundred miles away, but her mind connected the two anyway and tried to find a pattern. Irrational behaviour had found a way to spread across the country before, so it was far from impossible.

  The rest of the journey passed without incident. She soon found herself at home, and without thinking locked the door behind her. Her house mates would be surprised, but pleased when they found this. All of them kept the door locked automatically, and complained when it never occurred to Ruth to do the same. She only locked when the house was unoccupied, and even then frequently forgot. After making a cup of tea Ruth sat in front of the TV and put the news on, concerned that something significant was happening. There was little of interest happening in the national news, the focus being on wars happening overseas, and the latest unemployment figures. In the local news there was a short piece about some violence in one of the notoriously rough estates and a resulting increase in police presence, but nothing to really catch her attention. The unexpected news that she had received from her mother was just setting her imagination a bit wild.

  Despite assuring herself that her brother had just been involved in an unavoidable accident and would soon be released back to the farm, and that the suggestions of out of control violence were just a fantasy, Ruth was glad when her house mates returned an hour later, so she was not alone in the house. The rational part of her brain was following a logical interpretation of events, but the other part was running rampant with absurdities. She had been in the house alone for about four hours by the time they arrived, and had been agitated the whole time, unable to settle to any one occupation except thinking about the content of the earlier phone call.

  The reassurance of there being additional numbers around her was soon offset. After a coffee and a bite to eat her housemates had gone to a bar in town for a few early drinks. It was on the verge of developing into a full blown night out, when the bar they were in was shut down by the police, and the mood was killed. Lucy had driven the four of them home, the rest of the group they had been with scattered in their various directions. Simon proceeded to give the details of the evening,

  “Plunkett’s was still pretty quiet because it’s still early, and it’s a Wednesday. There were a few other tables, can’t have been more than thirty or forty people, and you know the size of the place. We were on the balcony bit looking down on everything. I’d just got back from the toilet and I saw these three guys walking in who looked a bit weird.”

  “Bloody thugs.” Lucy interrupted.

  “Football hooligans.” Natalie added.

  “It wasn’t football hooligans.” Paul argued. “There’s not even a game on tonight. They were drugged up or something. Two of them were just wearing football shirts. That’s like a uniform for the Geordies.”

  Ruth interrupted before the argument could go any further, “What happened?”

  “As I was saying, three guys walked in. There were no customers at the bar, but they were well staffed ready for the night. One of the barmen nodded at them and was all ready to take their order. Then they just fucking went for him. All three of them tried to grab this one guy. One of them just got his tie, which was a clip on thing and just came loose, but the big heavyweight guy got hold of an arm, and the other one got a piece of his shirt. The other bar staff were pretty quick and pulled him away from the three guys, but not before one of them had taken a bite out of his arm… Who the fuck would do that, I mean a chunk of flesh was bitten right off his arm.”

  “I already had my phone out
to call Sam, so I had called the police by this point.” Lucy added.

  “Good job too. These guys were not stopping. They were trying to climb over the bar, but like Paul said, they were on something and were really uncoordinated and they guys behind the bar were shoving them back with whatever they could get hold of. We weren’t about to pick a fight with these three nutters, but there were four blokes at one of the tables downstairs who decided to step in at that point. I know one of them. He’s in the rugby team, and looking at the other three I’m pretty sure that’s where he knows them from. Anyway, they grabbed the three nutters from behind, double teaming the big guy, and tried to throw them out of the bar. It happened really fast, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but next thing two of the rugby players had been bitten, one on the hand, the other on the shoulder. One of the guys in a Newcastle shirt got loose, and went straight for the throat of the guy I know.”

  “It was horrible.” Paul added.

  “The other three rugby players dragged their friend free while trying to fight off the three lunatics. They got him to the stairs and formed a wall in front of him, but he looked in a really bad way. We went down the stairs and tried to help him, but what first aid do you carry out on someone whose throat has been bitten out? Just below us the fight was still going on. The rugby players were beating the crap out of the three guys, but they just kept coming forward. They didn’t seem to feel any pain, and didn’t seem to tire. I think if it had gone on the Rugby players would have tired first and been overpowered. All three had been bitten at least once and were bleeding. What changed things was that other people in the bar tried to flee and this caught the attention of the psychos that started this. They turned and started chasing easier targets who couldn’t get out of the door quick enough to escape.”