This is the first draft of the first chapter of a new novel that I am putting together. It's not from the world of the Collector of Tales. It's more a thriller I guess in a more standard novel style.
Any feedback would be welcome.
The Plague Year - Chapter One
The train came to a grumbling halt and as a door was pushed open, two heavily swaddled and muffled shapes climbed down onto the frozen ground and stand for a while beside the track. It is dark and it is about 05.20 local time. There is a dusting of white powdery snow on the flat and compressed earth around them. Incongruously, a mobile phone beeps out to announce the receipt of a text message and, not far away, a large dog is trotting towards them with ambiguous intent.
The woman, for the anoraked and scarved figure on the left nearest the train is a woman, rummages in her pocket with her gloved hands as she tries to recover the phone. Her partner watches the dog as it approaches them and recalls the words from the guide book that tell him that in Mongolia, all the dogs are man eaters and that even the great Ghenghis Khan feared them. This dog was large, about the size of a small pony. One eye reflected back light. The other was missing.
“Bea...” her partner said cautiously, “I think we should get back up into the train.”
He hadn't realised how dry his mouth was because the words came out strangely: a mix of half strangled vowels and broken consonant sounds. He nudged her arm with his to gain her attention.
“Bea!”
A muffled response was returned. It was unintelligible as it stood but to make the point further, the train let out a hiss and started to move away with a series of grinding squeals as cold metal protested against cold metal. The dog let out a yelp and veered to its right away from the sound, tail between legs and its hind quarters crouched slightly and at the same time a voice called out.
“Tatvai moril”
He seemed to appear from nowhere. A young man of about five foot in height was walking towards them with his hand held out before him. He wore no gloves and in the darkness his skin seemed to glow with an oily luminescence.
“Tatvai moril.”
He was almost upon them. The train had gathered up sufficient momentum and was now drawing away fast leaving a trail of liquid that fell from the underside of the carriages and froze on the ground below.
“Baavgay!”
This appeared to be addressed to the dog for it responded with a reluctant if not petulant bark and slunk over to where the young man had now come to a halt in front of the two outsiders. Close up the dog looked vaguely like a small bear and it stank.
“Welcome,” the young man said now in English as he pumped the gloved hand of the other man vigorously. “I have car” He added. “I have name. Khenbish . You call me Ken”
“Constantin,” the shrouded man said in reply, “Contantinidis.”
“Dr. Constantinedis!” exclaimed the young man who had all this time kept hold of the man’s hand and continued to shake it.
“No, that is my wife.” The man said quietly.
Ken stopped pumping his hand and turned to the woman who had hitherto been ignored.
“Doctor...”
“Tavtai moril, Khenbish.” She said quietly.
“Tavtai moril” Ken replied, courteously.
As the last carriage of the train finally passed them and clattered off into the dark, its one small red light flickering back at them like a bloodshot version of Baavgay’s one eye. In its wake the dust devils and powdered snow , plastic cups, bags and other detritus of humanity bowled along enthusiastically in the direction that the train had now gone. Bea watched quietly for a while and wondered how on earth such rubbish could collect out here on the edge of nowhere. “I’m lovin it!” proclaimed one paper cup as it bowled along the tracks with the ubiquitous and familiar yellow “m” turning over and over as it went.
Now that the train had gone, she could see a battered old car parked casually on the other side of the tracks. The engine was still running and the rear doors and the trunk were open. There was no road that she could see, just a flat expanse of compacted earth running off into the darkness.
“Please,” called the young man, “let’s get into my car.”
He paused as if for some reply but neither of the outsiders spoke and so he added more words to the mix.
“Dr. Constantinedis, I’ll take your pack.”
“No you will not,” Bea replied, “and you will call me, Bea. My husband is Conn.”
She stepped across the track and walked towards the car. Without waiting, she slipped the pack from her shoulders and swung it onto the back seat of the vehicle. She then straightened up and stretched her aching muscles. It was a heavy pack and she had only carried it from the train to the car. Some of the planned activities were going to prove a little demanding, she feared.
Ken barked a command to Baavgay and the dog slunk off to the other side of the vehicle, offering the woman some distance as it swung around the front of the car in a wide arc. It then sat and waited at the front door on the passengers’ side. It was going to be a fragrant journey if that creature was going to accompany them. At least, thought Bea, it wasn’t going to be hot and that would hopefully minimise the stench.
She could hear the two men heading towards her now and they were discussing the route that Ken had described across the Gobi. Conn seemed to be fairly relaxed about it and that reassured her. He asked a couple of questions but Ken gave fairly straightforward answers and it seemed to satisfy him. Something odd about sound in that place caught her out and she jumped when her husband’s hand came down gently on her shoulder.
“You all right, love?” He had felt the movement and was concerned.
“Just tired, that’s all. Twenty-two hours on a train heading out into oblivion is not my idea of fun. The cold and the early morning don’t make for relaxation and the prospect of several days in the close company of that dog don’t inspire me. Let’s just leave it at that, my dear, shall we?”
She smiled, but he could see that she was weary and somehow she looked older than her twenty-eight years. Inside the hood of the anorak he could see that warm pale skin, those bright dark eyes and that beautiful mouth that, right now, he really wanted to kiss.
“Come come, my friends, let’s leave this place.”
Ken’s voice broke into his thoughts and brought him back into the dark and the cold from the warmth of a hotel room in Beijing. He helped his wife into the car and closed the door after her and then crossed to the other side of the vehicle to wrestle with his own pack under the baleful eye of Baavgay, before climbing into the car himself.
Ken saw to the dog and it climbed up into the passenger seat in the front where it filled the complete space with its bear-like form and its unholy stink. The young man seemed oblivious to the smell but was eager to get away from the crossing now that the train had gone. He appeared to relax as he closed the trunk and slipped into the driver’s seat, shutting the old door firmly after him.
“Now we go!” he said grinning over his shoulder at them. “Tomorrow night we sleep in luxury.”
The car stalled as soon as he put it into gear but after a few half hearted attempts to start up, he had the thing in motion and was swinging away from the railway track and out into the broad expanse of flat terrain before them.
As he drove away Khenbish watched the movement back at the crossing in his rear mirror. There were shapes moving about there, where none had been before. To his keen eyes, there were four of them: one was sniffing on the ground where the woman had been standing. The others were hunting around in the debris that littered the area.
“Tarbagan.” He whispered quietly under his breath unaware that the man seated behind him had a few words in Mongolian and that one of these was the word for the ‘marmot’, though to Conn the connection with the plague carrying rodents was obscure in the context of a car and a frozen railway crossing in the south west of the Gobi Desert.
It wasn’t worth the conversation however and a more pressing need was the fact that Ken had turned up the heating and the stink of dog was fast becoming intolerable.
There were two text messages on Bea’s phone. The first one that she read was from her father checking that she was all right. It was, as always written in perfect English without abbreviation or textualisation and it finished with ‘love daddy’. She thought of him sitting in bed in the early hours of a late English summer as he tapped out the words carefully and slowly. She suppressed the urge to reply at once just in case she lost signal. It was pretty remarkable that she had any at all and she wanted to check the other message first.
The second message was from Henrik back in Oxford and had been sent about three hours ago. As she read it her father was forgotten.
They had managed to establish proliferation of the virus in three of the assays : Sooties, rats and the WC. Henrik’s feeble attempt at English humour did not mask the seriousness of the last two letters of the text. WC was the West China cohort of human samples. These had been taken from students at the Shenyang Pharmaceutical University where in 2006, there had been an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that had been attributed to the hantavirus SEOV or Seoul Virus. The rats, technically the brown Norweigan rat were an obvious choice and there were no surprises there. The Sooty Mangabeys were a bit of a wild card. Believed to be involved in the origins of the HIV-2 virus, it had seemed worth looking at the ability of the creatures to become infected with a disease that humans had caught already. Bea hadn’t really expected any success with these ( if success could be called the right word).
Bea started to tap out a response consisting of a series of questions (in her view) although to Henrik, when he finally received the text, they would read as a series of increasingly agitated demands for information. As she got into the message, Bea decided that it was worth a phone call rather than text, even if it was around 02.00 in the UK right now. She checked for signal and predictably it was gone. A nois partway between a squeak and a muffled expletive escaped from her lips.
Conn, who had been dozing lightly, looked up.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“No signal!” was all that Bea could manage.
“Well no, I’m not surprised really. We’re on the edge of the Desert. It’s the middle of nowhere!” He chuckled to himself as though he had just made a joke and nodded off once more.
“No signal, Dr. Bea.” Ken called back from the front. “No signal here. Come back in about,” he looked at his watch, “about four hours if we make good time.”
Bea’s frustration went into overdrive and she started to hammer out a series of messages that would go when the signal returned.
Dr. Constantinedis had good reason to be agitated. Quite apart from the dog and the stifling heat from the old car’s heater and the prospect of several hours and days travelling in this style, the cryptic note from Henrik had confirmed a worry that had been growing on her mind as they made the tortuous train journey from Beijing.
Her Oxford laboratory had been studying rodent borne viruses for some years now and from collaborative work with other laboratories in New Mexico and in Beijing, she believed that they were pretty close to identifying a viable treatment that would leave the current supportive treatments and mechanical dialysis normally indicated back in the stone age where they belonged. However, that was before a young man had walked into the hospital in Ulaanbataar in the spring of 2010 complaining of all the usual flu-like symptoms : chills, fever, nausea, aches and the like. Within 48 hours of admission he had suffered kidney failure and a couple of days later he was dead.
The cause of death was determined as acute viral phneumonia and a hantavirus was first suspected as the culprit. Seoul virus was the most likely candidate on evidence of geography and initial symptoms but a second camp favoured the less likely Sin Nombre virus primarily because of the subsequent cause of death.
The problem with the second option was that this was out of line both in geography and in the normal rodent that was responsible for its transmission, given that this particular virus was prevalent in North and Central America. However, Ulaanbataar boasted an airport and as such opened itself out to the international world of pathogen exchange and so this possibility could not be discounted. The debate however was for the most part academic and medical because the young man could not be identified and so it was not possible to trace his movements back to a possible source of infection. The brown Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) was suspected as the vector either from the wild population or possibly from an infected laboratory animal (as may have been the case in Shenyang in 2006). The debate was also short lived because within a week of the young man’s death, three workers in the hospital in Ulaanbataar had developed symptoms of the disease and before a month was out, the authorities had imposed an embargo of news reporting from the area and all routes in and out of the city were closed.
Bea had heard of the outbreak within a week of the first new death. A young doctor working in A & E at the hospital had become ill with symptoms similar to the first death and preliminary findings were emailed to her in Oxford by the Centre for Disease Control in Beijing. The information wasn’t particularly helpful, not through any fault of the Chinese but simply because there had not been enough time to undertake any significant or meaningful level of research. Equally, there had been no background information provided about either the new fatality or the original one. There could be any number of sources of infection although at this stage it was believed that it was rodent borne.
A polite email back to the Chinese thanked them for the information and asked to be kept up to date with any further developments.
Those developments came in a few weeks later when she was advised that several hundred people had now presented with the symptoms and that there had been over a hundred fatalities so far. From the facts and the picture forming it was becoming increasingly obvious that the source of infection was not rodents and that something a little more sinister was taking place.
Bea stared out of the misted car window and watched the light from the east spreading across the sky. They were heading north and she was in the right hand seat with both large packs between her and her husband so she could see the sun rise and he could not. However, from the gentle snoring sounds, he was fast asleep anyway. The lights appearing on her side of the car were pretty spectacular with reds and purples and yellows spreading across the ink stain that was the retreating night sky as it seemed to head off to the west.
The car hit something and Ken brought the car to a halt with some words of his own that were probably expletives in Mongolian. The engine stalled once more and strangely, he seemed to be more concerned to get it started up again rather than to get out and see what the obstruction was. Conn was now awake and was asking what had happened but their guide paid no attention to him.
“Shouldn’t we find out what we hit?” asked Bea in a tone that was probably a bit sharper than she had intended.
She needn’t have worried though, because the man ignored her as well. Ken fiddled urgently with the ignition and after a few of those interminable rattling barks that old engines give off as their drivers attempt to coax them into life, the thing gave a loud bang and coughed itself back into action. Ken floored the accelerator with the clutch down and the engine roared angrily in the fading darkness. Bea saw a number of small animals run off as though from underneath the car, heading out in all directions to a distance of about fifty metres where they stopped and turned around to watch the car. They sat up on their haunches and Bea was sure that she could hear them calling to each other. The sounds were instructions, she was sure of it.
“Tarbagan!” said Ken, “ we hit a tarbagan.”
“A marmot?” queried Conn. “Like those back at the crossing?”
“No, not those back at the crossing. They were different creatures. These are...”
He seemed to run out of words but before either of the outsiders could say anything else he had leaned across and opened the front passenger door carefully. He issued a command to the dog and Baavgay leapt out into the desert. Ken had not let go of the door even when the dog pushed against it as he got out of the car. Once the animal was out, Ken pulled it shut and locked it.
“You should lock your doors.” He whispered.
“What on earth for?” asked Conn.
“Surely the little blighters can’t open the doors...”
He paused before continuing, “...and even if they could what harm are they to us?”
“Lock your door!” It was a command, not a request.
“Do it Conn!” This was Bea and she was frightened and as she whispered the words she pushed the lock down on her own door.
For a while the three of them watched the dog as trotted round to the front of the car. Its head went down to sniff at something on the ground beneath it – presumably the thing that they had hit. Baavgay’s back was still visible and they could see from the movements that he made that, whatever it was was likely to offer him an impromptu meal. Ken shouted at him to get him to move away and with some reluctance the head came back up and they saw the two dark pits of the dogs eyes looking back at them.
His muzzle was bloody although it wasn’t clear if he had been feeding. Bea thought that there seemed a little too much blood for the average road-kill. It clearly wasn’t a marmot on the road.
By now Baavgay had circled the car and was heading out into the growing darkness in the direction that Bea had seen the marmots scatter. They weren’t visible now although she did not recall when it was that they had gone. The dog seemed inquisitive but not particularly concerned ; his ears were upright and his tail for the first time since she had seen him, was erect.
“Where’s he going?” she asked.
“He’s looking for wolves.” replied Ken.
“Wolves?” she queried. It seemed a little extreme.
“Yes, yes,” said Ken. He seemed a little impatient but he added. “Whatever we hit, it’s not small: perhaps a small deer.”
“But you said we hit a marmot.” she persisted.
“Surely, but I was wrong. Too much blood on old Baavgay and he’s tried a bit. He’ll not eat tarbagan. The meat is ... “
He searched for a word and failed.
“Yes, but why did you say that we hit a tarbagan?” she persisted.
“Bea, leave it!”
This was Conn. He was looking out into the darkness after the dog.
