“We need to meet,” Nell says briskly. “Read the materials, talk them through, figure out where we go next.”
“Already on my way over to you.”
For the first time in a few days, I feel excited. I would never let my staff know, but this work is a grind with no letup and, despite popular belief, I’m only human. I get tired and overwhelmed and just want it all to be over. I don’t show it. Leaders need to be strong, and no one can accuse me of being weak. But I needed this today. We needed this boost, badly. This will speed up our research tenfold.
Thank you, George and Elizabeth and Amaya. If I was in their position I probably wouldn’t have released this information. But they’re not me and I can benefit from it, and that means we’ll have a vaccine quicker and men can stop dying. We’re reaching a critical point in population loss the world over. We’re past a point of return but we’re not yet past the point of return. There are still enough young women of child-bearing age to have a hope in hell of population recovery. I sigh, and text my assistant to get me another Red Bull. The work is only just beginning.
SURVIVAL
MORVEN
A small farm next to the Cairngorms National Park, the Independent Republic of Scotland
Day 224
It’s been 161 days since I saw my son. I know he’s alive from the crackly call I get from his walkie-talkie every morning, but that’s the only contact we have. When it’s dark and I’m washing the dishes in the kitchen, I can see the faint glow from his hut eight hundred meters away. It takes everything I have not to run the short distance and scoop him into my arms.
Cameron—my patient, frustrated husband—has been asking for months when we’re going to let Jamie come back. “When we know it’s safe,” I say. He’s becoming increasingly resentful of my fear. We’ve been together twenty-five years; I know him like the back of my hand and I know he’s going to snap soon. But he’s always been the more reckless of the two of us. None of the boys seem to be sick, this is true. Cameron hasn’t gotten sick.
But we don’t know anything about these boys or the virus. We don’t know how long you can be asymptomatic. What if one of them has it lurking in his system or there’s a bit of it in one of the tents? The stakes are so high, the regret would kill me if Jamie died all because we were impatient. Cameron says I’m a conspiracy theorist because I don’t believe the government when they say men are asymptomatic for two days. I don’t believe it. They’ve done everything wrong. They didn’t believe Amanda Maclean, they haven’t found a vaccine, they barely did anything to stop the spread of the virus. I just don’t believe them.
The other boys are playing football on the makeshift pitch. The whoops and hollers of seventy-eight teenage boys used to bring a smile to my face. I would revel in the sounds of joy when outside the safe confines of our space here, there is only danger and sadness. But that was almost six months ago. Now, the resentment is killing me.
If I was a different kind of woman, I would maybe acknowledge that this is traumatizing and that my brain feels frayed and close to collapse. As it is, I drink two bottles of our stashed wine once every few weeks and try to forget that any of this is happening. Without my son I’m struggling to function. I’m keeping other women’s sons safe and happy and well while my own son rots in loneliness a fifteen-minute walk away. The boys are wonderful. It’s not their fault that any of this is happening. They all look so young, especially when they first arrived. Fear takes the promise of adulthood out of a child’s face, I find. These big teenage lads, nearly six feet, away from their mums, scared senseless, unsure if they’d ever see their dads again, looked so young. Gangly and insubstantial.
Thank God we were given supplies with each bus. The boys each have a box—they read STERILIZED—SAFE on the sides—with a sleeping bag, a pillow, basic food supplies, water purification tablets, and a “leisure” item. I did a double take when I saw those. There were a few different ones—some had a football, others a Frisbee. There was even a cricket bat and ball. Part of me thought, A football?! They need food! But it was good foresight on the part of whoever did that.