Free All Fall Down by Louise Voss Page B

home and drink plenty of fluids. Do not go to the hospital. A special helpline has been set up …’
    For the next two hours, the old man continued to stare at the TV.
    This was it. The one. For many years, he and scientists like him had issued warnings that one day a mighty plague would sweep the earth. The authorities – the CDC and the WHO and all those other government motherfuckers – pretended they were prepared for it.
    But he was the only man in America who knew what it was and how to stop it.
    He called for the guard. After a few minutes, one of the older guards arrived. Officer Hillier. He looked tired.
    ‘What’s up, Doc?’ he asked wearily.
    In the prison, people always said this to him. It drove him nuts, but he ignored it.
    ‘Is anyone in the prison sick?’
    Hillier raised an eyebrow. ‘What kinda question is that?’
    ‘A perfectly reasonable question. I just want to know if anyone in the prison has contracted this virus they’re talking about.’
    Hillier looked over the old man’s shoulder at the TV. ‘Oh, that. Just a buncha people with a bad cold. Yeah, a few people here have got sick. Why you asking? Want to experiment on them, huh?’
    The old man grinned at him. ‘You’re an asshole, Hillier.’
    ‘And you just lost your privileges for a week, Doc. And that includes using the phone and the internet. And the TV.’
    He hadn’t expected that. ‘No, please, Hillier, I need—’
    The big guard stuck a broad finger in his face. ‘Shut the fuck up. I’ll send someone to take away your TV later. Enjoy it while you can.’
    The old man watched the guard retreat from the cell, banging the door shut behind him, and shook his head, the thinnest of smiles on his lips.
    Let them take away his TV, his internet, his phone. They’d all be dead soon. If they knew what he knew, Hillier and the rest of them would be offering him all their money, their houses, their fucking
wives
in return for his help. Hillier was one of the people whose slow, hideous death he’d buy a ticket to watch.
    He knew he wouldn’t have to wait long.

9
    ‘So, Dr Maddox,’ said Agent McCarthy, leaning back in the seat and stretching his arms over his head, linking his fingers together, palms facing the car roof. The leather underneath his buttocks complained noisily. ‘Been to Sequoia before?’
    He was a big man, particularly when stretching, and his bulk seemed to fill the back of the car. His flesh had the compacted appearance of someone who works out a lot but who also loves his food a little too much.
    ‘Sequoia?’ Kate looked out of the window. All she could make out was the faint outline of bare rocky peaks rising against the deepening blue of the evening sky. ‘The big tree?’
    ‘The national park,’ said McCarthy, making a face at her.
    ‘Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I did know that. I blame the jet lag. No, I haven’t been there before. But it is the home of those giant trees, right?’
    ‘Right. We don’t get to drive through it, though.’
    ‘The park?’ The conversation felt to Kate, through her jet lag, as though it was going in claustrophobic spirals of incomprehension.
    ‘No, the real famous sequoia, the one everyone’s heard of: it fell across the road in the thirties and the sucker was way too big to be moved, its trunk is, like, twenty foot wide, so they cut a hole in it and made it into a tunnel instead.’ He made sawing gestures with his right hand, and then curved his palm in an arc, as if stroking an invisible cat’s head, to indicate the tunnel.
    ‘Redwoods are even bigger, though – they’re over the other side of the park. Those puppies are so big you can drive right through the middle of ’em, even when they’re still living.’
    Jack would love that, Kate thought, driving right through a tree. She vaguely remembered seeing photographs of sequoias – or maybe redwoods – in an encyclopaedia. It was so surreal, she thought, to be in this car with two FBI agents, making small talk about