Free Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 by Louise Welsh Page A

classic margaritas and a bottle of wine at Pizza Express. He crumpled the voucher into a ball and let it drop to the ground.
    Out in the prison corridors beyond someone bayed like a wolf.
    ‘I’ll be glad to get out of here,’ Jeb muttered. He was rooting through the abandoned gear, pocketing car keys, checking ID cards. He found a Snickers bar, tore its wrapper free and shoved it into his mouth.
    Magnus felt he might kill Jeb for a share of the chocolate but he asked, ‘How will we do it?’
    ‘Same way we came in, through the front door.’
    The locker room was windowless and lined with steel cabinets. It was larger than the cell they had shared, but it gave Magnus the same trapped feeling and his skin itched with the urge to escape. A Daily Express lay folded beneath a wooden bench. Its headline screamed, CONTAGION! Magnus picked up the tabloid. It had been published two days ago. The first three pages were devoted to the virus. People were calling it the sweats and it was overloading hospitals in London, Paris, New York and Berlin. There was an editorial alleging that the poor state of the NHS had precipitated the crisis, but the criticisms were well-rehearsed and perfunctory, as if the journalist’s heart had not really been in the story.
    China and Russia had issued statements denying rumours of outbreaks in their major cities, but social media contradicted official accounts and the Express carried surreptitiously-taken photographs of a Shanghai hospital ward lined with beds full of failing patients.
    A small galaxy of celebrities had been felled by the virus. Magnus searched for Johnny Dongo’s name, but either the comedian was okay or he had been eclipsed by A-listers. There was something distasteful about the celebrity photographs, the rows of hot women in bikinis, all of them dead.
    ‘Look at this.’ Magnus passed the paper to Jeb.
    ‘You can’t trust tabloid rags.’ Jeb tossed the paper on to the floor. ‘They don’t care about facts, or whose life they ruin, just as long as they can twist out a good story.’
    Magnus lifted the paper from the floor and held it wide, showing Jeb the photograph of the hospital ward, flanked by sidebars of smiling female celebrities.
    ‘People are dying.’
    Jeb was riffling through jackets and trouser pockets. He glanced up. ‘We already knew that.’ He clicked a penknife open, checking its blade. ‘How many of these actresses are holed up in some spa, ready to come back from the dead with a big tada when the time’s right? And who says the people in that hospital have the chills? All that photo shows is exactly what I’d expect to see in a hospital, patients lying in bed.’
    ‘They’re calling it the sweats.’
    Jeb clicked the penknife shut. ‘Sweats, chills, I don’t give a fuck.’ He slid the closed knife into his jeans pocket. ‘Just concentrate on getting out of here. We can worry about killer flu after that.’
    Magnus joined Jeb on the floor and rummaged in a sports bag. There was nothing useful in it, just a bottle of shower gel that claimed to double as shampoo and a towel, but touching another man’s possessions felt intimate and wrong. Magnus shoved it out of the way and started on another bag. He wanted to find something to eat. He wanted a knife like the one Jeb had found, or, better still, a Taser. He said, ‘What if the front door’s locked?’
    ‘I’m hoping someone will have already solved that problem for us, but if it’s locked then we find a way of opening it.’ Getting rid of his incriminating tracksuit had made Jeb more confident. ‘Here.’ He passed Magnus a prison officer’s identity card.
    The man in the ID photograph was older than Magnus. His hair was a similar dark brown, but it was cut short in a barber-shop no-style. His face was thin and intelligent-looking; perfect casting for a university professor, or a curator of rare manuscripts.
    ‘I don’t look anything like him,’ Magnus said.
    ‘Just flash it and only