Free Fourth Horseman by Kate Thompson

any case it would be deadly boring. I’m just going straight there and straight back. I should be home some time in the afternoon. If I’m not you’ll have to go to the lab and feed the squirrels.’
    I managed to get back to sleep and didn’t wake up till after ten. I had a long shower and a long breakfast, then pottered around my room, listening to music and pretending I was tidying up. I was just beginning to think about going over to the lab when I heard Dad come in.
    I met him in the kitchen and put the kettle on. He swept straight past me, keeping as great a distance between us as was possible in the kitchen. I wondered if I was contaminated, but it was himself he was worried about.
    ‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘Could have squirrel sneeze particulates on me.’
    He ran straight upstairs for a shower, and when he came back down his face was bright red from scrubbing and he had changed his clothes. I put a cup of tea in front of him but he ignored it.
    ‘Have to get this flask straight to the lab,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll come with you.’
    ‘Good. We’ll go on the bikes,’ he said. ‘Just in case. I was as careful as I could be, but there’s the slightest chance I carried some of the virus with me into the car. If our squirrels caught it, it could ruin the whole experiment.’
    There was a small steel flask in the kitchen with a temperature dial on the side. I watched Dad as he put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and meticulously wiped the outside with special disinfectant from a brown glass bottle. Then he put it in a backpack and we went out together to the shed.
    His bike was covered in cobwebs and the tyres were flat. Mums was there, though, in good working order, so he took that and together we cycled to the lab. Dad pedalled like a maniac—I found it hard to believe that he was so fit considering how little exercise he took, but it didn’t seem to take anything out of him. He was in a race against time to get the virus alive and well to the lab and into a culture before it died on him. If there was a virus, he said. There was no guarantee that there was. The squirrel had been very sick and had a high temperature but it might have been caused by any number of things.
    We parked the bikes and I used my card to open the door in the hayshed. Dad went straight through the cage room and into the ‘bug-lock’, which is what he called the decontamination chamber between the cage room and the virus lab. I changed into my work clothes, then said hello to the squirrels. They were delighted to see me and clung to the bars of their cages, looking for food and attention.
    Whatever Dad was doing took ages. I fed the squirrels and cleaned out all the cages, then handled the slowcoaches until we were all thoroughly bored by each other. I was ready to go home then, but I was keen to know how Dad was getting on and decided to hang on for a while. I turned on the TV but there was nothing interesting on and I turned it off again. The lab buildings were ominously silent and, despite the space and the ventilation, felt airless. I could only imagine what processes my father was going through behind the airtight walls, what alchemical techniques he was using to isolate that tiny string of DNA. I tried not to think about the potential for disaster that lay in what he was doing. I trusted him absolutely, as a scientist and as a father, but no amount of rationalizing could get rid of the sense of unease.
    I made a cup of tea and drank it and was just deciding to go home and make a start on the dinner when Dad appeared, stumbling barefoot through the bug-lock door, still in the process of putting on his shirt.
    ‘We’ve got one!’ he said, pushing a button into the wrong buttonhole so that his shirt hung skew-whiff down his front. He wasn’t quite punching the air with his fist but he wasn’t far off it. ‘I’m sorry I was so long but I had to get a few samples set up in a culture. They’re breeding away happily