The woman across the hall was taken away, screaming all the while, and soon after, men in full white overalls with face masks and gloves came in and cleaned her room.

They used a pressure washer after removing the bedding that was then taken away. Once the room was clean, they coated every surface with antiseptic powerful enough that I couldn’t get the stink out of my nose long after they had gone.

No one told me what was happening and I didn’t get any food that day.

I slept fitfully and awoke aching and grumpy, in no mood to spend another day rereading the same magazines and listening to the tormented screams of people succumbing to what I could only guess was a form of madness.

Not that I had much choice.

I wondered if the lack of food was on purpose, a way of keeping the quarantined people weak so that if they turned crazy, they could be more easily dealt with. A part of me, the suspicious paranoid part, suspected that was the case.

The more rational part of me insisted that it was typical government ineptitude and general incompetence.

It was anybody's guess which was true.

My stomach was grumbling loudly when the door of my room opened and I let out a gasp of surprised relief as I recognised the tall figure standing outlined there.

“Mark!”

“Hey, mate.” His brow furrowed and he turned his head back to snap instructions at someone in the corridor. He turned back to me, shaking his head. “Been looking for you for bloody days.”

“You have?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “I’m touched, mate.”

“Aye, no doubt.” We shared a quick grin. “Sorry, it took so long. When we heard about the crash, we checked the hospitals first and then the police. Took a shit load of paperwork to find out where you’d been stashed and then even more for them to agree to release you.”

“I’m being released?”

Okay, not the sharpest response, but I could blame the lack of food and surprise for that.

“Yeah. I’d say grab your gear but doesn’t look like you have any.”

I had a quick look around the small room, an instinctive action, and then laughed ruefully. I had nothing but the clothes on my back, my house keys and my wallet. My phone and luggage were lost in the crash. I didn’t even have a toothbrush.

“What about the quarantine?”

“Fuck it,” he snapped. “I’m responsible for you and I’ve given assurances that you’ll finish the quarantine back at my place.”

“They let you do that?”

He flashed another quick grin, the expression seeming natural to him. That smile, along with his general boy next door good looks, and the easy charm of someone confident in himself, had allowed him to skate through life.

It helped that he was intelligent, good-humoured and an accomplished doctor in one of the better hospitals in the capital city.

Anyone else, I would have immediately disliked, but I’d known Mark for more years than I cared to think about and he was as close a friend as I could get.

“You coming then?” he asked, tapping his wristwatch with one finger. “I’m on a schedule. I need to get you home and then I’m back to the hospital.”

I pushed myself up and followed him out of the room. My legs trembled and I wasn’t sure if that was from hunger, fatigue or nervousness. I’d not been out of that room in far too long and I’d seen enough of what was happening in the neighbouring rooms to be more than a little wary.

But, nothing happened. The doors were all locked and we were escorted to the end of the corridor by the large orderly who seemed to be stationed there. He let us out into the larger space beyond and as soon as I was through the door, I breathed a soft sigh of relief.

That relief soon faded as I looked around. The entire place seemed to be a hive of activity with little real coordination or purpose. Pallets of boxes were dotted around the floor and vans came and went with an almost constant regularity.

One van was being loaded with what looked to be body bags, and I watched wide-eyed as I waited for Mark to sign some forms. Then we were off, brushing past the uniformed officers guarding the entrance, and out into the fresh evening air.

“How long was I in there?”

“It’s Sunday,” Mark said and glanced at his watch. “Just after seven.”

The crash had happened Friday morning. I must have been close to release anyway which is likely the only reason they let me go early. It heartened me a little to know that probably meant I had little likelihood of turning crazy like those other poor bastards back there.

We walked towards the sleek black car parked a little way along a quiet street lined with warehouses and industrial units. Mark soon strode ahead as I began to limp, my knee paining me. He noticed and glanced back, lifting one brow questioningly.

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“Yeah, my knee’s still fucked.”

“Told you to go private,” he remarked with a smirk. “Would have had you back running already.”

“Doubtful, I never did much running before I hurt my knee.”

Mark laughed and unlocked the car, waving me around to the passenger side. I slid in gratefully and grimaced as I thought of my soiled clothing on his clean interior. He noticed my discomfort and waved it away with a laugh.

“Shower and a change of clothes when we get to my place,” he said. “You’ll feel loads better.”

I couldn’t lie, that sounded pretty damned good. But as Mark started the car, I looked at him. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Christ.” He laughed again, low and throaty. “Just jump right into the difficult questions, huh?”

“Yeah, you know me. I’m not one to beat around the bush.”

He didn’t immediately answer as he set off, driving through the city streets. I was content to wait for him to answer while I watched the city as we drove past.

There were few people on the streets and many of the shops and businesses were shuttered. The flashing lights of emergency vehicles were everywhere though and all too often we passed a van with men in full white overalls spraying liquid around.

I wondered what they were doing and I was about to ask when Mark spoke. “There’s a new bug going around,” he said. “We’ve been getting reports of it for a while and it’s something we’ve been told to watch for.”

By, ‘we’ I assumed he meant the hospital higher-ups. He was head of his department in the private hospital where he worked, and I had no doubt he had all kinds of information about this ‘bug’ that he knew I wouldn’t understand.

I appreciated him dumbing down his explanation for me even if I was also a little resentful that he felt he needed to.

“We don’t know much, other than it’s popping up everywhere.”

“In England?”

“Worldwide,” he corrected with a shake of his head. “Appears in small clusters and seems to burn out fairly rapidly.” He hesitated before adding, “Or at least it did.”

I didn’t speak, waiting for him to continue despite the questions I could feel practically burning inside of me, eager to be given voice.

“Now…” he let out a soft sigh. “Well, now, it’s popping up all over the bloody place.”

“Okay, and what’s the point of the quarantine?” I couldn’t help myself from asking that, which might be due to more than a little resentment at being locked up for a couple of days.

“It’s not airborne, or even bloodborne. The only way we have found it to be transmitted is through saliva.”

“Through bites?” Which is why they kept asking me about being bitten I guessed.

“Yeah.”

“Then who is biting people?”

He glanced over at me and I got a sudden glimpse into how tired he actually was. There was a weariness in his eyes that I’d never seen there before. Even in our wilder university days.

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Yeah.” Another sigh as we stopped at a red light. “That’s why we get clusters of it. Seems it spreads fairly rapidly through the rat population. So fast that it burns itself out.”

“Then they bite people?”

“They become hyper-aggressive. Like rabies times a hundred. When infected, the rat goes nuts attacking all the others it can find. A lot of them die, the ones that don’t, well they go a bit crazy and will attack anything, or anyone, they come across.”

“Which means people get infected?”

“Not always. About forty per cent get infected if they’re bitten by a rat.”

“Which is why the quarantine.”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment as if considering what he should say next. “If someone gets infected, it hits them hard. Incubation can be up to sixty hours and at any point they turn.”

“Turn?” My thoughts went back to the woman from the room opposite mine. The way she had slammed her head against the glass. “They get aggressive.” It wasn’t a question.

Mark sighed. “Look, this isn’t widely shared yet, but, yeah. Some turn in an instant, and others get ill first, with fever and hallucinations mainly. It’s always the same though, they become aggressive and violent.”

“If someone infected bites you, then the incubation period is shorter than for those bitten by a rat. Can be hours or minutes.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“So is there, like, a vaccine or drugs?”

Mark snorted and shook his head. “Hell, no! There’s nothing we’ve found yet that even slows down the infection let alone stop it. Once you turn, you’re gone. Whomever you might have been before, it’s like… well, it’s like they regress. Basic functions only.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Fight, feed or fuck.” He grimaced. “That’s basically it.”

“Christ!” I looked down at my hands, resting in my lap and thought back to those people in the rooms near my own. The screams, incoherent but full of rage. The orderly who’d been bitten on the hand and escorted away by another with a baton at the ready. “Jesus, man. What the hell are they doing about this?”

Mark nodded towards another van we passed, the white-clothed men lifting heavy drums of chemicals and refilling their sprayers.

“It starts with the rats. Only rats, so far, but if we can kill them before they attack people we have a chance of containing it.”

“You said it was happening everywhere though?”

The country was full of rats. You found them everywhere, from farms to cities. A common pest, humans had been fighting the damned things since we first settled in one place and they were still around. Considering our government couldn’t seem to organise a pissup in a brewery, I had very little confidence that they would be able to genocide an entire species of rodent.

“Clusters, mate,” Mark pointed out. “They have phases. Infected, then a bit of a mad frenzy while they attack every other rat or animal around them. After that, they form packs and attack each other as much as people.”

“Does that happen with people too?”

“No idea. We’ve not passed the frenzy part yet,” he admitted. “Soon as someone starts attacking people around them, the police are called and they separate out anyone who might be infected and those definitely infected and ship them off.”

“How do they tell the difference?”

“If someone’s been bitten, they’re infected. Simple as that. For those who might not want to admit it, or even realise it, well, dogs can smell it. Cats too, but dogs are easier to train.”

The police handlers with the dogs sniffing everyone at the crash site suddenly made sense. They had growled at several people who had been put in a separate van and driven away. Those they hadn’t reacted to, like me, were placed in quarantine.

“What happens to the people infected?”

“Holding facility while we figure out a way of helping them,” Mark said, a little too quickly. “We’re told at the hospital that anyone we know is infected is secured and hooded so they can’t bite anyone, then the police come and take them away.”

“So you’re a bouncer as well as a doctor?” I couldn’t help the smirk at that. Mark was very much a lover and not a fighter. I doubt he’d ever thrown a punch in his life.

“Fuck no! We have security on every floor to deal with that shit.” He laughed. “Not had to do it yet, thank God.”

He pulled in beside a large building that towered over us and grunted as he killed the engine. He gave a soft sigh before looking at me.

“We’re here, mate. Let’s get you settled in then I need to head back to work. We can talk more, later, yeah?”

I nodded slowly, the answers he’d already given had just created more questions in me but the idea of a shower and something to eat was far too appealing. So, I bit my tongue and climbed out of the car before following him inside.