Invisible

At between 50 and 200 nanometres it was easy to miss. In fact, everyone failed to notice as it stalked the pavement at the corner of Isambard and New Canal Street; a cloud of submicroscopic bees left suspended and airborne by an oblivious runner from a house on Grand Pavillion, a few blocks due north. Sweat and droplets, a heady mix of illness and infection.

The Old Victoria had survived the Blitz. On September 3^rd 1941, a doodlebug had landed just two hundred yards away. Rather than detonating, it had pitched in the earth to become a UXB. A bastion of sanctuary for the weary traveller and the indulgently inebriated, the traditional saloon pub had seen many a visitor in its time whilst surviving the occasional bomb. More recently, it had become a regular haunt for those in office looking for a low profile, confidential discussion whilst taking advantage of one of the glass, panelled snugs. The ornate, rather grand clock behind the bar ticked on; 10pm loomed large and kicking out time would be upon those present once more.

Of all the various exits from the drinking establishment, by far the most popular was the door that provided an exit directly onto the cobbled, New Canal street. Bursting from the pub like an anxious wave crashing on an ambivalent beach, the throng of Friday night drinkers stumbled, staggered, ambled and hurried away, restricted in further ambitions by the circumstances of a Pandemic. Amongst the leavers were two men: one blonde and shaggy-haired, rotund and bumptious; the other thin, slightly hunched over, narrow-eyed and carrying an attaché case under his arm.

“Thank you for bearing with me on the Durham thing.”

“That’s quite alright. Remind me how that went again.” Blustered the shaggy-haired man.

“Oh, no need to go over old ground. We spoke about it before, remember? When you were about to go into hospital.”

The thin man’s eyes flickered left and right, fox-like in their cunning. His voice monotone and level, civil service bled through his diction.

“Did we?” the bluster continued with a discordant confusion borne of officialdom and privilege.

“Remember remember the 5^th of November. Oh, and that talk I gave in the Rose Garden.”

“Oh, yes. Now you come to mention it.”

As they emerged from the hustle of escaping evacuees, a further, defined mass of tiny particles could be seen following the horde but only if you happened to have an electron microscope with you. It hungered for a host, desperate to follow in its brethren’s footsteps from the invisible orgy that had taken place in the pub. Moving on the breeze that was an aspect of that particular autumn night, it drifted along the street, looking for a home; a place to replicate, a place to propagate.

The two men approached the street corner, still muttering and chattering, discussing the order of proceedings for the following day. The red brick wall that ran alongside the pavement displayed its overlaid graffiti written in multi-coloured spray can - urban art for the street wise. In the distance was a long-established industrial estate housing garages and workshops, providing work for many in the area. The smell of oil was palpable during the week when the wind was blowing in the right direction.

As they neared the stalker (quietly watching, waiting) the thin man sensed something, something not quite right. He fumbled with his now scrunched up face mask in his trouser pocket; thinking, plotting, aligning his thoughts using well-worn Machiavellian principles. They were now almost upon the dormant mugger.

The shaggy-haired man took a shuffling step, the cloud gasped, opening wide in welcome. Not knowing why but in a reflex of sub-conscious movement, the thin man barged his drinking partner to one side with his shoulder, taking the full impact of the virus at the same moment. Like a squaddie diving on a landmine in Afghanistan, it was a rare act of selflessness.

The hovering molecules filed into the thin man’s body, streaming into his mouth and nostrils, flowing down the back of his unsuspecting throat. It was a moment of incendiary jubilation, of becoming one with a new host; a union of nature’s beings.

The cloud swirled and spiralled and made its way down its new incumbent’s trachea heading for the lungs. Scouts from the newly entrenched cloud broke off from the main group, intent on exploring the body, a place to divide and conquer and divide over and over again. A small group entered the man’s breast, looking for his heart. As it raced towards its destination, quite suddenly it stopped dead in its tracks. Where the atriums should be, where the ventricles should be, there was NOTHING; a cavernous space, a non-beating vacuum.

The virus considered this; static, motionless, thinking. And after what seemed an age but, in reality, was just seconds, it decided that discretion was the better part of virus valour. The cloud of “bees” gathered once more and beat a hasty retreat. Funnelling back up the wind pipe, the unholy mass streamed back out of Reynard the fox (at least that’s how he may have been known in a 12^th century allegory).

The bureaucrat looked temporarily dazed as his, sprawled on the ground partner, arose groggily to his feet.

“What was all that about? I’ll have you know I boxed at school.” The shaggy-haired man spouted, indignantly.

The Whitehall official put his hand under the other man’s armpit and helped him up.

“Sorry about that PM.” He said ruefully. “Not sure why I did that. I think I had a funny turn. I thought I saw something but then my eyes aren’t what they were.”

“I should think so. Although, of course, we should be grateful to you for your generous contribution. I never really thought of you as the blueprint for humanity.”

“It’s the least I could do.” The often grey-suited official smiled again, drawing on the praise, his chest lightly puffing out.

“Who would have thought that the key to saving mankind would have been me?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, and one which was hard to speculate about enough with the greatest sense of any kind of irony. The holy grail of efficacy had involved a cast of thousands across the Globe, the best and brightest from the biggest biotech companies of our age and unimaginable sums of money to solve the gravest of issues.

“Yes, indeed. A working vaccine based on your heart. Now that is a turn up for the book.”

This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents
are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental