This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack

Author:Mike McCormack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

The next news bulletin adds little by way of hard information.

Reports that a complete wing of the Mater Hospital has been requisitioned as a quarantine unit are as yet unconfirmed. In the context of a terrorist attack the measure seems reasonable and proportionate but Nealon’s whole sense of what’s happening is still out of kilter, everything drifting out of focus.

He is still turning the possibilities over in his mind when the first checkpoint looms up ahead of him. A cop in a high-visibility vest flags him down with a torch and guides him into the checkpoint fifty yards farther on, to where two more Guards are flanked by a pair of soldiers in full battledress and communications headsets. Nealon coasts towards them and pulls up. One of the cops sweeps his torch across the front of his car, taking in the make and number plate before switching the beam to Nealon’s face, letting it linger there for a long moment. Then a quick sweep of the car’s interior before he steps back and turns his mouth onto his shoulder to speak a few words. He then waves Nealon through between the soldiers who have moved off to opposite sides of the road.

Nealon pushes on, watching the checkpoint disappear behind him. It feels like he has come through some sort of portal, some fissure in the world through which time and circumstances are inexplicably altered.

The Guards and soldiers have faded completely from sight when the phone goes off on the seat beside him, the backlit screen casting a blue halo around it.

‘You’re going to meet two more of those,’ the voice says. ‘They’ll be no problem, just keep driving nice and steady.’

‘What do you make of this threat thing, how real is it?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ the voice answers without apparent interest.

‘Or who’s behind it?’

‘I wouldn’t know that either.’

‘Your hand is nowhere in any of this?’

‘This is not my sort of thing, just drive carefully.’ And with that the phone goes dead.

Nealon does not wonder any more at the abruptness of these interventions. His own ready compliance with them is something to dwell on another time.

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