The Dragon Plague

Chapter 4

That evening, Sophie wished Amanda and Lukas a good week end. When she stepped on the crowded train that would take her home, she could not help but stare at her fellow passengers.

A lot of people, she included, wore hats and gloves to protect themselves from the rain, and many of the faces couldn't be seen very well.

How many of them could be infected? And how many shoulders, how many elbows, backs and hands had she inadvertently touched to get on the train, while grasping the handles to avoid falling as she scrambled to her seat? How many people had sat there before her?

It was simply terrifying.

She tried to focus on the city scenery rolling outside the window.

Europa was the last city that the world knew: it was the largest, once, before the Great War and the devastation that followed it.

It covered an area of ??fifteen thousand square kilometres, an area that apparently centuries before was divided between France, Germany and Belgium.

The buildings were tall and grey, and illuminated by the evening light they had a spectral beauty of their own. The city stretched endlessly, not only around but also upward: in that area few buildings had less than fifty floors.

It was said to be the last bastion of a civilization that was nearly lost and forgotten.

The train went through the second ring, then the third and fourth.

The first ring, the richest and most ancient part of the city, was not accessible to the majority of citizens; it was divided from the rest of the districts by a high wall topped with barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with machine guns ready to fire. The buildings were lower in there and there was more space between them.

However, few people lived in the first district: it was an area mostly dedicated to government buildings, ministries and offices.

Sophie didn't think too much about it; it was as if on another planet.

The train ran along the suspended tracks between the blocks.

Under the city there still existed a network of tunnels and tracks dating back hundreds of years, but it was mostly unused these days: it had become too dangerous.

The underground spaces provided shelter to the poorest, those who had no jobs and no access to the food distribution or social accommodations, so they could only live by their wits. No law existed down there, and theft and murder were everyday occurrences. There were roads and tunnels that crossed the entire city, linking each street with the buildings, stations, sewers and rivers.

One could live their entire life in the underground city, they said, without ever leaving: women gave birth there, and their children could live for years without ever seeing the sunlight.

Sophie shuddered.

She arrived at her station in the fifth ring, got off the train and walked home.

She lived in a tiny apartment in a building with hundreds of housing units. Since she had neither a partner nor children, according to the law she was entitled to a room of four by four meters: enough space for a single bed topped with shelves full of books, a folding table, sink and stove, a television hanging on the wall opposite the bed.

With her savings from the first year of work she had purchased the installation of a small bathroom divided by a sheet metal wall: it was little more than a meter and a half square, but at least she could avoid the long lines at the common bathroom.

During the years, she had made the little place as cosy as she could, painting the walls in a bright shade of yellow and buying a colourful blanket that she hoped could counter the greyness and darkness that penetrated through the window.

Once she walked in, she stroked the stunted lettuce that grew in a small vase on the sill of her one skimpy window. She carefully watered the pitiful little plants.

"How are you, babies?" she greeted them affectionately "Am I wrong or have you grown a bit?"

She had read that talking to plants would help them grow, so she often engaged in long conversations with her lettuce.

Most people tried to grow some kind of food themselves, but the lack of light was a big problem. The houses were crammed too closely to one another to allow the passage of natural light to any significant degree.

"If I manage to put aside some money this year, I'll buy some nice cultivation lamps for you," she promised.

She opened the fridge and realized that she has to go to the food distribution as soon as possible, as there was almost nothing left.

That night she was too tired, though.

She put together a sandwich of stale bread and a protein substitute (a burger with a cardboard-like consistency) that she accompanied with a strawberry-flavoured drink.

Sometimes she wondered if the strawberry flavour of soft drinks and snacks was the one of real strawberries, as she had never eaten one.

A lot of foods were strawberry-flavoured, but they were all slightly different from each other... who knew which the real one was?

In any case, the sweet drink and humble meal made her feel better.

She turned on the television. All the channels showed updates on the case of the plague reported that morning.

Then a message from President Hartmann was broadcasted. In his missive the President reassured the citizens and stressed that the disease had been contained.

The President was an elderly man, with a white beard and a deep, comforting voice; if he said that the emergency had been contained, it was probably true, Sophie thought. Perhaps there were many people who could lie in front of cameras, but Hartmann surely was not one of them.

After the presidential message, there was a broadcast that showed the brutal assault of a dragon on the edge of the quarantined areas: raw and disturbing images with vehicles exploding and trees going up in flames like matches.

Everything was taken from a distance, so the dragon looked like a dark and blurred shape, which made it even more terrifying.

Sophie sank into the comforting warmth of the blankets.

She lost her parents and brother during the first wave of the plague, when she was a child. Actually she had very few memories of her family. She could remember their faces only thanks to the photographs preserved in an old, yellowed album. It was her paternal grandmother who had raised her until she was twelve.

She was lucky: thousands of children like her, at that time, had been infected, or locked up in state institutions more similar to prisons than to orphanages.

She had ended up in one of those places herself, though fortunately for no more than a couple of years.

It was a period of her life that she didn't like to dwell upon. On her fifteenth birthday she was deemed fit to live alone, and was given a housing unit and the credits inherited from her grandmother.

In any case, seeing the world around her collapse because of an epidemic had instilled in her the desire to become a doctor. She had always known that this was the mission she wanted to dedicate her life to: what was the point of doing anything else, if a single virus could wipe out every human effort?

Amanda had been working for some time on a research project focused on finding a vaccine against the disease. At first Sophie had to take care of the patients in the study, but this left her with a certain amount of time to help Amanda.

One of the most annoying bureaucratic hurdles was acquiring the authorization to obtain samples of infected blood, a procedure that took many months and never resulted in the requested quantity.

To be honest, Sophie had no illusions that she would find the cure for the dragon plague herself. She was aware of her limits: the way she saw it, some people had a quick, brilliant mind... they had insights.

She was not one of them. She had never thought of herself as stupid, but she didn't have that spark of genius that she saw in other people... in Amanda, for example.

She might find the cure, Sophie was certain; one of the reasons why Sophie loved working with Amanda was the feeling of being able to contribute to something important. "You're a young old woman." Amanda told her sometimes, teasing her for her quiet and lonely nature. "You only lack the white hair and the knitting needles."

Sophie usually laughed it off - even though, deep down, she wondered if it might be true.