Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,161

to go. If I’m not going to get any help soon, I’ve got to get back to work.” She started to take the receiver away from her ear.

“Wait!” Dunworthy shouted. “Don’t hang up.”

She put the receiver back to her ear, looking impatient.

“I need to ask you some more questions. It’s very important. The sooner we source this virus, the sooner the quarantine will be lifted and you can get assistance at the dig.”

She looked unconvinced, but she punched up a code, laid the receiver in its cradle, and said, “You don’t mind if I work while we talk?”

“No,” Dunworthy said, relieved. “Please do.”

She moved abruptly out-of-picture, returned, and punched up something else. “Sorry. It won’t reach,” she said, and the screen went fuzzy while she, presumably, moved the phone to her new worksite. When the picture reappeared, Montoya was crouched in a mudhole by a stone tomb. Dunworthy supposed it was the one whose lid she and Badri had nearly dropped.

The lid, which bore the effigy of a knight in full armor, his arms crossed over his mailed chest so that his hands in their heavy cuirasses lay on his shoulders and his sword at his feet, stood propped at a precarious angle against the side, obscuring the elaborate carved letters. “Requiesc—” was all he could see. Requiescat in pace. “Rest in peace,” a blessing the knight had obviously not been granted. His sleeping face under the carved helmet looked disapproving.

Montoya had draped a thin sheet of plastene over the open top. It was beaded with water. Dunworthy wondered if the other side of the tomb bore a morbid carving of the horror that lay within, like the ones in Colin’s illustration, and if it were as ghastly as the reality. Water spilled steadily into the head of the tomb, dragging the plastic down.

Montoya straightened, bringing up with her a flat box filled with mud. “Well?” she said, laying it across the corner of the tomb. “You said you had some more questions?”

“Yes,” he said. “You said there wasn’t anyone else at the dig when Badri was there.”

“There wasn’t,” she said, wiping sweat off her forehead. “Whew, it’s muggy in here.” She took off her terrorist jacket and draped it over the tomb lid.

“What about locals? People not connected with the dig?”

“If there’d been anyone here, I’d have recruited them.” She began sorting through the mud in the box, unearthing several brown stones. “The lid weighed a ton, and we’d no sooner gotten it off than it started raining. I would’ve recruited anybody who happened by, but the dig’s too far out for anyone to happen by.”

“What about the National Trust staff?”

She held the stones under the water to clean them. “They’re only here during the summer.”

He had hoped someone at the dig would turn out to be the source, that Badri had come in contact with a local, a National Trust staffer, or a wandering duck hunter. But myxoviruses didn’t have carriers. The mysterious local would have had to have the disease himself, and Mary had been in touch with every hospital and doctor’s surgery in England. There hadn’t been any cases outside the perimeter.

Montoya held the stones up one by one to the battery light clipped to one of the supporting posts, turning them in the light, looking at their still-muddy edges.

“What about birds?”

“Birds?” she said, and he realized it must sound as though he were suggesting she recruit passing sparrows to help raise the lid of the tomb.

“The virus may have been spread by birds. Ducks, geese, chickens,” he said, even though he wasn’t certain chickens were reservoirs. “Are there any at the dig?”

“Chickens?” she said, holding one of the stones half-raised to the light.

“Viruses are sometimes caused by the intersection of animal and human viruses,” he explained. “Fowl are the most common reservoirs, but fish are sometimes responsible. Or pigs. Are there any pigs there at the dig?”

She was still looking at him as though she thought he was daft.

“The dig’s on a National Trust farm, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the actual farm’s three kilometers away. We’re in the middle of a barley field. There aren’t any pigs around, or birds, or fish.” She went back to examining the stones.

No birds. No pigs. No locals. The source of the virus wasn’t here at the dig either. Possibly it wasn’t anywhere, and Badri’s influenza had mutated spontaneously, as Mary had said happened occasionally, appearing out of thin air and descending on Oxford the way the plague had descended