The Peco Incident by Des Hunt Read Free Book Online

horror. When she’d finished, she stood and wandered aimlessly in circles for a time before pulling out her phone.
    That’s when Shreeves reappeared. His body language suggested that he now knew he was in real trouble. This time he pleaded with her. It worked no better than the earlier bullying. She made the phone call anyway.

    It was almost an hour later when the biosecurity team arrived. By then we’d moved back to the gate to wait with Cathy. A very unhappy Bryce Shreeves had unlocked the gate and disappeared again.
    Cathy wouldn’t talk about what she’d seen in the shed, other than to say that she’d seen dead and dying animals. When Nick asked whether it was bird flu or not, she said she didn’t know, claiming that many bird diseases had very similar symptoms. They’d have to wait for the test results.
    I’d visualized the biosecurity people arriving in a couple of vehicles and going quietly about their work. It was nothing likethat. Vehicle after vehicle drove up the side road, until they were packed end to end as far back as we could see.
    A man jumped out of the first one and marched over to where Cathy was standing. Nick and I had slipped back a bit to be out of the way. Nick was taking photos of the vehicles with his phone.
    ‘Who are they?’ demanded the man, pointing at us.
    ‘They’re the boys who reported the dead birds.’
    ‘Thank them, and get rid of them. They have to be outside the quarantine zone. Pronto!’
    Before Cathy could respond, the man had turned and left.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got to go.’
    ‘Who’s he to order us around?’ asked Nick.
    ‘Colin Saxton. He’s the Incident Controller. He has the power to order you around whenever he wants. He can even have you arrested.’
    Nick looked daggers at the man, who had begun issuing orders to the rest of the team.
    ‘Can you give us a ride back to our bikes?’ I asked.
    Cathy looked at her car, now blocked in by several other vehicles. She shook her head. ‘Sorry. You’ll have to walk.’ She fished in her pocket and pulled out a card. ‘This has all my contact details. Give me a call or email me tomorrow and I’ll let you know what we’ve found out. OK?’
    We nodded our acceptance and started the long walk back to the café.
    As we went past the biosecurity vehicles, we got some idea of what would be involved once they moved into the compound.There was a mobile cafeteria, a toilet block, and a command centre. Through the windows of a bus we saw people putting on full protective suits. One truck, labelled
Decontamination Unit,
was a big, walk-through shower. Behind it were tankers labelled with multiple hazardous-chemical symbols. Then there were the closed vans that had no markings whatsoever.
    I found it both exciting and scary. The scary part was the precautions these people were taking to protect themselves. They were wearing spacesuits to go into the same place where Dad and I had gone with nothing more than a builder’s dust mask. Nick hadn’t even had that! I wondered whether Mr Colin Saxton would have been so keen to get rid of us if he’d known where we’d been during the night.
    There were a couple of hundred metres of empty road before we got to the T-junction. There we found many more vehicles. However, these were not parked neatly in lines; they were all over the place, making it impossible for others to get through. They were the vans, cars and motorbikes of the various news media.
    A barrier blocking access into the side road was manned by police. Other officers were trying to sort out the chaos of vehicles. They were having little success, as the media personnel were too busy talking into microphones, or scribbling in notebooks.
    After watching for a while, we continued towards Portobello.
    There we found more media: a television crew was interviewing the people from the café. I recognized the interviewer as Jim Black. He did a current events programme on NetNewsthat Mum and Dad enjoyed