‘Why not?’ he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

The ‘farmhouse’ turned out to be a former hotel on a hillside on the outskirts of town, set back among concealing trees at the end of a long, private road. Officially, the farmhouse belonged to a local startup looking to harvest graduates from the university. I listened to all this, and tried to ignore the small voice in the back of my head that kept wondering if this wasn’t all some wild delusional fantasy Floyd had dreamed up. But then, if it hadn’t been for his warning about the audit . . .

I listened to Floyd as we drove out to the farmhouse in his rented Land Rover. He spoke of a threat of biological Armageddon I could scarcely credit. He was right, of course, but by the time I knew that, it was too late, and Herschel and Marlon had already beaten and tortured him to death.

I didn’t ask Floyd how he’d known the two men would be out, or how he’d got keys to get inside. I just assumed it was all spook stuff of some kind, but I still felt thoroughly scandalized when I saw just how easy it was for us to get inside the farmhouse.

My mind kept trying to find excuses for what we found in room after room. There were weapons, stockpiles of canned food and water filtration units. One room looked as if it had been converted into an engineering shop. Another had been turned into a miniature ward, filled with an impressive supply of medical equipment. It was like a paranoid’s dream of what they’d need to survive the fall of civilization.

Even all that wasn’t anything compared to what we found in the basement.

The basement was split into two long rooms, accessible only by a specially installed airlock system. HEPA filters hummed quietly, scraping the air clean. Most of the space was taken up by a number of temperature-controlled incubation units, and hazmat suits hung on racks next to crates and boxes of yet more supplies. A couple of computers had been set up in a corner on a desk, and there was sufficient lab equipment to grow bugs on a frankly industrial scale, even with just the two of them working in isolation.

I could no longer deny the obvious: whatever Herschel and Marlon were planning, it was big. Would whatever bugs they had developed be spread by blood, by skin or transmitted through the air? It was too early to tell, but my stomach roiled at finding that Floyd had been right in everything he had told me.