0.4 (9 page)

One metre.

I held on to the gutter concrete with my right hand and shuffled my feet around so I was facing the middle of the tree; swallowed a ball of spit that felt about the size of a satsuma; gritted my teeth; bent my knees and then jumped.

My legs threw me forwards, and suddenly I was rootless, at the mercy of scientific forces like mass and velocity, resistance and gravity. It was terrifying and exhilarating. I threw myself at the tree and opened my arms to catch it.

I hit a tall, upright branch full-face, crashing into it, hard. It made me dizzy – the pain I ignored for now – and I felt myself starting to fall.

I thrashed my arms and clawed for the tree, feeling the hardness of the wood slipping from my grasp. Leaves and smaller branches whipped at my face as I started to tumble downwards. The moment stretched out in perfect slow motion.

I’m dead
, I thought calmly, far more calmly than I would have expected under the circumstances.

I think it was that calmness that saved my life.

It allowed me to give survival one more go.

I made a last, deliberate grab for a branch and it felt as if my arms were being torn from their sockets. My head was thrown backwards and my back arched at a painful angle. Twigs slapped my face and I could taste leaves in my mouth.

But I held on, sweating and trembling, hugging the branch to my chest. My legs fought for even safer purchase and found it.

A few breaths to calm myself down, and to get my heart beating at a more normal rate, then I inched myself down the branch, towards the trunk. Evolution was all well and good, but a monkey would have made a far better job of this than me.

In time I reached the sawn-off ‘platform’ I had seen from my window and tried to lower myself on to it. The angle that the branch met the platform was difficult, but I adjusted my position on the branch and pretty much slid on to it. It was a small area, but wide enough for me to catch my breath and prepare for the next phase of my descent.

I was crouching there, braced on all sides by branches, when suddenly the front door opened and Doctor Campbell stepped out, on to the path, off to my left and only a short
distance below me. I felt certain that he would see me, but there was no way to conceal myself further, so I waited with a leaden feeling in my stomach.

Doctor Campbell was speaking to one or both of my parents, who remained inside the house. His voice was loud enough for me to hear everything.

‘Make sure he stays where he is,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m sorry, but it is clear that he is one of the nought-point-four. There is nothing that can be done for him. He will have to be dealt with.’

My mother uttered a strange, strangled sound.

‘I will return soon,’ the doctor said, ignoring her. ‘Drug him if you have to.’

He turned and walked away from the house and his route brought him even closer to my hiding place. I crouched lower as if making myself fractionally smaller would stop him spotting me if he decided to look my way.

But he didn’t look my way, and I watched him go, and heard the front door of my house close. It sounded loud and hollow like the door of a tomb.

I was one of the
nought-point-four
.

That was what Doctor Campbell had said: 0.4.

What on earth did that mean?

I waited a few seconds, slipped through the cover of branches and shimmied down the trunk of the old beech tree.

I had thought that I was scared before.

He will have to be dealt with
, the doctor had said, and a chill passed down my spine.

Did it mean that I was going to be killed? It had certainly sounded that way to me.

There is nothing that can be done for him
.

He is one of the nought-point-four. Drug him if you have to
.

What in hell was going on?

I set off for Lilly’s house to find out.

I had to know if what I was . . .

. . .
yeah, I know. I’m just in the middle of . . . I will . . . I just need to
. . .

(Silence)

I felt like a criminal on the run, making my way through enemy territory. I was terrified of bumping into anyone, but there was no one around to bump into. The village, it seemed, was deserted. Like Mum and Dad, everyone had to be back at home.

Awaiting further instructions
.

I couldn’t trust anyone.

Doctor Campbell had said that I was one of the
nought-point-four
, and that I would
have to be dealt with
. Did that make everyone else in the village, everyone I knew, part of the other group?

Nought-point-four – that was four-tenths. Four over ten. Two-fifths. Was that how few people like me still existed? Had the other nought-point-six been
changed
somehow?

0.6.

Six-tenths.

More than half.

Was I now in the minority?

And how mad did
that
sound?

I didn’t know, not for certain, that there was anything going on here at all.

I was running scared through the village because . . . because of
what?

OK, something had happened in Millgrove; something that had affected everyone in the village, except for four people who were hypnotised at the time.

OK, there was no one on the streets of the village, even though it was a Saturday afternoon and there were
always
people on the streets.

OK, my parents were acting oddly.

And, OK, the doctor had said a few things that had
sounded
sinister to me.

But maybe Doctor Campbell was right. Maybe I was suffering from the after-affects of hypnosis, and had experienced an inverted version of reality that had meant I had seen everyone else standing still when it was really me who was paralysed.

Maybe the whole thing was just a fantasy.

Maybe none of it was real.

Maybe it was paranoia and nothing else.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

A nightmare
, the doctor had called it: could it be nothing more than that? Could my mind be playing tricks upon me?

And that made me think of Jerry Possett. Local guy. Old – in his seventies, I guess. Probably harmless, but something has gone wrong with his brain. He holds conversations with people who aren’t really there; often arguing with these imaginary people in an angry voice.

To Jerry, those people are really there. He sees them, hears them. But they don’t exist. And Jerry doesn’t seem to know that they don’t exist.

The point I’m making here is that our brains play tricks. They can make us see patterns where there are no patterns; see faces in the grain of a wardrobe; castles in cloud formations; something psychologically revealing in an ink blot; can even make ordinarily sane people see UFOs over old man Naylor’s grain silos.

I don’t know enough about the way the brain works. In fact, I don’t have a clue how the brain works. Hundreds of
thoughts flow through my brain from one hour to the next and not one of them is about how I’m thinking them.

So what if this was just my brain going off the rails?

Hallucinations.

Paranoia.

A mental breakdown caused by Danny’s act.

Meningitis.

Swine flu.

Marsh gas.

Maybe my brain just never wired up all that well to begin with and my whole life had been leading up to this moment, where the bad wiring sends sparks of insanity through my skull and makes me into a Jerry Possett, a nutcase to be avoided.

Maybe
nought-point-four
was simply doctors’ jargon for
he’s blown a fuse in his brain and we need to get him somewhere secure before he harms himself or others.

How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be playing up in the first place.

Was that some kind of paradox?

Was I mad?

I arrived at Lilly’s house and didn’t know what to do.

If
her
family were behaving anything like
my
family they wouldn’t let her out; they would be finding excuses to stand by the door and make sure she stayed where she was.

Should I throw stones at her window, to attract her attention?

That would be a whole lot easier if I knew which one was her room.

Did I really want to speak to her, anyway?

Did I want to discover that she had no memory of the things I remembered happening to us? Did I really want to find out that all this was happening because my mind was messed up?

I stood there, trying to find a path through it all.

And then the front door of Lilly’s house burst open and Lilly came hurtling towards me.

Lilly saw me standing there and her face registered both surprise and relief. She sprinted towards me and shouted, ‘RUN!’ with such urgency that I did just that.

Turned around and ran.

Gave into a stampede instinct inherited from an earlier model of humanity, where sabre-toothed tigers stalked the landscape.

I ran, hearing Lilly’s feet slapping the pavement just behind me, and it was as if all the tension of the day had suddenly been given an outlet in one mad burst of energy. I drove my legs as fast as they would carry me, away from Lilly’s house, without an idea in my head as to why we were running.

Nor where we were running to – it didn’t matter.

In those moments, with every thought, breath and muscle focused on the physical act of running, I felt . . .
free
.

Someone shouted Lilly’s name from behind us, and Lilly’s footsteps sped up as a result. She gained ground on me, and then she was running next to me.

‘Where are we going?’ I shouted, feeling the words ripped from my lungs.

‘I don’t know,’ she shouted back. ‘I’ve just got to get away from . . . from
them
.’

I should have been terrified by her words, but instead they actually made me smile. If Lilly was feeling the same way, and her parents had suddenly turned weird, then I wasn’t crazy.

My mind was not broken.

I could get through this.

We
could get through this.

I think I only realised where we were heading when I started recognising details of the route from earlier. Some kind of impulse had nudged us towards a place we both thought could give us sanctuary from the madness that was hemming us in on all sides.

We stopped running as we passed the Cross house.

My lungs were burning and there was a fierce pain in my side. Bent over double, I gasped and wheezed and Lilly
joined me, even placing a hand on my back.

‘Thank you for coming to get me,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the exercise.’

She half-smiled.

‘I’m sorry I got into that silly stuff earlier,’ she said quietly. ‘You know, the Simon stuff?’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, finally unbending myself and standing up straight. ‘How is Simon?’

Lilly shook her head. ‘He’s gone,’ she told me. ‘Just like all of them. I mean they’re there, and everything, but they’re not, not really.’

She stood up too.

‘I must sound crazy,’ she said.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I know exactly what you mean. They
have
changed.’

We carried on towards Mrs O’Donnell’s house.

‘Has Doctor Campbell been round for a visit yet?’ I asked her.

She nodded. ‘You too, huh? He told me that I had experienced a powerful hallucination, that it was all a dream I was having, but, like, awake. You?’

‘Same story.’ We were at Mrs O’Donnell’s door now. ‘I overheard him telling my parents that I was one of the nought-point-four.’

Lilly looked at me oddly.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked.

I shrugged.

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d have an idea.’

I lifted my knuckles to the front door, was just about to knock, and turned to Lilly.

‘But I think you’re one of them too,’ I said.

I knocked.

There were noises from within and we stood and waited for them to get closer. Mrs O’Donnell, it appeared, was in no hurry to open her door. Lilly and I stood there, feeling horribly exposed, and I started thinking that any second two angry sets of parents were going to come around the corner.