9781629270050-Text-for-ePub-rev (20 page)

“What—” he began, but wasn’t silenced this time by Peter. Something slammed into his
mind with the force of a runaway truck. He gasped and was only vaguely aware that
Ceri was making a high-pitched keening sound. From somewhere further away, he could
still hear Dusty howling.

His mind was being examined. An intelligence, far superior to his own,
infinitely
superior, was probing, deeper, deeper . . .

As the gloom deepened to blackness and he felt his knees begin to buckle, the pressure
lessened, lifted like removing the lid of a pressure cooker, and was gone.

Tom sank to his knees, still clutching the others’ hands. He looked to his left. Ceri
had also fallen to the floor; her head hung down on her chest and she gulped deep
convulsive sobs.

Other than the sound of Ceri’s sobbing and his own ragged breaths, silence had returned.
Dusty had stopped howling.

Tom looked up at Peter. Peter’s eyes glittered darkly in the firelight as he returned
Tom’s gaze with a grimness that Tom hadn’t seen before.

“I have delayed too long.” Peter’s voice was as toneless as a broken whistle. “They
are coming.”

Part 3:
Auld Lang Syne

Chapter Sixteen

T
he nation that had stood almost alone against the might of the Third Reich and had
refused to bow even when defeat to the mighty Nazi war machine had seemed inevitable,
was brought to its knees—rather, flat on its dying face—by an organism invisible to
the naked eye.

In England, Scotland and Wales, the Millennium Bug had left alive a little under eleven
thousand people out of a combined population of fifty-nine million. Around three thousand
of those had since perished by suicide or starvation or accident. Nearly all of the
remaining eight thousand now headed for London.

Not many had tried to resist the calling. Minds still numbed by shock and loss had
proved an easy target, wide open to intrusion. Those who did resist performed a brief
exercise in futility: the sheer mass of intellect brought to bear against their comparatively
puny minds made it a one-sided contest.

Cars, vans, motorbikes, boats, bicycles . . . whatever was at hand was utilised in
obeying the compulsion to head to England’s capital. One middle-aged man, paralysed
from the waist down in a skiing accident, travelled the sixty miles from his home
in Northampton in his wheelchair, forcing himself up steep inclines until his hands
were raw and bleeding. An elderly woman, who could not drive, set off from Portsmouth
on foot, a trek of around one hundred miles; she almost made it as far as the M25,
the motorway that rings Greater London, when her heart gave out just outside Guildford.

Despite a few incidental deaths like that of the elderly lady, the vast majority reached
London alive. The calling of the Commune had not been sufficient to override the survivors’
basic instinct to keep on surviving. Minds that might have been open to suggestions
to walk off a cliff or slit wrists had already taken those and similar options.

No, the Commune did not possess the strength to achieve mass suicide. Not yet.

* * * * *

She stared out of the car window as they passed through villages and skirted around
towns. The car juddered over potholes that had appeared during the cold snap in November
and would never now be repaired. The wind had strengthened, whipping up old newspaper
and crisp packets that had come free from bin bags deposited at the roadside and never
collected, now torn open by cats and birds.

Scrawny dogs and stringy cats darted away at their approach. Cows and horses watched
them from fields, surviving on grass and rainwater. Sheep blundered across roads in
search of richer pastures. Birds rose at the sound of the vehicles and circled until
they had passed. But she saw no people.

“A land of song that’s lost its voice,” she murmured, too quietly for her companion
to hear.

Strings of forlorn fairy lights swung in the wind; plastic santas and snowmen leaned
crookedly in gardens; they had to slow down to steer around an almost life-sized plastic
sleigh and reindeer that had been blown into the roadway.

“My dad was in a choir,” she said, a tear trickling down her cheek.

“Sorry?” said Tom.

“My dad. He was in a male voice choir,” said Ceri. “He and Mum went almost immediately.
Neither of them had been well for a while so the virus got them within hours. I think. . . .”
She paused to swipe angrily at the tears. “I think they must have infected Paul. He
came with me to the hospital. And Paul infected Rhys.”

“Paul’s your husband?”

“And Rhys was my son.”

Tom said nothing more and they lapsed into silence for a few miles. They were heading
north, through the middle of Wales. They had started off following the A470 towards
the Brecon Beacons, but had found it blocked near Merthyr by a multi-vehicle pile-up
that they could not find a way around. They had been forced to backtrack, the further
delay making Peter jittery judging by the anguished look he’d shot them as he’d turned
the Range Rover around, and had since been following winding B roads and lanes.

“Peter knows about the virus,” said Tom, breaking the silence.

“What do you mean?” She half twisted in her seat to face him.

“He knows how it started.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But he said it was started deliberately. I don’t know whether to believe
him.” Tom continued to look straight ahead, following Peter’s Range Rover closely.
“He said he has something to show me. When we stop I’ll make him show me. Show us.”

When they had arrived at Peter’s cottage the previous evening, Peter had refused point-blank
to discuss anything. He had looked drawn and haggard so Tom hadn’t pressed it. As
soon as they had loaded the Range Rover with the containers of diesel, food and water,
and camping equipment, Peter had wanted to leave, but it was Tom’s turn to be obstinate.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m shattered. That thing that happened in Ceri’s, it’s
left me feeling exhausted. It was as much as I could do to drive here. I can’t drive
any more tonight, especially through the dark. And look at Ceri. She’s drained. Truth
be told, you look like shit, too. We all need to rest.”

Peter opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again as his shoulders slumped. “You’re
right. But we have to leave at first light. Put some distance between us and here.
Then
we’ll talk.”

They had spent a fitful night, Ceri in Peter’s bed, the men on the settee and armchair,
but all looked slightly improved in morning’s light. They had left Peter’s village
a little after eight o’clock and had been driving constantly since.

Ceri craned her neck to look into the back of the Jaguar. “Dusty’s still fast asleep,”
she said.

“Good,” said Tom. “I was worried that he’d be affected by all that howling, but he
seems fine. Just tired, like all of us.”

Ceri drew in a deep breath. “That . . . whatever it was yesterday in my house . . .
I think Peter stopped it doing something to us.”

“I think so, too. But I want some answers. Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

Tom pressed the heel of his hand into the centre of the steering wheel, sounding the
horn. When Peter slowed down to glance back at them, Ceri mimed forking food into
her mouth and Peter stopped in the middle of the road. Tom did likewise and killed
the engine. He glanced around. Dark spindly fir trees grew to the edge of the road
on one side; on the other was a drystone wall with empty shrubland beyond.

“Hmm. . . .” said Tom. “The middle of nowhere.”

Ceri smiled. He wasn’t much for small talk, but she was starting to like Tom. She
had been very unsure at first, had very nearly allowed them to drive away. It maybe
had been the shock of discovering that she wasn’t the last person left alive, but
she felt glad that she had come out of it in time to call them back. She hadn’t done
so with any intention of going with them; she merely craved human company after almost
two weeks of grief and solitude. Until that invasion of her head, if that is what
it had been. If the other man hadn’t been there to do whatever it was he’d done, she
dreaded to think what would have become of her. She had felt her sanity beginning
to slip away like sand through fingers . . .

After that, going with them had seemed the obvious thing to do. She barely gave a
glance at her house after she closed the door behind them. It had stopped feeling
like home when she had returned from the hospital a widow and mother without a child.

Ceri opened the car door and got out, glad to be able to stretch her legs. Peter had
spread a tarpaulin in the middle of the road and was setting out tins, bottles of
water and plastic plates.

“A proper little picnic,” she said. “
Da iawn
.”

“I know that one,” said Peter with a smile. “‘Very good’. I married a Welsh girl.”

Tom also got out and opened the rear door. Dusty bounded out, seeming to grin, and
almost knocked her over in his delight at seeing her. She noticed that he didn’t run
over to Peter. Instead, the dog ran to the treeline and squatted.

“Erm,” said Tom, looking from Dusty to her. “I’m just going to nip into the trees
for the same thing. Ah, not
precisely
the same thing, you understand. What I need can be accomplished standing up. . . .”

“Well, I’m going behind that wall,” she replied. “Either way, I’ll be
twttying
down.”

“
Twttying
down?” said Peter, eyebrows raised. “Don’t recall that one.”

“Squatting,” she said and almost uttered a giggle.

While she protected her modesty with the stone wall and conducted her business, Ceri
wondered at how good it felt to smile and joke, no matter how feebly. It didn’t make
the grief and pain disappear, but pushed them away a little. For a few moments, she
felt human again.

* * * * *

Joe Lowden was a northern boy through and through. Born and raised in the fishing
town of Grimsby, he had never been further south than Nottingham. That had been on
a school trip to Sherwood Forest when his class had been studying the legend of Robin
Hood. Joe hadn’t been particularly impressed; unsurprisingly, the forest had amounted
to little more than a bunch of trees. The ancient oak in which Robin was reputed to
have hidden from the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham was fenced off so that Joe couldn’t
do the one thing he had been looking forward to: climbing inside. The best part of
the trip had been the journey home when he and his classmates shot at each other with
the plastic bows and arrows they’d bought at the gift shop, until the spoilsport teachers
confiscated them. It hadn’t been Joe’s fault that one of his arrows had ended up stuck
to the driver’s bald head—the boy he’d been aiming at had ducked.

School had never been Joe’s strong point. He left the first chance he had when he
reached sixteen. He told the careers officer that he intended going to work on his
father’s trawler, but that was a lie. His father had once or twice suggested that
as a possible career path for Joe, but without conviction. He knew that the sea didn’t
run in Joe’s blood as it did in his own. If that made him wonder about the source
of Joe’s blood, he never mentioned it to Joe. In truth, he never mentioned much of
anything to Joe, which suited Joe just fine. The less interest his father took in
him, the more he could pursue his own ambitions.

His mother, even when sober, showed even less interest in her only child. Occasionally,
she’d thrust a tenner into his hand for him to run down the offie for a packet of
fags or a bottle of cheap wine, telling him he could keep the change. Most of the
time, she sat in front of the TV drinking or had her awful friends round and they’d
all get drunk together.

When his father came home, filthy and stinking of fish, they would row, he would start
drinking and occasionally slap her, then they’d storm off to separate bedrooms.

Joe tended to stay out until late into the night, creeping back in to his tiny bedroom
long after they had passed out, her from wine and vodka, him from whiskey and exhaustion.

Unlike many boys his age, Joe had no love for football or sport in general. He didn’t
read, though he could so long as the author hadn’t used too many big words; he simply
couldn’t see the point. He didn’t have a computer or games console. He occasionally
went to the cinema to see an action film or anything with zombies; they could keep
the arty-farty stuff, though.

Nevertheless, Joe had developed an interest; one he had discovered when barely into
his teens and one that, now he was approaching eighteen, had become an all-consuming
passion. Not one that he could share with his parents, though they unwittingly funded
it in part by helpfully leaving purses and wallets lying around the place, and by
not being careful enough with their valuable items of jewellery. Petty theft and the
occasional burglary provided much of the remaining necessary cash. Any shortfall he
made up with his fortnightly benefits—as if they seriously expected him to use it
to try to find a job.

The onset of the Millennium Bug and the swift demise of his parents and everyone else
he knew had given him a new freedom to indulge his passion. He had fallen sick himself,
but had barely noticed. He spent most of his days in a fug of delirium anyway; a touch
of flu made little difference.

He wondered briefly if his parents had found release from the pain of their existence,
then found that he didn’t much care. Quite why his maker had deemed it fit to spare
him, he spent not a moment pondering. He had no time for traditional gods. He worshipped
the gods of cannabis, ecstasy and mephodrone. Soon, he thought, he would graduate
to the higher deities: the gods of cocaine and heroin.

Joe knew where most of the dealers in Grimsby and the surrounding areas lived. He
had never passed a driving test, but that needn’t stop him now. The Filth had gone
the way of everyone else and he could drive where and how he pleased. And if he banged
up a few cars along the way, who was there to give a monkey’s?

Within days of the streets falling quiet and deserted, Joe had accumulated a good-sized
suitcase-full of every leisure drug that had been doing the rounds in the North-east
when the virus had hit. He took the case to the poshest hotel in Grimsby, to the poshest
room that didn’t smell like an abattoir, and indulged. Boy, did he indulge!

When the wave of mental energy hit him like a brick one afternoon, Joe was lying on
a king-sized bed, eyes open but glazed, dreaming of rainbow bridges and flying serpents
and subterranean lakes of molten white gold. As he slowly came out of the fugue, he
felt a longing to go to London.

He didn’t pause to wonder why he suddenly had this urge, but it seemed as good a place
as any to find more drugs.
No
he chided himself
Better. The best. London—where the streets are paved with marijuana.

An image, as clear as a multi-pixel photo, shone bright and clear in his mind. Plastic
bags of weed and amphs and angel dust and blues and . . . everywhere his mind’s eye
looked, the bags waited, on pavements, on walls, in bus stops, to a backdrop of St
Paul’s dome and Big Ben and a red double-decker bus, for him to pick up.