The Fury (16 page)

‘Turn around when it is safe to do so.’

Cal really wished he could take the satnav lady’s advice. He wanted nothing more than to be able to swing the Freelander one-eighty, get the hell out of this weird little town and back on the dual carriageway.

Only he couldn’t. Something had made him pull off the relatively empty A11 just after Mildenhall – that same weird voiceless voice inside his head, making him ignore the instructions from the console, flick his indicator on and pull the car off the high street down a narrow road packed with houses.

There were people here. A delivery driver was unpacking crates from an Iceland van a few cars down, and a bunch of teenage skateboarders were messing around on the corner, one riding on the back of another, all of them laughing. They could have been Cal and his mates outside the library back in Oakminster, not a care in the world other than the constant ever-shifting mystery of who fancies who and what to do about it. He thought about Georgia, about Megan and Eddie and the others. It felt like a million years since he’d last seen them.

The delivery driver started to sniff the air as Cal pulled closer. The crate tumbled from his hands and a plastic carton of milk burst. He ran at the Freelander and Cal pressed his foot down a little harder, accelerating. The skateboarders had caught wind of him too. With a row of parked cars on each side there wasn’t any room to manoeuvre so Cal kept his speed at a constant twenty-five, hoping they’d get out of the way.

They didn’t, the first kid meeting the 4x4 head-on like a charging bull, bouncing almost straight backwards. The others were bumped aside by the bonnet, knocked into the gaps between the cars. Cal didn’t stop, even when the Freelander ran over something under its wheels, something big, something soft. He steered around the corner, guided by that strange radar in his head, a silence that seemed vast and unbroken even though he could hear the monkey-like shrieks from behind him, the sound of doors opening, the thunder of footsteps. There was a turning to the left and he took it, increasing his speed so that the little kids with the garden sale wouldn’t sense him until it was too late.

The road went down a hill, curving to the right then rising steeply again. Whatever it was inside his head was louder now, but still utterly silent. It reminded him of being at the bottom of the swimming pool, a perfect, pitchless peace. Even though he could see the crowd running after him in his rear-view mirror, even though he had no idea what lay ahead, it made him feel safe. It made him feel that he was doing the right thing.

He swung round another corner, the Freelander clattering over a pushbike that had been abandoned in the road. There was movement up ahead, a man running away from Cal, towards a small mob clustered outside a house on the left. There were four or five of them, a mix of men and women and even a little boy who didn’t look any older than five. The ones he could see wore the same expression of utter fury, so fierce that it turned their faces into demon masks. He sped up, somehow knowing the exact same thing that he had back on the motorway – that there was somebody close by who was just like him.

There was no time for a plan. Cal reached the mob in seconds and slammed on the brakes, the Freelander skidding into a low wall. A woman staggered towards him, howling as she tried to worm in through the broken passenger windows. Cal reached for his bag but couldn’t get it, the woman’s fingers pinching the flesh around his throat, her breath hot on his face. He grabbed the first thing he could find, a two-litre bottle of Dr Pepper, using it to batter her hands away. He opened his door and tumbled away from her onto the street.

What the hell am I doing?

Another woman reached for Cal with bloodied fingers. He swung the bottle like a baseball bat. It made a ridiculous boinging sound as it hit her head, spinning her onto the tarmac. The first woman was crawling out of the car and Cal slammed the door in her face, twice, then legged it around the back of the Freelander.

One of the adults in the garden charged at Cal,
stumbling
on the broken wall and giving him enough time to see that the others were clustered around a gated passage that led down the side of the house. Past the bars of the gate he could see a girl. She looked maybe eleven or twelve and she was screaming, but it was a different sound from the one the people on this side of the gate were making. It was filled not with hate but with terror.

He lifted the bottle over his shoulder, waiting until the man was almost on him before swinging hard again. It clipped his nose, a brittle crack echoing around the street. The man didn’t seem to notice, grabbing Cal around the neck and squeezing, flecks of blood spraying from his face with each snorting breath.

Cal thrust the bottle into the soft spot beneath the man’s chin, pushing up until the hands around his throat loosened. He swung the bottle at him. It hit, but exploded, the drink fizzing out like there were Mentos inside. The man gnashed at it, distracted, and Cal punched him in the face.

Something was biting him in the leg and he looked down to see the little boy there. He knocked him away as gently as he dared, kicking the woman who followed in the face. The last guy was big, but Cal remembered his Choy Li Fut training. He stepped behind him, locking his right leg around the man’s knee then shunting hard. The guy tripped, dropping like a felled tree, his head cracking on the concrete path.

Cal glanced up the street to see people hammering down it. He had maybe thirty seconds before he was swamped. He ran to the gate, ignoring the fire that burned in his muscles and lungs. There were actually two people inside, the second a white-haired old lady with crooked fingers coiled around the girl’s legs. The girl was kicking out at her, her face twisted by fear and blunted by shadow, her screams amplified by the narrow passageway. Cal tried the gate but the handle wouldn’t budge.

‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Let me in!’

The girl ignored him, her cries reaching a crescendo as the old woman sank her teeth into her leg. Cal glanced up the road again. Fifteen seconds. He swore, took a step back, then kicked out. A jarring pain tore up his leg and his back but the gate didn’t budge. He paused, breathing in through his nose, taking up a guarding stance then kicking out again with every ounce of strength he had.

The rusted lock snapped, something metal clanging down the passageway as the gate swung open. Cal ran through it, booting the old lady like he was taking a penalty. He grabbed the girl under her arms, ignoring her screams and her punches.

‘It’s okay, trust me, I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, the words only half formed in his breathless panic. He clamped her to him as he sprinted out into the garden, dodging one of the mob who was back on her feet then tearing open the Freelander door. The woman who had climbed inside the car was unconscious – or dead – and Cal grabbed her by the hair and tried to pull her free. She wouldn’t budge, her limbs locked between the seats. The hail of footsteps was deafening now, each panted breath audible.

‘Don’t run,’ he said, putting the girl down and grabbing the woman with both hands. Her body slid from the car like a bag of meat, slopping to the ground. The girl took a few steps away from him but stopped when she saw the crowd pounding down the street – maybe twenty people now, all howling. She looked up at him, her eyes so wide with shock they didn’t look real.

‘You can trust me, I promise,’ he said. The kid at the head of the crowd – one of the skateboarders, Cal thought – had almost reached them. ‘We need to go.’

He held out a hand and she took it, letting him help her into the driver’s seat. He climbed in next to her, slamming the door just as the skateboarder drew level. Momentum carried the kid past and he slipped on the gravel, disappearing with a yelp. The girl shuffled into the passenger seat as Cal slung the car in gear and floored it, barrelling down the street, the chaos and the carnage once again safely contained in the cracked glass of his rear-view mirror.

The only one who spoke was the satnav lady, and even she seemed relieved to Cal as he happily followed her directions out of Boxwood St Mary back towards the A11. He didn’t take his foot off the gas, finally remembering to breathe when he hit the slip road that led back onto the dual carriageway. Only when he was doing seventy in the outside lane did he notice that his entire body was as rigid as stone. He let himself relax, tremors taking the place of the tension.

‘Continue on the current road,’ said the lady.

Cal glanced over at the girl. She was curled up in the passenger seat, making it look huge. Her face was ashen, like she’d been completely drained through the cuts on her arms and neck. Her long hair swayed like seaweed in the gale from the broken windows. She stared out of the windscreen through watery blue eyes, but Cal knew she wasn’t seeing anything except maybe a replay of whatever it was she’d been through.

‘That lady’s name is Miss Naggy,’ he said, his voice too loud despite the howl of the wind and the heavy thrum of tyres. It was a stupid thing to say, but Cal didn’t have anything else. He glanced at the road then back at her. ‘She lives in the car and tells me where to go.’

The girl didn’t budge. At least she wasn’t trying to attack him, that could only be a good thing. A car was coming up fast behind him and Cal braced himself, indicating left and sliding into the inside lane. The BMW wobbled a little as it blasted past but it didn’t stop. Cal checked his mirrors then pulled out again to overtake a lorry. If he moved past people quickly enough they seemed to go back to normal before anything bad happened.

‘When I go the wrong way she tells me off,’ he went on. ‘Well, she usually tells my mum off, that’s why she called her Miss Naggy. It’s her name, not mine.’

Smooth, Cal
, he thought.
You’re so great with kids.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. She didn’t reply, didn’t even seem to notice him. He thought about leaving her alone. Maybe she was in shock or something, and he wasn’t sure what you were supposed to do with people like that. Wasn’t there a rule about not letting them go to sleep? Or was that for something else. Constipation or something.

Concussion, idiot
, his brain said, and he snorted a laugh. The noise made the girl jump. She snapped out of whatever trance she’d been in and gazed fearfully at Cal. He saw her fingers stray towards the door handle –
Christ, don’t do that, kid, you’ll be pâté on the motorway
– and he held up his left hand to show that he wasn’t
going
to hurt her.

‘It’s okay, please don’t be scared.’ The road ahead looked clearer and he pulled back into the left-hand lane, slowing down so that the noise inside the car was more a summer storm than a full-blown hurricane. ‘My name is Cal, you can trust me, I promise you.’

She shuffled further back into her seat, curled up like a hedgehog.

‘Where are we going?’ she said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said, her voice was a whisper bound up and carried off by the wind.

‘Somewhere safe,’ he replied. ‘At least, I think so. I’m not sure. But I’ll look after you, don’t worry, okay?’

There must have been something friendly in his face because the girl seemed to relax. She rested her chin on her knees, those huge eyes never blinking.

‘Miss Naggy wants you to put on your seat belt,’ Cal said, realising that neither of them was wearing one. He clipped on his own. ‘She’ll tell us off if you don’t.’

The girl looked at him, then at the built-in console where the voice came from. She reached up and pulled the belt over her curled-up legs, clicking it into the socket. They’d driven another half mile before she spoke, her voice so soft and so full of sadness that Cal felt a lump rise inside his throat.

‘Everyone hates me.’

‘They don’t,’ he said before he’d thought about what he could follow it with. ‘There’s just, I don’t know, something wrong with people. It’s making them do things they don’t want to. Like zombies, you know?’

She didn’t respond.

‘Everyone has been attacking me too. It started at school, all my friends, they tried to . . .’ he faltered, the words scared of being heard. He coughed them out. ‘They tried to kill me. Then people from the street, people I’d never seen before in my life.’ He’d wiped a tear away before he even noticed he was crying. ‘Then my mum.’

The girl looked back at him, her mouth hanging open, and a jarring blast of adrenalin tore through Cal as he thought she was about to throw herself over the seat and sink her teeth into his throat.

‘Your mum tried to hurt you?’ she said. Cal nodded. She stared at something a million miles away, deep in thought. There was a moment of revelation there, some awful understanding. Then she lowered her head to her raised knees and began to sob, great heaving cries. Cal’s hand hovered over her for a second or two before landing on her shoulder. Her whole body jolted at the touch but other than that she didn’t acknowledge it. He gently stroked his thumb back and forth, the way his mum had always done with him when he was
upset
.