The Fury (18 page)

Daisy walked between the two boys, breaking into a trot every few seconds to keep up with their giant strides. She was exhausted, her legs aching from the sand and her hands from the two carrier bags she held, but she felt safe. Which was weird, really, considering she’d broken one of the most important rules, one of the things her mum and dad had drummed into her again and again and again. Never,
ever
talk to strangers. And
certainly
never,
ever, EVER
get into a strange boy’s car and let him drive you across the country to meet another even stranger boy and then go with them both to a secret place that nobody else knows about.

She should have been more nervous, but that usual horrid feeling in her chest and stomach she got when she was scared – like there were living things crawling around inside her – just wasn’t there. It might have still been the shock of what had happened. It might have been the fact that in the last few hours everything in her life, everything she knew about the world, had changed.

But there was something else, too.

‘So, where are you from?’ she heard Cal ask.

He was a few paces in front of her, a huge black duffel bag over his shoulder and the last carrier gripped in one hand. The other boy was a few paces in front of him and he wasn’t carrying anything except the gun. They were almost walking in line. The sea was still to their right, huge and shiny like a big bit of silver foil. The dunes rose to their left. The sun had dipped below them now, making the sand look more like wet cement. She jogged forward a few steps until she was by Cal’s side again.

‘Around here someplace?’

He’s from the Larkman
, Daisy thought idly. Which was weird because she’d never heard of the Larkman before.

‘Norwich,’ Brick grunted without looking back.

Oh
, thought Daisy.

‘A place called the Larkman, actually,’ he went on. ‘You won’t have heard of it.’

‘Cool,’ said Cal. He smiled down at Daisy and she smiled back without having to think about it. Cal was nice, and she could trust him. Even if he hadn’t saved her life she’d have known that. He wasn’t from Norwich, he was from a place called Oak Minster or something. It made her think of a church made of wood. That little piece of knowledge floated in her brain like an ice cube in a glass of water, kind of see-through and almost invisible but definitely there. It made her head feel cold, not in a bad way.

‘You okay?’ Cal asked her. ‘You want me to take those bags?’

‘I’m okay,’ she replied, not wanting to feel even more like a kid than she already did. With her parents not around any more –
Not gone, though; remember what Cal said, he could make things normal again
– she’d have to look after herself for a while. She couldn’t expect these boys to, because everyone knew boys were a bit rubbish. She looked up at Brick’s back. Even in the dark the bigger boy’s hair seemed to glow orange.
He hates it
, she thought.
Not because of the colour, or because people tease him, but because it reminds him of his dad
. Her head was full of ice cubes, each one different, all of them clinking little bits of knowledge over her thoughts.

‘Who did you say attacked you?’ Cal asked. ‘Your girlfriend, was it?’

Brick shot a look over his shoulder that was easy enough to read – 
Don’t go there –
but it softened after a moment. He bent down and picked up one of the little stones that littered the beach, lobbing it out into the sea. It went a long way. Daisy felt sorry for it, because it would be stuck in the cold, dark water for ages. Maybe forever.

‘That’s how it started, yeah,’ he said as he walked. ‘We were making out, y’know? Then she just went mental. She bit me.’ He turned again and pointed at the wound above his eye. It looked dirty and horrible. ‘Wasn’t just that, though, she was proper psycho, tried to claw me to pieces. No reason, I didn’t do anything. Then I went to the garage, to get help, and a load of people came after me. They wanted to kill me.’

He’s not saying something
, thought Daisy. And another ice cube floated by inside her mind, a dark corridor and some steps, a locked door at the bottom of them. This thought gave her a bad feeling, an unpleasant tickling in her stomach, and she pushed it away by focusing on the gulls that bobbed on the sea. They peered back at her, and their little eyes reminded her of the people who had attacked her – the ambulance man and Mrs Baird and all the neighbours and people she’d never seen before – because there was nothing at all in those eyes. They were hollow black marbles.

‘You call the police or anything?’ Cal asked.

Brick shook his head. ‘They’d have come after me too. Don’t know how I know that but I do.’ He looked at Cal. ‘You know it too.’

So did Daisy. Everyone would come after them, no matter where they went or what they did. Until they found a way to fix this, the whole world would have the fury. This wasn’t another ice cube thought, this was a big flashing light in her head, impossible to ignore or push away.

‘The fury,’ said Brick, nodding as if Daisy had spoken it aloud. ‘Question is why. Why us?’

The only answer to this was the sound of the sea as it lapped the beach with its foamy tongue, that and the gentle cries of the gulls settling into bed. Did they sleep on the water? That was odd. How did they not capsize in the middle of the night?

They walked in silence for a few more minutes, Daisy falling further and further behind as the soft, uneven ground took its toll on her legs. She tried to make sense of the other ice cubes. She could see one with a pretty girl reading a book. That was Cal’s. There was another of a pier full of arcade machines that was too see-through to make any sense of. There were nasty ones, too: people screaming and biting and punching and kicking and chasing that belonged to both of the boys. Daisy surfed through them like someone channel flicking, not really understanding how these things could be in her head, unless she was imagining them.

After a while Brick moved off to the left, towards the dunes. Up ahead the beach narrowed, and she could make out a weird wooden thing – like a huge collapsed rope bridge – stretching over the sand into the sea. She jogged to catch up, almost stumbling. Cal waited for her at the bottom of the dune, Brick already halfway up.

‘You sure you don’t want me to take them?’ he asked, hiking his bag up over his shoulder. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I think we’re almost there.’

How did she know that? She wasn’t quite sure, she just did. Just like she knew she’d see a big wheel even before it rose over the top of the dune like a rusty metal sun. The ice cube image was almost exactly the same as the real one, laid over it and shimmering ever so slightly. Only in the ice cube the wheel was actually turning, people visible inside the rocking carriages. Could she smell doughnuts too? She blinked and the ice melted. The wheel was ancient, nothing like the big one in London she’d been on. Bits had even fallen off it, some of the metal poles in the middle and three or four carriages too. It looked like a giant that was missing some of its teeth.

Brick flapped gracelessly down the other side of the dune, towards a huge fence. Daisy saw that there wasn’t just a Ferris wheel ahead but a whole theme park – there were two roller coasters, by the looks of things, and one of those rides that whizzed up and down and made you feel sick just looking at it, and a large square building with a roof like waves. Her heart lifted when she saw a carousel too, although she could only make out the painted, cone-shaped roof over the fence. She loved carousels! It was the closest she’d ever really come to riding a horse.

‘It’s a theme park,’ she said.

Brick turned and somehow a smile managed to land on his sour face again.

‘It used to be,’ he said. ‘Don’t get excited, though. Nothing works any more. But it’s safe, nobody ever comes here apart from me.’

It didn’t matter if nothing worked, there still might be horses. In fact couldn’t she see them now, like another one of those weird half-invisible thoughts that made her brain feel cold? She could see their kind eyes and their long noses and that horrible dark corridor and the steps going down and the locked door and something behind it that moaned.

Her skin went prickly and she ran to Cal, walking by his side as they followed Brick down the dune onto a concrete walkway. It ran alongside the fence, and about halfway down Brick squeezed through a gap and
disappeared
. He was waiting for them on the other side when they caught up.

‘Watch you don’t scratch yourself,’ he said to Daisy. ‘The wire is pretty sharp.’

Cal grabbed the fence and pulled it open and she looked at the gap. She searched inside herself, looking for warning signs, looking for those little electric currents that told her something bad might happen. But they weren’t there. Other than that corridor and the locked door –
which might not even be real, which might just be in your head
– she felt absolutely one hundred per cent safe.

She crawled through the gap on her hands and knees, standing and dusting herself off as Cal followed. Brick shushed them out the way, grabbing a huge piece of wood on which she could make out the letters NDYFLOSS AN. He rested it over the fence, giving it a shove to make sure it was firmly in place. Even with the exit blocked Daisy couldn’t feel the slightest trace of fear. In fact she couldn’t remember ever being anywhere before where she’d felt quite as much like she was
supposed
to be.

Brick turned and stretched out his long, freckled arms. This time his smile was nervous, almost bashful.

‘Cal, Daisy, welcome to Fursville.’

It could have been a romantic dinner, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was eating a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and the person sitting opposite him, on the other side of the candlelit table, was an ugly ginger guy called Brick.

They were on the first floor of the pavilion, in the small restaurant called Waves. One side of the room was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, but there was no sea view any more. They’d been boarded over from the outside, much of the glass cracked and stained so that the stuttering candle was reflected in it several times, making it seem like the room was alight. The whole place was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs, and the stench of sea rot hung in the air along with the smoke.

His discomfort must have shown because Brick snorted out another one of his not-quite-laughs.

‘It’s not the Four Seasons or anything,’ he said.

‘It’s fine,’ said Cal, funnelling the crumbs into his mouth then flattening the crisp packet against the mouldering tablecloth. Daisy lay on a small, damp chaise longue to their side. She’d climbed on it about five minutes ago and she was already fast asleep, her snores as soft as velvet. ‘It’s safe.’

‘It’s definitely safe. Nobody’s ever here. Ever.’

That wasn’t a surprise, from what they’d seen in the last half hour. Brick had given them a guided tour, acting like he worked here as he showed them the roller coaster and the log flume and the carousel and the dodgem track and the overgrown miniature golf course. What he really should have been doing, Cal thought, was showing them the emergency exits, the safest hideaways, the supplies, the weak points, the lookout areas. At the very least he could have pointed the way to the facilities. But no, he’d walked around muttering about arcade machines and doughnuts and which was the best seat to take on the flume if you didn’t want to get wet – even though none of it even worked any more.

Cal hadn’t said anything, though. It did seem quiet here, and from what he and Daisy had seen in the car on the drive up this part of the coast was as good as deserted. There would be plenty of time to shore the park up in case people came looking.

He sighed, hard enough to make the candlelight flutter. It was the first time he’d admitted to himself that this might not go away overnight. It might not go away at all.

‘What?’ Brick asked.

‘Nothing. This whole thing, it doesn’t seem real.’

‘I know. Feels like another lifetime that I was riding out here with Lisa, that we were fine.’

Another lifetime
, thought Cal. It really did. How long had it been since he was back at school playing football? Maybe ten hours. Ten hours for the rules of the universe to unravel around him, for everything he knew to turn to rot. It reminded him of a poem they’d done in English, but he couldn’t remember how it went. Something about things falling apart. They sat in silence, both of them chewing their own thoughts as the candle guttered like a chesty breath, a death rattle.

‘Your girlfriend,’ said Cal. ‘Lisa? What . . . I mean, er, is she—’

‘You don’t have to worry about her,’ said Brick sharply, with a look that told Cal it would be better not to pursue the subject any further.

‘You have any idea what might be causing this?’ Cal asked, quickly changing tack. ‘I mean I can’t think of anything. Except genetics maybe.’

‘Huh?’ Brick grunted.

‘Like cats. You know how some cats are, they just need to see another cat and they go for it. They fight to the death sometimes. Dogs too, I guess.’

Brick nodded, deep in thought.

‘But something like that doesn’t just happen,’ he said eventually. ‘You don’t just flick a switch and everyone hates you.’

‘It wasn’t just that with me,’ Cal said. Daisy stirred, snuffling and pressing her face into the chaise longue. He waited for her breathing to even out again before continuing. ‘Things have been strange for a few days now. People were ignoring me, acting weird. I thought they were just playing games but . . .’

He didn’t need to finish. Brick drew patterns in the dust on the table, the nail on his forefinger a crescent moon of dirt and blood. When he lifted his arm Cal saw a circle with two x’s for eyes, angry slanted eyebrows and a downturned mouth. A smiley without the smile. Somehow, without properly acknowledging the thought, he’d known that was what Brick was going to draw.

‘The fury,’ Brick mumbled, looking at his creation. ‘Good name for it, right?’

‘Certainly fits the bill,’ Cal said. ‘Why us, though? And why now?’

Brick’s eyes met Cal’s for a fraction of a second before bouncing off. He leant down and rummaged in a carrier bag – one that he’d picked up from the foyer as they were passing through. He hefted a laptop from it and laid it carefully on the table, covering up his dust drawing.

‘I need to show you something,’ he said as he opened the lid. Cal heard the whine of the hard drive coming to life, and the boy’s face was suddenly bathed in a sickly white glow. Cal got up, wiping the dirt from his palms as he walked round the table. Brick was online, the browser showing the same Yahoo Answers page that Cal had seen back at home. He could see Rick_B’s original message, and below that his own panicked response. Brick peered up, looking half his age from this angle. ‘It’s not just us,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Cal replied, watching Brick’s eyes widen. ‘I saw it happen on the motorway, a ton of people on top of a car attacking somebody inside. It was someone like us. I’m not sure how, I just know it.’

He choked as the memory burned back, the flames from the explosion seeming to sear the flesh of his brain. Brick turned back to the screen. When he raised his dust-blackened finger to the trackpad it was shaking.

‘It’s not just that,’ he said. ‘You weren’t the only person to reply. Look.’

He scrolled down the page slowly enough for Cal to read the eleven answers that followed his, all of them but two almost a carbon copy of his own. By the time he’d reached the last he felt like he’d run a marathon – that or been punched hard in the gut. He had to lean on the back of Brick’s chair to stop his disco legs throwing him to the floor.

‘That’s from four hours ago,’ Brick said, moving the pointer over the time of the last entry, 6.05 p.m. ‘I haven’t checked since then.’

He led the arrow up towards the refresh button and Cal almost screamed for him not to press it. He didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to know.

Brick clicked. The page loaded up painfully slowly. The Yahoo header, then the adverts, then the frame, then Brick’s message. The answers followed, all together like they were being vomited onto the page.

All forty-eight of them.

‘Jesus,’ said Cal, and this time he had to sit on the chair to the left of Brick’s. His whole body felt numb, cold. ‘Please tell me they’re not all real.’

Brick was scrolling down again, and his ghostly
pallor
had nothing to do with the light from the screen. Cal watched the boy’s face crumple into itself a little further with each new answer he read. It seemed like an age later when he finally turned his red, swimming eyes up. They looked at each other properly for the first time, and despite their differences they could have been mirror images.

‘Brick?’ Cal asked. ‘What do they say?’

‘The same thing,’ he breathed, breaking away to the screen again. ‘They’re all exactly the same.’

‘What do we do?’ Brick didn’t reply, the candlelight giving his skin a waxwork sheen.
Like he isn’t real; like none of this is real
, Cal’s brain insisted.
How can it be? How can this be happening?
‘Brick, what do we do?’

Brick looked up, and this time when their eyes met, Cal knew exactly what Brick was thinking.

‘We tell them,’ Cal said. ‘We tell them about this place.’

‘We have to,’ Brick confirmed. ‘I don’t want to but we have to. Look, you and me, we haven’t killed each other, or Daisy. If we’re . . .’

‘Different,’ Cal said when he saw him struggling.

‘If we’re different, if there’s something about us that’s different from the others, from the Fury’ –
He’s given it a capital F
, Cal realised,
it’s more than just a word now
– ‘then we have to get together, as many of us as we can. It’s the only way we can be safe, we can figure it out.’

‘But you can’t tell them where we are,’ Cal said. ‘Not on there, what if the others find us? Brick, we need to think about this.’

‘We don’t have time,’ he replied, tapping his finger on the top of the screen. Cal noticed the battery icon there, red and flashing. ‘It’s about to shut down and there’s no power here.’

Cal swore, loud enough to stir Daisy again. She wriggled over, opening her eyes and seeing him. By the time her distant, dreamer’s smile had faded she was asleep again.

‘Look,’ said Brick quietly. ‘I won’t tell them about Fursville. There’s a second-hand car showroom just over the road, it’s empty. I’ll tell them to go there and wait for someone to come to them. We can keep watch on the place, and if anything looks suspicious we just won’t show ourselves. Yeah?’

Cal shook his head.

‘Yeah?’ Brick repeated.

‘Okay,’ Cal said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Okay, whatever.’

Brick was already typing:

He stopped, running both hands through his hair.

‘Will that do?’ he asked. Cal didn’t reply. Brick read it through once more, the pointer hovering over the Post Reply button. ‘I guess it will have to.’

He clicked, and five seconds later the post appeared on the refreshed page.

‘You know it’s not gonna take a genius to work out that if we’re not in the showroom we’re gonna be in the bloody great big empty amusement park next door,’ Cal said, slumping back. ‘We should have met them at the car park.’

‘It’s too far away,’ Brick said. ‘We’d have to make that slog every day. It’s not safe.’

‘
This
isn’t safe,’ Cal snapped back. Brick closed the laptop, tapping his fingers on it. ‘We need to make extra sure this place is secure,’ Cal went on. ‘Seal up the fence, have an emergency plan, just in case.’

It took Brick a moment to look up. He stared at Cal, but it seemed that he was peering through him, at something much deeper.

‘Things fall apart,’ he said, his voice as low as the guttering candle. Cal shook his head as the poem he couldn’t remember, the one he’d learned at school, tumbled from Brick’s lips. ‘The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’

Brick looked away, firelight burning in his eyes as he finished.

‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. And goddamned everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’