She staggered over toward him, pulling the creatures out of her hair as they tried to burrow out of sight and hide in her thick locks. “Get out! Make it bigger from outside!”
“Mom?”
“Just do it!” She turned away again, screaming angrily as she ripped at the back of her head with both hands trying to locate something digging into her scalp there.
Leon tore off his hoodie, bunched it up, and draped it over the lower wires, pulled himself up, then stuck his head and shoulders through the narrow gap. Grace was outside, flapping her good hand at him to hurry up.
“Come on! Come on!”
He wriggled and pushed and felt wires stab and scrape his shoulders and back and finally, with more of his weight outside, he toppled out and fell, taking the impact on his upper back.
He lay there for a few seconds, winded, gasping to get some air back in his lungs.
Grace’s face appeared above him, her long, matted hair dangling down and tickling his nose. She was screaming at him to get up.
“Help Mom! Help Mom!”
Still wheezing, dazed, his head spinning, he let Grace pull him to his feet. She couldn’t reach the window. He just about could. He could hear Mohammed’s deep voice screaming with pain. His mom’s too.
He grabbed at several of the bent wires, braced his feet against the brick wall and tugged ferociously at them. They bent farther, more granules of glass clattering down on him. He fell to the ground, a twist of rusting mesh wire clasped in each hand.
He got to his feet and was about to pull himself up and look inside when his mom’s hands emerged through the ragged hole. Her forearms and elbows wriggled through; then, finally, she managed to push her head out through the narrow gap.
Grace screamed.
His mom’s hair seemed to be moving with a life of its own, like Medusa’s snakes, churning, swaying, shifting. The creatures were swarming up over her shoulders, clambering over each other like greedy prospectors to stake a claim on any spare part of her bare flesh. Probing skeletal legs and scalpels emerged from her hairline and cautiously explored her temples, her eyebrows, looking for another handhold on which to grasp to complete their advance over her.
Blood was trickling down her face from hundreds of cuts. She blinked bloody tears and her eyes—round, terrified, and bloodshot—settled on them.
“Go!” she whimpered. “Go…”
“Mom! Come on!” screamed Grace.
Their mom struggled to pull herself through the narrow gap, managed to squeeze a shoulder through, but the top of her chest was pinned by the barbs of wire. Creatures scuttled out of the window past her and dropped down on to the asphalt, sensing fresh prey to pursue.
“Oh God… They’re digging into me!” she screamed. A long string of blood spilled from her mouth. “Oh God…oh God…” She stared at them both before slowly slipping back. “Oh God…they’re inside…”
She slid out of view. The last visible part of her was her left hand holding stubbornly to some of the wire mesh for a few seconds more. Then her fingers slackened and her hand dropped from sight.
Part II
Chapter 32
“Settle down. Everyone…please just stop talking and listen.”
What was now the community meeting space used to be the staff room. It was still lined with lockers along one wall, a whiteboard with a duty roster, and magnetized “performance smileys” stuck along one end of it.
Ron Carnegie stood at the front, wearing his dark-green Emerald Parks sweatshirt and a bright-green plastic name tag that reminded everyone, just in case they’d forgotten, that he was called Ron Carnegie and he was in charge here. Site manager, still, even if the world outside had changed beyond all recognition.
“Come along now, people. Let’s not waste any more time—let’s get this morning’s briefing underway.”
Ron looked around at those present in the staff room. Thirty-seven of them in total, including himself. Twenty-five of whom he knew reasonably well, or as well as a manager could get to know his own staff, though the majority of them were twenty years younger than him. Kids, really. The others were an assortment of waifs and strays who’d wandered into the park or had been found on a foraging run: the Lin family—mom, dad, and their three small kids; Freya, the gawky goth girl with a limp and a lisp; Erik, the poor chap who’d been on chemo when the plague hit—his hair was beginning to grow back now, but so, presumably, was his tumor; Christof, a Swedish graduate student with an almost-unintelligible accent who had been over here studying forestry; Dorris, a bookstore manager who’d driven into the park somehow believing it was a government virus-research center.
A mixed bag, and every one of them now his responsibility until help eventually arrived.
“Karl? What have you been seeing out there?”
Karl Mullen was the Emerald Parks engineering manager, known as “Spanners.” The nickname had arrived with him from the merchant navy. It’s what every ship’s engineer is called, he’d explained on his first day at work. Nautical tradition an’ all that. Spanners had stopped wearing the Emerald Parks uniform since the end of the world, claiming it was pointless since no one was now employing him. He got up off the end of the table on which he’d been perched.
“Not much to report again, Ron. No signs of life, I’m afraid. No airplane trails, no smoke anywhere, no car engines. Nothing.” This was how his daily contribution always began. The same nothing to report report.
Ron nodded. “Well, let’s not give up hoping, people. We can’t be the only ones left. What about snarks?”
Snarks—Ron’s label for It…for Them.
The term had taken hold pretty quickly, linguistic Darwinism at work. It was quick and easy to say and sounded about right for something for which they didn’t have an informed name. Other names had held sway for a while—scuttlers, crawlers, bugs, wrigglers—but since those things out there seemed to be constantly changing, snarks, being a more generic term, served as the catchall. “Not many today, Ron. I spotted several of those bigger ones we’ve been seeing recently. The rat-size ones.” They looked nothing like rats, of course, just roughly the same size as them. Ghostly pale, their skin was almost see-through, limbs varying in number from three to six. Recently, the snarks had started looking slightly different, dispensing with their insect-like, segmented exoskeletons and appearing with internal skeletons covered by a thin and almost transparent layer of skin.
“They skirted the perimeter for a few minutes. I think they were testing to find a way in again, but they gave up.”
“Good,” said Ron, satisfied with that. “As I know you’re fed up with me saying, we’re quite safe in here.”
“But they’re definitely getting bigger…so it’s not always going to be safe here,” interrupted a girl’s voice.
All eyes, including Ron’s, settled on Freya.
“I’m just saying what you’re all thinking! The snarks are getting bigger!” She hated the word. There was that annoying hard S on the front that forced her to slur and made her sound drunk.
She turned in her seat and looked around at them. “How long before they get to be the size of a…I dunno…a dog or a cow? Are we still going to be able to keep them out then?”
Ron sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. Without the lenses on, his eyes looked like tiny, little cartoon dots. “Look, Freya, this place is as good as any. Those things, the snarks—God knows what they are, but they’re not going to get in here anytime soon.”
“Not yet.”
Maybe she wasn’t saying what all these people around her were thinking. Maybe they wanted to buy into Ron’s unflappable certainty that they were safe in Emerald Park forever.
“We’re immune, Freya,” said someone behind her. She turned around and saw it was Ron’s deputy manager, Dave Lester. “Every last one of us here is immune. Which means, frankly,
we’ve just got those pests to deal with when we go outside. And they squish pretty easily.”
“Right now they do…but what if they get bigger? Stronger? What then?”
“Then we take baseball bats along with us, sweetheart.” He got a laugh from a couple of the younger lads at the back, Big Phil and Iain, the park’s two fitness instructors. As far as she could see, that pair of knuckle-dragging idiots were treating the end of the world like some kind of video game.
And…sweetheart, seriously? She narrowed her eyes warningly at Dave. He winked back at her and blew her a kiss. She closed her eyes, turned back around in her chair to face Ron, and flipped the finger back at him.
“Anytime, anywhere, gorgeous,” he called out. He got his obligatory hyena-like guffaws from the back.
“Not even if you were the last man on earth,” she replied.
“’S all right, Freya love. You can relax. I’m not that desperate. Not yet, anyway.”
Freya rolled her eyes and tried to ignore the sniggering from his boneheaded followers. Dave was a sleazy jerk.
“That’s enough of that!” said Ron. He clapped his hands together like a primary school teacher. “Freya, watch the attitude, and, Dave, please. Let’s avoid the sexist comments. I still expect professional standards to be maintained here! Especially from my deputy!”
Dave shrugged an apology. “Yeah, sure. Sorry, Ron.”
“Now look,” Ron continued, “we are perfectly safe here. We just need to keep vigilant, keep patient…and keep taking the pills. Speaking of which…” He pulled out a Tupperware box, peeled off the lid, and handed it to Spanners. “Medication time. Will you pass that around, please, Karl?”
A good-natured groan went around as the box was passed along, but everyone dipped a hand in and took out a single capsule.
“Now…I’m looking for volunteers for a reconnaissance run tomorrow. We’re getting low on a number of things, including these meds,” he said. “Volunteers, please…and if we get none, then I’m going to have to pull some names out of a hat.”
Freya stuck her hand up. “I’ll volunteer to drive.” She could use a break from the routine. Every day was the same now: three meals in the cafeteria and waiting, waiting, waiting for rescue.
“OK, thank you, Freya.” Ron nodded. She could drive. Bizarrely, she was one of the few here with a driver’s license. Most of Ron’s staff were straight out of college and had never taken a test. Spanners had never gotten around to it, the cleaning ladies were mostly Eastern Europeans who had been bussed to work, and he had no idea about the Lin family.
Freya ignored Dave questioning her ability to drive with his pals. She might slur like a drunk, limp like an alcoholic, but she could drive perfectly well.
“Anyone else?”
She prayed Dave wasn’t putting his hand up. She didn’t want him leering at the back of her head in the car.
“All right, then,” said Ron. “I’ll pick Claire…Phil…and Iain.”
Freya rolled her eyes. “Orange” Claire was the park’s beautician, all nails and fake tan. And of course Phil and Iain were Dumb and Dumber.
Great.
“Good. Then we’ll have you four, tomorrow morning, nine o’ clock sharp, at the spa therapy reception desk.”
Chapter 33
Freya Harper was just sixteen when her physician told her and her parents she might be presenting the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Perfect timing for her school exams. Perfect timing for her late-starting but finally flourishing social life.
She’d always been one of the social outliers, one of the mixed bag of misfits who were pushed to the side. Not because of her MS—that hadn’t happened yet—but because she was more academic than the Cool Sisters. Unlike them, she didn’t celebrate being blond, bland, and inept. She didn’t run around flapping her hands and gasping OhmyGodohmyGod when asked to dissect a frog, or curl her lip sarcastically in math and insist it was only going to be useful when she needed to count out her (future) rich soccer player boyfriend’s weekly paycheck.
She didn’t shave her off her eyebrows, then paint them right back on again. She didn’t hitch her school skirt several inches higher by rolling over the waistband. She didn’t spill her heart out on Facebook every night or do an endless procession of duck-face selfies into her webcam.
When the Cool Sisters weren’t calling her a “lesbo,” they mockingly called her female simply because she was different from them, outside their narrow-minded definition of “normal,” which to those bubbleheaded idiots obviously made her gay.
She wasn’t. She just wasn’t like them.
It had only been in ninth grade that her brand of acerbic sarcasm had quite randomly become fashionable. The cool boys thought it was cool, all of them lining up and taking turns at being on the receiving end of her sharp tongue, guffawing together and flicking their wrists as she snarkily put them down. The cool girls tried to mimic it badly (butt-clenchingly, embarrassingly badly, truth be told), and after five long years in the wilderness, Freya was finally in.
Then along came wonderful MS.
Her increasing lack of agility, her clumsiness, had become annoying. But since she’d never been the sporty type, nor the dancer type, nor the dainty waif type, that hadn’t been a major problem, and she’d put it down to being more the clumsy Bridget Jones type—her head so full of Important and Interesting Stuff that there was less of it to devote to looking out for doorframes, or corners of desks. It was when her speech started to change that Freya had become truly concerned. Her lips had begun to feel numb, like after a trip to a dentist. Over the course of a week, they went from being oddly tingly to completely numb. When she probed them with her fingers, they felt like someone else’s lips. That’s when she got worried. When she spoke, she sounded as if she’d been drinking. In fact, her parents even accused her of sneaking some booze into her room. So she told them about her mouth (but not the bumping into desks—that she put down to being just plain clumsy).
They went to the doctors, and after some tests, she received that totally awesome news from her physician. The stuff about how “it can be managed; it can be slowed down. The discomfort can be minimized with prescription painkillers, but…I’m afraid multiple sclerosis can’t be cured.”
The whole being cool at school thing went south pretty quickly after that. The boys began to think she sounded weird, and the delivery of those acerbic and sharp-witted one-liners began to sound rather clunky and…well…pretty lame.
Secondary school popularity, Freya discovered, was a fickle mistress: any person was only one banana-skin mishap, one social gaffe, one unsightly blemish, one tuck-your-skirt-into-your-tights moment away from social exile.
That all happened six months before plague day, or VE Day—that’s what Ron called it. Virus in England Day. Freya, like pretty much everyone else, had gone to bed on a foreign news story and woken up to a national crisis.
Five days later, she’d emerged from her apartment house in Kings Lynn, stepping over the remains of her parents and out into a very quiet world. She kept the memory of those first five days locked away in a compartment of her mind, the stuff of awful nightmares. She’d wondered why the virus had spared her. God knows, it had had ample opportunity to dissolve her too, but it hadn’t. It had “tasted” her, spat her out, and moved on to her mom and dad. It had turned the only two people on planet Earth that she cared about and her cocker spaniel, Teddy, into a pile of mush that had spread across the kitchen and into the living room, sending tendrils up the side wall of the stairs as it looked for more victims in the bedrooms upstairs.
She’d hidden away in her room for nearly a week. Grabbed everything she could possibly eat and drink and bolted herself inside. It was a combination of the water finally running out and the first tendrils emerging through the gap beneath her door and starting to explore her room that convinced her it was time to go.
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• • •
“Hey, what you up to?”
Freya had been window-gazing again. She did it more at night than during the day. There was something pleasing about the way the green floodlights planted around the inside perimeter of the tropicarium tilted upward and caught the overhanging branches and leaves of the mature trees outside. By day, the same view out through the glass wall looked drab; by night it looked exotic and jungle-y.
“Wotchupta?” asked Dave again.
“Enjoying some peace and quiet,” she replied coolly.
He sat down on the wicker sofa beside her. “You don’t like me, do you?”
She shot a sideways glance at him. He actually sounded a touch nicer than normal. His voice didn’t have that assertive, hard edge to it, nor the blokey the next thing I say is going to be funny so listen up tone that he put on in front of his wingmen.
“I just thought I better apologize for this morning.”
“What? The casually demeaning laddish sexism?”
He took a second to process that. “Yeah…that thing.”
She shrugged. At least he was aware he’d been rude, even if he didn’t know how to label it. “In that case…OK. Thank you.”
“We’ve all got to live together. Maybe even for the rest of our lives. So I…”
“It’s early days yet.”
Dave made a sucking noise through his lips. “You’re still pretty hopeful this is just a temporary thing, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Come on, Freya. You’ve seen as much as anyone else.” Oh, she had. More, probably. Dave, Ron, and the park’s staff had all been here watching the world’s final forty-eight hours of civilization unfold on Sky News. Watched the end of the world from the comfort of a luxury health spa. But Freya and the others had escaped from the virus, seen the aftermath firsthand…and, yes, it didn’t look encouraging, but she couldn’t believe nobody—nobody else at all—had managed to survive it.