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 catch-all.
‘Not many today, Ron. I spotted several of those bigger ones we’ve been seeing recently. The rat-sized 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 any time 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 round 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 round in her chair to face Ron and flipped a finger back at him.
‘Any time, 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 bone-headed acolytes. Dave was a sleazy jerk.
‘That’s enough of that, the lot of you!’ said Ron. He clapped his hands together like a primary-school teacher. ‘Freya, mind 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 round, 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 after volunteers for a recce 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 do with a break from the routine. Every day was the same now: three meals in the canteen 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 driving licence. Most of Ron’s staff were straight out of community college and had never taken a test. Spanners had never got round to it, the cleaning ladies were mostly Eastern Europeans who had been bussed in to work, he had no idea about the Lin family . . .
Freya ignored Dave questioning her ability to drive with his mates. She might slur like a drunkard, limp like an alcoholic, but she could drive perfectly well.
‘Anyone else?’
She prayed Dave wasn’t putting his hand up. She could do without 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 beauty therapist, 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 bookings desk.’
CHAPTER 33
Freya Harper was just sixteen when her GP told her and her mum she might be presenting the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Perfect timing for her O levels. 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 shunted to the margins. In the Jacobs Family Selection, she was one of the broken biscuits. 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 blonde, 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 Maths and insist it was only going to come in useful when she needed to count out her (future) rich footballer boyfriend’s weekly pocket money.
She didn’t shave her eyebrows off then paint them right back on again. She didn’t hitch her school skirt several centimetres higher by rolling over the waistband. She didn’t spill her heart out on Facebook every night, or do an endless procession of duck-lip selfies into her webcam.
When the Cool Sisters weren’t calling her a ‘lesbo’, they mockingly called her feMALE (with emphasis on the second syllable) simply because she was different from them. Outside their narrow-minded definition of ‘normal’, which to those bubble-headed idiots obviously made her gay.
She wasn’t. She just wasn’t like them.
It had only been in Year Ten at school that her brand of acerbic sarcasm had quite randomly become fashionable. The cool boys thought it was cool, all of them queuing up and taking turns to be 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 creeping lack of agility, her clumsiness, had become annoying. But since she’d never been the sporty type, nor the dancer type, nor the dainty flounce-around-like-Florence 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 d
esks. It was when her speech started to change that Freya had become properly 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. That’s when she told them about her mouth (not the bumping into desks – that she put down to being just plain clumsy).
They went to the doctors and after some tests she got that totally awesome news from her GP. 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 . . . rather lame.
Secondary-school popularity, Freya discovered, was a fickle mistress: any person was only one banana-skin mishap, one social gaff, 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 terraced house in Kings Lynn, stepping over the remains of her parents and out into a very quiet world. The memory of those first five days she kept 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 mum 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 lounge, 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.
‘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 upwards 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 officious 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 it, seen the aftermath first hand . . . and, yes, it hadn’t looked encouraging, but she couldn’t believe nobody – nobody else at all – had managed to weather it.
‘It’s all gone. It’s an empty world. We’re what’s left.’ Dave adopted a cornball lisping accent. ‘In the wake of a global apocklelixsh, they were mankind’sh laaaaasht and bessssht hope.’
She was expected to chuckle at that. She didn’t.
‘Maybe you should start thinking about that,’ he continued. ‘That we’ve got to make this work. Or we’re, you know, totally bolloxed.’
‘It works already. We have food and power and water.’
‘Work, as in, for the rest of our lives. We may have to be the ones that rebuild civilization. That’s a huge responsibility for us . . .’
He said ‘us’ but she knew he meant ‘me’. And he wasn’t doing that cornball voice now. He was quite serious.
‘For Ron,’ she corrected.
He nodded. ‘The old boy’s got a shedload to cope with. And I’m there to help him until . . .’
‘You take over.’
A smile flickered on to his lips, which he quickly moulded into a wince.
Nice save.
‘I’m going to be his deputy manager for as long as he’s around . . . Then, you know, I guess at some point I’ll have to step in and—’
‘Finally get your promotion to spa manager, huh?’
His expression hardened. ‘There are nearly forty people here now. In the future we’re gonna grow and somebody’s got to keep things orderly.’
‘We’re gonna grow? Make babies, you mean?’
He spread his hands innocently. ‘That’s how populations grow, last time I heard.’
She got it. Got his angle.
‘This isn’t actually an apology, is it?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied defensively. ‘I just said sorry, didn’t I?’
‘I may sound slightly stoned sometimes. My stupid lips get in the way, but that doesn’t mean I’m a smackhead. If this is your ham-fisted attempt to get a leg-over, Dave, nice try, but I’m not interested.’
He shook his head.
‘So what’s the matter? Did Claire turn you down again?’
He got up, the wicker seat creaking. ‘You think you’re really –’ he struggled to find a good word – ‘sharp and funny, don’t you!’
She shrugged. ‘Well . . . at least I’m not a total idiot. I’m hoping.’
‘Just so you know,’ he snorted, ‘I wouldn’t touch you with a bloody barge pole. I don’t do charity work.’ He paced away into the faux-jungle inside the glass building, past the zero-maintenance plastic palm trees and ferns.
‘Nice. Thank you so much for that,’ she said quietly.
Ron Carnegie was waiting, nine o’ clock sharp, by the spa booking desk. The others, drafted into the foraging party, were already assembled there: Big Phil and Iain nervously swapping wisecracks, covering their edginess with bravado, and Claire, make-up slapped on thickly like a protective second skin. They’d already made a start kitting themselves out for the trip, pulling on several layers of tracksuit bottoms, then strapping plastic knee braces and shin guards over the top.
‘You’re going to stay in the car, Freya, all right?’
She looked at Ron. ‘Of course.’ She shrugged. ‘I volunteered to drive, not to bug squish.’
The two young men grinned at that. ‘We’re the SAS,’ said Big Phil. ‘Snark Annihilation Squad.’
‘Don’t mess about, lads,’ said Ron. ‘You’re not heading out to find the snarks – you’re on an errand. We need to top up on things. Here’s the shopping list.’
‘I need . . . some things.’ Claire shot a glance at Freya. Freya nodded.
br /> Me too.
Ron handed Claire the community shopping list. ‘We need everything that’s on there and anything else you can think of.’ He turned to the two young men. ‘And please, lads, no risks. All right? This is not some PlayStation zombie game. If there’re too many of them out there, we’ll try again later.’
‘Relax, Mr Carnegie,’ said Big Phil, picking up a cricket bat. ‘We’ll be careful.’ He looked at Freya. ‘And you’re sure you’re OK to drive today?’
‘As we can all see, I’m no super athlete.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘But I’m not an invalid either.’
Not yet.
Phil grinned at that. Away from his ‘pack leader’, Dave Lester, he was slightly less obnoxious.
‘Now just be careful. Like I say, if there are too many out and about today, then just come back. We can try this again tomorrow.’
‘We’ll be OK, Mr Carnegie.’
‘Good. Well, then . . . I suppose we should get the show on the road.’
He walked them to the revolving glass door at the front that led outside to the car park: a clearing hewn out of the woods, with individual parking bays marked out with log dividers. There were only a dozen cars in it. Three of them belonged to members of staff who’d been here when it all kicked off. The others belonged to the park and had the park’s swervy green logo stencilled down the side, a halfway house between a Nike swoosh and a feather. It was supposed to be a leaf, symbolizing all things natural and the exclusive hideaway forest location.
He handed Freya the keys to the hybrid Land Rover.
‘Drive carefully, Freya. I’ll see you lot in an hour’s time.’
CHAPTER 34
‘I’m telling you, the plague was brewed up by the . . . uh . . . Al-Talibarnies,’ said Iain.
Freya mentally rolled her eyes then looked in the rearview mirror at him and scoffed at that. ‘Yeah, right, those Taliban and their big-ass, top-secret, bio-weapon research facility in Kandahar.’
‘Well, come on, it was made by someone,’ he argued with a shrug. ‘A weapon designed to leave buildings and objects and machinery intact? Seriously . . . it’s the perfect anti-personnel weapon. And, you know, they were losing their jee-had thing, right?’