One of the toddlers peering out of the trailer answered that. ‘Peeep-ol!’
Naga took several cautious steps forward. ‘Yes, we are, love. We’re real.’ She held out her empty hands. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. It’s OK . . . It’s OK.’
The boy took his time regarding her.
‘Look!’ said Naga. ‘I have fingernails. Hair. I’m real!’
The boy stared at her hands for a while then, slowly, he lowered the bat to a half-ready posture, still in both fists and still ready to swing at a moment’s notice. He eyed Moss holding the extinguisher, and Royce holding a jerry can of fuel. ‘Please . . . d-don’t hurt us.’
‘We won’t,’ assured Naga. She took another step forward.
‘I . . . I had to l-l-look after them all,’ said the boy slowly. His eyes darted from one person to the next. With the bat in his hands he looked like a guilty schoolboy explaining a broken window. ‘Th-th-there was . . . n-no one . . . else l-left.’ His stammer was achingly bad. He pushed through the words, tenaciously delivering a few at a time until he hit another hard consonant. ‘N-no g-grown ups l-left . . . I . . . I had . . .’
Naga advanced towards him. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. It’s OK.’
The boy lowered his bat all the way until the tip of it clunked harmlessly on the road beside his feet. He was trembling. From where he was standing, ten metres away, Leon could see he was shaking and twitching uncontrollably.
‘C-c-can . . . we . . . c-c-come . . . with . . . you?’
‘Oh, love!’ gasped Naga. ‘Of course you can!’ She quickly closed the gap between them and wrapped her arms round him. The boy towering over her was frozen and stiff at first. He looked confused, unsure, his rapidly blinking blue-eyed stare continuing over the top of her head, evaluating each of them in turn.
He began to wilt like an unwatered sunflower. His head, too big for those narrow shoulders, gently lowered until it rested on Naga’s, his chin settling on to her dark hair.
He closed his eyes and began to sob.
CHAPTER 41
They were into Wiltshire now, having detoured off the M3 because of the frequency with which they’d been having to stop and clear their way through jams. They’d gone towards Salisbury along the A303, and after skirting the cathedral town were now heading south-east again, back towards the coast. On several occasions they’d passed through a vehicle graveyard with a pathway already cleared through.
An encouraging sign.
‘Looks like we’re not the first ones heading to Southampton,’ said Freya. She gazed out of the back of the truck. They were moving slowly but steadily, not hampered by blockages, but slowed down to a walking pace by those who couldn’t fit into the two trucks. They were taking turns to ride or walk, the youngest and weakest children, by common consent, being excused from the rota.
‘Well, we may not be the first . . .’ replied Leon. They could see marks on the road where vehicles had been dragged or shunted to the side of the road. ‘But now I’m beginning to think we might end up being the last ones in line.’
‘We’ll be fine.’ Freya elbowed him. ‘We’ll get on a ship.’
Leon glanced at his sister. Grace was one of those walking behind the truck. The children they’d picked up – there had been nearly fifty of them – had merged into their group. Some were too poorly and malnourished to walk, some just too young.
Leon noticed Grace seemed to be getting on with the skinny blond boy, the children’s reluctant leader. His name was Jerry. Leon had heard a bare-bones sketch of his story from Grace the last time they’d stopped for a toilet break. Jerry was fifteen, tall for his age, and under different circumstances might have been bulkier. Dad would have said he had the frame for a quarterback. He just needed to throw some more meat on it.
The kids had all been in a children’s hospital in London, a famous place called Great Ormond Street. When he’d shrugged at the mention of the name, Grace had tutted at his ignorance. Although Leon was pretty sure she’d not heard of it either until five minutes ago.
When the virus had struck, it wiped out everyone but the patients, the majority of whom, of course, were on analgesics of one kind or another at the time. Jerry, thirteen when it had hit, had been the oldest surviving patient. Being the eldest, he’d become their leader by default.
He’d told Grace that for the last two years the children had sheltered in the hospital surviving on the scraps they could forage from the surrounding city, fighting off the ‘creepers’, as they’d called them.
Leon studied the boy. He had the gaunt look of someone who was ready to cave in. Those rapidly blinking eyes, the head tremors, the stammering . . . He looked as if he’d been just about managing to hold it together for the sake of the little ones.
Originally there’d been about a hundred of them, Grace had told Leon. Over half the children under Jerry’s care had died – some because of the illnesses from which they were already suffering, but many others from simple things like septicaemia or malnutrition. And, of course, others had been jumped and killed by the creepers. Leon wondered how he himself would have coped with such a burden. It had been hard enough having just Grace to worry about in those first few months after Mum had gone. But to have so many children looking to you for their survival, every minute of every day? It was no wonder poor Jerry looked like a battle-scarred old man.
Then, just like Leon and Freya had, one day the children had stumbled across something on a foraging trip: an emergency command and control centre, still running on a trickle of electricity coming from somewhere, and a crackling radio broadcasting the American president’s message.
Leon watched his sister and Jerry walking together, knuckles almost brushing as their hands swung loosely by their sides, heads leaning in to listen to each other as they spoke, and realized that there was some chemistry going on down there.
A virus of a different kind.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Freya.
He turned to her, and she was smiling. More a mischievous smirk.
‘You think?’
She nodded. ‘I think.’
Leon looked back at them and realized he was actually evaluating the boy’s suitability for his sister. He saw their loose swinging hands begin to slow down and synchronize, bump gently against each other, fingers cautiously extending and tangling. And he couldn’t help smiling for her.
At that moment Grace caught his eye and glared when she noticed Leon was watching them. Leon gave her a cheeky wink then made an exaggerated show of turning his back to her.
‘Giving those crazy kids a little space, huh?’ asked Freya.
He nodded. ‘We have stage-one hand-holding going on!’
CHAPTER 42
Grace knew, or was almost certain she knew, way before she felt the warmth of his skin against hers. As their fingers tentatively entwined for the very first time, the cells from her sweat glands were already on the surface of his skin, embarking on a covert mission of discovery.
And so, in turn, were his.
Less than a minute after first contact, one of his cells was in her bloodstream and being approached by her body’s endlessly patrolling security guards, her version of white blood cells. An exchange of amino acids later, and ‘friend’ status was established. Within another minute the invading cell had been carried along the arterial transport system up to a primary data-gathering cluster for closer examination and confirmation.
Chemical messages released, absorbed, tasted and understood in nanoseconds.
Grace turned to look at Jerry, and at almost the same moment he stole a glance back at her, blue eyes meeting brown.
Around them the others were all walking too closely for Grace and Jerry to talk aloud, and the truck’s belching and complaining engine was far too loud for them to whisper.
However, through their clasped hands they spoke. A conversation slowed down to almost human standards as intelligence clusters phrased questions and passed them on to data-car
rier cells, which flowed into the pulsing stream, through the connecting tissue that was now gluing their hands together and onwards up to the receiving cluster to listen to.
[You are infected. I thought ---- were.]
Grace smiled. {Thought you were too. Are you the only one in your group?}
[No. We all infected.]
Grace couldn’t help turning to look at him. {All of you?}
The communication wasn’t perfect. She sensed he was using different chemical combinations and concentrations to her. A variant of their language. Like an accent.
[I had no choice. Infect all.] He looked up at the youngest children sitting in the back of the truck in front of them. [Many of them were ---------- of --------- when I got -------- it ---------- so they -------------]
{Jerry, can you adjust your carrier sequence? Some of your messages are becoming fragments I can’t understand.}
Jerry nodded. A moment later he came back to her. [Is that better?]
{Yes. Much better.}
He’d also adjusted his chemical carrier to match hers. [You get so used to talking within your own colony. You develop your own language.]
Grace nodded. {Like different accents and slang words, I suppose.}
[Exactly.]
{Tell me again . . . about the children?}
[Most of them were dying of cancer and other medical conditions. When I got infected . . . when I finally became aware I was infected, I realized they would die if I didn’t try to save their lives this way.]
{You did so much more than save them.}
[I know.]
Grace sensed regret or sadness in the taste of his last message. {You did the right thing, Jerry.}
[It was hard at the time . . . They were terrified.]
That message came with a visual memory attached. For a fleeting second Grace glimpsed a gloomily lit hospital ward. Tall Victorian sash windows barricaded with upended beds, slits of daylight slanting down into a dark space full of dirty sheets and mattresses, a floor covered with opened and discarded tin cans, human faeces collecting in corners. And blood . . . so much of it. Grace could see dozens of pallid young bodies scattered across the ward floor in various stages of decomposition, a grotesque massacre of children, with just a few left cowering in one corner, hugging each other, screaming in terror at the slaughterhouse scene before them . . . and Jerry, approaching them, looming over them in whatever terrifying manifestation he must have been in, slowly descending upon them.
Grace felt their terror in his memory. Felt their horror and felt the reluctance on his part to give them this gift . . . because of how traumatic the moment of transition was going to be.
His memory triggered one of her own. She remembered being little more than a toddler, getting an injection in her arm for something. She remembered crying and screaming, her and all the other boys and girls in her elementary school class. Even though she knew it was a good thing, a medicine to keep them all safe from nasties, she’d been terrified of that tiny little glinting needle sliding into her upper arm. It had been the terror of . . . anticipation, of seeing those ‘treated’ before you, of counting down the victims ahead of you in the line.
Jerry’s memory was a thousand times worse than hers. Those poor children . . . waiting their turn.
{Oh my God . . .}
[It was . . . difficult. We were all in one small space together. It was attack them all at once or do nothing. I had little choice.]
{It was the right thing to do . . .} she sent. But the following thought tagged along with it: Could I have done that?
[You do what is for the best, don’t you?] replied Jerry. [You help. You preserve life if you can. Even if the way to do it is . . . terrifying for the person.]
{Change can be really, really hard.}
[Harder for some, much easier for others. My change was gradual. It was easy for me. I didn’t realize I was infected for a long time. Then they began to show me things.]
{It was the same for me. Dreams at first . . . then the explaining.} Grace looked at him. {You ever wonder who they are? Where they came from?}
[Perhaps it’s God? Maybe this is where the idea of heaven and God came from? This virus?]
{You mean it’s been here before?}
[Perhaps. I don’t know. I do know they care for us. They want what’s best for us. No matter how frightening this has been, the plague when it first arrived, the creepers, the fighting to stay alive – all those things – beyond all that, this has been about what’s best for everyone.]
Just like the nice young doctor who came to her elementary school with his bag of scary shiny needles.
[You know what makes me really sad, Grace?]
{What?}
[All those people, even the animals, who lived out their short lives then died before the virus came along. All gone. All those wasted lives. All those wasted memories.]
Grace felt Jerry squeeze her hand. She turned to look at him and she saw beneath the loose locks of his unkempt fringe, his blinking blue eyes. He looked so sad.
{Yeah. You’re right. That’s really horrible to think about.}
Jerry changed the subject. [What about you?]
His message arrived without any context. {What are you asking me?}
[Is it just you in your group or are there others?]
Her method had differed so much to his. Perhaps she should have done the same, infected them all at Everett’s castle. One night of butchery and bloodletting and the nasty business would have been done with.
But, then again, there would have been flames. So her approach had been cautious.
{It’s just me . . . and one other.}
[That’s dangerous. It has to be all.]
Grace knew what he was saying. She knew that better than anyone. Their paranoia was like a forest fire: one suspicious sign, one odd look, it seemed, and the fuel came out.
[You need to save them all. All at once. No mercy. It’s the kindest thing, Grace.]
CHAPTER 43
‘Lieutenant Tidwell . . . talk to me, son. What do you see?’
Lieutenant Dan Tidwell stared through the tall iron bars of the perimeter fence out at the six lanes of El Malecón highway. Those six lanes were usually sparsely populated with vehicles running on rationed gas. The highway was normally just sun-baked concrete that bordered the study in rich blues that was Havana’s idyllic sea view.
Right now, though, the highway was more than just an empty concrete apron. A column of tanks and armoured personnel vehicles was rolling menacingly up it towards the American embassy’s grounds.
Tidwell pulled up his field glasses, counted the vehicles approaching them, and made a rough estimate of what was coming their way.
He thumbed his radio on. ‘I’m looking at a couple of mechanized brigades, BTR Forties, Fifties carrying men, backed up by, I dunno . . . maybe a dozen, T-sixty-twos.’ Tidwell knew President Trent had done his time in the marines. Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, he’d been a lieutenant just like Tidwell. The president would know his hardware shorthand and what Tidwell and his men were facing . . . and probably knew exactly how they were feeling.
Shit scared and unable to show it.
‘Just hang in there, son,’ replied Trent. ‘You keep those assholes off my lawn, OK?’
‘We’ll do our best, sir.’
‘Thank you, Lieutenant. Stand by for further orders.’
Tidwell lowered his field glasses and turned to his men. Two sections of marines carrying nothing but M27s and one FGM-148 Javelin between them. For a defensive position they had pretty much squat, nothing more than some flimsy iron railings, some shitty dried-up bushes and a couple of sandbag horseshoe positions for cover.
‘Buckle down, guys. Looks like the Cubans are gonna dump a whole load of whoop-ass on us. Ross, Farez, get that launch tube set up. At least we got a shot at taking out one of their goddamn tanks.’
‘Sir!’
Tidwell tucked away the binoculars into his pouch and took
several steps back from the iron railings. Shit . . .
He doubted they’d even get a chance to fire the javelin. If they were smart, those sons of bitches were going to pull up those T-62s into a tidy line across the highway and shell them until they were mincemeat and rubble.
‘Lieutenant? This a “for real” situation?’ asked Corporal Gant.
‘It is.’
Standing orders were to hold the ground. Fire on anything that got within range. He turned and looked back at the severe glass-and-concrete embassy building. The president was in there still. He could have bolted for the docks, leaving him and his men behind to defend the last bit of functioning US territory left in the world.
But he hadn’t. That meant something.
And if the POTUS was staying put, Tidwell and his boys were going to dig in like bloody-minded little ticks on a dog’s back and hold this hard shitty scrabble ground for as long as possible.
‘This is frikkin crazy, sir!’ said the corporal.
He had a point.
‘Frikkin crazy it certainly is, Gant,’ replied Tidwell.
He watched as several of the BTRs came to a halt and spilled troops from their rear. Roughly a company’s worth of olive-drab revolutionary guards spread out either side of the highway, picking their way forward, running from cover to cover towards the embassy compound.
Crazy. The world’s population reduced to what? Their ragtag fleet and this island? And, God knows, maybe one or two other small pockets elsewhere . . . and, still, it came down to a shooting match between Us and Them.
‘Doug! Dougie! For Chrissakes, pick up the damned phone and talk to them!’
The only other man in the room was a marine sergeant. Tom noticed him stiffen and wince at his over-familiarity with the president. He gestured at the window. ‘They’re not playing around any more!’
Tom was sure Trent could see the convoy of vehicles like a long, fat olive-green python sliding down the highway from where he was standing behind his desk. It was pretty goddamn impossible to miss. Like a Red Square parade, except with a warm tropical backdrop.