The hall filled with sounds of shuffling and gasps.
Beneath his thick moustache, Corkie bit his lip. ‘We came across a large concentration of them. And this time they’re bigger. A lot bigger.’
Corkie scanned the faces either side of the two long tables until his eyes finally settled on Leon and Freya. ‘We rescued those two over there . . . Leon and . . . ?’
‘Freya,’ said Freya.
‘Aye . . . the pair of you were lucky we were in the area. Lucky you actually used your guns or we wouldn’t have heard—’
‘I wonder,’ cut in Everett. He looked at Corkie and raised a hand. ‘Sorry for interrupting, Sergeant.’ He turned to look at Leon and Freya. ‘Would one of you two mind briefing us on what you’ve seen out there? Where you’ve come from? Any information at all would be most helpful to us.’
All eyes settled on them both. They looked at each other. Me? You?
Freya shrugged and took the initiative. ‘We’ve come from Norwich. We were driving . . . on the A40, I think it was. There was, like, an obstruction and we needed a spare tyre and so we had to get out and walk into Oxford.’
‘We found both of them in the underpass, sir,’ said Corkie.
Everett made a face. ‘You actually went down into an underpass?’
Freya nodded. ‘We thought it was safe enough. It wasn’t a long tunnel or . . . you know, totally dark, it was just . . . well, easier, quicker to just cut through that way.’
Everett tutted. ‘What we learned last year, young lady, was that the virus seeks out warmth. Warm, dark places. Underground places. Basements, cellars, tunnels.’
‘And underpasses,’ added Freya.
‘Indeed. Those are the sorts of areas Corkie and his lads have been probing for signs of the virus. Without any encounters, that is, until today. We were actually beginning to hope the virus had died off.’
‘Us too.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s why we came out of hiding. We just—’
‘Corkie tells me the kraken’s scuttlers had you bottled up in there. Can you tell us anything you can remember? Everything you saw, as best you can? Like I said earlier, any information, no matter how unimportant or trivial you think it is, could help us in the future.’
‘Well, the crabs – we call them snarks by the way – they are definitely much bigger, and also, they seem . . . I dunno, a bit smarter?’ She turned to Leon for support. ‘What do you think?’
He looked around at the many pairs of eyes suddenly resting on him. In the life before, that would have turned his cheeks hot and red and left him tongue-tied, but, after everything that had happened these last two years, all the things he’d witnessed and endured, opening his mouth before a waiting audience was a big nothing to him.
‘Sure.’ Leon nodded. ‘They moved in from both ends, tried to outflank us. They also seemed to figure out what my gun did pretty damned quickly.’
‘Smart,’ said Freya. ‘Smarter. Definitely.’
‘And there was a root thing. We saw this big root,’ added Leon.
Everett frowned. ‘A root?’
‘Yeah. Like a thick tree root running across the roof beneath the underpass. It was big, I mean tree-trunk big.’
‘And to be clear,’ cut in Freya, ‘it wasn’t a tree root. It was something the virus made.’
Everett looked at Corkie. ‘You seen anything like that?’
‘No, sir.’
He turned back to them. ‘You’re sure this “root” was part of the virus?’
‘Definitely, sir.’ Leon realized Freya had sat back down, letting him do the telling. ‘We saw there was, like, this blister-type thing growing out of the root. Like a tumour or something. And then it sort of burst and then all those snarks came spilling out.’
‘Snarks?’ Everett narrowed his eyes for a moment. He smiled at Leon and nodded approvingly. ‘That’s a rather good name for the buggers.’
Leon continued. ‘That was on our way back through the underpass. We went through it first time and didn’t see it, and then coming back . . . I think we must’ve woken it up first time, and while we were looking around for a tyre that tumour thing was growing.’
Everett stroked the tip of his nose absently. ‘Perhaps you triggered something?’
Leon nodded. They hadn’t exactly been stealthy; Freya had been singing her head off.
‘Yeah. And those snarks came out looking to see what was up.’
‘Don’t like the sound of that. Roots . . . I wonder if this thing is linking itself up?’ Everett turned to Corkie. ‘Did you see this root?’
‘No, sir. But we weren’t exactly hanging about.’
Everett steepled his fingers beneath his nose. ‘I suspected the kraken might have gone dormant, lying low, hiding from the cold. But this suggests it’s been doing a lot more than merely hibernating. What do you make of it, Corkie?’
The sergeant sat back in his chair. ‘Well, we’ve seen it try to make copies – a couple of those bad human copies last year. Bad dog copies too. Lots of those scuttlers, of course. But nothing yet like what this lad’s described.’
He looked at Leon. ‘Not saying you’re lying, son, but are you sure it wasn’t just a tree root? I mean nature’s had its own way for the last couple of years.’
‘It grew a giant bloody sac!’ cut in Freya. ‘Which split open and unloaded a frikkin avalanche of snarks on us.’ She looked around the room. ‘I’m no tree expert, but I’m pretty sure they don’t normally do that.’
A guy sitting opposite him, with a ponytail and the meagre tuft of a goatee, snorted with laughter.
‘Consolidating,’ said Everett. The word hung in the air and echoed for far too long around the cavernous hall. ‘God help us all, then,’ he muttered, before stopping himself, as if suddenly aware that his misgivings were best kept to himself. He turned his attention back to Leon and Freya. ‘Thank you. Thank you both. I presume you’ve already been checked over by Dr Hahn?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Leon.
‘Good. It’s just a precaution. Clearly the pair of you aren’t kraken stooges. And I imagine you’re both very hungry.’ He managed a congenial smile. ‘We should all eat now before dinner gets boiled to a tasteless slop.’ He nodded towards the uniformed men either side of him. ‘Knights first. Off you go, gentlemen.’
The soldiers stood up as Everett sat down, and the hall instantly filled with the hubbub of voices and movement, the clattering of bowls and spoons as a queue began to form at the far end of the hall beside the fire and the dogs started to bark for scraps.
CHAPTER 13
Two Years Ago
‘Tom, this is going to be a bar-room brawl. We have no POTUS, no Veep, apart from Monica LaGuardia over there, and she’s useless. I’m the only cabinet-ranked official here.’
Tom looked where Dougie was pointing. He vaguely recognized the Secretary of Agriculture, her dark hair was pulled up into an I-mean-business bun.
Trent was sitting back in his chair and muttering into Tom’s ear as he leaned over his friend’s shoulder. ‘We’ve got a mixture of military chiefs-of-staff, from our armed forces and various others. We’ve got a bunch of White House flunkies, the Mexican ambassador, for Christ’s sake . . . a real collection of tide-drift, and no one’s got a goddamn clue what the hell we’re going to do next. Tom, we need to take control of this chaos right now.’
‘OK. I’m right here. Whatever you need me to do, Dougie.’
The room was noisy with a dozen different heated conversations going on. Douglas Trent clapped his hands loudly together like a schoolteacher. ‘All right, everyone, shut the hell up!’
The crowded briefing room hushed down. Tom backed up against one of the faux wood-panel walls and found a narrow space between two clipboard-carrying navy officers.
‘Right . . .’ Trent tossed the papers he’d been carrying on to the table in front of him. ‘We don’t have a playbook to work from. This –’ he gestured dismissively at the scattered papers – ‘is shit! It’s n
othing more than a To Do list of things we need to sort out!’
His loud locker-room voice battened the room down to a shocked silence.
‘It’s a pile of crap! But it’s what we’ve got. And right at the top of that To Do list is sorting out a crisis chain of command.’
Monica leaned forward on her elbows. ‘Doug, we don’t even know for sure yet where both the president and the vice president are . . . or whether they’ve been—’
‘Last communication from Camp David wasn’t encouraging,’ interrupted Trent. ‘There was a call from one of Bernie’s secret-service detachment that this . . . outbreak had hit them there.’
‘And we’ve heard nothing from the vice in the last eighteen hours,’ somebody called out from the edge of the room. Heads turned towards a young, well-groomed representative from the White House press staff.
‘Right.’ Trent nodded. ‘And we’ve had nothing from the rest of the cabinet.’
‘Jed’s still alive,’ said Monica. ‘I got a text from him.’
‘How long ago?’ asked Trent.
‘A few . . . some hours ago . . .’ She shrugged defensively. ‘This morning.’
‘Jesus!’ Trent shook his head. ‘This morning I woke up to George Clooney’s court appearance and South Park reruns. This morning was a lifetime ago. Jed’s gone, Monica.’ He looked around the conference table. ‘The attorney general’s dead. Just like everyone else. As far as I’m aware, this sorry cluster of ships is pretty much all we have for an organized government.’
‘Doug, if Jed’s still alive, he’s next in succession, after the vice, after the secretary of state, after the—’
‘I’m well aware of the goddamn chain!’ He slapped his hand on the table. ‘But we’ve got to work with who we have – and that means whoever’s standing right here in this room!’
‘It’s too soon to write off the others.’
‘Too soon?’ Trent looked at Monica with incredulity. ‘In the space of the last twenty-four hours, we’ve gone from a goddamn amber bio-alert to . . . this.’ He looked around the room. ‘Unless anybody here knows any better, this is the US government right now.’
‘Sir . . . Mr Trent?’
Doug looked to his right at a silver-haired woman in a pastel orange jacket, another face Tom vaguely recognized from the television but couldn’t place right now. In the back of his mind he had her down as a political correspondent for some paper or network.
‘If the first order of business is succession, then, unless I’m mistaken –’ she nodded at Monica LaGuardia – ‘the Secretary of Agriculture is actually next in line.’
‘Monica?’ He looked pointedly across the table at her. ‘Monica?’
Monica challenged his stare with her own. ‘Doug, if we really are down to eighth place of succession, then, yes, I’m afraid Helen’s right. It’s going to be me.’
The room filled with the sound of shuffling and whispered asides. Tom noted concern on the faces of many of the older uniformed delegates present.
Trent shook his head slowly. ‘Monica, we have a succession order that dates back to what . . . the Second World War?’ He huffed out a dry, hacking laugh of exasperation. ‘And that order was based on the chronology of when government departments were created, if I’m not mistaken. Which puts, let me see, Secretary for Housing above Secretary for Homeland Security, for Chrissakes!’
‘I’m sorry, Doug. It’s all that we’ve got to work with.’
‘We’re screwed!’ snapped Trent loudly. ‘We. Are. Frikkin. Screwed!’ He looked around the table, eyes wide and challenging. ‘Our country pretty much just got wiped out! The world just got wiped out! We have no playbook here and we are—’
‘We have a playbook,’ said Monica. ‘It’s called the constitution.’
Trent planted both fists on the table in front of him. ‘I’m going to play my cards for all of you people to see. I’m just going to say this once, then I’m done talking because we’ve got way too much other crap to sort through.’
Jesus. Tom could see where this was going. Doug’s got half of them like putty in his hands already. Tom could see that most of the silver-haired men sporting bars of campaign medals were nodding, urging Doug to take just one more tiny step forward.
‘I’m going to insist we bypass Monica. She’s only a recent appointee. She doesn’t have enough experience to lead. Christ, she’s an ex-beet farmer from Illinois who got appointed because Bernie wanted more female faces in the cabinet. As Secretary for Commerce, I’m well aware that puts me next in line. I know that looks bad, but frankly I don’t give a crap how it looks. We need to get this sorted and start making some decis—’
‘That’s absolutely outrageous!’
Trent sat back in his chair. It creaked in the silence. ‘Well, you know, do feel free to sue me, Monica. Hell, I won’t even mount a defence.’
‘This is . . . unconstitutional! This is actually illegal, for God’s sake!’
‘I think we’re way past that, Monica. Way past that.’
She looked around for support. ‘This is not how we do this! Helen?’
The woman with the orange jacket shrugged. ‘Look, I’m just—’
‘Hey! People!’ Trent clapped his hands together again. ‘We’ve got God knows how many American citizens sitting out there in the freezing cold. And we’ve got nowhere to take them. Who knows how much food and water there is on these ships. People are going to die unless we get off our asses and act.’
‘We should take a vote,’ said Tom. Doug twisted in his chair. All eyes settled on him. He was waiting for someone to call him out and ask who the hell he was. But then the same could probably be asked of half the people crowded into this room.
He took a deep breath and added, ‘There’s no America left, anyway. Just survivors. I think the constitution is pretty much irrelevant right now.’
Trent offered him the slightest nod of gratitude. You tell ’em, amigo.
‘Right!’ Trent spread his hands. ‘Good idea. We vote on this. Everyone American in this room gets a vote. No one else. It’s Monica or me.’ He grabbed a paper cup full of pens sitting in front of him and emptied the biros on to the table. ‘Grab a pen, some paper and write a name down. Come on, let’s get this done!’
CHAPTER 14
Freya watched the soldiers – Everett’s ‘knights’ – from the rooftop of the castle. They were out there, beyond the protective moat, in the tall grass working in ‘no-man’s land’. Leon was somewhere among them and she pivoted on her better leg to try to catch a glimpse of him between the castle’s battlements.
Major Everett had announced in this morning’s breakfast briefing – or ‘morning prayers’ as he liked to call it – that as it was now clear the virus was out there and still a very present threat, the defences they’d been relying on last summer that had been allowed to fall into a less-than-ready state in the intervening months needed immediate attention.
She watched the men working in teams of four and five, rolling barrels of chemicals across the muddy ground, carefully carrying packets of demolition charges and bundles of wiring between them. Several soldiers stood on guard, dotted around the tall grass and scanning the distant treeline for any signs of movement. They were wearing their distinctive ‘armour’ plating, which she now understood was sportswear. One of the soldiers had sheepishly informed her they’d raided a sports store last year and grabbed every last bit of cycling, skateboarding and snowboarding protective gear they could lay their hands on.
‘Don’t worry. It’s not as hazardous as it looks.’
She turned to see a slight woman – shorter than her with dark skin and boyishly short cropped black hair.
‘It is of course men’s work, though,’ the woman added dryly as she folded laundry that she’d plucked from one of the washing lines stretched across the flat castle roof.
She offered Freya a small hand. ‘I’m Naga.’
‘Freya.’
Naga jerked her chin at the
men working out beyond the moat. ‘Like I said, men’s work. Typical, isn’t it? The first thing that vanishes in the aftermath of an apocalypse is a hundred years’ worth of women’s liberation. Apparently, once more, we’re only good for hanging out laundry.’
Freya found herself nodding. Although . . . ‘You sure it’s OK?’
‘Pfft. Relax. Just firecrackers.’
Freya pointed at the craters that punctuated the wild grass. ‘The holes look pretty big. What’s in the drums those guys are rolling?’
‘Liquid butane.’ Naga folded a shirt and dropped it into the basket at her feet. ‘Don’t worry, though. Nothing’s live until the field’s cleared and Corkie goes out to wire it up.’
Canisters of liquid gas – that explained the craters.
Naga narrowed her eyes. ‘Meanwhile us women, as always, are stuck with the cooking, cleaning and scrubbing. Presumably because we’re all too stupid and female to dig a hole, stick a barrel in it and twist some wires.’
‘Do those bombs actually work?’
She nodded. ‘They did a pretty good job last year. I don’t know if we killed that many, but the big bangs seemed to do a good job of scaring them off.’
‘What about the moat? Did that help?’
‘Uh-huh. Corkie’s boys backed several trucks full of gritting salt right up to the edge and dumped it in. That water’s probably saltier than a bag of chips.’
Freya managed to pick out Leon, knee deep in a hole, swinging a shovel full of earth over his shoulder. Naga’s reassuring words settled her a little. An odd sensation, though, to suddenly realize that she was pining, aching, to get him safely back on this side of the moat.
Let’s not be getting all gooey-eyed, Freya. There’s love, there’s Love and there’s LOVE.
She wasn’t sure which of those she and Leon shared at the moment, but it was enough that she couldn’t help casting an anxious glance his way every now and then.
She was plucking some woolly red socks from the line when she became aware Naga had just said something. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said, do you want to guess what I did before I became a bloody laundry lady?’