Instead of taking away her hand she held mine there against her warm stomach, while searching my face – for what, I don’t know.
I licked my lips, feeling suddenly hot. ‘So what’s the business with the trucks? Surely you can’t kill them all.’
‘No. And we’re running short of diesel. We’re having to cut down on the cull runs. But the cull was the Doc’s idea. He noticed after the first attack, when we killed so many of them, they didn’t touch us until more Kaybees joined them. He thinks they need a critical number before their instincts tell them to attack. You know, like sparrows flap around for a few days before they’ve got enough in their flock then, bang, a switch flicks in their heads and suddenly they’re off south. So we do our best to keep the number of Kaybees as low as we can. And it seems to be working. We’ve had no mass attacks since the big one five weeks ago.’
‘But surely you can’t go on like this?’
‘No. And lately we’ve had a few individual Kaybees attacking us. It usually turns out to be one of the kids’ parents. But that might be something to do with their building projects.’
‘Building projects? What do you mean? What are they building?’ A horn sounded. ‘I’ll tell you later. It looks as if you’ve got a lot of news to catch up on since you hid yourself away in the back of beyond.’
We drove along a dirt track. Jigsaw had jumped back in the cab and was wiping at something with a rag. I saw they were gold rings. He slipped a couple of wedding rings onto his little finger and sat admiring the way they glinted in the cold sunlight.
I sat there trying to work through what had happened that morning. I’d wanted to catch up with the barge, then at the first opportunity release Trousers and the other kids. But they would be miles from here by now; also their situation didn’t seem so perilous now I’d heard what the pattern would be. Sheila was confident the captives would be released as part of the Creosotes’ experiment.
Another event that morning that I found almost shocking was making contact with another community of sane human beings. In Eskdale we’d come to accept that we were the only ones left on the face of planet Earth. Now it looked as if there were communities of kids dotted all over the place.
Most troubling was hearing about the behaviour change in the Creosotes. They were murderously hostile again. They were flowing back north from wherever they had migrated to. My only hope was that Sarah would be safe. Maybe the Creosotes wouldn’t find a place as remote as Eskdale.
Sheila sang out, ‘Home sweet home.’
The place seemed to be little more than a collection of farm buildings and farm labourers’ cottages. Around the place was a high barbed wire fence making it resemble a prisoner of war camp. Outside the fence ran a ditch. That still had lumps of burnt stuff clinging to the sides.
The leader was a nineteen-year-old called Boss. He’d been a trainee security guard when civilization went belly-up and he appeared to rule the place firmly but reasonably fairly.
I did see, though, beneath his eyes, black half-moons and when he spoke his breath nearly cut me in two. The last five weeks of virtual siege had taken their toll on Boss. He was boozing hard to get through it.
First off they took me into the farmhouse kitchen and fed me with bowls full of rabbit stew and pancake-shaped things that they called bread.
It hit me as I troughed out on the stew that these different communities were each developing their own cultures. At Eskdale the thing was to tattoo your face. Here it was jewellery. Everyone wore gold bangles and rings; so many, in fact, that if someone waved you were blinded by the flash.
Another thing I saw was that they were less reliant on scavenged stores for food. The vegetables in the stew were fresh, they had hutches full of rabbits, chickens roamed all over the place, and everyone looked fit and lean from hard work. If it wasn’t for the four thousand-odd Creosotes thirsting for their blood they would’ve seemed certain to survive.
Sheila stuck close by me, listening to what I’d have to say. Those big dark eyes of hers constantly watched mine.
Doc, the brains of the community, reminded me a lot of Del-Coffey. Same wire-rim glasses and a fuzz of blonde hair. He didn’t show off as much as Del-Coffey, though, and I found myself liking him. Christ, I was changing. Ten months ago I’d probably have spat in his eye.
‘Tell me about Eskdale,’ he said eagerly. ‘Did you get a chance to observe the Kaybees much? At first everyone thought they were just plain crazy. But there seem to be patterns to their insanity. They go through distinct stages – like they are evolving.’ He rattled on, pumping me for what I knew. I told him some secondhand stuff I’d got from Del-Coffey.
Doc’s theory was that the build-up of electromagnetic radiation from TV, radio and radar transmissions had finally scrambled humanity’s brains. Like a computer floppy disc being left too close to the monitor eventually leads to it corrupting. ‘Obviously, Nick, adult biology differs from that of children and adolescents – you know, hormone levels and stuff like that. So everyone over nineteen – ker-poww.’
‘But we’re safe now,’ I said. ‘I mean, Sheila here turned nineteen five weeks ago.’
He nodded. ‘Yep, we’re safe. All the transmitters in the world are now as dead as my Granny Sally.’
‘Not all of them,’ said Jigsaw, enthusiastically mopping up gravy with his bread.
‘That’s true. Not quite all.’ Doc grinned. ‘You finished, Nick? I’ve got some things to show you. You’re going to be amazed.’
‘Well … Thanks for the food, and saving my bones. But I’ve got to get back home. I’m going to have to warn my community that the adults are a threat again. We’ll need to be ready in case they attack.’
Sheila grabbed my arm as I stood up. ‘Nick. You can’t just walk out of here. It’d be suicide. They’ve circled the whole camp. You’d never get past them.’
‘I can’t just sit here and leave everyone at my place like sitting ducks. I don’t even know how long it’ll take me to walk back there. A week at least.’
Doc said, ‘Take it easy. We’ll work out something to get you home. The thing is not to rush it. But I’d recommend you stay here at least tonight … Come on, I’ll show you round our metropolis. We’ve got forty-five people here. The youngest is three months. Now that was scary – delivering a baby. Lucky it’s as natural as going to the lavatory. We’ve had two more since – and not a single complication.’
Sheila walked round with us, linking arms with me.
It had become an essential part of meeting someone for the first time that you told them what happened to you on that BIG DAY 1. I told them mine. I’d heard Sheila’s already. Doc lived on a houseboat with his parents. They chased him round the deck until he jumped into the dinghy and floated away like Moses in his basket.
I said, ‘You told me that you’d got some amazing things to show me.’
‘Sure … First we climb this ladder. It’s the watch tower. Go on, Nick. It’s safe.’
I climbed to the top of the timber tower that looked out over the flat farmland. Doc and Sheila followed me up. In the watch tower a mean-looking machine gun rested on its mount. Next to that a telescope.
‘Nick. Take a look through the telescope. I’ve trained it on what I want you to see.’
I put my eye to the eye-piece. From a field in the distance rose a pyramid. It was dark in colour and what it was made from God only knew.
‘I reckon it’s a good two hundred feet high.’ Doc polished his glasses on a tissue. ‘They started building it about two months ago.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s where the adults go to die.’
‘A graveyard?’
‘Sort of. A cross between a hospice and a graveyard. You see them go there when they’re old and sick, or injured – after they tried to bust in here they crawled there by the hundred. Most are still alive when they get there. They just haul themselves on, then wait to die.’
‘Jesus … They behave as if they have
no will of their own. They’re like robots or ants.’
‘That’s it, Nick. They behave collectively. The individual is unimportant. It’s the species that matters. It doesn’t matter to them if ten thousand die so long as they can crush us.’
‘But why the pyramid?’
Sheila shrugged. ‘At least it’s tidy.’
Doc smiled. ‘Thank God it’s winter. When it was hot you could catch the stink from here. And it’s a good seven miles away. Even further away they’re building what look like temples out of the skulls of their children. Lucky you can’t see them from here. Come on, Nick, we’ve more surprises to amaze you.’
In a stable was a room filled with electronic equipment.
‘As Jigsaw so rightly said, there are still some transmitters in operation. This is one. We have a hand-cranked generator to charge those car batteries there in the box.’
I whistled. ‘It looks impressive. But is there anyone out there to talk to?’
Doc pulled out an exercise book and flicked through the pages. ‘We’ve made contact with fourteen other communities. They’re dotted all over the world: New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Iceland, Denmark, Israel, Ireland; there’s the full list. We’ve also picked up Morse, which we can’t understand unfortunately, and some distant broadcasts have been bounced off the ionosphere from, I guess, the Far East, but seeing as we’ve no linguists we don’t know what they’re saying.’
A question I knew I had to ask, but was afraid to, came out. ‘It’s all like this, then – everywhere?’
‘It is, Nick. It is. Some time on that Saturday night in April. Every adult human being on this planet went mad. Then they killed their children. Most of the young must have died. We’re the lucky ones.’
Sheila held my arm tight. ‘And sometimes I wonder if we really are the lucky ones. It’d be tough enough surviving like this even without the Kaybees wanting to kill us at the first opportunity.’
Doc nodded. ‘She’s right. Some communities are going under from natural causes.’ He pointed at a page full of handwriting. It had two red lines running across it, and the word CLOSED.
‘That was a community in France of more than two hundred. A couple of months ago they told us their people were falling sick with fevers and lumps under their armpits.’ He shook his head, grim. ‘Three weeks ago they told us all of them were sick. A hundred had died. The guy I spoke to sounded half dead. Two weeks ago we had the last transmission. He just kept repeating, Good luck, Leyburn. Good luck, Leyburn. Pray for us, Leyburn, pray for us.’ Doc shrugged: his eyes had grown shiny behind his glasses. ‘Over the last few weeks two more communities have gone off air. One in Greece and one in Portugal. Both reported they were under heavy attack from adults. I can only imagine they’ve been overrun.’
‘So one by one, all over the world, we’re being snuffed out.’
‘That’s about the size of it. The luckiest beggars we’ve come across live on St Helena. Have you heard of it?’
I shook my head.
‘Napoleon Bonaparte was locked up there. The reason the Brits chose St Helena is because it’s a titchy island in the middle of the Atlantic. The community of kids there didn’t hang about. They armed themselves and hunted down and killed every single adult on the island.’ Doc looked wistful. ‘They’ve got it cushy there. A town, a power station. Huge reserves of fuel. Fertile fields, and thousands of flaming miles of ocean to fish in.’ He looked at me hard. ‘We should learn their lesson, Nick. We’ve got to find some way of exterminating the adults – shoot them, burn them, gas them, bury them … Anything to just get rid of the bastards.’
‘Just how do you hope to do that?’
Doc smiled, tired. ‘In a crazy, illogical way, Nick, that’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.’
Chapter Forty
Breaker of the Dark
During breakfast I asked Doc something that had been troubling me all night.
‘Doc. Yesterday in the radio shack you said you expected me to show you how to exterminate the Kaybees. What made you say that?’
He blushed. ‘I should have kept my mouth shut. But it’s … well, to put it bluntly it’s weird. We talk amongst ourselves. We talk to the community over in Harmby, and then we’re talking on the radio every day to other communities around the world.’
‘You’re losing me, Doc. What’s this got to do with me?’
‘Nick, there’s a basic message, or flavour if you like, coming out of these dialogues. There’s a sense of expectancy. I call it the Messiah syndrome. People from Alaska to Malta are developing this gut feeling that a stranger will come who will give us the answers to the questions we’re all asking. And more importantly, this person is going to rid us of the Kaybees and lead us … if not to the promised land … at least show us how to survive.’ Watching me intently he sipped his coffee. ‘Didn’t you feel this in Eskdale?’
‘No, we had a lot on our minds.’ I thought of Curt and his band of sadists making our lives hell.
‘I know it seems illogical. That one person could do this. Perhaps in times of trouble we all wish for a messiah to come and save us. I’ve read enough psychology to sit here and dismiss it as delusional crap, but I admit it, Nick. I feel it here.’ Doc pressed his hand to his chest.
‘Why did you think it was me?’
‘Wishful thinking. We want our messiah to come so much that the first mysterious stranger that arrives we say, by God’s flesh, here he is! Sheila was saying last night she thinks there’s something special about you. She says she can see something in your eyes that she’s seen in those ancient portraits of Christ.’
I chewed my bread and began to sweat. Christ. These people were one short of a packet of three. Especially if they thought I was some messiah, a supernatural hero, come to lead them to the promised land.
I nodded at Boss who sat sullenly eating at another table. ‘What does he think?’
‘I think he’d just like someone to take the responsibility of leadership off his shoulders. Since the attack five weeks ago he’s really taken to the bottle.’
I shook my head. This was so crazy I wanted to laugh out loud. ‘You know, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Doc. I’m a nobody. I left school with zilch qualifications. Before this happened I was just an odd-job man for a bent dealer. My ambitions stretched no further than the next night out on the beer.’
Doc seemed embarrassed to have mentioned it; for the rest of the meal he looked down at his food as he ate.
By the time I’d zipped up my leather jacket I knew what I’d do.
I didn’t say good-bye. I just walked straight out of the camp gates and down the road. Above, the sky looked like a concrete roof: drops of rain began to splat on the ground.
My feelings were mixed. Concern for Sarah. Horror at meeting my parents again. Bewilderment at what Doc had said in the canteen. I was confused; the only cure was to walk until I dropped.
The road signs were still clear. It might take a week but I’d make it home.
For the first half-mile I saw no sign of the Creosotes. Maybe Sheila and Doc had over-estimated the threat.
I walked fast. The roads were skimmed over now with moss, giving them the appearance of being covered by a green peach fluff – but there were no obstacles.
Then I saw the first Creosote. A guy of about forty lay on his side at the edge of the road. He used one elbow to prop up the top half of his body. He didn’t move but he watched me walk by.
When I rounded the next bend I stopped and breathed in sharply. Twenty adults stood and watched me. Their eyes had taken on that fierce glare.
This time I was the fool. I’d simply quit the camp with no preparations. Being eager to get back to Eskdale had knocked any sense I had from out of my skull. This might get me killed.
I turned and ran.
I passed the guy at the roadside. Now he sat up to watch me pass. To my left in the field were more Creosotes streaming across the grass.
Shit, you stupid twat, Aten! br />
I ran harder, panting raggedly. Behind me I heard the bushes rustling like fury as the Creosotes forced their way through into the lane.
At last I saw the camp. I did not stop running until I was safely through the gates.
Sheila was waiting for me. Her eyes were wide with shock. ‘What the hell did you do that for? You haven’t even got a gun, for pity’s sake!’
I pulled in lungfuls of air. ‘I need to get back home … They don’t know the danger they’re in … You’ll have to drive me past them in your truck.’
‘I can’t do that, Nick. Not without Boss’s permission.’
‘Well, let’s go ask him.’ I coughed and spat. ‘I need to be moving on before the winter sets in.’
‘Surely you can stay a few days, Nick. Please?’
I shook my head and went to find Boss. He leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He looked like death.
I asked him for what I wanted and he looked up through those hungover eyes. ‘No. Not yet.’
I started to press him but he suddenly snapped, ‘I said no! That is my decision. No. No. No!’
He stamped off into the yard to shout at some kids chopping wood.
Angry, I turned to Sarah. ‘Shit … It wouldn’t take someone ten minutes to run me out past the Creosotes. Then I’d walk the rest of the damn way!’
‘Nick. He has his reasons – he’s—’
‘I’ll work the price of my fare, then. What needs doing in this place?’ I stormed off, determined to do something so worthwhile they’d be forced to reward me with that ten-minute truck ride.
Here they relied on candles and kerosene lamps for light. They were adequate but at night the communal lounges looked not just dim but damn well depressing. It’d get worse as winter brought the long dark nights.
I found the generator they had used to generate electricity when they first arrived there. Then I collared the first kid I saw and asked, ‘Hey, just a minute … Why doesn’t anyone start the generator? There’s nothing wrong with it.’