The motorway wasn’t blocked, exactly. It was full.
I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge that crossed the motorway, got out, leaving the engine running and the door open, then looked down.
Beneath me the six-lane highway stretched out in a long S curve, flanked at each side by corn fields. A sign set on the embankment said simply: THE SOUTH.
I had planned to hit the motorway then hammer the Shogun south. In an hour or less I imagined myself reaching the normal world with the army at the checkpoint telling me where to go next. I probably wouldn’t even need the food I’d dumped in the back of the car.
But I wouldn’t be using this motorway. From one end to the other, as far as I could see, was a river. A vast, sluggish river, squeezed between grass bankings. A river of human beings.
Like a river they all flowed in the same direction, from north to south, at the same slow pace. Thousands of people – you could not see an inch of road tar.
A burnt-out truck a hundred yards to the south forced them to part like a river flowing round a rock, then they merged again, to flow on in their single-minded migration.
There was something mind-numbing about this flow of people. I imagined myself climbing over the fence to jump down the thirty feet to land on them.
Like you saw singers at rock concerts hurling themselves onto an audience so tightly packed they could roll over them like you roll across a bed. I could do that. I could go with them. There was something at the end of the motorway that they wanted. And, oh shit, they wanted it so badly they were prepared to walk for hours down this road with no food, no drink, no rest. They were like those on a pilgrimage to see the coming of the Lord.
Not one looked up at me. Their ten thousand eyes burned south.
I unglued my hands from the railing and stepped back – shaking.
I walked round the Shogun breathing so deeply it hurt my lungs. When I felt balanced again I looked down at the river of people. I looked harder this time, making myself see individuals, not a mess of heads.
I was searching for a child. Or at least someone who looked under twenty.
Thousands marched silently beneath me. I never did see a single child. However, I did notice blood marks on some of the walkers’ faces. They had killed their children too.
I got back into the car and stamped the pedal so hard that the big tyres spun on the Shogun, powering me away from the river of lunatics.
My plan remained the same. If I headed back to Doncaster I knew I could join another road south.
As Doncaster’s suburbs began to slip by I slowed down. There were wrecked cars, burnt-out buses. A school was burning so brightly it looked as if a crack had opened in the Earth and a chunk of hell was bursting through.
At a crossroads I looked right. A group of middle-aged men and women walked in my direction. Some carried ten-foot poles topped with objects that although I couldn’t identify made me suddenly cold in the warm car.
I had intended driving straight on but looking to my left I saw an orange VW Beetle, parked at a clumsy angle. Two girls, one about eighteen, the other elevenish, were changing a flat.
They were doing a good job. The car was jacked high and the younger girl was wheeling the spare toward the other girl.
They were dead meat.
The group of adults had seen me for sure, and possibly the girls. They walked purposefully in my direction.
Pulling the car a sharp left, I stopped alongside the VW.
The eighteen-year-old, long blonde hair, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, ignored me and hoisted the spare onto the hub.
The younger girl, wearing riding jodhpurs, her blonde hair tied into a pony tail, just stared at me as if I’d dropped from a goldenwinged spaceship.
In the rear view mirror I saw the group with the poles had nearly reached the crossroads.
I leaned through the window. ‘I reckon you’ve got about ninety seconds to leave that and get in.’
The older girl still ignored me and began tightening the wheel nuts.
‘Eighty seconds.’ I lightly revved the engine. ‘Forget it. Get in the car.’
The younger girl looked at the older one. ‘Sarah!’
Sarah threw down the wrench. She wasn’t frightened, she was angry. ‘All right, all right …’ She shot me a hard look trying to read what I was like. Would I drive round the corner, then take a Stanley knife to their throats?
‘Get in.’ I opened the back door from the inside, still keeping one hand on the steering wheel and glancing in the rear view. The pole carriers were a hundred yards behind and closing quickly.
The oldest girl, Sarah, opened the VW door. ‘Vicki, out. We’re going with this … gentleman.’
Another girl, about tennish, wearing pink-rimmed glasses and with the same colour hair in a pony tail, jumped out of the car, ran to the back door of the Shogun – then she stopped.
‘Wait a minute.’
She ran back to the VW.
The girl behind me shouted in such a high-pitched voice it pierced my skull. ‘Vicki! Hurry up! There’s people coming! They’ll catch us!’
‘Vicki!’ Sarah ran to the car looking as if she’d drag the brat back by the hair. Vicki bounced into the back seat of the VW, pulled out a fluffy rabbit toy, then ran back to the Shogun. She slid in beside the other girl. Sarah joined her, slamming the door shut so hard I felt the air compress against the back of my neck.
When I looked back at the mob this time they were close enough for me to see their expressions. Some of them had broken into a run.
The two youngest girls lay down in the back seat, hands over their ears, eyes screwed shut. Sarah looked back, composed, even curious.
I wasted no time in hitting the gas – we took off like a rocket, leaving the orange VW to its fate.
THANKS … I waited for her to say the word. She didn’t.
‘My name’s Nick Aten.’ For a second I thought she was going to stay mute.
Then she held up her hands so I could see them in the rear view. They were black with filth. ‘Have you got any tissues?’
The car’s owner had thoughtfully provided a drum of wet wipes and I handed them back.
Sarah wiped her hands, then her face. There was a bruise turning blue on her left cheek. From the look on her face she had reached a decision. She’d decided to trust me.
‘I’m Sarah Hayes. These are my sisters, Vicki and Anne.’
‘Where were you going?’
‘Doncaster. We had to drive over a lot of broken glass on the way in. I think we picked up the puncture there.’
‘Have you got relatives in Doncaster?’
‘No.’
One of the girls piped up. ‘We’re going to the police station. We’re in trouble.’
‘Vicki.’ Sarah glared at her to shut her mouth.
‘Why can’t we tell him, Sarah?’ The little girl sounded as if she’d start crying. ‘He’s the first nice man we’ve seen. He might help us.’
‘We don’t know him. He might … he might be on his way to work or something.’
I nearly laughed. Big sister was still trying to pretend the world was sane.
I told them, ‘I’m in trouble too.’
The two youngest girls leaned forward, eyes round. ‘What you done?’
‘Nothing really. But I think it’s the same trouble as you. Look, there’s no point in going into Doncaster. It’s full of … It’s not safe at the moment.’
Vicki hugged the rabbit. ‘We’ve got to go to the police. We’ve got to tell them what happened.’
‘What did happen?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ This was big sister, Sarah.
A seventeen-year-old male can’t look at a girl without ticking off the usual list.
Attractive? Nice breasts? Fit figure? Etc, etc … If you’re male and over fourteen you know what I mean. To that list I’d add Was she intelligent? The answer was a thumping Yes: Sarah had got looks and she was nobody’s fool.
&n
bsp; ‘Where are you taking us, Nick Aten?’
‘Have you eaten today?’
‘No.’
The younger girls chorused. ‘We’re starving.’
‘Then I’ll drive somewhere quiet and we’ll have a picnic. I’ve got stacks of food in the back.’
I drove away from town. Occasionally I glanced back at Sarah. Her eyes had a metal edge to them – also they told me they had seen a slice of hell this last forty-eight hours.
I thought she’d say nothing for while. Shock can lock memories away in a steel box and bury it deep in the mind. But as I looked at her in the mirror her eyes locked onto mine and she told me what had happened to her.
Chapter Eleven
This Is What Happened to Sarah Hayes
Sarah lived with her family on a farm. On Sunday morning, Day 2, she had got up, dressed, then gone out into the farmyard where her parents stood leaning with their backs to a wall.
‘Morning,’ she had said, smiling. ‘Are Vicki and Anne out riding?’
That’s when her father punched her in the face.
‘Kill her, James. Kill her,’ shouted her mother. ‘Kill her before she hurts anyone else!’
Shock numbed the initial pain of her father’s punch, but it knocked her back onto the dirt. Mother reached out for daughter, a knife in her hand, her eyes blazing hatred.
Dazed, Sarah acted on instinct. She ran back to the house, clawed her way upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. It was a solid door but the bolt wasn’t: designed for modesty not survival.
As she backed away from the door someone knocked on it. Her father. ‘Come on out, Sarah, love. We’ve got to talk to you. It’s important.’
If her father had tried he could have kicked in the door inside thirty seconds. But for some reason he talked. He told Sarah over and over how he and her mother loved her. And the plans they had for her. If only she’d unlock the door.
Sarah, too shocked to think, sat on the floor.
‘Come on, Sarah, love. Your mother’s making you a cup of tea. Open the door.’
She couldn’t think what to do, so she did what her guts told her to do.
She ran the water. ‘I’m just going to wash, then I’ll come out.’
Leaving the water running, she climbed out of the window onto the flat roof of the conservatory. From there, she swung herself off the roof, hanging by her hands from the guttering, before dropping into the flower bed.
Legs threatening to give way, she managed to jog round the house. As she ran she heard the sound of her VW Beetle.
Her sisters had seen what had happened to her, got the car started and were desperately trying to drive the thing. Eleven-year-old Anne in the driving seat, revving the engine until it rattled, tried to get it in gear but didn’t know she had to depress the clutch pedal. Metal struck metal, the old German car shrieked.
Sarah pushed both sisters into the front passenger seat then reversed the car across the yard as her father belted from the house. One look at his face told her RUN.
As she drove down the drive he charged the car, punching through the passenger window with his fist.
Sarah thrashed the motor and the car left him behind. Immediately he stopped running and just stared after them.
Five minutes later Sarah parked the car – then she threw up in a hedgebottom.
After that, the sequence of events was similar to mine. Driving round, shocked. Listening to the same message on the radio. Seeing the aftermath where parents had torn apart their children.
By late afternoon both sisters were complaining of hunger. Sarah found a deserted village store. They could have taken what they wanted but the Hayes sisters had been brought up nicely with a private education. Looting wasn’t on the curriculum so Sarah left the few coins she found in the car to pay for the loaf of bread and chocolate they took.
Sunday night they slept in the car in a wood. The next morning she decided to drive to Doncaster police station.
If I hadn’t found them as they tried to change the tyre I think the three sisters – or some part of them – would have joined the other objects that topped the ten-foot poles carried by the mob.
Chapter Twelve
Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?
‘What’s happened? Why are they trying to kill us?
Shrugging, I opened another beer. Sarah sat on the wooden bench that looked over the fields and tried to work out what had happened. It was a mystery she wanted to solve so much it hurt her more than the bruised cheekbone.
‘I went to bed Saturday night. I’d watched TV with my parents. They were perfectly normal. Dad even brought home a Chinese meal. Then when I woke up Sunday morning they tried to kill me.
‘Had your father ever brought home a Chinese meal before?’
‘No. He always said he never fancied eating—’ She shot me a look with those clear blue eyes.
‘What do you mean, Nick? What’s eating Chinese food got to do with …’
‘Not much, probably. Only the last time I saw my dad he was drinking beer in the afternoon. Nothing odd about that except I’d never seen him ever drink beer before during the day.’
‘You mean they were starting to change even then?’
‘Probably. But the changes were so slight you didn’t notice them at the time.’
‘But what caused it?’ Sarah beat her knee to the rhythm of the words. ‘What caused most of the population to turn into homicidal maniacs?’
‘Not most of the population. All the adult population.’ I told her about the river of lunatics I’d seen on the motorway. ‘As far as I can tell everyone over twenty has been driven stark, barking mad. I haven’t seen any kids affected.’
‘But how?’
I nearly told her my neural disrupter theory. In the cold light of day it sounded too half-assed. I shrugged again.
She started pacing in front of the bench. ‘Is it something in the water supply? In the air? Like a nerve gas? Is it a virus? Why should it send people not just mad, but … but it seems to implant in parents a – a craving to kill their own children … I mean they’re not fighting each other, they’re banding together, they’re flocking like birds … they want … they seem to need to … oh God … God …’
Sarah suddenly sat down rubbing her forehead, like she was trying to massage the mystery from her brain.
And she obviously had brains. She was trying to work out logically what had happened. I’m short on brains. I opened another beer. Why should I try and work out what happened? There’d be plenty of scientists and psychologists and all that shit working on what had hit Doncaster for years to come.
I walked round the hilltop. Castle Rising is a straight-sided little hill that pokes out of the flat countryside like a monster zit. I’d not chosen it for its picturesque setting but its views of the surrounding fields. If the crazy people should come we’d see them a mile off.
Sarah’s sisters sat on a blanket, eating sandwiches. I avoided them. They never stopped asking questions.
‘Will mummy and daddy be all right now? When can we go home? Who’ll look after Pookah and Chestnut?’ (Their ponies.) ‘If that car isn’t yours whose is it then? Won’t we get into trouble if we don’t go to school?’
I completed the circuit of the hilltop and sat beside Sarah. A faint fatherly instinct suggested I put my arm around her and tell her everything would be okay. But at seventeen you don’t do that kind of thing.
‘Sarah. I planned on driving south. I reckon we should be out of the affected area after a few miles … You and your sisters can come along if you like.’
‘Thanks … And thanks for picking us up back in town. You took a risk.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ I drained the can. ‘We’ll have another half-hour here then we’ll be off.’
I picked a patch of soft grass on the sloping hillside and lay down. Sunshine warmed my face and the beer and sandwiches made me feel that the world was going to be all right after all. My eyes closed.
br /> The birds sang, the two youngest girls were laughing. At this distance it sounded musical.
I let myself imagine I was drifting on a cloud, a mile high above the countryside; it was as soft as cottonwool. I relaxed into it; I relaxed and I relaxed and I floated out of this world.
‘Nick! Here, quick!’
I ran down the hillside so fast that when I tried to stop I skied the rest of the way, my trainers buzzing over the grass.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Then I stopped and gawped stupidly at the two people in front of me.
‘Mum … Dad.’ I had to laugh out loud then or cry hysterically. ‘How did you find me? Are you all right? Did – did you see what’s happened in Doncaster? They – they … It’s all—’
‘Nick … It’s all right, Nick. We know what happened.’
My dad, smiling, showing the gap in his top teeth, walked up and put his arm around me. The hug was tight and loving. Mum hung back, pushing back her hair. Her smile was pure mother love.
‘Nick, I bet you’d given us up for dead,’ she said. ‘Whatever happens we’ll never leave you again.’ She kissed me on the cheek. If she could she would have picked me up like a toddler and hugged me.
‘Come on, let’s go home. The car’s parked on the road.’
‘John’s waiting to see you. He’s been dying to show you those new games he bought.’
A cold lump squeezed through my guts to my legs. A bastard dream.
I shook my head. ‘Yeah. John’s dying to see me. And where’s Uncle Jack? Playing crazy golf?’
My mother laughed like a teenage girl. ‘No. We left him practising his guitar in the kitchen.’
I still wanted to go with them. I really did. I wanted them to strap me in the back of dad’s car and ride home like I was seven years old. But something deeper said:
NO. RUN LIKE HELL, NICK ATEN. SHOVE YOUR PARENTS AWAY AND RUN, RUN, RUN. THEY’RE GOING TO QUEER YOU UP, BOY.
‘Here you are, Nicholas.’
‘You know he’s going to either end up a millionaire one day or end up in jail.’
Run, Nick, run!
Too late.
Mum and dad pushed me down and held me flat on the ground, my arms outstretched. I was seven years old, not strong enough to stop what they were going to do to me.